Recent reviews by Utamaru

Beautiful and touching

Cool combination of two games I spent fair amount of time playing when I was in uni: Armadillo Run and Portal. Personally for me it turned out to be a hidden gem because for some reason I found this game only recently. Base game is fairly diverse and fun. There's a repetition in level design, but not to an extent where I felt like quitting. DLC brings somewhat new way to play and is really fun. Bing played first 15 levels without noticing how fast time passed. A few (5-ish..?) DLC levels are kinda pain in the ass though because for me it felt like they were less about figuring out a technique or concept but more about micro-managing bridges. Basically you know how to beat the level but things don't quite line up. Maybe I'm just dumb though, which is quite likely.
Also the cutscenes! The narrative, the story, the drama they contain. Invited my whole family to watch every single one of them. Powerful stuff.

Update: After a few months, after my irritation from the game settled down a bit, I decided to give it another shot and try to understand if I did something wrong while playing because dark and mysterious atmosphere of the game kept attracting me. Turns out that my problem was in the fact that I thought that the proper way of playing the game was to pick up all the malignant items and deal with malfunctions no matter what, or otherwise you'll be too weak if you skip all or some malignant items. That turned out to be false and you'll be totally fine even if you skip all the malignant items. They're just a way of proving you with some not so necessary benefits if you really need them for a cost of your inconvenience, which can be bypassed with a special currency. Malfunctions really start to be a problem in biomes 4-6 if you stack them, that's when I dropped the game. After I returned, I picked up 2 malignant items, which required me to pick up an artifact in order to fix them. After clearing the whole biome 4 in search of single artifact, which I couldn't find, I realized that it was a bad play on my part. So yeah, if you struggle, don't be like old me. Kinda wish I could realize a better way of playing Returnal earlier, but I guess I had other things on my mind at that time. One of my favorite games right now.


Old review at around 30 hours in:

Visual and sound design are great. Level design and progression are not so great. I had some fun in it. But the further I played, the more complaints I've got.

1. Consumables. I rarely find an occasion to use them. Most of their effects are either unmemorable or you simply forget about them (it especially sucks if you do forget to use it when it's best time to use this specific consumable, and keeping everything is mind is another complaint which will be explained further in this review). Also their icons - after 30 hours into the game I still find myself having to go to inventory to read what each consumable does. For example it would be easy to realize that consumable with blue ice icon freezes enemies around you, even if you find it for the first time. I realize that game wanted to have a specific look and ui colors variety is a sacrifice that had to be made. Devs made their choice and I think impact of the consequences of this choice are too severe. Also having consumables drop from places where artifacts can be dropped (chests, replicators etc) means they have same value as artifacts. But they're not? Artifacts are more powerful and having useless consumable drop sucks.

2. Weapons leveling. It's tedious. Also it's completely random, like most things in this game. Half of the weapons are not fun to use and are pretty situational. Not having some kind of control over what you get sucks. At first I was excited to level all perks of my Hollowseeker to level 3 but after getting Spitmaw and some other weapons I realized I would need to level everything killed the excitement for me. I realize that devs probably wanted players to adapt to everything and that's simply too much for me. I would like to have some control over the gameplay and how I play. Being forced to play in a way that is sufficient to beat the level without much alternatives (you have some, but they're not optimal) is not what I enjoy. Not saying it's a bad thing. Just not my thing. Also there're just not enough enemies to level up your weapons at a pace that feels okay for me. You constantly find a new weapon before completing previous one.

3. Balance and difficulty curve. My first death was on the first first boss. Then on 3rd and then I beat act 2. After that I kept dying in the first 2-3 rooms from random elites and it felt like I hit a wall and couldn't get out occasionally being able to go to the next world and beating the run. It's weird. With being able to unlock a new artifact (or consumable... yay...) each run it felt like I kept getting weaker and weaker because initial set or artifacts and consumables was way more powerful then it was after artifacts pool got diluted with artifacts that don't have much synergies with other items and just simply not good enough to justify spent currency.

4. Map. Icons on the map to be specific. Many things that have completely different effects have same icons on the mini-map and it's frustrating to be unable to remember what is that thing in this room and if you really wanna know you have to go there.

5. Optimal/powerful builds, min-maxing. Another tedious thing. I realize that I don't have to pick up everything and use everything. But if you don't wanna spend hundreds of hours to beat Act 3 you have to be thoughtful. And to be thoughtful means to not pick up everything at the first site because you might need it later to fix your malfunctions. And having to remember everything sucks (especially because of my previous point #4). And having to backtrack sucks even more. It was fun at first because I kept finding new things because of this. But after doing it each run it started to feel old and unrewarding.

I realize that you can write express same complaints about other big rogue-likes like The Binding of Isaac or Risk of Rain etc. But for some reason I enjoyed those more. I'm not a game-designer to figure out why. I just felt frustrated after putting 30 hours into Returnal because I didn't feel rewarded enough for my time. I kept investing my time because first impression of the game was really good and I expected to see more good things to enjoy.

Bosses are cool tho. Wish the game capitalized on the boss fights aspect more.

It turned out to be an unstructured flow of thoughts instead of proper review. Sorry for that.

Lazy parody

Good old Dead Space but better. Prime example of what a game remake should look like

Combat feels clunky and unresponsive. There's no animation cancelling. I thought level up upgrades would fix something and make it more interesting, but nope, skill tree has the most boring stuff - +X% damage / +Y% something / add 1 more hit to the combo (combos are basically mash 1 button a bunch of times, and at the end you can press 1 other button). Some stuff in upgrades tree should have been enabled by default but I guess they didn't know what else to add to the upgrades tree so they cut essential stuff and put it there, which shows that combat as flawed and not interesting at it's core.

Story and characters are typical anime so if you're not a fan you're not going to enjoy it. I thought I was an anime fan, but conversations and character development is so bad that I just cringe most of the time.

I'm not sure what's the point of this semi-open world simulation but it has no gameplay value. You just waste time before missions to run there to talk to someone and start the mission. Very questionable. Between and during the mission world feels empty and uninspired.

I tried but I didn't enjoy anything about this game. Music is okay tho

Great visuals, atmosphere, story, music and gameplay. Can't say a single bad thing about this game other then it's rather short. But functions (your character's abilities) combinations give you a ton of replayability. I hope more people will give it a try because I guarantee that most of you will love it. I did

Simply a really good game. No annoying mechanics, simple and pleasant story and gameplay to chill to a few evenings. Would like to highlight amazing detailing of the environment, world and animations. What an eye-candy.

My main problem with this game is it's just too punishing and way too grindy. And this is coming from someone who enjoys grinding. But here it's just pure frustration. I know what a fair punishment in games is. Here you're expected to perform perfect dodges one after the other through bunch of elite enemies that you can't stagger with most of your attacks (but they can and will stagger you) while not being able to animation cancel some of your attacks (so you end up getting hit because a bunch of mobs are after you) and also not take damage because if you didn't get any kind of healing you're donezo and also manage your stamina points (this stamina points system feels way off, definitely not a fan of it). Sometimes you just will get hit, no matter how good you are. I managed to get to exploration 11 when I realized that I'm not enjoying it at all because most of the time I feel frustration that rng decided to give me useless weapon/relics. Ph yeah, also relics. They're either beyond useless or meta. If you didn't get at least some of the meta relics - this run is pretty much dead.

I really tried to like this game because I enjoyed visuals but it's just impossible. Can't recommend to anyone

Update #1: the game is fine, turns out I'm just depressed
Update #2: turns out the game was actually slowly but steadily becoming a steaming pile of garbage and with update #1 I've just gaslighted myself.

Old review:
I can't force myself to play this game anymore. I loved it. I really did. But it looks like game designers don't respect my time that I've put into Destiny 2.

For the last few years I suffered from anxiety-depressive disorder. I lost all interest towards anything in life. After I started playing during Season of Opulence I immediately got hooked up. Destiny 2 taught me to be passionate towards something again. Since then I played every single day. I remember realizing that I didn't have much time to get MMXIX title, but I really wanted it so I immediately started learning all raids that were present in the game at that moment. I had a notebook where I would draw encounters and write down strats for every role because I didn't want to be a dead weight for my raid group (I didn't have anyone to play with so my only option was LFG). I successfully learned and completed all raids in under 1 month and it was amazing. I had so many great memories: first Flawless ticked in Trials of Osiris with my friend Blue, endless Gambit grind for Reckoner title with my girlfriend, weekly raiding with lore discussions and readings with my clan Guardian.FM Cryptarchy, raid challenges with LFGs, ♥♥♥♥♥ Labs, day one DSC completion, and many many more.

But I don't like where this game is going. Strikes/crucible/gambit are boring and don't have any meaningful rewards. Once you learn the raid and have all loot from it - it becomes boring too. Seasonal content is beyond boring. Bright Dust economy is broken (not to mention that they cut your bright dust income every year). There's literally no endgame. Sunsetting was eye-opening experience. I have so many favorite weapons that I just can't use anymore, even in low level content. I also never understood power level grind every single season. Also cheaters in Trials and Survival. If only you knew how many of my tickets got ruined on 7th game by cheaters. Time gated and time restricted content is annoying. It looks like management is trying too damn hard to keep you logging in for any reason even if you don't have anything meaningful to do. This game had so many opportunities to be great but it just never happens. Management keeps promising that great things are coming but every time we end up with the same annoying design philosophy and practices.

Sorry if anyone finds this write up annoying. I really had to get this off my chest. It hurts me that I have to stop playing Destiny 2 but I also feel relieved.