Recent reviews by moxi!

VERY IMPORTANT EDIT: As of 4/25/25 there was an update that pushed a complete overhaul of the game's visuals. This overhaul is optional, with the option provided as soon as you start up the game. I genuinely couldn't be happier to say that this update completely resolves a lot of the complaints I had regarding the visuals. Massive kudos to the dev for giving a very tactful and well-executed solution for those of us who struggled with this aspect of the game! It's incredibly cool how the 'realistic' darker palette was implemented while preserving some of the eccentric flair of the OG schemes (Man, the gold iframe flash on the player model pops SO well in contrast to the environment). Absolutely excellent update and a big step in the right direction.

I'll be doing continued edits and a larger rewrite of this review after I've put more time in to feel everything out again with the overhaul. While I believe that the rest of what I wrote still stands, this update is proof that the developer can process feedback and work it into some great changes. I really believe that the rest of the game can be evened out and brought to the high points that the player combat and visuals sit at (If we keep making our voices heard!). I'll leave the full original review preserved below for the time being, but please consider this edit stub as an earnest recommendation. Even if the game isn't perfect now, it'll only keep getting better as time goes on. My respect has been earned and I'm looking forward to future updates.


END OF EDIT, ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW:


Came back to the game after a bit over a year and it's pretty wild to me how so much changed yet feels exactly the same.. This is unfortunately both a good and a bad thing. After having given Mortal Sin more time in the oven, I don't think I can comfortably recommend it if things continue in the direction they seem to be going.

Combat mechanics on the player's side are easily the best part of the experience. You are REALLY fast and it's very fun to dance around rooms disassembling enemies. Parrying is super weighty and satisfying and bounces off the combo system very well. Being able to play both defense and offense fluidly as needed is very challenging yet rewarding. Bash hitboxes feel pretty awful and it's very easy to miss contact with some smaller enemies and slide across the room, which always feels jarring and can often lead to you flying into map hazards. The block stamina system is horribly unforgiving and makes blocking as a mechanic effectively nonexistent. In most cases the ultimatum is to parry or to die.

If you're paying attention, you'll notice that half of that paragraph was pretty harsh despite me saying these mechanics are the best part of the game. This should probably help measure expectations for how the rest of the game feels to play.

The visual design of the game is an absolute headache, with the most obvious offender being the overall color scheme the game has opted for. Fortunately for us there are some decently robust options for adjusting things to be more comfortable for viewing. There's not a lot you can do to make the game any less ugly and nothing to do about every enemy being a vaguely humanoid blob of monotone color. Map assets range from bland to invasively ugly and there somehow isn't a single positive standout across the entire game. Enemy design is equally bland; Nearly everything you encounter is either a generic undead guy or a generic demon. The shark guys would be kinda neat but they contribute to another problem I'll bring up later.

The gear system is hilariously flawed in so many ways. Every item you pick up has an item level, a set of random stats, and often comes with a special skill. These skills are not actual manually activated skills and are instead either special properties granted to your generic moveset or passive effects that happen when they want to. Whenever a skill is activated the item's durability is drained a certain amount. Because the game's combat system forces you to cycle through most of your moveset in order to make combos and hit cancelling work, this results in situations where some pieces of gears get completely destroyed during every single combat encounter from repeated activations that you can't avoid. What's even more dumb is that the text telling you that this durability drain even happens to begin with was REMOVED from gear descriptions in an update, meaning as a new player you'll probably see that some pieces of gear consistently get exploded every encounter and have no idea why.

In theory all of this stuff makes sense; If you're constantly activating an item's effect, you'll get durability drain equal to the value you're getting from using the item. So what's the issue?

The problem is with the last part of that statement, about drain being equal to the value you're getting. With passive item skills this concept is totally fine, as they'll only activate under their respective conditions as you'd expect. On the other hand, active skills tied to your base abilities will ALWAYS be considered 'active' whenever you perform the action, regardless of whether you actually get any value from the skill being used or not. A great example of this is the 'quick step' skill that spawns on boots. The main component of this skill essentially gives your bash uses invulnerability during travel, but that also means the skill activates and drains durability EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU BASH. The drain is a set amount per bash and has nothing to do with how long the invulnerability lasts or if any damage is avoided using the skill, meaning if you're using the bash for offense (Reminder that bash is mandatory for combos, thus you WILL be using it offensively very very often) you end up wasting a ton of durability on nothing.

Enemy combat mechanics are confusingly awful and seem to have only gotten worse since I last played. Attacks are pretty fast and really poorly telegraphed, so if you don't learn to predict the AI and parry everything you'll definitely suffer for it. There are UI elements that try to help enemy readability, but every single indicator is just a yellow-black circle in the middle of your screen. The indicator flashes at the start of an enemy's attack for a set amount of time, regardless of how fast or slow the attack is. You can't just go for parry attempts on reaction to the indicator because of this; If you try to parry and the attack happens to be a slow one you get exploded at no fault of your own. Many attacks are already borderline unreactable even with the indicator, so being forced to check for slow heavy attacks just isn't a reasonable ask.

This is where the thing I hinted at with the shark guys comes into play. Ranged enemies share the EXACT same attack indicator that melee ones do, and because of projectile travel time the timing with which you need to try to parry/avoid their attacks varies wildly. Don't forget, the attack indicator only flashes at the start of the attack for a short amount of time. On paper this should be fine since you can just see the projectile coming at you and parry at the proper time, but this becomes LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE with any sort of large enemy in your face blocking your view. It is not rare to see 3+ indicators come from a large enemy's direction and have no way of knowing what's coming or when you need to parry. Have fun!

As a whole, Mortal Sin feels like one great idea with a wealth of under-baked mechanics holding it down. The developer has put a lot of thought and effort into making the combat experience on the player's end feel amazing and continues to iterate and improve on it, which is great! Unfortunately, this just isn't enough to carry the rest of the gameplay experience and probably never will be. I'll be following future updates and I'll happily update my review if the experience as a whole is improved and brought to the same standard of quality as the combat feel.

Certainly flawed, but still an extremely enjoyable horror experience that is well worth the asking price. Character controls are somewhat clunky at first, but are easy to adjust to and certainly not as bad as other reviews might lead you to believe. Every bit of music/sound design is fantastic and does a great job at telegraphing the tone of whatever section of the game you're currently at. The ARG aspects are smoothly implemented and satisfying to solve, with only a sparing couple of strange leaps in logic that me and my friends had to search online for help in figuring out.

My only major complaint with the game is that enemy encounters are WAY too slow at the moment. Any time 2 or more enemies spawn in an area the game grinds to a halt and it completely kills the pacing and tension for me. In these situations it's mostly faster to just die to an enemy and run back to where you were after they all despawn. The game is much better when you're not stuck staring at a green barrel for several minutes.

I can't sit on toilets. I destroyed a breathing mass and now I think it protects me. I died and became flesh. I took the red door, which is the one I always take and you should always take it too. I Found The Tren Dealer. I was broke, but I killed a rich man and now I'm not. The eyes did nothing but stare and yet I still murdered them in cold blood. Unfortunately I cannot kill fish. I was told I need more hair but I don't care, my hammer is nice. Cow?

I beat the game, I think. I'll be back.

Gamefeel is way too sluggish for me. Every action takes a good while to go through and it feels like my character is moving through quicksand at any given moment. In some ways this is a boon: Enemies function the same way as you and will be just as sluggish, making defensive play incredibly easy. On the other hand, any form of aggression just feels way too slow to make it feel worth picking up in my eyes. Menuing also feels slightly laggy for some reason, like every input is delayed JUST enough to be mildly frustrating but not unusable. Low framerate exacerbates the previous problems to a point where it ended up making me feel I didn't want to try anymore (According to other reviews, framerate wasn't an issue in beta... What gives?)

Another minor issue I have with the game is that the reward aspect of the combat feel is really not there. When I land the cut on an enemy it looks explosive and bloody, but the sound design is incredibly lacking. It just sounds like turning a hose on and off. The kill sound is such a strange outlier when the rest of the soundscape is very good: Block sounds are gentle but impactful enough to notice and the actual sound of the swing itself is exactly as swift and light as it should be! Humans are a lot more than bags of blood, but the sound choice for kills would lead you to believe otherwise.

I don't doubt the appeal this game has to others. The scenes are absolutely gorgeous and the combat LOOKS fantastic. It just plays at a pace that I can't adapt to and doesn't feel great once I do work around it. Definitely not for me.

Middle thumb, as it can be more or less fun depending on what you're looking to get out of the game. Gunplay feels way too floaty to me with most weapons and movement feels uncomfortably sluggish. On the other hand, melee combat is pretty solid and the variety in character building is strong enough to stick around for. I'd probably still recommend Vermintide 2 because it generally feels much better to play, but if you REALLY want 40k in particular then this isn't too bad.

As a horror game, I find this one leaving a bit to be desired. I've encountered maybe one or two creatures that genuinely gave me a good spook, but nothing else really hits the same. Dying does very little to contribute to the feeling of fear; It really feels like consideration wasn't put into how scary it is to die in this game, rather into how scary it is to OTHER PEOPLE when you die. I've never really died and given more of a reaction than "Oh... I guess I'm dead now" but I can definitely admit that it's very creepy watching some unknown being drag the corpse of your friend off to its.. Collection? Home? Nest? Who knows.

As an exploration experience, REALLY tragically disappointing. Map variety really isn't where it should be and you'll get extremely familiar with the halls you roam very quickly. The procedural generation is very much just spamming a bunch of interconnecting halls without much consideration of logic or gameplay viability. The number of times I've gone down an exceedingly long and boring hall only to reach a dead-end with nothing to show... I hope that future iterations of early access can improve on this front because it's quite rough.

Now, as a social experience... This is where my recommendation comes from. This game does everything right in terms of making things fun with friends. If you play Lethal Company with friends and you don't use the in-game voice chat then you are doing yourself an INCREDIBLE disservice, as this game has some of the best use of proximity voice chat I have ever seen in a game. The number of silly little situations you and your party can get into and the memorable moments that unfold all completely outweigh any negatives I've mentioned until now.

That all being said, I do hope for some general improvement in the non-social aspects that the game is lacking in. As a big fan of Zeekerss games as a whole (I still firmly believe that It Steals has some of the most brilliant horror mechanics ever designed, and Upturned is a hilarious and terribly underrated masterpiece) I know that this game can be so much more than it is now. I pray that the sudden popularity ends up as more than a trend and people stick around for the future, because this is a developer that is well deserving.

I also hope that some work is done on the outdoor visuals of the game. Nearly every map I've seen looks extremely ugly and janky (And not in the way that is somehow both terrifying and charming that Zeekerss is normally so good at)

A couple years ago, I left a review on the early access launch of this game. I felt that on a base mechanical level the game felt great with pretty smooth movement, solid gunplay, and a perk/upgrade system that provided some alright variation between runs (even if the depth of the system is somewhat shallow). My only major gripes were with the extremely bad health system and the poor enemy variety. My opinions on the game have unfortunately only changed slightly for the worse since then, but that is really only shifting from an "it's pretty good!" to an "it's alright."

Movement still feels good and there are a bunch of tools to expand your movement options that can be found if you look for them. The base movement mechanics have started to wear off their novelty for me, as sprinting is still somewhat problematic in my opinion. Sprinting is completely overshadowed by slidehopping and only serves to discourage new players from engaging in close combat as you can't use your weapons mid-sprint. It's a small piece of the identity crisis this game constantly finds itself in that I'll touch on a bit later in this review.

Gunplay is still great and has actually gotten notably better in some ways! Weapon variety feels excellent and you can really get away with using most weapons you pick up now. Energy weapons in general feel great and I'm quite happy with the improvements made to the category since early access.

The perk system has really started to show its cracks with time. The variety in options is generally very poor and most characters only have ~2-3 major perk choices that lead to viable build variations. The rest of the perk selections are pretty middling and feel more like mild QoL than substantial build growth moments. Overall the perks are just fairly lukewarm and, outside of the spare few very strong options, none really do a whole lot to keep me wanting to explore/experiment with the system.

Enemy variety hasn't improved much. Small robots with guns, normal robots with guns, flying robots with guns, and turrets are the bulk of your encounters. There are elite enemies that you can run into after some progression, but they're essentially just normal robots with a minor gimmick and some harsh statpadding. The lack of variety inevitably makes encounters feel pretty samey, which is only salvaged by the previously mentioned player mechanics being pretty good and guns being varied enough. Enemies are also generally designed with attacks that are only reactable or avoidable at range, meaning close combat is often significantly more difficult than other playstyles.

The health system still sucks, which is really unfortunate as this was the big thing I was hoping to see improved from early access. It's effectively a ♥♥♥♥ version of Ultrakill's health system which tries to encourage aggressive play to stay afloat. Unfortunately, not only is the healing you receive in combat absolutely pitiful, but also the rest of the game tries REALLY oppressively hard to discourage aggressive play in other ways, to the point where your best bet most of the time is still to stand really far away and snipe things until they die. Kinda weird how most of the strongest and most popular builds are ranged crit builds, huh?

Bosses are by far my biggest complaint with the game right now. While a lot of the designs are quite novel and fun in concept, they tend to come packaged with features made specifically to punish builds that aren't just generic gun builds. Summon builds don't really tend to struggle too much, but they also take ages to kill certain bosses which can really kill the momentum of a run. Melee builds in particular spend a lot of time sitting around and waiting, as nearly every boss in the game has an attack which is literally just an orange field of damage around them made specifically to screw melee players. It's not difficult to deal with, it's just boring and tedious for the sake of being boring and tedious (and yet another thing punching down on close combat in this game!).

So, yeah. A very strangely flawed FPS roguelite that seems to want to encourage aggressive play while doing a lot to make the playstyle as unfun as possible. As someone who enjoys exploring every build option in games of this genre, it's really disappointing to see the build difficulty + strength gradient align almost perfectly with what range each build plays at relative to the enemy. If you're into hectic ranged combat then this will probably be your cup of tea. Otherwise, I'd stick to other faster FPS titles to get your fix. Overall I'm sitting somewhere in the side thumb/slight thumbs up range.

UPDATE: Decided to come back to this game to see if any of the problems I presented in this review were resolved. In all the time that has passed, I'd say that two problems have been half-addressed, with no attempts even being made to resolve any other problems with the game.

So, which problems have been 'addressed'?

Firstly: You can now unequip runes without needing to buy and equip new ones. You still can't refund runes for reasons that remain well beyond me.

Second: There is now an option to add outlines to all enemies. The outline matches the bleak color scheme of the rest of the game so it's not terribly impactful, but I suppose it's better than nothing. The game still lacks any other form of accessibility or keybinding options.

Balancing remains awful since the last time I visited this game. The difference between the strongest builds versus anything else available is night and day. There are still some runes which are completely worthless and some which are pretty gamebreaking.

It's extremely disappointing to see that such little progress has been made to improve the base mechanics of this game. My original review stated a 'middle thumb', which stayed somewhat optimistic in the presumption that the rough edges of this game could get polished out given time in the early access oven. My hopes have been pretty efficiently stomped out now so I'm pretty confident in swinging to a total thumbs down. The only compliment I can muster up for this game anymore is that the character portraits are quite pretty.


END OF UPDATE, ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW:


Middle thumb for me as of now, leaning slightly on the negative. This could easily be prone to change as I play more, but for now my experience isn't all too great.

First impressions of the gameplay loop are average at best. Gunplay is fine but does feels a little clunky, as for some reason your movement speed is slowed to a crawl whenever you take a shot. There is an upgrade to resolve this, but having to take an upgrade to bandaid a problem rather than to enhance the gameplay doesn't feel great. The game gives you the ability to cancel a reload by shooting, which sounds nice on paper but often results in accidentally cancelling a reload right at it's very end, forcing you to repeat the whole reload over again. A settings toggle for this feature would be nice, but the game is horribly lacking in options right now (We'll get to this later) so I don't necessarily have high hopes for that coming soon.

Sound design is overall decent with a couple of poor outliers. As far as I can tell there's only one song that plays while in runs but it hasn't gotten too repetitive for me yet. Bullet sounds are fine so far that I've heard but reload sounds are really weirdly inconsistent. I kept hearing keyboard sounds while playing and checked my second monitor several times thinking I was in a voicechat and forgot, only to realize that the sound the revolver makes when it finishes reloading sounds exactly like a high quality soundbite of someone pressing a keyboard key. The process of unlocking runes (The game's permanent progression system, which we'll again get to later) also completely lacks any sound, making the process pretty largely unsatisfying. Overall, there wasn't really any choice in sound design that stood out to me as great but also none that were necessarily awful (Just a bit weird at times).

The game has some really bad readability issues, seemingly by design. During gameplay the map is extremely dark and enemies are somewhat difficult to see at range. This isn't generally a problem at first but grows in significance as the game increasingly throws more enemies at you. Expect many deaths to come from enemies that you simply didn't spot until it's too late. There are vision range upgrades to light up the map a little, but this is not only a repeat of the upgrade bandaid problem but also barely even noticeable. Characters blend together really easily due to most lacking color, with enemies tending to group together often and becoming an indiscernible blob of matter on the map. On a small scale the muted tones and reserved color scheme look pretty cool, but when you have a ton of enemies on the screen it becomes really muddy and ugly.

The game's permanent progression system is pretty weak, while fortunately being the part that I feel would be easiest to fix. It's by far the most grindy part of the game (Later tier upgrades rack up some especially steep prices), but there is very little else to spend currency on so I suppose that's not the worst thing ever.

To quickly explain how perma progression (The rune shop) works:
The rune shop is split into 2 categories, with each category having 4 tiers with 3 runes per tier. You start with 1 tier available in each category and need to level runes 5 times in a category to unlock it's next tier. Each tier is more expensive than the last.

You can only equip one rune per tier in each category but for some reason you can't directly unequip them, just swap to another rune. You also cannot refund purchases, so any commitment made to purchasing runes is permanent. These factors essentially mean that if you buy a rune and regret it after then you're forced to either buy a new rune to equip or, if you don't have enough currency, do a new run with the rune you don't like to get currency to buy another. Balancing is also not fantastic: Some runes essentially do nothing (Vision...) while others have potential to make you near-unkillable when combined properly. Like previously stated however, these are obviously prone to change and are likely very temporary complaints.

Options are HORRIBLY lacking. As of now there is little to work with beyond the absolute basics like volume and resolution. The game completely lacks keybind options and there are no settings for toying with the color scheme at all. Lack of color options make the game a hard sell to anyone who is red-green colorblind as all enemy projectiles are colorcoded red. Accessibility options should certainly be looked into sooner rather than later.

As a whole, 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a mixed bag that's difficult to recommend versus it's inspirations. Attempts to stand out end up feeling like downgrades and the experience on a first taste is little beyond bland. The game certainly has a lot of growing pains to work through and I suppose we'll see if they can pull through them in their 1-2 month early access approximate.

EDIT: An update was recently pushed for the game that drastically cuts down the prices of early-game weapons. While this answers for half of my major complaint in this review it also makes the other half much more glaring, with a significantly more extreme ramp-up in cost factor as you progress through the game.

Dead Cells is a fluid and charismatic action-roguelite that I feel is held back somewhat by having a bit too much of a grind requirement to get the ball rolling. The game has a ton of unlocks it wants you to dig for, but some of them are buried DEEP and you're started with the video game equivalent of a toy spade to dig with.

Essentially, most of the unlocks are hidden behind random drops from certain enemies. The drop chances for some of these unlocks are extremely low (several are <1% drop chance) but this can be padded out by a somewhat costly consumable item you can buy.

Unfortunately, this is only the first layer of tedium.

Once you actually get the drop, you then have to actually BUY the unlock (as in, purchase the right to have the item drop in your runs) from merchants appearing in checkpoints throughout your run, and these unlocks can be really damn expensive. It would be great to see some love given to the starting item pool, as I ended up getting VERY familiar with a small set of really boring weapons for several hours before I could access anything interesting.

If you're the type of player who is willing to sink in the time to flesh out your item pool then this game will reward you with a snappy, satisfying combat system with a ton of fun weapons to boot. Less patient players might struggle to maintain grip on this one.

A fantastic bullet hell action-roguelite with a ton to offer! As someone who typically gets very overwhelmed by bullet hells, I found this game to be extremely engaging and never felt that any of my deaths were unfair. The game does provide ample means to adjust difficulty up or down if needed, and while I haven't felt any desire to turn the difficulty down myself I feel it makes this a pretty great game for newcomers or people looking for a less 'intense' experience. The developers are also absolute sweethearts and are very helpful to anyone asking for such in their discord server.

When any of my friends are looking for a fresh roguelite experience, this is the absolute first game that I always recommend. Pick it up!! It's wonderful!!