Recent reviews by Faust

If FEARs Alma is too scary and the battalions of AI soldiers too difficult for you, give Operation Thunderstorm a try. Cut from the same cloth as the aforementioned FEAR, both are using the LithTech Jupiter Ex Engine, which makes for some satisfying shooting excursions. However, that's everything these two titles have in common. OT was born in a time when people were already fed up with WW2 shooters and just before City Interactive started their re-branding, both in name and products, to move away from their somewhat jank-ridden image.

And it shows. Operation Thunderstorm arguably has some of the most funny dialogue I've ever heard in recent years, just because the writing and acting is just comically bad. This might be related to me being a German, able to understand everything the soldiers are talking about but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter anyways.

If you have 2-3 hours to spare, pick up your rifle and kill three of Nazi Germanys most dangerous man, neatly packaged into some maze-like, interconnected missions you won't even remember if asked for at gunpoint. It's janky, it's cheap but it's also a whole lot of fun. The shooting feels great, which won't surprise anyone who ever played the first two FEAR-games. Just do yourself a favor and get an unofficial uncensored patch (it can be easily found under Guides) to not only unlock historically accurate icongraphy but also blood and gore effects. Without them, the game feels lacking, to put it mildly.

I got my copy on sale for 1$ and it was a dollar perfectly spent.

Over the last couple of years, I often felt the urge to explore the wastelands. Story was always extremely bad, full of plot holes, non-sensical behaviors and lackluster NPCs.

I did however care about the freedom FO4 managed to offer, especially if you took your time to add QoL mods and some actual questlines.

Now that Bethesda once again felt the urge to torpedo their own product — which was carried by modders basically since launch — just so they can lure fresh franchise fans into spending too much money on a broken product, I can at least do my part and drag down their metrics a bit further.

Instead of actually developing new games — or maybe a new engine frame work? — they just keep banking on our collective nostalgia for a game they didn’t even make proper in the first place.

Having had a short look at the demo, I think there is a good foundation for a future fun game. Since there is no neutral option I'll have to keep the thumb down, just because I did find many areas that would need lots of improvement.

First, some Positives: I really liked the intro and the tone it sets. Graphics quality aside, this feels like a great introduction to the game. The rooms or levels have a nice Doom-corridor aesthetic and it feels different to other, more open-spaced games in the genre, despite the enemies behaving frustratingly unexpected. Kinetic bullet guns feel good but grenade launcher, RPGs and such don't tbf.

What rubs me the wrong way, throughout the whole demo, is the lack of a certain core identity or universe, especially considering everything I saw in the intro. Why are there so many bugs and insects? Are these monsters living in the ruins? What do these have to do with the planetary invaders? I like the idea of having the cuties running alongside and doing some shooting as well but then again, we didn't they show of this stuff in the introduction? This might be nitpicking on a high level but due to this, it felt a bit shoved together, at least for my taste.

Human-like enemies are too fast and unpredictable. They don't seem to have any weight to them, neither when they are running, shooting or getting shot at. Other enemies seem to practically materialize behind the player. I did get the small audio cues they send but at some point, they literally come from everywhere, which lead to a play style akin too "waiting in the corner until everything has rushed up the stairs". Despite the barrage of enemies, I felt near invincible due to healing being very, very generous. I'd say the difficulty could be toned up quite a bit.

Finally, I think you should pick your graphics style before it is too late. After getting a mild headache from the bloomy areas, I deactivated SSGI and the game suddenly felt more grounded and readable. Sticking to that old-school style could at least help you with some kind of identity, letting Ironsand stick out. The same goes for the upgrade cards which - and I really don't mean this in a mean way - do look a bit like cheap mobile game upgrades. More stylized, less UI-polished versions could improve this but I'm again speaking about personal preferences.

Overall I do think there is potential in Ironsand and I really hope you don't get discouraged by some of the less helpful, negative review. I do not see this game in an online co-op setting, at least for now. Neither the levels nor enemy designs would make this a pleasant experience imo.

Barely hitting 60 fps with Settings mixed between Medium and Very High ─ with dlss Quality activated ─ on 4070 Super 12GB, RAM 32GB and Ryzen 7 7700X , in 1440p. This isn't really great tbh. It does look okay but you can clearly see the difference between DLSS on and off; It's not like this game does anything extremely new or looks out of this world ─ especially compared to BL3 ─ so what bothers me the most right now are the people defending settings that make your game look worse just so the numbers go up. Gaslighting 101.

We're playing co-op and the story seemed interesting so far but then the host crashed and with it our will to progress. Surprisingly, the gunplay actually feels worse compared to BL3, at least for now. It's like the shots don't have any real impact and unless you see a critical pop up, it doesn't feel like your doing much. I'm still looking forward to playing it more but if you think those reviews complaining about performance talk nonsense ─ they don't. DLSS helps, yes, but it should be a tool for less powerful PCs to handle games that look far more complex and demanding than BL4. On top of that you have a toxic CEO, defensively yelling at customers, which is never a good sign.

[UPDATE]
The game crashes every 40-60 minutes for my gf, which makes co-op extremely unfun, to put it mildly. Her setup is nearly the same as mine. Due to this, I'm constantly greeted with another bug ─ I'm assuming it is one, otherwise it would be pretty bad game design ─ which is me having to re-spec my skill tree every time I join her game. We've honestly played the game for around 8 hours together now and it's only showing more issues.

When it comes to single player, besides the rather underwhelming soundtrack ─ compared to BL3 ─ there are glitching textures, NPCs teleporting, frozen enemies that defreeze but stay in their positions, Quest Items disappearing, Quest Items not showing up in the first place, unreasonable frame drops — the list is basically endless, not forgetting the hourly crashes on my gfs rig. I had to restart multiple times just to fix buggy quest lines, as early as calling the elevator in the tutorial. This is the premium game for premium gamers? Depends on where you set the bar, I guess?

tl;dr: A low-poly indie love letter to Half-Life and Stalker, with two distinctly different game modes, engaging story-telling and great gunplay.

The Saying “Never judge a book by its cover” was tailor made for games like ADACA. Under its multitude of bundled assets and plain low-poly textures lies an innovative, mysterious and highly satisfying indie shooter that caught me by surprise. Following the advice of the always helpful Dominic Tarason , I picked this one up on sale and haven’t really played anything else since. It’s unbelievable that ADACA was made by a single developer. Sure, the credits show quite a list of different asset packs but isn’t that the purpose of these anyways? The reason why the term “asset flip” became known in the first place is due to the fact that some developers take these assets, glue them together without thought and purpose, slap a price tag on it and call their piece of junk a finished game.

ADACA instead offers two distinct game modes: A linear campaign with a compelling story-line and Half-life inspired gameplay ─ even making use of a gravity-gun like arm ─, cut into three different episodes with multiple missions. Looking through the augmented eyes of Jessy Thorn you’re thrown from end to end, in a short but sweet plot that takes a couple of hours to finish. It’s a mysterious science fiction story that doesn’t hide its inspirational origins but still offers a very personal spin on the subject. Some missions are extremely well crafted, with dark underground passages that gave off survival horror-like vibes, while others felt a bit like moving from one enemy spawner to the next.

If you don’t like linear, tubular level design, then the second mode, Zone Control, is more to your liking. In a nonlinear open world experience, reminiscent of Stalker, you take up the gun as Sgt. Lexi Abrahms. It’s a highly rewarding experience in which information isn't spoonfed but has to be discovered via notes, logs and other messages. It feels way more like a game of survival and exploration, with a chain of missions that can’t be saved in between.

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The mystery surrounding the world of ADACA is extremely well crafted, with hidden secrets and codes that can be easily missed. Even if you’re mindfully picking up bits and pieces, there is still the problem of finding the correct place to apply your knowledge. At one point, I came across a code pad that opened a locked door only after being fed with a code I picked up. hours earlier, listening to a couple of radio frequencies. Moments like these make this game old-school and rewarding; there is no arrow pointing in any directions, nobody telling you to write anything down, just simple intuition.

Another great addition is the gravity-arm, which serves as your handy Swiss Army knife. You can pick up objects to overcome obstacles and reach hidden platforms or just use everything as deadly projectiles, which is fun to watch and saves ammunition. It’s possible to block paths so that enemies can't reach you but I generally preferred the more “definite” way of blasting them into oblivion. A staggered foe can be disarmed by picking up his gun, even instantly using it against its former user, which made for some very hilarious gameplay moments.

Yet, despite not being a big fan of puzzle games, I would have liked to make more use of my gravity arm. In most cases, you’re simply carrying batteries around, maybe throwing them over a large distance, which feels like a waste of potential.

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If there is something I had to criticise, it’s the feeling that Episode 3 of the campaign was unnecessarily prolonged with the help of bullet-sponge enemies, which overall made it feel slightly inferior to Episode 1 and 2. Zone Control mode is, by all means, a wonderful blast from the past with its game design promoting anything but hand-holding.

I also loved the way how the leitmotif, established at the start of the game, keeps coming back at you whenever something important happens or a mystery unfolds. It's just a small thing but it always felt incredibly atmospheric.

ADACA is a great example of indie games done right and easy to recommend for everyone enjoying story-driven fps gameplay. It does have some janky parts to it, like the movement sometimes feeling a bit sluggish, but it makes up for these short-comings with rewarding gameplay that respects ─ and challenges ─ the player's intellect.

tl;dr: A story-driven first person shooter with incredible atmosphere and worldbuilding, suffering from lacklustre performance and bugs.

If you can stomach heavily fluctuating frames and occasional game freezes, Industria could be a perfect choice as a short, story-driven fps. Heavily inspired by Half-Life 2, it offers a great mix between phantastic storytelling and real-world events. What starts in East Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Berlin wall November 9th 1989 quickly leads to an alternate dimension when our main protagonist Nora follows her boyfriend Walter through a secret machine called ATLAS.

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The jump from late 80s East Germany into, what looks like, an alternative 1920s dieselpunk inspired city called Hakavik feels familiar and alien at the same time. Humanlike machines roam the streets, by design killing everything on sight. It's here where Industria really caught my attention. The city of Hakavik looks calm,, even serene, so long as no machine is trying to hunt you down. Scattered belongings of its former ─ human ─ inhabitants really invoke the impression of a place that had once been teeming with life. Every now and then, you'll find bits of written lore, allowing players to piece together the information themselves. The story is never fully explained and parts of it won't make sense even after you finished the game, leaving me with mixed feelings.

The atmosphere is a very strong aspect of Industria despite music being very rare, almost absent. Instead, ambient sounds and noises add to the feeling of loneliness and isolation. Although the city is rather small and many doors won't open, you're still switching between bright open streets and damp, dark buildings. The latter make full usage of your flashlight, which never fully runs out but becomes less and less useful if you do not find a battery on time. The weapon at the ready, there was an almost survival horror-like feeling whenever I was inside of a dark building. Pumping and pulsating noises from the machines were omnipresent, their footsteps giving away their position.

However, the intelligence of these constructs felt a bit lacking, almost comical at times. At first, everything is rushing at you but, if being damaged enough, many robots turned around and just ran in circles. This would make sense if they had actual means to repair themselves but the way it worked here it was almost as if somebody played the Benny Hill theme in the background. Combat didn't feel challenging and ammo was scarce until I noticed that some boxes could be crushed, providing plenty of options to take down robots without worrying about running out. What gave me a headache though were the forced autosaves and the very rare occasions to save at a typewriter, again giving off the feeling of old-school survival horror. These typewriters were almost always placed in a nonsensical way, like right before or after an auto-save.

Industria looks rather nice, especially for an indie game. This doesn't explain the abysmal performance, which became an issue after chapter 2, only getting worse the further I went. Sure, my RTX3060/i7-10870H/32GB RAM notebook is not exactly high-end but come on, running everything on medium settings with balanced DLSS and I'm still not getting frequent 50-60 fps feels rather poor. In the end, I even chose performance but this didn't seem to have much of an impact. Sometimes, I got short freezes or hiccups when shooting enemies, which naturally is the worst situation for said problems.

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Had I not known beforehand that Industria is a relatively short game, lasting around 2-4 hours, I would have abandoned it midway through the playthrough. Still, the story really resonated with me and I wanted to see its end. The latter felt abruptly, which could explain the recent announcement of Industria 2.

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Hakavik whenever I was not worried about my laptop catching fire or something. The second half of the game feels very unpolished, untested and, to a degree, unfinished, as if time and resources were running out for the project though. Therefore, I only recommend getting Industria on sale. It offers a unique setting and a story that kept me thinking, embedded in a mixture of walking sim and survival action. If you finish the game, still looking for answers, there is a great guide that summarizes everything up nicely while also trying to give answers to questions you're surely going to have.

tl;dr: A cleverly written rhythm rogue-lite in urban Berlin, with colorful, addictive combat and a fantastic soundtrack.
Every round in BeatSlayer is a truly amazing experience. There is just something in rhythm games that's keeping me on the edge of my seat, hopefully hitting every beat, repeat after repeat. Okay, sorry about that. This game really is a lot of fun though, albeit being a tad bit short due to a smaller budget. Yet, instead of putting more meaningless content into BeatSlayer just to make it last longer, the focus was put on polished animations, sound and fluidity.

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Evil music mastermind Dietrich is sending his brain wave radio from the Berlin Tower ─ The Fernsehturm ─ to control every citizen, literally making them dance to his tunes. One of his captives, Toni, is the brother and closest family to our heroine Mia, who is desperately trying to free him from Dietrich's evil clutches. Between her and the tower-top crawls, flies and drives an army of evil robot henchmen, determined to put Mia down.

I love this setting. Choosing urban Berlin as a rhythm playground feels both unique and fresh. Seeing the subway driving through Friedrichstraße while smashing some robot faces is just priceless. Being from Germany myself, I laughed along the punchlines, but I acknowledge that not knowing anything about German pop culture makes some jokes feel rather pointless. Still, the writing is pretty clever, repeatedly using musical catchphrases that serve the general theme.

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Frankly, you either love or hate the gameplay, there isn’t much room in-between. You move, hit, slice and kick to the groove, hopefully chaining enough beats together to enter a state called Tanzrausch. Once entered, your damage improves and many abilities offer increased potential. If you’re not able to feel the rhythm, the whole game could become a chore. Sure, there are plenty of accessibility options like a metronome, a rhythm bar and other useful features but if you’re having trouble staying in Tanzrausch, BeatSlayer turns into an immensely hard game.

Buildwise I found myself sticking to damage-over-time abilities and shield regenerates, due to the fact that raw damage attacks were hard to apply in more hectic combat scenarios, especially the final boss. That’s not to say that other routes weren’t viable but I felt that letting the dots do most of the work also helped with staying on the beat. If you want to explore different ways to finish, you can. Easily. As it is common for other rogue-lites, unlockable talents improve various aspects of Mia. Here however, the player is able to increase the chance in-category, guaranteeing the likelihood of for example, Virus Power-Ups throughout the run. I love how this makes changing playstyles less of a gamble and respects the players time.

The soundtrack is amazing. It feels like there are only a handful of different tracks but they all come in variations, mirroring both the stage you’re in and the intensity thereof. 80s synthwave and straightforward kicks clash with EDM, guitar riffs and even live orchestration to keep your head bumping and axe swinging respectively. If you want to check it out, this is my favorite track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stHohm41ciw

BeatSlayer offers quality over quantity with a rough game time length of 8-14 hours, depending on your skill level and need to unlock all achievements. The gameplay feels tight, responsive and rewarding, alongside a kick-ass soundtrack. If you’re using a bluetooth headset, I recommend following the game’s advice to adjust the latency accordingly to avoid frustration though.

Personally, this has become one of my favorite rogue-lites of recent years, both in terms of replayability and entertainment factor. Sure, there isn’t as much of a story compared to genre-giant Hades but Mia still got the moves like Zagreus.

tl;dr: A flawed but ambitious indie adventure game with a captivating sci-fi story, retro aesthetics, and lackluster combat, held back by technical issues. Despite its shortcomings, the narrative depth and passion of the developers shine through
There's something inherently charming about a small indie team pouring their vision into a game that blends adventure with dashes of RPG and shooting elements. However, despite the store pages promising ad-text, this game doesn't feel so much as a soap opera but a put-it-all-in B-movie, with a story that could have easily filled twice the games length, if explored thoroughly. This is not a bad thing by design but I could feel that, in the end, I was craving for more. More explanation, more exploration, more exposition ─ but less combat. Really.

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The prologue starts with a chain of mundane fetch quests. John Covenant, an ex-soldier turned starship captain and main-character, is doing weirdly basic tasks as someone who actually has authority on a space vessel. Sure, it works quite well to explore the ship and get to know the crew but I do think both could have been handled in a better way, like, calling everyone to the conference room? I wouldn't mention it if the prologue wasn't so uninteresting, so much so that I actually considered not playing any further. However, a look into the codex felt like the saving grace: lore, plenty of it. Maybe even a bit too much.

The story recap, without giving everything away is this: War between multiple nations wreaked havoc on late 22nd century earth. While big corporations sold their weapons to every faction, they secretly plotted a plan to overtake the blue planet, creating an armed corporatocracy. Also, space faring was invented but the universe, despite finding smaller lifeforms, didn't seem to offer any intelligent race despite humans. Now, to keep the balance in check, said corporations refer to espionage, creating the endless cold war. Captain John Covenant fought for the losing side and is now looking to earn his money with jobs of varying degrees of legality. Of course, one of these jobs ─ your main mission ─ could possibly mean the end of life as we know it. Also, Tyranids. Or Necrons? Not exactly both of them but I was instantly reminded of their typical flavors.

For a game this indie, the story would have been absurdly epic, if it wasn't crammed into such a short game. Remember as a kid, when you wrote something on a piece of paper, you always started in the middle, with big, bold letters. Then, reaching the end, you noticed how little space there was left but the words had to come out, so the letters became smaller and smaller, until parts of the message were hard to read and understand; I'd really loved for Covenant to be the very large piece of paper because the story was what kept me going, apart from the retro aesthetics and unique artstyle in some of the short cutscenes.

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Combat however felt very lacking. Like, a basic version of an action game but you have to try really hard to get killed. Aside from the final fight, there wasn't a challenge to combat. Agents from every corporation, didn't mean business but running in circles, shooting lasers, kept coming at me over and over again. There are special duck-and-cover situations as well, but these happened only twice throughout my playthrough. Killing the last boss was the only tough situation I encountered in-game yet that wasn't the real challenge.

Instead, I came across a couple of bugs. Some of them were only minor spelling mistakes or grammar issues; it was obvious from the start that the development team didn't natively speak English but that didn't have any major impact. What did were enemies, stuck in geometry, outside of camera range. I couldn't kill them so the camera did not reset, forcing me to reload the game. Another time, I triggered a quest ending but neither took the quest in the first place nor got a useful explanation for what I actually achieved. A thing of beauty was the laser beam of the final boss that created a major graphic bug or artifact. It seems like the assets weren't all deleted and so I watched my credits roll with a rather unique overlay:
https://test1.login.steam.hlxgame.cc/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3218642434

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Covenant: Project Zero clearly was a passion project of a small development team. I'm glad I kept playing for roughly four hours before the credits rolled, despite the amount of question marks that were still floating around my head. Maybe the final achievement "The End... Or is it?" was more than just a nod to a particular well-known franchise and there is a part two in the making? Even if there isn't, there is plenty to enjoy here, especially if you like adventure with great retro vibes. The story, while at times feeling totally underdeveloped, really made up for the subpar combat and a small army of bugs. Next time, just ditch the combat, ditch the side quests and solely focus on the epic plot.

Zen with a Pen is quite a misleading name for a game that becomes very challenging, very fast. I'm not easily frustrated after years of playing Super Hexagon, Boson X and other fail-or-finish games; however, this little fun right here made for a very infuriating Sunday morning, which I find very enjoyable.

The premise is easy to understand and execute: Guide a small ball through an increasingly difficult path of obstacles, with your mouse working as a fountain pen. Left click to apply ink, right click to remove it but be aware that the ink itself vanishes on its own. Physics are active and a constant stream of air pushes you forward, most of the time right into a spiky ending. I admit in all honesty that this is a pretty hard game, at least for me. I had to take a break in level 4 because I was stuck at the final checkpoint. In order to overcome a couple of corners, it was mandatory to apply the force of a certain power-up. Couple this with a slight degree of randomness, you'll always get when a ball hits a plane, and suddenly it feels like a game of chance rather than of skill.

Speaking of power-ups: there are four of them, with varying effects. One makes the ball very small, the other gives a shield to survive one spiky hit and the one I was talking about before gave a huge boost but only on the first contact with any object. Difficulties range from Easy to Zen but don't get fooled: Zen is by far the hardest, without even having any checkpoints in between. Easy provides more ink and power-ups and yet I still struggled.

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If I had to suggest some minor improvements, especially for long-term replayability, two things come to my mind. Firstly, remove the need to finish a level to unlock the next. As of right now, every time I get back to Zen with a Pen, I either have the choice to replay a course in higher difficulty or that one level I'm currently stuck in. I rather enjoy playing level 5 until I hit a wall ─ or a spike, figuratively speaking ─ and move over to level 6 until I'm stuck again. Maybe unlock the next level after finishing 50% of the prior course, to give players something to look forward to, even if they fail. This might be personal preference though.

Secondly, the music. I think many tracks are very well done and kind of remove some of the frustration that's building up. However, to restart from a checkpoint, you have two choices: Wait until the camera has settled in again, which, like everything in game can be sped up via holding the space bar, or press a rewind button in the top right corner. The latter is much quicker but causes the music to restart, which can be annoying after repeated attempts. It would be great to have the option to instantly restart without the music resetting.

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In summary, Zen with a Pen is great little time-killer that fits perfectly into a lunch-break, a morning routine or whenever you want something that's easy to pick up but hard to finish. It's not a big game, only offering 8 levels so far but I'm sure that it will take some time to finish these, even on lowest difficulties. If there was something I dislike it's the occasional randomness of the ball. This of course can't be avoided entirely but it's unnecessarily adding up on the already difficult game design.
If you still can't decide, give the free demo a try!

"I built a program to listen to people, but I myself heard nothing."

Eliza is a thought-provoking Visual Novel with branching narratives, somber music and exceptional voice acting. It's the kind of game that already felt relevant in 2019 but seems ─ at least to me ─ impossible to ignore in 2024. The main story is focused on Evelyn, who, after having taken 3 years in seclusion, starts to reorganize her life, working as a proxy for an AI counseling app called Eliza. Evelyn also starts reconnecting with some of her old friends and colleagues, who are mildly surprised about her choice to act as the human face of an artificial intelligence but it does seem to help her by dealing with past, present and even future decisions. However, questions of morality, ethics and even usefulness keep rising which ultimately get decided by the players actions.

Doing Evelyn's work as a councilor by listening to peoples complains but only being able to answer what Eliza prompts into your virtual interface felt unnerving, even infuriating at times; many of us know how annoying it feels if you're forced to interact with a chatbot AI that's not able to understand nuanced wording or only acts as a modernized FAQ. Yet Eliza is different in that this AI reflects people's thoughts and feelings onto themselves, effectively forcing them to question their own motives and beliefs. The topics discussed are always very intimate and include issues many of us have experienced in our lives. Would we take these to an AI counselor program if it was a cheap therapy alternative though? I don't know but it's only one of many open questions Eliza ─ the game ─ forces upon the player.

I've worked in the video games industry, a big tech agency and still do my job in something in between these two, even involving AI, so I might be a bit biased. Nonetheless, I never felt that a game represented the small line between technological advancements and dehumanizing society better than Eliza does. You only have to read articles about big corporations laying off people because they think replacing this workforce with chat gpt seems logical, at least from a financial standpoint. By playing through Eliza you're helping Evelyn through her times of uncertainty but in the end, it's also about aligning your own moral compass, carefully thinking about the pros and cons of your decisions. There are multiple endings and I think, in some way, none of them are bad, depending on the angle you're looking at the outcomes.

I highly recommend giving Eliza a try, even if you're not a big fan of visual novels because neither am I. Still, I found the writing intriguing and very clever, beautifully portrayed by unique voice actors. The music always complemented different situations and acted accordingly to prepare the perfect emotional background. Overall, a great example of ambiguous storytelling without taking the responsibility out of the players hands.