Recent reviews by slowWolf

As Sony has elected to reverse their dumb-ass decision, it's time to change the review.

I'd like to write a more detailed review, about the satire in the game; how the gunplay and immersive mechanics make Helldivers a masterpiece; how the music absolutely inspires and terrifies me, and not in the most obvious ways you would think.

But it's enough to know that people are so passionate about this game that they would take one of the biggest hits of 2024 and tank the review score so badly to keep the game more open and freely available. To say in a big voice that no, it's not okay to sell a game somewhere and then remove access to it.

Should Sony muck with the product again, I have no doubt that the HD2 players will remember where the review button is.

And a notice: Magika and Helldivers 1 are also good games! If you've left a bad review on those games due to Sony being a ♥♥♥♥ head, please remember to remove those negative reviews or say something nice about them!

I have never done a hard drug in my life. Growing up in a privileged, predominantly white neighbourhood with no small amount of wealth and with no likely consequences, that might come as a surprise. Despite having potential access to some incredible stuff, or so I'm imagining, it never crossed my mind why anyone in their right mind would want to inject the good ♥♥♥♥ into their veins.

That was until the other day where I played Vampire Survivors.

Vampire Survivors is a game that was unleashed into early access on the 17th of December, 2021, and is still in early access at the time of this writing. It is the single best example, in recent memory, as to what makes a video game video gamey. It is the pure, raw, and un-refined stuff that lays bare why kids and adults alike get hooked on the stuff.

The game is amongst the simplest and easiest examples of what a game can be; a power fantasy, an arcade score smasher, and a constant wallop of positive reinforcement wrapped up in the skin of a 1990's Castlevania. Your character in Vampire Survivors begins weak, barely able to handle more than a dozen bats at a time. By the end of a 30 minute run, you have easily massacred tens of thousands of monsters, using nothing but a joystick.

The monsters hardly matter in their numbers or behaviour, mechanically amounting to a slow and steady deluge of dumb idiots slamming themselves face-first into the attacks spewing from every angle of your little character. There are some cute tricks that the monsters can do, but not many, and this leaves the player with very few choices to make in the heat of the moment. This is an interesting choice seeing as the player can do one thing only: move. The rest of the game is automatic. Vampire Survivors is in essence a bullet hell, but the bullets are very slow and can be eliminated.

"It's a bullet hell, but you're the bullet hell" is the way I've heard this described. Although I agree the game is a bullet hell, I do find the way Vampire Survivors handles the tropes of the genre refreshing. As I said before, the bullets are literally waves of thousands of monsters headed your way. There are few intricacies to this, and dodging is simple so long as the monsters are dying. To kill them, the players needs to collect and co-ordinate a suite of weapons gained by leveling up and picking up treasure chests. These weapons are nearly all reskinned and appropriated Castlevania weapons: the knife, the axe, holy water, you name it. They can all be leveled up fairly quickly, and they get immensely more powerful as you do so. Alongside your up-to 6 weapons, you can choose a bunch of support abilities as well; these include increased movement speed, area of effect on weapons, or the incredibly powerful Duplicator that makes more projectiles. Although you don't get to push any buttons yourself, the number of bullets and effects spewing from your character sprite goes from a trickle to a torrent of spinning scythes, lasers, and fireballs in little time at all. If you choose the right weapon and support items combinations you can get even more powerful versions of your weapons, and this is where the heart of the choices in the game lead up to: a question. How fast can I kill these guys?

The answer is yes, so long as you've chosen correctly and don't walk into enemies like a nimrod. This is the heart of the power fantasy in Vampure surivors, and part of the reason why it's so engrossing, though the game puts a hard cap on how powerful you're allowed to feel. I'll speak about this later on, so… put a pin in this for a few minutes.

After a run, or when you die, the game tallies how much gold you've collected over the run. This is not the blue experience gems that eventually litter the field like a spilled glitter bomb, but the proper cold hard cash you get from opening treasure chests, finding coins on the ground, or leveling up so much that you can't upgrade your weapons anymore and are forced to choose between largely useless chicken or money. This money is funneled into a meta-game progression which can boost your natural stats by a significant margin. It's fairly straightforward: you spend gold to be more powerful, get further into the game, and then get more powerful by spending more gold that you found by getting further into the game. Coupled with the randomized item choices in-game, Vampire Survivors has the shadows of what it takes to be a roguelite. That said, the levels aren't random and the enemies come in the same waves, one after the other.The elements of a roguelite are there, but Vampire Survivors has less in common with the Binding of Isaac or Dead Cells than with Shoot-em ups and arcade booth coin slammers.

So what does this game even do, then? It's easy, maybe too easy, and yet I find myself impelled to play rounds every couple of minutes. The only reason I can think of is dopamine, injected directly into the eyes and ears.

As you mulch through hundreds of the little bastards on screen, the monsters drop little gems. These are your experience points. Every experience gem gives a handy little "ting" to let the player know they got the stuff. At first, it's just a couple of tings here and there. By the end of the game it's a roar of sound effects, beeps and boops and all that other junk that players have come to expect means "reward" in game terms. The game primes players by giving only a slow trickle of this positive reinforcement before overloading them with a high that is normally quite difficult to achieve in most other games. To call it a sensory overload, an overdose of pixelated glory, is an understatement. To have a game give success so easily, so readily and so quickly, is what forces Vampire Survivors to be not just a fun game, but an addicting one; a low barrier of entry to a cascade of power, a fantasy that relies on very little effort being put into the thing. It's a game that's perfect for the lazy gamer, and admittedly that's not a bad thing. Sometimes it's great to be lazy and relax.

That said, the brain can only handle so much, and the game developers know that. First, after 30 minutes the game will end your run forcefully, sic'ing death itself to end you. To experience that kind of power again, to taste that proverbial dragon, you're going to have to play another run. Second, I've played 15 hours at the time of this writing, but now the irritation begins to set in. The boredom creeps up on me like the monsters in the game, slowly until the press of them overwhelms me and overpowers my sense of fun. Now when I play, it feels like doing a routine, like something that simply is done. It took me about 15 hours, but I have absolutely spent the game. I've wrung it out like a sopping rag, until it is dry and offers nothing more to me.

That's when the developers drop another patch with new items and content, which is apparently going to keep happening on a weekly basis. Then I'm in for another couple of hours, finding the new novelties and doing my very best to break the game again.

For $3, I'd say that's not a bad spend.

The closest thing to a neighbour this game has is Deathstate. It's the same idea: the character automates your offense while the player controls all the movement, coupled with a deeper and more menacing game. If you've played Vampire Survivors, maybe Deathstate can give you more of the same with a different vibe.

Do you miss the days where games were simply "blast stuff forever?" Is Hell your vacation destination? Do you wish you could shoot knives out of your hand so fast it looks like a polygonal flamethrower? 

Also, do you not mind dying?

Devil Daggers is a really simple game. It honestly is just shoot things until you die; that's the entire game. The tricky bit is to last as long as possible without dying, which is so much easier to say than to do. The longest round of Devil Daggers I've had was around 2 minutes, and that took a lot of effort and practice. In fact, the only achievement in the game asks you to survive  500 seconds, or 8 minutes and 20 seconds. At the time of this writing, 0.1% of all players of Devil Daggers have managed 500 seconds.

This literal hell of shoot, die, repeat is still very engaging though. It's based on Arena shooters of old (in particular it reminds me of Quake) that featured mechanics like Strafe Jumping to build up speed and "rocket" jumping, and keeping an older looking demonic vibe to all the enemies.

Which fits well. The Vantablack level of darkness frames a stone platform, where all the shooting happens. Over the course of a run, specific enemies will spawn in and around the platform, screaming and screeching to life in a horrifying way. Devil Daggers is definitely best played with headphones on, since the expertly engineered audio is not only immersive and terrible to behold, but absolutely essential in pinpointing where enemies are coming from. This, combined with tight controls and simple shooting mechanics mean that players are easily sucked into the dark abyss that is Devil Daggers.

So what lives down there in the dark? As soon as you pick up your dagger, the game throws all kinds of horrible things at you; chattering hordes of skulls, floating spiders, gargantuan centipedes... there are 13 enemy types in all, but they all work together beautifully. Enemies in Devil Daggers will always spawn at certain time periods, meaning that (with practice) you can predict what's coming next and how to handle them. It's insanely well tuned, and absolutely brutally hard to overcome without being obtuse. Repeated attempts see improvement, and players that pay attention and learn the rhythms of the game can get pretty far in.

To help the player, you can upgrade your base weapon by collecting red stones from dead enemies. So long as you're not firing, the stones travel directly to the player, so good play requires knowing when you need to shoot, and when you need to get precious stones. With enough of the things, players get an improved weapon; faster firing rates, more damage, and eventually a panic button that fires homing daggers all over the place. It's a simple mechanic that requires practice to really get the hang of, since too much time spent collecting stones means time spent not shooting, and time not spent shooting is time enough for the hordes you're facing to overwhelm you.

The reward for all this is minimal, though. If you're not into arcade-style high scores and competition, then Devil Daggers will be an absolute waste. The entire point of the game is surviving the longest you possibly can, and if leaderboards or personal bests aren't your thing, then this game isn't for you; but if that type of masochism appeals to your tastes, then guess what? This game is literally built for specifically that.

In order to help players learn, Devil Daggers saves the replays of a player's personal best, and makes them available to everyone for viewing. You can actually watch the best players in the game get their high score from their perspective, and learn how they managed it. It'll obviously be tougher than it looks, but replays are still insightful and helpful for those looking to get one of the hardest achievements I've ever seen.

Devil Daggers sits at a $5.49 CAD on Steam, which is perfect for 11 hours I've put into it so far. It's a really focused, tightly tuned shooter that, for those who are looking for brilliantly designed, satisfying mechanics from their 1990's arcade shooters, is an absolutely great time.

Absolver is a game that is ambitious to its core. The sights, the sounds, the mechanics, all of them reach towards something great. It is impressive, and I find it easy to recognize how hard Absolver tried to make a name for itself. I also find is easy to recognize that Absolver may have tripped over itself in excitement in some areas, and would like to explore how and why. I would like to mention now that I will be covering spoilery material, and if you're not up for that, then be advised that's where I'm headed. If we're all good with that, let's continue.

Absolver is self-described as an online multiplayer combat game. Sloclap, the developers, do themselves a disservice by describing their game this way. It is absolutely those things, but it is better described as a brilliant 3rd person fighting game wearing the skin of a 3rd person adventure game like a cheap, old coat worn by someone for a very long time before it was ripped off their cold, dead corpse. Granted, that's not as easy to market, but that's what it is.

Absolver's story takes place in a land called Adal. A long time ago, disaster struck; this disaster, called the Downfall (not very original, but functional regardless), destroyed the old Adal empire, leaving many dead and few still living. The few left living created a new ruling caste, the Guides, who live on top of a mountain. Like most old martial arts super guru hermits, they are hard to get to. The player is one of the few who have managed this journey, and taken on the role of Prospect. The Guides send Prospects back to Adal wearing a mask which removes the need to eat or sleep, and prevents the wearer from dying. As one of these Prospects, the player is chosen to go back to Adal, and prove their worth by killing a dozen "marked ones," earning experience and leveling up along the way in a traditional action-adventure style. Accomplishing this will grant them the rank of Absolver, the Absolvers being an elite group of martial artists who serve the Guides in some way.

The appeal of the world isn't to do with story, though. Not really. It's not a very big game based on content alone, but that doesn't stop the game from standing out. There are two big factors in Absolver's appeal that gives it a lasting and ambitious impression; first, there's the combat system, and second, the in-and-out multiplayer aspect of the world.

Absolver has a 2 button attack system. Just 2. It's a simple system where one button uses a chain of attacks, and the other uses an alternate attack. It's elegant and easy to use. Despite having only 2 buttons for offense, the system itself is startlingly deep when you add the additional systems involved.

The attacks themselves are determined by something called a "combat deck," which is effectively a completely customizable movelist. Once a character has enough experience, each stance in a combat deck can accommodate up to three chained attacks that go in sequence from left to right, as well as one alternate attack. Since there are four stances, a combat deck can consist of up to 12 chained attacks and 4 alternate attacks, for a potential total of 16 attacks in a deck. Each attack has to start in a certain stance, and ends in a different one, which allows players to chain more than just one stance's worth of attacks in a row. Consequently, a combat deck can be built to player preference, either to flow around the entire deck for a continuous barrage or have several smaller combos, whichever the player prefers. There are so many different ways to build a combat deck that it's either very daunting or very exciting to tinker with the huge number of options available, and I haven't yet mentioned that every individual move in the game also has their own unique animations, power, speed, range, and can have other special attributes such as guardbreaking, super armour, or whether it can avoid certain moves during the attack, to name a few. The amount of variation possible between different combat decks is dizzying.

Thankfully, it doesn't have to be complex; players can simply choose to have less moves in their combat deck. There's less potential for interesting synergies and movesets, but it's still entirely effective and much easier to work with.

Players have 3 defensive options available to them at any time: blocking, dodging, and style defenses. Blocking is simple enough; the player blocks so long as they hold the button down. Blocking an attack costs stamina, with weaker attacks using less stamina to block than bigger ones. Dodging is a quick movement in a direction of the player's choice. Dodging is quick and costs a small amount of stamina to use, but is has no invincibility frames. This means it’s a purely positional defense; if the player makes a mistake, it's usually punished by the attack they meant to dodge in the first place. Style defenses come in several varieties, unique to the style being used, though they all have the same philosophical idea: high risk, high reward. Used correctly, they can turn the tide of a fight.


While out in the world, every section of the world works like a small instance with a revolving door of people that leave and enter, with a maximum of 3 people being in any one area at a time. Unlike an MMO where seeing another player is a dime-a-dozen moment, Absolver's player interactions are unique opportunities for emergent gameplay. It's a genuine feeling of the unknown; players can attack you at any time, whether in co-op mode or not. Coupled with a seemingly deliberately minimal emote system, which is the only non-violent means of communication, Absolver's playerbase must make their actions speak for them.

I was standing in the Oratian Quarter on top of one of the buildings, admiring the view. It's truly still a spectacular world, and I was appreciating that I could see the coloseum and the harbour, the neighbouring areas, by using a high vantage point, an actual navigation technique. And then, a random player just attacked me from behind, almost pushing me off the edge of the building. Swinging around with a dodge, I immediately broke into several kicks and then backed off. A bright flash of light later, I stood with my sword in hand, and waited to see his response. Several moments passed. Eventually, his stance relaxed, and I dropped my focus and folded my sword away. I gave him a thumbs up, the "yeah" emote. The other player hung his head, slumped his shoulders (the "sad" emote), and without warning ran off the edge of the building, killing himself. He ran by a few moments later after respawning without so much as a wave, and continued on his way. I hadn't laughed so hard in days.

Absolver also features, at the time of this writing, a 1 on 1, best of 5 PvP mode that works like online matchmaking. It works well, when connections allow, and is a lot of fun most of the time. It can be overwhelming to new players though, so players who give themselves room to fail and learn. The benefits of competing in the combat trials include rare gear, and opportunities to battle certain bosses again.

Sloclap are still currently developing Absolver for several months into the future, which is reassuring. I just find myself wishing that the developers had made a thoughtful game to be supported by the robust combat system, rather than a combat system showcased by some game. Although this may come across as fortune cookie nonsense, it's clear to me that Absolver is a strong and capable game that lacks focus and balance in all of its many aspects.

Flinthook is a platformer with roguelite elements that reminds me a lot of the rosy coloured arcades from a long time ago. From minute 1, the game's pixelated world screams of a time when you needed quarters to keep going, to try again. Gorgeous artwork and fun, action packed music help to push you onwards through one ship after another.

Why chase through ships though? Is it loot? Story? a combination of the two? The narrative backbone exists, and it does try to create a cohesive experience. You're hunting down pirates all over the galaxy to rescue little ghosts that might or might not have something to do with Captain Flinthook, the pirate you play as. This loose, simple narrative doesn't get much deeper, but that's fine. The point of the game is not a narrative one; the goal is to have a mechanically sound game.

Flinthook delivers on that promise well, combining tough platforming segments with satisfying combat. Along with jumping and shooting, you have access to a few other mechanics to help navigate the spaces you find yourself in. The titular flinthook itself is easily the most used, and very satisfying to master. Hooks abound on these space ships, and thanks to your flinthook it's an easy matter to throw yourself across a room with incredible speed. It's much harder to do so without taking damage, so practice is necessary; once mastered, the flinthook is essential for attack, defence, and maneuvering. Everything, really, and it's a good thing that the main mechanic is so fun and challenging to work with.

You also have access to the chronobelt, an item that slows everything down to a crawl for a short time. At first, it was easy to ignore the chronobelt; you slow down as much as everything else, so why would you ever use it? This, it turns out, is a fatal mistake to make. The game constantly reminds you that the chronobelt is amazing, either through loading tips or even ingame characters remarking that "I wish I had a chronobelt!" Used properly, the chronobelt makes even the toughest rooms possible, since the slowed time allows for the precision needed to execute remarkably cool actions. Flinthooking through a spray of bullets, flipping over your opponent, and then blasting them to space dust is fun, and made possible through the combination of all of your abilities.

Several other abilities can be acquired throughout the game, if you're lucky enough. Many of the ships you raid have red and white cards called "perks" scattered about. They aren't too rare; it's often you'll see them in shops, as rewards for completing a room, or by paying for them through certain rooms. Although not as transformative as items in other roguelites, these perks offer distinct advantages over the course of a run. Bouncing bullets? Extra shields on every ship? The ability to bounce on an enemy's head, Mario Style? Even a dodge roll. This is a small portion of the perks you can get.

As you play, you get the ability to equip perks at the beginning of a run as well. This allows you to tailor your experience to the run, or to your playstyle, without completely upsetting the balance/feel of the game from the word go. Every Flinthook run will be the Flinthook experience; within that experience, perks will change how it feels.

That said, the game's focus is mechanical. To a fault, really, since the game doesn't really look different or feel much different from the first 10 minutes to the next 10 hours. There's a gradual increase of power, as is necessary in a good roguelite, but it isn't as pronounced as it is in other games in the genre. It's subdued, even. It's as if the developers wanted a certain type of experience, and wanted to keep it that way. This prescriptive type of development is okay, and I am totally fine with it myself since I find the game fun to play from a mechanical perspective. I was happy the game would never be too easy. Unless I learned what the game had to teach me, the game would never have a moment where I would feel like "this run is over already, let's just finish it" that happens often in other roguelites. Even when I learned the patterns and learned to navigate the trickier corridors, that feeling hasn't happened once to me. This is a plus in my books, since that means the game will always be challenging and fun, regardless of my meta power level.

The only time where it feels like the game drags on is on the final story based raid. As you're hunting down the final boss, you beat the old ones in a spaced out boss rush over the course of 12 ships. 12 ships is a lot of ships, and only 3 of those ships are bosses. the other 9 are regular raids; if it wasn't for the game's ability to pause a run and come back to it later, this final mission would be nearly impossibly long. And if you want an alternate ending, be prepared to go through this ordeal at least 2 times, once of which will be much harder since you'll be actively taking disadvantages throughout the whole mission.

The end goal of Flinthook, however, isn't about the story or the narrative. It's not really about growing your collection of perks and story items either. The main aspect of the game is hunting for points. Every single mission has a leaderboard, where every high score a player has earned is archived. This, I think, is what sells Flinthook as a game to me, and as a love letter to the arcades of old. Passing by old game machines and seeing the top score-to-beat is exactly the same as in Flinthook. Losing is sometimes brutal, ending what might be well over 20 minutes of gameplay only to start again. But the thirst for points, for the rush of blasting, jumping, and hooking your way through pirate ships, this drives the game forward.

But is Flinthook a good better game for that? Certain aspects of the game suffer. The brutality of losing a lot of mission progress can absolutely break the experience for some people. This happens often enough for one reason: the environment. The environment is hard to read to an untrained eye because of the subdued, unsaturated colour palette. Even after playing a decent amount, several of the traps are difficult to parse from the foreground and abckground, easily taking chunks of health from the unwary player. Other times, stacking difficulty modifiers, such as rumble room (pressure plate spikes) and tenderizer (additional spike strips) can be put together in lethal, sometimes unavoidable combinations. Careful players might avoid the majority of the issues there, since you can often choose which ship you go to based on the modifiers present.

It's funny though. The rooms, barring any major modifiers, are carefully crafted, sometimes down to the half second. I was working through a room with moving floors, spike balls, and thugs blasting down the lanes constantly. From the outset, it seemed impossible not to take damage. There was simply too much stuff to avoid. It's at that point something snapped into place, and I felt like I was seeing the code of the game. A properly timed jump and a judicious use of the chronobelt to dodge incoming projectiles in time was suddenly obvious. I beat the room flawlessly, and I felt like a king. A degree of observation and of self-responsibility was all that was needed. This alone convinced me the game was somewhat solvable, where good skill and game knowledge was rewarded far more than good luck.

Flinthook is a brilliant game. The art, the actual process of playing, all of that is rewarding and worth my time. But then the question comes up; what about the perma death? what about the frustrating feeling of losing? That's far more subjective, but I found my time well used. I'm hooked on the game, and play it when I have spare time simply for the fun of blasting more pirates for points. If that's not arcade era game design, I don't know what is.

If you can get past the initial learning curve and burden of knowledge the game puts on you, then DOTA2 can be extremely rewarding.

As far as most MOBAs are concerned, this one has a good blend of strategy and relfexes that rewards those who can use both to their advantage. The gameplay is, as a result, solid, and every sessions provides new opportunities for fun and strategy.

The UI is a little underpopulated, however, and doesn't explain much. learning how to do some of the functional things, like leaving a game that's safe to leave, or muting people, or reporting people, are not super intuitive: you have to dig. Furthermore, the options available, though very powerful and plentiful, are not explained super well. As a result, it's important to toy around with your settings a bit, which can be a hassle.

As far as the F2P model goes, it's pretty fair: you can play the whole game without needing any of the micro transactions. The only thing they do is customize your aethetics, and happily not to an extreme extent.

Because of this, the game has a really unified look despite all the different items your characters can wear. This might dissuade people from buying them, because some of the items are barely even visible.

Overall, I would recommend this game to anyone with a hankering for a challenge. The game is NOT easy, but it is worthwhile and a lot of fun once you get a hang of things. Veterans of the genre will find a lot to like.

One of the best examples of how game controls don't have to be an issue with story telling, but how to make controls an integral part of telling what would otherwise be a normal story, and make it something extraordinary. Highly recommended.

Full disclosure here, I'm really involved with Awesomenauts. I've met the developers, Ronimo, in person more than twice and have been contracted to do work for them. I've cast tournament events in a professional capacity, wrote and recorded an in-game announcer, earned a "Golden Duck" (the Ronimo community award), and attribute any real success of my YouTube channel to Awesomenauts and the community that surrounds it. Awesomenauts is my single most played game of all time, sitting at 2800+ hours at the time of this writing, and has been a core part of my life for over 5 years. I've bought the game and the old expansions for myself and several friends, and contributed to their Starstorm Kickstarter for $162, and have bought most of the cosmetic skins available. With that said, let's continue.

Awesomenauts is what happens when you take the guts of a 2D platformer, put them inside a MOBA framework, and present it with all the energy and enthusiasm and 80's Saturday morning cartoon can muster. Awesomenauts is fast, frenetic, and easy to pick up while being deep enough to warrant hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Awesomenauts controls like a 2D action platformer. You jump and shoot, though every character, or Awesomenaut, is a unique expression of the genre. Most walk, but some have multiple jumps, flutter, and others outright fly to name just a couple of mobility options. All of their attacks and abilities differ as well, and the cast features everything from cowboy blasters and oversized rocket launchers to time vortexes, nuclear explosions, and black holes. Every single character of the 30+ roster is a unique experience in its own right, and offers a huge amount of variety to players looking for longterm investment in the game. This is especially true when you can combine different abilities and attacks to create devastating combinations and effective strategies.

The goal of the game is to destroy the enemy team's core. Doing this means fighting your way through base defenses, waves of drones, and the enemy Awesomenauts themselves. This last one is where the game's 2D platforming mechanics really shine. Certain characters are stellar chasers capable of quick, responsive platforming, while others are slow and have lousy jumps. Chasing and being chased around a level in Awesomenauts is a thrilling experience.

During a match, players earn 2 resources: solar and experience. Solar is the individual means of improving your character. Killing enemies and destroying turrets earns solar for every team member. Solar can also be picked up off the ground from collecting coloured cubes that dot the landscape or from dead drones. Solar can be spent on upgrades back at your base, which can increase everything from the damage dealt by an ability or the health of the player to more unique effects such as reflecting projectiles or creating exploding cocoons.

Experience is gained as a team, like in Heroes of the Storm. Every point you collect by completing objectives goes towards the team's level, where higher levels passively increase the team's damage dealt and health bar. This system conditions players to stay out in the field longer, which leads to them helping team mates and pushing out enemy drone waves: excellent habits to have. Team experience doesn't fix the "bad player ♥♥♥♥ game" symptom of MOBAs, but good teams can boost a weaker player into a position where that player can be effective and participate while also dampening the effect of a player who's very skilled comparatively. This results in more even games for most.

Awesomenauts, now being free to play, features a typical meta-game progression that is very similar to how Heroes of the Storm's system works, including a meta currency, account levels, character levels, and so on. None of this is particularly new, but it's worth mentioning that Awesomenauts' tutorial system grants enough meta-currency that players can acquire at least 1 character once they're done the tutorial quests. They don’t have to choose blindly either; the armory gives players the chance to try a character before buying. If players want access to all the characters, Awesomenauts borrows a page from SMITE's book and allows consumers to buy the "All-Nauts pack," which grants access to all the Awesomenauts available now and in the future.

Cosmetics are difficult to come by. Aside from account portraits and drop pod skins, Awesomepoints can only buy new characters. The majority of character skins and announcers are only acquirable through real money purchases. Even though skins and announcers purely cosmetic, the Awesomenauts experience is definitely less without them; reason being, the cosmetics are fantastic. The announcers are full of character and inject each game with a completely different feel. Some are laugh out loud hilarious, while others offer a more serious approach. The skins are even more interesting; basic skins simply reskin a character, but the legendary skins replace art, voice work, and even character themes entirely without sacrificing their identity.

Still, the base game experience is a treat for the eyes and ears. The characters are well animated and fun to listen to. Characters even have their own unique theme music and killing spree, which helps convey their personalities better than any skin available in the store. The levels you blast your way through are hand drawn, meticulously put together, and have plenty of little touches that add life to the worlds you fight over.

Still, Awesomenauts isn’t perfect. For instance, the presentation of menus is not the best. Unintuitive interfaces and burried menu options are not clearly explained or shown, meaning that players will likely get lost trying to find the options they're looking for. Nothing shows this more than the muting and reporting system. Muting a player shouldn't take more than 1 click to do and should be dead simple. This is not the case; It takes at least 3 clicks and one drop-down menu to mute and report someone, which is 2 clicks too long when I'm rushed, angry, or otherwise upset and want to get rid of the problem quickly.

Awesomenauts is also online-only. There's no way to play the game without an internet connection, even if all you want to do is play against bots. This is not a design decision Ronimo will turn back on, unfortunately, even if it makes sense considering the difficulty of making an effective free to play game that is offline able. It's mostly disappointing because Awesomenauts used to have an offline mode before it went free to play, which I found useful on occasion in the past when I'd be traveling or out someplace remote.

For those looking for more from Awesomenauts, the game has two additional features that expand on the game immensely; custom games and a level editor. The level editor is incredibly powerful and allows players to make all kinds of maps and game types, including platform racing, tower defense maps, and small character campaigns. These maps can be played in custom games, which offer a huge amount of control to players. A huge number of settings can be tweaked, including solar gain, respawn times, creep spawn rates, or spawning a solar boss anytime a player dies. Since all of these work within the Steam Workshop, it's an easy matter to subscribe to new maps and modes you can use whenever you like.

All in all, Awesomenauts has 3 things I absolutely love; the 2D mechanics are fun and well designed, they add a still unique take on a MOBA (which is a genre I love), and the game presentation is without compare. Despite the issues present within any multiplayer game, unfortunate offline incompatibility, and some unintuitive interface issues, Awesomenauts has been my go to game for 5 years. It does a better job of making MOBAs accessible than any other MOBA on the market, triple A or otherwise, while still providing a deeply engaging game for committed players.