Recent reviews by Wobbly🐍Python

The controls are tight, the balancing is ongoing, and the characters are fully realized and fun! Get in here.

tl;dr: New players, stay away until you see some patch notes about the difficulty curve. It's awful, and I'm saying that as a long time Redout enjoyer and advocate.

Redout 2 seems to be a game by game developers who have not spoken to anyone outside of their hardcore playerbase for the past decade. The difficulty curve is insane, and the campaign mode has an aggressive problem with the very idea of player agency.

The tutorials are blisteringly hard, and I'm saying that as a guy who has over 80 hours in the previous game. They slow time and assume control from you, that can occasionally put you into walls or off the track, as the only way to progress past them is to hold down the designated input. They are unhelpful at best, and mandatory. I had to teach myself boost-stacking to complete the tutorial level you have to beat to unlock the tutorial about boost stacking. I got 3rd place in a tutorial that just shows you *text* explaining car stats. It is massively overtuned for the hardcore crowd.

As an additional screw-you, the game only half-explains some vital mechanics and locks them behind additional tutorials in the tutorial race league that you can only access after you have won some races in the B tier league. It's comical how bad this signposting is.

The campaign forces you to drive the ESA car. You do not get to choose your starting chassis. You are forced into this un-upgraded jalopy and asked to play the game against opponents that are genuinely just better than you, and race like they've been turning laps since before you were born. The idea that a player would have preferences about what kind of car they would like is not even considered. Progression is glacial and involves unlocking specific parts that arbitrarily raise different stats. It's impossible early game to determine if you have lost because you made driving mistakes, or because your numbers are not turgid enough to out-race the raid boss. This is a terrible sensation to foist upon players who may be losing due only to developer malice and no actual fault of their own.

Some of the earliest campaign events available to you as a player are one-lap time trials. Blind. You do not have any idea what you're getting into in a precision racing game that literally sells itself on near incomprehensible fastness. Hope you enjoy the restart button because you'll use it a lot chasing a gold that is physically impossible to achieve with the terrible car you are forced to drive at start.

My favorite bit though, after all of this crass mistrust of the player to make any meaningful decisions or observations, is that in the multiplayer mode the ONLY cars available to you are the un-upgraded junker you start with or fully kitted out max level versions of every other car. The idea that new players might form a small grid to teach themselves in a reasonable spread of their preferred low tier vehicles is apparently completely lost on 34 Big Things, and it is an absolute shame.

The new player experience for this game is a trainwreck. I'm sure the 10 people who show up to the weekly wallgrind are going to have a great time, but they are not about to find themselves many new friends with the launch of Redout 2.

All that said: For those of you who have not been scared away, the actual mechanical driving in this game is a thing of beauty. Cars handle with an amount of control and willingness to cooperate with long, boostful drifts that I could only have dreamed of playing Redout1. There are now boosters that live in the apexes of some corners and will still accelerate you accordingly even if you are fully sidewrong to their orientation. The boost pool is fully intertwined with your vehicle's health, and were it not for the fact that a single explosion means an entire race restart, is really fun to balance. The combination pressures of your auto-repair's time delay, your coolant temperatures begging you to go faster, and the flickering booster ahead of you forces you into a beautiful headspace balancing risk and reward.

Until you go slightly too far, explode, and the setback of exploding is so punishing it forces you to restart the map.

I don't have high hopes for 34big things having a functional response to feedback however. They have failed to provide proper lobbies, or for that matter proper lobby controls after that being a glaring issue for the entirety of Redout1. I fear that they may be too stubborn in their design convictions to realize that their tiny cabal of dedicated fans will be the only people interested in their future ranked league and season passes if this new player experience is not addressed.

The most pessimistic part of me is very looking forward to seeing how they cultivate a competitive scene without allowing for a casual one to exist. The cart is firmly before the horse there, and by we've seen how that plays out time and time again.

is good. More moody and atmospheric than you'd expect from a guy that goes around posting about wehate.money all the time.

Is good. Is free. Get the DLC it's wooooorth it.

If you're gonna like Foxhole really comes down to what kind of video games player you wanna' be.

• If you wanna' shoot mans for five to thirty minutes in a fast paced arena then it's a bad time.

• If you wanna' spend an hour or five behind a rock making jokes about the enemy team's farts as they mustard gas your advances then it's absolutely excellent.

• If you think Euro Truck simulator doesn't have enough tank ambushes, then this is a game for you.

• If you wanna' be the big hero big boy such a good boy oh lemme pinchuwinchums your cheekies u big boy hero boy. Oh did u save the day my big handsome baby? My muscular vasculat baby waby warfightum. Did you get a call to ur dooty? Did you? *Did youuuu?*
then you're gonna' have a bad time.


• If you wanna haul a downed teammate out of a crater with a medical bag in one hand while they chirp "OH NO I HAVE GONE ALL DOWNY WOWNIES UWU" over your shoulder then join my squad I'm hilarious.
"PWEASE DOCTOR TURN MY FROWN UPSIDE DOWN"

Approachable, but complicated buildemup. I'm sure I'll have more complete thoughts later but right now I'm just trying to figure out programming.

Very excited to mess around with the track editor and organize a Mario Kart grand prix with my friends.

Game has insufficient moderation capabilities to suss out who is drawing ♥♥♥♥♥ on the map so the rest of the lobby can voteban. Without community management tools it's only playable with friends you already trust.

Embr is what I've been waiting for, but didn't really know I wanted.

Embr has a lot going for it visually. It has first and foremost a charming, cohesive, and inviting aesthetic. Bold and bright colors make it a cheerful experience even at its most frantic or desperate. The chunky low-poly aesthetic comes together to remind me at least passingly of Ed Edd and Eddy and other cartoon classics of my youth. Interactable items and hazards are easy to understand, while presenting interesting challenges. I can't make any claims about color-blind-friendliness, but the game relies strongly on large, animated, chunky shapes, so I'm sure it's definitely not doing poorly at it. In all, the whole game is easy to understand and fun to look at.

It follows that up with a really charming sense of humor satirizing the gig economy at every turn. From the career fair introduction to the absolute dingdong clients that you're yanking from their preoccupation taking a selfie with their burning television. I'm particularly amused by the clients that are so insistent on taking a right proper dump that left unattended they will quietly dash back into a burning building to finish their business and ruin yours. Embr has *aggressive* competition in the form of Hoser, but you'll need to play the game to get the skinny on that drama.

It's a very refreshing thing to be boldly dashing into danger to save people with something that isn't a gun, from something that isn't people with guns, or things that are best handled by some other kind of non-gun-related murder. The game doesn't go out of its way to spatter blood on the wall, make the clients scream in agony while they're throwing themselves bodily into a grease fire either. Instead they have Embr's app informing you politely via text message that a person has expired, and turning them immediately into a hilariously goofy cartoon skeleton. People are dim and distracted, but also so perfectly unconcerned with what's going on around them that failure doesn't have much of a sting.

Embr's gameplay has a really creative and cute array of tools that gets you to think outside of the box when doing your duties. Rounds can last as little as five minutes, and in that way really respects my time as a working person. In the hours I've played, I have thrown clients from a burning building onto mattresses, waterslides, other players, and even for a while a helpfully angled bouncepad. I've made bridges out of ladders and deployed at least one magical, flying, slip n' slide of doom as I throw myself around a burning pile of industrial shipping crates that have been converted into fire-prone homes.

Get this game! It's good solo, it's better with friends, but it's never bad.

XCom Chimera squad is a game that crashes when new enemies are introduced to the field mid-combat. It also features your characters deleting their own inventory between missions.

Wait for news about patch fixes or don't buy it. The half price is because they didn't do any QA.

All that's missing is you.

Intruder is the only game, including actual Metal Gear Solid games, that has effectively captured the iconic silly sneak n' shoot gameplay I crave.

An experience for those driven by the sounds of jiggling doorknobs and footsteps. Designed to delight those with a strong urge to giggle manically under a desk while opponents fill a life-size cardboard cutout of yourself with holes. For anyone who wants to crawl through vents throwing tactical bananas under the tightly laced boots of your enemies. For anyone who has ever wished to lay in a planter while informing deadly enemies of your fictional exploits. For any person that's ever wanted to crack a door open *just a little bit* so you can feed your camera through the doorway before you go bursting in like an absolute dingdong.

Literally the only shortcomings of this game are its tiny userbase, and its reliance on players to use in-game communications, lest central mechanics be obviated by stinky stinker cheateypants beaming thoughts into one another's brains. Which you can do anyway with the camera binoculars, but please use the in-game features to do it.

Put down your private discord call, and pick up the best stealth action shooter produced to date.