Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Mar 6, 2022

  Absolutely ruined by a misleading, inaccurate and at best barely-legible map. Outbuddies ensures you'll spend hours looking for pickups the game tells you you've already found, missing tiny rooms indiscernible amongst obnoxiously-placed map icons, and a mini-map drawn to a baffling and unreadable scale. Avoid.
• antholomations

  Jul 16, 2022

  It's unfortunate, this game started with hype: An Explorer, buff and mad with desire to seize the treasures of Gods past, cast down by a wicked storm, his flying fortress dashed into the ocean beneath, and befriend by a robot upon his awakening in forbidden lands. The early half of the game has you sneaking past fearsome foes, and obtaining weapons and tools alike to chart your way to that Old God's Treasure. Then you encounter the gameplay, moving boxes a lot with janky physics, a wall jump that doesn't seem to work on every wall, but every wall looks alike, so... Then there are the controls: (J) is Attack (K) is Interact, Run, Place Bomb. (L) is Go Prone to crawl, and Dodge Roll. Yes, you will be hitting the wrong inputs, and yes I believe you can rebind your keys. But then there's three major issues I have; firstly, there's an ability that you need to progress that is hidden in three different pieces hidden in side passages that you most likely will miss in your travels. Issue one, isn't a problem if not for issue two: There are save points, you save the games progress with those, however when you enter a room, the game checkpoints you at the start of that room, and if you leave the game and start it back up, you are started at the checkpoint, not your save. It gets worse, because if you don't save at save point and die, those things you've collected don't save. Once again, this is something that you can get used to, until issue three appears: The Enemies who charge to attack you in Melee range, or are on narrow cliffs that the only way to fight them would be using a melee attack, but that isn't in your arsenal, no, you have bombs that don't go on every surface, you could try and sneak, but fumble over controls. Then... There is the Skulk Fish. The Skulk Fish doesn't skulk, it doesn't have to, for it's a swarm enemy, eight, differing in size so you will miss most of them, two to three hits to kill each fish, cannot dodge dash past or through them like the dodge roll does (Yes, it's on the same input) and no, they don't have to go around walls to get you, they get to pretend those don't exist, but don't worry those walls are plenty real for you, and they will corner you, and you might survive, but their schools are plenty, and your sanity might not hold out, beware, there are mazes in the deep. In closing, fun start, I beat the second boss, probably won't beat this game, but might return to it throughout the year(s).
• Alcaran

  Dec 31, 2022

  The visuals are great, the controls are fine and something you can get used to, but the game punishes you for doing stuff out of order. You fall down one pit to discover two missing tiles on the map and then you have to repeat an hour-long journey to grab a third orb that levels up your hacking. You should've grabbed it BEFORE you decided to drop down that hole. You probably remember water levels and clunky and slow movement underwater in other metroidvanias right? Well there's a lot of that here. The game simply becomes tedious. I really wanted to like it but I simply cannot, nor recommend it.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 16, 2019

  Editing this review now that I've finished the game and I can say it's one of my favorites in a long time. Pros: -The game gives the player many mechanics to master so it never gets boring, and paces it well so they have a chance to learn them all before they need to have them mastered. -It feels massively vast but in a way that's not overwhelming. It reminds me somewhat of Hollow Knight when it opens up, areas are similar in size or even larger, with lots of options for where you can go at any one time. For the sake of pacing it also makes sure the previous parts are thoroughly explored before introducing anything especially open. -It reminds me of the 2D Metroids moreso than any other non-Metroid game, but in a way that is very distinctive and definitely not copying those games. There are some abilities that are similar to the ones in Metroid, but then there are also a lot of abilities that manipulate the environment or give it a unique feel in other ways. (The steam dash in particular is a great touch.) In addition, some people didn't like some of the controls for these abilities but they were just patched to be more intuitive and now I don't have any gripes with those things. -It's beautiful overall, the story's interesting and easy to follow even if you don't get too deep into it, but still complex and interesting enough to have substance for those who do want to really get into it. -The boss design is some of my favorite of any metroidvania ever. They're designed to take many attempts, but feel like you're making progress with each attempt so it never feels unfair. The final boss in particular is exactly what a final boss should be, a true test of the skills you've picked up over the course of the game in a really fair, even way rather than just throwing everything at the player. 2 particular bosses are unfortunately not intuitive at all but hopefully that will be fixed in an upcoming update as well, and once you do figure them out it's a nice aha moment. Cons: -Some parts can be a little bit confusing and hard to follow. It's mostly intuitive, so as long as you don't second guess yourself you're probably on the right track. Most of the time this isn't an issue. And even if you do go the wrong way once or twice that's part of the fun of it I think, and there are lots of ways it's made non-tedious. -The art can be a little bit samey because of the palette and the size of areas. Same thing with the music but I think it's more of an issue with the music because a single track is used across an entire area and if you're in that area for an hour or more then it can get monotonous. This was a bit frustrating to me as someone who tends to focus on the music but it's definitely not game-ruining. (UPDATE: After looking at the art on the kickstarter which was originally more varied but updated to be more consistent and stylized, and after finishing the game, I realize that the idea is for the art and music to set a tone that's carried and expanded upon as you progress. This works to great effect at a couple of points in particular but it mostly gives the game that feeling of being miles under the ocean and feels like it's in a distinctive world of its own. Both aspects grew on me a lot.) If you're a fan of 2D Metroids or Axiom Verge, or even other metroidvanias such as Hollow Knight, definitely check it out!
• gamedeal user

  Oct 17, 2019

  I love this game. Big levels - check You can get lost and you will love it - check Hypnotic soundtrack - check On the fly tutorial - check Intuitive controls - check Nice Physics - check Little riddles - check No Pseudo-Plot to laugh about just a little story - check FInally a game worth its price - check The games colour-palette and the soundtrack make you feel like you getting the wettest grass ever :) -> hypnotic - check cons: The one and only I found (IMHO) is the map because of its blocky 8-bit optics. I would buy again............super
• gamedeal user

  Oct 21, 2019

  Outbuddies is a wonderful metroidvania game that takes inspiration both from metroid and Lovecraftian lore. As a great fan of both of these, I was initially drawn to the game because of that, but I stayed for the incredible exploration, gameplay and atmosphere. My favorite part of this game is that you are encouraged to go your own way: there are so many paths to take, often times even "unintentional" ones - you can use every ability in your arsenal to get to areas you otherwise would not currently be able to. This opens up a great deal of possibility of exploration, making the world feel vast, and sometimes, engulfing - the perfect feel for a metroidvania.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 23, 2019

  [h1]Neat and addictive metroidvania[/h1] It is much more "metroid-" than "-vania" and clearly feels like a successor of Super Metroid both visually and in terms of progression mechanics. However this game does several things even better than its famous predecessor, and also introduces some new distinctive features. What I personally found the best - the world is full of places that don't tell you obviously which mechanics you need to pass them, you always have to experiment. And sometimes it even feels like you found a hack to sneak where you're not supposed to be yet with your current gear. Pros: - Huge interconnected and very well designed world. - Lots of progression mechanics which the game encourages you to combine and experiment. - 30+ hours of gameplay for the first 100% completion. - Interesting and quite challenging bosses. - Neat pixel-art graphics. - Developer really cares about the community feedback and is eager to improve the game after release. Cons: - Some lore is present, but on a very basic level, could be a bit richer. - No character development at all (besides progression mechanics of course), even the max HP can't be increased. Conclusion: very solid, nice looking, and addictive metroidvania, recommended for all fans of the genre, and especially of the Metroid series.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 12, 2019

  Buluc is a boss i did not figure out how to work until the dev told me which is kind of embarrassing but also nice of the dev. he is great i love this game a lot and i though up until this point it is very fun. the other bosses are really great and i liked fighting them. i really want to finish this. the enemies are veried and combat feels smooth for the most part. not sure how the bots work and why they only laser me sometimes when im hitting enemies but not iother times. this is the second metroidvania ive played and i really really love
• gamedeal user

  May 24, 2020

  Can't really recommend Outbuddies. Only gave it a half hour but I was thoroughly lost with the number of controls and button combinations dumped on me within the first few minutes of gameplay. It's got a neat atmosphere but there was too much wrong with it for me to put more time into it. For a platformer, the controls feel very stiff for no appreciable reason. Clicking the button to fire your weapon usually fired it but sometimes just wouldn’t or would fire a half second late. Jump air control exists but its clunky; changing direction, again, felt clunky like I needed to be pushing the button a half second earlier. 'Buddy' is a neat concept but, in practice, it's just a bad break in the flow of the game to switch to an entirely different camera and set of controls to move blocks around or scan around a room. The game isn’t all that readable either, there are lots of games I've played and liked with the simplistic pixilated art style but this one in particular is very muddled and easy to get lost in. The menu isn’t good, the text has translation/tensing problems, some of the tutorials were confusing… it's just overall lacking a couple months of polish to make it playable. It's got some charm and potential but can't say you should spend your money on it.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 20, 2020

  It started out pretty fun. The controls felt a little stiff, but the gameplay made up for it. I love this genre. This game however about halfway through just became really tedious. As the map got bigger and bigger, you never knew which way you were supposed to go. You get an ability that allows you to progress to the next area, so you look at your map and see the paths you could not take before. One out of five possibilities could be the right way. Since there is not objective marker, you pick one that seems right and move out across the map. It takes you a while to get there, but you finally arrive and...you picked incorrectly. The power up you obtained doesn't help you through that obstacle. Try again. So now you have to pick another potential path and travel all the way over there. It's a whole lot of backtracking. They tried to mediate this annoying gameplay feature by implementing portals, but they were scattered in weird places and rarely were actually useful at shortening the distance you needed to cross. For this reason alone, I cannot recommend it. EDIT: I will admit that the art style was very nice in this game. I really enjoyed the Lovecraftian aesthetic all the bosses had. Definitely very well done in the visuals department. 5/10