Recent reviews by Wobbly🐍Python

Abiotic Factor is the closest I've come to genuine wonder and interest in a game's world since playing Subnautica.

This program is the best thing out there for anyone doing pixel art.

Arrowhead has made a wonderful product but SONY has stepped in and pulled the rug out from under the international community for the sake of data collection and keeping surprise smash hit Helldivers2 inside the walled garden of PSN.

Their corporate meddling is disenfranchising entire regions of the world that are not supported by PSN in any way. They cannot continue to play a thing that they have paid money for, purely for SONY's bottom line. I don't live in an affected place, but today them, tomorrow anyone else.

Until Arrowhead is free of SONY's meddling, I cannot in good faith recommend this product.

[UPDATE]: We did it! Helldivers 2 is being spared the horrible yoke of the PSN.

This game ate me for a day.

This game is a turn based strategy title that gives me very strong vibes back to when I used to play a lot of original Civilization. There is a lot of micro-management at times, but there's also a lot of fun systems to balance.

Managing ammunition supplies for your forces doesn't sound like a super fun idea until you run out of ammunition midway through a defensive and have to find ways to scrabble together more in a big hurry!

If you're looking for something that's gonna' immerse your think wrinkles in good strategy juice then this is for sure up your alley.

Xenonauts 2 has improved on its predecessors in basically every way, while maintaining a religious adherence to what made the genre both immortal and vaguely inaccessible at the same time.

If you've tried to play the Classic SciFi strategy game XCom before and its old, rough edges and jank bugs are a bit too much to handle, pick this up! It's been rebalanced to be approachable and intelligible, but also rigorous and difficult. Small quality of life improvements pile up to a heaping helping of good fun.

This is one of those games that is a sub-narrative generator. Soldiers that you named "PooPants The Expendable" take their inadvisable two-pistol, body-armorless approach to gritty tactical warfare and surprise you at every turn with clutch rolls. Veteran Riflemen somehow manage to miss shots with 90% success rates because they were having intrusive thoughts about a brick of cheese. A lone soldier throws enough smoke bombs to smoke out Cheech and Chong as a means to incapacitate a psychic alien leader. An Unnamed farmer NPC destroys a platoon of lizardmen with a shotgun before bleeding out deep inside the downed alien mothership.

The enemy plays by the same apparent rules that you do, and the overall vibe is that you're playing the cool asymmetrical tabletop game with a small novel's worth of rules that you can never convince all your friends that it would be a really cool time and they would love it if they just gave it half a chance.

The Early Access label means there's a few frame hitches here and there, but by and large the heaving bulk of game that you interact with at the moment is wildly polished. I'm having a really great time streaming it and naming soldiers after my chat regulars. It's a good time. I promise you'll love it if you'd just read this small rulebook.

Pawsecuted is a kind of crunchy survival simulator thing, and normally I'm super not about those. I find their worlds usually are canvases of despair that I'm expected to paint a frown emoji on somewhere. Pawsecuted isn't a bright and happy setting. It's full of poison and bleeding out in a ditch, or racing between bleeding out and dieing of poison because you fought a pissed off wallaby and his pet snakes or whatever. But it's absolutely grim and dark in a way that doesn't make me immediately want to put it back like the lid on a box of stink.

Something about it has really gotten lodged in my think wrinkles, and I keep finding myself wondering about the world inside. In my most recent session (per writing), I helped a cult build a shrine to a precursor, delivered someone who was forced to survive donner-party style in a closet to their hometown, accidentally entered (and won) an eating contest that was explicitly not geared towards herbivores, and dug up a vehicle that I intend to repair if possible.

The game has shown me tooltips that mention "establishing settlements", and every time I feel like I've got myself figured out, I awaken to some new primal survival trait like the nose wiggles that help me suss out dangerous encounters. I haven't nailed down if it's the pacing of new things, or the general whimsy about struggling to survive in the outback as a genetically engineered rabbit-person in a time beyond humanity.

Whatever the reason, this game's livin' in my head rent free and it's a cool roommate.

Hey little Billy. You ever kickflipped a boat? WELL HOLD ON TO YOUR HAPPY MEAL.

Waves of Steel is a delightful labor of love, and a riotous good time. In an age where games seem deeply preoccupied by their "difficulty curves", "Resource management" and "Being played correctly", this breath of fresh air seems to be mostly concerned with "Are ya' havin' a good time, sport?".

In the shortest: This is a ship-building bullet-hell-feeling blastemup. You toot your big ol' battleship out onto the water against hundreds of other boats, and dip, duck, dodge, dive while exchanging fire. This is *not* a battleship simulator. This game feels like the best kind of arcade challenge. It's not trying to eat my quarters, and it's not asking me to make highly specific compromises on my play to see more of what it's offering. It's hit a very nice harmony between letting me get away with absolute murder, and pitching challenges at me befitting such antics.

For every time I manage to create a ship composed of spinning bow drills; flamethrowers; and an organized team of foghorn soloists that herald my arrival on the battlefield; Waves of Steel airdrops enemy battleships onto the water via a formation flyover. I've also seen the enemy forces in Waves of Steel Deploy submarines full of warships that crack open like Kinder surprise eggs full of angry sailing bees. The game brings to life the wonder of sitting in the bath with my toy boats, where perhaps one of them has taken its warfighting classes by watching a bit too much professional wrestling. All of the boats are in on that drama though.

The story of the game seems to be presented with a straight-ish face. The tension of the world is real, despite the Saturday-morning-cartoon-action-hour stakes. Characters aren't trying to quip the world's next best one-liner at all times, and instead have reasonable conversations about the goins-ons of the world. It's actually very nice being presented with a cast that isn't actively trying to be the next great tumblr funnyman. The most pressing topic is that a mysterious organization by the name of Jorgunmandr is spreading across the globe, sowing WAR in its wake. They want our floating drydock the Ratatosk and they will stop at nothing to take it from us. I'm especially excited to learn more about Disaffected war-enjoyer and Battleship-Ace Arbuthnot and his *FLYING BATTLESHIP*.

If you're looking to kick back; have a laugh; forget your troubles; have a fun time; and enjoy your gaming hours without feeling like you've suddenly picked up a second job; then Waves of Steel is for you. I'm hard pressed to suggest there's a better place to drop your cash at the moment.

This game used to be my go-to party game but between an insistence to default-off all the settings that make the game fun, and the abundance of bugs in the latest maps/updates I really can't do it anymore.

Setting custom settings the game defaults to ignoring at every possible opportunity becomes a chore. The finicky bounce-out intolerance leading to resets from completely valid shots becomes a chore. Getting stuck on geometry along fully intended routes is a chore. Bouncing wildly off of geometry that isn't perceptible is a chore.

Unless they go back and start doing literally any amount of bugfixes or bugchecks I can't keep recommending this title to people in good faith.

[Original review preserved as a period piece from a couple years ago. Scroll deeper for a more modern take.]

Man, Hunt:Showdown has really become a miserable time somehow

On its surface it's everything I would like. Stealth action PVE/PVP set in an alternate history civil war timeline with supernatural zombies:

You and a buddy plumb through the bayou hunting zomberinos and banishing demons using guns from the "Nerf or Nothing" era of firearm design.

Full of visceral danger, mortality at every step! but the reality is everyone sets the foliage to off and snipes you across the map because like some kind of Metal Gear Acid Tripper I inevitably end up hiding in bushes that only exist to me.

it's such a great concept that just does not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work at all.
or at least simulates exactly how miserable a world in which demons are less dangerous than your neighbors would actually be.

I really think that game would be much improved if you and the 15 other people on the map at any given time were like, actually gonna' have to work together.

Until they do something with it you can really just get the same effect by having your next door neighbor fire a gun in the air somewhere in the yard opposite your home while you stare at a Dark Souls "You died" screen.

[UPDATE]

The game Hunt has been in an ongoing state of improvement for a while now. They've recently completely donked the UI in a way that's inconvenient, but not entirely unclear, but they've actually addressed some of the above points.

The natural hazards of the world have been becoming more frequent and more oppressive in the moment to moment gameplay. Larger, scarier beasts have been added that spawn more sporadically in the gameworld in addition to the usual canned hams.

Gunplay has been addressed to include bullet travel times and bullet drop, meaning that lag wizards who have turned off foliage nearly entirely can no longer 360 aimbot noscope you from halfway across the Virginia wildlands.

Ultimately, I have come around and there is a lot to love here if you can keep yourself unsalted.

Team up with your friends! Explore the galaxy as a team through various dedicated roles. Engage in goofy roleplay and find the keys to valhalla or whatever.

Or at least you could do that, but instead it turns out Space Gambling is as Mormon as it gets and you have to play Liars Dice with a bunch of frogs in power armor for 20 hours.

Please either make this optional to the main quest or get. a. better. boardgame.