Recent reviews by Mr. Jerry Atrique

Good

Team Fortress 2 is the most fun you can have online.
And TF2C is so much more fun than vanilla TF2.

Spent 2 hours saving everyone in Iron Throne.
Only to discover afterwards there's no achievement for that :o)

Honestly, after all these years, Dark Souls: The First is the best Souls they've ever made.
Having played every single Souls games, Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring, I can say that although they've streamlined and improved many ideas with subsequent games, they've never managed to capture the lightning in a bottle that is Dark Souls again.

The main two things that make this game truly great for me are the level design and progression.
No Souls game comes close to how actually cool the Dark Souls interconnected world is and how satisfying it is to explore, even after dozens of playthroughs. Well, I guess Shadow of the Erdtree kind of attempts to do something simillar but in open world, but it's just not the same. I never had that feeling of my mind expanding after riding that damn elevator from Undead Parish back to Firelink Shrine for the second time, even though every From game is doing this shortcut design time and time again, and in my opinion failing at recapturing that same feeling.

And progression? Idk man, it feels like Dark Souls had that sweet spot of mechanics between Demon's Souls' rawness and modern Souls' streamlining. Armor actually makes a lot of difference and you can feel it. Stamina and health are a lot more important. Overall leveling feels more impactful where you actually feel your power growing with every allocated point. Especially after Elden Ring with its weird leveling break points.

The Remaster? It's good. My only gripe with it would be that stupid bonfire in Catacombs. It really wasn't all that necessary, nobody died to Pinwheel ever (except Jerma, but he's a tired old man, so don't be harsh), and they should've put it directly after Pinwheel if they really wanted a checkpoint there. But it's not that critical. Just don't sit on it before getting the Lord Vessel. Other than that the price is an absolute rip-off, never buy this at full price.

This is a janky mess of a game held together by duct tape and voodoo. Made using ancient programming language, with no budget and by just one person who probably never wrote a design document in his life, and it somehow works. Every piece falls into place and creates a very fun and soulful experience.

Basically, Brigand is like if Deus Ex and Morrowind had a child and it grew up on a diet of banana beer and coca leaves. It's not exactly a pinnacle of beauty and it's sometimes unwieldy, but I love it. It's a good game with a broad variety of mechanics, choices and consequences.
And it's still getting updated. Brian (the dev) is still adding new content and relentlessly patching the game while working on another separate title.

It's good. If you like old-school RPGs and can look past jank, try it.

Poorly balanced game.

On higher difficulties, most builds just don't work, and builds that do work are OP meta stuff that just instantly clears entire rooms. That is if you get lucky and RNG actually gives you the stuff you need for the build. Usually roguelikes have other means to build your characters that aren't affected by RNG or you get multiple means to manipulate even bad RNG in your favor. And roguelites usually just don't put this much effort on RNG and instead allow mechanical skill expression to mitigate bad RNG.
This game has mechanical skill expression in the form of dodging enemy attacks and aiming. Your typical movement shooter stuff. But all of that just doesn't matter on higher difficulties because bosses and elite enemies have so much health and armor that you HAVE TO win the numbers game. And you win it by getting good RNG. And if you aren't, then you are not playing the game. It's just a glorified casino simulator and that's a shame because I actually love the amount of variety you can have with different characters, weapons, ascensions, etc. Unfortunately, all this variety goes out of the window because of bad balance.

It's also one of those games that has a tacked on co-op mode without actually being designed for co-op from the ground up. Eventually you will just have one player in the party getting lucky with RNG for their OP build and clearing all enemies instantly without allowing others to play the game.

This is a diamond in the rough right now. A potentially good game that is still cooking, but the systems they already have in place and developer's logs and roadmap give me the assurance that they have a good vision and will be able to accomplish something great.

Basically, if you are interested in a dungeon crawling experience in a system-driven procedurally generated world (like Daggerfall but turn-based and top-down) with Mount & Blade or Battle Brothers faction dynamics mixed in, keep an eye out for this game.

A looter woke me up in the middle of the night stealing my sleeping bag from right underneath me and running away, so I chased them and beaten them to death with a shoe.

Level design sucks

I really like Half-Life: MMod.
The updated weapon models, textures, animations and sounds are good and don't go against the general art style of the game. New particles are awesome. New modes for weapons like suppressors for the pistol and the SMG or the revolver laser sight from multiplayer are neat. Also, much needed quality of life changes like the ability to choose any chapter from main menu or texture filtering setting. It's all cool stuff.

However, some changes are questionable or I would even go as far as to say outright bad.
Why is the projectile bullets option is on by default? I remember launching the mod for the first time and being repulsed because the gunplay felt just awful. Bullet projectiles were on back then and I didn't know that I could disable them at the time. To each their own of course, it's just not my thing, and there are people that like things like these. But I don't think such options should be on by default. They change the feel of the weapons too much.
Second, why the new spawns? I guess they wanted to spice things up, and I even like a handful of the new enemy placements because they can be clever (like that one alien slave in Questionable Ethics that starts the experiment instead of you). But most of the time they just feel like unncessary spam that makes me sigh and anticipate the moment when it will be over. Unforseen Consequences and Questionable Ethics are the most egregious examples of that.

Other than that it's mostly a good and fresh experience.