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Recent reviews by Amuro Rail

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Showing 1-10 of 70 entries
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
4.5 hrs on record
short, beautiful, and it feels good to play. a miniature masterpiece. thank you sheepo
Posted March 16.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
33.9 hrs on record
this game's badass
Posted March 11.
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1 person found this review helpful
0.0 hrs on record
mooncrash is one of the most strangely designed games i have ever played. it is sold to you as a roguelite. it is not a roguelite. the objective in mooncrash is not to complete a run. instead the objective is to complete 27 smaller objectives over the course of however many runs you need. this ends up being extremely awkward.

the world itself is consistent; the four areas are hand-designed. items on the map and even supply containers are consistent in both their location and the type of supplies they provide. even the enemy positions feel lacking in variety. to make runs even more consistent, you will quickly amass a large amount of currency that can be spent on anything you've found a fabrication plan for before you pick a character, allowing you to begin a run with a complete inventory that isn't dependent on finding loot (your ability to do this depends on what fabrication plans you find but i very quickly had all of the essentials and then some). what this means is that every run would play out the same, except, again, completing a run is not the goal; completing objectives is the goal.

as you complete objectives more factors will be added to make the world more dangerous even from the start of a new run. there is also a timer that at certain intervals will make the enemies stronger, and eventually just kick you out of the run. but again, completing objectives is the goal, not completing a run. almost all of these goals can be accomplished quickly and easily at the start of a run before the danger levels gets too high. so you might be wondering what the point of the timer is, and it really only has one.

in mooncrash you pick from one of five characters (four of which have to be unlocked by meeting certain conditions), with the goal (sort of) of escaping the moon. each character has a set of neuromods they can acquire, which persist between runs upon escaping or dying, the run is not over; instead the world state is maintained and you pick a different character to try to escape with. you can use a portable storage operator to transfer a lot of, if not all of, your items between runs (unless you forget to put your items on it before you escape); if you happen to die, you can get those items from the last character's corpse. one of the objectives is to escape with all 5 characters is one run, and that's sort of the "ultimate" objective, although it's not necessarily the last one you'll complete. it is in this context only that the timer is a meaningful mechanic, but by the time you're going for this, you'll likely be so familiar with the game world and mechanics that it's more or less just a matter of running to the escape route as each character. there are also items you can find that will turn back the clock, and since escaping with every character will involve navigating much of the world, you'll likely find a bunch of them. ultimately on my first attempt at the full escape, i completed it at danger level 3 of 5, and i wasn't even going that fast.

and that's another thing that ties into completing a run not being the goal: it is, frankly, very easy to run directly to a character's given escape route. there are a couple with some degree of nuance, but once you know what you're doing it's still straightforward. most enemies along the way can be avoided entirely, or otherwise dispatched without much effort, especially since you can just buy everything you'll need to kill them and heal any damage you happen to take. i read a few reviews lamenting that the game was unbearably hard but i'm not sure how they arrived at this conclusion. i think the devs expected you to spend a lot of your points on neuromods (which are a massive point sink) instead of supplies, but you honestly don't need neuromods when you have a few guns and a bunch of ammo and healing items at all times during a run. consequently the different characters don't feel meaningful a lot of the time because everyone wields a shotgun more or less the same way.

so what the heck is mooncrash? it's a normal prey dlc. another, smaller space base overrun with aliens that you have to navigate around, listening to audio logs and figuring out the best ways to get around and use your tools. but it fell into a pool of radioactive roguelite acid and crawled out as a weird mutant. i suspect that this wasn't intended to be a roguelite from the outset, and if it was, the team ended up compromising too much on it for the sake of including the story features, or they just had no idea what they were doing. reinforcing this belief: in perhaps the weirdest decision i've ever seen for a roguelite with lots of meta progression, once you finish the last objective, the game will save right before going into an ending sequence, so you'll have to make a new save and reset all your meta progression to keep playing.

ultimately, i still enjoyed it. you still have a lot of options as to how you want to deal with whatever situation you find yourself in, and the levels are fun to explore and learn your way around. the story felt awkward and much less compelling than the base game, likely in part due to the awkward delivery as a result of this weird not-roguelite structure, but even aside from that, i just didn't find the characters or smaller stories presented to be interesting. the most important flaw, though, is how much it trips over itself; it completely fails at being a roguelite, only managing to be enough of one to make playing the not-roguelite part inconvenient. if you really liked prey, mooncrash is worth a few bucks when it's on sale. if you didn't really like prey, mooncrash probably won't change your mind.
Posted February 26. Last edited February 27.
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5 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
6.9 hrs on record
bisexual goro majimalligator
i drive a chevrolet movie theater
Posted February 11.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
20.2 hrs on record (17.2 hrs at review time)
kero blaster :D
Posted January 31.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
19.1 hrs on record (15.0 hrs at review time)
this game's badass, but published by dangen. at time of writing, there are a few days left on the agdq 2024 humble bundle; the best way to purchase this game is to buy that bundle and adjust your donation to maximize the amount going to charity.
Posted January 28. Last edited January 28.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
5.6 hrs on record
this game's badass
Posted January 6.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
6.1 hrs on record
this games bada**
Posted December 28, 2023.
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53 people found this review helpful
2
26.1 hrs on record
normally when i like a game i'll leave a review that just says "this game's badass" to help it with the algorithm. with souldiers i have to say "this game's badass, but" and then type a lot more words.

souldiers is a troidlike where you play as a generic but unreasonably capable guy with no name, personality, or backstory on a vague quest from which he gets constantly sidetracked. you have a choice of three generic guys to play as, which is locked in from the start of the game: sword guy, bow guy, or staff guy. the whole trinity of guys is here. i have only played as the sword guy so far, who is pretty simple but fun if you like to play as a guy with a sword who runs and jumps around and swings a sword. maybe the other guys are miserable to play as and you'll hate the game if you play as them, i don't know. anyway, as you play, your chosen guy will level up, acquire new abilities and elemental powers, and progress along a skill tree (that is honestly pretty underwhelming, at least for sword guy). there are other guys (mostly generic, some not) on the same quest as your guy but they don't do a whole lot. it's mostly just your guy. some people probably won't like that your guy is so totally generic, but i love it.

souldiers is a good game. i can say this confidently. the action is simple, but quick and satisfying. the art is great. the music is good. the boss fights are fun and diverse, and the game as a whole presented a solid, but not overwhelming, challenge on its hardest difficulty. the world is huge, there are tons of subweapons and accessories to find, sidequests to complete, things to backtrack to as you get new abilities, etc.

one of the things that, to me, makes souldiers stand out within the genre is that it feels more like a zelda game than a troidlike. the game's world is comprised of a number of sprawling dungeons, broken up by mostly linear overworld segments. you'll get to a dungeon, get a new ability or two in the dungeon, and then navigate some more overworld and plot before getting to the next dungeon, until the end of the game.

all this probably makes souldiers sound like a fairly normal and good video game, which it is. but.

souldiers is, for better or for worse, the longest troidlike i have played; my first playthrough took around 23 hours, ending at around 90% total completion. i tried to be thorough (within reason) and did not spend a lot of time being lost, so you can assume that at least 20 of those hours were totally productive. most of this time will come from the dungeons, of which there are 6, and they are all 2-3 hours long depending on how much you explore and how lost you get (plus more time later if you choose to backtrack, as most of them have significant chunks that are inaccessible until you have abilities acquired after the dungeon). normally i do not fault games for being too long, but in the case of most of these dungeons, it is just too much. you will get you abilities pretty early into the dungeon, and then it's the same handful of enemies and gimmicks for the entire thing, and it becomes something of a drag even if it never actually becomes bad.

souldiers looks great, but can be frustrating to visually parse when things get hectic. most enemies are small, have very short tells for their attacks, or both. you have to squint to see what an enemy is doing, and good luck even doing that if you have damage numbers on, which make it even harder to see. when enemies overlap with each other, or with you, it becomes almost impossible to see what they are doing. you can play around all of this, but it doesn't feel like you SHOULD have to.

i mentioned earlier that there are tons of subweapons and accessories to find, and quests to complete. there are in fact too many. there are, i think, 20-something subweapons? there are a lot of them. pretty sure i didn't find them all, and i don't feel like counting them in any case. some are of course more useful than others, but none are particularly useful until fully upgraded, which requires a limited resource you'll pick up throughout the game. the main issue here is that switching between these quickly becomes overwhelming; without going into the pause menu (which i'll mention now is a very clunky menu that i never fully got used to), you can only switch between weapons linearly along a list, and that's not something you want to do 10 times to find the weapon you want during combat; you're just going to have to stop and menu. accessories have the same issues; while there is a good degree of thought and choice that goes into picking them, you'll frequently want to swap them, and menuing this feels way less comfortable than it needs to be.

most of the aforementioned sidequests involve going to a previously visited area and finding a miniboss, which exists in the form of a souped-up normal enemy enemy. the problem is you are not told where exactly the enemy is; sometimes there are obvious locations for them but in some cases, especially in the dungeons, i did not even want to bother combing these giant areas for an underwhelming reward. the sidequests that aren't doing this are usually unremarkable as well.

lastly, and i'm pretty sure this is the main reason why the game's reviews are (at time of writing) mixed overall, the game can be buggy, and it used to be way buggier. a few times the game would start bugging out (sometimes significantly) during area transitions, and i had to restart the game to fix it. most significantly, though, there is a significant portion of map (which was fortunately optional) that i was entirely unable to access because a platforming element that i had to activate simply would not work. this persisted through restarting the game, and i'm not sure anything short of a new save (if that) would fix it. there are reports of gamebreaking bugs in this game, and i'm not sure if they were patched, and this game hasn't received any updates in quite some time so i wouldn't expect any remaining bugs to be fixed.

i realize i've said a lot more bad about this game than good but it's just easier for me to talk about why things are bad than why they are good. as i said at the start of this review, this game's badass, but. it has some issues. those issues may be just a nuisance, or they may ruin the game for you if not render it unplayable. this is the studio's first game, and i'm really hoping it's not their last, because if they learn from the mistakes they made with this game, i think they can put out a game where i can just leave a review that says "this game's badass" and not have to type out an essay.

this game is in the november 2023 humble monthly. i got the game from there. if you got the game from there and you own it anyway, you might as well give it a try because you, like me, might really like it in spite of its issues. if you're buying the game outright, just be aware that you're probably not going to know if you actually like it or not before the refund period is up.
Posted November 11, 2023. Last edited November 11, 2023.
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1 person found this review helpful
8.4 hrs on record (6.9 hrs at review time)
this game's badass
Posted October 24, 2023.
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Showing 1-10 of 70 entries