Recent reviews by internisus

Fun game. Terrible friends.

I shouldn't like REPO. It's the sort of thing I think of as friendslop, where the fun comes from hanging out with your friends while the game occupies you all with silly physics shenanigans. But it's surprisingly engaging thanks to slow, methodical play as you work together to carefully move valuables, aided by thoughtful devices, weapons, and movement mechanics. The monster and player designs do a great job of blending goofiness with genuine scares. Proximity voice chat (and a variety of situations that alter it) contributes to this being an experience you share with your friends rather than just a thing to keep you busy while you spend time together.

The fact that I've played a game for so long while it's not even finished speaks for itself.

I decided to drop this. It seems like it's all right at doing its thing, but I'm not feeling it. I do have the itch for something like this that gives me a sense of satisfying growth, but the very slow, long-term, real-time nature of Sim Companies is a problem when what you're seeking is an escape from the frustration of how terribly slowly your irl progress is moving towards your actual, important goals. And if I wanted to participate in a player-driven economy, I'd rather do it in something like EVE Online or hackmud where it's not just raw, dry capitalism but wrapped in a cool and interesting package—where it serves a greater purpose than just money for money's sake.

I did give Sim Companies about a week to get a sense for it. I looked around, set initial goals for myself (reaching level 10 to access pumpkins for seasonal sales while working towards a mill to establish a coffee powder production line for a somewhat higher profit good than apples and grapes), and just felt my interest dwindle day by day until I reached those goals and didn't care enough to set new ones.

I'm open to a very slow burn, but I know of many long-form idle/incremental games that seem much more satisfying and attractive. To be honest, part of my issue is simply that the game doesn't look better. Its UI is pretty bare and unappealing. I'm shallow that way. And if I am to get geeky with spreadsheets and optimization I'm going to need more interesting subject matter. Again, this is probably fine enough for the right kind of player, but I think there are a million better uses for my time, so I guess I'll go browse my list of tycoon and management games and try to find a different way to unlock some dopamine.

Islands of Insight is essentially a theme park adaptation of The Witness. It’s not about the thoughtfulness and observation required in that earlier game to discern the rules—or even to see the puzzle in the first place. It’s just not interested in being abstruse and clever in that way. Instead, it drops you into a playground where you constantly walk up to puzzles that are clearly marked as puzzles and whose rules are simply stated, solving them to tick off a box in your massive completion checklist and earn a bit of progress towards more elaborate clothes. Even its hidden objects and perspective puzzles are distinct forms placed upon the environment rather than being a part of it. So Islands doesn't have the depth and mindfulness and philosophical care of The Witness—but I still enjoy it quite a lot.

The best parts are the enclaves, themed ‘dungeons’ that exist separately from the open world and contain finite, set puzzles rather than an endless cycle of randomly spawning optional challenges. They have a nice sense of progression and exploration to them, owing to their stable, handcrafted layouts. I’ve been through some of these that I wish I could reset and play again. Early on, The Empyrean Journey strings you through an ascending sequence of floating islands to get your wings and then sets you loose to chase a wandering echo through descending rings in a cinematic climax. The Glass Temple is all about navigating a dense, illusory space as you solve mazes with multiple exits, seek out hidden archways, and work through paths that can lead you to objects tantalizingly teased on the other side of crystal walls. These sections have unique identities that make for a refreshing change from the thick soup of the open world. If Islands is a theme park, enclaves are the rides.

But, even when you’ve run out of that type of content or are merely taking your time to reach the next area, you’ll find plenty to do. There’s a wide variety ranging from strong logic boards to bite-sized spatial queries that can barely even be considered puzzles. Certainly some of these formats are better than others, but it’s really more about the relaxing overall experience formed by the endless pull of their myriad distractions rather than the quality of any individual challenge. Islands is absolutely not an essential play like The Witness is, but, if you can be satisfied with a pleasant and very moreish world that lets you lazily wander around while chaining together rapid dopamine hits of diverse intellectual intensity, then you’ll have a great time with it. I see skydrops in my sleep.

While I recognize that The Crew is just another disposable helping of Ubisoft open-world slop full of map-revealing radar towers and distracting activity icons that get in your way at least as often as they represent opportunities for rewards, I can't help but feel a great affection for it. The ridiculous deep-cover gang infiltration (it's incredible how many things can be accomplished through the medium of illegal street racing) story and world flavor, however thin and clichéd, are so much more fun than the bland sports festival theming that seems to be the trend today. Race design is hit and miss, but the hits are memorable, like the time I bested a high-performance supercar with my dirt-tuned Nissan Fairlady by efficiently drifting through a series of off-road shortcuts that ran alongside and often cut across the street, a twisting duel of contrasts that felt much more interesting than a typical race between similar vehicles sharing the same circuit.

But, more than anything else, I just enjoyed tracing my way across the massive map, winding through the mountainous northeast on a rainy night to Laurent Juillet's ambient music or stomping through a southern swamp to Baby or Black Milk. I know it doesn't seem very impressive, but I think I might just be happy if a game gives me a map, a car, and a soundtrack. My love for paths and routes and mazes is something that I think about all the time in the context of videogames but rarely talk about because I don't entirely know how to explain it and doubt most people would understand, but the point here is that I take great pleasure in simply following The Crew's interstates and highways. Those relaxing cross-country trips that lasted twenty or thirty minutes before I reached New York or Los Angeles for the first time, flying down the overpass as the buildings gradually enveloped me, decelerating into the smooth cruise of an exit loop, fluidly weaving through traffic as I cleanly transitioned into a tunnel or a grid of city blocks, coolly emboldened by the Arctic Monkeys or American Princes song on the radio—those are the experiences that I'll remember most from this game.

Is that really anything remarkable for the genre? Am I overvaluing The Crew because I simply haven't played many of its influences, competitors, and successors? I honestly don't know. I look forward to finding out.

I meant to spend more time with it before it got shut down, but thankfully members of the community seem pretty confident that they can get some kind of server emulation up and running to preserve the game. I hope it won't take long. I still have to finish avenging my brother's murder by driving real good.

I decided to stop playing—well, more like I just didn't pick it back up to fulfill my daily obligations once the new season began, enjoyed how freeing that felt, and went with it. And yet...

Maybe someone with under two weeks of play (mostly on mobile, FYI) and an aversion to competitive games is not the best person to review this thing, but I think it's very good, actually? Play is quick and punchy, card powers are simple but compelling, the field division into three locations leads to interesting combos and mind games that wouldn't exist on a uniform board, collection upgrading is addictive ("frame break!"), the music is a clew of earworms, and the game as a whole feels more approachable and less burdensome than competitors owing to brief matches and small decks.

I used to play Hearthstone (really, aside from scant single-player adventures, I would just log in and make a ranking push each month for the card back even though I usually didn't feel like it), and putting a deck together was a massive slog because, with 30 cards per deck and a huge catalog of possibilities, flipping through all those pages to consider the often redundant options for so many positions along the curve made holding a strategic picture in mind daunting at best—and attempting to optimize it without copying a pre-made from some website nearly impossible. This isn't the case in Snap, where most cards seem distinct, each of the six turns represents a clear step in your tactical plan, and every space in your deck feels important. It could well be that players who've dipped into several pools are seeing a more bloated game by now, but at my level this is pretty tight. Every card has something to offer, with the exception of the few throwaway starter cards that don't bring any actual abilities to the board (and there are ways to mess around with even those).

And collecting those cards is fun in its own right. Seeing friends share images of their broad rosters of diverse characters was a big part of Snap's draw for me, especially with some of the fun and sometimes bizarro variant art available for them. Every character has their own unique logo design, and seeing them all assembled in a big set is naturally pleasurable. Abilities usually make a good logical match to the character themselves, and cards further express that character through unique visual effects both on play and on ability activation. The game just does an excellent job overall of harnessing the immense and colorful stable of characters that Marvel has to offer. I mentioned the card upgrades earlier, but it bears repeating that this sense that you're investing in cards or variants that you often play with or think are cool by upgrading their art is a very smart addition to the collectable card game format. If you've got a favorite, giving it 3D layering or animated elements just feels great. More than in many similar games, there's a powerful physicality in the cards you collect, and you come to feel like they actually belong to you.

Honestly, writing this review is dangerous. I can feel the pull to get back in there, but I'm resisting because, as enjoyable as Snap is just to play, I can't do it casually. Everything about its structure is designed to draw commitment from you through collection levels, a risk/reward rank ladder, and daily/weekly/monthly missions feeding season pass rewards. Maybe I've just been beaten down by the industry to the point where I cynically expect this stuff rather than resent its manipulation as strongly as I should, but either way the simple truth is that I don't have room in my life for another game that wants to make me play it all of the time.

I look at Marvel Snap and extrapolate the progression I've experienced so far to ask: What would I actually get out of investing in this for months of regular—frequent, even!—play? This is obviously personal, but because it's a competitive game the answer for me is very little. There's no content to conquer. There's no puzzle to solve. There's no end point. It's just about continuously being better than other players, grinding along infinite progression tracks, and acquiring more cards and cosmetic collectables. I don't deny that there's satisfaction in a win, but competitive victories never last. Beating other players isn't really meaningful or attractive to me enough on its own. So I have made the adult decision to not get sucked into this, because I know that, eventually, it will leave me feeling hollow.

And maybe it wasn't all that hard for me, after all; I just needed a single day off to remember how nice it felt not to be constantly compelled to keep up. I indulge enough games like that already, believe me. No matter how shiny, another can't be good for my mental health.

Reminds me of a Don Hertzfeldt film. There’s obvious satire here about consumer culture, but more affectingly it’s an existential crisis in miniature that will leave you thinking about all the life you’re not living and all the regrets you’ll have when the time has all gone up up the chimney, like everything else. It can’t last forever.

As someone who has yet to play Tarkov but finds its structure appealing, I was initially excited by a more accessible (and colorful) version of the idea in The Cycle. And there's a lot that I enjoy about it: I like the thought process of preparation and the risk of losing what you choose to take with you, the weight/inventory management that comes from the fact that your primary goal is to scavenge, and the tension of moving through the world, listening for threats while trying not to draw attention to yourself.

But here's the problem: a lot of the people playing The Cycle gleefully treat it like a free-for-all battle royale, and I have a high tendency to lose the nearly inevitable engagements with other players. They'll hunt and kill you even when there is little to be gained, possibly for preemption but more likely just for sport. And what I've decided is that, for me at least, the flaw at the core of the game is that there is no incentive to cooperate with strangers you come across or even to just let them live; they are either a danger better eliminated than shown your back, prey who exist to fill your own pack, or rivals who will empty out the map's important loot sites if you leave them be. Other players are never a resource, and that's a big problem (as well as kind of deeply sad).

And yeah, maybe the natural response to this complaint is that I should make more of an effort to go after other players myself, to get the drop on them or at least attack on sight without pause, never giving them the benefit of the doubt. Only... I don't want to play that game. I don't want a battle royale with loot; I want a scavenging game with uncertainty. Not just because I'm not the greatest pvp combatant but also because a predetermined and constant antagonistic relationship to other players in this context is tragically uninteresting. Maybe what I want is just a pve-only version of The Cycle. There's already a degree of fear and occasional panic that I get from exploring among the alien beasts, and that could certainly be leaned into and leveraged to achieve the notes of preparation, risk, and caution that make this kind of game exciting.

I feel that The Division's Dark Zones hit a better balance in creating this kind of experience, although I am not sure I can say exactly how—only that I've seen a much greater chance of other players there simply ignoring me or even working alongside me, and yet the possibility of betrayal or outright predation always remains to keep you alert and suspicious. Maybe it's the higher time-to-kill owing to RPG systems that make outcomes less certain for those who would draw first blood. Maybe it's the more complex nature of its randomly rolled loot and the fact that taking down NPC enemies has the potential to reward something more exciting than one of two unchanging monster parts. In The Cycle, killing another player has such a higher potential for valuable loot than hunting even a pretty dangerous alien critter, but you can find some juicy drops by taking down world bosses in The Division—and the value of what you take home is much more subjective owing to builds and desired stats.

All I know is that I've had marvelously tense but ultimately peaceful encounters in The Division, but in The Cycle there's little question of whether a confrontation will occur when I come across another player. And that's not their fault. Their behavior is the product of the game's design. Maybe the developers are content with this incessant bloodbath. Maybe this is what Tarkov is like, too. Maybe this is what other players want. But it's not what I'm looking for.

A brilliant gameplay loop makes Dome Keeper a perfect roguelike—for the right kind of player. Don't be fooled into expecting a relaxing mining experience out of this job; every underground excursion is conducted with one eye on your watch as you hastily carve out and collect your findings before returning to the surface chamber just in time to fight off a fresh wave of shadowy beasts intent on ousting you from your invasive venture. As the machinery within your dome eagerly grinds up the backbreaking resources you've hauled in, you slump in front of the nearby console for a quick rest and decide whether to invest your iron in improved defensive lasers or a superior drill before getting back on the clock and back in the dirt. At least down there you're safe.

Dome Keeper's beating heart lives in the tension between mining and defense. You are continuously being drawn back and forth across these roles—rhythmically, predictably, like a pendulum—with your seat at the upgrade/battle terminal serving as a neatly connective transition point between the two sides of the game as one fuels the other. Everything you do has a touch of tactility and weight and nuance, from the drag of the ore slowing down your jetpack to the need to visit a recharge station for your pulse scanner to the design choice of having wandering orbs pull your misbegotten goods up the lift rather than just letting them float up some boring beam.

The soft pixel art is muted and moody, and the fanfares and periodic ambient melodies of the soundtrack are wistful and warm; alien but inviting. The more time you spend in the tunnels and caverns, the more they begin to feel like home. Maybe you'll move in—after you've finished your conquest, of course.

I'd been excited about Shatter Remastered Deluxe for months, but only after its release did I learn thanks to other users that it's not a remaster of the original but rather of a mobile port. Why anyone would choose to take such a circuitous path for a modern re-release of this arcade classic is quite beyond me, but the result is obvious and predictable.

I made a back-to-back comparison of the original 2010 Steam version of Shatter and this new "Remastered Deluxe" release, and it's a clear downgrade. Everything simply looks and sounds cheaper and thinner, and there's a bizarre and unforgivable choppiness to performance. I waited 12 days before testing to allow time for patches while staying inside the refund window, and it's still a dramatic disappointment.

Shatter is a wonderful game, but this is not the version of it that you should play. Buy the 2010 release here on Steam, give its .xml file a quick edit in Notepad to cover your modern resolution, and enjoy a vastly superior product to this so-called remaster.