Recent reviews by MacAlmighty

I feel like this game is how my teachers in high-school would grade my work - creative and ambitious, but with some technical issues. And boy, were there were some pretty bad issues, like getting soft locked in the first minigame in my first play session. Even in the end section when that minigame comes up again, I managed to get soft locked by the same thing. Luckily there was a skip minigame button that got me out of it. I enjoyed the other minigames though, they were short enough that they didn’t feel like they detracted or overstayed their welcome, and if I really wanted to I could’ve skipped them.

Most reviews come before June 2025 which added the ‘challenge mode’ update, which is what I played on. If you’re worried about the reviews saying its too easy, give that a whirl. They also added a ‘streamlined mode’ which helps cut down some of the puzzle help, dialogue, and things like panning to a door opening after pressing a button, so keep that in mind when you’re reading old reviews from before the update.

I think the challenge mode reduces your health and adds more enemy types - some of the combat encounters were fun, but others were more frustrating. The part that frustrated me was that a lot of the enemies have mechanics where you don’t actually want to be hitting them - electrocuting you when you hit them, turning into a puddle of acid when they die, or outright exploding. I feel like that encouraged you to throw your sword more often, but the sword throwing did less damage than actually whacking them. I also found a lot of the time I’d be swinging on an enemy, then when I’d try to roll away I was already locked into an attack, chunking me for a third of my health.

The book was an awesome framing mechanic for the story and each level, and the 3D world manipulation gave some interesting puzzles. I liked most of the 3D sections, it really was a ‘wow’ moment the first time you leave the book. They did a little more than I thought they would with book as well, though I thought they would play into the word swapping mechanic (where one particular word in a sentence can be popped out and swapped with another) more. There were some small funny Easter eggs caused by using unintended words, so I’ll give props for that.

I liked some chapters better than others. The art pieces encouraged exploration and some light puzzle solving, usually from something unlocked later in the chapter, encouraging you to remember or revisit pages. That said, I felt it drag a little towards the end, especially when more enemies were added to the same combat room where I just wanted to progress. Some combat save points were really forgiving, others were a bit frustrating with how far back they sent you. I got around 35 of the collectibles on my blind run, and fear I missed 15 since I didn't hit some specific trees or something. If you care about that sort of thing you might want a collectibles guide.

With those complaints said, I think there’s more good in this game than bad. Very cool of the devs to add the streamlined and challenge modes, but man I wish they’d go back and take a look at some of the bugs. Overall it’s an A for creativity, art, sound, and music, and a C for execution. I’d recommend this to people who like the trailer, game designers for some of the novelty of the mechanics, and parents with a slightly older kid (that last boss design was a bit more than I was expecting haha).

It is what it says on the tin: it's a game about building a tower. I picked it up since I'm developing something fairly similar, and there's not a lot of games about building towers on steam (so I wanted to do a bit of research).

There are some cool ideas in here, I liked that the grass spreads out the taller you build. It makes it so that the higher you go, the better view you get, and you can see the grass progress. The feather currency was ok, rewarding you for the blocks placed and the height of your tower, but could be 'cheesed' in pretty obvious ways. Not that there's a crazy amount of upgrades to buy with them - better jumps, double jumps, blocks 'drying' faster, where blocks that dry out after not moving for a few seconds can't be moved anymore by anything. That's the primary method of building and making sure the tower doesn't fall over so you don't lose unecessary progress.

The block placement is pretty janky, but the snap to rotation upgrade helps. I don't know why that's not the default option, since you're working with rectangular prisms - and any misaligned angle is going to make the tower build fail. Also, you have collision enabled with the block you're holding, so once you get the double jump upgrade, you can just jump on it to the skybox if you wanted. This also causes issues while placing, mostly a physics explosion with you being knocked off the tower. It was also tough lining up the blocks, and 'wet blocks' can be knocked around by the one you're holding, so you really have to wait between placement (unless you get the last drying upgrade). The tier 4 jump upgrade also gives you unlimited flight, and I think the dev(s?) forgot to change it from 1 feather (or just to let you see the end), so you could finish it as quick as you want.

There's a few 'difficulties', but I didn't notice any of the promised 'natural disasters' in the description, the only change I noticed was the end height, and maybe the cost of upgrades (I think the angle upgrade was 5 feathers in easy mode, and 15 in hard). A way to break blocks would also be good, since the player can nudge them while placing them, causing them to be off by just a little bit, if you're OCD about that sort of thing. I thought I might be able to softlock myself by building a fort around me, but luckily exiting and entering the game puts you back in the starting spot, so that's good. You might be able to softlock yourself building around there, but it makes it more difficult to accidentally trap yourself.

After flying up on hard mode I did end up beating it the intended was on easy mode. I will admit I got in a flow state for a little bit, which is a good thing, but I spent the whole time just placing a 2x2 column. There's not much else going on to keep you engaged.

Could have something here with a bit more time in the oven, but needs some work. Something to make building more challenging and engaging. I've got a few ideas, but I'm saving that for my game, haha. Nice try at least. I won't refund it since I knew what I was getting into, but I can't recommend it either.

I think I've got a pretty good taste of every character so I can confidently say:
Slay the Spire 2 is more Slay the Spire. I liked Slay the Spire, very much so, so I like this. If you didn't get STS1, you're not going to get this either. Some strategies got tuned, while other combos including cards and relics are the exact same.

The big pros for me are the new ancients which replace boss relics (that usually made or broke runs) and give a variety of unique upgrades, and the multiplayer support. The new card modifiers are a nice addition too, giving an additional path to upgrade cards asides from the pre-established +upgrade system. Without those changes this probably would've felt like a big update instead of a new game. Everything that needs balancing tweaks is probably going to get looked at by the time this fully releases, but I have confidence this will be just as enjoyable on launch!

I get some Dirt League skits in my feed sometimes, and I quite like them! But I haven't watched their D&D series and I'm not aware of other stuff they do. I got this in a humble bundle, the name sounded familiar and I went "oh yeah, I like these guys, I know they probably had little say in development but I'll try it out".

The fishing combat system is a little intriguing, combining timing (and a quick time event) with spells to deal damage and heal, so it's more engaging than a lot of finishing mechanics. There were also a few small funny dialogue bits in the hour I played, I'm sure I might've gotten a chuckle out of some more. Judging by the reviews they re-use a lot of the jokes, and that might have worn me down, but it was alright for the hour I played. The NPC portraits were also well made, and there's some good shaders and effects and touches in the world.

That said, this game is a fetch quest game more than a fishing game. I think you can make jokes about fetch quests in MMO's being absurdly long and tedious without actually being the thing. If it was a short experience I might have stuck it out, but after getting my fill (an hour) I saw the howlongtobeat was something like 12 hours. I just don't have it in me to play a 12 hour long walking back and forth simulator with some fishing in between. If that's what you like and you know what you're getting into, enjoy it! I personally can't recommend it to my friends, especially not for 26$ CAD. Maybe I'll try again in the future, cause MMO's are supposed to get good near the middle, right?

Nifty demo! The trailer sold me on giving it a try. The core gameplay loop is pretty intuitive, and you get a taste for the kind of obstacles and enemies the game will have. There's a couple funny lines/visuals in there too, I really like the style - and appreciate actions/sfx happening on the music beat. Definitely going to check out the full release!

Disclaimer: I got up for a walk which turned into a two hour affair part way through the demo. I wasn't sure if it saved, so I kept it open. It's got a bit of play time, but not 3 hours haha

Pretty good rogue-lite!
I was surprised with the amount of variety in upgrades and modifiers you can pick up. Even though the end goal is to make bigger and bigger payouts (usually focusing on 1-3 symbols), you can get there in many different ways. I also really appreciated that the items had 'sub-themes' which made unlocking new ones understandable and exciting. I really liked the premise and style, and I definitely had a good time (when I wasn't rolling empty or chain 666's - I somehow managed to roll four 666's in a 7 pull round with only a 3% chance each time). If you like the premise or enjoy other kind of incremental-rogueish-engine building type games, you'll definitely have fun.

I finished the main game in a couple of hours (6 or so?), but the memory pack modifiers kept me coming back for a while after. I just wish I could 'trade' in a few memory cards from one pack for another, since I ended up with 30+ of one when I wanted to keep trying another particular one.

That said, I found the early rounds to be pretty tough, and the later rounds too forgiving - it usually felt like a struggle to get a good engine going, then steamrolling the rest of the game. The steamrolling was not helped by some items (usually the incremental ones) being superior to a lot of other items, so I found myself usually pivoting from early game +luck items to overall progression items on round 2 or 3 on the runs I actually won. That also made it a bit difficult to play for hours on end, I found that a few 1-2 hour sessions was good for me.

But yeah, overall good game well executed. You probably won't be playing for hundreds of hours, but good for 5-20, maybe ~60 if you're a completionist.

Yeah, sorry but it's not for me, and I wouldn't recommend it to my friends either. If the premise of 'squirrel with a gun' is enough to make you interested, you'll probably have fun playing the game and don't need to wade through this wall of text.

Take my review with a grain of salt - It's very rare I enjoy sandboxy chaos type games, and even more rare I enjoy collectathons. I’m not this game's target audience, but I got it in my humble monthly subscription and decided to check it out in my effort to try new genres. I feel like I'm going a bit crazy with how positively people talk about this game on reddit, youtube, and twitter.

I feel like there's a lot of missed potential here. I enjoyed the gun jump platforming, but the other half of the game is combat with bullet spongey expressionless agent smith types. There was some variety in enemy types (using guns other than pistols like rocket launchers) near the end, but every other combat was very repetitive. The repetitiveness was not helped by the fact that every gun only had one ‘finisher’ move, so it got old fast.

Speaking of, I get the feeling that Squirrel with a Gun wants to be brutal without consequence. The execute animations are violent - jumping onto an agent, blasting them downwards while unloading a clip, but it doesn't have any blood or gore. I'm actually fine with that, but it feels like it has this veneer of edginess with a noncommittal core. You can snap a civilian's neck which looks shocking, but a few seconds later they twist their head back and get up like nothing happened. You can hold them up at gunpoint too, and they’ll drop acorns - this games currency to unlock more gun drop points. You can shoot them right after, but they’ll get back up. I think they can also take photos of you judging by the achievements, but I never stuck around long enough to find out.

Some of the visuals were nice, it ran fine on my RTX4070 + 12700k, but I wouldn't be surprised if people on lower end hardware struggled. There were more than a handful of visual bugs, usually related to the animations. On one hand it's hard to blame the dev for that, there's a lot of edge cases about how you would need to adjust the animations to not clip through the world, but if they were set up a bit differently (rotating the bodies, or just having two animations and checking if there's space to play the first) it wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

The game is kind of open world, but it's a very small map. I also don't hate this, it encourages your own kind of exploration at your own pace. The flag poles were very helpful to see the kind of stuff you could unlock and where, without blatantly telling you what to do. There really didn't feel like any 'sandbox' elements, like things to interact with and change the world. Your options were mostly: shoot people, climb on people, drive into people, do the premade puzzles. Not a lot, or any environmental interactions.

A lot of the time I was just looking for where to go and stuff to do, especially in the last zone where you need to press (5?) buttons to open up the boss fight. If you miss something like how to start the helium puzzle, you're going to have a hard time. But at the same time, the game gives a few too many hints, like still giving you hints in the last boss fight.

The costumes were fine, it's nice some of them had special effects, but they're also not personally motivating. I just picked them up as I went along.

The game is definitely still buggy. Audio stopping or restarting, visuals, and movement states (like going from sliding off something to bouncing, you wouldn't bounce for a few seconds). Even on very high settings I noticed a lot of LOD issues, especially in animation frame rate. I get the balance that holding an item like a gun would make you heavier and sink in the water, but it also meant you needed to find a new gun frequently. I also had a hard time trying to climb onto enemies to try and steal their guns - it felt very inconsistent (maybe you needed to damage them first? But you need a gun to damage them). Oh yeah, I also clipped out of the water slides and missed collectibles with how inconsistent they were to ride.

I did not have a fun time with the first boss fight. You have to do the same action several times, and if you're a bit too slow running away after finishing a segment (or the fall animation takes too long since you jumped from just a bit too high), you have to do the entire thing over again. No wonder 58% of players got the car (the thing you need to access the fight), but only 43% of players finished the boss fight. The second boss fight went fine for me, I beat it on the first try, and felt like a fine conclusion to the story.

Lastly, the vehicle control was rough. I get Squirrel with a Gun wants to be kind of chaotic and fast paced, but it was awful controlling the RC car. The boat (which you're being pulled by on a tether while on water skis) handles a bit better, but you don't use it for long. Some vertical jumps like getting out of the water also had this weird small inward curve, so you would need to stand back a bit from the edge to jump over it. Climbing was ok, but jumping to land on rails was really inconsistent, and I'd need to climb all the way back up to try again.

Saving didn’t always save puzzle states, which never feels good. These were usually independent (it would save your overall progress) but you might need to do steps again to access other areas. I was also able to skip some segments entirely just by riding and mid-air-reloading guns, which is a plus and minus. Not a good sign I wanted to skip segments, but nice that I was able to.

On the bright side, there were some cool segments and funny extra details. For example, the costume you equip shows up in the main menu, and there's at least one costume which even changes the title text. The spooky house segment also caught me off guard, I wish there was more novel stuff like that. Most of the game is just going through houses and shooting enemies.
I enjoyed the music, and it was really nice that it was adaptive to the environment. The extra reload clip upgrade was also good to find, since that meant you were able to skip more platforming puzzles like I mentioned earlier.

A few of the puzzles felt good to figure out naturally, like getting the sad birthday guy a cake. That’s not really ‘Squirrel with a Gun’ related, but felt nice to do. Maybe that’s a lot of my issue with this game: the identity crisis. It could have been chaotic and violent with fast kill times and destructible environment pieces, or it could have leaned more into the cutesy go around doing puzzles side, with the novelty that your movement is using a gun to blast yourself upwards. This game feels like a weird compromise in the middle where it really didn’t need to be, and felt like the contrast was supposed to be interesting on its own.

Overall, this felt like it was trying hard to be something it wasn't. And even worse, the gameplay loop wasn't fun to me. Good effort by the dev to throw in some extra features (and the ending credit sequence probably inspired by super smash bros melee), but I seriously can not recommend this game at the price tag, and it was barely worth the humble bundle price. Instead of enjoying the game's chaotic intention, I'll be taking away more learnings about what's not fun in a game like this.

EDIT: I got the 'true ending' in just under 8 hours. I will say StarVaders is on the easy side - I didn't lose any runs and didn't have to grind to unlock better artifacts/cards to win. But honestly, I liked it way more that way, it's fun to unlock stuff and gives casual players potential to grow in power, but still respects your time. The doom system and boss fights are all set up to build that tension while giving you just enough tools to beat them, so it felt like I had several close calls even if I didn't lose. I'm probably going to keep playing too, there's still a bunch of challenge modes and a secret ending to go for. I'm even more confident in recommending StarVaders now!


FIRST IMPRESSION:
Super sick deckbuilder/tactics game! Very flashy and stylish, very intuitive. The 'more info' screen that shows off keywords and effects makes it really easy to understand what enemies and cards do - that instantly smoothed the learning curve and made it easy to get into. I finished just finished the tutorial run and had a blast, pun somewhat intended. The music bangs too. A lot of people like me saw the potential this game has just by the first run, like the potential depth with the card modifiers and combos with relics.

Definitely recommend, this game has it.

Unironically grew on me a little bit as I was playing. I was going to quit after one session, but after watching a playthrough I saw there was a halfway checkpoint and the total length wasn't that long, came back and beat it the next session.

Don't get me wrong, it's not even a great 'rage' or 'difficult platformer' game (I haven't played too many to compare it too, but have played a few). The walkback, especially from the first half of the game, is obnoxiously slow due to the players speed. The 'banana monologues' weren't really banana related either, or not what you would expect reading the description, just one line quips about stuff the dev probably likes. I did think two of the lines were a little funny, but noticed a typo in another. Oh yeah, and unless there was a secret true diamond ending I missed, the main one you get is red, not blue like the description. Does that really matter? No, but I'm assuming the tagline was copied from the other original Banana Hell game. I'm assuming the dialogue logic was copied over from there too.

But, asides from a few phantom jumps where my jump was cut short (almost like I hit my head on an invisible block), it was entirely fair about whenever I got knocked off by mistiming something. Using the obstacles to boost around was also pretty clever, and has the potential for an optimized speedrun root by using the bugs to boost around. The art was actually really well done too, I'd love to see the dev (who I assume is the artist) work on something else, maybe a little less janky, or as part of a team. Banana Johnson stood out well against the red lights of the enemies and atmospheric snow palette.

Thanks for the free game, Petri! That said, that was enough Banana Hell for me. Check it out for a little bit if you also got it for free, but don't feel bad about ragequitting. Maybe buy it if you've got some extra change leftover in your steam wallet or something, but don't expect much.

Stopped on my first playthrough since playing it made me feel kind of sick, but adding a reticle and messsing with some of the settings helped me. Worth a little playthrough for the gags and or just to experience it