Последние обзоры Baines

I want to recommend it. I had fun for most of the time I spent on it. It has some flaws, but the killer are the risks of instant death.

Mess up a jump, and you die. Mess up exiting a conveyor belt, and you die. Slightly mistime or mis-space your path through crushers, and you die. Everything else in the game produces death through an accumulation of mistakes, but these spots instantly kill you for the slightest mis-press of a single key.

At first it was a minor annoyance. The only area that guaranteed a forced jumping spot could be skipped. The zigzagging pathways were annoying, but could be navigated safely with care and a bit of preventative enemy clearing or defensive action. Even the spots where the game has you crossing thin zigzagging walkways and then puts hard to hit or sturdy melee enemies in front or behind you.

But then I hit the factory. And I died because I apparently didn't commit to stepping onto a conveyor properly, as the game immediately dropped me off the side. And I nearly died because I didn't exit a conveyor with the right timing, but somehow managed to glitch roll myself to safety from mid-air. And I died to a series of crushers because I stopped a few pixels too soon in the "safe" spot halfway through.

And I realized this just wasn't fun. None of the prior jumping spots were fun, they were just frustrating due to knowing the slightest mistake would end the run regardless of how well I'd been playing. None of the navigating thin zigzagging walkways was fun, it was just another frustration where I had to be careful to not accidentally instantly die due to moving slightly too far in the wrong direction. I'd put up with that stuff because it happened to be rare enough, at least until the Factory.

Action Taimanin is very much a mobile action game, for all the negatives that brings. It isn't technically bad; it is simply pointless on a platform that allows games to be built for more than a basic touch screen interface.

Combat allows for movement, a single attack button which can be repeatedly tapped to execute a single attack string, a dodge button, a "support" attack that will have around a 45 second cooldown, and an ultimate attack that you can only perform after collecting enough activation pick-ups. Beyond this, you can eventually assign three (four if you pay(?) to unlock the final slot) special moves. These moves have basic inputs (hold attack, hold dodge, tap attack immediately after a dodge, etc), and most also operate on about ~10 cooldowns. There is some additional interplay where equipped supporters unlock additional effects in specific special moves (such as reduced cooldown or adding a healing effect). The special moves might could have made combat more meaningful, but being restricted to so few moves, combined with their cooldowns, drains much of that merit.

"Stages" are very much mobile-style, in that they are only a couple of minutes long. You fight a few enemies, move forward, fight a few enemies, move forward, and fight a boss. Higher difficulties (you start on Easy) do add more enemies, in addition to vastly boosting enemy stats. Stronger enemies also tend to have plenty of armor that lets them simply power through your attacks (repeated hits can eventually "stun" them), and may ignore stuff like the launcher effect of a special move or the vacuum effect of a supporter.

In Japanese game style, these super short action segments are surrounded by absurdly long runs of dialog boxes. I'm almost certain that some stages are shorter than the preceding dialogs even when you skip everything. There may be a story here, but the method of delivery is so poor that you'll soon be skipping through it. The game would rather use 50 two-sentence dialog boxes to ramble on about random stuff than get to any particular relevant point.

In typical f2p style, the game deluges you with gifts and currencies when you first start to play, making it hard to judge how much those items are actually worth until after you already feel invested. It looks like you can play through the game without paying real money, but again the action just isn't that entertaining. You'll also probably burn through much of your "free" crystals on all the "first time half-price" gacha rolls before you realize unlocking additional playable characters (of which there are plenty) requires a sizable chunk of those crystals. Mind, you need those gacha rolls anyway to get enough useful supporters that power up your character and have a chance to get better weapons for your playable character, so you are probably hurting either way you go...

And the game will try to lock you in to playing. There are daily log-in bonuses, daily quests, and limited events that will give you the consumables that you'll burn through. Early levels come fast, giving large item and currency rewards. You get rewards for first time completions of story chapters. You get rewards for using supporters. Etc. The combat is set to make you feel powerful as well. The default difficulty is Easy, and a decent gacha result or two can quickly put you well ahead on that difficulty curve. The game uses that f2p mobile gimmick where stronger enemies get way more life bars, so every attack looks like it laying waste to an enemy's health even if realistically you are only giving it a minor scratch.

Again, the game isn't actually bad. It's just that there are tons of even average PC games that give you more for your time.

Recommended with a massive caveat. Despite appearances, design and balance issues quickly kill the "skill-based" aspect of the game.

What remains is a decent enough cheap time waster, that even lets you save mid-run when you get bored. But the balance truly is borked. Play it for a bit, see the interesting ship ideas, have a bit of a power trip, then uninstall it and move on to some other game.

In the initial mode, the game ends before you can even benefit from most upgrades. In Endless mode, you quickly gain so much power that even at maxed difficulty you can safely clear levels with several ships just by sitting in place with autofire turned on. I never bothered to try Wander mode.

In theory, your eventual death will come from enemy health and spawn rates outpacing your damage output to such a degree that you simply can no longer kill enemies before they reach you while the sheer enemy density means that you cannot avoid other collisions when trying to gain more room/time to deal damage. In reality, you'll become bored enough well before that point that you start actively seeking your own destruction.

It's short, it's free, it's a Lovecraft-inspired dating sim visual novel.

It is completely linear. There are no real choices until the end. The game either won't let you proceed without following the given instructions, or failing to follow the instructions will give you an immediate ending.

The game has an automatic checkpoint system, which allows you to fairly quickly recover from any Ending choice without having to replay the entire game.

There is one section that appears to be timing based, where failure to complete the task in time results in an immediate "Bad Ending".

An underrated and largely forgotten gem that tried to push fast action shooters towards maintaining mobility rather than cover. It also did pretty interesting things with horde AI and map traversal for both the player and enemies.

It's similar to other "battle" Solitaire games, except more random, less fair, too long, and with permadeath.

It's a non-infringing Super Monkey Ball fan game.

However, its primary strength is also its primary weakness. It feels like an extensive level mod pack for the original arcade and Gamecube games, but it is more a level mod pack than its own game.

Rather than gradually increasing the difficulty by adding and developing new ideas across stages, Rolled Out's levels so far feel as if they were each completed in a vacuum and then sorted by difficulty.

As for aesthetics, the game so far has no personality of its own. It begins and ends at being a non-infringing SMB fan sequel. There is no "character" to the selectable creatures, it is just an assortment of random creature models that get stuck in a ball. You can select ball designs, pick the colors of the balls, and pick custom trails, but they are equally character-less. The levels visually are less fancy SMB designs. The banana-replacements are the most generic looking coin pick-ups one could imagine.

But in the end, it is more SMB-like levels to play.

Mechanically, one of the better Warriors games in general. One of the best and most innovative decisions for the franchise is the replacement of the standard musou/super system. Now you can assign the moves that you want to four "special move" slots, each with their own meter. Other improvements to the Warriors model include an enhanced air combo system and an honestly overpowered dash system. OPPW4 also does a pretty good job with playable giant characters. Issues with some of OPPW3's mechanics have been fixed.

Of course this is a Koei Warriors game, so it still has its shortcomings. The new "Flight" characters have pretty bad move sets, and for many characters flight can often feel more like a mixed blessing or outright disadvantage than a benefit. Characters can still be pretty wildly imbalanced, and not for story/canon reasons, just from poor/neglectful design or the embarrassment of riches that benefits the popular. Some characters were certainly neglected. It felt like OPPW3 offered a bit more on replayability, while OPPW4 has you repeating the same handful of missions to grind coins/berries. The game cuts much of One Piece's story, most likely due to the reduced roster. There are some bits that just feel like lazy design or padding, like having two story missions that consist of a single fight with Crocodile (presumably just to pad the Alabasta story section and/or overall mission count.)

Something just feels off in the level design. They can be a bit dull, and can feel a bit overlong. There are also annoying bits that can veer into "gotcha" trial-and-error territory rather than a reflex test, just enough to kill you once. Sometimes you just don't see far enough ahead to be certain of the right action. Sometimes it may be an inconsistency in how objects behave that can slow you just enough to fail the first time.

For those that dislike such matters, half the game is co-op multiplayer. If you only care about single player, you are arguably getting half a game.

While I didn't have any consistent technical issues, the first time I changed the game's resolution, it resulted in the game freezing to the point that I had to reboot my PC. Afterwards, the game behaved fine.

Is the game bad? Not really. But I just can't find myself recommending it. It doesn't do anything special, not to make up for its kind of meh-ness.

Din's Legacy is simply too unfinished a game to be recommended. It needed months of additional development and polish. As post-release updates have seemingly stopped, and were only minor bugfixes prior, it appears that Legacy will never be more than that.

Legacy is built upon the framework of Zombasite, giving it an already weak foundation. Ideas that made previous Soldak offerings stand out are reduced to shells in Legacy. Diplomacy is technically still present, but is completely useless. Zombasite's town defense is present, but town guards are not, which renders the quickly destroyed town gates nearly worthless. Far from Drox Operative's interweaved relationships, there are no negative consequences to your quest selection; just complete everything. The Zombasite infection is brought over, but is more frustrating than anything else. Worse, Legacy's new gimmick, skill mutation, feels like an alpha implementation of a concept.

Difficulty is all over the place, with different scenarios ranging from dirt-easy to nearly impossible when tackled at the same difficulty. The difficulty curve within scenarios is flawed in a different manner, hardest at the start but reduced to cake-walk busywork by the latter half.

The mutation system, which theoretically allows any character to gain any skill, suffers from the unbalanced nature of skills. Some skills are simply more valuable than others. Some are valuable enough that you are simply handicapping yourself, at times greatly, to not obtain them. With the ability to fill your skill tree with viable options, there is no reason to waste points on upgrading skills that offer minimal improvements.

Though some issues were fixed post-release, the game still has some annoying bugs. For example, uneven ground (particularly underground caves) will sometimes "eat" ranged attacks that should not have been blocked, forcing you to move to another position to even have a chance of hitting a target.