Recent reviews by IllegibleScream

Spent 4 hours exploring a speck of dust before I was murdered by Maxwells Demon.

Then I tried to get larger, and had an existential nightmare.

10/10 This game really grizzled my omelette.

Stay off the X grass.

Engrave the spaghetti into your soul Junior. It shall nurture you when all other things fail.

One of the games of all time.

Hakita please add a No Checkpoints option for people trying to go for P Rank so we don't have to keep hitting Restart Level when we get targeted by 4 Malicious beams at the same time thank you.

I was one of the players who used to jokingly say that the UI was atrocious. I would like to apologize to the UI. I didn't judge old Dwarf Fortress as a product, but now I absolutely will.

I absolutely recommend you go to the Dwarf Fortress File Depot and download the 47.05 r11 PeredexisErrant starter pack. I cannot at this time recommend you actually play the Steam Release. The official tileset has some charm to it, and I don't dislike it. I still play with the ASCII or one of the other tilesets, but it's not bad.

The music might grow on me if I listened to the music, but for me it's the vaguely flamenco guitar track, something from Doom 2, or silence.

The mouse controls frustrate me. Old DF was keyboard only, with the DFHack utility patching in some minor mouse controls. I and many others would still play entirely with keyboard, due to accessibility reasons. A mouse is inherently more difficult to navigate menus with than keys.

That brings me to the menus. Old menus were a mess. New menus are a different mess. Old menus you could learn the keybind, and once you memorized it you'd slam through them navigating deep into something in a second. Now most of those are buttons you need to click, with no associated keybinds. This means you now require a mouse to play Dwarf Fortress. \

In addition to this, certain features that used to exist in the older versions have been removed. One-Step has been removed, so there's no advancing the simulation slowly. Things have been moved from one menu or list to another, and it seems to have as much internal consistency as it used to.

Cutting trees used to be a single entry in the Designations, now it's a button by itself. This is baffling, as cutting trees is something you will only do for maybe ten minutes at the start. After that, Wood is a scarcely used, but essential resource. This is certainly not a thing you should devote limited UI space to.

Cutting trees was D - T - Enter - Shift and arrow or numpad - Enter - Escape to close the menu. This might seem like a lot. It is not. From the home row on the keyboard it takes maybe two seconds to designate a large area to cut. Now you wiggle your mouse to find the pointer, go to the bottom of the screen to click the small button, move your mouse to the area, click one corner, move to the other corner, click the other corner, right click to clear the mouse. This requires more precision and means more moving of the hands to do the same task.

I will begin playing the steam release once there is a legacy UI and Legacy Keybinding option. Give me back my three panels, give me my Designate.

Slashers Keep is a simple rogue lite where you climb a tower. There's plenty of mechanics that interact to allow you to grow stronger, and overall it's not particularly demanding at the lower levels.

The melee system is functional and doesn't overstay its welcome. You hit with a click and can hold for a stronger attack. Enemies will swing at you on a particular interval for what they are, and you can parry them with a right click. Later on this will do more damage and become very very useful. For now it's just nice to avoid the loss of health.

Weapons swing faster based on what they are, and it overall makes sense. Daggers are quick and low damage, Maces and hammers are slow and high damage. Everything else sits on a spectrum between them. There seems to be knockback and stagger mechanics based on what the enemy is hit with, but it's inconsistent and easy to miss.

You can dodge attacks and traps with movement, so once you have decent gear you can sprint through the first level with a heavy melee strike and chain kill everything you find, and simply step around enemy strikes.

The problems start when you reach more complex rooms. Most of the time you're just in a hallway or square room with maybe a pillar or two to dodge and fight around. Some rooms though feature stairs, fences, loose boxes, furniture, and traps. It's very easy to lose track of the enemy you swung at because they clipped to a higher position due to loose boxes and furniture moving around.

Because Slashers Keep uses a Doom styled 2d sprite system, most enemy models are just a flat sprite that faces you at all times. This means that if they clip to a higher or lower position than standard, they can become very difficult to shoot at, block, or attack in melee.

This isn't a problem in the first rooms, but once boxes and shelves fall over and create more complex and difficult terrain, it rapidly can turn an easy 1v2 fight into an unmanageable mess. This could just be a skill issue.

I've lost many strong characters and runs to a zombie that managed to climb several boxes and continue to hit me from what feels like way to far up for a standing character model to strike at.

The wand system is alright, but I haven't interacted with it nearly as much as the melee. The wands function more like firearms than anything, with an ammo system that is tracked for each individual wand you pick up. There's different varieties that act like sidearms, shotguns, snipers, filling their combat role in a satisfying fashion. However, your melee damage will almost certainly outpace the wands damage immediately, and with the extremely low ammo and inventory space keeping your wands topped up with ammo will be a serious challenge, as will killing anything without needing to reload at least once. It reminds me of bloodborne, where your ranged option isn't meant to deal damage, but is utility for opening up more options in a fight. The problem is that wands here don't seem to do anything aside from deal direct damage. If they staggered enemies then it might be different, but it feels like you're spending a lot of ammo, inventory space for the ammo, and time better spent with your melee, all so you can deal a bit of damage to ranged enemies.

On top of all that, wands disappear when empty and there's no way to recover them. A skill you can acquire early on will prevent them from vanishing, so you can in theory reload them and continue to use them later. You aren't told this skill exists until you encounter it, and it feels like a mandatory skill to even engage with wand combat beyond firing what drops and then returning to melee. Again, ammo will still be an issue, but at least you can hold onto wands that you like, to reload and keep using.

Now, I've mentioned skills a few times, so I'll go into them now. You acquire skills by picking up gear that has them. Early on you'll find simple ones like Melee Life Steal on a sword. This gives a microscopic amount of life steal, but it'll help keep you alive long enough to keep climbing.

The real skill system appears once you have a skill point, which you get every few or every other level. Not sure which. A skill point allows you to take a currently active skill, whether from gear or from having bought a level in it before, and make that one level Permanent. In the melee life steal example, this means you could now drop the weapon and continue to have the small life steal amount with other weapons, and buy more levels of life steal in the future. This is nice because you can essentially find what skills you like, and if you value it enough, buy a permanent level to keep it in other runs. Early on you'll basically be deciding what you want to get permanent levels of from the first few floors.

I really enjoy the skill system, since it means you get a sense of exploration and wonder when you find a new weapon or armor piece that has a skill you haven't seen before. The fact that it has some permanent progression is nice too, but your mileage may vary on if that's a good thing in the roguelike/lite environment.

Based on the character backstory you chose, you gain a single skill that you can't get any other way. You can't gain levels in the skill either, so it starts as powerful as it will ever get. It could color every run with that character, but they haven't felt that distinctive so far.

An early character, The Prince, starts off with more damage on sneak attacks. Without this skill existing, I wouldn't even know sneak attacks are a thing, since there's no indication of stealth or sneaking being mechanics. A pass of them, or some early skills that make them obvious, such as the eye from Elder Scrolls, might be in order. Crouching to see vision cones could be a good implementation.

Alongside the skill system is the chutes and crafting. Any floor above the starting floor has a drop chute that allows you to send items back down. The purpose of this is to save valuable items for your next run to pick up and use. Most often this means sending down a good weapon and some armor so your next try has an easier first few floors. The best use early on, is to help crafting. You will occasionally find components as loot. These are clearly labeled. There's hilts, blades, axe heads, crossguards, gems, enchantments, and anything you could think of. These can be combined, up to four at a time, to create custom weapons that will hopefully be stronger and more useful than anything you've found.

Components take up valuable inventory space, and dying with them means they're gone for good. So you might spend a few runs trying to collect components for one very nice weapon, only to craft it and die immediately. Or, you craft it, send it down to pick up next run, and perpetually live in fear of losing it, so you keep sending it down at the second or third floor, never using it to push further up. This is probably just me, since I play like a rat. Currently the crafting system stops at melee weapons, but you can add enchantments and upgrades to wands as well, just not make any from scratch.

Occasionally you'll find empty bottles. These are very useful, since they are the only way to interact with Alchemy. To use Alchemy you take the empty bottle in your inventory, and combine two other consumables into it. This could be ammo for wands, health potions, bombs, and stat upgrades. Some results of alchemy are extremely useful, others are novelties. These aren't random, so finding powerful combinations that grant skill levels you want is a priority.

There's also a random shop from the second level onwards.

Using your crafted weapons, powerful enchanted wands, gear, farmed skills, and hopefully honed experience you'll push to the first boss. That's where I've ended my runs so far, since I'm not experienced enough yet to push past it. By grinding my skills and gear I'll eventually kill it, but for now I want to really explore the lower floors and see what I might have missed.

Edit: As of 7/24/2024 there have been many improvements. There is still no concrete news from Valve or a maintenance/update plan.

I used to have a funny review here. Now it’s been votekicked by bots and I can’t get out of spawn without being killed by a spinning gibbous sniper.

I don’t want TF2 to just be a game I used to play. I want to come back. I want to market garden some poor F2P and have them call me a hacker because they don’t know how to rocket jump yet.

I can’t play it like this. #FixTF2

In NaissanceE you are Lucy, lost inside a vast and foreboding superstructure. You were chased, and have fallen down into the bowels.

Explore and try to ground yourself. Piece together the pieces of this place; learn its tricks and traverse it.

You have no weapons, no tools save your feet and your wits. These will be enough. Oftentimes you'll need to take things slowly. Sometimes you need to kick it up and run faster than you can think.

When you run, you need to breathe to keep running. This is indicated by a dot and Lucy making a sharp breathing noise. Click to breathe, keep running, and don't look back.

NaissanceE has simple graphics, in the sense of most objects being untextured cubes of various sizes. On the grand scale used thoughl; they adopt an entire visual sense of their own.

Don't let the first few rooms dissuade you. Things grow and change and your first view of the sublime abyss this game shows is breathtaking.

Often you will find some hidden path to progress, feel clever, only to realize this was the path all along.

Often, you will feel small and hopeless. This is intentional. But some of this environment cares about you. Most doesn't care, and a sparse bit of it now and then actively hates you.

Overall this is a game that needs to be experienced, despite it continually trying to push you out and fight you at every step.

Great and unique battle royale game. Very solid mechanics, shooting, etc,. Dev is active and always working on updates.
Driving is useful without being overpowered, all the guns feel unique and fun to shoot, there's a massive variety of build paths for your genetic supersoldier, etc,.

Only problem is I don't think I've ever met another human player. Bots as far as the eye can see.

Gud gaem. You are wienar

I made the below review before the 1.0 release. Since then the game has changed, in some ways for the better, in many ways for the worse.

Weapon Sway, which used to be punishing, forcing you to be very deliberate and take fights slowly, was almost entirely eliminated.

This means twitch aim is far more important, and also means that those shots and fights you saw in the trailer are almost impossible. Now, it's a headshot race. If you pop them in the head before they get you, you win.

Peeking becomes a coinflip. Who takes the others head off first?

This also means stealth isn't terribly important, mobility is. The game's changed a lot, simply because of how weapon accuracy interacts with weapon sway. Most engagements will happen at 30 meter or more ranges, getting closer becomes risky due to shotguns being ridiculous. Most shotguns are a one shot to the body under 15 meters, all of them are one shots under 10 meters. They have a decent spread, so pushing on someone with a shotgun is horrible. It's a deathwish. Don't do it.

Crazy aim means far more now than it used too, which is a mistake in my opinion. I can still have some success keeping my ears open and moving stealthily, but if someone sees you and you don't see them, you die. Full stop. There's so little sway that even a half decent aim means they can headshot you without you even realizing you were seen.

Honestly, the game we have now isn't the game we had in early access. It's less methodical, more geared to the Rainbow Six type of player.

I still like it, but it's not what I was promised. A good portion of the original review, below, still holds true. But other stuff... Ehh.

==> Original Review Starts Here <==

This game is not for everyone. Full stop. In fact, it's not for most people. The gunplay is deliberate and slow, with a heavy emphasis on positioning, accuracy, and stealth. It takes two button clicks to fire your gun, as opposed to a single click in TF2 or Counterstrike.
Every single gun is a one shot headshot within its range. Having a better gun does nothing to guarantee your survival, but simply gives you more options for your range and positioning. That's important, but won't do much for you without a decent amount of experience and gamesense.

There is permadeath, and it's relatively punishing. You can spend hundreds or thousands of the in game currency, only to get killed by a more skilled player with terrible guns, and you can only watch in shock as he takes your high end guns and goes on to murder the entire server with them. With time and practice, you can be that skilled player with terrible guns, but that takes a while.

This game is in early access, with all the weirdness and bugs that entails. I've been in matches with friends, and watched as they climbed over a fence and got dropped because the server didn't know where to place them. I've seen people phase through walls like ghosts. Hell, a few nights ago I smashed out a window to climb through it, only for the window to remain intact after I was on the other side. That bug let me retain stealth and get a cheeky kill on another player. A minute later I did it again and the window exploded. There's very little consistency. One minute you can sneak past an entire map of NPC monsters, and the next you're getting jumped by everything within a mile.

Past that, past all the bugs, past the early access weirdness, I see a very unique game. One where you can get invested in a character, think you're gods gift to monster slaying, and then get destroyed by someone who tracked you for thirty minutes so they could shoot you in the back of the head at your moment of triumph. I've been on both sides of that, and it's hilarious and horrible in equal measure.

This is a game where you can practice a skill, and reach what you thought was mastery of it, only to be floored by watching someone else do it better than you thought possible. And then you can kill them anyways, because they were out of position, and you had a clear line of sight with your sexy, sexy, russian rifle.

If you can accept that you're gonna lose your characters to what you think is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥;
'What? How did he make that shot!?'
'That's broken! I was behind a wall, why did he get the headshot through wood? Did he guess?'
'How the ♥♥♥♥ DID I MISS THAT HIS HEAD WAS and now he killed me...'
if you can look past losing characters that you invested a lot of in game cash into, and you can simply pick yourself up again and try with a different gun, then you're gonna love this game. I'll end this pompous ass review with one of my favorite quotes.

'Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. ~Henry Ford'