Recent reviews by tcassat

What I thought would just be silly nostalgia-based entertainment turned out to be a very well-written game. I recommend it to anyone who wants to remember the early days of the Internet, have fun with all the funny content, explore a fictional operating system, download lots of interesting original music "illegally", etc., and while doing all this, discover the story of characters you'll become attached to.

I wanted to finish all the games before leaving a review, but I realized that this will require at least 50 hours of gameplay, and I have my doubts about dedicating that much time to this game...

My expectation with UFO50 was to feel like I was exploring real old games from a parallel dimension or something (as the game's intro indicates). What I felt was that I was playing a collection of average modern indie games. In basically everything, from the mechanics, to the gameplay twists, to the pixel art, to the audio, it's all 85% modern indie games, and only 15% old games. The devs have failed in their historical research, if they think they're representing things from back then with any fidelity. Making references to multiple famous games is not the same thing as creating a simulacrum of an ancient era.

It's as if UFO50 was more of a tribute to the amateur indie scene of 2010-2019 than old 1980-1989 ganes.

Regarding the games themselves, you have the formula you've come to expect from the vast majority of indies: a strong reference to old games, but with a twist on the formula. Not all games follow this pattern, but most fit it. Once the twist gets old, you're back to relying on gameplay fundamentals, and that's when you realize that most of UFO50's games are pretty shallow. Much shallower than the good games of the 1980/90s, in fact.

There are some genuinely entertaining games in the collection, don't get me wrong, but even these are usually pretty shallow. The only playable shooter, for example, is fun (Seaside Drive), but after playing its 4 levels, it's not like there's much to explore. But okay, that's understandable, the guys made 50 games, so nobody expected games with depth comparable to “true” games, the real problem is that many of the games in the collection don't even manage to be entertaining on their own.

Star Waspir, for example, is one of the worst shmups I've ever played, and I'm not exaggerating. Planet Zoldath is a fetch quest where you have two slots for items and have to swap them all the time in a procedural world with terrible controls, a horrible game. Paint Chase is relatively addictive, but I wonder how thirsty someone needs to be for games to really devote more than an hour to it. I'd say the same for Campanella 1, you'd have to be abstinent from games to consider dedicating a lot of time looking for secret cofees in a game with such simplistic gameplay. Golfaria is annoying. Fist Hell is a beat'n up that misses out on several of the genre's basic fundamentals. Night Manor has an uninspired story and a gimmick that just wastes your time as you try and solve the game's puzzles. Onion Delivery is simply unpleasant to play. And so on...

Finally, I don't think this game will age well, many of the players who are loving the experience will at some point start to get out of the mindset that the context of the game puts you in, stop caring about collecting items and winning gold and cherry discs, and at that point UFO50 will have to sustain itself just because of the quality of its games. That's when many will begin to realize that Campanella, Mini and Max, Velgress, Magical Garden, Pilot Quest, etc., aren't as interesting as they once seemed.

In my opinion, UFO50 will not stand the test of time, and I'm going to leave this review here for the next years to see if my claim will be vindicated.

NOTE: this game was highly rated by critics, with a 90/100 on Metacritics, but most games are going to be 6/10, 7/10, with a few points off the curve (both up and down). It's being overrated by the critics.

An excellent Japanese shoot'em up that runs flawlessly at high resolutions and high frame rates, without stutters, without frame pacing problems, a perfect experience which is rare for this type of game on PCs.

I didn't want to leave a negative review, but in a fit of rage I uninstalled the game and decided to leave this review as a warning to players: DON'T PLAY WITH A MAGE!

I played for about 40 hours with one, holding on as long as I could, but there comes a time when the unpleasant gameplay this class brings will drive you crazy. The problem with playing as mage is simple: when a spell fails, you are punished harshly because mana is very valuable. And guess what? You're going to miss spells all the time, even if you're wearing light armor to avoid the penalty. Even with only a 3% accuracy penalty, I missed 6 (SIX!) spells in a row, using up all my mana, against an enemy who drains your mana and runs twice a turn (i.e. when he gets close to the mage with no armor, no mana, no s#it, there's nothing else to do). And you won't only miss projectiles, but basically everything. You try to freeze the enemy, you miss the spell. You try to silence him so he can't cast spells... oops! You missed the mute spell. So now you have to retreat while consuming your precious potions, which require a whole laborious process to make (from farming to alchemy, which consumes expensive bottles).

In other words. The whole experience is miserable. The game is extremely unpleasant to play, even though there are some good things about it.

In short: there is something of value in this game, but please, make an archer, ignore the wizard completely, unless you want to subject yourself to digital torture.

Sometimes spending time on a silly task that doesn't require much concentration, skill or thought is all anyone needs, but after playing Vampire Survivors for around 17 hours I've started to revise this idea that spending time on pointless activities is harmless, especially when the activity uses a lot of little psychological tricks to get you engaged in a task that is essentially nothing.

Of course, not everything we do needs to have some kind of transcendental meaning, but holy s#it, this game goes overboard when it comes to trapping the player with "worthless" things. I know no one will read this, but I'll leave it here anyway: don't buy this game, it's the closest you'll ever get to digital degeneration.

Basically, when you're too tired to do some complex task and just need to spend a few minutes doing something silly to rest your brain, do anything but play this game. Create a house of cards, read some silly book, play some old game ROM for a few minutes, close your eyes and start meditating, whatever you do will be better for your mind and your well-being.

I'm going to delete this s#it so I don't fall into the temptation of wasting time on this piece of garbage again.

Very good, you can see the author's superhuman effort to make every mechanic of the game as fun and functional as possible. This is a truly unique game. The author is said to have worked on the game for 12 years, and you can tell.

A kind of visual novel, where your decisions on what to add to the files of the people under investigation will affect the events and the ending.

The writing is excellent, dealing with the controversial topic of citizen surveillance in the age of the Internet and all that it can cause, from the good, like preventing a terrorist attack and saving innocent lives, to the bad, like putting too much power in the hands of the establishment, which in turn can use it to ruin innocent lives.

This game is bad. For those who have a vague memory of having played previously on PC, know that this is not the same version made in the Build Engine (which is also quite bad), is based on the Saturn and Playstation versions.

The point is... Powerslave was never a phenomenon at the time it was released, something that is quite fair by the way, people had hundreds of better gaming options on consoles at the time. The fame of this game is something more recent, mainly popularized by youtubers who liked to show the game as a kind of programming magic (mainly because the engine was used to port things like Quake to the Saturn). Then the fame was further enhanced by the "revolutionary" metroidvania style, something that newer players think is something modern, when in fact it is not.

About the game itself, it is a bad FPS, with bad enemies, bad level design, bad weapons, bad movement, bad flow, bad graphics, bad sound effects, bad backtracking, bad ammunition system, bad health system, bad textures, bad platforming and the only motivation to play it nowadays is for historical curiosity.

A game with potential but that has been abandoned in a broken version for a long time. Don't buy it.

As for the game itself, is a city builder whose differential are the regional scales. It is the only city builder I know that tries to offer dimensions compatible with the real world, you can get maps of 70km x 70km approximately, which is more than most metropolises in the real world need...

The good news ends there, though. The artwork is null, the graphics are pretty poor and the music sounds like a random string of notes (it is impossible to play this game with the music on for more than 5 minutes). The simulation is quite precarious with few things being calculated other than routes the inhabitants need to take, which is broken in the latest version, by the way. The menu is too amateurish and horrible. The performance is poor even though the graphics look like they come from a game from the late 1980s. Etc.

I didn't want to review the game yet because it is clearly not complete. After so long that the devs don't communicate anymore, however, I think it is safe to conclude that the game has been abandoned. Even if the devs appear out of nowhere and continue working on the game, however, I don't see much possibility of them turning this into acceptable software, so I think it's safe to not recommend this game and move on.

The game has all the problems of Serious Sam 4, from performance to the absurd amount of overpowered things that make any balance impossible. Five levels isn't enough either, but now with survival missions and access to the workshop, lack of content should no longer be a problem.

The level design, especially of the first two levels, has a quality level above Serious Sam 4. The first two levels are very interesting, they have varied situations and battles that remind you of the classic Serious Sam in the way they flow.

The third level is more about exploration, as if it were a small "open world". I'm not a fan of this approach but it works well.

The fourth and fifth levels are the more modern style where you use your overpowered tools to hold line against a bunch of enemies. In my opinion, this is the worst type of level Serious Sam has to offer and unfortunately it's the theme of the last two levels. Still, they aren't bad, they're just more on the braindead side of the action, but they're still fun with good moments.

For fans of Serious Sam, it's another one of these imperfect games that has its charm and moments, so it's recommended. Also, I think it's more recommendable than SS4 for those who aren't a fan of the series and are just looking for an older style FPS.