Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

Doraemon is some kind of anime series in Japan. I don't know for sure since I've never seen/heard of it. And I really don't care either. Here is one of many games based on Doraemon. Fortunately, you don't need to have heard of it to play this. At least, I don't think. At first glance, this is just your typical boring Famicom RPG. And for the most part… well, it is. But there's a lot of stuff in it that's really neat and makes it pretty fun to play. Some parts just are so unbelievably badass that they can not be described in a review such as this. I don't know whether to recommend it or not, since the cool parts are pretty scarce, but anyway just give it a try. Or not. I think you should though.

This is such a weird game for me. I have no idea what to rate it because while in hindsight, I think that what I played of it (I got to the third main boss I think?) didn't really do anything that new, I can't say I didn't enjoy it. I ended up quitting because I kept dying at that boss and I just wasn't motivated enough to play anymore since everything was so repetitive and none of the stories for the bosses really stuck with me but it had a lot of potential. The art was awesome, the combat was fine, the story was... there, I guess. Besides that, gameplay and environments were just the same thing over and over again and a lot of the assets were just recycled from Experience's other games. It was obviously made on a budget so I don't get why it's so expensive (and no, being a long game alone does not warrant that hefty a price tag).

Basically, I kind of liked and disliked a lot of the same features at the same time. Plus points for letting me have Kazuo Yashiki from Death Mark (a much better Experience game) in my party, minus points for letting me have Kazuo Yashiki from Death Mark in my party as a cardboard cutout that heals me occasionally instead of actually coming up with new and interesting characters who contribute to a gripping story. I dunno, maybe it's just because I like plot-heavy games but a bit more originality in general couldn't have hurt.

Pyre is a resoundingly "okay" game that was honestly pretty good but unfortunately the runtime went a little longer than I felt it needed. For me it was a typical Supergiant experience: Top of the line visuals (namely in character design,) impressive work put in an original world, a dedicated Darren Korb soundtrack, and a unique gimmick that drives gameplay. I liked it quite a bit more than Transistor and Bastion, though not as much as Hades, because I felt like the gameplay loop until you have to repeat it ad nauseum was fairly entertaining. Space basketball is a pretty neat concept and I'd like to see it explored more in a game down the line, but the loop felt a little stagnant as Pyre went on. I will say that initially I was upset that I had to change up my party as the game went on to get the actual ending of the game, but I appreciated the nuances different character archetypes brought to Pyre. Ultimately I felt like some of battles against NPC's felt like they were simply waiting for my reaction or cheating the AI reaction timing to certain things, but overall it was fine.

In the end, I found Pyre to be a simply "good" game and nothing really more than that. The runtime went a bit longer than my liking, but I'd consider this to be one of Supergiant's better titles. I'd recommend it to anyone who can catch it on sale or is a fan of their material in general.

Awesome game, enjoyed it from start to finish. Interesting enough story about a cop going down a path of corruption or honesty. Good gameplay loop, felt rewarded when I invested in my low number officers (Sadano and Austin <3) Involves a bit of strategy since you won’t have your cops work for you everyday, sometimes they have to attend some personal errands or just not work at all, which is nice since it helps the player be more engaged since they can’t just send cops to a call and turn off their brain. Nothing bad I can really say about this game. There’s a second game of This is the Police, which i personally enjoy more but a lot of people don’t. In summary 8.5/10, worth the time if you like management games and a nice cop story.

I may not be the only person for whom Pyre is their favourite Supergiant game, but I don't suspect there are many of us.

As with any game from this studio the gorgeous visuals and Korb soundtrack are worth the price of admission. But I also love everything else. The cast are a joy. I love that winning or losing the basketball holy rites doesn't matter for progress but simply what it means for the characters. And a fantasy world with strange fantasy species and elaborate fantasy religions is the peak of my bullshit.

Miden Tower is one of the better EXE Create games I've played. The world and story are both surprisingly interesting. The world reminds me of the webtoon, Tower of God because of the tower setting. In Miden Tower, the whole game takes place in a massive tower where people are self-sustained without needing to leave the tower. In fact, the the residents of the tower hasn't left for hundreds of years. There is a lot of variety to the locations within the tower. From volcanos, snowy mountains, and forests, the place doesn't look much different than the outside world.

Even though the residents hasn't left the tower, it hasn't stopped the Empire's army from outside in invading. Another unique aspect about the tower is that Mana exists everywhere within allowing its residents to use magic (which helped create the environment). The Empire is drawn to the Mana and wants to use it for nefarious reasons.

The story starts with the the MC on a crusade against the Empire's soldiers for killing his childhood friend many years ago. Much of the story follows his journey from being obsessed with vengeance to finding another solution.

The development of the main cast is good and while the heroine doesn't have much herself, she plays a large role in the MC's development. If the game was any popular, I'd expect there to be wall memes since the heroine is a literal wall slab that was animated through magic. She can turn from wall to a human appearance at any time. Despite the ridiculous idea, the concept was amusing and played for a lot of laughs throughout.

The gameplay is similar to Exe-Create's other games. It does seem a bit harder early on since enemies deal a lot of damage (and throughout the game actually), but there's a lot of easy ways to break the game and get very powerful which ultimately makes it a pretty relaxing game. There's a lot of QoL mechanics which allows you to adjust the encounter rate. Eventually can be turned off once you reached the end of a dungeon.

One highlight of the game is the passive system. Every character has 48 passives (most are shared with each other) that can be increased during and out of battle. Passives like fire resistance gets stronger the more fire damage you take. Then there's the heroine's tea passive that gives a chance to inflict poison. The passive levels up through various cutscenes where she happens to make tea which makes the whole idea pretty amusing too.

Overall, Miden Tower was a fun game with some interesting game mechanics like the passive system. The story is solid and surprisingly dark at times. A ton of characters die throughout so I'm surprised it doesn't get a higher ESRB rating than "E". Like many Kemco games though, it's on the short side so you can complete nearly everything in under 20 hours.

Since its release this has been one of the roguelikes I've been perpetually coming back to. The big question here is how it compares to the first game, even with the big change to the progression structure, the bones are still so similar that it's impossible to judge this game purely on its own merits. The combat is still largely the same as the first game, but has been improved in a couple of key ways - RNG has generally been reduced and the chance mechanics that do exist are more interesting to play around. In DD1 it was fairly common for attacks to have 85-90% accuracy, this time, most attacks are guaranteed to hit by default unless there are accuracy/dodge buffs involves. These buffs have been reworked too and numerical buffs like "+10% dodge for 3 turns" have been replaced by dodge tokens that increase the dodge chance of a character by a whopping 50%, but these are spend when they activate, regardless of whether the triggering attack is successfully dodged or not. This system makes especially high dodge enemies much more engaging to play against, and generally encourages planning your turns ahead to a degree that I don't think the first game entirely managed.

A lot of the best innovations in this game are just things it improved from DD1. One thing the first game struggled with for a long time and in my opinion never found a fully satisfying solution to is that it was, in earlier versions, fairly easy to kill all enemies except one support type, and then stall for however long it took to use healing skills to bring everyone back to full health. There were a couple of attempts to fix this, and in the current build of DD1, they'll spawn reinforcements if you spend too long without using attack skills. In DD2, support enemies will do a suicide charge that kills them, ends the battle, but takes a huge toll on your party if they're left alone and it feels more natural and works better as a punishment for stall exploits. Trinkets have been reworked across the board, they generally have more interesting and defining effects now instead of the mostly percentage based buffs in the first game, this is a knock on effect of the new buff system.

But the biggest change is turning the game in roguelike, which is far more divisive. Personally, I never liked the overarching progression in DD1 and I'd go so far as to say it's one of the worst attempts I've seen at doing XCOM-style base progression. Character upgrades get expensive late into the game, but they don't unlock anything new, they just make sure that your numbers keep pace with the enemy numbers and the enemies having higher numbers is the only thing that differentiates the hard version of an area from the easy one. In the roguelike progression of DD2, every skill only has 1 upgrade level, and you don't get enough upgrade points for all of them, which makes the choice of which skills to focus on more interesting. Many support and debuff skills also gain additional effects when upgraded, and trinkets have more interesting effects, which makes it actually feel like your ability to equip your party is meaningfully progressing over the course of one run, while upgrades in DD1 mostly felt like a linear obligation. Removing the worst part of the game is a change for the better in my book, but I'll acknowledge here that some people aren't fans of the roguelike structure, especially because runs can go south rather quickly even late into the game. I do think that runs are too long, even short ones go on for hours, which makes loosing in the third area a draining experience - this still sucks less then wiping against a tier three boss in DD1 and having to repeat the money grind for me but they are too long. I genuinely don't know what the travel sections that play like a slow, easy version of subway surfers are supposed to add to the game (these used to be slower at launch). It's overall a game I enjoy a lot and keep coming back to, but the sheer length of the individual runs can make restart loops much more draining then I find them in other roguelikes.

A lot of complaints I had at launch have since been fixed - they added party and character loadouts so you don't have to reconstruct your whole party every time you start a new run, the third confession boss has been nerfed (I actually haven't fought the nerfed version so I'll take their word for it), they made it easier to recover from loosing a character.