Recent reviews by Huff'Npuff

Review after 50 hours in and having beaten most of the campaign with friends: Despite the 'continue' campaign mechanic, this game is still crazy fun all the way through and absolutely worth the money. I got it on sale for $12, but I'd have easily paid more if I'd known how fun it was.

Initial review: Tons of fun playing with friends, even compared with L4D2 which I've been playing for more than a decade.

True, there are no more updates, but the game appears to be great as it is, so buy it on sale and enjoy! Plus, I'm excited to see what the dev team comes out with next; if it's as good as this game, I'll definitely be buying it. I have no opinion about multiplayer because I never played it in L4D and have no plans to play it here, but the campaign is fantastic, so no complaints there. Honestly not sure where all the negativity is coming from because I feel that B4B is a worthy successor to L4D and a darn fun game besides that.


Pros:
- Solid gun play. To me, the weapons are even more fun in this game than they are in L4D
- Upgrade/card system: Not too complicated, and adds an interesting mix of customizing your play through (offense, support, melee build, run and gun, etc.)
- 'No Hope' difficulty. Absolute carnage, absolute masochistic enjoyment.
- Friendly blood splatter. There's nothing like accidentally knifing your pal in the face because you thought he was a blood-soaked zombie.

Cons:
- The continuation system: I personally wish you could start from any spot along the campaign trail regardless of difficulty level. This is the only game mechanic that makes the game less fun because it makes it "harder" by taking things away (losing prior completed progress). Why is that necessary? The harder levels are already more difficult (and fun) because of the mind boggling amount of zombies and brutal damage mechanics, but adding the continuation system pushes it over the edge in my opinion. I can't enjoy No Hope difficulty because while I might be able to beat one or two missions on that difficulty, six missions in a row isn't happening.
- The difference in difficulty between Nightmare and No Hope: you go from 'pretty difficult' to 'neck-deep in spawn-camping zeds'. It feels to me like there needs to be one more intermediate difficulty between the two.

When you're titled from too much COD, this is a nice way to sit back, relax, and smell the gunsmoke with friends

It's like many classic Nintendo games: the focus is on gameplay, not on graphics.

Even there, this game was visually beautiful, fun, and an entertaining ride while it lasted. Definitely worth the pricetag, short, sweet, and to the point.

This game finally gave me a chance to score

I am wondering how out of all my triple-A title games, it was five minutes from a fly's perspective that got me the most emotionally invested.

Short question: why should I purchase Substance Designer?

Short answer: because it'll save you infinite amounts of time in the long run, and time is money.

I'll admit I was hesitant to purchase SD; it looked to me as though I was paying $75 for an edge wear generator, so I held back for many months until it went on sale, but now that I've purchased it, I cannot imagine my production pipeline without it. Creating a substance may take me a few more hours than creating, say, a photoshoped material, but when done, I can alter that substance in so many ways SO incredibly fast that I can create realistically about 20 to 50 completely different materials in the time it'd take me to create three or four non-substance materials from scratch. And remember, these are procedurally generated and entirely seamless materials that take up literally under HALF A MEGABYTE in file size.

For anyone who uses non-Substance enabled programs (like me [goooOOO BLENDER!]), don't let that stop you from purchasing SD. Yes, you will have export out your substance's bitmaps and reapply them every time you want to change it, but that takes three minutes max; if you had to create a new material every time you wanted something different without SD, I guarantee you it's going to take longer than three minutes.

Whether I'm using SD to create procedural materials or using it to fine tune my models' bitmaps, I have found the enitire experience worth every cent I spent on it. For those of you who are interested in creating seamless, tileable materials, I "highly" recommend SD as this is, in my opinion, it's strongest front.

Short Question: Why should I buy this?
Short Answer: Because it does around 60% of what the equivalent professional software (nDo, Substance Designer, zBrush) does for $600-$700 dollars less.

Super Simple Tutorial:

1. Search 'brick wall' on google images, save the image of your liking (seamless textures are best) as a .png file on your desktop.

2. Open Mindtex, press the 'open diffuse' button and let the image load.

3. Play around with the sliders until you find something you like.


Seriously, it's that simple and I guarantee you'll get a texture about 10 times better looking than the original for almost no time at all. No, this is not zBrush or Substance Designer, but it's an amazing little program that does a fantastic job at quickly editing diffuse, height, normal, ect. maps for the indie game designer/hobbyist. Chances are you're probably not buying this if you're planning on going into the modeling/animation profession because you'll be busy learning the aforementioned high-end programs, but if you're working on low to mid-budget projects with a small group, or using it for your own film animation projects like I am, than this program is amazing because it gives you incredibly fast, easy, yet beautiful results for literally what it takes to buy two meals at McDonalds. Unless you've been modeling/animating for years, I strongly recommend this program because it is both a great introduction into the world of texturing and a cost-effective way of greatly increasing the value of your work.

In conclusion:

Make yourself a sandwich for a couple of nights instead of eating and out buy this.