Recent reviews by Citelm

One of the best forays into the League universe you can experience. It is at times buggy and has some clunky design but overall a great experience I would recommend to anyone with an interest in the universe and turn based RPGs.

It's a real shame Riot Forge got killed but we at least got this amazing experience out of it.

One of my favorites of all time!

The character design, animations and dialogue, as well as music are all fantastic. The only thing on the presentation front that you could gripe about is the lack of voice acting, but missing a cherry on top doesn't ruin an otherwise great game. The gameplay is fairly simple and you can lean more towards visual novel or card battler beyond the foundation of brewing potions through mixing and matching different ingredients.

Overall the game is pretty forgiving, easy to understand and polished, but I did run into a few bugs, one of which completely breaks the game if you end up abusing it.

The balance is a bit off, as haggling(the card battling minigame) gets seriously undermined by an introduction roughly 20% of the game in because of the ability to sell potions without needing to spend any time slots, manage stress or pick between which characters to socialize with and get close to in your spare time.

Before wrapping it up, I'll mention how you can absolutely break the game but if you're not interested in that- I strongly recommend the game if you like the fantasy of growing your little potion shop from nothing and hanging out with the incredibly well written and animated cast. Read on only if you're curious about my ramblings.
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The main goal is to have a set of your potions be valued higher than a set amount at certain points in the story, however earning too much money so a mix of making increasingly better potions and being able to haggle effectively are needed. Unless you find a way to make money meaningless, giving you potions good enough to instantly, or in a turn or two of haggling, win the evaluation. Alternatively, make such a broken haggling deck that you can infinitely raise the value of a potion, no matter how low quality it is.

As I only stumbled onto the instant selling one but not the infinite deck, that's what I'll mention. The game revolves around setting potions to brew and then spending time(selling or socializing), until the new batch is ready. That means there's only so many potions you can sell due to the limitation of shelf space and 2 time slots of opening the shop for sales, the vending machine completely wrecks that balance, letting you exclusively socialize and passively sell.

In theory you still have to wait for things to sell out on their own while you're away though, potentially leaving potions that are lucrative one day unsold into the next. However, any save with a loaded vending machine that is loaded into from the main menu instantly sells most, if not all potions every time(I believe I've had it happen that only some, not all are sold, but I don't remember so I'm mentioning just in case).

Simply put: Load up vending machine, save game, close game, load save, ???, profit. This lets you make AND sell days worth of potions with efficient fuel usage in a single day, all while maximizing time to socialize and all but removing the need to haggle. I ended up not brewing or selling any potions in the last 9 days of the game because I was over 990,000 gold and reaching 1 million loops you over into having 0. Note: while the competition prizes can push you over 1 million, they also underflow you from 0 and return you to your previous sum.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Fun, lots of diverse playstyles from different characters and challenges for each character to keep you occupied. The art and writing are lovely, and for an incredible price to boot for what you get out of it.

Very cheap and addictingly good.

Unnecessary 2K launcher DRM was added recently. Glad to see they're making the experience worse for paying customers, go pirate it instead.

Instead improving performance, crashes or the overall experience, 2K added a launcher and claimed it was a "Quality of life" feature.

Alright game with questionable execution, more details below.

Off the bat, if you're playing on controller, there is no rebinding and the only lock on you have access to is hold. Despite Toggle being available as a function for keyboard, you cannot enable it on controller and whichever input you start the game in is locked in for the session, so you are unable to do it manually through keyboard either.
Additionally, the left joystick doesn't allow for smooth 360 degrees running. Instead you get running in the four main directions and their diagonal intersections switch to walking which makes movement and combat feel clunky at times.

Onto the universal issues, difficulty seemed off to me almost immediately, attacks hit you for insignificant damage, others can kill you in about a second. Why? Damage over time effects are tied to framerate, thus even if you're playing on a 60 fps monitor, you're likely going to be taking twice as much damage as intended from certain attacks. (On a cheesily positive sidenote, you do have access to DoT attacks yourself, which can trivialize non-boss encounters, but an overall balanced experience is usually preferable.)

Note for Achievement hunters- Saving has caused me to lose collectibles required for achievements. There's hidden collectibles all over the levels, fast travel takes you through a minute long walking section every time and collection of some might not be saved, making you backtrack through all of them in the same session around the end to be able to get the achievement.

The gameplay itself is serviceable but nothing special if you're used to PlatinumGames or other more involved brawlers from around its first release and since then. The visual style and voice acting are great in my opinion and it's worth watching the cutscenes if you're considering getting into the series.

TL;DR- Technical issues and a basic combat system bring the experience way down, but if you don't mind that, Darksiders might be worth picking up.

Campaign is good and short, can easily be finished in a single EAPlay Subscription.

Cyber Hook is a great short game with some caveats.
The art style is simple, fitting and everything is understandable pretty much at a glance.

Soundtrack fits the gameplay and aesthetics pretty well.

The story is minimal, but the gameplay is fun enough on its own to make up for it.

Lastly, and most importantly, the gameplay:
The basics of shoot Hook to terrain, pull towards Hook, Shoot and Pause time are enough to provide you lots of tense situations where you're split seconds away from beating your record, trying to reach the end of the level as fast as possible. The game excels at open level design, where you are able to swing around freely, often times skipping parts of the level and having the freedom to approach it in your own way at times. Unfortunately, here's where the caveat comes in for me. While the open levels feel amazing to race your way across, the boxed in, linear levels can be less enjoyable due to the forced approach and later on downright infuriating when you have to maneuver in tight insta-kill spaces and have no alternative approach, which soured some of the fun I had with about 80% of the game up to that point.

Overall, if you enjoy the aesthetic and speedy parkour gameplay, I would recommend you download the Demo and give it a try. Even if you don't end up beating all the levels, you are able to get the conclusion of your time in the game and unlock a speedrun mode for some additional content!

I definitely recommend this if you've got about an hour of spare time to do some puzzles, read some cutesy dialogue and look at some well drawn characters. At the low cost of free, the only thing stopping you is the short download and not hating puzzles(or following tutorials/skipping every level).