Recent reviews by Crungo Bungo

I hate to use games industry buzzwords like "immersive" as descriptors, but this is genuinely one of the most immersive games I've ever played. I also hate to give it a bad review but nothing kills immersion faster than a common bug which renders your model invisible and intangible to enemy fire and can only be fixed by giving up hours of progress.

Blatantly amateurish, but in a good way. Falling into the category of boomer shooter clones, its flavor takes more after Marathon than DOOM. There's a smorgasbord of weapons and mechanics (including a pilotable mech!) included purely for the cool factor, without regard for redundancy or being ostentatious. With some nice sprites and gnarly gibs, you'll love to blow enemy anime girls into pieces. The biggest problem is that the late game revolves around running to each level exit before the blasted game can crash.

"I have your IP address, Keiichi-kun."

Maranax Infirmu--AAAAAGGHHH!!

Come for the crime drama mystery. Remember it for the Haru ending.

My first review was wrong, this game is very very good actually. The only problem is that a lot of the late game true completionist content is unreasonably difficult. I'm talking about not even remotely fair boss battles.

Umineko demonstrates that if you write a bunch of metanarrative nonsense to deliberately confuse people + bring up Schrödinger's cat a billion times + tie in the plot with your first work for no good reason + make the entire point some postmodern crap about how reality isn't real, you can trick tons of people into thinking your story is good. With that being said there are still enough interesting themes here to make it salvageable with a total rewrite, but as it stands it's a complete waste of writing talent. I find it difficult to express in words how disappointed I was with this VN. If you hated this review of Umineko please leave a comment down below telling me how I didn't understand it.

If you finished Higurashi and are coming to Umineko eagerly awaiting another masterpiece, I'm sorry to tell you that this VN is pure pulp garbage. Not only is it a thematic retread of the original When They Cry novel, not only does it fail to meet Higurashi's quality in nearly every area (presentation, pacing, writing, characters, BG's, sound design, etc), not only is it a mystery story with basically no mystery, but it also has the gall to retroactively ruin Higurashi's resolution. Stay away.

Game of the Year material once they fix the awful progression system and add normal features like being able to choose what game mode you queue for. Spectacularly polished gameplay but an awful grind that will have you playing modes you probably didn't want to. Definitely try this game, but wait until the major issues get fixed first.

Edit: The major issues have almost entirely been fixed. Progression is massively improved, gameplay is more fair to pc players, new maps and playlists are regularly added and to top it off the new Squad Battle mode is easily the best, most balanced mode in the entire game. Issues still remain like poor implementation of SBMM and inconsistent latency but it's easily in a better state than it was two years ago.

A really superb game. Made by ex-Infinity Ward devs, it's what CoD could be if CoD had actually evolved. The pure polished feel and refined movement to TF2 puts it above and beyond any other twitch shooter. It's controls are somewhere between CoD's and a true arena shooter, a perfect balance of run and gun militarism and freedom in the air. All the maps compliment the mechanics perfectly whether you're playing on foot or in your Titan and there's a great variety of them too. And who makes a single-player campaign for a primarily multiplayer shooter that's actually really good? It has one of the most creative levels in recent years (you know the one I mean if you've played it). Not even Northstar, the CAR or one-hit melee can ruin this game. Play it.