Recent reviews by roninpawn

Every time I say this, I feel shocked... But Invisible, Inc. is one of the best games I've ever played. It's just such a wee-small sort of thing... That it blows my mind to thing that THIS is in my top 5 games, of all time.

Every millimetre of Invisible, Inc. is polished to the nines. The story is brilliant, subversive, and well-told. The characters are flawed, broken, and self-interested people -- like they SHOULD BE! And that gives me the freedom to play to the rules of THEIR morality, without caring about my own.

The length and pace of a campaign is precisely what you can't find enough of these days... It's short and tight. If anything, Invisible, Inc. walks off the stage like its a seasoned stand-up comedian: Ending the set about 5 minutes before you'd want it to. Which leaves you wanting more.

And while, in a better world, this wouldn't be high-praise: Invisible, Inc. is FINISHED. Shocking, right? $60 triple-A games can't pull that off, anymore. I have only encountered ONE bug in Invisible, Inc. in 61 hours playing it: A guard got stuck saying a line of dialogue on loop and the AI's turn wouldn't end. I was able to break the guard out of it by simply escaping in and out of the pause menu, once.

This is what gaming should be. A tight idea, well executed, with a discreet beginning, middle, and end... AND infinite replayability! Beyond the procedural generation, offering an inexhaustible number of unique scenarios, and 400 different starting-character combinations (not counting the DLC!), each difficulty-level of the game changes the rules just enough to require a slightly different play style. In fact, I tell anyone who I recommend the game to, to play from the lowest level of difficulty whether you think you can hack it at a higher level or not. Because Easy is its own enjoyable experience, separate from Experienced, Expert, and Expert-Plus.

There is just so much packed into what seems a tiny, humble box, here. While I'm not sure where Invisible, Inc. falls in my top 5 games of all time, I can easily say that it is my #1 recommend. My other favorite titles might not be for everyone. But Invisible, Inc. is. You WILL get your money's worth out of it. And you WILL recommend it to others.

NOT the game you think it is.
Somehow they've managed to pack the best of Far Cry in with the best of Space Engineers, and also-somehow... I didn't see it coming. The game is so sweet to you when you first meet. It takes you for dinner and dancing -- icecream afterwards. It's the perfect gentleman and at the end of the night it walks you to the door, pecks you on the cheek, turns and drives away.

Then Comes GAIYA.

You're floating along, building your outpost; chatting idly with your drones; knocking back pirates like they're made of paper... Then you idly wonder where your harvest drone Scott went to. "Scott was DESTROYED by some jerk" pops up in the corner of your screen. You grab up your axe and stomp out the door to show someone a thing or two about a thing or two!

The next message in the corner of the screen reads, "You were DESTROYED by some jerk." Flustered, you crawl out of drop-pod 2, take three steps and a level 59 spider eats your face off.

6 lives later you manage to make it back to your outpost, slam the force-field on behind you, and collapse in the corner to have a good cry.

...this is NOT the game you think it is.
(It's better.)

There are some negative reviews floating atop the pile here on House Flipper's Steam page -- many with totally valid complaints, mind you. But, I want to - not so much rebut those claims - as encourage people to grab this title in lieu of them and discover that it's a very good game, regardless.

First off: Did you know that in the first 24 hours of release, the developers had already patched in FOV options in response to user's complaints? In fact, the littany of negative reviews I read before buying were 9/10 answered the first time I opened the game; when the in-game developer's notes popped up to announce that on May 18th, 24 hours after release, they'd already patched out the biggest day-one gripes that players had.

The second time I opened the game, a whole 'nother massive list of bugs and Quality of Life issues had been addressed. And, at time of post, it's been all of a week since this game went 1.0 on Steam. So what I'm saying is: You've got some of the most dedicated and responsive developers I've ever seen right here, who instead of going on vacation to celebrate release and leaving their playerbase to drown in day one bugs and gameplay issues, (looking at you Firaxis) knew to stay close and be ready to patch.

Another thing to note is that every negative review I've read of this game has come from people who pause briefly to say that they like the game; That they've enjoyed their time with it. And every positive review I've read has paused breifly to say, "there are definitely some issues that need worked out." So the concensus from both those giving thumbs-down and those giving thumbs-up seems to actually be, "good game, needs patches."

As to my opinion: "Good game, needs patches."

There's a lot of excellent polish-work and thoughtful tutorialization / player initiation here from day one. And the issues and complaints others have listed are... not, NOT there. But they just don't impact the gameplay, enjoyment, or satisfaction you get after stripping out a disgusting, fire-damaged house, restoring it to gorgeousness with accent walls, recessed lighting, and subtle convenience features that surely mean nothing to the game's AI buyers, but that have to come to matter to you; the builder.

My only REAL complaint about this title is graphics performance and optomization. I get 120fps by the in-game counter, but even at those rates, what ends up on my screen often stutters and jerks when moving. And the last time I played, I somehow ended up with 40-60fps while doing a certain email-job, that released me to the usual 120fps as soon as I left that job?

So... optomization, smoothness, and graphics performance amount to my only complaint. And that complaint is not enough to keep me from either playing, enjoying, or recommending House Flipper, here. With what we've seen from the devs in just the first few days following release, I think we can expect to see those optomizations come down the pipe within the next few months.

Pick this one up.

My first impression is... likely to be my last impression.

This does not at all feel like it was designed to be a standalone game -- but as DLC. If that's wrong, and it was always meant to be a proper sequel, then its the dictionary definition of over-reaching. The first prison has something like 20 inmates, just as many guards, and two stories worth of prison for the player to familiarize themselves with. Couple that with cluttered visual designs that fail to clearly communicate what a given room is meant to be, and a train wreck of UI implementations that solve challenges by chucking everything plus the kitchen sink at the player's head... (sans regard for whether prison inmates are likely to have been given detailed maps of the prison's ventilation systems when they were admitted)

...And what you've got is a developer trying to address the biggest loudest complaints of its player base from the first game: 1.) without realizing that it's player base is NOT composed of GAME DEVELOPERS and therefore: 2.) sacrificing any notion of tutorialization via gameplay arch by: 3.) overwhelming new players with an excess of mechanics; way-too-big, asymetric starting levels; onscreen clutter; and about thirty-too-many NPCs in the first prison.

Rather than focus on escape, I spent day one seeing how these systems - old and new - work in the sequel. My first mission was to get a manicure kit for a prisoner. Neither flavor text nor UI communicated to me that this was an item that had to be crafted from its base components. Meanwhile the crafting menu, having two dozen entries on just one of its five pages, set me spending my first minutes in the game mousing over them one by one to see if SOMETHING in this clunky UI would give me a clue as to what it expected of me.

As I collected the items needed, the on-screen mission log, with its great big bloody check boxes, failed to tick any of those boxes as I gathered the items; Leaving some of my audience (livestream) reasonably presuming that there was a "quest-version" of the item that I had to find somewhere in the prison before I could craft the manicure kit. There isn't. It's just half-done UI implementation.

I never found the nail polish needed to craft the kit, but in the meanwhile I took a quest to bring J-Bomb (or some such fellow) a tub of talcum powder. I found it, brought it to him, pressed 'E,' saw J-Bomb's stats displayed, ticked over to the 'Gift' tab and gave the talcum powder to him. He happily accepted! And then walked away without giving me a dime. Using the gift tab to deliver the quest item did not count as mission completion, I wasn't rewarded, but at least J-Bomb's itchy red areas would improve?

Summarily, what we have here is DLC for The Escapists, meant to be played by enthusiasts who are still enjoying the original game. There's no introductory game arch in this sequel because it expects the player will be coming to it on the heels of finishing the original. The first levels are too big, over-populated, and non-instructional, because players buying DLC don't want or need to start from scratch -- they want expansion on the game they're already familiar with. Makes sense.

The only problem is that someone decided it would be way more lucrative to sell a sequel to the massively popular original than to merely release DLC for a title that few have bothered thinking about in the past two years. Which also makes sense.

Sadly, what we get is a game that not only assumes, but in its present state outright demands, that its players be returning from having played the original... and recently. Team 17 hasn't planned for newcomers or short memories.

Strictly speaking, I'm not a newcomer. Having played The Escapists back when it launched, this sequel reads like an over-reaction to playerbase complaints featuring expansion for expansion's sake. They've gone around spackling in every hole and crack that someone pointed out to them with whatever game device happened to be handy at the time. Um... here's an onscreen mini-map. Why? Dunno. Does that make it better? How about stacked levels, each with ventilation systems, plus the underground? That's 5 unique depths to use level one! Is that too much? How about a dedicated crafting menu with descriptions listing sixty-some items, and no more trading for recipes? Is that an improvement or the opposite?

In their eagerness to please, Team 17 seems to have tried to address everyone's complaints all at once. And by getting rid of what Joey and Davey and Mary each individually disliked, they've accidentally plastered over all the thoughtful game design that made the first title enjoyable. Leaving a game that was once simple enough to explain itself by way of playing it, now complicated beyond comprehensibility by the developer's fevered explanations.

To be clear, I'm not saying that The Escapists 2 is hard. I'm saying it's illegible. If you narrow your attention to simply trying to escape each prison, and block out the excess of static noise presented by the design choices, cluttered spaces, and excessive UI, you'll surely progress.

I simply found that after a half-hour's play, I couldn't be bothered to.

I came to Loot Hero DX blind, and as soon as I started playing, I laughed myself into a gasping fit. There is a fun little game in here, no doubt, but its true value to the society of gaming at large is as a joyous piss-take on RPG grind. Loot Hero DX has dedicated the entireity of its gamepla to grind -- and it's grind is honestly enjoyable. The sound effects ding in that key-of-C casino style that sings "You're being rewarded! Wheeee!!!" The music, and the blazing speed at which the game eventually takes place, build to a momentum of thrust that inflates the gameplay to a sense of significance that it honestly doesn't have...

Everything in here is done beautifully, and everything about it is a winky little commentary on RPG grind. And the most amazing thing about it is that it does grind better than any other title. Every drop of fun has been squeezed out of these threadbare mechanics, and then the sponge was given another twist to be sure.

It's short. It's fun. And it's priced perfectly as a donation tossed to a street-corner musician who gave you an experience; brief, but worthy.

Super fun game... with a horrible tutorial.

This was my first time playing a VR game with swing-your-arms movement mechanics, and maybe in part because of that, just thirty minutes of it was an epic experience. You've got yourself a cover-based FPS that sends you running for the sandbags using this immersive movement mechanic, and when all is said and done: you find yourself panting and sweating, even though you've just been stood in place, swinging your arms... looking pretty goofy to anyone else stood in the room. Oh, and you're probably giggling a little, too.

The varying enemy types and placement present some variety of challenge, of course, but more notably they've been used expertly to create wholy unanticipated jumpscare moments and a degree of light-hearted tension I was not expecting. In a stroke of genius, the player-friendly characters milling about here and there all stop to wave at you when you approach them, and between the bright, genial design and the genuineness of expression conveyed in the animation... You're a monster if you didn't wave back. every. single. time.

The movement mechanics, the shooting, reloading, and the weapons themselves all hang together nicely within the context of the game. Moving, dodging, and shooting quickly becomes a seamless, natural experience, where you can just react without having to think about what button to press or how this all works. again?

Summarily, the game's level design, art, and unusual (at least to me) movement mechanics are a massive success.

[CHANGING GEARS NOW]

This, in stark contrast to the diminished expetation the game presents at the load screen and throughout the miserably conceived tutorial.

My first experience opening the game, with headset still resting on my forehead as I configured a recording solution was a screaming-loud audio blast so deafening that I instinctively yanked the official Vive-packaged earbuds from my ears. After cursing a bit, I reduced the Vive volume ouput to just over 50%, restarted the game for the sake of the recording, and found that even halved, that first blast at the game's open was still ridiculously loud. Considering I halved the volume, I suppose the rest of the game's sound effects were pretty overloud as well.

The technical implementation of audio in the game needs a lot of work. Beyond audio stacking, seemingly without a decibal limit (glass shattering layered on gunshots layered on more glass shattering that becomes deafening) there were several points in the game where portions of the audio just stopped working altogther.

Theres a certain turning point moment where you walk out of a building into a courtyard area carrying a big new gun to find yourself for the first time overwhelmed by a mass of enemies who quickly start flanking you. In multiple attempts to clear this area, my gun's rat-a-tat disappeared, leaving a weird hollow feeling to the action. Whenever I stood behind a certain piece of cover that triggered an intensely loud glass-breaking sound whenever it was shot - which was happening all but constantly from the swarm of shooters - my gun's audio would cut out until I left that piece of cover.

(Probably those two things are related.)

The game also tries to have some fun with partially deafening you when you take certain kinds of damage, which is brilliant in theory, but the execution here flops. The transitions are rough enough to break immersion, and to coin a phrase - you can hear the gears turning.

(Note for the developer: Add a tinitus ring - there's a specific frequency.)

But these lackings in the audio are quickly forgotten in the heat of the game, where everything else is working together so well. What lacks that isn't overlookable is the surprisingly half-♥♥♥♥♥♥ tutorial.

My first experience in the tutorial was being given the edict to pick up my gun. I reached out for my gun, and bounced my controller off of a wall. The gun was about 18 inches outside my play space and having never played a swing-your-arms-to-move VR game before, I spent the next three minutes trying stuff until I figured out to hold the trackpad down while making the movements. That mechanic would later be taught in the tutorial... two or three steps after it was appropriate and needed.

Additionally, while the swing-your-arms movement mechanic works brilliantly in the game, where there's a fair bit of open space to move in, it becomes physically sickening in a confined area. You start running into barriers and then your virtual body slams to a hault, or starts strafing along the edge, and the motion sickness this mechanic is meant to address, pops right back up. (along with some stomach acid)

So starting the tutorial with your gun buried in a wall, then having to work out the movement system yourself because you haven't been taught it, and then having the area in which you work it out be ~3.5 meters square, is a combination of horrible choices that all at once diminished my expectations of the game I was about to play.

When I finally got hold of the gun, some shooting targets appeared to teach me about firing, reloading, and ammo pickups. Two of these targets either have faulty hitboxes, or perhaps because they face the player at a 90 degree angle without reference to the position from which the player will be shooting, the only way I moved passed this section of the tutorial was by jiggling my hand in their general directions while unloading a full clip for each of them. Actually aiming left them unhittable.

Later, there's a climbing tutorial in which you scale a virtual ladder. There seems to be snapping problems with the grabbing mechanic that go beyond the visual of your virtual hands often gripping a space two inches below the rungs. Maybe this is in the design of Vive's controller and its hard to get a proper squeeze out of it, but regardless I slipped off the rungs several times before finally reaching the top, where a 90 degree turn in the direction of climbing left me in a position where I felt encouraged to literally injure myself reaching for it. I had a rung in my left hand and as I reached out to grab the forward rung with my right, the excess spacing left me wanting to twist left my rotator cuff back and down in a way that my body would not have appreciated.

If I'm better at the monkey bars in real life than I am in VR, something's very wrong with the playground.

After the climbing fiasco I ran forward to the next tutorial area and as I arrived a message slid up out of the ground with written instructions, but because it popped up so near to me while I was running, I apparently moved too close to it before I could stop... and it immediately sunk back into the ground before I could read the message.

By this point I was already writing off the game. Whoever made this slipshod tutorial couldn't possibly have designed a fun or even functional experience waiting for me on the other side of it.

Happily I was wrong. And it speaks to just how well designed the core gameplay of Vindicta is that it could recover from such a terrible opening and still leave me saying, "That was really fun."

At time of review, Vindicta is still early access, so to the developer I plead: Turn the critical mind and careful design you show in the game itself onto your tutorial. Teach players to move before they shoot, angle the target range to respect the position the player is shooting from, avoid confined spaces with this movement mechanic... And hey! Just because you've got Stretch Armstrong-length arms, doesn't mean the rest of us do. ...come on, with your 2 meter gapped ladder rungs!

All that said, the game is damned fun. If its your first time playing a FPS in VR that doesn't just stand you in one spot and send waves of enemies to you; that gets you running for cover using a movement mechanic that truly immerses you in the action: You're going to have a hell of a good time.

$30 worth of a good time? Not sure.
$20 worth of a good time. Yeah.

Absolutely the worst title I've ever played. Back at ED's release I really wanted to love this game and I tried HARD. The visuals were so amazing and that first moment I was loaded into the cockpit, with the displays popping up as I moused over them; The interiors of the giant space stations, the in-depth control I had over my ship, down to each individual power circuit for each system... It was all breathtaking.

And then I played the game and I realized that a pretty wrapper does not a lover make.

I'm not exaggerating when I call this my personal pick for worst game ever. The developers completely ignore the player's experience at every turn. There is no in-game design for tutorialization. Are there tutorials? Yes. Mechanical tutorials on how to pilot the ship. But once in the game, you discover that piloting the ship is about 30% of what's going on, and none of the other 70% is ever coached, explicitly expressed, or made apparent within the game.

Now, you can get away with that as a developer if the controls and interface are intuitive, if you've crafted your player's first-time experiences delicately, if you gate players through a series of initializing tasks that will give them the event-experiences required to communicate the core mechanics... Elite Dangerous does none of this. No care or thought has been put into the player's experience. You are dropped into the cockpit of a ship and -- well, good luck.

Now I've put dozens of hours into ED, mainly back when it launched. I've mined, I've freighted, I've tried to pirate. (And found that isn't really a thing you can do.) I got damn good at taking down much larger ships than mine with my little Eagle. (ship of preference after trying the larger, more "powerful" ones) What I'm saying is that, back in the day, I pushed through the developer's complete disconcern for my first-experience. I learned the mechanics they couldn't be bothered to teach me. I got good at dog fighting and bounty hunting. (the only truly playable career path) I made my space-bucks and built my ship out. I'm not speaking from a position of having been frustrated before I figured it out and walked away.

I'm speaking from a position of having been frustrated, having figured it out, and then having walked away. Because the lack of concern Frontier has for new players, and the implicit demand they make for the player to cross massive spans of unknown mechanics just to be able to start enjoying it, is merely the first warning you receive that the game you are about to play has no interest in your entertainment. It's the early sign that you would be served best to walk away.

ED values it's economy more than it values the you, the player. It will make you wait, no exaggeration, HOURS... for the chance to have fun in the game you are presumably playing for the explicit purpose of having fun. I have accepted missions in ED requiring me to kill pirates in sectors 'X,' 'Y,' and 'Z,' only to fly in straight lines back and forth, popping in and out of non-instance instances where nothing useful occurs, back and forth from sector to sector, for TWO HOURS, finding only enough pirates in that time to keep me hoping I'd soon find the next... And then the mission timer expires.

ED is an awful experience by an awful developer who has chosen to model gameplay around Skinner Box psychological warfare, instead of giving the slightest toss for whether the player base has legitimate fun. Frontier hates you, but they love your money, and they aren't opposed to hypnotizing you to get it.

DO NOT waste money on this - very pretty, very shiny - empty husk of a game that only still exists for the purpose of selling you a season pass to yet more graphically polished, gameplay devoid waiting simulator. I know it looks like there's something here. I thought so too. But I looked really hard for it. And I assure you, there is not.

Best VR game I've played to date. Simple mechanics. Waves of enemies rushing your position. Just you and two guns. Simple as it is, this is the one I pop into, stand there with two giant space-glocks dangling at my sides and feel like a badass. The thumping dark-synth music track helps a lot with that! I get in there and play for twenty minutes (or thirty; or forty; JUST FIVE MORE!) and walk away satisfied and maybe a little sweaty.

Playing on Normal difficulty routinely finds me crouched on the floor, both shields deployed in a shell around my body, waiting for a pistol to cool down or an enemy to break formation. And there's just nothing more immersive than being cornered like that. The guns have four modes. A single shot revolver will one-hit the weaker mobs, but there's a full second's reload time. The energy repeater takes down drones quick with fully automatic fire, but overheats fast and you've got to lead your shots. The sniper blast will one-hit pretty much anything, but takes several seconds holding the trigger to charge a shot. And then there's the best of them: Simple semi-automatic pistols. Dual-wield them and spray bullets in alternating trigger pulls directly at the heads of the enemy. (always at the heads. always at the heads.)

I've played to level 24 on Easy mode before getting overwhelmed. But normal difficulty rarely sees me past 12. The dogs man, the dogs.

The game slows the more there is on screen - I'm guessing to preserve the framerate for head tracking - and it works perfectly with the gameplay. The more enemies and shots flying, the more slow-mo, Neo, bullet-time you get to try to deal with it all. An you will be overwhelmed. This is a VR roomscale arcade shooter that does what it does brilliantly. And as amazed I've been at other titles, for their depth, or scale, or picturesque rendering -- this is the best VR game in my catalog right now. And I will continue coming back to it to claim another twenty minutes as an action hero, for a long, long time.

Highly recommend.