The Waste Land

A terrible game developed by an obnoxious jerk. I was the first player to write a negative Steam review of The Waste Land (in September of 2014). My review was sincerely critical of the game's glaring flaws, and the Italian developer, Fledermaus, had his friends in Italy follow and attack me everywhere they could on Steam for about a month. When I posted my original review, within one day my review was swamped with about a dozen childish insults written in broken English by various degenerates living in Italy. Sure enough, these were Fledermaus's lackeys coming to aid him. In the first 24-hour period, my Steam review of The Wasteland had 19 downvotes, 2 upvotes, and comments like "Gues ur wrong!", "If it is bad why is youre review so hated.", "Try righting a rel review." It didn't stop there. Almost daily I was getting harassed with insults from random Italians on my public Steam profile. I got fed up with the attention, so I took the review down, especially seeing as how the indie g...

An 8 bit Metroidvania with a massive world, but rough around the edges and monotonous. Pros: No hand holding. Massive interconnected map mostly open from the get go. Great Nes castelvanina aesthetic with a day and night cycle. Huge Bosses. Cons: Focuses too much on combat, with few environmental or platforming puzzles. You mostly go from point A to point B or die trying. All upgrades bar 2 are damage and life upgrades. Enemy variety a tad too low. Late game there are no incentives to fight enemies as they drop no money nor experience (While that negates any form of grinding it is still an issue). Some bugs, mostly benign (crashed twice, music disappeared rarely). Hyper Subjective Notes: I wish there were more music tracks in the game (there are about 8 tracks). Tackling bosses under equipped can be a very very long slog. The final boss was underwhelming. Some limited form of fast travel might have been nice, mainly to search for secrets in a swifter manner (or to negate pointl...

Great game, crafted with a lot of love and perfect recreation of what made 1st gen metroidvanias so fun back in the day. This game plays well and has a great atmosphere, plenty of exploring and gearing and period perfect music. Highly recommended.

This game is pushing nostalgia buttons that I wasn't even aware I had. I don't remember playing this in the '80s nor have I read the poem. Whoever dug this up, good show! The 8-bit yet sophisticated graphics, dark and purposeful palette, chiptune music, mature and frightening enemy design, and cryptic and quirky dialogue show the developer's intimacy with that era's games that most "retro" games miss. It very much plays like an adult oriented NES Castlevania, Star Wars, or Battle of Olympus minus the screen flickering of those old cartridges. People who need constant direction and rewards will be turned off that you need to do a lot of exploring on your own and each swing of your weapon doesn't bestoy you with xp or loot. The upgrades are static and required to progress to new areas like in Metroid. There's no xp or random gear loot, just rotten meat that will hurt you for even expecting such things. I played past the first of five world bosses and will be playing this game...

What I liked most about this game is that once it began I felt like a kid with an impulse to call my grade school buddies saying "hey I just got this awesome new game that lets you play a king that looks like Aragorn with the cloak and everything." Also, [i]The Wasteland[/i] did "well" at combining [i]Metroid[/i] like items or equipment with a [i]Castelvania[/i] open world, if you can remember back to [i]Simon's Quest[/i]. I also appreciated the little pun on choosing level of difficulty. Difficulty selection philosophically points at how older games are better at challenging players. Finally, the credits were done in an interesting way too. However, there are enough reasons I cannot recommend purchasing this game. I won't go into the particulars, but the main one is that I imagined a retro open world would have had more substance. Retro City Rampage already paved the Retro open world and any indie developers must ask what can we do equal or better? Next, what is going on in this stor...

This game is a love or hate work. And I say work, because the work put into it by only one man is anything but unnoticeable. Made with lots of heart and dedication, very very well drawn pixel design. Now this game is a love letter to old games. But do you know old games? Many sucked! Many had poor level design, poor gameplay, poor difficulty curve... but we still played these as kids, because that was all we knew, and thought it was great! This game is about that. It is not just "a la metroid" with modern gameplay or revamped level design. No. It IS oldschool content in EVERYTHING. I hate arty movies that try themselves in black and white or in silent mode, but with all the rest that looks fake and new, "because it is modern times". This developer here thought of doing an old game, like old game. And that's it. Plus, he enjoyed Eliot and his tale, and it is true that the atmosphere in this game IS unique, and peculiar. Objective definitely successful, I would say. You have to understan...

I hope you like walking because that is all you are going to do in this game. The game is set in a world that is too big for it, and there isn't much to do in it. There are enemies that you can kill, but they are the most meaningless enemies you'll ever encounter. They are just there to stop from walking, not to entertain you. I personally kept jumping over enemies to skip them. This game is just a travesty of metroidvanias. Avoid it unless you like exploration games without the exploration element. 4/10

I was a bit skeptic on this game after reading few reviews that said it is boring as a metroidvania, i was born in the early 80's so i know what they are talking about, but i bought it and tried it myself and i have to admit that despite its limits, (no markets in the city, the power ups are limited to health boosts, a pair of boots and weapons) is a good game, it gave me the right amount of nostalgic feelings and i had my dose of fun, i can't understand the people complaining about many screens being fillers because i don't find it boring at all, maybe a bit repetitive but i'm used to this sort of games and stands upon its aspects. I'm still at the beginning, just beated boss 1, the giant worm, but i'm looking forward to complete this game, the only aspect i didn't like much is the difficulty in finding spawn points after the first boss, for example if I need to quit the game, because i'm suddenly busy, i loose all my progresses as i should spend 30-40 minutes around the map finding ...

I was playing this game a bit, but the game was really bad, its boring, enemies are not rewarding, music is annoying repetitive. You can only play this game with a resolution that is like 600x800. Entirely zoomed in. You can't change this. So you better turn off the "friend logs in, or plays that game" because otherwise 1/4 of ur screen will be filled with that message. Sometimes the melee actions are a bit clunky. The dead animation of enemies are okay. I really enjoy playing metroidvania games, but this game just doesn't have it. I don't really feel that im progressing at all. I even got this game at a discount (72 cent) and still i have refunded it. 1/10

2/10 Recommeded by a Curator... Sigh... I bought it 'cause it was on $1.49 USD (85% discount). The game lacks of mechanics, the controls are messed up. I'm using a XBOX 360 controller and I have to jump with A buttom, and main attack with B instead of X, and I even can't change the configuration. The soundtrack is way TOO repetitive and bad quality, it feels annoying playing it for +10 min. You feel like playing Castlevania II, but non-linear, bad soundtrack and sound effects, lack of customization, and the dialogues from the NPC are pointless. There's no point killing monster since there's no reward, and the drops made by monster harm you instead of giving some benefits. lol I cannot recommend this game at all, to be honest. At least for the moments. It needs A LOT of improvements.