Recent reviews by \\ThatOneLamia

To start with, This is probably the worst fighting game I've played and I've played plenty. Smack studio, Brawlhalla, Guilty gear Strive, Guilty gear Xrd, Gulty gear Rev2, Street fighter 6, Smash brawl, Smash Melee, Smash Ult, Rivals of Aether 1.

I'm certain 90% of what I say could be just contributed to "Skill issue" but at their core, It's still an issue that just makes the game... not fun? Characters just get more "turns" because of the absurd rate they can attack, Basically just making them their own juggling act that just doesn't feel good to go against. For a game made to be competitive, It feels like the devs would struggle reading a kindergarten picture book.

The mechanics in this game just aren't fun? Floorhugging and floorcanceling just punish you for attacking your opponents. The Parry mechanic is borderline useless, Grabs just feel too powerful and the character balance just makes it so most of the cast is useless

Just go play a different game, The asking price is absurd and not worth it and unless you're willing to put up with tons and tons of annoying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, just go play smash or rivals 1 or literally anything else.

Back in open beta when you could first play the game, I'd say it was good. Now it's just kinda dogwater. Feels slow and unresponsive.

Me and my friend are pretty desperate for good co-op games. Being a fan of rougelikes/rougelites it was pretty obvious choice. I took a few seconds to peep at the trailer and decided it looked pretty good. It hasn't disappointed so far


There's not really much else to say other than it's snappy, solid and the online MP plays very well even on higher ping. The first thing I noticed when starting up the game was how *snappy* it felt. I'm not exaggerating, it literally feels like eating a cookie that's at the right middle-ground between crunchy and soft. It feels *good*.
Our first game was a little weird as we figured things out but it took less than 10 minutes to figure out the gameplay loop. It's not bad. There's multiple types of objectives you do on each level and they're pretty neat.


I think a-lot of people are under the wrong opinion of: "If it's inspired by another game then it's not unique and it's garbage". Those people of course would be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dumbasses. Every game takes liberties from other games, It's just how the world works. Take an idea and refine it to make it yours, This concept isn't even unique to games, Music, Sports and literally most other things mimic this.
That being said it very obviously does have some inspiration from the ROR series, However the gameplay is so much different than ROR that I'd say anyone who claims it's a "Risk of Rain Clone" probably sits on the ground in his schools special education classroom while the teacher tries to get them to understand that crayons don't go in your bodies orifices.
After 8 hours of playing the game, I can confidently state: This game is nothing like risk of rain 2. I don't understand backlash from people claiming it is. "Wow A rougelike where you kill things and collect items to make you stronger?!?! Completely unheard of!". The only similarities this game shares is that it's 3d and items stack. There's no time-scaling, enemies just level up. The graphics are vaguely similar and that's it.


It's good! The character and enemy design have the sense of mystery and vague sense of "awe", It's brilliant! The art and graphic design is awesome as well. The stages are really nice to look at with a bunch of things that make you go "huh, what's that" or "why is that there?"


It has a pretty good start for being EA. The characters are fun, The game is responsive and I can see tons of potential for it. However it's not without its cons. Enemies can spawn ontop of you or corner you in a wall making you stuck or so that you can't move which sucks when it happens. Other than that, that's the only bug I've noticed.


It's a good game, I'm having fun. If you're into the genre then pick it up. It has soul and I can see it becoming pretty popular!

The games great but even it was the most dogwater slop ever made the music would carry it. They didn't just cook, they burnt down the entire forest with the soundtrack.

Valhiem is a very unique game, It has a very pretty to look at art-style and uniquely generated worlds. It's a hardcore open world adventure game that has a lot to offer, however it falls flat in almost all of it's delivery. This fact makes me very angry because honestly I really, really want to love this game but I just can't.

For a game that is made for co-op and playing with friends, this game really wants to make itself play like an mmorpg. The skill grinding is annoying to say the least, It takes days of real life time grinding to level a skill to 100 and has a runescape-esk approach to the leveling system meaning it's multiplicative. This in of itself wouldn't be a dealbreaker if there wasn't skill drain . Dying reduces your skills by a percent. Trust me when I say, you will be doing a lot of dying due to cheese or just bad mechanics in general.

To get better gear, you'll need to get resources to do so. This isn't so bad at first, Copper weapons only requiring a couple or so ingots to create a weapon and armor so you can get the first actual taste of combat in the game. After progressing far enough, you'll find yourself needing better gear, so you'll gather the next material; Iron. This requires you to locate a swamp and hope it has some dungeons on it. The dungeon consist of mining sludge and finding iron scrap. You get back to base and smelt it, you'll find they increased how many ingots you need to make items, by a lot. This trend goes on and on and instead of making unique and fun ways to gather materials they just create filler playtime by forcing you to do the same tedious task over and over.

I remember watching a video that said "Any bad game can be fun if you're playing with friends". Valhiem really puts this to the test. The game is just draining to play. You have to get double the resources for each person whose playing with you. Multiplayer really just highlights some way too grindy areas of this game.

The scenes you see in this game while sailing are beautiful they did a good job on the art for this game. However you'll be looking at it for hours and hours while sailing. Sailing in this game takes way too long. There's a wind mechanic in this game that pretty much affects everything. The way tree's fall, the way gravity is applied to you, the way your arrows arc and most importantly, your sailboat. If the wind isn't against your sails and is directly in front of you, the boat stops moving via sail, you have to paddle it. So it's completely rng if a trip is going to take one hour or three. The wind mechanic is horrible and it only gets somewhat bareable after you kill a mid-game boss and chose to use their ability. Five minutes of good wind while sailing with a 25 minute cooldown. It's miserable to say the least.

Your stamina and health comes from what food you consume. Some food gives a bunch of stamina, some gives a bunch of heath. Food is pretty basic in the early game, however to the mid game you'll be finding yourself grinding for hours just so you can have decent food and survivablity. You'll need multiple things just to make a single item. Most of the time you'll have to go out and grind the for thingA you need to make thingB. It's annoying and could be balanced better. Not to mention food has a timer. Most of the time around 20-30 minutes but after half of the time is up it'll start to slowly drain it's given attributes, meaning you'll need to eat it again to gain the max attributes back.

There are dozens of small things they do that just artificially increase the difficulty or pad the time you have to keep playing to do something. Instead of opting for a system where things are crafted when you click them, you have to wait about 3 seconds for each item you craft. Three seconds might not be a lot but it gets very frustrating when you need to craft twenty items and you have to wait three seconds between each click because the game just wants to artificially inflate its average play-time.

After spending five or six hours collecting an inventory full of an ore, so you can make sure everyone can get what they want without having to compensate for materials and the such, you'll have to smelt that material into actual ingots. You'll have to make coal by putting logs in a kiln. Then every 10 or so seconds a single piece of coal comes out. You'll load up the furnace with 20 coal to smelt 10 items because it's a 2:1 ratio of coal to ingot. So every 20 seconds a single ingot will pop out of the furnace. Keep in material cost for crafting goes up as you progress the tiers, so you'll be waiting for multiple stacks of items to be smelted while micromanaging all of it.



The combat in this game is mid at best. Roll to dodge attacks or you can time a block to perfectly parry a move. For being an open world game where you'll be doing lots of combat in lots of various places, it sure feels like they didn't think of that when making the weapons and attacks. All weapons have a couple of unique attack animations, You click, you attack directly in-front of your character. Now if you're on a slight decline/incline from your target then you're just SOL. Enemies are persistant in this game, able to climb up super steep hills with ease when it would take your character over 700 stamina to even get up it. It ends up just being a hassle. Enemies will stunlock you and will kill you in a couple hits. Status effects like cold and wet just serve to artificially inflate the difficulty by pretty much stunting your stamina gain.

You'll find yourself sticking to the objectively better weapons in this game since there's no reason to use anything else honestly. The character uses a spear like a moron and 90% of the enemies in the game are weak to blunt so you'll probably just end up using clubs/maces. An entire boss pretty much requires you to forgo whatever weapon you were using before because they're practically immune to all other damage types. Invalidating your build for a gimmicky damage type system

I love difficult games. I opt in for the hardest settings for games when I'm given the chance. However the difficulty in this game is just so draining. You'll be doing a lot of dying when playing this game so that ensures your skills are always mid to low. Micromanaging food, stamina and health just makes this game feel like a micromanaging sim.

Now image all of this difficulty when you can't see in dungeons or at night because for some reason the devs chose to disclude a gamma slider for some reason. If I want to be able to see I have to change my monitor settings to something I'm just not comfortable with which I'm not going to do when a single slider could fix the issue.

Valhiem is amazing to look at. It does a very good job at the art style it went for and it knocks it out of the park. The game is fun sometimes and the building system is absolutely amazing however there's just not enough good there to excuse how horrid this game is most of the time and that's why I can't reccomend it. I might revisit it and see how it's changes some years from now but honestly, I don't have high hopes for it.

To start off three words, micromanagement the game . If that turns you off then just turn the other way and don't look back. This game is also very slow to get into and you will probably die... a lot . Being turn-based was actually a pretty interesting design choice for this type of game and it's one I've never seen before and it works pretty well most of the time.

• The UI is really... weird. Honestly a game like this with a vast amount of options of what you can do on a single object is obviously going to have a lot of options but I feel like the keybinds and selections could be implemented in a way that made it feel less like clutter.
  
• inventory management is *terrible*. There are plenty of things that could be done to make it less tedious but the devs opt in for a more hands on approach for your inventory management.

• When you first get into the game you'll notice that it really tries to be realistic in some areas and it ends up making the game quite a bit more grindy.
  
• The keybinds the UI's are really bad and sometimes don't make sense.
  
• While there are hints in the game that point you in the right direction for certain crafting recipes and how to do certain things, You'll still end up probably using the wiki.

• Saved the best for last. I absolutely LOVE the design and style of the game. I'm aware it's probably not for everyone but something about it really takes me back to older games for some reason.
  
• It feels so rewarding to get something done, Like finish building an actual shelter or getting a decent supply of food and water.
  
• The community seems to be pretty active (although I'm not an active member inside of it), They host get-togethers and the such.

I honestly bought this game as a one-off thinking I'd play through it and be done with it figuring the devs just kinda threw it out there and would let it die but it's gotten plenty of updates. I'm looking forward to the future and to see what else they have planned for the game.

Dredgers is a fun game with alot of options on how you want to play, from an immortal human that can resurrect themselves to a blacksmith who brings his weapons to life to fight for himself.

The game itself doesn't feel finished and I'm pretty sure is planned to be worked on. The gameplay is pretty weird aswell, There's alot of stuff that isn't really explained and combat is clunky. I think the charm of this game comes from the charming style and the quantity of things to do. Basically the mix-and-match that the game gives you.

If you want a well polished and balanced game, This isn't the game for you but I'd wait a bit before completely writing it off. I bought it for lack of anything else to do but I am pretty happy with what I got.

Kenshi is a game about making your own character and doing whatever the hell you decide you want to do. There are no set end-goals that you have to reach. Instead you make your own. The game offers you freedom to do whatever you want, whether or not that you're actually able to do set goals is up to your characters skills, which in my opinion is great.

I loved and still do love this game but I cannot recommend it to anyone for some pretty glaring reasons.

First off:
Stealth is broken overpowered and extremely easy to get to max level. You don't need a good weapon or any form of tactics to even use stealth. Go into a friendly environment and just crouch for a bit while your other characters do anything else. Instantly high level stealth. While using stealth you have the option to knock out an enemy in one hit based on a percentage chance. You can do this with any humanoid enemy *any*. I've cleared out entire camps of bandits and robots just by knocking them out and looting the place. It's stupid how broken stealth is. Boss fights that should be epic and offer a challenge are just undermined by the fact you can knock them out. Using stealth just feels like cheating, You could just *not* use stealth but then you're undermining a feature of the game which personally doesn't sit right with me.

Second off:
The world is extremely stale after you explore it. This might just be a personal thing but it bugs me. After you do a quest for someone then that's it. There's pretty much 0 interaction between them and your faction anymore. Maybe if you get raided they'll send a squad to help but that's it.

Finally:
The game is unfinished and not being worked on anymore. I've heard stuff about kenshi 2 but i don't really have hopes for it. The devs didn't finish this game so why should you trust them to finish the second one. There are parts of the game that are unfinished or feel unfinished. There's also huge crippling bugs everywhere.

I like the game, but I really can't recommend it to anyone looking for a smooth polished game. The game concept is amazing and I love the idea of this kinda game, but kenshi falls flat.

I already wrote a review for this game about a year ago now I believe and a lot has happened between then and now. I still actively play this game and still don't recommend it. I'm going to rewrite my review and focus on the relevant stuff. I've hit diamond pretty much every season for a long time now so this review is from the perspective of a diamond player. I've been playing this game for about 6 years now so take that as you will.
This game has the most players out of ANY fighter game to date and for good reason. The netcode for the game is decent, it's extremely easy to get into matches, no waiting or any other finicky jumbo you have to tweak around. Start game, Choose gamemode, Wait a few seconds, You got a match. There's really not a lack of players until you're extremely high up in the elo ranges on ranked. (For EU/US-W/US-E I know some other regions are less populated but people still play there). It's a two button game. With multiple weapon types that all characters have two of. Skill based matchmaking works pretty well, sometimes there will be an oddball smurf or just an insane player but those are outliers. The system does its job like clockwork there will always be someone on to fight and that's nice.


However this game runs on THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FLASH PLAYER and it SHOWS. I sport a higher end pc that runs any game I can throw at it. However this game despite being a 2d game just randomly lags and has weird odd kinks. Overly animated skins slow down the performance of the out of game menus and can honestly just be very annoying. There are random small various bugs that are just annoying and the devs should just fix. Color bugs in 2's, Not being able to join in on a lobby you're spectating randomly (extremely annoying when you get a room invite), The random selector running off the worst RNG ever to be conceived by man; If you pick random you'll quite literally be playing the same 5 characters over and over again. Honestly the devs really should just port the game to literally anything else. Flash hasn't been supported since 2020.


I mentioned it before but brawlhalla has a two button game with multiple weapon types and each character using two of them. It's easy and simple to understand, however hard to master. Gameplay will pretty much always be unique depending on who you're fighting since this game is all about skill expression. Most gripe about passive play which is understandable since punishing is king in this game. You'll see passive gameplay become more and more prevalent the higher in elo you go this trend can make most of ranked extremely boring and/or frustrating. Personally I believe passive play is a valid form of skill expression, however the issue lies in how much better it is than the alternative. I mean this isn't even just an issue in silver/gold/plat/diamond. If you watch a pro player fight another pro most of the match is just them waiting for the other to attack.


This game has over 10 unique weapons and 43 characters to pic from, each having 6 attacks unique to each respective character. While the game is viable on any character the large quantity of unique attacks and weapons means that some weapons are objectively just going to be better than others, Some people will get upset when I say this but there is 100% a meta. with 43 characters in the game most people see what characters pros chose and then exclusively only play those characters. There's always this bad taste meta-slave phase after a big tournament where everyone will be playing a character that won the tournament and it's pretty annoying.


BMG has from what I've seen always been pretty horrible at balancing. They tend to dance around root issues and obvious meta picks nerfing random things when it's obvious what a cause of an issue is. Weapons and characters tend to fluctuate between a state of being extremely good, being balanced, being over-tuned and then being horrible. Balance patches happen once every couple months which is extremely annoying because sometimes something is just so extremely good or so bad and you have to just deal with it until the next patch. BMG doesn't even hotfix anything so you're stuck with what they decide to change for that patch. BMG is also extremely biased and ignores certain weapons for extremely long periods of time.


An example of bias would be when Rayman first came out and his sigs were pretty good, Then the next patch they BUFF all 6 of his unique attacks and then proceed to buff BOTH of his weapons.
An example of weapons fluxing from ranging to great to bad would be hammer. I hate fighting and using hammer but after being a meta weapon for years they decided to neuter it. BMG does this thing where they'll change the frames on a weapon and then change the hitboxes of the weapon and then refuse to change the actual drawn animation for it, making weapons like hammer and greatsword just not hit where the animations show they hit and it feels extremely janky. The hitboxes no longer line up with any of the animations. it feels super slow now which would be fine but similar weapons like axe which has an extremely similar attack and also being a heavy weapon swing super fast. BMG doesn't know how to balance and just end up randomly nerfing things that make pretty much no sense.


Onto one of the features in this game I absolutely despise. Crossovers are basically reskins of existing characters but they're unique because they replace the animations of their respective characters special attacks. You can probably already tell where this is going. They do a horrible job of properly representing the special attacks of the character about 90% of the time. The change in animation and such makes it so you can't rely on sound and in some cases reflexes. You pretty much have to learn that specific characters attack animations all over again. Sometimes they attack won't even follow the hitboxes so you can just get cheesed. It's quite literally meta to just choose a crossover character since there's a good chance you'll be able to throw out a move and cheese via animation. It seems like brawlhalla just does this on purpose so that people buy that crossover.
If that wasn't annoying enough brawlhalla constantly vomits out crossovers. There are more crossovers than there are actual characters. In my personal opinion, that makes this game feel like a shoddy joke. It's genuinely disappointing and extremely annoying.


People will try and tell you "Brawlhalla isn't toxic it's just a few bad apples blah blah blah". I have hung out with pros and streamers and the such and I can tell you with an honest and open heart brawlhalla harbors one of the most hateful and toxic communties in any fighting game. The pros quite literally hate each-other and good players that can contest them. Top level players are often times extremely toxic when they're not in the spotlight.
The normal competitive playerbase that harbors silvers/golds/plats/diamonds are pretty toxic too. They disabled the in-game chat for random queues but you'll often times find yourself getting invited to a lobby to get called slurs or other toxic goodies.


Brawlhalla can be a fun game sometimes but more often than not, it's just not fun at anything other than a casual level. It's a great party game for casual play but it's just tiresome and annoying at any level of comp play. Even though I sometimes enjoy this game I know that this game is deeply flawed and honestly isn't worth the hassle of picking up if you're looking for a competitive scene.

\\It's an okay dating simulator, I'd prefer if you could do more with the girl you choose to go after. It has some sorta depressing moments (Thus the warning about easily disturbed, The depressing moments are pretty subtle.). It's really just a feel good sorta game. Nothing too lewd (Suprising, I know.). It also has a nice soundtrack.
It'd rate it a 9.5/10