I've never played a game more outlandish. Where do I even start? The premise is you get stuck in some weird soul hotel and you have to trick a bunch of demented guests out of their souls and have enough to get out or something.
The faux-child-friendly design of the characters won't fool anyone, they are very creepy and, upon losing their souls, will chase you down and do terrible things to you if you're caught. And so it becomes a game of observation and stealth, of sneaking through corridors and peeping through keyholes to figure out the best time to seize the next soul.
The necessity of learning the layout of Gregory's hotel allows players to appreciate its nuanced design, full of peculiar delights and collectibles.
Purely on the basis that there's simply nothing like it (except its even more surreal anime series of the same name and style), this one is truly a hidden gem and well worth checking out.

It's alright. It more or less has the same structure as River City Ransom. Combat controls are pretty nice overall.
What isn't so nice is the way the RPG elements are handled.

My biggest gripe with the game is how enemy health (apparently) is scaled as you progress with the story. Including basic enemies from all the way to the first area who turn into damage sponges later on. I feel this defeats the purpose of the stats where I feel the only character stat that's noticeable is Stamina.

Funnily enough, that isn't the case for the bosses. Overall, I enjoyed almost all of them.
I saw some people have trouble with them, which I don't get. Their patterns seem pretty clear cut to figure out. If you're slightly patient, you'll find out much all their patterns with a death or two at most. Sometimes, you can even bum rush. Simple case of boss doing an attack -> you dodge -> boss is open (provided they don't have their temporary invincible mode on at the moment) -> attack.

The writing.... let's just say it's not my cup of tea (meaning cringe.) But at least the tone is consistent throughout.
More importantly, I can skip all cutscenes by holding one of the face buttons.
Though, I do like both the normal ending and the secret ending. Especially as someone who has played the japanese only Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka.

Speaking of which: https://youtu.be/2cnG4_2VS5I

This game is... underwhelming, to say the least. I think the style of this game and it's music is quite good, but in terms of actual gameplay and story? Eh. I think the gameplay itself can be fun, the moves you can unlock are really neat and theres some fun stuff you can do, but a big problem I have is that you can't really combo well. With all the different moves you get, it feels like you should be able to do some sick combos, but in reality all the moves have so much lag it just kind of fucks up every time you want to combo. Mix that with some shaky boss design and repetitive enemies and you get a so/so game, but that's not my only gripe.

The story. Now, let me just say now that I love the designs of every character, and some of them such as Noize and Skullmageddon were really fun. But, the writing overall was weak as hell, ESPECIALLY from the protagonists. The protagonists really don't feel like their own characters, as half the game they're doing nothing but talk about Kunio and Riki, and the other half of their dialogue is just... eh? The girls don't have too much depth outside of their general personalities, and they don't change much throughout the story either. As well as this, the plot of the game is Quite Shit, with not real reward for the tasks you do because each boss you fight always says the same "I have no information but you can go to this guy". Like, I thought we grew past the whole "your princess is in another castle" way of writing when we got out of the NES era. I think my favorite part of the writing is the "rival" girls Hasube and Mami, and the way the story references how theyre technically the "canon" girlfriends of Kunio and Rikki, and how you gain that canonocity by defeating them as secret bosses. That was clever.

Really, this game is just full of things that are fine, but could be better. The gameplay is fine, but has much more potential to be combo-y and fun. The writing is charming at times, but the characters, especially the protagonists, lack depth (which isnt shocking from the all-men writing team LMAO). And also a small gripe is that the boss cutscenes have to be manually skipped each time you restart a fight, like at least you can skip them but just please you don't need to play them every time just let me fight the boss again already. But, yeah, it's fine but can't really recommend. Play a Streets of Rage game instead lol.

I liked it.

...Was that not enough of a review? Saying it’s a beat ‘em up and that I liked it covers the basics, and I think this meta part of the sentence earns some points for stylistic flair.

That's River City Girls. It includes everything you basically need, and it has a unique style that makes it stand out, but you’re left wishing that there was a little bit more substance, something particularly memorable, instead of being the video game equivalent of fireworks. Spectacular, but there’s a certain melancholy in the level of technical skill that goes into such a fleeting form of joy.

There’s an old joke that says heaven is where the police are British, the chefs are French, the weapons are from Blood, the movement is from Quake, and the personality is from Doom. I may have gotten a bit mixed up there but I’m fairly certain that hell looks something like Painkiller. The visuals are from Quake 2, the enemies are from Serious Sam, and the movement is from Counter Strike, it forms such a perfect palette of blandness that’s almost shocking to experience. Instead of feeling like an arena shooter, it’s more like a courtyard shooter, with all the hallmarks that make the genre enjoyable scaled down to a level that feels almost pitiful. Instead of flying around layered battlefields like in Quake, you walk from flat square to flat square, doing a limp sort of bunny hopping to speed the process up. There’s never a time where you walk into a room and get surprised by the type of enemies waiting for you, they usually just spawn in one-by-one, and the majority are forgettable melee-only chaff to be dispersed in a single hit. The only time you’re required to really think is when searching for the last enemy of a horde, since you aren’t allowed to progress to the next room until every single enemy has been defeated, even when they tend to get hung up on doorways and obstructions. The compass points in their general direction, but if you didn’t notice that a few enemies are running in circles on top of a nearby rooftop, you’ll be left wondering if the game just broke. That’s something that tends to happen a lot in this game, as I had multiple save corruptions that would crash my game whenever I attempted to load. Sometimes I could load a corrupted save, but from that point, trying to save in any form would cause a crash, including the automatic checkpoints. It took me a while to figure out what exactly was happening there and delete all the corrupted saves, so it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the majority of times I launched the game were when trying to recover from a crash.

Honestly, this is one of the rare times I have nothing nice to say about a game. The closest it gets is with its unique alternate fire-modes like the ones from Blood, but the enemy reactions are so devoid of personality and the ammo pickups are so unreliable that I hardly noticed their presence at all. The story is peak 2000’s supernatural schlock, the protagonist is totally unlikable, the bosses are all confusingly bad, I really can’t recommend this game to anyone. If you haven’t played Blood or its recent port, Fresh Supply, I would go check that out instead. It’s bursting with personality, and it was able to pack in much more fun and challenge than Painkiller was able to manage with every possible technical advantage.

This game left me so devoid of feeling it made me feel like a corpse.

This has to be one of the most boring, repetitive, and soul-crushing games I've played in some time.
It takes so many points from Zelda BOTW but never understood what made BOTW great; so everything feels super disingenuous and bland.
The combat is just Assassins Creed Odyssey's combat that being it's repetitious and barely adds any challenge.

The game tries to be funny in the same way Borderlands try to be funny "Annoying/Self-Awareness + Self-Deprecation = COMEDY GOLD". I thought it was really unfunny but what we find funny is super subjective so this isn't really a point against the game but more like something I wanted to rant about.

At the end of the day, I found the game so boring I didn't even finish it, and don't give me the whole "You can't review a game unless you've actually played it".
I put nearly 19 hours into this game and the whole time I was bored out of my mind, I don't care if it gets really good by the 45-hour mark if your game can't Interest me in less than 10 hours then you've failed in my opinion.

The mighty Ubisoft Gods have molded a fragile world that's just as puzzling as the Collyer Brothers' labyrinthian apartment.

The moment I lost hope for Fenyx: Rising Immortails was during the first real boss fight: Achilles the Corrupted Hero. Okay so like, you know how Achilles Heel is a thing? Well, one of Fenyx's Achilles Heels is the combat. If you exploit Dark Achilles obvious weakness you don't stun him or deal massive damage (His HP is insane btw). No, what happens is you do maybe 10 points more damage, and he kinda stumbles for half a second before attacking again. The combat system is so reliant on it's tedious stamina mechanic that even boss fights feel copy-paste. Simple concepts such as dealing extra damage for headshots are locked behind a skill tree which makes the beginning of the game a slog. All of the skills feel like a gamechanger but it's an artificial feeling because all they do is curtail the epic fun you have button-mashing to death OC do not Steal Jaba the Hutt, and cute lil' boars high on bath salts. One of the few skills you unlock that feels like a legitimate skill is slowing down time when using a bow mid-air. Cool. Cool. Cool.

Let's double back on epic Achilles battle again. I personally finished the fight by shooting his foot (it's literally bandaged) and then went in with heavy attacks when he finally gets stunned; this took me roughly 25 minutes. The faster solution is to ignore the famous weakness and just parry his first move and hit him with some heavy axe attacks, rinse and repeat (It feels bad... like exploiting AI bad). Wanna know the real kicker? When you stun him with the axe: he falls down and gestures towards his foot and grabs it. This fucking caned animation doesn't make even make sense in context. What kind of game punishes you for exploiting a bosses weakness?

Beyond my issues with the combat there's a lot of cool looking armor and weapons to find in chests and finding them is the best part of the game, however there's another "but" here. I didn't feel any of the benefits of the equipment. During the Achilles fight I was wearing a hood that gave the bow extra damage if I was at full health, but like it still took me 25 minutes slay Achilles. There's many concepts they utilized that originated from Breath of the Wild (which I have no issues with), but they decided to not implement the actually interesting subtleties like having equipment have a more important role with the world itself. I don't get any cool moments like being struck by lightning during a storm, or changing to more appropriate clothing for hot or cold climates, nope, we just get static buffs that don't make much of a difference.

There's a lot of other problems here too. The map is refreshingly more compact than Ubisoft's previous titles, however it's so cluttered with cliffs (The map is 80% mountains man!) god statues, useless broken bridges, and the usual copy-paste temples/houses/statues. Navigating the map is a nightmare, you spent half the game slowly climbing up endless cliffs. You can't utilize your mount because the map has zero flow to it. Remember how all the Korok puzzles subtly blended in with the environment aiding the atmosphere? Ubisoft thinks you're a fucking idiot because all of the puzzles are marked with red. You can't walk 30 seconds without spotting these blights upon the land. It clashes with the mood they're trying to set (not to mention red wall blocks are archaic at this point). The camera is too zoomed out and left me feeling detached from the world and it's characters. I want to see the details of the art but I can only do that with the camera feature, not naturally. I think this is the worst world Ubisoft has crafted. The surreal style I think they tried to accomplish just ends up looking like some glitched auto-generated terrain from Sim City.

Puzzles range from pushing boxes onto pads, pushing balls into holes, throwing rocks at damaged walls, and platforming; there's no innovation here. You get the feeling you've seen all the puzzles Fenyix has to offer puzzle within the first few shrines. The ball puzzles are infuriating because the physics are wonky; the shrine where I fought Achilles starts with you pulling a lever to spawn a ball which moves across upward wind tunnels, and you have to speed-platform (movement feels sluggish) to catch the ball before it falls off the other side of the platform it's headed towards. My first three attempts the physics failed and caused the ball fall into the abyss before it even reached it's destination. It's random if this lever works as intended. You could say GTFO OR GET GUD at platforming and catch the ball before it falls but the controls are baffling and unintuitive. Like why is square crouch? Why does pushing the analog sticks do nothing useful? Why are the R1/R2 the attack buttons? It's impressive how this game manages to feel sluggish even outside of the game. You can change the controls but honestly I didn't feel like playing the text-based version of sliding block puzzle that is fixing the controls, I'm already sick of finishing the actual fucking sliding block puzzles in the game itself. No thanks.

I'm going to finish off this review with a video I took showcasing how passionless this game is.

https://twitter.com/chadhacheydev/status/1413024881265029120?s=20