Recent reviews by Baines

This is a very basic vertical shmup that is hurt too much by its slow pace. The game simply drags. You'll consider quitting out of boredom long before you take your first hit.

I want to like Iron Fisticle, but it feels too poorly paced.

The most immediate issue is that it feels like your default weapon simply does too little damage. Perhaps it is the use of an upgrade system that allows the purchase of permanent stat upgrades in addition to finding single-game upgrades. Perhaps the game was balanced more for co-op. Perhaps too much importance was put on the randomly spawning temporary weapon pick-ups, which tend to tear through crowds. Perhaps it is the extremely short range of your "desperation" bomb, or perhaps too much importance was placed on your (cooldown-limited) dash ability. The end result is that your default weapon is simply insufficient to deal with the number of enemies that you will sometimes face.

The low damage default weapon becomes a particular problem when the next pick-up weapon, which spawns into a random location, ends up appearing on the other side of the room behind the enemies that your default weapon is incapable of carving a path through. As you progress, enemy health and density simply outpaces your own damage-dealing capacity (perhaps until/unless you grind those permanent upgrades.)

Even without a sizable horde, the sheer ineffectiveness of the default weapon can be frustrating when it takes multiple shots to break a destructible urn.

Bosses are something of an annoyance. While regular rooms are about dealing with oncoming waves of direct-contact enemies, bosses employ bullet sprays. It doesn't reach bullet hell shmup levels, but bosses can sometimes feel like a bit of a damage sponge, and you don't have the miniscule hit box of a bullet hell shmup either.

For achievement hunters, some of the achievements are purely luck, relying on random treasure pick-ups that you are not guaranteed to encounter in a game.

This isn't a game, it is an art project minimal walking sim. You pretty much hold down one key for a few minutes until you reach the end. If you feel like it, you can do the same thing again with the alternate character, to get the same ending. The game is free, but I can't really say it is worth the time to bother with.

On technical matters: The game crashes the first time you click on the credits, which switches the playable character and awards the game's only achievement. There is a section where you can fly off the left side of the screen because either the camera doesn't follow properly or the invisible border is misplaced. Near the beginning, a couple of pieces of background slip art have visible ends, so you get a piece of ground and a branch that look like they are simply floating in space.

The combat system is so painfully sluggish, clunky, and limited that the quality of the rest of the game doesn't even matter. Simply playing through the prologue had me ready to uninstall the title.

There are better beat'em-up Roguelites on Steam. There are better multiplayer beat'em-ups on PC.

UPDATE: After a few years, I decided to give the game another chance, only to find it was even worse than I'd remembered.

Attacks tend to lock you into place, unable to move. It takes several hits to kill enemies, and many enemies are not stunned by your attacks. Some skills can lock your movement for multiple seconds. Some skills and special actions seem largely useless, or outright designed to get you hit for attempting to use them. While your ranged attacks are mostly locked to a horizontal path or cone, several enemies have ranged attacks that target you regardless of your position.

The game is simply a chore to play.

I want to like the game. I've given it multiple changes, coming back after months and multiple updates. I've liked other party randomized board games.

100% Orange Juice is just too random. Frustratingly so. Often with few real choices offered, and little in the way of being able to mitigate circumstances. It isn't impossible to bend some odds in your favor, and a skilled/smart player will have better odds of winning than a careless player. But it isn't enough. You will also see runaway victories turned into defeats. You'll see defeats turned into potential runaway victories. You'll gnash your teeth in frustration as you fail turn after turn to stand up after being knocked out.

Still, the game might be playable with human opponents, though there are better games to play against other humans. The campaign (against cheating AI, though a patch did at least add a difficulty selection that affects how much the AI cheats) is even more frustrating. Added to the mix is the annoying pace of the game, as you will have a lot of down time between actual decisions. You can speed up the game, but that means you risk missing seeing what cards the opponents play.

Quite bluntly, garbage. The only crimes are presenting the game as being meaningful in any way and charging money for a product that wouldn't even be worth the time spent playing it for free.

Forget the idea of a world where police have forgotten why they do what they do. The only connection to that world is in the one-sentence tagline for each of the five "games". The games themselves are mindless mimicry of art piece drivel, the kind of stuff that you'd get on the lower end of a Junior High English project.

This could still be salvageable if the game play itself had some value, but it doesn't. The five games are as absent in game play and mechanical design as they are in higher meaning.

The first game, by the store description, says you must "balance collecting citations with an abstract deficit, looking for tiny crimes". No, just no. You just trudge your tiny pixel person after any generic other pixel person, clicking your mouse on them to make numbers go up, then pressing the space bar to collect your points. After 20 seconds, the "game" ends, and your points are added to your deficit. Then the game starts over. Because (Junior High School student idea of) "art".

The second game is about the drudgery of playing capture the flag without an opponent in a harsh environment (more Junior High "art"), which comes down to holding up+right for several seconds (to walk to the flag) then holding up+left for several seconds (to return the flag to your base), then repeating this presumably indefinitely because "art". Though in practice, you'll probably quit right after returning to base the first time. There isn't even a police connection in this one.

The third game actually has the basis of a real, potentially decent game. It doesn't do anything to make it into a real, potentially decent game, but it at least has the basis of one. The theme here is collecting evidence, but the cops have forgotten why they collect evidence or even what evidence is, so you just pick up everything you cross until you die from falling too far.

The fourth game is about controlling a couple of cops on a raft in a flooded city. As with the second game, there is again no connection with policing (or any message about it) other than the detail that the characters on the raft are cops. You just drift through the city (you have no control of the raft), and click the mouse as you pass piles of garbage (to search them.)

The fifth game doesn't bother to even pretend to be a game anymore. And yet again, it has absolutely no connection to policing (or some distortion of policing) beyond the playable character presumably being a cop. Walk your tiny pixel cop around a beach filled with garbage.

Rooftop Cop completely fails at delivering any message or provoking any thought. It fails to be entertaining. It doens't even succeed at its theme, as only two of the five games are even about distorted ideas of policing.

The development of Gang Beasts has been something of a roller coaster. It was always the fun little physics brawler that dreamed big, but updates could sometimes be head scratching. Mechanics would change seemingly randomly, Something might be broken, and would remain through months of updates. Stages would see repeated radical redesigns. The game could be chaotic fun, but it always looked like it need more work.

Gang Beasts is now officially out of Early Access, and it feels like it should still be in Early Access. The graphics might be a bit shinier, but it still doesn't feel like a polished finished product.

Making matters worse is the console nature of the game. Gang Beasts leaving Early Access coincides with Gang Beasts launching on the PS4, and the "full release" is in some ways a downgrade over the previous version. Resolution options have been removed, controller icons have been replaced with PS controller buttons, and some stages have been simplified. It is hard to see these changes as just a coincidence.

Not that the "full release" is absent other issues. Performance seems to have declined (despite seeing some simpler stages) and some new bugs have cropped up. The often criticized camera system (though as often the issue was that stages were designed seemingly without concern for the limitations of the camera system) was replaced with a new camera system that doesn't actually seem to be any better (but is now determined to zoom in really close).

I'd like to give Nongunz a chance, but the tag line "Nongünz is obscure in both gameplay and theme" is taken to the extreme. Requiring players put some effort into discovering elements is one thing, but Nongünz is an action game that doesn't even explain its own user interface.

Maybe there is a decent game underneath the downright frustrating level of obfuscation. I don't know. I realized that I'd have to read a FAQ just to learn how to play it in order to find out, but reading a FAQ would defeat the whole point of wanting players to figure out the game themselves. And even then, the action only felt okay.

The action itself is a bit annoyingly in how some things were implemented. It might have been less annoying if you could only shoot horizontally, but the game lets you shoot up...only while sliding. So as long as you have the time, you can slide back and forth (or into a wall) shooting at enemies above you. You can jump up through certain platforms, but you can't jump down through them, forcing you to loop around the allowed "down" path. Even what appear to be basic enemies take multiple shots to kill, potentially forcing you to stop to dodge or otherwise escape just so you can go back to shooting otherwise not particularly threatening targets.

So, what does Nongünz tell you? It has a brief "tutorial" where you learn to move, jump, shoot, dodge roll through obstacles, open chests, mid-air dodge through obstacles, and dash. (It doesn't tell you that the dash is reliant on a pick-up item.) You'll also pick up some cards that have no explanation of what they do or how to even use them. You'll probably find your health gauge due to taking hits while figuring out the mid-air dodge. That's it. It won't explain your inventory and the various menu options, or cards, items, other gauges, or even the red digits at the bottom of the screen.

Then you go to a town, apparently a home base. You can enter some buildings, and can interact with some spots, but the game of course won't make any effort to explain what those interactions are actually doing. Eventually you'll stumble into an area where you can fight stuff. Then you'll die and go to a white room, where you can choose to go back into an area where you fight, or you can explore and find your way back to the home base, though you won't know why you might or might not want to.

Finally, you'll want to exit the game. Hopefully you'll remember that Alt+F4 can kill a Windows process, because I don't even know if the game has an exit option. I certainly never found one (and it doesn't cooperate that well with Alt+Tabbing.)

If the Nongünz itself made more of an effort, then maybe I'd be able to recommend it. But it doesn't, and I cannot.

One of many 99 cent simple puzzle games available on Steam, VOI is competent enough to spend an hour on. All the puzzles revolve around the same basic mechanic, when two black objects overlap, you get white instead. Some may find the puzzles to be a bit too simplistic.

Mechanically, the game is about as bare bones as you can get. There are no options. To exit, you have to kill the window (progress is saved). There isn't even a "Game completed" notice. At first I thought the game was bugged on the last puzzle, as it just sat there seemingly ignoring my solution, until I noticed in the Steam client that I'd been awarded the final achievement.

The translation is lacking, sometimes leading to confusion. English language support staff may have left.

But still the game is fun. It is a Roguelite-inspired action game, with permadeath. You can get some persistent buffs, but you aren't going to cruise through higher difficulties just from grinding. Many of the persistent buffs are relatively weak, and assigning points to the skill tree will also apply buffs to enemies. Mostly, to progress you will simply have to get better at the game itself, both in learning how to better exploit what you are given as well as just getting better at the combat.

The combat system is a bit more involved than it may originally seem. You can freely switch between three equipped weapons, with each weapon assigned to its own button. Switching mid-combo will simply continue with the next attack of the next weapon's string. Different types of weapons of course have different attack speeds and deal different amounts of damage, but the natures of the attacks also vary. Some attacks will juggle, some will stun, and some have movement built into them, giving you more reason to intelligently switch between different weapons mid-combo. Beyond this, higher rank weapons will carry not only extra elemental damage effects, they can carry other effects that activate upon killing an enemy (such as bestowing a protective shield or causing an explosion.) You also have jumping attacks, counters (performed after blocking, and some shields also apply special effects on block), specials that consume part of an "Anger" gauge, and supers that consume the entire anger gauge.

Mind, you might not notice those details about the combo system at first. The game requires you complete the game on Easy before you can play on Normal, and Easy can be beaten by randomly mashing attacks. There isn't a point to blocking until you reach Normal, and it doesn't become a critical skill until Hard. (Enemy attack rates are tied to difficulty. On Easy, you'll kill most non-boss enemies before they ever bother to attack.)