JoeArkhive
WIP: 29/03 Finised Act 1
quite enjoyable so far. combat is pretty simple yet entertaining, getting some nice combos and taking advantage of scenarios with team members. I definitely wish you could fine-tune how you party auto-battles though, the options provided are quite limited which often leads to team-members doing things you did not want, and having every party-member follow orders makes combat feel too slow IMO. e.g. I wish i could make veronica always buff her MM before sending off attacks, or I wish I could make Serena prioritise doing buffs when she doesn't need to heal anyone, instead of just doing a pointless wand attack that only ever seems to wake up an enemy Erik has just put to sleep lol.
Story is quite generic but its entertain and engaging enough. Plenty of cliches but its still endearing, I do wish the party interacted with each other a little more, e.g. when you arrive in Gondolia and Veronica / Serena immediately side with Sylvano to go waste time, fun stuff like that but I think the party expands too quickly for anyone to properly develop so far...
WIP: 21/04
Really enjoying the story much more in Act II so far, does make me wish there was more character development in Act I BUT still really enjoy seeing the party members develop and change and be given purpose n shit. Combat becomes much more entertaining with crazier abilities being added to almost everyone. At this point Erik still feels a little lame to play with, his schtick of "apply debuff, apply clone buff, do big attack, repeat" is pretty repetitive and at this point that's all he can do, he has basically no other abilities.
quite enjoyable so far. combat is pretty simple yet entertaining, getting some nice combos and taking advantage of scenarios with team members. I definitely wish you could fine-tune how you party auto-battles though, the options provided are quite limited which often leads to team-members doing things you did not want, and having every party-member follow orders makes combat feel too slow IMO. e.g. I wish i could make veronica always buff her MM before sending off attacks, or I wish I could make Serena prioritise doing buffs when she doesn't need to heal anyone, instead of just doing a pointless wand attack that only ever seems to wake up an enemy Erik has just put to sleep lol.
Story is quite generic but its entertain and engaging enough. Plenty of cliches but its still endearing, I do wish the party interacted with each other a little more, e.g. when you arrive in Gondolia and Veronica / Serena immediately side with Sylvano to go waste time, fun stuff like that but I think the party expands too quickly for anyone to properly develop so far...
WIP: 21/04
Really enjoying the story much more in Act II so far, does make me wish there was more character development in Act I BUT still really enjoy seeing the party members develop and change and be given purpose n shit. Combat becomes much more entertaining with crazier abilities being added to almost everyone. At this point Erik still feels a little lame to play with, his schtick of "apply debuff, apply clone buff, do big attack, repeat" is pretty repetitive and at this point that's all he can do, he has basically no other abilities.
2014
Overall really great. Story is leagues more interesting than Halo CE, higher stakes now that Earth is envolves and Cortana is left in danger, the added perspective of the Arbiter is really ahead of its time for 2004 and its elevated by Blur's amazing new cutscenes that are the definitive way to experience this story. Some of the weapon balancing is quite bad though, maybe moreso than in CE. most weapons that you can dual-wield are basically useless, and the AR finds a way to be even worse than in CE too.
Overall great game that holds up well. there are some annoyingly harsh spots you can find yourself in during Heroic difficulty depending on what guns and grenades you have on you at that time but action is still punchy, and story is still very entertaining.
2022
Some bad boss fights, some bad locations, some bad weapon design, and some bad story-telling but even with these few and far-between low-points in quality its an absolutely fantastic overall package.
Amazing game almost no notes! Action is fun and punchy, does a great job of balancing the power-fantasy between you and the other guardians making them feel really important to the fight while you're still the star of the show. The story is also really enjoyable, goes beyond Gunn's best work across his GoTG movies by giving a far better balanced spread of attention to the whole group, notably how important and well written Drax is to this game vs being little more than the butt of most jokes in the movie adaptions.
Only notes for improvement is sometimes Groot or Drax would get stuck somewhere while exploring and wouldn't be available for interactables needed for progression, or a combat sequence would get stuck unfinished despite clearing all enemies, though this only happened a couple times during my playthrough and a quick checkpoint reset would fix it.
Other than that sometimes dialogue would get cut-off from new scripted events happening and choosing one of Quill's dialogue options too soon which is a shame because the banter between the cast is very enjoyable!
Only notes for improvement is sometimes Groot or Drax would get stuck somewhere while exploring and wouldn't be available for interactables needed for progression, or a combat sequence would get stuck unfinished despite clearing all enemies, though this only happened a couple times during my playthrough and a quick checkpoint reset would fix it.
Other than that sometimes dialogue would get cut-off from new scripted events happening and choosing one of Quill's dialogue options too soon which is a shame because the banter between the cast is very enjoyable!
2023
Cool combat gimmic and great artstyle, if a little vanilla. unfortunately an equal amount of the game is spent walking through hallways and other quite boring areas rather than having fun smashing up robots. PLUS holy cringe dialogue
Unparalleled vibes. Great pixel art and top tier CD music makes this game feel a cut above much of what came before and even after it. This game benefits greatly for being towars the end of the pixel-art era, having a very experienced design team and the power of the PS1 to do whatever they wanted visually, + The music and sound design still feels top of the line today thanks to the quality available on the PS1 compared to cartridge based games.
2005
Definitely a good 4th installment. Switching it up to purely mission based gameplay was the right call. Mission objectives are quite repetitive and the locations are quite barebones but you are able to get through them and this game in general quite quickly and are encouraged to go fast so it doesn't really matter, just hone in on the non-stop action.
Too easy, repetitive, and stop-start to be anything more than just OK. In the original Super Mario games you could absolutely fly through level after level but Wonder you are constantly interrupted by the dumb little worm, irrelevant dialogue and wandering around the overworld looking for what to do instead of playing the levels which are quite fun but too much time is spent NOT playing through them in this game. Should be called Super Mario Wander XD.
2021
Preface: Only played the first act since the rest of the game is completely different and doesn't interest me at all.
Really fun little rogue-like card game! I liked the little puzzles around the cabin, and especially the few little friends you get in your deck, makes me wish there was an entire deckbuilder game built around cards with personalities.
I think its a little too easy to end up with decks that are full of terrible cards, but sometimes its just as easy to get a few cards that can carry you through an entire run.
overall a really fun game you can finish in a couple hours!
Really fun little rogue-like card game! I liked the little puzzles around the cabin, and especially the few little friends you get in your deck, makes me wish there was an entire deckbuilder game built around cards with personalities.
I think its a little too easy to end up with decks that are full of terrible cards, but sometimes its just as easy to get a few cards that can carry you through an entire run.
overall a really fun game you can finish in a couple hours!
Like the previous game, there are some all around improvements to character movement and combat, the always strafe mode when you have a gun out is a nice addition since theres basically never a time you want to do otherwise. Unfortunately this game's UI is way uglier than R&C2s, and the story this time around felt extremely generic compared to the first two games. The previous entries had nice little kid-friendly digs at corporatism and capitalism that this game throws out to centre a generic "crazy evil genius". I think some of the R&C2 legacy weapons from slim cognito are available way too late into the game, that even aquiring them ASAP for free provide no benefit on first playthough. By far the worst part about this game is the super boring holo-comic mini-games. I thought the forced Miles + MJ filler missions in Insomniac's Spider-Man game was bad but looks like useless filler has been apart of their game-design for a long time.
Pretty much improves on the first game in every way. better character and combat controls, more interesting weapons, and more interesting planet designs with some decently fun mini-game like levels thrown it to mix things up. Latter part of the game drags on a little bit, and a few planets feel like you spend 10 minutes there and immediately move on. But over-all great action platformer.
2002
One of the worst controlling shooters I've ever come across, thank god the developers played Ocarina of Time before developing the sequel and realised what a proper lock-on system is like. Still a charming game with great animation and personality for the time.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Cute little game overall. Simple but nice artstyle and music and the core gameplay mechanics while pretty simple play with scale in a fun way. Game would be much better with a "Spring" button to speed up some parts that require to walk back and forth a bit.