Recent reviews by kill on sight

this game kinda sucks a little bit (affectionate)

the good:

• the atmosphere is mostly excellent.
  
• the customization is far more extensive than it has any right to be for a game of this scale.
  
• plain and simple street racing game that's about street racing and nothing else. that's refreshing.
  
• gotta love the time and place.

the bad:

• controls are not remappable.
  
• lots of unskippable cinematics gets frustrating.
  
• absolutely disgusting amount of horrendous visual filters that can't be turned off that make it genuinely hard to see. these filters are not needed to set the mood or for "the aesthetic", they're just annoying. my eyes are not a VHS tape. the game would have the same vibe without them, and be better for it. at the very least, they should be optional.
  
• going from bad to worse, the screen gets heavily pixelated if you make contact with anything, making it even harder to see.
  
• motion blur that is not only impossible to turn off, but also blurs the UI. motion blur is not necessary for a sense of speed, and this game already has that figured out.
  
• camera goes mental at even the slightest touch of the stick, which is annoying in third person and unbearable in first person.
  
• the GPS is useless.
  
• terrible audio mixing with insane reverb on everything all the time, insane bass boosts on the music and certain sound effects, grating high frequencies from the engine, and frequent distortion due to everything being way too loud.
  
• I really don't like the engine sounds. they hurt my ears, and I also find it annoying that the BOV sound doesn't cut off when the engine opens up again, and extremely annoying that the engine has a different pitch at redline for every gear.
  
• aside from two tracks, I really don't think the music fits this game at all. nothing about it says "racing game" to me, let alone this specific type of racing game.
  
• racing is simultaneously way too easy and unfair. I was always way faster than every opponent in a straight line, so even though they always get a literally perfect start and accelerate ahead, I'd always leave them in the dust. but they could all take corners twice as fast as me, even with all prototype handling parts and maximized downforce... and even if they do get far ahead (like if I crash, like I once did three times in a single race) there's extremely powerful reverse rubberbanding guaranteeing that you will always catch up.
  
• the driving itself feels pretty bad. acceleration is pitifully slow in first gear, engines rev like they're full of molasses, the handling is extremely heavy and slow to respond even when fully upgraded, and when you combine this poor handling with endgame top speeds and the extremely bad visibility from the filters and low draw distance, some traffic becomes genuinely impossible to avoid, even if you see it coming.
  
• at the endgame, you are practically required to have more horsepower than the car is physically capable of cooling, which guarantees that you will overheat in every outing. it especially hurts against bosses, because the car does not cool down at all between races. the fact that you can easily win anyway feels even worse.
  
• fuel system is annoying, because the game doesn't allow you to refuel until you get below half a tank, which isn't enough for long races, so it's easy to end up being forced to run out of fuel mid race, especially against bosses.
  
• it's a little disappointing that the only type of racing on display here is simple A-to-B sprint racing from a standing start, instead of the much cooler and more unique rolling start health-bar outrun races of A Certain Other Game.
  
• certain road sections are so glitchy that driving on them has at least a 50% chance of sending you flying into the air and over the world boundaries. the same thing happens to the opponents.

that sure is a lot of complaining, huh? I promise, I complain out of love, not hate. I put nearly ten hours into this thing after all, and I could have easily quit after 45 minutes because that's all it takes to see everything the game has to offer.

this game has an incredible soul hiding underneath all the rough. I desperately want to see it reach its full potential, but I think it needs a lot more than simple polishing to achieve that. it needs serious work. fundamental work. fortunately, everything important is already there, it just needs adjusting, not rebuilding, so I'm confident the game can be transformed into something incredible before release, even if it defies all expectations and doesn't get delayed like every single kickstarter game ever.

and if every single one of my issues with the game goes unaddressed, well, that's fine too. I'm not the dev, I'm just picky, and I'll probably enjoy the game anyway, because it's good. just not great.

so anyway, yeah it's worth playing, even if it's a little crusty

(short version: maximum quality video game, buy it)

I played this game in early access in the middle of 2022. Me playing any early access game is rare enough, there are apparently 29 games in my Steam library that were once in early access, only four of which being games I purchased myself during that time, and Sanabi was not one of those. A friend gifted it to me and simply said "you need to play this" and so I did. Version 1.0.11 already had me completely hooked, and I could tell right away that this was going to be an incredible game when it was finished. So, after getting to the end of the demo, I put it down and patiently waited. Eventually I forgot about it, because when it finally came out on November 8th of 2023, I didn't realize it happened until it was almost December, and by the time I got around to playing it properly, it had already seen several more patches... including the addition of a speedrun mode. That's how you know it's *really* a gem.

A certain rule of thumb has existed in the back of my brain for many years now. "If the game has a grappling hook that isn't a quicktime event, it's probably an amazing game." Hasn't failed me yet. Well, not only does Sanabi *have* a grappling hook, the grappling hook is *the core of the gameplay*. A 2D platformer built entirely around swinging with a grappling hook and using enemies as single-use springboards is a game made specifically for me, but also a dangerous concept, since it relies *heavily* on the controls feeling consistent, predictable, and extremely good. The player needs to always simultaneously feel fully in control, and on the razor's edge of control. Not an easy balance to achieve.

But thankfully, it's fully achieved here, even managing to never become frustrating because the incredible clarity of the controls makes it impossible to blame the game for a skill issue. Not that you'd be doing that very often anyway, however, because even when you're not playing well, flying around the map like Captain Korea still always looks and feels cool. The game only loses its footing for a moment in the later stages, because one of the cool setpieces feels really clunky compared to the rest of the game and overstays its welcome, but I find that easy to overlook since it only happens once. It's even easier to look past that hiccup when considering the sheer rush of dopamine the final chapter gives you, rushing through the game at full power feeling like a god. I'd be singing this game's praises even if it was *just* a platformer with nothing else of note to offer.

But simply building the entire game around perfect controls wasn't enough. They had everything, and needed more.

Sanabi is a visually breathtaking game that bleeds style no matter where you look, with another level of visual beauty added through the extremely expressive and stylish character animations, all well beyond any reasonable expectations for a team of this size - only five people, and starting out as college students no less - to produce. Sound design is also wonderfully chunky and crisp, adding a lot of weight to the already weighty visuals, and even notably improved since the early access build I originally played.

The original soundtrack is beyond perfect for the game as well, fitting flawlessly into every scene and elevating the experience *greatly* while also being simply fantastic music on its own, to the point that I will probably be listening to this soundtrack outside of the game from time to time - as *music* to lose myself in, not just background sound - which is something I do so rarely with games that I didn't even have a top five until now; Jet Lancer, Hypnagogia: Boundless Dreams, Doom 2016, Iridion II, and now Sanabi... and it takes position 2 in that list.

Games like this aren't expected to have much, if any, narrative either. Nobody would have complained if Sanabi didn't have a storyline, all it really needed was to say that a bad thing happened and you're going in to fix it. But of course, that wasn't enough for Wonder Potion. The story of Sanabi is more than simply present, it's compelling enough, interesting enough, and charming. It's not exactly revolutionary, but that doesn't matter, it's way better than it ever needed to be - much better than the disgraceful writing of some triple-A games that get showered with praise - and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

As I played, I figured out most of the reveals before they came to pass, but from what I've seen online, a lot of people didn't, and even if you *do* see things coming like I did, getting to the end still makes the second playthrough feel pretty different, so I can't even say predictability is a caveat here. The only real caveat is that towards the end of the game (but not *at* the end, pretty much just in chapter 4), the translation quality dips, and it can be a little jarring, occasionally causing me to need to reread lines... but I can't get mad at that. Oddly, the focus on the story seems a little controversial, because The Gamers™ hate reading and cutscenes in 2D platformers, even when it's as good as this.

Fortunately for them, they only have to deal with it once, because once you see the true ending of the game - continue the game if you went downstairs - speedrun mode is unlocked. No dialogue, no cutscenes, no boss fights, no loading screens, no fades to black, just a straightforward run through each chapter with nothing to distract you from the incredibly fun flow of swinging through levels quickly. Every time you complete a chapter in speedrun mode, the game kicks back to the title screen instead of back to the speedrun menu, which is unfortunate and annoying, but livable considering how fun it is to run through each chapter nonstop. I'll call it an enforced moment of respite. My first attempt ended up at a total time of 1:11:20, which felt pretty slow to me and did a very good job of showing me just how much I still have to learn, especially since I then found out the current record on speedrun.com at that time was 25:58. I will definitely be coming back to this for a long time.

The more I like a thing, the less I usually have to say about it. I've said as much as I can think of at this point, I don't know how to dig deeper into the details about *why* this game is so fantastic or what makes it feel so amazing to play. So just trust me bro. I'll close with this.

Wonder Potion had everything they needed and chose to go *well* above and beyond for the sake of their vision. The result is something to be very proud of, and I applaud them. Sanabi is absolutely one of the best games I've played, and an all time favorite.

the overwhelming nothingness provided by this game caused me to go outside and stare at the sun just to feel again

Is this even the same series? The first three games all had very different aesthetics, sure, but not only does this game not look even remotely similar to the other three from any angle, it doesn't play anything like them either. I think Codemasters completely forgot what this series was supposed to be. It makes no sense for DIRT 3 to have led to this - yes I know DIRT Rally came between 3 and 4, ignore that for me please - and even less sense for this to have led to the abominable DIRT 5.

I've seen a lot of argument around the internet about which game has the better physics, this or DIRT Rally, and I will confidently and *loudly* say that it is definitely not this game. I'm not looking for a hardcore simulator or perfect realism here, that's not what these games are made for, but I do at least want physics that are consistent and predictable (like simulation mode isn't) without undermining a part of the game's main appeal (like gamer mode does). No matter which option I chose, I wasn't happy, but I ultimately settled on gamer mode because I'd rather sacrifice some control and deal with excessive grip than be in a constant high-stakes full-focus battle against the physics engine. It doesn't matter anyway because the difficulty is too low to care. At one point, I won a stage in simulation mode on the highest difficulty *with* a flip, a four second penalty for recovering, a head on crash into a spin, and a right rear tire that came off two thirds of the way through, leaving the car borderline uncontrollable and much slower as a result.

But now for some good things: having your own team! I like that little addition. It doesn't really change the game, but it adds that extra little something that admittedly none of the other games had. Personalization. You could buy cars in 1 and 2, but that only got you access to an unchanging car that wasn't really your own, and in 3, car buying wasn't present at all, you chose the car you drove per race based on the team offers available to you from your level, but here in 4, the cars are *your* cars in your garage with parts you can change, a livery you can customize a bit, sponsors you choose yourself, and repair bills for all the damage you take. You even hire staff for your team yourself and set their wages. It's not a deep system and it's certainly not a reason to buy the game, but I like it and I'm glad it's here. Another improvement is that the rally stages are properly narrow again, which helps some with the sense of speed and adds a lot of thrill back into the mix that DIRT 3 was lacking.

Too bad that's all the good I can think of. I did not have very much fun with this game, and that's a shame because it *theoretically* has the most satisfying and in-depth form of progression in any DIRT game, but in practice, I'm just bored. My mind is numbed by it. The most obvious reasons for that are that the difficulty is too low for me and neither of the two available handling models suit me, but it's so much more than that.

Tracks are all procedurally generated now and have nothing visually or mechanically interesting about them, so devastatingly lacking in the uniqueness department that not only does every track feel the same, I mentally decoded exactly how the track generation works after a few hours and became forever unable to unsee the fact that not only is every stage made of blocks, and not only are those blocks reused in every stage, *single stages* reuse entirely identical blocks more than once. Like my favorite, Fitzroy, right 5 into left 6 long tightens over crest, right 5. That's burned into my head now. I hate Fitzroy.

The music in the soundtrack is fine but you almost never hear it, and when you do, it's usually through a horrendous filter that's supposed to make it sound like it's coming from a distant PA system. The entire interface of the game is flat and uninteresting, no emphasis whatsoever is placed on any other drivers, and the only aspect of the presentation with any kind of personality is your co-driver, who only has so much to say anyway. Credit where it's due, the co-driver in this game is great and has a lot more personality than previous games while also giving more information more accurately, and the option to customize how far ahead the pace notes are read out to you is great, but a co-driver does not support an entire game.

Rallycross, meanwhile, is just so extremely boring compared to previous games, but now with the addition of a spotter that repeats the same line on every single lap about what position he thinks you'll be in after all other drivers take their joker laps, just to make it extra miserable. On one hand, rallycross cars handle more predictably than rally cars so that makes them an improvement, but on the other hand, they're *too* predictable and feel dead and soulless, which when combined with the fact you're doing a lot of laps around tiny tracks, makes even the closest racing feel like a sleepy haze. Making that feeling even worse still is the fact that the head camera (which is the only camera angle I used in this game, third person was unsuable) has absolutely zero movement, so the game feels frozen stiff in rallycross where the terrain is mostly smooth. I didn't even bother to try landrush.

Flashbacks are also gone entirely, which is a huge shame, because the Codemasters implementation of rewinding in racing games is by far the best in the business, and I'd much rather spend a consumable rewind instead of restarting the entire stage if I crash out at the very end, which is more likely in this game than any of the previous. Also many cars have the exact same power and weight, and I mean *exactly* the same numbers, yet they're somehow vastly different to drive. In particular, I found the Group A Impreza to be *vastly* superior in both speed and handling to the Evo VI, and the 2000cc Impreza *vastly* superior in both speed and handling to the Group A one, even though all three cars have exactly 300 bhp and weigh exactly 2711 lbs. Weird game, I don't like it, and I don't want to play it anymore.

Gamer mode says "I'm here to have fun" on it, and it's true, that's what I'm here for, but that's not what I'm getting from DIRT 4. DIRT 2 is still the best of the five in my opinion, because that's where all the fun is, and DIRT Rally is clearly the better choice for a simulator experience thanks to its full focus on detailed and satisfying realistic physics that actually make sense. This game, then, has no reason to exist. Was it meant to be a casualized version of DIRT Rally in response to the success of that game? Is there even an audience for that? Did they get negative feedback on this game and catastrophically overcorrect with DIRT 5, or was that game actually planned to be that way from the start? I don't understand this game at all and after playing it, I no longer understand the franchise as a whole, because not a single game so far has had any meaningful similarity to any of the others. The worst part of it all is that this game, like DIRT 3, is far from a bad game, it has all the elements it needs to be excellent... but unlike DIRT 3, it just *isn't* excellent at all, and I don't know how they managed to so spectacularly fail to put any of the pieces together when it was all right in front of them.

I'm just going to play DIRT 2 again and forget this game exists. Shouldn't be too hard, since the only memorable aspect of this game is that you can have Nicky Grist as your co-driver.

Do not buy this game. At the time of posting this, the game is four months old and already 50% off, and I don't think that's enough. I played the whole thing on a free weekend and I still want a refund. I am 100% confident that this is the worst racing game Codemasters has developed by far. After my first hour, I was bored out of my mind and sightly mad. After five hours, I felt dead and empty inside. I don't have a single positive thing to say about it.

It's in the title, you race on dirt, so why do these cars have so much grip on ice that it feels like a slightly damp road in a road racing game? It's genuinely faster 90% of the time to drive as though you're on asphalt in this game. Even water does nothing, you can drive through a veritable lake on the track and not notice. Interestingly, RWD cars seem to have more grip than anything else, until they don't, because their traction works like a light switch. In every other situation though, these cars are so grippy that I often can't drift at all when I want to, on dirt. Also, the AI are brain dead immovable objects that can block you for whole laps on narrow tracks, and even on the hardest difficulty they drive so slow that - provided you get past them before they pile up and block you - it's nearly impossible to lose first place, let alone fall off the podium, unless you specifically choose the slowest cars available... which sometimes you have to specifically buy, because the starting car is sometimes pretty good. That doesn't matter either though, because even a dead last finish still gets you a stamp and still allows you to progress. What's the point? Listen, I appreciate that racing games have finally begun to move past the idea that you must take first place to progress, but LAST should be a LOSS.

Speaking of pointless things, money. I don't understand why that's even a mechanic, because you earn so much money from every race you're guaranteed to earn a million before you finish the game, even if you take the shortest route to the credits like I did. That route is five (5) hours long. Five hours to beat the game and it still feels like it was padded for time. Add to that the fact that everything to add value to a career mode is gone (sponsors are meaningless afterthoughts, no teams at all, no sense of progression whatsoever, no rhyme nor reason to anything,) and you have one of the most shallow big budget racing games ever to hit the market. Not just shallow, but lifeless in every way. There is no personality to this game, so they hired some YouTube "personalities" to carry the whole game on their shoulders... and whether or not that's a good thing depends on whether or not you enjoy Donut media. The cars are lifeless, they all feel the same, and the the extent of customization available to you is three presets, four sponsor decals that are just for looks, and one sticker. Woo. Even the graphics are lifeless, with this game looking so amazingly dull that if it wasn't for the sheer abundance of particle effects and bloomy lighting, it could be two console generations older than it is and probably look nearly the same. I'm not one to prioritize graphics either, but when your game has nothing else going for it...

Who is AJ? Who is Bruno? Why do I care? Why were they some of the easiest races in the game despite being the final ones? What's the point of secondary objectives when they're all stupidly easy and do nothing of value? Why does the camera look up and down with the right stick instead of look behind and either zoom in or raise the angle? Why does the weather and even the time of day change between two opposite extremes in five seconds or less? Why does the game take five entire minutes to launch? What am I doing here? Why is pathfinder so mindbogglingly stupid? Why is any of this? What even are the throwdowns? Whatever they are, they're important enough to get their own dedicated tab on the career screen, not only did I never get an explanation from the game about what they are, they're all optional.

This whole game is optional, and the right choice is to choose any other option.

Jet Lancer is an absolutely phenomenal game and I can’t believe I didn’t know about it sooner. No game has captivated me quite like this has. Since I first picked up the game, I could tell that it was going to be special, and now that I’ve completed it several times, gotten nearly all of the achievements (something I almost never do), and speedran the game (something I’ve never done before), I’m pretty comfortable in saying that Jet Lancer has become my favorite game of all time.

I'll cover a few key things here though.

First things first, allow me to say that as easy as it is to look at this and say “Jet Lancer is like Luftrausers but better” (seriously, just look at the Steam reviews and count how many people compare it to that game in their first few sentences,) I think that does a disservice to both games. Luftrausers is a stripped down extremely minimalistic game by design, and that’s all it was ever meant to be. But Jet Lancer is far from minimalistic. Jet Lancer is not just more complex, larger in scale, more polished, more structured, more challenging, and more addicting, but it’s also a lot more ambitious. It feels less like a game developer’s idea for a cool mechanic, and more like someone’s dream brought to life. Maybe it’s not that big a deal for the developers and I’m just projecting, but it sure feels that way. The only thing these games share in common is that you have a jet, you shoot other jets, and you can turn your engine off sometimes. And they’re 2D. They’re both great but they’re not really comparable in my opinion, and I feel quite strongly about that.

Part of the reason for that is because while I’m capable of explaining exactly how I feel about Luftrausers and why, down to the details, I can’t do the same for Jet Lancer. The sheer quality of the gameplay has left me blown away, to the point that I can’t effectively analyze it anymore, even after so many playthroughs.

The game is not easy, so the journey from rookie to ultra instinct can be grueling if this isn’t the kind of game you’re accustomed to or pick up easily. While I recommend aiming to eventually beat the game with no training modules and on default settings, you can give yourself some breathing room with the accessibility options by increasing the evade window, halving the damage you take, or even becoming invincible entirely. You can also make it harder for yourself if you’re so inclined by removing the evade window entirely and turning off the UI in the same menu. Aside from that, there are other accessibility options there, like changing the minigun and the afterburner to toggles instead of press and hold, and disabling strobe light effects. You can also remap controls and such, or use a controller, but let me just say I have no idea how one could play this game with a controller when the mouse controls are just so, so tight… but I might buy it again on the Switch anyway and find out.

A word of warning though, when you beat the game the first time, you might feel a little let down. You might also think it’s a great and fitting ending, I don’t know, but if you do feel let down at all, just trust me on this one: Go beat new game plus, and pay attention to the dialog near the end. If you still aren’t satisfied, well, at least you got good enough to get there at all, and that’s a pretty darn rewarding feeling.

Another warning, the final boss is absolutely not the most difficult part of the game, that would be mission 37. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all, and I don’t think you should feel that way either once you see what I mean. If anything, I don’t think adjusting mission 37 would benefit the game at all unless the final boss was then also made much more difficult, because fighting tons of different small targets all over the map at the same time will never be the same as fighting a single particularly dangerous target. Mission 37 is the true final boss, the rest is the victory lap, and that’s okay.

All in all, this is a game that I will never forget, and will now always hold a special place in my life. Code Wakers created an absolute masterwork, a triumph of a game.

good puzzles, good music, good art, good game, good recipe...

it's a recipe for success

Pikuniku is a nice game.

That’s basically all I have to say about it… it’s nice. I like it, it was a fun time to play through. Would recommend. It’s hard to write about a game like this because while I think it’s good, I also don’t know what to talk about. It’s just… fun and good. It made me chuckle more than once and left me smiling for the most part. What even IS this game? Adventure puzzle platformer I guess, but… none of that really describes this game. It’s just nice.

The music is good, the writing is good, the art style is good, the game is good, it’s very nice. What more could you ask for?

Just play it.

the greatest creation humanity has to show for itself.

Don't play it twice.