A short adventure puzzle game with a mild horror aesthetic similar to Tim Burton's movies. The gameplay reminds me of a 3D Limbo/Inside. The puzzles are intuitive, and there is a good amount of artistry here. I love, love, love that there is no dialog. I hope this trend catches on as I can't stand bloated hack writing.
Galactrix brings addictive match 3 Puzzle Quest gameplay to a sci-fi setting. There are serious gameplay flaws here starting with balance issues, and moving on to the the obnoxious leapgate minigames where you have to match many gems on a timer. I like that they tried to do something different conceptually, but much more QA was needed.
This is the worst Final Fantasy I've played. Not to say that it's bad exactly, but I can't recommend it to anyone other than die-hard fans as the gameplay just isn't there. It's very linear with a good number of dungeons that you can only visit once. The game designers also implemented a skill system that improves by repeatedly using it similar to Elder Scrolls. It's very tedious, and although I appreciate them trying out different things, it just does not work at all. On the plus side it's interesting to see the origins of so many Final Fantasy tropes. Even more than the first game, we see so many iconic monsters like the Behemoth and Iron Giant, characters like Cid, and the storyline of rebels fighting a repressive regime feels familiar.
A quirky walking simulator with a couple puzzles thrown in. These games live or die based on the strength of the story, and this one is ok. The setting is original, and takes place in a fantasy version of a soviet state, populated by supersized animals, strange mechanical contraptions, and giant monolithic soviet structures. In this place, a young nun embarks upon a journey, while grappling with her inner demons over theological quandaries. It's a nice character study, and reminds me of some of Dostoevsky's writing about crime and necessity. If this were a novel, I would say it's decent enough. As a game, it falls somewhat short, as it is lacking in the actual gameplay department.
A charming indie cyberpunk action RPG with anime girls that is more fun than it has any right to be. The wordy story and simplistic action combat keep it from being really good. The story is kind of silly and does not justify this amount of dialog. I also encountered a number of severe graphical bugs during my playtime that made the platforming parts very difficult until I reset the game.
So here I am playing this in the Genesis collection on my Xbox in 2026 and having a blast. It starts out pretty rough with your unprepared character being thrown in an unforgiving dungeon to try to **** enough xp and gold to make it to the next section. The game UI is so clunky and gameplay is so archaic that I was tempted to bounce off the game several times. I'm glad I stuck with it though, because this is actually quite a competent blobber, with a challenging difficulty curve, and some novel story-based progression mechanics for its time. I found it compelling how tough and different the enemies were, and how mini-bosses would have an introductory sequence when they made an appearance. I mean, even now I think it's pretty cool. I would have been blown away if I had played it when it came out. Overall I regret missing this game during the Genesis era, because it's one of the best examples of the dungeon crawler I've played. I can only recommend it to enthusiasts however, as it is rough around the edges, and the endless corridors without a minimap will drive you slowly insane. It's like the bridge between the western Wizardry and Might and Magic series of games and more accessible Japanese dungeon crawlers such as Etrian Odyssey.
A bare-bones blobber in the spirit of Might and Magic that handles the important parts competently enough, but does not excel in any area. As the game progresses the combat balance goes out the window, and the last 1/3 of the game feels like a RNG-fest of big numbers.
The Citizen Sleeper franchise reminds me of Disco Elysium in space. Although the writing isn't on the same level, the gameplay beats with dice rolls is similar. CS2 is a good sequel that improves upon the original in every way, especially in terms of RPG mechanics, allowing you to explore a variety of locations across a stretch of space, and recruit a crew of companions you can take on your Firefly-like journey. There's an element of danger now in the form of contracts, which are essentially missions with tight failure conditions. This has changed the atmosphere of the game from being a fairly cozy adventure in the first game to one with a real sense of urgency. Since this is essentially a visual novel, your enjoyment of the game will largely come down to whether you like the writing itself. It has improved, expanding upon the world-building and various sci-fi concepts, although, like CS1, it's a little too wordy and oversentimental for my taste. I wouldn't call it bad though, and it comes down to personal preference.
The first area of Avowed and 20 hours of the game blew me away. If it had kept that momentum it would have been the best RPG I've played in the past few years, even better than Clair Obscur. As it is, it's not quite the Elder Scrolls killer, although objectively better than those game in most ways, especially combat and basic gameplay. The writing is ok. The gameplay is great. The first person combat engine is the best I've ever seen. Better than dishonored. The sense of exploration and wonder is great. It feels like there is something interesting around every corner. Repetitive enemies. Awful equipment upgrade system based on your current equipment levels. 98 hours for non-evil completionist run.
I have an idea. Let's make a generic RPG, but you also have to argue with your girlfriend about stupid crap like you're in a dating sim. The start of this game is auspicious. Good visuals, ok gameplay, and an interesting setting with a novel alternate history about ghost hunters that reminded me a bit of "The Order: 1886." After finishing it I am much less enthused. This game is frickin verbose. There's an investigative element, so you have to go around collecting clues like Alan Wake 2, and it's just as boring as in that game. As I mentioned, you have to argue with your girlfriend a lot, so there's a lot of cringy arguing mixed with lovey-dovey banter. It must be for a different audience because it made me **** combat has some interesting quirks with shifting your character and banishing, but it gets repetitive fast since you run into the same 5 enemies, and they respawn often. Even fights with trash mobs is unavoidable, and you can't leave the area until they're all dead. This makes backtracking, which already ****, a nightmare, and there truly is a lot of it, since the metroidvania unlockables and various side missions require you revisit the same areas again and again. The save system is horrific, and the game will autosave over your manual saves, which I've never seen before. There is so much amateur hour stuff here in terms of gameplay that could have been avoided if someone asked, "Is this fun?" I can't stress enough how wordy this game is with endless chatGPT level dialog and missions that require you to essentially talk it out. The writers are so eager to force you to listen to their banal and overlong story about a witchhunt. I ended up skipping a lot of scenes towards the end. Oh, and the last level is an absolute slog.
Why are Cthulhu games so uninspired when the source material is so good? Alone in the Dark has bad combat, terrible stealth, frustrating level design, and is buggy to boot. Controlling the characters is so clunky, it feels like a PS2 game. The story is serviceable, but not really scary or that interesting. It's fairly short, although you can play through the game with each of the two characters to double the length. There is a different personal quest for each of them that almost makes it worthwhile. I suggest giving it a pass unless you're a diehard Cthulhu fan.
Excellent remake. It doesn't do the bare minimum such as Demon's Souls, and it doesn't retain a lot of the original's irritating features while barely improving on anything other than the graphics such as Resident Evil 2. Instead it expands and improves upon the original immensely, while retaining the essence of what made it great. It's essentially a whole new game. This is what all remakes should aspire to be.
This original and very addictive take on the rogue-lite genre is like a choose your own adventure game using building modules. The closest thing I can think of is Hand of Fate. It's fun and cozy and packed with secrets and puzzles for the player to discover.
A cozy adventure puzzle game with interesting visuals. The standout here is the art design, which is distinctive and creative similar to a Pixar animated movie. Gameplay-wise it reminds me of the PS2 games like Spyro, although there's virtually no combat to speak of. I personally found it too light to be really engaging, but it's good for what it is.
This horror-puzzle game is quite frustrating and clunky gameplay-wise, but grew on me with its horror elements and distinct aesthetic. The decor here is like the sort of retro-futurism the 70s envisioned, with a claustrophobic maze-like brutalism that reminded me of the game "Observer." The enemy encounters are wretched and obnoxious, but also pretty creepy. The overall effect is interesting from a horror perspective. Basic and essential abilities are poorly explained however, so I would recommend using a guide.
Dumb name for a good RPG. The only SMT game I played was Nocturne, and Metaphor has way more RPG elements than that. This is more like Persona 5 crossed with Final Fantasy 15, with all the social links and world dungeons that need to be cleared by a certain date, but also buying equipment and cooking recipes. It actually comes together pretty well for the most part... but similar to the Persona games, there is way too much talking. Sometimes these guys yap on for half an hour, and it's the typical hackneyed JRPG slop. This game is way too wordy, and the writers are too confident with their trite dialog and melodramatic storylines. You have to endlessly click through dialog about racism between elves, and every character has a tragic backstory you have to listen to. It gets tedious halfway through the game, and becomes unbearable towards the end, especially the neverending epilogue. I had to start skipping scenes because they wouldn't get to the point. There have to be 10 chatGPT lines to select a destination on a map when silence would be better. I give it an 8 for gameplay, but the unceasing boring dialog and unskippable credits brings it down to a 7. This is one game where I wish the developers had less confidence, especially in their writing. This took me 115 hours to complete with almost all the achievements.
A competent adaptation of the W40k space marine experience, only marred by an awful boss fight. The strength here is in the simplicity of the gameplay. The developers didn't come up with elaborate character advancement systems or complicated game mechanics. Just the Astartes using their usual weapons, and doing what they do best, bashing and shooting things to death. It's good fun, and ends just as it starts getting repetitive. 14.5 hours to finish the campaign on hard.
It's not my favorite genre, but Hades is only second to Returnal for rogue-likes. My favorite part is the variety of viable combinations and builds that can be constructed. The gameplay has an excellent flow, and is a delight to play for the first 20 runs or so. Unfortunately, even the best rogue-likes get repetitive, but I do not regret my time with this one.
At first I was having a lot of fun with this action adventure game, and was prepared to give it a 7-8, but it keeps gets worse as time goes on. I like the advancement system in the game, as it is simple and embedded in the gameplay. The combat and stealth system are subpar. The sense of exploration and level design are decent. It's similar to other action RPGs that are based around hub levels. Absolutely awful boss fights including a horrific ending. Quirky annoying design decisions like randomly switching out your costume at certain points in the game. A lot of tedious backtracking similar to a Metroidvania because you don't get maps until much later. It took 60 hours to 100% this game and the Order of Giants DLC.
The combat, world-building, sense of movement and exploration are all top notch. I hate the platforming Super Meat Boy sections. The worst platforming sections in this game are similar to doing a no-hit Dark Souls run. If you float half a centimeter the wrong direction, or wait a quarter of a second too long, you fail the section, and have to do it from the beginning again, and save points are few and far between. There are also many parts of the platforming sections where you don't know what you're supposed to be doing, such as how to actually get that block to fall, or make a jump that seems impossible, and trial and error is heavily punished with a long walk back, reminiscent of Dark Souls 1 having to run back to a boss. It's much worse here though, because it's there is a strong puzzle element to the gameplay. It like playing a puzzle game having to do all the other puzzles again if you get one wrong. This is terrible game design. Gameplay in its ultimate form is intuitive, and Silksong is often not. Horrible environmental puzzles, platforming sections, and obnoxious level design holds this game back. The game is seriously big for a 2D action game. 83.5 hours to finish with 100% completion.
Pretty good old-school RPG, despite being fairly buggy even today. I often had to restart the game because the party was frozen initiating combat, and completely missed out on a section of the game because of a bugged a quest flag. It's a mixed bag of good and bad, but I did have fun. The gameplay itself is difficult and engaging on the highest setting, and the writing is decent, if not award-winning. The combat can be described as X-COM lite, with less game balance and environmental complexity, although there are far more options because of the nature of RPGs.
Pretty good old-school experience. Kind of buggy even after all these years, and unclear in what you're supposed to do to resolve quests. This game isn't that well-known so there's not that much info about it. I had to scour the internet for hidden solutions like a tech-priest. It was very interesting to see how this game was the precursor to Fallout and it is evident, just sub killer robots for supermutants. This is probably one of the first games that had NPC party companions who had a bit of agency. They have special dialog and personal quests, and motivations that might be different from your own.
The classics never die. This charming old-school experience takes me back to my childhood, and playing Ultima and Might and Magic late into the night. It might as well be called Fallout 0 since you can see how it was the prototype for that storied franchise. It's all here, the position-based tactical combat, the wild and whacky post-war setting, and even the epilogue with a montage of how your choices affected the wasteland. I had a great time playing this, even though it is janky as hell by any measure.
I wonder if I would have liked this game a lot more if I had played it when it was released, since I was a fan of "Monkey Island," "LOOM," and other point-and-click adventure games. I say this because after finishing "Full Throttle" in a single day on Sep 4 2025, it's not particularly compelling by today's standards. It has a certain charm, and some novel gameplay mechanics for its time like actual combat on bikes, but pretty much any Wadjet game is miles ahead of "Full Throttle." I can only recommend this if you've played everything else.
I appreciate that the mechanics of this ARPG are simple as opposed to overcomplicated systems like Diablo 4 and Inquisitor:Martyr. The enemies and combat get fairly repetitive however, and the game balance and writing are pretty bad. It's a short game worth a single run if you like the genre, but it's nothing remarkable.
It all feels so generic. There's some decent ARPG gameplay hidden somewhere in here, but you have to wade through so many battlepass lootbox shenanigans to get to them. The part that I find the most troublesome is how complicated it all is. There are endless upgrade systems with gems, mods, familiars, enchantments, and others, all tied together with some grinding mechanic, or with the help of your credit card. I like my action games to be minimalist. You go into dungeons and bash on things. This game offends me. The story is also overcomplicated. You have to click on tons of dialog question marks and follow people around to service the storyline, which isn't really that interesting.
I've played through Hexen multiple times throughout the decades. I've never finished Heretic until today however, despite many attempts in the past.
What is there to say? Fantasy Doom. Classic games.
For a Diablo-like ARPG set in the W40k universe, I can only say this is surpassingly mid. Like Diablo 4, they've forgotten the law of simplicity, that less is more. There is crafting, and mods, and factions, and currencies, and perks, and a morality system. It's tedious and takes away from the joy of running around bashing things. The unbalanced combat quickly became faceroll for my character. This system map design is most annoying I've ever seen. Every time you want to zoom into or out of a planet you have sit there for a few seconds while a zooming animation completes. You also can't just leave the sector map by hitting the cancel button, and have to go into the radial menu to do it. It's a small thing, but at the same time egregiously bad design
It's a pretty good sequel that builds upon everything that was great about the first, and actually cuts back a bit on the bloated cutscenes and dialog, although not by much. This is still very much a Kojima production with all that entails, including over-the-top action and absurdist dialog. It does sometimes suffer from a repetitive feeling of "been there, done that" coming from the first game, and also has an egregious unskippable credits scene, which knocks it down a bit from the original Death Stranding, which was my GOTY. At 164 hours for me to platinum, it's a long road to travel.
A C-tier passable souls-like with lots of problems. The biggest issue is that the combat is fundamentally flawed and repetitive. It's most reminiscent of Bloodborne's fast-paced dodging and parrying with guns, but lacks the finesse and attention to enemy design of that game, so encounters ends up being about swinging your axe wildly while spamming Enki, who is your spell-like companion. The story follows standard tropes, although the introduction of a WW1-like gun-centric environment is interesting. "Flintlock" doesn't have much enemy or build variety, and there's nothing really to recommend it unless you've played every other Souls-like. I played this on the xbox.
As a big fan of Labyrinth of Refrain, I have to say they overdid it this time. The original mechanics or having to build out a huge roster and reroll characters has been dialed to 11. The story has taken a huge dive from the original, which had an interesting main character POV who was a horrible person. The cutscenes in this one were badly written dross that I fast-forwarded through. The only good thing was a streak of perversion through some of the dialog. It fell into a predictable pattern. Explore the dungeon until you run into a triggering event or treasure, and sit through a bad cutscene back at base, and repeat. Horrible procedurally generated dungeons halfway through.
Spyro 1 remastered is a fun game that harkens back to a simpler time, when gameplay was emphasized over story or cinematics. Some of the levels are surprisingly difficulty for something so PG and cartoonish. Levels are constantly introducing new enemies with different attack mechanics that keep the combat interesting. It's a good formula that gets the basics right, which puts it above most games today.
He's finally back, just in time to remove our rose-tinted glasses, and remind us how overrated the original game was. This is a true spiritual sequel, with janky combat, annoying gameplay, and a pretentious story that belabors the point, just like the original. Everything is dialed to 11 here, as the story is more pompous than the original, and the story is beaten to death through often unskippable uninteresting dialog that is long enough to make JRPG writers blush. The central conceit that Alan Wake is the god-creator of his own narrative is hammered home through indulgent set pieces, and repetitive monologs. Everything about this game is repetitive. You often have to keep repeating the same sequence trying to figure out what the trigger is to progress the story forward. It's very tedious, with an overlong ending that drags on so much that it becomes satire. "When is this **** game going to end?" You could tell this was made by people who were high on their own supply, entirely too pleased with themselves, with little interest in pleasing the player. Almost everything in this game, from solving cases with hundreds of clues pasted onto a board like some Excel wordsheet monkey, to the incredibly annoying boss fights, to the worst chase sequences in gaming history, to every story element being explained endlessly, except what you're supposed to do next, which is not explained at all or hidden behind some annoying puzzle, seems to be designed to deter us, the gamers. This is a game designed by committee, and not by gamers.
The story is the same old, and the gameplay is fairly dire. As a bard, you can play music to summon creatures like Pokemon, having up to 4 at a time to create your own party. There are a few abysmally designed quests and combat sections that really drag down the game. I still had some fun here as a lover of old school RPGs. The best part is the Monty Hall sense of humor that satirizes the genre that made me genuinely laugh a couple of times. The last game to do that was "Disco Elysium." I suggest most people keep away, as there are thousands of games you should play before this.
Nine Sols is like a cross between Hollow Knight, Hyperlight Drifter, and Sekiro, and displays a good grasp of the combat and gameplay that made those games great. The only real downside is that, like most JRPGs, it's a little too wordy, and there is a penchant for overlong mawkish dialog. A lot of the aesthetics and style of Nine Sols reminded me of Hyperlight Drifter, but I wish they had taken the best part, which is no talking.
Classic Bioware ala KOTOR in an aesthetic eastern shell. What's not to love? Sure, the combat is clunky, and the quests can be vague and frustrating, but that's part of the old-school charm. There's nothing else quite like this martial arts action-RPG. 63 hours to complete.
A very mid walking simulator, with PS2 era gameplay, and an unengaging story, other than 1 Shyamalan twist that you could see coming from a mile away. There's nothing to recommend this disappointing showing from Ragnar Tornquist, who is one of my favorite game writers.
Excellent iteration of the JRPG. Engaging skill-based combat system, good emotive storytelling with mystery for the first half of the game, and visually great to look at. What impresses me the most however is that Clair Obscur has a great sense of personal style. Like Persona 5, the game just looks cool. I love seeing the characters fight. The second half gets bogged down by obnoxious minigames, repetitive combat, too much dialog, indulgent cutscenes, and a mawkish dragged out ending. If they had shortened the game by 50%, it would be a 10/10 contender. Less is more. As it is, it's an excellent RPG with refreshing ideas, and mostly great execution. It took me 87 hours to complete every achievement in the game.
I love me some blobbers, and I love Might and Magic, yet this homage to those games left me unsatisfied. Everything about this game is just a little too bare-bones, barely meeting the minimum requirements of a blobber, with an annoying puzzle element involving questing. I appreciate the lack of hand-holding, but the balance is all over the place, and you can get stuck for hours on a quest, revisiting earlier locations wondering who you're supposed to talk to, if you don't use a guide. Playing this made me admire the craftsmanship that went into the Might and Magic series. 44 hours to finish on hard with 105 ingame days.
Maybe this was something 2 decades ago. I'll never know. The experience I had was a half-baked clumsy mess. The story is nothing special, with cutscene dialog that goes on too long. The combat is repetitive, and fighting the first enemies in the game aren't much different from fighting the last enemies. The boss fights are more interesting, but gimmicky. They're more like puzzles than skill checks. I do like that Kain is a cold uncompromising merciless SOB. None of this compassionate anti-hero garbage.
So despite all the negative feedback, I had fun playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The core gameplay loop is solid for the first 40 hours, before the enemy encounters start to become repetitive. The combat itself is a mix of the action-based visceral combat of DA2 crossed with the hub-based open world exploration of Inquisition. It's not the epic fantasy opus that is DA1, but what is? The worst part is the meretricious grade-school level writing. The previous Dragon Age games had interesting companions and clever dialog, and the subject matter could get fairly dark. The dialog in Veilguard is on the levef of an after-school special, with easy conflicts that can be solved with platitudes and believing in oneself. Your companions are either boring, annoying, or both, the quality of conversation is very mid, and there's too much of it. I cringed whenever I saw a marker in base for another contrived conversation about something vapid, and later I found myself fast-forwarding through most of it, especially the bloated over-long ending sequence where Bioware tried to recreate the suicide mission of Mass Effect 2 with a poor imitation. At 119 hours to platinum, Veilguard is twice as long as it should have been.
WoTR answers the age-old question, is it possible to have too much DnD? It took me 452 hours over two and a half months to complete this game, and all of its dlc. Sure, I'm a bit of a completionist, and a good chunk of that time was AFK, but still this is an absurdly long game. Elden Ring took me 160 hours to platinum for comparison. The story was quite good, and suitably epic. There's a lot of dialog here. It's a bit too much tbh, and I found myself speed-reading halfway through. Everyone from demon lords to the local innkeeper has a life story to tell, and most of them aren't that interesting. The combat is a homebrew of 5e dnd, and works for the first half of the game. Owlcat takes some generous liberties with the pnp rules to maintain balance, and it turns into a bit of a cluster the further into the game you go. If it seems like I dislike this game, I actually liked it a lot. This is a high-effort game made with great passion and quality(aside from a healthy helping of requisite bugs).
A high-concept game where you play as something like a film nerd poring over footage. I admire the premise, but could only play it for about an hour. Watching b-movie clips and interviews is incredibly boring for me, and making it into a game barely improves the experience. This reminded me of "Return of the Obra Dinn" because almost the entire game consists of watching and studying slices of footage. Unlike Immortality however, the events in that game were actually interesting.
An unforgiving open world game similar to the Metro series. The amount of dynamism in the encounters as various factions randomly spawn across the map harkens back to one of the main selling point of the original Stalker game, and lends a great amount of unpredictability to overland travel. There are no punches pulled in terms of combat, and encounters are sometimes hard to the point of seeming unfair, especially in the beginning. Incredibly buggy game. Worse than Cyberpunk at release.
With all the open-ended design comes the requisite bugs, and Stalker 2 is is no exception. Broken quests, missing NPCs, unrecognized flags, it's all here. This game is buggy as hell. Also very unbalanced and poorly tested. Game decisions aren't balanced. Going against the ward is a death sentence. An absolutely nonsensical story that's even dumber than the original Stalker. How could the same country that gave us Doestoevsky be so bad at writing video games. It's also overly wordy at times. I have to sit through crap dialog like a JRPG. If the game was stable I would give it an 8. As it is, it's still in beta. I had to stop playing 70% of the way through due to several game-breaking bugs that prevented progress on the main quest. Edit: I came back to finish this 4 months later after the main bugs were patched. It's still pretty buggy, but I was able to finish the Ward ending after 97 hours played. The last section goes on too long, and is demoralizingly frustrating. Did I mention the bugs? This was buggier than Dying Light 2 at release.
This is much better than Kona 1, but still not very good. You play as something like a paranormal detective around the general theme of snowy environments. For the most part it plays like a walking simulator with minor survival elements. The combat sections are extremely basic, and there is a bit of puzzle-solving when it comes to navigating sections of the game like large mansions. Overall though, what gameplay is here feels tacked on for its own sake, and not organic. I found the exploration of enclosed areas moderately engaging in a way similar to Resident Evil, and the constant internal dialog of the main character like a Raymond Chandler character was a fun addition. Overall, meh.
A garden-variety walking simulator with tedious puzzles and running back and forth for keys. There's some mild mystery and horror that reminded me of Bioshock without the gameplay or clever writing. The only gameplay here consists of aggravating poorly-designed chase sequences. The writing could have been done with chatGPT, and doesn't really fit together or reach any sort of resolution. At 7 hours to complete everything, it's a short experience. The only bright side is that the visuals were decent, and some environments like the opera house looked great. There are much better games in this genre you should play before this.
The Dark Souls of tactical RPGs. The gameplay isn't easy to describe. It reminded me most of XCOM wherein you have to recruit and level up a party of individuals, but instead of random 3D tactical maps, you have random 2D dungeons that need to be cleared in a manner similar to a roguelike, but "Darkest Dungeon" has more complexity, lore, and character permanence than others in the rogue genre. DD is a storm of inspired atmosphere and gameplay delivering a brutal experience where the player feels like they're scrabbling just to survive. There are a few missteps here that keep it from a perfect score. Dungeons have different tiers that can only be entered by characters of similar levels, which can create an awkward juggling of heroes for different level ranges. The game can also be quite grindy at times as the player waits for certain thresholds or events based on RNG to resolve. The titular "Darkest Dungeon" which comprises the final area had some BS mechanics that left a poor impression.
A strong JRPG in the same style as Cronotrigger. The gameplay is the biggest selling point, as the sense of exploration and combat are well done. I was very charmed by this game for about the first half, but the longer I played it, the less I liked it. The lack of decent fast-travel until near the end of the game, especially to your homebase, is an issue, as you have to navigate through previously explored maze-like regions to get back to a previous area. And you need to do a LOT of backtracking this game. There's also too much horrible dialog that I ended up skipping because the characters would yap endlessly with juvenile writing.. The combat is fun and challenging at first but becomes easy to cheese because of all the difficulty options and relics which are essentially cheat codes. I believe choose your own difficulty options are a cop-out on the part of the developers. There are also too many tedious minigames like quiz show, fishing, and battle poker that hit a discordant note. A lot of love went into making this, but also a lot of poor game design. Having to back-track deep into a castle, and then have your characters warped across the map without asking, and then having to sit through 10 minutes of meretricious dialog, and then having to run all the way back to the castle again. I deducted a point just for that awful sequence.
What a slog. Endless amounts of garbage dialog. An obnoxiously overcomplicated spammy mess of a combat system. It seems like every other fight they throw more rules at you. You have to craft combos of attacks to target the enemy's weakness every battle, and there are all sorts of different kinds of arts, switch triggers, break points, and other tedious hidden **** story and dialog is pretty bad imo, and follows the usual anime cliches, with the usual tropes of the cringy outspoken girl, and annoying autistic child, and it seemed like ever 100 ft they would stop and yap aimlessly. There's just so much poorly written dreck, I started skipping through it after a while because it added no value. I love the dialog in BG3, and listen with hushed reverence to the dialog in FromSoft games. The writing here is **** itemization in the game is also terrible. You're given a ton of generic loot like a looter-shooter, and you have to disenchant copies of the same item to upgrade to +X versions of it similar to Nioh. It is tedious and makes the whole process of receiving loot to a be a chore. I actually dread going to the merchant to play account manager with my inventory.Technically, the game is competently made(music, graphics, QA, etc..), and there are moments of joy to be found, but it's all for naught when the fundamental building blocks of gameplay are so badly designed. Overall I just wanted the experience to end, and rushed to the final fight.
A very fun game that gets the main elements right. It's comparable to games like Darksiders, Shadow Warrior remake, and Doom Eternal. The series it really reminded me of though was Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. There's nothing deep going on here. It's your typical on-rails action RPG where the player moves through various combat arenas, with some light puzzle and story elements in-between. Considering how many games out there can't even get that right though, I appreciate when a games does.
