One of the greatest first impressions I have had with a game in years... Maybe ever?

Yeah actually. Absolutely.

'Atomic Heart' starts off hot and not just with the robot babes that I'm sure you've seen spammed all over the place. If you require further research, just look at Iru's review near the most liked. Those robots do be robottin'. The robutt.

Doesn't do anything for me but I do think it is pretty funny how the conversation around this game has pulled a RE Village when it was previously very controversial lmao. You see them once near the beginning and for the rest of the time I played it never again. Oldest trick in the book. They call that the "Babe & Switch".

The 'Bioshock Infinite' intro ripoff without the Beach Boys. fuck you mike love. yeah i'm not capitalizing your first and last name chump!

The 'Prey (2016)' intro swagger jacking.

All of it was blatantly obvious but it looks absolutely incredible. Didn't really care if this thing was going to end up derivative and I thought maybe it would be fun in time. Running on a 3080ti, I was and continue to be very impressed by parts of this game (visuals/music, hi Mick Gordon ilu) even with the knowledge that I'm not going to go back to it after 7 hours.

Gorgeous as the first hour of it may be, it is so fucking tedious I almost can't believe it.

Go over here, go over there, go to these six different places to open an area and then do it again while fighting robots that strangely look like hitler with sponge damage. I couldn't take the robots seriously at all with their design and if anything, it almost helped this become a "so bad it loops around into being good" situation but no, maddeningly tedious.

If we're going to continue to give 'Forspoken' shit for how they went about the script and their protagonist, this absolutely deserves to be roasted to the same degree. This isn't so bad its good or 'Duke Nukem', this dude stinks. Even forgiving that he's an asshole to his partner (a nauseatingly vocal british glove just like how 'Forspoken' had a vomit inducing british talking wristband) or he won't shut the fuck up about critters, he is blatantly an instrument for the developers to make fun of you for wasting your time with the mindless objectives they have provided. They do not respect the player by any means.

'Atomic Heart' will have some fans and in NO way is this an awful game but is your time not more valuable than this?

No matter if it is on game pass or you bought it elsewhere, I think it is. I know you want another 'Bioshock', 'Prey (2016)', 'System Shock 2' or what have you but I truly believe your time is way more valuable than anything 'Atomic Heart' can give you. Besides possibly the robots.

EDIT: Also the FOV can't be changed and it makes you feel like you're stuck in an elevator with melee players and nobody has any cell reception. Dire.

when I was a kid my folks said I was "wasteful" for not eating lukewarm canned corn. if only they could see what mundfish did with this artstyle and soundtrack

ever wanted bioshock with crafting? me either, but some pervert out there's rubbing his slimy palms together and I'd salute him as long as there was glass or iron bars between us

here's a tip from the boy genius: set the audio to any language you don't understand and let the microscopic subtitles safekeep you from the dialogue so you can make it more than an hour in

as far as the rest of this shit goes? I tried, I really did. I installed this twice so you know I'm being honest. do you know how long it takes me to download 75.24GB? you'd fuckin puke if you did

credit where credit's due I never thought I'd play a thing where the core loop is bashing a couple bots, LARPing as the vacuum from teletubbies, and feeding trash to a sexual assault appliance but here we are wow gaming has sure come a long way

I think it's finally an artform go dig up ebert and let him know

My Abandonware is one of my favorite sites, and some of my favorite people ever are those who fix up old games just to make them playable on modern operating systems for those wishing to experience their childhood again. They didn't need to do that, but they did and I'm forever grateful for that, because I sure as hell wouldn't have been able to pull that off with my preschool level programming skill.

Imagine you were a kid and for some reason Mattel shipped you five hundred Hot Wheels playsets leaving them all on your front yard one morning, that's essentially the plot of this game. How did this happen? Are you a kid who got the house to themselves while stealing their parent's credit card number? Is it a power fantasy being daydreamed in your little mind as you're tortured at school from sitting through math class? I can relate, I'd slap at least ten members of US Congress for all those playsets in addition to just doing that for free.

Stunt Track Driver is essentially just an FMV time trial racer, there's a championship mode, but your only opponent is the time limit counting down that threatens you with a good ol' Famicom-esque punishment of sending you back to the first track if you dare to let it hit zero, and slow you to a crawl as your little wee diecast car suddenly runs out of Hot Wheels brand fuel. The Attic stage was, and still is my worst nightmare. Little corner turns with hops in them to make you inexplicably tumble offscreen as a wav file of someone kicking a dodgeball through a Lego set plays, then you got the damn cat making you have to correct yourself mid-air after it sends your car flipping upwards from gingerly pawing around in the mouse hole. All with the tiniest shred of time available to you, because fuck you we only have six (seven, one's hidden in the damn Mattel logo) stages, aside from the track editor where you can connect five Volcano Blowout sets in a row in your garage.

Who the fuck keeps a suit of armor with an axe in their attic? Who you duelin' at midnight grandpa?

Stunt Track Driver is wonky due to it's dastardly FMV nature, it has no opponents to race, a mysterious force of nature could suddenly take you out as you're navigating a hard corner, and it might take an hour tops to see everything it has to offer. What's with this game? I'll tell ya what's with it. It's a heartwarming return from a 20+ year absence from my heart, that's what it is. To be a wee little diecast car racing around playsets in a random suburban house with no viewable humans, that's what it means to be a kid again.

Unspeakable levels of pleasant feelings I have for this silly kids game about kids toys, I love it so.

What I Look For In a Life Partner: stereotypically Italian, makes pizza and knows how to perform a spinning piledriver.

You know what I'm tired of? Player characters who only do wimpy attacks like jumping on their enemies, or swiping with their dinky-ass little broadswords. What are ya gonna do with that buster sword? Tickle me to death? I'm here to grapple with every goddamn thing I see, and uppercut them through the ceiling straight into other enemies, initiating a combo and gaining points like an even more sadistic version of bowling. Like a demented pizza-making freight train I dash around colliding into everyone like an Ed Edd n' Eddy character straight outta Hell with nothing to lose. I do a sick body splash too. You see that stupid sunglasses-wearin' pineapple guy? I'm gonna beat the daylights outta him. I hate him! He ruins every pizza he touches! I'm gonna smash you into the ground Pineapple Man!!! BOOM! POW! SMACK!

BRUTALITY IS ME! I AM THE BRUTALIZER!

It kind of goes without saying what Pizza Tower is attempting to mimic. I mean, you know why I'm playing this, and I know why you're probably interested in it. Hell, it even has a golf stage perhaps as an allusion to the third game. Mario is jealous! He is so mad that Wario has better games than him! He can't take it anymore! He politicked to Nintendo and made Wario sit behind a desk to develop microgames for wee ant babies, while Mario continued to hog the spotlight! Denying us more pure Wario games with shoulder charging and butt smashing action! Say no more though, because a wacky Italian pizza chef straight out of some kind of What A Cartoon-ass 90s era CN show is here to deliver the good shit.

In the case of whether you're wondering if it pulls it off well, I personally think it passes with multiple flying colors of some sort. I would even go as far as to say it adds enough to become it's own identity regardless of it's painfully obvious inspiration. Peppino is a big-time brawler that I mesh with as well as tomato sauce and mozzarella, and just when you think the transformations are gonna start repeating they instead just keep cranking out more. Well, except near the end, they kinda go overboard on a certain one involving a semi-ranged weapon that people tend to hate in multiplayer. Still pastrami cool though, and it's gonna be really satisfying once you start making this game your main squeeze and master it to the nth degree.

THE CHECKLIST:
•Heavyweight character move-set with professional wrestling moves [X]
•Collecting shit, but not too much shit. [X]
•Blast Processing [X]
•Sick Boss Fights [X]
•Cartoon Aesthetic [X]

Yup, that's a bunch of boxes checked. Vee is in love maybe. Pizza Tower, I choo-choo-choose you to be my Valentine. Swoon

Somehow every review I write on this ends up
hampered by issues in clarity,
issues of both creative phrasing and,
technically, meaningful content.

For certain, my critique on the game is simple;
on any grounds, the writing and story are harmful,
routinely espousing the most toxic of views towards victims.

Clearly, Bloober Team relies on shock tactics to earn clout, an
underhanded attempt to earn viral attention through harmful
notions and rhetoric. I'm not writing in clearest terms, and
that could be chalked up to being tired of thinking about this
shit for cunts.

You can go fast in Pizza Tower. Like really fast! I guess not fast enough because my warped little brain wanted to go even faster. I found myself instinctively holding the left or right button on the d-pad with an iron grip so tight my thumb started to hurt. All in the vain attempt to gain more speed.

I've been following this game on and off since 2019 and I'm so glad it turned out as great as it did. I played Wario Land 4 in preparation for this game and boy, its influences are very apparent. The most obvious one being the rush mechanic. In Wario Land 4, jumping on a frog switch activates a timer and you have to race back to the level's starting point. What this also does is change the level's environment; paths originally closed off by blocks are now open, and vice versa. In Pizza Tower this activates after attacking Pillar John and is known as Pizza Time. Just like in Wario Land 4, it's a race to the beginning, but along the way you can do some backtracking for collectables or secrets that you might have missed on the initial run through, the clock is always ticking though! The whole thing is quite exhilarating; making it back to the beginning with just a few seconds to spare is so gratifying.

To aid you in achieving breakneck speed you have a pretty sizable move set, a lot of these pretty much taken from Wario Land. You have the continuous dash, grab, ground pound, and all that fun stuff, but unlike Wario, you have a super jump which can be performed by holding up while in a continuous dash state at max speed. You can do a sick ass piledriver by pressing down in midair while you're holding onto an enemy. Wario doesn't have that (he has a piledriver in Wario World)! Defeating an enemy starts a combo which is maintained by defeating more enemies and collecting toppings scattered around the levels. Defeating enemies also raises your heat meter which increases the points given out; additionally, this makes enemies more aggressive, so make sure you don't drop your combo! Oh wait, you have this taunt which is totally useless right? Well, this totally useless taunt can turn into a screen wipe after accumulating enough points, indicated by you having an electric aura around you. The taunt can act as a parry for enemy attacks and projectiles as well.

This game is just fun and that's really all I can say about it. It's a video game ass video game and I'm all here for it. Side note for anyone playing, after the animated intro sequence, you see Peppino sitting in a dark room. Let this idle for about 40 seconds for a cool reward!

At least Poppy playtime was honest.

- Merch store and sequel despite just releasing
- Blatant Poppy Playtime and Rainbow Friends wannabe
- Advertised as a full game even though it's a 20 minute tech demo
- Kindergarten bought from Aliexpress
- There are no system requirements
- Forced motion blur (it looks really bad)

ALSO THE GAME OVER SCREEN IS LITERALLY JUST THE LETTER "t" HOW DID THEY FORGET