Recent reviews by Dreziv

Played it, loved it. Played it again, learned the combat system better, loved it more. Discovered this is a prequel, so I went and played Zeno Clash 1 and 2, and now I love all three. Three wildly different games, and ironically this one is a pretty good starting point, despite coming out a decade after the last installment. Zenozoik is a beautiful and fascinating setting, and the characters within are so unique that you'll see someone and go "didn't I beat another one of these guys?" and the answer is no! You beat this same guy! He just got back up and came for you again later! The outlandish charm of these titles is back in full-force, and as a new fan, I couldn't be happier.

Another big shift from ACE Team! Very happy to have found this series, even if I did start with Clash: Artifacts of Chaos. Getting to explore Zenozoik again (in co-op!) and see all sorts of new and bizarre locales is a total treat for me. Although, I gotta admit, seems the combat got, like. Way easier. You can kinda just use the left-right-left-right-both combo they teach you in the tutorial on every enemy and do just fine. Using your crowd control items is pretty fun, though. Anyway, since I still have ZC1's challenge tower and all of Artifacts of Chaos to do if I want some more challenging fights, I take the narrative focus as a trade-off I enjoy. Really got to learn a hell of a lot more than either of the other titles, and I loved it.

Bought this game because I loved Clash: Artifacts of Chaos and learned that was a prequel to this. I knew going from a 2023 game to a 2009 game would be a serious adjustment, but where Zeno Clash lacks some smoothness, it makes up to me in being fascinating, beautiful, and just so weird. But don't get me wrong, it is also very satisfying to beat people up in this game. Playing Artifacts of Chaos first though, shows that ACE Team has done plenty of growing, which in turn leaves me excited to play Zeno Clash 2 soon.

Short but sweet. It's like Hades but chill as hell. Pacing gets a little weird, especially with the post-launch update content, but I put it out of my mind and enjoyed the ride.
As long as you can buy in to reading the dates talk about their problems you'll probably have a pretty good time, but one thing I did notice is that early on you can max out the level on all your current weapons in just one dungeon run, and you might catch yourself thinking "oh boy, now I gotta leave the dungeon and read the VN segments before I can go back to fighting." That can be a little annoying, especially because I did actually really enjoy the fighting, but when that thought occurred to me I just had to tell myself to chill out, so I guess that's my advice to you, too.

This is a perfectly pleasant 'vania game. Not revolutionary, it probably won't blow your socks off, but it's got nice combat, good enemies to whack on, and the music's not bad either. Some of the spells you get are actually really fun to play with. My favorite spell was the one where you toss a tennis ball, and then you can whack it, and the faster it's going, the more damage it does to enemies. By the end game, there's actually quite a lot of tools to play with, and even if there's not much reason to use all of them, you can do some fun stuff if you get creative. I'm not very good at the momentum-based platforming stuff, the kind you'd see in like, base-game Celeste, so those being totally optional made them a little more pleasant to be slamming myself against. Thumbs up for the little mushroom game.

I wanted to love this game, which makes this so incredibly frustrating. I spent three days playing this with friends, and none of us had a shred of enthusiasm in our voices after maybe hour 2. Just became a constant slog of asking how to make progress and getting back an answer that made me miserable because it meant I had to play more of this game.

I don't like PvP games, so I played on a PvE server, and I think it's great that you can do that, but I feel like large swathes of balance decisions are made for PvP, which makes PvE unnecessarily miserable.

Combat in this game is mindless, slow swinging at enemies that can chunk the hell out of your life and dodging on an EIGHT second cooldown at a Diablo-style camera angle. It's worth mentioning here that I also am not a Diablo fan, but at least in Diablo you had skill trees, and could make some kind of a build for your character. I was hoping this game would have some skill-trees to explore the different kind of vampires you could be, but that's not the case. You gain powers (and gear recipes) by tracking a target and then taking a long walk to find the boss, (sometimes the bosses will move so much they'll lead you away from their arena, and they'll notice they're out of bounds, and reset the fight, gaining all HP back) and have a slog-fight with them until they die and you can drink their blood. Once you get their power, you'll realize "oh my god, I have to replace one of my abilities because I only have two ability slots." Two ability slots for magic does allow you to take a first attempt at a boss and say "actually I think I want this defensive skill instead of this ranged one" but that's more akin to finding a solution to a puzzle than it is making a character that works for you. Also, weapons have skills, but you get them by having that weapon be a certain material-level. Copper is the third tier of weapon, which gives you the first weapon skill of that weapon-type.

Crafting takes so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long. I don't know who looked at the speed at which items smelt in Minecraft and decided it should take ten times longer (recipes often take 60 seconds) and be split up across all the different rooms in your house. To craft some of the more useful items, you use a workbench, but that workbench will craft items for cheaper if it is on a Workshop Floor. Items including your armor, which is made out of materials that you use at the Tannery, or the Loom, which are both machines that receive that same efficiency bonus if they are on a floor that matches their type, just like the workshop, leading to me having to walk a full circuit around my base whenever I want to craft anything, because I wouldn't want to put a Workshop in my Tannery, because then the armor would cost more material because I made it in the Tannery where I keep all the armor materials, rather than the Workshop, where I keep the Woodworking things.

I'm already steamed enough having to lay all this out, but just one more complaint. The blood system. Blood is the way you heal, even if that healing is only worth doing out of combat. When starting or respawning, you have the "Frailed" blood type, which gives no bonuses. You can drink the blood of most enemies, giving you their blood type, i.e. "Creature," "Warrior," "Rogue," etc. These come at varying percentage-based levels (1% blood will give you nearly no bonus but is still worth it if you desperately need blood, 100% blood gives you all bonuses and buffs them) and are overwritten whenever you drink another blood, making all blood types merely passive, temporary bonuses that are doomed to be replaced next time you step to the sidelines to heal, consuming your blood, so you need more blood for next time you heal, so you sup upon the nearest Deer (Creature, 7%), losing the buffs you got from defeating and feeding from someone who had a blood type of Brute (57%).

I hope this game can become better, I really do. But until then I will be refunding.

This game kicks ass, actually. You've got a large number of tools at your disposal, allowing you a lot of freedom and opportunities to make creative kills. I've always had a soft spot for OddWorld's less-than-mature atmosphere, since I had Munch's Oddysee when I was little, and if you like that, it's in this one, too. As I was playing, I was comparing a lot of what I was doing to Half-Life, Halo, and Dishonored, which was all a very welcome surprise. However, the PC port is a little rocky. Play on keyboard+mouse, save yourself the struggle. You'll want to bind a new key for changing your ammo, so you don't have to take a hand off WASD or the mouse to hit the arrow keys to do it.

All in all, I had a ton of fun playing with the many options available in Stranger's Wrath.

Trails in the Sky came to me in a time when I was very disillusioned with games. It had been a long time since I had played a game that impressed me in... even the slightest, most games seeming dull or uninspired. I felt pretty bad about games as a whole, and then I found this absolutely spectacular game. It dazzled me. It confused me. It frustrated me.

I was completely blown away.

A story with an unassuming beginning, blossoming out into tons and tons of individual story lines, all touching upon the world around it and enriching the experience as a whole. The main plot has secrets being revealed left right and center, up until the end, and once you've reached the end, playing through the game again makes you appreciate the writing doubly so, as you now understand certain aspects of the history better.

Lovable characters, each one with unique abilities and proficiencies in combat and charming characteristics in dialogue, mixing together, butting heads, recognizing each other's flaws, and becoming better for it all. They use what is, at times, pretty cheesy dialogue to win me over, but it's good cheese. The kind of cheese that allows for genuine emotion to come through in writing.

A soundtrack made to impress. There's areas where one particular song plays, for instance at a lakeside hotel in the second city, that whenever I hear it I can't help but close my eyes and get swept away in a calmed state, letting everything else melt away. And other times, pumping battle music that rocks so hard I'm ready for battle.

The magic system was really confusing when I first played, and it still is, in this one especially, because like, each gem you put onto a character has different numbers of smaller gems and certain combinations of the smaller gems unlock different spells and none of this is really explained very well. I put two earth gems on the main character and didn't understand where these better earth spells were coming from. Another character is locked into using water gems in a number of their slots, and with water being the healing element, it was very strange to me that they seemed to have ridiculously good healing, sometimes better healing than even necessary, making it frustrating when this very good healer had to leave my party.

This game made me so genuinely happy that I could gush on about it like this I had spent my time getting to know it. There's no way this one should be passed up by anyone.

Trails: The Third is pretty bad though.