Rayze_Darr

There's a passable, 6/10 soulslike in here somewhere; one with good visuals and music, a great core concept, okay combat, and disappointingly poor balance and level design. But that game is buried under a wave of bugs, crashes, performance issues, and a lack of keybinding options. If you're craving a great, colorful soulslike, there are just better options. More polished, more fun besides. Enotria is a very hard game to recommend even ignoring the polish issues, especially in a year with Elden Ring DLC, Another Crab's Treasure, and Nine Sols.

Fast-paced combat action that never gets dull, a great supportive soundtrack and overall sound design, hilarious writing in a super fun setting, great art style, and crazy good replayability. There are some performance nitpicks, but the good far, FAR outweighs the nitpicks. Most fun game of 2024 so far.

Great boss battles make the experience worth it, but the game is riddled with hard-to-ignore nitpicks. No automatic scrolling in menus, no attacking while crouching, consumable healing without any form of natural recovery, performance issues and other intrusive bugs, no NG+ paired with missable achievements, and even the otherwise great bosses often feel way too spongey. The game simply needed more public testing to work out kinks that the devs had gone "creator blind" to.

The game simply isn't finished. The glitches, the framerate, the lack of customization, the lack of any competitive endgame a la Battle Tower. Even the monster designs themselves are dull and incomplete feeling. This generation offers nothing over previous, completed generations, and in its current state should just be skipped.

It's easy to look at games of the same sub-genre and refer to them as "clones." Duke Nukem is a Doom clone, Banjo-Kazooie is a Mario 64 clone, Outer Worlds is a Fallout clone. What's important with these titles, though, is not to look at the aspects they borrowed, but the ones that set them apart. Duke Nukem has a self-aware sense of humor, Banjo-Kazooie has a more immersive world, Outer Worlds is actually consistently functional. Nexomon: Extinction is a monster-collecting JRPG with one-on-one, turn-based combat, with a maximum party of 6 and with 4 move slots. But that's not what makes this game worth every penny and then some. That is just the hook. It's everything that it does so much better than other games of its sub-genre that really set it apart. Technically the third game in the series, Extinction takes place a full millenium after the previous title. Since the defeat of the villain of Nexomon, the world has found itself the battlefield of a war between colossal Tyrants, fighting each other to claim the title of King of Monsters, and leaving the world in shambles as collateral damage. You are a 15-year-old orphan. Now a man or woman in the eyes of society, you embark to join the Tamer's Guild to learn how to control the monsters that inhabit your world, the Nexomon, in order to join the fight to protect what remains of humanity from the Tyrant menace. Already, Extinction sets itself apart with its premise. But this isn't the kind of game that's going to set up a plot about giant monsters on a rampage, only to have it solved by someone else before you can even get to them. Extinction keeps your character at the center. This is truly your story, and it's a dang good one too. Though the game has a lot of humor in it, almost to a fault with the number of fourth-wall breaks, the main plot is kept tense and exciting, and will easily grip you throughout the 30-50 hour story. Combat takes on a traditional style, with both monsters taking turns to attack. Unlike the original Nexomon, turn order is not alternating, but based on a Speed stat. Rather, I should say, it's based on two. Attacks in Extinction aren't just flat values, rendering 90% of a monster's moveset useless. Instead, each attack not only has its own base power, stamina consumption, and accuracy, but its own speed modifier and critical hit chance, meaning that even the weakest moves have their uses. Combine this with the fact that a Nexomon can only learn one type of elemental move, and thay every Nexomon was held to a base stat total standard in its final form, and you get a crazy side-effect: every monster in the game is perfectly viable on your team. Let's talk recruiting monsters. Capturing a Nexomon isn't as basic as reducing its health or giving it a status effect. While these still help greatly, you can also feed a wild Nexomon food, or increase its odds of capture passively by finding whistles scattered throughout the game map. Once you're ready to capture it, you can use either a basic trap, or a rarer one that's specifically made for that type of Nexomon. Even then, you have a brief quicktime event that can add just a smidge on to your capture rate. All of this combines together to really give you the feeling of taming the monsters, instead of enslaving them. Plus, filling out your database isn't just its own reward, but also increases your odds of finding super rare Cosmic Nexomon to show off. There's so much more that I could rave on about, from the fun animations, to the great soundtrack, to the downright absurd amount of community support the developers have shown. All of it just continues to point to Nexomon: Extinction as being more than just a clone, and more than just an alternative. It stands proudly alongside Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, Snack World, and several other great monster collecting games of this generation, and in my humble opinion surpasses them all. Truly, Nexomon: Extinction is a Tyrant in its own right. Verdict: 10/10

It's easy to look at games of the same sub-genre and refer to them as "clones." Duke Nukem is a Doom clone, Banjo-Kazooie is a Mario 64 clone, Outer Worlds is a Fallout clone. What's important with these titles, though, is not to look at the aspects they borrowed, but the ones that set them apart. Duke Nukem has a self-aware sense of humor, Banjo-Kazooie has a more immersive world, Outer Worlds is actually consistently functional. Nexomon: Extinction is a monster-collecting JRPG with one-on-one, turn-based combat, with a maximum party of 6 and with 4 move slots. But that's not what makes this game worth every penny and then some. That is just the hook. It's everything that it does so much better than other games of its sub-genre that really set it apart. Technically the third game in the series, Extinction takes place a full millenium after the previous title. Since the defeat of the villain of Nexomon, the world has found itself the battlefield of a war between colossal Tyrants, fighting each other to claim the title of King of Monsters, and leaving the world in shambles as collateral damage. You are a 15-year-old orphan. Now a man or woman in the eyes of society, you embark to join the Tamer's Guild to learn how to control the monsters that inhabit your world, the Nexomon, in order to join the fight to protect what remains of humanity from the Tyrant menace. Already, Extinction sets itself apart with its premise. But this isn't the kind of game that's going to set up a plot about giant monsters on a rampage, only to have it solved by someone else before you can even get to them. Extinction keeps your character at the center. This is truly your story, and it's a dang good one too. Though the game has a lot of humor in it, almost to a fault with the number of fourth-wall breaks, the main plot is kept tense and exciting, and will easily grip you throughout the 30-50 hour story. Combat takes on a traditional style, with both monsters taking turns to attack. Unlike the original Nexomon, turn order is not alternating, but based on a Speed stat. Rather, I should say, it's based on two. Attacks in Extinction aren't just flat values, rendering 90% of a monster's moveset useless. Instead, each attack not only has its own base power, stamina consumption, and accuracy, but its own speed modifier and critical hit chance, meaning that even the weakest moves have their uses. Combine this with the fact that a Nexomon can only learn one type of elemental move, and thay every Nexomon was held to a base stat total standard in its final form, and you get a crazy side-effect: every monster in the game is perfectly viable on your team. Let's talk recruiting monsters. Capturing a Nexomon isn't as basic as reducing its health or giving it a status effect. While these still help greatly, you can also feed a wild Nexomon food, or increase its odds of capture passively by finding whistles scattered throughout the game map. Once you're ready to capture it, you can use either a basic trap, or a rarer one that's specifically made for that type of Nexomon. Even then, you have a brief quicktime event that can add just a smidge on to your capture rate. All of this combines together to really give you the feeling of taming the monsters, instead of enslaving them. Plus, filling out your database isn't just its own reward, but also increases your odds of finding super rare Cosmic Nexomon to show off. There's so much more that I could rave on about, from the fun animations, to the great soundtrack, to the downright absurd amount of community support the developers have shown. All of it just continues to point to Nexomon: Extinction as being more than just a clone, and more than just an alternative. It stands proudly alongside Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, Snack World, and several other great monster collecting games of this generation, and in my humble opinion surpasses them all. Truly, Nexomon: Extinction is a Tyrant in its own right. Verdict: 10/10

It's easy to look at games of the same sub-genre and refer to them as "clones." Duke Nukem is a Doom clone, Banjo-Kazooie is a Mario 64 clone, Outer Worlds is a Fallout clone. What's important with these titles, though, is not to look at the aspects they borrowed, but the ones that set them apart. Duke Nukem has a self-aware sense of humor, Banjo-Kazooie has a more immersive world, Outer Worlds is actually consistently functional. Nexomon: Extinction is a monster-collecting JRPG with one-on-one, turn-based combat, with a maximum party of 6 and with 4 move slots. But that's not what makes this game worth every penny and then some. That is just the hook. It's everything that it does so much better than other games of its sub-genre that really set it apart. Technically the third game in the series, Extinction takes place a full millenium after the previous title. Since the defeat of the villain of Nexomon, the world has found itself the battlefield of a war between colossal Tyrants, fighting each other to claim the title of King of Monsters, and leaving the world in shambles as collateral damage. You are a 15-year-old orphan. Now a man or woman in the eyes of society, you embark to join the Tamer's Guild to learn how to control the monsters that inhabit your world, the Nexomon, in order to join the fight to protect what remains of humanity from the Tyrant menace. Already, Extinction sets itself apart with its premise. But this isn't the kind of game that's going to set up a plot about giant monsters on a rampage, only to have it solved by someone else before you can even get to them. Extinction keeps your character at the center. This is truly your story, and it's a dang good one too. Though the game has a lot of humor in it, almost to a fault with the number of fourth-wall breaks, the main plot is kept tense and exciting, and will easily grip you throughout the 30-50 hour story. Combat takes on a traditional style, with both monsters taking turns to attack. Unlike the original Nexomon, turn order is not alternating, but based on a Speed stat. Rather, I should say, it's based on two. Attacks in Extinction aren't just flat values, rendering 90% of a monster's moveset useless. Instead, each attack not only has its own base power, stamina consumption, and accuracy, but its own speed modifier and critical hit chance, meaning that even the weakest moves have their uses. Combine this with the fact that a Nexomon can only learn one type of elemental move, and thay every Nexomon was held to a base stat total standard in its final form, and you get a crazy side-effect: every monster in the game is perfectly viable on your team. Let's talk recruiting monsters. Capturing a Nexomon isn't as basic as reducing its health or giving it a status effect. While these still help greatly, you can also feed a wild Nexomon food, or increase its odds of capture passively by finding whistles scattered throughout the game map. Once you're ready to capture it, you can use either a basic trap, or a rarer one that's specifically made for that type of Nexomon. Even then, you have a brief quicktime event that can add just a smidge on to your capture rate. All of this combines together to really give you the feeling of taming the monsters, instead of enslaving them. Plus, filling out your database isn't just its own reward, but also increases your odds of finding super rare Cosmic Nexomon to show off. There's so much more that I could rave on about, from the fun animations, to the great soundtrack, to the downright absurd amount of community support the developers have shown. All of it just continues to point to Nexomon: Extinction as being more than just a clone, and more than just an alternative. It stands proudly alongside Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, Snack World, and several other great monster collecting games of this generation, and in my humble opinion surpasses them all. Truly, Nexomon: Extinction is a Tyrant in its own right. Verdict: 10/10