Recent reviews by Syrsly

OK, I like this one. I wasn't a big fan of TerraTech back in the day, but this action roguelike is a great spin-off venture! Highly recommend it.

Performance wise, it runs well on my main gaming rig but struggles to run on my Surface Laptop 4. I streamed it somewhat well to my handheld, but I'd prefer to be able to run it natively. It isn't super performant, but it isn't unoptimized. It runs very smooth on menus and when the game starts, but it starts to chug on lesser hardware once the enemies start to flood the screen and a lot is happening.

A little basic for 2026 but it's cheap, so it's to be expected. I like the 1996-ish vibe of it, but it likely won't give me much more than 2 hours of entertainment. Again, it's cheap, so that's fine. If it was expensive, I'd slam the game and say not to buy it, but at such a cheap price, it was worth checking out. It should have more upgrade paths added for replay value, and I'd like to see more buttons utilized. Stages are so basic that I don't care for more.

It was only a dollar, and it was new, so I bought it to support interesting software on the platform. Tried it out months later and it wasn't great. Waited years and came back to it. It hasn't got a lot of enhancements in all this time, and it still has a ton of problems which make it hard to recommend to others. That said, if you're a web dev like me, you might like this software just as something to tinker with. It can be a pretty cool piece of kit to make a shortcut bar or anything else you can make with web design skills. You will have to edit files to use this app effectively. There are some major issues with the app which no amount of web skills will fix. I wish I had the source code to the app so I could try to fix said issues, like the resolution being too small for a 2K monitor or the app not having an intuitive navigation scheme. I also wish the dev would come out with more built-in wallpaper examples, because the app only has one built-in wallpaper... and it's not a great example of the features available.

All that said, it's so cheap, and it's a very unique and potentially useful app.

Great action roguelite in the same vein as Vampire Survivors but 3d. Looks great. Sounds good. Plays well. Perhaps a little too frustrating at times, and I wish there were more maps to explore. Character unlocks are abundant, though, and the weapons, tomes, and other unlocks are also abundant enough to keep things interesting for a long time. At ~27 hours in, I still haven't unlocked the final of the 3 biomes, but I have defeated the final boss twice, and I've got more than half the achievements. The dev should add more biomes and add some secret areas to explore the maps for. I also think the weapons and tomes should have synergies added. I'd like to see the sword combine with the flamewalker to make the flame sword dancer for example. Could also be cool to add character-specific weapon limitations to make it more worth it to try different characters once you find new powerups.

Performance-wise, the game runs pretty smoothly even on my Surface Laptop 4. No complaints there!

The game is best played in short bursts.

I don't normally write reviews for demos, but this is a really fun demo with tons of replay value. Highly reecommend it.

I like AOE anything, and I look forward to the Crucible mode introduced with the Dynasties of the East DLC/Expansion. The base game is already kind of expensive, but even without the DLC, it feels like they've provided plenty of content... at least for non-competitive players.

Good extraction shooter but not much else. It's loosely scifi, but it isn't as badass or as structured as Helldivers 2. It is, however, very popular and has the most loot I've ever seen in a game in this genre. It sometimes feels amazing in how you slide and vault and use items and sneak around and shoot and so on, but it is also derpy and frustrating due to unreliable controls and looting mechanics that make you have to trust other players not to kill you but then does nothing to incentivize players to be friendly.

Overall, it's fun, and I think it's easily worth the $27 I paid on Fanatical near release for it. I wouldn't pay much more than that, but it is a lot more content than the open beta led me to believe. I just wish it was more well thought out in terms of story and immersion. It reminds me of Dragonseeds from the original PlayStation in how the base is just represented by a menu system and nothing else. I would have liked a lobby system to meet players underground and form friendships there. I would have liked to have underground living quarters where we could build our own player-owned rooms like RuneScape. I would like to see the players I just talked to on the recent players list instead of players I never met from hours I wasn't playing at all. Things like that.

I really wish I could give this gave a 3/5 or something like that instead of a full recommendation, because there's a lot wrong with the game... but it's fun, anyway. I enjoy looting, ok? If you're like me, join me in this game. You'll have fun. For a short while anyway. Once you want to play with friends, it gets really bad.

I like the game. It's nothing special, but it's enjoyable. It has a nice soundtrack, fun old school retro visuals, and a ton of upgrade paths for your character. It also has a good coop implementation.

Played this game a couple times after its initial early access release in 2020. It was very rough and mostly unplayable. It didn't have anything really going for it, and the competition in the VR mech shooter genre was fierce.

Now, after playing it again in late 2025 with a friend against AI, I think I like it. The lightweight mechs look awesome and feel speedy. The big mechs have a lot of cool functionality, like being spawn points. The movement on HTC Vive feels pretty good and feels like it was designed for the Vive trackpad. The game supports Vive and Quest 2 quite well. For maximum immersion, I would go with the Index controllers, but those will have to have constant gripping, which gets tiring.

The tutorial is way too long-winded, but it can be skipped by closing the game and reopening it. To get into a match with a friend, there's no way to join via Steam, and there's no invite system, so you have to coordinate and choose the right battle from the battles menu, which is difficult because there's no match title. The menu UIs are also very unresponsive and sometimes take several clicks to register interaction.

Overall, good mech game to play with friends. Get it on sale.

This game doesn't know what it wants to be. I would put this in the automation genre, but it doesn't let you design layouts for anything, so it's kind of barebones in that genre. You just click upgrades and balance stats. I would put it in the mystery thriller genre, but there's really not much narrative to this game. You get some emails to read, but that's about it. I would put this in the clicker genre, but you barely have to worry about the clicking of faces at all after a few minutes in the beginning of the game, and no other clicking mechanism is ever introduced. It is most closely related to the clicker genre, but I wouldn't recommend it for that.

Some aspects of the game are basically missing. You may see some footage of video where it's spotting faces. That's not gameplay. There's no video footage of faces other than a little video clip in the documents that serves no gameplay purpose. I also found the emergency transmission windows annoying and not at all realistic... to the point where they were the same videos over and over with no rhyme or reason to when they show up.

That said, the Win95 theming is done extremely well, and I hope it gets expanded on. I want to see improvements to the music player. Maybe add a Winamp upgrade? Also, it'd be nice if early days GPUs were introduced to help with mining the video feeds. I could also see part of the narrative being that you have to upgrade the OS to support newer video codecs but you'd give up your anonymity in the process and have to waste more power on a newer OS. None of that is done here. Everything takes place on a semi-convincing Windows-like OS that doesn't have Paint and doesn't let you edit documents. It also doesn't have a command line interface, something I expected to see considering the focus on energy consumption.

What's unclear to me is whether or not the hardware is on your premises or networked into as an agent. I think that's the weak point I noticed before anything else. It appears to be a situation where the hardware is in a solar farm location nowhere near your real home, but when it overheats, your own computer overheats, so that breaks that illusion. Which is it?

Overall, I like the game, but it feels shallow. It could be a ton better. It doesn't feel particularly special. It is, however, a little bit relevant to today's AI-related problems. It's an interesting base for a game that could evolve into something special later, but right now, it's just not enough to do to keep things engaging. I suffered through the first playthrough just hoping it got more interesting, and it never did.