Recent reviews by slyder - score

you get to listen to Mikael Stanne while slaying demons with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ guns
what more would you want

Bugbear's worst game.
I'm a huge fan of the flatout franchise, I played Glimmerati. I played RR: Unbounded. All of those are miles ahead of this piece of ♥♥♥♥.

While visually it's the best game out of the ones I named (even debatable with Ridge Racer), it's the most hollow one out of them all.

Driving model feels incredibly boring (yay, what fun to slide around at a car screaming at high RPM with no traction). The career is just a pointless grid with no real sense of progression. The AI is stupid. The tracks are so incredibly boring/lazy (I LOOOOOOVE OVALS). The hitreg is actually terrible and many times the game won't even recognize a pretty massive hit/crash.

and shoutout for getting rid of the one thing the studio knew how to do - original characters. Because it's so much better driving against hordes of pregenerated reddit usernames.

Don't waste your time with this ♥♥♥♥. I don't even know why I was looking forward to playing this for years. Now I bought it and it's just another tasteless boring product on the shelf.

Wish there were less unfunny negative reviews so that I would actually bother reading the ones actually adressing the game's issues.

Yeah I will probably try and finish this anyways, now that I bought it, but it's genuinely a bad game.

It's pretty pretentious. It has actual garbage controls. I'm okay with a game being challenging, but the biggest challenge here are just the awful controls. That's not fun in any way.

Avoid this garbage. Do yourself a favor.

i rate this game 23/20

It may be just stockholm syndrome speaking, but I think this dress-up game for cars is overall pretty decent.

The environments and maps are pretty interesting and well made, the checkpoints are actually done very well for the most parts (they only lack height), the driving model is a weird cheap subpar mess - some gamemodes are pretty fun, some aren't. The soundtrack is terrible and the multiplayer is wack, just like the "team members". The customization is pretty good for the most parts. Overall a solid game. Like 5.5/10.

Just make sure you don't pay the full price. Seriously, it's NOT worth that much :)

I LOVE GRAFIELD
I LOVE LASAGA
I HATE THE DOG
I WILL DO EVERYTHING YOU WANT FROM ME MY LORD GARFIELD
FOR YOU I SHALL ELIMINATE ALL OF MANKIND WITH PIES
I LOVE YOU GARFIELD
I LOV3 YOU GARFIELD
I LOVE YOU GARFIELD

Is it the best AA game out there? No, I'd say AA3 and AAI2 were still a little bit ahead of this piece.
Is it a ride worth paying all that cash for? Absolutely.
We have finally came back to the era where AA games are not afraid of building a story based on past events from older cases and or games, creating something big in the process. I wouldn't mind if this was the only Ace Attorney series from now on.

To my extortioner...

marvelous characters & soundtrack by the way :)

I was surprised. From what I've heard about the game from fellow racers, this game was rather mediocre and as such I went in with low expectations. I wonder why people don't like it.

The driving model works really well, I had a blast going through the game and it actually emulates the feeling of the original Grid really well, despite the fact it feels a bit slower and more stable. I couldn't ask for more in this case.

The career progression system is not perfect, I'll admit. Even though you're just looking for a grid full of seemingly soulless events though, I found it quite refreshing as I slowly went through most of the tracks with different cars, while being surprisingly entertained most of the time. The level-upping in this game works very as well, and despite the fact this all may seem a bit grindy I still find it to be a step up from the absolute hell (in terms of career progression) that was Grid Autosport.

The variety of tracks and cars is lacking. The carlist was good enough for me, I was glad to see a lot of classics which you don't get to see in a lot of racing games nowadays, but the tracklist was really poor, and you'll be pretty much repeating multiple variations of the same five locations over and over again.

The graphics are amazing. Original Grid was visually really ahead of it's time, and this game pays full homage to that. (yeah, I'm not the type to talk about graphics, it simply looks great okay)

What was missing: Besides bigger variety of tracks, this game lacked a lot of stuff which I really enjoyed about the original Grid. Bigger emphasis on the team developement, the story of making it from the bottom to the top, and most importantly, two certain gamemodes - Touge (my most favourite Grid gamemode of all time) and Drifts (I'm not a huge fan of drift events, but they'd definitely bring some diversity and freshness into this game, which it definitely needed).

and since everyone nowadays goes crazy over optimalization, I have to say I was really pleasantly surprised. I'm running a rather old setup for modern standards (i5 4460, GTX 750 Ti) and the game was running well while looking absolutely fabulous. Bonus points for that.

Overall, I had a lot of fun playing this (and I'm not stopping anytime soon), and I consider this to be the second best Grid as of now (excluding Legends, didn't get to play it yet). It's simply a pleasure to play, to weave through corners at high speeds and that's the most important element of racing games. It took me roughly 20 hours to finish, which is nice playtime for current price (honestly wouldn't be worth the cash back when the game had an AAA pricetag), but nowadays it's worth it, especially on sale.

Recommended.

EDIT: I'm currently near completing the game on 100%, and as such I have two more complaints which I thought I should mention. First one being the AI - it seems a bit too aggressive (I was spun out by the drivers for no reason quite a lot) and acts a lot like you're not there. The second small complain are the curbs - they make you spin out very easily really often for no reason (didn't notice this as I had Traction Control on maximum possible value when I wrote the review).

Still recommended.

Alright, let me start if off by saying that for 9.99€, this is a crime. However, for 99 cents when it's on sale this is genuinely a decent choice.

Team 6 went with the motto "quantity over quality" and it shows. The game has plenty of content, but nothing, NOTHING is finished. Not even the elementary stuff like AI which is absolutely stupidly overpowered or just plain stupid (classic case of making no mistakes whatsoever, but the moment you make a mistake they'll crash on a straight road).

The driving model is surprisingly okay-ish, and depending on your car choice you might have a good time going through some of the tracks. I did encounter a bug where the car refused to steer to the right properly though, and instead went sliding and spinning out immediately, which was fixed after restarting the game.

The maps are a split issue. While it seems to be the only thing where they at least tried, they're absolutely unreadable and the stiffness of half the objects on the road makes no sense whatsoever. Some of the hills in the offroad tracks are overly large, and some cars (including the AI) will struggle going up on them, which ruins the whole feeling. The circuit tracks are pretty well made though (probably because of the layouts already existing, yes, I noticed that half-assed Hockenheimring Team6).

The derbies are boring and poorly made. Not only is the damage model overall absolutely garbage (which is pretty crucial for a demolition derby racing game if you ask me), but the way the game counts points is absolutely retarded, plus the AI also shines here (you will get ganged upon by 3-4 drivers, eventually get stuck on their roof and get 10k points for staying there as the games will consider that as dealing damage for whatever reason).

The stunts are surprisingly okay. While the camera is absolutely terribly made, the stunts now allow you much more control post launch than the previous franchise entries, and this allowed for some interesting concepts for stunts, on which Team6 capitalized successfully.

The game also struggles with not having any unified career/campaign unlike the previous FlatOut games, and it shows - you do unlock some cars and tracks as you progress through certain types of events, but overall it all feels only like one huge "quick race" (in racing games, this stands for simply playing a track with a car of your choice while not progressing anywhere, just to get a feel for it/beat a certain time/whatever you want to do there). I can't also overlook some of the bugs I encountered while playing (broken UI after alttabbing, Justin Case's texture being broken during stunts and the driving model one I mentioned).

...and last but not least, the sounds are all very questionable. You'll get your eardrums blown off every single time you start, as there will be good bunch of cars NOSing instantly, but other than that there's not much, no songs (besides the main menu music), nothing.

I'm almost certain that I missed some points, however I won't go into details with every single gamemode in the game, since as I said, there are plenty and none of them are finished properly, so it would be a bit pointless. However, let me say this - the game is better than the general public makes it out to be, if this came out seven years earlier, and was being given out for free in those magazine CDs, I bet I'd have nice childhood memories of it. It's by no means a good game, but it also did some stuff correctly, and has it's moments where you'll genuinely be having fun. If you have a spare change left in your steam wallet, and don't want to buy either Unity asset abomination or a furry porn game, give this one a go.

Update: oh, and the multiplayer still works, and is actually pretty fun to play. Bonus points for that)

Writing reviews is hard, and this is especially true for Visual Novels, where you want to convey your opinions and feelings about the game as accurately as possible, yet without talking about specific events in order to avoid spoilers. I'll still try.

I've been eyeing 25W ever since I finished TSC and FSR. TSC has a special place in my heart, mostly because it's the one pure-blooded VN that dragged me down into this rabbit-hole, so I did not expect for the sequel to be better than original TSC in my eyes. That was foolish of me.

The whole game feels much more refined. I found it hard to dive deep into this (just like with TSC), but once I got myself in, I got so immersed I couldn't stop. This time being presented with three routes, two new ones (Correctness & Match Maker), and one that should already be familiar to you from TSC (Placebo). Despite having to deal with brand new characters, they were all written very well, and soon enough it was easy to sympathize with them, despite their intentions, which were opposing each other's interests. I could still sympathize will most (if not all) of their actions, and never felt alienated by their decisions.

The soundtrack is another chapter to talk about - unlike the original game which mostly felt that the tracks were there for ambience, and most of them were not worthy of listening to outside of the game, I feel like that changed here. The tracks were still great for building the atmosphere, yet they were great on their own as well.

Despite that, 25W is not all sunshine and rainbows. The UI was rather uncomfortable to use (especially while writing letter codes), some of the "puzzles" were just trial-and-error tests of patience for no reason (as usual with Suda's games), the greatest example being locating the flat in Correctness#04, the solutions to riddles in Match Maker''04 were lost in translation so they didn't make much sense and the whole Placebo*03 chapter felt really tedious to go through.

You will let these small minuses slide though. Why? Because the endings exist, the endings to each individual stories/routes, which were by far superior to the ones in TSC. Their pacing, their weight, their depth, their events, everything about them was just perfect.

In conclusion, this slightly-under-20-hours long adventure was worth every penny. Go for it if you are familiar with The Silver Case universe, you will not regret it.