Recent reviews by Brom

Okay first of all: I'm not leaving a negative review because I think the DLC is bad. If you liked Neva, and wished you could give Nomada Studio more money, then hey, go for it. There are plenty of worse things you could spend 3€ on, and if there are developers who should have all the funding they want for whatever they do next, Nomada Studio is certainly among them.

But me, I can't understand what the purpose of this DLC is (other than, as I said, make some money). Neva's story was beautiful, and its circular nature - with the cutscene at the end being almost identical to the one at the beginning - fit the theme of the game: caring for your loved ones, and for the environment, is a neverending battle. What does seeing the exact moment Alba met Neva for the first time add to the story? The DLC is too short for any kind of arc, growth or introspection. You chase a bunch of glowing butterflies, you find Neva, you run from a huge monster, you fight the huge monster, that's it. You don't really discover anything new about Alba or Neva. It's just showing that moment for the sake of showing it, not because there was a story to tell there.

And honestly it feels like the other parts of the game were half-hearted, too. The gameplay is okay, but I found the part where you run from the monster while holding Neva in your arms more frustrating than emotionally touching, The DLC is visually very impressive, animation and background quality is consistently very high, but it also feels like it lacks the inspiration that was so common during Neva. Like absolutely, the DLC looks nice! But I never had any real "woah" moment.

So to conclude, It's an "okay" DLC that doesn't add anything to the characters. Buy it if you want to support Nomada.

This review is going to stay negative until:

- They add saves to the campaign
- The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bug that causes the reverse command to make your tanks move ass first into the enemy lines gets fixed

Other than that, the game's good actually. The UI could use some work but that's it tbh. However those two things I mentioned are frankly unacceptable.

Honestly surprised by the fact that the reviews for Ravenswatch are only around 70-80% positive. In my opinion this is an excellent roguelite with a cool idea, great presentation, and nice variety of playstyles between the 8 available heroes.

Initially I was a bit skeptical about the time limit but after a bunch of runs it becomes clear that it fits well in the overall game loop, adding a strategical layer beyond "am i strong enough" to what objectives one should example; for example, the recently added star altars offer nice options, but whether they're nice enough to spend 1-2 minutes trying to clear them depends on a few factors. For people who like a less frantic experience, one of the modifiers offered by the game removes the time limit, which is nice for people who want to get the hang of the game, but be warned that no time limit absolutely breaks the balance of the game in favor of the player.

Funnily enough, Ravenswatch is also easier the fewer players there are. Some characters that do a lot of damage but struggle a bit with survivability are likely to have a harder time when enemies have a lot more health. And this also makes it very unlikely to be able to carry a bossfight when your teammates are dead. Maybe some rebalance would help but also I don't imagine finding the sweet spot is easy.

If there's a criticism I have is that I would like for singleplayer and multiplayer games to have separate save slots. Sometimes I want to do a run on my own but I know I have to commit to it to the end because if I want to play with friends later I'd have to lose my progress.

I don't wanna give this game a negative review because all in all I had a decent time playing it in co-op with my brother, and I can see the heart that went into creating it, but at the same time my recommendation comes with many many asterisks. The TL; DR: is: only get this game if you REALLY want to play as a Lord of the Rings dwarf reconquering Moria from the Orcs. Reconstructing Moria is very obviously what the devs spent a lot of their time on, and they did a good job at it. There's also some neat ideas, like the dwarves starting to sing when they dig metals or precious rocks, and having a good dance when you pick up a mug of beer.

However, there's also many things which are simply not that great. The building system, for example, is unwieldy - you can only rotate things 90°, they don't always latch to other elements easily, and sometimes it's hard to figure out if you're building something inside of a rock wall rather than on the outiside (where, for example, wall torches should usually be). When starting the game, you have to move your base often to avoid long walks, and then suddenly once you can reliably build (and rebuild) teleports, you have literally no need to move it anymore. The combat is incredibly awkward. Sometimes when attacking your dwarf will not move an inch, and other times it will make a crazy dash towards some randomly picked target (not necessarily an enemy). Enemies literally drop from the sky! (or, well, the ceiling). You'll enter an area, see three enemies, decide to engage them, and suddenly there's five more around you, and at normal difficulty, enemies at your tier level are always a threat. And to top it off, the game is very poorly optimized. I don't mind that the graphics aren't particularly great but regularly dropping frames, if not having outright stutters, is painful.

So if you REALLY wanna play a videogame set in LotR and you REALLY like survival games, and you don't mind an abundant does of jank, then yeah this might be a good game for you. Other than that, maybe think carefully before buying it.

I mean what can you say about a game that has (at time of writing) 14k+ reviews, 97% of which are positive. It's a really, really good game. It's not flawless, the English translation was done by a non-native speaker (or equivalent) which leads to some lines sounding a bit weird (but not compromisingly so) and, more importantly, the grappling hook mechanics are a bit imprecise at times.

But other than that, oh my god. Using the grappling hooks feels GREAT. When you manage to do that sequence without ever stopping you feel like a badass. The pixel art and the animation quality is insane. The OST is great with some absolute bangers (King's Orders ohmygod - but don't look it up if you haven't played the game, it's a bit spoilery). And the story. Oh man, the story, like maybe you can argue that beyond the convolutedness it's pretty simple but also shut up man. I wish every 'simple' story was able to get everything so RIGHT. The way the intro kicks you in the stomach, the feeling of "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what the hell" as the mystery about Mago City starts to unfold, the payoff at the end!! The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ payoff when you get Sanabi!!!

I always found statements like 'this is the best game ever' really dumb and I haven't changed my mind but damn, this is one of the good ones.

Been a while since I have reviewed a game on Steam, but thought I Was a Teenage Exocolonist was a worthy enough exception. The premise is simple enough: you're a ten-year-old among the first people to set foot on a new planet; every month, you can pick an activity that will keep you busy during that month (i.e. studying biology, relaxing, exploring the outskirts of the colony); the playthrough ends when you reach your 20th year of age.

Of course, there's plenty of things that will happen in the meanwhile, and it's up to you to decide how you want to face those events. Perhaps some you'll fail, even, but even that progresses the story. Given the age of the protagonists, there's a lot of coming-of-age in the story, of the main character trying to find their place in the world and to find out what they really want to be, and it's all written really well. Sure, some dialogues or interactions might repeat themselves, or sound a bit like filler - but trust me, for a smaller game like this, there's really a ton of content to read through. And the best thing is that it never feels too verbose: descriptions and dialogues always feel accurate but snappy.

As with most story-centric games (this one has some light gameplay: the optionally skippable card game that decides how well you do in activities and challenges, and some exploration) there are choices that you'll have to take, and each of those has consequences. Some people might not get to the end of the playthrough depending on what you do. Sometimes, you can also decide to be an outright ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ - but I'd say that picking certain choices is more telling of the player than it is of the developer. Just because they give you the choice of negging a specific character just so you can be with them later doesn't mean you have to, for example. The themes of the game touch onto current issues, too - the game definitely asks you to reflect about what the relationship between us humans and the natural world should be.

The game also incentivizes repeated playthroughs - not just because of all the choices or the outcomes, but because the idea of loop / parallel lives is baked in the plot and further replays can be affected by the knowledge (your own as a player, and through further dialogue choices) you have acquired in other lives.

Finally, worth pointing out that the game is simply delightful from an artistic point of view - beautiful art and delicate, never invasive but always on-point soundtrack (it's also on Spotify!). Absolutely loved my time with it, and genuinely surprised this isn't being talked about more.

This game's bad.

"But Brom", I hear some of you saying, "I'm a massive 40k nerd. How could I not love this game??" And, believe me, I hear you. Trudging through the dark bowels of a Space Hulk as a Terminator, mowing down Hormagaunts and Genestealers while hopefully not getting torn to shreds, sounds great, right?

Well, unfortunately, it isn't. Deathwing, even in its current "Enhanced Edition" state, is mediocre at best. The visuals are cool and the sound is good, but that's pretty much all it's got going for it. Weapon balance is wack. Half of the (very limited) weapon choices might as well not be there, and the attachment system is uninteresting, providing admittedly useful but very boring bonuses (also why do I need to spend renown to make it so my weapon doesn't jam. Make it not do that by default you dolts).

Mission design is among the worst I've seen. Walk there, push a button. Now walk over there, wait a bunch. Now shoot some more while waiting until the AdMech's slow-ass Commodore 64s have finished running their calculations. And I get that this game doesn't have the highest budget, but come on. Realizing that having to spend 10 minutes sitting in the geneseed room shooting at the waves of trash mobs that come running at you from a corridor is bad design should be common sense, and I certainly expected better from the developers of EYE.

The enemies are also very uninteresting. There is some attempt at variety, but ultimately it boils down to slashy dudes (sometimes hard to see), tougher slashy dudes (sometimes they oneshot you), boomy dudes, shooty dudes and turrets.

Also ♥♥♥♥ the CAT escort mission. That piece of AdMech trash lost its way and kept going back and forth and we could not progress. We had to get killed and skip to the next mission. Admittedly we didn't try to soothe its machine spirit by chanting. Maybe we should have done that.

So overall. It's a somewhat passable game if you have three friends to play it with. Otherwise, you're better of reinstalling Space Marine and playing that game instead.

I didn't actually dislike Luna Nights. I think it's a neat little game. Its most interesting feature is certainly Sakuya's ability to slow down and freeze time, which while certainly not an unheard of ability in videogames, it's always fun to play around with. Time manipulation shines especially against bosses, where it'll definitely come in handy when you'll have to avoid their bullet-hell style attacks, or certain particularly quick moves.

In general, boss battles are what Luna Nights does best. Those are fun and exciting - perhaps a little bit too long for my liking, although not by a huge margin. But the thing is, that's about it; everything else Luna Nights does is average at best. This includes, perhaps surprisingly, combat: while bosses deserve praise, the same can't be said for average enemies, who are generally not that interesting to fight, nor particularly inspired in design. The game world lacks in terms of design as well; some areas might be a little bit nicer than others, but none stands out. This is especially poor news for a metroidvania, a genre that traditionally wants the player to revisit older areas once they've unlocked upgrades: it's harder to remember where you saw an item you couldn't access if there's nothing memorable about the game's world. In addition, retreading your steps often feels a lot more bothersome that it is worth, due to the way areas are connected, due to obstacles littered around the world and the fact that enemies respawn every time you exit and re-enter an area.

Luna Nights is also a very small game. I just beat the final boss (although the game expects me to beat it again? Not sure, I'll try to do that in the near future), and Steam indicates I have played the game for 5 hours; there is also not much to explore beyond what you're supposed to see as you're trying to reach the end, just a few upgrades littered here and there, but they're not that many. Finally, the story is also barely worth paying attention to - I guess it might make a little more sense if you're a Touhou fan, but for me it was mostly nonsensical and seemingly poorly translated rambling.

So in conclusion. It's an okay game, a six out of ten in my book. It has some neat ideas, but fails to couple them with a solid gameplay (again, with the exception of boss battles) and good world building. It also never really manages to shake the impression that what you're playing is basically a fan-made game, well made as far as fan games go, but still fan-made.

If you're looking for a competent metroidvania, play Hollow Knight or Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight before you play this.

There's a weird feeling that sometimes grips me when I play certain games. In part, it's a very common one, the one you feel when you're liking a game a lot, and that game is in your mind all the time. Even when you’re doing other stuff, you can’t help but find yourself thinking, “damn, I can’t wait to see what happens next.” And it's great, right?

But then there's the other side of that. The side that can't help but constantly remind you that the more you play, the sooner the game is going to end. That those great times you're having - the affection and sympathy for the characters, the pride swelling in your chest after solving a puzzle, the thrill of a tough fight - will be over. And so you're torn between playing the game and not playing it too much because you want it to last as much as it can.

It's pointless, obviously. You're still going to reach the end, no matter what. But it's still there, and it’s exactly how I felt when playing CrossCode, Radical Fish's isometric action-rpg with platforming and puzzle elements that puts you in a virtual MMO world. There's no two ways about it: CrossCode is an excellent game. It's not perfect, of course. But what flaws it has - like for example the combat being a bit weak at least until the first temple - are minor, and dwarfed by the sheer amount of things that CrossCode gets right. The story, the world design, the animations, the music, the bosses, the puzzles. It’s incredible.

Some of you might be wondering, "But if this game is so good, why did barely make it to any of the top games of the year lists?" And the truth is, I don't know. Maybe it's a combination of how late into the year it released and how long it is. But believe me: not many story-based indie games can keep a level of overall quality this high, and for such a long time. With CrossCode, it's not quality or quantity. It's both.

Let me preface my review by saying one thing: as a (mostly) one-man effort, Iconoclast is terrific. You only need to look at a random gameplay video or trailer while keeping in mind that what you see - the levels, the character designs, the story, the music, the coding - was made by one person, Joachim Sandberg, to realize how big of an accomplishment this is.

However. What I want to do is judge the game on its own merits, and not on external factors, no matter how impressive I might find them. I realize I might end up talking about the things I disliked more than the things I liked, so I'll be clear on this: despite its flaws, I enjoyed Iconoclasts. It's a solid game and it's worth playing. It’s just not the best game I played this year.

First of all: Iconoclasts might look like a metroidvania at first, but it's not. There's not much in the way of exploration and, even if you do unlock powerups that let you access new areas, the plot is going to lead you on a very linear path. There’s some platforming, but it’s rather sparse and not the focus of the game: that role is reserved for puzzles and combat.

The puzzles are relatively simple, with some exceptions. One thing about them that left me a bit iffy is that I was able to "solve" some of them in ways that I'm not 100% sure were intended: one of the puzzles towards the end of the game can be completely bypassed by clever use of the pink boxes in the room and the swap gun. Much in the same way, it happened a couple times in my playthrough that some obstacles that clearly required more brainpower than I had available at the moment could be surpassed by simply diving headfirst into them and using those few seconds of invincibility to reach the otherwise inaccessible area.

But Robin's wrench and stun gun are not going to be used only for puzzle-solving; there's a fair deal of combat in Iconoclasts, too. Generic enemies are varied enough, both design and mechanically wise: simply whacking or shooting an enemy often won't be enough to dissuade them from standing in your way. At the same time, though, I wouldn't say combat is one of the game's selling points; while it does its job decently enough, this is no Hollow Knight or Hyper Light Drifter. The same applies to bosses. Most of them have the tendency to feel a bit - for lack of a better word - gimmicky; there's a lot of "do this thing x times and you win", paired with relatively simple attack patterns, so some fights boil down to waiting until the stars align and you can mess their day real bad. It doesn't help that some bossfights require you to use Mina, a different character; this would be a good idea in theory, but Mina's shotgun is much clunkier than Robin's stun gun and it makes for some annoying gameplay moments.

I was also disappointed by the tweak system and, in conjunction with that, by the various treasure spread around the levels. The loot will always boil down to one out of four upgrade materials and, combined with the fact that upgrades for Robin don't feel like they matter much, you never really get a sense of wonder and excitement when you see a new chest; you more or less already know what's in there, and that it won't be impressive.

As far as the story goes, Iconoclasts is similar to Cave Story in vibe: both games start colorful and wacky and have cute characters but it doesn't take long before you come to the realization that the story is, in fact, pretty damn dark. However, while there are obvious differences in terms of plot, I think Cave Story executes his way better. While it starts off good, Iconoclasts seems to quickly develop a taste for the melodramatic, like it mistakes making everything and everyone as miserable as it could possibly be for how mature narration should look like. There's a ton of gruesome deaths and ugly, sad backstories or destinies for many of the side characters, and as a result it all ends up drowned in the tides of misery. When everything is a tragedy, nothing is.

(also, why does no one give a ♥♥♥♥ about the blue goo that takes over lifeforms and is literally everywhere? Not even a passing remark? A "hey what's this thing that looks like some elder god is corrupting our land and why is it here and how do we get rid of it?" No?)

The message about blind belief isn't exactly subtle either - City One's "pearly gates" are guarded by an old, bearded gatekeeper named Pete that decides who is deserving of entry, in case you're still unsure about what specifically the cult of Mother is a reference to - but I'd be lying if I said I cared much for it, and not due to personal beliefs. I'm not a religious person myself, but what Iconoclasts seems to try to say about the matter sounds an awful lot like a well-worded "believing in imaginary friends is bad don't do it" which I feel is too simple of an outlook on the theme of belief. But perhaps I'm wrong and I completely misunderstood what Joachim Sandberg was trying to say. Might very well be.

The ending is also very weird, and I'll leave it at that.

But despite all this, Iconoclasts is certainly not a game without its charms; the general design is very good, as well as animation quality; the gameplay, while it might not be a shining beacon, is still solid and varied enough to keep you entertained; the music is also pretty good and, while I might not be the biggest fan of the game's story, I still was interested in seeing where it would go. So all in all: a neat little game, worthy of your time if you're a fan of the genre.