this game can't make up its mind re: how badly it wants to be Siege. it's not an awful game, i don't hate it, but all of its most prominent strengths - the gunplay, the operator variety, etc. - all of them are Siege exports. all of its biggest drawbacks come from changes made for this new game mode (because let's be honest, that's what this is).

some operators have interesting changes made to their abilities for this, some are just pasted in wholesale. the operators here seem to be selected based on popularity instead of utility - there's virtually no reason to ever use Fuze or Hibana, and there's no sign of operators that would be far more useful here: Ying, Lesion, etc. guns that were changed for the PvP of Siege are virtually useless here - any especially rapid-firing SMG is unusable due to recoil - it's a much greater issue when you're up against more than five opponents and are spraying most of your bullets into the wall.

weirdly though, i do keep coming back. the game gets the noggin joggin' a lot more than it ever was during Siege's Outbreak event (the thing that inspired this whole shindig). the sprawl seems kind of tedious when starting out but becomes a genuine issue at higher difficulties when you realize it makes everything else more threatening by merely existing. wrangling randos towards an objective can suck in ways multiplayer is always capable of, but the satisfaction of working with them to reach ever-higher Maelstrom Protocol ranks is real, although hard to convey. watching someone you just met brave a horrifying wave of enemies, risking their own operator's death just to help you recover yours is always heartwarming (not a word i thought i would use in a review for a Tim Clunky game).

the short version of this review is that this is very, very obviously for people who like the strong skeleton Siege has (with its operators and satisfying gun mechanics) but want a PvE game built on this chassis. it reminds me a bit of the kind of fun i got from playing Vermintide 2, effectively a horde mode where the horde itself is a credible threat (and not just fodder). all in all? i do like the game, it's fun in a completely different way from normal Siege. i'm a little mad at myself though for paying Forty United States Dollars for this (sponsored by White Claw Surge™) - if you're interested in this, definitely wait until it's on sale or try it through game pass if you're already subbed. i think you're much more likely to find an experience that's worth the money this way. strong 6 to low 7/10.

The game's biggest flaw definitely comes from an underutilization of the Play As Anyone mechanic - make the characters distinct! Characters do not have meaningful shortcomings or strengths because they are either insignificant to start, or mitigated by the environment (spiderbot machines and cargo drone launch pads). Let me fail! The game is relatively easy as-is, but the fact that you aren't allowed to challenge yourself with weak characters (or a character with a strange specialization) means that the "Play As Anyone" system feels more like you're playing somewhere between 1 and 5 different characters with 50 different faces. It's a shame too, because the gameplay is decently engaging, and could be moreso if the characters you play felt different. There is a willingness to explore by adding a new mechanic, but no willingness to allow that mechanic to meaningfully impact how you play the game (or to allow the setting to change the game by maybe making guns harder to find?).

About the politics in the game: the game itself is sort of wishy-washy with its politics when it comes to things you're going to see during the course of the main story - vague allusions to "resistance," "taking things back for the people," and Bagley's jokes about "fascist school". The in-game radio shows, however, tell you the kind of weak lib shit you're meant to believe, though - that our current media landscape prizes misinformation in order to get clicks and keep you engaged, that this landscape is perfect for authoritarians to take root, but also that nothing needs to meaningfully change. It's good actually to have clickbaity news you can't trust! It teaches you to be critical (note: if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you)! These are actual points from the game! Despite this very obvious downside to modern media that has been actually exploited in-universe to put authoritarians in power, there's nothing you can really do about the media ecosystem - you can always trust the current version of the BBC (or GBB in-game) to uh, give you fair, unbiased news that you can trust, and if authoritarians abuse this system and take over? Well, the people have to rise up of course, to restore their classic British freedoms and a capitalist democracy. If Far Cry 5 is the beer commercial version of America, this is its British equivalent.

(The audiolog I was citing can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM4UfadGDkg)

I wish so, so badly that this were a better game.

Throwaway lore justifying the type of "pirates v. ninjas" conflict that the internet of ten years ago seemed so madly in love with. A fighting game core stripped down to its basics, so that even people who don't normally engage with fighting games can enjoy it. And I do, but none of the modes here ever feel like the one that you're meant to be playing. I'll break this down in detail below, but if you want the TLDR you can skip to the end.

1v1 - The character movesets offer mixups and combos that are easy to memorize, but leave very little room for player expression - there are players who use the entire hero's kit, and players who only know how to chain together 2 or 3 moves. Very rarely will you feel like you've played someone who has used a hero in a unique way, meaning that 1v1s feel more like a training mode for the "real" game than a mode that can stand on its own. There's no glaring flaws with 1v1s, so I understand why this is one of the more popular modes, but what am I doing this for? A lot of the things that draw people to play fighting games aren't present here - continuously honing your play on a character you like, expressing yourself by developing your own playstyle, etc.

2v2 - Mostly the same problems as 1v1, except for with the wrinkle that there are now additional players to worry about. Typically, people in this game mode will pair off into 2 duels, and whoever wins their duel first has to go deal with the remaining opponent. Sure, you could gank while your duel opponent is still alive, but because they can clearly see where you spawn and every hero is roughly the same speed, they're just going to come slap you in the back of the head as soon as you get to their teammate. This feels like the right number of players for a game mode in For Honor, but with no neutral objectives or macro gameplay to worry about, there's not a lot to chew on here either.

4v4s - There are a couple iterations of 4v4, but Dominion is definitely the more popular of the two. You capture and hold 3 zones that passively grant you points, and once your team has 1000 points, respawns are disabled for the enemy team. This is definitely the closest For Honor comes to having a "core" game mode, at least in terms of how it feels. There are entire systems present in 4v4 that are unusable in smaller game modes, and the maps allow for all kinds of traps and playing around enemy sight lines, taking advantage of the fact that 4 people is just enough that your brain can't hold all of that info while you're squaring off with someone chain-spamming Orochi's light attacks. The loadout system and the objectives allow people who are weaker mechanically to contribute to the team, and it means that even heroes with more rigid movesets (warlord) can still contribute to the game by adopting a support-like playstyle (or by cheesing players into environmental hazards). The issue here is that the fighting game-like nature of the game makes the ganking and other "no honor" behaviors incredibly frustrating for everyone involved. Despite all this, this game mode is so chaotic that there's no real way to strategize unless you can recruit three friends to join you (lol good luck). Most of your time in Dominion will be spent running from capture point to capture point, trying to formulate a personal strategy that makes sense amidst the broader chaos. Time for the Revenge mechanic!

Revenge - This is one of the ways the game tries to balance things for players who get ganked. Your combat options are severely limited unless you lock onto a player, at which point a little "shield" pops up on your HUD. With rare exceptions, every attack comes from the left, right, or the top, and you defend by matching the direction. When a player ganks you, any attacks from them will always be from the side they're standing on, making it easier to defend against them, and you'll build up extra "Revenge" meter, a buff not worth describing here except for the fact that you hulk out and temporarily gain a larger health bar. Skilled players can often 1v2 with the help of this mechanic, and skilled gankers will often try to repeatedly guard-break an opponent instead of throwing out a parryable attack. What this means is that a gank from an unskilled player will often result in the victim killing both of you, frustrating both attackers. If it does work, it feels like playing a fighting game where a second enemy player suddenly connects and starts throwing out special moves in the middle of your opponent's normal combo.

Conclusion: There are some interesting ideas here, and I really like the medieval-ish fantasy aspects to this game, but the same mechanics that are intended to serve as anti-frustration measures often make this game more frustrating for everyone involved. It's a shame that Ubi didn't immediately knock it out of the park with this new IP as it's one of my favorite ideas from them in recent years, and I'm not even sure what to call it other than a "truly 3D" fighting game. If you want For Honor without playing For Honor, your closest comparison is probably Absolver (maybe?), but I never felt like Absolver's world does anything to sell a fantasy. Beyond that, I'm not aware of anything that plays like this. This is the kind of fighting game that I want, the kind of fighting game I'd like to learn, but this iteration of it definitely needs more time in the oven. I'd love to see For Honor 2 (or a shameless rip-off), but I don't know if I trust Ubisoft to take the right lessons from this game.

Given that the character select screen in Melty Blood alone is full of late-arrival spoilers, I don’t make special effort to avoid spoilers in this review. No plot events have been mentioned, but if you’re especially spoiler-sensitive you may want to avoid this. If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this page wondering if you should play this game, I do recommend it, with the caveat that there is a LOT of sexual violence in this game. It’s not a factor in every part of the story, but it’s still featured prominently in both the lore and the foreground of a few scenes.

It’s been six weeks since I finished the last route of Tsukihime at this point. I had originally contented myself with throwing down some lazy notes as I completed each route, slowly amounting to a large wall of text without many of the qualities of a real review. At this point, though, I’ve realized that I’ve not stopped thinking about this game for a month and a half - any piece of media that can do this deserves a better, more thought-out review.

The first thing I feel that I should mention is that it’s an incredibly... rough game, in a number of ways. I’ve already mentioned the sexual violence in my disclaimer at the beginning, but even with a strong stomach for this kind of thing there were a couple times where I found myself actually physically cringing at the text on my screen. The dialogue is sometimes laughably weak (god help you during the H-scenes) and the art itself can also be… strange. Nrvnqsr is an unsettling presence in the VN for his incredibly long neck long before he gets to directly participate in the story.

Despite all this, it manages to shine rather brightly through strong character writing and excellent usage of the enforced route order to execute layered reveals. It takes a lot of skill to keep new plot twists coming after 4 playthroughs and 25 hours without feeling contrived, but they do pull it off. In the early routes these tend to be delivered in the form of one of the heroines sitting down to have a thirty minute info-dump conversation with Shiki, but as the game progresses the new reveals flow better with the story and can even be rather subtle. I know it doesn't sound like I'm setting a terribly high bar here, but the late plot twists are rewarding to discover as they feel logical (by the standards of the universe) and have sufficient build-up.

Tsukihime’s characters are the real draw. There’s a reason half the reviewers here have profile photos from the game. While trope-y writing weighs some of them down pretty heavily (I’m sorry, but Akiha never progressed beyond “real doujin hours”), the saving grace here is that each character is given real agency within the story, even if they fail to make full use of it. This is why I found the Far Side routes to be much more enjoyable overall - with most of the background lore about this world out of the way and a focus on life within the Tohno mansion, there’s a lot more room to drive at what makes each of the players here special. Some of the supernatural stuff is still tiring, with SHIKI and Yumizuka becoming especially grating presences, but being able to ignore “True Ancestors” and “Dead Apostles” in favor of stories about festering resentment and familial guilt is a real blessing.

A lot of Tsukihime’s biggest flaws crop up whenever sex is involved. I maintain that it would benefit tremendously from not being an eroge, as working the H-scenes into each route has a tendency to weaken them overall. When the buildup is fine, there’s still no guarantee that the scene itself will be any good - between the music, the premise, the writing, and the fact that it was apparently deserving of a “Fridge Brilliance” entry on TV Tropes, the mere thought of the Ciel H-scene is enough to make me laugh every time. The game falls back on lust to show that Shiki “isn’t thinking clearly” and while nothing usually comes of it (even the H-scenes are typically portrayed as romantic affairs) it doesn’t stop this from being gross when it comes up. I’ve seen Kara no Kyoukai, I know what Nasu can do when he doesn't have to shoehorn in some fanservice.

Even with its flaws, Tsukihime is one of the most captivating visual novels I’ve read. It is amateurish in many ways. Its characters are both tropey and fleshed-out, its world is simultaneously cozy and unsettling. I think the best parts of the game are contained almost entirely in the back half, after you’ve already played it at least twice - and I think it’s the experience of having read through four versions of this story that makes the fifth so rewarding. While the “land of contrasts” is pretty lazy media criticism, with Tsukihime I do sincerely believe that it is because it is so frequently clumsy that the standout moments are so much more interesting.

So, listen. I don't really play fighting games. I know what most of the terminology means and generally understand what the frame data people talk about means, but when I'm playing these games I am two measly notches above truly mindless button mashing. I'm never the person who excels in games due to superior mechanical skill, so I'm not particularly interested in getting deeply invested in a genre of games where I'll never feel capable of mastering anything.

But this game? This game feels good. Other reviews here seem somewhat displeased with this game's potential as a competitively viable fighting game, but this is a dream for someone who engages with fighting games on the same level as I do - a level where you "learn" a character until you feel like you can do some mildly cool shit sometimes, and your eyes glaze over when you see some 40-input combo string appear on your screen. The lightning fast pace and truly bonkers mobility options set things up so you always feel like you're a split second away from doing something flashy and just laying into this little idiot baby who thinks they can cook you. Even defense feels chunky - successfully shielding an attack feels like a lightning strike. I can't even be mad about it, I get just as hype watching them block my own attacks.

Gotta love the characters too. These are VN characters, baby, and Nasu can't stop you before each match to make you read for 45 minutes about what constitutes a "vampire" in Souya, so it's a lot of fun seeing how they've adapted the newly-HD cast to squeeze character expression out of the animations. Mostly, this work was already done with previous iterations of Melty, but it's still fun to see the way Shiki and Aoko's mentor/mentee relationship translates into moveset similarities (and the way you can show someone three seconds of gameplay from the identical red-haired maids and they would immediately understand the dynamic the two have). Not exactly reinventing the wheel in terms of characterization here but it's schlocky anime fun all the way down. Even its most serious cast members are wound so ridiculously tight that you can't help but laugh at them ("the perfect combination of human and demon blood").

It is completely brain-off fun? No, but it's as close as a mainstream fighting game will come to providing that kind of experience.

A mesmerizing game at its best. The first few missions are such a slog, given that your starter trucks think of shallow mud as if it were glue, but getting a truck that can haul things over terrain with actual obstacles allows this game to show off how fun it can be.

It's a little bare in terms of gameplay elements - it really is just "deliver thing to place" - but the actual logistics of getting thing X to place Y turns this simple act of traversal into a puzzle, making this much more comparable to Death Stranding than SCS's Truck Sim games. It's a shame that the game is either ludicrously easy or really hard once you acquire a few trucks, with no real in-between. This means that the only real factor is "can your truck grip the terrain and/or winch itself along", which doesn't completely nullify the fun in the game, but I rarely feel like I need to use more than 4-5 of the 60+ vehicles in the game.

All in all it's still an enjoyable game that allows you to engage your brain a bit without being an overly stressful or action-packed experience. I'm not really big into them myself but I imagine this is peak "podcast game" material. My suggestion is to Cheat Engine in a small amount of money so the hump at the beginning is a little smaller, and you can get to the meat of the experience a little faster - you won't exactly be robbing yourself of the feeling of progression either, as most of the content is still locked behind levels.

Little tiny bite-sized tragedies, each one a treat in its own right. The sections connecting these vignettes give away the game a bit, and it's not like each story is treading new narrative ground, but as a free 90-minute game from a two-person team it's punching well above its weight class. I love a lot about this, especially the historical setting that doesn't get enough love in gaming. Nothing sells me on a game like firing it up and seeing "1929, Central Asia".

If nothing else, this game deserves your time for the second act alone. If that were released as its own game I'd be giving it a 10.

EDIT: i don't really like this review! i'm currently working through a replay of the entire series and hopefully i'll be inspired to put out something a little better than this after i do so.

Sure, it's fine. It's made better by the fact that you are presumably playing this after Y3 - a game where the combat consists of you burning everything in your arsenal to get the enemy to stop fucking blocking for one second jesus christ only for them to knock you down.

The four protagonists in this is an interesting move, but each of them only gets a couple chapters in the spotlight before the story's over, which lends the game a feeling of "Okay now quick! Look over here!" Some do better than others - you start the game with Akiyama, a character that outshines even Kiryu with his magnetism, only to switch to Saejima, who is a downright charisma vacuum. Despite having one of the more interesting stories, Saejima is a real one-note character and both his combat and his personality take the wind out of the story's sails for all but a single dramatic moment during his campaign. Kiryu himself is probably the least interesting he's been in any entry so far, so in retrospect it's probably better that they didn't try to write him into this story at an earlier point.

The different combat styles of each protagonist keep things relatively fresh, but can also be a source of frustration. I didn't have that much difficulty switching from the fast Akiyama to the slower Saejima, but that doesn't mean that it was pleasant at all to play. And may God help you during Tanimura's part of the four-part final boss, a fight so terrible that I want to go back to fighting Jingu to see if it's actually worse or if I'm just remembering the Jingu fight too fondly in comparison.

Anyway, about the real game: there are a ton of karaoke songs but you can't really play them until 10-15 hours in when you get Kiryu. Akiyama and Kiryu both do excellent versions of "Pure Love in Kamurocho", and Kiryu gets a "Machine Gun Kiss," which is the best karaoke song in the entire series. Saejima can't do karaoke at all, and Tanimura can only do two or three songs (the ones with backup portions, he doesn't sing). I appreciate Kiryu having like thirty goddamn songs, RGG Studios, but what's up with that?

The world is gorgeous, massive, and deep as a puddle, but you're not meant to play it like a life sim. The story isn't going to win any awards for having the most mind-blowing plot twists or unique story beats, but it's compelling regardless - I still remember marathon-ing my way the end credits and looking out my window to see the sun rising.

I can't speak for online, as I only played it briefly, but I do remember feeling like there was more to do in the Online than there is in the post-storymode singleplayer. I had a little bit of fun fucking around with friends, but I do prefer the peace of singleplayer/solo online, as (in my limited experience) seeing another player on the map is a guarantee that one of you is going to die.

Quick thoughts, before I have the time to put out a full review:

- a lot more story driven on first playthrough. multiple levels where there's only one exit (only for the first time you play it!). this isnt new - they did this for colorado in h2016, for one, but its more frequent here.
- story is solid, but makes for a weird experience bc the entire game is the conclusion to a larger story. people picking up 3 without playing the others will absolutely be lost.
- camera can feel kinda gimmicky at times, but i never hate its implementation. its a neat addition and the only time it becomes cumbersome is if you pick up a lot of shit in a single level and need to figure out which of the million rectangles is the camera
- definitely feels like a prototype of a 007 game. in a wild coincidence, IO is working on a 007 project. considering any game in this trilogy would already be the best Bond game we've seen in years, i trust them to make something interesting out of it. the implementation of new gadgets, gameplay interactions, and heavier narrative elements in this entry were all done well and I expect that they'll knock the 007 project out of the park if they apply what they've learned with H6-8.

I played this game start to finish in one sitting, and yet I can't really rate it that highly. The real "content" in this game is unlocking new tools for destroying spiders and the controls are just a teensy bit too clunky to fully enjoy all of them (guns especially feel just a tad too inaccurate). There are a lot of challenges though, for those that want them - there are always enough easy ones that you can pass the level with relatively little effort, but the more involved ones can be quite difficult, especially as the game goes on.

20 USD for this (full price) feels a little bit steep, but the current Winter Sale price of $9 feels like a good deal for what you're getting, assuming you're not a completionist. You can also easily play this while watching youtube videos, as you don't really need any audio cues and there's nothing time-sensitive. This is the kind of thing I look for when I'm buying casual games.