Hexxproof
2020
Buying another roguelite deckbuilder after just feeling like I can't take any more StS clones was a risk, but I had heard that this was different and it is! This game actually doesn't really play anything like StS. Instead, you're presented with a block puzzler style level where the row closest to you can attack you and you have to stop them before they do, by playing cards that manipulate the board somehow. The dagger can be chained for as many daggers as you have and the axe can only attack once, but can kill the whole front row. The other interesting quirk is that cards are spent permanently when you play them, so you have to constantly redesign your deck based on what you find.
That's really about it. It's simple but quite neat, refreshing and not at all a StS clone. It's also got a unique art style and color scheme that just works, as well as a personal atmosphere combined with the dark story of a bullied kid finding her pride in designing... Well, I think she's designing the game we're playing?
Because the problem is that I will never see the ending to this plot since I felt like the first campaign was all I needed. The game doesn't even really clarify very well that there are three campaigns - there's just a menu selection that says "Path of the Giant" by default and I only found out that you can click that button and switch to a new campaign with a new story and new cards by random exploration and not because the UI invited me to - and so I thought I was done with the game when I finally beat the giant after maybe 10 hours of trying. I was satisfied and felt like I had completed a fun, if perhaps too simple, little diversion and I was actually a little annoyed when I realized that I had really only begun.
The issue is that this simple design is too simple and after one campaign, you start feeling like you want more complicated decks, like how it'd be cool to combine the dagger card with more cards that let you draw cards and more complicated combos. On top of the simplicitiy, it also becomes clear with time that the base design doesn't truly work. Permanently spending your cards means that you're left to RNG a little too often, and you can lose because you got to the stage where you absolutely must have strong ranged attacks without lucking into very many ranged cards, which isn't very fun in the long run. The game can also create some impossible scenarios, like how two copies of the creature on the anvil will just give each other armor every turn, so you get stuck in a loop where you turn is spent knocking off the armor they will then give themselves on their own turn and you can't get out of that loop since cards are finite.
I will still recommend this game as a neat little diversion with an interesting idea and a personal story and theme. It's a strong little title that just doesn't survive further scrutiny, but I will say that I think this game should be the new standard intro deckbuilder that we recommend to newbies. It's still got challenge and it'll still teach people deckbuilder logic, but with a more personal touch and simpler mechanics. I liked this one even though I found a few major flaws and won't be playing it to the end.
That's really about it. It's simple but quite neat, refreshing and not at all a StS clone. It's also got a unique art style and color scheme that just works, as well as a personal atmosphere combined with the dark story of a bullied kid finding her pride in designing... Well, I think she's designing the game we're playing?
Because the problem is that I will never see the ending to this plot since I felt like the first campaign was all I needed. The game doesn't even really clarify very well that there are three campaigns - there's just a menu selection that says "Path of the Giant" by default and I only found out that you can click that button and switch to a new campaign with a new story and new cards by random exploration and not because the UI invited me to - and so I thought I was done with the game when I finally beat the giant after maybe 10 hours of trying. I was satisfied and felt like I had completed a fun, if perhaps too simple, little diversion and I was actually a little annoyed when I realized that I had really only begun.
The issue is that this simple design is too simple and after one campaign, you start feeling like you want more complicated decks, like how it'd be cool to combine the dagger card with more cards that let you draw cards and more complicated combos. On top of the simplicitiy, it also becomes clear with time that the base design doesn't truly work. Permanently spending your cards means that you're left to RNG a little too often, and you can lose because you got to the stage where you absolutely must have strong ranged attacks without lucking into very many ranged cards, which isn't very fun in the long run. The game can also create some impossible scenarios, like how two copies of the creature on the anvil will just give each other armor every turn, so you get stuck in a loop where you turn is spent knocking off the armor they will then give themselves on their own turn and you can't get out of that loop since cards are finite.
I will still recommend this game as a neat little diversion with an interesting idea and a personal story and theme. It's a strong little title that just doesn't survive further scrutiny, but I will say that I think this game should be the new standard intro deckbuilder that we recommend to newbies. It's still got challenge and it'll still teach people deckbuilder logic, but with a more personal touch and simpler mechanics. I liked this one even though I found a few major flaws and won't be playing it to the end.
Seemed a lot more charming in videos than it actually is in practice... Run around small levels, putting out fires and earning cash for upgrades so you can do it all over again, except with controls that felt responsive and fine but not engaging and that I didn't feel like I wanted to keep using. An okay game, but there's so much else to make time for.
1982
Have always and will always hate this game. The stupid ostrich never does what you want it to!
Man, fuck this version. Rondo is one of the best games in the series and this is one of the worst, even though it uses the same sprites and so on and, on the surface, looks like it's the same game. Everything has been changed for the worse and everything has been made annoying as fuck. Literally constant medusa heads and bats. Richter is even slower and tankier than in Rondo. Pits everywhere, including in the absolutely absurd final fight. There is absolutely no reason to ever play this game and I really don't know why they decided to torture us with this version in the Advance Collection.
It's just...boring.
Is this a contender for best Igavania, possibly even dethroning Symphony of the Night? I think it just might be. I don't really know what to say about games that are this good, as I'm better at complaining than praising. Everything here is awesome, from beginning to end.
Beautiful artwork, if a bit low in resolution due to the original format, with some amazing animations considering the system's limitations. Smooth gameplay that is actually similar in design to Circle of the Moon, in that there is a small amount of intentional clunkiness, but pulled off so much better and more smoothly. Soma has limitations, but never feels like controlling a sentient slab of concrete. And, as always, banger soundtrack that mixes new tracks with both SOTN and even older classics. I'll avoid spoiling which track, but having the end theme be a chill alternate version of one of the most classic jams was a beautiful choice. Hell, even the barebones story is pretty good despite clunky english dialogue.
The soul system in and of itself is amazing and so deeply addictive, since almost all of them are fun and engaging to mess around and experiment with, and because you get so hooked on collecting every one just to see what it does. Keeping that system for some of the sequels and even in Bloodstained was absolutely the right choice. The only bummer here is that Aria doesn't have the system where souls get stronger the more of them you find.
My two main complaints, that take half a star off the score, are the castle structure and, despite the previous paragraph, the execution of the soul system. I don't like the part of the castle that has teleportation to floating rooms, as that felt needlessly confusing even after learning which exit leads where and because I simply don't like segmented castle bits that don't connect to the whole, and the game is too stingy with fast travel locations (I especially don't understand why the important "hub" room with the teleporting exits doesn't get a convenient portal room) and the fact that there's never a save room right next to a fast travel portal. For the soul system, the problem is, of course, the often abysmal drop rates and how little sense that makes. Anyone who doesn't intentionally grind souls will finish with only probably like 20 souls out of 120 and while I understand that the idea is probably that each fast run like that is different because of what souls you get, it's still a shame since it means most players probably won't get to see much of what the souls have to offer. The 4% droprate ones aren't so bad, but were the 0,4% rate ones really necessary? No, they most assuredly weren't and all souls should've stuck with 4-5%.
I thought I wouldn't have a longer review in me for this game, but here I go again and I'm going to stop now. This game is still very good and still very worth checking out, despite being 20 years old and made for a tiny screen. I suspect these reviews are mostly just read by people who already like the game in question, but if not, and you're on the fence, then absolutely try the Advance Collection out. If you even kind of like metroidvanias and can enjoy retro, you won't be disappointed.
Beautiful artwork, if a bit low in resolution due to the original format, with some amazing animations considering the system's limitations. Smooth gameplay that is actually similar in design to Circle of the Moon, in that there is a small amount of intentional clunkiness, but pulled off so much better and more smoothly. Soma has limitations, but never feels like controlling a sentient slab of concrete. And, as always, banger soundtrack that mixes new tracks with both SOTN and even older classics. I'll avoid spoiling which track, but having the end theme be a chill alternate version of one of the most classic jams was a beautiful choice. Hell, even the barebones story is pretty good despite clunky english dialogue.
The soul system in and of itself is amazing and so deeply addictive, since almost all of them are fun and engaging to mess around and experiment with, and because you get so hooked on collecting every one just to see what it does. Keeping that system for some of the sequels and even in Bloodstained was absolutely the right choice. The only bummer here is that Aria doesn't have the system where souls get stronger the more of them you find.
My two main complaints, that take half a star off the score, are the castle structure and, despite the previous paragraph, the execution of the soul system. I don't like the part of the castle that has teleportation to floating rooms, as that felt needlessly confusing even after learning which exit leads where and because I simply don't like segmented castle bits that don't connect to the whole, and the game is too stingy with fast travel locations (I especially don't understand why the important "hub" room with the teleporting exits doesn't get a convenient portal room) and the fact that there's never a save room right next to a fast travel portal. For the soul system, the problem is, of course, the often abysmal drop rates and how little sense that makes. Anyone who doesn't intentionally grind souls will finish with only probably like 20 souls out of 120 and while I understand that the idea is probably that each fast run like that is different because of what souls you get, it's still a shame since it means most players probably won't get to see much of what the souls have to offer. The 4% droprate ones aren't so bad, but were the 0,4% rate ones really necessary? No, they most assuredly weren't and all souls should've stuck with 4-5%.
I thought I wouldn't have a longer review in me for this game, but here I go again and I'm going to stop now. This game is still very good and still very worth checking out, despite being 20 years old and made for a tiny screen. I suspect these reviews are mostly just read by people who already like the game in question, but if not, and you're on the fence, then absolutely try the Advance Collection out. If you even kind of like metroidvanias and can enjoy retro, you won't be disappointed.
2020
Looking like yet another game that I respect without enjoying it very much. At first, I just knew this as a roguelite deckbuilder and put it off for a while, but then I heard that it's actually a roguelite deckbuilder RPG, with travel between cities and forming of relationships and so on, and then I had to immediately buy it only to be immediately disappointed by how overengineered it all seems, but without having an equally as immediate hook.
From the beginning, the game instantly digs into itself and throws words and phrases at you. This and that many currencies, so and so many different statues, factions and characters to befriend or make an enemy of. Apply Apprehension to gain two Nervous stacks which then trade back in for Resolve counters and blah, blah, blah. I suppose it's well-designed, but it doesn't draw me in to see a wall of text for the game's various complicated ailments and boons. Maybe I've just had enough games to last me a lifetime if I feel like this about complicated games, or maybe this one could do a better job of luring you in and wanting you to discover more bit by bit instead of drowning you all at once. I don't know, I just know that I'm not having very much fun with the game.
The best example is perhaps the fact that you have two decks. One for combat and one for negotations. That's a layer of complexity that doesn't really add anything, because now you have to keep track of two decks (and can't just choose to be either talker or fighter since some scenarios will demand one or the other), without really expanding the game as negotation "combat" is just more or less the same as regular combat. Do attacks and raise defense, except the attacks are arguments instead of fists. That's really it and there is no deeper difference than that. More keywords and status effect names to remember.
I don't hate it and there is much that I do like. The artwork is classic Klei and looks better and more fitting than ever. The gameplay is solid and glitch free. The day system works out nicely enough with you being allowed to pick whatever your next task is as the previous one moves the clock along until you run out of time and missions. It all works fine, but I'm just feeling overwhelmed by things to learn without feeling a desire to learn them, and it doesn't help that the overworld map feels very linear in how you're not allowed to move freely across it, and it certainly doesn't help that this game does the one thing I hate the most in deckbuilders; it won't carry over defense to the next round, causing the ever-persistent problem of dead hands where if you drew nothing but defense, you just played a terrible turn that can end up with you losing through no fault of your own. Hate that in Slay The Spire, hate it here and will hate it in the next game that does it. And, since everything in Griftlands is solved through card play, me being sick of this mechanic comes into play pretty much directly as the game begins and leaves me not wanting to play more. So I won't and this is the game's third and final attempt.
Good game that's not for me. Again.
From the beginning, the game instantly digs into itself and throws words and phrases at you. This and that many currencies, so and so many different statues, factions and characters to befriend or make an enemy of. Apply Apprehension to gain two Nervous stacks which then trade back in for Resolve counters and blah, blah, blah. I suppose it's well-designed, but it doesn't draw me in to see a wall of text for the game's various complicated ailments and boons. Maybe I've just had enough games to last me a lifetime if I feel like this about complicated games, or maybe this one could do a better job of luring you in and wanting you to discover more bit by bit instead of drowning you all at once. I don't know, I just know that I'm not having very much fun with the game.
The best example is perhaps the fact that you have two decks. One for combat and one for negotations. That's a layer of complexity that doesn't really add anything, because now you have to keep track of two decks (and can't just choose to be either talker or fighter since some scenarios will demand one or the other), without really expanding the game as negotation "combat" is just more or less the same as regular combat. Do attacks and raise defense, except the attacks are arguments instead of fists. That's really it and there is no deeper difference than that. More keywords and status effect names to remember.
I don't hate it and there is much that I do like. The artwork is classic Klei and looks better and more fitting than ever. The gameplay is solid and glitch free. The day system works out nicely enough with you being allowed to pick whatever your next task is as the previous one moves the clock along until you run out of time and missions. It all works fine, but I'm just feeling overwhelmed by things to learn without feeling a desire to learn them, and it doesn't help that the overworld map feels very linear in how you're not allowed to move freely across it, and it certainly doesn't help that this game does the one thing I hate the most in deckbuilders; it won't carry over defense to the next round, causing the ever-persistent problem of dead hands where if you drew nothing but defense, you just played a terrible turn that can end up with you losing through no fault of your own. Hate that in Slay The Spire, hate it here and will hate it in the next game that does it. And, since everything in Griftlands is solved through card play, me being sick of this mechanic comes into play pretty much directly as the game begins and leaves me not wanting to play more. So I won't and this is the game's third and final attempt.
Good game that's not for me. Again.
2018
Enjoyable game that goes on for too long and gets old. At first, I was really into going on short expeditions, getting some XP, finding some loot and going through the usual motions of upgrading and evolving my setup, and I'm always into any game that borrows its art style from Mike Mignola, but the campaign drags on for too long and feels too similar throughout. Board derelict, explore by pushing the scan button and either avoiding or taking on enemies as you see fit, take on missions that are always fetch quests of some form and plan your escape before you run out of energy or oxygen. The latter aspect kept the game engaging at first, but perhaps the biggest problem with the game is that, if you do the side quests and explore fully (which the game encourages by having a "% explored" stat for each derelict), you end up too wealthy too quickly and it kills the challenge of the game. The only remaining "challenge" is, towards the end, when enemies decide to just have like 95% evasion rate sometimes and that's just frustrating. I marked the game as completed, but honestly, I gave up before the last derelict and didn't see the ending. It's just going to be another, even larger, derelict with the same challenges and probably enemies with 100% evasion rate, and the game barely even has a story worth concluding. I'm harsh on the game since it ended up disappointing, but it was enjoyable for the majority of the playthrough and it's just disappointing that it didn't feel fun enough to finish.
2020
Another game that seems fine enough for what it is, but where I just don't like what it is very much. I found nothing to complain about in the hour or so I spent on it, but also found nothing that hooked me and I quickly got bored with fumbling around in the dark, looking for tiny ore veins and waiting for the slow MULE to catch up, and occasionally shooting space bugs. I suppose this game was meant exclusively for co-op and that it might be more fun in that way, but I will never be finding out.
Decent little city-builder with a terrible PS4 port. While I managed to have a weekend of fun with it, I really don't recommend this game to anyone on this platform. Maybe not even on PC, where it hopefully plays better.
First of all, I quite like that this game is a post-apocalyptic survival game that actually isn't about zombies. There are no Zs to be found! If I pieced it together correctly, the world ended because of increasing natural disasters, which are also a game mechanic, and combat is always against other humans. Your citizens can mutate, but nothing much happens aside from them dying. I like it!
The other major thing that made me like the game more than it deserves is the general structure, which I'm a dedicated sucker for. You build and improve your city in that portion of the game, and you recruit specialists and send them on scavenging or combat missions. I'll play any game with this structure and enjoy it and this game is no exception. I just love tinkering with my city/HQ, sending minions to explore the area and scavenging for resources for crafting and building. It doesn't even have to be good for me to like it, which is lucky in this scenario as Surviving The Aftermath isn't very good. I'm going to give it a decent score, but only because I like tinkering, building, exploring and scavenging quite a lot and because we're starved for this kind of game on PS4.
The major problem is the performance on console, even on a Pro set to performance. The game starts out fine, but once your city is a decent size, the game becomes very slow, clunky and unresponsive. Have to wait like a full second for the game to react to button presses and such. That's standard behavior and just how the game plays as your city grows, but it also has a memory leak where, if you play for a few hours, the game becomes completely unplayable and has to be relaunched to get some framerate back. Once your city is big enough, the game just stops being fun because every menu is slow and unresponsive and doing things like painstakingly decorating your city becomes a painful chore as not only is the game a poor performer, it also has low QoL and you cannot do things like plant a whole row of bushes or copy and paste.
And that's the next major flaw; the fact that this game plays like it's 20 years old or more. You can't drag and drop things and in order to do anything, you have to click the object and bring up its preferences window and then find the menu option in there. It's like playing Windows 95, if that was a game. No convenient features for more or less anything. Want a row of hedges lining main street? Place each bush one by one. Want to delete your whole field of now out-dated solar panels now that you have wind turbines? Click each one, find the tiny demolish icon at the bottom of the preferences window so you have to scroll past a bunch of options you never click on to get to the one you click all the time. Like yeah it's cool that the game has a bunch of limitation features and you can automatically tell the tailor to stop sewing once they've made a certain amount of jackets and such, but the game is so easy that it's just a bunch of options that are in the way and make the menus clunkier. I set my world to medium difficulty and average amount of everything (whereas the default is easy and all resources/etc set to plentiful) and the game was still far too easy. I'm trying for the platinum trophy and to do that I have to survive 30 catastrophes for 365 days and I feel like I beat the game and established a sustainable city back in day 190 or so. The game is currently playing itself just to advance time as I write this.
One thing I will say is that the PC reviews for this game call it messy and buggy and I have to say that the PS4 release isn't that outside of the poor framerate as the city grows. I have also noticed that there's some kind of mystery regarding water as it seems to just disappear into a black hole and I have to have a massive water farm in order to satiate my people, and there's also something funky going on with the delegation of tasks in that the game seems to require an unusually massive amount of courier workers and very few others as you're constantly running out of workers even though you have a large population. The latter doesn't really seem like a glitch, though. Other than that, I haven't had the game glitch out very often and it's really just the poor performance that's a major problem.
So...yeah...this game isn't actually good but I'm going to give it a decent rating anyway. It's objectively quite bad, but I had a fun and engaging weekend with it and a weekend is all you really need for $15 on sale. Had I bought this at full price and on launch, I would've been quite angry and slammed this game with the lowest score possible, but waiting a couple of years and getting it cheap for just a weekend of fun saves the whole experience. Build a little, recruit some cool followers, figure out the at least somewhat engaging story because it's not about zombies for once and then finish the game and have nothing left to do right as it becomes an unplayable mess with terrible framerate. Decent score only because the genre is kind of rare on PS4 and because this one was fun enough to last a couple of days, not because it's actually good. Just get in, have some fun, get out, probably forget about it forever.
First of all, I quite like that this game is a post-apocalyptic survival game that actually isn't about zombies. There are no Zs to be found! If I pieced it together correctly, the world ended because of increasing natural disasters, which are also a game mechanic, and combat is always against other humans. Your citizens can mutate, but nothing much happens aside from them dying. I like it!
The other major thing that made me like the game more than it deserves is the general structure, which I'm a dedicated sucker for. You build and improve your city in that portion of the game, and you recruit specialists and send them on scavenging or combat missions. I'll play any game with this structure and enjoy it and this game is no exception. I just love tinkering with my city/HQ, sending minions to explore the area and scavenging for resources for crafting and building. It doesn't even have to be good for me to like it, which is lucky in this scenario as Surviving The Aftermath isn't very good. I'm going to give it a decent score, but only because I like tinkering, building, exploring and scavenging quite a lot and because we're starved for this kind of game on PS4.
The major problem is the performance on console, even on a Pro set to performance. The game starts out fine, but once your city is a decent size, the game becomes very slow, clunky and unresponsive. Have to wait like a full second for the game to react to button presses and such. That's standard behavior and just how the game plays as your city grows, but it also has a memory leak where, if you play for a few hours, the game becomes completely unplayable and has to be relaunched to get some framerate back. Once your city is big enough, the game just stops being fun because every menu is slow and unresponsive and doing things like painstakingly decorating your city becomes a painful chore as not only is the game a poor performer, it also has low QoL and you cannot do things like plant a whole row of bushes or copy and paste.
And that's the next major flaw; the fact that this game plays like it's 20 years old or more. You can't drag and drop things and in order to do anything, you have to click the object and bring up its preferences window and then find the menu option in there. It's like playing Windows 95, if that was a game. No convenient features for more or less anything. Want a row of hedges lining main street? Place each bush one by one. Want to delete your whole field of now out-dated solar panels now that you have wind turbines? Click each one, find the tiny demolish icon at the bottom of the preferences window so you have to scroll past a bunch of options you never click on to get to the one you click all the time. Like yeah it's cool that the game has a bunch of limitation features and you can automatically tell the tailor to stop sewing once they've made a certain amount of jackets and such, but the game is so easy that it's just a bunch of options that are in the way and make the menus clunkier. I set my world to medium difficulty and average amount of everything (whereas the default is easy and all resources/etc set to plentiful) and the game was still far too easy. I'm trying for the platinum trophy and to do that I have to survive 30 catastrophes for 365 days and I feel like I beat the game and established a sustainable city back in day 190 or so. The game is currently playing itself just to advance time as I write this.
One thing I will say is that the PC reviews for this game call it messy and buggy and I have to say that the PS4 release isn't that outside of the poor framerate as the city grows. I have also noticed that there's some kind of mystery regarding water as it seems to just disappear into a black hole and I have to have a massive water farm in order to satiate my people, and there's also something funky going on with the delegation of tasks in that the game seems to require an unusually massive amount of courier workers and very few others as you're constantly running out of workers even though you have a large population. The latter doesn't really seem like a glitch, though. Other than that, I haven't had the game glitch out very often and it's really just the poor performance that's a major problem.
So...yeah...this game isn't actually good but I'm going to give it a decent rating anyway. It's objectively quite bad, but I had a fun and engaging weekend with it and a weekend is all you really need for $15 on sale. Had I bought this at full price and on launch, I would've been quite angry and slammed this game with the lowest score possible, but waiting a couple of years and getting it cheap for just a weekend of fun saves the whole experience. Build a little, recruit some cool followers, figure out the at least somewhat engaging story because it's not about zombies for once and then finish the game and have nothing left to do right as it becomes an unplayable mess with terrible framerate. Decent score only because the genre is kind of rare on PS4 and because this one was fun enough to last a couple of days, not because it's actually good. Just get in, have some fun, get out, probably forget about it forever.
2021
A just okay survival type game that's way too focused on co-op and feels very stressful to try to play solo. Pretty amateurish in most ways. Addictive at first but quickly got boring. Almost as boring as this review.
Very good game that I can't stand because I don't have that natural rhythm and doing everything on beat is extremely exhausting for me.
2014
I love how this game satirizes capitalism, but when the developers were told they can't nickle-and-dime with microtransactions as much on PS4 as they can on other platforms, they abandoned that version immediately. I guess these guys lived long enough to see themselves become the villains.
1983
This is a fun animated movie, but it's miserable as a videogame.
This game is pretty much the actual worst, and yet I spent so many hours on it as a kid. I'm pretty sure that this game is why I'm cynical as an adult. I remember playing that dreadful first level over and over and at least somewhat enjoying the second level. I'm not sure I ever got further than like the fourth level since it not only sucks, it's annoyingly hard too. Do not play this game!