Recent reviews by Lunix Vandal

Particularly compared to PW1, Project Warlock 2 is an unpalatable, disjointed mess. The visuals are overcooked, the map unreadable, the default headbob nauseating, the movement excessively fast and slippery, the much-advertised gunplay constantly interrupted by the need to thoroughly search every nook and cranny for stat-up tokens. A hard miss for me.

This. Yes. Absolutely this. This is what we need more of in the world. No multi-decade-spanning franchise that has worn out its welcome, no soulless toxic "AAA" studio, no day 1 microtransaction DLC garbage in a full-price game, no life-destroying developer crunch that leads to an unplayable release and forced early retirements. Just a damn fine group of people doing what they love at their own damn pace and being damn good at it. Any year Supergiant drops a new game is a year Supergiant deserves to win GOTY.

Death to Chronos.

Hi-Fi RUSH is, quite possibly, everything I want out of a video game. Gameplay that is fun, first and foremost, layered with an excellent and memorable soundtrack, a diverse and likable cast of protagonists who undergo genuine character growth, and a feel-good story about a group of friends doing the right things for the right reasons being able to overcome soulless corporate greed.

Would-be GotY 2023 contenders take note: Hi-Fi RUSH is king of the hill, and will not be dethroned easily.

20MTD has a nice aesthetic and tries to be a more thinky/tactical action-roguelike compared to e.g. Vampire Survivors, but it has a slapdash sense of game balance that ultimately makes it less fun than the competition. As of the current patch (0.9.1), gun-focused builds are hampered by perks with downsides and anti-synergies, while the new summon and Soul Heart perks have ridiculous self-synergy that turn any character + weapon combination into an unkillable juggernaut with no need to actually use their weapon or unique abilities.

Vampire Survivors has a surprising amount of longevity and replay value for a game listed at $5 -- I'd call it a bargain at twice the price. Oodles of playable characters (one for each of the dozens of weapons in the game), a wide variety of maps and enemy types, and an excellent soundtrack, all without the hot microtransaction garbage that plagues mobile games in the genre. If it has one flaw, it's that a "winning" run on most maps under default settings takes well over half an hour, a significant portion of which you may be able to go AFK due to your upgrades making you as-like-unto-immortal.

Three out of four stars, would kill Death with his own scythe again.

The grip was a bit awkward to adjust to at first, but the Steam Controller quickly became one of my favorite controller designs of all time. The sheer utility of being able to reassign every button and custom-tweak the stick and trackpads' inputs, sensitivity, and deadzones was a godsend for games where a controller was desirable but the in-game options were lacking. Mine finally had a shoulder button break after five years of on-and-off use, and I was hugely disappointed to see the "No Longer Available" tag on the Steam storefront -- you can be sure that the day Valve announces a successor or another production run I'll be ordering one on the spot.

A worthy successor to Batterystaple's previous "Mega Man but it's a Roguelike" title, 20XX. Already has a much larger pool of in-run items, more fleshed-out metaprogression, and more distinct level themes with more variety within each theme ... all of which is expanding with each regularly-scheduled update.

My only real gripe with 30XX, as-is, is that much of the game uses high-saturation and/or low-contrast color schemes -- combined with the amount of on-screen chaos in certain areas, I get noticeable levels of eye fatigue *very* quickly, and to a much greater extent than with most other games I've played.

December '22 update: Between the developer's suggestion to lower the Bloom setting and the new Visibility options to add outlines to sprites and dim the background, my eyestrain issues with this game are pretty much completely gone. A++ game, A++ devs, can't wait to see what's planned for 2023. ♥

The good:
- Solid "two-button" rhythm gameplay (protip: Type-C and -D inputs have three buttons mapped to each input, and Custom Buttons gives you up to four -- great for higher difficulties)
- Good spread of difficulty levels, with 2-4 charts available per song
- Hours and hours of Japanophile-pleasing music
- Aguably the most sensible DLC pricing I've ever seen -- instead of overcharging for the base game and nickel-and-diming the player on DLC, Muse Dash puts the cost where the content is
- Sexycute aesthetic

The bad:
- Ongoing development and support was handed off to a subsidiary of the original publisher. In the process, this broke support for linking your save to your Steam account instead of using a third-party login. Many users are also experiencing problems with the game not recognizing purchased DLC. In both cases, Peropero has refused to acknowledge that the problem is on their end, blaming users and refusing to give a timeline for a fix.
- "Are ya winning, son?"

Overpriced for what you get -- the DLC adds nothing to the game until after you've cleared the base game's story, and except for the new mutations and time trials it's almost entirely rehashing the base game's Revenge and Apex Hunt filler content. The new exploration zone is poorly optimized, causing significant lag whenever you open the map (and given the number of quest objectives there, it happens a lot). Truth Quest also has the unfortunate post-base-game effect of replacing the "Animal Planet feel-good documentary pastiche" voiceovers with tasteless conspiracy-theory rambling.

The one bright spot in the whole mess are the new mutations, which give the player 1) a better ranged option than Shadow tailwhips and return-to-sender'ing the hunters' explosives, 2) better splash damage than the Electric set, and 3) better survivability and boat damage than the Bone set. They are, uh, "kinda OP," and (poorly) balanced only by needing far more Nutrients to level up (especially Mutagen) compared to any base-game content.

An unholy mashup of Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, and Slay the Spire.

And Pony Island. Oh good lord the mindscrews. I legitimately sat in numb shock for like ten minutes after the ending cutscene.

10/10, would unzip the OLD_DATA again.