Sir Whoopass

 Sir Whoopass has a lot of attitude, and a sassy companion narrator - it's over the top silly, and full of terrible cut scene animations and flexing machismo.

The game looks and plays like a PS3 game though, cutesy but a button masher mainly with some parkour levels.  The bosses were not interesting, the physics were bad, the jokes were cornball, there is no real draw to play the rest at all.

There is a difference between funny and corny that these developers didn't care to differentiate between.

First Class Escape 2: Head in the Clouds

First Class Escape 2: Head in the Clouds is the successor to First Class Escape which I had played previously.   Previously I was able to make it through the various train cars solving the puzzles, this time I simply had no patience for it.  The very first room has to finding simple tools to escape with and the hot spots for using a screwdriver seemed maddeningly small.

Opening the door I was presented with a fuse box puzzle that effectively was going to control the way you get into various doors by powering up some systems instead of others.

I lost all interest.  I think these things work best when you have immediate and visceral feedback, like the "Boxes" game, or at least incentive to play outside of the puzzle existing in the universe.

Mortal Shell

Mortal Shell is a love letter to Dark Souls.  You play as a ... fleshy thing.  Think an anatomy poster of a human skeletal system covered in muscles, and you are able to inhabit various "Shells" which are mindless bodies, this is your stat choices - and one of 4 weapons.   In combat, if you take critical damage - you get knocked out of the shell and are super vulnerable, you can jump back into your shell again but you can only get saved from death in this way once.

The ability to turn to stone at any point, made it very friendly to a Dark Souls player -- I didn't have to learn any of the boss fights really.  After I learned to use mechanic well, almost every boss cycle became jump attack, stone, run to safety until recharge despite any abilities they had.  I fought the first boss ten times, every other boss was one or two shot at most.    

Where it probably suffered from most is level design - I'm prone to getting lost, and I've also experienced amazing dungeon level designs.  I like doors that lead back to hub rooms, I like ladders you can kick down, I like opening shortcuts along the way -- the prospect of going through an area carefully and killing everything is fun once, then I want to run past the grunts on the way to something more interesting.  These were long and linear, perhaps intentionally so because you had to replay them in hard mode in order to escape once you killed the baddies in each of the towers and ... extracted their gland.

This is a great game for a small developer.

Dead Island 2

Dead Island 2 takes the Dead Island and does ... nothing more with it except a physics update.

Dead Island franchise needs to figure out what they're trying to be -- it feels like they are going for a Saint's Row vibe, but putting in a C- effort.  Shamblers .. lead to Brutes ... lead to Fatties ... lead to Screamers ... lead to Bloated Exploders ... lead to Hunter Seekers ... lead to Cronenberg gigantibeast.  I was being spoonfed zombie baby formula.

Respawning was just stupidly fast too -- they weren't a problem to deal with, but it was annoying to clear the top floor of a house and have the bottom floor respawn.  Let me clear a zone!

The end of the game came abruptly right as I was saying I was going stay behind and look for Nikki who is "the key to it all".   ... a DLC ending?   Are we really setting up for a fricking DLC ending!?

/uninstall

We Become What We Behold

We Become What We Behold is a quick little game that was ported to Steam by a fan wherein you watch a bunch of minions wander around the screen.   Eventually one of them will have an aberration of some sort (a square head, wear a hat, get angry) - and if you take a picture of what happens, it becomes the new #hashtag behavior and is posted at the center.

#HATS ARE COOL

Lots of people start wearing hats, and the story evolves.

It's an interesting idea, and I would LOVE to see this explored in a way that can stretch things out - but as it stands the game is quite linear, progressing you towards chaos and destruction and therefore rests as an art project.