Recent reviews by Byrdn

A sequel to and upgrade from The Citadel.

There's a greater variety of guns, and some balance changes have made each more worth using. In the first game, some guns were noticeably more effective than others, and given ammo in such quantity that you could stick to a couple of them without much issue. Now, they each have their own niche - I found myself swapping between them much more frequently to deal with whatever situation needed solving. Differences in how each gun handles and reloads also means you're more likely to vibe with one handgun over the other, or whatever the gun may be.

There's a greater variety of gore... which isn't really my thing, but you can really see the love that went into it. Enemies have a lot of ways they can die. After shooting through a stage or two, there was a point that I noticed the sound of laboured breathing, and looked around to find one of the enemy soldiers bleeding out on the floor, staring at me.

There's also a greater quantity of lore, which was my one pseudo-complaint from the first game. I'll not spoil any of it.

Beyond Citadel might be the most I've enjoyed a single-player FPS.

A simple but satisfying gameplay loop of shooting things before they blow up whatever you're protecting - but a considerable amount of variety and polish for that simplicity.

As the variety goes, there's obviously the guns: 7 categories of them, if we're including handguns. Each category has a decent number of variants: there are 5 different assault rifles, 5 different sub machine guns, and 4 different shotguns, for instance.
There are also a bunch of single-use items like barriers, drones or mines; and a bunch of cooldown gadgets like a minigun, an energy cannon, a flamethrower, homing rockets...
The enemies are different flavours of drone, but some of the flavours get pretty different. From suicide-bombers to mine-layers, to a big artillery gun that you can intercept the shots from. I'll refrain from spoiling more.

There are 7 different support characters, from which you can have 1 tag along in each run to help you out. While you might expect there being 7 to mean each uniquely uses each weapon category... nobody wants to bring only a handgun, so there are actually 2 who use assault rifles.
Weapons aside, the characters themselves are pretty endearing. I enjoyed seeing their short story segments throughout each run, or their interactions with Snezhinka in the barracks - all those little animations that plenty of other games would forgo as unnecessary, but that house soul.
The support characters each have their own ending - if I had to complain about something, it would be that most of these support-character-specific endings are somewhat similar. But that makes sense for the story, and the scope of the game.

I also appreciated the different environments the game takes you through, and the little tweaks to the gameplay that come with it. Again, I'll not spoil the specifics, but some of the stages are showcased briefly in the teaser video on this page: the shipping containers stacked like an extra wall, or the tank rolling through.

Overall: short but sweet. And very inexpensive.

There's a sequel coming out next month, so I finally got around to playing this, after having it on my wishlist a long while.
Having done so, I'm really looking forward to the sequel now.

The style of The Citadel is charming - the visuals, the exaggerated travel time and bullet drop, the feel of the movement... 2 of the 10+ weapons reload rounds at a time instead of slapping in a whole magazine, and loading each round is an R-press - I'm sure some people would find that annoying, but it's a little gimmick that I liked. Basically, the guns are fun. That's always good in an FPS.

Some will be put off by the gore, or the anime style, of course.
Personally, I think the biggest negative for me was that I wanted just a little more lore. Keeping up the pace of the gameplay isn't a bad thing, but there's a section of the game where the few lines of dialogue reduce to zero for a while. It's far from a story-heavy game, anyway.

Steam says I completed the game in ~9 hours, which I'd guess is a little longer than average.
So it's quite short, but not to the point I'd consider it a negative. It's quite cheap too, after all, and it doesn't overstay its welcome... and if you're dying for more of the same, Beyond Citadel's coming right at the start of 2025.

Sekiro if he was a bunny instead of a wolf.

A short game, being only 8 boss battles, but fun.
Also it's free.

Developer, I will pay for more of this.

I went into this game not expecting much, but I was surprised how full of charm it is.

There's not much in the way of gameplay - just wandering around, some choices, and some very simple puzzles.
But the interactions between the two main characters, the dark humour blended in with the unsettling scenarios, the effort put into cut-in art that sometimes only appears for a single line... It all just landed perfectly.
Waiting warmly for the rest of the episodes.

This game really makes you feel like having sex with your sister.

At some point, I would have liked to recommend this game. Unfortunately, the devs have succumbed to censorship yet again for this game, over a decade after its initial release. Steam has hidden a lot of reviews referring to this censorship - but it's something I'd want to know if I was looking into a game.

The censorship extends from art in-game to voicing, even to removing guest art from the separate art book.

Even the concept art in the art book has been altered; that the current dev team won't let even that and the guest art exist as a record of what they've "grown from" reads as incredibly disrespectful to me. Another announcer voice pack that was removed completely was a stretch goal from the original Kickstarter.

Also among the censorship is the police brutality in Big Band's backstory, which is central to his development.

Skullgirls is a unique team fighter, where you can select 1-3 fighters, with their damage and health scaled up if you opt not to take the extra characters.

Being a 6-button game and possibly having 3 pretty different characters, combat can get quite chaotic. It could be difficult for new players to get into for that reason.

Ultimately, I can't recommend the game after the devs have shown how willing they are to censor and outright remove the work that their fans paid for.

Moonscars seems to try to create a compelling but mysterious world, like many of its apparent inspirations, while also trying to introduce some unique mechanics. Unfortunately, neither aspect seems to land quite right.

Visuals: Probably responsible for piquing a lot of people's interest in the game. Similar in style to Blasphemous, but gets somewhat monotonous.

Story: Told in bits and pieces, often in awkward terms and phrasing; I'm sure some of this is for style, but a lot of the awkwardness is doubtlessly from the translation.
In games like these, you sometimes don't see a character for a huge stretch of the game, only to find them again and have a development revealed to you by as little as a few lines of text or environmental clues, yet they can still be quite compelling. Ultimately, I can't say Moonscars really managed to make me feel this for its characters - not even the protagonist.

Gameplay:

Moveset: You have a sword, you swing it 3 times to combo. You can parry most enemy attacks to get a damaging counter in, or you can always dodge them and the others that you can't parry.

The game will give you three special attacks to pick from at certain intervals: you can take one of them. Generally speaking, you will have only one special attack. Unfortunately, they're all very slow, so not as worth using as they might otherwise appear.

You also have magic. Some enemies need to be hit with magic once to take any damage, and are awkward to hit without certain spells, so I'd recommend getting a few different ones. For some reason, you can only equip 2 spells at once, though you can pause to swap them out freely. It's just slightly cumbersome to have to go into the menu to do this. Some of the magic summons minions to fight for you, while others are AoE blasts or projectiles.

Traversal: You can walljump or dash in the air. Later on, you get a superdash, allowing you to move at decent speed horizontally, and glide over wider gaps. This should make traversal feel better, but it often doesn't; passing an enemy while superdashing will cause you to fall out into a slow roll, which will obviously prevent you from gliding over gaps. The really unfortunate part is that enemies aren't the only things that do this. Your own summons cause you to fall out of superdash too, as do their corpses, or enemy corpses.

Variety: Lacking some variety; there aren't a huge number of enemies, and the game uses doppelganger "minibosses" for unlocking fast travel points. (Doppelgangers share your moveset, but aren't incredibly smart about using any of it.) The environments aren't incredibly varied either.

Death: Moonscars has a few systems that relate to you dying. First: ashes(/"souls"/money) you collect are dropped on death, and can be reclaimed by returning to where you died. Ashes are used to buy a few items, or to unlock new magic. Second: Dying too much will turn the moon red, which increases enemy strength, but also causes them to drop more ashes. You can use rare consumables to turn the moon back to normal. Third: "spite" level-ups grant bonuses to stats, but are lost on death. If you die to a boss, you have to grind a little if you want to fight it in peak condition again, essentially.

TL;DR: Other similar games do it better. I'd wait for a sale or give it a pass.

Great core gameplay marred by all the other systems that surround it, and an incomplete and very buggy release.

Performance: Frequent crashes, sometimes several in a single mission. I'm on the luckier side, but still get crashes now and then. Framerate issues occur more on certain maps, but aren't infrequent.

Loading times are quite long even on an SSD, and you're forced to reconnect to the servers and load the entire hub every time you finish a mission or even change characters.

Update: After some patches, performance generally seems to have improved - though, like I said, I was on the luckier side to begin with.

Bugs and Other Issues:

Update: I've removed the "UI issues" segment I previously had here, as the two examples I used have been fixed. The rest appear to still apply:

Ungettable Goods: Scrips/Grims (items required for side-missions) frequently are unable to be interacted with, preventing you from being able to complete those side-missions without several attempts.

Twitching: Server connection issues occur frequently: trying to swap weapons will sometimes have your character twitch back to the weapon you were trying to switch from; sometimes your Lasgun will flash, or your launcher will let out a thoom as a grenade flies from it, only for the game to twitch and roll that shot right back into your mag, like it never happened.

Phantom Slaps: Shooting an enemy in the head will sometimes play the headshot sound, have blood burst from the enemy's head, only for no hitmarker to appear, and the enemy to be uninjured. Even if a hit registers, sometimes enemies will just ignore your attack's stagger, sometimes even several times in a row. Sometimes dodging a leaping dog will have it spin 90 degrees in midair to home in on you regardless. Against enemies for which these things are supposed to be the counterplay, the lack of reliability is ridiculous.

When selecting a mission on the 4th difficulty and with no modifiers, then checking the details mid-mission, it will always say you're playing a high-intensity modifier. The devs have claimed this is just a UI bug, but some people have doubts about that.

The Ubersreik 5: Occasionally, you'll notice you've got 4 squadmates. Plus yourself. This is a 4-player game. In every mission this has happened to me in, the extra 5th character is a bot - and yet, at the end of the mission, it's always the actual player that the game kicks from the group.

The Hub:
Incomplete on release, but still grindy now: You're no longer forced to check the shop every hour in hopes that the base weapon you're looking for appears - but that doesn't mean the RNG isn't still harsh. You can buy the base weapon type you want, but its stat total and distribution are still randomised, which can be significant.

Completing missions also now gives one item guaranteed, with higher difficulties supposedly having a higher chance to give higher rarity weapons/charms - I've yet to receive one weapon with a good stat total, though.

Upgrading gear is a little less painful, due to the adjusted material drops, and the ability to replace one of two blessings on your weapon. You just need to hope you get a weapon with decent stats, one good perk, and one good blessing, instead of two.

Timers: Everything's on a timer. That weapon you wanted but didn't want to RNG so hard on? Not in the shop, check back in an hour. That mission you wanted to run? Not there on the right difficulty, or with the right modifiers, check back in an hour. This is made even worse by global conditions, so almost every mission has even more buggy dogs to deal with. That cosmetic in the premium cash shop looks pretty nice - would be a shame if it disappeared soon and you missed out, huh?

The Cash Shop: Crafting wasn't ready for the full release, but you know what was? Yeah. After backlash, they removed the visible timer in the cash shop, but commented that it may be added back in later, once more cosmetics have been added to the game. Their reasoning was that having too much in the shop at once was confusing to the players.

Naturally, the paid cosmetics generally look far more visually impressive than the free ones. Yet they have their own issues with clipping, or Zealots' thumbs being disconnected from the rest of their hands.

Also naturally, they have their own premium currency, which you have to buy in packs either too small or too large for the cosmetic sets, to try to wring more cash out of you.

Story: It's not there.

Characters:
NPCs: There are a few of these who talk to you on missions. They're alright.

Player Characters: You can select various aspects of your background, your appearance, one of 4 classes, and one of 3 personalities for each class.

Classes are important mechanically. Personalities affect your character's voice lines. Background details appear to do nothing.

Characters will "interact" with each other during missions. Because there are so many possible combinations of squadmates, most of the conversations sound like the characters are talking past each other instead of actually conversing.

Classes:
Veteran: At higher difficulties, enemies with guns melt every other class - but Veteran has twice as much base Toughness (a sort of shield which blocks ranged damage and mitigates melee damage), more ammo, passives which let him regen toughness at range, an ability which boosts his ranged damage, cuts ranged damage taken by 75%, highlights priority targets and refreshes its duration when one of those targets is killed.

So he must be weak in melee, right? He's got one of the strongest melee weapons in the game, so not particularly. Veteran can kinda do it all.

Zealot: The melee specialist, who is passable at melee. Yells, recovers half toughness and runs at people for his class ability. But he only recovers half of his toughness, so enemies at higher difficulties will shoot you once, eat all your toughness and stagger you. Get used to spamming sprint and crouch to slide and hope nobody manages to shoot you.

Psyker: Explodes heads with his mind - except at higher difficulties, having your head exploded with mind powers isn't fatal. Even a dog can survive having its brain blown up once. Unfortunately your mind powers are also blocked by guardrails, even if there's a foot-high gap that you can easily see through.

Psyker's passives are a mess of missing synergy, unless you happen to take a flame staff, and they're very squishy unless you happen to take a force sword with deflect and a particular passive to let you block more. The update also nerfed his passive quell rate with non-force weapons, making him a bit clunkier again.

Ogryn: Big Boys who struggle to find cover, constantly get shot in the back by their teammates, and are really good at knocking enemies over and carrying things. Has more health and takes less damage than other classes, but still melts to gunners at higher difficulties.

Weapons:
Distinctiveness: Darktide's weapons are good overall, but seem less distinct than Vermintide 2: several weapons are shared across 3 classes, while Vermintide 2 weapons were mostly unique to each class.

Several weapons are different marks of the same base weapon, like the three devil's claw swords, the various combat axes, the three heavy swords, three dueling swords, three Lucius, Kantrael and Recon lasguns, three sharpshooter and braced autoguns. Each weapon variant has a slightly tweaked moveset or stats, but they often feel and look quite similar, and one often outperforms the rest in general.

TL;DR: Go play Vermintide 2 until they've fixed this a bit.

Seeing this was on sale again, felt like I should make a quick review of it.

First off: The online multiplayer doesn't work.
The game's been out for years, but hasn't been patched at all.
Obviously the online is pretty dead now - but if you're planning to play with friends, you might not be able to.

With that aside: I'm a big fan of games like this and Monster Hunter.
Toukiden has some cool build variety due to its mitama system and how they synergise with different weapons, but the movement and attacks never felt as satisfying as Monster Hunter's. Doesn't feel like they have the same weight.

The game is still decently fun to play single player, but I can't recommend it when they've abandoned it in this state.

UNIclr's one of my favourite fighting games, despite its current lack of rollback netcode.

The GRD system rewarding active offense and defense, the gatlings and reverse beats, assaults as an instant air dash or plain air option in an otherwise decently grounded game - it all comes together into a pretty well-balanced and fun game.

Something I think UNIclr handles particularly well is character variety.
Characters in a game like Street Fighter can feel quite similar, while anime fighters like BlazBlue sometimes have significant gimmicks to each character; that and the longer combos make it easier to express their differences. But the gimmicks can sometimes be intrusive, for lack of a better term. UNIclr strikes a good balance between them, allowing characters to feel unique without approaching something I've seen some people describe as "playing their own game".

Comparing Melty Blood AACC to UNIclr, there are some clear character ideas French Bread carried between the two: Seifuku's 236X pinwheel oki to Carmine's 236X pinwheel oki, Akiha's 22X negative edge pools to Carmine's 214[X] negative edge mines, Satsuki's hopping command grab to Mika's, or some of Kouma to Enkidu.

French Bread not being tied to someone else's IP doubtlessly gave them a lot of freedom, which let this series shine.