Recent reviews by Tancred Payans

From the esteemed developers of Gothic wa Mahou Otome, their only DoDonPachi game on steam as of writing.

DoDonPachi Great Revival itself is excellent. An easy recommend to anyone that plays 2D vertically scrolling shooters. That includes the official Touhou games.
CAVE has been making shmups since 1995, and by 1998 they became pretty good at it. This game is no exception and the high quality that is to be expected of a Cave game is present here. Good visual clarity (a few exceptions), intricate patterns, and arcane but fun to learn mechanics are the highlights of DDP.

Harder to recommend to people that aren't already into shmups. These games usually take a lot of playing the same stages over and over again to master and finally complete.
Additionally, none of the mechanics are explained anywhere. Sure players can just look them up on the internet now but I don't think any game should be relying on that.

The Knack 2 of the FEAR franchise.

IT'S RAW

Looking at reviews I'm seriously confused at why people leave positive ones or why they say things along the lines of this game being a good sequel to the first.

The industrial visual style of the first game has gone out the window to be replaced with glowy stuff everywhere and it doesn't look good. Everyone has LEDs on them so that you can locate them way too easily and are even highlighted when using the slowmo mode. Visibility wasn't much of a problem in the first game and poor visibility was sometimes deliberate so that the player has to decide whether to turn on the flashlight and expose themselves so they can see or keep it off, reducing the chance of being detected instantly but reducing visibility.

None of the weapons feel punchy especially compared to the first game. Now they all sound like super soakers and you can't even dual wield pistols.

The difficulty at least on hard feels REALLY broken this time. Broken as in you can be randomly sprayed by one enemy from a distance and die instantly or they can spend minutes firing everywhere and hitting nothing. It also makes the shotgun almost unusable as it's effective range is so short as to bring you within one shot range of the enemy. One shot range as in they will one shot you. With a smg burst or their own shotgun which is more effective against you than the enemies. This is not helped by the lower maximum medkit count than the previous game.

I've played Blood far more than any other build game for good reason. It's the best of the build games, even better than Tekwar.

Almost all the weapons are fun to use and all of them are useful in some situation, though some are useful in more situations than others. The fast firing sawed off is one of the greatest shotguns to be put in a video game, and the dynamite is a brilliant masterpiece due to it's abundance and impactful build engine explosions. Unfortunately I only figured out after one playthrough and watching some hack on youtube that it can be charged up for a longer distance throw which is necessary information for proper use.

The worst thing about this game is the hitscanners. They're everywhere, have lightning fast reaction time, are deadly accurate, and can deal out high damage from a distance, rapidly. This can be quite annoying initially but Blood makes it work with it's powerful arsenal allowing the player to dispatch them very quickly or before you even see them by bouncing dynamite around corners.

Initially I left a negative review with the explicit purpose of annoying people that like this game. That's pretty lame especially considering I ended up liking it so I have rewritten it several times and made it positive.

Cuphead is a game about gambling causing anthropomorphic porcelain to fight giant monsters.

Excellent presentation. The animation is very detailed and is high quality.
The movement is smooth and you're allowed to fire in 8 directions while having a lock button to stand still and fire diagonally.
The keyboard controls are alright but I felt like rebinding a couple of things.

This game is fairly short, playtime varies depending on how long it takes you to get past the stages as opposed to the game itself having 40 hours of content like a RPG.
The difficulty is nonsense sometimes, couple of examples are the random platforms on the bee boss and the random attack patterns of the devil, ie. platforms moving randomly and poker chips that randomly fall.
Those are only a couple of examples. The difficulty often ends up being more broken than General Morden from Metal Slug or Contra just because of how random the game can bee.

Despite this the game isn't the death march like people make this game out to be due to bosses being fought individually rather than being forced to play several stages every time you die to a boss.

Supreme Commander 2: Tiberian Twilight

TL;DR vastly different from the first game, skirmish gameplay is like simplified Company of Heroes 2, campaign is nothing like the first game or the skirmish mode in DoW2.

Positives:
-Good voice acting
-Good bolter sound
-Good art direction
-Nice and varied environments
-No Boreale

Largely negative text wall:

-No Boreale

DoW2's Campaign is a pretty drastic departure from the original games and plays quite differently from your typical RTS. You control 4 different small squads of units that you develop over the course of several missions, levelling them up and giving them newer high level and rare equipment with unique stats like an RPG or something. I found it somewhat entertaining but not as much as the original game or it's expansions.

The campaign has some issues, controlling only a few units presents a problem when the entire map is covered with enemies. Whether they melt your units quickly (primarch - pRo gAmEr difficulty) or are just tedious to clear out (medium difficulty). On both difficulties I found the bosses to be ridiculous damage sponges which can occasionally one shot your units. Despite the one shotting they aren't even hard to fight, just end up being tedious taking several minutes to defeat. A lot of the missions seem very cut and paste, whole maps, objectives so it gets a little... repetitive.

I enjoy CoH2, but I don't like the skirmish mode here. CoH2 plays similarly but is more refined, DoW 1 and it's expansions had more content. It feels like a stepping stone towards CoH2 that for some reason doesn't have so much effort put into it.

The pathfinding seems a bit broken. There is no base building. There is no securing capture points from attack with any sort of convenient defense buildings not made of the Emperor's toilet paper. The maps are usually too small so points change hands rapidly.

A lot of people seem to like this game, I enjoyed playing it but I wouldn't recommend it as it's very different from the originals, the campaign gets tedious sometimes, and the skirmish mode lacks replayability.

Dismantle this game, gambit especially wipe that garbage from the face of the earth

TL;DR Game sucks, "Your money and your life" - Bungo

Positives:

-Raids with friends
-PVP with friends
-Telling someone they have budget shaders because they can't get mine from Spire anymore because it's gone and never coming back

Rant:

This is one of those games not designed to be fun. It shares more in common with stupid mobile gacha games than Bungie's Halo franchise, being filled with too many in game currencies, being grindy as hell, and being designed to engage the player by triggering some sort of psychological reaction that causes them to "have to" keep playing and improve their character. Not because it is fun, but because of some imagined obligation to do so that a lot of people including myself are susceptible to.

D2 may be "free to play" but to engage in the core content of the game in any meaningful way one must pay the price of a AAA deluxe edition game every single time Bungie wants you to, the price being over $60 USD for access to most of the content of the latest expansions and seasons.

Over $60 USD so you can grind some boring content over several weeks over and over again and for what? So you can go into trials where you face the greatest sweatlords to grease Destiny 2 PVP with their presence? So you can play some tedious master nightfall that practically requires two other people to complete?

I understand that this sounds like rambling, but this game is baaaaad. It exists to waste your time and your money with very few redeeming qualities, especially if you only play solo.

This game is monetised in a very nasty way where the developers release ridiculous amounts of DLC even though you already paid for the game. Without said DLC game is really lacking in content.

In terms of gameplay PD2 has rather bland gunplay. It's so bland it's not even worth discussing. During heists you typically have two options, jank first person stealth or going loud where you mow down hundreds of policemen like they're nothing. Regardless of which option you take, heists consist of doing various tasks mostly involving waiting around a not insignificant time for something to happen.

The interesting part of this game is coming up with builds, and playing unique heists that aren't cook off, Ukrainian job, or hoxton breakout. The soundtrack is very good too, though whether music is "good" or not is usually quite subjective.

Eventually you may discover that cook off and hoxton breakout are just a *bit* more efficient in terms of gaining XP than anything else in the game. The game then degenerates into farming the same mission over and over again so you can level up your guy so he can get some gloves and increase the value of the roman numerals next to your name tag.

Bland gameplay aside, the infinite DLC business model is enough for me to leave my meaningless red thumbs down review. Don't support this, but make sure you have more than 290 hours on the game before criticising anything about it because apparently you need more than that to know anything about the game.

The good news is, the original gameplay is preserved. Unfortunately that means the original gameplay is preserved.

To be fair, this is good since this is supposed to be a remaster not a remake. It also controls nicely and runs in reasonable resolutions now, as well as having an excellent remastered soundtrack including a few tracks from Red Alert 2.

Potential issues:

The two games included here are CnC at it's most basic, and it's still unbalanced. This is especially felt in Nod missions where GDI usually has access to infinite napalm planes that can one shot your buildings and units and are nigh impossible to stop consistently because the Nod sam sites are complete garbage at destroying them. GDI also has mammoth tanks which kill everything while Nod is stuck with light tanks which you need to make large groups of to contend with a few mammoths.

Many missions in Tiberium dawn are barely playable, almost requiring intense cheese to win otherwise the AI will use it's cheating in the form of increased money and production rates to eventually steamroll the player.

Red alert in comparison has aged better than Tiberium dawn, but it's still got it's fair share of nonsense like the AI getting infinite reinforcements from off the map and horrible indoor missions. The Soviet missions can often be slogs because the Allies have gap generators which cover up parts of the map that your units don't have immediate line of sight in, preventing you permanently scouting out the area until the gap generator is destroyed. The Allies also get cruisers which can fire across half the map and destroy your construction yard in a few hits while the Soviets get a submarine only capable of naval combat until one of the expansions.

The difficulty settings are done pretty badly. On hard the AI gets WAY more money than you, eg. one harvester trip for the player means you can afford 1 light tank, while the AI can afford about 6 and churns them out at a faster rate than you do. Everything the AI has on hard does more damage and takes less damage, making for a fun experience when the game is already lopsided.

This sounds pretty bad, so why still recommend? I had fun playing it and it has cheesy cutscenes.