Recent reviews by vipervicious

Pros:
- It nails all of the basics of how a twin-stick shooter should control.
- The limited vision adds an interesting dynamic that enables unique upgrade types that you wouldn't see in other twin-stick/survivors style games
- Upgrades feel immediately meaningful when you take them.
- Putting together a powerful build is satisfying and rarely completely eliminates the game's challenge, especially on harder difficulties.
- The developers are actively supporting the game, have added a lot since release, and clearly intend to release a lot more.

Cons:
- On harder difficulties there are only really 2 kinds of builds that are really effective which makes certain upgrades borderline mandatory and all the others just "not bad, but not what you need."
- Certain upgrade paths include upgrades that seem contradictory in their intent at times. This isn't usually a problem, but sometimes a really useful upgrade for your build will only be acquirable after taking 1 or more other upgrades that are not useful for your build at all.
- As of 1/30/2024, certain upgrades appear to use AI art to act as a representative icon attached to the upgrade. Ignoring the ethics of this (a more full discussion is below), The AI art is such an indistinct mush of semi-recognizable things that the icons serve almost no purpose and most are impossible to identify at a glance.

Nitpicks
- The variety of enemies is pretty low (at least on map 1).

This game is very solid and definitely worth your time if you like twin-stick shooters/survivors style games. While the visuals are not what someone might call fancy, the game uses it's unique lighting and monochromatic style to make very simple graphics do a lot with very little. The controls feel snappy and the action feels appropriately frenetic. There are occasions on higher difficulties where your survival feels dependent on how lucky you are with upgrades, but very rarely does a death feel like it was completely beyond your ability to prevent.

One thing to mention is that the game seems to use some amount of A.I. art assets for icons in the upgrade screens. This is actually detrimental to their effectiveness as Icons as it's hard to distinguish these icons between each other in any meaningful way. Also there are definitely a host of ethical quandaries with using this in a released product (free or not). Fortunately the developers seem to be in the process of phasing these icons out in exchange for their own custom pixel art icons (that frankly look better than the A.I. stuff ever did). This is a great direction and can't wait for the rest of the icons to be replaced with their own in house stuff.

The bottom line is this game is solid and amazing for being free. Worth playing and worth purchasing their "DLC" donation to support the developers.

Pros:
- The controls are very tight and responsive in a way that makes you never feel like deaths are "cheap"
- Large metroidvania-style map is fun to navigate and explore
- Checkpoints are placed at reasonable distances that ensure challenge without making it difficult to navigate or "bank" your gems
- You have a reasonable level of control over how much challenge you want to engage with as the first available ending is reachable without completing everything
- Despite being a precision platformer, never gets so hard that it's especially frustrating

Cons:
- It could be considered a little "short" or "light" on content, but I think it's more than fair for the price (and it would look weird not to have anything here.

Nitpicks:
- Despite how it looks, this is not a metroidvania. If you go in expecting a bunch of different powers scattered about that will unlock new areas, you will be dissapointed.
- Some of the jumping sections around retractable spikes require you to move through the spikes as they are retracting, which I find somewhat annoying as it's a disconnect from what it looks like you can/can't do and what you actually can/can't do
- Even at it's hardest, this game never gets crushingly hard/punishing, so if you're looking for the next "I wanna be the..." platformer, you won't find it here.

I liked this game a lot. It is a solid precision platformer with a lot of neat environmental mechanics. The map could have added frustrating navigation chores in between the different platforming challenges, but through well placed checkpoints and fast travel spots, it provides a fun exploration aspect to the game that allows for the fun of discovery of both new areas and secrets (none of which are critical to getting the game's most basic ending). This is a great little game with a lot of value for the asking price.

Pros:
- Fun Parkour style action
- The kick as your main way to interact with everything is cool, fun, intuitive, and funny
- Executing a level well is satisfying and fun
- The aesthetic, gameplay, and tone work really well together

Cons:
- The whole game feels like it's lacking a bit of polish all over the place (check nitpicks section)
- While the "get to the end and kill the big guy" levels are pretty consistently fun, the more sandboxy "kill all the little dudes around the area" levels feel like they want you to be careful and methodical in a way that the game's loose momentum based controls make more difficult and less fun. I could see them possibly being fun once you have mastery over the games system and can refine and perfect your routing, but when you first encounter them, they're just a slog.
- It seems like a number of little aesthetic details are in the way of gameplay to no overall benefit. More than once a lip of a window or a small cosmetic edge of a building sent me plummeting to my death.

Nitpicks:
- game music resets every time you die and restart a level which gets annoying because it happens a lot
- the window to jump kick at an enemy can be fidgety and catching an enemy on the edge of your kicking range can be really difficult as the enemy "blinks" in and out of range.
- Some stages (especially ones where you're in a sea of the same color buildings) can be confusing to navigate as the critical path isn't terribly distinguishable from the background elements you can't interact with.

Overall I think the game's pretty good if a little frustrating at times. More than likely worth your time, although it might make more sense to get it on sale if you're on the fence. I am looking forward to whatever the developer makes next.

Interesting puzzle game that puts the logic of minesweeper games front and center without actually being a minesweeper game.

I played Guilty Gear XX back in the day and tried this out and loved it. However, there are major issues, some of which may be fixed in the future and others almost certainly won't. Here are some quick Pro's and Con's:

Pros:
- Everything about the game during the actual fighting is rock solid, smooth, and feels terrific
- Probably the best looking fighting game available today IMHO
- Online matchmaking in ranked battles doesn't just give players a level of skill to strive for, but also easily sorts players into matchmaking lobbies with players of similar skill levels. It also makes the process of expert players sniping new players difficult and unrewarding, meaning that brand new players won't just get steamrolled in online play.
- the rollback netcode makes online matches in your own region almost as smooth as playing in person. While there can be latency issues since everyone's connection speed can't be 100% accounted for, when the system works it works beautifully.

Cons:
- The single player experience is the thinnest it's been in a Guilty Gear game since the first few entries in the series and might be even worse than that. You get an arcade mode, 1v1 against cpu mode, and a survival mode. That's it. The game includes a story mode, but it's basically just a 4 hour movie with no gameplay. This is not hyperbole, the is no gameplay
- Everytime you open the game it must communicate with the server, and this can take up to 5 minutes. While they have improved it, it's still egregious that you have to go through this access even the single player content.

Overall, I still recommend the game, but if what I said above in the cons is a deterrent, you've been warned.

It's relatively short, but if you like adventure games and/or solving puzzle boxes, this game is well worth it.

This is probably the best combat centric rogue-like I've played. The various weapons you pick up can completely change the way you play the game, making each run feel like it's own individual experience. If you're not a fan of souls-like combat (heavy focus on exactly what your attack animations are, defense focused around using dodge-rolls and parries to avoid getting hit), this probably won't convert you. However, if that's your jam, this definitely combines that combat style with randomly generated levels better than pretty much any other game out there.

Everything is broken, nothing goes right, and you are a goat.

10/10

Another Perspective takes a simple mechanic and explores it thoroughly without overstaying it's welcome. Whether it's worth $5 to you depends on how much you feel like spending on something that is a very minimalist, succinct, but short experience that will test how you approach a problem. I definitely think it's worth $5 dollars.