Recent reviews by Tleno

This game has no right to be as good as it is! A surprisingly passionate for surprisingly crude source material spinoff that makes Postal more of a "proper" shooter - you're still The Dude, you're dealing with mundane tasks like get an autograph or secure toilet paper, but now you gotta kill hordes of wacky enemies on your way to it, including some bossfights.

Now, first thing first, the humor - as you'd expect from Postal, it's all about guaranteed to get outdated political and pop-culture jokes, and timeless as long as you remain forever a child poop jokes. This game delivers both, and how! The plot and pop culture references are peak late 10s to early 20s, with stuff like Trump Wall, Karen meme, Covid and the temporary toilet paper shortage it induced, and Elon Musk. Though I feel the power fantasy of shooting Musk might've only grown more popular since the development of this game started. The poop humor is also overflowing here, multiple enemies are just entirely made of faeces or shoot poop out of their butts or are uncomfortably sexualized women whose pain noises will make everyone think you're watching porn if you're not playing this on headphones. Dude throws some one-liners too, watches Uwe Boll and shoots dildos as arrows.

Now gameplay itself, it's absolutely unoriginal beyond maybe half the powerups turning your useless peeing gimmick into powerful enemy-damaging or mind-controlling attacks, but it's a real generous homage to all sorts of classic game guns and enemy types to fight. There's a wholesale ripped from Doom Eternal Super Shotgun with hook, yes, there's a combination BFG and Unreal Tournament shock rifle that even calls this out in it's description, there's a pistol resembling one from Titanfall 2 finale (but nerfed), or something like the Ion Fury revolver. It's a huge trove of surprisingly powerful all by themselves firearms, and with how many enemies you fight and how weapon wheel slows time, you get to quite fomrotably pick what you need for current situation - despite retro appeal this game has plenty of modern sensibilities (gameplay-wise, presentation has zero sensibility as you'd expect). Only two complaints is that it's definitely short, and also medium and hard feel like pretty big jumps in difficulty, wish there was a hard-ish mode between the two.

Now, art! I won't lie, this low-poly, low-res Tim Burton nightmarescape style fits with Postal all fine and dandy, and there's always plenty of nice detail to all locales, weapons and enemies, and like every level is a different locale with different scenery. The soundtrack is good too, great really, both the combat and the background track for exploring all the locales. There's also a level editor here. Like, implemented within the game itself, and you can easily test your levels with a button click. Impressive feat! Not most comfortable UX with that one, but much better than quite some actual classic shooters editors.

If you love this whole "boomer shooter" genre and aren't easily offended by sheer immaturity, this is quite a wild ride, I recommend you try it - and I guess consider buying on a sale if you're frugal and picky with playtime.

A game that gets compared to Hotline Miami a lot due to it's violence and top-down combat but it really stands on it's own, all while offering a mysterious loose plot about a mansion that may be an afterlife or an otherworldly dimension.

The reason it gets compared to HM so much is that it's a high-lethality, fast-pace romp throughout levels killing everyone in your way, all top down and picking up guns from the ground. Which is definitely inspired by Hotline Miami, but then the differences kick in, like both you and enemies being able to soak some damage instead of dying from single hit, and there's a very stylish and useful slow-mo mode you can use frequently that helps you dodge shots and aim better yourself, which makes it feel like a whole damn big load of cool movies. Another big but less obvious difference is that enemies here are so, so much smarter - they will run at noises you cause, but they will also take cover to fire at you from, or ambush you, provided you didn't jump on them by surprise, and even though you can soak up some damage, if enemies anticipate you they're going to shoot you as soon as they see you, so it's a very risky approach to jump at them head on instead of trying to find a flank or using dodge roll or slow mo to get an edge. Oh yes, there are dodge rolls here, but also you can make cool leaps over stuff like tables and sofas like in a movie, which also counts as making you immune, and some of roguelite aspect upgrades give you temporary bonuses for rolling or leaping over environment details.

Talking about upgrade part, there's a variety, not too big but varied, of liquors you get at a bar, that in standard roguelite fashion you get to make a choice of after some levels, and there's some predictable boring stat boosts or super situational gimmicks, but also a lot of super handy heals and income boost effects, or damage increases, or even companions to assist you in combat, not to mention stuff like turning all of one-handed ranged weapons into dual-wield variants or extremely risk and rewardy ones that half your health but double income. Oh yes, income, nothing comes free here, the drinks cost and you gotta kill enemies quick and rack up combos for biggest payouts - which means taking risks, so you have to go all in on speedrunning individual levels and soaking up bullets if it means finishing everyone fast enough. But nothing stops you from buying multiple or all of them if you do well enough, especially later on, and there's also gachapon balls you can get useless toys or variety-increasing new guns for enemies you encounter ingame - and also yourself! Whole thing is build on playing safe or risking and gambling, like, you unlock new drinks by investing into them during a run, and if you die you won't get to use the money you got, but you may as well need that money for something else as you play - and same with gachapons, are you gonna get a toy or increase in shotgun variety that synergizes with your current build boosting shotguns? Or would it be better to not risk it and keep hard-earned cash for reliable barman drinks instead?

Betting feels like a major plot in this game. Like, the place you're in is called a mansion but it feels more like a casino or some shady mafioso-run hotel sometimes, and the story implies you were a pretty bad person for your fate to bring you there, risking life again and again to save your beloved. And there's lots of tiny minutia details adding to the feel, like how you must drop a gun away before bartender offers you a drink. It creates a really interesting, auteurish feel to the mystery world and the mystery plot even if it's just a game about running around and shooting people for booze you'll take a sip at most of. Soundtrack is also a banger, very much so.

So yeah, if you love running fast and shooting? Consider this. Don't get put off by big chunky pixel art style and seemingly derivative gameplay, this game rocks and has it's own vibe and really really nice flow.

Ah, Renegade, an FPS spinoff to classic RTS series. Made to please the always obsessed with chasing the latest fads EA who really wanted more shooters since that was the fashion at the time. This was a game made by people who created a lot of great titles, but doing an FPS for the first time, and it shows.

This one, actually, got a story that is part of canon, 3rd game has a monument to Havoc the game's protagonist, and it makes some callbacks to various mainline plot points like you find a corpse of Seth from Nod campaign, there's more hints at what eventually became the Scrin. It takes place somewhere around the first game, and lovingly recreates a lot of stuff from it in a different scale and context. Like, the structures you'd build or destroy are here too, you get to enter them and wreck from inside. The guns are in, they got this RTS-esque damage effects to different objects, like flamethrowers don't harm vehicles much but are effective against both non-fireproof infantry and structures, and there's tiberium that won't harm tiberium mutants but is fair game against most of everything else. You get to ride stuff like mammoth tanks, too! And multiplayer got orcas, and stealth tanks!

Now, as for gameplay itself... it's kinda rough, but fun. There's a huge variety of guns overall, and while enemies are numerous and respawning, they get stunlocked by gunfire easily, with some weapons even knocking out entire groups with penetrating projectiles, if you position right, which is somewhat funny but also lets you more easily take on crowds of enemies. There's also vehicles to ride, and while this game doesn't reach the amazing combat sandboxyness of Halo, it still offers variation in engagements. On other hand a lot in this game is baffling or rough and incomplete feeling. As a simple example, you can reload any gun even if it already has a full magazine, for some reason. Crouching is a thing but it's very instantaneous AND very little of any level geometry is actually accounted for crouching even if it looks like it should. There's some stability flaws, and vehicles can be easy to get stuck in tighter areas... thankfully, placing annoying snipers and rocket troopers on any roof aside the game is considerate to avoid putting you in scenarios where you'll get to deal with getting your vehicles stuck too often, with such sections offering nice roads and open zones. Also there's like one track looping throughout entire level but those are Klepacki bangers so it's fine.

If you're a CC fan who appreciates FPSes too, try it if you can handle jank. If you enjoy older, more unusual FPSes, don't miss out on this one. Just don't forget the Tiberiumm Technologies fanpatch, it's essential!

Paranautical Activity was like one of first roguelite FPSes, from back when roguelike was still a novel thing, and looking back, it aged badly. Hell, if what chances are it's more known as the game taken down for it's dev cursing at and threatening Gabe Newell on social media, resulting in the title being taken off Steam for some time, than it's actual merits.

Now, first thing first, as far as unappealing blocky visual styles go, this game takes the cake with really rough pseudo-voxel enemy designs and UI, and level design even more angular - while it tries to be an arena shooter, like Quake of sorts, with lots of projectiles to dodge, the individual areas are way too small and primitive to fully capitalize on this. One thing that redeems style and levels is dynamic lights that indeed look neat and distinct but that's it.

Now, the gameplay, it's pretty predictable roguelite as genre is established meets arena FPS faire, with the roguelike bit sometimes offering interesting gimmicky pickups but too often boild down to flat bonuses to stats, like max lives or whatnot, whereas the FPS kinda suffers from enemy AI being primtiive and simple, running circles is always enough to deal with most threat and the failures usually happen due to fire density getting too high for you to deal with, so the main skill here is dodging, not much space for buildcrafting, most playtroughs feel quite similar as a result.

Just... was nice for it's time but now there's so many more titles with a better sense of how to make something a roguelite, and even more titles that are just fun simple singleplayer shooter so this comes off weak.

FTL is a truly classic, influential indie. After over a decade of existence it feels just a bit rough around the edges and it's visuals bit maladapted for higher resolutions, but the gameplay still shines with all the cool decision-making you get during tense spaceship battles.

General premise is, well, you gotta travel trough random points throughout multiple areas, until you reach your HQ to warn of enemies weakness and beat their commanding flagship, all while on a run from their encroaching forces and taking on their advance scouts, pirates, and other ships in a real time with pause combat. Sometimes you actually get to avoid combat somehow but it's still the meat and potatoes here. Which involves managing both ship systems, the weapons, and the crews. You just get to do that Star Trek-esque "reroute power to shields!" stuff, or micromanage the crew to take on boarding hostiles or deal with a fire, making tough choices whenever just too much is at stake.

In general it's real fun to create and try different builds with different weapon and ship systems, especially with Advanced Edition adding stuff like mind control or hacking, plus some more gear and unusual crew, and there's even Multiverse mod that adds even more goodness to witness and try out, so there's always more if you find original game unenticing.

I wholeheartedly recommend this, it's not as tight as the studio's second game, Into The Breach, but it's just as smart and intriguing.

Evil Genius 1 was a frustratingly flawed game with amazing premise and style. Evil Genius 2 follows it's footsteps, except with less style. For every step forwards it makes a step backwards and then farts and laughs about it.

For those that never heard of series, you get to play as a supervillain, the James Bond golden age sort, or how they often get parodied or pastiched in later media. You have a giant hopefully inactive volcano lair, you have henchmen and minions (also yellow, but not THOSE), and am ambition to rule or destroy the world, by building a doomsday device-inator of sorts. It also is the 60s, so music and to extent art style do reflect that, not to mention characters and the tech you field.

This is a management - building game, ultimately, and that boils down to three activities: maintaining and expanding the lair and all it's many facilities, keeping good guys away or disposing of them if needed, and finally taking over the world. Original's issue was that lair management was fraught with minions taking too long to achieve anything, especially becoming not useless, fiddly micromanagement of things, and in general poor pacing. EG2 has attempted to remedy many pacing and micromanagement issues in multitude of ways, and simplest ones like just speeding up individual minions upgrade time and other activities and allowing to toggle auto-rebuild of destroyed items work well, but then others like scheme-performing minions never returning instead of needing a recall have questionable effect, or come with drawback, like how all the stats got reduced to three, creating overlap between facilities, both cafeteria and barracks beds can let minions heal up, same with hospital, but they can actually do just fine and dandy never visiting the hospital and just snacking off their bullet wounds, it appears, even if hospital beds would have been faster, importance of having all these facilities running is greatly reduced, the lair begins to feel so much more hollow and facilities arbitrary when you realize that.

Now, the defense aspect. The annoying body disposal thing got simplified and reduced but bodies still stay and it's still an undesirable evidence the forces of justice would be better off not seeing, and there's both traps and minions to deal with intruders, plus the whole "front" disguising your place as casino out there, sure, but traps seemingly aren't that reliable when it comes to any more experienced investigators and agents, and guards aren't that exciting of a defense, you just just have to have enough of them and they'll take on enemies with some loses. It all feels kinda stagnant and very minimally improved comparing to original, both minions and traps are a fun iconic bit in series after all. And the world stage management got changed a lot but then in the end feels kinda annoying to meddle with, as t was earlier. On the bright side, scientific research is way less gimmicky, even if it's ,more standard.

There's also just... not that many interesting new mechanics? You can build several floors of island but there's very little of stuff like new inter-room interactions, or new environmental hazards beyond do-gooders and fires we had before, just as annoying. Worse yet, the tone! The first game was unserious but it didn't go out of it's way to be anything more than a parody, and have fun visual gags delivered with wonderful character animations that are a pleasure to observe. Here, uh... the dialogue, and humorous puns, it all feels way too Saturday morning cartoon, just phoned it most predictable jokes. Sometimes a tooltip has a witty joke but all the scheme and quest titles are groan-inducing puns. Worse yet, the animations really barely compare to passion and energy original had, early on you can notice the interrogation chair having a variety of animations but it's not the same, rather subdued.

This game tries to improve on original's many failures but then it often fails, and just like it begins to stretch too long while leaving you dealing with routine, repetitive protection and upgrade jobs while waiting for some development to reach conclusion. If you got the patience you can try it, but it's not like we live in a world deprived of bright comedic management-strategies anymore, maybe check out Two Point Something instead?

A roguelite action-platformer that offers quite a challenge while demanding a lightning fast pace but also doesn't hesitate to let you make the game easier, and doesn't overstay it's welcome.

The story is, surprisingly for roguelite, simple but intriguing - you're a comic book character, as in, fictional within narrative itself, going trough comic book pages, trying to reassert yourself in the mind of an author who's burned out, is low on ideas, and is pondering about fully abandoning life's work. It's quaint, there's a nice twist there, and it does touch upon creative's struggles regarding validation and sense of direction. Also there are small comicbooky details like how areas go from top left to bottom right like a comic book page there, and labels by items reference past issues that obviously never existed but imply a very labyrinthine lore with magic, technology, ancient gods, aliens and time travel all in.

Gameplay, what originally intimidated me was that the game is touted as pretty combo-centric, which it is, but it was more lenient than you would expect, you get quite some time, and you get a lot of options to kill enemies quickly, things like melee and Mario deal a surprising amount of damage, and sprint and air dash are quick to pull off with minimum restrictions so you just need to remember to use these as frequently. Everything is snappy and smooth, too. Lategame bosses can turn this into a Touhou with how many projectiles they launch, but for majority of game the hazards aren't that many.

On other hand the roguelite aspect is pretty light. Sure enemy placement and layouts and random objectives are randomized, but it's not as much of a game changer. On other hand bosses are actually varied, each area will have a variation of them, and even final area boss is one of tree, and there are a decent variety of hostiles, so that helps keep runs fresh. Also, while items and upgrades you can find are usually welcome additions, there's a surprisingly limited selection on them, but guns? Guns are all varied, while majority require unlocking ingame in involved way, each new type feels distinct and interesting, while most of time being pretty useful or having a cool redeeming feature. Wish other gear and upgrades were as varied, really.

Also, the soundtrack slaps though I worry it may be repetitive if played for longer, the dynamic soundtrack changes from ambienty to heroic heavy action solely based on your combo, so you'll hear it go back and forth between three or so tracks.

This is nice, if you want a replayable action platformer where you can and even get to encourage to just run and rush wrecking everything in your way, go for it.

This is an earnest if derivative imitation of Vampire Survivors, and while originality or lack of it is debatable, the balance and pacing issues are there and they make the game inferior to it's inspiration.

Just like in Vampire Survivors you fight endless hordes of ever-improving enemies with a single character, leveling up and getting random suggestions what weapon or upgrade to pick, with a limited slot of either you van have - except here it's only 4. There's even identical item evolution system - except here there is no tome or collection list to remind of ones you unlocked. There's also no proper treasure beyond predictable and formulaic chests that get dropped by bosses, which are bigger enemies with health bars that you fight 1 on 1 and they launch projectile attacks player can dodge - but they have only a single attack at a time so they're very dull to fight, especially without good single target damage weapon as they will be real spongey then. The beginning is hard but if you get trough it things get easier, a common thing in VS too but here it's worse and applies to grindy unlock metagame too, where VS had each purchase raise the price of all items, with incremental increases, with a complex pricing formula, here everything is much simpler - and making playing much simpler once you get the ball rolling. Also despite customizing characters with custom abilities depicting a cool closeup the devs didn't make them differ much, simply adding a bonus to a single stat, no interesting progression boons or restrictions, nothing.

Now, for the good parts, they replaced powerups with a custom system where filling up a special bar allows you to pick one, but you have to go trough all powerups before you an use any of them again - even if they're nothing new themselves. There's also dash dodge and the unique character abilities each and every one of them goes hard, animesque closeup of a character, and then like a magic nuke blast or project stream obliterates all enemies.

I don't recommend this one, it's passable, but being so brazenly derivative in a genre full of way more interesting and original games coming out regularly while having awful balancing, it's not worth much.

Wolfenstein: The New Order was, undoubtedly, one of finest singleplayer FPSes in a loomg while, wonderful in every way. This one, the sequel, unfortunately, falters in many ways but not as much as to become genuinely bad.

So, in first part of planned trilogy, you witnessed nazis win WW2 as allied trooper William B Blazkowich, who snaps out from decade of stupor, finds a love of his life, and joins ups the resistance, killing the one guy who gave nazis an immense technological edge. In this one, the resistance efforts continue, this time focusing on overthrowing the occupation of US to kick off further liberation effort from. And this game, it just kicks the kitch of original Wolfenstein up further, so now apart from Germanazified covers of real songs you get immense loads of Americana but dystopian and Germanophilic. The scifi designs are as great as they were before, that rugged industrial look of nazi bots and armor. What's different is that writing comes off way more... Marvel Cinematic Universe-esque? Humor pacing-wise. Personally I appreciated but over years head a lot of complaints how it takes off the drama, which I disagree with, all the dramatic narratives take time to unravel but they come to fruition.

Now, gameplay-wise, this thing is pretty close to first one, with details like simple sneaking with officers calling reinforcements if alerted, dual-wield, some perks for performing specific actions... though, dual-wield allows you to combine whatever two things now which is under-appreciated but comes handy considering swapping guns isn't quick here so stuff like having a close and medium range guns both at hand is handy and distinct-feeling. Though, the guns themselves aren't that distinct from first game or general trends, apart from getting upgrades that emphasize the guns niches in interesting ways like SMGs getting harder-hitting but slower round toggle, or assault rifle becoming a semi-auto sniper. Also, enemies are hard-hitting but easy to kill if using right weapons or aiming right, the combat is great. What isn't that great is the side content of sorts, such as hunting for nazi officers by revisiting already played on maps - two thirds into the game you get to hunt them in just slightly reworked original areas, and it feels very phoned in. Same with DLC, allegedly, all very heavy asset reuse with nothing new.

Another issue is that the game can be buggy. I had some crashes related to a side mission in the hug area, and would constantly get non-critical warnings claiming I'm out of VRAM even tho I have twice this game requires. Also I had some visual glitches like few decals having weird shadows. A far cry from release performance issue but I remember first game and Old Blood expandalone both being way more polished than that.

If you enjoyed Wolfenstein: The New Order, this one is solid enough sequel despite misgivings - it continues the themes of the first game, it maintains what was great in it and while somewhat conservative and jank it is definitely memorable. If you haven't, try that one first, it's way more solid and will help you get invested in this one's story. Also, don't bother buying DLCs, there's nothing worthwhile there, really shameless asset reuse with nothing original to show and irrelevant plots.

An absolute banger of a roguelite where you clear out ancient derelict spaceships, one by one.

You only get snippets of the story and setting but what you get is intriguing. Overall you're working as a space pirate crew's boarding power armor guy, and your crew gets commissioned by shady corporates to clear the way to eponymous Cryptark within a derelict fleet of ancient starships of long-lost civilization, all bursting with still-active self-defense systems. As optional objective you can recover the civilization's artifacts, getting a nice narration from the crew extrapolating things - turns out the derelict fleet's story is pretty interesting.

Now, gameplay itself is that you float around and deal with threats like turrets and enemies inside the randomly generated spaceship interiors. It's a sidescroller but not platformer - there's zero G, you float whenever instead of jumping, but also stuff like guns actually push you back. And apart from hazards the ship has special systems, like shield generators or factories or alarm controllers, and these toggle some complications like reinforcements or mines or whatever within ship. Almost always the ship core you need to destroy is guyarded by shields, for instance, so you have to destroy the shield generator, and sometimes the core chamber is so full of turrets you can't shake a stick at them so you need to disable turrets, and either reinforcement generating factories or alarm system guarding core must go to if you want less annoying threats distracting you from takedown. It feels less like scavenging operation and more like a well-planned if mostly improvised heist.

Now, another important thing I want to emphasize is that this comes with different gamemodes. Starting off you'll see Campaign is as the default option, but while it's a great starting point to get used to game, you may at certain point just begin to stick to singular piece of gear unless you find something better, and in general start sticking to rote approaches. Or you may just get sick of stressful time limits and budget management. That's where, instead of putting the game away, I insist you try the Rogue mode which turns this from hectic heist into more methodical and survival-centric experience, really flipping the script while keeping same gear and weapons for player to use.

Also, art style and soundtrack just plain rock. Great tracks, cool designs, the game has very neat dynamic lighting for a 2D game.

Definitely recommend this if you ever wished for a sort of action-tactical roguelite where you have to have a plan of approach and yet also get to shoot things violently and with a variety of gear.