i've thought about this game almost every single day of my life since i played it.

honestly pretty bummed with this one. new switch skills and switch skill swap feel pretty worthless and almost every weapon i play just feels better the way i played it in vanilla. new content was doled out much too slowly and hearing that postgame content is at 50 and 100 is baffling to me. already feels thin on content so to put things at such extreme ranks feels like padding. jungle map is a mess and not really fun.

i liked the characters and cinematics and the citadel is maybe my favorite mh map of all time. malzeno owns hard and so does the last boss. maybe my expectations were just set too high from iceborne? i dunno. hopefully patches add more.

Look if I'm going to be honest I would say that I have a negative interest in vtubers. I don't watch them and actively avoid them. I don't know a single person in here outside of the funny dog lady and the White Woman.

But I can't deny the amount of love and passion put into a free game that honestly rivals Vampire Survivors in my eyes. So many characters, so many items and unlocks, a heap of bonus minigame stuff, great art, solid music. I especially love that each character's main weapon is unique to them and they have special unique skills as well. That solves the biggest issue I have with Vampire Survivors where the characters didn't really matter and I all built them the same way, with whatever was OP. Here I have to think more and play to their individual strengths.

I downloaded this on a whim and played it for 8 hours straight and will probably put at least another 30 in, if not more.

One of the better retro royale styled games. Not as good as Tetris 99, better than Pac-man or Mario 35. F-Zero X had a battle royale mode in it anyway, the high octane, violent, boost/energy balance nature of F-Zero fits the genre great! I wish that the races kept going until 1 person was standing, though, instead of ending like a normal race. They add a bunch of obstacles anyway, why not keep amping it up! trailing 1 person on Death Wind for like, 2 and a half minutes for the win would've been super hype. Still, enjoy how they set it up and I like the customization and all of the old comic art in the UI and menus! More F-Zero please!

2022

This is a hard 2 to give, but Tunic was an experience that was much more than I expected only to be brought down by being exactly what I expected.

I don't tend to watch trailers or follow pre-release footage outside of an initial reveal, so I had no clue about the instruction manual aspect of this game or the fact that it was all in a fantasy language. I loved this part of Tunic. The manual artwork was superb and really nailed the feeling of the old Zelda chibi art. The way information is dealt out was very nostalgic, and just as a concept, I love it so much. 5 star stuff. I grew up with a bunch of floppy drives with a ton of NES and SNES roms and combing through the JP releases was one of my favorite things to do. I don't speak this language, and I don't know what is going on, but I play a lot of games so I should be fine, right? And after some trial and error, yeah, I could pick up on that stuff with context clues and intuition. Tunic does such an amazing job of recreating this feeling.

Visually, the game is amazing. Soft shadows and lighting combined with a super strong art design goes a long way. I was in awe of some of the locations in this game (Blue Key area especially.) Likewise, the music also shines. Lifeforced is such a strong composer with Dustforce being one of my favorite game OSTs ever. The track that plays in the East Forest is so reminiscent of an alternate reality "Secret of the Forest" it gave me goosebumps. Every track did such a good job of setting a mood without being too ambient.

The puzzles are so clever. I was filling out a notebook in a way I haven't done since I played Fez and this completely caught me off guard. I had no idea the game was going to go this way and I was so for it. I don't want to spoil too much, but there is one mechanic that gave me the same feeling cracking the Rosetta Stone did all those years ago. I solved the obvious ones then found one of the secret ones, and then I was hooked. I had to 100% this, I had to solve every riddle, I had to complete this.

But I didn't. And that's because I have not talked about, well, playing the game. This game takes heavily from Souls games, more-so than Zelda, honestly. Block, parry, rolling i-frames, stamina, Estus, corpse runs, punishing combat encounters, the works. And okay, cool, I like those games a lot too. The issue is that Tunic..... just doesn't fit that style of gameplay. The controls are very loose... It's hard to describe, moving around feels tank-ish? Like you have a pretty substantial turning radius, so moving about in precise combat just never felt good. I'd constantly find myself dying due to get stuck on geometry or just trying to run past an encounter just to overshoot the path and then be stuck in a corner. Enemy AI at points is relentless and sometimes outright broken, and I mean in the sense that it wasn't functioning correctly, not that it was too hard or something. There's one encounter in West Garden where a bunch of flying enemies come swarming in from halfway across the map, even though I had never even been near them. Like I knew where they became active, it wasn't even remotely close to where I was, and yet the AI would become active and just flyover at hyperspeed like they're trying to catch up. Also, for those particular flying enemies, you aren't really equipped to handle them at that point. The game does a pretty good job about giving you items and consumables, but you don't get a projectile weapon until the end of that area. They weren't hard or anything, so why even have them? They were just annoying, having to wait for 20 seconds for this thing to get it's pathing right and not get stuck somewhere for you to just kill it in 2 hits.

The camera was another big issue for me. The game is pretty cheeky and hides paths that you can't see due to a static isometric angle. And then it does it 50 more times, like it's being clever. It got tiring very quickly and the annoyance was only exacerbated by how often I found myself clipping into the geometry. I constantly found myself asking, "Is this a hidden path or am I just stuck in a cliff again?" I don't even need like a free camera, but just a simple 90 degree rotation would have made things so much less frustrating.

I have a bunch of other minor grievances like the stamina system sucks, the rules the game sets seem inconsistent and it breaks them at seemingly random times, the lack of (good) fast travel in a game about exploration is frustrating, and they all just came culminating to a point where I didn't want to play anymore. I'm missing 2 pieces to the Mountain Door puzzle and maybe half a dozen secret puzzles left and I am super curious about what I left unfinished. But I'll probably just look up a longplay and see if I can solve them without having to actually play the game. This is a game I should be gushing about non-stop to people and honestly I probably still will, just with a big fat asterisk at the end.


played purely for the lore to enjoy the later games. the bump combat is just not for me and the game definitely shows that it was made in 87 at points. the world was charming and characters were fun. the music was banging from start to finish. dark fact is maybe the most fucked up boss i've ever fought in a video games. looking forward to ys iii and onward.

if you liked rogue legacy 1, you'll love this. it's more polished and more of that. if you didn't like rogue legacy 1 (me), it just doesn't do enough things different to change your mind. movement is really cool.

never heard of this but I kept seeing someone I follow on twitch stream it and every time i went "is this dude really streaming roblox?" watched 30 minutes of it and purchased immediately.

so refreshing to get the enjoyment of a AAA shooter without having to free up 200 GB and upgrading 3 different PC components just to still be plagued with poor optimization issues. the game is 2.1 GB and runs at over 140 frames, even with a massive 255 player match and destructible environments.

especially love the voip comms. no one has been toxic, everyone is just roleplaying, it owns. i love that when you die it auto triggers your mic and you can let out a death gurgle. good fun.

surprised at how much more i like this than 2.

they finally made functional lobbies that you can use to just join a friend. story is more octo expansion style missions, which owns. last boss was so sick.

everything else is par for the course for splatoon. great art and character designs, incredible music, and super addictive gameplay.

not much i can complain about, other than nintendo shipping a console without an ethernet port (if you are playing switch games online, BUY THE ETHERNET ADAPTER)

Live game so obviously thoughts will fluctuate depending on the season, but this is purely for the campaign experience.

Loved this way more than I did Witch Queen. Played the entire thing solo legendary and thought it was just the right amount of difficulty. Things hit hard, and enemies could take a beating but without feeling bullet spongey like I thought they were in WQ. Neomuna is easily my favorite location they've introduced. Headlong is a top 5 FPS mission of all time. The final fight was a real bastard and I still felt like it had too much health, but not nearly as bad as the Savathun fight.

Strand is easily the best thing they've added in the games lifecycle. It might wind up being a blight on PVP but I do not care about Crucible, y'all gotta hold that. In PVE it's the first subclass to pull me away from using Well. Super excited to use it in content from the rest of the game.

totally fine for a mobile game but god, at this point i'm so done with games that require you to just watch ads every 2 minutes. my 3rd ad glitched out and couldn't be closed so i couldn't go back to the game and just uninstalled.

i love diablo and arpgs, but when they announced a mobile game, i was not interested. i don't like phone games. i was gonna pass. then they said it was coming to pc, and i got interested again. but it's still a phone game, but on a big screen.

my biggest issue is honestly them advertising "controller support" when the game is completely unplayable on pad. using the menus is impossible. the joystick drifts and frequently goes in the complete wrong direction. there are also several menus that literally do not accept any form of pad input and have to be navigated with a mouse. nothing is controlled like you would think with a pad. they do not do any work to make it usable, just throw a cursor on screen and require you to press and hold a button while you mimic finger swiping with an analogue stick. absolutely miserable.

when it comes to gameplay, it's not diablo. it's lost ark. the exact issues i had with lost ark i have with this. it's a series of going from quest marker to quest marker with no combat in between. you never face more than 4-5 mobs at a time and you don't spam skills because cooldowns are all so high. this is verbatim the review i wrote for lost ark. you actually get to play the game in dungeons, and higher difficulties require multiplayer play. i don't play diablo in parties. i like playing solo. this game doesn't facilitate that.

the monetization is obviously gross and egregious but it's a mobile game designed to milk money from people with predatory timed offers. beat a dungeon? congrats, here's your reward: the ability to buy a chest. i bit and wound up buying the first of these chests they offered for 1 USD. the game crashed 4 times trying to spend money in it. i should have taken it as a sign.

the things i like about diablo 3 (pushing greater rifts) are present, and very similar, with one change. the resource you use to run these rifts? yeah you just buy them.

i honestly wasn't expecting much. i was at least expecting a diablo game. but i got a half baked mobile mmo. i bet it'll do gangbusters overseas. but it's not for me. i'll wait for 4.

Super fun set of movement tools in this game. Really had a blast seeing a location I just BARELY couldn't get to and then spending like 20 minutes trying the same set of jumps over and over until it's pixel perfect and manage to make it.

The game goes for a very specific look/vibe of n64 platformer and it executes on it exceptionally well. Good music, textures are muddy in just the right way and the models animate just right.

Not a huge fan of the combat. Sometimes struggled to tell when I was colliding with an enemy and something about the lock-on camera just felt... not right, even with the follow option on. The menus are kinda ugly and I wish there had been a map of some sort, or like an item screen with collected/totals in the zone or something. Can't fault it that hard though, menus and maps are hard and I have to assume it's from a solo dev.

Absolutely worth checking out if you like movement heavy platformers. Recommend paying full price too, it's such a good value at only 6 bucks.

One of the most visually compelling game I have ever or honestly will ever play. Insane that this game looks as good as it does. I can't believe it sometimes. The game sounds equally as unbelievable, just the most chaotic mess of samples and MIDI and wacky ass cartoon sound effects. It's a nightmare and I love it.

Almost every stage's gimmick was fun but there were a handful that didn't hit for me. The movement is maybe a little looser that I would've liked. It took a bit longer to dial in than I would've preferred but by the end I was feeling pretty good about navigating stages. Will probably go back to try to get some P ranks.

The boss stages are garbage. I know it's an homage to Wario Land but I hated the bosses in that game too. I like the combination of platforming and combat and how you can incorporate your combat abilities during normal stages to keep a combo and go faster, but when you strip away the platforming and it's JUST combat I really just don't think it lands for me like they wanted it to.

Still love this game though. It will probably flip between a 4 and a 5 for me. Not a game I'll forget about and definitely think it deserves to be played.

i know it's weird to review an early access game, but holy fuck.