Recent reviews by Scrubsauce

Dumped well over 100 hours into this in 2023 starting fresh - folks who prefer a single player campaign like myself can easily solo the vast majority of the content in this game and play through most of the major storylines for dozens and dozens of hours, completing all manner of main/side quests without having to engage with other users. Even then, the community members I've encountered on this game in those rare encounters have all been fantastic folks. Looking forward to continued support from the dev teams.

It's still going!

Payday 2 was Games as a Service done right, with Overkill providing a healthy mix of free and paid content over the years of its development. Were there missteps in their strategy like the non-cosmetic skins/microtransactions a while back? Sure, but unlike other devs, Overkill listened to the community when there was backlash and they adjusted their strategies until that relationship was healthy again.

The wave is still going even at the end of 2022 to help support the studio as they gear up for Payday 3.

Their ability to weave an overarching storyline into years worth of additional heists, culminating in a big finale was nothing short of grand, and I enjoyed getting to revisit the universe semi-regularly and what started out with a handful of missions with little plot turned into a full fledged campaign. Get it (forsure), at least to play through the storyline on normal difficulty.

A bonus episode to help flesh out Natalia's story? Sure, why not! I picked this up with the rest of the game proper but played it after concluding the main story. Plot-wise, it does a good job at addressing some outlying plot threads that are hinted at in the end of the main plot line, as well as touching on some of Natalia's origins and her ties to the antagonist of the main storyline.
Like all episodes of Revelations 2, you are given control of two characters who can interact with the environment in different ways, and you have to juggle control over the two to progress through each level successfully. This time around, you've got Natalia as your primary character, rather than as a sidekick. The secondary character provided is a "Dark Natalia" of sorts, and while regular Natalia can interact with the environment physically and is vulnerable to enemies, Dark Natalia can proceed through a level ahead of her kinder self, and mark out enemies for a period of time. Using Dark Natalia as a scout, the rest of the game plays like a no-nonsense stealth-like spin off of Revelations 2's core gameplay mechanics. Regular Natalia is completely incapable of hurting enemies, and if one discovers her, you must start the area over from your last checkpoint. Between the two bonus episodes, I prefer this one's remix on gameplay more, as it realizes you can approach a Resident Evil level with stealth instead of the usual choice of "run" or "gun". The length is minimal, so maybe wait for a sale, but if you are looking for a different take on the base game experience, this is the episode to go with over the much more stressful The Struggle.

The screenshots and trailers of this game all looked gorgeous, and despite the length issues I'd heard about, the subject matter interested me in game-form. It was an honest-to-gosh original concept that I hadn't experienced or seen tackled in any of the dozens of games I've tackled to beat over the last half-decade or so. So, despite the immense negativity surrounding this title, I opted to pick it up on deep discount.
I really wanted to give this game a chance, I did! I played through multiple endings over the course of ~1-2 hours. The length wasn't the issue for me, as I think it's perfectly reasonable to try and tell an interesting story for a cheap enough price tag with a short run time (the length of time I spent on this title is approaching industry standard for a full-on film, I wonder why an hour in a game seems so much shorter?). Unfortunately, the game gets in its own way more times than I was comfortable with. Some of the characters' vocal delivery might be fine...or it might not be? It could be an artifact of sketchy lip synching, or just poor voice over work in the first place, or poor script writing, or poor direction of decent talent, or some chimera-beast of an issue involving all of the aboveproblems. Either way, a lot of the dialog comes off as choppy and ill-timed.
Graphically the game IS beautiful, but probably more-so in still format than anything else. I had several issues in my playthroughs with models not loading and characters flat out being invisible during cut scenes (even the BIG cut scene at the end of one of the possible story forks). I gave up and resorted to YouTube playthroughs to get a sense of what I was missing.
Control-wise, the game handles like a drunk, which I guess is the point for many of the scenes, but it just felt so unresponsive and not something I dictated as the player so much as I casually suggested and sometimes the player character would listen. Very odd handling, this is one of those games that makes you aware of the character having two separate legs and can throw you off entirely from what you're expecting with tighter WASD handling in FPS style games.
The one thing this game does do right is the soundtrack, I'd love a copy of the credits song and the club banger toward the beginning of the story, but haven't had any luck tracking down those songs online. If any game could benefit from having soundtrack DLC, this would be it.
Overall, the game feels very much like an art-house film or a student project. I love the idea, and what the developers were trying to convey, though the lack of support to fix the technical issues really hurts their credibility in my eyes. Games are not films, if you want the player to be able to experience the art you've created, you have to attend to technical issues or risk alienating your audience entirely on this product and future ones. Subject-matter-wise, this is a step in the right direction, but the execution is so lacking I can't reccomend it unless if you find it on sale for a huge discount beyond the $3 asking price of the store as of this writing.

Journey to the West is one of those folktales I've always meant to get around to, specially being a fan of Dragon Ball and having seen the founding members of Gorillaz work on music and art for a stage show version of the fable. I remember ENSLAVED being hyped up and on shelves back during the early days of the 360/PS3 era, but having no consoles of my own at that stage in the game, I never got around to playing this one.

Fast forward a few years and BAM, the whole game plus all the DLC in one package on Steam for a good sale price, I could finally see what the deal was. The cast is at least semi-star studded, with the whole thing being the brainchild of Andy Serkis (Gollum, Snoke, Caesar, like a ton of other roles in sci-fi and fantasy movies you might have seen) and Ninja Theory (Heavenly Sword). The sidekick is voiced by Lindsey Shaw, who played Moze in Ned's Declassified on Nick back a few years ago. So the game at least has star appeal if you're a fan of their past performances.

The game apparently had poor sales, and while plans were laid out for expanding with sequels, etc., the whole initiative was scrapped because money. After having given the game the attention needed to see it through to the end, I'm kind of bummed I won't see anymore of this world the developers and Andy built together. Enslaved takes place in a post-apocalyptic America (the fallout of some sort of robot revolution...maybe?), and the majority of its competition in the late 00's, is really, really vibrant and full of color throughout its various locales. From the rocky cliffs, deserts, and crumbling New York City, everything is just so vivid. This is a future that mother nature is in the process of successfully reclaiming.

I think part of Enslaved's problem is that it marketed itself as a third person combat/platformer, but in practice, the combat is not a major highlight or feature of the game (but still manages to look cool, albeit repetitive in some spurts). Enemy types are changed up with different combinations of foes with varying weak points coming at you in different situations, forcing you to adapt your combat tactics as some sort of puzzle mechanic. The platforming especially is not the free-world climbing of Assassin's Creed, nor is it the anything-goes hopping-to-your-doom of 90's platformers like Mario 64. You have to try really hard to find a way to die in the climbing sections of the game, as many times it keeps you from making a suicide leap. Instead, the puzzle nature comes out in full force, and you as the player are looking for the correct way to navigate the space Monkey is in, while still collecting ammo, power ups, collectibles, etc. If the game had been marketed more as a puzzle of "where do I jump to next?" then maybe early reviewers in the 00's would have known what they were getting into instead of being disappointed by the (at first) seemingly restrictive controls.

The area where Enslaved really shines is the cut scenes and character interactions. Performances were motion captured, and these nearly decade old characters do a better job at emoting than many AAA NPC's I've seen even in 2016 titles. There is so much chemistry, subtlety and character interaction going on just in the main trio's body language alone, and these are elements of human communication that games tend to leave on the cutting room floor in favor of more polished gameplay. That's fine in practice, but it was just so refreshing to see, and the uncanny valley never even became an issue!

I mentioned this package includes the console DLC, you also get access to a several hour long campaign starring a different character, with totally different movement and combat mechanics. This is a nice way to fill in some of the gaps for this character's backstory and habits, and a refreshing change of pace from Monkey's acrobatics and staff abilities. Plus, hey, extra story content for free!

Enslaved is just such a curiosity of its time, and even then only console cycle into the past. I'm disappointed the plans to take the franchise further didn't pan out, but I still think this game is worth diving into for the things it tried to be different at. It may not have succeeded on all fronts, but when it does get it right, it really shines through, and you can tell the people behind it put everything they had into making something unique.

I grew up in a strict household, and was never allowed a console of my own. So pre-broadband days I would dive into the previews and reviews and whatever else Electronic Gaming Monthly could throw at me, and I remember being enthralled at all of the deepness and intrigue over MGS2. When the PSP first launched, I jumped at the idea to get my first Metal Gear game under my belt, the very underwhelming BCG AC!D. Since then, I haven't touched the franchise for one reason or another (console exclusivity when I was mainly a PC Gamer, Konami politics post-Kojima, etc.), but Revengeance made its way into my backlog in one of those windows where it was something I was interested in.
I remember when the game was first announced at an E3 all those years ago, and seemed to become vaporware until Platinum, another famed developer I had not touched before, announced the return of this gave as REVENGEANCE. Of course, it took a bit longer for the game to hit PC, and even longer for me to get around to playing it, but I finally did!
The Steam version of the game grabs you the main campaign, a time trials DLC, and two additional, smaller campaigns starring supporting characters from the main narrative (think Half-Life Blue Shift moreso than Opposing Force). Considering the price I grabbed this for when it was on sale (in the teens of dollars if I recall), that's more than enough content for the pricetag IMO.
The first level into this game and holy crap, its living up to everything childhood me and teenaged me took away from what I thought the MGS series and Platinum games would be like: giant technorganic mechs, augmented humans, ridiculously over the top action and gameplay mechanics, convoluted political conspiracy narratives, and hit-or-miss lip synching performances from the English audio track.
The controls feel very fluid throughout the game, some of the most responsive I've felt in a third person game since the Ezio trilogy from Assassin's Creed. While there's an upgrade system, this game doesn't take the Deus Ex route of making you invest in certain skills, and is generous enough to let you get most of the potential powerups through a single playthrough (though this may scale with difficulty, but I'm not certain). The main gameplay consists of third person hack-and-slash w/ combo-'em-up attack schemas. When Raiden, the cyborg ninja mercenary turned superhero you star as in the main storyline, gains enough meter, you enter an over-the-shoulder viewpoint and the attack mode turns into full-on Fruit Ninja insanity, even bosses in certain cases aren't immune from it. You're able to slice enemies up into as many chunks as you can manage until your meter depletes. It isn't as satisfying as the gibs in, say, Killing Floor 2, but for what it is I was impressed at the technical feat of turning a ragdoll into dozens of tiny fillets.
The story is pure insanity, in classic Kojima fashion, but was suprisingly stomachable for someone like myself with only minimal exposure to the universe. The two bonus campaigns help flesh out certain back stories that are heavily alluded to in the main story, one being your sidekick, the other being the recurring rival Gary Oak-style character you have to overcome to get to the climax of the base game. At least one of these expansions introduces some new attack styles and ideas, while the other is just nice filler for fleshing out the lore.
If you can get over Konami getting money from your purchase after how they handled the release of MGS5, I vote have at it. It won't be traditional Metal Gear, but it will be kind of ridiculous. Okay not kind of, it will be COMPLETELY ridiculous, and it will take itself SO seriously the entire time, but you will probably still have fun.

What with the giant backlogs Steam sales and freebies entail, I tend to wait to buy games until they hit a certain price range. As a result, I've been lagging on Assassin's Creed games pretty regularly, so I know I am a little late to the scene for this particular entry in the series (having played all of the main series, story DLC's, the first Nintendo DS title, and Liberation HD up until now as well, just as some background). I'll be honest, Assassin's Creed 3 felt like the series had lost its way a little. None of the characters felt likeable, and the lines between good guy/bad guy were blurry without the added benefit of making the plot seem any deeper for it. The alt-history DLC was alright, if only a bit short and nonsensical, and Liberation HD had the unfortunate flavor of diet cola, feeling almost like the real thing, but never quite getting there. So to say I had fallen out of favor with the series would probably be a bit of an understatement. The magic of the Ezio arc had seemed to expire, which the series managed to pull off even though it was annualized. All of these reasons combined with the fact that I wasn't interested in naval combat dominating a game (as I found the naval portions of AC3 to be a bit of a distraction, not something I wanted to revisit) made me really hesitant to try this game, but several of my amigos continued to press the issue so I finally got around to it in my backlog.
Wow, I was wrong, and I am so happy for it. Gone are the emo, edgy character archetypes, replaced with likable heroes and compelling villains alike. The bland rural colonial America has been replaced with a bright and vibrant tropical Carribean landscape, and the pirate motifs don't even end up feeling shoved down your throat. Some naval combat is necessary but the mechanics are much more enjoyable this time around, and I really do feel a lot of this comes down to Edward's charisma versus Connor's ugh-ness.
The present-day portion of the game is weird, and first person, which makes me want to switch between a gamepad for third person portions and a mouse-keyboard combo for the rest. It plays similarly to the Subject 16 DLC from Revelations, but without the spooky computer-ghost feel and any of the Mirror's Edge style mechanics (you're just a dude, in an office complex). This had an opportunity to be boring, but always served to further the story both in the past and in the present, and even managed to weave in some closure from the ending of Assassin's Creed 3, so even if I tried I couldn't hate it.
The Deluxe Edition contains an additional 1-3 hour campaign where you play as Aveline, which feels like what I wish Liberation HD could have been. It felt great to control her with her full range of abilities without the technical limitations of the Vita port. While it seems the ship for a full-fledged Aveline game has sailed, the plot heavily alludes to more going on in her world that we may see someday.
Having bought the DLC with the base game, I am unable to post a separate review for Freedom Cry, but this expansion is also totally worth it, eclipsing the Aveline adventure in enjoyment and thrill levels. You're looking at a 6-8 hour expansion set in a separate chunk of the ocean, with new mechanics based around the slave trade. Many of the minor side-quest activities have been replaced with slave trade related goals. Due to the shortened length of the game, your ship can only be upgraded so much, and now many of the upgrades revolve around how many slaves you free either from side activities or main quest lines, as well as how many slaves are recruited into the revolution you help to fuel. Adewale, while a different sort of hero than Edward, still manages to improve on the past couple of AC heroes in many ways, and is immediately so much more enjoyable to spend time as versus Connor. The writers continued with the steam they built up from the main campaign and managed to surround the protagonist with an array of good, bad, and somewhere in the middle characters that are all compelling and (usually) benefit the plot's richness from their introduction forward. I hope to see more expansions like this as the series starts to get re-evaluated by Ubisoft and transitions away from being an annualized title into something more.
AC4 just has so much more energy, passion, and smiles all around, while still maintaining "hey, there's consequences for all of this crazy stuff you're participating in". I'm back in for the series now, and am looking forward to playing the acclaimed Rogue next.

As far as fictional trope genres go, horror is a close number two to my love for scifi (sorry fantasy). Anything from slasher to paranormal usually gets me excited and interested, and one genre of horror I've always been in general orbit around is Lovecraftian. Due to a lack of bandwidth or maybe just poor choices on my own part, I've only dabbled in this area of horror, but have a pretty good idea of how some of the more popular concepts and characters work (spawning all KINDS of shoggoths in Super Scribblenauts back on the Nintendo DS!).
Magrunner: Dark Pulse starts out as the gleaming, pretty, Mirror's Edge style universe, with nods to Tesla and Facebook all over the place, that after the first hour or so quickly devolves into this grimy, rusted, supernatural, Lovecraftian romp. I almost kind of wish they hadn't peeled away the fancy futurist style so quickly, because aside from the early and late chapters, you're left with this rust tinted, more decayed set of maps. The futurist stuff was probably the prettiest part graphically, and using it so minimally just didn't do the assets justice. The level designers could have taken some more nods from the Portal series and slowly peeled back those layers (remember how crazy those last few levels of Portal were?). The final levels are just crazy and wild and nonsensical, and will tickle anyone's Cthulu curiosity if only briefly.
Speaking of Portal, as a first person puzzle game with different rooms/puzzles/chambers/situations for each level, there will always be a lot of comparisons to what many will argue is the best benchmark for this type of genre. Mechanically speaking, the idea of using attracting and repelling magnetic fields on props in the map sounds like a simple binary solution mechanic you find in the Portal series (blue and orange portals vs red and blue magnetic fields), but Magrunner's difficulty curve turns it up to 11 as the narrative proceeds, so if you're looking for a challenge: Have. At. It. Magrunner actually implements the one thing I always craved in a Portal game though, in that there are levels where you have to outwit enemy AI and cause their untimely demise using your magnetic glove and props on the map. This is a lot different from the stationary turrets of Portal-land, and can be a lot more intense when the oogie-boogie is trying to grab you relentlessly if you miss that jump.
The story has a basic setup for why the protagonist is doing what he's doing, and dives into the "what the heck even?" of being thrown into the mix with a Cthulu-death-cult that comes as the standard reaction for anyone who hasn't been exposed to this sort of stuff. There's nothing outstanding about the narrative, the cut scenes in between acts are told via animated paintings and get the jist of the basic plot across in small bite-sized pieces, while virtual interactions with NPC's do the rest of the heavy lifting in that regard. The universe itself has some interesting pieces that never quite get explained, like why magnets to do what the Zuckerberg anagrammed benefactor aims to do? Or what's the deal with mutants in this society? What happened to the other testing candidates? And what even happened to put Earth into the state its in (to avoid spoilers) after the last level for the epilogues final cut scene? Maybe if I was more up and up on Cthulu stuff the ending would make more sense, but I've become used to accepting the wtf endings that horror narratives provide so I'll leave it.
If you're big on Lovecraftian themes, or are looking for a challenging first person puzzle game with a unique and challenging set of puzzle mechanics, be sure to give this a look when its on sale. If you're only here for the story you'd be better served looking elsewhere. As it stands, I can't hold any of the games flaws against it TOO hard, since it does most of what its trying to do competently, and it has a really weird mix of genres in a single place I wasn't expecting to find in the first place.

I was a huge fan of the Shank series and Mark of the Ninja (MotN2 when Klei?), so when I realized there was an extra level that I hadn't had the joy of playing yet my interest was piqued. The HowLongToBeat times clocked the DLC as somewhere between 1-2 hours, so the pricetag of $4.99 seemed a little steep, so as is customary on Steam, I waited for a sale and picked this up for about a dollar and change USD.
The DLC takes you through a mini-campaign of sort, from when the mentor character of the main game was in his prime as a ninja. You're forced to play a more stealthy, non-violent path throughout the level, so several of the items have been replaced with more non-lethal alternatives, like dusk moths which can cloud light fixtures, or choke an unsuspecting guard like a dust cloud straight out of some sort of biblical locust plague-tier shenanigans. It had been over a year since I conquered the base game, but this still felt very familiar and comfortable while playing, and helped illustrate how solid the mechanics are for MotN.
The plot is framed as a sort of campfire story, being told by the protagonist reliving their past and trying to convey a lesson. Without going too far into spoiler territory, it does not dramatically change the player's understanding of the plot for the main campaign, but does a nice little bit of universe building for the lore at large.
The most interesting part of the level is that the developers used it as a platform for "directory commentary", wherein interactable icons appear throughout the level, that relate the design philosophy, stage archictecture, QA testing, etc. that all goes into how Klei constructs a level for MotN. As a developer myself, its always nice to see how others engineer a situation in software, games or otherwise, and especially when the final product is so fluid and seamless like MotN.
If you enjoyed the gameplay of the main story, you can't go wrong diving back in for a little more when the price is a bit lower on this piece of DLC.

First person Spider-Man!
I normally have a lot harder time getting into the headspace of a fantasy game than a scifi game, and I'm sure there's a lot of players out there who fall on either side of that fence as far as preferences go. I snapped it up first sale after it was on my wishlist from just a couple clips of gameplay, not knowing there was a little bit of fantastical nature to the game. I happened upon A Story About My Uncle after playing Coffee Stain Studios' Goat Simulator and was curious about what else was in their catalog. Turns out they had published this game for Gone North Games, and now I'm in love with both of these developers.
The majority of the fantasy elements in the story are/are not explained away by the mysteriousness of the world you visit. What's happened in this land might just be scientific, and your method of travel and equipment are certainly scientific in nature. So what Gone North Games have done here is successfully blur the lines between a scifi and fantasy aesthetic without making it look like a Thor movie, and I applaud them for that. This is all made even more enjoyable by just how pretty this game looks on high graphical settings.
For the gameplay side of things, I have not felt such fluid progress in a game since the early levels of Portal or first few tracks of Audiosurf I played. There is a learning curve as your suit grants and removes abilities throughout the campaign, but I can only think of one actual instance where I got stuck and couldn't figure out what I needed to do immediately. Even still, there is a difficulty to the game, in that you're running and grappling from platform to platform in the sky like Spider-man, except with a energy lasso instead. Later in the game there are clear paths for how you should traverse the level, but in several spots there were less obvious paths I was able to successfully traverse, and I appreciate the non-linearity of it all. ASAMU is not a first person puzzle game or "walking simulator", it is a game highly geared around movement and staying mobile. The thrill of flying through the level and the close calls of almost missing the timing on some jumps could sell the game alone for some. The only downside is the length (~3 hours), though I feel the game puts you through its paces just fine before you reach the end. If you're looking for a fresh experience of flying around like a web slinger be sure to give this a look.