Recent reviews by Sleg

It is better to die for Super Earth than to live for yourself.

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One of the leading Freedom Simulators on Steam; this game is well-worth a recommendation.

Liberating space from three visibly and functionally distinct factions of foes, this game plays like a cross between Magicka and Alien Swarm. Especially to the former insofar as it's very, very easy to pulp your buddies, and only slightly more difficult to bring them back following an accident. And there will be accidents.

Although this game is playable solo, I do much more strongly recommend it if you have a group of friends to play it with. Friends that won't mind being crushed by a drop pod, or a tank, or a dropship. Or minced by a strafing run, or blown up by some artillery fire. Or just plain shot in the back of the head.
To say nothing of the actual enemies themselves!

HELLDIVERS offers a wide variety of weapons and support abilities with which to carnage your teammates freedom-hating scum, ranging from grenade launchers, to mechs, to micronukes, to squad-loaded rocket launchers, to a bolt-action rifle. Although the meta might only call for a few specific things, you're really better off just having fun with it. You'll find that some weapons and calldowns tend to work better on one faction than another, which allows for some experimentation and freedom in your builds.

The game looks pretty nice, and controls very well on a gamepad, although I know some people have taken issue with the PC controls. The difficulty display takes the form of a number, and ranges from cozy slow recon to absolutely horrifyingly tense and non-stop danger. Each of the 3 factions has a different focus on their power curve, as well as giant bosses that can be optionally fought.

The general gameplay loop is objective-oriented, and actually fighting things is usually secondary, if you can avoid getting caught by dealing with the patrols quickly. Which isn't always as easy as it sounds when you have the objectives to worry about, especially by yourself. Casualties in co-op can be quickly replaced by any surviving member of the squad by calling reinforcements, or by an automated lives system in solo play. This keeps the gameplay moving along pretty smoothly.

If I were to level any real cricitism of the game, it would be that the story and plot are nearly non-existent, if you actually care about that kind of thing. Some people complain about certain DLC being "mandatory" for high level play, but I honestly think you're fine with the free stuff. Do some investigation on your own, if it concerns you.

Definitely worth playing with friends. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if you only plan on playing solo/with pubs, though.

Lovely aesthetic, but undone by the pacing, UI, and execution.

The game is far too hectic to wrestle with the simultaneously chunky and tiny UI, the AI of both the guards and the civilians is extremely basic and arbitrary.

There are no discernable patrol patterns, and once you get into a fight, which you invariably will with the way the guards work, especially earlier in, you're left completely to the mercy of the RNG rather than something sensible like NOT challenging a guard openly and proceeding to get walloped on the head repeatedly while the rest of your crew stands around helplessly. Even if you DID bring along two people that can fight back instead of instantly getting arrested, you can't double team guards, even though they can double team you. Great.

Looks nice, at least.

[edit] Having said this, I like the concept of the game and will happily give this game another shot later down the line once a few things (Say, keybinding, the UI) are worked on. I can live with the sketchy AI and hectic pacing.

As promised, I have changed my review to positive. Spike Chunsoft has shown some initiative to fix certain problems with the game, although there are still other issues that may yet go unfixed. Read carefully, and make your own decision.

Many of my complaints more directly concern fans of OWH . Newcomers will not mind most of these things as much, so take it with a grain of salt.

To preface, I've spent several hundreds of hours playing both OWH, OWH , and Mystery Chronicle in both languages.
I've already written extensively about the game, however...

Let's talk about the (arguably) positive things first, and what I think of them.

• There's a lot more classes! Unfortunately, the classes are not quite as unique, well thought out, or finely nuanced as before. But they're still fun to play, just not as well balanced.
  
• There's new character designs and art for everyone! But I personally preferred Smoking_Wolf's designs. This one is rather subjective.
  
• There's new chipsets for all the terrain, and sprites for all the enemies and characters! Except, in my opinion, rather than Smoking_Wolf's handmade sprites, they just look like they came from a tablet port of Final Fantasy. There's nothing exactly wrong with them, however, I just feel that they lack character.
  
• There's new music! I prefer the old music. Too bad, I guess.
  
• There's voice acting! Except because of this, it causes skipping dialog to take absolutely forever, and hearing your companions cheering (I'm looking at you, Keyton and Nami) gets tiring very quickly. I also don't really value the voice acting all that much to begin with.
  
• There's a totally new set of companions! I could go on for a very long time talking about why the companions are worse, but this is meant to be a bullet point review, and a temporary one at that. Suffice to say I have extensively talked about why the new companions are inferior, and why DPS > Utility. Also I don't really like any of them but that's just me I guess.
  
• There's twice as many class unlock quests! But they're totally boring as hell and only one of them is even vaguely difficult compared to OWH 's class unlock quests...
  
• There's new weapons! Hey, actually I like this one. The fists and extra weapons in existing categories are pretty okay, boomerangs are unique, (albeit I don't use them because they're inaccurate as hell) and generally speaking they didn't totally ruin the existing balance of the weapons!
  
• There are new biomes! The only real caveat I have this time is that Mandragoras totally screw up existing balance and tend to give you way more food than you'll need for the next several hundreds of kilometers.
  
• There are new enemies! They're also easily some of the most absolutely horrid things in the game! I'm looking at you, Dullahan.
  
• The vast majority of enemies are now able to use abilities at any level! Most of these abilities are either knockback or rotting your equipment. This actually keeps things more interesting, generally, which is good! Mostly.

As far as I can remember, that's about all of the new content! With that said...
Things that didn't make it into the remake. Take these as you will.

• The Force Knight class. Some of his things got moved to Astrologist but for the most part he's gone.
  
• Dairy cows. Why.
  
• Albert.
  
• Fairy Iris joining you as a bonus companion.
  
• The goddess statues in the castle
  
• The boss timer
  
• Being able to see buildings on the minimap
  
• Holy Emperor Souther was in the original version of the remake, but didn't make it to the English release.
  
• Gradually progressing rewards from companion skits. For all but a few companions, only the last skit actually gives you any reward.
  
• Balance

Everything else is ported over more or less 1:1. There are no new endings compared to OWH .
Now, let's talk about the things that I don't like. This is mostly nitpicks, but I'll try to be short about it.

• TRAPS! Fundamentally, they're fine, and I think there's a decent idea here, but they completely blew it. Generally speaking, in a lot of cases you can avoid YASDs by being smart and avoiding putting yourself into bad situations. This is good! But there are a few that are just outright poorly designed. Traps are completely invisible until detected, and there is no way to increase your chance to detect or avoid traps by means of item, companion, skill, stat, class, or spell.
  Landmines ignite bombs and instantly kill all NPCs in a 3x3 radius, including friendly hires.
  What this means is, basically, in order to minimize your damage, the best course of action is to simply not take advantage of these features of the game at all. This is bad design.
  Aside from this is sleep traps, which make you lose control of your character for 6 turns, having a chance to wake up every time you get hit. If you're running from something, or step on one of these as approaching a strong enemy, or even a group of weaker enemies, odds are that you will just die on the spot, before you're able to take any actions again. You cannot heal while sleeping, you can't take a debuff cleanser, your allies can't wake you up.
  There are other things like rust traps that permanently add a debuff to items, or log traps that can push you into instant death pits or lava tiles, too.
  There's a trap visibility option to augment this now.
  
• The hero ticker has been replaced with a twitter feed. Unlike OWH , this twitter feed doesn't tell you what difficulty someone is on, which companions they have, how much HP/EN they have, whether or not they're using the vault. It doesn't automatically update, and people tend to hesitate to fill their friend's twitter feeds with inane nonsense, so you end up seeing the same few tweets scrolling endlessly, rather than actually feeling like you're making progress with fellow adventurers. It would also seem that the items that ghosts drop are now random, instead of being weighted based on the the parting message of the deceased.
  
• The building generation for quests is absolutely awful, and can place required NPCs in a range of mountains on the border of the map, where they're almost impossible to reach.
  
• The screen is a few tiles shorter.
  
• Perhaps as a side effect of the above point, everything seems harder to come by. Fewer towns, fewer enemies, fewer items, fewer arrows to the point of making bows almost not worth taking most of the time.
  
• Many of the Type C skins for each class are actually just recolored NPCs. This is rather lazy.
  
• You can't repair things in the dimensional vault. I personally actually don't mind this, as I don't use the thing, but it's kind of ridiculous because it just means people are going to go out of their way to find worlds with black markets so they can stockpile repair scrolls to use for the same purpose.
  
• Oddly long loading times, regardless of hardware.
  
• Inferior performance. Trying to dash across a long stretch of land takes way longer than it used to.
  
• I already actually mentioned this up above as a caveat to the new voices, but skipping dialog takes FOREVER and makes the game incredibly more tedious to play.
  
• The readout for status effects is completely useless.

And lastly, one last category for things that don't bug me as much personally but are still huge issues for other people.

• 30 FPS cap
  
• Really, really horrible resolution choices
  
• Some people are reporting crashes or can't play the game
  
• The hotkey menu and UI in general are significantly worse (I'm used to bad menus.)
  
• Controls are always displayed as keyboard even though it's clearly intended for pads.
  
• Companion skits are all overly suggestive.

This game is not OWH , but it's still fun. Make an informed decision.

(Please ignore the small amount of play-time I have. I've had this game for around a decade, and the developer has kindly supplied me with a key for the Steam version.)

See the bottom of the review for TL;DR.

I rarely write positive reviews, but to me, the devotion that Sami shows to his supporters and fans is nothing short of remarkable. He went through the trouble of walking me through the steps of getting my key re-sent and updated despite me having very little of the original information I had when originally purchasing the game, and also has made a point of giving Steam keys to those who own lifetime registration keys.

Though, this is a review about URW, not about the developer.

URW takes a somewhat different approach to things than a lot of roguelikes, especially the ones usually seen on Steam. Rather than abstracting concepts like HP, satiation, exhaustion, deities, combat, and so on, URW tries as well as it is able to approach things more realistically. Fans of Dwarf Fortress Adventurer Mode shouldn't be too out of their element here.

Rather than being about killing dragons and getting amulets, URW is more generally about surviving in the wilderness. Trying to, anyway. Combat poses a very real threat. One missed blow could get you a concussion, or swept off of your feet and getting a spear through your chest, or teeth at your throat. This is made all the more painful, because your characters and the worlds they live in are indeed very permanent. You might build a house and make a type of farm, trading regularly with a nearby village. Make a smokehouse to cure your meats, make a sauna, get drunk, do what people from Finland do.

But the combat itself isn't the only problem. You also have to worry about things like your wounds getting infected, illnesses, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, sleep deprivation. Of course, when you're injured, it becomes even harder to care for yourself... but that might be skipping ahead a little too far. Depending on whatever choice of background and scenario you pick, your first priority might be making a temporary shelter out of sticks and leaves, fending off a wolf, or escaping from captivity.

After you make yourself marginally more comfortable, you need to start working on feeding yourself, and making (or trading for, or looting, or stealing) tools as a means to accomplish this. Whether that means hunting for food, fishing, foraging, robbing other people, stealing from them, or just plain killing them and eating them. (The gods won't mind. Really.) But while eating raw food might be okay sometimes, you should probably consider cooking it, making a dish of it, or maybe a bit later on, working on a means of preparing it for long-term storage, like digging a cold-storage cellar, or curing it with salt, or in a smokehouse.

Once you have a somewhat reliable means of feeding yourself and living comfortably in the trees, and have a nice axe, hopefully without too many people's blood on it, you could think about building a house for yourself! Or you could live like a nomad. Your choice, really. Either way, once you're on your feet, you can get niceties by trading things like cured furs and pelts to village traders and other wanderers possibly like yourself.

Although there are arbitrary goals that can reward you with things, ultimately they are optional and there is no endgame or final goal of URW besides what you dictate.

URW is definitely not for everyone, and I do recommend trying the free version first. Don't let my review make the game sound more hypeworthy than it is. See for yourself if you like it or not. Even if you think you like roguelikes, this one might not sit well with you.

tl;dr Mostly-realistic wilderness survival roguelike that eventually turns into a violent Harvest Moon with permadeath.
TRY THE FREE VERSION FIRST.

Tentatively positive because they ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mostly everything, including microtransactions, and finally added something between Overkill and Deathwish.

Still don't like the revamped weapon balance.

I was a very avid player of the original free Japanese version of this game, and I can absolutely say I'm glad I paid full price for this game and the DLC. This is an excellent coffeebreak game, and I hope the rest of SmokingWOLF's games get translated and put on Steam as well.

One Way Heroics 2 is coming soon! Looking forward to it.

Normally I don't write recommendations when a Steam Event isn't involved. But this game was really something else. I can't even gather the will to write a sarcastic anti-recommendation. I hate fewer things more than self-aware games laden with "funny" and "random" achievements. Every step this game takes further in evolution makes it more and more insufferable. Crammed full of jokes and references that most half-witted gamers will clap their hands and giggle at, all I can do is groan and wonder just where this miserable excuse for a game will take me next. The music manages to become increasingly grating as it "evolves." Simply miraculous. Though billed as ~video game evolution~, the evolution itself is rapidly toned down after the first five minutes, and then you are sucked into a horrible slog of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ generic RPG.

Please, videogames, stop trying to be clever.

P.S. thank you buun

This game somehow takes the seemingly impossible to screw up Hack 'n' Slash genre and gives it an indie spitshine.

Unfortunately indie games chew tobacco all the time and never brush their teeth.