Recent reviews by Uzu

This is one of the most busted PC ports I've played in recent times, it's laughable that something like this could be released and not fixed after 3 years.

First of all, the game will not launch at all if your CPU has too many cores.

You can download a modified .exe from the steam forums or Hex edit the following line "4c 24 30 4c 8d 05 46 ff ff ff 31 c9 e8 37 b8 25" (31 and c9 are the edits) yourself and then it will launch.

If this doesn't sound horrible enough already, If you have a framerate other than 60, you cannot pick up items at all, which is weird since the game has an unlocked framerate by default.

Items will spawn in the air and will only drop back into the ground "sometimes"... Or 100% reliably if you ALT+Tab out and back into the game, but do you really want to do this after every single fight? (In a Musou style game)

It's crazy to think this game only ever gets a 40% discount considering it isn't even playable without some unreasonable workarounds, this should have been fixed long ago and I will gladly rebuy it if it is fixed, otherwise I recommend to stay away from it.

This game has rollback netcode made by the Killer Instinct devs, so that should be all you really need to know.

Made by the company that would become Examu later on (The makers of Arcana Heart) this game polishes the Samsho formula to another level, insanely easy to pick up due to the simplicity of its inputs and super hard to master with the amount of mechanics in play, more people should be playing games like this.

Be sure to pick Samsho 7 up if you can, that game shares nearly all of its mechanics with this, so you can start practicing for it here!

Disclaimer: I actually love this game, but I also love many other games and lying is possibly the dumbest thing anyone can ever do, so I'm offering you my completely honest and objective opinion about the things at hand, which comes from an experienced player and someone who plans on continuing to play this game.

Also, if you like this game, check out the "Elminage" series, "Elminage Original" and "Elminage Gothic" are on steam and you're going to love them.

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Do you play games because you want: to have a good time/you enjoy a cool story/some "fun" gameplay/like a good challenge?

You may find that experience with this game up to a point, play exactly until you reach Floor 10 (First boss) and then uninstall forever and never look back, you might be tempted to play more, but you shouldn't.

You can watch the rest of the bosses and cutscenes on youtube, trust me.

If you liked what you saw or if you like Suda51/Grasshopper, consider buying one of the DLC packs just to support the developers.

Despite what you might have read this game is NOT "Pay 2 Win", or anything like that, but it's also not for everybody, if you want to read more about this scroll down further.

Do you play games because you want to try to overcome some grueling challenges, hardcore stuff that only you and a select few will ever care about?

Don't play this, go play a skill based game like a shoot-em-up/STG, rhythm game, or basically anything else, this game is actually very very easy, *insert your favorite "hard game" here* is most likely harder than this by a long shot.

This game only gets a little bit difficult once you reach floor 100, which depending on how you play, will take from 300 to 500 hours of grinding if not much more, and no, I'm not kidding or exaggerating.

If you play this up to floor 40 (Where the "story" ends) with the mentality that you will quit after floor 40, and not bother with the "End game" content, you're just wasting your time.

Do you enjoy mindless grinding and you are also a hardcore masochist?

Well, you're right at home and let me explain why.

This is a game where progress comes in tiny increments, you cannot sit down and experience a considerable amount of content without grinding.

This game is not "Pay 2 Win"; at first glance one might think it's possible to pay for a certain things in game, however, the reality is that there will always be a GIGANTIC forced grind for you to do, and no amount of in-game currency is going to fix that.

The in-game currency (Death Metals/DM) allows you to do two things, you spend 2 DM for 10 storage slots, which are CRUCIAL to all the insane grinding you will be doing OR you can waste them on reviving a character once.

Here's the thing, if you spend DMs on reviving your character in order to hit a boss for 1 damage for 5 hours straight until you kill it after spending 1000 DM, All that is going to happen is that you're going to advance to the next floor, and get completely obliterated again.

All this game boils down to is a series of "gear checks", what this means is that the floor after the boss or whatever floor you just wasted DM trying to brute force, is going to be much more "difficult" than what you just got past, so it's a situation where you will not progress.

This game has some very obvious walls for gear checks, where most people experience them are floors:

16, 21, 23, 30, 33, 36, 38, 40, 50

You might look at this and think "That can't be so bad, that seems like a normal difficulty spike in any game and makes sense", What you don't know yet is that the spike from each "wall" is comparable to the sum of all previous walls, in other words, The amount of time you spent getting from 1 to 30, is more or less the same amount of time its going to take you to go from 30 to 40 and so on.

Let It Die is not a game to be "experienced", it's a game to be endured.

If someone thinks that "Hernia", the in-game currency "material"/"item", shop is "Pay 2 Win", I have to say that I personally would have LOVED if it actually allowed you to pay to win somehow, but what Hernia actually is, is an equivalent to buying a Team Fortress 2 Rocket Launcher for 10 USD on the "Mannco. Store", you just don't do that.

Hernia has a randomized stock of items which updates every day, and the stock of the items it carries is LIMITED, which means you can technically only buy 1 piece (or 5 if you are extremelly "lucky") of whatever Materials are in stock.

You really don't have to be a genius to realize you will need 200 of this material, not 1 or 5. So trying to pay for items is ridiculously ineffective, the forced grind is inescapable.

A ton of games have those little "scams" thrown around, it doesn't matter where you look, Warframe, Overwatch (People actually buy Lootboxes), TF2, etc. but if you somehow fall for it, it's 100% on you.

You can also buy premium decals with 10 Death Metals OR 50,000 Kill Coins (non purchasable, in-game currency), but same thing, if you spend DM on this, you're throwing your money into the garbage, the drop-rates are so bad you will never get the decal you need, so it virtually makes no difference if you spend KC instead of wasting DM.

DM should only ever be used for "Event" premium decals, like the current "No More Heroes" decals (at the time of writing), but once again, you will only want 1 or 2 out of all the possible decals you may get, and if you aren't wasting your DM, you should naturally have enough for a couple of those decals just from daily rewards and missions.

Now that the economy is out of the way, if you still want to commit to this game, make sure you check the wiki so you can start min-maxing the items you will craft from the start, it will really make a big difference, I didn't use a guide until floor 30, because I wanted to know why I couldn't damage the floor 30 boss, just to find out I should've been upgrading the "Iron" weapon just for this scenario.

A Wiki will also help you understand how the mechanics actually work and to not waste any of your resources, which seems to be a common trend for people who are new to this game.

Also, properly playing this game and using all the advantages it gives you (Like learning how to farm TDM early and using "Gyakufunsha") will improve your early to mid game grinding vastly.

Let it Die is very interesting, it might as well be a turn based RPG instead of an action game in a lot of scenarios, to give you an example, you might struggle with this boss due to the natural progression of the game, only to come back to farm it later and find out it dies in 1 hit to your newly upgraded gear.

This is something you will encounter consistently, usage of mushrooms, decals, upgraded weapons, will turn almost any fight into something you will get through completely untouched.

"Difficulty" is very much like an MMO, you just see numbers go up until things actually have enough health in floor 100 for you to not be able to 1 shot them that easily (Though still possible in some scenarios)

If you think of the game it is a "carrot on a stick" metaphor, the grinding never, NEVER, gets better, I'm dead serious, at no point it ever gets more enjoyable, more "fair", nothing. If anything, when you're grinding for Materials that only appear on floors 100+ and it takes hours to reach floor 100 in the first place, you realize that the grinding has only got worse.

The RNG behind drop rates is soul crushing, you will be farming for MONTHS for a single decal you want thinking you might finally get it this day and it won't happen, you can spend 8 hours straight farming a boss (Shoutouts to JIN-DIE) and get 0 drops of the "Metal" you need, which you need 5+ pieces of for a single upgrade (Out of 4 individual upgrades within 4 tiers total (so, 16 upgrades where you have to farm for materials for each individual upgrade)

You may think you've experienced masochist games before, but you haven't tried to reach floor 250 in Let It Die.

Dungeon Manager ZV is really good, I don't have as much of a playtime as I wish I did on it but I find myself constantly thinking about this game.

What is so good about it?

This game hits a very specific micro-management game and idle/clicker game. Min-maxing this game is surprisingly satisfying and watching the simulations happen in real time, with the ability to speed or slow them down at will is pretty fantastic, it also has a decent replayability, you will most likely "beat" the "campaign" in about 5 or 6 hours, but to get all the achievements or to aim for a high score on the leaderboards you'll spend another 10~15 hours at very least.

The dynamic difficulty, the "endless" aspect and freedom of being able to do things however you want at your own pace are some of the most enjoyable aspects of this game, which make it very special to me.

I'm gonna be real with you here, this game is basically a "spreadsheet" game, all you get is a couple of menus and that's where the whole game happens, so if you have some imagination then by all means you should play this game, if you don't think you can handle a game where you're staring at mostly text, then I would suggest checking "Dungeon Manager ZV: Resurrection" and "Dungeon Manager ZV 2" instead, as they to seem to be more visually appealing.

I have not played them at the moment of writing this review (I plan on doing so) but if the system of the sequels is similar to this game, then they are most likely gems of their own.

My only complaint about this game is that it's locked to a 640x480 resolution and you can't really do windowed mode because of it, but it's understandable for an old "indie" japanese game (2004).

If you like simulation/clicker/management games, this is a really good title to check out.

Buy this game

This review is from the perspective of a Beatmania IIDX 10th Dan and experienced Pump It Up player (s24/d24), who also plays other rhythm games (SDVX/Taiko/Miku/Ouendan1&2/Rhythm Heaven/Groove Coaster, etc), so hopefully that will help somebody give it more perspective, if you don't know what any of the things I wrote above means then don't even worry, I'll explain more below.

If you're a beginner to rhythm games:

This game is actually pretty good, the timing is very lenient so if you aren't used to games that are very strict, this is a good place to start, the amount of songs you get for the base price is very good in my opinion (48 songs at the time of writing) and you can buy a lot more with a single DLC purchase that says it will include every song they will release in the future, which is pretty good too.

The game has a lot of eye candy so that's also good for newcomers and spectators.

If you're not used to asian music, this is also a good place to start, a lot of the songs and artists included here are very good. (AmamoriP, Lunatic Sounds, Memme, P4koo, Paul Bazooka, to name a few)

And it seems that some crossover songs from other games on steam are present, like Candleman: The Complete Journey, Gaokao.Love.100Days, ICEY and Nekopara for example.

The settings menu is a little on the simple side, you can tell this game was a mobile game at some point (Apparently its also on Vita, PS4, and Switch), but it's serviceable, you can adjust the timing, speed, turn keysounds on and off (with some settings in-between), and switch from a horizontal to a more vertical display and it's great that you're given the option for this.

The game has easy and hard modes and a "4 key" and "6 key" mode, where you use 4 and 6 keys to play the game respectively, with the 6 key variants being harder, so if you plan on playing every single song and difficulty that's at least 160~ different "charts" to play, once again, pretty good for the base value of the game (without DLC).

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If you're an experienced rhythm game player:

This is a very lenient game, not only in timing but also in difficulty and input recognition, you can actually more or less mash pretty hard in some songs and still have most of that count as a combo, so if you're looking for something that's at least a bit more strict and will be more difficult to master, you're probably better off buying Groove Coaster.

That said, the charts themselves aren't too bad, the hardest level in-game seems to be 10, even though the rankings don't seem to be too accurate (Some lvl 8 songs seem harder than the 10's and so on) but that's just a common rhythm game thing really.

In terms of difficulty I would say the "Hard" 4 key and 6 key charts are comparable to IIDX 9's and 10's but the reduced timing and accuracy requirements will probably make them feel much easier.

I still think it's a very decent game to exercise your chart reading though, although charts are fixed so you will inevitably memorize some parts of them eventually (compared to how random works in IIDX)

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Overall, if you're looking for good rhythm games on steam, your options are pretty limited and this is a great addition to the current library of them.

Click for a video of me sightreading the Nekopara song

Complete with sound effects, music and game mechanics from the original game, this is probably one of the cutest forms of DLC in any game I've ever seen.

One of the finest shmups on steam, and one of the best games in here overall, do yourself a favor and play it.

Update:

It's the year 2018 and with 2019 coming up I can still tell you Crimzon Clover is as good as ever, if you haven't got this already you have been missing out.

If you played XIIZeal and didn't like it (Due to waggling and what not) fear not, DELTAZEAL Is where the money went.

Not only the music and presentation are fantastic, the entire game system is super good, there's branching paths depending on which side of the screen you stand on at certain points and the powerup system is very unique, there's 3 main weapons, wide shot, missile and laser which you powerup by picking color coded triangles, You can mix and match them and have multiple triangles for shot, one on laser and the rest on missiles or go all in and fill your powerup bar with the same powerup to get a super powered version of it, combine this with a black hole special attack that you can release to negate enemy projectiles (and raise your score) and you got a very unique experience.

This game is a little gem that was lost in time, originally it was called G-Stream G2020 developed by "Oriental Soft" which was later "remastered" by Triangle Service (founded by Ex-Oriental Soft's Toshiaki Fujino) and ported to Xbox 360 as in Shooting Love 10th Anniversary XIIZEAL & ΔZEAL (Japan import) and is now easily purchasable on Steam thanks to Degica.

Go buy it, it's good and you should support both Triangle Service and Degica so they keep bringing great games like this to PC.

"Do you recommend this game?"

Maybe.

I enjoyed AKIBA'S TRIP: Undead & Undressed a lot, i beat it in two sittings but here's why i can't really recommend it to everybody, the combat is terrible.

It really is, it's awful and it has no redeeming qualities and that's all the gameplay there is, think of a way slower version of Dead Rising (You even get wacky weapons like beating up dudes with Body Pillows, Anime swords, Arcade PCBs, Gachapon machines etc), But the combat is so extremelly unsatisfying you will pray for every enemy encounter to end as fast as possible.

That's really a shame too since they put a lot of effort on offering customization options, there's a lot of weapons to choose from and clothing that serves as armor and you can upgrade both to raise their attack and defense respectively aside from changing your character's appearance however there's only 3 true weapon types (Light, Medium and Heavy) and soon you realize that heavy weapons aren't that great and a lot of the movesets for medium weapons are really bad as well, despite wanting to use wacky weapons upgrading one of the lighter weapons (Sonico's guitar) proved to be more effective thanks to the fast swing speed, which is pretty much required for encounters against multiple enemies at the same time and doesn't come at a loss of damage since you can just upgrade it to do 99 damage.

Aside from the combat the game has a lot of Visual Novel elements, It has an enjoyable story with branching paths and multiple endings depending on which girl you decide to go for and how deep your relationship with said girl becomes, this is actually the most enjoyable part of the game by far and if you were to play the story missions only the game isn't actually very long, It can probably be beaten under 6 hours on the easiest difficulty and i would recommend playing it that way, I did my first playthrough of this game on Hard and every enemy encounter is just a chore, It all comes down to kiting, You hit the enemy once then run away, repeat, which becomes much more annoying due to the nature of the combat in this game.

I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone who isn't into Otaku culture as that's the main selling point of the game, the humor is great, the characters are great, world is great, but the combat is atrocious so if you are looking to buy this merely for the gameplay i would advice you to not do so.

I would be very interested to see a sequel (third game in the series) with better gameplay, they got a lot of neat ideas but everything is brought down by how tedious the combat is, and you're forced to do a bunch of it if you want to get to the good parts (Visual Novel elements).

If you can look past the gameplay it's actually a very enjoyable game, I had a fun time with it so i can't give it a 100% negative review, but that doesn't make me ignore its flaws, it's a decent concept that could be developed way further, wouldn't recommend paying full price for it, give it a shot when it's discounted during a sale... maybe.