Recent reviews by TheLemon27

cozy fishing game with gay animals :3

Great style, solid rhythm game foundation and good story...

But the actual game part of it? Hitting buttons to the beat? feels atrocious
I wish rhythm games would stop having multiple charts for each song, it just makes each one worse because the harder ones are encouraged to put extra notes where there are none, and the easier ones are encouraged to take notes away that are actually there.
Oh, and the health drain is so quick to drain and sooooo slow to fill up, even on the lowest possible setting that it might as well all be "no-miss mode".

I don't play rhythm games because I'm good at them, I play them because they're fun.
this was not.

i have never said "oh honey, no..." to a fictional character more in my life

im not even done yet!

I love this game to death, but spoiled myself before playing.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GO INTO THIS GAME COMPLETELY BLIND !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you'll thank me later.
...or you might hate me, whichever happens.

...oh! also the music bangs, might as well get the soundtrack bundle.

I think this game is really cool.
However, the tutorial, while funny and good worldbuilding, is terrible for teaching the mechanics. I still have no clue what i'm doing half of the time.
Pair that with horrendous audio issues (everyone is incredibly quiet, even on max audio settings) and you get a thumbs down for now.

(Edit: Bots are gone!!!!! Updated score, please ignore latter half of review)

This is one of the greatest games of all time.
Gunplay is satisfying, the weapon system allows for incredible depth, all of the characters are great, and so on.
It just has one problem.

You can't play it.
At least, not very well.

For the past FIVE YEARS, this masterpiece has been infested with botted players that cheat, spam slurs in both text and voice chat, and votekick what few real players there are. Valve, a multi-billion dollar corporation, has been aware of this for at least a year, probably longer, and has still done nothing to mitigate the main issue.

If the bots leave, if the game becomes playable again, I will change my review. But until then, I do not recommend this game.

#FixTf2

[NOTE: Parts of this review are outdated, as it was written before 5/29/2024. The review itself is unchanged, but I have added an addendums section at the end that will cover various updates after the initial review if they address what I discuss in said review.]


I'm conflicted about this game.

On one hand, the concept is cool, the character designs are cooler and all the secrets and other stuff is really cool, but on the other, the gunplay feels unsatisfying, voicelines repeat ad nauseam (I know you can turn off voices in the settings but until I realized that the repeated voice lines damn near drove me insane), and the matchmaking system feels unbalanced.

The gunplay is very... almost floaty, in a sense. The weapons don't feel as punchy as they should, this is compounded by the fact that an often situation that I get into is that I pump the other player just chock full of bullets, and I think I'm almost about to win, then they kill me and I see they still had a third of their health left.
The matchmaking leaves something to be desired, too. I am often matched up with people who are seemingly above my skill level, (and progression level, don't you worry I'll get to the progression later) I get steamrolled, rinse and repeat. I am aware they have tried to mitigate this issue. Now, if you get matched up with someone with a higher skill/progression level, you'll get a small buff. That gets activated at the beginning at the round. Whose text is only on screen for a split second. That is also randomized. Do ya see the issue here? Not to mention it doesn't trigger when it really should (for instance, I have little-to-no cosmetics, as I haven't played the game that much. I get matched with someone who has a full loadout of cosmetics, indicating that they've, most likely, played more games then I have. the buff mechanic doesn't happen, the other player's really good. I get steamrolled). A better solution would be, maybe to give a different buff depending on what character you're playing as? That way you'd know what buff you get each time. Or, better idea, instead of trying to even the playing field between someone with six hours and someone with 1k hours by giving an ignorable buff, maybe just don't match with the people who trigger that mechanic.

Finally the progression.
Let me preface this by saying: I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love CCGs. I have a ton of Magic cards, I play PvZ: Heroes often, and I've even tried to make my own at one point.
Now, FvFs' deck system works like the following:
Each card has a type, rarity, effect, and cost. (type, rarity and effect don't matter for building a deck so I'll ignore them for now.)
Each deck must have:
Only one (1) of each type of card.
At least twenty-five (25) total cards.
At most fifty (50) total cost.

The one thing I don't like about this system, personally, is the fact that you can't use duplicates. This stifles creativity in decks, imo.
But, you can still get duplicate cards from packs and such, so what do you do with them?
I'm so "glad" you asked. The duplicates get turned into progression for card leveling, the bane of my existence. I absolutely DESPISE any form of poorly thought out "numbers go up" style of progression. I hated it when PvZ2 did it, I hated it when UpGun did it, and FvF is no exception. The stat ups from the card level up system commit the three cardinal sins of a stat-based leveling system in my eyes.
1) Small stat ups
2) Grindy and/or overly luck-based progression
3) Potentially balance-breaking
The stat ups you get from leveling up cards are so small that it doesn't even really register most of the time for me. The only way you can get cards is by either buying packs, or getting packs from leveling up normally. No way to speed things up or plan out your level ups in any way. And, even though the initial level up buffs are minuscule, I can see the potential of someone who plays this game a ton, getting a ton of duplicates, or a hacker/cheater cheating in a buncha money/duplicates and leveling up their cards to the point that it's unfair to anyone playing with base-level or lower-level cards. You might think I'm exaggerating, but PvZ2 does the exact same thing, where level 2 is like -0.2s refresh time, but by the time you max out its' level it instantly kills anything, fires every 0.0005 seconds and costs 25 sun.
Once again, a potential fix for this might be to ditch card leveling and give the player cash back for each duplicate, or give a new currency that can unlock cards you've seen but don't own, or even just make the packs just not give duplicates any more.

The thing I hate the most about giving this thumbs-down, is that the game is really cool, with a lot of detail, and special events, and hidden story, and other stuff that I would love to interact with, but just can't because the actual gameplay of it makes me legitimately angry. I wish the developers the best of luck, and hope everyone can be civil in the comments.





ok but my actual biggest complaint is that they made spike british

Addendums:
- [5/29/2024] In the most recent update (the anniversary one) they added a new "collectors pack" that gives you a card that you don't have. This mitigates the issue with duplicates I talked about, but still doesnt fix what I didn't like about the card leveling system.

i love this game but have one issue with it.
the issue being the fact that theres no goal to work towards besides beating an endless series of levels, which makes me feel like all my actions are in vein and, concequently, makes me not wanna play it anymore. id suggest adding steam achievements but idk much abt game design lol

its still a thumbs up review because the gameplay is good :3

proximity voice chat makes every game better

EDIT: ok, while i still really like this game, i can no longer give it a positive review, as the devs are exploiting fomo HARD with the new timed events.
gamemodes, maps, now even ROLES are available "for a limited time only" then never again. please just keep them. thank you

amogus