Recent reviews by luckz

«Same review with more screenshots (Steam limitations)»[lillycorner.com]

Wanted: Dead is a gory and challenging action game with fast-paced, unforgiving combat. You take the role of Hannah Stone, a lieutenant of the Hong Kong police and member of a four-person squad infamous for wanton destruction. They are tasked to uncover a corporate conspiracy involving one of the major producers of synthetic humanoids on the market. The game is split into five lengthy missions of multiple stages.

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The combat is a mix of third person shooter and slasher, with Lt. Stone and her team making their way through hordes of enemies. Baddies are primarily dispatched using katana and pistol combos, which routinely comes with a loss of limbs on their end, and there are some twenty-odd finisher attacks (which don’t quite approach the Mortal Kombat gore level). The window for parrying enemy attacks is very tight and once you’re hit, it’s very difficult to prevent further hits. There is a short window to recover some of the lost health by dishing out more damage. There is a skill tree in which you progress at a pleasant pace, but only because the game is rather short.

The combat has a number of janky aspects. Oftentimes when you are fighting enemies up close, the too-close camera position makes it hard to see enemies to your sides and behind you. Compared to other parry-reliant titles this is unnecessarily bothersome. Further harming your spatial awareness are two other issues: your teammates are too difficult to distinguish from enemies in the heat of battle, especially on dark levels, and it is too hard to keep track of which enemies are still alive and thus dangers you have to be aware of. Since you can partially dismember many of your opponents without fully incapacitating them, just seeing gore isn’t a clear indicator. The only clear ways to know is a tiny visual indicator showing XP gain, and the very repetitive death scream you hear from most enemy types. With a less close camera, teammate icons, and perhaps outlines for living enemies, you could be spared some deaths that are frustrating only because the game does not provide you enough clarity.

Other glitchy or just unpolished bits that are less of a bother are that snap-aiming on enemies sprinting at you often just doesn’t work and instead puts your crosshair far to the side, and that weapons you intended to leave on the ground for later or were using when you got downed like to despawn. Notably, the powerful chainsaw is just gone from the game if you die holding it, and it can feel more efficient to die again to retry from the last checkpoint to get it back.

The systems design of Wanted: Dead regularly bites off much more than it should be trying to chew. There’s a cover system that doesn’t make all that much sense in this game, as you have to constantly keep moving and attacking. Shooting in general is not very effective, with an enemy requiring many bullets to kill, and many of the available weapons suffer both from a lack of accuracy and a lack of available ammunition. Besides a weapon slot for guns you take from enemies or the environment, you have an assault rifle that you can customize at checkpoints, min-/maxing its stats using the gradually increasing amount of available parts. None of these mechanics really had to be in the game.

While her teammates are close by in most of the fights, the player can’t control them, and they typically do not kill too many enemies on their own. Only Doc has the less cosmetic purpose of providing the player one revive per checkpoint. The only other healing is through injecting stimpacks that some stronger enemies can drop on the lower difficulty modes.

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You can’t talk about Wanted: Dead without touching on how it’s both way too little game for the $40 asking price, yet in other areas there’s inexplicably much content. There are only five missions for a eight to ten hour duration, which goes down to around four hours for an experienced player on a lower difficulty level. At the same time, it has as many wacky minigames as you would expect in a Yakuza title. A collectible might just play a lengthy character backstory flashback. Shortly after the first mission, a memory is played out as an anime. There even are several minutes-long live-action cooking videos!

This discrepancy leads to the matter of who should and who shouldn’t be recommended the game:

Fans of the weird, wacky, and zany (and jank)
There are so many largely-intentional idiosyncrasies in Wanted: Dead. This starts with the main character being a war criminal released from prison, pressed into police service, but with a wholesome work environment and an active dating life. The game can’t even decide if she’s a police detective or lieutenant – the terms are just used interchangeably. Despite her English/American last name of Stone, she is supposedly Swiss, and speaks with a thick German accent (this admittedly is addressed by the end of the game). Meanwhile, her Russian teammate Doc has the least Russian voice ever.

There’s a full shoot ’em up created by Japanese developer PiXEL that is also available as a separate free Steam download. Characters have cybernetic implants, there are parody soft drink companies, and random references to our pop culture that don’t exactly make sense in a post-nuclear-war future. So many intentionally goofy things made it into this release, in a way it’s truly "art for art’s sake".

Difficulty masochists with a tolerance for janky games
The game’s Easy mode was initially hidden behind a cheat code and only unlocked for everyone a year after the release. The Steam comment section of that patch is chock-full of complaints that there shouldn’t be an easy mode to begin with, and complaining about other beginner-focused QoL improvements of adding an extra checkpoint and a health bar to the first difficult mini-boss.
If you value challenge more than polish, this title might just be what you’re looking for. An adequate new game plus lets you hone your skills over and over.

Casual gamers
Wanted: Dead is very much aimed at hardcore players, who don’t get frustrated from repeatedly dying and repeating a fight as often as needed. The enemies are tough as nails and the damage received can feel massive, even when playing on Normal difficulty mode. The recently-unlocked Easy mode is far less challenging, but does not feel like the intended gameplay experience.

Achievement hunters
Getting all the achievements not only requires completing the game on the three non-easy difficulty modes, but also flawlessly hitting some 800 key presses in a rhythm mini game. Unless you mastered several Dark Souls titles, this is unlikely to be a game you can get all the achievements in.

Fortunately, collectible and achievement progress accumulate across your different save games, so it’s not necessary to find all items in the same run, or to complete tasks like performing 100 handgun counters to unblockable attacks on the same save.

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Conclusion
Wanted: Dead is recommendable to players belonging to two particular niches: the "git gud" difficulty fanatics will be pleased that the game is quite hard on Normal mode, after which there’s Hard and the appropriately-named Japanese Hard. 1980s B-movie connoisseurs. The other group will appreciate the game for being Japanese Weird, from the retro-cyber-futuristic world building all the way to the many intentionally odd and unfortunately-janky parts of the game.

Introductory note: This review is based on October 2023's "Viral Evolution" update, which adds a virus/immunity system to the game.As the game is in Early Access, major changes are expected.

In Forever Skies, the skies of a (partially procedurally generated) ravaged Earth are yours for the taking. It’s a game along the lines of Subnautica, Raft or Green Hell – titles the developers at Far From Home openly cite as inspiration. Expect exploration (including story elements), survival elements, resource gathering and crafting. Instead of building underwater bases, a floating home, or jungle huts, you commandeer and expand your very own airship, balloon and all. Flying to spire-like platforms and exploring (and looting) those makes up the majority of this game. The looting experience resembles the loose loot in Fallout titles, except that the derelict platforms here require careful movement, as any steep falls without solid ground below most definitely result in your death. Below a certain altitude, you take damage from dust storms and eventually die, so don’t expect trips to the planet’s surface.

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The afore-mentioned October update made the survival elements more complex. Energy, health, nutrition and hydration bars are essential to your immunity level. Outside the tutorial area, you can contract viruses and then have to cure them. How fast these meters drain depends on the chosen difficulty setting, and that furthermore affects the effects of death. On easy, there is no penalty, whereas on normal and hard, you lose a percentage of your resources, and there’s a permadeath mode too. Due to the risk of falling from a structure or your ship after a careless misstep, I would only recommend it to true masochists. After a recent update, the difficulty setting can be changed at any time. While there is some hostile flora and fauna to be found, the developers have said they won’t add human enemies or ship-to-ship combat. The fairly static enemies are meant more as progression checks that you pass with the right items, not to challenge your FPS skills.

While keeping your character alive and your airship intact requires a constant flow of resources, the most basic ones are provided very generously. Floating debris is enough to keep your insect catcher and water condenser going, and cooking what you obtain via the insect catcher is the primary way of obtaining food. As these are effectively infinite resources, and you have an effectively limitless number of locations to land on and loot, Forever Skies is not a game about making do with the last resources left on a destroyed world. At the same time, it is not about building a self-sufficient base that produces advanced resources to keep growing, either. While getting the bare necessities in a pinch is no problem, any time a specific rare part is needed to craft something, that tends to mean a trip to a location it’ll spawn in. This goes from batteries for keeping your hand-held tools charged to different liquids used in crafting recipes. The December 2023 update will add gardening, but until then, to deal with viruses on hard difficulty you might need a trip to a greenhouse location, and since collected plants spoil over time, you cannot stockpile them either. Obtaining new technologies also requires you to scan devices or collect datapads in specific location types, rather than points for the unlock tree as seen in sandbox crafting games.

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Your airship is constructed from square rooms that snap together, once again reminiscent of Subnautica. Stations that produce or process are placed inside your ship, while placing catwalk tiles on the outside is required for stations that interact with the environment, like water collectors, insect catchers, and the all-important extractor, with which you suck up resources from certain big stationary objects and floating debris alike. Adding more or better engines lets you go faster, additional turbines enable you to reach higher altitudes (and thus higher-tier structures), and increasing the size of the balloon on top (or even adding additional balloons on a truly big airship) boosts the lift capacity so that you can build a bigger boat. The chosen shape of course strongly influences how many obstacles one usually collides with and how hard it is to park at a structure.

I called the game partially procedurally generated because despite there being a few biomes recognizable at a distance, the platforms you spend most of your time on come from a relatively small pool of prefabs. Some of these also come with additional variations, but not in a way that makes them feel distinct – compare it to how every time you start a mission in Icarus or Payday 2, there are some subtle changes to the level. Time will tell if the developers can spruce up their procedural generation to a degree that could rival the exploration variety of, say, the static world in Subnautica. I would estimate the current content in the 10–15 hours range, or 25 hours if you want to put time into building out the airship or hunting down every last craftable blueprint.

In some ways, the game is quite polished already. Whenever anything happens, your suit/ship voice lets you know (think Subnautica), and stations that want attention will emit some appropriate noise until they get it. Thanks to that, I was never caught off guard by my character starving or my ship taking damage. The tutorial does a fine job of guiding you, with an objectives checklist stretching deep into the game, so you are never lost with no idea what to do. There are QoL improvements I would wish for, like crafting showing how many output items you receive and letting you enqueue multiple jobs, or crafting from a ship-wide global inventory at least in single-player. Keeping track of which box holds your circuit boards ultimately is as boring as remembering where you placed those iron ingots is in other titles.

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Forever Skies is pretty to look at, but this comes at a high hardware cost – weak laptops need not apply. Achievements aren’t available yet, though they were cited as a feature to expect sooner rather than later. Finally, compared to established games in the genre with more years of development, there is a limit to the tech tree depths, there are not all that many available ship parts, and the structures you explore get repetitive after a while. At the time of writing, there isn’t much third-party content either: almost all of the available mods are cheats like more inventory slots, bigger stack sizes, or no food decay. If you are happy to dip your toes in during Early Access, rest assured that save games are intended to remain compatible through full release.

As someone who enjoyed walking off into a random direction and seeing what awaits me in the likes of Minecraft and Valheim, I could not help thinking how much more I would enjoy this game with a friend or two. One player piloting the ship, another extracting floating debris or stationary resources, another cooking or crafting… The developers have put four-player support on the top of their list, and being able to play with friends would surely entice me to put many more hours in – if there also is something meaningful to work towards, that is.

I found the exploration aspect of Forever Skies quite satisfactory, but then again, the previous paragraph should make it clear that I’m all too happy to misappropriate the game as a sandbox experience. Players specifically looking for a well-concluded narrative throughout their crafting adventure should wait until there is more meat on this dust moth, as presently only the precursors of storytelling are in place.

Much like South Korea has been very effectively exporting music, telly shows and more to a wider global audience for some years now, Southeast Asia is on a roll when it comes to games with emotions in them. I'd go out and wager that Toge Productions and others will continue to spearhead this for years to come. A Space for the Unbound's non-linearly told story puts you in control of a high school student who collaborates with his girlfriend on a bucket list of things to do before graduation, and then things happen and it's into figuring out what's going on: is the world ending, are there parallel universes, who is the real villain, and other questions that come up in your typical young-adult-with-superpowers story. At the same time, you get to meet plenty of town inhabitants and help them solve various problems.

The developers manage not only to convey the distinct culture, architecture, lifestyle of Indonesia in the age before ubiquitous cellphones, but also to always keep the experience and character relationships perfectly relatable for a global audience. Expect to find mentions of various dishes of the local cuisine, though usually without explanation as to what they actually are or how they taste.

The gameplay itself consists of walking (or usually running) through game screens with the arrow keys and interacting with everything around. Getting to all the right places in town will have you memorize the layout (or frequently consult the ingame map). There's a timed action system used frequently, which for the majority of the game is not too difficult. Objectives usually just amount to doing the right thing in the right place, with occasional puzzles to clue together from nearby items.

As you would expect, as you interact with the world and the characters, you learn the various NPCs backstories and their worries (that you might help address). Especially the central more fleshed out ones will remain vivid in your mind. The game's themes include family, friendship, bullying, forgiveness, self-discovery. From time to time, there is this unfortunate game design antipattern that I call the "Assassin's Creed dialogue choice", heavily used in Odyssey and Valhalla so they can pretend they qualify as RPGs: in a conversation you get to pick between two or very rarely three mutually exclusive options that result in maybe two or three lines of dialogue without any other further impact or relevance, and there is no way to access the lines hidden behind the choice you did not take (beyond reloading the latest save and perhaps replaying a few minutes of the game).

Depending on your pace and completionism levels, I'd estimate 8–12 hours to finish the game. While you cannot alter how the story unfolds, the bucket list mechanic essentially amounts to missable Steam Achievements. At the time of writing, only about a seventh of the users who finished the story also did everything else (to reach the "true ending"). For that, you truly must play with a guide at hand to know where to find collectibles (cats to pet, and name!, as well as bottle caps of Indonesian drinks) and when to go look for some other NPCs. At least one of these achievements is also frustratingly difficult: in the town's arcade, the previously mentioned timed action system has you execute fighting game combos with very tight timing. Theoretically you could write them down or memorize them ahead of time, but neither is a pleasant idea. The arcade machine is only accessible in the first third or so of the game, and successfully braving this challenge will make most of the other upcoming timed input sequences feel like a walk in the park. There is another slightly frustrating achievement where you must press the interact button with the right rhythm 70 times, and if you exceed 50 but don't reach 70 you have to reload your latest save. (I used this guide and additionally these quiz notes[www.thegamer.com] and using those avoided what I would consider excessive story spoilers.)

I think even the song interludes you get from time to time are missable, so only a fraction of players (again judging by achievement stats) have even reached them.

Personally, I wasn't a particular fan of where the overall story went about halfway through the game (from chapter 4 on), but as I don't think my complaints will be shared by too many readers, I won't hold it against the game.

I would recommend the game to people who enjoy touching storytelling and don't mind QTE-like action & dodging sequences. Pretty much every time you interact with a cat (or other animal) in town, you get a little speech bubble with a heart emoticon, so if you find that sort of thing heartwarming, go and press that buy button.
However, A Space for the Unbound does not attempt to be Day of the Tentacle/Maniac Mansion. If you want to solve truly complex puzzles, abhor any real-time keyboarding challenges, expect laugh-out-loud comedy, or want either a branching story or otherwise non-linear gameplay, you won't find these here.

It's unfortunate that the name Ballads of Hongye already suggests a relaxed, atmospheric experience. Take a quick peek at the game's store page, and you will spot detailed building animations among the rich variety of sometimes-fantastical construction choices. The prime cause of its rocky reception at launch is the disparity between the slow-paced, contemplative feast for the eyes spontaneous buyers expect, and the reality of Hongye:

While it's not exactly a survival city builder along the lines of Frostpunk, it is sure a hard game. It's a game about balancing production, it's a game about braving the odd disaster (or whole series of those), and it's a game that grades you. To expand your city area and unlock some new buildings, you take on challenges in which you govern a preset region with preset goals, but randomized building unlocks specific to the current challenge attempt. Each of these consists of multiple stages with objectives that let you proceed to the next stage, whereupon the game rates your performance based on how fast you were, how efficiently you spent your money, whether you used a wide variety of buildings, and if you made your citizens happy. Getting an overall S+ rating is anything but a cakewalk. I think the biggest obstacle for admirers of the game's art style and animations is the first of these categories. To get a S+ in speed, rather than watching all the superb building animations, you keep the game paused at almost all times, and unpause only long enough to plop down buildings or order upgrades with the actions-per-minute of a professional Starcraft player. The meaningful difference between the game's relaxed mode and challenge mode is that in the latter, you have to keep your economy afloat and keep the final conditions met until a year has passed since the start of the challenge, while in the former, you can just end it immediately. After completing a challenge, this area together with everything you built there is added to the overall area you manage, meaning the titular Hongye quickly grows into a sprawling economy of loosely connected screens with a combined overall balance sheet. The buildings you could build during the challenge attempt stay in place after you succeed, but you can't keep building from the challenge's set of structures. Instead, after succeeding in a challenge you pick two unlocks to bring with you into the freeplay view. If you lose a challenge, you lose the fee you had to spend on attempting it, and recoup only very few resources. In that sense, if you don't win sooner or later, several consecutive failed attempts can eventually just lose you the game altogether.

Both in the freeplay view and during a challenge, you have to manage your income and expenses in money and five other resources across the four seasons, as well as make sure you have enough population to serve as workers. Each month brings the next season (so it's not a 'real year'), and as you can imagine, most food production buildings will be less efficient in winter, while firewood needs will be higher. The challenges have more of a puzzle element to them since you might be required to stockpile a specific resource, or deal with catastrophes of a particular type. Playing in the global freeplay view is more akin to a regular city builder, but spend too much time slacking and you'll quickly end up jumping between your absorbed regions trying to handle all the simultaneous disaster events. Making a solid profit there is still important, as unlocks you buy in the skill tree are paid from your global budget instead of draining your challenge-specific resources.

A few days after initial release, the developers announced they were contemplating relaxing the restriction from giving any orders while the game is paused, and in the long run they want to explore offering an experience that appeals to fans of regular ol' city builders. For now though, if you want a chillaxed game to lean back and watch your villagers ant about, this might not be what you are looking for.

If balancing the books and challenging yourself to play efficiently is your thing, the $10/10€ asking price is truly generous. The game was clearly crafted with a lot of love, from its unique look to the responsive dev team churning out patches left and right.

A somewhat disturbing kinetic novel featuring everything from B like body horror to A like animal mutilation. For the most spoiler-free experience, only read the "mature content description" block of the store page – at least I was glad that I went into it without the knowledge imparted by the trailer and store page description fresh on my mind.

Fans of horror comics get a decently constructed story and solid art for a low price. Sounds and music are also done well. It's obviously not voiced, and I didn't think that detracted from the experience.

As I generally keep my horror intake to about once a year, I finished the game beset with mild worry for the quality of my sleep in the upcoming nights. So to say it once more, this is one of those viewer discretion is advised titles.

On June 23, the developer announced the removal of the game from the store (to get some sales from people who buy that kinda stuff).
In reply to questions if there will be any form of sale or price reduction before (it was even the summer sale!), the developer answered:

Originally posted by njoygo:

Sorry, but I want to stop selling now.

Then the developer waited a fashionable while to make sure the bulk of purchasers are outside of the 14 day refund window, and announced that there won't be a removal after all:

Originally posted by njoygo:

The plan has changed.
Sales continue.

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If you argue with Steam Support about this being an unjolly bait and switch and/or cite random local consumer protection laws of your country, you can likely still get a refund.

Tiny Little Lion's Threaded is a fine example of a well-polished casual logic game. While their other games (also with publisher Boomzap), the I Love Finding Cats/Pups pure hidden object game series, are more of a less professional lower-effort endeavour in my book, with underwhelming presentation and some rough edges, here I found nothing of the sort to complain about.* The 'threads' you connect create dandy artwork, you can play the levels in any order, and your progress is always saved. It even nicely continues to the next unfinished level, while for the largest level sizes you can employ mousewheel zooming and WSAD scrolling. Each motif is introduced with a neat rhyme, and upon completion you're asked a perfectly child-safe quiz question for flavour. Those are hard/exotic enough for adults to struggle (lest they resort to an online search engine), but it's not like there was a penalty for getting them wrong.

Numberlink-type puzzles are of course nothing new, with for example the Flow Free mobile games having reached tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of downloads. The levels here are all very easy, merely ramping up in size and thus complexity across each of the 9 sets of 8 levels, but they never turn into the experience of wondering for a dozen minutes how the developer (or their random level generator) could possibly expect you to solve something, and due to the lines-to-connect being numbered in length and colour-coded, the overall possibilities are vastly fewer than in games that use only numerical length or colour-coding. The smallest 15x15 levels can be solved in a minute if you're really serious about it, while a more relaxed attempt at the biggest 30x30 or 40x40 levels could take a good fifteen minutes. For the impatient achievement hunters among us, there's a hint function to place a random connection on a relatively short cooldown – that, however, kind of defeats the purpose of the more meditative gameplay inherent to this subgenre, especially for a this easy title. Difficulty can be increased a bit by disabling an automatic hint for miscoloured tiles; either way it won't outright tell you about just any wrong line.

I wasn’t bothered by it, but Wikipedia advised me that Numberlink purists might be offended that levels often have multiple valid solutions (only very small deviations, but they exist), which is also why the game shows you the art as the developers intended it after each level's completion.

What I don't necessarily agree with is the $7 / 5.7€ price tag for what even the least pressured players will finish in less than ten hours. Competitors like Konstructors' Lines games will cost you less, but then again, they don't have spiffy animal descriptions and come with NSFW achievement spam. If you don't mind vastly more difficult puzzles, a game like Voxelgram will have you assembling art (minus the rhymes and quiz) for at least five times as many hours.

*: Well, maybe the end-of-level animation that first fades your solution to white, before assembling the developers' artwork could be achieved in a less blinding way, and it wouldn't be wrong to play the levels not primarily ordered by theme but by size, to avoid the difficulty jumping up and down, but those are rather minor nitpicks.

Huntdown comes with perfectly charming pixel art, a fine story & atmosphere that quite some effort was put into (somewhere between Escape From New York and The Warriors), the corniest writing you could ask for brought to life by plenty of voice actors, and a really decent variety of levels/enemies/weapons. There's tons of boss fights, and the bosses' move sets are pretty unique as well. Technically it's alright, excluding that co-op is limited to single machine / Remote Play Together and the frame rate can't go beyond a 1990s-esque 60 FPS. At least it's Unity and not GameMaker...

Unfortunately, I can't say I enjoyed the actual gameplay for more than a few minutes in the 5-6 hours I spent playing it. Beyond "it's not fun for me", I suppose the only objective faults I can find is that the (button-mashing) partner revive system can be quite frustrating, and the control layout should (at least optionally!) be split up into way more buttons, since you regularly find yourself doing the wrong thing with a button that has multiple context-sensitive functions.

Extremely bad object finding game at an absurdly high nominal price. Obviously if anything pick up a Steam key for a few microdollars rather than buying the outrageously-priced offering here.

Choose the "100 hidden" series instead – accept no compromise.

Painful eye-straining default graphics settings, once-per-playthrough missable achievements in a collectibles game, and half the gameplay challenge is holding your right analogue trigger down with the exact force the game wants you to.
You don't even want to know how this works for mouse/keyboard players.

All this for just 20 dollars/euros! Thanks, EA.