Recent reviews by DRIFTER

Blacksmith Weapon Merchant is a resource management clicker that's a sufficient time waster; Gather resources to satisfy an infinite list of blacksmith orders. Clicking focuses attention on what to gather and what to upgrade, accelerating as the game goes on with more resource types and faster timers.

This review is intended to be informational, but since steam forces a rating, choosing recommended on the basis of no bugs in my playthrough and that it's completely free.

The most difficult part of this game is its start. If you don't balance your "stick" and "stone" gathering, you might start to lose "lives" as dissatisfied customers' patience runs out. But if you can get past the initial tier upgrades, things get much easier with more workers, faster pickups, and improved efficiency. The latter possibly the most important, cutting your resource costs by a wide margin.

The game doesn't seem to have an end once you reach its highest recipe tier, regardless of how fast the timers become: With improved efficiency and lightning fast workers, you'll be bottlenecked only by how fast you can get trees to spawn. Once you've hit 10,000 orders, there's no other achievements to strive for, so it's up to you how much longer to stay (assuming your clicker finger doesn't tire).

The DLCs are purely cosmetic, allowing you to donate to the developer. You're unlikely to get much use out of them, however, as the game lacks replay value. One run, and you've seen it all.

Achievement Hunters: ~30 mins to 100%. An autoclicker makes the later state of the game trivial, when the screen becomes too fast and crowded to study. Survive to 5k orders in one game, then grind to 10k. Fastest if done in one session, since it doesn't seem to save game progress.

In today's cluttered last-man-standing genre, a lot of BR's look and play the same. Parachute down on a large map, procure weapons (usually firearms), and pick off opponents while pressured into a progressively smaller area. Darwin decided to do something others have not: Fuse a survival game into a king of the hill combat mold. And to a degree, it actually works.

Up to 10 players are teleported into a randomly generated map. The map itself is a shuffle of preset "biomes," all mid-winter, but with notable differences: A central frozen lake, scattered treehouses, a futuristic city, a rustic town with a central chapel, a shipping yard, and a molten canyon complete with expansive piping, to name a few. As combatants navigate these, they hunt down chests, chop down trees, harvest darwinium (energy resource), and the occasional robo-deer for special items and healing. Using gathered resources, you can craft arrows, a couple traps, and class-specific upgrades to boost your offensive, defensive, or tactical abilities.

It's a lot to take in at first, but with practice, becomes second nature. Darwin is a high skill ceiling game for those who dare to master it, giving you all the tools to pull of incredible trickshots with a bow, intense melee axe fights, or satisfying 4D chess plays of out-maneuvering opponents into hidden, preset traps. There are many montages on youtube that showcase Darwin at its peak, and indeed, it's mesmerizing. Here's just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnxTpxBVOts

During its early days, Darwin was not built on classes, but rather, customization. You could directly upgrade and build any combination of powers you pleased, limited only by resources and the time to craft them. On launch, they removed this freedom and narrowed your abilities into three classes: Jetpack, Grapple Hook, Seeker Drone. Jetpack focuses on verticality / aerial bow use / speed, Grapple on melee / shields / 1v1, Seeker on tracking / trapping / invisibility. Within your class selection your access to abilities is limited, so you need to make the most of your strengths. Ultimately, though, every class comes down to quick reflexes and good aim.

Darwin's survival element has you juggle a constant pressure against cold, which, if ignored, will steadily deplete your HP akin to a poison effect. To combat this, you craft fires that warm you up, but give away your position to the enemy by a stage-wide visible smoke signal. You can put these out early by crafting snowballs, or use them strategically to throw off opponents. Speaking of snowballs, you can lob these at opponents to lower their cold resistance and possibly seal a battle of attrition if they can't warm up.

Last but not least, the game had a novel idea of tasking one spectator player as a show director, granting the power to spice things up to their whims. These had access to "cards" (randomly selected events) including things like resource gifts, buffs, zone closure, and even a nuke, forcing players to evacuate or risk KO by countdown. It featured a twitch integration to let the audience vote and grant bonus XP to the most entertaining participants.

So why is the game in maintenance mode, then? As per usual, my thoughts:

1. Insufficient marketing and platform accessibility - Before it went F2P, Darwin was a pay to play title, which likely kept potential players at bay (the early access dilemma). Eventually, the game extended to other platforms, but had limitations: It was never available on Switch, and for Xbox players, Live was required. Though it utilized Twitch and picked up some streamers, where else was it advertised? If the intended market was competitive, where were the tournaments and the big prizes? There were some, but I can't recall hearing about them.

2. Catering to the wrong audience - Unlike its cartoonish appearance, Darwin is no casual game. If you didn't already, watch the linked video above to get a sense for how fast combat can be... significant precision and foresight are needed to land your shots, deflect attacks, or lure opponents into traps. I'm not sure that Darwin pulled enough of the esports type, which the game seems made for. When streamers picked up the game, some rose to the challenge and improved their skill. But others, soured by continuous losses, became detractors, and their complaints shaped content changes. It's a catch-22 of wanting a competitive audience but catering your game to players who weren't as dedicated, and the end result was alienating both experienced alpha testers (who didn't like the class system) and the newcomers getting stomped by pros in the full release, who may not have stuck around long enough. Speaking of which, some casuals didn't even make it past the survival mechanics to manage their cold meters. They wanted faster games.

3. Lack of incentives, removing core features - Touched on above, not a lot of early adopters appreciated losing the full crafting wheel and being pigeonholed into classes. Battlepass came late in the life cycle, finally giving players something to strive for with tasks to perform. And not to be forgotten, duos - party with a friend - was a defining draw to the game, and it was taken out on release (in favor of ranked free for all). Some people only want to play with pals, and that forced these out altogether.

Today, you can still experience vanilla Darwin under custom matches - I suggest you do so - to see what could have been. If you enjoy it, search the forums for discord links to find premades and get a real game going. You can gamble on midweek and weekend randoms but true challengers all go customs.

Achievement Hunters: Typical grind achievements. Very time consuming... there is no consistent way to get XP outside of 1 daily win + top 3 finish. You can farm with a friend or use an idle account. Must be done in public matchmaking, customs don't count. Level 50 is easily a 3 month or so commitment.

And caution about the legendary weapon skin. It costs 1500 ramen which you will earn as you grind levels and perform daily tasks. You could get lucky and find one in a level up crate, but if not, be sure NOT TO BUY LEGEND CLOTHING. My mistake cost me another month of grind.

~50-100 hrs to 100% ?

As already pointed out by another reviewer, Meatball is a Unity asset pack flipped under another name.

The original was called Freeze: X Mission by Andrew Oleynik[assetstore.unity.com]. It's been depreciated on the official Unity store, but you can still find copies of it elsewhere[assetsale.herokuapp.com].

As such, you're paying to play a game that's been copied and pasted with the only change being a solid red background covering up the original one. The game is difficult, requiring very fast reflexes to weave a ball through insta-death razor blades, but thankfully, the game's achievements are only to idle it, no work required.

If you care about owning an easy completion, steam restricted game (doesn't count for profile stats), then here you go. But if you care about the ethics of posting up someone else's work and claiming it as your own... now you know.

Achievement Hunters: 2hr 30 min idle to 100%

This review is intended to be informational, but as steam forces a rating, choosing not recommended on the basis of incomplete content and broken achievements.

7 Angels was, first and foremost, an adult-oriented title, not unlike the many 18+ visual novels found across the industry. Now imagine you wanted to convert one into a mobile game, complete with stamina timers and premium currency... how would you do it? Angels' solution to this was a mix of branching choices and match-3 challenges.

You, a nameless male protag, were using a dating app to seduce an ever-increasing roster of ladies in an equally ever-increasing number of absurd circumstances. All dialogue played out in a "chat simulator" in app, allowing you to choose to be cheeky or polite in most cases. The scenarios were largely linear--only a series of correct choices would lead to the ending--but were interspersed with light puzzling in later chapters. For instance, one story had you navigating a small dungeon, and you'd have to choose where to go next and what items to carry in order to unlock a door. Each action cost stamina (phone battery power) which served to limit your playtime and pad out episode length. There were dead ends in the stories and infinite loops inside the "adventure puzzles," carefully placed to drain players of stamina and encourage currency spending.

Match-3+ challenges were the real gatekeeper in this game... to please the ladies and perform perilous tasks, Angels would throw up one of its handful of match-3 stages. These included: Score (reach a certain goal), Bombs (clear specific balls within a move limit or game over), Power-up (match 6+, 9+, or 12+ for a respective powerup X number of times), and for lack of a better term, "Boss mode" (clear one or two large balls by matching around them, depleting their "hit points"). These challenges varied in difficulty by the number of colors included, ranging from as little as three to as many as five. Naturally, lower colors required higher score goals, and vice-versa.

Where the monetization crept into the puzzles was by way of bypassing turn limits. Every puzzle session restricted the number of moves you could make before a game over, and if you didn't finish, you could spend rubies to continue. Spending currency not only gave you more moves but made each of your moves more potent, specifically useful for score challenges. In addition, there were 4 premium powerups obtained only by spending currency, enabling players to destroy any chosen location or color without restrictions.

The last layer of monetization came by way of "gifts" and "memory." Gifts were items you could earn by completing daily challenges, in-game achievements, or from the daily roulette wheel, aside from outright purchasing them. They served several functions, like buying explicit animated illustrations, stickers, or unlocking VIP mode. VIP mode was an optional toggle to make roughly 30% of an episode completely stamina free, giving players a big boost to tackle a portion of the story without fear of failure or currency expense. Memory referred to the size of the storage on your emulated phone; Throughout the story, illustrations were texted to you to show what's going on, and without sufficient memory, everything would be covered in mosaics. Pay up, or use your imagination.

Today, the Angels' service has concluded. Steam never saw more than 5 episodes, whereas 2 seasons made it to the web-based and mobile versions of this game. What lead to its shutdown? I can think of a few reasons:

1. Difficulty / Unfair physics in match-3 - It's no exaggeration to say that the puzzle segments were "designed for failure." For a long time I thought it was impossible to progress the game, until wasting around a thousand stamina to become comfortable with the variations and physics. You could connect balls of the same color as long as there was a clear "path," but the path wasn't always available even if there was a visible gap. Learning this inconsistent behavior and how to strategically corral matching colors together for powerups was the key to success. I take it that few players stuck around that long. If you decided to pay, the costs were pretty steep, potentially wiping out your hard earned stash if you weren't absolutely sure you could win in the next purchased moves.

2. Niche Audience - I won't pretend to know the stats on the adult game market, but I would bet that most people here for the artwork aren't the most patient of puzzlers. For those less inclined to suffer through high score matching challenges or running in circles to escape a text adventure maze, perhaps a premium skip feature might have retained that audience, assuming they were willing to pay to get to the goods. What options were available didn't guarantee success, and didn't provide any ancillary benefits on replay (if you wanted to go back to collect all the artworks, you had to start from scratch every episode).

3. The Writing - I don't mean to say that this kind of game deserves Pulitzer prizewinning literary mastery, nor would it be fair to demand perfect English from a foreign dev team. However... surely it could have used a native proofreader or editor? The biggest problem with the game is that you could tell it was written by one person. The girls didn't have unique voices, and fell back on familiar mannerisms and emoji usages. Yes, it's a comedy and shouldn't be taken seriously, but shouldn't a text-based adventure contain a variety of personalities to entertain and keep the reader hooked for more? Once you met Lilith, you met them all.

TL;DR - Especially when it comes to mobile games, I believe the most important factor is accessibility. As a player, I always felt like this game was trying to restrict my progress at every turn, and even when I forked over currency, never felt like I was really buying any advantage. Coupled with a niche audience in a niche market, it was the recipe for an uphill battle to retain players.

Achievement Hunters: Incomplete. Besides the fact that the game imported achievements for the entirety of Season 1 and never gave access beyond Chapter 5, several in-game achievements were broken. Buying rubies never unlocked the "it's gas" achievement, and completing daily challenges never incremented the /10 counter. Broken from the start, and now, unplayable.

~15hrs to ~60% (time estimate hard to pinpoint since it was possible to spend premium currency to farm challenges, skip stamina timers, or skip puzzle failures)

Pros:
✔️ Sleek UI with features like friends lists, private chat, trading, challenges
✔️ Generous amounts of chips given for daily login and handouts every other hour
✔️ Like cosmetics? Collect and customize avatars and tables
✔️ Competitive rankings, leaderboards
✔️ Chests that randomly spawn midgame to encourage taking risks for prizes

Cons:
❌ Real poker players won't be able to earn any money here. Strictly for fun
❌ Public chat lacks moderation. Players can get pretty nasty with high stakes
❌ Players abuse going all in, making it a game of chicken. They call the worst of hands, steal the chip lead, and keep playing this way with no apparent drawback.
❌ The house takes 10% of the entire end pot. This may be a strategy to combat the previous point, but it really hurts when trying to recoup losses
❌ Would have been nice to see alternative poker rules / variants for change of pace

If you play this one, you play for kicks. There's no reason to invest cash unless you need chips, which, why do you? You can't cash out, the money's imaginary. The problem is the players... people don't respect "normal" poker rules, and opt for bingo plays. This is the biggest issue with the game - you won't really get to hone your skills consistently here.

There are no shortage of poker games out there, and I think you can do better than this one, especially in the fun department.

Achievements: Just one. Semi-secret. Equip the right skin, vote for the right table, and win a hand. Can be cheesed by trading for those items and going to an empty room with said trader. They fold, you win. ~1 min to 100%. Detailed guide here.

This review is intended to be informational. But since Steam forces me to take a side, I choose not recommended on the basis of being extremely short, and that there are better parody experiences for the same price.

To be clear, I don't dislike THE CORRIDOR. I just feel anything towards it, either. From start to finish, your job is to press a button, or at least attempt to do so, whilst the narrator derides and obstructs your efforts. The setting is fine, the concept is executed adequately, but by the time you get to the finish, you're liable to ask yourself, "That's it?"

If CORRIDOR wanted to convey to us the challenges of game design, it had a few good ideas. Displaying the game engine, design sequence, disassembling the building blocks piece by piece - all fine. The issues I have lie more with the delivery and the writing. From the outset, the player is greeted with hostility and commanded to "go away," the reasons for which are not really explained until the very end. Unlike Stanley, which had colorful banter throughout, the player's experience is largely adversarial. And once we do reach that climax, it's underwhelming, because we don't experience the narrator's growth. We're given a post-it note. Whoopie. The purpose of our journey was to help the narrator overcome his fear, and in so doing, we've learned... what, exactly?

As a silly walking sim, it fits the criteria, but CORRIDOR doesn't dare to do anything with its setting. Besides making the actual task more convoluted or impractical, it has a few funny genre switch ups with are short lived, and would have been excellent to explore more. Perhaps sprinkle sarcastic commentary about these and why the narrator decided that button pushing is the penultimate gaming experience? As a conduit to tell a short story, CORRIDOR misses the chance to convey just how painstaking it can be to craft art, rather than intentionally mocking the game experience as a means to an end.

You may be thinking that I'm being too harsh on a what's clearly a joke on a budget. And that's fair. It's cheap, it has achievements, and it may give you a chuckle. I just wish to see something different and exciting from a decades-old trope, a new iteration or perspective. Even if it is just a buck. Once you see all it has to offer, you're unlikely to open it ever again... which, ironically, is exactly what the narrator intended at the start.

Achievement Hunters: See guides for walkthrough. About half missable, but short enough that replay is no big deal. (If you do complete it and need to return, use the reset data option in settings). If you use a guide from the very start and don't need any replays, I estimate ~20 minute completion is possible.

From its inception, SpellBreak dared to make its mark on an overly crowded genre by betting all its chips on its fantasy warfare. No archers, soldiers, or monsters were welcome here - only mages allowed. In that limitation, it would spark the imagination of many, while repelling the interest of others. Grab an elemental gauntlet, procure a companion one on site, and combine your powers with the right timing and circumstances to seize the flow of battle. When it hit its stride, it was exhilarating.

Gauntlets came in the following affinities, and provided the following main class bonuses:

• Fire - Lob flame bullets that would ignite foes and fauna in a limited area, dealing damage over time. Its special was a wall of flames that served as a barrier to obscure vision or cut off escape. Caster could pass through these walls for a flight effect.
  
• Toxin - A fan-shaped ("shotgun") spray of poison similar to flame, dealing damage over time on foes and creating toxic puddles with the same effect if stepped on. Its special was a toxic cloud dealing damage to anyone except the caster initially, granting a dash + invisibility effect on first contact.
  
• Frost - Sniper class, specializing in long (arced) shots. Level ups added slow descents and enemy highlighting, not to mention extra damage on overcharge. Its special was a ice storm that deflected projectiles and nullifed damage temporarily, or could be used to get close to your opponent and freeze/slow them temporarily. Its unique perk was creating ice trails below bullets, enabling the fastest traversal (skiing) in the game.
  
• Lightning - The hitscan playstyle; fire electricity that dealt instant damage and even more with each successive shot, limited only by your aim and mana pool. Its special was to call down an AOE storm with limited range, temporarily paralyzing its prey.
  
• Earth - a defensive playstyle, that buffed the caster with armor regen each cast, but was limited to direct contact with the terrain. Its special was to lob boulders at opponents that grew as they traveled, somewhat compensating for their slow speed. Easiest early on, but difficult endgame, when the environment rarely gave you shared ground with your opponent.
  
• Air - Weak but rapid "wind sickles," which could also be fired facing down to create lift, replacing jump as a more economical traversal option. Its special was to create a cyclone that would either pull in enemies, or launch the caster up and make them float. Spell damage was buffed as long as the caster remained aloft.

Where Spellbreak shined was their interplay. Walled in by toxin spray and clouds? Freeze them, rendering them harmless. Then electrocute them, for a large AOE damage effect, or ignite them for a powerful explosion. Successfully pull an opponent into your cyclone? Poison it, electrocute it, or ignite it for bonus damage and status effect. Pesky ice user moving too fast to hit? Electrocute their trails, or pummel them with earth to create a frozen mist that actually slows them down instead. It's this chaos that kept you on toes regardless of how many matches played, always trying to gauge your opponents' arsenal while evaluating your own.

Spellbreak was big on traversal--movement was everything--and gave you a jump, a hover (hold to fly higher but expend mana), and a short dodge/dash. Runes provided that missing link, mimicking class skills like invisibility, float, aura tracking, or flying, while also providing wildcards like time rewind or teleportation. Mastering these could get you behind your opponent for a surprise attack, or evacuating to safety while you consume recovery items. Portions of the map had great verticality, such as towering castles or hovering debris fields, which made for some tense endgame plays.

Leveling up your classes unlocked talents, which allowed you to build custom loadouts. Offering everything from increased movement speed, faster item usage, damage absorption, levitation, and so on - your build options were plenty. Go all in on a glass cannon ice build, create a difficult to kill earth tank, or take to the skies with a lightweight wind mage that benefited constantly from class bonuses.

By now you may be thinking, "Sounds great! So why end of service?" For that, here are a few of my thoughts:

1. An over-saturated genre + lack of marketing + limited exclusivity: It's no surprise that fortnite, PUBG, Apex are the kings of the hill when it comes to BR, and trying to push a new IP against them is incredibly difficult. But did Spellbreak ever aggressively advertise? Where was it pulling in its playerbase? Epic enticed the studio for a limited period of exclusivity, but in so doing, was only known to the Fortnite crowd who were quite happy to stick with what they already knew. Once Steam finally launched, mediocre numbers received it, only to freefall afterwards.

2. Imbalanced matchmaking, lack of ranked on launch, bots: When the game did launch, new players were being placed against alpha vets who would destroy them. PvP games live and die by their balance, and a squad-based game like this was a dice roll on getting a team who could carry or one who was clueless--in fact, even playing this late in its life cycle, I experienced this firsthand. High level accounts demolished me in less than a minute. Bots are a controversial topic - on one hand, they solve matchmaking times and provide practice. On the other, they turn off experienced players for providing little challenge, as the thrill of BR is the unpredictability of your opponents.

3. Lack of game modes, maps, classes: Spellbreak forced BR teams of 3, 2, and solos, but could it have incorporated something new? The map was gorgeous to see and I personally loved traveling through it, but many complained it was empty, full of rubble and flat expanses that never changed from launch. The forced mage gameplay didn't offer any melee combat, which could have been introduced as a sort of subclass specialization. Some players want specific playstyles Spellbreak didn't offer.

4. Monetization + lack of communication: Free to plays struggle to convince their audience to spend. Spellbreak only offered cosmetics and nothing more, which wasn't enough to open many wallets. The game never figured out financing, and although it did feature story missions, seasons, and some balancing changes, went into deep radio silence midway into its runtime. Regular communication may have retained its playerbase who took it as a sign of abandonment.

Proletariat, Inc. has been bought by Blizzard and reassigned to World of Warcraft, so the studio is still around. But it's a shame that this game pays the price of that acquisition, scheduled to sunset early next year. If you see this in time, give it a test drive, before you miss your chance to experience something unique.

Achievement Hunters: Easy. You'll gain everything as you level every class to 14, required to obtain each afterglow. The only one that may give you trouble is revivals - you must die to enemies, wardens count. Go to any spawn point, suicide, and swap revives 20x. ~50hrs to 100%.

This review was posted to participate in the Steam Awards 2022, nominated for the "Better with Friends" category.

If someone told me a decade ago that we'd be seeing Batman fighting Bugs Bunny on PC, I'd have thought they were being cute. Leave it to the most bizarre year in recent memory to bring us a fever dream fighting game matchup that no one has pulled off before. The list is mind boggling: Seven Universe, Adventure Time, Justice League, Hanna Barbara, Game of Thrones(!?), Space Jam, Gremlins, Iron Giant, Rick and Morty, Looney Tunes. If rumors are to be believed, then we'll be receiving Static Shock, Mortal Kombat, Cartoon Network (Powerpuff / Johnny Bravo / Samurai Jack / Ben 10), Animaniacs, LOTR, Stranger Things (eleven, at least), Ted Lasso, Godzilla, Lego Movie, and Wizard of Oz. (And no, Breaking Bad is not in the game, though director Tony Huynh praised the fan mockup on twitter). Bonus points for getting every character voice lines, and their original VA's to reprise their roles.

Somehow, the ambitious and eager Player First Games team accomplished the impossible, not just with the licensing agreements to grab everyone's attention, but the mechanics to keep us seated. Whether you play Smash Bros. for a living or have never touched a Nintendo console in your life, it speaks to all skill levels with simple controls, easy recoveries, and numerous mobility options to keep you in the ring even if you're taking a beating. That isn't to say that all characters play the same--far from it.

The game divides its characters into the following classes:

• Bruiser - Offensive, frontline fighters. Balanced
  
• Tank - High damage but low mobility
  
• Support - Buffers and debuffers, low damage
  
• Assassin - Focus on combos, traps to juggle. Offset by low HP.
  
• Mage - High range projectiles, summons. Unusual movesets, difficult to master

Like Smash, Versus is all about wailing on your opponent until they become light enough to knock off the stage. Matches take place in 1v1, 2v2, or 4P free for all, familiar to anyone who's played this genre. However, unlike Smash, Versus emphasizes 2v2 over anything else. This is because the character classes are designed to complement one another, and can be further focused by the use of unlockable perks. Notably, character grabs, ledge grabs, shields and parries are entirely absent, but are replaced by wall jumps, double jumps for all, and precise dodges to make enemy attacks whiff. Skills and dodges have stamina timers to prevent spam abuse.

Perks are the bread and butter of competitive play, and deserve additional mention. They bolster a variety of focuses, like passive or conditional ability cooldown reduction, extra damage at low HP, knockback resistance, increase damage on hitstun, triple jump, or extra jump height. Unlocked perks can be purchased on other characters as well, which widens tactical possibilities and team synergies. The most interesting part? Perk stacking: If you and your teammate take the same perks, their effect is amplified. This is especially useful for support + tank character teams, for instance. Without a doubt, the game rewards you for exploring and experimenting with numerous builds, and this will be key to the game's longevity.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. From casual to pro, you can find people of all skill levels in this highly populated fighter. There's a growing competitive community behind it, if you want to take it to the next level, and is already geared to be a mainstay at EVO and other landmark events. The game has proven its worth by strong quarter earnings and a rapidly record-setting playerbase, and if the leaks hold true, still has a lot in store to show us. It's F2P friendly and the battlepass is purely cosmetic - but it will cost you, if you must have those comic accurate (or meme accurate) costumes / recolors. Beware Shaggy Blanco.

Achievement Hunters: Very simple grind achievements. Play/win total games/modes, get ringouts (spike/projectile/doubles), make toasts. Most come with natural play. Unless you're speedrunning it, roughly 45 (+/-15) hours to 100%.

Since Steam forces a rating, choosing not recommended on the basis of having its online service shutdown, cutting off the campaign and any ability to earn its achievements. If you're looking to acquire it, it isn't worth the purchase anymore.

What exactly was Volta-X? Not quite RTS, not quite RPG, but something in-between. It followed the adventures of a plucky animal trio aspiring to become renown mecha pilots. While expanding their headquarters and upgrading their arsenal, they'd uncover a nefarious plot and save the world from gigantic aliens. This culminated in a cliffhanger for a second season, which sadly never materialized.

Progression came by way of completing missions, or "minisodes" as it called them, presented as skits, couched between 1V1 battles VS AI and human opponents. The PVP element was framed as part of its robot league ranking, depicted as the competitive journey to becoming world champs. Winning matches unlocked new crew, parts, and robos, as well as new facilities. That is to say, in addition to combat, you needed to design and manage your underground bunker, balancing utilities, crew happiness, and R&D.

There was a wealth of customization. Including:
- Crew - Each character had skill trees with two unique perks, favoring melee, ranged, or status builds
- Weapons - Not just sword or lasers, but force fields, drones, status, and buff / debuff variants as well
- Mechs - Varied by number and type of compatible parts (shoulder / chest / arm) and had unique special abilities, such as transformation, speed boost, armor, or status effect damage
- Base - Facilities for research (unlocks), lab (upgrades), training (leveling up mechs & characters not used in battle). Efficiency was based on crew friendship (schedule them to work together) and happiness (balance their needs). Crew needs included hunger, rest, social, and stress

There is so much more to explain about these but time and space does not allow. Suffice to say, you could build anything. A melee smasher, complete with defense-lowering acid shooters and paralyzing electric fists. A fully ranged sniper, with cannons, turrets, and automated drones. An impenetrable fortress, with force field, shield, repair bots and crew, relying on lasers and satellite strikes to burn your enemy down. Or a crew-disabling specialist, with radar to see their locations, frost rays to slow them down, and pile drivers to cut their HP to shreds. Of course, every build choice has its own weaknesses, too: Melee can't hit if the enemy is flying, Ranged won't connect if the enemy has force fields, status can be shut down with resistant perks, repair bots, and sprinklers, and crew targeting loses to early radar destruction, swift enemies, heal bots, and shielded builds.

The combat was similar to the popular JRPG "active time battle" system. Each part has a timer, which when charged, can launch an attack. Priority goes to whomever locks in a target first, and you can combo attacks by locking in as many as possible back to back. You had three ways to win: Destroy the head, disable all three crew members, or survive with the most points. 50 points for head, 2 points per crew, and 1 point per part destroyed.

As it goes with all PVP games, Volta struggled with balance. If you could destroy the head, you could instantly win, so the meta leaned heavily in this direction. Defense was discarded in favor of offense, rushing as quickly as possible to pound the opponent into submission. The A.I. specifically struggled to deal with this, even in the highest of rankings. The only real challenge was felt in its consecutive 4-stage fight, the penultimate optional challenge of warrior league, which carries over your crew and part HP without any recovery between battles.

What remains of the game today is its "metaverse" mode, a rogue-lite which forces you to pick between randomized parts, upgrades, and crew members. It has a bit of meta progression in between plays, such as unlocking stronger crew, perks, and weapons in the selection pool, but it's heavily RNG dependent and may frustrate more casual players who would have preferred the full control of the story campaign. Why the story wasn't made available offline is anyone's guess.

Volta was by no means a perfect game, but it held a great deal of promise. It's a shame it chose a service path and as such, is now pulled from sale and support. If you own it, it's worth a spin. If you don't, I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to acquire a copy, especially if the price is inflated.

Achievement Hunters: No longer possible to complete. All achievements were tied to online mode, and were bugged - you had to change language to get them to unlock (reasons unknown). If you didn't get them by 11/9, RIP.

Although this review is intended to be informational, Steam forces a rating. I choose not recommended on the basis of impending shutdown, and reasons I'll go into below.

On the surface, Riff seems fun, turning your personal music library into a racetrack. Procedural generation means you'll never get the same tracks twice, conjuring up more twists, turns, barriers, and ramps. You can play it safe and aim for score, or try to collect coins scattered on the tracks to pay for new cars and paint jobs.

And that would be fine, until we take a closer look at the mechanics. Unlike its inspiration AudioSurf, Riff doesn't really provide much of a challenge. Your primary task is to steer the car, not actually drive it - whether your hands are on the controls or not, it propels itself ever forward. And that's the thing, there is no fail state. Taking your hands off the controls, your vehicle will eventually cross the finish line, albeit with a terrible score.

Stages are comprised of an assortment of blocks, ramps, and hills, with optional pickups that charge your turbo boost. A well-timed boost helps you gain more air and push beyond the tempo bar, both awarding you with more points, but is never really needed lest you fall behind. Touching any kind of obstacle slows your car, and hurts your multiplier, but never damages you or provides any actual threat to completion.

This is where I feel Riff falls short. Leaderboards are the only real challenge, and also the game's Achilles heel, for two reasons: One, you have to like score attack, or you won't have any goal to strive for in this game. Two, you have to have access to the same music. That's right, scoreboards are song specific - and this game only comes with 25 tracks. The rest is on you. If other people haven't played your track, you have no one to "race" against. In my 100 song grind, rarely did I find players to match with my eclectic music selections, leaving me largely alone.

Riff's incentives are meager at best. The unlockable cars are purely cosmetic - at least, I could not find any advantage to using one over another. The skins get ludicrously expensive, requiring dozens of hours of coin grinding (looking at you, hotline), but they aren't even all that appealing, since you're always staring at the back of your car. There's an XP system but... tied to nothing. It grants you no new cars, no extra modes. Prestige, maybe? But you can't even see other player profiles, so it's kind of a dead end.

Having completed all of its achievements, I feel like Riff is a one-trick pony. Its procedural generation is quaint, but added nothing else to the package, almost as if it's still stuck in early access. For this reason, I don't think it will appeal to hardcore rhythm enthusiasts, only to casual gamers looking to destress to their favorite soundtrack. And that, too, is going away - the scoreboard servers will disconnect in the near future. For these reasons, you aren't missing much if you haven't already purchased the game.

Achievement Hunters: ~50 hrs with cheese. A handful skill, the rest a moderate grind. See details in all 3 posted hub guides, and you can find further suggestions by searching the forum. I discovered that bitrate matters - even if you find the same song, the track may be different than shown, so beware.

Two cars are hidden, and require playing a song from Fleetwood mac + The Police, each. The sprays will take on the order of hundreds of thousands of coins, which will take an excessive amount of time if done naturally. Here's the trick: Family share to an alt or friend, and have them upload a ~8 second track. Crash into the wall, and push against it to finish. Now you race against their ghost, and easily win by driving straight. Set up a macro, and spam. It will take many hours, but you will idle to completion. Word of warning - the game crashed multiple times for me, so periodically pause and exit to main menu. It does not save your progress between replays.

Note: If you have a lot of friends (over 100?) you will need to blacklist everyone except the friend in question to be able to successfully race against their ghost for that achievement. This game is built on older architecture and will fail ("try again later") if too many to load.