Recent reviews by JPM岩

This mod was a lot of fun, I liked it a lot better then Reloaded, which I felt was over complicating things for the sake of "look what we can do", vs Revolution, which adds onto existing mechanics, in a fun way. The story was neat, though the ending I feel was abrupt, and puzzles, I only have two or three chambers where I have gripes with (two I needed to look up because the signage was just awful, and I feel a few more info signs here and there would've maybe me enjoy some chambers more). The new mechanics introduced, however, were amazing. More depth with the gels (granted I dont recall the showers existing in vanilla, so if they were there, oops). The overgrown outdoors section allowing you to climb around Aperature. My favorite, however, was the double laser. It really reminded my of the board game, Khet, and I hope to see more laser-like puzzles like this in the future.
Overall, a great mod, perfect for those you really did not like Reloaded, maybe doubley perfect if you did. It feels really like the name says, Portal: Reloaded.

I REALLY enjoyed this game. The puzzles were fantastic, the setting was amazing, the gardening towards the end got SUPER creative. I love just about everything about it. However, I leave a negative review because of the price. I beat this game in 3 hours, and even on sale, the game is 22 dollars. Everything is great but the price, but the steep price for such a short game forces me to leave this review.

This game is not fun, simple as. I thought I would really enjoy this game since I enjoy Holopro, but the only thing this game has going is art. I'll start by saying this game looks great. the aesthetic is amazing, the music is top notch, visually everything there. But Kayu is not a game designer by any means, and it heavily shows.
First off, controls are extremely unresponsive. At points I had a full second delay between input and reaction in game. It made even simple fights against basic enemies really unfun. Next, enemies can just infinitely combo you. While I understand you want the player to not be this overpowered sponge, there's a point where you, as a designer, have to realize that just infinitely combing the player, when the player can't even remotely do the same, isn't fun. There were points I just stopped playing because responding to the game and doing nothing were the exact same experience. On top of that, I didnt think it was possible, but you get punished for combos. If you are in a combo, instead of getting faster, you actually attack slower, leaving you wide open for enemy attacks. This alone tells me the game never actually had proper playtesting, as this is something games have really done a good job of since the early 90s.
You'd think "Well JPM, what about specials?" To which I'd say "they're garbage!" Granted, I only played as Polka, but you can very quickly tell there was oshi-bias, as Polka's specials are utter crap. Her Initial Special summons two Field Weapons with a small AoE burst, which sounds great. However, Polka has zero synergy with this, Field Weapons past World 1 become more a burden than a bonus, unless you get lucky with gear upgrades, which even, mean nothing in late game. And you'd think "Oh well she gets a bonus right?" Nope! You can't use specials, you can't use charged attacks, nothing. You can at most throw, but guess what, Field weapons are as strong as regular attacks, so they're just aesthetic, outside of slight bonuses, like more coins or poison (which, poison is extremely weak). Polka's second special is where she uses her propeller to attack with a massive AoE. However, if you get hit at all, this completely cancels the attack, meaning you have to wait for it to fully recharge if you get hit even within the first frame. Finally, her Super Special does very little damage. You jump on a damaing circus ball, and roll around. But using this against Koyori, the first boss, this basically did no damage. Are moves better for other characters? Maybe. But seeing as 1/4 characters is just bad with zero balancing or any synergy design being at a solid 0%, you can heavily tell there's a bias.
Enemies too get extremely boring. Even in World 5, you start to fight the same 3 enemies in essentially a loop, with random boss rushes thrown in. I like the ideal of enemies being uniform per world, which works great, but towards the end, enemies look visually identical, making it harder to decipher exactly what you're fighting. You also have enemies that will just perfect dodge your attacks, combine with with ranged enemies that teleport, basic minions just become chores. Minibosses also get more annoying than fun. They just start to spam homing projectiles that dont visually match their hit boxes, so you'll take damage from literally nothing.
Combat itself too, just sucks. Your melee range doesn't even remotely match the sprite, with Polka, your melee range is maybe half of what the sprite visually shows. You also have no vertical attacks, meaning you can ONLY attack left and right. However, enemies get vertical attacks, meaning you're just kiting. But, thanks to the massive before-mentioned input delays, you're not even kiting. You're just soaking damage with your combos, making it feel like fighting enemies is more hassle than it should be. Boss fights also feel extremely unfair and unfun. Perfect homing moves, scripted invincibility, hitboxes not matching move sprites, it's a mess. On top of it, the bosses will summon enemies during their fights, so you're not only dealing with screen-wide AoEs, you have to deal with enemies interrupting your combos and specials too. Combat feels like it heavily revolves around item useage, which also tells me there was little gameplay balancing done.
Last but not least, the UI is HORRENDOUS. I cannot state this enough, Ui is THE most important thing a video game should have, and functionality should always prioritize looks, and this game botched it. Menus look like they were fan art pieces that in 5 minutes were made into functions. The pause menu, which does a great job looking like a paused YouTube stream, does a horrible job portraying a menu. the icons the player interacts with are tiny and in the top right of the screen. Your inventory which you interact with the most, ideally, takes up less than 10% of the pause menu, because God forbid we get in the way of Kayu's art. The main menu is also a perfect example of this, with the actual gameplay options taking up a minuscule part of the screen. Last but not least, whoever designed the shop UI needs to be just removed from the team. The buttons make no sense and are unlabeled, I didn't even know you could sell anything until I got an achievement saying I could. The shop menu is also full of two separate scroll menus, which, why not just make the shop menu itself larger? You It's okay to use more than 15% of the screen for these things, I don't know if large UI like, killed Kayu's dog or something, but he seems scared of it. The Shop's UI for the player's inventory is also, I kid you not, a 10x50 pixel space. You have to literally scroll through the menu to see a full visual of the sprite. It's absolutely God awful.
I know people will say "well it's designed around multiplayer!" Well, then delay it? This shouldn't be an abstract concept, suck up your pride, and delay it. In it's current state, the game is nowhere near complete. If this is what hololive fangames are going to be like, they should just stop. I feel bad for saying this, but this game is designed to be streamed to the audience, with Kaela, a notorious hololive girl known for streaming 24 hours almost daily, being the only talent that is an intractable NPC. It's a streambait game that needed a delay, and is going to coast by because it's hololive.
Simply put, it's not fun.

I found this game as something Pikmin fans enjoyed, and really was a good "Pikmin-like" game, controllable units that really do differentiate each other, provide different strategies for approaching enemies, etc. World 1 started this way, and towards the end, I started to understand proper combat. You uses Guardians as your front liners, Sentinels as your main power, then the Mages as a support unit. Combat was REALLY fun. However, the final boss of World 1, a giant spider, proved me wrong.
The level started with a chase sequence, which was whatever, get through the collapsing tunnel, nothing crazy, but rather out of place. Then, the boss fight starts. The way I'm assuming youre supposed to use units, is working fine. Boss homes in on the player occasionally, meaning you dont just stand there, and you occasionally summon more units, nothing special. However, halfway through, little babies spawn, and everything youre taught so far in the game gets thrown out the window. The babies one shot your guardians, something the game specifically states cant be done, as Guardians are you tank units, and within seconds, your army is basically nothing. If I missed a mechanic or something, I dont know, as nothing in game indicated anything. I tried multiple tactics, using multiple units vs one baby, spamming a ton of damage vs one baby, etc, nothing. The babies took longer to kill than the actual boss, and left a VERY sour taste in my mouth. I thought to press on, maybe it was a fluke, first big boss for the devs in the game, I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
World 2 started, and eventually, I stumble across Commanders, a new unit. These are the most useless unit in the game thus far, and do nothing but waste Anima, and my journey with them were extremely disappointing. Then, traversing through this first level, I ran into an absolutely horribly designed mini boss. It would, once again, oneshot my guardians, and basically everything else, had movement much faster than minions' movement, so I was constantly losing units, and had an attack that would just stop units from attacking, despite being in a "phase" where the game specifically marks the enemy has weakened. A normally 5 minute tops fight turned into a 20 minute slog. I then, immediately after ran into another miniboss that made me just shut off the game. It was an idle boss, meaning it couldnt move, but all it did was push away units outside of attacking range, including Sentinels with their range upgrade, and then suck them up to, surprise, instantly kill my units. At one point, the boss just spammed this over and over, and genuinely none of my units could attack, they would just be either pushed away only to be instantly killed, or just instantly killed. All of this was going on while around the arena, instant killing tornados were spawning. After about 7ish minutes, the boss lost maybe a tenth of it's HP and I just shut off the game. It was just miserable to play.
It sucks that I have to say this game is bad, but there's no other way to describe it. It has an extremely engaging story, Otto feels very Olimar-like in that he's a "normal guy", and says probably the hardest line I've ever seen in a video game, "Anna is my world, Zhar [the villain] can rule the rest of it". The RPG elements also work really well, being able to upgrade not only your character, but your units as well. And the first world, up until the spider, worked REALLY well. But that spider, and fights after absolutely destroyed any enthusiasm I had for find a potential "Pikmin-like". It hurts me to say this, but this game is just bad.

A genuinely God awful game, inb almost every way of describing it. I bought this game as I saw folks saying it was a solid Pikmin clone and thought to myself "might as well buy it on sale, try it out". Early game, I would say "absolutely, this definitely feels like a Pikmin-like". Then, once I unlocked the blues, the game COMPLETELY changed it's progression. It no longer was about controlling a horde of goblins to do tasks. It turned into an EXTREMELY repetitive puzzle game, where you send your goblins out and hope theyll follow your directional inputs. It's not a "they will", barely even a "might", as this mechanic just does not work well enough to constitute entire dungeons designed around it. You quickly get introduced to enemies specific to this environment, which, if you were allowed any other goblin type, there'd be no issue. Reds have ranged, greens deal good damage to turned backs, and browns are just beserkers. But youre forced with blues, which are specifically nerfed to not only do piss all for damage, but make you utilize timed-events to bait enemies, which DOES NOT EVEN WORK most the time. Couple this with the fact that grinding for types is a slog due to only certain enemies give the souls you need to spawn more, this one type has basically killed all enjoy I've had for this game. And, from what I've read, I've gotten really far. It's sad to say that such an original take on a Pikmin-like with actually relative good feeling controls, get killed by this forced, God-awful mechanic. If anyone knows of any mods or such that can just make things for these types of puzzles easier, let me know, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, its just so bad.

If you enjoyed past Monster Hunter titles, you're going to enjoy this one. It's the same formula it's been for 20 years, you kill monsters for pants to wear to kill the next monster. Combat is much more fluid this time around, and skills are deefinately more balanced. One thing I really appreciate is that weaker armors can have extremely good skills to make up for the low defense, and really hones in for a "higher risk for damage" set up. Rampages are okay, I wish more were done with them, but theyre probably not coming back. The new monsters are great as always. Wirebugs and Switch Skills are great, definately taking to figure out how to use effectively, with Switch Skills being a lot like Arts from Generations. 10/10.

Wild at Heart is a game that tries to emulate one of my favorite game franchises ever, Pikmin. It's a psuedo-RTS, where you have different units, and travel across the overworld to use your units to save the day. Or at least tries to, but does a very poor job at it.
"Wield an ever-growing herd of quirky creatures to rebuild broken paths, battle perilous beasts, and solve peculiar puzzles in a rich, interconnected world. Join two young runaways as they unravel the mysteries of a lost realm in this nostalgic storybook fantasy!" This blurb is just one lie after another.
"Quirky creatures" is probably the most truthful, Spritelings are very much like Pikmin from the series of the same game, and do offer a lot of unique takes (except one is a direct rip off of Red Pikmin, fire resistant and better fight). Unfortunately, most puzzles fall flat and are a simple "use x type on y obstacle". Very rarely do you complete a puzzle and feel satisfied. The types are just forced, to the point, almost every puzzle will have invisible walls or change some property to force you to do things in a specific way (for example, sprites can go into water, but one particular puzzle, they for some reason cant go into the same water, despite being connected to the same body). It restricts player options, something Pikmin is known to have to a degree, and shows poor puzzle making (the ice world was probably the only area with actually engaging puzzles, even then, i cheesed half of them).
"Rebuild Broken Paths" I'm not sure what this entails to, everything was just a simple "move x part with y amount of sprites". If it means story, the story was easily forgettable, really forcing you to watch unenguaging cutscenes of two kids talking around a campfire.
"Battle Perilous Beasts". Combat is just bad. You cant move while throwing your sprites, and it's really easy to get stunlocked by enemies because of this. The sprites' AI is also horrendous, most of the time they'll just stand still and ignore enemies unless they directly touch them with the initial throw, meaning you can throw 30, and only 5 will actually fight. Also, the sprites have hidden HP bars that you can only see by going through various menus. But your sprites will rarely die, because enemies are just super bland. One enemy, a giant rock golem, which seems to be a midboss, does next to no damage, it's strongest attack targeting the player, not the sprites.
"Rich Interconnect World". The world is almost always empty and void of life. All enemies are just off to the side, meaning 9/10 you need to go out of your way to find enemies, or theyre right by a gate to the next area, which, outside of one section in the Wispwagon, does not even remotely feel connected. Just different levels stuck together by doors that can only be accessed by two or three tunnels.
I dont know what's remotely nostalgic about the game, other than it seems to take place in the 90s. It's hardly nostalgic to Pikmin, and anyone who says "this is better than Pikmin" has NEVER played Pikmin. This game has a lot of wasted potential. For 25 dollars, this game is an absolute rip off (beat the game in under 8 hours), your money is better spent else where.

I want to like this game, I really do, but it has some really big flaws that, in my opinion, make it not even worth 6 dollars. The first is the hit reg, which makes absolutely makes no sense. You can shoot a wall, and kill a person, you can shoot someone sitting still and have the bullets fly through them. Feels like I'm playing a Source game. Second is drifting, which, I understand it's a core mechanic, but it's nonsensical in how it works. Sometimes, you can drift through a field of grass, with no downsides, other times, you can go slightly off the path, and get stopped dead in your tracks. This REALLY needs improvement. Finally, cheaters. I wouldn't think that cheaters would be in a game like this, but I was wrong. Had a lag guy on my team who killed a good 12 players solo, at one point, 4 players shooting him and he was taking no damage, ran into another guy who was flying, and another that walked through walls, and could shoot through walls.
Again, I really want to the like this game, but it's not even worth the 6 dollars, especially when I know I can play games on Steam for 3 dollars, that were made in less than 5 weeks, and play better.

An amazing addition for those who enjoyed the base game, and want more. While the DLC does boast new monsters, new subspecies, new armor and weapons, the biggest thing is Master Rank. Replacing older games' system of GRank (it's the same thing), it adds a new level of difficulty to the game for those looking for a harder challenge. Master Ranks new skills, weapon moves, armors, weapons, augmentations, events, basically a ton new everything and then some. The new areas and monsters look beautiful, and music sounds great, whether its new themes like Seliana or the Hoarfrost, or returning themes, like Nargacuga or Glavenus.
My personal favorite of the whole expansion though is the Guiding Lands. This after-story area is essentially an endless hunt, with monsters showing up and leaving at random intervals. It also brings a special area leveling mechanic, where different regions within the Guiding Lands can level or delevel, allowing for special monsters to spawn. As of writing this, there are 4 different regions within the Guiding Lands to explore, with two more coming in the future.
This leads me to Free Content Updates. Iceborne is getting free content updates over the next few months, from collabs, to new monsters, to a new siege fight. A lot to come for a great expansion.

This is a very fun, and very relaxing game. The premise is simple, you essentially have a slime farm. You can explore the world to find rarer slimes to farm and make more money. It's very cute, and there's a good chunk to explore and find, whether its in comfy canyons, relaxing mountain hots springs, or vivid jungles. There's also some side stories you can follow to help out other ranchers.
10/10, if I hadnt done everything there was to do twice, I'd do it again.