srf5132

Animal Well is a competent metroidvania that overstays its welcome and relies too heavily on cryptic puzzles for my taste, especially in the "end game". The game starts out as a pretty standard metroidvania. You wander around, find items that make it possible to explore more areas, rinse and repeat. This section is genuinely quite fun. The items are quite novel, and there were many interesting combinations of uses to find. During this phase of the game you will find a number of secret "eggs", which are the games main collectible. In true metroidvania fashion, many of these eggs will not be possible to get until you unlock more movement items, requiring you to backtrack to the item. This backtracking is par for the course for metroidvania fans, but it is more annoying than usual in this game for a couple of reasons. First, the movement of your character and the environment is very slow, even fully upgraded, making backtracking a sludge. Second, some items are locked behind finishing the game the first time, making for a lot of frustrating moments, where I couldn't understand how to get some item, only to look it up out of frustration, realizing that I needed to finish the game first. This is contrary to usual metroidvania logic, where you are compelled to finish whatever you want to before entering the final area, so it would've been nice if this change was communicated more clearly. After the first ending is when the game gets decidedly more annoying. The new items you get from beating the game require you to effectively go through every single room in the game again to find all of the "eggs". I personally found many of these to be very hard to find, and often come down to missing one tile on the screen or, very often, using the flute in the room. You _could_ certainly do all of this without looking up a guide, but be prepared to go into every room and use every item in it in every conceivable location, because otherwise you almost certainly will miss things. This section was annoying and I lost my enjoyment of the game at this stage. I think that all in all the first part of the game, with maybe half as many eggs would've been about the right length for me. Once you've finished the egg collectathon, strap in, because now there's a whole other tier of secrets to find. "Bunnies". This is where the game goes from puzzles that are frustrating and boring to ones that are so cryptic they are essentially only possible with help from the internet. I don't like these sorts of things in games because they drive artificial hype from people finding things out on the internet and sharing ideas, but actually solving the puzzle doesn't feel very rewarding, since for almost all of them you aren't actually able to solve it yourself. Now, this wouldn't be so bad on its own, but those super puzzles bleed into the rest of the game so that I ended up spending a lot of time trying to solve these cryptic super puzzles, only to realize that they were not really meant to be solvable and weren't for the eggs I was now in the business of collecting. So, on a whole, there is a decent metroidvania here, but I would recommend just putting it down after the first set of credits, as everything that comes after that is just too frustrating and tedious to enjoy.

In nioh, we saw a fairly generic action game, with some very brutal mechanics. The game was fine, but I wasn't a huge fan. In nioh 2, the studio was cearly coming into their own and the game was just short of amazing. It had a lot more flexibility in play style, and the gameplay was a lot less action focused, with more to explore and do. Additionally, it was much easier, and where I couldn't finish nioh, I had little trouble getting to the end of nioh 2. This game feels like a step backwards. The exploration is a lot less rewarding, the combat is much more minimalistic, and the challenge is turned up to 11. Perhaps for some diehard action junkies this will hit the spot, but I have no desire to force myself to use the unforgiving parry system, so this is a pass from me.

Pokemon Violet was overall a fun and engrossing experience, despite some noticeable issues. This review comes after beating the story and catching ~75% of the pokemon in the game, which amounts to the vast majority that are available in just one of the 2 version. The main pokemon I had left to catch were evolutions from past gens that I didn't feel like grinding out. I think that based on this I have seen enough to give a fairly balanced apraisal. First, the pros: * The open world worked well and allowed a lot of freedom without ever feeling overwhelming. There was always something new to do but it never fell into the trap of many open world games of overloading the player with options. * The new pokemon were mostly all pretty good, though there weren't many stand out hits outside of the starters. * The returning pokemon were very good choices and there were hardly any duds. The fact that there were 400 across both games was exciting, and in general most of the new areas it was exciting to find out what pokemon you were going to run into. * The tera system is interesting and should make for some exciting competetive games. * Random battles are gone. This may be a con for some, but it really makes filling in the pokedex much more fun and rewarding imo. * There were some decently challenging battles. Obviously this series isn't know for its difficulty, but I think in a nuzzlelock or perma death run this game might offer some interesting challenges. * The graphics worked well. They weren't the next step forward in realism, but they handle the scenes and pokemon well, and seeing the various emotions and movements of the pokemon is truly a joy. It amazes me that they make so many different characters all have individual flairs and neat quirks. * The world was fun to traverse, once you've unlocked some movement items. This is a must for any open world game and largely works here, much better than I expected tbh. The cons: * Did have a few crashes, especially seemed to happen when walking into buildings. * Performance was bad at times, but I dont think I had nearly as many issues as I hear reported. Note that I played this docked on a first gen switch and it was smooth most of the time. The main exceptions were some late game areas when a lot of things were on screen at once, and also in the water. However, if you can live with the ocassional choppy frames, it wasn't really worse than virtually any other game I have played at release in recent memory, and the game is still playable with little issue. * The story is not what you're here for, but still pretty aweful. It is hard to write kids game stories that have real impact, but even compared to many of the other games in the series, this one is pretty bad. * The school idea was sort of neat, and it felt like they wanted relationship building like in persona, but that all fell pretty flat. * The raid battles are pretty bad. I didn't like these in sword and shield, and they aren't improved here. Thankfully you can largely ignore these. * The late game is a bit disapointing. This is honestly probably my biggest issue with the game right now. Obviously you can fill your pokedex and redo gyms, but there's just not much with any meat to it. This is something that pokemon has struggled with a lot recently. The high point of the series on this subject I would put at gold/silver, where you got essentially an entire extra pokemon quest to go on. I'm not sure what the ultimate solution would be for this, but it would just be nice to have an adventure where you have a fully powerful team but still have lots of places left to explore with new pokemon in them. Perhaps we will get something to fulfil this in dlc in a few months, but for now its pretty paltry. So, there you have it. i would say that if you like pokemon games you will probably like this one. It improves on the series in interesting and fun ways, but it is still a pokemon game at heart. If you can overlook a few issues, some of which may be adjusted in the not too distant future, then there are many hours of fun to be had here.

This game has a lot of heart and ambition, and at its best it captures some of that classic 2D zelda spirit of adventure and mystery. And those highs are indeed very high. The excitement of solving mysteries and unraveling the world of this game has been some of the most fun I've had with a game all year. However, it doesn't always hit its mark, and many of its mysteries end up more frustrating than fun. Some of the late game secrets in particular require long code inputs that often left me scratching my head and searching forums, only to realize I had simply messed up one in a long series of button presses. Additionally, many players will be put off by the difficulty of some of the bosses. There is a "no fail" mode that you can turn on to effectively skip certain fights, but this isn't some really a "feels good" solution for players looking for some challenge without a lot of frustration. I yearn for the day when we can just have difficulty options as standard in games again. So, in sum, I recommend this game strongly for those consumers looking for that sense of wonder and nastolgia, especially for those looking to recapture the feelings they once got from games like Zelda 1 and 3. Just know that in the later parts of the game you should prepare for significant frustrations both due to combat difficulty and obscure puzzles that virtually necesitate using a guide.

Overall, Mortal Shell is a very mediocre game. It controls well, better than most other souls-like games, and the graphic quality is relatively high, with all the shininess and particle effects we've come to expect from unreal engine. Additionally, mortal shell brings a couple of interesting mechanics to the table with a very interesting "harden" mechanic as well as offering a nicely flexible class system. The systems in the game are also very simple, which might be a welcome change of pace for some people that aren't into the deep rpg elements of the souls games. However, for all the good the game brings to the table, it is also very bland and many of the areas and enemies aren't very interesting. One of the things that's so great about the souls games is how vibrant and detailed all of the components of the game. Every area of the games ooze with lore and heavily customized architecture that gives a sense of wonder and mystery, and every boss feels unique and interesting. By contrast, areas in mortal shell seem like randomly arranged sets of themed environment components and the rooms in any given area have a tendency to blend together to the point of easily getting lost. The bosses in mortal shell are also nothing to write home about, as they are primarily just humanoid enemies with a random weapon, except for the last boss, who was a welcome change of pace (though he still wasn't a very good boss in my opinion). Also note that the game is incredibly short, being completable in about a weekend. With all that said, I do think this game is worth playing. It does a lot good, and it is probably the most well-done souls like game besides maybe nioh 2, so if you are a fan of the genre and need something to hold you over before elden ring this will fill an afternoon or so for you. If you aren't a fan of the souls games this probably won't be the one to win you ever, and if you've never played a souls game -- well, just play dark souls or Bloodborne and come back to this if you get addicted.

This game seems like it would be good, but to be perfectly honest it is way too difficult for me so I haven't seen very much of it. I haven't been able to get through the first biome. I'm sure this game would be cool if it had an easy mode, but as it is I feel like I wasted $60, don't make the same mistake I did.

This game was somewhat of a disappointment. It was a really good idea, and It has a lot of polish, but I feel the polish is perhaps in the wrong areas. The terminal itself is far too basic to even really call it a terminal (doesn't even have the "echo" command). I would love to see a game like this with a more fully fledged terminal (complete with vim, emacs, grep, awk etc.), and perhaps one that even included such tools as "metasploit" that a true pen-tester would be using on a regular basis. However, given that it is virtually the only modern "terminal emulator" game, it deserves a look, at least until someone makes a better version of the same concept.