Recent reviews by johnkilo3

Fun game with a surprising amount of depth.

I really enjoyed Cruelty Squad, so I have been looking forward to this game for a long time. No, I did not expect this to be Cruelty Squad 2, and I was excited to see the new direction.

On starting the game there is no explanation as to what any the stats mean aside from two, no explanation on how they affect gameplay. There is no explanation if picking a high level recruit makes things easier or harder than picking a lower level other class.

Even on the lowest difficulty this game is very hard. I like a challenge, but dying over and over, and being difficult just for the sake of being difficult has never been my cup of tea. I know the Dark Souls games has made that game style popular, but to me it is just an annoying waste of time. I grew up on difficult games on the NES, but at a certain point it becomes not fun.

I like the esoteric weirdness of both Cruelty Squad and Psycho Patrol R, but when the game is this difficult, having little to no direction, and little explanation of the gameplay mechanics is very frustrating. The gameplay of Cruelty Squad was straightforward, so all the odd story stuff didn't interfere with the gameplay and figuring things out. This game is open world, so everything is trial and error (and lots of dying) to even figure out basic mechanics. I only really knew where to go in the beginning because I saw a streamer who had early access do it a week ago.

I do enjoy the style, the oddness, and story, and I'm glad the dev makes stuff like this instead of the same old crap we've seen over and over. I can tell he has put a lot of work into the game. That said, $40 is a lot to ask for an unfinished early access game. In my opinion it should have maybe been $20, and then $40 after early access.

I'll be picking it up again in the future when it is on sale. I want to support this dev, but I'll be more comfortable spending less in case I just can't get into it like Cruelty Squad. Hopefully by then some quality of life revisions will be made and the game will be completed.

Also, this dev's community is made up of vocal edgy 15 year olds who attack anyone who has anything negative to say, so that's unfortunate.

Edit 3/27/2025: the dev has been actively dumping on anyone who has criticism for the game, no matter how valid it is, so I wouldn't count on this game ever being improved much aside from frames performance optimization and things like that. Disregarding valid criticism by saying "skill issue," "you don't get it," or "you need to learn to read" is not going to change the fact that this game has flaws that could easily be fixed. I think the saddest part is that most people who have a negative view of this game, myself included, all agree that we are a fan of Ville's style and want this game to be fun and succeed, but I don't see that happening anymore. The game DOES have something to it which could make it a lot of fun if revisions were made. I guess the only valid feedback to the dev is "this game is SO much better than Cruelty Squad, Gorbino's Quest!!!1!!! I'd pay $400 for this!"

Part of me wonders if he didn't like the attention and praise he got for Cruelty Squad so he decided to make the antithesis of it (aside from the art style); an unbalanced slog that is not fun. And no, I was never expecting this to be Cruelty Squad 2, nor did I even want it to be.
The fact is the game is hard because the AI has laser precision and can one tap you regardless of what difficulty and armor you have. The highest level armor maybe gets you 2 or 3 rapid fire taps before you die, which is nothing when you're fighting AI with automatic assault rifles. Acting like the combat is deep is a joke considering the most viable tactic is hiding behind a wall, announcing your presence, and then shooting the enemy as it comes around the corner. Rinse and repeat.

Leaving everything vague and extra difficult might give it the illusion of being deep, mysterious and creative, but it really is just adding to the game being a pain in the ass to progress through. A lot of people like that Dark Souls dying over and over, extra difficult for the sake of being extra difficult slog game style, but I do not. I wanted a challenging but fair, creative, FUN game. Cruelty Squad could be difficult, but once you died you could do the level over again without penalty. This game's monetary repercussions of dying (its version of souls in Dark Souls) just adds to the annoyance.

After refunding my copy I played a pirated version (the dev is fine with pirating) a bit to see if my opinion of the game would be different without the high price (for what it is) being a factor, and no, if anything more play time reinforced how I felt about it even more.
Long story short; I don't see this game getting better based on the attitude of the dev. If anything it'll be made worse out of spite. I hope not. I really like his art and creativity and want him to succeed. In the off chance in the future this game is made better I will change my review.

This is what happens when you make a Unity asset game but put in actual thought and effort (and original art), instead of making the 20th half-assed Internet Cafe game clone of beating thieves with bats and mining crypto while avoiding the police, you get an actual good game.

Great little rogue-like RPG that uses ukiyo-e woodblock prints as the in game art. Very good game, and for only $3 it's a no-brainer. I only wish it was longer!

One of the best games ever made.

If you're interested in purchasing this game, chances are you've probably seen someone play it and use the "create your own superstar" feature. The truth is... this feature is amazing. WWE 2k17 was my first foray into a wrestling game since the SNES, as I had stopped watching wresting in the late 90s. You can completely customize your character from their looks, costume, and customize everyone one of their wrestling moves from a list with hundreds of moves.
The most fun part of it is making your own wrestlers, shows, arenas, etc, using the feature to upload your own art.
But this is where an otherwise pretty fun game gets ruined.

2K's servers are apparently monitored by an automated system which decides what is offensive and what isn't. So even if you NEVER play online and everything you upload is for your personal use at home, you can be permanently banned from the image upload feature and every other online feature. The thing is, you can be banned if whatever you upload is completely unoffensive and meets their ruleset, as this automated system can easily interpret something offensive and is not fool-proof. This is what happened to me. After enjoying this game for a year and putting over 200 hours in it (yes, I know some people have much more), I was banned without warning for something a bot interpreted as offensive. Initially I thought it was a bug as there was no notice or warning, so I reached out to 2K's abysmal tech support, only to find out after 2 days of troubleshooting that I was banned indefinitely for this, with no help at all. I then searched Google, only to find out that enough other players had experienced this that there had been stories written about it on some gaming sites a year ago. Sadly, I never knew about this, and I'm sure if you're considering purchasing this game you haven't either. People have been banned for uploading a normal, "safe for work" portrait of two women, for example.

So I know what you're thinking. WWE 2K18 is out now, but it's too expensive and you're considering getting 2K17 because it's a bit cheaper. Well don't. Because it could be you who puts 200 hours into this game and then all of a sudden you're randomly banned in the middle of making characters for no reason. So then you're thinking, well I'll just get this and not worry about all the customization and play with the regular WWE wrestlers. Well guess what, customization and making the game truly your own is the only reason to buy this, because lets face it, the AI in this game is pretty mediocre, and the wrestlers of today are pretty bland. The rankings in my career are pretty garbage, you can kick in the #1 contender's face in 10 different matches and you'll be lucky to move from 6 to 5 in the contenders rankings. There's only so many times you can destroy *insert bland wrestler here* before you yern to make your own league with interesting wrestlers and shows in My Universe. Also, with every new update the game becomes more unstable. It rarely crashed when I first purchased it a year ago, now I can't even do a full 30 person Royal Rumble without the game dying 3 wrestlers (or less) into it.

So yeah. Save your money and hope someday that the WWE license will pass to a better company. One that at least lets you upload images to your own game for home use, and not rely on their overly complicated and ban happy website way of doing it. Oh, and by the way, from the looks of it 2K18 is the exact same game, right down to the same hair styles available to you in the customization mode, but with a little bit of polish.

Much better than you would ever expect a South Park game to be, and actually a solid RPG.

Fun game except you have to install Uplay in order to play it, and the two "boss" fights were quicktime events, rather than what would have been exciting and very satisfying fights. Ruined the whole point of the game for me.

I had initially bought this game, then returned it for a refund here on Steam. I later felt I didn't give the game enough of a chance, and my love of aircraft and building things made me re-buy it. Now I wish I had just kept my money.
The sad thing is that this game has the makings of a great game. It is like Kerbal Space Program, but much simplier.
It is very easy to snap parts together to make a craft. I do think that there should be a larger variety of structural parts, and it would make getting the desired shapes you want much easier.
The biggest gripe I have about this game is that it is way too bare bones to not be considered early access. You make your plane/jet you fly it... and then there is nothing to do. To make matters worse the map is pretty boring with hardly anything to do. As far as I can tell, unlike Kerbal Space Program, the things you put into the map are not persistent, which means jets you leave laying around will not be there again if you stop flying in sandbox. This prevents you from creating your own little stories or senarios. This game does have a cool feature where you can dogfight with/against your created planes/jets, but then you quickly realize that it is so arcade that even the basic wing cannon does the same amount of (unrealistic) damage as an air to air missile. With the "fire and forget" missiles you can target the opposing jet, while they target you, and you can both be destroyed at the same time. You can manage to evade the missiles with maneuvers, but the fact that there are no countermeasures such as chaff and flares is a glaring omission. The AI is also so simplistic that you can fly around the mountains of the island, and without firing a shot, the AI jet will crash because it isn't smart enough to avoid the mountains while pursuing you.
Lastly, they developers state that there are over 100,000 aircraft available for download on their website, created by the community. This is true, and thankfully it is very easy to download them. Unfortunately, the fact that every conceivable aircraft is already available is a big drawback to me. What reason do I have to spend an hour or two creating/recreating an aircraft when every jet/plane you could think of is already available on the website? It is like buying the games Gran Turismo or Forza and then using a cheat to unlock every car. While it seems fun at first, you quickly realize that you lost really the only reason to play this game.
I can't recommend this game as it sits right now. I wouldn't buy this for the price of $12 (or $10 during the Steam winter sale). I would say an appropriate price would be $5 or less. Not unless the developers really flesh out the game and give the player much more to do. I really hope they continue to develop it because I really think they could have a great game on their hands.

Edited review.

My original review was a negative for the game being heavily loot box driven and having repetitive missions. That said, after putting 900 hours into the game, I can no longer give it a negative. For all it's faults, it still does a better job of capturing Star Trek than any "modern" interpretation of Trek (the JJ Abrams movies, Discovery, etc). I do wish the game had more to do with exploration, and less to do with money and combat. If you like Star Trek, you will probably like this game. You don't NEED to spend money to progress through all the story missions, but a premium ship will make it much easier (not to mention other paid boosts).