Recent reviews by Svobodli

I've never played Armored Core, I've barely played From Software games except Elden Ring, and I absolutely loved this game.

It's just peak mech action gameplay to me and playing it feels super cool. The story is well paced, engaging and synergizes well with the gameplay. It also encourages multiple playthroughs by having some branching decision paths, new missions, and new parts in subsequent games which, early on, may already seem daunting, but by the end actually felt pretty exciting to me.

You can build all kinds of mechs and they accommodate a bunch of playstyles-- two legs, four legs, treads, swords, guns, cannons, missles, drones. Geek out managing all your stats to maximize energy and weight efficiency, or just pick the stuff with the most blue in the stats when you change it and see how it goes. Poke people with missles and cannons from across the level, or get up in their ♥♥♥♥ and juke em out with all your blasty stabs. You can save all your builds and quickly swap between them too. Color and decal customization seems to be as deep as some racing sim livery design editors if you're into that.

Very epic space desolation vibes in the music and visuals. Cinematic ambient tech trance kinda music set an appropriate feeling tone. Playing on an ultrawide monitor made it that much more amazing and the peripheral vision gave me some room to breathe around the UI and action. It probably looks fine in widescreen too but I love the ultra support.

This game is just so much fun if it doesn't make you hate it, and may be the coolest mech game you'll have played. I say that because it can be really challenging and complicated at times. If you hit a wall with a boss or figuring out good builds or what stats mean, it could be really discouraging or overwhelming, but the game encourages perseverance and experimentation. Unlike many Souls games (which I don't consider this to be, but seems to be a point of comparison regarding difficulty), you can adjust all your parts and weapons whenever you die and restart from your last checkpoint which are frequent and always right before major battles.

Bosses can be brutal, but there's a charm in the challenge and the ability to quick swap parts and reload right before boss fights kept me encouraged to keep trying until I succeeded.

If you're having a really hard time, there are plenty of community discussions, guides and videos about mechanics, stats, builds, and other gameplay elements that can quickly help you out. And listen, for all the super capable and independent individuals that like to figure ♥♥♥♥ out for themselves... just... seriously if it's stressing you out or agitating you, just ask for help or find a video or a guide about some ♥♥♥♥ that you're stuck on or want help with. It's not a big deal and doesn't compromise your integrity as a gamer. You're not cheating, you're not letting yourself or anybody down, just play games and have fun.

Anyway, I'll be going back for one of very very few NG+ in my gaming history. Recommend for any action, mech, anime, space drama loving gamers out there.

Overall:
I loved this reason to come back to Outer Wilds. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and the way it played with my assumptions, perspective, curiosity and fear of unknown in new and genuinely exciting ways.

I didn't have high expectations for Echoes of the Eye to measure up to the base game, but Mobius really did such a great job of nestling this new adventure into the Outer Wilds universe. New mechanics, new story, new layers, new depths, but maintains so much of the charm I believe is core to this world.

On the spoops:
This expansion does bring a particular spookiness to it. I think the atmosphere and immersion amplify the horror qualities here, but I didn't find it entirely different to the types of things that scared me in the base game. Deep unknowns, darkness, sudden sounds, mystical symbolism and vaguely unsettling visual elements had been core to the Outer Wilds experience for me, and I think this DLC just finds new ways to prod our natural fears and discomforts to recreate that. The new music and sound design does add a lot too, but I love it so much more for it. I'll just say that I don't think the peak scares of this game were greater than in the base game. I think if, like me, you were able to clench your sphincters hard enough to get through places like Dark Bramble, you'll make it through Echoes of the Eye and have fun :) I think the atmosphere and frights are absolutely worth maintaining though, so I wouldn't recommend messing with the frights setting unless you feel really blocked.

Things I didn't enjoy as much:
I felt a bit of a breaking point around darkness/sneaking exploration, as others have mentioned. It clicks, and it's still completely worth trucking through, but I won't deny that it wore on me while I was eager to make progress.
The new content is also pretty self-contained, so when there's stuff you need to try again or redo to progress, it feels a little grindy. I don't think this is a big deal and kinda makes sense since there isn't nearly as many threads or places to bounce between as in the base game.

Final thoughts:
I had a lot of fun and am thankful to Mobius for putting so much more into this universe. I continue to be in awe and am giddy for any possibility of more content from this team. If you're on the fence and still reading this, you're probably curious enough to just go play it. You've also probably spent more gambling on far less potentially fulfilling experiences.

I dunno.. 9/10? Nothing's perfect. Total recommend.

Really solid combo of Clue (solving murder mysteries) and Memento (working backwards through a story) with some surprising (baby spoiler) horror elements. I will say that reviews I've seen or read about this game don't give a good sense of what playing it is like, or the way it activates your hidden detective brain.

The game is pretty accessible and lets you get used to the mechanics before the story flow gets denser. After that, the pacing is largely up to you in how much time you want to spend digesting each scene, and moving between different notes and chapters. There's a good balance of visual, verbal, and written information, so I never felt like I'm constantly reading paragraphs or making sense of cryptic maps or symbology or something. There were times that the overall amount of activity felt a bit overwhelming, but those were also some of my favorite sections. Towards the end, I found it helpful to take very light notes just to stay focused on specific things to investigate and follow through.

Anyway, really unique, immersive experience.

I got it on sale, but wouldn't have regretted it at full price either. It's only $20. You've probably had less fulfilling experiences for more.

Easily one of the better hours I've experienced. Could've done without the explicit instructions for making dynamite though. Bit inappropriate.

Disclaimer: I don't play many CRPG's and am definitely not a hardcore RP'er in general. I never thought I'd finish this game. I finished a 'classic mode' game, maxing out side content, with like ~110-130 actual hours playing the game

So... I'm torn. I really loved the story, the part I played in it, and how it panned out. Incredible perception of freedom in this game. It left me genuinely curious how the game would unfold had I made different decisions.I think this game would appeal to sandbox gamers (minus the open world) but, for me, the type of freedom this game has often distracted from what I was doing in the story, or my immersion in it. There's a lot to tinker with if you're willing to immerse in the systems, but I would have liked for it to be more focused on gameplay and tactics. I really disliked how much looting and inventory management there is in the game. There's gotta be a way to organize that and recipes and books and equipables better. Felt messy and time consuming to filter through and organize. Probably as a noob, I just wish there were more guardrails or tips for effectively scaling with the difficulty of the game, without requiring deep meta or wiki browsing. I feel better prepared for the next CRPG I play, and for what it's worth, I finished Disco Elysium around the same time and liked it better.

Overall: 7/10

The good: There is so much to do.

• The story. Factions on factions on shadow factions. It was cool unraveling it all and finding gems of hidden context through side quests. I do wish one of the big reveals towards the end factored into the ending or final decision more... but ok.
  
• Side quests. There are a ton of side quests, many pretty deep, the majority of which are rewarding and fun.
  
• Freedom. You decide how you want to go about your quests and interactions. Kill, sneak, diplomat, ignore. It feels like these are all valid options
  
• Spec. You can build/spec/respec your party however you want at any point in the game-- skills, stats, class, hair, etc
  
• Interaction. You can talk to probably literally everybody, and they'll all have something to say about their world and their life

The bad: There is so much to do.

• Spec. There are so many attributes and skills and items and weapons. They all really matter and I was getting destroyed in some of the more intense battles in the very beginning and the very end, requiring me to spend a lot of time reloading, or running around trying to figure out how to "be better" to do the thing I wanted to do.
  
• Pacing is... up to you. Spending a bunch of hours deep diving side quests or shopping or managing your party sometimes feels necessary, but it does feel like a rabbit hole. I really felt the times I got trapped and spent my whole session in menus or backtracking. My attention spills everywhere playing this game.

The ugly: There is so much to do.

• Loot. Looting what feels like 98% of objects in the world is a bit of a double edged sword. Boxes, vases, shelves, chests, drawers, corpses, bags... I mean, the list of object types isn't that long, but they're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ eeeveryywhere. The Lucky Charm skill encouraged my aggressive looting for higher rare drop chance, but this whole world of interaction drove me mad. I certainly did it to myself, but loot did feel like a massive distraction. Clearly just not a fan of excessive, useless loot.
• Shopping. Was not into searching for specific shopkeepers to sell me the specific type of spells or weapons or armor I needed. Why are there so many? Why don't they have better signs? Why are they scattered all over the place? It just adds to the time sink and running around aimlessly.
  
• Complexity. There's little to nudge you towards good builds or good practices. This is probably the other side of total freedom-- you do whatever you want, but you also have to figure it out yourself. This really cost me in the first 1-2 acts, and then at the very end. The last battle of the game was seriously impossible for me until looking up some good builds online and then spending a bunch of time getting better gear. I spent 100+ hours on this game, I'm getting my epic battle dammit. Also, there's a crafting system in this game. Good luck.