Recent reviews by Sloth-Man

Absolutely fantastic game and a great point to jump on for newcomers to the series. As a fan who started with 4, this was basically everything I could've asked for in a modern Armored Core game. The 1st playthrough took me roughly 18-20 hours, and the 2nd playthrough actually has new missions and some different fights and outcomes in existing missions. If you want the best mech game ever, then here you go.

THE coop shooter.

Really cool game, but the ending sucked. It's pretentious and gets in the way of itself. You literally have to wait 2 and a half hours just to be able to play the game again. I get the point, but I just wanna play the game man.

The first game is a really fantastic parody of the RPG genre, it really kind of feels like playing through the history of these games in a way. It had a lot of personality, and at only 2-3 hours long, it didnt overstay its welcome.
Evoland 2 while technically superior, has almost entirely lost the parody angle. Instead you have a more bog standard cast of characters who don't really stand out in any way, writing that seems almost purely utilitarian, and references. Lots, and LOTS of references. While 1 would try to make an effort to tie the jokes into the gameplay, the story, and the setting, all to joke about the genre as a whole, 2 is simply content to go "whoa guys, remember Metal Gear Solid?!" And then leave it there. The pacing is also a lot worse in 2. At the beginning of the game theres several sections that feel like pure filler, including a section where youre trapped in a town and have to work jobs for a good long while. This game feels boring as SIN as a result. The first one didn't waste your time like that. It came in, made its point, and then got out. Evoland 2 feels like it doesn't really know what it wants to be by comparison. Is it a legit RPG that you should be taking seriously? Is it a wacky parody game? The game honestly doesn't seem to know often times. It feels strange to say about a game like this, but the 2nd game's real problem is that it completely lacks focus, while the first game knew exactly what it was going for. Overall I think it's worth it on sale, just for the first game, which is why this gets a thumbs up. The second game is there too, if you REALLY want more, but the first game is the real gem here.

This game is the single best implementation of tabletop RPG rules I've ever seen.For a long time, this carried the game for me. There's a few MAJOR issues with this game though that really hold it back, and keep me from recommending it.

1. Encounter design is straight up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. There's no getting around it. There's no reason why timber wolves should be running around with permanent magical effects like blur. as a matter of fact, basically EVERYTHING just has blur slapped on it with no in game explanation. For ♥♥♥♥'s sake guys, at least have a wizard buff up the enemies at the start of the battle or something. This is not only annoying to deal with, but also completely immersion breaking. Why do random trees have blur? Cave spiders? Wolves? Kobolds? You only have a limited amount of spellslots for most of the game, so no, dispelling magic isnt really much of an option. Sure you can do that for one particularly big enemy, but most of the time you just wont have enough slots to avoid having to constantly deal with blur. This is just one of the permanent buffs that every enemy seems to have. As you get further into the game, they just keep stacking permanent buffs on these basic enemies, and it serves to make all these encounters feel incredibly artificial. Speaking of artificial, enemies just spawn in mid combat often times, no warning, no delay on their turn, no explanation, nothing. They just spawn in like its horde mode in Gears. You know, when i summon stuff, that stuff is stunned for an entire turn. Why can the enemies just get free reinforcements for nothing? Oftentimes these enemies would spawn behind my front line tanks, causing my entire battle plan to go completely out the window due to circumstances that weren't my fault at all. If i pulled this kind of ♥♥♥♥ as a DM to my players, they wouldn't want to play anymore. Give me a turn in advance or *something* to prepare for enemies spawning in like this. I can't plan around things that don't make sense and have no warning.
Another big problem is that every single enemy, even basic ones, have had their stats buffed to cartoonish degrees. Once again, no explanation given. This feels like a major kick in the teeth. The developers know the core ruleset, they're faithful to it in almost every other part of the game, and yet here, on this one specific aspect, they've purposely buffed everything's stats. I was on the normal difficulty and was continuously baffled in the early game over how tough basic enemies were. Eventually, I just came to expect that the enemies would all be buffed. I wouldn't mind this kind of ♥♥♥♥ on the harder difficulties, but come on. On the normal difficulty i expect you to be accurate to the source material.
There are so many more problems with the encounter design that i could get into, but i dont want to bloat this section anymore. Just know we're eventually talking about permanent stat debuffs, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spawns, enemy spam, mandatory party separation, an entire solo section for your main character (screw you if you chose sorcerer.) etc. etc. it only gets worse as the game goes on.

2. Kingdom management starts off incredibly promising, but only gets worse as it goes on. It has a few problems, one is that events start repeating pretty early on, another is that it's not very well explained, and if you fall behind you're completely screwed. This is really, really bad for an RPG with hundreds of hours of content. You can get a hundred hours in, only to realize that you hadn't managed your kingdom properly 40 hours ago. Now you're stuck in a death spiral with no way out except turning the kingdom management to "automatic" in the options. I played on easy kingdom management, and i felt like it was about right there. I had a friend who was on normal, and he ended up in that death spiral situation earlier, forcing him to change it to automatic mode, or else lose the entire campaign. This is an incredibly anticlimactic way for things to go, and actively robbed a lot of players of the main promise of the game: building your kingdom.
Almost everything in the kingdom management is RNG as well, so if you have bad luck you're just screwed. Cool idea, absolutely awful execution. The game would've been better without any of it.

3. This game starts off with a lot of player choice. It truly feels like the game accounts for, and adapts around your decisions for most of your play time. I played a character who started off as chaotic evil, but slowly shifted alignment throughout the game towards good as the responsibility of his kingdom turned him into more and more of a proper ruler. For a long time, the game let me play that, and it was great. Sadly the end of the game completely drops the ball. I don't want to spoil things too bad, but unless you've made the EXACT CORRECT decisions, (usually the good ones) then you will get absolutely zero resolution for any of your party members. They all just exit the story in the dumbest, most anticlimactic way possible. I'm not saying i needed a good end for them. I'm not saying i needed all of them to like me, i needed a proper climax! The big one for me was Amiri telling me at the end "you never cared about me" and then just walking away. That's it! That's all you get! All because of one option i picked 50 hours prior. Apparently the fact that she was one of my key advisors and we had a great friendship for the entire rest of the game meant absolutely nothing. You get no dialogue options. You can't talk to her about this. There are no speech checks or anything. Just "you never cared about me" exit stage right. I was so curious where her story was gonna go after that decision, but the answer is "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nowhere". Hey developers, if this is how you're gonna handle my choices, I'd prefer if you just made me choose the correct one, instead of just giving me a giant middle finger after over a hundred hours of play. I kept imagining how the players at my tabletop sessions would react if I pulled something like this. "Can't I do a speech check?" "Can i cast sleep on her and try to talk it out later?" "I want to try saying x" but you get none of that. Every. Single. Companion. is like this. Every single one. So if you didn't make all the exact correct decisions in the game, you will watch a laughably artificial succession of every party member exiting the story in the most anticlimactic way possible. This is terrible. Genuinely felt like I'd wasted my time getting invested in any of these people.

4. The length of this game is ridiculous for what it has to offer. Simply put, there is not enough content here for 100+ hours. You will be repeating a lot of fights over and over again, seeing the same copy pasted maps, and going for hours at a time without feeling like you've done anything actually impactful. This is a game that feels bloated, and padded. Surely 70 hours is still pretty good right? Why are we stretching this so thin? It doesnt make any sense to me. I would've really preferred a game that was a bit shorter if it meant that it didn't waste my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time as much as this one does.

I've never played a game that starts off so great, but ended with me having such negative feelings about it. Like I said, this is the best video game adaptation of a tabletop RPG ruleset ive ever seen. The combat is great, it has a wide selection of spells, the core of this game is incredibly solid. It was just let down by absolutely awful encounter design, and some baffling design decisions. Honestly it really feels like the developers stretched themselves thin and couldn't deliver. Id say avoid. I felt like I'd wasted my time by the end, and wished i could've spent that time elsewhere.

The developers (who aren't even the original devs by the way) decided to remove and censor content in a game they didn't even make. Absolutely pathetic behavior. I'm getting really sick of terminally online moral busy bodies deciding what I can or can't see. Do yourself a favor and avoid this game like the plague. None of your money will go to the people who actually made it, and these people currently care more about scoring good boy points for people who never played this game. Make your own game you hacks, stop defacing one I actually liked.

Captcha is arkane and locks you out for 3 hours if you fail it. hey, fine if you dont want me to play the game i wont lol.

Game won't start, there's zero indication of why.

The game is pretty good, it's just held back by a few very annoying design decisions. Namely, the headcrab enemy is extremely annoying. It feels like their hitbox is completely raandom at times. For some reason, this is by far the most common enemy type in the game, and they do a ton of damage. I get it. you put the crab from half life in your game, can you please stop spamming this piece of ♥♥♥♥ enemy all over the place? literally any other enemy is more fun to fight.

EDIT: Also the performance is quite frankly unacceptable for a game like this, and there's very few graphics options to speak of. Make sure this runs properly before you get over the 2 hour mark, and just refund it if it doesn't. There's no reason a game like this should be so demanding.

Another issue i have is that the game loves to throw you into giant arenas with a ton of enemies all over the place. The graphics are kind of blurry at long distances, so oftentimes you'll be running around desperately trying to figure out where the hell you're even getting shot from. In a game where you die very quickly, this beomes a major annoyance pretty quickly. On top of that, the game will just randomly spawn enemies all across the level, usually whenever you progress things slightly. So you'll have to repeat the process of figuring out where the hell you're being shot from at least 5 times in every big open area. It's tedious.

Overall the game is a solid 7/10. The core of the game is pretty good, but there's too many questionable decisions in the encounter design for me to really say it's great.

Since most of the top reviews are entirely unhelpful and obnoxious I figured I'd write a short review that talks about the actual game. The short version is that Ultrakill is a very, very good shooter at it's core, that i feel is often dragged down by some of its design decisions, which are designed to appeal to people who do nothing but play this game nonstop.

The whole premise is that it's basically like if DOOM got mixed up with Devil May Cry. Im a huge fan of both these game series. I've played every DOOM game multiple times, and I've beaten every DMC on the highest difficulties. The main difference in design that I feel holds Ultrakill back, is that while DOOM and DMC are perfectly fun to play at an average level of skill, Ultrakill is absolutely brutal and demands that you know the high level tactics often just to survive in these levels. I have no problem with that on the higher difficulties, but on my first playthrough im just a mere mortal with a job who wants to have some fun before i devote myself to learning all these complex techniques. THAT was the brilliance of DMC, and why i bothered getting good at it in the first place. That game is still a ton of fun, even on a first playthorugh, and it saved the real depth of its mechanics for repeat playthroughs and higher difficulties. I think by basically requiring all these mechanics on a first playthrough, it feels restrictive, and definitely doesn't make me feel very stylish. On top of that some boss fights are great, while others are very frustrating, often requiring you to parry their moves that don't really give you much time to react to them. This game also uses a checkpoint system that can honestly be infuriating at times too.

Finally the community: It's filled with sex obsessed weirdos who project their fetishes all over this game, despite there being absoutely no sexuual content whatsoever. Despite this, the dev decided to appeal to these people. hence the absolute state of the reviews for this game where its just people spewing nonsense about sex in a game that has nothing to do with it.

I've probably come off as more negative than I intended to be, but I see no reviews talking about the negatives, and instead just blindly praising the game, when it definitely has issues. Conclusion: It's good but it still needs work to properly balance things.

EDIT: I feel i should also point out some of the positives as well here:
The shooting feels great
The weapons are very imaginative
The levels are also very imaginative and often feature some pretty striking imagery
the mobility feels great
I enjoy earning currency in the game and buying weapon upgrades, I just wish there was more to spend the currency on! Maybe some throw away extras or alternate modifiers like big head mode or low(er) gravity?
The music is great
The gore is pretty satisfying too