Parallax Abstraction 最近的评测

Surprised this was free, especially given it was published. A one man made tribute to Wolfenstein 3D, but a whole new game. Impressive scope and scale with a goofy story and a lot of weapon variety. Sadly, it's rather buggy, some of the last levels are too sprawling and no mid-mission saves is really frustrating. Solid boomer shooter though and can't beat the price!

The second episode, with a bit more depth and length than the first. Has some annoying jank with movement (especially getting around the later environment), but definitely did the creepy atmosphere better. If these are actual Reddit stories being brought to life in game form, it's being well done so far.

A very short (and free) horror vignette, apparently based on a Reddit story. First of 5 episodes. A nice first effort and free too, though the jump scares I could have done without. The paid episodes are apparently bigger. Going to do them all.

"Tap the top half of the screen to pause the game". Tells you all you need to know really. This is a half-assed port of a mobile game and not even a particularly good one. Mediocre graphics, generic stock music, AI generated voice and doesn't understand the fundamentals of what made top-down retro racing games appealing to begin with. There are many superior options on Steam if you're looking for this genre.

Poor imitation of Crazy Taxi with what feels like a LOT of AI assets, especially audio. Looks and feels like something you'd come across in a mobile app store. Will need a lot of further development to hold a candle to what it's trying to copy.

I thought the first Industria was just OK, but showed real interesting potential. With this sequel, Bleakmill has clearly upped their ambitions a LOT, aiming to make something very much akin to Resident Evil. For a demo that's clearly based on very early development, they've already accomplished a ton and this could be something special indeed.

Again, keeping in mind this is very early and most of this will likely change, these are my observations:

• Optimization is rough and in many of the typical "UE5 is a mess" kind of ways. Optimization usually happens right near the end of development though, so full benefit of the doubt is given here.
  
• When AMD FSR is enabled, Frame Generation is also enabled and can't be disabled. These have to be separated out. On my 9070 XT, the frame rate was in the 40s at 1440p without FSR but with it enabled, aiming was laggy because of the frame generation.
  
• Character lip-syncing is very rough, but likely placeholder and will improve.
  
• The battery life on the enemy tracker is way too short. Comes across as weird when your flashlight battery is endless.
  
• I like the crafting system, but dragging multiple units of each individual component of something onto the workspace is tedious. I think either allowing players to specify stacks or just dragging in each ingredient and the craftable options lighting up if there's enough quantity in inventory would be better.
  
• Crouch really needs an option to be either a hold or a toggle. I much prefer crouch toggle.

This is a demo so give it a try yourself, but what's here at this early stage is very impressive and a huge leap in ambition from the first game. This is solid on my radar now!

A very Layers of Fear inspired psychological horror title about the horrors of trying to break into acting and working with extreme auteurs. Largely a walking sim, with a few relatively easy puzzles and some FMV scenes that are very well done by some of the best voice actors in gaming, and also Alannah Pearce. Shows many of these actors have chops beyond just voice. Sadly also has a lot of jump scares that add nothing useful. A toggle to turn them off would have been nice. This was made on a shoestring budget to keep Surgent Studios afloat and it definitely shows in places, with a lot of store-bought assets being used and an overall basic level of polish. For something made so cheaply and quickly though, there's a cool story here and it would be cool to see them take a shot at another with more time and money.

With City Connection, it's always a roll of the dice. You either get a decent port or a garbage one. This is the latter. The game defaults to Japanese and you have to mess around in the menus or find someone's guide to change it to English. Game play is also tied to frame rate so unless you set your display to 60Hz, controls will be so touchy that the game's unplayable. Don't support junk conversions like this.

Online leaderboards are broken and despite being patched for it, the game doesn't run properly on high refresh rate displays unless you disable V-Sync. Should not still be sold with core functionality broken or should at least be made very clear up front. Avoid.

The pixel art, music and atmosphere are cool, but the story is very slow moving, all told through wordy text boxes and after over 2 hours, hasn't gotten compelling or interesting. Every mission is old school stealth, using the Metal Gear Solid vision cone concept. I don't mind this, but there's no margin for error and even though you can engage in combat if necessary, you characters all go down in a couple of shots and it's clearly not what things were designed around. There's only one checkpoint in each level and if you respawn at one, it's with whatever amount of health you had when you activated it so if you didn't have much, be prepared to potentially start multiple levels over again. Enemies all patrol in set patterns, meaning everything can be beat with memorisation if you are willing to put in the time.

This will definitely appeal to certain kinds of players, but even as a big fan of anything cyberpunk and someone who doesn't tend to quit games once I've started them, I just couldn't do any more of this one.