"God, I love the military industrial complex."
- Albert Einstein after 6 straight hours of Armored Core

Armored Core is awesome because kiddie wink fuckwit Dark Souls fans and people who have sandblasted their taste away can publicly expose themselves for not understanding a single thing about AC. AC is not about epic Mech battles or lore or any bullshit. It's about you spending hours in the garage making the worst looking abomination of a unit ever so that you can throw it at a mission and see if you're stupid idea works and if it does you have the additional challenge of seeing if you can dunk on your friends with it in multiplayer.

All hail fromsoftware bringers of Kino

I genuinely really enjoyed the story mode. The thing is only the way it's packaged. I mean, would it be so hard for them to just release the story mode as its own game? Is it that fucking hard blizzard? Wouldn't that generate hype and a lot more money with a 60$/€ pricetag? That's what the people want, not this seasonal, 15$/€, 1,5h campaign bullshit. Get it together Blizzard, fuck. I see that a lot of work has been put into the story and I see the potential it could have had if it was its own thing. A fully dedicated story release will probably only see the light of day once the whole story has been squeezed out on the various seasons going forward, which is probably some years in the future. Aware

Also, good job blizzard on the Steam release, the reception and the reviews are pretty hilarious. "Overwhelmingly Negative (57,197)" as of (2023-08-12)

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I could genuinely go into details on why this new PVE invasion is aggressively boring, but considering it is less than 2 hours long. Why should I bother wasting my time on making a long review on something that is so proud of being this mediocre when I could recommend you countless other games like Deep Rock Galactic or Remnant 2 that are actual fulfilling PVE experiences, which are worth your time with buddies instead of Invasion, which costs 15 dollars alone already feels like a robbery. Please use that money to support an indie dev instead of this snooze fest

Bug Fables is pretty neat! My main issue here is simply that the battle system is really quite simple, but I get that it was the intent and the medal system allows for a lot of different builds... even if most are just various forms of nuke builds lol.

The plot is decently compelling, it's not any writing grand stage but it serves its purpose. Leif is a really compelling character and his arc is the absolute highlight here and it's best experienced yourself, but I really like Kabbu and Vi too. I also appreciate how the team working as a single unit is shown via gameplay as well as the narrative. Vi is the only one who can hit flying enemies and drop them down, Kabbu is the only one who can flip enemies, Leif is the only one who can send enemies out when they dig down, and they each get overworld skills that are necessary for general traversal.

Game also looks really great, captures the graphical essence of the original Paper Mario on Nintendo 64 while looking modern at the same time. The soundtrack is also a banger which goes a long way.

Is Bug Fables a masterpiece? No. I have some gripes mainly based on me being a large RPG player, but for what it's aiming to be, it's a plenty good romp I would recommend to most people in some capacity.