Análises recentes de Kizei

I have really mixed feelings so far. I think I will keep playing and will end up enjoying it, but there's quite a few things preventing me from considering it a great experience.

The overall gameplay, theme, and aesthetic is amazing. But - and I say this knowing a bunch of AC purists and From Soft fans will be upset with me - there's a lot of accessibility lacking for the sake of "immersion" and sticking to the classic feel that I've heard the originals had.

For context, I am a mostly able-bodied gamer who has many hours logged into Elden Ring and some minor experience in other From Soft games. My only real disabilities are imperfect vision (corrected with contacts) and ADHD, so I'm approaching the game with those "debuffs," but otherwise and open and eager mind.

My biggest issues are as follows:

1. There is no option (that I have been able to find yet) to allow you to change UI size or color. I like the stylized mech HUD appearance, but the fonts and reticles always being thin and semi-transparent white is awful for visibility when you have explosions and action taking over the screen most of the time.

2. In addition to the fonts and interface elements just being small, they are spread out in a way that - perhaps just do to personal preference and past game experience - doesn't feel conducive to tracking everything I need to. Bottom left is my health, bottom right my ammo, bottom middle my own stamina and stagger bar, top middle for enemy health and subtitles, and a circle around the reticle for my reload timer. I've found it nearly impossible to really track all the information presented to me efficiently, as I have to go out of my way to remove my sight from the battle to monitor these things. I never had a problem with the interface in Elden Ring or any Souls games, but I'm finding it hard to adjust to how AC presents this info.

3. The performance is inconsistent. It was so good for the first 5 missions or so, buttery smooth and optimized to a level I didn't expect. But then, I hit the mission with the giant mining rig walker and that went out the window. Between insane levels of camera shake and my frame rate jumping from 120 (max cap) down to 30, then to 80, then to 60, and all over... Honestly, I'd be fine with it in this context for the sake of immersion, if it wasn't for the hit performance seemed to take. I think, similar to my experience in Elden Ring, this has to be an Easy Anti Cheat problem - any game that has that awful "solution" in it has similar issues, despite my high end rig (10900k, 32 GB of DDR4, 3080ti, well cooled and no overheating.)

4. I wish that I could turn the sensitivity up just a little more on controller. It goes from 1-10, and 10 feels just a little sluggish still.

5. For a game seemingly made with controller in mind, the controller inputs for certain UI stuff is god awful. For example, in the decal editor, you cannot hold a direction to move an icon farther in a direction. You have to tap the stick/d-pad again and again, over and over, once for every pixel you want to move the decal. It works GREAT with mouse and keyboard since I can just drag things around, but it's a pain to swap between both input methods when the game doesn't automatically change the input hints between each button layout, instead forcing you to go into the settings menu anytime you want to change the displayed buttons from keyboard to controller, or vice versa.

6. This one may genuinely just be me misunderstanding, but lock on feels off/broken. It hit my right stick, I see that I am locked on, but that target lock break the moment the enemy moves more than a foot in any direction. At that point, what's even the point of lock on? My partner mentioned there might be some sort of stat on gear to make it more consistent, in accordance with older AC games or similar mech piloting stuff, but so far I've only seen stats to increase the speed at which my homing missiles lock targets.

Beyond that, the game seems great - a treat for old fans and an awesome, modern entry for new players. I'm just hoping for some settings (not even difficulty options) so that I'm not straining my eyes just to play.

Even if you may not be aware of Hololive or a fan of them, this is one of the best "Survivors" games out there, and it's 100% free. It keeps getting big updates every few months to add more characters, game modes, and other content to do, such as the newest patch which gave us fishing and farming as an alternate means to make money, and a simple house-decorating area to spend our excess coins.

It's seriously one of the most polished and impressive fan games I've ever seen.

Describing my gaming interests has always been complicated, but one thing I've always loved is skill trees and the idea of the classic Final Fantasy job system. And yet, for whatever reason, beyond a few success (FF Tactics, FFXI come to mind) I've never really been one to get into JRPGs, which has made scratching that particular itch rather difficult.

When I saw this game a year or so ago, I thought it looked charming and like it might give me another casual way to emulate the feeling of those gameplay systems, so I grabbed it and played a few hours, had a good time but dropped it due to other games taking my interest way.

I worried, though, that I wouldn't really click with the game in the long term like I've struggled with other games of this type before; I worried about the reliance jumping and platforming, as I've always found other platformers more frustrating than enjoyable...

Fast forward about a week ago - I had a long weekend off work, and decided I might as well start a play through of a new game, and happened to scroll across Crystal Project in my library. Sure, why not? I had a great time with my first few hours, so I started up a new save.

I made a party consisting of myself, my partner, and two of our gamer friends playing roles according to our typical aesthetic or class preferences - me and partner a caster and physical DPS respectively, the others a healer and tank - and dove it.

The early hours were just as I remembered - charming and lovely music (despite apparently being royalty free music, it works SO well here,) awesome sprites put into a Minecraft-esque blocky world, satisfying ability trees and classes to hunt down and unlock.

I'll save you the novel, but fast forward to now and I'm around 35 hours in and still have so much to go. I've unlocked around 12 classes so far, taken down a bunch of bosses, unlocked most of the massive world, two mounts for different ways of traversal, and I've seen hints of so many more systems and classes that await me.

This might be the most fun and addicting game I've played in forever, and all my fears of how I might not click with the game are long forgotten - the story is light but enjoyable, not as overbearing or cliche as some JRPGs (though it does use plenty of tropes, it does so in a way that's a bit more self aware); the platforming is actually fun - the jumps are tricky and puzzles challenging, but they're also forgiving and allow you to quickly respawn from your last "safe" jump and just try again with little to no backtracking or serious penalty, and you're definitely rewarded for finding sneaky pathways and breaking into areas that seem like they would be "out of bounds" but are actually intended paths to secrets and side objective; there's SO much to collect - classes ("crystals") being the main one, but also special items to find and NPC dialogues or bits of lore to give you a hint in a pinch.

Anyway, I promise I wouldn't make you read too much of a novel, so I'll wrap it up. If you like classic JRPGs, play this game. If you love team and class building, play this game. If you, like me, have liked the idea of JRPGs on paper but could never get into them, give this one a try. If the idea of platforming turns you off, try the demo and you might be surprisingly into it like I am.

Seriously - developer, this game is a masterpiece in my eyes. It has its flaws for sure (tanks could use some buffs, traveling the overworld and backtracking can sometimes get tedious, bosses can sometimes be frustrating - but that might be a skill issue on my part lol) but it's everything I've been looking for in a game and I've had a phenomenal time playing it.

It's really not what I expected. It lacks polish which is somewhat expected for an indie shooter, but even beyond that... the connection lags like crazy, I take damage before rounding corners at the beginning of matches, death times are way too quick to be enjoyable or to be learned from.

It looks fun and drips style, but lacks substance.

EDIT: I am too tired to actually *update* my review, but needless to say, the monetization has been corrected. This game is weird, and trying to express my feelings towards it gives me a headache, but I think I should try anyway.

I just joked to my friends that this is a "really bad great game," and I mean that with a lot of love as someone who fully intends to keep playing and is willingly marking "Yes" on my review here.

The monetization worries me, with "double dipping" on a game that costs money and has both a battle pass and paid cosmetics already in early access.

The balance feels all sorts of wrong - the initial 3 classes I was given to play as die as easily as a soggy sheet of printer paper, but then I unlock the dual shield guy and every encounter (including bosses) is trivially easy.

The game lacks polish in a lot of key places, the combat gets a bit of repetitive and overall the game seems generally lacking in the content department.

And yet, despite all of that... I find myself coming back again and again.

The gameplay is a perfect mix of a few different games - the combat reminds me a bit of Transistor, or one of Supergiant's other popular titles; the style and loop has a hint of Dungeon Defenders; every moment I'm reminded of other games, and yet Inkbound manages to feel like something fun and new despite every comparison I can make.

The voice acting, while not the most groundbreaking or perfect out there, is charming and engaging, the storytelling intriguing, the vibes lighthearted and fun.

The visual character customization doesn't seem too groundbreaking at first, but there's a lot of depth - infinite color possibilities, a fun custom sticker/texture system for your skin, plenty of armor, weapon, pet skins to collect... Enough to make something that looks nice, epic, or stupid depending on your tastes.

The runs are quick enough that they don't feel like a chore - I can hop on and go from start to finish when I have a short break, which is a great feeling against some other roguelikes with longer runs.

While I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, the prospect of multiplayer intrigues me and I look forward to seeing what sort of wild shenanigans might emerge when you have multiple players involved in combat.

Overall, this game has surprised me in a lot of ways - some good, some bad... But, at the end of the day, I definitely recommend it and can see myself playing again and again, especially if development continues and content continually gets added.

I hope this review might be seen by the devs so they can iron out some of the pain points - review monetization, give the game some polish, work on balance.

If so, this very well could be one of the next hit roguelikes, and I encourage anyone looking for something that manages to feel familiar yet unique at the same time to grab the game and give it a try - you'll be able to get a decent feel for what the game has in story within the timeframe for a refund, so if you find it's not for you there's no harm - but I think anyone considering trying it out owes themselves to give it a shot!

Great fun so far! There's some unique mechanics when it comes to the evolution feature, lots of neat skills to play with, multiple factions to play with. This is a great start!

The only thing I think the game could use are some more cards (thought obviously that always comes with time anyway in a CCG) and just *slightly* sped up animations, or the removal of the zoom-in when creatures attack so you can keep queueing up more moves from other units - sometimes things just feel a tad slow.

Other than that, I'm really looking forward to playing more and seeing how this game develops!

This should honestly be branded as a Darkest Dungeon spin off and not Darkest Dungeon 2.

It's a good game with great art direction and carrying all the flavor of the first, but beyond that the game feels nothing like the original Darkest Dungeon.

No longer are you collecting and recruiting heroes, building them up and falling in love with them through your play, watching them get boons and debuffs, being devastated as one you poured time and effort into dies.

Instead, it just plays out like a run-of-the-mill roguelike with the Darkest Dungeon combat spliced in. You pick a set of four heroes to begin your run, get thrown into a tedious stagecoach driving game, encounter random events and combat encounters. Then you either win or lose, and reset with a new run.

You do have a "home base" to unlock upgrades that carry over and make future runs more interesting - new items to collect, new classes.

For me, Darkest Dungeon was about falling in love with the characters you randomly collect and level up through playing, the tense moments of growing and losing them, and dungeons, of course! And yet, they've removed even that aspect from the main gameplay - no more managing light and sanity and charting a course through a maze of passages and encounters. Perhaps it shows up in some form later, but for the game to be this different right out the gate is immensely disappointing.

Also, the tutorialization sucks imo. All the new mechanics are introduced to you, essentially, through an in-game manual and not discovered or shown through gameplay. Sure, tooltips and notifications guiding you to the manual show up as you need them, but having to pull open that manual, scroll to find what you are looking for or what's "new," every time something is introduced is just so boring and immersion breaking.

I probably should have done more research before buying, but I'm just disappointed. Refunded.

I'm a huge fan of tactical RPGs and have lots of experience with other titles. My favorite thing to see is class trees and customizable stats/skills, and this delivered on that front. This has a lot of promise and seems perfect for me, but I noticed very quickly that the difficulty is... off.

The easy difficulty is way too easy for me, and removes permadeath on characters. It doesn't really feel challenging at all, though it's still fun enough.

The medium difficulty, though, is already bordering on brutally hard. Money is constantly tight while you try to pay your troops each week, people are constantly injured and having to either sit out battles or go in at 50% health, etc. If I need 2000-3000 gold every 2 weeks to pay my team, I make 200-500 per fight, I can maybe squeeze in 5 or 6 per week if I'm lucky and no one is seriously injured, but then also have to pay for rations and gear replacements when weapons break for units... Yeah, it just doesn't quite add up.

I didn't even try the hard mode.

One thing that I think might help to offset this is some adjustments to the scheduling system. Each in-game day you select an activity to do during the day - either enter the arena and fight for a paycheck, or spend your money recruiting new units, buying gear, or paying for training for them - and you can only do one per day. There is a definite lack of things to do during the day of you are either strapped for cash, have injured units early on, or both... And it feels really, really bad to just waste a day to recover and gain nothing for it.

As a suggestion to the devs, a few things that might help:

1) Allow us to choose a difficulty of fight in the arena each day. We can fight and easier team for less reward but a safer win or, if we're healed up and ready to go, risk it on a harder encounter.

2) Give us some more "free" options during the day. Maybe some sort of work or scouting/hunting system where we can either earn some money sending our units to work, or at least bring home rations so they aren't starving.

3) Re-balance rations/food requirements, or bundle them up into the bi-weekly pay system. It's weird to need both. I see what you were doing, but it ends up feeling like I'm paying the team double to keep them remotely happy and healthy.

4) Make the shopping option not require the full day to complete so we can also enter the arena that day and offset the cost. If you want going to the market to take the whole day, maybe make an option to devote a full day to it in return for "haggling" the prices or something.

I'm not really feeling the game right now, so I refunded, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it and picking it up later to see if things improve because there's a lot I like! I just don't see myself giving it another try in its current state.

The game is fun and feels great to play, but it feels weirdly difficult for what it is, and oppressively frustrating to unlock any sort of progression as a result.

I'm all for difficulty, but I feel like I'm making no progress towards "getting good" because the difficulty doesn't seem like intentional, strategic design; just poorly design enemies and unclear abilities and effects. I feel like I'm being blown up by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemies that take many shots to kill while being able to pop me in the blink of an eye.

I do worry about the potential for monetization, as others have said, but I want to focus this review on the other aspects of the game for those who want to know about the gameplay itself.

I'm not the biggest racing or cart racer fan, but I've played a good amount of Mario Kart in my time, as well as some Kart Rider Drift and others. And, all of that in mind, I genuinely think Disney Speedstorm might actually be my favorite of them (monetization not withstanding.)

The tracks are all beautiful and detailed, taking you through a number of worlds and scenes from various Disney movies and parks, all with plenty of shortcut, alternate routes, mirror courses, alternate starts, and more - plenty to keep it fresh and develop your own way through a course, plan tactically, and speed past opponents.

The characters are tons of fun, at least if you're a Disney fan. Many of them use classic lines from their respective movies, but but with a racing twist. And there's Figment representation! Disney parks fans rejoice.

The best part of all, so far, is the music. Each course has a number of different remixed tunes to go along with it - Make a Man Out Of You for the Mulan one, some of the Muses' gospel-sounding tracks for Hercules, etc. And these go harder than they have any right to. Absolute jams that will tickle your nostalgia while also putting you in the racing mood.

There's a couple different online race modes, as well as a ton of "story quests" that take the form of various challenge races - standard races, time trials, elimination modes, ones where you need to play as a certain character, ones with missions to perform x amount of stuns or use a number of items, etc. There's a lot of variety, and they seem like a great way to learn the mechanics, as well as start unlocking some characters and leveling them up!

All of the above makes this, for me, probably the best cart racer on PC, and a definite favorite overall personally.

Going into some of the progression mechanics - I'm 50/50 on them. First, there's the issue of monetization. Everything here is setup to support battlepasses for years to come which, on its own, isn't the worst thing... But there's also loot boxes (currently only purchasable with battle pass and other in-game currencies) and gacha shards to collect. For that reason, I am worried as others are.

That being said, if there wasn't monetizaiton to all of this (or if the monetization could stay purely cosmetic) I personally find the progression and gameplay loop appealing. I'm goal oriented, I like seeing numbers go up, so acquiring unlocks and things to fine tune stats and unlock new skills would be a nice mechanic if it wasn't a red flag here. At the same time, I can see why this might be a turn off for some folks who just want a "pure" cart racing experience, but there's plenty of room for private lobbies and alternate game modes (the former seems to already exist) that I hope the devs can consider in the future!

The one saving grace for now is that there doesn't appear to be any option to spend money beyond buying the game itself (or a Founder's Pack,) or a battle pass, meaning the only P2W present is a few exclusive skins for the early access packs and a bit of quicker progression for those with the premium battlepass unlocked. On top of that, in addition to your standard daily and weekly rotation of battle pass challenges to complete for progress, there seems to be a system in place for a seasonal story mode with challenges similar to the base game's story quest with tons and tons of time trials and objectives to complete to earn experience on the pass even as a solo player, or someone still learning and gearing up.

Overall, I definitely do recommend the game. It's great fun, and the core game is clearly made with passion for the movies and characters with many levels of detail and effort put in that it doesn't feel like *just* a cash grab. I just hope that the monetization stays tame enough to keep people engaged and not scared away by credit card swipers.