Recent reviews by SomeBitTripFan

I had good enough fun with the campaign. Levels were polished, built on challenge, and didn't put any significant emphasis on speed or "a perfect run". Clear that and shift into the arcade mode however, where a bulk of the levels are gated by performance and all of the flaws of the game come into sharp focus. Dark, moody, atmospheric roads and environments become hard to read obstacles that kill your multi-minute attempts. Spectacle becomes distractions from the very deadly 25 meters of road in front of you. Scenic stretches become boring padding across repeated attempts. It doesn't help that, frankly, the vehicle physics are responsive to the point of being boring. You can't lose traction and levels are consistently designed to be blitzed through with non-stop boost (and anything short of that is losing you that gold medal), removing any real speed-handling considerations. Maybe it gets better the deeper you get into arcade mode, but the starting lineup of levels are a huge step down in difficulty, but long enough and hard-to-see enough to tank my continued interest.

Received this game as a gift in mid-November to play with friends. While it didn't become the biggest hit to play for my friends, it's since shot up to one of my most played games on Steam. All of my time has been spent in the game during the Rival Incursion update, so I can't speak on how the game has improved, but the current state of the game is satisfyingly robust and varied. If you're looking for a mission-based co-op game with a heavy-dose of progression systems, this is one of the strongest titles I've played. Especially compared to a title like Warframe, you'll find a much more manageable grind and far more interesting mission-to-mission gameplay.

Pros:
+Destructible terrain allows for some unique and sometimes janky terrain generation. The challenges and teamwork required to overcome some terrain makes for some of the most unique and memorable sessions of gameplay.
+Every class is vital and has unique responsibilities only they can fulfill. It's hard to full carry or be carried in this game. Learning to gauge your teammates reliability and habits quickly and play around them is its own skill which the game heavily rewards.
+Charm: The hub between missions is full of small details and fun distractions while waiting for a group or for other's to work out their loadout. Kick barrels, get drunk on magic beers, dance, explore, play soccer, chase a high score in barrel-hoop, and more. The dedicated cheer button features a wealth of fun voice-lines to get you and your companions in a "ROCK AND STONE!" mood. There are also robust and easy to acquire cosmetics to make your dwarfs look as goofy, badass, or unsightly as you'd like. There are also a significant number of voice lines which make cheeky-to-dated pop-culture references.

Cons:
-Optimizing builds is a bit obtuse and there are only 5 loadout slots per character. This doesn't even cover every primary-secondary weapon conversation, let alone difficulty-optimized builds. You'll have to consult the wiki or test things out in a 20+ minute mission to work out the finer details. A firing range would be a nice addition to help with this.
-Overclocks: These are the primary grind once you get past the early game. The abilities they grant range from useless to weapon-defining. Unfortunately, you have little choice in which ones you get, only get about 6-7 a week (and 3 of those are dependent on crafting or doing well in the game's hardest content), and the game seems to go out of its way to give you overclocks for the classes you aren't playing when you first start acquiring them.
-Performance: I play this game on a laptop with an i7-7700HQ and 1050 Ti at medium settings. Enemy encounters still often bring the framerate down to ~40 FPS. I get consistently better performance out of Devil May Cry 5 at medium-high settings than this game.
-Load Times: Getting into missions can take a long time. Expect to get stuck on a loading screen well above a minute when starting a public mission, someone's progress bar is going to lag behind and creep for the last 50%.

I'll be adding more to this review as time goes on, but wanted to focus on details you might not see at face value for now. Shooting is feels fine/good. Movement isn't robust for most classes, but Scout's grappling hook puts him in the upper eschalons of mobile FPS characters. Enemies are mostly simple and dumb, but numerous and often have weakspots/counterplay. Learning to be ammo efficient, but effective is probably the most interesting part of gunplay.

Mainly just posting this now for the Steam Awards, but this is the first fighting game I've played seriously at all and played in an online setting ever. Learned most of the system mechanics and foundations from +R, but I've only gotten real fighting game experience from this game. It still takes effort and research, but climbing the Tower and generally learning this game and it's matchups has been a genuine joy. I hope this game will have a long, healthy lifespan, but when it does reach the end of its run, I feel perfectly able to pick up a new fighting game.

I'm a fighting game newbie. Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R has a reputation for being a hard game to get into. Admittedly, I have yet to play any online matches, but the singleplayer content has still made this a more interesting and enjoyable ride than I'd anticipated. Maybe spend a bit of time in Training to choose a character and get a feel for them, know your basic commands. Survival mode seems to have the slowest ramp-up in difficulty. It sounds daunting, but it's almost definitely the best mode to start with. With a bit more of a bearing on the game, most of the other modes are viable, but mission mode is a particular highlight. The missions are cruel at times, but are great at pushing you to improve in specific areas with a character. Just the singleplayer experience has made this game worthwhile to me.

La-Mulana captures, for my jaded gamer brain, the experience of playing my first video games. The bosses are difficult, the puzzles are inscrutable and perplexing, when exploring I often get hopelessly lost with no idea of where I should go to progress further. Every inch I've gained in getting closer to beating this game has felt rewarding like few other games are nowadays.

Comically, despite the number of hours I've put into the game at present, I still haven't succeeded in beating it. At some point, I meet a puzzle too obscure get too occupied with other things to continue playing, lose my notes and knowledge of the game, and realize that starting over would be the my best option to stand a chance against the game. I've restarted three or so times at present. Surprisingly, when restarting the game, it remains fresh. The action remains challenging, the puzzles remain tough, the secrets remain the embodiment of the things that one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ friend would make up and tell you during recess. If you're looking for a complete package of a game that feels like that game for your older sibling's SNES/Genesis that you really only saw half of on that one file that they stopped playing 3/4th's of the way through the game and you'd never delete, this game will deliver that experience and then some. I look forward to my next restart when I attempt to beat this game again.

DOOM Eternal is a wonderful game which I look forward to playing more. I'm only leaving the review under "Not recommended" for now so minimum-spec players looking for performance reports might see it..

I played the game on a well-cooling laptop with an i7-7700HQ, GTX 1050 Ti, and 16GB of RAM. Just above minimum specs (give or take a bit since mobile GPU). To maintain something resembling solid 60 FPS, I had to drop every setting to its minimum, but on top of that locked the resolution scale at 50% (so 540p) and STILL experienced consistent frame drops across the campaign, especially during the final boss. I looked into performance issues people are having, turned off every possible overlay the game could have, it never fixed this problem. The store page promises 1080p/60FPS at minimum specs, but didn't deliver. Low-end buyers beware.

I'll happily update my review to "Recommended" and talk about the virtues of the game if I find a fix (and I've tried), performance issues are resolved, or if the store page updates to better communicate the performance minimum-spec buyers should expect. But for me, the promised performance was a lie.

Edit: I've recently been informed that HDD speed can be a factor for the game's performance. There's no way for me to investigate this claim myself at this time, but if I become able to the results of said test will be reflected in an update to this review.

The Wonderful 101 is an odd title from Platinum. The climax of Kamiya's love to shift into arcade-influenced mini-segments and gimmicky level design, a titan in spectacle and ceaseless self-1UPmanship. It's an odd experiment in action games as well, opting for a few easy to remember input commands from which the game's combos can arise. The influence of or at least the Nintendo target audience is apparent, as Platinum persues some simplifications and leans harder on level craft, but the charm, passion, and heart of the game is its most notable feature.

Note: I have not played Crash 3 yet and have no prior experience with these titles. Review will be updated after I complete Crash 3.

Appeal: Crash N.Sane Trilogy is one of the most execution-oriented platforming games I have ever encountered. It's a very easy game to learn and the game sets clear goalposts for achievement and mastery.

Banes: Crash 1 is especially simple and shallow in design, but even Crash 2 isn't deep. Most mastery is entirely in that execution, with relic collecting requiring a small amount of strategy in how to clear obstacles as fast as possible. Crash 2 is especially bad about requiring memorization and trial-and-error. Controls for playing Crash 2 fast are repetitive and somewhat painful when played over long periods.

Content: The game features a large amount of content, which isn't exceptionally varied, but isn't indistinct either. This consistency, alongside clearly presented goalposts for mastery, makes the game exceptionally binge-able. A significant appeal in the game is replaying levels and chasing faster times.

Recommended: Yes, but tenuously.

-Full Review In the Works

There's no unique view or aspect of this game I could discuss or convey better than someone else already has. TF2 remains a standout multiplayer title for its fine-tuned close-quarters movement/arena shooter roots, individually deep and varied classes, and wild social dynamics and atmosphere. While it can be hard to find a match to your exact liking, TF2 is a game about making the best of an endless variety of situations.

Warframe is a game with massive potential largely wasted and destroyed from its free-to-play nature and scatterbrained, overly-ambitious developers. At it's core is possibly the best movement/mobility of any shooter or maybe even game ever coupled with satisfying weapons and interesting ability sets. The surrounding progression systems unfortunately destroy any long term enjoyment than can be derived from the game, turning an enjoyable experience into an endless, repetitive, braindead resource farm.

Progression systems nested in progression systems and resources to get resources to build resources to get resources strangle the initial enjoyment of the game as you try to climb the endlessly growing mountain of content/progression. You'll run the same mission dozens of times. The objective and layout of the rooms will be slightly different, but not enough for it to feel different. Subconsciously, you start anticipate which doorways will lead to the objective among a new arrangement of the same one or two dozen rooms of each tileset. Your cursor will quickly flick between all the enemies in the room as they die almost instantaneously once in aim, trying to at least scratch the flying nigh-invincible arbiter of death you've since become. You'll park in a dead end with some team mates, spam a number key, while they each spam another number key since you'll get resources faster doing that than actually playing the game. But don't think about stopping. You don't want to miss out on that super rare reward they're handing out for doing a month's worth of daily missions. You're already three weeks in, you don't want to not get the best rewards from the battle pass. You're already 500 hours in and have crafted and leveled more weapons than you can even remember, what's a few more? Why'd you even start climbing the mountain if you never intended to get to the top?

The above paragraph is meant to be a bit dramatic, but those are genuine thoughts and experiences I've had playing this game now. The first 100 hours or so were great, I couldn't even tell you what happened for the next 400. I guess I did what I did for the first 100 or so, but just gathered more resources, crafted more weapons, leveled those weapons, gathered more resources... etc. That's the ultimate goal, craft and level every available weapon, pet breed, character, and faction and I'm definitely forgetting something. As for the developers, they're content with not really fixing the game's core issues and turning that farm into something enjoyable. Instead, they make some kind of new content that after release is abandoned with only minor additions being made to it every now and then. They make a new boss and expect/incentivize players to kill it repeatedly. Make a new, vaguely different game mode and expect/incentivize players to play it repeatedly. And if you're into this game, you're going to do so, because it's the only way to get the resources for that cool new weapon and to raise your account level.

If you're looking for a free time sink, Warframe will be that in spades, because it doesn't just let you sink time, it demands that you sink time. You'll have to work it into your schedule, because it'll want to you play every day for at least an hour or two. At some point, probably after the 1000th time you've run the same mission, it'll stop being fun. A new weapon won't change that, a new Warframe won't change that. If you still decide to play Warframe, only play it when you're enjoying the game itself. If you're playing with the goal of getting almost everything, stop. I watched a friend almost piss his life away over this game. It makes me sad that a game with such potential is instead a baited trap.