Recent reviews by Weasel Biggs

I've spent countless hours with the previous version both here and on mobile. While I get the sense that the official byline of needing to upgrade the game's network infrastructure to suit modern needs feels like a thinly-veiled excuse to justify a complete re-release (gotta love whales and paypigs), I'm also left feeling like AI matches are slightly better balanced, in this version.

If you remember the previous one, Marge Loughbot was your default "dumb as bricks" AI player, while Otis Vanderbot was a seasoned long-game AI player; the type to bank cards for almost half of a game and then later explode across the map. One scattered her purchased segments and seemed to leave things to luck, the other seemed to work with a deliberate, long-term plan in mind. Now, most AI players behave in the same way, as a kind of more natural balance between the two extremes. It's easier to get the sense that you're playing against "people" that both have something like a plan in mind and also seize opportunities as they come.

For everything else, this version of TTR is a notable downgrade. There's no central lobby for Online games, so the only way to really get anywhere close to the curated feeling of the old app's lobby would be to compulsively add absolutely everyone to your Friends list, and especially to rely on Steam's Discussions page or on other platforms like Reddit to copy-and-paste the friend codes for returning old-timers. The option of being able to run an asynchronized game, however, is a welcome one. Great if you're the type to spend days mulling over things while playing correspondence chess, which is a bit of a niche concept in today's interconnected world.

It's only really required as a purchase if you absolutely need to keep tabs on TTR regulars. If you only ever played offline, save yourself a few bucks and skip this one. The old version does the job quite well and has a much broader suite of expansions.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an easy sell if you’ve played Black Isle and BioWare’s seminal classics in the genre – as yes, older tabletop geeks remember the BioWare from well before Mass Effect. Back when the Edmonton-based company was just itching to abandon its roots as the developer of hospital-related software (yes, look it up – hence the name) the first project that allowed them to put their name up in lights in the gaming space was their licensed Forgotten Realms digital campaign, Baldur’s Gate the first in name.

Much has changed since then, with extensively mocapped interactions, gorgeous cinematics, fully-voiced characters, but where Larian differs from Bio’s approach to the D&D license is in their understanding of the less-celebrated parts of the system. See, the earlier games in the series assumed you’d do things as expected of a High Fantasy setup – as in sling spells, swing swords, fling arrows or slit throats. Baldur’s Gate 3 knows full well that as a player itching to improvise in the context of a campaign, you’d very much like to Mage Hand that barrel over there into a gaggle of enemies readying their next strike, and you’re likely to want to be mobile, too. The first two games in the series mostly expected you to hold your ground until you’d deplete your opponent’s Health points, whereas this one has shades of XCOM to it: taking cover matters if possible, but it won’t give you a handy UI element to denote cover, however. Instead, the world is open for you to interpret or use as you wish, so it’s up to you to figure out if that boulder over there couldn’t deflect a few goblin arrows – or if you couldn’t just push it free to squash the poor sods.

Similarly, BG1 and 2 tended to not really bother you with simulated dice throws. They were in the Action Log at the bottom of the screen, but never were broken down in a way that could allow a player to really understand the systemics at play. Here, they are. You roll a D20, your modifiers are shown ahead of time, along with the dice rolls that resulted in them – all of them written down in a recognizable format. The UI then makes a bit of a show of combining everything into a final value and clearly denotes your passing mark. The end result is that BG3 is possibly the best entry-point into D&D 5E you could hope to get – unless you’re looking to min-max or autolevel. In both cases, the game is more than open to accommodate you. So if you’re curious but don’t feel like shelling for a handful of sourcebooks, you could get a full experience for the price of about two add-on volumes.

As to what experience this is, well, you’re in dire straits from the get-go. Lovecraftian creatures called Mind Flayers have captured you and infected you with their young, with their breeding process involving an alien tadpole burrowing into your head and feeding into your very sense of identity and memories. Eventually, if nobody helps you, you’ll mutate into a squid-faced horror. Luckily for you, you’ve got companions of misfortune ranging from Lae’zel the green-skinned Githyanki to Astarion the curiously pallid and red-eyed Elf with a thing for exposed throats – and several more. Some are morally upstanding, others are self-serving, and it’ll be up to you to chart your course in order to survive. In the process, you just might save Faerün and the Forgotten Realms from horror and ruin from beyond the mortal planes of existence.

Honestly, this is it. It’s the CRPG in the most classic vein that some of us were waiting for, after finding that Dragon Age and the rise of the Live Service model didn’t really support the same kind of narrative thrills our old, kludgey, word-obsessed frameworks used to enable. It’s a minmaxer’s paradise and friendly enough for hack-and-slashers, but it gives you so much more if you’ve been that annoying guy at a tabletop campaign who insists on pushing his DM’s buttons.

This comes highly, highly recommended.

The controversy's hard to avoid, but if you're willing to consider that a bigot's opinions have less staying power than their artistic output that predates their radicalization, there's a window of moral opportunity, here. I'm not one to advocate for piracy either, but if your concerns are pecuniary and you're reading this on Steam, I'm sure you know what to do.

That said, Legacy could stand on its own even in the absence of Rowling's works, as thoroughly as it couches the lore. You could've skipped the books and movies and still would have a decent glimpse of the Wizarding World - with a few interesting concessions to modern concerns. Where there aren't any concessions is in the game's structure, which is decidedly oldschool. Avalanche, Ubisoft - même combat, to coin a phrase.

You're a teenager inexplicably gifted with a wizard or witch's powers and you're facing the perils of being a late arrival to a new school. From the Sorting Ceremony to the game's epilogue, there's a slow ramping-up of your character's abilities and general involvement, starting with the early reveal that you aren't quite your average hedge mage... In fact, you might signify the return of forces long-since forgotten. In-between universe-defining events, you'll attend classes, gain new spells and abilities and might soon feel the dark allure of unmentionable forces. Anyone remember Ralph Fiennes' meme-worthy "Avada Kedavra"?

What am I saying; anyone reading this is a guaranteed Potterhead or someone swayed by the game's solid reputation as a good open-world game on its own!

Otherwise, the game is fairly moddable thanks to Nexus Mods' Vortex launcher, and it's probably one of the better test cases for the Steam Deck's ability to run modern AAA releases.

Definitely recommended, unless you have understandable moral compunctions.

I don't understand how someone can think that releasing this was going to recoup costs in any meaningful fashion. Yes, there's times where a product is struggling and it might be a somewhat wise move to pander to the Sunk Cost fallacy, but Redfall isn't one of such occasions. The game's had years in the oven, about as much as your average tentpole release, and what we've received is worse off than No Man's Sky's first release, and certainly worse than Cyberpunk 2077's.

Let's be clear here - I do not blame Arkane Austin. As to why, it's because the guys who gave us PREY or both Dishonored titles have since left both the Austin and Lyon offices. This is an Arkane Austin title in name only, and feels much more like something that should've been marketed as a first outing from an indie studio, something we'd find acceptable if it were Early Access material and if we had the clear understanding that the enemy AI, weapon balance and general plot of the game were all placeholders.

Consider another mostly-vapid Early Access title like V Rising, for instance. There's almost nothing there, beyond the expected grind and the notion that once you've built up your keep and dominated all bosses, you're more or less due for a restart. In V Rising's case, you at least get the sense that the game is being actively worked on. Things could improve over time, and will definitely change.

Not so with Redfall - and that is what's utterly baffling.

If that's all you have to offer as a studio, you don't try and recoup your losses, especially not as part of some weirdo attempt to tout it as one of XBOX Game Pass' more Premium offerings. You could cut your losses, scrap the project - and re-evaluate your design document.

Oh, and above all? Ignore focus groups. I work in Marketing, and I know for a fact that most panel-selected "gamers" who get paid to chew on stale donuts and drink free coffee do not know what they want. They know what they like, sure, but they're not in the best position to articulate it. Neither is your board of shareholders. If someone with stocks on the table tells you to work on a concept your team isn't known for successfully tackling, that's an immediate red flag.

Redfall is everything that's wrong with the video games industry as of 2023. Good on you if you've found a few hours' worth of fun with some friends and the dumb enemy AI, but those same friends of yours are worth far, far better. Why play this, when you've got Tiny Tina's Wonderlands or any of the Borderlands games?

It's not really my policy to write a review after so little time spent with it, but I feel a game like Anemoiapolis is a special exception to the rule.

There isn't much to it, really. What feels like a routine maintenance call for what's probably a paper lot's electrical grid spirals into what's effectively the essence of liminal spaces as a game, and in the best ways possible. It's hard not to compare Anemoiapolis to the plethora of Backrooms-related content that's available both on here and on indie platforms, but it does something better than most other Backrooms projects: it lets the setting breathe.

I think the Backrooms sort of deluded a lot of people into thinking that Liminal Horror *has* to involve a shadowy corporation, needlessly cryptic "levels" and a few various bugaboos to eat your face off if you linger too long. All of that tells me that several content creators likely haven't been alone in a food court, a gym's lavatories or a library before. The real horror of Liminality is the horror of what *is*, but devoid of any human affect. It's realizing that the space you're in is purpose-built for humans - but that humans have forever left that space, likely quickly, quietly and impossibly cleanly.

So you're alone with nothing except bits and pieces of Mallsoft, the occasional weird shadow, hallways that bleed into public spaces that bleed back into private ones - and your own footsteps. The end result is a slow, torturous and deliberate lack of stimulation that's eventually just as nerve-wracking as any Entity-powered foray into randomly-segmented beige cubicle spaces. As the game is really adept at pulling the rug from under your feet, oftentimes with tiny, easily-missable details.

Did you notice the endless walls and unclaimed power outlets in the Convention Center? Now find the one outlet in the entire space that is where it *shouldn't* be. It's the horror of monotony broken in sudden, unexplained and absurd ways that are just too perfectly timed to be an actual asset-placement bug.

This is highly, highly recommended if you're looking for a more cerebral and atmospheric take on something that's just south of the Backrooms, with just a *tiny* bit of remaining human presence left, all the more to make the experience as anxiety-inducing as possible. Stay away if you're allergic to walking sims or if the idea of following a base collect-a-thon to unlock parts of the facility offends your Game Design sensibilities.

You're getting a single table for what felt like a fairly premium price at launch, but this might as well be the mother of all Fantasy pinball tables. The physics change depending on where the ball is, subsections or smaller sub-tables can be unlocked, and the entire playing field is awash with animated details. As a cherry on top, Demon's Tilt also supports Tate mode, for that truly authentic "I bought an entire pinball table for myself like a baller who's got money to burn" feel.

The Steam offerings for Pinball are few and far between, but Demon's Tilt is likely to be the best of them all - also because it doesn't gatekeep its content behind endless DLC packs. See Zen Studios and their pinball frontend, for an example of where my frustrations lie...

A word to the wise: go take a pre-emptive piss before starting a Trombone Champ session. This game is dangerously, perhaps lethally funny.

There isn't much to it, really. It's a modded Osu! of sorts for people with a thing for instrument trivia and for unironically enjoying horrible performances. If you've ever repressed laughter over a younger relative's Music class recital because they haven't yet caught on to their lack of talent and are still trying their absolute best, you'll instantly get what Trombone Champ is aiming for. There is no way for anyone to manage perfect aim and timing on all songs - not here. At some point, you'll slip up and blurt out a hilariously inappropriate half-tone in the worst of times. It's all downhill from there, believe me.

Like I said, bring an empty bladder and get ready to spend more time laughing at yourself than actually playing. For this exact reason, this comes highly recommended.

How it used to be: Welp, this sure is a planet, alright. Its lifeforms are certifiably alien, as well. Look, there's a poorly-animated giraffe thing that's doing the butt-scoot thing from Cow & Chicken! What can I do on this planet, you ask? I can mine for basic survival resources and, well, just grind my way to the centre of the galaxy for no clearly-defined reason.

How it's going: Welp, my work's cut out for me, looks like. I've unlocked all the prefab base parts after hours of grinding, I'm just about ready to set solar panels on my new base, but there's no gold deposits within reach! Let's see, I can either trek aimlessly until I reach one or go somewhere past my local orbit to maybe mine some gold from the asteroid fields. There's one catch, though - the neato ship I recovered is a massive fixer-upper, and its photon cannon module is busted. It's off to Magnetized Ferrite and Sodium Nitrate, then - but I'm on a Paradise planet! That means no Sodium plants! Luckily, my third neighbour in the solar system has Sodium in its ecosystem, but it's a radiation-blasted hellhole that'll kill me flat in a few minutes if I don't boost my Hazard Protection - but that requires some Ion Batteries and some Wiring Looms, so I'm off to the Space Station! Yay, busywork!

A great game if you like retrofuturistic Sci-Fi vistas and are just about ready to try a Dad game, but want something that has a bit more personality to its endless checklists. The plot isn't terribly inspired, but it's a lot better than the Release version's concept of Schlepping Space Rocks Around So the Space God Reboots Your Game.

For similar results with less Chromatic Aberration, try House Flipper.

Several among us are likely to have that one friend or relative, or we at least know someone who’s a teensy bit too much into alternative medicine or guided meditation. You can tell they’re not deepening a practice or applying the result of some research to a new topic, but rather they’re coasting on a rush of feel-good vibes that they only maintain in chasing the Next Great Thing. Sometimes, the Next Great Thing is a stand-up desk, or maybe a keto diet. At other times, it’s a cult.

Honey, I Joined a Cult takes a subject matter that’s usually mired in uncomfortable bits of Pop Culture tidbits, like knowing about Marshall Applewhite’s desire to ride the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet to some perceived astral plane, or Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo and its infamous sarin gas attacks carried out in Tokyo’s subway system – and skirts right past all that grue to effectively poke at the simple truth behind most cultists; which is that these people are lost, in need of guidance – and sometimes given to a bit of the old word salad. That, at least, can make them funny.

So you’re a quack and a scam artist – or a guru, naturally – and you’ve just hatched you next get-rich-reasonably-quick scheme; which is to start a cult. The basics are straightforward, seeing as a brainwashing routine couldn’t survive a constant immersion in the outside world. Your job is to see to every single need of your cultists and to arrange for the gradual expansion and eventual prominence of your ad-hoc bit of faux spirituality. It starts with the basics (food, rest, hygiene and a place to pray) and quickly expands with the need to not only draw in other faithful, but also maintain what you’ve built for yourself. You need to see to your followers’ crumbling mental health and also diversify your message, eventually figuring out if you’re more of the type to be coasting on the works of New Age ASMRtists or if awakening a few Great Old Ones is more your jam. Either way, you’ll need a media presence, influence in the wider world – and money. Lots of it. Mechanically, it’s all very close to Introversion Software’s Prison Architect – the one difference is you’re screaming about aliens and God giving you superpowers to keep your “inmates” happy. There’s a few recognizable quirks in the mechanics, from a Management screen that interfaces with each cultist’s individual quirks and foibles to a schedule that can be set on a per-hour basis. A lot like Planet Coaster or Planet Zoo, this is a game where a lot of the fun is in making minute adjustments over several hours. If you’re more the SimCity type and enjoy seeing how moving a decimal point can futz with your slime mold of an ecosystem, you’ll probably want to stay away. HIJaC is a game for the motherers and terminal optimizers but works on a scale that feels more like the later half of Netflix’s “Keep Sweet” documentary than, say, Scientology’s bafflingly meteoric rise.

Of course, it’s all still in Early Access, and could use a little more variety. You’ll first love the very “Hippie Meets Shaft” vibes of the soundtrack, and then maybe start to think about muting it on occasion. The main loop is hard to break, and most events that alter everyday life on the compound are simple, from a toilet breaking down and needing a visit from the maintenance man to someone you’d sent on a mission ending up in the pokey for a few days. Fail to keep your followers’ mental stats in check, and you could find yourself with your elected Chosen One foaming at the mouth out by the complex’s main gates, screaming insult-filled gibberish at random passerbys. Early on, generating stable growth and keeping everyone debatably sane is a bit of an ordeal, so balancing issues can still pop up. As it stands, however, Honey I Joined a Cult is a fun and deeply satirical little ditty that isn’t likely to wow any Management Sim fan’s socks off, but that gets some laughs out of anyone with a bit of a history on what happens when a relative suddenly goes nuts about Celtic mythology and massive chunks of pyrite yanked out of old concrete slabs.

A lot of reviewers opened up their thoughts on The Ascent as being a Cyberpunk 2077 killer. If you're only looking at this issue from the perspective of the lore and setting, then it's absolutely true. R. Talsorian's take on Cyberpunk as a genre has a visual language that doesn't entirely stick to the concept's classics, and that mostly ignores the visual canon set by universes like Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell. It's Cyberpunk at its glitziest and flashiest, so it's nice to find a recent trove of indie games sticking closer to the House that Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer built, as it were... On the other hand, if you're coming into The Ascent expecting something that specifically improves on Cyberpunk 2077's gameplay, you'll find that your mileage may vary. If you've got patience enough for isometric shooters and rigid Diablo-like quest structures, then yes, some improvements are on offer. If you're a roleplayer, however, you'd probably be better off sticking to Night City.

As can be expected of the genre, we open onto a crapsack world of interstellar travel and choking corporate overreach, wherein the hive-like maze of Planet Veles strikes newcomers as a means to strike it rich. The problem is Veles is almost wholly owned by the Ascent Group, a megacorp that's turned the planet's surface into an arcology designed to concentrate billions of people within its convergent services. Ascent owns practically everything and as such, we arrive on Veles as an Indent - essentially short for "indentured corporate slave" - tasked with yet another bottom-tier assignment that barely covers our living expenses.

However, something hits the fan during what should've been routine gun-assisted maintenance, and the Ascent Group is now in bankruptcy, with its sub-bosses left to fend for themselves and protect their people using their own resources. Your boss is quick to put you on guard detail for a regional meeting that predictably goes south, and you're soon left with the task of climbing your way out of the slums to find out what it is that's paralyzed the entire planet and essentially fed it to its own wolves.

Mechanically, this is presented in twin-stick shooter format, with an isometric viewpoint that occasionally sweeps closer or further away to really make the art direction shine - and this is where The Ascent fires on all cylinders. Veles is choking with cables, pipes, steel trusses, reinforced glass, neon flare-ups and dot-matrix displays, all of it awash in the unrestrained Orientalism that's become a hallmark of Cyberpunk as a genre. Rain is almost omnipresent even if the sky remains invisible, and every square inch that isn't serving as a host to a walkway or a platform is oozing with detail. Veles consequently feels a lot bigger than the playable areas indicate, and the surrounding traffic goes a long way to making this place feel lived-in and authentic. Similarly, the score by Pawel Blaszczak leans really hard in the direction of Ghost in the Shell, putting emphasis on the suggested scale of the arcology and on all the grime and squalor that surrounds the player character in the lower levels. Whenever you're not gawking at the view or fragging gang members and cyborgs galore, you'll have to contend with the game's single biggest black mark: its UI.

As can be expected, the game includes various enemy types and favors a per-type meta. Expect having to switch between weaponry depending on who or what it is you're targeting, and having to regularly allocate stat points. Unfortunately, not all stats are equal in terms of efficiency, and the interface fails at showing just what is and what isn't central to survivability as a concept. Everything is just there for you to take in, from the current values to their six or seven modifiers, to the fact that any piece of kit that's equipped influences SIX stats equally, in some cases. It's a heck of a lot of info to keep track of, and without the ability to compare and contrast items, it's all-too-easy to skip past an interesting or worthwhile pickup. The same criticism applies to the overworld map and minimal, as they're awash with info - but none of it is clear at the onset. The end result is that it's rather easy to stumble into high-level quests early on, and to be forced to rely on what functionally is a good idea, even if it's not entirely well implemented.

You see, there's cover practically everywhere on Veles. You're expected to crouch down and use your Aim High modifier to land headshots from a crouched position, but most twin-stick shooters present a lot of info to take in during a firefight and rightfully emphasize movement. The Ascent offers a basic, essentially DIY cover system as an alternative, but lining up distant targets with a long-range sight while keeping track of who or what might motivate your dodge-rolling over to the next bit of cover is harder than it seems. Thankfully, that's an easy problem to solve: just crank the difficulty down one tick and you've got enough damage mitigation potential to frag your way through Veles like it's RUINER's Rengkok South or Hotline Miami's Floridian nightmare. If you're going to follow the game's emphasis on cover, I'd strongly advise you to remap the default Crouch button (LCTRL) to something like Q or E. I don't mind extending my pinky in shooters, but being stuck in a near-constant claw grip just in case something went down wasn't exactly a fun part of the experience.

As far as performance is concerned, I've tried The Ascent on an i7 7700K with 16 GBs and a GTX 1080 OC and an i9 11200K with 32 GBs and an RTX 2080 Super. The first case scenario gives us a fluid experience at no loss of fidelity, but without any raytracing perks. The second one was clearly bottlenecked by the GPU if RTX was enabled. The Ascent does have its fair share of small optimization hiccups, and some particularly intensive camera shots brought my DX12-compatible and RTX-compliant system down to single digits, where other games like Resident Evil Village were more accomodating and remained within the 30FPS range with raytracing enabled. I'd imagine that any ballers out there who managed to murder or bribe enough people to afford an RTX 3090 in the midst of a chip shortage wouldn't be exposed to similar performance dips.

All things considered, it's an incredibly impressive effort from a new studio, with its founders' pedigree more than obviously showing through. This is an indie game with the technical chops of an AAA project, and with *just* a few burrs and warts that might get fixed in any potential sequels.