I played this for like 3 months straight every day last summer and in September I just sort of stopped for some reason. The game is fun for a while but I think there's just too little things to do and progress towards after you finish the 'campaign'.

I think you have to have a lot of patience and creativity to make steady progress through the post-game where your efforts are focused on terraforming, decorating, and redesigning your island and I didn't really have the motivation to stick it through. Maybe I'll jump back in sometime in the future.

Exo One grows on you as its level design develops — the relatively simplistic early levels growing more complex as mechanics are added (or subtracted) and new twists are added to its stunning set of environments. And driving the player through those strange and sometimes wondrous planets is a gorgeous soundtrack filled with moody, contemplative tracks that, for me, are the game's lasting highlight. All-in-all, it's a wondrous, moody, atmospheric game that captures the scale of outer space in a way few games have.

Or, in short, it's like Denis Villeneuve decided to remake Journey and Interstellar at the same time, as a game about falling with style.

I hated this so much it made me re-evaluate my scoring system.

There's no point to Vampire Survivors at all. At least other games I hate like Castlevania Adventure or Metroid 1 have obstacles to overcome, goals to reach and mechanics to master. Vampire Survivors technically has those, but the game essentially plays itself most of the time. All you really do is walk around to level up which lets you kill things a little faster than you did before. Even walking sims, at the VERY least, will usually attempt to convey an emotion or tell a story through some sort of abstract way. I felt absolutely nothing playing Vampire Survivors.

I'm not gonna say it killed my family and pissed on my bed since it's dirt cheap and even free on mobile, but the fact that I'm relieved I didn't even spend $5 for it on PC says a lot. In fact, instead of buying Vampire Survivors, here's just a few games that cost $5 (not on sale) or less that you should buy instead!

DOOM (or DOOM II, or DOOM 64)
Hylics
Plants Vs. Zombies
Super Hexagon
Geometry Dash
Downwell
VVVVVV
and many many more!

I feel like a fucking crazy person seeing the amount of people who fell in love with this. If you want a roguelike, play Gungeon. If you want bullet hell, also play Gungeon. Just play Gungeon.

+expansive world with gorgeous, varied environment design. great sense of scale as you climb each titan
+great overall concept, the titans that the characters live on are intricately tied to the plot and feel natural to explore
+excellent character design in terms of the synergy between their abilities and which roles they can adapt to in team builds
+excellent character design otherwise too lol, very likable
+I personally have a soft spot for the voice actors entirely coming from the commonwealth... gives the games a unique identity over here
+I have not played the original, but it seems like many quality-of-life elements have been added, specifically for quest tracking
+this has been controversial but I prefer the heavy anime-influenced of this version over the ps2-level realism of the original. considering that the original engine has been reused, I think switching to a style that favors lower-poly is appropriate
+the general xeno-series mixture of organic and mechanical elements is great as usual, especially in how its integrated in the duality between bionis and mechonis

-combat is really lacking in terms of variation from battle to battle. topplelock is an interesting mechanic but when every battle is just topplelocking, it's not very interesting
-level has too much sway in the outcome of battles, where raw stats seem to be more decisive than team-building in many cases
-the first half of the story lacks much driving force, which is a ridiculous amount of time in a game that can easily last ~90 hours
-much of the story is opaque in the first half and beyond, partially contributing to the above. I didn't feel like I had a good idea of what was going on until maybe 60-70 hours in
-I don't know quite how long I spent on side content but I have a feeling it was at least 15 hours. in that time I didn't feel like I got much useful out of doing side missions or leveling up affinity for how boring it was to perform
-side quests are very bland, a lot of kill x enemy, pick up x item, save x person, etc. missions with irrelevant, flimsy justifications
-overstuffed with systems, many of which don't feel immediately useful or feel superfluous. I distinctly remember xc2 having this issue as well
-I'm reasonably sure this is running on the xc2 engine, but that engine had some graphical flaws and so does this game. you will notice that many assets are lacking or even from the wii original, and the framerate / resolution dip in heated situations, especially when in handheld mode
-considering the most interesting part of this game is the team-building and mastering each character's playstyle, it feels like much of the design doesn't really encourage experimentation outside of a couple of endgame encounters (specifically DL)

as much as I want to like this game, it frankly felt like a chore pretty quickly and never let up, even when the final twenty hours or so shed light on many of the mysteries wrapped up in the story. for the time investment involved, I'm just not sure it's worth the slog for a dozen hours of interesting twists at the end