Recent reviews by PhleBuster

Excellent survival horror!

Best one in the Amnesia series for the horror experience, the Bunker has a fresh new take on the formula with a small but extremely deadly area to explore. All resources feel too scant, and the only thing scarier than leaving your safe zone is trying to get back to it by navigating in the dark after the lights turn off, with a monster breathing down your neck.

Some frustrating parts, and especially the first few expeditions can be extremely tough, but the sound design and atmosphere are A+, so my final score is 9.5/10.

Fun deckbuilding choose-your-adventure game with interesting random events and very solid gameplay. The and combat system reminds me of a HOMM card game I played for a while, but even that aside it's also pretty similar to MTG, so easy to slip into if you've played any trading card games. Lots of fun combos you can do with your cards to make short work of the enemy, but also need to keep your guard up to mitigate risks.

First campaign took me 4 hours, but there's a ton of potential replay value here.

Fascinating early game experience turns into a rather frustrating mid-game grind once you get past the initial hurdle of the town upgrades, and an outright hostile end game. There's a reason only a record low 4% of players have finished a playthrough as per the game's achievements.

Considering the amount of time and money it takes to grind heroes to max level, the RNG at highest levels resulting in unavoidable instadeaths is miserable, and the gameplay design of the final dungeon cannot be defended.

At best the game is a good way to pass the time grinding safe missions for no real gain except to slowly level up your heroes.

With 80 hours in the game I can already safely say this is an amazing game. A must buy for any existing fans of FromSoft games, and also the most accessible for new players (despite still being intensely difficult). The gameplay design is more user friendly than ever, and with the open world you will never get 'stuck' on a too hard encounter as there are countless options on where to go.

I believe I'm currently at most 25% through the game. This world must actually be the size of Skyrim, which I wouldn't have believed.

On the technical front, game runs smoothly on my below minimum spec rig on high settings, with grass and shadows set to medium.

Decent light fun, maybe a bit longer than the game should've been because it pretty much exhausts all its tricks halfway through and it actually just gets easier toward the end as you start to get all the necessary tools to mitigate damage (in the end I beat the final boss without it getting a single action out, on hardest difficulty). It's easy to tell it's a tiny team production, kinda concept first and not fully satisfactory.

The extra elements like currency and skill tree are all "fake progression" as you basically unlock everything anyway. It also has some bugs, part of which may be inaccurate descriptions but I even encountered one that would've been a game over if I hadn't had my deck reset ability unused - I had a 'locked' card which required one more card of a color, but I had 0 cards left to turn (for that matter, I feel you should have unlimited deck resets, it already costs a turn which is a penalty, and you can kinda get stuck in a situation where you can do nothing but be a punching bag if you're unlucky and have already used the single reset).

I recommend the hardest difficulty for anyone experienced with puzzle games, or I suspect the game would feel too easy.

Took about 80 hours to finish on hard difficulty.
TL;DR: Whatever you do, don't play on the hard difficulty.

Pros:

• Nice presentation and good 2D art, though unfortunately lacking in event illustrations.
  
• The tactical side is pretty fun as after the beginning the missions actually get very tight, and there's very little room for error - rewards from missions are minimal and if you lose any units you'll probably lose money instead of gaining it. There are some grindable missions, but even they don't give practically any money, just EXP, and if you lose any units in them you go in the red since money penalties still apply.
  
• On strategic side it has some fun support systems like several factions with their own reputation that unlock different things for you, and some choices that decide which faction reputation you get, but they're extremely underdeveloped.

Cons:

• There are no maids in the game. This is unacceptable false advertising.
  
• If you play the game, for god's sake don't play on the "hard" difficulty, it's only artificial as you can only save once per mission, which might be fine in another game but BotM is begging to be savescummed with % based hits and tons of 1-shots, and grueling punishments for losing any units in a mission. The 1-save limit won't make the missions "harder", it just means you'll be replaying them to infinity and wasting your time.
  
• Still no maids in the game.
  
• The mission design has a very random quality, if we assume you're actually supposed to avoid save scumming some situations are just insanely unlikely to pull through, and enemy AI has no clear logic how it operates - sometimes their units suicide on units they can't even damage, on others they all unerringly gang one of your characters down from full HP in one turn.
  
• The story is so irrelevant and poorly constructed I kinda started treating it as though it doesn't even exist. While it's a fantasy setting, any personal motivations and faction goals are presumably based on French history and without knowing those it's anyone's guess what's supposed to be happening in the plot.
  
• As a final point to underline the story's messiness, the game doesn't even have an ending. It literally ends on a "our battles will continue" with "man that upcoming army looks tough to beat, this will be a hard battle. THE END!". I think it has a DLC that probably continues the story, so... they didn't even sell you the whole game to begin with.
  
• Gameplay has a lot of ambiguity; it basically has a common RPS system of strategy games but it's a bit hard to tell what's good against what by just looking at their units. Light and heavy cavalry? Muskets and rifles? And it has a bunch of other oddities too that are probably based on something but it's hard to tell what.
  
• Some of the game objectives can be really wonky. I was bashing my head against a wall in a mission where for bonus objective you needed to keep a CPU-controlled unit from getting hit a single time. As if that's in your control. Even healing them to full at the end of the mission wasn't enough for the objective, you just fail if a CPU artillery decides to target them. Those are among the biggest quest sins ever.

Amazingly good, strongly recommended.
It was refreshing to play a game I could finish in a day and it felt like a very good length. There's no time-wasting components in the game so it was very fast-paced, I had a hard time putting it down till I had played to the end (which took 7 hours).

Excellent narrative experience, not text heavy but the events were well conveyed and it was even genuinely touching at times and made me re-evaluate my philosophy in the game.

There's probably some decent replay value especially if you reach a less fortunate ending but I don't majorly regret anything in my outcome, so I think i'm satisfied with one playthrough.

Just finished the game (all chapters) - a great roguelite.

If you like tactical games and space games, can't go wrong with Crying Suns.
Each run is a mini campaign where you need to constantly weigh your available resources against your short and long term goals. While there's a lot of randomization involved, the game never throws BS at you that just kills you because you're unlucky. At worst a generally bad run finally concludes in a battle you just fail at because your ship is sorely lacking compared to where you should be at that point, or you realize you overlooked a crucial safety option.

Each chapter presents different obstacles, and different ships you unlock as you clear each chapter make all of them tactically different experiences (if you choose to use them).

The dark story that progresses as you play, instead of ever resetting, is quite captivating as well.

Review based on finishing the first route of Langrisser 1, will update if further play raises other thoughts:

To begin with, it's worth noting that the gameplay is different from original games, for better or worse (it sounds like those may have been slightly more tactical (RPS heavy) but also more RNG reliant (hit chance))

• The original art by Satoshi Urushihara is obviously gorgeous
  
• The remake works well technically and is fun to play.
  
• You can choose to play with any mix of old and new map and character art.
  
• Voice acting is pretty good.
  
• The game has a mercenary system where each hero can bring a few troops of chosen type with them, and there's a good mix of strategies between relying on a buffed-up hero or going for a commander type that buffs the mercenaries (they won't be quite as good as a hero but you have more of them and they can still be very strong)
  
• You can unlock more roles in a branching tree which give you different stats, spells, mercenaries and so on, and it's pretty interesting, most characters have a different tree.
  
• A few of the missions are pretty challenging.
  
• A lot of bang for the buck, since the package includes 2 full games and even one has a decently long campaign with a ton of different routes with different missions for replay value.

• Most of the missions don't feel very hard until the end of the campaign.
  
• The RPS system has been downtoned a bit too much IMO, most units are just 'neutral' against most other units and stats are much more important, even units that are weak against another one will actually run over them when you're high level.
• When you play with original character art, the game skips event CGs because they only exist in new artstyle and apparently the developers figured that if you want original art you don't want to see those - and there isn't even a CG gallery or anything so you'll literally just miss them. This should definitely be an option.
  
• You can't play using mouse on PC (not a big deal to me)
  
• It may be because of the gameplay changes they've made, but a lot of mercenary units feel completely useless (for example any and all variants of archers, their stats are too low, they don't deal enough damage to bother with, and have very limited range)
  
• This is almost just a bug report, but if enemies use a big spell on your army, camera focuses on the enemy that casts it, and doesn't show the actual spell explosion if it's on the edge of the screen, so you don't see what it's hitting and for how much damage.

Edit: note, you can choose a slightly harder difficulty option on NG+, which probably should be an option on NG already since it doesn't make any real difference on NG+ if you also keep your hero progress, but would make the first playthrough more challenging for those who want it. Just saying.

I kinda wondered about the lack of story between missions but wrote it off to the old game design - only after finishing both Langrisser 1 and 2 did I notice that there's a button on the screen between missions with a button prompt (not even a menu item) to view "Synopsis" - this in fact gives the pre-mission story which was originally supposed to be shown automatically between missions! Don't be like me and miss half the exposition!

A solid mystery/horror experience, though FPS may stutter in places even on a pretty good system.