Recent reviews by Sundown

Lord only knows how much I've stuck with this game, but it's pretty clear that Bungie has well and truly fumbled the bag. It is nearly impossible to onboard new players into the game with the disaster that is the New Light campaign, and even harder to maintain the motivation of friends who would want to play the game with you. Systems that were intended to help players enjoy the game keep getting walked back time and again, and core repeatable game systems have been left to languish in complete irrelevancy.

While systems teased for the upcoming "Year of Prophecy" stand to resolve some of these issues, Bungie will need to do more than a mild overhaul to how they handle their content. Building the game around "you had to be there for it" moments, combined with managerial ineptitude and an unwillingness to do the right thing for the game's health results in Bungie constantly letting the game go right to the brink before they do some sweeping Hail Mary change that makes the game fun to play again for a short time before the cycle inevitably repeats.

It's such a shame that the core moment-to-moment gameplay - the guns, the abilities, the general feel when you get to properly dominating hard content - is weighed down by an overarching design strategy that is slowly suffocating a game that truly felt like it was recovering and had a positive future back during the era of Witch Queen.

This game is definitely an experience, just like JSRF was for me as a kid. It's not quite JSRF, and there's definitely flaky points (map design being a little too open, combat as more of an afterthought, cops are just an annoyance you run from, some annoying songs combined with a limited area-based playlist system) but it's still good fun nonetheless. It doesn't have the same kind of flow like JSRF does, but the controls are right there, and I don't recall ever having a moment where the game was misinterpreting my input or trying too hard to snap me to a surface I didn't actually want to be on.

Kick back, relax, do stunts, build up a big combo, and just enjoy the game for what it is. It's a relatively casual experience throughout that focuses more on the adventure/platformer aspect.

Let me put it simply - Starbound's base game really isn't worth it. The plot is boring, the boss fights aren't particularly interesting, planets aren't really worth visiting after the second or third randomly generated world. Given its history and other 2D platformers in the market, it's very easy to compare this to the high water mark that is Terraria. As such, if you want a cohesive experience that's fun, fast, and tight right out of the box, stop reading this review - Terraria will be a much better choice.

What Starbound is, really, is a framework for you to slap hundreds of mods on top of to create your own experience, fix developer oversights, and overall set up Starbound to be your 2D platformer. No two Starbound installs are the same (unless it's vanilla), everyone has their own picks with mods, and Starbound itself is relatively resilient against the Jenga tower of mods you can install.

Buy it to mod the hell out of it and make your own version of Starbound, don't buy it for just the base game.

RBS is unfortunately an extremely fiddly game with lots of strange or otherwise poor design decisions. It could have been an interesting SHMUP, but in the long run, it fails at being a fun SHMUP. Warp mode after every boss is RNG as to whether you survive or not. If you drop any frames, you will probably die. The game spits out asteroids at such a high volume that it's ridiculous to contend with. You're essentially required to max out the Radioshield upgrade in order to actually play the game, as it's impossible to dodge everything all of the time consistently - especially when the game decides to either throw in a "hell" mode of which there are two, bullet hell and spike hell. Spike hell, you can't do anything about, as the game will just launch spikes from every dead enemy that are large and hard to dodge. Bullet hell is more manageable as it spouts slow moving bullets. Bosses are generally fair except for the pulsar star one with laser beams and unfair shields.

Only by maxing out all of your upgrades will you even stand a chance at enjoying this game.

BeamNG.drive (which I will henceforth refer to as Drive) is less of a game and more of a tech demo. Don't let that stop you, though. Drive attempts to be the most accurate simulation of vehicles out there, primarily through their destruction. Vehicles handle with reasonable levels of realism, but most people will probably be playing Drive for the express purpose of crushing every single vehicle they can get their hands on into tiny blocks of metal in increasingly creative ways. Drive offers extensive vehicle customization, multiple flavors of maps, and various flavors of vehicles, both classic and modern. As a game, Drive would definitely not be a recommendation I make to people. However, what Drive shines at is being a sandbox for cars. Every single part of Drive's API is exposed to the end-user, allowing them to make maps and cars for the game - in a nutshell, there is a thriving modding community around this game for the express purpose of adding More Content(tm). The Drive team releases updates somewhat regularly, with major updates coming every 2-4 months. Major updates tend to seem incremental, but largely revamp the game engine, and tend to pack in new cars, new modes, and/or new maps. The developers are actively making this game better over time, but don't expect it to get much more efficient - Drive requires reasonably modern hardware if you want to put more than two or three vehicles in a map together without turning your computer into a pile of slag.

In short: Buy the game if you just want to drive a realistically simulated car and/or want to smash things together like you imagined you did with Hot Wheels in your childhood.

I really want to like Aaero. It's got a great concept behind it as a rail shooter with some Rez-like elements, but after having put some time into it, I cannot say that I enjoy Aaero as it stands currently. My main issues boil down to user-friendliness:

• If you don't have the most accurate and best controller, you will struggle to keep on the rails and get a high accuracy rating (necessary for building up at least 4-star rating scores in order to progress through levels.) There is no "stickiness" factor which helps you to stay on rails, either, meaning that if your input is even slightly wrong, you will never get over 75-80% accuracy.
  
• Lots of the rail transitions require dead-on perfect timing. If your controller is inaccurate, good luck trying to get good rail transitions down.
  
• It's impossible to tell when your shots transition from "slow moving bullet" to "instant laser beam" as there is no intuitive way to stay on the beat or learn when your shots are in laser beam mode - all it would have taken is an onscreen metronome of sorts in order to resolve this problem. The only real indication that I think I saw was on the already noisy targeting indicator, which is invisible if not against a light background.
  
• The targeting indicator is anti-user. The overstyled cursor makes it hard for me to see what's going on, especially in boss battles where I absolutely need to be aware of incoming fire. In fact, it seems like the game encourages you to fire as fast as possible as often as possible, as stacking shots, especially in boss levels, becomes suicide.
  
• "Secrets" (if you can even call them that) have some severe pop-in. They'll only pop up at the last second in many levels, and oftentimes when you finally see them, you can't even shoot at them as they leave the radius in which you can target before you can shoot them. I'm left waving my cursor around at random at almost any shooting section where they'd pop up in the hopes that I can actually tag them before they leave the targeting radius.
  
• Crushing traps are frustrating. Even though safe passages are marked in blue, it is extremely difficult to see them when the entire palette is shades of red/red-orange and blue - combined with the bloom effect making it difficult to see a trap clearly at distance. It's also likely that when you let your stick return to center after one of those crushing traps, you'll smack right into the side of the crushing trap you just passed, killing you.
  
• I get that bosses are supposed to be challenging - but if I can't kill it after 10 attempts even after putting my best effort in and trying to wrap my head around the inane shot travel system, maybe the boss is simply too challenging for the average player.
  
  
  
  Aaero is fun - if you can get past the frustrations. I do hope that the developer is paying attention and is actively making strides to improve their game post-launch (which seems to be the case, if the announcement they made is any indication). I really do want to like Aaero, but I cannot recommend it to anyone right now knowing my own experience frustrated me to no end.

It's Wipeout like you (don't) remember it. If you take Wip3out and extrapolate it to the modern day, you get BallisticNG. It even comes with lots of little retro fancies for you to get even more nostalgic with. That's not really what we're here for, though - we're here for the gameplay.

While bNG is fun, expect to get EXTREMELY frustrated the moment you get past the second set of campaign events. Unless you are an absolutely perfect pilot, you aren't even going to get past the "normal" difficulty in a large majority of situations. In my opinion the difficulty ramps up way too fast, as it becomes less of an exercise in being a good pilot and more of one of "I made one eeny tiny mistake, I have to restart because these bots follow the perfect racing line and I can't do anything better than what a human can do". There are also no really guided experiences to teach you how to race optimally, so even though I understand the mechanics and how they work on my ship, I still constantly donk off walls and can't get the optimal line like the bots can.

If you ditch the loosely-structured campaign mode for the custom races, you can glean a lot more fun out of them. You can make the races far more suited to your skill level as well as nerfing the AI back into line so you can have a race where you feel like you're actually being challenged rather than crushed. Workshop tracks provide way more variety, but be warned that many of them are also designed to be maddeningly difficult, so experiment and see which ones you like.

Downloading custom ships from the workshop seems to be broken. They all have 0 stats across the board, meaning that poking one gently causes it to instantly detonate. Even new ships seem to have this problem. I don't know what's going on, I've simply just stopped downloading ships and stuck to the stock ones.

In short - unless you are a god at every video game you touch, BallisticNG's campaign mode will make you suffer, and that is one piece of the retro experience I wish it did not try to copy as much. I feel like a lot of work still needs to be done to whip the AI back into line so that it's fun for players like me who just aren't very good but want to enjoy the game. However, I can tell the game was made with a lot of love, and having loosely followed it ever since I picked it up while the game was offered for free, I'm sure the developers are listening.

Also, sidenote - this game has a banging soundtrack with lots of original, good music. It's got more retro takes for the people who enjoyed the style of music DJ Sasha did for Wip3out, but it's also got modern takes with lots of DnB. There's something for everyone.

I really want to like Distance. I really do. I really want to give it a "yes" recommend, but at the same time, the base game feels inherently flawed, almost rushed. The reason why I feel like this is because Distance's core gameplay is great for the most part, and driving in general feels as expected. Boosting feels fun, and actually feels obligated for most of the campaign, with cooldown rings and checkpoints spaced just far enough apart so that you don't blow up from boosting too much. Where this whole driving model seems to fall apart at the seams is right in the middle of the campaign. You see, in Distance, there's a mechanic that lets your car fly, right? Well, aside from the immensely frustrating flight model that doesn't control like you expect it to, with random rolling happening when you just want to yaw your car and with a slow reaction speed, it seems the developers pre-emptively removed a lot of the frustration related to it by just simply disabling it for most of the campaign, and even in the post-campaign.

That's right. A mechanic they implemented is disabled most of the campaign. I've got to be honest with you, I can see why they disabled it, given that flight is slower than driving, and it doesn't feel very polished compared to the driving model.

Speaking of mechanics, let's talk level design. The main campaign levels feel nicely laid out, with lots of pretty colors. It's a lot better than the pre-release campaign in many respects, but at the same time, I feel like most of the "threat" offered by the infection is just gone.

And that's where one of my problems with Distance's campaign sits.

As I played through the campaign, I found myself growing more and more frustrated with the whole thing. There's no real threat from the virus, so you ignore the set pieces and start focusing on going really fast. Tracks get progressively harder, but it feels like the difficulty is less about fair, challenging difficulty and more about "here's an obstacle we marked extremely poorly so if you calibrated the brightness level as you were told when you first started up the game you'll never see it until you're right on top of it." There's a good handful of hazards that aren't signposted well, so when you die, you feel cheated. For example: there's some large unmoving laser beams on a certain level that just pass through the track. They're the same pink as the floor obstacles (which kill you,) but at the same time, I was convinced that it was just something to pass through. That was the wrong assumption. Those lasers don't have a visual or auditory tell like the other lasers that can slice pieces off your car. Additionally, on one of the final levels, there's a splitting path that has a nearly invisible obstacle blocking one of the jumps. That felt beyond frustrating to hit, to the point where I vocally swore at my screen out of confusion and frustration.

Additionally, when playing one of those final levels (Overload), I could tell where they hadn't changed a single thing from Monolith, and had added even more frustration-creating features in the process. One of the 180° road-to-road transitions you need to make has a gap so small that it requires at least three attempts to get right, otherwise you'll scrape the road with the side of your car and fall off - a holdover from Monolith that I wish they had changed to make fairer. Another earlier level spits you out of a tunnel at 60 degrees and you'd be lucky if you don't immediately die by hitting the wall on the track you're supposed to land on. Level design in general during the later levels feels like it takes a step forwards, only to take one step back, do a spin, and wonder what just happened.

(Spoiler ahead about the game's ending.)
On the topic of difficulty ramping - why is the final boss such a pushover? Three hits and it's gone. The obstacles are hilariously easy to avoid even when boosting. I didn't really feel like there was much pressure after the first go, and was expecting a much harder labyrinth of track pieces, obstacles, etc. For an enemy that's harassing you the entire game by trying to project nightmares onto you and steal away some time from you, it was a giant enemy crab. And the actual ending of the game? I'll save that for the plot section...

The game's plot honestly feels like it's getting too much storytelling. I felt a little cheated that (spoiler if you haven't completed the campaign) the time you complete the game in doesn't really matter. The timer is a barely-there motivator to make you boost through levels, but in reality, the time you have left is scripted to not really matter at all. You could probably fail if you sat still, but even if you just drove straight forward without boosting unless it was necessary, you would beat the game on time. The entire "plot" feels weak without the infection actually feeling threatening, combined with the level design becoming frustrating in the later levels. If anything, I would have preferred minimal voice-overs, with just the occasional clock read-out to feel like I was being pushed to do something. One of the things I liked about Distance's plot before the adventure update is that it didn't have much hand-holding, if at all. It was up to you to figure out what's going on with the world around you, construct the lore in your head, but at the same time leave you wondering what your true purpose was. Are you an anti-virus car? Are you trying to simply escape? The new adventure mode railroads you into the "escape" plan, which makes passing by all of the infected setpieces less impactful and more like "oh, ok, I'm going as fast as I can, this kinda sucks." And the ending, oh, the ending. Don't mouse over this spoiler if you don't want to read the end of the game, but if you really want to know, it's the most anti-climatic ending that Refract could have possibly thought up, and I felt cheated with how much build-up there was. Alright, here's the actual ending. You're just being used as an automotive abstraction of evolutionary computation. You "finish" your race to the end, get a performance value, and your car's disassembled. That's it. No saving humanity or paying off on any of the build-up. It's like getting punched in the gut by the game. I was legitimately disappointed by this.

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I still really want to give Distance a thumbs-up. Refract has spent so much time working on this game. It's beautiful, has interesting mechanics to play with, and with the workshop support, that gets taken up to 11 by the community. The map editor is a bit clunky, but you can make the exact same levels that Refract has made for the campaign, as they used the exact same tools (IIRC). This means that whatever the developers can make, you can make them too - and possibly do them even better than the developers. The workshop is chock-full of amazing maps with interesting concepts, ranging from the casual adventure style of map to challenge maps that will leave you tearing your hair out of your head as you try to figure out how in the blazes anyone could ever complete it.

However, a word of warning - from the time I've spent in the community, the Discord can be quite unwelcoming to newcomers, and if you even speak a word that a track is too difficult for you, you're told to suck it up and get good. This is not a community I'd recommend engaging with on a larger scale unless you've got skin made of solid steel and don't care what people say unless it's reasonable. Additionally, a multiplayer lobby has a very high chance of a map being chosen that is a challenge map. If you want the best experience, it's best to find a group of people that are like-minded and enjoy playing the game like you do, whether you're a fan of blasting at top speed through maps that make themselves fun high-speed adventures or challenging yourself.

I've hit the character limit... oops.

A few months ago (i.e. May 2018,) I was having too much fun playing GRIP. Even now, in November 2018, I am still having way too much fun playing GRIP.

GRIP is very similar to the Rollcage games of yore (actually, you probably could just call it Rollcage 2018 and nobody would bat an eye.) With that in mind, this is not like Rollcage in that everything in GRIP feels grounded in terms of powerups you can pick up (i.e. missiles, guns,) and powerup usage becomes less about being gimmicky and more about skillful usage of them in order to gain the upper hand. The only slightly gimmicky powerup is the disruptor, which warps time so that people far in the back can move up closer to the front, and I don't really have a problem with that - it helps sandwich the pack together, and makes things more interesting.

GRIP's performance is truly tremendous. You'll need a decent GPU as the game tends to be more GPU than CPU limited, but even then, a mid-range computer from 5 years ago should be able to easily handle this game without hiccups. The game has just been optimized incredibly well, and though you might see some pop-in as a result of the optimizations, the result is that levels load lightning-fast. In the early access versions I used to end up waiting 10-15 seconds for a level to load, but now it takes anywhere between 3 and 5 seconds from a hard drive. I have to give massive props to Caged Element for making this game run so buttery smooth. The only time I've had framerate dips is when a lot of cars explode at once, putting a lot of particles on screen - but this situation is so rare that it'd be hard to knock it just for that.

GRIP currently has 15 vehicles spread across 5 different manufacturers, with each manufacturer's cars broken up into three de facto categories: Speedsters, fast accelerating but with lower top speed and lower health; Aggressors, middle-of-the-road in everything; and tanks, heavy, slow accelerating vehicles that are some of the fastest vehicles in the game. Certain vehicles in each class have their own tactics as to how to drive them, and even speedsters can easily be faster than tanks on the right maps with the right drivers. GRIP also features 4 different planets with 6 tracks each (totaling 24), each one with their own theme. A desert wasteland, a frozen iceball, an overgrown jungle, and a city-world are all places you can race at, and each planet offers its own style of track and race styles. Norvos and Jahtra - the iceball and wasteland, respectively - have a mix of flat-out stretches with some relatively easy-to-navigate sweeping turns. Liddo 5, the jungle track, is mostly straight stretches with very few turns to compensate for. Orbital Prime, the city-planet, has the tracks with the most curves. Every vehicle finds their niche on these tracks, making for interesting races where the right missile at the right time can mean the difference.

GRIP's vehicle model is, for the most part, excellent. Even now there are still a few weird kinks here and there in the vehicle controller that seem to be related to the fact that the game makes its own physics engine scream, but for the most part, every single one of these heavily armored race vehicles feels good to drive. The Vintek Rogue is snappy with a right-there turning ability that feels great and makes me want to keep driving it. The Cygon Tempest is big and boaty, but temper it with with the handbrake and it'll go anywhere. Treat the Tempest's handbrake too aggressively and you'll find yourself sideways with all of your velocity disappearing into the ground. The camera in races is alright - it's a hybrid of track-follow and car-follow, where if you're going slow it'll point in the direction of the race, but your car will turn. It'll slide to the side just slightly as you drift around corners, and it straight up looks awesome. Arena mode just clamps the camera right behind you, which is superior for the low-speed driving you'll be doing in the arenas.

Speaking of modes, GRIP offers a few different modes - standard races, ultimate races (i.e. score by shooting people with your weapons), timed elimination races, time trials, and "go really fast" mode. On the combat side, there's an arena mode, but there's plans for more arena-like modes in the future. There's also a Carkour mode, which might be familiar to those who have played Rollcage and completed the challenge tracks. Every mode has configuration options, but more importantly with standard and ultimate races, you can turn on car destruction. Once a car is destroyed, respawns take 10 seconds, punishing those who don't know when to back out of a fight.

GRIP features a level-based progression system. By level 19 you'll have unlocked all the cars, but by level 9 you'll have basically everything you need to do well in the game. GRIP is good about giving you a reasonable selection of cars early on, though the grind through the lower levels is a little frustrating. Here's something awesome, though - literally everything you do while driving your car is rewarded. Catch some air? Here's some experience for your air time. Set the hottest lap this race? Here's some more. But here's the great thing - the laps you do in time trial grant you experience. If you're trying to set the fastest lap time on a track, you're rewarded. If you're just practicing, you're rewarded. It's the best little feature I've ever seen, and I love it. While I'm not an amazing driver, being able to be rewarded for the time I put in for my practice and time trial attempts is awesome.

GRIP's multiplayer is incredibly fun, if a bit clunky. CE's servers seem to have a little trouble after a while, or sometimes the game itself just breaks and prevents joining lobbies until you restart, but by whatever godly hand has touched it, the netcode for GRIP is incredible. I've been able to play with people with abysmal internet quality and somehow their car drives just as expected, with minimal jitter and shake. Voting for races is annoying (you only get 20 seconds to search through the levels and set up a race/arena match the way you want to!) but has so much power for creating fantastic races - whether you want to mortify the entire lobby with lethal AI and catch-up enabled (why) or go hardcore with destructible vehicles and no catch-up. More importantly, GRIP's lobbies tend to focus a bit less on raw racing skill and more about smart usage of the powerups you're given. You could use that Firestorm right now, but why not wait until you overtake the pack in front of you so you can punch it and get out of weapons range as fast as possible? Not only that, the community is incredibly welcoming and friendly. From my time on the GRIP Discord server, there's basically no real strife at all - everyone's there to have fun, and that's truly incredible.
Don't have an online friend group or an internet connection? You can still hook up to a TV and play local multiplayer, just like the good old days, with up to 4 people. Frustrate your IRL friends! Make your family hate you! It's all fun and games.

Overall, GRIP is probably one of the most fun racing games I have played in a while. This game oozes fun from every piece of its body, mixed with equal amounts of frustration. The launch release of this game is just icing on the cake. Developers do listen to the community, and directly engage with community members. There's also a home for you grizzled Rollcage veterans in the Discord as well, but I'm sure that if you're a Rollcage fan you've already heard of and experimented with this game. If you haven't touched it and are just watching videos, take the plunge. The game is challenging, but mastering it means you can milk it for every last drop of fun it can offer, which it has in spades. This game holds onto its 95/100 rating in my experience, and with just that little extra bit of polish and tweaking, this game will take home an even higher rating.

A delightfully challenging and relaxing puzzle game (for the most part) that really harkens back to older times when you could get lost in a game exploring for hours on end, finding secrets and challenges, dying a lot just to keep coming back and going "I can ace this, I can get to that collectible/place/MacGuffin!"

FEZ does an excellent job of warping a 3D game into a 2D plane and making an interesting platformer that demands you spin the camera, a lot. FEZ's puzzles and challenges can also be quite devious, and can sometimes be inane. 100%ing this game will require you to juggle your sysclock however, and you will more than likely need a guide to find your way to collectibles hidden behind combinations.

FEZ is not particularly well optimized for hardware made before 2013, but runs buttery smooth on modern hardware. Don't bother trying to make FEZ run on older hardware - the minimal graphical options mean you can't do much about it anyways.

Pick it up for cheap, and get the 8 or 10 hours of gameplay out of it. Wander the beautifully crafted worlds. Get lost in the lore. Avoid using the guides until you're truly stumped. FEZ is a modern classic.

**92 out of 100.**