Recent reviews by popcar2

Tetragun is a great arcade game, very much worth the low price of free and pretty fun for a handful of rounds.

Some feedback:

* I agree with adding a high contrast mode. The issue isn't just the colors, but the enemy death particles being the same color and shape. It's hard to parse where enemies are when there are 100 circles on screen, most of which are just remains of dead enemies.

* Higher difficulties are very RNG-driven. On Extreme and Nightmare you have to hope you don't get a run-ending enemy trait *and* getting the right upgrades. Also, sometimes you just lose since fast enemies come from all directions and rotation speed is constantly a bottleneck.

* It would be nice if I can view my current stats

* The game could use a balance pass. Some enemy traits are inconsequential while others (like Duplication) are total run enders. Many upgrades are also not useful outside of stat upgrades. Helpers like asteroids and military dudes feel to weak and unreliable compared to just 50% more fire rate or rotation speed, things that are necessary to win.

That's it. Thanks for making the game free!

This is an improved, more polished version of the best social deduction game ever made. If you like the last one or the genre as a whole, you'll love this game. It's that simple. The classic mode is pretty bad for veterans because it's very balanced in favor of town winning but the other modes are a blast.

There are some technical issues and the UI is more complicated than it needs to be, which is what's driving all the negative reviews. Some people are crashing but ever since they restarted the servers earlier it's been a stable experience for me.

The new roles are awesome. New neutral roles like Doomsayer and Shroud can cause a lot of chaos and confusion, new town roles like Admirer and Deputy are creative and support risk vs reward gameplay.

Mafia has been merged into Coven, which while initially disappointing turned out to actually be a great idea. They took the best parts of Mafia and Coven and merged roles. There are no longer boring roles like framer or consig around. Every coven role feels like it carries its own weight.

The devs also reworked problematic roles like investigator, which limited how many roles you can claim. If you were a serial killer for example, you *had* to claim doctor. Now, you have a wide range of roles you can fake, and the game has more depth as a result. So far, it's been really fun. Highly recommended.

TL;DR: Like ToS1? You'll like ToS2. Hate complex social deduction games? Then this game isn't for you.

Murder on the Orient Express if it were good

Jokes aside, I expected a silly April Fool's joke but what we got was a surprisingly great game. It had no right being this polished and fun AND FREE. Worth a play for any Sonic fan.

I want to believe.

This game was made with good intentions but it's clear the developers lack any foresight or skill to pull this off. What you see now is a pre-alpha game that will likely die in a few months because the devs are terrible at knowing what the playerbase needs. The base gameplay is so barebones that it's not worth playing for more than 10 minutes.
The lead dev, bluedrake, has good intentions but has some insane hot takes that makes it clear he has no idea what he's doing.

First of all, there were cheaters in the playtest. The devs dismissed this, saying the game doesn't NEED anti-cheat, and the best form of anti-cheat is good server moderation. They again dismissed anticheats at some point saying "all competitive games have cheaters, anti-cheats just slow them down" (Implying anticheat isn't useful). Also, the community can make their own anticheat!
Goomes (Community manager): "my general understanding of anticheat is none of them are perfect, and the most effective ones are probably really intrusive and you probably wouldnt want on your computer in the first place lol"

So we're already off to a fantastic start. The game releases, and behold! Cheaters everywhere. Who could've seen this one coming? Of course, the devs do a 180 and said they're implementing an optional anti-cheat for server devs. They could've listened to the people that warned them, but they released the game anyways without anti-cheat. They'll fix it when most of the playerbase has already left.

For a game that's solely focused on modding, there is surprisingly not much thought put into it. Modded servers are dead because it's too confusing to get them to work. Aside from the fact that steam workshop was broken on release, there is no way to auto-download mods from a server and no error messages upon connecting. So if a server uses mods X and Y, if you don't already have them and try to connect, it will just boot you to the main menu. You have to know beforehand which mods are required and go look for them in the workshop, because the game DOES NOT EVEN TELL YOU which ones are missing.

Of course, the devs didn't see that coming. They made a poll on which feature they should focus on next, and auto-downloading mods got the vast majority of the votes. It's so obvious, it's mindblowing that they released the game without it. Imagine G-Mod but it tells you to go look for 60 separate mods upon connecting to a server. Anyone could've told them it's a basic feature.

Listening to his dev updates, bluedrake is the type of guy that sees and accepts all criticism but learns all the wrong lessons from it. Upon seeing that the game is mixed on steam, he said that this doesn't affect him and is normal because the only games that are overwhelmingly positive are niche 2D pixel platformers. Sure. Definitely. And he said that most people don't understand that the game is in early access and therefore are saying it's too empty and simple. No, we understand. They don't understand that as soon as a game is available, it's ready to be reviewed and criticized. They never admit that they released the game in a sad state it never should've been released in. Updates that should've been there from day 1 are too slow.

Every preview of the game on YouTube before release said the same thing: The game is too janky, too empty, too unfinished to be released. They ignored everyone and did it anyways. What we're left with is a boringly generic and janky military shooter with the hopes that modders will save the game and make it... Fun.

1 week ago, the peak player count was 1500. Yesterday, the peak player count was 660. By the end of the month, I expect it to be way less and mostly consist of modders. The only thing you can expect is glacially slow updates and the developers having terrible takes on Discord. They released a broken game and expected the playerbase to stick around for months until they fix it.

20 Minutes Till Dawn feels like a game thrown together to meet the hype of vampire survivors clones. It's poorly thought out and is laughably easy, becoming almost impossible to lose in after unlocking a couple of upgrades. The only way you can die is by limiting yourself. The only difficult part of the game is the first 3 minutes before you get the few upgrades you need to win. After that, it's watching everything around you die in one second until the game eventually ends.

There <i>are</i> harder difficulty levels but I'm now on difficulty 9/15 and it doesn't feel any different from 0. Maybe it does get hard at the end. I'm not spending another 5 hours to find out.

Each update seems to make the game more broken and unfocused. The addition of soul hearts elevated the game from "This is really easy, nothing can hit me" to "This is really easy, nothing can hit me and I also have unlimited HP". The dev doesn't seem to know what they're doing. Ice is still busted, summons can win the game for you without shooting a single bullet, enemies and bosses are really boring and derivative, every stage looks and plays the same, it's STILL hard to see what's happening on screen at any given moment...

I would like to say that creating different builds is fun, but it isn't. Every upgrade is some variation of "deal more damage", some comboing with others to deal even more damage. The dev realized that this is just a DPS race and no other stat matters, so they made other stats tie in to dealing more damage. Some summons deal more damage based on max HP. Some upgrades increase your fire rate with move speed. None of it matters. Every upgrade is just "Deal more damage", and every run ends the same way.

The game is cheap but I wouldn't call the 6 hours I've played that fun. The first 20 minutes were, but after my first win it just became very derivative and every run is basically the same.

There is a legitimately good game here beneath all the crashes and technical issues. I crashed in 2 DMZ games in a row, losing almost an hour of progress with friends. What a pain. Wait for updates.

The game itself is fun, but I feel scammed by the fact that I bought this in EA and they suddenly added premium currency, a cash shop, and a battle pass to a game I've already bought for full price. The devs said they won't even make any content updates, so this is literally just greed. I wouldn't recommend it unless it's in deep discount, which is only a matter of time because the devs are hell-bent on killing their playerbase with terrible PR and moves like this.

"B-b-b-but it's just cosmetics!" Yeah, and I just paid full price to buy the game, so why does it have microtransactions like a f2p game? They also make every regular cosmetic overpriced so normal people have to grind to get any cosmetics. Disgusting practice. Would've gotten a refund if I could.

Also, battle pass aside, the MMO aspect of this game sucks ass. It's virtually a singleplayer game where you see people walking around. There's no incentive to interact with anyone, you can't join people in their fights, the co-op is poorly thought out and gives you no advantage for teaming up. You control 2 temtem vs you and your friend controlling 1? Why would I want to give myself less control? Why is this even an MMO if there's no reason to team up?

It's Picross 3D. If you know what that is, you know what's up, and you know it's good. Voxelgram has an insane amount of levels, really smooth controls, and great QoL changes to what you expect from Picross 3D.

If you don't know what Picross 3D is, it's a logic game where you slowly break away blocks to reveal a sculpture of an object in the end. It's fun and casual, and not very difficult.

While Voxelgram is a lovely game in its own right and improves upon Picross 3D in some aspects, imo it falls short in a couple of aspects. Everything just lacks oomph

Nitpicks:

• Everything feels a little unsatisfying. In Picross 3D, a block breaks into many pieces when you remove it, in this game you just get a "click" noise and the block fades away. The level end screen shows you the final object with little to no fanfare, and finishing a diorama just feels like I ticked a box.
  
• I don't like the sound and music. The click sfx get grating over time, in terms of music there are like 3 tracks that are really melancholic for some reason. The music tries to be relaxing but it comes off as needlessly sad for such a casual game.
  
• No timer or challenge levels. In Picross 3D, you have a timer to keep you on your toes and challenge levels you need to finish in a quick time. Some people didn't like these, but I loved it and wish this game had something similar.

Aside from that, this game is pretty great, but with a little more polish it could've been amazing. Still highly recommend, following up Picross 3D was never an easy task.

Stuttering issues are variable for different people. I'm under minimum specs but I'm running the game extremely well on 30fps, with very few stutters (like 1-2 per hour), and usually only when entering a new area. It's not a big deal on my end and the game is perfectly fine.

As for the game itself, it's 11/10. Everything about it is incredible. Combat is amazing, the world is fantastical and full of variety, the open world is full of surprises and never boring, the game has an OVERWHELMING amount of content, and there's even more build variety than dark souls. Just awesome!

You have to grind for 20-30 hours just so you can play this bloody game. Until you grind XP and unlock the last 3 tiers of many different towers you're straight up playing at a disadvantage, and you're going to lose every single game because the game fails to match you against people of the same level.