Senaste recensioner av Rusty

An Elder Scrolls game without combat and a fairly unique painting mechanic. Eastshade manages to nail that drive to explore and go off the beaten track that you have in Scrolls games. It doesn't need combat because the beautiful scenery, quirky characters and your ability to capture the world on canvas, are fine replacements.

Not perfect by any means as performance is pretty janky and there are no key rebindings.

Get dropped into a ♥♥♥♥ looking map that's probably been ripped entirely from an Unreal asset, get rushed by zombie clones and if you can figure out how to draw your weapon, fight with the truly awful shooting mechanics until you die. Asset trash blast from the past.

Imagine if Steam were to somehow lose the store wars leaving us with the miserable prospect of a future in which we can only look forward to games like Cold Cable Lifeshit; an amateur project cobbled together in Game Guru. It looks hideous, is poorly designed and has ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thick AI. Sometimes the enemies don’t even respond to you so enjoy walking around the ugly environments looking for keys until you’re too bored to continue.

A bit like the 1979 game Lunar Lander but with nicer graphics and slightly more complex mechanics; Newt’s Voyage is still fairly simple by modern standards, perhaps betraying its mobile roots. Gameplay wise, you control a selection of spaceships by making slight adjustments to their thrusters with the directional keys, all whilst collecting items and avoiding obstacles.

Despite the casual gameplay there is a fairly high skill ceiling as the levels quickly get more difficult and require more precise manoeuvring of your ship. The question here is; do you have the patience to go through the same gameplay loop over and over until you’ve mastered it? This often depends on how enjoyable you find that gameplay. I didn’t particularly enjoy it and was ready to give up the moment I started dying multiple times. Your mileage may vary and the game is free so you can see for yourself.

Runs like a lame, arthritic tortoise and plays like the worst version of the scarecrow levels from Arkham Asylum that your mind could possibly conceive. Viewing the sun through a high powered telescope would be easier on the eyes and mind than this audio-visual nightmare.

If all you’re looking for is more Subnautica gameplay, Subnautica: Below Zero will suit you just fine. If you’re looking for an atmospheric exploration game with subtle storytelling that’s more frightening than most horror games, then you’re out of luck (Check out my impressions video for some more thoughts and some early gameplay footage).
https://youtu.be/RAoiGn6njY4
That’s not to say that S:BZ is lacking all the things that made Subnautica one of my games of 2018, it just has them to a lesser degree. This might have something to do with how recently I finished playing the original, but it’s also down to some of the changes they’ve made in the storytelling and in the lack of significant changes to the gameplay.

When I started playing the most glaring issue in my mind was how familiar everything felt. Subnautica was constantly surprising and exploration rewarded you with new items, biomes, story and lore. Here I felt like I was going through the motions once again, crafting identical starting items with often identical resources. It’s like playing Subnautica with an arctic skin which is extremely disappointing from a gameplay perspective. The game even teases you with a fully equipped base –the kind you might’ve built in Subnautica- before ripping it away.

The developers have also decided to go with a voiced protagonist this time round. From my admittedly limited playtime this appears to have affected the atmosphere and player incentive. Subnautica trapped you on a planet after your ship crashed, killing the other survivors off-screen. The only contact you got was through a one way radio and your pda.

You were incentivised to find supplies to survive because no one else was going to help you. You were also compelled to explore not only to find out what happened to the other passengers, but to find a way to escape. In S:BZ you don’t feel isolated or that incentivized because your sister offers to pick you up in a rescue ship from the off. Why a character would explore such a hostile environment without available help alone is beyond me, and this silliness takes away some of the fear that was in Subnautica. The jocular nature of the protagonist's radio banter doesn’t help.

This is very early access so a lot can change (my review included) in the next year, but I’ll only dive back in once the game’s finished. Perhaps the samey gameplay will feel less of a chore by then and I’ll be up for exploring this brrrr-ave new world. The developers managed to grab me with Subnautica so I have faith that they can turn this around. Hopefully the story will be engrossing enough to keep me playing and perhaps they’ll be some exciting gameplay tweaks. Fingers crossed.

The premise is a good one; throw a small child into a world of monsters ripped from various folk tales. Unfortunately the execution is so poor that I simply can’t recommend this.

The game is actually fairly well presented and could perhaps work as a creepy 2D puzzle platformer if it wasn’t for the terrible game design. Like Limbo but worse, Incubo is a game in which you have to die to progress. Almost every section with an enemy or puzzle requires you to lose numerous times to bypass it. Often you can’t even see the solution to an area until you’ve died several times. This trial and error gameplay is made all the worse by the sluggish movement and patchy checkpoints which require you to play sections of the game over and over. Some sections also seem to require very specific actions or precise movements to beat, which leads to frustration. This is death to a horror game too, as the repetition kills any tension built by the visuals and sound effects.

If you disliked the seemingly random nature of Limbo’s gameplay then you’ll surely dislike Incubo.

SYNTHETIK Arena appears to be a free to play taste of the developers other game, SYNTHETIK: Legion Rising. It has fewer features than that game but still contains quite a bit of content. All game modes, classes and weapons (outside the premium pack) appear to be unlockable through play, which is nice. It even has multiplayer.

This is an enjoyable top down shooter with lots of weapon and enemy variety. The missions all do appear a bit samey but there is another variety in classes and customisation that I don’t think you’ll get bored too quickly.

My main issue with the game is the reload system which requires you to eject your clip and then reload. That’s probably down to my ineptitude though, and the fact that I’m not very good at these fast paced reaction heavy games. My brain breaks down with all the internal management you have to do and there appears to be a lot of stuff to remember on the surface. I could see myself getting better with time though, and for a free to play game this is definitely worth putting some time into.

One of a few games published by SMU Guildhall over the last couple of years, and probably my favourite. This publisher is slightly different in that it's also a graduate video game education program. All the games published by SMUG are developed by different teams of students and are free to play.

Plays a bit like a basic Zelda dungeon stripped of combat and items; also Link is an adorable frog with a very limited moveset. Its casual puzzle solving in a nice looking environment and it’s also incredibly short. The cynic in me wonders if Steam really needs these relatively shallow student projects when it’s full to bursting. Then I think of all the embarrassing trash on this store made by people who aren’t students and I’m totally ok with it. For zero money it’s well worth a go, especially if you have young kids that you want to introduce to the wonderful world of video games.

Like Hunt Down The Freeman the focus of this mod seems to be on telling a unique, canonical story set in the Half-life universe, and also like HDTF, it's a pile of ♥♥♥♥. You can view a section of each chapter in my impressions video, not because I wanted to play the whole thing you understand, but because I got stuck on each one.
https://youtu.be/E7Nxx8maBPw
This is the HDTF School of game design with no clear goal for the player, frustrating enemy encounters, bland environments and poor level design. The combat is made worse by all the particle effects and blinding lights, and the horrible red filter that overlays the screen when you're injured is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ obnoxious. Then there's the fact that whenever you go near a wall your gun points to the side, which is really useful in the middle of a gun battle; comes with the added bonus of nullifying your torch.

It’s all big mess, a hodgepodge of assets thrown into a big Source pot with no care for how it all turns out or for where the ingredients were ‘sourced’ from. Titanfall cough cough. It’s not quite as insulting as HDTF because at least it’s free and some of the enemy placements seem to be thought out, even if they aren’t enjoyable to actually play.

It just seems like another vanity project from a modder more interested in Half-life’s lore than in that franchises revolutionary gameplay. This once venerable series is being violated again and I don’t think Valve care, which is a little sad in this instance, rather than the ♥♥♥♥ you that was HDTF.

I will give the developer minor credit for letting me experience each level without having to complete the previous one, although that might tell you all you need to know about the quality of said levels.