Frontiersmann

Excellent game, lots of fun. 10/10 please play. Two main complaints I see about this game are: (1) over sexualization; and (2) lack of gameplay depth. I will address both. This game is not supposed to be serious, it is supposed to be funny. Maybe a little shocking. The antagonist knows that he is a creeper. He does goofy dances while babbling about fetishes. He knows he is objectifying women, the whole plot is he's trying to "collect" them and make them fight each other like super heroine barbie dolls in his pervy fantasy world. That's what makes him the villain. The plot has a bit of a fourth wall thing going on too, so he will definitely make you uncomfortable. Also, these sorts of costumes have been normalized. They are complaining about a juvenile male fantasy in a fighting game, what did they expect? There are literally dozens of swimsuits, pajamas, revealing party dresses, ****, and tons of cleavage and bare bottoms in Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Blazblue, other SNK, Dead or Alive, etc. I guess these critics just don't like being confronted with how it's actually lewd? Yes there is a lot of sexualization in this game. It serves a narrative purpose. Anyone complaining about it is totally missing the point, and it would be hypocritical for them to dismiss the same (perhaps even more arbitrary) issues in other fighters. As for gameplay. The only buttons are light attack, heavy attack, special attack, throw, block, character swap, and super. Running forward with a heavy attack will give you a dash attack that can lead to a wall bounce combo. Grabbing will beat a blocking opponent. You can grab opponents in mid air. Long strings can cause a blocking opponent to become dizzy if they block too much. You can also air dash to make your aerial approaches ambiguous. You can cancel the ending frames of your attacks into special moves by spending meter, giving you more damage. You can cancel your special moves into super, if you have enough meter. If you get blocked or miss, you can end up getting over-extended and can take a bunch of damage. The right joystick uses items you can pick up mid-battle, which introduce some randomness. Items give your opponent another thing to manage, can be used on offense or defense. Directional inputs can change your special attack and your throw, and depending on the character your super. Not your light or heavy. There are no motion inputs. No crouch. Block is relegated to a button instead of your joystick. That means no high-low mixups, no left-right mixups. For defensive options, you can dodge roll in either direction, you can dodge in the air, you can back dash, if you get knocked down you can get up immediately if you have good timing, including waking up to the left, right, or middle, or you can delay wakeup. You can throw tech by hitting the throw button right after an opponent grabs you, but doing this means you won't be blocking so you will be vulnerable to attacks. If you block and you want to get out of pressure you can cancel your block-stun into a left or right dodge roll by spending a bit of meter. You can also tag out for your team member if one of fighters is running low on meter or health, including with cancelling a successful attack into a tag. Comeback mechanics and winning. You need to manage your meter carefully because if you spend it all on getting damage, you won't be able to close out the round. You need to KO with a super, and supers take a lot of meter. The amount of meter you have stocked is directly related to how much damage you have taken. The less life you have, the more meter you can spend. So you can be a threat to win right until the round closes out. This game checks every box for things that FGC veterans complain about. Don't listen to those people. They don't understand how to play. They just want the game to be another street fighter clone and they're paying attention to the wrong stuff. If they say there are no mix-ups, then they forgot how to shimmy in and out of range to bait out a throw. They forgot about staggering offensive pressure to trick people into letting go of the block button. They might have even forgotten how to play footsies. All of those things are in this game. If they say the combo system is brain-dead, then they don't realize that the low-effort plays give low-effort rewards, and they can carry high risk. If they complain that there isn't enough of a reward for good execution, they aren't taking into account that you need to actually practice to get the timing on your wall bounce combos, air chases, and your special cancels right. This game is not about obtuse complicated commands or memorization. It is about navigating and controlling the space between the fighters. In some ways this game will teach you how to play neutral better than street fighter will. Great game. 10/10 please play.

This is a great little game. Generally I'm in agreement with critics on a specific point: the narrative is what you show up for. However, the game is more than just a story. The whole thing from beginning to end (story, characters, gameplay, audio, graphics) is cute and uncomplicated. Much like a number of other popular indie titles, this is just a simple way to de-stress. This sort of game is great for people who are just tired of dealing with crap all day and need an escape. The game gives you something to apply yourself at, but it won't punish you for failure, and it won't force you into stressful situations. It's just a calm, slow, deep breath. Recommended for people with families and high-stress jobs.

This game deserves more attention than game journalists have given it. Wonderful little title. A+. I like it because the devs made relaxation a priority. Most popular games are high action games that require energy and focus from their players. They're stressful. Not this game. Simple premise, uncomplicated design, with a small handful of mental exercises and a few brief moments of low stakes skill based play. After a hard day of work, chores, or dealing with family demands, this game invites you to a calm place, and lets you breathe. Excellent, artistic experience. The only thing really holding this game back is the noticeable drop in frame rate when playing level 3 in docked mode. I didn't notice any problems when playing in handheld mode.

The player guides a character through levels, but cannot interact with the character directly. The character will always move in a straight line until they run into a direction changing obstacle. The only way that players can interact with anything at all is by swiping left and right on the touch screen, which moves a bar of green light across the screen. When the bar of light is moved, it toggles every single changeable object in the level at once. The end result is that the player feels like they're pushing and pulling the same lever non-stop in order to play. This is the "timeswapper" mechanic. As far as I can tell, it is the only control. Occasionally the lever will need to be carefully positioned in the middle of the screen in order to force the bird to move at an angle. This gets particularly frustrating as you may only have a second or two to wrestle with swiping exactly 27, 42, or 83% of the way across the screen to get the stupid bird to move at a punishingly precise angle or else run into a wall and die. Repeatedly. Although the collectibles in each level (a series of 3 star tokens) might have been used to give the player a mental gymnastic exercise, in practice they only encourage the player to struggle against the game's overly simplistic and poorly implemented user interface. Due to the fact that there's literally only one thing the player can do to control anything (swipe), there is no ability or incentive to explore. Also due to the fact that there's literally one control, the game highlights the most mundane parts of video gaming. It actively draws attention or of the level and makes you focus on the fact that you're repeating the same gesture ad nauseam. The levels become more technically difficult, but provide no diversity of experiences. The one redeeming factor is the fifteen second animation at the beginning of the game. Downhill from there. Sure, it's only the price of a hot dog, but I've played better games on my cell phone for free. More than the price, it's just not worth the time. So go but a hot dog. You'll enjoy it more.

My wife and I got a PS4 on a total whim, and I have been looking for reasons to use it over my Wii U over the past few days. I'm happy to report that Abyss Odyssey is one of those reasons. In Abyss Odyssey, ACE Team came up with a brilliant title that can keep you busy for hours upon hours. Unfortunately, it is weak in presentation. The game introduces almost all of its weak points within fifteen minutes of play, most of which are aesthetic. Sadly, if feels as if the developers came up with a brilliant concept, then neglected to dot their i's and cross their t's, or perhaps they ran out of money and had to publish the game despite some obvious areas where improvement could be made. Despite this, the game play and game's overall style are easily compelling enough overcome its issues. The game is a side-scrolling action adventure game, similar in some ways to Castlevania or Metroid. But, if you go into Abyss Odyssey expecting a Metroidvania type experience, you will be surprised. It has more in common with a roguelike dungeon-crawler, or the original Diablo. While Metroidvania games frequently make exploration a main focus, the bulk of Abyss Odyssey's environments are procedurally generated, meaning that exploration necessarily plays second fiddle to combat. Exploring each floor of the Abyss is still rewarding, but unlike Metroidvania titles, there is no backtracking to explore previously unreachable areas. Players who want lasting appeal can find it through hidden collectible "journal entries" that appear randomly after combat. Upon selecting a character and leaving the main menu, you are immediately dropped into a tutorial level. After learning how to block, dodge, and jump your way through a simple obstacle course, the tutorial feeds you one of the game's easier enemies. This enemy serves as a sharp wake-up call, without posing any real threat. It tells the player that, in order to do well at this game, he or she will really need to give it the old Harvard try. If not, they'll get beaten to a pulp. The tutorial ends with a larger combat involving several enemies, ending with a rock slide that appears to bury your main character. This sequence is followed by a small amount of plot, powerfully emphasizing one of the game's biggest strengths: its overall sense of style. The game employs a beautiful art nouveau aesthetic fitting its 1890s setting, and employs dark fairy tale themes with compelling effect. Then it throws you headlong into the Abyss, where the real grind begins. As mentioned earlier, the game is not without problems. These problems begin, forebodingly, with the character select screen. It makes a poor first impression, because the game doesn't do enough to communicate that the player has only one character option. As for the game itself, the voice acting is somewhat flat. The game's music is fitting, but the only particularly memorable thing about it is that if you manage to survive for long enough (about ten minutes), there is a one or two second period of complete silence before the track starts again. Even though the bulk of the game's environments are procedurally generated, the recycling of assets will make them feel repetitive. The control layout is not bad, but there are a couple things that might leave you scratching your head. For example, the frequent use of the R3 button when the function could have been mapped to R1, L1, R2 or L2 instead. Additionally, the tutorial simply doesn't do enough to prepare players for aspects that are central to the game, including character growth, handling death, and special abilities. After the tutorial is over, players might still be confused about how to use the triangle button, which becomes rather important. It can be customized to do things depending on whether the player is pushing up, down, or forward, and the tutorial doesn't adequately explain this or give players the tools to figure it out. Additionally, players might feel like they're set up to fail, and get frustrated. Indeed, it would be crushingly difficult to beat the game without dying. Dying is, in fact, tied directly into the story. The only punishment for dying is having to return to town, where the player will be able to use their gathered loot, special abilities, and experience points to take another shot at descending into the abyss -- which is exactly what they will want to do. The game play is simple, plain, and right at the forefront of the whole experience. It rewards skill, but doesn't punish players for being unskilled. Rather, it encourages players to keep improving. Although it takes a little while to figure combat out, the simple fun of the combat system and the transparency of the end goal make the game highly addicting, regardless of the lack of spit and polish. Overall, the game gets a solid 8 out of 10 from me. Not astounding, certainly not perfect, but it hits all the important things right on target. It's more fun than most AAA titles, by far.