Musical Bullet-Dodger 'Afterbeat' Leaves Early Access with Thousands of Custom Levels

I am tanking incomprehensible amounts of psychic damage daily because I am a moron and want to keep the entire games industry in my field of view.

While I'm not as hardline as some, I've removed my saved payment info and any other identifying stuff from my Epic account, because goddamn I cannot trust you assholes with anything anymore.

I really love how much the sprites in Boltgun 2 (even moreso than the first) look like painted miniatures. There's a soft-shaded matte look to them all. It makes the game feel like playing with intricately painted but still absurd toys.

Just screaming into the void on this one. Could we just have ONE WEEK without man-made horrors making un-man-made horrors?

this has lived in my head for a week and I gotta let it out

I mean, people got really mad about the Assassin's Creed series changing *too much*, shifting entirely from a stealth series into a Witcher-like open world RPG for a whole trilogy. While Ubisoft may have a clear house style, they're still making bigger swings than you'd think.

Oh, it still is weird on so many levels and keeps making wild mechanical and narrative turns. It's just that the core combat just works like the developers clearly intended now.

I mean, I could just as easily come up with 30 Amiga platformers that look nigh identical, right down to the chunky bottom-bar UI. It might resonate, but emotions lie.

You see it SO often. Very popular game with 90%+ positive user reviews gets a major update or free expansion years later. Something everyone should be happy with. 'Recent reviews: 50% positive', and if you look, it's people who are clearly just very sad, rationalizing why they've fallen out of love

I've said it before, but while there's Recession Indicators everywhere, I think Steam user reviews are a great general Depression Indicator. As people get sadder and more frustrated with the world they grow more likely to take it out on their leisure-things. And they've got a public venue to do so

Not only is this smart design, but also yeah, Wanted: Dead is pretty neat. The metacritic score represents a jankier version of the game, too. They did a round of major overhaul updates that really smoothed it out mechanically. Of course, the Steam user review only drops over time, because... ?🤷?

And honestly you really don't need those until you get into the expansions anyway. There's fast-travel points EVERYWHERE.

Still an excellent game after 14 years, and they've now fixed the last big reason I'd ever tell someone to hold off on playing it. The free trial is *easily* 100+ hours of open-world action RPG goodness. Significantly more if you want to really strip everything from its bones.

Son of a bitch. I JUST wake up, I open Bluesky, and THIS is what I see first!? Pour one out for Redlynx. The Trials games were fantastic and Ubisoft never seemed to know what to do with them. Hope they don't axe the user-made content servers next... but this is Ubisoft.

The pawns have such an excitable puppy-like core to them. Even when they're completely failing, it somehow feels in character.

A funny number of people I know worked on this game. Folks are cool. Game's cool too.