Recent reviews by TeaJay

Look at how far my darling twin-stick shooter has come.

Helldivers 2, much like it's predecessor is a coop shooter. Gather up a team, complete a mission and extract with goodies to prepare and personalize your playstyle.

It's an incredibly fun game to play with friends, and at its core it's a refreshing live-service game with a slowly evolving narrative that's actually done right. No FOMO battlepasses and you can earn premium currency. The game doesn't feel like a second 9-5 but still has it's strengths as a daily mainstay should you choose it to be.

And while Arrowhead may fumble or stumble a little when it comes to patching/ balancing a game that ended up reaching far outside of it's intended audience. At the end of the day Helldivers is an incredibly fun game that stands out head and shoulders in a sea of live service battle pass AAAA slop.

FYI Mute/ stop the trailer because it will spoil your playtrough, quite literally going trough the story beats.

TL;DR Anomaly uses Rimworld as a tool to tell its own story, rather than integrating itself into the storytelling toolset of Rimworld to tell stories. I do not recommend it if you just want to expand your Rimworld experience, I do recommend it if you want to experience a horror-story in Rimworld, but they really weren't kidding about the 'Cabin in the Woods' experience.

Anomaly wants you to see all the cool horrors it has at its disposal, and rather than cherrypicking tropes/ elements of horror, it will (and has to for gameplay reasons) show you everything in it's toolbox, grotesque fleshbeasts, shambling corpses, mysterious structures will all be coming out of the woodwork to get you all at once with little to no narrative connection or reasons.

Gameplay wise, there's some holes too, Anomaly will let you capture entities and study them to unlock their secrets... except, not really? Most of the entities will unlock you a new dark research to study the moment they walk into the map, regardless if you ended up capturing them and studying them directly. And as a disappointing cherry on top, outside of one or two researches, these never have anything to do with how you can fend off these dark entities better, but rather how you can use them to your own benefit. This is especially annoying because Anomaly loves deploying unseen horrors or alterations to your colony without giving you the tools to reverse/ prevent them.

If you're a veteran, Anomaly offers a fun challenge and will probably catch you off guard every once in a while. Remember to save often, and to thoroughly surgically inspect every gift horse you are given.

You can set the skill effect visual intensity to 0.1% and still manage to blind yourself by the amount of chaos you're outputting. 10/10

Incredibly fun take on the 'survivors' genre, deep replayability, incrementally impactful meta-game and offers plenty of QOL-options to influence your upgrade rolls as your deck of options expands, something that's sorely missing from other games in it's genre.

Wartales is a gorgeous, fun, easy to learn, hard to master turn-based RPG. It manages to deliver a story, but still offers a vast sandbox world to play around in without feeling railroaded or leaving you feeling lost.
It uses a wonderfully crafted UI to guide you through every detail of its features, without becoming sluggish when you just want to get something done quick.
Combat is fun and rewarding, the fluid narratives that form within the party due to battles or events feel important, yet won't completely bash your group apart with events that feel completely out of your control.
It's a wonderful game to play Coop with a friend, and works very fluently and intuitively.

Wartales is a product of passion that absolutely deserves to be in your library if you have any sort of interest in its genre.

At it's core, Stolen Realms is wonderful. Solid gameplay, build variety and interesting boss mechanics that, while embracing some rogue-like elements into it's randomized dungeon crawls, also manages to avoid some pitfalls cleverly.

It's strenghts;

- Combat here and now; you hit the portal hit up a node and get to playing, really it's that simple. While it may be less interesting for those seeking a narrative or a story in a game, it's a great pick up and play kind of game when you either have an half hour to burn or want to grind bosses for hours.

- Build variety; classless skill trees leads to limitless options and quirky builds you can put together, electric rogue? Ice monk? You can dream it you can probably run it.

- Loot loot and more loot; While itemized games usually fall into a pitfall of relying too much upon randomly generated stats, and thus making it fairly annoying to get the items you're looking for, SR fixes this by making items predetermined, but making lots of them spread over various enemy types or boss loot-tables, enabling you to hunt upgrades or rare drops.

- Drop-in Co-op; Thanks to it's similtanious turn system, one of the major flaws of turn based coop games is effectively eliminated on the spot, leading to a smooth and rapid experience. Build synergies can lead to very interesting team strategies and there are certainly more ways then one to tackle fights.

It's weaknesses;

- Character stats; Perhaps an unfortunate victim of the classless system, but a lot of characters tend to follow similar stat disposition. Once your realize one stat handles how much damage your characters will be out-putting, it won't be long before every character will begin dumping points into it.

- Visual clutter; Fire, AoE's, Aura's all being drawn over the ground layer UI-hexagons, it doesn't take much to be overwhelming, and unclear what you're clicking on precisely. A miss click off the HUD can lead to a tank running into the backline, or a healer parking itself between bosses without a way to return.

- Lack of AI partners; While the scaling enemy system and fluid party building is great, running a party of 6 characters can be rather overwhelming, this might be an issue of lacking AI, but it'd be nice if some party members could be played by the computer.

-Minor UI issues; Game hitching when you click drag an ability for a split second, event interactions requiring you to roll for all 6 characters individually, enemy text bubbles causing your first action to not be read. Level sorting for the stash. There's a few very minor gripes that can lead to a somewhat stuttering experience, but for an Early Acces game, it's commendable that these are the only ones I can find.

TL;DR Darktide is unfinished, Fatshark is choking on their own lies and failures to deliver on promises while blatant monetization shemes designed to wring every last little cent out of you are already in full swing. Either give the game a year to get the development time it so desperately needs, wait for a big sale or the announcement that they're cutting Tencent's Tzeentch-ian tomfoolery out of the game's systems.

At it's core, the refined gameplay loop, it's good, but the pristine image is slathered constantly by a back-and-forth balancing act just so head scratching for a CO-OP game, a progression system that tossed out everything they learned in their previous games and a FOMO rotating cash shop because they think being able to browse a store is too much for our feeble minds to manage.

It's ok.

While I'm sure this game has it's merrits in being a potential PvP powerhouse, it's listed as a co-op game and I will review it as such.

Combat is incredibly smooth, abilities feel statisfying to use, which isn't a surprise, seeing Stunlock's prior game Battlerite. The progression mechanic of hunting bosses for new recipes and abilities is refreshing and the presentation/ atmosphere is incredible.

But as the honeymoon settles, the same issues keep popping up again and again.

Combat, whilst incredibly smooth, fast and visceral, V Rising unfortunately suffers from PvP balancing severely hampering the possible fun PvE abilities could have. Whilst you are pushing trough harder and harder bosses, every ability you find is more akin to a side-grade, rather than an improvement, with incredibly neutered CC-effects in a game that loves throwing a crowd at you, leaning back on arbitrary gear scaling to deal more damage with skills in general.

Additionally, you're incredibly hamstrung with only having two active combat ablities along with a dash selected from your book at all time. Usually offering up one of said abilities for a counter or other defensive spell that you need to simply survive.

This makes the visceral combat as seen in the trailer more fo a rarity because you're most likely going to be circle strafing and running away, waiting for your defensive ability to come off cooldown. With the amount of damage enemies tend to do in burst, diving in headfirst is almost a guaranteed death sentence. Not to mention boss fights generally devolving into the same, hit and run circles around them. And while combat feels fluid and impactful, enemies love to stun/ snare or slow you, making you crumple about as quickly as paper, with little room for error/ recovery.


Which is what brings progression out into the spotlight. Because outside of unlocking abilities and side-grades, it quickly becomes apparant that you cannot gear up as well as enemies can, leading to a lot of one-shot abilities and combo's already around the level 30 mark. Additionally, research is unlocked with drops from enemies and breakables, leading to a lot more grinding the same areas over and over again.


Lastly, the game looks amazing, using lighting and effects to bolster an already incredible artstyle. But the more time you spend in the world, the more you realize it's just a set-piece. Your vampire, quickly moves away from abilities that allow you to actualy lifesteal, in a game where that should be one of the biggest combat mechanics, you're limited to only recover 10% of your health per combat encounter. And while you can build an enormous castle, the locals won't really bother you or try and stop you, outside maybe an NPC's path that still leads trough your castle grounds.


To summarize, V Rising is a grindy PvP-first ARPG, with hamstrung progression, neutered abilities, barely any world mechanics outside of playing the floor is lava and a crafting and building system that feels like a time-gated mobile game.

It's alright.

Ah man, where to start... Well, at its core. The Riftbreaker is an excellent blend of smooth action combat with plenty of combat options and a base building/ tower defense game that's not afraid to go in-depth and offers oddly unique and viable ways of circumventing shortages and recource chokepoints.

It's definitely the kind of game where you'll lose track of time while you're pushing trough the campaign. The phasing of wich and story where actually surprisingly good for a game of this genre. The voice acting and setting play at a very non black and white commentary about humanity ripping up a planet for resources. It doesn't grandstand, nor does it ignore obvious hypocrisy.

The gameplay, as mentioned earlier is absolutely great, but it does suffer from the biggest flaw in the game, which ill address later. While tower defense is the name of the game, you'll still find yourself optimising resource production and energy grids. And when it comes to combat it expects you to get your hands dirty. Have enemies slam into densely fortified areas, or slap two miniguns onto your mech and go make some monster mash, all equally viable.

But where the game really starts to fall trough, is its balancing. While less apparent in the campaign, as you'll be spending more time researching upgrades then you will pushing trough hordes of enemies, it throws an unexpected curveball at you in the form of ranged damage. You could be dancing a fine line with spending durability in melee combat, or trading ammunition/ resources in defense, and suddenly completely get obliterated by off-screen enemies.

The amount of ranged spam is a little astounding, combined with towers not really prioritising targets (despite the game itself teaching you about tower matches in the campaign versus specific enemies) An artillery piece will gladly lob a shell at the closest single enemy then it will fire at ranged opponents. Causing this horrible push-back of an absolute horde of ranged enemies battering your defenses and yourself that's near unavoidable. The game really loves kicking the teeth out of your base sometimes either trough unavoidable events or artillery enemies and there's just nothing it offers apart from a few self repair options with limited range.

And where the obvious solution here would be to fortify out of the wahoo, the semi random nature of attack directions and energy based tower limits really can leave your defenses spread thin.

So in conclusion, The Riftbreaker is a great action/ tower defense game with a wonderful artstyle, surprisingly good campaign and fluid gameplay. You'll either play for hours... or exactly 5 minutes whenever the balancing rears its ugly head.