Recent reviews by Neckbearded Vulture

Corn Kidz 64 is an absolutely delightful N64-styled platformer. It's short, but oh so very sweet, The controls are tight, the levels are densely-packed, and the visual style is impeccable. For people who love N64-era plaformers that are looking for a short bit of filler between larger games instead of larger collect-a-thons, Corn Kidz64 is an easy instant recommend.

Between this and Psuedoregalia, fans of the "Fifth-generation-inspired 3D platformers with a heavy emphasis on movement that take place in dreams where you control an anthropomorphic goat that does not appear to be wearing pants" genre are eating pretty well in 2023. Fantastic game, definitely worth the price. It's good!

If you're reading this to know whether I think modern-day Runescape is worth your time or your money as a completionist with more than 25000 hours in this game (I play primarily through the Jagex Launcher, not the Steam client), the answer is "No." If you want a little more detail, the answer is "Dear god NO, this game and its developers do not respect you, your time, or your money." If you must play Runescape, go play an ironman in OSRS instead. If you want my full thoughts on modern Runescape, they're below.

I'd imagine that a lot of the people out there on steam playing games have heard of Runescape. Maybe you saw it on miniclip once when you were a kid, or that one friend of yours growing up would never stop shutting up about it. Well, it's still running, as one of those immortal forever-games that lingers just on the edge of the collective unconscious of the english-speaking web. For some people, installing Runescape will be like coming home after a long break. For others like me, we've never left. Runescape is a game that fills me with many feelings- Chief among them nostalgia, the cozy warmth of meeting new friends, and the wonders of exploration.

Unfortunately in the past few years those feelings have been eclipsed by far by a profound sense of sadness, disgust, and revulsion, mostly as a result of the horrendous mismanagement of the game by its team. Runescape is a game that on face value has a lot going for it-- It's got more than 20 years of continuous updates, and for half of those years it spent its time being able to gloat that it was the most popular f2p MMO on the western market. Those times are long-passed Runescape. Modern-day Runescape is a game that resents its history and legacy- the developers do everything in their power to try and get you to pay them real money to make sure you never see even a small fraction of the content in the game. This isn't purely because they want your money though- They legitimately do not want you to play through the game's older and context-building content, as they are ashamed of it.

Why are the devs ashamed of it? Is it because the content is bad? Yes and no. It's not the quality of the content itself- Compare the reviews of this game to Oldschool Runescape, this game's sister-MMO that it shares roughly 10 years of content with. No, they developers are ashamed of it because they've willfully failed to upkeep it- The game boasts a nice artstyle and pretty graphics... in the free-to-play area. A large chunk of members areas, the parts of the game that they expect you to pay real money for on a recurring basis via your subscription, have gone unupdated from sometimes as far back as 2011, when Runescape was strictly a browser game. The member's areas have a mismatch of different artstyles, some ancient, some charming, some extremely ugly. Characters will have eight different looks in eight different artstyles over the course of a single questline. Some questlines straight up dead-end on major cliffhangers, teasing you with major plots that will never be resolved. Some of the modern questlines are alright in terms of quality, but the developer's lack of foreward thinking means that sometimes at low levels you'll be thrown directly into the middle of a 2012-era questline for seemingly no reason, surrounded by characters the game expects you to know and care about, because they were relevant in 2012, but have not met yet because you're still 200 hours of progression before you'll hit the master-level quest that introduced them in 2010.

So, if the content is kind of a mess, what's the replacement? Well, as I mentioned before, the developers want you to sidestep the quest and grind-related content by paying them real money. A lot of real money. Runescape is naked and unabashed in how eagerly it begs for you to spend money. While the game advertises itself as a free-to-play game on its face, to make serious progress past level 40 or so (which is a level range you hit VERY quickly in your account progression), the game expects you to:
-subscribe to membership, a monthly fee to access the majority of the game's content
-subscribe to PREMIUM membership. That's right, there's multiple membership tiers! This one gets you meaningless 'extra bonuses' to content, when Jagex feels like giving them out (No, you don't get to know in advance before purchasing if they'll actually do that for any content in the next year.)
-spend real money playing Treasure Hunter, the game's gacha p2w gacha system th
-pay for the game's battlepass
-purchase cosmetics via its ingame cosmetic shop using a currency used only in that shop which prevents you for paying the exact amount of money that the thing costs
...and more. The game will hound you, relentlessly, to pay it more even when you're already given it money. It is unabashedly shameless in how often it will try to remind you to pay money. It will dangle level 99 capes in front of you and go "Grinding to level 99 in this skill takes sooooo lonnnnggg, but if you paid for some treasure hunter keys you could have it in half an hour and nobody else will ever know you paid for it". It's gross. the game has level 120 capes in skills that do not go past 99 and who do not introduce new training methods past level 50 purely to guilt-trip you into pulling out your wallet to fork up for treasure hunter to make up the experience gap so you have the 'highest' cape of distinction for that skill. It's downright disgusting. And it's not limited purely to skills levels- every single facet of this game has been systemically hollowed out, and I can say it that with confidence because I own a trimmed completionist cape. I have in fact done E V E R Y T H I N G this game has to offer as a result of playing this game for 20 years.

I gave up every shred of that progress to go play Oldschool, the 2007-era version of runescape that doesn't have microtransactions, a couple of years ago. I don't regret it and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Modern-day runescape is a game without a soul, and that fact makes it the saddest game I've ever played.