Recent reviews by Kaittycat

This game falls into the same mental category for me as Death Stranding. At it's core, it's game where you drive, take in the environment, plunder abandoned and break down parts for resources to repair and upgrade your car. Though there is danger, there's no combat. It's really just about the driving.

Incredibly immersive, creepy at times, hectic others, and often very calm and relaxing. If you like to take in the world as you drive through the weird and discover different anomalies, you'll probably like this game. There's a lot of novelty in finding new weird things that could potentially wreck your precious car if you're not careful.

I love how hands-on the car management is, replacing wheels and panels by prying them off and carrying them around, doing manual maintenance, fixing a popped tire while you're on the road, and preparing for anything... but others might find such things a chore.

PSN requirement has been reportedly reverted! Now my review can be positive! :)

This is easily my game of the year. Ever since I was a kid I've wanted an immersive first or third person shooter with unending bugs to tear through with machineguns and explosives or play through a good game based on Starship Troopers. All those years of playing Starcraft and being sad that Starcraft Ghost never became a thing.. but thankfully, all these years later, Helldivers 2 delivers on all fronts.

Even after I've unlocked just about everything (not literally, but close to 90% of all unlockables,) I still love to play the game, just to play it! No treadmill needed! Though it does help that there has been a trickle of new stuff, weapons, enemies, and the overarching story delivered through alerts - usually this stuff isn't even announced, we just get brand new enemy types showing up in missions before they become a widespread menace!

A lot of fun with friends, I just spent 9 hours in the blink of an eye. Weapons feel pretty varied and have their own tactical depth, set of moves, and variations in upgrades. Art style is incredible. The game gets very difficult later on as well, so get ready to watch enemies telegraphing their moves and being careful about your positioning and attack commitments. This definitely isn't a shallow brawler like Castle Crashers.

After 9 hours, I can see the edges of what the game currently has to offer in EA, new stuff is less frequent and weapon and armor upgrades require revisiting the same biome over and over. Though I personally enjoy the gameplay loop enough to be looking forward to it, I'm not focused on upgrading or maxing my stats as much as I want to get better at blowing things up with my big cannon and get a cool build going.

Since the game is only $10 and in it's first early access build, I can easily recommend it for the amount of enjoyment I've gotten out of it already. If you don't like replaying content, as you normally do in rogue-lites or Monster Hunter, you might not enjoy it or would at least be better off waiting for a later/full release; which will undoubtedly improve an already fun game by leagues given the developer's track record.

This is such a good coin pushing game. If you like coin pushers, this is basically the best on the market that I've played. I would play Tower Unite just for the coin pusher. I would play The Coin Game just for the coin pusher. This one beats all of them. I can't stop playing it...

You've got a bunch of upgrades to farm and a bunch of collectibles to collect. I really enjoy farming the easy stages to upgrade my skills.

It IS a little rough around the edges, unpolished in some places, but I can forgive that for an indie developer. I do have some criticisms & feedback:

- The early game pacing isn't great, it feels very slow the first couple hours until you unlock a few upgrades, THEN it gets extremely addictive. The early stages give you almost no money so it's a while before you can really start buying stuff. Later, when you can throw down 4 coins per second or just turn on Auto and strategically lay down a line of coins, it's great to watch the waterfalls of coins and towers of chips falling.

- The difficulty and rewards are all over the place. Some of the stages will basically win themselves without any strategy, others stumped me until my 3rd or 4th attempt. Because of how the game handles victory being whether you're profitable or not, the difficult stages are not very rewarding. The hard stages, you often just barely make profit, while the easy stages end up giving big rewards (and are very attractive and enjoyable to farm.)

- The graphics, for the most part, are pretty good with the exception of the water stages looking terrible and the character art being pretty generic.

- Sound effects are also pretty generic and could use more variety. The end-level cheering sfx is grating. I also immediately muted the music, but there's still music in Arcade mode for the spin.

- You can't rebind the controls.

- Arcade mode is a little rough, but it's going to get updates and more levels. Hopefully it gets a lot more love.

That's a lot of critique, but I do love the game! I'm really looking forward to updates from the developer and see the game get even better.

Scratches the same itch as Apex Legends but better. Apex became frustrating for me since I cannot click heads with pinpoint accuracy, I always felt like baggage to my team. This game, though? You have plenty of alternative playstyles like melee, flamethrower, grenade launchers, disruption, defense, shields and support. Things like healing, being able to grab your teammates' corpses to a safe spot to res them, setting up defenses, walling off with mines, goo, turrets and barricades.. It's great! I love class-based team tactics. There's so much room for jukes and snap strategies with the multi-floor design of the maps.

Plus this game has the best level destruction and physics since Red Faction Guerrilla. It's so fun to play as a heavy, using the sledgehammer to knock down entire buildings, using the charge ability to plow through walls like the juggernaut, holy HECK I love it! It's not just for show, you can really dig out an objective from below so your team can bypass a fortified position or take down a building's foundation and watch it crumble.

A walking simulator if, instead of walking, you Tribes'd. There's a very serene flow state that you can enter once you've learned how to control your little marble/pancake. No real pressures or dangers, just good sights, sounds and game feel. Good for relaxing down from stress, or with a little weed.

Very fun and fast paced twin stick rogue-lite, I love the class selection and variety. Game feels so punchy and satisfying, everything from mowing down foes with an automatic rifle, landing pinpoint headshots with a sniper, setting off big explosions. It even feels good play as a patient commando, creeping around with a silenced pistol, avoiding sight lines, setting traps and backstabbing unsuspecting bots.

It presents a good challenge and modular difficulty that quickly ramps up, swarms of enemies can descend on you and overwhelm you before you realize it, then your gun jams, you've backed yourself into a corner, everything can go so wrong so quickly! It forces you into making important snap decisions and rewards mastering your skills, emptying mags and active reloads becomes an enjoyable rhythm.

For me, the best part of city building and sim management games is the early game. Setting up that initial settlement, getting used to the environment, the unique challenges, exploring, researching, unlocking things. In these kinds of games, I usually get too overwhelmed or bored after 10, 20 hours into a game. Against the Storm manages to turn the entire game into the most fun part for me - every settlement is a fresh start to set up and explore, with every settlement lasting a few hours before you move onto the next one. Each settlement contributes toward an overarching goal, unlocks and progress.

At first I didn't think I'd like the time pressure mechanics, but it actually really keeps me going and focused - a lot of management games have nothing to stop you from sitting and farming up whatever, you can go slow and I often stagnate, researching everything before advancing the game. Against the Storm has you constantly solving problems and making sure time doesn't tick out. For a city building game, it feels very active, you almost always have something to optimize, workers to move around, something to pay attention to, build, gather, trade.

Then after every settlement, win or lose, you get resources for spending on your Rogue-Legacy-esque absolutely massive research tree with critical new features to be unlocked, it keeps me coming back to see what else the game has to offer. The game is AAA tier polished and packed with stuff to do, discover, and unlock.

There's so much variety in biomes, extra challenges for extra rewards, what kinds of workers you bring, extra talent bonuses, mission orders to choose from. I love that you have only a very basic set of buildings to start out in each settlement and choose what advanced buildings to unlock over time, it makes its own set of challenges and optimization play - not every biome has every resource, you won't always get the building you need to make what you want, you really have to make impactful choices throughout every settlement.

The music and visual style is also top notch. The storm music in particular feels so foreboding, unsettling.

TLDR; this is the best city building sim management game I've ever played, and I've played a lot of them

Absolutely a contender for GOTY, up there with Gungeon, Isaac and Atomicrops

This game is so fun, creative and has so much energy. Tons of content from the long development, an absolute blast in co-op. So many silly weapons, items, characters and enemies, it's been a joy to dive into! I've yet to finish a run, 8 hours in and it feels like I'm constantly discovering things. It's difficult on the Rogue setting but in a way that feels pretty fair and has me coming back again and again.. just one more run..

EA Update 8/9/23:
I'm still torn. Two updates added a bit of content to the game, but now the price has gone up from $20-$25 to $30. The value isn't there for what you get at this time.
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Early Access Release Review:

The skeleton of the game is good. It gives you the hectic feeling of being swarmed by bugs just as it is in the movie which is fantastic. I love the concept of big team co-op, I love the system of build-and-defend, and it hits the nostalgia notes of older big-team class-based FPS games like Quake Wars, Section 8 and BF2142 in a great way! In the sea of competitive small team FPS games, I have been starving for a game like this.

But there's no meat on the bones, not much variety or stuff to keep you playing, not much new to see after the first couple of hours and the player count is rapidly falling off. It needs polish and more variety in unlocks, weapons, maps, aliens, all of which IS planned according to the roadmap.

I'm really looking forward to the game getting updates! As it stands right now, in it's current state released into early access and current price point, I cannot recommend it. I will absolutely revisit this review after the next update and beyond.