The Craplands, ehem sorry. The Crashlands (Don't starve combat with a parody of bordeland's humor)

 I have often mocked the "kill monster to get stronger to kill monster" loop progression of action games, but now that I've seen Crashland's "kite monster for ten minutes a dozen times to get "stronger" to kite the same monsters for an even greater amount of time always on tiptoe of getting one-shotted" all of this on the combat mechanics stole from a game thats NOT about combat, literally the worst aspect of Don't Starve, and mashed with a forced "sarcastic" humor and terrible graphics, I have to say I'm sad to have wasted the three hours I put into this crap of a game 

Rotten Flesh (pixel look for your dog in the sewers game)

 Plot reminder: You just finished playing lost in vivo and for some reason you thought "hey wouldn't it be great if MY dog got lost in the sewers?" and then you tossed said dog in a manhole and said "OH ROY MY BOY WHERE ARE YOU" that's where the game starts.

 As it turns out there's a skin-eating monster that some lunatics summoned for some reason and then fed it with a bunch of skins so that it might take on human appearance, again I don't know why anyone would want that.

 Through the game we see about twenty dead people, plus ten photos of other people we assume "went missing" and even more that were ripped to pieces, yet none of those skins seem to have left the momo any closer to his alleged goal.

 In fact, he even seems to have given up because the sewers are full with unconsumed skins! He is like "I need more skins" dude, you got fifteen skins just around the corner, I just passed them! Pure capitalist monster, that one.

 Anyway, at the end of running around the sewers unsurprisingly it turns out the dog was dead. I suspect the whole game was made only to change lost in vivo's ending. 

Gamewise, it's just that running around and hiding to avoid the monster that's quite the camper for someone who's immune to bullets. 

Grim Realms (Grim Nights 2, build your base, fight the undead, that kind of thing game)

 

 I absolutely LOVED grim nights. Or at least that's what I remember. POINT IS: this is disastrous. I have never seen such a bad interface as this game has.

 The mechanics are overly complicated, much of them left unexplained, there could be a lot of quality of life automatization, the characters will simply NOT do as told, there are a lot of level restriction though it's not clear how to overcome them especially in harsher environments such as the mountains, as it currently stands (supposedly 1.0) it's unplayable.

 My predecessors had said that as your colony grows in size, so do the problems. I miss the old days, when things were simple. You didn't have a "research table", unnecessary constraints, cryptic missions or far-away voices. You dug for loot, you got them soldiers and killed the zeds that came from the east.

Less features please, MichaelSoft Binbows.

Void Bastards (When you don't know the answer to the test so you just put in whatever)

Like the room? Good. You'll be seeing it a lot. 

 Stealing graphics and mechanics from games like Borderlands and other FPS Void bastards gives the players a mish-mash of stealth/survival/action mechanics that are poorly balanced and lack any coherency.

 The absurdity of the setting and the quests rather than being funny or ingenious is dull and motivation-draining. It's like the developers are telling the players fart jokes and cheap puns over and over again.

 The combat is simply terrible, normally most old-school fashion FPS the enemy bullets are difficult to dodge but in a narrow hallway with no cover at all is simply impossible, same as trying to be stealthy.

 The enemy spawners ("rifts") couped with the limited oxygen seem to rush the player, but the limited ammunition, lack of enemy detection on the minimap and lack of efficient healing make this unviable, which drags each raid for twenty minutes. Looting its not satisfactory and the weapons you unlock are awful, like the awkward DPS dealing "stealth" rifle, that doesn't benefits from accuracy or the Rocket launcher type that ends up dealing more damage to you in the enclosed space of the ship than to the enemies, one of which is outright impervious to damage (screw). 

Dicefolk (pokemon meets dice mechanics)

  Again, the idea of the game isn't bad, but there's too much to polish in order to pick interest. There's too few poke-- err. Chimeras. There's too few chimeras to pick and the abilities they have are mostly useless, the survival mechanic in which you don't heal between fights is annoying and the enemies are always the same. 

 Edit 6/24: I found out it was actually made by the pokemon guys, in response to a very popular game that I didn't play named "palmworld" or something like that, pokemon guys were like "Hey! only us pokemon guys can make pokemon-like games!", so that went well. 

Intravenous (Kill junkies simulator)

Steve: *literally standing in the middle of the pathway*
mobs: WHY DON'T YOU COME OUT PUSSY!?

  Plot reminder: Some random junkies kill your brother just because, and you wake up full of thirst for blood and revenge.

 Fortunately, you are an ace sharpshooter which is purely coincidental. Also fortunately and not at all suspicious, after killing a few junkies in the effort to catch your brother's killer a person dubbed "the accomplice" offers you unlimited weapons and supplies of the sort, for free.

 After that there's three or four levels of you, killing hundreds of heavily armed men that this junkie who was mugging few dollars out of bypassers to score some dope somehow manages to hire and equip, until you reach and terminate him, after which you terminate the drug lord behind the supply line, and finally thanks to a very talkative hitman that one day breaks into your house you find out that "The accomplice" wasn't really an accomplice and was actually behind the whole thing. People these days, eh? You can't trust anyone. 

 This is all very standar in terms of vigilante '90s plot, not super interesting but good enough to kickstart the game and better than "some super deadly virus that brings people back from the dead somehow got out of a top-secret military research center and brought down the apocalypse".

 The gameplay is the good part, I can't say anything other than flawless. Sure, maybe there could be things to add, but I felt very immersed in this stealth-action game. 

Doom Breaker (Dude get's K'd by demon god but gets a re-do with all his knowledge and couple of skills, 101 chapters webtoon)

 To start off, and while apparently superfluous, very relevant, the artwork is great. I realized how important that is AFTER I finished reading Doom Breaker and end up reading some other webtoon and was deterred by the lifeless eyes and disproportionate limbs.

 Also, the fights are mostly discernable except a flash of lights here and there that's mandatory in a magic fantasy comic, which again may seem "duh" to anyone inexperienced that hasn't suffer from the dragon ballz like shonen "too fast for the eye to see" fights which is basically like looking at the Windows screensaver.

PR: Following the desire of power, presumably maybe they're just idiots, the Demon cult of the God of Destruction (are we the baddies?) summons this world-consuming entity after a few decades or centuries of thorough planification and effectively bring apocalypse onto the world.

 I say "idiots" because same as those super-villains hell-bent on destroying the world, they were left with nowhere to live.

 Anyway, like the saying goes the world is full of idiots and that means is full of Tartarus Worshippers (Tarts), it's like that racist guy in the online chats there's always at least one, but since the protag already knows the identity of these while having limited power (in theory) he manages to thwart a lot of the Tarts plans. As the story left, he had to slay all the dragons in the world to acquire enough raw power to fend off the inevitable demon invasion. 

While far from original the story read easy and it's entertaining, coupled with good art and decent/neutral characters (non-hateable) it's one of the best manhwas I've read 8/10

 

The Gods' Game by Rohan Vile- ehem. Rohan Vider (Dude gets swoop into the, well, gods' game and tries to fight his way to freedom.)

 3/24

 We LitRPG/Isekai/Fantasy readers know that the "against the heavens" plot is nothing particularly new to humankind and much less to fantasy setting where for some reason or other the gods tend to be either tyrants or jerks, wonder what gave authors the idea. Mysteries of life I suppose.

 What's also not particularly new is how much of a resounding failure most of these stories are. For once, while at first (few pages) the protagonist tends to be in a precarious situation that improves quickly and drastically, usually by some overpowered skill or some game breaking artifact, like Failure Frame or Arifureta.

 While this may seem inconsequential feeling that the character is never in fatal danger takes the edge of the books, but surprisingly in the Gods' Game the protagonist manages to have a procedural and natural skill evolution that gives him enough force to fight his enemies but not nearly to forget that he's fighting an overwhelming force that has rooted itself for the last few eons.

 While the good-nature, straight black-or-white moral compass of the MC is not my cup of tea it feels much more natural that other more edgy characters like the ones in the aforementioned books, and I have come to sympathize with Kyran. Though it may have some to do with him always taking the hard path which is funnier to read that a "not get involved '', probably more realistic character.

 Another good implementation that Rohan has made is the casting of spells and the sort with italicized letters (Mirien shadow stepped, Aiken stone dived), instead of simply saying "attack" and "strike" over and over again or having the poor characters having to shout the name of their skills like a bunch of tards.

 I hold my judgement on world-building since this topic is developed through small dialogues between battles instead of lore-dumps so it's still insufficient knowledge as to volume 5, but so far so good. It's interesting that some races are favored by certain gods and more commonly found in their domains or vice-versa, giving a visual aid to the God's personalities and aesthetic tastes.

 I would argue that despite the novel being power almost solely by these Gods after a thousand pages there's little we readers know about them except that they are ruthless and pretty much bad news, but the non-godly characters get enough development and are lifelike and interesting, from the most notorious ones such as Zarr and Mirien to less relevant ones like the dwarf Hamen and the ogre... whose name I don't remember. Myruk? Anyway, great reading, five volumes in less than a week binge for me. I have rarely seen such great display of epic fiction as I did in these series. I hope, though it's a distant hope, that the author will continue the series. Since he's left it at what I reckon would be a third of the full story, I can't give it a full ten, but a solid 9/10