Recent reviews by Faust

If you've never listened to Loop Blues while working, what are you even doing here?

Don't go into Luna Abyss expecting a fast-paced shooter. It is a bullet-hell, first person platformer and exploration game with lock-on gun play that feels like a combination of Doom 2016 and Metroid Prime. Everything oozes style and atmosphere, with incredible lighting and droning sound effects. The voice-over feels fitting, albeit a bit funny at times, and overall, the game does a great job at keeping me hooked on the story.

It runs incredible on my system, rarely dipping below 120 fps with everything cranked up to a mixture of epic and cinematic, on a Linux machine running Proton experimental. The difficulty is very manageable and you should at least play on Warden difficulty to feel challenged, unless you're absolutely just in for the story and exploration part. You start out with very few things to do but over time, your character unlocks new mechanics and weapons that keep the game entertaining.

In some cases, flashing colors and effects can put a harsh strain on the eyes but luckily Luna Abyss comes equipped with a plethora of accessibility options which lets you tone down everything. If you're unsure if the lock-on combat isn't for you or not, just give the demo a try. I'd suggest playing with gamepad instead of M+KB because the lock-on mechanic + jumping flows more natural with a controller in hand and I also think that the camera behaves slightly differently.
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Kwalee Labs managed to craft a world that is in equal parts haunting, beautiful and creepy, with a great art style, entertaining combat and almost perfect performance. Give the demo a try, you surely won't regret it.

Even if you're not into Rhythm games, Dead as Disco will either turn you into a music aficionado or at least provide one hell of a good time. Remember the satisfying smoothness when you first played the button prompt combat of Batman: Arkham Asylum? Imagine you're combining this with beats-per-beat combos and you likely get one of the best indies released in 2026.

Gamepad should be a given; I tried with a keyboard and it does work but lacks the oomph of pressing your takedown in the right moment. Latency wasn't an issue at all, even without calibrating anything. I did turn Nvdia Reflex On and Off again but both states seemed fine to me. There are plenty of graphic options to make this game either run pristine or semi-potato because having poor frame-rates might fiddle with the responsiveness and overall combat flow. I'm also running Linux, using Proton Experimental, and everything runs perfectly fine.

The story works as intended and I already had some great goosebumps moments in the boss fights. Parts of the dialogue are voiced which makes the "silent" rest feel slightly disconnected. Still. it's filled with music related puns that almost always hit the spot. Granted it is still early access and you might get through the initial content pretty quick, the option to upload your own music (or just keep grinding to "She's a maniac" over and over) will keep you coming back. There is a clear road map that outlines what's coming next, which is already more than 80% of other Early Access titles can provide. The soundtrack is an absolute banger and offers something for everyone.

This was probably one of the best "just pick up a game" moments I had in ages. If there was one negative aspect, I'd argue that all this feet tapping is going to make your legs grow in an unhealthy way.

If FEARs Alma is too scary and the battalions of AI soldiers too difficult for you, give Operation Thunderstorm a try. Cut from the same cloth as the aforementioned FEAR, both are using the LithTech Jupiter Ex Engine, which makes for some satisfying shooting excursions. However, that's everything these two titles have in common. OT was born in a time when people were already fed up with WW2 shooters and just before City Interactive started their re-branding, both in name and products, to move away from their somewhat jank-ridden image.

And it shows. Operation Thunderstorm arguably has some of the most funny dialogue I've ever heard in recent years, just because the writing and acting is just comically bad. This might be related to me being a German, able to understand everything the soldiers are talking about but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter anyways.

If you have 2-3 hours to spare, pick up your rifle and kill three of Nazi Germanys most dangerous man, neatly packaged into some maze-like, interconnected missions you won't even remember if asked for at gunpoint. It's janky, it's cheap but it's also a whole lot of fun. The shooting feels great, which won't surprise anyone who ever played the first two FEAR-games. Just do yourself a favor and get an unofficial uncensored patch (it can be easily found under Guides) to not only unlock historically accurate icongraphy but also blood and gore effects. Without them, the game feels lacking, to put it mildly.

I got my copy on sale for 1$ and it was a dollar perfectly spent.

Over the last couple of years, I often felt the urge to explore the wastelands. Story was always extremely bad, full of plot holes, non-sensical behaviors and lackluster NPCs.

I did however care about the freedom FO4 managed to offer, especially if you took your time to add QoL mods and some actual questlines.

Now that Bethesda once again felt the urge to torpedo their own product — which was carried by modders basically since launch — just so they can lure fresh franchise fans into spending too much money on a broken product, I can at least do my part and drag down their metrics a bit further.

Instead of actually developing new games — or maybe a new engine frame work? — they just keep banking on our collective nostalgia for a game they didn’t even make proper in the first place.

Having had a short look at the demo, I think there is a good foundation for a future fun game. Since there is no neutral option I'll have to keep the thumb down, just because I did find many areas that would need lots of improvement.

First, some Positives: I really liked the intro and the tone it sets. Graphics quality aside, this feels like a great introduction to the game. The rooms or levels have a nice Doom-corridor aesthetic and it feels different to other, more open-spaced games in the genre, despite the enemies behaving frustratingly unexpected. Kinetic bullet guns feel good but grenade launcher, RPGs and such don't tbf.

What rubs me the wrong way, throughout the whole demo, is the lack of a certain core identity or universe, especially considering everything I saw in the intro. Why are there so many bugs and insects? Are these monsters living in the ruins? What do these have to do with the planetary invaders? I like the idea of having the cuties running alongside and doing some shooting as well but then again, we didn't they show of this stuff in the introduction? This might be nitpicking on a high level but due to this, it felt a bit shoved together, at least for my taste.

Human-like enemies are too fast and unpredictable. They don't seem to have any weight to them, neither when they are running, shooting or getting shot at. Other enemies seem to practically materialize behind the player. I did get the small audio cues they send but at some point, they literally come from everywhere, which lead to a play style akin too "waiting in the corner until everything has rushed up the stairs". Despite the barrage of enemies, I felt near invincible due to healing being very, very generous. I'd say the difficulty could be toned up quite a bit.

Finally, I think you should pick your graphics style before it is too late. After getting a mild headache from the bloomy areas, I deactivated SSGI and the game suddenly felt more grounded and readable. Sticking to that old-school style could at least help you with some kind of identity, letting Ironsand stick out. The same goes for the upgrade cards which - and I really don't mean this in a mean way - do look a bit like cheap mobile game upgrades. More stylized, less UI-polished versions could improve this but I'm again speaking about personal preferences.

Overall I do think there is potential in Ironsand and I really hope you don't get discouraged by some of the less helpful, negative review. I do not see this game in an online co-op setting, at least for now. Neither the levels nor enemy designs would make this a pleasant experience imo.

Barely hitting 60 fps with Settings mixed between Medium and Very High ─ with dlss Quality activated ─ on 4070 Super 12GB, RAM 32GB and Ryzen 7 7700X , in 1440p. This isn't really great tbh. It does look okay but you can clearly see the difference between DLSS on and off; It's not like this game does anything extremely new or looks out of this world ─ especially compared to BL3 ─ so what bothers me the most right now are the people defending settings that make your game look worse just so the numbers go up. Gaslighting 101.

We're playing co-op and the story seemed interesting so far but then the host crashed and with it our will to progress. Surprisingly, the gunplay actually feels worse compared to BL3, at least for now. It's like the shots don't have any real impact and unless you see a critical pop up, it doesn't feel like your doing much. I'm still looking forward to playing it more but if you think those reviews complaining about performance talk nonsense ─ they don't. DLSS helps, yes, but it should be a tool for less powerful PCs to handle games that look far more complex and demanding than BL4. On top of that you have a toxic CEO, defensively yelling at customers, which is never a good sign.

[UPDATE]
The game crashes every 40-60 minutes for my gf, which makes co-op extremely unfun, to put it mildly. Her setup is nearly the same as mine. Due to this, I'm constantly greeted with another bug ─ I'm assuming it is one, otherwise it would be pretty bad game design ─ which is me having to re-spec my skill tree every time I join her game. We've honestly played the game for around 8 hours together now and it's only showing more issues.

When it comes to single player, besides the rather underwhelming soundtrack ─ compared to BL3 ─ there are glitching textures, NPCs teleporting, frozen enemies that defreeze but stay in their positions, Quest Items disappearing, Quest Items not showing up in the first place, unreasonable frame drops — the list is basically endless, not forgetting the hourly crashes on my gfs rig. I had to restart multiple times just to fix buggy quest lines, as early as calling the elevator in the tutorial. This is the premium game for premium gamers? Depends on where you set the bar, I guess?

tl;dr: A low-poly indie love letter to Half-Life and Stalker, with two distinctly different game modes, engaging story-telling and great gunplay.

The Saying “Never judge a book by its cover” was tailor made for games like ADACA. Under its multitude of bundled assets and plain low-poly textures lies an innovative, mysterious and highly satisfying indie shooter that caught me by surprise. Following the advice of the always helpful Dominic Tarason , I picked this one up on sale and haven’t really played anything else since. It’s unbelievable that ADACA was made by a single developer. Sure, the credits show quite a list of different asset packs but isn’t that the purpose of these anyways? The reason why the term “asset flip” became known in the first place is due to the fact that some developers take these assets, glue them together without thought and purpose, slap a price tag on it and call their piece of junk a finished game.

ADACA instead offers two distinct game modes: A linear campaign with a compelling story-line and Half-life inspired gameplay ─ even making use of a gravity-gun like arm ─, cut into three different episodes with multiple missions. Looking through the augmented eyes of Jessy Thorn you’re thrown from end to end, in a short but sweet plot that takes a couple of hours to finish. It’s a mysterious science fiction story that doesn’t hide its inspirational origins but still offers a very personal spin on the subject. Some missions are extremely well crafted, with dark underground passages that gave off survival horror-like vibes, while others felt a bit like moving from one enemy spawner to the next.

If you don’t like linear, tubular level design, then the second mode, Zone Control, is more to your liking. In a nonlinear open world experience, reminiscent of Stalker, you take up the gun as Sgt. Lexi Abrahms. It’s a highly rewarding experience in which information isn't spoonfed but has to be discovered via notes, logs and other messages. It feels way more like a game of survival and exploration, with a chain of missions that can’t be saved in between.

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The mystery surrounding the world of ADACA is extremely well crafted, with hidden secrets and codes that can be easily missed. Even if you’re mindfully picking up bits and pieces, there is still the problem of finding the correct place to apply your knowledge. At one point, I came across a code pad that opened a locked door only after being fed with a code I picked up. hours earlier, listening to a couple of radio frequencies. Moments like these make this game old-school and rewarding; there is no arrow pointing in any directions, nobody telling you to write anything down, just simple intuition.

Another great addition is the gravity-arm, which serves as your handy Swiss Army knife. You can pick up objects to overcome obstacles and reach hidden platforms or just use everything as deadly projectiles, which is fun to watch and saves ammunition. It’s possible to block paths so that enemies can't reach you but I generally preferred the more “definite” way of blasting them into oblivion. A staggered foe can be disarmed by picking up his gun, even instantly using it against its former user, which made for some very hilarious gameplay moments.

Yet, despite not being a big fan of puzzle games, I would have liked to make more use of my gravity arm. In most cases, you’re simply carrying batteries around, maybe throwing them over a large distance, which feels like a waste of potential.

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If there is something I had to criticise, it’s the feeling that Episode 3 of the campaign was unnecessarily prolonged with the help of bullet-sponge enemies, which overall made it feel slightly inferior to Episode 1 and 2. Zone Control mode is, by all means, a wonderful blast from the past with its game design promoting anything but hand-holding.

I also loved the way how the leitmotif, established at the start of the game, keeps coming back at you whenever something important happens or a mystery unfolds. It's just a small thing but it always felt incredibly atmospheric.

ADACA is a great example of indie games done right and easy to recommend for everyone enjoying story-driven fps gameplay. It does have some janky parts to it, like the movement sometimes feeling a bit sluggish, but it makes up for these short-comings with rewarding gameplay that respects ─ and challenges ─ the player's intellect.

tl;dr: A story-driven first person shooter with incredible atmosphere and worldbuilding, suffering from lacklustre performance and bugs.

If you can stomach heavily fluctuating frames and occasional game freezes, Industria could be a perfect choice as a short, story-driven fps. Heavily inspired by Half-Life 2, it offers a great mix between phantastic storytelling and real-world events. What starts in East Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Berlin wall November 9th 1989 quickly leads to an alternate dimension when our main protagonist Nora follows her boyfriend Walter through a secret machine called ATLAS.

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The jump from late 80s East Germany into, what looks like, an alternative 1920s dieselpunk inspired city called Hakavik feels familiar and alien at the same time. Humanlike machines roam the streets, by design killing everything on sight. It's here where Industria really caught my attention. The city of Hakavik looks calm,, even serene, so long as no machine is trying to hunt you down. Scattered belongings of its former ─ human ─ inhabitants really invoke the impression of a place that had once been teeming with life. Every now and then, you'll find bits of written lore, allowing players to piece together the information themselves. The story is never fully explained and parts of it won't make sense even after you finished the game, leaving me with mixed feelings.

The atmosphere is a very strong aspect of Industria despite music being very rare, almost absent. Instead, ambient sounds and noises add to the feeling of loneliness and isolation. Although the city is rather small and many doors won't open, you're still switching between bright open streets and damp, dark buildings. The latter make full usage of your flashlight, which never fully runs out but becomes less and less useful if you do not find a battery on time. The weapon at the ready, there was an almost survival horror-like feeling whenever I was inside of a dark building. Pumping and pulsating noises from the machines were omnipresent, their footsteps giving away their position.

However, the intelligence of these constructs felt a bit lacking, almost comical at times. At first, everything is rushing at you but, if being damaged enough, many robots turned around and just ran in circles. This would make sense if they had actual means to repair themselves but the way it worked here it was almost as if somebody played the Benny Hill theme in the background. Combat didn't feel challenging and ammo was scarce until I noticed that some boxes could be crushed, providing plenty of options to take down robots without worrying about running out. What gave me a headache though were the forced autosaves and the very rare occasions to save at a typewriter, again giving off the feeling of old-school survival horror. These typewriters were almost always placed in a nonsensical way, like right before or after an auto-save.

Industria looks rather nice, especially for an indie game. This doesn't explain the abysmal performance, which became an issue after chapter 2, only getting worse the further I went. Sure, my RTX3060/i7-10870H/32GB RAM notebook is not exactly high-end but come on, running everything on medium settings with balanced DLSS and I'm still not getting frequent 50-60 fps feels rather poor. In the end, I even chose performance but this didn't seem to have much of an impact. Sometimes, I got short freezes or hiccups when shooting enemies, which naturally is the worst situation for said problems.

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Had I not known beforehand that Industria is a relatively short game, lasting around 2-4 hours, I would have abandoned it midway through the playthrough. Still, the story really resonated with me and I wanted to see its end. The latter felt abruptly, which could explain the recent announcement of Industria 2.

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Hakavik whenever I was not worried about my laptop catching fire or something. The second half of the game feels very unpolished, untested and, to a degree, unfinished, as if time and resources were running out for the project though. Therefore, I only recommend getting Industria on sale. It offers a unique setting and a story that kept me thinking, embedded in a mixture of walking sim and survival action. If you finish the game, still looking for answers, there is a great guide that summarizes everything up nicely while also trying to give answers to questions you're surely going to have.

tl;dr: A cleverly written rhythm rogue-lite in urban Berlin, with colorful, addictive combat and a fantastic soundtrack.
Every round in BeatSlayer is a truly amazing experience. There is just something in rhythm games that's keeping me on the edge of my seat, hopefully hitting every beat, repeat after repeat. Okay, sorry about that. This game really is a lot of fun though, albeit being a tad bit short due to a smaller budget. Yet, instead of putting more meaningless content into BeatSlayer just to make it last longer, the focus was put on polished animations, sound and fluidity.

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Evil music mastermind Dietrich is sending his brain wave radio from the Berlin Tower ─ The Fernsehturm ─ to control every citizen, literally making them dance to his tunes. One of his captives, Toni, is the brother and closest family to our heroine Mia, who is desperately trying to free him from Dietrich's evil clutches. Between her and the tower-top crawls, flies and drives an army of evil robot henchmen, determined to put Mia down.

I love this setting. Choosing urban Berlin as a rhythm playground feels both unique and fresh. Seeing the subway driving through Friedrichstraße while smashing some robot faces is just priceless. Being from Germany myself, I laughed along the punchlines, but I acknowledge that not knowing anything about German pop culture makes some jokes feel rather pointless. Still, the writing is pretty clever, repeatedly using musical catchphrases that serve the general theme.

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Frankly, you either love or hate the gameplay, there isn’t much room in-between. You move, hit, slice and kick to the groove, hopefully chaining enough beats together to enter a state called Tanzrausch. Once entered, your damage improves and many abilities offer increased potential. If you’re not able to feel the rhythm, the whole game could become a chore. Sure, there are plenty of accessibility options like a metronome, a rhythm bar and other useful features but if you’re having trouble staying in Tanzrausch, BeatSlayer turns into an immensely hard game.

Buildwise I found myself sticking to damage-over-time abilities and shield regenerates, due to the fact that raw damage attacks were hard to apply in more hectic combat scenarios, especially the final boss. That’s not to say that other routes weren’t viable but I felt that letting the dots do most of the work also helped with staying on the beat. If you want to explore different ways to finish, you can. Easily. As it is common for other rogue-lites, unlockable talents improve various aspects of Mia. Here however, the player is able to increase the chance in-category, guaranteeing the likelihood of for example, Virus Power-Ups throughout the run. I love how this makes changing playstyles less of a gamble and respects the players time.

The soundtrack is amazing. It feels like there are only a handful of different tracks but they all come in variations, mirroring both the stage you’re in and the intensity thereof. 80s synthwave and straightforward kicks clash with EDM, guitar riffs and even live orchestration to keep your head bumping and axe swinging respectively. If you want to check it out, this is my favorite track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stHohm41ciw

BeatSlayer offers quality over quantity with a rough game time length of 8-14 hours, depending on your skill level and need to unlock all achievements. The gameplay feels tight, responsive and rewarding, alongside a kick-ass soundtrack. If you’re using a bluetooth headset, I recommend following the game’s advice to adjust the latency accordingly to avoid frustration though.

Personally, this has become one of my favorite rogue-lites of recent years, both in terms of replayability and entertainment factor. Sure, there isn’t as much of a story compared to genre-giant Hades but Mia still got the moves like Zagreus.