Recent reviews by goka9696

I can fix her

She can make me worse

Crow Country is a short survival horror game that can best be described as charming. It's a very tightly crafted experience that despite some tonal whiplashes here and there managed to keep me invested until the very end of my run. The game has a good amount of puzzles and easy difficulty that removes combat entirely and turns it into more of a mystery title where you need to solve puzzles to progress instead of worrying about the many monstrosities inhabiting the park. I'm not sure if I would recommend it at full price due to how short it is, but I can certainly say that it was made with love and attention.

A surprisingly solid and fun roguelike. Good variety of weapons (which is pretty funny coming from Callisto Protocol), 4 different biomes with unique enemies, fun cast of characters and a pretty unique rivals mechanic that I haven't really seen in any other roguelike, forcing the player to compete with 3 other people for the final escape pod. I'm surprised the game doesn't have coop or even pvp, since both would fit pretty well with the game's design. The game is also pretty cheap.

My main issue are the questionable PC controls. While devs do recommend gamepad, KB/M for the most part works fine, but one glaring issue is the inability to aim charged attacks or GRP strikes with the mouse. Mouse itself is only used to aim your ranged weapon, everything else is aimed via movement keys. It is possible to get used to it and there are some workarounds that allow you to aim with the mouse, such as using GRP while firing, but it would've been nice if the game had proper KB/M controls.

Overall a well made game that is a pleasant surprise. I expected a cheap cash grab, but got an enjoyable roguelike.

My Kino Neighbourhood

SPIDERSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

It is a huge shame, but sadly I can't recommend the game at this time. There's too many game breaking bugs in the first hour or so. I'm not talking about minor stuff, entire scripts responsible for level transitions might break, doors might not open and require noclip to pass, etc. Developer has been promising a new update with additional content and bugfixes, but it's been a year since then, and he's also working on a new title at the same time. Until the supposed update comes out, I can't recommend this title, which is disappointing since the game does have great atmosphere and setting, but the bugs legitimately ruin the experience.

It's like Planet Crafter. There's no actual freedom. You're just going through milestones. No point in playing it.

Wukong is a beautiful game made by devs that clearly put a lot of love and effort into their project. Insane attention to detail in the environments, with dev team actually going to various temples throughout China, beautiful animations at the end of each chapter that tell a specific story from "Journey to the West", great soundtrack, very varied locations and enemies, game only really starts repeating some enemies and animations towards the very end, and even then it's extremely rare, probably less than 3 enemies through the entire game. A lot of bosses have unique gimmicks and aren't just trying to spam long-winded combos that last for ten seconds or more, and with very few exceptions you usually have tools to ensure you are never stuck on the defensive for too long.

I do have issues with the game. Main character often misses his attacks on some of the bigger enemies and bosses, camera can be very slow during boss fights, chapter 2 imo was so dull it almost made me drop the game, some bosses can feel a bit overtuned or just bad, there's an insane amount of invisible walls in the beginning, and yet in later areas some secrets require you to drop down from ledges, resulting in you constantly hitting every boundary with poor monkey's head. But despite everything, I can wholeheartedly recommend this project just because of the amount of passion that developers put into it, and that's not even taking into account that the game overall is better than a lot of the AAA slop we've been getting for years, including some other representatives of the genre. It's not a perfect game by any means, but it's one made by people that actually care about their craft, and aren't just in it to make a quick buck.

Cloak & Dagger is a short stealth game heavily inspired by old Splinter Cell titles. The game features 5 levels (though one of them is a tutorial and only has 2 enemies), with the main challenge being avoiding the guards that cannot be killed or taken out in any way. While developer did add an option to knock guards out from behind, it can be very clunky to use and enemies only stay down for a very limited period of time, so it's best to avoid confrontation entirely if you can help it.

Our spy is equipped with 4 weapons to help him deal with the enemies: a EMP gun that can be used to shock enemies or disable lights and cameras, which is completely silent, or you can charge up a powerful shot that will destroy the lights completely (though not the cameras), but that can be heard by enemies who will arrive to investigate the commotion. The other 3 weapons are all different types of grenades: EMP grenade, the most useful of the bunch, can disable every light source in the environment, though in my experience it doesn't always disable cameras, and I'm unsure if it's a bug or not. Next we have a flashbang, which disables enemies for a limited time, and finally a noisemaker. Frankly, in my playthrough I only ever used the EMP grenade.

Levels in the game are very short, if one were to look on youtube you can easily find walkthroughs of the full game that can take less than 30 minutes overall. However, they aren't without their charm, the Oil Rig level in particular was a pretty big difficulty spike due to cramped environments and confusing layout. Despite their small size, the levels often provide the player with different ways of approaching their objective, such as breakable windows or vents that can sometimes be used to circumvent a large part of the level.

The game can be pretty buggy, particularly during climbing animations, which a few times resulted in me getting completely stuck and unable to move. The final level also had noticeable framerate dips, though overall it was playable and the game never crashed on me. The AI can sometimes bug out and end up stuck on in an alert state, standing in the same spot, which I assume happens because guards are unable to reach the source of the sound and end up stuck in place.

Despite its issues, I did enjoy Cloak & Dagger, and my main issue with it isn't even the price, which isn't all that high, but rather the length. Game is very short, and while, to my knowledge, the dev is currently working on a new title, I wish he made an update or DLC for Shadow Operations with a few new levels. Even with how short they are, if the title had at least twice as many levels I could've easily recommended it, but as it stands this is a very cautious recommend that mostly applies to the fans of the genre, or those willing to support indie devs interested in providing us with the style of game that AAA publishers are not invested in these days.

Sadly in its current state I can't recommend the game. This is less to do with any technical issues, though I did experience one annoying bug with UI scale and game did crash once, my main issue is with the way campaign is designed. Game features a small but very well made tutorial that teaches you pretty much anything you need to know... during small-scale operations. It features two short missions with 2 and 4 squad members each, and a short squad setup sequence in-between. You would think that this is enough to prepare you, but no.

I'll admit, while I do like turn-based strategies quite a lot, I was never really a fan of very old-school titles like Xenonauts or the original X-COM / UFO Defence games. They always felt very overwhelming to me since the games required you to juggle and micromanage a lot of things, which made it hard to follow. This combined with the games' overall complexity resulted in me dropping them pretty fast. I did however enjoy Jagged Alliance 3, which, while not exactly the same, is still quite an old-school title.

Either USC: Counterforce is designed for the old-school players who enjoy such level of micromanagement, or developers really went overboard, because the game's campaign throws you off the deep end right from the beginning. After a short story introduction and extremely short "tutorial" that explains what each screen does you are left entirely to your own devices. I'll list my issues in order of me noticing them as I played:

1. Extremely cluttered and confusing UI for the squad management screen. From the very beginning you have quite a lot of soldiers. I haven't counted, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's at least 20 of them. Each of them starts with a loadout that often doesn't synergize at all with their skillset, has a different rank from colonel, who's your player avatar and the de-facto leader of the entire operation, to ensigns. All of them also start with a few skillpoints you can spread around, though this doesn't change the fact that they already come pre-leveled. As a result, before you even start your first mission you have to go through the tedious process of outfitting every single soldier for the role you want, and set their skillpoints accordingly while keeping in mind their preset stats. All of this imo is just tedious and takes too much time, while at the same moment overwhelming the player with this massive list of soldiers of different ranks, stats and equipment types, but without anything concrete, like specializations.

2. Base building. Unless I missed something, there was no tutorial about it. Apparently from what I've read you technically don't even have to do it if you don't want to. However, if you do, you basically have to figure everything out on the fly. Granted, the game is turn based so you're not actually in any hurry, but still.

3. Overwhelming odds on the very first mission. From what I've seen on the forums the actual objective is to investigate various POIs, such as research sites or military installations, while various hordes roaming the map are actually optional. On my first run I gave a horde a go thinking that I would be met with basic enemies. Imagine my surprise when I was met not with just basic worms and scorpions, but massive juggernauts that look like boss fights. If the game does have increasing levels of challenge, I can't imagine what other monsters it could be hiding, because I'm pretty sure I saw like 8 different enemy types on my first mission alone.

4. Bizarre aiming controls. I might be misunderstanding something, but I genuinely do not understand how game decides where your soldiers can and cannot fire depending on the fire mode you chose. The ranges and actual tiles chosen as potential targets feel entirely arbitrary.

Once again, I admit that I am not really a fan of truly old-school tactics titles like the original X-COM, Xenonauts, old JA games and the like. I did enjoy playing Silent Storm as a kid, but overall it is possible that this specific style of TBS simply isn't for me, however, after looking at the forums and seeing quite a few people voice similar concerns, I feel confident that at least some of my complaints are justified and aren't just a matter of taste. I do hope developers put more work into the Campaign mode and perhaps even improve the UI, since what little I actually did play of the tactical combat (most of my time was actually spent on the campaign map and not during combat) I found pretty enjoyable, but currently it feels like there's just way too much tedious busywork involved.