Recent reviews by Furlington Boat Cactory

Do you like "Animal Crossing?"

Do you like "The Binding of Isaac?"

Did you ever wish you could play both at the same time?

That's "Cult of the Lamb" in a nutshell.

If you're the kind of person who likes managing resources and keeping a lot of balls in the air, this should just about scratch that itch for you. While the town management and dungeon runs largely function as two separate and independent games, both serve as a good amount of pressure on the other. While you're on "crusades" through the four different, procedurally-generated dungeons, activity still carries on as normal in your town while you're not there, so if you spend too much time away from your community, things can quickly and easily spiral out of control. At the same time, crusades through the dungeons are, at least at first, your primary way of gathering essential resources and progressing through the main storyline. A large portion of the resources and labor you need to keep your town running can be cultivated within the town itself, but a few things are only available on crusades, so even in late- to end-game, you'll still not be completely out of things to do outside of your town.

The in-game story and lore delivers what you would expect from any of the promotional material you may have seen and serves perfectly well as incentive to explore the world of Cult of the Lamb and interact with the varied cast of characters therein, each of which with unique characterized dialogue and vocalizations to quickly convey their personalities. The story being told, itself, while not delivering anything particularly surprising or unexpected, is woven with plenty of intrigue and detail and a couple of questions left unanswered for your brain to chew on even after you've read everything the game and story has to offer.

All of this isn't to say the game is free from criticism. What I said at the beginning is true, this feels like animal crossing blended with the gameplay and aesthetics of The Binding of Isaac. The approach works, by and large, but, at its worst, it can feel like these two gameplay styles have been stapled onto each other somewhat sloppily and frequently get in each other's way. Each one holding the other back from being totally enjoyable. These elements are likely intentional to get the two to continually interact and not let either fade into the background, but that still can lead to a fair amount of frustration as each one can, at times, feel like distractions from the other. You're in the middle of getting your farm in order, when you run out of essential resources and have to go out and get them. You're deep in one of the dungeons, when you get a notification that one of your followers have died, or two of your followers have started fighting, or they have begun to starve despite filling two kitchens with food. There are ways to mitigate these issues, for certain, and you're expected to have affairs in order before leaving the village, but this isn't always feasible or even possible given that most things that need to be taken care of in town come with time-pressure whether that be in the form of a hard time-limit on follower-given quests or the threat of starvation or loss of faith from too much time spent away.

A smaller criticism is that, in the late- or end-game, the crusades struggle to stay relevant as your town becomes largely self-sufficient. A lot of your input begins to feel like busy-work, performing the same few tasks over and over again just to make sure your followers don't starve while they come to you with the occasional fetch-quest sending you to collect something from the crusades or perform a random ritual.

In spite of it's flaws, I whole-heartedly recommend this game. It offers satisfying progression, gameplay that's easy to understand without everything being handed to you and options to up the difficulty in interesting ways should you want more of a challenge. It is well worth the asking price.

Like a lot of other I played this game when I was much younger and it's pretty much the only MMO I've ever played with any kind of dedication. I reinstalled for a bit of nostalgia and was sorely disappointed. This game is terrified of losing your attention for even a second and holds your hand through so much of the first levels that it hardly feels like you're playing a game at all. They want you to get to the newer stuff as soon as possible, so they front-load a lot of the progression to the point that it feels like your clicking through dialogue trees in a visual novel and this goes on for hours before you're able to actually do anything without the game holding your hand and even then, you're so over-leveled by that point, that any of the nearby quests become insultingly easy with no need for help from anyone else. In all the hours of playtime I accumulated, scant though they may have been, I went through a complete questline and never had to heal even a single time.

A simple and straight-forward wave-based, endurance, rogue-like. The fundamentals for a solid game are all there with a modest sense of humor that doesn't take itself too seriously. The controls feel a bit floaty and it desparately needs some more control options like disabling mouse acceleration and smoothing, but otherwise, I could see this being a fun time-waster were it given a bit more development and fleshing out.

A simple and straight-forward horror-esque adventure in an interesting world. Delivers pretty much exactly what it promises and was over-all enjoyable from start to finish. Only gripe would have to be that some of the animation can look a bit silly at times which can be detrimental to atmosphere it's trying to build.

A short, but very sweet, platformer.

A novel and charming idea that I would love to see expanded into a more robust experience. The subtle story-telling of the environment and level-design left me wanting to know more about the world these characters inhabit and what its history might be.

It certainly isn't without its faults, though. The game has a tendency to freeze with seemingly no cause (this happened a total of 5 times over the course of my playthrough, with 2 of those times happening while I was in the pause screen), some of the platforming and collision could be a bit finicky and frustrating at times getting stuck on weird geometry and debris, the checkpoints seem a bit oddly spaced out, which became irritating when the game would freeze forcing me to undo a large chunk of my progress and in one case back-track through a section of platforming that was clearly not designed to be run backward, in order to fix a bugged objective marker, and lastly, the final chase sequence is extremely unforgiving and most of the time feels like a coin-flip as to whether it's even possible (if you get stuck on this bit, no, you aren't doing anything wrong, you're just supposed to run) and on top of that the intro cutscene to the chase is just a bit too long and unskippable, making every failure just that much more grating.

All-in-all, a few hiccups that are definitely worth mentioning and looking into, but an overall positive experience that is worth your time and attention.

Update edit part 2: The improvements mentioned last time around seem to have just been a flash in the pan, something that happened by way of course rather the result of conscious action on Valve's part. Bots are even more rampant than ever and, on top of that are becoming dangerous as well with reports of harrassment, DDoSing, doxxing, and, in rare cases, swatting to those who stay outspoken about the aim-bot issue. Bots are flooding casual servers en masse making the game nigh unplayable for anyone thinking of just picking the game up, unless you feel like requeueing for an hour or more to find a workable server, and even then you'll need to keep constant vigilance to make sure bots are kicked as quickly as possible, lest they bring with them their own horde of fellow basement dwellers to ruin things for everyone else.

Probably in your best interest to steer clear of anything Valve has to actually maintain themselves, as they'll likely just brush it off as "treadmill work."

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Update edit: Things have massively improved as the "#SaveTF2" movement seems to have had an actual impact. The game is, once again, getting regular security updates and the bots, while not completely gone, have been massively reduced and gimped on the whole. One bot joining your server is not longer the herald of the end-times of any fun you might have been having, and people have become pretty quick on the up-take with voting out bots when they do join. Not everything is perfect, but with the changes that have been made, I feel confidant recommending this game once again. Still the most fun I've ever had online.

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It's Team Fortress 2. You've obviously heard about it time and time again.

You've heard about it as the funny hat game.

You've heard about it as that thing that came bundled with Half-Life 2 and Portal.

You've heard about it as, quite possibly, the pinnacle of the war class-based FPS genre.

With nearly 2000 hours on record over more than a decade of play, I can confirm to you that it is all that and more.

Though it has a steep learning curve, Team Fortress 2 is mechanically complex, easy to pick up, and deeply rewarding to master. Every kill you get in this game will feel earned and there will always be something new to learn about the mechanics and various playstyles of every individual class. I could sing the praises of this game for hours. But, my conscience will not let me praise it any further for fear of misleading any who might read this.

In its current state, I cannot, in good faith, recommend this game.

Valve has all but abandoned this game and joining any casual server will show you that. I understand that they, by and large, have moved on to bigger projects and better engines, but I'm not just talking about a lack of substantial updates for the past 4 years: if that was the only issue, I would still whole-heartedly recommend this game to anyone with even a passing interest in class-based shooters. No; This game has become absolutely lousy with bot accounts that will flood any and all servers en masse without even the slightest attempt to hide any of it, except spoofing their name to make them only that much harder to votekick. There is a large swathe of people who seem to be wholly devoted to ruining this game, and the lack of occupied time/server space to devote to doing it.

Valve has done next to nothing to remedy this aside from half-assed solutions that provided no relief and, in-fact, may have done more harm than good to the community at large.

And to make things clear, this game is not dead. I know I'm painting what seems to be a nigh dystopian picture, but open up the community server browser and find any half-decent server, and you'll find them full to the brim with nary a bot in sight. It is possible to enjoy this game, even in its current state and I'll likely continue to play it.

But that isn't enough for me to recommend it.

I'm sorry you got here so late.

You missed out on one hell of a ride.

Valve: either fix this or shut it down, but, for the love of god, stop leaving us in the dark.

Full disclosure, I'm doing this largely for the Steam sale, but I wanted to do it right and not just throw up something half-assed.

I'm a fairly casual gamer and I enjoy this game immensely. It certainly isn't flawless, but for the price you pay, it is certainly good enough.

At first glance, this looks like a smash clone, and you wouldn't be wrong in drawing a lot of comparisons between the two. They are similar games if you look at them in broad strokes (i.e. They're in the same genre). Things start changing a lot once you start looking at the minutia and the mechanics of the game. Brawlhalla isn't any where near as hectic as smash, all of the characters(legends) are fairly restricted in what they can do at any given time. simplistic map design and all the legends sharing the same basic moveset (aside from signatures) means that the core game is more-or-less the same no matter what legend you choose with slight variations in how fast, strong, or enduring the legend is. What ends up making the most difference, both between the legends and in regards to smash, is what weapons your legend uses. The weapon system in Brawlhalla is the main mechanic that separates it from most other platform fighters. Whereas smash has a wide variety of items and weapons that any character is free to use, Brawlhalla's set is considerably less, Throughout every match, item drops will spawn and they will be either a bomb, a mine, a spike ball, a horn, or a weapon pick-up. The bomb and mine are pretty self-explanatory (they go boom), the spike ball does a bit of damage when thrown (basically a long-distance punch), the horn summons a weapon pick-up. and a weapon pick-up allows your legend to equip one of the two weapons assigned to the legend you chose. These weapons are the mechanic around which the game is centered. Your legends fighting style is based almost entirely on these two weapons, so your legend choice is based less on which character you like the most and more on which two weapons you like using the most (cross your fingers that they have a legend out that uses both). Each weapon operates differently and has it's own strengths and weaknesses and it's these that you have to plan around for both yourself and your opponent (pro-tip: work on getting at least proficient in unarmed: it's good for taking players by surprise and for shutting down anyone trying to block your path to a weapon, the unarmed moveset is the same for all legends). Playing this game, you won't want for content, the dev team is pretty consistent with patches and content updates including new legends and new weapons on a fairly regular basis. Content updates are so regular, in fact, that some, myself included, would say that it's almost a negative, in that the devs have a tendency to favor content over balance and moving on the next content update before working all of the bugs and balance issues out of the previous update.
Another small minus (and I do mean minor) is that this game does contain micro-transactions. Cosmetics and most of the legends are locked at the start of the game. HOWEVER only the cosmetic items require you to pay actual money. All of the legends are purchasable with in-game currency that is earned playing matches, and you don't have to rely on guess work to buy the right legend. Every week, a different set of six legends are made free-to-play, so you can try out legends to get a feel for which one is for you before you spend your hard-fought gold on one. All-in-all, i definitely recommend this game. the player base is wide enough that you don't have very long queue times, and matches are over pretty quick ( ~8minutes each give or take overtime), devs are adding enough new content and mechanic changes(including the occasional new game mode) to keep things fresh and interesting, and to top everything off, it's free.

(caveat emptor: soooooooo much salt. the salt is so bad the devs added in an automatic "gg" button and have after-match chat auto-minimized. This game makes people angry for some reason.)