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Recent Game Reviews

11 Game Reviews

==REVIEW==
Things I enjoyed:
• Game looks good. Guns look nice and UI is intuitive.
• Firing range is a very handy buy-before-try testing ground.
• Variety of game modes, which all play very differently and encourage different builds and weapons
• The rewards for accuracy and headshots encourage building a balanced gun over maximizing DPS or burst damage
• The super weapons look incredibly cool and just owning them feels good
• Gameplay is engaging because of the constant loop of unlocking stuff.
• Attachments are for the most part well balanced where every one has a niche of some kind
• Credit system is far less hassle than the shard system of previous games

Things that can use changing:
• Lava is far more difficult than other game modes. It's very difficult to keep up with the multiple-per-second rain of targets at only ~50 kills. Some move fast enough to cross the screen during the 1 or 2 seconds required to reload an assault rifle. Making things worse is that accuracy is graded harshly against fast-moving targets, and headshots are almost down to luck with the constant rotations.
• Shotguns feel nearly useless. The fact that each pellet counts as a shot fired means they'll destroy a game's accuracy rating. Each round expended should count as a shot, not each pellet. Also because of their long reloads, low piercing and wild spreads, I've found shotguns are less powerful at close range than high-caliber pistols. They could use either a statistical buff or a game mode devoted to close quarters where they can shine.
• Underbarrel secondary weapons aren't appealing for their high cost because the ammunition is limited, which limits them only to game modes with a very short duration. There should be a way to reload them. The simplest way I can think of is that firing them when they are empty will trigger a reload animation. This would have to be balanced against their clip size, of course.
• One-shot weapons do not benefit from shock-damper, rapid-fire or grip attachments (the last is on the boltcaster's lance). Those could be removed.
• The m203 and the mk13 ELGM are pointlessly similar and there's no reason to buy one if you have the other. Same with the XM25 and the XM29.
• The bipod attachment is strictly superior to the grip. There's no reason to consider the grip if a bipod is available.
• I only found the zoom in ability useful during the Sniper game mode. All others have time and situational awareness pressure that discourage zooming in.
• Hitting heads with launchers does count as a headshot for the purposes of unlocking attachments but 1) it doesn't notify you when you do, which is an oversight and 2) it doesn't count towards challenges, so challenges to headshot with launchers are literally impossible.

==SUGGESTIONS FOR NEW STUFF==
• Game mode: Skeet. Dummies are thrown in a ballistic arc so that they land near the player's weapon (sometimes overshooting or undershooting by a decent amount), bounce high once, then disappear. The game ends when ten dummies disappear this way, similarly to lava or defender.
• Game mode: Close up. Dummies appear close to the player weapon in a 360 arc around them, then disappear in a few seconds. To discourage spraying, some are -Red Dummies- that give a score/credit penalty if destroyed but count as a normal kill if allowed to disappear. Game mode lasts 60 seconds and targets gradually increase in HP like with Hardened. Finally, a use case for shotguns.
• Launcher: Starstreak HVM. Each shot fires a cluster of three high-speed darts that follow the player's cursor for a few seconds, then stop homing. One shot, decently long reload.
• Ammo attachment: Hot load. Bullet moves 2x faster. Effectively increases accuracy against moving targets at long range. The boltcaster's lance would have this effect too by default, because that just makes sense.

==GAME GUIDE==
• White/green/blue targets have 100 HP. Armored (gray) targets have 500 HP. Headshots deal 125% damage base, 225% with Hollow Point. Some overkill is okay if you have piercing, because each pierce-through deals less damage. Keep in mind that Hardened, Defender and War modes start at these values but gradually increase the HP of targets.
• Score is based on accuracy, kills and headshots. Credits are based on kills and headshots only. Headshots are worth about twice as much as kills on both measures, so focus on your headshots.
• Piercing is important in most game modes, it improves your accuracy (which counts hits made vs shots fired) as well as your damage. I recommend 3-5 on fast-firing guns, and as much as 8 on slower guns.
• Speed loader is a fantastic mod that will halve total reload time. However, if you add the extended ammo mod, that will also proportionately increase the reload time, so don't use them together.
• For most purposes, 90% accuracy will let you get headshots on nearly anything. If you reach that but still have trouble hitting stuff, try reducing recoil instead.

This game gave me some very, very strong feelings.

What I liked:
- This is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. The player is given no context, only a very urgent and dire circumstance, and is left to figure out what is happening on their own. There's just enough detail given that conclusions can easily be drawn, but still a strong sense of mystery.
- Outstanding aesthetics. The blend of cartoony and realistic art is startling. This game pull no punches with the sound effects and the kills. Especially the children crying and enemies wailing as they die. An absence of music makes the game particularly chilling and serious. This is way darker than most games rated "M" here.
-The sneaking is intense. It's a bit unpredictable and the stakes are extremely high. I had moments where I was freaking out even while unseen.
-A lot of difficult choices to be made, partly because of the small inventory space and high difficulty, partly because of the presence of children among the enemies.
-Game is intuitive enough to figure out as you go. Strength in simplicity.

What I believe should change:
-Tutorial. I skipped it.
-Shooting is not worth it. After the halfway point, It's almost never worth it to kill a guard and render an area virtually impassable with many alerted enemies. To say nothing of the extremely high chance of being chased down immediately, even if I retreat to an area with no enemies. Bullets also use up valuable inventory space. As it currently is, I only keep one bullet and chuck the rest because shooting gets me killed more often than not.
-Gun pigs are vastly overpowered. They can take most of the player's health from long range (sometimes off the screen). Because shooting is so loud, it's difficult to hit the same enemy twice without either getting shot back, or gutted by enemies alerted by the gunshot. And there are a *lot* of them. Taking the first shot is already a huge risk. Why a second one?
-The player's only option if discovered is exiting the area. If lots of knife enemies are around or a gun pig shows up during the chase, it's pretty much over. Getting spotted away from an exit area is going to kill or cripple the player because leaving the zone is that difficult.
-"Survival" sections are heavily RNG-based. The third zone I was unable to pass, because there was a gapless vertical wall of pigs with knives and guns, so sneaking wasn't an option and even careful sniping got me killed in short order. I quit at that point because the above complaints aren't something I can bypass with skill. All I could do is pray to the RNG to leave enough holes for me to sneak through without fighting.

Changes to address these:
-Proper tutorial.
-I would make shooting useful by allowing the player to shoot while discovered. That way it could be a last-ditch measure to stop charging knife pigs to cover an escape. That'd make it useful to actually keep bullets in the inventory outside of the "survive" sections. I understand the developer may want to encourage running when being chased, but I think using up inventory space and alerting even more enemies is enough a severe enough drawback that shooting remains balanced. This would also give the player an option besides simply making a beeline for the zone exit.
-I would change the gun pigs to die in one hit like everyone else, hit for a little under half the player's health (still very deadly, but not an insta-kill if already wounded), and reduce their range a little bit so they need to be visible on the screen to shoot.
-Guarantee at least one valid sneaking route during "survival" zones so the player isn't forced to murder their way through if the RNG is unkind. It can be kind of tight, but should be doable without perfect sneaking skills.

Additional suggestions:
-I think, instead of always simply collapsing, it would even be more shocking if wounded pigs sometimes crawled or struggled in silence at the end of their lives.
-As an anti-frustration feature, prevent the player from shooting if they're not aiming at an enemy. Bullets are highly limited and shooting is very likely to get the player killed. A missed shot is often a death sentence, especially against gun pigs.

Speculation on the game plot: (by no means authoritative)
Given the following:
-The enemies are not heavily armed (many unarmed pigs, many only with knives) and seem loosely organized.
-The enemies bring along their children and keep them close.
-The enemies recognize and *immediately* attack the player character on sight, or immediately alert someone who will. There is no questions about affiliation or taking prisoners, it's purely killing on sight. This is also despite the player character having no distinguishing characteristics other than a backpack.
-There are corpses in the forest, left to rot where they fell.
-Children and unarmed pigs do not charge the player, so this isn't like a zombie plague that makes people aggressive. I believe all the enemies are murdering entirely of their own volition.

My interpretation is this a Rwanda-like genocide. The enemies are for the most part decidedly not soldiers. They are civilians who are killing another ethnic group. That's why civilians are attacking other pigs without hesitation. The two player characters and the bodies they find while hunting are all part of the victimized ethnic group. I feel like that's pretty much the only realistic explanation for the situation. Again, all speculation, but I think the evidence is pretty strong here.

Overall, great game. Left one hell of an impression on me. I give it 4.5/5 because I while feel some aspects of the difficulty are justified, others, like the ones I listed, seem out of the player's reasonable control.

Stopsignal responds:

Oh god, thank you so much!! Just making the whole game is worth it with even only one of these kind of reviews :)

Your comments are on point. The tutorial sucks- gotta learn the hard way. Looots of people hated the walls of text, hahahah.
Shooting is only worth it on boss levels or if you are on the edge of the levels. The simple fact is that the level is too cramped to be able to shoot without being heard. I actually think i would not change anything about the shooting itself: I'd change the levels. They need to be bigger, the enemies and camps more scattered, so you could more easily scout around. Maybe even give the player binoculars, for the full "STALKER-y" experience.
With the gun pigs, it depends. There are two kinds- one dows die in one shot, then the bigger ones (with a red, shaking eye on top at all times) do tank one shot. They get severely slowed down, however. Cover is absolutely needed when fighting them.
Also, survival zones aren't really that rng based! They got some, to give variety, but you will, %90 of the time, need to shoot to distract or kill to pass. When i do this game over again (i'm thinking of doing it from scratch, but more professional-like) i don't know exactly what i'll do with these. Will probably change the design quite a bunch!

As for your interpretation, man, i just love it. I personally won't tell much because i think it's highly personal and people will all see it in different ways, and i don't want to influence people.
But your interpretation just makes the whole violence feel even more dirty, so i like it!

Thank you so much for the review!!! It made my day when i read it! <3

The good:
* Art and music are perfect.
* Writing is silly, but in a good way. I enjoyed it.
* I found the control scheme fairly easy to get used to and a nice twist.
* With one exception, music syncs fantastically with attacks and necessary movements and it's gorgeous to see in action.

Stuff to improve:
* No tutorial. I know the small robot throws out a couple of softballs first, but then it escalates quickly. This is probably why other reviews complain about the control scheme, since the player is just thrown into the deep end.
* Visual hitbox guide for notes is *extremely* small relative to the speed of the balls and is useless when the screen gets busy. If the music sync wasn't perfect most of the time, this game would become an exercise in frustration.
* Orchid's attacks decouple from the song's rhythm about a minute in. I can dodge her attacks nearly perfectly until that point, then she spams absurdly fast while the music shreds away in blissful ignorance of whatever she is doing. This makes passing the stage difficult to impossible for me, personally. I have no idea how anyone else manages it.
* Getting hit seems to stun the player character, and it also makes a loud sound that can easily throw off a groove or briefly obscure the music (and since this game is hearing reliant, that's a problem). This makes it fairly easy for a single mistake to snowball during an intense sequence. Game would be greatly improved by making mistakes less disruptive to a player's flow.
* Feels somewhat like a demo, given how barebones the plot, writing, etc are. To put it a better way, this game is short and sweet, but you could easily expand this into a full game and it would be AWESOME. Just saying.

Figburn responds:

thank you for the feedback! we’ll definitely take it into consideration as we add more and tweak things about the game

Recent Audio Reviews

42 Audio Reviews

The sweet, sweet sounds of my thirtieth death by cop.

For the weakest opponent in the game, Small Robot sure knows how to jam. This got stuck in my head for quite some time, shall we say.

In the modern world (modern world)
Great leaders resolve their conflicts (their conflicts)
With words...

Words like...
Scum Launcher! (scud launcher!)
Carpet Bombing! (carpet bombing!)
Tomahawk Missile! (Tomahawk MISSILE!)

Age 32, Male

Joined on 1/19/11

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