thephilosopher
2020
If I wanted to experience something that was crass, mean-spirited, derivative, uninspired, clunky, depressing, vacuous, pretentious and stuffed with filler, I'd read my old posts.
2021
Combat is dreadful; feels like you're hitting a beanbag chair that occasionally attacks in your direction. Enemies don't stagger at all, meaning there's no feedback from your attacks, meaning that you don't feel like you're actually doing any damage. The attack button is R1 and the dodge is R2; you can't remap this, so there is no escape from the worst action game control scheme of all time. The game looks hideous--the advanced 3D graphics combined with the anime art style create an uncanny look. I feel like I'm playing with action figures and half of them are my sisters' Barbie and Ken dolls. The storyline seems competent (by the abysmal standards of JRPGs, anyway), but if it's not worth playing the game to find out what happens. The voiceacting is terribly wooden--it would have been better as a text-only game. The animated sequences are cool, I guess, but anime post-2010 or so has this homogenous look that I dislike.
Very glad I played this on GamePass instead of buying it, even on sale. Generation Zero. Ghostwire: Tokyo. The Outer Worlds. Ravenlok. Deathloop. Sword and Fairy. Starfield. Diablo IV. And now Tales of Arise. Thank you, GamePass, for helping me dodge these bullets. I would have wasted money on this trash if it wasn't for you.
Actually, I would rather play with Barbie dolls than play this game. Barbie is awesome and Ken is a chad.
Very glad I played this on GamePass instead of buying it, even on sale. Generation Zero. Ghostwire: Tokyo. The Outer Worlds. Ravenlok. Deathloop. Sword and Fairy. Starfield. Diablo IV. And now Tales of Arise. Thank you, GamePass, for helping me dodge these bullets. I would have wasted money on this trash if it wasn't for you.
Actually, I would rather play with Barbie dolls than play this game. Barbie is awesome and Ken is a chad.
2024
"A D3D11-compatible GPU (Feature Level 11.0, Shader Model 5.0) is required to run the engine."
2006
This review contains spoilers
The Unlucky Girl
While other survival horror games feature zombies, ghosts, and red pyramid thingies, Rule of Rose makes the player face the most terrifying thing of all--being an adolescent girl.
And I'm only half-joking here.
Back when I was in college I took a class where I had to read this awful, boring book called Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. As best I remember it, the plot of it was something like "young girl gets bullied by her friends in middle school, then grows up and uses this as a reason to leave her boyfriend or something." It made no impression on me--it was an absolute slog. And every woman in the class loved the book, because they all related to that adolescent experience.
Teenage boys [1] are mean and terrible, but they are usually mean and terrible in a straightforward way. The other boys might bully you, but at least you kind of always know where you stand. Adolescent girls, on the other hand, seem to play this 5-dimensional chess game of pettiness and backstabbing. Guys, at least in the genteel settings that I frequent, tend to age out of the chest-thumping machismo if they don't want to go to prison, women can, if they want, continue larping Mean Girls for the rest of their lives (not to say that all of them do). And girl's bullying just doesn't make sense to me, as a dude. A teenage boy would bully another boy by pointing out that he has a small pp--cruel, but I can see the logic behind it. But a teenage girl will not only bully another teenage girl by pointing out that she has small boobs, but will just as easily bully her by pointing out that she has big boobs, which does not really make sense to a guy.
All of this is not to say that women are bad or that all women continue to carry on their worst behavior from their teenage years or anything of that nature. What it is to say is that there's a distinctive and very negative sort of adolescent female experience that women can really relate to and men find kind of alien. And it's this sort of experience that Rule of Rose is capturing.
Rule of Rose is about the horrors of being a young teenage or preadolescent girl trapped in a hierarchy of other petty and vindictive teenage girls. And its quite literally a hierarchy--there's a poster in the game of a crudely drawn chart showing where every girl stands, from the "Princesses" and "Duchesses" up at the top to the main character, Jennifer, being classified as a "Beggar" at the bottom. The main character's goal near the beginning is to get into the room of the "Aristocrats" (all the other girls--this is clearly a metaphor for joining a clique). Once she gets there, at the end of chapter 2, she gets tormented by the other girls--and then at the beginning of chapter 3, we're back to trying to get into the Aristocrats' room to join the cool kids table. Definitely not the way a teenage boy would handle things. [2]
All of this is to say that, in a way, Rule of Rose is the only feminist game I've ever played. Other games may have female action heroes doing the same things that male action heroes do, but this one seems designed around specifically female experience, of the kinds that I mentioned above. Like Cat's Eye, it's not really for me, but I can appreciate the artistic boldness and creativity in making a video game about women's experiences instead of just "girl with gun go boom" [3].
Unfortunately, the game just sucks.
Rule of Snooze
Gameplay-wise, Rule of Rose is essentially the poor man's Silent Hill. The classic Silent Hill trilogy doesn't have great gameplay, but what it lacks in gameplay it makes up in atmosphere and storyline. Rule of Rose not only lacks the Silent Hill stylishness, but makes the gameplay worse.
The game has free movement rather than tank controls, but somehow the devs ended up with the worst camera scheme of all time. The camera is semi-fixed, but depending on where you enter a room from it will be angled in a different direction. This means that you will be constantly disoriented as you go from room to room, never knowing which way is up or down, so to speak. "Use the map," you say. Ah, but Dear Reader, the map isn't easily called up by pressing the triangle button--you have to press pause, navigate to the space on the menu where your map is, select the map, then select "Use" from your list of options, and only then can you pull up the map, which does not, by the way, tell you where save rooms are or which doors are locked the way that the map in Silent Hill did. And since so many of the areas (at least in the first 2-3 hours of the game) are so dull and samey, you will be going back and forth through the entire game area trying to find what you are looking for, getting disoriented by the ever-revolving camera--and make no mistake, you will backtrack through this game quite a bit.
While the game tackles some interesting themes, the way the story is told is just terrible. It's meant to be surreal, but is just incoherent. Silent Hill 2, for all its weirdness, sets out the ground rules of the story pretty quickly. James wants to find out why he got a letter from his dead wife asking him to come to Silent Hill, so he comes to Silent Hill, only to be met by the first twist--the town is filled with monsters and weird people. There are further twists in the story, but they are all based on the foundation of our main character having a realistic motivation and background. The groundedness of the main character helps contextualize the twists in the narrative and the surreal environment. Rule of Rose just feels like a bunch of "twists" thrown together because "ooh spooky." I always knew in Silent Hill 2 why James was doing what he was doing. I never figured out what was motivating Jennifer in Rule of Rose, or why she even bothered finding the next MacGuffin. This approach might work in an adrenaline-fueled action game, but in a story-driven horror game, it's just frustrating. The first chapter begins with Jennifer deciding to run after this random little boy (whom she meets in the first five minutes of the game) to a spooky orphanage. Then she gets buried alive and wakes up in an airship filled with weird children, with no explanation. Is this normal in the Rule of Rose universe? I don't know because Jennifer has been acting like a lunatic this entire time. Silent Hill 2 gave us a good 20-30 minutes of James acting like a normal person with normal motivations in a relatively normal place with no monsters or surreal events in order to set up the fact that the town of Silent Hill was not normal. Rule of Rose gives us 20-30 minutes of Jennifer acting like the world's dumbest slasher movie victim before then transitioning to something completely unrelated. The game seems like it's trying to go for a mystery, but just throwing together random, illogical occurrences does not itself make a mystery.
Even though the Silent Hills are graphically "out of date," they still have impressive and spooky monster designs, like Pyramid Head. About an hour or so into Rule of Rose we see the first monster and I almost laughed, because this thing not only did not look scary, but was also even smaller than our protagonist, who is a very slight teenage girl. "Big scary dude monster chases girl" is a recipe for instant horror; "hobbit-sized monster chases girl" is just funny. After your first encounter with this monster, one where the camera swings so that a stack of crates stands between you, the player, and the character on the screen, you don't see any more of these dweebs until you are suddenly ganked by 8 of them at a time attacking you...with brooms. This game gives Silent Hill 4 a run for its money when it comes to bad monster designs. As if this wasn't funny enough, you get to the end of the chapter only to witness Jennifer get tortured with the Rat Tied To A Stick...sorry, I know this is supposed to be a serious game, but there is no way that a rat tied to a stick isn't hilarious [4]. Horror games often aren't particularly scary to me, but they should at least make an attempt. 90% of the time this game isn't even trying to be scary, and when it is it's unintentionally funny.
To be fair, I will mention a few good things the game does. The art style for the menus and chapter headings has a whimsical, British children's book/Tim Burton vibe to it. There is also a dog in the game [5], who acts as a diegetic quest marker--for example, you can let the dog sniff an item that belonged to someone and then he will lead you in their direction. It's an interesting idea, but I feel like the execution here is not only bare-bones, but also stuck in a boring game.
In short, this game is just a bad Silent Hill clone with a few interesting ideas that don't outweigh its flaws. Maybe there is some mid-game twist that would totally blow my mind, but I highly doubt it. Life is too short to continue playing this.
And oh yea, the "controversy"--this game was banned in several countries due to a misleading review that claimed all sorts of scurrilous and false things about the game. "Every frame is dripping with sadism and perversion" wrote the reviewer, evidently confusing Rule of Rose with Rumble Roses. The scarcity of this game due to the bans + overall poor sales made it a cult classic, but the rumors of its sordid nature are happily untrue.
On the other hand, if you die in the game, you die in real life.
[1] Before I get crucified by the Terminally Online Wall-of-Text posters--yes, I realize that statements about sex and gender are always generalizations, they do not accurately describe every single person, and if they don't describe you, that doesn't mean that you are somehow invalidated. My intention is to describe some large-scale trends, not set a normative framework for "Every person of each gender ever." Now fuck off.
[2] Not that a teenage boy would handle things rationally either.
[3] Although personally I'd rather play "girl with gun go boom."
[4] Apparently, according to the IGN review there is also an "Onion Sack" later in the game, which just sounds funny to me.
[5] This is always a plus--dogs are on my short list of animals that I don't want to see tied to a stick.
While other survival horror games feature zombies, ghosts, and red pyramid thingies, Rule of Rose makes the player face the most terrifying thing of all--being an adolescent girl.
And I'm only half-joking here.
Back when I was in college I took a class where I had to read this awful, boring book called Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. As best I remember it, the plot of it was something like "young girl gets bullied by her friends in middle school, then grows up and uses this as a reason to leave her boyfriend or something." It made no impression on me--it was an absolute slog. And every woman in the class loved the book, because they all related to that adolescent experience.
Teenage boys [1] are mean and terrible, but they are usually mean and terrible in a straightforward way. The other boys might bully you, but at least you kind of always know where you stand. Adolescent girls, on the other hand, seem to play this 5-dimensional chess game of pettiness and backstabbing. Guys, at least in the genteel settings that I frequent, tend to age out of the chest-thumping machismo if they don't want to go to prison, women can, if they want, continue larping Mean Girls for the rest of their lives (not to say that all of them do). And girl's bullying just doesn't make sense to me, as a dude. A teenage boy would bully another boy by pointing out that he has a small pp--cruel, but I can see the logic behind it. But a teenage girl will not only bully another teenage girl by pointing out that she has small boobs, but will just as easily bully her by pointing out that she has big boobs, which does not really make sense to a guy.
All of this is not to say that women are bad or that all women continue to carry on their worst behavior from their teenage years or anything of that nature. What it is to say is that there's a distinctive and very negative sort of adolescent female experience that women can really relate to and men find kind of alien. And it's this sort of experience that Rule of Rose is capturing.
Rule of Rose is about the horrors of being a young teenage or preadolescent girl trapped in a hierarchy of other petty and vindictive teenage girls. And its quite literally a hierarchy--there's a poster in the game of a crudely drawn chart showing where every girl stands, from the "Princesses" and "Duchesses" up at the top to the main character, Jennifer, being classified as a "Beggar" at the bottom. The main character's goal near the beginning is to get into the room of the "Aristocrats" (all the other girls--this is clearly a metaphor for joining a clique). Once she gets there, at the end of chapter 2, she gets tormented by the other girls--and then at the beginning of chapter 3, we're back to trying to get into the Aristocrats' room to join the cool kids table. Definitely not the way a teenage boy would handle things. [2]
All of this is to say that, in a way, Rule of Rose is the only feminist game I've ever played. Other games may have female action heroes doing the same things that male action heroes do, but this one seems designed around specifically female experience, of the kinds that I mentioned above. Like Cat's Eye, it's not really for me, but I can appreciate the artistic boldness and creativity in making a video game about women's experiences instead of just "girl with gun go boom" [3].
Unfortunately, the game just sucks.
Rule of Snooze
Gameplay-wise, Rule of Rose is essentially the poor man's Silent Hill. The classic Silent Hill trilogy doesn't have great gameplay, but what it lacks in gameplay it makes up in atmosphere and storyline. Rule of Rose not only lacks the Silent Hill stylishness, but makes the gameplay worse.
The game has free movement rather than tank controls, but somehow the devs ended up with the worst camera scheme of all time. The camera is semi-fixed, but depending on where you enter a room from it will be angled in a different direction. This means that you will be constantly disoriented as you go from room to room, never knowing which way is up or down, so to speak. "Use the map," you say. Ah, but Dear Reader, the map isn't easily called up by pressing the triangle button--you have to press pause, navigate to the space on the menu where your map is, select the map, then select "Use" from your list of options, and only then can you pull up the map, which does not, by the way, tell you where save rooms are or which doors are locked the way that the map in Silent Hill did. And since so many of the areas (at least in the first 2-3 hours of the game) are so dull and samey, you will be going back and forth through the entire game area trying to find what you are looking for, getting disoriented by the ever-revolving camera--and make no mistake, you will backtrack through this game quite a bit.
While the game tackles some interesting themes, the way the story is told is just terrible. It's meant to be surreal, but is just incoherent. Silent Hill 2, for all its weirdness, sets out the ground rules of the story pretty quickly. James wants to find out why he got a letter from his dead wife asking him to come to Silent Hill, so he comes to Silent Hill, only to be met by the first twist--the town is filled with monsters and weird people. There are further twists in the story, but they are all based on the foundation of our main character having a realistic motivation and background. The groundedness of the main character helps contextualize the twists in the narrative and the surreal environment. Rule of Rose just feels like a bunch of "twists" thrown together because "ooh spooky." I always knew in Silent Hill 2 why James was doing what he was doing. I never figured out what was motivating Jennifer in Rule of Rose, or why she even bothered finding the next MacGuffin. This approach might work in an adrenaline-fueled action game, but in a story-driven horror game, it's just frustrating. The first chapter begins with Jennifer deciding to run after this random little boy (whom she meets in the first five minutes of the game) to a spooky orphanage. Then she gets buried alive and wakes up in an airship filled with weird children, with no explanation. Is this normal in the Rule of Rose universe? I don't know because Jennifer has been acting like a lunatic this entire time. Silent Hill 2 gave us a good 20-30 minutes of James acting like a normal person with normal motivations in a relatively normal place with no monsters or surreal events in order to set up the fact that the town of Silent Hill was not normal. Rule of Rose gives us 20-30 minutes of Jennifer acting like the world's dumbest slasher movie victim before then transitioning to something completely unrelated. The game seems like it's trying to go for a mystery, but just throwing together random, illogical occurrences does not itself make a mystery.
Even though the Silent Hills are graphically "out of date," they still have impressive and spooky monster designs, like Pyramid Head. About an hour or so into Rule of Rose we see the first monster and I almost laughed, because this thing not only did not look scary, but was also even smaller than our protagonist, who is a very slight teenage girl. "Big scary dude monster chases girl" is a recipe for instant horror; "hobbit-sized monster chases girl" is just funny. After your first encounter with this monster, one where the camera swings so that a stack of crates stands between you, the player, and the character on the screen, you don't see any more of these dweebs until you are suddenly ganked by 8 of them at a time attacking you...with brooms. This game gives Silent Hill 4 a run for its money when it comes to bad monster designs. As if this wasn't funny enough, you get to the end of the chapter only to witness Jennifer get tortured with the Rat Tied To A Stick...sorry, I know this is supposed to be a serious game, but there is no way that a rat tied to a stick isn't hilarious [4]. Horror games often aren't particularly scary to me, but they should at least make an attempt. 90% of the time this game isn't even trying to be scary, and when it is it's unintentionally funny.
To be fair, I will mention a few good things the game does. The art style for the menus and chapter headings has a whimsical, British children's book/Tim Burton vibe to it. There is also a dog in the game [5], who acts as a diegetic quest marker--for example, you can let the dog sniff an item that belonged to someone and then he will lead you in their direction. It's an interesting idea, but I feel like the execution here is not only bare-bones, but also stuck in a boring game.
In short, this game is just a bad Silent Hill clone with a few interesting ideas that don't outweigh its flaws. Maybe there is some mid-game twist that would totally blow my mind, but I highly doubt it. Life is too short to continue playing this.
And oh yea, the "controversy"--this game was banned in several countries due to a misleading review that claimed all sorts of scurrilous and false things about the game. "Every frame is dripping with sadism and perversion" wrote the reviewer, evidently confusing Rule of Rose with Rumble Roses. The scarcity of this game due to the bans + overall poor sales made it a cult classic, but the rumors of its sordid nature are happily untrue.
On the other hand, if you die in the game, you die in real life.
[1] Before I get crucified by the Terminally Online Wall-of-Text posters--yes, I realize that statements about sex and gender are always generalizations, they do not accurately describe every single person, and if they don't describe you, that doesn't mean that you are somehow invalidated. My intention is to describe some large-scale trends, not set a normative framework for "Every person of each gender ever." Now fuck off.
[2] Not that a teenage boy would handle things rationally either.
[3] Although personally I'd rather play "girl with gun go boom."
[4] Apparently, according to the IGN review there is also an "Onion Sack" later in the game, which just sounds funny to me.
[5] This is always a plus--dogs are on my short list of animals that I don't want to see tied to a stick.
2004
"This cannot possibly be trashier than Dead or Alive," he thought to himself.
It was.
It was.
2023
I finally deleted this game after it was sitting on my hard drive (thank you, Gamepass) since its release. I just couldn't get into it.
Skyrim is one of my favorite games, and I like what I've played of Fallout: New Vegas as well. This felt nothing like those games. It felt quite close to nothing at all. The opening plot (which was as slow as molasses) was a bad knock-off of the beginning of Mass Effect. The planets didn't look particularly cool. There were no aliens. Space combat didn't grab me. I put this game on the shelf for a while due to life issues and just never felt compelled to play it again. I hate to agree with the consensus, but in this case the hivemind is right--this game is just bland.
Also, I've never seen anyone point this out: you can pick up a lot of different trinkets in the game, but you can't really use them to decorate the inside of your ship. You can kinda-sorta place them around your ship using that janky "hold the button to move the object" thing that Skyrim uses, but there's no easy option to just put your collectibles on a shelf. What is the point of the game giving me a globe or something if I can't display it?
Very disappointed. This was going to be the one game that I would consider paying full price for. All they had to do was Skyrim with guns in space, and they failed at even that.
Skyrim is one of my favorite games, and I like what I've played of Fallout: New Vegas as well. This felt nothing like those games. It felt quite close to nothing at all. The opening plot (which was as slow as molasses) was a bad knock-off of the beginning of Mass Effect. The planets didn't look particularly cool. There were no aliens. Space combat didn't grab me. I put this game on the shelf for a while due to life issues and just never felt compelled to play it again. I hate to agree with the consensus, but in this case the hivemind is right--this game is just bland.
Also, I've never seen anyone point this out: you can pick up a lot of different trinkets in the game, but you can't really use them to decorate the inside of your ship. You can kinda-sorta place them around your ship using that janky "hold the button to move the object" thing that Skyrim uses, but there's no easy option to just put your collectibles on a shelf. What is the point of the game giving me a globe or something if I can't display it?
Very disappointed. This was going to be the one game that I would consider paying full price for. All they had to do was Skyrim with guns in space, and they failed at even that.
2019
There is literally no reason to play this over any GTA game. I own several GTA and Saints Row titles and would gladly play any of them over this. Anything you can do in this game you can do in your average GTA/Saints Row game, but cooler and faster. Avoid.
2012
I am by no means a connoisseur of fighting games. I play them primarily single-player or with friends, and my playstyle is best described as "glorified button mashing." So if you are looking for an in-depth review of the combat mechanics of DOA5, look elsewhere--I'm reviewing this from a casual perspective.
And from a casual perspective, it is pretty fun. I like it more than Super Street Fighter IV. A lot of the moves look cool and the fact that you can counter moves with grapples/throws and move in a 3d plane adds a bit of depth to it that's not in the Street Fighters (at least not for casual players). The animations for all the attacks look cool and the arenas all have destructible things in them, so the game is visually exciting. One of the high points of this is playing as/against Brad Wong--the drunken boxing style that he uses is perfectly captured in the game and looks really interesting. And in fact, it is nice to see different martial arts styles displayed by different characters in the game--no doubt they are all quite unrealistic, but it is cool that each character has a distinct style.
The game has a story mode that acts as a tutorial. In each mission (fight), you have a bonus objective that involves mastering one of the game's mechanics (e.g. doing a counter throw or something). If you complete the bonus objective, you get some extra points, but you are never required to complete the bonus objective to progress. This is a great idea because it allows new players to learn the mechanics without holding more experienced players back, and I wish more games copied from this system.
Unfortunately, the game's story mode is filled with long, bizarre, nonsensical cutscenes. I can't do better than Shamus Young's analysis of the non-plot.. I do wish that the budget spent on giving cutscenes that do not even achieve the bare minimum of a framing story had been spent on additional characters or arenas instead.
This game is the most thirsty game I have ever played. If you are a man, this game is directed at you, as every character is either a smokin' hot chick, a buff dude, a dude who looks gay, or a buff dude who looks gay. A large part of the game involves unlocking different (skimpy) outfits for the (mostly female) characters. As best I can tell from playing it so far, everything stays in PG-13 territory, so naturally, the game is rated M. Regardless of the ridiculous fanservice, the game is still a fun fighting game, and I would recommend it to any casual player who likes fighting games.
And from a casual perspective, it is pretty fun. I like it more than Super Street Fighter IV. A lot of the moves look cool and the fact that you can counter moves with grapples/throws and move in a 3d plane adds a bit of depth to it that's not in the Street Fighters (at least not for casual players). The animations for all the attacks look cool and the arenas all have destructible things in them, so the game is visually exciting. One of the high points of this is playing as/against Brad Wong--the drunken boxing style that he uses is perfectly captured in the game and looks really interesting. And in fact, it is nice to see different martial arts styles displayed by different characters in the game--no doubt they are all quite unrealistic, but it is cool that each character has a distinct style.
The game has a story mode that acts as a tutorial. In each mission (fight), you have a bonus objective that involves mastering one of the game's mechanics (e.g. doing a counter throw or something). If you complete the bonus objective, you get some extra points, but you are never required to complete the bonus objective to progress. This is a great idea because it allows new players to learn the mechanics without holding more experienced players back, and I wish more games copied from this system.
Unfortunately, the game's story mode is filled with long, bizarre, nonsensical cutscenes. I can't do better than Shamus Young's analysis of the non-plot.. I do wish that the budget spent on giving cutscenes that do not even achieve the bare minimum of a framing story had been spent on additional characters or arenas instead.
This game is the most thirsty game I have ever played. If you are a man, this game is directed at you, as every character is either a smokin' hot chick, a buff dude, a dude who looks gay, or a buff dude who looks gay. A large part of the game involves unlocking different (skimpy) outfits for the (mostly female) characters. As best I can tell from playing it so far, everything stays in PG-13 territory, so naturally, the game is rated M. Regardless of the ridiculous fanservice, the game is still a fun fighting game, and I would recommend it to any casual player who likes fighting games.
2019
Completed the arcade track on the free version. I like the combat better than DOA5, although that may be the fact that my PC controller is in much better shape than my Xbox 360 controller. Unfortunately, the game is ruined by pedoshit. I have no desire to see characters who are "18," look 12, and are dressed up like BDSM maids or whatever. There's a big difference between pretty ladies and creepy lolicon fanservice.
Between this and Mortal Kombat 11's artists using actual death footage as references for their fatalities, I begin to wonder if fighting game franchises are having some race to the bottom to compete for the tackiest and edgiest content.
Between this and Mortal Kombat 11's artists using actual death footage as references for their fatalities, I begin to wonder if fighting game franchises are having some race to the bottom to compete for the tackiest and edgiest content.
2016
Played briefly on PC to see if it was better than I remembered it being on mobile. It was not. A mediocre game on mobile, it transitions to being borderline trash on PC. No reason to play this when you can play literally any other hack-n-slash game.
No game has worked harder to make me stop playing in the first thirty minutes or so. Long, unskippable cutscenes? Check. Talking animals? Check. Talking animals with jiggle physics (blech!)? Check. Ridiculous premise with "Duke Nukem trying to be serious and emotional" delivery?[1] Check. A bug that spams the same voice lines over and over again? Check.
I maybe could have powered through this if this were a well-regarded metroidvania, along the lines of Symphony of the Night or Aria of Sorrow, but the game has received middling reviews and there are plenty of alternatives I can play. And also, the hands on the raccoon/tanuki character were creepy. He's a talking raccoon, but has human hands rather than paws. I don't want to think about it.
[1] The Wolfenstein: The New Order approach to cinematic storytelling.
I maybe could have powered through this if this were a well-regarded metroidvania, along the lines of Symphony of the Night or Aria of Sorrow, but the game has received middling reviews and there are plenty of alternatives I can play. And also, the hands on the raccoon/tanuki character were creepy. He's a talking raccoon, but has human hands rather than paws. I don't want to think about it.
[1] The Wolfenstein: The New Order approach to cinematic storytelling.
Feels like a very basic mobile game ported to PC, right down to the aspect ratio. Personally not my thing.
Edit: There's an entire mechanic that I only figured out after I initially wrote the review (you can draw circles around your ship with the mouse to protect it). Unfortunately, this does not change my initial opinion.
Edit: There's an entire mechanic that I only figured out after I initially wrote the review (you can draw circles around your ship with the mouse to protect it). Unfortunately, this does not change my initial opinion.
2020
I am too dumb for these puzzles and the storyline did not grip me. However, I refuse to give any game where the protagonist is a hot Jewish woman anything lower than a 3.
2017
Just when you thought you'd wiped the last painful memories of the NES era from your mind, Dragon Climax shows up to remind you once again how awful that time really was. From the ear-rape music to the basic gameplay to the lack of reasonable checkpoints to surprise enemies, almost every horrid feature of NES gaming comes back with a vengeance in Dragon's Climax. But wait, there's more. Boss battles that can be beaten by cornering the boss and mashing "A." Dull and repetitive level design. Lampposts in the background that are flashing like a strobe light. A female lead whose ridiculous character design seems intended to make my dragon climax, but instead makes me want to weep and then die. A black enemy NPC who looks like he stepped out of a minstrel show. And best of all, the baffling decision to use the A button to pause cutscenes instead of skipping through the dialogue (unlike, you know, every NES game ever). Life is too short to play a bad rip-off of already bad retro games. Avoid .
2016
Probably a fun game in its own right, but using the command line is too close to what I do for a living to be fun for me.