Recent reviews by Watcher

It's been almost 10 years since I got it and this is still my go-to game for co-op experience.

Had some good time playing this game with friends in the past, but now EA decided to shoot it into oblivion and 'make a remaster' to sell you the same (or worse?) half-baked product.

Single player kept the 2002's Hot Pursuit 2 time challenges for bronze, silver and gold medals, which you would need to progress to the next set of races or police chases. To get the gold medal you would need to drive perfectly and memorize where to take the shortcuts on the map. It got quite grindy for me, also when you get a medal for the race, you had to watch your 'progress bar' to the next rank of calculated experience and the new cars you have unlocked by reaching a level. These took a long time and were unskippable, but required to press a button to continue after seeing each new thing, iirc (which was annoying, ofc).

Using a keyboard was fine for racing, but main menu only used keyboard as well, which isn't that great, to be honest.

Soundtrack was there, but I remember just turning it off at some point and not turning it back on anymore. The tracklist seems okayish, but it got repetitive, I guess? Especially the main menu, which is always the same song.

Got pushed in with a drawer and stuck, made me anxious.

On a more serious note, did see some interesting visuals, some spooks gave me chills and the musical pieces were well-put together. Anyone can probably relate to the feeling of not knowing what to do when you want to have fun alone or with friends, but have something on your mind that prevents you from doing so.

Had a look at the Russian translation and it was usable, but words were sometimes clipping out of places. Could be connected to my Windows settings using enlarged fonts.

GRIP is a Rollcage successor game, which to me (as I haven't played Rollcage games) means you can drive on the walls and ceiling, you don't have to worry about flipping your car, as it can drive on both sides, and you can use different weapons to help you become a winner.

Visuals look good to me, there's a variety of different tracks to choose, some of them make you drive through the industrial world while others have you zoom through lava and space stations. You can change the colors of your car body, rims, change tires (visual).

There're classic races, where you need to be 1st on the finish line to win, but also ultimate races where the reward goes to those who get the most points by using weapons against other players. There're also arena deathmatch and carkour mode where you need to get to a goal through a difficult course.

Rollcage had drum and bass music, so hearing drum'n'bass soundtrack in this game was expected. Personally, I love dnb, but if you don't enjoy that genre, you can use music from your computer, as it has a folder you can copy your tracks to be played in-game. Different vehicles have their own engine sounds and weapons and blasts sound pretty good, too. The devs have been adding new content to the game, so now we have a bunch of new cars and new music tracks by Full Kontakt and Shivaxi, which is great news to me.

I've seen people complain about gameplay and controls, but I don't have any issues with that. There're two buttons for using pickup in your left slot and your right slot, if you have two. As a keyboard user, I had a problem with Shift and Ctrl being the left and the right pickup slot, so I ended up changing it to Z and C. Also, while the in-game tutorial (primer) lets you get the basics pretty well, there is a BOOST input to use that green bar for more acceleration, and there's an input to make your car make a hop which could be helpful to gain more speed or to take a certain route.

I tried single player, and it feels like the campaign has a slow start, but I'm looking forward to the increasing difficulty and speed. The real fun of GRIP to me is multiplayer, but I haven't been playing the game that much recently. If you launch the game and don't see anyone in multiplayer, check the game's discord server (link is in the community hub discussions), where you can find active players, give your feedback to devs and talk to other people outside of races. You can also invite people to play directly from Discord, iirc. GL&HF!

It's easy to understand the game controls, you get to learn the ropes while progressing through the levels, using a gamepad is not a requirement, but an option;
It's nice to look at visuals and hear little details in soundwork;
The soundtrack is great for listening inside or outside the game world;
The story element is engaging, and going further than a story playthrough rewards you...with more gameplay!

The game is okay for what it's offering. Don't remember having performance issues (i5-6500, 1050 ti, 16GB RAM) with shadows on medium and post-processing on low.
The only issue I had with the game was when I tried connecting to a custom server and the game just went back to the main menu after a bit with no error message (it does show a message, if, say, there are no free player slots on a server). So some servers I can connect to and some I can't.

Tried a bit of ranked modes, not sure if I liked those, but I see how the portals can be used in play. However, the most fun I had was in custom game lobbies, which you can set up to change gameplay, e.g. the game's speed, weapons available to players, weapon's damage, whether all can use portal guns or not (but why would you remove those)

Player satisfaction depends on his connection, I guess.

Having a decent PC setting graphic settings to low doesn't give you anything,
you still get frame drops, unresponsive controls, freezing, losing connection and crashing whenever you have a high latency.
Edit: new update only proves this further, always get that Ubisoft branded audio and game stuttering

The fact that I have to play this game in Russian, because this is the only version available in the store, adds more UNNECESSARY TRICKINESS to the menu navigation as the text goes out of frames and looks very poorly on my screen.

If you like a game where you hold a corner for the entire duration of a round and then win or lose;
If you like prefiring every corner and that's what you want to see on killcams;
If you want to be yelled at whenever you are the last alive but get no info from your teammates

GET. THIS. GAME.

• Striking visuals, both stunning and creepy
  
• Amazing acting and soundwork
  
• Intuitive gameplay, sometimes it's not clear how to progress further, but we all have different perception.

I checked the steam achievement stats and noticed it says that less than half people who bought the game got past the first 'boss', so here's a tip if you're stuck:
See the game controls.

Basically the best of the Worms 2d games. Balanced turn-based combat, single-player training and missions, custom team flags, graves and soundbanks, most of those can be also changed outside the game with some tools. Hotseat, local and online multiplayer. The game still has a working server maintained and regular players in multiplayer, works on modern systems like Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 and should work on Linux (with Wine). Also, it's a 1999 game, so you don't need a powerful PC to play.

If you're new to the series, the game has quite a list of things to learn, first being the basic controls (hold space to shoot with rockets and artillery, right-click mouse or F1-F12 buttons to choose weapons, ~ for utils, combinations of enter and backspace presses for different jumps). In-game training missions cover in-game mechanics, but it might be not that obvious to somebody.
If you'd like to learn how to play custom game modes (schemes) with people online and game rules, here's a link [worms2d.info] . The website also has a lot of other information about the game.
Also here's a big video tutorial (English subtitles available) about the game mechanics and some general info about online community.

2020:
Spotted devs adding servers for testing new builds of the game, further improving compatibility with modern systems, improving rendering for animations, a windowed mode and integrating some wormkit modules like Rubberworm, so they don't have to be downloaded separately. See this if you're interested in coming back to this game.

Defy Gravity gives you a great mixture of simple platformer, gravity puzzles and well-fitting space techno soundtrack!

There are multiple ways to beat the levels, sometimes you can avoid using one item, sometimes you have to use all of your in-game skills to reach the exit.

And how simple the concept of the game is, so unique it gets. You can see that even from the main menu.

As I've mentioned above, the music adds the atmosphere (or adds more space type feelings).

Now, the bad side is the controls. Well, it's good that you can get used to these pretty soon and that there are two different sets, but they work simultaneously and sometimes you accidentally press the wrong key and ruin your run. But, at the same time, you have unlimited lives and checkpoints, that nearly eliminates this problem. Also, you can use a gamepad instead of keyboard, and I believe that solves the issue too.

Another problem is the in-game crosshair color. It would be very nice to have a way to change it, because if you use "crosshair type: 1" setting you can just lose it at the screen while you're going through the level.

You should definitely play it, especially when it comes for such low price (till July 21st).