Recent reviews by Cycles

Fascinating game. A technical swordplay game where you actually need to guide your weapon some as you fight. The tutorial is quick, but thorough. It touches on everything you need to know, but you'll need to practice as you play to get a feel for the mechanics.

Friendly fire is a part of this, so while there's still plenty of opportunity to flail around wildly in a whirlwind of death and/or button mashing, you need to position carefully or you'll hurt your team more than the enemy. You don't NEED to master the melee combat minigame to have fun. You can just grab a heavy weapon and smash the skulls of distracted foes and uncoordinated noobs, but there's some depth to it that is fun to explore.

The maps tend to be some combination of control points and objectives, with "Invasion" being more objective focused with clear attacking and defending teams, and Frontline being a more standard control-point tug-of-war. They vary in quality, but in general, there's a lot of strategic options that create a sort of TF2 feel, but with significantly fewer projectiles, a lot more heavy armor, and a melee combat focus.

"Brawl" mode is great for practicing skills, and if you dig around, you'll find dueling servers that sometimes have very helpful experts that can give you pointers on your technique. Clashing, turn control, attack changeups, and cancels are all things you can learn to meaningfully improve your effectiveness in combat.

Overall, excellent, unique game with lots of character.

So steam suggests a lot of random games at me, including this one, which I always passed over because the ad image looks like some sort of VR gimmick "the sims" diving game with a little minecraft thrown in. A friend noticed I didn't have it and picked it up for me.

Turns out the game is NOT that at all. The game is a very purposefully constructed sci-fi exploration game that does an excellent job pulling you all over the diverse and expansive world of the game, while still giving you plenty of room to explore on your own.

The tech progression is very well calibrated so when you hit a road block, if you just explore a little farther out, you'll usually find what you need. Basebuilding exists as a worthwhile way to reduce travel times and to semi-automate some aspects of survival, but not something you need to go crazy on. Of course, you CAN, and it looks like they have a mode dedicated specifically to that. I played through in perma-death mode, which certainly changed some of my approaches, but I found extremely enjoyable.

I absolutely would have bought this for the full price if I had a better idea of what the game was like.

All in all, I actually get the same feeling from this game I used to get from older Metroid games. Exploring a hostile world full of strange creatures. Upgrading your technology to survive. Those were the things I liked most about those games. In some ways, I probably wished those games could have been a bit more like this one.

Who can say what this game is actually about? I'm not even sure the developers could. I suspect they all went to sleep one night, and woke up a year later in different parts of their office building. One of them woke up in a janitor's closet. Another standing atop the building arms raised, awoke to the patter of rain on their face. Another awoke alone in the lounge sitting at a table that had twelve filled teacups, all still warm. And so on. No one could say what happened, but they knew they had finished their work and the product was ready for release.

E.Y.E. is an experience. Play it, and gain Brouzouf. Available now in packs of four.

Fine game. Lighthearted, plot-light roguelike with fun visuals. If you like the idea of Binding of Isaac, but are creeped out by the plot/visuals, maybe try this instead.

My one complaint is that most defensive items are a trap. There's a lot of "reduce damage type x by y%", "cast X when hit", or "increase drop/effectiveness of healing orb" items. These are mostly a waste of space as they either don't come up very often, or you could just buy a healing potion instead. Getting hit in this game is basically always a mistake. Its better to just grab another offensive booster and accept that you want to either get better at dodging or build around things that let you heal by attacking. This unfortunately lowers the replay value some, but the core gameplay is fun enough to live through it.

A nice turned-based tactics game. Beautiful sound, lore and scenery, though the enemy portraits look a little goofy sometimes, they're certainly not bad. Lots and lots of that delicious Warhammer flavor. Each mission has a choose your own adventure portion that I appreciate, but only think is a good idea with the "enhanced exploration" option from the settings on. This disables no achievement progress and gives you icons which indicate roughly what the effect of a given action will be in game mechanics if an option succeeds. It doesn't tell you positive or negative, but it makes it POSSIBLE to guess, and actually fun.

Difficulty does drop off pretty quickly once you start unlocking 3rd level canticles (once-per mission spells that pack a lot of punch), but its still interesting, and fun to play around with different deployment configurations.

Huh, I guess that I never reviewed this game.

So what you're looking at here is a GREAT blend of fighting-game and metroidvania. At first glance, it looks like just another metroidvania with cute, elegant, anime art and some plot about angels and demons. Largely unimportant. Decently executed.

What won't become clear until you get to the boss-fights is that you are playing a really slick, single-player, smash-bros style fighting game. You have blocks, skill-cancels, light, heavy and special attacks that you can string together into combos. As you play through the game you'll level up and unlock upgrades, but the levels cap at 20 and the upgrades are similarly limited, so you'll need to specialize into the fighting style you're feeling into on a given run-through, which means the game is, for the most part, low on grinding, high on skill. Its not about having enough stats, its about learning how to reliably counter a boss's skills.

The game is relatively short, but has a lot of replay value. Before even specializing or locking in upgrades, there are 4 characters, and each character has something like 4 different weapons they can get, each of which has its own fairly different play-style. Armors and accessories are similarly less about stats and more about modifications to play-style. There's a LOT to play with here.

Notably, there are a few gotchas when it comes to progression that aren't bad necessarily, but good to know going in. There's a few things that if you don't do, will cause some towns in the game to disappear, which can be surprising the first time it occurs but its easy enough to fix on the next play-through. Similarly, while you can eventually re-spec your stats and special abilities if they aren't working out, weapon, armor and spell upgrades are limited. You can still unlock the baseline version of most things, and they will even still be useful even at the end of the game un-upgraded, but you might not get all your favorites to max. If you're a first-run completionist, be sure to have a guide handy as you play to avoid frustration.

Speaking of frustration, this game is unforgiving. It challenges you to to build a character that can fight the bosses using mechanics and your reflexes. i don't think there is a build that can win on stats alone, and boss fights are graded such that in order to get the best rewards, you'll need to S-rank at least a few. Its a game about the challenge though, and no boss fight is completely "dumb". Each boss is working as hard as you are, and that's what makes it fun.

This game is really fun and really rewarding, and I feel worth every penny, and every hour you put in. All metroidvanias could learn about combat mechanics from this game, corporate or Indie. The game was made with a lot of love, and it really shows.

TLDR: 2 parts castlevania, 1 part smash bros, 1 part megaman, short with lots of replay value.

Edit: Having recently played a few souls-like games, that souls-like technical difficulty is also core to enjoying this game. It just wasn't in my vocabulary when I initially wrote this review.

There's a craft to making an experience. Making sure realizations happen at the right time. Creating a sense of wonder. Building a world that for some time can contain the fascination of the mind. Axiom Verge creates a definite experience that I greatly enjoyed.

The gameplay is simple, tried-and-true metroid-style exploration, shooting, and tool-based puzzle solving. If you're new to them, this is a fine game to start with. If you're familiar, Axiom Verge will give you a chance to flex a lot of old muscles, but often in ways that will surprise you.

The atmosphere is great. Every background, wall and enemy comes together to create a world that feels both alien and alive. Walls and floors are often constructed of what looks like intestines or pipes of blood, creating the feeling of wandering through a giant monster's innards, which ties in nicely to the story.

Axiom Verge's story does an excellent job of giving meaning to its unsettling aesthetic, and many of the mechanical surprises it has under its hood. In the end, I wish there were a little more of the story, but then, wanting more is usually a sign of a good story.

Axiom Verge creates an experience I enjoyed immeansely and its easily one of the best platformers I've played in years. If you've ever wanted to wander through strange and hostile alien landscapes, or just want to remenisce on the days of the 2D Metroid games, don't miss this one.

If you wanted a Video Game of Kung Fury. This is as close as you'll get. And being a video game, its in my opinion more entertaining.

Raw 80's pureed and mixed with glowsticks and packed into the Far Cry 3 maps with Neon dino-dragon sandwiches. Grab some bread and take a bite.