Recent reviews by Druanach

if you like Super Mario 64, you'll like A Hat in Time. It's a great and cute 3D platformer with very smooth movement and responsive controls.

Base game levels are of pretty "standard" difficulty (with optional paths/collectibles that may be slightly more difficult), while the Death Wish DLCs ups the difficulty to eleven - so there's content for casual players as well as tryhards.

I personally suggest playing with keyboard + mouse unless you're very experienced with controllers, as the mouse allows for the most accurate movement control in my opinion.

Atmospheric puzzle game with very well made puzzles. Easily beats every other puzzle game I've ever played in terms of puzzle design except for Baba Is You, and is on par with the Myst series for story/atmosphere.

Great to play and max once if you like a chill grindy game.
Endgame grinds are really annoying though, the worst among them being player owned ports, which requires logging in once or twice daily to click though an extremely sluggish UI (clicks take up to a second to be processed) for multiple minutes every time, and doing this for multiple months up to potentially a full year, if one want to get any cape past max cape (quest/comp/trimmed comp).

Another important thing is that Jagex, the dev company, is owned by a private equity firm. This means that they want to squeeze as much money out of the playerpase as they can, and then sell it to another private equity firm which will repeat the process. Meaning that over time the monetization of the game will become ever more predatory, something to keep in mind before deciding to invest any time and money into this game.

The game is fun for a while, but build diversity suffers a lot due to some boss/enemy mechanics being unavoidable, so lifesteal builds that can just facetank anything are simply the best, but extremely boring, choice.
Going for anything else is just reducing survivability for absolutely no gain, as lifesteal builds inherently go for maximum DPS to get maximum healing. Any build that would require actually avoiding boss attacks gets at most a little extra damage from less investment into lifesteal, but loses a lot of effective DPS due to having to run around a lot instead of being able to attack constantly.

Update: The game has seen quite some changes since I last played. An 'Evade' skill was added that allows dodging attacks, and bosses have been improved - for example, one egregious boss that had a tiny arena it would fill with AoEs is now much more interesting and all his attacks can be avoided now.
Lifesteal builds are still incredibly powerful and boring though.
Overall I still think the game is worth playing for a bit (like one playthough, potentially even into NG+2 to get to full power for your build), but combat would need major changes to remain interesting for longer.

Fun for a bit, but the many bugs and the needless grinding is annoying.

My main gripe is that when the game lags, your inputs can just be ignored - which is deadly if it affects your ability to block (either doesn't block, or doesn't switch to a weapon that can block). You can play a half-hour mission perfectly and then die to a single missed input you have no control over.

Another major issue, which has been made even worse with Versus (the PvP gamemode), is the P2W DLC characters and weapons which are all completely unbalanced. Characters and ranged weapons with infinite ammunition where ammo is usually a balancing factor, ranged weapons for the melee-only classes, melee weapons that are just better in every single way than existing weapons, etc.
Most egregious is Grail Knight. Playing with one is extremely annoying in PvE as it turns the game into a walking sim - he is just so incredibly overpowered, being able to delete anything including monsters in a single hit each each.
Engineer is just plain broken in both PvE and PvP due to having the best ranged weapons by far, one of which has infinite ammunition, and the other has insane damage and AoE. Plus he also can make infinite grenades, which are very strong and there's a limited amount per map.

Another game that thinks that horrbile controls equals difficulty. Having to remember a dozen 8-key-stroke combinations makes this game feel more like work than a game.

Edit: After fixing the above issue with macros (I don't care if this may get me banned, I'm not playing this game without these), the game is less annoying to play. There's still a ton of issues though:

- Most of the game is spent walking around meaninglessly between locations. Add some enemies or shorten distances.
- Swarms only spawn in one location at a time near one player at random. this means that 3 of 4 players don't have any enemies to fight and the gameplay is trivial for them, while one is just running from the horde since fighting it is suboptimal usually (some mission types spawn enemies around the objective, which partially fixes this, but most don't).
- The game does not balance itself with regards to the number of players (e.g. less enemies spawn with fewer players) - in fact, it does the opposite, as each player in a team adds a buff for every player. Combined with the previously mentioned swarm spawn mechanic this makes solo almost impossible on high difficulties while 4-players is trivially easy even on the hardest difficulty.
- Crashes and bugs galore. You can expect a big chunk of missions to fail due to random client crashes, as well as bugs like terminals not being reachable or not doing anything, or objectives not completing despite having done everything, or the server connection being lost for even 5 seconds which immediately ends the mission with zero rewards.
- The game does not capture the mouse cursor properly, even in fullscreen mode, leading to the game losing focus a lot if using more than one monitor. This usually results in an unavoidable death as you cannot control your character for a few seconds when this happens.

Also, why the hell does the game keep repeating "press 1 2 3 to switch weapons"? I think after dozens of missions I might have just learned that. Disabling hints in the options also doesn't fix this.

Your stats (e.g. speed) improve by levelling up - meaning that you have to grind A TON before you can even really play the game properly.

I cannot stress enough how incredibly stupid such a levelling system is for a (multiplayer!) racing game.

Puzzles at the start are pretty good, but get very tedious later on while not becoming much more difficult. The main culprit is the movement which while it allows for good puzzles, also makes moving around within a puzzle a chore. Some puzzles even have totally unnecessary path segments where you need to do like 20 button presses in the correct order just to get from A to B - all without any sausages involved, so theres 0 reason why these couldn't just be straight lines instead.

There's puzzles of various difficulties, especially also in the DLCs.
I liked that there's often multiple ways to solve things - though often in what seems like unintended ways by abusing physics ^^
Walking is a bit slow, but the game isn't that long and you'll be spending most of the time thinking about how to solve a puzzle anyway.

The game is extremely easy and there's no difficulty setting. Apparently it gets harder at higher levels - but you'd have to invest a significant amount of time grinding boring stuff to reach that, and maybe it won't hold up by then so I'll pass.