Recent reviews by rexpulli

Dredge is the stripped down version of the non-existent overwhelmingly-positive game I made up in my head after reading the reviews. Looks? It's the certified texture-less indie game. Narrative? Barely there. Progression? Fish and sell to buy engine upgrades so you can fish faster to get the other upgrades, fishing is just mini-games, mostly variations of the same three basic types. Gameplay? Main quest is a fetch quest and it's very linear, deliver the item and it'll send you to the next zone where another voiceless sprite will give you a sub-quest, which is also a fetch quest but for fish, so it's extra annoying because of RNG.
What's left? There's a Lovecraft-like ocean mystery, it's derivative and ultimately disappoints but it's still fun enough to keep you grinding. My favourite part was a cute angler-fish pretending to be a boat and chasing you around at night, not scary but inventive. Overall, the game is middling, a thumbs down may be too harsh but I have to balance out all these reviewers saying it's amazing.

There are 2 campaigns: Serpulo (original) and Erekir (7.0 update). Serpulo is boring and confusing, Erekir plays more like a traditional RTS campaign and it's very good. Play Erekir first like the game suggest because if you play Serpulo first you might think the game is not for you and uninstall it, like I almost did.

There's not much to say about the game itself, if you like this type of games you'll like Mindustry. My only complaint is that the way some components work is unintuitive and many hours into the game I still find myself wondering "Why is there Beryllium in this Duct?".

Just doing my part in lowering this abomination's user reviews score.

It's hard to screw up a cyberpunk detective story, but they managed to do it. It starts weak, then a murder mystery is introduced and it feels like the story is going somewhere, but pretty soon after that it starts splurging non-sense at you: cat mafia, AIs uprising, machine gods and so on. None of it makes sense and none of it is resolved. Frankly, half-way through the game I stopped paying attention to whatever the hell was going on.
The game was developed by a Chinese indie developer and it's possible some stuff was lost in translation but, more likely, there was nothing to lose and the translation just made everything worse.
Game-play is puzzles, rather obtuse puzzles that waste a lot of your time but aren’t hard to solve. Two things I liked are the music in the main menu and the pixel art which is above average.

Best Action RPG ever made but it should be enjoyed in moderation. Also, if you are looking for a game with permanent progression, Path of Exile is not the right game for you.
The developer has a complete disregard for your time and will implement sweeping changes to game systems as well as retroactive nerfs, to the point that a character you invested dozen of hours in is no longer functional.
Personally I stopped playing the game after enjoying a specific iteration of the game, which introduced a fun and rewarding crafting system which could be enjoyed by both hardcore and casual players. I enjoyed it too much, however, and when the developer inevitably decided to get rid of it, I lost interest in the game altogether.
It may sound odd but I believe Path of Exile is meant to played as a very long MOBA PvE match. You build your character according a very strict meta and at the end of the Challenge League (i.e. the match) you forget about it since you'll most likely never play it again, because the meta will be purposely switched up by the developer to "keep the game fresh", regardless of any balance requirements.
You repeat this process every 3 months (that's the length of a Challenge League). Eventually you'll get tired because the process gets rather repetitive. This is why I again suggest you enjoy it in moderation, which can be hard because the game is designed to be addictive and the ultimate goal is to "own the player's soul" as the Managing Director of the game candidly admitted.
A safer alternative is to play the game as if it was a single player game: just play the campaign and pretend there's no end-game, that way you still get to enjoy a good portion of the deep gameplay mechanics, the story and the beautiful art design. If you found Diablo 3 too cartoony and safe, you'll love this game (the Lunaris Temple from Act 3 is something you'll never see from modern-day Blizzard).
Finally, a note about micro-transactions: the game is often touted as a good example because micro-transactions are only cosmetics and you can't buy power (not pay-to-win). This might have been true back in 2013, when version 1.0.0 was released, but it's certainly not true today. This is due to the inventory (stash) which is extremely limited in both capacity and features. If you end up playing the end-game of Path of Exile, you'll soon realize that it's designed to be tedious and inefficient, unless you buy Premium stash tabs that is, then it becomes very enjoyable and only then you'll be able to compete in the game's economy, which is a large part of the experience.
There's nothing wrong with this of course, the game is free and it's being worked on by over 100 people, but you should be aware that you'll end up spending money if you are interested in the end-game. To give you an idea, you'll need at least 400 in-game points, which you can get by buying a basic support pack for 30$ (300 points and a few cosmetics) and the starter pack for 20$ (200 points and an extra stash tab) for a total of 50$ (USD). It's the price of a AAA game but if you end up liking the end-game, it's worth it.

Tedious to play since it’s controlled almost exclusively with the mouse. By the tenth day, the daily routine (craft by day, scavenge by night) became extremely boring. Trailers and reviews are all misleading, too much focus on the message, which is a pedestrian "War is bad, be sad now". I already know that, in fact I reckon everyone does. From a “hard-hitting depiction of war” I expected character development, emergent narrative, some actual moral dilemmas, but all I got was generic text blurbs, all grey environments (the saddest colour, as everyone knows) and a Yes/No prompt to gift medicine to a couple of starving kids, real deep stuff.

If I didn't know the release date, I would have thought this was a scrapped prototype for Opus Magnum. Presentation is poor, not just minimalist which would be fine. The mechanics are complex and inelegant, yet the puzzle themselves are, for the most part, easy. It never feels satisfying to complete a puzzle, so I never felt like going back to find a more clever solution. Story is non-existent so you don't even get an incentive to brute-force your way to the end. Even the included mini-game is terrible. The only thing I can praise is the music.
If you still think you might like this, then I strongly recommend you play Opus Magnum instead.

Pixel art is of the most basic kind, music is fine and game-play is boring. Supposedly, this is an homage to Power Rangers and other shows of that kind. However, even if you're a fan, there's not much celebration of shoddy Japanese TV shows here, just a lot of cringe writing.

Not a good rogue-like. Too little changes between runs and when you inevitably fail, you only get points to spend in a skill tree. Progression in the skill tree is fine at first then it's too slow, this is mitigated by the fact that the skill tree is mostly useless aside from upgrading critical damage and a combo shield which is the only real defense you have, aside from getting good, because you get very little health refills during a run.
Also, difficulty spikes considerably at the second comic book (each level is a different comic book) because enemies take double the time to kill and your character doesn't scale that fast so it all becomes too slow and grindy. Switching to Easy mode barely helps.
I was also unimpressed by the story and how it's delivered, I'd have preferred a dumb story to this uninspired commentary on the struggle of comic book artists.

Fantastic game, worth playing for the artwork alone. The story is simple but wholesome, good pacing as well. Game-play is a mix of metroidvania, JRPG and a fighting game and that makes it very original. I was worried it was going to be hard because I suck at fighting games but it turned out to be very easy; there is a NG+ if you want a challenge.
I read some of the other reviews and they all seem to be motivated but some irrelevant drama about what some guy at Lab Zero may have or have not done. However, one relevant point of criticism is that because of what happened with the developer the game was not finished, maybe so but to me the game felt finished, it just needed a couple more voiced lines for some of the secondary companion characters, but it's not a big deal. Overall, it's a great game.