Recent reviews by Leah

Low content density, confusing progression system kneecapping your first impressions, hard to intuit what the hell is going on, poor communication systems in a game mandating coordinated co-op gameplay, this game is simply not worth the 40$ asking price.

If you can get a group of 3 to play through the game and get it on a sale for like... 10-20$, you'll have a decent time, they did a good job at making the high moments actually fun, but the game drags its heels on a lot of the point-to-point gameplay, and there's just a lot of really basic issues like unsatisfying shooting, unclear visuals, and annoying game-breaking bugs, stuff that may or may not get fixed by the time this game is about a year old.

All respect to Remedy as they've got a good team behind the art, but it really seems like nailing gameplay is just completely out of their reach with their current team, it feels as if they haven't made a game with tight gameplay since Max Payne 2.

The best I can say about this game is that it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be.

A close contender for my favourite expansion, as well as a close contender for my favourite piece of Final Fantasy media, loved it from start to finish and this has given me the surge to get back into the game after my interest waning after the poor post-release content from the last expansion.

The demo did not do this game justice at all, the demo was a dull combat focused demo that was really linear, this is the real deal full of personality (a bit too much Gianni, but oh well) good level design, and your what-have-yous that typically come with Immersive Sims.

Really nails the aesthetic of a pulp-y detective comic.

Giving this game the gold star for being a New Blood game that's actually really good, going alongside FAITH and Gloomwood.

Finally, I can turn on the soundtrack to MGR:R in a game that doesn't suck

But really, this game is exactly what the rhythm shooter genre needed, its strengths aren't even necessarily because of good design (even if it IS well designed) it's just because the alternatives are just, not great?

BPM is too kit-bashed with random assets and in general lacks a lot of quality from weapons to flat soundtrack to dull rooms to not very fun boss fights.
Hellsinger is a close contender, but has a few problems of its own, the multiplier punishing you for getting hit runs in contrary to the enemy design that spams you with projectiles that can be hard to make out, the soundtrack's genre doesn't make it easy enough to stick to the rhythms, and good GOD does the game crash a lot, making you restart an ENTIRE LEVEL.

but ROBOBEAT? It's cut to the chase, with a strong enough weapon roster shown off right at the beginning, focusing on the basics and how stats can be tweaked to make that feel better and full of variety without re-inventing the wheel or forcing you to use clunky unfun garbage, there's a lot of movement, but the game doesn't box you into spamming dashes or parries and also invites you to try and manipulate your movement in other ways like the wall/ground parry and recoil momentum.
There's good sound and visual design that makes each hit punch, seeing and hearing enemy attacks is pretty easy, but the feedback to getting hit probably should be a bit sharper with the audio, and I personally recommend replacing the blinding static effect with a directional hurt indicator.
Levels and enemy design go together pretty fluidly, never feels like you don't have enough space or have too much, or that the enemies don't work with the area you're in.
The soundtrack is a bit simple, but unlike BPM it doesn't work against the genre, with the style and simplicity fitting the more electronic style.

The worst I can say is that it's a bit easy, and that I personally don't like boss fights in any FPS game, and there's some criticisms to the custom track maker needing a few more features and a better way to detect beats, unless I didn't notice, there's not even a "tapper" to try and manually set the BPM of a track, but instead a clunky menu to add beats manually on the graph for the audio, which is hard to navigate through when it's confusing on how you're supposed to rewind the audio in the first place

EDIT: Apparently according to the developer response, there are options to have a "tapper" but it just wasn't very clear at first, so this isn't as big of a problem, and shortly enough might not even be a problem at all.

Wall jumping can get annoying just trying to back up into a corner and now you're sticking to a wall, could there be an option to change the behaviour to only stick to walls while holding space or not at all for walls behind you?
Can't say I cared for the story either, but it's at the very least a bit vague so you can kind of just skip past it and think about it again if I ever decide to care about it.

And to any of the devs, if you're reading this, fix the jump so that you can add momentum to it, you can jump and then shoot with boosted recoil to launch yourself in the air, but not jump and shoot at the same time as you won't gain any momentum, it's a minor thing but it makes it feel very "natural" like it's Rocket Jumping.

Also, I don't know if anything like this gets introduced later on (probably not), so I'll just mention it for now, if it doesn't exist, how about some two-handed weapons? maybe variants of existing guns but stronger and/or with a unique gimmick, for the folks who don't like the dual-wielding, or just some stuff that would work better with it, like a sniper that reloads every other beat, penetrates targets, and/or has an alternate fire mode.

this game is what people are talking about when they claim that western rpgs are soulless and have meaningless stories dreamt up by talentless hacks

This is like, overall an improvement for the game, load times are better, battle system is more interesting and improved (and apparently with the option to roll back to the original, nice!) and presentation is overall WAAAY better, especially the monologues being framed in this weird stand-up, the act has been cleaned up and the game is now at the very least "good".

However I have one major snag, this is a definitive turn towards surrealist visuals and cinematography at every. left. turn.
It starts to get difficult to follow the story when every other room has a thousand things going on, things just randomly change probably to resemble some form of symbolism and it's just laid too hard too fast, even going to the point where it's making existing story moments hard to follow, I really have a lot of respect for the developers so I don't want to say something as rough as "pretentious" or "stuck up their own ass" but the issue of things being confusing is still there, and a lot of the actual tangible changes to how things roll out in the opening act just make it even more confusing.

Also, I'm really hoping that prologue is exclusive to the demo or at the very least happens far later into the game, it leans into that surrealist confusion too much and it really really starts to feel too confusing, the only thing I can see it actually setting a scene with is "wow, is this gonna be one of those games where it overdoes the art-y symbolism to make it look like there's something where there isn't?" even though it really isn't the case here.

It's probably a lot less confusing for those with the older versions of the game fresh in their memories, but I haven't really touched the game in years and was waiting to start fresh, but stuff like this makes me come out feeling like I started FF7 with the remake, seeing Cait Sith appear and am just left thinking "who the ♥♥♥♥ is that? what was the point of that scene?"
You don't want to design your scenes around people who have already experienced them, and I'm really hoping these choices weren't done out of an inability to re-record the lines for the scenes, so all the effort was put into just re-tooling the cinematics into something that doesn't look like the playset at the end of a Moral Oral episode.

Regardless though at the end, this is still a major improvement and I'm very much looking forward to the final product, hope for the best with it and maybe it'll finally nip the armchair criticism from the types of people who only interact with it from the perspective of "well i heard someone else hate it so i'm going to look at it as if it's mindless garbage"

Best of luck, and hopefully this is the last you'll have to be working on this game again, you're destined for greater than being chained to a project that didn't hit as hard as it could've for the better part of a decade, I'd really like to see what new titles you could put out.

Stephen King once wrote that nightmares exist outside of logic and there's little fun to be had in explanations.
They're antithetical to the poetry of fear.
In a horror story the victim keeps asking why, but there can be no explanation and there shouldn't be one.
The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest and is what we'll remember in the end.
My name is Alan Wake, I'm a writer.

An absolute disaster, with a company who has gone out of their way to ignore any and all feedback.

Yeah, Payday 2 had a similarly ♥♥♥♥ launch (minus the always online stuff, the only companies that can get away with that are AAA companies) but you know what they did? They reworked basically everything in the game, animations, systems, AI, netcode, heist design, changed leadership several times, and it ended up being for the better by a wide margin!

But post Overkill Payday seems directionless, they're too afraid to course correct so instead they change directors only for the new director to announce that they're not changing anything, and just make excuses like how "Payday 3 is supposed to be a different flavor of Payday"

♥♥♥♥ man, At least dealing with people like Goldfarb and Bo actually got us a fun game.

This is just alright for about the first hour, tops, then it is a complete and total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disaster with some of the worst boss designs and general encounter design I've ever played in a Half-Life mod.

Just skip this and go to the sequel, you're not missing out on any backstory and the sequel is amazing.

The least fun you can have online.... is now FREE.