Recent reviews by Amiculi

A surprising time capsule of games. Essentially you get 50 8-bit adjacent titles that mix retro concepts with modern ones, and almost entirely fall in the 7 to 10 out of 10 range, give or take a bit and subject to the individual's taste.

Despite not being my most played this year, UFO50 IS my GotY without a doubt.

Plays great on Steam Deck. Just disable the Epic crap and you don't have to worry too much about playing on the go, though, it might get stuck on a black screen on the first boot, restarting it fixed it for me.

Medium settings with 30fps in game cap for the best visual experience.
Low settings with 60fps in game cap and 50hz on steam deck for the best performance experience. This is really hit and miss, crazier fights end up dipping to like 35, may well be best to just do 30fps on medium. Has some inconsistencies from 28-32 but is mostly fine. Totally playable either way.

Will get about 2 hours battery in both cases.

Put something like 60 hours into this on consoles and it's really great. I do think Dead Island 1 and Riptide are better games from a few points, most notably build variety, but this is still a great game in its own right, and considering its development history, the quality of what we've received is a damned miracle.

I cannot currently recommend CONVRGENCE in its release state. I've been flipflopping on whether or not I'll refund it but I think I'm going to hold onto it and see how it goes as there is a lot of potential here, unfortunately, right now the solo developer situation is really showing.

At its core, this is an extraction shooter that lifts concepts from several other games including STALKER (blatantly), Into The Radius (also blatantly), Survival Nation (mildly), Saints & Sinners (slightly) and Arizona Sunshine 2 (loosely).

From STALKER you get the theme. Into The Radius also shares this same basic theme and this game carries some of its ideas like weapon maintenance and the shop system, Saints & Sinners gives you its backpack system. Survival Nation offers its unnecessarily fast draining food and drink meters that offer nothing to the game but busywork and Arizona Sunshine 2 brings its doggo.

The game functions as a sort of Tarkov inspired extraction shooter with procedurally generated maps, a soft progression system and a lot of inventory management. It's skeleton is sturdy and there's a lot of potential but a lot of it is poorly executed. I can, however, see that it's potentially the scaffold upon which a better game will be grafted in time.

You have a very bare bones base with a shooting range, a shop, a room with storage chest, a barrel of water and a snoring guy. From the base you twist the submarine style door handle to enter the staging area where you pick a photo of a location and of a companion to bring with you, of which there are currently two locations and one companion. You take them to the exit guard and a beeping starts echoing in the room which function as a countdown to load. From here you enter into a clever driving sequence loading screen where you sit in the driver's seat of a truck and your partner sits in the passenger seat. You can fiddle with the radio and steer the carry comically bouncing off the sides of the road, it's cute, though it may nauseate some players.

Once loading is done you're prompted to turn the key on the ignition (bafflingly located to the left of the wheel) and you enter into the stage. I have thusfar only done the first zone, a haphazard ministorage park with narrow paths leading between containers, some open, some closed, and with dumpsters and wrecked cars strewn around. You set about shooting bandits and looking for resources to bring back and an exit, marked by a green light on the ground which initiates another beeping countdown to load. Upon return you can sell what you've found, store things you want to keep, clean your weapons and maintain your stats.

All in all it sounds pretty decent but everything is ultra low rent. The containers consist of 4 or 5 little buildings, some with doors open that you can explore, most of which are empty, and the rest being closed. There is no interaction with the world outside of a few specific boxes you can open, though there are many boxes that look similar that you cannot open, and the rare locker. There are no physics objects, car doors, switches, building doors or debris to fiddle with or interact with. The game is not "VRAF" as they say.

Loot is hidden in awkward places like dumpsters that you cannot physically reach like a normal human and ended up requiring just holding an arm out, crouching and blindly grabbing for, inside car trunks with similar issues, on overturned spools and on tables, sometimes you might find something inside a car but I've only seen one.

A major problem with loot is you have no idea what any of it is or does, some of them might be interactive but it's not clear if it's a usable item or just something to sell, I found a healing syringe in that category, and you find a lot of food items but you can't eat any of them despite food being a necessary component of your survival, Basically the game sorely needs some sort of information panel to bring up on items like Into The Radius. Similarly weapon maintenance is hard to understand what it does.

Bringing it back to sell the prices are wildly random, the highest value items I've found so far were all low tech electronics, like nearly 1500 for a crappy LCD Tetris game, and something similar for a big busted up calculator, but then medicine runs you like 500 and food is usually 250 or less, enemy weapons and magazines often sell for next to nothing as well (which are themselves an issue since you can't take weapons in your backpack, you have only your own weapon's slots, so you need to forego one to loot another). It could use some sort of tracker for the value of items.

Basically a HUGE problem is lack of information. When you eat you can't see what your hunger is while you eat, and when you drink you can't see where your thirst is while you drink as both actions are two handed activities and you can only check this information on your PDA. It isn't immersive in this case it's just annoying.

Back to the map, it is extremely bland, very samey, every run is basically the exact same location with a slightly different shape and it's very easy to get lost as you plod along at a snail's pace.

The enemies are pretty braindead, tending to get stuck on everything and just rush straight towards you, often times you can headshot a group of three before they really react if you're quick enough. I don't know if this is a bad thing though as the gunplay is pretty middling and basically everything is in need of work.

The start of the game was laborious to say the least as your starter backpack has only 9 slots and it comes with I think 5 or 6 of them full, including with a lighter and pack of cigarettes which appear to have no gameplay function (and have an insanely obnoxious sound when used as the developer has apparently never smoked a cigarette (but good on him for that!)). I recommend dumping most of the items except your water canteen and medkit in your storage box before heading out or you'll not be able to bring back much of any loot. Saving up enough money and ranking up to get the second backpack gave only one more page of 9 slots.

But considering how empty the maps are this may just be a limiting factor to deal with that fact.

Anyway, it sounds like I just abhor the game at this point but I don't, it just has a huge number of criticisms that need leveled at it right now. It feels very much like a bunch of part of other games crammed into a new game and it lacks an identity of its own, but I do think it can eventually find one. I like that it's a more casual experience in all honesty and I actually like the dog a bit more than the one in AS2, though, I really wish it would stop licking my face and peeing on me while I'm trying to get a bead on a bandit.

I just think that overall it needs more time in the oven, but I suppose that's what Early Access is for.

Of ALL the issues it currently has though I think the biggest problem right now is performance. I don't have a blistering rig but I didn't have any issues with Bonelab or Arizona Sushine 2 or modded up Fallout 4 VR, and yet this one really struggles. I tried reducing the graphics settings but that had no impact on performance at all, I think it's just an issue with the engine currently as movement is very lurchy and uneven, and actually made me a little queasy at times. Strafing is especially jittery and laggy feeling, though, standing still and looking around seems smooth, but that might just be a product of decent reprojection or something.

So, I suppose in conclusion, this is a game that may one day be great, but right now lacks identity and has a lot of technical issues, but considering it's been worked on by only a single person, it's reasonably impressive. But regardless of the development studios size a game still needs to stand on its own merits and currently CONVRGENCE doesn't quite manage it. I'll try and update in the future as it changes though, I really do think there's potential here.

I shot a group of eco terrorists to death with a gun wielding monkey on my head and then I butchered him because he was too lazy.

What a great port!

Locked 60fps max settings on the Steam Deck even.

I do hope we see more older Omega Force games ported in the future, especially WO2.

Actual scam.

Hate to say it but this game seems to be dead. No audience, no updates in almost a year, no comms with the devs, it's seemingly just fully abandoned.

What IS here is a really mixed bag. It's got cool ideas but seems largely co-op focused, but no one is playing so good luck there. The combat is a complete mess with floaty everything, no real hit feedback and just generally jank controls. The upgrade systems are ULTRA grindy, quite tedious and unbelievably wide ranging for very few actual benefits, basically your base has like 400 things you can upgrade, every one of them takes just ages to make progress in and the benefit you get from it is a few percent, at least that's the impression I got.

The game is terribly optimized, I keep trying it but getting 60fps is an abslute pipe dream, on minimum settings it still struggles suggesting it's just that it's super early access, and being that they never update it, that probably won't change.

When they first showed this at I think it was one of the early PS5 events, it was one of my most-wanted games and I was super excited to try it when it hit early access but after years of waiting I have zero faith this is going anywhere and I don't think it's worth buying currently, even at the frequent $5-ish sale price. Maybe in the future they'll actually finish it and I'll try to come back and revisit it but sadly, I doubt they will.

Just like the first game, the devs have failed to stack extremes in testing resulting in all the best builds being nerfed in under two weeks from launch.

Trait cap is crap considering the first game had no trait cap and that was one of the best things about it.

Game is horribly overtuned difficulty-wise with basically everything oneshotting you on higher difficulties, they may as well not be in the game.

Overall this is a massive downgrade from the first game, not even mods can save it currently.

There is fun to be had on one playthrough and those weird people in gimp masks who only enjoy games when they can cry out 'hit me harder daddy' while they fail over and over.

My playtime is misleading, I got it on PC to possibly mod, I have about 100 hours on PS5 and have beaten the game a few times. The lack of any real endgame or builds plus the nerfs have killed any interest I have in it though.

Online only for a largely single player game is pants on head stupid. Get rid of it, makes it basically impossible to properly enjoy on Steam Deck.

Also, STILL needs 60fps update on PS5.

This is a bad game. It was made for people with 10 years experience in the game, as in it launched in that state, and today you need 20.

The game's overarching set of problems are as follows.

1. It is opaque.

This game tells you a lot but also tells you nothing. Almost every aspect of progression is essentially a series of noncommittal shrugs. Is this weapon better? I unno. The number on my skill sheet went up. Yup. But is it better? I unno. I'll go kill some stuff, wait, why am I killing them slower? I unno. So the old weapon was better? Maybe. So what do the sheet numbers actually mean? 🤷‍♂️

2. It is long.

This is often a good thing but this game drags on. And on. And on. And on. That's fine the first time around but if you're doing seasons? Good lord it takes you a full time work week just to get into end game, which is a whole other kettle of fish. Though, even once you get to the end game you're not at the end game. You now have to grind the endgame to get to the endgame, where they put another endgame? I don't know, that's a whole other issue.

3. It's a mess.

This game has been getting new mechanics and gimmicks and features added on a regular basis for just shy of a decade. The result is that there's a million little event things that pop up and you may only see them once a week and not really have any idea what the point of them is. They're spread so thin you can't really engage with them in a meaningful way.

4. It is JAGGED.

This game's difficulty curves give you whiplash. It would probably be less bad if not for the first problem because you could try and figure out what's going wrong but generally, that's not happening. The game has two difficulties after the first about 15 minutes, once you get your first skill. Cakewalk easy is the majority of the experience. We're talking auto-clicker difficulty. Prepare for 40-60 hours of boring pointless gameplay that teaches you nothing and offers zero ounces of engaging content. When it isn't yawn inducing, it's instant death execution style. You were on your knees with a burlap sack over your head and you don't know who killed you or what with, but you're absolutely dead.

5. It's a walking simulator.

So those deaths I mentioned? Well, they tend to happen when you least expect and then you have to walk back to where you were. When you get there there's a 50/50 chance that you're going to die instantly again from something off screen, requiring another 2 minute walk of shame, or whatever killed you is also dead and you never even saw it. This is a big part of the endgame maps too, especially their bosses. You'll run a map that's 40 screen width's long, enter the boss arena and it just covers the entire arena in death field so you die, and now you get to walk across those 40 screens again to come back. Good chance you just won't be able to kill the boss and you'll be wasting the next 10 minutes walking back and cursing.

6. The currency system.

Do I really have to explain? This may be the single worst aspect of the game. Just a big bag of junk in the long run. Sure, they have individual purposes but it turns trade into a mess. You literally need a spreadsheet to understand the value of anything, and even then you might not. You know how f2p games use a secondary currency to abstract you far enough away from your money that you don't understand its value (🤔), they've done that as a game mechanic.

7. The loot system.

The above plays into this as well. This is a game about loot, where more loot drops than in literally any other game, to the point that you need external software to set up loot filters just so you can see through the unwashed masses of trash that drop. It's a loot game about not picking up anything. And because the currency system is a nightmare, some of it might be worth 6 screws and a bit of string, then another might be worth 7 stale french fries and a size 11 left Dr Sholes insole. Good luck finding out! You're going to almost daily have the experience of "oh, that's worth something? I skipped on dozens of those..." Because the game doesn't want you to understand it, it purposely obfuscates and confuses everything.

8. The game doesn't want you to understand it, it purposely obfuscates and confuses everything.

Go talk to that vendor and give them 60 unique rings. Or how about you go give them rare quality items with exactly the same name. Oh hey, you've got 7 potions with 3% quality each, how about you go trade the vendor those all at once. Yeah, they all do stuff, but the game won't tell you. It's a wiki-mandatory game. You cannot play this as a self found, self discovered new player and experience anything approaching success. I think the only reason the game is actually online-only is because they want to make sure you have access to Google while you play.

Beyond that there are a whole mess of issues that just compound on top of each other. I've been trying to get into this game off and on for years. Played it when it first came out, played it a bunch on console when it hit there, both platforms, came back on Steam. I don't know what it is with this game and me but we simply do not mesh. I like knowing why I failed so I can improve, not just guessing at what it might have been. I like my combat experience to make sense, not to melt everything instantly unless I can't hurt it at all, and for enemies to not hurt me at all unless they instantly kill me. It never feels like you have opportunity to actually figure anything out. Further, a lot of the games' base features are what feels like outsourced to various websites with game integration, which the game also doesn't tell you about. Even if you decide to just follow some build on line you spend as much time in the game as you do with some external software tracking the overturned 40 gallon bin of Legos they call a passive tree.

Almost every aspect of this game has been abstracted into 4 layers of complexity that are ALMOST meaningless being that it will have 40 solutions and only 2 are right most of the time, meaning almost everything else is basically a trick. It's just there to stymie you, it doesn't serve a purpose. This is a bad game that a lot of people unconditionally love an unreasonable amount, but I think that's because they've spent enough money on it to have bought a new car.