Recent reviews by Green Sun, Red Mage

Honestly, I absolutely adored this game. The vibes are absolutely impeccable, to be honest - cruising around dark, foggy moonlit nights on the back roads in the forests of Washington state, dodging eerie happenings and trying to pick through the mystery of the zone. Looking after my car to keep it running, giving it a series of nicknames - Mel, Weird Wagon, Sarah, and so on, and jamming to tunes that fit the vibes and sometimes making a mad-dash drive towards a scorching pillar of light to escape the doom closing in around me, as my car creaks and groans and threatens to come apart at the seams... impeccable vibes, for sure. The story was pretty neat and the setting fun to learn about and poke around in and while the ending could've been slightly more fleshed out - it wasn't bad or anything, not to the extent that it hampered my enjoyment really! I adored this game, and as a semi-recent transplant to the PNW... it really hits.

Stylish blue-collar corporate sci-fi aesthetics? Check.
Excellently easy-to-use 6-degrees-of-freedom movement? Check.
Chill americana guitar soundtrack to work to? Check.
Sudden bursts of terror as you accidentally crack your visor with a computer to the face? Check.
Solidly written thus far story about the horrors of corporations left unchecked and the values of unions? Check check.

Please play this game, it's so satisfying to rip a ship apart.

A really weird little game that will probably gel pretty well with fans of Undertale, even though the end goal is kind of the opposite. It's got some weird elements of what feels like Zen involved in some of the visuals and trippier plot points, but it also has a banging soundtrack. So give it a shot, it's pretty fun if you like musical games or dodging things.

Edited now that I've finished the main game and side-quests, aside from the post-game grinding. Still can't say as I'd recommend getting this at anything more than deep discount. More thorough review follows:

Combat: The gunplay on its own feels fine enough depending on what weapon you use, but most enemies can be pretty major bullet sponges. At the beginning of the game this means nearly dying a lot, and later in the game just means kind of being frustrated as you have to keep waiting for skills to cool down that'll let you do enough damage to take out the swarms of identical enemies. Some weapons that feel like they should hit extremely hard, like an automatic shotgun, wind up doing less damage in a less efficient way than a good revolver, and take way longer to reload. I can't speak for the other classes, but the Trickster class that incentivises doing all your fighting up-close-and-personal if possible really seems to struggle in that regard at times, because so many Elite enemies (which the game kind of just spams out sometimes towards the later game) have a Boss Stomp to just knock you flying, and the ability to temporarily ignore all your crowd-control powers. Maybe I'm just built wrong but it's been frustrating across the board, with even recent fights either being skin-of-your-teeth or easy but longwinded slogs. Doesn't help that when you revisit an area, if you can't fast-travel to the right waypoint, you have to go through a lot of the same boilerplate fights all over again, with no way to run past. Note: I know it's possible to turn the world difficulty down to make things easier on yourself, but the game doesn't want you to do that because leveling up world tier is the only way to get stronger gear and higher max equip levels.

Navigation: Even outside of combat, Outriders has been an exercise in little frustrations. The map-screen is basically worthless, since there's no indicator where you're standing or facing in a given area; it just sort of highlights the overall space that you're in. Minimap (really just a radar, I guess) is even worse - it'll show you loosely how close enemies are, but there's no actual layout of the area around you to give context to any locations. Pressing tab will create a little ball you're supposed to be able to follow to your objective, but it bugs out constantly. It'll try to lead you to places you can't go, lead you in and out of the same zone over and over again, or try to lead you back into the area of one sidequest you already completed, when you're trying to do another right nearby before you can turn it in. You're also not allowed to fast-travel from your map screen, only waypoints that are pretty few and far between on some zones, and even from those, you can't fast-travel to another major zone. You've got to fast-travel back to your camp, talk to the guy with the truck, wait for a loading screen, then run over to the fast-travel flag in that location and jump to where you want to be. More or less. Navigation and travel are just kind of bunk across the board.

Inventory and Gear: Another frustrating set of mechanics. Almost nothing drops money in any real usable amount, so if you want to visit vendors (rarely any point to later in the game, but occasionally you see something nice), you have to just sell off items to get cash. {Edit: You CAN quick-sell items, it's done the same way as scrapping items, right clicking each item and then holding delete.} High-tier stuff (elite and higher) needs "Titanium" to level up, and it's been so scarce in my playthrough that I've gotten maybe... 200 of it by level 23, and a single level-up on a weapon costs about 15-20, or 50 to rank a rare up to an elite. It's all just... very frustratingly stingy, which sucks for a looter shooter. I've only found two Legendaries at this point even with an apparent "Loot Rarity Modifier" of +250% and a "Legendary Drop Rate Modifier" of +345% at world-tier 10. They were both hats.

Story - Spoilers ahead! For the bulk of the game (really all but the very last scenes), I'd call the overall tone of the game... dismal and depressing. Any time you meet a character, be prepared for one of the following: they die within two scenes of knowing them; you kill them yourself in a cutscene; they turn into crotchety old miserable bastards because of the timeskip; or they turn out to be just absolute monsters. Sidequests have been largely depressing: Meet a kindly old man merchant who offers you some tea and "the good stuff in the back"? haha jk he's going to get shot dead instantly and now you have to go avenge him and free some other merchant lady from just the skeeviest of places. Talk to sweet old lady in a town who apparently got robbed? haha jk she was actually the one who robbed those people and threatened to ruin their lives. Wounded, dying old man wants you to bring a letter to some smugglers who facilitate communication between him and his daughter, who's toughing it out in a radioactive hellhole? haha jk she's been dead for ages and the smugglers have just been taking his stuff and writing him fluff letters. So you kill them. The whole main story feels just... grim and hopeless and miserable 99 times out of 100, and the amount of times I've had what could've been a hopeful-looking outcome to a quest turn into a depressing one is really sort of starting to wear on me. There are a couple little moments of levity or badassery, mostly based on misconceptions or people not knowing your character is what they are, but... other than a hopefully somewhat hopeful ending that doesn't actually change the status quo too much in the short term because the two sides are still at war despite there being supplies galore, the whole game just feels... dour.

[Bugs]: There's been a couple so far. Not too many, but it's definitely worth noting. Like I mentioned before, the guide-orb button will sometimes lead you to just completely wrong places and refuses to update where it wants you to go even if you change the currently-marked quest. Animations for opening doors or breaking through barricades can sometimes get stuck with your character struggling to get into the proper position, unless you release the button and try again. Resource nodes will sometimes stop being harvestable if you get hit while mining them, like if you were trying to be slick and drill some rocks real quick. Enemies will just sometimes... not get hit with AOE attacks that clearly went right overtop them, with melee and linear attacks like Time Rift being the worst offenders. And on rare occasions, creature enemies have gotten stuck in the floor, with my AOE reload-damage having to be used to kill them off. There's also a pretty bad glitch in dialogue audio during cutscenes or walking chatter, where it'll either stutter and jump ahead through parts of words, or it'll start saying a phrase then jump back and repeat it again. I don't think everyone on the planet has a stutter and sometimes the cutscenes will jump to try and keep up with it, so definitely a bug. Also, the subtitles will go completely off the rails sometimes, either falling behind or rushing way ahead.

Overall, I want to like this game more. it's got nice environments and combat moves look slick as hell, and the base idea isn't terrible (if a bit retread from other media), but between how sloggy the combat is, how stingy the loot system is, and how dreary the storyline is... I rate this a 5/10

A short but pleasant little platforming puzzle game in the vein of Limbo - simple movement, pushing items around, and trying not to die to things in the attractively abstract environment. A few of the platforming segments near were enough to snag me up almost long enough to get frustrated, but I managed to pull through. Not much story dialogue, but what there is is well voice-acted and seemed heartfelt. All in all, it feels like a nice send-up to both classic sci-fi and to games like Limbo.

Not bad at all for a little freebie game. Takes about 30-40 minutes to beat I'd say, so worth a look and not demanding of your time.

Pros:
Pretty satisfying-to-use skills and a reasonably quick reload time on the gun
Very forgiving timing to dodge most ranged attacks
Looks pretty nice, all told
Honestly pretty fun boss fight, imo
Quick and free

Cons:
Very limited enemy variety and AI (but that's understandable)
A bit prone to swarms of enemies at once (lookin' at you, Dojo-type room)
The bindings for the skills take a minute to get used to since they somehow felt like they were in odd spots to me
The "hold out for x amount of time" has a couple of built-in points where you have to reactivate it but doesn't stop the flow of enemies, so if you didn't notice it happened you might be sitting there for a hot minute.

Overall pretty cute though, and I'd love to see what the dev would do with more!

As always, Supergiant have made an excellent game. Varied environments, fun hack-and-slash gameplay and Roguelite elements, and charming, diverse character design. I love how all the different gods and various Cthonic characters look. I also appreciate that despite looking a little edgy, Zagreus is actually a nice inversion of the usual Edgy Dude protagonists you frequently see. He's kind of soft and makes awkward jokes to try to break tension instead of trying to be cocky, and he really cares about people.
Get this game, it's amazing.

A really solid game! Obviously still needs some work, but this bad boy soaks up time like it's nobody's business! I had my concerns about how the original game would translate in to a 3d space, but it works surprisingly well. Definitely recommended.

Spaceships, loud guns, getting to kill Klansmen, and stomping on Hitler's face in space? What could be better?

In the mood for a cute, goofy point-and-click adventure with a lot of charm and a nice soundtrack? Feeling nostalgic for the 90s? A fan of Homestuck, or wondering about Homestuck and wanting to know a little more about what's going on without having to jump head-first into 9000 pages of comic first? Want to support indie devs and small art-teams?

If any of the above applies to you, then give this game a shot!
And then...
Let me tell you about Homestuck. C;