Recent reviews by astarr

Edit: This is good! The December 15th patch added great modes and some great quality of life options.

It's similar to Family Feud, or Jackbox's Guesspionage. The different game modes are a good way to use the ranked surveys, but bounce - while creative - doesn't really feel good to play.

Edit: It's been two months and there's been so much content and quality of life updates. This is turning out to be an incredible early access game.

Original: It's like Farm Together 1 - a very good game - with improvements.

Read my full review[backloggd.com].

This is what you all wanted, right?

After numerous times seeing Steam discussion topics like "I'm not buying a new JBPP until there's a universal launcher!" It's here and it does what it's supposed to.

It can be better; users are making their lists of wants to the developers and its being updated. So far the biggest challenges are launching in windowed mode, lack of customisation and accessibility options, and no controller input.

I put 55 hours into Star Conflict, a similar PVE/PVP F2P game from Gaijin. I only put 3 hours into this before seeing the same structure, which is unbearable PVE in early levels, and then impossible PVP when other players are paying for vehicles and parts.

Except in this case, Crossout is pretty boring. You can drive around a desert with uninteresting landmarks, brown colour schemes and nothing but enemies or mission markers around. Even with the vehicle-building aspect, there's no hook or anything to pull the player in, except a sunk-cost fallacy if you ended up purchasing something for this game. Even if you paid to win, I don't see how showing up to the same arena to dunk on bots and noobs would be exciting.

I'd recommend something like Mechwarrior Online instead. Even though you can't build a vehicle from the frame upwards, there is interesting customization attached to lore, strategy, tactics, great gunplay, and actually populated servers for matches.

war is a ♥♥♥♥.

Jackbox Party Pack 10 is a real test with these party packs. It's a test of what new experiences will work with your friend group, what will work with your phone and what works generally as a gaming concept.

I was able to play the >3 player games a couple of times each, before a significant update on November 15, 2023. Rating each of these packs requires a breakdown of each game, so here's what we thought of the 10th one in the series.

Fixy Text was loved by everyone, but me. I believe this is where the device bugs hit the hardest. It's an interesting design that is kind of like Job Job and Quiplash from other packs. The fun lies in how interesting, creative and funny your friend group is, with some minimal support from the game. The game provides some prompting, but doesn't rely upon it, so role-playing elements depend on the group you're with, unlike Roomerang or Hypnotorious from this pack. I experienced a lot of bugs while playing, including my cursor and typed letters being randomly applied in the text message, making me a chaotic disaster to play with. Everyone else really loved freestyling text messages with minimal prompts and having their wit acknowledged by others gifting them points.

Tee K.O. 2 was a hit among my friend group, and this has definite quality of life improvements over the first. My problems with the first one are mostly resolved in this one, you can re-use text and pictures that weren't used in previous rounds. However, I really didn't like the last round re-using the shirts we've already made and won with - our group really enjoys the surprise and hilarity from introducing new shirts, but this is a new favourite of ours despite this issue.

Dodo Re Mi is a highlight. It's Guitar Hero for your phone, which I'm very surprised hasn't been done yet. It can be played solo or with one other person, and has been incredible fun just for my partner and I to play through. It's what we've spent the most time with and had the most connection to from both myself who has mastered most Guitar Hero games and someone who has never played a rhythm game before. This could have been an entirely standalone game with the amount of work going into it. However, my Samsung A13 really struggled, often skipping, lagging and freezing during the game, or having inputs not recognized or seen, but that's probably all on my phone model.

Time Jinx is a decent trivia game that is something closer to Guesspionage than a You Don't Know Jack or Trivia Murder Party. It makes good use to contemporary popular cultural historical events for trivia questions. It also has decent for rubberbanding for players who either struggled to remember timelines or guessed poorly. It's fun and interesting, albeit not as much as their other trivia games.

Hypnotorious could potentially be the weakest one of the pack. It relies heavily on the group's roleplaying ability, which mine isn't good at, but also has a somewhat confusing premise and prompting. Our group will have to revisit it, but some of them did enjoy it.

The November 25th update seems to resolve some issues and improve games somewhat, but I have yet to try. This isn't the weakest of the Jackbox Party Packs, but it's far from the strongest.

Did I not review this yet? Okay it's an awesome game. The devs' investment into open-source game development tech is awesome too.

The game is janky and won't be finished - it shouldn't have left EA without any kind of story, dialogue or bug fixes.

It has a pretty fun loop of stealthily wiping out settler camps and burning them to the ground, but it's marred by some strange AI behaviour including detection. It has an interesting and ambitious strategy layer that if micromanaged properly is still missing information or context to allow the player to make proper decisions and not be baffled by the outcome, like sending a band of warriors to take out a settler gathering ends up losing a battle and it's unclear whether the numbers didn't work in the players' favour.

Beyond enacting a revenge power fantasy, there's not much to garner out of this game. Connecting with the community is a split between the weirdest and most bigoted people on the internet, with a small fraction actually being people who are or care about Indigenous resistance to colonialism. Thankfully the former don't stick around after making a few ♥♥♥♥♥♥ comments, but it really did a number to push the latter out of the community, which was probably harboured by the development team and community managers.

Solidarity with the Indigenous resisters, land defenders and water protectors as they fight back against neo-colonialist governments on Turtle Island and around the world.

Edit: There's been some updates that really fix the balance, quality of life and bugs in the game. I still feel like there's fundamental mechanic, graphic and story issues that can't and won't fit for what I'd want. It's a decent game and getting better - especially with including the first DLC into the base game for free - so I'm changing it from a not recommended to a recommended review with a lot of caveats.

Original: This game is absolutely not game of the year material.

Dying Light 2 was a difficult game to enjoy, especially after playing Dying Light 1 for over 250 hours and absolutely loving it. I shouldn't have even picked this up. Dying Light 2 immediately feels different than its predecessor - the parkour, the combat and the environments. Some of these are improvements and design choices that make the game significantly better, but as a package it's not making the game enjoyable.

After 90 hours, I've fully upgraded the combat and parkour skill trees, so the parkour actually feels better and not sluggish or limited. There's interesting choices made in the new system, including having stamina drain during climbing, which makes sense too. Except now the movements feel "floaty" and "sticky," like the running and jumping over a median isn't fluid or fast, as well as grabbing ledges during jumps. That is, if a bug prevents you from grabbing a ledge by clipping you through a wall and the floor.

One thing I missed in the DL1 endgame was actually fighting zombies, as New Game makes combat too difficult to kill a single zombie with a melee weapon. DL2 has excellent fighting moves and the weapons feel like they have a good weight. Blocks and dodges that actually add something new and fun to do during encounters. Except the encounters are the same situation per enemy type, they all have predictable 1-2 movesets and there's rarely any surprises in combat, which leads into the repetitive, boring and frustrating package this entire game is.

These design choices are fine changes, but the package together doesn't feel great in a means I can't really articulate. I'm not sure if it's because I now have a paraglider in the game that makes some aspects of the travelling boring, or because the landscape and buildings are almost cookie-cutter copies (including a spot that was directly copied and pasted, by error, over top of one another). Every time I see a notification in this world, it feels like a chore to meet someone, fetch something, clear out zombies or raiders from a building, or rescue someone in distress.

I felt like the Dying Light 1 story wasn't interesting and this is even worse. There's three overarching stories in this game, your player character's, the human story and the zombie story. Both Dying Lights tell the story of late-stage zombie apocalypses, where we would typically be introduced to the story of an outbreak, these drop us into the months and years afterwards. This has the potential for being the most interesting part, but feels like a backdrop of Dying Light 2, while you interact more with humans and your player character's main quest. The human stories are not engaging at all, most people talk to you for the purpose of fetching something for them, and there's only a few optional and rare glimpses into the actual emotions and history of the characters in the game.

There's really odd story choices that feel incomplete or written by different people at different times. For example, you can take on side quests for mail carriers and are challenged with utilizing your "people skills" by delivering letters to customers. I would have assumed this meant talk them through the emotional content of the letters, or have them scribe a letter on their behalf. It's not though, as your character tells the recipient that "you've received a letter" and the recipient reacts with "this is the content of the letter" and the mission ends. Was my character tested like they were told they would be?

It also feels like separate line readings were absolutely divorced from their context. Another example included talking to a mother about her disobedient son, who has a cockney British (maybe?) that seems a little over-the-top, but then you talk to her son who has a very gruff Boston American (possibly?) accent. They both sound not just from different families, but different games completely.

For a game that boasted of having over 300,000 words and 40,000 lines of dialogue, you will hear a lot of the same dialogue constantly. There's story-telling in the environment as you pass by, but they're so often repeated I can now recite them as a pass by a couple where one of them is stung by a bee. I understand that these are stories or reactions people surviving in this environment are supposed to be sharing to give some kind of life to this game, but these scripted moments you pass through are repeated over and over again - and aren't really interesting. Also, when you talk to people, the environmental effects like particles and ashes are floating around and through the people you're talking to, which is distracting and immersion-breaking.

It's unfortunate that this game is one of the few I may abandon mid-playthrough. I'm not drawn in to the stories and as much as I want to, I don't care about the people living in this world. I don't find it enjoyable after the first few hours of maxing out my character, running around and fighting zombies and raiders. Is it me? Am I experiencing open-world fatigue after playing the first one and just a handful of other open-world games? How could this game be a game of the year with so many odd or bad design choices, bugs and poorly collaborated writing? I don't even know if I could go back and play it after patches, unless there are significant changes to enemies, parkouring and combat to pull me back in.

"Musical detective point & click" was all I really saw going into this, and I appreciated that.

This was a real throwback to 90-00's claymation, point & click adventures and Flash games all-in-one. It's a short, fun story without many mechanics, as far as clicking around a room, choosing a destination, then clicking your topics of conversation. There's about 2-3 puzzles in the game and one choice that has an impact on the ending.

What I was really here for was the awkward music, off-key singing and characters. I got those in a cute and funny claymated game, along with brilliant undertones of capitalism and gender critique.

Now that I've finished this, I'm really excited for Dominique Pamplemousse & Dominique Pamplemousse in "Combinatorial Explosion!"