Recent reviews by krev

Marathon is like the missing sasquatch link between Doom, System Shock, and Star Trek, and is a dastardly yet impressive creature of the early 90s with a campaign spanning 27 missions across six chapters.

Alien Slavers stalk dimly-lit corridors as you stride through the Marathon, contending with everything from hapless civilian crew to renegade defense drones as you work with - and perhaps against - the ship's decaying AI stewards. Blinking seamlessly from one level to the next as they teleport you onward, your only means of saving or healing are by finding Pattern Buffers and Shield Recharge Stations, and they are luxuries you won't always have.

Expect secrets, ruthless labyrinthine levels, and eventual mechanical mastery to finish the game for even the game's credits are hidden in a secret. Bungie's bastardry was so youthful, fresh, and vigorous that even the mechanics needed to progress are a secret - grenade climbing, toast-gliding, and more as things that only 'real' players may have stumbled into.

As Durandal puts it, "I give no hints. Do it on your own, or die trying."

tl;dr ghost in the shell deus ex set in hl2 beta land, play the demo & you'll know if you'll like it

Crude, clunky, filthy - handmade cyberjank in the most endearing sense I can muster.

Trains don't quite follow their rails, trams and boats will clip through stuff, and the pipes don't quite fit together, to say nothing of the abstract models or textures. In most other games this sort of thing would be sloppy, yet it's actually quite fitting for a lo-fi post-nuclear Poland. The further you go east, the deeper you head into the wastes, and the more interesting it gets.

Sentient helicopters, nuclear meltdowns, commie insurgents, and joycultist terrorism: Peripeteia has so much to offer, and it's an early access gem if you don't mind it being rough. The Demo is a fantastic slice of the wider game and it is the bar by which you'll love or hate it. Every level has multiple paths, different little endings, and it's easy to miss half or more of what it had to offer - hence how just five maps has pulled over thirty hours from me in the last couple of weeks, even if it chugs in that way indie unity releases tend to do.

Initially the game came up on my radar back in maybe 2020 or 2021 by way of their taste in music, but I hadn't been able to really give it a whirl until now - and while it's been a long road and with more of a ways to go, it's refreshing to have a cyberpunk game as far from the corpo-punk vibrancy of 2077 as possible. Something like a post-apocalyptic Ghost in the Shell set in the land of the HL2 beta, where commie insurgents will cremate you just to harvest your augments faster.

Dirty, simple, handmade - I'm waiting for more.

Beneath the blood and guts, Beyond Citadel is an apt name for an expansion upon the original's unique style. Boasting more weapons, new abilities, and over three dozen enemy types across over fifty levels, the world of Citadel has much to offer provided you can successfully acclimate to (or reconfigure) the game.

Your first gun, for example, is a .50 cal lever-action cavalry carbine which may be the perfect introductory weapon since it feeds the first new detail to the player, provided they allow it - manually cycling the action. In BC, you can rack the charging handle of every weapon manually, be it to chamber a new round, clear jams, or even simply eject cartridges to empty the weapon. It's neat to pick up the live rounds again and put them back in the pool and a neat way to add flavor to something that you normally autopilot through.

Bolt actions, pump shotguns, lever actions, and reload animations are practically mandated pauses in shooting where you wait for an animation to finish, but if you allow it, Beyond Citadel puts them into your hands. Instead of hitting R and sprinting around an arena while the animation plays, suddenly it's on you to actually load the gun. Suddenly it's on you to remember how to unjam the weapon, or to chamber the next round, or to be mindful about your spare mags. It's optional, but it's got a way of connecting you to your guns.

It's also got a way of encouraging you to use more weapons. Rush through your reloads, waste your spare mags, never retrieve them, and suddenly you have more ammo than you have mags. Eventually you might have to remove a magazine, wait for it to refill, and then reload the gun - and you might not have time to wait. That, or you'll have used that gun so heavily non-stop, never repairing it, and it'll just flat-out break, exploding in your hands.

Granular weapon handling is a peculiar thing to have in a game like Citadel, yet strange as it was, I felt like it worked really well and find it hard to picture the game without it. Detailed gun mechanics are consistent with the detailed art and gore of Citadel, which need no reintroduction. It's unique, yet natural, and even in a sense as it applies to retro gaming which, in their own ways, often had some strange level of granularity or depth to them.

It's like the antithesis of a mainstream game, the sort that look ever-more realistic yet are ever-simpler in game design - Citadel is comparatively crude looking, yet impressive in it's niche detail.

I could go on and on about the worldbuilding and story, talk about translation errors, get into the pacing and the ways in which the game feels streamlined (in a good way), but overall Beyond Citadel is a strong recommendation in my eyes much like the first, and I can't help but want more.

If you wanna fork over four bucks for a skin, that's your choice. Would've been neat to see a more classic Dougram-ish Shadow Hawk as a homage to the real classic design.

The mech itself will probably get phased out of your drops if you don't retrofit it into a specialized custom, especially in the late game.

Creative, kinetic, vibrant, it's a semi-breakcore time-trial obstacle course more than a shooter.

Easy to learn, tantalizing to master, the story is tropey setdressing for what might also be called a puzzle platformer, if by that I mean that there are levels where you have to snipe laser demons with rocket launchers that you then spend as grapple-hooks to swing to the next weapon pickup.

I haven't played in a couple of years, but it's good stuff that can prove addictive if you give it a chance.

It's like a miniature 2D SupCom type deal, easy to get into for people new to RTS but with fun to be had - especially since it seems like modding is pretty easy, lots of .png image editing as opposed to potentially complicated 3D models.

The mods can get pretty interesting, too, with things amounting to total conversions - I'd recommend taking a look at the MechWarrior: Wargames mod, for example.

you need only compare how small the workshop here is compared to that of xcom 2 to see how this game may have fallen down a flight of stairs

i played xcom 2 from release practically nonstop for weeks on end and by the end of a month had dumped about a month's worth of hours into the game - i burned out a motherboard with all the mods i put into xcom 2

having invested two and a half hours now, i can say that i think i'm done with this zoomer swat xcom spinoff; the bones of the tactical layer are reused, but it feels like the meat has been scraped out and replaced with some kind of vegan alternative that so far has made a really lackluster if not bad first impression

xcom 2 put a ton of emphasis on character customization and stacked a lot on the attachment you'd build with incredibly personalized soldiers whose stories developed organically and on the back of your decisions; chimera squad gutted that and you have preset characters whose shirts you can recolor, and that's kind of it far as i can tell

Some people say Armored Core 6 is hard;
Others say Armored Core 6 is easy.

The reality is that it's the most forgiving and accessible Armored Core yet made - though that does not mean it's an easy game, just that failure lacks the consequences that used to come with it. As such, failure can come quite often, and oppressively so - constantly, even. Armored Core overall is arguably about failure.

Not, however, about the misery of failure. Failure is the great teacher.

Failure is an opportunity to grow, change, adapt, and ultimately persevere - and I'd say that it's finding your way through it that makes Armored Core fun. In failure, learning, and in learning, mastery.

Fires of Rubicon will reward you if you stick around and achieve that mastery, no matter how you put yourself on that path. Allow yourself to learn and you will find a rhythm, find a flow, find a method - you will learn to listen for cues and recognize patterns, openings, opportunities, and the best way you can get the job done.

It's been said by certain figures that the essence of a good Mecha work is that a pilot has built their machine, and your Armored Core experience - the mech and game alike - are literally what you make of it. Learn your parts, how they work, where they work best and what they work with - build your machine, learn your machine, and put it to the test.

Find your solution, find your approach, find your way through it. Fail, and try, try, try again.

It's failure that will teach you about how your Core works, and failure that will teach you how the game works. If failure makes you angry - if failure frustrates you? Armored Core may not be for you. But if you're okay with losing - sometimes losing a lot, very often, and very badly - then maybe it is.

To enjoy Armored Core 6, you need to be willing to put up with failure and to climb the proverbial wall.

So, buddy - are you ready to climb the wall?

cyberpunk is a lot like the city you play in; it really is as buggy, flawed, crash-prone, and unreliable as it's made out to be, but if you can push through it there's a lot it has to offer

just don't pay full price for it, and expect something more like a diseased ghetto californian deus ex, instead of some cyborg GTA new vegas anime

In Bomber Crew, I had to fight off fighter wings while sending crew to crawl on the wings and fix the engines, and I watched as they'd sometimes get knocked off or jostled while maneuvering during repairs. I scrambled crew around to fix people up or put out fires or return fire when the enemy got good hits in or planted themselves on our tail, and every fighter that scored a hit tore a hole in the skin of the plane. Once they tore off the entire tail of the plane, and more than once they've shot away my landing gear or blown off my engines. I've limped back to base and stopped on the runway, watched my wings fall off, and called it mission complete.

For as cartoony a game as Bomber Crew was, I feel like it showed the scars of your battles a lot better and felt a lot more grounded and a lot more interesting whereas I come out of a fight in Space Crew, check my ship during a jump, and am met with dull surprise that there's a fire in my cargo bay that I hadn't noticed. I look at the scorched metal decal, and I think, 'man, this isn't as good as Bomber Crew'.

I had fun with Bomber Cew and thought that Space Crew would bring something new to the table, but it's barely been an hour and I just feel bored. It feels like they didn't really expand on the concept or the strengths laid out in Bomber Crew and just adapted it to a generic sci-fi soup with the blandest and most basic ship design possible.

Your turrets are soda cans wearing hinged boomboxes for hats, and those boxes sprout gun barrels. I'm not sure I can think of a turret design more boring, and slapping one of those on per side of the flying rectangle you get as a spaceship - that's really it, I think. It's boring. Boring designs, generic sci-fi, and all in service of a rehash of Bomber Crew.

Bomber Crew made me want to get into historical fiction and documentaries on bomber crews. Space Crew just disappoints me.