Recent reviews by The Nozzle

Pros: The combat is enjoyable for little while due to the visceral combat animations and skill selections.

Cons: Quite literally everything else.

This was one of the most boring leveling experiences in an MMO I've ever had, I just couldn't take it anymore. If your game is so focused on endgame content, why would you require the player to undertake such a mindless slog of terrible writing and gameplay (without the faintest whiff of immersion) in order to get there? The questing repeats a rapid cycle of walk-to-place-and-press-one-button ad nauseam, whether that's talking to an NPC, grabbing an object, or killing a screen full of mobs with one click. It's like a single, glorified, run-on fetch quest. The only break in the monotony at all was the occasional boss fight and I can only remember a couple that had any interesting mechanics or difficulty that required you to, every now and then, step lazily to the side.

Beyond the mind-numbing leveling experience, there are an absolutely staggering number of disparate and and needless systems in the game with the insultingly obvious purpose of draining every last drop of player time and, to the surprise of no one, encouraging them to spend as much of their money as possible. I can only hope that this isn't a harbinger for the already shaky future of MMORPGs.

At least I think I've finally learned to trust my gut and avoid any game where the female character models look like two drumsticks with high heels and cleavage pinwheeling around. There are plenty of design choice abominations in this category, but this game is definitely vying to be a top contender and it sure seems to be a consistent way to tell if a game is going to be a dumpster fire at a glance.

I really gave this game a fair shake, but it's not currently in an enjoyable state and you should wait to see if it improves before purchasing.

There are some good ideas (a couple new, most heavily inspired from Diablo, Path of Exile, and Grim Dawn), but the issues are too oppressive to really appreciate them. Setting aside the server downtime problems, the small and overloaded development team, and the skill tree that masquerades itself as having depth and nuance (puddle-deep and horrifyingly imbalanced), my biggest problems with Wolcen are the difficulty and the netcode.

It should absolutely not take 50 hours of gameplay before you encounter a fight that you can't just traipse through one-shotting everything in your path with basic attacks while taking no damage. I kept holding out thinking it would change in the endgame, but aside from one or two fights, it never ramped and I'm out of steam waiting for it to happen. And those one or two fights were largely challenging due to what sure seems like terrible netcode.

Playing offline is fine. Playing online on a server with a 40ms ping nets you missing and misaligned telegraphs, missing and jittery animations, dodge-rolling in-place, consistently getting caught by abilities you dodged out of a full second beforehand, and just an overall miserable experience of epileptic wonderment, which is then multiplied by the number of people in your party. And the party scaling itself just turns the experience into a game of "who can rush to the front to one-shot the next pack of enemies first," either way.

Great voice acting, though. Can't say I've been able to say that about an ARPG since Mr. Gough voiced good ol' Deckard Cain.

Initially, I had a blast in Mordhau. Outside of a small handful of things that only pop up at an extremely high level of play and will likely be adjusted down the line, the mechanics have a very solid foundation and it was quite fulfilling starting at "easy to learn" and trending towards "hard to master" territory.

Unfortunately - and I say this as someone who's been happily gaming since the '80s - this game has the single worst, most venomous, vitriolic, toxic, hate-spewing, troll-ridden, and generally unpleasant communities I have ever encountered. This is not an exaggeration. I cannot think of a single worse community across the roughly eight berjillion hours I've spent playing games with other humans. No MMO, FPS, Fighting Game, RTS, ARPG, Monopoly on Family Game Night, nothing. Nothing comes close.

I normally wouldn't dream of rating a game poorly based entirely on the community, but, well, this is a recommendation. And I wouldn't recommend observing this community* through binoculars to anyone with a shred of hope left in humanity.

Of course, my great sin was enjoying the idea of the large pitched battles of the Frontline game mode. The exception to what I wrote here is if you like the idea of hanging out in duel servers. Most duel servers are fine and a great way to improve your play in never-ending 1v1 battles.

If do end up playing and you haven't played any of the 2½ other games that exist in this specialized sub-genre, just be prepared to spend, quite literally, dozens of hours to get a hang of the basics, hundreds of hours training your muscle memory to get gud, and then thousands of hours trying to figure out how to beat that one naked guy that showed up killed you 30 times in a row while avoiding your attacks using nothing but emote dance-fighting immediately after you thought to yourself "Hey, I'm getting pretty good at this."

Also, on the rather off-chance you have misophonia and decide to play this game, be prepared for "incessantly screaming foppish men" to suddenly become one of your triggers.

Possibly the most dedicated developers on Steam. This game is one of the finest 2-4 player co-op games on the market and, in my experience, is the gold standard for procedural generation of environments. The movement, shooting, classes, enemy variation, humor, and voice acting are all top notch and it feels like there is new, well-thought-out content every time I fire the game up.

Solo is fun (you get a helpful robo-buddy if you're solo) but the game absolutely shines in co-op. It's almost a genre of its own, but if you smashed L4D and Minecraft together with enough pressure and heat, you would get something akin to Deep Rock Galactic.

Apologies in advance for the slew of FTL comparisons.

FTL is one of my favorite games of all time, so when Subset announced Into the Breach, I foolishly allowed myself to get my hopes up. Turns out, even though they are completely different games linked only* by a thin thread of choice-based quasi-randomness on the overworld map, it exceeded my expectations.

There's an argument to be made that it lacks replayability compared to FTL, which is accurate to some degree, but it's hard to compare any minimalistic game to FTL's replayability just by its design philosophy (closer DNA to Rogue, more randomness, overall higher difficulty, storied events...), but I personally LOVED going after every achievement in Into the Breach, which requires probably something like 20-30 successful playthroughs at an absolute minimum, and I'm not normally particularly interested in achievements. Though to be fair, the achievements are a (well-implemented) part of the progression system in this game, which really made them exciting and rewarding to pursue, even if a few of them could be a bit maddening in the moment!

If you do "everything" "right," you have an extremely high probability of winning in any given playthrough, particularly when compared against FTL. That becomes more obvious when you look at the nicely-tuned mech squads and pilots versus the (intentionally) somewhat imbalanced nature of all the different FTL ships and variants.

It may not look like it on the surface, but Into the Breach is an absolute triumph in gaming. I can't think of another game offhand that has such an elegant balance to its puzzle-like randomness and the player's choices to deal with it. It is immensely satisfying when you're on the back foot staring at the battleground mulling over your dwindling options for what seems like forever, only to suddenly realize "WAIT! If I move this unit FIRST, then I can knockback that enemy INTO my first unit which will do enough damage so that the other enemy unit acting BEFORE it will kill it, clearing the way for that OTHER enemy unit to hit THAT unit, which will charge into it and knock it into the water, KILLING IT INSTANTLY AND WINNING THE DAY BECAUSE I AM A TACTICAL GENIUS."

It feels good. Trust me.

It's a good game. A spiritual mashup with the likes of Team Fortress and Call of Duty. I love the design and feel of the characters - all intelligent, modern-day mercenaries with unique feels (minus a couple exceptions such as Arty&Skyhammer), stengths, backstories, and good-quality voice acting. It's seriously refreshing to see a developer take a design path that doesn't include bikini-clad women and roid-raging bros. Every mercenary in this game feels like they actually belong on a battlefield.

The map styles and game modes are well thought out at this point in development, though I have some concerns with how heavily some abilities dominate select maps due to their layouts, such as the artillery strikes and orbital laser.

This is a very fast-paced game and the overall mechanics work well together. One-shots aren't uncommon with headshots using shotguns and sniper rifles, explosive damage is "realistic," it's not unusual as a medic to defibrillate 5 people in as many seconds, the "downed" mechanic - which I usually find clunky - feels like it adds to this game, healing and ammo resupply play large strategic roles, the mounted guns feel powerful but vulnerable, the long-jumping and wall-jumping make you feel like a ninja, the visual and audio indicators for mines, explosives, air strikes, abilities, etc. are well done (again, with some exception, but that I'll chalk up to beta) and make it feel like you aren't being cheated by random chance when they take you out, and everything about the gameplay just feels polished and tight.

At this point, the only concerns I have are related to balance. I'm worried that explosives are too powerful overall, from chained artillery strikes locking down objectives and obliterating deployables far away and behind cover, to grenade spam making hallways totally impassable, to remote mines being too easy to use a la TF2 Demoman Sticky Bombs that one-shot you.

A lot of people are decrying the game because of the new Phantom class, but I only started playing at its inception and beyond having an extremely low skill floor, I'm not convinced it's imbalanced. The health is above-average, the SMG is above-average, and the katana often one-shots you, but the cloak can be seen (Predator-esq), which should tell you all you need to know. Though as a disclaimer, I tend to play characters with shotguns, so as long as I catch them at least 1 second before they're in melee range, I've won. It's probably slightly less forgiving for characters with other weapons.

Some kinks to iron out for sure, but absolutely worth a try. Just be sure to stick with it and not get too discouraged while you acclimate to the pace and style. I would suggest saving your first 50,000 credits before spending on anything else so you can get the mercenary you most identify with. I've found no reason to spend money on the game yet, but I probably will later just to support the developers.

Another promising game demolished by terrible publishing practices before it ever got a real chance.

The game itself is good, if somewhat lacking in depth. The characters are all fantastic, the art style is awesome, and the gameplay is solid - though it can certainly get repetitive. The pricing model, however, is everything wrong with so many modern games. The base game is overpriced at $60 (what ammounts to an excellent $30 game) and if you want any of the other content, most of which is day-1 or nearly-day-1 DLC, you'll be subjected to enough microtransactions to choke a camel. $15 for the "new" monster and $7.50 for each new hunter is ridiculous. $140 worth of DLC at the time of writing this on a content-light game released 2 months ago.

Turtle Rock is an EXCELLENT developer, but 2K can go fornicate themselves. They've turned this into yet another cash grab and that annoys the hell out of me. Unless there is a radical change, the community is going to stagnate and wither. I wouldn't hold your breath.

Many times when a developer decides to assign multiple genres with no apparent connection to their game, the result is a smoldering heap of garbage. This is not the case with Sanctum 2. "Tower Defense" and "First-Person Shooter" are definitely apt descriptors, but this game is much more than the sum of its parts.

Between the characters, weapons, perks, towers, map layouts, and co-op there are an incredible number of ways to discover and perfect your own playstyle - and it is SATISFYING when you do.

The art style and sound is phenominal, the comic strip-themed level interludes that progress the story are well made and very fitting, and the characters all have distinct personalities that I adore. I do wish there were more lines for each of them, but that just speaks to how well they were made.

The bottom line is that it's obvious thought and (the right) effort was put into every last detail of this game. I can't wait for more.