Recent reviews by CustomCharacter

When PalWorld came out, I heard people talking about other monster-collecting games and this game came up quite a bit. It happened to be on sale at the time, so I picked it up. It's a good time, overall: the elemental mechanics are generally satisfying to use (and eventually break across your knee), the music is decent (the combat tracks are a highlight, though admittedly I am a sucker for tracks that add vocals at times of hype), and the artwork is all really good. I have only a couple nitpicks about the main game:

- The comedy is really hit or miss. For me it was more misses, but there were some good moments.
- The ending kinda sucks.
- I only really found myself interested in Felix's story, and the Shakespeare references with Viola seem comically out of place.

The post-game and 100% experience, on the other hand, soured me on it a bit.

-Once you get into a potential rhythm of how everything works, you realize just how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long each combat is. Pokemon, for all its faults, has an option to turn off battle animations for a reason. I installed mods to speed up combat 5x and[i/] remove the animations, and it still felt long due to each effect (passives, ailments, etc.) having to play out individually.
-The overworld dash's ability to start a combat with a Fire element attack is sometimes detrimental. It wouldn't be as bad if you could just avoid Air-type enemies in the overworld, but because you only see one monster of a potential encounter you can bump into something hoping to beat it quickly only to have an Air Wall suddenly block you. (This is, of course, compounded by the above issue.)
-Speaking of: the Ranger board quest to knock out certain types of enemies is really rough. The whole Ranger Noticeboard system is half-baked to begin with, but given that not every enemy on the board can appear on the overworld it can become a grind of 'run into enemy -> escape because the board target isn't there -> repeat ad nauseam'.
-Several of the fast travel points are in really awful spots. One of the mods I installed fixed this by allowing me to also fast travel to campfires, but before that if I wanted to go anywhere on the north end of the map it was a frustrating endeavour of dodging weak enemies to leave, for example, the Mall or the Titania.
-The overspill mechanic is cool in the main game, where you can coordinate your fusion and attacks to end combats with other humans early, but it's a concern if you leave a low-health monster out. The post-game removes that functionality entirely from enemies, but keeps it for you, so not only does human combat become less interesting, it feels like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rules patch exclusively to screw you over.
-The post-game grind is so slow.. Seriously, you need 435 Fused Material to unlock Orb Fusions, which are the only way in the game to get more than one Fused Material at a time. Otherwise, it's static encounters and quests. Once again, this is compounded severely by how slow combat is. (This might be alleviated a bit by the Pier of the Unknown DLC, but I doubt it.)

Overall, like an 8/10. Don't 100% it unless you're a moron like me, though.

Competent Quake-style shooter. It doesn't do anything new, but it does it competently.

Sprite design is overall well-done, but I genuinely prefer the models for their readability (and I'm glad they include both options.). Levels are generally well-designed, but I think the aesthetic is a little too samey across the game, with only a few of the last levels really breaking through into their own. And I feel like quite a few of the weapons have very similar use cases or only exist until you get a better option.

I genuinely enjoyed the actual 'shipbreaking' part of this game. I liked the puzzle element of making sure you devise a plan for disassembly, then over time optimising it for time and potential mistakes. In that regard, this game is great, and mod support makes it even better.

The story though...

Look, I'm someone who's typically pro-union, and I would still describe it as idealistic union propaganda.

Lynx does everything companies used to do in the early Industrial era: company scrip rather than proper payment; renting your tools to you and only allowing you to buy them when they're beyond warranty; sending in an 'observer' whose job it is to make sure workers are hitting quota, humanity be damned; and so on. But when the ball gets rolling, they never actually do any of the historical union-busting tricks. They never send cyber-Pinkertons at you to break your kneecaps, they never hire scabs to do the work instead ( you can even be a scab and the story still turns out the same way), and in general they act rather toothless, even acquiescing to every request once the plot concludes...Which is hilarious, because Lynx would absolutely have legal recourse to fire your crew. In the game's climax, you commit an actual no-go in union protesting by destroying product. There's a reason why modern unions strike and picket rather than destroy the thing their employee does, because destruction of property is a legitimate legal reason to fire someone.

There is no way in hell the setting points a picture in which a union would actually form, which is highly incongruent with the story it actually tells.

I don't think the game was trying to make a political message, but it did, and it did it in a really poor way. I think if they committed, it could've actually been better, honestly: Kai actually dying permanently due to Hal deleting his biological backup would've been an excellent sci-fi twist to the general lesson of 'regulations are written in blood' common in blue-collar work, but they couldn't even commit to that.

TL;DR: Game content is good, story content is ♥♥♥♥. Play the Free-Play mode and don't touch Career.

I've wanted to play through the first System Shock for a while, but it's one of those games where the dated graphics and UI genuinely makes it difficult to parse in the modern era. My understanding is that this is very close to a 1-1 recreation of the game, but with a more modern UI, engine, and graphics.

Despite being a remake, it feels much like a modern Immersive Sim akin to later entries in the genre like Prey, which speaks volumes about why this is one of the fathers of the genre. I have only a few minor complaints as someone who didn't play the original:

- The cyberspace sections are all a drag. I give them mostly a pass because it looks like it replicates the original really well, but I never *liked* playing them.
- On the hardest difficulty for combat, the later enemies feel a *bit* too bullet-spongey. On difficulties 1 and 2, they feel fine.
- The ending sequence *sucks* for a number of (spoilery) reasons, and looking on Youtube it seems like it's the only major departure from the original. I understand the difficulty of translating the part of SHODAN trying to take you over, but...As soon as you step into that last cyberspace section in this, the only failstate is if you were like me and went in with little time left over; if you're not playing on the hardest difficulty, you've basically won the game at that point.

In short: they did a really good job. The complaints above are mostly nitpicks.

EDIT: Since the most recent update said to change the ending, I replayed it. It's much better, still not perfect but at least it's actually kinda fun this time.

🖕 ♥♥♥♥ you Microsoft, Tango gives you one of the best games of 2023 and you reward them by shutting them down? Un-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-believable.

My review from when I 100%'d the game is still below. While it's a lot of complaining about minutiae, I still ultimately really enjoyed this game. I am not happy with Microsoft's actions.

I loved this game. The gameplay is solid, it takes itself *just* seriously enough that the emotional moment at the end still works, and most of the music is fantastic (even if the Streamer Mode variants sometimes feel like Legally Distinct versions of the licensed tracks). The recently-added gamemodes are difficult but designed largely for people who've otherwise mastered the game, so they feel really good to play once you're at that point. Overall, 8/10 experience.


However, the 100% journey is...not great, and I'd like to complain a bit.

First off: Why do I have to beat the game on *every difficulty?* That's a minimum of 5 times, but more realistically 6 times since you probably won't get all S ranks on your first playthrough, and each runthrough where you miss a secret thing adds *another.* The difficulty settings are also kinda wack; once you get used to the gimmick, Rhythm Master is probably the *easiest* difficulty because enemies don't die as easily, meaning you can continue to combo them for much longer than lower difficulties. The only time I ever reached a 200 hit combo was on RM, and it wasn't even close otherwise. I had to spam a cheese strategy to get my S scores on the easiest difficulty because enemies died too quickly for me to get enough points off them.

That cheese strategy? Hibiki. It's the dominant strategy of the game. Why should I bother using my entire moveset that I've practiced if I can just spam Steal Counters or Shred until I get enough batteries to spam Hibiki for a minimum of 7000 points per enemy hit? Once I learned about it, I was frustrated because it was so much easier and faster than actually comboing through most enemies.

WA-ES-2 enemies - the samurai ones - waste so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time because they're the only enemies that can enter the Rhythm Parry Attack armour stance without actually doing the attack, and will sometimes enter a brief cutscene when doing it anyway (usually ending your combo.) Yes, I know you can use Korsica to blow them out of the armour stance, but it still wastes so much time compared to every other enemy in the game. Especially since their actual Rhythm Parry Attack still has a significant wait time until the timing comes out because of the poem it writes that only Japanese readers can understand!

Fire-related anything kinda sucks, mostly because you have to wiggle the sticks to put it out. I got an RSI playing Metal Gear Rising because of wiggle-the-sticks attacks, so I'm never a fan of them. But also, fire-based enemies are more difficult to parry because fire often lingers beyond the parry invuln beats. Unless you have the chip that buffs the length of invuln from directional parries, a GNR-FL0 will still set you on fire if it's shooting you at the same time as something else.

The rhythm sections are fun the first couple times, but since they *never change* it stops being interesting. Mimosa's is particularly egregious in that regard, because you have to fight her in two separate Rhythm Tower climbs. The emotional moment with the Reflection track is fantastic the first time and a great story moment...but it's two and a half minutes of slow rhythm gameplay in a game about fast-paced action gameplay, and you're asking me to play through it at least four more times, long after the emotional catharsis of the scene means anything.

Finally, while I like the majority of music in this game, the Korsica arc feels like it goes for waaay too long, and I think it's largely because the two larger levels' songs - Security Shutdown and This'll Be Rough - sound really similar when outside of combat. Contrast the previous arc, which has four songs over two shorter levels - one is a remix, sure, but it's a much higher BPM and it's for a single section of the level.

Overall, I highly recommend this game, and I *do* actually recommend a second playthrough on Rhythm Master if you got the hang of the systems in your first playthrough. Just...don't go for 100%.

TL;DR: I enjoyed most of time with the content of Sunless Skies...but there's so much filler that I wouldn't recommend it. I think Sunless Sea is a better experience overall, for several reasons.

But first, things I liked. The writing is good, as always for Fallen London stuff. The imagery in Skies is beautiful, and more visually conveys both the eldritch horrors of the world and the authoritarian methods humanity has to use to conquer them. The world is much more constant in comparison to Sea; my first run was spent mostly upgrading officers so that my later lineages would have better options. I overall prefer the combat in Skies to Sea, as there's a lot more nuance to the types of weapons available. Heat is also an interesting idea of a resource, but it has some flaws I'll get to. Finally, I like the levelling system in theory when compared to Sea, because it makes a lot of the harder choices more permanent. The Secrets of Sea were infinitely farmable; levels are not.

As for problems...

Sea's difficulty all came in the first 10 hours or so, where you lacked knowledge and resources to move much beyond London. Once you figured out the echo farming loops and where to get all the resources for quests, it was just a matter of putting it all together. Skies' difficulty curve is much less flat, but for all the wrong reasons: Terror is an actual issue in Skies, since it both accumulates faster and is significantly harder to get rid of; Nightmares have a tendency to lose you stats permanently, and are ridiculous to remove; and your resources are much more limited (12 cargo in the starting ship compared to 40). None of these would inherently make the game not recommendable, but there are some design issues that Sea doesn't have at all.

For example, it's impossible to guarantee a good result on a lot of checks due to a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 'partial success' roll in the background that only activates if you would've normally succeeded. (Don't trust the wiki, either; it is NOT just 5%.) Skies also has a ton of trap options: don't ever run a Secondment with one of your officers unless their upgrade is redundant to another officer in their station. A lot of weapon upgrades don't meaningfully increase your DPS because the Heat bar never upgrades, and bigger weapons often generate more heat. You also have to aim with most weapons, so fewer shots means you need to be more accurate. Another one is engine upgrades: the math is complicated, but in short, they all cover less distance per unit of fuel than your starter engine, and at best increase your speed by 70%. If you want to go fast economically, you're forced to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dash everywhere. (These engine upgrade also didn't even exist until the Sovereign patch launched.)

But why does speed matter so much that they'd make highly inefficient engines just to move faster? Well, despite the High Wilderness being obsensibly outer space, there are a lot of rocks and walls in the way, so going as the crow flies isn't possible in 95% of situations like it was in Sea. Even then, I reinstalled Sea to do the comparison...

• in Sea, with the basic engine, ship, and no Full Steam Ahead, it took about 11 minutes to go from the Dawn Machine to Irem in a straight line, i.e. one corner to the opposite.
  
• in Skies, from London to the one edge of the circle I could reach in a straight line under the same conditions, took ~3.5 minutes, so 7 minutes for the full diameter if there weren't walls in the way...

But there are also four different areas, with many of the access points being potentially opposites from each other. Movement between ports is glacial in comparison to Sea. You can't even set a course and look away at Youtube or something because of how often you need to turn!

You wanna know how bad it is? The universally recommended method to not make this game be a slog is to install Cheat Engine, and enable a hotkey to turn on and off the speedhack. After about 10 hours of the vanilla speed, I took that option and put the modifier to 2.5x, turning it off only for combat. If I want to compare completion times, Sea + Zubmariner took me 168.9 hours to 100%, and that has 7 ambitions and some abnoxious achievements (like spending ~61 hours actively at sea). While my real time for Skies is above, the adjusted time for the speedhax is ~159 hours (reducing the multiplier to x2 to take into account disabling it for combat encounters.) For a game with less content.

To cap it all off, I've only played the Sovereign patch so I don't know what changed, but it seems like some of these complaints stem from changes made in said patch. I've seen posts online of people saying that Terror was easier to manage here than it was in Sea, for example.

While I (like many others) like Dishonored 2 less than 1, I think it gets a bad rep sometimes which makes people not do a second playthrough.

For example, during my first playthrough I was honestly convinced that NG Shadow + Clean Hands + Flesh & Steel on Very Hard was impossible due to how the levels felt when playing through with powers and kills. But my second playthrough achieved just that; the level design doesn't feel as conducive to that as the first game, but it absolutely is. Both options are a lot of fun (something I can't really say for Dishonored 1, where killing guards was always the more fun route).

I do have a few criticisms, though:
-Bone Charms are still a crapshoot

• Once again, there are no sanity checks to make sure the randomized Bone Charms are useful.
  
• This is especially egregious since you can get Charms that improve abilities the character never has access to before NG+.
  
• Just like the first game, you're not guaranteed to even get the useful ones for your run. 55 passive rolls for 38 regular runes, 18 passive rolls for 10 black runes, and 13 passive rolls for 6 corrupted runes.

-Dark Vision is useless for finding loot in this game, which is frustrating moreso because they added two new coin types. (Good luck finding them all!)
-Most of the powers feel gimmicky rather than genuinely useful.
-Most of the blueprint upgrades are only useful for deadly playthroughs.

TL;DR eh, like a 7.5/10 compared to DH1's 8/10.

This DLC has its moments of charm, but it's buggy, untested and feels outright unfinished. I guarantee no one on the dev team actually got the achievements, or else basic problems with it would've been solved. Problems like:

• 'my streak in Kill Chain keeps breaking for no reason'
  
• 'waiting an unskippable three seconds between resets wastes my time'
  
• 'Assassin's Run isn't fun to do because assassins have janky head hitboxes and can teleport frame 1 of noticing you'
  
• 'The easiest way to beat Kill Cascade or Train Runner is to try as hard as you can to play as little as possible'
  
• 'The easiest way to get 3 stars on Mystery Foe is to keep restarting until the target is in the closest room, which is trivial to find out because the room has a different layout and a single clue will inform you which of the duo inside is the target'
  
• 'The janky physics engine makes Kill Chain and Bend Time Massacre crapshoots, and something (probably a memory leak) causes incomplete resets and crashes in them'
  
• 'Bonfires has no sanity checks to make sure you aren't bouncing back and forth between two very far markers'
  
• 'Dogs are the only enemies in Back Alley Brawl that can outright stun you, but are so frail a weak sneeze can kill them by the time you get back up'
  
• 'Expert Burglar is almost impossible because half the treasure in the level is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ loose change'
  
• 'Kill Cascade's last target is almost impossible to actually hit until you realize she's facing the other way as all the other foes'
  
• etc...

I could probably ♥♥♥♥♥ for hours about little things, but I think the point comes across well enough.

I don't actually recommend playing this game anymore, as the sequel - from what I've seen - fixes every issue I have with it.

However, to ignore the (pardon the pun) legacy of this game would be dismissing the advances it made to the genre. It came out almost a decade ago, when the roguelite scene was still nascent; the original Isaac was only two years old, and Risk of Rain would release later that year. It was the first game to really nail a sense of proper progression; even runs that go poorly might be able to advance something in the metagame, and every step along the way was an actual improvement (contrasting, say, Isaac, where some runs would succeed only to unlock a bad item.)

it made those strides with some hiccups, though. The knowledge base for the game is relatively small, as all of your characters have the exact same melee attack and one of 11 spells, most of which are barely useful. There aren't many enemy varieties, with the only area having mostly unique ones being the Forest. The bosses are fairly typical 2D-platformer bullet hell, but unfortunately controls feel slippery and janky due to movement being purely digital. It takes some practice to dodge those patterns, and it never feels good.

The last achievement - one where you clear the entire game in under 15 deaths - also feels completely counter-intuitive to the game's design. You're supposed to die early on, not just because you lack knowledge but because the game scales harder than your characters do at the start. There's a reason why the speedruns rush Shinobi ASAP: it's the only class that can deal enough damage early game. I barely eked it out with 14 deaths, and most of those were Shinobi.

TL;DR Was a good game in 2013, but play the sequel instead.

Hollow Knight is really, really good. There's a reason it's considered by many as one of the best indies of all time. It has an incredibly strong art direction, was supported well through its development, and is one of the best Metroidvanias out there.

However, it's not perfect. There are some not-so-obvious issues that come up when trying to get some of the harder achievements - namely, the Godmaster ones. To quote the Completionist, "If you had an amazing five-course dinner, but the dessert was just a huge pinecone...[That pinecone] is what [Godmaster] is."
-There's a lot of waiting in boss fights. It's less noticable while you're playing the game, as it's paced out by the exploration part of metroidvanias. But in Godmaster it becomes glaringly obvious, especially when you have to stand still for them to announce their arrival every time. Even then, some bosses in the main game are guilty; Uumuu, Grimm, and Soul Master/Tyrant are fights with a lot of downtime. (I may be biased, however; Sisters of Battle is probably my favourite boss fight in the game, in part because it has zero downtime.)
-I like overcharming as an option because it's a risk-reward thing; double damage, but you can add on an expensive charm to a build for one notch. Doubling a bosses normal damage? Not so much. It's not fun design in the best of times, but it becomes especially grueling when you're dealing with the hardest bosses in the game at the very end of a half-hour long boss marathon. I spent 20 hours alone learning Pure Vessel and Absolute Radiance, and it would've been so much quicker if they didn't punish mistakes so harshly.
-This isn't applicable in Godmaster, but for the speedrun achievements there is one issue as well: scaling HP based on how much you've upgraded your main source of damage is counter-intuitive to what an upgrade should be. It should not be optimal to wait until the very end of the game to upgrade the nail, but that's exactly what speedrunners recommend (if you upgrade it at all)

I seriously cannot wait for Silksong, but I hope these bugbears I have are fixed in it. More Paths of Pain, less Pantheons of Hollownest, please.