Ayreos

Digimon fans wanted this game, but it has poor pacing in the first half, underwhelming writing and translation and generally seems to ignore the narrative achievements of the visual novel genre in the last 30-40 years. The characters are also hard to relate to, and you can't really direct the flow of the story as you'd expect to. The concept is fantastic, but the executing ends up being poor despite doing a lot of things right too. A mixed bag and a shame.

Digimon world 1 was an amazing game and this one really had all the tools to make a great sequel to it. However the resources were misused into trying to work around the limitations of the old game and rehashing it, rather than bringing what made it amazing into a new age. The digimon world here feels soulless, the graphics are less crisp than a PS1 game and the mechanics immediately fall for the pitfalls of the old games, without the charm that made it all worth it. Digimon World 1 was a game of exploration and resource management. The whole world was open for exploration and new areas could be unlocked on the fly. What stopped you was the level of growth your digimon had. You were in charge of juggling both your partner and the world. In this game your partners are just a chore and the world progression is locked behind artificial progression barriers. You get all the negatives of the first game (chore-like digimon training, difficulty spikes) without the engrossing interactions and the visceral connection with your digimon partner.

The game is definitely technically solid, addictive to play, and leaves recent pokemon entries in the dust. The devs worked hard. But it's a mirage. This is a game designed by committee, so: 1) All the digimon are generally interchangeable. Even the "bond" stat can just be raised using money to feed the digimon and you get far more money than you ever need. The "personality" mechanic lacks all personality since all the digimon cycle the same few question after every 4 battles and it can take a long time to change personality too. Quicker to ignore it. 2)The conveniences included make it easy to play, but also make a lot of mechanics seem pointless or trivial and it feels like any other game released this year. Collect useless stuff, buy useless stuff, play useless minigame, go through useless mechanics for no reason. If you got the DLC dungeons you can always max your digimon through grinding exp and digivolving, then you can safely ignore everything else besides agent ranking. Even the digifarm is useless if you do that because you'll get bond through story dungeons and and stats through digivolving as many times as needed. 3) The battle system has a good set of elemental and type advantages, i would say much more intuitive than Pokemon, however it's way too simple. Even the ancient Digimon World 2 eventually got complex and satisfying and rewarded your investment in all your digivolutions with digimon tailored for their battle roles perfectly. In this game, pretty much anything you do is fine, since you can add and remove skills at will. So while it's sometimes charming and an addictive game with an okay story, it's bloated and disconnected and ultimately too simplistic, placing it at the high end of average at the end of the day.

Game designed by committee. You pick trash off the ground, suffer the tired and nearly pointless "crafting system", then fight big enemies in a rush without time to process the events, then fight as different people just because the committee decided you need the variety. It all feels tired and already-seen. It's playable, but inoffensive. Clearly a game designed to ensure good reviews by being average, not a meaningful experience. A shame because the type-moon plot and setting are decent. At this point, i'd prefer it as a visual novel, with gameplay limited to boss battles. The whole "kill hungreds of men in a peaceful age without anyone noticing" kills all immersion anyway. Games by committee are a high-scoring plague. edit: i kept playing past the mid-point and frankly plot and gameplay don't improve. There's plenty of missable ingredients, the game doesn't respect your time and characters are dealt with summarily and sidelined in the most tired and lazy plot developments imaginable.

The atmosphere, music, story and graphical oomph (especially the outside views) are all effortlessly propelling this game for a 10. The gameplay is where things take hit, and unfortunately that's what matters the most. Here are the two major issues for me: 1) unoriginal Unfortunately, it plays like a re-run of frostpunk, but in space. I liked it, but it has negatives like the constant state of impending doom which many players dislike, while lacking the novelty factor or frostpunks more directly relatable setting. 2) clunky While finding ways to optimize the city management are satisfying, some design decisions aren't particularly immersive or rewarding, unlike the rest of the game. Destroying buildings, trying to optimize resources across sectors and moving people around are major and constant concerns and headscratchers, despite getting old very fast and being purely mechanical. People in Ixion are just numbers and buildings are tetris pieces. This hole gameplay layer even looks decidedly worse than the rest of the game. It's fine, and sometimes even fun, but most often simply detracts from an otherwise great sci fi story, rather than enhancing it. In conclusion, i'm convinced Ixion would have become a bigger hit if the main gameplay was greatly simplified and the story, its options and events concerning the space opera were expanded instead.

For me, the best game of the last 10 years. The art is phenomenal. The best example of 2D node animation. The gameplay is fun and directly ties into the story segments. The writing is actually good. Characters travel to a different time period and actually experience different form of light culture shock. It's not superficial at all. Yes, it has small flaws all over, but that's all trivialized by the amount of effort, attention to detail and love this game so obviously got and conveys to the player. The setting and storytelling, the concept art, design references to cultural classics from both west and east, the sense of scale. This game oozes value all over and there would be too much to write. Taken apart, the battle segments might seem to lack a little in presentation and variety, but since most of the time is spent exploring the non-linear story, they never overstay their welcome. 13 sentinels truly performs a feat of game design to create something far above the sum of its parts.

+ souls combat with all the bells and whistles + many viable builds despite the meme ones being popular + best graphics yet in the series and great character creator + lots of content to play through, 100+ hours is the norm + the catacomb level design is surprisingly creative and fun for dungeon lovers like myself ----- - Worst boss and enemy combat design. Blatant Input reading, delayed attacks, endless boss combos and unnecessarily short punish windows. Whether easy or hard, it's simply never satisfying to defeat an enemy. - Heavy asset reuse. Every cave and landmark is exactly like all the other ones in their category. Every catacomb, cave and ruin looks exactly the same. Most bosses and enemies are reused too. - Terrible storyline. Hard to process main plot with an abstract, irrelevant twist (Radagon & Marika), and npc quests that always reward the player with utterly depressing and futile outcomes. It feels better to NOT do them! - The open world is really just for looks. It's a wasteland with points of interest, generic caves, catacombs and ruins with mostly useless loot. Combat is all you really have to look forward to. Try not to miss radiant quests from Bethesda. At least those were better than nothing. - Uncreative armor design and lack of variety for gear. A lot of sets are thematically redundant or look alike, when they don't look plain disappointing. - Weapon and spell variety really makes sense in NG+ only. At a first playthrough you'll be likely stuck to the same couple spells and weapons due to the upgrade system and the best ones being confined to late game. - The damage scaling can be harsh unless you're told to stack VIT and defense bonuses early on, and even then it's not pleasant to die immediately to every couple rats you failed to notice in time.

An unabashed masterpiece, albeit unpolished, being indie. The art direction is world-class beautiful and fresh. The few locations, characters and set pieces are very carefully designed for maximum quality. The music is fantastic. The writing and narrative are flawlessly presented, the player can discover it at his own rate and is rewarded for interacting with the game as much as possible, which is wonderful, but will unfortunately not be as appreciated by players who do not enjoy reading and pondering. The gameplay is actually well-designed and stimulating. I don't mind the cube puzzles as well, but they change in tone too much from the rest of the game even though they fit well narratively. It's the only oversight to me. In my opinion the game needs to be played and thought of for a while for it to be complete. You can look for someone else's conclusions about it as well, if too impatient. Essentially almost every piece of information in it is part of the narrative and important. Congratulations to the developers for releasing something so deep, beautiful and meaningful. Thanks for the exhilarating experience. All i wish is that you made more, and others developed games with such dedication for interactive art and gameplay. It's sorely needed.

The game hits immediately for its high quality. The gameplay is very fun and the story cute. The character art isn't my cup of tea, but Emile singlehandedly makes up for that. There is however one very large issue: everything is stretched far above the excessive. Usually more content is better, however there is a point where more becomes less. Each area in this game lasts too long, requires way too much backtracking and effort and is not properly paced by plot events. The game would improve considerably if all areas were reduced in length by a factor of 3, perhaps by letting the player explore large chunks of them later. There are just so many bushes, so many fetch quests and so many platforming puzzles i'm willing to perform to advance the story by a beat. None of that stuff is fun enough to spend hours doing it. The dungeons are just as bad.

Etremely generic units, generic plot, generic missions, generic maps. Game looks like Ground Control from 2000. They took everything that made Homeworld unique and stripped it away. The gameplay is its only saving grace, but given the lack of the ballistics of Homeworld 1 (clearly the open source code **** from 20 years ago was too hard for these guys to replicate) it fails to reach its potential too. On second thought, this sounds like a review for Homeworld2. Let's go with everything that makes this game unworthy of being put beside Homeworld i can think of on two feet: -The voice acting doesn't manage to convey the gravitas of the original, despite using the same techniques. The performances are simply not intense enough. Blame the voice director. -Radio chatter is also less grave in its delivery. Some units sound like they're on a picnic. -Every map is the same desert. I guess they don't mind that Homeworld had amazingly colorful backgrounds and they're failing to match up on a purely visual front to simple cubemaps. -All the units are the same type of truck. The design is subjective, but i find them abysmal despite nice clean lines. The salvagers look like yellow Daleks for f***'s sake. The planes are better. -Plot is like an expanded version of the Kadeshi encounter delivered through flat voice acting that drags on for far, far too long. -Let's not even pretend the plot matches Homeworld on sheer impact alone. Or creativity. Or richness. I'm speaking in objective terms: Homeworld had far more set pieces and unpredictable events. No subtlety here either. -The UI follows the simplistic rule of "if you notice it's there, it's done wrong!" Too bad the UI in HW1 and Cataclysm added to the game's atmosphere without taking away nearly any time at all. It definitely could have been improved, but it has been stripped away instead. -The music and sound design try their best to imitate Homeworld. They really do. Sadly, that's all they do. -Units and gameplay are slow. It helps during the more hectic moments, but gets tiresome fast. One of the most useful and varied units, the Baserunner, is one of the slowest. Terrible design choice. It punishes the player for wanting to use it. -Somehow, science in this game is done by blasting priceless ancient technology to pieces. I know this was a different game at one point, but it's ludicrous they thought it was compatible with their setting by the end. -The gameplay is overall pretty decent. However, the aforementioned issues drag it down into the sand. A mission starts and the very prospect of navigating the units through yet more dunes and rocky corridors is a drag with predictable consequences and bland rewards. -No modding

More of King of Dragon Pass(would have been more successful calling it a prequel, since it's basically the same exact game), but: Less interesting mechanics (no defeating clans and taking their lands, no management of traders.) More completely unnecessary mechanics that ruin the game straight out (spirits take exploration time and regular game time for mostly outrageously useless rewards and the families mechanic doesn't allow to make the circle you want or play with the bonuses that fit your playstyle.) Far less imaginative stories and events unless focusing heavily on exploration (Oh look, an **** leader wants to get killed for the 5th time, nothing as interesting as the ducks.) Combat requires some reading about since the game's tutorials barely cover it, causing many i've talked to to experience random outcomes and frustration. Less inspired writing in general (For instance: Weaponthanes -> Swords, Tula -> Village/Clan. Way to trash the low-hanging fruits of charm and style!) Game can be lost pretty easily by not pursuing a seemingly normal event in a specific direction, clearly by design. In conclusion: we need more imaginative games like this that have a solid and well-thought setting, but sadly it doesn't live up to the game it so obviously copies a decade later... even at best it's just more of the same. Very disappointed. If they release sequels (which are planned) without some real innovations or narrative oomph they will see their sales fall. Very disappointed the original wasn't brought to new heights.

Hugely underrated game. It's not an RPG with dungeon exploring like other Grandia titles, which seems to get this game negative reviews, but it's a dungeon crawler with light RPG narrative. It has the same battle mechanics of Grandia 3, which makes it one of the best, if not the best combat system on the console, with the perk of having more likable characters and less fluff to get distracted by. The dungeons are expansive and provide different challenges. If you really miss the narrative you'll be glad to find out the few NPCs present refresh their dialogue very often and the meal scenes from previous games deepen the relationships between characters egregiously. Post-game content is also great. I can't find a single complaint, if not a few animations and the damn english voice-over. Remember Nanao from RAD? She's going to be your party member in this one. Gave me PTSD.

A fun demo that needed more levels and little else to be great, and 5 years later it's the same demo diluted over many more hours, with clunky controls and poorly written, predictable "lore" dumped on the player from the first few seconds of play, coupled with inane characters to boot. A disappointment and a lesson on protracted developed. How is it possible that the game regressed from its Kickstarter demo state?

Absolutely infuriating, annoying and improperly designed in virtually all aspects. But it has good narrative. And good victories in combat. And success and reward where at first none seems to be. Suddenly the **** the game throws at you, the nonsensical setting and assets and overwhelmingly janky combat dissipate, leaving value behind, and the knowledge that true difficulty has been overcome. Suddenly, that "hard" difficulty setting doesn't look like an insulting mockery anymore. After all, the game would be piss easy if i started at level 1 again.

No joke, the worst game i ever had the displeasure of playing. A walking simulator camouflaged as stealth game with mechanics taken and simplified from better games out there. The assets are all of high quality. This includes the voiceovers, however there are few of them, repeated ad nauseam, over and over again for the entire length of the game (4-5 hours). Most unforgivable is the intriguing sci-fi setup of the game, which never picks up, but instead fizzles out progressively so much, the final "cutscene" is a 10 minutes walk through yet another repetition of previously seen assets, two sentence two describe the most banal resolution in history and then.... nothing. I could easily beat the character limit criticizing this non-game, but it already stole too much of my time. It's an extended demo of a soulless non-game. Good luck.

-Character art is great, but the world art is abstract and too simplistic to be immersive. -Gameplay is very fun and innovative, but higher difficulties become easily frustrating as there are simply too many things to keep in mind to win in a satisfying manner (Complex strategies are counter-productive and hard to pull off!) -The story is interesting and emotional, but the ending is surprisingly mundane and bittersweet. The story never seems to really climax, which is the biggest issue for me. -Music is great as it's customary for Supergiant, but there aren't enough songs to carry the game on its musical qualities alone. 7/10 is what i'd give all three games from Supergiant to date. More detailed art, more songs, stronger plot climax and simpler, tighter gameplay is what i'd like to see.

Finished in one playthrough, the game is definitely playable and quite visually pleasant (even astounding at times), but nothing else. All the environments are repetitive, and so are the perils encountered. The plot is inconsequential. It takes far more to scare an adult than this game manages to do, so i can only confine it to the realm of walking simulators. Recommended for children, but don't expect it to entertain them for more than an afternoon: it's that short.

The whole digimon rising and battling mechanic is fairly entertaining, while the sleuthing plot is if standard anime fare, with extremely bare-bones 3d animation. It also takes its sweet time to pick up. The big problem is the meat of the gameplay, the "dungeon" traversing. In short, the game expects you to re-run the same twisted, featureless corridors for hours on end. At 10 hours in my 3 starting digimon are champion-class and the story enemies are in-training. The "dungeons" presented are 3 featureless corridors. After the starting premise the scenario made an awkward genre change to the titular "sleuthing" and instantly devolved into an episodic grind. Example of a typical "case": Find the "mean guy" (marked with an "!") in the usual empty corridor-dungeon, fighting completely under-leveled enemies through random encounters. Defeat him in one shot. He assures you he is good now. Use (expensive) item to warp back to start of dungeon. Warp to base. Receive meager reward that doesn't cover the cost of the warping item. Story missions are essentially the same but usually require scouring areas looking for npcs with exclamation or lock signs on them (so much for sleuthing!). After 10 hours there is no challenge and no plot. Seeing your digimon pointlessly reach champion-level in droves, with no space to add more is the only reward for bothering with this game. At least the game features a coliseum. It might become somewhat better later, but i already wasted too many hours to bother finding out.

A game in which the sounds and the atmosphere of a space science fiction fantasy are lovingly crafted. Unfortunately, that's about the only positive thing i can say about the game. Annoying mechanics, strange design choices, a complete dearth of content(made, if possible, worse by the first "expansion" currently in beta, which simply broadened an already shallow, repetitive experience with yet more shallow content. There are the makings of a fun experience below all the frustration, but it was impossible for me to get at it, and not for the lack of trying. Worst of all: don't hope to be able to play multiplayer comfortably with your friends! Just don't!

The game is a faithful follow-up to the spirit of the classic Infinity Engine games. It improves a few things and makes a few things worse(which is debatable), but it *is* a faithful throwback to an older model of cRPGs without unbearable defects. For some people that is enough. For me, though, the actual lack of improvement, progress or especially, the failure to become the pinnacle of the genre is pretty damning for this game. What happened to game journalism? A mediocre Infinity Engine game is now rated on par with classics on Metacritic. It does not even approach Planescape Torment, and it only teases the heights of Baldur's Gate 2. Walls of pretty decent writing at every turn do not make up for the non-existent party AI, or the lack of direction. The plot can be literally summed with "I see dead people...", which goes far beyond cliche in 2015. When the first Baldur's Gate was released, it was a pleasant trip. The second was more of a roller coaster. Pillars of Eternity is something like the former. It can serve as a somewhat bland introduction to the genre, but it should not become its apex. I cannot rate it higher because BG1 does that already, and it does it perhaps slightly better. The modern engine and revamped graphics alone are not worth the price, or the hype.

Do you know the feeling of receiving a toy you wanted as a kid, only to find out it was a cheap replica? That feeling of both betrayal and disappointment? Xenoverse is that for me. Graphics: poor, even for cell shaded. There are fighting games which do the drawn style of 3D infinitely better. Plot: The great setup of "joining" the dragon ball plot as an external character is wasted. You continuously fight pointless quests and battles, with a pathetic scriptwriting and direction for the main story battles and events. How can you feel involved in a story when you constantly go off to fight quests for money, in which you join random DB characters (good and evil)? Gameplay: I find it better than the Budokai Tenkaichi games, but it oscillates between extremely easy and frustratingly hard for apparently no reason. Too much depends on camera controls, locking on and dodging finishers. I feel even the PS1 fighting games had better mechanics for that. Conclusion: Mediocre and unpolished. Clearly yet another cash grab on the backs of fans and nostalgia. Any of the old Budokai Tenkaichi games is worth your money more than this.

This game's greatest and most noteworthy feature is being a survival game based in reality, instead of a practically impossible fantasy scenario, such as zombies. The game is challenging and surprisingly moving. The hard choices feel more real and much stronger compared to a zombie game, for obvious reasons. I found myself conflicted about whether i was planning to rob at gunpoint a helpless elderly couple for their food, or whether they were just a game's NPCs, and i was simply getting free virtual supplies in a virtual environment. I still decided against it. Feeling good for doing the right thing felt better than feeling good for "winning" the game. It's a shockingly valuable lesson no games has managed to provide so far, hence my high score for it. My only gripe with it is that character dynamics are unclear, which can cost the precious life and supplies of your scavenger. More than once, while simply exploring or attempting to trade with someone, i ended up being killed by them, apparently for "trespassing" on an invisible limit in their abodes. I wish the NPCs would warn you more clearly about when you are intruding on them.

PROs: -Original -Engrossing rogue-like tower-defense with strategy and RPG mechanics(!) -Varied and replayable thanks to the unlockables CONs: -Poorly balanced. Seems to oscillate between too easy and too hard regardless of settings. -Each run is too long. For fairly repetitive gameplay there is no excuse for the excessive length of one game. -Some tower defenses seem considerably less useful than others, also random research options make it worse. -No plot whatsoever, despite in-depth character backgrounds. A little polish and ironing of the CONs would make for an amazing game.

The game is playable after being patched, however it suffers greatly from the comparatively superior games on the market from over a decade ago. This is mostly for people who played the heck out of Fallout 1 and 2 and Tactics and have this game as the only alternative. Otherwise, it doesn't even scratch the level of its predecessors. For people thinking "rose colored glasses", i played the older FO games after playing this one for the first time. They're vastly superior in all regards. Pity.

The opening cinematic was amazing. The game itself wasn't. Why? Because it is a camouflaged older game, Civilization V. A game the developers seems convinced was successful. And maybe it was, but not with the historical Civ fandom. With this iteration the Civ series has finally shed all pretense to reveal the publisher's true motivation: to copy and profit on Starcraft's popularity. Civ's old and appassionate fandom was clearly too tight for their income aspirations, yet not tight enough to spare them from slapping the beloved "Civilization" trademark on a Starcraft 2 clone. That said, the problems i find with this game are the same i found with Civ5. And they all stem from limitation. There is a new quest system. But these quests cannot be actively pursued and are limited in number and type. There is Civ5's innovative hexagon movement style. However the map is full of miasma (obstacles) and ranged units from the very beginning, making positioning either irrelevant or downright frustrating. Map size can be chosen up to "massive", however most unit movement is tailored for the ridiculously small, Starcraft-like maps, which ends up distorting gameplay, as technology and productions goes at one speed, while the units at another. This happens even in slower progression settings. Research, virtues and affinity systems of progress are all interesting and apparently versatile, but they end up constraining each other, destroying all emergent gameplay in the process and forcing the player in a narrow corridor of choices. That's because achieving a victory type is not up to strategy, but picking the pre-determined corridor. These limitations show how the developer attempted to create a fast, competitive, and perfectly balanced multiplayer experience, by disregarding the singleplayer greatness that made the franchise so popular and beloved in the first place. The result is that instead of a wide breadth intersecting and unforeseen choices and strategies, players are constrained into becoming akin the poor AI they have to combat. Limited in movement, unit stacking, AI depth, progress types and immediate choices, this game punishes what it should by nature reward: experimentation, creativity and ambition. I guess it's back to Civ2 and AC for me. Once again this industry has taught me that my habit of trying games before purchasing them or, god forbid, pre-purchasing them, is the only way to avoid supporting such rotten practices as game-cloning and rehashing. I applaud the developers for having no qualms in receiving paychecks for such behaviors. I wouldn't be able to come to terms with knowing i trick my fans for a wage.

Cheap bullet hell arcade game. It plays okay, but for people who do not speak japanese reading subtitles is virtually impossible. The game constantly spams the players with enemies and numerous important plot details at the same time, coupled with a lot of typical anime-style chatter from the protagonists. It's barely decent button-mashing, but nothing else.

While Bastion wasn't perfect, it offered a solid gameplay and an immediate story, neither of which definition can be applied to Transistor. I can only appreciate that the developers wanted to push their previous results and achieve something even greater. Unfortunately, while Transistor delivers a level of artistry that is equal to Bastion, it loses in every other regard. The story is too subtle and inconsistent to truly intrigue players from the get go. This despite the super soundtrack to give it life, which instead steals the spotlight entirely. Furthermore, the narration that made Bastion famous is back, but with no story to narrate. This time the narrator is part of the story, and since said story is holding itself back to create a sense of wonder, the narration has truly little to narrate, quickly becoming a nuisance to the action. Finally, the gameplay (combat), a hybrid of turn-based battle and real time action, doesn't coalesce into a unified whole because of a lack of coherence to its mechanics. While the player can control the main character freely, he usually cannot efficiently escape the enemies because of their superior range and speed. This forces the player to make use of the "planning" stage, which allows to perform a multitude of moves virtually instantaneously, while the enemy is helpless to react. While this mechanic balances encounters, it renders the action part of the game often futile, and misses the obvious gameplay potential of allowing players to plot and stack moves while anticipating enemy movement, since enemies are virtually stationary during its execution. Worst of all, this mechanic translates to a simple and obligatory bite&run tactic for inexperienced players and, given the limited length of the game, requires a second and a third playthrough to be exploited more creatively. At that point the game has already lost most of its difficulty, however. Ultimately, all the extravagant and ambitious choices of the game turn out to be shallow, despite the developers'' obvious quest for depth. There is still a remarkable game to play in Transistor, but a number of frustrating flaws as well.

The game's visuals are great. The soundtrack, a masterpiece. The gameplay is engrossing, but highly repetitive. To complete random battles without crippling yourself you will have perform anywhere from 16 to 64 commands in a single turn. After a short while, it gets repetitive. Repetitive are also all the dungeons of the game. The Job system is the star of the gameplay, but if you played FF3, FF5 or their derivatives, this is just more of the same. Bosses will often perform the same 2-4 moves in order, being almost impossible to defeat for the wrong combination of jobs, but extremely easy for the right one, which doesn't really allow for any emergent gameplay, despite the jobs' apparent potential for it. Finally, the rating is only 6 because story is to me the most important part of an RPG. Bravely Default tries to include higher depth and coherence than the usual JRPG fare, but fails to introduce any new structure to the game, which is an unforgivable flaw. Each dungeon concludes with a boss or event. If you are walking somewhere and there is a cave nearby, be assured that's your next story destination. There are 4 crystals and 4 continents, plus you can guess the order in which you will visit them from the very beginning. The game is, in short, extremely linear. While the plot tries to throw twists and mysteries at you, you will see everything coming long before it happens. The characters themselves are pure stereotypes. As a final blow, the endgame is already famously jarring and repetitive, involving forced grinding through the same content multiple times for a good ending. Notably, though, the english voice acting is remarkable. You will probably still hate Agnés.

Whether you approach the game as a veteran X player or a new space sim enthusiast, you'll be sorely disappointed. The game's positives are massively overshadowed by countless throwbacks to an ancient generation of computer gaming, bugs and misguided attempts to emulate recent commercial successes. If you are ready to stomach 2004-level animations and frustrating design choices just to get your hands on a twitch-based space sim, you'll be much better off with an actual 2004 game.

Total War: Rome II does one thing right. It allows you to see which professional reviewers don't play the games they review for any significant amount of time or deliberately lie about their experiences playing them. This game is a hastily thrown together beta, and at least one year of full development away from being playable. The other comments cover the issues in exhaustive detail. Thank god i got to try it before purchasing. For anyone who did purchase it, i recommend asking a refund whenever applicable. Even though Steam policy doesn't support refunds, many European countries legally require a refund option regardless of agreements. For now, it's back to playing the first Rome: TW, with mods of course.

The skilled artwork, great presentation, charming characters and interesting combat really rose my hopes up for this game. Unfortunately, the sometimes awkward voice acting, the unforgivably unpolished cutscenes and the blandness of the setting have quickly crushed most expectations. Granted, it is not hard to play through this RPG and get away some entertainment from it, Arc Rise Fantasia will hardly provide starved RPG fans with the depth and memorable moments they are looking for.

I'll be synthetic. The game is filled to the brim with entirely gratuitous scripted actions. I hate those. Many scenarios are likewise gratuitously slow. I hate that. Zombies' reactions to attacks reek of brawler games. Tekken wasn't as clumsy though. The interface reeks of console design. It's insulting on PC. A lightly dressed guy in the opening scenario apparently holds a dozen different guns on him, with negligible amounts of ammo for each. Immersion: zero. It's amazing how a game which starts so similarly to say, RE3, fails to convey any basic feature which made such an old game fun. You can't feel alone (you're not), you can't feel lost (press the Q key), you can't feel in danger ("Continue?" As if it were Tekken), you don't feel scared. I'll never even try a RE game again after this.

Great music, remarkable backdrop art, skillful ship design and a cool twist on the space shooter gameplay should have made this game a must buy for the fans of the genre, but are instead are the accusing fingers pointing to its inadequacy. Simply said, Strike Suit Zero is too simple. Other than for a single combat gimmick its gameplay is far below the heights achieved by the genre in games like freespace or the X series. While this can be partially attributed to its indie origins and a substantial difference in budget, it doesn't excuse the level of monotony encountered throughout the game. Monotony of combat, characterized by few, ever identical ships and, what is most glaring, monotony of narration, which is shallow enough that its total absence would have probably gotten a higher score from me. Add an uneven difficulty curve and a few design mistakes and an otherwise acceptable shooter becomes a trite waste of time.

No loading times at all with an old PSP2001 model here. This game is faster for me than Final Fantasy Tactics and most other tactical RPGs, possibly because my cpu speed is set to 333Mhz. Not sure what to say about all the raging reviews about loading times. I guess the majority of the populace shudders at the very idea of having to fiddle just a tiny bit with their hardware configurations to better their play experience. Too bad for those people as this is a magnificent tactical RPG with an entertaining battle system and engrossing features they will never get to experience. I'm enjoying it more than any other tactical RPG i have played up to this day. It deserves a ten just to rub it in the faces of those people who enjoy beating cripples, but i doubt they will understand the metaphor anyway.

Playing this game i have the feeling i am playing through a Mass Effect DLC, and not the best one... until i am brought back to reality by its Modern Warfare-like combat and the stealth "routes" available. Those are the main differences between the two games. There is the same dialog system, the same lack of weaponry choice of ME2, the same hub-dungeons mechanic, the token "hacking" mini-game and even the original augment system works in the same way as Mass Effect's character progression (with exp points granting points to expend in new abilities and powering up old ones), although some modifications provide effects similar to those of Crysis' famous combat suit. I can't help feeling the whole game is a massive sense of deja-vu topped with lack of creativity. Only the concept design and art sometimes go above the average. Even with my settings maxed i found the graphics to be lacking and the backgrounds mostly unappealing, at about the level of the first Mass Effect, if not less. The music score is interesting and it's clear a skilled writer was hired for the occasion, but both fall flat because of the repetitive and unoriginal gameplay. Perhaps after playing through all of the FPS games of the last decade i have grown insensitive to the appeal of the genre, but i still play quite a few of them and the third installment of Deus Ex doesn't provide anything substantially new to the standard. Even though i am a fan of the more rough and unforgiving combat i have no reason to play through Deus Ex: Human Revolution again. Wanting an engrossing story and captivating scenery Mass Effect is by far superior, while Battlefield Bad Company 2 or Modern Warfare 2 go the extra mile in terms of realism, stealth action and weaponry choice. I can hardly contain my disappointment and stupefaction in front of the acclaim a game like this is receiving, but i will give it the rating i believe it deserves: a 7, mostly for its good production value, polished gameplay and cool (although easily guessed) story climax. Le sigh.