Recent reviews by Timrod

Edge of Eternity is a backwards attempt at making a JRPG by western developers who pretty clearly had no idea what they were doing. It looks and plays like an early Xbox 360 game despite being developed between around 2017 and 2023, and is a pastiche of things ripped from other, better games filled with mechanics that feel like they exist solely so that the developers could say they do.

The game starts with a plot ripped directly from Star Ocean 2: you have a medieval fantasy realm at war with a spacefaring civilization that has dropped Galactic Ebola on them, and your plucky protagonist, a teenage idiot with hair that looks like it was welded on, is out to save his family from it and end the war. I knew at this point that it was not going to be a good game, but it gets so much worse.

The gameplay is a frankensteined monstrosity of the first Xenoblade game and the PS1-era Final Fantasy games, except with even worse pacing issues than either of those games had. It's a game stuck in 1999 made in an era where even the companies who made the games that "inspired" this one were focused on streamlining their games and removing the boring parts. The game takes place entirely on one contiguous world map, which looks exactly like launch World of Warcraft in that it's overly large and empty. This is where things start getting stupid.

The world map takes approximately forever to navigate if you use the default movement options, which include simply walking (very slow) and sprinting (slightly less slow but still too slow). You do get a mount, but it's also really slow even when sprinting. The fastest movement option is mashing R1, which makes your character do a sword lunge that's meant to be used on enemies to give you a pre-emptive attack against them but also launches him forward around 10 meters every time you do it. Mashing R1 is faster than the mount's sprint speed, which is one of the most backwards things I've ever seen in game design.

The battles also make no sense because of how the game is balanced. You start each battle with full HP and MP, and so there's very little reason for you to ever use physical attacks given that you're almost never going to run out of MP unless you get into a boss fight. I'm not sure why they even had an option for physical attacks in the first place, nor am I sure why it takes three button presses to use a physical attack when there is no reason it should ever take more than two.

I got bored of this half an hour in and I'm probably never going to come back to it until I uninstall it.

I am never going to finish Pragmata because it's incredibly boring and has no sense of pacing - it's Resident Evil 4 without any of the things that made RE4 a good or engaging game.

Part of the problem is how slow combat is, because the combat is quite literally RE4 with extra steps. Imagine if every time Leon Kennedy wanted to shoot a zombie, he had to first solve one of those Google CAPTCHAs that asks you to identify buses or crosswalks - and that's exactly what Pragmata is. The gunplay is unsatisfying because even after solving the CAPTCHA to make enemies vulnerable to bullets, your guns do little damage and have three or four shots before you have to discard them and find new ones - it's a commentary on materialism, see, and that's why the game has to be incredibly boring and why combat has to drag on while you wait for your infinite ammo pistol to recharge.

The plot isn't particularly engaging, either. I know people have said how cute the robodaughter is or whatever, but I found her kind of offputting and shoehorned in to the point where I was kind of hoping there'd be an option to blow her head off with a shotgun. I found Grace in RE: Requiem annoying, but Diana is annoying on an entirely different level.

Wait for a deep discount on this.

Mina the Hollower is a Gameboy soulslike demake that has a lot of issues - it's a game that tries to be Bloodborne but ultimately falls far short and becomes a frustrating mess of bad controls and hard-to-read graphic design.

The game has three major design flaws, chief among them the way it handles health recovery. You start with three "plasma vials" that can be regenerated at checkpoints in the most annoying way possible: you have to dig into the checkpoint, wait for a screen transition, and then wait for a machine to shoot out a new set of vials every time you want to recover. The vials don't heal anything by themselves - you have to damage enemies to create a recoverable portion of your health bar that is lost if you take further damage. Where this becomes a mess is when the game does platforming challenges: there's nowhere to build recovery meter in most of the platforming-heavy areas, leaving you with little choice but to make constant trips back to the nearest checkpoint. I don't know how no one at Yacht Club looked at that and didn't understand how annoying that is to sit through.

The game also has a dearth of checkpoints at a time when even From Software themselves have largely changed over to eliminating corpse runbacks. I don't know why they wouldn't put more in, especially near the platforming areas where you can't otherwise recover health. Having to run through six or seven screens full of enemies that can remove 2/3 of your health bar in a single hit really isn't fun, it's just incredibly tedious and turns the game into a slog.

Finally, it has the issue of the controls. Your dodge button is on a roughly 1.5 second delay - you have to jump and go through a complete jump animation, plus an additional animation to burrow for around a second before you have to re-surface. Burrowing is EXTREMELY awkward to do, especially when combined with platforming, and especially in combat. I don't know why the game was designed this way or who thought it would be at all fun or engaging.

Avoid.

Zero Parades is an attempt by the half of ZA/UM that remained together after the IP scandal surrounding Disco Elysium to make a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium. It's the latest in a string of cowardly remakes or successors that try to stick so close to whatever their "original" is that they fail to differentiate themselves.

It's hard to even say what's different other than the one or two mechanical changes: the game starts in a room very similar to the one you started Disco Elysium in, and you're still in vague Not-Europe with a blank-slate character who discovers themselves through complicated political ideology. The only difference is that this time around your skill points are worth less because of increased difficulty checks and the existence of a stamina system that boosts skill checks but drains skill points permanently if you use too much of it.

It feels like ZA/UM released the same game twice, and so I'd say there's no point playing it unless you've played the original.

Cursed Words is an absolute fever dream of a game that starts out as Balatro but for Boggle. You get a grid with letters in it and make words using straight or diagonal lines (or some combination thereof). For the first two runs, you're mostly running entirely on luck. Then you unlock the third character, and all hell breaks loose.

Suddenly, 1234AY789 is a word. So is 1/3 2/8 3/7 4/8 5/10. So is a long string of random chess notation. The game starts throwing points at you for reasons you barely understand, and soon you've won the state Boggle championships by walking in, throwing your chair at the judge, giving your opponent both middle fingers and counting to ten. The game stops being about making words and starts becoming a game about breaking the game the way Balatro is.

This game is absolutely worth the money.

I backed this game on Kickstarter with the full expectation that it was not going to be good. I knew it was going to be a cheap cash-in, but I've also been a fan of KC Green since the Horribleville days and wanted to see him at least get something out of the one thing he ever made that went viral. In case you're unaware, the backstory goes like this: Question Hound was a character from Gunshow, a comic KC made in the 2010s. One strip from Gunshow (the infamous "This is Fine" strip) went viral, and was subsequently stolen by a bunch of shady companies and slapped on cheap merchandise, most of which was made without the artist's approval.

I knew things were going to be bad from the get-go because the game is a mascot platformer based around a non-character: Question Hound is barely an entity in Gunshow and had his longest appearance in a different comic (KC's short-lived syndicated strip Funny Online Animals) where he was killed off as a reflection of the fact that KC didn't really "own" him anymore. What I didn't anticipate is that this game is to Hollow Knight what Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is to the racing genre.

The art style looks nothing like KC's. I don't know how much he had to do with this game outside of licensing his character for it, but it looks like it was done entirely without his input. The enemy designs have no identity, the animation is lacking at best, and the whole thing is just.. bad. It becomes clear early on that the ONLY thing the developers had rights to was Question Hound himself, and just had to make the rest up.

The gameplay also isn't great: enemies are damage spongy but not particularly hard to avoid. Most of the damage I took was to contact damage rather than from an actual attack, and for the most part it made more sense to run past everything than actually try to fight it. There are also a lot of outright bad design choices: the game has "rest points" that restore your HP bar but don't restore your heal charges, which have to be purchased from coffee machines that are nowhere near the rest points. The whole thing makes no sense and feels bad.

Even if you're a KC Green fan, I'd avoid this one. It's not the fun kind of bad game, it's the borderline unplayable kind.

It's hard to review Olden Era without also reviewing Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which Olden Era is heavily modeled on. With that said, Olden Era is an attempt at making a successor to HoMM3 by people who played HoMM3 competitively. Does it live up to the hype? I'd say not really. It's not a bad game by any means, but there are a bunch of things - some fixable, others probably not - that would make it a hard sell over simply playing HoMM3 again.

Olden Era commits a lot of obvious design errors, some of which are inherited from HoMM3 and some of which aren't. One problem the franchise has had since the first game is the supremacy of ranged units and fliers in combat - ground-based melee is useless because of how slow it is. Olden Era does very little to fix this: some units that were melee in HoMM3 now have a "reach attack" option that allows them to attack a hex or two away, but for the most part your melee units exist solely to mess with the AI (which tends to prioritize attacking large stacks of melee units).

Then there's the problem of combat being a poorly-paced mess. HoMM3 had an option to skip unit animations, which almost everyone used because some units took forever to animate. I timed it, and the minotaurs you start with in the single-player campaign take nearly ten seconds to animate walking across their maximum move distance. I get that the game isn't as visually impressive if everything teleports everywhere, but it seems questionable that no one looked at that move animation and didn't go "Wow, that seems like it'd be a pain to sit through every time you need to move that unit".

The new unit upgrade system is similarly questionable. Every unit has two upgrade paths, which is great until you realize that most of them are so similar that there's not really a reason to pick one over the other outside of a couple of specific circumstances (ie; the human archers that can either attack twice or attack once but not take a damage penalty from range). The effort to have that many upgrade paths is laudable, but I feel like it just adds needless complexity to a game that's already kind of hard to pick up, not to mention a bunch of extra clicks that really don't need to be there when upgrading units.

I feel like with time, this could potentially be something approaching a good game. Right now, it's simply not worth the money until these things get fixed.

Snap and Grab is a criminally underpriced game that combines Hitman with Pokemon Snap by way of Lupin III, and generally does what it sets out to do pretty well. You take photographs of objectives, make a timeline to bypass the security, and then run the heist sequence to finally steal it.

The game itself is pretty good, if a bit easy - I tried the first two zones and had no problem knocking out guards to get a disguise that let me walk through the entire area without being stopped. I think the only real problem I ran into at first was a sort of lack of focus in the level design. The zones each have multiple treasures in them, but you can only ever steal one at at time even though the entire zone is accessible regardless of which objective you pick. I spent a while trying to scope out all of the treasures in the first zone only to find out that I could only steal one at a time.

One caveat is that there are no re-bindable controls and the game doesn't officially support keyboard and mouse as a control scheme: you can use it, but the UI is very controller oriented.

Other than that, this game is definitely worth it at a $6 price point.

Last Flag is possibly the worst game I've ever played. It's half Monday Night Combat and half stolen mechanics from Deadlock pasted together in a way that makes absolutely no sense and feels utterly horrible to play. It is Concord 2.5, and feels worse than even Highguard did in every imaginable sense of the word. It's unbalanced, has mechanics that make no sense, and then dumps the mechanics to be a team deathmatch game.

The first thing I want to talk about is how it fails at being a hero shooter. You know how Overwatch and Deadlock have characters with lots of voice lines and they intentionally make footstep noises and call out their abilities so that people have an opportunity to react to what's going on? Last Flag has none of that. Characters are COMPLETELY SILENT apart from a couple of short lines that only happen if they're at low health. There are no footstep noises unless you jump, characters don't call out their abilities, and as a result detecting people is far harder than it should be.

Instead, the game opts to have the world's most annoying announcer - I think they were trying to copy Mickey Cantor from Monday Night Combat, except half the time the announcer spouts "comedic" lines that have nothing to do with gameplay. The best part? There is no way to turn the announcer off. You can set the volume for his lines to zero, and the game ignores it. You also can't turn off the text readout of the announcer's pointless BS, which takes up too much screen real estate for something that has ZERO GAMEPLAY IMPACT.

Then there are the characters themselves. I can tell you exactly how they were made: the developers took a list of abilities from Deadlock, threw them into a bowl, and randomly picked three per character. There was no thought put into any of these, and as a result you have one character who is disgustingly overpowered and is a near-surefire ticket to victory and a bunch who aren't at all.

Let me talk about one of the non-viable ones first: Scout. Scout is this game's Vindicta. He has a sniper rifle, has the longest effective weapon range in the game, and is bolstered by the fact that this game has no directional hit indicators so no one knows where he's shooting them from. His abilities consist of using his pet bird to scout, which makes him control the bird and leaves him completely helpless. The bird marks enemies, which doesn't do a whole lot when the TTK in this game is Call of Duty level and respawn times are only ever 15 seconds. He also has a dash that is useless because he will die long before it's ever useful as an escape.

Then you have Knives. Knives is the most broken character in the game: she's a melee-only Haze who can go invisible and plant a respawn portal anywhere on the map, including in the enemy base. Her TTK is among the lowest in a game that already has a very low TTK, and playing her is a near-guaranteed win because she doesn't need to aim or reload.

Now let me talk about the game mechanics, which are nonsensical and contradictory. The idea is that each team hides a flag, and then goes through a phase where they fight over capture points that reveal sections of the map that don't have the flag in them until it eventually shows the flag's exact location. In theory, you win by stealing the flag and bringing it to your "pyramid", where you undergo a 90-second defense period in which the other team can take their flag back. In practice, that almost never happens unless the match is a one-sided stomp.

Instead, you have a point counter that rises every time someone gets a kill or captures a point. At the 20-minute mark, the game does a tiebreaker based on point count, and 95% of the time points are the only thing that matter. This makes trying to capture the flag pointless because you're feeding kills (and therefore points) to the other team - the game usually comes down to kills and whoever held the control points longer.

This game is absolutely miserable, and given that it's probably going to be dead online within a couple of weeks barring some achievement farmers (and no, I wouldn't recommend doing that given that one of the achievements is playing 100 matches on a specific map), it's not worth getting into.

Every major cultural touchstone has its cheap imitators. Dark Souls released in 2012 and spawned an entire genre of knockoffs, none of which stood up to the original. The same thing goes for Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors (even though Vampire Survivors was itself a clone). People of Note is that but for K-Pop Demon Hunters and to a lesser extent, Hazbin Hotel. It's not a good musical. It's not a good RPG. It was pretty clearly made on a shoestring budget and I feel bad for almost everyone involved in making it because they probably could've done something halfway compelling if they weren't trying so hard to ape existing franchises.

I think the best way I can explain this game is the first ten minutes or so. The main character, a wannabe k-pop princess who looks like a K-Pop Demon Hunters OC, goes on stage to audition for a concert with her character song, Under the Lights. Under the Lights is your standard "I am / I want" song, and my first reaction was to check the store page for an AI disclosure because it sounded like it was written by ChatGPT. The lyrics were droll, the backing music was forgettable, and five minutes later I honestly could not tell you what it sounded like other than that it was a very generic k-pop song.

The main character is, of course, shot down by an evil judge who calls her music trash. Now, a good musical could have done something with this: make the opening song bad on purpose with the point being that at the end, there's a better version of it to show what the character learned and how they changed. For about thirty seconds, that was what I thought it was - until the game confirms that no, Under the Lights is supposed to be good and the judge is corrupt.

The rest of the OST is similarly uninspired. There's a song called Sorry Girl that feels like an early 00s Backstreet Boys knockoff and the final song is a less interesting version of Hazbin Hotel's "Hear My Hope" about the power of friendship. That last one was so cringe-inducing that I couldn't sit through more than about fifteen seconds of it.

Now let's talk about the gameplay. Battles are a sort-of rhythm game that was clearly done without any real thought put in. Attacks spawn a series of shrinking circles that have to be hit at the right time like a rhythm game, but it's not done to the battle music (which is more generic k-pop) or to any kind of beat. This means you're relying purely on visual cues, and even those aren't done well: each attack and skill has the circles pop up in seemingly random places and in an order that doesn't necessarily make sense - in some cases, they go top to bottom and left to right, while in others they go bottom to top or right to left. This does nothing but slow combat down, and the whole thing is unintuitive and feels INCREDIBLY bad.

The writing is similarly annoying because it makes every word a music pun and I hate it. It's bad. This game is utter tripe concocted to ride K-Pop Demon Hunters' coattails and belongs in the dumpster.