Recent reviews by Hf

When in doubt, throw more AND gates at it.

Honestly, loads of fun. I really wish there were more games like this for more subjects. It feels like I actually learned something and I had fun doing so.

I only have a few pieces of criticism:
1. The game occupies an awkward middle ground in terms of what skill level it appears to be trying to cater toward. I had a very rudimentary grasp of logic gates, bits, bytes, etc. going into the game and it felt like just the right level of challenge for me to complete without looking anything up. That said, I suspect somebody with actual study time into cpu architecture would plow through this and I'm not sure if the sandbox mode offers enough novelty to make it worthwhile. On the other hand, I'm not sure if the game presents a complete layman with enough information to reasonably complete it without doing research outside of the game.

2. Sometimes I wondered if I was just brute forcing through with solutions that were too hyper specific to a level's tests. Obviously, not every arrangement is going to scale beyond a very specific use case but I think it would've been kinda nice after each stage to see a comparison with a real world solution for the same problem. Likewise, hardly a necessary feature but it'd also be kinda nice to be able to "inspect" the various parts (e.g., the 1-bit memory modules) in a manner similar to the component workshop and go back and look at the stage where the player first "makes" that component as a reminder of how the logic worked at the micro level and further reinforce that each complex gate is made of simple ones.

Despite how much I wrote about them though, these are really minor criticisms. Awesome game. Highly worth the price. I need a few dozen more puzzle-ish games that teach subjects in an interesting way in my life ASAP.

Great game. Gorgeous sprite work and animations. Wonderful music. The plot is very straightforward but it has the same enchanting feeling as other Momodora games, which is to say that it feels like there's a real world behind the story.

There are a few balance oddities with sigils, but my only real criticism is that several plot threads seem to abruptly end. This normally wouldn't be a problem since a sequel would flesh them out, except this was billed as the end of Momodora's overall story so the cases where this happened ended up feeling a bit unsatisfying.

Honestly though, absolutely worth the price. Highly recommended for anybody who likes metroidvanias, especially if you like exploring and piecing together lore in games. I picked it up and didn't put it down until I beat the game. I'm at 109% completion now and am going back in for the remaining 2% as soon as I post this review.

Extremely fun with 3 friends and proximity chat. For the group I played with it ended up feeling like a comedy game with a few horror moments.

The core gameplay loop is strong. There's a learning curve to figuring out how to deal with monsters. There's also a bit to pick up on in terms of mission selection, map exploration, and inventory management. It's even got tech to master.

Replayability is a little bit of a concern though. The amount of content is small enough that you can probably have a good idea how to deal with everything and every map within a few nights of binging the game, and probably within a few hours if you look at any guides. Since it's a game where a lot of the difficulty and fun depends on not knowing how to deal with scenarios, it feels like there's a risk of the game losing a lot of its draw as a casual player becomes knowledgeable enough to remove the danger from most encounters. That said, I'd guess that people who are into hardcore optimization will find this to be hugely replayable since there's a lot of room for improving speed and efficiency even after that point.

Overall though, at the current listed price of $10, I think Lethal Company is extremely fun and offers more than enough content and playtime to be well worth it.

Fun game! Mechanics are clearly based on Sekiro and will likely scratch that itch for Sekiro-style boss battles. There's enough variety in attack patterns that each boss is interesting. I've S-ranked all the 2-star bosses and am working through the 3-star bosses now and would definitely recommend this as a short, fun action boss rush.

Also, as of writing it says English language not supported but there was an English translation option when I loaded the game.

Modifying my review after finishing NG+, still working on the NG++ run.

Positives:
Even after 2 playthroughs, this game is a visual feast. There's so much care and attention put into the little elements like directional boosters firing as you turn your AC. It really helps sell the feeling that you're piloting a big physics-defying robot.

Movement feels really good. The faster mechs feel so satisfying to pilot with quick boosting and flight to avoid incoming volleys.

There appears to be a decently high skill ceiling. It feels great to go back through earlier missions armed with more mechanical knowledge and speed through them like an ace.

The decal/AC customization is in-depth and you can turn your AC into a reference to more or less any other giant mech genre game/show you can imagine, or do something original with it, or plaster it with anime.

So-so:
I think they should've nixed repair kits and just had a larger AP pool.

The only way you won't have time to trigger a repair kit is if you're stunlocked anyway, since it's an instant heal that only requires you to let off the firing button for half a second to press. Functionally having a bigger AP pool is more or less the same thing but better fits into the mech mercenary game theme, and it also makes it less weird when you fight enemy ACs who have varying amounts of repair kits.

The mission pacing is pretty weird and it also detracts from the mech mercenary game theme. You will almost always get a full resupply kit before a boss, and most of the smaller enemies aren't very threatening in this game to begin with. I can't really say what the fix would be here, but designing and balancing most of the levels around a checkpoint and a boss does detract from it feeling like an Armored Core game.

Also it feels like a miss that they didn't include coop. It just being a case of hiring another independent mercenary to assist feels like an easy lore explanation for most of the missions.

Finally, I miss weapon arms. They were dumb but running sword arms was silly.

The bad:
Many of the bosses feel poorly utilized. There's rarely any buildup to them other than knowing that you're about to fight a boss because you were just given a resupply sherpa and a checkpoint, and then they're dropped on you in a cutscene.

In contrast, the AC vs AC fights are more exciting, at least to me, because most of the ACs you fight are also in the arena, so there's some buildup. Likewise, in operation Wallclimber the boss spends time shooting at you before you actually engage it directly. These both create way more buildup than dropping a supermech directly on top of you.

Also, another big problem is that the weapon balance is really bad right now. There are a few weapons that outperform everything else. If you bring them, pretty much every boss encounter will be easy. If not, it'll be a lot more reliant on your dodging skills. I think once the first balancing pass comes, we'll hopefully see less extremes in terms of the difficulty people are experiencing.

Finally, Mission 27 is just bad. I'm sorry. It's everything that was wrong with the Bed of Chaos. It's basically just a puzzle mission where you spend most of your time waiting, and it's so painfully scripted that it might as well have been a cutscene.

All that said though, overall a great game. I'm glad to see Armored Core back.

Actually never imagined I'd negatively review a Project Moon game, but here we are. To be completely honest and up-front here, this review is a result of the summer event controversy.

I believe that Project Moon's decision to fire the CG illustrator was bad and short-sighted. It is especially concerning since the reason for firing the illustrator appears to be because people who were mad about design choices included into the game (design choices that the director and others presumably OK-ed) dug through years of the illustrator's personal account history in order to find something that they might get fired over. However, at this point I also believe that this is symbolic of several concerning management decisions, which may just be a result of being in over their head.

This event ultimately pushed me to honestly look at my own experience with the game and whether I'm even enjoying it, and the answer is no, I haven't enjoyed it since before the chicken event.

In terms of gameplay, it feels like a hard step down from Library of Ruina. It's clearly been simplified for mobile, but it also clearly didn't need to be simplified for mobile as it differentiates combat between a "vs mook" style of combat and a deeper style of combat.

In the vs mook combat you select between 2 skills (which themselves are randomly drawn out of 3), or using a defensive action which is always available, or using an EGO action. You have no choice over targeting and can't manipulate the combat in the ways that were possible in Ruina.

In the deeper style of combat you get the vs mook combat options and also get to select targets, which creates a massive amount of depth. Unsurprisingly, the deeper style of combat is used for all boss encounters and the current challenge mode of Refraction Railroad.

The problem with this, for me, is that the vs Mook gameplay isn't engaging in any meaningful way. It's just boring filler between the part of the game that I actually like (the story) that occasionally gets extra annoying when auto targeting puts me in a situation that manually targeting never would've (e.g., a character getting staggered and then being unable to redirect attacks aimed at them). There's really no reason to do anything in this combat other than to pick the win rate option and occasionally pop an EGO.

This is exacerbated further because, in addition to typical gacha grind encounters, they fill the story chapters with these vs mook encounters to space out the cutscenes. One chapter has something like 40 fights that are not challenging or interesting in any way, unless you intentionally make them harder by bringing underleveled and underperforming identities, to get to the parts of the game that are actually fun (the story, the unique dungeons, and the challenging boss fights).

But then that comes to the second problem. The inclusion of full-on gacha mechanics has started to result in power creep with identities that are just blatantly overpowered. While Library of Ruina had similar identities, they cost $0 which made it less of a problem. At release it wasn't as bad, but some of the newer identities coming out are just silly and trivialize the challenge content. I think this will continue to become a greater balancing problem over time because, to be honest, Project Moon struggled at balance and creating challenging content in Library of Ruina where they could just assume everybody had the strongest cards.

The story is still great, at least, and the dungeons still have a glimmer of hope that they could become deep enough to legitimately be fun, but honestly, as it is I'd rather have read Limbus Company's story as one of Project Moon's web novels rather than playing it in this format.

Honestly just a genuinely fun FPS. Skill ceiling feels high, gameplay feels smooth, and I'm having a load of fun with it. It's got good long range sniping, bullet physics, magazine management, vehicle gameplay, and classes. I haven't enjoyed an FPS this much since I picked up TF2 back in the orange box days.

My most major complaint is that right now the class and gun balance needs a lot of tweaking. Medics are the only class that can self-heal and they're able to equal or outperform the other classes at basically everything other than long range engagements. SMGs also seem a bit busted right now as there are a few that are better than assault rifles at mid range and can out-DPS basically anything else. Since medics use SMGs, there's not much reason to play anything else.

There's also a bit of UI polish needed and it would be nice to have a training mode that includes vehicles so that fewer transport heli pilots start a match by delivering 14 tickets directly into the woodchipper.

That said, devs seem extremely responsive and active. This is absolutely worth the $15 even if nothing else gets changed. Game is overall proof that you can make an extremely engaging game with a small team, small budget, and minimal graphics focus as long as the developers love the genre.

Game has potential but there's still a lot of jagged edges. Would still recommend it as being worth the price of admission at the moment if you have 4 or more friends to play with.

The good:

• Building and resource collection are nice additions to the co-op horde shooter game type. It makes me feel a little bit like I'm playing one of those RTS-FPS hybrid games. I think they even have room to lean harder into this with a commander game mode that's a bit more hectic.
  
• General gameplay loop feels enjoyable so far. See bugs, shoot bugs. The guns generally feel pretty punch-y, which is nice.
  
• The 16 player cap is also a nice addition to the co-op horde shooter game type. It gives the game a proper Starship Troopers feel of human waves vs swarms of bugs.

The bad:

• The UI/visual design is rough around the edges. Things like player healthbars and incapacitated allies fade into the background pretty easily, especially when you have a few dozen bugs assaulting your position.
  
• The bugs are surprisingly not very threatening, even on Veteran. The worst bug type is the gunner and that's because it can basically 360 no scope you the second it spawns, and you probably won't survive unless you're a bastion. They could really do with reining in the gunner but making the other bug types more threatening (or maybe more numerous).
  
• There's not much in the way of class identity or distinction yet. The operator seems like easily the best all around class, with bastion being decently strong and having its own niche of being a wall of HP and bullets. Hunter, on the other hand, feels outperformed at everything except for having slightly better mobility every 20 or so seconds. As best I can tell, the Hunter does not have a rifle with a shotgun secondary, which feels like a missed opportunity to lean into its CQC identity and also ties in with the movie.

Overall, I do believe this game is worth a good 10~ hours of fun at the moment as long as you have some friends to jump in with and like the horde shooter genre. It's going to need a lot of polish and care to get to the point where it has a core gameplay loop that allows it to match Left 4 Dead, Deep Rock Galactica, Payday 2, GTFO, etc. in replayability though.

I spent several thousand hours on the free version of the game. I've spent in-game years building massive city walls, capable of fending off the mightiest of sieges, grand dining rooms centered by artificial waterfalls, and cavern training camps intended to turn novice recruits into hardened warriors.

Once, during a fever dream caused by a bad cold, I envisioned building a great spire in this game that stretched from the bedrock all the way into the very heavens, and then when I got healthy enough to sit at my computer I spent real weeks doing just that, resulting in a true monument to avarice that eventually fell when an unfortunately placed garbage stockpile caused a tantrum spiral that left every dwarf in the spire mad or dead.

What I'm trying to say here is, at this point I've gotten so much value out of this game that the Steam version could gain sentience, walk into my house, and shoot my dog and it would still get a positive review from me.

It's Sniper Elite 5. If you've played any other Sniper Elite, you basically already know what you're getting: an incremental improvement on the existing formula. If you liked the previous games, you'll almost definitely like this one once the bugs are ironed out.

If you haven't though, the really, really short version is that Sniper Elite is a series about being an Elite Sniper who for some reason is also a commando who has to sneak into areas alone to deal with entire platoons, tanks, aircraft, random Nazi super weapons, and in-between all that also has to shoot Hitler every few months.

The game's most compelling mechanics are that bullet drop and wind physics are actually accounted for as part of shooting, and you get a fancy bullet camera showing you every individual organ/tendon/etc. your bullet severed on its path through Nazi #8,792. These are excellent and if the concept interests you, you will probably enjoy the Sniper Elite series (though it might be arguable if you'll find them worthwhile at full price).

As for 5 in particular, the close quarters combat feels a lot better than in the previous installments. The increased information on what ranges weapon and ammo types are audible from is great. Sniping feels as good as ever, and it really hits its stride on chapter 3 of the campaign where you can spend tens of minutes methodically picking off targets from 300m+ away prior to entering the mission area proper to clean up the stragglers. I also believe that the limitations placed on throwing rocks and ressing coop partners was a good idea.

Please keep in mind that I have not tried the invasion mode yet, as I want to finish the campaign once before adding an extra chaos agent to it. I also only really play the Sniper games on authentic/authentic plus, since accounting for bullet physics is what I enjoy most in these games. I have no idea how this plays on lower difficulties with UI assist.

In terms of things I think could be done better. Still a lot of bugs. The map is a bit confusing as to what can be traversed and what can't, as some waist-high walls will completely thwart your progress but sometimes you can also go up what appears to be a flat wall. Still missing a full authentic plus equivalent from Sniper Elite 4.

Overall verdict: give it like a month for some of the worst bugs to get patched. Afterward, if you're a die hard Sniper Elite fan it's probably worth a grab. If you're new to the series, might want to try it on a sale (or grab Sniper Elite 4 when it's on sale and make a decision on 5 based off that).