Recent reviews by 2Weak2Live

This guy was dead on arrival and has been completely abandoned. it's amazing the server is still up. Steam needs to stop suckering people by putting it on sale.

Overall, Song of the Deep is a well designed and well produced game. The art is excellent, the game play flows smoothly, and it's generally non-buggy.

If I'd never played Aquaria, I'd stop there. But the truth is that Aquaria is a better game, and gives you much more bang/buck. SotD is worth playing, but by comparison it feels very simplistic and a bit boring.

I played Shadwen (twice through, killing everyone and then killing noone) largely because I'm a fan of the Trine series from the same studio.

Sadly, Shadwen feels like nothing so much as an interesting tech demo for a half finished game. The enemies are rather dumb and don't change throughout the game; there are just more of them. All of the mechanics are introduced in the first 10 minutes. Overall, the game is pretty boring.

If you're looking for a more polished stealth game, Thief is probably a better choice.

Aside from a seemingly tacked on ending and a vending machine repeating a line from Bioshock 1, this game has little relevance to the previous Bioshock games. It's more of a hallway FPS with some insane theming tacked on.

Among the many cons:

• highly repetitive gunfights with the same enemies from start to finish
  
• pretty much nothing other than pure DPS battles
  
• forces you to switch weapons all the time, because you can only hold 2 and you never have enough ammo for them
  
• a dumb familiar that just follows you around and occasionally refills your ever lacking ammo and health, and is somehow magically invulnerable despite being in the line of fire
  
• loads of racist nonsense
  
• loads of insane religious nonsense
  
• child abuse
  
• child sexualization

The gameplay is uninspiring. The story line is both overblown and vile. Definitely game of the year, in the "least likely to be missed after uninstalling" category.

For a more in depth discussion of the gameplay elements, I recommend this review:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198058259993/recommended/8870/

Positives:
* The story is entertaining (for the most part).
* The mechanics are generally pretty clean.
* Levels are well designed so you don't get stuck.
* Obviously lots of weird stuff inspired by the books.

Negatives:
* Sexualization of a child protagonist is pretty awkward.
* Nigh impossible to get all the collectibles in one pass, because it likes to close doors behind you so you can't look in other paths.
* Controls become somewhat annoying mid-game and positively irritating near end-game.

This game might be fun, were it not for the fact that the controller support is fundamentally broken. All of the chording abilities (Execution, Wraith Flash/Blast, etc.) just do not work reliably, and make some of the missions essentially impossible. Worse, because of the game mechanics, not only does it screw you in the short term, but when you inevitably die because the ability you were relying on didn't go off, various captains get promoted and it screws you over long term as well. It's absolutely shameful that this hasn't been fixed in the 3 years the game has been out.

If you haven't played Aquaria, you're missing one of the true indie gems.

It's not just that the game mechanics are well designed and flow very smoothly. Or that the animation is spot on and never glitchy. Or that the art style is awesome (although the graphics are a bit dated 10 years later). Or that it has an interesting backstory. Or a great soundtrack.

It's all of these things together. Aquaria is a top notch game. I was actually sad that I finished it, knowing that they never made the sequel.


That said, it does have one somewhat annoying problem. There's no native controller support; instead it emulates a keyboard and mouse. Aiming with the right stick this way is pretty annoying, especially in the later part of the game or doing the really high jumping columns to get to rukh eggs. You might want to pass on the controller and use keyboard and mouse for this game.

First, let me say that overall I love Ori. I definitely recommend playing it, but it is not perfect.

Pros:
* The art is amazing.
* The progression is well designed. E.g., you never get stuck anywhere you can't get out of.
* The Bash skill is unusual (though not unique) and makes for some pretty amazing parkour sequences.

Cons:
* The controls are sometimes glitchy. E.g., after playing through nearly twice, I still don't know why it sometimes unexpectedly divebombs. This makes some of the long parkour sequences unnecessarily frustrating.
* The skill usage is poorly balanced. While you'll use Bash almost continuously in the second half of the game, several other skills get used very rarely (e.g. you'll probably only use Light Burst to light lanterns and both Charge Flame and Charge Jump to break a few rocks). Even in the final challenge in Mount Huro, where you'd expect everything to come together, you won't use some skills at all.
* There are several places where, on your first pass, you can't know what to do because something is hidden off screen. The only way to get through them is to try it blindly, most likely dying, and then try again with newly revealed information. It feels almost dickish to essentially require deaths, but also have achievements for not dying.

The first "chapter" of Bendy amounts to: find 6 objects which are semi-randomly placed but all out in the open, press 2 buttons, and then smash some boards.

That's it.

To say it's weak sauce would be an incredible understatement. And to call the single jump scare some kind of "horror"? No, I don't think so.

At its core, A Good Snowman is a variant of Sokoban, a quite old puzzle game. There are a lot of variations on this theme (e.g. the Quell games), but Snowman manages to bring a new mechanic that I haven't seen before. So, kudos for that.

I do have a couple of nits, though. The game is pretty short (only 30 puzzles in the main game; compare with 84 in Quell at only $4, plus the additional jewel collection). And how the dream level works is very poorly explained.

There's nothing earth shattering here, but if you like puzzles, it's worth a play.