Recent reviews by Panther

Short and quite bad animations in today's standards. The story is practically non-existent. Voice acting is a Japanese-sounding little chick, same sample in every scene. Not recommended at all for adult scenes.

As for the puzzle mini games... well, those are relaxing, but too easy, non-rewarding, and played through in less than an hour. Skip this one.

Again a hard to not recommend game in the Yakuza series. But I'm still going to, here's why.

As is the case with most Yakuza games, the world within the game doesn't follow its own rules. This makes following the story silly and frustrating. First your character is plowing through enemies as if they were cardboard. Next you'll watch a 5 minute movie about your character struggling with a piece of said cardboard. This is supposed to create tension and motivation for the story, but since the world already lost most its believability, it's hard to keep invested.

Next we have what's actually happening in the story. Well... not much really?! The main story is very simple and short. There are side missions that you mostly plow through, and as usual they don't have much story to them. They work as an excuse to beat up people but that's it.

The coliseum fights are somewhat fun, but there's only so much of those until you've seen enough. Maybe some more variety would keep things interesting?

The fight system also feels somewhat more limited and boring compared to previous titles. Things are mostly smooth but it's just very repetitive even with full abilities. With only two styles and quite clear use cases for them, fights start to quickly repeat the same pattern.

One of my surprising personal favorite features in previous titles was eating at the restaurants. It brought my mind back to Japan (where I've visited a couple of times), and I always got very hungry watching and listening to Kiryu eating. Unfortunately that feature has been basically removed, as you don't gain any experience from eating anymore and the eating animations aren't that delicious anymore.

It's not a bad game at all, but unlike Yakuza 0, I don't think I'll remember or miss what happened in this game after a few years. And hence, I'd only recommend this to people addicted to Kiryu beating up people.

This is a great game. Emphasis on the last word: unlike most stuff with adult content that are just interaction-less clickers, this one is actually entertaining, rewarding and especially relaxing a game. It is a successful combination of interesting plot, mostly likable characters, relaxing music and atmosphere, nice puzzles and of course the adult content scenes, which there are not only plenty, but their quality and variety is very good. The developer sure knows what they are doing, some of the stuff feels interestingly tingly indeed.

There's only a few negative things I would say about the game. It would be nice if one could skip certain parts faster, and sometimes there's a strong find the hidden object vibe going on. Also, there's no Steam cloud support for save games and Steam achievements aren't working at all on Linux. Other than that, what a pleasant surprise.

Figured this would be a few hours of relaxing escapism (or sexcapism or whatever the word would be to describe the type of "game" this is) and it did start as one. The plot, albeit quite silly and not exactly honed to perfection, got me surprisingly hooked, but suddenly the game ended with a "to be continued in season 2" screen. Somehow I thought this wasn't one of those seasonal novels (I missed the appendix in the title), so basically all the time invested in the plot was for nothing.

The lewdness was somewhat lackluster (both in quality and in quantity), so the plot became the stronger selling point, as the characters seemed to have depth to them and they seemed to be developing nicely. But since all that ended abruptly I can't really recommend this as it led to a disappointment. There's some potential though, just would need the complete story, or at least better adult scenes. Since this is a pure visual novel (not a game), story and/or scenes should not be lacking.

It's basically various porn scenes, sick jokes and a tiny bit of growth story mixed together as a visual novel with much more interaction than your average auto-skipper. The graphics and voice acting is actually pretty good, and some of the jokes have made me laugh out loud. The game actually works in the sense that you mostly stop thinking about anything at all while playing it, and hence it's not just exciting, but also very relaxing. Was positively surprised so thumbs up. I probably wouldn't play without a guide, though - it really is that much brains off.

When it's advertised as having over 7 hours of remastered music, I expect it to have the original music in high quality format. Unfortunately that is not the case. If you love the music, the original CD soundtracks are the only way to go. The remasters included are not technically CD quality, and the versions played by the live band sound nowhere like the classic versions.

The game is a classic though and a nostalgia trip, so if those suit your needs, go ahead. For music, don't bother.

This is a though one. On one hand it's a clear recommendation - the game isn't _bad_. It's just that there are better and more coherent ones, such as the Deus Ex series.

Ignoring the small bugs and graphics glitches and other things like that one sees the real problems of the game: the mechanics are outdated and not balanced. The game tries to fight against its own mechanics. Changes I would implement that would make Cyberpunk 2077 much better in my opinion:
- Ditch the leveled items. It's an immersion killer and it fights against the idea of upgrading.
- Ditch the upgrade mechanics, scrap items and junk. Add more functional weapon mods instead.
- Ditch the level system, or make it at least give 3 points per level up.
- Ditch the genital system.
- Reward the player with lots of money.
- Make some environments more destructible, such as vending machines.
- Add more random events, e.g. gang fights or car chases.
- Make the gameplay smoother and quicker. Think Rage 2 or the new Doom games. Currently the controls are awful and laggy.

After around 35 hours of actual gameplay I finished the game. The plot was mostly okay and some of the characters were really likeable. But the things I remember from the playthrough are basically only a couple of firefights, one of which happens in the beginning when you're controlling Johnny (the Keanu Reeves character). Interestingly that segment has none of the crap I listed above that I feel should be ditched.

Also, I felt like my character had almost no cyberware or skills (I was around level 26 I think) when I started the last mission. This game would simply require hundreds of hours of playing to get to enjoy all the goodies the RPG system of it has to offer. That's way too slow, especially when the main plot is relatively short.

In the end you're left with a mediocre shooter with mediocre gameplay, a somewhat empty-feeling but wonderful-looking world, an almost empty if-I-only-had-skill-points character skill tree, an almost empty if-I-only-had-money cyberware tree, and an inventory full of junk and weapons/items you never ever used during the game. Not bad, but can't recommend without reservation, either.

Edit: after playing the game some more hours, this time just grinding the side jobs, money is not really an issue. The game should more actively guide the player towards well-rewarding missions. The first few side quests I tried were unluckily not rewarding at all and hence they discouraged me from grinding any more. The RPG elements (different skill trees), however, still feel very much behind dozens and dozens of hours of just grinding without any plot. That is just not enjoyable - unless you have said skills already. It's a classic example of "grind to make gameplay more enjoyable", which I consider bad design in a single player game.

Edit: I've now played around a hundred hours. I've finished around 98% what the open world has to offer (see achievements). Around the 50 hour mark I had most of the skills I wanted, a full cyberware tree and basically infinite money. But my initial feelings were indeed correct: the world really is somewhat empty, and without plot it's not that exciting. I've been ill so I've had time to play the game this much, but I wouldn't have wasted the time otherwise.

I was disappointed. Had three game sessions, each were quite boring and dull.

I didn't like the art style (broken colors and all), but at least the game has somewhat consistent a style, so you might like it.
There's very little variety of enemies, and except for the uzi, the weapons didn't feel satisfying to me at all. Sound effects are also dull. Soundtrack is boring, monotonous and forgettable.

The level design seemed to be based too much on the assumption that every player absolutely wants to search 100% of secrets. Well, I didn't. I was just looking for good, fun times, with the occasional secret here and there. The end result for the couple of first levels was that they were quite boring and sometimes I got lost on where to go next. The third level I flew around using cheats and still in ten minutes couldn't find the exit.

I am a DN3D and Doom veteran, and absolutely love those games, their level and art design, their weapons, sounds and music. Just last year I played the new World Tour episode of DN3D for the first time, and it still felt quite fresh, unlike Ion Fury. This just feels like an old DN3D total conversion (granted, a very high-quality one).

I don't know if the game has been toned down (I read that there was some controversy with the publishers getting too woke or something), but it certainly didn't feel like there was any rock'n'roll going on. Everything felt cautious and forgettable, i.e. boring - not fun enough to justify the price nor the time spent figuring out the levels.

Fun, relaxing and good looking. As usual, almost nothing makes any sense, but who cares. Quick to get into the "action".

The game is at times really fun and the plot hooks you up nicely. I would recommend some parts of it, but as a whole, it left me just a bit too disappointed.

There's an awful lot of mini-games and unnecessary stuff to do. I guess some people might find them fun, and some of them were really making me laugh because of the randomness of it, but they are basically just time wasters and have nothing to do with the plot or the main mechanics of the game, except for earning you some money you can use to upgrade your abilities. Good thing you eventually will get enough money without spending too much time doing busywork, but I feel like I did waste a lot of hours in the beginning because I didn't really know what was essential for the plot/experience and what wasn't.

Once the plot starts to thicken, you're hooked, but at the end part of the game there's just way too much, should I say, Japanese-style cliffhangers and storytelling. The characters are shouting death threats all the time, but when the time comes, they don't do anything. It gets old quite fast - for example, there's one antagonist you fight I think four times. Then there are sudden dramatic last second shifts of events in the plot, after slugging for a couple of hours. It feels a bit frustrating at times, and same goes for the ending. Eventually I feel like nothing made any sense and whatever happened during the game didn't matter - that nice plot buildup just didn't pay off. Oh, and even though there weren't that many QTEs (quick time event), there were still enough to frustrate you, if you're not a fan.

All in all, a few really good laughs, a few enjoyable battles, but just a bit too much time wasted on nonsense. I recommend this title only if you have 30+ hours to waste on a game that has plot for 15 hours max. But if you do, go for it - the game's certainly not bad, either.

Edit: now reading some other negative reviews, a lot of them seem to focus on the technical side. Yakuza 0 was absolutely stable for me, no crashes, slowdowns, nothing. A couple of minor things that resolved themselves on the way, but very much technically as good as it gets. I played using a wireless Xbox One controller.