Recent reviews by Crotalo 🐍

The game feels incomplete, which is a shame because it had such high potential. Unfortunately, it falls short, likely due to the developers' overly ambitious goals. Dread Delusions boasts a charming ambiance and well-crafted world design, but it is lackluster in terms of gameplay. You can easily run through enemies like a train and avoid their predictable moves even at the lowest levels, with no real punishment for mistakes. This issue is so pronounced that you can use death as a means of travel without any repercussions.

Despite the world's handsome design, it lacks content, creating a sense of emptiness likely stemming from poor gameplay design that fails to reward exploration. It's disappointing because I had high expectations for this game. As someone else aptly put it, you install Dread Delusions expecting an open-world version of Lunacid, but instead, you are met with a beautifully crafted yet empty world, devoid of engaging gameplay mechanics and burdened with unnecessary dialogues that feel as though they were written by a teenager.

I would like to thank the developers for this hidden gem. Crafted by the same team behind Lost in Vivo, this game improves upon its predecessor by incorporating Dark Souls-style elements into a classic first-person shooter framework. The atmosphere is fantastic, thanks to the meticulously designed levels and the perfectly fitting soundtrack.

A disclaimer: this is not an AAA production, so don't expect cutting-edge graphics. However, the retro style perfectly suits what a small independent development team can achieve. You'll find plenty of exploration opportunities in an unforgiving environment, where your approach to the challenges ahead is entirely up to you.

Regardless of its budget, this product excels not only in its gameplay mechanics but also in its unsettling atmosphere and horror ambiance. Despite not being easily scared, I often found myself startled during regular in-game activities such as exploration and combat. Throughout my entire playthrough, I had an inexplicable feeling of being constantly watched, as danger lurked around every corner with no clear indication of what to expect at any moment.

Importantly, for its price, the game guarantees a great experience, offering over 20 hours of gameplay if you aim for completion. A total recommendation for fans of the old-school action-RPG genre.

I loved every single moment of it. We should have more developers willing to capture the essence of those long-gone survival horror classics.

Gothic 3 how it should have been.

Where is Nightmare of Decay 2?

This title is definitely not what could be generally expectable from any game. The lenght is < 3hrs, the plot feels written by a 16yrs old, the gameplay is way too basic yet repetitive, and the whole graphic compartment is rather lackluster. This once would have been a free mod, today thanks to our lowered standards it's a "metroidvania" title sold for around 8€. There are definitely far better retroshooters around and even if there were not I would still not suggest paying this much for such a short and badly realized experience.

Randomly generated tedious gameplay without any plot, story or sense.

Definitely the retro dungeon crawler that we needed.

Synthetik is an old school top-down shooter that excels at what it proposes. It features also a cooperative mode and the levels are randomly generated within the fixed pattern of progress.

The difficulty is elevated although customizable, but, regardless of the high chances of failure inherent to any "run", to lose does still feel ok. Whether if, it is fundamental to understand that also RNG has an important contribution to the overall probability of success, therefore the in-game frustration is manageable.

The only thing that you will regret after buying this gem, is that after 100 hours it will probably not feel as addictive as it was in the beginning, but perhaps that's a good downside.

After playing more than 50 hours, I have done my statistical analysis of the RNG and I can declare that the system does not work as it should, thus, this is a critical negative aspect for the gameplay since the whole game mechanics rely on that. To make it simple, in the scope to hit a target with an 80% probability of success, which means that you would potentially hit it 8 times out of 10, you will fail at least half of the attempts every time.

The game, despite being on normal difficulty forces you to "savescum" and to exploit the quick load mechanics for the sole purpose of surviving the encounters. Regardless of being a fan of hardcore turn-based strategy, if you mix up these two factors you can solely find yourself raveling in frustration.

Such is a shame because the game still had the potential to be rated positively despite also the total lack of audio dialogues, the very cheap NPC characterization, the badly designed inventory system, and the horrible and repetitive soundtrack.

Generally, this is an overly ambitious project that lacks any type of guidance to the player. It is too big and there is no navigation aid apart from the basic map that, for the way it has been developed, it still does not contribute to making the exploration pleasurable at all. The whole setting of the game is claustrophobic and lacks creativity by any meaning. Some will argue that this is what you should expect from a post-apocalyptic underground society, but for the sake of entertainment perhaps it should have been more appropriate for the developers to include more interestable environments, elements that could have momentarily differ from the usual cave-cave-cave-metro-bunker-cave. The plot is too mixed up with swarms of sidequests, bad exploration, and lack of inventory space to find it any appreciable.

This product is not bad itself but has many sides that can ruin its enjoyability, therefore, I do not feel I can recommend it to anyone since it could turn out to be a way too frustrating experience.