Recent reviews by Enzer

I forgot to refund the game, but I'm kind of glad I didn't. They've updated the handling and it feels a metric ton better! Definitely enough to move it to a positive review for me, albeit a shaky one.

I finally got Jetass and near the end I T-boned an Enforcer while in 1st. Not sure where they came from, they probably came out of the shortcut or something. The end of the track is also extremely technical and probably shouldn't be, for this boss specifically. I ended up getting stuck on the Enforcer and losing the race, which is a real feel bad and goes back to the "this would feel better as a combat game first and not a racing game" mentality of my previous reviews. Also golden tickets are effectively a worthless waste of money. Just let me retry the boss instead of making me lose outright if I have one, yeah? I get the no skips, but I spent the money, which could've gone into another upgrade, just to lose even though I have one.

I do still fishtail as the first car, but it's nowhere near as bad and recovery feels good. I do still feel like you absolutely HAVE to build into defense or you just die. I had two defense items and I still felt like the enemies were taking large chunks of my health away with their guns. You can break a lock with boosting, but when you're in first, they basically just instantly lock on you again and again and again, it feels. Also boosts aren't infinite and require running enemies over so you run out and just take the damage without recourse. You can apparently also evade a lock with sidebash, which is on a cooldown, but it's a very disorientating maneuver (for me, anyway) so I may try, but it's not optimal.

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I've now played the game for 117 minutes, a whole 81 minutes more than before. I've done 3 runs (failed miserably on the second one, the first one was the first review I made and that got past boss 1). After getting up to the 4th car I have to say it handles much better. I still fishtail every once in a while, but it's not as bad, but it has less handling stats than the starter car so not sure how that works.

One of my biggest gripes right now is Act 3 is just absolutely brutal. Enemy machine gun fire tears you apart so fast you don't know why you're suddenly a scrap heap. Even with the tier 4 defense I kept taking immense amounts of damage and with a similarly tiered Stinger I felt like I was only doing good amounts of damage because it has a self-synergy and I had a high tier damage bonus for guns. So far it feels like you're shoehorned into a specific build, which is not great in a rogue lite.

The other biggest gripe is that golden tickets are kind of a scam. If you lose a race they're magical. If you get wrecked you just die again in 3 seconds because you respawn with barely any health. Since repairs don't respawn, and you can't spawn new ones unless you destroy enemies, you are probably better off just parking and letting the race end than continuing to play instead of spending the ticket getting wrecked, which disincentivizes playing the game.

Positively, I did feel like I got further now that I have some upgrades. Whether that's due to the better car or the fact I unlocked the Stinger, I'm not sure. It's a fun weapon (though I think it may have self-damage, hard to tell in the chaos).

There seems like a lot to experiment with in the battlepass-style meta progression mechanic, but I'm just shy of the refund window and I'm not sure I really want to keep it with how the first 117 minutes have gone. The combat can actually be fun at times, but the enemy progression curve feels exponential and mine feels pretty flat across a run. If meta progressions matter too much, then it's going to kill any fun in act 1 and probably 2, too, just to have a good time in act 3.

My review below, made at at 36 minutes of play time still stands for me.

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One day maybe Valve will include some sort of middling review option, but that's not today. I have never played a Carmageddon game before so that part does not matter to me.

The game isn't a very good racing game. Your car feels slow, even going max speed carbon copies of your car will speed by you, as will hefty pickup trucks. Then you'll catch right up to them later. This is great for a combat game as there's always an opponent around to fight, but you're required to podium (or in some cases flat out win) races... So that's a bad racing game.

That being said, it kind of makes it an okay kart racer. It lacks the fun item rolling of picking up a new weapon on the field that Kart racers have and instead your weapon is locked in place until you buy or find an upgrade on your path. You can at least upgrade your car along the way and there's meta progression, but the only thing that's really kart-like is the on-field pickups.

The driving physics are not the greatest, though. I find I spin out for no apparent reason sometimes. Like the game ties some of the physics to framerate and they go haywire or something, I don't know, either way it's not very fun to take the same turn 2 times in a row and then suddenly spin out coming around it in a way that feels the same as before (but probably isn't since, while driving feels slow, it's really not). I've fishtailed more times than I can count, but sometimes you can't recover or don't recover fast enough and have to reset or back up and it slows the whole game down. Maybe I'm being hit in the back, but it's hard to tell with the camera so close to the vehicle.

I do have fun with the combat. A lot of the weapons lock on, with various time to locks, but you can shoot them off manually if you want. You don't seem to get any more points for it, but it is a thing you can do. There are obstacles to avoid while fighting other racers that play into the zombie theme as well as police and stage obstacles. While none of the bosses I've seen are necessarily unique, a couple of them drop explosive barrels from the back for example, they are still neat and pose a challenge outside the normal events.

The reason I have to go negative instead of positive on a mixed review of this game is that the racing is the weakest part and it's REQUIRED... I'm not so sure the combat is. If every racing level was replaced with, effectively, a destruction derby where you have no laps and your goal is to kill all other racers (or you have laps and your goal is to kill a minimum number or you get bonuses per elimination that would give you resources to help you later or a time limit instead of laps or... Well I could go on).

Basically, this game needs more combat focus and less racing focus to make the game more fun for me. Hopefully playing it more and unlocking the meta progression will unlock more fun, but since it has problems in the fundamentals I'm not keeping my hopes up.

I'm absolutely loving the game. It's weird and quirky and I can't always understand what the characters are saying (or maybe why they're saying the things they're saying... But the words, in the order the words are in I sometimes don't understand, I guess... Look, I'm very tired, but I wanted to write this before bed).

Aaaaaanyway. If the demo is still up (and I really hope it stays up forever), try the demo. It's a fantastic representation of the game. If you love the demo you'll almost certainly love the main game, it's basically more of that and I haven't gotten sick of that in 7 or so hours so far.

Seriously, just check it out.

It's right here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2821920/Angeline_Era_Demo/

2025-11-11 - Devs don't appear to be active on the Steam forums, the place they're selling the game, the place their customers are going to go when they want answers or assistance or recognition that they see our posts and are doing something, anything, about the issues people are having. Even a "yep, we see this and we're working on it" would be nice. Because of that, even if the below changes I will still not be recommending the game.

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2025-11-08 - Look, I'm loving the game, but I can't recommend it yet. This review is for the Early Access release version so this may not apply if you're in futureland. The performance isn't there yet and there are issues with UX that are so unbelievably frustrating to me specifically. The game is a mix of Raft and Forever Skies (which itself is inspired by Raft).

This review is by no means exhaustive, but I do want to get back to playing it despite the flaws lol.

• The game sounds and looks fantastic
  
• Recycling is very satisfying as is the general gameplay loop
  
• I spent about 4 hours in the first building scrapping everything, please send help
  
• The weapons I've played with all feel unique (only 3 so far, but I can unlock 2 more)
  
• You're sailing a ship and it feels like it, which is super immersive. You can sail third and first person.
  
• Craft from storage is a thing!
  
• I like the general premise of the game and the story, but I haven't read the logs yet.

• The ship constantly moves around while you're trying to place items. You do not move around (or at least not at the same rate) so when building thins things, especially on walls, it's difficult to align as the ship's rocking about.
  
• Looking down to pick something up or interact with something below you will often just attach a cable to your chest instead of picking up the item you're looking for.
  
• Shut off button for cable extenders is so big that you can't interact with the bottom port when placed close to a floor.
  
• Sometimes pressing E while looking down doesn't attach a cable to yourself, but your gun if you have your gun out (I think that's what's causing it) even though your gun is normally V. Though I'm pretty sure I've had it pull from my backpack, too, or the button changed based on context as well. Inconsistencies like this are the kind of tiny annoyance that add up, especially when they happen in combat.
  
• Organics... You need them to make fuel for both weapons and the ship. Without it you max out at 19 KPH (11.8 MPH) and it feels SO SLOW. The problem is that organics are slow to get. You can get them from combat, but if you farm that way it gets very boring sitting at the same cocoon waiting for it to spawn more over and over. The engine uses so much fuel you need a metric ton (literally) to keep that engine running. They also make a negligible amount of diesel for the amount you use.
  
• Your ship sails like a barge. Slow to accelerate, slow to stop, slow to turn. At least it's better when running 2 engines.
  
• Had to disable raytracing because the game just crashes on load otherwise. This was a problem in the demo, too, but I didn't know how to fix it there. There is another bug I haven't checked that was in the demo where I couldn't have Global Illumination set to low or it would crash on start.
  
• Performance is questionable at times, even on a 7950x3D and 7900xtx at 1440p I get all kinds of random frame drops, but it's usually pretty smooth. Saving will lock the game up for what feels like an eternity. I have my settings set to every 5 minutes and I feel it.
  
  • Hotfix 1 brought an update to the save system where autosaving no longer locks the game up, but accessing the save menu is still a problem
• Hit feedback is poor on enemies. I oftentimes don't know if I'm doing damage. I was pretty sure the electric pistol was a no-range weapon, but after playing for a bit I realized it just does small amounts of damage rapidly so it felt that way.
  
  • Some of this was fixed in Hotfix 1 (the electric pistol is much better at telling you where you're shooting now)
• No way to expand the ship itself. No making it bigger or smaller or upgrading anything except the engine's pistons
  
• No universal cargo hold on your ship and the range of craft from storage feels too short on the ship. You have to build and place a bunch of boxes instead of your ship having a cargo hold, each one has a weight limit (50, 100, or 200 depending on tier), pretty close to the fabricator or you or else it won't see them. No idea what the range is, but it feels too short. I can't find a way to visualize it in game though.
  
• Mooring is super strong and can tip your ship in unexpected ways. It's especially bad in rough waters where it may pull your ship under the area you're docked.
  
• Game prioritizes interacting over shooting, even when in combat.
  
• Shark, a renewable resource of great value, is nearly impossible to salvage.
  
• Story quests set out to not tell you that you need water hooked up before telling you need a specific item that degrades over an hour if it's not in the right place with electricity (which the questline tells you to do) and water (which the questline does not tell you to do). There's a limited number of this story item on the map and they don't respawn so this information is paramount.

I played the heck out of the demo and I haven't gotten through all the demo content yet, but there's still all kinds of added stuff to enjoy. A bigger HQ, more secrets, more story elements, and even a special newsletter level with the same humor I enjoyed from the demo.

If you like a bit of potty humor (pun very much intended) I think you'll like this game. Most of it is walking around spanking things, but there are some segments with different aspects/gameplay like parkour or tower defense. There are branching paths that you can go back to in case you want to try the other route, which probably get one of the endings. With a bunch of secrets to find and an overarching plot to unveil I'm sure I'll continue to have a grand time! You may also encounter a dab of horror elements along the way, but be brave, little toaster!

I would be remiss not to mention that I was a playtester on this game through a good chunk of its time so I've seen my fair share of the game's progression from basically just an Act 1 proof of concept with placeholder textures all the way to what it is now. My review of the demo still stands for the most part. I thoroughly enjoyed my time testing it and was eager to buy my copy day 1.

You'll be fighting through fun, and oftentimes frenetic, rogue-lite arenas trying to save your Great Tree and country from a dystopian corporation. There are many upgrades that give you special abilities. You can summon birds, clouds of poison, balls of electricity, and more to send your foes back to the break room (just try not to get carted yourself and watch out for mage rot). There's a set of weapons and my favorite is probably the shuriken, weak as it may be, but the knuckles are a close second. I admit I don't use the ranged thornball attacks as much as I probably should, but there's a nice variety there too. You can beat rivals to use one of their skills for the run, too! Every weapon feels unique in its own right with different effects if you charge/heavy attack. There are even ultimate abilities you can find during a run that do screen-wide attacks.

The arena traversal is pretty neat. You get a hex grid where you can choose where to go (so long as you are going upish, so up, up-left, or up-right). It feels more controllable for the player than something like Slay the Spire's. You'll mostly find arena rooms, but there are challenge rooms (not sure what the official name is) where you do a harder fight for permanent currency, break rooms, minigame rooms, blank rooms (you don't even go inside these, they're just a space on the map to stand), rival fights, fleeting chest rooms, the atrium (a respite before the boss, not sure if what's the official name lol), and of course the boss. Sometimes there's weather and boy do you have to weather the weather! It's a hazard that will keep you on your toes for that fight, that's for sure. While you fight you generate hype and fame to get more permanent currency at the end of the run and I think it also changes how much and how often you get audience rewards after a fight. It's a mechanic I should have paid more attention to, that's for sure. I do know it gives you more options when you get your pick of abilities at the end of a room. Speaking of, there is a downside to stacking these things called mage rot that will eat into your max health if you go overboard so choose wisely!

I think my favorite thing is that almost everything inside the arena can be launched at enemies. Rocks? Yep. Trees? For sure. Enemies!? Yes! Enemy... Projectiles!? Also yes. Too many bullets? Just send 'em back! It's like a bullet hell where you control the narrative. I would not consider myself great at Hades. I don't think I've ever gotten to a boss with full health (let alone ended one with what I came in with). To me this game has similar fights to Hades, but taking damage doesn't feel as bad and you have more ways to mitigate it because you can bounce back projectiles, but also dash around (I still suck at both lol). Once you've gone through a few runs you do get the ability to make the game more difficult. This is, technically speaking, required in order to finish the game, but you get to choose the type of difficulty increase.

There are still more features I didn't even cover. Permanent currency purchases, special arenas, minigame types, vending machines, slot machines, fountains, prayers, meal tickets; boy I'm probably forgetting a few things there even. I think it's pretty inexpensive for how much work was put into it. There was no AI used in the game as far as I am aware: voices were acted by humans, the music was made by a musician, the art was made by an artist, and the program was made by a programmer. I'm sure Echelon disapproves of the situation. The devs have also been pretty receptive to feedback and have been fixing issues as they arise.

Super fun with or without friends and gets updated frequently.

After playing, and play testing, this a bunch on another platform I think I can say this is a fun, and oftentimes frenetic, rogue-lite arena game. You will find upgrades to your attacks so you can bird, poison, electrocute, ground spike, and more your enemies in this corporate dystopia to save your Great Tree and country.

I think my favorite thing is that almost everything inside the arena can be launched at enemies. Rocks? Yep. Trees? For sure. Enemies!? Yes! Enemy... Projectiles!? Also yes. Too many bullets? Just send 'em back!

In a year full of games of the year, this is my game of the year. I liked the puzzles, but I loved the story. It was very moving and thought provoking through and through. A fantastic follow up to the first game. New types of puzzle elements that I adored. Visually unique sections with stunning graphics. Top notch voice acting. Characters with personalities, wants, needs, and feelings. It's rare that a game lets you actually guide the story and feel impactful. Your choices are generally going to be for or against advancement and that determines certain things later down the line. Maybe they're not as impactful as I think, but it definitely feels impactful. The main story surrounding the megastructure kept me guessing with every new bit of info, and I was always kind of sort of vaguely right until about half-way through where I effectively had it figured it out, but still wasn't confident in what my idea was, only to have it validated near the end.

The only non-spoilery gripe I had was that traveling around the overworld felt kind of bad. Visually, it was stunning, and there's good variety but running from puzzle to puzzle was daunting at the best of times and infuriating at the worst. One of the maps is basically a ton of narrow paths on top of cliffs over water. The water may or may not kill you, but if you shortcut some of the lower paths, it definitely will. This causes a lot of unnecessary travel time, especially on extra windy and vertical maps. I do appreciate the stone markers with the blinking lights, as well as the compass.

The story left me wanting to know more about the world. What happened before, what happens next. It was engaging and engrossing in a way a game hasn't been for me in a very long time.

It took me about 30 hours to get through the game. All puzzles, including side ones, and get all the question marks on the compass, as well as faffed about town to chat to everyone. If you don't want to get this game for yourself, get this game for Miranda. Get it for Trevor. Get it for Byron, Athena, Yaqut, Neith, Alcatraz... Get it for this cast of very human characters. I'd love this as a TV show; a movie just wouldn't be long enough.

There's a lot to say about the game, but I don't have the time. Let's just say I loved just about every minute of it.

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Spoilers below.

This section contains my thoughts on certain aspects of the game that are close to, or include the end.

If you care about major plot points in the story I would turn back now.

You have been warned.

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Let's start out with this... I want to be able to watch the star cinematic again. It gave me chills.

The whole theory of everything is one of those things I think about from time to time, but always as a scientist, never before in a philosophic sense. I think the story does well in conveying that. With the grief of losing their child and even with what should be ultimate power, they feel powerless. It just hits you with that sort of sorrow that lingers. I wanted to save Miranda if I could. I got attached to her newfound wonder of the world she found herself in. I felt despair to find this ultimately led to her end... But I had an inkling there was going to be a twist. Somewhere. She just had to be alive. There had to be a way... I pressed on feeling as Cornelius may have. Finally when she does come back it was a wave of relief, I had to tell Athena. I couldn't just save her daughter and leave her in that pyramid. Then at the end, Yaqut asks her out on a date and it's adorable. It was an engaging arc and we even got some story of what happens after, which is something I'll always love.

Then the credits end and you see a grave. Trevor. I, admittedly, skipped some of the text entries (and hopefully none of the audio), but it makes me wonder... Did Alexandra bury Trevor? If so... What did Alexandra feel as the last human. She seemed like a workaholic. Trying to get all of this done before her eventual demise. I don't remember much from the first game, unfortunately, so maybe there are more details there. I did find Trevor's crush on Alexandra charming, though bittersweet. His general frustrations at trying to learn to do something when all the experts are dead. There is a lot of character in every character.

I have a couple spoiler-related gripes. Prometheus' (and to a lesser extent) Pandora's and Sphinx's lines were delivered. They felt like they were a stage play, is the best way to describe them. I guess in some ways they were, though. They were Athena's inner voices, they were characters in a play on repeat in her mind. So in a way, that was the best way to deliver those lines. Unfortunately, it made Prometheus' initial entrance feel less impactful, especially as he's getting chained.

The last set of puzzles annoyed the heck out of me. I loved the new mechanic of the ever-changing laser emitter/receiver, but once I got to Utopia/Dystopia... I messed up a couple times trying to figure some stuff out and ended up underwater and having to restart. When I restarted I lost all my progress for the entire thing so I had to hear Athena say the same 4-5 lines over and over again because I messed up at about the same number every time. The swapping between the two potential futures was great, except that it requires far too much legwork and even on my NVMe SSD was stuttering every time the other future loaded in (and the other one loaded out, I guess). The puzzles were neat and I liked that you could send lasers between the two, but for some reason I thought that doing certain things on one would effect the other. Like using the drill on the wall in Utopia would cut a hole in Dystopia. I was sadly mistaken, but that could have been cool, too.

If you like to play around with guns, I highly recommend this no matter your VR headset (as long as it's supported).

It's been consistently updated for years and there are a ton of mods if you want something new!

Very fun game, especially with friends, that has been updated a ton over the last decade. My only complaint is that my computer produces unstable frame rates that make the game more difficult than it should be. I've tried several fixes and none worked so I decided to stop worrying and love the game.