Recent reviews by harmonica

yes

Game seemed cool but I hit an infinite loading screen

The game simply does not respect your time and it only gets worse the further in you get.

the puzzles are too easy, the writers were afraid of their own premise and the game is painfully lacking in self awareness. looks nice though.

As a remake it's sufficiently competent. I had a good enough time.

The problem is that they included a limited inventory. This makes it so you can only carry a few of the many guns at any one point in time. Does this make the game unfairly hard? No, it has no meaningful impact on difficulty because you always have more than enough ammo for whatever guns you have. The limited inventory serves no meaningful purpose towards the games balance. It is purely to waste your time and consequently reduce the amount of fun you have.

A critical part of what makes old shooters fun is that they give you massive arsenals. Nightdive simply do not understand what made old games fun. They must suffer consequences for this so they never hurt anyone again.

Despite having been out for over a year the game's ally AI is broken to a degree that makes the game unplayable if you're trying to rescue all of the mudokens. Until this is patched DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. I will update this once it gets fixed. If you see this review DO NOT BUY. I have never seen a game in a prerelease state an entire year after it's initial release.

It's cool

I was surprised by how much I ended up liking this. It actually comes with two campaigns with totally different enemies, bosses and music that are built around one another in a clever way. Cool weapon system, great music and a few top shelf bosses. Highly recommended if you're looking for a good shooter.

This is a good game, but it has problems the prevent me from being able to recommend it at the moment.

Bad:
1. The music isn't good. Not mediocre, it is just bad with a few exceptions. The first stage has mindless guitar strumming that will grate on you and one of the second stages sounds almost identical yet somehow worse. And there aren't multiple songs that can play per area like in the original. You get one song. The first area song will get to you in particular because of the next reason.

2. The first area is too slow. You spend a long time here. There are two formidable enemies that take a lot of hits to kill, a horned lizard which becomes a pinball of death on aggro and a mole that burrows and emerges at will from the ground. The game is not afraid to throw a lot of these enemies at once too and while you can often ignore the lizards you are taking a risk ignoring the moles, so to play it safe you need to kill them. There are also a lot of arrow traps, and they need to be disarmed which is another time sink. A slow first area really hurts the dynamic.

3. Something is wrong with the hitboxes. I'm not sure if they're broken or too strict. If you land a bit off center you risk getting hit. The whip is also shorter. I don't really understand this since the game is more difficult than the first they shouldn't have reduced your effectiveness at all.

Good:

It's more Spelunky, but harder. This might not be a good thing for people who haven't played the first much but I appreciate it.

What do?:

Wait for a sale or wait for a patch. It somewhat feels like it is still in early access and it needs refining.

Edit: jumping on enemies is more functional but needs a bit more refining still. complaint #3 is getting fixed progressively and will probably be sufficiently mitigated in a month of this edit.

Edit 2: eh, it's good enough now.

If you want to look at fish and learn a thing or two about them don't bother. There are about 20 different fish in this game and they all swim away from you if you get remotely near. If you want to hear the personal drama of uninteresting burned out lesbionic characters while swimming miles back and forth in order to listen to various whale songs this is the game for you.

This is just the most unbearable kind of trash. It's a mobile phone game with a minimum of content where all interactive elements are just repetitive fetch quest tier time wasters to pad out the game in order to stuff more of their bad character dialog in. All you can think about while playing this is some developer team meeting with BPD freaks bleating "yes, we're making a game about diving but what about MY interests?". It's obvious they never wanted to make a game about the ocean but instead some kind of self insert story where they can vicariously become interesting people with, like, complicated but totally enviable lives.

I love diving games and would have been willing to overlook any number of flaws if they just gave me a pretty environment with lots of fish to look at. But there is no biodiversity and every environment is low effort cut and past jobs.