Recent reviews by Entropy

This game is best to play with friends, I'd not recommend going in solo. You can join random players, but it's just not the same if you have some people to talk to in your favorite discord server :D

I really enjoy the gun play and overall progression. There are a lot of weapons and tools to unlock, and each of them feel good to use. The overall "narrative" is well done and has helped to build a fun community. The developer continues to support the game with free patches, and the ingame monitization is entirely optional. You can unlock everything by playing, and to me it does not feel like a grind, because the gameplay itself is just fun :)

Because of the bright and colorful art style many people will probably not think that this could be a soulslike game, but the core game play and design is very well executed! You have all the ingredients you need for a good soulslike: engaging combat, looping level design and hard boss fights. This studio proves that the soulslike genre can have lots of colors and goofy animations and a funny story - not everything needs to be grim and dark all the time.
Additionally, this game can be enjoyed by many more players because of the built-in accessibility features, like not dropping your souls/microplastics on death, for example.
On of the best features imho is that you can respawn at the boss you just died at instantly, collect your lost microplastics and choose whether or not to continue fighting the boss. This feature should be in every soulslike imho :)

One of the best roguelite action games out there! The combat feels very fast due to smooth animation canceling, which let's you dodge and parry during your own attack animations. I personally love this kind of gameplay because you are constantly engaged with the enemies, with almost no down time during combat.
I also love that enemy attacks are clearly indicated with visual and sound effects, making it clear when you can parry them (unlike many other games where you have to watch the attack animation very closely). If you select the perk that replenishes your stamina completely upon a successful parry, the action almost never stops :)
There are 3 different biomes you can select at the start of a new run, each with 3 sub-regions and 1 boss/champion for each sub-region. Each run randomizes the layout of the "rooms" and each room has some randomized elements to it, like enemy spawns and loot. I found it easy to put a lot of hours into this game because it was always fresh!
The meta-progression might be the only thing that doesn't stand out to me. It's serviceable but ran out of steam for me after around 20 hours. I still played almost 20 hours more after that, so it's fine ;)

I cannot recommend this game enough!
Against The Storm is a unique blend of the Base-Building and Roguelite genres. If you like Base-Building you can expect very deep management gameplay, which is varied for each settlement you start due to the roguelite nature of the game.

Each cycle clears and randomizes the world map, and during one cycle you start one settlement ("Embarkation") after another. During one cycle you can embark on a new settlement roughly around 8 to 12 times, and one settlement takes 45 to 60 minutes, which I found hits the sweet spot :)

You can pause and exit the game at any time, and since the game launches very very fast (on an SSD at least) you can even just jump in and play for like 20 minutes if you don't have that much time. I found it very easy to jump in and out of a match and get my bearings again.

Building a settlement itself is very engaging. You are constantly exploring the randomly generated map and try to work with what you have been given. It makes for a fresh experience each time, which is great for someone like me who don't likes repetition very much.

Additionally the developer has been very active since the early access period started, and also after the 1.0 release. I'm looking forward to what that studio does next!

I'm not a die-hard souls-like fan, so this review is for people like me who are interested in the genre but never played one. Elden Ring is very likely a must-buy for folks who already enjoyed the previous FromSoftware games.It's hard for me to recommend this game, but in the end the positives outweigh the negatives. Most of my issues come from the fact that I don't like repetition very much. I do like roguelike/roguelites a lot, but there the repetition is not exactly the same every run. In souls-like games you have to go through the exact same areas with the exact same enemies over and over again.Let's start with the positives:

• Exploring the open world is really fun and rewarding! There are a lot of hidden nooks and crannies with interesting gameplay.
• Trying out the different weapons was fun.
• For the most part the melee combat was fun and engaging, at least against small and medium sized enemies. I mostly blocked enemy attacks with my Greatshield and counter attacked, which staggers a lot of enemies directly or after a few successful counters.
• The traditional souls-like death-and-progression-system works really well in this open world. If you are stuck at one point you can just go somewhere else most of the time. You have a lot of freedom where you want to go.

Here are my negatives:

• A lot of the bosses were not fun to fight against for me. Many are just big damage sponges and you have to roll out of their way constantly and chip away at their health one attack at a time before having to roll away again. This was tedious and not engaging for me.
• Some boss fights appear quite sudden. If you have a lot of runes on you and get defeated (which for boss fights you will most likely lose your very first attempt), you have to go back to the boss fight, scramble to get your runes back and try to defeat the boss. This happened to me a few times and it's very frustrating. I know that Lies of P has solved this issue by simply putting the lost Runes/Ergo in front of the boss entrance, so you can choose if you want to continue or not.
• I found it very tedious to get into the lore. Apparently you have to read item descriptions for that, which I did not expect was a requirement for exploring that part of the game.
• I tried out some mage builds but that kind of gameplay was boring to me. You just stand at a distance and spam stuff. I got drawn to the game for the melee combat, so that's not that big of a let down.
• There are some design decisions that could be way better imho, like the fact that Great Runes are kinda useless because you lose their effect upon death, and activating them costs items that you need to farm.

But overall the game is very well crafted with interesting world building and mechanics. If you like challenging combat and open world exploration you should experience it for yourself! If you find constant repetition frustrating you should probably skip this.

This strikes a very good balance between action and tactics. Somewhere in the middle between the Battlefield series and ArmA. You can respawn rather quickly (between 1s and 40s; rolling timers are used) and the gun play feels more forgiving and leans more into the arcade. But almost no guns have scopes, so be prepared to lean towards your monitor a lot :D

Generally this game is played by a more mature audience. In my almost 500 hours I have never encountered any racism or sexism (your mileage may very, of course). I had female squad leads and commanders and nobody cared (i.e. they weren't harassed or made fun of, like in many other online games).

The game is not that well optimized yet, but runs well enough on even my old Radeon RX 480 :)

Awesome strategy/building game.

It isn't a game in the traditional sense. You use an only 90s police computer to search for video footage of a women being interviewed. There is no real gameplay. But the story just hooks you in right from the start. After uncovering it all you actually feel like a detective.

Just great :D