Recent reviews by constantcompile

If you're looking for a quick, bite-sized game that you can tear through in less than an hour with the help of a guide, Overboard! has you covered. If you want a rich story full of layered characters that you can spend ten hours on or more - without a guide - it's got you covered there, too.

But here's where I must caution you - if you want a complexly-branching narrative with several different endings, hyper-specific context-sensitive dialogue, and a game that will constantly surprise you with how the developers anticipated every outcome... You need to dial back your expectations.

Overboard! is a small-scale indie title that is $15 at full price. It has not been polished to a mirror shine, and it has a relatively limited scope. What's there is very good - the characters are charming and memorable, and the story is well-told. Although the game usually railroads you into only a few types of major ending states, they are generally very effective and the small flourishes are endearing. In the end, I suppose saying "it left me wanting more than it had" is a compliment, of sorts.

That said - I still recommend it.

Exo One is a game about atmosphere and aesthetic.

That's all it is.

If you want to know whether you'll like this game, search for "Exo One: Prologue" which is its free demo. If you play that, you think, "Yes, more of this, please," and are willing to part with however many dollars in exchange for two-ish hours of (very pretty) new levels, then by all means go ahead.

I personally found the flashing images and the looped garbles of the dialogue kind of irritating, and I wasn't satisfied with the ending. The game is unique enough, and pretty enough, that I'll give it a thumbs up in spite of that - but I really hope the developers add options to disable all of that stuff and just let you play the game uninterrupted.

Recommended if you play "Exo One: Prologue" and are comfortable with the price point for a two-ish-hour campaign.

Man, this must be a rough time to be a small dev team. Time Loader is a sidescrolling platformer that will inevitably be overshadowed by more impressive titles in the genre, through no fault of its own.

Okay, maybe a little fault of its own. I spent - no lie - the entire game wishing I didn't move so dang slowly. Your little RC wheels crawl across the screen. The physics of your jumping are inconsistent, and you'll frequently need to retry jumps. Because this is a side-scrolling game in a 3D environment, you'll frequently run into cases of "Y'know, with just a little movement along the Z-axis, which the character is capable of in cutscenes, this wouldn't be a problem." I have no idea what the store description means by "dozens of upgrades" - maybe the logic is "a third of a dozen is still dozens." And bugs are still present - I had one CTD and needed to disconnect and reconnect my controller a couple of times because actions weren't registering.

That aside - Time Loader is a "single-timeline" time travel story that mainly features physics puzzles as obstacles to platforming progression. The devs have taken great care to make sure you can't soft-lock yourself, which both is a blessing and a curse. I said in my review of The Gardens Between that you could effectively "Chekhov's Gun" your way through a level by interacting with all of the actionable objects you came across, thereby solving the problem before even seeing what the problem is - Time Loader has the same issue. If you can do a thing, you should probably do the thing.

At the same time, some of your actions need to be so precise that I can't recommend this to newcomers either. I feel like more than half of players will find the gameplay too dull, and another eighth will find the platforming too fiddly. It advertises itself as "relaxing" and "nostalgic," but as an 80's kid myself, I need more than a toy DeLorean in the background to find myself gripped with emotion. The story didn't accomplish that either.

The game teases multiple endings, as well as a way to get the "best" one. Look at the other reviews - see the ones with 2-3 hours? They beat Time Loader once. Those with 4+ may have gotten the best ending. At time of writing, only about 10% of reviewers found the game compelling enough to put that kind of time in.

That's why I give this game my absolute bare-minimum thumbs-up of "it's okay." There is a game here. There is a decently original story. There are decently pretty visuals. The gameplay is... adequate. Passable. The puzzles are occasionally even somewhat clever.

Honestly? If you're a Humble Monthly subscriber, or an Xbox Game Pass subscriber, or even if you just have an Epic Game Store account, I'd probably just wait until this pops up for free. Nothing in Time Loader made it feel like a "must play," and my free time is limited enough that even that makes me regret having spent my time on it.

Tepidly recommended.

Dwarf Journey feels like a diet Rogue Legacy, and that's not a bad thing. You have the same procedurally-generated maps and the melee-range combat, but without the systems on top of systems; no random buffs and debuffs, no dice-roll classes, just your dude and the enemies - nice and simple.

"Simple" might even be understating it; there isn't very much enemy variety. You've got homing flyers, projectile tossers, and straight-chargers, and that's pretty much it. But enemy counts and placements always feel right. Always challenging, rarely overwhelming. Almost every hit I took in Dwarf Journey felt like my own fault, and that's no small compliment. I beat the campaign in 3.5 hours, and that feels right for a game that's $7 full-price.

Here's my problem: There are achievements for upgrading every piece of equipment in the game, including those that are straight downgrades to the endgame gear, as well as for dying five hundred times. Do you know how many times I died before beating the campaign? Twelve. According to Steam statistics, more than 80% of players beat the final boss before dying even 50 times. What in the world was the dev thinking?

So. If you're a completionist, and you try to only play games you can 100% without monotony, this game is probably a miss. But if you like simple, casual 2D combat and can look past those few achievements you almost certainly won't bother with, you can probably pick this one up.

Recommended.

You do know that Shadow of the Colossus had the whole stamina-climb thing before BotW, right?

Regardless, yes - stamina climbing is most of what you'll be doing in Sable, along with some light dungeon-puzzling and plenty of hoverbiking from place to place. And it's a good time! Good writing, great setting, plenty to do and discover.

Honestly, my biggest complaint is that the character animations (specifically) are locked to like 12 FPS regardless of other settings. I was able to ignore it after a while but it bugged the heck out of me. Speaking of bugs, yeah, quite a few. Nothing gamebreaking but be ready for heavy sustained frame dips and occasional physics snafus.

Didn't ruin my experience though. I 100%'d Sable in about 19 hours and enjoyed myself more or less throughout. A nice, nonviolent wander-em-up.

Recommended.

If you're wanting to experience the mid-aughts era of open-world gameplay, this is probably one of the prettier games you could do it with. The remastered graphics look fantastic, and run almost flawlessly. The humor is certainly of its time; most of it was middling to mediocre even then and hasn't aged any better (though parts of the NPC dialogue, especially those voiced by Steve Blum, have a few good bits - it's a shame they didn't subtitle these to make them more accessible).

Still, this remake was competently done, the VO performances are still phenomenal, and it's a decent enough way to spend ten bucks and ten hours to 100%. Shout out to the developers for NOT making a "collect all of the probes" achievement - that was the right call.

Every single facet of this game impressed me.

The platforming is tight, responsive and challenging. Controls feel great. Combat is engaging. Music is superb. Visuals are immaculate.

The few flaws that exist aren't dealbreakers. Some instant-death obstacles and zones feel like they could've just done damage and knockback instead to preserve immersion. A couple of collectibles here and there needing late- or post-game upgrades feel unnecessary.

Those don't detract from the beauty and sheer technical craft on display. This is a game that was given the time, polish and attention needed to really bring out the heights of what the medium is capable of. This is one of the all-time greats, and deserves a spot in every Top 100 list in gaming going forward.

Highly recommended.

As someone who hasn't played Mighty No. 9, or Gunvolt, or Gal*Gun, this was a decent enough Megaman clone. It's convinced me to finally dust off my Kickstarter copy of Mighty No. 9 and give it a shot, after all of the... uh... fan reaction upon its release.

I 100%'d this in about 3 hours with a fresh save - I logged about 2 hours prior to that, hence my time on record.

I'd pick this up on sale, but I still recommend it.

I'm a sucker for levels that can be burned through quickly. In DSBNS, You can expect to complete the first 20 or so levels in about 10 minutes depending on whether you get hung up on any of them. It's basically Hotline Miami except everyone is polygonal figures.

Well, not exactly. In Hotline Miami you pick up weapons on the fly, whereas in DSNBS you pick your loadout at the starting box and it's locked in outside of that box. The problem is that trying to vary your loadout is rarely rewarding. Most of the weapons you can buy in the shop have such glaring downsides that you feel better off sticking to what you already have, at least in Single-Player, and this only gets worse in hard mode.

"Sneakier" difficulty introduces the Bulletproof Baseball Bat Bastard (tm). He chases you through each level and will quickly kill you if you aren't moving fast enough, meaning that the katana (sword) is practically the only viable weapon for most of those levels - any others just won't carve through the enemies fast enough. One level locked B4 in a bookcase, and it was brilliant - I dual-wielded AK47s and it was the freshest the gameplay had felt all campaign. Alas, it was back to the status quo next level.

For all of the effort that went into hand-designing these levels, most of them feel incredibly samey - the aforementioned bookcase level feels like the exception that proves the rule. If particular sets levels had locked you in to a particular weapon loadout - even if it were just the default loadout that could be changed - and you played through ten or so levels that were designed around that weapon, it would go a long way toward mixing up the gameplay. Instead, every time I died in the sneakier campaign, it just felt like I needed to katana harder.

That said, do I still recommend this game? I mean, for it's current sale price of $0.99, sure. I hope to try the co-op gameplay with my friends soon; maybe that will introduce more novelty and flexibility to the gameplay.

Recommended for top-down shooter fans who won't mind a katana-based hard campaign.

In Umiro, you need to draw paths for your characters - who walk at a fixed speed - to avoid moving black orbs. This will frequently involve having them run around in circles to stall as an orb passes by.

Although you can see the corresponding position of the other character as you draw, the death orbs continue moving throughout the entire planning phase - the only way to reset their position, in order to get a known "time equals zero" for consistent results, is to die. This creates an incredibly frustrating pattern of "throwing away" a first attempt because you know the orb position won't be quite right. (And before you say "well, you could wait until the orbs cycle back," there are different groups of orbs that move at different rates quite often.)

Okay, so if the gameplay didn't grab me, how's the story? Mediocre at best. The characters and overall story are paper-thin, I saw any reveals coming a mile off, and overall I wasn't fond of it. That only leaves the visuals, which I'll admit have a nice aesthetic, but not enough to carry the game.

YMMV, but I didn't enjoy my time with this game and I don't think it's worth the asking price.

Not recommended.