The challenge of Akka Arrh, as with most Llamasoft games, is to figure out what you need to pay attention to in each level. Separating signal from noise is a big part of that challenge, but there's almost always a cue. Sometimes it's a new enemy, sometimes it's a new dynamic with the board, sometimes it's a mixture of both. There's real brilliance in the rhythms and arrangements of each level and the way that they progress in sets.

It's a little uneven, however, and there were too many moments of cascading failure for my liking. The last few levels don't quite have the same satisfying balance as most of the rest of the game due to some sponge-y enemies and nasty combinations. It can be a little too easy to get caught with bullets from multiple directions. My irritation was often compounded by detonations that took place outside of my field of view.

Most of the time, though, that happened because of my own imprecision. I think it's probably Llamasoft's way of communicating to the player that they're being too trigger happy or off-rhythm with bombs and chains. It doesn't always work, but luckily, the ability to restart each level with one's best score and pods (read: lives) mitigates the frustration. It also encouraged me to go back to previous levels to outdo my score and accumulate a better restart for levels in which I was struggling. There's an excellent score tracking system in here, too, which seems inspired by watching speedrunners and cooking that together with a classic score chasing sensibility.

Finally, a note about the music and sound effects. As with most recent Llamasoft games, attention to sound cues is essential. Often, it's the only way to get a heads-up amidst the particle explosions and other visual noise. But Llamasoft has changed up the electro rave stylings of their games for a quieter, more emergent approach. It uses the game's sound effects and the rhythms created between their wave designs and timing and the players' actions. The results give Akka Arrh a distinctive soundscape that only adds to a wonderfully unique game.

Get ready to dunk on Duplo 4 and other games with stable framerates or functional multiplayer in global chat alongside your fellow trailblazing trendsetters slavishly following youtube guides coming up with fun novel builds in this hot new "indie" hack & slash ARPG by hardcore gamers for hardcore gamers (hence why the hotbar limits you to 5 skills), that incidentally spent half a decade in early access with barely any substantial updates during the last couple of years leading up to its recent "1.0 release", which definitely now qualifies it as a robust and most of all complete game. That's why the campaign is still unfinished and you're getting to beta test two new subclasses along with other minor little things like an auction house, while yet more overdue fixes/reworks of old busted stuff littering the game are still underway, allegedly. If that wasn't good enough, it was made in Unity (of course) by incompetents to boot to ensure it runs as poorly as one would hope and so that moving your character has you weightlessly slide across the terrain just like in all your favorite survival crafting games or b**mer shooters, on top of the presentation in many ways being worse than even Path of Exile circa a decade ago. But don't you dare bring any of that up regarding a game with a CGI pre-release trailer and premium currency microtransactions or else you'll be getting plenty of downvotes from folks who for instance think boss attacks being inaudible is perfectly acceptable, or the equivalent of a skill like frozen orb looking and sounding many times worse than its originator from 24 years ago is a-okay. Because ackshually As We All Know it's a lower budget title by an incompetent "independent" studio and that's why they couldn't afford to for example implement animations for your character blocking attacks with a shield, unlike say a game called Diablo released back in 1996.

The time travel premise in this Chronicon successor amounts to a convenient excuse to recycle level geometry and an occasional opportunity to kill dinosaurs, with one dungeon featuring everyone's favorite ephemeral gimmick from Titanfall 2/Dishonored Too, which about sums up how inspired the whole thing is outside of the mechanical back-end and the few trademark Good Ideas there. Can I name any of the characters or even quote a single line of dialogue from the stellar storyline comparable in quality to Hellgate London's you ask? Well of course, my favorite was "ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄCK!!!!" - Spymaster Zerrick. All in all, if you're a fan of clipping your sword through enemies and hearing the same anemic splatter SFX over&over while littering the screen with increasingly larger damage numbers, then this should suffice as a good enough opioid to help distract you until Path of Exile 2 is available to play for the modest price of a 250 eurodollar supporter pack complementary with your closed beta key.

PS: the volume slider for the muzak says "absolute bangers for ye gamers", and that's why even at max it's borderline inaudible ingame and the OST itself is comprised of "relaxing 432hz tunes to fall asleep to" or epic™ tracks with women going OOO and AAA, really gets you PumPd up and ready2slay

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You sit before the computer again; a bone-numbing chill blankets the air between you and the screen, as if the monitor itself bordered on some other, colder space. This is the portal to your Fortress of Regrets... now all you need do is inscribe your feelings upon the website.

> 𝐓𝐚𝐩 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐭𝐲𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮.
- 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞... 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐰.


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This thought of yours has been peeled from the back of your mind. Its rough gray surface reminds you of a zombie's hide; it looks more like another piece of worn-out novelty writing than a legitimate video game review.
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> 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭.
- 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞.


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You clench your teeth and dig your mind into your soul; with a dry, tearing sound, you peel off a strip of yourself. The chill between yourself and the monitor becomes stronger, almost hungering, as if the screen has opened a crack in your mind...
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> 𝐊𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐭𝐲𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠; 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝.
- 𝐏𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲...


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You finish the review. Before your thoughts can escape, you press 'Create Log' and let forth several paragraphs of bullshit. As you prepare to save your work, a series of images float across your mind...
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> 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭: "𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐦𝐲 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬..."
- 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭: "𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐦𝐲 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐭..."
- 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭: "𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭..."
- 𝐋𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲.


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You whisper the words to yourself, but the regret echoes through your mind:
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> 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐞

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'I regret...'
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> 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐞

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"I regret that I played this game."
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Completed this over the course of a rainy weekend with my partner and I don't think I could have asked for a better environment to experience the game in. Being the Watson to someone else's Holmes as they spend an oppressive autumn experiencing this genre is so bloody fun.

The Thinking Panel is the chief innovation here, and now all I want is for this game to somehow fall into the laps of Ace Attorney's design team. The Thinking Panel places the onus of investigation thoroughly on the player, but doesn't cast them adrift in a world of deductive overload - an incredibly brain-pleasing achievement that even the best mystery-focused detective fiction often fails to do well. Agatha Christie has been put on notice post-mortem; gone should be the days of Phoenix railroading us down conversational flowcharts that hurtle towards a linear, factual truth.

At one point during our playthrough, it was suggested that this gameplay could be imposed upon existing mysteries (e.g. a Hounds of the Baskervilles DLC pack), but I think the world that Andrejs Kļaviņš and Ernests Kļaviņš have created here is rich enough that we don't need to go raid our old pile of Ian Rankin novels for inspiration. The way each murder builds from a comedy to the singular tragedy of absolutist "virtue"-driven Modern England is just too deliciously timely to ignore. We are all coming down with a Case of the Golden Idol.

I feel like I've had a real bad run of disappointments with Doom Eternal, R3MAKE, and now this.

The most accurate way I can describe how the game made me feel was that it's like playing with someone's hands on your shoulders, and they're near-constantly turning you here and there, telling you where to look, and how long for.

[Hold triangle to continue reading]

It's: "Go. Stop. Ok, go. Turn and look at this. Now go. Stop. Walk. Look over here. Stop. Go. Wait, look at this... Keep looking... Keep Looking... Now go".

Over and over and over. It's a real shame because there's some great stuff in there, old and new. But it's absolutely mired in egregious modern AAA structure. The amount of slow ducking under this, and carefully sidling through that is ridiculous. Forced walks and having the camera wrenched from you time and time again because they don't trust you to look and find things yourself. I cannae even be bothered going into the bloat and busywork, but the game is a good 15 hours too long, and I forced myself through it like I haven't had to do with anything in some time.

Barret's great, and I wish Marlene was my pal.