Recent reviews by Cookie Jedi

If you had to reduce the elements of Inkbound down into a concentrate, you'd have a delicious mixture of Hades and Divinity Original Sin. If that description is enough to hook you, do yourself a favor and pick this game up. For a [currently on sale] price of about $16USD you'll have few, if any, purchases this year more worth it than this game.

While Inkbound doesn't quite "reinvent turn-based gameplay," it absolutely delivers on its promises of a "fluid online-only co-op roguelike." The quality of the animations paired with a wonderfully stylized art direction allow Inkbound to pop off the screen in ways some of its contemporaries just can't measure up to. It effortlessly conveys simultaneous feelings of almost Lovecraftian fantasy with a healthy sprinkling of Saturday morning cartoons. The game can run, and run well, on a calculator -- so these visuals never have to be sacrificed for performance no matter the system you're running.

The motions of the characters, enemies, and abilities all flow seamlessly and it's this fluidity that makes combat absolutely HIT. Abilites, for the most part, feel impactful and heavy. Coupled with top notch audio design and mixing, you'll become immersed in the world of Inkbound for hours.

Strategies for the game are fairly widely varried especially for an Early Access game. Some are, of course, way more overpowered than others but their overpowered nature feels earned and exciting rather than cheese and triviality. The boss fights can be unforgivingly difficult compared to even the hard stages if your build is perfect -- but for me personally that's a positive in its favor.

The base formula for Inkbound is nothing new, you dungeon crawl through a series of battles gathering currency, items and abilities along the way to a final boss fight. If you've played something like Slay the Spire you are going to know at a basic level what's going on here. However, the combat really truly sets this game apart from others in the genre and the art style is frosting on an already tasty and filling cake.


With a slew of features on the way and the developers being incredibly active in discord with a roadmap publically available and updates frequent, this is going to be one of the major success stories for Steam's Early Access program and a talking point for indie devs for years to come.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga is undeniably a masterpiece of a game; one that was put together by people clearly incredibly passionate about the genre. I write this as someone whose favorite genres of games are various on turn-based or tactical RPGs. Final Fantasy Tactics, Knights of the Old Republic, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, and Ogre Battle 64 are in my top 10 of best/favorite games of all time. Symphony of War can very easily slot it's name into the conversation with these all-time greats.

Symphony of War is a linear, 30-odd chapter, story driven tactical RPG with some additional side quests and optional arena battles available for testing out and/or leveling up squads.

A squad can contain up to 9 individual units on a 3x3 grid, very similar to Ogre Battle, with each individual unit have randomized passives and stats as well as the potential to teach them specific passives and stat level ups via items. Mixing and matching your units, their passives and their typings is something you could expect to, but by no means be required to, dump hours in experimenting or roleplaying. Honestly, it was one of my favorite parts of the game and something I personally haven't actually seen in a video game in a solid 20 years, plus it was executed to perfection.

Battles occur very much like other similar games in the genre: you move your squad on the grid to an adjacent or in-range tile, click attack, and a window will pop up showing both squads doing battle. Squads have a number of factors that impact a battle including a morale system which can be used to force enemies with low morale to surrender getting you bonuses at the end of a level. The sprites are VERY well made and the combat animations are fluid and gorgeous in the art style. Overall, it's a very satisfying experience and can scratch several specific itches for fans of the genre.

With all of this praise, there is however some room for improvement. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your preference in game, none of my gripes at all come from the gameplay or combat presentation. The issues I have with Symphony of War, albeit nitpickingly small, are entirely in the story and out-of-combat art.

The Story of Symphony of War is a by-the-books fantasy affair. That's it. That's the extent of my criticism of the story. It's very well written, and does enough to keep you engaged and feel like you have agency in the plot, but it's almost paint by numbers in terms of how predictable the twists are and how the plot shapes up over the course of the game. It isn't a bad story by any means, just don't expect anything world altering.

Finally, the out-of-combat art. Much like the story of the game, the conversation art isn't bad by any means, but it is somewhat jarring and feels almost entirely out of place with the rest of the aesthetics presented in the game. I think an ever so slightly less realistic and more simplistic art style would have suited the game better, personally. The character art did grow on me over time, it certainly has its own charm, but I could never in the 40+ hours I put into it fully get over just how slightly "off" it felt.

In summation, Symphony of War is a monumentally welcome breathe of fresh air in a much neglected genre in video gaming. The combat is phenomenal, the mechanics and game direction are all cream of the crop, and the sprite artwork is lovely. It's not going to win any awards in terms of plot, and the off-style conversational portraits can be immersion breaking at times, by Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga is easily one of the best Tactical RPGs to come out in decades and certainly a contender for Game of the Year 2022.

Let's get the obvious and most glaring stuff outta the way first. This game is INCREDIBLY poorly optimized and, yes, has more than it's fair share of bugs. I've got on Overclocked i7 4770k and a 1660 super with 24 gigs of RAM (a slightly better setup than the recommended 1080p high) and this game absolutely chugs on 1080p medium. The framerate is incredibly inconsistent with jumps all over from 25-40fps but for the most part it's steady somewhere between 30-35 which is playable.

Now, with this level of poor optimization, why am I recommending it? Well I'm 23 hours in at time of writing and I've had an absolute blast every bit of the way. The voice acting is some of the best I've ever heard in a video game. Half a dozen different spoken languages by various crowd npcs using native, fluent speakers of those languages does unparalleled things for the immersion. The cyberpunky mechanics, like the Quickhacks, scanning, and going to a ripper doc for upgrades all feel fleshed out and like they belong in the world.

The story is, so far, very nicely structured and well written. The whole world feels lived in and like the people living in it have been through some real ♥♥♥♥. It's a refreshing anti-capitalist take on the world and very true to the Cyberpunk genre as a whole and the tabletop it gets its namesake from.

At 23 hours, I'm largely very satisfied with my experience so far and I've barely scratched the surface of what there is to do in Night City. At $60 US cost of admission, that's less than $3 an hour of value, certainly better return on your investment than pretty much any other form of entertainment.

Is CP2077 in a rough place right now? Yeah, yeah it definitely is. Maybe give it a month or two to get some solid QOL patches if you're really on the fence about it. But know this game is absolutely worth playing today.

Here's how a typical session of Rust goes:

Wake up naked on beach with rock.
Get killed by man with an AK47 as soon as you open your eyes.
Respawn naked on beach with roc,
Get killed by man with an AK 47 as soon as you open your eyes.

I think you can see where this is going.

10/10 would get murdered upon birth again.

Mechanically, this game plays like a cross between Catan and Risk, or Dungeon Dice Monsters. The hex-grid, playing card, and turn-based elements are classics of the board game genre but Armello takes it a step further, cashing in on some of the features only a virtual game can provide, adding Stealth abilities and a Day/Night cycle.

Visually, Armello is a work of art. Alternating between simplistic but well-drawn 2D animation for the in-combat animations and a gorgeously rendered 3D world, Armello flexes its muscles visually while using very little resources to run the game. Transitions are smooth and crisp, there's no clash between the art styles, and the almost-cartoon like stylization gives the game a comfortable charm.

I have not played the single-player experience so I cannot comment on that, but several multiplayer games with friends have been completely unique, well designed, balanced, and of course, incredibly fun each time.