Recent reviews by Sae

It's an autobattler if you could use the power of capitalism and your wallet to take less damage than your opponent and do more damage to them. P2W mobile port schlop, avoid.

I'm a long time player of Elona/Elona+ - I think since 2011/2012, when I would put a bunch of various roguelikes on a USB to bring to the library to play for a little during lunch at school. The start on this is a fair bit slower, owing to the expanded base management and crafting mechanics, and extended tutorial quests, but otherwise, it feels like a game entirely building on the bones of what Elona gave us, making it more approachable to a modern audience and adding various quality of life. Given I've put hundreds of hours into Elona over the years, I'll treat this as a first impression, but its a glowing one.

My one notable thing is how inventories work now - a bag system where you can create extra bags for more inventory slots to stack different items in. I think it's a great improvement, but also is a bit clunky to manage interface wise with multiple bags open. Also, picturing my character hauling multiple crates on her back Death Stranding style across Elona because she doesn't know how to sew is quite hilarious.

I would put this at a tenuous recommendation, with the caveat to temper your expectations.

The combat is snappy, fluid and enjoyable, the performance is solid, there's a ton of accessibility and such and for once I'm not straining to read text and subtitles because they're offering multiple sizes. There's some standout performances; notably, Solas commands a scene whenever he shows up in it, overjoyed to have him back. Varric is good as always, and any time I saw a returning character, they felt recognisable to what I remembered of them.

But the caveat is the dialogue, and the writing. Every time I get into a cutscene I'm sorta grimacing and bracing myself and trying to guess what the least 'wink wink, nudge nudge' marvel-disney esque dialogue option is going to be, and rarely do I get to. Your main character doesn't really feel grounded in the world; there's this sort of nudge, look to the camera/speak to the audience with half the dialogue, and the rest feel like she's been airdropped into this setting with little consistency. There's this sort of, fawning subservience to any major character within the world with how your character has been written, alternated with brusque, unwarranted ego. And then it flips back to the wink, the nudge, the lack of respect for the plot gravitas the world has been bouncing between demanding and disrespecting.

The main character has been deeply, deeply unlikeable for me so far, and as far as the companion cast, largely it's... better, but only for some. I won't take Harding around, ever.

And, y'know, it's a shame to have to say this, right? As far as triple A games, I don't get many dubs for actually getting to play a canonical transperson. Being able to actually play a character that explores those themes should be an auto-imprint my character. But I don't relate to her; even in the explorations of the Trans Experience. There has to be better ways of writing gender expression more grounded into a setting like Dragon Age. As it is now, it's deeply unrelatable.

There's good bits of writing, there's some amazing delivery, but it's scattered, and I'm largely taken out of the experience at some point whenever I delve into dialogue.

All that said, the gameplay itself, really good. Free respecs for reassigning and trying out different specialisations until you find one you like are much appreciated, and allows me to rejig companions based on who I'm taking with me rather than having to make static pairings that need to go with one another. Skills are flashy; sometimes a little too much as a warrior, when I find it hard to read the block indicator for whats blockable and unblockable in the chaos. Giving the Warrior a two-foot tackle/dropkick as the first ability they get was an excellent choice. The world is vast and quite well made (with exception of some... exceptionally ugly parts of the Crossroads), with some lovely vistas and scenery, and generally I've liked most character designs I've seen, though some are a bit... loud, and excessive, as are some of your armour designs.

There's good to be found, and my opinion might continue wavering or might improve as I play more, but as it stands a couple chapters in and 8 hours, that's the feelings. The fact that it's a triple A game, polished on release, good performance, not demanding a bunch of microtransactions or live service ♥♥♥♥ - that also earns some lenience in my appraisal, I think, but we'll see how far it goes I suppose.

fishing :)

ough warframe

This game has changed a ton since I started playing it back when it was a separate launcher in closed beta. Some changes I've liked, some I haven't, metashifts have happened, frames I liked have been powercrept out of being relevant or usable... But ultimately, it's still just an extremely fun game built around an extremely robust combat system, with plenty of vertical and sideways progression to explore and enjoy. There's always something to spend some time on, to delve into, and something to optimise. I'll play for 100 hours every year or two, then abandon it, and I'll keep doing so.

It's a grindy game, but that's what I want from it. I do miss the less mobile, slower combat days, but it's ultimately for the better how it is now; it's an extremely good and fun game with... some, frustrating free-to-play holdovers.

Please, I beg you, remove the stupid 'rush' timers from facebook era free to play.

I'm terrible at bullet hell games, but this game is extremely fun and polished. Some game mechanics frustrate me a little (King's Arsenal basically mandates switching to arrow keys for me for the stage because of how the movement mechanic works) but I feel like I get a bit better at them each time I go for a run. Even Normal difficulty is hard for me right now, though Cute difficulty is a bit too easy, so it's kind of a 'get good' situation. The 'pity' unlocks are a great system for making sure you can unlock all the classes and items, (kill bosses to eventually unlock everything if you're too stinky at the game to go hard mode) the classes feel well designed with multiple build paths and synergies, the upgrade + item system is enjoyable... It's just a good game. Reminds me that I still need to play Maiden & Spell, which I've owned a while but have yet to touch because bullet hells are the genre I have the most skill issue with, hah.

Give it a try - the demo is an excellent taste and will sell you on whether you'd be interested in it or not. It's missing a bit of QOL features from the main version, but it'll show you what you need to know.

It's really good for making organic looking medieval settlements due to it's building/zoning system - but the content isn't all there yet. I recommend it, but probably in 1-2 years, maybe 3 since it's a one person dev team. It's lacking a lot of content right now, and you'll run up against "This is still being worked on" a lot.

Once again, I'm back to this game to find out if it's any better. Answer? Not really. I mean, it's passable - it's alright. But the world still feels quite dead even with NPCs occasionally roaming about, because mostly, enemy density isn't there, and there's nothing to do. I was really confused why wandering around with a friend and just looking for things to do wasn't really working, and why there didn't seem to be much in the way of content for level pre-25, and it's because there isn't, according to what answers I could find on reddit.

Basically, it just expects you to be doing events, expeditions and a lot of daily quests, as far as I can tell. Not much of it is designed for coop apart from the expeditions and the daily ops, and those seem to be mostly for when you're level 40-50. It's not good, it's still not got much in the way of meaningful content, and what is there seems to be for when you've progressed your character to full special. I do like the perk card system, but that's about it. Just play Fallout New Vegas.

Game with a pretty interesting gimmick (use real-world data to build your maps) that's falling a little short in the long term depth and replayability right now. It's quite fun, don't get me wrong - there's a quite core appeal to doing some zombie apocalypse in places familiar to you, but it's lacking depth. There's not a whole lot of buildings to build and gameplay is quite samey in that there's not a whole lot of depth or variance to the scavenging, not a whole lot of items or resources to find or events to trigger. But what's there right now is good - it just needs some fleshing out.

Recommended, but give it some time, wait for them to flesh out the gameplay depth.

Really simple premise, really well executed. It's RPGmaker and has the usual RPGMaker scuffed UI-vibe, but apart from tat it's just a very solid logic puzzle game wrapped up in a roguelite shell. Descend the levels, solve as many mimic puzzles as possible to get resources to beat enemies and fight the final boss - some puzzles will have incomplete/imperfect information, so you're encouraged to descend without opening some mimics if the lies and truths can't be solved. On top of that, there's many variations on the dungeon rules - Standard, Expert and Random are the default, but once you beat the first three you also get access to Robbers, Number, Doubt and Confuse adding more wrinkles and difficulty to the formula, on top of escalating difficulty settings for every individual mode. It's just really, really good, and for the asking price of large portion of chips (london prices :) ), I have very little difficulty recommending it wholesale. Give the demo a try - on first glance, I wasn't really sure if I'd like it, but on rereading the idea grew on me and on playing, it's just good.

Complaints would be that strategy on the items kinda boils down to buying as many ATK candies as you can afford - if you can kill an enemy, then it won't attack you, making your defence value moot for all but the end boss (and with enough ATK, with a full HP bar the end boss will never get through you when you're likely to find decent armour to equip at some point in the 30 floors. There's some QOL issues - going through the right click menu to the inventory to using the item you want to use is a bit cumbersome, but not a dealbreaker. (Maybe it's different if you use the keyboard mode, it's got an option for mouse-only play and I've been using just that!). The music is also a bit endlessly repetitive, so I turned it off.

Ultimately though, those are small potatoes, and the variety of logic puzzles on offer and the core concept is good enough and the gameplay replayable enough that it's just fun.