Recent reviews by 💕Cyril💕

Thank you, SlimeSmile. You make the best Touhou games.

If you're like me and played Tales of Xillia & thought the battle system was the worst thing you've ever seen, then played Berseria and was dumfounded that they managed to make it worse, well I've got good news for you. This will be the first Tales game in the history of Tales games that will be playable to you. They brought back basic attacks which they never should have taken away, and brought back the series' equivalent of mana points back in a big way. Again, things that never should've gone away, but this series has never known good design. The combat has been improved so drastically in this game that I actually couldn't believe what I was seeing when I first played the game. They have ditched the horrible 3-dimensional "linear action battle system" that has just been a thorn in the series' ass since inception, it's still present, but it's so unobtrusive now that it basically doesn't exist. It's just a target system now. Good! It's like whoever designed the battle system took their heads out of their ass and said, "You know, I'm going to make a great battle system. Tradition can screw itself." The battle system is actually so good that it retroactively taught me how to play previous Tales games. A little premise: I have never been bad at games. I can beat some Touhou games on hard, I can beat Ys Origin on nightmare, but Xillia kicked my ass on normal, on the first boss fight. I was stuck on it for years. But after playing this game I went back and beat it first try. Let that be a testament to how good this battle system is that it is not only a good time on its own, but it retroactively taught me how I was supposed to use the nightmare that was the previous games. So.. what about the rest of it? Well..

Xillia's story was bland with bad combat, Symphonia's voice acting was so bad I thought it was supposed to be a joke until there was a serious moment and it was still just as bad.. Berseria seems to have a good story but the battle system is the worst thing in history..

Arise's story seems.. Bad. It seems bad. I'm not far in but the setup alone is bad. They do this thing that a lot of things in modern times do, they raise the stakes to 100 in the first 2 seconds and use a stupid fake concept to aid in the raising of those stakes. The Dahnahs are enslaved and they're using a magical CRYSTAL 2 DRAIN UR LIFE FORCE WOW!! SO REAL!! I dunno about you, but I can totally relate to these stupid, fake, fictitious ideas that only serve to raise the stakes and make you feel super bad in the first 2 seconds. Beyond that, a child nearly gets the ♥♥♥♥ beat out of him in the first 2 seconds of the game as well. A literal child. This is rated T?

Beyond that, the characters are.. Insufferable. Go on any forums and you'll find various posts of "When will Shionne grow on me?" "Does Shionne get nicer?" "Rinwell sucks" "They have no chemistry". Now, I've not gotten very far in the game, but I can tell you one thing. In just 2 HOURS of playtime, Shionne was insufferable. Intolerable, even. She's abrasive, cold, rude. And considering what the ending of this game is supposed to be, her demeanor makes even less sense. People desperately try to say "oh she gets better in the last HALF of the game!", but if she's insufferable in the first two HOURS, I can't sit through that if I'm supposed to be enjoying a story. Now, I can't speak to Rinwell. But people say she's awful and that's just sad to hear because she's my favorite character of the bunch, design wise.

As for the music.. Wow! It's great! Motoi Sakuraba does it again. It's not really a surprise at this point, nor an argument to buy this game over others even in its own series, but it's the case anyway.

So, essentially, it's another troubled entry in the Tales franchise. If you've somehow managed to deal with the horrible quality of the other tales games, you can tolerate this one. And if you haven't been able to tolerate the other ones, there's still problems here too that you can't tolerate. Shame. It's definitely going the correct direction as a series, but when it took over 20 years with almost 20 games, there's a serious problem.

Good gameplay, skip the story. What's a JRPG without the story? Exactly.

5/10

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another online multiplayer game ruined by updates pog

cons:
they ruined the character designs
no banksharing (what the hell, that's actually pretty bad)

other than that, good release. costumes are reasonably priced & they even give a costume away for free. holy hell guys nice job

Can't believe the top critical review for this game is "they removed Zoya's ability to grapple onto anything, the game is ruined!"

It literally affects nothing. The puzzles in every game were designed to grapple onto specific platforms, this literally changes nothing.

Frozenbyte does it again with another phenomenal Trine game, with industry-leading visuals and music. Really, that's all there is to it.

So, I wrote a review for this years ago but I guess I deleted it because it wasn't really worth posting. However, a few things need to be said about this.

First of all: the UI was changed in several ways from the OG. This is the primary issue. If the game looks different to what you remember, that is why. I assembled a patch years ago of all the changed files (verified by a comparison program, forgot its name) into a zip, which I will link here. https://t.co/Y5hww7tq6b
The files are directly from the 2001 game disc, complete with the Legacy Interactive screen still in place.
DL the patch & extract/replace the files in the Moon Tycoon folder.

..That's basically it. They changed a bunch of stuff including the logo and all the legible text on the buttons to goofy cartoony icons. Bad frustrating UI changes & this reverts them all. Now we don't have to figure out what an icon of "scale" means. or "fire". or "checkbox". or "lightning bolt" contrasted with "structure that looks like a power line tower". It just says what it is.

Don't know why they felt the need to change these things, it's almost like the plague of modern UI design crept into a 20 year old game. I'm also not 100% sure which came first but I'm almost positive it wasn't this because I have the disc & it's not that way there.

Aside from that the game is excellent & I clocked nearly 100 hours in it back in 2010.

I ended up really not liking this one as much as I thought I would. I actually really dislike it. Unfortunately, I had played just .2 hours over the Steam refund period before I decided I absolutely never wanted to play it again. Luckily I got it on sale, but that's neither here nor there.

Unlike Super Meat Boy, or even Mario, your height and speed have almost nothing to directly do with anything you do.

This game is based on one thing. One thing. The distance between your character and the end of your grapple hook. That's it. It controls your inertia, your height, your speed. Nothing you directly do in every other platformer in existence has anything to do with what happens here. Height depends on your release timing of the grapple, and grapple length. Speed depends on those two things as well, but primarily grapple length. Dash doesn't increase your speed like you'd expect it to. Rather it seems to "increase"? your max speed like some kind of bizarre multiplier. Speed, again, being based off the distance between your character and the end of your grapple hook.

It's strange. I would call it the most passive platformer I've ever played. You can jump right, move right, have the right speed, but if your distance between your character and the end of your grapple hook is wrong, your speed is eaten. Your height is eaten. You eat ♥♥♥♥.

It never feels like I did anything wrong.

The music is terrible. Really 5/10 material here. Nothing I'd ever listen to. There was one track that got stuck in my head that I listened to outside of game, but when there's only a few tracks, it's no achievement for a song to get stuck in a player's head.

With the quality of the music, I found it baffling how there was no option to force repeat a specific track of music, or multiple tracks, of your choosing. You can scroll to a specific track by spamming the Rstick button down, but that gets more tiring than the music. So I picked to just allow the music to autoscroll between the tracks of mediocre quality.

The opening of the game left me in a state of confusion. It's like one of those early 2000s games where there's a narrator with a gravelly voice and the title of the game in an extremely cliche, overly dramatic, just not-funny, not-interesting fashion. You want a parallel? Drake of the 99 Dragons. To add to this horrendously unfunny nonsense, every time you boot up the game you get an obnoxious narration of the title of the game in the same nonsensical narration cadence. It's horrible.

So yeah. I'm gonna be refunding this game and hope Steam accepts it.

What a damn shame. I thought I'd like this one more.

Free game PagChomp

I've been sitting on a review for this game for almost 3 years now, since it came out. As time went on, I found out more information, figured no one would like what I had to say, figured I couldn't say what I thought accurately enough, saw the response from the community and ultimately, just stopped caring about putting my thoughts out for anyone to see. But when I can say that the first Cloudbuilt is my favorite game on PC, I think my opinion deserves to see the light.

As someone who loves the original CB, top 10 on nearly every IL and leaderboard, this is an incredibly bastardized version of the original Cloudbuilt. It does the 3 things that I hate the most in the game industry: Remakes unnecessarily, changes for the sake of change, and player hostile game mechanics. I'll attempt to be brief, because the chances are at this point in time, that you already bought the game, love it, and have been playing it for years, or you're a newcomer that just wants the gist.


They changed everything for the sake of change, not for the sake of what's better. The levels are bigger, why? I don't know. They added and removed some pathways, and changed others. Again, not better, just different. They changed the weapon so that it's controller friendly and a disastrous mix of "variety", it's a shotgun, a grenade launcher, and pellet shooter. This just makes it more clunky to use. The maximum charge shot introduces a delay so that when you fire at something you then have to take cover and wait if it would've alternatively died in one blue charge. And the controller compatibility is of course so that it could be played with one as console sales were a big focus on the release of this game. The argument for this new style of gun is that you no longer have to hold mouse1 down to keep your blue shot, which was the most common complaint in the community about the original game somehow. My only response is "bruh", because the people who genuinely complain about holding the mouse1 button down should grow an actual hand. Alternatively, if it was such a big deal to you in the first game, take your hand off the trigger and wait to charge it until you need to use it, like this game forces everyone to do now unless you prefire every surface. Demi feels like an actual brick in this game which was reacted to comically by the players of the game at release. I don't have a huge issue with how she controls, but if I had to choose I would choose how she controls in the first game. She just feels like a sack of potatoes in this one. Another change that's just there to be a change and I can't understand the purpose behind it.
The music is embarrassing. I forgot about it until this very moment. I'm genuinely embarrassed thinking about it. They claim to have remixed the tracks, and sure, they did. With one instrument. What they call remixing is taking the original track and replacing one instrument with a live version. That's it, I'm dead serious. Instead of being a synth or something they just used... I don't even want to think about it anymore. Check the versions on YouTube if you want. It's absolutely embarrassing and I cringe just thinking about it.

The boost panels are blue now instead of green. They just changed, changed and changed for the sake of change. I wonder how blatant it was that they were just trying to reuse assets and make it seem new to save their company to everyone in the process. Now, don't take this the wrong way. I love Coilworks. But if I was sitting there, during the process of making this game, I would've been cringing at how we're just packaging everything up in a new coat of paint and acting like it's significantly remade.

And it just goes on from that. There are tons of small, annoying changes.

The hub world was changed from a cool overhead map in the sky that shows small previews of every level to a static, stock, white hospital with absolutely no landmarks or anything worth a damn in it. They're just literal doors that all look the exact same as each other with a name for the level.

There's an upgrade system now. It's totally useless.

The story got some tweaking, but it's just a lot more words of Demi being existential. I don't like the story, never did, in either game, but I don't see how this added any significance.

Other things I can't remember...

But now, I'd like to talk about the worst thing I've ever seen.

This game has something called the Fog Core. This is a small orb item somewhere. For any of you that've ever seen my stream, you might know a little panel I put in my info. For others, I'll explain. The Fog Core is the worst thing that this game ever did, and one of the worst things any game ever did. It outright lies to the player, it has negative effects to the game experience. This was what I meant when I said player-hostile game mechanics. This little ♥♥♥♥♥ right here. When you first encounter the Fog Core, it tells you that when you pick it up, it causes permanent changes to your game. It doesn't tell you what they are. And that when you pick it up, you can't put it back. But since I was a blind player that was playing the game for the first time, I had to pick it up to progress. So I picked it up. The effects it had on the game if I remember correctly were; blocking my access to various levels and other things I can't remember. Basically, it was kind of a mess, and I wanted to play the levels that it blocked from me. So I went back to where the Fog Core was and tried to put it back, thinking I would be at a loss based on what it told me before. Well, guess what it told me? It said I could put it back. What? It had just told me that I couldn't put it back. That it would cause permanent changes to my game. So I'm to understand that it lied to me the first time? What it tells me this time when I arrive is that I can put it back, but I CAN'T TAKE IT AGAIN. Very well, I suppose I'll put it back. It lied to me the first time so I suppose this is one of those things that just tries to make itself seem weighty when actually it's just player-friendly and allows you to swap it on and off at your leisure. DEEEAAAAAD ♥♥♥♥♥♥ WRONG! This time, the inconsistent piece of trash was actually telling the truth. I couldn't get the Fog Core anymore on that file. If I ever wanted to get it again, I would have to play through the entire game on another file.

THIS. GAME. IS. THE. WORST.

The Fog Core is required, I think, to unlock secret levels that the game doesn't tell you about and that I would have no clue even exist if I didn't watch Kalifen stream them when it released. And I say I think, because I have no clue how they're unlocked. If you ever want to unlock these levels be prepared to scour for a guide. I don't know if a guide exists because I can't stand this game and I'm not going to look it up.

So, in summary, I hate this game. I think it's one of the biggest embarrassments in game history. And while I never will understand why, some of the community actually likes this game. If I'm correct, at least a few top runners, including myself, all like the original better. If you are going to take it from anyone, I suggest you take it from us. Buy the original. It has Steam Workshop with custom levels, a level editor, better music, better control, better everything. It's the better experience. I won't recommend this version till the day I die.