Recent reviews by sodapone

I still remember when I bought this game at launch, coincidentally just a week after watching Starship Troopers for the first time. It was wild, going from seeing that kind of stuff on a movie screen to experiencing it vicariously through a video game, and my god, Helldivers 2 does an amazing job at making you feel like cannon fodder—you will die, like, constantly. I can count the number of missions where I didn't die once on a single hand, and that's out of hundreds. And lore-wise, that Helldiver you controlled that just got turned into chunky salsa is dead dead—the next one you call down is a completely different person (who happens to have the same weapons and armour because that would be disorienting otherwise).

But while you are cannon fodder, you're cannon fodder in charge of pointing the giant guns and bomb payloads of a space warship and fast attack craft at the enemy. What that means is that while you will die constantly, you do have options, and you can kill 50-100 enemies for every one time you die—provided you are judicious with how you use what's provided to you. And on that note, teamwork is important—friendly fire is on, and it is not reduced at all, meaning that if you're not careful your cluster bomb can wipe out half your squad as well as your intended target. But because everyone is expecting to die anyway, it ends up being one of the least toxic co-op shooters out there—oftentimes getting teamkilled results in raucous laughter in the voice chat, especially if the way you went out was particularly funny.

Backing up all this is the worldbuilding—the absurdity of this entire world is cranked up to eleven, with Super Earth itself being a hilarious parody of authoritarian and militaristic governments, and it just creates this environment where you and your teammates are all laughing with each other at this crazy world with its crazy inhabitants and its crazy enemies and its crazy happenings from mission to mission.

The way the entire war unfolds in front of you in real time—like the world's largest TTRPG campaign—is the real icing on the cake, with player-driven storytelling being the literal driving force behind everything. Malevelon Creek was just some random-ass planet that a couple Arrowhead employees probably put together in a single afternoon without much thought, and now it has made a permanent mark in video game history as "Space Vietnam". You just don't get that kind of community-driven experience in any other game.

The reason why right now so many people are getting into this game is because this invasion of Super Earth isn't going to last, and this will be your only chance to actually see the planet, its megacities, its populace, and SEAF troopers up close. Everything is told in real time, and there's no rewind button—so if any of this sounds interesting to you, there's no better time to play than now. This game is worth it at any price, I swear; it is already one of the defining multiplayer classics of the 2020's.

Just wait for Den of Wolves, please.

This is the best AAA game I've played in over a decade and I say that with no irony or exaggeration.

For the record, I'm into rhythm games, but I've never really been able to pick up beat-em-up and fighting games because I tend to forget combos or mash when backed into a corner. This being a rhythm beat-em-up solves that issue because of how every move, both yours and enemies', is made to the beat; it gives me just enough time to think about what I should be doing and how I should be reacting to them. The abilities at your disposal feel like completely natural extensions to the gameplay and mesh seamlessly with the natural sense of flow you develop. And the way it's all delivered to you--with the same style, panache, and humour that you consistently find across the rest of the game--it's all just a masterclass in game design, and it just makes every second of the game so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fun.

Graphically, it's not leveraging the full power of the Xbox Series nor even a modern midrange gaming PC, but it doesn't need to. The game's artstyle is somewhere between superhero comic and shonen manga and every single frame of the game looks like it came straight out of one of them. It's absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beautiful and is so incredibly polished that it's pretty much the only thing that reminds me this is a AAA game.

Let's actually talk about that polish more in this separate paragraph. Chai's powers of rhythm actually affect everything around him, causing not just him but everything around him to move to the beat. Pistons will go up and down to it, lights will blink to it, vents will let off steam to it--even boss cutscenes where they reveal weaponry are done to the beat. And this isn't just for show--it's to help you keep on the beat. When everything around you follows the same rhythm, it's much harder for you to skip a beat yourself. Other details like NPCs who are just there to add flavour to the world having multiple different lines of dialogue--which are all fully voiced--that's the kinda detail I'd expect to see in a JRPG like EarthBound or Undertale, not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beat-em-up??????? Apparently there's even references to past Tango games like The Evil Within scattered around the levels--not that I'd know because this is actually the first game of theirs that I've played, but it's always super cool to see that stuff.

The amount of content in the game for it being just $30 is also staggering to me--I ended up buying the Digital Deluxe Edition because I felt that paying $40 was actually a more fair price for what you get here. Your average playthrough should last around 10-11 hours, assuming you die only a few times--which is way more than I was expecting for the price. And then after that, the game then offers you postgame content too--in the form of timed challenges you can take on by finding doors in each of the levels, a new highest difficulty setting, and a Challenge Tower which I've yet to try at time of writing.

So yeah, Tango seriously just shadowdropped a major GOTY contender for 2023, in the very first month of the year. You may not be a rhythm gamer or a beat-em-up player, but if you're at least one of the two, you will have an absolute blast with this game. Even if you aren't either of those, I still recommend you at least give it a shot--and if not on here where you can refund it, then you can get it on Xbox Game Pass too.

Edit: Gave proper credit to the studio behind this, rather than the publisher who so callously shut them down.

Yeah, don't bother if you have an AMD GPU.

What can I say? The game is pretty much perfect in terms of what it sets out to achieve. It's a turn-based RPG with psychological horror elements, framed around themes like trauma, anxiety, repression, and isolation. That's all I can really say about the game story-wise, because by god, you had better go into this game knowing as little as possible.

Gameplay is brilliant too, using a unique system of status effects as emotions--no emotion is necessarily better or worse than the other except fear, as each offers its own buffs to stats as well as debuffs. They also interact with each other in a rock-paper-scissors system; happiness is strong against anger, anger is strong against sadness, and sadness is strong against happiness. Throw in an energy system that allows you to do follow-up attacks and create wicked combos, and there's plenty of strategizing for RPG junkies here to chew on.

In terms of other things the game does, I have never seen concepts and feelings like trauma, anxiety, depression, phobias, and dissociative amnesia translated so incredibly well to any form of media. Through its incredibly smart use of gameplay mechanics, level design, and sound design, you'll really get a taste of what it's like to be afraid of heights, spiders, or drowning--just like the main character. And that final boss... It took me a while for its absolute brilliance to dawn on me, but trust me, it is incredible.

Did any of that sound great to you? Awesome! Get this game and play it. Now. Before you get spoiled. Again, it's best you go into this game knowing as little as possible. However... I will say that if you yourself have suffered from trauma in the past, then it may not be a good idea to play a game that could trigger those same feelings. But it's up to you to decide whether you can handle it. If you can though, it will definitely be worth it.

What a lot of people say about what makes Project Zomboid so great is true--what makes it so enjoyable is that you aren't some sort of superman who's immune to the virus and capable of fighting off entire hordes on their own. You're just a guy, who's just as vulnerable to the infection as anyone else. Top that off with the incredibly detailed survival mechanics--turns out the devs used to be The Sims modders, so that's where they got their chops in this--and you'll find yourself struggling for survival against Mother Nature just as much as against the zombies (one time when I was playing with friends, we got a tropical storm literally on the first day; that's the Midwestern climate for ya.)

Anyway, its groundedness means that there is no shortage of things to do, and its sheer brutal difficulty means that even something as pathetic as digging worms out of the ground and eating them so you don't starve feels like a major victory. The game makes sure your expectations are tempered out of the gate, as every time you load into a world, it straight-up tells you "THERE WAS NO HOPE OF SURVIVAL; THIS IS HOW YOU DIED". Picking up this game, you will struggle at first; I know it may be tempting to go in blind, but I would recommend doing some reading first so that you don't get too confused. You will die a lot, but each death is fair, and gives you a hard lesson that you can use to get just a bit further next run--and failing that, the Custom Sandbox mode lets you fine-tune the difficulty to be just the way you like it (I disable the helicopter event, ♥♥♥♥ those news media idiots.)

So yeah, definitely get it if this sounds even slightly interesting to you. Even in early access, it's far more in-depth than any other zombie game you've played; and its brutal difficulty and game mechanics will totally humble you--and you'll find that shockingly enjoyable.

The Forza Horizon games are like other open-world arcade racers, but with the physics engine and driving model of its older sister series, Forza Motorsport--albeit tuned to be just a bit more arcadey. This setup gets you the best of both worlds: From open-world arcade racers, you get a ton of fun, exciting activities to try; while the more sim-like physics make the actual driving and racing feel far more engaging and rewarding when you get it right. Combine this with the upgrades and tuning systems being full sim so that you can fine-tune every car to your personal preferences, and you end up with a seriously winning formula.

There is one fundamental issue I hold with all of the Forza Horizon games since FH3, however: They're far too eager to shower you in high-end sports cars and supercars, before you've even learned how to actually race a car with sim physics. This, when they don't actually teach you proper racing techniques; literally only the basic controls. RTGame's series on FH4 and FH5 really demonstrates how much of a problem this is, as coming from other arcade racers, he didn't actually know he had to brake for hard corners until several streams into FH5.

The FH games also don't teach you about the performance index and class system, which results in an extremely common noob trap of players believing that their cars should be upgraded to the absolute maximum, resulting in them taking a B-class Honda Civic, cramming an ungodly amount of upgrades into it until it becomes S2-class, and then immediately slamming it into the nearest barrier at 200mph because they think that faster is always better.

So if you wanna get into this game and have never played a racer with physics more realistic than NFS or Mario Kart, then take my advice: Start slow. The game gives you a Supra and a Corvette C8 from the starting gate, but find a car that you can build for B-class road racing, and start from there. Look up tutorials online, and you'll be getting podium finishes before you know it. As an old saying in the greater car community goes, "It's more fun to drive a slow car fast, than a fast car slow."

Anyway, gripes about progression and teaching new players aside, FH5 is an excellent game that evolves Forza Horizon's winning formula even more. It's definitely the best racing game of the year--although to be fair, there wasn't much competition to be had this year anyway. If you want to get started with more realistic racing games, this is a great springboard--so long as you don't rely entirely on the game to teach you.

It's literally just Cookie Clicker, the original browser idle game; on Steam for five bucks. Sure, you could just play the web version for free, but I think the Steam version is worth it for the cloud saves alone. Plus, I think Orteil deserves it for codifying the entire idle game genre as we know it.

Speaking of, coming back to Cookie Clicker after some 6 or so years, I can confidently say that while many other idle games have come after it, Cookie Clicker is still the best of them--balancing the "gameplay", the buildings, the upgrades, and the writing in such a way that it all feels very accessible, just so long as you're willing to put in the time. This also prevents it from being rather hypocritical, as idle games inherently are a sort of parody and deconstruction of video game progression, and more recently the monetization of games. The web version of Cookie Clicker grants everyone up to a +100% CPS boost based on how many top-tier patrons Orteil has, but on Steam, you already paid--the bonus is based on how many active players there are, with 10,000 being needed to access the full +100% boost. Naturally, everyone and their grandma is constantly running this game, so you can count on it being there. And that's it; that's all paying for the game gets you. You can't buy more cookies like you can buy money in Adventure Capitalist.

But... Yeah, it's Cookie Clicker. Honestly, you probably have made up your mind already as to whether it's worth spending $5 for. But I think it's very much worth it, and so it gets my recommendation.

All those other reviews are true; American Truck Simulator--as does its more well-known sister game Euro Truck Sim 2--is one of those games that you'd think would be impossibly niche, but it's actually surprisingly addictive. You really get into a sort of zen state when you play; it's just you, your cargo, and hundreds of miles of open road... And the speed limits, and the traffic cars, which sometimes I really question the sanity of... But I digress.

I play with a Logitech G920 racing wheel (might get a Thrustmaster T300RS later), and the driving model feels very true-to-life; it properly emphasizes the sheer size and weight of the trucks you're driving, and the cargo you're hauling. It's not like you feel entirely helpless though; you've got some pretty good brakes, and--though this is apparently due to how American semis have a lower centre of gravity than the European ones--your handling is far better than you'd ever expect it to be. Overall, it feels like you're just in control enough for the truck driving experience to not be frustrating, but also not so easy that it doesn't feel realistic.

The map is very true-to-life; SCS pay a lot of attention to the geography and unique features of each state, and it really shows. Part of the reason why I picked this game up was due to a sort of wanderlust after being trapped at home for over a year, and this game really scratched the itch I've had to go on a big American road trip.

Anyway, if you wanna see if you'd enjoy it, pick up the free demo--it's still kinda niche; not everyone has the sorta mindset that lets them sit and just drive along Interstates for hours at a time--but you will be surprised if you are one of those sorts of people. Get all the states if you can, and also don't forget to pick up the truck DLCs--they're free, but you'll still have to go and take the free downloads from their store pages. Otherwise, you'll be stuck with just Peterbilt and Kenworth trucks.

Man, this really was the peak of the franchise, huh.

Payday 2 is... Not what exactly you'd expect of it based on its setting and aesthetic. You'd expect a blood-pumping stealth game/tactical shooter drenched in classic heist films like Heat—and instead you get a blood-pumping horde shooter with RPG-like skill trees, and the heist aesthetic laid on top (and later on the story goes completely off the rails and turns into that gotye wokeuplikethis aliens meme). That isn't to say it's bad—in fact, this combination of co-op shooter with RPG elements is by far one of the most addictive formulas I've ever played, and my hours logged are a testament to that. I really can't stress enough how fun it is—there's a reason why this game was a staple of every Steam player's library for the better part of a decade.

Looking at it in the context of Payday 3 being a year old, I can't help but feel saddened that the absolute rollercoaster this game went through in order to give its sequel the best chance possible was utterly squandered by Starbreeze's incompetence. Nevertheless, nothing made this game worse while Payday 3 was being a clown show (and I don't mean in a positive way considering the clown masks), so I have to come to the conclusion that if there's a Payday game you should buy, it's this one—or the first game if you want something truer to the original heist vibe. The graphics are rough and its engine is held together with duct tape and prayers, but that gameplay loop is really worth it. Get it, and maybe some of its DLC too, before Starbreeze's luck finally runs out, whenever that may be—who can tell at this point if this cornerstone of co-op shooter history will still be available on Steam by the end of the decade?