Recent reviews by beardalaxy

This is the real version of the game. Has so much modding potential, and it actually works. This is an amazing game, one of my favorites from my childhood. I've always loved popping in even just for a few single player matches. PLEASE DO NOT BUY THE SHODDILY PUT TOGETHER "REMASTER!!!"

The game soft locks if you look at it wrong. Seriously, sometimes it'll just hang on the results screen with your character far in the distance. If someone quits out of a ranked match in between the ending and the results screen, you'll get soft locked. If you're playing arcade mode, it will soft lock. How these have escaped the devs for this long, yet they are pushing out single character DLC for $7 each is beyond me. To put that into perspective, you get 1 character for $7. Smash Ultimate gave you a character, a stage, and a bunch of music for $6. Call it shrinkflation I guess, but the quality of the game is just not there to justify charging that much for less than you'd get from a premium offering.

The game does play well. I'm going to keep playing it throughout the free weekend. It is considerably better than the original. There's no way I'd buy it, though. It's way too frustrating to have to force quit the game at least once an hour. There is still a decent amount of jank here too, but again it is still better than the original.

Even with the free weekend, I also have run into the same people several times in ranked. I don't think this game is going to have good staying power so if you're buying it, you should probably be buying it to play with some friends for a little bit as a party game and not taking it too seriously. Especially if these soft locking problems continue.

Mr. Krabs also seems kind of cracked. I don't know too much about this game obviously, I've only played it for this free weekend, but I'm not so sure any character should have a mechanic that lets them kill you at 30 damage from a distance. It's not great form to have your paid character being one that is this good.

Ranked is also not that great... no such thing as banning stages or counter picking. I actually ran into someone who seemed to be hacking because his character always showed as random in the character select screen, but when we got into the actual match it would always be one of two characters. One time, the VS screen image didn't even match up to their character. I can only assume this is to make sure that people can't counterpick him, but if it was baked into the game it'd eliminate that problem.

Awesome game. I see lots of people complaining about the open world bike section but I honestly thought it was pretty fun. I do like racing games though so that might affect my viewpoint on it. The inclusion of the bike in general was sweet. I do wish you had more time to spend with the final upgrade and that it persisted into the Hardcore mode, but I can understand that it might break some things. Still, it would have been a fun inclusion.

The story is pretty good, characters are decent, gameplay is awesome as ever. It is unfortunate that it stutters so much due to what I can only assume is lingering shader compilation and traversal stutters, even though the game compiles them whenever you launch it. There were a few times it did get me killed. Luckily the game is fast enough that it doesn't matter a whole lot. Just reset after death to a few seconds ago and no more stuttering for that part.

If you liked the first game, you'll definitely enjoy this one. I thought it was about on-par with the original and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I can imagine that some people may like it more or less, but that's typically how sequels go anyway.

There is one issue with the keybinding... I really wish I could scroll through the Shuriken, Ghost, and Tempest abilities with the mouse wheel instead of clicking 1/2/3. It would certainly make things easier in combat and in platforming.

The base gameplay is fun, and it builds on the first game well enough. There are some things that I personally find annoying, like certain game modes, that others may not, so I won't comment on that really. What I really like about this game and the first one is the way drifting feels and how it gives you boost, much like how Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing works. I'd still just recommend getting the first game though and leaving this one in the dust. What's added isn't really worth it in the long run, and I only got about 7 hours of enjoyment before I felt like putting it to rest.

The UI is broken, the menus can be difficult to navigate as your position gets reset pretty often (and their design is just not that great overall, for instance the campaign has a weird map system instead of just laying out the objectives in an easy list). The multiplayer is completely dead. Custom tracks can still only be loaded in time trial mode. The perk system is a downgrade from the first game. The game has some weird Epic integration that seems completely unnecessary and apparently didn't even ship with the original version of this game.

On top of that, it seems like a lot of users, mostly on Steam Deck, can't actually play through the campaign due to cutscene issues. There has been no update to solve this. That's not a good sign. I would avoid this one, buy the last one instead if you're looking for some fun racing.

I wish I had looked more into the reviews and discussions for this before buying it because I'm feeling some pretty big buyer's remorse right about now (which is even worse considering I bought this with a Christmas gift card). Of course, the one time I don't look at reviews I get shafted. I enjoyed the first game and this looked like more of a good thing, so I thought, hey, what could go wrong...?

The best part about this game is watching to see how long it takes your friends to realize you've died.

Beautiful graphics, great story and memorable/lovable characters, fun combat, and overall just good gameplay. This is a game that really hearkens back to what it means to be a GAME. Just pure fun the whole the way through, including 100% completing the game and beyond. There are extras, cheats, new game plus bonuses, and just so much fun stuff. The dialogue is pretty fun too. Normal difficulty is actually pretty easy, so if you want a bit more of a challenge then select the second hardest difficulty for your first playthrough. I didn't die a single time playing on the normal mode.

The ONLY gripe I have with this game is that the characters are VERY quick to point out what you need to do and where you need to go. It holds your hand a little too much in the puzzle/exploration sections of the game. I really dislike this trend in gaming these days, but if that's the only thing wrong with the game then I'm still willing to overlook something like that. There were also a myriad of random bugs and visual issues when the game launched, but it seems like those have been smoothed over for the most part now!

At the time of writing this review, I only need one more achievement to get all of them. This game is awesome. I played it through once really quick on my buddy's PS5 and was thrilled when it got announced for PC because it meant I could finally spend the time on the game that it deserves. I definitely think it's worth $60, which is not what one can say about many games these days. Play this game! It's awesome! Insomniac and Nixxes did a fantastic job.

I'd also like to point out that the vibration for the DualShock 4 is remarkably well done. I'm surprised at how close it got to the PS5 version of the game, actually. I didn't think the DS4 was capable of rumble like that. Definitely caught me by surprise. If you are using a DS4, make sure to disable Steam Input for the game, since it has native support for it and you'll be able to use stuff like half trigger pulls that way.

Just from first impressions on the free weekend, I think this is a decent game. The dialogue is pretty cringeworthy and I definitely had to turn it off completely to actually just enjoy the game and focus on the racing. Honestly, the effects aren't too crazy or distracting, like I thought they would be. The soundtrack is crap, but again you can just turn it down and play your own music if you really want to. I still can't get a hang of the drifting, but as I'm upgrading my car it's definitely making it a lot easier and I'm getting more used to it.

This is not really a $70 game, not by a long shot. It's missing a robust settings menu, so all of the effects are permanently on (except for like, motion blur). For $20, it's a good price I think. It's just a racing game.

Very frequent stuttering, lack of options to turn visual settings such as motion blur and lens flare off completely, and anti-aliasing that leaves horrible ghosting. The game seems to perform well when it isn't stuttering, which normally happens after entering a new room (which I get the feeling you'll be doing a lot of in this game, going through a mansion and whatnot). It's also an 18GB download which, quite frankly, is far too large for a 5-minute teaser. I get the feeling that most, if not all, of the full game's files are included in this download for some reason. Not great for people on limited connections.

Thankfully, the community manager seems to be forwarding issues to the devs, but it remains unknown whether or not they will actually consider these issues and fix them for the final release of the game. Given the current state of the video game industry, I wouldn't trust that any of these issues will be resolved by the time the game launches. I would suggest not pre-ordering the game or buying it on release unless they patch this prologue itself to address the concerns.

This is more of an interesting tech demo than a game. The controls and camera need a little bit of work, as it ends up feeling incredibly inconsistent to play. Everything is physics based, and I can't help but think that sometimes it is better to not make everything strictly based on physics in order to achieve a better feel and give the player a bit more control. It is a pretty finicky experience that had me janking my way around the levels sometimes, but getting janked by the level at other times.

As a game, there's really nothing of substance here. There are 15 levels but they may as well all be pretty much the same thing. The motif only slightly changes from level to level. The collectibles are literally just that, and don't actually do anything beyond giving you some sense of accomplishment I guess? It seems that if you get 100% you unlock a new skin, but there's very little reason to play the game after that unless you are intent on speedrunning.

If you can get the game on sale for a couple bucks or something, then it might be worth it just to mess around for a bit. Though it's really nothing to write home about, and they could have been much more imaginative with adding things like new abilities or a higher degree of variation in the levels. It would have been cool to see something like boss fights at the end of worlds, too. Either that, or some moments with set pieces that are interesting.

The checkpoint system is also a little wonky, with physical buttons you have to land on in order to save your progress in the level. If you just went through a big set of snaking around over a perilous void, grab the main collectible you need to beat the level, and then die after, you're going to have to do it all over again instead of just starting from when you collected the main piece. It can get a little annoying.

There are also cutscenes you can't skip that sort of overstay their welcome, and your spot in the level select isn't saved so you have to navigate back to the level you left off on one by one. The options menu is also pretty lacking. Minor problems, but they start to get old pretty fast.

Can't comment on the music because I turned it off and played my own.

I wish you could give neutral ratings on Steam. It's okay. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. When I was a kid I was never able to beat it, and a lot of streams I've watched from people playing the originals seem to take a much longer time than I did. I'm not saying I'm a god gamer or anything, I'd say I'm fairly average, but this was just really easy altogether. There are a lot of unlockables and cosmetics and stuff but the majority of it is just cosmetic and you don't really have enough play time to even unlock all of it without replaying stages several times. This would probably be better to pick up if you know you have a bunch of friends who want to play it with you. Otherwise, just play the original games... no reason not to. Unless you absolutely NEED to have some of the cosmetics and stuff, I guess. I will admit that playing as Sonic was pretty cool.

I also want to mention that I played this with a mod that changes the physics and camera to more closely resemble the original game, as well as changing the circle gate to a square one in the Steam Input settings. If you're going to play this and are totally expecting it to play like the original game, you'll need to do those things. Personally, I'd say using a Gamecube controller if you have one available to you would make it better as well, since you get those sweet octagon notches.