The central conceit of the story of this game completely falls apart by the end, and the story is an unsatisfying mess that really loses focus and has nothing meaningful to say about its subject matter. Additionally, having a game that is solely about the evils of AI having so much genAI art, assets, and voice used in it feels tonedeaf and wildly hypocritical.
A really trippy, visually stunning game. The atmosphere and puzzles are really inventive and immersive. I really enjoyed my time with it, but it was a bit shorter than I would have preferred.
A damn fine DKC-like which made me grin like a little kid at Christmas again. Great, creative stage design. Stellar soundtrack. Brilliant use of the overworld map to introduce level variants. The negatives do begin to pile up by the end though. The quill economy is both unfair and unbalanced. Some of the tonics waste a slot and cost WAY too **** much. The unity engine jank is not well suited for platformers and needed a lot more tweaking to make it as precise as I would have liked. Still, an excellent game and well worth the time I spent playing. Got 100% completion as well.
I cannot fathom who thought that an annoying support character who tells you where to go and where to use your abilities, would be welcome in a Metroid game. He is annoying, never shuts up, and ruins ANY immersion I could have with this game, and you cannot turn him off. Environments look pretty nice in some biomes. The desert is a huge, empty waste of space and time. Gating desert music behind amiibo is supremely scummy and deserves to be called out for the greedy, terrible behavior that it is. The music not gated behind a plastic toy paywall is actually the only thing I can praise without caveats. The heart of MP is beating in here somewhere but is bogged down by horrendous writing and aggravating design decisions. I once again must go to the indie market to get my Metroid fix because neither Mercury Steam nor Retro have what it takes to carry this franchise. What a shame.
It seems to me that since Marvel has become Insomniac's new sugar daddy, IG are content to let their original IPs languish in inter-dimensional (haha) limbo. Both with the PS4 soft reboot and this PS5 continuation of the main series, IG just don't want to bring their A-game to this franchise anymore, which is just a shame. I adore this series and have played every single game in the series (Yes, even All 4 One), but the technical issues plaguing this game and the woefully boring story just left a sour taste in my mouth. It's been 5 games since we learned that the Lombaxes sealed themselves away in another dimension, and Ratchet never ever goes after them? Why are we sitting around playing a tedious version of spot the multiverse variant when we could be on a NEW adventure finding the Lombaxes? It's like the storywriters are AFRAID to move this universe forward it's just....pathetic. And don't get me started on the bugs. This is THE buggiest game in the franchise, and quite frankly the state this game released in is inexcusable. I finished the game out of obligation, but I did not enjoy my time with it. There is so much potential for this series, if only IG could muster up the energy to care.
I didn't care for Mario Odyssey all that much. The game was mostly empty spectacle (save for NDC) and just didn't have that sense of magic and exploration as Mario 64. Fast forward to Sw2 and now we have DKB which is just Mario Odyssey with even less imagination. Mash the button until you find banana. Fight a piss easy boss. Fall to next layer. Repeat ad nauseum. Game looks okay but the lighting, visuals and the atrocious framerate really just is inexcusable at this point. If Nintendo cannot make games that run on their own hardware, then maybe they need to be making more powerful consoles. This game even has the audacity to pull the Twilight Princess gambit where you swap out the new villain (Zant/Void Kong) with the old villain (Ganon/Take A **** Guess) appropo of absolutely nothing. Stunningly lazy and stupid.
I will say the same thing about Chapters 3 and 4 as I did about 1 and 2: I like the characters and I like the world, but I don't love them. That disconnect is driven by each episode being mostly faffing about and then 5 minutes of plot advancement. That coupled with the absurdly long wait time between chapters is killing my enthusiasm for the game. I'll probably like DR well enough once it's all out, but the release schedule is drastically hurting my enjoyment of it.
An infinite sea of trash on a trash platform made of trashy trash from my trash bin. Seriously, this is insulting to have to pay for, and Nintendo needs to get its head out of its butt if it thinks this is worth paying for.
I mean, props for reusing the MK8 engine and (mostly) running at a stable 60fps, but this is one of the worse entries of Mario Kart I have ever played. The open world is mostly barren filled with sparse challenges that are not rewarding. The music is mostly rehashes of classic music with very little fare in terms of new music. The rubberbanding of the AI is the worst it has EVER been in this series. And to top it all off, the items are SO overpowered as to render and skill in racing completely moot. I do not know what they were thinking with this iteration, but I absolutely hate playing it. Congrats Nintendo.
I loved D2016 and Eternal, but this...I don't know what this is. It's dull, boring, plodding, soulless, unfunny, and surprisingly unfun to play. I don't know. They somehow took the run and gun, silly, self aware tone of the last two games and made it serious and broody and BORING. They released a good trailer, but man most of this game is just not those bits. The exclusion of a Mick Gordon OST also I think killed the atmosphere. I cannot think of a single song or moment where the music or sound design impressed me AT ALL. Also Marty Stratton should be fired.
A true masterpiece. A game that understands that "homage to a bygone era of RPGs" means you have to put in the effort to not only emulate said era but have a great game on top of that people actually want to play. Excellent music, terrific story and characters, and a combat system that is fun and creative to boot. A rare game that spoke to me on a deep level about grief, rage, and chronic illness that has a voice and character steeped in the real life experience of its creator. You cannot fake the emotions that this game is utilizing in its characters, and that makes them all the more powerful and touching. A true tour de force that made both myself and my partner weep openly. The most earnest 10/10 I can possibly muster.
It's a pretty good little top down LTTP-like multiplayer game. The game has a lot going for it: the leveling up is fun, exploring the worlds with the different powers is fun, the dungeons are challenging. The game is let down, however, by a host of issues: online multiplayer is only somewhat stable, there are a ton of weird bugs/glitches, the enemy power levels feel wildly unfair at times and unbalanced, and the dungeons become repetitive after a while. Still, I love the core of this game and would love for the devs to make a sequel that improves upon this foundation.
How to not make a compelling murder mystery 101:
- Characters have amnesia
- Characters have an annoying assistant
- WAY TOO MANY CHARACTERS
- Just kidding we murdered half the cast after the prologue, lol
- Unskippable cutscenes
- Unskippable dialogue heavy infodumps that don't actually tell you anything useful etc etc etc
I, at time of writing, am still digesting the full scope and story of this game; I might still be doing so in a month's time, but I know my opinion will not change. This game is fantastic. Strictly as a game, it's a fairly straight forward walking sim with not as much gameplay as I would prefer, but the story, writing, characters, pacing, world, sound design, voice acting, and just overall /style/ really nail everything they set out to achieve. This story hit me at exactly the right in time in my life, and I cannot thank the creator's enough for making it. Brilliantly done.
Very rarely do I play a game and wish I could give it a negative score. Zero is too high praise for this absolute waste of code. It's ugly, broken, dull, dreary, stupid, shallow, and everything is broken. Also the story is terrible.
This game is still a banger, and I completed it here as well as back on the Gamecube. I genuinely miss the thoughtfully written characters, bonkers story, and slightly anarchic sense of humor the Paper Mario games used to have. How clever of Nintendo to rerelease two of the greatest Mario RPGs on Switch, only to accentuate how terrible the past two decades of Mario RPGs have become.
Knowing the pedigree behind this game, it's amazing to me how cheap it feels. The mechanics are wholly uninspired, button-mashing action genre fair. The main gimmick of the game feels like a bizarre cross between Siren and Geist, but it never does anything interesting with its own mechanics. The characters are atrociously written, unengaging, and have absolutely no agency or personality in their own stories. To top it all off, the overarching story is written like a 6-year-old vibrating between planes of reality on a caffeine high who doesn't know how to write complete sentences but then, as the energy wears off, slowly forgets what they were writing about and leaves the thought dangling, never to be completed. It is a complete and utter mess.
I will give a bit of credit for the devs actually creating a new world for the game to take place in. It's very pretty, but that is about the only nice thing I can say about the game. Combat is really samey and doesn't evolve much as the game progresses. The movelist is very very repetitve and lacks the creativity seen in earlier titles. The world is well animated but the writing is, well, bland. The Mario RPGs live and die on their characters, the writing, and the pacing, but this game story is just so unbearably uninteresting and flat. Also, they /literally/ copy and pasted the intro from the recent Dreamworks Mario movie into this game to start the game off. The laziness on display is staggering.
I adore Red Candle's first two games, but this is their first work that I could not enjoy. I love the art style, world, characters, and sound design, but unfortunately the gameplay just isn't up to par and copies all the worst design elements from Hollow Knight: repetitive world that isn't fun to explore, checkpoints way too far away from boss rooms forcing repeated tasks and backtracking, soulslike combat that feels more frustrating than fun, few actual rewards for killing bosses and progressing, boss-type characters that immediately become regular enemies in the world thus becoming repetitive. This type of gameplay loop just is not fun for me.
I quite enjoy the retro, OG Gameboy aesthetic, but this game is horrendously designed and deliberately wastes the player's time. I got to around the 100th floor or something, and the game locked me out of the story ending because I died a bunch of times on an earlier floor in a specific way, and then the game "invisibly" said, "Right you can continue but we're not going to tell you 40 floors from now, you have already screwed yourself." Any type of game design that deliberately lies to the player and wastes the player's time, can get in the bin. You can have your meta-narrative. You can have your discovery of new things on repeated playthroughs. That is fine, but do NOT waste my time and then pretend that you think that is a clever subversion. Unacceptable.
I loved this game growing up, and this is the most faithful remake I have ever seen on modern systems. It is still as charming, funny, and a musical BOP as it was back on the SNES, and now a whole new generation of gamers get to experience this timeless classic. You cannot improve on perfection, but a new coat of paint is nice every now and then.
Man, what a waste of potential this game is. It is so close to being excellent but just doesn't quite get there. I love the premise, the monster designs, the gross and weird story, the sound design. There is a lot to love here. Unfortunately, the game is buggy as all hell and is largely held back by complex systems within the game that are not well explained to the player. At all. If the game had a lot more polish and a more consistent gameplay loop, this would have been incredible.
Great story, characters, and sound design. Unfortunately the gameplay is little more than walking around and talking to people, so I would've liked more interactivity within the game world and more gameplay mechanics.
I love the idea of a puzzle game that creates its puzzles based on language and learning through action. I thought the story and the world were beautifully realized. I just don't think the large amount of forced stealth sections in the middle of the game really was the best choice. It killed the pacing for me and made me not want to continue playing.
Pretty fun little hodgepodge of ideas. I'd really say only 15 or so of the 50 were actually fun enough to keep playing, but I like the spirit of what they were trying to do. Great little snacky fun but not a great amount of depth.
I love P&C adventure games, and I've played my fair share of text parsers, but this game just frustrated me too much to finish it. I kept running into road blocks because I knew what I had to do, but the game wouldn't let me actually /do/ it. Needlessly finnicky with prepositions, certain items can't be used until they are looked at AND THEN examined in your inventory, vague objectives that scream "nonsense video game logic". I truly truly wanted to love this game, but I just couldn't.
It's very good fun with a bunch of friends together, but ultimately the game is just too damned restrictive in the first 20 hours of play. You constantly need skills you can't purchase. You constantly need money you can't earn because there aren't enough missions that you can complete at your insultingly low level. The seeds of an amazing game are here, but the balance is just way way off the mark.
Horror devs, here is my advice to you. To all of you: If you don't have a good story to tell, then don't make a horror game. Full stop. Your loving homage to "insert legacy horror franchise here" is not enough. This game is just junk. Thoughtless, meandering, soulless junk.
Game is a decent little Metroidvania, but it commits too many sins of "not telling the players crucial information to progress". It's cute enough and fun to explore but the lack of story and music really dragged the whole experience down for me.
A quality little horror game with great characters and great atmosphere. I am taking off a few points because while I liked the story the game told, the ending left a lot to be desired. There were lots of seemingly answerable questions left unanswered, which didn't satisfy. Also the puzzles in the final area were mostly unintelligible nonsense.
Absolutely lovely game with great atmosphere, characters, story, as well as sound and puzzle design. A really really fun game held up even higher by its excellent story and world-building. This will definitely be my fav horror game of 2024. Simply excellent.
This is just a physics platformer wearing the skin of a Zelda game and it is tedious and boring. I hope you like spawning a rock, grabbing a rock, and chucking it at an enemy because that's all I ever did. Zelda cannot defend herself, and so the combat becomes an aggravating slog. The overuse of TOTK style bokoblin camps, the BLATANT copy and pasting of TOTK/BOTW style runes into the game, and the AWFUL UI choices that everyone complained about in TOTK are here. Completely unaltered. It is like Nintendo wants to homogenize every /single/ Zelda game into the same boring, tedious, unfun experience. If this is where the series is going, then I'm done. I refuse to play new Zelda installments that aren't well thought out, challenging, and do not treat the player like an absolute moron. Utter trash.
The voice acting and sound design alone make this game an absolute delight to play. Story is pretty good, if a little short overall. Still, I absolutely loved it. What a delightful, fun, imaginative world these devs have created.
I was enjoying the game up until the 50% completion mark, roughly 25 hours in, but then the game devolves into a series of ****, unfun, sometimes headache inducing mazes. It's just not dreadful. Additionally the design choices which in the early game are annoying at first, begin to /actively/ punish the player and inconvenience them with no other reason than, "Haha f*** you" in the late game. All my good will from the first impressions with the game has been drained away as the end game approaches and the level of player inconvenience and **** ramps up. Really frustrating.
In 13 years, Remedy has learned absolutely nothing about how to tell a compelling story. The writing, dialogue, and characters are largely archetypical junk. Not a single, original thought in the game's head. The gameplay is either boring gunplay or placing sticky notes on a big wall. In order for this style of paranormal/investigative game to be engaging, the story has to be rock solid and compelling. Spoiler warning, it isn't.
Wonderful indie MM-like game with great art, great level design, and STELLAR music. I hope they make a sequel one day because this game nails everything it sets out to do. 9.8/10
The game is decent, but it in no way comes close to rivaling Mania's return to form or for that matter some Sonic fan games in recent years. The controls feel slow and plodding at times, the bosses are universally awful, the music is nothing special, and it runs at sub-30 fps on Switch. Just not great all around. Oh, and I hope you enjoy grinding out the levels over and over for medals which you use to buy stupid online cosmetics or paying microtransactions 'cause you know Sega will patch those in at some point. Not good enough.
This isn't in any way an evolution or expansion of 2D Mario platformers, it is just the same kid-centric, banal, "New" series in a slightly different coat of paint. There is no unifying central game mechanic, no power ups that are used in interesting ways, no new or interesting music. It is boring and unchallenging. If it weren't for the per level "acid trip" segments, the levels would absolutely play themselves. I just don't understand the hype with this game. Mario Maker 2 is more of an evolution in terms of what players can do and play and the vast majority of that game's content is user-generated. I'll give Wonder a few points for style and artistic flair, but that's it. Nintendo nowadays is afraid of making anything that doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. Back in the day they made platformers that were fun, fair, and challenging, but now...this is just junk.
Really solid game, and I'm glad Capcom released a finished product this time around /cough SF5 cough/. Let's go through the pros/cons: - Pros: - Love the classic versus modern control options. Accessibility is always a good thing, and I know /tons/ of people personally who could never get into fighting games who are loving SF6. - The netcode is magic and works almost flawlessly most of the time. - Fights and mechanics feel really good and fluid. - I love the depth of tutorials, character guides, and combo trials. It really lets you learn all the in-depth mechanics of the game and try them out in real time. - Love most of the new characters. They feel varied and interesting in their personalities and playstyles. - Cons: - World Tour mode is boring as hell. It’s a never-ending deluge of stop and start. Go here, cutscene. Go there, Luke texts you fifteen times. Go here, cutscene. It’s really really boring to me, and I wish they had made it more interesting. I understand that it slowly teaches you the mechanics of the game, and it’s a great way to learn the mechanics as a beginner, but…I personally am not a beginner, and I just was not enjoying it at all. - You /cannot/ unlock alt costumes for characters unless you grind for a /long/ time in World Tour, and as previously mentioned, I could not stand this mode. The only other way to unlock the costumes are microtransactions… - Capcom couldn’t resist its usual greedy, corporate BS: the game locks all character costumes and color variants behind either grinding in game, or microtransactions. And you must grind A LOT to unlock any one single thing, which is the usual corpo strategy for pressuring you to skip the grind and just pay real money. It’s **** **** by design, and I hate it. - Mobile Game Economy: there are as far as I can tell FOUR different currencies in the game, all designed to make you grind and to introduce the confusopoly to the player. Again, it’s an awful corpo practice that makes the game confusing and the rewards even harder to attain. Awful awful awful corpo greed. - Drive Rush at time of writing eats your inputs, meaning you as the other player seeing someone Drive Rush run towards you cannot react. It’s a massive oversight by the designers and needs to be fixed ASAP. - There is a game-breaking exploit in the triple input assist button mode at time of writing. It basically makes ranked unplayable. Needs to be fixed ASAP. - Arcade Mode is a great addition as always. I love classic SF lore in the Arcade Mode, but the stories for each character feel absolutely barebones and don’t add much to the lore of the game or the universe. It could be so much more, but right now it’s very lackluster. I want to rate this game higher, as I am loving playing with my friends again…but the manipulative single player and the corporate greed on display make it impossible.
Excellent gameplay and a very rewarding gameplay loop. You have four classes, lots of weapons and side unlocks, and a HUGE variety of missions. This to me is truly the successor to four-player co-op games like Left 4 Dead. It starts off tough and gets easier to the more you play and unlock, but the game is smart enough to add new difficulty modes but also mission modifiers to help keep the game feeling fresh. I love it, but if I had to offer a few criticisms, it would be these: 1. Make emotes and colors universal to all classes once unlocked. Seriously, there's no reason not to given how rare those items are. 2. Add more guns or variations on equipment within classes. Once you've unlocked all the guns, it kinda feels like you have nothing left to do with that class. Love this game! Keep up the great work devs!
I loved Breath of the Wild. While it is a great game, it's not perfect, and Nintendo really had an opportunity to improve upon the foundation laid out by BOTW with a direct sequel...instead they chose to play it completely safe and rerelease BOTW as TOTK. I call this game "Copy/Paste - Find and Replace". Here are just a few examples: 1. The music is almost completely copy pasted throughout the entire game; I think I noticed 5 new themes while playing. 2. Ascend rune is just Revali's Gale but now it goes through solid matter. 3. The time rune no longer freezes time but moves time backwards slowly. 4. You wake up in a shrine with zero powers. 5. You start on the “Great” area and can’t leave until you gain your 4 base powers. 6. Zelda is missing for some reason. 7. Zelda's Memories are now called Dragon’s Tears. 8. You have to complete Zonai Shrines instead of Sheikah Shrines to open up warp points. 9. You have to find all the same armor sets. 10. You go to each race's region to beat a themed dungeon. 11. You have to collect stupid Korok seeds. 12. Weapons are very very fragile (possibly more so than BOTW). 13. You gather the four Champions to help you fight Ganon. 14. You have to remove “Corruption” within each race’s region. 15. You have to complete a dungeon in each race’s region. 16. Sheikah Towers are now Skyview Towers. The only new gameplay aspect in this entire game is the fusing/crafting system, which is so needlessly finnicky and restrictive as to deter me wanting to use it. I hope you like building long planks as a ramp or bridge, because that’s largely all you do. Sure, you can build vehicles to your heart’s content, but you have a limited “energy” meter that drains within 5-10 seconds meaning you cannot actually USE any of those vehicles for any meaningful length of time. How do you upgrade your energy meter? Grinding. Lots of grinding. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to grind for 20-30 hours just to improve a **** battery. I want to enjoy a Zelda game, not play an MMO. Another thing that bothers me is that all of the shrines are stupidly easy. There wasn’t a single one that even /remotely/ used the new mechanics in interesting ways. Nintendo is so proud of its new crafting system that solving a puzzle often times, you guessed it, means you build a ramp or a bridge to cross a gap. Whoopdie damn do. The temples are seriously the worst in the series. They are all THE SAME TEMPLE, with variations on “how many buttons do I need to press”? You just wander around until you find a button, then you press it. Do this a few times, fight the boss. Temple over. There are no puzzles, no items, no thought. It’s just so incredibly lazy, and I don’t know why they designed them this way. And why is Zelda relegated to not being a character in this game? In BOTW she was very sympathetic, compelling, and well written. In this one they make her disappear and then she doesn’t have any character change or growth throughout the entire game. She’s there to be a magical mcguffin, and it’s just sad. I wanted her to play a larger role, help Link alongside him this time around, maybe even contribute to gameplay. Nope. Go sit on the sideline and do nothing, Zelda. You aren’t important. I criticize this game because I know Nintendo is capable of more, and quite frankly this game is just creatively empty to me. Same map, same gameplay, same exact story, same beats…and apparently it took them over 6 years to make. I keep asking myself, how is that possible? I don’t have an answer.
It gets a few points for the nice new coat of paint and a few gameplay tweaks, but that's all this game has going for it. It's just an imposter wearing the skin of a better game. Let's break down a few things: Tone: The tone of RE4 was one that perfectly balanced action and b-movie horror camp. Leon was a seasoned special ops veteran years after the events of RE2. He was smart, sassy, a bit of a flirt, but still took his job seriously. Several of his iconic lines from the original are here in this **** their delivery falls completely flat because they are being delivered by RE2-Remake Leon, not RE4 Leon. And that shift in character and tone /fundamentally/ changes everything about this game. RE2-Remake Leon is a boring misery guts, and that tone carries over here, ruining the vibe that defined RE4. Dialogue: Many of the famous Leon sassy lines from RE4 are here, but again they don't fit with this version of Leon. It feels forced, and I hate that feeling. Additionally Luis' slightly flirtatious, lecherous character has been completely sanded off. In RE4 he makes a passing remark about Ashley's chest...which she rightfully calls him out for and chews him out. Removing Ashley's agency and removing this dialogue from the game removes these fun character moments. There's also dialogue removed where Ashley offers herself to Leon after everything they've been through, giving a lead female character a nice bit of sexual agency that the remake takes away. Leon turns her down of course, he's a professional and not a perv, and it was nice to see that interaction play out realistically and maturely. There's just so much character and sass from the original game that seems to have been sanded off somewhere along the way. Color: This may be a petty complaint, **** the RE engine games are really dark and look washed out in their environment design. The original, while mostly awash with browns and greens, was still brightly lit and looked dynamic due to great art direction. The RE4-Remake environments certainly look more detailed, but everything just looks too cluttered and dark. There's something about the design for many of the REmakes in the RE Engine that just does not work for me. It lacks...vibrancy and sense of artistic variation. This leaves environments just feeling monotonous somehow. Gameplay: I don't understand the decision to add meaningless busywork to RE4-Remake. The original had lots of optional short bonus objectives for money, but those were quick and usually just for extra collectibles (completely optional). In the RE4-Remake, there are way too many "go here kill 3 rats" / "backtrack into another area and break something" side missions. They feel like open world busywork, and it feels like you /have/ to do them because the loot system in the remake is so much stingier with quality drops. Character Models: Like...there are a few characters I think that are actually as good as RE4 or better in the remake (Hunnigan and Mendez look terrific), but Ashley looks like Leon with a longer, stupider haircut. Salazar looks /atrocious/. Saddler looks...okay albeit bland. Again, RE4 even with its limited graphics gave these characters such life and personality with good art direction, but the stiff, awkwardness of the RE Engine models just look...like **** It's a fine way to play RE4 if that's all you **** it's not as good as the original. Not even remotely close.
An absolute blast **** with a weird sense of humor, great gameplay, and lots of bonus challenges for the 100% completionist nutters out there. The soundtrack and sound design are also top notch and fun. Indie devs once again prove, if Nintendo isn't going to make a new game in the series they like (in this case Warioland specifically), it's up to them to fill that void with their own great games. Great work, devs!
Points for excellent sound design and aesthetic, but honestly...that's all I can give points for. I love sci-fi and I love horror, but this game doesn't utilize its sci-fi setting in any interesting or meaningful way, and the horror isn't scary. The story is threadbare and doesn't really go anywhere. The game constantly dumps "lore" about the world in which the game takes place, but it's mostly useless information about different replika models. The story doesn't integrate with the lore, and the lore doesn't inform the story or the world. Lastly, forcing you to have a small inventory does not present a "challenge" as the devs put it. It wastes the player's time by forcing them to backtrack /constantly/ to sparse save rooms to dump their items. Additionally an item that is WORN BY THE PLAYER, SHOULD NOT TAKE UP AN INVENTORY SLOT. Are you actually taking the piss or are you just mean? Seriously...I wanted to love this game, but it just has too many **** design choices and poor story elements. Not good enough.
I wanted to rate this game higher. I was loving it until I got to the second boss and then everything went to (golf) hell. It seems to me that the latter third of the game just was not tested properly, as it is riddled with bugs. I had multiple instances of the game softlocking itself during The Explorer bossfight: - Terrain deformations mutating and leaving my ball in a place that it couldn't be hit - The Explorer hitting her ball into a water hazard and it bouncing in the water indefinitely - The Explorer moving to hit her ball at a new location only to have the terrain reform around her in such a way as to prevent her from moving. I eventually after much trial and error was able to get past The Explorer boss fight, but the area afterwards, The Caverns, was riddled with more bugs. Fire balls don't ignite vines like they are supposed to. The HUD and ball shot tracker disappeared for a round. The ball spin on certain types of terrain just flat out didn't work. The music, pixel art, and presentation are all top notch, but I can't award many points beyond that because I literally cannot complete the game due to the bugs. I reached out to Chuhai Labs on social media and asked if they were working on a patch and was promptly ignored...
Easily the most ambitious game in the series, it unfortunately lacks the focus of the previous games, which let's the whole affair down. The Bayonetta segments of the game are terrific, but the campaign is split into three character campaigns: Bayonetta, Viola, and Jeanne. The other two characters' sections are boring, tedious or both. The game is fun some of the time, just not all the time, and the unfun bits are far too frequent and debilitating. I still think Bayo 2 is the strongest entry in the series.
It needs a lot of work in the fine details, but the core of this game is already great and a lot of fun. If the devs could add in the QOL updates to make playing more smooth, as well as add in more sound effects and map-level feedback, this would be an absolute banger of a Mario Party style game. Great work so far, but it still needs work!
