Recent reviews by inter

This game is all edge with no substance.

MC is very vocal about his disgust towards human beings and his desire to annihilate them. "Interesting", I thought, expecting I'd be able to kill all kinds of people in all sorts of scenarios. After all it's a power fantasy setting that's supposed to be played to blow off some steam, right?

Well, no.

There are no pregnant women, no children, no teenagers, no elders. You can only kill adult civilians and law enforcement. No chance of getting into a religious hotspot to get believers to meet their creator... not even a synagogue? Given the neo-nazi allegations the devs are involved in.

You can't hold anybody hostage, which flushes so many potential and twisted scenarios down the drain. The gameplay is also incredibly monotonous and gets gray as quickly as the game's chosen color palette.

And all in all, there isn't much you can do other than gunning people down and performing executions to restore health. It's honestly pretty boring. Hatred is all bark and no bite.

This game cured my thalassophobia.

It made me experience a childlike wonder that I didn't know I still had in me. It's short, and it's not bloated with unnecessary gimmicks. What it does, it does excellently.

Highly recommended, especially given how much it gives you in such a small amount of time.

This is a short game. It consists on 3 short acts, and each act has a few puzzles that you must solve in order to progress.

The gimmick in Contrast is that it's not a platformer in the traditional sense. The protagonist (a little girl) has an imaginary (?) friend (the character you use) that can turn into a shadow to interact with other shadows being cast by a light source.

I'm not sure if I'm biased because I've played puzzle games recently, but Contrast didn't feel challenging at all. So do try it out if you like relaxing gameplay. Additionally, it seemed to me that the puzzles in Act III were considerably more well crafted than those found in Act I and II.

At times it feels like a demo for something bigger, and I kept expecting complexity and difficulty to grow (which never really happened), and then when I got the hang of everything and am ready for something greater, the game is over.

- Aesthetic: can't go wrong with 30s/noir theme
- Soundtrack: jazz
- Graphics: they hold up well despite its age

- Gameplay: it's just alright
- Story: the big reveal at the end was a nice touch, but on the grand scheme of things the story isn't anything special or extraordinary, the stakes are low and it's pretty much an anecdote

- Collectibles: the photos, drawings, newspaper notes etc. I understand, but the luminaries feel completely pointless, as there are no discernible changes in the game whether you collect them or not, they're just collectable for the sake of it

As a final note, my gameplay seems much longer because I used a trading card farming tool. In reality it took me about 3h to finish the game.

Neat little game. It shows the creator's perspective on mental illness (and living with it).

Short, straight to the point, doesn't try to be deeper than it should be, it doesn't come across as pseudo-intellectual... it's all perks!

If there is one thing I hate in this world is teenage angst ("ugh nobody understands meee!"), and I was pleasantly surprised by not finding any here. The protagonist is in an extremely dark place, but she is seemingly unaware of the gravity of her situation.

It's very short but also replayable (so you can get different outcomes). I recommend getting it on sale though.

It's a nice little game (or more like an interactive slideshow), but I can't recommend it in good faith for the following reasons:

1. The sequel has a beautiful animated short that resumes EVERYTHING that happens in this "first part" (which is already short to begin with), rendering it pointless
   
2. The sequel has a lot more work and effort put into it, it's more interactive, has a better soundtrack, more depth to it, etc.
   
3. The graphics are discernible shapes in the sequel instead of pixel vomit
   
4. The sequel has more replayability (despite its short length)

The sequel caught my eye and I bought this one too, thinking I would need some kind of extra context provided in it that could prove helpful before I played the sequel, and it was not the case at all.

I'm not upset and won't ask for a refund (even though this is like 15 minutes long) since I spent less than 1€, but to anybody reading this, save yourself the euro and spend it on trading cards or literally anything else.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1604000/Milk_outside_a_bag_of_milk_outside_a_bag_of_milk/

Fun and entertaining, despite its flaws.

• Gameplay: there are more tombs in this game than there were in previous ones, and puzzles come in all shapes and forms
  
• Dub: for consistency purposes, I played it in spanish, and was pleasantly surprised by how good a job the game does at staying legit when it comes to linguistics: indigenous people actually talk in their native tongues (as in, indigenous languages from the pre-hispanic era)
  
• Lore/history: another thing that stood out for me was the amount of historically accurate information included in the game, found in relics/manuscripts explaining their technology/way of life. I would recommend to anyone who plays this game to actually stop and read the bits of information when they find collectibles

• Story: the main story in this game is easily the most lackluster in recent times. It's like Marvel movies... started based in fiction but believable, and somehow it evolved into something completely outlandish and borderline ridiculous. A whole paramilitary force, armed to the teeth and with an unlimited R&D budget is uncapable of killing 1 tiny woman? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's gotten so ridiculous that I stopped paying attention halfway through and just forced myself through the story. My actual endgame when playing this was getting to the next tomb.
  
• Lara: this might sound mysogynistic (it is; I am)... you can tell there were a lot of women involved in crucial decision making in this game because a) the story sucks; b) women are in charge of taking every important decision throughout the story (and yet it blows up on their face almost every time, I wonder what they meant by this) and men are either pawns or villains; c) they somehow managed to make Lara progressively uglier and Mary Sue-er in every single game
  
• Annoying gameplay decisions in Paititi: there are several parts in the Paititi map where you're forced to walk. Slowly. No way to change or avoid this. It's especially annoying when you're hunting collectibles and just want to move on quickly. There's also forced outfit swaps in large areas of Paititi. This makes sense during the story because you're supposed to wear a specific tribal outfit to fool the guards (which is hilarious in itself, because somehow a white woman with a british accent is A+ OK as long as she wears the tribal outfit LOL), but post-game it's just a ridiculous and obnoxious mechanic. I go out of my way to find every collectible, pick all the gold/precious minerals so I can afford the outfit upgrades, and for what? Just so I'll get forced to wear a specific outfit or the guards (who supposedly fight for a losing faction and shouldn't even be there post-game??) or I won't be able to enter certain areas? Who approved this?

• Soundtrack: the OST in this game shines due to its absence. I can't even call it mediocre because it's just not there. I found myself playing my own music/soundtracks from other games while I progressed. This is nothing like the 2013 game (I had a blast with that one), it saddens me when big studios underestimate the importance of a GOOD soundtrack and how it can influence the impact a game has on its players
  
• Questionable level design decisions: I disabled all the assistance options the game offers to hint where you can climb, hang from, survival instinct, etc. - and I'd say that it doesn't affect 95% of the game, but for the 5% it does, it showcases poor level design. There are parts where the answer is hidden underneath several layers of game mechanics and there is virtually no way to find the answer on your own without enabling visual cues or checking a guide
  
• Questionable mechanic decisions: for starters, the game is very clearly made with controllers in mind. If you (like me) make the mistake of binding "E" to interact/melee, the game is perfectly playable for the most part, but it effectively breaks in some QTEs (wolves, foxes, jaguars...), because the game tells you to press "E", but if you do, you'll find yourself dying over and over again until you bind melee to a DIFFERENT key. Another thing I found is that there's a puzzle where you have to spin a wheel with different symbols to open a set of doors, and I'm not kidding with this, the puzzle is literally broken/unsolvable UNLESS you enable vsync and cap your framerate in half (I have a 180hz display so I had to cap it to 90fps)
  
  
  FINAL VERDICT
  Is it fun? Yes. Does it have flaws? Yes, a few... small or massive depending on who you ask, but all in all they don't take much away from the tomb raiding experience. If you go in for the puzzles, puzzles you'll find.
  
  As a final note, there are mods in nexus for this game if you'd like to return Lara back to her roots. Skip the fragile feminity.

I bought it for a discount years ago and forgot about it. Recently, after years away from PC gaming I've decided to-- see what I did there? I'm yapping. And you couldn't care less because the reason you're reading this is to find out why I DON'T recommend this game, but I'm dragging it unnecessarily... see? I did it again.

And that's it. That's how this game is written. You want to finish the mission and move onto something else but the NPCs are constantly yapping, trying way too hard to be witty and funny and what's worse, you literally cannot progress until they finish talking... at first it's cringeworthy, but over time it becomes exhausting and it drains your soul. There's something seriously wrong with the writing of your game if players have to go out of their way to COMPLETELY SILENCE character dialogue in order to make it bearable.

Other than the bad writing/mediocre story, we got:

It's good at times but a strong 5/10 if compared to BL2's. The volume is so low I had to lower SFX and crank the music up, and even then, it's only noticeable in combat/bosses. The rest of the game feels silent... where is the atmosphere?!

Reach lvl13, enemies drop lvl14 gear. Reach lvl15, enemies drop lvl17 gear. I bore with it at first because I thought "my level must be too low", but it never stopped happening. This is how the game works apparently. Out of 16 weapons in my backpack right now, I can't use 10 of them because I'm underleveled, despite strictly sticking to main story missions within my level. This is just bad game design lol

Considering who's the Gearbox CEO, it comes at no surprise that the game has its share of predatory anti-consumer practices, such as full-screen ads for Borderlands 4, and a lot of paywalled mission markers. Why does the game show quest markers for DLCs that I don't own? Ahh, this must be the "premium game for premium gamers" that Bitchford talked about.

The more I play this game, the clearer it is for me that Gearbox peaked with Borderlands 2, and it's been downhill since then. The steep decline in writing and product quality is palpable. Glad I bought this for a huge discount and I sat out BL4 (another mess). Gearbox is dead to me.

The one and only thing that should matter for a game is if it's fun or not, and Prodeus is undoubtedly fun.

• Gunplay: every weapon is pleasant to use, the shooting sounds are unique and satisfying, and reloading is pure ASMR goodness
  
• Gameplay: it feels similar to classic Doom; level progress is locked behind door keycards that you have to find, and when there's an enemy horde you have to stay in the move and switch weapons constantly to survive, exploiting enemy weaknesses
  
• Graphics: the game has an intentional retro aesthetic with low res/pixelated textures, which in my opinion fit really well with the game vibe
  
• Level design: I am by no means close to finishing the game (33%), but so far from what I've seen in about a dozen levels, each one is unique in their own way; it doesn't feel monotonous and there's always something to do, a new route, a secret to uncover, etc.

• Soundtrack: I gave the game a chance and let it handle the music, but the soundtrack is undoubtedly mid and has weird timing; the music is calm mid combat and then the "aggressiveness" kicks in when you're nearly done killing everyone. It's not a game-breaking experience but I opted to mute the music and play my own
  
• Difficulty: I haven't tried the max difficulty yet, but from what I've seen, more difficulty doesn't necessarily equal more enemies, it just means you take more damage, which is a bit disappointing

Checkpoint system: this is arguably the worst part about the game. As you progress in each level, you will find checkpoints (that sometimes trigger enemies to spawn)... the problem is, if you die, you respawn with 100% health and no penalty whatsoever. Whoever you killed, stays dead, so there is no such thing as a revenge system in place. For a game of this type, it's really anticlimatic. I understand catering to more casual players who don't want to have a hard time progressing, but why not make it an option? If you want things to be a bit more challenging, you're out of luck.

Despite its flaws, like I said at the beginning of this review, Prodeus is undoubtedly fun. In a landscape where most AAA games are just creatively bankrupt slop, endlessly milking established franchises and pretending to sell us the same thing every year, or worse, release an incomplete/broken mess of a game and promise to fix it along the way? Prodeus is a breath of fresh air, and it definitely deserves a chance.

The base game is great but this DLC was just not it. I like difficult, but this DLC wasn't a good difficult, it was a bad difficult. How come? It's artificially difficult. Badly designed, bullet spongy difficult. Just poor game design.

The encounters drag for far too long, tough enemies are effectively bullet sponges, and you will sense it's noticeably more punishing than the base game, to the point it becomes obnoxious and the fun factor is gone, regardless of the difficulty you choose.

And then there's the boss battle. Boy was that a drag. It wasn't fun, it wasn't difficult, it was straight up tedious. And reading the other reviews glazing this turd is the cherry on top of this ♥♥♥♥ cake. It reads like people who pour the entire bottle of hot sauce in their noodles and say iT's nOt sPiCy, while you can see them crying and sniffling while shoving spoonful after spoonful of inedible garbage in their mouths.

There was a time where I considered myself a competionist and I forced myself to push through until the end. I was unemployed back then, and to be fair, I had a lot of free time. Today that's no longer the case. I set the difficulty to the lowest option, rushed through the last encounter to fight the boss, and after seeing his healthbar regenerating time after time after time while I boringly dodged and exploited the same weak spots over and over and over again, something in me just snapped, and I realized I wasn't having fun at all. Right before the final blow, I closed the game and didn't look back. The story they were trying to tell me? I no longer care, lost interest. Next.

keep in mind, you must replay the base game entirely before unlocking the side stories, which are what make the game worth the price

do not waste time trying to find new stuff in the base game, there's nothing new there
all the new stuff is outside of the base game which is bundled in here

the first time i didn't get it and probably my negative review is still around
sayori is really growing into me this time, idk why