Recent reviews by Thirdrail

There have been three truly great automotive combat games since people started trying to convert Car Wars into a video game: Autoduel, the original Twisted Metal, and now this title. This should have been one of the big games of the last year, but somehow it slipped past most of us. There is a ton of content here, and it's all AAA quality and execution. (Well, except for the names. As the title of the game may suggest to you, these people are TERRIBLE at naming things. Just terrible. It's painful. I'm not kidding.) Right now this is $3.45 on Humble. That's a steal. Highly recommended at any price point!

As usual, feel free to friend me for multiplayer.

BUY FOR $1 IN HUMBLE BUNDLE. COME RACE KARTS WITH FARGO AND ME.

Why does miniature golf need to be miniature? Why can't it be the scale of regular golf, so I'm putting through three hundred yards of bumpers and windmills and rollercoasters? Also, why can't mini-golf have lots of mechanical hummingbirds?

Obviously, we've all asked these questions. Now Vertiginous Golf is here to answer them.

It's insanity, but it all works well. It's fun and polished, especially for a tiny indy production like this one. The multiplayer is the star of the show. Charming and imaginative describe virtually every inch of what exists in Vertiginous Golf.

My only real complaint is lack of content. It needs more courses. Partly, that's Early Access. But, the future goals say the final game will have 45+ courses, and it will need to be double that, at least, because it IS miniature golf. Real golf is about honing nuances. Miniature golf, at any scale, is far more dependent on novelty factor. As cool and robust as these course designs are, they're not anything you're going to play fifty or a hundred times. The game needs so many holes that by the time you finish the final holes, you can no longer remember the early holes clearly. That's the only way this will ever be anything more than an incredibly cool way to spend an evening or two. The only way this will ever be a real game.

My hope is that this will turn into a more expensive game, with far, far more content, instead of remaining a cheap game which inevitably starts pushing the edges of its content after just a few hours. At the moment, it reminds me a lot of the disc golf sector of the ps3 game Sports Champions - BRILLIANT, but give me more of it. A *lot* more of it.

I recommend this game IF, and ONLY IF:

1) You bring your own friends.
2) You never contact customer support, or require help or moderation of any kind. At all.
3) You are ok with boutique pricing.

It's a fun game. They do a great job on the heroes. The roster is the highlight of this game, and depth and diversity of roster is what holds the Diablo clone that is Marvel Heroes together. That said, there are thirty-something heroes and maybe one and half heroes worth of content to play through, so there is a lot of repetition. Of course, repetition is the foundation of all video gaming, so, as usual, it's more a matter of finding a form of repetition you enjoy, as opposed to avoiding it, which is virtually impossible.

The main problem here is the community, by which I mean both the devs and the players. The players are the most sycophantic group of white knights I've ever encountered online, which is really saying a lot. You'd think you were playing the game with the dev's spouses, as personally as they take any and all criticism of such a deeply flawed title. And there is a lot of legitimate criticism to be made of a game that was downright terrible a year ago, and still, in its new playable form, remains only one-quarter finished, at the most generous estimate. Mention that fact, or allude to it in any way, and prepare to be made pariah by Marvel's zealot based online community. Worse, you could ask a question, and reveal yourself to be someone who does not comb the Marvel Heroes forums for the information required to play the game. Only a lazy scumbag would expect a game to be explained in-game, without having to go look up patch notes after leaving Steam to sign in at a third party website, and the Marvel community enforces this type of summary judgement with a mixture of glee and zeal that would impress even the most jaded citizens of Ironforge. This is internet tribalism at its finest, and the resulting experience as a player, particularly a new player, is correspondingly atrocious.

The devs and moderators, sadly, are far worse. Whether you're talking about the development team, or the moderators, poor communication is the hallmark of Gazillion Entertainment. Be prepared to do frequent out of game research, simply because the devs can't be bothered explaining even the simplest aspects of play in-game. And pray Yig will help you should you ever require assistance with anything, at any point, because the support department at Gaz certainly isn't going to help you. You will never be a good enough customer to even be treated like a customer, much less a good one.

Which is almost fascinating, because Marvel Heroes can be quite expensive. New heroes cost $4.50, $9, or $13.50, depending (mostly) on how long they've been available. A single new costume for said hero can be anywhere from $4.50 to $14.50. It is painfully easy to spend $500 on this game, and claims of thousands spent are not uncommon. This is boutique pricing straight off Melrose in LA, but the whole thing is run by a group of people whose customer service skills would be considered unprofessional by Orange County swap meet standards. The true marvel here is that Marvel has left their multizillion dollar IP in the hands of people who don't just ignore their customers, but often seem to have a genuine dislike for them.

Don't get me wrong. The game is fun to play.

Just bring your own friends. And be prepared to throw down big money. At a business where the proprietors and other customers will bridge the entire spectrum between pointed disinterest and open hostility.

Assuming you are paying less than $12 for the "Complete Pack", I absolutely DO recommend this incredibly silly game. It's a bit clunky and a bit outdated, but both of those things actually add to the game, in my opinion, because they make it impossible to take too seriously. That is, of course, the great flaw in the FPS world: the taking of things too seriously. How many otherwise solid games does The Serious ruin? More than I could count. There ain't none of that going on round these parts.

There's stuff to unlock, and customization options, and several game types, although you'll probably want to spend most of your time in the Team Objective mode, because that's a hell of lot more fun than overplayed junk game modes like team deathmatch. There's a key for yelling. That's my favorite key. You can yell a lot of stuff, and almost all of it sounds like it was recorded from drunk SCA members. There's a lot of very silly gore: remember the fight with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? This game is like a 7gb homage to that battle.

Another thing I heartily approve of is the support this game is getting from its devs. Twenty-eight major updates, and countless smaller ones, in less than two years. I'm sure it desperately needed twenty-seven of those. But it got them! Kudos to these goofy people for providing their goofy game with a classy, old school level of post-release love.

Again, just to be clear, do NOT, under any circumstances, pay full retail for this game. $12. Or less. For both the game and the expansion. (The expansion is terrible, and no one seems to play it, but that doesn't matter, because, as every gamer knows, COMPLETIONISM IS ITS OWN REWARD.)

Hands down the best pool game I've played. Graphically, it borders on being a tech demo for high end lighting and reflection effects. It's ridiculously shiny. The felt looks like felt. (I would not be surprised to see this game come bundled with every graphics card released in the next five years. It makes your GPU look like a hero.) The physics are just as good: crisp and consistent. Lots of game modes. Lots of cue sticks, balls, table decals, and pool halls to unlock. (I've played for 9 hours, I'm reasonably good at pool, and I've only opened up the easiest fourth of the unlockables.) Thanks to the quirky descriptions of your opponents before the matches, the game ends up having a ton of personality, considering it doesn't render the players at all, only their ghostly, floating sticks. It's got solid multiplayer, at least for two people. By people I mean friends. You can play big tournaments, in theory, with larger groups of strangers.

Perhaps most importantly in the context of 2014 gaming, Pool Nation is getting continued love and support from its devs. Snooker and "Box of Tricks" are both coming soon as free updates, and the devs are active in the forums.

As I write this, the game is on sale for $1.50. It's correctly priced at $10, so $1.50 is a steal.

A fun game with an interesting concept. It plays like an old tabletop board game, or perhaps something from the earliest days of pc gaming. It's very well designed in terms of balance and mechanics. The problem is the price for the extremely limited amount of content this game represents. Qvadriga is an excellent $3 to $5 cell phone game, not a $20 pc game. *If* you can get it on sale, for an accurate price, then I highly recommend it, but in a world where indy games with staggering levels of content like Xenonauts and FTL are $25 and $10 respectively, charging $20 for this anemic little game is both insulting and insane.

The amount of work and balancing that has gone into this $10 game is simply astounding. It's well written, well designed, full of strange hidden activities and unlockable ships, and has the best music this side of Risk of Rain. And they're not even done improving it. Another huge, free, expansion is on its way. (as of Feb. 2014) I would call the learning curve extreme (even by Rogue-like standards) but the game is a rare masterpiece, and it's well worth the time you'll spend being brutally crushed by aliens. If I could only recommend one game from the last five years, it would be FTL.

An FPS with MMO-style drops and items. This game does a lot of things right, and a couple things wrong (casual play is slightly skewed by an overabundance of the cheesiest sniper rifle ever put in an FPS), but all in all it's fun and addictive and a great way to hang out with your friends. 400+ hours in a game that cost me $4. It's hard not to recommend a game which presents that kind of dollar to time ratio.

There is some residual beta-like wonkiness this game never truly escapes, but I have to say, it is the closest anyone has ever gotten to the perfect zombie game. It's open world, you can pick among a variety of safehouses and fortify/upgrade them, and go rescue/recruit other survivors. The map is nice, the combat is fun, and the expansion pack adds a TON of replay value. Assuming it's on sale, as it so often is, and you can get both the base game and the DLC for $20 or less, it's a great deal, and you probably won't end up furious about the minor glitches you encounter along the way. It's also gotten fantastic support from its devs, with frequent updates and fixes, so it gets a little better every few weeks. I also give them points for having a lot of strong, fun, female characters, which far too many games ignore, considering it's now 2014, not the mid-1800s.