Recent reviews by Kizei

It's good!

The only issue I've had so far is 2 out of the 6 or 7 games I played seemed to have server issues that resulted in pretty awful rubber banding/inability to play. That sucked.

Other than that though? This game is an absolute blast in my opinion. I was worried seeing the negative reviews, but having played a handful of matches (some solo, some with a friend) I have loved it and can see myself throwing more hours into this game for sure.

Just a highlight of some of the pros:

1) Character designs. Art style might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I think the characters are all super fun and well animated, full of personality and alright voice acting. I love them, especially the pretty girls... Sorry, not sorry. I like that each character has a few distinct skins with unique themes, but then you can unlock palette swaps if you want the same skin with some different vibes. Also, there seem to be smaller cosmetics like hats and hairstyles you can mix and match (?) in addition to weapon skins that are separate from the outfits, meaning you get some more unique customization options.

2) Controls. Feels awesome! I'm not sure what people are complaining about when it comes to controls. The only downside I see so far is lack of controller support on PC, but the mouse/keyboard controls would have been what I used anyway and they feel pretty dang good. I have zero complaints about the default keybinds, everything feels responsive, the character kits feel satisfying, decent hit feedback and ability to respond to ambushes... All good in my book! There's also nothing distinctly "Mobile game" about the UI, so I'm not sure where those complaints are arising from either. Unlike some mobile -> PC ports, you don't have annoying buttons or joystick overlays visible, and the menus too look more akin to Fortnite on PC or console than a mobile UI.

3) Monetization is fine. Not a glowing bastion of hope in the gaming industry, but far from a new low. I can see some people having valid complaints with it. But, I do want to clarify that you CAN get characters as F2P, and fairly easily. You get 1 character right away and 2 more via the rest of the tutorial, as well as like 100 free trial tickets per character as launch rewards. To unlock them permanently, you just need 10-20k of the F2P gold coin currency - acquired via matches and quests, with enough for one character unlock given for completing the full tutorial - and some of the purple "Ether" crafting material, which also seems to come from quests. Both can also be found on the battle pass which has both free and paid tracks, though the majority of rewards do fall on the paid side. Skins seem to be almost entirely paid for, but that's also standard. It's all pretty par for the course for F2P games - valid to complain if it's not your cup of tea, but nothing you won't be unfamiliar with if you've played League or other F2P hero shooter/MOBA style games before. Also, there are no characters "Locked" behind the battle pass or any other pay wall that I can see - all of them are available with gold.

Overall, it's a solid game. It feels unique enough in the current climate without totally reinventing the wheel. If you want a lighthearted battle royale that's easy to pick up but has a high enough skill ceiling for more hardcore players, I think this is a solid choice.

This game is insanely addicting.

The best way I can explain it is the Vampire Survivors of the Tower Defense genre.

I love it.

Fair warning: This review will contain slight story/content spoilers. I'm not going into the nitty gritty of the lore or anything, but I think there's some things I'll mention that are best experienced blind like I did.

I will admit, I initially refunded Nightingale. Not for lack of not enjoying it, mind you, but I felt it was a bit lacking from my first hour or two, and the performance had me concerned, so I thought I'd give it some more time in the oven.

After a day or two, though, I had a craving to play more, so I felt there was at least *something* pulling me to continue, and thus it was worth the early investment. I grabbed the game again and dove back in, starting a fresh character.

The first few hours with the game are unfortunately a bit plain - beautiful, no doubt... But nothing special. A bit of lore dump from Puck, then your off building and collecting resources, fighting enemies, all the usual survival game stuff. It's fun, sure, but nothing special to distinguish it from other titles beyond the aesthetics alone.

That being said, you fall into a very satisfying gameplay loop of realm hopping to complete quests and find different merchants selling recipes you haven't found yet, completing puzzles that *do* get repetitive but aren't overly tedious or required to do endlessly, upgrading your base and your combat stats along the way.

While still nothing too special, there's a certain charm to walking blindly into the portals you open, unsure of exactly what awaits on the other side beyond the flavor of biome you requested and its difficulty level, that kept the hours grinding away feeling fresh. If I got annoyed with performance drops in a muggy swamp, I could pop out and conjure a desert instead; if the desert got boring to look at, I could change to a forest; if the forest wasn't doing it for me, the minor cards could change the climate and bonuses to something more appealing or even challenging.

Fast forward a few hours, and I'm reaching what seems to be the "end" of the main story quest and realizing what I've been playing was, in essence, and extended tutorial. I gather up materials for an NPC to open a portal to Nightingale itself, somewhat spoiled by reviews referring to the game as "more of an MMO" and having an "MMO-like hub city that you eventually reach." But I didn't really anticipate what awaited me there.

Just like my character, I suddenly went from being a lone survivor to joining a community of

From that point on, the game seems to really open up - or, perhaps, reach a good stopping/casual transition point, depending on your playstyle. Once you reach Nightingale, you are indeed thrust into a more survival MMO setting. In addition to the hub, there's dungeons you can run with other players to collect materials and currency for end game gear, and a whole new tier of biome difficulty opens up for you to begin exploring as well.

If you're like me, a fan of the grind and MMOs, this is super exciting. Mind you, don't go in expecting *quite* the build depth of a Guild Wars 2 or the cinematic and challenging raids of an FFXIV or WoW... But, you'll get something based on the same idea. Run your dungeons, collect loot, come back to the hub to buy new items and recipes to get stronger, make a cooler and more powerful build, rinse and repeat.

If you're not, that also seems to be okay. You don't have to sit by mindlessly queuing for dungeons, either. You also have an extension of the normal survival loop to pursue through higher tiers of the biomes, and some cool new decorating options to play with as you do.

I have yet to explore the next set of "Ascended" biomes, but it's on my to do list for when I get off work today. I'm planning ideas for my new base and, honestly, I'm pretty excited to grind out new gear - both to have cooler fashion and try out new builds.

I do still think the game could benefit from some extra time in the oven to smooth out its rough edges. The optimization definitely needs work at points, the combat can feel laggy and floaty at times, some more puzzles and landmark variants to reduce repetitiveness, and overall just more content would do wonders. But, that's what early access is for.

If you're on the fence, give the game a bit of time to develop. But, either way, I'm having a great time.

Even though I'm kinda burnt out on the game, I'm turning my review back to positive as of 5/5/2024 since Sony actually listened and decided not to enforce the making of a PSN account on Steam players.

Thanks Sony!

I want to like this game - the DRG setting is fun, the gameplay feels like it has promise and some variation over other Survivors/Bullet Heaven/Garlic games with the mining and pathing.

But there's a lot missing, too.

1) As others have said, the upgrades just feel lacking. Currently, most of it is just more damage, faster attacks, or health. I saw a couple damage elemental swap upgrades, and the overclocks and different weapon unlocks are kinda neat... But the runs instantly felt repetitive when you have 4 weapon slots and have only 5 total weapons to possibly slot into them.

2) Gunner instantly felt lacking because it doesn't seem like the game has a strafe mechanic of any kind (move one direction while firing in another.) I might have missed it due to the lack of hotkey settings or tutorials at this stage of the game, but when the class is locked to firing in the direction you are pointing and you need to mine to clear a drop zone, but you have bugs swarming from behind... It just doesn't feel good.

3) Visually, while I like the style, readability of hitboxes is nearly impossible in some cases. The isometric/3D view means bugs can literally be invisible behind the tiny rise of a wall, meaning you unknowingly walk right into them when rounding a corner; exploding bugs radius of damage when they burst seemed inconsistent - though it might not have been, there just wasn't any sort of AOE marker so it was nearly impossible to judge what was a safe distance from them; it's hard to tell which enemies are getting hit by your bullets outside of the major bosses and elites that actually have a health bar - obviously there's damage numbers, but it's not always obvious what enemy that number is affecting.

I'm refunding for now as I'm not interested in playing more in its current state, but it's one I do think I have a good chance of picking up again as it develops, and encourage others to watch videos or try it out before committing, and keep tabs on future development, too.

Genuinely the best action JRPG on Steam. All the charm of the Granblue IP and characters, wrapped up into a narrative adventure with flashy and satisfying combat, with some mission-based co-op sprinkled on top. It's a blast, alone or with friends.

Until the game sees some much needed optimization updates, I find it hard to recommend, and I would refund if I wasn't locked out of doing so from being willing to wait to see if things got better.

I'm currently running on a custom built PC with an i9-10900k, 3080ti, and 32 GB of DDR4, game on an M.2 SSD. Over the course of a few attempted play sessions, I have also upgraded my PC's cooling pretty significantly in the months since I bought it, and have tried playing the game before and after said upgrade.

Being on a high end PC, I would expect the game to run decently well. I fully expect optimization issues since it's early access, certainly, but I would expect it to be reasonably playable. Spoiler: It's not. Far from it.

When I first started playing, the game would cause my PC to overheat, crash, and often BSOD my PC constantly. I had a hunch something was wrong with my PC though, so I ran some tests and decided to give Wayfinder the benefit of the doubt, come back and try it after some small tweaks and upgrades.

I put the game down for a while, tweaked some physical positioning of hardware and improved the cooling. The PC ran better than ever in all my other games, and Wayfinder no longer blue screened, but the performance was still awful. I lowered the settings from the suggested value of Ultra down to High and noticed no change; I lowered them further, and the improvement was negligible; I've tried different FPS caps, FSR on and off, and a number of other settings but the same things always happen:

1) Reaching 100 FPS or more to try and match my monitor's refresh rate of 144 Hz seems like a pipe dream, but this point I'm willing to ignore since the game is still in development and undergoing optimization efforts.

2) The game freezes so often. In the hub it's more akin to the normal microstutters I've come to accept with any game that insists on running Easy Anti Cheat, but the moment I get into combat things become genuinely unplayable - the game freezes for a second or more any time enemies spawn or an ally engages in a new round of combat; sometimes, the game will seemingly do the same second/multi-second freeze up even outside of times when enemies are spawning.

It's just really disheartening. On one hand, yeah, it's Early Access and I have no doubts they will continue to make efforts to improve the performance. But, at the same time, this Early Access isn't even playable for, and I paid for access to it. I almost wish I *hadn't* given them the benefit of the doubt early on, so I'd still be within the playtime and purchase timeframe to be eligible for a refund - I would still love to pick the game up, later at launch, when things are smoother.

But, waiting in the initial hype queues (and crashes) and praying for optimization since last summer kind of shot me in the foot, and I feel like I've wasted time and money, and for that reason I don't feel comfortable giving this one a thumbs up just yet.

Good :)