Recent reviews by Gay Raccoon

So the great thing about this game is that unlike some games that can be played co-op, this game was clearly actually designed from the ground up as a co-op experience and to be easy to play with your friends. And by that last part I mean, you don't have to commit to always playing with the same group of people lest someone else fall behind in the power curve or come back to find that time has moved on dramatically without them, which are problems you can get with a lot of games. All the way from MMOs to those single-player games that have co-op tacked on.

But Deep Rock? The power curve is there, but gentle enough that if your friends play constantly and you only play now and then, you can still drop in and actually play with them without it feeling like you're in different worlds. And that is honestly one of the best things about it. There are many great things about this game, but that's the one I keep thinking about.

Also the devs keep updating the game after like three or four years to add new stuff to it and don't make you pay a bunch of extra money for it. That's pretty great.

It's too bad we couldn't nominate one game for multiple categories during the Steam Awards, because this game would be a rightful nominee for more than one category. Definitely both game of the year and soundtrack of the year, at least.

But seriously this game does a wonderful job at taking the harsh edge off of roguelites, not only by having a progression system that persists between escape attempts and makes subsequent attempts easier than the last, but also by having a great cast of characters you actually want to spend more time with and letting you do so every time you die and return to the House of Hades. That, and having a narrative that's actually both interesting and actually moves without something ridiculous like clearing the highest difficulty level or something.

Supergiant clearly put a lot of thought, love, and effort into this game, and it shines through in the experience of playing it. And beyond that, they released it at a very affordable price point, and with graphics that are both beautiful and also work fine even on weaker systems, so that even people who can't afford the latest and greatest AAA stuff can enjoy it.

Basically Hades is the total package and a shining example of what makes a game great, let alone just being a good *indie* game. This is genuinely better than the vast majority of AAA titles out there, even ones that are themselves quite good, and something that any player willing and able to face a little challenge (and it does have a good easy mode that can be turned on at any time to make Zagreus tougher without making the game trivial for those who are finding it hard in a not-fun way) should treat themselves to.

I mean I have 3400 hours in the game so I guess I could stand to recommend it. It's not without its flaws, but it's probably the best free-to-play game out there at the moment, and has some of the most wonderfully kinetic gameplay of any massively multiplayer online co-op game out there. The monetization is reasonable and the game actually tackles Actual Themes at some point, though you have to get a ways into the star chart to start getting the cinematic quests. Being a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game, it is quite grindy, but it a) is still an extremely kinetic game with a lot of finger candy in the actual moment-to-moment gameplay and b) has a wide variety of different mechanics, systems, and mission types to grind on, so it's not just the same thing all the time.

The game is extremely complex and fairly different from many other games and doesn't explain everything well, but it does have the courtesy to introduce its systems in a very gradual way rather than dumping them all on you at once, and the playerbase is usually happy to tell you about how the obtuse things work if you ask. A free hint to start you off: the primary power progression doesn't come from unlocking new warframes or necessarily even weapons; the primary power progression comes from upgrading your key mods, like the basic stat mods for your warframes and weapons.

Some things you might do in this game include:
- breaking corporate thumbs on behalf of an underground labor union
- making money by betting on yourself in a finance-themed deathmatch arena run by a corporate televangelist with a stock ticker for a beard
- learning the edgy backstory of your wacky ship AI
- petting the dog kubrow
- hoverboard tricks to impress a bunch of slang-talking orphans
- looking at spreadsheets to help you optimize your weapon and mod loadout when you become one of those endgame people with like a thousand hours in the game
- Mission Impossible
- tracking and tranquilizing futuristic sci-fi wildlife for wildlife conservation efforts and getting rewarded with loads of stuffed animals you can use to clutter up your ship
- a whole lot of shooty bang bang and run and jump and all that fun kinetic twitchy business
- trading with other players for rare mods and parts for enhanced-quality warframes and weapons
- growing up and finding yourself
- starting a betting pool with your friends on what completely unexpected homages the next warframe or expansion will pay
- generally being a cyborg ninja in space
- wondering where three thousand hours of your life went

Written after getting all the achievements in the first game: I'm old and tired and don't have nearly the patience I had when I was younger and I'm used to just losing my patience with a lot of games these days, especially the really hard ones, but this one was good enough to keep me trying in spite of how hard it was all the way through the gold relic in Stormy Ascent. It made me feel like I haven't lost it yet. And it was very hard: a lot of those special gems and gold relics had me retrying dozens of times. It was still worth it. (Full disclosure: I got the game from Humble Monthly, which I don't think is receiving it "for free" per se.)

Short (I 100%ed it in about 11 hours, and that's a fairly long playtime for this game) and solid but not amazing mechanically, but the storytelling was fantastic and really spoke to me. Faced subject matter I never expected a game from a major publisher like Arc System Works to engage with, and with a lot of power and sensitivity to boot.

Suffice it to say that as emotionally difficult as it was (I cried), this game touched me enough that I'm actually sad I've hit 100% completion because I don't want to say goodbye to J.J. and Emily yet, and that if SWERY were ever to return to these characters and show us what they get up to after the events of this game I'd be all over it.

I will say, while there's a light at the end of the tunnel, this game hit me like a truck and messed me up but good and I still can't get the bleedin' theme song out of my head. The constant cycle of death and rebirth is a fitting gameplay mechanic given how much this game hurts, so be forewarned. Though it might also be exactly what you needed.

The many criticisms that this game fails to build upon ye olde collectathon in any major way are basically correct, but while it's true that the mechanics are kind of dated and some of the collectables can be a little Guide Dang It, it's still a fun and joyful romp. I wouldn't buy it at full price (I got it from my Humble Monthly subscription, which isn't actually free per se), but if you can get it on sale it's a good 15 to 25 hours of nostalgic fun, depending upon your level of completionism and whether you're willing to crack open a wiki for the last few collectables.

I don't like strategery and tacticools games. With their tendency towards slow pacing and lack of exciting and physically good-feeling gameplay, they've always just felt kind of meh to me.

This game just about made me ♥♥♥♥ myself like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good, take it from someone who doesn't even like the genre. They just managed to make a strategery and tacticool game that's actually that *exciting* and *thrilling* from one turn to the next, to the tune of "just one more mission" until the bloody sun is coming up.

Also I like how the soldiers are humanized by their bonding mechanics, unique per-soldier cross-class options they can get with XP, variable combat intelligence and willpower, and the fact that they can suffer long-term psychological trauma when bad things happen. You can start developing a soldier one way only to get them into the training area once they're at a higher rank only to find that their random slate of cross-class options reveal that their talents lie in a different build, and fortunately you can have them retrain to accommodate for that. None of them are perfect or hand-designed to your specifications and no two are totally the same; they're all their own person in some way, even if you have a lot of influence over how they develop. Even the scientists get in on it, with their willful inspiration and breakthroughs--you can command them to do any research you normally have access to instead of what they really *want* to do, of course, but if you let them do the research they want instead, they'll do it faster, or might even be able to perform special breakthrough research that's not available under normal circumstances.

Also I like that the Chosen are chatty. They're characters that have a lot to say about you and how you do things, and some people might be annoyed by how they never shut up, but I appreciated their sociability. It made clashes with them feel just a little more personal, because they were actual *characters* and not just *units*.

but yeah it's a really fun game. too fun, going by the complete hash that is now my sleep schedule

So I bought this game on sale, thinking "eh it looks like it could be kinda fun, maybe"

Started playing it

...finally pull myself away *14 bloody hours later*

This is the most metal game there ever was. It is a game in which you are a metal roadie in a world made of metal album covers in the Age of Metal and need to raise a metal army to battle against metal oppressors like hair metal warlords and metal S&M demons by doing extremely metal things with the power of metal. And *on top of that*, you actually get good acting and excellent world-building and a story that has actual cool surprises. Plus metal mythology. *Metal mythology*. And metal wildlife. And lots of collectibles to reward exploration of the extremely metal world, not dissimilar to Psychonauts, only this time around you can get a tool after you've beaten the game to actually help you find the last thingamabobber out in the middle of nowhere that you never had any clue was there and so forth. Oh, and a soundtrack of over 100 fine metal selections, including original work for the game by Lita Ford, and cool voice acting by big metal names (and also Tim Curry, because Tim Curry).

And don't wuss out just because it has RTS elements. Only two or three of the battles are any trouble, and they have tricks to them such that even if you suck at RTS games, you can still beat them. I'm terrible at RTS games and I beat this thing.

Seriously why haven't you played this game yet. Do you just hate metal. Why do you hate metal. If you don't hate metal play this game.

Don't be fooled by the cutesy exterior: this game is kind of like Zelda II, Soul Calibur, Dark Souls (OK, *maybe*; don't hold me to that one), and Candyland all somehow got together and made a baby. It's a hard game, especially when you play it on Plumfield Must Die--err, Expert--like I did, and the AI--both that of computer-controlled allies and that of enemies--is slick as hell, not to mention brutal and ruthless.

On the story front, the *premise* is pedestrian JRPG fare, but the execution is good. Chekhov's guns are properly loaded, happenings are foreshadowed instead of whipped out of someone's ass, Arche is metal as hell (only idiots and wussies say bad things about Arche Plumfield), and, as dorblz as the storyline is for the most part (largely being filtered through a child's viewpoint), there's actually a little drama and a few earnestly badass moments--and for the attentive, details to be found in bits and pieces that shed light on the plot and offer fuel for speculation.