Recent reviews by iriyap

Significantly worse performance than the base game, constant stutters when moving through open world areas, and any time there are big particle effects (which is every boss fight) your frame rate will tank.

This was my first Darksiders game, so I dived in with no expectations, but ended up really enjoying it. The user rating is really unfair in my opinion, this is a pretty nice and polished game, although not without flaws.

It's not really a souls-like either, there are only some superficial elements, like the "bonfires" you respawn at, the "estus" like healing, animation commitment (can be turned off via the "classic" mode, which I recommend). The game has a 2 weapon combat system, you fight with the whip + one of the 4 elemental weapons (dual chains/fire, spear/lightning, hammer/gravity and dual swords/ice), and there's also a chakram/glaive as your sole ranged option. The combat is much faster paced than Souls and there's a lot of combo potential, e.g. you can do Scorpion's "get over here" thing (from Mortal Kombat) to catch an enemy with your whip and then juggle them. You can also jump, stomp, do charged attacks, and there's even a Devil Trigger like super transformation.

You can't block and the dodge is just a short dodge step, no rolling. The only defensive option is the dodge counter a la Bayonetta/Oneechanbara. You dodge at the last second, the game slows down and you press one of the attack buttons to counter, which deals a lot of damage and has very satisfying animations. This also usually breaks the enemy's combo, thus making a lot of 1v1 fights quite easy. Just bait the first hit, then counter and go ham.

However, the combat system shows its flaws when it comes to group fights. The game loves spamming large groups of fast enemies and even with the whip's wide, sweeping hitboxes it's still easy to get overwhelmed and chain stunlocked, as you can't really dodge counter when surrounded by multiple enemies, so you kind of just pull back and mash. The camera is not the best either, it's too low when locked on, with Fury partially obscuring the opponent.

The enemies hit hard and it's possible to get 2 shot, especially early on when you're low level and don't have any upgrades, however the game offers a plethora of difficulty options to accommodate all skill levels (but none of them will let you just button mash through the game, you still have to counter). I recommend playing on balanced (aka normal) + classic mode (you can dodge cancel your attacks).

There are a lot of boss fights, but none of them are too hard, except for maybe Lust who's a double boss fight very similar to Ornstein & Smough in Dark Souls, as well as the last boss in the Void Keepers DLC who's a little overtuned.

The game is set in a large interconnected world with no loading screens and numerous shortcuts and secrets to find, and you can tackle the areas and bosses in a non-linear fashion. There are also metroidvania elements, you unlock 4 elemental powers and each comes with multiple new movement abilities (e.g. high jump, wall jump, gliding, walking on water etc). There's a fair amount of platforming and even some puzzles (although nothing too crazy). The game has no map and you're thrown in with no guidance or handholding, which I found really refreshing and fun. The exploration is excellent, you pick a direction, drop down a hole, and can end up somewhere really cool.

While the game is not AAA, the graphics are quite pretty, and the animations are very smooth. The cutscenes are very cinematic and the voice acting is solid. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4 and I haven't encountered any bugs or issues (aside from the missing texture for a shipping container, which you can fix using this mod[www.nexusmods.com], apparently the texture got lost in one of the updates).

Overall, if you're a fan of challenging action games and metroidvania like exploration with no guidance, Darksiders III is lots of fun and an easy recommendation.

Definitely one of the best games I've played in recent years, but since there are already thousands of reviews singing the game's praises, I'll focus on the shortcomings instead.

- The difficulty is all over the place. I realize it's hard to balance an open world game, but this is the first Souls game where you can walk into a boss room and 3 shot the boss in 3 seconds. Many non-story bosses just seem way undertuned.
- Weapon upgrade materials are too limited, you have to focus on 2-3 weapons until the end game when you can finally buy as many as you'd like. Regular upgrade path going all the way to +25 requiring 97 (!) stones total is just way too tedious. Given that the game is 100+ hours long, not being able to freely switch weapons until the end game is just too odd of a design choice, it discourages experimentation.
- You will have to wiki the NPC quests because it's an open world game with no quest log and the NPCs can move literally anywhere in the world, and there are often 0 clues for the next step of their quest line (e.g. Diallos moving to Jarburg).
- Everywhere but the tiny hub is a warzone. Some traditional RPG towns would have helped a lot, like e.g. the capital city in Dragon's Dogma.
- Some weapon classes like the great hammers have been nerfed since Dark Souls 3 and are rather underwhelming compared to other weapons.
- Rats and dogs have been buffed up massively, in both damage and poise. You can no longer poise through their bites with a greatsword.
- Too many hard enemies boil down to "flails randomly with infinite poise". How do we make our famous series harder? Just make the enemy a walking hitbox. Yeah, fun.

PC port:

- CPU optimization. The game tends to put too much load on the first CPU thread instead of distributing the workload evenly, resulting in a very CPU heavy game. Particle effects in particular can be very CPU intensive. You need a good recent CPU to run this game comfortably, and it'll still drop frames in a few specific scenes (e.g. the Walking Mausoleum in Consecrated Snowfields).
- Crashing. The game does occasionally crash and sometimes even lock up, especially when quitting back to title and reloading a save, possibly due to a memory leak. In some rare cases the crashes can also corrupt your saves, so make sure to make manual save backups just to be safe.
- 60 fps lock, no ultrawide support. The engine does support these things, and there are mods that unlock both, so it seems like these features were intentionally locked to maintain parity with consoles. E.g. the game actually supports ultrawide perfectly, HOR+, no UI stretching, but then it ADDS BLACK BARS on top of it, just to spite you, seemingly. People know this because the black bars are buggy and sometimes do not load, letting you play in actual ultrawide for a bit.
- No DLSS, FSR or any other upscaling support. Again, available through mods, but you'll be forced to play offline because of the anti-cheat. And it's a shame because the raytracing mode that was added in a patch is basically unusable without DLSS unless you have a top end GPU.

Cyber Shadow is the video game equivalent of stuffing your face full of jalapeños and biting down. And then doing it again and again. It's definitely one of the spiciest indie platformers I've played yet, a lot more difficult than The Messenger or Shovel Knight. The beginning is not even that hard at first but once you get your full moveset the game takes off the kid gloves and cranks the difficulty up to 11, all the way to Ninja Gaiden (NES) levels and maybe even beyond.

There are (somewhat infrequent) checkpoints and infinite lives, so the developers went all out with making the game as challenging as possible. There are numerous nail biting sections such as riding a small platform over a chasm of insta-death spikes while fighting off flying enemies and parrying projectiles, where any single mistake will set you three rooms back. Tanking and damage boosting are almost never a thing because the enemies hit hard and there's knockdown and insta-death hazards everywhere.

Sadly, the starting moveset is very limited, just attack and jump. But very quickly you unlock shurikens, wall climb (same as in Mega Man, you slide down walls), upwards slash (with projectiles if you have SP), downwards slash (aka pogo, with a small explosion if you have SP), projectile parry (tap forward when you're about to eat a projectile, then press attack to send it back), and then sprint, teleport slash, double jump and the ability to charge ALL of the above attacks. The teleport slash is the coolest ability by far and the game's main gimmick. Basically when sprinting all regular attacks become teleport slashes, you teleport a short distance while slashing through whatever's in the way. It lets you move very fast, gives a lot of i-frames, and can also be chained, even mid-air. You can double jump high in the air, teleport slash towards an enemy, then teleport slash back through the same enemy to your initial position.

The artwork and music are stellar, there are gorgeous anime style cutscenes (key frames only, not fully animated) between the chapters. The game has 11 chapters total which will take you around 10 hours on a blind playthrough, although once mastered the game can be beaten much faster (there's an achievement for beating it in under 3 hours). This is primarily a precision platformer and the boss fights aren't the focus and there aren't too many, although the final boss has 3 phases with no saving or health refills, so you'll have to sweat a bit before you watch the ending. This is not a metroidvania either, it's entirely stage based, although you can replay earlier stages with newly unlocked abilities to access secret rooms with HP/SP upgrades.

If I had to nitpick, the shuriken and the parry should have had their own buttons, but the developer chose to embrace a NES like control scheme with only 2 main buttons (jump and attack), so the shuriken is up+attack, while the upwards slash is down+attack (a bit counterintuitive), and the parry is tap forward. Sprinting is double tapping by default, but can thankfully be changed to one of the shoulder/trigger buttons.

Here's hoping that hard mode/new game plus update is still coming some day.

Triangle Strategy is ultimately a decent game for the fans of turn-based tactics but the extreme amount of very dry dialog will be a turn-off for many.

True to its name, the game follows a war over resources (salt in this case) between three kingdoms, yet it's extremely black and white. Your home kingdom is portrayed as entirely innocent while the other two are ruled by mustache twirling crooks. Naturally, you get invaded a few chapters in, and as a lord of a high house you must forge shaky alliances in order to survive.

Branched storytelling was a big selling point, but the choices you make are ultimately an illusion, as the game just circles back to the main story path 1-2 chapters later. E.g. early on you can choose to surrender a very important person to the enemy (who wants them executed) or make a desperate stand to protect this person. You'd think, this is a crucial choice that splits the game in two different routes. But it doesn't matter what you pick, that person will fake their death and become irrelevant until the late game. Later on, when retaking a city you can choose to either destroy the nearby dam to flood the city or infiltrate the castle and assassinate commanding officers. It doesn't matter, the city gets destroyed anyway. Basically your choices only affect what immediate battles you get to fight. Pick one, and you fight these guys on this map, pick the other and it's a different map, but the story continues the same way regardless. All that said, the choices do matter for the ending. The real ending requires a specific set of choices, otherwise you'll have to pick from 3 bad endings which essentially boil down to "surrender to enemy A", "surrender to enemy B" and "run away".

Also, it's worth noting that despite its attempts to ape Game of Thrones (e.g. the first chapter is essentially the same setup as the first episode of the show), the writing is still extremely Japanese. The game is hilariously overwritten, with characters talking about the same things over and over, stating their emotions out loud (often via monologues), there's an extreme amount of exposition and recaps. You'll sit through a lengthy cutscene only to get booted to the world map where the narrator will summarize the whole thing once more. The writers absolutely think the player is a complete dummy who needs every single detail spoonfed to them many times over. There's no nuance or hidden depth to anything that happens in the game. The villain is that rude guy who hates everyone and laughs at his own evil schemes. The protagonists always win their battles, no matter the odds. The game makes no attempt whatsoever to make its characters come off as human. Which is fine for anime, as anime is so reliant on tropes, but this kind of writing is a very poor fit for a serious war drama.

The combat is actually rather well done. You know how most Japanese made SRPGs are very heavy on the RPG part and basically boil down to team management simulators where grinding up your dudes is THE game, and the strategy part is walking your army into theirs? Triangle Strategy is the complete opposite of that. There's no job system, no generic recruits, all 30 playable units are unique named characters with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game has anti-grinding measures as well, the EXP gain is rubber banded, so it's impossible to outlevel the challenge, while previously benched units will catch up to the current level in just a few turns. There's barely any customization either, just 2 accessory slots and a small perk tree which is all linear upgrades. An ice mage will always be an ice mage, but he's also the only one who can create ice walls to block off paths and cast silence on enemy mages. There are some really creative units too, like a guy who builds ladders to let you scale any cliff, or a circus clown who can mimic any enemy's last used ability.

All of this means that it's a legit tactics game and offers a good challenge even on the normal difficulty, which is pretty refreshing when it comes to JRPGs. There's no way to brute force a win, and a single mistake can result in a lost unit (no permadeath though). Having said that, if you're familiar with these types of games, the good old "stay together and let them come" strategy works out just fine 95% of the time. Tanks up front, melee guys on the sides, archers and mages in the back, everyone within the range of a healer. Most maps boil down to picking a good place to defend and staying there until everyone else is dead.

Negatives wise, the AI is too forgiving, the enemy often has twice as many units as you, but their faraway units just skip their turns. If there's a boss, they will often do nothing until you either kill most of the enemies or get too close to the boss. Mages are too powerful, you get 4 elemental mages with AoE spells, and a guy who recharges their mana (TP), and these 5 are basically the best units in the game and will deal the lion's share of damage. There's little enemy variety, it's all swordsmen, pikemen, mounted pikemen, bowmen, shield bearers, rogues, mages, healers and sometimes hawk riders (flying bowmen). There are no animals or monsters of any kind.

Just on the matter of the story alone, I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone not used to Japanese RPGs and visual novels. There's 40-60 minutes of cutscenes between the battles, you have to be able to stomach the glacial pacing and the robotic dialog. I wouldn't recommend the game to the fans of Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre either, as this is not a unit building game. But if you're fine with skimming through interminable cutscenes to get to a surprisingly well designed tactics game, then you'll have fun with this.

Persona 5 is one of those JRPGs you absolutely have to try if you have any interest in the genre. Does this mean the game is perfect? Far from it, but the overall package is so brimming with content and style it's very hard to pass it up.

If you're not familiar with Persona, it started as a spin-off of Megami Tensei, which is a dungeon crawler series where you build a team of demons to do the fighting for you. Persona took the demon fusion mechanics from its progenitor, simplified the combat a bit to make it more palatable for a broader audience, and combined the dungeon crawling gameplay with social simulation. In each Persona game you play as a high school transfer student making acquaintances and building connections all over the city, both in and outside your school, and these bonds in turn increase your demon fusion capabilities, making the dungeon crawler and social simulation halves of the game feed into each other.

Make no mistake, the Persona games are some of the most story heavy JRPGs ever made, and Persona 5 Royal is by far the longest in the series, requiring 100-150 hours for just one playthrough. Yet it never feels like a drag due to its clever design. The game runs on a day-to-day calendar system, once you're past the obligatory prologue section, you get to decide what you want to do each day. Do you want to go dungeon crawling today? Or do you choose to bond with some of your team mates? Maybe give a call to that hot teacher? Or make friends with a disgraced politician, or wax philosophy with a budding psychologist? All of these character stories can be tackled in any order, and the way you engage with these characters does matter, pick wrong responses and your relationship might stall. And virtually all female characters can also be romanced, even your seniors.

At the same time, this is also a traditional JRPG where you explore dungeons and fight enemies. Similar to Megami Tensei, you get to recruit demons (virtually any non-boss enemy), at which point they become your "personas", and you can fuse them together to make new and stronger personas. There's a massive roster of personas, covering most real world religions, medieval grimoires and modern urban legends. Yes, you can summon even Holy Mary and Satan. Each persona has its own beautifully crafted unique look. Fusing personas allows you to not only create higher level personas, but also mix and match their skills, so this customization can be a very fun time sink.

The dungeons in Persona 3 and 4 sadly consisted of procedurally generated hallways and blocky rooms, which was a common complaint. The dungeon quality was not only inadequate compared to the mainline series, Shin Megami Tensei, but just pretty poor for JRPGs in general. Persona 5 rectified this complaint by introducing completely handcrafted dungeons, full of unique setpieces, puzzles and story sequences, with virtually no recycled rooms. These so called "palaces" are always a spectacle from start to finish and each is rich in content requiring about 5 hours to clear. Although, there's still a single procedurally generated dungeon that acts as a filler between the story ones.

The art style is extremely well done, you won't believe this was originally a PS3 game, it's just so beautiful. Every random action you take has a snazzy animation. The jazz soundtrack is very catchy and always a joy to listen to, featuring a lot of vocal tracks that get your blood pumping during the battles and dramatic story scenes.

Negatives wise, the game is on the easy side, even compared to previous Persona games, the pacing is also worse, as the developers were worried about newcomers getting lost, so everything is explained many times over which can be a bit of a drag. You have to be fine with very large amounts of cutscenes and text.

To sum it all up, this is honestly a must play for any fan of anime and JRPGs, but if you're on the fence, consider if you'll be okay with a story heavy game where you can easily go 10 hours without any combat.

Way too many auto-scrolling levels, the whole second half of the game is nothing but auto-scrolling levels. Something is always chasing you (a tornado, a monster, rising acid or lava) or you're stuck on a moving platform, one wrong jump and it's all over. And with only one checkpoint per level, the game rarely feels enjoyable, it's just repeating the same sections over and over until you memorize all the blind jumps and can finally be done.

Worse yet are the dragon mask levels where your character is running automatically and you can only double jump and dash downwards, all at rather high speed, leaving you barely any time to react, it's incredibly frustrating. I was expecting a cool retro platformer, not Temple Run. Very disappointed.

This is a high quality game but with a very niche appeal, being a more modern take on the classic Final Fantasy job formula. If you loved games like Final Fantasy III 3D and Octopath Traveler, this is more of the same, just with better visuals, smoother combat and various quality-of-life improvements. Don't be spooked by the II in the title, the game's story and setting have no relation whatsoever to Bravely Default and Bravely Second, which are still 3DS exclusives and the director has no plans of porting them to Steam[i.imgur.com].

And while there's a decent amount of story, it's not the focus. This is a gameplay heavy JRPG for people who love job systems and experimentation. There's no "story mode" either, the only difference between casual/normal/hard difficulties is enemy speed, i.e. how often the enemy gets turns, you still have to exploit weaknesses and the damage taken/dealt will always be 100%. So if you're unwilling to engage with the job mechanics, you will not be able to progress, as bosses can wipe you in just a couple turns if you don't know what you're doing. It's largely impossible to overpower bosses by grinding levels, you need to build a sensible party, e.g. the classic tank/healer/physical attacker/magical attacker.

If you've never played a Bravely game before, the main gimmick of the series is the brave/default system. Brave lets you borrow up to 3 turns, while default banks the current turn and puts the character in the guard stance. So e.g. you can default for 3 turns, then brave 3x to execute 4 actions at once. This lets you deal a lot of damage while still guarding most of the time. And you can also choose to be brave even without any extra turns banked, which will simply make your character skip the next turns (but without guarding), this is a gamble that can pay off if you know those extra turns will net you a victory.

The game offers 24 jobs to choose from, each with a unique outfit for every party member. Of course, given this many options, the balance can be shaky. Some jobs are must haves, some are great for their active abilities, while others are only worth it for 1-2 passives. Your main job will decide your stat scaling, weapon proficiency, active abilities as well as give you up to 2 specialties (unique perks, e.g. white mages can AoE revive and remove status). You can also choose a sub-job but it will only be used for its active abilities (barring some late game exceptions). And you can also equip up to 5 passive abilities from any jobs you have learned. Compared to previous games, buffs have been nerfed making bards quite weak, and turn order is now individual instead of global, meaning characters with high speed and low equipment weight get more turns.

Some players complain about puzzle bosses, but I didn't find this to be true, outside of some late game exceptions. The vast majority of bosses are beatable with any party combination, provided it's within reason. You never need to switch to a specific job to beat a boss. However, it's worth noting that the game relies a lot on counters, but at the same time you get a passive pretty early on that makes you immune to physical counters, and magical counters are pretty rare.

The game offers mostly excellent quality-of-life with 4 combat speed options (adjustable on the fly) plus a button that lets you repeat your last turn's actions which is useful when fighting trash mobs. However, there are also some notable UX issues, such as dungeons having no maps and the battle info screen only listing weaknesses but not immunities and resistances (although, those can be looked up in the lore menu). Also, the quest log only keeps track of active quests, you can't see what quests you have completed.

Audio and visuals wise, I thought the game was excellent. The characters look very cute and diverse, the models are high poly with very detailed textures despite the semi-chibi art style. The towns are 2.5D and look like oil paintings, while everything else is fully 3D. The soundtrack in particular is really good, it was composed by Revo, the same musician that worked on the previous Bravely games, and it's full of bangers. Just listen to the boss theme or the second battle theme. The localization is very high quality and done in the same style as Dragon Quest XI, featuring a plethora of British accents and regional slang, which is very fitting for this kind of game.

Side content wise, the game has 100 side quests, which can range from basic fetch quests to high effort ones with fully voiced cutscenes and exclusive dungeons and bosses. The post-game is sadly lacking but there's a New Game Plus mode that allows for some interesting challenges such as a level 1 run.

Overall, Bravely Default II is an easy recommendation provided you're into classic JRPGs and value complex turn-based combat over story and characters.

Hyper Light Drifter is a very artsy top-down hack & slash game with some metroidvania elements, somewhat inspired by 2D Zelda and Dark Souls, and set in a post-apocalyptic world with some cyberpunk elements. But make no mistake, the main appeal is the trippy visuals and the oppressive ambient soundtrack, the combat can be fun, but the game is not much of a challenge if you play a lot of action games.

The story is extremely vague, the protagonist is a katana wielding masked swordsman roaming the world looking for a cure for his sickness, but beyond that it is all up to interpretation, as the game is entirely wordless, with no dialog or any other text, not unlike games like Journey or INSIDE. It all essentially boils down to a giant metaphor for a heart condition because the lead developer is sick in real life.

The combat is your average Souls inspired "slash twice then dodge". The rhythm is pretty unique though, your walking speed is quite slow but you move very fast when dashing and the first dash upgrade allows you to chain dashes indefinitely. The drifter can also deflect projectiles with his blade, as well as wield a variety of guns, from a basic pistol to a shotgun and various energy weapons. Ammo is in short supply but you restore it by slashing at the enemies giving the formula a certain ebb and flow.

Personally, I had a lot of fun hunting for secrets, because the game has tons and many of them are very sneaky and require thinking outside the box. Things are often obscured by the game's top down perspective and you basically try to break out of bounds to get them. You can find currency for upgrades, keys for optional areas and even alternate outfits that provide a variety of passive buffs.

The game is quite short, with only 4 main areas and 8 bosses. A completionist playthrough will take about 15 hours, and if you don't care about secrets, it will be around half that time. Check out Death's Door if you want a similar game but a bit more modern and less artsy.

This game is hard to recommend. It's just so low budget, and worse yet, very padded with dungeons going on forever and the combat system, while being a fun idea in concept, boiling down to mindless skill spam. I'd honestly recommend playing the sequel first as it does virtually everything much better, and then coming back to Overdose, if you still want more. Strangely enough, Overdose spoils a major plot twist of the sequel (Marie), while the sequel doesn't spoil any parts of Overdose's story, so that's another reason to start with the sequel.

With that disclaimer out of the way, Caligula Effect: Overdose is a niche JRPG made by some of the Persona 2 staff (such as Tadashi Satomi). The premise is very similar to the Matrix movie. People are abducted into a virtual world without realizing it, someone redpills you, and now your job is to assemble a group of like minded individuals and find a way back to the real world. The setting is themed around music and songs, and the antagonists are musicians. The game has an excellent soundtrack, with each dungeon theme having both instrumental and vocal tracks, which the game seamlessly transitions between when battling enemies. Seriously, it can't be understated how good the soundtrack is, just give it a listen: Distorted†Happiness, Onboro, Peter Pan Syndrome.

Apart from music, the other thing the game does very well is the characters. The gimmick here is that everyone's virtual avatars are idealized versions of themselves and can differ greatly from their real life selves. Some of the characters are fat or anorexic in real life, some are short or ugly people, some are much older than they pretend to be, yet others can even be the opposite sex. And many of them are mentally unwell individuals with issues ranging from self-harm and suicidal thoughts to sexual deviance and sociopathy. Exploring each character's backstory, while entirely optional, is a major part of the experience, and these character episodes are all very engaging. And unlike the sequel, you can also befriend the bad guys (the musicians), for a total of 19 (!) party members, each of them with 9 fully voiced episodes, for a total of 19 x 9 = 171 character episodes.

The main story is nothing special (yes, you go back home when you beat all musicians, no major twists here), but the characters really carry the game. It's a bit like Danganronpa, you get a large and colorful cast of unhinged and sometimes edgy characters, and that's what you're really here for, the story is just an excuse to get them all together.

This game could've been an easy recommendation, but make no mistake, the dungeons are absolutely awful, each of them has half a dozen huge labyrinthine floors consisting of nothing but hallways and square rooms, filled to the brim with essentially just one enemy type. The combat system is very flawed with accuracy being tied to level difference. Attempting to take on enemies above your level will make you miss most of your attacks. But fighting lower level enemies is a snoozefest as they can't fight back. Every difficulty setting up to Hard is mindless, while Extreme is just tedious as your accuracy is nerfed even more. There's so much garbage loot you'll completely stop looking at your inventory half way through. And the most baffling part is 500 (!) copypasted sidequests, although these are thankfully entirely optional, even if you're an achievement hunter you need to complete "only" 100.

Are the colorful characters and the banging soundtrack worth the slog? A playthrough with all character episodes will take around 40 hours. If you're not sure, just play the sequel first, it's a much smoother experience, and if it gets you hooked on the series, you can always come back to Overdose.