Recent reviews by Koumori

Do you always play Druids in RPGs? Wish you could carry around that one friend who inevitably separates from the group and gets lost? Perhaps you just have an atavistic urge to grab someone with your teeth and shake them like a ragdoll? Well, this is the ARPG for you!

Having been designed around it as a core gameplay element, Coridden features much better shapeshifting mechanics than most games out there; swapping from human to beast and back again is seamless, and subtle differences in how your character handles on four legs compared to two combine with a full suite of silky smooth quadruped animations (including specialized animations for actions which often get overlooked, such as making a sudden 180° turn or clambering up ledges) to ensure that each beast form looks and feels just as good to play with as the human form does. Plus, as hinted at in my opening paragraph, there are a couple of rarely-explored options available to you as a beast; namely, the ability to carry human players on your back in order to give them greater mobility, and the ability to grab enemies smaller than yourself in your jaws (or, in the case of the scorpion-tailed Scaptor, impale them on your stinger) and drag them around, maul them, or swing them into other nearby foes.

Although you are expected to swap frequently between human and beast forms in order to take advantage of the separate stamina meters and skill cooldowns, it is entirely possible to build your character in such a way as to stay in one form or the other permanently; with twelve human skill trees and eleven beast skill trees, you'll still have plenty of options. Perfect for a duo wherein one player acts as the designated mount and the other as the rider!

Coridden does unfortunately exhibit a bit of "indie game jank," e.g. occasional clipping through environment geometry, and the current game balance is somewhat... less-than-balanced, but it has a solid foundation which only needs polishing up to become something special.

I've completed a new 80+ hour playthrough of Terraria every year since its inception in 2011, and despite continuing this annual tradition for well over a decade now, the game still remains fun and engaging every single time I play it.

Terraria is truly a labor of love, and it shows.

Glorified tech demo; it has lots of ideas, but no depth or polish whatsoever. It definitely won't be in a finished state within the naively optimistic 1-year time span which the dev claims as the ETA for a full release (especially since, at the time of this review, there's only three months left of that aforementioned year). I do not, in fact, expect it to ever reach an acceptably finished state at all—I've seen many "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" early access games like this, and they nearly always either get stuck in development limbo or outright abandoned because the dev doesn't want to and/or doesn't know how to flesh out existing content.

This is one of those instances where I'd give a "Maybe" recommendation if given the option. Numerous minor flaws engender a definite "amateur dev" vibe, and everything from the plot to the combat feels kind of half-baked. It is, however, competent enough to remain moderately enjoyable through a full playthrough (30-ish hours for 100% completion, probably about 20 hours otherwise). Overall a basically decent yet forgettable game; get it at a ≥50% discount.

Edit: Well it's been six months since I wrote this review, and while the game is still terribly optimized it at least runs on the hardware they claim it will run on. Since the game is actually quite fun despite its spotty performance, I suppose I'll change my review to recommended.


Exceptionally poorly optimized. Many people are experiencing unacceptable performance issues despite meeting or exceeding the recommended system specs.

My suggestion would be to wait a few months and see if patches have made the performance more reliable by then.

Inferior to Fable: The Lost Chapters in pretty much every way. Bad controls, terrible UI, and a truly nauseating camera. Even the "enhanced" graphics, which are supposed to be the entire selling point of this remaster, feel like they've lost something from the original identity; they made some small yet significant tweaks to the art style rather than just sharpening textures, and in my opinion it's not a change for the better.

Just buy Fable:TLC. It's cheaper anyway.

Obscene "micro"transaction prices in their new cash shop, and a battlepass to keep the fear of missing out instilled in you. I guess the DLC packs haven't been selling as well as they'd like these days, so they've decided to start milking the whales.

It is still a good game underneath that nonsense, but I can't in good conscience give a positive review to a game with this sort of monetization model.