Muscle Mommy Kassandra
After 125 hours and completely 100%ing the game, I can say that the only good thing about this game is locations/atmosphere and Kassandra. Oh, also the never seen before Isu DLC. Poorly executed but still, it was interesting to experience it. It could have been WAAAAAY better but here we are. I don't even want to talk about animations and the effort put in this game.
It's not even an Assassin's Creed game, too. I just take this game at face value and subtract the "Assassin's Creed" from it and voila! it's a great game :D

Best part of the game: Muscle Mommy Kassandra :3

Overall a fun game but it's being held back by numerous, truly numerous, flaws.

Silent Hope is a roguelike that alternates between sending you inside a long, continuous dungeons to kill monsters, gather materials and move forward and another section where you are managing resources at your base.

First of all, the base management is absolutely horrendous. During the dungeoning, you gather materials which will be used to craft weapons, pretty straightforward so far right? Except you need to process them into processed materials first, for example turning wood into lumber or plant something for it to grow, before you can use them. This also takes time, which only runs when you are dungeoning. So to use new materials and ingredients, you essentially need at least two runs which is a weird decision that I don't really understand and only serves to hinder your progress if you rush through the dungeons, which start very easy.

The loot system of the game isn't spared from this. With a diablo-like loot system, you're gonna get a lot of weapons or so you thought. They're crafting schemes which you need to actually craft at the base using your materials. Unfortunately, the variable differences between weapons are very minimal: their base attack value is almost the same per weapon type and one area in a dungeon will usually only have the same weapon type, until you progress enough to get better weapons. Ultimately, you just end up with a lot of copies of the same weapon cluttering your inventory, and the inventory and crafting interface in this game are pretty bad and unintuitive. Did I mention how bad the processing interface was? Because you'll be wasting a lot of time scrolling to get the material you want to process, interrupted by an animation the first time you do it after every dungeoning session and then you'll waste even more getting rid of needless weapon schemes and whatnot. There's no easy way to scroll and sort your stuff, it's all very tedious and involves a lot of micromanagement and repetition.

There's also cooking and... yeah, it's not really much better than the rest.

The story is fairly unimpressive and serviceable. Despite being a part of the Rune Factory series, it doesn't really develop onto anything so it might as well not be a spinoff. Aside from woolies and a few weapon/ingredients from the main series, you'll hardly recognise anything. The music is also fairly limited and gets repeated a lot during your playthroughs. On another hand, I was very surprised with the voice acting, especially of the king, which was very good, but there are few instances of dialogue in the game (excluding the constantly chattering princess, which thankfully can be disabled).

Dungeoning is where the game is fun but even so, it's pretty limited. Most monsters hardly flinch so a lot of the game involves running back and forth by using the dodge feature whenever your skills are recharging. The more you move forward, the less useful your basic attack seems to be and unfortunately your skills have at least 4-5 seconds of cooldown for the lucky ones, 10 for the unlucky caster which is in my opinion the worst class in the game because of this. You can end up waiting a lot depending on your playstyle, just because your skills have very long cooldown and you can at most have three of them. This also creates a dilemma where you either try to get easily spammable skills to be effective or you try to focus on a good combo (like caster seems to be build for) but you'll be AFK for a while after every burst of attacks.

Some characters also suffer from terrible flaws. Warrior for example has an attack where she spins her weapon and it's supposed to attract enemies to her, stunning them if they get hit enough. However, this skill flinches the enemies, sending them away from you and resulting in them not being attracted nor getting stunned. Another one of her attacks is a charge which pushes enemies away and is supposed to deal multiple hits as long as you keep running into an enemy. The unfortunate result is the physics of the game will often throw an enemies ABOVE your head and they won't get hit until the end of your charge. This kind of game breaking thing is fairly common and pretty annoying honestly, even more so when I really enjoyed the concept of those.

The dungeons stay fairly basic with a limited number of enemies that repeat themselves in slightly different shapes. Overall it's alright, but the repetitive nature of being forced into the same areas over and over because you died or you need to process materials or you need to level up your previous characters is pretty underwhelming, even more so knowing that you already have dozens of every material type, that you are not going to get a better weapon or anything out of it... There is no fast way to progress, especially in the lategame where floors can be extremely long and tedious to go through, without any indication of an exit. I honestly spent more time just running and dodging enemies because I had absolutely nothing to gain and it's much more efficient to progress to newer areas to progress.

Despite this, one last thing will eventually hold you back. You might assume that you can simply blast through the game with one character and equip better gear on the others, allowing them to catch up. You would be wrong, as levels heavily influence your character's strength despite this, you will therefore be forced to eventually go back an area or two and grind them.

I feel like this game would really have benefited from allowing more than three skills to be funnier to play. It also doesn't really play into its concept of constantly switching characters despite the boosts you get from doing so and the frequency of crystals, because they really want you to stay stuck in the same area and level up every character individually. Additionally, you'll only unlock the third and last class of every character one dungeon layer after beating the main story boss and oh boy, you'll need to grind your characters and repeat that one area with each of the seven characters.

I would add the completely astounding price of 40usd on release as yet another flaw but at least by now you can get the game at 20usd on sales. Which is still fairly expensive in my opinion, there are better and cheaper roguelites out there. Ultimately, if it hadn't been a Rune Factory spinoff I probably would not have ended up playing it.

I initially wrote a whole long ass review but deleted it cuz I wanna keep this short and sweet. This game fucks. Very derivative at times yes, but honestly who fucking cares when so much of this shit is on par with, or even better than Fromsoft's games. To the point where if this had "Fromsoftware" in the splash screen, I can guarantee a lot of people wouldnt even bat an eye.

The combat system is so deep and consistent, the bosses are all hits no misses, the world is really cool, the levels are mostly good, and the story is surprisingly engaging from start to finish. Best surprise of the year for sure, and likely my favorite game of the year as well. I certainly found it harder than any souls game Ive played so far, but thankfully its consistent as hell, and pretty much every roadblock I was hitting was quite simply just me not being good enough. The parry window is indeed very tight, but unlike some reviews here might say, it aint fuckin random, you just have shit timing. And I would know, because I myself had shit timing at first. But even through all the deaths and frustration, damn is this shit fuckin good.

Also some of the reviews here are hilarious. It’s so clear that anybody giving this a negative rating got skill checked super hard. Sorry you bashed your head into a wall trying to mash R1 and heal spam like it was Bloodborne. Speaking of which, if anybody is looking for a game like Bloodborne, but with slightly worse levels and wayyyyyyyy better bosses, boy do I have a recommendation for you!

Probably the most polished souls like to date. Nails it in presentation, and mechanics (most of the time) but the world-building can be a bit lackluster. My engagement of Souls games comes from a sense of exploration and wonder, and finding out how people survive and operate in the screwed-up worlds they live in. Lies of P doesn't really make me question a whole lot. Everything is laid out, there are no real discoveries to have, and the story is very much in your face. You can't miss it. There's no real room to interpret or ruminate on what the journey meant, which I think is the biggest letdown. Quests have a very user-friendly design which I think is a positive and negative. They actually can be completed without a wiki on hand (thank god!!) but on the other hand, they feel too gamey now? Like, time to go here. Deliver this to that person. Time to talk to this person, didn't you see the face on the level screen? It's the one thing that made Soul's game create that sense of discovery and that the world is alive; organically interacting with NPCs on their own journeys. Regardless, it's a shining achievement for a team like this to hit so many correct notes from FromSoft's design, while still trying to establish their own identity and justify their game's existence. I may not be 100% on board with all the decisions made in the game, but man was I thoroughly impressed. Solid game, and I can't wait for the sequel.

8/10 :)

I think the greatest sin of the NSMB games is that they've "flattened" people's perception of what the 2D Mario games were/can be. Believe it or not, games like SMB3 and SMW didn't limit themselves to just "grass world, desert world, ice world, water world", and even when they did use those tropes, they didn't depict them exactly the same way. Those games didn't just have an overworld map, SMB3 had essentially a board game with moving pieces that was catered perfectly to competitive playthroughs, and provided variety between levels. SMW's map was less varied, but told a story through the way you progressed through a detailed map with detours and distinct sections that all made sense in how they were all a part of one specific location. Even SMW has more than just one 1-up minigame. These games had distinct personalities, different aesthetics and inspirations, and the NSMB series serves to get everything in one perfect line. This is what Nintendo would have you believe Mario has Always Been and Always Will Be, which is why it seems projects like Super Nintendo World and the Illumination Mario Movie seem to borrow a lot from these games.

There are some actually good ideas for Mario levels here, some joy is to be had in terms of providing good, reliable 2D Mario platforming. Honestly, I wouldn't go all the way to say this is a bad game. But it seems to actively try to be unremarkable the whole time. The game's marketing revolves around "look at AAALLLL the COOOIIIIINS" but I'll be honest, there's a lot of them but not THAT many. Not enough to hang your entire game on. Also the raccoon leaf is here, P-meter and all, no real reason, it's just here because they need something here, god forbid they come up with an actual new power-up. Like I said, there's genuinely good levels and moments in this game, but it's not worth it.

One last thing: this game tries not to be too hard in terms of level design, which is fine, but it tries to make up for that by making some of the collectibles absurdly difficult to find, usually involving assumptions I would never make on my own. I guess that's also not a bad thing, just slightly exhausting. Glad I never got tricked into actually buying this game at any point. Did you know it's very easy to hack your 3DS?