Recent reviews by Rusty

If you like retro games, this is amazing. You get 50 neat little games with this. It's like an entire alternate catalog of NES and SNES games. You can often tell what the games were inspired by, but everything has an original twist to it, there aren't really any boring clones.

When I first saw that this was the next game that the devs of Spelunky had made, I wasn't so sure about it, but now that I've played it, I've got to say that I'm impressed with what they did. It's 100% this meme:
"I want shorter games with worse graphics, made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding"

It's like rocket league, but with Fifa Street controls.

Games depend a lot on your team mates, like in any other team based online multiplayer.

Controls seem a bit weird at first, but once you get used to it, you will realize that the game gives you nice control over dribbling, passing and shooting. There is much less BS than in Fifa/eFootball. There's no p2w, only skins, so for this reason Rematch is already a much better game and the only thing I will play from now on, when I get the urge for some virtual football.

One major drawback to me is that the game doesn't have splitscreen or an offline mode against bots. It would be nice if those features could still be added later on.

It's like a big singleplayer CS surf map with bots. Fun movement shooter!

The bossfights were cool, but also a bit janky. Story is basically non-existant. There's a good variety of guns and it looks like the game can also be played in co-op with optional PvP. The Steam Workshop update for custom maps and the addition of a randomized rogue mode are nice for replayability.

Duck Game, but it's like an FPS from the early 2000s. Free, without bull$hit.

If you didn't play Duck Game, you should, but what this means is you have short battles that end quickly, you get points if you win. You play a couple rounds, then the map switches. Whoever reaches a certain amount of points wins.

The focus on 1v1 is a nice break from all the team-based multiplayer games we have now.
This puts the game in the unique spot of being the best 1v1 FPS game (tell me of a better one if you disagree).

CS 1.6 cursed style graphics are all you need for a fun multiplayer FPS.
The variety of maps is impressive; movement and gunplay is good.
If you're someone with little time, it's a perfect game for quick sessions.

The only problem is I get about 2 crashes every hour. I see it as a feature, so I don't play too much. I'm willing to overlook this fault, since it's a game made by just three guys.
(still fix the crashes)

If you like FPS games even a little bit, give this one a try. It's good fun.

It's janky, bland nonsense. Even as a f2p game it wasn't worth the couple of hours I spent on it.

Annoyances:
- You can't rebind all keys, even though some default keybinds suck
- You can't turn off chromatic aberration, a graphical effect that makes things blurry and adds a slight purple/bluish outline around most objects
- Random disconnects/lag on an otherwise stable internet connection
- Weird translations all over the place, wooden dialogue, or rather monologues since barely any characters talk to to each other, they just instruct you or lore dump, while your character nods. It's not even good cringe because it's so boring.
- This is what made me leave, when I found out: Servers reset when a new season starts and you lose your base and gear. Screw that. Please let me decide when I want to start a new game, don't just force delete saves.

The one good thing that the game showed me is that I should probably play Days Gone because cruising around a zombie apocalypse on a motorcycle is fun. But just directly ripping off that idea feels very lazy.

I only tried this because of the apparently large playerbase, but don't let that fool you. Many other co-op PvE games are better. I'd even rather play through L4D again for the millionth time.

So Activision puts this game on sale, knowing that a big reason for buying it is to play the H2M mod.
Then after the sale, they send a cease & desist letter to the mod developers. They did this so quickly I didn't even have time to play the mod. What a great way to show your players that you despise them and see them as nothing but dumb cattle to be exploited for money. This is such ridiculously scummy behavior, I can't help but imagine the responsible marketing idiot/CEO is rubbing his slimy hands together, while grinning like the joker and laughing maniacally. Is this really what you want players to think of your company? Nothing but heartless, greedy A$$holes.

I try to open the game, so I have enough playtime to write a negative review. That doesn't even work. Instead I'm greeted by and ugly, meaningless windows error "Out of Memory". So the game doesn't even start properly. I'm guessing the development team consists mostly of clowns and they didn't bother opening their software to do the most basic testing. This smells like the laziest kind of console port.
I look up if there's a fix and it involves downloading some files and moving them around. Can't be bothered to do that and just leave the error on the screen for half an hour while doomscrolling the bad reviews for the game.

Enjoy the hate, Activision. You deserve every single bad review and more than that really, the company deserves bankruptcy at the very least. Let this company and series crash and burn.

It's not worth your time currently and most likely never will be.

I noticed Stormgate, when it was being hyped up to be the next Starcraft / Warcraft RTS. I think that the hype was mostly wishful thinking from RTS players who are disappointed with Blizzard's neglect of SC2 and the failure of making a good game out of Warcraft III: Reforged (while nuking the original Warcraft III on battlenet). So understandably people are hoping for a spiritual successor.

Stormgate isn't it. The campaign is so bad it drags the entire game down with it and makes me want to avoid it completely. I played the first 3 missions free and watched the rest on youtube. Glad I didn't pay. It's not "rough around the edges", it's an unsalvageable trainwreck. It's bland cringe with an unlikable main character, trash writing, world building and story, poor voice acting, bad mission design and an awful artstyle. There is simply no way that it can get close to being the next good RTS, unless they redo all of that. It's a shame because the actual 1v1 mode is not bad, but not enough on its own. From what I've seen so far, I don't believe Frost Giant has the energy, talent and money they would need to make it good. The Quickmacro feature is nice, but such a small improvement, it's basically irrelevant.

One thing I found especially annoying and haven't seen mentioned anywhere yet is that the game never explains to you that Therium is a resource that replenishes over time and 5 workers are the ideal amount on a patch, so that it never depletes. Why is that not mentioned or indicated anywhere? It's such a trap for new players who try to figure the game out themselves, rather than look up guides online because you can send an infinite amount of workers to quickly deplete the Therium and ruin your economy. This little piece of knowledge is the difference between playing a good game and getting stomped by someone who knows this in 1v1. It's so annoying to have the game pretend to be "noob-friendly" with it's intuitive Quickmacro feature and then stab you in the back with the hidden detail on how Therium works. The only way I got to know this is by clicking the "learn to play" button in the main menu and watching an intro Youtube video. The game should somehow teach you this in the first mission and the UI should indicate something.

Frost Giant spent their $40 million budget on creating a worse game than what we had over 10 years ago. The CEO/founders probably made more money than expected, so their goals are met. The game feels like it's a calculated attempt to make the bare minimum viable product to not get sued, by implementing enough microtransactions to pay back investors. You can tell by the lack of detail that no one in charge really cares about it and it will probably never be anything great. Basically Stormgate feels like a lame attempt to milk the starving RTS crowd.

The only faint shimmer of hope for Stormgate is that I'm completely wrong about everything and Frost Giant pulls a 360.
But that's some serious Copium and looks impossible to me.

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To end this review on something more positive, I will leave some other recommendations for RTS players.
I'm currently playing Iron Harvest which is on sale now for $5 and a good game for the price.

Some upcoming RTS games that look promising:
- Tempest Rising
- Immortal: Gates of Pyre
- Battle Aces

The classics:
- Warcraft III (original, not reforged - you can still play it in multiplayer via WC3Connect or GameRanger)
- Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
- Command & Conquer Remastered (surprisingly not a bad remake)

As a final note: Starcraft II is still the best RTS overall, even after more than a decade since release. Sadly it won't be developed further. I agree with other reviews that all Stormgate really does is make me want to play more SC2 (so I can forget that Stormgate exists). I think it's fair to be savage with Stormgate for the horrendous microtransactions that the game already has, despite being a tasteless nothingburger.

Battlefield + TF2 + Good movement and maps = The Finals

The destructible maps alone make this one of the best new FPS multiplayer games in years.

The only downside is default skins suck. Get the Battlepass. It's one of those good battlepasses, where you get some in-game currency too and can unlock it every season by only buying it once and playing.

Dopamine

I got both poker nights in the Humble Telltale Bundle (2017), so I paid less than a dollar for each game :-)

Poker Night 1+2 might be the most fun poker games to ever exist. Nothing else can match the vibe and banter between the characters. It's a perfect Steam Deck game too.

Most other poker games put me to sleep, but I guess poker in Read Dead 1+2 is also ok. In singleplayer it's fun to cowboy ragequit, shoot everyone at the table and take your money back, when things go sideways, while the online multiplayer poker is pretty good too.

Sad that poker night can't be bought anymore on Steam, but now that it's abandonware to me that means morally it's fair game to acquire by other methods. A search on igg-games[dot]com returned useful results. Do with that as you will.

I tried finding any other fun poker games and the only other one that looked interesting to me was Dogs Playing Poker (2002) which is based on the paintings "dogs playing poker". Each dog has a backstory. The game is available on myabandonware[dot]com

If anyone has other decent poker game suggestions with fun characters or gimmicks, please share as a comment!