Recenzii recente de (kl0n) ᗜˬᗜ 👍

Improves on everything Asylum did while keeping (most of) what made the first game great. Very good worldbuilding, even if the plot leaves something to be desired.

The first game had a variation of 9 combat moves, and this one ups that count to 13, at the cost of heavily nerfing the Batclaw. You get new abilities such as Freeflow Focus, which lets you move faster while enemies move slower (but you can still take damage and lose your Freeflow in this state). For traversal, you get a new Grapnel Boost which lets you glide around without ever having to touch down as long as you have something to boost off of, and there are a few glide-powered takedowns which make street brawls that much more fun to start. There are new enemies, such as armored and shielded enemies, but you still have knife-wielding enemies (taken down a little differently this time), and Titan thugs, who are mainly saved for Riddler's Revenge.

Riddler's Revenge is the main blemish on this otherwise-fun game. It's ridiculous that they managed to make collectible-hunting so fun, but then rewarded our efforts with THIS. For completion, the first game only made you complete 4 maps on 2 difficulties for both combat and stealth (totalling 24 medals in each). In Arkham City, you have 24 maps (12 with normal difficulties and score tiering, 12 on extreme), and that's not all. You also have to complete "campaigns", gauntlets of 3 challenge maps in a row where the aim is to earn all 9 medals (earning all possible medals from all maps) in one go. Also unlike the first game, the score tiering is much harsher this time around. For most combat maps in Asylum, the old formula was Silver and Gold tiers being double and triple the Bronze score respectively, but now in Arkham City they're double and quadruple (respectively), making each map much more of a grind. The whole thing seems sadistically designed to punish players, rather than supplement the experience like Asylum's challenges did.

A little messed up, but it was a great way to make us care about pre-established characters (that I previously found annoying).

Cw: contains venting, a reference to the prequel, Amogus.

• Timing/flow of combat is wonky, freeflow seems to be inconsistent all-around. I know players claim there's a rhythm to it and that you shouldn't button-mash, but my experience has been the complete opposite.
  
• You only have a window of like 1-2 seconds at most to add each successive move to your combo before it expires.
  
• Countering only works if you're within the enemy's attack area (so you could be millimetres out of it and break your combo in your attempt to counter because the game decides this time that it won't clip you into countering their move and you're left grappling with thin air)
  
• You're told far too late in the tutorial stage that you have to work up to a x3 combo (with regular hits) to enter freeflow to begin with, after numerous skirmishes with Blackgate thugs.
  
• The other type of enemy engagement, the stealth, almost feels like an afterthought. There is only one ability upgrade that pertains directly to your stealth moveset, and while more of your gadgets are oriented at stealth sections rather than the open combat/freeflow sections (in which you're only allowed to effectively utilise the batclaw and batarang without breaking combos), the core game (at least in story mode) doesn't have enough of it to make you feel like you get to use them well enough. The predator challenges do somewhat recognise it since their medals demand that you make use of the otherwise-underutilised bat-gadgets.
  
• Most boss fights are basically the same, fight a brute hopped up on Titan while his comrades attempt to wear you down. Only 2-3 boss fights are any different here.
  
• Being only able to heal by gathering XP, whether from collectibles or beating fights, made progression annoying for most of my first couple of runs at this game. It gets better if you get the hang of freeflow and/or just reload when you take major damage though.

Scarecrow and Ivy's boss fights/levels were genuinely FUN boss fights, Riddler's collectibles felt padded but not to the level of, say, a Ubisoft sandbox, and more importantly they were all easy enough to complete without having to use the internet as long as you find his maps, despite whatever he incorrectly claims. Combat is satisfying once you get the hang of it (I recommend practising your available moves in challenge modes if you're not getting frequent high combos in story mode). Mark Hamill absolutely nails his Joker persona as always, but Kevin Conroy's performance wasn't as dramatic as he could've been in the climax, far too quiet.

The game radiates machismo, which is very much take-it-or-leave-it as Rocksteady's ideal Batman clearly seems to be one that prefers to primarily solve things with his fists. The game has standard backtracking to older areas with newer gadgets, just as with any Metroidvania. I personally enjoyed this part but I understand that most people typically don't care so much.

Bottom line, it's a superhero game with quality beyond games as buggy as are released nowadays, so I'd recommend it to anyone. Has a good amount of replayability in the challenges, which I'm probably gonna try for next.

Turned a casual bird/flight sim from something that sounded conceptually boring into a serene experience. I still come back to this soundtrack on quiet nights, especially Home.

I wonder what other beautiful games and music Forgotten Key might've put out if they still existed today. A pity we'll never know.

Zombie game with slow movement. Why are they always so boring?

A happy game by Amanita. You know what to expect.

Game got an update and my world save disappeared. Not sure whether to blame the devs or the cloud host, but 1 year on, I'm still not over it.

Transistor is a cyberpunk tale of romance, with a hybrid turn-based/real-time RPG combat system. Tl;dr: story and soundtrack are on par with Bastion, even if the gameplay itself is not.

There are quite a few downsides to this game. It has limiters similar to Bastion's idols, which can be toggled on for extra challenge/XP at checkpoints, but they start to feel cheap at times (one of these limiters wrecks any functions you uninstall and renders them unuseable until the next checkpoint you configure your sword at, and another limiter causes enemies to drop cells on death that inflict damage onto you upon absorption, and it's hard to quickly tell the difference in the heat of the moment). It has a Turn function to let you freeze combat and queue up actions/functions with the threat of enemy bombardment minimised, which can also let you outrun enemies to get away or line up shots to hit them before they can evade, but the downside is that you're locked out of using any functions until your Turn() function has recharged, and enemies can move while you perform your attacks, meaning you might waste a Turn aiming and empty space because a Fetch moved an inch to the right. During combat your fight area is usually tiny as well with a border you can't escape, so you can't run far enough to be safe from enemies using the remainder of your Turn cooldown chasing you into a corner and shooting at you. Losing a full bar of health causes your sword to consume one of your (up to 4) active functions to refill your health, making the fight and subsequent game harder, as you can expect fights to get progressively challenging. I gave up on the game for a week when I got to the final boss fight, after facing several groups of cloaked enemies that remained invulnerable for 99% of the time, only showing an opportunity to strike for half a second at a time.

I started to have fun with the game right at the end of my first playthrough, when I discovered effective builds to beat the final boss and generally survive Recursion (NG+) without having to call on Turn(), which as it turns out, becomes a crutch that slows you down if you keep relying on it beyond your first playthrough. The game's Steam Community Guides really saved me many headaches there. Not being distracted by the awfully-thought-out combat system meant that for my second playthrough, I could experience the story and music the way the developers intended, and I began to enjoy every minute of it.

As for the story itself, it's similar to Bastion. Person in dead/dying world, first order of business is trying to survive, and somewhere along the way, they find the power to shape their reality. No point in sharing fan theories about the nature of the Process and Cloudbank here, but it's a fun read. It has a more mysterious, intriguing, and subtle atmosphere compared to Bastion which does help.

Bottom line, I think it's pretty fun IF you can manage to get past the very experimental-feeling combat system.

A game about death, fires, and people becoming hollow (or "forlorn")? Yep, it's a souls-like.

On a more serious note, it's a fun short kids' game with an obvious amount of care put into the storytelling and puzzles without requiring you to invest too much time or energy (my initial playthrough took around 6 hours). I found myself playing it to unwind after Platinum-ing Furi and was surprised at the emotional depth on display, it was everything I'd hoped GRIS would be (vibrant and reflective instead of monotone and empty, somewhat populated instead of isolated, etc.). Minor details, like some Embers not wanting to be helped or the journal scraps of the previous person to complete a full pilgrimage, really helped to flesh the world out and ground it to a degree. I can't say how many children's games over the years have been this cathartic because I certainly never played (m)any of those, so I wouldn't go so far as to call this a masterpiece, but it's definitely one of the best games I've played in the past couple of years in terms of overall experience, and I'm glad that 7 months later I can finally support it on Steam as well.

The OST deserves to be sold on Steam.

DOTY