FreshHalibut

Plot is light, but it's impressive how much they manage to gigabotch it.

Chapter 1:

We are a badass cowboy who has been resurrected to fight the evil in the cursed lands.
This evil is manifested as corrupting Gold artifacts that we must seek and retrieve.
Our liason for this adventure is the Totem of Souls, which is Gianni if he were a Native American Cowskull spirit guide.
We go out, find the cursed Gold, return it to the Totem for destruction and to trace the root back to the boss monster.

We kill the boss monster and the Totem says good job, but there are more cursed lands we must purify.

Chapter 2:

We are introduced to the second cursed land by the Totem, it doesn't know as much about the swamp so we have to go help the locals out a bit.
The locals talk of a corrupting spirit that can't be killed by man, the only one who knew how died, so we go on a quest to resurrect them.

We resurrect another undead cowboy who tells us how to kill the boss monster and also hints that the Totem is merely using us to purify the lands and is basically going to make us his errand boy until we super-die or go insane. So he suggests that we peace out to the mountains to escape its influence.

Chapter 3:

We escape to the mountains but Oops you died! Build a new Totem of Souls because I can't be bothered to resurrect you every time you die!

Also whoever you helped out in Chapter 2 shows up to say "I'm leaving forever, goodbye, buy my unique gear before I disappear lmao"

So we deliberately leave the swamp with the other undead to escape our servitude to the Gianni Totem, only for the undead to say "actually we need to build a totem, get to it"?????
So we go on a fetch quest to build a new totem after LEAVING THE OLD TOTEM BEHIND and after building it, Gianni shows up in Demon form and says "I WAS THE FINAL BOSS ALL ALONG" And then he dies in like six shots...

Which, okay really dumb twist, but at least the ending cutscene will be decent right? We defeated the (now demonic) Totem of Souls for some reason... and have escaped our servitude. Only no, the totem essentially says "You didn't win, you can't kill me" and we get a scene of demons stomping around a wild west city while Gianni continues to say "You didn't win! Nothing you did mattered! You'll get bored fighting demons someday and come back to me!" And frustratingly that's what happens in the ending cutscene...

So to put it shortly,

Chapter 1: We are resurrected to fight evil by Native Spirits working against demonic incursion

Chapter 2: We saved the day and our boss said "get back to work idiot" so we make plans to escape after saving the day a second time

Chapter 3: We escaped the Native Spirits, but we summon them again because??? and then they say "Hahaha we were actually evil the whole time, literally nothing you did mattered and everyone is probably dead"
This is somehow in spite of the fact that they used to you kill off cursed entities and save the lands in Chapter 1 and 2.

Just absolutely baffling. I can only imagine they were slapping together the plot and gameplay for the third chapter to get it out the door and reassign people onto other stuff.
There's no other rationalization I can come up with for Chapter 1 and 2 being so tight and then the finale jumping the shark.

Quality game that everyone's already praised. I don't think there's anything more that I can add except that I played the whole thing on Steam Deck and it was great as a portable title.

The latest Resident Evil remake is fun. Everything I expected to be there was there along with new stuff. I don't really have a lot to say about the game, I feel it's a quality redo of the original. Mercenaries mode is fun, Assignment ADA was fleshed out a little bit, and I just had a good time with it overall. I don't like Saddler as much in the remake though.

10/10 Experience, Did my playthrough as a Int/Dex ArtCop and had a great time being an art snob who knows every little detail about Contact Mike. I do have a major spoilery complaint though,

Another high profile release. I finished all the playthroughs and had a great time overall. I think I ended up cheesing a lot of the game by running Tetrapod legs though. I flew around like a helicopter with Dual miniguns and rockets as my problem solvers. The voice acting for characters you never physically see was really actually super good. Everyone talks about Rusty, but really the whole cast is stellar. I fought most of the bosses before they got nerfed and felt appropriately challenged most of the time. Didn't touch PvP but really stellar experience building and painting my own mecha and blowing stuff up.

Was really pleasantly surprised by this one. The entire game is a tribute to the first two Robocop movies and it's full of easter eggs and callbacks to scenes from the movies. The shooting is fun, the character moments and humor were all pretty good, and they got Peter Weller to do the Robocop voice. The whole game feels like a highlight reel of gags and locations from the universe. The story isn't anything groundbreaking, but I enjoyed it. Narratively it's an unofficial Robocop 2.5. Most of the fun writing comes from the sidequests and character interactions when you're not blowing heads off.

It's Serious Sam again, but way better than SS3. Better enemy variety, better weapon variety, levels are kind of plain though. Vehicle sections are okay, but mostly setdressing.

The funny narrator game got a bunch more content and it's all pretty good. Enjoyed my time with the new version.

What a visual stunner, creative environments and fun gunplay once you figure out the arsenal. Amid Evil follows closer to Hexen than Doom, so you've got Weird projectile swords and needle shooting Maces instead of Shotguns and rockets. I'd say the first world is a little eh but worlds 2-5 are super neat.

The Black Labyrinth Expansion is a prequel that just released this year and adds about three more worlds to the game. Newblood learned a lot since 2019 and outside of the initial swamp area, The Black Labyrinth is full of cool environments and setpieces.

Finally a good 40K single player FPS. Maybe a little long for the enemy variety it has, and if you don't get a kick out of using a volkite cavalier to pop chaos marines, you're not going to like it as much. Still a solid time, but more Doom 2016 than Dusk.

I only finished BOTW just this year, but I'm glad I did. Jumping into the sequel after clearing all of BOTW's stuff made the improvements and story changes hit just a little better. It was nice seeing the world move on after the first game and building stuff is fun. More enemy variety,  more weapon variety, just more of everything really. Exploring still feels just as rewarding especially with the new gear to find. I look forward to going back to it at some point.

As a fan of rhythm games, shooters, and heavy metal, this game ticks all my boxes and it is wonderful. The soundtrack is great and utilizes play better, soundtrack-gets-hype technology, the weapons all feel great to use, and every level feels visually different. My main complaint is that there isn't more of it, but wouldn't you know they patched in a horde mode a few months ago.

Funny little exploration game heavily centered on grafiti. Kind of a virtual tourism game as you explore the world and interact with it's grimy inhabitants.

A Metroidvania Doom style FPS with a freaky artstyle. You have infinite ammo and explore the world finding powerups and key items to unlock more of the world. The story is pretty dark actually and told through the environment and enemies you face. Fairly short and unique experience with some existential dread thrown in for good measure.

The standalone release of the Homestar games was a surprise to be sure. Remade with full voiceacting, it was like putting on a pair of comfy socks and being transported back to the days of SBEmail. A very short but nostalgic romp full of that same familiar humor they're known for.

Single room Roguelite FPS where you fight hordes of dudes and collect treasure to buy powerups. Really simple to pick up and play, but what sets it apart for me is that rocket jumping (spike jumping) is a core survival mechanic, it's really fun to catapult around the room dodging enemies and raining down bullets.

Ion Maiden finally released the Aftershock DLC so I decided to dive back in. Haven't quite finished it, on episode 4 out of 5 I think? The enemy variety feels like it stagnates after about the third episode and you've got most of the arsenal by then too. Wins my vote for what I'd want out of Duke3D - 2. Really pretty build engine game that plays well, environments all feel well realized. Need to finish the vanilla campaign and dive into the DLC.

Only played the first episode but it's a lot of fun. Very over the top and neat environments to explore. Feels like a total power trip so far, not sure how they're going to balance it later in the game. Hard to consider the player weak when you can double jump away from danger, shoot a guy while wallrunning, and chainsaw slide someone's legs off while landing.

It's competent? I have no complaints about it, but I didn't end up finishing the game because it wasn't super gripping me. It was fun enough to play, it played like a modern boom shooter, but something about it was just plain? I'll probably go back to it when I'm looking for something to turn the brain off to.

Weird little game that's inspired by Q3:A and Unreal. The story is split between what are essentially bot matches and exploration and intrigue. I honestly don't like the weapons very much and the controls feel weird. I do like going to maps after the match is over and trying to boundary break, that's the other core of the game. You're trapped in this Unreal Tournament clone and need to poke at the edges of the world to try and find glitches and things to break out of it. It's just the Unreal Tournament part of the game I didn't like that much. It's in early access so I hope they polish it up some more, high octane combat spaced out by creepy glitch worlds still sounds really interesting.

Cute little physics jumpy game. I enjoyed it but I wasn't enamored with it.

It's actually unironically really good, as long as you can appreciate a little intentional jank and the 2000s aesthetic. In lore it's made by Zane and his programmer buddy, so it's full of stupid jokes and references to Hypnospace Outlaw. It plays well and the levels are fun to explore and easter egg hunt. The S-Blade has a Hackblood charge.

It's really interesting, but I wouldn't say its good? It goes for a photorealism art style, but in the doom engine, so everything is a 4K texture with primitive polygons. The damage tries to do the Stalker thing where everything is hyper lethal, including you, but checkpointing is very not good and quicksaves just bring you back to checkpoints. The story is bad and obtuse, but it's translated from Russian so maybe it's lost in translation? It's full of things I want to enjoy, but the developer dumped it on steam, released a few patches and then the war started. So I don't know if it will ever get polished up or finished. The idea of Doom Engine Stalker seemed really interesting, but it's not a good package.

Really neat procedurally generated detective game. You generate a random city to do detective work in and murders are procedurally generated as you play. All the detective work is manual, you have to make your own pinboards, follow your own leads, and chase your own clues. There's a few tricks that can make the game easy, but it's still in early access and receiving content updates. It also fancies itself an Immersive sim, so there's plenty of hacking computers, vent crawling, and stealing involved in your detective work.

Of all the shitpost games I've played, this is the most shitpost out of all of them. A shooter inspired by Postal2 but even less tasteful with the over reliance on sex/toilet humor. The game never takes itself seriously and goes for silly or shock humor. I can't find anything on the developers, but It's like a weird British Toilet Postal 2 judging by the jabs at Tesco and Sheffield. The kind of thing you play for the spectacle and insanity rather than gameplay. Although it does play competently.

10/10 Wonderful great amazing shooter. I'd heard about the hype, but just the tutorial level blew me away with the freedom of movement and dexterity they expect you to show. The rest of the campaign is really super good, wonderful setpieces all around (not just "the device!"), and jumping into the Titan to break up the on foot sections was great. Unlocking more Titan loadouts over the course of the game spices things up, the infantry weapons are fun to use, and I just loved the back and forth between BT and Jack. Just really wonderful time with the campaign, one of the best I've played.

Okay, so I don't normally go for visual novels, as evidenced by 90% of my list being shooters, but I saw this one pop up on my steam recommends and gave it look. Steam was likely inspired by Disco Elysium and Stanley Parable earlier in the year. I didn't actually buy it until I kept seeing news about it pop off, so I decided to check it out and see what all the fuss was. Now I'm still not big on VNs, but I did really enjoy this one. There are a lot of branching paths and the story goes places I wasn't expecting. I didn't boot it up to play a romance game, and it fully supports that surprisingly. There's a lot of surprisingly good voice acting and writing and many ways for scenarios to play out, even ones that ultimately lead to the same branch. I've gotten a few endings, but I've only found roughly half of them I think.

It's more story missions for MW5, a game already at odds with its playerbase. I enjoyed it, but it's clearly on life support while they work on MW5 Clans.

Weird psychedelic horde/arena FPS where your weapons are fueled by Testosterone and Estrogen. Enemies adapt to your tactics as the level progress meaning you have to change strategies or weapons to stay on top. This often means getting armor, but if you're doing headshots a lot, enemies will start moving more erratically. There are a series of "Mission givers" which each have their own level gimmicks, but there's also story behind the story where you're breaking into the game behind the game. On the surface you're doing missions for random goobers, but after a few of those you're suddenly finding audiologs about the company before it went bankrupt and what happened to the other subjects. Interesting stuff, but the gunplay is just a little too janky sometimes. I got decently far, but haven't finished it. By the time I stopped playing I was lime green with pink nails shooting lightning at dudes in a mall while a motivational speaker kept telling me to find the light. Trippy stuff.

When you unlock a new weapon, you're given the choice between two options which are meant to fill the same role.

Only, you're not given any indication as to what the weapon does until you pick it.

Most of the weapons are perfectly usable, but there are some clear losers in the bunch.

You have the standard kit including your starter pistol, which does starter pistol things.

There's a whip melee attack which is actually really good since it hits in a wide cone.

And a flashlight which works on two enemies in the game.

For shotgun, you have the choice between a standard FPS shotgun and a crossbow. The crossbow is actually an arrow shotgun, but is less accurate/useful.

Going in blind, you'd guess the choice is between close range and long range damage, but actually no.

For the Rocket launcher slot, you have the choice of a rocket launcher, or a useless Sniper Rifle.

The rocket launcher can open blocked passageways, the sniper rifle doesn't even do enough damage to oneshot things.

In the chaingun slot, you have the option of an inaccurate SMG or Alien Blaster.

The alien blaster is like the starter pistol, but does big damage and has slightly less ammo.

The SMG wouldn't be bad as a rapid fire gun, but the shots veer left and right at random.

It's like they took Doom's chaingun, but implemented it less elegantly since you can tapfire Doom's chaingun for accuracy.

One more weird thing with the armory, you never get ammo counters.

There's a vague ammo meter for each gun which spends it at different rates, the ammo bars are all separate at least.

Also there's no specific ammo types, you just pick up a yellow ammo box and it maxes out your ammo for every weapon.

So we have our arsenal and a bunch of enemies to shoot on the way to the collectible, sounds simple enough.

Enemies and damage are really strange in this game however.

Some enemies seem to take extra damage from certain weapons, with no indication that this is the case.

I have no idea if the damage is split, or if enemies have specific weaknesses, only that skeletons can be oneshot with the whip but take three shotgun blasts.

Weapons don't seem to have any consistent damage profiles against enemies.

Sometimes it takes one pistol shot, but the same enemy would take three rockets.

In fact, rockets are fairly poorly implemented. They do damage the player and are relatively ineffective as a weapon.

I spent most of the game shooting things with the alien blaster since it seemed to function as a heavy pistol.

Its perfectly accurate and oneshots most things.

There's a colorful collection of enemies in the game, themed for each world.

The variety is actually great, every world has something new to throw at you, from slimes to giant bugs that hide as money.

What's not great is that half the enemies seem to barely work.

Many enemies deal contact damage, except they don't, so they're completely non-threatening.

Some enemies however, deal so much damage that they kill you from full health, at maximum possible health.

There's no indication which is which, you just have to learn the enemies.

Oh, but there are enemies which are designed to kill you from full health, there's a Slasher villain and the grim reaper.

I'm not talking about those, clearly telegraphed instant death enemies.

I'm talking about the little mascot devils that instantly kill you and count as a standard enemy for some reason.

And the lava frogs that deal leaky lava damage through walls and floors and have buggy hitboxes making them difficult to hit.

The bosses are all either way too lethal or completely ineffectual.

It's less of a back and forth fight, and more a DPS race to kill the boss before they oneshot you.

The variety is nice, but it feels like a lot of them are half functional.

While I appreciate the variety of environments on display, some of them were not properly playtested.

Water is instant death, so the flooded world is a pain because it's a crapshoot if the waves are going to graze your big toe through the boat you're platforming on.

One of the boss levels later in the game plain does not work.

If not careful, it's fairly easy to clip through the walls or floor and fall into the void.

Also each level is like, a couple of hallways.

We're talking 1-2 minute completion time for many levels, which means each world is only like 10-20 minutes long.

So the overall game is actually a decent length, but each level is bite sized.

It kind of works to the game's favor, because if you bug out or get oneshot by something, you're not losing much progress.

Worlds in Nine Circles are all open world amusement parks themed after Sins/Circles of hell.

Each level now has ten shards to find in any order, one of which consisting of finding 5 lost-souls (basically Jinjos).

Some of the level will not be accessible until you find the shop and buy that level's powerup.

For the most part it's a natural flow, I quite liked it. There are godbeams on points-of-interest to help the player navigate to shops, shards, or souls.

Also, on the pause screen, each shard has a name which hints at where it is.

So outside of bugginess, it was pretty easy to find all the shards on any given level.

Also each world still has its own themed enemies, although later levels will throw in enemies from earlier levels even outside of the theme.

Some enemies are completely new, while others are recycled from the first game when appropriate.

Each world has an ability to find and sometimes a new weapon.

Most of these are situational things like ziplining, wallrunning, and teleport doors, but I liked how each world integrates it's upgrade into the overall level.

There are also transformation spots in a few levels where Dracula turns into a bat or fish for a short time to get a shard in some hard to reach location.

As you do with a game inspired by Banjo-Kazooie.

Additionally, there are a number of minigames sprinkled throughout the game.

Some of them feel like experiments from the developer, like "Coaster Chaos" being a Game&Watch minigame or Bumper Cars consisting of red dots pushing each other out of the ring. The kind of thing you'd find in an old flash game.

Each world also has a time machine that takes Dracula to what is essentially a short Wolf3D inspired level.

They're practically just hallways with some enemies and a shard at the end, but they're short and different.

All the old enemy weirdness from the first game is still present, although I swear there are *more* enemies who don't deal damage.

The new enemies still have the damage resistance strangeness as well, such as the cerberus dogs taking a ton of bullets or one melee swipe.

This is actually a bit of a boon, because every time you complete a scene transition, all the enemies in the world respawn.

I'd rather have a bunch of enemies I can scoot past than have to re-kill everything every single time.

On the whole, I'd say the enemies are generally ineffectual, but not completely ignorable.

They probably won't kill you, but you still have to eliminate them to be able to explore freely.

There are still a few enemies who are always oneshots too, but they are greatly reduced.

Mostly what will kill you is falling into a pit or touching a part of the level that triggers instant death.

The new arsenal is basically a straight copy or upgrade over the first game.

You get the classic pistol and melee swipe, but there's only one type of weapon for each slot now.

Your set gear list is a regular shotgun, an accurate machine gun, the same useless rocket launcher, and a flamethrower thing that barely works.

The pistol, shotgun, and machine gun are enough to clear anything in the game so I don't mind the others being kinda wack.

The rocket launcher still serves as a door opener more than a weapon and the flameshooter thing only has five shots, but doesn't actually seem to kill anything.

The Lasergun in SS4 has an alternate "Death Ray" firemode, which does tremendous damage at the cost of ammo.

Siberian Mayhem replaces the Lasergun with a Thermal Deathray with slightly less damage, but enemies explode on death.

There is no downside to always using it when you have ammo, it does good damage to everything and they give you lots of ammo for it since it's new.

The Devastator/Sniper are replaced with a Railgun crossbow. Instead of having armor piercing grenade projectiles, it functions more like a hitscan railgun.

It doesn't hold as much ammo as the Devastator, but it doesn't need to reload and travel time is instant.

It has the laser-pointer hipfire accuracy, and piercing shots, of the devastator, and also the long range hitscan problem solving of the Sniper.

Once again, there's no reason not to use it on every mid-tier enemy and up since you get plenty of ammo and it's incredibly good.

Another side effect to the Thermal Beam and Railgun crossbow being hyper-accurate is that there's no downside to dualwielding them.

It's useless to dual wield the Sniper since you can't aim it, and the Lasergun loses access to it's deathray mode limiting it to better-minigun mode.

You could dual wield both the Thermal Beam and Railgun at the same time and have no downsides, since they're laser accurate, no recoil, and no alternate firemode.

There's the enemy on the game cover, which is a laser variant of SS4's flamer enemy.

They're not too bad, they fire vertical and horizontal beams which are easy to dodge.

They added a revamped version of the Marsh Hoppers. They're annoying, it's a melee enemy, but they have flash-step dodging abilities.

This forces you to use explosives on them since they will reflexively dodge shotgun and AK fire. This seems to be intentional since they give out shotgun grenades like candy whenever they're present.

There's also a buffed up version of Zealots. The original zealot can only be killed with piercing/explosives or dodging and shooting their back. The Buffed Zealot, the Legionnaire, has a shield and an even smaller weakspot on their back. They're faster, stronger, and a real pain to deal with in packs until you get a rocket launcher or the Railgun Crossbow which bypasses their whole gimmick.

Lastly the Sentry tower which serves as a mini-boss fight for vehicle sections. It's not so difficult as it is annoying.

It fires blast templates at you that you have to dodge while fighting other things. Get too close and it opens up with twin miniguns that kill you quickly.

Since it does so much damage, you end up driving in circles around it picking it apart while other enemies swarm around you. Also it's invulnerable unless you hit the weakpoint, which is only exposed on a cooldown after it spams blast-templates at you.