Recent reviews by ffrasisti [ARG]

It's not a bad idea on paper but the narrative aspect is weak, shallow and loaded to the brim with blatant progressive malarkey. The racing is too simple to be fun for sustained periods of time and you may find yourself wanting to skip it as frequently as possible. The resource/time/travel management roguelike would be more fun if the story segments were longer, more frequent and your decisions had an actual impact the consequences of which you could see beyond a single line of text at the end and a change in resource values.
It's not a good VN style game, it's not a good travel management game (80 Days this is not) and its not a good racing game. It reminds me of things like Night Call, but that game knew to fully lean into the story even if it was also politically loaded with bs. No part of the game is particularly good and in tandem they dont really mesh that well or amount to anything that interesting. Could have been so much better. Avoid.

It's as if Neon White and the movie Crank had a baby that liked Fist of the Nothern Star

My only con so far is that rooms repat too much but at the breakneck pace they might have done it so you dotn get lost?
Beware you wont have much time at all to take in the sights, its always a rush and thats the point

An adorable little 'Untitled Goose Game' inspired game about an indoor cat on a small adventure around his little neighborhood.
Short and sweet but full of purrsonality.
Gamefies "being a cat" really well, its funny and the animations are cute.
Half the fun is testing whether stuff will work Yes, people slip on bananas. Yes, you can drop phones on toilets. You can knock every little piece of a chessboard. The dog hat gets you past dogs. lol

So far the concept seems interesting, but there seems to be too much about personal/national identity conflicts in the Hong Kong/China divide that frankly, I at least could do without.
You know "The Last Human" trope? The final icon of our species, beloved by a future society of succesors (be it robots, clones, other races) for being an impeccable embodiment of our virtues, an icon of what made us great?
Yeah, what if she was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥?
And you had to bear witness to their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and how that revelation could impact your fragile society that is all that remains after an Arrival/Roadside Picnic style alien aproximation to earth killed all of humanity.
It's an interesting 3d exploration adventure narrative game with a few dialogue options that so far have not offered me any control of the narrative. Will update when I finish it

I wish the devs were given more time to polish and expand but whats here is solid AA material. It got rushed because of Embracer's BS but hopefully the devs can keep making stuff like this.
The "visible seams", so to speak, are the jank of the melee, and the lack of variety between enemies and campaigns. It's hard not to imagine a much better game if this had a bit more money and maybe another 8 months of dev time.
But like I said, solid enough, luckily.
Hopefully there's a bigger sequel.
Also, Jodie Comer should be in more games.

Welcome Back, Level 5

L5 Does Evangelion. the last of humanity lives blissfully unaware that outside their sheltered carefully curated lives in a safe heaven, the world is a wasteland where giant robots fend off the alien invasion that almost wiped us out and re-terraformed Earth to suit their needs.
A team of youngsters with the ideal reflexes and neurological capabilities is assembled to go outisde and pilot the new generation of giant robots called Evas Megatons.

The story unfolds in an open 2D sidescrolling rpg city while the combat gameplay is a full 3D (but not super expensive AAA, remeber, L5 is a AA dev that mostly comes from handheld games) mecha figther thats actually pretty fun. It invites comparisons to 13 Sentinels, another game I loved, but that drops the ball on the gameplay since the devs ran out of money and you dont really pilot the robots, you see them as dots on a radar (I'm still mad about that). But they made up for it with 10/10 art and a brilliant story. Which, yeah, this doesnt really match in those aspects but its clearly not attempting to be a Vanillaware title. The art and story we have here are actually pretty good too. So odious comparisons aside, both are great for different reasons.

Cons/Caveats to keep in mind:

• Mind that this is still story focused, and while they do add a lot of cutsomization and variety, its still a "cheap combat" that might feel like it lacks map variety or the scale doesnt feel very epic.
  
• There seem to be vestiges of what was a once a F2P model? The game has many screen where you accept rewards one after another, there are login bonuses which get sent to a "mailbox" and theres a battlepass? None of that is necesary at all to interact with but its really rare seeing it there. Maybe at one point the multiplayer was f2p?
  
• Remember it's a 1.5A game that feels like, i dunno a 3ds game? Might not be what you wanted for the price
  
• Another gripe is the amount of cosmetic DLC and the fact that something as simple as victory poses needs to be bought separately.

So yeah, those vestiges of a diferent kind of monetization and the fact that the scale of the combat feels a bit on the toyish side like Gundam Alliance SD rather than say AC6. I liked it as an arcady, charming robot action game, with a sidescrolling neat anime story on top. But Armored Core this is not

See? There we go Sony, it wasnt that hard. Companies fearing the wrath of their players always makes my day.
I love democracy.
But seriously, dont ever give these companies an inch. Remember this victory next time they push garbage on you. And they will try.
For Super Steam!

The concept is really cool but the gameplay is terrible. And the generic grey dude constantly on screen instead of unique NPCS (I thought their features would reveal as we learn from them but no, its the same generic faceless npcs over and over) really bugs me.
Most of your time is spent trying to get lucky rolling the dice with stalking actons while revealing parts of a timeline that you just cant effin read well even on a fullscreen 1440p monitor.
Most of the game is staring at a timeline that looks like NLE software and a gray generic dude in the middle.

Great idea, crap execution, im out after less than half an hour after confirming the whole game is like this

Hay que tenerle paciencia a una traducción al inglés imperfecta pero no directamente mala. Pasable.
Y los devs reciben mails aceptando críticas y mejoras sobre la traudcción o errores que hayas encontrado.
Es un juego de detective con elementos de aventura gráfica tipo Sherlock de Frogwares, con sistemas de lógica, testimonio y evidencia basados en Ace Attorney. (Hasta tiene un juicio, y la "deduction dance" de TGAA) El gameplay fuera de los elementos deductivos te hace explorar en modo sidescroller, comparable en presentación a algo como los Spirit Hunter NG. Tiene algunas mecánicas originales incluso.
El problema acá es lisa y llanamente el presupuesto. Tiene una buena historia, buenos misterios, no gasta tiempo con cosas obvias como AA, el juego salta sobre las conexiones lógicas tan pero tan evidentes que ni te hace gastar tiempo presentando evidencia para eso which is nice I guess.
Hasta que aplican eso a tirarte a señalar un culpable de forma un poco impetuosa en algunos casos... pero tengo que reconocer que es satisfactorio, cuando ya lo habías resuelto en tu cabeza, poder acusar de un saque sin dar mil circunloquios como en AA.
Aunque, el tema del pulido, en juego y traducción, pueden irritar a algunos sobre todo cuando la traducción ofusca un poco la lógica. Tiene parte del problema que plaga todo juego de detectives. El famoso "sé la respuesta pero no sé por qué forma y mecanismos puntuales el juego quiere que se la comunique", que ya está en AA pero la verdad, el juego tiene más lógica que muchos casos de Ace Attorney y con una traducción más pulida quizá no hubiera visto un solo Game Over.
Es una muy linda companion piece a The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, ya que también tiene lugar en el período donde oriente le agacha la cabeza a los poderes occidentales de finales del siglo XIX e intenta emularlos con relaciones medio carnales.
Es muy interesante ver conflictos sobre los comienzos de la industrialización china donde los personajes chinos temen por no poder desarrollar su país en un ambiente imperialista, donde están económicamente colonizados, sabiendo que en el presente sopapearon al mundo entero en ese aspecto.
Hay pequeñas lecciones de historia y cultura muy copadas en el medio.
Toma inspiración de múltiples tipos de juegos detectivescos, sobre todo los AA de los cuales captura la "lógica" enrevesada de los misterios. Pero sin exageraciones, y con una duración por caso más corta lo cual hace que fluya mejor que AA ocasionalmente. Aunque por momentos, como dije, no está claro que cazzo presentar en qué orden y la traducción debería mejorar un poco ahí.
TLDR: Si te gustó The Great Ace Attorney, y podés tolerar una presentación y una traducción al inglés limitadas por el bajo presupuesto hay un juego interesante acá.

It needs WAY more optimization, particularly on the CPU side. Framegen would be welcome. Even so, it's not much of a looker, so the performance cost is not in tune with the relatively meh visuals which only seem to ramp up in cutscenes. The MTX on a 70USD game, are dumb and needing an item for fast travel or changing your looks is annoying. Does make you think if they tweaked it so it takes longer to get those items so you just pay for them, which is silly. Also you cant make multiple characters for some reason. You have to delete save folders, and mess with the steam cloud. Why?

The game seems as narratively loose as the first one but pretty fun still. Hope there's more of a narrative in this one.