125
Products
reviewed
930
Products
in account

Recent reviews by WHAM

< 1  2  3 ... 13 >
Showing 1-10 of 125 entries
2 people found this review helpful
167.4 hrs on record (156.9 hrs at review time)
F1 23 and 24 are unfortunately a broken game (for they are the same game, with some very minor tweaks). While they remain the only real way of experiencing the full F1 race weekend and season experiences and have some really great features, such as the 2 player career, the numerous bugs (cars starting on wrong lap, broken track limits, broken penalties, audio cutting off and never recovering in the middle of a 90 minute race), constant connectivity issues, lackluster AI (robotic driving along racing line, often unable to respond to unexpected events or car positioning, always doing the exact same maneuvers to defend leading to predictable and boring racing), in-game advertising and utterly rampant pushing of microtransactions and unwanted features is just unforgivable. A dead-on-arrival multiplayer community with no moderation and no reason to behave well towards other racers leaves the game lacking against almost any online racing game.

It is simply not possible to recommend this game to anyone, unless you absolutely want to race on the official F1 tracks and, preferrably, you have a friend to play with regularly.
Posted January 25.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
2.2 hrs on record
"I've QUACKED the case!"

To get the obvious out of the way, Duck Detective is a great little game and well worth its full asking price.

In the game you take on the role of the eponymous Duck Detective, hired on to uncover the mystery of a stolen lunch while studying your surroundings and the colourful characters that inhabit the game's office environment. The premise is a relatively simple, but manages to get a ton of value out of that simplicity by mixing just the right amount of hearty humour with an excellently voiced protagonist that has a bit of seriousness mixed into his lines. All in all the game's audiovisual presentation is great, though the lack of character animation that has them looking like cardboard cutouts does add up over time.

Oh, and there is a dedicated quack button. It makes you go quack! That's immediately a bonus point in the gameplay category right there!

As for the gameplay, the core of the game consists of looking at objects, chatting to people and collecting the keywords that allow you to piece together relatively simple fill-the-blank sentences that add up to form our detective's reasoning, which allows the game to move onto its next scene. I was a bit slow and brute forced a few words here and there, but for the vast majority of the puzzles it's a perfectly reasonable chain of logic and association that lets you piece together the information you need.

Duck Detective is a great game about ducks, salami and secrets and I heartily recommend it! Here's to hoping we get a sequel involving a certain sidekick character, too!

Playtime: 2 hours (A single full playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 10
Story: 10
Gameplay: 10
Overall: 9
Posted August 21, 2024.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
47.1 hrs on record
"A science team has been killed... again!?"

IXION is a city builder in space, with a main story to engage with, as well as a high number of smaller storylets to experience. This is not a common genre of game, as usually games that are city builders and games that have strong stories live on different continents and only occasionally write terse letters to one another.

Most surprising of all: IXION pulls off this unusual genre combo really quite well!

In the game you take on the role of an Administrator aboard the space station / ship Tiqqun, as she is prepared for her systems test voyage. This test run turns into a desperately real mission to colonize some distant world, as a disastrous event combined with some time distortion shenanigans leaves the Earth and her population devastated. The Tiqqun must explore start systems, study ruins of past attempts to reach out into the starts and uncover the ugly aftermath of a species-ending conflict.

All of that is done by the science teams aboard their little scout ships, though, you get to focus on building, managing and optimizing.

IXION provides a quite solid challenge with its limited build space, simple logistics and resource management. Besides worrying about food and building materials, the very condition of the ships hull, her energy levels and even the morale of the surviving crew are to be considered, with any one failure potentially leading to a cascading failure. Suffering a game over and having to start again from a previous save happened to me a few times, so do keep that in mind in case this is not the kind of stress you want in your city builder.

The game manages to look and sound very nice, with vast space vistas, well drawn art for various events and actions, all encompassed by a occasionally bombastic electronic ambient music the developers are well known for by now. Buildings are detailed and you can see people and logistics vehicles buzzing about in the city view, lights flicker and die as power runs low and all sorts of little bells and whistles provide a ton to look at.

This visual style comes at a great cost to performance, however, which you'll want to be aware of. For my 3080ti powered gaming machine the later stages of the game tended to drag framerate right down to the 30's on a regular basis. The game just runs poorly, with the clutter bogging it down, no matter what I try to do with the settings.

Still, despite its technical issues, I enjoyed the vast majority of my time with IXION and I enjoyed nearly all aspects of the story it tells. Hopefully we'll see more games of this type, merging proper stories with simulations and city builders in the future, too!


Playtime: 47 hours (A single full playthrough, after a few failed attempts)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 8
Story: 9
Gameplay: 8
Overall: 9
Posted August 19, 2024.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1.2 hrs on record
"The bip went boop and the bzzch."

Deadnaut: Signal Lost strives to convey atmosphere through limited means. It puts its player in the seat of a distant commander figure in control of a Deadnaut, a poor as-good-as-dead soul that gets sent on near-suicide missions for reasons I didn't quite catch. You watch your screen and see a dot representing your character, you hear sounds muffled and distant as if relayed through a microphone inside their suit somewhere far away, though some sounds seem to come in strangely clear, so I have no idea what the game is trying to convey here. Story is given in random tidbits gleaned from log entries that I quickly stopped reading, as they all seemed disjointed and unrelated to one another, possibly due to randomization. There are cool screens and gadgets and buttons and you can't do much with any of them, so the areas where the game manages to look nice feel utterly wasted. Or perhaps I was just spoiled too much by Carrier Command 2 and Highfleet...

What the game actually is, in the end, is a fairly slow, repetitive and frustrating roguelike with the traditional grid based movement, randomly generated levels and unforgiving permadeath mechanics. Explaining its mechanics or making them easy to grasp through gameplay is not a strong suite of the game, leaving it up to the player to read up on the tutorials to figure out what things are, and even after a couple of hours I felt like I was missing a lot of basics. Enemies spawn seemingly out of nowhere, often in droves. I found myself mashing a familiar button combo of E-E-Q-Q-Q-Q-E-E-Q-Q-Q-Q. Two presses of the E key to fire a shotgun, then four presses of the Q key to fire the pistol twice, repeat. Occasionally move away from enemies, and when you run out of enemies you get to walk through a very, VERY long corridor where nothing happens. The levels felt far too large, far too empty of content and far too soulless. Perhaps this is an attempt by the developers to convey a kind of space-y horror of great voids and distances, but it does not translate well to the gameplay experience.

I quickly got a pretty bad feeling of this game and don't think I'll be picking it back up anytime soon. While the game boasts great customizability, I didn't really find it even on the runs where I managed to reach the first shop. The upgrade trees seemed uninteresting and the missions too samey to keep me interested. No aspect of the game really carries it anywhere, nothing really sets it apart or gives the player a reason to keep going.

Playtime: 1-2 hours (A handful of short runs)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 7
Audio: 4
Story: 3
Gameplay: 2
Overall: 4
Posted July 20, 2024.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
24.5 hrs on record
"And that's not all, buy my potions now and get absolutely nothing for free!"

Visual novels are an acquired taste and most people will bounce off them, often deeming them 'not even games'. Potionomics strives to stand out in that crowd, with the game blurring the line between a visual novel, a deck-building card game, a time management, potion brewing and shopkeeping simulator, all in one tidy package wrapped in stylish artwork and, quite frankly, far too many pretty characters! It's just not fair, they can't ALL look that good!

But alas, they very much do. Character art, animation and emoting are all top notch and Potionomics is a delight to play just to see the exaggerated animations and expressions will come up as Sylvia charms her way to another sale.

Sylvia is, as one might have guessed from the above, a maker of potions. Having inherited her late uncle's potion shop on a remote magical island, she finds herself also having inherited a debilitating load of debt and a curious talking owl that suggests she partake in a series of potion making contests to win enough prize money to clear her debt and free her to pursue her dreams.

The core gameplay revolves around a loop of crafting potions by balancing six types of ingredients, along with a host of special features like strong smell or pleasant looking bubbles that alter the value of potions brewed. Once Sylvia has her potions, she can let in the customers and initiate a haggling card game in which the player must balance the stress of sales work with suitable combinations of cards to push up the price of her potions and securing a sale before the customer's patience runs out. The money earned can then be put towards more varied and better ingredients, allowing more advanced potions to be crafted for greater income. Each part of this gameplay loop clicks into its place almost immediately.

The result is simply a fun experience, though the looming contest deadlines that demand the player's finest potions are always there to direct focus.

To tie all the gameplay mechanics together Potionomics provides a cast of colourful characters to engage with. Sylvia can meet and forge relationships with various folks on the island, who then provide her with services such as rare ingredients, fuel for potion brewing or improved equipment and furniture. Some adventuring type characters can also accept potions to fuel their adventures, returning with loot from the various regions of the island that Sylvia can then use in her craft. Some basic dialogue options are provided to allow the player to fine-tune conversations to better friendships and perhaps even lead to a passionate love story to form (yes, of course I dated the walrus-man, he was objectively the best pick!). To motivate the player to pay attention, in addition to the snappy dialogue and animation, is the reward of new cards for use in the haggling minigame, which are unlocked whenever a new level of friendship is reached with a character.

All in all I found Potionomics a blast to play and an easy recommend! Just keep in mind that having multiple save files is a good idea, as the game is not going to give you mercy if you find yourself missing a contest deadline!


Playtime: 20+ hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 9
Audio: 6
Story: 7
Gameplay: 7
Overall: 8
Posted July 15, 2024.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
6 people found this review helpful
12.6 hrs on record
"I need to start sleeping with an iron horseshoe under my pillow..."

Rusted Moss is a game that pretty much drops its player into the story with very little in the way of explanation. There isn't an introduction to speak of and even the protagonist and her black puck -shaped sidekick (called Puck) are barely introduced by name. The game recounts the aftermath of an explosion aimed at ending humanity and ushering in the age of magical and, in all honestly, really quite evil and twisted fae folk that seem to delight in kidnappings, cruel life-ending pranks and kicking small animals for fun.

From what I can tell, however, the game seems to have multiple potential endings and various dialogue during the game is aimed at particular paths towards particular endings, which can cause the characters to come off as quite confused at times, flipping between viewpoints, moods and ideals at a moments notice based on how and where the player explores.

All in all, the story felt rather meaningless and tacked on as an excuse for the various characters we meet to be varying degrees of upset and hostile.

As for the gameplay side, there is much more meat here, at least for particular kinds of players. Tiled maps to explore, shortcuts to unlock and a neat little roster of weapons and Hollow Knight -inspired trinkets to alter playstyle, all hallmarks of a modern metroidvania, are solidly implemented.

Rusted Moss stands out of the crowd of metroidvania -style games with its unique movement mechanic: the springy-sproingy grapple the player unlocks very early on. Specific kinds of surfaces can be grappled to and the elastic connection between the player character and the world is running on a physics simulation that allows all sorts of precision swings, bounces and tricks to be pulled off. This idea is great, but for me personally, it became a hindrance as the game went on. The later stages require such precise actions, chained grapples and seemingly pixel-perfect control of the keyboard and mouse that I began to feel quite burned out by it all. This became a major issue for me as the game demanded these controls to be fully utilized during hectic bossfights that occasionally felt quite unfair and luck-based, with the boss overlapping the player, dealing contact damage and moving fast enough to prevent escape as the grapple impacts the boss enemy's body uselessly.

The game with its unique, if stressful, controls comes packaged in a fairly retro looking pixel art style that draws clear inspiration from Japanese cartoons and animation. Low native resolution is used to ensure pixels are properly rendered even as the game rotates certain enemies and projectiles, though this occasionally creates some seemingly misplaced pixels, especially with the weapons the player character carries. Sounds and music do their jobs well enough, though some music tracks can get rather grating as they repeat over and over, which can pile on frustration as the player takes on the same boss for the fifteenth time in a row.

All in all, I can see the potential of Rusted Moss and how it is definitely a game of note. For me, though, its punishing default difficulty combined with a story arc I found rather unpleasant and messy, make it difficult to recommend for a general player.

If you are one for physics -based movement, extreme precision platforming and high skill mouse-and-keyboard gunplay, this might still be for you, even if it wasn't quite for me.


Playtime: 12 hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 6
Story: 3
Gameplay: 6
Overall: 5
Posted July 15, 2024.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
28 people found this review helpful
4 people found this review funny
4.9 hrs on record
"H.R. Giger would like his penis statues back."

I've been noticing a trend in videogame storytelling in the past few years: games want to really go hard for that whole 'show, don't tell' style of storytelling. Most attempts fall flat because what they show is so vague and open to interpretation that there might as well not be a story.

This is especially relevant in case when it comes to Scorn.

Scorn is really a game about only one things: visually realizing an artists uncomfortable vision of a flesh-mechanical civilization, where every button, switch and lever is a squishy horror and entire buildings are constructed seemingly only for the purpose of inflicting torment and suffering. If a story exists in this game, it is left so vague and so unclear as to not exist at all. Why places exist, why we move through them, why we interact with them, why we fight against fleshy blobmonsters or why the game ends with such an underwhelming whimper of the developer displaying their deep discomfort with sexuality, we will never know.

Scorn is very, very pretty, though. The only reason it ever got off the ground and got attention is its visual and technical production. Borrowing from a few disturbing art sources for inspiration, it creates a truly impressive visual parade of horrors. Machines, rooms, passages, long-dead creatures, even the very weapons the player carries are all designed and realized with such meticulous detail it's a wonder the developer ever completed their project.

Sadly, I fear it is that attention to visual detail and rich animation of gore and flesh that left the rest of the game so utterly failing to be playable. Scorn has perhaps four or five simple puzzles, and each of those are repeated a standard set of three times to pad out the game. It has maybe four or five enemy types, which are repeated ad nauseam. It gives you four weapons, very limited ammo and a combat system that is frustratingly slow, clunky and unfun to play with. Its very visual style fight against any attempt to create a game in this setting, as the rooms and tunnels begin to melt together in the player's mind for looking too similar, as navigation becomes a chore and as the prolonged animations drag on to turn even the most simple actions, such as moving an elevator, into sheer suffering to wait through.

Scorn, then, is a game that manages to intrigue for its first half hour, and for about another fifteen minutes towards the very end. Between those times there are a few hours of horribly underdeveloped gameplay, wasted time and repetition that leaves me wholly unable to recommend this game. If you want to get all the best parts of Scorn without having to suffer through its content, you can just watch someone else do a longplay of it on Youtube. You'll see all the pretty and strange and disturbing things without having to waste your own time or money.

Playtime: 4 hours (A single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 9
Audio: 5
Story: 1
Gameplay: 2
Overall: 3
Posted April 8, 2024. Last edited April 12, 2024.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
13.0 hrs on record
"Awaken, dreamer!"

I had little idea of what I was getting into when I began to play Lunacid. I knew the game had "some weird mechanics", but I had no real idea. Then I read the in-game manual and I began to see just what kind of madness the devs had plunged me into, and I loved it!

The game tracks the current real-world phase of the moon and that has an impact on how magic works in the game.

If you're like me, you know from that little tidbit alone that we're in for a good time!

Lunacid casts you down into a well, where all the dead, corrupt and criminals belong, as punishment for whatever crime you may or may not have committed. Once down there, you begin your exploration with the goals of survival and finding a way out of the well. This journey will go through forgotten temples, ancient catacombs, underground forests and far more, with each area packed with detail, varied enemies and so very many secrets it's near impossible to find all of them on a first playthrough. I surely didn't!

The game is rendered in a faux PlayStation 1 era graphical style, with chunky character models and limited special effects and lighting, while making the most of these limitations to invoke atmosphere and mystery all around. The soundscape offers both basic sound effects for common interactions and attacks, as well as more unusual noises to provide unsettling atmosphere and the occasional scare. The soundtracks is the most mixed part of the game. The game clearly states who created each track in the list as it begins to play, revealing that a host of composers worked on music for the game, which leads to a somewhat confused list as the style and theme can vary quite wildly from one area to the next. None of the music I'd call bad, just a little odd at times.

While there is no doubt that I'm recommending this game, I do wish to voice a minor gripe with it. I happened to begin playing near christmas time, and the game seems to have some seasonal content. The safe area was adorned with festive decorations and I discovered a Chistmas -themed spell early on, which felt odd and a little immersion breaking. Some of the NPC interactions were also a little odd and gave the game a more humorous tone than might have felt appropriate at times. Expect quirkiness.

But most of all: expect a fun exploration with plenty to offer!


Playtime: 13+ hours (Single playthrough)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 8
Audio: 8
Story: 7
Gameplay: 10
Overall: 9
Posted January 14, 2024.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
4 people found this review helpful
20.7 hrs on record
"Unspeakable, unnameable, uncomfortable. University!"

Dreams in the Witch house is, for all intents and purposes, a faithful retelling of the H.P. Lovecraft book by the same name, with some added bells, whistles and mechanics to turn it into a proper game. It is also, by far, the best H.P. Lovecraft inspired videogame I am currently aware of, and easily earns its recommendation.

In the game you take on the role of Walter Gilman, a young man recently moved from the town of Haverhill to the city of Arkham to study at the local university. Your aunt has graciously paid for your lodging for the next couple months, but most unfortunately the house and room you come to inhabit are quite definitely cursed.

Dark dreams and visions, recurring rodent infestations and mundane threats like criminals on the street all conspire to make the simple act of studing for exams a challenge for Walter, making each new day both an oppotunity and a challenge. Should we focus on studying at home with the earplugs on? Head to the university to enjoy the warm fireplace of the library reading hall? Eat an expensive dinner to feel better after that recurring nightmare about cosmic mathematical music? See a movie while hoping not to encounter that creepy old woman that keeps staring and grinning in a deeply unsetting way?

There is so much on offer here, so much inspiration and inventiveness in how all aspects of the story, characters and game work together to build up a survival challenge for the player to overcome.

When it comes to the audiovisual aspects, the game both shines and stumbles a little. The soundscape with its jolly daytime music, brooding nighttime ambience and the my-heart-skipped-several-beats sound of a shattering lightbulb are absolutely perfect, and while initially not having any voice acting felt cheap, it makes a lot of sense considering the number of times an average player is likely to replay parts of the game. As for the graphics, the game does a terrific job in depicting its settings, but this is also where I feel it suffers its greatest issues. While the characters are drawn in a crisp pixel art style with flat shading and distinct eyes, the backgrounds and objects around them are drawn in a more blurred style that allows for better shading and detail, but also has the characters looking quite out of place against some backdrops. Over time my eyes adjusted to this, but especially early on I felt this was quite distracting and I wished the game had chosen one style or the other for all of its visuals.

As a final note, while I will happily score the gameplay elements of Dreams in the Witch House a full ten, it has to be pointed out that some conditions for triggering gameplay elements can be a little frustrating at times. As much of the game is randomized between runs, triggering certain events can take far longer than one might wish for, delaying or blocking the player's progress. Don't expect to discover everything, at least not without a guide.

But don't fret even if you don't discover quite everything, either. That discovery, experimentation and challenge is precisely what makes this game so good, so fresh and so easy to recommend!


Playtime: 20+ hours (Several playthroughs)

Ratings (1-10)
Visual: 7
Audio: 9
Story: 9
Gameplay: 10
Overall: 9
Posted December 24, 2023.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
5 people found this review helpful
0.9 hrs on record
In under an hour of gameplay I encountered several immersion and game breaking bugs and issues. To top that off it seems the developers have turned to AI generated content rather than human generated content. As such I can only recommend people avoid this product. Had I known, I wouldn't have purchased the game to begin with.
Posted September 26, 2023.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
< 1  2  3 ... 13 >
Showing 1-10 of 125 entries