13
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4523
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Recent reviews by Soma

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Showing 1-10 of 13 entries
5 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
102.2 hrs on record
"Does RE4 need a remake yet?"

"Nah" I told myself. The original still holds up very well, or it does in my mind, although nostalgia is not always a reliable emotion. Plus I already own 4 copies of the game. Surely I don't need more.

Yet Capcom interjects with another "WE DO IT!", this time without the t-shirt. And what do you know, good thing I don't take decisions at Capcom (we would have a new Breath of Fire if I did, dammit), because RE4R is amazing. The original is one of my favorite games ever, in the genre and otherwise, but here comes the remake, which easily replaced it.

Some of my initial concerns were, are they gonna try to give the game a more "serious" tone? While supposedly a horror game, the original RE4 has a lot of ridiculous moments -- ridiculously fun, that is, but silly in a lot of ways. Yet again Capcom steps in with that reveal trailer and we see Leon parrying a chainsaw with his tiny little butter knife.

The biggest grin shapes up on my face. What a legend, Capcom, what a legend.

That said, the game still feels more serious or grounded, with generally good acting and characters that are more flashed out and interesting. Luis and Ashley in particular are a big glow-up. Even new, sleep-deprived Leon is great. I will make sure my grave reads "Nighty night, Knight" next to my name when the time comes.

A side note on Separate Ways, which generated some discussion about it being a paid DLC -- It's great. No, it's not free. But neither was the original. If you played the game on the Gamecube you had to buy a PS2 and a full priced copy of the game for it. 10 euros/dollars for this new rendition feels pretty fair; it's actually a fairly lengthy campaign that sparked a few "it's longer than RE3R" jokes, with definitely a good amount of new content. The original always felt more like a little treat to entice people to buy another copy of the game (and well, it worked), with little new content and some things that didn't quite add up, like fighting Krauser again as Ada, which does not happen in the remake.

But that's enough words. RE4 is amazing. Something I played with a wide smile across my face, just like the old times. And that should be telling.
Posted November 21, 2023.
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819 people found this review helpful
54 people found this review funny
23
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3
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15
33.8 hrs on record
"Mom, can I have Bloodborne?"

"No sweetie, we have Bloodborne at home."

You shake your head, but soon realize mom is on to something.

Round8 takes a more straightforward approach to story telling than FromSoftware, but is able to convey a fairly captivating narrative with a twist on the tale of Pinocchio where lying won't make you a good boy, but is nevertheless proof of your humanity and empathy.

LoP's boss fights are one of the highlights, and show that it understands what one of the most important elements in a souls-like game is: patterns and movesets. Bosses have many unique attacks and animations, often with long wind ups (some might say a lesson it shouldn't have learned from recent FromSoftware games) that require the player's full attention and pinpoint reaction to be defeated, with a major focus on perfect guards to stagger and destroy enemies' weapons.

Adding to this is a weapon system that allows you to dismantle and combine blades and handles to create your own moves, making you able for instance to create a dagger with the moveset and the scaling of a mace weapon.

Exploration itself is fairly linear, with usually only a single main location the player can go, but every area is sufficiently interesting to go through, offering the usual shortcuts and amount of nooks and crannies to discover, but is perhaps generally not as strong as From's best.

Nonetheless, south korean Round8 came out of nowhere with what is very likely the best non-From souls-like in the market, right next to Nioh, while resembling the source material more closely than Team Ninja's title. An all-around impressive effort, and one that I can't wait to see more of.
Posted October 10, 2023. Last edited October 10, 2023.
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3 people found this review helpful
90.2 hrs on record
Final Fantasy VII looking even better than we ourselves imagined it in our head after playing the original as kids. We didn't think the game would have become a cinematic, linear action game almost in the vein of Uncharted, but boy, here we are.

We are stuck on a train ride we don't want to end, in fact we are on rail more often than we'd like. Yet combat is fun and slick. Music, characters and situations bring a nostalgic smile to the face, and new story elements inspire both doubt and intrigue.

Here's hoping the wait for Rebirth won't span another two rounds of platform exclusivities.
Posted November 22, 2022. Last edited November 23, 2022.
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2 people found this review helpful
12.2 hrs on record
I wasn't sure if to give Forgive Me Father a positive or negative rating. I eventually ended up going for a favorable review, even though I'd consider the game something of a mixed bag.

What first catches the eye is obviously the artstyle. The comic book visuals while not entirely new are fairly unique in the shooter genre, and are for the most part fairly impressive even though some of the environmental texture work looks a bit on the simple side. Enemies, while looking like the part, are sort of lacking in the animation department making them look somewhat stiff. That said, the overall effect is still pleasant looking.

Almost every encounter is signaled by the start of heavy metal music, and when I say heavy I mean HEAVY. The default sound volume in FMF is incredibly high, with electric guitars being played directly inside your head by cthulhu himself, probably, which gives every encounter the right amount of excitement you need to fight the hordes of undead and eldritch creatures the game will throw at you. The same high volume extends to sound effects, some unbearably so. The metal doors closing and opening themselves as you approach in I believe Episode 3 jump scared me more than other actual horror games. Please do something about those. Please.

The game offers two playable characters, The Priest and the Journalist. Both are voice acted, with the first sounding more stoic and the second trying her best to crack one liners and jokes in the vein of Duke Nukem, Blood, and other similar main characters in old school FPS. Now, I've only tried the priest briefly and the voice actor seems to play his part well enough. My actual playthrough was with the journalist, which er, can sometime sound a bit off. Although the campiness eventually grew on me.

Gameplay-wise characters are distinguished by their personal skills, each requiring the build up of "madness" acquired by simply fighting enemies. The more you kill, the less damage you take, and the more you inflict, which results in even more madness acquired.

The skills are, in theory, a central part of combat, and can even be upgraded. In practice, they don't work as good as they should. The journalist's consists of, first, a blunt that somehow grants you a sword for a limited time which restores your health with every kill. Cool in theory, in practice the hit box for said sword is so small that you'll miss most hits, instead leaving you wide open. If that was not enough it will barely do any damage later on if left unleveled, so if saved as last resort to restore some HP it will in most cases have a counterproductive effect. Second, a camera that stuns enemies and stops them on their track. Nice, if not that the range of it is really, really short and in life or death situations will rarely be effective. Third, a voodoo doll that deals damage to all enemies surrounding you in a small area. Seems good at first, but again, it quickly becomes ineffective as the damage barely does anything especially in the later stages of the game. And lastly, what I found the most effective, cigarettes that slow down time for everyone except you for a few seconds, something that can actually affect the outcome of an encounter even in the latter parts of the game. If not... if not that it seems to be bugged and in some levels it caused massive slowdowns in such a way that made things harder to hit while active, making it effectively useless.

Now, all of these special skills can be leveled up to level 3, something I have not done, and here's why. The game uses a skill tree of sorts from which you can upgrade your skills, weapons and maximum health and armor. Additionally, one of these skill allows you to get more experience points with each kill (protip: spend your first three points on this skill). And yet, even with this skill unlocked, leveling up becomes increasingly difficult as you go further into the game, even considering the large quantity of enemies you'll be put against in the last third of the adventure. In other words, you'll be unable to acquire everything and will have to make some decisions on what to learn, which in my case was mostly weapon upgrades. Which brings me to the next point: weapon upgrades often bring you a choice, a non reversible one at that (unless you decide to reload your save), something that in some cases will change the ammo type of the firearm, sometimes in one that is less common. The general feeling is that, while the system is kinda fun (the upgraded shotgun rocks), it's also in need of some rebalancing. Why would I want to upgrade my flashlight/lantern when XP is so limited? What if you decide to do so early on and realize it's a waste in the final stages of the game when leveling becomes slow as molasses and you are unable to upgrade actual useful equipment?

Speaking of balancing, this is perhaps my biggest gripe with the game. If you've played lots of FPS in the past, old and new, and want to start the game at anything higher than the normal difficulty setting, don't. Save yourself the headache. Things start balanced enough until around the midpoint of the game, where it starts throwing enemy upon enemy at you, eventually reaching the final episode, where some of the most annoying critters I've ever seen in a FPS are introduced. The last episode loves, it loves tossing flying enemies throwing projectiles at you from far distances, and it loves mixing them up with every other type of enemy. It's hard to even tell what some of these enemies are, as they flail, bounce and trot uncontrollably left and right as they had just stolen one of your blunts and smoked it just before the encounter. High-as-a-kite-Kirby, I've called the little pink blob sliding all over the room shooting all kind of things in every direction. Perhaps an even worse enemy than the Kleers in Serious Sam, which I hate with a passion. But Serious Sam, though, allows you to save in the middle of a fight, and perhaps more importantly, it usually gives you enough ammunition to deal with everything in your way.

As other people have mentioned, at times it's unclear if deep inside FMF wants to be a Survival Horror or a FPS. Ammo has a carrying limit (something you can upgrade to be fair), a bit too limited for some weapons, and if that was not enough the game gets incredibly stingy in making you find more in some of the late stage levels, essentially pitting you in forced encounters but then refusing to give you a mean to actually try to come out of it alive. This one level at some point required me to shoot a barrel to break open a wall. Enemies are hidden in the room, and enemies are also after the breach I just opened in the wall. I have 10 bullets left between 2 weapons. No, there are no ammo pickups nearby. I lost count of how many times I had to retry this segment, each time trying to use less ammunition or attempting to run past enemies (I pretty much couldn't).
Now let's talk about the save system. Unlike old school FPS where quick saving was common, FMF takes a Turok approach to things and only allows you to save at specific points in the level (luckily, unlike survival horrors of old, doesn't require an item to do so). Initially this is not much of a problem, but here we are in the last couple episodes constantly backtracking to the save point after every encounter so I don't have to deal with Kirby on crack for the umpteenth time.
If that was not enough, the game had this bug that made so the "reload checkpoint" option after dying sometimes would instead make you restart the level from the beginning, essentially making me waste more time between more loading screens. This happened to me over and over, effectively skyrocketing my hatred for stoner Kirby and his friends.

Having said all of that, FMF is for the most part a fun game with a moment to moment action that keeps you going straight into the next level. That is, until the balance issues start crawling up.
Posted April 11, 2022.
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2 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
152.2 hrs on record (149.2 hrs at review time)
It's not often that I find myself muttering the words "man, this is so good" and "holy sh*t" while playing a game. Whether you're simply staring at the incredibly beautiful views, finding new locations, discovering secrets, new abilities, spells, run into a new enemy or boss, observing what they're *capable* of, getting destroyed by said boss only to prevail at the end, Elden Ring is a constant ballad of "holy sh*t(s)" and "this is so good(s)".

It feels like yesterday that whenever someone would mention the name FromSoftware I'd think "that's the devs of... uhh... King's Field, Echo Night, Lost Kingdoms... ehh." Fast forward to my post Demon's Souls self and here I am ordering those same games off eBay out of sheer respect and curiosity for a developer I clearly hadn't given enough attention.

To this day, there is no one else in the game industry capable of crafting a dark, harsh, yet satisfying and beautiful fantasy world and experience like FromSoftware. No one.
Posted March 5, 2022. Last edited April 6, 2022.
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50 people found this review helpful
8 people found this review funny
2
5,917.9 hrs on record (3,490.3 hrs at review time)
There's a lot to like *and* dislike in Dead by Daylight, especially dislike according to many, very vocal players. And yet, being the only truly successful exponent of the genre it "keeps getting away with it," as some would put it.

This "review" is not going to cover the reasons why as one can find enough documentation online, making my little write-up essentially useless and totally-not-an-excuse to post a review for the Steam Awards event. Whoops!

But, briefly, DbD is as fun and rewarding as it can be miserable and frustrating. Be patient, don't take it too seriously, and bring some friends (imaginary ones if you're playing the role of killer).

Also, Resident Evil and Silent Hill characters in the same game would have been a huge deal, around 20 years ago. But it still is in my heart, dammit.
Posted November 24, 2021. Last edited November 25, 2021.
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3 people found this review helpful
90.5 hrs on record (59.7 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
Extremely engaging to play with friends, despite a couple design choices such as the "running" speed which makes playing larger maps a tedious process more than anything, and a certain lack of content (there's more already planned though).

But all in all, one of the surprises of 2020 and an incredible effort considering this is a one-man work.
Posted November 25, 2020.
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3 people found this review helpful
37.6 hrs on record (34.4 hrs at review time)
Being based on one of the most beloved games in the franchise and coming after the, especially at the time of release, incredible remake of the first RE game, RE2 had big shoes to fill.

I'm glad to say Capcom nailed the project, almost in its entirety. From the new, dark and thick atmosphere to reworked puzzles and areas, combat and controls that are modernized enough to feel comfortable without plunging the player straight into the action game territory of some of the more modern episodes in the series, RE2 is a remake done just right.

And how not to mention the imposing Tyrant (Mr. X for his old friends), which will stalk the corridors of the police station, his stomping to be heard from the other side of the building, closer and closer to your location.

The only sad note I must add is related to the second scenario of the game, unlocked after finishing your first playthrough, which only adds a couple new weapons and skips/reworks some of the early bits of the game, instead of providing exciting new locations and situations. This lack is likely dictated by time and budget constraint, but it nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity that would have made a great game even better.

Regardless of that, RE2 is one of the best horror games of the last decade, and one every fan of the genre is obliged to play through at least once.
Posted November 26, 2019. Last edited November 26, 2019.
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7 people found this review helpful
95.8 hrs on record (77.4 hrs at review time)
RE4 with refined mechanics and added coop. While one could argue the latter made the game even more linear and less tense, it does make for a damn fun experience. Provided you're not bothered by the, by today's standards, outdated controls.
Posted June 29, 2019.
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9 people found this review helpful
7.6 hrs on record
An endearing, twisted little puzzle platformer that reminded me a lot of Limbo and INSIDE. Like the titles developed by PlayDead, Little Nightmares tells its story very quietly, without the use of words or voices, but through actions and clues in the enviroment. The game is set entirely in a ship, where the little protagonist wearing a yellow raincoat must find a way out and elude all of its denizens who wish to capture her or quite literally eat her.

A side note about the DLCs -- while they reuse some of the locations from the main game, they are absolutely worth playing, and will offer pretty much the same amount of playtime as the main story, along with some fun new twists in the gameplay mechanics during the latter chapters. Just be prepared to leave the game with a certain bittersweet taste in your mouth after being done with them.
Posted November 21, 2018. Last edited November 21, 2018.
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Showing 1-10 of 13 entries