Recent reviews by awp

Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is a great JRPG and a great piece of fish-oriented art.

The world and characters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of the genre and the writing is definitely my jam, but it goes a step further by being mechanically interesting with its touted "bar system". Combat is a bit slow at times, but it remains fun throughout. It's varied yet easy to understand, which allows you to torpedo the game's difficulty with your stylish and attractive mastery of its battle systems.

There are jokes in almost every door and treasure chest in the game, but the real hero is the ending card, which is undoubtedly the most rewarding "Fin" I have ever seen.

Quickstart guide to Space Engineers: Mine resources > Refine ores > Build Assembler > Craft Spaceship > Crash Spaceship > Create Memory Craters > Reminisce

The release of version 6 introduces Survivors Mode, a new gameplay mode with a new set of enemies, levels, and rules. It will feel familiar to those who've played reverse bullet hell games before; the basic concept is that you're in an arena and enemies will spawn all over the map in increasing numbers and intensity as time goes on. You need to survive for 30 minutes by killing enemies, collecting orbs, leveling up, and acquiring more power to survive the increasing onslaught.

The corridor gameplay mode Vampire Hunters launched with was enough to explore the concept of shooting waves of demons with an absurd number of guns, but it's in the Survivors mode where the game truly feels at home. It's a blast, in more ways than one. Being played from a first person view means your position and situational awareness become all the more important.

What's in the current Early Access version is great even if it's only a few hours of content, but the with more bosses and maps on the way it'll only get better. The bones of the game are in a very good spot now

Play time at the time of review is about 90 minutes, played on the Steam Deck in offline mode so the timers are off.

I have a reasonable amount of experience and patience with modern sonic games. Unleashed was fine, Generations was great, Colors was a good game with a bad control scheme. Finished all of them, and liked them all well enough.

Lost World is, unfortunately, marred with weird decisions that prevent me from enjoying it. The biggest of these issues is how the player character actually handles. The controls are fine (other than the Run button, which shouldn't exist and is held almost the entire time the game is played) but the interactions are so weird. Momentum rolls to a stop incredibly quickly, wall jumps are awkward, limp, and cause more problems than they solve. The homing attack feels finicky, particularly on boss fights because iframes are not visually represented. Hitting enemies tanks your speed to zero (including bosses that are attempting to crash into you) so I found myself avoiding them instead. It's incredibly hard to go fast for more than a few seconds - not because the level has thrown a Gotcha at you (as is the case with classic 2D sonics) but because you've just...run out of speed. Everything you do, apart from Just Running, eventually brings you to a crawl without sufficient means to smoothly maintain speed. Sonic just feels bad to run around as, plain and simple.

The level designs are fun and creative (at least, for the first world and a half that I experienced) but that's about the only strong thing the game has going for it. A lot of things feel rather odd; the story is told in between stages but there seems to be absolutely no relation between the two. The world map controls oddly and is free roaming for absolutely no reason, making it feel clunkier to get between stages. You're dropped into the first level after the intro cutscene with no onboarding, no explanation of controls, no instructions, and no defined goal. Wisps from Sonic Colors are also in this game, for seemingly no reason, and are also never explained. It's hard to tell what exactly went wrong with Lost World, but very easy to tell that something absolutely DID go wrong.

I don't think it would take a significant amount of rework for the game to feel good to play, but I doubt it will happen, either.

As a Rising Monster Hunter, it is your job to Hunt Monsters around the Rise.

A very mechanically solid and well executed beat em up. Played couch coop, campaign runtime about 8 hours with minimal revisiting of stages. Four playable characters with different playstyles, but even when you find the one you like the most you can still mix up your build/playstyle with the perks on the gear you'll accumulate, which is a very welcome touch. Mixing basic combos with resource spenders is immensely satisfying when it enables you to pull off a masterful juggle. One of the bosses is pretty irritating to fight, and later stages can get pretty cluttered with actors but I enjoyed everything else.

This game was a pleasant surprise. I'd held off for a while because it was reportedly fairly janky, which it...kind of is, but in a mostly-tolerable way that reminds me of early builds of Half Life 2. Boneworks is very immersive, it reacts to your actions surprisingly well, and never really feels like it's taking shortcuts in its interaction models.

The campaign is of average length, but the narrative being told feels inconsistent. The environmental narrative has that same "you are exploring the back alleys of a system you are not meant to peer behind the curtains of" vibe that Portal did so well, but the live action cinematics that put words to your progression felt like they came out of nowhere, describing actions and intentions the story's protagonist had that I was completely unaware of.

The biggest downside to the campaign is that there's a plethora of delightful tools and systems to play with, but for the most part the combat is just "here's your guns, shoot things". It's just a missed opportunity when impaling enemies with swords, daggers, shovels, or throwing random crap around feels so good.

Ever since playing Alyx, every other VR game has been soured due to how high the bar had now been set on interactivity and immersion, so I was delighted to find that, while Boneworks lacks polish in some areas and is pretty janky at times, it actually manages to raise the bar even HIGHER in a lot of ways. The ability to jump higher by physically jumping in the real world, while quite dangerous, is a fantastic touch. Scraping meat cleavers together produces satisfying sparks and sounds. The collectable system is strangely appealing, emphasized by the number of secret items and areas sprinkled through the campaign.

After having played through the game's story and checking out a number of the optional post-game content, I've gotten my money's worth out of it but I'm still left wanting more, simply because of how enjoyable being in this engine has been.

It's like a fifth the price of Doom Eternal and at least twice as enjoyable. It fumbles in a few spots and isn't terribly well balanced but it is a lot of fun. Might be the only campaign FPS I've played more than once since, like...Duke3D.

As the World's premier Monster Hunter, it is your job to Hunt Monsters around the World.

Grab a couple beers and a couple mates and go plunder goodies in space. For a good time. For Karl!