Recent reviews by Zephyrtf

This goes hard if you're 14 and just discovered touching yourself.
Otherwise, it's kind of tepid. Tentative recommend, but prepare for some lame attempts at edgy shock.

Gameplaywise it's just sniper elite with a preset strip of vantage points, but you can fire the bullet again if you hit something good with it.

a really good game about tragedy and loss, masked under a really really exceptionally awful name. Play this, at no point does it seek to titillate and is largely about rich people being idiots.

It's very nice being able to revisit the grimy nightmare of Robocop's Detroit again, especially in so faithful a format. If you like the idea of being a slow juggernaut picking fights with hordes of hapless idiot crooks, don't sleep on it.

Fight the military industrial complex and win.

While not terribly difficult, this game provides a comfortable amount of challenge and some truly gorgeous pixel art replicating the excellent work you'd see in Tactics Advance, with their own flair and a more modern post-apocalyptic flavor.

Environments are lush and interesting to look at, tactical decisions do actually have importance, and for once turn economy ISN'T everything.

Min-maxing is fun here, since stat rerolling is completely free and your point buys give marginal gains unless you reach marked threshholds that give you boosts to a more important stat.
As a result, you don't get stuck in the menus micromanaging numbers half as often as other games in the genre have had me doing, which I appreciate a lot. The most confusion and thought I've had to put into it was what scrolls and equipment to put on specific characters before a tough encounter.

Critically speaking, the element system doesn't make a whole lot of sense, though. I find a lot of the decisions around that quite odd. There's some that are obvious, but a few really don't click for me and that lack of intuitive flow makes it hard to memorize elemental interactions that are quite important for some of the more difficult fights.
I also found the mixed resolutions on the navigation menu art to be quite distracting, which sucks because in isolation these assets are great! I feel like it would have been worth the time to redraw some of them to proper scale, since I understand why the decision was made.

Overall though, these are relatively minor nitpicks, and what I played let me relive the GOOD parts of tactics-advanced without having to think about all the reasons that game kinda sucked, haha. Great job!

Absolutely fantastic remake. I feel like I've gone full circle, playing the original on ps2 and playing it again now and somehow getting the same emotional experience in full.

Thank you bloober team, you defied a lot of negativity to get this out and what you've made truly shows your passion for the series.

While I'm not terribly impressed by ARG puzzles and cryptographic meta ♥♥♥♥, the writing in this was quite good and actually sold a compelling justification for the trappings of the genre in a way you don't often see. Points off for authenticity in a few spots, but points back on and then some for effective meta-scares and concept building.

I like the it!

This game has some of the most human lore I've ever read, and was very pleasant for it. It made exploring for new info in the postgame worth doing.
To illustrate this, I'll use the description for the acid bubble anomalies. It's framed as a conversation about a coworker who died recklessly running into one of them, getting reduced to nothing but goop. In that conversation, they're talking about how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up it is that they can't tell the family what happened or even why it's going to need to be a closed casket funeral.
Then it ends on them going "What? No I'm not sad the guy died, he was a jerk!"

It's such a lovely combination of apathy and callousness that feels very true to how people respond to things like this, more worried about the family of a guy than they are mourning the guy who died.

This kind of excellent empathic writing permeates the entire game, both in the main storyline and out of it. You can kinda put together the internal monologues of characters just listening to their dialogue and actions taken, and it's something that can consistently be felt even in the more superfluous documents. EG, one of the Meeting Minutes documents has the main science lady addressing a tendency of her colleagues to talk over her using hard data she recorded OF those interactions.

Mechanically, the game is rather simple. Hoard crafting ingredients, use it to upgrade and repair your dinky station wagon into a hardened battle dinky station wagon, try not to get launched into orbit by pillars of stone and explosions. The driving feels weighty and chaotic, suitable for how horrible those things tended to be to drive, and even at later upgrades you're still going to need to deal with your car skidding out sometimes. It makes offroading way more engaging than it might be otherwise since you're barely able to keep a straight line on a slight slope especially with your cracked suspension bouncing you like a basketball with every small turn you make.

Ultimately, for a genre of game I'm not usually a fan of (survival crafting is my truest enemy), Pacific Drive really impressed me! I do reccomend playing on a higher difficulty though since if you're the efficient planning sort it'll be a bit on the easy end.

Astoundingly, someone actually managed to make a first-person hotline miami game work, and work well.
I've little else to say, the only critique I really have of the game is that some of the challenges are pointless drudgery like stomping all the cockroaches in a level.

This game has... a LOT of bugs and quality of life problems. Notably, scrolling doesn't work properly in the social media ui, and there's a chance the dialogue will just softlock you sometimes.
It should mean a lot about the quality of the art and writing that I'm still putting this as a recommend in spite of that!
Plus, the autosave is incredibly generous, and makes it a negligible issue when these problems do arise and you have to restart the game to progress.