It's adecent game, although the environment get repetitive after a bit and the action is frenetic in a BAD way. I would have preferred more monstrous enemies but in reality you spend the majority of time shooting soldiers with split second reaction and great accuracy, forcing you to restart from the last checkpoint having memorized their position in order to preemptively shoot before they appear on screen. Later levels are a PITA made of constant trial and error.

I wish there was a meh rating...

often challenging, rarely fun.

I only plowed through because I already had it. Game has a lot of balancing issues, enemy aims like they know where you are (which they do) and it has a lot of very frustrating moments, not because of actual difficulty, but because of artificially created one. Main example? The dev makes rats not be hit by most projectile weapons (shotgun being the oddity, and it seems due to a bug) so you can only hit them with your kick. Most of the time the kick lands, but you still take damage. So what does the dev do? Dev add 5-6 rats to a boss fight, with 5ish zombies running at you. So the boss fight takes longer than it should, because you just run around trying not to become ground beef. Because a single rat can kill you waaaaaay to easily (let aone 5 of them). Also, your uzi has Star Wars Stormtrooper aim, you could point it at an enemy, and the 5-6 shot burst will just miss him entirely. His burst though? Oh it will hit.

It seems the Dev could not program proper AI, so just made do with this. And it is awful. Heck if I had realized I somehow got this (not sure when) I'd probably would have tried for a refund.

My advice is to just watch a playthrough. With commentary. You'll have a much better time.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. It's got some cool ideas here and there, the presentation is good, it manages to be decently creepy despite its retro, overhead presentation. The music is solid and atmospheric. And the narrative is interesting.

But the game is just downright unfair a lot of the time. I almost quit partway through the fourth level, right before you get your first gun, because of the rats. Rats can only be killed by kicking them, which is slow, has a narrow area of effect, and leaves you wide open if you miss. I got stuck on a swarm of them and almost gave up right then and there, but managed to power through. Once I got a gun the game's combat opened up and the challenge actually felt fair...until the underground prison.

There you're fighting dozens of soldiers with guns of their own, and the game's unbalanced nature becomes painfully clear. Your guns suffer from a degree of spread that makes accuracy over distances troublesome, while the enemy's are so accurate I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually using hitscan. Enemy grenades are akin to homing missiles that zoom right at you and blow up on contact, and drop your life down to almost nothing if you're within half a screen of them, while yours are more like polite suggestions for the enemy to "please, for the love of God, die already." It's a suggestion they don't often take; several times I threw a grenade into a small room right next to enemies, only to go in for mop-up and find out they didn't even take a scratch, shortly before being gunned down.

If you have the patience for a janky, frustrating game with some interesting ideas, maybe give it a try on sale. As for me, I'm uninstalling and finding something more entertaining to do with my time.

Got it from humblebundle, played from start to finish wanting to like it but can't recommend.
I like the graphics, it's a well built game overall, no bugs found.
Little but ok exploration, you can just power through the game without collectibles, I like that you have the choice
Constant automatic saves, which helped limit frustration at times.

Nevertheless, story is fragmented and a bit dull and I just did not like any of the characters or dialogs. Level design is random, goes from linear, to empty, to just pure bad level design, a few times you have no idea what you are expected to do and get stuck looking around ( prison was just the worst ), you are expected to run and dodge but just constantly get stuck in objects, and sometimes you just walk from a to b and jsut wish they made a cinematic or something of the like.
Wonky controls, health ALMOST useless, I felt you get easily killed quickly (zelda style hearts could have been a better choice, maybe more apt to the game style), I hated the dodge and stamina ui/management (you have no idea that you're tired until you just are). Game wishes to give a tense atmosphere and does it well until it just ruins the mood with some unnecessary jumpscares.

Summary: Not Recommended. For the most part, GARAGE really nails it on the presentation (I mean the trailer certainly sold me on it), but it completely ♥♥♥♥♥ the bed mechanically. While playable, a litany of ill-thought out mechanical design choices make the game a challenge that is consistently more frustrating than genuinely enjoyable or fun. Despite getting more fun when you start getting to less crazy-tight corridors (with less, but not absent, rats) in the last 3 or so chapters, it really wears out its welcome at 6 hours, and for a $15 asking price you can do a lot better.

Full Review:
In GARAGE, you play as guy with amnesia working his way through a parking garage as some kind of zombie apocalypse occurs. You have melee punches and kicks to start, and then you find stuff like an ax, a shotgun, a pistol, etc. to kill baddies with. The narrative gets pretty wild from there at its own weird pace, but at the end I was surprised at just how very grounded and thoroughly explained it all was. The game really doesn't sell itself on its narrative, and I didn't really care about it too much because the rest of the game was so frustrating mechanically, but it's actually a pretty good story that I could really never guess the next turn in.

The game sells itself a lot on its presentation and style, and not undeservedly so. The visuals are technically 3D, but it doesn't seem like that most of the time because of a scan-line set that are ever-present on the screen, as the game is going for a kind of VHS B-Movie Horror aesthetic in all kinds of ways. The colors will spasm, the screen telescopes (kinda like Hotline Miami but you don't really have control over it), and the blood and gore are EVERYWHERE as you fight increasingly crazy monsters. The only real complaint I have with the visuals is that they're sometimes a bit TOO crazy, and they can make what you can and can't walk on confusing as well as make hitboxes unclear.

Interesting presentation and premise aside, the game really starts to tank in the mechanics department, as the game's largest problems come from its survival horror meets twin-stick shooter design. Functionally it's adequate enough to complete the game, but I'd be skeptical on how long you could keep your sanity if you played through with a gamepad the whole way through. The only reason I was able to stick with it is because I switched to mouse & keyboard a couple hours in. And before I continue on, I will mention that the controls are bugged for gamepad for the Steam version of this (I believe it's also at least available on Xbox One), as you can't actually steer vehicles with the gamepad. The animation for turning happens, but you don't turn. You need to use WASD to turn the motorcycle in the earlier chapters and it's crazy awkward (but at least it's a short section).

When I think "twin-stick shooter," I think crazy arcadey action like Smash TV or Forgotten Worlds. Using one stick to keep yourself alive and the other to fire wildly at the oncoming onslaught. When I think "survival horror," I think careful, methodical playing to conserve the limited rations you have, because every enemy is dangerous and your resources for dealing with them are very limited. Why anyone though mixing these two genres would be a great idea, I have no clue, but GARAGE fails to execute this fusion well.

The simple fact is that this game plays like garbage on a gamepad (with twin-sticks) because it is unreasonably difficult to aim accurately with the right joystick compared to aiming with your mouse. Conserving ammo is basically impossible because stuff is so hard to hit in the first place, and the game is hard enough and your ammo caps are low enough that you really can't afford to mess up too many shots. You melee attacks are absolutely garbage, and this also brings me onto another important point that exemplifies all of the trouble with the lack of thought that went into crafting the mechanics of this "twin-stick shooter": Rats.

Rats are the very first enemy you meet in the game, and they'll be jumping you to try and attack you the whole way through it up to the very final boss fight. They go towards you slowly, then CHARGE at you, almost faster than you can move, and they also do tons of damage, so they can't just be ignored or gone past. Your choices to deal with rats are two: You can either use a precious bullet of the few you have to shoot the rat and hope you hit that tiny target, or you can kick it. Kicking is a special melee attack that you can do no matter what weapon you're holding. You can't kick while moving, it has a very short range, and the range isn't even the width of your already thin character. If the enemy isn't within about the middle third of the front of you (and nearly on top of you already), you aren't gonna land that kick. Add on top of that that rats take not one but TWO kick to kill, and you have an insanely infuriating enemy that is present throughout the whole game, whose main design flaw would've been dealt with had rats been melee-able just like any other enemy in the game.

And the list of problems with the genre mash-up absolutely doesn't stop there.
- You have a dodge roll, but you already normal-walk faster than most any can run and the walls are lined with deadly fire and pits that can kill you so it's totally useless or worse almost the entire game.
- The telescoping screen and crazy lights don't just make you sick, they can also hide enemies with guns off-screen who can see you but you can't see them, and they deal SO much damage that you may as well trial-and-error your way through a section to see where all the hidden gun-guys are so you don't just die a bunch just from not being psychic.
- To add icing on the cake of cheap enemies with guns, they also have guns with much higher accuracy then you, so they'll routinely empty an entire clip into you while you literally can't hit them that many times from the same distance away with (supposedly) the exact same weapon.
That's about everything, but I'm sure I've forgotten something. Regardless, I hope I've made it evident that the mechanics in this game REALLY needed some rebalancing and re-thinking before launch, because they make an already annoying genre mash-up even less bearable.

GARAGE: Bad Trip is a 2D top-down, twin-stick shooter with the survivor horror theme filled with lots of gore.

I liked the game premise and the story it wants to tell. There are a variety of enemies, locations, 3 boss fights (plus a mini boss that spawns three or four times), and secrets to be explored.

After halfway through, there are four types of challenge sections that get unlocked (access through the main menu). The first three challenges have seven stages, and the last one has six stages. I liked the idea of that and enjoyed playing through a couple of types.

The music tracks and the sound design are done pretty well.

The weapons carry quite a punch and are very satisfying to use.

There are three difficulty settings: Easy, Normal and Hard.

The main story took me around 8.5 hours on normal. It may take a couple of hours extra to hunt for missing achievements (check out the guide section of the game). The challenge stages may take 2 to 3 hours (It depends on how patient you are!). It took me roughly 14 hours to get 100% achievements (I had some offline play, which didn’t reflect on my overall playtime.). The main story-related achievements can be completed on any difficulty setting. But you can’t select a difficulty on challenge stages. You have to play it on the default setting that has been set internally.

Now on to the disliked points.

I don’t mind challenging games, but this game has serious balancing issues. I started the game on Hard to challenge myself. But soon I had to switch to normal. You can change the difficulty midway, but you will be thrown back to the beginning of the current chapter. The game has an auto-checkpoint system. But you have to complete the chapter before quitting the game. The game won’t resume from the midway saved point. It always starts with the initial point of a current chapter.

The enemies do very high damage even on normal. There are so many cheap gotcha moments to give unfair deaths. I don’t like such design choices. So many sections, including challenge stages, felt outright ridiculous, and passing through them felt like a chore. Also, weapon damage is quite inconsistent. So, you are at the mercy of RNG.

Kicking the rats mostly eats up your health; then what's the point of giving that option? And the rats cannot be beaten by punching or an axe. You either have to use the kick (which is highly inconsistent) or some weapon (which wastes the ammo unnecessarily). Also, all the weapons take a lot of time to reload.

There are quite a lot of enemy spam scenarios. If you are not quick with your reflexes, they will gang up on you, and you are done in no time. It felt like the developer wanted to punish you for playing their game.

I started playing with a controller. But aiming felt counter-intuitive with that. So I had to switch back to KB+M.

I also didn’t like the writing. There are no voice-overs. The story is told through texts only. The writing felt amateurish.

Overall, my experience was more frustrating than enjoyable. The games are played for fun. The developer didn’t care about the fun part that much. Instead, they focused on making players' lives miserable by creating rage-inducing game mechanics.

Some more serious play-testing, players’ feedback (through a demo), and fine tuning in some of the game mechanics could have made this game much better.

If you are into such games that feel punishing, then you may grab this. If you don’t care about achievements and just want to check it out, I would recommend playing it on "easy" difficulty and buying the game at a deep discount.

My verdict: 4/10

Can't really recommend it. Played it on the deck, runs flawlessly at 60fps with low tdp around 5w or less, right out of the box.

The main reason i can't recommend it, it's that the game itself it's not really enjoyable due to balancing at least for me, even playing on easy felt much harder than some other twin stick shooters, for example some boss fights were easier than regular areas, due to ammunition placement, also weapons for some reason can only hold a small amount of bullets per magazine. Graphics wise its ok for what it is.

Story wise, it felt unfinished for me. Overall can only recommend getting it in a bundle or deep discount, if you still want to give it a try.

GARAGE: Bad Trip is a top-down twin-stick shooter that wants nothing more than to impress and excite. The sleek visuals and sublime sound design lure you in, then the fast-paced, challenging combat keeps you hooked on clearing level after level. However, missed opportunities and wasted potential take their toll on the game, limiting gameplay variety and giving rise to the game’s tamer moments.

no