Recent reviews by Groza

Harshly addictive, with little to no payoff... but there is a lot of potential.

While yes, this game is in a way similar to both Forager and Factorio, I would argue it lands itself in neither territory, offering a fairly unique take with unique problems on the automation genre. For starters, miners and conveyor belts are replaced with handy little robots that function much the same, except there is a limit of 3(+2) per island. What this effectively means is the collection of resources and ultimately the performance of your factories is limited. What doesn't help the matters is the buildings are awkwardly shaped compared to the island (square buildings and grid on a hexagonal island) and the game doesn't tell you the speed at which your buildings work for certain recipes, so optimizing is rather... hard.
The game does feature its fair share of charm however and getting through it to 100% was a rather quick but enjoyable ride. If this is your cup of tea, look no further.

Exquisitely good time killer for queues in FFXIV

Are you winning, son?
Pretty simple and relaxing game where your only goal is flipping the tiles to unveil the increasingly spicy images. The difficulty, sadly, is all over the place, and some stages for some bizarre reason are very poorly optimized (on my set up some stages ran at 60+ fps, some crunched down hard to 9 fps), which is an issue that persists throughout the "sequels" of this game as well. It has 100 achievements that unlock rapidly as you play, some being more annoying than others to get and requiring some grinding. Clicking to turn the tiles also gets obsolete over time, with skills taking a predominant part of later stages. Overall, if you're looking for a game to 100% quite easily, this is a pretty good and affordable option.

Note: upon writing the review, I'm currently roughly halfway through the campaign. I will update it upon finishing it if my opinion on the game has changed.

Being a fan of the Monster Hunter series and all the games that fall in the similar category, as well as having spent around 300 hours on Gods Eater: Burst on my trusty old PSP, and another 100 on God Eater 2 on Vita, I decided to give this game a go. And I'll keep it short - get it while it's on sale if you like these types of games.

The good:
- new weapons are an absolute joy to play, while the addition of new systems to the old, trusty weapons, make for a real pleasurable experience
- the visual revamp of this game compared to previous installments, including some of the UI and VFX, help make this game feel fresher
- game, at least up until difficulty 4, has a large variety of Aragami to fight - some of them are the same archetypes of enemies (for example Barbarius is largely reminiscent of Hannibal), others are entirely new, welcome additions
- the outfits, while fewer, all follow a similar theme (tape) and look great, making collecting them an experience of its own
- Ash Aragami - Aragami who grow stronger upon "devouring" God Eaters and change their attack patterns - are an amazing expansion in terms of enemy variety and I do hope to see more of them in the future
- Ein. Come on, I know you'll recognize him.

The bad:
- there are visibly fewer Aragami present in the game, unless the latter difficulties unlock the roster from previous games
- the game is noticably easier than the previous installments, with Burst Arts being the main culprit (even if they make the combat way more satisfying)

The ugly:
- the character customization is lackluster and leaves a sour taste in the mouth after the likes of Code Vein came out
- the story quickly devolves to what essentially is a close copy of the original GEB story (this time with Phym instead of Shio)

Overall, I don't have much to complain about. And I don't even want to nitpick - the game is very enjoyable and makes for great gaming sessions.

Hentai is the only reason you'd buy this game (duh). It helps that it's dirt cheap.
What doesn't help is the brutally bad translation job, clunky mechanics, obstructing vision effects and the fact that the tutorial teaches you incorrect keybinds. And for every "scene" you unlock you also have to sit through a massive "story portion" that really... sucks.

In the wake of Fallout 76 controversy, I decided to boot Fallout 4 and give it an honest go after I dropped the game 40 minutes in a few months ago. I found that... the game crashed immediately upon pressing the "Continue" button. The fix for this is quite simple actually - simply block the Fallout 4 exe in your Firewall - but this raises some serious questions. Why is a legitimately bought game's executable file required to be blocked, and why Bethesda failed to fix the issue themselves - or simply notify the players of an existing issue?
My problem is not with the game itself, not even the crash issue - but the means to fix it and the company's lack of interest. For that alone I cannot recommend Fallout 4 at that point, but I will keep playing it and eventually update my review to form an honest opinion of the state of the game.
Until then - not recommended.

UPDATE 29/12/2019: Because Steam asked to.
After almost three painstaking years since my last review, I still can't recommend the game to anyone. I'm going to keep it short this time. New, paid character skins, so you can blend in easier with your surroundings. The game is still riddled with cheaters and occasional server problems, along with visual glitches and performance issues for some. Valve's response is adding a new type of paid content, this time dangerously scratching on the surface of pay-to-win.

UPDATE 18/02/2017: New insight on the game. You can read my old review below.
Since my last review, which was posted in July last year, not much really changed. Just some 'small touches' by the devs, you know - they added sprays to the game, so now instead of having a small chance to drop a half-decent weapon skin you could sell on market for some profit you now have an even smaller one, with sprays dominating the drop table. And, yeah, they're cheap as hell. So if you wanted to profit out of this game, I wish you luck.
Other than that, they introduced skinnable gloves. So yeah, with knives being the past 'most expensive' skins in the game, now you have gloves, which are even rarer. As you can probably tell, Valve's moneygrab tactics are blooming.
They recently announced that they're working on a remake to de_dust2. Great to see they're focusing on the most important things that should be fixed, instead of wasting their time with a map revamp </sarcasm>.
What about the matchmaking? Glad you asked. Prime system doesn't do much, as people can register with throwaway phone numbers and still be queued for Prime. Which means that it doesn't help jack. If you queue without Prime, however, your chance of encountering a cheater rises up to approx. 95%. Not sure who still uses Overwatch, but that doesn't seem to help. Reporting people wields results after long periods of time, or not at all. I wouldn't be surprised if at this rate Valve partnered up with cheat providers for more profit, since hacking in this game is easier than stealing a kid's candy... and seems it still goes about unpunished.

And, almost forgot, they introduced public lobbies. For the first few weeks it was what you'd expect, random people jumping on your lobby and starting to screech autistically. Now? Hey, now you have like 7-9 bots instajoining your lobbies that you can't kick.

So, yeah. Still broken, and Valve still doesn't listen. Cause, you know. MONEY <3

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
If you like shooters or Counter-Strike in general, do yourself a favor and play the good old 1.6 or Source. Global Offensive promised to deliver an upgraded experience of those good shooters, but, as it is universally known, they stopped at promises only. While the improved mechanics of the game and the indulging competitive mode are welcome additions, if you came for those reasons, well... you will be disappointed.
This game had a rough start, and I'm fairly sure you know the story. It wasn't too well introduced, hit near-rock bottom and then scored a 'miraculous' revival thanks to the skins update. That's when the devs really cared for the game, and tried to provide as much as they could so that the players liked it.

Sadly however, they stopped as soon as the downfall of the game was no longer imminent, as at this point it seems almost absurd to consider the game as successful as CS:GO dying out in the foreseeable future. And that's exactly why it's no longer as good - the game is plagued by hackers and smurfs, essentially destroying the pure pleasure of defeating an enemy in close quarters, scoring a faraway headshot with a pistol or winning a clutch. Surely, those feelings are quite alright - but they are buried really fast upon encountering somebody who's not abiding by the rules.
VAC is no use, devs haven't devised a way to avoid matchmaking you against a smurf, the greatly promoted Overwatch system stopped bringing relief after a while and Prime Matchmaking doesn't look promising either.

Competitive games we all enjoy playing are now a lottery - you either get a complete one-sided slaughterfest thanks to unfair play, or finally get a room to breathe and play a single well-fought game, with a chance of somebody joking around and killing the pleasure yet again.
The icing on the cake is, as I already mentioned, the skin system. Instead of focusing more on the security so that the game is actually playable, we're getting balance patches so that the pros can feel a little different during tournaments, new cases to milk the money out of twelve year olds' parents and more useless stuff. In short... not recommended.

tl;dr: the game is STILL full of hackers, smurfs, trolls and raging kids who 'f*ck your mother'. It kills every little bit of enjoyment and at this stage, I wouldn't recommend buying it... maybe when valve drops another sale and starts caring for our enjoyment and not our money for once.

A pretty decent time killer. Made me determined enough to 100% it and speedrun it afterwards. The content is somewhat limited however, so I'd kill for some additional characters DLC or something.

This is probably the best spent 9,50 euro of my life.

The game so unbalanced it hurts your anus. And that's a great thing! Randomly generated dungeons, randomly acquired loot, randomly met heroes, all that in a mixture of... everything. With each death I feel more fixated to beat this on the next run. The worse the enemies get, the more entertained I feel. An ideal game to play whenever you have some time.

And, for goodness sake, this game makes you laugh out with every bit of text you get. What more do you need from some tense strategical run than encountering a hero with the skill called Verbal Abuse? Absolutely nothing. 11/10 would buy again.

>zombie apocalypse
>fellow humans take your friends, shoot at you and lock you in underground labirynth of traps
10/10 would curse them again