Recent reviews by Nova225

Fantastic 3D pixel / voxel art, great music, and a decently strong story make for a great sci-fi JRPG. It's a well made game all around and I was hooked the whole way through.

The only real complaint I have is that there is a sidequest which results in an optional party member. The party member is not scaled to your level and starts at level 1, and the earliest you can get him, you'll be at least 10 levels ahead of him, so if you decide to use him, you need to spend some extra time grinding levels with him. He also has no abilities or weapons, aside from a few bonus attacks per turn and some decent stat growth. He gets a couple lines at the end of the story, but has no story significance otherwise. He basically feels like a complete afterthought to the game and doesn't really add anything.

As a foreword, I've played the original PS1 Star Ocean 2 probably at least ten times. I've generally only played the Claude story (I'm sorry, Leon is my favorite character and I can't stand to not have him). I beat the final boss with no limiter, the bonus dungeon and all the secret bosses, and gotten the absolute best equipment for my characters. I've never played any of the remasters or remakes, so my experience is solely based on the original PS1 game, so if something was changed in the PSP remaster before this game, I'm dumb and not aware of it.

This is a phenomenal remake, and it truly is a remake. The newly designed character portraits look a million times better than both the OG and the Second Evolution remaster on the PSP. There's a ton of voice acting now, and most of it sounds pretty solid and not the least bit cringey. The combat has improved immensely. It still plays like the original style, but skills that were garbage in the original (looking at you "flip") now work great. There's a defense breaking system like Final Fantasy 7 Remake and some skills and spells excel and breaking defenses instead of straight damage dealing. Enemies telegraph their attacks with a red glow and with proper timing you can dodge / counter attack them too, making combat not nearly as button mashy as the original. Spells have been revamped across the board, many of them being multihit now and they don't slow down the fights, so now spellcasters are actually worthwhile to have in your team when the the OG meta was to use 3 swordsman and Rena as a support caster. Formations provide actual bonuses and you have reasons to use different ones depending on your playstyle and what stats you need.

Enemies can be seen and avoided for the most part, both in dungeons and on the world map (think the Tales Of games as a good example). You can "chain" multiple encounters together too and fight them back to back, allowing a better way to grind.

The entire games 2D portrait style has been remade in 3D. And it looks amazing. I miss the 3D squishing models of items that have been replaced with portraits, but there's a cute sprite animation now instead, so I give that a pass. But you can also item create in bulk, *and* the game clearly illustrates to you what your chance of success as well.

This is a standard for remakes. Keep the existing stuff that's good, but improve and streamline the stuff that didn't flow well.

To preface this, Below Zero is good game, I feel, but it's not *as good* as the original Subnautica.

My play time is a bit fragmented, I got really close to finishing it, but got stuck for whatever reason and quit without finishing it. After getting back into the original game, I tried to give this another shot.

There's a bunch of design decisions that are different from the original game, mostly because BZ is a standalone expansion rather than a full fledged sequel. Some of these decisions were great, others I think stemmed from a misrepresentation of what players liked.

Let's start with the good. The developers are masters of creating underwater alien landscapes. Glowing purple rocks that regularly "pop" into flame jets. Lily pads that are attached to chunks of rock at their base. Massive icebergs with caverns inside. Deep underwater mushrooms that spit out spores that float in the water. All of it feels alien and you'll always be amazed at the environment.

The progression system does two things: it allows you to slowly acclimate to the environments around you while letting you grind out some resources for your next project, and there's always at least one or two resources that will force you to go out of your comfort zone to search for new materials. For example, to make a certain material, you need mushrooms from a deep cave. Your vehicle likely won't be able to reach all the way, so you'll be forced to do at least 100 meters or so outside the safety of your seateuck. You'll also rarely feel like you need to grind. The system from the OG Subnautica was changed so that each outcropping now has 1 special resource, or titanium (a general crafting resource for most things and base building) instead of having nodes carry 1 of 3 different resources that was completely random.

As for the bad, the story just isn't as intriguing. S1 had a story of a mysterious crash landing, and you slowly put the pieces together of what happened, and how you'll escape the alien planet. You're also a silent protagonist, so you're alone with your thoughts and the occasional informational and sometimes snarky PDA. SZ has a voice protagonist and eventually an alien in your head. I don't hate this, but it creates a very different vibe than the original. The game also gives you your objectives almost straight away (find 3 specific blueprints, craft them, then bring them to a certain place, and also find out what happened to your sister). S1 didn't, you just survived and slowly got introduced to the gravity of the situation you were in. The character animations for people are also just... Weird, like they couldn't do stop motion so they all feel like cheap canned animations from the early GameCube era.

Land areas are too much and Subnauticas engine leaves a lot to be desired. There are a few neat moments, but for the most part they just feel like a slog.

Lastly, I don't like the Seateuck and it's modular design. I get why the Cyclops from S1 wasn't included, because of the map size, but there's no point to getting all the Seateuck mods. Half of them are useless (sleeping quarters and aquarium), and the more modules you add, the slower you get. The Seamoth was a perfect early exploration vessel and there was no need to remove it from BZ. The Prawn suit is back because I'm sure the fan base would've rioted if they scrapped it.

Overall I think it's still a fine game and if you liked the exploraion of S1, you'll find something you liked in SBZ.

Close but not quite there. I'm not sure what the point of the ticket system is if you still require the player to play all the stages to get into the final elevator anyway. It defeats the purpose. It also forces players for the first few stages to scour for tickets (especially to get the 60 needed for the theater level, because the golf course is barren of tickets).

The procedural generated levels are lacking. Lots of large empty spaces that don't quite feel liminal because they're created at such odd angles. If the dev is going to stick to using procedural generation, then you're gonna need more assets to diversify environments a bit and those environments are going to need more props in them. The lazy river / pool zone is fine, it's meant to confuse you a bit as you backtrack through areas you're sure you were just at, only to be met with a new area you haven't seen after a few minutes.

Speaking of, the areas that are more handcrafted feel considerably better to play. They have a creepiness factor (you can't die, but you'll still feel like you're being watched) and they all feel like an environmental puzzle you're trying to solve, like climbing a fountain to reach a higher ledge or ducking into a vent to reach a closed off store in the mall.

Get rid of the tickets, and maybe even the hub area. Clean up the procedural generation if you're going to insist on using it. Handcraft a little more and intermix it with your procedural generation so the players feel like they're exploring something and not an AIs idea of what Liminal space is.

A great Silent Hill / RE style game with extra eldritch horror and some sci-fi thrown in. Honestly a great game with some good (though a little convoluted) writing. There's a lot of hidden lore to unpack and by the second half of the game you'll be questioning if anything you're seeing is real.

My biggest complaint is the inventory size. You're limited to 6 items, which includes weapons, ammo, tools, and key puzzle items. You'll be making frequent trips to save rooms to store all of your stuff, because you never know when the game will stop giving you 10mm pistol ammo and start swamping you with shotgun shells instead. 2nd largest is that the game isn't always clear on what "resets" enemies when you alert them and leave a room. Sometimes you can immediately return and they'll be back to their usual patrols, others they'll just wait at the door and get an easy hit if you're not careful.

tldr, beautiful game with an amazing story, mechanically a little rough around the edges.

Doom Eternal is a fantastic game. Few people debate this.

But what id did to Mick Gordon is an absolute travesty. I cannot in good faith recommend anyone buy this game given the gross miscarriage of injustice done to the music composer who was a major part of the modern DOOM identity.

Do yourself a favor. Go in as blind as possible. Don't look at any guides. The system of getting pages of the manual that you can't fully understand is a stroke of genius.

Also I haven't found a waterfall that *doesn't* have a secret behind it.

**EDIT: Finished the game**

I'll admit for many of the later "post-game puzzles" I looked at a guide for. The in game language is very difficult to decipher blindly, and if you're not familiar with English you probably shouldn't even bother.

The surprising thing about this game is you can pretty much do any puzzle at any given time once you get one or two specific items, but because of how the manual is handled, you'll never know how until you see the pages (or experiment a lot)

I think the most amount of tries I've spent on a boss fight was 7-8, but nothing is stopping you from exploring more and finding stat boosts.

FIST is a great game, but I'm hesitant to call it a good Metroidvania.

Each area the game takes you through is fairly linear, and you'll only revisit them if you want to get collectibles or data disks (used to unlock some moves). Otherwise you never need to return. There's a few areas midway through the game you can 100% complete on your first pass.

I find the combat system enjoyable, but I question some design decisions. It's a gambit every time you go into to attack, because you don't know if you'll interrupt your opponents move or not. Many attacks from enemies will just super armor their way through and hit you anyway.

You start with a dash, but not really a dodge. You can't dash through enemies until you get a VERY late game upgrade, which personally made combat flow much better not being body blocked by enemies. You aren't given a block / parry ability until about halfway through either. I've played games with a similar parry mechanic, so it wasn't too out of left field for me to figure out, but it does NOT like analog sticks. I had to swap my movement to the D-Pad on my Logitech F310. From there parrying was actually pretty easy. But just like with enemies super armoring through attacks, sometimes parrying will stun the enemy completely, and other times it will just negate damage. Early on you also get a charge up punch which is shown that it can be used as a counter move against a bosses rocket punch, but it's never utilized again after that.

Storyline wise it's better than most Metroidvanias. My only complaint is that if you press the confirm button too soon in a conversation where action is happening, then you'll go from talking to punching without seeing what triggered it in between.

Eventually you get a hang of the combat and find what combos work well for you and steamroll most enemies. Some of the bosses can be challenging, but not anything too rough.

Not great, not terrible. I got up to the first boss about 3-4 levels in an unlocked a handful of abilities.

Picked it up on release because giant mech suits are awesome. But this game is trying to be DOOM without being DOOM.

It feels like the devs pulled a lot of inspiration from the newer DOOMs. A mix of platforming, keyfinding, a few somewhat hidden secrets, and their take on glory kills. That is, executing enemies for health special ability boosts. But they failed to take what made that awesome. DOOM got away with it because it's first person so you can't see what other enemies are doing. In Blackwind, it just looks weird, because all the enemies stand still while you rip the arm off of the 4th enemy you see. There's also no punch to them. In DOOM you're getting a rock sting, a facefull of gore, and visceral feel. Blackwind especially fails on the sound design, because nothing feels impactful. Everything feels like wet noodles hitting one another. When I flip over the enemy crabs and stomp on them, the screen should shake and you should feel the boom. But it's nothing.

The actual gameplay is fine, no more repetitive than any other hack and slash. I don't *hate* the protaganist, but I feel he handles ripping and tearing aliens and seeing 100 dead soldiers without a hint of trauma. They really could've looked at a game like Iji to watch someones descent into trauma, but they opted for the saturday morning cartoon style, and it doesn't fit with all the blood and gore.

This game is fantastic but it comes with a big "When the stars align" caveat.

You need friends to play with.
You need a working microphone.
You need a good internet connection.
You need the server side stuff to not break.

The last point is the biggest. This was a project by a single dev that blew up almost overnight. When my wife and I logged onto play today the population for U.S. servers alone was in the 50k zone. The game is struggling to deal with the massive influx, plus there's modders that are overloading some servers by allowing 10+ players in a 4 player game. The other downside is it's still early access. There's a lot of jank, the animations are awful, and the controls take a good hour to get the hang of (placing a camera is pain for a while).

But when the stars align, the game is incredibly good fun. You're a bunch of investigators trying to find out what kind of ghost you're dealing with so the exorcists can do their job properly later. There's something like 15 ghost types, and each one acts differently. Shades are really shy and will barely act out if you're with other people. Demons will tear out throats faster than you can run out of the house. You have to use a plethora of equipment to figure out where the ghost is and what kind it is, as well as a handful of bonus objectives that change each round. The better you do, the more money you get, which can be spent on more equipment.

The developer has a fantastic idea that is executed near perfectly, and the game can only get better from here.