Recent reviews by Emily Yume

In my restless dreams, I see that town... Stutter Hill

Great game but holy heckles bros can we get the stuttering under control or abolish Unreal Engine lol

Lol Microtransactions retroactively added to a single player game.

Y'all crazy

Garbage fire optimization
Garbage fire engine
Absolute Garbage fire of a price

Avoid this piece of ♥♥♥♥ like the plague, game came out months ago and it's still barely playable. If you absolutely MUST play this game, get it on console or lock FPS to 30.

If I were to give a game the "Worst of 2023" at the time of writing, this turbo turd of a game is my #1 pick. Optimize your dumpster fire of a game if you want to charge $70. Would refund if I could.

Some Quick Impressions / Review on Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty after completing it:

I urge folks to walk into this one treading lightly because even though the phrase : Nioh's Sekiro applies to it, I didn't think it was that great of a game all things considered even after overlooking the numerous performance issues.

Overall, I do recommend the game on a deep sale as it's easily one of the better handling Souls-like games and it has one of the best character creators out there. That said, I'll start off with the positives first - and number one is the gameplay. This game feels snappy, controls and flows great and it looks cool as heck in motion and on top of that, it also allows you the freedom to approach this game in different ways that are all pretty valid for the most part.

Stealth is pretty viable, like Sekiro, it follows a pretty similar interaction path and it also serves to even the odds a lot more in your favor should you decide to approach battles a lot more tactfully and cautiously. Combat itself feels like Nioh but with the added benefit of no stamina and you can freely deflect at any time. You've also got a pretty solid ranged arsenal in the way of Bows, Crossbows and Repeater Crossbows that can let you deal with ranged enemies at leisure. You've also got a pretty big variety of "Wizardry" spells that provide lifesteal, attack and defense buffs as well as ranged and close options to use at leisure.

Boss fights in the game are also a real spectacle and are all animated very nicely, pretty decent enemy variety too! Unfortunately, let's talk about what's not great about this game. First, as varied as your spells are, at the start they do so little damage they are not particularly worth using, I found the use of the damage and lifesteal effects to be infinitely more valuable than any attack spell. Likewise, I'm not sure if this was an oversight or not, but being able to deflect while holding block completely breaks the game and a lot of sections.

I've complained about this with Nioh, and it stands here, I do not enjoy the gameplay loop of this game, and I especially do not like making each level play out stage based as it does currently. I also heavily disliked the fortification/morale system as this plays into another issue I had with this game, and that this is the single, easiest Souls-like I've played to date by far. Outside of the first boss, no other enemy type or boss in the game was tough, lifesteal on fatal strikes is pretty much free heals and often I went through entire stages without using a single Dragon Pot heal. I would probably call this the most accessible Souls-like out there so far.

The story for this game is also pretty dumb and after about half the game, I ended up skipping most cutscenes, which is rare for me on a first time playthrough. Truthfully, I give it a thumbs up on gameplay alone, but due to numerous performance issues, a pretty bad story and a weak flow to the overall game, I would wait for a deep sale on this one.

Unlike most folks I actually like Frey a lot and the overall world and combat felt great to play... whenever it wasn't running like absolute ass.

Because I've been asked by a few friends already, I thought I'd make this much clearer with this: This game does NOT run well on most configurations and I honestly could not tell you why. I get the exact same performance in 4K, 1440p and 1080p with recommended settings and with DLSS. Even tried swapping the DLSS.dll with a more recent and older one - no matter what I do, this game runs extremely poorly.

I suggest everyone stay away from this game, unless you're not fully committed to running this ♥♥♥♥ at 30 fps which is the only time this game doesn't have awful stuttering and frame dips, I would not even bother.

Game was run at the time with a PC with a 3080ti, 32gb 3200mhz ram and a 5900x.

Short Review & Impressions here for The Chant:

It was a pretty good game overall, despite not everything coming together in a cohesive package. There's one aspect of this game I thoroughly disliked but other than that, pretty solid horror survival game akin to the PS3 era of Silent Hill games.

Despite the above mentioned, the game wasn't all that scary but the exploratory aspects and seeing what happened in the past was very neat. Combat is a bit wonky but once you get the hang of it, you can combo strikes into stuns into prism powers which made most combat encounters a joke. Your weapons are craftable sticks (?) with differing attack powers depending on when they where they were used but I didn't really find them to be all that different from one another. That said, having to explore for materials to build your weapons ended up being a pretty fun aspect despite my initial reservations to it, mainly because it heavily rewards exploration, even minor, and how efficient you are at using your Prism powers and tools or just knowing when not to fight and bolt outta there.

That said, the one aspect about this game I heavily, heavily disliked was a stalker enemy introduced early on that goes by the name of Angie, a manifestation that follows you around in the form of a bunch of bugs. Angie broke up the pace whenever she would appear and would often force you to rush through an environment or else you'd have to deal with two annoying mechanics, one is the rapidly diminishing Mind meter, which induces a Panic Attack state that just makes you unable to fight back for a time and the other is the fact that this enemy is a constant thorn on your side as then the lower Mind makes exploring inside the Gloom zones much harder to boot.

I also have to give glowing praise for the game's use of environmental storytelling, it's excellent models and pretty neat enemy designs and the absolutely haunting sound design they went with for the title. All in all though, the game does get a recommendation from me, but I would advise waiting for a sale if you're like me and are already sick to death of Mr. X stalker archetypes as Angie can and will ruin a good bit of the game's pacing, on top of that, the combat being kinda janky may not be for everyone.

If you're looking for a pretty decent horror experience built by what I definitely consider to be a hella hardworking team, I think this is a good one to keep an eye out.

PS - Thank you Mike for having a small chat with me over Steam, I'm glad to see a lot of the stuttering issues were cleaned up to a tee, made post update a stutter free experience and a joy to play at 4K.

Honestly, let me start by saying this game is decent. Combat is still the same classic Shadow Warrior with quick gunplay and with satisfying melee combat. Problem was everything around it.

Let me start with the biggest elephant in the room, or in this game's case, a petite one, the game's like 5 hours long and, at the time of writing, has major stuttering issues and is lacking some pretty obvious features that should have been here in the first place for a game releasing in 2022 - like a Level Select for one.

Like I said previously, combat is satisfying, they took the Doom Eternal approach to this game and just give you a decent arsenal of guns while the katana serves as a ammo refill option at the start, but does become much more powerful later on once you gain the ability to add Crowd Control elements to it. Finishers are pretty satisfying too both giving you a health recovery and in some cases, very powerful tools to clear out waves of enemies quickly.

So with all this praise, why exactly am I not recommending it? Honestly, the 5 hour game time is not a big deal to me as I value short and sweet games more than the 100 hour epic nowadays - the problem really stem from the game itself. Enemy variety is rather low and even though the combat is satisfying, it can get old and repetitive VERY quickly to the point where it being 5 hours ensures the game doesn't overstay it's welcome. The game has a grappling hook that barely functions half the time and is mostly used in on-rails and linear platforming sections.

I had a LOT of problems with these sections, sometimes the cursor for it would not appear even though I'm staring at it and against enemy encounters I found it nigh unusable because it had an annoying tendency to put me above the enemy itself. A lot of my gripes against the game really is just how forgettable the entire experience is, cool visuals aside.

I know this review is written haphazardly and I apologize for the lack of structure, I saw a lot of peeps eyeing this game and honestly, I quite expected better than this, especially after the excellent Shadow Warrior 2. This game feels like a huge step back in every regard, it had some funny moments for me with the meta jokes, but the godawful platforming, repetitive enemy wave based encounters with admittedly great combat and the pretty bare bones story sadly means I won't be revisiting this game for a long time. If you're reading this wondering if you should play it as a fan of these Boomer Shooter titles - it's worth playing at least once, but I would wait for a deep sale unless you believe $50 is worth 5 hours.

This is more a First Impressions thus far, mainly because I do feel like I should warn peeps about some very clear issues present in the game.

When I played a bout of Arcade offline, it felt smooth, fast and fun. The Arcade mode is beyond bare bones however, there's a set of fights to play in a row, some giving you the option to swap who you fight next. For what they included I would have rather them not add anything at all - these large text boxes where the characters just say a wack line and move on is very out of place. There's also no boss character to speak of like Master/Crazy Hand in Smash. There are no endings, no story, etc - it's literally just the win screen at the end.

Moving up to the visuals, I think the game looks great overall, but guys, please, stop over using Chromatic Aberration where it's not needed or atleast give the option to turn that off. It makes the game look blurry and weird even on a 1440p display, maxed out. Animations could use a bit of work, Toph in particular, looks SUPER stiff, their jump animations almost makes her look like she's T-Posing, it looks weird. I don't mind characters having really quick animations, and most of them DO look good. Toph was the outlier for me. This game also seems to lack 'impact'. The sound of strong attacks kinda carry the game in terms of that satisfying hit, but lacking any freeze frames makes the game feel a bit floaty, almost as if everyone in this game has Steve's neutral attack from SSBU.

Presentation wise, the game needs work. The game's menu brought back very vivid memories of PlayStation All Stars' Menus. It looks very basic, very vanilla, which wouldn't be a bad thing, but you can almost tell the UI was mostly designed for a smaller system (namely the Switch) and not touched up, a bit, or added a bit of flair to it. The UI in game also needs a bit of work, the %'s at the bottom are hard to keep an eye on them with how frantic this game can get. The Results Screen and VS screen were also huge misses for me. I did not like the tiny text showing the characters' name with a blank background and their artwork. Why not make a 2D Artwork of their name matching their show's logos or something? The Results screen just has a LOT of empty space I felt, I know it looks this way because it may have 4 players, but most of the games online are 1v1 endeavours.

Also, boy do I think it sucks when characters only have 1 Color Scheme to them. Colors palettes are non existant in this game. If there's 2 April O'Neals in the match, both of them will wear the same yellow jumpsuit with the same hair color, I THINK one of them gets a slightly darker hue, but I'm not even sure about that one. This one I feel may have been an issue with licensing but I do think this is something that SHOULD be addressed, because just keeping an eye out on the barely visible text that can sometimes blend into the background to even know who you are if it happens to be a mirror is annoying.

Stages I feel really need an Omega/FD variant to have a much wider pool of areas to fight in that aren't incredibly annoying. Some of the stages right now feel a bit buggy or annoying to play in, particularly the Powered Toast Man one, as awesome as it looks, if you, at any point get hit into the cereal, it's a complete toss if you'll just die in there or not. One time I got tapped and just insta died, the other time I got hit by a strong down attack and just sank to the bottom, didn't die and popped back up as if nothing happened. Some stages as well seem to have very tiny death zones, Catdog's stage for example, if you even as much as come into contact with the edge BRIEFLY, you kinda just blow up. Speaking of -

Not a big deal, but it would have been cool to have similar animations for sending opponents sky high, like how Smash has the into the distance or camera hit KO's. I also feel like this game would REALLY benefit from having a visual mechanic that's similar to SSBU's Critical Hit screen, cause sometimes I just land a Strong Attack from mid screen, and without any indication, it just kills, either the impact is not there or there should be a bit clearer method to tell how far away people are going to fly off.

As much as I dislike them too, I do think this game should have had a fully casual mode with items being usable, I actually got a bit confused in Lincoln's stage because you had moving items in the stage that almost looked like you could pick em up.

I can't comment a whole lot on the online yet - but the 4 or so matches I did manage to play all felt "jumpy", similar to SFV's. I am running on a wired connection and play other competitive games and FFXIV just fine. Maybe I just had bad luck with the peeps I ran into online, but 0/4 of those games felt good to play.

There's also a BIG issue with controller remapping right now too. For some strange reason, I cannot seem to map my strong attacks to my right stick, but you do get the strong hits when your character is on the ground. That was a really weird decision they kinda just went with. It would have been great to remap controllers a bit better without being forced to rely on Steam Controller settings for these.

I dunno, the bit I played was enjoyable. The game has IMMENSE potential, but this feels undercooked as of launch day at least. Toph's animations look like butt, there's kind of a weird disparity between how some characters look. The Loud kids for example, look super well animated and then well, you get Toph. The presentation could definitely use a bit of work to make it look less like PSAS and more like something unique and snazzy. This game is in desperate need of alt color palettes for characters not just for gameplay visibility in potential mirrors, but also for fun!

The roster to me is also a bit weird. Crazy how we have 3 Spongebob reps, 3 Avatar reps (for the love of all that is holy, please fix Toph lol) 2 Loud House reps, etc yet we have no Miko from Glitch Techs, no XJ9, no Jimmy Neutron and other very popular Nickelodeon characters. It's a good roster overall, but it's like releasing Smash Bros with Mario and Luigi, but not including Link or Captain Falcon.

(PS - I am fully aware Glitch Techs is hella niche, I just want Miko in this game maaan)

I don't think I have ever been more torn on recommending or not recommending a game.

Not going to go super in-depth with this "review", but I will say - this is the best worst game I've played in a very long time. So much of this game has the potential to be a 9 /10 or even a 10/10 contender just due to how creative it's systems are.

To explain the above a bit more - Biomutant has a LOT of well designed mechanics that are ultimate held back by the game itself in a way that end up being detrimental. If you take the game by bits and pieces, each individual mechanic would actually classify as "Great" or even "Innovative" but all together, the game is just repeatedly dragged down by a ton of small issues that eventually add up into a large detriment.

For example, the game's Crafting System for Weapons is easily one of the most creative I have ever seen in a game, I would even go as far as to say it's very innovative - but the end result ends up being 2 detriments to the game itself and one that affects this system. First off, the combat in the game is hardly balanced properly, melee weapons are practically worthless outside a very specific scenario and Automatic Rifles are beyond broken, even more so when you unlock Perfect Reload. Secondly, same as before, not only are the enemies not able to deal with your onslaught of lead, the way the world continually scales to your character, is not balanced properly - enemies ONLY scale to your Level, meaning they do NOT scale according to the power you possess, which means you can end up completely breaking the game 2 hours into it if you manage to get lucky enough with an elemental base for an Automatic Rifle.

The game also just straight up feels at times like it does not respect your time. I'm not sure why they thought giving you tools to unlock certain areas, like a crowbar to unlock doors, a big punchy fist to break down walls, a Jet ski and other stuff also require you to complete an asinine fetch quest to raise them to Lvl 2, just to use them in like, 4-5 more scenarios that you normally couldn't. Honestly, I could go on and on about how much this game just presents a very well thought out, enveloped system only to just severely undermine it with another mechanic.

Not only that, the sound in this game is so, off putting. Even after turning the "Narrator" all the way down to 0, he would still find ways to just spit out nonsense from time to time. Weapons and guns all have different sounds for the most part, but feel kinda drowned out, like there's a lack of proper sound tuning. There's barely any music to speak of, and there is, I just barely remember any of them and certainly none I would pop in for a jam here or there.

To give it SOME praise, this is one of the visually stunning games I've played in a while. The environments are all super detailed and just fun to explore. Plenty of vistas and sights to see, and just makes running around for hours a very relaxing experience for the most part.

So, why am I recommending this game? Well, I personally got 30 hours of enjoyment from it and I may pop back in to get 100% eventually. I did really love some of the systems the game has. I think overall, I ended up walking away pretty happy from it despite my reluctance in recommending it.

I will say however, that my review is a touch misleading. The reason for that is because I actually do NOT recommend the majority of you actually pick up this game until it hits a deep sale. I personally had a pretty good time with it but just as a one of, I know a lot of you will straight up not enjoy this game. Take that as you will.

Well, they did it. I actually think this game, for me atleast, is the best in the series, in more ways than one.

Let me start by explaining what the game's about - you play as Alex Chen, someone who the game tells you has had a pretty rough upbringing and is brought to a small town, community driven locale by her brother. Her powers are a little harder to explain in detail, but essentially boil down to telepathy. I still think LiS1 had the more "gameplay" oriented powers by allowing you to turn back time, but True Colors easily beats the haphazardly used telekinesis in LiS2. In essence, your powers function as a form of world building - which makes the small community more lived in and very pleasant.

Chapter 1 is a little slow, and then proceeds to stab you at the end of it, but the following chapters more or less focus on exploring how Alex interacts with the community while attempting to solve a mystery that I won't spoil here. I will say, this is downright my favorite in the series. I think this game has a great blend of slice of life elements with the usual emotional storytelling - in a way that does it a bit better than the first game. One thing I did think could have been fleshed out a bit more, was Alex' relationship with her best friends Ryan and Steph in the game and, kinda similar to LiS2, it's a little hard to tell the passage of time in between chapters and larger events.

Talking a bit about the characters - I'm surprised by how much I loved the cast in this game. Alex herself feels like a pretty realistic rendition of a girl whom has had a hard life and is just now starting to slowly crack out of that shell and the rest of the cast have their own quirks and perks that makes them endearing. It's easy to get a grasp on characters due to the way her powers work - because you can read into people's moods and their thoughts, they manage to make even random NPCs memorable, sometimes turning them into unsuspecting side quests.

Another thing I have to especially mention - holy crap does this game look amazing. This series has definitely gone far from it's indie beginnings. They still keep the watercolor textures for the most part, but are now backed up by incredible sharpness, and a lighting engine that continues to improve each time I buy into the series. This entry in particular, has some of the prettiest Ray Tracing effects I've seen to date. The way light bounces off Alex' glasses in some scenes is a sight to behold, absolutely phenomenal job by the devs and artists.

The music in this series has always been a strong high point with it's 'Homey" feeling use of licensed tracks and this game is no different - although I would say the OST to me was a bit less memorable than past entries. Voice acting is absolutely phenomenal though, LiS1 and BTS had great voice acting while I was unimpressed by LiS2's for the most part, but the entire cast in TC was great.

Honestly, I can't give this game enough praise without trying to spoil anything. I think this game strikes a perfect blend of mystery, slice of life elements and social elements that this series has kinda lacked since LiS1. I didn't enjoy LIS2 because of how saturday morning cartoony it felt and I'm glad they decided to move away from that misery driven experience to a more character and community oriented one. One thing I will say, I do think the price is a bit on the steep side - the game is about on the same length as past entries. Roughly 10-12 hours long, but it does have a neat collect-a-thon that may be enjoyable to completionists.

This is now definitely in my top five for 2021. Highly recommended from myself.