The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ review

hey boys and girls welcome to my review of the sandbox casual christian educational game the binding of isaac i'm attempting to venture at least some of my content into other games than just league of legends and seeing as i've wasted i mean spent 440 hours playing isaac instead of making videos i reckon it's about goddamn time that i put my procrastination where my channel is and actually review the damn game my perspective on this entire review is based on the game with both expansions the premise of the game is simple you're isaac but your mother is [ __ ] delusional batshit crazy and she wants to stab you with a knife and thus you escape into the basement your goal is to get as far down as you can along the way you'll acquire different passive or active items consumables trinkets health and stat upgrades and followers who help you in various ways you'll use these upgrades to face a multitude of monsters and bosses the more the game you complete the more items floors bosses and characters you unlock the further down you get the harder the game gets both the regular monsters and bosses get significantly more difficult in the beginning it's baby napnap time but towards the end it'll be more like some of the most enjoyable gameplays getting different combinations of items through bosses item or shop rooms angel room or devil deals or a few other various means such as secret rooms it's incredibly satisfying to see your character's progression and they really didn't limit themselves in terms of what's in the game let me give you an example you can get stat upgrades that make you shoot tears faster great but if you get flaming mind you should fire tears what if you get that and quad shot and mysterious liquid that's right you now shoot 4 toxic splash damage fire tiers at a time you can easily stack upwards of 100 items in one long run and most effects don't override each other they combine one of my favorite item combinations is the active item the blank card along with the jera rune which duplicates all pickups on the floor including chests all you gotta do to become ultimately powerful is make it to the chest floor with this combo and have a battery drop in one room and then a key drop in another room voila you can now duplicate these chests infinitely which all have a random item from the good item pulls in them and then duplicate yourself an infinite amount of keys alternatively if you're lazy what if i told you you could get every item in the game without moving a finger well the item steam sale will reduce the cost of everything in the shop by 50 percent but if you manage to get two steam sales either by duplicating it using the item diplopia or through fighting greed and getting one in the shop luckily everything will now effectively cost zero and if you also manage to find restock the shops will not restock an item whenever you buy one for the cherry on top you want to be lucky enough to also find the item chaos what does chaos do you may ask it combines all of the item pools in the game into one normally this is a come [ __ ] rng item and you might want to avoid it at all costs but in this specific scenario it constitutes one of the few ways you can with very specific item combinations completely break the game all you have to do is just stand on top of one of the items and go do stuff for a while when you come back your character will have literally every single item you've unlocked in the game you'll be able to kill most bosses in a single hit yet my very favorite item combination is much simpler it's two items it's the devil deal item brimstone which changes your tears to this giant laser combined with the active item tammy's head which shoots your tears in a few directions around you or in this case lasers the recharge time of tammy's head is one room and activating it can pretty much decimate an entire room although some items have incredible synergy with some builds you just get to a point where the effects are [ __ ] ridiculous although the aesthetic of the game is generally pretty light-hearted many aspects of the game certainly aren't from the mere premise of the game where either a isaac's mother is a [ __ ] psycho wants to stab him or b isaac is very delusionally schizophrenic and mentally ill the creator of the game edmund macmillan said that he wanted to explore how religious zealotry could negatively affect a young child and that mixed with personal experiences from his own childhood are what influenced some of the major themes in the binding of isaac you can make deals with the devil where you give up your heart containers become more evil and get devil room items or you can go the other path and get angel items depending on your choices there's different floor paths where you can end up going the route that's thematically inspired by heaven or the route that's thematically inspired by hell a lot of the monsters in the game look similar to isaac and he finds them off with his tears it's almost as if isaac is fighting off his own demons the items he needs to survive distort him and he doesn't ever escape the basement he just goes deeper and deeper some of the art design might look a bit childish at first glance but the game is absolutely no stranger to adult themes you've got bosses representing the seven deadly sins there's a pill which will induce hematemesis which is the vomiting of blood there's a boss unplayable character called blue baby which is a reference to blue baby syndrome in which a baby's skin complexion appears blue from a lack of oxygen in its blood due to a congenial heart defect they named a consumable after the lemon party which is a shock site featuring a group of elderly men performing oral sex there's even a certain pill in the game and if you take it you just take damage and it says bad trip i don't want to spoil any of the endings but they certainly invoke quite the emotional response this fantastic attention to detail and the implementation of all these themes adds so much to the experience the game doesn't try to shelter the player and it's extremely fleshed out you can tell it's made by developers who've played their fair share of arcade games each time you start a game the floor and loot is all randomized and with the several hundred items in the game you can get some very interesting combinations each run feels unique because your win condition is constituted by your build and each run is unique on top of that there's like tons of stuff i haven't even mentioned and i feel like it's all these little things that actually make the game like character transformations if you pick up three different guppy items you transform into guppy isaac's dead cat who can fly and spawns a blue fly each time one of his tears hits an enemy if you pick up three different syringes you'll become spun which is a large dose central nervous system stimulant reference i believe and if you eat three puberty pills you'll become an adult there's also a huge variety in rooms that can spawn each floor has two secret rooms that aren't visible on the map and there's plenty of rooms that only spawn randomly oh and why did i pause just now because that door that opened up right there leads the section called boss rush where you have to find 15 waves of bosses it's a special section that only opens if you beat mom in under 20 minutes notice the timer i am a god anyways resume the gameplay footage when you break rocks there's a very tiny chance that they'll have a retro treasure room under them and each retro treasure room has a 0.1 chance of making the black market appear but i don't think it's just a good game because i autistically like all these little details your progression in the game feels organic and rewarding the further you get the more decked out the item pool gets and the more tools you'll have at your disposal for getting even further now i'm a bit of a perfectionist sometimes so when i got into this game i wanted to complete the whole game entirely what i didn't realize is just how much replayability this game has with both the expansions let me take you through my process of completing the game once i got good enough to power through the first five floors of the game i beat the first major boss mom which unlocked the woman utero floors for future runs this is when i started taking notice of the progression note on each character for each major thing you beat a little icon will show up for a total of up to 9 icons there's an upgrade to the icon if you do it on heart and you unlock twice as much [ __ ] so no more baby nap nap time i now have to complete this whole game on hard i then beat the mom's heart boss of the seventh floor eleven times which replaces the boss with it lives beating that lets me enter either sheol or the cathedral also refer to these paths as heaven or hell then i beat the boss of hell satan five different times and the boss of heaven isaac five different times which unlocked the negative and the polaroid which now appear after the mom boss fight you pick one of the items to choose a path for that particular run if you pick up the negative you can enter the dark room after completing sheol or if you take the polaroid you can enter the chest after completing the cathedral this is a huge step why is that because the chest has boss baby sorry it has the boss blue baby beating it unlocks the character blue baby why do we want this [ __ ] character that can't have any red heart containers and is generally gonna die over and over again when you're at the skill level because if you managed to beat the whole game to the cathedral with him and beat isaac you unlocked the d6 as the starting item for isaac now the game just got so much better you literally start with an active item that'll let you reroll other pedestrian items i don't think i need to explain why that is a huge upgrade i then went on to defeat the lamb in the dark room after that i noticed this giant golden door that appears in the chest in the dark room i then completely without using google.com used my own incredible deduction skills to find out that during a run you need to run into two angel rooms blow up the angel statues fight the angel bosses and get the two key pieces alternatively you can also just be lucky enough to find the dad's key item which can open any door anyways behind the giant golden door lies mega satan after beating mega satan my thirst hadn't been quenched i knew there was more to complete lo and behold boss rush if you manage to beat mom within 20 minutes the special door opens where you have to fight a multitude of bosses 15 waves in a row in fact with just the items you've been able to acquire on the first five floors in under 20 minutes i stopped maximizing each flash potential and started playing on a timer then if you manage the beat it lives that's the seventh floor in under 30 minutes it opens the hush boss fight the second hardest boss in the game once i beat hush it unlocked the void for me the final floor in a normal run it's not even guaranteed to open up after you've unlocked it when you beat mega satan there's a 50 chance of the portal spawning and a significantly smaller chance on the boss's preceding mega satan the void is insanely big containing multiple boss rooms one of which will contain delirium the actual final boss of the game i was so many hours leave when i finally got here and did i feel divine when i had completed the void no apps are [ __ ] lutely not you see as it turns out delirium wasn't the ninth icon i was missing defeating him only uh crumbles the paper no i needed to defeat the game's greedier mode to feel complete so i played greedier modus einstein finally managed to beat ultra greed lo and behold a completed checkmark list for one character but there's 14 different characters in the game so here we [ __ ] go one after one on hard mode for each and every character i defeated idlibs isaac boss rush satan blue baby the land mega satan ultra great hush and delirium except for one character the lost the lost without any upgrades is easily the most rage inducing character in the game the premise is that the loss doesn't have health or anything if he gets hit one single time he [ __ ] dies i realized that the task before me was near impossible seeing as delirium can literally tell the frag in ways you can't dodge so i took it upon myself to do some deep thinking without the use of google.com and came to the conclusion that i needed to donate 879 coins to the green mode donation machine which appears after you beat ultra greed i should mention that in greed mode you need your coins for items that will make you strong enough to beat it so 879 coins through traditional means is a shitload of time alternatively you can't just be lucky enough to have a run where you have one of the few combinations in the game that'll let you have infinite coins and be playing on a character you haven't defeated greedier mode with so the chance of the donation machine breaking is zero percent so i got the [ __ ] 879 coins donated in the machine and what did i get in return the holy mantle is a starting item on the lost now the holy mantle is a shield that'll tank one hit per room making the lost infinitely more enjoyable to play seeing as you have to get hit twice now to die i then played the lost over and over and over and over again until i felt i got really [ __ ] good at the game once you're really inside the lost is one of the more fun characters he can take devil deals for free since he doesn't have any health and his flying plus spectral tears makes him a pretty good character once you've played the game for several hundred hours there's no challenge in going through the game with the d6 and isaac countless keyboards noise complaints and anger management classes later i finally beat every single boss with the lost and i finally have every check mark on every character or so i thought but as it turns out i'd missed one essential thing if you donate 1 000 coins to the greek donation machine you unlock the actual last character the late game fantasy the man the myth the legend the keeper i foolishly believe that this was just a quick oversight i beat this whole game with the [ __ ] lost this is gonna be sunshine and happiness all the way the [ __ ] starts with triple shot this is gonna be easy like yeezy baby little did i know at the time that the keeper is a scumbag ass white rat bastard and absolutely the worst guy ever in any game he has two coins for health and his health can't be increased past that so you think he's starting like the lost in terms of difficulty two hits per room for him to die and so on but here's why i almost break down into an angry psychosis every time i'm reminded of the keeper the only way for him to heal is by picking up a coin and unlike the lost that takes away his health if he takes devil deals so he can't take any of the two health devil deals and whenever he takes a single one he's not one hit away from dying he's extremely slow he shoots extremely slowly and it's just so goddamn [ __ ] frustrating to die over and over and over again and just waste some goddamn [ __ ] many hours of my life you'd think i'm over exaggerating but take a look at this clip right here this was less than an hour ago when i was getting footage for this video i'd spent a long ass time getting this far and i finally had a good build on the keeper i managed to run into one of the rarest and strongest items in the game the godhead yet because i haven't played isaac in a long time i forgot what the purple fires do just listen to my genuine live reaction but eventually i manifested an extreme mastery over this game i knew every single enemy in the game their attacks their movement patterns and even though my mental health might never recover from the ordeal inch by inch i eventually defeated idlibs isaac bosch rush satan blue baby the lamb mega slave ultra greed hush and delirium and with my sanity hanging on by a thread i could finally say that i had completed everything on everyone now was i satisfied yet admittedly yeah i felt pretty damn good about that but there was still more stuff for me to do so now the task was to complete every single challenge in the game i did that with the exception of a few that my girlfriend wanted to complete after we did that i felt that i'd already gone so far i might as well try to full-on complete the game and achieve everything did i 100 it [ __ ] right now i'm sitting at 98 completion with 332 out of 339 achievements now why did i quit because i spent 440 hours on this game just to find out that a few of the achievements required to 100 are complete and utter [ __ ] one challenge will have you completing the daily challenge 30 [ __ ] days in a row and while almost being two hours into a run going for the rerun achievement a bug transformed me into the lost without the holy mantle and i died on my fourth rerun honestly i put this game down for a long time before making this review and i've only gotten into playing it occasionally the game was incredible for me before i played it so much that it became a completion grind somewhere along the line this game corrupted me and playing it was no longer about having fun and chilling out now it was just a repetitive monotonous crusade to discover how incredibly stubborn i am if you haven't played the game i highly suggest you try it out regardless of whether you're into this type of game in fact if you don't play dungeon run games already i think you might enjoy playing it even more i've had the game for almost a year and i still find myself going back to it and that's after i completely grinded this game out isaac is very appealing regardless of who you are it's one of the few games my girlfriend really wants to play with me and i can highly recommend downloading the two player mod throwing it on a big screen and plugging in two controllers i think this game is conceptually brilliant and i think that gameplay wise they executed so well the sound design and background music of the game and just the art direction in general is [ __ ] phenomenal and there's few flaws in the game that aren't subjective criticisms i'd say it's one of the better games i've ever played in my life i give the binding of isaac 332 out of 339 [ __ ] terrible atrocious

Channel: UberDanger

Views: 1,544,298

Rating: 4.939992 out of 5

Keywords: UberDanger, The Binding of Isaac, Gameplay, Review, The binding of Isaac review, UberDanger review, The Lost, The Keeper, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth, Rebirth, The binding of Isaac Afterbirth, Afterbirth, Afterbirth+, commentary, not League of Legends

Id: _Hd5IyiEjQo

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/10outa10woodrapeagan]

450 hours? So he just finished AB?

[u/lautrebeacon]

He's a casual...