Recent reviews by Sentientv2

Fun game that provides a lot of different combinations of play styles with strengths and weaknesses. You can see a lot of teams feel like they've found some winning combo using one type of build for all three players, but the game seems to provide a lot of counters for everything. Have folks zipping around you? Drop gas or fire. I've enjoyed every class I've played so far.

I'm sure there will be tweaks to things, but I'm having a lot of fun with my friends and even when we lose it feels like we still learned more about how to play the game together and get better individually and as a team. It's hard to say the last time I was able to see my mistakes so easily and course correct in subsequent matches. The one thing I don't feel like there's much of a counter for is the sniper rifle. Especially on the rooftop match where you have to cross the span outside without any protection. It just seems like the sniper rifle does too much damage to have a ton of recourse. You're basically playing to have one team member survive so you can respawn on them and that doesn't feel too fun. Maybe if there was some sort of barrier or distraction you could trigger in the level. I'm probably not seeing the pickups I need to use in that area. The sniper rifle just hits HARD.

I also like how easily it can be for multiple teams to mix things up. I've seen teams drop in on my team and wipe us out, but in the middle of trying to steal our payout, two or three other teams descend and keep everyone occupied long enough that we still got credit. It feels like you can read the other teams a bit and play them against one another or adapt your strategy to avoid how they're playing and get to the deposits in a more clever way. I love a game that can mix skill and a bit of mind games.

The game oozes style, with skins that give a lewis gun drum the appearance of a roulette wheel, a cat that does nothing but sits on your shoulder and wears a tin-foil hat, silly character animations. It just feels fun and pretty fresh and most importantly, sincerely executed. A lot of studios think just making tons of skins is the way they'll make money, but don't focus enough on the quality of all of them. This game doesn't have as many looks, but imo they look incredible.

I'm cheering for this game. It seems like there's a lot of promise here and a fair amount of it already well realized.

My wishlist for improvements:
- More maps: I do think that the maps might get a bit stale after a while so I'm interested in seeing what they add to what is there now.
- Speed: it feels pretty good, but some of the spans of traversal on maps feels a bit sluggish. It isn't all of them and it isn't all of the time. Perhaps it's certain pathways. I found that the Vegas style map can be frustrating without a heavy to knock through walls. My advice in general for folks feeling like it feels slow is you're probably not looking around for access to zip lines enough, which is a pretty critical part of the game to traverse quickly. Get up high and then you almost always have access to cross 1/3 of the map in seconds.
- Give us more overarching narrative. There's an interesting and pretty world Embark has built, but it's hard to know anything about it in how quickly the game plays out. I think fleshing out and presenting the lore to players will help everyone stick around the game for longer.

Keep up the good work devs! (A former BF1 and BFV player).

Just incredible. The amount of polish in this game is kind of astounding. I played a LOT of the first Rogue Legacy and I was a bit worried about the art style changing so much. My worries were quickly put to rest when I saw how well they executed on it. It feels soft like a nostalgic cartoon, yet the forms are distinct and readable. The controls are still incredible and just the most buttery smooth thing you can imagine. This game somehow gives me back the skill I had as a kid beating Mega Man games in a day. They really nailed the feel and responsiveness of the controls.

I've played closer to 60 hours of the game when you include the pre-release beta weekends. I've enjoyed the game so far. It's not perfect, but it has a lot of potential. I do think the developers could do more to accommodate lower spec hardware.

I think the talents and the vast number of them will play out in interesting ways down the line when it comes to multiplayer and having your friends develop characters that have complimentary and likely non-overlapping skill tree specs. I imagine my friends and I will have a designated miner, hunter, etc. With the release of the game, there's some neat items to build in the main space base that will allow for some pretty cool buffs to certain stats. There's a lot more content than during beta and I'm still pouring over it.

If you like resource gathering games this is pretty fun. Like Satisfactory, the world is a known quantity in terms of layout. Different from Satisfactory however, the resources are randomized within a biome. So you while you can always find a mine in the same location on the map, you will not always see ore like gold in that same mine during each of your prospects (missions).

I'll update my review when I get more sleep, but I'm going to be at 4am looking forward to my next session.

Speaking to my own experience, Houdini is an incredible tool for creation of 3D assets for games. Not only that, but it can generate a lot of varied output given a little input. Houdini can be used for much more than games, but this is the experience that I can directly speak to.

Houdini is 3D procedural software that enables the creation of models, rigs, animations, and more. It uses a node graph layout to generate an output. The parameters on nodes can be set to take input or vary based on values like frame or time or full expressions. With this variety, artists are able to generate many outputs from a single graph. For example, you can setup a graph that makes a stylized rock. Tying certain parameters throughout the graph to things like the current frame of the timeline allow you to do something like run the timeline and each frame a different variation of your rock graph is produced.

One of the most fundamental aspects to understand about Houdini is that the workflow is non-destructive. If you have used Adobe Substance Designer, then know that it is much the same concept of design. Non-Destructive means that if you made a graph to create a rock, but you eventually decide you don't like the way a certain node affected the end-result, you simply change or remove the node from the graph. When you do that, everything that resulted after that node is updated to reflect your changes. An example of a destructive workflow is Photoshop, where you are bound to your history and how much you can undo. When you want to make a change you made 10 actions ago, you must also abandon all of the actions between your current state and the action you wish to change. With a tool like Houdini, if you get a request from a producer or art director to change an aspect an asset's design, it isn't the huge undertaking that requires you to forfeit hours of work.

Houdini is used in studios big and small to supplement the game development process. Control by Remedy Games used it to create damage models and visual effects. Studios like Ubisoft used it to help with their level design and world creation process in FarCry 5. They could paint out areas for things like roads, buildings, plant coverage, etc. in their level editor and send that data into Houdini. Houdini would run simulations against all of these parameters and return resulting geometry. They even used it to simulate coverage of plants, accounting for things like tree canopy and competition of species within an area. There are videos available from both of these teams sharing how they used Houdini and I urge you to check them out.

With Houdini Indie, you get the ability to access most all of the full version of Houdini's features (the full version can run thousands of dollars a year). With Houdini Indie though, you get included access to Houdini Engine, which is a bridge between the Houdini application and a game engine. Houdini Engine leverages Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs) to expose parameters to be tweaked and input to be specified in a game engine asset. These values are sent to Houdini and Houdini runs the asset's graph with the configured parameters and sends back the result. So in Unreal, I could make a spline and hook it up to an HDA that creates a fence and it will create a fence according to the properties of the spline curve.

SideFX has some great resources they posted recently called the Game Jam Starter Kit that show what these look like in practice in both Unity and Unreal.

I feel that this process of procedural design of assets is at least one of the major paths for game art pipelines moving forward. With a tool like Houdini, one can setup asset creation to meet the requirements of current platforms and be ready to scale to support the needs of tomorrow's platforms.

If you're interested in procedural content creation, technical art, and/or building effective art pipelines, you owe it to yourself to try out Houdini and research more about how it's currently being used in studios. It's going to become more widely used to help small teams create projects with scope previously beyond their reach.

I got this game when it was first out (before they took it off the store for a bit). I thought it was great then and it's still great. I never had any technical issues with the game as some people noted when it was first out.

As for the experience, the pacing is pretty good and I felt the story manages to take some great, unexpected turns. I definitely got all of the feels I had when I played Arkham Asylum. The combat system is in top form here and they seem to have found the little things to tweak in a very complex system to make it that much easier for me to feel like a badass.

Oh, and if you like collectibles and/or have been a fan of the Joker Puzzles in the past, the ones in this game are fun. They're not all incredibly hard, but some of them will have you thinking about how to solve them for a while.

Highly recommend this game.

This game is so much fun. Playing this with the Vive versus looking at screenshots just does not do it justice. I was enjoying it so much I was unable to stop playing this until the game told me I was done, it's that good. It's definitely my favorite Vive game I've played so far.

What I loved:
- Great sense of immersion
- Great style
- Writing (on pieces of paper throughout the game) was pretty entertaining to think about the meanings of and well written
- Little touches - things like drawing the bow string back and getting a haptic tension feeling in the controller

Things that I think could improve or at least considered by the devs:
- Combat
I didn't dislike the swordplay and shield stuff, but I felt like I was flailing a bit more than I would have liked to or felt immersive. I couldn't quite learn what was working against the enemies other than sheer flailing. I could get a cut around the head on the base skeleton warrior guys, but it was hard to replicate it time after time. Sometime I would get blocked. Using the bow and arrow was awesome and, when I was in a bind, would usually be a reliable strategy. Still I would love to be able to feel like I was a master of the swordplay.

I was also wondering what sort of assumptions were made in the way the skeleton characters block that would be advantageous or disadvantageous to either a left or right handed player. I'm not sure if it makes sense, but maybe have skeletons that are left or right handed so there's a chance to even that playing field a tad.

- User interface
It would be great if there's an option to choose a left-handed inventory "belt" layout. As a lefty I was picking things up frequently with my left hand, but having to reach across my body to the end slot to put an item away. I'm a pretty skinny person, but sometimes reaching and looking would cause the "belt" UI to shift over to the right on me, making it a bit more tedious to put the item away than it already was. It would be great as a lefty to just be able to put things away without having to stare too much at the slot.

- Multiple item "belt" user interface
If a slot on the belt contains more than one item, maybe experiment with implementing a mechanic where the user can twist the controller once they've activated a slot and then twisting would cycle backwards or forwards through the items in that slot. Another option might be to show the items in some sort of list that pops out once you've activated that slot and moving the controller up or down moves through the items (only a few around the current one are shown)

All of those things said, I have to say this is the highlight game for me thus far on the Vive. Great job and great start!

Note: Reviewing as a Vive user who has never played the game before playing it on the Vive hardware.

There's a lot of fun to be had in this game and there's a fun sense of progression you can feel in terms of control competency. I can only assume that this is enhanced when you play it on the Vive because you're constantly moving, adjusting, watching your step, and swinging your way across a level to hidden collectibles and objectives.

Initially was on the fence about this game, but I was able to find the right settings for me to allow me to play this game without feeling ill. I think it had to do with turning the comfort VR OFF. The smooth movement seems like it would be fine as we're so used to it in traditional controller-based and non-VR games, but the acceleration it does in VR when you turn is not fun after a while and has a cumulative effect on your body. I was sweating and not feeling well in my stomach after 1.5 hours the first go-round. The next session, I turned the comfort VR setting back on (so turning is done in increments) and I was able to play for hours without much discomfort at all and was able to truly enjoy the experience.

The one thing I feel like could be improved somewhat is the response to the direction pad inputs. Sometimes it feels like it's too sensitive and other times I cannot get it to do what I want. It's usually sensitive in the game world when I'm trying to turn and stiff in the menus.

Other than that, I really do recommend this game. I think it has more meat on the bones than a lot of other games that were Vive ready on launch day! Get it!

This game is a gem, especially on PC. The combat is near-mindless fun in a good way and the sound effects and the music will likely bring a smile to your face if you're a fan of Japanese RPG games. Even the voice acting is pretty good. The story for this game is much more than I was expecting. It's not incredibly deep as far as I've played just yet, but it's provided a level of depth I hadn't anticipated. Lastly, you don't see a lot of games on PC with this sort of whimsical charm with respect to character design and general presentation (even the menus), so the art style has been a breath of fresh air with respect to gaming on my PC.

Loving it so far. It's definitely a step up from any of the Dynasty Warriors games in terms of overall polish.

Great game from the maker of 10000000. You don't play this game for the graphical fidelity, but it's a simple, very approachable puzzler that is very hard to put down. This game is made to be beaten and made to make you feel good, so pick it up and enjoy it! It's hard not to if you like puzzle games at all.

Last thing I'd say is there isn't a ton of strategy apart from getting all of the things the game vendors sell and using it to get to the end. I'm still playing through it and I think I'm about 80% done.