Recent reviews by Aerie

Sincastermon sends his regards.

One of the best games, if not the best game I've played in many years. Easy to pick up, hard to master. Compete against yourself, your friends, or everyone on the leaderboards.

When I first saw the game announced, I absolutely loved the aesthetic of it. I was still unsure about the gameplay. Cards as weapons? Seems weird. I'm glad I gave it a shot, because it flows so well. It's the kind of game that lets you 'easily' enter the mythical 'flow state', where you manage to crank out lower and lower times on each level, until you hit the author medals. And they are by no means easy to get. However, getting good times on levels is not required, so if you want to take your time with each level instead of pushing the game to its limits, that's also fine.

The game starts off simple, giving you one or two cards/weapons to play around with, where you're free to figure out the movement and what makes you go faster. The chapters continue, as do the weapons the game gives you to play with. The chapters never feel like they overstay their welcome, as once you're finished with one, the aesthetic, music, and weapons change, and you get to learn new, exciting mechanics in form of shooting things, or the discard ability.

The story is-- Oh, uhh..

And the music is fantastic! Banging soundtrack by an artist I've never heard of before. It's not often I seek out game OSTs on Spotify, but this is one of the rare times.

Game runs smooth, gameplay is smooth, soundtrack is smooth. If you've so much as felt a tiny bit interested in the game, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. It's an experience all the way through. The only thing I want is more Neon White.

As I grow older, and after playing a lot of different games, I feel my tastes change from what I enjoyed in the past. What I like playing now is vastly different from what I enjoyed playing when I was younger, and that's just how it is.

I heard a bunch of good things about Doom 2016, but after looking at gameplay, I just couldn't really see how it's something up my alley. My day of playing FPS games were kinda behind me, and ultimately decided against buying it. Then this game came out, and I heard it included some platforming - which is a personal favorite - and just generally had a bunch of improvements such as fast, fluid movement compared to the first one, and more varied gunplay. So I decided what the hell, why not.

This game is incredible.

It rekindled a flame I thought was long gone, and I haven't had this much fun in an FPS game in a long time. It seems like that's what the devs decided to focus on, something I feel like has been lost on the gaming industry for a very long time. Just fun.

Other games strive for realism and mechanics I find boring and punishing. Sprint meter, weapon decay, ridiculous reloading times. This game says "♥♥♥♥ all that ♥♥♥♥, here, have some weapons and go shoot ♥♥♥♥. Chainsaw stuff when you run out of ammo. Set ♥♥♥♥ on fire when you're out of armor. Punch ♥♥♥♥ to death for health. Go ham." And it's just so incredibly refreshing to finally feel that feeling again, where a game is just fun.

The sound design, accompanied by a banging soundtrack runs unparalleled to any other game I've played in a very long time. Mick Gordon is a musical genius, which also shows in his personality - for better or worse.

The graphics are great, and it's optimized enough to give me 120+ fps on my old battered GTX 970.

Of course there were parts I found lacking in the game. The bossfights in particular weren't entirely fun, but as the game is focused on arena-shooting, it's just a minor complaint. I love the movement, I love the platforming, I love the fast-paced gameplay that's just focused on fun.

Thank you id for bringing fun back to gaming in 2020. I hope other companies see what you're doing and decide to reel back the realism just a tad and bring back what gaming was supposed to be in the first place. As a wise man once said, if it's not fun, why bother?

This will be slightly lengthy, but I'll start with the good parts of the game.

It looks very pretty, the biomes are good, the last biome was definitely my favorite part, aestheticly. Shooting stuff feels fun, the guns feel powerful, the numbers look juicy.

That's where it ends.

When I saw this game at E3, I was hyped. It looked exactly up my alley, a fun, coop game where you shoot bosses and explore pretty areas. Having put several hundred hours into the Borderlands series and Monster Hunter, I figured I'd have a good time. Oh how wrong I was. Let's go through the list.

The enemies - While they feel nice to shoot, and look different, it all kinda feels.. Samey. Oh go here, shoot another set of these enemies, which pretty much just functions as a reskin of the enemies from the previous biome. Boring. None of the enemies were particularly challenging either.

The sound - Guns sound good in this game, when the sound decides to work. Both me and my coop partner had the same issues of the sound cutting out completely at various points, as if the game was lagging. It always came back, but it was jarring whenever it happened. Like someone pulled out the plug of your headset only to struggle with shoving it back in.

The bosses - How sad is it that how they make the bosses "hard" is by introducing a metric ton of ads for you to kill. That's not fun. I want to shoot at the boss, not whatever else I've been shooting at the entire game. Most bosses have two, or three attacks. That's it. There's nothing more to it. They're very well telegraphed (which is good), making them extremely easy to dodge. The health of the bosses seem okay, it's just man, I wish they fleshed out the actual bosses more, instead of prolonging the fight by introducing ads. It's ironic, as the last boss of the game is literally just shooting ads. For a game whose selling point is the bosses and replayability, this has none. None of the bosses we fought in the playthrough were fun, some of them were completely bugged out.
Have some examples:
Harrow stuck in the floor[puu.sh]
Onslaught stuck in an animation loop for the entire duration of the fight[puu.sh]
Scald & Sear standing completely still without attacking[puu.sh]

Since the bosses only have two or three well telegraphed attacks, you usually end up first or second trying most bosses.

The gear - What gear? Yes, you can craft new weapons from the items you get from bosses, but why would you? Upgrading the starting gear you get is a way better option. I'm sure there are other guns that sound more fun, but none of them caught my eye.


All in all, it's a terrible, buggy mess, worthy of an Early Access tag. Does it have replayability? Not for me. I would rather play something else than run through this again. None of the bossfights were good, some of them were buggy, and I refuse to believe I just had an "unlucky" time on my first run. This game does not deserve more of my time that it has already gotten, and I severely regret my purchase. If you're looking to get the game, wait for a No Man's Sky level of content patch and overhaul, or a 90% discount. Thanks for reading.

Monster Hunter World is my first game in the series and as such there was a lot to get into. The massive amounts of tutorials and "tell, don't show" can get very overwhelming. Many times in the start, I wanted the game to show me what to do, instead of just telling me. That way you'd learn faster. Learn by doing, after all.

However, when you get through most of the tutorial (The story, really), you're greeted with a world where you've unlocked most things and you're free to to everything you want, and it's magnificent. After the story is where the game really shines. Harder versions (Tempered/Arch tempered) of monsters unlock, from which you get better rewards, to get better gear, to kill even harder monsters even faster. The grind/farmfest in this game is real, but it's done in such a wonderfully rewarding way. Killing big monsters with your oversized anime swords or other ridiculous weapons feels good. Hitting the monster on its feet until it dies has never been more exciting.

From a gameplay perspective, the game is amazing, and it's the most fun I've had with video games in years.
From a technical perspective, the game is a mess. The optimization is nonexistent. I get my 60 frames just fine, and my specs aren't the best, but the stutters and framedrops that happen on certain bossfights - looking at you, Teostra - is really inexcusable after they've had 7 months to "do this right".
And just forget playing this on anything but Windows 10. They've clearly not done anything at all to optimize this game for other OS, as my friend went from 40 FPS and stutters to flawless 60 FPS after upgrading.

The mouse controls like an emulated joystick, the keyboard controls for ranged weapons are.. Questionable, and the multiplayer errors are frustrating to say the last.
But through all this garbage lies a fantastic game that you will kick yourself for not trying.

They're working on the mouse controls, the keyboard controls can be rebound, the multiplayer got a patch just yesterday, and they're gonna keep fixing it. It's much better now than it was. Not perfect, mind you, but way, way better.

Overall, the game is amazingly fun, and you'll do yourself a favor by trying it out. Don't let the reviewbombing scare you off, as the main issue has been fixed.

Also you can dress up your cat and it's the best thing about this game.

***EDIT: Teostra fps drops has been fixed since I posted this review.

Good game with a fun community. After trying this game out for 3000 hours I feel like I can finally recommend it.
You have been banned from Global Chat for voicing negative opinions.

I started play Tower Unite in 2017 and I've accumulated over 3,000 hours in it. I absolutely adore this game, which is why it saddens me to see the devs so actively trying to kill its userbase. I can only imagine they're sick of working on the game, and they want to kill it so they can move on and work on other things, I see no other explanation.

The community has always been very fond of the devs, and the people criticising the game are often shut down and gotten rid of, pushed out of the echo chamber, and left feeling unwelcome by a hoard of yes-men.

With every patch (Which are few and far between nowadays, don't worry, development takes time), new completely ridiculous and inexcusable bugs are introduced. Bugs that are not hard to find at all, which makes it hard to believe they tested the patches before they pushed them. A recent example would be the roads in the plaza you're supposed to walk on not being solid anymore. Another example would be when the achievement update came out, and - lo and behold - achievements didn't even work. Even better, some of them still don't work, and it's been more than 7 months.

Development in this game is slow. The devs are few, but committed (A famous example would be the Arcade, which has been in development since I started playing the game in 2017 until now, still not done yet, but supposedly worked on.) Other common examples would be fishing and achievements, both out, both kinda barebones, some broken.

The excuse you hear often is how the game is in Early Access, like that's supposed to be a catch-all defense for the extreme laziness of the devs when it comes to actually testing their patches. The mantra seems to be "We'll code only the necessary, the community will deal with the broken state of the game." And it's working. The community consistently excuses this laziness to a sickening degree. There is a limit to what you should have to put up with, and this is on the very extreme end.

I touched on the community a little bit, which is out of the devs hands anyway, but I feel the need to address it from a different perspective. The introduction of Global Chat was something everyone looked forward to in the game, getting to talk to people regardless of what server they're in? Amazing.

However.

With the introduction of the global chat came global chat rules. These rules are so arbitrary it might as well be Pyongyang. Sometimes you get swept in as collateral damage if someone talks about something the moderators feel is bannable that day. They consistently make up rules as they go, and alter them to their needs to deal with "troublesome" members of the community that they don't feel like belong. The whole thing ends up feeling very tense, and you end up thinking "Is this okay for me to say, or am I gonna get banned?" even if you just want to write a silly joke or have a bant with someone. It's frustrating to feel like Big Brother is constantly watching over you, and not knowing if he's in a nice mood, or if he wants to be a bully. You shouldn't feel like you're not allowed to be social in a game that focuses this much on being social.

There are plenty of other negative reviews that mention some more "shady" and "scummy" practices from the dev team, the GMT debacle being the biggest and most recent one. For the sake of keeping my own review.. "short", I advise you to read up on that in other reviews who can put it much better than I can.

I've gone from supporting the devs and believing in their product, to anger and contempt in a game I love so dearly. I'm saddened by the fact that the community lets this happen, and if it keeps going like this, the game will be dead on arrival. The community consists entirely of "cliques" that will not hesitate to throw you head first out the door if you say something they disagree with.

It's with a heavy heart that I can no longer recommend this game, and I hope they decide to take it in a different direction than they are now.

Maybe I'm heartless, maybe I'm too old to understand what you kids struggle with today, but throwing me into a story and not expanding upon it doesn't leave me very emotionally attached to the person I am, nor the person I'm talking to.

You go to high school, you talk to people daily, high school ends, you drift apart. That's life. There is no need to make a game out of that. I don't know why this game is getting all this praise as it clearly does nothing but the absolute minimum to get people to relate to it.

"Have you ever lost a friend you knew in high school? This is a game about what that feels like. Can you relate? Can you? I'm going to keep pushing this on you until you can't bear it anymore!"

No thank you, Emily. Go away, stay away.

Wings of Vi is a fantastic precision platformer with great music, solid controls, and challenging bosses.

The gameplay is what you expect it to be. It's a hard game with tight platforming. You will die, but every time you die, you get one step closer to the next checkpoint, and getting to the next checkpoint after a couple attempts is a great feeling. Being a precision platformer, it's not for everyone. You're going to need patience, and a lot of it. Previous experience in precise games is recommended, though not required.

The game throws new mechanics at you in a nice, relaxing pace, unlike how it makes you learn these new mechanics. Once you get a new mechanic, you're thrown right into a much more challenging platforming experience, requiring you to step your game up. The learning curve might be steep some places, but mastering it after a while gives you a sense of satisfaction.

For someone new to the whole "hard games scene", this is a great start. Even if it's one of the - if not the hardest game I've ever had the pleasure to play, it's a great experience. If you like challenging games, if you just want to try out something hard instead of one of the "hold right and press X once in a while to win" games, I'd go for Wings of Vi.

Finally I don't have to meet real life females. Now I can stay at home and talk to my fox girls without needing any confidence. They love me for who I am, and for all the doritos and mountain dew I shove in my hole.