Recent reviews by v1ralgam3r

I remember first joining this game as a dipstick wannabe Engineer / Medic player, having no clue what I was doing. Seeing the Blue Moon update pass and all the excitement behind it. Taking days just to troll around trade sites and auctions because I deemed this game fun enough to actually want to look nice.

I don't think people can have a positive first experience train like that in the game's current state. If you don't already know what you're doing enough to fix the default settings to acceptable modern standards, and then navigate the community server lists, you're doomed. I wouldn't wish the rampant bot swarm of Casual Matchmaking upon anyone, and those same bots are constantly trying to DDOS the functional servers and actively swat-bombing people who take an avid stance against them.

Valve's attempts to silence the bots only made poor players suffer and forced each bot to give Valve money to operate at their most annoying: The company is actively profiting off of bots now due to the mandatory payment for talking rights! Most of the game's updates are purely for monetization packs built from other community members' passion projects, several bugs and mapping errors exist since decades ago - up to built-in features actively not working at all and then punishing you for the attempted usage of a nonworking button - and the few anticheat measures built into the game either don't work at all or are able to be abused for the bot nest's benefit.

I can't ever regret the comparatively small amount of time I spent with this game, but I'll be hard-pressed to look at this game with any fondness upon recollection. There's just too much broken stuff once you muscle past surface observation, and the only people who want to try to fix these issues are constantly being punished for their efforts.

Rain World is a game about survival. There are goals in the world to find and aim for, sure, and the story is interesting to mull over as you discover it, but at the base of this 2D platformer you're simply struggling to survive a hostile world. It's frustrating at times, occasionally veering into unfair with some scenarios and situations brought by camera and AI mechanics, and while the game has offered ways to make it easier via characters and Remix settings, the base is unrelenting in its difficulty.

Frankly, in the short time I've played so far, I love this game. I fully intend to complete it as far as I possibly can, after writing this. The 40-some hours so far has come from a full playthrough of the "normal" character's campaign, a character from the Downpour DLC (which I also heartily recommend), and toying about with other characters and side challenges offered.

Each character does have its own campaign, but I'll only describe the two that you can select at the start; Survivor has fallen away from its family during a heavy rain storm, into the grounds of Five Pebbles and Looks to the Moon. Monk's story is immediately after this, as they dive after their sibling into the playable space to find and bring them back. In both counts, a strange hologram will guide you to Five Pebbles, who will then instruct you towards the endgame location - both of which you are free to ignore for as long as you'd like to explore, and perhaps find a way through without his aid if you're savvy enough.

I touched on this in the intro, but you will die multiple times while playing. It's just part of the many cycles this game follows, and sometimes can't be helped, but every death is almost guaranteed to teach you something about the world. You might notice how a creature dens in specific places when it ganks you out of nowhere, or how another moves while it chases you down and eventually turns you into lunch. The ways to die are about equal to the ways in which you can navigate the world, and if you dedicate the time and can catch your impatience and/or temper, eventually you'll get comfortable enough with your wobbly little slugcat to almost be graceful through challenges that used to be certain doom.

If you've got the money to spare, and enjoy a game that demands you really sit down to master what it has to offer, Rain World is easily an amazing value for its price. The devs have been updating it often to patch bugs, as well, and the Workshop's content is growing alongside.

I want to like this game, I really do, but it seems to be in a constant state of conflict with itself. I didn't play it for very long at all, so take this review with a grain of salt, but it just... it just felt wrong to play in a way that I'm having difficulty describing briefly.

My first three minutes of the game were spent trying to alter the controls away from default, but it didn't quite seem to function properly - in fact, I'd completely hardlocked myself once per minute just in the initial INPUT menu, because altering some keys will prevent them being used until confirmed, but without the ability to use the keys I wanted to change I could not physically confirm those changes and would need to completely reset the game and invalidate my attempts to make the controls match the standards of everything else on the market. I'd eventually made do with something that fit my preferences without completely breaking the menu, but it was already a bad start.

From there, I started the game and immediately had to CTRL + ESC to change the application's volume down to around 45%. The explosion and siren sfx, even at the lowest in-game volume setting, were extremely grating, and this would follow for sounds such as basic rock turrets and earthquakes; the turrets were especially irritating, as their firing sfx will constantly sound off so long as you're on the same map chunk they occupy, even if they haven't been on screen at all.

Issues with the game's camera were also apparent at times, as I'd been playing in Windowed mode. The first "boss" that you get an achievement for locks the camera in place, but the arena can be larger than your window; this allows the boss to charge to the far left of the room and snipe at you with its rockets and shots while you cannot physically see it. The camera also just feels somewhat disorienting when forced to move vertically due to a smooth motion as opposed to the horizontal flat scrolling speed, and this smoothness oddly creates minor screen tearing when put into a pixel-graphics setting such as this. Camera effects such as heat waves in early zones also cause similar issues, along with a strange effect when you notice that while the terrain's visuals waver in the heat, entities such as the player character do not.

I know a majority of this review is complaining, but there's also some genuine good in Escape from Tethys that's worth seeing. Defeating enemies makes them explode or evaporate in a satisfyingly chunky way, making your shots feel very strong even so early on. The artwork in general is rather nice, really, and most screenshots of the game look great! Some of the abilities I've looked at through external means also seem to go really well together - even if the physics can make you feel both floaty and heavy at the same time somehow - and I can see them coming together to play in a pleasant way if only this game had been more polished.

Give the game a try if you're still unsure, as the game is pretty inexpensive, but I personally didn't enjoy my limited time attempting to get through it.

The game's pretty interesting, really. You die in one hit, so does the boss, have fun bashing your head into the wall until you breach. It's honestly a style that irritates me in a good way, purely from the spiteful catharsis of putting down a titan that was giving me grief, and the mechanics are simple & solid enough to last for what's feeling to be a short runtime.

Shame that the game physically feels like said wall-to-head bashing at times. There's a large amount of screen shake and every boss kill rewards you with pure, blinding white with loud ambiance noise; neither of these can be turned off, neither of these had any warning at all, and I can see this being a barrier to anyone who's epileptic and might actually suffer immediate and possibly lethal health issues from these aesthetic choices. I was enjoying my time, but the game's video choice is very literally painful to me and forced me to put it down almost as fast as I had begun playing.

Overall I'd recommend, unless you're prone to seizures or migraines. Those two stipulations will definitely kill the game for you, if not just kill you outright as you play.

This just feels like an overly ambitious Game Jam project, so I really feel bad for giving it a poor recommendation. The camera is either super slow or super fast, there's horrible desync issues for online play, remote play is just nonfunctional... honestly, this game needed more time to cook.

This add-on is the kind of content I absolutely adore to see as DLC. You get an entire new mission mode, new houses to see, new furnitures, and a lovely transformation wipe to view all your hard work with. Seeing all the extra, mostly well made content makes this pack worth what the Garden Flipper DLC is currently priced as, without the drawback its opponent carries in absence of it being detrimental to the base game.

The mission mode gives you multiple unique houses and tasks to take care of, ranging all the way from spacious rooms that you're free to organize as you wish down to compact spaces where you need to treat it like a jigsaw puzzle to fit all the needed furnishings into the space. Replayability is also offered with each house holding multiple "choose your path" style of tasks that often leave the target rooms feeling completely different. Adding to the satisfaction of a complete job is the ability to buy the assignment houses afterwards, so you can reconfigure everything to suit your own style.

All manner of extra furniture and tablet organizations were also added with this DLC, and I personally enjoy them very much. There are new shower styles that encourage you to build new walls as their walls, lending to a rather modern-style bathroom when everything is placed in. You're given a completely new category for wall mouldings to give just that extra touch of detail to a high-class house, and even more compact layouts are complimented with some of the new offerings such as a desk that's built into a nice shelving stack or a bed that can fold in on itself.

Overall, I'd highly recommend you grab this DLC without hesitation! It adds so much to the game that I honestly believe that the developers are under-pricing the package.

This DLC brings a fairly large amount of outdoor content, letting you make the outside of a house look as good as the inside - perhaps even moreso. However, what upsets me so much with this DLC is how I feel it does and simultaneously does not impact the game as a whole.

The most glaring and talked about bit that I've noticed is that a fair chunk of plots have an absolutely overgrown yard space in the base game. This would be fine, and is relaxing to clear, but doing so is outright impossible without owning this DLC, and such basic lawn care feels like it would be a given to have just in the main game - ugly outside can really mar enjoying a well made interior overall. This DLC's achievements are also included for free in the base game, and as such might make this feel like an obligation purchase for anyone who wants to 100% House Flipper's Steam 'cheevo rating - making enjoyment of it even worse in the long run.

Even when you do get this $15.00 add-on to the game, a player might notice some upsetting tidbits throughout. What qualifies for one garden type or another can feel vague at points, and the competition's results can feel negligible when your relatively high score only scarcely impacts the price. None of the clients in either the base game or Apocalypse add-on have any input to provide or preferences to be had whatsoever, further increasing the feeling of disconnect between the game itself and what you're bothering to do with the outside. Most work to be done with paving and terrain maintenance is rather clunky, with graphics not lining up between pieces of the same cobblestone path or the ability to properly border the base house layouts just not being possible with your given limitations.

It bears saying that most of the content here is in fact worth a try. You can make some truly beautiful works with what's here given enough time, and it can feel accomplishing to actually do so. The problems I have lie almost entirely on the DLC's impact on the gameplay itself and issues with how that's tackled.

If you desperately enjoy working with outside layouts, then this might make you happy, but I just can't recommend this at all unless it's worked over to polish up a fair bit more on the game interactivity side. As it is, I only felt obliged to grab it to mow the base game's poorly kept grass and maybe put in a few shrubs.

This review is edited from a recommend to a Not Recommended, over the span of a handful of years with the game on and off.

The base game is pretty great, and has been updated throughout the multiple DLCs with QoL updates which include small detail touches, furniture pieces that interact much more interestingly with the room structure, and UI improvements that had been asked for repeatedly. The gameplay cycle itself, while repetitive due to the game's nature, is extremely enjoyable and I can't find any complaints with it at all - some DLC does enhance it in ways such as specific puzzle-like tasks that reward you with the full free-reign of base, or editing furniture to match an aesthetic better across the house.

All of my issues come from the developers' use of DLC. To put it simply, the game is slowly becoming an add-on content farm, quite literally with the two most recent packs. While the first two could be middling in some aspects and shining at best, I'd still say they stayed true to the game's overall themes and made it a much better experience. Sadly, as DLC packs continued to be tossed at this game, the entire optimization of House Flipper steadily declined, bugs were constantly introduced to prior aspects which still continue to be ignored since the first release, and the themes diverged more and more to where there's now animal care and crop growing, for some inexplicable reason that I can't justify as anything but an excuse to get more money from this game. Due to the handling of achievements, you can't officially 100% the game on Steam without paying a rather hefty sum, and every new update revokes that claim for you unless you pay for the new expansion.

At it's core, House Flipper is an amazing game and I've got great memories of playing. Sometimes I'll still attempt to boot the game up, and when it functions properly I still have an enjoyable few hours. For me, though, the refusal to polish what already exists in a chase for more profits via unfinished add-ons has completely ruined my view of the game, to where I genuinely cannot recommend it any longer.

What can I really say about a game when the damn thing won't even run? It's an issue that a great many people have had, and... well, obviously nothing has been done to address it for laptop users.

I'll give it a proper deal if I can get an actual desktop to run it, but it's still super disappointing that these issues with laptop still happen.

A nice melee-based platformer game with good humor and hints of Mega Man, Shovel Knight, and other games of similar style. Don't let the Monster Girls in the title fool you, this is a genuinely good game!

Each initial chosen stage has its own difficulty curve, though it does feel like there was a definite intended First & Last stage before the "fortress" stages. Level design is generally solid, and the abilities given lean towards useful in most cases (though one of them does get outclassed rather quickly).

Overall, definitely do give this game a play!