Category: PC Games

Friend Vs Friends

I enjoy playing Friends Vs Friends. I don’t enjoy its progression structure for unlocks, and I will complain about that in a bit. One person I played with called it “Play-To-Win” which is very funny way of putting it, and also felt kind of accurate. But let’s start with the good stuff.

Genre1v1/2v2 FPS
Recommend? Y/NYes.
Price$10. Deluxe Ed $18. No IAP.
PlatformPC
Short VersionBest as a party game with friends. Progression systems are a bit annoying, but not a deal breaker.

Friends Vs Friends is a 1v1 and 2v2 first person shooter with a pleasant low-poly vibe. The goal is simple: kill the other player before they kill you to win a round. Win 3 rounds before they do to win the match.

So now it’s time for the twist.

Before a game, you build a deck of cards. Using a card can give you a weapon or other equipment, buff you, debuff an opponent, or other wild and weird things.

Perhaps most importantly for the purpose of strategy, unused cards carry over between rounds, and it’s possible to see which cards the opponent uses. So if they pop a powerful weapon, give me a big head, and slow on me on me at the start of the round, I might decide it’s not even worth committing resources to try to win that round. Instead I might pool up cards, then try to push through on a future one.

The end result is a really fun blend of moment to moment resource management, and FPS skill. Time to kill is fairly high overall, with most weapons requiring a large number of hits. This is important because it gives you the time you need to decide what cards to use.

The most fun I’ve had with Friends Vs Friends is playing it as a sort of party game with 3-4 friends who I talked into getting it. It’s relatively easy to set up a private game, invite folks, and then just jump into it. Running around, yelling at each other, trash talking, and calling every single round winning clutch is great.

But some parts are not as great. So let’s talk about them.

Progression and other complaints

Deckbuilding in Friends Vs Friends is reliant on collecting cards. You buy card packs with a in-game earned currency. There are two types of card packs: basic and rare. Rare packs cost twice as much as the basic ones, and it feels like you earn currency pretty slowly.

The frustrating thing about the cards is that they use what I’ve come to think of as the “Clash of Clans” model. That’s the one where duplicates don’t give you more copies of the card to work with, they just upgrade the existing card’s power level. Which is not very fun, because it means duplicates of a rare card (instead of feeling special and improving your deck a lot) just give you a like 3% boost.

But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is quests.

There are daily and weekly quests, because of course there are, and they give much larger amounts of EXP than just playing games. This would be fine, except for one thing.

You can’t complete these quests in games withfriends, or anything that isn’t random online matchmaking.

And the random online matchmaking, suffers from two really big issues. First of all, it’s very easy to just drop out of a match after a loss. So you can expect to see a lot of canceled rematches. This in turn means a fair amount of time spent waiting for the next match.

To be fair, I would also probably quit after losing a match to someone at progression level 100.

Secondly, it just isn’t quite as fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable with a group of friends shouting at each other over voice chat, and with the ability to make a fair set of 2v2’s by balancing teams.

But grinding online is the best way to unlock more cards and money to play with, and also the only way to unlock the in-game cosmetics.

So the weird end result is that the best way to play a game called Friends Vs Friends is, in fact, to not play it against your friends.

Overall

I like Friends Vs Friends. The gunplay is fun, and it feels fantastic as a group game. Unfortunately for my group of folks, it sort of got its lunch eaten by BattleBit in the FPS department. But we were having a good time with it before that.

It probably would have been better if the quests/progressions/unlocks didn’t work the way they did, or there was more capacity to really deckbuild. As it is, it’s fun, but the deckbuilding is never about building cool combos. Ultimately deckbuilding is just a “Stuff as much good stuff as you can” sort of vibe.

Overall thought, it’s good! I just wish there was a bit more to it, and some tweaks to a few systems because it could have been great.

Deceive Inc

Deceive Inc is out. This game’s been on my watch list for a while, mostly based off playing the demo a while back. I’ve managed to rack up 30 hours so far, and I’m ready to give my thoughts. I do like Deceive Inc, and I recommend it. BUT.

In what feels very appropriate, I don’t think Deceive Inc is actually the stealth game it might first appear to be. Or, at least, it’s not quite a stealth game at its core. So let’s talk about that.

Deceive Inc’s Deception

Deceive Inc falls into a lot of genres. It’s a multiplayer stealth action game with battle royale and hero shooter elements.

However, it’s the shooter part that I really want to focus on. The shooting is the most important game mechanic underpinning everything else in Deceive Inc. It’s not what you’ll be spending most of your time doing, necessarily, but it is required for victory. Which brings me to my one big point: if you do not like first person shooters, you will not like Deceive Inc.

If you do enjoy first person shooters, though, you will find this one of the most interesting and unique takes on the battle royale genre that’s been done so far.

More on that later. For now, let’s talk about the general flow of a game of Deceive Inc. Players take the role of spies infiltrating one of several expansive maps, attempting to escape with a briefcase, while avoiding being killed by NPC guards and other players.

I won’t be talking about the AI guards much from here on out. They serve the same purpose as AI in Hunt: Showdown. They’re not actually much of a threat except that drawing their attention them will alert other players to your presence.

Note: Between when I started writing this, and it getting put up on the blog, Deceive Inc has added a new class of NPC called the Elite Guard who are noticeably more lethal. Still not a threat on their own, but absolutely can become a problem in larger firefights.

Fortunately, avoiding the NPC guards is incredibly easy. Deceive Inc has a disguise system called cover. Cover lets a player copy the appearance of any character they can see and stand next to. As long as you have cover that matches the appropriate area, guards will never shoot you.

Author Note: The actual functionality for cover is incredibly interesting. The character other players see doesn’t actually mimic your movement 100%. Instead, it just faces the direction you last moved. This means that you can look around wildly without giving yourself away as a human player. You can also walk backwards to watch behind you, while giving the impression you’re looking in the direction you’re moving.

Cover is broken when you shoot or get shot enough, or if you’re seen for too long in a forbidden area. For example, a staff member cover won’t last long in a guard area.

The primary threat to success is other players, and the actions they take. I have a whole side writeup about the meta strategies currently in vogue.

What Deceive Inc Does Well

Deceive Inc absolutely nails the 70’s spy aesthetic. Every map and character feels like they just stepped out of a portal from the James Bond or Austin Powers movies. There’s a fun but not overwhelming retro-tech theme, and the sound effects and music fit incredibly well. (Casino map when Sweat Bandits?)

My personal favorite, Larcin.

The gunplay is solid, if a bit unusual compared to many other shooters. Time to kill is fairly high, and takes some getting used to. So do some of the behaviors around aiming. Each character also only has a single gun. But in the long run, the biggest difference from most shooters are the activated abilities.

Deceive Inc also has one of the best respawn mechanics that I’ve ever seen in a battle royale. There’s no respawn or bleed out. Instead, downed teammates can always be revived as long as they don’t leave the game. The catch is that each respawn brings them back with lower and lower max health. This rewards quick pickoffs and disengaging, but it’s still always possible to stage a comeback.

The spy and sneaking mechanics are fun and flavorful. Unfortunately, for reasons I wrote about in another post, really trying to blend in and be stealthy isn’t quite the best way to play the game. Even so, the sneaking absolutely sell the fantasy of being the high tech secret agent. The devs have indicated that they’re trying to make the game be a bit more punishing of run and gun, and have released patches to encourage that, so we’ll see how it goes in the long run.

Friction Points and Annoyances

In-game, I have very few annoyances with Deceive Inc. That said, I would really like to be able to see kill replays, and would love to see damage breakdowns upon death. Even after playing for 25 hours, I still often don’t understand how I was spotted out and killed. This makes learning really hard.

In addition, there are a bunch of small things in Deceive Inc that aren’t explained super well. These include various status effects, debuffs, and how specific weapons work. The information is present in the game, but it’s just not super easily exposed. The most recent update added a glossary which I like, but it could still do a bit more.

Out of the actual gameplay, I have one big complaint, and a few minor ones. The biggest complaint is the matchmaking.

The matchmaking is bad.

I recognize that a small player base leads to tradeoffs in order to keep queue time down. That said, getting matched into someone who has played 15 times as much as me feels bad. Getting matched into a whole team of players with that much time played felt even worse. The lack of death breakdowns and kill replays means it’s not possible to even learn from this kind of absolute butchery.

Also, I don’t love that in a game I already paid $20 for, there’s a battle pass on release. Blah blah, server expenses, blah blah, live service. But look. I already gave you $20. C’mon.

Conclusions

Do I recommend Deceive Inc? As long as you enjoy first person shooting mechanics, yes.

Everyone I’ve played this game with so far has enjoyed it, and played more with me, which is ridiculously high bar all things considered. It definitely has pain points, and bunch of unique mechanics that can make it a bit difficult to learn, but I’ve never played anything quite like it.

Guns in Deceive Inc

Author’s Note: This was part of my writeup on Deceive Inc. Partway through, I realized that a 7 paragraph diatribe about gun balance and the current meta might not be the most relevant for deciding if you want to buy Deceive Inc. That said, I still think this post does make an accurate observation about why Deceive Inc plays the way it does.

Deceive Inc sells itself as a stealth game, but after playing a few rounds, it becomes clear that isn’t entirely true. The dominant strategy used by very high level (300, the level cap) players is much more based around fast movement, while ignoring the stealth aspects of the game to a certain extent.

I think this happens because the guns fairly high time-to-kill. Across the characters I’ve played, and had my friends play, here’s a short list with some approximate damage values:

WeaponBody ShotHeadshot
Sniper Rifle3575 (Charged)
Shotgun4550 (ADS)
Pistol10-1520

For reference, a player starts out at 100 health, and some in game upgrades can push them up to 115 health at max.

But the important part here is that there is no way to one-shot kill a full health player. Which I think I think makes sense when you game out a bunch of other factors:

Since Deceive Inc is a battle royale, there is no respawning. You have to play carefully offensively, and defensively. Players want to blend in, and they want to be paranoid of anyone who sticks out. In addition, it’s a fairly small player count battle royale, withonly up to 12-16 players in a match.

So if weapons could one-shot, be it a shotgun at close range, or a sniper headshot, the dominant strategy I think becomes something like “Engage anyone suspicious, and try to one tap them.” If the player is correct, and did spot a disguised human, they instantly win the combat, can disengage, and have permanently removed a threat from the game with very little risk to themself.

If they’re wrong, they’ve made themself a target for anyone else nearby to get one-tapped, and also wasted ammo. But because of the risk of being spotted, I still think the right choice is to blast first, ask questions later. And this encourages a super passive playstyle of taking the minimal number of risks at all points in time, to avoid being found and nuked down.

But weapons don’t one shot. So even if you spot someone else out first, and engage them first with a surprise shot, it’s still very possible for the player who is stronger with the gunplay mechanics to turn and kill you.

This is why I can only recommend Deceive Inc to people who like first person shooters. Playing well against other humans requires winning gunfights. And winning gunfights requires strong FPS skill mechanics. Even though most of the game is spent engaging with the stealth mechanics and trying to avoid trouble, without gunplay skills, you just can’t win.

Treasure And Truth – A Dota 2 Mod

Diablo 4 is out! So long as you’re willing to pay $20 plus the $70 price tag to Blizzard. Blizzard, a company that’s been notable for an unending parade of scandals related to sexual assault and employee mistreatment.

Unfun Fact! Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick threatened over voicemail to kill his personal assistant! But don’t worry, it was settled out of court. I’m sure it was a fair and reasonable settlement, as there’s never been a power imbalance between an employee and their multi-millionaire boss.

Any, where was I? Oh, yes. You could buy Diablo 4, a game that despite costing $70 on release already has a cash shop, and season battle pass.

Or instead of supporting the shambling corpse of a once-loved company whose external face might have always been a lie, you could join me in Treasure and Truth.

Treasure and Truth is a mod for Dota 2. Like Diablo 4, it’s an ARPG, and unfortunately also like Diablo 4, it also has a cash shop, but I’ll get to that part in a bit. Unlike Diablo 4, it’s free!

This is a mod.

Also, I’m going to say some rude things about Treasure and Truth in this review, but I am 100% using the game as Diablo withdrawal methadone at the moment. Ultimately, I do recommend playing. If nothing else, it’s an incredible demonstration of both the potential, and some of the drawbacks of a Dota 2 mod.

Core Gameplay

Treasure and Truth is an action role playing game, which is to say it has no roleplaying, and some action. And since it’s a mod for Dota 2, the standard Dota 2 mechanics and controls mostly apply. It’s top down and semi-isometric.

It’s also Chinese. This is relevant for a number of reasons, but most importantly because of the translation. Or lack of thereof.

I’m not sure what “White Character” means here. I’m almost positive it’s not a buff that only applies if you’re Caucasian.

The game is translated into English, but not all of it, and not always correctly. Some parts are fully translated and make sense. Some parts are translated but not localized. And as a result you end up fighting “Pliers of the Hole,” which is probably supposed to be something like “Jaws of the Abyss.”

Not exactly the most intimidating enemy.

And sometimes, it’s very important when it turns out that #wings2_start_system is supposed to be text telling you how to unlock an entire alternate end-game power system for heavily scaling certain stats.

But anyway: on to core gameplay! There are kinda three modes in Treasure and Truth, but two are the same, so we’re going to cover them as one thing.

The two modes are story and key mode. All this really boils down to is that you go into a big non-changing map, kill monsters until a boss portal opens up, and kill that boss. Rinse and repeat three times, and you’ve cleared the level.

In story mode, enemies give you loot. In the key mode, there’s a timer, and the quality and amount of loot scales with how fast you can finish. There are five base levels, and in classic ARPG style, once you finish a set of them, you unlock the next difficulty.

The other mode is raids.

Raids are a test of your patience, and your ability to find 2-4 other human beings who are capable of understanding concepts like what a circle is, and that sometimes in order to win, you need to stop doing damage for a bit.

Sarcasm and my sanity aside, raids are the most interesting mode, as they actively require paying attention, and knowing certain mechanics. They are also kind of janky, and unlike the other modes, don’t scale stats with player count, so you really need other people to work with.

Heart of the Game

At its core, Treasure and Truth is a gear chase game about making number go up. There are a bunch of systems for doing this, but they all contribute to the same end result. Collecting sets of gear will activate passives, that make numbers go up. Upgrading and collecting pets will make your numbers go up. Clearing the raid will drop unique gear, which as long as another party member who isn’t even of the right class doesn’t fucking “need” it, will make numbers go up.

Look at these numbers.

And collecting the artifacts from the Gacha will make numbers go up. So let’s go back to that monetization for a moment.

Money, Money, Money*

Treasure and Truth has a cash shop. It also has a set of resource systems that I’ll save a lot time by summarizing, “You can’t directly pay to win, but you can buy upgrade materials and items that you would otherwise have to farm, in order to skip grinding.” In addition, you can also buy certain in-game market currency with a system that works the same way as a WoW token.

There are also paid supporter roles that grant in-game buffs, a Gacha for rolling artifacts, and yes, and a paid Battlepass.

You might be wondering why I’m giving Treasure and Truth less shit for this when I opened by ripping Diablo 4 for doing it. Well, for starters, Treasure and Truth isn’t $70.

I might have a bit of a double standard here, but implementing an entire cash shop is something I find impressive when done as part of a mod, and scummy when done as part of full priced retail game. The shitty monetization also isn’t relevant until late game, which I’d imagine most people might not even reach.

In Conclusion

If nothing else, I find Treasure and Truth fascinating as a project. It feels incredibly high effort for a mod on top of someone else’s game, and it’s also incredibly amusing to me as a sort of proto-MMO. As an example of this, one of the current raids has an entire set of mechanics that the community has discovered a way to skip, and this hasn’t been patched.

It’s not a lifestyle game, or even something I can see playing long term, but it’s what I wanted in terms of something I can just turn off my brain and play. And I have had some really entertaining experiences guiding people through raids, and talking with other players trying to understand how the hell certain systems work because they’re not translated properly.

Oh, and writing a set of AHK macros to farm points in the AFK mode.

If you want to play Truth and Treasure, you’ll have to start by downloading Dota 2, then you’ll want to go install this mod from the community.

Ultimately what I’ve really gotten out of Truth and Treasure is a sense of wonder and discovery that I enjoy. There are no guides to the raids. There aren’t any perfect builds. There is no checklist, or speed run of someone who got the game 4 days early reaching level cap before people who pre-ordered could play it.

There is a poorly moderated Discord, untranslated patch notes, and esoteric systems that make no sense, and occasionally might break. And frankly, I love that sort of shit.

Also, the cash shop. Which I don’t love.

Postscript Ramblings

I’ve seen a bunch of discussions on Reddit about pay-to-win MMOs are more common in Korea and China due to cultural differences. There does seem to be a pattern of pay-to-win in games that get ported from those regions. Lost Ark, Black Desert, and MapleStory are all great examples of this. But my only source for this is people saying shit on Reddit, so it’s entirely possible this is just some gamer orientalism. If it is true, Treasure and Truth definitely falls into this pattern with its monetization tactics.

Also, while we’re on the subject of crackpot theories involving China, I really wonder if Treasure and Truth was developed as a mod (as opposed to a standalone game) in order to get around the video game licensing/distribution/censorship issues in China. After all, if you can’t release your own game, co-opting someone else’s game into providing your infrastructure and underlying matchmaking and everything is really clever, and might explain why Treasure and Truth exists as a mod in the first place.

Catch the Fox

Disclosure: I received a key for free on Lurkit.

Let it never be said that I’m a hack reviewer. Developers, if you give me a key to your game, rest assured I will play the entire thing before I review it. Even if that means I spend 93 minutes of my life on a generic repeatable task in an Unreal 5 demo map.

Don’t conflate that with me saying nice things about your game though. Instead, I’ve decided to title this review “Constructive Criticism.”

For the people reading this review who aren’t the developers of Catch the Fox, here’s a brief overview of the game. The player is placed into a large level populated by shrubberies, foxes, and powerups. The goal is to get close enough to touch the foxes. After touching enough foxes, the next level is unlocked. When you touch a fox, its fur gets redder, and then it moves faster.

Movement

The core of Catch the Fox’s gameplay is movement. It’s really the only thing you can do. Getting airborne gives you a speed boost on returning to the ground. This allows the player to skate merrily along. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t for a few issues.

The foxes you need to touch have a hitbox for collisions that’s only slightly smaller then the hitbox for “touching” them. And when you collide with them, you instantly lose all momentum. This absolutely kills any sense of pacing or chaining together multiple tags.

It’s like if every time I stomped a goomba, I had to fill out a death certificate, and inform their next of kin before moving on. In addition, the player’s jump is miserable, capable of clearing a small subset of environmental obstacles and absolutely nothing else. It’s not high enough to jump over foxes, or up to any interesting areas.

Environments and Level Design

Speaking of environmental obstacles, let’s talk about the levels. I have two problems with them. The levels themselves are not laid out in such as a way as to actually encourage use of the movement mechanics. One level, Fractal, while quite pretty, has literally no capacity to gain speed or momentum, and might as well be flat once you reach the bottom layer.

Visually appealing? Yes. Mechanically appealing? Absolutely not.

Secondly, the other levels have been populated with a frankly ridiculous amount of what I’d politely call “environmental chaff.” The game is about touching foxes, not trying to touch foxes and slamming my wooden head into a tree every five inches.

The strongest level had none of these at all. It’s a great big ocean of sand-dunes that form curving pits. This layout actually lets you leap around and gain speed. This level isn’t the most visually diverse, but that doesn’t matter, because this is a video game. It’s about the game mechanics, not the visuals.

Performance and Bugs

The game was actually fairly bug free, though I did once encounter invisible foxes that couldn’t be tagged. It was on the spooky level, so maybe it’s supposed to be like that? Still frustrating and annoying though.

Performance is frankly terrible. I’m running on a 1080, on low graphics, windowed, and I got like 30 FPS. Maybe it’s my setup, but given how much my frame rate goes up when I’m looking at the ground, or not looking at trees, I don’t think that’s the case here. For a fast paced game based around movement, that’s not acceptable.

The strongest level in the game. Is it because it’s not cluttered with trash? Quite possibly!

And while we’re on the subject of graphics: motion blur sucks. No one likes motion blur. Maybe smearing makes things look neat, but in a game, I want to actually be able to see stuff.

Conclusion – For the Devs

You’ve made a movement based game where every aspect of the gameplay plays counter to that. Your level design doesn’t play with the surf and speed gain systems you’ve developed. All clutter and environmental garbage appears to tank the frame rate. Your primary mechanic of tagging plays counter to that movement.

I liked the music, and there is a bit of zen feel to the game on levels like Ocean Outpost when I could get a flow going.

Conclusion – For Everyone Else

Catch the Fox is not currently worth buying. The most interesting thing I got out of playing it was doing this writeup, and reflecting on the interplay between level design and traversal mechanics. It’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit since the terrible game I made for Ludum Dare 53.

If for some reason you read all of this, and still want to buy it, Catch the Fox is $3 on Steam.

PS: All the screenshots in this review are from the Steam page. I’m not hugely interested in playing more of this game in its current state just for image captures.