Recent reviews by viva

its fun to shoot things

how about you finish the textures first before releasing rofl

also the same building copy and pasted a dozen times over, often with grass and other foilage clipping through.

when you gotta cash in on that Player Unknown's Battlegrounds money. Winner winner chicken dinner pan.

I don't really know if I'm meant to be the target audience for Tacoma or not. The game comes off as incredibly shallow and painfully average. The game doesn't have some truly great sin that means one should skip it, but it's also not noteworthy enough to stick out from other games.

There's nothing inherently wrong with walking simulators, as they can be very enjoyable (INFRA and SOMA being great walking simulator games) but Tacoma never challenges the player in any meaningful way. There are no noteworthy puzzles or interesting avenues to explore. You're very much on a linear pathway in the game and there are no meaningful areas you could miss.

The story that is told throughout the game is honestly paper thin. It's very much the corporation-is-evil type stuff we've all seen before and the crew has very few flaws. The most one could say is that one character was foolishly seeking the avenue of least resistance, but that's hardly a deep or concerning flaw. The story is very straight forward.

The game forgos character development for romance. It's pretty eh, honestly. None of the characters seem really deep and there isn't like any sort of love triangle or anything interesting. One dude is crushing on a woman. Two members are married and the remaining two have love interests elsewhere. If you're into LGBT, three members are gay. Meh.

Oh and the game also features Gone Home's ability to examine items by moving them around. You can do this with (nearly) every single item you can pick up in the game. But because there's nothing to the story outside of the cutscenes there's very little to learn (the most you can get is a little bit of background from papers, but the rest of the items contain very little information otherwise).

The game is short which is good considering playing this style of game for 8 hours would be an incredibly painful experience. I took my time checking a ton of things and getting all of the cheevos and beat it in 4 hours. I listened to every conversation, etc.

Overall I'm feeling really meh. Nothing noteworthy to speak of. Would prefer a middling rating here but will instead recommend skipping instead.

A game that was undeservedly overlooked this year. If you enjoy a fun top down arcade style shooter, you cannot go wrong with this game. Please buy it.

I was excited for Yooka-Laylee and immediately preordered it when I was able to. I even bought the digital deluxe version with the soundtrack. I was very excited. However, it pains me to say that I cannot recommend Yooka-Laylee. While the initial couple of hours show great promise, the rest of the time as you finish off the other 4 worlds is horribly unpolished.

I wish I could sum it up in a couple sentences, but I really can't. There are just so many little problems that show that the development team haven't learned anything from the past 20 years nor do they play their own game.

One of the biggest problems for me is the quizzes. I know this has been beaten to death before, but they really are awful. There's no indicator that you're about to be hit with one, many of them are incredibly pedantic like naming a specific character when the characters rarely say anything interesting, so I found myself skipping the dialog all the time.

Is that my fault? Well, that's up to you to decide. However when you beat the final quiz Laylee makes a "witty" comment about how you won't need to pay attention anymore for the awful quizzes. It's a desperate attempt at tongue-in-cheek humor but when the quizzes themselves aren't enjoyable the joke comes off as insulting rather than amusing.

Ok the quizzes are bad, but is that it? Well, no. The game is also plagued with a variety of minigames in each world. There's one that's supposed to a retro arcade game and another which is the cart one. All of the arcade ones vastly outstay their welcome, especially if you're trying to beat the high score. Prepare to play something you don't want to. The cart one is also unfun. It's novel the first time, but they appear in every game world which means you will be repeating it at least 5 times, perhaps more depending on your skill level.

If they were just unfun that would be one thing, but the game is so poorly designed that it turns what could just be a speedbump into something that will likely frustrate you. You cannot restart these unless you die. That means that if you make a small mistake, you cannot just press start. What happens when you die? You get a loading screen and then annoying dialog asking you why you're awful. Well isn't that just pleasant. Then you click yes and have another loading screen. Thankfully on PC the loading screns are really short, however it's hard not to look at this as just annoying. Both the arcade and the cart ones do NOT let you see what your target goal is on the HUD. You only see your current score. Additionally for the cart one, there are brakes and a boost you can perform. They have a short cooldown timer however there is NO HUD indicator for them. WHY????? Also you can get hurt after you go through the final hoop at the end of the cart track. Even though you cannot move. Good design, Playtonic.

The camera isn't good, but I found myself able to ignore it most of the time. However the places where it's bad, ESPECIALLY in World 2 when you're the truck are where it's REALLY bad. Expect to have a bad time.

The devs claim that there is a patch in the works to help skip the gibberish, which is often in places where you have to retry constantly. Which is as you can imagine very obnoxious. However it was announced May 2nd and here we are at May 28th without a peep.

A lot of these problems, to me, come off as a developer not playing their own game. They seem incredibly obvious to someone who has played 20 hours. They're small issues, but everytime they happen, they chip at your enjoyment of the game.

The Best Game of 1996? Hardly....

I'll get this out of the way first. Yes I'm aware it's a roguelike. I have hundreds of hours in Binding of Isaac, Spelunky and many others. I can certainly enjoy a fantastic roguelike. I've even played some of the FPS roguelikes, but none truly appealed to me. Tower of Guns and Killing Room both failed in their offerings to me. I did like Ziggaurat however.

STRAFE seemed like it was aware of what was wrong with those games. Your game needs to be fast paced, good gun feedback and a wide variety of weapons to truly feel great. A FPS game needs to have good gun feedback to succeed. If it feels like you're shooting a pea shooter the entire game will feel like a grind. You also need a good amount of enemy variety. Oh and excellent level design never hurts.

Thankfully, STRAFE puts itself above all of its competitors and manages to nail none of these. The guns don't have a good feel, especially the assault rifle, but none of them feel very good. Especially when you're constantly going against hordes of mindless enemies. Enemies that will walk into walls, aggro through locked doors and do generally stupid things like walk directly into acid.

There are a selection of weapons you can pick up, but it doesn't appear as though you can ever reload them, only your primary. Also you cannot individually select weapons, you MUST use your scroll wheel which is obnoxious.

The game forces you to go slow with hazards that are often times really dumb. Actually, the best tactic in the game is to backwards, not strafe as the name implies. I'm guessing the developers knew this so they put enemies that spawn behind you which is never a fun mechanic. If the enemies had footsteps this wouldn't be a problem but no one is praising this game for having excellent game design.

Does the game have a wide variety of level pieces at least? It IS randomly generated after all? Well that's a great question. The answer is no. The game doesn't. You will see pieces repeating after a couple of playthroughs. Despite the textures being literally grey blocks for the first chapter (and then expanding to brown canyons in the second), they couldn't figure out how to make the level pieces not obvious. The game also has some really poorly designed bits of levels, such as having a "hidden" elevator that you can really only find if you memorize the texture for it. Adorable. It's not a secret, either. Just another sign of inept design.

But whatever. Congrats you got my $15 for this. A subpar roguelike advertised as being a 90s games purely based on the poor graphics rather than any mechanics or anything truly interesting from that generation. At least Devolver made some good trailers for it.

Great Half-Life 2 mod. A bit short, but a lot of good attention to detail and interesting puzzles. Enemy placement is a bit sporadic. Some combat areas feel like there's a bit too much junk on the ground. Other than that it was good fun. Highly recommended.

Updates over the years have improved this game immensely. TWI have really turned it around and I'm happy to recommend it. I love to boot it up every once and a while and play for quite a bit. The same fun co-op you'd get from Killing Floor 1 with a nice coat of paint.

INFRA appears to be a walking simulator on the surface but there is so much more beneath the surface. If you want a game that will allow you to explore abandoned structures and offer you some great puzzles along the way I highly recommend INFRA.

INFRA manages to separate itself from the pack of walking simulators very quickly by making every area of the game worthy of exploring, but also having so many puzzles that immerse you into the world and contribute to the tone and atmosphere of the game. The puzzles are very creative, often involving many different variables and there are often puzzles that you will miss on your first playthrough (I know I did!). The enviroments are large and open ended - exploring the enviroments never ceases to be interesting. In fact on my second playthrough I found many areas and passages that I had missed on my first playthrough which I thought I did a thorough job on. However even on my second playthrough I still didn't get the 90% repaired achievement. The amount of content is amazing and with part 2 out and continuing the line of excellent puzzle design, interesting world development it pains me to see the game so underrated.

The voice acting at times sounds weird. As if the voice actor wasn't a native English speaker and was fighting with his accent. It isn't a big deal and I've come to find some of the lines endearing over my playtime.

Overall INFRA is a game I highly recommend. A gem that cannot - should not - be missed

Ya'll better nominate this game for The “I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award” Award.

I am a huge fan of fan projects that are focused on single player. As they usually produce the most interesting results. I've played a ton of them and I always try and look for the positives. I'm not against paying for a mod, but there's a level of quality to be expected with a price tag attached. Prospekt does not meet these expectations. In a lot of ways it feels like someone's first mod. The attention to detail is too low, there are no major changes to the game design. The game has nothing that pulls you into it, let alone justifies its $10 MSRP price tag.

The level design is amateurish at best. At worst you're fighting the poor lighting that the game gives you. It's either blindingly bright or puzzle elements that are drenched in darkness. Whilst there can definitely be dark moments, the fact that the game is so dark makes me think the developer doesn't know how to properly light Source engine levels. The exceeding brightness of some lights also lends credibility to this theory. The level design itself is fairly linear. None of it is notable except being a lot of big rooms... typically full of nothing. Enemy engagements aren't great, either. The transition between areas are... a ton of vents. In fact if you love vents and disembodied voices communicating to you, then this game comes highly recommended.

The game graphically looks fine other than the lighting issues, but that's mostly because it's using the stock Half-Life 2 textures with a filter that greatly increases the color saturation, which looks odd. The contrast appears to be tweaked a bit as well but it's hard for me to tell. They changed the HUD's font to some really ugly large font. I'm not a fan but it's a pretty minor change anyways.

At this point I'm starting to ramble, but honestly this game didn't impress me whatsoever. I read the forums and the developer seemed dedicated to improving it and I commend that, but I find it hard to justify money on this. Best of luck with your future endeavors. May luck bless you... but it has abandoned you here IMO.