Recent reviews by TheDarkPhantom

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

I have always been a fan of arcade and combat themed racing games as they have consistently been more fun to me than simulators that dominate the market nowadays. One of the games in this genre that I had always heard its name through my gaming career but never got to play it, was FlatOut. I recently tried the first game of the series and was overwhelmingly disappointed by it, to the point that I consider it one of the worst racing games I have ever played.

Then I tried FlatOut 2 and I have to say... it's much better than what I anticipated. Although my final impressions are more on the meh side rather than being completely positive.

FlatOut 2 is literally what FlatOut 1 should have been. It takes the first game and fixes almost every problem I had with it. Vehicles no longer feel like paper creations that get thrown around with a simple nudge, track hazards cause the exact reactions that you would expect them to do when hit with a car, the shortcuts are easily identifiable and well-placed, the game allows you to return to the track after going out of bounds without the need to reset position, the reset function places you back on the track in a fair manner, and the windshield ejections are not only restricted only to high speed crashes but their animations take less time to be finished. The soundtrack is even much better than the first game, fitting the gameplay more.
FlatOut 2 also does away with the awkward cash reward system in FlatOut 1, where you would get small sums of cash after hitting the hazards present on the race tracks. Now, your extra cash rewards are tied to what you do in the races. You get extra cash for wrecking the opponents' cars, in addition to fulfilling certain milestones in the races such as recording the fastest lap time or wrecking the most hazards compared to everyone else. Speaking of which...

With the tweaked gameplay, FlatOut 2 now has more emphasis on destruction compared to its predecessor, and this makes it so much more fun to play. Race tracks now frequently either go straight through destructible environments, or have a fair amount of them scattered around. The nitro meter fills up much faster and more reliably than the previous game as well, allowing for more mayhem and more chances to take down opponents, and the new boosting effect correctly relays the sense of top speed to the player.
Because of all of the above, the chaos that happens on the race tracks and events is very entertaining to witness and the activities are incredibly fun as well. But unfortunately, the game doesn't stay fun like that. At least for me.

Some may find this a nitpick, but I strongly believe there's one thing the game does wrong, and it's the way it represents other opponents as actual racers.
It's not unusual to see something like this in racing games, as a lot of them (and especially mascot racers) use it to invoke a sense of rivalry between the player and the AI opponents by giving the latter personalities and special traits. FlatOut 2 does this too, but you will only remember two of the racers after playing the game, with every mention of them making your blood boil: Jack Benton and Sofia Martinez.
These guys are the only opponents that will give you a hard time through the whole game by being incredibly fast and overtaking you every time you do a simple mistake. If you take a screenshot of every race's final standings and compare them afterwards, you will almost always see them in the top 3. The game's explanation for such behavior is that they are professional racers and therefore should be harder to go up against as a result. But I would be lying to say they didn't kill the fun for me, because they made me go back to how I was playing FlatOut 1 whenever I wanted to compete for the first place. Every time I was in the first place, I had to stop taking risks, driving as carefully as I could and stick to the main road as much as possible. Every time I looked at the map at the corner of the screen after starting a race, I always saw one or both of them in the front of everyone else. I have no problem taking the L and ending up on the 2nd or 3rd places or even lower, but I don't want to witness the same scenario over and over again whenever I race. It makes me more annoyed and tired rather than motivated.
And then you will start seeing some peculiar behavior from them and other AI opponents as well. For example, why sometimes you start boosting and the AI opponent in front of you, who is driving normally, seemingly has the same speed as you? Why sometimes you start boosting at top speed, and then someone else easily overtakes you with even higher speed? Now granted, these tactics were not uncommon in the games of that era, but put them next to what I ranted about above and you can clearly see why I don't like them.

FlatOut 2 takes the 1st game & fixes almost every issue with it, resulting in a much more fun racer. Although AI's over-aggressiveness can sour the experience, especially in its numerous normal races.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

You know, sometimes ratings and reviews of a game can be pretty deceptive. Not because the reviewer is lying, but because their point of view and their standards are wildly different from what yours. Maybe nostalgia is getting in the way. Maybe something that is very critical to you is not much of an issue for the other person. Or maybe they are more forgiving when playing a game than you are. Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade (KOTT for short) is one such game, with other reviews on its store page making you think it's a game that has perfectly stood the test of time.
It has not.

In terms of story and its narration, there's not much here. You're a good christian boy, a bad guy is trying to destroy the world, the bad guy kidnaps your love interest, you go out to kill the bad guy and save everyone. There's no environmental storytelling, no fleshing out the characters and no pieces of lore hidden around the levels. The game just offers you your usual good against evil story with a Crusades theme, with the only attempts at storytelling limited to the animated cutscenes you will see every few stages. And the whole thing concludes with a plot twist ending that is pretty weak and dissatisfying, and honestly made me more mad with the game after I found out about it.
Now you might be wondering why I am malding about the story in this game. The first reason is that the game has insane amounts of lost potential in this department as it truly feels atmospheric at times. Some scenery in a few levels, combined with Gustaf Grefberg's music tracks, make for some captivating moments that could have been used to elevate the storytelling. But the game never capitalizes on this idea. Instead it constantly forces you inside hallways, streets and closed off areas, even fumbling the rare chances it gets.
And the second reason is that with a gameplay like THIS, they really should have had a better story presentation to make one actively want to continue playing it.

Unfortunately, the gameplay in KOTT is a massive borefest and becomes repetitive very fast. All you do in a level is going from the starting point to the ending point, while constantly fighting the enemies that dare to stand in your way. This is not a problem on its own, but the thing is that neither the combat is actually fun nor the game offers you enough encouragement to go on. Allow me to explain.
The game simply throws you into way too many forced combat encounters per level with no breathing room in between. Sometimes you cannot go from one room to the other or even move a few steps forward without an enemy showing up to fight you. And sometimes, enemy spawn points are pretty questionable, with them magically appearing out of nowhere after a cutscene finishes playing or attacking you mere moments after a level starts. So you just fight and fight and fight... without having the game offering anything to break this repetitive flow.
As I have mentioned before, the story is pretty bland & uninteresting and the game refrains from using in-game cutscenes, only offering pre-rendered ones at certain points. There are no collectables or meaningful secrets in the game. There are only 6 puzzles present in the whole game. The game ties the majority of unlocks to weapon usage and how many enemies you kill, and gives you all of the weapons pretty early on, so there's almost nothing left to reveal by progression aside from the main story plot. Therefore, the combat is all that the game has to offer for a huge part of it, and it being so basic and bland doesn't help the situation we have here.

The combat system in KOTT feels like what happens if you take a fantasy action game, then strip it from its features one by one until the bare minimum remains. Or if it's unfinished to begin with.
In KOTT you will get access to a total of 4 weapons, starting with a sword and then gradually acquiring an axe, a mace and a bow. But unfortunately, the first three weapons function exactly the same, with the only difference being small amounts of damage increase against specific enemy types. On the other hand, the bow is incredibly powerful, being capable of killing even the most annoying enemies in a few hits and one-shotting every enemy and boss (excluding the final boss) with a headshot, even if they are armored. Thankfully, it's handicapped by the number of arrows.
Then we get to the actual combat and I have to say, it's pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bland. While KOTT somewhat leans into the hack & slash genre on lower difficulties, it requires a slower and more strategical approach to combat as a whole. You can get surrounded by as much as 3-4 enemies at once, with their rapid attacks making it hard to employ a hack & slash playstyle and not get overwhelmed. You need to study the enemies' attack patterns, attacking and defending at the right time to get past them.
But it won't offer you enough to enjoy the fighting. You will be doing the exact same combos as most of them are not suitable to use against enemies with such a combat system, and you will fight against the exact same enemy types for the entirety of the game. Moreover, most enemies have a habit of constantly blocking your attacks, forcing you to spam your guard break special move (which gives you a small timeframe to only land one or two hits) or returning the favor by also constantly blocking their attacks and waiting for an opening. And remember when I said the game constantly makes you fight with no breathing room? I think you can now understand the whole problem.

I will admit that aside from the pre-rendered cutscenes, the game still looks really good for a game from 2004. The textures look clean and the game supports modern resolutions as well. The animations for the main characters and enemies, especially in combat, are also praiseworthy as they are very smooth due to the devs using motion capture. Although it does stumble a bit in the technical side as while the game runs without additional tinkering, it has broken refresh rate and brightness adjusters, among some other issues such as baffling lack of controller support.
As for the music, the game uses the same music system that was later used in The Darkness, with each level having a calm version and a combat version of the music to seamlessly switch between. It features some very well-composed tracks that are pleasant to listen to, even enhancing the experience at the very rare times the game isn't throwing you into a fight and the scenery looks interesting enough to back it up. But then there are sections in the game where absolutely no music is playing (like the second boss), and then we have tracks being reused over and over again as you go through a couple of levels back to back.

The game feels unfinished, feeling like what you get when you strip action games down to their very basic form. It's not bad, but is incredibly bland and boring to play compared to its peers.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

I have not played a lot of FlatOut. I know that. But even so, I can say with absolute certainty that FlatOut is one of the worst racing games I have ever played in my life.

The gameplay presentation is FlatOut is absolutely misleading. The game is advertised as an adrenaline pumping and thrilling combat racing game where you can smash through the environment and shred the opponents' cars like in a demolition derby. But none of those are actually true, as doing any of the actions I mentioned before results in you losing the races. In order to win the races, you need to stick to the main path and drive as carefully as possible without hitting anything or anyone, and refraining from taking shortcuts.

Why so? Because hitting any obstacle on a race track in FlatOut feels like hitting a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wall, while driving a car made out of paper. FlatOut is not like the Burnout series or other similar games where you smash through small obstacles and go toe-to-toe with your opponents without losing control. In FlatOut, you will feel the difference. The cars you drive in this game feel like they are made out of paper, easily swinging to the left and right by simply steering or with a simple nudge from the opponents' cars. Smaller obstacles will considerably slow you down if you hit them head-on, and if you hit them in any other way, may god help you as you will witness your car getting stuck at the best case scenario, and getting thrown around, thrown in the air while spinning or overturned at worst. As for the stronger obstacles like logs, trees and metal railings, there's a %50 chance of them causing the driver to be shot out of the car instantly, no matter how much speed you had while hitting them. Sometimes I gently hit a tree by the side of my car and watched the driver taking a flight through the windshield at full speed, and sometimes I did the same thing and nothing happened.

Then there's the issue of shortcuts. Each race track has a number of shortcuts for you to take. But most of the time, taking shortcuts is an incredibly risky move. Not only there are various objects littered throughout the shortcut roads as well, increasing the risk of hitting them and losing control of the car, but not every terrain can be used as a shortcut even though they look like one. There are various locations on the tracks that will cause a player to think of using them as a risky shortcut, but many of these are marked as "out of bounds" locations and if you spend more than 1 second in them, the game will stop you from progressing until you reset your car position. No, simply returning to the track is not enough; the game will not leave you alone until you press the reset button. All of these make taking shortcuts utterly useless because it's not worth risking using them just to end up in a lower race position.

And the reset feature... OH LORD THE RESET FEATURE. Upon pressing the button to reset your car and get back into action, you will witness the game putting you far behind where you got stuck, forcing you to severely fall behind the competition and witness unwinnable situations at times that might cause you to restart the whole race.

The result of such a mess is a game that I absolutely loathed playing. I never felt like I was in control and most of the crashes & setbacks I experienced were not because of my inability to play a racing game or lack of skill, but because the game decided to do whatever the hell it wanted. It punished me for trying to think out of the box, it punished me for accidentally going out of its strict track boundaries for a few seconds, it punished me for simply trying to play it and have fun. And I do not see why I have to keep playing it any longer as a result.


FlatOut is an incredibly flawed racing game that encourages you to be reckless as if you are participating in a demolition derby, then punishes you for doing that and not being careful. Just skip it.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Well, they do say not to judge a book based on its cover.
On first look, Golden Force appears to be a really good game. In terms of visual presentation, the game is colorful with every single playable and non-playable character having very well-drawn sprites and animations. The music is also pleasant to listen to, even sometimes reminding me of the Crash Bandicoot series for some reason. Although the number of available tracks is incredibly low, with I think about only 6 tracks composed for all the levels you will be going through. And to top it off, the game has solid foundations for a great action-platformer.
But when we get to the actual gameplay... well... that's the part when the game takes a turn for the worse.

You can already see a lot of reviews on this game's store page claiming that it's a hard game. Yes, this game is hard. But it's hard for the wrong reasons.
There's a difference between how hard games are designed. Some are made with the intention to offer a challenging yet highly curated experience from the moment of their inception, like the Dark Souls series or Cuphead or Super Meat Boy, and it becomes a part of their identity as if you take the challenge out, the games will stop to function correctly and lose all of their appeal. Then we have the second group which contains the games with artificial difficulty added to them; As if someone made a fully-functioning game and then suddenly decided to make it harder. A whole lot of old/retro games and harder difficulties in games fall under the second group, and Golden Force belongs there as well.
To me, nothing in this game says "I am hard because I was designed to be this way" as the game uses a lot of old tactics that are frequently used to artificially increase a game's difficulty. There are quite a lot of locations in the game when you don't know what's around you due to the camera being very close and slow to move around, especially when it comes to move from left to right and vice versa, requiring trial and error to get past them and paving the way for cheap hits. There are instant death hazards that are twice as annoying as their counter parts in other games, considering how the camera system behaves in Golden Force. The bosses have absurd amounts of health with not much attack variety, making them look more like boring endurance rounds rather than actually challenging parts of the game. The game hides health pickups behind breaking random chests (a very useful information to have) and never tells you this until you find it on your own. And the checkpoints are rare and badly placed compared to the length of the levels and the amount/types of hazards you have to go through.

Unfortunately, there are shortcomings in the gameplay department as well.
First, we have the stale nature of the gameplay. Whatever you see in the first stages of the game is what you will be experiencing for the entirety of it, as the game never decides to give you extra abilities or break away from its level design mentality. The only thing you can do is to upgrade HP and the number of attacks you can do in a combo, alongside buying temporary powerups. Even the four playable characters end up being lame as they have no differences with each other aside from their appearance and animations. All of them are melee-based characters with the exact same moveset. You would expect Drago (a dragon character) to at least be able to double jump using its wings but the game doesn't have that. You would expect the Elder to be a somewhat ranged character based on the game's promotional artwork, but he just punches enemies.
And what's worse is even with such a basic and uninteresting combat, the game really likes to constantly lock you inside arenas and make you fight with waves of enemies, even buffing the health of some of them to miniboss status so you can have fun constantly hitting the same enemy for a minute until it dies.
Then we have the utterly worthless economy system. There are a variety of collectables in this game in the form of big yellow coins, seashells and normal coins. The big coins and seashells act as the optional, very hard to get collectables that getting all of them unlocks an extra level in each world. But they are also used to upgrade your health and combo attack length. Then we have the normal coins which you can buy time-limited powerups with. However, the items you can buy with these currencies are crazily expensive, requiring hours of grinding to purchase. More so, you can only have one of those powerups at a time, and most of them have the only purpose of making combat sequences end faster. Add the fact that you lose all of your accumulated coins in a level after losing all of your lives and without any option to recover them (like Shovel Knight for example) to the mix, and you can see why not many people care about collecting them after a while.
Now that we're speaking of stuff getting reset after a death and becoming worthless because of it, let's talk about the special attack as well. By collecting items and hitting enemies in the levels, you slowly start to build up a yellow bar at the top left of the screen. When that bar is full, you can use a screen nuke special attack to kill all enemies and severly damage bosses. But the thing is, just like the normal currency, that bar also takes ages to get filled and you will lose all of your accumulated meter on death. So you won't be using it much on a normal playthrough.

The last thing I want to mention is how the game feels unpolished, as the game misses some crucial features and even has baffling issues that should have been spotted before launch or shortly after launch at worst.
First, there are some visual issues. If you select Elder with his primary skin as a playable character and try to do a charge attack in the water, you will see him suddenly changing into Drago, performing the attack and then turning back. Some of the enemies that hide underground (the brown enemies with skulls on their head) suddenly pop out of nowhere, with no animation of them coming out. And I have checked the spritesheets with UABE and the animation frames for both of these cases are there. Then there's the issue of gaps appearing in the terrain upon vertical navigation, which is incredibly jarring to see.
But wait, there's more! If you mistakenly activate the 2P mode, you can't simply deactivate it with the same button press. Not only that, activating the 2P mode on a controller immediately switches the primary control method to keyboard and disables controller inputs for player 1, requiring the player to restart the game in order to be able to use controllers again.
And then we have the case of missing features. The ability to remap your controller is completely absent from the game. Other than sliders for audio and a toggle for the fullscreen mode, the game offers no additional graphical options, so you cannot change resolution without resorting to engine commands or disable some visual effects like the screen shake.

Honestly cannot recommend this game. Gameplay is incredibly stale, with the game's promise of offering a hard experience just ending up being artificial difficulty. Not to mention the baffling issues.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

I bought Blade Assault back when it was in early access. It was an incredibly buggy mess that still showed a lot of potential, so I held on with my purchase and decided to wait until it was finished. Eventually, I forgot about it until a while ago and decided to try it out. And then...

Honestly, I am beyond disappointed.

To say the story of Blade Assault is a mess, is an understatement. It kinda has a story, but ignores it for the most part and treats it as a means to start the gameplay.
You start the game in a prison, break out of it, get your ass handed to you by one of the endgame bosses, and then get transported to the game's hub to start the actual meat of the game, all in the span of about 15 minutes. The game explains very little about its world and even less about its characters. More so, every single instance when you think there would be a special dialogue is filled with nothingness. The main character wakes up after the events in the prologue and never questions where he is, talks with the person who rescued him and never mentions that fact, or sees the real sides of the characters he's working with and never questions them. All he needs is "muh revenge" and nothing else. And the same applies to the other playable characters, who have even less story than the main character. And the dialogues are filled to the brim with typos themselves, further signifying that not much attention was put on the story.
Now you might be wondering, was all this rant about the story and dialogues even necessary? For me, it is. Because you need a reason to kickstart an adventure. You need to give the players a good goal to work towards and a well-defined world to be immersed in. Not many will go through a game if they cannot find a purpose in the journey. Especially if the gameplay is like THIS.

On the surface, the gameplay system of Blade Assault seems amazing. The game goes for a mixture of Dead Cells and Hades, with the main gameplay feel and life/SP increase system taken straight from Dead Cells, and the obtainable skills and the synergies between them coming straight from Hades. The thing is, the game does not utilize them correctly.
Combat difficulty constantly fluctuates between laughably easy and unnecessarily hard, partly due to the game's danger level mechanic and partly due to its overall design. Every few minutes, the danger level of your character increases, applying negative effects on your run or buffing the enemies. Enemies are incredibly easy to deal with on danger level 0 and 1, with danger level 2 and above creating a lot of trouble as many of the enemies will be armored and it will be easy for them to swarm you and make you take hits in-between the visual clutter. Then we have the bosses that are badly designed. There's not an understandable difficulty increase between bosses, as the first two bosses are incredibly easy to beat and then the third boss kicks your ass with poison damage, spawning minions and always hovering above the battlefield. And to put a cherry on top of all this, all of the bosses have absurdly high HP amounts, making bossfights a bore.
And as for the skills, they are disappointing as well. Many of the skills you can obtain are just stat changers, with the synergies between them not impacting the combat in any significant way. Not to mention their variety is incredibly low and you will run into the same skills over and over again, which seems to be a thing this game really likes to do.

By far, the repetition is the biggest issue with the game.
The gameplay of Blade Assault is incredibly monotonous and repetitive. All you do through the game is entering a new area, fighting the first wave of enemies that spawn in, fighting the second wave of enemies that spawn in, optionally fighting the third wave of enemies that spawn in if you have triggered it, then fighting a final wave of enemies at the end of the area to obtain an item, repeat from the beginning unless you are getting to the boss. And all of this back-to-back fighting with no variation in-between them just makes the gameplay very repetitive.
And the same repetition even applies to the randomization of this game. You can do multiple runs back to back, just to see the exact same level layouts with the exact same enemy types and the exact same spawn locations in them getting repeated, over and over and over again. If this is a rogue-lite, then why the hell it looks like it's running out of content in the first two hours, the most important period of time when a player decides whether or not to skip that game?!


One of the weakest rogue-lites you can find on Steam. It runs out of randomized content pretty fast, leaving you to do the same things over and over again, and is pretty unbalanced at times.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

I am pretty outspoken when it comes to my disappointment with major publishers pulling away from the hack & slash genre. I firmly believe the genre is getting abandoned due to high focus on cinematic storytelling, and cramming rogue-like and souls-like elements in games just to appeal to mass audiences. That's why I was pretty stoked when I came across Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death; A hack & slash game taking notes from the old God of War games.
It starts fantastic, providing one of the most chaotic intros to a video game. But then various issues show themselves, many stemming from the game's low budget, dragging the experience down from an instant recommendation to a "Meh..." at best and making me wonder what the devs could have done with more time, money and experience if they weren't banished to casino hell.

The first hour of the game is actually the very best part of it and makes it feel like you're watching an insanely fun action B-movie. It features non-stop set pieces and fight sequences in impossible situations, while being filled to the brim with explosions and the world breaking down in front of your eyes. Not only that, the combat is fast and fun, filled with tons of screen filling and flashy visual effects with occasional minigames to break the pace and add some variety.
But of course, you cannot base a game entirely on action sequences. You need to have some platforming/puzzle sections and even change the environment from time to time to prevent the experience from getting repetitive. The game does the environmental changes rather well, starting in an industrial area and then switching to ancient temples overrun with flora, snowy mountaintops and dark dungeons, all while constantly using its camera shots to make the scale of the environment seem much bigger and more beautiful than what they originally look like and to make the action events more impactful. And the game switches between areas in a nearly seamless manner, without having lengthy loading times in-between them.
The cast of voice actors, which includes surprising appearances such as James Hong, have done their job pretty well. The banter between Marlow and King Tep is interesting for the majority of time, with the latter sometimes becoming angry at the player for failing to solve very simple puzzles being a nice touch. Although the presentation in this department does feel lackluster in some parts. For example, James Hong rarely gets to shine as the antagonist of the story.

The game has lots of qualities when it comes to what it can present. But unfortunately, it starts to go below its initial impressions after a while and from time to time, you can see indications of the devs not having the necessary time and budget to properly playtest and fine-tune the game and turning it into a fantastic hack & slash game.
You will face bosses that make you think a spectacular battle is coming, just for them to be annihilated with a few strikes and a QTE. About %85 of the game's cinematics (including boss finishers) are not voiced, are overly long and just feature static models placed together in a diorama-like manner. Some of the gameplay to set-piece/QTE transitions are very sudden and come out of literally nowhere, not letting you to get ready for them. Sometimes various interactable items are placed near each other, leading to unwanted results such as jumping to a grappling point instead of refilling health.
And then we have the glitches. Simply climbing around the environment can sometimes result in you getting trapped with no way to get out, or cause the game to go haywire and allow you to climb on unclimbable surfaces. Sometimes the controls stop responding momentarily in a specific shooting section. And lastly, the game starts to have audio mixing issues at times, making dialogues incredibly low volume and hard to listen to, or even doesn't play them at all.
And these were the smaller issues. Now we get to the bigger ones that affect the experience in a bigger way.

At first, Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death's combat proves to be incredibly fast and fun, reminiscent of the old God of War games. The game gives you quite a number of neat and flashy combos for each of the 4 weapon types you can access (scythe, blades, whip and hammer), even giving you a Bayonetta-styled combo training area to test each of them. You will eventually get access to magic attacks as well, each with specific properties and flashy animations.
However, the combat starts to feel tedious after a while. At some point in the story, the game starts to introduce armored variations of normal enemies and tanky ones who are just damage sponges, even using them alongside other enemy types. At this point and onwards, most of your weapons become incredibly useless against them as your flashy combos do nothing against them plowing through your hits and getting to you, and your magic attacks become useless too as they don't deal much damage and your SP bar runs out pretty fast after using them. Then there's the issue of your weapons and magic attacks creating a lot of visual clutter on the screen, making you unable to see what the hell is going on and potentially get hit.
This is the moment when the hammer (Patan's Tusk) becomes the best weapon against majority of the enemies as it produces no invasive visual effects, and its attacks can interrupt enemies, stun them momentarily and deal heavy damage all at the same time, rendering other weapons useless except when you are facing against hordes of small enemies. And this very fact causes the combat to become incredibly stale, a far cry from how it started to be.

Unfortunately, the game also has some camera issues.
As I have mentioned before, Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death is a game inspired by old God of War games and just like them, uses fixed camera angles. This type of camera system is tricky to use as while it allows the developers to hide secrets in plain sight and put more emphasis on the environmental details and scenery, an improper implementation of it can make navigation and combat a hell to go through. Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death does the former point right, but I really cannot say the same about the latter.
For the majority of time, the game uses camera angles well and the scale of the events & environments you are traversing is correctly relayed to the player. But there are instances when the game's camera placement become problematic, making combat and platforming a chore at times. Sometimes the camera stays too close to the player while fighting with a group of enemies, and sometimes it starts showing everything from an unorthodox angle, making it difficult to do simple platforming.


A hack & slash that starts like an amazing action B-movie, then gradually loses its charm and becomes tedious over time, showing off its development constraints. For many, it may be worth it on sale.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

PAWARUMI is a very well-made shmup game, and one that I believe is criminally underrated. The game takes several inspirations from Ikaruga, which is one of the best games in the shmup/bullet hell genre, to form its gameplay and presentation. But while it does look great and is fun to play, some unfortunate issues and its reliance on being a classic-styled shmup ultimately cause it to not be a suitable pick for everyone.

If there's one thing that PAWARUMI absolutely nails, it's the presentation. The soundtrack of the game is very well-composed. No doubts about that. But it's the visual design and polish that deserves the most praise.
All of the level backgrounds in the game are very detailed and full of color, with each of them having a dominant shade of color throughout them to set their moods. The same applies to the player ship and the enemies, each having specific designs that make them wildly different to the other types. The cinematic camera shots are done really well and add to the game's feeling of progression through or between the levels; much like the same thing with Ikaruga, only without the possible goosebumps as the result of music and visuals being perfectly synced.
I especially love the attention to detail in this game. The default bindings of the game have been set in a way that the color of shots and the color of their respective buttons on an Xbox 360 controller are the same. Each of the fire modes are signified with the facial appearances of Condor, Serpent and Jaguar, and you will see a brief animation of them appearing upon firing the weapons in addition to the playable ship changing its appearance. And the design of the HUD and the characters are very in-line with drawings of Aztecs, a civilization which is a major source of inspiration for this game.

When it comes to talking about the gameplay and how it feels at a fundamental level, I've got to say it is very fun, well constructed and unique. Sure, the game lacks the punch it needs to make enemy explosions impactful, but everything else work together to deliver a satisfying shooting experience.
The game's uniqueness comes in the form of its shot modes, where it takes Ikaruga's polarity system, changes some stuff and then adds more to it. In PAWARUMI, you have access to three color coded shot modes: Laser beam (Blue), homing missiles (Red) and curved shots (Green). The enemies are all drenched in one of these three colors, and attacking them with each of the shots causes you to achieve one of the following effects:

• Crush (bottom middle of the screen): Attacking an enemy with the opposing shot color, dealing more damage as a result.
  
• Boost (bottom right of the screen): Attacking an enemy with the other opposing color, in order to charge your special attack.
  
• Drain (bottom left of the screen): Attacking an enemy with a shot that has their exact color, in order to charge your shield. Also causes the drained enemies to attack faster in retaliation.

One one hand, this weapon system gives you complete freedom to decide what you want to do and how you want to progress. But on the other hand, it also makes the gameplay very confusing. If you cannot get a grip on how the weapon system is handled, you will be forced to constantly take a peek at the bottom of the screen and then immediately look back to make sure you won't get hit by the enemies. Not only that, one of the bosses forces you to play a shell game and hit the target with the exact weapon effect he asks you to choose, further making this an issue for the confused.

When it comes to the difficulty, PAWARUMI is a decently balanced game with very well-designed enemy patterns. However, it's not a game that I would recommend to the newcomers to the genre or casual players as its game design is based on older titles in the shmup genre, not offering any modern quality of life additions.
What I mean by such statement is that PAWARUMI is a game that in classic shmup fashion, requires dedication to be finished. The game's true ending is only accessible on the hardest difficulty mode and some enemy patterns, such as certain laser beam enemies in the Industrial Complex, require you to have prior knowledge of their appearance in order to not get hit by them.
Furthermore, you are forced to 1CC the game. There is no free play mode, no extra lives system and no unlockable credit points in this game. If you run out of shield meter and die at any point, which can happen a lot as the amount of shield and super meter you have don't recharge between levels, the run is over and you have to restart everything from the beginning. All of these make for a game that requires hours of practice and restarts in order to access its ending, thus not making it a suitable choice for casuals and newcomers, or those with limited time on their hands. The 1CC is especially a problem here since I believe the game unintentionally suffers from a rather big problem.

This is the main reason that much to my dismay, I decided to not recommend this game. If there was a middle ground option I would have chosen that instead, but unfortunately I do not have such leisure.
As I have mentioned before, PAWARUMI is a game with a lot of work put into designing its levels, models and other visual elements. But while this works for the game by providing a unique visual presentation, it also works against it by increasing the chances of visual clarity issues surfacing, which is very visible in the Dune Ocean and Xibalba levels.
Simply put, the background is colorful and detailed, all of your ship's attacks have visual effects of their own, the animation for special bars filling up takes some space on the screen and some setpieces fill the screen with various moving objects, making some of the levels visually busy. Not only that, enemy projectiles have a dark purple color that makes them hard to notice in busy scenes, with only the faster variants being bright and noticeable. Then there is the fact that all of the enemies in this game deal contact damage and their fly patterns can cause them to come right at you.
So basically, you have to watch out for the projectiles that are coming at you from all directions in middle of all of the visual effects (as the game is a vertical shooter in 16:9 aspect ratio, allowing fleeing enemies to attack at you from the sides of the screen), and also watch out for the enemies that are flying around or for the sudden lunge attacks of the bosses, all while you are also keeping an eye on the enemies and the bottom of the screen to determine which shot type you should use against them. This is simply too much, paving the way for many instances when you legitimately don't know what hit you. And need I remind you that you are forced to finish this game in one sitting without continues?


A fantastic & frankly underrated shmup with lots of care and polish put into its presentation and gameplay. Unfortunately, the game's 1CC requirement and some clarity issues make it hard to recommend.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

You know, I am not fond of rogue-lite games anymore. At the moment, I believe the market is overrun with rogue-lites that are very similar in terms of their gameplay. Very few games try to add something different to their gameplay formula, and I do not have an exact reason for that.
That was why I was pleasantly surprised by Fury Unleashed. On the surface, it's just another rogue-lite that tries to mix various genres together. But it also introduces a gameplay mechanic that makes it very different from others, in exchange for it not appealing to everyone.

Fury Unleashed is about a comic artist who has lost their creativity and contemplates about what to do with the creations they hold dear. You appear in-game as the action hero of that artist's comics, named Fury, and have to find a way to prove yourself and rekindle their flames in order to be able to avoid being forgotten.
And such story has directly affected the visual presentation of the game, although not as detailed as examples like Comix Zone. Each stage is presented to you in forms of different issues of Fury Unleashed comic series, containing three chapters and a final boss fight. Each of the chapters/levels are presented as pages of a comic book, with each randomized tile inside them presented as frames with torn sides to indicate where you can exit them and go to the next one. I do believe the devs could have done more with the presentation, but we have is enough for the game.

In terms of gameplay, the game feels really fun to play and I dare say it becomes addicting. The movement options are incredibly well-done and Fury feels good to control as a result. The game retains the classic control method of twin stick shooters, using the left analog stick/WASD to move and right analog stick/mouse for manual aiming, then places the other buttons in locations that create the least amount of hassle for the players who decide to use the default keybindings. The dash button can also be held down, which makes Fury run faster on the ground and auto-climb small ledges in front of them to allow for fast movement.
Then we have the stomp attack. This attack is initiated by pressing down while in the air, causing fury to slam to the ground and crush whatever that is underneath them. Since this attack is able to kill every enemy in one hit with the exception of powered up ones and bosses, it become a really fun and also risky method to dispatch enemies; as you now have the option of damaging the enemies from afar to play it safe, or get in close and personal when you get the chance to finish them off in one hit. This becomes very fun to do when you take a specific gameplay feature into account, which I will explain very soon.
So far, everything feels good. Then come the gameplay features that make Fury Unleashed not suitable for everyone.

Fury Unleashed is a rogue-lite, and that means RNG decides how hard your runs are going to be. The game utilizes RNG in various ways: The tiles that make the chapters, the weapons, the shops, the challenges, boss arena layouts, and even the number of bosses and their types are going to be decided by random. And on top of these, we have the chaos events.
Every once in a while, you might run into roooms that are covered in black and white, replicating a sketchbook aesthetic, with enemies already in them or gradually spawning in. These are known as chaos events, with some of them awarding you with a weapon blueprint to unlock new weapons, and others offering nothing in return. Contrary to other rooms, there is no way to get out of these and you need to kill every enemy in order to be able to proceed, making these events a primary cause of failed runs.
However, these randomizations are quite limited and not always well-done. The number of tiles and layouts are enough for a first playthrough, but not for hours of gameplay; which is a curse for the casual player and a blessing for a speedrunner. As for the enemy/object randomization, you can sometimes run into enemy placements with no way out of taking damage, get targeted by specific types of enemies who are outside of your field of view, constantly get guns with pitiful DPS, or may find a challenge in a place that you have no chance of completing it. All of these are not game breaking, but are very frustrating.
Depending on the RNG and which weapons, bosses and enemy placements you get, you're either gonna have a fun time or the game kicks your ass very hard. And the ass kicking is going to be even more brutal if you cannot perform the one thing the gameplay is built around.

Fury Unleashed is a game that is HEAVILY reliant on doing kill combos and maintaining them as the main gameplay mechanic. If you honestly can't reliably keep a kill combo going, you better refund the game immediately because you won't get much out of the game and will probably never make it to the end.
By killing an enemy, the game starts a kill combo meter at the upper left side of the screen, just below the health bar. Each kill increases your combo by one and upon getting to certain combo levels, the soundtrack suddenly changes to more dramatic themes to notify you of how well you are doing. The combo ends if you either get hit by the enemies or the combo meter runs out. Coupled with the smooth movement system, this makes for an incredibly fun and even addicting gameplay, with your desire to maintaining your combo
And doing combos is absolutely needed, as helpful mechanics (like shields or faster reloads) and even healing are directly tied to the kill combo. Fury Unleashed has no reliable system for health recovery. You can only heal yourself by finding an RNG-driven doctor NPC, beating a boss, or maintaining a combo level of over 3 so each enemy has a chance of dropping health items after unlocking a certain skill. On one hand, this is a good way to make players want to master the game and learn the enemies' attack patterns to keep their combo going. And on the other hand, this makes for a lot of frustration if you are not good enough or when you desperately need healing before facing the bosses.

Fury Unleashed also has two extra modes, with gameplay based on other indie games: SUPERHOT and Crypt of the Necrodancer. And both of these modes have problems.
SUPERHOT game mode uses a predefined set of skills for the playable character, then applies SUPERHOT's ruleset to the gameplay by slowing down the action while being completely still and returning to full speed on movement, and also your character dies in one hit. To be honest, this type of gameplay doesn't fit Fury Unleashed's encounters. This game is about moving fast, baiting enemy attacks and using a variety of attacks to dispose of them. In SUPERHOT mode, melee attacks and fast movement become very dangerous (the latter because of environmental hazards), and that just takes the fun out of the game.
Crypt of the Necrodancer mode is even worse. The game claims that in this mode, you will run and attack to the beat of the music and that's not true. In terms of movement, the gameplay slows down and briefly returns the speed to normal on each music beat, resulting in a headache inducing movement. As for the attacks, they really never feel like they are in-sync with the music either, resulting in a horrible experience.

A very fun and even addicting twin-stick rogue-lite game, despite some shortcomings when it comes to RNG features. Although the gameplay's reliance on kill combos can turn many away from it.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Sometimes I play a game that has clearly taken inspirations from another wildly successful game, but does it so badly that not only makes me have no intention of finishing it anymore, but also makes me appreciate the qualities of the game it has taken inspirations from.
Tower Hunter: Erza's Trial is exactly that game. It has taken clear inspirations from Dead Cells, offering the same gameplay style and upgrade system. But the execution of these inspirations is clearly half-baked, and the innovations it adds to the mix takes the enjoyment out of it. And that is without mentioning some of its shortcomings and issues.

• This is a Chinese game and that always means trouble as games made by Chinese developers are notorious for having extremely broken English translations, resulting in purely nonsensical dialogues & item descriptions and questionable enemy names. So if you ever wondered why this game has a boss named EVIL LOLITA, this is why.
  
• The music is not fit for a rogue-lite game, especially one with such long levels. Instead of making sure the music tracks have decent length and enough quality to not get repetitive after hours of playtime, the game just plays them over and over again for extended periods of time, ultimately making them extremely tiring to listen to.
  
• The stereo sfx playback system is broken, playing some sounds on the wrong side of the headphones.
  
• The game is insanely and needlessly long. The game has over 6 levels with each having two long sections of their own and a boss fight at the end of them. This makes each death purely painful as you will need to do all of them from the beginning and the gameplay is nowhere as fast as Dead Cells.
  
• The level design is pure nonsense, feeling like a complete newbie designed the tiles used for the game's procedural generation system. There are shops in middle of the levels for no understandable reason, there are paths that literally go nowhere, there are platforms in locations where there shouldn't be any, and there are secret areas that get shown on the map for some reason and are completely empty when you get to them!
  
• The same thing applies to how the game handles the enemy placements. Instead of placing them in understandable locations to challenge the player, it just spams a lot of them together, even putting them in optional locked rooms.
  
• The bosses are underwhelming, even appearing less challenging than the normal enemies. All you need to do is to rush them down and hit them repeatedly, and they will die in about a minute.
  
• You cannot double jump after falling from a platform like in other games. If you fall down and try to jump to save yourself, Ezra will just do a flip in the air while continuing to go downwards.
  
• If a trap hits you from the bottom while you are in the air, like the spears in the third area, you will immediately fall down towards the trap and get him again. This will trap you in a damage loop and if you can't get out in time, you will be facing the game over screen.

The game takes Dead Cells' gameplay formula, but executes it in a very undercooked and flawed manner. Coupled with its numerous additional issues and shotcomings, I see no reason for you to try it.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

You know what's worse than playing a bad game? Playing a game that starts being awesome and then suddenly changes mid-way, turning into something that you do not enjoy anymore and leaves you bewildered as to why such a change was necessary.
Going Under is one of those games. A game that starts very well, managing to use its narrative features to gloss over its shortcomings and reel the players in, but fails to keep itself going and starts focusing on the wrong things as well.

Going Under is an enjoyable critique of current work culture dressed up as a game. The game's events happen in a world very similar to ours, with mega corporations that grow with each passing day, taking smaller companies and startups as their own and then doing whatever the hell they want with them. You start the game in the shoes of an unpaid intern named Jackie, who is assigned to an already struggling startup to do marketing, and gets entangled in a whole lot of stuff instead.
It's actually amazing how well this game handles work-related topics in our current world. The whole story and all of the dialogues are cleverly written commentaries of various topics such as corporate greed, workplace culture, startups, artificial intelligence and even overuse of the technology. In fact, some of the story events literally depict what we have seen happening around us and in bigger corporations in recent years.
And the game delivers these commentaries through clever jokes, well-done references and easter eggs, fine humor and a cast of likeable & colorful characters, with occasional drama to make you really feel what the main character's co-workers are going through. All of the characters you will see in this game have distinct personalities and mannerisms, to the point you can't help but constantly get reminded of real people who are currently working at a corporation or running it. Hell, some of these characters and what they told me even reminded me of people who are around me and are not even working a corporate job.
When it comes to easter eggs, Going Under has one of the best instances of hiding them or giving subtle nods. The game literally puts the easter eggs in front of your face but unless you are paying attention, you won't be able to identify them. And the things the game references with its easter eggs are wild, from other video games to actual people and even viral internet things that you would never expect seeing them in a game like this.
And the game needed such well-done narrative presentation, as the gameplay does not have any charms of its own to encourage players to carry on.

Despite what people are saying on this game's store page, I firmly believe Going Under is not a rogue-lite. This game is a beat'em up at its core, with rogue-lite elements sprinkled in to inject some variety to the gameplay. And honestly, they're not enough.
The meat of the gameplay consists of arriving at a dungeon and going through multiple rooms that are randomly put together by the game, each either containing enemies to fight, showing a specific optional task to do or offering you to pick up potentially helpful powerups and skills in forms of special rooms and shops. Your goal is to get to the ending room and fight a final wave of enemies for the first three floors of the dungeon, and then face the boss and beat them on the 4th floor. But you won't have access to weapons from the get-go; You have to pick up items that are scattered around the room and use them as weapons, and them maybe switch them with the actual weapons the enemies drop; either to get a better weapon or switch your currently damaged weapon before it breaks mid-combat.
However, contrary to what you might think, the combat is not fun. Despite the game offering the mentorship system (unlocking passive skills in exchange for mission completion), curses (temporary debuffs in exchange for items) and a boatload of skills to unlock, the combat is still very underdeveloped and the novelty of the whole thing quickly wears off. Because what you do through all of the available dungeons is literally the same thing and the optional missions sometimes are more infuriating & time-consuming rather than being challenging. That's why the narrative presentation is so strong. The game simply uses the story and the witty commentary to make you want to carry on with the gameplay.
The game does this for the first 4-6 hours, at which point you will finally feel the gameplay fatigue kicking in, with the story being unable to stop it. By this point in time, you have reached the mid-point of the game, awaiting the second half of the adventure to begin. But while you expect the game to reveal its next big thing and add something new to the gameplay, it just does something completely different, dramatically decreasing the value of the game in the process.

The second half of Going Under features one of the most severe quality nosedives I have ever seen in a video game. And I do not mean it has ♥♥♥♥ quality. The game just starts focusing on doing the opposite of what it was already doing, completely forgetting how it kept the experience going for so long.
Upon starting the second half of the game, you'll see a series of dramatic story events and then the quality of the game sharply drops afterwards. At this moment, the game completely stops being fun; because it changes its focus from what works for it to what doesn't work. If the first half of the game focused on carrying the gameplay through narrative, the second half tries to carry the narrative through gameplay by removing all of the story and dialogues, and locking them behind gameplay progression. There won't be any optional conversations with the NPCs or story cutscenes until the very end. If you want to see more of the story, you have to beat all of the dungeons again and reach the final boss. And that is without mentioning the difficulty spike you'll be facing.
In the second half of the game, you will be forced to run through harder versions of all of the past dungeons and bosses in order to access more story content and reach the ending. In each encounter, the game will throw more enemies at you with significantly increased health and more armor points, turning them into literal damage sponges. Meanwhile, you'll be using the very same set of abilities that you've been using since the start of the game. This makes the game unnecessarily hard and in the case of the second dungeon, even unfair & poorly designed. And that's where everything falls apart, because as I mentioned before, the gameplay gets incredibly stale after a while and it's the narrative and commentary that drives the players forward in the first half of the game. So, by switching the driving factor and not adding anything of value to it, the game completely loses its appeal.
And even if you power through and try to finish the game with all of the gameplay issues and frequent bugs (like curses becoming permanent, item descriptions getting messed up, optional missions becoming unbeatable, and more) your reward is a disappointing final boss and a lackluster ending, with the story being completely unable to salvage them. By this point I was completely burnt out and didn't even bother with the optional game mode the game offers you. Because honestly... I didn't want more of the same gameplay I was playing until that point.


Starts great as a charming & enjoyable game with clever commentary on corporations and work culture, then the quality sharply nosedives upon getting to the second half, changing the game for the worse.