Recent reviews by regularjinks

Hands down banger of a rhythm game.

Rhythm games can get kinda samey, especially the ones that are riffs on riffs of Beatmania, but Rift of the NecroDancer really shakes up that formula with the various monsters. If you're experienced with rhythm games, the monsters and maps will throw your sight-reading skills for a loop in a way I found really fun. They also have decent accessibility options, especially for colorblind folks who would otherwise have a hard time distinguishing between monster variants.

Pro tip: PLAY THE TUTORIALS. Even if you're a rhythm game hotshot and think you don't need to, play them. All three of them together are maybe 10 minutes tops, and they explain very important details about the game mechanics. The way the monsters move is always predictable—the tutorials will explain the differences between them e.g. that green zombies bounce off walls, red zombies go through them, the bats always move the way they're facing, so on and so forth.

The only thing I found a little frustrating were the boss battles in story mode—they're not bad, but in one or two of them in particular, the animation audio and song audio clash, and the way the arrows are placed makes the timing feel muddy. It ends up being a situation where you don't know why you're missing, and it's odd in a game that otherwise makes it very obvious what happened when you make a mistake.

Outside of that one nit, you should buy this if you even sort of like rhythm games.

Fun little roguelite auto-shooter. This is one of those solid 7/10 games—some iffy spots, but overall very good if you like the DRG vibe and want something that'll scratch the itch for a few runs on your lunch break.

The grind can be rough in spots. Some of the higher hazards will very quickly overrun you with bugs if you don't plan your upgrades carefully, and some of the upgrade RNG is frustrating, like when you've got an objective for a hazard level in a zone to get a weapon to level 18, and it's at 17 and you're on zone 5 and the dreadnoughts are at 5% HP and it just won't give you the last effing upgrade even after 3-4 rerolls... anyway.

Worth getting, especially if it's on sale, and I'm optimistic about the early access adding things that feel like they're missing for fans of the original game.

Turn-based cheeseball stick figure anime fight scene ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for clowning on your friends. 10/10 no notes

I genuinely feel a little bad for this game because it's going to get compared to Balatro, and Balatro is such a stupidly high bar.

It's not genre-defining. It is a fun little blackjack deckbuilder with cute jokes and nice art. It essentially has permadeath; when you lose, you start over with a regular deck, though you can unlock a few other decks if you win a run. Plenty to strategize around, requires some thinking and planning to win, and I'll keep coming back to it when I'm on lunch and want something where I can play a few short games.

Awesome game, and I'm picky about city-builders.

Each run lasts 2-3 hours, and there are several runs in a round; your string of little settlements are wiped out after each round, but as you progress, the rounds get longer. It's building a strategy for the same game loop, but because there's an element of randomness, it hasn't gotten stale, and some of the map modifiers force you out of your comfort zone and into a more challenging playstyle. Some people might be put off by that, but I enjoyed having to figure out how to adapt.

It is possible for RNG to put you at a big disadvantage, but even then, there's usually an earlier choice you could have made differently in order to avoid it. Even then, it's almost always possible to salvage a bad run (I've had a few really satisfying last-minute turnarounds). When you do lose, it feels fair and you usually know why (spoiler: it's usually poor planning).

There's a little bit of a learning curve but it's not too steep, and the progressive difficulty makes it feel approachable.

Strong recommend if you're even sort of into city-builders or RTS.

Recommended with caveats.

If you're playing for the combat content, Dawntrail is pretty good. They cooked with the first 3 extreme trials, the first 8-man raid series, and the first alliance raid. The dungeons are challenging enough to keep you paying attention, which is really nice after a few expansions of dungeons you can sleepwalk through. I don't really get some of the job changes they've made, and for reasons I really don't understand, they took Black Mage out behind the shed. I guess they really wanted people to play Pictomancer?

If you're playing for the story content... alright look. I wanted to like this expansion's story so bad. I tried so hard to like it. There are things I like about it, but overall it's really disappointing so far. Having finished the 7.1 MSQ, I have a glimmer of hope that they're building up to something interesting, but the overall story experience has not been up to the usual standard.

Wuk Lamat needs time offscreen. I like her well enough as a character, but please give me a chance to miss her. The game has had an ensemble cast for 10+ years; it would feel just as forced if any of the other Scions were constantly hovering. I want to get to know the other characters! Give me more time with Erenville and Krile and Koana and such, and give Wuk Lamat a coffee break or something. I'm happy to see her develop, but not at the expense of literally every other character in the expansion.

I don't think the voice actors were bad or miscast, but I do think the voice direction and sound mixing went way off the rails somewhere. Some of Wuk Lamat's English lines sound like her VA didn't fully understand the context of a given scene, G'raha sounds weirdly flat even with an experienced and skilled VA who's been voicing him for years, Y'shtola sounds like her VA was recording from two rooms over, and almost all of the American accents are uncanny, as though their VAs were told to half-commit to Southern accents but not told which part of the South. Again, I don't think this is the VAs' fault, and the transphobic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ directed toward Wuk Lamat's VA is way beyond the pale, but whoever did the voice direction has some things to answer for.

The pacing is also janky. It's real slow up to level 95 or so, and then the story takes off and moves at an absolutely blistering clip to get to where it leaves off at the end of 7.0. I really think the run-up to the level 95 dungeon could've used more bake time for character development and worldbuilding—it's a super interesting zone that clearly has a ton of lore buried in it and I wish the story had spent a little more time there. 7.1 seems to be smoothing this out a little bit, but a lot remains to be seen.

Overall, I hesitantly recommend it. The combat stuff is generally good (BLM mains, your therapy reimbursements are in the mail), the story stuff is not SE's best showing. I'm biased in FFXIV's favor; I really love the MSQ and I tried so hard to love this part of it. It's got some pretty good high notes, but the low notes are some of the weakest storytelling since the boring parts of ARR, and I know SE can do better than this.

I didn't need the few hundred hours of my life I'm gonna pour into this game anyway.

You know how everyone has that game in the back of their mind? The one they think about sometimes and wish they could get everyone to play it? Penrose is one of those for me.

Criminally underappreciated game. It's short, and you'll probably only play it through once or twice, but the writing is captivating. There are a few little puzzles, but they're not hard if you take a minute to pay attention to details. Everything in the game is there for a reason.

100% worth the five bucks.

Okay look. I can see your eyes glazing over at "roguelite deckbuilder". I know the idea of a poker roguelite deckbuilder sounds like the most boring thing known to man and dog. No wait come back just hear me out I promise.

The way I described it to a friend is "Balatro has no right to be as fun as it is". It's just enough of a skill game to forgive the cruelty of the RNG, and it's just enough of a chance game to keep you hooked enough to develop the skill. Seriously the first time I tried it I blinked and it was 3 hours later.

It's 100% worth the 15 bucks.

Overall: fantastic game. I can't remember the last time I marathoned a single-player game from start to finish, but Chants of Sennaar just reset the timer.

Good:
- The language decoding is genuinely fun, and both the logograms and the grammars are clearly loving nods to some real-life natural languages—e.g., there are real languages that have distinct plural markers or use reduplication to mean "many", one of the writing systems is an obvious wink to Devanagari script, so on. They're pretty simple overall, but it's a good balance—any more complicated and it would probably turn off a lot of people who don't have a special interest in linguistics. (No I totally don't have a fixation on linguistics, why do you ask?)

- It's a pretty game, in its own way. It's not super detailed graphically, but it doesn't need to be; it's economical and thoughtful about how it uses shape and color, and that pays off. Even with a limited palette and fairly uncomplicated line art, each area is carefully put together and has its own very distinct visual vibe. It also means it'll run on a potato with integrated graphics crudely glued on, and I think this game deserves to have a wide swath of people who can play it. (That said, some of the illustrations in the journal are unexpectedly beautiful—make sure to spend a few minutes admiring them.)

- Good balance on difficulty. I like puzzle and stealth games a lot, and there was a section or two that stumped me for a few minutes. Only a few minutes, though—someone who isn't used to puzzles or stealth might find some sections challenging, but I don't think it'll be so challenging as to put them off the game. The puzzles are also clever as hell but still feel approachable; they depend more on being observant and a little bit of logic.

- The plot is definitely there, but leaves some room for interpretation; it does a lot of showing instead of telling. I like this and don't mind plots being a little vague or leaving some open questions, but this could be a downside for some people, so bear it in mind.

- Good at explaining the basics of what it wants you to do without actually explaining it. Good guidance, no handholding.

Not So Good:

- The fast travel system is helpful, but it's still kind of a pain in the butt to get around sometimes, and no map means you gotta do a lot of backtracking and getting lost until you have the area roughly mapped out in your head. That definitely has some appeal for an exploration vibe, but even then it can be frustrating at times. It'd actually be easily solved by making the player character run just a tiny little bit faster when out of danger.

- Does not feel good to play with mouse and keyboard. It's significantly improved by using a controller, to the point that I'd say a controller is basically a requirement for getting the most out of the game.

- The auto-positioning for the stealth sections is really annoying, and the explanation for how to switch to free movement took me a minute to find again. I understand why it's there and it's probably a big help for some people, but if you're experienced with stealth games, you will probably find it irritating.

- Too short. Gimme like 3 more floors I wanna keep playing kthx :)

Again, overall, fabulous game, and frankly I'd have paid double the price and still thought it was a good deal.