Recent reviews by Tuna

Portal Revolution is a fan made mod set between the events of Portal 1 and Portal 2.
The player is awoken by an AI and is guided though the decaying facility to attempt to restore order in the chaos.

This fan made campaign took 8 years to make and it certainly shows with some gorgeous visuals and a healthy 5 hour playtime.

The puzzles are about the right difficulty for a seasoned player but will be probably too hard for those who have not completed portal 2 first. The highlight being the end puzzle that layered upon itself.

The soundtrack is custom made and complements some of the levels really well.

The level pacing does feel a bit like an infinite portal chamber and certain chapters do drag with long connecting sequences walking though abandoned areas.
It does pick up however once you've met the second companion.

As far as bringing new Aperture areas to explore there's just one - 'the flooded', the rest of the time the game comfortably reuses most of what we've previously seen in P2.

The voice acting is a bit... wonky, I understand this is a free mod so its not going to have any budget for this, but I think its not helped by...

The dialog writing, a lot of was overly verbose or had non-native phrasing. The biggest travesty was the missing signature Aperture wackiness and charm.

Graphics 9/10
Game play 8/10
Sound 8/10
Story 6/10

Overall: 7.75/10

Last seen online is a game about a teenage girl who has gone missing and you're recovering evidence to her disappearance by searching her computer.

Thematically the game has solid foundation with a cool 2000s/Windows XP ascetic and some creative puzzles.
You start by snooping around the desktop folders reading chat logs, piecing small clues together to gain access to deeper system files, this is great and really shines.

Things fall apart in the second half, the game switches to a Gothic second life clone quickly forgetting the desktop setting and becoming a generic point and click Monkey island type puzzler with a horror skin.

I could tolerate this being a small offshoot section, but it's literally 50% of the game. You start to make pace completing the puzzles in the area, and the game abruptly ends.

Its quite frustrating as this genuinely could be a good game, it has some sparks of ideas around the death of game servers and nostalgia in the end sequence that could of been fleshed out and explored.
But the ideas & themes are unfortunately under delivered, more time is needed to deliver the story, build up, tease and finally earn the conclusion.


As it stands is just too short and unfinished to recommend.

Starts off well but quickly devolves into a slog of a campaign.
Mainly the unit balancing is completely off, the aircraft are way too strong as 2/3 unit types cannot attack them and the one unit that can has at least a 50% miss rate.

The AI can spawn whatever ship it wants wherever it wants with no regards to resources or captured factory types. its pretty obvious when a lone oil rig deep into your territory suddenly has 7 juggernauts defending it despite being captured moments ago

This culimates to a peak when the campain asks you to survive 20 minutes, only for one random AI spawn to capture a factory and your instantly replaying the entire level again and again.
The game simply does not respect the players time.

Controls do not work, cannot get past tutorial

Avoid,

The game is filled to brim with bugs, lacks polish and playtesting.
Most of the time you're performing the same monotonous 3 puzzles over, over and over, I get it, move the box and jump on it, stand on disk, block steam. The levels only vary in their appearance, and the order you see the puzzles.

Controls - are awful, plagued with prolific input drops. Jump and interact register around ~95% of the time. I don't know what is going on, the performance seems fine but its borderline unplayable. Using items relies moving a cursor around with the keyboard rather than... you know...the cursor pointing device all computers come with. If you accidently hit an item you cannot toggle it off by pressing the key again.

Movement - The shadow character often glitches about passing though objects, getting stuck and then spontaneously dying. Neither character is able to stand on moving platforms consistently, they will fall off without babysitting, which happens all the time when your concentrating on the other character. The game lacks animations for when you cant do things, often you'll be spamming the interact button thinking its dropping your presses when infact you cant use it yet (despite a tooltip suggesting you can)

Visuals - the perception of depth is poor due to ironically, a lack of a ground shadow. The levels lack visual polish, and you often see out of bounds due to gaps in the scenery.

Boss fights poorly communicate to the player their win conditions, and progress. You'll often die and whip back to an earlier checkpoint and have no clue what boss sequence you are on.

The boss problems all culminates in the final boss, which... without a shadow of a doubt (pun intended) is one of the worst pieces of game design I've ever seen. Final boss battles tend to test the player's experience with they've learnt in the game, but clearly the creators forgot what their game was and decided to have the main character stand around and do nothing.
The side character has to complete a win condition of dropping and bouncing a perfectly timed physics object atop of buggy spinning platforms... 3 times. You then get to the second sequence where I must of died about 30 times due to the complete unavoidable randomness of the projectiles. If your struggling you can make the 3D character immune by using an item.
The final credits confirmed my suspicions, there were zero playtesters.

2/10 - some games are left better in the shadows

Renegade Ops is a good car shooter with some interesting mechanics to keep you coming back.

Levels are long, contain multiple objectives and are quite well thought out
Gunplay is satisfying you do decent damage, you receive decent damage, mistakes are punished, skillshots are rewarded.

The performance stutters a little when the action heats up
The movement controls are awful with M&K, you'll find none of the roads line up with the 8 cardinal directions, causing you to microadjust steering with a repeated taps or risk skidding.
Some of the renegades are flat out useless, why would you want a car that deploys a turret only when stationary?
The upgrade system is a little restrictive by only allowing 4 perks to be equipped, despite spending experience points on 'unlocking' them.

Infinite is a generally good game with some minor flaws and a few rough edges. Definitely recommended.

Columbia is a visually stunning world to inhabit with a clear art direction and stellar implementation.
The gameplay is engaging with the highlights being Elisabeth and Booker's interactions.
Gunplay and upgrades are mostly satisfying, and the game is non punishing with combat deaths.
Performance is great, the game is well optimised.
The soundtrack is great with weapons interacting with the soundtrack.

Whilst visually the world is stunning, as far as interactability goes it's lifeless, there are no neutral NPCs, just static scripted animations. Elisabeth could of been a great bridge between the player and the world and have some interesting world building in the form of dialogs to the inhabitants.
There are a lot of forced animations that you have to let complete or the game will fight you, most notably is the skyhook mounting camera force, you can try and fight it but the game wont stop until your looking in the direction it wants.
The reserve ammo for weapons is small and depletes often which is fine... if you could pick up another weapon off the ground and have new ammo. Longer fights devolve into a hunt for a weapon type you've not used recently rather than enjoying the fights.
The story promised a lot, but fails to culminate to a satisfying ending. Ignoring all the paradoxes there is some good to be had here still, but bulk of the story is miss paced, with the last 1/5 of the game attempting to communicate 60% of the story.
Save slots are not a thing, so makes multiple runthoughs a PIA to manage

Graphics: 9/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Sound: 9/10
Story: 6/10

Overall 8/10

Awful puzzle platformer that draws it's challenge from the worst mechanic in platformers - fall damage. There is no reason to have fall damage in a game designed around flying in the air via rotating. You accelerate constantly towards the bottom of the screen, regardless of orientation there is no mechanics or physics to it, once you hit a certain speed you die.
The music is awful, the sound design is awful, the graphics are awful and the game play is awful.
Avoid.

Suffers from the usual point and click everywhere to find the obscure hidden pixel solution.
Whats worse is your characters position and stance determines what is clickable, you must stand in the exact correct spot to interact with what could be a puzzle item.

I ended up enjoying the interactive puzzles a bit more, despite some feeling out of place (space invaders anyone?), there is some diamond within this coal.

What brings the whole experience to soot is the god awful performance issues I and many others have. The stuttering and slowdowns made this a chore to complete, fuelled with the excess backtracking, and lack of animation skips. Some areas even require you repeat the puzzle solution over and over to as you pass though them.

The whole experience culminated into a slog with some obnoxious padding.
Visually it's encompassing and brings you into the world, so if the art looks interesting to you give it a go, but if your here for some point a click adventure puzzling machinarium does not deliver personally.

You are not buying a game, you are buying a visual choose your own adventure book. There is one 'gameplay' element and that is the choice of dialog, certain choices get you different endings.
If that sounds like its for you then I can recommenced it, otherwise if you like a bit more interaction and puzzles there are plenty of visual novels on steam with more gameplay.