Recent reviews by Kwiper

Let's go gambling!

the real bank robbery was the friends we made along the way

me and my hot half elf gf save the world with our muscle mommy and gay best friends

I backed this game all the way back when its indiegogo campaign launched, so I've been looking forward to it for quite some time. Now that I've finished it, I enjoyed it just fine, it definitely scratched that lawyer game itch and there's a lot to like about it...

But it has some issues.

The game definitely needed a lot more QA time. Throughout my playthrough, I encountered a good many typos in every case. Some of them were so obvious (like missed punctuation, missing words, etc.) that it's almost like they weren't tested beforehand. On top of that, there were a few instances where names were clearly changed during development, but sometimes some elements weren't changed to reflect that so you had witnesses that were called one name but their name tag said another. Some UI elements weren't aligned properly, and some evidence had text that was blocked by the present evidence button. Also a lot of evidence still looked like they were using placeholder icons. The game was pushed up a week from its initial release date, but I don't think it should have been. Even that extra week could have fixed a lot.

I enjoyed the story just fine but some elements in most of the cases really bugged me. As you play through the game, you'll notice that there's a good number of evidence that just goes unused. This makes each investigation and trial not feel as tight as they are in an Ace Attorney game as there's a bunch of stuff that isn't even relevant to the case. In an Ace Attorney game, EVERYTHING gets used at least once, even for innocuous things. Furthermore, there were some plotlines that are implied to play a very important role later on... but then they're just never brought up again. I feel like this was a result of some things being cut and changed throughout development but if that's the case, those references should've just been cut full stop. If you've played the game, you'll know what I'm talking about. It has to do with a girl and her boat.

I really enjoyed a lot of the cases. Being set in a magical world, you can do a lot of unique things with the genre that haven't been done before. And for the most part, the game does that really well. These are cases that you can ONLY do in a game that has magic. And I really appreciate the game for taking full advantage of that. But, there are moments in cases that are very frustratingly obtuse. Sometimes during cross-examination, the game will heavily imply you're supposed to be paying attention to one line, by changing witness testimony after pressing it, but then it'll turn out the correct solution was a completely different line. Or maybe the descriptions in the evidence you have are too vague to match what they're supposed to be presented to. In these cases, they left me frustrated and brute-forcing the solution rather than trying to rationalize the solution myself, which isn't what you want in a lawyer game. Thankfully, these moments don't happen that often but they are blemishes on otherwise really solid trials.

Other than that, I quite enjoyed the game, the music and art are really strong points and the game has some pretty good writing for the most part, albeit it does take itself a bit too seriously at some points and can be a bit edgy. But that's fine. The game sets up a sequel in its post-credits scene, but if the team does decide to follow up on this game, I hope they address the many issues present in this first game because it's a solid foundation to do something great with. If you want something to scratch that lawyer game itch, I do recommend it.

My controller's RB button broke while playing but I didn't wanna repair it yet because the game was just too good to put down.

I don't think this game is bad, I think in general it's a competent game that lays the foundation for something even greater. But I can't say I particularly enjoyed it that much, even as a big Harry Potter fan growing up.

In terms of what the game does really well, the world design is absolutely spectacular. I grew up with Harry Potter, I've fantasized about visiting Hogwarts before just like everybody else playing this game, and in that aspect, Avalanche nailed it. Not just Hogwarts itself, but the world around it too. Frankly, I didn't expect the world outside Hogwarts to be that vast and detailed, but they did it anyways. Within the castle walls is where the game shines the most. Exploring the hallways, finding my way around the castle, recognizing landmarks, was incredible. I played the game without a minimap and without the navigation HUD, which meant I had to engage with every aspect of the world to find my way. In my opinion, that's the best way to play a game like this, as it forces you to really pay attention to all the details of the world and absorb it for yourself. The castle is filled with so many recognizable points of interest that it's so easy to build your own mental map of the place. The developers did an amazing job here, and I hope they continue to work on worlds like this one in their future projects.

That's kind of where my enjoyment of the game ends. Everything else about the game felt very safe or very shallow. Side quests not tied to the main story or relationship quests were pretty unremarkable. The majority of them were either fetch quests or going to specific points on the map. Besides the few that introduced new puzzles for the player, I didn't really remember them that much, and I only really did them just to get some more experience to level up. Some of the puzzles are clever but they all have really specific solutions that I thought was kind of disappointing. I would've liked to have been able to solve puzzles in different ways using different spells, encouraging creativity. You get such a wide array of spells, and the fact you only use about 5 for the majority of the puzzles in this game is just a bit disappointing.

The main story itself is fine, but nothing really to write home about. It was fairly by the books, I could tell where it was going pretty early on, and while there were some interesting developments, I can't say I really cared about any of the characters involved. You don't learn much about any of the major players except for like one character in flashbacks, who's already dead so they only exist as a plot device. Not to mention, the story is entirely linear with no branching paths except for one dialogue choice at the very end, which I thought was just underwhelming. The game makes it a single insular black and white choice that locks you into the "good" and "bad" end, but your choice doesn't even feel that impactful because there are no real consequences for your choice. If you're going to have 99% of the game be linear with only one choice at the end that barely changes anything, just don't bother with that illusion of choice.

The more enjoyable stories were the companion relationship stories, which exist in parallel with the main story. I found them to be far more interesting than the main story itself, because I got invested in seeing how these companions would develop and change over the course of them. My favourite of the stories, the one with the Slytherin kid, gets really dark, and you start to question your own morals within it, which I found to be so cool. You start to feel bad for the people around him, and if you decide to enable his choices, you become complicit within it, and I think that's just such a cool and interesting narrative choice. I wish I could say the same about the main story, and I wish the consequences for choosing the darker path in this questline also impacted other aspects of the game. But it doesn't, and I'll get to that later. I think it's a shame there wasn't a fourth companion for Ravenclaw, as that was the house I picked. There's like one Ravenclaw kid who joins you on one main story mission and that's about it. I was a bit disappointed there, but it's possible one was cut out for the sake of time.

This is going to be my hottest take, but I didn't really like the combat that much, and especially the combat encounters. Starting with the combat system itself, it's fine, but really spammy. You get a wide variety of spells to choose from, but in practicality all the spells of the different colours are just used the same for each colour type. There's some synergy between certain spells, like how you can use Diffindo on an enemy frozen with Glacius to deal more damage, but it's not significant enough where it changes up your playstyle that drastically. No matter what spells I had selected, I was always just spamming the basic cast until I had spells charged up, and used them on enemies with shields, and then dodged whenever the indicator game up. That's it, that's the whole combat loop. You do this on every single enemy in the game, even the bosses. It got old real fast, especially with the quality of enemy encounters in this game. Even with the spell variety, there just aren't many opportunities for creativity here.

In every major dungeon or combat event, you're just fighting hordes of enemies with maybe one big tanky guy. The tanky guys take so long to kill, you're gonna focus on them more while you avoid the other enemies, simply because it is easier to do so. There's no strategy in that, only your ability to dodge/counter incoming attacks while slowly whittling down the health of another enemy. Rinse, and repeat. Throwing huge hordes of enemies at the player doesn't make combat more difficult, it just makes it more tedious, and there aren't that many good crowd control/AOE spells for the player to use. Again, a limitation of the combat system. Because all the major combat encounters follow this formula, once you find a rhythm that works for you, you're just going to be using it for the rest of the game with very little variety. It got to the point where I was using Avada Kedavra once I unlocked it just to speed up battles, and not because it was cool and edgy.

Speaking of the Unforgivables, while it's great that they're included, I don't think they were fully integrated into the game the best that they could be. As in, once you get them, there are no interesting consequences for using them. If you use them in front of your friends, they're just a bit disappointed in you and move on. Not really the reaction you'd expect from using the SINGLE MOST POWERFUL AND ILLEGAL SPELLS IN THE WORLD. This is the type of magic that should have serious ramifications on yourself and your relationships, and the fact that all you get is a disapproving comment for using them instead of drasically changing the course of relationships and story progression really undermines the impact these spells should have.

Graphically, the game is stunning but the performance on PC is inexcusable. I played and beat this game before the patch so I don't know if that's been fixed, but my experience was quite bad. I am playing on a 3070, Ryzen 5600x, 48GB of RAM. I should be well over the recommended specs, but even when I tried playing on *medium* quality, I was getting severe frame drops. Hopefully it is fixed as of writing this.

Overall, it has really good aspects, but is brought down by really underwhelming and disappointing game design and story. I do hope Avalanche continues to build on this with expansions, maybe even a sequel that addresses my issues with the game, because as I said, there is a solid foundation here for a great game.

Don't you dare go Hollow

OH YEAH BABY IT'S DREAD BURNING TIME

Can't wait to play my favourite game for the 5th time for the first time!!!

thank you insomniac games for providing a free game with this photo mode