Recent reviews by MadFriarAvelyn

It's rare I ever complete a game multiple times. I just finished up the third NG++ ending and had a blast the whole time. Some difficulty spikes in the first run that I had a rough time with, but the second and third runs make you feel like a badass. Game runs like a dream, plays great, has some stunningly large environments and has some fantastic music in the OST. It has been far too long since I last played an Armored Core game, and this is easily my favorite release of the year.

Also V.IV Rusty rules.

Credits are finally rolling for my playthrough of the game. Originally bought this on PS5 but my backlog prevented me from diving too far into it, but had some great initial impressions. When I heard it was being ported to PC I knew I had to nab it so I could put my new gaming PC through its paces.

End result? Fantastic gameplay, runs smooth as butter at 4K, looks great, controls great, sounds great. Now that a few patches are out to resolve a few launch issues: incredible port. Shout out to Insomniac Games for making an excellent game, and shout out to Nixxes for making an incredible port by talented developers that care about the PC space.

If this is the quality of game we'll receive from Sony exclusives being ported PC, I am looking forward to more.

I've played the first couple hours of Nier and, uh, yeah, it's a PS3-ass port of a PS3 game with all of the faults (unfortunately) expected of it. The gameplay (but not cutscenes!) tied to frame rate is kind of disappointing to see in 2021 (let alone, uh, 2001), and it doesn't have great support outside of 16:9 aspect ratios. Ultrawide screens will be boxed down to a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Square, with the development of FFXIV going as well as it has, we expect better of other titles you publish for PC. Look at your competitors, like Capcom, or Koei Tecmo, delivering much better software in the same space. Please stop publishing poor ports of console titles to PC unless you can also fix the glaring issues between the two versions.

This game rules, and is another great entry in the Yakuza series for veterans familiar to it, and a great entry into the series for anyone that was put off by the gameplay of previous entries, especially players who enjoy JRPGs.

Grab some drinks and a couple friends and pass the controller around level by level. It'll be over in no time, but it'll be fun the whole time.

Buy the OST version if you can, has plenty of tunes to relax to after the game is done.

A cheap, low-effort, unpolished platformer. Includes six levels for you to platform around, with the main goal being to collect three tears in a level before you can exit and progress to the next level. Other collectibles include berries, which have only two uses: unlocking achievements and buying optional weapon upgrades. The former are useless, the latter are only debatably useful, as many enemies are easily avoidable, and in a worse case easy to dispatch with your default weapon. To make matters worse, there are three tiers of weapon upgrades you can get. The first one lets your leaf fire a projectile (to make dispatching the already easily avoidable enemies trivial). The second and third? A simple color change, and a different particle effect for the projectile you shoot. Not worth the effort to farm the berries for them. Because of this, the game doesn't give you much motivation to actually collect any of the (non-required) collectibles.

From a gameplay perspective, the platforming isn't very tight. Controls are often loose and slippery, which can lead to many frustrating deaths. These deaths are made all the more frustrating with an inconsistent "checkpoint" system implemented in the game that randomly decides to respawn you in a fair location close to where you died, or at the start of the level. However, once you get adjusted to this, the platforming just tends to be easy and...boring. Even the enemies in the game present no challenge, often standing still and waiting for you to kill them. There are maybe a half dozen enemies in the game total that provide a greater challenge of...moving in a line. Literally one enemy in the game fires projectiles. None of which are hard to deal with (except for the last one, which is elaborated on below). The game does include a local co-op mode, but I fail to see a point to it, as (at least in the hub world) the second player is almost exclusively tied to the first player as the camera is locked on that player, leaving no extra incentives bring a second player as that player can't even help you explore and complete the level more quickly.

From a presentation perspective, the game looks cheap: almost every object is a simple mashup of a basic 3D construct, a cube, a cylinder, or a cone, scaled to give the illusion of a more complex object. Animations, where they exist, are usually basic looping idle, or walking animations where the models in question simply waggle their arms or legs about. Enemies, when dispatched, often simply fall over and just...vanish. Sometimes with a poof of (barely recognizable) smoke, and sometimes with an extra sound effect. Textures are simplistic, often including no detail. One shining example of this lack of detail are the levels that include a snow effect, where the snow is represented by...an extra white, untextured cube stacked on top of other level geometry. Finally, there are some very strange camera positioning choices in the game, and since the game doesn't let you adjust your camera angle or position, can make some sections more difficult than they need to be. Finally, the music and sound effects in the game are completely unremarkable, with the end-of-level jingle being a recording of someone mashing an out-of-tune piano.

The game is also buggy. Bugs encountered during my playthrough include: being pushed through the level geometry to my death by a moving platform, enemies that fire projectiles continuing to fire projectiles even after being killed, jumping up against the corner of certain geometry in the level causing the player character to flip upside down and become stuck, random white square appearing on the screen in the hub world (I assume these are meant to be dialog boxes of some kind, but don't display properly), camera angles often not correcting themselves when moving through a level, or after a death, and on rare occasions sticking in the pre-level cutscene position when you enter a level, rendering it unbeatable (since you can't see where your character is). The worst offender though: the number of fruit you collect from a level doesn't reset when you exit a level unless you reset the game. This allows you to enter a level, collect a ton of fruit, exit the level (which adds it to the total necessary for unlocking the achievements and the unlockable weapons), then re-enter the level and immediately exit to add the same amount of fruit to your total again. You can do this non-stop to unlock all of the collectibles in the game, without even going past the first level.

My final thoughts: I feel like this game was the end result of a single developer new to developing video games. The credits back me up on this, as many of the roles listed were done by the same person, with one exception besides the special thanks section. If I take that into account, I encourage that developer to keep writing new games, as they're moving in a step in the right direction. But I encourage them, for future titles, to remember to make the gamplay engaging and rewarding, to make smarter game design choices in terms of controls and presentation, and to spend some extra time polishing the game and stomping out bugs. I also recommend not trying to compare your games to, frankly superior games (such as Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie, which this game was compared to), when the only similarities are you can jump and collect things.

Only buy Woodle Tree Adventures if you desperately want to waste 30-60 minutes of your life, and you have literally nothing better to spend $3 on.