Shenobi
2013
This game is a mess. I had originally abandoned it, but something about it on my last circling of my unending backlog caught my attention and I had to play it to completion. I cannot state it enough, though -- WHAT AN ABSOLUTE MESS.
It's a first-person dungeon crawler that has an aesthetic I can get behind, but everything else is muddled in some fashion.
-- The equipment UI is busted and requires you to jump back to the EQ list in order to see what you're putting on vs. what you're wearing because it won't show the stat differences for every aspect of the equipment while you're cycling through potential stuff you can wear.
-- At one point, I got a Long Sword I really liked and those swords can be equipped with Shields. For whatever reason, this sword could not...and it erased my shield I was wearing in the process.
-- There's stuttering when moving through your room in the house, making it feel like the game's going to hard freeze at any point.
-- I actually got softlocked while trying to leave town because the menu for town never opened up one time when I left my house.
-- Combat is slow and not all skills detail exactly how they work or who they target properly.
-- Music loops every 60-90 seconds (I think) and it's the kind of loop where it just ends on one note and abruptly goes back to the beginning and it's not a clean loop, so enjoy that jarring sensation over and over.
-- At one point, I discovered that combat actually takes place above the dungeon floors because I went to open a door when a fight started and it caused me to be able to move around while in the combat screen...so I walked and fell out of the combat area and onto the open ceiling of the dungeon floor I was on, and then fell back into the dungeon area. Since this was a fixed fight I could visibly see on the screen, I couldn't actually go back to fight that fight again because, well...I had no way to get back up into the sky where fights take place.
-- Some secrets just don't even work. I beat one of the strongest monsters in the game and it dropped the item I needed to unlock some secret doors, but the item left my inventory so I couldn't even open the doors. What was behind those doors? The best spells in the game. Whoops!
-- Spelling errors galore.
-- The credits might be my favorite moment, because I'm most certain that they asked the people in the "Special Thanks" section to write what they want their names credited as and we got a number of "Anonymous", but we also got "No", "No, thank you.", "No thanks", and my favorite: "I don't want my name to appear in the credits." I hope I got that last one right, because I was too busy cracking up to make sure I remembered it properly.
It's not a great dungeon crawling RPG, but for some reason, I got obsessed enough to plow through it and read a really poorly-written and goofy ending. I'm not changing my rating on this game, but at least I finally dealt a blow to The Backlog Monster. Yay for small victories!
(pass on this game unless you're desperate)
It's a first-person dungeon crawler that has an aesthetic I can get behind, but everything else is muddled in some fashion.
-- The equipment UI is busted and requires you to jump back to the EQ list in order to see what you're putting on vs. what you're wearing because it won't show the stat differences for every aspect of the equipment while you're cycling through potential stuff you can wear.
-- At one point, I got a Long Sword I really liked and those swords can be equipped with Shields. For whatever reason, this sword could not...and it erased my shield I was wearing in the process.
-- There's stuttering when moving through your room in the house, making it feel like the game's going to hard freeze at any point.
-- I actually got softlocked while trying to leave town because the menu for town never opened up one time when I left my house.
-- Combat is slow and not all skills detail exactly how they work or who they target properly.
-- Music loops every 60-90 seconds (I think) and it's the kind of loop where it just ends on one note and abruptly goes back to the beginning and it's not a clean loop, so enjoy that jarring sensation over and over.
-- At one point, I discovered that combat actually takes place above the dungeon floors because I went to open a door when a fight started and it caused me to be able to move around while in the combat screen...so I walked and fell out of the combat area and onto the open ceiling of the dungeon floor I was on, and then fell back into the dungeon area. Since this was a fixed fight I could visibly see on the screen, I couldn't actually go back to fight that fight again because, well...I had no way to get back up into the sky where fights take place.
-- Some secrets just don't even work. I beat one of the strongest monsters in the game and it dropped the item I needed to unlock some secret doors, but the item left my inventory so I couldn't even open the doors. What was behind those doors? The best spells in the game. Whoops!
-- Spelling errors galore.
-- The credits might be my favorite moment, because I'm most certain that they asked the people in the "Special Thanks" section to write what they want their names credited as and we got a number of "Anonymous", but we also got "No", "No, thank you.", "No thanks", and my favorite: "I don't want my name to appear in the credits." I hope I got that last one right, because I was too busy cracking up to make sure I remembered it properly.
It's not a great dungeon crawling RPG, but for some reason, I got obsessed enough to plow through it and read a really poorly-written and goofy ending. I'm not changing my rating on this game, but at least I finally dealt a blow to The Backlog Monster. Yay for small victories!
(pass on this game unless you're desperate)
This review contains spoilers
When this game doesn't get in the way of itself, it can actually be a fun time.
Level design is all over the place, ranging from interesting exploration to headache-inducing platforming (including escape sequences). Fast travel is one point per area, but for vital items that you might have missed, enjoy traipsing ALL THE WAY back through areas. I know that shouldn't sound bad in a Metroidvania, but this game started to grate on me after a little while when it came to going back to explore stuff.
Bosses are varying levels of okay-to-bad, in some cases just based on whether you're in the second phase or not. There are several bosses with attacks that follow based on what side you're on, so even if they telegraph the move to give you an opportunity to react, rolling past them or jumping in the opposite direction they're facing just means you're going to take a hit on the other side of them because they 180 on a dime.
In the case of one boss, you have an NPC assisting you for parts of the fight and it felt like the boss had a larger health bar because of this. I don't know if that's actually the case or not, but the fight felt like a slog because the boss had homing projectile attacks that would only come after you and since you're doing about 90% of the damage for this fight, you spend a good portion of the fight at times just dodging instead of being able to take a swing while NPC occasionally gets in a single hit every thirty seconds or so.
Weapons/weapon skills are a mixed bag, because some skills are vital abilities needed to make progression in the game and in conjunction with your ability tree, sometimes create really awkward scenarios just because of the dev's design choice. One weapon has a secondary ability to shield you from inclement weather and other hazards and you're required to use it against a boss. You have an ability that lets you check the health of a boss by using your weapon skill to hit the boss. What happens when you're forced to use a weapon that just acts as a shield when you're next to a boss? You end up standing there next to a boss, probably looking like an idiot.
I'm not suggesting that ability (seeing boss HP) is particularly important or necessary, but there's lots of little design decisions that don't make a lot of sense like this. That same weapon I mentioned can protect you from a hazard as long as you have it up, but you can't jump while you're using it and there's an area where you have to navigate down while holding up said weapon and there's spikes on either side of some ledges you can land on. What do you do if you land on a ledge? Well, you stand there until you decide to take a lot of damage because you're going to have to eat the hazard, the spikes, or both in order to proceed further down. If you get to that area, you'll probably understand what I mean, because I promise I'm making it sound way less annoying than it is if you have even a passing interest in getting secrets and exploring rooms.
Design rant incoming:
I think the most criminal design moment is the first (yes, there's two!) escape sequence you find around the halfway point in the game. You get about a half-screen's worth of distance from the boss the whole time and the sequence is probably somewhere around 90 seconds of precision platforming. Since your character has the ability to switch between their normal form and their companion's form (that of a giant frog that can use some gate-smashing abilities), you learn quickly (by dying) that you need to be in frog form to start the run.
When you get to the point where you need to use the frog's ability, you have to wait an extra moment longer than you think you do to use the ability. This is because the ability is tied to the same button as the roll / air-dash command and the prompt that shows up when you're in range of using said ability doesn't cause the ability to become active. You actually have to stop in order to activate it, THEN you can get things moving again.
You keep platforming and work your way further over and find another gated section your frog has to smash through in a different way. It's a charge-up move, so you need to stick the landing and set it up quickly because it takes a bit of time to get going. There is an ability on your ability tree that shortens charge time for frog's moves, but we'll come back to why this mostly doesn't matter shortly.
Assuming you get through all that, you think you're probably home free, so you do a bit more platforming (or just eating damage so you can use I-Frames to exploit air dashing and ignore some of the platforming), and reach a ledge. You can see another ledge on the other side, so you do what you know and jump/air-dash across to the other side from the ledge...and die because you were expected to fire a projectile past the edge of the screen that you could see to hit a lever to bring that platform over to the other side so you could clear a particular jump over there in order to keep going.
So, you rinse and repeat all this until the platforming goes right. Or quit the game. Because even though you have save checkpoints throughout the game, the developer of this game thought you should start right from this boss escape sequence over and over until you got it right. I mentioned that the charge time reduction ability wasn't really relevant, and this is largely why -- if you didn't purchase it before this point, you're definitely not purchasing it now. Since slight goofs bring the boss about 33% closer to you in each instance, it takes very little in the way of mistakes to have to restart the fight. I could easily see people giving up on the game during that fight because I already wasn't having a good time and mostly just wanted to play to see the end of the game instead of because I was enjoying myself.
End of design rant...or is it?
The next area of the game, you get a double jump ability. Use it by jumping in the air and then jumping again. Simple enough, right? It even has a sound cue to indicate the second jump happened. And this is where I think what should be a quality one would appreciate might exist because there was an issue with coding.
Your abilities you gain in each area get a lot of workout from them to make you feel like you're getting the most out of them. This particular area that requires double jumping has A LOT of platforms and wall jumping to navigate around. The problem is, sometimes you jump once and you suddenly hear the double jump sound. Lo and behold, you press the jump button again and nothing happens! Kinda makes me wonder if the sound cue was added in because something was wrong with the double jump and they wanted you to hear the cue so you could make a manual adjustment on the fly -- which I had to do probably several dozen times over the course of the next two areas.
TRUE end of design rant.
Beyond that, lots of little dialogue mistakes (mostly misspellings, but one particular story scene they refer to the character as "she", but then instruct someone multiple times to keep an eye on "him") and some impressive screen tearing in certain areas.
Soundtrack is okay, regular enemies are mostly fine. The one shining element of the game is that there's a lot of dialogue you can access if you really want to seek it out by going back and talking to the usual NPCs each time you make progress to a new area. Story's nothing to write home about, but they did do a solid job trying to establish some worldbuilding, so kudos for that, and it's largely why I give this two stars.
I quit at 70% area completion according to the game and I don't really see an interest in carrying on. It's not that I couldn't -- I just got tired of fighting the game and weird design decisions that made the experience less fluid than it should have been. I think it says something that I was looking at someone's map they made to make sure I didn't miss out on secrets, only to find out that -- in regards to the second sequence -- they quite literally mention that you shouldn't attempt the second sequence if you're in a bad mood and not having a good time trying to handle the controls. OOF.
Get it on deep sale, or get it in the Humble Monthly Bundle like I did. Not the worst Metroidvania, but it really tried to shoot itself in the foot with a rocket launcher.
Level design is all over the place, ranging from interesting exploration to headache-inducing platforming (including escape sequences). Fast travel is one point per area, but for vital items that you might have missed, enjoy traipsing ALL THE WAY back through areas. I know that shouldn't sound bad in a Metroidvania, but this game started to grate on me after a little while when it came to going back to explore stuff.
Bosses are varying levels of okay-to-bad, in some cases just based on whether you're in the second phase or not. There are several bosses with attacks that follow based on what side you're on, so even if they telegraph the move to give you an opportunity to react, rolling past them or jumping in the opposite direction they're facing just means you're going to take a hit on the other side of them because they 180 on a dime.
In the case of one boss, you have an NPC assisting you for parts of the fight and it felt like the boss had a larger health bar because of this. I don't know if that's actually the case or not, but the fight felt like a slog because the boss had homing projectile attacks that would only come after you and since you're doing about 90% of the damage for this fight, you spend a good portion of the fight at times just dodging instead of being able to take a swing while NPC occasionally gets in a single hit every thirty seconds or so.
Weapons/weapon skills are a mixed bag, because some skills are vital abilities needed to make progression in the game and in conjunction with your ability tree, sometimes create really awkward scenarios just because of the dev's design choice. One weapon has a secondary ability to shield you from inclement weather and other hazards and you're required to use it against a boss. You have an ability that lets you check the health of a boss by using your weapon skill to hit the boss. What happens when you're forced to use a weapon that just acts as a shield when you're next to a boss? You end up standing there next to a boss, probably looking like an idiot.
I'm not suggesting that ability (seeing boss HP) is particularly important or necessary, but there's lots of little design decisions that don't make a lot of sense like this. That same weapon I mentioned can protect you from a hazard as long as you have it up, but you can't jump while you're using it and there's an area where you have to navigate down while holding up said weapon and there's spikes on either side of some ledges you can land on. What do you do if you land on a ledge? Well, you stand there until you decide to take a lot of damage because you're going to have to eat the hazard, the spikes, or both in order to proceed further down. If you get to that area, you'll probably understand what I mean, because I promise I'm making it sound way less annoying than it is if you have even a passing interest in getting secrets and exploring rooms.
Design rant incoming:
I think the most criminal design moment is the first (yes, there's two!) escape sequence you find around the halfway point in the game. You get about a half-screen's worth of distance from the boss the whole time and the sequence is probably somewhere around 90 seconds of precision platforming. Since your character has the ability to switch between their normal form and their companion's form (that of a giant frog that can use some gate-smashing abilities), you learn quickly (by dying) that you need to be in frog form to start the run.
When you get to the point where you need to use the frog's ability, you have to wait an extra moment longer than you think you do to use the ability. This is because the ability is tied to the same button as the roll / air-dash command and the prompt that shows up when you're in range of using said ability doesn't cause the ability to become active. You actually have to stop in order to activate it, THEN you can get things moving again.
You keep platforming and work your way further over and find another gated section your frog has to smash through in a different way. It's a charge-up move, so you need to stick the landing and set it up quickly because it takes a bit of time to get going. There is an ability on your ability tree that shortens charge time for frog's moves, but we'll come back to why this mostly doesn't matter shortly.
Assuming you get through all that, you think you're probably home free, so you do a bit more platforming (or just eating damage so you can use I-Frames to exploit air dashing and ignore some of the platforming), and reach a ledge. You can see another ledge on the other side, so you do what you know and jump/air-dash across to the other side from the ledge...and die because you were expected to fire a projectile past the edge of the screen that you could see to hit a lever to bring that platform over to the other side so you could clear a particular jump over there in order to keep going.
So, you rinse and repeat all this until the platforming goes right. Or quit the game. Because even though you have save checkpoints throughout the game, the developer of this game thought you should start right from this boss escape sequence over and over until you got it right. I mentioned that the charge time reduction ability wasn't really relevant, and this is largely why -- if you didn't purchase it before this point, you're definitely not purchasing it now. Since slight goofs bring the boss about 33% closer to you in each instance, it takes very little in the way of mistakes to have to restart the fight. I could easily see people giving up on the game during that fight because I already wasn't having a good time and mostly just wanted to play to see the end of the game instead of because I was enjoying myself.
End of design rant...or is it?
The next area of the game, you get a double jump ability. Use it by jumping in the air and then jumping again. Simple enough, right? It even has a sound cue to indicate the second jump happened. And this is where I think what should be a quality one would appreciate might exist because there was an issue with coding.
Your abilities you gain in each area get a lot of workout from them to make you feel like you're getting the most out of them. This particular area that requires double jumping has A LOT of platforms and wall jumping to navigate around. The problem is, sometimes you jump once and you suddenly hear the double jump sound. Lo and behold, you press the jump button again and nothing happens! Kinda makes me wonder if the sound cue was added in because something was wrong with the double jump and they wanted you to hear the cue so you could make a manual adjustment on the fly -- which I had to do probably several dozen times over the course of the next two areas.
TRUE end of design rant.
Beyond that, lots of little dialogue mistakes (mostly misspellings, but one particular story scene they refer to the character as "she", but then instruct someone multiple times to keep an eye on "him") and some impressive screen tearing in certain areas.
Soundtrack is okay, regular enemies are mostly fine. The one shining element of the game is that there's a lot of dialogue you can access if you really want to seek it out by going back and talking to the usual NPCs each time you make progress to a new area. Story's nothing to write home about, but they did do a solid job trying to establish some worldbuilding, so kudos for that, and it's largely why I give this two stars.
I quit at 70% area completion according to the game and I don't really see an interest in carrying on. It's not that I couldn't -- I just got tired of fighting the game and weird design decisions that made the experience less fluid than it should have been. I think it says something that I was looking at someone's map they made to make sure I didn't miss out on secrets, only to find out that -- in regards to the second sequence -- they quite literally mention that you shouldn't attempt the second sequence if you're in a bad mood and not having a good time trying to handle the controls. OOF.
Get it on deep sale, or get it in the Humble Monthly Bundle like I did. Not the worst Metroidvania, but it really tried to shoot itself in the foot with a rocket launcher.
1999
This is one of the few Dreamcast games I didn't enjoy on some level at all. I feel like I remember seeing reviews of this game getting a 3/10 and I thought, "An RPG for the DC, how can this be a bad thing?"
Don't let me stop you from discovering what kind of gem this game is. It might even be worth at least 1.5 stars!
Don't let me stop you from discovering what kind of gem this game is. It might even be worth at least 1.5 stars!
1987
I think the description of the game hits the nail on the head here -- it's just a sloppier, more restrictive Double Dragon without any of the fun.
Decided to go back and really give this a go, since it has a full translation and I'm a sucker for Shining Force-style games where I get to see back-and-forth reactions for combat.
It's...an okay game. It suffers more than anything from just being cumbersome about everything it does. Some examples:
-- Text is SLOW and there's not really a way to speed it up unless you're just fast-forwarding on an emulator.
-- Some text prompts are bugged. When you first meet Eris, you're asked if you'll accompany her to the next area of the game and you're given the option to say NO, so you can resupply before you leave. If you say NO, you mention needing to resupply, she tells you that she understands, and as soon as the dialogue ends...it takes you back to the beginning of the dialogue exchange you just had again, forcing you to keep saying NO until you give up and say YES to move on without resupplying.
-- Enemy behavior is largely poor and skills are super-strong. AI will give you every reason to cut it down with very little resistance. I won the major boss fight at the end of Chapter 2 in two hits, and I didn't need the first hit. The boss waltzed right up to attack one of my slow-moving units after I moved him first, so I just brought the hero up as the last action for that turn, then when everyone re-cycled and became available again, I just moved the hero over next to him and used the special ability to do exactsies. Two potential healers nearby could do nothing about me one-shotting him and didn't even try to remedy the damage done by the hit that didn't matter.
-- The Law and Chaos emblem alignment system is a neat idea, since it rewards you with unique party members that will come hang with you if you're far enough in one direction or the other...except it's not always apparent as to where you stand with some characters. I got one early in Chapter 1 who just left after I cleared a mission by following the mission rules, but I was too CHAOTIC because I had been killing enemies up to that point and not escaping from battle -- something the game doesn't even tell you about. Then I got another character in Chapter 2 who left after the first fight he was involved in because I became too LAWFUL, even though I had no idea I was even close to that point because again, no warning.
-- To add to that, this means that upgrading character equipment is a risky venture because you don't always know who might just peace out on you. A few spell out their rules, but if you're not consulting a guide, good luck.
-- Equipment is really just weapons and healing items, but even this is convoluted, because it doesn't feel obvious as to whether there are equipment limitations or not, and it's never clearly stated that in order to equip something, you simply need to buy it and you automatically can select it in battle because NOTHING IS ACTUALLY EQUIPPED. If you're like me and spending extra turns camping out so you can use the storage system to check stuff, overworld enemies could come up on you simply because of how pointless the equipment system is along with storage at campsites.
-- The alternating turn system for characters and enemies seems interesting at first, but it becomes apparent quickly that since you can control your order, you're never really in any danger if you think about tactics because even when there's less enemies and the smaller number start getting multiple actions, there's gap periods where they still have to wait on enough of your units to go, so you can always stack formations in your favor to avoid leaving a healer or archer open to major damage.
I didn't make major headway into the game because it just felt like a slog to deal with the first several chapters, but I'll also say that IF the translation is remotely accurate, the dialogue is kind of a mess and feels like something out of some really bad anime. Some of the exchanges are just beyond goofy and apparently, every dude is a horndog, I guess. I won't fault the game for that since I don't know what the original dialogue was like, but the translation definitely didn't do me any favors for enjoying it.
I doubt I'll ever go back to this again, but it was nice to spend a little time with a different attempt at a Shining Force-type game, even if it never seemed to live up to that caliber of quality.
It's...an okay game. It suffers more than anything from just being cumbersome about everything it does. Some examples:
-- Text is SLOW and there's not really a way to speed it up unless you're just fast-forwarding on an emulator.
-- Some text prompts are bugged. When you first meet Eris, you're asked if you'll accompany her to the next area of the game and you're given the option to say NO, so you can resupply before you leave. If you say NO, you mention needing to resupply, she tells you that she understands, and as soon as the dialogue ends...it takes you back to the beginning of the dialogue exchange you just had again, forcing you to keep saying NO until you give up and say YES to move on without resupplying.
-- Enemy behavior is largely poor and skills are super-strong. AI will give you every reason to cut it down with very little resistance. I won the major boss fight at the end of Chapter 2 in two hits, and I didn't need the first hit. The boss waltzed right up to attack one of my slow-moving units after I moved him first, so I just brought the hero up as the last action for that turn, then when everyone re-cycled and became available again, I just moved the hero over next to him and used the special ability to do exactsies. Two potential healers nearby could do nothing about me one-shotting him and didn't even try to remedy the damage done by the hit that didn't matter.
-- The Law and Chaos emblem alignment system is a neat idea, since it rewards you with unique party members that will come hang with you if you're far enough in one direction or the other...except it's not always apparent as to where you stand with some characters. I got one early in Chapter 1 who just left after I cleared a mission by following the mission rules, but I was too CHAOTIC because I had been killing enemies up to that point and not escaping from battle -- something the game doesn't even tell you about. Then I got another character in Chapter 2 who left after the first fight he was involved in because I became too LAWFUL, even though I had no idea I was even close to that point because again, no warning.
-- To add to that, this means that upgrading character equipment is a risky venture because you don't always know who might just peace out on you. A few spell out their rules, but if you're not consulting a guide, good luck.
-- Equipment is really just weapons and healing items, but even this is convoluted, because it doesn't feel obvious as to whether there are equipment limitations or not, and it's never clearly stated that in order to equip something, you simply need to buy it and you automatically can select it in battle because NOTHING IS ACTUALLY EQUIPPED. If you're like me and spending extra turns camping out so you can use the storage system to check stuff, overworld enemies could come up on you simply because of how pointless the equipment system is along with storage at campsites.
-- The alternating turn system for characters and enemies seems interesting at first, but it becomes apparent quickly that since you can control your order, you're never really in any danger if you think about tactics because even when there's less enemies and the smaller number start getting multiple actions, there's gap periods where they still have to wait on enough of your units to go, so you can always stack formations in your favor to avoid leaving a healer or archer open to major damage.
I didn't make major headway into the game because it just felt like a slog to deal with the first several chapters, but I'll also say that IF the translation is remotely accurate, the dialogue is kind of a mess and feels like something out of some really bad anime. Some of the exchanges are just beyond goofy and apparently, every dude is a horndog, I guess. I won't fault the game for that since I don't know what the original dialogue was like, but the translation definitely didn't do me any favors for enjoying it.
I doubt I'll ever go back to this again, but it was nice to spend a little time with a different attempt at a Shining Force-type game, even if it never seemed to live up to that caliber of quality.
1988
If you didn't fear birds before playing this game, you will by Area 3-1.
Going to be in the minority probably, but F3:GOTY is my favorite Fallout game in the franchise.
2016
My favorite Tales game over both Xillia and Vesperia. That's all I've got to say.
2019
I picked this up because it was tagged as a Metroidvania, and I guess, to an extent, it is.
Area gating definitely happens, but the monster holding the power-ups at least in the first four hours I played happened to be the merchant that wanted to sell you your double jump, triple jump, force cube, and such. I did eventually pick up a few other power-ups on my own through puzzle solving, but a number of them felt extremely optional.
For what it's worth, the puzzles are pretty fun to figure out, but because they're the meat of what this game is, the game really feels more like a puzzle sandbox than anything else. There's combat as well, but combat is pointlessly awful. Sure, it's briefly fun to drop your Force Cube power-up on an enemy or blow them up by spawning it inside of them, but that's like 30 seconds of enjoyment amidst A LOT OF TIME in which you just slash-slash-slash-slash-slash-slash-slash until an enemy is dead because they're in the way of the next puzzle you're heading for...or worse, shooting at you or launching themselves at you to distract you from the puzzle you're working on.
Exploration is simultaneously fun and frustrating because the game is happy to push a triple jump on you fairly early on along with the Force Cube you see in the title image for the game -- basically another free jump that you can spawn beneath you. Exploration is thoroughly encouraged...until it isn't. Sometimes, you can find yourself getting up to places you don't belong and the only real signal is when your body no longer touches the ground you're standing on and proceeds to slide around in a spastic manner. Sometimes, you can get another jump or two out despite this happening, and sometimes you can't. It shouldn't sound like a big deal, but the game also will let you into areas you shouldn't be in at all in certain instances.
I definitely softlocked myself twice by making it onto seemingly easy ledges with my jumps and the cube, only to think I found a secret cave because you could crouch and sneak into the cave like all the other previous crouchy-sneaky caves, but I ended up finding dead ends and could not crouch my way back out of the area I ended up in. Of course, I also used space like this to reach chest loots (usually some attack or regeneration stat power-ups) I shouldn't have been able to access from where I was. The end result is that it's fun when things work and occasionally rather annoying when they don't.
The game seems very reward heavy -- it reminds me a bit of Lootbox Lyfe in that regard, but I had a lot more fun with the power-ups from Lootbox Lyfe, even if it felt a little more linear in terms of exploration at times. I guess the difference between the two for me is that I finished Lootbox Lyfe and this one is going back into the backlog. All the positive reviews I saw on Steam make sense, but this game isn't grabbing me like it grabbed so many other people. If there's a demo, check it out. If you're hard-up for a Metroidvania, this feels like it fits the mold, even if it also feels strongly like nothing more than a puzzle game with monsters that get in the way.
Area gating definitely happens, but the monster holding the power-ups at least in the first four hours I played happened to be the merchant that wanted to sell you your double jump, triple jump, force cube, and such. I did eventually pick up a few other power-ups on my own through puzzle solving, but a number of them felt extremely optional.
For what it's worth, the puzzles are pretty fun to figure out, but because they're the meat of what this game is, the game really feels more like a puzzle sandbox than anything else. There's combat as well, but combat is pointlessly awful. Sure, it's briefly fun to drop your Force Cube power-up on an enemy or blow them up by spawning it inside of them, but that's like 30 seconds of enjoyment amidst A LOT OF TIME in which you just slash-slash-slash-slash-slash-slash-slash until an enemy is dead because they're in the way of the next puzzle you're heading for...or worse, shooting at you or launching themselves at you to distract you from the puzzle you're working on.
Exploration is simultaneously fun and frustrating because the game is happy to push a triple jump on you fairly early on along with the Force Cube you see in the title image for the game -- basically another free jump that you can spawn beneath you. Exploration is thoroughly encouraged...until it isn't. Sometimes, you can find yourself getting up to places you don't belong and the only real signal is when your body no longer touches the ground you're standing on and proceeds to slide around in a spastic manner. Sometimes, you can get another jump or two out despite this happening, and sometimes you can't. It shouldn't sound like a big deal, but the game also will let you into areas you shouldn't be in at all in certain instances.
I definitely softlocked myself twice by making it onto seemingly easy ledges with my jumps and the cube, only to think I found a secret cave because you could crouch and sneak into the cave like all the other previous crouchy-sneaky caves, but I ended up finding dead ends and could not crouch my way back out of the area I ended up in. Of course, I also used space like this to reach chest loots (usually some attack or regeneration stat power-ups) I shouldn't have been able to access from where I was. The end result is that it's fun when things work and occasionally rather annoying when they don't.
The game seems very reward heavy -- it reminds me a bit of Lootbox Lyfe in that regard, but I had a lot more fun with the power-ups from Lootbox Lyfe, even if it felt a little more linear in terms of exploration at times. I guess the difference between the two for me is that I finished Lootbox Lyfe and this one is going back into the backlog. All the positive reviews I saw on Steam make sense, but this game isn't grabbing me like it grabbed so many other people. If there's a demo, check it out. If you're hard-up for a Metroidvania, this feels like it fits the mold, even if it also feels strongly like nothing more than a puzzle game with monsters that get in the way.
1988
The first time I got to Area 6 as a kid, I knew I could not stop until I finished this game because the soundtrack was too good to not be fully appreciated.
2003
The definitive racing game. There's been a few solid racers since that have tried to reach this level of depth and design, but they're still just pretenders to the true king of the racing throne.
Here's to hoping for a new and somehow improved F-Zero game before 2037, unlikely though it may be.
Here's to hoping for a new and somehow improved F-Zero game before 2037, unlikely though it may be.
2022
This game is my jam, through and through.
A Tower Defense and Time/Resource Management Game that doesn't fall into all the annoying pitfalls that can happen with either genre. You control the defenses for the Dome, you control how long you want to spend down in the mining area to get resources, you control whether you want to focus on your defenses or yourself to improve things with your resources. There is no, "Did I place the right tower in the right place?" There is a hypothetical, "Did I make the right upgrade?"
But that's the thing -- when you lose, it's 100% on you and you generally know exactly why. There's no replaying the same level over and over and trying a different permutation of weapons or placements to see which ones give you success -- the permutations in this game are decided by you prior to the start of the game and the mining resources are RNG'd down below for the run and you roll with what you get and the order in which building should happen becomes quickly realized (at least with the Engineer, I can't speak on the Assessor yet because I've played all my games as an Engineer so far). You WANT that drill upgrade first while things are easy so you can mine resources faster, you WANT that series of movement upgrades for getting back and forth from the mine to the dome (and potentially with cargo) faster. You WANT gun movement as soon as possible for your laser cannon defenses. And these are things you realize within losing your first game -- or at least, they seemed apparent to me. New worlds didn't feel like places where I needed to lose again in order to win -- it was the same structure with slightly different rules, even when the enemies were different and the relics found were different!
Speaking of, that was a surprise. After my first loss, I went through another run and had the same enemy sets and I thought I knew how all the enemy behaviors worked by the end of Game 2. Then I upscaled to a Medium-sized map and suddenly, I'm 80% of the enemies I'm fighting are completely new ones I haven't seen before.
Upgrades feel distinctly noticeable -- you're very aware of movement increases, damage increases, drilling power increases. All of it feels tangible. I think sound is a major reason that some of these things are noticeable. Resources clink against each other and the ground when you're dragging them around while mining, every laser cannon upgrade sounds angrier instead of just being a wider beam, divebombing enemies screech as they fling themselves down at your shield, and a little buddy that assists you with digging in the mines sometimes can be audibly noticed when actually digging or potentially about to sleep if you're in reasonable proximity to him.
The music is largely relaxing when mining and my brain wasn't really focused on it during combat. Visually, it's nothing remarkable, but I'm here for a Tower Defense-type game, so I'm not exactly begging for quality visuals.
I'd say my only gripes are that (as far as I know) there isn't another character type beyond the Engineer and Assessor, so your permutations are always a bit limited in that regard. I haven't messed around with Prestige Mode yet because I've been unlocking other stuff to play around with in Relic Hunt Mode (the default mode). Also, there's a minor glitch that happens sometimes when you first exit the battle console, where your character will occasionally get stuck in the bottom-right corner of the dome for no particular reason for a second or two. I haven't been able to figure out what elicits that particular behavior, but as soon as you notice it, you just stop trying to move and then start moving again and it's fine.
This review is possibly a bit premature, but given that I'm about to go jump back in for another game right after I finish writing this, I feel confident in what I've experienced so far being a very polished experience. Get it, full price or whenever works for you. Help a dev out, they're still working on updates for the game.
A Tower Defense and Time/Resource Management Game that doesn't fall into all the annoying pitfalls that can happen with either genre. You control the defenses for the Dome, you control how long you want to spend down in the mining area to get resources, you control whether you want to focus on your defenses or yourself to improve things with your resources. There is no, "Did I place the right tower in the right place?" There is a hypothetical, "Did I make the right upgrade?"
But that's the thing -- when you lose, it's 100% on you and you generally know exactly why. There's no replaying the same level over and over and trying a different permutation of weapons or placements to see which ones give you success -- the permutations in this game are decided by you prior to the start of the game and the mining resources are RNG'd down below for the run and you roll with what you get and the order in which building should happen becomes quickly realized (at least with the Engineer, I can't speak on the Assessor yet because I've played all my games as an Engineer so far). You WANT that drill upgrade first while things are easy so you can mine resources faster, you WANT that series of movement upgrades for getting back and forth from the mine to the dome (and potentially with cargo) faster. You WANT gun movement as soon as possible for your laser cannon defenses. And these are things you realize within losing your first game -- or at least, they seemed apparent to me. New worlds didn't feel like places where I needed to lose again in order to win -- it was the same structure with slightly different rules, even when the enemies were different and the relics found were different!
Speaking of, that was a surprise. After my first loss, I went through another run and had the same enemy sets and I thought I knew how all the enemy behaviors worked by the end of Game 2. Then I upscaled to a Medium-sized map and suddenly, I'm 80% of the enemies I'm fighting are completely new ones I haven't seen before.
Upgrades feel distinctly noticeable -- you're very aware of movement increases, damage increases, drilling power increases. All of it feels tangible. I think sound is a major reason that some of these things are noticeable. Resources clink against each other and the ground when you're dragging them around while mining, every laser cannon upgrade sounds angrier instead of just being a wider beam, divebombing enemies screech as they fling themselves down at your shield, and a little buddy that assists you with digging in the mines sometimes can be audibly noticed when actually digging or potentially about to sleep if you're in reasonable proximity to him.
The music is largely relaxing when mining and my brain wasn't really focused on it during combat. Visually, it's nothing remarkable, but I'm here for a Tower Defense-type game, so I'm not exactly begging for quality visuals.
I'd say my only gripes are that (as far as I know) there isn't another character type beyond the Engineer and Assessor, so your permutations are always a bit limited in that regard. I haven't messed around with Prestige Mode yet because I've been unlocking other stuff to play around with in Relic Hunt Mode (the default mode). Also, there's a minor glitch that happens sometimes when you first exit the battle console, where your character will occasionally get stuck in the bottom-right corner of the dome for no particular reason for a second or two. I haven't been able to figure out what elicits that particular behavior, but as soon as you notice it, you just stop trying to move and then start moving again and it's fine.
This review is possibly a bit premature, but given that I'm about to go jump back in for another game right after I finish writing this, I feel confident in what I've experienced so far being a very polished experience. Get it, full price or whenever works for you. Help a dev out, they're still working on updates for the game.
2022
There's potential here, but the game design is just a mess of concepts that essentially amount to "let's be different for the sake of being different" without regard for how the design impedes fun or potential fun.
Observations:
-- Like walking/running and aiming? Not in this game. Hold a button to stand still and aim and hope you're not shaky with your analog stick, because weak spots receive more damage.
-- If you use your gun for too long, it overheats and your range and amount of damage output decrease. The tradeoff is that whatever melee weapon you have deals extra damage during this time. This will last for a limited time before the weapon cools down and you're back to firing your gun for damage again. What about enemies that excel at ranged attacks or proximity attacks? What about enemies that are strong against one type of attack and not the other? Answer: if they exist, too bad, suck it up and waste time using the other weapon form.
-- On one hand, I want to praise the exploration that the game allows for, since there's a lot of winding paths that loop back on each other but plenty of nooks and crannies to go for. On the other, the map doesn't even list legitimate passages in a number of places and gating is based on abilities you find in random places that aren't necessarily obvious.
-- Although I don't care much about signposting, this game is terrible about it outside of when you first accept the main quest of the game and are given five general directions to go in. You are advised to take on a certain one first, but you can theoretically reach each of the other ones if you just wander around aimlessly and find all the necessary gated abilities for a given area.
-- I don't mind that the Souls system is present (they even define your level as "SL #" after the Souls system) and I don't mind the modules that essentially feel like the charm system from Hollow Knight. If something works, why not borrow it and find a way to logically incorporate it into your game. We don't ask car manufacturers to find alternatives for wheels or side-view mirrors, so I don't see the problem in devs working with something that's a functional system.
-- The missile subweapon is just so much more appealing than any other one I found, especially once you're used to miserably standing still while aiming. It's also considered a gated ability needed for progression, so it feels like it's mandatory to have it at the ready anyway.
-- The real sadness for this game is in the main quest to retrieve some stuff and bring it back to a base. For what I can only assume are story-based reasons, you cannot fast travel from the location where you acquire one of the vital parts. You have to trudge back a good 20-30 minutes to the base because...because. You also can't opt to go hunt down another part because the game explicitly tells you as much -- if you beat a boss and grab a part, you're stuck with the part and the long walk back and you just have to shrug your shoulders and suck up doing a pointlessly long walk for...reasons.
The lattermost point I listed above REALLY took me out of the game. I don't want to spend an extra 2-3 hours of walking back to base just to satisfy some random dev need. It doesn't bring me joy, it doesn't keep me invested -- I'd just rather be doing anything else. It's great that you added in some new monsters on the way back; still not interested.
I found two bosses before giving up and the second one seemed like it could be fun to try and figure out, but after getting through the first boss on the first try, my interest in knowing I'm stuck with four more walks back is zero, I'm done. At least the MC has an appealing personality I can get behind.
Observations:
-- Like walking/running and aiming? Not in this game. Hold a button to stand still and aim and hope you're not shaky with your analog stick, because weak spots receive more damage.
-- If you use your gun for too long, it overheats and your range and amount of damage output decrease. The tradeoff is that whatever melee weapon you have deals extra damage during this time. This will last for a limited time before the weapon cools down and you're back to firing your gun for damage again. What about enemies that excel at ranged attacks or proximity attacks? What about enemies that are strong against one type of attack and not the other? Answer: if they exist, too bad, suck it up and waste time using the other weapon form.
-- On one hand, I want to praise the exploration that the game allows for, since there's a lot of winding paths that loop back on each other but plenty of nooks and crannies to go for. On the other, the map doesn't even list legitimate passages in a number of places and gating is based on abilities you find in random places that aren't necessarily obvious.
-- Although I don't care much about signposting, this game is terrible about it outside of when you first accept the main quest of the game and are given five general directions to go in. You are advised to take on a certain one first, but you can theoretically reach each of the other ones if you just wander around aimlessly and find all the necessary gated abilities for a given area.
-- I don't mind that the Souls system is present (they even define your level as "SL #" after the Souls system) and I don't mind the modules that essentially feel like the charm system from Hollow Knight. If something works, why not borrow it and find a way to logically incorporate it into your game. We don't ask car manufacturers to find alternatives for wheels or side-view mirrors, so I don't see the problem in devs working with something that's a functional system.
-- The missile subweapon is just so much more appealing than any other one I found, especially once you're used to miserably standing still while aiming. It's also considered a gated ability needed for progression, so it feels like it's mandatory to have it at the ready anyway.
-- The real sadness for this game is in the main quest to retrieve some stuff and bring it back to a base. For what I can only assume are story-based reasons, you cannot fast travel from the location where you acquire one of the vital parts. You have to trudge back a good 20-30 minutes to the base because...because. You also can't opt to go hunt down another part because the game explicitly tells you as much -- if you beat a boss and grab a part, you're stuck with the part and the long walk back and you just have to shrug your shoulders and suck up doing a pointlessly long walk for...reasons.
The lattermost point I listed above REALLY took me out of the game. I don't want to spend an extra 2-3 hours of walking back to base just to satisfy some random dev need. It doesn't bring me joy, it doesn't keep me invested -- I'd just rather be doing anything else. It's great that you added in some new monsters on the way back; still not interested.
I found two bosses before giving up and the second one seemed like it could be fun to try and figure out, but after getting through the first boss on the first try, my interest in knowing I'm stuck with four more walks back is zero, I'm done. At least the MC has an appealing personality I can get behind.
1986
Unfairly difficult, but that was kinda par for the course for its time, much like the first Mega Man and other games that were trying to emulate that arcade feel via learning advancement through repetitive deaths. I think Castlevania 3 and 4 did it better, though.
The best fighting game ever, for me. It's not even close. I have so many hours and so many stories with this game. So much love.