Recent reviews by BeepPerson

Worth it

Worth it.

A severely underrated game in my opinion. It's rare that I see a game go for the "retro 3D platformer homage" route and not only feel they nailed the aesthetic perfectly, but feel the game is unique in its own right as well. In particular, it really does look and feel like either a cancelled launch N64 game or a game I would've dreamt up as a kid. The first actual level especially gave me a warm, nostalgic feeling.

On top of all of that, they did the smart (imo) thing when making a retro-inspired game and didn't overdo making it play like an old game; the movement, while maybe not using the momentum/velocity mechanics as much as they could have, feels very nice and they don't lock off an overwhelming amount of content behind the upgrade system.

(This next section contains a lot of spoilers, but I want to talk about them)
Another thing I really appreciate about Cavern of Dreams is the worldbuilding. The main story could've maybe used a bit more upfront fleshing out, but exploring the tidbits of lore in the collectible cards and stage secrets still reveals a decent amount of info, namely the fate of Luna's dad (The Frozen King) & the subsequent relationship between her and Sage, several secret notes of which particularly broke my heart with Sage's (semi-understandable?) misunderstanding of Luna's intentions with her creations and just shutting her away out of fear and the implication that the game takes place after some kind of war, with many cards and notes mentioning various NPCs not wanting to fight when ordered to, or being failed experiments. It's not often I see a retro-inspired 3D platformer do worldbuilding like this.
One last thing I want to mention before moving on that I found interesting is every character with a card has an element associated with them: wind, earth, fire, or water. There's a fifth element (which is represented by stars/space) that only has one "character" associated with it - the Boxed Nightmare that froze Luna's father...

The game is near perfect for me, but still has a few issues. Some puzzles were way too obtuse for me, Prismic Palace in particular being the biggest offender. The hints were either too vague for me or were so well hidden that I couldn't have been bothered finding the answer myself. Most of the puzzles were fine, but when they're rough they're rough.
If I had to give any other criticisms, I will say the collectible mushrooms and water bubble upgrade honestly felt a bit tacked on as mechanics. Not enough to detract from the game but definitely very "take them or leave them".

Despite the small gripes I have, I really really liked Cavern of Dreams. The game at full price as of writing is 13 USD and I think that's a fair price given the overall quality. And if you see it on a sale and like 3D platformers at all, buying it's a no-brainer. I hope we can see more games from the team some day, whether it's a sequel or something else entirely.

UPDATE: Funny enough, not long after I left this review, they put out one more major update that added time trials, improved performance, and redid the visuals of the "final" area I believe. So take the negative parts of this review with a grain of salt, they may not be relevant anymore. I'll properly update this review if I ever end up replaying the game :)

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Re:Fresh is a cute but very short 3D platformer with light collectathon elements. My only real problem with it is that it has performance issues on my end even on Low settings - probably due to having no GPU, though I do have a Ryzen 7 5700G that runs most games like this pretty well even at higher settings, so it could be a mix of my setup and some optimization issues? I imagine it runs perfectly if you have any GPU from the past 7 years or so.

I don't really have much to say otherwise, the characters are cute, the story is simple but wholesome enough, and the platforming is decently fun (the final "area" is my least favorite visually, it does feel a bit thrown together). Maybe a bit overpriced at 5 dollars if only due to the length, but that may not even bother some people. And if you see it on sale it's def worth grabbing if you like 3D platformers and/or cute games.

Space Hole 2016 is a bizarre, goofy, and sometimes scary experience.

From the moment you launch the game it sets the tone pretty well - I don't even really want to describe it just because it made me laugh so hard realizing how I'd be controlling the "character", and since the game is literally about a dollar at full price, I'd say just buy it if the screenshots intrigue you at all.

That being said, I will give some broad pros and cons just to give a bit more of an idea what you're getting into.

PROS
+ As you probably saw in the screenshots, many of the levels nail the feeling that you're in a playable Bryce 3D render. If not that, they feel surreal in their own right even if they boil down to "a bunch of shapes put together" due to the lighting and scale they tend to have. A handful of levels are just outright unnerving - like you're having a bad trip, as cliched as it sound (though this is largely due to these levels having the lighting make it hard to see where you're going at points plus the music being replaced by eerie droning ambiance.)

+ The music system in the game is equally odd. The hub levels are nice ambient tracks (minus a couple late-game hubs...), while the main levels usually consist of select songs from a couple Beverly Crusher albums... which diegetically play from the levels' goal. So the further away you are from it, the quieter it will be until you get too far to even hear it at all. I liked the songs themselves though, and they fit the game in a weird way.

+ The game is already kind of janky (in a fun way), and after completing enough levels you get two upgrades that make it even jankier (particularly the landmine upgrade, which has pretty inconsistent launch power due to it more creating an aura of force that the landmine itself can be affected by for a second, rather than being a straight explosion). Depending on your disposition, the jank could be a pro or con (and sometimes it does dip into being a con, even for me). But given the nature of what the game is, I do think this jank adds to it rather than hinders.

+ There's over 100 levels, so you're definitely getting your bang for your (roughly) one buck.

CONS
- Some levels in the later half of the game are just not fun at all. One of my least favorites involved literally just brute force exploding my way through a bunch of balls in a tight corridor. The balls were flying all over the place, and I hated it. The level difficulty can also be inconsistent at times, but that's a classic issue games with a lot of short levels tend to have.

- The diagetic music makes it a bit grating on the ears when you can't have the goal centered on your screen.

- When you beat the game you gain access to M Mode. Do not turn on M Mode. Or at least back up your save before doing so. M Mode is effectively New Game +, but your ship also constantly grows and shrinks and the landmine button now produces 3 mines. It makes some levels outright impossible to beat, and one level kept bugging out and making my screen black forcing me to back out. You have to delete your save to turn this mode off. So at least I have the memories of this game...

CONCLUSION
It's a dollar. You can say that about many games on Steam to be fair, but I do feel this is one of the better games you can spend a dollar on. So if you saw the screenshots and even vaguely thought it looks interesting, I'd say just go for it. I look forward to getting to the other Space Holes at some point too.

Being that this game is still a demo/in beta, I won't go too in depth

But I will say that if you enjoy platformers with a large focus on speed & movement tech and/or exploration, this is definitely a game to keep an eye on. What's in the demo as of writing shows a lot of promise for what's in store; more specifically, it aims to have objective-based levels where said objectives can be as simple as "go to a specific area of the map" or something a bit more involved like helping an NPC out or completing a minigame - while also adding expansive HUBs into the mix with their own secrets and collectibles to find. The demo will have plenty of updates before release as well, so be sure to check back every now and then!

I'll update this review when the game is either fully released or the demo has a big enough update that I feel the need to give my thoughts, but as it stands the demo is just plain solid, and I highly recommend you just check it out for yourself!

In the Slap City, you have to slap to survive.

Pros:
-Has the usual charm that Ludosity games tend to have
-Netplay works well, and game runs well in general on ~10 year old hardware
-Graphics are pretty nice overall
-Has a story mode that feels like a mix between Melee's Adventure mode and Brawl's Subspace Emissary along with the "standard" arcade modes, and I appreciate the effort alone if nothing else
-Tons of stages to play on
-While there aren't many characters, they all play very differently from each other and are all at least somewhat viable to more casual players...like me (Minus Asha, I didn't like them much)

Cons:
-Soundtrack is just kind of there at best (the White Board stage's theme is awful though)
-The last couple stages of the Store Mode aren't very fun
-Not much lasting appeal for single player, especially if you're not a fan of Ludosity's writing

Overall, I'd say this is a decent Smash-esque fighting game, especially if you have a friend who'd want to play it too. Definitely get it on a sale (like now, as of writing :)) )

7.5/10

Also, I think it's game of the year because it's the only one I've played released this year that I haven't put in another category, and it is the best of the ones I have played this year anyway.

Don't feel like making a gigantic review right now ahem Game Awards but I just want to say that this game is indeed pretty cool.

If you enjoy turn-based strategy games, you'd probably enjoy this a lot. While the gameplay is fairly simple on the surface, there's also a lot of strategies you can pull off, especially when you realize you can use your own units' attacks to move other units without even hurting them [for instance, using a Charger to move your Launcher much further than it would normally go].

There are some annoyances in the gameplay, namely that the fire/explosion based enemies have a bit too much RNG involved for my liking, but the devs have done a good job so far to fix most irritating quirks in the game.

The only other downside that they can't really fix is the small playerbase. While as of writing, it's a bit easier to find a game than before, you may have some difficulty finding a game depending on where you live. Thankfully, there's also single player content to it's not a complete waste of space should you not be able to find any game at all.

Overall, I'd say you should for sure look into this game if it looks interesting to you. I don't think it's quite worth 10 dollars at this stage, but if you see it on sale at around half price or lower, then get it for sure.

Score: 7.5/10

[Also, if you're just going to play this for the Rust helmet, don't refund Clatter cause you'll lose the helmet
also stop buying games exclusively for in-game cosmetics and nothing else.]

Some people like games where all you have to do is push a button and things happen. Other people like games so complex that they require a manual of some kind with all of the information you have to take in. And then there are people who like games that are simple to play but are complex enough to still be engaging and make you think. Rogue Agent isn't quite that unfortunately.

+The concept is interesting. Basically, you select an agent, you complete missions, and when you complete them you can level up your agent and increase life, accuracy (damage), evasion (defence), or intel (mild damage+defence buff that's not worth getting). The ultimate goal is to kill all of the other agents, and you do that by having higher stats than them and interfering with their missions.

+The first few times you play it, it's actually kind of interesting to play.

+The game runs well and I didn't really experience any game-ruining bugs, so you could have this as a "background game".

+You can get items drops that you can sell on the market...that's neat for a free game, right?

+theres achievements i guess...

-It loses its appeal fairly quickly. The game pretty much boils down to "do missions to level up, let the other agents kill each other, and kill the ones that are low health until it gets down to all agents going to one mission area and hope you don't die".

-The settings menu doesn't really work. The volume sliders will reset every time you start up the game and you can't change the resolution using the in-game resolution options. In fact, the full screen option is the only one that works (you can change the resolution by just dragging the window in windowed mode so there's that at least).

While I don't think it's that good of a game, due to the fact that it's free and it runs well enough even on low-end computers to where it can at least be something you do in the background, I can't complain too much. The dev has stated multiple times that this is either a test game or in early access (which if it is, then it should actually say it's in early access...), and I understand that, but as the game is now, it's fairly shallow, but it's free and the concept is interesting. Hopefully the dev can take this concept and make an even better game out of it.

Since writing this review, the dev has made some small but fairly significant changes to the game. You can no longer see where enemy agents will travel to. Because of this, you need to actually think about where you'll go for your mission if you want to avoid conflict which does make the game a good chunk deeper than before (the blue guy will go to the closest mission, the green guy will go to the furthest mission, and the remaining agents will go to whichever mission(s) are closest to the player's base). Additionally, he's made some general bug fixes/small improvements to the game and UI. Also forgot to mention in the original review that the music's pretty nice.

The only problem is that there's no clear indication in-game of what the AI's paterns are. I had to find out their paterns though an update post on the Steam page. While this isn't inherently bad depending on how you look at it, it'd be nice to have a clear indication of the "rules". Also, there's still the unfortunate problem of the end game boiling down to "well better hope you don't die to the last agent" if there's only you and one AI, though there's really no way to get around that.

Overall, these small changes do make the game decently more complex surprisingly (albiet still kind of losing steam after a dozen or so games at most). And since it's still free and still no super intensive, I'd stil recommend it, just slightly more than before.

7/10
Old score: 6/10

Sometimes, you might play a game that you know is bad, but for some reason, you still find it kind of fun. Sometimes, a game's poor design and glitches can be fun and even endearing if you're the right kind of person. One thing that's never fun or endearing, however, are game-breaking glitches that make the game unplayable in some way...

+ Somewhat unique concept of hitting someone/something by throwing a rock at them with your weapon like you would hit a ball with a bat. If that bores you, however, there's also a mode that just lets you fight against people using the somewhat-functional battle system of "move the mouse towards people and move it in a circle to spin".

+ There's an in-game "shop" where you can buy upgrades for your character with gold you get from winning whatever mode you pick.

+- As said before, if you enjoy semi-glitchy/broken games, you'll probably get a good 30 minutes to an hour from this. If you don't, then...

- Unfortunately, even if you do like glitchy games, there's one glitch that's not very fun at all: Sometimes when you get too close to something that's moving (I think that's how this glitch happens?), the game will crash so hard that it will erase all of your progress. All of it. Or it did for me at least. Not sure anyone else has played this long enough to get that glitch.

- The game by itself gets pretty boring after a short time. This isn't helped by the fact that, if you want to get upgrades, you will have to grind pretty hard, as levels pay very little gold (minus Duel mode for some reason).

- No volume sliders of any kind, so be ready to alt-tab and open Volume Mixer (and then do it again if the game crashes).

- The menus look and feel terrible.

-+ The graphics feel like they're from a low-quality Flash game from the early-mid 2000s. Some people like that aesthetic, and this might even be what the dev was going for (since there's a "Retro Mode" button that compresses the graphics from 1-4 intensity), so if you're into those kinds of graphics, you'll probably like these.

-+ The music is also...something. I don't like it myself. It's basically war drums and similar instruments, possibly to make it feel more like an arena, but the music ultimately comes off as rejected Adult Swim bumper music. If you really, really, really like "surreal sounding" music though, you might like it?

While the game is free and can be fun for a short time, the game breaking bug and overall poor layout is what ruins it for me. Even if the bug was fixed, I'm not sure I'd recommend the game to anyone outside of people who want something to have dumb fun with for less than an hour. If you are that kind of person, go ahead and roll the dice. You'll probably be done before the game crashes anyway.

4/10