Recent reviews by Zach Fett

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

I would highly recommend Zedfest for fans of Killing Floor, zombie horde-style games, or just people who enjoy co-op shooters in general.

The simplest way to describe Zedfest is that it's Killing Floor but third person and with a faster, arena shooter-y movement style (you can even rocket jump!). And a bit more silliness.

For being made by one (?) developer it is extremely impressive and well done. Combat and movement feel really satisfying (something I'm usually very picky about), there's a ridiculous amount of content and stuff to unlock, I've had no noticeable major bugs, and there's even mod support including a few custom maps. Check out the DOOM 3 Marine mod I made here![www.nexusmods.com]

The only complaints I have are pretty minor. Some of the objective types need a few tweaks, especially "Stealing the Meat!?" Once you rebuild the "Mega Zed" you have to fight it, but it's so fast on higher difficulties you can't really outrun it, and there's no indicator of how much health it has and it's very tanky.

I'd also like if enemy types were explained in-game. It took me a long while to figure out what the siren enemies are doing and I'm still not 100% sure (buffing nearby enemies, I think?). I'd like to see the hidden first person command ("ENTERFP") made official since it almost works really well, just needs a tiny bit of polishing up the camera position. There's no toggle crouch setting, and I'd really like if there was an "instrumental soundtrack-only" option like Killing Floor 2 had, since some songs include death metal screaming vocals that are pretty distracting.

And as far as bugs go, there are only two that I can recall: The "Zed Outline" setting doesn't seem to work properly when disabled, and bosses can't be finished off with explosive weapons. They take damage from them perfectly fine, but when they're at that final 0.01 hp remaining, you can't use an explosive weapon to finish them off, it has to be either melee or something that fires bullets.

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

It's literally more of HELLDIVERS but third person, prettier, and even more satisfying gameplay. There's a few issues at launch, but overall I'm thoroughly enjoying it and I'd easily recommend the game to anyone who was either a fan of the first game, the Earth Defense Force series, or just wants a good co-op shooter.

The gunplay feels great, weapons are very punchy, enemies are fun to shoot, there's limb damage for all enemies (and players!) which adds a bit of extra depth to the combat (shoot off the arms of that charging Automaton to remove it's weapons!). Movement feels nice and weighty, you can dive onto the floor and shoot while laying on your back (BFV-style). I cannot stress enough how great everything feels in this game, I could not ask for it to be any better.

The graphics are fantastic (check my screenshots for proof) and it runs surprisingly well. I've had no issues with stuttering, judder, anything like what most modern PC releases have suffered from.

I've had only one crash, and it was from a known bug (don't try to equip anything in the Armory until after doing one more mission after the tutorial) EDIT: This has been fixed! The only major issue I've encountered in my 5 hours of playtime so far is joining randoms through quickplay is very finicky. It works maybe 25% of the time, but I know the developers have mentioned they're aware of the server issues and have a hotfix incoming very soon.

Otherwise I've had no issues. I like how you can get everything for free (premium currency is earnable, the sorta-battle passes are more like unlock trees that are available forever no matter when you start playing, there's no FOMO).

One issue I've seen some reviews mention is the game's use of an anti-cheat. Yes, I would prefer the game not to need it, but I do know hackers were a bit of an issue in the first game and they'd try to ruin the galactic war system.

1. No, the anti-cheat does not run 24/7. I've checked, the anti-cheat's process and services are immediately stopped when the game closes (even when it crashed the one time).
   
   
2. Yes, the anti-cheat they use is "kernel level", but I swear people just hear that scary word and don't look any further. Almost every anti-cheat is "kernel level", including VAC, EasyAntiCheat, BattleEye, etc.

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

I'm sorry but Limitless Hunger is too rough for me to recommend, there's a few too many major issues.

My biggest complaint is the horrible hitboxes on attacks, they're entirely busted. You frequently take damage from attacks that clearly should've missed, and this is especially noticeable with some boss fights where they take off half your HP from one hit. On the flip side, most non-boss encounters are incredibly easy by just strafing and jumping. The AI is very basic and just runs straight toward you so they also get stuck frequently.

Another gripe I have is the level design just isn't very good, at least from the few levels I saw. Arenas are either far too large and easy to circle strafe around enemies forever, or they're way too small. Most boss arenas fit into the latter, especially the Cerberus boss fight, you can barely get around that boss with how tiny the area is and most of it's attacks have massive hitboxes. Even when the size of the arena isn't the issue, they're usually just kind of.. boring. Visually some look nice, but design-wise they're almost all very flat.

The UI is, quite frankly, atrocious. It feels like the dev spent more time on putting those links to streamers/YouTubers on the main menu than they did on the level select screen or settings menu. The mouse sensitivity and FOV sliders don't even give you any values so who knows what they're set to.

The audio mixing is really rough, especially boss dialogue which is mixed pretty poorly with the rest of the game audio.

The weapon selection is.. meh? I don't think some of the weapons were thought out very well. The sword seems pretty useless when you have infinite ammo pistols, the machine gun is really unsatisfying and quickly replaced by the minigun, and the secondary fire on the shotgun is kinda broken; it has a short cooldown, infinite ammo, and a huge AOE. Also there's a grapple hook thing that I guess is supposed to pull you toward the enemy you use it on but it doesn't really do that, it just kinda moves you a few feet forward and then instagibs the enemies. It's sort of just a long range melee attack, I guess?

Lastly, it looks like the game hasn't received any updates/patches since it's release in 2021 (at least there's nothing in the news tab and SteamDB says there haven't been any). The developer is now working on some other game they've shown a bit of on their Twitter, but what's frustrating is that apparently an update was nearly finished for Limitless Hunger and just.. never released? https://twitter.com/Void__ink/status/1487767316452589571

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

It is criminal that Glitch Busters currently only has 41 reviews on Steam. I pray it sold decently well because I would love to see a follow-up, preferably with more of the mech and hover vehicles, and Ana, of course.

TL;DR: Highly recommended, especially if you can play this with a friend or three, but even solo I would recommend this criminally underappreciated game. It's a charming third person shooter/platformer with interesting co-op mechanics, great level variety, satisfying weapons, incredibly fun vehicles, and a good amount of replayability.

The store page currently has the "Looter Shooter" user tag and that is entirely false, I don't know why people tagged it as such. Missions are linear with occasional side paths/secrets, and weapons are obtained by first unlocking them in the shop, then they have a random chance to appear in the weapon chests scattered around levels. Any weapon or power-up you obtain during a mission is only available for that level. If anything it's almost more of a roguelike situation, but only barely.

For the most part it just plays like a standard level-based third person shooter with platforming bits, kinda like Ratchet & Clank, except with a lot more magnet-y co-op stuff going on. You can stack on top of your friends, bounce off each other's heads to reach high places, walk on magnetic walls, etc. You earn points/coins during missions to then spend on permanently unlocking weapons and power-ups that then have a chance to spawn in any future level, and you can also use your coins on cosmetics. There are zero microtransactions in the game, and only one DLC that's a measly $3 for a boss rush challenge mode and a handful of recolored accessories like purple/green wings.

I should also mention that there are three vehicle types in the game that spawn during certain levels, and they are one of my favorite things in this game. There's a rolling drill vehicle, a missile-firing mech, and a hover vehicle. Each one has a different attack ability when stacked on teammates. I especially loved the mech and hover vehicle, I wish they were in the game more!

The story mode took me roughly 8 hours to complete and get all but two achievements, but there's still quite a bit to do. There's a "Patrol Mode" which I think lets you play on story locations with randomly generated levels from set pieces? That or they just have their own level design from the story, I'm not sure. In Patrol Mode you select the location you want to play on, then a duration of either short/medium/long, and play through areas as long as possible until you reach 3 stars or run out of time and fail. It also seems like the enemies are randomly chosen for each mission, I've seen late-game enemies spawning in early locations, which was cool. There's also a "Simulation Mode" where you can basically customize your own Patrol mission, down to which enemies, weapons, etc. will spawn. There seems to be quite a bit of replayability.

I only have two gripes with the game. The AI teammates can be a bit dumb sometimes; I wish I could ping a vehicle for them to get in and sometimes they'll just constantly fall into water/lava like dummies. Secondly, the side-scrolling/forward-scrolling levels are pretty rough and frustrating. A lot of this is due to having to pray the AI know to raise you at the right time to avoid getting hit, but half the time they wouldn't. Also I would've preferred if we could freely aim up/down instead of just forward during those levels.

I've only encountered two noticeable bugs so far. For some reason custom keybinds just.. don't work for me. They work fine for my friend, but no matter what once I get into a mission I'm back to default keybinds, even though the menu still shows them as set correctly. I even tried editing the config file manually with no luck. Annoying issue, but the default binds are thankfully alright. I just wish I could give a thumbs up with my side mouse button!

The second bug I've witnessed was when an enemy froze in a dying position but wouldn't actually die, and then they started slowly floating up toward the moon.. It was majestic looking, but required restarting the mission since the game doesn't have any sort of trigger for "an enemy has left this plane of existence, instakill it". Thankfully missions are short so we only lost maybe 5 minutes of our time.

Oh and one more very big final complaint I have with the game: I can't play as Ana! :'(

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

STEEP is an incredibly comfy game, there's very little else I find as cathartic as riding around the mountains in this game for hours on end.

I consider this to be one of Ubisoft's last great games. The monetization was pretty fair, it doesn't constantly bother you to buy cosmetics or anything, it doesn't have a battle pass or any live service crap to shove down your throat, and there's very little handholding with tutorials or anything like most modern Ubisoft games.

The game is also frequently on sale for $4.50, or the edition with all the DLC for a measly $7.50 (which I'd recommend since the DLC map, Alaska, and the DLC gear like the wooden sled are incredibly fun to screw around with).

You may be asking yourself, "Why get this when the sequel, Riders Republic, is already out and cheap too?" Because STEEP is better. Plain and simple. Riders Republic is much more of a modern Ubisoft game with all the worst parts of live service games in it. There's a battle pass, it often shoves the cosmetic shop in your face, there's tons of handholding and tutorial spam. Additionally they went in a more obnoxious over-the-top "How do you do, fellow kids?" direction, the physics and controls feel drastically worse and more arcade-y (there's a STEEP control scheme but it doesn't work well and feels nothing like STEEP), there are NPCs and real players EVERYWHERE on the map, you never get to be alone, and because there are far more gear types it feels like none of them are done well. They spread themselves out too much.

STEEP doesn't have these issues. It's simpler in some ways, but far more polished and developed with snowboarding and skiing. It feels incredibly satisfying to just ride around, to have the mountain to yourself, STEEP is, as I said at the start of this review, a great and comfy game. Highly recommended.

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

A fun but very janky and short Japanese TPS from the early 360 era.

The PC port is decent, there's thankfully no mouse acceleration or smoothing! It's not perfect though. The game ignores small mouse movements (no matter the DPI), the single anti-aliasing option doesn't do much (and forcing it with Nvidia Profile Inspector breaks lighting), and strangely enough the game stutters horribly unless you keep a controller plugged in. You can still play with a mouse and keyboard, but you have to keep a controller plugged in as well. Very odd.

As far as gameplay goes, it's pretty fun. I do however think you'll see the best level in the game at the very start, Stage 1. It gets worse from there, with Stage 2's city being way, way too big and maze-like. Stage 5, the foggy forest, is probably my second favorite level, unless we count boss fights then obviously fighting a massive flying demon while on top of a jet takes the cake. They went all out there, and then surprisingly the final boss is pretty lame and easy in comparison.

There's also a few points where the game suddenly turns into Silent Hill with two very creepy monster designs, those came out of left field but they're really cool. I would've actually liked more of that.

Once you beat the game you'll unlock "Concept Missions" in the main menu. They're sorta like the minigames in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence where you play the same levels but in very fun and unique ways, like needing to find 50 enemies hiding in the forest stage, or one where you have no weapons, only your push ability ("Willpower") and a ton of explosive barrels all around you to use on the big brain enemies. They're all a nice change of pace.

I do have a few gameplay-related gripes I should mention:

1. The game doesn't incentivize you to use your powers/abilities very much. You can play 90% of the game entirely as a standard TPS and do fine.
   
   
2. There's no way to bind abilities to hotkeys. Having to bring up the ability wheel and cycle through it to find the one you want while in the middle of a fight is rough.
   
   
3. After you beat the game for the first time you unlock Stage Select, but the developers inexplicably decided that you shouldn't be able to earn skill points while playing through stages individually. You have to start a New Game+ and play the levels consecutively to keep working on leveling everything up. What the hell? I just wanna play the levels I like!

Overall I do recommend Bullet Witch, but on sale. It's an enjoyable budget title with some very fun moments and just the right amount of cheese and jankiness.

It's frequently on sale for $4-5 and well worth that price. Yes, the campaign is very short (maybe 4-5 hours long at most), but there are multiple difficulties (including two secret ones to unlock), a bit of a grind to unlock every ability/upgrade, and the Concept Missions add some extra playtime.

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

A tense arcade-y combination of score attack and third person shooter that's easily worth the $4 it's often on sale for.

There are a few issues on PC to keep in mind. ADS sensitivity isn't separated from hip-fire sensitivity (if you have a Logitech mouse you can get around this with DPI shifting when you hold RMB), multiplayer surprisingly still works but uses GFWL so it takes some fiddling, and lastly vignette and motion blur are tied to other post-processing effects. Overall nothing too major.

It's a shame Bizarre Creations is no longer with us, they made some great games that for whatever reason went under the radar like this and Blur.

https://twitter.com/GameAesthetix/status/1736053751163830781

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

This is really close to being a great multiplayer game, but balancing needs a lot of work and there's a few too many poor design choices right now for me to recommend the game.

A major gripe I've had with this game since I played the first beta over a year ago is that Cashout currently incentivizes third partying. As in, if two teams are fighting over a vault, the best thing for team 3 to do is wait on the sidelines until one team dies, then swoop in and kill the remaining team and steal the vault before the timer ends.

There is no reason to be in control of a vault unless it's timer is about to end.

This absolutely needs to be changed, if anything the vaults should be slowly depositing money into the defending team's score, instead of all at once at the end of the timer. Otherwise it is far too easy to defend a vault for all but the last 5 seconds of a timer, get third partied and wiped, and then get nothing out of all that time spent defending. It's incredibly unsatisfying.

Balance in general is all over the place. There are some weapons, like the V9S and SA1216, that have been a bit too strong since the betas and for release they didn't buff the other weapons to try to make them more compelling choices. They also nerfed Light quite a bit since the second to last closed beta, their starting SMG (the MAC-10/M11) used to shred so people complained and the developers swung the pendulum a bit too far in the opposite direction imo. Now Medium is better in close range than Light (unless the Light uses a V9S, of course).

I'd also like to see some more "regular" modes added. Maybe a mode with only two teams competing, 6v6, instead of 3v3v3? A standard team deathmatch or Battlefield-style Conquest mode would also be really fun with the mechanics going on in this game. I just really hope the developers figure out the balancing at some point.

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

A cute and casual party game with good map variety, a nice artstyle (thanks to Terada Tera), lots of unlockables, very fair monetization with everything obtainable for free, crossplay, a competent PC release, a catchy soundtrack, and full bot support! Why isn't this more popular?

There are quite a few maps with nice aesthetics/variety, a lot of cute cosmetics, tons of gear/weapons to unlock, and the monetization seems very fair. You can only spend real money on XP/coin boosters (which seem unnecessary, thankfully) and the battle pass each season ("Episode"), which only costs $5 and has two reward tracks included (50 for Busters, 50 for Monsters, and a lot of the rewards are free regardless of if you buy the battle pass).

From what I can tell, after an Episode has ended all of those cosmetics go into the random loot pool for both the shop (which cycles daily and only uses the in-game coin currency, not real money) and the gacha loot boxes (which again only uses coins, not real money!). Props to the devs for doing that and avoiding both predatory microtransactions and FOMO.

Also the soundtrack is really, really good. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXlhMpkGTmV3y9AH51KLP5ExoNbvWtBpc

There are a couple negatives I have with the game. For one thing the game is pretty dead, even with crossplay. I'll occasionally bump into one or two other players, but that's been a rare occasion so far. Thankfully, however, the game has full bot support for both sides and you still earn full XP and coins with them. Sometimes I legitimately cannot tell if someone is a bot or not, which is probably a good thing.

On the flip side, the few times I've gotten a human Monster player.. I can tell very, very quickly, because they're usually high level and know how to absolutely destroy the Busters. As other reviews have mentioned, the game seems a bit unbalanced with Monsters being a bit too strong when played by someone who knows what to do, especially ones with long range attacks.

However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this review it's a very casual party game. Matches only last a couple minutes, jumping into another match is very fast (mainly thanks to instant bot fill), and the game doesn't make you feel bad for losing a match, you still get plenty of XP and coins.

One more negative I have, is that there aren't really any graphic settings for the game. Thankfully as far as a "PC game by Japanese devs" goes it's fine, it plays well with mouse and keyboard, there's key rebinding, and there's no awful mouse smoothing or acceleration (THANK YOU!), but I would like to see a few graphic settings added. I'd like if we could disable the currently-forced chromatic aberration and vignette, as well as settings for render scale and anti-aliasing to get rid of the jaggies. Otherwise it seems like a competent PC release.

I also would like to see some more game modes added if possible, even if it's just something like 6 Busters vs. 2 Monsters.

Some reviews have mentioned how annoying Goonyan's English VA is with the constant "Nyamo!" voiceline, I highly recommend you switch to Japanese voices and English text. Goonyan's Japanese VA (Shiori Izawa!) is much nicer on the ears and almost kinda sounds a bit like Neco-Arc to me. You won't even hear much voiced dialogue in the game past the prologue, anyway.

TL;DR: Would definitely recommend, especially if you can get it on sale and maybe bring some friends in, or if you're like me and okay with playing with bots. I could see this being really fun with a full group of friends. I noticed that if you do a private match (which still allows for crossplay thanks to lobby codes), the monster player is chosen at random before each match, which is great.

Follow my curator page for more recommendations!

It's like if Hotline Miami was a 3D retro-style FPS with very satisfying combat and an interesting trippy visual style.