Recent reviews by The Dog Nerd

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Caring about Payday 3 is a constant struggle. Abandoned by the mainstream audience after a disastrous launch and stuck with a immensely understaffed dev team under an utterly incompetent parent company, this game is battered, bruised, and broken. That last part is very literal, because this game has a lot of bugs. Everything is stacked against Payday 3: the media narrative, the mainstream opinion, the tight-knit Payday community, and even Starbreeze itself who have decided to make huge cuts to the development staff. It's a constant bad news doom spiral that can make you really upset if you engage with the discourse surrounding this game, which is why it's a good thing to sometimes tune out the noise and narrow the focus. What is actually here in this video game now? What are we actually playing and talking about in the present day?

You might think I'm crazy, stupid, or both, but personally? I love this game, warts and all.

Is the experience flawed? Objectively, absolutely. The content offering including heists, weapons, and playable heisters still pales in comparison to its predecessor Payday 2 by a large margin. While most heists are fun and engaging with objectives that I enjoy doing over and over, they aren't nearly as variable or replayable due to low amounts of randomization of map layouts, objective locations, or escapes. The lack of pre-planning beyond basic favors really hurts after seeing some of the potential of that concept in Payday 2. The skills system is simplistic and too generalized, meaning that most characters play pretty similarly to each other compared to the insane amount of variety in build options in Payday 2. Weapons and weapon attachments have nowhere near the level of options that would want or expect from the sequel to Payday 2, a game with some of the highest amounts of weapon customization and options in any FPS game from the standard to the ridiculously over-the-top.

You might be thinking, if most of the issues with Payday 3 so far are that everything is a downgrade from the previous game in the series, what exactly is better about Payday 3? Looking at all of this on paper, Payday 2 just seems like the game I should be playing instead. Well, the interesting thing about video games and especially action games is that how the game feels to control is actually a major factor in the potential enjoyment of the experience. The way the character moves, the way enemies react to my attacks and actions, the way that my weapons feel in my hands.

What Payday 3 has is the simple fact that playing it just feels great.

The weapons are animated beautifully and have lots of impact from the sound design to the reaction of the SWATs when you take them out. Shooting the enemies in loud feels especially good though because, compared to most enemies in other horde shooter games, they are pretty tough and cunning on top of that. SWATs will run to take cover if they are attacked, hide behind special units like Shields to breach a room, and sometimes stay behind to protect areas where the heisters have been. That's why there are far less enemies on the map at a time compared to Payday 2, they don't need to be so numerous because each one is a much greater threat. The escalating difficulty system where stronger SWATs and more powerful specials are spawned further into each loud heist creates a pressure to get things done quick that simply didn't exist in previous games because of how powerful you could become.

Stealth is massively improved from the previous entry. With no detection risk and with many more actions being allowed when you are not masked up, you can complete many stealth missions without ever drawing your gun. It makes stealth feel extremely satisfying to coordinate, even in a lobby with many people. One person can take hostages and control them, taking out guards to make the maskless player's job easier while another hacks cameras in the way so that another player can pass. Manipulating guards by deliberately getting caught and getting escorted out not only gives you more leeway, it can create interesting strategies to get guards out of the way without killing them.

In both stealth and loud gameplay, the music greatly amplifies the experience. Gustavo Coutinho is the GOAT and in my opinion is the worthy successor to Simon Viklund. Shoutouts to Siren Rush, Pump and Dump, and Blockbuster for being real standouts. Also, quality of the heists has vastly improved since launch. About every post-launch heist has been better than launch and seem to linearly improve in quality of map layout and general design. It's just a shame that people who haven't played since launch have seen most of these.

I genuinely hope that this game bounces back because even with all of the technical flaws and the features that are missing, it's one of my go-to FPS and co-op games based on the aesthetics, movement, and game feel alone.

You have something here, Starbreeze. You can fix it. You just have to actually commit to doing so.

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Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (BRC) is an indie game triumph, a return to the early 2000s era where games released finished and extreme sports games with attitude ruled the roost. It's brought to us by Team Reptile, a small team from The Netherlands whose previous efforts with Lethal League and Lethal League Blaze proved that this team had the artistic sensibilities required to resurrect this long forgotten genre of game. They've nailed it here and then some.

It's impossible to play this game without being reminded of Sega's Jet Set Radio franchise. The aesthetics match Jet Set Radio Future's cyberpunky vibes, with the character designs, cel-shading, low-poly models, and thick outlines around the characters evoking similar feelings as you skate down long city streets, manual across the atrium of a huge mall, or launch yourself over the water at the oceanfront.

If the homage to JSR wasn't obvious just from looking at the game, the music would shock you into recognition even further. The soundtrack is truly excellent, featuring a collection of licensed music as well as original tracks composed specifically for the game, including tracks by JSR's composer Hideki Naganuma who steals the show here as always. Aesthetically, everything about this game works and feels cohesive.

The gameplay is like an expanded version of Jet Set Radio Future with much better feeling controls and maps that are purpose built for super long combos and dopamine-spiking navigation. There's nothing like blasting through the entirety of a stage, hitting every rail turn, wallride, and ramp and watching that combo number climb into the stratosphere while you're jamming to some funky beats. When you're free to trick, tag, and combo the game is at its best, but there are some standout moments that happen during the game's story where platforming is the main focus. Turns out that BRC is also a very competent 3D platformer. The only part of the gameplay that is lackluster is the combat, which is way too simplistic and clunky for it to be constantly enjoyable. Luckily it's not something that you're forced to do all the time.

I won't say much about the story because it really worth experiencing yourself. It's pretty weird, cerebral, and is enhanced greatly by the unique set pieces and graphical presentation. Overall the campaign is really well paced and has you moving quickly from huge map to huge map. I was satisfied with the length of it too, being over 10 hours to complete with even more time needed to 100 percent.

Overall, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was one of my favorite games 2023 and is now in the running for one of my favorite games ever.

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I want to preface this review by saying that Postal is not a game that will be enjoyed by everyone. Even people who can stomach the themes will mostly likely have issues with it due to its age or general clunkiness. The fine folks at Running With Scissors (RWS) have updated this game a ton over the years to help it run, control, and perform better on modern operating systems, which is great of them to do for game preservation purposes. Being a game originally released in 1997 though, no amount of quality of life improvements can fix some core issues that this game such as the low enemy variety, balancing problems, low res UI elements, and very short length. You pretty much see everything that Postal has going for it gameplay wise in the first two levels, so if it doesn't grab you then, it never will.

Even with the previously mentioned issues, I still lean toward positive with this review because Postal is a very unique game, even compared to the later games in the series. What it does different is its commitment to a macabre premise: playing as a psychotic mass murderer who can gun down everyone in his town including innocent people. It's a horrific concept for a video game, one that immediately caused controversy at the time of Postal's release. Such a concept required RWS to walk a fine line with how Postal was presented. You can't glorify or glamorize a concept like this, at least not without crossing some disturbing lines that I'm sure the game developers didn't want to cross. At the same time though, you can't make it too edgy or brooding without it becoming a parody of itself, something that games who tried a similar concept like Hatred fell into.

Postal doesn't feel like a joke. It feels like the glimpse into the twisted mind of a spree killer, a perspective that is handled with appropriate levels of horror, dread, and discomfort.

The game is a fairly simplistic isometric and top down shooter that plays like a twinstick shooter. You move with the WASD keys and aim by pointing your mouse at where you want to fire. You have an infinite ammo machine gun, but also several other weapons that you find throughout the game. The gameplay is fine enough for a game released so long ago. While you can run and gun with the machine gun, it is very weak and is therefore used as a backup when your stronger options run out of ammo. You have to stop to fire many of the stronger weapons like the rocket launcher which can feel awkward when you're trying to dodge enemy gunfire, grenades, or missiles. There's a very small amount of unique enemies to engage with. Policemen with pistols, mine workers who throw grenades, guys with napalm rockets, soldiers with machine guns, and perhaps most infamously, stationary rocket turrets which have the power to stunlock you to death with their rocket barrages. It's easy to get frustrated or bored with the gameplay itself if twinstick shooting isn't your thing, and because of the lack of polish, content, and balance Postal certainly won't win you over with the gameplay alone.

The aesthetics of this game are what elevates the game's quality massively. The music, which only plays on the main menu and during mid level loading screens, is a mixture of dissonant sounds, screams, and other samples that do the opposite of amp you up for the next level: they remind you of the horror of the acts that you are committing as the main character. The artwork accompanying the music is similarly hellish. Images of death, destruction, moving shadows, and demonic beings are shown alongside the ramblings of a madman as he moves from place to place, leaving trails of bodies in his wake. While there is no music that plays during the gameplay, each level starts with the map filled with NPCs running around talking nonsense, screaming, or shooting their own weapons back at you. And then once the map is cleared, there is a still, eerie silence...

Rick Hunter's voice acting deserves special mention as it is absolutely iconic of not just this game, but the entire Postal franchise. His low, gravely voice interjects constantly during gameplay, laughing and quipping almost every time you gun someone down. He's like a grinning devil on your shoulder, egging you on through the entire level until everyone is dead. While his voice may be first assumed to belong to the player character, the Postal Dude himself, the game files refer to Rick Hunter's lines as "Demon". This adds subtext and potential for interpretation into the game's story. You don't have to kill innocents who don't attack you to progress, but this 'demon' cackles in approval if you do so. How much is the Postal Dude really in control of his actions? Is there a literal demon twisting his perception of the people in the town, or are you the demon puppeting an innocent man into committing these heinous acts? It adds multiple layers of narrative complexity onto what initially seems like a low brow game made just for shock value.

While the game is very short and isn't the greatest game ever to play, Postal's strong aesthetics and presentation can leave a very strong impression on you. Even decades later, there's still not a game quite like it. There's a lot of good reasons as to why that is. The real world has changed drastically since 1997, especially in the way of real life violence and video games being in the crossfire in culture wars related to that. That makes this one little game stand out though, not only as a time capsule of the era it was made in, but also as a unique piece of interactive art that covers a topic that no other video game would dare to try and tackle.

"We may never know exactly what set him off, but rest assured we will have plenty of time to study him."

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Horror games are dime a dozen these days, but they aren't created equal. There are dozens if not hundreds of streamer/YouTuber bait horror games that don't have much depth and are meant to get a cheap scare from the person playing to entertain the people watching. When you actually play games like that for yourself though, most of the entertainment value is lost because of how shallow the gameplay, story, and aesthetic qualities are in reality. Most horror games, like most horror movies, aren't deep or meaningful pieces of media that are put together with any greater purpose than just scaring you. Jump at the loud noises and move on.

This is not an issue that Faith: The Unholy Trinity has. Mostly created by a one-man team known as Airdorf Games, everything about it is considered, crafted, and precision focused to tell a story that is horrifying to the core while also being hopeful and insightful, and it does this while also not being ashamed of being a video game.

Despite the aesthetics being very simplistic, being heavily inspired by the Atari 2600 era and early PC games like Oregon Trail, it is capable of being quite disturbing in its imagery thanks to an impressive implementation of rotoscoped animation in the cutscenes. The smoothness of the pixelated characters on screen gives an uncanny vibe that makes you feel like you're playing a haunted video game that shouldn't be able to move and operate like it does. This combined with the robotic sounding text-to-speech 'voice acting' makes the game feel particularly unsettling and immersive. The characters feel more alive than their chunky pixels would otherwise suggest, and that helps get you invested in the story's drama and themes.

Speaking of themes, Faith's horror is intimately connected to Christian lore and thus pulls a lot of inspiration from classic horror films like The Exorcist. Ideas of possession, demonology, Satanic cults, and the end-times prophecies of Revelations. These themes are wrapped up in the protagonist's own personal story, one filled with loss, regret, and, as the game's title implies, having the strength of faith to face down the tough challenges of life. The game has a lot more to say that it might initially seem, and it made experiencing the story a deeper experience than most horror games are.

The gameplay of Faith is also something of note. There are only two main controls in the game: moving the character with the WASD or arrow keys and pressing the space bar to hold up your crucifix, which serves as the player's only means of defense for most of the game. Without going too deep into spoiler territory, Airdorf is able to accomplish so much with this simple method of control and interactivity that it's honestly mind blowing. Puzzles, unique set piece moments, and even boss fights are all accomplished within this framework, and they are quite good too, way better than you would ever expect upon seeing the game for the first time.

Faith: The Unholy Trinity is a technically compilation of three different games that represent the chapters of the games story. Each chapter also represents Airdorf improving as a developer, with each chapter rising in quality until the big finish. Chapter 1 is great and has standout moments, but it is extremely short in length and only has one major boss fight. Chapter 2 is longer, scarier, and starts to dip into the game's deeper themes. However, Chapter 3 is the most impressive chapter thematically and mechanically and is the part where the game fires on all cylinders, leveraging all of its strengths and culminating into a grand finale that will stick in my mind for years. I would have never expected a game like this to over-deliver so much from its original premise.

If you're a horror fan who can't get enough of the genre, this is a no-brainer. But, if you're new into horror and want a solid first entry to get you acclimated to what this genre can give you at its best, Faith: The Unholy Trinity is a great place to start, especially for the price.

Faith without works is...

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The Finals isn't a perfect game. It has some pretty major issues with game balance that seem to change every time the weekly patch comes out. It has problems with performance mostly related to the destruction physics being handled server side. It has the typical issue that every modern free to play video game has where the store prices are heavily inflated for what you actually get in return which are usually bloated bundles where you'd only realistically want one or two of the items in it. While the battle passes are easy to grind compared to other games and have lots of quality stuff in them, they are still FOMO machines that force you to play continuously to get the value that is advertised. And since Season 3, the devs have issues settling on which competitive format actually fits the game that they have designed while keeping the fanbase happy at the same time.

I wanted to get all of those points out of the way before I say that The Finals is truly unique in the sea of competitive FPS games that are competing for your attention. There is really and truly nothing exactly like it, and it is awesome.

The Finals was developed by Embark Studios, a team mostly comprised of former DICE devs. You can spot the Battlefield influence right away, from the quality and realism of the weapon models and animations, to the class based design with gadgets locked to specific classes, to the iteration on DICE's legendary environmental destruction technology. Even the art direction is uniquely DICE, featuring bright primary colors and clean cityscapes that immediately evoke memories of Mirror's Edge. It looks and feels like it was crafted by a team of game dev veterans from the aesthetics to the gameplay to the technology used to craft it.

The biggest technological innovation that The Finals brings to the table is the destruction physics and their impressive server-side implementation. Almost every structure in The Finals' arenas can be destroyed. Floors, ceilings, and walls can be breached and used tactically by each team to create new passageways, use new sightlines, or relocate objectives by bringing them down through the floor for example. When the building's supports take too much damage, the entire structure can even come tumbling down piece by piece. The chaos that this can cause isn't just a fun spectacle to behold, it can and often does have a great impact on each game by dramatically changing sight lines, throwing up smoke and debris into the air, and making the terrain much harder to navigate around objective points. Unlike the Battlefield games from the past where the destruction physics were handled on each client's machine, The Finals puts all of that load onto the server instead. This way of doing things means that every player connected to a game experiences the destruction the exact same way, preventing issues like desyncing that could happen in the Battlefield games. It is the most fun thing about The Finals as a product and you should do yourself a favor and try it for yourself if you've missed those magical Battlefield moments from the Bad Company 2 and BF3 eras.

The class mechanics are another Battlefield staple that The Finals iterates on. Each class (Light, Medium, and Heavy) have completely different options for their kits and feel very different to control. Lights are fast and have specializations focused around hit and run tactics from close or long range, Mediums are versatile damage dealers and supporters with many types of weapons and even a few movement options, and Heavies are slow tanks with heavy weapons that have the largest ability to reshape the arena with their tools and abilities. All of these classes have many weapons and gadgets which can radically change how they can be effective in each game. Just to show some of the variety available to each class, Lights can use sniper rifles, SMGs, bows, throwing knives, swords, and daggers as weapons, equip specializations that let them perform a sideways dash, cloak, or use a grappling hook. The amount of subclasses that exist for each of these three classes that can work or at the very least be fun is vast and is limited only to your creativity as a player. It reminds me a lot of Team Fortress 2 in that way, and it's an aspect of game design that I've been missing.

There's an arcade-y feel to the game that is enhanced by the smoothness of the player movement. You can jump pretty high to climb walls and objects, you can sprint into a crouch slide to go down hills to gain a huge speed boost you can carry forward into a long jump, and you can use various movement tools like jump pads and ziplines to gain even more maneuverability. The speed of the player movement, the momentum you can and the ease of which you can climb and mantle over objects or onto roofs almost makes the game feel like Apex Legends or Titanfall 2 combined with the more grounded weapons and destruction of the Battlefield games.

The maps, game modes, and variety they bring together are excellent as well. The gameshow aesthetics of the game are used to introduce each map with bright, cheery commentary before they all get destroyed over the course of a game. Each subsequent season after the first has brought an entirely new aesthetic and vibe to the game, and this is always reflected in the map that is released too. While the stock maps of Monaco, Las Vegas, Seoul, and Skyway Stadium are all large and varied enough to still not be boring almost a year later, SYS$Horizon (Season 2) and Kyoto (Season 3) have raised the aesthetic and layout standard that Embark had already set. I love both of the new maps, and their quality makes me excited for what future offerings will eventually get added.

In short, The Finals' positives are in the core design, the technology, and the sheer amount of polish for a free to play game, and its negatives come from the devs trying to walk the tightrope of balance, game format, and pricing structure. The base gameplay is so good that I personally can put up with all of the small issues, and with the frequency of updates and amount of care that Embark puts in to solve issues as they come up show a commitment to making this game the best it can be.

Hope to see you in the arena!

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Shantae: Risky's Revenge was the killer app of DSiWare back in the day and the second chance for a forgotten character that I had never heard of whenever it came out. Luckily since Risky's Revenge, Shantae has stuck around, and she did it based on the sheer quality of this one game.

Shantae: Risky's Revenge (RR) is a super solid sidescrolling Metroidvania from developer WayForward that reintroduced the world to their Shantae franchise after the previous entry released on the Game Boy Color to little fanfare, mostly since the GBA was already out when it released. There are obvious limitations that exist in RR which come from it being originally designed for the DSi, such as the limited aspect ratio and the text boxes that were formatted for a tiny DS screen. However, most of the game's excellent pixel art holds up well scaled up to higher resolutions, as does the fantastic character art used in cutscenes, menus, and bonus artwork you unlocked for completing the game's various endings. I appreciate how unapologetically cute and attractive that WayForward made their female characters for this franchise as it only adds to the appeal. Who doesn't love cute girls drawn in an anime-ish style?

The world of Sequin Land, for the most part, is fun to explore and has lots of secrets to discover. The dungeons are a definite highlight, making use of all of the powers and transformations that Shantae gets access to over the course of the game and getting increasingly difficult in a way that feels satisfying as you grow stronger. The pacing is this game's biggest strength as you move from objective to objective at a breezy pace. Grinding for experience or item drops is not necessary unless you want all of the shop items, which is not needed at all to beat the game normally. Get ready for a pretty difficult final boss if you don't have healing items or upgrades!

The only real gripe that I have with the game come from how the warp system is set up. Sometimes you have to walk pretty far out of your way from any given area just to reach a point where you can fast travel. This is a problem especially in the game's main hub of Scuttle Town, where you have to waste about a minute to get to a zone where a fast travel point is located. Even with this slight frustration, it never got so annoying that it interrupted the flow of the game in the long run.

Just like the original version of Risky's Revenge on the DSi, the Director's Cut version of the game on Steam is short, sweet, and to the point. It can be beaten in about three or four hours on a first playthrough, but a speedrun can be completed in around an hour with just a bit of practice. If you're like me, you'll be charmed by the game's presentation, music, and characters enough that you'll immediately want to dive back in and do it all again but faster and better, maybe even on the game's additional mode which gives you more magic but less health. I've beaten the game about six times to get all of the achievements. For the price of ten dollars, you're definitely getting your money's worth if you do that!

RR is a wonderful little game that I'd recommend to just about anyone, not just Metroidvania genre heads. On a budget of ten dollars, you can hardly get a more fun, charming, and replayable platformer than this.

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In the early 2010s, you couldn't walk into a video game store without tripping over FPS games, but you'd be hard pressed to find any game that felt anything like the shooters of old. "Boomer shooters" as we know them today didn't really exist yet, but the desire for old school design principles was rising. While Doom 2016 was the release that revived interest in that kind of game in the mainstream, Wolfenstein: The New Order (TNO) was heralding its arrival a whole two years earlier, developed by MachineGames, a Swedish studio founded and staffed by many ex-Starbreeze devs.

Many of the classic staples of old school FPS return in TNO. There are health and armor kits placed around the levels which you need to reach maximum health, secrets in every map with optional goodies and power ups, an auto map, and you have the ability to carry the entire arsenal of weapons in the game as you find them. These elements are pretty common to see in the current day after the explosion of indie boomer shooters post-Doom 2016, but in 2014 it was really novel to see these elements of old school design get brought back in a game that otherwise felt very modern graphically.

And there is a lot of modern shooter design here as well, but these elements are implemented in a way that feel like they fit alongside the boomshooty elements. Limited health regeneration, a quick grenade throw button, aiming down sights (ADS), the ability to dual wield any weapon you have two of, leaning, destructible cover, a light stealth system with melee take downs, and probably the most influential part that carried forward into Doom 2016 and many other boomer shooters into the future: character progression. By completing challenges within the game's campaign, your character becomes stronger and better in various ways. While the buffs offered by this system are slight, by the end you can feel a big difference in ability from the start of the game until the end.

Speaking of modern, let's talk about the presentation and the graphics. For a game that has become a decade old in the time that I write this review, TNO is still a looker. The game doesn't have the highest quality graphics ever even for the time, but it is carried by stellar art direction and music. The dystopian setting of a world overrun by the Nazis that the game portrays is scary, oppressive, and beautiful in a twisted sense. Even in non-combat scenes where you're driving through perfectly paved streets in the middle of the day are made eerie and unnerving with soldiers in black armor with assault rifles patrolling around you. This oppressive feeling gives the game a horror vibe without being a horror game and every new part of the game can inspire awe and fear of the Nazis seemingly impossible technological achievements and military might since they subjugated the entire world, which makes it all the more cathartic when you're taking them down.

Guns feel perfect in TNO. Since almost of the weapons in the game are stolen from Nazis you take down, you can feel the weight and the power of each weapon that they use against you and inflict it right back onto them. The assault rifle, the pistol, the throwing knives, the marksman rifle, the shotgun, the mounted machine gun, and the all-powerful LaserKraftWerk that slowly gets upgraded throughout the game. Each of these weapons contribute to the sandbox and feel perfectly suited for each level that they appear in. While there aren't too many distinct enemy types in TNO, there's enough variety in the campaign to make each shootout feel fun.

On the surface you'd be forgiven for thinking that TNO, like many boomshoots before and since, would be pretty light on story and would be a fun, swashbuckling adventure story similar to the previous Wolfenstein games. You'd be wrong. TNO is a bleak, often horrific and sad, thought provoking, and emotionally-mature game with several fleshed characters, including the protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz. Without spoiling much, the story's broadest theme is about broken people trying desperately to rebel against overwhelming oppression and terror in a world where seemingly all hope is lost. Personally, I found the story to be one of the best aspects of the game and worth experiencing even if story in video games isn't your primary point of enjoyment. It's that good.

The only gripe I really had when revisiting this game is the technical issues with the engine the game runs on, idTech 5. The game is locked to 60 frames per second even if your system can run it at much higher frame rates and there are lots of small issues like limited FOV, forced on post processing effects, and muddy textures that render at much lower resolutions than they should before streaming in eventually. Luckily, you can simply download the id5 Tweaker mod and adjust to your satisfaction. That resulted in a very smooth and mostly seamless experience. The most I had to do was lock the frame rate to fix some issues with enemies spawning in or getting stuck in transitions between cutscenes and gameplay.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is an excellent game that I very much enjoyed revisiting, and I think that everyone who hasn't played it should do so, especially if you're knee deep in the modern boomer shooter revival that is happening now. This game's release was a pivotal step in making these kinds of games return, and I think that paying respects to the forerunners is a good thing to do.

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Neon White is a game that is a bit complicated to describe to someone else if you're taking all of its parts into account. It's a first person shooter, yes, but it's also a high-speed, high-precision platformer with deck-building elements, and a story presented in the style of a cheesy visual novel. Any one of those elements might sound like a turn-off, but all of these disparate sounding elements feel totally in sync when you're actually playing it.

Its bite sized levels are beautifully designed, providing high amounts of visual spectacle while still being clean and readable as a player. The art direction reminded me greatly of Mirror's Edge, where the levels are mostly comprised of white and grey colors while enemies and important level design elements are bright primary and secondary colors that stand out against the stage layouts. They are perfect for speedrun optimizations, with entire sections able to be skipped with creative applications of the card system.

While some levels can be quite difficult and allow for very little error, your own character movement within those levels is never the obstacle. Movement as the titular Neon White is super smooth and responsive. There's a perfect level of floatiness to the jumps that, combined with extremely high levels or air control, can allow you save yourself if you do make a mistake. In the case that you do mess up completely though, restarting is a breeze. Just one button press and you're back at the beginning of the level ready to go again. The speed, game feel, and the ease of restarting can easily make you go into a "just one more level" flowstate that only ends when you reach the end of each chapter. The music is a major part of why this happens as well. Machine Girl's original soundtrack feels uniquely tailored to fit this game's surreal world. It's a dreamy and otherworldly electronic score that is punctuated with vocal samples that somehow never get distracting even in the midst of a difficult level.

You'll also be motivated to explore each level further to find the collectible items hidden in each. That's because the collectible items help advance your relationships with other characters in the visual novel parts of the game in a system very similar to the Social Link system from the Persona series. You get not only extra dialogue which lets you learn more about each of the characters and their history with the protagonist, but also entire new levels with unique gimmicks that are challenging in their own right. This gives an extra dimension to the collectibles that make them feel less like a checklist item and give them extra meaning if you enjoy the characters.

Speaking of the characters, they can be really cringey at times. I would understand why some people might be turned off by the story because of how the characters are written. The game's art has a strong anime inspired look, but it is written less like an actual anime and more like an anime fanfiction written by internet dwelling, trope-loving westerners. Maybe it's just because I read a lot of anime discourse on the western internet and have watched some abridged series, but I found this style charming despite how over the top it was. The good news is that it doesn't ever detract from the gameplay.

I implore you to check this game out if any of this sounds interesting to you. As odd as all of the elements sound, it all clicks into a game that is pure fun for the entire runtime.

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Deep Rock Galactic is an anomaly in the modern gaming landscape. Every area where other live service games utterly fail, DRG delivers in spades.

It's an absolutely massive game with tons of content to enjoy despite having a tiny install size on your computer. It has excellent netcode for online co-op and can be enjoyed offline just as much as playing with friends. It has seamlessly integrated mod support, with the developers going so far as to give their approval to many of the community's best quality of life mods. It has addicting progression systems that are constantly giving players with new, fun ways to play from when you're just starting out as a greenbeard all the way into the endgame. It is endlessly replayable, containing a massive variety of mission types, biomes, modifiers, and difficulty modes to play, making every expedition down to Hoxxes IV unique. It has a great low-poly art style, a charming tone, and an excellent lighting system that conveys so many different moods depending on where you are and what you're doing.

It has inspired game design combining the best aspects of class-based shooters like Team Fortress 2, horde shooters like Left 4 Dead, and the terrain-shaping spelunking of Terraria and Minecraft. Excellent music and sound design immerse you in a relaxing, almost zen-like state when you're exploring caves, setting up traversal tools, collecting minerals, and scanning for objectives. When the action starts and the mood shifts, it becomes a frantic game of target prioritization, movement, resource management, and teamwork that keeps everyone on their toes. This classic horde shooter design is enhanced by a huge roster of enemies that have a ton of variance in when they appear during each procedurally generated run, keeping things exciting with the constant threat of being overwhelmed.

It has a seasonal update model which not only adds huge swaths of new content, but also an additional battle pass style progression track that is totally free for all players to access, no purchase needed. It has cosmetic DLCs that provide real value for your money compared to the competition. To describe what I mean, 15 dollars might get you one skin for one weapon in some other games, but 15 dollars for the Supporter II Upgrade in DRG will give you a framework and paintjob for all weapons in the game, an armor paintjob for all classes, a helmet, and even more features on top of that.

And here's the kicker, the most impressive part of all of this. DRG accomplishes all of these amazing things as a game, providing so much value for your money and respecting your time as a player... while being half the price of your usual AAA game and being made by a small team of indie devs. Let that sink in.

Deep Rock Galactic is an amazing game on its own merits, but it's also a light in the darkness of an industry that has been lost in an abyss of greed, exploitation, horrifically low amounts of respect paid to people who actually buy and play video games. I've gotten so much more out of this game than almost any AAA product, and it has only gotten better with post-launch support. You don't have to accept mediocrity from much larger teams when games like this exist.

If you don't Rock and Stone, you ain't coming home!

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Sonic Adventure DX was, and still is, an admirable but ultimately flawed attempt from Sega and Sonic Team to modernize and update certain aspects of the classic Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure. Every version of DX has introduced more instability and bugs that impact the experience of the average player. Terrain clipping issues that result in falling out of the map, wonky physics interactions that lead to disorientating gameplay moments, and a broken lighting system that make all of the characters look plastic-y leave DX with so many obvious problems that many might assume that the people who like it must be insane. This Steam version doesn't even have proper PC options or alternate presentation styles. Hope you like forced 4:3 resolutions!

Even with all of this being said about this version of the game, Sonic Adventure is a game very much worth playing. It has a great variety of stages, seven playable campaigns with a surprisingly ambitious story for the time, an incredible soundtrack, and a massive amount of replay value thanks to multiple stage objectives, a mission mode, minigames, and the first version of the iconic and addicting Chao Garden. The movement and game feel, at least when it isn't breaking due to DX's borked physics, are unmatched. Adventure's movement is momentum heavy and far less automated than future Sonic games. Mastery of the game's movement systems and character movesets can allow you to finesse stages in a fraction of the intended time, making you feel like a master speedrunner even as a super casual player like myself. Even with some of the less polished and dated elements like the rudimentary cutscenes and the incredibly awkward voice acting, the gameplay in Adventure is timeless.

If you do choose to play this game based on this review, I highly recommend looking into running PkR's SADX Mod Installer before you start playing. The collection of mods that comes with that program instantly transforms this janky Steam version of Sonic Adventure DX into the definitive version of the game, fixing mountains of bugs and adding quality of life improvements like much more stable framerates, lighting fixes that make characters look much better, and the ability to run the game at widescreen aspect ratios. You can also install asset packs that make SADX look like the original Dreamcast version, and even restore the DLC content previously only available if you connected your Dreamcast to the internet back in the day. While it is a shame that modding scene has to do so much of the heavy lifting for this Steam version, it is great to see their efforts elevate Sonic Adventure DX to the level that makes it look, feel, and perform better than any other version of the game.

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