Recent reviews by Pyetech

I tried out this game on the recommendation of a friend. The voice acting is great. Everything else is mediocre.

Really a fantastic little game, especially considering its price. I don't even usually like roguelites, but Downwell surprised me with its addictive, twitchy gameplay. The combo system is an interesting mechanic because it encourages you to stay in the air for as long as possible. This forces you to choose between bouncing off of enemies, shooting them, or shooting simply to take advantage of your weapon's recoil.

Downwell does contain randomness, but it almost never seems unfair or out of your hands--complaints I've had with many other roguelikes. Its difficulty is therefore perfectly acceptable.

I can think of two complaints, the first being that it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether your character will land on an enemy and kill them, or hit them from the side and take damage. I'm sure I'll be crucified by roguelike purists for saying this, but I would have preferred a slightly more generous collision detection system. My second criticism is that combo bonuses do not increase past 25 enemies killed, so you are encouraged to land and break your combo every so often, rather than seeing how high you can go.

If you enjoy tight, streamlined gameplay and are interested in objectively improving at something the more time you spend with it, I wholeheartedly recommend Downwell.

Crown of the Ivory King is a welcome addition to Dark Souls 2. The setting is unique and sprawling, with secrets tucked away in typical Dark Souls fashion. The level design is average, I would say, since while it encourages you to backtrack, it does not really provide a new mechanic to justify it. I felt like I was retreading the same ground, looking for routes that were artificially blocked off before. The boss design is fine but relies a bit too much on trial and error gimmicks for my taste.

A review of this DLC cannot be complete without mentioning the Frigid Outskirts, which is a wide open expanse where you only get a couple seconds of visibility twice a minute or so. By itself, this could be an interesting mechanic since Dark Souls 2 never realized its intention to force players to use a torch in dark areas to light their way. The problem lies in the enemies, who will (rarely) spawn two or three at a time and overwhelm you. The boss fight at the end is incredibly far from the nearest bonfire, forcing you to trek through the barren expanse between each try. Thank God I found out I could stay off the beaten path to avoid most enemy spawns.

Despite these complaints, I very much enjoyed my experience. I would rank Crown of the Ivory King in the middle of the three DLCs, behind Crown of the Sunken King and ahead of Crown of the Old Iron King.

Crown of the Old Iron King has quite a lot going for it, but unfortunately it falls short on a few fronts. The exterior area is gorgeous, but the interior section is unmemorable and the potential of the moving platforms is never fully realized. However, there is still plenty to explore, and it does manage to get the player to revisit sections from a new perspective.

My biggest complaint is that some of its difficulty comes from enemies who are more obnoxious and tedious than anything else. This is made even worse because two of the three bosses (one of which is a rehash) are located far from bonfires, forcing you to slog through (and/or charge past) way too much after each death.

Crown of the Old Iron king is my least favorite of the three DLCs, but overall I am still happy with my experience.

Of the three Dark Souls 2 DLCs, Crown of the Sunken King is probably my favorite. The area has a unique and engrossing atmosphere, Dark Souls 1-tier level design that rewards exploration and loops back on itself, and hard but fair boss fights. I feel like I got my money's worth, even at $10.

Enjoyable but very overrated. The well-written characters in the ensemble cast are clearly the stars of this show. In an age of one-dimensional personalities, it's refreshing to see glimpses of the second dimension; if each character wasn't relegated to a single act out of the three in the game, we might have seen a third dimension come through. It's normally difficult to make someone laugh out loud using only text, but Undertale's Earthbound-like, off-the-wall sense of humor when talking to people or checking out the environment managed to make me do so repeatedly.

The comparisons with Earthbound end there, though. The environments and puzzles in Undertale are extremely bland and forgettable, giving me the impression that I was always being railroaded toward the next event. Secrets are relatively sparse, but they do usually manage to subvert your expectations when they appear.

It's true that the combat system is clearly inspired by Earthbound's, but in practice, the similarities are purely superficial. In each turn of an encounter, you have the option of either fighting the opponent using timed button presses or trying to perform a more tame action (such as talking, petting, cheering, etc.) in an attempt to make the enemy lose their will to fight. During the enemy's turns, you are tasked with dodging various patterns of projectiles for a certain amount of time (luckily, these patterns are so unique to each opponent that this never grows stale). I recommend sparing at least the bosses, both for story purposes and because each enemy's sparing setup is novel (it's also often a longer process, and this dodging minigame is some of the only real gameplay you'll find in Undertale). One thing I appreciated is that in most games, characterization will halt when combat begins. Not so in this one!

If you enjoy replaying through games, you'll be pleased to learn that Undertale offers enough of an incentive to play through it a second or even third time, if you really want to experience everything. Some of this, though, manifests itself as sections being artificially blocked off during the first playthrough, which I think is bad design.

I see the word "charming" thrown around a lot when talking about Undertale. It is indeed charming, but how much is charm worth to you? Wait to buy it until it's 50% off.

8/10

Repetitive and purposefully generic. Not enough information is given to the player for them to make informed itemization decisions.

Decent if you like platformer collectathons. The amount of meaningless and unintuitive things to collect reminded me of Donkey Kong 64. The level design is varied but was likely more novel when the game was first released in 2005. While there are stretches of uninterrupted gameplay, there are also sections loaded with cutscenes and long character monologues that I would rather have read than listened to. The Levitation power is overpowered and trivializes most of the platforming once it is acquired.

Psychonauts is not a classic, but it's still enjoyable to play through.

A solid but perhaps overrated citybuilding game in the vein of SimCity, with an emphasis on macromanagement rather than micromanagement. Recommended for casual players or people who are interested in building a city without worrying about intricate game mechanics.

The Good:

• You're given general freedom to build your city however you wish. Curved roads open up a lot of possibilities. I was very engrossed when I first started playing.
  
• Very good performance.
  
• Some mechanics, such as traffic congestion, are unique, interesting, and stay relevant lategame.
  
• The progression system, where you unlock buildings and land for your city as it becomes larger, gives you an empirical sense of satisfaction.
  
• Meeting certain secondary objectives will unlock unique buildings such as monuments. However, I wish more of the standard buildings were unlocked in this fashion rather than simply requiring a certain population amount.
  
• Intuitive UI with a helpful but unobtrusive in-game tutorial.

The Bad:

• Very little micromanagement, and no resource production line. You can set industrial districts to mine a few different resources, but this has almost no practical effect. I am a fan of the 1999 citybuilding game Pharaoh, where you build up your city's industry to improve living conditions, trade with other cities, and so on. Expect none of that in Cities: Skylines. You can designate tiles to be residential, commercial, or industrial areas (with a downtown/suburban option for each), but you have no control beyond that.
  
• The game becomes too easy after a certain point. Money becomes essentially infinite, and mechanics such as pollution, electricity, water, crime, fire, etc. become irrelevant due to the OP buildings that have been unlocked. Perhaps this is simply a result of a lack of depth to these mechanics in the first place.
  
• Low replayability. The macromanagement-focused nature of the game makes me doubt I would be able to do much new with another city.
  
• While modding support is appreciated, almost none appear to add new gameplay mechanics.
  
• No disasters, random events, food requirements, etc. When done tastefully, these mechanics can add a lot of spice and variety to your experience.
  
• No campaign, which can still be done well in citybuilding games.
  
• The in-game "social media" feedback system (where citizens would voice their opinions on your city) repeats information so often that you learn to ignore it.
  
• The map I selected had no sea routes and therefore made it impossible to unlock all the (non-essential) buildings. Perhaps my fault for picking that map in the first place, but still annoying.

I absolutely loved my initial playthrough of FEZ. Its dimension-shifting gimmick works wonderfully, and I happen to really like collectathons. The platforming is about as pure as it gets, with interesting environments and no enemies appearing in the entire game. There is also no handholding whatsoever--you can explore the world of FEZ in any way you choose. The intro and outro cutscenes are inventive and bizarre, so they were a pleasure to watch.

Casual playthroughs like my first one will be somewhat short. Being a completionist, I returned to my save file and set out to collect everything I had missed. Unfortunately, I soon became disappointed with the puzzle design, particularly for the "anti-cubes", which are supposed to be more difficult to obtain.

As it turns out, the solutions are almost always a sequence of inputs that are written down for you somewhere (usually in that level, using an annoying made-up language). Some of the puzzles are extremely difficult, tedious, and/or involved, and many are impossible on your first playthrough. Clearly, a few were intended to require a community-wide effort, and I expect it was fun to work together to solve them when the game was first released, but nowadays, expecting players to use the internet to look up solutions is bad design. Although it is possible to warp to certain locations in FEZ, getting to these puzzles generally takes just long enough that it would be slightly annoying to make your way back later, encouraging you to look up answers to these dull puzzles if you can't immediately figure them out. I would much prefer more standard environmental puzzles.