Doesn't fix many of the original game's shortcomings while simultaneously looking quite ugly compared to the sharp look of the original's pixel art. The one thing that seemed improved was getting more XP in the arena, which cuts down grinding. Not a reason to choose this over the DS version IMO.
I didn't even get into the game. The menu graphics options are busted for me and that's an immediate abort. Directly into the trash it goes and mashing that refund button. How embarrassing.
Probably one of the most grindy, boring Castlevania games ever made. I can't say I'm surprised in hindsight that this game put the nail in the coffin for new exploration-action games from Konami for many years. Aria of Sorrow was the last great Castlevania game before all these crappy downgrades dropped on the DS.
It's a fairly safe Classicvania clone. The sprites are pretty ugly and the story is throwaway. But if you're bored and looking for something Not-Castlevania, this is it.
Maybe it'd be fine if it was made for the GBA 25 years ago, but the sprites are ugly as hell and not much improved over the first game. The story is written like I'm supposed to care, but the MC is even worse than Shanoa in OoE. I didn't make it very far because the game feels like crap to play. When I've played indie games like Cave Story and Hollow Knight, movement feeling worse than many Flash games I remember playing back in 2005 is quite bad; especially for a sequel title.
Some of the worst Mario games ever made. Boring, bad camera, and Mario controls even worse than the previous GCN and N64 entries. I've never played more than a few hours of either game because they are so dull and formulaic to play.
Marginally better than the first game, still not particularly interesting. It didn't hold my interest for more than a few hours. All the problems introduced in the first game are still present.
Never was a fan. Everything seemed bad compared to M64 except the visuals. The camera being so erratic hurt Mario's mobility, too, with certain maneuvers like the the stop-somersault becoming hard to consistently perform because Mario moves in relation to the camera orientation. I got bored within a few hours. Unless these were your first Mario games, they're really not particularly good or special.
Plays like garbage, the map is terrible, and generally just a disgrace to the Metroid series. The lore dumps by visor scanning might be one of the earliest examples of this terrible idea that I've played. I can't say I'm surprised when Retro Studios is just the same devs that made C-tier Turok on the N64. So, they went and made D-tier Metroid on the GCN.
It's much better than the first game, but that's not saying much. The game is pretty boring in the first few hours and I didn't feel like playing it beyond that. Suikoden II really doesn't even hold a candle to the worst of the FF games from 4th and 5th gen.
Unbelievably bad. Combat is terrible, the new MC is dumb, and everything feels like a bad Platinum game (redundant, but still worth clarifying). I never thought I would see a worse NG entry than NG3, but here we are. Thank GabeN for allowing me to refund this garbage after an hour of pretending like it would ever become worth playing.
I tried this sequel out after I saw they were re-releasing the first game's campaign with souped up features from this sequel. Unfortunately, while it is a little better, it's still very unwieldy and kind of bad. If you play slowly and stealthily, it's monotonous and cryptic about what you are even supposed to be doing. If you go in guns blazing, the noise will attract EVERY ENEMY in the map to come and kill you. I was especially disappointed that there was no option to turn off the player's artificial lighting in the 'view cone.' For a game about shadows and stealth, having an arbitrary 'flashlight' all over the screen is incredibly irritating. There is night vision, so I can always turn that on if I'm stuck in a dark area. I feel like the format for this game and the original should have been an OTS third-person game like Splinter Cell and it would likely be amazing. But having verticality of obstacles in a top-down 2D game is quite dumb. At least have the format be a pitched/angled isometric view like Crusader: No Remorse/Regret. A nice effort, but still not really worth any more of my time before requesting a refund.
Like a mash-up of Hotline Miami and Splinter Cell that isn't remotely as good as either. As other users have said, lots of trial and error when enemies can see you WAY outside of the screen and you have no idea they're there unless you painstakingly go through trial and error to pinpoint all the enemies before moving through an area. Contrived, bad stealth. I guess there are guns, too, but good luck fighting off an entire map's worth of enemies if you make any loud noise. That means it's a bad stealth game OR a bad top-down shooter, as you choose it to be.
I had a feeling as soon as I couldn't get my XInput controller to register at launch that I was probably going to be in for a bad time. The tactics adaptation for Metal Slug immediately falls into typical rogue-lite garbage where 'HA HA! YOU DIED! But do please keep replaying the same boring section until you get appropriate unlocks to advance' comes into effect. Rogue-like or bust. Give me all the tools to succeed from the outset and let RNG dictate each individual run. I don't want to utterly fail a mission because game features aren't unlocked yet in Level 1 - nor do I want to replay Level 1 twice for no reason, then replay Levels 1 and 2 again with a new game feature, ad nauseam every time until Level x. Of course they nailed the art style and vibe, but I played for about 30 minutes and immediately started mashing the REFUND button.
Cliched story, had to turn off all the annoying voices, combat becomes an unfortunate combination of moronic AI that doesn't follow orders and with fairly bad real-time action that falls into a boring, repetitive pattern for many fights. I got to a particularly poorly-designed puzzle and decided that after about five hours, I don't think it's a great idea to invest my time in the remaining 40-or-however-many hours this game has left. I still think Phantasia is probably the best one in this series and don't think I'll be playing anymore since Symphonia is among the top three games in the series; and it's quite bad.
The opening couple of hours had me rather enjoying the atmosphere and gameplay. I had issues getting my controller to work and eventually ended up just using a joy2key solution (QJoypad for Linux) to map buttons to keyboard controls. As much as I was having a good time, the game abruptly changed to a (poorly done) work simulator for several minutes and absolutely killed the vibe. What a completely stupid, pretentious decision to make instead of just hinting at the connection between the game world and the protagonist's 'IRL' counterpart. It could have been handled much better with a brief cutscene and then let me continue exploring the game world and remaining immersed. I wish devs wouldn't beat me over the head with their personal problems in a game. Subtlety and metaphor go a long way instead of just 'WORK **** OMG SO DEPRESSED YOU GUISE ;_;'
Full disclosure: I got this at launch for free through an Epic Games Store promotion. I loved the demo for this game and expected more of the same lightheartedness through the rest of the campaign. Sadly, the game starts taking itself far too seriously and the mission structure becomes increasingly monotonous and repetitive (genuinely, every day ends with driving to your home and begins with driving to the main office for cutscenes). A good concept that regrettably didn't pan out well. The game itself seems well made and the atmosphere is great. It seems like a Goat Simulator type game that might be good down the road for a dollar and to kill some time.
It caught me off guard that this game is a bit more like Odallus than a straight Ninja Gaiden NES clone. While the game generally does a good job of capturing the feel of an old NES game, the abilities that you get later in the game have some unforgivable control problems that are baked-in. The dash triggering the horizontal displacement slash at the worst possible times made me drop the game and not look back. Giving the player the ability to dash and re-tread old levels for power-ups is a nice touch for a Rondo-like/MMX-like game. That makes it all the more unfortunate that going through the levels faster and more powerful than the first time feels so much worse when you die to instant death spikes because the basic attack now rams you full speed ahead past enemies and into hazards. I also should mention that the story segments occur way too frequently considering how bland the story actually is. I can't really recommend this game due to the low amount of polish. I am disappointed that Yacht Club allowed a game like this to release with their name attached.
I made it about halfway before losing interest. There's nothing inherently wrong with the combat and tactics, but they just seem to get stale very quickly. The writing isn't particularly good and the announcer gets increasingly annoying, despite turning his comments down to 'rare' in the settings. I think being stuck with limited characters and their special abilities while the enemy variety massively increases over the first four episodes also has the effect of disengaging the player (e.g. why is the enemy's interesting variety outpacing my party's interesting variety?). Good effect and I hope they do better the next time around.
The six-year wait was not worth it. It feels like Team Cherry took everything they learned after working on the original Hollow Knight for several years and threw it out the window. The combat is horrid and for the nearly ten hours I played, did not come anywhere close to the satisfaction I had while playing HK1. The map unlocking is still incredibly annoying and, while I know people defend it from the first game, I dislike it for exploration action games like Metroid. It's not immersion-enhancing to have to rest to fill out the map - it's tedious and boring. Overall skill progression felt much worse than the HK1. The mix of rosary beads and shards felt incredibly unbalanced and stupid to me. The characters were boring and now everything feels unnecessarily chatty. Again, one of the strong points of the first game was environmental storytelling, adding to the mystery of the world. Bosses and checkpoints all feel formulaic and unsatisfying, as well. By contrast, I played Islets a couple of years ago and that indie crew made two Metroid-like games in a row that were both amazing. Now that they have a third on the way, I guess I will look forward to that now that Silksong has been a complete disappointment for me.
I ended up refunding this game within the two hour window for a number of reasons. First, the writing is really pathetically poor. The characters are some of the mopiest, overly emotional lot I've ever had the displeasure to witness in a game. The world just really seems like art vomit all over in an attempt to impress, but likely over half the things that are seen during the intro are just from the EGS store and smattered around the opening town. Gameplay was nothing to write home about if you've played SMRPG and Legend of Dragoon. I've had this review deleted once and edited against my consent a second time. There's really no need for subversion if it's that good. After hitting the island and a giant nonsensical cinematic dump, you're set to start exploring the Paintress' island - again, looking like linear, generic asset store environments. I didn't make it much farther because performance was really poor on my system thanks to UE5 generally being a garbage engine (or developers not understanding how to optimize asset usage?) and wasting some of my 2 hr. window on trying to figure out why nothing was running well, even on medium settings. I gave this game a chance, don't see what all the fuss is about, and ended up just watching the cutscenes on YouTube. A lot of the cutscenes lost their impact for me because I don't think anyone took the time to coordinate the realistic faces with proper blinking animations. So, the characters often have this really uncanny valley stare on their faces and it ruined any of the drama that I'm sure was intended. In the end, I'm glad I had a hunch I should put the $50 back in my piggy bank for something else.
I liked the scenario setup. Blending sci-fi and Greek mythology seemed like a pretty cool combination. The art and environments all looked good. But then you start playing the game and it just does not feel engaging to play or compelling to continue. The map really does make or break a good exploration action game - and this one's just kind of stinks.
I gave it a fair chance, but came away unimpressed. The way the backgrounds for the game were all made from actual dioramas is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the game quickly falls into the modern JRPG pitfalls of 'let's have a basically unnecessary cutscene every 5 steps!' Seriously, not every trivial piece of dialogue needs to change the camera angle for 3 lines of flavor-text dialogue and take control away from me. It's a shame because the combat is actually kind of cool with the slightly tactical targeting for special abilities. Ultimately, I lost interest pretty quickly and wouldn't really recommend this game to anyone who actually enjoys when JRPGs were briefly good.
More like Robocrap. The opening makes it seems like the shooting will be cool as you fight progressively better equipped enemies. However, the walking simulator part ruins the game. Just let this IP RIP.
Visually impressive, but narratively uninteresting. I can't get immersed in the gameplay when the story is so underwhelming. It seems like this game was just an excuse to make a ro-booty main character and a bunch of sci-fi 3D assets. The one-sided monologues are really boring and cringey. I'd avoid or at least make sure you can get a refund if you buy on Steam.
Easily one of the worst JRPGs I've ever played. I can't be sure this was even made by the same person that launched the Final Fantasy series. Maybe this marks the onset of his dementia or something? Impressions are from the first few hours because I dropped this turd hard when I realized how boring it was going to be: the characters are all either dull or annoying, they look stupid as all hell (not hard by JRPG standards), the scenario is just a bunch of garbage thrown together to justify impressive visuals, and the combat is slow, tedious, and unrewarding. I just can't bring myself to care about any of the plot setup that's developed in the opening segments. Having to grind for abilities to even survive the second boss battle was annoying on top of the terribly presented story. I'm sure this game can last 100 hours or something like what I've read elsewhere. But how miserable must your life be to actually slog through this complete crap when you could just play anything else that's probably better?
It doesn't even matter how many bugs were squashed since release - the writing in this game is so pretentious and awful that no amount of gameplay makes me want to sit through all the boring monologues. This game might be one of the best examples of why games didn't need to try and become movies and voice actors are massively overrated when it comes to gaming. Canning this garbage makes me just want to go back and play Fallout: New Vegas instead.
It seems like every game Team Ninja has made since about 2010 has been a stinker - although I don't remember Nioh being quite this bad. Wo Long doesn't really play well as a Souls game or an action game. Combat is simply not captivating between boss fights. Rise of the Ronin seems to also be on this level or boring garbage, as I tried this title out after playing that and refunding it.
Ugly, buggy, seems like the writing is below even childish. When I view the game on Steam, I need to input information to verify I'm 18 or older - but the writing tone is basically for kindergartners. If by some chance you buy, make sure you can get a refund. I think I only played for about 10 minutes before turning it back in to my Steam wallet.
I had a deuce of a time getting this game to even run at all without crashing every 5 minutes. The mod manager/launcher Spine seems to run the game better than Steam natively. In a pinch, even OpenGothic support for Gothic 1 is much better than the native exes. So, now that I can play the game properly, what did I think of it? Well, it's a charming yet middling game with a very bloated map. Once you get the hang of combat and leveling up, the game quickly overcomes its learning curve. There are still a few surprises to be had, though, which are nice touches. I wish fast travel were available sooner instead of running back and forth across the map for early objectives so much. It's one of those games I wish I had used the developer mode earlier to pick a couple of locations and make my own fast travel between them to save some time and tedium. Still, it's better than the awful, broken experience I've had with Gothic for the last 15 years I've owned it and never seen what was so special about it.
Seeing all the high praise for this game, I thought it might be pretty decent. I'd seen it touted as 'reverse Guitar Hero' in a couple of places. Unfortunately, upon playing it, it's not much more than pretentious artgame trash. The music is decent enough, but the gameplay is just Puke Central. You can stand in a corner for seconds at a time while enemy patterns fly by. And then the next match, there's garbage everywhere and you don't really move your character to the rhythm. Just another Undertale wannabe indie.
Easily one of the most trash, one-note games in existence. People must praise it for the art and sound design because the gameplay is dog $#!%. Even when you boost enemy stats with /players, the game is simply uninteresting and wholly unfun to play. An early 'but it's fun with friends!' meme game.
Easily one of the most trash, one-note games in existence. People must praise it for the art and sound design because the gameplay is dog $#!%. Even when you boost enemy stats with /players, the game is simply uninteresting and wholly unfun to play. An early 'but it's fun with friends!' meme game.
I didn't realize this game was still following the Souls formula for combat. Even so, Nioh was pretty decent and added its own fast-paced style to the formula. But after getting past the first boss, my character is just not responding to inputs properly at all. I'll use the parry command and nothing at all will happen more than half the time. I didn't have as many performance issues running the game at 'standard' setting as others have claimed. But the control issues are simply a non-negotiable for an action game. Maybe they'll fix this port in time, but for right now, it is horrid. You can't believe my disappointment having waited so long to play it on PC.
edit: After trying out Wo Long at the recommendation of another friend, I can see the similarities between it and Rise of the Ronin. I think these awkward design decisions have been deliberate on the part of Team Ninja, which is a shame.
I gave this game a shot on recommendation and didn't find it worth my time before two hours was up to refund. At first, it seems like a more refined version of Celceta, but then falls into similar trappings. The story is basically worthless and keeps getting in the way of the action. The addition of supporting cast party members instead of simply following Adol on his adventures leads to chronic interruptions of the gameplay and exploration with trivial cutscenes. The bosses are kind of boring compared to the PS2 era revival games. The generic enemies are interesting briefly before turning into nothing but fodder. Overall, if you've played Celceta or Seven, this entry takes similar missteps and should also be avoided.
I can see why the game's studio got closed shortly after release - this game is downright awful. Beyond the looks, this game is (cutscene - walking/running in open terrain segment) x 3, then a brief smattering of combat, (cutscene - walking/running in open terrain segment) x5, small bit of combat, ad nauseum. The first hour I played was like wandering a boring, empty MMO world. Sure, it's designed by the Mana artist - but that's only a small part of what made the old games so good! Truly one of the most disappointing titles I've finally gotten around to playing. Not worth buying only to refund.
Bland art style, boring story, unsatisfying gameplay, and poor performance. I heard this game was from one of the Dragon Age: Origins directors, so I thought I'd check it out. The first 30 minutes or so with the game was enough for me to request a refund. It feels like there's nothing of substance here and games like Psi Ops already did the telekinetic object manipulation schtick better.
I like the concept, but that game itself seems poorly optimized early on. Combat is good - and yet if you've played Mordhau, you'll appreciate that's already a better game. The RPG elements are fairly low stakes and kind of boring. Even fast travel is slow moving, regardless of whether you are on foot or have a horse. Really, this game just feels like a walking sim for the 10 or so hours I've played to try and get into the story. I got it for free from Epic. I can't imagine dropping money on something like this game, though, for the quality.
Interesting concept, less than great execution. I didn't realize it was a rogue-like initially, but even then, thought the gameplay was serviceable. It kind of reminded me of a scavenging, 3D Blaster Master. What sank me on it was the first boss. I had 1 heal and not enough ammo to even finish killing it. What's the point of pitting a level 1 character against a boss that won't have enough ammo to defeat it?
Almost forgot to mention the optimization seems quite bad. Other games that I can run high-medium at 60 FPS struggled even with most lighting and textures set to medium and low.
Horrible opening, lukewarm combat, bland characters. I was shocked to see that in some places, this is a top 5 Tales game. I turned off combat voices, only to discover that combat sound effects also were disabled. Really? I don't want to hear endless dialogue yammering while fighting and so I just have to hear nothing except the middling music? It really deserves a zero, but I'm being generous here.
It does a lot right. It's just that the plot gets SO MUCH boring padding through the combat. The combat itself might not be so bad except that in every version I've played, the summons and magic stop the combat for over ten seconds each time and really make all the battles far more drawn out than needed. This problem could have been solved by increasing the EXP and having the characters finish battles much faster. As it stands, it's a great concept - it's just too flawed to hold my attention for another 20 hours after already sinking 10 hrs. into it.
It went too far into wanting to be a movie and diverging from what made the first game and Warhead so great. The graphics still hold up, but the gameplay is really poor. The forced narrative segments are not well done and are all over the campaign in the first few hours. I just can't bring myself to ever finish this game because it's so boring and monotonous to play.
'OH YA, BRO - GAME'S SO HARD WITH MY DELIBERATE DESIGN FLAWS!' Yet another fundamentally flawed, artgame, indie title. It's clear they are trying to imitate Hollow Knight, but don't really know what they are doing. Combat is way too fast for how close quarters everything is; or maybe they want you to play slower and more deliberately like MUH DARK SOLES!?! They rest of the movement doesn't really reflect that style, either, though. So, it's really just a confused mess within the opening hour. The first boss is mostly a touch hazard, but your basic attacks are so close range, it's far too easy to bump into it and end up dying or getting stuck in scenery. That kind of goes the same for basic enemies and what damage sponges they are. I wish they would have spent a fraction of the time on game design as they clearly spent writing the EPIC STORY BRO and the art assets. Ultimately not worth the frustrations for such a flawed game - I'm glad the full game was far worse than the demo and that I could make this an easy refund.
Cool art style and concept ruined by endless yammering and an uninteresting story. I shouldn't spend more time in stuck in menus and skipping cutscenes than actually playing the game.
Cool art style and concept ruined by endless yammering and an uninteresting story. I shouldn't spend more time in stuck in menus and skipping cutscenes than actually playing the game.
I had to give this game a few tries before settling on this low score. Leading up to my final attempt to enjoy Dread, I replayed all the previous 2D Metroid games to see if I still even liked them. Fun fact: I do because they are all great games! Then comes Dread, co-developed by a studio that I personally don't think has ever made an even middling game (Mercury Steam). For starters, I didn't even begin to like Dread until over an hour in when I go the Morph Ball ability. I see now why the other games introduced this exploration ability very early on. Having the first or second ability (can't remember if you get wall hanging before or after) be move slowly and stealth is such a drag. From a series that has the Screw Attack and the Speed Booster (which MS also somehow botched), this is perhaps one of the worst design decisions they could have made to draw in a Metroid veteran. It continues to make the whole experience slow and boring.
Another major problem MS couldn't develop well was the balance between progress and backtracking. Backtracking should generally come later and be a reward to re-experience an old area in a new way. MS's approach is to make you bypass a part ('was I even done in this section?'), explore a new area for a few minutes, immediately backtrack and finish the section. I think this starts happening after the second EMMI and is just annoyingly boring. I don't think I made it much past getting the grapple beam because I lost interest. The Speed Booster requiring an activation just killed any further hope I had for this game. It's like every step they took forward, they immediately stepped two backward. For me, the series ended at Fusion and I'll just pretend like this abomination never released. MD is mogged in just about every way by Shadow Complex that released 12 years earlier.
Pretty rinse and repeat twin-stick shooter. Looks good and plays well enough, except I couldn't get my controller to work at all. And controller is the recommended way of playing. YMMV but I didn't care to keep on with the monotony after about 30 minutes.
I've spent more time trying to get this game to work properly again than I've spent playing it. I played through it at launch and then ever since the Ultimate Edition got upgraded for me through the EA Origin client, the game has been a bug-riddled mess. I confirmed that the game logic is broken on PC by trying a copy of DA:O on consoles and it doesn't have nearly the number of skill and combat problems that the PC version has had now since at least 2013. The little bits I've replayed are annoying, though, with companions generally disapproving of any sort of questing for XP or world exploration while also not just f$%^ing off from the party so I don't have to listen to the whining. If I could play this game solo, it would be a much better experience because you must have a party or face the consequences of imbalanced (or bugged, honestly couldn't tell at this point) enemy swarms that kill you in about two seconds. After rewatching a recent playthrough to revisit the ending segments that I haven't seen in over a decade, I realized that it felt like I forgot the ending of the game and wanted to see it again. The only problem with this idea being that the game is really a giant, hollow set of fetch quests in a discount LOTR setting and there wasn't anything except for maybe a few dialogue exchanges towards the end that don't impact the sequel (so far as I could tell, at least). I don't understand the praise for this game when it feels so rushed and unpolished compared to ME1, which I feel was more like BioWare's last true game before the EA influence started taking over their studio management. RIP old BioWare
