Recent reviews by Lone Wanderer

artificial difficulty

AWFUL QUEST SYSTEM and stupid autosaves ruining my playthroughs. unplayable without a 100% walkthrough and without backup saves every 5 minutes..

also EAC is cancer, it takes away at least 15fps for no reason

peak fiction... if you are 100 iq midwit. otherwise it's boring and overrated.

(memes aside, this is more of a mixed review. skip unless you know what you are looking for)

a LOT of misconceptions about this game

yes, this is a mobile gacha (you pull for weapons, not characters)
no, this is not a proper remake of the compilation games (also it's VERY incomplete)
is it pay2win? yes and no (see below)

here's a quick rundown of all the thing you need to know (port/graphics/outfits are good, i won't write about them):

• - Story Mode: at the time of writing, this game covers the og ff7 story up to junon, crisis core story up to banora and there are 5 chapters of the exclusive First Soldier (Sephiroth) story (and so far it's pretty bad, not even worth watching on youtube). The story is adapted in forms of "chapters", which are a mix of narration/battle/dungeon "exploration". Now, all of these are very well done, EXCEPT for the midgar part of of ff7. it's so rushed it's laughable, and it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth. so if you only care about seeing the og ff7 story remade with good graphics, then this is an easy skip
  
• - Gameplay: this is DEFINITELY the best part of the game. that said, 90% of content can be done with recommended auto-equip and on auto-battle. BUT, if you try tackling content above your power level, that's where this game shines. you'll need a perfect understanding of team building mechanics in order to make a team that potentially COULD beat the boss you're facing, and then you have to actually beat it on manual, by memorizing enemy attack patterns, optimizing atb usage (of all 3 characters in real time), and again, having a a VERY deep understainding of battle mechanics otherwise you won't pull it off. Dungeons add 1 more layer of difficulty by making you find the optimal route, taking the optimal upgrades, managing item usage, etc... Basically, at that 10%, Ever Crisis becomes a skill-based "puzzle" game, and this is where it REALLY shines (finally beating the hardest boss after 10h+ of retries felt better than beating any boss in any souls game for reference).
  
• - Monetization: the monetization is GOOD. basically this game is design to NOT let you spend money on it by making everything ridiculously overpriced. for reference, if you want to do a 10-pull on weapons you need to spend like $15. but if you consider all the free gems, free pulls, free tickets, etc... in practice you do 2+ 10-pulls per day on average FOR FREE, and it's been like this from the game's launch (for reference i did 4000+ free pulls in total). this game is VERY generous when it comes to free stuff (and the odds for gold weapons are very good (7.5%), and you only need 1 copy of some of them to clear most of the content).
  so what's the point of spending money? there are none unless you are a whale who wants to catch up with the power creep within a week. of ALL the content, the only whale "exclusive" things in the game are 3 cosmetic banners icons and 5 cosmetic profile banners (also 5 cosmetic wallpapers but those are relatively cheap). that's literally it. and most of those are from the first 3 months of the game's lifetime, because now a f2p player can clear ALL the content (assuming he started playing on launch).
  the only other exception is that you can't get ALL the gears with the free gems, but you can get something like half of them (basically pull only on arcanums and crossovers), so it's more than okay for gameplay purposes since those are the only really "good" ones.
  also a lot of reviews are talking about aggressive popups, but those will mostly go away after the first few days so they are not an issue at all.
  
• - QoL mechanics: this is the biggest offender. this game doesn't value your time. stuff that should be done with 1 click (like all the daily mission) require at least 30m DAILY. also you can't skip fights even if you are 10x stronger than the enemy. auto-equip is GARBAGE for anything above your power level, the companion ai is super annoying (remember those manual fight i wrote about where you need to manage atb of all 3 characters? that's half the battle, fighting against you own AI to prevent it from doing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥). also there's other UI issues that STILL haven't been fixed after 4 months, even if everybody keeps complaining about them (not being able to batch-convert materials, auto-resetting equip on extra fights, no retry button, the whole materia ui, etc...). this stuff has no excuse

tl;dr:
gacha fan and ff7 fan: recommended but you'll need to invest a lot of time in order to "get good"
not gacha fan but an ff7 fan: give it a try. if you'll manage to endure the first week, you will probably enjoy the daily grind
gacha fan but not an ff7 fan: skip it, there are better gachas
not gacha fan and not ff7 fan: obvious skip

technically my verdict is "mixed", but i'm leaving this review as positive since i assume most people interested in this are already fans of FF7 universe and it's kinda sad seeing them missing out because of few popups and blatantly unfair reviews...

subnautica but in space

aged like fine wine

the music was extremely hype. also my pc BSOD'd once the ♥♥♥♥ started going down, so i guess the flavor was conveyed more than successfully.

This is a surprising good version of Ultimate DOOM that is perfect for 99% of players. You get all the 3 episodes from the original DOOM, the 4th from Ultimate DOOM and you can download Sigil (5th episode made by John Romero) from in-game and enable/disable it on-the-fly (something that apparently no other source port I know of can do. This is also true for all other side-loaded WADs). In terms of the official content, this is the definitive DOOM (1993) package that you should absolutely get if you are a newcomer who simply wants to play some DOOM instead of wasting days of "port-hopping".

If you are not a newcomer though, here are some nitpicks that made me consider switching to another source port, from the most serious to the lesser ones (most of these are kinda baffling and could've been easily fixed with another patch, but sadly it looks like the game stopped getting updates...):
-No Steam Achievements. Not that the game really needs them, but it's extremely strange since this same Unity version has them on every other platform...
-Light censorship: red crosses are green and the NIN logo is removed. This can easily be solved by following a community guide and patching the IWAD, so I don't really consider it an issue. Said patch should also add widescreen backgrounds for the main menu which are cool (for SIgil too).
-No Xbox bonus WAD (Sewers). That level was kinda out-of-place anyway and definitely shouldn't be included in the first episode at all, but having it as a bonus WAD from the in-game catalog would've been great. It can be easily side-loaded though, so also not really an issue.
-"Thy Flesh Consumed" has broken secrets on a couple of later levels. The whole episodes is somewhat low-effort in terms of polish, but these secrets specifically (which you can't get without noclipping) are plain bugs that should've been fixed.
-The "Mouse Sensitivity" option is completely broken. I like the default sensitivity, but still...
-MP3 music instead of MIDI for the main game. I have literally no idea why this is a thing, considering that the port itself can play MIDI from side-loaded WADs and the soundfont is pretty decent. That said, MP3 song are great and honestly I never noticed them looping anyway.
-No option to PIstol-Start automatically. Very few source ports have it, but it looks like something that would sit just right in this one. You can still suicide at the beginning of the round, but whatever.
-Levels with 0 secrets show "0% secrets" on the end screen, instead of "100% secrets". This triggers my OCD and I don't like it.
-You can't get 100% kills of the last level of episode 1 if pistol-starting. Again, this triggers my OCD, they could've made so that the monsters in the final room didn't count, or added a rocket launcher somewhere after the final boss.
-Episode 1 doesn't have an ending image like all the other episodes (I think it's the same screen that showed the shareware notice in the shareware version, but in this one it's just a background with nothing else. Even episode 4 had one, and that one was very unpolished).
-Inputting "iddt" twice on the automap is useless. AFAIK the point of this cheat is to show the countable items/enemies left on the map, in order to get 100%, but not only both enemies and items are the same color, but also all the barrels, corpses, ammo, etc... So it's LITERALLY useless as of now.

So this is it. Obviously there are a lot of other thing that could've been added/improved, but these are the once that I care about. I'm still sticking with the Unity port over others simply because of the ease-of-use, but I wish it was a little better, that's it.

Also play Sigil if you haven't yet, it's the perfect conclusion of the Ultimate DOOM (1993) experience.

dying makes you restart the whole game from the beginning.... was it so hard adding an (even optional) checkpoint at the beginning of every level?

very sad since otherwise this would've been a really great game

i went full schizo after reading this, 10/10