Overall pretty fun on the gamplay front. The Emblem and Break systems felt pretty good and gave some thought and variety to the combat. Much of the other sub systems (Skill Points, emblem weapon upgrades, etc) were half baked and other elements lacked transparency (character stat growth, when you actually should be promoting people). Had good map variety in the main story and paralogues. The paralogues were callbacks to old FE maps which means nothing if you're a relatively new player.

Story was pretty meh. It was straight forward without much to it but it served its purpose of giving you a reason to do the map and because of permadeath mechanic being a thing a lot of characters would stop showing up in the story once you recruited them.

Characters are colorfully designed but very one note with one or two defining traits that constantly appear in their support skits which starts to feel samey after enough times. Static endings for supports makes it not worth doing the skits other than your main combat force.

the TLDR is that this is the anti-3 Houses. The gameplay is better but the social elements are weaker. Still worth a look if you're into tactical/strategy RPGS.

I'm not a Harry Potter fan, I haven't read the books or watched the movies and don't not a lot. But the trailers made me interested in it. In the end my feeling is that the game's ok. There's some things I thought it did right like the atmosphere and some of the cinematic moments. There's also a couple of sections that felt unique and enjoyable from that end.

But overall it was a pretty generic story of bad guys wanting to find the McGruffin and you the Chosen One must stop them. The dark arts element they teased was disappointing, you learn the spell (pretty late) but it has 0 impact outside of combat itself so there's no reason not to get them. Some individual stories were good, some pretty forgettable.

Combat was pretty fun, though I did get caught up flipping around my spell load outs mid combat. And when there's a lot of enemies on screen it can become frustrating as you spend a lot of time just dodging/blocking. It also gets a bit repetitive as spells sort of do the same thing in the end, they either CC the enemy or just do direct damage so you just have to rotate through them.

The general gameplay is a giant collectathon for appearances for you and your crafting room. The latter I basically never engaged with outside of quests because there was really no reason to other than to identify items. There's a set of players that will really enjoy customizing the room, I was not one of them.

Overall I think the game is fine, bonus points if your a Harry Potter fan, but it hardly does anything really impressive to Open World games other than the atmosphere of the setting.

A serviceable strategy game that has some interesting ideas that unfortunately translate into plodding unengaging gameplay.

The aspect of being able to create your own race and modify them as the game goes on is excellent and thematically can give your race a different feeling. While the differences aren't massive as it's only a handful of spells, of which you likely won't immediately learn them all, over time it adds up and you can steer your faction in certain directions.

An issue is that since each spell isn't particularly impactful, it's not really that exciting getting new spells (which is more or less the replacement for technology tree) when in civ there's certain techs that really change your position such as unlocking your special unit or a tier upgrade or special building to get a big jump, and that's very much missing from the overworld campaign.

Where AoW4 puts it's eggs is in the tactical combat, everything eventually ends up there and it's.. ok. Their isn't exactly much maneuvering or positioning as the maps are relatively small and the game encourages you to clump up because of accuracy and that moving can take away from how many attacks you do, and it pays to be aggressive taking out enemies off the map. There are status effects but most aren't impactful since once your forces have met the enemy combat only lasts ~3-5 turns. But after the first couple you're either almost guaranteed to win or not. It does get old and it's pretty easy to just gang up on the AI overall.

Which the AI isn't very brilliant in any situation and I found them most passive. You generally have to just make your way to them for any war to end. In tactical maps they'll just run over bad areas on the map rather than shift around them.

And as for the city building it feels kind of stripped down in some ways. Pretty much you build structures internally so actual size/map placement generally doesn't matter with the exception of your main tier settlement building and special buildings which take up a province on the map. Generally you can just build them all over time as there's very few that have some sort of draw back. And map expansion you lock yourself in mostly with what you want the new province to produce.

There is also an underground map which I don't think execution wise ends up being that interesting and you have to swap your map around to see it. You can build cities there but it honestly felt more tedious to keep in mind.

And the UI is not great, there's a lot of information that would be great to see in terms of what other free/AI cities have that you can't see, or even get a vague idea how powerful or ahead someone is to know if you need to address it.

Overall again had some interesting ideas but in the end, the execution left a lot to be desired where I wasn't really excited to play the game so much as just end them so I can do the pantheon tree.

Doom and Warhammer 40K make a pretty good pairing. It has a nice retro aesthetic that does try to capture elements of the 40K which is cool. But the main issue is that, it gets a bit stale after a couple of hours. The enemies and environments start to feel repetitive after a bit. Even though the environment's may be 'new' they're structured pretty similar in their design. There's not much to explore, the secrets are temporary power ups either timed or just for that level and they tend to be just tucked somewhere rather than an exciting reward for exploring. Weapons also didn't feel very unique for the most part, didn't feel like it mattered what I used it was about as effective.

I like the idea behind this, it would be cool to see it expanded and some of the design kinks ironed out, tap into the larger roster of 40K races or lore. It is a game that ultimately is difficult to complete because it doesn't do much to keep your attention with fresh game design or story elements.

It's BotW only more refined. Ultimately the fusing/crafting elements of the game make it stand out with the creative freedom given in a lot of situations. Downside is they doubled the map size by including another map but it's very samey without much interesting.

Would rather they focus on a smaller map with more points of interest that are actually interesting.

Solid game overall but gameplay is the focus, not the story which is fine but immaterial.

Probably one of the best 2D platformers to come out in a long while. Inspired by the Wario Land series the style and wackiness seems to be based on 90's cartoons and the animation is very fluid. Music is top notch and fits the game well.

Tight game design on most levels really allows you to fly through the levels once you understand the layout and why things are placed where they're placed. Most levels have some new element/gimmick and while some work better than others, in general it manages to keep every level feeling fresh enough to make you want to keep going.

If you're just trying to get through the game it's roughly a 6 hour experience. But there's plenty of additional enjoyment in unlocking all the achievements/collectables along with getting P rankings on every level that will add hours to your playtime if you want.

If you've ever enjoyed platformers in your life, it's worth checking out this indie gem.

Never played the original Gamecube game so I don't have any attachment to this. Overall it's a product of it's time. It's very much a Metroid game, collecting upgrade to access new areas and power up and it's fun to explore.

But there's a lot of clunkiness in the movement, camera angles, and general design. For the time it showed that Metroid was able to make the leap from 2D to 3D successfully.

But without the nostalgia glasses the game is just ok, it's a good remaster, faithful to the original for better or for worse with nicer graphics.

Trails into Reverie acts as a closure to both the CS and Crossbell games in many ways while incorporating elements from Sky the 3rd.

The story overall is fine, its mostly self contained but uses elements from Cold Steel 4 so it's certainly not something I'd recommend for anyone getting into the series. It had some good moments overall, not as great as some in CS4 but also no where near as low. General criticism might be that some of the elements the series has been there done that. But the pacing is so much better than previous games.

Part of this is due to a semi optional dungeon area that you are relatively free to go to whenever you want. This also acts as a farewell to the engine before Kuro as they throw every character under the sun at you to use along with all the DLC outfits from the previous games which is delightful. Additionally it shares elements from 3rd where you can watch optional side stories that are this games version of doors.

Music is generally good, very much if you like Trails music there's no real reason you wouldn't like it here.

Characters are all the old ones you love. Most of them have their small part to play but generally fade into the background afterwards, though by breaking up the story into three branches it gives the story and characters in them room to breath and feel a bit more impactful than CS4.

The new ones for me there was one character I really enjoyed and the other two I would be fine if they don't return, I don't feel like they brought anything really new and one of their personalities was as exciting as wet cardboard.

At the end Reverie is a good way to wrap everything up going into Kuro and makes me look forward to what the series has in the future.

I can understand the general praise the game gets. It's very fresh feeling both in terms of it's vibe and presentation. The mechanic feels unique too where combat is on a beat.

Story wise it's pretty silly, power of friendship thing but it's entertaining for what the game is. Combat is ok, you don't have to follow the beat with your presses but if you do you get bonus damage.

Music is overall good, I think though that it's hard to feel that it's good since a lot of the game is platforming, and during those sections they dial the music down to basically being a metronome so there's no excitement or build up. Music was best during boss fights or when they generally used a licensed track.

Overall for a 10-12 hour game it's pretty enjoyable but more iteration/licensed music budget (amazing how much lyrics help hype up a track) would be great.

I'd call this more of an art piece than an actual game. I think they did a wonderful job capturing the feeling of playing a cat, abet a very intelligent one. And the actual environmental work was fantastic. The actual story is simple but a bit depressing when you think about it.

But there's not much game here and is mostly exploration based. There's a few fetch type quests, example: find this, to give to this person to get this key item to go to the next area. And some light puzzle and avoid the beams sections. But generally it's fairly light.

But at 6 hours it doesn't manage to overstay its welcome and is well done but not exactly mind blowing in any regard.