Eschaton 最近的评测

I'm 33 hours in just messing around in the "survival" game (very poorly-named mode; there's no resource management at all; basically the mode involves you building vehicles to collect new parts in order to build more sophisticated vehicles in order to reach even harder-to-access parts, all that you might eventually escape the planet in a spaceship that you build). I got this game as part of a humble bundle and thought: well, my kids will love it at least - but instead it is me who gets a huge kick out of this game.

It actually doesn't play very well as a child's game - at least not the way I've been playing it, where I try not to rely on the built-in vehicle templates. I imagine the templates would help younger players with less of a grasp of newtonian physics, so I applaud the decision to include those. Yet even still, the difficulties involved with the control schemes - especially for submersibles and aircraft - seems likely to prove too much for younger players. Instead it gives old hands such as myself a worthy challenge, and one that I did not know I'd get a kick out of.

If you have other games like this (and I know this is hardly the first game of its type), Trailmakers might not be worth acquiring. I can't speak to that since I don't have any of those other games. Instead, I can only speak about the qualities of this title; keeping it brief by listing only the salient features which I know I really enjoy:

+ Physics are pretty good; you can do things like use servos to build helicopters or paddle boats, or gain additional traction by adding wheels and loose shocks. The part collection puzzles created by the physics in the game are a blast to think your way through, and of course since the only limits are those of the game engine, solutions are many and open-ended. You'll feel like you came to your own solution after each difficult piece is retrieved, which is satisfying.

+ Graphics are actually quite good on the higher settings in a cartoon kind of way, and there's plenty of options to tweak. You can even decide whether to do object culling work with your CPU or GPU, so for those with machines where one part is better than the other, you have a chance to more usefully balance the utilization of your hardware.

+ The build process is relatively painless. Part manipulation is a breeze, with cut/paste and rudimentary mirroring built in to help speed things up. You can save a bunch of vehicle templates and switch between vehicles on the fly for quick testing or complex puzzle solutions that require more than one vehicle to optimally solve. I think there's a nice balance of parts, as well: pretty much everything you need, and just a few gimmick parts you don't to clutter it up (but good for a few laughs).

There are a few things I don't like, of course:

- Physics can be wonky; I have found situations (almost all edge cases) in which controls do unexpected things such as spinning me through the air without any understandable cause. Submersible play is perhaps the most aggravating in this regard; water doesn't always behave like a liquid; it's really more like a super-dense gas layer; standard fare for vidya at this point. Related point: you can't build a boat by designing a watertight hull; you have to have "floatation" devices. It all works out in the end; a minor disappointment.

- I have found that this game can make my R5 1600X and RX 480 8gb chug; it looks like the game is solidly multi-threaded, so at least the CPU isn't the bottleneck. I believe some of it may have to do with old abandoned vehicles starting to clutter up my area, but can't be sure since these abandoned parts at least sometimes are auto-cleaned.

- If you enable controller controls on PC, these sometimes randomly seem to "take over" - you won't get your PC controls back until you disable controller controls in the game options. That said, the controller controls are probably the better way to actually control the vehicles, while PC controls are the best for building. Not sure how they could have made things better here, except to eliminate this odd bug (I don't even have a controller connected to my PC when it happens, so go figure).

- Not really a fair criticism, but you can ONLY build vehicles. The game is so much fun, I found myself wishing I could build a farm to live on, and a machine shop, and maybe a factory... I might be a little obsessed.

Brigador started out as a slow burn for me. I really had an initial attraction to the game for purely aesthetic reasons - the soundtrack was by favorite artist; Makeup and Vanity Set. The gritty, retro-but-sophisticated, ultra-greebled cyberpunk art and setting appealed as I was riding a heady wave of William Gibson, Synthwave, and anticipation of Blade Runner's sequel and Cyberpunk 2077. It has customizable mechs, which pretty much grabs my inner child by the lapels and drags them in front of the part of my brain that controls the paypal account. The witty and cynical flavor texts which abounded throughout the game, telling the story of Solo Nobre and Novo Solo via blurbs under each gun, mech, pilot, and mission, gave me something for my mind to chew on, creating the world in which I could imagine my actions and their consequences as part of a larger story; the brutal, often short lives of my pilots merely corporate subscripts of a savage struggle for power in the wake of Great Leader's death.

But at first, especially before they revamped the control options menu in a later update, I was really not sure whether all of this artistic achievement was attached to gameplay that was actually GOOD. I was frustrated:

- the levels are flat
- the levels are sometimes brutally hard, sometimes stupidly easy
- the game often doesn't give you enough information to make good purchasing decisions
- levels get rehashed across different freelance campaigns
- weapon balance is nonexistent; some are absolutely terrifying, others are nigh useless - some can defeat all opponents, others are good specifically only at defeating some
- the game is way too damn dark
- no multiplayer/coop
- a game which cried out for cutscenes, voiceovers, and randomized levels/freelance campaigns had none
- the game conflates points with money and then makes it super-easy to earn a ton of both by destroying the level (you get money for destroying pretty much anything), but the levels are huge and fundamentally this means the game is asking you to trade your time for achievement (a lame grind to do better than other players/advance through the game).

Gradually, though, as I came back to this game over and over again (thanks in large part to the fact it could be played on any of my computers since it supported Linux), I came to realize most of the above criticisms had valid answers, or were the result of looking at the game wrong:

- flat levels are intricately populated with a 2D urban jungle of structures, flora, and vehicles which provide a diverse array of tactical options
- the hard levels you have to prepare and conserve for; the easy levels exist for that purpose; they vary the gameplay so that it's not always so tense, but always important.
- while it's not necessarily a great dev decision, omitting info prior to purchase forces players to make do with what they end up buying, pushing players to innovate tactics and loadouts. Almost every level (with notable exceptions) is so open-ended that it is impossible to find yourself without a means of accomplishing through subterfuge what brute force could not - and that is immensely satisfying.
- level rehash becomes more understandable once your realize how ridiculously intricate and large these levels are, and how they were constructed to push players to use all the tools available to them - who would have guessed that if you know you'll be fighting in a cemetery, it makes more sense to use a grav than a tank or mech, for instance?
- weapon balance actually ends up being a problem - not that it's not fun to use immensely powerful weapons when feeling lazy, or super crappy ones when feeling up to a challenge - but more because the devs unknowingly removed one of the more interesting dynamics present in some other mech games - the need to balance guns which damage shields and those which focus on armor/hull damage. It's still here, but it's just not as important as in other games if you don't want it to be, and the game loses some sophistication because it leaves that wrinkle behind.
- the game actually looks fine if you brighten your monitor up or get one that can display blacks nicely.
- the AI in the game ends up being sufficient, but future multiplayer in a sequel game is undeniably desirable
- cutscenes, voiceovers, and randomization would also all be great; no denying it.
- I'm still kind of interested in the problem presented by giving payers almost unlimited points opportunities in each level, but only if they grind... but honestly it doesn't bother me as much as it used to. The game is just fun to play through without worrying about the points, and if you do, you'll always have plenty of cash to play with as you expand your arsenal. This will only matter for people trying to achieve top scores.

So at the end, you get a game that's a good game in the tradition of something like Dynasty Warriors, but with a truly excellent presentation. It may not bring anything "new" to the table, but that which it does bring, it brings with truly unbeatable style and quality. Definitely buy and hope Stellar Jockeys makes more of this franchise in the future.

I'm a mech guy with a relatively unusual perspective. Unlike most mech lovers who come from the two main lineages (you can have anime (Macross/Gundam/Robotech etc) people and you can have FASA (Battletech/Mechwarrior) people, I come from one of the countless smaller mech game universes - not Front Mission (though it's generally excellent), not Armored Core (also fun)... but the Starsiege universe. This is a storied mech universe following mech battles through Earthsiege, Starsiege, and Cyberstorm games, with forays into non-mech stuff (Tribes, mostly). Of these, Missionforce: Cyberstorm and Cyberstorm 2 are most like BattleTech, and thus these are my point of reference. They're from the late 90s, and an entirely different era of computer gaming. If you like Battletech... you might want to take a look at those.

So what have I got out of Battletech, returning me to tactical mecha games after all these years? The fights are smaller and more detailed, the pilots and mecha behave very differently from what I'm used to - not that it's a bad thing!

The AI is actually pretty good here, which is incredibly refreshing - a big departure from most other games made these days and to see them exceed even the older titles where that sort of thing was considered important is great to see. The initiative system, in which each side takes multiple turns according to the speed and reflexes of the individuals in the fight, takes some getting used to, but ultimately it helps avoid one of the chief problems in the older titles, where one side is capable of utterly crushing the other since they get to move all their units without much except enemy counter fire to interrupt them.

I also really have to call out the map designers and texture artists who worked on this game - they did a great job on the maps, and it looks great to fight in these varied and tactically interesting locations. I do wish that weapons didn't clip through the terrain as often as they do, and I wish that I was able to pivot my view to lower angles so I could intelligently choose my defilade, but I don't know where to lay blame for that unfortunate inaccuracy.

There's been some criticism of the game's pace - some feel that the cutscenes and mech animations are too much. I understand that position and I generally don't like to watch the same cutscene play out time over time - this is particularly annoying when it comes to traveling from one star system to another. That being said, however, most of these cutscenes are really not that bad - mech warfare is cool because it is infantry combat blown out of proportion - the vehicles serve as larger-than-life avatars of martial prowess giving knightly prominence to human combatants who would otherwise be lost in the immensity of modern warfare's firepower, like so many doughboys cowering in trenches. The desire to express that elevation via animations and cutscenes is understandable and ultimately not hard for me to tolerate; it only gives me more time to process my next move.

The end result is a game without very much ambition, but plenty of polish and thoughtfulness; it knows what it's doing and it satisfies where consumers of mech combat and tactical TBS have itches to scratch. There's nothing here that will blow you out of the water; nothing new or exciting - except that it brings a dead genre back to life and rejuvenates it. In the future, if we're lucky, perhaps there will be a sequel with greater scope and ambition - something like Cyberstorm 2, but with modern sensibilities and capabilities.

Here's to hoping. Until then, Battletech is really an enjoyable installment.

This is much closer to what anime used to be like in the 90s and early aughts; excellent art with questionable direction and more than a hint of japanese worldview suffused throughout. Spoilers may be found below!

There are four stories - a samurai tailor's stay at a haunted shrine, the tragedy of an (edo period?) fireman's unrequited love, the story of an ancient Japanese village beset by an interstellar demon, and finally the story of a next-century post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt taking place across the barren desert of what appears to have once been mainland Japan - Mt. Fuji featuring prominent and unchanged above a blasted desert landscape. Indeed, while I'm not going back to watch this again just yet, it seems to me the sacred mountain appears near the end of each piece, rising above the action as a meditation, at least to me, on the connection of the tale to the broader Japanese culture in which it exists.

The first tale is a twist on traditional Japanese archetypes, in that it inverts the stereotype of the ronin or samurai as a destroyer or killer. The main character resolves conflict primarily through tailoring and prayer, but exhibits a warrior's spirit in doing so, even when confronted with the terrifying ghosts of the shrine's unresolved past. Other than that, this story preaches mindfulness and courtesy as a means of conquering adversity - a thoroughly Japanese conception that ends up reintegrating the Samurai's inversion within the broader cultural conception of what traits are admirable in a person. This makes it easily the most positive and hopeful of the four shorts, and it ends up feeling very strongly like a call to reimagine traditional values. Too bad this one has a fairly modern CGI animation style that makes it look sillier than it talks.

The second tale of the fireman and his childhood love is perhaps the most visually stunning of the four. The short literally unrolls from a Japanese prayer scroll at the start, and takes its visual cues from wood block engraving pictures you may have seen in history books - a very traditional art style perhaps most well-known in that magnificent work of art "Hokusai - the Wave." To further make the viewer feel like they are watching scenes unroll on a long scroll, the short is shot in an ultra-wide format that leaves the top and bottom of the frame unused - except that here it IS used; beautiful Japanese patterns flit back and forth, simulating the eye's transit across a wide page. Very neat. Unfortunately the story doesn't rise to the ambition of the animation - it's a simple thing, though I won't try to claim I really attempted to dig deep for allegory. It felt like it might have been there, saying something about the fiery passions of the young and their danger, but the story didn't convince me it was worth the effort of trying to figure it out.

The third tale is what makes this set of shorts really not appropriate for younger viewers. It's a bloody, messy tale involving a christian ronin, a possessed white bear, and their ersatz alliance in the face of a hellish alien that's been terrorizing the countryside, snatching up women and impregnating them with its spawn back in the ruins of its crashed spaceship. There's some truly brutal stuff here - one might even say METAL AS F*CK - but at its heart this is a story about keeping faith that good and purity will prevail over evil and corruption if one sets their mind to it. Most intriguing to think on here is the obvious Christianity of the ronin, teaching a young girl to pray, and the very Shinto-esque bear spirit, who answers that prayer by slaying the demon (with a little help from the ronin and a few musketeers). Allegorical? I hope so, because otherwise this is really just a set piece for some interesting violence.

The last short involves the fateful mission of half a dozen talky, brazen government-sponsored scavengers on a mission into the desert wasteland of what appears to have once been Honshu, the main island of Japan. Dead cities dot the dusty pan, each harboring loot and potential danger for these scavengers - but as we learn soon enough, these men are also there to clear up old weapons left behind by some kind of apocalyptic war - robot tanks (a perennial Japanese favorite at least since GiTS) and automated missile launchers. These soldier-scavengers use ingenious small-unit technologies and tactics, illustrated in truly amazing detail and fidelity, to fight heroically against the demons of the old war - but in the end it seems like perhaps it was their presumption of a violent resolution that dooms the mission. This one is philosophically the richest of the pieces, and it's a shame that the point is almost lost in the brilliance of the animation, the solid direction, and the really pretty decent dialog.

I hate console controllers, with few exceptions. The few I've liked were usually extremely simple, like the original NES controller, which is great for simple games like 2D platformers. For complex games, like Civilization or Tribes: Ascend, I've always preferred keyboard and mouse. I STILL prefer keyboard and mouse when sitting at my computer.

But now, when I'm sitting in front of my TV and I want to play some of the more party, casual-oriented games I have on my HTPC, nothing really beats the Steam Controller for ease of use and adaptability. I also have an Xbox 360 controller, a PS3 controller, and some older gamepads - none of them allow me to use the mouse in any serious way, and none of them have button design that doesn't lead to muscle strain for me over time. The steam controller effortlessly switches me between controlling the game, controlling the steam interface, and controlling the windows or linux desktop environment with equal ease - all while keeping my fingers and especially thumbs from wearing out or feeling like they're fighting the controller to get the degree of control I want. Moreover, while I'm usually a wired-control kind of guy, the steam controller's wireless connection converted me - it's effortless and introduces absolutely no wonkiness to the controls. Beautiful to experience in action.

This is the controller that made living room gaming possible for me. It's true that it doesn't really make it possible to enjoy a serious FPS (though I get by in FPS-oriented games like Sir, You Are Being Hunted just fine), and it's also true that you won't really be able to type to friends in more than five word sentences without getting annoyed (I just keep a small wireless keyboard nearby for that), but strategy games, artillery games (worms), platformers, isometric twin-stick shooters, some roguelikes, 3rd-person games (Tomb Raider et al), and probably some other genres I'm not thinking of right now have all worked beautifully for me with this controller. I'm currently working out a way to make it usable for simulator games like War Thunder - I think I've hit on the genius of making the underside paddles forward and backward throttle, which frees up everything above for the maneuvering and targeting even while moving.

Here's the thing that most people who want a controller do not get or enjoy about this controller - it's insanely customizable. It is the embodiment of PC gaming in a controller's body. Every single control surface on it is tweakable and assignable - almost every single game I've played with it that seemed clunky at first was fixable by searching for premade button assignments that people have made (when you save your button config it's visible to everyone else, who can also try it out), or else muddling through the process of making my own, which is a whole other learning experience. Just last week I found out it has a gyroscope I can assign to move my characters in broad strokes, then have aim control switch to the "mousepad" for fine movement just by touching it. Super useful!

This controller is exactly what the Steam Machine concept is - a mostly misunderstood tool that fits right between PC gaming and console gaming, filling in that gap to bring us all closer together. Yeah, I drank the koolaid. It was delicious.

Gear Up is a game I'd like to spend more time with. It has a decent blend of action and robot design, great art direction, and good level design as well. It runs well, it runs cross-platform, and it works well with my steam controller after customization.

But. There are always caveats. Gear Up suffers from a grind, and it has issues with balancing because of this. It also feels like the developer should have taken this idea further; there's a feeling that this could have been like some kind of massive team-based FPS with classes, like Tribes. Maybe that's just my nostalgia speaking.

What I think is safe to say is that Gear Up is a good idea that deserves even more attention than it gets, both from its developer and from the playing public.

NOTE: This is a very old review. I have also been negatively involved with the developers and parted ways with the project since then, so I will not do a followup review as I think I would be unfairly biased. You should probably go look for more recent reviews than this one.

Endless Sky is a straight up ripoff (with several excellent additions) of the Escape Velocity series - and that's a good, even great thing.

Cons:
- Economy is static, not dynamic like in EV
- I'm pretty sure the ships just fly around; they don't affect the economy either. For example, you can't ever clear a sector of pirates; new ones will always spawn to take the old one's places, sometimes right before your eyes
- Enemy AI is incredibly stupid; I've had pirates with only missile launchers chase me down even after they expend all their missiles, which means I get a free kill
- It is definitely possible, especially early in the game, to get auto-ganked by huge mobs of enemies as soon as you take off from a planet, before you even have a chance to see what awaits you in space. Since there's no skill, just dumb luck, this is quite frustrating for people like me who try to get through games like this without save-scumming as much as possible.
-Besides the rebel plotline, it's really hard for me to find any of the other plotlines. I had one other plotline offer, but I was really hoping to ally with the Republic and I have seen no offers from them at all - which sucks since you need their military license if you want to buy their ships.
-There are no pirate-customized ships on sale, even on the worlds that explicitly say they are for sale.

Pros:
- Combat pacing is perfect
- Progression feels good
- Visuals are a step up from EV:Nova
- Autopilot for landing, shooting, and multi-jumping is very good
- The balance between speed, power, and heat means there's a lot of thought to put into customizing your ship
- Customization of your ship is properly encouraged within limits; it's possible to have a "millenium falcon" type ship
- Ship boarding actions are hugely improved from the EV series
- Game is in a very stable and efficient state already
- Mortgages and Crew mechanics are a great addition to make management of your liquid assets more complex
- Fleet commands are of course a welcome improvement
- There's plenty to explore and even late into the game I feel like there are more secrets that I will uncover with proper detective work
- Game is open-source, free, and fully cross-platform. It doesn't get better from a licensing standpoint.

The Weird:
- You never have to pay for fuel. At all. Yet much of the economy is apparently based around deuterium fuel processing. This makes zero sense, but I'm not yet sure whether it's a good or a bad thing for gameplay.
- You seemingly can't buy any equipment to improve the quality of your long-range (on map) scans
- Events happen, but I've yet to see any planets trade hands even when factions are at war. The game FEELS very static.
- Every action takes exactly 1 day. You have no option to spend more days on a planet, just to use up time, and no matter how long the jump is, every hyperspace jump takes 1 day.

The Wanted:
- A news feed
- Distinction between privateers and pirates; faction-aligned privateers only prey on certain non-faction ships
- Dynamic, persistent economy - ships should have real lives, taking jobs on worlds. If they die, they die. If no one takes a job, it stays there until someone does take it. If food gets dumped on a planet, then prices of food should plummet after the sale. Every planet should use/produce stockpiled resources at a certain hidden rate to determine how fast that depreciation recovers/occurs, and the planets should spawn new spacecraft at a given rate depending on their population.

Wonderful game with a long, long future ahead of it.

This game is a great roguelike, and the only one I've ever played where I don't usually get even slightly angry when I die, which is still often, though I've played it quite a bit.

Aside from the nice ancillary things, like its very low system requirements (though I have seen the game take up to 80% of a single Phenom processor core running at 3.4ghz) and complete cross-compatibility with windows/mac/linux, the game itself features colorful and endearing 2D graphics, and plenty of them. The only game with more loot that I've seen is probably Borderlands 2, and certainly its loot is less well-documented. This thing has hilarious descriptions for everything from en-meatening Pork Swords to cringe-collecting Meat Wands.

Not everything in this game is a ♥♥♥♥ joke, either. Beyond the humor, the gameplay itself is compelling, because it basically makes no attempt to balance its skills, and allows you to take something like 7 of them right off the bat, from a pool of something like 30. Then, when you advance, you choose which skill to improve, which usually boosts your base stats a little and then gives you some kind of rules-bending ability/spell/mutation/fell aspect that fundamentally changes the way you play the game after acquiring it. This makes every playthrough new, and is only helped by the semi-random dungeon, with its themed floors and heaps of treasure. Seriously, this game has so much loot they give you an interdimensional ROOM (forget bag) of holding to store all of it in. This is important, because there's also CRAFTING! Which is practically a minigame of economy in and of itself if you choose to go that route. Fortunately, since that item management shtuff is not for everyone, it is totally possible to play through the whole game without ever crafting a single thing; turning all that useless detritus into lutefisk for the lutefisk god. He is a benevolent fishy deity that you will come to worship, should you delve deeply enough into the dungeons.

Anyway, there are a LOT of quality roguelikes out there. Why pay for this one when you could enjoy a free one like Dungeon Crawler: Stone Soup? I think it's simply down to the overall quality of the game; as a whole, it makes for an attractive, entertaining, funny look at the genre that is both a sendup and an experience that stands well on its own, once you get past the laughs.

This is a quality return to the kind of game you might have played in a coin-operated arcade when you were younger, if you were lucky enough to live near one - but with all the unnecessary elements which slow down gameplay lobotomized, then replaced with extra creativity and a good sense of whimsy. Basically what you get is a faux-retro art presentation of the gauntlet genre of game, or for those of you who never played games like Gauntlet or Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara - it's a coop beat 'em up for up to 4 people on the same screen in which you use randomly generated loot to plumb the depths of a randomly generated dungeon, in which you will very inevitably die (it's properly hard later on). The first part of the game might feel like it's over-easy, especially if you spend a lot of time on it (you can descend to the next "level" of the dungeon as soon as you find the door down, like most roguelikes), but as you descend, you will start dying to random traps triggered by nothing more or less than your own curiosity, turns taken wrongly, ill-timed leaps into lava, and unfortunate encounters with vampires and cyclops - just to name a few. Under the thin veneer of cutesy "8-bit" sprites and whimsical openGL-driven lighting effects, beyond the little visual jokes like the bathrooms you can use to change your character's appearance at the beginning of the game, this program is very definitely trying to kill you. Sometimes this feels unfair, but the game mitigates that by breaking with roguelike tradition and allowing you to be revived from death (with no loot) - IF you have a friend to revive you who is able to recompose you from the tatters of the souls of those he or she slays. More on this caveat later.

Gameplay mechanics are simple. There are no classes, no skill trees, no "combo" moves, and not even a whiff of crafting. Controls are so simple you can play this game on a super-nintendo controller without issue - which is a good thing in a game that's going for the arcade-ey beat 'em up style, in my opinion. All character progression lies in simple level gains, which boost stats for everyone in the same way, and the loot. Ah, the loot. This game features randomly generated weapons, bottles of unnamed substances (you gotta drink 'em to find out what they do; some will cause you to vomit a skittle-esque rainbow on the dungeon floor, which is almost as entertaining to watch as it is painful to your character), beer (gain XP, lose health and control of your character's better judgment for a while), apples (health), and hats like if you took Team Fortress and smashed it into 2.5 dimensions, then told a computer with a dictionary to name all the items uniquely. There are many hats. Many. I've had hats that looked like cats, which shot laser beams from their eyes. Hats that consisted of a wolf's face and which caused me to sprint and jump at great speed. There was a "hat" that was actually just a beehive, which released angry social insects upon any who dared get in the way of my sword swings. There were even some really weird hats that were just made out of cloth and stitching and gave me some basic stat boosts... And you can carry as many of them as you want, and switch out from one to the other whenever you need. Just keep in mind that your inventory system is its own game mechanic - it is a line that must be scrolled through to find what you want in it, so the more you keep, the longer it can take to get to what you need. Since there's no pausing and scrolling, even in single-player, this means that there have been times when I died because I couldn't switch out my gear fast enough to adapt to some new threat the dungeon had thrown at me. To me, that's elegant design. To others, that's the UI getting in the way of the gameplay. What you think about that may actually be a good judge of what you think of this game, because the 2.5-dimensional world you're in (you and all other sprites are flat, but you exist in a series of isometric rooms with depth to them) also makes finding the correct depth of your opponents something of a challenge. If you played old TMNT games, or other 2.5D games, then you know all it takes to get used to this is practice, but for some that's an off-putting requirement. I find it just complicated enough to add the necessary difficulty I'm looking for in a party game like this one.

By now you've obviously determined that this is a positive review. I like this game a lot, and I think it has great potential as a game to break out on the big screen at a party (it worked great on my SteamOS machine in my livingroom with a Playstation 2 - 2! controller attached) for a night of drunken shouting, button-mashing, and confused laughter (remember that time when you touched your sister's barbie doll in the naughty places and laughed to yourself? Yeah, like that). Unfortunately, that's also the reason I haven't played very much of this game - it's difficult to get people to sit down and play coop games in person anymore, which is the only way you can do coop for this title. Maybe it's the perception that the game looks "old" and therefore "difficult" or "arcane," or maybe it just looks too simple on the surface for people to be intrigued, but whatever the reason, you will have trouble getting people to play. That's worth mentioning, since the only way you can be resurrected is with a surviving friend to help you out - and the game's difficulty seems scaled around that mechanic. You can play solo, but it definitely makes survival to the end a much more random prospect - just like the point at which I decide I've said too much and end this review.