Recent reviews by Brzrkr

Crashed almost every session I played, every time in a different way, often making the PC unusable until pulling the plug. I'm not risking hardware damage for this.

Unique and extremely well designed. Addictive in all the right ways, and expects the player to be smart (or become it) without being unfair. Since playing this, I keep assigning "aspects" to things and people in the real world.

The only flaws are with quality of life minutiae and a few gameplay paths that look like dead ends; they probably planned to flesh them out more in DLCs that never ended up coming out. What is left is still a ton of content.

Charming little game. Nice sense of humour, awesome music (I wish there were more tracks), remarkable art.
You can finish it in a single day, and it's free. No reason not to pick it up.

The music and visuals should already be enough to guarantee a buy in my opinion.

If you appreciate good narration and aren't just looking for a tactics game, this is for you.

At the time of writing I only played it once, so I cannot vouch for how much choices vary the story exactly, but it certainly does seem to matter *a lot*, and the choices themselves are hard enough to force you into giving them some thought.

As for the combat system, it's definitely interesting and novel, and I found it entertaining. Do give this one a try.

A lovely little game that offers good longevity. The plot is well-written and uses the cyberpunk setting very well. I don't recommend getting this game if you don't like reading and paying attention to the story.

The combat system is more basic than I'd like, but it manages to be fun. The hacking mechanics should have been polished more, considering how important they are.

I like the character progression as a whole, but many of the choices are rather forced (specifically the damage immunities and mobility augments).

I don't know if it's worth full price, but definitely get it when on sale.

No way to scale the interface, which is hard to read from 1080p upwards. The settings menu is almost as poor as the ones in mobile games.

If you need any proof that video games can be art, play this game.

It's an absolute masterpiece of aesthetics and storytelling, as is to be expected from Supergiant Games, but the gameplay is also engaging and refreshing. It's a bit of a slow burner, but never once have I felt bored by this game.

You're most likely here to hear about the gameplay so I'll get to the point: it's challenging but fair, stressful but rewarding, and this, even though losing is not something to necessarily avoid at all costs. Which gets me to the next point.

Choices matter, they really do. It's amazing how everything ties together no matter how deep into the campaign, even though the choices you have to make have so drastic and visible results.

Why NOT play Pyre then? Well, if any of the following describes you, it's possible that you won't enjoy it as much as I did (but I'd still give it a shot at least on discount):
- You are bored by any form of narration, no matter how well done.
- You want all the action right away.
- You are a cold, grey being with no soul whatsoever.

A must have if you like to play or even make boardgames or pen & paper.
Please don't use it to play Monopoly though. .-.

I played this game and its predecessor (Bloodline Champions) since their alphas. It's the only one of its kind, unfortunately.
I love it, so why do I not recommend it?

I would have recommended it until... now, actually. It has a few problems that make the experience frustrating; they wouldn't matter, if only there had been any effort whatsoever towards fixing them.

1. Stuttering. The game stutters quite often when some abilities are cast - this doesn't happen on every machine but it does on mine, and it shouldn't. It's been there since closed alpha and it's still there now with no improvement. It's as if the game didn't pre-load all animations that will be needed before the fight, which is an unthinkable oversight if I'm right, and still a long-lived unfixed bug if I'm not right.

2. Balance. The game balance is getting worse and worse. It's far better than other similar games have, but the worst part is the direction it's going to. The devs seem to buff all the most unfun mechanics (roots, silences) and as a result, characters who don't employ them end up in the gutter the more patches are released. I'd rather they'd found different mechanics that leave some room for counter play but apparently, according to the devs, you can only have fun when you take it away from others.

3. Inconsistencies. Sometimes abilities are fixed because some aspect of them is too strong. But similar abilities other characters have are left untouched despite possessing that same aspect, probably because that other character is not that strong right now. The result is that the player cannot expect any consistency. You need to learn what every ability in the game does when reacting with each other ability, because something that looks like an AoE might count as a melee attack instead and vice-versa. Who knows if it's counterable or not.

4. Patch rate. Considering how fast the game is to play, data on individual characters and abilities is probably gathered fast and in great quantity, but despite this, the patches, which come months apart, barely contain balance changes. It's just my humble opinion, but I think a fast game should have more frequent patches; since problems are detected quickly by the players, why can't the devs detect them as quickly?
This also applies to gameplay bugs. At the time of writing, Ezmo is being played a lot because his talent "after using your shield, throw a projectile based on how much stuff you parried" deals damage even when not parrying anything, and the amount of damage it deals is immensely higher than the tooltips suggest. There is clearly soemthing wrong and people know it, this is disrupting ranked queue, and yet no patch or hotfix has come since the patch that introduced the problem.

5. Visual inconsistency. Quite simply, things don't seem to have the size they really have. I reckon this may be intentional since it makes gameplay more dynamic, but I don't think it has any place in this game, where every hit has the potential to matter a lot. Some abilities have giant round AoEs that when actually played, seem to actually be somewhat square in shape. Projectiles which appear to have a certain width actually hit you even when they should (according to the visuals) barely miss you. Some characters have to rely very heavily on raw footwork to dodge stuff in order not to waste important cooldowns, but these inconsistencies make it basically a diceroll to determine whether you'll be hit or not.

Just to clarify my position once again: I've been with this game since its predecessor was born, I love it and I dare say I'm not even bad at it, but now I'm pretty close to uninstalling it because there are so many less frustrating games I could be playing instead. Thanks for reading this far.

Hardest boiled game on Steam. Play it and die of stress, literally.