Recent reviews by Snipufin

Free weekend warrior review:

When you first start the game, you have to deal with a lot of handholding to get started: tutorial after tutorial just to introduce concepts after concepts. Mix that in with some standard MCU quirky superhero writing (everyone thinks they're Peter Parker in the game that actually has Peter Parker), and you quickly find yourself just groaning at the thought of playing the game. The tutorial elements themselves also feel like they fail to explain quite a few important concepts, like what you do with all these different ingredients, reagents and components that you gain from various missions, quests or otherwise roaming around the base, thus adding to the overwhelmed feeling. My first impression just reminds me of Vault of the Void: a Slay The Spire clone that had to come up with 20 extra mechanics just to consider itself an upgrade to the original game.

As for the main gameplay, I'm actually digging it. Coming from XCOM developers, I expected it to be a lot of XCOM itself, but turns out it's more akin to Slay The Spire meets Into The Breach: the main combat works a lot like your standard deckbuilder roguelite, but it also has a lot of enemy/ally/environmental positioning involved with it, since a lot of cards have knockback abilities (and knocking enemies into other things makes them take more damage or gives them status effects). Complete with enemy's telegraphed attacks, you're pretty much staring at these two games dead in the face.

Out of combat, the deckbuilder influence bleeds through with the aforementioned resources, that you use to make new cards, upgrade existing cards or leveling up your heroes among other things. Between missions, you have a base fairly similar to the XCOM 2 Avenger, but mixed in with Mass Effect or Fire Emblem: Three Houses free roam exploration complete with resource gathering, constant tasks over different areas and checking in with your teammates for any possible bonding opportunity or Paragon/Renegade style morality boosting.

Overall, after the intensive mechanic dump, I'm enjoying the core gameplay. The combat UI can be a bit clunky (although I should've seen that coming a mile away considering it's Firaxis), and the most annoying thing for me is running around in the base after every mission (since you have to scour for any resources since they can actually matter). But if you're not possessed by the ADHD demon that makes this groanworthy instead of cathartic, I can definitely recommend this game.

One last point regarding replay value: I don't know how much there is to it. The game provides you with 8 difficulty levels, out of which 6 are locked at the start of the game, but they're designed to be unlocked during gameplay. When it came to XCOM for me, I always had to take a few years off before playing it again, and this would probably be one of those games as well.

An excellent, albeit a bit worse continuation to Yakuza 0. While they had to work around the mid-00's story and weaving their updated Majima personality into the game, they did a wonderful job tying the story from 0 all the way into the original game.

Speaking of Majima, I had a weird bug: when I was doing Komaki training, he had me fight against this "Hannya-man" character, but after I beat him, I received Majima Everywhere experience. Does anyone know why this happens?

Many rhythm games, while great on their own, tend to have a few fundamental flaws in them, but A Dance of Fire and Ice steers away from them.

Whenever you're playing a rhythm game, you usually will eventually run into a song where it introduces a new pattern in the middle of a song, and you will ultimately fail said pattern because you just have no clue how to approach it in the two seconds that it shows up on screen. This either results in you failing the song, having to restart the song and play it for two minutes, or you just barely scraping through, making you feel like you didn't really need to learn that pattern. Of course, you could go into practice mode and pick that segment, but that kicks you out of the flow state.

A Dance of Fire and Ice handles this differently: every world starts with introductory songs that are meant for solely learning new (or sometimes relearning old) patterns before giving you the actual challenge of the world. While the gameplay itself might feel harsh by ending the song immediately after one failure, you never feel overwhelmed by it, since you have just been taught how to handle the patterns. The game does not dwell on your failure, and you are quickly back at it again.

Another minor thing to praise about is that the game does not rely on visual trickery for its rhythm gameplay. Many modern rhythm games (especially the one-button kinds like Geometry Dash) like to make confusing visuals in order to make timings harder, which in my opinion takes the rhythm out of rhythm games. While the snaking pattern of the tiles might seem like it's designed to confuse you, you quickly understand the patterns of it and the snakiness becomes clarifying.

As for the songs, there's a neat selection of custom songs. My favorite one is this Katamari Damacy style upbeat, happy song (10-X), which just took the frustration away while failing over and over again.

Ultimately, it's a bit on the short end for the baselines, but for $5, you could do a whole lot worse. The Steam Workshop has plenty of custom maps for the game, so you won't run out of content.

It's not quite Artifact, but it scratches the itch.

Marvel Snap is basically a mix of Artifact and Gwent, but games only take <5 minutes and the monetization isn't as bad. Your progression will stagnate at one point, encouraging you to only play your dailies and nothing else if you want to get new cards, but the dailies, if played around them, won't take long each day.

The game has the classic Ben Brode/Hearthstone randomness to it, with each game having 3 randomly selected locations each providing various elements to the game, making the games not feel so boring and repetitive every single time. With only 12 unique cards in each deck, your draw will be consistent enough that most of the time you shouldn't complain about draw RNG.

"Now that's odd," you might say, "you're both praising the lack of RNG and the inclusion of RNG!" That much is true. Here comes the catch: the game also uses a poker style betting, where ranked matches are played for Cosmic Cubes. Each match starts with a wager of 1 cube, and if you allow the game to complete (i.e. you're not forfeiting early), it increases to two. Now, each player is allowed to Snap once per game, doubling the amount of cubes wagered after that turn (so you are allowed to "fold" your cards before the wager doubles). With this, each match has the possibility to range between 1 and 8 cubes. Therefore, complaining about ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG (like Reddit likes to do) is pointless, because you can minimize your losses, and thus your rank gain is more dependant on the games you actually commit to (aka the games where you run good).

Thus, Marvel Snap theoretically eliminated the frustration of high randomness, and leaned into it with wacky cards and locations (don't tell Reddit, but my favorite one is Ego, a location that turns the game into an AI match by taking control from both players). With low initial stakes, no loss is too upsetting unless you allow it to be, and with low match time, you find yourself often going "just one more game". And the poker-style betting allows you to go for your Exodia decks where you have to draw very specific cards to win, since you can just back out with minimal losses in case you didn't manage to activate Pot of Greed.

P.S. Steam says I have 2 hours of playtime when writing this, but I have played this for the past 6 months on mobile

The protagonist of this game is so relatable with his limitation of only being able to do two things each day.

This game will make you hate people. You're out there just casually enjoying some match-3 gameplay until you realize that you make one little mistake because one of the girls has a gameplay rule that doesn't like the way you play the game, so you find yourself saying "Ashley you little ♥♥♥♥♥" over and over again until you just fail an easy win because SOMEONE NAMED LILLIAN doesn't like you getting extra moves.

And then despite all these baggage and struggles, you still force yourself through it because you just want to get your peepee wet. Just like in real life. 10/10

This funny animal game looks like a rather crappy free-to-play Hearthstone Battlegrounds clone, and it is. It's very simple, generic, and there's not much depth to it at first glance.

However, that's why it works. If you're looking for a game that doesn't require quick thinking, hard time commitment or learning massive amounts of strategies, this is it. A typical round takes about 10 minutes, you're free to think, pause or even quit the game in the middle of a round without losing anything. This game requires absolutely nothing. The ultimate boomer game.

In If My Heart Had Wings, the main character joins a quest where a group of girls are seeking for the Morning Glory.

No, seriously.

Jos et osaa arvostaa tarinaa, älä lue enempää. Tämä ei ole tyypillinen pasta carbonara -räiskintä.

Kun luin, että tällä pelillä olisi vahva viesti, en ollut uskoa sitä. Mutta pelattuani sitä hetken en voinut päästää sitä käsistäni. Tarinaa paljastamatta en voi paljoa kertoa, mutta pelatessani tätä peliä pystyin kirjaimellisesti tuntemaan tämän raa'an sodan vaikutukset itsessäni. Jokainen päätös olisi todella vaikea ja tarkkaan pohdittu. Mutta tässä pelissä ei ole oikeita päätöksiä. On vain vääriä ja väärempiä päätöksiä. Mikään päätös ei ollut hyväksi. Mutta eteenpäin oli jatkettava.

Taistelusysteemi tuntui aluksi könkäiseltä, johtuen luultavasti konsoliohjainkokoonpanoista. Kun aluksi mietin, että kenen idea oli laittaa juokseminen, suojautuminen ja suojasta poistuminen samalle napille, tuntui ajatus väkisinkin vastenmieliseltä. Mutta loppujen lopuksi kaikki toimi hyvin, jos osasi. Taistelu oli tyypillistä suojarunkkausta ja huohotusta terveyden palauttamiseksi, mutta se oli toteutettu järkevästi. Pienen tolpan takana suojautuminen ei luonut maagista suojakilpeä, enkä voinut ottaa lippaallista luoteja naamaani naarmuuntumatta, vaan jo parikin harhaluotia saattoi tappaa. Missään et voinut olla täysin suojassa. Ja aseidenkin vähyys ei ollenkaan helpottanut tilannetta. Pelissä ei todellakaan voinut olla hampaisiin asti aseistettu, ja kahden aseen rajoitus tarkoitti väkisinkin sitä, että jokaiseen tilanteeseen ei voinut varautua. Tottakai kuolleilta vihollisilta sai ja pitikin viedä aseita, mutta heidänkin aseet olivat usein hyvin vähäpanoksisia. Oletettavasti siksi, koska viholliset olivat jo tuhlanneet ison osan kudeistaan yrittäessään ampua sinua.

Ainoana miinuksena osaan mainita sen, että päähenkilöä ääninäyttelee Nolan North.

Tätä peliä voisi suositella heille, jotka ymmärtävät tarinan ja tunteiden päälle, eivätkä vaivaannu Nolan Northin jatkuvasta huutamisesta. 9/10