Recent reviews by viva

[Note: key received from Devolver Digital for free]

After extensive playing of the game... I fear as though I may have jumped the gun in my earlier review. Shadow Warrior 2 on the surface seems like a nice improvement over the 2013 version, however when you scratch away the flashy paint there are some noticeable problems. It's tough because this isn't a bad game per se but these problems drag down the experience and as a whole the game advances in some areas but feels like a step back in others.


What I mean about enemy design here is how their attacks and variety of moves but also how the enemies fit into the overall array of enemies that you fight. There are a lot of enemies, however very few have anything truly unique about them. As an example, in 2013 there were golems that were only able to take damage to their back. During engagements you would often bait them into charging into a wall and then get your hits off on their back. These same enemies make a return in SW2 however this mechanic is completely gone. You can instead wail on them from any direction and deal decent damage. All enemies are basically the same in this regard. They have "weak spots" which apparently increase the amount of damage, but the increase is hardly worth the time and effort that you'll often just go for meat shots instead.

Very rarely did I ever feel like the enemies worked well together to create a cohesive force. For example in Serious Sam 3 the enemies complement each other in that you must prioritize certain enemies over others. You should kill kamikazes first, even if there are gnaars closer to you, as they will catch up faster and kill you quicker. You can dance around the gnaars. In Shadow Warrior 2 the only enemy that has any sort of prioritization is the Dynomite which is... just the kamikaze but like the goombas from Mario. This isn't bad, but it's just one enemy type out of many that the game has... but none of the others do anything special or interesting.


Meh. I played a couple of hours with a friend and we both didn't see much difference from the single player experience to bother justify the enemy HP buffs that reduced our fun. Despite the co-op being revealed in the reveal trailer, it doesn't feel remotely fleshed out. It feels tacked on. I am rather disappointed as even though I knew the limits (such as everyone playing as Lo Wang to themselves), the co-op still managed to underdeliver in a lot of ways. No interaction. Very little meshing. It feels like Torchlight 2's co-op instead of say Diablo 3.


I know that story isn't a primary focus for a classic old school style shooter but man does the writing here blow on several levels. The game throws characters at you with no introductions whatsoever. Kamiko is a worse Hoji in every respect. The game seems like it's going to bring up interesting things and then [fade to black]. None of the characters are particularly notable aside from Wang. There's no build up for your boss fights. It's just... it's just empty. Real missed potential here. I liked the writing in SW2013 as well.


It seems like they all take place on the same maps on the others and again the story isn't there to prop these side missions up and the gameplay difference between the side missions and the actual story missions is actually really minor. The only bonus for playing through the side missions is the additional weapons and some skill points. Again it feels like missed potential for some interesting content but instead it's just mediocre content that you could skip or not.


Loot drops too often. The differences between the different types of loot is too marginal. The UI is poorly designed and you cannot sort/filter to your desires despite having hundreds of gems in your inventory. You can only mark gems as junk individually. You can only sell all junk if you have a controller connected (yeah...). You can craft them but the stats are completely random, so you're just rolling the dice again, hoping for a marginally better result. The skill trees are kinda nice but somehow it seems even less fleshed out than 2013's. I do like that they used the artwork from 2013's comic book style cutscenes for them though. That's appreciated.

These are some of the problems that I had with the game. I still enjoyed my time with it, but it feels a lot more bittersweet than I would've hoped. It reminds me a lot of Halo 2 in that it feels like the right direction, but the execution was fumbled. Hopefully they will return with Shadow Warrior 3 with a much more refined solid product that I will be able to wholeheartedly recommend.

I wanted to like this game. A lot. I loved the art style a lot. The animations had a little bit of jank to them, but that just added to the charm for me.

The gameplay held me back though. Making a fun platformer is about good level design, good camera control and the controls feeling right. TurnOn doesn't exceed at any of these and it ends up making the entire experience worse off for it.

TurnOn has mostly okay level design except for a few areas where you have to do blind faith jumps because the only way to progress is to jump to an offscreen rope. The game often has no indicator of these so enjoy sometimes blindly jumping to your death. The camera control is bad... or rather there is no camera control. The camera is hard locked to your character so you can't just test to see if it's a blind faith jump and airstrafe back. Despite there being no punishment for jumping to your death, this does make this part of the game incredibly tedious, especially for the 4-5 second respawn animation and it teleporting you back to the last checkpoint. The gameplay works on a 2d plane, however there can be multiple 2d planes for you to jump between in a single level. This can work in the game and sometimes it's pretty novel, but for the most part you'll probably find it incredibly annoying. The camera will flick up and the scenery will move in an attempt to get you to hook onto the scene behind -- even if it isn't possible for you to successfully make the jump. This will make jumping for the collectibles annoying, but it will also make you try and jump up to an area that may not be accessible at all.

As a causal platformer, these issues would be annoying, but just an annoyance on an otherwise enjoyable game, right? Well that's until you play the annoying auto run levels. These appear to be synced up to the music, but it's done very poorly. Instead enjoy a lot of trial and error and hearing the same part of the song as you unsuccessfully try and make your way through. At first it's a neat gimmick, but the game continues to throw them at you.

Ugh. I really don't want to rate this game down. I don't feel good about it, but I cannot recommend this in good earnest. What a shame.

A highly, highly recommended mod for anyone who loves the Half-Life universe or loves atmospheric games. This mod absolutely nails the tone and atmosphere. Even as a person who has spent countless hours in Garry's Mod, the Source SDK et al I was able to quickly immerse myself.

Calling it a mod almost feels like discounting it because there's a lot of attention to detail put forth into it. The changes to the Half-Life 2 combat model are great additions and the QR code mechanic works amazingly and I could certainly see it in a future Half-Life title fitting in exceptionally well.

With an admission price of free there's nothing for one to lose by trying it out. Give it a shot and be amazed.

If you love story based games with great narration (a la Bastion) but also love your choices mattering. My is this game for you!

I typically don't write reviews until I've completed a game but frankly this one has so much attention to detail and witty writing that it's an absolute atrocity that this game's sales aren't much higher. An absolute blast and must play, IMO.

TY the Tasmanian Tiger might not be the strongest collectathon game (although I haven't played Banjo Kazooie in quite some time!) it is still a very enjoyable, solid game.

It's worth noting that the early access badge that the game has is mostly for the PC port, which I found completely satisifactory in terms of controls. Performance was a little wonky at times, especially if you enable some of the newer settings recently added; however these will likely be addressed with time. The developers seem quite responsive and eager to continue to improve the game. They are also supposedly planning to port the second game, if this one sells well.

The game's combat is simple, mostly revolving around you choosing which type of boomerang for which situation. Exploring the maps is fun for the most part, however I wasn't a fan of the beach levels personally.

The game's setting is rare so it is really enjoyable to hear Australian accents and see the wildlife that is more common there.

All in all an enjoyable experience if you're looking for a good collectathon on PC and don't want to fret with emulators.

Epistory is a beautiful handcrafted game for which you explore an isometric landscape, exploring dungeons and of course type to destroy the infestation. How well does this work in motion? Surprisingly very well. The controls for moving your character may be a tad awkward initially -- it offers WASD but I found it to be inferior to using the game's recommended controls of ijfe which seem to be tighter. However once you get over that, you will find the game is very expertly crafted. Menu items, etc are all typable meaning that your hands will never need to leave your keyboard.

The game is challenging mostly in your speed of typing and lack of errors. If you make too many errors, your progress on a word will be reset. Towards the end of the game you are often sent a lot of enemies at once. There are powers which can help alleviate some stress however typing quickly and reading the screen quickly are very necessary.

The art style of the game is beautiful. Very reminiscent of orgami/paper mache. The animations are all very well done. Especially when revealing parts of the map.

Cons:
- Controls are initially awkward at first / WASD is less tight
- Map can be useless at times. I found it really hard to read in dungeons especially.
- Is a tad short (~4 hours for me to beat the story skipping two dungeon areas, with the rest of my hours doing achievements/completion)

[Key acquired via Humble Monthly]

There's a pop-up "ad" in the game, with a smug guy with text overlayed that says "How I made $54 doing this one simple trick". I imagine this ad is supposed to be satirical however when I saw it for the fourth time after other seizure inducing effects I realized that the ad wasn't actually ironic at all. The smug guy is the developer, happy he managed to sell what can only be called a trainwreck of a game.

Unimaginative level designs, boring weapons, clipping through level geometry, and hit effects that will blind and annoy you with how obnoxious they are. Avoid this dreck.

Postal 2: Paradise Lost is Running With Scissors' best content yet. Bringing the focus on open world errand based gameplay with its amusing humor and goofy gameplay.

The other reviewers are correct: it isn't fair to call this mere DLC. It's expansion sized. Sure it reuses the assets but the amount of content and the addition of another 5 days definitely increases the game dramatically.

That being said this is also an expansion where if you don't like the base game's gameplay there won't be much of a reason for you to bother checking this out. It's still POSTAL 2 style humor of being offensive and satirical at whatever RWS feels like.

I enjoyed my time and didn't mind paying the $6 price for more enjoyment out of Postal.

Marlow Briggs is a fun game, action packed game with tongue-in-cheek B movie style humor and fun God of War style gameplay.

Marlow Briggs isn't exactly breaking any new ground however a good game doesn't need to break new ground to be fun and an enjoyable experience. Sometimes it's the games that just want to have fun that make you enjoy your time with them the most. Marlow Briggs fits this description so aptly. The voice acting is decent but still has the cheese to really emphasize the B movie style. Marlow is actually voiced by Pierce from the Saints Row series.

The combat is solid with a lot of combos. You're given the ability to do light and heavy hits, but there's no automatic counter attack button which means that you still need to pay attention to the game to win. The enemy variety is rather decent. You'll fight bugs, big guys who want to melee you and guys with rocket launchers and flamethrowers. The enemies are dispatched kind of simuilarly but the amount of combos at your disposal means that you can vary it up yourself.

The game is about 6-8 hours in length depending on how you play.


Overall an enjoyable experience and a steal for $5. Highly recommended.

A surprisingly fun and interesting puzzle platformer. As many others I've grown tired of the puzzle platformer genre as there's just so many of them these days. Most of them not being terribly interesting. Yet Albert and Otto managed to keep my interest.

A good mix between puzzles that required some thinking - although never difficult enough to stop the experience from feeling fluid - and some puzzles which require precision. The game tells its story through letters presumably from the girl to Albert which also serve as checkpoints. They're very kid like which is nice and describe her life as Albert attempts to catch up to her.

To be honest I didn't like LIMBO myself. It just didn't hook into me. This game did though. And I like it a lot. It's very short (about 2 hours long) but it's worth a playthrough. The music is excellent and the art style works really well (some observant might notice the color choices along with where the game takes place...).

I look forward to the rest of the series.