Recent reviews by Doki

I went into this expecting it to be only be okay-ish, BUT I WAS DEAD WRONG. I am astounded by the sheer quality here.
This is a game made with pure heart and soul. The amount of detail, care, and pure passion in this indie game puts most AAA games to shame.
It's a real shame this game went under peoples radar, it's so well made and deserves a lot more love. If you enjoy later music action games like Hi-Fi Rush, or just find the art fun to look at, PLEASE BUY THIS GAME! The devs deserve way more love and credit for the effort they put into this game.

EDIT: I think the game is good and well made for the most part actually. Buy it and support the devs. They actually treat Crash better than Activision does, now that Activision has Crash as nothing more than a test pig for scumbag AI models.

Original Review:

I REALLY want to play and enjoy this game. I truly do. It is a good game, There is so much LOVE and EFFORT put into this game. With is hailing itself as bringing back the feeling of classic Crash Bandicoot, I was super hyped. But it breaks my heart that I cannot recommend this game to casual platform lovers.

And it's primarily because I can't see any of it.

The game is full of excessive visual clutter that makes it difficult to keep track of what is even going on. Anton often blends into the background regardless of color palette, because of all the seizure inducing flashes and hundreds of particles in the foreground on screen at any given time. The game does have the option to turn off screen shake and reduce some flashes, but it barely does anything in making the game more visually clear.

Visual clarity was a major goal of the original Crash games, the devs took great care in designing all the levels and art so Crash was easily visible at all times, no matter the screen. Unfortunately, while Antonblast is keen to put in references and internet memes in the game based around Crash Bandicoot, and use plenty of the same music tropes and sound effects, they did not seem to study any of the design philosophy of Crash.

On that note, the completion requirements are also ludicrous, and seem beyond human ability at times. Crash 2 & 3 were designed to be 100% completed while providing a slight bit more challenge than the basic playthroughs. Antonblast feels more like Crash 4 than any of the classic Crash games, and for those who don't know, that's a herculean feat that requires 80 hours. (Not helping the semi-randomized shop giving me Nitro Fueled flashback and that fiasco. Thankfully this doesn't have in-game currency. But that begs the question of why it's even randomized in the first place when it does nothing but frustrate the player?)

Big props to the developer and musicians for offering this to players for free!
Be sure the buy the game if you have not already!

This is my Turok

I want to compliment the devs for creating one of the best optimized 3D games I have seen in a long time. This game is less than half a gigabyte, and barely runs up my GPU temp by like 3 degrees. More devs need to learn from this example.

In addition, the artstyle and character designs are very distinct and cute! The movement is also very fun, if slightly rough around the edges. And further praise for making an OFFLINE playable MMO! We need more of these!

My only qualm is the game is FULL of padding, backtracking, forced grinding, and fetch quests. Like you will get a quest, go out to an area, kill x amount of enemies or obtain a number of random chance drops, backtrack all the way back to the hubworld to turn in your quest, and get barely anything of value for your efforts, with VERY little story either. Repeat ad-nausium until you get to a dungeon. I hope the developers refine the game in the future to cut down on this forced grinding and backtracking repetition, and make the experience more unique and fun, and less of a time waster.

Anyone who says "This game aged poorly" is someone who hates fun and probably buys Fifa games on a yearly basis unironically. And their favorite food is white bread with nothing on it.

A great game made with heart and soul! I normally don't buy early access games, but this is the exception, and I'm glad I made that exception. This is even better than classic Starfox.

Activision is mass firing artists and programmers and replacing them with AI generated garbage. Do not support them. If you want to play this game, get it through other means that doesn't involve giving money to Activision.

The game crashed part way through and never booted up again, even after verifying files and reinstalling. The thoughts I have for what I was able to play are below:

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In videogame design, there is a principal of "Ratio of Depth to Complexity". The goal is to maximize the amount of depth you can get out of game mechanics, while minimizing how complex the game is to do that.

With that said, XCom is very complex, but lacks the strategic depth I was promised. Pardon the comparison, but it feels very "Casual" compared to classic Fire Emblem, dumbed down because they are afraid of people not being able to do basic math. Fire Emblem came out over 30 years ago, and this game still insists on using frustrating and baffling design decisions that have higher complexity, but have less depth than most Fire Emblem games and even Valkyria Chronicles. Despite being released in the modern era.

A list of frustrating mechanics that add nothing to the game and have been done much better elsewhere:

- Not being able to see enemy stats
- Not being able to see enemy movement and firing range
- Not being able the percentage chance cover and half-cover gives you or the enemy.
- Player stats that are poorly explained and even outright lies.
- Not being able to see your own firing range until after movement
- Not being able to undo movement if you haven't taken an action
- Randomized damage values
- Randomized enemy placement
- Insta-kill alien enemies
- Randomly deciding if a soldier can be revived or not
- Not being able to see your own weapon stats mid-mission, so you don't know the minimum amount of damage you will do.

This game doesn't give you the tools you need to plan a solid and in-depth strategy beyond 1 turn, meaning that you have to either just roll with unfairness, or save-scum to deal with stuff that you didn't have the means to account for. You can't effectively lead an army if the game forcibly blindfolds you from having what you need to know to succeed.

Not to say it's a horrible game, but it's not what the hardcore strategy game people hyped it up to be.

This game forces ugly AI upscaling to be active at all times, and you need a mod loader to be able to even turn it off.