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Recent reviews by IndigoAK

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Showing 1-10 of 18 entries
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
7.8 hrs on record (1.3 hrs at review time)
I don't even know where to start with this game.

Let's start with the fact that the combat somehow got worse between Legend and Anniversary. Instead of just standing around shooting at people that just stand there and shoot you, you now have these stupid bullet time sequences where you have to dodge at the right time and wait for a crosshair to appear before firing. Except that's it. That's the combat. Enemies do these slow-mo attacks 9 times out of 10 whenever they're attacking you, so Crystal Dynamics took the criticism about Legend's combat where you just stood there and shoot people and replaced it with combat that's terrible in the opposite direction. It's like if someone tells you your breath stinks, so you decide to drink an entire bottle of perfume. Congrats, I guess. You're gonna die, but your breathe will smell like a fairy's rear-end on your way out.

Then there's the traversal. Every single issue that Legend has is still there, plus they added some new ones to boot. That ledge that looks like you can grab it? Well, you can, but Lara might just inexplicably not grab it 50% of the time and fall to her death. Sometimes, you might jump for a ledge and Lara glitches into grabbing the ledge next to it. The new hotness in this game though is that now Lara can clamber up waist high ledges, except that she can't really. They didn't actually code in clambering, so you just kind have to jump at waist high ledges and Lara does this weird animation that looks like the animation had a stroke while keyframing. Oh, and if you thought that maybe moving crates around somehow got easier, you're in for a world of pain. I don't know you screw up something as simple as moving crates around like Crystal Dynamics did in these two games.

Visually, the game looks exactly like Legend did without the next-gen graphics. Which is fine if you like that "PS2 game upscaled to PC resolutions" aesthetic. They're not amazing, but they aren't terrible. The visuals are just kinda there. One big issue though is the motion blur. For whatever weird reason, the developers decided that if the camera butts up against something, the motion blur should smear the screen. Or if you swing the camera around fast enough. Or if the game just feels like smearing the screen. You can turn it off by disabling the post processing, but then you lose a bunch of other stuff. There's also a mod that claims to be able to disable it, but that option doesn't actually seem to work (and honestly, it kinda feels like it made it worse somehow).

Audio wise, the game is significantly better than Legend and a lot of that boils down to Zip and the wannabe Shaun Hastings (Alister, I think his name is, I honestly have no idea) being absent and therefore unable to continually spew a bunch of trite one-liners every fifteen seconds.
Posted March 15.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1 person found this review funny
4.7 hrs on record (2.4 hrs at review time)
This game has not aged well. I'm not actually sure how it was every actually considered decent.

Let's start with the visuals: this is an ugly game. Regardless of which graphics mode you use, but especially if you use the Next Gen mode, it's just awful. The textures and billboard sprites are low res even for the game's original era, there's constant issues with missing geometry if you move the camera in a certain way and don't even get me started on the character models. Lara looks semi-realistic in most scenes, but then there's other characters that look like they came from a Jak & Daxter game (not really an insult, just an observation). I was constantly switching back and forth between the graphics modes and I just couldn't decide which one to stick with because they both suck.

Then there's the audio. It's...there. Nothing about the audio design in this game really stands out.

For the combat, it's terrible. It's like they tried to slightly modernize the original tank-based combat, but there's really no slightly about it. It's basically the same exact combat and it's just as terrible as it was in those games. It mostly involves just running around and holding the fire button until things die, occasionally backflipping if it happens to get too close (which isn't often because there's less than 10 enemies in this game that do something other than shoot at you).

And then the story. Like everything else, it's just there. It's an excuse to go from A to B to C. Which would be fine, I guess, if A, B, C and D weren't all so freaking short. This is a short game. Even if you're trying to make it last longer, it's only like five hours long, if that.
Posted March 14.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
2.2 hrs on record
I just can't get into this game. The visuals are okay and the gameplay is okay, but the story so far has just been disembodied voices on the mission briefing and debriefing screens spouting hamfisted exposition.

If there is one thing I absolutely loathe in visual storytelling, it's expository dialogue and this game seems to be quite literally nothing but expository dialogue and so you can see my dilemma.

So, in summary: if you like robots and Dark Souls with robots, and you don't mind characters that talk at you instead of to you, this game might be your thing.
Posted March 2.
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4 people found this review helpful
3 people found this review funny
42.8 hrs on record (2.6 hrs at review time)
My review will be negative until they improve the color picker to something more than "the bare minimum" and add the ability to copy/paste/delete colors. I've met brain damaged chihauhua's with better color pickers and they don't even have color pickers.
Posted February 9. Last edited March 3.
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1 person found this review helpful
0.9 hrs on record
I really wanted to like this game, but I got to what I presume is the end and it just devolved into a tedious puzzle game with my second least favorite puzzle type in video games: dragging boxes around. If Sony Santa Monica couldn't figure out how to make dragging boxes fun in a game like God of War (the OG PS2 one) where there's blood and violence and boobs to distract you from how horrible they are, I don't know how the developer of this game thought they could do better.
Posted February 4.
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1 person found this review helpful
34.6 hrs on record (1.5 hrs at review time)
This game is like if Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Charmed and Sabrina the Teenage Witch had a foursome and then a little game baby.
Posted February 2.
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2 people found this review helpful
939.7 hrs on record (849.5 hrs at review time)
This game is a lot like Grey's Anatomy for me. There are often moments where I question whether or not I actually hate it, but I'm too invested in the storyline to stop now. Sunk cost fallacy, I guess.
Posted January 31.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
31.7 hrs on record (2.5 hrs at review time)
It's the same consistently high quality artwork from the previous games in a bigger, more polished package. If you liked this developer's previous work, you'll like this.
Posted January 31.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
0.4 hrs on record
This game is basically split into two different modes. There's a platforming mode that works like Limbo, Inside, Stela, etc etc and those sections are perfectly tolerable.

However there's also sections you play like a puzzle FPS game where a female protagonist narrates literally everything that happens, even the cutscenes you're watching. For instance, at the very beginning of the game she has to distract her boss. On top of the usual adventure game shtick where the character quips about everything you click on, once you do figure out how to distract her boss, the character describes in detail out loud what she's seeing. She's essentially a living audio description track and I just find this to be an insufferable trend in modern video games. I am not blind; my eyes are fully functional. I am capable of watching a cutscene where the events are not spoonfed to me by the protagonist.

This has to be a generational thing. Video games twenty years ago did not do this. This game was officially my "Oh god, I'm a millennial boomer!" moment.
Posted January 31. Last edited February 1.
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3 people found this review helpful
9.5 hrs on record (3.9 hrs at review time)
This is yet another game on Steam that I wish I could give a middle thumb option. There's something here that certain people would like, but it just doesn't do anything for me in particular.

My two biggest issues are that the combat is really clunky, even by Falcom's standards, and that once again, NISA's localization is pretty lackluster.

On the combat side, the game just doesn't have the responsiveness or clarity of Ys. Enemies often attack without telegraphing, hitboxes are incongruent and the game has a strange inconsistency in how it handles height in combat - enemies can hit you from above (or below) with attacks that don't look like they should be able to hit you, whereas you cannot do the same. The default controls are also terrible.

On the localization side, all of the hallmarks of NISA's brand of localization are present. The grammar is often stilted, the game is full of odd translation choices (or words that are straight-up incorrect, like in a quest that refers to process of making wine as "pickling") and most importantly, the dialogue really struggles with flow. You'd think when given a script that's significantly less dense than Falcom's usual, that NISA might be able to put together something a little more presentable. A poor assumption, it seems.
Posted January 28. Last edited January 28.
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Showing 1-10 of 18 entries