Recent reviews by schnedwob

I'm gonna start by saying that this review contains spoilers for what I'm assuming is about mid-game content.

This game has a whole lot going for it. The environmental art is densely detailed, captivating, stylish, charming, I could go on. The gameplay has a decent foundation, with the player's nine to five dictating the way they interact with the world, as well as where they fit into it. The combination of the two results in a feeling of this really humble sort of poverty, which in its own way, especially at first, works really well! However, that changes as the game continues.

The game sets up this expectation that the world is deeper than it seems, more or less literally in the form of the sewer-dungeon. Characters talk about the extensive ruins tunneling throughout the planet, full of scavengers, adventurers, and monsters. The markets are teeming with spells, armor, weaponry, and other goods that in any other game would seem like the setting's various dungeon-diving necessities. Further endorsing this expectation, the very beginning of the game has the player purchase an eye from a unique vendor who sells nothing but these eyes, which are required to enter the sewers. The player walks forward a little bit, through the uppermost level of the dungeon, to a door which the game makes a lot of ceremony out of as it creaks open with a lot of light and sound. The player retrieves a skull from behind the door, and they're shunted back into the overworld, now cursed both with this skull that gnaws away at their luckiness as well as with the expectation of a deeper, more involved game.

While all this points toward the start of some dungeon-crawling RPG portion, the game outs itself as a million times shallower. To remove the curse of the skull, the player has to collect three fragments of a tablet. One of the pieces is hidden behind an unimaginative fetch quest, the second behind an even more monotonous nine-part fetch quest, and the third in the lifeless, bland sewer beneath the city. The "deeper" sewer in particular bothered me, because not only was it starkly free of detail compared to the part the player explores in the intro, but it's trivially easy to just walk diagonally and evade the only barrier the player faces down there. After that, the player is left with what is esentially a ten part grind to acquire the other two pieces of the tablet, which due to the game erasing all my progress as I was about halfway there, I didn't bother to complete.

I've played other altgames before, and often the point is not so much to complete some sort of objective as it is to merely soak in the game's world, interact with it in interesting ways, and just have a nice time of that. Where Spaceport Janitor fails compared to peers like Crypt Worlds or Goblet Grotto is that once you've taken in the setting and spoken to the maybe five unique NPCs, there's simply no incentive to keep going. To add insult to injury, the eponymous diary is entirely bugged, cloning whatever I wrote each night into all the previous entries.

Overall, Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is like a feature-poor Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing. The game could almost be considered a deconstruction of the other two, and other games like them, if only it did more than just reduce those formulas to the most joyless parts. After teasing the player with a vibrant and colorful world, it shuts them down with gameplay that reduces the overall experience to one of shallow pointlessness.

This game is so far removed from what it originally was it's sad. Jagex did away with every ounce of uniqueness and atmosphere in favor of a hectic, disorganized mess of a game that can only really be characterized as a bastardization of what it once was. It's not even particularly bad, it's just depressing considering what the game used to be.

Incredibly polished bare-bones (heh) gameplay with a stark, creepy aesthetic give Devil Daggers a gritty uniqueness. Buy this game.

A better Wolfenstein than Wolfenstein. That's including the new one. A little rough around the edges, but it plays incredibly well, and though the graphics are the tiniest bit dated, it still looks very nice. I'm only a few levels in, but there's already a great variety of weapons and if the trailers/screenshots are anything to go by there's quite a few more.

Gameplay-wise, it straddles the line between older shooters (Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior) and the earlier Call of Duty games. Movement is slow and aiming is kinda janky- protip, don't aim down the sights unless you really have to- but the melee combos and the fairly quick weapon switching make combat really fun.

The term 'hidden gem' is a bit of a cliche, but it definitely applies here.

I got this game in a Humble Bundle, and at first it seemed like a nice afterthought. However, as soon as I started playing, the nuances of the visual style- the kind that are tough to capture in screenshots- really popped out at me. The game's got a very excellent look going- even if it seems, superficially, to be a generic "retro" one.

Halfway through the tutorial, I realized it had basically the same gameplay as that Lego Rock Raiders game. What I'm saying is: Buy Freking Meatbags.

Like Super Smash Brothers, with a little bit of Dark Souls thrown in for good measure. ACE does it again.

In this simulation/social commentary Vidcon, you play as the owner of a GARAGE who must repair AUTOMOBILES to make ends meet. Without a formal education or any experience in AUTOMOBILE repair, you must take out a loan to finance both your business and your training. However, if you choose poorly, you will find yourself in the red- unable to pursue both options. Which will you choose: future opportunity or present stability? Will you cut corners to keep your nascent GARAGE afloat? Will you end up penniless, forever trapped in a greasy dubstep purgatory? All these questions are answered... and more... in CAR MECHANIC SIMULATOR TWO-K ONE-FOUR!

Really fun game... the first time around. I couldn't bring myself to finish more than one run through the cave. The dialogue is punchy, and entertaining, and seeing everyone's stories play out was cool, but the IKEA-style puzzles (and the backtracking accompanying them) quickly turned the game into a chore.

Spelunky, as an FPS. Quake, but as a roguelite. Paranautical Activity, but good. These are all things you could use to describe this excellent, excellent game.