I love the idea of playing this game much more than actually playing it but it's a fantastic game nonetheless.

The tech here is really impressive, the way things break, burn, smash and fall apart makes a little spot in my brain glow bright red from satisfaction. The most fun I had was loading up a city map and using the AC-130 mod to commit war crimes.

The actual game here is primarily a puzzle game. You have objectives like "steal X item" with a strict time limit once you start, you'll be arrested and sentenced to voxel jail if you fail. I'm glad the developers took the time to find a way to utilise the tech they had and make an actual game, they could have just as easily launched it as a simple sandbox.

The early levels are great fun and really activate your almonds, making me feel like my brain is ENORMOUS. The later levels feel less satisfying to beat as the game progresses. I stopped trying to achieve the secondary objectives and just wanted to finish the game by the end.

I was surprised by the extensive use of vehicles in this game but they handle well and situations like dropping a safe through 3 floors and having it smash through the roof of a van to drive away with are real highlights.

The music is fun, it matches the tone so well. I feel like Eric Andre in his Cat Burglar skit when I run around the map spraypainting the route I am going to take before I accidentally blow up a building wrong and get flattened.

Apparently the studio was bought up by a new publisher who has them working on subpar DLC packs, I haven't touched any of that but the base game is well worth the price of admission.

Multiplayer would go so HARD in this game.
Steam Workshop support is also a major plus.

I wrote a review for this already, originally written for Steam but I want to return to this as I have a lot to say.

There is no other experience like Squad. Teams are comprised of squads with set roles and headed up by a Squad Lead (SL), fireteams may be contained within. Matches are 50v50 on large maps focused on controlling key points. SL's need to coordinate their squads to complete objectives or support attacks, they also must communicate with other SLs to make this work. Voice chat is a necessity for this game.

On the scale of Arcade Shooter to Milsim, Squad leans much further on the Milsim side, not as far as something like ARMA but not as arcady as something like Insurgency or Hell Let Loose.

I don't know why Milsim developers seem to think that slow animations equate to realism. Everything you do can be measured with a calendar. Following a recent update known as Infantry Complete Overhaul (ICO) even aiming down sights requires 3 days notice. I play anti-tank 90% of the time which requires aiming for specific points on vehicles from hundreds of meters away, the openings for these shots can be only a few seconds and with this new update I don't even try anymore.

The entire intention of the update was to promote teamplay and slow the game down. However, the kind of players who went off on their own haven't been affected, because in all honesty they are turbo nerds who put more hours into this game than anything else in their lives, the kind of individuals who say "over" at the end of sentences through VC.

Most games you die to enemies you never even see. With ICO you and an enemy can walk right up to each other, spray like crazy and both walk away like it is a spaghetti western. The recoil and sway is utterly ridiculous. For a game that prides itself on realism all I can say is that it has completely shit the bed when it comes to representing the fighting ability of the average soldier. Sprinting for more than 2 seconds renders your soldier unable to cope with the physicality of being alive.

ICO isn't going away and the most hardcore elements of the community love it, again because they are turbonerds who believe their hardcore military man shooter should contain zero fun and should only be played by people willing to refer to them as 'Sir'.

I miss the highs this game used to offer. Holding a point with a squad of 8 guys against an onslaught, having a single medic be the backbone of the team. Landing a perfect RPG shot to take out a full helicopter. Sneaking behind enemy lines to locate a FOB so command can mortar it. Hell, games where I got zero kills and just did logistics runs back and forth from main were still fun.

Nowadays this game just makes me sad. You can still find some elements of fun but it takes a lot of sacrifice. Playing Squad requires a minimum of an hour of your time, between server queues, match set up, early game and the length of matches, if you decide you had a bad game which provided no fun it came at the cost of your entire evening.

The developers are also frustratingly focused on the wrong things with this game. Please god fix the broken server browser. Please add more official servers. Stop splitting your playerbase across two broken games and keep them on one broken game instead. Please fix the endless audio issues. Have you guys never heard of optimisation? Can you fix the bug that prevents spawning after waiting 90 seconds on the rallypoint? Can you fix the janky vehicle physics?

I don't encourage anyone new to try this game. I just miss what it used to be.

Also the community sucks. Yes please play Yugoslavian war music through your microphone at full volume for the entire game set up phase, hilarious and never been done before. Please do a fake Russian accent every opportunity, it kills me with laughter. I love when you scream racial slurs over and over every time you drive past, it's groundbreaking comedy. Oh yeah, you should definitely not unlock any Squads so that people joining the server cannot literally play the game and get kicked for being AFK due to something out of their control. I thoroughly enjoy getting TK'd because you insist on playing heavy armour but can't identify friendlies from enemies. Yeah bro, Squad was totally as quick and arcadey as Call of Duty before the ICO update and anyone complaining obviously doesn't know how to play, I am sure that earned you a purple heart with your military RP clan.

Yes I am mad, cope, seethe, etc. but I guess a game that forces you to communicate directly with people seriously highlights how obnoxious they can be. Given the small size of the community and server list you do run into the same clowns often.

Adding to the list of quality Metroidvanias lately, Animal Well is a largely vague game about a blob creature (?) that explores an atmospheric labyrinth with many secrets to find. There’s no combat save for avoiding occasional enemies and mainly focused on figuring out how to progress using the items you find throughout. The level design and platforming puzzles were well done and made clever use of all the mechanics, though were still straightforward enough that I wasn’t stuck on much for very long. The pixel art is really great too

Reaching credits took about 8 hours for me, but this also appears to be a game with a lot of hidden depth to it going off reviews and how much unexplained stuff I can still find (similar to Tunic it seems). Curious to see how much more you can get out of its postgame, but for the main content alone it’s well worth it

Pretty good detective game, great even for being so short. A girl named Seowon went missing and was never found leaving the case unsolved, until years later the retired detective who handled the investigation is urged to reexamine the details and try to figure out what happened to her

Searching through a mess of past conversations with the people relevant to the case, the goal of the game is to make sense of the detective’s distorted memories by reordering these conversations and assigning them to the right person, initially being confusingly jumbled until they gradually fit in proper order and you start to get an understanding of what was really going on. It’s only about 3 hours but found its mystery pretty compelling, and I liked the game’s simple pixel style and music which fit its moody tone really well

Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games have already proven themselves as one of my favorite indie studios with Detention and Devotion (two horror games I hold in very high regard), and I was especially happy to see them still push forward with their next game despite the nonsense surrounding Devotion’s continued ban from storefronts. Branching out into making a Metroidvania with Sekiro inspired combat no less is quite a shift from their previous works though, and I was very curious to see how a team of their caliber would handle such a different project

Needless to say, very satisfied with it. Nine Sols is fantastic, certainly drawing from the likes of Sekiro’s brutally difficult “parry or die” gameplay but adopting it to a 2D style incredibly well. It stands out on its own by forgoing a direct posture system in favor of its talisman mechanic (where you instead quickly attach bombs earned with parries to enemies), which gets so fun once your skills open up and makes for some of the most entertaining combat I’ve played of these type of games. The bosses in particular are really cool to fight against, initially seeming like insurmountable walls that gradually get more and more manageable as you memorize their patterns, until you can somehow effortlessly flow against their relentless attacks without even thinking. The final boss for the true ending is especially awesome in this regard, honestly one of the most rewarding I’ve fought in recent memory

Beyond just the combat, it further impresses with its unique “Taopunk” world-building and heavier narrative focus that’s a cut above many others in the genre. There’s not many Metroidvanias where I was as invested in the dialogue and characters quite like this one, Yi in particular was endearing as the main protag, and the story surrounding his vengeful path against the “Nine Sols” he once worked with was really interesting to follow, getting surprisingly heartfelt even. The game’s hub, the Four Seasons Pavilion, is nice too in how it encourages you to keep up with the other characters and watch as it changes in appearance the more items you bring to Shuanshuan

The game’s music is great and the handdrawn 2D art/animations for characters and environments is lovely, mixing beautiful aesthetics with grungy underground sci-fi machinery, and using detailed manga style panels for story moments that further add to the excellent presentation

Map exploration was enjoyable too. It’s not really Hollow Knight level in that regard, but has solid variety and was fun to clear out areas looking for chests or optional bosses. Traversal is limited initially but also gets pretty good as you unlock stuff like air dash and double jump for platforming sections. The priority was definitely more towards its combat here, but still well done

Finished my replay of WD1
and had to say when I 1st played this game I was hype for it like everyone else and was disappointed like everyone else cuz it didn't deliver on those high-end visuals, and the sad reality is because of that controversy we just didn't appreciate what great things this game did at the time.

History aside this replay been helluva a ride man, I freaking love this game, and how great of a SP experience this is, this was the time when Ubisoft try to exp with diff stuff before becoming shitsoft and passionless game-pumping factory.
I love how gritty and dark this origin STORY for a vigilante is, wished it was more memorable and Aiden was a bit better acted so he had some charm.
MISSIONS and GAMEPLAY are the high lights of this game, these missions are fun af, and this 3rd person gameplay is just goat af, idk what happened with future WD the guns become toys, but here man they sound great, have weight to them and are impactful.
the animation system deserve big round of applause in this game especially, the walking, running, hiding in car, diff take downs for each gun, its just John wich simulator man.
now this isn't perfect, wished the world was more alive, and dense and hacking was also very serviceable, cars could've used more physics IG, and side activities are cool design around vigilante stuff but they do repeat themselves.

overall as I said playing through this story is amazing, the missions, gameplay and animation and dark tone of the story carry this shit hard for me.
SOLID 8/10

The World Ends With You is a must play game with some of the best characters, music, combat, and story of any RPG to date. I’ll begin with a basic story synopsis.

Neku Sakuraba awoke in the middle of Shibuya with no memories and a message on his phone. “Reach 104. You have 60 minutes. Fail, and face erasure - The Reapers” Neku thinks the message is a prank until a timer appears on his hand and monsters called noise appear. He runs to Hachiko and finds a girl that tells him to fight the noise he has to make a pact, and she initiates a pact with Neku. He accepts, and the pact is formed. Neku is able to fight the noise and heads to 104. That completes the mission and removes the timer from his hand. Unfortunately for Neku, there are 6 more days and one mission per day. If he wants to survive the seven days and beat the Reapers’ Game Neku will have to learn how to trust his partner.

While I do believe the story to be the best part of TWEWY (The World Ends With You), the combat certainly isn’t lacking enjoyment. The combat in the final remix (the version I’m playing) is different compared to the combat in the original (the version on DS). That version has your partner be on the top screen and their attacks be controlled by the buttons and D-pad, while Neku is controlled with touch controls on the bottom screen. This combat system only works on dual screen devices, so when porting TWEWY to mobile devices, the cross combo system was made (this is also the system used in final remix, with the addition of co-op). Neku is controlled on the one screen with touch or pointer controls, and you have to do a specific action to summon your partner onto the screen. For Shiki, it’s tapping an enemy, and cross combing enemies (attacking enemies at the same time as Shiki) stunlocking them until your pin has to reboot or your partner has to reboot. For this reason and the sync rate, cross comboing is pretty important in TWEWY (Final and Solo remix) combat, and to cross combo effectively, you’ll have to use the pins that best sync up with your partner's attack action.

Pins are what Neku use to fight in combat, there are many different ways to separate pins, but I’ll separate them into the type of command you’ll need to do for the pin to activate. Pins that make you tap on the enemy are good for summoning Shiki and performing cross combos since both of you will be attacking the enemy increasing the sync rate. Once the sync rate reaches 100%, you can activate a special attack. Shiki’s is matching two symbols to the symbol on the top. These special attacks do a lot more damage compared to normal attacks, which is why you’ll want to sync up with your partner and attack at the same time to increase your sync rate. Some pin types I like personally are the ones that drag obstacles to attack enemies (unfortunately these ones don’t work on bosses, since during boss fights there are on obstacles to drag). I also like the pins where you slash the enemy, since it knocks the enemy back and stuns them for a bit (not as good as cross comboing stunning). All pins have a reboot phase (except for pins with numbers next to them ex. healing pins) which is what happens when you've used all of this pins uses. It has to recharge so you can't use it until it's done rebooting. You should look at how long a pin takes to reboot when deciding if you want to use it. Some pins have boot phase, which means you won't be able to use it until a few seconds after the battle starts. I'd say that booting time doesn't matter too much since it's a once a battle thing, but most good pins don't have boot times so this feature shouldn't matter much later into the game. Also, you’ll get a very, VERY good pin near the end of the game, equip it (the ATK is insane when you factor how many times you can use before a reboot is required).

The final part of the TWEWY experience that rounds everything together, is of course, THE MUSIC. As soon as people hear “Calling”, it enlightens them to the glory of this game’s music. While music is subjective, I believe that everyone who has played TWEWY can say that every song in the game is a BANGER. Some of my personal favorites are “Someday (Kingdom Mix)” [The feels…], “Three Minutes Clapping” (All the sounds come together, to make a great beat, add on the lyrics, and it’s one of the best songs), “Transformation” (2nd Favorite boss theme in the game), “Noisy Noise” (Pretty good at making me feel fear), and every other song in the game. These were a few I mentioned but I genuinely love every song in this game. I like some songs more than others, but all the tracks in this game are spectacular.

Now if you’re reading this review and you still haven’t played The World Ends With You yet, go and play it! Phenomenal cast, story, music, and gameplay, on every single version. It doesn’t matter how you play it, DS, Switch, or Mobile (The mobile port got delisted unfortunately :(, so that one is a lot harder now). I hope this review got you into the world of TWEWY if you're not already in it, It’s a wonderful world!