Recent reviews by nitepone

Astoundingly fun little game! Simultaneously challenging and relaxing. Really cute art style too!

Take2 operated early access scam. rip

Thank you, to the developer team at Gearbox, for your efforts fixing up the latest update!

The fast turn around to patch the new game breaking bugs is reassuring. And I'm hopeful that the "unified codebase" and the SotS dlc will meet expectations in time!

2007-2017, TF2 matchmaking uses a simple "quickplay" functionality that put players onto mostly community servers.

2017, Valve removes quickplay in favor of "casual matchmaking"; removing the ability of the community to moderate itself.

Only a couple years later, the botting problem started. And it has continued to get worse for the 5 years since. Valve Software took away the community's ability to self moderate by killing decade old community servers; and then they refused to put any moderation effort to fill that void.

The community ought to be livid. Especially given how horrifically abusive the in-game spam from these bots has become. Or worse, Valve's 5 years of complete silence on the matter; despite raking in many millions each year from SCM and in-game micro transactions.

Valve made the bot problem. They need to fix it.

cool game.

The original risk of rain is an important game to me. It was a huge help through the early years of college and something I look back on fondly. Playing with too many artifacts, on rainstorm, staying up until 2 am.. there was a genuine excitement every time we progress to the third stage.. hoping that this would be "the run"

But, RoR1 has aged.. not so well.. and the netcode... let's just say that it wasn't a great experience on the same wifi network, forget about thousands of miles away. It's a great concept wrapped in a buggy mess that often needs rose tinted glasses

As for RoR:Returns, from just a couple runs, it feels like what I imagined RoR1 from under those rose tinted glasses. The animations are clean, the UX is great, the settings (and display scaling) work without feeling janky. Character movement feels so much better and everything on the screen is vastly more readable.

Tons of new mechanics that worked well in RoR2 have found their way here, and things like shrines of the mountain offer exciting new ways to fly too close to the sun for the quest of "the run".

Risk of Rain offers an amazing 2D platforming experience. And Risk of Rain Returns finally packages that up into a game that I can hopefully recommend. (Cough, 0.7 hours at review time)

And at $15?? A group of 4 can have an amazing night with this game, for less than the cost of a single triple A game.

Thank you to hopoo games, gearbox, and the many years of work that went into making this series and this title. This title seems like the perfect love letter to the original title that made the RoR franchise. And more importantly thank you for the most enjoyable multiplayer experiences I've had.

An impressive encapsulation of retro ag racing goodness.

Runs excellent on steamdeck!! And the simple visual style seems to allow for impressive battery performance on the go.

Gaijan has made the grind in this game so much worse than it was when I started playing in 2016.

I liked having a more casual PvP aircraft combat game than DCS. But long gone are they days where you would have battles of P47s, P51s, and Spitfires against FW190s and BF109s. All games are just a mindless moshpit of 'meta' aircraft. And players are mostly focused on doing what lessens the painful grind.

In 7 years, there is are still only one active "realistic" mode for aircraft. Which has seen no significant changes other than adding more modern aircraft. It is painfully obvious at this point that Gaijan cares about adding new vehicles; and have no intention to innovate on gameplay using older vehicles. Only occasionally adding a game mode for an an event, but providing extremely limited rewards out of paranoia of disrupting their carefully crafted manipulative SL/GE economy. And every vehicle they add takes longer to research, or costs more to unlock. Some of their recent events requiring an average of 30+ hours a week to unlock rewards.

The other day, Gaijan made a blog post titled "How progression and economy is built in F2P games", and explained that difficult grinds are part of their "economy". Even going on to whine about review bombing that has occurred due to their increased effort to make the grind longer. "Also, review bombing will not cause modifying or nullifying in-game prices - if the game is shut down, no one wins"

Gaijan, this review is not about the cost of your game. I have spent hundreds on WT and DCS. This review is about the pathetic fixation on your "economy" instead of adding new gamemode/gameplay. If you want to appease your community, wake the ♥♥♥♥ up and remember that you are making a **video game** not an "economy".

Hopoo <3

This game used to be cool and promising. But the company behind it has lost sight of making a good game and now only seek profit.

Seeking profit is fine, but this game has horrifying flaws, bugs, and feels unpolished. I have given this game a whole year before reviewing, and I am disappointed by slow pitiful content updates. I am disappointed by the company's legal activity.

The developers crushed item trading out of greed to force more steam community market sales. The company focuses on crates instead of gameplay, not working to make the game more fluid.

Cheaters are still too common and the gameplay is repetitive. Without any workshop support, the devs simply can't make enough content to keep this game fresh, and the gameplay isn't refined enough to call it a serious esport.

This game had promise, and we all gave the developers money because we saw that promise. I can only hope that at some point gameplay and community becomes priority again.