First Impression: Spirit Hunter Volume 3 – Death Mark II (Switch) ~ Ghost and Ghouls in School

Nintendo.co.uk microsite – Wikipedia – Death Mark Wiki

It’s finally here! The 3rd game in the Spirit Hunter series. If you have read my blog in the past, you might know I have been waiting for this game since the studio launched the crowdfunding campaign for this game. Back in 2019, this game got successfully crowdfunded. The game came out in Japan in December 2022. The English version was going to come out in October of last year. But, it got pushed to this year, and we saw a release on the February 15th, 2024. While a lot of other amazing games have come out this month, I have been mostly playing this game. Does it live up to my expectations, or did it ruin the series for me? In this article, I want to talk about my honest opinion on the game, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your thoughts and/or opinions on the game and/or the content of this article. So, it’s time to dive right into this new volume in the Spirit Hunter series.

Editorial note: to avoid spoilers, the screenshots will only be of the first chapter of the game.

Ghost and Ghouls in School

Unlike the previous volume, NG, we don’t play with as a totally new character. As the name implies, we continue the story of the first volume, Death Mark. If you are afraid that you need to play Death Mark again to understand the story in this game, don’t worry.

The game explains who the returning characters are, and the game doesn’t spoil what happened to them in the previous game at all. Some characters hint at their chapter in Death Mark, but not outright spoil it. The way how this is handled in this game is impressive. This way, you can play the games out of order without getting a lot, if any, spoilers on the previous titles.

While you can jump into this game without playing the previous games, it’s quite helpful if you have played the previous titles. The references won’t fly over your head, and it makes the writing that more enjoyable. In this game, you take on the role of Kazuo Yashiki, the protagonist of the first game. A few months after Death Mark, he gets called by the headmaster of Konoehara Academy since there are rumors of a spirit haunting the school. This spirit called “the Departed” is posting disturbing notices of killing a student at night. The investigation is started after the first student has disappeared, and the second notice has been found.

Compared to the two previous games, there is some more voice acting in this game. While not everything is voice acted, it’s more than the previous two titles. It’s not fully voice acted like Corpse Party, but the voice acting mostly happens when a character gets introduced or at very special moments. The voice acting in this game is quite well done, and I only wish there is more in the next games. Since, I honestly think that the voice actors really nailed the personalities of their characters and might make the game even better.

To really avoid spoilers, I’m not going to talk too in depth about the story in this game. But what I can say is that overall, the story follows the structure of NG quite a lot. I haven’t finished the game yet, but so far I have been enjoying the story. Surprisingly, this game is twice as long as Death Mark. If you know what you are doing, you can beat Death Mark in, give or take 11 hours. NG can be beaten in, give or take 16 hours. According to howlongtobeat.com, this game is 25 hours long.

Now, this game doesn’t feel like it’s taking 25 hours to complete to me. While I’m playing on my Nintendo Switch, where you can’t really see your playtime very well, I did write my playtime down for a while and honestly, I can totally believe this game can take you between 20 and 25 hours to beat. The story flows so well, that you get the impression it’s shorter. I think that mostly has to do with the lack of padding there is in this game. This game doesn’t waste your time and gets right into the meat of the game. This game takes you on a journey and doesn’t let go. It tries to keep you on the edge of your seat to see what’s going next, and it succeeds in that for the most part. But for a horror game like this, this breakneck pace is a knife that can cut both ways.

Tamer Ghosts

In some ways, this game is a lot tamer compared to the previous two titles. All the chapters in this game involve the student body of the academy in someway or another.

I can’t really put my finger on why, but I found this game less scary than the two previous titles. This game has its scary moments, but it’s a lot tamer in its scares.

Maybe the rather fast-paced flow of the game isn’t doing it any favors. There is not a lot of time for the actual scares to sink in and grab you by surprise. Thinking about it, padding is quite essential in horror games. Since it gives you the time to let it all sink in. The strongest moments of horror in this game are the cutscenes before the final spirit battle at the end of a chapter. The small cutscene of the spirit entering the room is something I want to see more of.

Another thing that isn’t doing this game any favors is how lame the actual jumpscares are in this game. In the original Death Mark, we had some very creative jumpscares and a lot of them fit the context of the story extremely well. Now, NG had a few cheap and easy jumpscares. But, it dared to even insert jumpscares and creepy moments in the pause menu. Now, I can totally understand people not liking jumpscares and I really like how you have an option to disable them in the options’ menu in this game. I left them enabled to see where the creative jumpscares are in this game.

I was extremely disappointed. Every jumpscare in this game is during scene transitions. And not only that, if you play on a controller, your controller rumbles several frames before. The tutorial actually tells you that it’s a feature so you can brave yourself. This is an extremely stupid mechanic and is a step back from the previous two games. Currently, I’m midway in the game and I have only seen a maximum of four jumpscares. And I can only remember 1, while I can remember several from Death Mark and NG. This way I’m less on edge and the actual scares have less of an impact on me.

It was really promising in the first chapter, where you get introduced to special events that can actually drain your soul (health) if you make a mistake in your investigation. The potential to make you think twice before you investigate something would make a player very nervous. Are you sure this is the right path forward, or will it lead to loss of your soul? Especially since a spirit interaction can happen at any moment, and you need your soul power to be as high as possible for that. I’ll talk about that more later.

Yet, this mechanic is extremely underused. After its introduction, it’s barely used at all. Apart from some forced moments, I have barely seen any of them. If we ever get a volume 4 in this series, this is a mechanic they surely need to develop further. Also, the penalty for these moments is way too weak. Especially, you have a button to quickly travel back to the save room to fill your health to the maximum.

Something else that makes this game tamer is the fact that it blocks off some exploration. There were several times when you were stopped from exploring the hallways of the academy because you get tunneled to the right location to investigate next.

I honestly felt that after chapter 2, this game got a lot tamer and the scares in this game are somewhat underused. It’s a shame since there are a lot of improvements in this title that will take the series forwards. A perfect example is when you select a wrong choice, you don’t have to replay the whole interaction anymore. You start right back at the start of the act with the loss of some soul.

Also, you don’t have to pick the right character anymore while facing the spirit. Since, you can actually choose the standby characters during your suspension acts and spirit fights. Granted, this takes away from the puzzle elements in this game, but it fixes that you have to go back to the save room to change character and go back to face the spirit. It saves a lot of hassle with juggling saves.

More game this time

There is a lot more game in this volume compare to the two previous games. First, the exploration is extremely different. This time, you don’t go from room to room or from scene to scene. You can actually walk around with your character. There are some moments where you explore a room, and it goes back to the style of the two previous games. And I love it. The controls are extremely responsive and easy to understand. The only issue I had is that the skip button sometimes didn’t work after the first press. But it’s something that didn’t really bother me that much.

Another major improvement and gameplay element in this game is how there are collectables in this game. Yes, in each chapter there are various teeth of lost souls you can find. These have two benefits for you to find them. The first is that when you collect enough of them, you can actually level up and increase your amount of soul power you have. Let me tell you, this comes in extremely handy since some fights can be brutal if you haven’t solved the puzzle in your mind yet.

Another benefit of collecting these teeth is that it unlocks more information of the characters in this game. It’s a nice addition, but not the main reason you should collect them, since the additional information is mostly for 100% completions and don’t really serve a gameplay mechanic beyond that.

Now, what can you do with these teeth? Well, this time the collectable is more than meeting somebody if you collected all the “D-Man Cards” in NG. Now you can purchase special items with them. These will help you in combat quite a lot and are somewhat essential if you don’t want to quickly get in a game over loop. But I’ll talk about the tense moments and spirit fights later in this article. Just like the D-Man cards, these teeth are chapter based. So, make sure you explored everything before you move on to the next chapter if you want to collect all the teeth.

Now, there are also blackend tooths that can appear. These curse a whole area and drain your soul power while you are in that area. You can’t leave that area before you have found and destroyed the blackend tooth. This is an amazing mechanic I would love to see happen more in the series. I would also love to see it being more creative, since after you found them, the puzzle is solved. I would love to see in a sequel that you have to use a certain item or interact with it in a certain way to destroy it.

The stats system comes more into play this time around. There are several puzzles where you need to have a certain character with you to solve. And it’s made even easier, since you can quickly see the stats of the other characters in the chapter from the pause screen. While it’s sadly underimplemented, it’s a step in the right direction and I would love to see more.

The tense moments like the Live or Die from the original return as Suspensive Acts in this game. Instead of your soul power being a countdown clock, you now how two things to worry about. The first thing is that you have soul power. Each action costs a certain amount of soul power. Not only that, each action has a chance to succeed or fail. If it fails, the next time you preform that action, the success chance increases by quite a lot. Also, a wrong action can give you a big penalty to your soul power.

While I can totally understand that this new system isn’t going to click with everybody, I honestly think it’s perfect. The only thing I dislike is that the options are a bit too limited. If you spend your time collecting the teeth and buying the items, the amount of choices you can pick from makes the spirit fights a lot easier. So, it’s a balancing act. How difficult or easy do you want to make it for yourself?

The biggest issue people have with this new system is that it’s based on RNG. I can totally understand that from a gameplay point of view, but it actually helps to make this game even more scary. Since, actions can fail and not everything can happen perfectly from the first time.

On top of that, this game has several endings. Like the previous titles, it depends on how good you purify each spirit. This time, you get even more tested upon how well you understand the spirit you faced. This time you don’t destroy or purify the spirit during the fight, you actually have to do one more interaction and depending on that, you get towards a certain ending. Honestly, I can’t really choose which system I like more. At one hand, now you are tested if you understand the grude of the spirit, but on the other hand… Now, you don’t have two ways to finish the spirit fight and you having to figure out if you did it right. Both systems are quite enjoyable and maybe in a sequel I would love to see both appear.

Visually, this game is really amazing. The game has a very similar style compared to the two previous games and the art this time around is amazing. Several times I was looking in awe at my screen at the spirit designs. Apart from the spirit entering the room, there are no real cutscenes in this game. A lot is done by big 2D drawings with the text describing what’s happening. To avoid me talking in circles, I’ll just say that the visual style of this game didn’t dissapoint. You can even choose between two outfits for the main character.

I really want to talk more indepth about the visuals and describe them more, but I’m not going to do that to avoid spoilers in this article. But let me tell you, this game has amazing design. You’ll get the most out of the visuals and the scares when you are playing this game not too far from the screen. There are some details on the spirits you can miss if you are setting too far from the screen. The first time I encountered the Departed, I didn’t notice some details since I was playing on my big TV and I set three meters away from that. But, the second meeting was while I was playing on the train to work. That time those details caught me off guard and I actually jumped a bit.

In terms of the audiovisual design, this game is pretty good as well. The sound effects in this game are pretty good. Some of them are re-used from the previous games but why change a winning formula? But the music is something that’s extremely well done. I already added the soundtrack to my playlist, I love it that much. The music is hitting the same atmosphere compared to the two previous games but it’s also standing loud and proud on it’s own two feet.

Now, there isn’t an autosave in this game just yet. So, don’t forget to save every so often. This time around we got 99 save slots. While the actual save file only tell you if you are at the start, middle or end of a chapter… We do have a lot more save slots now.

Also, we have a gallery in the main menu where you can see the different artwork, character profiles, play through the sound track and also watch the spirit introductions. You can even choose which partner is with you without having to replay that chapter. And there is also an “extra menu” that will unlock when you have beaten the game… What will that be… I’ll find out soon.

So far, I have been enjoying this game quite a lot. This game changes the formula of the previous two volumes quite a lot and makes it more like a scary game than a scary visual novel with some interactive elements. The biggest complaint I have with this game is that there are a lot of things very undercooked. Some mechanics are barely used or don’t have a lot of gameplay to them like the blackend teeth or some just fall flat on their face like the jumpscares.

But, I’m really loving what I see in terms of evolution through the series. I really think there is a lot of potential to make more volumes in the series. If this game was meant to test the waters with the new mechanics, then I have to say that is was extremely successful. I can’t wait to beat this game and see how the story will end. Now that there is more gameplay in this game, I even dare to say that this game might interest people who enjoy playing adventure games as well. The negative/weaker parts of the game don’t outweigh the positive and good parts of this game in my honest opinion. There is a lot of potential for growth. I look at it that way. And what we got is an amazing foundation, especially since there aren’t really any mechanics or things that don’t work. It’s just that they lack some depth.

Now, if you are a fan of the previous two titles, Death Mark II knockes it out of the park and then some. If you have never played any Spirit Hunter game, this game comes highly recommened if you enjoy horror and/or adventure games. Don’t let this series be a hidden gem and give it a shot. To me, this game was totally worth the wait. And honestly, I’m actually crossing my fingers for Spirit Hunter volume 4. Since if they can do this with the series, oh boy… Can’t wait to see where they go next.

And with that, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article, but until then… Have a great rest of your day and take care.

First Impression: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (PC – Steam) ~ Role playing With Guns

Official microsite – Steam page – Wikipedia

Something that is on my bucket list for a while now, is playing a round of Dungeons and Dragons. Currently, I haven’t made the time to actually do it. But, when I saw that there was a shooter with a lot of dungeon and dragons elements, I got quite interested. I mean, I love unique shooters, so I gave it a shot. I didn’t know that this game was a spin-off of the Borderlands series, another series that is on my bucket list but… you guessed it, I haven’t played yet. But, is this game any good? I mean, I placed it on the 9th spot of best game I played in 2023, so you would think it’s good. But perhaps it’s a “me thing” and if I look with a critical eye, this game might be full of flaws. There is only one way to find that out, and that’s taking a good look at it, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on the game and/or the content of the article in the comment section down below.

Role playing with guns

In this game, we play as a new character joining a group of D&D players who are about to wrap up a game. At the start of the game, you can customize your character. The amount of customization options you get are quite overwhelming. The amount of control you have in this game to fine tune your character is possibly a game in itself. Now, it’s a shame you don’t see your character yourself outside the pause menu or some cutscenes.

The pacing of this game fully depends on if you do any side quests or just want to explore the world. Overall, the writing of this game is charming. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you really feel that the main characters are a group of friends who welcome a new player into their world. During the game, the personalities of the characters really shine through in the world building and through the voice acting.

We get quite the diverse cast of voice actors lending their voice to this game. I have to say, they did an amazing job bringing this world to life. The personality and the emotions of the characters really shine through, giving this game even more of a Saturday morning cartoon vibe. While the story is predictable and silly sometimes, it’s written in such a way that you always want to know what’s going to happen next or how they are going to resolve the current crisis.

The silly puns of the enemies, the charming world, the over the top writing… It’s like I said earlier, this game’s story feels like you are watching a Saturday morning cartoon. There are also various different builds you make, so I think that the replay value of this game is going to be quite high. It wouldn’t surprise me that all the different builds play quite different from each other.

Now there is a whole multiplayer section to this game. Personally, I don’t play a lot of multiplayers. So, I’m not going to talk about it in this article. But, it sounds interesting. I wonder how they balanced this game, since overall this game feels a bit easy to me. Maybe I got quite used to keep moving and prioritizing enemies after playing games like Metal: HellSigner and Doom Eternal. But, if you balance your weapons and equipment to your playstyle, this game isn’t too much of a problem on normal difficulty.

On the fly polish

Visually, this game goes for the Borderlands style. This game uses a lot of shell shading and comic book style to present their world. It has quite realistic environments, but I do have some complaints.

The first complaint is that after fast traveling or traveling between zones, the game took quite some time to load in the high resolution textures. If I compare my computer specs to the recommended specs for this game, I shouldn’t have any problem. Thankfully, this is something that quickly fixes itself. After max 5 seconds in an area, the whole area loads.

The second complaint I have about the visuals is that in some houses, their front door is open. Yet, it’s a complete black hole with an invisible wall. You can’t even enter the houses. I can totally understand that modeling a lot of houses and balancing the loot and such inside of them is a lot of work, but this is just bad. It feels unfinished. You would think that there is only one of these houses like this, but oh no. There are several. Even some side quests have an NPC exit a house and, behind the front door, it goes completely black. Why?

But my biggest complaint is how quest markers aren’t visible enough on the mini map. In the screenshot I placed a bit higher, you can see that small blue marker above my ammo count in the right corner. Guess what, that’s a main quest marker. Now, you also notice that same marker on the mini map on the top right. But, if the area isn’t on your mini map, you don’t see it. You don’t get a hint in which direction you should go. So, we start playing a game where we have to open the pause menu to look at the map.

Overall, this game looks and runs amazingly fine. Just like the options to create your character, there are a lot of options you can tweak to your liking. There is even in a built-in benchmarking feature. I raised every setting to the highest it can go, and let me tell you, the game looks amazing. The vibrant colors and the smooth animations of this game are really great. Apart from the complaints I talked about above this paragraph, I don’t have anything really that I didn’t like about the visual presentation.

Now, let’s talk about the gameplay. In this game, you go from area to arena to finish battle arena’s. Honestly, I call it Doom in a Medieval fantasy setting. That’s one of the core gameplay loops in this game. Now, this loop has one negative, the risk of the game becoming repetitive. Let me tell you, this game can be quite repetitive. Outside the battles, there isn’t a lot to do in this game, and the fact that the enemies respawn in certain area’s for you to grind isn’t doing the game any favors.

Now, you also have the overworld sections of this game. This is nothing more than a fancy level select. Now, you do have these wild Pokémon encounters… Well, I call them Pokémon encounters because they spawn randomly, and you go into a small arena to battle for weapons amongst other things. The biggest difference is that you can’t really run from these battles and don’t really have a clear indication on how many enemies are left in the encounter. Apart from that, you have some minor environment puzzles where you have to go through a dungeon to get a key to open a gate, or a cheese chip. Yeah, a cheese chip.

Overwhelming

Now, there is a lot that this game does right. The amusing story, the amount of depth are just two examples. Visually, this game is also quite good.

Now, something I don’t really like is how many stats there are in this game. It didn’t take very long before my inventory was filled with various items like weapons and armor that I didn’t know what to do with. Also, the amount of ammo creates in the area is just too much. I rarely ran out of ammo. To a point that I that the ammo that the enemies dropped fill the floor.

You also have a helpful dragon that attacks enemies for you on the battlefield and saved my skin several times. You have a whole tree to upgrade your companion. And on top of that, you also have a melee attack you can preform. But, that melee attack is quite risky, since the animation takes quite some time… more than enough time for the enemies to gang up on you and do some serious damage.

The game feels a bit overwhelming sometimes. Especially for loot goblins like myself, who don’t throw any loot away and think that we can use them to craft or upgrade them for stronger ones. And this game is also hell for somebody who wants to open all chests in this game, since your inventory is anything but big enough to hold all that loot.

You’ll need to make decisions and adapt to the environment. Thankfully, we can run around the environment with responsive and easy to learn controls. I only have two complaints about the controls. The first one is that in certain menu’s like the blacksmith menu, the way to move left/right/up and down isn’t changed with the controls in the options’ menu. That menu uses WSAD to move, and I use an AZERTY keyboard here in Belgium… So, I have to set my fingers quite unnatural to move in that menu.

The other complaint I have about the controls is that you need to hold some keys to preform an action. In general, this isn’t a bad thing, since now we don’t have to deal with silly “are you sure” boxes. But, if your inventory is full, and you are fighting, and you are standing on top of some junk… the pickup key turns into an equip key. Sadly, the communication to the player that your inventory is full isn’t strong enough and I equipped weaker weapons and armor so many times. Just pay attention to that.

This brings me to the music and sound effects for this game. The sound effects in this game are overall very impactful. You really feel the impact of the guns you shoot and projectiles hitting you. I don’t have any complaints about that part, apart from sometimes not having a clear enough sound effect when you pick up health or when your inventory is full. I mostly had this problem in hectic battle situations. Thankfully, the visual effects sometimes helped to solve this.

The music in this game is amazing. I didn’t hesitate to buy the soundtrack of this game to add to my playlist. It’s very bombastic and orchestral. It’s loud and proud. Furthermore, it fits the game writing like a glove. I tried to play this game without music and the impact of some scenes really was lost. The battles also became a bit boring.

While, I’m currently midway into the main campaign and I haven’t touched any of the DLC’s yet… I’m quite enjoying myself with this game. This game isn’t perfect, it has some flaws. But, the positives far outweigh the negatives in my opinion. I actually had a hard time finishing this article because I kept playing this game while taking notes to finish this article. While I said that the gameplay loop might be somewhat repetitive earlier in this article, I still enjoy it. I also enjoy that you can get a second chance in a battle and revive yourself. The frequent saving in this game and the fact you can have multiple characters in this game is another cherry on this cake.

Personally, I recommend this game to everybody who enjoys playing shooter games and don’t mind having a bit of fantasy in their shooters. It’s an unique RPG where your main weapon isn’t a sword but it’s a gun. It’s a great game and if this is what the Borderlands series is about, I’m quite interested to give the whole series a chance. If I would give this game a score, I would give it a 70/100 for now. But, I haven’t finished the game, so I’ll leave my final score up for when I write a review of this game or fully finished it.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I want to thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you in another one, but until then have a great rest of your day and take care.

First Impression: Fire Emblem: Three Hopes (Switch) ~ Mashing Buttons For War

Wikipedia – Nintendo.com microsite

There are only a few Nintendo franchises that are suited for a cross-over with the Dynasty Warriors series. The best one in my mind is Fire Emblem. So, it was no surprise to me that when you had the unique concept of Three Houses, a warriors-style game was going to follow. I wanted to play it since it released, but I got distracted by other games and the game gathered dust on my wishlist. Recently, I saw it was on sale on my local store, so I snagged a copy. I put it in my Switch and I knew it was going to be a game I wanted to write about from then. What do I think about this game? Is it a good game, or is it a game I have buyers regret over? Let’s find out in this first impression, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on this game and/or the content of this article. So, let’s mash buttons for this war and let’s dive right into giving this game a good, honest look.

Choosing your starter

In this game, you play as a mercenary Shez hunting down the Ashen Demon. This Ashen Demon is actually the main character of the mainline game, Three Houses. The story being told in this game is actually an alternate timeline of the mainline game.

That’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to play this game. In Three Houses, there is a lot going on since the main character joined the academy and started teaching one of the three houses. But, what if that never happened and things go differently? Well, you get the story in this game. Now, you’d think that this game is either filled with spoilers for the mainline game or you won’t be able to follow it if you haven’t played the mainline game.

But, that’s far from the truth. Both games can be enjoyed separately. Things gets explained and since this is another timeline, things can go rather differently. Since, in this game, the school life is extremely short-lived. After your first few battles, you meet the three Lords of the lands, and you have to make a decision on which house you will join. After that, you basically choose your story path for the game. For my playthrough, I have chosen another house from my Three Houses playthrough, and I’m glad I did. I was always curious about the other characters, and I actually want to replay Three Houses with the other house now.

The stories in the three houses are quite different from each other. Without giving too much away, I’ll say this. The stories of all three paths do intertwine and depending on which house you join, that house will succeed in their mission. Now, I’m really curious to see how different the stories will be in the end. But, for that, I’ll have to play through this beefy game. This game can take around 140 hours to beat 100%, and I’m only half way the first route.

The writing in this game is pretty good in my opinion. It feels like that, an epic adventure anime series that can really draw you in. The story can take its twists and turns, but it has extremely powerful heroes and characters that have their own little quirks and charms to make you love them and cheer for them. You clearly have your episodic structure in this game, and it fits like a glove.

And on top of that, the voice acting in this game is just the cherry on top. The same cast returns from the mainline game to this game. While some characters do sound a bit different with the different direction and the time passed, the performance is amazing. They all fit the personality of the characters and give that additional layer of charm. Not everything is voice acted, but most of it is.

Also, I have to give some additional props to the voice actors since with the amount of things that can happen in this game and the different paths you can take, it must have been a beast of a script to do. And to write for that matter. Yet, I did notice some narrative tricks being used so that dialogue can be reused. Since, there is this mechanic there is a chance to recruit enemy generals to your side, and then their dialogue is mostly written is such a way, it doesn’t really matter in which house they are in.

Depending on which house you choose, you also choose your focus in the game. In my playthrough I chose for the Blue Lions. They excel at military tactics and mostly focus on swords and spears.

During the game, you unlock materials and seals to let your fighters go to a different class, so you can balance out your team. This is something extremely important, since choosing the right crew to go into battle will make all the difference in the end. Don’t always choose the class of your crew based upon numbers, make sure you have a diverse team, and you have all different types of warriors.

Mashing buttons for war

The biggest difference it will make is in the battles. There is a strength and weakness mechanic that is extremely well-balanced and can make an easy mission extremely difficult. But, I’ll talk more about the battles later in the article. First, I want to focus on the other mechanic in this game, and that is the base.

In between battles, you can run around in your base to talk to other characters and improve their bonds for not only more lore, but also for benefits during the battles. Your typical elements like in all the previous warriors games are here. A smithy, a supplier, a market… But this time, instead of it being a somewhat boring or overwhelming menu system, it’s a lively camp. It’s a joy to run around in, but sometimes it felt nothing more than just window dressing. The main issue is that you have fast travel and nothing else really happens in the camp. You do have some animations at certain places, but they never move from their location or interact with others. In Three Houses, you had characters walking around, making the place feel more lively than it actually was. Now, we have one NPC maybe walking around and for the rest we have empty paths and market vendors that shout to buy their wares to you. That being said, it’s extremely nice set dressing. To such a degree that I now feel that the menu system in Fire Emblem Warriors feels lazy.

One gameplay mechanic that really got improved is that the upgrading of your units isn’t a mindless menu system anymore. I always felt that it was really silly that you needed to upgrade your units through so many steps each and every time. This has been streamlined quite a lot and I love it. No more grinding certain missions for that one resource to beef up that one unit you wanted to play as.

Also, various other mechanics and activities of Three Houses made it into this game as well. Things like cooking and going on an expedition with you are also present in this game. They are some fun side activities, but don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Just like finding various notes scattered around the camp, they are just nice and welcomed set dressing.

Now, explaining every little detail and mechanic of a Destiny Warriors game is asking for a long article. There is lots to do and balance in this game. I won’t be surprised that some players will lose hours just to maximize and perfect every little stat. But, that wouldn’t matter if the other main mechanic in this game wasn’t fun. How do the battles play?

Well, if you played any warrior game before like Hyrule Warriors… You know what to expect here. In this hack and slash game, you are dropped in a map with your allies and you get a main objective. That main objective is your win condition. In a lot of battles, there is also a loose condition. So, taking that into account is quite important. Do use the battle map before the battle to your advantage and swap out your units accordingly. If you strategize before the battle starts, you will make it yourself easier.

During the battles, you can take control of a maximum of 4 characters on the battlefield. You can easily switch between them with the up and down arrows of the D-pad. Knowing when the switch is half the battle. Overall, the AI in this game is pretty good and provides you with the help you need, and the other units follow orders perfectly, yet it is faster sometimes to do the fight yourself. And as soon as you learn the combo’s and master the mechanics of each fighting style, oh boy can this become an enjoyable button mashing gaming.

Your right side of the controller will get a work-out. Especially the R, X and Y buttons. The faster you’re mashing them and use R for your special skills, the fights can become a cakewalk. But, don’t rest easy. You would think that this game is going to be easy from reading my previous sentence. But, don’t get yourself fooled. The difficulty differences are quite straightforward, like explained in this section from gameguides.com. Yet, if you don’t keep your wits about you and focus on taking out the right strongholds and generals, you will be overwhelmed pretty fast. When you understand that the non-general soldiers aren’t that big of a threat, you will make it yourself easier. Also, know when to defend a unit and when to attack.

Also, you can choose if you play this on Classic or Casual mode. Whilst you can change your difficulty level if you so desire, you can’t change the gameplay mode. So, if you don’t want to play with permadeath of your characters anymore, then you are out of luck. Personally, I’m playing on normal and casual mode. I get too frustrated when one simple mistake would mean that I loose a character that might make a later fight nearly impossible and the worry just ruins the fun for me. It’s a me thing and I’m glad we have the option.

Another part of the difficulty comes in via trying to get the best battle rank in each mission and chapter. Since, the rewards of these ranks are extremely worthwhile your time. They also helped during the side missions and unlock even better weapons and abilities.

There are a lot, and I really mean a lot, of mechanics in this game so that the players who love to micromanage will be able to eat their heart out. Thankfully, this game doesn’t force you into learning every single detail of this game and lets you play how every you want. Making this game’s replay value go through the roof. Now, another related question is… Is this game best played in short bursts, or should you play it in longer sessions. Well, that all depends on how well the gameplay clicks with you. Overall, there are a lot of different things that can happen during a mission, but after a while we see the same things happening over and over again.

This game can become repetitive real fast. There are various battle mechanics and things that can happen during a battle, but the breaks in the camp are quite welcome. Also, the side missions and the additional bonus things you can do in between battles are needed to break the repetitive nature of the battles. Don’t get me wrong, the battles aren’t boring… But, it doesn’t take long before you have seen the majority of gimmicks that can happen during a battle.

Yet for some reason, I felt that the battles in this game compared to all the previous warrior style games I have played are the best flowing so far. Giving order to your units and seeing them dash off and really have an impact on the battle… It pays off. I feel like they hit the sweetspot here. I can’t really put my finger on it but the battle gameplay just flows quite nicely. Maybe it also has to do with the audio and visual presentation during these battles.

The fact you see your allies icon dashing on the mini map towards their goal and saying a quick line when they executing their task, really helps during the hectic battles. They warn you when they are in need of aid as well. The controls to easily switch between your units help a lot with quickly managing everyting. You rarely feel like you wasted your time with a mechanic.

Visually, this game also helps a lot. The animations really feel impactful and give you the feeling that you are fighting an epic battle. I can totally excuse the game not animating all your soldiers in fighting for the sake of performance, but the little fighting that happens around you to “fake” this actually happening is doing quite a lot. Rarely did the game slow down for me, so everything happened with a smooth framerate. Now, I haven’t played the two player mode in this game… And maybe the framerate there isn’t the best… Especially in the previous Fire Emblem Warriors game, I played the two player mode and oh boy, that wasn’t the most optimal mode.

Also, looking at screenshots of the two player mode, I feel like it does a number on the amazing visual presentation of this game. It cuts the screen horizontally in half and I’m sorry but it just doesn’t look right. Maybe on a big screen it looks better but, on the Switch itself… I shudder at the thought. It’s a shame that the visuals looks so streched and wrong in multiplayer since they are quite nice.

Almost the sweetspot

This game almost hits the sweetspot on being a “perfect” game, it’s insane. Yet, there are somethings I find strange how they got through the cracks.

First of all, the visuals are amazing. You really feel like you are running through a real world that’s going through a big war. The visual style is medieval fantasy and it really shines through in the whole game. Yet, when somebody crosses their arms in a cutscene, the hands keep upright. To a point that it is immersion breaking sometimes. Oh, and the same thing happens in cutscenes when people want to place their hand in their side. The gap between their side and their hand is big enough to fit a your whole arm in between. Also, in cutscenes, everybody is mostly in their idle animation apart from when they are talking. And this is something that annoyed me a lot in this game. Dare to keep that shocked pose instead of just going back to idle. It breaks the flow of the story and it feels stiff and slow.

The UI is extremely clean and easy to understand. It’s a blast to navigate and gives you all the needed information. Yet, after unlocking a class for a character you get the question if you want to change it or not… without seeing which stats are impacted and which ones aren’t.

Using your abilities in battle is quite easy to do. Just press “R” and choose the right ability. Yet, the very powerful ability using R+A doesn’t always work as you expect. Sometimes I feel that the very strong final attack just didn’t trigger and got skipped. Also, the meter changes to being almost full again so I started wondering if it was glitched or not.

There are also various item pickups in during the battle. But, it’s not always too clear what item pick up does what. For some reason, I always confuse the blue and purple pick ups. And it’s so easy to waste a pick up, it’s rather annoying. Also, when an ally is wonded, you can’t easy heal them or move them to pick up an item or break a green pot. Little sidenote on pots, these red pots on the mini map sometimes look quite brown in game. Maybe because of lighting or maybe it has too much blue and green added to the texture.

These small issues started to grab more of my attention as soon as I decided to write this article. Like not all sunrays have good anti-aliasing (making straight lines look less jagged basically). It is distracting once you notice it. Just like the hand thing I talked about earlier. It’s a shame since the cutscenes are more lively now since they use 3D character models instead of character portraits in Fire Emblem Warriors.

Something that doesn’t have any issues is the soundtrack of this game. The soundtrack really pumps you up during the battle and helps make the game feel even more impactful during battles and relaxing during camp visits. The orchestral score is a joy to listen to and I have to admit that I listen to it here and there while I’m working. It’s a great soundtrack and I’m glad it’s added to my playlist.

The sound effects are pretty great as well. They stand out quite a lot so it’s easy to know what is happening and it always gives the needed information to the player to not make it a guessing game. Thankfully, you also get some visual information as well so people with hearing problems don’t loose out on the advantages the sound effects can give you.

The amount of options you have in this game is incredible. You can tweak the game to your favor, you can also change the whole button lay-out to your wishes without changing the default button lay-out of your Switch. While I prefer playing this game with a Pro controller, the game plays smooth with joycons as well. While the same supports one joy con to play the game, do yourself a favor and play with either both joycons or a pro controller.

Now, this game does have an autosave feature, but I’m also really glad that this game have several save slots. While you only have 8 slots in this game, that’s more than enough to experiment in your playthrough. The only minor issue is that when have saved before the last battle, the game forces you to save before you enter the war map the last battle. Without mistake. One simple if loop where the game checks if the player has saved a few minutes manually before and it wasn’t an autosave would solve this minor issue.

Overall, I fell in love with this game. Compared to the previous warrior style games we got from Nintendo franchises, this is one of the better ones. It isn’t overwhelming and you don’t have to micromanage every little stat, but it does provide you with that option. It’s the same addictive hack and slash gameplay we are used too in these games but it also manages to flow a bit better.

While the game does have some minor issues here and there, they aren’t too big of a deal. Like when you teleport in your camp to a facility you can press A to interact but when you teleport to a unit, you have to walk a few steps towards them before you can interact.

If we ever get another warrior style game, I think that this game has set amazing foundations for the next title. The main complaint I see other reviewers say is that the combat isn’t diverse enough. Personally, I somewhat agree that some classes play extremely similar but, it’s one thing they should focus on expanding next. Do more with combat styles like archers having a larger attack range but being weaker in close combat. Or give mages the chance to buff their allies.

What we got in this game feel like an extremely solid foundation for the next games. I’m so glad I played this game since it’s one of the better ones I played this year. I was afraid that I was burned out of the warrior style gameplay, but no. This game drew me right back in and reminded me why taking care of the details is so important in making a good game. I can’t wait to see what else this game has to offer since I’m going to beat it, that’s for sure. And after that, I should beat the other Fire Emblem games that are still on my backlog… shouldn’t I?

I highly recommend this game to everybody who enjoys warrior style games, hack and slash games, Fire Emblem fans and everybody who enjoyed the Hyrule Warriors games. This game takes leaps and bounds to improve itself compared to the previous warriors game in the Fire Emblem series. While it has some small distracting issues, overall this game delivers an amazing experience where you can sink a lot of hours into and with a highly replayable game. So, what are you waiting for soldier? A command to play the game? Well, here it is! Pick up your controller and join the war with quirky, unique characters that takes itself just seriously enough. Join the fight in something that feels like you were young watching your favorite adventure TV-series every Saterday morning whilst you feel extremely powerful and wonder what’s going to happen next. That’s how I personally felt while playing this game.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I want to thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

First Impression: Metal: Hellsinger (PC – Steam) ~ Rhythmic Doom

Steam – Official website

While I love music, I’m not that fond of rhythm games. Because, I can’t keep a rhythm for some reason. Especially in games, since my playing style is quite reflex based, and I act on instinct instead of on the beat of music. Anyway, I was scrolling through the games I got via my Humble Bundle subscription and I saw Metal: Hellsinger. I was like: “Oh, a new indie shooter game, let’s give it a try.”. I only noticed that it was a rhythm game after I installed it and booted it up. So, I was afraid that this game wasn’t going to be something for me. Yet, this game surprised me… And in this article I want to talk about it, while I invite you to give your thoughts and/or opinions on the content of this article and/or the game in the comment section down below.

Going to hell singing

In the world of this game, hell is a place where memories are lost. Demons don’t know who they were and why they are down there. Also, because souls are tortured in hell, something is taken away from you. For the main character in this game, the Unknown, that’s her voice. She is out to get it back and travels through hell to defeat the demons standing in her way to get her voice back.

The story in this game mostly takes a backseat for the actual gameplay loop of this game. I’ll talk more about the gameplay later. First, let me talk about the voice acting. The voice acting in this game is pretty good. Since the main character is mute, one of our weapons is our guide and tells what’s going on. The skull named Paz is voiced by no one less than Troy Baker. His performance here is excellent, and it’s a joy to listen to. The other voiced character is the main antagonist of the game, the Red Judge. She is voiced by Jennifer Hale. I have to tell you, the voice acting in this game is well done.

In terms of the story, I’m not going to critique it too much. Because the game is rather short, and I don’t want to spoil anything. Not that this story is going to move you to the edge of your seat, but still. Howlongtobeat puts this game at a runtime of 4 1/2 hours, and I have to say that’s a very low estimate. If you are good at rhythm games, I can totally see this game taking you give or take 5 hours, but if you aren’t the best in rhythm games, I think that 7 to 8 hours is more reasonable.

Now, something I really like in this game is that the cutscenes are mainly lightly animated comic book panels. This makes the art in the cutscenes of this game highly detailed and give it an amazing atmosphere. A few cutscenes are in-game and they look fine. Let me just say that if I had to be real nitpicky that some textures in action moments were a bit rough and stood out from the amazing looking visuals in this game. Thankfully, it’s something that will be noticed if you review games for a hobby or a job, but I’m certain it will be less noticeable if you are just enjoying this game.

The story is mostly told at the start and at the end of each level. The pacing of this game is quite fast because of certain gameplay mechanics. But, more on that later. If it’s too fast for you, you have a codex where you can look up more lore or more information on the enemies and events in the game. These unlock automatically, and you don’t have to go looking for them… Looking at you, Doom…

Rhythmic Doom

If I had to describe this game in a few sentences, I have to say this. Take the hectic shooting combat of Doom, combine it with the combo system of Devil May Cry, and mix it with the rhythm gameplay from Crypt of the Necromancer.

In this game, you go from arena to arena and fight a boss at the end. The arenas themselves are combat puzzles where you have to know how each enemy operates in order for you to prioritize the right enemies. Each arena is gets between 2 and 5 rounds of enemies spawned in. In total, you have 7 main enemy types for you to deal with. They get introduced one by one, and you get more than enough time to learn the behaviors of these enemies.

You also have special elite versions of some enemies, and let me tell you… They are the ones you will hate. They are not only stronger than their normal counterpart but also hit harder. I still hate the first elite enemy you encounter. The shield cambions can go and die in a fire. You need to get close to them and strafe around them to get through their shield, but they have a very nasty wide fireball attack that makes getting close to them quite difficult.

Just like in Doom, you can stagger an enemy. When you stagger an enemy, you can glory kill them. Instead of blinking blue, they blink orange in this game. If you press E at the right time, you will fly towards the enemy and glory kill it. If you don’t press E at the right time, the enemy will get up and continue attacking you. Glory killing is important since you can regain some health from it. This is especially handy when you used up all the healing crystals in the arena.

Now, you might have noticed at the top of the screenshots, you have a multiplier. This multiplier is exactly what you assume, it’s a damage multiplier. Like in Devil May Cry, if you keep fighting, that meter will go up. The higher it goes, the better. It’ll slowly go down, so you have to make a mad dash towards the next arena to fight again to keep it high. There are also sometimes power-ups in the arena’s that either double your current fury OR up it to the maximum right away, which is 16x.

Sadly, just killing enemies doesn’t increase the counter. If you look closely at the crosshair in the screenshots, you might start to understand how the rhythm mechanic in this game works. It’s sort of like DDR/Guitar Hero, where arrows come from one side, and you have to hit the right button when they are inside the arrows of the crosshair. The better your rhythm, the more damage you do and the more your fury meter increases.

But, that’s not the only advantage of keeping a rhythm. When you press “R” at the perfect time during the reload animation, you’ll be able to instantly reload your weapon. Now, unlike Doom, you don’t have limited ammo. So, no need to keep in mind which ammo you still have and which one not. You can only take two guns into a level, so choose wisely. Each weapon has their own special mechanics and usefulness and maybe if you die over and over again, you might want to try with another weapon.

Another important gameplay mechanic is the yellow bar you see in the screenshots. This yellow bar is a charge bar. The better you hold the rhythm, the more you charge that bar with that weapon. When it reaches max, you will be able to unleash the special ability of that weapon. For example, for your blade, it’s going ninja on your enemies with extremely fast sword swings. Another example are the dual pistols, where you spawn a temporary clone of yourself, they not only helps you fight but also increases your fury meter.

Now, interesting to know is that you can revive yourself 3 times on the easiest difficulty when trading in some score. This is an amazing feature in my opinion. This allows players with a bad sense of rhythm to play this game without getting too frustrated, but it’s also a punishment. Now, these points are nothing more than bragging rights for the global leaderboard, but it works quite effectively. I don’t know how different it is on the other difficulty modes, since I’m playing on the easy difficulty. There are four of them, with the 4th one being locked at first.

Metal rhythmic

I think that it’ll surprise nobody that for this game, we get a metal soundtrack. On the Wikipedia page for this game, you get an amazing list of all the tracks in this game.

Now, while I do enjoy metal music, I’m not that big a fan when the vocals are just screaming the lyrics into the mic. I just enjoy my music when I understand the lyrics right away without listing closely, and English not being my first language also plays a huge role in that. Thankfully, in this game, it isn’t that bad. There are a few tracks where it happens and most of them are understandable, like in Amaranthe tracks, for example.

The amount of different artists that helped to make this soundtrack by Two Feathers come true is just incredible. Some of these are real earworms, like the main theme and “Stygia ft. Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy”. I think I’ll have to look up some of these bands later, since I really liked their work for this game. Each level has its own theme and the soundtrack fits this game as a glove. There are also two DLC’s for this game. One adds 9 additional songs and the other one adds two songs and some cosmetics.

Let me be honest, I feel that the second DLC with “essential songs” isn’t the best. There are some none metal songs in there and clash hard with the vibe. The other DLC that adds two additional songs and cosmetics is a lot better and a steal for the price. I’m really curious to see what they are going to do next, since when you look at the DLC list in the main menu, there is a third option saying “coming soon”.

The music and gameplay work together quite nicely to bring you a highly addictive arena shooter with a lot of rhythm game elements. Apart from that, the sound design of this game is also quite amazing. The guns and weapons feel amazing to use, and you really hear the impact they have. Now, sometimes the feedback of getting hit isn’t clear enough, but playing a bit with the options fixed that for me.

Speaking about the options, the amount of flexibility this game has is just insane. You can adjust quite a lot to your liking, and you can even totally disable the whole rhythm mechanic from the game. Now, I advise against doing that since the game is quite well-balanced on the easiest difficulty setting, and you can just recalibrate so the audio and video latency is to your playstyle.

Visually, this game looks amazing. While the colors used in the levels can be quite monotone, everything still stands out and everything is quite easy to read during hectic fights. Also, details like the marionete enemies having strings aren’t lost during the hectic gameplay. You can quickly see when you are low on ammo on a gun or when an enemy is hiding or walking behind a wall. You also quickly see exit when you finished the arena.

Each level also has it’s own unique visual presentation. From a snowy arena to an big church… Each level looks different and looks amazing. A lot of memorable set pieces. I loved the mine level where you always came back to a similar room and had a lot of different fights. Also, the visuals change whenever you are in a higher fury counter. A lot more fireworks are displayed with some more animations.

In terms of animations, these just add to the atmosphere. Attacks are quite well telegraphed and with the quite responsive controls, I rarely felt that taken damage wasn’t my fault. Also, the green glow healing crystals give off, makes them easy to read as well. Something I also love is that you can see the top of the Unknown’s wings when you double jump. There are a lot of details present in this game without the UI and the screen becoming cluttered with information. Oh, and in terms of the animations as well, the animation of the main character in the main menu, oh boy. The way she throws you the peace sign and flies off when you click on the exit button or when she looks at the skull when you look at the codex, just wow. The charm while staying true to the setting is amazing.

Something you need to be careful of is that there are no mid-level saves in this game. One time I had the bad luck that just before a bossfight, Windows Update decided to reboot my PC. When my computer rebooted and I restarted the game, I had to restart the level. Thankfully, the levels are rather short so it isn’t that bad. The game saves automatically when you beat a level so we don’t have to worry about that one.

Something else to keep in mind is that healing crystals can be destroyed with one simple shot. And yes, they despawn quite rapidly. So, stay aware while fighting since these healing crystals are really needed in this game.

I have been mostly praising this game, but are there any negatives I can say about this game? What is this game doing wrong? It’s not the extremely stable frame rate, since I haven’t seen any slowdowns while playing this game. Most of my complaints about this game are rather small in the grand scheme of things.

The first minor complaint I have is that actually preforming a glory kill is quite unforgiving. If you are even a little bit off, you get denied. Thankfully, you get that information quickly with a visual and sound cue. But, still the amount of times I was off by just a few milliseconds and got denied, is frustrating.

The second minor complaint I have is about the default controls. Your blade is the first weapon you have and let me tell you, with the font useed, you barely see the difference between É and E. So, it took me some time to realize I had to press 1 on my number row instead of E… Just show the number keys too on that small icon.

Apart from going for a higher score or finding the hidden coat of armor for more additional bonus goodies, there isn’t a high replay value. Also, the UI before you enter the level gives you the impression that you need the sigils … while you don’t need them at all.

Sigils are bonus challenges that can unlock additional perks but unlike Nightmare Reaper these are anything but essential to finish the game. I only finished my first Sigil after I had beaten one of the final three levels. Yet, they are a fun challenge to challenge your skills with the game with an unique twist. They are also timed as well.

The third minor complain I have is how semi-aggressive the DLC is promoted. “Unlock by buying the DLC”. But on the other hand, I totally understand that the company needs to make money and promote that the DLC exists.

My final minor complaint is that as soon as you have found your two weapons, you are set. Apart from when they are introduced, there is no reason to use them anymore. It’s a shame since all them have unique and nice gameplay styles. Do yourself a favor and change up your weapons sometimes.

Honestly, I’m having a hard time finding negavites with this game. Most of the negatives I can say about this game are rather minor and don’t detract from the amazing gameplay loop. While I can totally understand that this game can feel repetitive to some, I feel that the gameplay loop and unique arenas are addictive enough to stand up on their own two feet.

I’m surprised that a rhythm game is this much fun and provides challenge for every playstyle. Even when you can’t keep rhythm like myself, you can still enjoy this game. You can also disable the rhythm mechanics completely. You’ll be able to experience the whole game but not be able to submit your score to the leaderboards. But, like I said earlier, you’ll miss out on one of the fundemental mechanics that make this game so much fun to play.

I highly recommend this game to everybody who enjoys action/shooter games. Especially if you enjoyed games like Blood, Nightmare Reaper, Quake or Doom. Do be warned that this game is on the short side, but is in my opinion totally worth full price. The amount of polish and care that has been put into this game is fantastic. At first I was afraid that this game was going to frustrate me like all other rhythm games do, but this game is polished to a fine diamond that really makes me want to stay in rhythm since it feels so rewarding to finally beat my score.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Review: Doom Eternal (PC) ~ Just A Little Bit More

Wikipedia – Steam – Official microsite

I still remember when I had beaten Doom 2016, I wanted to play the sequel. Yet, for some strange reason, my PC which was strong enough couldn’t run the game. Now, I was planning to build a new computer and recently I did. Now, I have a totally new computer, and I got Doom Eternal for free via my Humble Bundle subscription. Currently, I have beaten the main campaign, not yet the DLC. So, was it worth the wait for the new computer, or should I have played other games first? Well, in this article, I’ll talk about my honest first impression of the game and what I thought of it. I only focused my playthrough on the main campaign. So, no opinions on the DLC and the multiplayer. Also, feel free to leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on this game and/or the content of this article.

Just A Little Bit More

Doom Eternal is a game where the core mechanics of Doom 2016 are taken and expanded upon. Kind of like Tears of the Kingdom did for Breath of the Wild. The first piece of evidence of that move is the story.

In this game, we play as Doom guy. 14 years after the ending of Doom (2016). And of course, we get no explanation why it took Doom guy so long or what happened during that period. We do get some amazing voice acting from an outstanding cast. But the story this time around isn’t the best. While yes, we don’t play Doom for the story… But, this story has some problems.

There is a lot of technobabble in the game. Various things you can understand from context clues, and I mean the word context here in any way shape or form. Others are never explained at all. Of course, we have the scattered lore documents… But, that’s not the way how you pace a Doom story. We don’t play Doom to read notes, we play Doom to shoot demons and save Earth. If there was a bit more: “This is such and such, a member of that demon race that invaded Earth after that energy source was discovered…” or amongst those lines, it would feel a lot less mediocre.

Also, the unexplained 14-year gap between both games isn’t doing the story of this game any good. Quite often I felt I was playing the 3rd game in a story driven series. Where in the second game, a lot a thing happened and step up this 3rd story.

I think the balance between not explaining and explaining things is off here. Suddenly we are hunting for Hell Priests now, why are these important? How powerful are they? Why are we hunting them and… Hold up… Is this taking the gag of not caring about the details of the story to an extreme? Maybe so. Yet, this execution falls flat on its face in my opinion when it takes itself so seriously.

The expanded lore is there through the sometimes quite hidden notes you can pick up. So, if you want to make sense of the story and the events, you can read them. But, like I said… We don’t play a Doom game for reading, we play a Doom game to play a badass and challenge ourselves in tricky arena’s.

Nevertheless, I think the story is okay. I’d give it a just passing grade, out of 10. I just feel that it could have been fleshed out a bit more. Not only that, but I couldn’t help myself compare it to the opening of some of the previous Doom games, where things gradually build up, and we get to learn what everything is. Just like how this game introduces all the returning and new enemies to us.

Oh boy, the enemy roster is quite expanded in this game. And some of the new enemies are fascinating. For example, the Carcass. This enemy can put up energy walls that serve as shields. And they are used to protect their demon kind from an attack. Also, the new Whiplash snake enemies are creepy. They are snakes with whips that are quite annoying to hit when they are moving on the ground. There are other enemies like the Marauders. These just frustrated me to no end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the start of this part of the article, I said that Doom Eternal is an expanded version of Doom 2016. So, if you have played Doom 2016, you will feel right at home in this game. This game is still the action packed and tense shooter where you feel that you are locked in with the demons, but the demons are locked in with you.

Hectic micromanagement

Most of the gameplay loop is still here from Doom 2016. But, like in Doom Eternal tradition, there is more. The first big change is that there is no pistol anymore with unlimited ammo. So, if you run out of ammo, you’ll have to rely on the chainsaw.

You’d think that, like in Doom 2016, you’d use glory kills to refill your ammo as your health. But, oh no. In this game, that’s only for health. If you want ammo, you’ll have to chainsaw attack the enemies. So, it’s a good idea to keep the weaker enemies around to chainsaw them if you are running low. New in this game is that you don’t have to refuel the chainsaw when you are out of fuel. One piece of fuel automatically recharges. You can pick up more fuel if you want or have to chainsaw the bigger enemies.

Now, Doom Eternal got a lot more tricky compared to Doom 2016. If you are quite used to the Doom 2016 combat loop… Well, you will be thrown for a surprise here. This game is even more of a balancing act than before. You have so many options to kill demons, it’s a joy to enter an arena and fight your way through it.

Overall, Doom Eternal is quite linear. You go from A to B and overall, the path is almost always clear on what to do. And if it isn’t clear, a quick glance at the map will help you to figure out where to go next. At first, I was afraid that this would mean that secret hunting would be quite easy, but oh boy was I wrong. When I finished my first level and saw that I didn’t even find half of the secrets, I was surprised.

I can’t wait to replay through some scenario’s and try things differently or look at what I might have missed. Since, sometimes the secrets are quite helpful in your quest. And other times, they are fun collectables to decorate your ship.

Personally, I think this game can be a bit overwhelming. There is so much you can do in this game, it’s hard to keep track of everything. There are so many different types of enemies with their own unique weak points. You also have to juggle your ammo pool and on top of that, you have secrets to find… It took me until over the halfway point before I understood a lot of the finer mechanics of this game.

At a certain moment, the game just started to click. Yes, there is a lot in this game, and don’t expect to be able to find everything at your first playthrough. Unless you are using a guide, that is. Overall, this game took me 14 hours to complete, and I felt I found quite a lot of the secrets. There are several I didn’t find, but that’s for another playthrough.

The gameplay loop is mostly the same as Doom 2016. You go from arena to arena, shooting up waves upon waves of demons. If you stand still or let yourself get cornered, you’ll die. In this game, you can pick up extra lives. Now, these extra lives are extremely worth it. They respawn you when you die without you having to reload from a checkpoint. Let me tell you, if you think that this makes the game easier, oh boy… At the final three levels, I had close to twelve one ups in the bag. Even while being careful, I had zero of them at the final boss fight. This game will punish you if you don’t keep moving and prioritize certain enemies.

If you kill the weaker enemies right away, you’ll be in trouble. Since, it’s quite easy to run out of ammo. Even when you fully upgrade the ammo cap. Then, you’ll have to stagger the weaker “fodder” enemies to chainsaw them for ammo. Or blow up barrels for ammo. Sometimes I felt I wasn’t playing a shooter but an action strategy puzzle game.

Especially because this game becomes a sort of game where you have to make quick decisions. Remembering your controls and what does what is essential. I even mapped various things to my mouse for quick access. The trickiest thing is deciding if you chainsaw or glory kill the fodder enemies. Do you need health or ammo? Since, chainsawing fodder enemies gives you less health than glory killing. I do have one complaint about that, if you have the bad luck a stronger enemy comes in front of you, and you press the chainsaw button instead of the glory kill button, the animation of “not enough fuel” takes a bit too long before you can really preform your glory kill or chainsaw the right enemy… Or even shoot.

Outside the shooting, this game turns into something resembling the modern Tomb Raider trilogy. There is a lot of jumping and platforming puzzles in this game… So much so, that I even considered subtitling this review “Doom’s Identity Crisis” where I started to compare both games. In most cases, the way forward is very clearly signposted, so it’s quite rare to get lost or not know where to go. In very rare cases, it was not. It was either a swing bar being a bit too hidden or a switch that I didn’t know I had to hit. For example, in the later levels, swimming sections gets introduced. In these sections, there are tubes you can shoot into to shoot a button. Thankfully, I know from previous Doom games that this is a mechanic in the series, but newer players will have a tough time figuring that one out.

Happy journey

This article first started out as a first impression article. Since I played this game with a lot of breaks in between, I felt that I had to play this game again for a longer time to fully form an opinion. So, I played it quite a lot these past days and I even finished it.

I wondered if it’s better to play this game in one long sitting or in short bursts. To be honest, I don’t have a clear answer on that. The game is a lot of fun to play and when you get into the rhythm of things, it’s hard to put down. But on the other hand, I felt that this game was repetitive in longer bursts.

Now, during my research for this article, I noticed that a lot of people praised this game for it’s polish and smoothness. I do have to agree for the most part. Visually, this game is amazing. It’s gore and creepy in the right places and gorgous when it needs to me imposing. Very rarely I encountered some visual strangeness. Sadly, a few times I noticed some rough parts of the game. A door texture in the main hub here, a floating arm there.

Something that I felt that was off is when the Archvile spawned enemies, they don’t come alive right away. It’s an amazing effect to see them get “build to life”… But, quite often it took a few seconds for them to become active. As if the newly generated object was loading in the code of the AI for that demon. It felt jarring sometimes especially since this game runs so smooth. Just like me having the game sometimes not boot when I change my screen resolution.

Something that’s also quite impressive in terms of the visuals is the fact you can dress up your slayer as you wish. There are a lot a cosmetic options and skins you can unlock. Some of them ingame, others via cosmetic DLC. It’s amazing to see that all the cutscenes and reflections in game change as well. But, the cosmetics don’t give any buffs or change anything gameplay wise. So, having around € 90 of cosmetic packs in the Steam store, no thanks.

In terms of preformance, this game ran amazingly on my new computer. I had quite the smooth framerate and I have to agree that it’s optimized quite well there. Yes, the game is overwhelming and there is a lot going on… But, all sound cues and visual cues still give the player the information they need. Very rarely I nocited some input lag with the jumping.

The controls are quite good as well. Thankfully, the keys are shown in the UI, so you can quickly find what you are looking for at a glance. The UI isn’t “in your face” but gives you a lot of information as well. The only annoying thing in terms of the controls is that near the end of the game, you have to “use” some doors instead of what your are used too, runnig up to them and open them.

Now, I touched upon sound cues earlier. In terms of the music and sound effects, this game is just amazing. You’ll have a hard time playing this game without the sound. There are so many sound cues like low health or bosses charging up, it’s quite important. Thankfully, most of these sound cues also have a visual cue so deaf people won’t have trouble with this game too much there.

The music as well is amazing. The heavy metal tracks by Nick Gordon just pump you up for the action and add some amazing atmosphere to the game. During writing of this article, I have beene listening to my buddy Kovic his arrangement and I’m reliving the game again. I just have a weak spot for heavy metal soundtracks from shooters.

Now earlier, I said that I mostly agree that this game is extremely optimized. Sadly, I did encounter a few things that raised my eyebrows. First of all, sometimes after ammo depletion of one of my gun suddenly switched to the BFG. In the hectic fight, I didn’t notice that right away and the amount of times I shot a BFG round without wanting too, is just sad.

Also, I did notice some minor bugs. Twice, I clipped through the floor while climbing raising platforms. Sometimes I found a spot where I could clip into the level geometry. Yeah, some parts weren’t solid. Thankfully, these parts are very far and few between.

One thing that really felt “bad” is one boss fight. I’m sorry but the Khan Maykr boss fight is just silly. Just like others, I quite often ran out of ammo during that boss fight. Now, it turns out that when you shoot the new minion enemies in the head, they drop ammo. This is fine and all, but Khan Maykr eletricifies half of the arena and there are no fodder enemies. So, if you really run out of ammo… Though luck. That means you have to redo that boss fight. And how do we learn that these minions drop ammo? Well, from the codex page of course in the menu… Unlike all the other new enemies where you have an introduction screen with their weakspot.

This bossfight was needlessly hard and I honestly didn’t like to play it. Since, a few too many mistakes in your ammo management and it’s game over. Even all other boss fights spawn fodder enemies for you to heal or get more ammo. Why not this time? You can’t recover after a few mistakes and that just feels unfair. Especially when you read online that several weapon mods are quite effective… But, what if you weren’t focussing on these mods?

One other thing that I felt was disappointing in this game was that some mechanics are underused in the main campaign. During one moment in thte campaign, you can take control of a Revenant. You have a battle as that demon. There are also upgrades for that fight in your suit. But, this is only a short fight and once during the entire game. But maybe I can experiment with that more in the endless battles or the new battlemode that update 66.6 brought.

Now, I fully know that I haven’t talked about everyting this game has to offer. But there is just so much that this game has to offer that talking about everything would make this review take hours to read and weeks to write. So, I’m leaving various things as a surprise for you to discover when you give this game a shot.

Conclusion

The good:

+Addictive shooter loop.

+Amazing music and audio design.

+Great animations and visual presentation.

+Replay value in a linear shooter.

+Secret hunting is a lot of fun.

+Amazing controls.

+Great voice acting.

The bad:

-This game can be a bit overwhelming, so it’s easy to forget certain mechanics or features.

-Very minor visual hickups here and there.

-Presentation of the story. A bit too much reading for certain lore points and twists to make sense or have any kind of impact.

-Too many cosmetic DLC’s.

Conclusion:

If you enjoyed playing Doom 2016, you’ll love this game. This game is an amazing action game where quick decision making is key and central to the gameplay. I only have two major problems with this game.

First, is the story and how a lot of the lore and background information is explained in notes. Notes that are sometimes hidden in secrets. It’s a shame it’s presented like that since the pacing, writing and voice acting is amazing.

Secondly, the game is a bit too filled with content. This is a very tricky balacing act since as a casual player, you can only remember so much. The game is a bit too hectic to always remember that you have challenges and such. Thankfully, this makes the game quite replayable. Hopefully, the second time you play it in a different way so you unlock the other things.

Now, I’m happy that I played Doom Eternal. I can’t wait to start the two DLC campagins and explore all the mechanics and modes that I have missed. This game is amazing ride and an amazing follow up to Doom 2016. In my Doom 2016 review, I wondered if this game fixes a lot of the grips I had with Doom 2016. They set such a big step in the right direction. I honestly think that if in the next Doom game, they explain the lore eabout certain things more.. I think I’ll have a hard time finding flaws in this game.

If you enjoy action shooter games and don’t shy away from an interesting puzzle… This game is for you. You don’t need to have played Doom 2016 for you to play Doom Eternal. It wouldn’t surprise me that this game will be on my top 10 games of the year list. It is an amazing gamee with a few flaws but overall, these flaws didn’t hinder my enjoyment with this gem of a game. While the main campaign will take you 14 hours, I can totally see myself sinking a lot more hours in it.

And with that, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reaeding it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welecome you in another article, but until thene have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 90/100

Review: Persona 5 Royal (PS4) ~ Changing The World

Wikipedia – Official microsite

Exclusives are a strange thing. I heard quite a lot of things about the Persona series and how it captured the hearts of so many people. Persona mainly releases on PlayStation 4. Two years ago, I decided to bite the bullet and bought myself a PlayStation 4 Pro to play Persona 5 to see what the fuzz was about. Not too long after I had beaten the game for the first time, the ports to other platforms got announced. Oh well, that’s life sometimes for you. Now, I have another platform to play games on, and I’m glad I bought my PlayStation 4 Pro. At first, it was my Persona 5 Royal machine, even when I had a lot of other games for it. Now, why did Persona 5 Royal struck such a cord with me? Is the game really that good or am I just blinding myself to not feel buyer’s regret? Or am I just overlooking the flaws in the game…? Well, in this article, I want to talk this game that almost was my game of the year last year. I hope you are ready, since here we go, let’s dive right in the world of the Phantom Thieves, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your thoughts and/or opinions on this game and/or the content of this article.

Changing the world

To keep spoilers to a minimum in this article, I’m going to skip over various plot details and keep some parts vague. Since, this game is best experienced as blind as possible. Then, you get the most out of the story.

The game opens in a casino where you have to escape. Our main protagonist gets caught and detained by the police. The questioning starts, and you start telling the story from the beginning.

The protagonist got transferred to Shujin Academy in Tokyo after an incident where he tried to help a woman being harassed by a man. During his probation, he stays at Café LeBlanc, which is owned by a friend of his parents. Now, it doesn’t take long before the usual Persona story elements start with the Velvet Room. A strange app also appears on our hero’s phone.

After his first few schooldays, he gets in trouble with an abusive gym teacher. After that, they discover a Palace not too far from school. This Palace is a world manifested from warped emotions. In there, they learn who that gym teacher actually is, and things go from bad to worse.

In general, most of the story follows a similar structure. The main story is divided up into chapters. Each chapter introduces new characters and a new palace. The main goal of each chapter is to conquer the Palace in time before the looming treat stops you from doing so. This can go from being sued or expelled, the stakes are always high.

In terms of writing, the game sometimes gets quite predictable. Quite often I was able to predict what was going to happen. Now, does that make the story less interesting or thrilling? Heavens no. This story’s pacing and execution is extremely well done. Let me give you a few reasons why.

For of all, the voice acting. I already loved the voice acting in Persona 5 Strikers, and I love it here. I have nothing to critique nor complain about the voice acting in this game. It really pulled me into the world of this game and took me along for the ride.

Secondly, the theme of the story is wonderful. It doesn’t shy away from sensitive subjects and explores them. The character growth in this game is really well done and made me (want to) replay the game several times to even explore all the side stories with side characters.

Thirdly, the openness of the game helps the replay value of this game so much. You have more than enough time to beat the Palace in each chapter, so you can start exploring the world of this game. Making it so that you see new side stories each and every playthrough. There is also a way to romance the female characters, which also gives bonus scenes on certain dates.

And finally, the game does take its time. I mean, this game will take you over 100 hours to beat. And that’s if you know what you are doing. There isn’t a lot of padding either in this game, since each chapter brings depth to the characters and makes you appreciate them even more. Also, spending time with all the characters can be very beneficial during your playthrough.

The only negative I can say is that the new chapter and character in the expanded Royal version of this game is over before you know it. Let’s just say that the time you get in that final chapter is extremely short, making the character growth of the new characters somewhat shallow. Which is an extreme shame since the subjects it tackles are fascinating to explore and the new characters are extremely fun to use in battle. I wish you got a bit more time to explore around and use the new characters and your new abilities. But, that’s really the only thing I can critique about the bonus chapter, the short length of it.

Decisions, decisions

Unless you are using a guide, I think it’s quite impossible to experience everything that this game has to offer in your first playthrough. There is just too much content in this game, it’s insane. Trying to explain everything or critique it all in this article would lead to an extremely long article which might be a bit overwhelming to read.

So, let’s talk about some core mechanics first. At its core, there are two main gameplay sections in this game. Inside and outside the Palaces. First off, let’s talk about the Palaces. These are the dungeons inside the game, the main goal of each chapter. Each chapter’s story builds towards a boss at the end of the Palace and tackles a certain theme like abuse, greed or being self-centered. In these dungeons, you fight shadows in a turned based fighting style.

Now, explaining the whole battle system would create a whole article in itself. There are so many ways to tackle a battle, it’s insane. Having the correct strategy for a battle is half the battle. So, in the Palaces, you can make use of your Persona. These Personas are basically your ticket to being able to use magic. Normally, each character can only use one Persona. But, the main character can use multiple. So, you have to set up your Personas and your characters up just right to tackle the challenges of each Palace.

Not only that, it’s highly recommended that you discover the weakness of your enemies, since that not only does more damage, but you can also chain extremely strong combo’s with your allies. And let me tell you, these combo’s can mean the difference between life or death. Oh, but there is more. You and your allies also have weakspots, so you need to be careful with who you choose, since guess what… The enemies can also chain attacks when hitting weakspots.

If you played this game, you know that I’m leaving out quite a lot of things from the battle system here. From ailments to even negations with the enemy. Yes, you can negotiate with the enemies for more money, items or even joining your team. Oh, there is also a mechanic where stronger enemies can take your allies hostage and make the fight even more difficult for you.

The diversity in the battle system makes it that each new playthrough of Persona 5 feels new and unique. I have played through this game 3 times already and each time, the dungeons feel fresh even when I know what to do and solve the puzzle inside the dungeon. I’m able to prepare myself better in the Velvet Room to create the best setup to tackle the Palaces even faster to see more of the side content I haven’t seen, or I enjoy quite a lot.

Now, you might think that with all these mechanics I’m touching upon, the game is quite overwhelming. But, surprisingly, it is not. The first chapter of the game is an extremely well disguised tutorial. It teaches you all the mechanics slow and steady and let you get used to the mechanics without throwing them all at once to you. While there are a lot of mechanics, all of them stay relevant during the game since depending on your actions, you make certain things easier during your Palace investigation.

So, decisions are quite important in this game. Not only in how you tackle the battles and who you level up but also outside it. Basically, this game is also a simulation. You still have to go to school and live a normal life. Meanwhile, you can explore Tokyo and deepen your bond with other characters, tackle side quests, improve your skills, play mini-games, create better Persona’s in the Velvet Room…

All of these actions are quite important. Let me give you an example. If you deepen your bond with main or side characters, you improve their Confidante rank. There are 23 characters that have their own side story and seeing them through can give you amazing advantages. Things like not having to fight enemies that are below your level, cheaper healing items, more attack styles or even random stat boots during fights.

Keeping a calendar on who is around where and what actions you can do when is important. I even had a small notebook for taking notes next to me during my playthrough. Now, in all this chaos, it’s easy to forget that there is a bonus chapter in this game. Let me tell you, there is a way to unlock that chapter, but you have to prioritize certain characters that isn’t really well hinted at. Thankfully, there are spoiler free guides for it on the internet. It is the only guide I had to use, since I wasn’t able to figure that one out.

If I just gave you the impression that this game is easy, well, think again. This game made me think and strategize quite a lot, and if you don’t upgrade the right characters, don’t have the right Persona or don’t master the core mechanics, you will make this game quite frustrating. Thankfully, if you lose during the chapter boss fight, it’s possible to rewind a few days to give you the chance to prepare differently and maybe defeat the boss then.

Gameplay wise, the depth of this game is impressive. I highly recommend that you save your game quite often and make use of those different save slots you have. Outside the Palaces and in certain area’s of the Palace you can save. There is no autosave in this game and the prompting of saving is after certain important story events. While you can’t name your save files, the save file displays quite a lot of basic information for you to learn which one is which. Or you could take notes in an Excel sheet like I did.

Something I also want to mention is that the digital manual on Atlus’s website is also extremely well done. It explains the game extremely well and gives you general tips and tricks to understand everything and why certains things can be helpful to you.

Something else I want to mention is that there even a new game plus. When you reached an ending, since yes… there are multiple endings in this game, you can restart the game. Yet, there are certain things that carry over from one playthrough to the next. This article on PushSquare explains very nicely what carries over and what not. And speaking from experience, don’t go for the good and final ending on your first run in this game. Yes, the final chapter is short but unprepared it will kick your butt. Maybe I leveled the wrong characters but I had a way easier time after I started new game plus.

Personality everywhere

This game is dripping with personality. The visual presentation of this game is something of a masterclass. It’s bold, loud and proud and uses the anime and comic book style extremely effectively.

I find it extremely impressive how they worked the personality of the characters in the visual prestation of the menu’s and the UI. Everything brings it’s own charm and just brings the game more alive.

I’m also glad that I played the Royal version of this game instead of the original. Since, the Royal version of the game brings so many improvements to the game and it improves thee game even more. I have been skimming through this amazing list on Reddit and congrats to the everyone whole helped there since this is such a nice list. And these changes add so much to the personality and style of this game.

Now, the visual presentation of this game is proud and loud and this carries over to the animations as well. In various RPG’s I play, near the end I want to skip the battle animations but in this game, I don’t want to do it. Maybe I’m too invested in the story and presentation but I feel that even near the end, the impact of the attacks still keep hitting strong and statifying. Sometimes, it’s over exaggerated, but it always fits the personality of the character and just eye candy.

The visual presentation is always consistent and runs at a stable framerate. And on top of that, the soundtrack hits the spot extremely well. The opening theme and battle theme are two of my favorites. I never thought that a battle theme with lycris while hit so hard and not get boring or repetitive. Of course, it doesn’t play during all battles but still, the tracks with and without lycris are all amazing. They all enhance the current mood of the story fit the comic book artstyle of this game like a glove. They are so good, that I sometimes tried to make my attacks sync up with the lycris or just noticed myself signing along with it.

The sound effects are also extremely well done. The sound design helps to tell the story quite a lot and helps you during gameplay to get some useful information when enemies are nearby or give you more information. Some of the sound effects are well engrained into my brain so I know what action I need to take if I encounter it.

Honestly, I have a really hard time finding flaws in this game. The controls are amazing, the menu’s are a joy to use and there is some much depth that actually changes the story progression, it’s insane that this game works with one 1 crash in my 250+ hours of gameplay and I think that might have to do with my PS4 overheating on an extremely warm day… Also, I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches during my playthrough…

Besides the short bonus story chapter, there is barely anything to critique in Persona 5 Royal. Maybe the lack of an autosave can turn some people off but I didn’t had such a big problem with it. I have played games that have longer interruptions between when you can save… Corpse Party BloodDrive and Book Of Shadows, I’m looking at you. Maybe the predictable story can be a turn off for some, but personally, I didn’t mind that. Since, the way the story is paced, the writing, character development and the voice acting add so much personality.

I can understand that with the short additional story, players who first played the original and then the Royal version might feel cheated and might feel that this upgraded version is cheap and a cash grab. That’s a totally fair critism to make. Yet, I feel that it doesn’t make the whole game bad. It’s still the amazingly well crafted Persona 5 at its core.

Something I personally found a bit undercooked was the Thieves Den. Besides playing the addictive card game with the main characters you unlocked, I feel that besides a glorified showcase of your achievements, a sound box and a gallery… It just feels like bonus stuff from a collectors edition in a nice jacket. It’s not bad, but in my now 4th playthrough I rarely visit it. Besides being able to play cards with the main cast, I felt I had no real reason to go there. Maybe if it had a bit more gameplay like being able to play all mini games outside the story or more card games, that would have been amazing. The basic idea is there and it’s an amazing way to rewatch all the cutscenes or listen to the music in game instead of it being in a menu… But, it feels lacking in some area’s.

Now, when I look online to other reviews, a lot of people who didn’t like Persona 5 compare it to previous entries in the series. Currently, I’m also playing through the other Persona games and I enjoy them quite a lot as well. While I can see the argument about the theme of Persona 5 not clicking well if you first played Persona 3 or 4, but I just see it as a new world/setting with the Persona mechanics. A totally new take on formula and setting.

I actually talked about my biggest gripe with the game earlier. I personally highly disliked the way to unlock the bonus chapter in this game. It should have been better hinted at since if you start on it too late, you lock yourself out from it. So, if you want to go for the 3rd semester, please read a guide on how to do it… It isn’t difficult but you’ll need to make time for it.

And that’s everything I want to say about this game for now. I left a lot of gameplay mechanics out for you to discover if you are interested in this game. But, I gave you a general idea on this game and I think it’s high time to go to the conclusion of this review.

Conclusion

The good:

+Excellent story

+Addictive gameplay with loads of depth

+Extremely replayable

+Very diverse gameplay in each dungeon

+Top notch visual presentation and art style

+Amazing soundtrack

+…

The bad:

-Thieves den is a little bit undercooked.

-The bonus chapter of Royal could have been handled better. (Too short, not enough time for the character development like in the main story)

-The way how you unlock the addtional chapter is too hidden.

Final thoughts:

Oh boy, Persona 5 Royal. Last yeaer I had a very difficult time deciding if you or Desperados III would take the crown as my favorite game I started in 2022. One of my main reasons why I wanted to buy a PlayStation 4 was because I wanted to experience Persona 5. From those who played it, I heard so many great things and I can honestly see why now. In 2022, I had a hard time not playing this game, since I wanted to review other games on my blog as well… But, I have spened so much time on it.

It won’t surprise me that I’ll play through this game every so often like I play through my childhood favorite Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Personally, I can highly recommend this game to everybody who enjoys playing JRPGs or turnbased RPGs. This game is one of the best games I have played in recent times.

I mean, all the cosmetic DLC is now free on PS4 ever since the release of the ports to the other systems. While I played it on the PlayStation 4, I looked at the review on other platforms and it’s doing amazing.

I didn’t want to finish this game, since I didn’t want the ride to end. It’s rare that I feel as strong for a game. I remember that for games like Zero Escape or Nightmare Reaper. This game and its world really pulls you into an amazing adventure that really pulls on your heartstrings sometimes and doesn’t let go. I played this game from start to finish 3 times now and I’m thinking to play through it again for a 4th time during my fall break in a few months.

Thank you Atlus for creating this amazing title and I’m so happy that I experienced it. I had quite the hard time in writing this article, since I honestly didn’t know how tackle it since there is so much to talk about. It’s mindblowning how much and how much deepth this game has with barely anything feeling shallow. If you play this game, do like the loading screen says. Take your time, enjoy the game and relax.

With that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I want to thank you so much for reading this article eand I hope you enejoyeed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 100/100

First Impression: Suicide Guy – The Lost Dreams (Switch) ~ Let’s Find A Waking Solution

Nintendo.com microsite – Metacritic – ChubbyPixel

Since I started blogging, I have some developers reaching out to me with the question to review their game. One of these developers is Chubby Pixel, the developers behind Woodle Tree and Suicide Guy. Now, this game might have a trigger word in the title, the game doesn’t handle depression or actual suicide at all. In this series, our goal is to wake our dude up by ending his dreams as fast as we can. And how can a dream continue if we die in a dream? So, is this new entry in the trilogy a good entry or did the series run its course? Let’s find out in this article together. Since the developer gave me a free, press key to give you my 100% unfiltered opinion on the game. If you have any thoughts on this article and/or the content of the game, feel free to write a comment in the comment section down below.

Editorial note: this article is written on v1.1.

Let’s find a waking solution

We still play our beloved guy in this game. This guy already went on two previous adventures in his dreams to try and save himself from disaster. In his first adventure, he falls asleep while watching TV and the beer in his hand is falling towards the floor. He wakes up in a diner, where the screens in the diner are warning him on the danger of his favorite beer falling towards the ground. Our beer loving guy doesn’t want that, so we try to end his dreams as soon as possible, so we can catch that beer bottle before it hits the ground. And in the second adventure, our dude drinks an even stronger version of the beer, and let’s just say that he has a very strange drunken adventure.

In this third game, we don’t really know the trigger that sends our guy in the hell that’s layered dreams. Probably, it’s either the influence of his mind playing tricks on him. You know, when your mind creates some strange dreams sometimes? When you are exhausted or just have a lot going on.

Anyways, the story in these games isn’t the main focal point. It just provides an amazing setting for an interesting first person adventure game where the goal of each level is to wake up from your dream, so our guy can wake up and continue with his life. It’s an amazing setup for this subject, since it might be sensitive to some people. Also, while this is the third game in the series… You don’t need to have played or completed the previous two games. These games can be played in any order and the only link between the three games is the main character and the gameplay mechanics.

The main hub in this time around is a spaceship. We have 18 new levels to complete, so we can wake the guy up and let him continue with his life. If you have played one of the previous two games in this series, you know what to expect in this game. Let me cut this article short for those who played one of the two previous games by saying, if you enjoyed those games… You’ll enjoy this one as well. Since, it’s a total new set of puzzles for you to figure out. But, allow me to talk a bit more in-depth about this game for those who either forgot things about these games or just want to know more.

The references game

In the previous two games, you may have one or two levels referencing another game or a franchise. In this game, the amount of references is just through the roof. Quite often during my playthrough I was happily surprised at the references in this game to other games without it being overpowering and stealing the show. Various levels are also themed around big franchises, and I just love it. While I haven’t reached that point in the game just yet, I’m especially looking forward to the Indiana Jones level near the end. The reason I know that there is an Indy themed level is that I saw the trailer and our guy is just running around with a whip in a tomb… The amount of references I counted during watching that trailer was impressive to say the least.

At the moment of writing, this game is currently only released on the Nintendo Switch. Later this year, a Steam port will be released. It won’t surprise me that this game will come to other platforms as well in the future. At first, I found it a bit unfamiliar to not play this game on a mouse and keyboard, but I really quickly got used to playing this game on a controller.

The first level is an excellent tutorial level where most of the mechanics of this game get introduced. Don’t be silly and jump down at the end of the tutorial, since you’ll be back at the start and have to go back using the long away around. The tutorial in this game is excellent and teaches the mechanics to new players and is a quick refresher to those who played the games in the past since it has been quite some time since the previous title got released.

In general, the controls are quite responsive and great to use. Although, sometimes the controls felt a little floaty. Especially while jumping, I sometimes felt I didn’t have control on where I was going to land. Maybe adding a small black shadow underneath the guy, so players can judge the landing more, would be an ideal way to solve this issue. Currently, we have only a shadow to the side, but this isn’t enough to judge distance since you can’t exactly see where the shadow starts.

At first, I also wanted to complain about the slow turning of the camera. But, I was able to crank that up in the options’ menu. A bit higher sensitivity and voila, we were in business. You can also invert the camera controls there, if you want. There are quite some settings you can adjust, so you can optimize the game to how you want to play. Another example is you can enable or disable the rumble. But that seems to be bugged out, since each and every time I went to check on rumble it gets disabled.

If I’m allowed to nitpick, I have a few minor complaints about the options UI. First, in the main menu when you choose the “options” button, you appear on the second button instead of the first button of that menu. Secondly, in-game… You have the language option, but you can’t interact with it. There are also two “apply changes” buttons in that menu while in the game. Thirdly, there is no way to go back to the hub once in a level, only to the main menu. And a final nitpick is, why are two of the sound effects buttons (ZL and ZR) working while in the menu and not the others? I’d disable that, since the other solution would drive people who use the D-pad for menu navigation insane.

Now, the previous paragraph might sound like I’m giving the impression that the menu’s in this game are broken and unusable. But, that’s not true at all. They have some minor issues that should be polished out and that’s that. It wouldn’t surprise me that after the release of this article, the developer fixes several of these issues with a patch. Knowing Chubby Pixel, they are extremely open for feedback and bug reports, and they try to fix as many as they can. Once, I posted a YouTube video on a glitch I found, and one of the lead developers commented sometime later that they fixed that bug. Also, I notice that they really take advice to heart. So, if you have any feedback for them, just go to their Discord server and tell them or contact them, and they will help you out!

This game is quite linear and is mostly a puzzle game. After finishing the tutorial, you arrive at the hub, where you can go to the next level. Each level has a certain theme and your goal is to end that dream while exploring the level and using the tools provided to you. The fun in this game is that you have to figure out how to end the dream, since there is always one solution per level. There is also some replay value in this game since in each level there is a hidden collectible statue you can find. And let me tell you, some of these are quite tricky to find.

If you want to play this game, I highly recommend that you don’t use a walkthrough. Since, most of the fun in this game is trying to figure out what you need to do to complete the level. I’d only use a walkthrough when you are truly stuck and don’t know how to progress. Most levels can be finished in give or take 5 minutes, there are a few levels that are a bit longer, but not that much longer if you know what you are doing.

Since the levels are so short, I honestly don’t find it a big problem that you can’t save during a level. If you exit the game during a level, you’ll have to restart that level from the start once you reboot the game. And sometimes restarting a puzzle with a fresh mind might give you the solution. There is only one save slot and the game automatically saves after finishing every level. So, we don’t have to worry about that.

It’s getting better and better

When I’m honest with myself and look back at the previous games from Chubby Pixel, I’m really seeing growth in quality. While this game would take you around an hour when you know what you are doing, I rather see quality over quantity. When I started to play this game, I encountered barely any strange physics bugs or objects behaving in strange ways. These were present in the two previous games and patched out, but not this time. Also, weird little quirks like you seeing the player object (floating arms) when crouching and looking to the sides aren’t present in this game anymore.

There are also more details in the environments this time around. Visually, I felt like every level was a complete package and felt like a real dream somebody could have, while it still looked cartoony and colorful. I can’t exactly explain why, but I feel that the charm of the series is reaching its full potential in this game. The only thing I can be critical about in terms of the visuals is that if you go to the edges of the levels you can sometimes clip a bit in things and see a bit more than you are supposed to. This also very rarely happen inside the levels, but I only saw one time.

I really mean what I say in that the quality is improving each and every game. The puzzles are more clear, the visuals get better, the world design is improving… I also still adore how the music in this game is played through radio’s in the level which you can enable and disable to turn the music on and off. It also acts like a true radio where if you move away from it, the music grows more quite.

The music in this game just fits the charming atmosphere like a glove. It’s relaxing and just helps you to put your mind in a relaxing state. This game is a perfect game to wind down or just try to solve some interesting puzzles and relax.

This game also has quite the stable framerate. I didn’t notice any moments where the game started lagging or had slow downs. In terms of visuals and preformance, I only have one minor complaint about the animations. And that is that you can’t always see the punching animation when you move the camera a bit to the top.

I think that a great summary for this game is that this third entry in the Suicide Guy series is the best entry yet. The experience of the two previous games really shines through and this game is even more polished than the two games that came before it. I’m really having a difficult time trying to find things to critique. Especially since the quaility we are getting for a game that costs only €8 is insane to me.

Also, most things I can point out to critique could be patched in an update. Earlier examples I gave where mostly UI but let me give an example of a gameplay mechanic. There is a level where you have to jump on red elephant plushies to reach the sun. The level is extremely well built but I found it quite annoying that the red elephants could fly off if you jumped on the wrong area. I’d love to see a way to make these plusies more solid since it got quite frustrating if you were backtracking to get another plushie to complete the route and you jumped on one plushie the wrong way and it flew off to the ground. Another solution would be a midway checkpoint since if you complete the plushie part, you have to jump on the clouds and if you miss there, you can easily climb the castle via a ramp. Maybe I got a few times unlucky but I feel that either making these plushies more solid or giving a mid-way checkpoint during this part would improve that level quite a lot.

And that’s exactly my point I’m trying to make in this section of the article. In the past, there were more glaring flaws in the levels or just frustrating (timed) levels… Looking at you Rube Goldberg machine level from Sleeping Deeply. But in this game, a lot of the issues I found in the previous titles aren’t here anymore or in a way smaller capacity. A lot of things I talked about in this article aren’t dealbrakers. Some of them are (extreme) nitpicks even. I may repeat myself now but a lot of them can be fixed with a patch.

In conclusion, if you enjoy puzzle and/or adventure games, I’d totally recommend this game. This game doesn’t take itself too serious and that makes it a blast to play through. It’s an amazing game to spend an afternoon or two trying to beat all the levels and find all the hidden statues. I’m happy to see the newest entry in the series and looking at this entry, I’m sure that we are going to get more amazing games from Chubby Pixel. A small Italian indie game studio totally worth following.

I enjoyed my time playing this game and I’m thankful that I could write an article about it. But, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I hope you enjoyed reading the article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one, but until then have a great rest of your day and take care.

Game Quicky: Cipher Zero [Demo] (PC – Steam) ~ Picross With Extra Solutions

Press kit – Website – Steam store page

I’m always happy when developers give me the chance to review their game. While these days, I don’t always have the time to write an article in time for the release… I make it a priority to review these games first. In today’s article, I’m taking a look at Cipher Zero. Also, if you find this game interesting, you might want to take a look at the original version created for a game jam here or play the demo at the linked Steam page. In any case, I got a press key to give my 100% honest opinion on the game, so let’s go. If you have any thoughts/opinions on the game and/or the content of the article, feel free to share them in the comment section down below.

Editorial note: Currently, the full game isn’t out, but a demo is. The demo is giving a first impression on the final product.

The good

In this game, there is no real story. There is some world building, so this game isn’t your typical bland puzzle game. But, it’s vague and mysterious, so you fill it with your imagination. The relaxing music and the liminal space vibe this game is going for is just amazing.

Currently, the game is tracking quite a lot of what the players are doing in game. This could have some privacy concerns, but you can enable or disable that in the settings. The data is mostly meant for the developers to see if a puzzle is working or not. For example, while I was playing and researching this game… I got stuck on one level. After beating the level, somebody at the development team gave my suggestions to the team, and they are keeping an eye on that puzzle and the data it generates. This gives me a good feeling, since the developer is listing to input from their players and looking at where they get stuck to improve their game.

Sidenote, this is what is being tracked by the developer:

Regarding tracking, we’re tracking standard metrics in the game: how long you’re in the game for, how long you spend on puzzles, how many times you get things correct or incorrect. We also have a separate tool that tracks performance/crash data from the game so we can get additional information on crashes or errors that are happening during development. No other information is gathered from the user past that, and users have the ability to opt out before any data tracking begins.

– Developers of this game.

So, this game is basically a Nonogram with extra steps. If you don’t know what a nonogram is, you should read the linked Wikipedia article, since it’s tricky to explain. The tl;dr is basically that you have to fill in a grid where the amount of squares you need to be filled in are indicated at the sides of the grid.

Now, usually these puzzles are in a full grid. Yet, in this game, the grids have their own unique shapes, making the puzzles more unique. Also, slowly new mechanics are introduced, spicing up the puzzles. Something I love quite a lot is that sometimes a puzzle might have multiple solutions. I enjoyed trying to find all different solutions to a puzzle whenever it was possible.

The visuals are quite clean and overall easy to understand. The animations also clearly communicate to the player where they went wrong in the puzzle. Since there is no tutorial, that’s essential to get right. At one hand, the fact that there is no tutorial can be off putting to some players, yet overall the progression in this game is very well done… So, that’s no big problem at all.

The bad

Currently, the minimalistic design has some flaws. Like some things have a bind but no button. For example, there is no easy way to reset your puzzle. Along those lines, the iconography in this game isn’t the best. You have a gray circle to check your answer… It took me a while at my first puzzle to know I could click that to check my answer.

Going along that route, the level map is also not displaying enough information. It’s a nightmare trying to find a level to replay since if you don’t remember its location… There is no real indication on the world map what the map mechanic is in that batch of levels. Also, there is no way to go to the last level when you are at the start of the map.

Most problems I had with this game came from the UI, controls and a little bit of the flow of the game. I already gave two examples in terms of the UI. Let me give you another one. While you are playing a batch of levels, you have a bar at the top showing you how far you are in that section. Yet, it’s pretty unclear where one level starts and where one ends. So, if you want to go back to study an earlier example… Well, that’s going to require some clicking and guess work. I think this could be solved by breaking up that bar or having more clear indications for levels. Now, it’s a bit too clean.

Another small UI issue I find is that it in the options menu, it isn’t clear if an option is on or off. Now, we have a toggle switch that’s kind of meaningless.

The flow issue I have with the demo is that after beating the final puzzle… you don’t go automatically to the “end demo” screen. You do unlock it on the map menu, but it would be nice if I didn’t have to do those additional clicks.

In terms of the controls, the only issue I had is that the scroll wheel shouldn’t be the default way to go back and forth between puzzles. It is a bit too easy to hit your scroll wheel and loosing progress in that way.

The final thing I want to talk about is that there is no real hint system in this game. I’d love to see a small hint system where if you fail a certain amount of times, you can let the game fill in one or more squares in for you. It’d help for people getting stuck and being frustrated since one puzzle is stopping their progress.

There are also some amazing features being unbound by default. Like clearing the map or cycle through the solutions. If you want to play this game, I highly recommend that you bind these keys in the options menu first. You’ll thank me later for that.

The conclusion

So, when you read this article, you might think that this game has some major problems. Overall, this game currently has a very solid foundation. Yet, if the final product is just going to be additional levels… I think this game is going to get mediocre reviews.

My biggest issue with this game is that the minimalistic UI choices make it that some quality of life features are missing. Things like level numbers, indications of puzzle theme on the level map and here and there more icons for actions you can do would go a long way. Just a bit more information for the player. And you can always make these features a toggle, so the player can choose to show or hide them.

Suggestions for the full game is adding an easy way to reset your progress and have a built-in speedrun timer. Since, this game is the perfect game for speedrunning. Also, let the animations from the level map speed into the actual level from time to time. How cool would it be to see the train pass through the bottom while you are solving one of the levels?

All in all, after playing the demo I have high hopes for this game. I just cross my fingers that it’s going to be more than just more levels and puzzle mechanics. Since, if you polish this game a bit more besides giving it more levels… It’s going to go a long way. More levels don’t always make it a better game. Sometimes an extremely polished short game is better than a long game with undercooked or underused things. So, I’m curious to see the final product, so I can keep puzzling on while being puzzled.

And with that said, I have said everything I want about the game for now. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you in another one, but until then have a great rest of your day and take care.

First Impression: The Legend Of Zelda – Tears Of The Kingdom (Switch) ~ Where To Now?

Wikipedia – Zelda.com page

In 2017, Nintendo changed the open world adventure game genre forever with Breath of the Wild. We got a game where freedom was the central mechanic in the game. You could play it however you want and have your own unique adventure. Two years after the release at E3 2019, we got our first teaser that a sequel was in development. In May 2023, that sequel finally released. Now, is this sequel worth our time and money? I played this game and after several hours, I’m ready to give my opinion on the game. I haven’t beaten the game yet, but I’m quite close to the ending, hence why I place this review in the first impression category. So, let’s dive right into Link’s latest adventure and let’s take a look if it’s a game we should be playing or if it’s one that we are overhyping since it’s getting high scores across the board from other reviewers. Here is my honest opinion, and if you want to say something about this game and/or the content of this article… Feel free to do that in the comments down below! Enough stalling, let’s go!

Where to now?

In this game, we take control of Link. In this story, Link and Zelda are investigating strange tunnels underneath Hyrule. While exploring these tunnels, they come across some ancient evil. This ancient evil awakes from its slumber and after a small battle, Zelda disappears, Link gets wounded and the Master Sword almost gets destroyed.

After that, Link gets rescued by a strange figure who heals his wounds. But his arm was beyond saving so that strange figure gives his arm to Link. After that, Link walks out of the cave where he was recovering and finds himself in the sky, ready to explore the new world… so he can start his quest to try to find and rescue Zelda.

Since you can experience this story at your own peace and order, it’s difficult to review this story. Due to the fact you can experience it out of order, some dialogues have to be kept vague and generic. Since, writing separate dialogue for each possible option would be a nightmare to write, program and debug.

Yet, I feel that in this game… The story and world building is more present this time around compared to Breath of the Wild. In Breath of the Wild, I felt that each town was its own mini-story with only the main plot holding those stories together. But, in this game, there are a lot more things in the world that gives life to the world. The main and side story segments are more spread around on the map. I can’t really put on my finger on exactly why, but I felt that Hyrule was more alive this time around compared to Breath of the Wild.

Something that can also make or break your story is the voice acting. In this game, apart from your grunts and things of that nature, we have a silent Link. The voice cast for the English version is extremely solid. Overall, I find that the voice acting in this game is good. Here and there, some scenes are dancing on the line of over acting, but I don’t dislike it. I think that the biggest issue is that a lot of people were used to the characters being silent. When characters are silent, you tend to put your own voice and tone on that character. This makes it impossible to find a voice for the character that everybody will like. So, I can understand why people dislike the voice acting in this game.

Honestly, the voice acting still drew me into the game. I feel that they are going on a good path forward here, and Nintendo should start to experiment with putting more voice acting in their games to see what works and doesn’t. Since, I that’s one big thing I missed in a game like Pokémon Scarlet and Voilet. Granted, the grunts of the NPC’s make them adorable, which fit this game nicely.

So, overall, with a world that feels way more alive and a story that’s more present while you are exploring the game… I feel that they improved that over Breath of the Wild by a more than a mile. Yet, I feel there is one issue at the start of this game that I didn’t have with Breath of the Wild. I quite often asked myself, “where to now?”.

After the tutorial sky island, we get dropped into Hyrule. So, we think that the world just has some sky islands now. And then suddenly, you learn about something in the underground. So, you think… Oh, caves. But then you find a hole that goes deeper and deeper… Almost to the center of the world. And then you find out that the map almost doubled in size. I felt overwhelmed at what to tackle first and where to go next.

Is this an issue or a blessing? Well, that depends on your playstyle and how you want to tackle this game. I see this game as a giant playground that we can explore and have amazing adventures in. Like I said earlier, the world now feels way more alive, so there is a lot more to do and explore. Yet, if you want some guidance, the main quest line does an excellent job at pushing you towards your next objective. But, do explore around in each area, you never know what you’ll find.

How shall we do this?

If you asked me to talk about each mechanic in this game, both old and new, we would be here for a while. A long while. The amount of things you can do in this game is so vast, it’s like asking which games you can play with a few balls.

At its core, this game is Breath of the Wild with a lot of new mechanics. And I really mean, a lot. Let’s start by talking about Link’s new abilities. In this game, you have four new abilities. First is the Ultrahand, compare that with Magnesis from Breath of the Wild… but this time you can pick up almost anything. And then, you put two logs next to each other, and you notice that some green liquid puts them together. And then it doesn’t take long before you learn that you can build a ton of machines by putting a lot of things together.

And then you wonder what would happen if I put a rock on your sword? Well, why not use the second new ability, then? Fuse. This ability is just insane. With this, you can create various new weapons and just do unique things. It’s a lot of fun to experiment and learn which things do what.

We do have two other abilities as well. Let’s talk about recall first. With this ability, Link can rewind time on an object for a set amount of time. I’ll explain it with this example. Image an ice-cold river where rafts are flowing over, yet you have to reach the other side. Well, when you hope on the raft and use recall… the rafts goes against the flow back to its previous position, helping you to cross the ice-cold river.

Finally, we have the Ascend ability. This ability feels like a sort of cheat, since whenever there is a flat surface you can stand underneath, you can ascend through the ceiling to the top. And it’s used so well in this game, it’s insane.

You don’t have the abilities from Breath of the Wild anymore, but these just open a whole other way to interact with the world and sets the two games apart and makes both of them unique. Now, I haven’t talked about all abilities, but let’s talk about the new champion abilities.

This is where I have one problem with the game. The new champion abilities are fine, while I miss Revali’s gale. But, the way to activate them is annoying sometimes. After you have completed a champion quest, you unlock their ability. Their spirit runs next to you and when you want to use their ability, you have to get close to them and press “A”. Now, this is where the issue lies.

It’s way too easy to press “A”. Often, I activated one of the abilities by accident. You don’t want to know how many times I activated the Sage of Wind’s ability and saw my sweet loot go over a cliff edge… Or my trying to find the Sage of Fire since I want to break a break-able wall, so I don’t have to use my weapons or a bomb flower. At the other hand, it’s a blessing that they help you fight, and they helped me to get out of tight spots… But, sometimes it works against the player.

Sadly, this isn’t the only small problem this game has. Another annoying problem in my opinion is that when you enter a shrine where all your items are taken away to have a special and unique challenge… Don’t pick up the enemy loot when you want to keep it. Since, when you get your items back, you don’t always get the loot back you picked up. I learned that the hard way. Since, I wanted to charge my battery for Zonai devices.

Oh yeah, that’s another big thing. Remember the Master Cycle Zero in Breath of the Wild? Well, that’s back in a way. But this time, it’s way more than just a bike. Earlier, I talked about how you can build machines with Ultrahand. Well, with Zonai devices you can do some much more stuff. Image making a raft and placing a fan on top of it. Put that raft on the water and activate the fan and away you go. And this is truly the tip of the iceberg on what you can do. Let me just say that people already build things that allow them to fly or make tanks. Yes, tanks.

While there are a lot of build tutorials online… personally, I highly recommend toying around with it yourself. I feel that this game is the strongest when you go in blind and try to do your own thing. I don’t mean that you can’t inspiration from others, but I’m saying that you should make your own adventure in this game. Just like if you want to use the duplication glitches in this game. Yes, there are duplication glitches in this game. While Nintendo is trying to patch them out, a new one or ones are discovered not too long after. Personally, I’m not using these duplication glitches since they would ruin the magic of trying to use what I find for me. But, that’s the beauty of this game… You are free to play it how you want.

Making steps towards the end

I know that I’m leaving out a lot of mechanics from this review. To name just a few: the improved stables, the return of the koroks, the whole depths, the wells… There is so much to do in this game, it is insane. Maybe a bit too much since some things can feel a bit undercooked like the main Gerudo quest before the temple.

Everytime I play this game, I feel like I’m taking more steps towards completing this game. Personally, I try to avoid following guides as much as possible since I love the feeling I get for discovering the solution myself.

Yes, sometimes I run into small little problems like having to fight to remove an icon from the map and place another… But, apart from some minor issues, I have a lot of trouble finding negatives in this game. The controls of this game are excellent, responsive and a joy to use. Sometimes I struggle a bit with rotation and Ultrahand but this happens so rarely and most of the time going out and back into rotation mode fixes it for me.

Also, the game is less silent during exploration. The enviroment sounds are much more present and we get the clamic envoriment tracks being played more often. In this game we get a mix of old and new music and the soundtrack of this game is just amazing. I have to admit that I listen to it while I work from time to time. It just brings back memories of me playing the game.

The game isn’t short at all. According to Howlongtobeat.com, this game will take you at least 60 hours to complete if you don’t use a guide or use speedrun strats. But, have you seen that avarge for 100% completion? That’s close to 230 hours.

On top of that, this game isn’t a cake walk. There are a lot of area’s where you really need to be on your guard. It’s a game that where when you learn the mechanics and how to world works, the easier the game gets. Yet, you have to be on your guard. There are ways to make things a lot easier, but these still require either skill, grinding or both.

Now, visually this game is stunning for the Nintendo Switch. Compared to Breath of the Wild, this game is a huge improvement in terms of the visuals, presentation and animations. GamingBolt wrote an amazing article comparing the visuals of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Honestly, I have to agree with GamingBolt on this one. Visually, this game looks a lot better than Breath of the Wild but the Nintendo Switch is showing it’s limits sometimes. But, these moments aren’t too frequent and mostly fix themselves.

Now, this game runs at 30fps. Stable, I rarely to never actually noticed frame drops. Now, some people are saying that this game should run at 60fps or higher or “look better”. I even hear arguments that this game look like it’s stuck in last decade. Please, don’t let these comments pull you away from this game. This game runs smooth and 30fps is still very playable. Also, having a higher framerate (then 30) doesn’t mean that the game runs smoother. For some people, they don’t even notice the difference between 60pfs and 80fps. Why does it matter as long as the game runs smooth? As long as you don’t have any visual glitches and everything reacts like it should without delay? I just want to enjoy playing a game with a stable framerate than worrying about how high that framerate number goes. And that’s what Tears of the Kingdom really delivers in both handheld and docked mode with a minimal amount of issues. But, I honestly think that most of these issues don’t come from the 30fps but more from the aging hardware of the Switch.

You might have noticed that I compared this game a lot to Breath of the Wild. That’s because this game is promoted as the direct sequel to Breath of the Wild and it has a lot of subtle references to it. Just like there are a lot of easter eggs and references to previous titles. Yet, I feel like the two titles can’t be seperated. If you enjoyed Breath of the Wild, you will have a blast with this one.

Honestly… When I started playing this game, I was afraid that this game was going to be more of the same. That it would be a rehash of Breath of the Wild with a new story. But no, what we got is more than that. We got new unique mechanics, two new layers in the world, a more alive world, a lot more side quests and side content… Nintendo raised the bar again. Now, I’m honestly worried that the sequel to this game might become too big for it’s own good.

If I have to be overly critical, then I do have a few things I would love to see improved in the sequel. First of all, make the core mechanic of the temples/dungeons more unique. Please, stop with the “active x amount of terminals” since it just doesn’t help to make them unique. I feel like this time around they blended in more since you didn’t have the interactions with the Divine Beasts. The quest before entering the dugeon is a lot more memorable… But, thank you for letting us enter the dungeons after beating them.

Secondly, while this game brings a lot more to the table compared to Breath of the Wild, the core structure is largely the same. Weapons that brake easily, no real “dungeons” where you find a new unique item anymore, a ton of shrines dotted around the map… And on that level I totally understand why some people are seeing this a sort of DLC to Breath of the Wild. It’s a fair point to make. Something Nintendo can do for example is have less but longer shrines in the sequel. Or maybe even have the abilities in the big dungeons instead of the tutorial area?

Thirdly and finally, I’d love some quality of life improvements. A search bar on the map would be amazing for example. Also, give us the ability to pin a side quest AND a main quest to the map instead of abusing beacons for that. And if I’m allowed to really nitpick, I feel that in this game the visuals of a discovered shrine and a not yet discovered shrine are too similar… I “rediscovered” shrines quite often compared to Breath of the Wild.

Tears of the Kingdom took the new formula in Breath of the Wild and expanded on it. It added a lot more depth. If Nintendo takes this formula and polishes it even further and change things around they’ll have an instant hit on their hands. Don’t get me wrong, this game is incredible but it has some flaws that can’t be overlooked. Some critisms like it being more of the same are in a way valid, yet if that bothers you… is up to you.

I honestly feel that this game totally deserves it’s score. It’s one of the best games I have played and will play this year. I highly recommend it to everybody who enjoys playing Zelda games, action/adventure games and open world games. But, I feel like Tears of the Kingdom blows me more away then Breath of the Wild. But, that might be because I’m now more used to the new Zelda formula compared to the previous time.

In any case, that’s everything I wanted to saw about this game for now. Thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article and until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

First Impression: Paws Of Coal (PC – Steam) ~ Point-And-Dig

Steam store page

Remember a game I reviewed a while ago, called Speed Limit? Well, the developers behind that action game are back with a new title. It’s a point-and-click adventure called Paws of Coal. And it’s a sort of prequel-ish game to another game. A game I actually published the press kit off, when I still did that. Trip the Ark Fantastic. This game is actually a sort of demo for the gameplay for that bigger game, while it’s also a stand-alone short adventure. Oh, and there is also a demo for Trip the Ark Fantastic out, so if you want to give that a go… You can. Now, let’s get our hands dirty with coal and dive into this adventure. Since, GameChuck gave me a press code to review this game, but they always welcome my 100% honest and unfiltered opinion… So, here we go. It’s something I like as well. If you have any thoughts/opinions to share about this game and/or the content of this article, you are more than welcome to share them in the comment section down below.

Editorial note: this review is written when v1.3 was released. While writing, “Month 1” update got released.

Point-And-Dig

In this game, you play as Charles. A hedgehog helping a good old friend. Your friend is a doctor in a mining town investigating a strange illness that’s making a lot of the mining rabbits quite ill in the town. The rabbits actually went on strike since they think the government isn’t doing enough to help them cure the illness. Since our good friend doctor Hopper isn’t able to leave the clinic to investigate… Since, yeah, somebody has to care for the patients… Charles got tapped.

There is no voice acting in this game, not even a bit of grunting. Yet, the writing isn’t affected by that at all. The writing quality is honestly top-notch. I was honestly afraid that the writing was going to be weak or cheesy because this game is essentially a side project, but I was quite surprised. Quite often, I got quite immersed, and the writing actually made me forget that there weren’t too many animations going on while the story is being told.

At one hand, I could start complaining on how it would be more fun with animations that acted out what was being told… But, that was before I realized the style they are going for. This game almost feels like a (grand)parent telling their (grand)children a bedtime story. One with pictures and text at the side. Yet, the content of the story might not always fit a children’s book… it felt somehow nostalgic while I haven’t heard the story before.

I also loved how realistic they made the writing for the story being in an animal kingdom. In sayings, things like skin is replaced with fur and the actual personality of the animals is worked into the writing as well. The only negative I have is that in some spots, it isn’t consistent on how dialogue is shown. Sometimes the text that’s being spoken is in the same style is the text used for descriptions. Apart from that, I barely found any faults. Here and there, a very minor mistake, but most of them were missing ending ” ” ” at spoken sentences.

This game plays like your typical point-and-click game. Yet, there is no real tutorial that explains to you the movement keys. Thankfully, they are listed in the menu behind a button. But is it a bad thing that this game doesn’t have a tutorial? Nah, I don’t think so. Overall, the game is easy to understand and learn. Especially when you have played other point-and-click games like Broken Sword for example. The big difference in this game is that this game is somewhat open-world. You don’t go from one screen/area to the next, you have the whole world open to you from the start, and it’s up to you to find the answers to its many puzzles.

It’s a side-game?

At various moments, I felt that this project didn’t have the main focus of GameChuck. The following paragraphs might look like I’m going to “destroy” this game, but it’s because this game and concept has a lot of potential… but it has some missing polish that’s making the game look bad and unfinished.

One of the best examples is the saving system. The game saves after each dialogue, automatically. Which is great! You do also have three save slots where you can manually save outside of dialogues, no problems there.

But if the save/load slots don’t give the information IF there is a save file in there and/or WHERE that save is… Then we are having issues. What if you are testing things with the different answers you are giving, and you want to see if the dialogue changes from other characters as well? You almost need to write down which save slot is what. Also, you don’t get a message if you want to save over an existing save slot. The current implementation works technically, but it leaves out a lot of information visually.

Something I feel quite conflicted about is the music and sound effects in this game. While this game has some nice orchestral music, it plays too few. There are too many moments of pure silence, even between the tracks repeating. Also, there aren’t enough tracks to play as background music, which means that you hear the same track over and over again. A bit more music tracks as background music would have been amazing.

All in all, the sound effects are great. But, at certain moments, I feel that there are sound effects missing. Especially when you do an action that doesn’t or won’t work. A perfect example of this is the first time you get the prompt to press the “J” key to open up your journal. When you are in dialogues, you can’t open your journal. I was mashing my “J” key, and I thought I encountered a bug. But no, it’s just that the journal doesn’t open during dialogues. In those cases, I’d either play a sound effect or show a little pop-up that communicates that with the player. That way, things don’t feel rough around the edges.

This is something I felt here and there. That this game has some very rough edges. The controls are another great example of that. Currently, there is support to play this game alone with the mouse. Yet, I don’t recommend you do that in the current version, since going in and out of doors doesn’t work currently. Also, there is a roll feature that lets you quickly roll from one place to another… Yet, good luck trying to do that with the mouse controls! It doesn’t work. I highly recommend that you play this game mostly with the keyboard controls. They work a lot better, are snappy and extremely responsive. Also, the tooltips shown on the screen relate to the keyboard controls anyway.

Going for more

Listen, according to this tweet… This game is the first part of the Ark Fantastic universe. Honestly, this gets me quite excited. Since, if we are going to see more games with this high level of world building, writing and visual presentation, we are going to be in for a treat.

Yes, the visual presentation of this game is amazing. Like I said earlier in this article, this game looks like a children’s book you are reading at night to your children. It’s colorful, well detailed, and the atmosphere makes the art almost come to life.

The game also has a handy “TO DO” list for when you are unsure what to do next. You can also put your current theory in your journal to try and find the actual reason and cure for the illness going around in the Burrows. It’s a great detective/point-and-click game that makes you think about what characters are saying and really take notes. I even had several notes on the mystery sprinkled in between my notes for this article.

You can investigate so much, it’s insane. The comments you get on various things, helps to build the world quite a lot. Like, you can also inspect almost every art work to learn more about the world. There are also sometimes more ways than one to get the information you need. You can either go research it via books, or you can research it by going around and talking to the other characters. I especially love the moments where things click and when I finally have a new lead to hunt down next.

This game might be rather short, but it also manages to have multiple endings, so it also has replay value for a point-and-click game, even. I have to be honest, I have been playing this game for 3 – 4 hours, research it quite extensively, and I haven’t solved the mystery just yet. I feel like I’m close, but I haven’t beaten it yet. That’s why I’m only writing a first impression.

But, this game also gave me an amazing first impression at the future of this game, and its universe. Yes, it has some things to polish and work out, like at one place in the game, you can see the ending of the map. Thankfully, we have a developer that updates this game with various quality of life improvements and since the release on May 2nd, we got 4 small updates to the game. Here is one they can fix in the next update, since the “month 1 update” removes the version number… It might be great to also remove that toggle to show it or not from the option menu, don’t you agree?

Speaking about those toggles, this game has some interesting settings. It also has a setting that gives you somewhat of a behind the scenes look at how the game works and was created behind the scenes. It doesn’t contain too many spoilers, if any, I think. You can also make this game harder on yourself by hiding tooltips, so you have to find out what you can interact with and how. But if you want to play this game, I highly recommend that you enable tooltips to not get lost.

To avoid me rambling too long about this game and maybe going into spoiler town… I’m going to wrap up my article here with the following conclusion. This game might have some rough edges in terms of UI, sound effects and music… But, all in all, this game works and it works good. I think that this game has something for every adventure/point-and-click game lover. Knowing the studio behind this and how they take feedback to heart, I’m quite sure that this game and the next games in this universe will grow and become even better.

Don’t misunderstand me when I say that this game has some rough edges, they are anything but game breaking. I have played this game on and off during this month and I haven’t gotten any crash and a very stable framerate. I was excited to see what this interesting point-and-click game “Trip the Ark Fantastic” was going to be and now that I got my first taste of it, I’m hooked. If the next game also polishes the save/load UI and has more music and uses more sound effects to communicate things with the player… I may be in trouble as a reviewer since I may not have too many things to critique anymore.

Give this game a chance when it sounds at all interesting to you. It’s a great experience and I’m conviced that with our feedback the developers can bring us amazing games in this interesting and rich universe. Now, I have to write my usual ending paragraphs and publish this article so I can go back to solving the mystery of the illness. Maybe we should discuss theories in the comment section? I’ll repeat it for the last time, yes this game has rough edges but the positive outweigh the negative by a lot here. Besides, a lot of the rough edges can and may be patched in the future… So yeah.

With that said, I want to thank you so much for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you in another one! But until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!