Recent reviews by popcar2

This game IMO does exactly what a sequel should. It takes the first game and improves upon it with all-new content, but doesn't change the core gameplay. It's safe to say if you liked MT1 you'll love this, and if you hated MT1 you probably won't like this either. If you're wondering which one to buy, I would recommend just getting this one instead of the first.

• Incredibly fun new clans with lots of synergies and variety
  
• Really fun progression that unlocks new cards, clans, skins etc over time
  
• New mechanics like room cards and equipments add a lot more depth to the game
  
• The undo button is a god-send and saves you from misplays when you don't read that an enemy counters spells or whatever
  
• There are 10 covenant ranks instead of 20, the grind to unlock higher difficulties is basically removed. Things ramp up fast.

• The artstyle isn't great. I don't know why they went back to 2D skeletal animation when their last game Inkbound was incredibly pretty. Characters also look goofier than the last game.
  
• There's a story with visual novel-style cutscenes now... The writing isn't very good and the execution of cutscenes is pretty bad. Luckily they're very short and skippable.

This game is incredibly gorgeous, ambitious, and generally fun to play. While I do really like it, I think it needs more time in the oven.

There's a lot of genuine criticism that stops it from being an easy recommendation. There's quite a few annoying mechanics like equipment durability and a woefully unbalanced random loot system making it very hard to fight equipment that's right for your build, among other annoyances.

Meanwhile, the lead developer keeps melting down online and wants to make sweeping changes to the game's mechanics like removing stat leveling entirely and replacing it with a class-based system. It sounds like the game will spend at least a few more years in Early Access.

The game also has an identity crisis, being torn between having ARPG mechanics like daily/weekly quests that imply the game should be played forever, and a linear story-driven experience that should be one-and-done like Elden Ring. Which is it? I'm not sure anybody knows yet - they're still trying a lot of things.

So yeah, I think this game will be a 10/10 masterpiece some day assuming Moon Studios doesn't implode, but right now you're getting a really polished and fun ~20 hour game that's incomplete and has a lot of mechanics that don't gel well together. The most recent hotfixes are absolutely moving in the right direction, I can't wait to revisit No Rest for the Wicked a year or so in the future.

I loved Crypt of the Necrodancer and didn't expect to buy this game until I saw all the glowing reviews. Turns out this game, which I initially dismissed as "DDR with a gimmick", turned out to be a lot cooler than it looks!

Rift of the Necrodancer is pretty brilliant. Unlike the vast majority of rhythm games, it's a lot more gamey than pressing the buttons at the right time. The challenge here is understanding and reacting to tons of enemies that have all sorts of tricks. Some have to be hit twice, some spawn other enemies when hit, some charge from multiple steps away, etc.

There's a surprising amount of variety here that makes each level fresh. It doesn't just challenge you by throwing more notes, but rather having different enemy types and trickier combinations. Tracks are really well-laid out that it's easy to get into the rhythm and forget you're even looking at enemies.

Despite being tough, Rift is pretty lenient too. You start with 10 HP which can be restored by hitting food items, as well as having an "ultimate" that lets you miss enemies without losing HP for a short time. The expectation here is to just SURVIVE the level, and the game gives you different tools to do that. A big part of winning on hard is knowing when to save your ult, or panicking and pressing it when you lose your rhythm. Again, it's a lot more game-y than just "press the buttons at the right time".

There's also Punch Out style boss fights and Rhythm Heaven style minigames. They're all pretty good. What's very interesting is that since there can be SO many combinations of enemies and types that still land the at the same time, there's something called Remix Mode where enemies are randomized in the track (but the timings are exactly the same), forcing you to sight read and understand harder patterns rather than memorizing them.

Would recommend to anybody into rhythm games. Really fun time.

Solid 7/10
Psychonauts 2 has a lot of heart and soul but honestly it's not as great as everyone claims it is. The voice acting, environments and character design are S tier and carry a lot of my enjoyment of the game, because everything else is meh.

The gameplay is OK at best. Levels are very linear and the platforming itself is a bit clunky in many cases. Many levels and bosses feel like they're 2-3x as long as they should be.

What almost kills the game for me is how frequent cutscenes are. I swear there are so many sections in the game where there are back-to-back cutscenes every few steps you take.

Walked into a room? Cutscene. Walked a bit further? Cutscene of enemies spawning. Defeated enemies in 20 seconds? Cutscene. Now talk to this NPC. Done? Here's a cutscene. This game LOVES stopping you from playing every minute or so.

When you're not in a cutscene you start to realize how samey all the levels are. Platforming is very trivial and aside from moving a bit faster while on the ball, there is no interesting movement mechanics. It really is "double jump from platform to platform - the game".

If you take the game for what it is - an interactive theme park/animated movie - you'll have a lot of fun. If you're here for exciting gameplay, there are way better 3D platformers out there.

At what point does an MMORPG turn into a clicker game? Brighter Shores aims to streamline the genre but swings too far in that direction that the game is so, so simple and ends up being very shallow.

• Every single skill boils down to clicking on something and waiting for a bar to fill up. Gathering items, cooking, alchemy, combat, everything is so automated that it doesn't feel like you're doing anything.
  
• The game is comically grindy for no reason and there's no real reason to level anything up in general. You'll be doing the exact same thing on level 1 of gathering vs level 200. The only difference is the icon you're clicking on is different.
  
• The map is grid-based and relatively small-scale. It doesn't feel like a world, more like a set of connected hallways.
  
• Every quest is either a fetch quest or asks you to go talk to another NPC. There is no story to redeem this either, the writing is poor and full of fluff. The devs seemingly created the most generic fantasy world ever on purpose.
  
• The progression system means none of your grind and effort carries over between acts.
  
• Saying this is an MMO is a stretch. There's zero group activities, and people you meet disappear between rooms, so communicating with others becomes impossible.

I had hopes for this game, but my 4 hours of playing Brighter Shores were completely dull. I have a hard time seeing why anybody would play this compared to any other MMORPG in the market.

Long story short, Marvel Rivals is a great hero shooter, one of the only games that manages to remind me of classic Overwatch. It's fun to jump in and mess around, there's an impressive variety of heroes and abilities that guarantees everybody can enjoy the game. The production quality is superb, too.

That said, Marvel Rivals' gameplay feels very "messy" compared to many other multiplayer games. Visual and audio clarity are non-existent, you will often be in very fast paced team-fights with no idea of what's going on, who's damaging you, where your team is, and which team actually has the objective. Characters shout voice lines constantly and there are a few characters which would just cover the whole area with very distracting visual effects.

This problem is made way worse by the fact that this game has ZERO downtime between fights. Everybody respawns in only 10 seconds, and since maps are very small they'll be back on the objective in no time. There are times where we would kill 3-4 enemies, and by the time we get to the last ones alive, the rest of the team would be back in 15 seconds.

There's no time to strategize, no time to position properly, and no time to decide who wants to switch to which hero. Hell, matches even start before everybody loads the game. People who don't have the game on an SSD often miss the first half-minute of a match, and you'll be wondering where your team even is.

Another thing everybody's talking about is the lack of a role queue. Most matches will have only one or even zero healers since nobody's picking support, and there isn't anything you can do if the other 5 teammates are all DPS-mains.

Playing support is also very rough. Movement abilities are crazy in Marvel Rivals, a decent player can just jump over your whole team and focus you like Venom and Psylocke. Unless your team can turn around for a few seconds (not going to happen when they can barely see what's going on), you're probably dead.


The game is fun and I'm really looking forward to playing it more. That said, I hope they can improve clarity and balance, and maybe tone down the pace of the game a little bit. At the very least make respawn times longer so we can actually capitalize on kills.

Quest Master is just fantastic. I don't mean to put other games down, but it is leagues ahead of other "maker" games like Super Dungeon Maker. It's not even close.

Let's start with the gameplay itself: The controls are tight and very enjoyable. There's a good variety of enemies and items, and a ton of creative ways to use many of them. There's some you will expect like a boomerang and grappling hook, but quite a bit of unique ones like a wand that creates tornados which shoot you upwards, or a ghost lantern that shows invisible objects around you.

Dungeons can have multiple floors and there's so much you can do with it like being able to see floors below you and fall down to them assuming the level creator lets you. There's also a detailed map that automatically updates the more you explore, with teleporters to move around easily - encouraging huge levels and exploration without feeling lost!

One thing that surprised me is that there's some meta progression to Quest Master, there are rings you gain over time that grant you small bonuses when playing levels, and NPCs that visit the town at certain times to play small minigames. Pretty fun!

The production quality is S-tier as you can probably guess. Art, music, and sound effects are lovely and full of detail. It's obviously... Inspired... But there's a great amount of unique themes that it never feels like just a Zelda clone.

If you're here for the level maker, rest easy. It's awesome. It's very easy to use and has powerful mechanics like signals and conditionals to trigger events whenever you do something, whether that be solving a puzzle or opening a chest or killing an enemy, etc...


The game is fun. The community, while small, is creating TONS of quality levels with huge amounts of variety. Whether you're here just to play levels or make them, Quest Master is one of the best maker games out there, even in early access. Buy it!

Trackmania is a fantastic arcade racing game that has VERY powerful map-creation tools and an amazing community that gives us an infinite amount of content. I have well over 150 hours outside of Steam and still enjoy watching this game.

You might be wondering why I'm downvoting this game, then. It's because of two reasons:

* Ubisoft gimped the free version of the game, limiting it to just 10 easy campaign maps per season rather than the whole 25 maps, making the free version a joke

* The "premium version" is a $20/year subscription, which is outrageous especially considering 99% of content is made by the community and NOT Nadeo. I could stomach another subscription service when it was $10 per year, but last year they doubled the price to squeeze the playerbase.

Well, my subscription ended and I can no longer play online levels - the entire point of the game. I'm frankly very upset the community didn't cause a bigger ruckus at how insane the pricing of this game is. None of the updates or mediocre campaign maps justify such an expensive price to a game you'll never own.

In fact, the newer updates introducing legacy cars arguably made the game worse. The new cars are so finnicky to control and constant switching of them mid-track intentionally messes with your muscle memory and will force you to crash or lose control constantly.

Save your money and play TM:NF which is ACTUALLY free - or buy an older TM game like Turbo when on sale.

~15 years later, still remains to be the greatest element sandbox ever made. An absolute ton of elements to play with - both real and fantasy. I've got fond memories playing, and it only seems to have gotten better over the years.

The game is also a technical masterpiece, the download size is only like 3 megabytes and it could run on a potato.

That's kind of the big question. There's quite a lot of content available in the game right now and I've unlocked everything major. Hades 2 is a ton of fun, but as you might expect from early access the content abruptly ends at some point and you'll have to wait until the next update. While it is fun, there are also some kinks and pacing issues that will be ironed out over EA, so I would recommend waiting if you're not impatient like me.

The big issue with EA is obviously the story. When you beat the final boss, the story abruptly ends and you don't get to know what happens next. There's a couple of unresolved side stories as well,

Gameplay-wise, Hades 2 is awesome. It's as satisfying as you might expect from a sequel to Hades 1. The bosses are also a massive step up in quality, they're a lot more fun and creative.

There's some balance issues but something that really needs tweaking is omega abilities (charging attacks). If you base your build around charging attacks the combat becomes kind of tedious since you slow down time every time you charge, and you're incentivized to use your mana actively but it can feel like it takes forever to use it up.

You won't run into this in most runs, but when you have an omega attack build you'll quickly realize you have to hold attack for one second, release, and repeat 20 times until combat is over. All the while time slows down, which can bring the pacing of the combat down with it and it turns into a bit of a waiting game where you stand still and spam. Supergiant have acknowledged this and I trust they'll figure it out in time.

The one thing I am a bit worried about is the writing. The story is still excellent of course, but like others have mentioned it feels more dry than Hades 1. Melinoe isn't as interesting as Zagreus, her mission comes down to "I want to kill Chronos" and isn't very personal.

Hades 1 had a lot of fun dynamics like Zagreus' spiteful relationship with his father, his awkward friendship with Dusa and Meg, his funny rivalry with Theseus, etc. This game is lacking a bit of that energy. A lot of dialogue feels empty and a lot of Melinoe's relationship with others is just "good luck on your quest to kill Chronos we're rooting for you". Maybe this will improve as they add more content and the story evolves a bit more.

Still, the story's pretty good when it kicks off and I'm eager to see where it goes.

In short: Hades 2 is a worthy sequel. There's still some stuff that can (and probably will) improve. That and the fact that the story is incomplete means you should probably wait until release unless you're impatient like me.