Recent reviews by constantcompile

SiNKR 2 is the rare puzzle game that manages to be difficult while still having multiple paths to correct solutions. I completed it in about three hours and enjoyed my time with it.

Recommended.

AFTERBURN takes place over an infinite plain of procedurally-generated, mildly-mountainous landscape. If you fly too far from any particular opponent, the game will "rubber-band" them back in front of you, in a similar way to some racing games. This keeps you consistently engaged, but it also incentivizes you to continually flee from the increasingly absurd number of enemies that blip into existence out of thin air, and only pick off a couple at a time as they appear in front of you.

Once you settle in to this style of play - and you'll have to, eventually, if you plan to beat the campaign - your main focus will be on improving survivability, as your enemies have properly BS auto-aim that only seems confounded by Star Fox-style barrel rolls. So the aircraft will start to feel pretty samey, since you'll ultimately just be mashing the barrel-roll button and hoping your regenerative health doesn't hit zero before it refills.

All of that is not to trash the game - only to describe its mechanical limitations. If you don't mind how crude the difficulty is, you'll actually have a ton of fun with this title. It's a great game to play with an inexpensive flight stick (though I reverted to M+KB at the endgame difficulty), the low-poly visuals with bloom effects are charming, and you'll have some really thrilling moments with close calls with collision. Just don't expect the higher fidelity of more expensive air combat games.

I completed AFTERBURN in almost exactly two hours, and even though the brick wall of difficulty in the 6th level took a lot of sweat to overcome, I enjoyed my time with it.

Recommended.

Assemble with Care takes the gameplay of "mechanic simulator" type games and applies it to a short story about familial relationships.

A game like this absolutely needs to get two things right: Ease of mechanics, and strength of characters. Does it? Pretty much. Object interactions are a bit fiddly at times, and I personally opted to turn off the VO for most of the story (I listen to most spoken audio material at 1.5x-1.75x, so maybe I was just impatient). But it all went fine.

I burned through the game in less than an hour an a half, but, again - I'm impatient. You need to be in the right kind of mood for this one. Light a scented candle, have your favorite YA novel on your desk, try to identify with the character's emotional state of mind. The story's not fine literature but it knows what notes it wants to hit.

Recommended at whatever price point you feel is worth 1.5-2.5 hours of indie gameplay straight out of the Schoolastic Book Fair.

A person would need to be incredibly petty and critical to find fault with a game that is clearly made with love, where all proceeds go to charity.

Luckily, I am one such person.

First, the headline: This game scrolls from left-to-right at a pretty constant rate. If you play this game for more than ten minutes at a stretch, you'll notice that your field of view seems to continue warping leftward for a few minutes after you finish playing. For me personally, I noticed the muscles around my temples seemed to tense at this effect. If that sort of stuff tends not to effect you, great - otherwise, buyer beware.

Second, the difficulty. There are some pretty tight tolerances in this game, and the width of vehicles isn't especially well-telegraphed. I often found myself clipping vehicles I was trying to thread, and the upper border of the map in the sand area can be deceiving with whether a vehicle blocks its northernmost border.

Third, some of these dang goals. If you're a completionist like myself, be prepared for a bit of frustration in the latter half of your time with this game. I reduced the game speed from 60 FPS to 40 FPS, and that helped me clinch a few elusive goals that had evaded me previously.

Are those flaws enough for me to thumbs-down the game?

Not... quite. It's still a cute homage to Minit, and many of this game's quirks carry over from it. Minit, too, had a bit of jank involved and a difficulty that was near the upper limit of reasonable. If you liked Minit, you'll probably like Minit Fun Racer. Plan on this game being about 3 hours to 100% and spend (er, donate) what you feel is worth that time.

Recommended.

What I love about Righty Tighty XL is how much of an impact your own skill has with how quickly you accrue points. Starting out, you'll be earning points the "normal" way: grabbing the white circle and bringing it to the scoring area. But as you get more comfortable, you can quickly earn points in the early game through "near misses" with obstacles, which (imo) are easier to earn in this game than its two siblings.

Definitely recommend anyone pick this one up, it's a great $1 game.

I gave the original Bit Blaster XL a thumbs-down, citing its irritating control scheme and overly-aggressive difficulty. This is four times the cost for - basically - the same game. Do I recommend it?

Yes. Yes, absolutely.

The control scheme is changed from a binary left-right with a set turning speed - really only fit for keyboard arrows, incredibly frustrating with gamepad joystick - to a 360-degree scheme that is optimized for a gamepad joystick. This change alone, I kid you not, is easily worth the three extra dollars and your consideration.

Your ship actually feels precise now. On top of that, enemy spawn behavior, ammo depletion and replenishment rates, and weapon balance have all been reworked to feel more satisfying and more fair. More than once I asked myself, "Should I use a bomb to make sure I don't lose health?" Only to think, "Nah, y'know what, I think I got this."

I unlocked all of the ships in the original Bit Blaster XL before even getting close to the high-score achievement, and even then it felt far out of reach. In Super Bit Blaster XL, I got it with two ships left to unlock. Super Bit Blaster XL is so good that it made me reconsider the original, and after a few rounds I found my opinion had not changed: Bit Blaster XL is unpleasant to play, Super Bit Blaster XL is a joy.

Don't even bother playing the original. Grab a controller and pick this one up.

Recommended.

How do you know when the difficulty curve of a game is nearly perfect?

When you unlock the high-score achievement within ten minutes of unlocking the cumulative-number achievements.

Adamvision really knows his way around single-button games, and this is one of his better ones. I 100%'d it in about an hour, but this is really a game you should play for a few minutes at a time when you aren't able to sink your teeth into anything more substantial.

Recommended.

There aren't many games I've played that seem like they ought to be required curriculum for young adult students. 911 Operator is one of those games.

In it, you are tasked with directing Fire, Police, and EMS units to various disasters around a given city. Seeing the logistics of emergency services from this angle gives a useful perspective, if an imperfect one, and drives home the point that if you're calling 9-1-1, you should be ready to give your location immediately. You need to give the operator a street address or an intersection if you want anyone to know where to go.

But let's talk about those imperfections. From the game's perspective, an $80,000 truck gives you the same increased capability to address disasters as a $20,000 truck and a $3000 tool box. This is not even remotely true. The way the capabilities of your different units in this game are calculated is - to put it mildly - weird. This gives you some bizarre financial incentives, such as the aforementioned cash savings of having your firemen drive around in pickup trucks instead of fire engines. You'd think that a defibrillator would belong with EMS units, but I ended up giving it to a motorcycle policeman instead because he could double as an ad-hoc bomb squad.

To the game's credit, though, the numbers of your staff's abilities (which are the only thing that ultimately matter for resolving disasters) are fed into a difficulty calculator that seems to spit out challenges just possible to solve, with perfect management of your units (especially on Expert). Because the calculations use abilities and distance, agnostic of map shape, you can plug in any real-world city or county of sufficient size and run Emergency Services in your hometown (or, at least, the nearest major metropolitan area).

The result is a challenging but satisfying game of triage, redirection, occasional pulling of units from their existing assignments and general plate-spinning that kept me engaged for the full 13 hours it took to 100%. I ended up sticking with Chicago for my single-city run because it's nice and dense, so my units had less distance to travel. I didn't touch the DLC; I'm weighing whether to pick it up or just buy 112 Operator instead.

Recommended.

Start game. Walk away. Return. Open new present(s) after several attempts.

I didn't like Botanik, but it at least made an attempt at a multiplayer component. This is just an interactive screensaver, and not even a very good one. "Mountain" appears to do the same thing, better, for a third of the price.

Before anyone comes at me: If you liked it, great. I didn't.

Not recommended.

The description of "1+ hour of gameplay and endless exploration" is strangely fitting; you could pour days of your life into this game and come away with no more than an hour's worth of mediocre gameplay, stretched across millions of miles of empty roads and nondescript box buildings.

You'll come across a random zombie about every five minutes. Half the time they've already died - presumably of boredom. The game clock helpfully ticks away in the top-left corner, reminding you that every minute you spend in the game is another minute of your one, precious life that you'll never get back. You'll pass dozens upon dozens of sticks, screeching to a halt whenever you see the occasional fruit, driving a vehicle with possibly the jankiest physics I've ever encountered in a videogame - the back tires swinging wide with every turn, as though you were drifting around a corner at six miles per hour. A bug where your car would just straight-up disappear has thankfully been patched; the only thing worse than exploring Dead Run's desolate landscape in a vehicle would be doing so on foot. Unfortunately a bug where you'll destroy a gas can when cancelling its use remains. The radio signal turns out to be scientists who need you to - guess what - drive to other locations and report back to them. Nope. Absolutely not. One hour spent playing this game was already an hour too many.

The best thing that I can say about Dead Run is that I hope the developer can one day use the knowledge and experience they gained from creating it to make another game. One that isn't terrible. One that is unlike this one.

Not worth your money, your time, or your interest. If you want a game about exploration, I promise you that any device capable of running Steam can support a better game than this one. Your machine deserves better.

Not recommended.