Recent reviews by Ethiaz

I lost my mind playing this game. This review was written by my last brain cells.

Something like chess mixed with relativity - the faster you play, the more broken it becomes.

In general, stealth in this game is like a chess puzzle. Some enemies can see other enemies or each other, at all times or at certain intervals. The player has to use the unique abilities of the heroes to eliminate or distract the guards with correct timing and order to succeed. This has to be done so that the heroes can move through a certain area, or to kill a certain target, or to perform a certain action in a certain location. The maps are varied and have their unique twists. There are multiple ways to go through and complete missions. The player also has to use the environment and failing to conceal your actions may result in extra problems. It's a great feeling when a combined stealth approach works out.

The story is a historical fiction piece that takes place in the Edo period. There's a conspiracy and a brutal rebellion against the Shogun while you are on the Shogun's side. The setting is bloody and the game doesn't shy away from showing civilians as slaves or being disposed of when they get in the way of your missions for the Shogun. Voice settings offer an option between English or Japanese(modern dialect). The visuals and the soundtrack are simply amazing for this game.

The game doesn't fully let you learn about enemy behavior without forcing you to fail. Once an enemy spots a hero it's basically game over because heroes in an enemy's viewcone will move slower and there is no real chance of escape. There are going to be a lot of restarts early game. Characters can leave footprints but moving stabbed bodies doesn't leave any blood, which is a small inconsistency in detail. Without using an exploit, in the Imai Town mission the heroes have to kill half a garrison just to steal some papers from someone's pocket. Suganuma village is a curveball mission with guards that have their viewcones all over the place. Heroes openly talk to each other and the shinobi likes to yell out the names of his stealth attacks. Even more absurdly, guns are the most useful stealth weapon in this game. Some guards are placed right at the edge of a viewcone which makes it uncertain if they can be killed. Some guards react beyond their apparent awareness. The intro screen is pure earrape.

There are some obvious exploits where triggering a cinematic gets all heroes through an area in an immersion breaking way. If a hero isn't in range for a ranged attack they just start moving towards the target without stopping to actually use the attack. The heroes start to get weird when moved together, they will fight over the same space if ordered to move there. Jumping and areal attacks don't work consistently. When a hero unlocks a gate, they automatically move through it. Heroes automatically stand up and get spotted after exiting water. The kunoichi takes off her disguise when extinguishing torches. The game tends to forget custom controls when launched. Controlling heroes can be unnecessarily difficult and they can misread inputs. There is no pathfinding and a single hero's actions cannot be chained. Clicking through objects sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There is no movement cancel hotkey or a run/walk toggle key.

By far the biggest problem in the game is the inconsistency which is very bad for a stealth game because the player has to be able to predict the effects of their moves. This issue can be circumvented with patience, but speedrunning is hell.

Spend most of the time traveling and blowing up red stuff.

In general, the player has to liberate the whole map by destroying things and completing a few missions. The destructibles are located in cities and bases. The hardest parts for cities are police stations. Bases are defended by the military however they can usually just be ignored while you destroy the base. Sometimes you can get stuck searching for the last objects to destroy. Destroying stuff gets repetitive and eventually turns into a grind. To upgrade the player has to complete challenges of which wingsuit courses and crash bombs are the most fun, while in the others you have to deal with stuff that you already do. There are also missions that are short and the story is dull.

The best part of the game is just toying around with ways to attack bases and move around the huge map. The wingsuit is fun to use and driving boats is awesome due to the water physics. Also watching the destruction and explosions is very entertaining in the early game.

The visuals in this game are colorful and get the job done really well, except for AA and water not mixing well together. Mixed with the soundtrack, they create the perfect atmosphere for the game. However, night time in the game is too bright. The character dialogue is goofy, but it does deliver chuckles and gets the job done.

The physics are all over the place. The main character can do things that make no sense. Objects can randomly explode or fly into the air. The AI sometimes destroys its own stuff and you get rewards. Car driving is weird and the road can sometimes send the cars into the air. Bikes are extremely difficult to control.

The game window is clucky as hell, which makes tabbing in and out difficult. Phone call conversations repeat every time when you load the playthrough. You can just restock ammo, beacons and flares by just reloading the playthrough. Random events are annoying and often end in failure because some random AI somewhere blows something up. Cutscene audio is often out of sync. The message at the end of a challenge sometimes crashes and can fool you into thinking that the game itself has crashed. There have been moments when the camera controls resist the player. GPS navigation for cars is terrible at dealing with off-road destinations. The Laguna Blast challenge is broken as hell and you will learn pain. The enemies tend to be either blind or super aware. The helicopter challenges are for people with 100 fingers. And there are other bugs that should have been fixed.

Only the story mission DLC is worth it, however the Mech Land Assault gets boring fast. The Sky Fortress Pack wingsuit is OP and the main villain's voice is difficult to hear in conversations.

A great game slowly being destroyed by the developers.

The beauty of this game is in its simplicity which, given to players, turns into complexity. Your team has to move the ball to its objective, using cars, while the opposing team tries to stop you. These cars can jump, flip, rotate and boost into the air and all of this combines into a large variety of ways how players can outperform their opponents. All of this leads to a huge skill ceiling in mechanics, tactics, and strategy which can take all the time in the world to master and it's even still being evolved by the players right now. The more successful sophisticated plays you can make the more fun the game becomes.

The cars' appearance can be customized using items that can be junk items that drop randomly, paid Rocket Pass items, special event items, paid items from opening blueprints, paid featured items, or items from another featured roster that requires another special currency. It is a mess and it used to be even more messier when DLC was still sold. But the chaos doesn't end here. Some items can be traded, some can't be traded, some are exclusive and some can be obtained by everyone. Most item colors cannot be changed and you have to find the item with the specific color you want. And there are two cars, one for each team. To get the items you have to either get lucky or trade, while trading is a slow and painful process.

The arenas in the game are standardized, however they still have physical quirks left in them from the time when arenas were different. Also, most new arenas are visually confusing and it's harder to maintain awareness in them. The sound design was changed in the game and it came with the problem of other players' cars becoming less audible. There is no way to disable item drop messages. The MMR system is untransparent and doesn't appear to make any sense. The developers combat toxicity by implementing a program that just bans people for using certain words in chat, while ignoring the context, and still being easily circumnavigated. The game's terrible servers are legendary by this point.

The real problem is the fact that since the release of the game the people in charge have been trying to milk the game as much as possible. They have tried to sell out since the start and have recently succeeded with Epic Games. They have implemented every monetization scheme they could think of which also includes loot boxes. The system is in chaos from monetization methods being built one upon another. And most of the resources have been spent on items and monetization, rather than fixing and improving the game. There is also the dubious scheme where the developers have met with certain creators and those creators happen to support everything what the developers do, while the creators get advertised within the game.

This game will ruin other racing games for you.

The game is spent racing on twisting and turning tracks with an AG ship at five hundred meters per second. The ships are floaty and they have the ability to strafe and boost. They slide when turning and often letting the ship bump the barriers is the fastest way to take a turn. The ships can also get unpredictably spun by other ships. The tracks are located in different gravity environments that affect the speed and jumps. The game has multiple powerups and ship teams, but they are limited by practicality and there is a single team that is overwhelmingly used with just three useful powerups.

The game uses polygon style graphics with a neon style aesthetic. It takes you through exotic to insane locations. From a desert, to a freaking volcano and to the Moon and space.

There is an exploit that gives a ship a permanent speed increase. Too many pilot name banners can block the view of the track. Cheaters keep appearing on scoreboards although they are easy to spot. Portals, that let the ship go between tracks, cause stuttering. Ships in and on tubes are uncontrollable.

The DLC was made after the game because of popular demand for more tracks. It isn't necessary but it is worth it. The DLC tracks can be played in multiplayer by anyone if the host has them.