Recent reviews by /a/merican

It's a nearly perfect exploration game which is basically impossible to review. Only downside is there is basically no replay factor.

Played it for the memes. The soundtrack is cheesy but fun to listen to, and the writing exists.

However, the controls are abysmal. It seems like anything in the game can break your camera lock, then you get stunned immediately after, or worse have to watch a non interactive special move from the enemy. All combat excepting bosses is trivial and boring. Bosses break your camera.

Where to begin? Also playtime is inaccurate, I have a couple of hours on my phone and around 10 on a throwaway steam account.

First, on a technical side of things, if you so much as go past the launch screen on steam you'll be locked from transferring data over from a phone or other console. I have no idea why this is. If you do, you'll have to make a new steam account and transfer your data over to that one.

The UI is bad. There's no way to browse what cards you have without editing a deck. There's no way to import decks from third party sites, which every other CCG I've played has. Instead, you have to use the "public decks" feature, but browsing for decks here is annoying since you don't know who made it or if it's any good. (Yes I netdeck, there are 6000+ cards in modern yugioh and I haven't played since synchros, also this game is not very f2p friendly.) There are a multitude of other UI nitpicks I could make, but for brevity I won't.

Konami couldn't help but make the monetization as greedy as possible. As a new player, you're flooded with 15k or so gems in the first day or two of play. Don't let this fool you, as it quickly slows to a trickle. It's enough to make ~1 deck with good pulls, but decks after that are going to take substantially more effort. The packs are absurd. If you're looking for specific cards, say, for a shaddoll deck, you'll first have to either pull or craft a SR or UR card in their "secret" pack. This unlocks the *privilege* of being able to pull from that secret pack. The catch? You only unlock the secret pack for 24 hours. So if you've got a pet project deck, you'll need to plan far ahead to efficiently spend your gems. I can see no reason for this other than to encourage unwise spending of gems.

Crafting materials are limited to card rarities. What this means is if you want a specific ultra rare you'll have to dismantle 3 other ultra rares to get that card. Considering most good decks seem to have ~20 URs, ~20SRs, and ~15 N/R cards, you'll be heavily bottle-necked with thousands of N/R crafting points to spend, but 0 UR and SR crafting points to spend.

The tutorial is terrible for new players. I already knew most of what it was going over, but if someone came in completely green, the tutorial would probably not help them much. For example, there's a "tutorial" duel on chaining. You would think that Konami would give you a deck with a preset hand to emphasize chaining effects together, but instead the only tutorial element is a paragraph explaining chaining to you, and then you just play through with your trash starter deck. The summoning tutorials at least do this, but could have done more to explain detaching for xyz or arrows for links. Incidentally, the "starter" decks they offer you are all trash in a tier of their own; if you use them in anything other than solos you're going to chain losses, even in bronze.

As far as gameplay is concerned, I don't have much to say about it. Modern yugioh is two simultaneous games of solitaire, you'll spend about 10 minutes putting out your combo, and then your opponent will do the same. Games with more grindy decks can last an extremely long time (for a card game). If you're new you'll spend 90% of your opponents turn reading the novel of information thrown at you to understand what's going on. I knew this going in and I don't mark it as a negative, but it's something to be aware of.

No stuttering on my specs at medium-high settings (aa turned off all else high).

GTX 1060 6gb; i5 8400; 24GB ram

As it stands, it's a solid foundation for a unique city builder/survival game. The soundtrack is really relaxing, and, while slow paced, it doesn't feel like it drags on too much. However, I think there are several things the game should address before release. From a technical side, why doesn't the game have a borderless windowed option? That seems standard in almost every game released today. As far as gameplay is concerned, the tech tree feels really shallow. There is a lot of potential here, in experimental they're adding things like vertical water pumps to move water up a level, but I say why not go a step further. Piping isn't exactly high technology. A map generator would also be cool, since as it stands you only have the premade maps or edits you make to them.

This is clearly a homage to the MMBN series, so if you enjoyed that you'll probably enjoy this. The characters are mostly fun and well designed (except reva, who is just horribly slow and kinda bad IMO), and there's a decent amount of card variety for deckbuilding. The music is also top notch. Different characters, cards, artifacts, and such offer a decent amount of replayability, and the game feels very fun and fast paced to play.

Criticisms, mostly minor-ish:
While the game is replayable you can only fight against the exact same bosses so many times before they become relatively easy.
There may be a lot of cards, but the synergy between them is fairly low. Most decks just end up being aim thing press thing with little regard to combos and such. Also, some combos don't feel worth the effort like flow and structures, especially considering building a themed deck is often impractical even with the card specializations.
The level cap should be reduced to 20 or so. It takes a lot of time to get everything unlocked, and frankly there's no point.


Overall, OSFE is a fun experience and worth $15-$20.

And here I sigh,
for there once was a thigh,
so perfect as to catch my eye.
The dev did say,
that it was not the way,
thus the thigh they sought to mislay.
And thus my plight,
that I will have to write,
this craven game should say goodnight.

As a disclaimer, this is still very early access. You can complete all of the available content in under 4 hours and then you encounter a door which basically says early access ends here please hold.

As for critiques, the game is mostly fine overall. There's not much there though so it's really hard to review that portion of it. I really like the idea of a soulslike that focuses on fighting at range. However, Nobeta has some downsides. For one, the game is extremely easy. There are three contributing factors to this. First and foremost, all of the elements other than arcane are stupidly strong. Ice's charge cast is basically the equivalent of the jericho missile from iron man 1. It locks on in a huge range, and then nukes whoever it locks on to. Ice also does substantial damage with its normal cast. Fire basically shotguns with its normal cast, and its charge cast is a long range lock on nuke. Lighting just does insane damage but I don't think that we're supposed to get it yet so I'm not sure what to think about it. Next, it's really easy to just make yourself a statstick, which could be fixed by some number changes. You're also encouraged to spread your points around since the requirement to level each stat up is unique to that stat instead of being dependant on your level (dark souls, for example, gives you one stat per level making this really hard). Finally, there are only six or so types of enemies in the game right now, and only the ranged ones are really threatening. Only the first boss is really threatening as a result of the subsequent elements being much more powerful.

The combat in general also still needs some work. A lot of things prevent you from breaking the animation by dodging which can be really awkward sometimes. You can just stop casting and then dodge, so I don't know why you can't just dodge out of the animation. On the topic of dodging, some boss attacks seem to have really disjointed hitboxes where it will look like the attack clean missed you, but registered anyway. It's a bit awkward and could be tightened.

Another critiques of mine is that the environments are very dull. Most rooms have a couple of urns in them at most and look very plain. The music is fine, I guess, all three tracks of it. The only voice-line outside of Nobita's action noises is a single, solitary, cat meow, which is a bit disappointing.

Overall I didn't encounter any gamebreaking bugs, and what's there is a decent foundation to build the game on. I wouldn't recommend this if you're looking for a remotely complete experience because it still has a way to go.

TLDR: If you're a fan of the original series and can get it for relatively cheap, like through humble monthly, then get it, otherwise it isn't worth $40 since there really isn't much new. If you haven't played a spyro game before this is a great collection for you to get and you will thoroughly enjoy it.

There, you can read that and ignore this if you want to.

To qualify my recommendation, I would rather say, it depends.

This is a complete remaster of the original Spyro trilogy on the PS1. The levels are practically identical in every way except the visuals and music. The visuals are completely redone, and the music is mostly similar tracks to the original game with some improvements on the tracks. I personally haven't finished the games other than the first (which I had never 100%'d before), and probably won't since there isn't much point to it when I've already finished 2 and 3 multiple times each.

However, where the game differs from the original the most is in the controls. In the reignited trilogy the controls are noticeably less responsive than in the original series. This makes some minigames an absolute pain, especially the ones with tank controls which were already notoriously a pain to finish. Underwater and superflying controls are also somehow worse than the original. To add onto this, I swear some of the minigame npcs are faster, most notably a certain piece of ♥♥♥♥ haiku firefly and directionally challenged alchemist. Anyone that's played the original series is probably fully aware of which missions I'm talking about and how... inconvenient they would be if they were faster.

Furthermore, the game has some glitches in it. Some people I have seen elsewhere vastly overstate this, but I would be remiss to overlook them. The big ones, and you may never encounter them, are fps driven. For some reason if you have your fps locked above 30, some parts of the game mess up. The best example of this was where there was a door controlled by an npc that you were supposed to kill, and on 60 fps the door never opened, but if you lower it to 30 it does open. Another bug that I frequently encounter is when sparks simply ignores gems. You may be right on top of the gem and sparx will simply choose to ignore it, which can be infuriating sometimes. There are other glitches that I've seen people mention but have not personally seen so I'm not going to bring them up here. I recommend just locking at whatever you want and then adjusting if something is obviously wrong.

A final complaint that I have with the remaster is visual clarity. I consider this a very minor complaint, but with the increased ground clutter occasionally gems, particularly green gems, will blend in extremely well and be really hard to see as compared to the original series. This is a very rare problem and generally will not impact anyone.

I'm basically going to break my recommendation down into two groups, those that have played the original and those that haven't.

1. The target audience of this game is clearly people with nostalgia for the original series. I would not recommend this to these people because it isn't worth $40, in my opinion. The game is too rough around the edges to justify a new coat of (really pretty) paint. I purchased the product through the humble monthly deal for $12 plus some other games, which it is definitely worth, so if that option is open to you do that. Since I believe this is the target audience of the game I will give a general 'do not recommend.'

2. If you haven't played the spyro games then this is great for you. You'll easily pull 30+ hours from the game trying to 100% it and it's a great collectathon. I'm not going to talk too much about the original series in this review and keep it focused on the remaster, but the original series is great and this is a faithful remaster making it perfect for this group of people.

It's a good game, for team corgi