Recent reviews by dphn

slay the spire is a perfect roguelike. it is simultaneously built to break, while also being balanced on a razor's edge, rewarding skillful play and decision making, and having those decisions have a profound impact on each run. beating ascension 20 with each character was a journey of mastery that i found profoundly satisfying. i cannot recommend this game highly enough—i have been searching for another deckbuilding roguelike to scratch that itch to no avail.

if you enjoy card games (especially limited formats), this is the single player game to own.

skullgirls is a triumph. amazingly fun, incredibly deep, and profoundly expressive. the game is being unfairly review bombed by people who don't even play fighting games, and are mad the game devs voluntarily removed sexualization of minors and fascist imagery.

ignore the chuds. if this game looks dope to you, it goes on sale all the time—pick it up!!

i've been a fighting game player since blazblue continuum shift in 2010, so while you may or may not consider me an fg boomer, this is not coming from someone for whom this is their first fighting game.

i heckin' love guilty gear -strive-. it's the most fun i've had with a fighting game in the past decade. it's got the perfect balance of offense, pacing, and a roster of interesting and extremely diverse characters. for the record, i do think this is an amazing first fighting game for people, and have many friends who have learned to love fighting games through ggst, but it also offers a lot to a more experienced fighting game player, too.

it's got a quick tempo, with an emphasis on strike/throw, and characters designed around strong win-condition type scenarios, leading to potent offense, with risc and throws forcing defensive risks to be taken. strive also has the most freeform and interesting incarnation of the roman cancel system of any of the gear games, which leads to meter being very fun to use and problem solve with.

also, despite what fgc twitter would have you believe, the game has been very well balanced. there is one outlier currently, but even with that, any character can make top 8. just last night as i'm writing this, at texas showdown 2022, in the top 8 there was only 1 'top tier' character, and they did not win the event.

if you're thinking about giving this game a try, i think it's well worth it! even as i expect arksys to do some weird stuff with the balance (it is arksys) i look forward to enjoying this game over the next few years as its development cycle plays out (and probably many years after that). i love this game.

The mixed review status is well earned. The game has had a turbulent development cycle, but it appears to finally be paying off on all the promise it had on release. Don't let the previous, flawed versions of the game scare you off of this one. It's a good one.

I have a background in competitive Smash, hundreds if not thousands of hours in more "traditional" 2d fighting games, and just ticked over to 1,000 hours in Brawlhalla as of me writing this review.

Let me start by saying this: Brawlhalla is an absolute gem. It's simple at the base, with just 5 buttons (light attack, heavy attack, jump, dodge, and throw weapon), and no special commands to memorize or practice. At the top end, though, there is a lot of depth, with different ways to utilize dodge offensively, and ways to play around and cover your opponent's dodge options.

The real story, though, is the developers: Blue Mammoth Games. They are extremely transparent and active, with dev-streams on Twitch 3 times a week, and a lot of activity on the subreddit. They've created a game that developed a community, and that community helped them make the game into something special. The community wanted more advanced mechanics and tech to increase the skill-ceiling, and they found ways to do it without undermining the accessability that made the game easy to pick up and fall in love with. The community wanted tournaments, and BMG gave us BCS, the Brawlhalla Championship Series, for weekly esports culminating in BCX, the Brawlhalla Championship Expo, a lan event which will take place Nov 11th - 13th, where the best will fight it out over a $50,000 prize-pool.

+Simple, and easily understood controls make picking up the game easy
+Wide cast of delightfully camp characters ranging from a viking warrior to a steampunk scientist to an alien overlord and more
+Active community to talk about the game with on reddit
+Regular patches: Balance changes every 2 weeks, new legend every month, and a new weapon every 6 months, and new content every week
+It's a free game, which beyond being neat because it's free, means that there are constant influxes of new players, and players of all levels—cannot stress how utterly fantastic this is for a fighting game
+Fantastically well balanced for a game still in beta—every character and weapon is viable, with few people being able to agree on an accurate tier list, and all the tiers that do exist are very close
+Devs have a very judicial approach to buffs and nerfs, and almost never overbuff or overnerf
+Friendly and fantastic developers who really, really listen
+Growing esports scene, with tournaments every week and in every region
+GGPO gives a wonderful netplay experience, and there are servers in US-E, US-W, EU, AUS, and SEA
+Great training mode
+Diana

–Being a competitive game, there are elements of toxicity, though for every bad apple, there are many friendly people who are happy to help
–Game tends to have a lot of younger people playing it—makes me feel old sometimes
–It has a formulaic approach to character design—every character exists on the same base character frame, and every character (legend) only has a few distinct things about them, namely their stats, their specific combination of weapons (every legend has two that they alternate between), and their grounded heavy attacks (called signatures). This might seem like a strange decision, but it's why BMG is able to keep such a vigorous update schedule and release so much new content so quickly with such a small team.
–Because the base game is simple, and they wanted to add depth, that extra complexity had to go somewhere, and the dodge function received the most caveats and additional rules, meaning that it can take a bit to understand all the ways dodges can be used, and how you get them back off cooldown
–Not enough Diana skins

The last thing I'll go over is the micro transactions, because this is a free-to-play title. There is a group of 6 legends that are "free" every week, and that rotates. You can purchas legends for gold, which you get by logging in, completing missions (play 2 or win 1 game with one of legend X or Y) which you get once a day, leveling up legends, leveling up your account, and generally just playing. The premium currency is "Mammoth Coins" and can be spent to either unlock legends (not advised, you can unlock everything pretty quickly), or various cosmetics including avatars, legend skins, weapon skins, taunts, sidekicks (buddy that respawns you), and ko-effects. Furthermore, if you get a skin, that skin comes with a weapon skin for each weapon that legend uses, and you can mix-and-match these non-basic weapon skins with other legends that use the same weapons. So you can equip the pirate that uses sword and guns with an alien overlord's laser pistols and a samurai's katana, even if you don't have a skin for the pirate . This sort of customization is really nice once you build up a few skins, and adds a lot of "extra value" to cosmetic purchases. It also just feels nice knowing that you're supporting such great developers.

Even if you want to remain completely free-to-play, there's still plenty of neat cosmetics that you can unlock such as semi-exclusive colors unlocked by getting a legend to level 10 (white) and 25 (black) which cost between 2x and 5x as much as a character. Black in particular can take a while to unlock and represents a time and resource investment that can make a given legend feel more personal. There are also rewards for taking part in ranked which can be purchased with a resource given out at the end of each season, including a series of ranked colors, and weapon skins.

So, yeah. Brawlhalla is great. It's great for a first fighitng game, and it's just great in general. I think that everyone on steam should consider giving it a shot.

EDIT: ALSO BEST USE OF A FARM ANIMAL EVER!

Like many others writing the early reviews, I have hundreds of hours of play on this game pre-localization and steam release. Even with that, I am still a scrubby nooblet. This game is quite deep, and takes a lot to master, but it is also fairly accessable at a base level, only having 3 buttons and straight forward chains.

+ Amazing balance and depth
+ Dedicated community that has stuck around and will still continue to stick around
+ Fast gameplay that rewards aggression
+ While not a HD remake, they have smoothed out the sprites and touched up the backgrounds, several with very nice ambient effects
+ Over 90 characters due to the Moon system (31 characters with 3 moon styles = 93 possible playable characters)
+ Great characters — albeit, on average less outrageous than most others
+ Satsuki Yumizuka

- The game does not have a challenge/trial system, which means that you have to look up and figure things out entirely from third party sources, which presents a barrier to entry
- As mentioned by others, there are largely speaking only two sorts of players right now: the incredibly new, and the incredibly experienced. The experience gradient will even out over time
- As of release, the netplay is experiencing issues, but I am confident that it will be fixed relatively quickly—Arc System Works games generally have stellar netplay
- Some people might experience some lag on some of the revamped stages, such as the cherry blossom stage that now has actual cherry blossoms falling (it's pretty neat). I've heard there's an option to turn off sprite smoothing, but I don't know if it also changes the stages—I'm inclined to believe it does, but even if it doesn't, you can just avoid the problem stages

This is honestly the best-designed fighting game I've ever had the joy to play, and you should certainly give it a shot if you're considering.

This is a surprisingly fun game. It's challenging, and dynamic. Don't pass it up.