Recent reviews by Rubycario

I bought this game to one trick Ori, that's honestly the only selling point for me, though, and it's the reason I bought it on sale rather than for full price. That being said, although I haven't spent too much time in it yet, I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. Part of me expected to buy it, try it, and refund it, but I'll hold onto it now.

If you like Smash, you'll probably like this game, too.

Once the clicking starts, it never stops. I hear it in my dreams, in the car, at work, everywhere. There's no escaping it. Clicking is all, and soon all will be cookies.

I love a good game of Pac-Man.

Honestly, this game was surprisingly good. It had its flaws, which I'll get into, but I can honestly say I'm impressed with how this turned out.

As far as the story goes, it was good, really good in fact. It showcased every character fairly evenly, and delved pretty decently into this version of the Guardians. Some took more of the limelight than others, especially Quill and Rocket, but every character had their moment in the game. The story itself revolved around our motley crew banding together, accepting responsibility, depending on one another, facing their demons, and dealing with loss. It's one of those, "It had it all" type stories, and was pretty decently fleshed out. The story took me 20 hours to get through, but I'd say it'd take players maybe 15 depending on how they play the game.

The gameplay itself was solid, although they tossed a lot at the player right from the get go. Half the time during combat you will be cycling through each character's skills until you eventually get into the habit of choosing the moves that work best for your play style. I ended up with crab hands on my controller for the first few hours of gameplay until the combat system finally clicked. It's a lot to take in all at once, and they just kinda dump it on you, but you get used to it. That being said, I used a Nintendo Switch Pro controller for the entire game because keyboard and mouse controls are terrible in it. I'd recommend playing with a controller. Doesn't matter what flavor of controller you got, I just don't recommend mouse and keyboard for this game.

Level designs are fairly linear, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a heavily story focused game, and linearity helps in that regard. You're moving from point A to point B with very few diverging paths, which normally lead to a dead end with a collectible.

Graphically, the games look pretty good on my system. I have a RTX 3060 Ti, and there weren't really any graphical hiccups or loss of framerate at max settings. This probably won't be the same for everyone though, depending on your specs.

The characters tend to talk a lot. Which can be a negative depending on who you are. There's hardly a moment where the crew isn't participating in banter of some kind, whether it's related to the current mission, or their personal lives. I enjoyed this, but I can see how others may be put off by it. The voice acting is pretty good as well. For the most part, the jokes landed well for me, and the emotional bits were well done.

At the time of writing (10-29-2021) The game itself is relatively buggy. I haven't experienced too many bugs, but I had this issue happen a few times where I would finish off a boss or combat scenario and the game would just not progress. Boss spoiler: While fighting Fin Fang Foom, for example, the health bar dropped to 0, but the fight never ended. This would force me to have to reset from the last checkpoint, and fight that boss or sequence over again. There were a few issues with the audio cutting out, subtitles displaying the character name but no dialogue, I fell through the floor once during the final boss, I crashed a grand total of 1 time, and some things like doors would have bad clipping if I looked under the bridge I was standing on. However, all things considered, they're issues, but they're not the worst things I've ever experienced during a game's launch. I assume these'll be fixed relatively soon.

All in all, the game was good. If you're a fan of the Guardians of the Galaxy comic books, movies, or both. You'll probably enjoy this game. Way better than Marvel's Avengers, not quite on par with Insomniac's Spider-Man, but still a flarkin' good time.

It's games like this that make me wish Steam had more than a "Yes" or "No" for reviews. This game was by no means bad, but it has mixed reviews for good reasons. I don't typically structure my reviews with Pros and Cons, but I'm going to do that for this one to try to streamline my thoughts.

Pros:
• The world, graphics, and artstyle are beautiful, easily one of the best looking games I've played in 2021 so far. You can clearly see that the devs put a lot of passion into this project just by looking over the world and the character/enemy designs. Exploring this world, despite a decent amount of it reusing the same area layouts, was a lot of fun, and the main reason I spent more than 100 hours in this game.
  
  
• The combat in this game is solid. It's your basic hack and slash type combat system, mixed with some powerful ranged combat. It's simple, to the point, but effective.
  
  
• The crafting system is one of the primary reasons I got invested in this game pre-launch, it hold ups just as well as I expected it to, and is easily the best feature this game has to offer.
  
  
• Customization is pretty good. You can customize your rat thing to be anywhere from a "normal" looking rat to an absolute monster.
  
  Cons:
  
• The story wasn't that great. It was split into the 4-ish parts, the player character's story, the tribe war, the world eaters, and the overall lore of the game.
  
  The lore wasn't too bad, but rather than letting the player piece things together they'll spell it out for you, which kind of hindered that experience.
  
  The tribe war is a logical concept for a post apocalyptic setting, but due to the way the characters are handled, fell flat on almost all fronts.
  
  The World Eater story ties into the tribe war story, and it's pretty straight forward. There's a big tree, it's dying, you can choose to let it die or save it. It plays like Breath of the Wild's story on a fundamental level, you find a local, get their help prepping for the big fight, then go do the big fight. It's serviceable.
  
  Then there's the player story, which just really wasn't good at all. It came off like a poorly written children's book about how revenge is bad. It's consistent, at least, but I wouldn't call it good.
  
  
• The narrator basically ruins the dialogue for the game. Disregarding the fact that he tosses out random quips here and there during combat, because that can be turned off, all the dialogue in the game is done through the narrator's perspective. It's not like the narrator has a bad voice or anything, the dialogue just comes off as empty because of this decision. A narrator doing this can work, but it fell extremely flat here.
  
  
• The characters in this game have next to 0 personality, and that all ropes back into the narrator talking for each character you encounter. Each character speaks a bit of gibberish, and the narrator translates it. I say translate, but he more or less just does a dry read of their emotional state and what they want you to do. The characters in this game feel lifeless due to this, and the random NPCs all repeat the same 15 or so lines of dialogue to you when you encounter them because of this decision.
  
  
• While I said the combat was simple and effective, the way you upgrade your combat skills is pretty lackluster. All the pieces exist for it to be good, but they're not fleshed out enough. That, and there's an overabundance of upgrade resources. By the time I got to a stopping point with this game I had over 80 of one resource, and 20 or so of another upgrade resource. On one hand, it's great that they're not starving their players for skill points, but on the other hand drowning the player in them without a way to spend those points is arguably worse.
  
  
• Enemy variety could've been better.

Overall, if you're playing this game for a good story, might as well go play something else, you're not gonna find it here. If you're looking for a relatively interesting world to explore, then this game may fill that void for a little bit, but not at the full 60 dollar price tag. Maybe if it goes on a 50% sale. I enjoyed my time with this game for the most part, but not everyone will, and the mixed reception is justified for this title. It doesn't seem like the game fell flat in a lot of areas due to a lack of care by the developers, because there's clearly a lot of passion that went into this product, however it's their first game, and that lack of experience shows here.

I had been following this game for a little while because of the concepts brought to the table, and all the pieces are in all the right places here, but it's like some of the pieces are soggy and don't fit in right with the rest of the puzzle to give you a truly satisfying end product. It's a shame really, there's a lot of potential here, but Experiment 101 seem to be done with this game. I guess not everything can be a No Man's Sky, right?

Easily one of the best games I've ever played. It took everything good about the first game, and crammed it into a better package.

The things you'd expect from the first game are here, and still hold true to it. In a lot of ways, this game does all of that better. There are certain features I miss from Blind Forest, like the Soul Link system, but the rest of the game makes up for things like that.

The music, the artstyle, Ori's movement, the gameplay, and the combat are all a step up from Blind Forest, everything flows the same, but has more oomph to it.

Ori's movement in this game is the best of any Metroidvania game I've ever played. Most Metroidvania titles, and just 2D platformers in general, feel like your movements are locked to a grid, Ori's doesn't feel restricted despite only being able to move on the usual 2D plane.

The boss battles and escapes are great. They'll expect you to die on the majority of it all, but this game thrives on trial and error, and like with Blind Forest, when you die in this game, the game doesn't boot you into a "GAME OVER" screen, ask if you want to quit or continue, then load you up before the fight/ escape sequence began. Instead, when you die they just immediately toss you back into the mix, the music doesn't even reset, it just continues. This helps keep the momentum going, rather than it being like a director shouting "CUT! You screwed up the scene, take it from the top!" If you make a mistake, the game punishes you for it, but it doesn't take you out of the action or disrupt the flow of gameplay.

The gameplay, the visuals, and the music are the main reason I enjoy this game as much as I do. The story isn't bad in this game, but it often feels like their rehashing the story from the first game in a slightly less coherent way. It works, but it doesn't feel as natural as Kuro's story did in Blind Forest.

The combat in this game is excellent, it's no longer just hitting enemies with projectiles while mashing X, you've got some solid melee, ranged, and special abilities at your disposal. One gripe with this though is that there's a lot of skills, and I personally didn't end up using more than the sword, arrows and spear the majority of my play time. It's nice that there are options there for people who want to use them, but a lot of offensive abilities go overlooked by others.

Like the first game, this game picks up momentum and rarely loses it. However, this ended up making the game feel a little short. By the time I got to the end, I didn't want it to end, I wished there was just a few more boss fights, or a few more escape sequences to be found, but the game goes by relatively quickly.

Regardless, this is probably my second favorite game of all time. I would recommend playing Blind Forest first, but this game isn't worth skipping out on.

This is one of those games that was always on my radar, but I kept putting off for years thinking, "Oh, I'll get to it during the next sale," or "I'll buy X game this time instead."

I hate myself for that.

This is genuinely one of the best games I've ever played. The music, the artstyle, the story, the gameplay, the world itself, everything just flows so naturally together that I truly do end up feeling immersed in it, despite the fact it's a side scrolling platforming game with some Metroidvania elements.

The game picks up momentum and rarely loses it. You're constantly on the move, running, jumping, bashing, and gliding through each of the game's unique settings.

Ori's movement is the most fluid I've ever experienced in 2D platformer, and that's why it stands above other games in this genre, it comes off as floaty, but has surprising amount of weight to it, and the more skills you unlock the more fluid it becomes. The Bash ability is the bread and butter of this game, and once you get that, movement has virtually no limits.

One thing this game does that I haven't seen very often, if ever, is how it handles deaths. There's no actual bosses in this game, but there are a few escape sequences. When you die during one of those sequences, the game doesn't boot you into a "GAME OVER" screen, ask if you want to quit or continue, then load you up before the sequence began. Instead, when you die they just immediately toss you back into the mix, the music doesn't even reset, it just continues. This helps keep the momentum going, rather than it being like a director shouting "CUT! You screwed up the scene, take it from the top!" If you make a mistake, the game punishes you for it, but it doesn't take you out of the action or disrupt the flow of gameplay.

The music in this game is some of the best I've ever heard in a video game, it doesn't matter if you're exploring the world, watching a cutscene, or running for your life, the music in this game is truly something special.

If there's one gripe I really have about this game, it's the combat. It generally just revolves around you mashing X so that Sein (the little light ball that follows you around) can hit enemies with projectiles. This is small potatoes, though, since combat isn't the focus of this game, the platforming is.

The game isn't exactly hard, but it will test you, you will die often, you'll have to think critically while advancing through certain segments of the game and it will ask you to master the skills you've been given along the ride. You're gonna suffer, but you're gonna be happy about it.

There are very few games I could recommend as much as either of the Ori titles. They're truly masterpieces.

Duel Links is hard to recommend, but I'm gonna do it anyway. It's a lite version of the standard Yu-Gi-Oh! card game with its own twist, that being player skills. Not all skills are good, and unless you're playing Kaiba from Dark Side of Dimensions, you're probably gonna lose. This is because Konami doesn't know how to stop riding their Blue-Eyes shaped nostalgia train.

Regardless of Kaiba sucking the fun out of his own game, the game is pretty good. It's heavily anime focused and fully voice acted. It doesn't just focus on the first series either, at the time of reviewing they've added GX, 5D's, DSoD, Zexal, and Arc-V into the mix. So if you're a fan of any of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime series, you'll probably enjoy seeing your favorite characters come back to life (Unless you're playing Zexal's dub, because Konami is too cheap to hire back Yuma's original VA, but I digress)

As far as the actual card game goes, like I said, it's Yu-Gi-Oh! lite. You have 3 zones to utilize instead of 5, the player skills can turn the tide of a duel, Deck space has a minimum of 20 instead of 40, and the game doesn't have the entire TCG or OCG card pool, meaning it has a meta entirely separate from what we see with the game irl. I personally enjoy this (for now) because the main game has become hand trap hell, but this game has its own fair share of meta hell. Hope you like seeing Blue Eyes, because Konami will do ♥♥♥♥ all to nerf them, but consistently destroy any other deck that becomes top tier in like a week.

The game isn't Free to Play "unfriendly" but unless you spend money, you're gonna be a little late to every party.

With that all said, it's no substitute for the main Yu-Gi-Oh! card game. It's a nice little diversion that functions well and is extremely entertaining, but a lite version of the game will never be able to stand up to the original.

If you already like the main game and can deal with a bunch of rich, angsty science nerds calling you a third rate duelist with a fourth rate deck, then you'll probably enjoy Duel Links.

Gonna be real, I bought this game because it reminded me of Portal. That's not a bad thing, but there was a very similar tone about it, computer voice talking to the player, forcing them to go through test chambers with a weird handheld device, sterile testing environments, hard light bridges, and so on and so forth.

That being said, this game was a fun little puzzle game. The main chambers themselves weren't that tough, but the optional tests are where this game really shines. That last logic gate puzzle in particular took me a good while to solve. Not a terribly long game, or a terribly difficult game. The story was all right, too. Nothing overly complex, but had a twist like an M. Night Shyamalan movie. You'll get your 20 dollars worth, imho.

Portal is a game that basically defined a lot about my taste in games. It's short, sweet, to the point, and does offer a considerable challenge the first run through. It's not overly difficult, and really feels like bonus content for the Orange Box, since that's essentially all Portal was, but there's a reason this game gets mentioned whenever a new puzzle game comes onto the scene.

The dry humor, the lonely test chambers, the Portal Device itself, a sense that you're being watched despite feeling all alone with all the empty observation rooms looming around each test chamber really strikes a nerve with me. In a good way, though. It's one of my favorite games, really only being surpassed by its own sequel.