Recent reviews by Ivnie

"Heavy stutters" or "Stutter bullets" or "People from the Rami Ismail/JW/Terri Vellmann/whatever clique when they have to make an optimized game for once".

Boooooooooring. The dev really tried to invest into the "retro Tomb Raider-like" platformer feel, but has blown some things out of proportions. The locations are unnecessary large. I rarely say that, but the graphics make my eyes bleed, maybe because it's just copypasted textures all over the place with almost zero decorations. It takes a lot of time to traverse the levels, and there're no maps to make the navigation easier (there's a map tab, but I suppose you only receive them when you're about to be done with the game). You just don't have any idea of where to go. The movements are clunky at times, making it very frustrating to play, and the frustration is further reinforced by the checkpoint system returning you to some random solid ground the dev chose to use instead of the last one upon falling into a pit. And if you die from running out of health from falling, you're sent all the way back to the save point. Also, this is the first game where I had to turn the in-game music off, it felt like rubbing a chunk of polymeric foam against glass. Yikes.
If you're looking for a good "precision-based" platformer, better play Haydee.

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A very corny game.

The jokes are the origin of "safe edgy", it's like watching a dog with a muzzle on trying to bite anything: like I said, very corny, mostly revolving around "violence haha" and "poop and piss". I grew out of such humour, sorry. I fail to see how a lot of people find this "subtle".

The gameplay loop is even worse: it's just you walking around a large map which is subdivided into various locations you have to load into every time you go from one to another, and they require a lot of walking to traverse. Somewhere out there there are quest goals all work the same:
1. Reach a certain place
2. Take a quest item
3. Rush to the exit while having gorillions of enemies shooting at you
Flush, repeat. There's not much to do in the overworld besides that, the town is dead, not having any quests or major points of interests.

I'm sorry, but this game is just bad, I don't care about its cult status or that "it's a game of its time". There are old games that aged well, and then there are that didn't, Postal 2 is the latter.

The whole shtick of "what if we made a hack'n'slash game... but with GUNS????" is put into practice so damn poorly to the point when it's better to assume that it's a TPS where you occasionally use melee attacks. There is zero incentive in using melee weapons to "save ammo", in a game where a regular enemy dies from 2-3 shots, does not force you to be stuck in a long melee animation that barely deals any damage if you decide to gun it down and drop ammo like crazy. The upgrades and consumables are also very braindead: "spend X currency to add Y damage to a weapon", "use a consumable that gives you +X damage for Y seconds". Seriously? Am I buying an action game to play cookie clicker? The level design is also very lazy, with a lot of places being copy-pasted and having dead ends with nothing in it, like they don't even have loot or anything like that, it's just the end, now turn back. There are just so many systems in this game that are just put together without any thought of how to make them work. I am seriously in awe with how many people find this enjoyable, because it's the same quality as Borderlands 1 maybe.

SAAAAR PLEASE DO NOT REDEEM AND DO THE NEEDFULL, FIX YOUR INFINITE LOADING SCREENS SAAR PLEASE

This is such a corny ahh game I swear. It doesn't feel jarring unless you're playing the hard mode whose only difference is getting less resources, but you can still get run over by RNG, or be set for the rest of the run by getting an event that effectively skyrockets your resource production. That's it, no actual intervention from the player. OR you can get a bunch of events that have options like "nothing happens" and "you lose power/humans/receive a debuff for the rest of the run". I wish the people who get inspired by rogue-likes like TBoI or EtG where you basically move down a path and get random items without even having an option to choose from several random items, like it was done in normal rogue-likes akin to Nuclear Throne, all the worst.
Basically, the whole gameplay loop can be described as such:
1. Have an event guide pulled in another tab to check stuff
2. Pray
I wouldn't go as hard on a game that is not meant to be a complex rogue-like, but a nerve was struck.

Easy to learn, hard to master! Definitely had fun with this one, as this is seemingly an easy metroidvania game, which, in fact, has some decent platforming mechanics based on movement physics and precise action timing. On top of that, the game always tries something new to surprise you so you could stay on your toes until the end. Highly recommended!

If you were looking for a way to scratch your itch of classic survival horrors, than that's your cure. Not only it has a unique twist which is the first-person combat, but it also has a rich room for exploration, and you also get to play as different characters which have unique abilities that will reflect on your gameplay. Highly recommended!

"...as if it was indeed invincible."
This story was my first encounter with Stanislav Lem's books: I heard about the game and that it was "based on Lem's iconic novel", which I read first before jumping into the game. Now, "based" is a really convenient word for the developers to use, because it does not specify the scale of how true the game is to the source material. And need I need to tell you that my experience was underwhelming, to say the least, since it's a negative review?
If I had to use a rough analogy for a better understanding I'd say that The Invincible game is akin to a human that just died due to natural reasons: good looking, but dead inside.
The gameplay is basically a time filler: the navigation in this game is very poor to say the least, and it's very clunky as the character cannot sprint for longer than 5 seconds before getting all winded. The walking itself stutters every now and then due to the character constantly hitting invisible walls or starting some contextual animation like climbing a 30cm boulder. Now mind you, I'm okay with games that mostly consists of walking if it's presented properly AND if there's something to mix it up with, but all I had was cutscenes and even more unskippable animations. Quoting another review, "it's like reading a book where you have to put a lot of efforts into turning a page".
Speaking of cutscenes, the the story is also something that probably won't get your attention when playing. First of all, it's a prequel (and that's not even a major spoiler as it is revealed in the first 30 minutes of playing the game) that reiterates the most important points of the novel, but in a manner that will rather put you to sleep than make you care about what's going on on the screen. Lem's writing was really engaging, it was something that pushed me towards reading the book until the very end in anticipation. And it baffles me how a product that not only has bare story, but also visual and even some interaction value fails to even as much as maintain the same level of quality, instead providing some dry dialogues.
As for the visuals, that's one of few things I can commend along with the game's soundtrack, although I'd like to deduct some points due to the game performing poorly despite having nothing but empty landscapes you cannot interact with.
I hate to say that I'm disappointed given my respect to the source material, but I also have to admit that those are 2 completely different things we're talking about. Finishing the game was more of a chore than an actually engaging experience. It's one of those stories when you wait for something interesting to finally appear only to see the credits roll all of a sudden. I expected a good game, not Firewatch REDUX.