Recent reviews by Dapper

this game sucks i suck at it i hate it but i can't stop there's too much sauce (CAPCOM please stop stealing my money)

I just made 1 negative review completely useless.

This War of Mine meets Night of the Living Dead, a pretty competent first draft of what could be a very immersive entry into the Zombie Survival genre. Seems to have completely abandoned the original "Into The Dead" flavour in favour of a more grounded and character driven sense of immersion, which would be favourable if the characters were interesting enough--though at the moment that remains to be seen. Despite the little blurbs about each pair of survivors, none of those personalities are reflected in the gameplay in this demo, nothing about those dynamics is apparent once you're in the game.

Unfortunately for me this makes it a little hard to get into, since narrative is the driving force behind this type of survival game it would have been preferable to be following a story rather than just replenishing bars and gathering materials. I understand they wanted to push out something for Next Fest, so I'm not waggling my finger too hard, this is clearly more of a vertical slice than a demo. The only thing I even remember a character "saying" is that they hope they will meet someone from their school, it would be cool if this lead to a chance encounter with a zombified classmate! One can dream.

It also in general simply feels *too much* like This War of Mine while not really setting itself apart, right down to the same stack sizes for certain items and crafting recipes for tools and improvements. The main difference is each phase is not time-limited, so you can take your time before committing to anything, which was honestly what made This War of Mine exciting! Into The Dead instead has no time limit for each phase which is less punishing but also less immersive, while I understand there's benefits and drawbacks to both I hope this "stopped time" mechanic is relegated to an easier difficulty setting.

Overall I could see the game being very good on release as the combat, visuals, progression, and ambient storytelling (so far) is a great framework. I will patiently await a full release and hope that what comes in the full game carries the same weight as their excellent introductory movie!

Game is clean as hell when it is working, but even "5 bar green connection" matchmaking games end up with minimum 2 Delay Frame 8 Rollback Frame 180+ Ping matches that are impossible to play. My only hope is that we receive some updates that make the game look as clean as the in-game spectator matches in the main menu.

Also, for some reason the matchmaking randomly stops working. You can fix this by just leaving matchmaking and rejoining, seems to be pretty consistently happening after every 2-3 matches.

Most fun shortcut to 2AM I've found in a Roguelite Card Battle game.

One of the most well-crafted survival horror experiences of the last decade.

Keep Your Promise.

This is perhaps one of the most punishing survival games I've ever played, and the worst part is that it runs so well and plays so responsively that there's nothing I can say other than I am not very good at it.

I had a friend ask me whether or not one should buy this game, which prompted me to do something I rarely do which is give my recommendation on Steam (see, 700+ games, probably around 10 reviews at the time of posting this).

Squad is by all accounts a very well-made experience. Carefully designed gun models, painfully accurate vehicles and armoured transports, and a set of rules and gameplay features that tie together a wonderful symphony of gunfire and explosions. But that only really scratches the surface of what Squad really "is" underneath all of these systems which are assembled by some of the most talented developers in the milsim category on planet earth. This game is--without a doubt in my mind--the second-best Military Sandbox combat experience (next to Arma III which boasts options for both combat and creativity that even this game cannot compare to), and holistically the greatest milsim game ever released to date.

It's no surprise that I'm going to miss out on a lot of the details that would help to describe this to you in a text-based format without the accompaniment of pictures and video, but lend your eyes and your imagination for just a moment to the following amalgamation of different anecdotes about the game:
- During the beginning phases of the game, you'll be introduced to delightful conversation with your team. As I'm sure you already understand, this being a milsim game which has quite a competitive community, this generally devolves into nonsense about the previous game within your own squad, but when 50 players are in the same 100m, it transitions into anything from music-sharing to politics. Though rarely very memorable as individual moments, I'm sure I'm not the only one who looks forward to hanging around at the main base and chatting with people from all manner of different backgrounds--which I can imagine is not too dissimilar from the actual experience one might have when they are out on a military deployment.
- While you're out in the field, whether it's taking ground or holding it, your Squad (of up to 8 other players) are your best friends and your safety net. Sometimes they're full of holes, or uncooperative, or sometimes they aren't really much of a "squad" at all, but when you get a squad that works well together with one another you can bet your bottom-dollar that even in a game where you're getting pushed all the way back into your main base that you will at least do your best to try and clinch that victory. Even bad squads with vocal leaders can be good enough to pull together and execute tactics and strategies that can turn the tides of battle with as little as 4-5 well positioned players. For all those players who prefer to go-it alone, or have a good friend who they consider the only person they can work with effectively, why don't you try learning how to use Armoured vehicles, or become the next Logistics-running prodigy of the Middle Eastern Alliance?Feel the cheers (and the occasional jeers) of your teammates who parade at your arrival in key positions around the various theatres of war.
- Sometimes, when you're sitting around on a defence, putting up your best sandbag towers, and making sure to razor-wire the entry-points of your building with hasco-blocked windows, you'll sit and you'll listen... and you'll hear the pops and the booms and the bangs of distant-yet-approaching warfare and then suddenly--quiet. A moment in time that seems so impossible in a game of such scale but you'll hear it, the quiet chirping of nearby birds, the peaceful breeze blowing through the desert, the subtle ambience that has been delicately crafted by the developers which wraps the game up to be so utterly COMPLETE that when the action starts up again you will hardly remember why you were so caught up in just standing there. Bipod deployed, scoped in, and ready to rock, a flurry of bullets will begin landing outside your post and you'll be ripped back in as seamlessly as satin sheets.

Squad is not just a game, or a military simulation game, it's a dichotomy of experiences, wins, and losses. Immersive as any game could possibly be and boasting one of the strongest arguments for how to create infinite replayability, Squad is perfection. A golden ratio of point-and-shooting, 'nade-throwing, rocket launching, logi-riding, tank-shelling, A-10-brr'ing, and artillery-crushing wrapped up with an update (verison 2.0) which makes this game run SO MUCH BETTER than it ever has make the purchase of this game no longer a question of whether your PC could handle the game, but how far beyond 60, 120, 144, or 240fps you can push the game. In fact, before such an update I probably would not have wholeheartedly recommended the game in the same way I'm doing right now, but OWI have hit a home-run in terms of optimization passes on a game with maps that are several square kilometers it feels as smooth as a shooter of much smaller scale and scope. So my hats-off to the developers as well for this most recent 2.0 update as well, which puts this game at a very rare but very deserved perfect rating in my mind.

10/10 -- Was a 9/10 before the 2.0 update personally, so this is a must-buy for anyone who enjoys either military simluation games or large-scale multiplayer tactics games.

A fantastic, well-written, well-acted, and truly transcendent experience.

Disco Elysium puts you into the gum-shoes of a down-on-his-luck detective and pulls no punches in reminding you how dreadful that really can be. But as moody as the game is, it would be naive to say it struggled to put a smile on my face and shock me and excite me. It really amazed me just how methodical the whole experience was, teasing me, pulling me in, dragging me down into the depths of some unknown landscape with familiar architecture and people, and that was the most surprising part.

This game is full of people, people you want to help, because you're a detective. It gives them voices, and gives them just a touch of character, subtle animations and behaviours. It's all so cinematic in it's approach but suddenly you could just close your eyes and listen to the ambience in the bar, question the locals, and really get to know the atmosphere. Then, just when you think you're about to get to the bottom of things *snap* and you're on to asking another question, or taking another risk.

The striking art matched with a soundtrack that was expertly composed are a thing to behold on their own, and worth the price as well if you enjoy a good soundtrack to listen to casually. The character art itself gives an excellent insight into the state of a post-war nation, creating a great sense of a pseudo-european unified state on the brink of apocalypse, and that's not an exaggeration. A stillness permeates the surroundings, a lack of people notwithstanding, but a "something" that all of us try to forget about. The kind of feeling you get, then shake off, an intrusive thought, and then get back to it. This analogy also plays a lot into the player-character themselves. As you control the detective, you get to listen to a parade of mostly-lunatic neurons firing in your brain that you can't get rid of like those calls you get playing Grand Theft Auto Online. It's a little bit like you have 20 different Runescape NPCs standing in a line behind you waiting for their turn to interrupt you trying to get "Cook's Assistant" done, but they aren't *all* making puns so at least there's that. You also get to pick one to be a little bit more insistent on being heard, which definitely adds to the replayability aspect because I can't wait to see what Encyclopedia has to say about the world around me, even if I am tempted to just skip through his paragraphs already.

It goes without saying the game is utterly fantastic, technically it's well executed and best of all it's an RPG at heart. Which means there's definitely a reason to play it more than once and take a different approach. Maybe speedrun the game? Who knows.

I understand where the devs are going, I'm upset that this is what it's become, but I honestly can appreciate turning it into something bigger than it was before. BI is clearly trying to create platforms, not games, and Ylands started as a game.

I definitely enjoy the survival mode, and now it runs very well compared to when I played it half a year ago. In fact, the whole game runs a lot better! Sadly, like many games, I think the step to Free-to-Play was a risky yet necessary one. Hopefully at the end of the outrage BI can continue to develop Ylands into a creative interactive experience not unlike Roblox. It's certainly shaping up to be something just a little tiny bit like that. It's never going to be the most popular platform, just like Arma will never be the most popular Milsim. But, just like Arma, I hope that Ylands can become a staple in the creative genre as it very clearly has a lot of potential.