Still wakes the deep ("You drilled too deep!" kind of horror story, some influences from the Thing)

 PR: It was a normal day for Scottish short-fused but good with "the lecky" Caz in his oil rig nepotism gig, doing what he does best: whining about possible divorce and getting fired. Fortunatly insta-karma hit the boss instantly as in one of "what are the odds" moment, they happen to drill into an eldrich monster. They have been operating for months, no prob, prota get fired? Naw bruh.

 Pretty much everything explodes and starts collapsing as Caz goes around putting out fires, literally in some cases, and changing fuses all the while getting chased by different turned-to-tentacly-monster coworkers that look all very similar between themselves in that "Carrion" game monster fashion, although to be fair it's hard to see them in most occasions since the game is so dimly lit. Two days pass and a lot of people die as the monster which is a glowy mass of pulsating flesh basically, expand through the rig and even makes this portal-like bio-structure surrounding the drill that has some kind of magnetic force or something, eventually Caz admits defeat and blows up the rig in the hopes that fire will kill the underwater monster. Sad music, sad wife sending hopeful letter, gamers sobbing for some reason, the end. 

 Still Wakes the Deep takes its name after a poem they display in the game, fortunatly the only note, but I didn't understood it so I can't make comments on that. What I can say is that the greatest strenght and basically the only really good thing about the game is the visuals, the monster and the ambiance is thick and disgusting, but at the very end they manage to pull a "beauty of horror" which again eas a visual effort, the water is very detailed and the rig is realistic, funny enough the worst part of the visuals are the monsters themselves. The gameplay is a mish-mash of quick-events, pseudo-plataforming, valve-turning and lots of hiding in vents, which is an effort to add a little thrill to what's primarly a walking simulator.

 In my opinion the very worst aspect of the game is the story; a copy-paste from different lovecraftian sources adding zero explanation or depth to the eldritch abomination other than what you can deduce out of visuals, the characters come out as a bit flat as the effort to make them more realistic makes most the exchanges too mundane to make out any distinctive traits, and overall you spend much more time running around and throwing bottles to distract enemies than getting attached to the characters we're supposed to be sad to see die. Particulary the protagonist, whose only distinct characteristing is being bad-mouthed. 

Iratus, Lord of the dead (Hanz... Are we the good guys?)

PR; A powerful necromancer bent on world domination for no good reason other than needing something to do with his immortality, gets defeated by some nameless heroes.

 Fortunately for him, a bunch of miners think that cracking open the chained box in a crypt they found hidden in the depths of the earth, the one surrounded by glyphs and literal skulls warning of the danger inside it, is a good idea.

 And with that classic mumm-ra like "the evil shall prevail", Iratus is back in action.

 He assembles a few minions and sets out to dominate the world, hoping this age's heroes are less impressive.

 At least now he has revenge in case he needs to file a reason as to why is he doing all he's doing.

 Now, the game claims you (Iratus) are killing "the good guys" yet I've been paying attention and in order we've killed; Slavers, ogres, mercenaries, warmongers, berserkers, shady/ black market merchants, human experimenting crazy scientists, religion fanatics (the type that burn people for thinking differently), sadists, monsters, dragons... Are we the good guys? 

KeeperRL (Pretend to be a dungeon keeper, get bored and try to dominate the world)

Incredibly frustrating, keeperRL lacks balance throughout. Archers decimate your trained troops like nothing and there's nothing you can do about it, villagers destroy your minions like target practice or get slaughtered without even being able to put up a fight. Dungeon building is pointless, as no one raids your dungeon, and basically you'll find yourself waiting to recover troops, to wage an attrition war against some overleveled openent in the overworld map. 

Ravenous Devils (Just a restorant simulator with cannibal theme)

 ...that doesn't really affects gameplay. I mean, sure. You have a guy killing costumers that just walk in like lambs to the slughter and has the wife dumping them into the meat mincer, everything is covered in blood and whem you click theres a bloody splash.

 You do have to mop up the murder-blood though, guess that's the one that matters. The recipies are very basic to the point I got (not too far), no cooking minigames, no actual meat processing, no careful victim picking, no throughly using the body... I think that the only crime the protagonists of this game commit, that I can believe anyways, is selling used clothes at full price. Certainly not what I was expecting.

Demon's mirror (Connect three slay the spire)

 PR: Some dude hears about a mirror that grants wishes. Ellipsis. The same dude finds said mirror while walking through the forest, in a completely coincidental encounter. It just puffed into existence, how convenient. The mirror then teleports him to a roguelike deckbuilding parallel world filled with monsters. I would've asked for money or fame but maybe the guy's a masochist or something, reminds me of that one school mate that kept saying he'd love to live in a zombie apocalypse. 

"Wulf", "Drago", "Axo", yeah. Those are the names of the anthropomorphic creatures you'll be playing as in a rather fixated gameplay marked by their traits, and while there's some flexibility the cards themselves clearly indicate to you that there's a prefered playstyle associated with each character.

 Now what surprised me is how incredibly dragged fights become, easily being ten minutes each battle with enemies that have less than 100 HP, sometimes even less than 50 HP, due the terribly underwhelming damage you can inflict upon them.

 While it takes enormous wind up and five minutes alting between the Power-Crystal and Green-Essence all to get that 150% extra damage and half the board with the Swordy icons to deal about 30 damage, the enemy especially the elites throw sixty damage timebombs, debuffs and board breaking effects while attacking you for more than ten damage each turn like nothing, and given the max HP is sixty with near to no healing between battles the game forces you into defensive positions making battles too protracted to be enjoyable, especially considering that most the cards are very situational and relics are nighly useless, like the one that gives you 1 HP when you play a "power" card, the type that costs a lot of energy to play, can only be played once per battle and are quite rare on top of that. 

Necroking (Pixel auto-battler looping deck builder)

 PR: The dead were chillin' in their caskets until evil king comes around and tries to enslave them, that's when the freedom fighter lich assembles his army to kill the king, then kill him again, then again and then one more time. There are few intermissions where you help a certain NPC in special biomes in exchange for special units, though most of the time it's better to stick to basic units plus one or two specials rather than make contrived builds.

 The game has good graphics and it's entertaining for a couple hours, but IMO it overuses the "princess is in another castle" resource and shamelessly recicles the end-boss. It could use more content as like I said you're stuck with same-looking units plus a few unlocks you get through special currency mini-bosses drop. The "bone" supply mechanism is broken since at first it is annoying and a little later you have enough to throw to the ceiling, it would be best to just remove it. Promesing, but ultimately not developed enough to be memorable.

Spin Hero (Fantasy gacha)

I'll be honest I wasn't expecting much of this "luck be your landlord", slot-machine based gameplay I saw on the trailer.

 I was a bit surprised at finding out there's not much to the game other than spinning the wheel, given that the characters have near to none unique characteristics and are more a jack-of-all-trades type of adventurers, plused to the rather confusing slot machine mechanics that have so many drawings it makes it difficult to follow.

 I often find myself wondering why I got seventy armor in one turn and barely twenty the next given I had over ten armor items, but I suppose these micro-calculations and RNG are at fault.

 I didn't find the game engaging as it is simply crossing fingers and hoping that luck will favor you in every roll, that it will give you the items that you need for the difficulty spike at scenario three, not much else to do. 

Hatred (Angry dude kills people. Wait, Peter Steele? IS THAT YOU??)

PR: Some angry dude, whose anger is completely unexplained, goes out and kills a lot of random people just because he's angry at something.

 Fortunately for his, let's say, less than thorough planning, he has the ability to heal his wounds by executing people who are so stupid that they literally run towards the armed maniac instead of hiding or going away.

 I'm not commenting on the underdeveloped story, what I think made Hatred a subpar game is that the actual shooting and action is completely unrealistic. The dude ends the episode with more lead than flesh and resurrects in fashions that'd put Michael Myers to shame, people run around like headless chickens, and the police AI is set to run straight to the protagonist instead of taking cover, surrounding, flanking, or doing anything remotely intelligent.

 I believe that unless they add some sort of supernatural explanation like "lich/demon collecting souls" or something like that, the "kill to heal" mechanic subtracts rather than add. 

 

Empires of Undergrowth ("Scientists": SEVEN ANT COLONIES--- ONE ARENA. JOIN FORCES OR TOTAL ANNIHILATION??)

Yes, it's real.

 The game MOSTLY comes true to what it promised, it is indeed an RTS ant colony-builder, even if you control an unrealistically small number of ants in a battle for survival.

 What didn't click with me is the strange, level-based progression. I expected a mostly linear progression where you started as a small colony and slowly extended your influence towards other parts of the map, probably with some sort of central hub and small frontier battle nests, somewhat similar to Age of Empires but ants.

 Or at the very least to be some kind of meta that enables you to build up to something, even if it's just starting with a couple more ants. But every level starts with two ants and a pack of seeds nearby.

 The meta is non-existent, there's this thing where you build a custom nest to survive the scientists "experiments", which mostly consist on tossing a bunch of random mobs near your colony that surprisingly seem to put their differences to a side while dealing with you, but it's frankly BS and simply not what they advertised on the trailer. 

Is it decent? Yes, it's kinda fun to see your utterly disarticulated forces getting trashed around by some random beetle, then the same beetle getting swarmed by the ant reinforcement that hatched fully grown out of the eggs and hive-mindly went to his location. Perhaps they were a bit bold in calling it "documentary-like".

 Is it what I, or others for that matter, would've expected after more than six years of development? Certainly not. Sure, enemies have a distinct feeling to each other, but your only available strategy is to swarm the enemy, so it doesn't get me very engaged. 

Rogue Waters (Jack sparrow, is that you???)

 

That's Jack Sparrow minus the dreadlocks.

PR: When Captain Cutter, or well, first mate at the moment, gets told by Black... Err, well, I don't remember what his name was, but basically Blackbeard, to scoop the eye of some glowing statue of a sea goddess, he decides to blindly (heh) trust him, which cost him his eye as the scooped piece of jewelry flies straight to his face and replaces his biological eye.

 I don't know exactly how since I skipped a lot around the text, but Blackbeard has betrayed Cutter and now Cutter promised to exert revenge with the aid of his not-so-dead crew and the voice in his head, perk of the cursed stone-eye. Personally, if betraying means "granting immortality and control over mythical sea monsters", please betray me. I'm all in for betrayal! 

The game has three stages, one (the least relevant) where you pick your route like in every roguelike ever, especially deckbuilding roguelikes. This isn't very important as most times you pick between a very crappy option and a very good one, like "reward one: Cursed boots, plus one movement minus three max HP, reward two: two more pirates in the boarding phase", the second stage where you exchange cannon fire with the enemies, not my favorite one although the sound effects of cannons is kinda cool, where you measure what's better, if take advantages from the enemies or losing some of your own, and the third and main one which is a turn based, tactical slightly puzzle-like hand-to-hand combat.

Imagine tactical breach wizards, but it's actually good

Like some of my predecessors have pointed out, what plagues the game is lack of variety, the devs went for a roguelite experience when the actual content they had was for a linear RPG, counting barely five units, out of which only two are good, and enemies that behave very much alike.

 Fun, but not exactly groundbreaking: the kind of Jack Sparrow movies meets... Eh, well, I can't find it.

 There was a game about bouncing enemies against the walls for extra damage but I don't remember the name.

 Future me, if you remember, please edit.  Let's just say Jack Sparrow meets Slay the Spire meets Mutant Year Zero, sort of.

(edit three days later: The game you were thinking about is "Knights in Tight Spaces", but it hasn't even come out yet, so it's not an X meets Y)

This is actually a sequel to a game called "Fights in tight spaces," but I didn't know that at the time.

Zero Sievert (So frustrating that makes dark souls feel rewarding)

 

Looks great, but Zero Fun.

                                                   

 I don't often find myself waiting two weeks for a game to be released, so that should speak plenty about how many expectations I had. Well, expectations not met.

 Zero Sievert has three terrible issues (Some of which I already saw coming in the Chinese copy, Night Raider)

1- RNG dependency and fetch quests: I spent FIVE HOURS in the first mission alone, first steps, because I couldn't find five wolves to kill. I wiped the entire Lazar base, the other military one, killed a thousand boars and other etceteras, but no wolves.

 The second quest was to fetch "premium toilet paper" which I found insulting rather than funny, and after three village sweeps, I still couldn't find it.

 Weapons come with no modules, so the "most complex gunsmithing I've ever seen" that one of the reviewers spoke of is nowhere to be seen.

 To build anything, you need different types of scrap in ludicrous amounts, like 700 metal scrap, 300 food scrap, 500 weapon scrap, and so on. But you can't scrap anything, and the scraps you find in the wilderness never exceed twenty. You would need over a hundred raids only to build the workshop and see if it really lets you scrap things! And that's assuming you actually get the type of scraps you need.

2- Crazy, buggy difficulty: Zero Sievert is not a difficult game; it's just broken. The armor doesn't protect you, and the enemy bullets drain between half and a fourth of your HP, and given that they mostly use assault rifles, you get killed in a single burst.

 To compensate for this, I used the sniper rifle that sometimes kills enemies in one shot, sometimes it needs like five (up to RNGesus), but enemies still occasionally blindsided me (I was hiding in the dark, on the border of the screen), launching an unprecise burst that still killed me.

 Other enemies, such as wolves and ghouls, are extremely annoying and can sit in the middle of the character's hitbox, making it impossible to hit while dealing massive damage, sometimes killing you in one second. As long as these absurdities don't happen, like I said, it's possible to wipe high-grade mini-boss enemies with nothing but the base rifle (the one you buy) and some ammo. 

3- All that grind, and for what? The game makes you grind like crazy, by the time I quit, I had millions on top of millions of ruples and nothing to spend them on. There's no armor upgrade, no weapon mod shop, no stats improving juice, no weapon repair shop, well. No nothing, really. Only meds and bullets, at a very high price, may I add.

 I felt like I was being ripped off every time I had to make a purchase, with those +1000% price multipliers (over the selling value). Literally sold medkit for 600 ruples and got it sold back to me at 6000, friggin' insane. There's a perk system, but it's bullshit, really, a waste of time. (Things like "+5% sell value, throw granades 30% faster, carry five more kg...)

Additionally, Zero Sievert has other minor problems (comparatively) 

- Lack of weapon variety

- Lack of weapon balance

- No melee

- No stealth

- No enemy variety (having the player differentiate them by color when said colors are dark brown, light brown, and black is plain stupid)

- No real survival, just ticking clock

- Annoying radiation system

- Annoying slow looting system, one to two seconds per discovered item, most of which are useless trash. Some are literal trash.

- Annoying durability system that makes weapons jam and armor even less protective, with no practical way to repair them.

Amnesia the Bunker (Amnesia but you don't have amnesia and the monster is a hairless overgrown mole-dog)

"Glowy pond water from ruins bad for health, would not recommend" -Monster

Ok, the plot is a bit of a mess and like other horror games is all spreaded through notes, this is what I picked up

PR: During WWI a bunch of frenchies get gassed by the germans because they tried to apply trench warfare but dug it too deep (like fifteen feet or so) with no steps so it was the german soldiers getting cover and high ground instead of the french, foreshadowing that they're a bunch of idiots (At least this particular division). Some dude whose name I don't remember but it was something like Lambert saves the prota from dying and takes him to "safety" to the bunker, where the soldiers pretty much forget there's a war going about and simply demand casks of wine to spend their time.

 Weeks pass by and with nothing interesting to do, no war to wage you know, they accidently discover a hidden tunnel that leads into "the realm of darkness" where soldiers that pass through there had "the inhebriating orgiastic desire for sex and blood" linger in their minds. If only there was a way to quench their thirst for murder by, oh I don't know, do their damn jobs? Lambert gets the friggin' idiot star when, even though he was less than fifty feet away from the bunker and potable water, he decides to drink from some weird turquoise glowy puddle near the ruins-tunnel, just for the kicks of it.

 After whining about not being able to give some ugly stuffed toy to his son, about being too alone in the bunker without his only friend the prota (How selfish of him taking so long to recuperate from getting gassed), he suddenly starts saying how he's growing blistery gnarled claws and wants to kill people, so that escaletad quickly! Guess the french have a predisposition for "the dark", having invented butthole liking and all. Anyways, the prota comes and goes through the bunker collecting awfully written notes and codes that for the most part just open junk lockers, all this while avoiding swarms of rats that follow him around like he's the pied piper or something, eventually "killing" the monster with the morally disgusting tactic of luring him with the rabbit toy then toss a granade so that the bridge collapses, and he escapes the bunker only to be captured by enemy forces. Lame. 

 I'm not a sucker for old nostalgia games, Amnesia the dark descent wasn't all that good especially in later stages as you found more about the "story", but it was creative and pretty decent. Now amnesia games after that were just steal money with the dead man's name, literally a downhill into shitty games with overly-simplistic themes, specially Rebirth and this crap.

 The monster is basically a failed pug breed with grey mole, not very scary per se and on top of that he spawns at every corner so what little fright may such a lazy main monster inflict gets watered down through the six-hour gameplay, and funny enough players have died more to rats than to the monster which speaks lots of the rat balance. The gameplay is just running around in a boring, gray bunker with no horror elements until the very end in a extremely linear fashion, collecting gas that's never enough for the generator that's supposed to keep the monster away but literally does nothing as the monster strolls around at leisure, cranking up three times one of those awful noisy manual flashlights that nobody wants every fifteen seconds and hiding through the clealy sequenced monster apparitions. The story is underwhelming and basically a creepypasta, and the ending is just "meh", I'd make sure to avoid "amnesia" titles in the future. 

Lucky tower ultimate (Insert game to continue)

As bad as it looks

 PR: You went to take a dump and suddenly got teleported to the trap tower of some surprisingly nice wizard. You see a lot but don't remember it, so the premise of the game is that depending on luck (rng really) you can get unique playthroughs with varying difficulty but as it stands the game is just a barebones platformer.

 There's no real change whether you get the sword, the broom or nothing as striking the enemies with your fist is easier, the two hands inventory is awkward and unnecessary, as it adds nothing except maybe an annoying "getting used to controls" throwing away what you shouldn't, and swapping the stuff around instead of using it.

 I think that not only is it horrible, but that it shows no promise at all. 

World of horror (Junji Ito better be getting some money out of this)

Oh, woman with teeth instead of a face. Haven't seen that one before...

Imagine if you literally stole Junji Ito's work, the stories, the art, everything, and then added some shitty "combat" mechanics which is basically click on "kick" until the enemy dies, then seeing as the "game" needs more content you blatantly steal from H.P. lovecraft "old gods" and jam in some crappy Japanese creppy-pasta, put on a fifteen dollar tag and call it a day.

 That's right, you'd be getting WORLD OF HORROR (full caps), where a "TALL woman with SCISSORS" is called an eldritch abomination, an unspeakable horror that needs to be put down.

 "THERE HAS BEEN STRANGE SIGHTING IN THE TOWN, SUCH AS TALL WOMEN WITH SCISSORS WITHIN SCHOOL PREMISES", bruh if that's the town's newspaper headlines it's time to go digital, which is another nonsense of the plot, they literally say "In this era, the digital has grant us relief, but also awaken new problems, like hooded men performing rituals to summon ancient gods that threaten to shatter reality". WHAT. What's one thing have to do with the other!?

 Honestly, they should've gone for the visual novel style rather than the RPG because the random events and the combat are so frustrating. Let me explain:

 You don't have HP, you have STAMINA and REASON. Random events (as far as I got) have an unavoidable 80% chance of draining one or two of either, and you get about four of those; there's no "choice" that doesn't drain you, and there's no positive outcomes that I could see, other than some small XP boost.

 Then you get about three enemy encounters that between kicking and punching drain about two or three of both reason and stamina, giving you in return again a small XP boost, you can also get injuries in these random events I got like three of them in just one "mystery" (the mystery of the ramen that has gone bad, booo), so you solve the damn mystery, so to speak, go back to your house and take a bath, recovering one reason or one stamina. You've lost eight to twelve points and regained just one, plus now you've got all these injuries that'll make other encounters more difficult.

 Who thought this was a finished, polished product!? 

FAITH: The Unholy Trinity (The exorcist but it's Commodore 64)

PR: The worst exorcist in history, Father Garcia, apparently manages to turn a regular exorcism into bonding a demon to the material plane, then not happy with botching that one up, goes along and manages to throw the ball so far off the field with this Anny girl that prota (blue guy, us) have to go back and fix it up. Apparently, we're quite incompetent too, since there are five endings to chapter one and none is actually exorcising the girl. Guess that's what you'd expect from a priest whose only ability is to hold a cross up. 

The game takes the innovative uptake of 1980's 8-bit computer graphics, which enables certain forms of ambiance and horror to be more effective. Overall, while the game isn't very impressive and quite cliché plot-wise, the bizarre atmosphere and the cool pixel art make up for it. The sound is very important, also. 

DICEOMANCER (For you cheaters out there, developers made changing numbers into an actual game)

 PR: You have the ability to change certain numbers with your d6, so you take on the epic quest of killing the mega-boss who's immune to that effect obvs. Why you doing this? Apparently, "reality" started collapsing as you alter the numbers, and now a "purple mist" is chasing after you, the big boss being at the opposite end for some reason. 

The game art is real good, a comic-book meme-ish style which was very fun to play in this card-builder. The upgrades came a bit slowly, but I'm satisfied with the progression and even though there aren't many enemies I think it's because the game is supposed to be short.

 The dice mechanics were a bit hard to exploit in other ways than adding some mana or reducing enemy HP. Also, there's almost no healing cards but there's a bunch of self-damaging ones, which seems like a balancing issue to me. 

Morrowind (A 2002 game that looks like it's 1998, was developed for PC but plays as a tabletop and somehow feels like it's the pre-early access, beta version of Oblivion)

I'll go ahead and say it: Morrowind is not "bethesda's last hope", it's not the "elder scrolls best release", it's bad and outdated, plain and simple. 

The cities, that are really one house copy-pasted a dozen times, are the most complex scenery you'll see.

The books, as far as I got, have terrible writing. They go nowhere and are plagued with two-dimensional characters that barely make sense, following a series of racist archetypes such as the orc woman that marries her cell keeper because he simply asked and he seemed like a strong man to her, or the wild khajiit that steal money and launch ambush attacks, or the dhamer whose only purpose is to declare how superior dhamers are to other races.

 I'm not a social justice warrior, I wouldn't care if the characters were racists if it made sense instead of being a poor excuse to copy-paste archetypes and save the time of actually designing characters.

The combat is atrocious, I was so frustrated with my summoner build that could only summon one thing a couple times before running out of mana (no mana regen, can't find mana potions BTW) that I went to the weapon dealer and tried EVERY WEAPON. Throwing knives, ninja stars, bow and arrow, sword, claymore, dagger... Most things simply phased through the enemy without damaging it.

 It took me some time to figure out that there are "to-hit checks", so they were "dodging" my attack. Like many have said before me, putting to-hit checks on a real-time RPG is a bad idea, and completely counter-immersive. With the fail chances of magic attacks and the no-regeneration policy, playing as a mage is unviable, and with the nonexistent stealth, archery is basically an underpowered melee.

 Alchemy needs you to carry with you a thousand-pound equipment set around, and the potions themselves are only so useful. It's better to just cram a bulk-load of alcohol and beat the enemies with an axe. Enchanting is the same, better to just pay someone else to do it instead of very slowly leveling your own enchanting with all the trouble that getting the soul gems is. 

The landscapes are barren, basically just endless wastelands through which you can't run because of your limited stamina, which affects every aspect of the game. You tried to hurry and run past that giant gray dust bowl? If you ran into a couple of cliff racers and you're dead meat. Even mods can only do so much to improve the boring wilderness. 

Bugs. BUGS EVERYWHERE! Getting stuck on doors, getting stuck on walls, key items disappearing... On top of other defects, such as giant dwemer ruins with nothing but dead ends, annoying enemies that instantly heal the damage you make. Honestly, I don't know what the elder scroll community sees in this garbage, but sure as hell I can't see it.

Endoparasitic (Dumb scientists get killed cause they're so dumb)

I was reluctant to a gameplay that consisted of dragging the dude around.

  So everyone was like "endoparasitic this, endoparasitic that," so I gave it a go. 

PR: "Scientists" on a moon get a shipment of "mind parasites" that produce "spontaneous mutations and death" on the targets they infect, so they do what every sane person would do: They order 1000 CRATES OF THE THINGS. Yeah. But that's not all, apparently amidst the "scientistic method" of infecting random things and seeing what happens, the "hey, what happens if we infect a monkey with it?", "Hey, what happens if we infect mice with it?" and other etceteras, one of the docs goes crazy and has a dream about needing to infect himself with the worms, you know the ones that cause random mutations and death.

 The other jackasses at the facility are so idiotic that they fail to contain the breach, even though a friggin' disabled, near-dead dude dragging himself with his one hand, the only limb he has left, can kill 'em infected by the dozen.

 The game follows said dude, who needs to inject himself with "the vaccine" periodically to stave off the mind worms. Last time I checked, that wasn't how vaccines work, but, well, I'M NOT A SCIENTIST,  LUCKILY. 

 The game itself is pretty simple, not really my cup of tea, but I suppose it's fine for such a small project. For me, it was pretty frustrating, and the controls are simply not responsive enough for what the situation demands.

 In particular the "rat" enemy, you need to let it see you and quickly switch to the handgun with barely a millisecond to aim in the broad direction of the thing and shoot before it vanishes out of sight. It's ten times faster than you, so good luck trying to outrun it.

 If you have the patience to get used to the controls, maybe. But for me, there isn't anything compelling enough to stay. 

Slime 3K: Rise Against Despot ("I can't see 'cause you clogged the damn screen with mobs": survivors)

 

 Okay, for those who don't know, the Despot game was a failed premise of "your humans are expendable" when they were not, so now they try to rectify that error by having this slime monster killing humans by the thousands.

 I mean it, at level three, not even that far in, I had to quit playing 'cause the devs spammed the damn things and it made the game extremely laggy. Even if "Rise Against the Despot" didn't have that huge, flagrant issue, I think that they arrived late to the survivors' wave. They add nothing to the genre, other than having you travel the map looking for these randomly spawning shop machines, buying and merging, but not too much because you soon realize that you get RNG blocked if you try to go any further than tier three. 

Potion Tycoon (where's my alchemy???)

Hotel manager, anyone?

I've been promised that I'd get to do alchemy yet I was constantly blocked by the tycoon puzzles that I couldn't solve, balancing quality and price with enough variety to satisfy costumers... I couldn't solve them, either. It's like since I don't have enough initial budget I can't get the materials and infrastructure to satisfy the costumers the game keeps throwing at me. Honestly, no idea. Might be good managing game, but is the worse for those looking for alchemy. 

Literally tossing those toast looking bubbles into the purple goop following a recipy. That's it. 

Sand: A Superfluous Game (Sand: nothing but sand, insert: "hands of dispair" sand meme)

 The developer likes to pretend that the game is full of content, but I've played it for hours and the loop is killing the same three skeleton enemies over and over, then grind cacti for water.

 Upgrades and tech are basically useless, armor is useless, the magical powers look flashy but are terrible, the ranged combat with five little damage bullets that you have to retrieve like it's a nerf dart fight... The only viable gameplay is melee which is basically just clashing the enemy until they die. I'm not sure what the dev envisioned, but this has dozens of mechanics yet is devoid of content. 

ZED ZONE (When your character is uglier than the zombies)

This game is a complete mess, both graphically and mechanically.

 It's like the chinese version of Proyect Zomboid. It's a sore to the eye, when I google it it looked smooth and pixel-arty but when I played it, man... it's like every pixel is rendered differently so you have to guess where you are, where you're going and OMG why the character moves like he's stomping on something?

 The drops are nonesense, five minutes in and I got an antimater rifle out of a random zombie outside a convinence store in the middle of nowhere.

 The map is empty, the survival mechanics are placeholders since zombs drop everything you need to keep alive, the combat is dull, and a thousand different etceteras. 

V Rising (blue collar rising)

 

Killed the same bandits at the same camp 10 times in my three-hour playthrough. Bullshit rising

More like B Rising. As in "blue collar rising," because that's basically the game.

 You're a lumberman, or a stonemason who can't work during the day because you burst into flames, but you can't skip time even when "sleeping," so basically you wait for time to pass so you can chop more wood or dig some minerals.

 Why can't you just buy things? Good question. Why can't you enslave humans to do the dirty job for you, the alleged prince of the night? Because what's cooler than a vamp on a lumberjack shirt!

 Also, the respawn of "v blood" boss enemies is absolute BS, I don't know what the point is as they don't have special drops or anything, and it just feels like you're toiling for nothing. While tracking a certain enemy, I stumbled upon a higher-ranked miniboss and killed it, only for it to respawn again on my way again literally two minutes after.

 Also, the "build your castle" thing? Yeah, more like build your own crappy shack with crumbly palisade walls, there's not even an "add roof" option, you have to use a "mist creator" like a fucking edgelord instead of building a damn roof.

 

Zelter (Chinese zombie game about trying to figure out why a slingshot is more effective than an axe)

 Disclaimer, this game has been abandoned by its creator. Not even papa loves him. 

PR: "THE GOVERNMENT" collapsed due zombie virus ravaging the cities, they try all the cliché stuff like making blockades and throwing bombs at random city spots failing miserably like they always do.

 Fortunately, they come up with the smartest thing a government can do in a zombie apocalypse:  Sending average joes, unarmed and unarmored with nothing but a bottle of water into the middle of an infected city and task them to rescue as many citizens as they can in three days.

 It's always the Rick Grimes of the world that manage to do what the united specialists of the world can't, so why bother right? 

 Gameplay-wise, the scavenging is garbage (pun intended) as you smash things around like you're friggin' incredible Hulk or something. Why can't you just open the car's door instead of punching it like an autistic maniac?

The combat is incredibly frustrating and it lacks any finesse.

 Basically you shoot pebbles at the zeds while running around trying not to get hit, but it feels like it was designed for head-on clashes given this "tactic" isn't viable in melee.

I haven't fun any guns or ammo in my playthough

 As far as I got the zombies are very common, there's the CQC one, the ranged vile spitting one and the exploding one that  isn't really a threat. Honestly, I could have given it a chance had it not been for the ridiculous, utterly preposterous idea of going around armed with stone weapons like a friggin primitive. 

Dandy Ace (Skill card action roguelike)

If you think that the anime hotties are honey trap for the geeks, I wouldn't be able to disprove you.

 PR: Presumably evil trick mage gets angry at Dandy because he stole his clients, in my opinion simply due Dandy being blonde and pretty with bunny girl assistants and Evil mage being pot-belly hook-nose ugly, which against leads us to think that morality is a matter of aesthetics.

 Evil mage sells his soul to trap Dandy but for some reason instead of torturing him for all eternity or something like that he creates a maze of minions that nourish Dandy's power all the way to his chambers where he has to fight him as the end boss.

 Maybe Evil mage was a fan or Roguelikes or something, idk.

 The game is pretty fine except that the loop is too closed in my opinion. While the card swapping and different effects are cool, there's a rather limited amount before the grind begins and you're stuck with the same two, three cards. 

Lucius II (Imagine "the omen" but's a really bad game)

 

 Now, before you ask, no, I didn't play the first game because I didn't find it, they made a "demake," which is a ridiculous concept, and that pretty much redirected all my searches.

 I won't speak much of the plot since there isn't much of a plot to speak of, it's basically the Omen, but you play as demon boy.

 It's worth noting that all his "disciples" apparently commit suicide, so they're useless. With disciples like that, no wonders god banished him to hell.

 Anyways, the game advertises that you'll be able to unleash hell's wrath upon the mortal realm and gather some sort of demonic cohort, but the only thing you do in the game is key hunting and toss "poisoned donuts" around (they're pill.jpeg superposed to donut-box.jpeg).

 The other killing methods are rather unresponsive or require unrealistic micromanagement. Instead of taking a lighter with you, you need to lure the vic near a stove (by, like, throwing in a sandwich like it's a damn dog or an ant) in order to set the combustible on fire, which of course is ridiculous.

 Plain boring and unimaginative, even the powers are lame. Two-second mind control, wow... 

Night Raider (chinese zombie Zero Sievert knock-off)

When the knock-off is better than the original

 PR: You're in a camp, and you're told that you need to go gather supplies that they obviously don't need by scavenging a zombie-filled town.

 I tried asking the trainer/drill sergeant for quests and he gave nothing, since there isn't a open interface tutorial I played for several hours thinking that there were no missions at all, by the time I found out, I was sick of the "Go to the city, pocket all you can, return and sell everything to afford resupplying" loop, so I tried to rush the missions but they were mostly fetch quest that in the grindy RNG dependant loot pools make them drag out a lot.

 It's very frustrating that the store layouts and even the enemy locations are always the same, making the grind even more tedious. The combat ranges from annoyingly simple and easy to "how TF am I supposed to beat this", to which answer is you have to grind for a scope and kill the enemies with over-the-horizon strikes, it's one of those games where, as long as you keep the enemy out of range, you're invincible. Yes, exactly like Zero Sievert.

 Most bosses are too bullet sponge for my taste, some taking several mags to kill. Overall, I'd say it's a game that took the grind for things concept too far, making you check the same containers hundreds of times with no assurance that you'll get what you need. I was so excited to get the PC upgrade to use my millions (of gold coins I think it was the currency?)  to purchase the damn stuff I needed instead of grinding for it, only to find out in the comments that to purchase things you need to grind for golden credit cards, which IMO defeats the purpose of having a shop in a first place.

They Don't Sleep (Momma gets haunted by the dead while taking care of baby)

 

About as good as it looks

PR: Scumbag BF gets killed by random zombie, leaving us with a broken truck and a newborn baby. As the mother, we need to juggle between making trips to the villa to gather supplies, repairing the truck, taking care of our needs, plus the baby's, and defending the house from increasingly more difficult zombie attacks. You get killed a lot, but you pull some Re:Zero and start again with extra attributes. 

 I think the game is pretty decent, especially for an overexploited theme such as zombie apocalypse, but personally, the theme was a deal breaker. I hate children and babies most of all, having to take care of one, thinking that I have a dozen other things to worry about, is so annoying that I couldn't feel any accomplishment by surviving another day. Plus for the pixel art, and the innovative gameplay