Recent reviews by frumple

Compared to games from around 2024, its definetly clunky and almost intolerably defective/buggy. Like a supercar from the 80s or 90s, you wonder what people were hyped about! We were more primitive back in the stone ages. Stuff like this was fresh and exciting because everything else before it was worse. Much worse.
Grand Theft Auto III feels stiff and ugly, and it was ball-bouncingly amazing. Not for it's looks but the freedom of having a whole city as a playground.

Even with it's problems and old age, Max Payne can still feel satisfying. The care and attention to detail, and it's own style make taking on the devil's army of gangsters, mooks and bosses a memorable experience.
Yes they failed on many levels. The game is even called MAX PAYNE of all things! But they tried hard and aimed high. And the result is a respectable game.
The sequels never really felt good. Mechanically they were superior but we don't play games for that.


So, problems...


- you need a patch to control frame rates, otherwise Max Payne will run at >3000 FPS. This breaks collision detection and results in getting stuck in corridors and furniture.
Force FPS to 60 or your monitor's refresh (120, 144, 165 are ok). Anything that is way too fast will mess up collision and make the game unplayable.

- the Steam version lacks Max's narration and the level/cutscene music. You can replace the audio files with the restored version.

- the game also fails to load if it cannot detect the correct CPU, and newest CPUs cannot be detected by such an old game.

You need to download and apply these three patches in order to enjoy the game.
Mind you, even in it's day Max Payne was a difficult game to run without problems.
Still, its a disservice that Steam and Rockstar Games sell unplayable garbage when it is in their power to address the issues. Its not like Rockstar lacks funds to quickly patch one of the classics they own.
Cheap and lazy company.


In it's day, it was one of the coolest new games and part of a revolutionary new wave of games. It was at this time games were just becoming cool.
Some of it's tricks are still impressive although visually it is pretty poor. As ugly as the models are, they were an improvement on most other games around that time. To say nothing of early 3D games with their triangles of spiky butt-ugliness.
But Max Payne was noted for stiff models and terrible faces even when it was fresh!
Likewise, the game was heavy on the noire elements. They're pretty good but sometimes feel like Max is blathering on. At least he's not a depressive bore he becomes in later games.

The gameplay made Max Payne a success, and a healthy dose of good humor and style. Difficulty was all over the place but taking on and taking out the bad guys always felt so good.
It's definetly more of an action movie than a tactical game like Deus Ex, but when it comes to combat both games shine.

The story is hackneyed but not bad.
Being told through narrated comic strips allows for breaks from combat, and adds some touches like the fictional Cpt. Baseball Bat Boy comics, or even 4th wall breaking hallucinations where Max dreams he's in a comic version of his life.
Usually Max has his gun do the talking, but will comment on his surroundings or things he notices in game. Like a torn up letter that caught his eye, or a wounded gangster trying to run but can't get far.
Shoot an annoying elevator speaker and Max sarcastically says 'Thank YOU'.
Silly TV shows and hidden easter eggs also break up the violence heavy, too-serious nature of the main story.
Level design is very good overall.

For all it's faults, Max Payne is a game done right. The first chapter may be too long and Lupino's bs is out of place, but most of the game is 'just right'. Gunning down enemies feels cinematic and satisfying, and the story builds up to a climax almost perfectly.
Max is also likeable and most characters are at least memorable.

Some of the characters feel low budget, and the game doesn't feel like a AAA title. Because it wasn't. A lot of the villains seem too young for their roles but it adds more charm, or is easily ignored/forgiven. This wasn't a cookie cutter made game.

Come for the violence, stay for the style, tolerate the ugly. Shoot the stupid. And quicksave often :rolleyes:
Max Payne 1 is always a fun story to play.

I haven't played it in 15 years or so, and i still remember almost every detail. Its like a favorite movie, or favorite drink. It has crap acting, isn't perfect and will definetly give you a headache, but it goes down well. Every time.

One of the best games i have ever played.

Fun game.

The Messenger is an action platformer where you do ninja things like jumping, avoiding traps, throwing shuriken at enemies and exchanging corny quips with boss creatures.
There's also double jumps, secret collectibles, upgrades, a shop, a latch-type rope thing that is almost unique except it isn't, and a few devils that follow you around for a while each time you fail hard at being ninja.

Sometimes pokes fun at itself and the genre a little too much.
Gameplay is good. It would have made an amazing NES game.

It is not too difficult. Difficulty increases slowly, but surely.

Controls are good. Music ranges from fitting to amazing.
Be sure to also nag the Shopkeeper into telling you stories. One or two are special.

If you like this type of game, this one should be in your collection. Even if it sometimes doesn't take itself seriously enough.

Heat Signature is almost a game where you board ships, knock out guards, rescue captives or assassinate targets, and all that.
It's close to being that kind of game. Very close. Here is what sets it apart.

You get to do the abovementioned. From a 2D, top down perspective, you can plan your route and your moves in advance and try to figure out how to reach your objectives. Maybe do it silently, maybe without being seen.

You choose the jobs from your HQ. There you keep stashed guns and tools, a map and the job postings. There are also one off missions that are not pert of your current run.

When you pick a mission, the target ship spawns in the galaxy and you can hop into your one person craft, chase it down then latch onto their airlock. From there you board, you execute, you dissapear.
Sometimes you get caught. And promplty spaced, like garbage.

But that is where Heat Signature veers violently from the expected.

Because you don't die.

Getting spaced is merely an inconvenience. Or one that you can choose to do deliberately, as part of your plan.

In this game, you don't get the plan executed. You execute the plan. And bury it.

Because you get God mode enabled right away at the very beggining.

And all your progress does is shower extra cheats and hacks at you. You play the game by cheating at it as creatively as you can.
You do nothing the normal way. Maybe you try, but once you "get it" you can't play the game the same way anymore.

Not only can you pause at any moment, you're encouraged to do so by the game. It's your most powerful ability. When you stop time, you can examine all enemy units and see their equipment. Failure to properly scan them will result in your most hillarious face expressions when you die.
Because equipment can do so many quirky things, and it can change the equation drastically.

That blind, distracted and otherwise harmless human? He may be, against all expectations wearing armor. Instead of slicing him one-two, you and your plan end up tripping over their impenetrable body, still fully in one piece and presently 0.5s away from either raising the alarm or making your face uglier with a bullet.
It will take you 0.5s just to realize he's not dead...

All tools are game-changers. In your hands they are basically cheats. You use them to break the game and make everything go your way.

You can acquire a very cheap toy that swaps you with another human being. Maybe one that just fired a lethal bullet at you.
It's game over, for sure. For them.

You must remove three guards but they keep watching over each other's back, and one will certainly raise the alarm before you finish all of them?
Well, what a pity you didn't bring along a device that can hack THEM! With that thing you could silence one, then quickly murder the other two leaving the mute for last.

It's no pity at all. Return to your infiltrator vessed, return home to your HQ. Cool as ice, collect your device and return to the target ship. It's not alerted. Still oblivious.
You got to go back to the beginning of the mission and change your loadout o.O
The game just lets you?
It wants you to!

And if you don't have a tool that can crash a guard, get one that makes you invisible (from one direction only, your back is exposed) and cruise past them.
It's ok if one has a key you need to use. When you get across the room, hide and steal his key using another device cheat. It works through walls, no worries.

An enemy has armor and you have no armor piercing weapons, and none can be acquired?
The longer you play this game, the longer your list of ways to deal with the problem. You'll just come up with so many ideas you'll be spoiled for choice.

The man is wearing God-armor you cannot dent. And he is easy...

That's why an actually dangerous enemy in Heat Signature wears not armor but a scanner, a teleporter and a insta-kill melee weapon. Walk into their scanner radius and you die immediately.

Well, that's the idea anyway. Their idea. You will have come up with a few of your own.

Just play. :evil grin:
There's no game like it.


Just remember. You don't have to be good. So don't git gud. Git cheats.
You're allowed to fail missions with no penalty.

Pay attention to your targets and objective. Try to stay alive.
Everything else is someone else's problem.

There are three type of city builders:

1. Simcity, Cities Skylines
2. Pharaoh, Emperor, Caesar & Zeus, Anno series, Nebuchadnezzar
3. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Stardeus, Songs of Syx

The third is more about colony management and usually survival. Heavy emphasis on characters! The people matter and the details of what happens to them are quite deep.

The other two are more about the city itself. The first group focuses on zoning and the big picture.
It's games like Pharaoh and Anno that focus on logistics, road networks, supplies and manufacturing, and "teching up" or unlocking new stuff to build through research or housing levels.

Proximity, location, road access, terrain features. Those are all hugely important in these types of city builder.
In Cities Skylines, you paint the city into existance with a brush. Roads and connections do matter but they're not the main focus.

If you don't know this game type (you have never played an Anno game), then you might not understand what you're in for. Also, you should play Anno 1503 at least, possibly Anno 2070 as well. Mind the stupid Ubisoft launcher, it's total garbage.


I won't bore you with a review, not this time.
If you know what this game is then all you need to know is:

- It's every bit as good as an Anno or Pharaoh/Emperor game, with slightly different supply chains. Some easier, some harder.
- It's unfinished. Early Access and all. The campaign doesn't exist. Yet. There's 6-7 mountains to play
- The annoying road network from Pharaoh is finally put to rest.
- ...sometimes this new system, though it doesn't rely on walkers, is more annoying. Certainly it's evil.


EDIT - I'd like to add a little bit to the review.

Laysara is a challenging game. Scenarios do have goals you can follow that make it a little bit easier, but do not expect to immediately build the cities the right way. There is a lot to learn, and there are limitations that make it harder to maximize population areas. At least in the beginning.

Not all areas of the mountain have the same fertility, and this will affect the production of food and goods.
Furthermore, some special features like ore deposits or rivers will only be available in one zone.
If you want to build a basic housing area you may have to choose between lower, more lush area that is larger and has better food production, OR you may choose to build it higher up, where you have access to a river. Rivers mean baths and fish.
Or you can build two "cities", in two places.

Lastly, the game runs a bit slow on integrated graphics. It's beautiful and fast on a RTX 4060, but it will chugg very badly on Intel UHD 730, even if you reduce resolution and visual quality.
Maybe performance improves as development progresses.


Now, go play.
Games like this are few and far between and much to my surprise Laysara is both very good and challenging!

Yes

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If there is one bad thing about it, it's that at the beginning, it's really overwhelming. There is so much stuff to absorb.
But, give it a little time and you'll start to feel how all the different parts of gameplay come together.

Crafting, travelling, trading, doing quests, disturbing tanks, burying undead, overloading your poor truck, losing your mind over stress.
Get happy drunk in a safe city, get fixin' flats in a red zone. Then bluff a mobster, pet a dog and get robbed by an ol' lady.
All in a days work.

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I have rarely come across a game that so seamlessly hooks together so many different gameplay elements.
You could cut Dustland Delivery into two, and you'd get two ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥' games.

There's a lot of clicking in the beginning, and there's too many skills and items to figure out. Hit the road though, and try to keep your crew sane and happy. Events might hurt you, but they're not usually fatal. FTL this is not.
Unless you tempt faith (and you will, because you can honk the damn horn in a dangerous area, and it will attract... attention), you will usually be able to continue your story.

The story is your own exploration and trading, but there's several major quests going on as well as some minor ones.

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Still on the fence? The most powerful melee weapon is a lawn mower. If you know, you know.

Damn this game gets a huge recommendation!

It manages to be both overwhelmingly complex for beginners and at the same time too simplistic for a management game.

I like the budget constrains. It's a good idea and it prevents players accidentaly running out of money as well as intentionally playing too loose with finances. Many other management games would let players lock themselves into a debt spiral.

The negotiation mechanic is also interesting although probably too slow and unrealistic. In general the idea of departments generating points that can then be spent on improvements is a good idea.
Unfortunately, this happens passively and there is already too little to do in the game.

So much effort went into creating these generic racetracks, not only as a 2d plan but also full 3d models, with cars racing on them.
It's a huge waste of time to PLAY. Why do it? Why spend effort making it?
It looks good, but plays totally meh and it's skippable.

And it's a double shame because there are some tactics and choices that can be made during races. Very few though. Where is the radio button? Why is there zero communications between team and drivers? Why is it still so hard to get drivers to let their teammate by, without wasting so much time?
Pitstops can be changed and strategy rearranged on the fly, but there's so much more that goes on during a race that doesn't exist at all in this game.

The designers mimicked the real camera coverage so well, they made a dozen new race courses that feel even more boring than the real ones did.
Who is nostalgic for BORING 96 era Formula One?

The game could be good, and development continues. As it is right now, i do not like playing it at all.

Please, give me more to do. It doesn't have to be realistic or perfect. It's a management game, and i would like to feel like i am doing something. That i am guiding a team towards a target or goals.
If the game is going to be just clicking a few buttons, setting a slider or two, and having autocalc generate results (like quali or setup improvements), then ya'll needn't have bothered making such a huge game around such paltry gameplay.

OWM takes up 11Gb of boredom. Despite some absolutely genuine effort.

It's lacking in gameplay! Put more into it. Give me something to do.
If possible, also give characters some personality. They are dead generic. Just numbers and a picture. Make them mean something.

Parts of team management work out really well. Others are very basic. Again, i have nothing to do. And far too much is devoid of life and personality.
Sponsors are interchangeable and generic. The effort required to get them helps them stand out a little bit.

One final complaint. The commentator. He is super annoying. Makes me believe the people who make the game, don't actually play it.
That assault on eardrums would never be allowed in the game otherwise.

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Dulls the imagination, leaves the strategy and planning itch itching, offers nothing to play with, and then puts you to sleep with the most boring "racing" ever. All in sterile, featureless world.
Colorless, odorless, tasteless.
Pointless.

No, i don't recommend it.

It's not BAD however. I have played BAD F1/racing management games. Those are all total trash, and this is almost a good game. Maybe it gets the touches it needs. But since it's the second game in the series, i doubt it will happen.

It's not awful but it is bland and generic. It's impossible to recommend this game.

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Why not?

It promises to be FTL in 3d. With a 3d ship interior and 3d model crew moving from station to station. It looks fun but it isn't. It's much less than "FTL in 3d".

What it is is FTL's core game mechanics but without all the nice touches that elevated the experience of playing and suffering in FTL. The part that is fun is the weapons and combat/targeting, upgrading ship systems, traveling from point to point etc. The new 3d gimmick plays much worse unfortunately, and other additions are few and of mixed quality.

I don't mind FTL-like games existing. Doom-likes and rougelikes, or metroidvanias. I sometimes want more of the same. But this is considerably less of the same.
How?
Towards the end of development, subset games hired a professional writer to go over event text and dialogues, and it shows. Even though the story and writing is simple, it is GOOD!. In Zero Point, everything you read is boring and mundane. FTL mods put more effort into writing.

Then there's the music. It's not bad but it's generic. It does nothing.
FTL paid attention to color-blindness, Zero Point makes zero effort to do something similar.
And it's FTL hard.
But you just die and get dumped to the main menu. There are highscores but they are pointless. Just start a new game with some nobodies without any character or charm, die again and keep repeating until it's no longer fun.

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The biggest flaw of Zero Point is that it exists. Somebody had to make this. It's a shame they did an ok job technically but failed to put anything FUN into the game.
The design document must have been simple, as it basically copied the elements from FTL. Nothing wrong with that. Then a game was built according to spec, and... that was it. No effort anywere. nothing stands out. No clever writing, no fun hook.

There are a couple of innovations:
- the 3d ships and some bizzare time dilation mechanic that replaces pausable realtime of the game that inspired Zero Point.
- replacing the warp gate battle with an intercept chance. The exit is always unguarded but every node you visit raises this chance by 1-2%. If you get intercepted, you have to fight a very tough battle but if you win you reset the intercept chance.
- characters are voiced. I wish they weren't. They say a few lines and it quickly gets dull.

If you want to play some FTL like combat in a 3d setting then you wont waste much money. But it is the time wasted playing this that is the problem. Life is short and there are so many good games. This does not deserve more than a couple of hours, if that.

It might be fun on a tablet or portable device. It feels designed for such devices and it doesn't look so good on a desktop.

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I have a few nice things to say about it, but bottom line is it's bad. Not worth playing.

If you've never played FTL, play that. It's superior.
If you have played FTL, just play FTL.

If you rage easily, you'll rage effortlessly playing this!
It's fun, very hard, the music is great. I'm not even massively into chip music but i liked the soundtrack a lot.


It is HELLISHLY difficult. The first level is way too hard. After that it gets a little bit easier and you will likely have a decent weapon for times of trouble.

The biggest danger isn't even your enemies, it's YOU. Fiddling with a new weapon you haven't used before, or comparing stats or anything that takes your attention away for more than one sec.
Focus on defense and staying alive!

2nd biggest danger is getting boxed in by the environment/level layout...
I'm being serious. Like Nuclear Throne, if the level is randomly laid out against you, you're screwed the moment you set foot in it.

Sometimes RNG comes to your aid. Maybe it drops a "carry" weapon. Maybe even one you have ammo for.
I think some people will hate how much a difference random weapons can make. I get that, but on average the game drops more weapons than you can use, every run. You just have to live past level 1...

And it's not even that hard! You die in TWO~! hits.
You always die so easily.
Even late in the run all it takes is a couple of punches or a few unlucky bullets, and gg. Start again.

Whatever "casual" difficulty means, it isn't enough for casual players from what i've read in comments and reviews.
So be prepared to die, many, many times. You'll die within 10s of playing level 1
Or don't bother trying this game, there are easier ones.


Recommended for the fun, aesthetic, music, and music again.

I'd like to scavenge but radiation says i mustn't.

Exploration is ok. Ship systems and interaction is excellent. Wonderful game, it would be.
But radiation says it isn't.

I guess i could just ignore points because who cares about points. The pressure to hurry, hurry, hurry in an immersive gem with a thick athmosphere... it's just unwelcome. I am dissapointed to say Scavenger SV-4 isn't the game i hoped it would be.
It's close to being great. But it isn't.
I like playing it, but then it stops me.

As good as interacting with the ship and lander is, there's nothing epic at all. There is much to explore.
But the player is forced to hurry past the game itself! Is it because the game is poor? Yes part of the reason, no doubt.
If the player was allowed the time to lazily bum around their (cool) ship maybe they would notice a lot of gameplay is missing. But ... why? The ship is cool, the systems are cool, the lander and cargo and research and all that is cool. Why cut my time enjoying it?
Maybe it was supposed to add excitement or motivation? Maybe it even works for some people?

If you like to take your time, this game isn't like that at all.
I can't not recommend it. I love what it could have been. Unfortunately 4000 rads says otherwise.

Imagine being sold a sandwich with really special sauce. Then you discover there's hardly anything in the sandwich at all. And the bread is not tasty.

This game is like that. It should have been a great sandwich, but it isn't.
The sauce is very special though.


Try it. It's a fun little thing. Maybe you will like it a lot more than i did. The good is really excellent. And it did tickle something rarely tickled in gaming.
As bad as the game is, you're not going to be wasting your time. Odd thing to say but this is an odd game.

Unfortunately i have long since become radiactive dust, so reading this review is probably exceeding safe measures.
Get scanned.

:whiteskull: