Recent reviews by Jeff

Marathon's art direction is second to none, the atmosphere and gunplay present in the game are absolutely stellar and there is a deep feeling of tension throughout matches that makes this game feel unique and engaging to play.

I am the type of person who likes every ARPG. I love POE, I love POE2, I love Grim Dawn, I love D3 and D4. I love all ARPGS and have spent countless hours in all of them.

So when i say that Diablo 2, including the resurrected version, is the best ARPG I have ever played and one of the best video games ever published, I mean it.

This game sucks incredibly badly. It's glitchy, poorly balanced (best strat is just hide inside all night until the creatures stop spawning) and the creatures are not even remotely stealthy at all, they all just run at you at mach 7 and scream at you. Awful game

Fantastic game.

Dripping atmosphere that you get completely lost in.

Gripping story

Lots of stuff to do

Fairly deep and impactful RPG character building.

9/10

Absolum is a game that I was passively interested in and ended up liking more and more as I continued playing

To start:

The game is absolutely gorgeous and plays like a dream.
Characters are varied in function and design, which makes it fun to play different characters run to run despite the controls being rather simple.
There are many areas and branching paths that are fun to discover and explore, and runs don't typically last that long.
The classic beat-em-up gameplay is timeless and always fun, and it is absolutely buttery smooth in this game. Makes you feel like a total badass all the time.

Now I'm gonna move on to some minor critiques:

1. The writing is so bad it's actually hilarious. Like Laugh Out Loud.Other than Brohm the frog, none of the PCs have any serious personality and respond to most things with single sentences that are more often than not acknowledgements. It emulates old school beatemup dialogue, but not in an endearing way. more like a "we're still doing this?" way. (the only interesting writing is anything narrated by the mother character, typically descriptions of the area or the lore, which is also barebones)

2. The roguelike elements are very sparse and frankly seem tacked on in order to appeal to current customer tendencies which boil down to "If I'm gonna spend 20$ on a game I want 100 hrs out of it". I don't blame the devs for this, but giving all the characters all their moves that you would typically have to collect over a run and putting in a scoring system would have been better IMO than the very barebones roguelike elements which, while sometimes interesting and synergistic in their application, are often nothing more than "your move sometimes does more damage". I understand that it's harder to sell a game that you replay just because it's fun, but I feel this game is an example of the oversaturation of roguelikes in the indie game scene in order to drive sales rather than having something meaningful to contribute to the roguelike genre ala slay the spire or risk of rain 2.

3. The dev team was obviously inspired by fighting games with additions such as the parry, deflect and dodge, and so I think could have benefited from more inspiration such as command combos from DMC and additional, more complex combo routes. Obviously this means animating more moves, so i don't blame them for keeping it simple.

All in all, this game is amazing, and I really enjoy it. I nitpick about the roguelike elements, but when you hit a thunder strike that allows you to continue your air combo or when your thorn daggers are levitated by your teammate and sent towards an enemy in a massive barrage, it works. The fighting is fun and engaging, the game is challenging but fair and the animation and art design are top tier. Buy this game if you love beatemups.

Balatro is one of the best games of the year and one of the best games ever made period.

I hate to leave a bad review because I have followed this game on twitter for a long time and it looked really intriguing.

I played the game for about an hour on stream and a couple things stood out to me:

Animations are slow and clunky.
Enemies are tanky (and seemingly have random health values amongst similarly looking enemies)
Exploration is confusing and slow
Map is good but generally provides no useful info other than floor layout (doesn't say which doors are locked, etc...)
Direction of the game is confusing. There is never an indication of what you're supposed to do or where to go other than very very vague instructions on the pause menu.

Overall i did not enjoy my time with the game but I want to support the continued growth of this developer since I see the skeleton of a great game here.

This game is hauntingly beautiful, dirt cheap and has an absolutely unmatched atmosphere. Must buy

This game should be 60$

I never review games ever but this is a serious 10/10 game. The heart, passion and effort put into this game is only rivaled by the genius and varied level design, fast paced and engaging gameplay, phenomenal musical score and overall off the walls ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amounts of fun you have just playing the game.

Buy this game.

This is a detective game, and I adore detective games. Getting immersed in the world is a very important aspect of these kinds of games and unfortunately that is completely impossible with this game.

The concept is neat: You're a detective trying out a new technology that allows you to listen in to people's conversations and make deductions based off of that. There's just one problem.

The voice acting is ABSOLUTELY ABYSMAL. IT IS ABSOLUTELY GOD AWFUL. It is completely hammy, overacted and extremely extremely cringe. For a game based entirely around listening to dialogue between characters, the immense lack of quality is astounding and unacceptable.

The overacted nature of the VA also means that you can usually guess what happened within 30 seconds.

Overall really bad.