Combat Complex

Twin-stick shooter against various bugs and robots with some ARPG gearing, and the action here is fantastically tight with probably three key factors:

• Enemies target you but hit each other, so you manage their attacks to help your fighting instead of just staying out of trouble.
• “Frenzy” orb pickups, which act a bit like combo meter fuel except instead of chaining hits you make frequent choices about whether an orb drop is worth chasing, keeping you close to danger.
• Instant gun switching with overheating instead of reloading, so you fight hard and switch constantly between your three guns to keep any one from overheating while getting the best out of their specific properties.

I play a lot of twin-stick and top-down shooters, and this does a great job mixing the arcade twin-stick feel of high intensity fending off a swarm with tactical top-down dungeon crawling elements, and it’s just really special feeling to play. The core action feels not just well designed but like it was made just for me, and I’m genuinely glad someone made it (or is making it, since it’s early access). Plus, it’s extraction style instead of being a roguelite, so you’re always right at the best action while still getting procedural levels, so each run is a little different.

the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet

Sure, but there’s also plenty to explore, especially for people who haven’t played PoE1 and have to learn how things work from scratch. Given you don’t pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.

But probably more important that early access characters and stuff aren’t available out of early access, so you are explicitly playing temp characters. Fine if one treats their early/seasonal characters as temp characters anyway, but someone else might not want to play characters with no future after early access.

Yeah, the insistence on trading as a key part of the game (despite the garbage trading system) absolutely murders your loot, which is just a huge drag in a loot game.

Global trading means drop rates and gear quality have to be kept down across the entire playerbase, so stinginess is built in deeply on top of GGG’s inherent worship of time-wasting and RNG.

BTW, PoE2 separates skill gems from gear and removes color gem slot restrictions, so that at least frees you of the way PoE1 needed a drop to be good and to get good links and to get the colors you needed on those links. On the other hand, the simplified gem system is missing some life and fun. You don’t even level gems by using them anymore. You just burn a higher level gem drop to level a gem you already have.

No, at least six months is the plan.

It does have a price in a sense, but that price also gets you that exact value in premium currency, so you don’t actually pay anything extra for early access, you’re just required to buy that much currency to open the doors.

I used to be very patientgamer, but my patience model changed after finding again and again that buying late meant devs had wholly moved on from a game by the time I got it, and would hardly ever do basic needed fixes, things that needed to have been talked about earlier in the project. I also noticed how some early access sales would take years for the price to go up and then back down again for what amounted to only a few dollars of savings. Savings that, as I watch games I’m interested in fail in obscurity over and over, I don’t feel quite right about strictly withholding from the few devs taking chances on such projects for me, on top of not being around to try and help the project deliver a better game to players.

So, now I do buy some games in early access or even newly released, where I can poke the dev while they are still around, and my patience includes waiting for games to get through those after-buying growing pains instead of just waiting for them to drop into the discount bins, mostly forgotten by their devs and players both.

I’m still generally more strictly price-patient on most anything larger scale, both by devs and by audience.

Week 1

• You’ll Never Find Me 2023
• I am Not a Serial Killer 2016
• Ghost Mansion 2021 KOR (rewatch)
• Bad CGI Gator 2023
• Strange Darling 2024
• Terrifier 2017
• Hostile Dimensions 2024
• V/H/S/Beyond 2024
• It’s What’s Inside 2024
• The Corpse Washer 2024 IND
• Jakob’s Wife 2021
• Beezel 2024
• Things Will be Different 2024
• Killer Condom 1996 GER

Week 2

• A Wounded Fawn 2022
• Qorin 2022 IND
• Indigo 2023 IND
• Blink Twice 2024
• Delirium: Photo of Gioia 1987 ITA
• Luz 2018 GER
• Girl on the Third Floor 2019
• Clawfoot 2023
• Post Mortem 2020 HUN
• Terrifier 2 2022
• Phantoms 1998
• It Lives Inside 2023
• Green Room 2015
• The Radleys 2024
• Temurun 2024 IND
• The Sacrifice Game 2023
• Open 24 Hours 2018
• Lavalantula 2015

Thoughts

You’ll Never Find Me, A Wounded Fawn, Post Mortem, and Beezel were unexpected finds. It’s What’s Inside was expected to be good, and was still quite fun. Luz… was notably weird but probably workable. We’ll keep that around.

Strange Darling was awful. Big disappointment there, based on talk. We didn’t expect much from VHS Beyond, especially with the alien theme, but one always hopes for anthologies to pull some surprises. Like most of VHS 2 and on, at least it wasn’t worse.