Recent reviews by Timrod

Nightreign feels like a half-baked multiplayer mod for Elden Ring, and has so many issues that I can't recommend buying it - the balance is completely out of whack, there are still major bugs and crash issues, and the whole game feels designed to be a frustrating slot machine rather than a good roguelike.

I gave up on the game after defeating the first major boss, which is already a feat with the way matchmaking works in this game. The game expects you to be top-tier MMO raid level coordinated, but doesn't provide any of the tools necessary for that to work: there's no voice or text chat, no call-outs, no anything. This leads directly into the second problem: the fact that the game expects you to be perfectly optimal at all times.

The game is balanced such that if you take a single death without someone reviving you, the run is effectively dead. This is surprisingly easy to have happen, and it feels really dumb that the game doesn't simply end your run immediately if that happens, because there is no coming back from it. That's not the worst part, however. The worst part is the weapon slot machine.

The way bosses work in this game, you NEED their elemental weakness to do damage. If you don't have it, you are not clearing the run, plain and simple. The game does show you where those weapons will drop.. except the problem is that weapon drops are pure RNG. It is entirely possible to play as, say, the Raider (who is built around using big weapons) and get nothing but daggers and katanas that he's not suited for ,along with upgrades like "7% increased sorcery damage" or "let out an explosion every 10 seconds while standing perfectly still" that don't work at all with his build. Why would you use sorcery on a character who can cast maybe one spell at the effective maximum level before he runs out of FP?

What made me give up was having three runs as Ironeye (whose primary weapon is a bow) where not a single bow dropped that had the boss weakness on it. In two of those runs, no bows dropped at all and the game expected me to melee as a character who is intentionally built to die in one hit to pretty much anything but the weakest attacks. It's frustrating garbage, and the game penalizes you for leaving a run you already know is doomed to fail early. The solution to this should be easy: remove the garbage drops from the drop pool so that you don't get three upgrade choices that you can't use.

I don't even think FROM can or will fix the numerous issues this game has, and as such I have to give it a solid AVOID.

I bought this game after seeing a video in my Youtube feed declaring it one of the best RPGs the video creator had ever played. The game was cheap enough and on sale, so I bought a copy knowing there was a near-100% chance that person on Youtube was paid for that review, and sure enough they were.

Terra Memoria has one of the absolutely dullest combat systems I have ever seen in a game, and I've done a Let's Play of Shadow Hearts 3. There is virtually no customization: each character can equip three "pins" which give a slight stat boost, and nothing else. Your characters have a set spell list (which has a lot of overlap) and have a support character randomly assigned to them at the start of each fight. The objective is to "guard break" the enemies, which pushes them back in the turn order and makes them take slightly more damage. The problem is that I never felt at any point like combat was an actual challenge: in most cases, I was sitting there watching my characters hack away at enemies that had inflated HP bars but posed very little threat. It also doesn't feel like attacking elemental weaknesses really makes a lot of difference.

It almost feels like the game was made for a younger audience, but I can't imagine any kids who would want to sit through it. I'd pass on this.

Skald is a game that desperately wants to be a mid-90s CRPG and is just about as unbalanced in that it expects you to know what the optimal upgrade path is at all times or you will not be finishing the game, as evidenced by the fact that under 50% of players have ever made it past the second major dungeon.

The main problem this game has is that it's an unbalanced pile of garbage. The enemies scale up rapidly, but your characters don't scale at all - you get three "feat points" per level that can be used to do useless crap like "Increase accuracy by +1" when even with all the accuracy upgrades in the game your characters still can't hit anything. By the second area, you start running into 8 to 10 enemies at a time with 80 to 90 HP each that can twoshot your characters, who struggle to do more than 10 damage a turn.

Part of the problem is that so many of the abilities are bad: mages get an entire skill tree with nothing but worthless spells in it and can cast maybe two spells without running out of MP, clerics are even worse (they get a spell that costs half an MP bar to poison enemies for single-digit damage and the poison wears off after one turn) and the melee types get screwed over by the game not dropping gear: in the first six hours, I found all of three gear upgrades and that was with completely exploring every location I came across.

I haven't tried seeing if mods can fix this, but I wouldn't bother with it.

Dead by Daylight is easily the worst multiplayer game I've ever played. It is a multiplayer game balanced entirely by an optional social contract because the developers are clueless and only seem to care about releasing paid content packs.

You can immediately tell the game sucks by the fact that the queue to play the killer takes forever, and that the survivor queue has a giant "+50% IN-GAME CURRENCY" thing next to it - the reason is because the killer has a near-foolproof meta strategy that has no real counter: tunneling. The killer can just chase after one person repeatedly until they're removed from the game, and the player being tunneled can do nothing about it as the developers apparently decided that the survivors need to be utterly helpless short of end-game meta setups. The tradeoff is that tunneling is so un-fun that the game is unable to fill lobbies: of the handful I played, I don't think I had a single one where there wasn't at least one bot on the survivor team.

You would think that with this game being out for so long, the developers would get a clue. There are lot of really obvious fixes, like making the sacrifice hooks single-use and spawning new ones to prevent the killer from camping, that the developers refuse to take presumably because it would stop people buying the new overpowered killer of the month.

Avoid the hell out of this pile of ****.

Indiana Jones is an overall good game, apart from the times it feels like a confused Dungeons & Dragons DM after the players do something they don't expect. For a game about an explorer, it feels like it simply wasn't ready for people to actually explore it unless it's explicitly telling them where to go, something I felt almost immediately after starting the game proper.

In the game's first zone, the Vatican, there is a heavily guarded fascist encampment directly outside of the building you start in. Recognizing there was probably something in there, I snuck in and got a piece of paper with a safe combination on it.. only for the safe to be on the other side of a door that doesn't unlock for several hours. By the time I got to the point where the door unlocks, all the guards had respawned, rendering my entire first excursion into their camp pointless.

There's also a bit of an annoyance with the way the game forces you to backtrack if you want all the collectibles. Each zone has a number of doors unlocked by a key that is only reachable after finishing most or all of the plot quests in that zone, but the game doesn't mark where those doors are on the map so that you can come back later and unlock them, necessitating a visit to YouTube to find some video titled "INDIANA JONES WHERE TO FIND ALL DOORS WEHRMACHT KEY CLICK HERE TO DISCOVER IT" where the first two minutes are a channel intro and the commentator is hawking "real organic food delivered RIGHT TO YOUR DOOR" every ten seconds.

Also a bit annoying are a couple of combat mechanics: namely guns and dogs. Guns are an annoyance because by default, the enemies will only engage you in melee for the most part even if they have a gun. The second you fire a single bullet, however, every enemy in a five-mile radius gets alerted and suddenly becomes one of those laser-accurate shotgun snipers from Far Cry 2 who can kill you in two hits from across the map. Combined with the game's reliance on easily-broken melee weapons, this can get annoying when you pick up a luger from a pile of "unconscious" nazis instead of the baton you were aiming for. Dogs are similarly annoying because they can't be killed - you can only "scare" them by whipping in their general direction or firing a gun into the air. Half the time, this fails to work and the dog bites you anyway. Even worse, if you "scare" a dog and then alert a nearby human enemy, the dog will get right back up and start attacking again.

When the game works, however, it's very pretty and generally fun to play, and I'd definitely recommend it assuming you have the hardware to run it - even with forced raytracing, I was getting ~130 FPS on the highest settings on a 9800x3d and 7900xtx, a card notorious for its poor raytracing performance. There's really not much like dragging a nazi to you with your whip, grabbing him and smashing his face in, and then using his dead body to attract his buddies so you can do the same to them. It might, however, be worth waiting until the developers patch the game further and/or a price decrease hits.

The original 2014 Freedom Wars was actually a pretty good game, a Monster Hunter clone with a lot of features that Monster Hunter itself would later implement itself - things like having a grappling tool (which would later be implemented in Iceborne as the Clutch Claw) and not having to eat before missions (coincidentally, also a thing implemented in World/Iceborne in the form of the camp stove). It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Freedom Wars is probably responsible for a lot of the positive changes in World and Iceborne.

The PC port removes two of the worst parts of the original game: that being the fact that it was a PS Vita exclusive (and even though it was an upgrade on the PSP, the Vita still did not have the best controls for longer play sessions) and the fact that the controls had only limited customization. However, the port is still a little rough around the edges and doesn't remove some of the parts of the original game that really sucked (and not the kind of suckiness that enhances a game's quality).

The game is set in a dystopian future where everyone is in prison and must buy "entitlements" to be able to do even basic things like running. While this does a good job of impressing a horrific dystopia on you, it doesn't make for great gameplay. Your character's default movespeed outside of combat is an extremely slow crawl, and several of the early game story missions require you to make your way across the prison complex multiple times. While there is an entitlement you can buy very early on to allow you to run, it only allows you to run for a maximum of 9 seconds before the game pauses, flashes a red screen at you, and makes you hit a button before you can move again. Even worse, your character must be close to their overseer robot and the robot runs MUCH slower than you do - and of course, going too far pauses the game.

I also wish they had fixed a couple of the balance issues the original game had: for instance, the original game had a feature where you can grapple onto a robot and "sever" parts directly if you have the right weapon type, but doing so was almost never faster than simply picking a heavier weapon and smashing the parts directly.

The game is still probably worth it even with all the rough edges, but I don't think it's worth it at full price because the port simply doesn't add enough.

Victory Heat Rally is a game that is entirely style over substance. It does a pretty good job of mimicking a 5th generation arcade racer that wouldn't be out of place on a Sega Model 2 or ST-V, but then goes too far and turns into an unfair, unplayable mess with a blatantly cheating AI.

As soon as you reach the second "level" of races, every track becomes homogenized: they're all ultra-narrow, have fences on both sides that slow you to a crawl if you so much as brush up against them, and become more about finding what stats the developers intended you to have than actual racing skill. These maps become so bad that the AI can't handle them - I noticed the AI cars running into the fences but not losing speed on several occasions. The whole thing feels terrible to play, which is probably why fewer than a quarter of the people who bought this game, going by the achievement stats, have ever bothered to get more than about halfway through it.

There are also a number of "challenge" tracks that feel like they were untested or made for some earlier build of the game: one of them in the fifth cup (out of 9) requires you to drift-boost through gates that are on straightaways.. which as far as I can tell are borderline impossible to make it through short of pixel-perfect drift management.

I would avoid this game unless it is on a deep discount.

Of all the cheap games with less than two reviews I've played, Imoto has to be the one with the highest production values. I think it might have originally been launched with the intention of being some kind of NFT scam (the developer has obvious crypto leanings) and then abandoned when the bottom fell out of the NFT market.

Imoto is an extremely barebones beat-em-up that starts with an unskippable intro video that is (and I am not making this up) longer than the actual game is. The game itself is an extremely barebones excuse for a beat-em-up that has one working stage - the second stage has two enemies and then an invisible wall that stops you from progressing.

The game has exactly one attack and enemies which are essentially sandbags: they don't react to your movement or attacks and just sit there letting you pummel them to death. I think the original goal was to collect the literal Bitcoin the enemies drop and use it to upgrade your character, but the way the game works, you won't have enough time to buy even one upgrade before running into the unwinnable second stage.

Clearly, the developer made so much money hodling BTC that they don't need to work on this game anymore, so I'd say don't bother buying it.

On Your Tail is a furry dating simulator disguised as a detective game, and almost feels like someone spending a lot of time and money trying to get their furry OCs to go viral rather than an interesting game.

Your character has a "magic" lens that allows her to see the past, and is used only to see things that are incredibly obvious to the point where it's almost laughable - even though the game doesn't seem to be written that way. There's a moment early on where you're investigating a house you know was broken into, and your character looks at a bookshelf that has very clearly been turned over, eliciting no reaction from her. Then you look at it through the lens, at which point she realizes that the contents of the bookshelf are not intentionally on the floor.

On Your Tail also adapts one of the worst parts of the original Danganronpa, the part where you had to piece together manga panels to make a manga - only instead of manga panels, it's cards and you use it to move pieces around in a diorama. The whole thing is painfully slow and often involves failure due to elements you may have had no way of knowing about beforehand: the first one involves a squeaky board that I don't think your character will point out even if you run over it yourself, and I think the only way to know it's there is to fail the diorama.

The plot also isn't terribly interesting - it involves chasing after a thief, but it's hard to get into and doesn't really make a lot of sense: your character is only really in it because someone called her boring once. I think the idea is you're supposed to be in it for the furry dating sim parts, but the furries aren't even particularly interesting - most of them are cats or goats in an era when you have shows like Odd Taxi that have every character as a different species. I imagine most of the actual furries are probably playing Atlyss anyway, given that game is entirely 18+ ERP lobbies.

I'd say avoid this unless you are really, really into furries and/or dating sims.

Lost Dimension is a game you absolutely should not buy the PC port of. This game was originally on the PS3 and PS Vita, and released in 2013. You can pick up a copy of the PS3 or Vita version for almost nothing - not that I'd necessarily recommend that given the game was apparently localized by NISA, infamous for their garbage "translations" and ruining everything they touch.

Like the PS3 and Vita versions, the PC port does not contain the original Japanese dub. The English voiceactors are awful and were clearly done with NISA's usual budget of pocket change. Both the PS3 and Vita versions of the game have fan-made undubs readily accessible, which the PC does not have (the porting company apparently didn't have access to the Japanese audio).

The game was originally meant for a controller, and the controls do not at all translate well to PC - no surprise given that a lot of lower-budget Japanese games from that era had bad ports. Steam Input can partially fix this but turns it into a confusing mess since the game doesn't have the proper glyphs.

If you really want to play this game, I'd recommend finding a used PS3 and playing the undub. Don't buy this port.