Recent reviews by Deimos

I don't get all the praise this game gets. Maybe if you come at it from a city-building game background you might find it fun. But if you come at it from a colony building / resource management / survival game background, this game is extremely shallow in every possible way.

It's known by many that video games offer story telling possibilities that are unique to the medium due to its interactive nature. Nier: Automata is one of those rare titles that fully explores this potential. It's unforgettable.

The gameplay is solid, it fulfills its function of supporting a journey through an enticing world full of myth and wonder. The sublime soundtrack, and its technical implementation into the game, will draw you in and never let go.

Get it, play it. I hope my data finds you.



(play with controller, install FAR mod to get PC quality graphics)

Still the best competitive tactical FPS game in existence.

I've heard and read tons of praise for this game, but I honestly can't understand how one would enjoy it.

The environment interactivity is minimalistic to say the least, the experience of the game relies very heavily on a narrator that speaks very slowly, and the game itself mostly consists of walking around and pushing the occasional button.
When a game is this devoid of excitement right off the bat, one would expect and engaging and intriguing plot to be discernible, but what little is disclosed stinks of overused tropes and provides no stimulation. Don't get me wrong, it's clear there's an overall plot to be discovered, but the path to discovery is as interesting as watching paint dry. Portal is a good example of a game that does it well. Yes, there's a lot of mystery and something about the game world feels odd, but you unveil this mystery while doing fun and engaging things. This game is like portal without the portals and puzzles, where you just walk slowly through an office building listening to a narrator droning on and on about stuff. The point of videogames is for the player to have an interactive experience. An on-rails exposition defeats the purpose of the medium, like a sandwich made entirely out of bread crusts. Essential ingredients are absent.

The player has the choice between following commands, or being defiant. However, after following the defiant route a few times it becomes clear that this results in a pointless dead end, in which the player is subjected to one of the narrator's rants that takes waaaay too long, before being thrown back to the beginning of the game to start over. This means doing anything other than following commands is quite literally a waste of time for the player. Yet following commands is not fun. It's the worst possible catch 22 a player could be faced with in a game.

I spent the majority of the thirty minutes I played the game, fiddling and waiting for things to move along and for something interesting to happen. Alas, writing this review ended up being more entertaining than the game itself. It might just be the most boring game ever.

I was a bit apprehensive due to this game's over-the-top tongue-in-cheek sexualization of the main character, which is why I only ended up getting it when I saw it on sale for a low price, and due to the fervent community that constantly touts it as a great action title. But I'm glad I did, and honestly I regret not getting it earlier. Yes, the whole "I do things sensually because I'm sassy" trope can get silly at times, as it does in many Japanese games, but underneath that is an extremely engaging experience that's a ton of fun to play. The combat system is really really fun, and climbing the learning curve feels rewarding.

This game has a unique approach to the difficulty aspect. You can get through the game with a solid grasp of the mechanics and combat, but if you display anything short of stellar performance the game will basically taunt you for it. "Omg you needed to use health items? Lol you suck." "What do you mean you let an enemy hit you a single time? Do you think that's acceptable? Whatever bro.". It feels like being heckled for not achieving perfection, but in a playful manner. At the same time, the game has a combo-practice system that pops up during every single loading screen, and there are plenty of "bonus stages" where you are encouraged to learn and employ advanced combat mechanics. And if you do well at the game, it feels like the scoring system high-fives you all the way through. Also all the fun unlockables require consistent high scores to unlock. So instead of chewing you up and spitting you out for non-stellar performance, the game lures you towards improving your skill. And when you get to a point where you can consistently fight at the level the game expects you to, it's a ton of fun. Because you earned the epic ass-kicking you just dished out on that crowd of enemies without getting hit even once, and it was totally cool. Here, have some bonus stuff for being epic.

An exceedingly enjoyable 2D stealth game, crafted with huge attention to detail. The replayability factor is huge, due to several new "play modes" being unlocked throughout the game.

Definetly worth your time and money if you like stealth games.

This game is unique. I've played through it countless times, even before owning it on Steam.
Remember being a kid playing console games and swinging the controller around as if to try and make your in-game character jump higher? This game provides the full body experience, and here's why:

- high speed racing with a good physics engine
- destructable environments
- desctuctible cars (also the game rewards you for knocking out competitors)
- appropriate soundtrack
- engaging progression, with monetary rewards used for purchasing better cars and modifying them

The chaos is not a cheap gimmick, it was carefully layered on top of a solid racing game, and they complement each other wonderfuly. This is the single best Flatout game in the entire series to date, and there is no other racing game out there that comes close to providing this kind of experience.

Also despite being "old", the visuals in the game aged really well and you'd be surprised to learn of its age while playing.
Playing it on Windows 10 requires a simple fix due to the "GFWL" service not being available, but it's just a matter of placing one file in the game's folder.

In terms of 2D Sonic, this game is easily top 2, maybe best ever.
In terms of Sonic in general, this is the best game to come out in over ten years, with Sonic Generations taking second place.

New characters fit perfectly into the cast. Mighty's abilities are more on the fun side, while Ray seems more like a character made for a high skill ceiling.

Encore mode is also a ton of fun to play.

For asking price this DLC is top notch.

To keep it short:

- the general map design is acceptable, but the amount of visual clutter is absurd. Target aquisition and readability were clearly not prioritized in the visual design of the game. On top of this, when designing the destructible environment they decided that neither pieces of debris or ragdolls would be synchronized accross clients, meaning your view of the world is not the same as everyone else's. I've had situations where I was killed by enemies from angles at which their view of me should be occluded by rubble or a dead body, only to be told by spectating team-mates that on their screen no such occlusion took place. All of these design choices result in a game where the real enemy is the visual aspect, since the real challenge becomes spotting the enemy, not necessarily the combat itself;

- movement is clunky and inconsistent. Sometimes you need to "vault" an obstacle at ankle height, sometimes you don't, sometimes the same type of object can be vaulted in one instance and not in another, not to mention that a considerable amount of waist-high objects can't be vaulted for some reason. Movement intuition should be prioritized in gameplay, when I walk up to a waist-height piece of furniture, in a game where plenty of such objects can be vaulted, I should be allowed to vault it. If vaulting that precise object at that location poses a game balance issue, the object has to be changed or moved. Leaving it there and making it "unvaultable" only serves to mystify the movement mechanics;

- some props around the maps are bulletproof and some aren't. This does not depend on whether or not said objects would be bulletproof in real life, since often you'll find soft objects to be impervious to even high-caliber bullets, for some reason. This makes map readability even worse, since not only can you not apply basic intuition to your ability to interact physically with objects, the reaction of those objects to bullets is arbitrary and often unrealistic;

- even though the game has been out for 3 years, there are still instances of deployable items glitching the ability to navigate certain map features correctly, as well as areas intended to be unaccessible being accessible via exploits;

- despite the welcome implementation of spray patterns, which should have been there since day one, several weapons still suffer from an unnaceptable amount of randomness in their recoil;

- despite a supposed upgrade to the servers having taken place, instances of rubber-banding due to server-side issues are still abundant;

- the lag compensation and general game design skews the advantage heavily towards peekers, known in the general gaming community as "peeker's advantage". The peeker's advantage in this game is turned up to eleven;


I could go on, but this should be enough.

TL;DR: enjoyable, but not ready to be taken seriously as a competitive shooter.