Recent reviews by Bird

This is the game for people who like Slay the Spire and think "This is good, but I wish I could make a dozen micro-decisions every round to slightly change the output of my hand every turn".

Cro

A quintessential 5/5 game -- not only good artistically and mechanically, but uses the medium to tell a story that couldn't be told anywhere else

Neat twist on the existing P2 formula, with a good variety of puzzles and overall length. The way some mechanics work (e.g. cubes moving through time while pressed against a wall) require trial and error instead of being able to think them out, though.

The first game since the Flash age to make me to pull involuntary all-nighters

If you're going to make a game in a famously punishing genre, don't disguise crucial information such as attack hitboxes, unit pass-through rules, and where the floor stops.

This recomendation is conditional. If you're the kind of person who watches 150-episode anime, micromanages your party members in JRPGs, and went over to other people's houses as a kid to watch them play video games, then this game is for you. If you like tight pacing, pulse-pounding action, and melting into an intuitive control system, this game is not for you. If you're on the fence, go watch some gameplay. It'll either grab your interest or bore you to tears.

While it's not XCOM 3 in terms of story or scale, it's a good batch of experimental design choices for the franchise. The choice to move to pre-defined characters instead of randomly-generated blank slates was a good one, allowing for cohesive powersets and entertaining dialogue without sacrificing variety. The game's biggest problem is its engine -- while nothing ever failed to work, animations and GUI elements glitched out constantly, and crashes were common when new enemy units reinforced an in-progress mission. However, the game compensates for this with a generous auto-save system. In summary, it's good XCOM content that takes smart risks, but it won't convert any naysayers.

Fails in every way a JRPG can be fun. Combat is mind-numbingly easy, the story is boring and slowly-told, the characters are empty narrative vehicles for Toriyama's designs, and exploration is made excruciating tedious with enemy respawn mechanics and backtracking. The only thing distinguishing this from a run-of-the-mill RPG Maker game is the volume of its asset library.