Recent reviews by RickyWL

soulless corporate slop i will never install on my pc again.

Playing Beton Brutal and deciding to make your own take on it is cool! Making your own take on it without the scouting mode and filling it with blind jumps is not cool.

Easy mode is too easy due to near constant checkpoints and hard is too frustrating due to the innumerable aforementioned blind jumps and inconsistent mechanics. Unfortunately not very good, maybe worth picking up for >50% off, but really you should just go play Beton.

Great game that has the length and polish of a full game while 1/3 complete.

one of the most fun fps games of the year entirely for free??????

From the devs of How Fish is Made comes a spiritual successor to Silent Hill, except it removes the survival horror aspects and focuses on a great story, themes and character depth. While short, it manages to achieve a lot in the brief playtime, hitting on a lot of surprisingly emotive notes while delivering a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up experience. If you're looking for a short psychological horror game that zeroes in on atmosphere and plot, then you can't go wrong with this. Fully recommended.

Incredibly beautiful ending to the Sigmund Corp series. Playing this felt like a true celebration of the series as a whole after the 13 years of development, from some of the older tracks being used throughout special moments in the game all the way to that ending, I think one particularly meta aspect of the game that made it even more special was the series ending after playing them throughout my entire adult life, starting from 18 to now being a 31 year old man, sitting at his computer still emotional after it concluding. I sorta had a feeling where it was going - which isn't difficult to piece together if you've been properly following the series - but if anything that made the finality of the ending even more emotional. Would also rank the ending up there as one of my favourite ludonarrative harmony moments in gaming.

I wish I could say more right now, but after having just finished it, I'm still somewhat numb knowing it's all over. Either way, this review isn't so much for people who've played the series up to this point already, because if you have, then you already know you should buy Beach Episode. If you haven't played any of them, buy To The Moon, wrap yourself in a blanket and experience one of the most emotionally compelling narratives in gaming. You won't regret it.

(Completed on a different platform)

One of the most thematically deep, well-written narrative games I've ever played. It's astonishing how much it manages to reckon with in the space of 10~ hours of playtime. and the more I think about my experience with the game, the more I love it. It doesn't make full use of the medium like some of my favourite narrative games (What Remains of Edith Finch always being my go-to) due to it's lack of "gameplay", but that doesn't really matter when it's this good. Stunning visuals and great music only add to the package; if you're looking for a story to get wrapped up in over the course of a weekend, there aren't many better games you could pick. A surefire contender for GOTY 2024 and a must buy.

Edit: I should also acknowledge that i don't actually speak much about what playing the game is like or what it's actually about, but that's because I think the best way to experience this game is to go in with as little knowledge as possible. I bought it on impulse after seeing a couple of reviews and had a fantastic experience, so I would recommend doing the same!

For starters, I've played and loved movement FPS games for a long time. Titanfall 1 helped me rediscover my love for shooters with its fast paced movement and I've put over 2k hours into the series at this point, along with a significant amount of time put into other retro FPS style games too (Doom Eternal, Dusk, Ultrakill, Turbo Overkill etc.), so believe me when I say I genuinely feel bad for posting this, but I just can't recommend Sprawl. I can see what it's going for, but it feels like the game is actively fighting your attempts to have fun with it at every step of the way.

Level and environmental design simply don't mesh well with the gameplay, initially throwing you into cramped rooftop areas with such repetitive and dull visual design that it can be confusing to figure out where to go at times; admittedly not for long, but enough for it to frustrate. Industrial cyberpunk sounds really cool on paper, but in execution it is not fun to experience. I'm halfway through Act 2 at the moment and while the environmental and arena design does improve past the first couple of levels when they start to open up, it still never felt fun to actually play through. it could be argued that this is due to the oppressive atmosphere the game is portraying, but Dusk had a much darker, grimmer atmosphere and I loved the design of that game, so I'm not sure that's the case.

The gameplay itself is fine. I think Sprawl doesn't help itself with the fact that it released just after Turbo Overkill, but the movement is fairly awkward, since you have to hold strafe against wallruns to not slide down rather than automatically attaching to them. This is compounded by the arbitrary 3 wall jump limit, making it feel like movement is neutered by bizarre design choices that hinder rather than aid the game. There's also a lack of overall speed due to momentum not seeming to carry between movement options. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the platforming sequences don't excite and the only times I felt a rush during combat were those few moments where I felt I had any sense of speed, which is unfortunately rare (Unless I just didn't figure out how to conserve momentum).

Gunplay does feel satisfyingly punchy, but the fire rate on the shotgun is absurdly slow, and the pistol fire rate in slow motion is painfui too. While I understand that this is to incentivize weapon switching, low ammo caps for the SMGS and grenade launcher add another layer of frustration to the proceedings. I think what doesn't help the combat is that there's a lack of any setpieces or variety. There's one boss battle at the end of act 1 which was so easy I almost thought it must've bugged out, but there's every encounter feels functionally the same. Turbo Overkill mixed things up with new movement abilities and weapons at an almost breakneck pace, while Dusk was simplistic but had incredible level variety and unexpected moments From what I can tell, the actions you take in the first level in Sprawl will be almost exactly the same as the end of the game, barring a few extra weapons.

Overall I'm just disappointed. The clip based nature of the marketing on Twitter etc worked really well for Sprawl because they showcase those few moments where the game feels like it's achieving it's potential, but on a moment to moment basis, my general feeling was boredom rather than excitement to see what's next. Despite how critical I've been I don't think the game is terrible by any means, but it feels like a simply okay game to play, lacking in anything that would set it apart from the rest. Frankly, there are much better retro fps games that you can play instead of this.

The best thing I can say about Turbo Overkill is that out of the retro FPS revival in the last few years, there have only been a couple that have grabbed me out of the many I've played: Dusk and Ultrakill. Turbo Overkill is the only other retro FPS that has given me that same thrill, and it's now one of my favourite FPS games of all time.

While Turbo Overkill lacks the near perfect level design and horror ambience that I loved about Dusk, I would argue the gameplay is on a whole other level. The level design certainly isn't bad by any means, but there are a couple of levels where I found myself lost because of the sheer size of them, but it was never for long and I never found myself frustrated. Frantic, varied and chaotic are all things I want out of an FPS that TO delivers in spades, with the movement mechanics to match. An absolute must play for anyone that has even a remote interest in boomer shooters.

Horror is a tough genre to get right, relying on the fear of the unknown and the threat of what that unknown could be driving a large part of it for myself, something that Chasing Static cannot get right. However, even if a horror game isn't scary, then the story and its themes can at least be effective, right? Unfortunately not so in Chasing Static's case, as I found myself chasing anything that would be even remotely interesting, but finding nothing there.

You play as Daniel, who, after attending his father's funeral, stops at a small cafe and experiences a supernatural event, waking up to find the cafe abandoned and trashed. Upon leaving and being caught in a car crash, you stumble upon a seemingly abandoned bunker, albeit with the lights still on. A voice at the other end of a radio tells you you're stuck in a nightmare, pushing you to fix some research equipment around the area to escape. While doing this, you find equipment that allows you to interact with "echoes" - flashback vignettes of a story long played out involving a research team investigating the area - which served as little more than exposition dumps. Through these, the game attempts to introduce more of its horror, with one of the research team members affected by their research, driving them insane and slowly killing off their team . While this is a promising set up for a story, Chasing Static's story mostly feels incidental due to most of the narrative being from events in the past, essentially making the game play out as one long in media res, as you try to fix things that have already gone wrong. When you manage to fix the research equipment, you are told to head to a research facility, where the game attempts you throw in some actual narrative events and pathos. By that point, however, I was long checked out, and any attempts the game had to pass off its weak attempts at genuine themes in the story, it was introduced far too suddenly and was overall lacklustre.

Chasing Static's core concept wants to drive home a feeling of isolation and fear of what could be lurking around you, but can't manage anything scary outside of said concept and the most generic of tropes. I want to stress that I do not need a horror game to be a scare a minute, but I found myself growing increasingly irritated and desperate to be over with as the game dragged on. Despite being only 2 hours long (With a solid 20 minutes of that being aimless wandering), it easily felt double that length, while you occasionally stumble upon a dead body or a dark, claustrophobic location. However, these are things we've all seen before, so what exactly does Chasing Static do to differentiate itself? The answer is nothing much.

Take Silent Hill 2 again, for example. In the apartment complex at the start, you've already come across various monsters which move in horrific ways, nevermind the town itself which is encased in an unnatural fog. Even with all that, though, just as you start to get used to the monsters and work your way through them, they throw something unexpected in there - Pyramid Head. He doesn't do anything, simply standing to watch you through some grimy metal bars, before slowly walking away. You don't know what the ♥♥♥♥ he is, but you do know that you don't wan to ♥♥♥♥ with him (or ♥♥♥♥ him for that matter). Chasing Static however, does not present anything like this. You very quickly become accustomed to the echoes themselves, being aware that they have no effect other than seeing into the past, whereas the environments themselves have very little to offer you outside of the initial eeriness of stumbling around on your own at night. When the game cannot offer any extra explanation as to why you should be scared - even a hint of anything that could actually be chasing you - that tension very quickly reduces to boredom, which even more quickly becomes irritation. There is nothing to be scared of In Chasing Static, and I can't say it even makes good attempts to make you scared.

I could go further into why Chasing Static disappointed me such as the lack of cohesion in the world building, but frankly, the only thing that stopped me refunding Chasing Static was the hope that it would improve, and my now guilt at the thought of refunding a completed game. I went into it knowing it would be a low budget indie horror game attempting to be a psychological horror, but with very little of either - never mind the two combined - I found nothing but disappointment. I wish I could say otherwise, but Chasing Static isn't worth your time, even with how short it is.