Recent reviews by Vaudevillain

I'm recommending this hours after GSC have patched in A-Life fixes. What I've encountered so far isn't massive, but it's clearly working better than it was on day one.

My general impression after twenty hours of playtime is that, warts and all, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is what I've always wanted this series to be. Right now, my description of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is like an excellent, beautifully crafted ambient piece played a theater where a kid two rows back won't stop talking. If you can get over the fact that this thing microstutters to the point where it feels uncooperative with the player at times and you also don't mind a litany of visual bugs that still haven't been patched, what you'll find is an appropriately old-fashioned, immersive experience.

If you're a fan of this series or are in on its secret sauce, I would recommend it if you're able to get over those hurdles. If you aren't a fan of this series, you'll be lost on the writing. Although the marketing department tried to make it seem like this is a fairly newcomer friendly addition to this series, the writing requires some understanding of the lore and, unlike earlier entries in this series, the game doesn't come with a glossary. You're free to come to your own conclusions, but do know you'll probably be lost on many occasions.

To be general in my recommendations, you'll probably love if this if:

• You enjoy playing games without relying on their fast travel systems, or are at least open to that concept.
  
• You enjoy shooters with a more tactical bend, although don't mind if liberties are taken to make aspects of the gameplay more palatable
  
• You prefer subs, not dubs; conversely, if you find enjoyment in laughing at questionable dubs.
  
• You really like save scumming
  
• A lot.

I would say this was worth waiting for, although if somebody told me the present technical state let them down, I would absolutely understand that. Once again, your mileage may vary. I'm as positive as I am because I'm willing to overlook these things.

Intravenous 2 is a vast improvement over its predecessor in almost every way. Staying in-line with its inspirations, this is a pretty old-fashioned sequel; the mantra here is "bigger might be better, but damn if it's not cool going big, even if it bites us in the ass." It's not always cohesive, but it does bring about the aura of an era I wasn't really around for. That's something that stood out to me with the original game, and it's even truer here. One can almost smell the fading scent of an old-fashioned gaming magazine while musing over its additions to what the original game offered in its stealth sandboxes.

Whether or not I recommend playing Intravenous 2 is a matter of how curious the above statements make you feel. If everything I've written there seems tacky to you in some way, it's safe to say you can probably write this one off. If you're looking for a worthwhile narrative, it's abundantly clear that a lot more effort was put into it this time around, although I can't say it will be enough to compel you if this nothing else on offer seems of note. I would roughly compare it to one of those pulpy thrillers sold at airports around America that aim to entertain rather than provoke. I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment in any way, just that you aren't going to come away from Intravenous 2 musing on its broader themes and character arcs. What's there is solid for what it is, and the addition of branching paths is neat and adds enough replayability to the overall package, although, going in-line with its classic inspirations, you aren't faced with any moral quandaries here. The good choices are obviously good, the bad choices are obviously bad, and there's very little in-between. The game is self-aware enough of this to crack a joke about it at the end of its golden route, though, and that got a small chuckle out of me.

Overall, pretty decent and well worth the twenty dollars if you're the type of person who would be interested in buying it.

Borders between "basically unplayable" and "almost so bad that it's good".

In fifteen minutes, I was more entertained by this than any game I've played in the last week—and I barely even got to progress, since you get gunned down within seconds of spawning in on the first level.

I honestly don't recommend playing this, but you should absolutely watch somebody else suffer through it on YouTube.

Heed my advice and DO NOT start playing RImworld if you have a lot of responsibilities to tend to. Almost everyone on my friends list has put hundreds of hours into this thing, and having acclimatized myself to its learning curve, I see why. Rimworld is the most addictive game I've played in recent memory. It really is the perfect 'just one more thing' experience. You can, and absolutely will, tear through weekends playing this thing if you aren't careful. And my god, it is so much fun! I haven't scratched the surface of all possibilities yet, but even knowing what little I do, it's kept me thinking.

I do have a couple of complaints, though. I played a little bit of Vanilla, and most of my playthrough so far has been by using a modlist created by someone near and dear to me. Vanilla works, but Rimworld is one of the few games I've played where the old adage of "play vanilla first" does not apply. The many Quality of Life improvements I'm playing with now have not only made the game easier to understand, but they make the game a far better experience, in general. I'm not going to knock on the developer of having their own vision, but if you can use many of the QoL mods currently on the Workshop, you absolutely should. My biggest issue with Rimworld, though, is that the New User Experience is kinda terrible. Okay, I'm exaggerating. But it's not great. I get the "learn by doing" method it's going for, but that only really clicked with me after I had to resort to forum posts and consult somebody who knows this game inside-out. A lot of the issue, I feel, is that the game just isn't great at communicating small details to you unless you know to specifically use the overlays for them, which the tutorial skips entirely. Want to know why a freezer is thawing all of your meats, even though the Coolers you have built are set to a negative temperature? Having got the help I needed, I understand now that such a situation means your roof hasn't been fully built. But because the game doesn't alert you to this fact, or do anything in the affected area that would suggest as much, I was genuinely confused. This kind of thing was not an isolated incident during my first few hours with Rimworld, and it put me off playing it for a pretty long time. Oh, and the UI for alerts is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess. Most alerts don't go away unless you tell them to, which means that they can, and absolutely do, pile up. If you're still learning how to play and you have a learning helper off to the side, it doesn't minimize itself once those alerts go under it. This isn't the most inconvenient thing in the world, but it's such a strange oversight that I had to include it.

Overall, though, fun game, worth the thirty-five dollar pricetag, I love it. Honestly, it kind of gives me RCT3 vibes? Not really, because you're not building rollercoasters here (although I would absolutely play an expansion where you do), but it's just... I don't know. Have you ever played RCT3 just to zoom out, feel the warmth of the low-poly sun, and listen to the breezy soundtrack? It's hard to explain the appeal of that, but Rimworld is all that, all the time, and I adore it.

ToS 2 is a veritable love-it-or-hate-it experience, home to some of the most lovable and loathsome personalities you'll run across in any online game. It's honestly really hard to recommend, because you have literally no idea if somebody is trying to play this game casually or if your stupidity has just ruined someone else's day.

But honestly, if you're attuned to how absolutely chaotic all of this is, it's a really good time!

While I haven't completed it yet (so my opinion could totally change), at about nine hours in, I'm confident that this is good. Not more than that, and certainly not less. If you want me to be as brief as possible, I'll leave you with this: Burnhouse Lane is evidently the product of two men who have spent well over a decade making adventure games and perfecting their craft—it is also the product of two men who have seldom, if ever, touched game mechanics such as combat or platforming. If the price you're willing to pay for a well-produced, atmospheric, compelling, and, above all else, accessible adventure game is some fairly janky gameplay segments, I wholeheartedly recommend this. For everyone else, my recommendation is "kinda..." with a big asterisk at the end. It should also go without saying that if you cannot handle topics such as suicide, illness, abuse, and so forth, this probably isn't a game you should be playing. There's no shame in admitting that there are other games that would suit you better.

Emasculated power fantasy is my favorite type of boomer shooter. Don't ask me why.

Turbo Overkill is fast. Playing it makes my fingers hurt because they have to get balletic for this ♥♥♥♥. If you're on the ground, you're sliding. If you're not sliding, you're bouncing around in the air like a stress toy that accidentally gets thrown in direction of the closet that your bisexuality is hiding in. Man-made-♥♥♥♥♥ First Person Shooting at some of its most intense, and I love it.

I suppose it says something that the only game to have prominently used Leadwerks as an engine released over a decade ago, was a demo in length, commercially flopped, and is one of the worst-reviewed games on Metacritic. Oh, and you can't buy it anymore.

If you bought this in 2014, it might have been a good deal. A hundred bucks might have seemed like a lot, but considering you didn't (and still don't!) have to pay licensing fees, it was a solid buy. It also had video tutorials to complement the hit-and-miss documentation. Nowadays, those video tutorials have been set to private, there isn't a community large enough to produce tutorials to replace them, and what you're left with is documentation where 'Save File' actually redirects to 'Duplicate Directory,' and it never gets brought up again.

Still, if you're willing to stick it through, maybe there's a silver lining or two in here. But considering alternatives have only gotten more accessible and flashier and have communities large enough to learn from, 50 bucks is just too much to ask for. If you want to work in 3D, Unity and Unreal are free to use. Don't like Unity's licensing fees? Check out Stride; it's like Unity but without them. Want to learn how to make games? Gamemaker is a fantastic tool for that. And if you want all of those things and more, Godot is a perfect open-source alternative that touts frequent updates and a wide community. If this were eight years ago, I'd be singing a different tune. But come on, eight years.

Hopefully, it will have been worth the wait.

Most pieces of entertainment usually age in different ways. Sometimes, it ages like fine wine. Other times, the three cheese approach works well: if it's parmesan, it's goofy but has just the right texture to stand next to the wine. If it's blue cheese, it can be a bit funky and not to everyone's liking, but it helps you to appreciate what came before and after it. If it's a bowl of milk that's been left out in the sun for ten days, it's probably on par with the time The Bee Gees tried to make their own cinematic version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 (I ♥♥♥♥ you not, that's the actual title of this game) is the purest form of Blue Cheese, but it's more apt to say that this is a time capsule. The central conceit of this game is that fads are fun to laugh at in the moment. There are zombies in this game, and the song in the background acknowledges that if you were playing this in 2009, that's probably why you bought it. But because it was a cheaply made game, the developers were allowed to do a little more than that. The most interesting moments of this game about zombies are when the enemies you're fighting aren't zombies, and the music progressively gets stranger. The low production values also allow the game to attempt something that most big-budget games wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole at the time. As you might be able to generously infer from the title, almost every sentence in this game in typed in l33t-sp3ak. On the surface, it adds nothing. But it's a touch that firmly grounds in this in the era it was produced in, regardless of what year you're playing it. I want to say that it's there so the developers could connect with the audiences of forum threads and chatrooms better, but my personal interpretation of it is that it only adds to the mockery. The games you play are insipid and the way you talk about them is funny for all of the wrong reasons. That almost sounds harsh, and perhaps that's something that gets lost in translation when you realize that this was probably what the developers were known for the most at the time. It has wave-based mechanics, local multiplayer, it was less than ten dollars. Although they never published a review for it, IGN called it one of the best Xbox Live Indie Arcade Games.

It's easy to say this is a cynical and snarky game disguised as one with genuine intent, but if that's the case, the game sure doesn't play like it. Almost fourteen years later and removed from my uncle's house, I can't say that I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 has the same charm to it. The gameplay is fun, but it's only something you'll love if you're playing it with someone right next to you. For as abstract as the game can get, it still feels pretty limited owing to its nature as a low-effort parody. But what really seals the deal is that a game like this isn't weird or quirky anymore. Steam and itch.io are both platforms that are about as open as the Xbox Live Indie Arcade was, and even if they weren't, there are still platforms like Gamejolt that have a lot of weird and tacky games on them. As something of a historical artifact, I enjoy this. As something that stands neck-to-neck with the other strange games I own on Steam? I don't know what to say.

But my reverence for this what this was and what it meant to me at a certain point in time overrides that somewhat. Tepid as I may be toward it now, I respect it.