Recent reviews by Aavael

Hollow Knight is an example of a game carried by its art-style. The game is great to look at and instantly recognizable, but it simply is not fun. The initial few hours are quite enjoyable. The controls are very responsive, the aesthetics and character design are pleasant, and the music is nice. However, the more you progress, the less fun it becomes.

The limited player power is clearly a design choice but it makes progression feel very nonexistent for the most part. You get new abilities, but they're mostly just traversal gimmicks you'll use every once in a while. You get new charms, but they're limited by the number you can equip. You upgrade your weapon, but it just increases the invisible damage number in the background.

Excessive backtracking, checkpoint placement, boss encounter pacing, inconsistent level design quality, visual clarity and more are all issues. The game works on a base level, but it doesn't excel in any area that isn't related to the presentation. The game is overall just ok, but it is simply not fun enough to try to reach the end of the game.

Good visuals and soundtrack, ok-to-bad everything else.

Encounter and enemy designs aren't fun, the game is clunky and the pacing is rough with some awful mandatory sections where you get stripped of all movement abilities just so you can do some puzzle platforming to unlock new abilities.

Great game. It has the best take on turn-based combat with a ton of mechanics layered on top of each other, amazing art direction in everything UI-related, fantastic soundtrack, a few great story beats and characters, and all in all, it's fun.

The main downsides are the awful japanese writing and voice-acting direction (some characters are affected by this more than others), tropey characterization that fails to evolve outside of a couple of scenes and a way, way, way too long time to beat. Half of this game could have been cut and with decent direction, no value would have been lost.

Overall, if you can get past some of its generic anime painpoints, you'll find a great game that gives you more than enough value for your money.

This game is incredibly buggy. From small animation issues, to combat encounters not ending after killing everyone, to complete progress blocks. I tried playing this a long time ago on gamepass and my save file got corrupted, so I just recently bought this to try it again and I can't progress past chapter 5 due to a bug with an important npc not spawning.

Even besides the fact that this game is buggy, it isn't well designed. The coop aspect is the only saving grace, and considering that bugged out several times for me, this isn't worth playing.

They added a post-launch requirement for a PSN account, despite PSN not being available in many countries. So even though you could have been playing the game without any issues up until now, you're suddenly locked out and can't play the game you paid for.

It's a good entry in the franchise. It has a lot of content available from the get-go, a huge launch roster and solid gameplay. If you're a fan of Tekken in general, you'll like this one as well since it doesn't do much to reinvent the wheel outside of the heat system which seems to be pretty hit-or-miss with people.

The netcode is ok as long as you avoid all wifi players and it has cross-play, so the game will have a healthy playerbase for a long time. The ranked mode's point system is pretty bad and the character customization is awful. Also, there's a jukebox mode with all the music from the previous games, so that's a big plus.

Still the world's most confusing scam. Don't have access to all the missions from Hitman 2 and need to buy the expansion pass to play them (which I won't out of principle). The game itself is great but IO Interactive is the first studio I have seen to be this incompetent when it comes to selling their own product. Not worth wasting time on such a mess.

Overall a good game. My initial impressions were amazing, but in the later half of the game, it failed to maintain the same level of quality. This is a modern take on the old Castlevania formula (in every sense) but that's also to its detriment since some of the game design choices that were replicated and left in are a little annoying in a modern gaming landscape.

It shines it terms of level structure, progression, gameplay, build/loot variety and music. The in-game art style doesn't look great in my opinion, the story writing is just bad, the voice acting suffers due to the writing and personally, I wish the game was maybe 20% faster. My main issue is that nothing about this game feels new. Everything is just reminiscent of Castlevania and it never evolves past that. So in a world where there are so many fresh takes on metroidvanias released regularly, this one just feels the least creative.

Still a fun experience that doesn't really have any major issues that ruin the whole package. If you like the 2D Castlevania games and you want to play something like it, this is as close as you'll get.

Street Fighter 6 is a clear upgrade in every way from Street Fighter 5. It has a lot of offline/single-player content including an RPG campaign, tons of guides to teach you how to play, combo trials, more character freedom (and sauce), a strong launch roster, good performance, great netcode + wifi indicators, clean matchmaking and lobby systems, overall good visuals except for a handful of things (like certain attack animations and character models) and at its core, the game is just fun.

If you like fighting games, this one is a highlight release and there isn't much to dislike. It's a full package, unlike most other fighting games and to top it off, it's very accessible and has multiple control types to ease people into the game.

You can't change the game's resolution... You're forced to either play it in a tiny window or in a stretched fullscreen at a tiny resolution. The developer responded to some people asking how to fix that and he basically just said it is what it is and can't be fixed.