Recent reviews by Magnus

I'm about to tear into this game something fierce. It doesn't matter how good you think your writing is, hire an editor, hire some QA people. It's alright fun, but I'm left groaning at the end.

I'll start with the positives, though. The gameplay is fine. Being 2D, a common problem is enemies just flipping without any frames to attack, and this is not one of those instances. There's an okay variety to how you end up building your Deadsuit. But there is also only objectively one good way to progress through levels. This is where the positives end.

Continuing from gameplay, if you don't focus most of your levels into GunPower, you quickly feel the burn of spongey enemies. As you progress through the story, enemies also all level up, too. If you aren't careful, you might be shooting some electric sponges for far too long and leveling is becoming tedious. Thankfully, I changed courses very fast early on. I can see how some people could also fall into that trap... It would be okay if you could respec and learn the error of your ways, but if you invested even two hours, you might not wanna restart.

Contact damage is an archaic idea, and while it wasn't an issue for most of the game, there was one boss in particular, Ogre, that made it particularly frustrating. Even if you were to have contact damage, having the damage be the same amount as a full attack is just egregious. It can make some fights feel completely unfair. I'm in power armor, why isn't a BUG being hurt?

Fast Travel feels like a late addition, and one added in reluctantly. There are story points where you can't use fast travel, and that's fine. But when you CAN use fast travel, there are so few points available on the map that you'll end up running a quarter of the map any time you need to get anywhere. And if you need to backtrack for something, that becomes a bit more tedious...

Fast Travel seems like it could have been an easy fix, so why wasn't it? Well, that's because of Dark Souls style NPC quests. Souls generally has NPCs in your path that you need to go to to continue their quests. Not Ghost Song. In fact, there's two times you need to revisit one specific room that is in the starting area that you will enter one more time for sure, but a second time is really pushing it unless you're just... wandering for no reason. And these places are random as ♥♥♥♥, too. There's even an entirely out of the way room that I ran into on a whim while just re-exploring because of this that I would have never entered if I just was focusing on what paths I missed or loot I missed.

Speaking of paths, some hidden walls are too hidden. At the start, there's some hinting with little plants here and there, or you walk on something and it shakes... That's dropped almost completely later on. In fact, one of the only extra charges for healing is under a floor that doesn't shake and blends PERFECTLY into the rest of the floor. Am I expected to just run around shooting every wall and floor?

The indistinguishability also comes from the fact so much of the world is just flat blobs, uninteresting landscape. I'm gonna shamelessly compare this to Hollow Knight and Super Metroid and just say treat every room like you would an actual room and decorate it to have some purpose, not slag filled hallway with more slag.

The writing.

In the fourth stage, I just started mashing through some of the dialogue with the crew. "Bloat" does not begin to describe it. So the characters all love talking. At length. Conversations are mostly one sided, driven by Deadsuit being generally curious. And they go on and on and on about whatever's plaguing them. Imagine scrolling through a white girl's twitter feed. I can understand their problems, but the lengths to which it's hammered in.

Not only that, but dialogue will flip between text and voice. Text you can mash past at least, but once voice starts, then you have to listen through it all, even if it's dull, all in favor of completionism, but what a chore. And what is with the ship characters? So much of Gamber's dialogue comes off like a failed liberal arts degree's best attempt at being whimsical. And why is a ship even talking like that?

And like I mentioned before, quests are all over the place. Make sure you catch everyone as their next location every time.

Finally, the actual plot: The entire premise of what's going on is laid out to the character after a point. Some flowery dialogue is added but otherwise 'this is exactly why all this is happening'. There isn't room for any kind of interpretation, there is just something in the sun and also there's forces above sun worm gods that can just set bounties and send bug dudes. So the most bizarre things are just explained outright to you.

But the most frustrating is the inconsistency. Deadsuit is consistently shown as curious, helpful, inquisitive... But knows nothing about herself. And when presented, time and time again with opportunities to do so, refuses to look inward. Why is this the one thing someone so curious is not at all curious about? One boss even yells 'deadsuits aren't real' at one point even though you ARE one and what the ♥♥♥♥ a deadsuit even is is never explained at all.

And to top it off, spoilers mind you, Deadsuit is alluded to being possessed by Charley, Pasha's sister but that only ends up creating more questions, like why is the Deadsuit childsized? Was it empty? Did a totally unrelated child just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ die in another suit and Charley's ghost come over? Why is everyone else so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tall? Nothing satisfying ever comes from the mystery of the Deadsuit and is entirely unexplained, while the entire premise of the world is in turn, which could have been more interesting. But it's just *thrown* at you.


Skip all the dialogue, you'll have a better experience. I'm not exaggerating. Do buy it on sale, level up GunPower primarily, and if you want completionism, there's a 100% map for all the quest markers and other stuff if you need.

Life in its unabsorable excess leads to fruitless endeavors, draining the life without excess until it's bones and fertilizer into which the next abundance of wealth may plant their once again futile wishes only for the dry and parched to drain it for their own excess.

Ten outta ten, one of the best games I ever played. What the ♥♥♥♥ even was that?

Number one recommendation from everyone in video games is 'get through main story asap and hit NG+ and get all your powers'.

And there is... a lot of powers.

And you have to get them all each new run, otherwise you'll have one not leveled up... Can't chase after one specific one, either, just gotta cycle through all of them. And you have to do this ten times. Ten. For every run of the universe, you have to dedicate over an hour to just cycling through artifacts and temples. It is chore incarnate. I can genuinely say one of the core, most important ways of growing your character is like playing a phone game.

And you can ignore that if you just... want to avoid powers, sure. But... You can't ignore that if you want the best armor, either.

The writing is all very safe, there is no interesting politics, a lot of more writing is just rushed feeling, some set pieces are fine... The gameplay loop? I like it, it's nice. It's... it's just Fallout without VATs and with Skyrim powers. That's their big innovation.

But all that together just puts everyone in such a drag state their entire game time so it's wild anyone leaves a glowing review for it.

Oh, also, every companion is lawful good. You have no other options.

Sony will not be forcing PSN for PC players. Anyone in the world can play this game. And they should.

It's a fun game. I have had hours and hours of fun with friends, yelling and screaming as we're endlessly chased in pursuing freedom and liberty. And I hope this game lasts for a very long time.

More of Marvel's Spider-Man, not a sequel entirely but more of an expansion. The gameplay is fantastic, adding little to what made the previous game so excellent but also taking away a number of gadgets at the same time, possibly for balance sake. Even still, its' very easy to enter a cycle of domination with certain tools that leaves little challenge once you've mastered everything, but feels great to reach and accomplish.

They clearly rolled out the B-Team for the writing, however. Or maybe F-Team would be more accurate. To call this bad would be polite. The story is what's known as an idiot plot, the plot only being driven forward because everyone involved is an idiot. It is not a good story. It's downright grating at times, leaving you cheering for someone's death when they want to portray it as sad or shakespearean. The writers were nowhere near that mark.

The gameplay is enough for me to have a lot of fun. The swinging, the slightly changed city, the animations, the challenges. I had fun with the game a lot in just the gameplay on its own, so I recommend this: skip every cutscene if you want a purely good experience. Otherwise, get ready for some great highs in combat, and some very lows in story.


Nuform and Simon Krieger of Roxxon are introduced early, and characters are shown to hate Nuform completely. No one says why, they just go 'euch' and keep trying to knock him down. Simon Krieger himself is a very small villain, so his comic counterpart is not important. They'll manage to make him even less important through the course of the game.

Aaron Davis, Miles' uncle at the start "recognizes who Miles is by the way he was moving around while fighting convicts around Rhino". I cannot stress how bafflingly stupid this is. There was a whole ton of dialogue just prior where Miles could have slipped up a little at some point, but no, Aaron just recognizes Miles because his basketball moves are so similar to his extremely flexible super gymnastic mixed martial arts of Spider-Man. What a joke.

Miles' Mom insists she stay away from Aaron. She then also insists it's Aaron's job to tell Miles why he's not in the family. This is done within the same conversation. She's very stupid and running for office, not a good combination.

The "tragic villain" is Phin or the Tinkerer, a newly introduced character you only just learn about at the start of the game but Miles has known her his whole life. This helps to keep you disconnected from her plight entirely, on top of her ongoing actions.

The Tinkerer wants to "save" people from Roxxon and Nuform as it makes people sick. She decides that the best way to do this is not as a solo agent, but to hire a mafia called Unerground and provide them with dangerous weapons, who use said weapons to inflict harm on random people, rob banks, terrorize people in general. She also deems it perfectly fine to kill Spider-Man, who actively saves people every day and stands for doing the right thing with the power you're given.

She is very, very stupid and contradicts her "holy mission" nigh constantly by engaging in hostile actions that regularly endanger people's lives and thinks the death of random innocent civilians and even people who save them is fine, as she never addresses it herself.

She also is shown to be immensely capable on her own. She's amazing at everything she does and has the most perfect technology and she wants to save the city, but she's just misguided. Yes, this is also a Mary Sue.

Simon Krieger is "the real bad guy" but he's essentially entirely absent. Even after a point where Miles' is captured, he could have pulled his mask off but doesn't, waiting only for him to be awake to try and fail. It's at this point that it feels important to note Simon Krieger, Wilson Fisk, and JJJ are the only white characters in the game after Peter leaves. I'm not counting Rhino as he's very flat, but that's why he's fun, too. Hold onto that thought.

Simon has essentially no presence within the story other than being the bad guy they have to stop, and the story is instead racing against Phin to take him down because he's comically evil and really has no excuse, backstory, anything, he just is fine with poisoning people and has infinite money from who knows where, as he hasn't fully set up any facilities yet. Yet on the surface, his message is entirely good, and it's not clear why people hate him already.

Wilson Fisk is the same, only having a small dialogue with Miles' after his attempts at lowering property value of Harlem to buy it all for whatever reason. Issue is, it's made immediately clear Fisk has enough money to already buy all the land if he wanted to, so... why is he muscling people around at all? He operates above board a lot too, so it's kind of a stupid side plot entirely.

This is where the idiot plot comes up.

JJJ, one of the rudest most crass people to exist in all of Marvel, is known for having extreme integrity. In Marvel's Spider-Man, he's shown going right as Osborn just as much as he does Spider-Man. Now, Roxxon's Simon Krieger wants to operate in the city without having any vetting process to what Nuform is according to in game dialogue. Instead, JJJ defends him. JJJ is not that kind of character, he wants answers and wants to know why Simon would refuse such investigations, he would want to get to the bottom of it because he hates secrets. He hates them with a burning passion. Any dialogue not involving Simon is still great, but they really missed the mark there.

They introduce a new podcast, Danikast, to contrast JJJ's Just the Facts. The character Danika is an overweight dyed hair teenage girl, who also can do no wrong and constantly shares reminders about little things that might improve your life, but ultimately, she comes off as obnoxious, an attempt at a character with no flaws. It was the writer's attempt at showing what 'a good podcast should look like' but she fails to entertain, lacks wit, and kind of comes off as a nag more than anything. She's not enjoyable, at all.

It's important to note, the developers may have realized she was insufferable as well and you're able to turn off her podcast separately from JJJ's.

Now, towards the end of the story, Ganke, Miles' friend, goes on the Danikast. He publicly broadcasts he helps Spider-Man with the app. He is now a target. The point of the secret identity is to keep your friends and family out of harm's way. The writer clearly did not know this and may also be a part of this idiot plot.

Aaron Davis, or The Prowler, tries to lock Miles in a cage to keep him safe. This is so he can have a fight with the Prowler. None of the reasoning used here is sound. This is more idiot plot driving more show pieces. It doesn't make any sense to do this and at every point, Aaron could have simply helped Miles which would have made things go a lot more smoothly and easily. The attempt at flawed character writing is fundamentally wrong, doing the wrong thing for the right reason or the right thing for the wrong reason is paramount, but he's doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, leaving him faffing about like a moron.

Finally, Phin, the Tinkerer, is trying to destroy Harlem. She thinks she's saving it but refuses to listen to Miles because he "lied about being Spider-Man". She is a complete moron. She is upset at someone for keeping a secret identity secret, someone who regularly makes an effort to save lives every day, someone SHE tried to kill.

Her only possible redemption was to die. And she does! They try to make it sappy, but more discerning viewers will all be cheering that she finally croaked, vaporized in a blast she tried to start because she was an idiot.

Well, she's dead now. You've wasted the Tinkerer for this version of Spider-Man. Mix in some cringe BLM, pointless racial overtones lines like 'he's OUR spider-man', and you've made a miserable story.

AC6 is challenging, demanding of flexibility, versatility. Failures must be met with persistence and an open mind to back out entirely and change your approach completely. I've been a fan since the start of Armored Core, and though this game is far more simple than all the options there once was, this is by no means easier. If anything, it sure feels harder.

The story is portrayed well, things can be figured out ahead of time or never understood at all if you don't make an effort. The world is grim and dark with interesting and diverse characters. The plot is spaced out well and constantly driven forward by the need for more money. Even in NG+ and NG++, things change, some stuff in subtle ways, others in new missions that decide a new path for you, and each path having an important lesson to teach you: there is no right answer.

The gameplay may very well be the best Armored Core has ever had to offer. Customization has always been a massive part of AC and every little difference in parts chosen make the experience unique and different. Creativity is encouraged for new means of violence. But ingenuity is just as important. It's no secret the first real boss has been filtering bad players, but just being smart enough to know Pulse Armor is disrupted with pulse weaponry flips the fight upside down, making it fairly easy in comparison, taking advantage of dealing bonus damage with Direct Hits.

The missions themselves are all quite diverse as well. No two are the same and even similar ones have vastly different layouts. All of them build out the world nicely and make for incredible visual spectacles. Some are a walk in the park, and others will snap you in half with how much they ask. Make sure you have enough ammo for the mission you're eyeballing, lightweight ACs can only carry so much after all.

What I find truly fascinating, however, is there is clear inspiration from Daemon X Machina in this iteration. And that's wonderful.

Definitely my Game of the Year, by the way.

There's so few characters in game and it's already forty dollars. Why have character DLC when the game's already starved for them?

As of the most recent patch, a cypher, or the ability to change characters, was added to the hideout, something bafflingly excluded at launch. This means you can now change every character's skin and gear without being inundated with load screens.

The only thing I can say bad about BRC now is the DJ Cyber boss fight being a real jarringly poorly communicated thing. At least show a little cutscene of your character kicking one vinyl back at him first. And a few character designs suck ass like Rave.

Other than that, it's a fully enjoyable experience. Fun, floaty movement, tight controls, great music, great style even if it's lifted from old JSRF, but that's what people wanted, so that's not a bad thing. Even after the story, there's some post game challenges with good rewards to hammer out, and even some strange secrets.

A fully fun game I recommend completely.


The ending of a game impacts how you're left feeling about it. Even if the experience up to the end was good, an obnoxious ending can sour the entire experience. I say this genuinely, I would recommend this game if you're only going to play the story and don't care about completionism, but that may be a hard sell at the game's current price.

I love JSRF. I enjoyed BRC. I loved the story, mostly, I loved the art, mostly, I loved the areas, mostly. And the game functions very well. Mostly.

Until the post game.

The story is pretty good. I won't spoil anything, but it's got fun, discovery, and twists to it. I genuinely enjoyed going through it with each little surprise. But there's two parts that are so awkward that it simply takes me out of the story entirely: There is a character named Escher who is portrayed as thoughtful and important. This isn't a spoiler: He vanishes from the story. Just evaporates. Gone. He's not even an unlockable character. He just exits the game abruptly.

The other is the DJ Cyber fight, a boss battle built up to for a while... Clunky and miserable. It's also not immediately clear what you're supposed to do, the first instinct being dodge and approach. Overall, an exhaustive test of patience. I have nothing good to say about that fight at all.

The art's great, the more grounded characters are awesome. Red, Tryce, Bel, Vinyl and most enemies all look great. But then down a peg, we have Felix, Shine, Coil, Solace, Mesh, Rise who are stuck between more grounded designs and over the top, becoming unappealing for being stuck in between. They're not pleasant to look at because they can't commit either way. And then there's Rave and The Flesh Prince who are just purely eye sores. Escher was a rather cool looking character, but because the writer forgot he was even in the game, he's not unlockable.

JSRF had a lot of characters, a lot of them grounded punk designs, and a bunch of them also just plainly over the top. Each one had its own enjoyable aspects. For BRC, when your choice is a lot more limited, it makes you analyze what your choices are a lot more since there might not be a case of 'just play the one you like a lot'. In my case, I would have just used Escher and ignored this mostly, but he literally got Thanos'd out, leaving me analyzing everyone else. Not only that, but Faux is also not playable despite... being playable at the start. It doesn't need to make sense, Rokaku was playable by the end of JSRF. Let the player have fun. The lack of characters really gives me aches.

The maps are all very distinct and colorful and nice. Except the mall is just needlessly huge. Unironically you could scale the big round area down to half its size and you would not have any downsides gameplay wise. The same could be said about the Mataan River area, where it is just a long stretch of nothing, everything so vastly spaced apart. You could easily crush everything closer together and have a whole upper layer of wires and make it more enjoyable, but missed out on that entirely too. I enjoyed Mataan, then I had to do things there.

These are some basic issues that some QA would have helped greatly before release.


I'm going to quickly say what I do like about it. The graffiti system is great, and the art associated with it is wonderful. The phone is great, very immersive and useful tool and giving it a camera was impressive and fun to play with. Even the ability to change music. The combo system is leagues above what JSRF's was. It takes everything good about JSRF gameplay wise and simply tweaks it to be faster, more in depth, and more fun. Plus, mostly look better. Music? Fantastic. 2 Mello is the highlight of the soundtrack for sure. I Wanna Kno is awesome.


But here's my quitting moment, what just became too frustrating: UI after the story. Genuinely catastrophic, practically hostile to the player.

How do you change characters?
You need to stop at a black and white checked spot and dance.

Can you do this in your Hideout?
No, there is no way to change characters in your characters' base. This means, you need to stop and dance at a taxi spot.

Do taxi spots unlock when you go near them?
No, you have to interact with them each specifically. Seeing them isn't good enough.

Can you talk to characters to change to them in the Hideout?
No, only side characters will offer to be swapped to. Main characters will only do their post game dialogue, and recruited enemies will not even be in the Hideout to talk to. Only the ugly ones can be swapped to in the Hideout alone.

Can you change outfits while changing characters?
No, you need to select a character, then go to an outhouse to change. Adding to that, the outhouse cannot be used a second time, so to change multiple characters' outfits, you have to reload the area multiple times.

Can you change gear while changing characters?
No, you cannot. You need to first leave the Hideout to another area so you can change your character, then return back to the Hideout because the Hideout is the only place you can change your gear.

Further more, you need to also do this for an achievement, a unique spray on every taggable spot. Small tags are by character, and the Hideout is small, so it's the easiest place to do it in and keep track of every tag. Too bad you can't change characters in the Hideout, right?

Customizing more than one character becomes this loop: find square, take time to start dancing, select character, skip dance intro, find taxi spot which may not be close at all to square, take more time to start dancing, go to an outhouse and select colors, go to the floor of the gear you want and select the gear's look, go back to the taxi spot, start dancing AGAIN, go all the way back to the square you started at, START DANCING AGAIN, select your character...

To call this tedious would be polite.

Does the game at least tell you how many unlockables are left in an area?
Of course not.



To close off, I really enjoyed the game so long as you're stuck playing Red and don't need to worry about any of that. All the challenges and customizations are way off and don't need to be worried about until post game. If you do buy the game, just enjoy the story and skip anything after. I was very excited for this game but I am horribly disappointed by such awful, basic mistakes in UI design. This is why you hire someone to do QA. Literally this. Anyone could have caught this.

Wait for a QoL patch.

A prequel to the Zeno Clash games from some time ago, with a lot of queues taken from Dark Souls.

In most ways, this is an excellent game. The combat flows fantastically and so many moves and techniques are thoroughly satisfying. Hits all feel like they have impact, and there's a high skill ceiling. Much like Elden Ring, the difficulty is in what you choose to use, and you can make the game much easier by mixing health brews and using weapons, or you can slam your skull into enemies exclusively.

The visuals are fantastic, every character design is interesting and unique and even the most bizarre can still move and fight. The hatching shader is a wonderful thing that accentuates the entire world, and it's just lovely. The voice acting is superb with well written characters you can easily become attached to, and though the story itself is rather simple, everything surrounding it is unique, and the emotional points are delivered excellently. There is a lot of bird suicide to punctuate that point.

However, the main villain, Gemini, is not fleshed out enough. The focus of the story is kept on Pseudo, the player character, the entire time, so we're not given much of a feel of what Gemini is going through the entire time we're denying her anything.

Once you really get good, there isn't much of anything that can challenge you either, no NG+, no hard mode, no challenges. While others complain about how difficult Moon-Sun is, I kind of just knocked him around and it left me wanting.

All in all, a fantastic game. I look forward to Pseudo's next adventure.

Open Beta Test 2:

"We're going to show off more of the PvE this time!"

Load it up, get through a tutorial, get through a SECOND tutorial... And what am I greeted with? "Wargrames, a 5v5 mode."

The amount of lies this game advertises is disgusting.

Original:

This was a clown show. This marketing that makes you think of EDF? That it's a fun horde shooter to play with your friends and have a laugh?

Forget it. It's a PvP game, not PvE.

And not a good one at that. It tries to blend PvP and PvE, but you can quite literally ignore PvE and just dunk on the enemy team. The PvE that smears all of the marketing is quite literally secondary.

All the marketing shows you and your friends fighting off hordes of dinosaurs after dinosaur storms. It's wacky and fun and immediately the style is really eye popping. But actually it's not EDF. It's not a PvE game at all. All that PvE all over the marketing is not present in this beta. Will it even be present in release? Probably not. Why? It's a live service is why.

PvE will probably come in another five years when the game is about to die and it won't save it because they floundered their marketing so bad on this game that everyone who is interested from the trailers will come in, see it's PvP, do a 360 and walk away.

What a complete joke.