Senaste recensioner av DRIFTER

Ace of Spades was, for its time, a decent destructable minecraft-style brawler.

The developer has expressed interest in doing something about it in the future, but for now, the servers are virtually empty, and you can only play online. Best to avoid for the time being.

If you've never heard of the game this is based on, you'll find it hard to resist grabbing it afterward.

Whether this was made purely for promotional purposes or not, This 10-minute vignette captures the spirit of the original game and what it made it so great: Behind an otherwise mundane job, lie difficult moral decisions and tragic consequences for any mistakes.

Absolutely worth your time.

If you enjoy indie films, these sci-fi shorts are worth a quick viewing.

Running just under 15 minutes, the title piece The Defector paints an alternate depiction of how the Australian PM went missing in 1967. Despite its brevity, the casting, set design, and audio are on point, making for a delightful short thriller.

The second piece Anima does not appear to have any connection to the first, and tells the story of a man struggling to overcome profound loss. You will no doubt enjoy the Australian landscapes and starscapes depicted within. While not as powerful a performance, it is no less a fine work.

At the time of this review, only chapters 1 & 2 were available.
Looking forward to future entries, especially a continuation to the first.

There is no debate that Warframe is one of the sleekest looter shooters ever made. Besides its accessibility, its production values are simply insane for a game that is absolutely free; No DLC-locked content or required purchases, ever. The game is bolstered purely by cosmetics and premium currency called platinum, which only serves to buy boosts, bundles, or shortcut content. But Warframe is also a cautionary tale of a game that lacks direction, strung along by its creative designer who can't seem to commit to any one element and perfect it. And so, much like the universe it inhabits, Warframe has been, and is increasingly becoming, a derelict adrift.

Having now capped all the achievements in this marathon of a game, I feel compelled to post a critique for closure. There isn't too much I can add to the already 400k reviews here, but I figured I would provide feedback for the game's biggest issues both as encouragement to improve and as caution for new players.

Steam forces a positive or negative recommendation, so I chose positive, but this review is actually mixed.

Warframe generates buzz by adding a lot of cool-looking things, but ultimately end up abandoned or fail to be fleshed out. Open world expansions look fantastic, but after you try them, will quickly realize they are reskins of one another. Hoverboards (K-Drives) are rarely used by any seasoned players, since jetpacks (archwings) are far faster for travel. Story missions are probably the best part of the game, but no one can point you to a release schedule for these, as they're entirely random. PvP exists (conclave), but no one plays it, and besides the skill gap there's also big balancing issues long unaddressed. Railjack (space dogfighting) is initially fun, but quickly becomes stale as there's little enemy and objective variety.

Warframe's answer to content is "more stuff." But it doesn't need more stuff. It needs quality stuff. I'd rather they focus on one thing and make it really good than add more open worlds, loot grinds, and defense missions. Please, no more defense missions.

What I mean by this is that Warframe has virtually no in-game guidance. The new player experience is still in shambles. The opening cinematic tutorial, Vor's Prize, is great and all, but after you complete it, you're dumped to star chart with little idea of what to do next. Where do you go for a new frame? Or what about a specific weapon you saw in a screenshot? Good luck finding them on your own... there's no easy way to verify drop locations. I would not have been able to do anything in this game if it weren't for warframe.fandom.com. It shouldn't be this way.

Warframe has gatcha style mechanics for building things (12-24hr for weapons, 3 days for frames), and actually, I do not take issue with this. What I'm referring to is both the open world day cycles, which are unequal in length, requiring you to be available to quickly farm limited resources or objectives. Fishing falls prey to this, as does Eidolon hunting. In fact, if you aren't early enough to the Eidolon nightly bounties, you can't finish it at all - the boss will run away when day comes. There are events like plague star and scarlet spear, with fantastic loot available, but run for very limited time and far too infrequently. Bring them back more often, and either speed up the in-game cycles, or balance them to be easier to reach.

Look, I get it - F2P games and RNG go hand-in-hand. But virtually all of Warframe is centered around it. Just as one example, there's primes, or shinier reskins of existing weapons and frames, which are stronger. To get these, you'll need to farm for the relic (itself on a crowded loot table), and then unlock it (another loot table). You can team up to run these, but even after boosting your relics, expect to fail many times. To be fair, prime farming can be solved by trading, so as long as you spend the time, you can save up plat, then re-trade it to get what you need. You can also purchase plat with real currency, skipping the grind (but it's not cheap). Whenever new weapons are added to the game, you can expect their components to be added to loot tables at low rates. It's not a problem until you realize some of these missions will take 30 minutes to run to get to the stage that drops them, and you'll need to keep repeating these tens of dozens of times.

Rivens, on the other hand, are a different ball game. Rivens are rare mods that randomly buff and debuff stats for specific weapons. These are the true end game, pushing your arsenal past stock limits. The problem, however, is getting a good one. It requires rolling it over and over again to try to perfect those stats, and at this point I think you have better odds of being struck by lightning than getting a good one. Players have been shouting for it, and I agree: Make kuva (riven resource) more plentiful and lower the cost to roll. I gave up on Rivens because they're just not worth the time. It's better to sell them to players for plat IMO

Longtime players have different opinions, but most will agree: Warframe doesn't cater to veterans. Steel path was the most recent addition, but it was lackluster--repeat the whole star chart with beefed up enemies. That's it. No super secret missions or game modes, just run the chart and never do it again. Try it and see how sparse the population is, you'll probably never find other players in random matching. There have been other attempts for harder content, but none of them have retention as the loot rewards are limited, aren't worth it, or fail to introduce anything a player hasn't already spent hundreds of hours doing.

In conclusion, I don't want to say that Warframe is a bad game, it's simply not a great one. It started strong, listening to its playerbase and adding content regularly. Now, it's sputtering along, focusing on expansion instead of content. It's great that Warframe is on every platform (soon Epic games next), but if you want people to stay, you need to give us new and exciting things to do. Thankfully, Warframe is free, so you've got nothing to lose by trying it out. I would recommend experiencing all available story content at the very least... of course, you'll need to consult the wiki to find out how to do that.

Achievement Hunters: RUN AWAY. This is one of the longest 100% in existence, and I don't wish it upon anyone. But if you insist... you'll have to acquire and max out most of the game's arsenal to reach MR30. It is easily a 1500 hour grind. Many of the achievements will naturally unlock along the way.

Some very general pointers:

• NEVER buy cosmetics. Every piece of plat needs to go to inventory expansion.
  
• Check before you sell - there are several weapons and frames that require others as ingredients. It's usually OK to sell non-primes. Feed your frames to helminth.
  
• Utilize trading. It's the only way to reasonably shortcut relic grinding. Don't chase vaulted relic parts that are expensive - they may become unvaulted in the future and bottom out in price. Your best friend is https://warframe.market/
  
• Use tenno.zone/planner to easily keep track of missing parts for prime grinds

Good Luck.

InfiniPicross is nothing more than a random picross generator application. Or should I say, a white noise picross generator, because there isn't a single actual picture in the game, outside of one achievement. It does what it's advertised to do, make entirely random puzzles, but beyond that, you'll be hard pressed to find much else to do with this game.

• True to its name, can create whatever size puzzle your resolution supports in endless supply
  
• Supports themes to customize the puzzle display and interface to your liking
  
• It's cheap
  
• Has achievements that require real effort, if you like a challenge

• No campaign mode. No preset puzzles. No pictures. Isn't picross about pictures?
  
• Has workshop support for custom themes, ok, but you can't upload or create custom puzzles. Why?
  
• A resource hog. Slow startup, even slower puzzle generation. Really needs better optimization.
  
• NO undo feature. You better not make mistakes!
  
• One music track that gets old fast. I had to mute it.
  
• This is a big one: It only supports puzzles as big as your maximum resolution. This means some people may find it impossible to complete the larger achievement requirements, the largest being 50x99. You're out of luck on old monitors.

Frankly speaking, there are much better picross games, even free ones, on steam. And I sincerely mean no offense to the devs - you have made a solid random generator here. But getting personal, I enjoy picross for unveiling shapes and figures, not the pure logic aspect. As it is, this feels like a game for engineers and mathematicians.

Grab it on sale if you grab it at all, and do your homework to be sure your PC can handle it, if achievements are your thing.

Much like the original Zup!, this dlc gives you a couple minutes more playtime with what feel like levels that didn't make the cut in the main game. They also include the silver blocks (click to remove) that were not in the main game. Only 11 this time (as opposed to 22), they're worth trying if you enjoy physics puzzles.

Read my main game review here.

Zup! 2 provides exactly the same gameplay of the first: Click destructible red blocks to set objects in motion in an attempt to guide your blue ball to the green exit. I personally do enjoy this type of puzzle, but keep in mind the game is quite short, clocking in at about 30 minutes of gameplay for 66 stages, and its main selling point is a mess of achievements for the sole purpose of steam profile decoration. If you get it, get it on sale with the rest of them.

• 15 meg download, runs on a potato PC just fine
  
• Clean presentation, simple controls, simple gameplay
  
• 66 levels with 11 optional free DLC
  
• Cheap physics puzzlers tend to have bugs and unpredictable results when you redo stages. I couldn't find any such problems playing Zup! 2
  
• Slightly more challenging than the first; more precision timing based puzzles that rely less on random clicking.
  
• A very easy 100% for achievement hunters
  
• People who like to decorate their profile will find a wider set of characters in this sequel

• Even with more stages this game took me no longer than the first. I really think the ZUPs should be consolidated into less games.
  
• While some stages have a little room for different solutions, it is largely the same, meaning low replayability if at all.
  
• Nothing new - all the previous elements are here from Zup! making this feel like an expansion, not a new game. Why not introduce the silver blocks that until now have been DLC only?
  
• While achievement decoration serves a purpose, it's also becoming ridiculous: doubles and triples of the same character in different colors per stage. Clear cash grabs like Gaben achievement. Sets a problematic trend in using such achievements to sell games, when content should be the focus instead.

Because Zup! 2 gave me more of what I enjoyed about the first, I give it a thumbs up. The quality was on par with the first, and the puzzles were a little more challenging too. But keep in mind that the popularity is mainly due to achievements, not gameplay.

Grab it on sale as part of a developer bundle, because there are other puzzlers out there that can give you a lot more for a buck.

22 Free levels to add to your Zup! experience.

In all honesty, these should have been included in the main game, as short as it is. But definitely give these a go - they include the silver block mechanic, where you can destroy blocks on demand. These play as interesting "developer concept" levels that didn't make the cut. Worth an extra 15 minutes.

You can read my main game review here.

Zup! provides an extremely simple physics puzzler in a tiny package. It's small, it's short, but it manages to provide a fun 30-60 minutes and even has an extra set of DLC levels available, with their own mechanic. And I would be remiss not to mention the elephant in the room - letter achievements that work well on a steam profile. If those things appeal to you, then Zup! is worth a purchase, but probably not for full price.

• The base game is around 20 megs. Easy to run on any system.
  
• Simple controls and easy to learn
  
• 44 levels with 22 optional DLC, entirely free
  
• Has variety. Adds different coloured blocks with their own gimmics as you progress, so it stays fresh
  
• Vibrant colors with strong contrasts, easy on the eyes
  
• Cheap physics puzzlers tend to have bugs and/or unpredictability when you redo stages. I couldn't find any such problems in Zup!
  
• Guaranteed 100% if you like achievements
  
• The achievements themselves are a full set of alphabets, for profile decorators

• It's short. 30 minutes tops? Another 15 if you do the DLC. The game could have used more levels for this kind of length.
  
• Maybe a little too minimalist. In fact, it was the achievement popups that alerted me to what i was looking at - it should be clearer in-game. The introduction of different mechanics should be explained with a tutorial stage for each, IMO, not simply trial and error.
  
• Some of the puzzles can be brute forced, meaning, random clicking can yield success without any actual effort.
  
• Useless / rediculous achievements. An achievement for starting the game? Cartoon strip style joke achievements at periodic intervals? It feels like a cash grab, on top of the full character map collection.

Weighing everything listed above, I would recommend Zup! as a quick and easy puzzler, and I personally did enjoy it. I'm impressed that for a cheap game, it wasn't a cheap experience. I could tell that real effort was put into testing the stages and ensuring predictable results. I'm not so sure it deserves so many games by the same name, however. I've yet to complete the sequels, but my gut impression is that they could probably be merged into less games to balance the length and excessive achievements.

Grab it on sale as part of a developer bundle, because there are other puzzlers out there that can give you a lot more for a buck.

aMAZE is a collection of 50 mazes that you navigate with directional keys. Perhaps best suited for small children, even the most ardent of puzzle fans may find themselves falling asleep before completion. Poor resolution stock-art backgrounds, jarring colour choices, and elevator music stuck on infinite repeat are more likely to test your patience than your skill at mazes.

• Small footprint, small download
  
• Simple control scheme
  
• 50 mazes for a low price
  
• Achievement hunters will appreciate an easy 100%, 30-40 minutes tops.

• Graphically, looks and plays like a flash game. Low resolution backgrounds. Hues that could be hard on the eyes.
  
• Description advertises different mazes each time you play. I didn't find this to be the case. Don't expect much replayability.
  
• Only one track of music that loops forever
  
• Collision detection errors will have you completing mazes before the end, simply by brushing up against the wall near the goal. Not on all stages, but a few.
  
• There is little difference between the medium and hard mazes. You get 20 medium and only 10 hard, and some of the medium were harder. Even the achievement icon has a larger maze than the ones in the game itself!

If you're looking for a good maze collection, I would strongly suggest you try other titles first. aMAZE looks and feels cheaper than the print puzzlers you can buy at a local store. Get better resolution backgrounds that scale to modern monitor sizes. Thicken and standardize the maze lines to be consistent in every direction. Fix the poor collision detection that allows you to skip puzzles before they've been completed. Look for higher contrast combinations of lines to background hues to be easier on the eyes. Everything here feels like it was made in a rush, cutting whatever corners possible.

Even at this low price, I still wouldn't recommend this unless it was on sale or in a developer bundle.