Recent reviews by TH3G4M3GRL

An enjoyable experience for people looking for a more arcade styled stealth game. The gameplay is more in depth from the first game, with some issues. Such as the moment you dump your last body, you lose the blood meter telling you how much is left. As well as lack of level select so if you want to perfect clean the levels, you better have done it your first run through.

Visually the game is servicable, and has stylistic choices that give it an interesting perspective. I again feel the first game painted a better style for the game, but the grittier aspects they included wouldn't work in the first game. An evolving visual direction is good, but it wasn't too impressive to me.

Story was never a strong suit of the first game, but it felt concise and enjoyable. You're a momma's boy who cleans up crime scenes. Eventually you work for a client that has you cleaning up a serial killer and it escalates until you're stuck having to rescue your mom and clear your own name. This game however felt much more lackluster in the story department. There's several storylines, one for each character, and then the main story tying together the narrative.

The main story is the group of cleaners celebrating New Years after cleaning up a scene. Each level is served as a flashback of the character explaining the job. After each level you usually have a flashback of some kind with the character. As the night progresses, eventually a pager alerts everyone. Suddenly there's apparently a traitor in the crew. Everyone's holding up each other at gunpoint. Depending on choices made in dialogue, you can sway who the traitor actually is. The traitor dies, you pick somebody to dump the body. Game over. The traitor plot twist feels like it comes out of nowhere. I didn't really feel like this was a crew of friends... or coworkers really. They didn't ever have much of a cohesive relationship that felt genuine in much way. The characters existed but the only ones I felt really developed was Hal. He started depicted as a stilted dialect psychopath. Then you learn of his loved one he has, her desires to have a kid, that she wants him to go clean. The thoughts that nobody he works with views him as a proper person. His way of talking comes from trying to improve and express his barely present emotions, pausing every word to ensure he explains his exact thoughts. It gave a surprising bit of depth to him. Interestingly the more stressful the situation the more eloquent and composed he seemed, needing to pause less between words. It gives Hal a nice dynamic.

If you don't care for the story, the game itself is enjoyable. If you care for the story, it's a mixed bag. It's passable, but could have been executed better.

Madness: Project Nexus. This game has been a long time coming, and I've ridden through a lot of versions of this game. To put it simple is that if you enjoy the Madness series, you'll enjoy this. If you enjoy more arcade oriented beat-em-up games, you'll enjoy this.

The combat is easy to understand, but there's a surprising amount of nuance and depth from fight to fight. With mechanics as simple as the Arkham-style press attack button just before hitting to critical hit, to weapon durability and stabbing the broken weapon into someone for an instant kill. Dual wielding melee weapons to increase your damage output or taking a weapon and a gun in both hands to beat people up close and shoot them immediately after. There's a good amount of variety in your options.

Storywise the game is relatively self-contained and gives you enough information to rely on just the game. There are details that you can piece together from the animations and the game before, but none of that is necessary to enjoy the story of this game. Although, I am biased in this regard and may be wrong.

There is also the Arena mode, which is separate from the Story mode with its own story and gameplay mechanics. I do have some issues with the Arena mode, due to how the end game functions feels at odds with the other main aspects of it. It still is enjoyable despite that of course, if you enjoy the base gameplay enough.

Remember though. Just do what comes natural.

A buggy game that even once fixed would be lacking in many capacities.

The combat is just passable, but unless the enemies are vastly outnumbering you, typically you will out heal them or out damage them. Their AI is meagerly depressing. Where at one point, while defeating a rival boss, for three turns in a row the remaining enemies just spammed overwatch whilst I shot them to pieces. There's nothing I saw to indicate what skills enemy goons will have, nor your own goons defending places. In the goon vs goon combats, they can drag on dreadfully long thanks to this and their poor stats.
The risk of a game over is typically barely a threat, BUT I have faced heavy losses from when the AI spammed explosives (which are guaranteed decent chunks of damage), and did game over when one of the generic enemy goons turned out to have the meat hook skill to pull my boss into the wide open of five enemies and they focus fired on them.

Empire management in this game is technically there, but it is basically just upgrading without thought as all of it is beneficial. The alcohol production has some level of matching the demand that the neighborhoods want, but they'll all reach Whiskey guaranteed if you buy everything. Police apparently can shut down your businesses but unless you're actively slaughtering them I don't think they'll do anything. I could be wrong but they never bothered me.

Diplomacy between factions is present. Everyone seems highly eager to hate you however, unless you fork over absurd amounts of money to them. There's a "like" meter and a "threat" meter. The standing arrangements you can typically make with them however are very lackluster in power, and the only reasonable use for trading with them would be to snag a Unique tier weapon without having to kill them. Supposedly you can offer to protect others for money, but when I tried my "threat" was too high or something and it wouldn't let me. Along with this is a thing called a Mole for espionage. You send them to infiltrate an enemy faction and after six months, you sabotage them in some form depending on the class of the gangster you send in. However, six months is a very hefty chunk of time, and they're not guaranteed to succeed. For reference, I killed 6 enemy bosses or so after setting out my mole, and they never did their job.

In a similar vein to diplomacy, there is the gangsters and their relationship system. Some of your hires like, hate, or love others. They will refuse to shoot those that they like, and there's some interactions if you have their lover in your group, but I cannot tell if there's any benefits or if it's just drawbacks, as I believe they gain a negative status effect if their lover is low health. However, if you kill someone they just like, there's a chance that they will get upset and just leave. Which, to keep that, you'd need to ask a favour from another faction to kill the person they like if an enemy boss has them and you want to ensure you keep this one gangster. Overall the system here is barren but does have groundworks with some unique gangster specific quests (I have only seen two of them with a quest though).

Everything about this game is just average. It's meh. The setting helps carry it enough for me to say I could probably enjoy it in stints every now and again, but the gameplay is very dull and I don't think they can fix that unless they overhaul the systems.

A fun and challenging 2D shooter with enough of a compelling story to keep you invested. I thoroughly enjoyed and loved the game, and there's even workshop support so there's plenty of content to play with even past the base game. Especially with the hard mode version of the campaign.

That said, there's a few issues that very much disappoint me but don't really hinder the core of the gameplay.

The achievements, I would rather Death and Famine to be a "complete every stage without dying" and "complete every stage in total under an hour", rather than having to start an entirely new game to do such, as that means in order to fully 100% the game, you need to complete the game without dying in under an hour and then go complete the other achievements.

On top of that, you cannot buy every weapon in the game even with every achievement completed. You will always be short something, whether it's the scythe (in my case) or some other combination. You will not have enough souls to get everything. I'm not sure why the devs decided to make it so you can ALMOST get everything but not quite?

In the end, I really hope they come back to make a sequel that improves upon the gameplay and fixes the few janky parts of the game. (Making it so you can actually 100% the game in one file would be nice.)

A great story, fun gameplay, and great soundtrack combine into one of my favorite games of all time. Story currently ends on a cliffhanger, hopefully more content is coming. Also lets you pet cats.

With recent allegations of what the devs behind Starbound were doing with not paying their workers along with Rhopunzel making claims of sexual harassment cases... it's not looking good.

I've enjoyed the game. I think they've made some bad changes from early access to full release, but the overall product is still good and can go further beyond thanks to modding. I cannot however recommend this game until Chucklefish has provided proof that these claims are actually false. Not paying people for their work is plenty scummy and I've a personal investment in this. I backed this game on Kickstarter.

Prove it wrong if you can, Chucklefish. But I cannot in good heart say you should buy this game until that's proven otherwise.

I'm not going to be particularly in detail. The game is a spiritual successor to Advance Wars while bringing its own twists to the system. The only major issue I have is the big difference in this game is that your commander (strong ground unit, you lose if they perish) sometimes will almost never play a part in a battle if the map is heavily water and air based, as the commander is unable to interact with those unit types. Essentially this turns every water based map into a normal fight with no commander options.

Otherwise, the game is pretty well designed, although the "hard difficulty" in the Arcade mode isn't that fun to play against most of the time as their way of making it more challenging when I last played it was to just double the income of the AI. This results in eventually the AI overwhelming you with higher cost units if given enough time. The AI still falls for common tricks that they would fall for in normal too.

This game despite its flaws is plenty fun, has a ton of heists with varying objectives, simple horde wave based shooter. Ultimate Edition unlocks a lot of content, but isn't exactly needed. I'm bad at reviewing.

I've played a lot of this game, hoping it'd be enjoyable (which it is) but I keep finding multiple design flaws in this game that consistently piss me off. At this point of Stockholm syndrome I can't help but find myself constantly hoping for a patch that balances the game.

While the game is fun, it's only fun due to the interactions between players as every match starts to run into the same feeling. The maps all look the same, every Jason plays the same, and the only real change you can do is change your counselor. Every round starts with you looting cabins hoping to god you find useful supplies in order to survive if Jason decides to bother with you if you're a slow character.

The combat system of the game itself is not well made. Counselors must find weapons which have limited durability, these have varied stats and are used to try and stun Jason. There are 6 weapons out of 10 which anyone would choose to use (3 of those 6 are also the same stats just reskinned, so 3 out of 7). There is a combat stance for counselors and Jason, only counselors have a useless combat stance. Counselors have one advantage over Jason: Speed. Upon entering combat stance you are at walking speed and can "dodge" which doesn't seem to actually work.
There's no invincibility frames in dodging and Jason swings faster than you ever can as counselor to the point he can almost stun lock anyone. Jason's combat stance includes blocking which makes him completely immune to every possible stun in the game except for the shotgun. There is no way to break through his block and he can use this to ignore single use items such as firecrackers (which are meant to create a temporary safe space for counselors to get a breather) and flare guns (a single shot ranged weapon that has travel time and is useless if missed). Along with this Jason can block bear traps, which he is meant to step in and temporarily restrain him for a few seconds.

Counselors can also block, but if they block Jason's attack and swing immediately after Jason can get into block stance due to how slow swinging is. Hitboxes for weapons tend to phase through Jason at the most inopportune times and Jason gets plenty of invincibility frames when grabbing a counselor and also the moment he starts a kill animation. Along with this, any successful hits against Jason either do nothing at all or will stun him. There is no inbetween.

Jason's grab comes out faster than a counselor can swing a weapon (meaning he can grab you even if you swing first) and immediately ignore your entire attack despite watching your weapon make contact along with insane range. At this point Jason can mash his buttons for his grab kills such as the choke you start with to kill you almost immediately with no time for any attempt to be saved. Most of his other kills are lengthy and take space, giving other counselors a chance to get distance, this is true with an exception in two specific kills. The choke you start with and the head punch, which get you back into the action extremely quickly.

Jason himself is extremely slow where the slowest counselor in the game can jog and you'll still not catch up until they run out of stamina. To counter this you're given a Morph (which is a map-wide teleport to traverse the map or close distances) and Shift (which is disappearing and then zooming forward at high speeds to close distances). Upon exiting from either of these you can immediately grab, allowing you to kill a counselor if they don't have a pocket knife. Yet this typically only holds true for slower counselors (more on that later). This tends to create a situation where it's unfun to play against Jason due to his constant teleportation and one mistake being the instant death of you.

When playing as Jason a decent counselor playing anyone with high speed and decent stamina, such as Vanessa, are able to run you around relatively easily for at least 10 minutes. Upon injuring a counselor enough they enter a state where they can't outrun you, but they can easily heal to go back into sprinting (which first aid is easily found). Lower speed counselors on the other hand are generally a breeze to massacre (and all tend to be repair characters, the high speed ones not so much).

The developers however gave Jason some tools to help him with those pesky speedy counselors. Throwing knives and Traps. Throwing knives can be found scattered across the map inside cabins and around the outside. These are one time use knives that deal damage to counselors, in order to quickly gather knives you pretty much need to Shift and Morph around the map in order to get them. You start with all your traps at the beginning, which can vary depending on your Jason choice to 3, 5, and 7. These traps are one time use, can only be disarmed with a pocket knife (used to free yourself from Jason's grasp) and otherwise must be stepped in which gives you a global alert of your trap being triggered. Your traps also show on your map and will change appearance upon being triggered (even with a pocket knife).

So without much surprise, every Jason uses their traps for only objectives in the exact same spots, making the point of a trap to surprise and ensnare your prey in order to snag them useless as it becomes an early warning system that deals damage.

The counselors stats give barely any information on what they actually do in game, and thanks to certain people testing, it's found that Strength only affects knocking his mask off and that is the only thing it does (making this a nigh useless stat unless you are trying to kill Jason, which is a situational scenario to begin with). Stealth claims to affect Jason's Sense ability which lets him find counselors, but that is a flatout lie by the developers as people have found all it does is change the noise blips you give out to Jason. This makes a good chunk of the stats in the game pointless.

Extensive testing has also found many perks just don't work, perks that start you with items don't work ONLY if placed into your second perk slot (how that happens I do not know). The perks that do work are either extremely strong ones like Thick Skin which grants you extra damage resistance, Medic which gives you two uses from a healing spray, or are nigh useless such as Psychic which increases how far your voice can be heard (which is bad because Jason can hear you talk) and starts you with a Walkie Talkie (you can find these pretty freely at any point in the game).

The progression system is horrendous, the final unlock you get that effects gameplay is Part 9 Jason at 31 and afterwards all you get for every level is some extra CP to roll perks and unlock kills with along with some new recoloured clothes to dress up in. On top of that, they released some free clothes to "apologize" for a horrid launch. While most of these are unique, Chad shares one of his free pants with his level 100 pants.

I honestly don't think this game can improve without an entire rework at this stage. It feels like a beta you pay 40 bucks for. Their TOS isn't even in the game and can only be found via social media.