Hey there, this is the "games" page! In here, I'll yap about games, post some game reviews and maybe analyze some mechanics I like.
Updates will, as always, be posted on the Blog whenever I can.
Anyways, that's all for now so see y'all soon!
I recently bought what is maybe the most realistic and famous driving game out there : BeamNG. Its a good game, with great opportunities for modding, just driving around, aving fun and roaming if you have a good PC.
But the game is absolute crap without either a controller or a steering wheel. You end up constantly spinning out, understeering, oversteering, messing up the throttles without even enjoying the extensive stick shift system. This is exacerbated by how precise the game actually is: any mistake will send you flying off the track, and its painful to come close to the end of a track and crash out of nowhere becoauseyou didn't tap the arrow quickly enough
Other than that, the game is maybe the most precise driving simulator i've ever seen, complete with many types of cars, great environnements, perfect physics and, overall, fun gamemodes and challenges. Of course, its a driving simulator, dont expect anything else, but a really fun one at that.
8.4/10 if you have the equipement, else 3/10
Procedurally generating content can be a great tool in games. Minecraft mey be the most well known game with procedurally-generated content at the heart of the gameplay loop (seeded maps), and many other incredibly famous game incorporate this technique within the gameplay loop.
The popularity of this technique is mainly due to how we see games, more importantly roguelikes. Honestly, once you've played a roguelike, you've got the gimmick : play, lose, improve, play again, win, and unlock a new way to play. And that's the core loop of the game : repetition. Repetitively use the same mechanics until you unlock a new way to play. Thus, procedurally generating the maps, enemies, events and other aspects of the game can be very useful to pimp up the overall gameplay.
Despite the repetitiveness, I've always loved playing roguelikes. Extremely passionate teams have made incredible games, some of them being memorable experiences.
The first real roguelike I played was Neon Abyss. In the middle of the Covid pandemic, I found this game that i could play on my shitty PC between two online classes. And that was a revelation. This indie game changed the way I saw repetition within a gameplay loop.
Repetition is the double-edged sword that can either lead a game to greatness or absolutely kill a game. Within every gameplay, there is repetition: call it grinding, training, mastering a skill or replaying the same game, no game escapes repetition. Thus, games try to deal with repetition, and every game does so differently. In multiplayer games, the randomness of human interaction makes every game unique. In puzzle games, the puzzles change, evolve or new mechanics are introduced. Other games intrduce new maps, story elements, new weapons or other futile change andaddition to the game to try and distract the player from the repetitiveness of the gameplay. Roguelikes embrace that repetition, force the player to restart again and again and again, in search for something more. In the case of Neon Abyss, that's new characters with other gameplay mechaanics and a pretty long skill tree. But really, the story of Neon Abyss is kind of beneath the point : the range of weapons, items, the bosses, choices made within a game (Violence / Illusion and such), the pets and the mini games are the aspects that drove me to play this game again and again, without feeling like all of this was too much.
Rich of this newfound passion for roguelikes, i searched and searched for the best titles the genre had to offer, and of course found games like Enter the Gungeon (which was fun), Dead Cells (which i never played but a friend of mine played in school) and, most importantly : The Binding Of Isaac. I bought the games, seeing how it had amassed a cult following over the years, the distinct art style and dark story, and an incredibly rich gameplay and almanac of items... That i didn't like. Playing TBOI felt more like a task i was assigned to do. I felt like the controls were horrendous, the gameplay way to repetitive and unjustly unfair to be fun, and, worst of all, absolutely boring. This may seem like a useless rant, but I never understood why people loved this game so much : it is impossible to play without a tutorial, a wiki and the willpower of a god.
I let go of roguelikes for a while until 2024. The release of Balatro, as well as a friend telling me about FTL, led me to come back to this genre only now. And i love it, with some nuance to give.
Balatro is a great game, with some incredible gameplay. I love playing it, as its both comfy, repetitive to some point, has extensive gameplay (every deck with every stake and the challenge runs) and never feels too stale (cheers to the great music). However, I found it somewhat lacking : there is no actual story, nor objective : you play for the fun of it, and that can make playing the game somewhat boring. One has nothing to look up to, nor to look down to, except a "You Win !" or "You Lose..." screen. This aspect feels like it somehow undermines the overall quality of the game.
At the same time, I started playing FTL : Faster Than Light, and was shocked at both how similar every roguelike was one to another, and yet how incredible such a game could be. FTL is unapolegetically brutal, yet always fair. The gameplay is repetitive but the stakes always feel high, and the search for new mechanics, new ships, with new crewmate, makes the game feel so much bigger than Balatro. I enjoyed playing Balatro nonetheless, but FTL was amazing.
All in all, procedurally-generated roguelikes have a special place in my heart. The genre seems to be held up by just a few boring gimmicks, but small changes like a good story, intriguing characters or interesting mechanics bring the whole genre to a new level of fun.
This genre is really one of the most interesting and, sometimes, innovative genre there is out there. Its a way to tackle repetitiveness, indie ideas, and a great way for indie devs and artists to get their stuff out there.
What makes ultrakill such an excellent game?
This is an actual question btw. Despite being in early access, the game has become a staple of both the movement shooter and indie genres, while giving its players access to countless memes, funnies and story points to reflect upon. I personally believe a game is the reunion of 4 characteristics :
So lets quickly see how Ultrakill handles each of these aspects, and occasionally, master them.
First of all, the gameplay and mechanics. This is the strong point of Ultrakill. The game doesn't worry about physics, logic, or anything in general. The gameplay is simply incredible, and the mechanics impeccable. Everything, from the beat-em-all, doom-like style of the levels, the difficulty of bosses (particularly, on a first playthrough, V2, Gabriel, and P- levels), to the absolute mayhem that is the Cybergrind, is designed to make you better, faster, more adapted to any situation. The weapons are always balanced, and the skill-ceiling is sky-high, while still allowing noobies to enjoy the game. This really is Ultrakill's strong point: the flow of the game is perfect, and you're always encouraged to reach for better S-T-Y-L-E.
Secondly, and in my opinion, the weak point of the game: the story/lore and pacing. Not to say the story is inexistant: imagine a rethought, remixed, revamped and improved version of Dante's Divine Comedy. Creatively, and lore-wise, when you focus on that, things are great. But to learn about the lore, you really have to focus on it, look for secrets, and go out of your way. I had no idea of the lore on my first playthrough, apart from the post-gabe fights cutscenes. Pce-wise, the game is... eh? Not to say that the pace is bad, but the game can feel repetitive in layers 4 and 5, seeing what act 1 offered, and on lower difficulties, there is practically no change in pace within the acts. These are Ultrakill's lacking points, but i believe it's also a reason the game is so great: some people don't really care for long, unskippable cutscenes and extensive lore, especially in a doom-like such as Ultrakill.
Now for something that Ultrakill achieves nearly perfectly: feel. The game feel is fun, precise, fair, balanced and extensive, all at the same time. After a few dozen hours, you develop a sense of your environnement that completely changed the way you see other games. The movement is flowy, everything is slick, and just feels great to play. Nothing lacks flow-wise, and so, you just keep playing. I found myself playing for hours in the cybergrind, experimenting, just messing around, because i felt good just doing that. The game feels freeing.
On the graphics, there is nothing to say, apart that the PS1 style, low-poly effect is very-well done, and goes very well with the game. The revamp update makes things even better (we got circles now lol), and it feels good to be able toplay a game without needing a $1000 GPU. But the graphics quality is far outshined by the music design. Holy shit, i've rarely heard such quality tracks in a game. Musics range from jazzy bass, to Mick Gordon-style metal, to pensive music, and opens up the experience to new horizons. And i'm only talking about the music for levels here, not the great artists featured in the Cybergrind. The cybergrind music is something else. I have no idea how i don't get tired hearing the same few tracks for hours on end.
Finally, Ultrakill is a game that oozes character. Everything is combined with humour, derision, and introspection such that you get that "indie" feeling while playing an extremely high-quality game. And the small easter eggs, secrets and bonus levels go to show that Hakita really put his soul inside this game. Everything reeks of character, and that really puts Ultrakill above other games. Nothing screams quality like thislevel of attention to detail.
All in all, these characteristics are the reason Ultrakill, while still being in early access, is a must-play. It really redefines the genre of doom-likes and movement shooters, and raises the bar for crappy, industrial AAA games.
Go play Ultrakill. Thats an order. 9.3/10 game, would buy the Gabriel body pillow.
TF2 is everywhere. In my opinion, it may be one of the most influential games in history, with maybe Doom, Mario and Half Life. It's influence is quite literally everywhere. Popular culture has adopted the "Meet the Team" films as both memes and excellent marketing, the Source engine still being used, with Filmmaker, as an animation software, and the ongoing high player count since 2009 places the game as a cornerstone of gaming.
Now, things were not always perfect (few updates and the bot invasion) but it being a free game means that the player count was boosted, reviving the economy and forcing Valve to publish more security updates and, recently, giving us the SDK. The game is now pretty assuredly fixed (thanks to #SaveTF2 and #FixTF2), and will grow even more.
But my goal is not to say what the game is right now, but what it was. How good it always felt to come back, time and time again, to this anchor that was TF2 throughout my life. I remember watching "Meet the Sniper" and immediatly wanting to play him. Logging in for countless hours of sniper duel on 2Fort, and dying every 5 seconds to a bot spamming inappropriate messages
The class system really is perfect. Every class feels fulfilling to play: no matter who you main, as long as you are skilled, you are a valuable member of the team and contribute greatly to the flow. Weapons are all prettybalanced, and never feel too bad to lose or die against. The skill floor is pretty low, but with a low reward, and as you move into more skilled playstyles, the high level/high reward completely changesthe way you see the game. Really, TF2 is one of the easiest game to start playing, and always keeps that power of retention. You always want to get better, do more as one class, and when you feel burnt out, you just switch.
I grew up with TF2, which will always remain a part of me. I love this ame, and am entirely biased in this reveiew, but damn. Few games did as good as TF2, and even less so with the technical limitations in 2009 or the growing corporate greed slowly submerging game studios. Its amazing how such a successful game managed to dodge traps as dangerous as those.
9/10 sandviches for TF2, good game.