Recent reviews by Timrod

Having essentially finished the game minus the final scavenger hunt, I can say that Lucky Tower Ultimate is an otherwise decent roguelike that, unfortunately, lives up to its name in that it is 100% luck as to whether you finish a run or not. Because of that, I have to recommend against it until the developer fixes it.

The game's difficulty largely centers around traps - touching a trap without armor on instantly kills you. The trap hitboxes are wonky at best, and they can be placed in such a way that it's virtually impossible to get past them. One annoying gimmick that can appear as early as the second area is a Mastermind-style lever puzzle where you have three to five levers in a row and have to press them in a specific order to progress. Failing the puzzle is an unavoidable instakill. The four and five lever puzzles are generally not terrible, but the three-lever puzzles can give you as few as three guesses at them before killing you, which means you can die simply from being unlucky. I've had runs end because of this, and it sucks because there's nothing you can do about it: the lever puzzles don't have an obvious logic and there's no real feedback unless you get a lever correct.

Then there's the dynamite rooms, which can be equally frustrating to deal with. Dynamite rooms have explosive barrels placed on the far end which have to be extinguished to prevent an instadeath. The problem comes when you go into a dynamite room (and there's no way to detect these in advance) and the dynamite is behind a lever puzzle or a bunch of swinging axe pendulums that require you to wait to bypass. I've also had plenty of runs end due to bad dynamite luck, and it's also something that really needed to be sanity checked so that the dynamite doesn't spawn in a room that takes you more time to traverse than you have before the game ends.

The controls are also extremely bad at times, and even though people have complained, the developer hasn't fixed them. Your character can hold two items - one in each hand - and can equip a chest armor, a hat, and a money bag. There are three major problems here:

1. Your character can't "drop" items. You have one button that throws them a short distance, and a second that throws them full speed ahead as a weapon. Because of this, it's easy to unintentionally drop items down a pit or into a trap when you're only intending to inventory manage.

2. Your character can only unequip items in a specific order. If you want to take off your armor to fix it, you have to unequip your money bag, then your helmet, and finally your armor. This gets annoying when you have companions, who will pick up items from the ground and equip them.

3. Items on the ground overlap, and there's no way to select which item you want to interact with. The game "highlights" whatever item is closest to you, but often these are trash items like broken armor or corpses rather than the stuff you actually want to pick up.

These issues compound and lead to inventory management being far more of a pain than it should be, especially when you need to bring multiple items between floors.

Until these issues are fixed, I'd have a really hard time recommending this game.

Last Flag is possibly the worst game I've ever played. It's half Monday Night Combat and half stolen mechanics from Deadlock pasted together in a way that makes absolutely no sense and feels utterly horrible to play. It is Concord 2.5, and feels worse than even Highguard did in every imaginable sense of the word. It's unbalanced, has mechanics that make no sense, and then dumps the mechanics to be a team deathmatch game.

The first thing I want to talk about is how it fails at being a hero shooter. You know how Overwatch and Deadlock have characters with lots of voice lines and they intentionally make footstep noises and call out their abilities so that people have an opportunity to react to what's going on? Last Flag has none of that. Characters are COMPLETELY SILENT apart from a couple of short lines that only happen if they're at low health. There are no footstep noises unless you jump, characters don't call out their abilities, and as a result detecting people is far harder than it should be.

Instead, the game opts to have the world's most annoying announcer - I think they were trying to copy Mickey Cantor from Monday Night Combat, except half the time the announcer spouts "comedic" lines that have nothing to do with gameplay. The best part? There is no way to turn the announcer off. You can set the volume for his lines to zero, and the game ignores it. You also can't turn off the text readout of the announcer's pointless BS, which takes up too much screen real estate for something that has ZERO GAMEPLAY IMPACT.

Then there are the characters themselves. I can tell you exactly how they were made: the developers took a list of abilities from Deadlock, threw them into a bowl, and randomly picked three per character. There was no thought put into any of these, and as a result you have one character who is disgustingly overpowered and is a near-surefire ticket to victory and a bunch who aren't at all.

Let me talk about one of the non-viable ones first: Scout. Scout is this game's Vindicta. He has a sniper rifle, has the longest effective weapon range in the game, and is bolstered by the fact that this game has no directional hit indicators so no one knows where he's shooting them from. His abilities consist of using his pet bird to scout, which makes him control the bird and leaves him completely helpless. The bird marks enemies, which doesn't do a whole lot when the TTK in this game is Call of Duty level and respawn times are only ever 15 seconds. He also has a dash that is useless because he will die long before it's ever useful as an escape.

Then you have Knives. Knives is the most broken character in the game: she's a melee-only Haze who can go invisible and plant a respawn portal anywhere on the map, including in the enemy base. Her TTK is among the lowest in a game that already has a very low TTK, and playing her is a near-guaranteed win because she doesn't need to aim or reload.

Now let me talk about the game mechanics, which are nonsensical and contradictory. The idea is that each team hides a flag, and then goes through a phase where they fight over capture points that reveal sections of the map that don't have the flag in them until it eventually shows the flag's exact location. In theory, you win by stealing the flag and bringing it to your "pyramid", where you undergo a 90-second defense period in which the other team can take their flag back. In practice, that almost never happens unless the match is a one-sided stomp.

Instead, you have a point counter that rises every time someone gets a kill or captures a point. At the 20-minute mark, the game does a tiebreaker based on point count, and 95% of the time points are the only thing that matter. This makes trying to capture the flag pointless because you're feeding kills (and therefore points) to the other team - the game usually comes down to kills and whoever held the control points longer.

This game is absolutely miserable, and given that it's probably going to be dead online within a couple of weeks barring some achievement farmers (and no, I wouldn't recommend doing that given that one of the achievements is playing 100 matches on a specific map), it's not worth getting into.

Every major cultural touchstone has its cheap imitators. Dark Souls released in 2012 and spawned an entire genre of knockoffs, none of which stood up to the original. The same thing goes for Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors (even though Vampire Survivors was itself a clone). People of Note is that but for K-Pop Demon Hunters and to a lesser extent, Hazbin Hotel. It's not a good musical. It's not a good RPG. It was pretty clearly made on a shoestring budget and I feel bad for almost everyone involved in making it because they probably could've done something halfway compelling if they weren't trying so hard to ape existing franchises.

I think the best way I can explain this game is the first ten minutes or so. The main character, a wannabe k-pop princess who looks like a K-Pop Demon Hunters OC, goes on stage to audition for a concert with her character song, Under the Lights. Under the Lights is your standard "I am / I want" song, and my first reaction was to check the store page for an AI disclosure because it sounded like it was written by ChatGPT. The lyrics were droll, the backing music was forgettable, and five minutes later I honestly could not tell you what it sounded like other than that it was a very generic k-pop song.

The main character is, of course, shot down by an evil judge who calls her music trash. Now, a good musical could have done something with this: make the opening song bad on purpose with the point being that at the end, there's a better version of it to show what the character learned and how they changed. For about thirty seconds, that was what I thought it was - until the game confirms that no, Under the Lights is supposed to be good and the judge is corrupt.

The rest of the OST is similarly uninspired. There's a song called Sorry Girl that feels like an early 00s Backstreet Boys knockoff and the final song is a less interesting version of Hazbin Hotel's "Hear My Hope" about the power of friendship. That last one was so cringe-inducing that I couldn't sit through more than about fifteen seconds of it.

Now let's talk about the gameplay. Battles are a sort-of rhythm game that was clearly done without any real thought put in. Attacks spawn a series of shrinking circles that have to be hit at the right time like a rhythm game, but it's not done to the battle music (which is more generic k-pop) or to any kind of beat. This means you're relying purely on visual cues, and even those aren't done well: each attack and skill has the circles pop up in seemingly random places and in an order that doesn't necessarily make sense - in some cases, they go top to bottom and left to right, while in others they go bottom to top or right to left. This does nothing but slow combat down, and the whole thing is unintuitive and feels INCREDIBLY bad.

The writing is similarly annoying because it makes every word a music pun and I hate it. It's bad. This game is utter tripe concocted to ride K-Pop Demon Hunters' coattails and belongs in the dumpster.

All Will Fall is a very barebones city builder that feels like an early-stage early access game being sold as a finished product. It feels a lot like Cataclismo but without the combat or tower defense mechanics, instead opting for a fancy physics system that never really matters.

The game requires that everything you build is supported so that it doesn't collapse, but in practice that never happens: the game gives you a really long warning period before the collapse happens to the point where it almost becomes a Wile E. Coyote cartoon: at one point, I needed a worker to get to a small outcropping to harvest some resources, so I simply built a physically impossible bridge and replaced the parts every 10 in-game hours to reset the collapse timer. There's nothing in the game that ever threatens the stability of your structures, and so there's also not much of a reason to bother researching upgraded platforms or bridges unless you really need them to make something stable.

The flip side of that is there's very little reason to bother with customization, which is half the point of a decent city builder. The flooded buildings that serve as support anchors are tiny and have exactly enough room to build whatever it is you need and not much more, and are arranged in such a way that you have to take an intended path to build bridges between them - there's not really any way to optimize a bridge when there's only one place to put it. In general, I wish there were better optimization controls.

The resource extraction is also a 'set it and forget it' kind of thing, where once you have a setup that works there's very little reason to change it, and it's not particularly hard (barring running into bugs) to achieve that.

I would wait and see if the developers flesh this game out more before buying it.

LORT is a game best described as Elden Ring Nightreign with Fortnite's artstyle. It's a co-op hero shooter (for some definition of co-op, since it's dead online) and generally is a bad indie version of Nightreign. Avoid.

Esoteric Ebb is exactly what it sets out to be: a clone of Disco Elysium unburdened by the baggage surrounding ZA/UM and the uncertainty surrounding who actually holds the rights. It does that passably, but in a way that is inherently inferior to Disco Elysium - it's a pale imitator that makes a lot of mis-steps, some of which are a side-effect of the genre but others that probably could have been avoided by simply not making what the developers chose to make.

The game is built on the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, or at least the parts of that ruleset that are open source. This is an odd choice given that it doesn't take place in any of the 5E campaign settings and isn't a licensed D&D game, though the setting can best be described as a copyright-friendly pastiche of those. The end result is that the game needs to do a lot of worldbuilding that Disco Elysium didn't really have to, and that worldbuilding gets in the way of everything else and becomes a big, confusing mess that dumps walls of exposition on you to explain concepts that Disco Elysium didn't need to.

Instead of doing worldbuilding through dialog and internal monologue, the game instead opts to have a big, unwieldy glossary that inserts links to itself in the text - the problem being that the links were pretty clearly done through a grep function instead of by hand, and so the entries tend to be unrelated to what's going on. The best example of this is a character early on who uses the word "mimic" in a conversation in such a context that makes it clear they're not talking about the fantasy monster. The game helpfully converts the word into a link to an entry about the fantasy monster. The glossary entries are long-winded and tend to be fairly uninteresting, but also make reading back dialog difficult because they insert themselves in between dialog windows instead of opening as a separate window.

The game also tends to use fantasy gibberish that ruins the dynamic the player had with the protagonist in Disco Elysium and makes the plot harder to follow. Disco Elysium made really heavy use of dramatic irony, and that was part of the reason it worked so well: the player knows that none of the options the protagonist has are good and has to fall for them anyway. Esoteric Ebb uses fantasy gibberish even where real-world terms would work just fine, and there's really no reason for it because it's a custom setting.

The only way I'd ever bother to play this is if you've already played Disco Elysium first.

This program is trash. It doesn't work in any of the applications I tried it in, including Team Fortress 2 and Deadlock, even after adjusting settings. Meanwhile, Virtual Audio Cable continues to just work even though it requires more setup. Avoid.

Starpoint Gemini 2 is a game I can't believe I paid real money for. It's one more garbage Freelancer clone on a pile of trash.

The game goes like this. You start the campaign, and after a three minute or so cutscene with one of the most generic Freelancer clone plots imaginable, you get control of a ship while the game bombards you with tutorial prompts that don't actually tell you anything. Your goal is to fly to a planet and the game is spamming you with "Here's how you reticulate your gravity fluctuators" and other crap that has nothing to do with your current situation. I had to kill the prompts and then had to dig through the controls to figure out how to make my dumpster of a ship go forward, because the tutorial wasn't going to tell me.

Then you get to the fun part. Your ship moves at a snail's pace and there is NO WAY TO SPEED IT UP. Your goal is to fly 9,000 kilometers to a planet, and you move at maybe 30 kilometers per hour. You are in space and not even doing highway speeds. It took me ten minutes of the sixteen I played to fly there, and then I got a prompt to stop at the planet and fly back to where I came from. At that point, I started looking for some kind of "warp speed" button like Freelancer had.. except it doesn't exist. You are stuck moving like a grandmother driving down the interstate at 9:30 on Sunday morning toward your objective, and there is no way to speed it up. You can't even AFK it because like Desert Bus, your ship will drift slightly and you'll eventually wind up off course.

In a game like EVE, where the very slow movement is part of the game balance, that makes sense. It does not make sense in a singleplayer game, and as soon as I realized this was the intended experience I quit and uninstalled. Avoid.

I am one of the few people who has ever 100%ed Highguard. I am probably one of the few people who ever will 100% Highguard. Having done so, I can say that Highguard is a rotten game that likely would've never been good even if it hadn't died less than two months after launch. It's a pastiche of mindless trend chasing that is all the bad parts of Fortnite and Overwatch combined and thrown in with a bit of Tribes on top. It's a game that dares to make the statement, "Surely, if we make a game out of nothing but bits of financially successful shooters (and Tribes), we too will be financially successful."

Let me start by addressing the first part of the combination: Fortnite. Like Fortnite, Highguard has a phase where you roam the map opening treasure chests for random pieces of equipment. Unlike Fortnite, this phase effectively determines who wins the game because the guns are that unbalanced and the time to kill is not conducive to being a good FPS. I know this because I farmed 77 kills with "legendary" weapons due to how hard it is to get to the phase where those start appearing.

The game has exactly two viable weapons: the "Vanguard" (a Not-M4A1 that has a big magazine and a high fire rate) and the "Viper" (an SMG that I forget the real-world name of) which is effectively a shorter-range, higher fire rate Vanguard. Going into a 1v1 against anyone with those guns, unless you also have one, is an automatic loss unless they're AFK. Every other gun is a weaker version of one of those two, sometimes laughably so.

Take the "Paladin", the game's automatic shotgun, as an example. I used the Paladin in a match to farm kills, and found that even if your target is unarmored and standing still, the Paladin still takes nearly half of its 30-something round magazine to kill them. This is a situation that would never happen in an actual match, where I have magdumped all 30 rounds into an armored opponent and only barely killed them. Then there's the "Corsair", a three-round burst SMG that is quite possibly the only gun worse than the Paladin - it's so slow that when I was trying for melee kills, I could reliably melee kill people before they could take me down with it even if I had to charge in from a distance.

Beyond that, even with the better weapons, TTK is RIDICULOUS. Long-range combat is non-viable unless you get a lucky headshot with the sniper rifle because of how much cover there is, and close-range combat largely seems to boil down to how much lag either side has. At the point where most games end, everyone is going to have 200 HP in a game where most guns do 10 to 12 damage a shot.

Next, there's the Overwatch part. Apart from the character designs being generally trash (there's one guy who looks like the default Fortnite model trying to cosplay Terry Bogard), the unique character skills are generally useless except for one or two that are game-breakers. There's one character, for instance, who has an ultimate that turns him into an invincible melee-only yeti.. except he can still do objectives while he's invincible. Another has an ultimate that summons an invincible sentry gun that they can plant on an objective to stop your team from doing anything for several minutes. On the other side are things like the character whose ultimate is screaming really loud, which does maybe 40 damage and can break certain walls, or the character who gets six throwing knives that have no range and needs to land at least four of them to have a prayer at killing anything.

Then, finally, is the Tribes part. Highguard plays like a more drawn-out version of it, in that there are three gameplay phases and one of them shouldn't exist. The first phase after looting is this kind of pseudo-MOBA where you're trying to teamfight over a magic sword that lets you break the shield around the other team's base. The problem is that in most cases, the teamfight never really materializes: too often, I'd see both teams hiding behind rocks taking potshots at each other and not getting kills because of the stupidly long TTK until overtime occurs, at which point respawns are turned off and the first team to get a kill usually wins. At higher levels, this usually devolves further to a point where no one moves and the game results in an automatic tiebreaker where whoever had the sword closer to their base loses. The sword phase could be removed (and was, for a brief period) without changing a damn thing.

Once the sword phase is over, you have the "raid" phase, where one team gets a limited number of lives to plant a bomb on an objective and babysit it until it explodes, which isn't exactly compelling gameplay.

Beyond that, there are a lot of orphaned mechanics that don't really make sense. You can upgrade your base's walls to make it harder to enter, but in practice this doesn't matter because most of the bases are set up such that the enemy never needs to destroy more than one or two walls to reach an objective. You can mine crystals to get currency, which in practice no one ever does.

Highguard is a great example of what not to do, and the world is generally better off without it.

Demon Tides is a platformer with a lot of issues that, strangely enough, its predecessor didn't have - and its predecessor had a lot of problems.

Part of the problem is that there are a lot of spots where the game throws its own design in the trash. The game is designed such that you can place checkpoints anywhere and encourages you to use them: you can place them before difficult jumps or in spots that are hard to reach but might need to be visited more than once. It then promptly throws this away by introducing "challenge stages", which don't allow checkpoints and are both overly long and full of difficult jumps. They feel like the worst parts of Crash 4.

The camera is also wanting, in that it will frequently bug out. In the hour and change I played, I had it get stuck in a wall several times and had to reload a checkpoint. This got particularly infuriating during a challenge stage when I spent some 20 minutes going through it only to have the camera get stuck and had to restart the entire stage.

Aside from that, the stage design feels really obnoxious. Your character has three jumps that can be used in sequence: you have your regular jump, a double jump that turns you into a bat and blocks certain actions, and a "spin jump" that is primarily horizontal. Every jump in every stage is arranged such that you have to use all three forms for each and every jump because the platforms are spaced exactly far apart enough that you can just make it using all three.

I wouldn't buy this unless it's on deep discount and you're very into precision platformers.