Recent reviews by Smokescreen

It was on a dark and stormy night, with the rain hammering away covering any ill-intent sounds, when Nicholas "Squirrel" Rothaga realized this was the moment. This was the thing to do, and now was the time to do it. Quickly he jumped out of bed, his wife, Callie, sleeping next to him. She had fallen for him quickly because of his antisocial behavior and her depressive nature, but he did not think she would want to see this right now. The third member of the colony has started becoming a problem...

Glover was in charge of cooking duties, because he always insisted he was the best at it. But, he proved to be quite unreliable. At some point he even started to binge on all the food until all 20 meals were gone. He got in a fight with Callie, where he actually hit her in the arm--she promptly kicked the ♥♥♥♥ out of him, because she was Callie "Nails" Rothaga, and a sailor in her adult life--but, the assault left some ill will. Why did he do it? How far he goes so easily? These are the questions that mattered.

Glover became increasingly irrational, always in a terrible mood... always on the verge of a psychotic break. Earlier in the day, he avoided cooking duties again--the food supply still completely demolished since his binge. Squirrel was out, well, hunting squirrels, to bring home to cook. The meat storage was actually full with squirrels, because the bottleneck was Glover, refusing to butcher and cook them. Squirrel had to take over cooking duties, because everyone was starving. Glover himself was so hungry, that he ate the raw meat before it was cooked and became sick.

So, there he was, sick in bed, in the sick room. He would typically sleep in the same room as everyone else, with the cat at his side, but not tonight. So, maybe it was the opportunity... He was alone... it was raining... no one would hear. The food supply, the thing the entire colony relies on, is no thing to mess around with. There were more squirrels to butcher, and Squirrel planned to butcher them in the morning, get the food thing sorted out. But, what if Glover screws it all up again? Is it all worth it? Wouldn't it be easier to just feed 2, instead of 3?

Squirrel made his decision. He crept out of bed, down the hall out of the living area, through the under construction mining site, into the little sick room set aside, with Glover fast asleep. No one heard him scream over the pounding rain. Squirrel was not made for this... yet. His fists thrashed wildly, missing a lot. The rifle butt would only hit legs and shoulders, crushing toes, bruising here and there. It took many... many hits... before Glover finally succumbed. Then Squirrel quickly crept back in bed, before Callie woke up, and in her depressive way, dragged the corpse away and cleaned the blood without making much comment about it, to a little cave a ways away from home. A cave which would soon become a graveyard for many more colonists, sometimes from misfortune, sometimes from jealous rage, sometimes from sympathy.

Devs added full VR support and didnt ask for a penny. One of the best VR implementations I have seen, especially for a game that added VR later, with fully physical motion control for weapons and tools. Playing with non VR friends is possible, and they will marvel at your immersive powers of turning your head independent of your body and actually pointing at stuff with your hands and tools.

The game itself is a unique one among the survival genre, in how it attempts to preserve the physical matter and space everything occupies. This is evident in how the tree cutting and construction works, as well as the inventory in general. You do not have an inventory that abstracts wood into a table entry or grid icon with a number indicating the amount. Instead, you can see every stick you carry in a pile. every rock, every skull, with hard limits on how much you can carry of each thing.

Even every log must be carried, 2 at a time over your shoulder, and cannot just go in your bag. When the tree is felled, it turns into an exact number of logs to match the tree's length. You can build a log sled to carry up to 12 logs, which must be filled 2 at a time, pushed around by hand, and then unloaded 2 at a time... which is very satisfying exactly because of how nothing is abstracted.

When you build a cabin, you see where every log is physically used up in the construction and must be placed one a time (save the times when the log is actually split in half and you can see exactly where both halves are used). Even when you build the log sled, which is made with sticks, you can see where every stick is used in the construction. This is the same way for all the storage you can build, you can see each one constructed one stick at a time, and then once built, they store only a specific item type, like stones, and you can see every stone physically go into the storage, stacking up a pile, never abstracted.

The only issue is that sometimes construction can be frustrating, because the snapping to existing structures is somewhat limited... so something as basic as adding stairs to go between floors becomes a nightmare scenario. For example, it took me almost a full in game day to try to place a single set of stairs just because I cannot get it to target the position where I want it to go. I actually quit the game once out of frustration after spending an hour trying to place some stairs.

But, on the other hand, this is exactly what allows you to make completely custom looking structures. The collision is handled by the physical shape of every log, so you do not need to rely on snapping for the floors and walls to be functional, you just have to manually make sure there are no gaps to fall through. This sounds simple, but is made unnecessarily difficult by how hard it is to tell where something is being placed while you are placing it.

Basically 90% of the time is spent placing/replacing the position of something, then even when you finally construct it, you find out something isn't right, like the stairs are too low and block your movement, or the gap is too high, so you cannot walk over it smoothly without jumping, requiring you to smash it, losing 90% of the resources, and you must rebuild it several times before you get it how you simply wanted it from the very beginning.

The other significant part of the game is the cannibals and their AI, which is some of the best I have seen in a game. Something about how they move and behave makes them feel very alive. Hiding out by a fire, staring out into the darkness, you might see a skulking figure creep between trees, and it is frightening. Then when they laugh maniacally or give off their signal screams, it is truly terrifying. They also go into feral sprinting, parkouring over logs and such as they run across the land very quickly in packs (while I hide in a bush watching them).

Besides just surviving by finding food, water, and fire--and defending your camp against an increasing cannibal presence that eventually bring some gigantic macabre monstrosities to haunt your dreams--the main objective of the game is to find and explore scary caves, filled with cannibals and freakshows, searching for various equipment and tools, as well as piecing together from clues what happened after your airplane crash (which is quite a scary intro in VR btw), progressing a story arc with multiple endings.

Oh, and one last thing, there are boats (even a 2 person boat with an oar on both sides), and, you can build storage containers on boats, allowing you to make a logging boat that can carry hundreds of logs. For some reason, boating is satisfying in this game, including the way you can barely see while reversing. Although, I warn you, the water is dark, scary, and, yes, there are sharks.

if it truly didnt matter how my character looks, then you would let me re-roll it at the very least until I found one I liked. The truth is that it does matter how my character looks to the devs, which is why they made sure to not let me change it. They need me to be an ugly female because they are trying to train my morality. Then they pretend it is because the focus is on survival. If it was then they wouldnt go out of their way to implement a system to force multi culturalism and identity issues onto the players to deal with. Then they would let me choose a basic male or female character, and everyone would look the same, just like every other game. Here, they made a system to force you to feel what it is like to be born a certain way and not be able to change it. This was their only goal, to force you to feel and think about this. So their focus here was definitely not survival, and the fact they lie and try to be sneaky about it just makes it worse. gary was woke before it was trendy. he makes a hardcore murder game, but he wants to make sure you dont make fun of other people.

Compared to the first game, it shipped with more levels, it has a ton more bad guy variety, more weapon variety. It reminds of sequels like Doom2, where by doubling the enemy types, the game actually exponentially increases the total variety or combination of enemies you can encounter. You do not need to play the first game, as this game is better in almost every way.

When it comes to melee based FPS games, I think the only thing that really matters is how the melee feels. It needs to react quickly and naturally, and be consistent and accurate, and not have any weird delay. Vermintide 2 nails this! It is very fast paced, but you can still cut heads off like a surgeon if you have the coordination. With the bigger chaos type enemies introduced in this sequel, there are more opportunities to test this out, as they do not fall as easily as the rats. Often they require limb reduction, or head removal before they give up. There are even these big heavies, chaos warriors, that require considerable effort to disable. The best part is that the math behind it all is very accurate and reliable as well. Despite its lack of elegance in the system, an utterly lazy way of using +5-10% stats to teeter 2 hitting an enemy to single hitting, the math is at least very reliable. You can calculably make sure that you will take out a specific enemy type in 1 fewer hits, and can even test out your damage on practice dummies at the base.

The graphics are much improved over Vermintide 1, mostly in the level design. The Stingray engine was always very good at lighting, but the first game had somewhat uninspired level design that tended towards gray and drab. The levels in this game are much better laid out, with better overall design and eye for asthetics. It has many outdoor areas, and the levels are waaay larger in general. There are castles, keeps, dungeons, cities, towns, marshes, giant forests, overgrown ruins, ancient ruins, dwarven ruins, elven ruins, festering rat holes, chaos war camps, ramshackle rat favelas, sewers, farmlands, rivers, mountain passes, and only one really drab and ugly gray level I can think of, and even that one is on fire and under siege. One small issue I have is that they tried to vary the levels a bit too much, and so several levels will have an Endor/Red Woods type area for example, making each of the levels a bit less iconic or unique.

One thing I always liked about Vermintide, was how metal the weapons are. They are not purple, and glowing, with shiny things circling around them. They are metal. solid AF metal. Although, they were a bit more shiny in the first game, which I was quite fond of... not sure why they have less sheen in this one. Instead, you must unlock the... glowing, runed out versions for them through brute force RNG.

End game gets a bit unrewarding because of the ridiculously low chance to get the cool cosmetics, and also because the cosmetics are not really that cool, or not varied enough to warrant getting for standing out... very uninspired design. fire that modeler, lazy ♥♥♥♥. really, it must have taken the designer maybe 5 minutes to stick the runes on the weapon and not alter the shape whatsoever, and they expect you to work hundreds of hours to acquire this piece of garbage. Well, the good thing is, the weapons look great, possibly even better, without the stupid glowing runes on them. They are just nice cuts of metal, that look really solid and deadly. V1 had it a bit better, since the Stingray engine is very good at reflecting light off metal, and it was very satisfying to examine your solid metal weapons in some nice torch light.

Overall, this is one of the best coop melee FPS games you can get. With solid melee contact, it makes the combat fun and responsive. The game is also packed with content, especially for its price. There are not many choices these days for melee FPS anyway, or at least ones that feel right. And, if like me, you already own the few others, this one definitely earns its right to be a staple addition to the melee FPS collection.

The game is similar to classics like Zelda and Metroid in how there is a progression of loot out there in this single world, rather than levels. Probably more so like Metroid, because it is a side scroller that scrolls both horizontally and vertically. The map ends up being a giant network of rooms and passageways with some access restricted until certain equipment is found. You find and upgrade your character with unique equipment pieces that often give your character completely new abilities. You battle many enemy types and you evolve your strategies against them as you find the new gear.

But there is one major difference between the old games and this one: Modifiable terrain. The entire map is terraformable, hence the name terra-ria (I am guessing). This changes everything. The game ends up being more about exploring deep underground cave systems, digging your way into caverns, spelunking, placing torches and climby-bobs as you go along.

There are hundreds of weapons and tools to be found throughout the world, from melee to range, with boomerangs, pistols, swords, flying discs, laser guns, light sabers, crossbows, shotguns, rocket launchers, magic wands... All sorts of mining equipment, even augers... and one of the coolest grapling hooks in a game, ever. period. Hundreds of armors, nestled within dozens of tiers of equipment that you progress through with a crafting system that uses an entire progression of workbenches just to manage the sheer magnitude of possible items that can be crafted.

You will explore deserts, forests, oceans, and the demonic depths of hell. There are giant bosses, npcs, time based events, and dungeons with chests with loot. not just coins too, actual good loot. Its potentially THE single wooden boomerang on the map that you will pull from the chest. All the items are placed randomly in the map when the world is generated. It is almost as if the items from the zelda dungeons were dispersed randomly in the world, but they still retained their importance due to the game changing abilities that they give your character. Ya, in this game you will eventually fly to the clouds like a super badass with a laser sword.

And also, the terrain changes you make are persistent, so you can build a house (or dig a hovel, or whatever suits your style) and it will stick around. And there is multiplayer, so people build their own houses on servers, similar to minecraft. Then they go adventuring, looting, and fighting together, or joining each other's worlds to show off their houses, farms, and now even mechanism based contraptions.

The one complaint I might actually make is that there are toooo many damn things in this game. At some point there seemed to be a perfect balance, and then they just kept adding more and more. Maybe to appease those people who cannot stop playing it, because it is that addictive... those people who needed 100 different swords to choose from because they have been playing the game for 3000 hours. So, this is probably a pretty weak argument, that it sucks that there are like 100 swords, but it does make the progression seem a bit bloated. Especially compared to its finely tuned younger, slimmer self that achieved what I considered a perfect progression that felt complete, and that made the game feel complete. Now the game sorta feels endless... but maybe that is just how people actually prefer it.

An options menu driven gnome town management game with an isometric pixel art style and groovy chiptunes music.
As long as you enjoy the management genre, in all of its menu based gameplay glory, you can get many hours of enjoyment for such a small price.

Your task as manager is to designate areas for specific functions, create jobs that carry out the functions, assign those jobs to gnomes, and then tweak and refine everything until maximum efficiency is achieved. Your goal is to create a stable, functional colony. The gnomes must be organized to harvest, grow, produce, or trade for food to survive winters. Walls must be built to keep out wild animals, decorative living spaces built to enhance the quality of life and moods, and armies raised to protect against ever increasing goblin invasions. Mines must be dug to support the construction of these structures, and the precious ores and minerals must be processed by skilled gnomes at their various crafting stations, before finally being turned into weapons and armor by your assigned armor smiths and weapon smiths.

The game simulates the actions that each gnome does: moving, attacking, mining, crafting, hauling, etc. But, you, as the manager, get to decide what needs to be mined, what trees are designated for harvesting, what items need to be crafted, where the crafting stations go. It is up to you where the milk goes, what a milkman is called, what a milkman does, and which gnomes get to be milkmen. But you cannot simply tell a gnome to go get a specific bucket of milk and move it to where you want. You are the boss who designs the perfect job systems that ensure everyone always has something to do and knows what they should be doing it. You are not the kind of boss who can waste his time telling each individual what to do. Watching the colony play out the consequences of the systems that you have designed for them can be both rewarding and frustrating (as colony management should be).

UPDATE: holy @#$@, there is no co-op campaign! zombies trash does not count as co-op, stop advertising this game has co-op.

cant even chat in lobby because of the new era of baby coddling. heaven forbid someone offend someone in a competitive video game. this is only one of the many ways that the game tries to protect the player from the harshness of reality. probably more time was spent figuring out ways to attach additional tricycle wheels to an already 6 wheeled monstrosity of safety than trying to make sure the experience was as authentic to the period as possible.

NOTE: hours played only showing single player time played, I have 60+ hours on multiplayer.

the hobo pretending to be poor when begging on the corner, who then goes home to his mansion at night...

This is a stain upon game design. You play a magnetic moron who sticks to pavement and shoots clip after clip into spongey terminator badasses wearing wife beaters. The AI should at least be praised for their advanced team strategizing, as they often pincer the player, or force you to retreat. During this retreat though, you will lack full control over your character, who insists on sticking to the wrong surface just when it matters the most. You never really have full control over your character, to the degree that you hold A near anything and he literally slides into position (what is next ubisoft? hold A as your guy does everything for you on screen? hold down A till its over?).

The campaign "story" has been reduced to just a map and picking objectives that give you lines on screen to follow that lead you to rooftops, sewers, garages, and basements of the beautiful new york city, where you get to have an annoyingly voiced character talk long windedly at you over the radio, typically interrupting any conversation you might be having with your actual human friends. Of course if you have no friends, the enemies call you names and the friendlies can't stop giving you compliments, so that should make up for any socializing you might be missing out on. All the hub safe houses are functionally identical, despite their efforts to make them look different and have a unique personality for each quest giver. The entire game feels like copy pasta that has stretched the gameplay thin. Just like in ubi's other game, Wildlands, every new zone you enter gives you the exact same objectives, just rethemed. They are seriously just copy pasting and then changing a few things and they don't think we will notice... cause they think we are all moron casuals.

The world itself is amazing. It is a shame that they did not spend as much time on gameplay design as they did on the world itself. It is a shame that so many people spent so much effort to fully scan and model New York, only to have the game design team poop all over it. Every distinct location in New York is recognizable, but the quest writers decided they should put all the most iconic locations as pointless encounters or side missions, while the main missions have you going into boring places like the storage rooms, or basement underneath Grand Central Station, but never actually inside that recognizable main room with the arched glass.

The worst part of this loot shooter though, is the loot. They tried to copy the loot systems of your Diablos, Warcrafts, and Borderlands, and about the only thing they got right was the colors. They completely bungled the tiers, because they seem to think everyone deserves to be decked out by end game. You level up every 5 minutes, faster than you can even get used to your new gun before you replace it. No point of spending money, only to have your item obsolete within 5 minutes. All items are just copy paste of a small subset of items, with increased stats for each level. So ya, your level 16 ak47 will be better than your level 15 ak47, but it won't be worth the price at the shop, because your level 17 ak47 will drop 5 minutes later. Filthy casuals seem to love the intellectually unstimulating item hose strapped to their face!

OK, I was wrong. There is a worse thing than the loot. It is the inventory management. I am not sure how they could screw this up so seriously, given the dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of games doing it right. The entire thing is backwards or inside out, where you are going into menus within menus only to do things that could have been done in a single screen. Something as basic as equipping a new gun (every 5 minutes) is made into a process so annoying that you would rather just wait out the next gun (5 more minutes) before it is worth your time to actually swap it. And if you are foolish enough to ever use the loadouts system, then you are stuck having to now also add the new gun to loadout every time. And really, the guns are not worth the effort it takes to swap them, because it doesn't matter if your gun does 32k damage or 34k damage, cause the enemy has 5 billion health.

But, but... there are high damage slow shooting 5 clip snipers, and medium damage 10 clip snipers, and fast shooting low damage 20 clip snipers.... isn't that... no. no. just no.

This game is a lot like JJ Abram's Lost. At first it really pulls you in, and it seems like there is some epic story unfolding. For the first two seasons, you are thinking Abrams is the master, and you can't wait to see how it will turn out. Then you start to realize none of the loose ends are ever tied up, nothing ever concluded. Nothing ever actually turns out at all. Things just keep turning up though. You realize they keep opening up new plot points and nothing is ever coming to a beautiful close. Then you realize JJ Abrams has been pulling stuff out of his ass and you were being fooled the whole time, tricked into thinking there would be some rewarding conclusion, some masterful plan the whole time. But, no, that would take an actual master.

In Ark, the gameplay is terribly balanced for tedious boredom, getting worse every day as they add more crap. Basic dinosaur management is still completely broken, to where you still cannot run across the land with a dino following you without losing it. Inventory user interface and crafting system are one of the most frustrating ever conceived, with ludicrous limitations, half implemented controls, and once again balanced around tedious boredom. Everything in this game will ultimately lead to disappointment, and it is usually because of some BS that is unfinished, unbalanced, broken, and not your own fault.

The worst part is that it is very obvious that they have no intent on fixing the bugs and interface issues anymore, or crafting the overall experience. They did it for the first month the game was out, and then after that they handed the project off to their goombas to add new dinos and engrams. There are fundamental flaws with the interface that have gone unchanged for years. Just basic stuff like putting items into a box, which is done better in almost every single survival game out there, is unfinished. It's not like it is broken and cannot be fixed, it was just left as it was on early access launch. Good 'nuff.

This game gave the same illusion as Lost did. That this was going to be a mastered experience, THE dino game. Then instead of taking what was there and wrapping it up nicely into a perfect package, they just kept adding and adding, because that is all they knew how to do. This is because their plan all along was to keep adding crap, just like JJ Abrams. It wasn't that they had some master plan, and then it fell apart. It was that the plan all along was to constantly create crap and feed it to the dumb audience under the guise of a master plan as long as they could get away with it.

To this day, I have not seen past the 2nd season of Lost, and I cannot recommend it to anyone without warning them of the shameless shafting they will be receiving.