A good game whose patently unfair difficulty level is holding it back from being great. I missed Tactics Ogre in its original iteration, and it really filled the hole in my heart left by Final Fantasy **** a point. As much as the game satisfies, it eventually tests your capacity for monotonous, insurmountable punishment. There is a level cap for your party, designed to prevent you from becoming over-leveled and making the content trivial. This would have been a good design choice, if not for the mid-to-late game where every enemy out-levels you and has access to spells you cannot get. This is especially frustrating because you can't even grind to get on par with the enemy--instead you have to rely on luck, or, worse, look up the one very specific strategy that will result in victory. It is really frustrating for the game to plainly tell you in clear numbers that it is cheating and there is nothing you can do about it. The boss will one-shot three of your units with a single attack. The outcome of the entire battle will largely depend on whether you hit on a crowd control spell with a 31% chance of success. You just need to sit there and take it, wishing you could get your money back. This is not fun. There are games that are hard, and there are games that don't respect your time. This game is the latter. I know this is a remake of an older game, and it looks and sounds fantastic. But this is 2023, and gamers have different expectations now. They want to learn the rules and successfully apply them in creative ways, not beat their head into the game until it breaks by brute force. Honestly, if brute force level grinding actually worked, the game would be better. If I get 50 hours into a game and come to a wall in progress that can't be scaled without outside research or blind luck, I will just not finish that game. It's a shame, because Tactics Ogre: Reborn is so good, until it really isn't.
For the life of me, I can't figure out what this game wants me to do. The tutorial gives you tasks but doesn't tell you why it matters. If you transfer some knowledge from games like Civ you can figure out things like the resource management, but beyond that I am not given a reason to care.
Feels like a DLC to Subnautica, which is not bad. Not as scary because it's hard to recapture that feeling of not knowing what it is in the deeps, but new and interesting vehicles and QOL improvements make it a fresh experience.
I can't complain that Borderlands never changes, because I keep buying all these games anyway. But man...Borderlands never changes. This game did change things up little by going deeper into character creation, which is cool, but...damn, it's still Borderlands. This year's Handsome Jack clone is a dragon guy played by Will Arnett. I've never complained about Borderlands' humor before, but this time it was difficult to get through. I feel like I saw every joke coming. The combat is the same as ever, with more emphasis on melee and the replacement of grenades with spells. It's fun, because Borderlands is fun. But man, it's Borderlands. Again.
It’s fine. There are too many systems to keep track of and a whole hell of a lot of talking. Uninstalled when I finally admitted to myself I was only playing for the hot anime girls.
I thought I finally found a CRPG I liked, until i got to the first city and had to go through literally two hours of exposition and side quest gathering. I even tend to like talky games, but every goddamn townsperson had to give me their whole damn life story before sending me on a generic fetch quest. That's partly on me for being a completionist, but better games tend to dole this stuff out at a more measured pace. Not to mention that all objectives are pretty vague and very little direction is given, such that you feel compelled to talk to everyone simply in an attempt to grasp some narrative throughline. In the end it fell into a common CRPG trap: it forgot there was a game to play here.
Lots of tedious pickups. Microtransactions are gone but the game still feels balanced around them. The nemesis system is still cool, except that 50% of your nemeses come back from the dead and ambush you, usually when you're in the middle of fighting someone else. There is so much going on that it feels bloated to increase play time. Scouring the map in Shadow of Mordor was fun--somehow this feels like work.
Addictive and satisfying turn-based strategy that is more like chess than Starcraft. The variety of teams you can you make this endlessly playable. Sometimes relies on RNG--a game might sometimes hinge on random starting placement or weapon drops, but not often.
Serious old school Myst vibes. The music is incredible. This and Outer Wilds are the successors to the adventure genre. I brute forced some of the solutions at the end, but that was because I was being impatient.
A truly lovely and stirring puzzle game. It really makes the most of its core concept. Can and should be finished in one 2 to 3 hour session--otherwise you may forget what you were doing.
The Banner Saga is a beautiful, tedious game. It draws you in during the opening moments so effectively that it takes you a few hours to realize there isn't much there. It's a mix of an Oregon Trail-like journey and turn-based tactical combat, and both are pretty shallow. The journey gives you some choices to make, but since the outcomes are largely pre-determined they are all illusory. There is also a disposition mechanic which determines the happiness, and therefore number, of your caravanners, but this apparently has no impact whatsoever on gameplay. There is a map with gobs of lore about places you won't see and things you won't do. Why? Who knows. Combat is frustrating. The twist that attack power and health are the same is actually quite inspired, and if the enemy actually followed the same rules that you have to it would have been interesting. But they don't, and it's not. Your strategy is to break armor so you can attack health--but the enemy has so much health that they can just ignore your armor. There is no initiative and you always swap turns with the enemy, regardless of how much you outnumber them, until there is only one of them left. That means two enemy units get twice as many moves as four of yours. And since they always outlevel you by a considerable margin, you will always feel like you're at a disadvantage. I'm all for challenge, but if there is no way to build a winning team without sacrificing most of them to injuries every time, do I really feel like I'm advancing? No, I'm just desperately limping along all the while. If that's the intention, well, it makes for a game that is not enjoyable at all. There are also nonsensical UI and gameplay issues. You can't see your units' stats in the party select screen, just their levels. There is one equipment slot and one ability for each unit. The map can't be rotated, so units get lost and mistaken commands will be made. Moves can't be canceled, so if the Switch's twitchy sticks put you in the wrong place by mistake, you just need to eat it. The music and hand-drawn visuals are very good. But the game isn't finished. I got it for $5 on sale and I regret even paying that--that it's normally $25 seems outright criminal. Do not buy this, and instead hold out hope that Final Fantasy Tactics will be on Switch some day.
I'm finding Golf Story difficult to love. The golf itself is great, once you figure out for yourself how to play because the game WILL NOT tell you. But everything else seems to get in the way of just playing more golf. The pixel art graphics also clash terribly with the HD text and music. Plus where the save points are is a guessing game--you can select "save and quit" from the menu, but where you load in next time will be long before you left off, making you repeat content a lot. Supposedly one of the greats on Switch. I don't really see it.
I am sick of procedural generation. Procedurally-generated worlds feel so dead and pointless. Why do I want to explore a world with no soul, no intent behind its making? An endless widget search? Watching numbers go up? These might satisfy my gamer lizard brain, but they quickly get boring. In a game like Dead Cells, it is nominally to keep the challenge fresh, but each generation of the world is so bland that it fails to make an impression. If I can't even remember the last nonsensical string of gates and platforms, what's the point of giving me a new one? The point, of course, is to inflate playtime. It's the perfect way to stretch a 10 hour game across 100 hours, making for a more "epic" experience. Oh yes, you'll do the first two or three maps many, many times, because the randomness of the enemies and powerups means you'll just have to hope that this run deigns to give you a somewhat balanced experience. It may trick you into thinking you're doing well in the first two or three maps, but it will obliterate you in the next one, telling you that you need to grind out more of the few permanent powerups until you stand a chance at progressing. You will do this over and over. Oh, and there is a Dark Souls progression loss mechanic, because of course there is. Don't let the masochistic sycophants fool you, this is not fun. Combat is twitchy and trial-and-error. Putting a cooldown on your dodge in a game like this should be a crime. The beauty of a Metroidvania is in the layout. If the layout is the last priority, the game will suffer. This game suffers hard.
The combat is miserable. Every enemy can one- or two-shot you at every point of the game. They always go first, so you will always spend your first turns putting your characters on life support. Enemies can all teleport around the map at will. They all get to make "attacks of opportunity," which is basically a free half-turn--you can have this ability too, but your attacks miss about 50% of the time. Environmental effects exist only to cancel out every one of your strategic choices. The first encounter is always a wash, so that you can use your second to give your characters the high ground and set target priorities so they can have half a chance. You will never be able to do either on the fly the first time around. It almost feels as if save scumming is an actual gameplay mechanic, which is tragic. The item menus are a wreck, but eventually you will develop the muscle memory for them. You'd think they could translate the click-and-drag functionality of the PC to the Switch's touch controls, but they...just didn't. I liked the writing and acting well enough, and I normally hate voice acting in these games. You can RP in the conversations a little bit, but not so much in the combat, where failure to properly min/max from the jump will lead to a lot of wasted time. This was on my list for a long time, but something held me back until I took the jump just now. Maybe I was feeling my future disappointment ripple back in time. I should have listened, and never bought this sadistic pile of junk.
If you don't like roguelikes, Tangledeep won't convert you. I keep gambling on these, hoping to finally find something that is both compelling and infinitely replayable, but I just keep losing. It's perfectly good for what it is. You can experiment with class combinations and scour the maps for loot, then wipe your character and try something completely new. But like so many of its genre cousins, it fails to answer the critical question: why? Why do I want to keep replaying such an ephemeral experience? One of the problems with infinite variety is that things tend to lack soul. Maps are so random that they lack real character and fail to stand out--in effect, they may as well be identical from game to game, because there isn't anything worth remembering about the last set of dungeons anyway. Enemies are just different sprites that pretty much all do the same thing. Loot doesn't feel special when you know it's going to get replaced on the next floor. There is a rudimentary story here, but the draw of the game is meant to be the endless floor grinding, and I have yet to find such a game that makes me want to do that.
I liked Undertale fine, but I don't think it lives up to the hype. I was expecting the transcendental experience the indie community has raved about, but instead I got something that is part brilliant deconstruction of the genre and part lazy gag game. The primitive graphics certainly don't help--other games have done brilliant things with limited resources, but Undertale just kinda looks like the worst of the games that inspired it with occasional flourishes that remind you it was made in 2015. Edit: I was so, so wrong. Undertale is a love letter to video games. It sees me, sometimes in ways I don't want it to. It is art.
I have learned that I cannot trust professional game reviewers. Get a game for free, get paid to play it, and finish the whole thing in the 20 hours you budgeted for it before you have to play something else? 10/10, the return of proper Fallout! This is not proper Fallout. Fallout 4, for all its faults, is a much better Fallout game, and Fallout 4 is a pretty bad Fallout game. But even on its own, Outer Worlds is pretty lackluster. The adventure is on rails, stats and consumables don't particularly matter, and the environments are small. There is no point in exploring because you will get a green blip leading you to literally everything in the area eventually. The game only scores as high as it does with me because it fooled me into thinking there was going to be more for a decent amount of time. There is not more. I paid for a month of Game Pass for this and I am thankful that's all I spent. That said, leave that anti-SJW nonsense at home. Yes, there is a lesbian, and yes, sometimes a woman will be in charge. If this is a threat to your fragile masculinity, please feel free to recede from modern society and leave the rest of us alone.
Don't believe the comparisons: it's not at all like Myst. There is no story and no atmosphere, and the setting is completely incidental to the rest of the game. The entire thing is solving puzzles like the ones you might find in a cheap newsprint book from the dollar store. In fact, the only similarity to Myst is how some of the puzzles can be so absurdly obtuse that you don't understand the solutions even after you cheat and look them up. And you might enjoy that! But I didn't. At some point you, like me, may hit a wall. If you do, don't feel bad about giving up. Edit: I'm reading reviews from other places and I was pleasantly surprised to see other people using the word "obtuse," so I feel like writing a little more about that. It's very easy to dismiss a game as "too hard," and also to dismiss a critic as "too stupid." And I admit, I lost patience for the demands of this game. But how patient do I have to be with a game that does such a poor job of telling me its own rules? And when you think you learn the rules, the next puzzle will seem to violate them. And then rules will stack upon rules, overlap each other, cancel each other out. The puzzles go beyond all reasonable permutations of their various rules in a joyless trudge. The only thing you have to look forward to is another puzzle, and the only thing you feel after completing one is relief. When does a game stop being challenging and start being sadistic? Or worse, boring? Maybe if Jonathan Blow published a companion treatise outlining his thought processes while building the puzzles we'd have a chance. It feels as though, overall, the game and its creators want you to be impressed with how smart they are, and how smart you must be if you can match wits with them. And that leads me to the next word I saw in a lot of reviews, one I initially left out of mine: pretension. One thing the game "rewards" you with--indeed, they're the only things you actually "find"--are audio recordings and videos of scientific and philosophical musings. They do not advance gameplay, such as it is. They do not flesh out a world or a story, because there are no bones to put them on. No, they are simply there to lend a false air of intellectualism to a bunch of f***ing line puzzles. The game wants desperately to be smarter and deeper than it is.
I admit: this is my first journey into point and click, and, well, the impression that Thimbleweed Park gives me of the whole genre is just okay. The detective work is fun. The meta-humor veers between cute and "Jesus Christ we get it." The Twin Peaks trope is fine, if you like Twin Peaks. But some puzzles are pretty stupid. You will get stuck because every objective requires some mundane object that cannot be found in any of the logical places nor in most of the illogical ones. Like, I need to make printer ink from scratch so I can print a job application? I need to hunt for the only dime in town so I can use the pay phone? I'm an FBI agent investigating a murder and I only brought one piece of film for the Polaroid? And this is considered "adventure"? Never mind the side objective that is a literal pixel hunt. Luckily, there is a hint line that helps you overcome these blatant attempts to waste your time. Get it when it's on sale.
Darkest Dungeon doesn't respect your time. The game is a gauntlet of unfair odds designed to test your sanity, just like the titular dungeon is for your characters, and it will seem fun and challenging until this realization dawns on you. The game tricks you into thinking you can prepare an adequate party, but you can't--it will "randomly" devastate your party just when you have the most to lose. Stats mean nothing: an 80% hit rate on an ability may as well be 10% during regular battles and 0% when you're on death's door. You can't get good at this game, you can only keep playing until it lets you win. Does that sound fun to you?
As a recovering World of Warcraft addict, I'm always looking for something else that will scratch the itch. So far, even the best substitutes have done nothing but make me want to resub more. Neverwinter is no exception. It's pretty good, but I still know WoW is better.
I grabbed Earthlock because I wanted an old-school turn-based RPG to hold me over before Octopath Traveler, and I can report that it serves that purpose perfectly well! Basically, you command a group of colorful characters in an effort to save the world. If you've played Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy IX, you'll feel right at home. It hits all of the sweet spots that AAA RPGs tend to ignore nowadays, like true turn-based combat, static character classes, and a single linear story. Explore a dungeon, fight monsters, loot chests, hope you make it to the next save point. All good stuff. Unfortunately, the pacing docks it several points for me. Battles are slow (you can speed them up, but you have to toggle it on every battle). Natural progression will lead you to bosses you have no hope of beating, forcing you to grind. Instead of MP there are "amri points," which require you to skip a turn to recharge. The battle menu is confusing at first and annoying for the rest of the time, occasionally leading to missed button presses--I don't think Square has a copyright on the Fight Magic Item menu, do they? The confluence of all these factors make the game susceptible to the major complaint I have with games these days: It drags, and I'm ready for it to end so I can move on to something else. All in all, its good if you can get it on sale. Unless Octopath is out when you read this, then just get Octopath.
A first person puzzler in which you are guided through a series of rooms by an AI with ambiguous motivations and equipped with a gun that shoots pure science. Sounds pretty familiar, but The Turing Test is all the better for it. Calling it "Portal without portals" is apt. This time, instead of a portal gun, you have a device that can extract and shoot balls of energy that activate doors, lifts, switches, and so forth. You'll have to use logic and spacial awareness to properly combine the different kinds of energy with the appropriate machinery at the appropriate times to advance. While the difficulty curve seems to spike up and down without explanation, they puzzles are generally satisfying. The story is a bit lightweight, and most of it is just told through dialogue between player-character Ava and AI overlord TOM. Throughout the course of the game the two debate the nature of consciousness and free will, taking the stances one would expect a human and a computer to take. TOM's performance is suitably distant, but Ava sounds like she's reading off a card. It also seems silly that TOM has to spend the beginning of the game explaining basic computer science and space travel to Ava, who is immediately established as an astronaut/engineer. But those are minor quibbles. It's a good game with a memorable ending, which was much better than I expected from a Portal clone.
I wish I could have a more informed opinion, but the game ran so terribly that I traded it in after about three hours. It suffered horrendous slowdown whenever too much was happening on screen, so for a game centered on causing chaos, that's a death sentence. I play games on a console because standardized hardware is supposed to make performance optimization easy, so there's no excuse. Oh well. Just Cause 2 was good, and I think it's backwards-compatible, so try that.
Oxenfree is a stellar role-playing/psychological horror game that you will want to replay as soon as you finish it. The art is pretty good, but it's the voice acting and sound mixing that will stick in your mind for a long, long time. My only knock is that some of the dialogue options don't quite predict what Alex will say or how she says it, which can kinda take you out of it from a role-playing perspective, but the story drives forward so effectively that you don't have to linger on a mistake for long. There's no fighting, no inventory, and no equipment save for a handheld radio. Just you and your friends on a mysterious island full of secrets that you may or may not discover...this time.
I Am Setsuna had the pedigree and the potential to be something good. Unfortunately, the creators of Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger failed to learn the lessons they wrote themselves, and instead came up with a boring, cluttered slog. And clutter is the name of the game here. There is so much stuff to manage, but none of it really matters. This is most apparent in the combat, which is strongly reminiscent of Chrono Trigger but lacks all of the breezy efficiency. Each character has their own Techs, which can combo with the Techs of other characters for new, powerful moves. The first problem is that the game tells you which combos each Tech is a part of, but doesn't work backwards and tell you which Techs are needed for each combo. So, if you see a combo name you're interested in, you need to dig through the Tech menus of each character to see if you even have the component techs to pull it off. With nine playable characters, this is quite a chore. And, at the end, your reward is a combo that is total overkill anyway, because one or two heavy hitters in your party can handle all the combat just fine by themselves. Adding to the needless clutter is how you obtain the Techs in the first place. You loot materials from slain monsters and trade them in for Techs. This is not crafting, just bulk looting and selling. It's a wonder why they even bothered to invent names and values for each material, because it' doesn't matter what they are; every time you come to the Tech vendor, you'll have whatever you need to get whatever Tech is next on your list. Not that you really need to get new Techs anyway. Adding to the needless complexity is the fact that every character has multiple Techs that basically do the same thing. Every time you want to cast a spell, you choices are, essentially, "damage some of the things" or "damage everything." Each character has an element assigned to them, a la Chrono Trigger, but since the enemies seem to not have any real elemental weaknesses, they don't matter. The two non-elemental characters you get in the middle of the game can handily kill everything anyway, with some overpowered defensive capabilities to boot. You can customize your Techs as well, but to negligible effect. Each character can equip a talisman that will randomly level up a Tech with a certain ability, which will then randomly trigger when you use that Tech in the future. Since you're already overkilling everything, the bonuses end up being needless in addition to being unpredictable, so you're perfectly safe ignoring this mechanic entirely. Killing enemies also sometimes registers as a "Elemental Kill", "Timed Kill," "Exact Kill," or "Overkill," but these messages appear to mean nothing. Do you get more XP or treasure? You wouldn't notice anyway, since you're constantly rolling in both no matter what. Ironically, all of this overlays a relatively simple story. The primary character is Endir, a mercenary tasked with escorting Setsuna to the Last Lands, where she will serve as the traditional sacrifice that will abate the monster attacks that constantly plague the world. Along the way you will pick up a number of playable characters that all have distinct designs and personalities. It's all pretty straightforward, which is not bad. It's just a shame actually getting from chapter to chapter is a slog. The piano solo soundtrack is interesting in concept, but monotonous in execution, as is the totally snowbound world. It took nearly ten hours to reach the first new interesting environment, which is entirely too long. The game has been pressed upon fans of Chrono Trigger and old school Final Fantasy, but that's actually the worst audience for it. Those people know better, and will quickly see there is very little here. If you find it really, really cheap some day in the future, go for it. Until then, there are much better things to play on your Switch.
This must be one of those games that stereotypical PC gamers love because it's "pretty," as if graphics power can make up for clickfest gameplay, incomprehensible menus and terrible voice acting. I had heard a lot about this game on the Internet, but it isn't even worth the $10 I paid for it on Steam.
