Recent reviews by Indie-ana Jones

HELLDIVERS 2 has been liberated from the clutches of Sony. Its a pretty good game, I'll write a proper review for this game at some point.

Opelia bird insists the children are mine but the blood tests say otherwise

Also ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game blows ass

Still better than Security Breach

The RTS part of the game needs some cooking, but from a FPS perspective it's quite fun. I think a lot of the people who are complaining about the slowness of the game likely aren't aware that you can teleport. Once you understand that, you can keep getting back to the action a lot faster than you would otherwise. Aliens can't do this, however they have a number of other mobility options to allow them to make up for it (wall-climbing on any maps with mountainous terrain is a big boon).

Another thing to note is that the emptiness people are complaining about might be resolved if anyone was playing with the third faction enabled. Right now, all the servers are running human vs. alien, but my thought is human vs. human vs. alien is the intended experience.

That being said, the game's obviously not perfect. I certainly think its fun, though, and I'm interested to see where the developer takes it. It's 20 bucks, and certainly a good deal more fun than most triple-A games that come out nowadays.

This game is not necessarily bad, and it is likely better than some $60 games out there, but Barotrauma is a game that starts exciting and quicky descends into being boring and not worth your time.

Let me give you some introspective on what you can expect going into Barotrauma. There is 4 gamemodes, but only 3 of them have gameplay to them. You will probably spend most of your time in campaign mode, as that's where most of the content is, so this review will focus mainly on Campaign Mode. Campaigns are not a short affair, and you will take several days/weeks to complete it. The start of the campaign is ultimately where it is most fun, as your ship has no upgrades and most creatures can and will breach the sub quite often in combat. These times of crisis are where Barotrauma finds its fun, and every crew member will have something to do to stop whatever problem just slammed into your sub.

The issue here that quickly begins to arise is that your crew after a few missions will become much stronger than your monstrous adversaries very shortly after you start the campaign. Individual crew members gain EXP and gain skills to increase their own abilities and stats, and the submarine can also be upgraded in a similar manner. After you upgrade the sub a bit with better hulls and guns, you'll see that Barotrauma's fauna usually gets shredded immediately before getting anywhere near your sub. If they do get near your sub, your upgraded hull will prevent their entry until they get shredded by your guns.

After a few more upgrades, even the larger monsters (outside of Abyss creatures) will struggle to break your submarine. If you put an AI on a laser turret, they also have perfect accuracy, further decreasing the amount of challenge the game has. Eventually, after a while, you'll find that this crisis simulator has very little crisis in it. You will breeze through levels going objective to objective and the monsters will fail to even slow you down. For most of the crew, the game becomes an AFK simulator as you can also upgrade your devices to break less (to be fair, they aren't fun to fix anyway), meaning there's very little for the crew to do than wait to go outside to do an objective they've probably done many times before or for an abyss creature to show up and actually give a little challenge.

I feel like variety is good thing to mention here. There isn't many objectives or monsters in Barotrauma. Most of the monster roster is buffered by clones of pre-existing monsters, whose only difference is just a matter of size and stats. Most monsters employ the standard strategy of biting the sub if they can and then swimming away before coming back to do it again, with only a few exceptions to this rule. Outside of the sub, its pretty much the same thing, monsters swim up, bite you, then swim away to do it again or they just stick to maiming you without backing off. Things like spinelings, Thalamus, latchers, and husks have mechanics to make handling them more unique, but they do not make up the majority of the things you'll be running into unfortunately, so most of the monsters you run into, regardless of what they actually are, will do the same thing with just different stat values.

Objectives are also pretty limited. You have cargo and passenger transport, mining, cave infestation, monster hunting, ruins, and pirates. Pirates are probably the most fun of the objective types, as fighting another submarine ends up being much more engaging than the standard monster fight. However, most of the other objectives tend to be very plain with little in the ways of difficulty. Once you've done them a few times, you've pretty much seen everything.

While there is level progression as mentioned earlier, the growth in power of the crew greatly outweighs that of the surrounding area. Different zones have different monster spawns and gimmicks, but unfortunately it doesn't amount to much due to lack of variety in the first place. There is different environmental gimmicks at play for Captain and sometimes Gunner to take note of, but most of them end up just being tedious or very simple to avoid. Ballast flora is one of the few good ones, however it isn't really limited to any area of the game.

In terms of the jobs players are expected to perform, they're all extremely simple. Captain pilots the boat, Security mans the guns, Engineer fixes half the station's machinery, Mechanic fixes the other half, Medic gives people Morphine, Assistant fills in wherever, and everyone can jump in with guns when it comes to man-to-man combat, with Security getting the most benefits and perks for this specifically. These jobs ultimately don't have a lot of nuance or fun mechanics attached to them with some jobs getting shafted more than others, namely Mechanic and Assistant. Though, after a while, engineer and mechanic essentially blend into one job centered around maintaining the ship, so there's pretty much only 4 unique "jobs' to do in the end: Piloting, Fighting, Healing, and Fixing. Assistants usually just end up trying to entertain themselves with the game's sandbox elements, but eventually they'll get bored and just wait around doing nothing until they have to do something.

There's also outposts you visit between different missions, and they just exist to let you upgrade/buy stuff and get objectives for next mission. If you really get into the crafting side of the game, you will spend a lot of time at these places getting things ready for next mission. However, crafting things also takes a set minimum amount of time, which you and your team have to sit and wait for you to complete unless you do your crafting in-mission. Ultimately, you may end up waiting an extremely uncomfortable amount of time at outposts doing nothing depending on how you play and who you play with.

I can't say much about the ending due to only playing the testing version of it, but if its anything like that on live, it will make a great first impression and fail to stick the landing immediately afterwards.

So yes, I think the base game is probably not worth your time and most people will just get bored of it. However, to remedy this, Barotrauma does have an extensive workshop modlist, which can be used to improve the game's flaws. More mission content, enemy variety, and more nuanced mechanics are all available through mods, however the base game's offerings are extremely lacking.

Ultimately, Barotrauma is at its best when it is being a crisis simulator. When things go wrong, everyone has a job to do and its a very fun game. Unfortunately, Barotrauma's campaign quickly ditches the crisis simulator angle wherein it becomes a very boring and slow game about moving or watching somebody else move a boat from left to right, with the occasional fun event hidden in the hours upon hours of slog. It very quickly plays its entire hand to you after a few hours, and the rest ultimately becomes an exercise in boredom. If you're willing to shill out the big bucks for it to play through Campaign with your friends, you might have an alright time, though I think most people will get bored of it and probably drop it midway through.

I'm a sucker for games that interact directly with the player, and this game certainly fills in that niche. Too bad by the time Lumi ever shows up again, she's going to speak entirely in based-cringe speak.

All in all, I wasn't a huge fan of the level mechanics and their emphasis on speed, but this is one of those very few games where everything but the gameplay struck a cord for me, and to that end I would recommend the game solely based on the music, art, and humor. Boss fights were very good too, and I find myself replaying them sometimes, but nothing else.

Shoutouts to Mr. Sauceman, the final boss's second phase music is a banger,

This game is actually pretty good, only problem is the subpar player count. I think if they actually advertised the game it would do pretty well, kind of feels like an old Xbox 360 game in a good way.

This game is pretty fun so far and the sound design is pretty good, the worst part of the game so far is the fact that hosts leave a lot of the time when they start losing and the whole lobby gets lost because of it! Outside of that its a very fun game with a lot of interesting choices when it comes to perks and powers, something no other Prop Hunt deviant game has done so far. Overall if they fix the leaving host issue, this game is going to be great and I can't wait to see how they update it from here.

This game is extremely glitchy and after playing through it all, lacks a lot of the promising content seen the trailers. The story has also been husked out to the point where all the interesting avenues they set up for this game to take, they ignore them all. Stay away until something changes, the fact a $40 game released in the this state is abysmal and shows that the golden days of FNAF are behind it. I'd argue this is much worse than FNAF World's release, but this time there will be no apology and re-release to this dumpster fire.