Scribblenauts Unlimited is a unique game where the whole gimmick is that you can write down anything, and it will materialize for you. You use this to solve puzzles and sometimes defeat enemies.

"Oh no, I need someone to cut that rope", so you type "Huge knife with lazers, guns and wings" to solve the issue. This sounds fun on its own, but ie gets extremely old quickly. Most of the time you spawn in the same 5 items to solve all the different quests, and the game rarely makes you think outside of the box.
The issue with being able to do anything is that it's hard to design clever puzzles, especially without hinting in the puzzle wording itself how it can be solved.

While the game is fun enough on its own in the beginning, after only a couple of hours you have really seen all it has to offer, and the mechanics aren't interesting enough to make a lasting impression.

Dungeon Defenders was one of the first games I purchased on Steam, and wow, what a banger it once was.

The game with almost infinite grinding potential, endless of hours well spent. A tower defense where you're forced to team up with people to succeed if you want to get the best gear. A really smart way to encourage you playing with strangers. Even if these strangers are weaker than you, they still help out by being able to upgrade your gear for you.

Trendy, or Chromatic Games as they're called now really struct lightning in a bottle. We played this game for years, and since it was such a cheap game, it was incredibly easy to make friends join you. Despite the unbalanced mess it was behind the scenes, it was a good time.
If you weren't grinding away for loot, you were probably going through the player shops, hoping to find some good armor or weapons for you to use.

As with most games, this game eventually stopped getting dev support, and the community slowly dwindled away. Though it has seen somewhat of a resurgence in the past few years, we all hope that something similar can be created in the future, with current technology.

Unfortunately Chromatic has turned out to be the scum of the earth. They create multiple DD clones, sell the game based on hype, overpromise and underdeliver every time. Some games like Dungeon Defenders Going Rogue I'd argue is a straight up scam. Others, like Dungeon Defenders Awakened had promise, but they always end up ruining the experience with a patch (such as deleting all your items, or removing things from the game so it'll run better on switch).

If you want to play a DD game, stick with the original.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. What a wild ride this has been. I first purchased this game in 2014, and it never escaped my mind after that.

Including Counter-Strike Source, I have been playing CS on and off for over 10 years. Absolutely crazy to think about.

So, what makes this game so magical? The expertly crafted momentum based movement, the way the guns feel, the endless skill ceiling, the passion in the voice chat, and the feeling of no matter how much everyone hates each other, we still try our best to win.

No matter how many shooters that come out that could in theory replace this game as my go-to, whether it's R6, Overwatch or Valorant, I always seem to come back. Unlike most live services, the beauty of CS is that it's consistent. You'll learn to play with the AK, and it remains almost identical, 10 years later. You learn a map, and it's still there when you return. Your lineups, strategies and old muscle memory never becomes useless because a patch messed it all up.

Counter-strike is the constant. You always come back.

Though I am excited for CS2, it is almost sad to see this game disappear. We've been through so much, but it had to come to an end at some point.

My memories with this game will be a special part of me for the rest of my life.

Rivals of Aether came out at the perfect time for me. I was beginning to grow tired of the combo game in Smash 4, and despite doing very well for myself competitively, I found myself yearning to play something with a bit more variation.

Then Rivals came out. In my eyes this game had the "anything goes" combo game of smash melee, with the more fluent controls of modern smash games. Every character also had their unique gimmicks and ways to control the stage, which is not something we had really seen before.

The game was fun, and the only thing really holding it back was the lack of a playerbase and somewhat poor netcode. Here is my Steam Review from 2015:
I have played Super Smash Brothers all of my life, and I instantly fell in love with this game after seeing some gameplay. After Smash 4 came out, I haven't really played anything else on my console (currently 700 hours in ((update: 2000 hours in)), and I am sure I'll play this a whole lot too. An aggresive smash-like game with no shields, infinte combos and a very interesting way of edgue guarding. All characters are unique, and have something special to them. This game is amazing.

Here are my Pros and Cons.

Pros:
+Smooth gameplay
+All characters play completely different, and have their own side objectives
+Beautiful art
+Balanced
+Next to no bugs, which is a huge plus for an early access game
+Endless possibilities. You can basically combo anything into anything
+Unique features, which makes you play completely diffeent from Smash Bros
+Shovel knight

Cons:
-Online rooms (both private and public) only support 2 players
-No team mode online (I'd love to be able to play 2v2s)
-REALLY hard to find matches if you're in Europe. Play with friends or use online chat rooms



I am sure most of my cons will be gone after a couple of updates, but until then they're staying. And to end off this review:

lol m2k

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Now, in 2023, the game has been graphically reworked, it has Steam Workshop and fantactic mod support, features player progression and has a sequel on its way. It's only up from here.

Slap City came out not long before Smash Bros Ultimate, and was a perfect game to play for a little while before Smash came out.

The game is silly, competently made, with tons of love, flair, fun combos and unique character. It does everything it needs to, while also offering tons of extra "fun" modes. The game got dev support for about 4 years, which is actually longer than Smash Ultimate did.

Overall a very fun game with satisfying combos. Makes for a fantastic party game too. That said, it did not offer enough to be a staple of my friends group, and we never really found ourselves coming back to this game more than a few times.

An okay social deduction game. Charming amogus characters, decent minigames, and a very simple to understand gameplay loop. This game is incredibly accessible, available pretty much everywhere and costs almost nothing. No wonder it took off.

While the game is fine enough, the main drive to this game is really how accessible it is. There are many better games in the genre with more depth, variety, bigger scope and overall more gameplay than Among Us, yet many find themselves keep playing this one. Why?
Everyone has it. Trying to get friends to play Project Winter or Trouble in Terrorist Town has you trying to set up a server, or get all your friends to buy a game so they can mod in the game they want, or has them try to play a first person shooter when they have barely played video games before. Among Us skips all of that. No need to explain the rules, no need to learn how to play a video game, no need to own a good PC or even be a gamer. You can just play.

That is why I found myself playing this game so many times during the past couple of years. But is the game itself great? Ehh, it's alright. Lacks depth and if you "play to win" instead of playing to have fun it quickly becomes an unbalanced mess with no way for the impostor to really do anything.

Sea of thieves feels like a "nothing-game" to me. It is kind of like hanging out in a park. The park in itself may be pretty, there may be some activities you can do there, but overall the park itself has no objective to complete. Going to the park alone offers not much else than a nice break from whatever you were doing, but you can't describe it as "fun". The fun comes when you bring your friends and you start messing around.

The fun doesn't come from the game, it comes from your friends. While Sea of Thieves is charming and has started to introduce storylines, it overall feels pointless. After playing the game for 30 minutes you have seen everything it has to offer. It is one person steering the boat, the others jumping around, emoting or randomly shooting around until you reach your objective, at which point you run to the chest, maybe do some mediocre combat, and return with the treasure which is honestly a pain to drag from your boat to the store.

It's not really fun, and you are not rewarded for your time. There is no progression. Your boat won't change, you cannot find new weapons, there are no upgrades, no nothing. What you spawn in with is what you get. You do all of this to get currency to buy skins. This sounds cool, until you realize most of these same skins can just be bought for real cash. So there is nothing to gain by playing the game.

Going under is a charming roguelite that tasks you with exploring failed businesses below your startup. The main gimmick is that you can grab almost anything as a weapon. It's fun to grab a random cactus and yeet it at an enemy, and the visual gags are mostly funny. The jokes mostly land, one of my favorite being a cube attached to a chain called "The Blockchain", which you can use to damage enemies.

That said, the gameplay itself is just okay. Runs don't change it up, and there aren't many lvls to play through before the game wants you to go back to re-complete older stages. Overall enjoyable, cute and funny but it lacks real depth.

I love RoR2. It is one of those roguelites that challenge you to completely break it. Everything you do gives you an affect, for example, "+15% attack speed". Cool, now print that 20 times for 300% attack speed, become the machine gun you've always meant to be. This philosophy extends to every item, and there are many.
If you play your cards right, you can become so powerful that you can win by doing absolutely nothing. The game tries to spawn enemies equal to your power. Well, you can become so powerful that the game is unable to find anything worth challenging you with, so it stops spawning enemies. You have become the God of nothing.

The gameplay is highly addictive. Opening chests, seeking what items you get. Listening to the incredible soundtrack in the background, trying to manipulate the RNG in a way that gives you a consistent build.

Playing with friends gives you an even better experience. Fight over items, spawn the boss before everyone is ready, get upset when your friend who specced into 200% speed can get into every chest before you, then all suffer when that same friend who hoarded the items jumps into the wrong enemy and dies, leaving you all powerless to do much else.

It's great fun, tons to do. My only complaint is that it only has about 200 hours of gameplay before you run out of things to do. Now what will I do with all of my time? Play The Binding of Isaac?

Gunfire Reborn is probably the okayest game I ever played. It does nothing particularly well, but it isn't exactly bad either. It is one of the only multiplayer roguelites that allow for 4 player co-op, so me and my friends kept playing when we had nothing better to do.

"Nothing better to do" is kind of what it boils down to. We would play this if we were too tired to focus on a competitive game, or too busy talking to play anything with a story. No one would hop on and say "I really want to play Gunfire Reborn today", it's kind of where we just ended up sometimes.

Overall, it provided hours of stuff to do, I guess. That gotta count for something. It runs well, looks OK, functions, and it's easy to just "hop on and do a run".

That said, the game isn't exactly fun. Runs feel extremely samey, you are more or less locked to your gun for the entire run once you start upgrading, there is little enemy variety, the zones do not mix up like in most roguelites, scrolls feel like minor number tweaks instead of fun effects, you often get runs where you either deal excessive amounts of damage or almost no damage at all, there is no way to manipulate RNG, no risks, no rewards. It feels shallow. Unlike most Roguelites, this game also becomes easier the more you play, instead of the challenge ramping up. The game has you grind currency so you can purchase permanent upgrades. More health, deal more damage, less cooldowns, and more money on startup. It sounds fun, but other than it being a poor attempt at giving you something to do, it makes the game less interesting the more you play.

Is it a bad game? No. Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that me and my friend group already 100% completed Risk of Rain 2, we probably would never have touched this.

I will recommend this game only if you already beat Risk of Rain 2, have a friends group too large to play Roboquest, have finished Borderlands 2 and there is nothing else to play. If you fulfill all of these criteria, this game is for you.

This game more or less just "showed up" one day out of nowhere. "Oh, it's like Hearthstone, but singleplayer", I thought. I play it for a while, and wow. Just wow.
It essentially created today's deckbuilding roguelikes, and it hit it out of the park on its first try. Despite the many clones, no one has managed to to surpass the greatness that is Slay the Spire. The amount of different combos, strategies, the variation in gameplay and the level of control you have in the RNG has not been bested by anybody else yet.
I cannot wait to see what Mega Crit Games do next.