Recent reviews by sheybey

If you're like me and Alt+F4'd out of XCOM the first time you missed a 90% shot, this game is for you. Reminds me of Into The Breach. Moving things around is just as important (often more important) than doing damage. Lots of opportunities to knock your enemies out a window. You know what's going to happen on your turn, and if you don't like it, you can go back and do things differently. That is this game's main gimmick - an undo button. It's limited to your turn only so it doesn't completely trivialize the game.

Don't be fooled by the first act, which is deceptively easy. The difficulty ramps up quite nicely over the second and third acts, which kept me hooked enough to finish them in a single day, taking a day off of work to do so. The final boss battle has a great gimmick that forces you to think outside the warehouse in a game that already makes you think outside the box.

This game has a lot of Tom Francis signature humor. If you don't mind some dad jokes, you will like it. If rolling your eyes makes you want to quit, you might not. I personally think it's charming and that it succeeds where Borderlands failed. I largely tolerated Borderlands 2's humor, but this game has gotten more than one sensible chuckle out of me.

All of the levels are hand-designed, and it shows. I think you would have a hard time picking a perk loadout that can't beat a level. It's fairly generous with perk refund points so you can respec if you don't like what you have, but I never felt the need even through the end of the game.

The sound design is also a somewhat unexpected and very pleasant upside. I'm used to tactics games like XCOM that have very generic and tinny gun sounds and not a whole lot else. Tactical Breach Wizards has a very satisfying *thud* when someone hits a wall (which is how you will be doing most of your damage) and a nice variety of glass and wood breaking sounds for when you knock somebody off the map.

The cel-shaded visual style is executed well for the most part (just don't look at the characters' eyes too much during cutscenes...) I have never had difficulty figuring out what's happening during gameplay, with bright and punchy but not overly noisy particle effects to denote status effects and damage/knockback being done. Aside from the eyes, the only complaint I've had is that it can be difficult to tell what parts of the environment block LOS, but there is a handy LOS indicator while you're aiming abilities, and you can always try something out and undo if you misinterpreted the environment.

Overall, I'm very happy with this game. The undo button is balanced extremely well to remove most of my complaints about other tactics games - chance as a primary mechanic, having to memorize exactly how each and every enemy will behave, having to risk losing or go through a lengthy tutorial just to learn how a new ability works - without removing the difficulty.

As an added bonus, the game runs flawlessly under Proton Experimental with no tinkering required. I don't have a steam deck but I bet it would work well on that.

Now that I've finished the game, I have one more complaint. The ending commits the minor sin of resolving a few plot threads in dialog choices. Maybe I'll go back and redo the final mission to see the other choices, maybe I won't. The final fight was enjoyable but I don't know that I want to go back and do it again. I'll definitely be going back to finish the one-off challenge missions though, and overall still an easy recommend.

This is not a horror game. It's a party game where the objective is to die first so you can laugh at your friends as they die and then blame them when you don't meet quota.

Most comprehensive firearms sim I've ever seen, with an addictive roguelike mode where you shoot hotdogs for good measure. Has displaced Team Fortress 2 as my go-to game after work, see the number of hours I have in TF2 as to how big of an accomplishment this is.

Don't believe the in-game difficulty ratings, Sawayama is way harder than Fortune's Foundation.

⛏️🪨➕🥌

MARK LOP
KILL
JUMP LOP

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Risk of Rain 2 is a walking simulator which features ultra-realistic meteorological models as well as a breathtaking selection of beautiful umbrellas.

Terminal-based hacking sim with optional GUI. If you are familiar with using bash and the GNU userland in the real world, you will notice some edge cases (particularly with cd) that are valid commands in bash, but won't work in-game. It doesn't detract too much from the game overall, though - it's still a high quality emulation of the traditional unix environment.

The plot is a little predictable but is still interesting. There are a few interesting subplots, and I was pleasantly surprised at how deeply the world is fleshed out. You can even hack into the in-game mail server and read other people's messages.

Note that if you are on an optimus laptop, the game defaults to running on the integrated GPU, which can cause it to chug if you have all of the graphical effects on.

The humor can get a little risque, but the writing is top-notch. I was surprised to find myself actually getting invested in the story and remembering the all the characters' favorite drinks. I only made one mistake in my first playthrough. There are not many games nowadays that can so thoroughly command my attention.

If you enjoy visual novels (Phoenix Wright, Professor Layton, etc.) in any form, 100% recommended.