Recent reviews by popcar2

Pretty decent minimalist platformer that's fun to play in short bursts. That said, it has too many annoyances that make it worse than all my favorite precision platformers.

Gold placement is SO obnoxious. The difficulty of getting all the gold in a level is all over the place, sometimes a level will be a 2/10 in difficulty but a 9/10 if you're trying to 100% it. Sometimes it's a 4/10 in difficulty and getting all the gold is super easy. Sometimes there's so much gold in a level that you have to spend minutes making slightly different jumps to collect them all, or spend a long time backtracking back and forth. Trying to 100% a series of levels often feels like a massive waste of time, and I started having 10x more fun when I just completely gave up and started ignoring gold altogether.

Level design is a mixed bag. The game boasts over 4,000 levels and there's obviously a lot of quantity over quality. Too many levels feel more "annoying" than difficult, and there are a LOT of levels that are too cramped and stop you from enjoying the movement. A lot of levels where you're forced to backtrack through the whole level again just to extend the playtime. A lot of levels where 99% of its difficulty is in one jump, like ones where you have to hit a switch that's surrounded by mines very carefuly... Etc.

Fall damage sucks. I'm 5+ hours in and I still can't tell you if a jump will kill me or not. It's never clear, and there's no indicator other than praying that you jucst barely being under the death velocity. It's annoying that every time you make a big jump, you have to land on a slope or wall jump at the very last second to avoid death. I don't think it actually adds anything to the game, it's just a weird carry-over from the previous games.

The minimalism is a double edged sword. I get the game is intentionally simple and has few traps but all the levels blend in together. Despite one trillion levels or whatever, it gets repetitive. This is made super obvious by the fact that only 9% of people finished the first row of N++ levels, and how most people reviewing have <10 hours of playtime. People got bored. Virtually nobody bothered to finish a quarter of the levels included.

Overall: 7/10 game. Worth buying on sale if you're looking for a purist platformer.

It's Nuclear Throne with a dose of LSD and a sprinkle of Spelunky.

It's a great top-down Terraria clone, with some colony management and a solid amount of content (including end-game raids).


Fair warning: The multiplayer is really bad. The netcode is terrible and I'm pretty sure the devs are aware of this.

I'm playing with friends from another country, so my ping is often in the ~100-150 range. Not unplayable by any means when it comes to other games, but in this one we are getting a torrent of desync issues. This includes but isn't limited to:

1. Enemies appearing alive on my screen that have died 5 seconds ago
   
2. Any mount such as minecarts and hoverboards rubberbanding so hard that they're unusable (the camera keeps whipping backwards)
   
3. Enemies (AND BOSSES) sometimes not dropping loot on my end
   
4. Blocks that have been destroyed appearing on my screen and vice versa
   
5. Sometimes exiting a dungeon or cave teleports me to the wrong area in the map...?
   
6. Enemies and Bosses moving erratically on my screen which makes every weapon without homing borderline unusable for me

I wouldn't recommend this game if you're mainly playing multiplayer and don't have a great connection. I really hope the dev fixes this in the coming updates...

I 100% the game and got the true ending. Silksong was worth the wait. Absolutely fantastic in every way to the point where it feels like I'm stealing because of how cheap the game is.

The game is tough so it's not for everyone, but if you're ready for a challenge it's basically a 10/10. Easy choice for my GOTY.

My only nitpicks with the game are mostly some balance issues:

• Act 1 is pretty difficult and you don't have much build variety. It takes a while to get crests & tools that really make a difference in how you play. Many of the best tools are so late-game that you don't get any opportunity to use them at all, though Team Cherry confirmed content updates in the future so maybe they'll be usable then.
  
• Half the tools you can equip are pretty useless. I think some buffs for them go a long way.
  
• The balance on some mid-late game fights are a bit wack. Some important bosses feel weirdly easy while random no-name ones can wreck you. For example the final boss in act 2 is weirdly easy compared to the ones that came previously. I hope TC can balance things up a bit so the difficulty curve makes more sense.

That's pretty much it. What a game, man.

Fantastic game but I would wait until it's out of early access.

Runs feel a bit too repetitive. Some aspects of the game are poorly explained, like some progression mechanics that don't make sense until you read a guide.

The game also does a bad job of telling you what you've already finished, it doesn't even tell you which bosses you have/haven't beaten yet - or which crypts you've finished and where they are.

There's a good amount of enemy variety but considering how many times you're going to be repeating the same map, it could use a bit more. Balancing is also off, you could get swarmed with enemies literally as soon as you spawn and have no time to position yourself which seems like an oversight.

Overall it's a great game that needs more time in the oven. Looking forward to full release.

Amazing game BUT there's little reason to buy this over the sequel, which is better in every single way.

If you can get this at a deep discount, then sure. Otherwise, buy Monster Train 2 instead!

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.