Recent reviews by timmytwoinch

Absolutely stellar. The compelling story, well written characters, and adrenaline-packed scenes make this game relentlessly entertaining. I have nothing to say other than just play this now without spoiling anything for yourself. This is among the best narrative-driven games ever made.

I already paid for this on Patreon and have beaten season 1+2 several times. I am buying it again here to recommend it. This is the probably the best perverted visual novel (not that I've played a lot of them, or anything). It's really just a choose your own adventure visual novel of a pretty good college drama/romance story with an abundance of detailed sex scenes. Yes, you could jerk off to it, I guess, but I came for the story.

On release, I could barely play for 10 minutes without encountering some distracting or game-breaking bug. Now, after all the updates CDPR has done, Cyberpunk with the Phantom Liberty DLC is among the best current-gen games on the market. It is technically impressive, filled with content, and fun as hell. If Cyberpunk released in its current state, we would all be saying its GOTY material without question. Easily worth full price.

Can't deny that this is a great game, but it is pretty annoying to play, especially as someone who likes RPGs but isn't into DND. The combat is frustratingly RNG based and riddled with tedious limitations. The roleplay opportunities and writing are good enough to make it worth your money, but the fights are not as fun as Larian's previous work.

There are a lot of positives. There's an absurd level of attention to detail put into every facet of this game. I am astonished at how flawlessly interwoven the world is. The player's background and decisions seem to have an immense impact on how the story unravels, the state of the world, and whether its inhabitants prosper or perish. This really is a roleplayer's wet dream; if this doesn't satisfy you, nothing that’s been released so far will. You can be as righteous or as sadistically evil as your wildest fantasies.

The presentation and art style here are unparalleled for a fantasy RPG; I can’t think of a more visually stunning game in this category. There were segments of Baldur's Gate where the dialogue, facial expressions/animations, voice acting, and setpieces were so good, I thought I was watching HBO's newest fantasy show. This is one of those areas where Baldur’s Gate 3 shows you the peak of what a video game can be.

Every companion is interesting and boasts a compelling background. They ooze personality, they even move and express themselves uniquely. There isn't a single one that I don't like. Not only that, but you can start the game with any one of them as your main character, which unlocks additional details about their background that are normally inaccessible.

But I loathe the combat system, not because I dislike turn-based games, but because BG3 plays like DOS2 with all the fun patched out of it. There are a metric ♥♥♥♥ load of limitations around combat and heaps of RNG controlling everything you do. Yes it's more complex and more balanced, but it achieves that by being aggressively unfun.

Most attacks have a decent chance of missing, even when it would be nonsensical for that to happen. I once missed an attack on a sleeping target who was lying down on the ground. A toddler wouldn’t have missed that, but somehow my battle-hardened warrior did. If that seems fine to you, then you’ll be right at home in this slogfest.

I sorely miss the traditional way where enemies only dodge often if they are actually an evasive enemy type. Maybe every enemy is secretly a shadow ninja warrior who can phase out of reality at will, I don’t know. The most enjoyment I get out of this is from laughing after several turns pass where nobody hits their attack. It's comical how often attacks miss.

Getting only one main action per turn sucks. In a single turn of Divinity I could call down a rainstorm, freeze the water, and then shatter it. Or I could snipe someone, teleport their corpse into a mob, and blow it up. All those sick combos are gone. Instead, now I’m shooting one spell (which has a good chance of missing) and then ending my turn.

The rest system feels like it's carefully crafted to make the game as tedious as possible. It butchers the flow of gameplay by introducing more menus and loading screens before you can keep playing. You need to rest to regen spells, and if you don't, your character is so gutted that they barely do anything. The optimal strategy is to amass so many resources that you can long rest before every fight. Hardly anybody does this simply because it's boring. And if you dare run out of supplies, you have to run around buying or scrounging for them; the epitome of monotony.

All the above issues combine together to create the ultimate unsatisfying combat experience. Say you're playing a spellcaster. You shoot one spell (because that's usually all you get), it misses, and then you end your turn. On top of that, you still lose the spell slot from using that spell and have to rest.

I'm sure there are DnD related reasons for all these design choices, but I don't play or care about DnD. "Missed! > End Turn" isn't fun. Having to leap through menus after every fight just to use my main spells isn't fun. DOS1 and 2 were fun. No, this isn't a "git gud" situation; I don't have trouble winning encounters on balanced mode, I'm just bored. Maybe this RNG-laden drivel works for a tabletop game, but for a video game, it’s not enjoyable.

Overall, it's worth playing, but I am absolutely holding my breath for some kind of total combat overhaul mod.

Disconnected me from the match and then gave me a 5 minute for leaving (when I did not choose to leave). Before that penalty even ended, it randomly gave me another penalty for 10 minutes.

Below, you will find the over-obsessed thoughts of someone who has played way too much Elden Ring. Unless you love reading random ♥♥♥♥, ignore all of it and just buy the game. This is easily one of the greatest games ever made, I have over 1,400 hours and I'm nowhere near done with it.

Elden Ring is so massive it feels like it was released with free DLC on day one. If you were to play this without a guide, even 200 hours might not be enough to see everything. This is the epitome of a game that's actually worth $60, the level of high quality content and detail is astonishing.

And that's before we consider the absurd build diversity offered here. 20+ different melee weapon classes, casters can choose from 70 sorceries and/or 100 incantations, dozens of game-changing talismans, most weapons have changeable weapon skills, changeable damage types, and lots of ways to allocate your stats. The replayability is off the charts. I’ve spent hours theorycrafting and looking at spreadsheets to determine which stats, weapons, talismans, etc. are optimal for the build I want. Even after beating the game 7 times, there's still so many builds I haven't explored and it's the main reason I keep coming back.

Because of the immense number of gameplay options and its nonlinear structure, the game is as hard or as easy as you want it to be. You can decide you want maximum difficulty and play a melee build with no summons, or you can virtually skip bosses by melting them with a magic kamehameha wave. There are hardly any points where you must defeat a boss to progress. If you don’t feel like banging your head against a wall until it breaks, just go explore somewhere else on the map to level, maybe experiment with new builds, and come back when you’re stronger. This raises Elden Ring to a new level of accessibility not reached by any other game in this genre. You really can play it however you want.

While the graphics aren’t exactly next-gen, the artstyle and world design is so perfect that the visual experience in general ends up being preferable to games with better graphics. There are ominous marshes obscured by thick mist that hides the monsters within, castles built inside craggy mountains interspersed with lava, vast interconnected underground lands, a romanesque palace with fountains of blood, the list of impressive locations goes on. Everything looks like a world-class 3D painting in motion and it never fails to impress.

Enemy movesets can occasionally be irritating though. What pulls me towards this combat is the dance-like flow it can establish: the perfect balance of attacking and evading and/or blocking. Some enemies have the wildest combos in their moveset, yet on the player side, melee speed was clearly nerfed from what it was in DS3 for some weapons. Why? Boss encounters become boring when they start spazzing around for eons and giving you no chance to attack until you’ve waited out their tantrum. The recovery frames are too long for this, and it gets so much worse when you play a slower weapon (to the point where I don't play most weapon types because they're too slow).

Another thing I dislike are bosses with attacks that feign vulnerability at the end of the animation - goading the player into trying to punish, and then canceling that animation into another attack when they do. Sometimes they won’t do this followup attack at all. For melee builds, this inconsistency exists to trick you into attacking; the threat of a followup occurring always exists so either way it's optimal to do nothing and keep waiting. It's really not satisfying to see an apparent opening and decide not to try it because they might do a followup.

Equally annoying are bosses with moves where they are effectively or literally invincible for a long period of time. Foreskin Noble’s roll attack forces the player to stop attacking him and run in a circle for about 14 seconds (I counted). Half of the godawful final boss encounter consists of you chasing him as he flies or swims away from you over and over again. Most dragon fights suck because the dragon flies away from you constantly, spending half the fight riding towards the boss isn't fun.

Since she is considered to be the hardest boss (mostly because of waterfowl), I'm gonna complain about Malenia's waterfowl. This move alone makes the whole fight significantly less fun. Here's the best, most consistent counter to Waterfowl: Any time she has to pick a move and waterfowl isn't on cooldown, start running away just in case she picks waterfowl. The first flurry cannot be dodged without an unreasonably difficult maneuver, so why risk it? Instead, if you are far enough when she starts waterfowl, you can outrun flurry 1 and then dodge the other 2. This isn't a good way to create difficulty because it encourages the player to choose boring solutions.

I should note that many bosses have few or none of the problems I’ve described above and they are amazing fights, I just wish every boss was like that.

Compounding these issues is the fact that dodge still activates on button release rather than button press, on top of also having significant input delay. To increase the difficulty from Dark Souls, they’ve greatly amped up the variety of enemy attacks. It is tougher to determine when you should dodge and bosses will frequently try to bait your roll using delayed attacks, occasionally combined with faster attacks that look similar. For these reasons, it was more imperative that dodge was perfect in this game than ever, and yet this critical mechanic is unresponsive. Then there’s the offensively long input buffer window. It is so egregious that you can get hit because you pressed dodge too late, see your character recover from the hit, and then watch as they dodge again from that dodge input you made two seconds ago.

A brief note about PvP: the netcode is atrocious. No matter how good your connection is, attacks don’t register until many frames after they should. It’s also impossible to accurately space any moves out because attacks land even when your character model is not seen within the hitbox of the attack. You will frequently die when you were not visibly hit by anything at all. With that said, PvP can still be fun and it’s certainly better that it exists in a state this broken than not at all.

Overall, I would recommend buying this immediately. I disliked Dark Souls, but Elden Ring is pretty awesome. The options are so abundant and the world grants you so much freedom that I'm sure the majority of players can find some way to play it that they will enjoy.

In accordance with my secret word (fairness), I'll say that I would give this a "mixed" review if I could. It's little more than a glorified personality test, despite claiming to be much more. You can finish this in less than 10 minutes if you don't have a difficult time answering questions about yourself. I would consider this short, even for a measly two dollars.

The illusion that a binary yes/no quiz can reliably make accurate, personalized analyses about people falls apart if you apply even minimal skepticism. Many players feel as though their results speak to them, and that's because just like horoscopes and fortune cookies, it uses broad sweeping statements that intuitively feel true to most kinds of people. In fact, I replayed this game while answering all the questions randomly and the results were equally or perhaps even more accurate than they were when I answered truthfully.

It’s pretty boring.

Imagine a casserole where 40% of it is something you actually want to eat and the rest is utter ♥♥♥♥ that you suffer through. You are undoubtedly playing for the combat, but the game is tirelessly dedicated to slowly dragging you back and forth between quest markers instead. Questing is mind-numbingly tedious. On multiple occasions, I had to deliver a message from one NPC to another one standing in their immediate vicinity. It felt like I was back in middle school recess breaking up with my friend’s gf for him because he was too scared to do it himself.

There are also these dumb, needlessly long little animations plaguing the entire game. Slowly interact with items, slowly walk across tightropes, wait for platforms to rise so I can walk onto them and wait for them to slowly descend, wait for a 6 second animation to finish before I can fast travel, so on and so forth. Aside from that, your character moves like they’re stuck in molasses when they're not on a horse. You’re practically a demigod and yet somehow you still can’t run fast enough to outpace anyone in the special olympics.

The story is your typical subpar fantasy rubbish. Characters are totally uncompelling pious/noble/evil pinheads with no additional dimensionality who serve as meat-sack quest markers. Almost every quest is either collect X of the Y, kill X of the Y, or go to X and talk to Y. You won’t even know why you’re doing it because, just like everyone else does, you spammed G to skip through the boring drivel the NPC who gave you the quest vomited at you.

While it's monetarily free to play, the cost you pay is the enormous amount of time you will waste doing things that aren’t fun or interesting. ARPGs like Grim Dawn and Torchlight II held my attention because they knew not to waste the player’s time and instead kept the focus on gameplay. Perhaps Lost Ark rapidly transforms into something worth playing at endgame, but I’m not willing to shovel more ♥♥♥♥ down my throat in the hopes that the next bite tastes good.

One of the best fighting games you could be playing on PC right now.
- Great netcode
- Active playerbase
- Good gameplay and mechanics
- Amazing tutorial
- High skill ceiling
- Big titty anime waifus
There are very few other fighting games that can check all those boxes. Most of the popular ones fail in one or several key areas, especially netcode. This is worth the money even at full price.

Ultimately, I have to recommend it because its fine, but it bastardizes a lot of what made the original great. It's biggest downfall is actually stated in the title of the game itself. Double dates are not an extra option you earn after obtaining the favor of both girls involved, they are the only way to play the game.

From a gameplay perspective, double dates go back and forth between engaging and tiresomely difficult. Whether this is a positive or negative is up to the player, but rest assured that this is no longer a relaxing match three game for pansies. Sometimes it is so difficult to succeed in this game that I ponder simply returning to a real life bar and shooting my shot with 3D girls instead. There are an onslaught of new ways you can fail a date and you have to micromanage several additional resources. Both girls have an exhaustion meter, then they have rapidly shifting "baggage" that debuffs you during the date (when did this game become so realistic?), and broken heart matches will drain all their stamina.

As a result, if you don't put significant effort into choosing the correct date gifts, the date will end with both girls spitting in your face and denying you of any cooch. While the added challenge is entertaining at times, it also slows the game down to a snail's pace in comparison to the former. What I most dislike is the huge stamina cost you endure for matching 4+ tokens or multiple 3 matches at once. It increases difficulty significantly but robs the player of the chance to continuously execute those large, satisfying matches.

Forced double dates also have dire consequences from a dating sim perspective. Without any way to date one girl at a time, the whole experience becomes totally impersonal. In HuniePop 1, the relationship you had with a girl would build over the course of four dates; they would send increasingly suggestive photos after each one and only put out at the end. Now, there is zero anticipation. You immediately date two girls at once who often don't even know each other and then they bang each other's brains out after one conversation. You also lose the opportunity to ignore girls that you dislike because of this, as they will commonly be paired with girls that you are interested in.

On that note, I suppose its a good time to mention some of the new characters and why I despise them.

Sarah: so, in this game, the writers seem to have leaned into the stereotypes and aggressive western writing. The culmination of this effort is Sarah; an overblown japanophile who showers a grand total of once per week and terrorizes everyone in her vicinity by screaming "SUGOI!!!". It is clear that none of the girls actually like her, making it feel even more out of place when they're somehow willing to dive into her smelly vag. I'm also sort of puzzled by the decision to give Sarah a gross, fish-scented snatch when, unless I am mistaken, this game is supposed to be arousing. Whose fetish is that?

Zoey: while less dreadful than Sarah, she's a delusional brat with a vomit-inducing wardrobe and a hairstyle that resembles Sonic the Hedgehog's disfigured corpse. She is detestable and she looks, quite frankly, stupid. You will miss the so-called "boring", "normal" girls from HP1, like Tiffany, once you've dealt with this annoying broad for even a second.

Candace: in a category of her own where it can be reasonably argued that her design is morally problematic. Candace's main shtick is that she's dumb. By that, I mean REALLY dumb. I would liken her IQ to what you'd expect of an incestuously produced adolescent who suffered 6 concussions. In fact, she's so unrealistically stupid that despite her age of 25, you begin to wonder how capable she is of consenting to having intercourse with you at all. Needless to say that our sexual encounters made me feel like I was taking advantage of someone.

Side complaint, the sex scenes are senseless and immersion ruining now. The scenery doesn't change anymore, instead a loud "BONUS ROUND" sound blares and you immediately copulate regardless of your current location. Why are we banging on the casino floor? An aquarium? For ♥♥♥♥♥ sake, the middle of a park in broad daylight?

If you've never played a HuniePop game, buy the first one. If you enjoyed HuniePop 1, then this is worth it, depending on what you found compelling in the first game. The art is still about as good, but the match three gameplay is much more arduous, complex, and unforgiving (which you may actually enjoy). Most disappointingly, this is unquestionably a worse dating sim.