theurbanavian
2024
This game is just stupid fun. Between this and Lethal Company, its been the best year for funny silly games to play with friends.
2015
I wasn't sure if I wanted to write a review or be a little harsh to this game. I think what it is in concept is wonderful, I think small projects like this should be encouraged and the passion behind them absolves a little bit of the heat or criticism that a professional development would otherwise warrant.
Saying that, I really really wanted to like this game or give it a chance but some of the decisions and design made it really hard. I dropped the game after the third puzzle and I don't think I am picking it up again.
The first pain point was the voice acting. There is so much voice acting, and its not from a novel character its from a very iconic and well established one. I thought the first couple lines were cute and homage worthy, but you get a small novel of dialogue through an almost 15 minute introduction with no gameplay. Its really rough, and the longer it goes the more grating it gets.
I also really don't like the structure of the puzzles in this game, they feel like challenge mode portal 2 puzzles but exploring nicher mechanics. There's no mechanical set up, the game doesn't teach you something and then later build on it. Its just like a kitchen sink of the portal tools that feel like they fit other gauntlets of puzzles. It made it difficult to even find where I was supposed to start with a few of them. Its really not my cup of tea when it comes to the structure of what a good puzzle game is.
I wanted to push through it but I really wasn't enjoying my experience with the game.
Saying that, I really really wanted to like this game or give it a chance but some of the decisions and design made it really hard. I dropped the game after the third puzzle and I don't think I am picking it up again.
The first pain point was the voice acting. There is so much voice acting, and its not from a novel character its from a very iconic and well established one. I thought the first couple lines were cute and homage worthy, but you get a small novel of dialogue through an almost 15 minute introduction with no gameplay. Its really rough, and the longer it goes the more grating it gets.
I also really don't like the structure of the puzzles in this game, they feel like challenge mode portal 2 puzzles but exploring nicher mechanics. There's no mechanical set up, the game doesn't teach you something and then later build on it. Its just like a kitchen sink of the portal tools that feel like they fit other gauntlets of puzzles. It made it difficult to even find where I was supposed to start with a few of them. Its really not my cup of tea when it comes to the structure of what a good puzzle game is.
I wanted to push through it but I really wasn't enjoying my experience with the game.
2007
Such a wonderful and tight little puzzle experience. Its influence is found in the fabric of all following puzzle platforms.
Its hard to describe the nostalgia I felt during the credit roll. I haven't played through this experience since I was 10 or 11 and I'm still here. Still alive, working on games and making Art instead of Science.
Its hard to describe the nostalgia I felt during the credit roll. I haven't played through this experience since I was 10 or 11 and I'm still here. Still alive, working on games and making Art instead of Science.
2017
I think this is the time I put this game down for good. I am writing this retrospectively. Destiny 2 has always ebbed and flowed for me, the seasons where this game was at its best it was an all-encompassing experience. When bad seasons came around I stopped playing until it was worth picking up again. After forsakens year I find the good seasons fewer and farther between.
Season of Opulence, Season of Arrivals, Season of the Splicer, and Season of the Seraph I wish you well. You made me fall so much in love with the writing and world and gameplay of Destiny. Its secrets, its raids, its depth of mechanics.
The state the game was in with build crafting and mechanical expression in Season of the Seraph was unbelievable. It was such a wonderful time to play the game. I miss it dearly. The game has not had that spark for me since the countless reworks and simplifications.
It feels like Bungie doesn't really learn the lessons of its past content. Of how abysmal the game feels when appeasing to certain groups of player, how disastrous Destiny was mechanically in The Red War. How Forsaken brought what people loved about the original Destiny experience back.
It feels like Bungie hates the idea of a high skill ceiling in its PvE content, it feels like they just want the game to be plinking things from safe spots with long range weapons in GM content. Every time the playerbase sinks its teeth into the tools that Bungie gives us to mess around with they take them away. The orbs of light changes, the mod reworks, the survivability changes. The game has just gotten less and less fun to play, less and less fun to build around in, less fun to raid in, less fun to do the end game content in.
This year was the nail in the coffin. I tried, and I can't. Goodbye Destiny.
Season of Opulence, Season of Arrivals, Season of the Splicer, and Season of the Seraph I wish you well. You made me fall so much in love with the writing and world and gameplay of Destiny. Its secrets, its raids, its depth of mechanics.
The state the game was in with build crafting and mechanical expression in Season of the Seraph was unbelievable. It was such a wonderful time to play the game. I miss it dearly. The game has not had that spark for me since the countless reworks and simplifications.
It feels like Bungie doesn't really learn the lessons of its past content. Of how abysmal the game feels when appeasing to certain groups of player, how disastrous Destiny was mechanically in The Red War. How Forsaken brought what people loved about the original Destiny experience back.
It feels like Bungie hates the idea of a high skill ceiling in its PvE content, it feels like they just want the game to be plinking things from safe spots with long range weapons in GM content. Every time the playerbase sinks its teeth into the tools that Bungie gives us to mess around with they take them away. The orbs of light changes, the mod reworks, the survivability changes. The game has just gotten less and less fun to play, less and less fun to build around in, less fun to raid in, less fun to do the end game content in.
This year was the nail in the coffin. I tried, and I can't. Goodbye Destiny.
2014
I can't even communicate my nostalgia for this game. The era of my life that I was in, my old raid group, the music being in orbit and idling while waiting for people to log on. It was different then.
2013
An almost completely unrivaled waste of time whos content meekly surmounts to "numbers go up".
2009
This game is unironically life ruining.
More fun to play than BL2 with worse writing. The core cast was fun though.
2012
Unfortunately this game has only gotten worse with time. I had a lot of fun with it for what it was when it came out, and the writing is absolutely unforgettable. But the more innovations that happen in this genre the more I look poorly back on the gameplay here. Janky, clunky, and poorly scaled.
2009
This game is really rough on replay without the rosetinted goggles. I was completely enamoured by it when it released, but its charm has been completely superseded by borderlands 2 and in the process of its usurpation the flaws are so unbelievably obvious.
2014
This game is so unbelievably addicting, one of the best 4x experiences ever made.
There is so much genuine variety in playstyle between the different factions in this game. The quickest 270+ hours I've ever had taken away from me.
There is so much genuine variety in playstyle between the different factions in this game. The quickest 270+ hours I've ever had taken away from me.
I have been playing this game on and off for 14 years and I will 100% it one day.
I literally have had dreams where I unlock the Adaga
I literally have had dreams where I unlock the Adaga
My nostalgia and time with this game while I was a kid have been completely overshadowed by years of enjoyment I had with Project M.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Pikmin 4 is a really introspective sequel. It genuinely feels like a lot of this game was built from looking back at which each individual game in the series did well and delivering an experience that hit on each of those notes. It feels nostalgic to play, it is also really well put together. Which is almost good and bad for Pikmin, the jank feels like a core part of the experience. Taking unfair losses always felt core to the content of the game, sometimes theres just nothing you can do.
On that, Pikmin 4 has a bit of a modular difficulty in the gadgets you can aquire and how you use Oatchi. Oatchi when fully upgraded is essentially worth 100 pikmin. His ability to solo incredibly hard to efficiently take down enemies (like the fiery bulblax or spotty bulbear) means you can ignore a lot of the "difficulty" of the organizational parts of the game depending on how much you use Oatchi. Except when you have a timer.
Pikmin as a series has been pulled at both ends between two core gameplay fantasies that were defined by Pikmin 1 & 2. Pikmin 1 is dandori as this game puts it, its efficiently laying out the tasks before you and achieving them as quick as possible with as little loss as possible. Pikmin 2 is a vibes game, you have unlimited time and a substantially larger scope of collectables. You are chipping away at a bigger whole with less stakes, but not necessarily a less difficult experience. You can mess up as many times as you want and take as much time as you need but the task or challenge at hand always needs to be completed, the water wraith dungeon exemplifies this concept. You can take as many losses or days to do it, but at the end of the day you need to get to the end with enough pikmin for the purple flowers to solve the puzzle.
Back to Oatchi, Oatchi is a swiss-army knife that can fit every part of a Pikmin 2 vibes puzzle. With enough time Oatchi does everything. However, as a Pikmin 1 style tool. When you only have a certain amount of time, Oatchi can do anything, but can't do everything. Making him one of the most fun aspects of playing around the dandori puzzles. I think The Purple Key dandori puzzle is a wonderful stress test of this concept. The way Oatchi is used in that puzzle to get a platinum time is really fun. Similarly Dig Deep has a very fun push and pull with Oatchi between using him to kill fodder while your white pikmin are digging and then using him to pick up large uncovered items so you can more efficiently dandori. Oatchi in challenging content was very fun to play around.
Oatchi in the main game is also fun, in another way. In a Pikmin 2 vibes based way. When you are just enjoying the collecting, amassing, and exploring aspects of Pikmin. This "vibe" and Olimars story were the two very nostalgic parts of this game for me. Having Oatchi make the non-challenging content less taxing let me enjoy parts of the Pikmin vibes that I think I only really felt in Pikmin 2, and have been hoping to reexperience in a Pikmin game since then. In a "I don't want to deal with the fiery bulbax under the sprinkler in Giant's Hearth so I am just going to send Oatchi to solo kill it while I watch my Pikmin dandori a bunch of items in a neat little line" kind of way. I understand why people don't like Oatchi for the above reason, he is definitely a first order optimal strategy for the casual content of the game. All I would say about that is that he can't be used in that way in the challenging content of the game, and you don't have to use Oatchi in that way at all. I see a lot of people playing that just use Oatchi to get around faster and that is a much more authentically difficult overworld experience similar to base Pikmin 2 just without the jank.
My favorite content in the game was Olimar's Shipwreck Tale, I think it was a very fun challenging piece of "dandori" content that played a great homage to the original game. The scope was perfectly sized to be consumed in a single play session. It felt so awesome to breeze through that content in a high-challenge high-speed kind of way (I completed it in 6 days with an average of 5 ship parts a day). On a lot of the days I was getting parts within seconds of the timer ending, just barely getting what I needed to clear out an area before moving on. I felt incredibly warmed up and prepared from the content that comes before this section, I just beat the base game, I've been going ham on the dandori challenges, I took Olimar's cryptic life lesson to heart and this section felt so rewarding for the skillset the game was passively trying to encourage and foster. I think that's where the Pikmin games are at their strongest. A push pull between a contemplative vibe based stroll through a large beautifully designed slightly forgotten world where you feel small and everything is familiar but not quite the same as things actually are, and a high pressure efficiency dandori speed challenge where you are desperately trying to squeeze every last drop of value from a day. Where all actions feel deliberate. Where you are managing a bunch of things at once and just barely getting by.
Pikmin 4 scratched both itches and then some for me. It was a really nice game that scratched an itch Pikmin 2 left on me when I was a kid that hasn't been scratched again til now. Maybe in the next sequel we will finally be able to put Louie down like the dog he is.
On that, Pikmin 4 has a bit of a modular difficulty in the gadgets you can aquire and how you use Oatchi. Oatchi when fully upgraded is essentially worth 100 pikmin. His ability to solo incredibly hard to efficiently take down enemies (like the fiery bulblax or spotty bulbear) means you can ignore a lot of the "difficulty" of the organizational parts of the game depending on how much you use Oatchi. Except when you have a timer.
Pikmin as a series has been pulled at both ends between two core gameplay fantasies that were defined by Pikmin 1 & 2. Pikmin 1 is dandori as this game puts it, its efficiently laying out the tasks before you and achieving them as quick as possible with as little loss as possible. Pikmin 2 is a vibes game, you have unlimited time and a substantially larger scope of collectables. You are chipping away at a bigger whole with less stakes, but not necessarily a less difficult experience. You can mess up as many times as you want and take as much time as you need but the task or challenge at hand always needs to be completed, the water wraith dungeon exemplifies this concept. You can take as many losses or days to do it, but at the end of the day you need to get to the end with enough pikmin for the purple flowers to solve the puzzle.
Back to Oatchi, Oatchi is a swiss-army knife that can fit every part of a Pikmin 2 vibes puzzle. With enough time Oatchi does everything. However, as a Pikmin 1 style tool. When you only have a certain amount of time, Oatchi can do anything, but can't do everything. Making him one of the most fun aspects of playing around the dandori puzzles. I think The Purple Key dandori puzzle is a wonderful stress test of this concept. The way Oatchi is used in that puzzle to get a platinum time is really fun. Similarly Dig Deep has a very fun push and pull with Oatchi between using him to kill fodder while your white pikmin are digging and then using him to pick up large uncovered items so you can more efficiently dandori. Oatchi in challenging content was very fun to play around.
Oatchi in the main game is also fun, in another way. In a Pikmin 2 vibes based way. When you are just enjoying the collecting, amassing, and exploring aspects of Pikmin. This "vibe" and Olimars story were the two very nostalgic parts of this game for me. Having Oatchi make the non-challenging content less taxing let me enjoy parts of the Pikmin vibes that I think I only really felt in Pikmin 2, and have been hoping to reexperience in a Pikmin game since then. In a "I don't want to deal with the fiery bulbax under the sprinkler in Giant's Hearth so I am just going to send Oatchi to solo kill it while I watch my Pikmin dandori a bunch of items in a neat little line" kind of way. I understand why people don't like Oatchi for the above reason, he is definitely a first order optimal strategy for the casual content of the game. All I would say about that is that he can't be used in that way in the challenging content of the game, and you don't have to use Oatchi in that way at all. I see a lot of people playing that just use Oatchi to get around faster and that is a much more authentically difficult overworld experience similar to base Pikmin 2 just without the jank.
My favorite content in the game was Olimar's Shipwreck Tale, I think it was a very fun challenging piece of "dandori" content that played a great homage to the original game. The scope was perfectly sized to be consumed in a single play session. It felt so awesome to breeze through that content in a high-challenge high-speed kind of way (I completed it in 6 days with an average of 5 ship parts a day). On a lot of the days I was getting parts within seconds of the timer ending, just barely getting what I needed to clear out an area before moving on. I felt incredibly warmed up and prepared from the content that comes before this section, I just beat the base game, I've been going ham on the dandori challenges, I took Olimar's cryptic life lesson to heart and this section felt so rewarding for the skillset the game was passively trying to encourage and foster. I think that's where the Pikmin games are at their strongest. A push pull between a contemplative vibe based stroll through a large beautifully designed slightly forgotten world where you feel small and everything is familiar but not quite the same as things actually are, and a high pressure efficiency dandori speed challenge where you are desperately trying to squeeze every last drop of value from a day. Where all actions feel deliberate. Where you are managing a bunch of things at once and just barely getting by.
Pikmin 4 scratched both itches and then some for me. It was a really nice game that scratched an itch Pikmin 2 left on me when I was a kid that hasn't been scratched again til now. Maybe in the next sequel we will finally be able to put Louie down like the dog he is.
2022
There was something about playing this game on release day with a bunch of friends. We'd hang out in a call after 5-6 hours of playing, everyone had different stories about where they had been and what they had done first. No one had taken similar paths to each other, the game felt unfathomably large and novel. It was such an unbelievably cool experience that lasted until we all had about 40 hours in the game.