Recent reviews by makka

cool game, the story is fine enough and i really liked the environment a lot. Looking outside the hotel is really cool and there's a lot of environment transitions. It's a horror game but there's not much "gaming", it's not a survival horror type of game, more like go from point A to point B with some story elements.

the mouse smoothing really killed the experience for me. The game ran very well but it always felt so laggy because of the mouse smoothing that can't be disabled. Also there's no FOV configuration. I wish there were ways to start a game at certain days to make getting the different endings a bit easier, as you have to replay the entire game to get the other two good endings. There's only one dialogue in the entire game that actually changes the outcome of the game for good endings.

Also every corpse in this game is completely naked besides underwear, not sure what that's about.

it has very simplified game mechanics, and there is a relatively small learning curve, it's overall pretty chill. If you go for top 10 leaderboard times then you need to start honing on your execution, and if you get too good at the game in Battery mode you will just hold onto the battery the entire time uncontested and start getting kicked from the lobby. So there is a lot of "execution skill" involved. I come from Quake PQL style racing, and this game has some mechanics similar to it, but it's very different overall. The air drag in this game is HUGE, even at fast speeds you will lose all your horizontal momentum very quickly. Strafe jumping "air-strafing" only feels like it reduces the air drag a little bit, and since you only have to move your mouse a very tiny bit to air strafe, the routes feel very linear compared to quake race maps. It's not a fun game to try to beat your PB on routes, but it is very fun to play Capture mode.

On a side note, the infection mode game mode just seems not good (or at least the default settings) because the only time I've ever seen the blue "radar" team win is if I'm zipping around the map not being caught or dying from fall damage for ~8 minutes. Usually everyone gets caught very quickly, and you can only capture a tower or two, as you need to sit under the tower for what seems like 10 seconds to capture it, which is only possible at the very beginning of the match as the infected are infecting your team mates. In this way it doesn't feel like a team-vs-team game, it feels like a 1-vs-server game, which is what Battery mode already does.

This is not a MOBA, it's just a top down extraction game. There are no actual MOBA mechanics (base defense, towers, lanes, etc). Besides even talking about the extraction mechanics, itself, the combat is really poorly designed. It's clearly trying to go for a League kind of combat, with skillshots and such (and not dota team-fight mechanics which I think would fit much better tbh). The main problem is the combat feels really disconnected and floaty. You never feel like you're hitting anything, not players or the "jungle creeps", nor does it ever feel like you'e taking damage. You also don't really do much damage to begin with, just tickling your opponents. So the combat itself is simply not fun. There are no tactics/strategies in a fight, you have no way as a team of 200s to beat a team of 300s. you will just get run-down with the number advantage. In a dota-inspired game you could set up a gank, set up stuns, chain those stuns, have escape/mobility options, scout the map, set up huge ults that do a ton of damage/CC, etc.

I'm a huge Gothic fan, this seems very promising but oh boy it needs a lot of polishing. So many bugs, like how your character stops rendering, and obvious ones like how names will render on top of dialogue texts. Combat is really unpolished here, if your enemy has a bow you can just spam attack and dodge to get them to completely wig out, as they shoot arrows up into the sky (or at least aim into the sky). Besides those bugs, I think the combat here just needs so much more work, which is worrisome given the game is meant to release soon. I can tell they're trying to imitate the combat from Gothic 1, but with how slow the animations are, it's just a bit frustrating how unresponsive your character is. I know the game is trying to make it clear your character isn't agile and has no combat training, and maybe the combat gets a lot more fluid and responsive as you skill up, but at the same time trying to learn the combat system like this is only frustrating.

I also wish they modernized Gothic 1 controls instead of just using these generic controls, but I understand they probably don't want to risk alienating new fans. But you do immediately see the downsides to this, as picking up items isn't as tight and specific as it would be in Gothic 1. Also, you can't do vertical jumps nor can you ledge grab everything.

The graphics are great, of course. The game looks amazing. And it runs well enough, if you meet the pretty high system requirements.

So there are potentially a lot of red flags here. Primarily the concern is if the studio is working on polishing right now, or if they're not even finished with the game yet and will "polish" after they ship. This is a vertical slice so I would hope it's very polished and well tested, but you can find bugs almost immediately.

Overall, this game is probably going to ship a buggy broken mess. However original game

It's a unique and fun game, I found mostly about exploring the world the dev crafted. The amount of detail in the world is overwhelming. It is a rather silly game though. While there are quite a lot of procedural components, they play more of a supporting role. E.g. there are lots of fixed assets with limited interactions. It's it's a rather simple and silly game rather than a fully-simulated war/economic/political game, but there aren't really many games like it.

Personally I would've liked a map screen showing the land i own, where my kingdom occupies compared to other kingdoms, maybe also showing the trade routes I have, etc. You could justify it in-game by paying for a cartographer.

feels a bit too half baked but i think i like what they were trying to go for here. There are some mechanics that don't really feel properly fleshed out, like the carriers, the food/water/sleep system, etc. As well giving commands is a bit janky as most unarmed enemies will just walk forward to you anyways trying to shoot you. Given the procedural and very open map layout, i dont feel like it fits well in SWAT-style gameplay. Also there's a complete lack of settings. All this can be overlooked for the cheap price tag though.

It's a good mix of a runescape FPS and dark souls. There's no levels, and a lot of the weapons feel a little lackluster as they're not always upgrades, but for a 3 hour experience it's pretty solid. Overall it's relatively high quality for the pricetag. I will say I was a bit dissapointed in the level design though, it's the weakest aspect by far. It's just a bit too linear and since it's all underground, with not too much distinction between areas, all the levels just feel the same. The armor system also feels a bit lackluster, I didn't both to equip any armor due to the penalized stamina (and without many stats to understand how stamina was affected i just had to go by my gut instinct).

It's a pretty decent experience as is and multiplayer works pretty well.

it's a fun auto-battler dungeon crawler, you return to the main town hub often to restock, so finishing a quest in a dungeon might take multiple passes. You can play this while tired.

The intro tutorial is just about all i had to see. The vehicle camera is shoved so far up the car's ass that you can't see anything around you and I just get motion sickness, the FOV setting does nothing for this, so for that alone the game is unplayable for me. There's crowds of people rioting but all you hear in the ambient sounds is generic city sounds, and among many other small things the game is far too unpolished for the price. The radio is really annoying and it's just the same 10 or so clips on repeat. The AI in this game are really annoying, since they don't die, they just get back up and bum-rush you. They have no semblance of self-preservation or fear, even if you're in a car they'll try to stop it with their own body.

I was expecting just a simple cleanup game but it's got an overarching story with a lot of secret areas. It's way more forgiving about details than a lot of other similar games, but you can still softlock yourself if you just throw bags around a maniac. The levels themselves are a lot more interesting than other cleaning games as there's so much attention and detail put into them. There are also a lot of secret areas and you feel like the level is slowly expanding as you progress - this is the impression i got on the first level at least. Each secret area has a lot of detail too. This makes it unique and where it shines compared to any other cleaning game, besides the OG Viscera Cleanup, actually it's a bit of a modernized version of that game.

There are a few criticisms though that really hold this game back, sometimes items (often trash) just clip into the ground unable to be picked up, and sometimes you will spend 10, 20 even 30 minutes looking for some missing furniture item to just never find it. I wish the game would highlight missing furniture as it's just such a pain to hunt it down. And then just polish the garbage so if things clip out they get reset or something. Thankfully for garbage you can kind of get around this by breaking a ton of glass and collecting those, hopefully pushing the total item count to 100% and letting you perfect score even with a missing item (which worked for me).