Recent reviews by Anomalous Underdog

Can easily pass as a AAA game from the 16-bit era.

I feel like the controls overall need work, especially the cannon mini-game (to this day I still don't understand the controls for that cannon mini-game, so I skipped it). Enemies can sometimes hit you from off-screen, and I don't think that's fair.

Despite that, I can still recommend the game. The story, art, and music are all top-notch. It's got heart.

Sheds light on those niche games that I see: Touhou, PixelJunk Eden, heck even that EF-12 Fighting Game Maker that I thought was abandoned/scam by some corporate, turns out is made by a small studio (or a one-man army dev? still not sure after watching it) and is probably just having a hard time replying to the English reviews because of the language barrier (it's currently sitting at Mostly Negative here in Steam, which I think is unfortunate).

All in all, the vibe I got was System Shock (the desolate space station feel) with Demon's Souls combat (the animations remind me of Demon's Souls more than Dark Souls), with a character that came from E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy.

I found the camera speed to be too slow so I pressed start to see if there was any options (there wasn't). But to my surprise, what did happen was it split the screen and activated a local co-op mode as if the game thinks there's 2 controllers connected even though there's only 1. I ended up controlling two characters with my gamepad.

The other big problem is that after getting inside the vault there was no one there. I can't exit from the boss room so I was stuck. I ended up moving the 2nd player towards the same area, and only then did the boss appear. I died, and on my way to the boss again, to my surprise, the boss was already attacking even though I hadn't entered the boss room yet (I could see his attacks coming from across the walls). After my 4th or 5th try in fighting the boss, it disappeared again. And this time, no matter what I did, it didn't show up. Since I was stuck again, eventually, I just exited the game.

Combat is ok for me (I like the weapons and the attack animations, and the upgrade system looks ok), but I'm a person who really doesn't tolerate game-breaking bugs, so I wouldn't recommend this to my friends if they'll just experience the same boss bug that I had.

It's an ok game, if the full-version of the game doesn't have the bugs I experienced.

EDIT: Thanks for the dev response! I've been using DS4Windows and checking the options I'm pretty sure I got it disabled, or maybe I'm just an idiot. I'm hoping maybe the user can disable local co-op in the game's options at least (have it turned on by default)? Thanks again for the response. I'll check it out when the final game is released!

Improves a lot from the first XCOM both in visuals and gameplay. World map now feels more like a real-time board game (and I mean that in a good way), there's random events (ex. all your enemies get poison-tipped ammo for this month), a whole lot more mission types now, you can perform ambushes, and there's tons of mods to tweak the experience.

Amidst the cries of "kiyaaa!", I realized, what little meaning my life may have had left, I had lost them all at that point.

I'll be honest. I only downloaded this game for the achievements. It's just free, you know? But I did not expect what I got.

It's a sort of stealth puzzle game, about only 1 hour long (can't complain there, it's just a free game), but it was an exhilarating 1 hour.

The graphics are so good. The sunset looked magical, the rain effect is nice, and when the thunder came in, it took quite a while but when it did, that was so nice.

And then the tiger chase sequence, oh God, that was really good, had me running so fast. Took a while for it to leave.

There were some bugs though. When you press the elevator button, it can take a while for it to go down. And I think I heard some dialogue running in the background even though there wasn't anyone there. It's probably just a bug. Also, there was a time when Steam actually blocked you from proceeding further. Had to restart, but that happened only once.

The voice acting is, should I say, outstanding. I take it most of the NPCs are just there for comical effect, but I really do feel for them and their struggle. I really do.

All in all, not bad. It might even win some BAFTA awards.

I started using Blender way back in the version 2.3 days. I still use it now. For such a relatively small program, it can do things so well.

The reason why it looks as if Blender is breaking standard conventions on user interfaces is because there were no conventions when it was made. It started its life as an in-house tool for a 3d graphics company, way back when commercial applications like 3dsmax weren't mainstream yet, so it invented its own control schemes.

The thing is, in its own little world, the controls make sense, and once you get used to them, your work gets done fast (it favored hotkeys a lot).

I use Blender for creating low-poly, realtime graphics (i.e. 3d models for video games) so I can't comment on how well it does graphics meant for movies.

INTELLECTUAL DARK SOULS

10/10

There is a kind of suffering in the world that cannot be expressed with tears.
It cannot even be described to anyone.
Unable to take its own shape, it takes the form of a tear-shaped emerald and settles at the bottom of the heart, like snow on the quietest of nights.
It also powers an earthquake machine.

Most remakes are piss-poor attempts. Not this game. I'll admit that I never played the original Strider games, but this game is really good.

+ Amazingly good graphics.

- Lots of platforming, but poor execution. If you fall on water or get hit by spikes, it's instant death, and respawning is a short fade to black, then fade in with you back at the nearest respawn point. The whole respawn animation effect makes it a little too tedious when you do trial and error. Some respawn points put you too far back when you die, so for example, you'd have to wait for a moving platform to get closer to you again and jump on it, before you can proceed.

- The camera and perspective work against you for the platforming parts. The game has a sort of side-scrolling level layout, but you can move in 3d. So when you move deeper in, it's sometimes not easily evident since the camera is in side view. Running around the level often ends up with me bumping on posts and obstacles, which gets me stuck, which, at first glance doesn't look like it, but if you rotate the camera, you'd see that yes, you were trying to walk through a pillar. I would think that bringing the camera a little higher while maintaining its gaze down at the level could help, but I'm just guessing here. It's also sometimes hard to gauge where I'll land upon jumping.

- Generally clunky combat animations. Don't expect a deep combat system here. Even while you're constantly hitting an enemy, they're still able to do attacks while in the middle of getting hurt. So the idea here is to roll away when they're doing an attack. But with all the special effects your weapon does, its sometimes hard to notice when someone's about to hit you.



I'd really rather not give this game a thumbs down because it looks so gorgeous, you could tell the developers poured a lot into making the graphics look beautiful. But as a game, it's generally a frustrating experience, but your mileage may vary.