Recent reviews by Kernelpickle

The controls kinda suck and I hated their implementation of auto-save, because whenever garbage controls got in the way of how I wanted to play the story I had to repeat an entire chapter, instead of just reloading the last scene.

The story was decent, which is to say that I enjoyed it most of the time, while there were several moments that annoyed me. Not that anyone is playing this game or reading my review for birthing advice, but never do what they did in the scene where they just cut the umbilical cord without clamping it down. Other than that little bit, and some things they probably got wrong because they're French, it was like a Stranger Things--but not as good. Oh, and if you pick the ending I did, apparently it's also Terminator and Jodie is Sarah Connor. Not sure I have the patience to sit through another play through to see the stuff I missed, but I might consider it once I have my Steam Deck because this one is definitely one you need play the a gamepad. I played Hard Rain with a mouse and keyboard, because despite those controls being awful, I felt like the gamepad controls were actually worse. In this game it was the opposite. They couldn't figure out how to map two-stick gestures to a mouse without it being awful, and anytime they prompted for quick time event, the keys were just so random that it wasn't intuitive. With the gamepad, I feel like they could've done a better job at making the button prompts resemble the actual buttons a bit. Only the A,B,X,Y and the sticks should've been circles, the others should've been rectangular at the least.

Lots of nitpicking on my part, but it was close to being really good, it was just kinda good, and if you get it kinda cheap it's an interesting way to experience a story.

Imagine playing Left4Dead, but remove all of the good things that made it fun. If you're thinking about playing this because it's free, DON'T! I wish that I could ask Valve for a refund, but unfortunately they don't have the technology to give me back all that time I spent.

I could look past all the ugliness, and issues if the game played decently. When I started playing CS Beta (version 1.3 or 1.4) it looked pretty bad too, but that was the older HL1 engine and THIS is clearly built from the Source engine. I honestly don't know how you manage to take the Source engine, and make it look worse and play even worse, but clearly the kid with a speech impediment who narrates the Tutorial put a lot of time into finding a way.

The most annoying aspect, is that I was straight up lied to by the developer, because it absolutely DOES NOT support LAN play. It might say there's a LAN option, but there's no way to actively host the damn thing, unless you wanted to setup a standalone server. Well, guess what--when I was youngster, we used to enjoy dragging our computers to each others houses for wild ass, fun times, playing on an actual LAN, and shouting across the room. (In those days, voice chat was non-existent or complete garbage, it required paid access to a hosted server and it wasn't viable when more the half the players were on dial-up and STILL playing.)

So, playing games on a LAN, in the room with the other players was great, because not having to type to each other and being able to shout to them directly was an experience that I'm not sure if I'll get to experience again--due to the severe lack of games that feature LAN based multiplayer and/or Co-op.

I also don't know what's up with this "Early Access" crap when it's going on 5 years old, and it's FREE TO PLAY! Clearly, this is the case of an untalented Indie developer that needs to find a new hobby, or get a real job, because it's obvious to anyone that's played it, that the "Early Access" designation is merely there to cover up the fact that it doesn't look or play like an actual game.

The worst part is, that NOW I have to remove this crap from my system, and leave this review so none of my friends will think this was good. I even gave this turd a solid 1.8 hours, and I've got friends who've paid for games and moved on in less than an hour, and never bothered to get a refund. There are game I own, that I've played on other platforms or re-purchased that I've played less than this monstrosity.

Not good, not fun--it's like Minecraft with even worse textures, meaner zombies, substantially less freedom and clunkier controls that are not intuitive, nor do they make any sense. The tutorial was so bad, I bumbled around far longer than I should have just trying to do something simple like gas up a car, and some of the tasks made so little sense I couldn't even tell what they were trying to have me do.

On top of this being a weak game in general (I can see why it's free-to-play, clearly they'd lose their ass on refunds if they charged for the game up front, and they've gone with the pay-to-win model instead), they ALSO bundled this little turd with an even bigger turd called BattlEye.

If you've never had the pleasure of experiencing a Malware infection, by all means--install BattlEye, and you'll see what happens when you give an obfuscated piece of garbage full kernel access and let it scan ALL your files and EVERY process resident in your system memory.

I know it's annoying to play against hackers in a silly little computer game, but it's FAR WORSE when you hand them the keys to your system, and these goobers writing that software are absolutely opening up your system to any number of zero day exploits that are going to have far greater consequences for you than losing in a match, or avoiding the hard work involved in succeeding at games like this. I'm for anti-cheat measures like VAC and the manual player review process employed by CS:GO--they're the gold standard if you ask me, NOT BattlEye, which uses a stupid heuristic algorithm to scan your system (and even though no Anti-Virus scanner using the same technology has EVER found a false positive, right?!)

I don't know if the folks reading this are also American like myself (I know that the folks at BattlEye are German, so I definitely don't feel comfortable whenever Germans start feeling like they have absolute control), but here in America we have a fairly flawed justice system--but it's based on the principle of "Innocent until PROVEN guilty" and we also enjoy a constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure, which is what THIS BattlEye is literally doing. If suspected hackers fall under greater scrutiny, that's fine--that's the probable cause needed to make a search and potential seizure reasonable. Personally, I don't see cheating as an issue--the eSports leagues can do whatever they want to keep the playing field level, but regular folks can simply click a button to report a player, and move onto a different game, server or go do something else if we face unrealistically skilled players ruining our fun. What I can't abide by is this invasion of my privacy, and just like the criminal justice system; I'd much rather see 100 guilty men go free (because prosecutors failed to meet the highest burden of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt) than I would one innocent man being locked up for a crime he didn't commit.

So, if you like banging your head against a wall and enjoy painfully boring survival games--by all means, knock yourself out! Just DO NOT bother with installing that stupid BattlEye nonsense, because you easily can opt-out of that whole mess, and just host games locally or play in the wild west on severs that must have cheats galore! (Which might also just be mods that make the game more fun, so I guess it depends on your perspective).

DO NOT INSTALL! This game comes bundles with MALWARE called BattlEye, which demands that you allow it FULL KERNEL ACCESS TO YOUR SYSTEM AND ALLOW IT TO SCAN ALL PROCESSES RESIDENT IN SYSTEM MEMORY! If that doesn't alarm you, maybe the fact that it constantly exfiltrates data from YOUR system does! Data that it gathers from scanning YOUR FILES, before it sends them off to a European country (Germany, which may or may not violate international laws regarding encryption--I'm not a lawyer, but those laws are insanely complicated, because encryption was considered military/weapons technology once upon a time).

You can judge me and my tinfoil hat all you like, but the world is finally changing after all of those Intel Meltdown and Spectre exploits that escalated the privileges of non-privileged by poking around in the system memory, and making changes to the data stored by other applications. Thankfully modern computing is moving away from that wide open and insecure model, and there's been more of push towards sandboxing and encrypting memory, but BattlEye is step in the wrong direction, and if they don't go out of business before it happens these BattlEye people are gonna have their systems breached, someone is going to find a way to inject malware into their software directly, and it's going to be used for (more) nefarious means than they're already using it for.

I wish I could review the game itself, because I thoroughly enjoyed playing the original back in 2003 when it launched, and this looked like a modern update of a game that was way ahead of it's time. Sadly the folks at Sony bought into this crap, and now they're strong arming user into installing it. At least when I encountered this crap bundled with Unturned, I could simply opt-out of using it and play it with privacy and security minded folks like myself--even if it's JUST me playing it by myself.

This was a fun (and occasionally tricky) puzzle game, with some enjoyable humor thrown in. Well worth the $3 I paid for it, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys solving physics puzzles.