Recent reviews by Tiwill

Aesthetically pleasing twin-stick shooter with online co-op. You and a friend have to try to survive for as long as you can against increasingly intense hordes of zombies, finding boxes that contain random weapons and swapping guns when running out of ammo. This generally forces you to improvise using a wide variety of weapons throughout the run, which is fun.

Beyond the inherent joy of popping zombies and seeing blood burst from their well-animated fleshy bits, the other goal of the game is to grab cash from dead zombies so that you can upgrade your gun damage and such when you die. You can also buy different starting weapons there, and increase the difficulty.

A fun challenge I made up was to try to stay in the same location for as long as possible. You can be like, let's defend this car with our lives. Eventually the intensity gets too high to stay in one place, and you get to decide if you still want to go down with the ship or ditch the car you've almost formed an emotional attachment to. RIP car.

There are also 40 coins to find around the map, which allow you to unlock different characters. Playing as a different character is a purely cosmetic thing for fun, so you can be a chef with a katana, a goth girl with a flamethrower, santa with a rocket launcher, etc. There are more coins than there are skins, so you don't have to find all the coins unless you're a completionist.

The graphics are top notch and the music is catchy, I really enjoy the rainy suburb atmosphere.

This is the type of game I would play on flash sites back in the day, except way more polished and high-quality. Entirely worth the money, I think even if you decide that you've had your fill after one session, with a friend it'll have been a very fun session indeed.

Wishvale. Home.

I was a bit worried when this game was first announced because it's easy for games to get townbuilding mechanics wrong. Luckily, this game avoided those pitfalls and made the town restoration an integral part of the story. It fits the existing gameplay formula of Octopath Traveler much better than I could've ever imagined. Coming back home after exploring the world feels very comfy, and as long as you grab mats as you go (a near instant interaction), you'll have more than enough to build the required things in town to progress, so the addition of crafting mats added 0 tedium to the gameplay loop, and arguably improved it by making the game feel more rewarding and giving you a home to go back to.

The overall gameplay formula of the game is very similar to the previous games, so I won't go over all that again. However, the main big change is in the way the story works. There are a lot more playable characters this time around, so each one inevitably has less total screentime than the eight travelers got in previous games. Instead of having one major story per character, most of the recruitable characters get a recruitment quest, and then their time in the spotlight of the story effectively ends; they join you as a party member but don't really take part in the dialogue etc. There are some exceptions, the main ones being Stia and Phenn. Unsurprisingly, they are my two favorite characters from this game.

The main stories of the game generally happen around your silent protagonist and involve NPCs that primarily appear in cutscenes. Aside from the Wishvale guys, most of the characters that are important to the main plot lines never actually join your party as playable characters.

This probably sounds like a bad thing. Well, I can't deny that the storytelling is technically more flawed here than it was in the previous games. However, I think context matters. This is partially designed to be a fanservice game. You get to spend more time in world of the first Octopath Traveler game and recruit all the travelers from that game, among many new faces. The idea is, you can fill your party with anyone you want. In a game like this, it's impossible for every playable character to be a major character in the story. The guys from the first game are here and are playable, but this story is not theirs. Is this inherently a ludonarratively flawed concept? Maybe.

The important characters in the story do tend to temporarily join as a 9th party member controlled by the game. It works quite well, and can really add to the hype in boss battles. I think they figured, if these characters had instead been playable but optional to use, it would have been pretty anti-climactic narratively if you chose not to use them during their own story. And they couldn't have forced you to use them because you're already forced to have your created character in the party. They didn't want to force a second character onto you because that would defeat the entire purpose of letting you use whoever you want. When you think about all of it, it completely makes sense.

But also, since most of the important characters are not playable, I think they had to hold back a little bit on the story, because a masterpiece there would have felt wasted on unplayable characters. What's crazy though is that despite this, the story is way more engaging than I feared it would be. There are some truly memorable, emotional moments. There's definitely unremarkable filler too though, so it's nice they added a fastforward button for that.

To elaborate on that last bit, I think some of the cutscenes sometimes felt slow or pointless. For example, when you've already clearly established through their actions that the antagonists are irredeemable and exist only to bring about suffering, at some point I just wanna go and pulp them. If a cutscene isn't giving me a reason to re-evaluate that, some interesting lore, some hype dialogue, some real tension or at least something entertaining, then I'm probably gonna want to fastforward or skip it. I wouldn't say it happens often enough to be truly annoying though.

For the sake of being informative, there are still multiple separate plot lines in this game, which don't really intertwine. This aspect of the storytelling, which some players called disjointed or bad in the previous games, is still present. It's like that by design, but yeah.

The other thing to note is that if you've played the previous OT games and didn't enjoy them because your party members don't interact much with each other, you probably won't like this game either. I say "probably" because I do feel Stia and Phenn got a ton of screentime together in the Wishvale cutscenes, so if you use Stia and Phenn in your party like I did, then you might feel like this game fixed that aspect a bit. But don't expect characters to interact with the stories they aren't personally involved in, which is basically all of them.

Thankfully, none of that flawed stuff ruins the game for me at all. In fact, most of these flaws are either minor, or completely irrelevant to me because they are necessary for the game to function in the way that it does, which I enjoy.

I felt very close to Stia and Phenn, and I'll always love Tressa. That was my frontline for most of the game. I really enjoyed my party. The narrative flaws can't be a problem when the playable characters are characters that I love and the enjoyment of the game primarily comes from the exploration, RPG mechanics, boss battles and most importantly, just the vibes man. Yes, the music, the enjoyment of being in those towns, in that world. The story just gives context to it all, and some of it is great. But a game this fun to play and exist in just doesn't need a perfect story. It's about the full package.

Of course, your mileage may vary. I don't know what you like. But this is my review. In some ways, I felt this Octopath game was the best one at fulfilling the series' ultimate vision, which is being a non-linear turn-based JRPG. You're able to choose exactly who you recruit and when, where you go, and the only thing stopping you from running straight to the furthest city on the map is your level, a.k.a your ability to not get pulped by monsters on your way there.

This was always the soul of Octopath, and now the sheer amount of characters you can recruit in this game makes it feel even more like you built your own little squad. Or big squad, I should say. You can bring up to 8 characters at once into battle in this one, and it makes the combat even more fun.

I should probably say, the game is not very hard at all, but I think that's a good thing. If the game was hard, it would just make less builds viable. This just lets you do challenge runs, make more creative builds, etc. I'm not of the opinion that an RPG needs to be hard to be fun, quite the opposite really.

You also have more freedom in how you build each character now. Instead of choosing a sub-class, each character instead gets extra slots to equip almost any skill that exists in the game. You find them in various ways, but one of the ways you can get these equippable skills is by learning every base skill on a character, and then you can "master" those skills, which creates copies to be equipped on other characters.

To put it simply, you can basically create your own sub-classes now. This has a huge beneficial impact on the gameplay and roleplay. Although, it's not like it was worse before, just different. The downside to this new freedom is that now each character only has their default outfit (except your created character). But this opens up things quite a bit. I actually enjoy how each Octopath game has had slightly different gameplay like that, it keeps things fresh.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS

game has traps -> can't avoid them because diagonal movement paths are pre-calculated
rear damage is a thing -> can't reorient your cats
ankama games exist -> can't find a reason to spend 30 bux on a mechanically bad game
ty for reading my review!

That is how I feel about the dialogue, gameplay to story ratio, plot pacing, and lack of polish.

For a game about music, it sure is criminal how bad the sound design is when you're running around with other characters behind you. The footsteps will drive you mad because it plays the sounds for each character and they follow you at a distance, so you only hear the cacophony of their footsteps in one ear at a time. I start with this because it's indicative of a lack of care for the audio, which should never be a thing in a music game.

The writing is, I would say, 20% good. They desperately needed an editor to come in and trim the fat. The first two hours of the game are filled with incessant pointless yapping. It's fine at first but it gets old very fast after Clef gets introduced because now you have to deal with yapping on top of a bad attitude. So eventually, you start to mash the A button to get through it. I tried to press Start to see if I could skip some scenes. Nope, it just pauses the game. Too much dialogue in a game doesn't have to be a major problem if you just let the player skip to the next scene. I feel like this shouldn't have to be said, but maybe the developers have never played a game before. When you actually get to a rhythm game segment, the part when the game calculates your score can't be skipped or sped up at all either. You just sit there and watch numbers go up.

I will now rant about the plot.

Someone thought it would be a great idea to throw the player in jail for like 2 hours right after the start. Not only that, but they made sure to make this entire jail chapter as boring as I imagine a real jail would be. Thanks for that. Just what I wanted in my stylish anime rhythm game. Jail. No really, that was essential to the plot. After all, how else would the player know how much being stuck in jail sucks? We have to make sure the player understands that the jail food is bad too, so let's repeat it 5 times everyday, just in case they're stupid.

It was also a great idea to have us go to our "jail job" several days in a row, performing the exact same menial tasks as the previous day. We want Unbeatable to really make you feel like music is illegal and you just committed a crime in real life. Let's have the characters complain the whole time too, and make sure to progress the plot as slowly as possible, to convey the sense of existential dread a real prisoner would feel, as their life rots away in prison. Oh and have the characters fight among themselves for no other reason than the fact Clef has no brain cells, that'll make for a great story.

I would now like to remind everyone that this is a rhythm videogame entertainment product sold for real money.

So, shouldn't we be talking about how good the rhythm parts are, I hear you ask. As infrequent as they are, they must be amazing, right? That is what I would love to say. Unfortunately, no. Some of them are good. Mainly the ones that play like the demo. Whenever the gameplay takes this form, it's usually the most enjoyable part of the game. I mean, I kickstarted this game for a reason. I loved that demo.

Other than that, the baseball rhythm minigame was just ok. I didn't really enjoy the sound design of it that much and it took too long, so it felt a bit like a chore after a bit, but it was fine. The "fighting" segments with the vertical lanes are also just ok. I mean, it's fun compared to watching paint dry or mashing through bad dialogue, but that's not saying much is it.

The car chase segment was so obtuse to play that I couldn't even figure it out fully before it ended. It's not like I wanted a do-over, because it wasn't a fun segment to play either way, but it felt extra bad due to poor UX conveyance. That's like the one thing you don't want to get wrong in a rhythm game, guys. Just saying.

Maybe these bad gameplay segments are all by design, to reinforce the feeling that you want to play music, but you can't because it's illegal in this world, so the only time you get to play the rhythm game you paid for is when your character is escaping through her dreams. Secret ludo kino?

Some polish issues: at one point in jail I got the camera stuck as my character jumped out of the scene and could no longer be seen. At another point if you jump in a corridor your head will clip through the ceiling. Ow. There is a crash that occurs at the end of an agonizingly slow cutscene where your character stares at a light bulb for like 30 seconds; others have reported this as well. Sometimes dialogue will overlap in ways that feel intentional but other times it feels a lot less intentional, which has been reported by others. I didn't even care because I ended up wanting to mash through the dialogue anyway, if anything the characters were helping me by talking over each other. Still a polish issue though. If you walk by gently holding the analog stick in a direction, the character following you won't match your walk speed. They'll instead run, stop, run, stop. There's probably more, but the point is, no matter what you do, you'll run into a lack of polish.

The game has some pretty high-quality 2D animation and a strong visual art direction, but that can only take you so far when every other aspect of the game suffers from major issues.

Yes I've only played 2.3 hours, but I'm not going to recommend a game when I don't even feel like launching it after only two hours of gameplay. Instead I'm going to recommend that you watch the recent Chainsaw Man Reze Arc movie. If you want to actually feel something, that's a much better way to spend 2 hours.

I might continue this game someday just so I don't feel like I got robbed. Insert joke about doing crimes here. If you're on the fence about this game, I would personally not recommend it, though the demo was good, so you can still play that and dream about a better full game. Or go play Osu.

It's MGS 3 with mouse aim. Can't complain. I want some more!

PS: don't go for the 64 duck/frog achievement unless you're a freak. it'll give u a phantom pain

If you liked the concept of Risk of Rain 2 even just a little bit and you're an anime girl enjoyer, this is an easy recommendation especially for that low price. It genuinely feels like a game someone wanted to create because they wanted to play it themselves, which is usually the mark of a good game. Each character feels unique to play, so you're guaranteed to find one you like. I think all of them are fun personally. They're all unlocked at the start, which is good. The game also has good EDM/trance music that matches the current intensity level. Anyway, it's just a really cool co-op game to kill some time in, so check it out if you're into that sort of thing.

Boring, low-effort, meaningless content. This slop reuses every tired mechanic in the game, almost to show you that the game had been generic crap all along. It wasn't always THIS obvious before, but we've hit rock bottom here. This level of asset reuse and complete lack of identity may have been tolerable as a free DLC, but even then, it would still have been garbage soulless content and a waste of time. In any case, they certainly don't deserve money for this content. Feel free to cope in the comments but I think I'm done with this game if this is what PAID CONTENT is going to look like going forward.

Very addicting game with a nostalgic flash game aesthetic. Try the demo and see if you like it, the full game is more of that. Wolf Girl is best.

The reviews lied to me. This is a solid bite-sized entry in the series. Based on its reception, you'd think this game was a complete disaster, and yet it plays like Human Revolution, just with less verticality (no jump button) and no physics. So you can't throw environmental objects to create a distraction, and you can't move unconscious/dead bodies; they just vaporize after a few seconds instead. This makes for a simpler game, but simple doesn't automatically mean boring or bad. The game just has more of an arcade feel to it, without losing the aspects that make it immersive.

Since there's no easy way to distract guards, you're encouraged to grab the invisibility augmentation early on if you want to remain undetected while trespassing. The game actually forces you to try it out as your first augmentation during the prologue/tutorial, so they knew it was important. But this was always the strongest way to play Human Revolution in stealth, so... if you were already using that tactic in HR, the gameplay will feel virtually identical. I mean, if this was fine in HR, why wouldn't it be fine here? More of a good thing is not a bad thing.

So, the gameplay is more limited, but that doesn't make it bad. What about the graphics? Well, it feels like playing a PSP game in high resolution. I played the game in 4K and it looked very nice. The graphics are low-poly, but they are charming. Yes, charming. I mean come on. The original Deus Ex came out in 2000, and any true Deus Ex enthusiast will tell you that those crusty graphics are iconic as hell. In fact, simpler graphics make a game like this easier to read, so you don't have to constantly activate smart vision just to process what you can interact with at a glance. And this is not me throwing shade at Mankind Divided, I'm just saying both styles have pros and cons, and I would have loved seeing more of both. Not to mention, a game with these graphics would take far less money and time to make. If we got a sequel to Mankind Divided with these graphics I would happily take it over no sequel at all.

The game's biggest downfall is that the story is unfinished, but is that really enough to say that the entire game is bad? I don't think so. After all, Mankind Divided had the same problem. It's sad that the developers were not given the opportunity to continue these stories, because the world of Deus Ex is very engaging, immersive and dense in atmosphere. For me, everything comes together nicely because of the formula itself. So far, none of the Deus Ex games have strayed from that formula since the very first one, so even the "worst" ones have managed to be good to me.

Finishing a game in one sitting is a very satisfying feeling, so in that sense, I thought the pacing here was great. It is a short game, but that's fine as long as it's priced accordingly, which it is. You can get all Deus Ex games for peanuts these days. So if you enjoy the world of Deus Ex and just want to spend an extra 5 hours in it for a dollar or two, this is an easy recommendation. Think of it as the MGS: Peace Walker of Deus Ex, and you should have a pretty good time.

Hopefully Deus Ex will return someday.

Co-op Souls done right, finally. Thank you based dev. Please make more and inject it directly into my veins. By the way, peak sound design, music and atmosphere. I want more so I can hear even more crunchy sound effects and have an eargasm. You should add an icy spell that sounds similar to Ice Barrage in the sequel, I'll give my cat lots of hugs if you do.