Recent reviews by Vent Xekart

Tim Sweeney, more like Tim Weenie Hut Jr.

Delta Particles is a total conversion singleplayer mod for Half-Life by Yuri Epifantsev, where you play as an engineer named Nick Farrell at the Delta Base, a corporate rival of Black Mesa. Needless to say ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan because an experiment on site coincides with the Resonance Cascade.

Pros:
-Working achievement system.
-Solid and gorgeous level design.
-Solid scripted sequences.
-Subtitles/Closed-Captions for certain character voicelines.
-Re-worked Pistol and Shotgun.
-Decapitation/Beheading system for dealing headshots to enemies.
Cons:
-Subtitles/Dialogue Lines do not work with all available voicelines.
-Heavy use of recycled dialogue and lines from Half-Life and Half-Life: Opposing Force.
-With the exception of new zombie variants, there are no new Xenian enemies.
Neutral:
-The Assault Rifle and/or SMG are separate weapons.
-Shotgun gibs smaller enemies like Houndeyes and Headcrabs.
-Desert Eagle(?) and Revolver use separate ammo pools.
7/10

Probably one of the most relaxing and chill games on Steam that I've ever played.

Katawa Shoujo was what introduced me to visual novels and dating sims back in my final year of High School and needless to say, it is still my personal favorite. It has a beautiful soundtrack, great visuals, realistically-written characters, and several branching storylines for each one that still hits close to home for me.

10/10.

A cute little program/game in which users can make 3D Pipe(s) simulations like that the ones in that old Windows Screensaver. However, unlike the original product it was based off of, Conduits has a wider variety of options to customize each simulation as the user(s) see fit.

An interesting little free-to-play roguelite FPS. The visuals and music reminded me a bit of Risk Of Rain 2 while the weapon and powers reminded me of another indie game called "Xotic."

It's a shame it's so short though, because I feel it has potential for being expanded upon.

7/10

Unsorted Horror is a not a single game but rather a collection of short experimental horror-themed games by the aforementioned Mike Klubnika (Who recently rose to fame for his game Buckshot Roulette.) Now each game has slightly differing gameplay but they all share three common elements:
1. Gritty, low-poly, textures and models that remind me of Iron Lung and Voltage High Society.
2. Beautiful yet equally eerie ambient tracks by Jake "Jabbu" Coyle.
3. Heavy emphasis on the user's interaction with tools, items, or the interface in general.

Now onto the actual games themselves, each of which takes about ten to fifteen minutes to play through;
1. The Other Side: The player must escape an underground bunker with a improvised drill, performing repairs and maintenance on it as needed.
2. Control Room Alpha: A "Claw Machine" game where you open up a nest full of giant spiders and you have to collect samples from inside it using a remotely operated crane.
3. Carbon Steel: A game where you're a prisoner forced to perform cruel & unethical experiments on eldritch beings in an abandoned research facility.
4. Concrete Tremor: The best way I could describe this game is that it's a twisted form of "Battleship" but instead of destroying boats, you're destroying soviet-era tenements filled with people in a walled city.
5. The Tartarus Engine: You're one of three engineers trying to hack into and exploit an ancient supercomputer's vulnerabilities.

Each one is an interesting piece worth playing through at least once and you don't have to spend a single dollar on it.

7/10

"I love reloading in the middle of battle."

7.5/10

I've played my fair share of survival-horror games over the years but I can say without a doubt I haven't played one like Signalis until recently.

Setting-wise, it takes place in a dystopian future where the solar system is governed by a totalitarian regime where human cyborgs called Gestalts and Androids called Replikas work together. You play as Replika named Elster, whose searching for her Gestalt partner after their ship crash-lands on an arctic world. Without spoiling too much, I'll just say that things go down hill from there.

Gameplay-wise, the player has to navigate throughout levels using a limited inventory gathering items for specific puzzles/events and solving them to progress. Along the way, the player will find weapons and limited amounts of ammunition but combat can and should be avoided to prevent wasting supplies. Notes and documents can also be found and their contents will be stored in a data log that can be accessed alongside the inventory. In the same area is the radio transmitter/receive which can be used to solve certain puzzles and deal with one specific enemy type that will be encountered in the game. Combat is pretty simple, in that you equip a weapon, load it, and fire at an enemy until they're knocked over at which point you just kick them to ensure they stay down. (NOTE: Some of the enemies may come back to life!) The only exceptions to this are boss battles which may be a bit more difficult to deal with.

In terms of 3D visuals, their meant to emulate the low-poly graphics of classic games for the Nintendo 64 and the PS1 albeit with some modern touches for the lighting, reflections, and transparency effects. Speaking of the lighting, the use of dynamic lighting and shadows helps make the atmosphere more eerie. For the 2D visuals and cutscenes, the art-style reminds me a bit of the works of Tsutomu Nihei (BLAME!) and Masamune Shirow (Ghost In The Shell) though it's probably coincidental. The soundtrack is hauntingly beautiful and the sound design was very well done. The use of audio from old number stations and classical music for certain puzzles involving the radio transmitter/receiver actually fit very well with some of the situations once the player has the context.

The only negative thing I can say about this game is that the limited inventory (you can only carry six items) often led up to me backtracking several times throughout the game.

That aside, I would highly recommend this game for any fans of survival-horror games like System Shock 2 and Dead Space.

10/10

As of writing this review, Industria is probably the shortest game on the Unreal 4 engine I've ever played. I managed to finish it in about three-and-a-half-hours. Anyway, on to the review.

Players take the role of a young women named Nora who awakens to a phone call from her colleague and significant other Walter about the Fall of the Berlin Wall and how State Security is about to terminate the project they're involved in and in a rush to find him she ends up falling into a parallel world. There is much more to the story but I don't want to spoil anything.

Gameplay-wise it has a mix of elements one would find in the works by both Valve and Frictional Games. In regards to the former, players have a five weapons to use but they can only carry a limited amount of ammunition and players can find more if they break open supply boxes or explore the levels to find some. In regards to the latter, the player has an inventory where certain items must be used for puzzles to progress further through the game and there are a number of notes the player can add to their journal to flesh out some of the story. Of course, the player can also pick up and interact with props or other physics objects in-game much like in Half-Life 2 or Amnesia: The Dark Descent for example.

For the graphics, the game uses the Unreal 4 engine and oddly enough when you start the game on Steam you have the option of running it with DirectX11 or DirectX12. Either way, the textures, models, and environments look gorgeous. The only problem I ran into was that when I optimized the game with the Nvidia GeForce App and went back in game the atmospherics, post-processing, lighting, and more were temporarily disabled (Pausing the game and entering the options menu started slowly re-enabling everything.)

Now this game isn't without it's flaws. The biggest one in my opinion is the AI of the various enemies. Some of them have shown to have trouble traversing in areas they have access to and will try and find a way around when there isn't one before circling back to attack the player. There are a few exceptions to this rule but it is a bit of an oddity. Another flaw of this game in my opinion is it's length. I would've loved it if the developers had made it a longer journey through the entire city of Hakavik with an additional opportunity to explore the outer limits but I digress.

All in all, it's a decent game worth playing through at least once.

7/10