Recent reviews by solamon77

Now THIS is a Contra game! Hell yeah! My only beef is I wish it was longer, but that's how it is with these kind of games.

A+ game. Don't pay attention to my game time. I played it outside of Steam. I would love to see them do something with The Uninvited next!

This game is great! I'm looking at all the complaint reviews and I'm just not seeing it. It's a shmup, and a hard one at that, but if you pick a sensible upgrade path, and manage your resources right, it's not unbearable.

It's been a long time since someone put this much graphical might into the venerable shmup genre. It's good to see a release like this in the year 2024. If you like shumps, don't miss this one.

Let me get this out of the way right now. This is an absolute masterpiece of a game. You may wonder how I know this considering I only have a half hour of game time. It's because I played the demo for 20 hours before this released! This is like the demo but much much much more! More upgrades, more enemies, more days, more cities, more everything.

UMF is like a game from another dimension where arcades still rule the video game world and vector screens never went out of style. Let me paint a picture for you...

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The year is 20XX. The school bus dropped you off at an early stop. It's a short hike to the local strip mall. It's there your destination lies.

As you approach the nondescript building, your imagination already spinning, and reach out to grab the cold, rough handle. Pulling back, you open the blacked out door and walk into the dark, smoke filled room of your local video arcade. The sounds of pinging pinball machines and the clack of pool tables fills one ear. In the other you hear the digital harmony of 2 dozen arcade cabinets, each playing out the music of their attract modes, begging the gamer to deposit a token. The neon lights from the glowing screens seems all the more phosphorescent from the hazy cigarette smoke.

Then you see it. The new game everyone on the playground was talking about: Utopia Must Die.

You quickly run to the token machine, pop in the lunch money you saved (being full is overrated), and excitedly powerwalk up to the machine. A line has formed already so you line up your token against the bezel on the screen under the marque and wait your turn.

You watch as all the other kids have a go at it "So colorful! WOW! He made it to the 30th day!" Maybe you'll do better. You've heard talk on the playground about some of the crazy enemies you find late into the run, but you're not sure how much is true or how much is just talk, but today you hope to find out.

Your turn has come! You pop in your token, the crowd behind you huddles in close, and begin to play. It's everything they said it would be!
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That's the world this game comes from. A lost era. But at least there's developers like Pixeljam to remind us of those days.

Can't wait to see what you have planned coming up guys! The game is already more than worth the asking price. Even if nothing else is added, it's a complete game right now.

So yeah, buy it now. It's fantastic!

Edit: Just figured I'd check back in after 5 hours and say I'm still loving it!

Easily one of the best RPGs ever released on the PC. Skald does something that's really hard to pull off: it's "retro" but instead of striving to be accurate to the past, it instead aims to be what your memories tell you about those days. So it removes all of the frustrating things about that lost age while keeping the good things.

So I would recommend this not just to those looking to relive the glory days, but to anyone who just loves great writing, great characters, and fantastic RPGs.

Edit: Figured I'd give a quick update now that I finished it. Wow! What a story! I'll be thinking about this ending for a long time to come. This game was fantastic and I can't wait to see what the dev does next!

Absolutely yes. Starcom Nexus does hard sci-fi right. I haven't been this entertained by a sci-fi story in a long time. Plus, it has a really compelling game loop. I loved building up my ship into an unstoppable destroyer!

Pretty good game that honestly could have been great if they polished the controls a bit more. Aside from the games handling, everything else is excellent. I still think it's worth most people's time, but you'll spend your time feeling like the game could have been so much more.

Edit: Adding on now that I've finished it. There's SO much to like about this game that it's all the more painful how janky the controls are. And the jank gets worse the further in you go once the game starts asking you to do more with the controls. Plus, in the later levels there's a lot of parts where it's not exactly clear what the game wants you to do. I had to look up a video walkthru. So know that going into this, that's what you will face.

But in reward, you will get a pretty darn good fairy tale style story, great art, interesting characters, and a cute and fun main character. So if you don't mind struggling a bit, I think you'll enjoy the game. Still though, imagine what could have been if the game design team kept up with the art and story team.

This game should have gotten more attention. It's really good! And it actually has a competent and interesting story, which is a rarity in the metroidvania genre.

Definitely falls more on the Metroid side of things, which I'm sure you can tell just by the graphics alone.

Also, btw, this game really puts the maze element back into the metroidvania genre. Don't bother with this if you don't like getting lost. I do, so I was really happy with the lack of hand holding.

Either way, it's a fantastic game and I recommend it to all metroidvania fans.

It's an alright game for what it is. I payed I think $2 for it and it was fun to relive a Joe & Mac adventure.

A fantastic horror game. I will admit, I went into this assuming there would be some kind of supernatural element only to discover that World War 1 is horrific enough without any ghosts or monsters. I really commend the dev for choosing to go this route instead of adding zombies or something. It gives the game distinction.