Recent reviews by SpaceRobot

I was weary at first because it looks like the game is difficult to read, and it is... but...

my god is it binge inspiring. I've played 10 hours the first day after buying. Instantly got my money's worth. I think I'll 100% this game and love every minute of it.

There's a few bugs now and then, but really not a lot and certainly nothing game breaking. I've been able to find some kind of workaround or resolution to the few I've seen.

Game itself is really fun. Replayability is high because you always want to try out another build. The world is really deep and well fleshed out. Always something interesting going on around the corner.

Lots of room to be creative both in play and in deck-building. Feels super satisfying. All around very fun.

It's not a LONG game. I 100% it with 15h played. That's a good thing. It's a grind + a story, and as soon as that grind starts to not feel fun any more the game is over.

Don't expect deep mechanics. You mostly swim fast towards stuff and left click, but it manages to be fun while it lasts.

The game is constantly being narrated documentary-style by Chris Parnell. The VO is mostly comedic social commentary that I would have expected to feel too repetitive and preachy, but it didn't.

It's a great game to play as a break in between sessions of whatever rage-inducing competitive game you take too seriously. It's also a nice break from any of the popular genres currently flooding the market. You probably haven't played something like this since (if you're old enough) Feeding Frenzy.

The graphics, physics, and effects are amazing. The chaos of battle is immersive and beautiful. The worldbuilding/atmosphere/story is very enjoyable as well, though it does get a bit tiring to keep stopping to read short bits of lore.

The game has a lot of personality. A few rare times while playing it I felt like they were throwing complete nonsense at me just to waste my time but the majority of the nonsense is whimsically enjoyable.

I appreciate that the game doesn't overstay its welcome. After 32 hours I beat the game plus the DLC and felt satisfied, and the gameplay didn't become too stale and boring before that point. Some games include so much filler content and side-quests you can be 40 hours in, bored of the gameplay, and still not half done. This wasn't one of those.

It's just a great game. As good as you'd expect from this developer. Tons of fun to keep playing and playing, even after the main story is over.

When I first played it in 2017 I only got through 2 bosses and something else must have caught my attention. It always itched at me though, and with The Surge 2 out I've come back to finish this one first. I'm very glad I did.

PROS:
* Fun, smooth combat with great animations
* Bright, colorful visuals are a breath of fresh air for the Souls-like genre
* Executions and dismemberings haven't gotten old
* Trying out all the different weapon types doesn't set you back tooooo much. And they're all fun.

CONS:
* Hidden items are annoying. If you see (or hear) one, you don't know whether you should look around for a way to get it, or if it'll only be possible to get much later in the game.
* "Hardcore" Boss kills. The game doesn't tell you about them up front, so by the time you know about them it's probably too late and you've already missed out on one of the best weapons in the game.
* You encounter a lot of things that you won't be able to open until much later in the game, and coming back to them seems to be optional. If you hate FOMO and the idea of missing out on gear, you basically have to take notes as you play and refer back to them later

Play with a controller, if you have one!

I'll need to be updating this review as I play. As of this writing, I'm now about 30 hours into the game.

This was my review about 2 hours in:
"This was awful. The most difficult enemy to overcome is the controls. This game is to fighting skeletons as QWOP is to running."

^ that was while using an xbox controller. The combat takes a long time to get used to, and until you've done it a lot it feels incredibly clunky and unresponsive, and simply trying to look at the right enemy and swing your weapon feels like a chore at first.

but I got used to it.. and found it very satisfying once I did. Of course I had to look up how to actually backstab and parry online, because there are some very unintuitive caveats, but yeah, in the end, it feels very satisfying.

Since that review, I'm changing my recommendation from No to Yes, but with a huge caveat. People always say this game "doesn't hold your hand" or "hand things to you" and you might think that that's a good thing, but... well let me explain:

It's a game of mazes and traps, but the worst mazes and traps aren't so much in the environments you traverse and the enemies you face, they're in the decisions you make, and in a way that can be very, very unfun.

The first example of this that I encountered was immediately after the tutorial, when I didn't see the "right" way to go, and wasted a lot of time trying to go the "wrong" way. This was my bad. If I'd explored meticulously enough, I'd have seen the thin path to the "right" way and noticed that the enemies were easier to fight.

The second was in the UI. When looking at your character stats, the UI tells you that you can press Select to see explanations. When looking at items, however, it doesn't, but you can. The first time I saw the items stats screen, however, was while talking to a merchant. The stats screen looks the same, but you cannot press Select to view explanations while talking to a merchant, so when I pressed Select as an experiment and it didn't work, I concluded that you can't press Select to view item stats explanations. After all, it says you can for personal stats but not for items. I didn't know what some of them meant for the next 20 hours of gameplay. Git Gud... right?

There's an important elevator that should save you a lot of time early in the game. The first time I walked into it, it didn't work. Later I learned online that it should work, and when I tried it again, it worked. There was never any indicator that it had started working, and you never have any reason to believe it should be a functional elevator.

You do a thing and get an item to teleport you back home. You can either use it, or decide to walk. If you use the item, you'll never learn of an NPC that just appeared from nowhere on the way back.

There's a really nondescript locked door in a location that you'd otherwise have no reason to re-visit, but it's the only route to the second part of the first quest. What you know of the quest is that you have to do something up above in (Location Name) and down below, in (Location Name) but your only indication of the location of (Location Name) is "above" and "below". Well there's a ♥♥♥♥ load of "below" in this game that you can access from the very start, so I went to the wrong "below" and spent maybe 10 hours on it, clearing it, before I looked online and learned of the door. There was never any indication that I was in the "wrong" "below" and there was never anything to draw my attention to the nondescript locked door, which, by the way, was located way above.

So when you hear that the game doesn't "hand anything to you" expect that this means, basically, everything. It doesn't hand to you a bunch of what the controls are. It doesn't hand to you a hint of where you're actually supposed to go. You'll often be presented with options but you were never "handed" any clue what they might possibly do, so you're choosing blindly.

It does, sort of, hand to you a really heavy-handed, sparse story. At least so far. I've seen only the bare-bones of what you would call a story, and it was delivered by NPCs basically expositing story at me, plus a cutscene at the start. The worldbuilding is amazing and unique, though. Enemies, environments, lore, etc, all very good and fleshed out if you're looking for it. I think people confuse worldbuilding and story though, when they say the story is so good. What story-like progression there is has been so slow and confusing.

EDIT 70hrs in: Finally beat the game. Once I got the right upgraded armor and weapons, and a good level, actually defeating enemies became practically trivial. This game is like a puzzle game, where you have to do certain things in certain orders in order to progress, except unlike a puzzle game this game provides almost zero clues as to what the thing you need to do is, when you need to do it, or really whether you need to do it at all. It'll just leave you flailing about uselessly wasting your time unless you look everything up online. There's practically no chance you'll actually get to experience the story without looking it up online. Even paying very close attention, reading everything you see, talking to everyone you see... you'll get maybe 40% of what there is available to get (which isn't much) and the rest is only accessibly if you just happen to do the right things at the right times in the right order, either because you looked it up or because you just got lucky.

This is an amazingly fun, yet elegantly simple game.

The short and sweet of it is that it's Soccer, but with cars that can double-jump and booster.

PROS:
Elegantly simple, easy to learn
Entirely skill based
Teamwork feels natural
Incredibly, intensely fun
No DLC or microtransactions of any kind. I don't know about future plans, but I love that in a game

CONS:
It's a team game, so quitters are a thing
Lag, when it was noticable (not often) was very much so, because of the fast pace of the game
As of writing, no way to play in a party or communicate with my PS4 friends

I feel like I first have to mention that I am not a fan of racing games, soccer, or sports in general. Despite that, I was hooked on this game in the first round. The simplicity means that you and up to 3 of your friends can pick it up any time, and you wont have to explain any rules. This makes it a great local game to play to have a high-energy, intensely fun time. Competing against or cooperating with your friends are both equally enjoyable, even as the losing team.

Although the controls and rules are dirt simple, the game has complexity and is deeply skill-based. Moments that inspire "Hell yeah!"s and "Daaaayyyuuum"s are plenty, and the replay feature that comes after every goal nearly always has something worth watching to show. Once I bought the game on my PC and played solo online, I found difficulty surpressing loud shouts of glee and longed for an audience to see the many spectacular occassions that dot the experience of playing. Doing well feels so damn good, and mistakes seem to slip away as the pace and intensity of the game consumes you.

Teamwork seems to come naturally, and with the exception of a bit too many rage-quitters, the online community was polite and surprisingly forgiving.

It just feels good all around. Every aspect of playing felt solid, smooth, and satisfying.

This is probably one of my favorite games of all time. Besides the incredibly fun, fast paced, team oriented, skill based combat, the game features an automatic tournament system that allows players of all skill and commitment levels to participate, have a good time, and possibly even win rewards. It's like a MOBA, but without any ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.