Recent reviews by Baines

The action in HordeCore can be mindlessly entertaining, but the game is riddled with baffling design decisions.

While you automatically pick up crafting supplies by walking over them, you have to press the "A" button to pick up weapons, armor, and consumable items. "A" also happens to be the button for your first character's special ability, which can lead to you accidentally using that special when you are trying to pick up items in a hurry.

Why does the collectible card game exist? It's not particularly fun, and its tournaments waste nodes on the map.

Why does crafting or cooking require you sit through a timer (lasting a couple of seconds) before you can do anything? You can only craft or cook at your home base, where game time does not pass, so this serves absolutely no purpose other than to annoy the player.

Why does stepping on a twig in an optional stealth section trigger the same extended flood of zombies that setting off an sustained alarm does? And why does this also draw more zombies that running around guns blazing?

You can spend significant resources to get items you can equip on characters that bestow some unique ability. These items are single-use, and the game doesn't bother to tell you the ability that they bestow. This seems to exist as pure end-game game padding, with the player expected to grind away to get multiple copies of each item so they can test them out on each character until they find which items they ultimately want each character to have.

The crafting system seems to exist just to fill a check box for a zombie survival game. You can dismantle junk items for a single random crafting component. You can then use a number of those components to create the same kind of junk items that you already have too many of. You can use skill points to unlock higher level weapons and armor, but the whole system just feels half-baked.

The cooking system has its own weird decisions. You can unlock higher level cooking recipes through a skill purchase, but the higher tier food recipes appear to be worse than the default. At least for me, the limiting factor on food was by far the amount of wood used, not the raw meat. Yet the advanced recipes seem built around consuming more wood and other crafting resources so you can use less raw meat.

I could go on about all sorts of annoyances. The armor you can equip can add to both your armor stat and your max HP, but the game never explains how the armor stat works, so you are completely in the dark as to which armor is actually better. Some armors show the armor stat and then the HP, with other armors show the HP and then the armor stat. The game floods you with weapon pick-ups, that are all identical because there is only one weapon in each tier for each class with no variations. But really there are other negative reviews that explain the issues with the game better than I've done.

It's a free puzzle game with an interesting art style that can be completed in around an hour.

While an interesting idea in concept, the visual effect for the time restore ability can be visually distracting. When you store a copy of the stage, that copy becomes the new background, with the camera angled so you can see both the current state and the stored state. (The final preview image on the Steam page shows this effect.)

Bullet Witch was mediocre at best even when it was released in 2006. Even worse, its design and gameplay aged fast. Finally, the PC port had a few issues.

This isn't the ambitious janky fun of the early EDF, nor is it the janky but still somehow entertaining Oneechanbara. Comparing it to another old Xbox 360 game that was more recently ported to PC, it isn't the lively and surprisingly functional Metal Wolf Chaos XD. Despite failing in nearly every area, Bullet Witch doesn't even function as a "so bad it's good" title or as a game design object lesson; its just not worth bothering with.

Bullet Witch is a third person shooter with relatively poor shooting. For some reason, your targeting reticle stays red for a second or two even after the target has been killed. Despite having a sufficiently flippy jump, your character doesn't feel particularly mobile and can't really do anything in the air. You've got a spell that creates a temporary wall in front of you, but the game isn't built around ducking in and out of cover either, all you can do is just walk past the edge and back into enemy fire. Levels are pointlessly gigantic for how empty they are. You can travel a decent distance only to find you've gone to a dead end with nothing to find or do. It's not pretty, either. Invisible walls can be fairly aggressive in their placement. Crates and barrels look like obstacles, but you just clip straight through them. Casting spells not only as clunky as everything else, some switch to play an unskippable cut-scene.

On a positive, the PC port gave resolution options. It also messed up some animations slightly. You may notice your character's hand doesn't always align properly with her gun. The facial animation doesn't play for one of the spells. The PC port also adds a dash ability, but it is strangely activated by trying to crouch while you have the spell menu open? (Apparently this was a disabled debug feature in the original game?) It may just be me, but the colors in the PC port also seem to be less colorful than the Xbox 360 version?

This game was always something of a hard sell, and it now feels like yet another case where developers/publishers misread their market, to the detriment of both the game and consumers.

The developers have clearly put their focus on making a competitive serious anime/Vs-style fighter, just with a not-My Little Pony theme. The problem is that the "competitive serious" fighting game audience was always going to largely ignore this title because of its theme, while the audience drawn in by the theme were not going to be served by focusing exclusively on relatively bare competitive play.

This has culminated in the final blow. The long promised Story mode has been cancelled, with game development ending after the final Season 1 Pass character is released. As an extra insult, rather than giving this cancellation its own announcement, it was instead tacked onto the end of a news post about DLC characters and Patch Notes. It is also worth mentioning that the Steam store page continues to list the Story mode (and its continued development) as one of the key features of the game, while the Store page for the Shanty character DLC continues to list that owners of that DLC would receive an additional Story chapter.

Short version: The game contains potentially minutes of entertainment, which could easily be found elsewhere.

Jeff Minter popularized a style of arcade shooter that hit the player with speed, bright colors, excessive particle effects, loud effects, and techno music. Death Ray Manta attempts to inject that ethos with an unhealthy dose of steroids.

Death Ray Manta at is heart is a very basic twin-stick shooter. There are no options and no explanations, you simply press a button and start playing. You have one life, and your score is just the number of stages you've cleared plus any gems (one per stage?) that you collected.

For extra annoyance, even though the entire game field could easily have been fit into a stationary single screen, the view is instead set close enough that the camera has to pan around, further obscuring your view of the action and potential threats.

While I understand the desire devs have to include Steam Trading Cards, it seems somewhat exploitative to include them in a game that offers so little, as anyone idling for the handful of available cards will significantly skew the apparent play time of the game.

Utomah is a free student project that can be completed in about half an hour, short enough to feel more like a demo or proof of concept.

It looks pretty, is relatively polished, plays okay, and is free. It is pretty easy until the final boss, with frequent checkpoints and enough health that you'd almost have to try to die. My biggest issue is with that final boss. While it is far from an impossible task, it does pose a significant jump in difficulty, and its multi-stage design (which includes a couple of short unskippable cutscenes as well as having to navigate a couple of timed platforming sections where you can take damage) feels more punishing if you do die to it.

NOTE: Exile's End, also available on Steam, is apparently a remake of this game with higher production values and some game improvements. Other than the price difference or curiosity, there is presumably no reason to buy Inescapable.

A bad combination of boring and annoying.

Despite the user tag and even the "About the Game" section of the store description, I wouldn't consider this a Metroidvania. This is more like a really old PC game, where you keep opening locked gates to progress. (Either "find the physical key" or a "hit a switch and/or navigate the platforming challenge" key.)

Areas look boring. There is no music and little audio in general. Combat (when present) is dull.

A lot of little annoyances just pile up. There just seem to be so many "slightly wrong" design decisions in this game.

For example, at the beginning of the game, you take fall damage. (You also start with half health and no apparent method of healing.) Within a few minutes, you get a suit upgrade that completely negates fall damage, which begs the question of why the game ever bothered with fall damage in the first place. It might not even matter except there is at least one pixel perfect jump that delivers fall damage if you miss it.

Or consider the very old school approach to using keys. You do not automatically use a key at a gate, or even when you attempt to "use" the gate. You have to first select the key as your active item. This might not be so bad if there were only a few keys, but again the gameplay seems to be built around finding keys to open gates. While the key does vanish from your inventory after use, even this leads to an annoyance, as the item the game auto-selects afterwards is almost certainly not the item you actually want active.

I only spent a brief time with the game, but it just wore on me. I was soon performing a manual save at every decision point, so I could check both options as quitting to the menu and then loading a save was faster than backtracking. (Yes, you cannot load a manual save from the pause menu. You have to instead quit to the main menu, and from there you can load a manual save.)

I could continue to complain about minor things. But that itself is kind of annoying, so I'll stop here.

It's NES The Legend of Zelda with a shotgun. Not a carbon copy, but heavily inspired.

You can beat the dungeons in nearly any order. I don't recall any bosses requiring any item other than your shotgun, though other items can make boss fights easier. It does feel like every item has a use outside of just being a "key" to some form of gate, though some are more useful than others.

The final boss feels a bit BS compared to the rest of the game, but I later came to feel it isn't as unfair as its first seems. This boss isn't just about learning its simple pattern and then whaling away. You need to learn to efficiently deal with its various summoned minions while also trying to maximize the damage you deal to the boss during its vulnerable periods. Both those tasks can be made easier by smartly switching between your various items as necessary. While blasting away with double shotguns is a solution to most enemies in the game, doing so here just makes the battle harder.

This would have been a decent free student project. Unfortunately, this isn't a free student project.

The Initial is a spectacle fighter with somewhat clunky controls, somewhat frustrating combat, and bosses that have way too much health. At first it feels okay, if rather low budget. But elements of the game gradually start to annoy, and the simple truth is that there are many other better action games available for purchase on Steam.

You have a few basic combos, with a few more strings that can be purchased as you accrue money. Attacks lack a feel of impact, and some enemies will simply tank through your attacks with their own. Some attacks will send you dashing towards a specific enemy, but sometimes the game will send you off towards an unexpected target, which can both send you away from an enemy you were prioritizing as well as sending you into damage that you otherwise would have avoided. There are a few aerial strings (most of which need to be purchased) and a basic Dynasty Warriors launcher, but only some enemies can be launched and you can only launch one at a time. Some enemies default to a block stance, which can only be broken by your strong attacks, but your strong attack string is short and they'll recover from a guard break before you can switch to other strings. Running seems to require hitting the sprint button after you've already held a direction on the analog stick, but some actions also apparently eat the input for pressing the sprint button, which can leave you walking instead of performing the run you expected.

There are a few canned "assassination" attacks that can be performed when you put human enemies into a particular vulnerable state; these feel not quite polished. The battle continues as you perform these attacks, but you appear to be invulnerable for the duration, meaning you can try to use them to dodge other attacks. But even though other enemies remain active an on-screen, I think they are also invulnerable even if it looks like your attack should hit them? The attack you get also seems to be random, which could I guess potentially could see some animations put you in a worse state than others? Also, triggering these attacks can seem a bit janky. You only have to press the Strong attack button while "out of combat", but sometimes these can trigger during your combos (if you happen to press Y after the point your combo puts them into the trigger state) and sometimes they won't. And sometimes you can get hit before you can trigger the assassination.

Some design decisions make no sense. You have a hold-button-to-charge move, but it is so slow to charge that any enemy that poses any form of threat will hit you before you can fully charge the attack. You can "conveniently" purchase a skill upgrade that lets you spend 30% of your special gauge to skip the charge period, but even with this I was still getting hit out of the attack. This is a spectacle fighter where dodging, even perfect dodging (which the game acknowledges with a special visual effect), sends you out of counter-attack range and inflicts enough recovery time to prevent you from counter-attacking. Instead, you can "conveniently" purchase a skill that lets you perform a counter-attack after perfect dodging, and this is one of the most expensive skills available. (You also have to purchase the ability to counter-attack after a perfect block.)

While the stages are generally large open rectangles, there are spots where the camera will get blocked by scenery. This is particularly annoying as the devs seemed to have avoided some pitfalls but forgot about others. For example, if you get near the stage when fighting the first big robot miniboss, the camera view can become completely blocked by the stage curtains.

Bosses have a ton of health and seem to tank all your attacks? Even your super move (which requires your entire special gauge) may barely inflict a flesh wound. I stopped playing when facing the second stage boss, whose gimmick seems to be blocking all your attacks. Even when you hit him, he barely takes damage, and his own attacks are annoying to deal with.

Even if I'm being overly critical, the price tag kills this game. As I said, there are plenty of much better experiences available on Steam. Even on sale, you'd be better off putting in a few extra dollars to buy something else. Maybe the sequel improves upon this game; I don't know and I don't intend to find out.

Originally this was going to be "Recommended", with a massive caveat. Metal Dogs at best is a mediocre game, given relevance through its Metal Max/Saga setting. As I began listing how the game falls short in absolutely every area, I realized there simply isn't any reason to play it, even for fans of the setting.

The Metal Max series is a world of truly absurd creature design. Missile launchers may have the legs of human showgirls, while enormous dinosaur "warships" wander the desert. Metal Dogs uses almost none of this. The game not only uses just a handful of enemy types, they are all fairly tame (and repetitive) designs, both visibly and functionally.

The very basic random level generation isn't just repetitive and boring, While not technically broken, it is certainly far from ideal. It isn't uncommon to have long winding sections with little to nothing of interest beyond a few enemies and crates. I once encountered a level that consisted of nothing but consecutive intersections, containing a total of three crates and no enemies. There are a couple of tilesets, and no meaningful environment effects.

The mission structure is even more basic and repetitive than the random level generation, as almost all missions simply send you to complete 3-8 "floors" of randomly generated levels. "Boss" missions are identical, except you fight one of a handful of bosses on the final level. The lack of variety all around simply does not support the sheer number of "missions" the game "offers".

Weapons are designed along a triangle: machine guns have large clips and fast reloads but individual bullets do little damage, cannons have a single shot and long reloads but do massive damage, and missiles do moderate damage and have special effects but have abysmal reloads. You can equip three weapons, but the weapons just aren't balanced. Instead of relying on all three, you seem better off skipping machine guns entirely and then just running around more (wasting more time) while waiting for your actually effective weapons to reload. Particularly when enemy health is so tanky that many basic enemies can survive multiple cannon shots.

I could go on, but really it feels there is something wrong with every aspect of the game. I kept playing just to see if it would get more interesting, or better, or anything, and it never did. It kind of got worse. Then I completed the barely there story and unlocked "EX" missions... which are just more "complete 3-8 floors" of random enemies, except now you get more materials that you can use to improve your existing weapons. And I just stopped... I couldn't keep pushing forward with such a boring game, to improve weapons that only need improving because the same enemies I'd been killing now have more health.