Recent reviews by Spikeruth

This game is hard and great with friends. You will die a lot and you will probably laugh at how your friends disappear only to find out they died in a stupid way and nobody knew.

Feels like just another post-apocalyptic survival game. I find it pretty boring. Like many survival sandboxes, you'll be breaking things in the environment for resources, crafting tools, and building shelter. The looting and crafting systems are full of a lot of junk that feels pretty pointless. I guess it's just more expansive for the sake of being more complicated than Minecraft. Half the crafting is also locked behind recipes that you need to find in the world and/or skills that you need to unlock. That's another big problem I have. Most of your effort will be toward grinding out menial tasks so that you can gain skill points to spend on quite a large selection of abilities each with multiple ranks. Some seem good and others bad or just borderline useless. Again, it feels more complicated for the sake of it. Overall, it's not very interesting and there are games that do this stuff better. This game's somehow been in alpha for 5 years and still feels unfinished, unpolished, and janky as if it just released in alpha.

TL;DR: The game is really good, there's just not much interesting content after you beat it.
A great Star Wars experience and a great game overall. I didn't experience many bugs when I played, but I know many people have had a bad experience with them in the past. The game can still use a little more polish here and there, but it's mostly small annoyances and nothing that really hurts the experience in the long term. Combat is fun and a bit Dark Souls like, but not nearly as hard. I think there are some hidden systems that will make difficult fights easier if you're having trouble. Exploring to find upgrades will make fights much easier, especially if you collect ass many as you can. For reference, I make a habit of finding every secret and collectible to avoid backtracking so I went into the final boss with twice the health and thrice the stims compared to my friend who skipped all the optional stuff. After completing the game, the one thing that annoys me the most is the lack of any kind of fast-travel. Each planet has a complex and expansive map that each take a long time to traverse which makes back tracking to collect everything extremely tedious. Sometimes you can unlock shortcuts, but it'll still take 20 minutes to make it across the map. There's also no way to rematch bosses. By the time you max out your skill tree there's nothing to fight except normal enemies which gets really boring. There're also a few inconsistencies between some parts of the story and the established Star Wars canon which bothers a lore-nerd like me. Those are my only real issues with the game. Lightsaber combat is a blast and the map design reminds me of the old Ratchet and Clank games. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a traditional action adventure single player game or just a good Star Wars game.

Risk of Rain 2 is a very faithful adaptation of the first game into a 3D environment. While still unfinished, the game offers a large amount of content and near infinite replayability. The game is very RNG dependent, but it still offers players choices for what risks they want to take. Really the game boils down to being able to handle large amounts of enemies, making decisions to be as efficient as possible, and working with RNG to make a wacky build that actually works. It's a blast to play, especially with friends, and gets very stressful when you try to survive long runs while the difficulty infinitely increases.

UCH, as my friends and I call it, is a great game to play with friends. The best part of the game is Party Mode where you and your friends build a level bit by bit and create challenges for each other to overcome. It's casual fun, but it can get pretty competitive and absolutely crazy once you figure out how to best place your obstacles. There's also a free-build mode that lets you build a level ahead of time and play it like a traditional platformer or in Party Mode. The controls are simple and solid; you can walk, sprint, jump, and wall-jump so it's easy to pick up and you can pull off some impressive runs once you get a hang of it. There's plenty of stages, characters, and outfits to unlock to keep you playing. The menus are a bit weird though so that's my only complaint.

The most important thing to know about No Man's Sky is that it's not for everyone. It's a very niche experience that's intended for a very specific kind of player. There's no other game I can think of that is like it so you can't go into expecting something like Minecraft or GTA. Keep in mind, I enjoy this game for what it is, but you'll probably hate it if this isn't the experience you're looking for.

(TL;DR: Don't get this game if you don't want a chill, casual experience. NMS is great if you like exploring, apreciating nature, and being away from other people.)
Overall, No Man's Sky is as wide as it is deep which isn't much. Systems like trade economies, upgrade adjacency bonuses, and dialogue puzzles may seem complext at first, but are really simple after some practice. Nothing is particularly interesting, but luckily this isn't the point of the game. I think what makes this game great is the atmosphere. Even after a hundred hours everything feels alien and lonely. This is game to play if you just want some calm, quiet alone time. Luckily this is where the shallow mechanics shine because if you just want to chill and explore, build up your base, or collect resources for a while then you won't be bothered by having to deal with complex systems. However, if you're looking for something more then all of this will get tedious after a while.

No Man's Sky is primarily about exploration and this is my favorite part of the game. Planets, wildlife, ships, NPCs, and multitools are randomly generated, but after a while everything starts to look allike and you can easily recognize the recycled parts that everything is made. Still, there's enough variety to make every planet you visit feel like a different place and there's good incentives to go around and explore every planet. Wandering around for hours does get tedious, but I enjoy the lonely atmosphere and can't help but to discover the dozen or so animal species on each planet. Often I'll start the game and try to complete a task for myself (expand my base, continue a questline, etc.) but then end up spending 3 hours straight finding every animal and doing every sidequest in the first system I visit. On PC there's also a healthy modding community if you want some altered mechanics or just want the game to look prettier and more realistic.

While this game is a bullet-hell, you can almost play it like a rhythm game. Every level is designed to be in sync with its respective song, so listening to the music can clue you in on when you'll have to dodge. This makes learning a new level easier if you're familiar with the song. The music itself is another great thing about this game. All the tracks are liscensed from EDM artists/labels so there is a guarenteed level of musical quality. This will probably be a turn-off if you don't like this kind of music because most of the game's charm comes from how the music interacts with just about everything. My early on experience boils down to:

The Good:

• Jammin' soundtrack
  
• Great animation for only basic/abstract shapes
  
• Every level feels unique and offers a good challenge
  
• The story mode has interesting imagery and cute character animations
  
• Easy to get a hang of as someone fairly inexperienced with bullet-hells
  
• Local and online co-op

The Bad:

• Hitboxes feel weird (many moments where I don't know how I was or wasn't hit)
  
• Hazards sometimes don't sync to the music the way you'd expect
  
• Warning zones can be deceptively small/shaped or not present where you'd want them
  
• When you stop moving you always orientate yourself facing to the right which means you can't really dash without moving already

These are only minor issues that I hope get fixed for a more comfortable user experience. I've had no major issues so far. The one thing I feel is missing is a level editor and the ability to import custom levels/songs. This game has a lot of potential for future expansion.

I feel like this game has potential that hasn't been met but I'm pessimistic that it will ever be a great game any time soon. It currently lacks any in-game tutorial so I had no clue what was happening durring space combat so I won't be talking about that half of the game. Infantry combat feels like old first person shooters and it definitely has the look of Battlefield 2142. This game's visuals would look great for that time with large highly detailed environments, but low texture and sound quality and a lack of visual effects that you'd come to expect from a game in 2018 makes it a hard sell. Despite looking like a 15 year old game ported to last generation consoles, it felt pretty good playing it although game balance is hard to judge when you're only able to play with really bad bots. It felt like I could chew through enemies with just about anything although weapons don't feel very different from each other and there's no stats to compare weapons with. This, combined with no in-game tutorial or hints, poor map design, and no clarity on what you're suppossed to be doing make for a confusing experience. Finally, there's the close to non-existent playerbase which left me pretty bored slaughtering bots that only killed me because their poor reaction time made me think they were teammates.

I had high hopes when I first heard about this game, but now I don't expect it to do very well which is sad because I've always wanted a game with this kind of concept. This game needs a total makeover followed by a significant marketing push if it wants to succede. For now, I'm refunding and maybe I'll check on it in a few years if it's still alive.

On the surface, Rivals is a really fun game. I got it during the summer sale so I could play with my friends and luckily I was able to do that the day I got it. I jumped straight into the story mode to get used to the game. Despite it being blatantly tacked on, the story mode was a good challenge for me who has never owned a Smash Bros game but has played it countless times at friends' and reletives' houses for maybe 10 years. After story mode, I played with a friend who came over to my house and I introduced him to the game and he picked it up pretty quick, given that he plays Smash semi-regularly at home. After an enjoyable couple hours another friend of mine joined online, the friend who suggested I get this game. Strangely we found that you can't actually do a free-for-all online. Luckily you are able to damage your teamates so that worked out fine but the online features lack clarity (like how no one had any clue as to what was going on when picking a stage). Not having game setting customization is fine (to my knowledge; so no fun gamemodes like sudden death) but not having a free-for-all mode or being able to pick your teams is unexcuseable. At this point, I was still having fun but still was learning and decided to actually try the tutorial. Surprisingly, I found the tutorial very helpful and very in-depth even going so far as to tell you how many frames something lasts or needs to be done by and practice mode can show you the hitboxes of you and your attacks. But the more advanced tutorials show how the game wants to be played and I can't deal with that. The game not only teaches you how to play compettitvely like a pro; it expects it and the skill of some randoms I fought online compared to mine or my friends reinforces that idea for me. The tutorials teach you exactly how the game mechanics work and then immediately task you with abusing them before being alowed to continue. The edgeguarding tutorial alone took me around 30 minutes. Whether its true or not, you have to play dirty in this game in order to compete; you can't just get someone to 100% damage, hit them with a power attack, and expect them to die becuase few attacks have any real knockback on them and even then it's kept to a minimum. If you want kills, you have to push them over the edge and pummel them into the abyss yourself until they finally die. I like to fight a fair fight on the stage and I don't edgeguard becuase I'll either feel like a ♥♥♥♥ or be dead afterwards but this game doesn't facilitate that. There is no honor in this style of fighting. If your in to that, I highly recomend this game, otherwise, don't pick it up unless you are exclusively playing with friends you are comfortable with fighting. I'll still play this game with my friends, but I can't take it seriously anymore.