Recent reviews by DuckieMcduck

Not the best of the series by a long shot, for neither PvE nor PvP.

Basically, it's the stiffness of Dark Souls 1 and gimmicky garbage from Dark Souls 2 blended together, adding a mana meter for magic and weapon specials. Only play for coop butt-buddying.

Immersion is completely boneless, you fast travel to get to zones from the get-go instead of traversing the world as one continuous zone. Lore is still a crackfic as expected, good luck getting the gear for finishing "quests" without a guide, wherein NPCs will literally teleport out in front of you after mumbling nonsense for a bit.

Enjoy heavy armor? Well poise is a gimmick, wearing big armor does very little, both in feel and effect, unless you are aware of the concept of Hyper Armor from fighting games. Upgrading armor no longer exists, so if you enjoy a piece of armor for how it looks, you eventually may be replacing it for a ugly piece carpet later that does way more for you due to RPG reasons.

Instead of Undead-Curse-Human concept from DkS 1 & 2, they went with "Embering", whatever that may be. So on this one your character never turns into a zombie, or something wicked, if you die, you just stop producing sparkles from your nipples which turns off multiplayer. Again, very dripless direction as the routine for moisturizing your hollowed out, decomposing skin in the previous games was an important morning ritual to maintain your health, fashion, and Multiplayer availability. Defeating a boss automatically embers you so enjoy being forced into rollspam invasion/SWAT phantom masquerade ball in the follow up area even if you only feel like doing PvE for a bit. Speaking of which:

It's mostly tuned to coop with strangers at the moment. If you're stuck somewhere, instead of looking up a guide, you can usually have a dude who left the summon sign show you the ropes or place your own to get ember for helping people. This is a core aspect of Souls games and I think they nailed it. It is what it is.

In counterpart, the PvP is horrid. You can get an infinite invasion orb item now at least, but invading is a gank fest every time, by design, as there is a ludicrous amount of player slots (6 players with usually 2 of em being the invaders). Everybody got their healing Estus ready to go which can be drank very quickly, everybody is fast rolling across the map with an endurance meter the size of their hollow husband's greatsword. Items that could stop this are largely ineffective or found deep late into the game. Big sleep unless you find a dedicated fight club.

"Matchmaking" for PvP is done taking Soul Level and Weapon Upgrades into account, so by upgrading or picking up upgraded stuff you start getting filtered into the higher echelons of sweat lords without knowing about it.

Miracles are still generally garbage. Longsword types are extremely good, insanely versatile weapons for no reason, heavily outclassing clubs and large weapons (because poise barely matters unless you plan on trading hits). Some may say "balanced", I think it's just boring to the bone and unimaginative. This goes for PvE too, spamming Light attack with a sharpened yardstick to stun lock a fully plated Knight early into the game is a prime example of how the game is gonna be from there on.

Nope, this game has no cloud saves. You too will lose your 60 hour playthrough if you change computers without backing up like I haven't. Yes I'm salty. No, the review is not changing. Call the Blue Sentinels, you little crystal lizard.

Boring, bland, and ugly, it's just the tendency of the Souls-like games nowadays. Just play the older ones if you haven't. Only come back to this one if you really, really are still itching to sunbro for people. You can still find new players trying to make it through the game if coop is your thing.

The sad part of this advice is that you cannot really play the older games as they were. Dark Souls 1 Prepare To Die Edition was sunsetted on Steam (though honestly it was an extremely undercooked port with Microsoft's meme Games For Windows Live, people only played it because it was a beloved title). You can no longer buy it, and for now only Dark Souls Remastered, which possesses similar Multiplayer memes and strange matchmaking systems to DkS3. I liked this one for PvE the best, but also had fun with PvP even if it's a bit more ruthless (this 10 years ago, I imagine people got even more cracked since).

Although Dark Souls 2 32bit is still on the store, with separate DLC purchases, the playerbase was split into that one and Dark Souls 2: SoTF which is an even stranger game overall that feels like a weird mod to the original. I liked this one for PvP the best, but good luck finding people who aren't absolute sweats on it. Might as well play Tekken or something.

it's not gay as long as our scarves don't touch

"TOC to Entry team, this one is a goat rope! Head home."
- Tactical Operations Command, SWAT4

Ready or Not started off as a promising rookie in the Tactical Shooter sub-genre. Seemingly with a glint in their eyes, it went through a long period of Early Access in an attempt to be the perfect spiritual successor and contemporary interpretation of the renown local veteran, SWAT4[en.wikipedia.org].

Unfortunately, the only thing time on the field offered to Ready or Not was jadedness. Doing the right thing turned out hard, and the benefits for so would most likely not pay off. It grew authoritarian in its dullness, abandoning its ideal vision and adopting instead a gorged caricature with a strong beating heart that pumps incompetence.

The gameplay of Ready or Not (RoN) can be summed up as a hardcore PvE game where a small team of heroes will usually go against a battalion of incomprehensibly suicidal felons armed to the teeth that need to be put down at all costs. You can see some very "high-level" gameplay on the net, where players will dynamically enter a civilian building and annihilate every "bad guy" with gunshow levels of lethal weaponry to choose from.

This would all be fine as a premise, if not for the fact the intended way for a game like this to be played, and the way its score system works at the highest level and difficulty, would be to have the ideal of zero casualties.

There's a big gaping hole in the core of RoN which makes its gameplay loop a boring failure, noticeably:

• The Police Rules of Engagement (RoE) where use of force is to be strict are often confused for Military shoot-on-sight RoE; the scenarios and the suspect AI often have this mismatch for the game goal.
  
  • Enemies Suspects are often armed with military grade body armor, automatics, and pure malice, tending to run at the entry team. They are programmed to crave death, as running from danger to cover (or surrendering) is dishonorable in the eyes of Khorne, the God of Blood.
    
  • RoN comically exaggerates the incident that lead to the event of "cold cuffs", so reportedly dead bodies must be cuffed else they can return to life and snap your neck.
    
  • Alternatively, double tap crackheads with Slug rounds. They may keep coming back. Maybe we don't give the war on drugs enough credit.
• There are sitcom-tier levels of intelligence for the insertion briefing.
  
  • You're usually given a small description of the situation, the world's worst real estate company pictures available of the location, and a "map" drawn with crayons.
    
  • Want to know where the insertions are? Tough luck, jump in and die to find out.
• The many gadgets that should help the entry team to hold the upper hand feel superfluous
  
  • You can try to use a toy gun that shoots farts, pepper spray and a Tazer™ (none of which work for some suspects depending on the scenario) instead of a perfectly hip-fire accurate select-fire Battle Rifle and terminator armor with ballistic helmet and steel plates.
    
  • Enemies can quickly make out the pigs in the dark (and often through walls) so trying to use Nightvision Goggles for tactical superiority is comedic.
    
  • Indeed you can taze someone from behind a ballistic shield while they magdump you. Although the ideal situation would have been fighting human beings that can be surprised and defeated from tactical superiority; not battle tranced chimpanzees that need to be put in a shock collar with a long stick.
• It almost feels like "copaganda" [en.wikipedia.org] in the sense that trying to play "the game" right is a pointlessly risky endeavor that is fun to nobody except the most fetishistic of masochists that would sooner go extinct than stay in service.

Even in the event you are willing to ignore the game score rating and barge into civilian households with a full auto Armor Piercing weaponry under zero objections, the game will force you to locate and apprehend civilians in the map and other "evidence" garbage before you finish the scenario, just to rub it in that "it's a SWAT game". This also happens to be the excuse for there not being a "run" button, a match made in hell itself.

RoN uses the Unreal Engine 4 (UE) to a good amount of its potential and enjoys displaying high fidelity assets in detailed environments with innumerable amounts of shades. Unfortunately, this may as well be the uniform for any self-entitled UE powered game.

What RoN does with its uniformity is create a lot of visual pollution. A lot of things seem to be placed just for the sake of being placed, as if it's trying to justify having paid for those assets. Some of them are out of scale with the player size, giving you the impression the city is some sort of society composed of Elves and Dwarves; maybe the gameplay loop would have been more coherent if it were.

Lights and Lasers work out terribly depending on the graphical setting, often "reflecting" or being drowned by other ambient lights. Needless to say, all these things combined makes target acquisition more difficult. It appears the game is "so realistic" it is attempting to emulate an early onset of cataracts upon the player character.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3117449914

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3117449986

The "visual storytelling" is not too subtle. It displays lots of off-screen violence, sometimes you get extremely contrasting architecture such as an entire cave system built on the backyard of a crackhouse with schizophrenic drawings on the walls. Really nails it in that we don't take the war on drugs seriously enough, and that the bad guys are so evil they'll shoot the dog!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2913160318

There is a lot of audio, but it often gets drowned out by the gunfire or the 20 second long screams of agony from suspects with sixteen new additional orifices paid for by the local municipality. Subtitles are full of typos and mondegreens.


RoN tried to be virtuous and stand up when nobody else did when it comes to making a Tactical Shooter, and for that it quickly gained some credit. There is some gameplay and eye candy when it is in its best behavior, but a little time and experience will quickly show you its ugliness with a thoroughly broken soul.

In the event you're not willing to put up with blind trial-and-error until you too start seeing there can only be degrees of guilt rather than innocence in the crowds, I'd recommend skipping this title or waiting for a hefty sale with a mod list for a first playthrough.

If you kept up to here, consider checking the following:

- ARMA 3
- Hot Brass
- SWAT4 (on GoG)[www.gog.com]

Game has potential and a unique art direction, but feels too undercooked for playing right now.

Bare minimum of 3 players are needed otherwise game slows to a crawl as the gameplay loop is very fidgety; you must collect junk in a distant compound from your ship but have a small inventory for hauling items back which is shared with vital equipment, total party wipes are very punishing, and death (from creatures, environment, or traps) is very quick. All this makes it exponentially unfun the less players there are (hence a lot of footage you'll meet is modded to break the vanilla 4 player limit), as it will also wipe your save if you reach the fail state.

Interface is missing basically every setting (Master/Music audio, Key rebind, Graphics).

If they ever add a real options menu, and difficulty settings so you don't need to buy a copy for the entire shortbus in order to have some fun it'd be enough for this to turn into a must-have recommendation.

A meta goal for end-state would also be welcome as currently you simply run missions until you're fired, having to restart from square 1 with no equipment. Not much of a point in making it far, other than seeing what the more expensive equipment look like. As it is, it's more of a streamer game.

As of now, for any-player enabled horror high jinx, consider checking out the following:
- Phasmophobia
- Barotrauma

"You freaking sorry Mall Cops!" - Horizon Chief Tech Officer

This game is a love letter to the lost decade of shooters in the 2000's, with scribbled hearts all around the corners. Taking inspiration from titles such as Crysis, F.E.A.R., and even Half-Life 2 source mods (SMod Redux), Trepang2 steps into the light then hands you an expertly designed game, daring you not to have fun with it.

Trepang2 presents a tight gameplay loop for a shooter; with active cloaking, "hyperfocus" abilities that slow down time, and super dashes that recharge on kill, you are a super-soldier capable of turning legions of highly trained black ops agents into fine paste with little downtime. Well, as long as you can land your shots, that is.

If you miss or choke up on your movement, you'll run out of resources and be quickly rendered into super swiss cheese instead. The higher the difficulty setting, the more it will demand that its mechanics are mastered and its AI respected; enemies will not blindly run into a room if they know you're there and will employ suppression to keep you from peeking. The diverse combat strategy from opponents (depending on their mall cop rank) demands that you manage your cloaking abilities in order to circumvent being pinned down, and to buy breathing room when your weapons are empty. You can also make human shields with stealth, and turn enemies into living grenades when grappling them from behind.

Levels are classically linear and sometimes present "gauntlet" events that force you to kill enemies to proceed. They're diverse in theme, and have secrets and weapon unlocks hidden away. It has a special ending for those that can spot all secrets. Checkpoints and pickups for health/armor are expertly placed, and depending on the difficulty it's paramount to preserve ammo/armor/health. You unlock more weapons and funny gadgets as you complete main and side levels.

There are also many challenge modes and a sandbox. Replayability lies in completing the harder difficulty modes, unlocking challenge skins for your weapons and character, and collecting the hidden lore in levels.

Trepang2 looks crisp, even if a little dated, and favors closed environments with lots of shades. It's well optimized, and has a plethora of UI/Video options. The design of the weapons vary from bog standard Flashbangs and SMGs to insane items such as a pocket Vortex, a Rat Grenade or a Minigun with Bayonets (plural) attached to its barrels.

The worldbuilding for Trepang2 borrows a lot from the contemporary SCP Foundation lore, which gives it a balance between creepy to humorous at times. The soldiers you fight against have excellent voice acting that match their roles and rank, and a lot of eavesdrop dialogue is included as they attempt to take you on. This definitely helps paint the picture that indeed you're a fearsome foe. Depending on the difficulty, you also have special mercenary minibosses with their own lore that spawn to kill you (although they end up shredded just as easily as the rest, so it's mostly flavor).

Sometimes the levels end up looking too dark, with the flashlight not being very helpful, which is a difficult thing to balance due to monitor differences. Simply turning up the gamma the moment you feel enemies are just blending with the background helped me.

Of course, it also has some jumpscares. They are very few and far between as well as insanely telegraphed. I can only wonder how effective they actually are if you're not used to them.

Trepang2 is straight up built to be fun; a must-have work of love. It is accessible to all skills levels, possesses well crafted challenges, an engaging story to keep up with, and an art direction that wraps it all together.

If you're a fan of FPS and cheesy atmospheres, break the cycle and check out the free demo on the storepage.

>black and brown aesthetic
>darker than my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (read: doom 3 - doom 64 = -61 brightness gamma)
>toy sounding guns that have zero feedback when hitting an enemy
>combat is being put in a locked spawn area every once in a while, with mind numbing downtime transitions after you're done.
>during downtime you can press the "elevator up" button repeatedly in a fruitless attempt to speed up the transition; which will be entertaining to the sitcom audience who is watching you keep on wasting away your life as you're deliberately choosing to keep on playing this thing you paid actual money for
>health and ammo drop abundantly or none at all from enemies when the game feels like you need them. pickup management non existent, game manages for you
>gameplay loop leads to min maxing how long you must force yourself to watch mini "glory kill" cutscenes instead of just killing things
>getting hit by enemies does a 0.001μs long audiovisual effect, imperceptible yet meaningless because the game will just drop you 50 health after pushing over a hungry skeleton if you need it
>fps drops when a couple mummies decide to spawn during the scheduled, exhilarating 6 enemy maximum kindergarten meeting rooms
>unskippable cutscenes (???)
>fps locks to 60 during an ingame (??????) rendered cutscene
>chainsaw has ammo. one tick for one cutscene that will play

A thoroughly downgraded version of Painkiller for people who have never played a videogame in their lives; It's not DOOM.

People who threatened Mick Gordon over the sequel of this formula should legit hang themselves in a friendly match of Halo: Combat Evolved

If you've made it to here, consider checking the following:
- Painkiller: Black Edition
- ULTRAKILL
- Selaco
- Hello Kitty and Sanrio Friends Racing

"Jeez, whoever designed this town was on serious crack."
- Dude

Postal has never been a pretty series, although it was always simple to understand and deeply tied to the mundane. Postal 4 has divorced from this and gone on a drinking spree; Not at any point are your objectives easy to understand, nor are you provoked to act out and be creative with your arsenal. Your character behaves like a complete pushover both mechanically and in the narrative, from start to finish, regardless of how many people you decapitate; it is painfully boring as result.

Fundamentally, this game is actually awful and not in the expected way. Even beyond what's tolerable for jank in this series, Postal 4 does not feel like a Postal game. It feels like an extremely (and I mean extremely) dumbed down version of Saints Row.

To help you understand what this means, here's a quick rundown of each main game in the series:

• Postal
  
  • You got out of your house and killed people because you were going mad (read, going postal).
    
  • That was the sole point. It was basically the original HATRED, with surprisingly better writing.
  
  
• Postal 2
  
  • You got out of your trailer house and ran mundane errands in a semi-open world.
    
  • How you accomplished these ordinary tasks didn't matter, you could do them normally or just brutally murder everyone that dared bother you in the way. It provoked you to go postal and have fun with it.
    
  • The main character remains completely neutral about whatever the player chooses to do and all dialogue works.
  
  
• Postal 3 4
  
  • You have your trailer house stolen in a cutscene and you're bossed around by other people to run absurd quests for maybe a chance at finding your trailer.
    
  • You can't kill your bosses until someone else bosses you to kill your last boss, or until they finally threaten to kill you.
    
  • You can't actually go on your own to find your trailer in the so-called "open world", which is barely a step up and littered with load zones.
    
  • You have animated cutscenes telling you how your character feels and often showcasing what kind of silly set up he's going to fall victim of next.
    
  • You're forced to clean feces off the street, and your "option" is to whether or not mortally wound the Mexican food workers that are actively trying to kill you for taking away their "taco toppings".
    
  • You may pick highly effective non lethal weapons and ammunition.

In case you haven't noticed, Postal 4 wanted to be the odd one from the bunch. And it managed to, it's not very good.


It's borderline unplayable; glitches are a common sight, soft locks are omnipresent, performance is deplorable. Crashes are almost as exciting as the actual game and happen quite often.

The map is bigger, but now there are extremely long paths to traverse with nothing in them; I have not personally found a way to traverse them fast enough in my 10 hours of play. There are no actual vehicles you can drive, only speed capped mobility scooters with different colors. I expected there'd be some sort of drug that helped, but no. Somehow, there are still load zones exactly like those from 2003 in Postal 2 - just in case you think you're going too fast.

You have random "minigame" points around the map that challenge you to "kill 10 people with a shotgun" or run a miniscooter course. Collectibles. Again, this is a painful amount of effort that just makes the game look like a bootleg Saints Row.

The inventory has grown larger with numerous redundant items like 3 different types of Junk food or Spray cans and Mops that you can carry. Navigating it by the end of the week is painful. Using items like health pipes takes like a 4 second hold down press which is very bothersome.

As mentioned earlier, the presence of effective non-lethal weaponry and ammo is basically a discouragement from doing the one thing the game had to do; provoke you to go postal. Normally I'm all for choice, but between having a Postal game where not going mad is encouraged I'd much rather just go play a more sane game.

As of currently, there are only 3 difficulty settings compared to the dozens of difficulties in Postal 2, and none of them are equivalent to the POSTAL difficulty which would give every pedestrian a gun and instant aggro towards you. So, replayability is sorely limited.


There was an obsession by the team with detailed art assets and interior design, resulting in highly decorated stores and houses. But, there are usually no people or things to buy or even interact with. This involves things like entering a Porcelain store and finding out you're not able to break a single vase.

Of course, this needs not mean the game will be pretty! The game is super fugly. Even if you find the place to pick a different set of clothes, your character will still wear their purple bathrobe in every cutscene and quite frankly it's an eye sore.

Audio is highly reused and remixed from Postal 2, including pedestrian voice lines, screams and sound effects. Map Muzak is somehow worse by having a filter on top. The poor NPC interaction is highly reused and might as well be the same code.

I do not know how they messed up the violence but they did it. You hit someone with the broad side of a shovel and their neck is cut clean. Gore, which was the best candidate for improvement, is plain cartoony rather than cathartic and excessive. Pedestrians can tank hits from bladed weapons which feels absolutely terrible.


Postal 4 underdelivers at every front. It fails to be a graphical upgrade, it fails to be a gameplay upgrade, it fails to be a Postal upgrade. All it truly upgraded was the models of feces, and it seems like they were real proud of this one - at least one whole errand day is dedicated to toilets and fecal matter.

If you think Postal 4 sounds interesting for its violence and open world, check one of the following instead:

- Postal 2
- Saints Row 2
- Dead Rising

Very rarely I drop games before finishing them, and if you spend 30 seconds looking through my Steam library you'll see that I've tolerated quite some straining garbage. But Night In The Woods (NiTW) takes the cake for effectively sapping my will by being an entry level Visual Novel with the most obtuse interface for progressing the story and the most abhorrent cast I've ever seen.


You walk around in a side scroller until you find things that arbitrarily matter to the main character in order to mechanically progress.

There are forced minigames that clearly have an excess of detail that you can't even pay attention to and drag on forever; It sincerely feels like the people who made the game wanted to make different games (not to mention, the lead programmer/co-founder of the studio committed suicide not too long ago).

There is no real log of things that happen, your character will scribble awful drawings with a sharpie on their journal as events transpire.


Other reviews (which will have literally 1 paragraph) say the narrative is great but I could not possibly see it. There's nothing that grips you in the overarching narrative. I've read through Visual Novels about violent murders with more believable and likeable characters than those portrayed in this game; Not to imply NiTW is tasteful in the slightest either; there's also murder and heavy implications of sex, drugs, and heavy drinking. The problem here is the characters that exist around this.

NiTW's characters are written as either cognitively absent from the world and things around them (Angus, Mae's Parents), sarcastic and needlessly aggressive (Bea), or straight up mentally/socially challenged to the point of being criminal with no excuse (Mae and Gregg). Only 2 hours in and I had negative concern for any of the cast. Any character that has a modicum of common sense is promptly dismissed by the insufferable main character and promptly kept away from the narrative as much as possible.

The choices you have vary between "something stupid for no reason" and "something spectacularly more stupid because it's funny", and then finally you have the game say "well, you're stupid!" - very deep. It clearly touched its target audience who seem to relate to that sort of feeling.

Fundamentally, it's not a game for you to immerse yourself into and unwrap a narrative with meaningful choices. It's a short tale about losers doing loser things.


You'll probably enjoy the experience it's trying to deliver if you like misery porn or if you were a underperforming suburban single child with awful friends you had to tolerate; Personally I'm content not knowing what our chubby crayon artist college-dropout main character who wakes up at 5PM everyday will be up to in her little cozy american town, taken her experiences remind me of precisely nothing.

If you want some light gameplay story games with gripping narratives and good characters, consider checking out the following:

• To the Moon
  
• OneShot
  
• Disco Elysium

Evil Genius 2 is a base building game that provides the ingeniously flawed experience of being bad.

The game itself looks pretty at first. The graphical designs are captivating and purposely cheesy; it runs well and has dozens of graphical options as well as Vulkan support. It's a technically and visually interesting title much like its predecessor which arguably was ahead of its time in both of these departments. The marketing is also the biggest I've ever seen for a singleplayer title.

Unfortunately, everyone in this game is a poet until they start talking. The writing in the game is atrocious, and the gameplay loop shoots itself in the kneecaps when you finally think you can start running with it.


In the game you hire minions, make a base of operations, and take over the world in schemes that run on an overview board. It seems fun at first, until you hit the midgame.

Artificial constraints such as a hard population cap (that you only get to find out once you hit it) absolutely destroy whatever was left of fun in a game that is, at its core, about expansion and scale (growing the base/taking over the world). Here's why:

• Suddenly in midgame your base building comes to a complete halt: There's no reason to expand, because you simply can't staff it. There's no real reason to get money, because you have nothing to spend it on (either assets or personnel).
  
• You can't make it quality over quantity either: you can't get a base full of the super special minions because the minion hierarchy is not retro-compatible; by promoting minions they can't do the lower minion jobs so you always need the lower level minions. Basically with this, that's 2/3rd of the game just gone.

What you're left with is managing the boardgame part of the title. This involves looking at a literal board and "sending" minions outside of your base to give you cash income, or advance "game objective" progress in what are called "schemes".

• There's no cutscenes, no flavor text, nothing when these are started or completed. Minions just wait for a helicopter to leave your base and then the board game gives you an arbitrary amount of time to wait until they "complete" the scheme. You then get a tally on your objective counter and that's it, the game then effectively kills those minions. An absolutely dripless experience.
  
• Waiting; after spending those minions you then need to retrain them, and with the population capacity this means that you can't just amass them and flood the board and end the pain quickly; you'll train them on demand which means more waiting and more artificial constraining so you can't progress the game at your pace.

As if the boardgame by now wasn't brilliantly tedious, it also has a Heat mechanic to it which grows passively in every region you want to do stuff in (read: everywhere).

• You manage this heat in the boardgame, or you will have strong enemies investigating and finally assaulting your base. The game can then lock the region as well for an arbitrary amount of time (which you then have to wait for it to unlock). To make heat go down, you run deception schemes which also cost minions (that you will need to wait to retrain). You then wait for the heat to slowly go down.
  
• You can run faster schemes that cost a resource called intel, and to get intel you guessed it: You wait for some buildings to generate it (or better yet, you wait until the minions operating these buildings are done sleeping/eating/watching TV to generate it).
  
• Alternatively, you wait for an enemy agent to get captured, wait for them to get transported to their cell, wait for them to lose their resolve, and wait until they get interrogated. You then get 1-2 intel (the scheme costs like 20). You also have a maximum limit of 99 intel so you can't amass it.

But wait, there's more. The boardgame also presents you with super hero tokens that will travel in real time to regions that are idle (also in real time).

• Super Heroes stationed in a region increase heat gain and if you start a scheme that isn't deception in the same region, the super hero will notice and teleport into your base. This means you get to use your guards and cool traps to kill them now? No, killing the super hero in your base does nothing for you, they poof away like a ninja once defeated then go back to being a token; so all they do is damage and slow down your training so they make you wait more.
  
• The solution to this? Stop your scheme in another region and wait for them to move out. You can guarantee waiting to avoid potential more waiting (which can domino into more problems that just make you wait more to be resolved).

Now for the part I was truly waiting for: The missions, cutscenes and dialogue in this game are truly doing their best to not be good.

• When you start a mission, you'll get a Visual Novel style cutscene with your Genius on the left and whatever character they are talking to on the right. They have idle animations presenting their "mood" and it could not be further from pleasing, except when they start talking.
  
• My Genius was "Zalika", what seemed like a quirky character that wanted to create social media as a weapon turned out to be the most absolutely insufferable main character I've had to deal with in my decades of consuming media. She is meant to be an actual science genius but nothing about her suggests this: she says completely ignorant things, makes idiot decisions, gets caught off guard constantly in cutscenes. She also has her head inside of an aquarium and unlimited amounts of voice fry: you get the hellish combination that is her voice going through a tube every single time you start/finish a mission or tag enemies.
  
• Defeating/overcoming enemies with this format feels as weaksauce as possible. What's meant to be an incredible feat within the game's atmosphere just becomes a bit of banter exchanged in Visual Novel format. It legitimately makes me sick how much of a missed opportunity this was. Nothing you do feels rewarding or grandiose in the plot because the game doesn't bother presenting it as such.

Okay, but what if you just skip through every optional mission in the game to minimize the agonizing experience of going through terrible writing just for the base building and boardgame mechanics?

The game will take every "optional" mission you didn't slog through and turn it into a super strong enemy at the end that all bumrush your base at the same time.

Unfortunately this title tried to scoop up the actual Genius behind the original title from 2004 which was a technical marvel at the time.

They hired great artists and great programmers to go along but completely failed at actually designing the game to feel fun to experience and play: I'd take "Good Stupid" over this "Evil Genius" any day.

An expensive mess; it makes you wait in expectation of grandiose then never fulfills it, and when you realize it already took your time and your money. Don't ever let it make you wait for it to be less bad at any capacity.

“The tempt for greatness is the biggest drug in the world.”
— Mike Tyson

Fight Knight is a unique gem.

Being first and foremost a Dungeon Crawler, you'll navigate levels in a locked viewport and be able to rotate/move on a tile grid. However, loot and secrets are kept to a minimum and combat is a real time duke fest. The biggest goal is to simply make it to the top.


Whenever you move in most levels inside the tower, there's a chance to trigger an encounter. However, combat is skill based and takes in place in real time, in an infinite hallway, where you must punch, block, deflect, dodge, weave and counter strike dozens of different enemies with their own unique patterns and behavior. It's the strategic contrast between turn based, calm problem solving to high octane snap decision action that makes it quite a joy to play.

The game sticks to the theme that you must solve everything with your fists and quite honestly I cannot have wished for a better theme. You fight, communicate, navigate through menus, and solve puzzles using your dukes and Fight Knight does a great job not making it seem forced; it's a seamless gimmick.

Throughout the game you may expand your potion selection and inventory, choose gauntlets which change your fighting style, speed and poise/health, and also find and equip scrolls to use super moves during combat.

Saving and getting potions is something that can only be done at the start, so there's quite a bit of backtracking. Finding health items is extremely rare, so sometimes you really have to stop mid dungeon and trace a plan back when you're running low on equipment otherwise you are taking unnecessary risk.

After you beat the game, you'll unlock a New Game+ (Round 2) where you can find new trinkets, new enemy modifiers/patterns, and more. It's easily +20h of content. Take note, there's no Steam Cloud yet, so backup your saves.


The art direction is nothing short of stunning. Characters have inspired, unique designs and are presented as mixture of unique 2D spritework but with 3D bounciness that breathe them life when they talk, move, and get punched.

The game chooses between a set of color filters to all textures which change the mood and feel of the levels. The writing in the dialogue, which is not necessary to read through, is simply engaging to keep up with. The story and most of the characters are simply fun and likeable, making interactions enjoyable. The soundtrack follows the same gameplay contrast between high tempo and calm navigation tracks using carefully designed motifs for each level (which are extremely different in atmosphere and themes).


A fun and challenging game where you'll punch through dozens of different, beautifully crafted enemies and also solve puzzles and dilemmas with your fists alone. Lots of content and replayability; there are simple, clear goals that make the game enjoyable to play free of all numb grinding and guesswork that you may spot in other dungeon crawling games.

It could use some Quality of Life improvements like Steam Cloud and being able to craft healing items in the dungeon, but outside of that it's a great title specially in short bursts to knock yourself out with.