Recent reviews by Capt_Blakhelm

I like Boomer Shooters
I like Metroidvanias

But I dont like having to return back to previous stages and recomplete them as if I never completed them, all over again to make a little progress because I have a new ability to move further in it. Imagine if in the original Doom, everytime you beat a couple maps, you'd have to go back to one of the previous 3 maps and start it all over again as if you never completed it, all enemies and items respawned and doors reclosed because you now have ability to jump or swim somewhere you couldn't before. I find it irritating to run through the same fights and redeplete your ammo again and again just to make a little bit of progress.

I'm sure the game is ok enough for some people, but once i noticed retreading gameplay loop, I lost interest very quickly.

A pretty solid Doom-like Boomer shooter - A cross between the art design of Doom 2016 and level sizes of Doom 1. A pretty straight forward game but with not too many surprises - stages are separated by a Super Mario World style world map and some will require returning back to after you get upgrades from the later stages. I might argue that is one of the worst aspects of Prodeus - about 6 hours in and I have a good selection of weapons but the gameplay has largely remained the same since I have yet to be able to get enough ore fragments and game progression to get any new mechanics like dash boots and double jumping. There are short trial levels built around speedrunning with a specific weapon, but honestly, you don't need to go fast unless you want to - no medals, no looming threat, no timer - just follow the path and shoot the targets and do it the fastest if you want to make the leaderboards.

Prodeus is good, but that's just it. It's just good - not extraordinary, not excellent, not great, just good, but not good enough to motivate me to finish it until the end. The only "Carrot on stick" to keep me going is the items shops that I can't get without more time investment. The inclusion of a level editor is neat, but may not ultimately mean much in the end. A hundred or two maps and a dozen or so custom campaigns, but I've heard no mention of custom levels outside of the game itself - so not alot of people know or care about it it seems. Multiplayer exists, but as of Sept 2024, there is no community to play the game with outside of a Discord channel - so you'd need to do some legwork to get some games going or hop on at the right time.

If you're dying for another gory, future tech Space Marine Boomer Shooter, then you can't go wrong with Prodeus, but you're not missing alot if this is another game in your giant backlog.

It's impressive how quickly and easily Wallpaper Engine has effectively replaced desktop customization software from the likes of Stardock. This is likely due to the Steam Workshop integration, allowing any Steam user to upload animated wallpapers as long as it fits within the content guidelines and rules (and sometimes they don't). Name a major or moderately sized IP or game, and there is probably dozen or more backgrounds for it. Cool animations of Logos, hardware, or various effects. Anime wallpapers out the wazoo, so much so that there is a option to hide Anime content.

Backgrounds can change your Windows color theme, giving your use of Windows more variety when programs are up while the background is swapped. Playlists allow you to set up different lists of backgrounds to cycle through to your liking, though unfortunately, playlists aren't easily transferred between multiple devices and the developer hasn't made progress on that update since a three year old thread in where they wished for said feature in the future. Plenty of options allows you to change the "black bar" color, playback speed, horizontal flip, and stretch type. Some wallpapers allow you to change its position depending on your alignment settings, its volume if it has audio, or colors, speed, or size of elements within the animation itself. Some wallpapers can react to your mouse input or audio output - such as mouse trails, moving eyes, shifting weather effects, or spectrum analyzer style backgrounds. Most of your basic needs for options are covered, though I remember at one point wanting to change an aspect of wallpapers that WE doesn't have (maybe how many times a specific "wallpaper" in a playlist will loop before going to the next one, or maybe Wallpaper rotation, or something else I forgot).

One drawback of a Steam Workshop Supported file base is that if a wallpaper is removed from the Workshop then it will also no longer exist in your your personal Collection. There might ways around this, such as going offline in Steam (or all together on your device), but I don't think keeping a nude wallpaper of Ariel Piperfawn is worth losing out on all the other Steam online functionalities. An ability to use local only content to make your own wallpapers separate from Steam would be a great additional feature, though largely unnecessary due to the sheer amount of options available to you.

Performance will vary per device, but i have regularly used WE while playing games. I would probably consider pausing WE during some fullscreen games not only for performance improvements, but the automatic switching of wallpapers has occasionally caused hangups in games or other programs. Also, I've had mild conflicts with Stardock products like Fences. I'm pretty sure it works well with Window Effects and I could see obvious conflicts with any other programs that directly change your background itself..

Wallpaper Engine does alot for your wallpaper customization for a measly $4. If you want neat animated desktop backgrounds, just get it.

I bought a $4400 computer to play a game that wouldn't work on my $2000 computer

The good news is I feel the Steam Store page for the game aptly describes what it is. I often see a store page, sometimes with videos that hardly show any gameplay and is more concerned with showing off its lore and/or features or I might see that the logo and screenshots evokes features of another game, fooling me into believing it is similar to another and I eventually find out it's not quite what i thought it was.

In my personal opinion, the best way to experience The Exit 8 is near completely blindly (which is something I never say, considering how many games will leave you with buyers' remorse), so if you know nothing about this game and happen to be reading this review, You should only verify if your hardware can properly play the game, in which it can be refunded (provided you play it not too long after buying it). Even so, the game can be finished within the 2 hour return limit by most players (if you figure out what the game is about by then) and even better than that, the game is only $4, which in my experience with the game is worth the price.

I discovered The Exit 8 from seeing Nextlander, Ezekiel_III and maybe another streamer play the game - which was great for showing me a game I wanted to play, but bad for effectively "answering many of the puzzles" of the game or even the fact that I had to "answer puzzles".

The only scenarios i'll say not to buy this game is if you get any sort of motion sickness or any other maladies from First Person games or if you have negative interest in games that mess with the player. On that last note, the game doesn't have any blood, gore, or serious violence, but does have some mildly unsettling or creepy moments that might make some more sensitive people uncomfortable


(((SPOILER SECTION)))
I'll use the remainder of this review to cover a few notes that I would feel spoil the experience.
-$4 for effectively 1hr or less of gameplay does seem kind of steep, but if you're able to experience The Exit 8 with minimal spoilers, I think the small surprises and reward of figuring out the game makes for it.
- The game immediately loads into the game: No Logos. No Menu. No Tutorial. Literally press play, the screen fades or flickers to black, the game loads and fades into you being in a Japanese passageway with first person control of the character. This is great for the experience if the game works with no issues for you, but bad if you need to chance options. Thankfully, you can press Esc and get to an option menu if you need to change audio or video settings. Personally, the audio settings ere perfect as is and I didn't have to turn any volume down. I also assume the game auto-detects your hardware and tries to set the graphics settings appropriately, as it set mine to High and ran effectively at 60FPS and "Epic" preset would have been sub-30
- It may be worth playing The Exit 8 in the dark, but the majority of the game is played in "Bathed light" so it may not help immersion.
- For the longest time, I was looking for the anomaly that would change the Yellow floor tiles to faces or something as I've seen from streams. In a potentially masterful move, that anomaly was one of the last ones to appear and I got so used to not seeing it that I literally ignored the floor THE ONE TIME I NEEDED TOO, resetting my run. IT makes me wonder if the game was tracking my camera movements (looking at the floor frequently) and deciding to not give me that anomaly until it only had a few ones to pull from. If this was done intentionally by the developer(s), then this is BRILLIANT.
- The Exit 8 MIGHT be able to add more value with a level/script editor or allowing mod/workshop support, but I suppose that feature alone could spoil the experience. Regardless, if the develop doesn't make a sequel with such a feature, I fear a competitor would or at least you'll see similar experiences in games like Garry's Mod.
- Even with my prior knowledge of the game, my Steam time clocks up to about an 1hr. Some of that may have been paused/AFK, but I think most of if it was due to about 2 or 3 runs where I got complacent and missed some anomalies. Some of it was standing still, trying to notice if something was subtly moving or not, but I can't tell if passage way has a time limit or not.
- I could easily return this game since I only played it an hour, but I enjoyed it and wouldn't want to punish the developer despite making a game I enjoyed.

1) Match 2 icons in no less than 3 Perpendicular lines
2) Clear the screen to hear the girl moan and have a layer of clothing magically removed
3) Repeat again to remove another layer of clothing
4) Repeat again to remove the puzzle itself and see entire scene (most of which you can alreaady see by scrolling or zooming in the first place)
5) Get a lazy achievement that says Girl_#

The only complexities to the gameplay is that you can find yourself in a situation that is hard to match out of, but the game will always automatically re-arrange icons in a fashion allowing for another match or two, meaning there is effectively no fail-safe. You don't even need to use the occasional free icon shuffles the game gives you, unless you're just tired of hunting that one, solitary match that will give you progress. You also get a limited amount of match hunts (one per completed stage?. Oh and if you're worried about your parents...er...roommates walking in on your lewd, undress the girl game, you can click a convenient panic button.

Even the developer's Youtube Channel doesn't exactly promote the game, but hosts vids for pre-release development progress, which revealed to me the art is made in a program called Spline. Assuming the artist actually made the art and didnt steal it, the art quality is pretty good, if not one-note: Women of mostly similar body types in a single pose with parts of them that infinitely motion tweens between two states to simulate movement.

Split Second borrows similar philosophies from Burnout - made-up Unlicensed cars, great graphics, wanton vehicular destruction and road debris, rewarding successful play with tools to help win the race. Split Second was built in the time where not every game from a major publisher needed to be overloaded with monetization, when Michael Bay Transformers movies were popular and was made to not be too hard or too easy - it's no wonder why many people say Split Second is their favorite racing game of all time.

Drifting around corners and drafting behind cars earns each racer meter for Power Plays. Power Plays can be used to activate setpieces to crash or hinder opponents ahead of them, open up short cuts, or literally alter the path of the course. These events are fashioned after big budget action films like Transformers or Fast & Furious, so lots of big explosions, bombastic crashes, and toppling buildings, Outside of explosive barrels dropped from helicopters, each setpiece is an exciting treat to the eyes slightly alters the race track. A variety of race types keeps the game fresh and a limited control set makes the game easy to learn and pick up for some casual play.

Split Second on Steam has some problems that will prevent players from buying it, the biggest issues being it's rarely/never discounted price (no Sales in years), 30 FPS gameplay (60FPS patch affects Power Plays), no official DLC (DLC content needs to be pirated and manually installed), awkward Controller support (control glyphs are only for Keyboard and I needed to use Big Picture/Steam Input to get my XInput controller to work), broken Online Functionality (Servers for PC version were taken down), and possibly hardware dependent potential graphical issues/anomalies (a strange, glitched stairstepped pixel pattern going from the upper right to bottom left of my screen with an RX 580 GPU. Few others reported other screen related issues in Steam forums). Split Second is still very enjoyable despite these flaws, but this does mean the best version of these games are the console ports, at least from other users' reports.

Combat is too damn hard.

Need Learning books to level up combat skills.

Need Money to buy Learning books.

Need quests to earn money and experience points for levels, most of which have groups of enemies that can kill you in 1-4 hits.

Nah.

Ever since the "Indie Explosion" of games on Steam, I've been attracted to Breakout Clones - games that mimicked Breakout and Arkanoid "paddle and ball" style games but a with a new twist. While I was only marginally entertained at best by these games as a child, these new variants of the genre have been alot of fun for me. Ironically, probably the worst one I've played of these is the official Breakout recharged.

Drawkanoid is another one of these games - a name that channels the spirit of Arkanoid plus the ability to redraw your paddle. I'd say the game is a bit more akin to Shatter, as the bricks have physical properties causing them to float around the board if they are loose or come in the form of bullets being shot from a sort of turret brick that shoots out bricks similar to patterns seen in bullet Hell games. In Arkanoid, you slid a paddle at the bottom of the screen to bounce a ball up towards bricks which could randomly drop power ups. In Drawkanoid, you use the mouse to draw a paddle in a field at the bottom the screen. When the ball returns to this area, you have limited time in slow motion to draw a paddle to redeflect the ball back to the bricks. Instead of power ups being dropped, you can start a run with a loadout of up to 3 power ups depending on which ones you bought prior to the run.

The run based nature of the game, combined with buying upgrades between runs and random brick layouts on each stage gives Drawkanoid a rogue-lite vibe, especially with the fact that your persistent progression is in the form of currency dropped from certain bricks or situations, allowing you to buy upgrades and power ups at the end of a run. Power ups include the ability to penetrate more bricks, the ability to aim directly at a specific brick, or draw a path for the ball the follow. Other upgrades allow for situations that give you more currency or lives.

My top issue with Arkanoid in my limited time is that the presentation is both great but also distracting. The use of vibrant, neon colors and sparkling effects are a treat to the eyes, but a distraction to gameplay, especially in later levels when your time to draw the paddle before slow motion ends is drastically reduced. By the time you reach levels 5-7, you have very little time before the extremely fast moving ball bounces out of control, and sometimes, depending on where the ball bounces, it would have left sparks, trails, and a beam of light surrounding it, making it hard to see where the ball is, let alone where it is going as you try to find a good spot to draw your next paddle. Many times, I couldn't see the ball and by the time I could, it was too late. Worse off, certain trajectories make the ball bounce at a angle that is hard to guess where it will bounce too, causing you to draw the paddle in the wrong place and lose precious, very limited lives. Sure, feel free to argue "Skill issue" here - getting better at the game will make this less a problem. But it does effectively mean you will play about to the same point over and over again to grind for currency to get upgrades like more lives, which get dramatically more expensive per upgrade.

If you like Breakout clones, Drawkanoid is very fun and scratches that itch, but expect to play an indefinite amount of runs before you have a chance to beat it.

Another pretty basic beat em up. I lost all my lives by the start of the second level and boredquit when playing "Remix Mode". People who have put more time than me can give a more in depth review of whats good or bad here, but I didn't see much worth staying for. It also felt like my forward, forward attack move didn't always activate when I need it.

Other than maybe the setting, there isn't anything going on here you haven't seen in better brawlers.