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Recent reviews by AnDrEw

Showing 1-9 of 9 entries
5 people found this review helpful
14.0 hrs on record
I've heard great things about Psychonauts. Don't take it from me, look at the Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews. After finally playing it myself in the year 2023, I respectfully disagree.

There's a lot to love, and I understand where people are coming from. The classic Double Fine style is on full display, and it looks great for its time. The world is imaginative and funny, and the characters are incredibly wacky. I fully enjoyed many parts of this game (Lungfish, Milkman, Napoleon).

However.

For such a story-focused game, it fails to bring a sense of cohesion to the table. Almost all the characters are extremely simple. Character introductions are sparse, if present at all. At many points, it feels like important plot beats are skipped. The penultimate area's denizens are given zero context before you're thrust into their heads, and they ultimately don't matter at all. It's all just so simple, and I was expecting more from such an esteemed classic.

Side note about the audiovisuals: the mixing is completely broken in this port. There's no way it was this bad on release, right? It contributed to me almost dropping the game.

Moving on to the gameplay: it's ass. The physics are jank, so much so that they are nearly broken in some places. The animations don't help, with how jerky they are. Its adventure game trappings make you go into your inventory and use a specific item in a specific place, which is wild to me in the year 2023, but I remember those days. It's ostensibly a platformer, but only, like, 3 or 4 levels make you use your fancy platforming moves. And don't get me started on the double jump. The game doesn't let you double jump all the time, but you can always float, which was extremely upsetting in the final level where a double jump would have done the same thing as the float in getting me to a platform, but the double jump was not allowed. Like I said before, it's jank.

Again, I liked parts of this game, and I appreciate it. But I can't recommend playing it yourself. I've heard good things about the sequel, so I hope that it's being held to higher standards than this.
Posted February 18, 2023.
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1 person found this review helpful
10.9 hrs on record
I've been wanting to play Fez for SO long. I was following the development, and I love lush pixel art, and all the colors, and Paul Robertson did some animation, and it's just . . . this game should be my Jam. But it's not.

Right off the bat, Fez envelopes you in its serene sound design and immaculate pixel placement. You control cute lil' Gomez, and he jumps and climbs around, and it's great. Then you get to twist your perspective around, and hey, that's the gimmick! That's cool! There are cool perspective puzzles, you get to, uh, see more perspectives, of the world, you know. And in order to progress, you have to see things from a different . . . perspective . . . .

Listen, I'm out of nice things to say. I loved the idea of exploring this world and collecting the shiny trinkets, so I set off on a grand journey. And I found a neat puzzle! You've got to set up these blocks so that they form different tetronimoes from each side. I pushed them around, got them in almost the right formation, but the controls wouldn't let me nudge one of the blocks in the right direction. So I tried again. Like seven more times. And the problem for me was: the physics of this world don't make any sense. The 2D interactions just *bug out* when in a 3D world. I got a block to float in mid-air with nothing below it, just by pushing the four blocks around. At that point I gave up, and decided to see if I had the idea wrong. And it turns out you can PICK UP BLOCKS? The game failed to teach me that I could pick things up. On top of that, the solution involves putting the blocks on separate shiny spots, *not* touching each other. That is *not* how the tetronimo do.

So anyway I solved that puzzle finally and tried to figure out where to go next, but the confusing in-game map did not make it easy to navigate (why are discovered warp doors not displayed?). Exiting and entering a room resulted in an unexplained change in the room, but whatever. The physics continued to be broken (rotating caused part of Gomez to be visible, but the instant he jumped, he was suddenly behind everything). Collecting a cube caused Gomez to levitate in the air right into a glitch that killed him, ruining my immersion further. I proceeded to walk through a doorway in just the right way to lock the game up and force a hard reset.

My experience deciphering the runes in the game: the alphabet is laughably easy but tedious, the number system is poorly communicated, and the tutorial for the input glyphs breaks the game's own pattern of reading right to left.

So anyway I beat the game. And there were some clever moments that I enjoyed. But most of my 10 hours was spent checking off boxes, craning my neck 90 degrees to the right, and looking up puzzle solutions when I wasn't sure what to do because there is literally a puzzle that the community had to brute-force in order to solve. Most everything in the game that doesn't involve the main gimmick is either finding a secret code that you input with your controls or clumsy platforming ideas taken from better games. There is no story to speak of aside from sparse, vague background details about the world.

I do Not recommend this game. The exploration runs counter to the incongruous world design. The precise puzzling runs counter to the sloppy character controls and physics. There are graphical glitches that impede my sense of immersion that are *separate* from the intentional glitches put into the game by design. The incessant saving icon impedes my sense of immersion. Decoding the hidden messages makes me feel like the kid from A Christmas Story when he gets his decoder ring. The keyboard controls suck except for the map screen, where a controller sucks. Why does Phil Fish have such a hard-on for Tetris? The ONLY Tetris in this game is all the tetronimoes everywhere, but they are literally Everywhere! Stop it Phil! You can make other shapes!
Posted April 22, 2022.
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2 people found this review helpful
0.8 hrs on record
Too linear to be a cool game, with dialogue too stilted to be a cool story. If I knew these going in, I might have enjoyed it more. It looks pretty good for what it is though, and is obviously an iconic piece of video games history.
Posted April 21, 2022.
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1 person found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
6.8 hrs on record
10 years after its release, Spec Ops: The Line still delivers a breathtaking spectacle. The environments are bursting with color despite the desert setting, the voice acting is simply fantastic, and I think the music is pretty great. You may be aware of the significance of Spec Ops' story, but if you aren't, just know that it's special, especially for its time.

The gameplay isn't quite so special. On my first playthrough, I felt immersed and challenged at first, except for a few stumbling blocks like the part where you run from a heli. But halfway through, my slow methodical strategy revealed the enemy spawn mechanisms, and when I replayed a couple of chapters, some of the enemies' AI presented jarringly unrealistic and unfair situations. The cutscenes use a little bit too much shaky cam, and the waist-high barriers make combat arenas look very obvious.

That all said, this iconic experience is definitely worth your time, and gets a full thumbs up from me.
Posted April 19, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1 person found this review funny
0.2 hrs on record
Hahahahaha, this game crashed my computer when it tried to load the first level. Thanks, game!

Second try it worked, after putting all graphics settings to low.

Wasn't really worth it. 2.5D platformer with ugly visuals, no compelling plot or world, and a switching mechanic that the game tells you to press left trigger to use when playing with a keyboard.
Posted February 15, 2019.
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1 person found this review helpful
5.9 hrs on record (0.3 hrs at review time)
A fun little platformer with a minimalist style. I was determined to light up all of the map and 100% it, and almost managed it without a guide; there was just one or two missing doodads that I had to track down.

The level design is good, it flows and feels good to control. The one thing that feels sorta iffy is the last challenge, which is different than everything before it. It's cool though, so I'll give it a pass.

Definitely pick it up if it's on sale, but if you don't want to play a nice little platformer, this probably isn't worth it.
Posted March 21, 2018.
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1 person found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
0.4 hrs on record
From the title I was expecting a simple matching puzzle game with a zombie theme. What I got instead was a braindead "put enough of a single color person around a block of zombies" experience: there is no puzzling because there are no turns. You just have to do it fast enough to outpace the zombies. It didn't take long for the play to become repetitive, and any environmental objects to interact with were clearly labelled, but didn't have any indication of what they did; one was actively detrimental.

The production quality is nothing special, but I can't knock it for that because of how old the game is. What is a problem is how muted the active items you obtain are. The story text is nice and clean though.

Overall not worth your time or money.

Posted March 21, 2018.
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30 people found this review helpful
6 people found this review funny
1.4 hrs on record
This game wrecked me.
Posted November 3, 2016.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1 person found this review funny
161.5 hrs on record
There is literally too much to do in this game.
Posted December 27, 2011.
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Showing 1-9 of 9 entries