Recent reviews by Mega Man Soccer

Disclaimer: I backed the game and got my code from that.

It's an extremely frenetic evolution on Wario Land 4's gameplay structure that's already so great, combined with the ability to (at least vertically) perform a shinespark from the Metroid games, and the game oozes a ridiculous and off-kilter charm throughout it's art, it's humor, it's stage theming...

Basically the game has exactly the kind of feel you're probably expecting from watching videos or looking at screenshots. Extremely recommended.

While the game has it's flaws, it's honestly a pretty zen experience exploring the islands for things, and the cyber space levels are both good for bite-sized speedruns and are just fun trying to spot what level design it's calling back to. Also the characterization is great and while the lore callbacks are sometimes a bit egregious, it's really fulfilling to see all these events a lot of sonic fans have played through be treated as relevant information that the characters remember and compare against.

It's probably a bit mid if you're not a sonic fan but if you do enjoy sonic or the characters then this will likely be a surprising treat.

game opens with you choosing how a dog dies and then berates you for not saving the dog via a secret method that you can't do once you're on the problem proper

just a collection of binary choices where you're at fault for all of them with humor so dry that it's shrivelled and nonexistent beyond a bit of the tone of the woman reading the summary of the people that you definitely chose to kill in this game that doesn't give you all of the information

also will "jumpscare" you with flashbacks to previous characters you didn't intentionally save to further guilt trip you. Like showing a picture of a girl who earlier in the game wanted to grow up to be a doctor when you're choosing to develop vaccines or not, because "ohhh she could have helped see what you did???"

i'm sure it's for somebody but it completely killed my desire to do... much of anything after playing it. Just a miserable little exercise.

it's pretty good

Do I really need to tell you about the positives of Team Fortress 2

tl;dr: game lets you get every functionally unique weapon for free (with enough playtime you'll get a lot of them through free item drops, and you can trade for the ones you still want if you're premium (buy literally anything from the in-game store to be premium, or maybe it's 5 dollars in the store, either way), game has a fantastically high skill ceiling and isn't too difficult to learn beyond just learning about all of the weapons, still has a healthy playerbase after 12 years, and is still one of the best presented games with the richest characters i've ever seen. Play TF2. It's really good.

The downsides: you need to be "premium" to trade properly, which is cheap (buy anything in the store, or at least 5 dollars worth, not sure) but still limits your account, you couldn't even have every functional weapon in the game with the 50 slots you start with

cosmetics have been increasingly detailed over the years and this hurts performance while Valve still has not either adjusted the cosmetics somehow or given an option to disable cosmetics for performance

if you start taking the game somewhat seriously you'll probably need to adjust the game settings, if you really get deep into this game look up "cl_interp" guides

Definitely a fun little puzzle game. Every character manages to feel unique in playstyle and all of the mana types have their upsides to consider on different enemies. It feels extremely rewarding to use board manipulation spells to get a match to prevent damage that would've been nearly impossible otherwise and there's a lot of spells you can get to make a fun run.

Main downsides are that you don't seem able to refuse things in treasure rooms or just not take the Trinket from the skull game if you don't like it. Also certain enemies have abilities that aren't conveyed, like the blue spell-immune "skull" enemies having two moves despite not having a vein marker. These things can be learned though, just like enemies in Isaac.

A great game on it's own merit, the main downside is that you'll also be supporting Deneuvo, the cancer that somehow attaches itself to otherwise good games to do nothing but delay the PC release, harm modding, or tank performance.

This time it was just a short delay, but just remember that it's a game with Deneuvo.

Long story short, it's a Rare-styled collectathon platformer. I won't pretend it's quite as charming or quite as magical as the old N64 era games are, be it because it's a new game with references to modern trends, or just because of nostalgia, but so far it's a pretty fun game in it's own right and if you enjoy games like Banjo-Kazooie this game should be right up your alley.

Full disclosure though, i'm only up through the second world as of writing this. I've always been pretty bad at finding my way around these games. So far the most effective method of exploring seems to be to rush forward gathering as many quills and Pagies as you can find so you can get as many moves to explore with before trying to really find everything in a world, as even the first level has areas that require moves from later worlds to get many of the collectables.

Overkill has removed all microtransactions from the game, making safes free to open for anyone who gets them after Patch 100. The old safes still need you to buy drills for them but that's probably something to do with steam inventory shenanigans. I said i'd edit my review if they fixed the problem (and if I cared enough to play again after they did) and so I am.

The game is still fun, it was probably always still pretty fun at the end of the day, but I can tell you it still is now. There's even tutorial heists at long last. And keep in mind you can play all the DLC missions you don't have as long as someone else who owns the DLC hosts it. So yes, I can recommend it again.

Borderlands is a game about loot. You want to find the Vault. Why do you want to find it though? For loot. There's a secret area over here, what does it contain? More loot! Guns, shields, class/grenade mods, all different kinds of loot. Keep this in mind when starting to play Borderlands or it's sequel. The gunplay feels a little bit iffy sometimes, but it works plenty well enough. The main issue is that the game treats every bullet you fire as a really fast projectile, so sniper rifles aren't as incredibly OP as you might think at first, but they're still one kind of gun you're very likely to have on every character you make.

Speaking of characters, you can play as one of four classes, each with a different action skill and skill tree. Berserkers have. well... Berserk. They start healing a lot, and opt to punch things instead of shoot things. It's a great skill to just pop in a safe place and heal up for free, and it's always fun to just go on a bloody rampage with it, but be wary of charging into too many gun mooks with it. As far as skills go, the berserker is mainly a tanky brawler character who revolves around getting up close to soak up the damage for the rest of your team while still making a dark red mash of your enemies up close with his action skill. His Berserk tree is all about making Berserk more effective, making Berserk's cooldown shorter, increasing your sexual endurance. However, if you want to Berserk all the time, you need the beefiness that his Tank tree offers, It's all about making you tougher and making enemies do less damage to you. The last skill tree is Blaster. It's mostly based around explosive damage and Rocket Launchers, which are meant to be the Berserker's "choice" of weapons. However, either do to an error in the game, the port, or maybe i'm just using them wrong, rocket launchers are incredibly underwhelming, unless they have a powerful elemental effect tied to them, mostly ones with x4 of an element. The only time you'll ever really get any real use out of explosive damage in Borderlands 1, maybe outside of grenades, is when you get lucky enough to find a weapon with a rare attribute that changes it's bullets to rockets, and even then the unreliability of those weapons will likely make you replace them somewhat soon after. It's possible you'll be able to make explosive damage worthwhile with this skilltree, but the points you'll use to get to that point are much better off used in the other two skilltrees. However, respeccing is cheap in this game. Really really cheap, so feel free to experiment and prove me wrong! Also with all of the DLC and a patch that was put out at some point, the maximum amount of skillpoint you can ever get on a character is 69, so this tree will likely get some use late-game just to make these weak weapons more reliable and make your grenades more awesome.

Sirens can phasewalk, which basically makes a shockwave around you, damaging enemies and making you invisible and fast for a few seconds. Use this time to move up to someone and melee them to make another shockwave, bringing you back to normal and repositioning yourself. It's much more powerful once you have an elemental effect added onto it through elemental artifacts you find, but even at it's weakest it can save your hide in a tight spot. The siren's skill trees are Controller, which is based around messing with your enemies, mostly by Dazing them, making them slower and making them aim like a Stormtrooper. Next is the Elemental skill tree, which is based around doing lots of elemental damage and decreasing the amount you take. The last is Assassin, which is based around letting you phasewalk in to get an easy kill on an unsuspecting enemy, and using the momentum from that to wipe out the rest of the crowd while getting to your next Phasewalk faster.

The Hunter class has Deathwing, his pet bird who will fly out and attack an enemy, along with a number of other things, depending on what skills you have. Deathwing is fairly weak early game, but he/she becomes a force to be reckoned with later on. Also, a note on using Deathwing well, she has a tendancy to fly around in circles like a moron if you aren't looking at something for her to target, so she's not very good for tossing out from behind cover. This got infamous to the point that they make fun of it in Borderlands 2. Deathwing is still nice to have though. Anyway, the hunter's main focus is sniping, be it with Sniper Rifles or Revolvers. His Sniper tree is just what you'd think, making him wreck faces with Sniper Rifles. However, a word of warning, sniper rounds are capped fairly low due to how powerful they can be, so don't forget to have good weapons of other types to boot. However it's an amazing tree if you're playing with other people since you can stand back and melt the enemy opposition. Rogue is the tree based around Deathwing, and making her into a killing machine, while also making you get more loot for your trouble. This is a great tree to use for solo play, since it can keep you alive and give you ammo you might be in need of, and more loot is never a bad thing. His Gunslinger tree is a somewhat general tree based around critical hits, and giving you the chance to get random crits (under different names, like "killer shots" so they don't trigger crit bonuses)

The Soldier has the Scorpio Turret, which basically works like a decoy that does damage. It's not very powerful on it's own, but it does set up a very temporary spot for you to regroup and attack the distracted enemies. It's more useful than it sounds, don't worry. Infantry is a skill tree based around making the Soldier and his turret more deadly, and making him able to use it more often. It's fairly straightforward, and while I wouldn't put all my points into it right away, it's certainly worth easing into over the course of your playtime. The Support tree is all about making the turret work as a mini resupply station. some skills let it give you ammo, and there are some general defensive skills to help you get a foothold in a rough situation. His last skill tree, the Medic skill tree, is just what it sounds like. It gives you and your team a lot of different ways to get healed up, from a healing aura around the scorpio turret, to being able to heal teammates by SHOOTING THEM. Just keep in mind that some of these skills will be useless in a solo game, so if you want to play a support soldier, make him a seperate character instead of trying to shoehorn in some great skills into a character that can only use them occasionally when playing with other people.

Now for a big issue, is this game better or worse than Borderlands 2? It's not such a simple question. Borderlands 2 has more solid gunplay, and much better presentation and characters, however Borderlands 1 has a better loot system, and it's a fair challenge to solo players as long as they're willing to put in the time to get better at the game and put together a good build, whereas Borderlands 2 has bosses similar to Crawmerax that are nearly impossible to kill solo without an extremely specific build, which leads into my next point. Borderlands 2, while it does have room for different builds in it, mostly has specific skill combinations that are simply better than the rest, which is made worse when most of the legendaries seem built to work with a certain playstyle, especially the legendary class mods, which, to my knowledge, always give boosts to the same set of skills. And it's not that Borderlands 1 doesn't have skills that are just flat-out better than others, but it doesn't force you to use them late-game. You can have a weird build that doesn't focus on anything, as long as you have a few specific skills for late-game effectiveness, such as Tresspass on the Hunter. Also, BL1 has a more fair loot system, not based all around legendaries like BL2. Sadly, character limits cut this last point short. I suggest BL1 over 2 overall.