Tom Ravencroft
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MonsterVine
KeenGamerLatest Reviews
But if you’re willing to put up with that sort of ongoing pressure on your health and sanity (oh, how very meta), it is, at least, an intriguing experiment and a certainly unconventional game in a genre that usually tends to be more about 360 noscopes and sick kills than...
But on the other hand…there’s not really a competitor, except Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, so what else are you going to do? It’s a gorgeous game and when it all comes together and you’re soaring over the Grand Canyon or crashing into the street in front of your house or...
Look, I’m not going to lie to you, this isn’t some subversive indie game where deep down there’s a deeply moving story about a sad dad with a beard discovering he loves his son or whatever. There’s a squirrel, there’s a gun. What more do you want?
If the prospect of furiously trying to remember a bunch of words is daunting, there is a turn-based mode for combat–maximum retro–but real-time is the preferred mode. There’s not even a mouselook–maximum retro turbo!–it’s all keyboard. If wandering around a gloomy underground trying to remember how to word good and...
Multiplayer is an enjoyably chaotic affair that depends entirely on your ability to order dudes around and the quality of your teammates as well as your ability to coordinate. I get the push for it since it can be fun, but lord, they really do make it feel like a...
So if that kind of management and absurdity sounds appealing–and I did enjoy frowning at my goblin roster and trying to min-max stats in my goblin eugenics program–then hiding beneath the cutesy storybook exterior is the fiendish heart of a pretty good roguelike. There was also a major patch as...
And while I don’t know if I really got the storyline, I did enjoy it, because what I took from it was, basically, time has been shattered and people are trying to help, but every time they do, they just make things worse. There are many quests that are basically...
Once you’ve played the campaign enough times, and this is another “it feels crazy to say this”, there are also Special Ops, which are single one-shot missions, both official and support for user-created missions. And yes, there’s a mission creator, though it’s in beta right now. It’s still nice to...
So the combat is good, the squad management is good, and setting an ambush with a handful of troops and watching it play out perfectly is the real deal…but that’s not even the point. The point is herding your Czechs through the Russian Revolution, carefully leveling them up and picking...
The downside is that sometimes, being basically a Star Trek episode shoved into a video game means it suffers from video game bullshit like stealth, cover shooting, puzzles, minigames, etc. There is a story mode option where you don’t have to deal with these, but still. And there are some...
So if you don’t mind the fact that it’s not Darkest Dungeon But More and it’s Darkest Dungeon But Different…it’s worth caveating that the first 10 hours are so are basically just punching you in the face over and over again and normally I don’t put up with that at...
I’m not going to reveal much of the story since that’s the entire point of playing this one, but while it’s fairly linear, it’s fun to see it unfold from a fairly mundane beginning to what becomes kind of bugfuck especially once we get into the whole cults and Lovecraft...
