Radio Viscera Reviews

One level in and I'm blown away.

Fast fun and stylish. Definite recommend for arcadey shooter lovers.

Had higher hopes for this, clunky controls, despite only playing for about an hour I was already bored with the gameplay loop...

This is a fun game. I hope the developer launch a project for a sequel.

It has a great look, solid level design for the most part, there's lots to collect and unlock, and it has an addicting gameplay design (when it works). I'm honestly shocked this game didn't draw in more buyers with what it had to show in its marketing. But, as I was warned, there are some major problems. Aiming with a controller is tricky, rooms being blurred until you enter them for the first time hurts planning ahead, and physics, like ragdolling, doesn't always work. Especially when trying to send enemies flying into a trap. Could definitely help use something that makes enemies magnetize into traps you were aiming at/near. If you use a controller, and you want to use the jump button, remap it so you don't have to stop aiming. But for some reason, the jump button is also the select button. The GIF generator is cool and unique, but it rarely captures any moments worth capturing, and often ignores the best moments of your run. Checkpoints aren't the best placed/designed, there's lots of bugs that make progressing either way too hard, or impossible, forcing you to restart. And there's a critical bug where for some reason, at any random moment, the game will get an irreversible bug that makes everything black all the time. Verifying files doesn't fix this, changing the drive only delays the inevitable, and the dev abandoned this game, along with its MANY remaining issues I've listed. He has gone completely silent on this.

I know they make the game look amazing in the trailer, but if you're bad or relatively new to video games then this isn't for you. There is just too much to keep track of at the same time and almost no directions telling you where to go. The last update they released was on July 23 2021 saying they fixed the game crashing on startup. They did not fix the game crashing on startup. And since i was young and stupid i didn't know you could ask to refund games, but when i did find out i was way past the time limit you need to refund it in. The game itself was pretty fun, but honestly i can't reccomend it with these flaws. i hope this review helped.

liking this neat little indie game so far: its got a fun sense of humor and some silly physics based / grav gun combat, and a loop with a lot of potential, with only a few bugs ran into so far biggest caveat is the camera is mad disorienting, occasionally motion sickness inducing, and personally I can't play this game for more than 20 minutes at a time. Despite this I still like it and think its pretty good, not at all deserving of the "mixed" review status its got (which honestly is super confusing! I can only find like 2 or 3 negative reviews, scrolling to the bottom says 87% of user reviews are positive? and I scrolled through all 36 curator reviews and couldn't find anything negative, steam is doing this game dirty)

Some great stuff, but far from perfect. - Aesthetic is great, and it is *super* impressive that this was made by one guy (mostly? entirely?). - The plot is silly, and the corporate satire is far from new, but the game is having fun with it and so am I. :) - I really wanted to love this, and I have definitely had some fun with it, but I so far have found myself getting more and more frustrated as I go. It might be one of those games that 'clicks' the second or third time you boot it up, and I can tell it's a labor of love and it does a lot right. ----------------------- - **Major Gripe: CHECKPOINTS** -- game kills it's own momentum a lot, as the checkpoints are *really* spaced out, despite some places where it's really easy to walk too close to a hazard (or stumble into one of the hidden ones). In my experience you'll most often die to a hazard, as it's pretty easy to kill the bads and get HP back before they three-tap you. My first two deaths were walking into a previously unintroduced acid pit that opens up if you walk over some metal panels on the ground. The Checkpoint was so far away that I had forgotten what killed me when I got there and immediately did the same thing again. I wouldn't be bothered by that design at all IF the pit had been introduced (it's really easy to not launch anyone over there during that fight) or if there had been a checkpoint that wasn't ~5 minutes away. As it is, there have been a lot of times where I've had to trudge through the same easy fights a few times because I made a half-second mistake near a hazard; a mistake that, were there more frequent checkpoints, would have made me laugh instead of groan). - **Hazards were a huge selling point for me, but a bit of a let down in-game.** They would have been more interesting if they did more than just gib. Some silly sadism with acid pits and spikes and stuff sounded great, but they all feel like the same hazard (and I've always thought gibbing was actually kinda boring anyway). :( - **I thought the controls were fine on mouse and keyboard (just click on what you want to shoot) but I can see why people have mentioned them negatively due to other aspects of the game.**The game is sortof-but-not-quite-orthagonal, in that every pathway is blocked out in 45 and 90 degree angles, but if you try to walk diagonally with WASD (so, W+D, for isntance), your movement angle won't *quite* match up with the world; so, if you're on a narrow bridge that's on a diagonal, you can't just hold two arrow keys and make it work, you have to keep adjusting as you go or you'll fall off. That's not an issue on a controller (or a super big one anyway, so far), but it's a minor catch-22 as aiming with a mouse is much easier. The camera can also make things hard sometimes, but it's generally good at being where it needs to be. - **Score resets when you die. Oof.** :s Especially spicy since you need 6-digit scores to unlock stuff, so if you die anywhere beyond the first room or two you have pretty much no chance of getting that (as far as I can tell). They seem to be just cosmetic awards though, so that doesn't bother me much, but it is still a super punishing way of handling score. If you really know the levels I guess it's fine? You'd need to anyway, as pathfinding is often really tricky (and the radar pointer seems to not always be accurate, pointing you in the opposite direction) so you'll often lose your multipliers before you find the next fight if you can't immediately pick the right route. Again, only a gripe if you care about score, and so far I haven't had enough reason to to really be bothered. - **Pathfinding is prety tricky sometimes, even with the radar.** Example: giant launching button that has never been introduced before that is facing away from the camera and not highlighted (say, by lighting) to suggest it is important. I've spent a decent amount of time wandering and backtracking so far, especially the further I get into the game, and had a lot of "oh thank god" moments when the battle music starts up again. Also had a bug out where I couldn't progress for a bit; was told to 'start a fire in the explosive gas room', but the radar is pointing me directly towards a sealed door; it turned out I had accidentally entered a room too early and had to backtrack to another path that was the opposite direction of the arrow, blow up some stuff, and *then* go to that door. - I've hit a few bugs, like another of those giant launching buttons that seemed important to my next objective (near the drill in the second level), but when you walk into it you clip through and fall out of the map. Thankfully, this is just after a checkpoint, otherwise it would have been quite frustrating. - Some other...interesting choices. So, the first Mutator you unlock (assuming it's not random) is "instagib," which is effectively "ignore the game's core mechanic." Honestly, I turned it on because it didn't feel *that* different from the hazards anyway, and some of the rooms are somewhat stingy with them which can slow things down a bit, but it's definitely not the way the game was intended to be played either. I guess it's a nice relief-valve if you're not a fan of required hazards, though I wish there was a middle ground between "only hazards kill" and "gun instead of hazards". - The Highlights (save a gif) feature is an awesome idea, but it never seems to select your high-score moments; at the end of each level so far I've only ever seen a 1-2 kill gif, despite having wiped a few rooms with rapid multikills. I'd think that it's picking highest scoring moments, but it definitely doesn't seem like that's actually what's going on (how could the first kill walking in a new room with a low multiplier be higher scoring than killing the next five enemies in that same room?). -------------------------------------- So, after all that, why am I recommending this? Honestly, I felt that some of this feedback was important for people to see, so I wanted to add early-impressions to the page while the game was still new, but I acknowledge that I still don’t have that long in the game and later stages might bring more to the table. Hell, even with just some more time it will probably grow on me, and those initial frustrations might fade. Further, I know that this is a small-scale, indie production, and a lot of impressive stuff is on display here –even despite my gripes, I just couldn’t bring myself to add a “not recommended” to the small number of reviews currently on the page, especially when it’s the notes above that

If you're using doors instead of blasting through walls, you're doing it wrong. It's a nice take on a twin stick shooter where you can't kill or defeat things by shooting at them, but instead shooting them *into* things. I love all the glitchy visual effects. Game is very light on story and humour is definitely very weird, but I'm liking it so far.

Radio Viscera has a pretty great idea, a twin-stick shooter where you have to use the environment to indirectly kill your enemies while platforming. It also has a scoring system that allows for competitive or run-based games and mutators you can apply to change those runs up as well. Unfortunately, the core loop and the controls as well as some design issues make it too much of a burden to play. It's likely that with hours and hours put into the game it can be a highly skilled affair where you're running and jumping around these levels with routes planned, perfect timing, and doing what you will to the various enemies and hazards, but that is not the impression the game first provides. If like me, you can't stand the opening hours to get to where you become skillful and good at the game, then the high skill ceiling the later game might offer is out of reach because you don't even want to get near it. To begin, the controls on this are pretty awful. You can use the controller and play it like a twin-stick shooter, but the aiming on the controller with a stick is horrendously inaccurate, doesn't allow aiming at height, and with the emphasis on running around while shooting having the jump button take your thumb off the aiming stick means you likely aren't able to be as efficient or accurate as needed. You can switch to the mouse and keyboard but with an isometric camera and WASD controls platforming is a lot more difficult than it needs to be. On top of that, even though aiming with the mouse gives you much more accuracy than a controller might, you are still incredibly inaccurate and I would routinely miss enemies I had the cursor on because it was actually on a piece of geometry around them causing me to aim extremely far away from them due to the perspective. The primary combat design of enemies you can't directly kill but need to knock into environmental hazards is a great concept but here it has poor execution. Your reliance on wacky ragdolls, a force gun, and physics to kill them means that you can often line a shot up with the enemy between you and the hazard, shoot them, and they'll go sailing off and just miss it. This is actually made a little more frustrating by the fact that the game [b]does[/b] have a sort of aim-assist where the enemies tend to magnetize towards the hazards to help you out but not enough to make each and every attempt work. The emphasis seems to be on runs, getting through the level in a speedy time, and less about the combat. Enemies are just there to delay you and cause delays. But the fact that dealing with them is difficult through poor design and controls added onto the fact that they're fairly quick and accurate on shooting you lead to many frustrating moments of me getting hit despite doing everything I could to take them out before they could fire but being unable to due to the controls. On a smaller but still frustrating note, the game blurs out rooms you haven't been into yet and slowly unblurs them as you enter them. This led to a handful of times where I would jump into or rush into a room and immediately hit a hazard, killing me and resetting me to the last checkpoint. It also makes it difficult to accurately assess the enemies running around in that obscured room. Overall, the game is a great concept and if you're willing to spend hours and hours learning its intricacies and getting good with it, you might be able to have a great time stringing together combos and competing for high scores while running the levels. But the poor controls, better-on-paper ideas, and overall core loop being unable to hook me left me extremely disappointed in this purchase.