Recent reviews by The Gleech Cube

Honestly, this game deserves a lot more love than it's gotten, it's very good.

I've had a ton of fun with this game. The basic gameplay is good, the main story took just the right amount of time, the writing is decent, and the monsters design is really good -- some of these things are down-right adorable, while others are, well, pretty damned cool. (Favorites of mine have included the Spectral Wolf, Tar Blob, Ninki Nanka, Nightwing, and Krakaturtle)

Combat works more like a traditional RPG than a Pokemon game, which threw me a bit, but I think ends up being better. At any time, you have six active monsters; when you start combat, you pick a team of 3. They generally fall into one or more traditional RPG roles, based on how you build them: you've got your physical damage, magic damage, healing, buffing, and barriers. (Most monsters can potentially perform more than one role, depending on how they're built.) You've also got items (which give larger bonuses but are rarer) and food (which gives smaller bonuses). Each monster has four skill trees, and the build-space is fairly complex; some monsters I've found good builds with, some I've found great builds with, and some I'm still working on.

When you're not fighting monster battles, the game is a platformer. As platformers go, it's fairly conventional, but it's not bad. While you're going through the world, you can pick one of your monsters to follow you; it will give you a special ability. These abilities do a lot of the things that unlocked items would do in other platformers: some monsters will lift you, some will let you swim, some you can ride, some will give you a "ghost form" that lets you bypass fights, some will let you burn vines or break walls, and so on.

On the whole, the difficulty level is right where I want it to be. The monster fights are tough enough that you'll sometimes lose, but they're not impossible or unreasonable. There are a few boss fights that have thrown me for a loop, but I've managed to get through just about all of them. The platforming is honestly fairly unchallenging, but I'm OK with that -- not every game needs to be Celeste.

The "quality of life" is also very high. You can cary as many of your monsters with you as you want -- there's a nursery where you can leave them, but you don't have to, and there's no limit to the number of monsters you can have with you at a time; you can pick any monster to follow you at any time; you can swap monsters into your team at any time; you don't carry damage or conditions from battle to battle; and they start every battle at full mana, so they never run out of "PP". The biggest things you have to return to town for are changing your outfit, buying more consumables, and upgrading weapons and items.

The game also has PvP, but I have not tried it.

My current team is a rainbow-blob, a magically-levitating turtle with a volcano on it's back, and a rainbow-bird. Buffs for days!

I feel a little bad for this, because the friend who recommended this game to me might see it -- but I kind of hate this game.

One problem is that it's way too complicated. For my money, at least, a Sonic game should be simple: you jump through enemies to kill them, you avoid obstacles, and you run to the right. This game has four characters, with combos, direction-sensitive inputs, special moves, a dodge mechanic, and gear: it's half-way to being a medroidvania. I'm fine with metroidvanias, but I don't think the combination works.

This game also commits some of the cardinal sins of boss battles -- again, at least for my money. Some boss battles have multiple phases; if you die, you have to start over from the first phase; and some of them have long cutscenes with dialog before the fight, and that's where you pick up every time. At least they're skippable, thank god.

I also kind of hate some of the characters -- they're pretty much just stock characters, and they're not particularly likable or interesting takes on those tired archetypes. And the writing is pretty insipid. And I get it, it's a videogame, not the theatre, but still. I think they're trying to be genre-aware and "meta," and I kind of think how absolutely conventional and cliched they're being is supposed to be part of the joke, but I don't think it comes off. (Call me a pretentious prick if you want.)

I particularly loathe Carol the Wildcat. She very much reminds me of the kind of friend who's still breaking plates and pouring syrup on the table even though he's 25 now, not 5, and it's not being a "free spirit" or "wacky" anymore, now it's just being an impulsive, selfish ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I kind of like Neera Li, because her reaction to the rest of the cast is like my reaction to the rest of the cast: she finds them frustrating and wants to shoot them.

Maybe kind of inevitable, but kind of like any game where you've got different characters with multiple moves and special mechanics, I feel like the character balance might not be great. In particular, I think Neera really suffers because she can't move during her Sniper Drive. There are couple of bosses that move around a lot, that Carol seems to be able to just kind of cling to their face and slash, but Neera really struggles to keep up with and hit. Although it's entirely possible that I'm just missing something, or that I suck.

I actually kind of like this game. It's got some flaws -- some of which are significant -- but, ultimately, it's cute, brightly-colored, uncomplicated, and fun. Turns out that's pretty much what i want.

A really great adaptation of Battletech to a turn-based videogame. The map-game would never make a good video-game; the changes HBS made are, I think, all good.

It's also way easier to play than the Battletech map-game.

Down-side: the end-game devolves into you constantly taking on eight assault mechs, possibly plus turrets, in a lance of four, and that sucks; but the game's great fun until that happens. And you can still cheese a win out of it by using lots of LRM indirect fire; that works but is unrewarding.