Recent reviews by joeybuddy96

It's Dark Souls. There are a million mods to make the game whatever you want it to be.

It's a fun casual game. I wish it had keyboard shortcuts; it's mostly mouse-based.

I didn't personally enjoy it. The art style is really uneven. It's a mix of nightmare fuel and indie comic oversimplicity. The designs are right in uncanny valley territory. The dialog is boring and isn't funny when it wants to be. None of the characters are likable. The characters take forever to walk around. There's no fast travel. The music is fantastic and I'd recommend at least listening to the soundtrack for it. The minigames were hard to control; not hard in terms of difficulty, just annoyingly slow.

It's edutainmental.

It's spoopy and has physics. It's easy to softlock yourself via the physics, e.g. heavy object blocking door, item gets stuck on its side, etc, but still a lot of fun. It's mostly just atmospheric and grungy or gross rather than scary. Pretty clean compared to a lot of alleyways and houses I've been in though. Still only a few hours into it. 7/10 would imagine virtual odors again.

Uhh it benchmarks stuff. It's glitchy sometimes and isn't open source. The DLC isn't all available for purchase at once.

Pretty fun FPS RPG. Nice story. Not really as deep a dive into Randian objectivism as I'd have hoped. It's more like someone read the slip jacket of Atlas Shrugged and wrote for several days on what would happen if ethics were taken out of the equation. The game looks great, the music is great, and the voice acting is great. It's pretty on-rails sometimes, and some of the collectibles are annoyingly missable. I've only finished the first chapter, so I'll maybe revise my review later. 7/10

Pros:
-Nice variety in the sandbox: each zombie and enemy class has its own behaviors.
-Plenty of a variety of different kinds of scares: fear of starvation, dehydration, exposure, confinement, jump scares, dread, etc..
-It runs immediately as soon as you've installed it. Just be sure to uncheck EAC and it'll work fine. I know this sounds like something you'd take for granted, but very, very few of my Steam games run without game-killing issues that prevent you from playing it at all. *ahem* Echelon: Wind Warriors *ahem ahem*.
-Incredibly fun as a co-op game.
-Grungy without being a limited palette.

Cons:
-It's a WiP. Expect glitches. (e.g. remember to always, always skinny dip if you need to cross a body of water. Otherwise you'll drown on dry land.)
-My system is about three years old. It's resource intensive due to the large number of objects and textures.
-It can be a slow grind at times, but I'm still experimenting with the game as it develops to make things go faster.
-Limited character creation options. Needs a boobie size option.
-Once you're out of the tutorial, the game doesn't explain much at all. They've got text documents in-game, but aside from that, you're on your own in a very complex crafting sim. I've had to learn much of what I know from my friends who played it before me. Sitting and reading and sifting through wiki articles isn't a game--it's prep for playing, sure, but it's way inferior to games that have at least the option of hand-holding.
-I wish more games would give foley the attention it needs. It seems games like this either have ancient stock sound clips, a limited variety of sound or voice clips, or have corny human imitations of animal and environmental sounds.

YMMV:
-Stripper zombies.
-I haven't tried PvP yet. The game is already very difficult, I can imagine this mode is only for people who have gotten bored with the co-op and SP versions.
-It's a difficult game. Very easy to die when the difficulty is set to default. Expect to restart at least a dozen times before you get to Day 8 alive. It's also very rewarding because of the challenge.

8/10 buy it!

Alan Wake is one of those bittersweet games where you feel great after playing it, but sad that there's not more of it beyond the expansion pack. The game has so many bizarre and perspective-shifting events in it. It's like Twilight Zone meets Dark Shadows meets psychological horror. Just when you think you've got the world packed into a neat little box, you realize you've only got one piece out of many sorted out. The character dialog and character interaction is fluid and multi-layered, the character arcs that explore each facet of the characters are fascinating. The twists are wild and exciting. The music is appropriately quirky and discordant.

The mechanics aren't really the best part of the game. It's better as an interactive movie. It's not the best shooter, survival horror game, or jump-scare game. The combat can get repetitive. Not repetitive enough that it becomes a chore though. The action stays tense and the difficulty ramp is reasonable. Get it and the stand-alone whether it's on sale or not. 8.3/10

2/10. This is one of the first games I bought on Steam, probably around 2009 or 2010. It had problems with randomly crashing in the middle of a battle and erasing all progress. When I played it again in 2014, it still had problems with random crashes in single player campaign mode. The single overriding factor in rating a game is that the game can be played. If the game can't be played, it's a brick. For the twenty or so minutes that the game is available to play, it is fun. Kind of repetitive, and annoying to try to find the target you're supposed to kill in order to win a round, but fun nonetheless. There was an expansion pack called Scorched Earth that used to be available. It's no longer available in the Steam store or for purchase from anywhere else, which means that content is permanently inaccessible to people who didn't buy it when it was available.