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not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of two centuries worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid casinocore autoplaying bullshit that leaves you feeling the same way as you did moments after blasting rope to that fucked up mmm ice cream so tasty thing you found in the middle of a reddit doomscroll. this game should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou or vampire survivors or people whose lives have been ruined by industrialised gambling practices. you seen that casinos have RFID wristbands now that let you re-ante by just waving your hand across the slots? goes great with the simulated day/night lighting and complementary alcoholic energy drinks. endless hours of fun! fuck the review man let's talk the end of the world in the comments below

Completed this over the course of a rainy weekend with my partner and I don't think I could have asked for a better environment to experience the game in. Being the Watson to someone else's Holmes as they spend an oppressive autumn experiencing this genre is so bloody fun.

The Thinking Panel is the chief innovation here, and now all I want is for this game to somehow fall into the laps of Ace Attorney's design team. The Thinking Panel places the onus of investigation thoroughly on the player, but doesn't cast them adrift in a world of deductive overload - an incredibly brain-pleasing achievement that even the best mystery-focused detective fiction often fails to do well. Agatha Christie has been put on notice post-mortem; gone should be the days of Phoenix railroading us down conversational flowcharts that hurtle towards a linear, factual truth.

At one point during our playthrough, it was suggested that this gameplay could be imposed upon existing mysteries (e.g. a Hounds of the Baskervilles DLC pack), but I think the world that Andrejs Kļaviņš and Ernests Kļaviņš have created here is rich enough that we don't need to go raid our old pile of Ian Rankin novels for inspiration. The way each murder builds from a comedy to the singular tragedy of absolutist "virtue"-driven Modern England is just too deliciously timely to ignore. We are all coming down with a Case of the Golden Idol.

One of the best looking pixelslopvanias. It feels very thorough, but it's also very simple, so I guess that was the price. It's like grimdark but it's christian. it's like chrisdark. romcathdark. spaindark. grimberico. all of these words were invented by me

My pet peeve: When an action game with combos and abilities suddenly turns the final boss (of Ending A at least) into a dodgefest where you can only attack once every five minutes - I will kill for this slight towards my time and enjoyment.

I enjoyed exploring, except when I had to do ladderjumps (so retarded a concept it breaks immersion by its sheer existence) and trying to attach myself to a ladder midair with an animation system that could barely understand when I was trying to crouch and attack at the same time. I died more times to spikes than enemies in this game I'm almost certain

For some reason every indietroid soulslite supersouls fromlike independent video game thinks it needs to keep the patented "really vague bullshit story" mechanic of all Souls games, but you actually don't. That's a lifehack from me right there. In fact you really should not do that. Honestly, please stop. PLEASE stop, just give me any hint where to fucking go, I am BEGGING you. What the fuck does "the door behind which lies that which the holiness itself condemned to eternal reclusion" fucking mean. I am bleeding out of my ears

usually i just avoid VNs, they're not my thing, i do not attempt to play them and therefore never have to review them.

but as this was given to me as part of the playdate system itself, i tried it.

probably made it worse that I wasn't aware it was a VN till it was painfully too late.

allegedly this has gameplay, I never got there, I was so wildly frustrated with the boring and gratingly twee dialogue to even reach a 'level'

oh well.

probably a game for fans of steven universe, i have no idea why i think that.

A rare breed of maximally-political video game that is seemingly unashamed to throw around terms like 'traditional conservative' and literally laugh in the face of anarchists, even if it isn't entirely sure of what these words mean or imply. Essentially the Metal Gear Solid 4 of the Ace Combat franchise - throws ideas up into the air and then scrambles desperately to pick them up whenever they create conveniently-epic but emotionally/politically-incoherent "moments", perhaps best embodied in a late-game cutscene where two preteen girls grab a glock and shoot up a hard drive of flight data based on a king-turned-pilot in order to preserve the dignified human memory of a monarch who ran bombing missions during the Strangereal World's equivalent of the Kosovo War. Moreso than other Ace Combats, 7 is adamant in siloing fighter jets away from the universe they exist in, licensing and lionising pilots as apolitical titans of the sky who are simply following vocational orders from higher powers - something the godless unmanned drones could never understand.

Another king has more or less sewn up this game's ideology, so I won't bore you with The Implications (if any) of what this game's story chaotically tries to talk about. Mission 16: Last Hope - wherein a global communications outage renders your IFF useless during a mission to save a defecting general - is a real tragedy, though: a mission that perfectly captures the tone of the franchise's overarching "we're all blind pawns on the world's stage" themes in its gameplay, but is then almost immediately nullified by an announcement an hour later that you've unlocked some United States Air Force emblems to plaster all over your fictional fighter jets. No other real-world nation is represented in the game, and coupled with the game's recent Top Gun: Maverick DLC, it's hard not to think the franchise has set a hard course in the opposite direction of highly-conscious predecessors like Electrosphere and The Belkan War. The great thing about these games, at least, is that they have played exactly the same for over 20 years - you can pick and choose the ones that suit your preferred interpretations of strangereality and be none the worse off for it.

When THATCHER'S TECHBASE accidentally landed me in a bunch of newspapers and magazines last year, one question came up in every interview - "Do you think politics belong in video games?". The smart-arse non-committal wise-guy pseud-response I gave people went something along the lines of: well, games are art and art is personal and the personal is a product of the environment and environment is a product of political decisions and therefore every video game is political on some level, blah blah blah, etc. etc. etc. A nice vague answer the stands safely beyond reproach, a politican's response to a question about politics. Ace Combat 7 kinda throws that question into inverted flight by showing us what happens when affairs of state are injected directly into the Unreal Engine, bypassing environmental and personal factors to create pure political product. Sure, Call of Duty and its alikes have pulled this trick before, but they didn't lay down explicit dogma; it was all just set-dressing to make the murder more satisfyingly "real"istic. Project Aces have actually dared to pull up a pulpit here, and throughout the game's latter half I desperately waited for a series-trademark rug-pull moment where we'd learn it was all just a lesson in the blinding effects of radical-technocratic nationalism or whatever political theory the game was mulling over in that particular moment... but it never came. At least the game ends with Reiko Nagase descending from Heaven to tell you how sick your post-stall maneuvers were. That's something I can really believe in.

This is probably the best 4X I've ever played. It's got everything that I wanted.
Complex economy, logistic network, unit design, personnel management, population dynamics.

The only thing is that the UI is terrible and all over the place. Kinda ugly too.
But it is not as hard to learn as it looks.