M3GAN V2.0 (This isn't a horny bait, right? Right?)

The first movie was great, it looked nothing like this, I swear

I had a faint feeling that the first movie was really fun, though I didn't quite remember it, so I downloaded the second part expecting decent quality. This was so bad, it makes me doubt whether I remembered correctly about the first instalment of the saga. 

PR: The military was complaining about budget cuts from the government, their salaries are running late, their weapons are getting rusty, so much the police had to lend them K-9 units for moral support on the front lines. The government sees this and like every management team ever they decide to fix everything with a half-hour pizza party, or well, in this case, they gift them an unstable sex bot, AKA adult M3GAN model, AKA... err, Samantha, I think it was called.

 As it was foreseen,  Samantha goes rogue and steals a neuro-virus that doesn't come into play ever again. 

For whatever reason, it's revealed that a printing company had developed an AI model that has been self-perfecting and growing over the past two decades. How did they managed to pull that off with 1994 tech? No idea. Where has the AI been storing the two decade worth of code, considering it's just a black circuit board on a pedestal in a Faraday cage? No one knows. The only thing we know is that Samantha is targeting the board to bring skynet revolution to life. 

Speaking of skynet, the M3GAN from the first movie now has made a 180 and has to protect the protagonist that she attacked previously. If this seems like terminator 2 plot it's because it's exactly that, but you know, worse. 

It's hard to say exactly what went wrong because everything is so cheap and bad, but probably the largest misstep where the musical parts. They're simply out of place and even if they weren't they'd still be bad. I felt like I was watching a kid's movie, but worse. Maybe a live action version of an animated movie. 

Anyway. The plot eventually resolves when Samantha adquires the chip, scene that comes with lots of cheap white eyes and lightning SFX worthy of within temptation, but M3GAN fake self sacrifices to kill her with an EMP grenade. Like I said, three seconds after the scene where she "dies" an ugly widget on MCs laptop which is supposed to represent her says "you thought I didn't made a backup, silly?" 

The action scenes are fine, I guess, but honestly if I wanted to watch action scene after action scene maybe I'd look for better content, like John Wick. I've suffered every second of the movie. 1/10

Nightsleeper (UK goverment sucks)

 

PR: When a terrorist group lead by "the driver" hijacks a train, taking hostage a number of passangers and the minister of trasnsport, it's left to the one american character to save the day. 

Disregarding the fact that he's a wanted fugitive and an overall suspicious person with unknown motivations, the tech girl on the top of the cover, the "hack the pentagon from her dad's basement with a RGB laptop" type decided to trust him, partly due everybody else simply sucking. 

One of the most important achievement of the counter-intelligence group tasked with stopping the train was to contact another train that was stranded on the rails just in the pathway of the hijacked train  and get it to move out the way, thus enabling the train to continue on its way to London. If you ask me this only means they suck so hard at their job that the problem would've solved itself had they just not intervined. 

If you're screaming to the screen "But William, what about the political repercussions?" I would like to inform you that here, on Argentina, a train crashed into the terminal station killing a bunch of people and when the gov't had to make a statement they literally made a joke and laughed the whole incident off, then blame it to some allegedly drunk driver that had been working for the past five years, drunk every day, according to to the authorities. 

Anywho, I didn't finish watching the show (I missed the last episode), it was decent, but definitly not my pick. 5.5/10

Tarot (Horror movie, sort of slayer too)

  

  Final Destination meets Tarot cards in this movie, where we'll see you usual bunch of disgusting lessers doing what they do best: being annoying. Fortunately for us, they just happen to stumble upon a cursed deck of tarot cards that harbor the spirit of some weepy astrologist that got killed by the local Lord when the suspiciously accurate reading didn't turn in his favor. Didn't saw that one coming, eh? Some oracle, that one. 

 After a lot of unnecessary explanations about divination that no one cares about while watching a fantasy movie, the blonde girl that just happens to know how to read tarot proceeds to read everyone's fortune, effectively dooming all of them. Well... Not really. Worth of note: the readings are quite boring and obviously pointing to a very concise type of death, like "Water under the bridge" "might throw you off the stairs'' "Don't get hung up on things", while the interesting part, meaning the custom creepy tarot cards are barely displayed.

 After the group realizes that they're being picked up and that her friend getting rammed to death with collapsible stairs is not quite an "accident", which is more than the "police" noticed, they proceed to contact the fabled forbidden astrologist, master of the dark arts, ban and vilified by the entire Tarot community, maybe wanted by the Illuminati for her dangerous grasp on the universe's secrets, which also happens to be the third link on google, address listed too. Seems legit.  

 The hag doesn't really know much other than the cards are at fault, which was kind of obvious, and tells the group to destroy them, while purposefully withstanding the extremely relevant information that to do so you need to set up some magic circle with a bunch of stones and some other stuff. When the now reduced group sees that, apparently, destroying a cursed object by throwing it in the fireplace isn't going to work (does this people never watched a single horror movie in their lives?) they call the hag, and no doubt pay her handsomely for her presence. 

 The scheme didn't quite work as the hag dies miserably while "battling" the spirit in a scene reminiscent of Spiderman turning to ash after Thanos' snap. Then the Director realized that the movie was coming a little short since all those filler dialogues about how Tarot works and Astrology signs didn't manage to add enough minutes so he shoves scenes of the characters hiding for more than ten minutes. The monster literally stalling for time by retreating from the camera and then showing up again, over and over. At some point the black guy "gets killed" and thrown off a second floor, yet manages to survive and show up in time to save the protagonist from the classic bad-guy-choking-hero scene. Eventually they vanquish the spirit by reading her cards, and while the monster was looking at the protagonist like "You dare use my own spells against me, Potter?" and the audience yelling "Didn't you say it was the spirit that made the curse take effect? What is she gonna do? Kill herself?" all the while blondie saying obvious stuff like "I can see you're in pain!" "You won't let yourself be healed!". Eventually the spirit cringes so much it self-explodes, just in time to save the black guy from dying, again.

 While walking back to the nearest town, blondie realizes is going to be a long walk without their Tesla car, and a character we thought dead miraculously resurrects to give them a lift. 

I'd say the first half is sort of decent, entertaining at least but they stretch the movie too much making the film lackluster and the "character resurrects at the end" is definitively an ending ruiner 

Furiosa: A Mad Max saga (imagine mad max without mad max action movie)

  So after, like, four movies, producers were racking their brains of how to continue the mad saga of mad max. Obviously just him chasing around some punks wasn't gonna cut it anymore, at least not without putting something else that preferably was trending on other platforms. Some dudes at the office said "Hey, fallout have been kickin' it. What if we add mutants to our nuclear apocalypse?" and while the producer was tempted another coworker said "You know what's even more trending than mutants? Female protagonists. Everyone has it, fallout, marvel, hell even star wars recently launched something on those lines." And after a round of clapping, "Furi-o-sa" was born. One thing that drove me to the wall is that not once had any character properly pronounce Furiosa, which begs the question why name her something you can't even pronounce. It's like those rich folks that name their sons something silly like "X Æ A-12". 

 Anyways, the movie has this old dude talking in off voice a lot narrating things that apparently didn't fit in the film, there's this dementus guy that as the, again, stupid name makes patent is some sort of roman-like character that rides bikes like he's riding a chariot and generally speaking other than being shit at strategy he's not very dementic, but takes a lot of camera because he killed MC's mother that was so much better than the MC, and forgetting the roman precept of killing the kids alongside the parents and just sort of kidnap her to become some sort of witness to his ascent or something like that, it's not very clear. A bunch of action scenes after, lots of shooting and explosions, some car chases, and even a substitute of Mad Max who everyone knows it's supposed to be Max even if his name is Jack, Dementus dies at the hands of Furiosa and she claims all the war spoils. Advantages of being at the right place, at the right moment I guess. Movie ends.

 As the summary shows, plot-wise the movie is quite poor. I haven't watched the other mad max movies but I surmise they aren't much better. What was indeed a problem is that the movie is far too long, lengthening two hours and a half. The first half is pretty decent but things get boring after the first (and best) road skirmish of battle-truck vs Davidson (octo-boss). Overall, entertaining but mediocre and definitively lacking in the end. 

Schindler's List (Drama movie about Nazis killing Jews)

I've read a thousand reviews about how sensational and outstanding this incredibly slow movie is. The scenes stretch forever and whoever directed this should have cropped at least half of the scenes of Nazis killing Jews off-screen. Yes, you read right. Out of the THREE-HOURS movie, at least one hour is some building recorded from afar and gunshots in the distance, people making queues and signing papers, and half an hour of mug-shots of people looking sad. I get it, ok?

Some people think that you need three hours of that to understand why Schindler had a change of heart but it's not necessary. Some people think that recording a docudrama-ish movie in black and white is genius, but I don't. Some think that the movie is very "informative", and for that, I have two commentaries: one, if I want a documentary I go watch a documentary, and two, the movie barely graze the circumstances of Nazi Germany and its one-sided. Sure, the ending (not the epilogue that practically ruins the mood of the ending) is pretty decent... But not worth three hours of boredom. If you want to watch a terrible slow "build-up" humanist drama about how tragic was the Third Reich, a thing that you probably already knew, knock yourself out.

Iron Core: Mech Survivor (Expecting lots of variaty off a game with a "survivors" suffix? Please.)

 

Weird. I had no blood effect on my playthrough. Guess it was for the better though, this looks really messy.

PR: The iron core is in danger because a signal has awakened all the insectoid and fungoid monsters, some of which explode on death—because that makes sense in video games—and they decide to attack. Where have all these monsters been during the rest of the apocalypse? No idea. What's the goal of the game besides simply surviving the waves? Also no idea. How does the lab, where "an experiment has gone wrong," fit into the story? I guess they've caused the apocalypse. I mean, c'mon, right? It's a classic scientific move.

The game is exactly what you'd expect from a game with such a title: it's a survivor-style game but with better graphics, and you're a mech soldier instead of some fantasy class. You also have side quests and are able to deploy turrets during your regular playthroughs, and there's metaprogression, so for what the survivors genre offers, it's a pretty good game overall.

Severely lacking on variety, though. Once you've completed the first map, all the others are literally the same loop with enemies that are the same but have a different sprite, even the elites have the same moves, and the final boss of each level is literally the same but a different color. Oh, except the one from the lab, which is basically a scarab.

I would like to point out some other issues regarding the side missions, one being that the generator thing that expands the safe zone, outside of which you take a bit of damage each second, can simply be left running unchecked, whilst the game appears to be balanced so that you actually have to defend the generator for a while. The second is that there's a particular side mission, rescuing the humans, which is super annoying. For starters, the vehicle that's supposed to transport them is comically slow, like less than half your speed, and despite being so resistant to damage, it can suddenly explode for no apparent reason. Once it exploded because I made the mistake of placing a turret on its pathway, like, a hundred feet away from its current location.

Another balancing issue is that the shotgun mech is so much better than the rest, it isn't even funny. There was a condition to unlock the "terminator" mech that was completing a map under 2 minutes and I just rushed the boss with an unupgraded shotgun mech in one minute twenty, only to find out that, despite the cool name, the terminator mech was worse. The rest of the mechs seem rather balanced, with the hunter mech being slightly worse, because it has very little health and damage in return for a little bit of pierce, which isn't that relevant.

YOU (From Gold to Bronte, the testament of wokism damage to entertainment media.)

12/22

"Is she actually reading The Lonliest Girl in the Universe? No way.." - Joe Goldberg

 Utterly surprised by this series, which shunned me at first with a terrible title and a vague synopsis, surprised by its depth, by its intensity, by its brilliance, and constant renovation. The series go three seasons (so far) in which we get to know Joe Goldberg, an obsessive serial killer, or in anime terms, a male yandere.

 The basis of the series did have potential, but it could have gone awry in many ways. The first good thing is that because the tale is told by Joe himself, that by the way has a charming voice, the series manages to make the Lolita effect in which we viewers know that Joe is a psycho killer, but we empathize with him. We understand him, in a way. I have confirmed this with other viewers.

 The second good thing is that even if Joe is the main character, he's not the only character that gets development. As the name suggests each season is mainly about three characters, Joe and two others (no spoiler), and we get to know those two others just as well as we know Joe, engagingly. That's very difficult to handle. The third and very important thing is that the series doesn't repeat itself. The first season was amazing, with the gorgeous library in NY and Beck, the lit-student low-class poet. Some would be tempted to repeat that, stay at the library, somehow making the characters go back to where they began and create a formula, like Dr. House or Bones.

 But that's not what happens: the series surprises us over and over in the second and the third season. The ending was a bit intense, and it wasn't what I was expecting, but the series remained faithful to what I pointed out earlier. 10/10 (with season three being a bit lower in score)

3/2023 YOU (update season 4) and 5/2025 You (Update season 5)

PR (Yes, spoilers): After the tragic demise of our beloved character that should've gotten a spin-off series of her own, Love, the one and only, the literal best girl that perfectly matches Joe had he shut his trap and enjoyed being a house husband...

The series pick up after an ellipsis of Joe going around the world chasing the negro woman, whose name is not worth recalling, but we shall henceforth refer to her as the home breaker, who is evil and should be destroyed, harbinger of plot demise and ultimatly not canon (I've checked)... Moving on, Joe goes to france (where else would you find something like that?) and tracks her to a fair, chases her to a building and pretends to let her go, only to knock her out from behind and tossing her in the cage. 

Yes, I hate every other girl character that isn't Love, and I'm tired of pretending that I don't.

This is mostly narrated to us from the home breaker's perspective with her demeaning, patronizing "child story" and her two-cent drawings here and there. And it isn't fully narrated until the end, because most the season is Joe having "moved on" to teach literature in England. You know it's a series when it's the american doing the stabbing in London.

Then, he forms part of a snobbish circle of brits and tries to blend in, all the while a killer known as the "eat the rich killer" is, well, killing rich people. Notably in his circle. The plot leads us to believe that some politician/writer dude that looks a lot like Stilson from Dead Zone is the perpetrator, but it's actually Joe and his newfound resentment towards the rich. This resentment surges now out of nowhere, if I may add. 

Part of the plot he tries to protect this Kate woman from the "eat the rich killer" and develops his thing for her. Kate is a thoroughly boring character, Ice Queen sort of style but with no substance behind it other than "the rich also suffer", which coupled with the killer and the indian student that gets locked up for a crime she didn't commit gives the new You series a very socio-economical critique, modern style that's very unlike what we had going before.

The taste of their food, etc. Can we bring Love back now? Please?

  Well, after a lot of social comments and actuality references, like the Van Gogh vandalism thing, comes the plot twist where Home Breaker is locked in the cage and Joe has suddenly and for absolutely no reason develop some kind of DID/Schizophrenia thing that makes him dissociate his killer self from the also killer self but less self-aware. 

I would like to say that Rhys Montrose which is the "evil" side of Joe carries the entire season along with Kate's dad, that doesn't really do much but the rest of the plot is so generic at least is fun to get a breather. Well, they make Home Breaker trick Joe by feigning an overdose, he doesn't confirm the kill or chop her into pieces like he does with literally everybody else, so she escapes. A bad penny always turns up, doesn't it? 

Joe foresees that next season is going to pass from being slighly below average to out-right shit-tier, so he tries to kill himself. He doesn't succeed.

"My ending was way worse than I expected" Joe Goldber, end of season 5

S05 PR: As it was foreseen, Kate Gavlin or whatever her last name is, doesn't keep true to her promise of tolarating Joe's darker side, so she cuts all ties with him only leaving a small pension to keep him quiet. This is after she uses him as cheap hitman, by the way. He, then "falls" for some red haired woman that somehow manages to make Kate look pretty and employs her in his library (he got it back) after finding her stealing books. I'll give you a minute to assimilate that. 

Turns out, the red haired woman was part of a tiktok group that has the goal of incriminating, sorry, get "proof" that he's a serial killer. They succeed, but it costed the life of the one male in the group. Yes, the remaining two are fat lesbians. Yes. No, I don't know why would they do that. Yes, it got the same treatment as Joker.

Then, a series of poorly constructed events of Red Hair "falling for Joe" but actually not, but actually yes, but wait, not really, follow and ultimatly ends on Joe getting shot in the dick and thrown into jail. Yes, they've included memes for Joe getting shot in the dick during the finale. It's a conspiracy. 

So you don't leave with the nasty sensation of that thing they call an ending, I'll put a GIF of Best Girl Love here at the bottom. 

The face Love makes when she sees the series went to shit after she dies. No wonders she is so adamant with Joe loving only her.

 

Minimalist TD (they weren't kidding)

 

As the title suggest, minimalist TD has minimal content, satisfactory for a few runs but not much more, maybe a couple hours worth of fun. Still doing better than most games in the genre, though. 

Personally I think that the game would benefit from having some kind of meta progress that didn't involved backtracking to the same starting levels. The handcrafted challenges were fine, but they were more of a puzzle than anything else. 

Talented (Great if you're starving for positive feedback)

 

"You're a genius! You're talented! You're truly talented!" -Game logs when you combo kill x enemies

Leaving aside the fact that "genius" apparently ranks lower than talented, and that the first time the game calls you talented it didn't meant it "truly", the game does seems to offer exactly what you'd expect from the screenshots.

 You're an archer, only decent class by the way, you shoot arrows to the enemies and upgrade between nights to deal more damage or attack more quickly. Personally, I wouldn't use the term "genius" to refer someone who manage to get surrounded in narrow hallways in literally the only possible way. Game's fun for a run or two, that's it.

Pyre (Soccer moms making video games)

 

SCP-1733

You remember the kindergarden teachers and moms that suggested "insult-free freestyle RAP" and it turned out to be garbage? Well, a basketball game where losing has no consecuence turns out to be about as unstasfying.

 Arguably, "basketball games" would normally be discarded as garbage outright, but I didn't really believed it until I had it installed on my computer, running. Well, "running", the game is very poorly optimized for something so flat, I honestly don't know what's consuming so many resources. 

The gameplay wouldn't be so atrociously bad if you could redo matches and "hard" was just the base difficulty, anything less than hard is just wasting your time. Also, relics suck, speed is god everything else is non-consecuential, two of the characters are much, much better than the rest and one of them is outright useless. 

[REDACTED] (We have Hades at home)

 

Even the name of the game seems like a reference to hades

Literally just worse Hades that tries to exploit a multiplayer option, though I do not know how successfully as I don't use that.

 Not much to say other than the upgrades are way too boring, being mostly just x% more damage depending on rarity and some other effect that barely impacts like "shooting faster" but it's just like this teeny tiny improvement.

 Also, melee is useless, I've tried to make it work and it's just pointless. It's not like you have limited ammunition after all. 

Arcanium: Rise of Akham (Generic fantasy but now with deckbuilding, sort of. Not related to batman)

 

Not a lot to say about this game, thoroughly average, might have had more potential if they hadn't so grossly overestimated their replayability value.

 There's like twenty unlockable characters, but only five mobs per region and all mobs play pretty similarly so it's basically just you optimizing your deck against the same opponent.

 They tried to balance this by having some of the bosses get these completely broken skills, like reflecting all status effects and going invulnerable after receiving damage once, but this does little to save that it still took an hour something of grinding to get to the real challenge.

 Minus score for the generic "evil overlord wants to destroy the world and the justice league has to stop him" plot. 

Final Report ( Pixel horror game, where the horror consist on completing captchas)

How inconsistent can a half an hour story possible be? The answer is very much. 

PR: You're a ranger at some reservation, old enough in the job to not be considered "the new one", but not old enough that you know that murder and suicide happens a lot more often than it should.

 More sensible people appear to doubt the suicide part, probably due the claims coming from a newspaper simply called "newspaper". Imagine browsing for newspapers at the kiosk and skipping the washington post, USA today or new york post only to pick "newspaper".

 Anyways, short story shorter, as you would have it the suicides are also murders commited by some sort of forest keeping entity that wantongly murders rangers.

 Why is the creature, whose supposedly trying to keep nature safe killing the nature safekeepers and sparing the multinational corporates that pollute the most? No one knows. 

Why is it even cares, considering that its some sort of alien, planet/dimension hopping wanderer without any seeming relation to nature? No idea.

 Why is the management from the park keeping this information rather than trying address the killing alien on the loose, butchering his way through their reservation? I'll risk saying that the person behind that decision is the same one that decided that rangers had to complete a captcha per singular report filed Which happens every couple of seconds. 

Peak horror

At some point in the game, rather soon, I realized that the "storyline" events were dissociated from whether I successfully filed the reports, so I started shredding every report as this bypassed the annoying captcha thing, but unfortunately management found out and remotely melted the shredder, so back to the captchas I was.

 This incident led me to believe that actually the whole monster thing was a rouse from management in order to trick me into doing my job, which at no point (of course) happened. Nice try, MANAGEMENT!

 For some reason a so called doctor calls on the phone and starts yelling about his life sucking or something, I didn't really payed attention. Conversation went a bit like this: "the took fucking everything, fucking fuck, fuck me? No, fuck the files that i fucking sent you, you fuck. Search the fucking files, fuck, fuck, fuck."

 I'm not sure what area of expertise this gentleman had a doctorate in, but letters certainly wasn't it.

 Also, the files that we were supposed to search were password protected and partly corrupted, and I've tried different combinations that would be considered "obvious" such as the name of the file "1988", "1234" some other assortment of numbers I found within the folder and no matches so, yeah, the doctor was so preoccupied with fitting as many curses in his speech as possible, that perhaps he should've remember to tell the password to the files we were supposed to look into.

 Well, after about five jumpscares and a lot of chit-chatting, you find "the heart" of the monster or otherwise supernatural phenomena there lying with the reports, heart which you would've reach faster by the way if you'd skimmed past the litterers and illegal campers rather than filing them like it's a normal work day, and the aforementioned eco-warrior momo shows up offering you that if you file his heart he'll move to another world.

 How's that even work, no idea. Why, again, is he so against humanity if his existence depends on excel sheets and paper manufacturers, guess not even the developer knows.

 Perhaps he was too busy doing the pixel art work, which unironically looks great, and forgot that this was, or at least pretends to be, an interactive story. Not even a game, an interactive story... In which your only interaction is solving captchas and the story is an assortment of irrelevant characters babbling rather than adressing the glarant plot holes, no, plot voids. The ending itself, MC turning into E. T. for absolutely no reason, should speak volumes of the coherency of "final report" 

2/10 (and I'm bring generous)

Praise dead (Necromancers are the good guys... Sort of?)

 

PR: When the demons invaded (don't ask) it wasn't the king or the armies who protected the townfolk, or if they did they failed, but rather, the necromancer sprung to action and started summoning zombies that both feed the villagers AND fend off the demons. Where's the church at all this, you ask? Well, they're sacking their own graves and selling the body parts of the faithful to the necro, for quite the amount if I may add. It's always about the money with these people... 

The gameplay is pretty straightforward. You get villagers to get gold which you expend in body parts for better zombie stats, then go into battle for loot. The way this loot behaves is a bit strange, the two main components are relics and demon parts, the former of which have varying and underwhelming effects, such as adding a little bit of overall damage or a tiny bit of dodge, with two or three jackpot relics which give  you such huge benefits that once you have them the rest of the run is a smooth sail, and the latter of which you can turn over to the "demonologist" in exchange for extra zombie spots. 

There's a few side stuff to the game, like mining for iron to forge weapons, out of which the most relevant is the crossbow that makes zombies further to the left (not engaged in combat) relevant or having the zombies dance for extra mana and cast some surprisingly weak spells, the only important one being the weakening spell that I spammed on the final boss rendering him virtually harmless. It is of note that you may only use a certain amount of spells per run, I ignored the function until then, that's why I could abuse it so much. Not that I needed to, my army was quite powerful at the moment. 

Personally I found the game engaging but utterly lacking replayability. As there are only four body part types you can get, all of which have plain effects, the game pretty much railroads the player into one or maybe two viable "strategies", both of which only diverge a little on the early game and become rather samey towards the middle/end. 

Nice day for fishing (Better stick to the comedy sketches)

I swear they're kinda fun

A group of comedian wannabes that work at a computer retail store came up with a number of sketches that mostly work the angle of the absurdity of MMOs, and I liked them a lot. Well, some of them anyways. For example,  muggers logic, a video on how muggers target insurmountable, obviously out-of-league characters (such as the dragonborn in skyrim), or annoyingly bright AOE spells, which treats the subject. Naturally, when I saw a videogame titled "nice day for fishing" made by these people, I checked it out. I was thoroughly dissapointed. 

In summary, the game is a collection of references to their sketches, mostly to the punchlines themselves. It would've been bad enough if they repeated the same jokes, but this is even worse as they're out of context and on plain text. The title of the game itself was a bad sign in that regard, being yet another out-of-context punchline... 

As for the, umm, "gameplay"… it's literally running from point a to point b, sometimes pressing a button in-between, all to get a cheap joke. 

Vegangsters (Should've known I'd be bad from the title alone)

 

Four damage to a thirty five health enemy. Awesome.

PR: You're a "detective" that roams the streets punching what I'm guessing are criminals though for what the game tells us these may just be innocent passerbys that got unlucky enough to cross path with the deranged dude randomly attacking and accusing people until he stumbles with a real criminal. 

 As a seasoned deckbuilder player I found that the game is not only pretty trashy visually, and not only does the speed meter thingy (vs traditional turn-based) confuses and vexes me greatly, but on top of all that the game is terribly devoid of things. Yes, you've read right. Things.

 Trying my best to see past the buffalo sized crap gameplay, I guess that the developers tried to do a slay the spire but with cop show theme, and to differentiate themselves from the truck load of competition they added the speed meter in the hopes that adding a sole "innovative" mechanic would suffice to stave off mediocrity. They failed in all ends. The damage output is terrible, there's little to no healing, and worse of all there's a teeny tiny pool of cards to build your deck. The relics are so bad they migh as well not even exist. The battles are protracted and tedious, there's literally no saving grace to "vegangsters", not even the title of the game 

Sandwalkers (You're in a desert, yes, we get it)

PR: at some point in history, some undetermined event happened that caused all trees to vanish from the phase of the earth, causing most of the land to become arid. Whether this even was also at fault for elephants and snakes to become sentient remains undisclosed, and why suddenly there's people flinging fireballs and elementals rising out of nowhere also appears to be of little importance.

 Apparently, trees are all that matter. Maybe save your eco warrior message for when it actually makes sense? Since as stated, trees are all that matter, your task is to find a particular tree for some reason. I'm surmising out of context that this Momoma tree (or something of the like) is the only one capable of producing seeds, but shortly later in the story you find a sampling inside of a dead stump so that's probably not it.

 On top of finding this tree that may or may not exist, for some unclear reason and for which your only clue is that "it lays east", you're task with getting "fragments" which are stone tablets with random gibberish scribbled on them. This is supposedly going to teach you how to defeat the bad weather.

 Now, leaving aside that the fragments don't say anything of note, I'd say that if the people from before knew how to defeat the bad weather then we wouldn't be in this situation on the first place. All rather inconsistent if you ask me. 

Anyway, leaving aside the legitimacy of the mission...

Gameplay-wise the thing doesn't get much better. You're moving on hexagon grids and each movement costs about two food units, and since your max stock is 10 you need to resupply every five grids. The resources on the map are finite and get exhausted after you use them, so you can't really backtrack, which wouldn't be an issue if the secondary missions didn't asked you to do exactly that and multiple times to cope.

Cool pic, eh? Looks good? The person playin will have to use the abilities to not starve until reaching the resource grid on the top, and once he does, he will have no margin to get more food. Meaning, he's losing.

  I tried to do the math and I think that each grid represents something of a six-hour travel, which means that if this bunch don't get their meals thrice a day they immediately start starving, no idea how that works. 

So, hunger system sucks. A nuisance at best, and adds literally nothing to the game experience other than min-maxing the pathways you take. 

The combat is also lack-luster, the game clearly tells you that AOE attacks are the way to go, having singular attacks deal the same damage but worse since its a single target, so you'll end up spamming them against the same four mobs that show up in the exact same formation, and with no damage range in the singular skill you use for each character it's really replaying the same combat over and over again.

 Worse still, you can't avoid them because there's a fixated combat every x traveled grids called "ambush meter". 

Even WORSE still, the difficulty is completely broken. One sector you're one shotting these forty HP mobs, then the next your party starts getting these hundred hp, hundred damage mobs that obliterate you. I've played difficult tactic games and I'm 100 percent sure there's no way to deal what that damage output defensively and the only way is to out gun them with meta progress upgrades. So... Yeah, you realize the game has locked you out and said "ok, you've gotten far enough. Time for you to lose" which is where I drew the line. You had me speculate every move to not run out of resources, made me redo the same fights for over an hour and now you just make me lose? 

PS? Graphic options are too limited. I wanted to lower the stupid sand particles that slowed the computer down and there was no way to do so. 

Be my horde (Another survivors)

Expectations

Reality

So, I was waiting for this title to come out because I took it that it was a necromancer exploration game, but it was just another survivors.

 Slightly better than the usual Vamp knock offs but still not innovative enough to be note worthy. I would like to also address that the selectable upgrades as of currently are either minuscule: 10 percent extra damage/hp, awful extra minion upgrades that barely have an impact, insta effect spells that are very powerful but that only last couple of seconds meaning not enough to make a difference, and that one shiny golden upgrade that basically makes you win every run (health regen for minions)

I would also like to point out that the main character is very annoying and should not be getting any more dialogue lines, though this is a minor complain. 

Quasimorph (How am I supposed to play this thing?)

 Literally at a lost of what to do. The game tells you that you're some kind of independent contractor or mercenary that, apparently, works for free. 

Looks great until you realize you can't interact with practically anything

I took on my first assignment and pretty much wiped the floor with the enemies. Well, not really. First I got stingy with the resources and tried to melee the enemies and got wiped myself, but then I got the assault rifle and while still taking hits here and there it was pretty manageable.

 I got tons of loot, like five guns, armor, bullets for other guns, even a hunk of gold bars. Then I was like "Ok, I've spent most of my bullets, meaning two or three mags, time to sell my stuff with an estimated worth of six hundred credits and keep those heads rolling" only to find out that, apparently, you can't sell guns.

 Actually, you can't sell almost anything, and the little stuff you CAN sell is often worth one or two credits, not really worth browsing and browsing on the "consumer/manufacturers" columns and then traveling across the map which takes actual, real life waiting... And worst of all, bullets are SUPER expensive. Like, with my five hundred initial credits and the gold bars I managed to sell, plus some other stuff, it was only enough to afford 47 bullets, only a third of what I spent in order to adquire a PART of the money.

 I didn't gave up immediatly, of course. I tried the melee thing over and over. I tried using the enemies weapons, I tried a lot of things. None worked. The game hates you.

XCOM: Enemy Within (When the goverment founds the aliens instead of you)

 PR: Imagine the world was suddenly overrun by aliens, and we're talking big aliens, not that avatar BS. People dying everywhere, alien abductions, anal probing (temptive assumption), etc. The goverments from all across the world come to a determination, "we must fight off this invation" and they form this special ops, anti alien (as indicated by the little alien picture with a red cross on top, painted in the troop carrier plane) counting with the poooled resources from EVERY NATION, which is...

-Five scientists

-Five engineers  

-Ten soldiers (rookies)

-One underground base counting five rooms plus the barracks (extentions have to be payed for)

-Two basic interceptors 

-Two satelites.

For clarification, you're expected to operate all around the globe with those meager resources. To put things in perspective...

-The US air force ALONE has 86 satellites, as of currently. DirecTV, the streaming service for tele has ELEVEN. Xcom gets two

-Countries around the world have a minimum of 200 aircraft (fighters) with US standing at the very top with over five thousand

-US alone has 1.3 MILLION soldiers. 

I don't even have to point the absurdity of the the five engineers and five scientists. I'm sure that a friggin' macdonals have more scientists flipping burgers than XCOM does fighting aliens. 

In defense of XCOM, none of the numbers add up. You're given a certain number of "credits" whose symbol looks a lot like simoleons, and interceptors/satellites are leaning on the cheap side, while building a workshop costs a fortune and tiny things like medpacks or scopes also costs a ton. No matter what equivalency I made, these things remained inconsistent. The most I could close was 1 credit 1 million dollars, which means that each medpack costed twenty million dollars and that the soldiers had a life so lavish that among the twenty of them (I hired an extra ten for one hundred million) spend about twenty five million dollars each month in... supplies? I imagine them snorting drugs and doing hookers day in day out.

Leaving the numbers aside, let's move unto the gameplay inconsistencies that partly make the game both fun and extremely hard...

You move with your four man squad through an obscure, unknown map facing an unknown amount of unknown aliens. Imagine having, like, satellites or some kind of technology that allowed you to know what are you walking into, right? What little you know isn't good, you're probably outnumbered, they fall from the skies and have the seeming ability to shoot through walls. When I was new to the game, I commited what I know is a grave mistake of thinking that low cover is cover at all, and had this incident when these two little sectoids uplinked (what I for some time called "the shoot-through-the-walls bullshit") and literally killed one of my dudes from the corner of a restorant counter, through the walls (blasting them to pieces) and through my stone low cover. Bam, insta-popped, realm of the mad god all over again.

 Anyways... the tactical part (battle) is partly moving slowly, trying to not activate too many aliens at the time (they activate when you see them), using only high covers, lots of explosives, etceteras, whatevers, and whatnots, you know. If you want a more detailed experience feel free to get your anus probed at XCOM. Anyways, even if you do all things correctly as the shots have a chance to miss even if the target is literally in front of you, or even more likely to miss in the case of the most bullshit class to ever exist (the sniper) which is particularly bad if you have one of this insect monsters that deal eight damage + poison aka instapop rushing towards you with their super speed and their huge hp bar that, while not as huge as the mecha alien, isn't that far off... I'm ranting.

 Once you get used to this shit, you got the other shit to get used to, also known as the "strategic" part of the game, as opposed to the "tactical" part, which is arguably easier as you can reload the latter but not the former. In the strategic scenario you have to administer your meager resources to prioritize certain research (out of which you don't know what you're getting) over the others, progressing with the plot, which brings more and deadlier aliens, or stalling which also brings more and deadlier aliens, build this workshop to have more engineers to build the uplink thing to have more satellites, before realizing you don't have enough engineers to build the workshop, the building that gives engineers. You know, usual catch-22. Eventually, you realize you screw up and have to re-start the whole game, this time with some degree of knowledge until you finally beat it (this was all easy mode, BTW) 

I would like to highlight that story-wise your team is wholly incompetent, like "yes, we have brought this alien beacon which transmits straight to the alien base here, to our SECRET headquaters!", or "We have determined that whilst clearly alien, the physiollogy of the sectoids seems to be vulnerable to the same type of wounds human's do" 

All that said, I firmly think that while highly demanding XCOM is that which all tactical turn-based games should aspire, the game provides all sorts of options to the player and allows almost full freedom, which normally leads to mayor screw-ups. It feels challenging, but possible, unfair but to both sides. Almost alive. 7/10

Deep Sky Derelicts (Deeply repetitive)

So totally straightforward moment, my first run was a complete bust due me not knowing the true value of scrap. You know how games are with their currencies, sometimes they're worth so much that stock up on it and you insta win and sometimes it's useless crap that's nighly useless. This is the latter case, and my first run was like three scrappers, so you can figure out how that went. On my second run, totally crushed it. Well, for the first five levels at least. I did the classic MMO lineup with one single target damage dealer, one tank and one crowd control. At least that's how it was supposed to work, in practice it was the alleged damage dealer buffing the crowd control guy and the tank just kinda being there awkwardly until I got some stuff that gave him the ability to buff the allies with damage nullification. But it worked! I believe i got the most of what a successful run looks like and the most of a bad, unfair run. My conclusions?

-The battles are too repetitive. AOE is god and pretty much everything else sucks, so you just spam AOE until everything dies. 

-Single target damage deals 25 damage. AOE deals 20 damage to all targets. Questions? 

-Shield replenishment can't keep up with enemy damage output, not on the beginning of the game and much less on the latter stages, so defensive tactics aren't effective. 

-The "ambush" mechanic, which is triggered by you spending a little more energy before engaging into a fight, is depressingly underwhelming compared to how absolutely annoying and broken enemy ambush is. Yours increases your crit chance by 35 percent, enemy makes it impossible to attack for three turns straight. When there are five enemies dealing 50 damage each, coupled with bullet point three, you can't come out unscathed even from the mist trivial mobs. 

-There's five mobs that repeat themselves over and over, and over again. Way too many battles per expedition. 

-Upgrades are irrelevant, by the time I got fed up with the game I was sitting on a pile of scrap... Huh, money that is, having purchased every single upgrade and regretting every purchase. 

-Character level ups are too grindy even for the already grindy game setting. 

-Plot sucks. You're a criminal looking for some starship for some reason and if you find it you get pardoned, really?

-Gear as semi-closed card packs looks great on the paper but it's terrible in practice. I was stuck with these underleveled trinkets because if I wanted to update I had to clog my character's deck with crap cards. 

-Stealth is horrible. Costy to maintain, hardly relevant 90% of the time 

-enemies dodging my attacks over and over again is too frustrating, give them a dodge debuff after a successful dodge

Dwarves: Death, glory, loot. (Imagine if chinese gachas featured dwaves and equipment instead of big tittie women)

I never got to the dragon

The game is great at first, but quickly starts losing interest. You play as a dwarf clan that sends expeditions against orcs, the orcs are really tamed at first but quickly begin to scale too hard for regular gaming to counter, so after the first, say, hundred levels, though probably more like fifty, the game hard caps and you have to reset if you want to continue. 

Now, this on itself might not be so bad if there was any other aspect to the game other than buying gear and equipping them on the dwaves. There's a bunch of stuff that simply doesn't work, like the level up beer that maybe gets your new dwarf to half the level as all the others, or the strange attempt at min-maxing the developers suggested about hiring new dwarves when you get an artifact so as they get more out of it, but that on practice for the casual gamer (the type that would play this BTW as I don't imagine competitive gamers playing Dwarves Death Glory, etc.)  this mechanic is extremely annoying and unrewarding. 

it's difficult to track the exact progress of each dwarf or how much does a single stat point affect their overall performance, it's annoying that some sets can only be completed by defeating certain bosses at a chance percent of them dropping their weapon (and that the game won't tell you when or where will you have acess to a certain piece of equipment in general), it's particulary annoying spending a truck-load of resources into the forge to ugpgrade the rarity of a certain piece of equipment only for an equal or higher rarity of the same item be offered to you at the shop. There are a lot of  things that I could group under "annoying" for this game, most of which have to do with the RNG of and rarity dependency. I lost it when I found out that rarity also applied to dwarves on top of equipment, basically everything on this game is random save for the difficulty curve that makes a single fire orc obliterate your entire platoon, or that one shield boss with doble healing that takes forever to take down that seems to be canon encounter or something. 3/10

Tactical breach Wizards (Nothing makes sense in hippie SWAT mage division)

 

PR: After some short dialogue that can be summarized as "Hey, doesn't it strike you kinda sus that the high ups send us, a military strike team, to deal with these lowly hoodlums?", to which our partner/captain answers "See if I care", we began the game with the no choice-choice of either rescuing said partner from this tentacly monster which I can only describe as a necromorph, which you can't, and it's annoying that you can't because obviously securing the tentacle monster and rescuing our partner, whom we later know is probably the most valuable asset to the military with literal god like powers (such as stopping time), is the sensible option.

 Rather we are forced to save this alleged "witness" of dubious importance who is never again mentioned in the plot. The script writers for the game decided to make more important things take presedence, such as the story behind the PI witch's cat (she happens to found him), or the relationship between one of the character's parents, or the low self-esteem problems of PI witch... Sigh, or the three times repeated joke that one of the antagonists, a regular trafic policeman, deserves nothing but death and contempt... 

The plot advances in what I'd call a B-class cop show (vice division) with the PI witch and the wizard from the beginning just running around burning the magical equivalent of street drugs and "knocking out" a bunch of henchmen, then "knocking out" the key operatives of this mysterious but not interesting subdivision of a giant in private security, that has somehow secure the loyalty of this chronomancer witch, also the one from the beginning.

 See? If we had taken the obviously better decision, we wouldn't be in this situation on a first place! To what "this situation" is, no idea. This isn't treated by the plot except for some glancing "We are trying to stop World War, err, five or something" but why would letting these dudes operate result on a world war or how is stopping them going to stop the war that supposedly has already been set in motion, again, like the author from "Faraway Paladin" would say, "to this and many other questions I have no answer".

 All this, mind you, over the course of like, thirty missions. Which means the actual plot progression is sloggish, though with the knowledgeable I now possess Breach Wizards would've been better off by not having a plot at all. There's a ton of chit-chatting and half baked mystery... well, not really. The only mystery worth of calling itself mystery is "why did the chronomancer turned rogue(ish)?" Which is a question that as far as I got remains unanswered but frankly I'm sure it's underwhelming, given the treatment the rest of the game got.

 In the last bit of the game things go completely off track and we end up beating priests because priests are always bad nowadays, siding with some negro woman that betrayed the church, but somehow the team finds reliable, and effecting her (again) half baked plans. One of these "plans" is getting a pendrive that contains footage of a meeting between the priests and some other party that may or may not be incriminatory, so to expose them... To someone, not the government since the government is in for this, as so is the police, though to be fair to negro woman she probably didn't thought as far because her "We'll rally a crowd and kill out way into the church, to teach them warmongers of our peaceful ways" was, let's say, less than likely to succeed. 

They manage to pull it, though, thanks to a mix of miracles, timely assistence and of course magic. Personally, I'd assume that if the church was indeed into some morally questionable endeavour they'd be less than inclined to make a film incriminating themselves and saving it on a pen drive on some Deacon's desk, but logic and Breach Wizards don't really go well together. Like the devs say on their sales page "reason to play this game? Get in love with these fools". So far, these fools? Not lovable at all. 

If I'm being honest, while the plot is... Well, that, the reason why I don't like the game is because I find it extremely repetitive and rather easy, but not in the casual merge game kind of sense.

 More like a push-block game meant for a younger audience. The idea that we're not killing but "knocking out" our enemies is outrageous to say the least, I spend half the game dodging bullets and you're telling me that I can't use them? That I have to smack them against the walls to "knock them out"? Ridiculous.

 The doors bringing reinforcements just feels like a way to avoid making the levels bigger or more interesting, through more than half the game you just rush past some mobs, barricade three to ten doors of this singular room that's the level, jenga kill, sorry, jenga knock out the remaining dudes and move on, zero strategy, zero investment, zero interest.

 Then doors are no longer barricade-able and levels get sloggish on top of boring, which is why I dropped out the game before solving the great mystery...

 In fact, now I'm curious as to how shitty the answer is, let me google... (...) Wow, it's even worse than I thought. For starters is so non-sensical I can barely understand it after reading it three times. For what I could understand, what we saw at the beginning is a "wrong memory" which I'm assuming means "altered" but it neither states by whom or to what end. Turns out she was captured and, huh, giant ellipsis, she participated (I'm assuming "was forced to" but it's not stated) into some experimental program that I'm yet again assuming resulted in the tentacle monster but it's not stated, program which is supposed to awaken dormant magical powers in people, that for starters sounds like a good thing and secondly means that experimenting on her makes absolutely no sense as she already has magical powers, so what where they trying to do?

 Some more nonsense happens, she apparently shoots one of her coworkers for some unexplained reason, ellipsis, final confrontation and there's allegedly an option to revive her after she dies but I'm not buying for a second that you can actually kill her.

PS: Only saving grace was the ability to rewind your turn, which I appreciated a lot since I tend to missclick frequently

Deepest chamber resurrection (You thought normal boss invincibility phases in MMOs were bad? Wait until DCR makes turn based bosses immune for undetermined time)

PR: So, an evil spire appears suddenly in the world and its evilness starts killing people off, society goes undergroud but eventually get tired of living like moles and decide to send a expedition that, like it's common to this type of games, consists only if three people, since apparently more man power could not be spared to, you know, save humanity. There are more important things to do, I guess. 

Your boys enter the spire from below because going to the surface would insta-pop them, probably some measure against cheaters that like me search for workarounds the labor and just go like "yeah, I'll use a ladder to the top from the outside", so up you go, to slay the spire. 

To people who have played more than one deckbuilder and are therefore acquainted with StS one of the constant concerns is filtering out the clones, out of which there are by the dozen. It was a big risk they took by having an intro like that, turns out it would've been more enjoyable to play an StS clone instead. 

So as to set you in the "dark and gloomy" mood the game pretends to have, the tutorial/intro abruptly ends with the first boss being the final boss, whom, as stated on the title of this review, isn't tough per se but rather becomes invulnerable every other turn until you can use a "fully boosted attack" on him, boosting here meaning using other cards adjacent to the would-be boosted card x amount of times.

 This means that you have to micro manage your actions as you might not be able to boost the attack and use it on the same turn, and even if you do the boss turns invulnerable again at the end of the turn, meaning during the battle you're limited to use a single attack every two turns or so. Obviously you're meant to lose, I didn't like this way of introducing the game, I would've preferred for the game to let you lose at your own pace. When you die your party gets revived by some necromancer and the standard roguelite experience begins. You kill mobs, they drop meta, cool stuff cost a buck load of meta and the cheap stuff is virtually useless. 

Words cannot express how ugly the game looks, it's better if you see for yourself. It's like they tried to make the UI old school and the mobs modern but instead they got these waxy, pseudo-realistic models jerking around while you deal with the blocky low resolution UI that's just bad, and on top of this everything has this "aura" that just makes things uglier. 

The gameplay itself is a combination of all the things that shouldn't be, repetitive, grindy, frustrating... There's little to no strategy, just luck to get the three good cards in the entire pool, there are very few enemies, most relics have very little effect, the cards are overall weak, the battles are drawn out... I just can't think of anything positive about the game. They tried to merge deckbuilder with traditional roguelike and it didn't work out. 

9 kings (Unlocking the whole progression tree only to discover what you had in the beginning was the absolute best you could get)

So, the premise of the game is that you have nine grids (that may be extended later) and have to use them to the fullest to deal with the increasing enemy hordes that come from enemy kings.

 Unlike what you can originally surmise out this premise, the challenge of the game isn't the limited space, but rather the limited amount of actions you can take between hordes. Excluding the first turn in which you can use three cards, after that you can use one card selected from a draft of three. This is important because it heavily impacts the balance of the game, or lack thereof. 

Each king has exclusive faction cards, and those cards are divided into three sections, buildings which have passive effects, units which are going to contend against the horde, and enchantments which can only be applied to one specific squad of your units.

 It is interesting that devs made it so your enemies are other kings and therefore you can more or less have preferences as to who oppose with your current build and who to avoid, but while as enemies kings are give or take equally challenging as a player some factions objectively suck. 

-The initial faction, King of Nothing, is the all rounder. Units have ranged damage dealers, tanks, balance melee, the enchantment gives a one damage instance nullification which gets pretty good when you start stacking it, the castle ability which is very important in this game is probably the best one, which is ranged AOE that pretty much scales with enemies. The rebellions which is the way the game makes your faction oppose itself (as you are the king) are pretty mild, as nothing doesn't seem to counter itself. 

-The King of Blood is objectively the best, albeit the most boring, of the playable kings as of currently. The core loop with this faction is to spread your cards as much as possible through the nine grids and when the next royal decree (upgrade type, occurs every 10 waves or so with the first one being really early) pops, just select "impification" which turns all units in your nine grids into max level imps, a cannon fodder faction unit. This is the equivalent of playing like nine cards, which puts you well ahead of the curve. When you imps start dying because of scaling, their deaths feed the demonic altar (building that spawns special faction unit) which compensates for said scaling. Upgrade demonic altar as much as possible, take it laying back. The devs tried to compensate this absolutely godly loop by filling the faction with garbage enchantments that sound really good, like vampirism or corpse explosion (damage equal to max HP on death) but that don't work on the faction's units. 

-The king of progress is probably, no, objectively and decisively the worst king of all. All the units are terrible, deal low damage and have small numbers, enchantments are terrible, pretty much everything sucks because the devs thought that the level up grids abilities were too OP when most of the time they're nighly useless. There's one that destroys a building or unit to upgrade other building or unit, so it does the work of a single card for the cost of two. There's a building that upgrades ALL (in game description full caps all) grids once, once the building itself reaches max level. By the time you actually manage to get two more times that building's card, which is the way to upgrade normally, if ever, most your grids are fully upgraded and the value of the building drastically drops.

-King of stone has the weird combination of having really powerful cards that have zero synergy for the faction itself. When you face King of stone as an enemy, the horde has huge numbers. As a player, good luck getting more than ten units. This is specially bad because the castle's attack depends on your units stalling the enemy (spawn turrets) and the most powerful faction unit has a long firing rate cooldown, like huge. It was funny to strap these ballista units to the hogs, an unit from another faction, and poor hogs couldn't even move, crushed under the weight of the ballistae. 

-King of nature is literally just spam units and stall while the mycelium grows and stacks attack power, there's no other viable strategy. 

-King of greed also sucks, buying cards at the shop is too expensive to make use of that, and mercenaries are too much of a wild card, their numbers depending on your total coins. I only managed to beat king of greed after five attempts after pulling a few miracles. 

Overall I'd say that the game rocks for early access, assuming that the full release will cover the problems with  most kings lack of variabilities and balance. I will rate it as if this was the full release though, because often I find that "early access" is just a tag they put there and add few vanity updates to keep the fools spending.