Recent reviews by Sticky Viking

Initiall impressions:
Beatiful graphics, excellent voice acting and motion capture, the music is on point and the turn based combat with QTEs realy works. Will update the review when I am finished, but after the first couple of hours, this seems like a banger.

Also, I stumbled into an optional boss who dropped an outfit, now I look like a french mime with a baguette strapped to my back. Baguettes/10, GOTY material right there.

Side-note: I had some graphical issues, mainly flickering edges, which was solved by turning of all post-processing effects, and then setting the general option for post-processing to low.

I have to admit I didn't get this game. It is weird, yes, but I never felt like it used that weirdness to go anywhere with either it's story, gameplay or characters. Combined with what is essentially a walking simualator with some light puzzles, this felt like a chore to play through.

I will also have to add that I had a gamebreaking bug in one of the platforming sessions where Indika just kept falling through the platform, which was fixed by restarting my computer AND reverting to an earlier save.

SteamWorld Heist 2 was a bit of a mixed bag for me, as it shares what I consider to be the main weakness of it's predecessor; the difficulty scaling is complete nonsense.

At the start of the game you feel like you can comfortably manage most missions, and as you unlock more characters and level them up you will need to experiment with your classes and builds to get through most of the missions flawlessely, which is what I consider good game design, and was a lot of fun.
But at some point the game just starts throwing more and more enemies, hazards and time limits in your face until it gets to the point where anything but the classes that can move fast and precisely take out enemies in one shot almost gets redundant.

One of the missions that had me give up for a couple of days has infinite reinforcements, extra enemies hidden in ice blocks that gets released if the ice blocks are destroyed, and a bunch of enemies spawning totems that summons even more enemies. AoE weapons are out the window because of the aforementioned ice blocks being placed on every second tile, snipers will just get swarmed by enemies, and if you try to rush through with faster characters, the enemies who create totems can also create ligthning totmes which damage you anywhere on the map, meaning you can't just rush through, you have to deal with those. A lot of those missions felt more like it was up to random chance (what totems the enemies used), than something I could control.

I generally enjoy the challenge of having to try different builds and tactics to get through a game, but at some point I was just frustrated and tired of it, so I turned down the difficulty to easy and rushed through the last quarter of the game.

I did however really enjoy my time with it up until the point where it got frustrating, so if you can live with the stupid difficulty curve, I can recommend this.

There is a fine line between minimalistic and lazy, and this is definitely on the lazy side.

The whole gameplay loop consists of digging for ores, and returning to your garage to sell those resources so you can buy upgrades which allows you to dig faster, have a bigger inventory and use your equipment longer. These upgrades are linear, and you run out of upgrades to buy long before you reach the end of the game. A tier or two more of upgrades or some more creative upgrades other than "increase X number" would have been nice to keep the game from going stale in the end. Yes, this is a 60-100 minutes long game that gets stale.

Just buy a cup of coffee instead, the effects of caffeine will keep you happy for longer.

Disclamer: this was my first time playing MGS3, so no rose tinted glasses here. And oh man, what is there not to love?

A homage to spy thriller movies that goes above and beyond it's inspirations, combined with gameplay that let's you intuitively experiment and find solutions to a wide list of different scenarios.

The amount of times I thought to myself "wait, I can do that?" is beyond count, to the point that it makes me sad that a game from 2004 offers so many possibilites in it's gameplay and letting you think for yourself, while most modern games outside of the indie space are so affraid of you not understanding absolutely everything in the first few seconds. The amount of details that went into how the NPCs and world reacts to your actions are just astounding.

I bow down to Kojima and his team. I skipped playing Death Stranding in favour of watching a five hour recap of it, but I'll be there for day one for Death Stranding 2 if even half of the creative design and attention to detail has endured in their future productions.

This is one of the games where i wish Steam had a neutral option.

In one hand, NieR puts you into a quite unique setting with the mystery of why this world is like it is looming over you. It also has a pretty decent action gameplay, with some really exciting boss fights and all around excellent voice acting.

On the other hand, the pacing of the story is horrendous, with it being overly front- and backloaded, making the middle sections of the game a big slog to get through. It is overly saturated with "go there, kill and/or fetch me that" kind of quests without any narrative or gameplay signifance to them. This was fine for a while, but once you reach act 2 and you don't get any new additions to your spell and attack roster, I quickly felt bored when I wasn't doing the boss fights. You can skip a lot of the boring side-quests, but you will have to do a good portion of them in order to get enough gold to buy all the weapons which is required for ending C and D.

Speaking of the ending, one thing that might be a big hit or miss for a lot of people is going to be that you have to complete the second act of the game five times (four if you do some save scumming) to see all the endings and get the broader picture of what is going on. Combined with the aforementioned stagnation of the gameplay and the uninspired side quests, it quickly gets quite tedious to do so. I still did it though, because I liked the world and the characters.

If you think the game and setting seems interesting, give it a shot. I you don't vibe with it after getting through the first act, just don't bother completing the rest.

Fun and vibrant design, but a bit too casual in it's gameplay. Even on higher difficulties I felt like I steamrolled through the entire thing. Amazing as a podcast game, but I would recommend something like Element TD2 or Gemcraft over this if you want more depth and variety.

Initially a very charming game with a beautiful presentation, which is quickly bogged down by it's tedious gameplay mechanics and lackluster exploration.

Once you get over the novelty of having a pinball metroidvaina, and realise how much that concept is to the games own detriment, all the fun is sucked out. Moving around is a slog, and in a genre based around exploration, that is a death sentence.

You can certainly tell that a lot of love and effort has gone into this game, but ultimately it is simply not fun to play, and is one of the few games I have put down before I finnished it this year.

I can see what made the original Metal Gears great when they came out, but they are waaay to old school for me to recommend them for a modern audience. Unless you are retro enthusiast, you are better off just watching a let's play if you are curious of where the series started.

Fun and quite in depth, very much so compared to it's predecessor and the original Game Dev Tycoon by Greenheart games.

The early game feels like a scramble to research, experiment and expand, but by the early 2000's I had mostly become too big to fail, and the game turned into a wait for the next technology while I just crammed out whatever games I felt like, making the latter half of the game more of a slog to get through.

I would really like to see the 2010's and outwards fleshed out with more tech and some more events, and perhaps a rework to how game scores work so that you can't just get the formula right once and then just produce bangers as long as you keep up with the tech level.

I did however enjoy my time with MGT2, and hope the studio puts out more games in the future.