Recent reviews by Bird Studio

Thank you, Akira Toriyama

Peak Story

I'm gonna let Akira Toriyama's notes about the Sand Land game prior to his passing be my review:


I haven’t watched through all of the gameplay yet. However, it greatly expands the worldview of the original manga with many new exciting elements. It is high-quality as a stand alone game and I can tell it is a highly satisfying action-RPG game!

First of all, the graphics have an excellent balance of the atmosphere of the manga and its drawing style. The representation looks great. The game will surely provide you an exciting experience with a genuine sense of design and attention to detail, from the many new vehicle designs, various customizations, as well as the background design!

In the game, there is not only the world of SAND LAND,
but also a new world called FOREST LAND with new characters, which were not in the manga. You can enjoy a more substantial story, and a vast map to adventure while playing as the Fiend Prince.

I myself can only play casual games, but I do check out the trending games my family plays, and I think I know a little something about them even for an old man. I seriously recommend the game "SAND LAND"! — Akira Toriyama January 2024

This is Guilty Gear... but less

Pros:
- Great visuals and graphics
- Roman cancels are improved on with more utilities
- Has rollback

Mixed:
- OST of Strive is a mixture of both good and bad as the songs themselves are fine, but the more I listen to them constantly repeating with constant vocals gets annoying and irritating.
- While characters are very unique, however they can be so distant from each other that leads to horrible matchups

Cons:
- Horrible lobby system
- Servers have been very unstable recently
- Very tedious to find a game or join a friend
- Characters lack a lot of moves and depth from previous GG titles

This is THE best Guilty Gear game of all time and what future titles should strive to be

Pros:
- Has the best combo system in the GG franchise
- Fantastic soundtrack
- Mass diversity in characters and unique designs
- In depth and unique mechanics
- Has rollback netcode
- Agile and really fun fast paced movement

A fantastic entry within the Souls franchise overall

Pros:
- Fantastic open world experience with a variety of unique locations with dungeons, castles, arctics, underground areas etc.
- Tons of unique enemies and bosses.
- Combat system like other souls games is great with melee, ranged and the addition of horseback combat.
- Exploration is satisfying and filled with tons of secrets, side missions and side bosses.

Neutral:
- Boss game design within Elden Ring is a mix bag with some bosses going from being super fun to learn their patterns and counter them to going to others that feel cheap with attacks that keep you in a permanent stun lock.

Cons:
- Issues that have been specifically occuring on PC include massive fps drops, terrible mouse and keyboard adaption, and the game eating inputs from time to time when using a controller.
- With being an open world game and bosses not having difficulty scaling, you can easily abuse exploits and farms to over level yourself or invite a higher level friend to instantly kill your boss.

Still a 10/10 masterpiece and I'll die on this hill

Pros:
- Great visuals, ragdoll physics, gore and graphics with every weapon feeling meaty and weighty
- The inventory crafting system and modifications for weapons is vastly improved in this game, adding more variety and being able to upgrade almost every blueprint multiple times.
- Great innovations and improvements made to the combat system vs AI
- Amazing innovations and improvements made to the parkour system, the addition of the grapple hook and paraglider were fantastically implemented
- Amazing map designs that allows for so much more freeroam and sandbox within the open world with great interior buildings making it so that every building can be accessed and entered
- Lots of open world content including GRE facilities, anomalies, dark zones etc and with the recent addition of volatile hives and the volatile tyrant
- The skills you unlock in the skill tree felt majorly improved on with how useful they all feel in comparison to 80% of the skills of the 1st game being either useless or passive abilities, and this innovates the gameplay drastically with the more skills you unlock throughout the game
- Fantastic score/ost music that has a great implementation of dynamic music to it during parkour especially with how it's constantly in sync and changes depending on your location (e.g if you're inside a building or falling)
- Fantastic side missions with them having their own fleshed out stories, characters and choices for them
- Choices and decisions felt impactful while also changing the gameplay and adding world building with the peacekeepers vs survivors, while not having a change for the story structure within the grand scheme of the ending, it has major impacts within the journey with completely different missions, stories and information that is given depending on who you choose to side with/save/kill
- Great story, after playing through the game with new game plus and with friends, I've gotten a much bigger appreciation of the story and it is leagues better than that 1st game's story with different characters being likeable/non likeable depending on your choices and extra information given to those characters further fleshing them out, the side characters are the star of this game when it comes to the story as characters I didn't like/side with in my 1st playthrough actually became likeable/redeeming characters when siding with them in my 2nd playthrough, in terms of gameplay I had a blast playing through the missions and interacting with the characters, the main story also had really fun level designs and boss fights
- New game plus saved this game for me as I wouldn't have appreciated the aspects of the story if it wasn't for it and the bonuses you do get from new game plus is really good with 30 more inhibitors, much tougher bosses and a new easter egg with the saw blade that I believe is in new game plus only
- The new chapter addition with Harper in the game is such a great implementation adding much more content with new currencies, bounties, objectives and bounties

Mixed:
- While the ost and graphics are fantastic, it also changes the whole aesthetic of the game to a more colourful, fantasy heroic vibe than a gritty horror which is a style change that was definitely done on purpose and whether you like it or not comes down to expectations and personal preference

Cons:
- While the side characters in the story were great, Aiden Caldwell was a pretty forgettable and generic main character, especially in comparison to Kyle Crane unfortunately

As a major cod zombies fan, this game was a godsend and I'm so glad that I can replay this gem on PC
Pros:
- Great map variety with every map being almost completely unique for zombies
- Great gameplay variety that aims at both casual and hardcore playstyles for zombies and a variety of playstyles depending on the map for multiplayer
- Perfect implementation of advanced movements in multiplayer
- Zombies chronicles and custom zombies
- The gobble gum system was a great addition for zombies to help with newer players and even help hardcore players with speedruns and high round strategies
- Great variety of weapons for both multiplayer and zombies
- Specialists were implemented really good and can be a ton of fun in multiplayer
- Additional content with bonus modes such as freerun, nightmares and dead ops arcade
Cons:
- Average campaign, although not as bad as people made it out to seem
- Multiplayer weapons being locked behind supply drops
- Overpriced on steam

DBFZ is one of my favourite games of all time and definitely my favourite fighting game of all time with around 3000 hrs total with 2000+ hrs on ps4 and 986 hrs on pc as of current
Pros:
- Huge roster
- Great balancing since as of now every character is viable
- Beginner friendly
- Extremely fun to lab
- No micro transactions and everything from the store is purely cosmetic
- Fun raid boss and arena game modes
- Incredible and gorgeous graphics and cinematic animations, with all moves including normals being referenced from the anime
Cons:
- Terrible story mode
- Buggy and annoying interactions with superdash and auto combos
- Bad netcode

Just to put this out there, I have previously played 706 hours on ps4 and 345 hours on microsoft store (game pass)
Pros:
- extremely addicting gameplay
- Great game design with looping and mind games
- Good killer variety
- Licenses
Cons:
- Terrible balancing
- Incompetent developers
- Painful grinding
- Terrible skill based matchmaking
- God awful graphics
- Game is barely functional
- No survivor variety
- Cosmetics are too expensive or are only buy able via auric cells
- Updates only focused on the look of the game instead of fixing the game (Game still looks terrible)
- Game is a bug fest
- Terrible/extremely toxic community
- Game allows mechanics to remove any sort of fun via face camping, tunneling, gen rushing, meta/broken builds etc.
- Only 1 game mode
- Barely any innovation for the past years since the game's release