Recent reviews by Rex Bellator

Can a game possess glaring flaws yet still be considered underrated? Absolutely and Back 4 Blood embodies this paradox perfectly.

The Good:

o Fantastic graphics that capture both the icky body horror of the Ridden and their environments. Nice lighting effects make for some really nicely lit outdoor areas and moody subterranean areas (like Tunnels of Terror).

o A nice roster of characters with their unique perks which alters how the game plays.

o Combined with the cards/deck system it adds a lot of replayability by making different playthroughs feel different enough.

o B4B's deck system allows for a number of different play styles and its fun to come up with your own powerful combinations.

o Gunplay feels tight and responsive. A nice assortment of firearms for every occasion. Plus firearms can be improved with found upgrades that adds another nice touch of replayability.

o Corruption cards adds a lot of variety to the game, adding different types of Ridden mutations that can change up how you approach a level.

o AI teammates know how to use throwables!

o Excellent difficulty scaling, Veteran difficulty feels like a nice sweet spot between hard / expert difficulties. High difficulties are good but at times feel a little unfair.

o I like a lot of the player characters and their banter, as well as their many interactions with each other. Hoffman and Mom are the best to play as.

The Meh:

o One too many scripted sequences that always play out the same, Act I Episode 2 always has a giant RIdden called an Ogre spawn and it just gets repetitive.

o AI teammates either lag behind or stupidly walk right into your line of fire even though you're crouched and not moving.

o It's not always clear when you have a gauntlet to run through rather than a simple horde, which can be costly as you face off against a never-ending horde of Ridden; this is only a big deal at higher difficulty levels.

o Corruption cards (random conditions that are rolled at the beginning of a new map) can often suck the fun out of the game, especially if you get certain bad combinations.

o Some characters repeat certain catchphrases a little too often.


The Bad:

o Put simply: the multiplayer experience sucks but it's not a single thing that makes it suck but a lot of little bad decisions that ruins it for me - for example:

o Setting up a game on your own takes far too long to get going; it's almost as if Turtle Rock wants to double check you don't have anyone else to play with before reserving a server for you.

o Hosting a game leaves you at the mercy of disruptive players, unless you have majority you cannot kick people. This on its own isn't a big deal but because campaigns are played in "runs" it means quitting a campaign represents a loss of that time, forcing you to start a campaign over.

o Difficulty in multiplayer can be far harder than playing with bots at the same difficulty

o Bizarre design choices that prevent you from starting a game with a friend if, for instance, you have two different matchmaking preferences (you have crossplay enabled and they have it disabled will prevent you from starting).

Outside of multiplayer:

o Special spawns are a little too RNG and can absolutely f**k you if the RNG goes against you; most times it's not bad but story events can be extremely brutal on higher difficulties.

o Why the hell is Act I so long Turtle Rock? Act I is a SLOG composed of 9 different maps; it really should have been two separate campaigns. This, again, wouldn't be a big deal in a traditional game but because of the game's 'run' system, playing through a long act means they sometimes have to be played in two separate sessions. It can also mean that if you take on too much trauma (as you take damage your max health is reduced) it can put you into a fail state before your run is completed.


The Bottom Line: Back 4 Blood is a solid 4-player co-op zombie shooter with a lot of replayability and a lot of things to appreciate and I say this as a definitive Left 4 Dead veteran with over 3000 hours in Left 4 Dead 2, half of which was spent playing co-op.

Please note: Back 4 Blood is NOT for players of Left 4 Dead Versus, the only feature that Turtle Rock did not carry over from Left 4 Dead, which is fine by me because versus was overall incredibly toxic and full of exploits that Turtle Rock was right to avoid, something that Valve fanboys have criticized, yet oddly turn a blind eye toward Valve for never bothering to give us Left 4 Dead 3.

At least Turtle Rock got off their duffs and actually made a game unlike Valve.

It's funny how all the things that Gamers™ hate about modern gaming, i.e., live service, grindy mechanics, cluttered UI, poor visual feedback, glitches, poor movement controls are found in abundance in Deep Rock... and yet Deep Rock Galactic gets a free pass because the developers have been shrewd enough to throw them enough morsels to make them look past it.

Therefore who am I to give this glorious and magnificent game a thumbs down? Who dares look down upon this DARLING PRINCE OF THE REALM?? Not I.

But the fact remains I would rather play Left 4 Dead, or Borderlands, or any other 4-player co-op than DRG.

Deep Rock's enemies are boring, repetitive bullet sponges and despite years of updates the developers have barely moved the needle in this regard. For a game about Space Dwarves™ the default enemy are bugs. Where are the Orcs? The humans or elves? Where are the rival dwarf companies? Is Ghost Ship Games afraid of Games Workshop suing them or something?

There are zero humanoid enemies in this game. Just bugs and more bugs (rival incursion flying drones and turrets notwithstanding).

Speaking of bugs, enemies often spawn underneath your feet, they hit you through solid surfaces like metal flooring but your own attacks are blocked. Movement controls are terrible, often when you think you should be grabbing a ledge you slide right off and end up falling and taking fall damage.

The UI is equally terrible and visual feedback is bad. In the heat of battle your screen gets so cluttered with visual effects you feel like you're in a drug-fueled rave party making it very difficult to figure out where you're being hit from.

The dwarves themselves are pretty bland with their only personality being the repetitive voice lines that sound like they were recorded on an old Labtec microphone and passed through a voice filter. The rest of the audio experience is equally dull and flat.

But hey the game gives you free battle passes! Yay! And free cosmetics that you won't use because your paid DLC cosmetics are way superior! Yay! And it takes 30ish hours of grinding to level up a dwarf class (out of 4) before you can prestige and gain access to more advanced features then do it all over again for the other 3 classes! Yay!

This is all ironic because a theme that runs throughout DRG (the game) is that Deep Rock (the fictional company employing the dwarves) exploits them while making them work in unsafe conditions and expecting certain quotas be met (a theme that mimics real life 'company stores' that exploited miners).

Gotta hand it to them...Ghost Ship Games has managed to take something negative like grinding tedious, unoriginal tasks and made it into a game where their fans eat out of their hands.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon management are eagerly taking notes.

Hunt: Showdown is an atmospheric extraction shooter that is one part PVE horror survival and one part competitive PVP shooter. The artistic design of the world, the characters, monsters, and its setting in the 19th century Southern bayou are incredibly atmospheric. As a shooter it has a unique feel that blends twitchy action with sound tactical gameplay that rewards many different types of playstyles from run & gun to sniping to a mixture of both.

So why the negative thumbs-down review? Well for one: Steam's binary thumbs-up/down review system sucks (it's 2022 and we really should have a sideways thumb rating by now Gaben.)

Besides that the real reason is simple: Crytek.

As a developer Crytek has bungled the execution of this game, which pioneered the burgeoning genre of 'extraction shooter' and turned it into a tired vehicle for selling non-stop DLC cosmetics for 7-10 bucks a pop.

This on its own wouldn't be bad but Crytek continues to prioritize cosmetic sales and other microtransactions while undercutting the game in other areas that players ACTUALLY care about: the game is constantly riddled by bugs both big and small, some bugs like a ladder bug which gave people the ability to noclip through walls, took months to fix (if it was fixed at all), other bugs like a reload bug that eats ammo or doesn't allow you to use your firearm has been in the game for over a year, and only now the devs have acknowledge it on social media but caution that it will take even MORE time because the bug exists deep inside the code.

Then there's other niggling aspects of Crytek's management, like the fact that their Crytek engine is a dog that runs half as well as other leading engines while looking worse. Or the fact that they shortchange regional servers for South/Central America; when questioned on an official dev stream by a Mexican player why they don't get Mexican servers the community manager said "we don't plan to add regional servers in your area, you should play on US East/West servers."

This sounds harmless until you realize that about a year ago Crytek changed the netcode of the game to treat all actions, regardless of latency, as valid. That means if some 200ms player shoots you - even if it's a full second after you land a killing blow on them - the server will treat their bullet as valid. This has led to the frustrating regularity of trades among players killing each other as their bullets cross paths.

In practice what this means is that American servers are regularly flooded by South American and Asian players coming to exploit this latency welfare that Crytek throws at them.

These decisions, along with the multitude of hacks that have become ubiquitous are what led me to give up on the game. I might go back in the future but for now it remains uninstalled.

I am prompted to write this review because a friend asked me this evening if he should play this game: I told him exactly what I'm telling you here now: No. Even at $15.99 USD the game is slowly bleeding players while Crytek is cranking out DLC.

There was a point and time where Hunt was in a really good place and I would have emphatically said yes but that point is long past. This game is a rotting corpse that's still shambling like the grunts that wander its virtual bayou.

Crytek is shamelessly using Hunt like a tax shelter (thanks to German tax laws) while the money they make is being funneled into their executives' pockets because it certainly isn't being used to improve the game.

I feel bad for the artists and designers who dreamed up this unique world, they are the ones that have given Hunt: Showdown its heart and soul, but sadly their creation is being mismanaged and I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this Hunt: Showdown to someone looking to spend money on it.

If you have money to burn and don't care then chances are a negative review won't dissuade you, but if you value your time and money then give this game a pass.

Leave it to the lutefisk-addled Swedes to turn a first-person shooter -- a genre synonymous with adrenaline-pumping, pulse-pounding action -- into the single-most painful slog I've ever experienced full of dull enemies, copy/paste environments, and repetitive, mind-numbing combat and exploration.

This is doubly infuriating as this is the second title I've played using the impressive Avalanche engine (the first is TheHunter: Call of the Wild) which is capable of rendering sumptuous, complex scenery with awesome lighting and visual effects.

However, do not be fooled by the screenshots on the steam store page. It's obvious the developers have relied heavily on the Avalanche engine to do their heavy lifting rather than, you know, making a fun game.

Generation Zero may be best described as Swedish Fallout 76; it's an open world exploration/combat game where the story is told in notes, recordings, and messages. However, despite Fallout 76's rough launch and lingering issues it actually was a fun game with varied environments, even more varied enemies, and excellent environmental storytelling (and this was before the big Wastelanders update that added quests, NPCs, and factions).

Playing GenZero cooperatively offers zero change in the experience, instead of being bored alone you'll simply democratize the stultifying experience.

What makes GenZero so bad is its terrible AI for the antagonists: the robots. Robots come in different shapes and sizes: from headcrab sized spider-bots to dog-like hunters to hulking behemoths. Fights become exercises in frustration and futility as the developers only idea for their AI boils down to: "Wouldn't it be fun if we spammed the player with four different types of enemy all at the same time?"

Gunfights with robots ultimately become an unsatisfying dance of running from cover to cover as they aimbot you with precision, shooting the weakest ones first, while avoiding the barrage of aimbotted artillery from the larger bots (this is made even worse, if you can believe it, by the Russian bots that were added in an update that love to beam you from 250 meters away with laser-guided rocket barrages).

Your arsenal of weapons is your standard FPS fare: pistols, revolvers, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers. Only problem is that 99.99999 percent of the time you'll be equipping those weapons that have the most common ammo. Because of the weight limitations you can only carry 3-4 weapons otherwise you'll be over-encumbered and most ammo types, like explosive ammo for the rocket launchers are so prohibitively heavy that it makes using them impractical.

Using snipers is pointless because of the aforementioned aimbotting of robots that can shoot you while they are in perfect cover that obscures them; you'll be lucky to get a few shots off with a few sneak attacks before you have to switch to something like a shotgun or AR because you WILL be swarmed.

After you've put 10-20 hours into this game you will begin to question why you're playing this at all when there are so many other better games out there. There is hardly a semblance of a story here. There is no connective narrative tissue to make you care. In that time you will have visited forgettable Swedish locations whose names may as well be called Jöörgenböörgenstadt and Flärbennugen Farm.

After nearly 40 hours and countless respawns from being killed by terribly designed enemies I am done with this disgusting excuse for an open-world shooter.

If you're looking for something new in the open-world FPS genre steer clear of GenZero. There is nothing here that you cannot find in other games for the same price point; even Ubisoft's formulaic open world games have more to offer than this rotten Swedish meatball of a game.

Just because a game is free doesn't change the fact that it has to be worthy of your time. A game's cost is only part of the equation. Time is as precious as money.

Put simply: this game does not respect your time (or your intelligence for that matter).

Your role as an evil AI juggling humans to provide power, food, and uh.. labor... makes it seem like a management game but in execution it's a deceptive puzzle game that cheats you.

Despotism 3K suffers from two fundamental flaws: a randomized decision-making mechanic that most times willl derail your game unless you know in advance what the right option is and hidden systems designed to make you fail.

No matter how much you try to maintain a stable population of humans (more humans require more energy to maintain alive) your energy requirements continue to climb for some reason, even if you have the maximum amount of humans working on power generation your power needs increase despite barely breaking even. I have also noticed that some humans tire at faster rates even when performing the same tasks as others. Generating power, the key resource in the game, also doesn't add up; most times you're barely holding on even when you have the generator maxed out with humans and upgraded.

This tells me the dev is doing some behind-the-scenes trickery in order to hide the fact that they didn't know how to make the game mechanically sound so they employed hidden system to keep the player failing under the guise of difficulty.

Worse yet Despotism just isn't fun. Even when you're holding your own the game lacks a rewarding gameplay loop. Unlike other games based around failure you don't learn anything from failing here.

I got this game for free and I *still* feel cheated. That should tell you everything you need to know about Despotism 3K.

Now it's $7.99 USD. Just give this a hard pass.

(Review text hidden)

Eh... sure it's free but it's fundamentally flawed. Achievements are broken and the developer has no intention of fixing them. Gameplay is very repetitive for very little reward. The game's strongest quality is its charming retro graphics which capture the retro-futuristic space age aesthetic nicely, but they're not charming enough to carry the game through. Factor in the shallow gameplay and lack of achievements (plus lack of save system), it's just not worth one's time.

RIP to a once-great game. Servers are full of cheating bots that Valve is unable or unwilling (imho the latter) to fix. Such a shame as this was a great game in it's hey-day. Goodnight sweet prince TF2.

Edit: IGN confirms exactly what I've said weeks later. This game is broken and needs to be fixed by Valve.

This is a very qualified thumbs up. This would be a sideways thumb if I had the option. Right now Humankind definitely feels like a freshmen entry into the historical 4x genre by a developer with experience in the field. There's a lot of good ideas in here but the way they fit together doesn't always click together satisfyingly.

THE GOOD:

The systems they have for evolving your Civ are very well thought-out. Using influence, which you have to cultivate similar to culture in Civ, helps you unlock new civics or new wonders or even new cities helps prevent snowballing without feeling punishing (personally I hated the global happiness mechanic of Civ V and this game's solution to multiple cities is a nice touch).

Presentation wise the game is gorgeous, both in terms of graphics, the UI elements for units/technology and the music is just \*chef's kiss\* phenomenal.

THE BAD:

Pacing is an issue. The 300 turn limit means you're in a race to get the stars you need to advance to the next level. Technology doesn't always keep pace either. The first game I played I didn't even get to the last era because it just ended abruptly.

Because of this limit every thing feels rushed. Exploring so far doesn't feel super-important at least not once you've reached your natural limits of your empire (either because you've run out of land or space). Building a unit when you could be building a district or a wonder feels like a big risk especially if you're not sure if you're going to need it or not.

Furthermore, pacing has another problem. The early game lasts way too long while the mid/late games go by way too fast. The early stages of the game feel like you're just slapping END TURN until something interesting happens. This is a major flaw for a game that has you on the clock.

THE MEH:

Chasing stars (the things you need to progress to the next stage of the game) feels very much like a carrot on a stick. It felt good at first, especially as you scout new areas you're always finding these curiosities, they're like infinite goodie huts that reward you for exploring.

But then you start to get stars for building a district. Sometimes it feels like you build districts not because you want to but because you *have* to especially if you're in a relatively peaceful game where earning expansionist/militarist stars are a little more forthcoming.

Diplomacy feels a little limited. You can't sweeten offers with gold until the AI asks for it. Settling wars with the game's war score system is obtuse and often leads to undesired results.

Having played on different difficulties I feel like the AI is being given extra help even on lower settings. I've noticed the AI seems to be able to found new cities/outposts very easily, often dwarfing you and the other AIs by mid-game.

Final Verdict: This game has a lot of promise but right now that's all it has; it's in a very rudimentary state that's nowhere near developed like more mature games like Civilization VI (which I'm a fan of).

Amplitude needs to seriously rethink some of its systems such as the 300 turn time limit or at least improve pacing so that there are always interesting things to do. This alone would easily elevate Humankind into a must-have 4x game rather than a conceptual WIP that it is right now.

I've seen low effort mobile/flash games that had more depth and strategy than this amateurish weekend project. It's purely RNG based yet strangely the dice rolls seem weighted with 5s/2s coming up regularly.

There is absolutely no strategy to this game; the only real choice you have, besides picking a direction to move, is to either fight or run away and - when you factor in the weighted dice rolls - you're better off fighting, which if you survive only hampers your overall progress because fights have diminishing returns. Most dungeon runs end in a complete loss with nothing to show for it.

This "game" requires a complete rethink in order to make it more interesting and rewarding but the developers appear to have moved on to other projects.

If you enjoy casually tossing two six-sided dice in your spare time like some moon-faced buffoon then by all means give Snake Eyes Dungeon a try otherwise give it a very hard pass.