Recent reviews by ᴢᵃṣₛₐᶂɾᵅ​ᶳ

My feelings about this game are split. On one hand, the gameplay is incredibly unique, and the game provides an interesting take on non-Euclidean geometry. On the other hand, this may be the most confusing game I have ever played. If Steam had an option between thumbs-up and thumbs-down, that would be what I choose for this game.

If you are debating purchasing this game but lack the time/interest to read my entire review, scroll to the last paragraph.


Recursive Ruin is a game where the player can shift around an infinitely recursive world. What that means is that each area is contained within itself (like a chain of mirrors) and the player can decide to change where or how the area sits within itself. This concept is difficult to grasp at first but gets easier with time. This leads to an incredibly unique thinking-outside-the-box style of puzzles that are easily some of the coolest I have ever seen. The art style is strangely fitting for an infinitely recursive world and enhances the experience of wandering around these areas.

The story, which has many problems I will cover later, packs a hefty and emotional punch. The heavy themes of depression and loneliness combined with the fact that the levels repeat infinitely make the game feel almost claustrophobic despite the infinitely open nature of the level design. The game also dips its toes into themes of psychological horror here and there.

Put everything together and you get a unique and interesting puzzle game that would be a healthy addition to any gamer's library, that is if it were not for...


First: the game is not optimized properly. During some of the more open levels, the game consistently dropped frames. My PC is not a potato, this game should be able to run smoothly on every level, but it is unable to on those open levels. This does not make the game unplayable, but it is a little less playable on those levels.

Second: the game is too short. I would be okay with a game like this having at least five hours of puzzle-solving gameplay to it, but this game simply does not. I would say this game consists of about 40-50% puzzle gameplay with the rest being dedicated to the story. If the game were eight hours long, this would not be much of an issue, but the game is only about 4-5 hours long. The length would also not be an issue if the story were worthwhile, but that brings me to...

Third: the narrative is extremely confusing. I still have no idea how to feel about the story of this game. None of it seemed to make any sense. The levels where you are wandering around your small apartment, despite being extremely dull, are the only parts of the story that connect with one another. The rest of the narrative seems completely random and meaningless. Characters are introduced during infinite levels, and none of them are at all memorable. None of them seem to have any purpose, and they refrain from telling the player what the purpose of the game is or what they are doing outside of overly verbose hints. There are some references to ichor consuming the world, but none of that is ever fleshed out fully, and none of the characters seem to have any purpose or discernible intent.

The story wraps up with so many loose ends, which combined with the fact that nothing I did seemed to have an impact on the characters made me feel like everything I did was utterly pointless. Some of the levels (specifically the fifth and eleventh) hold absolutely no bearing on the rest of the story and serve only as cryptic metaphors. Throughout the game, there are flashbacks that show you memories of the character you play as, and those are partially interesting, but they feel completely irrelevant by the end, since none of them connect to the story within the infinite levels and have little relevance to what your character does during the apartment levels.


This game feels like a fever dream. The incredible visuals and puzzles combined with the wildly confusing haphazard story and the mild psychological horror themes drive that point home quite excessively. I think this game would benefit from the story being entirely removed. If this game had no story and was exclusively about solving these kaleidoscopic puzzles, then there would be far less filler, there would be no desire for the game to make sense, and the intrigue that a lack of a narrative creates does wonders for this style of game.

Throughout my experience playing this game, I consistently compared it to other non-Euclidean puzzle games. Specifically, I kept coming back to the comparison of this game to Manifold Garden. Both are games where infinite recursion is a main theme, but Manifold Garden succeeds where this game fails: the lack of narrative. There are exactly zero words spoken to the player in Manifold Garden and yet the atmosphere and intrigue of that game is much stronger than this one.


I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy this game. In fact, I would recommend this game in a heartbeat if it had no story. If you are like me and you have enjoyed many similar non-Euclidean puzzle games (specifically the ones mentioned below) or if you are a sucker for abstract artsy stories, then I wholeheartedly recommend this game to you. It may not be worth $15, but if you can pick the game up on sale, then I say go for it. If you are just looking for a neat space-bending puzzle game then your time and money would be better spent on Antichamber, COCOON, Manifold Garden, Patrick's Parabox, or Viewfinder.

My Glitchwave review: https://glitchwave.com/game/recursive-ruin/review/Zassafras/89187579/

On the surface, WHAT THE CAR? is a game similar to its predecessor, WHAT THE GOLF?: a light-hearted game with simple levels and fun humor. Unfortunately, this game does not at all live up to the quality of its predecessor and has various flaws riddled throughout that ruin the experience.


The most glaring flaw of WHAT THE CAR? is the gameplay, and specifically, the control scheme. Every level uses tank controls, only allowing the player to turn left and right along with some miscellaneous action like jumping or boosting. One of the later levels in the game sees collectible projectiles falling from the ceiling while a target moves up and down. The game allows the player to move side to side, jump, and shoot a projectile after collecting one. The problem is that shooting and jumping are bound to the same button. I guess Triband wanted their game to be playable on an Atari joystick rather than allowing the player to have other buttons.

In addition, the turning on most levels is so sluggish that you might as well be controlling an 18-wheeler. Most of the traditional levels might as well be ice levels, since momentum doesn't turn when the player does, and turning isn't fast enough to allow for quick adjustment. When the levels finally let up and give you faster rotation, you might as well be controlling a bar of soap, since the slightest tap nets an extremely sharp turn as the car slides and wobbles (which can also be very sickening to watch). The timer and leaderboards accentuate the problems with the controls, because the controls never allow for any skill expression and are too unreliable for most strategies to be remotely consistent.

You may have noticed from the trailer that some levels vary the way your car plays, and that would make the game more interesting if the variants were at all enjoyable to play. Over half of the different variants of gameplay are miserable to play, since the level of control you have over each variant is usually in the gutter. Easily the biggest offender is the "car with wheels but giraffes." This variant turns your wheels into giraffe necks, which is an odd idea, and doesn't work well at all. The awful turning speed makes these levels unbelievably annoying to play, since you can hardly control where the car goes apart from forward. The wheels also syncopate, which can cause any number of problems. The frustration the variants caused me make me question if this game was ever play-tested. Surely if this game was actually play-tested, then someone at Triband would've played these levels and saw how miserable they were to control, right? I refuse to believe levels that control this terribly would pass through play-testers without raising any red flags.


If the controls didn't deter you from this game, the level design makes everything even worse. The lack of accommodation the levels provide the player is astounding. Some levels will completely misunderstand how the player interacts with the environment and encourage the player to follow paths that are too difficult to stay on either because the path itself is poorly made, or because the player doesn't interact with the terrain or objects the way the developer intended.

During a skull level in world 5, I was trying to obtain a gold crown (rewarded for fast completion), which required me to take a side path. Using this path required taking three ramps. You can see a clip of this level here[imgur.com] (warning: this clip may cause motion sickness). I could almost always fly off the first ramp correctly. The second ramp was very inconsistent due to the unreliable launches I would get when turning off the ramp and landing on the road after the ramp was also inconsistent, due to the amount I would have to turn and the varying heights the ramp would give me. The third ramp was always impossible for me to launch off. Every time I tried, my car would bump into it and pop up like a wall jump in Mario Kart 64. The ramp never gave me enough height or speed to properly launch. Clearly, as said before, this game has not had enough testing and needed to be more rigorously tested before release.

In each level of the game, there is a card that upon collection and completion of the level will award a snapshot of the completion screen to you. These cards are often placed in areas the player wouldn't normally visit during the level, but aren't too difficult to get to. Sometimes you'll find a card placed in an area that either isn't visible to the player at any point, or is so convoluted to get to that it's barely worth grabbing. Occasionally, the path for these cards is just the fastest route of the level and the only way to obtain a golden crown for said level, which seems counter-intuitive. The worst part is when the cards are placed in a spot that inconveniences the player. In the same level I showed a clip of above, the card is on the underside of the road you drive on, meaning you have to maneuver your way onto the other side of the road and back, which is only barely possible and highly inconsistent thanks to the bad controls.


Naturally, the appeal of this game is its absurdity and wacky comedy. If you're like me and expect that this game have a similar level of hilarity to WHAT THE GOLF?, you will be disappointed to know that this game has no such hilarity. Most of this game's jokes are boring, forced, and/or nonsensical puns like "Shar-Car-Nado" or "C.A.R. Phone Home." With every new level I asked "is that supposed to be funny?" while simultaneously questioning my existence. The jokes in this game make me feel like I've been gaslit my whole life about what jokes even are since they all feel awkward, forced, and unfunny.

A lot of the game's humor hinges on the thought that the variants are wacky enough to make you laugh at their absurdity, but as stated earlier, the fact that they are not fun to play ruins any comedic appeal to them. They are also thrown at you for no rhyme or reason, leaving the player confused why they're playing the variant and why the variant controls so terribly rather than laughing at the absurdity of the variant.

A big part of why WHAT THE GOLF? had such great humor is because it infused references to films or other games into its levels. There are no references to be found in WHAT THE CAR? other than in the forced puns you have to sit through. Another reason why WHAT THE GOLF? had such a great appeal to me is because the sound the game made when you failed a level was pretty funny. A crowd of people come together to shout "wuahhh" whenever you fail in WHAT THE GOLF?, whereas this game has an unenthused, limp, and slightly patronizing "no" as the words "Oh no!" pop up, as if the game is mocking the player for failing (which is made worse by how frustrating the controls are).

Speaking of sound effects, the music in WHAT THE CAR? is infinitely worse than that of its predecessor. The music in WHAT THE GOLF? ties into the references and generally has a far larger presence in the game than the music here. The music in WHAT THE CAR? always seems to sound like the same low-energy song with how little conviction the instruments have and the constant whistling in every song.


This is an immensely disappointing game, and you're better off not playing it. The controls are consistently annoying and never allow for interesting or enjoyable gameplay. The level design compounds this problem by repeatedly subjecting the player to levels that force the player to feel the inconsistencies of the controls. The humor constantly makes little-to-no sense and repeatedly misses the mark. If you've never played WHAT THE GOLF?, you're better off buying that game than this underwhelming slop.


My Glitchwave review: https://glitchwave.com/game/what-the-car/review/Zassafras/89183443/

Welcome to Toribash Next! In this game, you will experience abhorrent physics, unbearable lag, horrible netcode/multiplayer system, unpleasant visuals, awful sound design, unbalanced mechanics, sluggish and gross movement, garbage controls, a terrible menu, countless bugs, and every problem present in the original game.

You want good physics? Too bad! You get a physics engine where doing anything can result in your Tori flying into the stratosphere or flailing everywhere. During one of my multiplayer matches I had a sword in my hand, and started randomly sliding in a circle after putting the top of the sword into the floor while still holding it.

You want a fun multiplayer experience? Not happening. Instead, you get a lag-fest, where you may have to measure time in minutes per turn due to lag. You also receive terrible 4-player experiences where other players can steal your spot mid-match if you are playing with multiple Toris at once (which the game lets you do if the player count isn't 4 yet). I lost a match because someone who joined mid-match decided they wanted to steal one of my spots. Additionally, for every player in the room, there's a visible camera model that can completely block your view, in case you wanted to actually look at your Tori.

You want appealing visuals? Oops! The developers decided that the tranquil empty plane of the original game is too boring, so they ruined the look of the background, and they also decided that every Tori would by default be the worst shade of gray possible. To add, the ghosts are also gray and make the game way more confusing, since it's hard to tell whose ghost is whose. Plus, the rendering system is awful, making the ghosts look far more solid than they should be, interfering with movement and planning.

You want a game that has at least halfway decent sound design? That's unfortunate. This game's sounds are all mixed horribly, which is most evident in the music. Each song that appears in the game is ripped from the original game, which would be nice, if they didn't completely change how they sound and screw with the stereo levels. Additionally, I could go without hearing an awful shouting noise every time someone joins my multiplayer lobby.

You want competitively viable mechanics? Keep dreaming. The point system is entirely broken, since you can get all your hard-earned points taken away at complete random. Additionally, the weapons have no balancing. You'd expect that landing gunshots gives you tons of points, but they only give you 100 points per hit. For context, I played a game with guns, missed every shot, yet still got 1,000 points by touching another player's foot.

You want satisfying or fast movement? Tough. What you get is slow, unresponsive joints that only move fast when you are flying all over the place. You also get the most disgusting over-extended joints that could easily make anyone shudder. Additionally, the ghost moves unbearably slow, so adjusting your Tori quickly is next to impossible without an instinctual knowledge of how your Tori moves, which is impractical because the game could decide you made a wrong move and make you fly all over the place.

You want controls that work? You won't find that here! Controlling your Tori is miserable, due to the complete lack of consistency. Sometimes, playing this devolves into a game of "move the camera around randomly so that you can move a single joint," because moving joints doesn't always work. You could be hovering your mouse right over the joint with the clearest view of it, and the game still refuses to change its state when you click, scroll, or press Z/X while hovering over it. Also, hardly any of the useful hotkeys from the original game exist in this one, which makes creating replays a chore.

You want a menu that isn't ridiculously unintuitive? Unlucky. The game's menu is sorted terribly and has had buttons completely vanish. God forbid you want to leave a multiplayer room to watch a replay, because then you have to click on a button that no longer exists to get to the top of the menu, just so you can click on replays. Saving replays is also a hassle, since you can't name them, and have to either have auto-save on, or click a button hidden behind a separate menu bound to a different button.

You want to play a game that doesn't have a laundry list of game-breaking bugs? You'd better look somewhere else. The sheer quantity of game-breaking bugs this game contains is unholy. I've even mentioned a few here, like the random removal of points or your Tori being shot into the stratosphere, but there's also various crashes, collision issues, rendering problems, and countless other bugs that would take too long to name here. If you want to see a more comprehensive list of the bugs present here, the Toribash forums have some threads about this game's bugs. Plus, all the issues that the original game had, such as the random lopsided physics that prevented symmetrical movement are only made worse in this version.

You want to play a fun game? You've come to the wrong place. This game is completely unplayable. The fact that we waited 7 years for this is insulting. I haven't been able to play this game for more than 30 minutes per week because of how miserable it is to play. Just play the original. That game is actually good.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! This game spells the word "right" wrong. This isn't a joke. You can see this in the game by hovering over your right shoulder or right elbow to see "Rigth Bicep" or "Rigth Tricep." What a joke.
https://v1.steam.hlxgame.cc/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3164325555

1 Year update: Hardly anything in this game has been fixed (including Rigth Bicep) and most of the player base has fully abandoned it. If you're still thinking of downloading this game in hopes of finding someone else on the game at all, then I'd go for the original game instead.

My Glitchwave review: https://glitchwave.com/game/toribash-next/review/Zassafras/89179189/

What this game gets right:
This is a game about a little boy who went exploring an dark, uncanny world in search of a girl. The level of work put into this game's atmosphere is stunning, and accurately simulates the feeling of venturing around an empty, soulless world. The game hardly has any music, but when the music kicks in, the dark, industrial ambience of each song heightens the sense of emptiness and existential dread the atmosphere makes the player feel. The art style—ignoring the issues I will touch on later—forces the player to feel the anxiety and loneliness that the atmosphere creates. The dark themes of the game are quite unique: the little boy is stuck in a limbo world, and he sees other kids trying to escape this limbo world by hanging themselves, which only heightens the feelings of loneliness and dread given by the game. If I were to look at this game strictly from an artistic perspective, this would easily be one of my favorite games on Steam, but obviously since this review is negative, that's not all.


What this game gets wrong:
This may be a great example of an artistic approach to games, but the main problem is that the game is not fun. Perfect for artsy people who want a short, yet imaginative game, but not so great for people who want to enjoy their games. Here are some of the reasons why this game is not fun to play:

First, the controls are terrible. This game uses five buttons—the arrow keys and the control key. The game also doesn't let you re-map your keys, forcing you to play with the control scheme you are given, which is ridiculous. The fact that the game lacks a designated jump key makes climbing and maneuvering on ropes a complete pain. The up arrow is the jump key, and also the climb up key, which leads to trouble when you try to jump off a rope. You also cannot climb up while swinging on the rope, since pressing up at the same time as left or right will make you jump off the rope. Additionally, the controls are incredibly unresponsive, since the little boy you play as takes a long time to respond to the player's inputs, which brings me to my next point.

Second, the little boy you play as feels impossibly stiff, as if the player was controlling a sentient plank of wood. His movement is so sluggish, he may as well be submerged in molasses, which is surprising, since he cannot step into three-foot high water without drowning, even if you are one step away from being totally fine. Early on in the game, you encounter a massive spider that will attack you if you stay in the same place for too long. The spider will also knock you down if you try to pass without completing the puzzle, which would be fine if the little boy did not take an unreasonably long time to stand up. I was forced to take a death because the game developers decided that this little boy has to take a whole year to stand up. The little boy's jumps are the wimpiest jumps you will ever see in a 2D platformer, since he barely goes anywhere vertically and can barely cross any gaps horizontally. For some reason, the game developers decided that making your character take fall damage in a 2D platformer was a good idea, and even if the player falls from a survivable height, the little boy will be stunned for a short period after landing, which is enough to screw with puzzle timings or cause you to die to an obstacle. The cherry-on-top is the fact that you have practically no control over the little boy's movement in the air: you are locked into a trajectory from the instant you jump, with nothing more than a marginal speed adjustment to help with midair movement. At the very end of the game, there is a section where gravity flips on a fast, yet predictable cycle. This cycle is difficult to take advantage of, because the timing is ambiguous due to how slow the little boy is to control. If you jump slightly too early, you will either take fall damage and die, or be stunned on the ground for too long, and if you jump late, you will be dead by the time the next flip comes around. Threading that gap between too early and too late is difficult, solely because the controls are too unresponsive to provide a predictable result.

Third: the puzzles are terrible. There are definitely some good puzzles here and there, but the majority of the puzzles are either too trivial, too convoluted, or require at least one death for a first-time player to solve. Do you remember that giant spider from earlier? The way you were supposed to solve that puzzle was to see the spike trap on the tree branch to the left of the spider, then wait for the spider to slam the ground with its legs a few times so that the now off-screen trap falls down to the ground (as an additional note, those spike traps have unfairly large hitboxes). My least favorite sections of this game were the parts where the little boy had a worm implanted in his head, because during those sections, you have no control over the direction the little boy walks. The game forces you to move in one direction until hitting a ray of light to switch directions or a tentacle that will eat the worm off your head (the first time the player experiences this mechanic, the game is entirely unclear about how to remove the worm and does not tell you that the ceiling tentacles eat the worms). When the little boy has a worm on his head, if the player tries to move backward, the only effect will be that the little boy slows down, making the sections infinitely more annoying, since you cannot stop moving. There are certain totally unpredictable puzzles or jumps scattered throughout the game that essentially require a death to understand, but upon replaying the section become trivially easy, because the unpredictable aspect of the puzzle is now easily predictable. Additionally, if the player dies on one of the puzzles, the respawn that the puzzle gives you can force you to re-do sections where 90% of the gameplay is waiting for something to happen, or push boxes that you spent ages pushing to exact locations only for their positions to reset upon death, which makes certain unpredictable guaranteed-death puzzles all the more annoying.

On the subject of unpredictability: fourth, the all-black art style creates the problem of the player mixing up the interactable terrain and the elements of the background or foreground. Far too often I found myself accidentally jumping into pits because what I thought was an object or portion of the terrain was actually just a decorative foreground or background element that I went straight through. Additionally, certain puzzles require the player to interact with an object that could easily be mistaken for a decorative object. When the player is introduced to gravity-flipping mechanics toward the end of the game, there is a large jump where you slide down a slope and jump off. The first time I played through this section, I thought the goal was to precisely jump under the saw blade and catch the rope that is hanging down from the saw blade, but in reality, the solution was to see an arrow pointing right that I initially thought was a background element and interact with it to rotate gravity, because the rope I was trying to grab was not a real object.


This is a classic case of form over function. The quality of the gameplay elements does not remotely match the quality of the artistic elements. I could see a game taking the atmosphere and theme of this game and crafting a much more enjoyable experience with them, but as is, this game plays too poorly to be anything beyond mediocre. If you are looking for an artsy game and you can put up with annoying gameplay, then this game is for you. Otherwise, your money would be better spent on better 2D platformers like VVVVVV or Celeste (I recommend the latter, my favorite 2D platformer). If you're looking for an artsier 2D platformer specifically, GRIS is a much better experience.

My Glitchwave review: https://glitchwave.com/game/limbo/review/Zassafras/89179190/

I hadn't played this game in over four years due to me growing out of it, and I've decided to play it one last time, but now that I've come back with a fresh mindset, I realize how bad this game actually is. This game is both mind-numbingly simple and wildly complicated at the same time, because the screen, and you along with it scroll at an essentially fixed pace. The only way you can interact with the game is to use jumps (left click, up arrow, or spacebar) and that keeps it really simple, but then you get into complex mechanics like how many modes there are, what orbs do, flipping your screen (which is done in the worst possible way), speed changes, etc. I personally think that this game has gotten WAY too complicated for an average player as you need to retain knowledge of what every single gimmick does to be able to deal with upcoming obstacles appropriately.

To add onto that, the physics engine is really janky and inconsistent leading to difficulties in controlling your character precisely. The physics engine is not all that problematic when talking about your simple square guy, as the only issues you can run into are quite rare, but the problem comes in when you start to get into the different modes. Ships are the most problematic for this one as instead of jumping, you click to aim your ship upwards. The problem is that this ship is ridiculously hard to control properly and doesn't allow you to fly straight as easily as one may want because of how difficult it is to control the ship. It is unnecessarily janky as well as minute differences in timing will sometimes translate to multiple blocks of distance. This same jank applies to many of the different modes such as the robot. To make it even worse, there's a mini version of every mode in the game which causes your gravity to be heavier and makes you jump less in turn causing it to be magnitudes more difficult to have sufficient control over your character.

Most of the normal levels are designed in such a way that makes the jank of the game incredibly apparent as I believe that most of them (really just modern ones) weren't designed in a way that makes them playable, but instead designed in a way to make them show off the respective update's new gimmick. With the 1.7 update, it was Electrodynamix and speed changes, 1.8 was Hexagon Force and dual characters, 1.9 it was Blast Processing and the wave mode, for 2.0 it was both Geometrical Dominator with the Robot, and Deadlocked with the new green orbs plus teleporting, then the worst one out of all, 2.1's Fingerdash that had new red and black orbs, new types of orbs, and the spider mode. None of those levels are very playable due to how janky the game is and the developer doesn't do a good job of making the levels in accordance to how good they are. Hexagon Force especially.

The custom levels don't make it any better as most custom levels focus purely on visual appeal and not straight-forward and easy to figure out gameplay forcing you to essentially blindly memorize where to jump, which is pushed by the verification system. The verification system, in short is a system where levels get verified and given a difficulty rating from one star to ten stars. The problem with this is that only the most visually appealing levels get verified and therefore those who don't want to spend 100 hours decorating a level with less than two minutes of gameplay, don't get their levels verified, and most likely won't get any plays for that reason. It's a shame, cause there's plenty of fun custom levels out there, but most of the time when I play any of them, I'm not really having any fun because of how much visuals are valued and how little the gameplay is valued.

However, the worst part of this game for me, is the music. By god does this music get old QUICK. This game's music will appeal to you if you like mediocre electro-house/edm, or pathetic wannabe dubstep music. That is basically the majority of the songs in this game. All electro-house and edm, with a little dubstep/brostep mixed in here and there, with zero vocal tracks to back. There's a way to make music like that interesting (see Daft Punk, Bjork, Aphex Twin, and Flying Lotus for examples of this), yet most of the time, the game chooses really poorly made music, mostly because the source of the music for this game (including custom songs that you can put in your levels) comes from Newgrounds. Probably the worst website to listen to music on due to how many amateur musicians decide to upload their badly-made NCS-type music onto the website. There are a couple of gems here and there but most of the time, you're getting terrible music. As an amateur music critic, I can tell you that there is SO MUCH MORE good music on the other side, and if the game dev decides to add any of that good music that he absolutely has the reach to get the rights for, I'd be all for it. For now though, pretty much all of the music in the game sucks.

If you want a better game that lets you create levels, try Super Mario Maker 2. It's a much better game.

This game is RIDDLED with tons of flaws that could be easily patched.

First, your starting towers are almost totally useless. You start with Dart Monkeys, Tack Shooters, Ninja Monkeys, Bomb Towers, and Sniper Monkeys. You can only upgrade them to tier 2 which is terrible as none of the lower upgrades are good. The only two towers out of the starting 5 that are actually okay are the Ninja Monkey and the Bomb Tower. Neither of them are very good, but they'll have to do when starting out, as all of your other options are terrible. Dart Monkeys are useless when you don't have the third tier of upgrades available since all they do is shoot one dart every second or two that will pierce four bloons when upgraded fully, which is completely unviable. Tack Shooters are slow, and are hard to use as the majority of the time you use them, you'll either place them down in a bad spot, or be on a track where you cannot place them in a good spot as Tack Shooters work best when placed next to a curve as then the tacks will hit the most amount of bloons, but it's completely random whether or not you get put on a track that can actually make them useful meaning half the time choosing them as a tower will be a detriment to you as the track you play on could be one that makes them nearly useless. Take the map Yin Yang as an example, a Tack Shooter cannot be placed in a spot that makes it superior to a Bomb Tower with the frag bombs upgrade as the curves on it are wide. And lastly, you have the Sniper Monkey. Probably one of the most useless towers in the whole game as not only is it insanely slow, but it is also super costly to upgrade. The sniper is one of the worst towers in the game as it does next to nothing to help you, and is only useful in an extremely small amount of situations mostly during higher rounds with better upgrades, which you don't have as you cannot unlock tier 3 or 4 for them when starting out.

Second, If you come across a player who knows the game very well, even your best towers can be as good as useless to defending certain bloons. Take for example on round 13. On round 13 you can send highly packed rainbow or zebra bloons to your opponent. You can even set them to regrow when you send them, which will make them slowly regenerate their layers after being popped. If you pop a regrow zebra bloon down to four pinks, if you give it time to regenerate back up to zebras, it won't regrow back into just one zebra, it'll regrow into four, meaning you can duplicate regrowing bloons into staggering numbers. This is even worse with rainbows, as those pop into two zebras each, and then et cetera, and you end up with way more bloons than you started with. Not to mention it's damn near impossible to fight against 9-12 grouped regrow rainbows, especially on round 13 which is when you can first send them, as your towers are most likely not strong enough to fight off those bloons. If you don't pop each bloon extremely quickly, you'll be fighting against hundreds of zebra, black, white, and pinks in a matter of seconds. If you do this against someone that just started the game, you'll always win as they won't be able to defend themselves with any of the 5 starting towers. And speaking of really difficult rushes to defend with the first 5 starting towers, camo bloons are a nightmare for new players. If you don't have tons of ninjas all around the map, you'll lose to camo in a matter of seconds.

Third, the developers are greedy as hell, as the game is extremely grind heavy, as you need a lot of medallions if you want to unlock everything, the powers that you can change require XP to unlock, which is extremely slow to obtain, and the leaderboard on the game is focused on how many medallions you've gotten weekly. You heard me right. The game's weekly leaderboard is based only on how much money you have obtained in a week. Not your wins, not your W/L ratio, but the amount of medallions obtained, rewarding people who play the BFB Colosseum arena lots, as that will reward a lot of medallions upon winning. At the time I am writing this, I have a higher ratio than the person at the top of the leaderboard. On top of that, the game has not been changed at all in the past three years that I've been away. No new towers or bloons even though BTD6 has released, hardly any balance changes to fix the huge problems that some towers have, just a bunch of way too long maps, a sandbox mode that is way worse than the one in BTD5, extra things to pay for, and the worst mechanic in the game, which is powers. What's also really annoying is the fact that a majority of players want to play long games, so some Assault modes are catered to that. It'll get boring quickly when every match is just a "see who can pack more temples as close as they can be" fest, especially when Defense mode exists. Not to mention the queue times have always been really long as it'll take over a minute to queue with someone even if the arena you are playing has 2000+ players it can still take a minute and a half to get into a match.

And most importantly, the balancing is AWFUL. Some towers are totally useless while others are insanely powerful. Take for example the Bomb Tower and the Sniper Monkey. Bomb Towers are extremely powerful as it is extremely versatile and can deal with almost every kind of bloon easily, it can also do 10x damage to the strongest bloon types and can set off 8 explosions in a circle while stunning the bloons, only weakness of the tower is camo which can be solved using other towers. Then you have the Sniper Monkey which is probably the worst tower in the game as it is insanely slow and can barely pop any bloons without any upgrades while having some of the most expensive upgrades known to man, with the only strength being that it helps you deal with strong bloons or spaced bloons. Speaking of spaced bloons, being able to send spaced pinks on round four is awful, and will most likely either force you to spend any money you've been saving up to defend against the bloons, or sell your current tower(s) in order to purchase ones that can deal with the spaced pink bloons being constantly sent to you. I've won tons of games just because my opponent couldn't defend against spaced pinks on round four. Even if you get a tower that can defend against spaced pink bloons, that tower could also be weak to other forms of rushing, such as the Monkey Apprentice, who is extremely weak to grouped regrow rushes, as the lightning bolt upgrade shoots across the map, which may end up hitting regrow bloons and since the lightning bolt is so slow to attack, the bloons will almost always regrow back by the time the Apprentice can hit them again, meaning it will easily be overwhelmed by strong regrows, and if you decide to purchase the Summon Whirlwind upgrade for the Apprentice, it will send them back giving them much more time to regrow making it even worse. Speaking of terrible upgrades, some so-called upgrades actually make your towers worse, and surprisingly, the Apprentice has two of those upgrades. One for each side! Dragon's Breath makes the Apprentice worse as the piercing that the normal Apprentice's projectiles have is completely removed, and replaced with fire that pops single layers at a time. An even larger example of a bad upgrade is the Aircraft Carrier upgrade for the Buccaneer. The destroyer upgrade is amazing as it'll pop a ton of bloons pretty quickly, and if you get the Grape Shot upgrade, the tower will easily destroy tons of bloons. Once you waste $7,000 on the Aircraft Carrier upgrade, The tower will go from shooting tons darts at the targets very quickly to a small aircraft flying around in circles and shooting darts aimlessly. These upgrades have been in the game for a long time and have never been changed at all.

If you want a good bloons game, go with BTD5 or BTD6 instead.

Honestly, this is the better version of Terraria.
You have access to a nearly endless amount of mods that change the game in such special ways, for example: Thorium Mod. Thorium is one of the biggest mods out there, it adds a bunch of major content that can be explored very thoroughly, (i.e. new bosses, new ores, new weapon classes). And then there are also mods like 'The' Fixer, which change minor things. 'The' Fixer fixes a grammatical issue with prefixes on weapons and accessories starting with the word "The" (i.e. The plan, The Axe). And then you have mods like: HERO's mod. This mod can do all sorts of things, like: Summoning Enemies/Bosses, Cheating in items, Changing the weather, Or even give you infinite reach.
I have played with tModLoader for years, even before it was out on steam! I maybe have 1,000+ hours on modded terraria worlds, and there is just so much that I love about it.
tModLoader is, and will always be superior to Vanilla terraria in every possible way.

This game is on another level, some games break the fourth wall a few times, in this game however, the fourth wall doesn't even exist.
This game creates an atmosphere that is extremely scary.
The puzzles in this game are really good.
This game doesn't rely solely on Jumpscares, like a lot of other horror games do. (e.g. FNaF)

I love IMSCARED, and i honestly want more!
I know i am 4 years late but I don't care, this game is still worth the $4

This game has one of the biggest learning curves, but if you stick with it, you can have loads of fun.
And even if you're not that great at it, playing this with friends in private rooms can make this really fun, especially when you play with fun mods.
If you want basic fun right out of the gate, play alone or with friends.
However if you wanna have long term fun, you can learn how to play against everyone online.

Though this game does have two big downsides.
1. The game has a steep learning curve, and takes a lot of time and practice to fully understand.
2. The community isn't the best and has some toxic people.

Still, despite that, I would still recommend this to anyone because it is still really fun on your own and with your friends. (Make sure that when you're playing with your friends, set the room to private by using a password)

Also quick tip: try to use your scrollwheel or Z and X to move your joints, NOT your left mouse button.

There are a few games that I would call a rite-of-passage for all gamers, and this is one of them. Playing Terraria is an absolute blast no matter how you play. The game can be grind heavy at certain points, but as a whole, Terraria never fails to be an excellent experience.

Here are some of the main reasons why I love this game: the bosses are stellar; the weapons, armors, and accessories are extremely well balanced; the progression is near perfect; the music is iconic; and the difficulty is on point. Plus, this game is infinitely more fun with friends. The level of hilarity that occurred during some of my multiplayer sessions were on another level of fun.

The only potentially frustrating part of this game is how grind heavy it can get, especially toward the end. Granted, some of the grinding is genuinely fun, but farming enemies for multiple of a rare drop can get tiring after a while.

If you're unwilling to grind, you could always duplicate the items, but unfortunately, the developers patched out the primary method of duplication (which was actually fairly balanced all things considered).

With that aside, this game is a must-play. If you haven't already bought this game, do it now. I promise, you will not regret it.