Recent reviews by J Bird

Never played this game as a kid but I do have a ton of nostalgia for that era of mediocre 3D platformers so I thought I would enjoy this, but it genuinely is soul draining. Some of the most uninspired (and janky) levels I've ever played, and the platforming isn't solid enough to make up for them. And on the pc port, there's this weird bug where the camera endlessly spins? It is frustrating and no fix online helped it. Definitely the LEAST broken of the Oddworld pc ports, but still broken enough to be annoying. Though I will say, of the sections I've played, Munch is FAR more enjoyable than Abe. This game really would have benefited from being a dedicated Munch adventure instead of this. Not horrible, but easily my least favorite of the Oddworld series.

If you have a 3060 and are struggling to run it, do these steps:
1. Find stranger.exe by going to your installation and opening the bin folder
2. Right click and go to properties
3. Click the compatibility tab
4. Turn on compatibility mode for vista service pack 2, disable fullscreen optimizations, and run this program as administrator
5. Click "Change high DPI settings" and enable high DPI scaling override for application
6. Turn off SSAA in the game launcher settings
7. Cap framerate to 100 or less in advanced settings
8. Turn off steam overlay and game recording
I'm not sure why but one or more of these settings caused my game to go from 5 fps to a clean 100 fps. Way too much effort to make a game work, but every Oddworld game I've played so far has been this way.

Never played Motherload (or even heard of it before reading some of the reviews here) but I can confidently say that this game does NOT rely on nostalgia to be fun, it is just genuinely a great experience that I really didn't expect to enjoy as much as I have. I did encounter a bug where I got stuck in a wall and was forced to load my save, but that's the only negative thing I can think of. Definitely worth the buy.

Now that I've 100% Bugsnax on both PS5 and PC, I think I can say without a doubt that it's one of my all time favorite games. I know it has gotten more popular after getting ports to all platforms, but I still feel as if it's criminally slept on. Genuinely amazing game and I hope it gets a sequel someday.

Very fun time, reallyyy hurts my hand and sanity (and I'll probably never finish it). If you have more patience than me and you enjoy movement/speedrun games with a high skill ceiling, then this might be the perfect game for you.

It's definitely the best non-fromsoft soulslike I've played, but still could do with some major improvements. Reusing the same enemies and minibosses so much is the most egregious crime because you can fight the most annoying miniboss of all time only for him to show up maybe 5 times in the next area. Why? I'm not gonna fight all of them and I can't imagine most people will so it's just a very strange design choice to me. All the umbral stuff is pretty cool and unique but not a single enemy in it is fun to fight so it ended up becoming an annoyance by the end of the game. I'd still give it a 7.5/10 though, a sequel with a bigger budget to fix these issues might be the perfect game for me.

I was under the assumption that most of the hate for this game was for the unnecessary live service integration, but it turns out that it's just extraordinarily boring and janky. I'm not the biggest Arkham fan but even I can see that they're superior games in every possible way.

Expected this to be a janky meme game but the hand-to-hand combat is actually great. Not that much content is available right now, but I do hope this game continues to expand.

Great game, but the price hike does feel a bit scummy seeing as how it still feels like the same unfinished game at the current 1.0 release. If it goes on sale to the previous asking point of 25$ or lower, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.

Not only is this my personal game of the year, it has also very quickly become one of my favorite games of all time. Underrated and beautifully crafted. I regret not playing it sooner despite knowing of its existence well before launch.