Rain World is a well crafted combination of gameplay mechanics, philosophical ideas and charming aesthetics. This creation is unfair and absolutely is a niche game. It will make you frustrated and is not for everyone. For me Rain World became one of the most important video games of my life. Let's get to the point:

• The world that feels alive. Getting chased by a Lizard while running under a random Dropwig waiting for pray making it jump on you but actually attacking The Lizard and making them lose interest in you while they fight for their lives. While you're watching this scene no longer as a pray with momentary sigh of relief the Scavengers invade the area and start throwing spears towards the Lizard that is already carrying new prey in its jaws while a wild Vulture appears trying to steal a hard-earned meal from this beautiful creature. Do you think this is a rare situation in this game? Not at all. Rain World ecosphere feels as alive as it can get and physics based environment emphasizes this very well. Creatures hunt, fight, fool around and survive the same as you. AI in this game is simply amazing and even simply observing it is fun.
  
  
• The OST. The Survivor intro music still makes me cry every time I listen to it. The "Urban Jungle" when you enter Outskirts? Feels as "danger all around waiting for you, you're under a hot sun" at first, but when you're experienced and coming back to Outskirts later it feels so nostalgic. "Moondown" giving you a feel of shared loneliness with a character while telling you "not so alone now you two" while giving new hope. When "Lantern Mice" plays in the Shaded Citadel. It's so cute and gives you a ray of light in this darkest place the same way these creatures give you the source of light. "Stargazer" after you exit The Exterior and see the ruins of the past civilizations feeling so alone, but now you have an end destination in your story. "Raindeer Ride" when you're traveling in almost no comeback region of the game knowing that your fate is almost sealed and this is your last moments on the surface. I don't want to spoil all of it. OST of this game is another topic and it absolutely nails the point of the game. It's simply beautiful, charming and emotional, while being unique and pretty diverse.
  
  
• Learning curve and difficulty. While at first you feel like a small creature testing its limits and trying to survive as best as it can the more experienced and smart you become the more connected to the slugcat you become. Learning to use stuff versus predators, learning to hunt, learning advanced movement and how creatures and the world behave: all of this feels really rewarding. The game itself is really hard, especially in the beginning and even after 100+ hours into the game I still can get mad when I'm getting really unlucky, but for me this is the part of the experience: this game is unfair. The world is unfair. Deal with it. Be smart and skillful and survive no matter the odds or be the prey. All I can advice is that you need to be patient with your few hours in this game. I would say that after 15-20 hours into the game a really small percentage of players feel the same type of frustration they feel at first. Even if you're angry at this point there's no turning back from the charm of this game. I myself almost dropped the game after first 5 hours, but I decided to comeback and be more patient.
  
  
• Aesthetic and atmosphere. The game perfectly combines sci-fi, post-apocalyptic and buddhist themes. Aesthetic and the atmosphere of this game are really unique and feel like nothing I tried before. Rain World feels like a combination of Dark Souls and Silent Hill to me. Apathy, both hope and hopelessness, loneliness, fear, decay, anger. This game makes you feel such an array of different emotions and feelings. It is absolutely indescribable.
  
  
• Point of the game. When I first started playing this game I was desperate for a route, for answers, for anything. I did not agree with the rain cycles mechanic, neither did I like some other game mechanics. My first hours into the game felt pretty negative and I somewhat hollow. I didn't know what I should do, but the more I played and the more experienced I become as a slugcat the more I saw the point of this game: there's no point. You can do whatever you want: survive, tame predators, kill dangerous creatures, explore, learn, kill for no reason or try to follow the storyline for each slugcat. You're free to do whatever you want. There's is a road you can take that will take you to the "end" of this game as fast as possible, but there's absolutely no need in doing this. Rain World is not a story based game that is needed to be finished as fast as possible. The ending will probably will leave you with a feeling of emptiness and demanding for answers. The moment I started taking big steps, learning how to survive, how to live and thrive and do whatever I wanted - it was the moment I knew I love this game. Everything else was just a bonus, things I can do, a route I can take, a journey I might go on, but everything is optional. I don't think I completed the game first time until at least 60~ hours into the game. And to be fair you can complete the story of the game in 2-3~ hours as a new player if you really want to. Do whatever you want and you will not regret it.
  
  
• Lore. I will not go in-depth for this one, the game lore is hard to connect and find. You can complete the game without understanding anything, but the lore itself is pretty interesting. You will rarely have a full picture of what's going in this world, but when you connect the pieces - it will feel like you're archaeologist dug up a picture of the past that makes sense why everything that is happening now the way it is. A lot of mysteries, vague concepts combined with logical and scientific stuff. The lore of this game is pretty interesting.
  

Here are some moments I still see as mistakes, bad game design choices or simply annoying, some of them are subjective, but some need real fixing:

• Rain World is a game about exploration and experimentation, yet the game has a tendency to punish you for it at times. Feels like a conflict in game design of Rain World. Wasn't a major issue for me after 15~ hours into the game though.
  
  
• In most games I tend to ignore tutorials, but Rain World really needs one. There's no way you're going to learn all about the movement and stuff like Spore Puffs and why they're needed without using the wiki.
  
  
• Rain World rarely rewards you for combat. This is somewhat fixed by the Hunter slugcat, but outside of Vulture masks I see little need in combat as a Survivor slugcat.
  
  
• Scavengers need fixing. They will kill you on accident trying to kill Overseers no matter how high your reputation is, while they obviously care about each other and wont do the same to their own kind. They will teleport into Shelters while following you even after the door has closed stealing all of your stuff and blocking you for a good minute in there in the next cycle. Maddening.
  
  
• In some places you jump down a pit and there's a platform, in some places it's a deathpit. In some places you climb up a wall to get into the next room, but there's an invisible "rubber wall" forcing you back. Sometimes this stuff is just not as obvious as you want it to be.

Summing up my review all I can say in the end is that Rain World is definitely a special game that I truly consider a piece of art. It is one of the most important games of my life and I would advise anyone to at least give it a good try. Videocult, thank you for such a masterpiece.

What fate a slugcat?

I've experienced this game from both casual and very niche tryhard sides and pretty much "completed" the game in every way possible.
Vermintide 2 has one of the most enjoyable melee combat systems in game industry, almost limitless space for your improvement, charming main characters and excellent dialogue writing.
This is the game worth spending hundreds of hours on, but it's not without major flaws. Let's go through the points:

Pros:

• Enjoyable co-op. This game is best played with your friends. While the game has bots, they will not carry you and they need to be geared to be good on higher difficulties. Explore, slay and escape together, bully your friends for dying too often. It's simply one of the best co-op experiences.
  
  
• Combat system and depth. It is a common opinion is that this game has one of the most enjoyable combat melee systems in gaming. It feels so satisfying to use majority of weapons, while at the same time there's so much to learn about every weapon and career, how to use them and when to use them. It doesn't matter if you're LMB spamming your falchion or heavy-canceling your flail. You're going to enjoy the hell out of it. There's also ranged combat that is great and is an important part of the game, but bear in mind there's more focus on the melee combat. Talents and active career skills add even more depth to the combat, but at the same time you need to be wary of your enemies, they also have different attacks, timings and weak points. Be sure to pick your best talents and sharpest weapons, higher difficulties will absolutely destroy you.
  
  
• OST. While OST of this game is nothing phenomenal, it's still a great work that perfectly suits the game. From "Escape and Panic" that will make you stressed out trying to escape the mission being the last man standing to bloodlust-inducing boss fight OST, which will make you want to scream "REPENT, REPENT, REPEEENT!" in a fanatical rush towards your foes.
  
  
• Content and replayability. Contrary to newbie opinions: there's plenty of things to do in Vermintide. Adventure maps that are similiar to Left 4 Dead, Chaos Wastes, a roguelike mode that puts more focus on random elements and making OP builds on the go, Deeds, being somewhat similar to a simplified Path of Exile map, that allow you to complete specific adventure maps with modifiers for more rewards, Weaves that have fixed enemy spawns, objectives and unique level modifiers, and finally modded content, a place for true tryhards and best parties of players in the game. You can make your game as hard as you're willing or just play casually. It's up to you, as long as you're enjoying. There's infinite replayability.
  
  
• Dialogue and character chemistry. Never would I imagine I'd need to mention this as something noteworthy in an action game, but dialogue writing and characters are charmingly done. Hundreds of dialogues for different game situations, levels and such. It's one of the cases where you can just spend hours listening to the in-game dialogue on YouTube. You will love the characters no matter their immaturity and cockiness, they have real depth and bizarre charisma fitting the verse, while also being voice acted by pure talents.

While I enjoyed the hell out of Vermintide 2 for the past years, the game has major issues that will get clearer the more you play this game:

Cons:

• Game support and developers. Game support is not the worst, but it's lacking at the best. Developers are known for making mediocre DLCs, uncalled-for and unenjoyable major expansions, breaking the game too often, abandoning features like skin shop and mod scene, or their own promises like dedicated servers, while also taking too much time to develop things that were expected to be a part of this game since the previous installment like versus. And for some reason they're really hesitant to support fan community activities. Sometimes they listen to the community, but most of the time they sadly prove themselves to be quite incompetent at supporting the game in the long run. They've made a great base game, I'll give them that. It's just that they hardly deliver to the expectations and regularly fall over and they seem to lack any understanding of their community with statements like "we never expected people to play this game for more than 100 hours".
  
  
• Optimization. There's not much to say. While the game and it's graphics are not for low-end rig, optimization still could've been much more better. Your FPS can jump from stable 100 to 40 in a blink, sometimes the drops don't make any sense at all and sometimes the game is unplayable. Even high-end PCs can struggle with this game and I wouldn't say this game has graphics that are on another level. It's more about the nature of this game, a combat that is based on fighting many foes at the same time. Though, this wouldn't explain why sometimes looking at specific spots of the maps without a horde will drop your FPS to 5, but sometimes you're having a decent FPS in an open location with many foes. Optimization is a pretty known issue of this game. It's easily playable, but not without issues.
  
  
• The grind. For some reason there's an unhealthy amount of grind in this game. And while this is something of a long past issue for veteran players, this will definitely be a problem for every new player. Difficulties? Unlocked with more power. Power? Increases with better gear and levels. Gear and levels? Need to grind lower difficulties at first. Careers and talents? Grind. You get the idea. You might spend hundreds of hours just trying to get your first top quality item and you would want at least 5 of them for each slot to start doing the highest level content in this game. And the main issue is that the grind is totally unneeded. It doesn't bring satisfaction compared to other games, and at it's core this system doesn't have much depth. You grind until you level up your character, their power level and get few veteran items. Only after that you can "start playing", because issue lies in the fact that lower difficulties in this game are not that enjoyable. They don't represent how the game feels, but you will be forced to play them for quite some time with no real choice.
  
  
• Community. Would never imagine I'd find this an issue in a PVE game, considering I'm a hardened PVP player with thousands hours of experience. I find myself to be rather unmannered from time to time, and to be fair community of this game is not the worst, and while there are a lot of talented and great people (I actually made quite a few friends in this game), there are still issues present within the community. Toxic people in quick play games? People that push the developers the idea that the game should be balanced around lower difficulties? Community personalities that enforce how this game should be played? Modders that take part in balancing the official game to ther own liking? Community organized PVP events that try to enforce a family friendly environment in a cruel and gory video game competitive event while also not providing a fair competitive grounds? It's all out there. For some reason the community has decent amount of unconfident people. Generally it's the same kind of people you would meet in a competitive game, but there's just too much of a contrast considering Vermintide 2 is an exclusively PVE game. People in open games can be toxic too.

In the end I can summarize Vermintide 2 as a unique and great co-op experience. While it suffers from major issues, it is still able to provide countless hours of highly pleasant vermin-slaying.

Everything's fine. Well, not really.