Recent reviews by Spoonalot

So. Starbound.
TLDR: This game is only good for farting around in, that is its only redeeming value, Starbound can almost assuredly have something for anyone not of serious temperament but otherwise this is a hot-mess the likes of which one only see's within a generation, and the effort to get there may very well not be worth it to most. You were warned (not that this review is a gaming generation too late but whatever.)

Story: Let me start off by saying that its not a sin that the story is terrible, its a sin that they tried, stopped trying, then threw their narrative off of a cliff into the trash. The game starts off with one of the strongest openings I've ever seen in a side scrolling perspective game, the back and foreground are busy with traffic and cityscapes, characters talk to you, sometimes by name and act like you have a place in the world by telling you that your character is graduating as a peacekeeper and you are very much late for the ceremony. The player would be forgiven for feeling like they are a modern RPG character for how fast things go to ♥♥♥♥ as a monster of hilarious size just shows up and ... basically one shots earth with you receiving just enough time to get to a ship that is modeled after your race and escape to parts unknown as other desperate ships try to leave in the background and...explode for no reason. This opening could have been more effective if the antagonist "The Ruin" as you will come to know it did not outright humiliate the peacekeepers instantly before you'd ever even joined and allowed earth to kinda fall with minimal fanfare when we had been on the planet unmolested at best for...2 minutes?

The previous paragraph only dealt with the optional 'tutorial' which if you view it only to have your character wake up on a broken ship afterword makes me experience tonal whiplash so hard I'd almost swear I was a mook in a bad stealth game with a kill me sign on my back as you go from the fall of earth to...a random peaceful planet #8127481 and have every character sans 1 'main character' give you at best 1 line of dialogue relating to the event, and every other time some inane happy-go-lucky or climate related 1-liner.

So here the player is, perhaps 4-6 hours of mining and god forbid farming slap another 2 hours if you tried that time sink later, and you've found the outpost where you will likely spend the majority of your time if only because its the only consistent store in the game for most of the things you can use to fart around or farm with and you get to... do what an old lady tells you after an unskippable cutscene (they are all unskippable for the record.) What follows is the player being directed to do what the player could have been doing hours ago and exploring the galaxy to (and i cannot make this ♥♥♥♥ up-) look at specific species-biased props, and effectively begin collecting useless NPC's with unique models who basicly stand around and either give a 1-off quest line or just...become a merchant which sound much less interesting then what they were doing beforehand (save maybe Koichi) their inclusion serves very little purpose and their reasons to come with you somehow consistently remain inane.

Finally you've done all the old lady's chores and she opens the door to the final boss for you...to avoid spoilers her key is something she likely could have lended to you to make the progression go much faster and is never given to you afterword making its inclusion somewhat infuriating as you never get to use this 'key' nor does it modify any of your gear or tech in any cool way without a mod.

Performance: This game is the worst preforming game that I have, and will likely ever, experience. Should you have never had the great fortune to never experience what is effectively Lag in what could be played single-player, then I would implore you to avoid Starbound at all costs. Enemies and NPC's regularly freeze when the game gets even the slightlest bit busy and sans the player just kinda freeze or float in whatever space they occupied and take any damage that touched their model all at once after their lag-fit is done and its the least annoying problem this game has, while playing multi-player shots will ring past my character who has a shield and kill the people behind me for no reason, movement speed is tied to frame rate which is almost always in the dumps in most biomes/planets. placing more than 12 objects or introducing 4-6 npc to a single area can bring the FPS cratering to the level of interest that people have in playing Gotham City Impostors again. Areas fail to load if you move at a decent pace at times, you experience constant frame stutter when mining with something larger than 3x3 and when picking up a large amount of items, which is frequent. Every time I catch the stupid every few months and desire to make something cool it does not take more than 15 minutes to remember 'oh yeah this game was programmed by Satan through the filter of source filmmaker spaghetti' and subsequently stop.

UI: This is a game where you loot hundreds upon hundreds of boxes, with no keybinding to loot all, this cannot be fixed by modders because this is a hard-coded limitation, I wish for the level of malevolent contempt that requires, additionally picking up a large (10+) variety of blocks or items can bury you in prompts for every individual item entering your inventory.

Gameplay: So you want the 15-seconds-of-fun dopamine rush of fighting stuff?
Look elsewhere. despite some guns having nice & punchy sound effects or the typical laser affair most ranged weapons feel limp, whereas most melee weapons while powerful and come with the benefit of not needing energy by default tend to fall into 1 of two categories:
1)Swords.
2)Not Swords.
Seriously most people I've talked to dismiss nearly every other weapon outright because its not the easy to use great-swords or because it don't have some cool secondary power like explosion teleport or giant sword... the latter of which is exclusive to great-swords and is most definitely not a certainty.
Ranged weapons can have some pretty neat secondaries but they all have atrocious scaling with primary fire nearly as a rule and can be cumbersome to use if they have a very low rate of fire.
However the capstone on combat is this weird situation where the best weapons in the game are throwing weapons that can only be found and not crafted, that do ridiculous damage if you can get enough of them can laugh off any boss in the game. Additionally all weapons are seperated into tiers, a tier 1 weapon will almost always be worse than a tier 3 weapon or heaven forbid legendary and only some for seemingly arbitrary reasons can be elevated to max tier with an end-game resource so you can go gallivant off into the stars with it without gimping yourself.

Customization: one of the only good things about this game is the level of customization available to the player, from the word go you can place your stat-less uniform into your cosmetic slot and wear it or whatever heinous-pride-month-creation you become 12 hours down the line, for the rest of the game should you so choose.

Farting around: So in the TLDR I said this game is only really at its peak when you mess around, what does that entail? well there are a number of musical instruments to find and blast note-variants of songs you've likely herd of, though most of the findable ones online available seem to be broken half the time unfortunately. building can actually be really good and allow for some cool-as-fug designs so long as you don't mind the slideshow when you start to place a few too many object or NPC's in one place. You can make a Colony that then-as-now felt like a pointless if neat side distraction as overwhelmingly it does not seem like the rewards outweigh the investment. And finally there's a large amount of unique cosmetics and weapons that make for a throw-away gags with friends.
Not Recommended.

I'm sure that ELDEN RING would be a competent game if not for the issues currently causing any attempts at enjoyment to become a slog of annoyances, not to mention the overarching change in enemy level design leading to some... missteps that shall be touched on.

First off this game runs unfortunately on my hardware though I do meet the requirements, as much as hopping aboard the bandwagon and shaking my fist at people I've paid full price to already would be therapeutic if the 60fps lock affected me in any way when my frames high-point has so far been mid 30's.

Secondly the most pressing issue: where the flying monkey fuc@nuggets is my enemy? No, seriously where are they and more importantly what are they doing because 50-70% of non-boss encounters have some god-forsaken level of pop-in regardless of settings that have led me to become something of an expert of fighting enemy's that I Cannot ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ see save for spell-caster effects and...torches.

Thirdly the design of this games open world seems all over the bloody place.
E.G. early on I discovered a cave and traversed its wolf-laden depths to plunge my spear into the moist skaven-looking boss within and trounced him easily within two attempts, with the bonfire grace being within nearly 20 feet of the boss. A few hours later I happen upon a series of shrines guarded by shining headless giants and sacrifice an item to open one, what followed was 3 hours of getting trounced by an enemy that I would later learn is a basic enemy that dropped nothing which is infuriating when I had just spent an egregious amount of time experimenting to do minimal damage on his only punishable string (a 4-8 long string of attacks all of which one shot my character with 500 health, to cap this all off I believed that the enemy had no ability to be staggered so died as I was gobsmacked so hard after getting a critical hit when he did this obnoxiously long string 4 times in a row to a charged heavy, and 12 times after trying & failing to replicate it. Additionally the capstone of this encounter was the commute- Die, watch the loading screen, go to the portal, say yes to a menu prompt, watch the loading screen, turn around, drop down 4 ledges run to the guy it was malevolent beyond words. When he was finally beaten not only did he not drop anything but left me stranded on a floating platform with no way out, with the location actively messing with your map to the point that after 15 minutes of experimentation (incidentally i had to look up which key is map and how to 2-hand weapons because they are not listed in the key-bind directory consume a penis for that one FROM.) I learned that you can filter by specific landmarks and teleported to a random grace, triumphant and ...with 600ish more souls runes than I'd started with.
Yay.

some bugs i'd though to include: jumping and staying airborne after a jump until the game just kills you and a cave boss...dying randomly to... I'm not sure I was jumping on my horse and he just went from half health to dead with the stagger break sound playing in the background.

One last thing: this game has a fetish for placing the player in tiny box arenas for the benefit of the non-required boss AI as some are so large they spend more time clipping into it then out of it or can traverse the whole arena in half a second or both, and to ruin your cameras ability to give helpful information on when to dodge. Frig off Ricky.

This game can be alright, but I've about had enough of riding into a blender of enemy's that failed to render, wait for a patch.

Edit: So I've played another 30-ish hours, Still cannot see half or more of the opposition on a regular basis (And not just because the lock on is still a mess of terrible camera angles) Which I should reiterate is fuggin' unacceptable and is a contributing reason as to why I have yet to finish the game or play for more than a few hours at a time, the developers have done a lot to allow hybrids to not feel like garbage and have some new fancy spells, but I'm going to have to hang this title up until the devs fix this game breaking bug where almost all the mobs (and their bloody horses) have greater invisibility.

Outriders is a somewhat competently put together game that has a number of quality of life features that are going somewhat unsung in the reviews I've skimmed, however it is a shame that any praise whatsoever I could heap upon the game is absolutely dwarfed by my inability to play it for any period of time consistently(And at time of writing cannot play at all).

People can fly assuredly gave it their best effort when designing the components that make the games whole, the altered powers mostly feel powerful and have their place and can be made even better with specific gear pieces and stat priority, guns can do what guns do and feel OK for the most part but some gun variants from what i played feel like they are just weaker versions of better ones overall (but I'm level 14 so that could be subject to re-appraisal if I ever can or want to play this game again).

One of my biggest gripes with this game is surprisingly the bloody login screen, where generations of games its senior allow the player to edit video, audio and other settings (basic features really) Outriders requires you to not only sit through what must be 40-60 seconds of unskippable splash screens and warnings to get to a lone, solitary login prompt. if you had not already somehow managed to turn the music off then enjoy being blasted by some super triumphant orchestral theme in the bloody menu you cannot turn down without first "logging in" and "Authenticating" first, but with whatever the buggery is happening with the servers you are likely to hear it for quite some length of time as even when its working the process seems to take about 4 minutes too bloody long. Particularly egregious is the hilarious fact that at time of writing if you cannot get into the server then the game has no way programmed to allow you to leave save for CRASHING which has happened multiple times.(you remember all those lies this games predecessors had to say about always online games about how much more safe, secure and easy it makes you to play something you paid 60$+ for? Yeah enjoy the future of gaming.)

The games transition/hub/game-play area system is hilariously jank as nearly every single scene transition has packaged with it a (thankfully) skip-able 2-4 second cut scene, and in multiplayer requires every player to 'vote' (see also unanimously agree).

Multiplayer also surprise, surprise! tends to do some unfortunate things. For example one player suddenly stop sending their bank info to Squenix? *Lost connection to Outriders server* host drop off the face of the earth? well hope you enjoy eating a crash and the 60 seconds of splash screens and the potential to have the servers being borked for you too!

I would love to get into how awesome it feels for a group to mow down hordes of dudes in full three player co-op but for whatever reason nobody ever joined the games of either mine or the buddy i'd joined, though I can suspect that the in-game party finder system (which was also fairly unreliable in the demo) reared its ugly head as it took half a dozen joining attempts for either party's fire wall to pipe up with weather they should allow Outriders to do stuff, and still 3-4 attempts needed to join afterword.

Getting to the game-play of this game is like pulling teeth from a honey badger, and it could suck divine ambrosia through a bodacious woman's mammies after that but the aftertaste of several minutes of your time being wasted every. single. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. time. you ordain to play it is not going to sit well beside it in your stomach and holy balls this analogy is getting to weird lets move on.

I suppose April 1st was an appropriate time to release because the launch has been a joke, hopefully whoever is managing the servers gets this nonsense in order but I'm not about to recommend a product that is good some of the time and does not work the rest.

For any perspective buyer the Approximation of my time spent logging/connecting to friends vs playing is around 4 hours to my (current) play times 9.8
I can only hope that many of you who would plan to vote for effective products with your wallets would find that Unacceptable.

Vermintide 2 is much like its source material in so far as it is dying a quick and undeserved death due to a series of blunders so obvious as to make the Coup De Grace painfully easy. Here is why.

Until recently I would have touted Vermintide 2 as a sub-competently developed game that, while lacking content did manage to achieve the "15 seconds of fun" dynamic at a frequency that could frankly nearly not be matched by its competition (lacking though that competition may be in number.). As of now the game bereft of viable playstyles that are not the slow and painfully boring stagger,attack rotation. Combined with massive nerfs to the player across the board and the laziest game buffs imaginable (say it with me now, MORE HEALTH, MORE DAMAGE~) to the opposition serve to highlight what players could tolerate before. The ball of chaos warriors overheading though each other is now nigh insurmountable due to cleaves and dodges nerf, the new besitgores if around the right crevice can all charge and instantly kill a player before said player knows they exist. Hell in this 'stagger meta' the beastmen have several special privileges it seems as they will oftentimes outright ignore stagger in its entirety, most infamous from personal experience being a minotaur that ignored 3 separate career shouts and continued attacking as if we were (much like constructive criticism on the Fatshark forums) an annoying pest.

Shield & anything is still awful, how HOW!?!? How do you make the beloved board, veteran of nearly every major conflict known to man and make it a sack of your-remaining-community-goodwill-post-2.0?

Fatshark should be known by now for being completely against half measures and incremental changes but good lord dropping a major game-changing patch that turned the enemy's from enjoyable fodder and occasional elite to a wall of unmovable silent backstab ninjas in conjunction with a new enemy may be the biggest unwelcome change to come to a game since War of the Roses doubled everythings health immediately post release...wait Wasn't Fatshark the dev for that game?

Even the only positive to come out of the winds of magic debacle is sort of back handed as the progression for getting gear, talents, and special effects is actually good, in fact i'm sure it would be something that most would've preferred to have on the games release (if it was applied to the base game and not subject to the diminishing returns of the weave). Unfortunately it is separate in its entirety from the base game, effectively just dividing the community.

I hope everyone like Age of Sigmarines because after this game dies that and 40k bargain-bin-tier games are all your going to be seeing from games wokeshop from now on.

If you've ever wanted to save your characters wife's life by throwing her out of a plate glass window, into the void of space before remote controlling a tiny pod to save her (and yourself), after having just murdered/stealthed past half the former crew and dodged missiles from another ship that is still actively blowing up the other half? How about doing so with named gear that a buddy of yours retired a character with and put into your acquirable item pool just by being in the steam friend list? No? Well then you just don't like fun i guess.

Heat Signature at its core is a game about problem solving, practical problems mostly that tend to involve things like "how many of these guards can i lure to a window so they get sucked into the coldness of space to suffocate?" "How am i gonna pickpocket the guard with the key with that AOE narc jerry standing right next to him?" or "How do I keep this Kenshiro meme with a sword from omae wa mo shindeiruing me in a huge radius?"
This at the very least, it does well. And when you pull a win out of your arse it feels great.
10/10 would throw concussion hammers into windows again.

Perusing Steam looking through the sorely lacking co-op section of games to play with my buddies with but 4 simple, yet damning caveats. A) Not yet another zombie game B) Not yet another tower defence game C) No early access games D) No 'MMO's.
Randomly search for the word 'Door' in the search bar to look up the price of door kickers for a friend, find what im looking for with the addition of 'Action Squad', What follows is the second in as many years that ive made an impluse buy that i did not regret- the other being Kenshi.

TLDR: Game is solid but does not hold your hand.

Merits:
Meritocracy - The game has a number of enemys and mechanics that rely on the players understanding of how they operate to combat them effectively, While many decry that 'there is no reason to take anything other than smoke grenades' the other pieces of equipment can all fulfill a means to an end (Particularly flashbangs on ladders).

Fast load times and simplistic menu's - Self explanitory.

Good Soundtrack - Your milage may vary.

Good enemy veriety and silhouettes - most enemys in the game are easily identifiable from each other and serves their own unique purpose when combating the player (Or your end round star count).

Distinctive classes/weapons - Every class has a role to play or an x-factor to their weapons or skill tree upgrades that allows them to stand out from one another.

Cons:
Lack of level selection in co-op - a small nit pick really but having to select a level and then being forced linearly to play from there unless you droped and re-made the lobby was a minor annoyance though the real grivence is that in co-op because there is no level selection between missions its impossible to tell what the mission objective actually is untill you've started the level (Hostage rescue, Bomb, Shoot all the things ect.).

And thats about it! Looking forward to more content from these Developers.

To start with this game has some huge balls claiming half of what it does on the store page, "The next milestone in the evolution of ARPG's" I beg to differ, slowing down the gameplay dramatically, removing the authenticity of the weapons roles by locking their full potentiel behind booster stimulants and shafting the relevance of an entire class by creating a damageless, underperforming abortion seems like several steps backwards to the norm of the medium.

"Fight the corruption together" Why would you? honestly why would you do that to yourself and the person you would ordain to play with, the balancing of this games co-op (when it works which it currently does not) is a Complete.Unmitigated.Joke, here is why; the health and suppression values inflate to ridiculous levels and removes the authenticity of the feel of the weapons, the bolter that 1 shot a guardsman beforehand? 2-3 shots now without fail with the addition of a single person. A single psyker with 5k health suddenly will become a bloody raid boss at 15k leading to this awful MMO feeling as you SLAUG through overinflated health bar after overinflated health bar for every enemy at 3 people. This also results in the slowdown of the progression for all involved due to the missions not receiving any bonus rewards whatsoever.

"A living expanding world" The only thing that seems to expand is the list of BLANKET nerfs to the players ability to progress as the numbers of fate and credits gained when vendoring the subhuman amounts of trash the game ordains to throw your way from what they used to be in 'beta'..

"Improve your weapons, Craft missions and tweak your skills" First of all skills cannot be tweaked they are set and permanent from weapon to weapon, secondly the only way to 'improve your weapon' is if its the top rarity grade and you blender in more top grade items to bring it up to your level again with a random (Typically useless) permanent stat mod.

The Death of Authenticity; This game has a particular fetish for locking decent experience rewards behind the most excessive and blatant stat padding and nerfing in recent memory, slowing the gameplay down to a crawl and highlighting the massive annoyance that is the suppression system (A.K.A the stunlock HP bar). The impact of weapons is heavily affected by these difficulty resulting in the jaw droppingly bizarre situations where a generic run of the mill Guardsman can survive a bolter round, airburst grenade in addition to getting bisected by a chainsword and still have enough health to stand definitely both middle fingers erect and calling Ollanius Pius a hyper-omega-cuck for good measure.

Weapon/psyker nonsense Balance; There is a severe disparity of important keywords not only from weapon to weapon but from ability to ability even on the same weapon as is the case for what feels like most of crusaders arsenal (Though the assassin and psyker is by no means exempt, in fact the psyker has the most useless skills to date!). A single weapon can have a number of uses or so we are led to believe. In practice this lack of focus to consistency leads to many weapons feeling schizophrenic with many having what are denoted as 'trash' abilities with the only potential saving grace being that the enemy all seem to parody your weapons and may themselves use said 'trash' abilities.

A single weapon can contain armor breaker/piercing on one ability have aoe on the next and cause a persistent effect that causes a vulnerability that can stack! (but usually never will because most of the abilities that cause it typically have a cooldown longer than 3 seconds on an effect that lasts 5.) creating an internal consistency where the only thing consistent about every weapon is that they are inconsistent and overall it feels very silly. Most weapons are never allowed to be really good at anything relying on specific modifiers to make a single aspect of play (and by extension 1-2 abilities) viable, let alone efficient.

The 5 second rule; Much like a vagrant dropping a nice fresh sandwich on an anthill and hoping it will come out unscathed many will be similarly disappointed to find ants crawling over their hopes and dreams of a coherent balance between status effects or the allowance of creative builds. Instead what we get is this cobbled-together mess where most statuses last ither 5 seconds or 10 seconds, though the former more the latter. Stun? 5 seconds Slow? 5 seconds Dots? (Which only 1 can exist on any one enemy at a time therefore making them aweful) 5 seconds. Blind? 5- oh wait they removed flashbangs nevermind.

Bizarre design; The only thing i can think of for several trees and their nodes is that someone on the design team declared "Wouldn't it be cool if?" followed by words so inhuman as to not be repeatable via text. and because of this we have for example the execution skill tree, a tree i will remind you is so GOD AWFUL that no one is sure if it works yet because nobody i know was stupid enough to waste points to check. Additionally how does the size of the CURSOR impact the FPS of a videogame? what the ♥♥♥♥.

Muh bug avalanche; Where do i start? how about at the start. Stun mines stun though green suppression because ♥♥♥♥ you for buying this game. The customization feature does not update when you select colors and gloss and whatnot leading to a rather expensive guessing game. enemies can disappear or warp beyond comprehension, you can fall though the world, co-op causes more rubberbanding than a rubber factory. supposedly finished things have placeholder names, characters have missing voice lines, uthers tarot cutscene has literally no sound other than the short 'placeholder animation' sound effects from 'beta'. The Crusader does not appear to suffer from the recent nerf of the void shield or the buff of the deflector shield. Continue ad-infinitum. What is HAPPENING?

Variety? what variety?; your options for side/tarot missions when ginding/spending fate points are thus. (Because i doubt we will see anything that breaks monotony like some of the story missions in clunky vehicles or warzones again.)
-Purge (Boring)
-Purge Lite (Hunt, Assassination)
-Bunker buster (with the most lackluster bunker destruction i've seen yet)
-Bunker Buster lite (silence the guns)
-Daemonic incursion
-Daemonic incursion lite (nurgle nests)
-Escort Mission (Panic room)

This game is seemingly by design made to piss people off and draw out the 'experience' so that time could be bought for the non existent gameplay.

The only thing funnier than this games state is the shill-tier users who defend it with some staunch defenders of this unmitigated sub-mediocrity being named (of their own volition by the way) Irrelevant, Mentally Unstable and Flawed.
Beware all ye who enter here.

For all its Faults H1Z1 has done the improbable: Limbo's drunk into the room far below my expectations.
I purchased this product with the expectations of a glitchy, unintuitive mess of a survival game that may be saved from its faults long enough to be enjoyed with my friends. What I- and what i can only assume was a significant portion of the population received was thus: A 20$ Splash screen and multiple error messages.

Now other games have survived such conditions before, however i can state with the utmost sincerity that i do not desire this to be one of them for multiple reasons. Post-Early access has been mired in what could in generous terms be referred to as "Maximum damage control" due to their bait-and-switch business model that has frankly been described by more articulate than I in the reviews below. Sony Online Entertainment is quickly garnering a deserved reputation for its cash grab antics that even seem to seep through their words tone even as they offer refunds.

I would love to add more points about what the game is about and indeed what my experience was hampered by to drive the point home that this is an avoid-at-all costs purchase, that it has more red flags than a girlfriend with a machete and to abandon all hope ye whom enter here, however after a day of being unable able to play leading up to this http://i.imgur.com/1qc0sUX.png the only enjoyment available for this is watching SOE back-peddle on their statements to save face.

Fear not Steam users for your salvation is but several mouse clicks away!
You are able to receive a refund by going to the top right of your steam overlay, click on your account name to open a drop down menu. and click on 'Account Details' afterwords click on 'Store Transactions' you should find yourself at your Recent Steam Store Transactions, under the Items column you should find H1Z1- underneath that you will find 'request a refund' click on that and enjoy your new 20$ in your steam wallet.

May this game fade into the circle of Hades when it is pointed at as how not to conduct business/game design/puppies.

One of the most fun mmo's i have ever played, a definate recomend for its awesome soundtrack and its skill/gear based combat. *Warning* Wolvers were harmed in the makeing of this review.