Recent reviews by Dudebro Pyro

so when is the pyro removing update

A nice experience for maybe 15-30 minutes. Great for what it is, but make sure you're willing to pay the price (if any) for the size.

It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fantastic being able to just play, say, a quick game of Uno or whatever you like, any time you want with any of your Steam friends. This is truly the technology of the future. Now I have even less reason to meet with anyone in person.

That said bear in mind that the controls can be a bit finicky. There isn't really any lag compensation, which sounds silly, but when every single interaction has maybe 50ms delay it quickly becomes noticeable. That, or maybe the game just has built-in latency, which is even worse. By no means does this make it unusable, just be aware that some games can get really annoying - the more movements you have to make, the more fiddly and frustrating it will be.

Many games seem to come with excellent scripts, which does basically negate the problem. But not every game will have that, since understandably making good scripts is a lot more complex than just throwing together a bunch of textures maybe with some 3D models and letting the game's physics engine handle everything. Playing, say, unscripted Risk would probably be torture.

How unfortunate. An otherwise pretty decent game, again succumbs to the political views of the developer. When the studio would rather fire someone guilty of wrongthink than reward very valuable contributions, I cannot in good faith support any product of theirs.

The sound was one of the best parts of the game - but apparently that means nothing compared to personal tweets and opinions completely unrelated to the game or company. My only regret is that I cannot refund it.

Enemy Within is to Enemy Unknown as Long War is to Enemy Within, pretty much.

Tl;dr: a good game if you like XCOM.

To elaborate: this game does have its problems. It isn't particularly well optimised; load times are pretty high; you'll get your fair share of minor graphical glitches, and apparently now and then actual bugs (though I haven't had that happen to me yet).

Personally, I've only experienced one or two crashes ever, and that's after installing a bunch of mod then disabling a few (which has a high chance of making your save unstable).

Now for the good bits: it's XCOM. It's updated. Whether it's better or worse than EU is up to opinion - I know some people that still swear by UFO Defense - but I don't think it's fair to claim that the older game is objecticely superior, as some reviews do.

I would, however, highly recommend browsing the workshop for mods you like. There are quite a few UI tweaks out there that make the game a much more pleasant experience by presenting information in easier-to-access places, reducing the amount of time you'll spend going out of your way to check things. Besides that, I would personally recomment True Concealment (if I remember the name correctly), which prevents the mission timer from counting down while your squad is concealed - allowing you to properly scout the battlefield and set up ambushes.

It's XCOM baby.

This game has 30,000 reviews, so I'm just gonna leave my thumbs-up here and redirect you to what someone who actually put effort into their review has to say. Or even better, redirect you to buying this game.

Just adding my own inconsequential Recommended. Don't mind me. Heck, how did you even find this review? No, heck, why are you still reading reviews for this game and haven't played it yet after all these years?

Honestly, if there was a neutral option I'd use it. However, there isn't, and I decided to lean against recommending this game, if only because I feel that, while not bad, the game is certainly highly overrated already.

You can read some 12,000 reviews raving about how awesome this is, so let me summarize here why I'm not recommending this game to all my friends like 96% of the other reviewers would have me do:

- Gameplay: standard action platformer, really. You gain some extra abilities as you progress; however, they are almost all direct upgrades to a special skill you can perform. To my knowledge, there are no sidegrades (at least none that you get in the first 11 or so hours - I haven't finished the game yet), and all your core abilities and attacks remain the same. The enemies get harder, of course, but since your stats increase too, I haven't felt much of a difficulty curve. There are select few special enemies that can be interesting to fight, but they are found seldom and between each notable encounter, you're going to have to kill hundreds upon hundreds of grunts, super grunts, tough grunts, grunty grunts...

- More on gameplay, but regarding the platformer aspect: it really isn't the focus of the game. As such, while there are some instances of interesting level design, most of it just functions as terrain for the fighting. ...And now you see my problem: since the fighting (at least on non-hard difficulties) basically involves repeating a perma-stunlock combination of moves over and over until everything on-screen dies, there isn't much to do in this game.

- The story: ah yes, the story. It's what ties the game together; what makes plowing through waves of grunts worth it, to get to the boss battle and get a cutscene and get on with the story. Unfortunately, the story, as far as I have seen it, is highly cliche. I can't really comment on the entire main plotline, since I haven't finished the game, but here's what I have seen:
- - - You start in some sacred clearing in a random forest, with amnesia. What an original plot device! I'm sure the game won't be about the main character trying to regain their memories while getting mixed up in a quest they don't understand helping people they don't know, which is actually very much tied into what the character did before losing their memories, only to emerge changed and a better person than they were before!
- - - Oh wait, that's exactly what happens.

- On the same note as the story, the sidequests are all extremely cliche. You know the usual model of the protagonist just going around, having everyone unload all of their worries on him, and then going to find various monster loot, misplaced keys, and random trivialities that really have no consequence whatsoever in the bigger picture? Yeah, that's exactly how every single sidequest in this game is like. Back when Zelda et al. did it 20 years ago, it was fine, not only because the technology of the time didn't allow anything too complex, but also because a) this particular format hadn't been beated to death yet, and b) there wasn't really much precedent for better quests, so there was nothing to take example from. But this is a 2013 game, it can do better! Or, apparently, not.

- This was made by a single person. While some people talk about how this has let them put their all into the game, unhampered by a marketing department or disagreements in the team, etc., in my opinion this also has a downside: there is a limit to the creativity of a single person, and I really feel like a second or third pair of eyes helping develop the game could have only made it better, and a lot of the aforementioned problems stem from this.

CONCLUSION: this game is alright. I got it at something like 90% off, and more or less enjoyed the 10 or so hours I put into it. It's definitely not one of those horrible indie games that seem to be built solely for marketing (and screaming "Look! I'm a new and innovative indie game, unhampered by the conventions of the gaming industry, and I'm definitely not a poorly-executed cash-grabbing attempt!") and not actual entertainment. But if it's not on sale, I still think it's not worth the money.

This game is surprisingly cheap, surprisingly stupid, and, in fact, surprisingly fun. You basically shoot dinos - there's little more to say.

It's definitely not an AAA title, and it has a few flaws - the main one being that the terrain collision detection can get somewhat wonky around rocks or other structures with sharp angles - but it's undeniably fun to play, and it's definitely a game I will keep coming back to for quite a while yet. For a game that costs 80 pence, what more could you ask for? Go ahead and buy it right now, you won't regret it.

The community, by the way, is rather nice, too. For example, when you need to cap an objective that's ~1km away in survival mode, and there are vehicles on hand, people will almost always wait for everyone to get on before riding away.

In short - for this price, I definitely recommend this game.