Katsono
2018
Judgment is in many ways much better than Yakuza, be it the story or gameplay. It's a really fun game to play, the combat is very solid compared to Yakuza and the story has much less of the silly interruptions that break the seriousness. The characters are all very fleshed out and from beginning to end the game doesn't suffer from any downfall.
2021
Just as good as the previous game, now in the new map from Yakuza 7 and with a new mode of transportation. The story is just as good as the previous game and so is the rest.
My only complaint would be that I didn't enjoy the way you unlock side quests by tracking them through an app.
My only complaint would be that I didn't enjoy the way you unlock side quests by tracking them through an app.
I really wasn't expecting this from a game that I mostly saw as the game equivalent of the trendy colour books for adults, which have never been something I was attracted to. However, contrary to my first impression, I now believe this is a top level mother-like. The character interactions are so memorable and the relationship between some is just incredible, truly a memorable game. Absolutely loved it.
Clever puzzles with a unique colouring mechanic at its core, it's basically a zelda without combat and some other game mechanics taken from "chill games" like Animal crossing (collecting clothes and house decoration). It all mixes well together. The level design is really tight and you just know it's good when the game asks you to find a random area from a picture and you can easily spot where it is, because every single area has its distinct features. It has much a simpler art style than many games but the fact you're taking part in it compensates plenty. And the soundtrack is also excellent.
Clever puzzles with a unique colouring mechanic at its core, it's basically a zelda without combat and some other game mechanics taken from "chill games" like Animal crossing (collecting clothes and house decoration). It all mixes well together. The level design is really tight and you just know it's good when the game asks you to find a random area from a picture and you can easily spot where it is, because every single area has its distinct features. It has much a simpler art style than many games but the fact you're taking part in it compensates plenty. And the soundtrack is also excellent.
2021
I don't know if I would give this game a try again. It's a very unpolished game and coming out as a sequel to Rune Factory 4 AND as a 2023 game I would say it just doesn't hold up.
I'm aware of the conditions this game was made in and its success is the only hope of seeing the series strive, so I'm glad ultimately it sold well enough but for me this was a very uninteresting game. I think the upgrade to 3D was an overly ambitious idea and they were not able to properly handle it: the performances are terrible and so are many other things such as the environments being flat and boring, how it makes the gameplay much slower (such as moving from one part of the town to another) and how clunky things can be (such as the farming, compared to RF4). RF4 feels like the peak of a genre and is extremely optimized in many aspects, every single action is incredibly satisfying so playing a game that feels extremely average as its sequel feels very disappointing.
I think RF5 doesn't really understand how much effort it takes to make 3D into something good. For example, it has much wider environments than RF4 and they both probably took about the same effort to make. But RF4 has overall tight and small areas, what's more separated by a grid system, compared to an open field type of design this is obviously easier to fill, the movement is snappier, etc. It's very difficult to have a 3D game with large spaces feel alive instead of empty, hence why it's mostly the focus of very big studios. RF5 really feels like a generic modern JRPG which aims too much at being modern and following the trends of third person view, open areas, etc. when it can't do it that well. Ultimately I wouldn't say the game is bad but it's so average that there's really nothing special about it. RF4 wasn't a perfect game but it had so many things that made it unique and were so well crafted that I will never forget the game. RF5 is just like a lot of the indie farming sims which don't really offer anything and are painfully average, only existing for hardcore fans of the genre who are already bored of the better games.
I only hope RF6 will bring back some of the things I loved about RF4 as it's one of my favourite games, but this one is not for me. One thing that I really liked however is the great art style, this was a big upgrade and feels much more mature than RF4 (the chara design not so much) but the in-game portraits fall pretty flat in comparison. The opening animation is a banger though, I really have to praise whoever directed it.
I'm aware of the conditions this game was made in and its success is the only hope of seeing the series strive, so I'm glad ultimately it sold well enough but for me this was a very uninteresting game. I think the upgrade to 3D was an overly ambitious idea and they were not able to properly handle it: the performances are terrible and so are many other things such as the environments being flat and boring, how it makes the gameplay much slower (such as moving from one part of the town to another) and how clunky things can be (such as the farming, compared to RF4). RF4 feels like the peak of a genre and is extremely optimized in many aspects, every single action is incredibly satisfying so playing a game that feels extremely average as its sequel feels very disappointing.
I think RF5 doesn't really understand how much effort it takes to make 3D into something good. For example, it has much wider environments than RF4 and they both probably took about the same effort to make. But RF4 has overall tight and small areas, what's more separated by a grid system, compared to an open field type of design this is obviously easier to fill, the movement is snappier, etc. It's very difficult to have a 3D game with large spaces feel alive instead of empty, hence why it's mostly the focus of very big studios. RF5 really feels like a generic modern JRPG which aims too much at being modern and following the trends of third person view, open areas, etc. when it can't do it that well. Ultimately I wouldn't say the game is bad but it's so average that there's really nothing special about it. RF4 wasn't a perfect game but it had so many things that made it unique and were so well crafted that I will never forget the game. RF5 is just like a lot of the indie farming sims which don't really offer anything and are painfully average, only existing for hardcore fans of the genre who are already bored of the better games.
I only hope RF6 will bring back some of the things I loved about RF4 as it's one of my favourite games, but this one is not for me. One thing that I really liked however is the great art style, this was a big upgrade and feels much more mature than RF4 (the chara design not so much) but the in-game portraits fall pretty flat in comparison. The opening animation is a banger though, I really have to praise whoever directed it.
2020
About 20 minutes to complete, the game takes you through different puzzles that are extremely linear and whose solution is obvious. Even the items only exist for the sake of solving one thing (seriously, the shovel and pickaxe just magically disappear after one use, and one of these items could have been used twice but instead you'll have to find a rock the second time you need to break a wall) and are conveniently located on your way. There's a decent amount of atmosphere, but really the game hasn't much more to offer and feels like a demo.
Most of your meager twenty minutes will be walking from point A to B, so really nothing much to say about this game. Not very interesting. The ending is very abrupt and you feel like you were just beginning to get into the game when it happens. There isn't much to say about lore or story either.
Most of your meager twenty minutes will be walking from point A to B, so really nothing much to say about this game. Not very interesting. The ending is very abrupt and you feel like you were just beginning to get into the game when it happens. There isn't much to say about lore or story either.
2023
A masterpiece of doom modding, horror and video gaming. Also the best reference to House of Leaves, ever.
My review goes for the original game, it was very good before it got butchered.
2018
What's the point of making a hack 'n slash game but you have to grind for 15 hours before you actually unlock the main gameplay? You'll have to spend a lot of time doing boring fetch quests asking you to kill one or two monsters before you get to any dungeon with real challenges and enough enemies not to be boring.
I'm not exaggerating, the game really expects you to just farm levels on the overworld while killing pointless critters that are in groups of maybe 4-5 at most and which pose no challenge at all. The gameplay feels satisfying but there's no way I'm wasting the time it asks me to.
I'm not exaggerating, the game really expects you to just farm levels on the overworld while killing pointless critters that are in groups of maybe 4-5 at most and which pose no challenge at all. The gameplay feels satisfying but there's no way I'm wasting the time it asks me to.
2023
It's a short small game which is akin to the mini-games in Mario Party for example, but a very well done example of such a game. The one island on which the game happens is beautiful and detailed, it's very fun to explore and reach the goal.
Pizza Possum is a short but sweat coop game, exactly the type I find the most fun.
Pizza Possum is a short but sweat coop game, exactly the type I find the most fun.
2020
A horror themed game with a pretty good setup where you play as the monster, the atmosphere is definitively very good throughout the game and so is the feeling of being a dangerous monster.
However the game itself can get pretty plain. The puzzles are the same throughout the entire game and the system of reducing your health to switch between powers gets boring and annoying really fast, even more so if you happen to get hit when you needed health and have to walk around looking for ways to recover your health.
The level design is perhaps the most disappointing part. While the game looks huge, it's extremely linear and at almost all times there's only one direction to go to which is very easy to guess. Even when it branches out, it's only because you need to go through multiple small branches to unlock the main path. There's a bit of backtracking to find optional upgrades which require later powers but it's very annoying due to the nature of the game: there's no map, it's very linear and getting to early areas can be very tedious. The game also makes an extensive huge of "teleportation" through gates that take you from one area to another, which doesn't help with mastering your environment. What's more, half these gates are one-sided and can't be used again (there are also areas you can only access once, because it requires a human to be alive and they'll die when you access the area).
However the game itself can get pretty plain. The puzzles are the same throughout the entire game and the system of reducing your health to switch between powers gets boring and annoying really fast, even more so if you happen to get hit when you needed health and have to walk around looking for ways to recover your health.
The level design is perhaps the most disappointing part. While the game looks huge, it's extremely linear and at almost all times there's only one direction to go to which is very easy to guess. Even when it branches out, it's only because you need to go through multiple small branches to unlock the main path. There's a bit of backtracking to find optional upgrades which require later powers but it's very annoying due to the nature of the game: there's no map, it's very linear and getting to early areas can be very tedious. The game also makes an extensive huge of "teleportation" through gates that take you from one area to another, which doesn't help with mastering your environment. What's more, half these gates are one-sided and can't be used again (there are also areas you can only access once, because it requires a human to be alive and they'll die when you access the area).
2021
Archvale is fun, but at the same time it is a painfully average game that feels like the developpers just didn't care for it, because there are so many things that seem easy to fix or terrible design choices that could be avoided from the beginning. I have checked the development process of the game and it seems to be a sort of mess, especially now because the main developper acknowledged to not having funds to keep working on it consistently, even though they intended to release a major rebalance patch.
The game is essentially Enter the gungeon but without the roguelike aspect and a consistent world to explore instead. Unfortunately, all that there's to explore are squares upon squares of the same thing. There isn't a single secret on the map and it is procedurally generated every adventure apparently, it's just a succession of areas where you need to fight enemies to progress until a new checkpoint or an eventual point of interest. The dungeons provide a bit more but they are few of them.
The bullet hell part is a pain since the very beginning. There's just too many bullets all the time and the patterns are pretty terrible. In the first place, you can't even make such complex patterns with a dozen randomized enemy per arena and the bosses aren't any better. They hardly have openings and just spam insane attacks with a lot of annoying gimmicks every time. For example, one boss is a slime that will not only cover the area in so many bullets you can barely see yourself but it'll constantly go off screen, there's no way to distinguish between its jumping attack and the one with a jump animation but where it remains motionless, you can't get close to it safely because there's not a single tell that it'll just jump at you and not only does it have its standard bullets but it also has AoE earthquakes that chain together and shoots dozens of small balls the same color as the ground to chip away at your health. And the worst is that they're VERY tanky and take forever to kill.
Overall it's still fun to play but the biggest issue here is that you have no indication of where to go in the open world, EVEN THOUGH there's actually a very precise order with each area being a specific level. So it's easy to end in a high level area without even realising it, especially when you aren't aware that the game is actually super linear, and waste a lot of time being stuck there and get frustrated. The game was really fun when this didn't happen but I spent multiple hours like this, just trying to beat a boss or clear a very hard area before I realised that I would have actually not have trouble elswhere. The bullet or boss patterns aren't a big deal when you're in the right place, but if you're not then they're very painful to deal with and the game is obviously not made with the intent of being cleared on challenge runs (not that it can't be done, but doing a no hit for example would just be extremely painful and would involve a lot of RNG).
The build system is pretty poor but still offers fun choices. The game offers three types of weapons : melee, ranged and magic. Magic has a gimmick of picking up enemy drops that supposedly make you temporarily stronger but I couldn't even tell the difference. The game heavily discourages playing around by having specialised equipment that increases only one type of damage, requiring you to constantly change your gear if you want to change your weapon type. As for the weapon themselves, I found myself nearly always using the same ones and only occasionally picking something else and, once again, not using anything else. Why? Because the weapons are fixed and most of them are essentially a mix of damage type and a different way of firing. Unfortunately you can't mix your own weapons and since you'll usually like a particular type of gun, you'll stick to the one same thing you're comfortable with. It doesn't help that everything is so tanky, so you REALLY need the buff from specialising.
Not a big loss anyway, because damage types and debuffs are almost useless. Does slow even do something? And the damage of poison, bleed and burn is so ridiculously low that a single hit from my weapon would do much more than maybe 30 seconds of poison. Hell, even the pots you can find and throw on the map and the bombs feel so underpowered as if the devs didn't even bother to check them. After an hour of playing, you'll probably do way more damage than any pot throwing could hope to achieve.
The camera is also pretty terrible, especially in coop where the enemies will constantly be out of your screen. I think the zoom on the map is just too much and decreasing it (at least in coop when players distance themselves) would have helped a lot. In coop the other player is your biggest enemy because of the camera moves and my experience was that most of our deaths were because of the camera.
Overall this game is pretty frustrating, it can be fun and has potential but many of the flaws are so obvious that players were bound to criticise them, and they're not so fundamental that a quick patch wouldn't have helped. For example, if you teleport to another area, your checkpoint doesn't change until you use the teleportation statue again, or how the two players are so hard to distinguish themselves... ! There are a lot of bugs like that that are easy to fix and it's hard to figure out why the devs, that are apparently still involved with this game, haven't fixed them yet. So it is saddening to see how the game is just stuck in its mediocre state.
The game is essentially Enter the gungeon but without the roguelike aspect and a consistent world to explore instead. Unfortunately, all that there's to explore are squares upon squares of the same thing. There isn't a single secret on the map and it is procedurally generated every adventure apparently, it's just a succession of areas where you need to fight enemies to progress until a new checkpoint or an eventual point of interest. The dungeons provide a bit more but they are few of them.
The bullet hell part is a pain since the very beginning. There's just too many bullets all the time and the patterns are pretty terrible. In the first place, you can't even make such complex patterns with a dozen randomized enemy per arena and the bosses aren't any better. They hardly have openings and just spam insane attacks with a lot of annoying gimmicks every time. For example, one boss is a slime that will not only cover the area in so many bullets you can barely see yourself but it'll constantly go off screen, there's no way to distinguish between its jumping attack and the one with a jump animation but where it remains motionless, you can't get close to it safely because there's not a single tell that it'll just jump at you and not only does it have its standard bullets but it also has AoE earthquakes that chain together and shoots dozens of small balls the same color as the ground to chip away at your health. And the worst is that they're VERY tanky and take forever to kill.
Overall it's still fun to play but the biggest issue here is that you have no indication of where to go in the open world, EVEN THOUGH there's actually a very precise order with each area being a specific level. So it's easy to end in a high level area without even realising it, especially when you aren't aware that the game is actually super linear, and waste a lot of time being stuck there and get frustrated. The game was really fun when this didn't happen but I spent multiple hours like this, just trying to beat a boss or clear a very hard area before I realised that I would have actually not have trouble elswhere. The bullet or boss patterns aren't a big deal when you're in the right place, but if you're not then they're very painful to deal with and the game is obviously not made with the intent of being cleared on challenge runs (not that it can't be done, but doing a no hit for example would just be extremely painful and would involve a lot of RNG).
The build system is pretty poor but still offers fun choices. The game offers three types of weapons : melee, ranged and magic. Magic has a gimmick of picking up enemy drops that supposedly make you temporarily stronger but I couldn't even tell the difference. The game heavily discourages playing around by having specialised equipment that increases only one type of damage, requiring you to constantly change your gear if you want to change your weapon type. As for the weapon themselves, I found myself nearly always using the same ones and only occasionally picking something else and, once again, not using anything else. Why? Because the weapons are fixed and most of them are essentially a mix of damage type and a different way of firing. Unfortunately you can't mix your own weapons and since you'll usually like a particular type of gun, you'll stick to the one same thing you're comfortable with. It doesn't help that everything is so tanky, so you REALLY need the buff from specialising.
Not a big loss anyway, because damage types and debuffs are almost useless. Does slow even do something? And the damage of poison, bleed and burn is so ridiculously low that a single hit from my weapon would do much more than maybe 30 seconds of poison. Hell, even the pots you can find and throw on the map and the bombs feel so underpowered as if the devs didn't even bother to check them. After an hour of playing, you'll probably do way more damage than any pot throwing could hope to achieve.
The camera is also pretty terrible, especially in coop where the enemies will constantly be out of your screen. I think the zoom on the map is just too much and decreasing it (at least in coop when players distance themselves) would have helped a lot. In coop the other player is your biggest enemy because of the camera moves and my experience was that most of our deaths were because of the camera.
Overall this game is pretty frustrating, it can be fun and has potential but many of the flaws are so obvious that players were bound to criticise them, and they're not so fundamental that a quick patch wouldn't have helped. For example, if you teleport to another area, your checkpoint doesn't change until you use the teleportation statue again, or how the two players are so hard to distinguish themselves... ! There are a lot of bugs like that that are easy to fix and it's hard to figure out why the devs, that are apparently still involved with this game, haven't fixed them yet. So it is saddening to see how the game is just stuck in its mediocre state.
It's a pretty contemplative game with an agreable sound design. The art style is neat and some of the areas are really beautiful to watch, but the game itself gets pretty repetitive even though it's only one hour long.
Some areas feel a bit longer than they should have been and the story isn't really amazing. I enjoyed the progression from nature into a modernized world and how the gibbons face the consequences of humanity but the last part takes a fantasy turn that I didn't really like, instead of focusing on reality.
One thing that's pretty disappointing is how the people are entirely in the background with the exception of one area. They'll not react in anyway to the monkey, not even look toward them or get startled.
The weakest point of the game is definitively the gameplay. It's only two buttons (okay, three with the backflip... which I barely managed to use honestly) and while it's pretty fun, it's actually pretty hard to grasp especially in some areas where it's easy too fall and hard to get back into the trees (which could have been used as a narrative element of how the monkeys can't handle civilisation like the jungle, but ultimately you're just as fast in city as you were in the forest).
Some areas feel a bit longer than they should have been and the story isn't really amazing. I enjoyed the progression from nature into a modernized world and how the gibbons face the consequences of humanity but the last part takes a fantasy turn that I didn't really like, instead of focusing on reality.
One thing that's pretty disappointing is how the people are entirely in the background with the exception of one area. They'll not react in anyway to the monkey, not even look toward them or get startled.
The weakest point of the game is definitively the gameplay. It's only two buttons (okay, three with the backflip... which I barely managed to use honestly) and while it's pretty fun, it's actually pretty hard to grasp especially in some areas where it's easy too fall and hard to get back into the trees (which could have been used as a narrative element of how the monkeys can't handle civilisation like the jungle, but ultimately you're just as fast in city as you were in the forest).
This DLC does something truly unique: one entire area of the game is recreated... into the past! I was seriously baffled when I saw this, it was amazing and extremely captivating to me.
The DLC also has three great bosses and they're FAST. Having such fast paced combat into this game was a nice unanticipated change and made for some tough challenge.
I didn't like some parts (the Sanctuary Guardian and how to access the DLC) but the good parts overshadow those.
The DLC also has three great bosses and they're FAST. Having such fast paced combat into this game was a nice unanticipated change and made for some tough challenge.
I didn't like some parts (the Sanctuary Guardian and how to access the DLC) but the good parts overshadow those.
This DLC has my favourite area of Dark Souls II, the Brume tower. The vertical design is pretty unique even for the series and was well exploited.
The main area in this DLC is beautiful and nice to explore. I really enjoyed the snow area.
I did not enjoy the idea of backtracking the whole thing after "unlocking" those sealed ice things, though, and it felt like a cheap way of padding content.
This DLC also has the worst area of the entire souls series: frozen outskirts.
I did not enjoy the idea of backtracking the whole thing after "unlocking" those sealed ice things, though, and it felt like a cheap way of padding content.
This DLC also has the worst area of the entire souls series: frozen outskirts.