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Recent reviews by Jocosity

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4 people found this review helpful
51.1 hrs on record (15.9 hrs at review time)
If you can run it, this is genuinely one of the most fun times I've had in an open world rpg. It takes everything that made the original game so unique and makes it better while fixing the parts that didn't work so well the first time, and it really does feel like it was worth the long wait as a worthy successor to it. The world is gorgeous and fun to explore, the pawns are as charming as ever, and the combat is so well-designed and physics-driven that even minor fights along the road can be a lot of fun. I would go as far as to say that this is maybe the first $70 game I've played that actually felt like it was worth $70.

The problem, of course, is those first pesky few words there. The game currently has a lot of technical issues regarding performance, and if you have a weaker PC I don't know if it's worth even trying it before the patches come around. It seems like it must be related to the NPCs, because the worst of it is mercifully restricted to the city hubs where not a lot of action happens anyways, but even out in the wilderness it can be pretty taxing on your CPU. If you do have a hefty PC it is usually within a playable range, and hasn't put a damper on my experience yet, but in the larger cities it can easily drop to around 20 fps, which is a huge pain if you're sensitive to low framerates.

The other elephant in the room is the DLC list, which is mostly just consumables offered as a sort of cheat, but frankly I don't know why this has suddenly become such a hotly debated issue. Capcom has been doing this for ages, and in everything from widely praised games like RE4make to the first Dragon's Dogma, which I can only assume most of these people just didn't play at launch to know about. You've probably heard all kinds of misinformation being hurled back and forth that makes these sound much more necessary and evil than they are, but the truth is that outside of a few things like the music pack everything is available in-game like always, and if anything buying the microtransaction packs only breaks the balance of the game. So don't do it, obviously -- problem solved.
Posted March 25.
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3 people found this review helpful
8.7 hrs on record
I don't know how much more there is to say than that it's more Trine. If you haven't played the rest of them, go do those first -- not because there's any real story relevance between them, but because most of them are great, and undoubtedly cheaper. If you have played the rest of them, you probably don't need to be told any of this. It's good Trine.

For those who aren't familiar with this series, which despite only being known about by about 1000 people is still somehow getting one game after another, Trine is a puzzle platforming series with an emphasis on co-op. The newer games support four players, but they're meant for three, one for each character. The knight is good at fighting and can use his comically large shield for anything from gliding to using it as a platform for the others, the thief has a grappling hook that can tether items together, the wizard can conjure up various shapes and levitate things, and every game one of the three is laughably overpowered compared to the other two. The newer games also let you set the character swapping to unlimited, where you can have multiple players playing a particular character at once, but unless you have a four person group (which would require it) I prefer the classic setting that restricts you to one each. The puzzles do change to accommodate it in either case, with Unlimited mode sometimes requiring multiple of one character instead of just allowing it, but it loses the importance of being reliant on whichever player is playing a certain character and the chaos of coordinating three people.

Trine 5 also has a puzzle difficulty toggle that I at least don't remember the previous games having. Nobody else seems to realize this, either -- I know this because the one time my group finally cracked and I tried to look up a walkthrough (I know, I know, but in our defense it was 2 AM), even the ones that said they were playing on hard mode only had the combat set to hard. The game warns you that it isn't meant for your first time, even if you've played the previous games, and quite frankly I agree, but in a game like this that just makes it that much funnier to play with a few friends. Coming across a puzzle you have no idea how to solve, breaking it in half with the combined efforts of three heroes and some thoughtfully applied physics, and moving on without ever figuring out what you were supposed to do is a cornerstone of the Trine experience, and the tradition is more alive than ever here.
Posted March 23.
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2 people found this review helpful
20.8 hrs on record
This game is basically Alone in the Dark cashing in on an almost 30 year old favor, taking lots of inspiration from Resident Evil's recent remakes in the same way that RE itself was inspired by the original. The difference is that where the RE remakes usually stick reasonably close to the source material, Alone in the Dark 2024 is practically a whole new game; the story is almost nothing like the original except the two main characters and the setting, if that wasn't made obvious enough by the trailers showing a whole cast of characters. You really don't spend all that much time alone or, indeed, in the dark in this reimagining, but it handles it well and tells an interesting story between its two characters (which now have their own reasonably distinct scenarios, instead of the choice just being cosmetic in the original). They also got that dude that played Santa in Violent Night to play Edward Carnby, and I thought he did a pretty good job.

Mechanically there's still a focus on puzzles more than the combat, and it comes with an option to disable whatever hint system the game might have that's separate from the combat difficulty. If you're a survival horror veteran I'd suggest at least starting with the combat difficulty turned up to hard and lowering it if you don't enjoy the combat, because Normal and Easy are both fairly easy by survival horror standards. You can't throw your inventory at monsters or equip them as melee weapons anymore, but they did at least try to adapt the original game's combat by littering combat areas with throwable items like bricks and a variety of temporary melee weapons. Both of them are a little janky, but I didn't really expect them to be brave enough to try to adapt that aspect of the game at all to be honest so I was surprised they did in the first place. Unfortunately, I am sad to say that you can no longer fistfight the zombies. Maybe it's for the best.

If I were to lodge complaints, I only really have two, and they're both familiar complaints for modern survival horror games. The first is the music, which occasionally has some good tracks but is mostly the kind of quiet and forgettable ambience you're definitely familiar with if you've played many survival horror games these days. It's not even that the original's soundtrack was particularly amazing, but it was present and noteworthy enough that it's recognizable even outside of the game's context to anyone that's played it. I've already accepted that most modern horror games inexplicably hate the idea of having a good soundtrack beyond one or two standout tracks, but it hurts here especially because even the people who hated Alone in the Dark 2008 (almost everyone) can usually agree that its soundtrack was fantastic.

My other gripe is the enemy variety. The original didn't have a ton of them either, sure, but it made each one count. Where are the deep ones? Where are the weird little chicken things? Where's that... purple bathtub thing, whatever that was? There are enemies besides humanoid ghouls (can we please just go back to zombies? Has it been long enough?), and if you add them all up it probably has even more than the original did, but they're just not that exciting. The most prominent ones are annoyingly small, and none of them really require a different approach to take down. The original game had you banishing stuff, running from stuff, and stabbing stuff all the time to throw some variety into the usual punching and shooting stuff, but despite them vastly expanding the environments in this the enemies didn't really catch up. And they're far from alone, here; this is endemic to the genre, with even the best games like RE2make cutting out all the minor enemies that would otherwise throw in some welcome variety to the trudge of vaguely humanoid shapes we get in every horror game these days. Why?

Neither of these problems are enough of a focus in the game to bring it down, though, and the rest is interesting enough to easily recommend to survival horror fans. It isn't quite as unique as Alone in the Dark 1992 or Alone in the Dark 2008, but considering what an awful time the series had under Atari recently I can see why they would want to play it a bit safe here. It's still creative where it counts, and it's designed well enough that I hope we get more games like this from them.
Posted March 23. Last edited March 23.
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1 person found this review helpful
0.6 hrs on record (0.1 hrs at review time)
The controls on PC are about as janky as it gets, the game is full of hard crashes that basically require you to go to pcgamingwiki for some fan patches to figure out how to navigate, we're never getting the improvements the PS3 Infero release got, and even getting to the gameplay requires getting through a scripted sequence that, while cool, only really halfway works even when it's working as intended. If you're looking for a functional game with no caveats, something easily palatable that you won't have to wrestle with on occasion, look elsewhere.

But if you're looking for something you maybe haven't seen before, something unique that feels like the developers were just throwing as many new ideas as they could come up with in the hopes that at least some of them would land, something with a banger soundtrack that will stick with you long after you've put it down, and you don't mind that it ends on one of the worst cliffhangers since HL2 Episode 2 -- then by all means, step right up. This game catches a huge amount of flak that's at least partially deserved, but it's the kind of experience that will immediately resonate with the right kind of person, and personally it's one of my top guilty pleasure games. It's goofy, it's fun, and if you've heard of it at all it's probably because of the inventory system, which is still probably the most charming implementations I've ever seen. The AITD pack softens the price blow on a normal day by giving you the three classic AITD games alongside it for $15 (and the original AITD is almost worth $15 alone (in the dark), if you're hard enough to stick with it), but lately it's been going on sale for less than $1 on its own or $1.50 for the pack, which is a criminal steal. What have you got to lose besides a dollar and some time?
Posted March 20.
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4 people found this review helpful
0.2 hrs on record
This game is a classic, and I'm glad to see it finally back on Steam. It takes a little bit of configuring to get it working just right (pcgamingwiki is your friend, as usual) on higher res screens, but don't let that stop you from giving this one a try because there's no point in waiting for patches (RIP Pandemic Studios).
Posted March 7.
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7 people found this review helpful
0.8 hrs on record (0.6 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
UPDATE: The dev put out a patch early today that fixed all of the things listed below, so now even those are no longer a negative factor.

A lot of the people writing reviews today seem to have missed the big blue EARLY ACCESS banner, to be honest. Yeah, the controller offset is (slightly) incorrect on a quest 3, to the extent of like 10 degrees. Yeah, it'd be nice to have features like smooth turning and hold grip instead of toggle. No, none of these are bad enough to ruin the game in any way, and I don't think it's worth kneecapping an extremely promising and fun indie VR game with mixed reviews on day one over it. If you want to voice your opinions and nitpicks, go to the discussion forum, where the dev is actively listening to feedback! If you want to buy a polished and fully-featured game, here's an idea: come back when that big blue banner is gone.
Posted March 4. Last edited March 5.
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2 people found this review helpful
3.8 hrs on record
The main draw of this remake compared to the original isn't the visuals, in my opinion. It does look gorgeous, and I think it's a genuine noticeable improvement both in terms of the graphical quality and the emotional impact of certain cutscenes, but what the original lacked in raw technology it made up for with an art style that I think holds up relatively well for what it is. To me, the new appeal of this game is in the addition of the local co-op mode. It does make the game a lot easier when you don't have to coordinate the brothers yourself (it sometimes starts to feel a bit more like a narrative game than a puzzle platformer), but I found myself surprised at how well it worked, and it reminded me more of the games Hazelight would go on to make than I realized back when I first played this. I don't think this game requires co-op in the same way that A Way Out or It Takes Two do, but it's more viable than I thought it would be.

In either case, whether you play the remake or the original or singleplayer or co-op, Brothers is a fantastic game that I'm happy to return to, particularly since I think it was kind of overlooked in comparison to their later games. But I should warn that from what I'm seeing from the other reviews, the optimization here is extremely rough. I'm running a 4070 ti so I didn't have any issues, but I also averaged at around 70 fps even with DLSS, and the game in general seems heavily CPU-bound. If you don't have a considerably strong PC, it might be good to wait for updates, if they come; until then, there's no shame in sticking to the original.
Posted March 3.
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1 person found this review helpful
10.0 hrs on record (9.9 hrs at review time)
I was told to play this going in as blind as I could manage, and I feel like I should pay that forward. It has some frustrations every now and then, but it's an extremely cool game as a whole.
Posted March 2.
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4 people found this review helpful
4.9 hrs on record (2.0 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
I've been keeping an eye on this game ever since its Nextfest demo, and the full game hasn't disappointed at all. There's nothing I could explain about this that wouldn't spoil some of the magic for yourself; skip the trailers and the screenshots and just download the demo. If you aren't sold by the end of it, I don't know what to tell you.
Posted February 26.
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5 people found this review helpful
0.3 hrs on record
To get it out of the way up front, the Apollo Justice trilogy is generally regarded as being the lesser of the three Ace Attorney collections. Some of its cases go basically nowhere, it feels like they didn't really decide on it being the "Apollo Justice Trilogy" until the third game, Dual Destinies has some questionable character decisions, and frankly these days these games are probably more well known for that meme about the clown girl than anything else. But with all that said, being the "lesser" of what a lot of people would consider some of the best mystery games of all time is a distinction that only sounds bad on paper. They're still good games in their own right, even if you have to temper your expectations slightly compared to the rest, and the first game is severely underrated. In terms of port quality it's generally as good as you'd expect, but in particular (at least to my eyes) the updated 2D art of Apollo Justice looks a lot nicer than the original trilogy's HD release.

Regarding the bonus content (which was mostly what I'm here for for now, since I've already played these games multiple times on the DS/3DS), it isn't as in-depth as The Great Ace Attorney's unused music vault and annotated concept art, but there is a lot of concept art for each character, alongside the usual suspects like the soundtrack and movie players and a silly animation studio that plays out like a more high quality version of that old objection maker website from the early 2000s. The Asinine Attorney bonus episodes unfortunately once again didn't make the cut, along with the Japan-exclusive collab costumes, but all of the other DLC is in, and it's still plenty content-complete and bonus-rich enough to consider this the definitive version of the games.
Posted January 25. Last edited January 25.
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Showing 1-10 of 584 entries