Hot_Anarcocoa
BACKER
This review contains spoilers
Imagine if Aerith had Groot in her party, would've saved her a lot of trouble! You can't tell me this isn't in the FFVII universe with Lady Hellbender's pets looking like some Advent Children ass dogs.
Seriously though, I am joining the chorus of people saying that this game is surprisingly good! It captures the feeling of the movies spectacularly, while obviously drawing from its own lore. How comic accurate it is I can't say, as like most people I'm mainly familiar with this stuff through the MCU. The combat could definitely use some polishing which is why this is a four star rather than five star game for me. The fundamentals are there for something great, but as is, the hits lack the kind of impact that I'd expect from a AAA experience. Your team attacks feel good especially once you get multiple AOE attacks that launch enemies around, although if they added even more umph to them I think it'd sell the impact even more. Your most basic attack however, shooting your twin pistols as Starlord, lacks any kind of physical reaction from the enemies whatsoever. Thankfully, the game is much more frequently about well paced story beats and exploration of absolutely gorgeous worlds. Top notch art direction going on here. I'd be very excited if they made a sequel to this and gave the combat that extra push it needs to be great, and maybe add even more unique non-combat gameplay moments, of which this game has a few, and they lend some great flavor that make the game stand out as its own. One last thing that really bugged me, is that there's so much dialogue that happens while you're walking about that will get interrupted by walking into a cutscene/fight/another line of dialogue, and I just can't believe this is still a problem we're having in the 2020's. Please, in a game this dialogue driven, just make your hallways long enough or implement a "as I was saying..." system!
Also, happy 200th review to me!
Seriously though, I am joining the chorus of people saying that this game is surprisingly good! It captures the feeling of the movies spectacularly, while obviously drawing from its own lore. How comic accurate it is I can't say, as like most people I'm mainly familiar with this stuff through the MCU. The combat could definitely use some polishing which is why this is a four star rather than five star game for me. The fundamentals are there for something great, but as is, the hits lack the kind of impact that I'd expect from a AAA experience. Your team attacks feel good especially once you get multiple AOE attacks that launch enemies around, although if they added even more umph to them I think it'd sell the impact even more. Your most basic attack however, shooting your twin pistols as Starlord, lacks any kind of physical reaction from the enemies whatsoever. Thankfully, the game is much more frequently about well paced story beats and exploration of absolutely gorgeous worlds. Top notch art direction going on here. I'd be very excited if they made a sequel to this and gave the combat that extra push it needs to be great, and maybe add even more unique non-combat gameplay moments, of which this game has a few, and they lend some great flavor that make the game stand out as its own. One last thing that really bugged me, is that there's so much dialogue that happens while you're walking about that will get interrupted by walking into a cutscene/fight/another line of dialogue, and I just can't believe this is still a problem we're having in the 2020's. Please, in a game this dialogue driven, just make your hallways long enough or implement a "as I was saying..." system!
Also, happy 200th review to me!
2009
Unironically great fighting game with tight Street Fighter style gameplay. Despite not being able to read Mandarin, the story does genuinely awesome stuff with the gameplay towards the end that would blow your mind if you saw it in a mainstream fighter.
2023
98 of y'all: It's not F-Zero GX online! Everybody is bumping into me! Q_Q
Me in 1st place: Hehe fun game.
Me in 1st place: Hehe fun game.
2011
I did a lot of this out of order and by the end my guy was way too strong and could brute force all the bosses lol. Gotta give 5 stars for the impact this had on the medium though. If I play another one of these I'll definitely try a dexterity build so I can't just brute force things.
Base Game: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Fighter Pass 1: Super Smash Bros. Ultimater
Fighter Pass 2: Super Smash Bros. Ultimatest
Seriously though, each entry in this series has always topped the last one for me, and has consistently remained my favorite fighting game, and this is truly the ultimate version of it. I could nitpick little things, like I wish the online worked better, 3 player smashes suck when they tend to be 1 person getting picked on, I wish we had more mascots like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro in place of some of the anime swordsmen we got, but ultimately (ha) I can't deny how much enjoyment I've gotten out of this. Nintendo kind of created their own whole little sub-genre of fighting game with this series and nobody has been able to do it better. A great party game and also great competitively, it's one of a kind.
Fighter Pass 1: Super Smash Bros. Ultimater
Fighter Pass 2: Super Smash Bros. Ultimatest
Seriously though, each entry in this series has always topped the last one for me, and has consistently remained my favorite fighting game, and this is truly the ultimate version of it. I could nitpick little things, like I wish the online worked better, 3 player smashes suck when they tend to be 1 person getting picked on, I wish we had more mascots like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro in place of some of the anime swordsmen we got, but ultimately (ha) I can't deny how much enjoyment I've gotten out of this. Nintendo kind of created their own whole little sub-genre of fighting game with this series and nobody has been able to do it better. A great party game and also great competitively, it's one of a kind.
2021
No Longer Home wears its inspiration on its sleeve, having a scene from the opening of Kentucky Route Zero on its protagonist's computer screen at one point. It bears some resemblance to KRZ in its dialogue system and set design, but taking place over a much shorter time-span and much smaller space. This is a nice little slice of life game about a couple of recent college grads about to move onto the next stage of their lives. Taking place the day before the big move, it deals with a lot of the stresses and anxieties that come with not knowing what comes next in life, how your relationships might change, what personal and societal expectations there are for your future, and how the market forces of capitalism muddy the waters even further. While the visual elements are steeped in magical realism, the semi-auto-biographical nature of its writing gives the story a very personal feeling that lets you really linger in this moment of the characters lives. This could have earned an extra star if it had the time to really delve deeper into some of the topics it brings up, but for an exploration of a small moment in life, I enjoyed the brief time I spent here.
2017
Gameplay that is as creative as it is fun, there's no other game like this out there. The way they manage to tie the gameplay into the story here is also great, as you'll be thinking about your wins and losses in order to level the character who you want to free, which then removes them from your roster, as well as thinking about which opposing team you want to elevate for the final showdown. Supergiant really managed to master the art of letting failure become not a hinderance, but an asset to their story with this game. Every character has something to love about them here and it really makes you invested in thinking about who to free, or who would even want to return if given the chance. Darren Korb of course knocks it out of the park with a banger soundtrack once again, with a nice creative treat waiting for you with one of the songs, if you've played you know which one. I only subtract half a star because well...this game is about overthrowing a tyrannical monarch but...well it's a bourgeois revolution. You're essentially doing the fantasy equivalent of the American revolution here. You overthrow the monarch only to establish a Liberal republic in which the merchant class still gets to amass vast riches. It's a near perfect game I just wish the politics were better.
1969
Oh man you know what, I think this was actually what I played at game camp! I remember being able to move side to side instead of just up and down, and the weird rotatation controller! So yeah, what I put as my Pong review is actually for this game! Also fun fact: I share a birthday with Ralph Baer!
1982
It's like Centipede, but more.
2021
"Intern! Review this game!"
"NO!"
"NO!"
2009
One of the least newcomer friendly games I've ever played. I tried giving it a chance by playing a match against bots with a friend who played a lot, and it was just, imagine the entire inventory of World of Warcraft but you have like one minute to learn it. And if you don't learn it and go online, everyone is going to be an asshole to you.
This is the cutest game I've played that starts by furiously throwing bombs into an ape's scrotum.
Not saying anything new here but it could've used some more abilities as we've grown used to the wide array in Kirby's past games, but it's an excellent first foray into 3d. It's not something I would 100% but it was a very pleasant single playthrough which is all I really ask of a Kirby game. I just wish that they would've let my co-op buddy have abilities as well like past titles did. The co-op partner has a very limited move set and is kind of rendered useless once Kirby gets upgrades.
Not saying anything new here but it could've used some more abilities as we've grown used to the wide array in Kirby's past games, but it's an excellent first foray into 3d. It's not something I would 100% but it was a very pleasant single playthrough which is all I really ask of a Kirby game. I just wish that they would've let my co-op buddy have abilities as well like past titles did. The co-op partner has a very limited move set and is kind of rendered useless once Kirby gets upgrades.
2020
This review contains spoilers
I really liked this game. It’s an Earthbound style rpg with some horror elements, and if you dig games like Undertale or LISA, or even Yume Nikki to a certain extent, you’ll probably like this one too. The music and the visuals are so good in this, and the Earthbound-esque writing is perfectly fun and silly, while the horror elements are suitably creepy, and the story will take you to some high highs, and some low lows. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this other than it’s a really well done game in that style.
The only thing that I wasn't really a fan of is that there is a twist towards the end which I have issues with. For the vast majority of the game you're under the impression that a character has committed suicide, and the narrative deals with this really well. The suicide has caused your friend group to break up as everyone has their own methods of coping, but in the end they come together and deal with it in a very well written way. But then a plot twist reveals that it was actually the protagonist who killed this character in an accident, and then he and another character framed it as a suicide to cover up his guilt. It just felt like a gross way to engage with that topic to me, especially since it was handled so well before that point. I just wish that between the suicide story, and the dealing with guilt story, they chose one or the other rather than combining them in this kind of gross way.
If they wanted to do the guilt story, they could have kept everything the same but simply not gone the extra step of having the characters frame the death as a suicide, and rather just had the protagonist lie about how the death happened. But even with all that said, it still does some cool stuff with its ending that I really liked, and it’s definitely earned its spot as a top tier game in my opinion.
The only thing that I wasn't really a fan of is that there is a twist towards the end which I have issues with. For the vast majority of the game you're under the impression that a character has committed suicide, and the narrative deals with this really well. The suicide has caused your friend group to break up as everyone has their own methods of coping, but in the end they come together and deal with it in a very well written way. But then a plot twist reveals that it was actually the protagonist who killed this character in an accident, and then he and another character framed it as a suicide to cover up his guilt. It just felt like a gross way to engage with that topic to me, especially since it was handled so well before that point. I just wish that between the suicide story, and the dealing with guilt story, they chose one or the other rather than combining them in this kind of gross way.
If they wanted to do the guilt story, they could have kept everything the same but simply not gone the extra step of having the characters frame the death as a suicide, and rather just had the protagonist lie about how the death happened. But even with all that said, it still does some cool stuff with its ending that I really liked, and it’s definitely earned its spot as a top tier game in my opinion.
An intense and thrilling campaign set in a fantastical alternate version of history where America was the good guys.
This was a massive disappointment for me. I was sold on this game when I saw its trailer during the Nintendo Direct, thinking it was going to be a sort of dystopian hip-hop rebellion kind of game. What I got was what if Bit.Trip Runner was terribly designed.
Maybe I'm missing something, but to me the music seemed utterly uninspired. It was the same kind of dull instrumental jazz tunes throughout the vast majority of the game. No song stood out as very different from any other song to me. Based on the trailer, I expected something with a bit more rapping in it, hoping the lyrics would tie into the dystopian setting. There was really only one level, the last one, that had some good rapping in it, and even then it wasn't able to keep it up for the whole level. The last level had a clever gimmick to it, and while the song was more enjoyable than the rest of the game, it was much too little, much too late at that point for me.
Worse yet, the music doesn't really sync up with the gameplay in any way whatsoever. While games like Bit.Trip Runner and Sayonara Wild Hearts have their soundtracks inextricably linked to their gameplay; Never Yield feels like a slog through the same obstacles over and over again, with a disconnected soundtrack in the background. And the repetitive obstacles are made even worse by the fact that some levels of this game are just repeats of previous levels. Even in the final level which had some enjoyable elements, after the rapping ends it goes right back to feeling like the same grind as the rest of the game.
Also, the default difficulty of this game makes a slow motion effect happen anytime you approach an obstacle. Not only does this mess with the flow of the game, it will sometimes happen so early that if you react to it immediately, you'll have reacted too soon and will end up hitting the obstacle anyways. At the same time, there were many moments where I timed a jump too late, and my character would clip through the obstacle and keep going as if I had cleared it.
As for this game's story, there hardly is one, and it's told through cutscenes that lack any sound effects, and have animations so poor they look like they were made in Gary's Mod. I haven't felt this swindled by a game in a long time, hard pass on this one.
Maybe I'm missing something, but to me the music seemed utterly uninspired. It was the same kind of dull instrumental jazz tunes throughout the vast majority of the game. No song stood out as very different from any other song to me. Based on the trailer, I expected something with a bit more rapping in it, hoping the lyrics would tie into the dystopian setting. There was really only one level, the last one, that had some good rapping in it, and even then it wasn't able to keep it up for the whole level. The last level had a clever gimmick to it, and while the song was more enjoyable than the rest of the game, it was much too little, much too late at that point for me.
Worse yet, the music doesn't really sync up with the gameplay in any way whatsoever. While games like Bit.Trip Runner and Sayonara Wild Hearts have their soundtracks inextricably linked to their gameplay; Never Yield feels like a slog through the same obstacles over and over again, with a disconnected soundtrack in the background. And the repetitive obstacles are made even worse by the fact that some levels of this game are just repeats of previous levels. Even in the final level which had some enjoyable elements, after the rapping ends it goes right back to feeling like the same grind as the rest of the game.
Also, the default difficulty of this game makes a slow motion effect happen anytime you approach an obstacle. Not only does this mess with the flow of the game, it will sometimes happen so early that if you react to it immediately, you'll have reacted too soon and will end up hitting the obstacle anyways. At the same time, there were many moments where I timed a jump too late, and my character would clip through the obstacle and keep going as if I had cleared it.
As for this game's story, there hardly is one, and it's told through cutscenes that lack any sound effects, and have animations so poor they look like they were made in Gary's Mod. I haven't felt this swindled by a game in a long time, hard pass on this one.