Recent reviews by Sintacs

Postal and GTA1/2 got together and had a roguelite baby.

Sonic the Hedgehog with a gun on a mix of deliriants and psychedelics.

Probably one of the best Doom games around, possibly even my tied for my personal favorite in the series with the first. Absolutely worth grabbing if you enjoyed the originals or old school shooters in general.

Currently the game has a bug impacting many where the screen is black. This can be fixed by changing your desktop resolution then running the game at a different resolution.

With that said, the game plays nothing like the original, and the biggest issue in that is some sort of "auto-drift" or just bad control design if that wasn't an intentional thing. What I mean by this is that when you, for example, turn right, your kart turns to the right, but it also slides to the left, meaning if you need to steer into items, you're more than likely going to miss them. You basically need to line yourself up with them before getting to them, and manage to grab them moving in a straight line, or simply get lucky when trying to steer into them, likely grabbing one you didn't want (but at least you got something, right?). As is, I can't recommend this. If you want to play an enjoyable version of the game, go grab the original for half the price of this mess.

The game has come a long way since it originally launched as a weird episodic title, where the first episode was free, but only one stage, giving people the impression it was a free-to-play game as it ended up being listed as one, despite not being one at the time. This was shot in the foot #1, but they relaunched as F2P, so they're improving. I'd say the largest negative at the moment for myself (and others from the sound of it too) is the antagonist system. The way that works is you'll queue as either a Raider, an Antagonist, or both. If you play as a Raider, you select your character with your teammates before hopping into the match. You may or may not have an Antagonist. An Antagonist is a player that is friendly aligned with the AI enemies, and is taked with killing all of the Raiders once they have run out of lives. The balance in this system is garbage at best, it very rarely feels balanced. You'll often end up with an Antagonist that is at such a greater skill level than your team that there's no real point in even trying (plus, if they're a higher level they do more damage than you do). Other times, you'll get matched with one who is very clearly brand new to the game, and they get completely stomped. I feel like this is still one of the continuing largest points of failure in the game. It's a cool idea, but the way it is currently implemented does not work, and the sooner Mercury Steam is willing to admit that and either remove it or balance it, the sooner I feel the game could actually grow in popularity. I feel the Antagonist system should be stripped and replaced with a separate PVP mode. The game already reminds me a lot of Anarchy Reigns, and a bit (in some ways) of Power Stone, and I think they could easily get a proper PVP mode working relatively easily. All the mechanics for cool modes are here, and it would be so much more enjoyable than PVP in the form of Antagonists.

tl;dr
The game is fun and has a ton of visual polish. There isn't much like it out there, and the dev had been making some good strides in improving things, despite a few (though fairly large) issues (like Antagonist balancing).

This is a poor man's Senran Kagura. It does many similar things, but they're all quite clunky in comparison. The combat is ok for a game at this price, but it's definitely not as smooth or polished as many of the other action/hack-n-slash games that are around, and at times can feel quite clunky. Visually the game looks ok, the animations are decent for a low budget title, but are very mediocre overall. I get the feeling that the focus here was more on making it look nice visually than play well, because it truly feels like a chore to play. The enemies all seem to have a little too much health, and you often have to fight quite a few at once, then just as many or more spawn in, and they're not particularly challenging to defeat outside of their high health, and generally don't pose much of a threat. I often found myself letting out a sight as I enter a new area and see all the enemies around, as I knew I'd be there for a while. While the combat isn't entirely terrible, it probably couldn't be more tedious. Bosses could have been a challenge, but spamming an attack chain, then dodging behind the boss and repeating was typically all that was required to defeat them. I'm not sure if they did any checking of their translation though, as there are many grammatical and spelling errors in nearly every bit of text, though I bought this for the ladies and gameplay, as I'm sure most others did.

In the end I can't recommend it, not when there's so many other better titles in the genre out there. Maybe you could get some enjoyment out of it for $1, but I say stay away for anything more than that. I'd say you're probably better off checking out either Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae or Senran Kagura (Shinovi Versus or Estival Versus).

I've played the hell out of Duke 3D, and while the new lighting effects in this version are great, the mouse control is terrible. It feels stiff and just "off" in comparison to previous ports and releases of the game. What causes this (as far as I can tell) is that the sensitivity for X and Y are different, and cannot be adjusted independently of eachother, and there is some look acceleration that cannot be disabled. Playing the original in DOSBox feels better than this. I don't understand how they could do suck a bad job on one of the core parts of the game, something you will always be using. Did the devs never play via EDuke32 or the Megaton Edition? Both of those played flawlessly. If you have any previous release of the game, stick with those over this. If you don't have a copy of the game yet, get this one on sale and play it in EDuke32.

Update: Turns out turning off the "true 3D rendering" fixes the mouse issue, but you lose out on all the nice visual enhancements that are really the only reason to own this version of the game. I'd recommend tracking down a copy of the Megaton Edition or 3D Realms Anthology over this still.

It's 40k skinned chess. Do you like chess and 40k? Yes? You'll probably dig it. If you don't like chess you should probably avoid it. There's also a mode where the pieces can shoot at eachother as well as take pieces in the usual way, but I don't really consider that to be the main draw here, though it seems most folks leaving negative reviews bought the game for that.

So being 100+ hours into the game now, you can definitely accomplish a lot more than many folks here would suggest without paying. I recently passed 1 million prestige, and the only money I spent on the game that influenced my advancement was the second starter pack thing they offer you when you're new, outside of that I bought a couple mounts. There are some points were progress really slows down (just before you get your God form), and it seems almost as if you have hit the "pay wall" many talk about, but you really just need to stick with it, as you'll soon have your God form, and from there progress jumps to a speed that seems insane at first as long as you complete your daily directives. Yes, you'll usually have a PVP quest in your directives, but you are also given 2 stimulants per day that can be used to skip that, and the rest will be provincial adventures that you should easily be able to solo, or group adventures, that you can always find people looking for more in region chat.

I haven't really had any issues with free progression so far, and really don't see the point in "paying to win" as a lot of the PVE content is either equalized, or scales to your current power, and nobody does PVP. Even if PVP were active, and you couldn't pay to power up, there's always going to be the no lifers that are still far ahead of everybody else messing with the balance of it, equalized PVP is the way to go in games like this, though I can't say if it has any equalized PVP as this is not something I was looking for in the game anyway.

Another thing I will touch on is the population of the game, as I see many negative reviews stating the game is dead. I have not experienced this, at very off hours, there are still plenty of players around, enough that you can still run full group content, during peak hours, there's tons of people around. I will note that I play on the North American server, and that this may not be the case on the European server.

Something fairly important to note is that the default server for the game is Europe, if you would like to play on the North American server, you will need to select it in a dropdown in the launcher, so make sure you do this before playing for the first time if you grabbed the free starter pack, or any other packs, as they will be registered to whichever server you enter after obtaining them.

tl;dr
I haven't encountered any issues with "pay to win" players as I only play PVE and it is somewhat irrelevant to do there (and in general as progression is quite fast after you get your God form), and the populations is fine on the NA server. If you enjoy action games, it's definitely worth a look.

While many will skip the game due to the oversexualization of the lead, it's not something that bothers me, and there are mods to cover her up and/or change her proportions for those that do not like how she was designed, so this really shouldn't be a reason to skip the game.

Now that we're past that, the game definitely makes you think and challenges your reflexes and timing. It's hard, but that's not a bad thing, it can be very satisfying to finally get past a tough room or puzzle. The gameplay reminds me very much of a comination of Tomb Raider and Resident Evil (4+), even down to some light horror/jumpscares. The places some of the robots can spawn in behind you after completing a puzzle, or fligging a switch can be really unexpected, and definitely made me jump a few times. The early areas you really won't see too many, nor will you have any spawning behind you, but the further you get, the more alert you'll need to be.

Visually the game looks very nice, everything is fairly simple and clean, but it works. The lead is animated very well, though the robots can be a little robotic (as they should be). The lighting is pretty nice, you'll often see nice shadows from pipes or fences that are cast onto the lead as well as the robots in the game.

Now, I'll get back to the difficulty of the game, it can be very hard, and can be fairly frustrating when you make a lot of progress, only to die, and your last save was an hour or so ago. The game uses a save system similar to that of the old Resident Evil games, you need to find floppy disks, and use them at designated save locations. Due to this, you don't necessarily want to be saving all the time, as you are limited in the number of saves you'll have at any given time, so you'll generally want to save them for the bigger accomplishments.

This is definitely one to check out for anybody who thinks the idea of Tomb Raider + Resident Evil sounds like something they would enjoy.