Recent reviews by bVork

Exhilarating. A stunning, intense tour-de-force. Every single stage feels like the epic final stage that a lesser shmup would have, and every stage tops the last. There's not a lot of difficulty here for experienced shmuppers (I 1CCed it on my second attempt) but it's such a thrill ride that it doesn't matter. There seems to be a decent amount of depth with the scoring system, especially with cancelling bullets into scoring cubes, so I'll be using that as an excuse just to play through this thrill ride again.

It's hard to believe that this is a real video game. It reminds me of those fake video games you sometimes see on TV, with art and mechanics that make no logical sense. And yet Freefall 3050AD exists, and might just be the most year 2000 video game ever made. It's garish and ridiculous, with bright science fiction visuals, inconsistent fonts, thumping techno, a gigantic UI, and poor tutorials.

And you know what? This game is surprisingly fun. At its core, there are two distinct level styles: a railshooter (albeit one where the primary direction is downwards rather than forwards) and a maze-platformer. In the falling sections, it's a fun balance of shooting enemies, avoiding oncoming objects, collecting powerups, and maintaining your speed. In the maze-platformer section, you need to navigate a series of updrafts of varying strength and direction while avoiding enemies. I don't think these are as enjoyable as the shooter segments, but it's an interesting way to break up the game.

This is a PC port of one of the eight games released on the obscure and ill-fated NUON platform. Unfortunately, it seems like a PC port that was made at the same time as the NUON game was released. You have two resolution options: 640x480 and 1280x1024. You can adjust the sound volume. And that's about it. The only concession to modern PCs is support for XInput controllers.

While I hesitate to recommend this game to everyone, the $3 CAD price is well worth it if you're interested in the very 2000 aeshetics, the NUON platform, or just relatively unique games in general.

The best 2D multiplayer game you can buy on Steam. At first glance, it doesn't seem much different than any other game in the weirdly specific yet surprisingly well-populated genre of "2d-4-player-one-hit-kill-battle-game" but the incredible variety of weapons and level designs make it really stand out. You're never in the same situation twice. And on top of that, it has robust mod support via Steam Workshop.

All of this would make it among the best, but here's the major difference that rockets it above all other similar games: Duck Game has online play. Unlike Towerfall or Samurai Gunn, there's no need to get your friends in the same room or set up Parsec or go to other lengths. Duck Game's online play just works.

Also, it has a dedicated quack button - and a dedicated analogue trigger to modify the pitch of the quacking.

I wish I hadn't picked this up. It's a five star fighting game in the shell of a one star exploitative cellphone lootbox game.

The story mode and actual kombat are excellent.

The system for unlocking stuff seems deliberately designed to be as tedious and as frustrating a grind as it possibly can be, in order to entice you to spend real money to bypass it. Towers are especially insidious, as the first few in a set are fairly doable, and then unblockable projectiles and other garbage starts being thrown at you. Garbage that you can mitigate or avoid through the use of consumable items, which are never doled out at the rate you need them. A large number of the Krypt chests (though apparently not all - not that this is indicated) are randomized, too, so you can't even use a map to spend your relatively scarce currency (you can blow through an hour's worth of earnings in 5 minutes in the Krypt) on only the things that you want.

The game also phones home on every single menu screen and locks you out of Towers and the Krypt if you're offline (or if their own servers are offline...) in order to prevent you from using external programs like Cheat Engine to give yourself currency.

Actually playing normal matches feels great, but the game is so coated in lootbox slime that I feel like the whole experience has been tainted.

PS: Don't get fooled by the Frost DLC. You automatically unlock her partway through the story mode.

A sloppy, technically-challenged game that is ultimately redeemed by its quality story and the sheer uniqueness of being one of a very small number of English-translated Chinese RPGs. (Note that this is a preliminary review. I have spent six hours with Sword and Fairy 6 so far. I'll update the review to give my final thoughts when I finish it, or earlier if I hit major issues that are worth mentioning.)

Sword and Fairy 6 is a fairly conventional RPG, mechanically. It follows a typical town, exploration/dungeon, repeat structure. One thing I find interesting is the ability to freely jump. This makes town navigation a lot more interesting than most RPGs thanks to the ability to jump onto roofs and run pretty much anywhere. There are lookout points in difficult-to-reach locations scattered throughout each area that even reward that sort of experimentation. On the flip side, the freedom you have to move anywhere also means it's very easy to hit the edge of an area or even fall through the void at the bottom (which conveniently just resets you to nearby solid ground).

Combat involves controlling a single character while the rest do their own thing, which can be influenced with tactical options on the left and by the skills selected. Each character has two sets of skills, each generally useful for a different situation. For example, one character has one skillset that focuses on DPS and one that focuses on buffs. It feels fairly sloppy to me since you don't really have fine control over everything your characters do. The best tactic is seems to be to manually control the character whose abilities are the most important for that particular situation (like healing or drawing aggro) and hope that everyone else behaves competently. There are also bonuses for defeating all of the enemies within a specified amount of time. I am unsure whether it's simply impossible early in the game or if there's some aspect to the combat that I do not understand, but not once have I managed to get the bonus.

The story is interesting. It starts off with some convenient meetings between characters who are all working towards a fairly simple goal, but it quickly becomes apparent that there's much more going on. Everyone is plagued with their own problems, doubts, and secrets, and I am very much looking forward to seeing how it all plays out. I'm being fairly vague to avoid spoilers, but I do find it neat how some twists are immediately obvious yet others are carefully laid-out yet never telegraphed. The voice acting seems great, not that I can understand much of it.

The localization is mediocre. The introductory video is by far the worst of it - I'm pretty sure it was machine-translated. But the in-game dialogue, while definitely wooden and sloppy (incorrect tenses, odd sentence construction, stray markup tags) is understandable.

The tutorials fare worse by some explaining some aspects but never really divulging why they matter, leaving you to flounder until you realize things through trial and error. The boss of the first dungeon is definitely a wake-up call that demonstrates why provoke, an ability simply mentioned in passing in the tutorial, is a key tool. And lots of things are never explained at all. For instance, NPCs sometimes respond differently (or even not at all) to different characters. If you've clicked on one who has the talk icon but they turned and didn't say anything, it's because they will only respond to a different character. I still do not understand the way the quest board in each town works. Sometimes quests that I cannot take appear on it, yet other quests never appear. It's weird and, again, never explained.

Another problem is the performance. Sword and Fairy 6 simply does not run very well, and looks nowhere near as good as its requirements would suggest. I have a GTX 1080 and the game stutters regularly. Not constantly, but it hitches every minute or two. The art style is fairly nice but areas look quite blocky and are often monochromatic. Animations are extremely stiff and repetitive - I hope you like seeing Yue Jinzhao do a facepalm, because he's going to be doing it a lot and in the exact same way every time.

Ultimately, despite the technical issues and general feeling of sloppiness that pervades many aspects of the game, I am enjoying my time with it and do recommend it. Sword and Fairy 6 is far from the best RPG you can play on PC, but it's still a fascinating journey through a fairly foreign (to Western eyes) world.

Doom is revelatory. It at once feels both extremely modern and yet firmly identifiable as a classic Doom game. It's its own beast, a brilliant gem of an FPS that shows how much can be done once designers go beyond corridors and stop-and-pop shooting.

It would be easy to call it a throwback, but Doom goes way beyond that. Instead, the designers have taken classical FPS mechanics like locked doors and level-based map design and modernized them. Like the original Doom games, you are acquiring colour-coded keys to open doors, looking for secret areas, and going back and forth across large maps to solve simple puzzles until you can reach the exit, but the great use of vertical space, story progression via voice messages and logs, and ability progression makes Doom a very modern game.

This structure wouldn't mean anything if the moment-to-moment mechanics were poor, but thankfully Doom is a top-class FPS in this area too. Movement is fast and feels precise. There's a lot of jumping and platforming, but judging distances and reachable ledges is never a problem. The combat is simply spectacular. It's fast and frantic, with varied and creative weapons that adhere to what one would expect out of a Doom arsenal and unique enemy types with individual behaviours that encourages specific tactics to defeat them. The "glory kills" - melee attacks that can be done on severely damaged enemies to create health pickups - encourage the player to take more risks when at low health rather than back off, preventing fights from becoming slower long-range exchanges of gunfire.

The presentation is spectacular. The level of detail is insane and the art design makes use of strong colour choices to accentuate different environments. Industrial bases, Martian deserts, and Hell itself all come alive and exude a sense of place that feels like it extends beyond your monitor. The audio design is fantastic. The sound effects are great, with weapon blasts, demon yells, and voice work all feeling very appropriate. I'm particularly surprised and pleased that Doom doesn't seem to go heavy on the loudness - weapons like the plasma gun are actually fairly quiet but still feel satisfying. It's a nice change from the sheer cacophony of Call of Duty and Battlefield. The music contains audio cues from the original Doom games but never degrades into simply covering existing songs. It's not quite as iconic and hummable as Bobby Prince's soundtracks, but it's very well integrated into the gameplay. The writing is both ridiculously over-the-top and played entirely seriously. Bits ranging from matter-of-fact announcements of demonic presence, to corporate-propaganda-meets-cult recordings being played over the base's PA system, to quasi-Biblical records in Hell that explain the Doom marine's backstory all have their own unique "voice" and phrasing, and are all enjoyable to listen to. I can't remember the last time I actually stopped moving in a shooter to listen to diegetic dialogue, but I did in Doom. The writers are (rightly) supremely confident in their ability to let the ludicrous nature of the story and setting stand on its own and never succumb to a fourth-wall-breaking reference or an ironic dig at their own worldbuilding. It's a commendable approach, one that respects the player's intelligence.

The only real problem? All of this praise applies only to the singleplayer. Multiplayer is a horrific abomination, a floaty Halo-esque mess without the vehicles, map design, or unique modes that make that game's multiplayer so good.

But that doesn't damage the incredible singleplayer campaign in any way. If you have any interest at all in singleplayer first-person shooters, you simply must play Doom.

A shmup without an option for digital gamepad/stick movement.
Are you kidding me?

Don't buy this. WB Games and Netherrealm have abandoned it. The PC version of Mortal Kombat X will not be getting any new characters, balance patches, or GGPO-style netcode. All of these things are coming to the console versions. WB treats PC players as second class citizens.

I am aware that this review is redundant (most of the top-rated reviews for MKX state the same thing), but every negative review drags the aggregate down just a little, which is the only way to punish WB for abandoning the game. Apart from boycotting WB-published games entirely, which I also recommend doing.

Don't buy this. It's broken. It will never be fixed.

It worked fine for approximately eight minutes before crashing. After that, I ended up with a host of issues. The game now keeps insisting that I have the demo version. It never remembers my display settings. The menus keep appearing as unreadable glyphs. Don't waste your time with this piece of trash. The developers should be ashamed of themselves.

The best and most shmup you can buy on Steam.

It's hard to explain how huge this game is. Do you want a lengthy single-player campaign that will take you many hours to complete? CS mode is that. Do you want a classic Darius experience with multiple routes? It has two of those modes: Original and Original EX. Do you want a huge selection of different challenges? Chronicle mode has hundreds and hundreds of challenges with thousands of stages. Even if you aren't the type who plays arcade games repeatedly in order to get higher scores, there's still enough here to occupy you for hundreds of hours.

And how is this gigantic game? In a word: incredible. Dariusburst takes a different tack than many modern bullet hell shooters and instead goes for what I'd call popcorn hell. Huge swarms of tiny enemies and asteroids are everywhere. The bosses are huge, have a large variety of attacks, and are exhilarating to fight. Don't think it's just swarms and bosses, though: there are plenty of bullet-firing medium sized enemies and stage walls to contend with, too. Dariusburst is very much its own thing and doesn't cleanly fit into any of the shmup archetypes.

The scoring system is relatively simple, with a multiplier that ticks up when you destroy waves of enemies and gets reduced when you get hit. Kill an entire enemy wave and the you get a score bonus multiplied by your current multiplier. Kill the final enemy of a wave with your rechargeable laser or bomb and you get that same bonus multiplied by 16. This means the best scoring tactic is to kill everything and try to eliminate the final enemy of each wave with your laser/bomb. This is easier said than done, so there's a lot of depth here in figuring out the ideal movement and timing for killing enemy waves. Bosses fire their own lasers and if you time it right, you can fire your own laser into that laser (like in G-Darius) and counter it for massive damage and large amounts of points if you kill the boss with the resulting counterburst.

The art design is great. It doesn't push a lot of polygons (this is an enhanced port of an arcade game based on a PSP game, after all) but the art more than makes up for it. Backgrounds can be astonishingly beautiful and the boss designs are great. There are also a large number of references to previous Darius games that are cool to pick out. Sound effects are well done. Nothing to write home about (apart from the wonderful boss alert siren), but they get the job done. The music is incredible. The "Freedom" song in the trailer is love-it-or-hate-it (I'm in the latter camp) but it's easily the least good of a long and lengthy soundtrack. The way the soundtrack is perfectly synchronized in the arcade modes is awe-inspiring.

There's only two real flaws with this game. The huge number of modes and missions means that high scores are scattered across a bunch of leaderboards rather than being concentrated and more competitive. Second, there's no practice mode for individual stages and bosses in AC mode. Some of the bosses (looking at YOU, Phantom Castle) have some really mean attacks and it would be nice to be able to practice them in AC mode without going through a series of stages beforehand. CS mode lets you select individual stages, so you can sort of use it for practice, but the aspect ratio is so different that it's not really the same thing as the AC mode boss fights.

All in all, I can't recommend this game enough. The price may be high but it is totally worth it given both the length and quality of Dariusburst: Chronicle Saviours.