296
Products
reviewed
0
Products
in account

Recent reviews by Vino [Olive Garden]

< 1  2  3 ... 30 >
Showing 1-10 of 296 entries
14 people found this review helpful
0.9 hrs on record
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is cheap and generic in a way that was forgivable and even charming in Slap City, Ludosity's previous game and this title's most direct influence. Nobody expected much from the little developer who saw the platform fighter genre, dominated as it is by the Smash franchise with niches filled in by Rivals of Aether (Smash for furry autists) and Brawlhalla (Smash for Brazilian children), and decided to make their own version (Smash for ...?), seemingly half-jokingly the whole time. The design of Slap City's quirky and high skill-ceiling mechanics provided enough "crunch" to distract players from the game's stiff animations, unpolished visual effects, and tiny cast of programmer-art nobodies. While these defects kept Slap City from reaching popularity even within the small world of platform fighter enthusiasts, it still had a place within the pantheon as a strange but endearing not-quite-a-novelty game.

But when that little developer put on their big boy pants, got a license from Nickelodeon, and decided to charge $50 for their $20 quirky/janky fighting game with a new coat of paint, there is an implication that the aforementioned coat of paint provides a value of around $30. Yet it's impossible to avoid noticing the cut corners and lack of content that reveal the absurdity of this game's price. I would've been more forgiving had this been a $20 download-only title, or a free-to-play game with individually purchased characters ala Brawlhalla. But since they are charging AAA prices, I'll review them to AAA standards.

Graphics: 4/10
Mediocre models and limited animation make this title feel like an early PS2 game. Characters have no alternate skins or even palette swaps to support readability in ditto matches. UI is generic and utterly without "Nick"-style flair and aesthetic. In fact, the only UI elements that feel "Nick" at all are the giant character art cutouts on the various menu screens. The rest of the UI looks like a rushed affair with a lack of polish approaching that of a game jam weekend project.

Sound design: 2/10
Characters don't have individual sound effects or voices. Just thump/slap/whack effects for the various types of moves that are reused throughout the roster. The only voice you'll hear throughout your fights will be the announcer half-heartedly reading through some generic reaction clips: "Wow!", "That's gotta hurt!", et cetera.
Zero music tracks from the source material. Stages have one song per stage, questionably "inspired" by the TV show it's from, but the best of these are unmemorable and little more than background noise (Harmonic Convergence - Korra's Theme). The worst are irritating enough to distract from the gameplay (Glove World - Sandy Cheeks' Theme).

Controls: 4/10
Barely customizable, doesn't work natively with gamecube controllers, no saving settings per-profile (no profiles at all, in fact). No tap jump option for those who aren't used to button jumping and have decades of muscle memory of pushing up to jump.

Gameplay: 7/10
This is Slap City with 90's nick themed character skins. If you liked playing Slap City you'll like this. If Slap City felt disjointed and janky then you're going to feel that way about All-Star Brawl. Not terrible, but not as good as any other platform fighter (except Brawlhalla).

Overall: 4/10, Do Not Recommend
All-Star Brawl is a barebones affair from start to finish and does not justify its asking price. While the gameplay is serviceable and an interesting departure from the tried-and-true formula of Smash, this is a thin, hollow-feeling experience that consistently leaves the player disappointed. I won't be returning to this game.
Posted October 9, 2021.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
2 people found this review helpful
1.3 hrs on record
Ossuary's description and video make it seem like a surreal/creepy horror game, but the gameplay heavily detracts from that feeling. You play as a person-like entity who wanders around and talks to other person-like entities. The unsettling vibe is undercut by game-y, boring 'quests' where you talk to Person A, who tells you to talk to Person B on the other side of the map, who then tells you to talk to Person C, then back to Person A. Then you are rewarded with an item that lets you talk to Person D, and so on.

The sole mechanic in the game is using your Sins on different people to get the reaction you need to advance a quest. This is interesting thematically but is actually just dressing for a very old adventure game mechanic. Corrupting a soul with the sin of wrath is not fundamentally different from "USE [object] ON [subject]". Just as it does in adventure games, this boils down to a trial-and-error system where you end up mindlessly using every sin on every character, as the puzzle's logic is skewed and often only makes sense in retrospect.

Ossuary's story is its strongest asset. It has a good theme, coherent design, and well-executed characters. As a satire of 1st world society it is a decent framework; unfortunately, the writing is weak. Much of it leans heavily on Discordian texts and similar 60's counterculture pseudophilosophies. This is what initially drew me to the game, being a fan of that sort of thing. But the writing here is largely referential in nature and brings neither the wit nor the insight of the source material. It reads like a creepypasta Principia Discordia fanfic.

All in all, the biggest flaw in Ossuary is the tedious gameplay. The store page sells this game entirely on the ambience and aesthetic, but you'll spend less time going "wtf that's messed up!!" and more time going "uuuuuuugghhhhh why do I have to walk BACK to that guy". I give it a 2/5 fnord.
Posted June 26, 2018.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
4 people found this review helpful
8 people found this review funny
2.0 hrs on record (0.6 hrs at review time)
Final boss is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. He chaingrabs you and leaves you permanently stunned with no recourse, even if you did all the grinding implied by the Secretary Bird. I spent 20 minutes playing Chopsticks for this? Can't even see the end cutscene. Pretty mad and will be refunding. Thanks for nothing.

Also I was told there was a mod for "it" but I couldn't find it in any of the usual sites????
Posted May 6, 2018.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
6 people found this review helpful
4.9 hrs on record
A light metroidvania with very charming graphics. Plenty of interesting bosses to kill, items to collect, and secrets to uncover. All of the different areas have their own art and music, and each are short enough that you don't ever feel bogged down.

This is a great game, and you can finish it in less than 5 hours. Recommended for both fans of the genre and those who are new!
Posted October 29, 2017.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
5 people found this review helpful
0.8 hrs on record
I like the attempts at novelty on the tried and true sudoku formula. The nomiko variant is initially interesting but isn't actually much different, once you get used to it. You always solve puzzles in the exact same way.

I also like the fact that you only need to solve certain squares to advance a level -- since a Sudoku puzzle always starts off at maximum difficulty and get easier as you go, this is a clever way of avoiding the tedious last third, where you're just filling in obvious cells.

This title has a real lack of polish, though. There's no background music, and a number of technical errors mar what could have easily been a fun timewaster. There's not a quick/easy way to input 'possible' values. You have to click on the pencil to toggle this on/off each time. Playing on paper or the Nintendo DS is a markedly better experience.

You're probably better off just googling "play sudoku" and going with whatever HTML5 bs pops up.
Posted October 21, 2017. Last edited October 21, 2017.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
10 people found this review helpful
2.2 hrs on record
I did not enjoy this game at all. The gameplay is mostly the sort of thing you'd get in an old-school Choose Your Own Adventure novella (if you GRAB THE SKELETON, turn to page 18...) with some basic dice rolling mechanics tacked on. Neither your choices or your dice rolls are interesting in any way. It feels like you're just sitting there while somebody describes a bunch of bad things happening to you, giving you almost nothing in the way of interactivity.

Combat is servicable, and is the most enjoyable part of the game. It's shallow but you do have some interesting abilities and different monsters use different tactics, so you generally - with some notable exceptions - feel like you have control over the outcome of the fights.

After beating the game once I had no desire to play it again, but I thought I'd try a few of the other characters to see if there was any replayability. While there are numerous 'flavor differences' between characters, the story remained the same. Your path is linear, with little branches of no consequence peppered throughout. It's very strange to me that a game with over a dozen characters to try has so little in the way of offering an actually new experience.

If this were all, I'd merely rate this game mediocre, for fans only. But there's one last aspect of this game that absolutely dooms it to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥: the mazes.

There are at least two (possibly more) large mazes that are pseudo-randomly generated out of corridors, turns, scripted events, and dead ends. Each bend in the maze asks for your input, even when there's only one way to go, or you're just backtracking through after hitting yet another dead end. It's horribly tedious - over fifteen minutes of mindlessly exploring empty corridors with the occasional identical "trap" room taking away your health then sending you back to wander aimlessly some more.

Don't buy this game. If you got it for free in a humble bundle like I did, don't bother. Read an actual book or play an actual game, don't waste your time.
Posted October 21, 2017.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
2 people found this review helpful
13.6 hrs on record (11.6 hrs at review time)
The most mechanically interesting Tower Defense game I've ever played. Lots of freedom in how you approach levels, maybe even too much -- you can find a strategy that works for you and apply it in every level, with a few exceptions. Usually Tower Defense games have levels that encourage certain strategies or enemy types that make only one approach viable. This is very rarely the case in GemCraft.

The graphics and story are pretty mediocre, though that's par for the course for the genre.

I particularly liked the Traits system, which acts as a dozen or so different difficulty adjustment options that increase item drop/rarity. It made the game feel like I was always pushing my limits, and rewarded me accordingly. Even just thinking about that as I'm writing this review makes me want to play more.

If I could only play one Tower Defense game for the rest of my life, I'd choose GemCraft without a second thought. It's got everything you could want and a whole lot more. Tons of content, more towers than you could ever use, a great sense of freedom and progression. Just a phenomenal game in almost every way.

4.5/5, highly recommended.
Posted September 10, 2017. Last edited September 10, 2017.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
22 people found this review helpful
25.8 hrs on record (11.8 hrs at review time)
For the past ten years, I've been an on-and-off-again player of the developers' first game, Kingdom of Loathing, and this shares a ton of similarities with it. If you're not familiar with KoL, it's free to play and in your browser right now, so go ahead and try it out if a funny, turn-based stick figure RPG is appealing to you and you're not ready to drop $11.

If you liked the writing and/or gameplay in KoL this is the best of that and actually a 'real game' too. KoL can be a little frustrating to play with the daily turn limits and such, and of course there's nothing like that here.

WoL is paced well and doesn't overstay its welcome - about 10 hours long, 6 if you were just doing mainline stuff.

A minor sticking point for me is the first 30 minutes are basically a point-and-click adventure (go here, pick up KEY_ITEM, go there, use KEY_ITEM, unlock next 'puzzle') but once you're out of that area it's got an overworld with lots of sidequests and such and it doesn't feel so constricted, and future playthroughs let you skip that.

The devs learned a lot from making KoL and you can tell from some of the design decisions about how combat works, stats, skill levels ups, etc. It's fun to play and very funny. I hope you play it!
Posted August 19, 2017. Last edited August 19, 2017.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
14 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
0.0 hrs on record
A couple hours of good content for a good game! I wish more games did stuff like this.

I really loved what they did to mix things up in this expansion. Rather than getting emails as you unlock new missions and such, you're in an IRC channel with other NPC hackers. They banter among themselves and sometimes help you out. It feels like you're part of a team!

The missions are cool too, and they do some neat things that the base game doesn't. I feared this DLC was just going to have a boring new GenericPort1 and a complimentary GenericPort1Cracker and that's it. While there is some of that there's also some genuinely cool moments and a great final challenge that gives you your own moral choice.
Posted July 2, 2017.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
1 person found this review helpful
1.1 hrs on record (0.9 hrs at review time)
It's like the best part of old school FPSes without anything else. If Serious Sam or Doom is a five course meal, this is a thick slice of chocolate cake with tons of icing. Very satisfying in short bursts!
Posted June 25, 2017.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
< 1  2  3 ... 30 >
Showing 1-10 of 296 entries