Recent reviews by Chilevec

well i remember getting this game a while back and getting annoyed with it being a running simulator that i found a bit janky. but uh, seeing as it hasn't been updated in 18 months, im gonna take this opportunity to say DONT.
i refunded it early on, and boy, i dodged a bullet didn' i?

Absolute classic, and the definition of a S&Box sandbox game.

If you ever wanted a game where you could just do whatever the hell you want, then behold.

Pairs well with the book series of Heretical Fishing by Haylock Jobson. Give me a sentient crab companion, WEBFISHING!
As mindless, yet satisfying, as an idle game, but with other fun quirky things to explore and do and stranger-friends to experience it with (or real friends, if you have any with 5 bucks).

good game. minus The Sony Incident, its been an honest game doing its best and said best is pretty good.

tf2 is a great game but is mismanaged and is likely never going to be legitimately improved on by valve. only maintained if we're lucky.

my list of gripes:

if you accidentally delete achievement cosmetics, they are unattainable on the account permanently. they are not tradable. they are not redroppable. steam support will not give you them back. resetting your achievements and reachieving will not get them back. i am never going to have a ghostly gibus because i was young and didnt understand what i was doing, because i had a full inventory and when prompted chose to delete it. same with many other achievement cosmetics.

besides this, tf2 is extremely unfriendly to new players.
its difficulty curve is abominable. so many mechanics that many people who play fps constantly will still struggle for ages to get a foothold. tf2 has a tutorial system but it is so horribly maintained that for a time it genuinely just didnt work, and even still mostly chalks up to "here are the buttons to switch or use weapons/gear" as well as blatantly bad information regarding weapon use cases.

players who do not spend money on team fortress 2 are unable to communicate in official valve servers. this was totally, definitely "in order to prevent bot accounts from mic/chat spamming" even though, because this is what bots do, they got through it anyway. this results in free players being unable to communicate in team fortress 2.

lastly, random crits. funny at times, annoying at others, you've probably heard it, but here's the part where i think it matters.
random crits are awarded to you when youre already doing well. this means already skilled players get a hard advantage on unskilled players. mind that random crits are almost always fatal, usually instantaneously. this is extremely frustrating to newcomers for very very good reason.
unsavvy beginners may also end up getting these random crits and having their reward system messed up, encouraging reckless gambling gameplay.

tf2 also has a really blantant toxic side to its community and while its not really valve's job to handle it imo, you'll still notice other companies trying to keep their games from having genuinely uncalled for behavior. im talking slurs, furry porn images, and other potentially disturbing content. tf2 has options to avoid seeing sprays and stuff, toggling off vc, etc. but its either toggle it off or risk it, without moderation.

> Do anything
> Crash
> Reopen
> Crash
> Lose all of your freaking sanity
> Crash
> Break something
> Eat
> Come back
> Open SFM
> Do anything
> Crash
> Commit self-inflicted blunt force trauma

15 minutes in. I adjust my audio first thing. I enter the game, and my audio reverts so I go to readjust the slider. The second I let go of the slider, the audio goes back to default and blasts my ears. Eventually, the music cuts out on its own and I start creating my character. As I create it, I choose different options for my character. I have to manually select which color I want to edit rather than how a sensible game would automatically start adjusting the color of what I just added. Furthermore, the color selection is done by directly sliding RGB values rather than a basic color wheel or something, meaning someone unfamiliar would have to fiddle with it, google a color picker, or give up. I start playing and I drive my boat, it was actually kind of cool so credit where credit is due. However, hopping onto the dock was difficult due to the weird physics. I fell in the water, went to land, and tried to walk under the bridge dock since I was on the opposite from the survivors, where I was supposed to go. I couldn't walk through the dock despite the wide space beams. So I went around it and realized I needed to go back to my boat for a fire extinguisher (That's on me, should've read the text), and it takes me a good minute to find out it was apparently embedded in the boat floor. I hop out, fall into the water but on the side toward the survivors, and put out their crash site. I head back to the boat again to get a medkit and go give a survivor first aid. I run toward the hospital and there are rocks but I can hop them and the survivors follow me. I go to the hospital, and apparently, the survivors fell into the rocks, soft locking me. I called it there.
The first 15 minutes and this game is an absolute horror of a bug-fest. It sounds like the reviews suggest it will get better but the developers have 2 DLCs out and this is their hecking intro sequence. I was about to get this for $16 but I don't know if I would want to get it for $5.

Although skill is required, the difficulty is ingenuity. Routing and strategizing how to get through a room with trial and error is the name of the game. The story is decent and even if you don't like it, it's not disruptive to the gameplay. Sometimes rooms felt like RNG but most of the time it's all in the strategy.
There's an upgrade, reflect, which is just parrying, and it rendered a lot of my kit useless the majority of the time until a room made me need to use alternate strategies. I beat the main campaign with very little in my build with only 6 hours on record, much of which may have been running in the background while doing stuff IRL. It has a hardcore mode after and some other modes that I have yet to try. But, at any rate:
My verdict / TL;DR: You'll enjoy it most if you're a completionist or enjoy replaying games. Don't expect amazing kit synergy, expect to die a lot (you're meant to and it doesn't feel terrible), and the story is short. But the gameplay is still satisfying and fun overall, just get it on sale.