Recent reviews by Rubyko

Pretty fun, it's not very long but it's more PW, the new squad is cool, I like its dynamic with the rest of the Federation. The music's pretty good, especially Redline.

I want to bully Eye-Tee.

Edit: Just a post 100% thought since I played a lot more after the review. While the game was overall a fun experience, and very unique, it does suffer from having some Hitchhiker quests tied to Hitchhikers that only showed up once each for me in my entire playtime. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you're a completionist who MUST get all endings you'll eventually feel like the game's overstaying its welcome in some regards.

Pretty novel concept for an RPG, your party is made up of the hitchhikers you find, abilities and encounters are all themed after driving and road trips. The game looks great, has a really good soundtrack. It's well paced and gets a lot of mileage out of simple scenes and mechanics. It also has a very good atmosphere, it's very unique in that regard, I really enjoy just picking a playlist and watching the scenery go by, it feels especially satisfying after completing certain hitchhiker side quests.

I'd say that the only major issue with the game is that, despite it having a very cute and interesting "combat" system, it is dragged down a bit by some hitchhikers having negative level up passives that really force me to play a specific way, imposing a gamey "meta".

Pretty unique idea all around, it's not that great of a card battling game, as that system suffers from the type of game this is trying to be (a linear story puzzle game), So it suffers from a lack of depth in its card system, an over reliance on the first draw of the turn, and a dependence on RNG for deck building that clashes with limited opportunities you have for deck building that comes with this being a linear game.

However as a sum of its parts the game's pretty great, it's atmospheric, the art direction's great, good music, a pretty novel story (unless you were really into creepy pastas as a kid), and it was a fun execution of this concept. It's hard to go in depth into what I liked about this game because the surprise is part of the fun.

Worth trying for anyone who wants something fun and different, a pass if you want a pure card battling game.

It's stylish, it's an original idea, it's fun when you have some time to kill. The focus of minimising risks with items that affect the "board state" reminds me of board games, which is cool. The one downside is that animations take too long, which gets boring once you've seen them all and just want to shoot yourself. Pretty cool all around though.

Bit of a confused game as far as balance goes, but it's really fun because of its unique setting.

The game shares the same influences as Hunt Showdown as far as setting goes, but the gameplay is shares some of STALKER Call of Pripyat's traits as far as core gameplay goes. It's a linear game set in an "open" area that you're free to explore, an artefact system, and the game encourages some stealth to level the playing field before going guns blazing. It's a type of game I enjoy a lot. The setting's great, music's nice and spooky, art direction's good for the most part. And the monsters are all fairly interesting once you're done with the generic zombies sections.

It has some pretty glaring flaws that can hinder enjoyment though. First of all the music controller is bad, it mainly just loops a track after a certain location trigger is walked through, this is a complete waste of the great music the game has because if you clear an area with stealth from afar before you walk in, you'll find yourself only ever hearing spooky tone setting music once you're in a looting frenzy. Second, the AI is pretty bad, it just walks in a straight line towards you for the most part, it's incredibly easy to cheese and I feel like the devs realized the balance of the game was done wrong because every location with tough AI enemies has a way to cheese them right next to the enemies.

Lastly and most importantly, the balance is just not very good, level up perks that give extra XP are boring, some unique weapons and artefacts have downsides that don't make them worth using in any circumstance compared to unique weapons and artefacts that only have upsides, ammo types are straight upgrades to damage, guns and melee weapons are considerably worse than sneaking with ammo efficient weapons like bows and xbows, etc. It's obviously a singleplayer game so at the end of the day the player can just choose the way he prefers to play, and the opportunity for player expression *IS* there, but the game's balance could have been done with more care.

I still enjoyed how unique and fun the game felt, it's a great setting I don't see often, it's a visual style I like, and the game has a killer ending song and credits animation.

The Boo Hag is hot

A pretty good experience all around, the environments and music ooze atmosphere and made it really easy to get into the mood of the game. I really like the visual style, it's pretty unique, expressive, and was a great art direction choice for the kind of game this is. The story's pretty good all around, it relies a lot on visuals and some interpretation which is something I can get behind, Sean and Mark's dynamic feels genuine rather than "quipy", so the dialogue between the two is pretty fun to listen to.

The horror segments will depend on your preferences, I for one, am not a fan of horror games where the player can't do anything to defend themselves, being left with running as their only option. Worth noting though, that these segments did impose the lingering fear that a threat could be around, which made certain sections of the game really shine to me as far as horror and atmosphere goes. These scenes, while having their own unique gimmick to them, wouldn't have worked if I didn't have to play tag with a monster beforehand, so I can accept the kind of horror game this is to get to enjoy some of the horror segments it lated showed off.

There's one singular problem I believe the game has, the voice acting isn't all that great at times, it's pretty amateurish. I understand why this is the case, and I don't believe the VA work is actually *bad* to the point it detracts from the experience in a meaningful way, but I do think some scenes could have been reworked to better deal with the fact that the VA work couldn't make some lines sound as expressive as they should have been.

The tldr though is that I do believe that if you're a fan of story focused games, which heavily rely on strong imagery, enjoy atmospheric horror, and likes a bit of poetry. You should play this game.

A sidegrade by most measures, while I do believe that the reception this game had was an exaggeration born out of misinformation and some poor memory, it is certainly true that this game failed to evolve the series in a meaningful way, and changed Dragon's Dogma reputation from "that unfinished game with lots of potential" to "that unfinished series with lots of potential".

The game improves on a few facets of the original game, the Warrior vocation is a lot better, graphical fidelity of facial features is genuinely impressive, the map is way bigger but does not feel less dense, there's a lot more optional dungeons, I really like some balance changes like the Loss Gauge, and sidequests were all around more interesting.

But there's a few downgrades too, no Mystic Knight, a few less spells, less clothing slots (a change similar to the downgrade from Oblivion to Skyrim), and most notably, the game becomes really easy to tackle very early on compared to DD1, even if DD1 was pretty easy itself.

Most offensively to some though, and with reason, is that the game did not progress meaningfully enough for the long wait that some people went through. It feels incredibly unfinished story wise, it clearly lacks a balance pass for the amount of enemies in some areas, as their overabundance is fatiguing at times, and loot tables make exploring generic dungeons a bit anti-climatic, as all the best gear is in shops anyways.

I still recommend the game, but with a big caveat, all I wanted was more Dragon's Dogma, I like the gameplay loop, I love the pawn system and all of its quirks, I love that it feels like setting out on a genuine adventure where completely unpredictable but cool things can happen, like being flown by a griffin to the other side of the country because you grabbed on to him at the wrong time, or using a Cyclops as a bridge because you knocked him off balance at the right time. It's an unique game and I still think it's worth experiencing what it offers, it's just that unfortunately what it offers should have spent more time in the oven.

The Sphynx is hot

TLDR: It's a nice game, worth playing if you're into the Alien franchise, or if you're a fan of RTT games and want to try something with a bit of novelty and interesting design choices. But suffers from a short dev and post-launch support time window, resulting in frustrating situations that will test your patience.

The general ambience of the game is well executed as far as Aliens is concerned. The music's good, levels are surprisingly varied in design for the type of setting Alien is. The story might be over the top to some, but it's fun, and pays off nicely in the final level.

The gameplay's really interesting, it's pretty novel, feels incredibly fitting to the franchise, has great ideas like saves being tied to a resource that you might want to invest in other ways, the available tools are fun to use, and the missions are excellently paced. There are some frustrating elements though, like randomized patrol routes causing blobs of enemies in chokepoints, silently sniping enemies being janky due to sight lines, and a lack of fine tuning in balancing things like Hive aggression growth for later missions, perk randomization distribution etc.

The game's biggest flaws though, are the considerable amount of bugs. For the most part they're very minor bugs, like dead Xenos being stuck in their sprinting pose (incredibly funny when the hive's aggressive), or destroyed eggs still spotting your marines and alerting the hive (not funny at all when the hive's aggressive). But I did have to restart a mission at least 3 times due to bugs related to the Xeno aggression state, or Stress growth, being stuck, not only is this potentially mission ruining, but campaign ruining as a whole if it happens at a bad time. This wasn't a huge deal at the end of the day, but it is frustrating to deal with in a game with limited saves and that is meant to be taken slowly.

It's a short ride, but a good one. The premise is pretty good and I feel like the writing gets good mileage out of it through the game's visuals and unorthodox presentation style. It is an incredibly simplistic game, most sections consist of talking to someone, walking from A to B and interacting with something. It's fairly simple but the sections always have some tension to them.

Excellent game, well written, had me hooked from the start. The writing does a good job of establishing the world without overly long exposition, and is packed with a lot of details, during dialogue, that set the player up for knowledge checks later into the game, things that are said at the very start of the game remain relevant for choices until the very end, which is something I greatly appreciate.

Characters are well done, I empathised with a lot of the people I met while playing the game. The game also has quite an array of choices to allow the player to roleplay which was fun, it felt pretty cool to start with a character concept in my head, portray it well thanks to the choices the game gave me, and see him grow as I met different people that challenged my character's views. My one complaint is not being able to change my personal ambition halfway through the story, this is a choice that can be made at the start, but the game's story throws enough introspective challenges at the player's character that it should be possible to have them change their mind.