Recent reviews by Jamsponge

My Summer Car is best summarised by its website: a Web 1.0 nightmare of scrolling marquees, tiling backgrounds and pixelated gifs, punctuated with the slogan:

"I am making this game because this game needs to be made. This is not made because this is fun game, but because it is NOT!"

The year is 1995 in Finland. You are a young man living out in the sticks who, for his 19th birthday, has been granted the very car he was born in. The fact that the car has long since rusted into non-function and been taken to bits in your dad's garage is besides the point; you've got nothing better to do all summer, so why not grab some sausages from the town shop (the only one store for miles around), do odd jobs to make some money, and build your Satsuma AMP from a useless hunk of garbage to the functional hunk of garbage it was 20 years ago!

This game can be intensely frustrating at time. You cannot pause while playing, and you cannot save your progress without visiting one of the few toilets dotted around the map to 'relax' for an hour or so. The physics are wonky, the controls (especially if you're on mouse & keyboard) are difficult and sometimes unintuitive, and use of a save editor is pretty much required if you don't want to sleep through a week-long prison sentence every time your drunk-driving cousin crashes into you. You will not be starting up your summer car for at least 6 hours on a single save.

But if you like the idea of painstakingly hand-assembling an engine, piece-by-piece, going through an hour-long troubleshooting process of why your engine won't start, and making liberal use of the "swear" button to vent your character's potentially-lethal frustrations, all while working and living in a rough but loving replica of 1990s recession-era Finland, you will fall in love with this game like I have.

Factorio is a game made by individuals who are more than happy to defend a man with a long and well-documented history of sexism, racism, and direct support for political figures who have harmed hundreds of thousands of people. In retrospect of these actions, I believe that the core conceit of the game - to be a polluting, mass-murdering coloniser - is no longer an accident created by the genre, but an intentional political message. While I have enjoyed its gameplay in the past, I can no longer in good conscience continue to play it, or recommend that others do.

This is definitely a yes with a caveat. World of Guns is a game for people who find guns mechanically fascinating and want to investigate them in a gameified way. I wouldn't particularly call it 'user-friendly', especially since at the start of the game, you will probably have very few guns you can actually access, and gaining experience points to unlock new guns is a bit of a grind. That said, the point of this is repetition - essentially drilling the format of each gun into your mind, and being able to improve your times for disassembly and reassembly in increasingly difficult game modes.

In summary, this is basically a game about speedrunning gun mechanisms.

Receiver is a game that is very simple to explain. You have a gun and a tape deck. You're looking for cassettes. You need to find ammo and avoid or shoot turrets and flying drones to collect them all. If you die, you lose your progress.

The catch: every feature of your gun has a different button assigned to it. Whether you're using a classic M1911, the high-capacity Glock 17, or a classic, punch-packing Smith & Wesson revolver, you have to make sure your safety's off, your rounds are loaded, and for goodness' sake, don't fire full auto!

The thing that makes Receiver so enjoyable is the balance between slow, deliberate exploration of a grey, dystopic environment, looking for resources and checking for enemies, and fast-paced panic as you desperately try to take down a drone before it one-hits you. Receiver is a game where you are expected to die a lot.

tl;dr? It's a first-person permadeath shooter whose mechanics are a fascinating mixture of ultra-simple and beautifully complex.

Elite Dangerous is probably not a game everybody would enjoy. The Venn diagram of people who like 3-dimensional space shooters, spreadsheets, and Euro Truck Simulator doesn't seem particularly large. But if the idea of learning dozens of separate keybinds so you can fly around an infinitely large (note: not actually infinite, just a few, oh, billions of billions of places to visit) galaxy, working with a variety of factions on a solar or galactic level, investigating mysterious hostile aliens and finding strange new relics, and taking part in community missions that have a real, long-term effect on the game world sounds interesting to you, Elite Dangerous might be a game you put a LOT of hours into.

tl;dr? you're a 34th century space pilot flying around the galaxy. do what you want.

Cortex Command is a game where (with the aid of mods) you can drop a piano full of crabs on a giant flying bone monster whilst the Combine fight the Space Marines. even without mods, expect a game full of ludicrous gibs, ludicrous amounts of bullets, and ludicrous screen lag as your poor computer desperately tries to keep up with everything it's having to render.

In conclusion, it's a physics-based RTS/ 2D shooter where you play as a brain that can control one soldier, dropship, or turret at a time. If you like the sound of any of this, you'll probably enjoy Cortex Command.

Have fun with a bit of the old ultraviolence in Paint the Town Red. You can try to pick your battles tactically to avoid being overwhelmed, or you can just punch everyone you see and enjoy the swarm. You're pretty much equally matched with your enemies, so the fights always feel fair, and the voxel-based dismemberment system is like nothing I've ever really seen before. If you like beat-em-ups, arcadey FPSes, or just like your games bloody, PLEASE check PtTR out. It's a fantastic game in Early Access already, and the content will just keep growing.

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If that seems like fun, download this game.