Recent reviews by NeverBetter

Hi, the recent people being jerks and reviewbombing unrelated games came to my attention: I'm leaving an honest review for Portal. Steam only has 9.1 hours on this game listed for me, for me that was something like 5-ish playthroughs on steam itself, and i've played through it about 5 more times on Switch, and in sure i've spent more frankly playing it on other accounts. While FixTF was the impetus for writing this review, its merely because I didn't think anything I personally had to say was entirely needed to be seen, but want to correct that behavior. I'm writing this from my phone so pardon any missed spelling mistakes or errors.

Now, with the preamble out of the way; Portal! There isn't much i can personally say that hasn't been said before. Between on point humor, a touch of horror, and loads of sci-fi flavor, Portal's settimg is fantastic, and despite its short run time, its staying power is fantastic.

As to gameplay, its an incredible puzzle game. Simple, certianly, but that simplicity forms really smart and fun puzzle design. White hallways giving way to desperate attempts to stop yourself from being shot by turrets, to trying to make your way in places you don't belong, all while feeling intuitive and snappy.

Music heavily sets the tone as well, with the best words i've found to describe it as "science synth" as a genre, each track sets the tone of the scenarios its in wonderfully, adding a sense of tension and fear while also sounding suitably futuristic and with a tone that makes you feel like you are in fact part of some lab rat experement.

Portal (as a series) has been one of my favorites since i was a child. While not my earliest recordings of footage I ever made, playthroughs of it that I recorded were some of the first things I ever properly video edited (though those files are long since lost). It's a wonderful, wonderful series and this is a wonderful game.

Recieved as a christmas gift, been loving it! I will say the opening can be a bit slow, controls can be fiddly, and the fact that upgrades require a seperate currency that is a bit slow to grind are all complaints, but besides those, having a blast with the game.

Buy.

I feel like all the loops I did shaved more life off of me than anything i've played thus far. It has great writing, good art, great music, but the gameplay is so.. Not gameplay. I could hardly call this a game, unless watching numbers go up or down for the majority of your life. You click and drag equipment on and I guess strategically place tiles. But in my opinion, this gets old quick with many of the tiles not being worth using aside from just being where you grind a resource from. Basebuilding is basic, the game in general suffers from a huge lack of interraction, I feel like I'm watching Twitch Plays in terms of the combat. Hundreds of meaningless enemies downed, thousands of resources gathered, but I feel no satisfaction playing it. Just empty boredom.

If you're the kind of person who likes semi-idle games like this, congrats, absolute winner, but with so little to call gameplay, it basically to me feels like a visual novel with extra, boring steps.

Yes, I recieved a copy for free, from a friend in fact, and I appreciate him and his gift, and I put in 63 hours of my life into this and it frankly feels like a waste. I think I got the cost of purchase out in enjoyment of the music and humor of the game, but I doubt i'd have ever bought it for myself.

Tl;dr at bottom

10 hours does not sound like a lot, but given that in that 10 hours, I've suffered the same bug a few times now, where I'm close to something big, and then a worker will refuse to actually do the assigned task for some reason. All of my workers are fine, completely unarmed, yet will not actually preform their task.

This was an issue on the last run of the game I played and will likely play when a series of four trees were not cut down, prohibiting me from building a key wall after I had constructed a few archer towers for an attempt on one of the goals of the game. As a result, my archers kept flooding into the towers and subsequently being picked off by areal units until my army had dwindled so drastically that I could no longer defend myself and my run was ruined.

While I understand and admire the developers for doing what they set out to do in terms of what they wanted the game to be (minimalisic strategy game) I feel that it's marred by a frustrating bug, and the lacking of any hud, even as an option that is turned off by default, is a poorer choice. In rougelikes and strategy games in general, the information given to the user is critical, and the more deprived of it you are the more likely you are to make mistakes. Furthermore, lacking the ability to disable some buildings after figuring out that they actively are harming you is very frustrating. If you realize an issue or error was made but can course-correct, but are prevented in doing so, it becomes a very quickly frustrating affair.

From a visuals standpoint, the game is rather beautiful, the water reflections, weather effects, and general lighting are great, and the soundtrack is for all intents and purposes, solid.

In terms of general gameplay/gameplay loop, there isn't anything that intriguing about the game to keep me playing past one successful run, which I haven't quite achieved yet due to, again, workers not preforming their jobs correctly causing issues. Most of your time is spent running in one direction or another, and visually, the environment doesn't really change aside from what trees, or shine, or river spot or what have you are around, meaning you're seeing the same dull green trees on either side of the map.

Map events like enemy portals and shrines don't make for environmental variation, it makes for run variation, but I would say they hardly grant any real replay value just because they're randomly placed, and they're the same objects every time, meaning that after you've seen said objects once, you'll see them again and again and again. As far as a rougelike goes, each run feels generally the same, run from place to place spending coins on hopefully useful upgrades, expanding your workforce, or buying shrine effects while terraforming the land (when it works). Let your purchased units do the hard work for you and pray that you bought enough archers to do the job you need done and that not too many of them get hit should your count be wrong and be able to easily correct it.

It's unbelievably simple and frankly droll. Not that I'm asking for your character to be able to fight for themselves, but having one combat able unit for most of the game, and then your second being a very expensive unit to produce at that and only doable in a limited quantity of two per side means that even just watching the fights as they take place is boring until the enemy busts through a wall, requiring you to jaunt in the other direction hoping your troops can actually deal with the situation. The night sections as a result feel frankly boring. You're not able to produce gold at night, your workers obviously can't go outside of the walls at night or else they'll get their lights knocked out, and unless you have something for them to do inside the walls and the money to do it, you're just sorta waiting for night to pass for your next chance at interacting with the game. The player shouldn't need to sit on their hands like a useless duck for a portion of the game. Hell, I'd take a stupid minigame to play while time passes at night over nothing.

TL;DR: Solid-ish game marred by a bad bug, boring sections in it's overall gameplay loop, and the focus on exploration not really yielding anything of intrigue to the player. If the bugs are ironed out, and perhaps the map was more interesting outside of good pixel art, then I could recommend. As it stands, too many issues to recommend to anyone.

shoot shoot aliens very good

I've been a tf2 player technically since the MVM update, though that account has been long since lost and forgotten. I love TF2, beyond being a game, I made many life long friends due to the game. I met many, many thousands of people with thousands of games played between each of them, talking to those people, forming connections and bonds that have stood the tests of time. It's because of a game like TF2 that I, when suffering from chronic severe pain that debilitated my ability to walk, that I could still find new people to talk to and bond with. TF2 to me means so much. Over years and years of spending time in this game, making memories that I'll take to my grave, I unfortunately cannot recommend it.

Today, TF2 is functionally unplayable unless you are lucky enough to find a mostly-bot-free server and then perform the treadmill work that Valve refuses to do themselves: Remove a functionally infinite pool of bots from the game you are actively in. TF2 is less game and more menu and timer simulator for players who don't want to let bots overrun the lobby. There's often little time to actually play when bots are actively joining in the slots where players belong. These bots advertise "immunity" to their auto-headshot aim cheats for a fee, while its owners blatantly harass, attack, and defame anyone with a platform who dares try to stop them.

Today, if you want to play TF2, you have to play in community servers, where the average skill level of players is significantly higher than your average pub.

Today, if you dare try to make the game fun again, to make a video game playable, the bot hosts will doxx you. They will harass you. They will make up fake evidence using powerful AI tools to make you say heinous things.

Today, if you're a free to play player, you can't even ask for a medic to top you up, even if you are in a community server (unless the server has plugins to get around that "feature" of TF2).

Today, a part of gaming history is left bleeding in a ditch, no sequel, no support, no love from its father from on-high, and it's not the only one. Dota, Counter-Strike, and many other IP's and games suffer while Valve again moves onto whatever the shiny new project they want to work on is. Right now, it's Deadlock, but why bother playing it when it'll inevitably be one of another of Valve's old playthings - relegated to the dustbin when it no longer entertains.

I can't in good conscience suggest anyone play TF2 right now. I wish I could say differently. Regardless of the new movement to save TF2 or the fact it will almost certainly do nothing, I wanted to write this re-review for a long time. I've wanted to put to words my feelings on the game that saved me from suffering in silence. A game that helped me realize not all fps games were CoD, that they could be games I could enjoy too. That helped me find a community of people I loved, raise one of my own even. I love Team Fortress. But something has to change.

To Valve's employees, who certainly will not read this, or if they do, will not care: I will never spend a dime in TF2 again. I'll never suggest this game to anyone again. Nor can i ever, ever suggest any Valve multiplayer title ever again. At least with Half-Life or Portal, those experiences are single player, and as long as they're stable and fun, i can suggest that. But for it's multiplayer titles, the titles to which Valve clearly aspires to make, but does not care to maintain. The ones in which they would rather offload their "treadmill work" to their consumers, would rather make and forget. I will not be playing Deadlock; even if it were to be of my personal tastes in games, I could not in good conscience play another Valve game, learn to love it, only to watch it decay before my eyes. It's clear to me this company is only concerned with milking whatever peanuts you can gather from the community at this point, so I have a message to anyone at the company that cares enough to listen: either change how you handle your products or end of life them. Stop providing servers and updates and just leave the game in the hands of community server owners. Let it die with some dignity. Or don't, continue to try and milk every nickle and dime from this game you can until the community can be milked no more, show us how you've become no different from Microsoft in the ways that matter.

EDIT: At time of writing this update, which is the Summer 2024 update, I still refuse to suggest this game. It still has glaring issues and the future of support is not guaranteed or defined.

H I M Y N A M E I S T I M M Y A N D I W A N T T O S H A K E Y O U B Y Y O U R C O L L A R T I L L Y O U R D E A D

I don't often find myself writing reviews for games cause I generally am really really passive, but this game is INCREDIBLY bad.

Cons:

Terrible animations (everyone bobs like they're a ship on water in example)

No movement abilities at all, other than WASD (meaning no advanced moving techniques to evade killers or even traverse geomotry)

The Survivor team has a ton of advantages over the killer (it takes only a second to take the killer out of the attempt to kill, and the action of is looking at him with your flashlight, which has a ton of battery)

EVERYTHING is on cooldown timers, and you move slower than a high-fiber solid block of fecal matter out of a fat man's rectum (first person experience on both ends)

killer is very hard to play, unsatasfying, and boring. You walk around the map with little to no idea what the hell your location is and any time you die you respawn randomly somewhere, and even when you catch someone, it takes a solid 16 seconds to kill someone and it's not satasfying, you more or less just grab them by their collar and shake them.

Player models are AWFUL. Both killer or monster, The monster you have by default looks like a naked mole rat with a light daiper rash on it's face. Humans didn't look much better.

Pros:

Friends and I had a lot of laughs from how bad it is.

Result: I got more pleasure by shoving a blender in my ass than playing this game, 3/10

Just stupid levels of fun when you have nothing to do but mess around.