Recent reviews by PurpleXVI

A very chill, calm game. It has the best cat in all of videogames.

And, amusingly enough, because it's a cartoon cat it feels more "real to life" than a lot of others, because I feel like these cartoony cats are how all cat owners perceive their kitties with their inner eyes.

There are a few puzzles that require you to engage brain gears slightly, but mostly it's just a very calming experience where you get to listen to a cat make cute cat sounds in a stylized narrow corner of the world that looks somewhat like Japan.

I'm happy with it and I hope the developers make more good things that make people happy.

Probably one of the better jRPG's I've played. Just the addition of a grid and an initiative order that can be manipulated by delays, cancels and S-breaks make the combat notably more fun than it would be otherwise.

The characters are largely charming and well-written, and it's nice to have a story where 90% of the people you meet are decent and normal, rather than a lot of stories that seem founded on half of the world being insufferable ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Music's great, world feels lived-in, plot makes sense.

If I could make a complaint it's that it has a very predictable jRPG romance that I was hoping until the last would not happen, just because it feels so cliche, and that on Normal mode the game feels a bit easy, but on Hard mode the last few battles feel a bit too spongy, but like... those are pretty minor complaints in the greater whole.

Oh and whoever designed Shining Poms needs to be waterboarded just a little bit until they regret it.

The marketing hype is that Dread Delusion is like "Morrowind" and "King's Field", but my personal experience is that it's really more like Fallout 3. The only thing it has in common with the former is mushrooms and with the latter that it has a save game mechanic that some people will hate.

But is it any good? No, not really.

Movement is clunky and janky, including the occasional possibility of dropping through terrain, unless you pick Guile/Agility as your starter stats you will also move at roughly the speed of a slug with scurvy. It's truly like being trapped in treacle.

Enemies have no real combat AI beyond "turn to face player, attack" but turn so slowly that even with rock-bottom mobility you can out-strafe all of them and stab even enemies with shields in the back trivially. Occasionally some enemies will fly, meaning you have to shoot them. This can prevent a problem as while you will be drowning in ammo, about 6 hours in, I have yet to find a single ranged weapon, and I've found one combat spell that I could imagine most players would miss. Oh, yeah, that's right, if you start out specialized for spellcasting you also start with no spells and probably won't find any combat spells for... between 1 and 3 hours if you find the earliest available one.

Saving... doesn't exist. And I mean that literally. There is no quicksaving and quickloading, nor are there any checkpoints, not even Soulslike checkpoints. Instead when you die, the engine tosses a die at the wall, watches it bounce out of the window, ignores the result of the die and picks a respawn point you've passed at some point before starting you there. The same happens if you quit and boot up the game again. I found myself restarting at the very first point in the game the first time I quit, after about three hours of playing.

The story and lore have a few interesting points, but mostly ones that are in the deep background of the game. I found myself not caring at all about any given character or quest I was given during the game.

Quests are... odd creatures, additionally. For instance, I was given a quest to find some evidence. About an hour earlier I had already found this, but after getting the quest I still had to go back and read the same book, because NOW it was a quest interactible instead of just a normal interactible. Another time, I find a locked door that cannot be opened(not even picked), I assume there's a lever or it'll open later and go on my way, I then pick up a quest and spend about half an hour not being able to advance it. Until I go back to the closed door from earlier which has, without warning or ceremony, opened and contains the way to proceed the quest.

Talking to NPC's is also... trivial. You never really have to consider what you say, usually you just have a Fallout 4-esque spread of: "Tell me more. I'd like to do your quest. I'd like the reward instead of doing the quest(Social skill check). Goodbye." No options to actually use what you know or try to outthink an NPC or get a bit ahead of the plot by making some conclusions.

It doesn't even tickle the "collect stuff"-nerves that Bethesda game do because in six hours of play I found one weapon, two hats, one spell and one piece of body armor. At least different weapons could switch up the gameplay a bit.

Exploring also largely consists of finding the same prefab buildings over and over again with different damage and usually no loot in them except occasional "Delusions"(XP) which is another funny thing. I've found more XP points just breaking into people's barns and abandoned buildings than I did from actual "dungeons." Then again about half of those dungeons consist of five rooms and about as many enemies. The only really large dungeon I found, an abandoned mine full of monster moths... actually contained no XP at all.

It really feels like a very early beta before any of the systems have been polished, before half the loot and spells have been implemented, when half the dialogue is placeholders and with the AI still in need of four or five rounds of additional detail.

I guess one area had a kind of cool background music track? But otherwise it's mostly ambient stuff that fails to register.

Oh and if you do intend to play this, turn off the "wobbly" features in the graphics settings or you'll probably get a severe eye ache.

Ever play one of those games you know you're going to hate pretty much from the moment your fingers first hit the controls? Synthetik 2 is one of those for me.

The presentation is dull, the gameplay feels hollow, the weapons are unsatisfying in accuracy and give terrible feedback when fired, and the controls are just... wrong on multiple levels. Firstly you've got the issue where the preset controls are bizarre. For abilities 1 through 3, the preset keys are, in order: 2, 1, H. While the remainder of my items, of which there are five, run 3 through 7. Why not just... shuffle those up one step and keep the others as 1, 2, 3? The world wonders.

Then there's the issue that they managed to make as default an operation as reloading annoying and fiddly. Most other games understand that when the player is out of ammo, what they want to do next is reload, so usually if you try to fire on an empty chamber... reloading starts automatically. This game doesn't do that, instead it just goes click. Fine, I will press the R key to reload... except that some weapons require you to first press the E key and then the R key, for inscrutable developer reasons.

This is the sort of thing you can get away with in some games, turning trivial tasks into little DDR-style minigames or some such, but not in what is effectively an isometric twin-stick shooter with hitscan enemies. If you crave some twinsticky goodness, there are so many better games you could be playing than this.

Oh and you can't turn off the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ screenshake at all, only tune it down. What the hell?

When I try to think about Fida Puti Samurai, I can think of a lot of small things that I'd see changed, but it feels like nitpicking to bring most of them up when the game just viscerally FEELS good.

The agile, high-speed movement combined with the punchy gunplay(outside of the couple of joke weapons, all of them feel and sound fun and effective, it also has absolutely the best selection of shotguns I've encountered in a long time) is just deeply, visecerally satisfying. If this dev makes another game I'm SO there for it.

Conceptually the game is kind of like Duke Nukem, it's very Build-y combined with some rogueliteness, both in the sense of having a ton of little barked quips and in the sense that it's more or less set in a scuzzy alternate reality, albeit a bit more anime-themed than Duke Nukem's "80's action movie"-theme. It also has some of the most cruelly hidden secrets I've seen in a long time, genuine relief at finding some of them and finally being able to not go insane about where that damn hidden action figure was.

It's also a pretty horny game, close the door when you're playing this. It's not outright smut, but armor in this game(for both player and enemies) only protects the most important parts(the boobs) and not really anything else. But, you know, that's fine. I can tell that this creator comes from a "hentai on VHS"-vibe, and that's actually a pretty fun vibe. It's got that low-res satisfaction and a ton of lovingly crafted almost-pixel art.

The storytelling is actually kind of enhanced by being ESL, because it gets across that sort of... fan-translated anime rip in English but done by someone from South America vibe. I could wish there was a bit more story, though, a few elements(like the IM's), feel like they get introduced and then dropped kinda quickly, but, you know... I can live with that. The in-game economy could maybe do with some adjusting, sure but like... whatever. It's fun shooting jellyfish and alien shock troopers while dashing past gynoids and kicking my way into a vent. I'm here for this. Good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. I want more.

Roboquest is kind of a sad failure, because it starts out really strong.

It's got a nice art style, basically Borderlands but a bit more colourful. The soundtrack is pretty jamming, though I do wish each biome had more than one track, they start getting a bit samey over repeat playthroughs. Controls feel responsive and enemies generally go down fast rather than being annoying sponges.

Unfortunately it falls into a couple of looter shooter/roguelite traps that sink it for me, as well as a few personal issues.

Firstly there's the classic issues that some weapons and perks are just BAD, and there's no way to "curate" your drop pool, so some runs are just stillborn entirely because you got trash. This is compounded by some sidequests requiring you to get certain items to bring to an NPC, with no guarantee you'll even have the chance to find them over three or four or even five runs. Still looking for that Sheriff's weapon, Roboquest...

Then there's the issue of enemy design. Enemies more or less have, outside of a few uniques, four chasses. Either they're a turret that's an orb on a stalk, they're an orb on treads, they're an orb with arms and legs or they're sort of a jet-propelled wedge. Those profiles really blur together, making target acquisition a pain in the ass. The biomes also do not really play very differently in terms of enemies, each of them has one enemy I'd consider to be "unique" to it, and that's it, the rest is the same bunch of robots you're otherwise blowing up all the time.

There are also some truly vestigial features, like rail-grinding, that serve no purpose outside of one boss fight and one challenge level. The game also encourages you to "explore for secrets!" and then there's like, one secret per safe area(usually an audio log) and two secrets hidden up on ledges right at the start, essentially nothing after that. Kind of a shame. The heights are useful otherwise, though, since enemies deal very poorly with heights for about 90% of the game, so if you can get height on them, you can obliterate them almost with impunity, especially if you have a weapon with an arcing path or a really long-range one. Some enemies don't even aggro if you attack them from far enough away. Bit janky, that.

There's also not really much randomness within the biomes. The Oasis is always a square of corridors, for instance, which makes the runs feel very samey very quickly, with only your weapon drops really varying them up.

In addition to corridors and open spaces, you also run into short arenas, Doom 2016-style, clear out all these spawning baddies to progress. Which provokes another issue, it's a very narrow space with no hiding areas, basically no cover, so a weapon or perk setup that works great the rest of the time might get you killed there. The sudden swerve in what's asked of the player and what's required to progress is, once again, a bit off.

As much as I appreciate a game that lets me shoot evil robots on the moon, there are just way better games in the genre, like Gunfire Reborn.

It also feels a bit like the game can't decide if it wants to play like Doom 2016(get up close, smack enemies around, get rewarded for it) or Borderlands(keep your distance, aim for weak spots, approach tactically). You're made of tissue paper, so running in gets you shredded, but health and metacurrency drops also evaporate, so you're forced to play somewhat counterintuitively. Weak spots can provide massive damage boosts, but enemies don't move like you'd expect for that sort of thing, they're constantly mobile(except turrets, obviously), they don't take cover, pause to reload, etc.

The reliance on weak spot damage and safety of long range combat also means, to elaborate on the earlier mention of bad weapons, that close-up weapons and low-accuracy weapons just outright suck. They don't kill fast enough to be "safe" to get in close, enemies are omnisciently aware of you so you can't sneak up on them, and if the accuracy doesn't let you blast away from draw distance range, it's inferior to something that does.

It feels like a game that still needs several rounds of beta patches before it's ready for release, which is a shame.

Also, having to speedrun to the Oasis every time I want to give The Rift a try is awful. Just let the damn door stay open after I make one run. All the other special requirements doors do.

Anyway, play Gunfire Reborn instead. Same vibes, but a far more tightly designed game.

Quasimorph is certainly a game, that I can assure you of, but it's absolutely also a weird, clunky one clearly designed by people who had more enthusiasm for mechanics than understanding of them. And not in the EYE sense of "we dropped LSD and had a vision of what this should be" but in the "weird German board game that takes two hours to set up and three hours per turn because there really had to be a special mechanic for flower pollenation in this game about renaissance Italy."

Even right from the start, you've got an options menu where none of the options have explanations, even stuff like "Fast Trading," which I needed to check the Steam forums to learn that it speeds up the game(much needed) in exchange for getting less stuff, so experienced players said not to pick it.

The game itself is kind of like if X-COM and Fallout had messy sex on top of nuclear waste so the baby was badly malformed and its legs kept falling off. That baby is Quasimorph. It bombards you with information, huge piles of items, without really giving you any way to determine what's useful or not. Even something as basic as "you need to put grenades on your belt to use them" took me a couple of moments to figure out where my belt slots were because the game had randomly crammed other stuff there. Everything is littered with crafting materials, weapons, armor, skulls, food in toilets, you need to watch your food AND your health AND specific body parts' health, and sometimes enemies just stunlock you and you die without getting an action, plus even starter enemies seem to happily take like a dozen or so bullets to die, and grenades explode THREE TURNS after being thrown.

Even just setting out for the first post-tutorial mission you have, I kid you not, something like a hundred equipment items to pick from. It is insane information overload and ninety of these items could have been condensed into item archetypes(do we really need five different types of canned food that don't stack with each other?).

Even cover is really weird, because most tile-based games with cover are very explicit about it. Some items are cover, others are not, the game tells you what's half cover and what's full cover, perhaps a little animation to indicate that yes, you are using the cover, and also your character(s) understand to shoot AROUND the wall they're hiding behind. None of that here, you have to kind of deduce when you're appropriately covered and then hope that your idiot clones know not to shoot into the wall but instead around it.

The clunkiness even extends to the dialogue. Dialogue screens are universally small, for like half a paragraph or so, but characters will vomit out huge tracts of text that force it to scroll nonetheless, rather than just using a smaller font size and/or a bigger text box. All the dialogue also strongly needs a second pass from a native English speaker or a good ESL translator, because at the moment half of it sounds like someone from Russia read a Tom Clancy novel and tried to copy "cool operator" speak.

Don't even get me started on what the hell is going on with the solar system map, nothing made sense.

Quasimorph might eventually morph(ha ha! see what I did there?) into a decent game, but I think the magic juice that makes that happen is if an outside editor comes in and takes a sharp knife to a bunch of sacred cows the devs clearly felt very passionately about, without ever questioning if they ever actually improved the game.

Jagged Alliance 3 is one of those games where every single aspect seems a little bit scuffed, and together all those little scuffs ruins the experience.

Right out of the gate, let's get to the biggest one: not showing hit percentages. Instead the game shows a nebulous balancing act of +'s and -'s to the act you're trying, supposedly to make people complain less about the RNG, but instead it just meant that I never had any idea if I was missing because I was taking bad shots, or missing because of the RNG. Is every + equal to every other +? Are +'s worth enough that I want to sacrifice an AP to get another? The game does not want to tell me enough to make an informed decision.

Enemies are also bizarrely spongy sometimes, right next to an area where every enemy dies from one shot to the head, is an area where one of the enemies takes five point-blank, double-barrelled shotgun blasts to the head before keeling over. There are also annoyances like some enemies arbitrarily having traits that let them shoot back when you hit them, and no indicators of which these are so you can take precautions.

Speaking of traits, the perk-based level-up system is also pretty bad since there are a couple of traits that are generally good, and then like twenty traits that only work for very specific playstyles, and only half of them seem to have a reasonable connection with the stat they're applied to(i.e. that a Strength perk necessarily does not synergize with the kind of play you'd want to give a high-Strength character).

The controls and UI and mechanics are also just generally scuffed in other ways. Sometimes after firing, the game stays on the firing setup so you can instantly take another shot. In other cases, it flicks out of it, for no reason. Characters radiate some sort of "mine-finding" power, based on Explosives skill, but there's no indicator of how wide it is, where mines might be, how often it pulses, etc. so you kind of have to frantically quicksave all the time or take tiny steps everywhere suspicious until you find mines. Also mines are bugged, sometimes after a reload disarmed mines will both re-arm AND RE-HIDE themselves so you can bungle into them.

Why do enemies get a free chance to reposition themselves into cover when they see you? This sucked in the Firaxis X-COM games and it sucks in JA3.

A lot of actions have weird interrupts in between them, and the game is very strangely inconsistent about what characters can shoot over or past, when they'll lean out beyond a corner, when they won't, etc. If you're lining up a shot from stealth mode, the game doesn't pause, so enemies might wander out of range or spot you rather than giving you an actual chance to finish up your action. Sometimes interact commands don't register, or some interacts have messed up activation locations, like some cuttable fences you can only cut *from the inside* arbitrarily.

Modifying weapons has a chance of failing, which wastes all the Parts you spent on it, and has no indicator of chance of success, and someone with 95 Mechanics can flub some of it repeatedly. It also once again doesn't indicate how good a thing is, since it only says stuff like "slightly" improves or "moderately" improves.

Arbitrarily, burst and full-auto fire bullets also do less damage per bullet? Why? I don't know. I have no idea.

The grid-based satellite map which is clearly, more or less, an homage to JA2, is also kind of wasted. There are so many empty areas that contain nothing of meaning and might as well not be there. I feel like the game would have worked better if you removed the entire world map and replaced it with a series of nodes of importance, maybe something more like the Fallout 1/2 map. Or perhaps just made it a linear campaign of encounters, with some optional sidequests and objectives, that would have worked so much better, because the "management"(rest and relief, medical stuff, repairing gear, training militia, etc.) is simultaneously something you HAVE to do, vapid enough that it's not DIFFICULT to do and incredibly dull.

Speaking of things that are repetitive and dull, I do appreciate Jagged Alliance as a series for its character personalities and defining barks, but by God, I do wish they were less common or more varied because during one combat encounter you will hear 90% of the barks your team has ten times over and you will soon come to hate even the ones you started out loving.

Lastly, enemy AI is very "videogame-y," like there's no attempt at making it believable. Enemies do not retreat, panic or show any kind of self-preservation, they know their only goal is to destroy you, so they'll happily burn to end you. With all the other verisimillitous things like equipment repair, it feels out of place.

Anyway, I didn't like this game. I don't feel it's worth people's time.

Valheim is about the definition of a half-baked game, I can't think of a single feature in it that feels like it was thought through or planned out.

At heart it's supposed to be a Viking-themed Survival Crafter. I mean, alright, that seems cool, right? Trolls and dwarves and maybe some giants and you get a longboat. The basic mechanics are as they always are: you explore, you eat, you build some sort of base, you fight critters, you tech up and your gear has durability.

The exploration is satisfying in the sense there are a lot of biomes, but it falls apart in the sense that you are only ever appropriately teched for one biome. The remainder are either trivial or instantly vaporize you. It also falls apart in that every biome appears to have all of one or two pre-placed structures or perhaps one dungeon type, it's very, very repetitive to go exploring. The dungeons in biomes are also either a single room or a grid of rooms where every room is enemies and/or treasure. No puzzles, traps or anything to spicy it up, not even a variety of room shapes.

Eating is, bizarrely, another thing they screwed up. You do not level up in any sense, instead your latest three foods eaten decide your HP and Stamina. However, you are never at risk of starvation and it is trivial to carry enough food for an arbitrarily long expedition, so mostly it exists to annoy you as A) the HP/Stam bars are constantly ticking down until you can eat again and B) if you die and respawn you're not just out your gear until you pick it up, but literally also your core "stats."

Base-building is surprisingly janky and inflexible, parts are uninteresting, a lot of shapes that you'd want to use are missing, and there's little reason to want to build an elaborate base. You basically need a one-room shack with crafting stations, and then you build a ditch around or a dirt berm around it since most enemies cannot figure out how to navigate elevation and terraforming is dirt simple. There are occasionally "raids" but they're the same enemies you always kill that just show up in a family-sized pack and then that's it.

Fighting seems to be trying to be a bit more complex than most survival crafters, with blocks, dodge rolls, multiple attacks for most weapons, etc. unfortunately enemies are braindead, they either run only straight at you or squirm around in mad circles constantly, cannot path to you correctly, and tiny elevation differences(like a foot of height) prevents you from hitting stuff or vice versa despite weapons literally passing through the target's model.

Tech and durability suffers from there being free repairs for everything so you need a relatively limited amount of each resource and then you are done, with each tech-up being guarded by a big boss that has a completely braindead AI and is trivially defeated by obstacles like: a large rock while you plunk arrows into his head over and over. Not giving the bosses pre-made arenas that guaranteed a functioning experience was a strange idea.

Even the viking aesthetics are busted. You fight weird dwarves and trolls, sure, but then very quickly it's RPG standbys and weird stuff like giant slimes, stone golems and mega mosquitoes. A giant glowing neon-green booger coming at me really destroys the faint aesthetics the game had going.

Every mechanic in Valheim is lacking depth, polish or planning to integrate it into other mechanics.

Robocop: Rogue City, is a 50-dollar game with 20 dollars of cosmetic DLC(for a first-person game where you only see said DLC in third-person cutscenes...) that looks like a 30 dollar game and plays like a 20 dollar game. That is to say: it would rate an okay if it was half the price and had no cosmetic DLC.

As it stands, it fails because the developers were cowards. I will explain.

RRC(because I am not typing that full name out every time) is at its strongest when its trying to do its own thing, for instance when you're doing community policing and training new colleagues as Robocop, with the occasional shootout. It's absolutely at its weakest when it's trying to copy the movies mindlessly, because the movie characters are the ones that look like they're wearing weird skin masks, have the most stilted animations and the worst voice acting. Similarly quoting from the movie is just, as the kids would put it, cringe. You can do better.

It occasionally dips a bit into investigative policing, but the developers were super terrified that one player might get stuck because they couldn't type a four-digit number, so everything is really just a "hidden object" puzzle where you need to scan the right thing, automatically get the answer, automatically provide it. You never have to type a code you find somewhere, or (outside of ONE TIME) in the game make a judgment call based on evidence, rather than just getting the answer on a silver platter(and that ONE TIME you have no evidence, so it's just a 50-50 roll). Robocop's scanning and hacking abilities would have been a great way to add some unexpected and unconventional clues and evidence for the player to make use of.

What about the combat, then? Robocop is known for shooting things, and shoot things he does. The "gimmick" here is that Robocop moves like a tank. No crouching, no dodge rolling, no jumping, no taking cover(sort of), which would be an interesting idea. Having to choose the right approach(frontal? circle around? breach a wall?), pick targets in the right order, watch surfaces that can't carry your weight, etc. it would basically be a Space Marine FPS and that could rule.

The problem is that there is almost always only one approach, you really only have one gun(you can pick up NPC guns but your "Auto 9" is about ten minutes into the game upgraded to the point where any other gun is meaningless) and they never really play with Robocop's "tankiness" or weight in any interesting ways. Combat encounters come in two flavours: either they are completely trivial and you never get hurt, you can sleep through them OR there are enemies that can three-shot even an endgame Robocop with maxed armor and health, and you need to do what the game isn't about: finding tall vertical cover and peeking out over it to plink enemies down, or in one case simply run past enemies.

RRC also suffers from pretty bad performance, even on a relatively modern system where better looking games have no problems, and a lot of weird physics bugs(hovering gibs, enemies stuck through objects, etc.), though none that actually impacted gameplay for me.

Storywise it rates a "sort of okay" but has a really weird structure and with a central matter coming to a head about halfway through and then simply disappearing for the rest of the game, making me think the game was about to end, and similarly going through a sort of stop-start structure for the rest of it. The game sort of ends twice and both times it's a really strange anticlimax, and the whole story only progresses because one of the antagonists keeps ranting about something like an idiot that no one else in the story cares about or acknowledges, and in doing so drops necessary hints for the story to progress.

The best things I can say about it is that when it actually tried to be a bit original, it was decent. There was in fact even one quest(training the new cop) which I thought was downright good. The environments look relatively nice, even if they're mostly sheer concrete walls and puddles, the lighting is solid. Things generally sound good, but for God's sake lads, you do not have to crib Basil Poledouris' notes, you can make your own music.