Recent reviews by Stan ♂ Next ♂ Door

Do you miss Warioland?
Do you miss those really ugly cartoons from the 90s like Cow and Chicken and Kablam!, along with those weird mspaint 4chan comics from the internets early days?
Don't you wish they all came together in some disgusting orgy and produced a baby? In Italy?

Look no further, Pizza Tower is here.

Part Heroin, Part Pepperoni, All parts Wario. This game is a fast, kinetic and fluid platformer that has you controlling a Chef running up and around a tower that plans on destroying his Pizzeria. You gotta run through each level saving your little topping friends from their cages, all the while smushing and punching and slamming anything that dares to stand in your way. You'll be running at enemies who scream in terror when they see the green white and red glory that is your forehead careening toward them at blazing hot speeds. Run up walls, dive down, and let no brick wall nor tomato goblin stand in your way.

The game's distinct look achieves something most triple AAAA games do not, and that's cohesion. It's ugly, it's revolting, yet you can tell what is always going and where anything is, even at high speeds. Once you beat a level, you need to make a mad dash out by playing the level in reverse while rave chiptune music is blaring before the Pizza Monster wakes up to eat your soul. It's easy to remember where everything was, you have arrows and your chef buddy pointing the way, all easy to see no matter where they are or what their doing. It all fits together perfectly and really feels like it was made by a person and not some committee that's worried you might get lost or not see something.

Since this is a modern day indie, it has the pleasure of taking the best things from previous games while putting it's own spin on it. Imagine if Super Meat Boy met Warioland, with very fluid controls and animations that all connect to each other seamlessly, while having unique levels that require memorization to truly master them. Nothing feels mean, nothing feels out of place, nothing feels out of reach.

This leads to the game having a high skill ceiling, as its score system will award you letter ranks depending on how often you got hit, how fast you beat the level and how much you collected. I was at 2 hours in when I wrote this review and I got a few A ranks on a couple of levels, so the game isn't shy to hand you highish grades to show you "wow, you did pretty good there, but can you master it?". Most games would have awarded me a C or lower because I'm new, because I don't have all the powers yet, because I haven't seen all the mechanics yet.

The game shows and teaches you everything right off the bat, it's up to you to figure these levels out, which paths to take, how many toppings to get on your pie, and whether you're feeling meat lovers tonight. Flying at mach speeds through levels with the music blaring without bumping into a wall is an incredibly rewarding feeling and you have no one to thank but yourself. No meters to manage, no powerups to abuse, just your two feet and your forehead, and maybe a handful of anchovies for those baddies that don't step aside.

Jack in some of those pot needles of yours and let the Chef do the talking. Wario may have retired, but his deranged cousin in the asylum is still causing trouble, and it's up to you to direct his anger toward this Pizza Tower.

5 out of 5 pies.

Twin Stick Vehicular sandbox mayhem. Controls take a bit of getting used to and the UI isn't the best but give it an hour and you're running around the map stomping all over mech suits and blowing up tanks.

Story/World/Atmosphere: If you want story/lore in your twin stick games this game has PLENTY, there's tons of pilots to unlock that are just a .jpg with text biographys for example on top of all the missions that have long descriptions. It's a dark bleak oppressive future and you're tasked with blowing ♥♥♥♥ up in it. The maps, lighting and sprites are all very gritty and paint a very good looking cyberpunk dystopia. The music is moody and that artist even went made songs for Stranger Things. The game is sprite based but this looks like the most crisp sharpest Starcraft-era game ever, you'll forget it's sprite based consistently.

Gameplay: You get 3 types of vehicles. Mech, Tank, Anti-Grav vehicle(flying car basically). Each can be customized with different types of rockets, morters, chain guns, etc. They have different abilities, mobility, it's not super granular but its very accessible. You pick a map of which there are plenty, complete the objectives, get money, buy more weapons and vehicles and .jpgs to switch up your pilot. It's very arcade like where you just blow things up while trying to survive and your goal is *gasp* more to have fun than anything else.

When you're done with the campaign or you want to do something on your own, there's a free play mode where you can pick whatever mission you want with money(missions arent expensive and you get plenty of money) that have different objectives. Your pilot jpg gives you different payout amounts, as well as the type of vehicle you have. Squishier vehicles get more money compared to your beefcakes.

Cons: Firing your weapons, unlike most twin sticks on pc or console where you either have a laser or a marker/cursor, this game is a hybrid. Theres a small triangle thats your cursor and there are 2 long arcs headlights that act as your laser sight. Losing sight of your cursor is constant as aiming far away your headlights will arc up to show how far they go, wether its enough to go over barricades or low enough to hit enemies mid range, the readability is not that good. You begin to learn everything by feel because the visual aid just isn't there, the arc lands at 5 meters, you know by feel the mortar will land at 7 meters and the rail gun will land at 4-5. It's not a huge problem but it leads to a learning curve that feels out of place because the game otherwise has an amazing tutorial and customizable UI to really ease you in. You can even slow the game down as much as you want with a setting.

The objectives are these tiny TINY little icons that you cant make bigger(but i think you can change the colour) that are the edges of your screen and with how the artstyle is, it just gets lost or outright invisible and you have to move your camera around to find it. The maps aren't super big but I found myself constantly scanning the edge of my screen looking for this 1x1 pixel to tell me where the last cannon to blow up is.

Final Thoughts: The artstyle, music and robot hotline miami gameplay gets a recommend from me. Whatever issues there are are pretty minor and theres mods you can screw around with to extend playtime. The sequel is in full development and looks to 'fix' everything about the 1st game while managing to look even better. The games 6 years old and got updates up until 2021 that added real content, REAL content. Not just skins or mutator updates like most developers do that try and tout they supported their game for years.

The best 4 hours of your life. Incredible game with incredible story telling and addictive gameplay.

*PATCHED* Consistent crashing upon respawn. Some days are worse than others, can play for a few hours with only 1 crash, other times it's unplayable. Will change review once it's patched.

Also as far as I know there is no afk kick system and no rage quit penalty's, every 'afk' person I get on my team I notice actually does play than eventually stands there and dc's, i assume they crash. And with how often I run into this issue, there's no way there is any sort of system to fight this, either they know you crashed and are not punishing you or you only get punished after you rage quit 50 games in a day. Either way, at my worst I had 5 crashes in 1 hour and face no penalty or ban, so the other review mentioning a ban is the only instance I have seen anywhere, never heard of that on the forums i frequent or the discords or reddits. *PATCHED*

I'm keep the original review above as it paints a bigger picture of the state of the Halo multiplayer. I don't have the campaign so that will not be reviewed here.

The gameplay in Halo Infinite is some of the best Halo since 3. They nailed a lot, it feels great and its very fun to play.

But the problem is 343. Everything 343 does is taking a step back consistently, nonstop, every chance they get. Since day 1 there is terrible performance for an xbox one game on PC, G-Sync somehow just does not work, the desync was told to us by 343 themselves it's not going to get fixed anytime soon and that was a day 1 problem. The UI is somehow worse than Halo 4 and 5 and it still hasn't been updated to actually be readable, I'm not going to commend the developer for slowly making playlists the community want/Halo has always had, because that's a mistake that shouldn't been made by the people on their THIRD Halo product.

My personal biggest issue is the desync, because that effects every single action you do and every action that happens upon you. Nothing can be trusted ever, you get the jump on people and they kill you with an assault rifle faster or they 1 shot you with a melee. This has been documented since Day 1, and the 343 said they will not fix it because there's other things for that team to worry about.

What's more important than making sure what Player 1 and Player 2 see on their screens is the same? How would you feel logging on everyday and 1 shotting people with your melee and they never react to your shots and seem to ignore you because on THEIR screen you're not there yet or your doing something else. What kind of game is that?

I want to like this game, I do, but modern day shooters are all wolves in sheeps clothing who only want your battle pass money and for you to log on and do your chores(dailies,weeklies) every day. Unfortunately even Halo was eaten by modern day monster, and the community doesn't give a flying f**k either. Everyone complained about the in game shop and battle pass and challenges instead of the games balance, the games netcode, the games broken custom game feature, the games performance, only complaints about their stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cosmetics.

We're lucky to have the MCC, someone begged their genie out there for that to get fixed and it did. Hold onto that with all your strength and pray they don't decide to come back to it and re-ruin it. Just continue to play that and forget anything after Reach ever happened.

Let's make a Retro FPS, where it reminds you of the golden days of Quake, Painkiller, and Unreal. It'll have that classic look and fast gunplay.

Sounds all great on paper right? You forgot one thing, where's the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SPICE?

Most classic shooters had their own thing going for them, Quake with it's speed and being a pioneer with it's graphics, half-life with it's story and character's while in-engine and not cutscenes, unreal with it's graphics and atmosphere. Dusk just doesn't have anything to it. It feels like a mod for some shooter you think you played in the 90s but can't remember what it was, was it a cereal box game? Was it your high school buddys map? There's just nothing really going for it other than it's genre.

I'm not going to say there's no soul or creativity in this, but what is here is kinda...boring? Derivative? When I first started playing it I was pretty mixed on it, I liked the first 60 seconds as I was taking in the game, before I started to do eye rolls. Strafe running is like 100x faster then running forwards or backwards, like really you're THAT on the nose about it? The enemies aren't really varied and the way they look is pretty bland too.

The graphics, as many many other indie game that go for 'retro' aesthetics, completely miss the mark. Just because it's retro doesn't mean you get to phone it in. The guns are almost literal blocks and the bullets are cylinders with square smoke trails, the colour pallete seems almost ripped from a template of a map maker, you feel like you're shooting pop guns.

There's just nothing impressive or interesting to talk about here, plus for the price you just know this is going to be $1 within the next 12 months since it's indie and 'different'.

Wahh Wahh you only played for an hour. If your game isn't interesting within an hour, than delete your computer. It's called having a loop, Halo called it the 30 second rule, whatever you want to label it as. The first level of Mario has you jumping over pits, on enemies, getting power ups and having side areas. All within literally 60 seconds. I played this after 20+ years of shooter experience and wondered why it got basic stuff wrong. Amid Evil, this games contemporary, didn't have any of these issues. It leaned in pretty hard with it's Quake-ness and went from there. Eye Catching artstyle, an Axe that literally drags in enemies so interesting weapons, more interesting world and level design. All within...60 seconds. I'm given a reason to go further.

Have you ever heard that the last thing you do in your game is create the first level? So that everything you learned can up to that point can be utilized to it's best form?

Conclusion: The game is just cookie cutter. It's like your little brother found your copy of painkiller and copied it for a school project.

2022 update: The developer was right and it was not $1 in a year, it was $1 in 2 years because it, like all indie games, went on humble bundle and I got a key for a dollar from reddit. Like I always do with all my indie games.

I've had this game since Early Access, they have never optimized the game. It wasn't until last year(2018) where they finally fixed the bug where your keybinds would be reset after EVERY.SINGLE.PATCH.

Only for that bug to come back.

Takes 10 years to boot up the game, 8 years if you have an ssd. Hope you like that 2080ti cause your Quake II with raytracing won't crash after a half hour like this game will.

The constant seasonal themes they do sound nice, if their artists and gameplay designers didn't hate each other and wanted each other dead. Hitboxes become a guessing game and every new theme fills you with the "I wonder what random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ monster I'm shooting at is a the Clot/Slasher/Stalker etc." dreaded feeling. There's Killing Floor 1 where the Bloat just had santa clothes on and then there's Killing Floor 2 where the crawler turns into some weird rose plant thing for Halloween with vines...it's just an ugly mess.

The menu and UI never got touched since Early Access announcement day, random things have scrolling bars, other's dont. Hovering over options will list a description of what it does, not all. Turning on AA will not turn on AA. Forcing it through the .ini is a 50/50 shot. V-Sync, pft, don't think these guys ever got a build of Unreal Engine 3 past 2010 to fix any V-Sync issues. Classes have been out of wack for god knows how long and the map making is a far cry from the Unreal Engine 2 days.

Killing Floor 1 got a lot of things right and it needed its own engine and game to perfect it, but they have no clue what their doing.

Also they added lootboxes years ago, and every single dollar spent on the microtransactions is going toward other games(NOT KILLING FLOOR) and none of those games you can buy on the Steam platform.

I do not recommend this game, or this developer. Please spend your money elsewhere, the days of lodsamone and DOSH died in 2015. Just spend the $5 or less on the first game, at least every excuse you think of for that game you can chalk up to it being a mod of a Unreal Tournament 2004. This developer specializes in releasing constant jank.

This is a patch, not DLC. No one, I repeat, NO ONE liked the initial loot and forge system, so how can this be called 2.0? The one before it was hardly 1.0. The loot system is still in need of a overhaul because you get loot from finishing levels only, meaning longer levels do not get played. And even then the loot you acquire will be garbage meaning you have to play that same short level another 20 times, so then you can go and play the longer level on a higher difficulty and not instantly die. Typical warhammer game that's pretty fun but as usual gouges the ♥♥♥♥ out of it's small, stockholm syndrome induced fanbase.

I pushed myself to the edge of my limits and beyond, but this game has expectations far beyond my own. No amount of grinding could have closed the gap. I realise that now. It was made painfully obvious to me today as I tried to get Broly's clothes. Imagine my shock, to see the undeniable truth, that no matter how hard I tried I would never be able to get a Z.

its bad

The game is pretty fun, the biggest downsides come to basic design flaws that stretch over the whole game.

Graphics: Incredibily furry, I was honestly uncomfortable playing it at first but I got used to it. You simply can't make a deviantart artstyle without it coming off as incredibly wrong to people that are familiar with the internet. Other than that the animations are smooth but readibility can be a pain, there'll be ♥♥♥♥ all over the screen which will obscure an enemy who will go a little dark meaning he's dodged into the background behind you than molly whops you for half-all of your HP.

Gameplay: You learn every move within an hour, the rest of the moves you learn are locked away from you by story barriers and are only for traversal, so the beginning area will sit at 75% discovery until you're halfway through the game because you don't have the abilities needed to reach the chests that have like 1000 gold in them(you'll be swimming in gold very quickly anyway). So yes, the game only has 3 or so combos, fidget your little tails the flying furry pal of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rape can learn more moves more than you, which is pretty great. The game is overall very easy, the entire game is very metroidvania(i hate this term but that's the closest thing I can think of to describe it) so that means big wide open areas with treasure and ♥♥♥♥ hidden around everywhere. Unfortunatly the areas are too big and your character is too slow, which means you'll be using your moves to traverse faster than wait for the move to cooldown than spin some more to go faster. The game has different difficulty levels that do nothing except increase enemy damage, this is where the gameplay flaws really come in.


The games just way too easy, despite only having 3 combo attacks, spinng your sword and mashing the fidget-kill-everything-on-screen button wipes enemies up like poo on butts. You'll start to feel like it's a chore and you're not really getting anything except gold and blueprints to craft new items(get a craft piece, sell to vendor, he catalogues it, buy infinite amounts) which are useless because you can run by every enemy and go into the next big area and get even better stuff. You level up in terms of strength and defense in a very simple manner, just go into the next area and get the good loot. I played the game on hardcore and it was frustrating, you're basically never going to be at full HP because the slightest hit will do half or more of your lifebar, so yeah you'll be destroying everything in sight, when you do get hit you will die. Yes there are healing items and you get plenty but it becomes a waste healing to full than getting nicked by an enemy that decided not to get stunlocked/staggered(this will happen a lot) and kill you. Bosses are pitiful and behave the same as enemies, so knock them into the air and destroy them unless they decide to ignore your attacks and kill you, turning a 10 second fight into a 2 minute respawn and die ordeal praying the AI just stops ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cheating.

Music,story,everything else: It's all fine and passable. Story is "get this 20 chicken feathers I'll give you money" quests along with a big main quest of "WHO AM I WHAT AM I FIGHTING FFFOOOOORRRR" story arc that at least has passable voice acting and nice presentations. Music is nothing special, I usually have it off and listen to my Morgan Page podcasts.