Glitchpunk
Review of Alpha.
Been on my wishlist ever since I saw it, since it did look a lot like gta2, which was my prime streaming game for a long time, so gave it a shot as soon as I could (didnt play demo though).
Will start with positives:
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Really does feel inspired by old gta’s a lot: radio (humor and songs), gang-respect system, tank-controls in car, saves at home, burping, gouranga and other small things - pretty cool!
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Upgrade system which carries itself into re-playthroughs
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Multiple endings, non-linearity in area progression
– Real player with 12.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Automobile Sim Games.
Update: There was a large patch on September 30th, Quality of Life update that should have fixed most of the serious technical issues. I haven’t replayed the game yet.
The game punked me immediately upon starting it by skyrocketing my fps to 482 in the main menu, effectively stun locking my GPU at 100% and 75°C in seconds. And my PC isn’t exactly a potato that needs frying, running an RTX2070, i7-7700K and 32GB of RAM, with an SSD to boot. Without capping the fps, it climbs to about 90 in-game on High settings, making the game stuttery and giving me a hot GPU turbine background noise. After capping the fps to 60 in the Nvidia panel, the game behaves like it should, mostly. There’s still some stuttering and weird lagging, but it becomes playable, for a bit at least. Unless you need to reduce your post-processing to medium, which completely changes the in-game lighting making everything pitch black. Checking the Known Issues topic in the discussions unveils more than a few bugs and glitches, from the mentioned post-processing problem to declining performance and heavily sparkling textures. I’ve had one complete freeze, where even alt+F4 wasn’t reacting and declining performance kept calling me to have a beer with her.
– Real player with 11.0 hrs in game
Analogue: A Hate Story
As VNs go I feel really conflicted about Analogue. There were a handful of elements I was really impressed by, but ultimately I don’t recommend it. It’s frustration incarnate; more time invested in it brings the opposite of a sense of reward.
Analogue is a VN showcase of interesting ideas that are never seen through to their full potential. The setting is barebones, any mystery of the events on the lost colony ship doesn’t have any real contrast with the experience of the player’s blank slate agent; indeed throughout the game I felt the real mystery was finding out what was normality outside of the ship.
– Real player with 17.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Sci-fi Games.
There’s no doubt that Steam has been flooded, for better or worse, by visual novels as of late.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Indie titles are great, but amidst the endless stream of “waifu”-bait visual novels (VNs) you’ll see here on Steam, I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find many decent stories with an intriguing plot that aren’t about getting in a girl’s pants for an affordable price. That’s par for the course when discussing visual novels, but that’s also why I tend to trust VNs from well-known studios/devs, because at least you know you’ll get plot while playing VNs of acclaim like Clannad, the Grisaia Trilogy, or The Devil on G-String in exchange for their premium price.
– Real player with 12.7 hrs in game
Cyberia
A great classic which aged terribly.
This Cyberpunk themed Action/Adventure augments rail shooter action scenes with adventure exploration and puzzle elements for an enjoyable, albeit all too brief experience. An odd feature is the game having 2 difficulty settings, one for “Arcade” and the other for “Puzzle”, both scaling from 1-3. One can not set both difficulties to “1” as the game informs you would be “too easy”.
Highs:
A cheap classic.
A fine historical blast from the past.
Fun rail shooter bits.
– Real player with 6.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Hacking Sci-fi Games.
It’s EXACTLY as I remember, not better or worse – I suppose it deserves to be called a graphic adventure game with action scenes. The voice acting is cheesy, the 1990s CGI looks hideous and plastic, you probably die a lot and…
There’s this element of masochism involved in playing Cyberia – take one late puzzle disguised as an action sequence, for instance, where you have to pick the right doors and eliminate enemies in the rooms so you can proceed. Pick a wrong door and you get a video clip of you getting shot in the back. Repeat a couple of times. For some reason, you don’t get a save point nearer to it, so you have to rinse and repeat through a different puzzle as well.
– Real player with 6.0 hrs in game