Recent reviews by Wish_Spark

as someone who does not watch anime, this was like taking off your sunglasses to see a flashbang and seeing a supernova instead. 10/10 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, gameplay is okay

Darktide is... Something. Many people say 'vermintide this and that' and while it's true that this game already had a dedicated fan base and another game similar, this game stands completely on its own and I will review it without reference to the other games.

My closest comparison would be 'What if L4D2 had the combat depth of Chivalry?' which is to say, it is an amazing game you can easily get lost in. With gameplay missions lasting 30-60 minutes, it had better be able to keep your attention, and it does. Between trying new weapons, new perks for those weapons, and entirely different build trees, this game will take a huge chunk of time out of your day, but if you enjoy being fairly challenged by a coop game it is worth it.

The downside to this title is the UI and the bugs. The UI is getting better, but it is still clunky and slow, and prone to bugs. Bugs are prevalent despite the developer's best efforts, and often lead to game crashes. With the time normally invested in one match, this can really disrupt the pacing and flow of the game. The loading times are also very slow, often adding 3-10 minutes to a match. Overall, despite having a few glaring bugs occasionally, due to the developer's attempts to fix any major bugs I wouldn't say they significantly impact the gameplay despite their prevalence.

I would recommend this game wholeheartedly if you have at least 3 hours to spend on it when you want to play games and like COOP shooters. I hesitantly recommend it if you have at least 1 full hour to play. It does everything it wants to do well, and the experience is unlike anything else on the market right now. The gameplay immersion in the world is second to none. Add on top of that the community modding support to add even more difficulties and quality of life upgrades, and you have yourself a modern masterpiece.

And remember, FOR THE EMPEROR!!!

Given my glowing review of the first game, I thought I would also review the sequel. Though this is labeled as a positive review, this game does fail to fully live up to the first game.

This game takes place in Nicole's senior year, and allows you to explore many more stories from her perspective. However, I feel like most of the endings fall short of providing meaningful commentary. This game is less like the first game in that regard, often not having much of a moral with it's endings. This results in the stories feeling a lot more human and direct, but also makes most of them fall flat; given that this game is completely standalone instead of a DLC, it makes it feel like it fails to stand as a complete product.

Something this game does provide is more of a 'slice of life' feeling to the stories it does have. Since the endings in this game deal with significantly less personal subject matters due to Nicole's already determined attitude, it makes it easier to enjoy this as an even more light hearted glimpse into the insane life of the characters. In almost all endings, this game seems as if it's meant to portray stories that canonically happened in the first game, but the first game didn't have the time nor the dialogue tree for. This is OK, but I feel as if it would've been served better as DLC or a bonus campaign, not a standalone game. Given that this is an indie company, I'm ok they didn't strictly adhere to this, though.

This game is fun, utilizing the same (albeit somehow even more mean) humor to tell it's stories. Given that there's slightly less than half the content from the first game and it doesn't have a cohesive narrative like the first game, I would wait for a sale to grab this unless you're really into the personal lives of some teenagers. And if that's the case... you know what Nicole would call you.

In mainstream male media, especially in media depicted as traditionally 'Masculine' to young boys, women are often depicted as prizes to be pursued relentlessly, as agents with no free will. Masculinity itself is depicted as attractive to all of these women as a blanket rule, and anything defying this is 'abnormal'. In normalizing both of these things, young boys are taught that they should become very strong or smart and once they do, they are automatically deserving of a woman.

This game represents the social repercussions of that for our female youth, through a jovial tone it reflects a real life representation of how young women are often put in precarious situations due to this corporate media campaign toward young boys. But instead of being from the perspective of those young boys, it is from the perspective of a young woman who has to put up with all their ♥♥♥♥.

This unique lens gives women who have gone through similar experiences a light-hearted sense of empathy as well as some laughs as the game takes great strides to not take itself seriously. It also gives men who may have not personally experienced it from either side a glimpse of how the hectic life of a teenage girl might've felt in many uncomfortable situations they were forced into and the mindsets and coping mechanics they might have had for the situation.

This game is realistic enough that you can understand its messaging, but never takes itself seriously enough for its dark tones to noticeably weigh down the play experience. I got all of the endings in 4 hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of the game and story except the relatively dated UI. Great game, would recommend if you have some time to kill and don't mind relatively dark topics in a humorous game.

Look; any way you want to slice it, this is a bad game.

The gameplay is fun, the character ideas are truly unique and aren't copies of each other, they each have unique dialogue and play styles, The cutscenes are hilarious, and I would highly reccomend watching the entire story once through on your favorite character at least once. I play this with my friends, and due to the way the cutscene skips are set up, some of the dialogue from the earlier missions has become an instant inside joke due to the fact you always hear it right before the mission starts.

Why, when I have so many good things to say about it, is this a bad game?

Well, the answer is that it isn't, everything in the game is fun and interesting to do, and if you like optimizing levels and testing weird stuff with friends, it's a fun game.

The real answer is that everything outside the game is a disaster. There's barely a playerbase despite it being crossplay between all consoles. Because of this, you will be paired against the 1 player who still plays this game, every day, despite the fact they have much better unlocks than you and 5 times as much play time, and they will destroy you in the unavoidable, random PvP.

It also takes literally days of playtime to unlock characters, and due to the way cards and weapons work now, it also takes hours to days to unlock the things you do want to do or try with the characters you have unlocked. The main replayability of the game is in something that's time gated.

As I like to joke, Spacelords is a game that rewards you more for not playing it. You get more rewards the first 4 times in a day you play it, then you get very little for continuing to play it. Considering it's P2P, the model makes no sense, outside of forcing newer players to spend money to unlock things before they realize there's no other players to even use their purchases, to squeeze money out of the few new players who grace this game.

All that's said, the gameplay is fun, fighting antagonists on the non-boss maps (they only queue for the boss maps for easy wins :^)) is fun, and the controls are unique but somewhat intuitive as you get a little playtime.

But is it a good game? Due to everything but the game its self, no. This is not a good game. If you're willing to sink hundreds of hours, it's a fun one, but it's not a good one.

Let me be the first person to make an actual review about this game:

Cons:
1) It is VERY OBVIOUSLY incomplete. However, the early access does very clearly state it isn't a full game yet, so I wasn't expecting it to be complete, and neither should you.
2) graphics are laughably bad. they're probably placeholders, but it's kind of funny how bad they are.
3) The handling is bad, movement doesn't feel great and jumping feels more 'teleporty' than 'jumpy'.
4) the online mode is RIDICULOUSLY bad right now, when i went in my ping constantly went up 100ms a seconds, however this was immediately fixed when I used Hamachi to use LAN instead, making it very playable.
5) The endings are not in the game yet. So playing this early access game is more of a beta test than a full game.
6) There's some bugs that caused people to crash, I've never experienced one personally in my playthrough, but I thought I'd mention it.

Pros:
1) It's free. Like, free free. Like, it's Containment Breach with your friends, and you don't have to drop a dime.
2) The parts you can actually PLAY are pretty similar to containment breach right now. And you can play them with your friends. Hilarity ensues.
3) The game is only going to improve, so you'll probably be able to play online without Hamachi reliably soon, and everything will feel better.

All in all, as it is right now, it's SCP containment breach but pixelated and with friends, which is still hilarious if not terrifying. There's a lot of bugs, but if you don't plan on taking it seriously then you should be able to have fun (with a little technical know-how with hamachi). I can't wait for this game to get better.

i̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶'̶t̶e̶c̶h̶i̶e̶s̶'̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶a̶c̶t̶e̶r̶.̶ ̶I̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶y̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶r̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶y̶e̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶l̶d̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶y̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶n̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶.̶

Nevermind. It was fun while it lasted.