Recent reviews by Jake Lee

A multiplayer only game that... I enjoy!?

Make Way is a racing game where you create the track between each round. The controls are super simple (accelerate, steer!), the balance between chaos and control is perfect, and the track pieces are unique.

I was concerned that I'd be unable to play Make Way without friends, but the queuing system found me a match within a couple of seconds. We both readied up, and played a complete game with zero issues throughout. I assume the other player was quite new to, since it was a pretty close battle.

Points are rewards just for *finishing* a section, with a bonus for first place. Whilst this seems like it might encourage safe and boring driving, it is countered by any slow players being killed until the next checkpoint. This means everyone has to keep up to earn any points, and there is a strong incentive to barge the other drivers whenever possible!

During my online match, we both won a few rounds, and there's not much opportunity to *properly* screw each other over, since what's more important is keeping yourself on the track. As such, if you try to do more than a gentle nudge down the straight you'll find yourself spinning out and losing points.

I absolutely loved Make Way, and the progression system (play more = unlock more track pieces) and challenges (play with a specific car, do jumps, etc) ensure I'll definitely be coming back after Jingle Jam. I really hope the multiplayer community survives, since the game would lose a lot of its appeal if the races were against AI. Pushing a player off the track is far more fun!

This is one of those games that I just *know* I could get totally sucked into. In Ikonei Island, you're exploring an island, and doing all the crafting, exploring, and combat you'd expect.

The characters weren't very relatable (alien children?), but the overall aesthetic reminded me a bit of games like Slime Rancher. You're given a decent degree of freedom, whilst still having guidance on what you need to do to progress. I started upgrading my house, and it provides a hint towards what items you'll eventually need.

Whilst I played single player (as usual), the store page lists an amazing feature where friends can play for free so long as *one* of you owns the game! This even applies to the 2 hour demo, a great way to get new groups of friends signed up.

I was sure I was going to hate this. The intro was very teenage girl angst, and I'm neither of those things!

However, once the game actually started up... I really liked it? The controls were one of the most intuitive I've seen in a rhythm game, with D-pad up/left/down being the 3 bars on the left, and Y/B/A being the 3 bars on the right. Things are arranged on-screen how they are on my controller, perfect!

The songs are very nostalgic if you're in your 20s / early 30s, it's essentially Blink-182 without any vocals. I've got a soft spot for the post-punk style songs, and they work really well with the "hit the button at the right time" gameplay. There's pretty standard variations (hold and mash), and they all have distinct colours and styles.

I completed the "bedroom" set of levels, and on the easiest difficulty it was definitely getting towards the limits of my own ability. Concentrating on 6 areas of the screen at once is tricky, and I'm terrified of how the difficulty will ramp up later on.

This would have been a 5/5 game if it wasn't for the cutscenes & overall story that are very teenage girl focussed. Unfortunately it's hard to *love* a game where I can't relate to the story at all.

Where's the game?

No official servers, no unofficial servers, no modded servers, nothing seems available in my region (UK). OK, so what about single player... well, you can make a server, but the progress will be totally wiped next time you start the game.

Finally get into actual gameplay, and it's just wandering around, collecting things, selling things, buying things. I'm guessing there's a competent game here, but for whatever reason it totally wasn't present for me. A very empty world, that feels lifeless despite the soft and cuddly aesthetic.

As a side note, it's pretty sloppy that a command prompt opens up whilst start a local server (the only way to play), with thousands of lines of dev logs. I should not ever see these.

Early access, so hopefully it becomes an actual competent game eventually.

Where's the game? Load into a level, read some weird preachy text, carry your brick to the end, go to the next level.

Boring aesthetic, boring gameplay, you'll spend almost the entirety of your time bored. At least it's cheap.

This game was hard work. The first 3 times I tried to launch it, the screen froze and I had to close the game. Steam also never seemed to know if it was running or not. Luckily, I tried launching it with my controller unplugged, and it finally actually loaded! Whilst I can't prove DEPLOYMENT is to blame, after my first and only session with DEPLOYMENT my Steam actually reported a critical component had failed and Steam had to restart. It then had to reinstall some sort of key Steam service. Great.

As an obviously multiplayer first game, I queued up for deathmatch and team deathmatch... both of which had 0 other players. I was put into a 2v2 game with 3 obvious bots, and the difficulty was essentially zero.

My AI companion spent the entire time running in a circle shooting at walls, whilst the enemy spawned and blindly charged at me every time. It was very easy to claim the powerups and slaughter the AI enemies. Fun for a minute or two, but there's no challenge.

The game has a couple of elements that *could* be good, such as powering up turrets to provide area abilities, and entering an "ultimate" mode to deal more damage. This is countered by the extremely limited options (only low or high graphic settings with high providing less than 60 FPS), zero playerbase, and technical bugginess. For example, finishing a game provides almost no information on how you performed, accuracy, etc.

I'm rating DEPLOYMENT especially low due to a simple controller breaking it, the endless technical problems, and there being no interesting gameplay without other players. A short single player campaign would have made this somewhat enjoyable, ah well.

Note: I only tried Homeworld 1.

This is clearly an extremely popular game but... I didn't get on with it. The first thing I saw in the game was an advert. Next, the tutorial glitched halfway through, and I could never navigate to my ships.

OK, fine, restart the game and try again. It works, and is the kind of space RTS you've played a hundred games elsewhere. The complexity is solid, and the UI is detailed, but the age is showing.

Whilst the Steam release date of the remastered edition is 2015, the original release seems to be 2019. This explains a lot. The gameplay is fine if a bit clunky, about what you'd expect from a 24 year old game.

If you've got nostalgia for this series you'll presumably love it, otherwise other games have done the same thing better.

This game started with a fully voiced, impressive cutscene. There was a story, corporate drama, robots, all looks great!

Oh, and then it revealed itself to be one of those "create the requested food" cooking games. Y'know, the Flash games that used to be super popular 15-20 years ago. Whilst the keyboard / controller controls were smooth (e.g. using trigger button to select a topping), it's just too painfully dull for me. This does seem like one of the better games in the genre, but it's not a genre I can ever enjoy.

There is an impressive variety of dishes here, but the "cooking" of them is always just going to be pressing a few buttons in the correct order. I also experienced a few bugs during gameplay, with screenshots not working, and some UI elements getting stuck for a bit.

I cannot *stand* this style of strategy game, where you plan all your ship's movements in 3D space, then all the actions are taken at once. There was a similar one I reviewed from last year's Jingle Jam ("Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command"), and they feel identical.

Even a quick skirmish takes countless repetitive turns. You have very limited options, all the ships are essentially just dancing around each other in space, it's the most dull representation of space combat possible.

Upon first opening the game -- that would have been pretty expensive if not in the Jingle Jam bundle -- I was met with an advert to buy other games. There were also adverts for various DLCs. There was also no story, cutscene, engagement, anything to grab my interest.

Once I closed the various adverts, I was thrown into the emptiness of space with a couple of ships. Who am I? Who am I fighting? Why should I care? Does this have any link to the Battlestar Galactica TV show I've watched? Who knows.

As with many strategy games, people seem to love this! Good for them! I don't, and was hoping for so much more. Perhaps it's one of those games that only gets good tens of hours in. I won't be finding out.

What an infuriating game. Astronimo is primarily a platformer, with a vehicle builder shoved inside. I'd like to think I'm *okay* at understanding tutorials, yet multiple parts just didn't seem to make sense (such as trying to lift a box over my head... that I need to stand on?). Despite this, I made it most of the way through the tutorial world, before the awful swinging controls made me give up.

On the Steam page I saw some element of "sharing worlds" is available, so I tried to play some workshop maps in case they were less painful, but... there didn't seem to be an option. The game also has a "lane" based system, but only seems to remember it exists occasionally. Same with currency. Same with zooming out to view other planets.

The construction seemed basic (grid based, move components and connect them), none of the physics interactions felt right, and overall I just didn't enjoy it at all. It's hard to quantify why it felt so unpleasant, perhaps it's the combination of very childish UI & design, plus confusing controls, making the target audience a mystery.

The game has only just entered early access, so perhaps it'll be a better game after few rounds of improving & simplifying.