Recent reviews by [NULL]

9 Kings is very fun and on the path to success through its early access. The game has a fun and snappy base that adds complexity layer by layer. Choosing your opponents wisely so you can gain their rewards without being defeated, planning out your units and buildings with limited space and unknown rewards ahead, wisely targeting with your base's attack, and managing your gold across rerolls and shops all combine to make a fun, quick, but surprisingly deep experience. The quirks of the many units of the game (stuff beyond their displayed stats like their speed, their starting position, their target priorities, their attack methods, their unit numbers, etc.) make planning your army very satisfying. The roadmap ahead teases exciting things to come, like new kings, cards, and gamemodes, so definitely keep an eye on this game even if you don't hop on now/

Since the devs seem to be reading the reviews, I'll make a list of some of my current issues with the game:
-The final assault/boss battle is terrible. You either one shot it in like 3 seconds or have the world's longest most protracted battle with it, sometimes culminating in an instant loss at the end if the boss out DPS's your troops after all its troops are gone. The boss wave seems to nerf your damage/attack speed and may nerf other stats behind the scenes, and that's lame. I literally just had a run with poison defenders today that went from wiping the wave before effortlessly to struggling to deal with the boss wave's troops and dealing a fraction of the poison they were the wave before. There's no way to anticipate what boss you'll get or to know if you'll have difficulty with it or run it over.
-Some values are hidden or pointlessly inflated. Values like move speed are not shown despite being modifiable, and some values like attack speed get pointlessly inflated. In a recent patch, the notes said that attack speed over a certain amount is converted to damage "on the back end" but attack speed can still reach silly numbers like 3.456+e11 and none of that conversion is shown. Knowing where the caps are and how things function would avoid the fairly common sad newbie moment of "why is my 5 trillion hits per second dispenser losing to endless mode year 60". In the same vein, what is a tower, summon, or construction is not super clear, and clearing this terminology up would help with selecting perks and understanding buff interactions.
-Endless mode needs some extra spice even if the jank does get ironed out.
-The prophecy system is a cool idea but very half baked and doesn't seem to account for how the game is actually played. 75% of the time it blesses tiles I am not planning around and there's usually not much point in getting the blessing active unless it randomly works out with how you build your plots. There's also not very many of blessings in the pool.

I've got like 2 billion hours on the Android version. This game is insanely good. Despite being dice based, this game is not the outta control luck fest you may fear it being. As you learn the game, it becomes abundantly clear that there's a lot of room for strategy and risk mitigation. The game's built-in undo heavy system lets you experiment to find the perfect line with the dice you chose to lock in, while the limited rerolls and the game's consistent difficulty curve keeps things challenging. And my god, the content. Tons of synergies, class combinations, difficulties, bonus modes, settings and adjustments, achievements, modding, etc., etc., etc. Plus gorgeous sprite work, minimal yet stylish animations, and cool ass physics based dice. This game is incredible. Get it!

Gonna lead with the sad fact that the game crashes like 1-2 minutes in if you're connected to the internet when launching the game. Disconnect, launch, then wait a lil bit, then reconnect to play and get achievements as normal.

Perfect Vermin is a perfect little game. It knows exactly what it means to do and sets out to do its job, no nonsense. It wastes no time establishing its tone and purpose and taking them rapidly to their inevitable end. A remarkable work of art and a fine example of what this medium is uniquely capable of doing.

I'll have to join the few who did not really enjoy this DLC. It isn't terrible by any means, but it certainly feels like it emphasizes the weaker parts of what made the main game good while also neglecting the strong original ideas the DLC brings to the table.

The Black Labyrinth is a prequel to the main game. It follows the Champion, known only as the Wanderer, on his quest to obtain the axe from the titular Black Labyrinth. Due to the more grounded plot, the level aesthetics still remain as gorgeous and intricate as the main game but are a big step back as far as visual spectacle goes . The standouts are the first four levels before the Black Labyrinth itself, especially the Dark Coast with its sprawling ocean and interweaving tunnels buried in the cliffside. The final four Black Labyrinth levels are less visually compelling, much darker and more generically fortress-like. Gone are the increasingly alien levels of the main game, replaced by beautiful but architecturally mundane stonework that is nowhere near as cool to navigate.

Without the axe, the Wanderer instead wields twin gauntlets, and the levels often utilize these gauntlets to activate special punchable buttons or to destroy the level to move forward. This is one of the most unique parts of the DLC, and it really adds to the power fantasy in several places by letting you punch clean thru walls or launch the balcony you're standing on across a chasm to continue. In the level The Chamber, several of these punch buttons recoil you up and around curved ramps and slopes, letting you surf up and around some small bits of the map. These moments are very short lived, however, and many of the punch buttons are used on rather tedious jumping puzzles that can often be skipped with planet jumps. It feels like a big missed opportunity for the movement-based moments to be so far and few between.

The enemies in the DLC are more generic than the base game and are generally not very fun to fight. They all feel like they have slightly too much health to blast down with the weaker weapons in your arsenal, and the way they are used often drags the pace of the game down. The worst is the tower shield knights, who are so pace destroying and annoying that I tended to just use the new super weapon on them as soon as I saw them rather than slowly try to catch them with planet blast damage, but many of the enemies have some flaw. Flail knights aren't easily dispatched with gauntlets despite being fodder enemies, archers are persistent pests from afar, big bull head clouds are tedious to fight in many places since you have to hide and peek them or else move constantly because they spawn in swarms. The encounters also just feel badly constructed. They do challenge you more than the encounters of the main game, but many also feel like cheap surprises or just flood enemies at you while you circle backpedal Serious Sam style (or just use the new superweapon to kill them all at once, rendering it all moot anyways).

The final boss is a step up from the bosses of the main game in terms of you actually needing to do more than stand still and shoot to fight it, but I found fighting it quite tedious. Several of its moves fling you around the battlefield if you get hit, while others are so ridiculously easy to dodge but must be dodged over and over and over as you widdle its HP down. More active and challenging but not very fun.

I'd still recommend anyone who liked the main game to try this DLC out, but I found it to be rather lacking in what I enjoyed from the main game without really carving out its own identity.

Amid Evil takes place after evil has already won. The once peaceful denizens and holy orders of many dimensions have been overcome and twisted by some great corruption that has succeeded in besting the very gods. You represent the last hope for these shattered worlds, the champion of the Black Labyrinth. Wielding its divine axe, you go forth to cleanse the corrupted vestiges of the old order of evil and liberate the realms.

In this nu-boomer-shooter, those realms take front and center. If there's one thing to get into Amid Evil for, it's the level and visual design. The action takes place across many wondrous worlds, through sprawling ruins, dilapidated temples, and forgotten machines, some grounded and terrestrial and others sprawling with root-like tendrils into the kaleidoscope colors of the cosmos. Amid Evil takes the many disparate and familiar elements in its visual and level design and recombines them into something all its own. The low-poly models and low-resolution textures share the canvas with incredible skyboxes, intricate level geometry, and gorgeous detailed weapon sprites, and everything is utilized perfectly to create something evocative and more than the sum of its part. Each level ups the ante, ascending beyond high fantasy into celestial fantasy, expanding on traditional boomshoot mini-mazes with more intricate mechanisms and fantastical platforming set pieces, and it all culminates in a satisfyingly creative final area.

Carving your way thru these corrupted realms is made exceedingly enjoyable by the arsenal of magic weapons at your disposal. A machine-gunning magic staff, a mace that launches crystals that pins enemies to walls, a rocket launcher that fires entire planets... All these bizarre and powerful weapons make you truly feel like a guns-blazing crusader ready to take on the eldritch deep. The weapons are beautifully rendered with incredibly detailed sprites that have dynamic lighting, and the soul mode you can attain from killing enough enemies adds another layer to the power fantasy with deeply overpowered enhancements to every weapon capable of clearing whole rooms with ease.

If there's one thing that is a bit lacking in Amid Evil, it's the difficulty of the enemy and boss encounters. I played thru the whole game on Hard, and until the final levels, the game barely posed a challenge. Enemies are often not numerous enough, threatening enough on their own, or in suitable level geometry to threaten a player. Even when the difficulty ramps up, health pickups and ammunition are so plentiful that it drops right back down. I recall many times that the game would throw a massive squad of mixed enemies at me, and I'd respond by firing the game's equivalent to the BFG and just kill them all because I had like 20 BFG shots lying around due to all the ammo for it everywhere. The bosses are especially nonthreatening and typically can be beaten by moving a certain way repeatedly or sometimes even by standing totally still. This isn't enough to hurt the fun of the game, as the levels remain fun to blast through and many of the bosses are great visual setpieces or have great gimmicks, but it does hold the game back from being one of the greats.

Overall, Amid Evil is recommended for a fun time cleaning up evil across the vibrant cosmos with your helicoptering axe.

I really liked Balatro... at first.

The game is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a poker rogue-lite based around collecting jokers with various interacting effects and enhancing your deck through adding, removing, altering and upgrading cards. The game really hooks you with this from the get go. Building your suite of jokers is fun, and managing your money and deck to create the highest combos you can can be satisfying, especially with some of the weirder Joker combos. The UI, sounds, and art direction ramps it up from fun to surprisingly addictive. Animations are snappy, sounds are crisp and fun, and the UI is informative yet minimal in a positive way.

This combo of snappy presentation and quick resource management and synergy building really hooked me when I started playing, but as my playtime grew and I climbed up the difficulty levels, the ugly side of Balatro began to show itself. Because the game is based around poker, you're heavily at the mercy of RNG from the very start. The earliest blinds when you have nothing are just... playing poker, fishing around for high scoring hands, just discarding and praying. With a 52 cards (or 40 with abandoned deck), there isn't any real control you can exert from the get go, and the control you do get is limited to what jokers and enhancements you have. Because jokers, vouchers, card upgrades, consumables, etc. are all located in the shop, the shop is the only meaningful avenue to take consistent action in Balatro. But there's more RNG there too. You don't control what shows up in the shop. It could be crap jokers or early double tarot cards when you want any jokers at all, or it could be game-changing or game-winning OP jokers. With only 2 slots for purchasable jokers and consumables in the shop at the start, you only get a few opportunities to get your deck up and running, and to get money to take advantage of those opportunities, you need to beat blinds or skip blinds in a way that gets you that money... which means, early on, lucking into good draws and good blind skip opportunities. This early game misery only gets worse as the difficulty increases, limiting your opportunities to make money and making it harder to survive if you get bad jokers early on.

Even with the early game woes aside, the game is just so RNG heavy that meaningful skill expression barely exists. All that matters is getting good jokers and guaranteeing powerful hands through deck alteration.You're at the mercy of what shows up in the shop, which you can only take advantage of with money, which you get good amounts of from winning blinds in a the fewest hands, which you can only get from the mercy of your deck drawing good for you. Or you can skip blinds when the skip gives you money, but that's also luck. The difficulty system in this game only makes this worse in an unfun way, gradually cutting away resources. One out of three blinds gives no innate money, faster scaling point requirements, less discards, less hand size, etc...

But let's say you love Balatro and you power through. How do you consistently beat these increasingly harsh odds? What do you value and what do you do? Well, since all you can really meaningfully do is shop at the store, you look for three things: chip generators, mult (multiplier for the chip value) generators, and mult multipliers. You look for these three things every single run, and as the stakes rise, you increasingly look for early scaling versions of all of these. What this means is that most runs turn into some variation of the same things: beat or skip the early blinds with good value (by drawing well or lucking into good blind skip rewards), manage your money until you can luck into some scaling in the shop and/or luck into some mult multers in the shop, and just make sure you don't run into a boss blind effect that can kill your run. How do you do that? Well there's a boss reroll voucher. How does it show up? In the shop... at random...

My final few hours of Balatro consisted of two things. One: getting really fun and powerful wacky combos that got obliterated by a boss blind debuff because it either killed my strategy or I (uncontrollably) drew poorly, and I never saw the boss reroll voucher. Two: winning because I lucked into godly jokers that fulfilled the above criteria or my wacky combo never got hard countered. I watched some YouTube videos of people playing the highest difficulty of this game and noticed that they tended to pick the same jokers pretty often, and that often the only skill they expressed was judging odds to draw a hand from your remaining deck, managing money, and recognizing good jokers. That's it. That's all you really get to do in this game. And I don't even think I consider two of those real skill as much as just things to consider.

For me to really recommend Balatro as something more than a Vampire Survivors-esque dopamine factory, it needs to change in a major way. There needs to be more for you to meaningfully do in a run besides fish for good jokers and count your dollars, and the higher difficulties need to meaningfully spice up the formula instead of primarily just making your runs worse. As of right now, I can't recommend it unless you're content with a flashy, well-produced, and addictive but ultimately shallow experience.

This is a great game. As advertised, the game is hostile. Nothing is planned, but (almost) everything works. The game loads levels and usable items in at random, and it's your job to get the fruit and get the heck out. It's totally possible to end up with items that make getting to the end impossible or nearly impossible, and therein lies the hostility. The game does not care if you get a win.

On the flip side, it doesn't care how you win. Platforming is generous (most inclines can be scaled by spam-jumping), and the suite of usable items are very creative. A lot of thought clearly went into how they interact with the world and with each other, and this makes every level secretly contain multiple versions of itself. A level played with boxes, balls, and frogs is inherently different than the same level played with spears, the camera, and pomegranates.

I expected to get bored after finishing the available levels in the game, but this amazing formula kept me going for several more hours, laughing at absurd solutions, cursing at complete failure, and feeling pride in pulling off crazy wins. The game even has Workshop support (available thru a beta at the time of writing) for custom levels if you want more.

If you're remotely interested, buy this and play it. It's quick, it's fun, it's silly, it's cerebral, it's so unique. Addictively simple and addictively complex. Very worth the price.

Noita is one of the best games I've ever played.

At its core, Noita is a roguelite with "falling sand" style physics simulation. You randomly acquire spells and put them together in wands with random stats while managing your health, gold, and inventory space to accumulate strength. The wand building is deep and satisfying in a way beyond most other games I've ever played. Spells have not just different damage, speed, and elemental effects but also statistical alterations and complex hidden interactions, and these interactions lead to depth of play that never seems to stop growing. If that sounds overwhelming, don't worry, as it simply gives you power from knowledge and many different ways to achieve your goals. You can make an all-powerful death wand with 26 spells if you want, or you can use just 5-7 pieces for a different effect (sometimes just as powerful as the 26-er depending on your pieces!)

The world of Noita is beautiful and brutal. The simulated world means that every grain of sand, drop of mystical potion, puff of gas, and pixel of metal is a potential obstacle or potential resource. Awareness is key, as every biome has something that can turn what feels like an untouchable "won run" into instant death, and that doesn't just mean the enemies. Locales and their inhabitants are strange, often hostile, and present a wide variety of both threats and boons. Don't be discouraged if you get vaporized early on, as every bit of knowledge brings you power as you learn to exploit the world while avoiding death. The soundtrack provides the perfect atmosphere for this environment. Sometimes psychedelic, sometimes haunting, sometimes frenetic and energetic, always appropriate to every threat and safe place and amazing to listen to.

It's hard to talk more about Noita without ruining the experience, so all I'll say is that the game offers much more than it appears, more than enough to justify the 300+ hours I've spent on it at the time of writing this review, more than enough to justify the first sentence in this review. The game captures witchcraft and mysticism in a way that no other game I've ever played has by not only giving you the fruits of the arcane art but also the journey to obtaining those fruits. Every bit of the game makes you feel like a witch, from the highs to the lows, from the triumphs to the terrors, from the power to the helplessness, from the euphoria of knowledge to the obfuscation of mysteries seemingly beyond your comprehension.

It's incredible. Buy it!

Legend of stone walls and atrocious combat.

Not really sure why this game is so beloved. It's a story-driven RPG maker game with no combat, which isn't a problem. I like these games when well-executed. This one is not well-executed. The two main characters are very annoying and often crack jokes or make weird comments that take away from the emotionality of the story. Even ignoring that, the story feels like it forces its twists and key emotional moments through really contrived plot elements. Spoilers contain more details but obviously spoil the whole game. The mother using beta blockers to remove the main character's memories of his dead brother is absolutely bizarre and nonsensical, and his wife's refusal to talk about his memory loss and how he forgot their first meeting directly is equally as baffling and frustrating. She spends much of the game trying to indirectly remind him and getting upset when it doesn't land. The game seems to want to use her autism as a reason for why she doesn't ever bring it up directly but it doesn't make any sense for her demonstrated level of social function and just comes off as kinda insulting, painting her as childish and sometimes rude. A tearjerker game with emotional dissonance in many places and poor setups for poor twists.

Not recommended.