Recent reviews by Flavor Savior

ABSOLUTE LAW ENFORCEMENT

Sony has officially revised the widely maligned PSN requirement for Helldivers 2, so I can finally recommend the game without any caveats. An impressively well-produced co-op horde shooter with a dev team committed to the community. The pace of updates is rapid, the monetization isn't overly predatory, the gunplay is satisfying and despite the ever-present danger of friendly fire the community is generally pretty cool.

Honestly quite surprised that a grassroots protest from the playerbase would be enough to make Sony reconsider their planned integration with PSN. Glad to see it, hope future PC ports similarly continue without unnecessary ties to Sony's ecosystem.

The most unrealistic thing in this game is the "check engine" light telling you exactly what the problem with your car is.

Why do devs keep putting garish golden weapon skins in video games, does anybody actually like how these things look? The default versions of the axe and the electro are way better. I got these with the day one edition, thank god you can turn them off.

Hades' slogan is that it's the "godlike roguelike", so it requires an appropriately ungodly amount of button mashing to get through.

I've revisited Hades over the past couple of days after the announcement for Hades 2 rekindled my interest; unfortunately this second attempt has similarly petered out several runs into the game, halfway through Elysium. Hades nails a lot of the metanarrative elements, there's always fresh dialogue with interesting characters in your hub zone between runs, there's fun banter between Zagreus and the various bosses you encounter as you attempt to escape Hades, the voice acting is stellar, and the art direction is possibly the best in its genre.

The dealbreaker for me is that the game's combat gets extremely tiresome in a physical way. All of Zagreus's actions (dash, cast, attack) have virtually no windup and hit instantly. In theory, this feels good, the game is very responsive and all of your mistakes are your own fault. However, in order to balance for this rapid moveset, the health values of enemies and bosses balloon over a nearly exponential curve as you move from Tartarus to Asphodel to Elysium and presumably up to the Temple of Styx. The game essentially turns into a really tiresome masher as common enemies demand longer and longer strings of rapid inputs to kill, and bosses require long stretches of button clicking to slowly chip away at their gargantuan lifebars.

Certain weapons are worse about this than others (fists, spear,) and particularly potent combinations of boons may ameliorate the issue during lucky individual runs, but otherwise it's omnipresent and turns me away from trying to complete the game or engage with its myriad progression systems. I hope Hades 2 will be a little less heavy on repetitive inputs, but since it doesn't seem to bother most of the existing audience I'm expecting more of the same. I guess that's fine, it's not an objective flaw and not every game has to meet my stringent criteria for damage-dealt-per-button-press.

Hitman 3 Standard Edition - $60
Hitman 3 Deluxe Edition (some DLC suits and escalation contracts) - $90
Hitman 3 Deluxe Edition + 7 Deadly Sins DLC pack - $120
Hitman Trilogy Standard Edition - $100
Hitman Trilogy + Trilogy Premium Add-On Bundle (DLC content from Hitman 1 + 2 and 3's Deluxe Edition) - $160
Hitman Trilogy + Trilogy Premium Add-On Bundle + 7 Deadly Sins DLC pack (all existing content at time of writing) - $190
(without looking at regional pricing, which is likely worse)

Hitman is one of my favorite franchises and the new trilogy is a perfect successor to Silent Assassin, Contracts and Blood Money, but this pricing model is embarrassing. If Io Interactive wants to charge the price of a full new release (or four new releases) for a title that had come out a year ago on a different storefront, that's their prerogative. In the meantime, prospective customers still need to consult a flow chart to determine what they're getting with which purchase, deal with server issues for a single-player game that has no business requiring a continuous online connection and contend with a needlessly roundabout progression carryover process that could have easily been substituted by importing a local save file from Hitman 1/2.

Io Interactive's game developers deserve props for delivering a dense, polished stealth sandbox. Regrettably, their publishing branch also deserves all the flak they get for extorting their fanbase like this. I recommend a purchase only on sale or after a price drop. Alternatively, play it on GamePass.

EDIT: had to revise "complete" package price because I had overlooked that the Trilogy Premium Add-On Bundle also includes the Deluxe Edition of Hitman 3. Hitman 2 Gold Bundle and Hitman 1 GOTY Edition is advised for the people that missed only one of those two games. Apologies to anyone affected.

A gaudy vaporwave nightmare with exceptional, open-ended level design and a varied arsenal of player tools set in a world of post-late stage terminal capitalism. A layer cake of secret weapons, levels and game mechanics. Well worth the price of admission if you can stomach its loud presentation and politics. One of a kind; CEO mindset required.

Step 1: obtain the suppunch perk. You can now reflect bullets back at the shooter by punching them with your bare hands.

Step 2: obtain the defall perk. Any time you reflect a bullet, you will also simultaneously reflect every other bullet on stage back at their respective shooters.

You now have an unarmed build dedicated to killing enemies with their own bullets. Good game, solid follow-up to the original.

The somewhat awkwardly titled I, Dracula: Genesis is a very solid attempt at the twin-stick shooter roguelite subgenre popularized by games such as The Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon. Even though this title is still in Early Access and I've only just scratched the surface (having completed the introductory universe and gotten the first ending), I am already enjoying ID:G more than those aforementioned titles.

The art style for this title is reminiscent of Earthworm Jim and Toejam and Earl. Even if you didn't grow up with these games, the artistry on display should be commended; every character, enemy, NPC, item and environmental element are detailed and lavishly animated. Unfortunately this can lead to some issues—the game looks very busy in motion, and it can be a challenge to pick out certain enemies and hostile projectiles among the onslaught of visual confusion, as the player character shoots their own projectiles unique to their gun.
Everything from available items, enemies, level hazards and challenge rooms must be unlocked by leveling up your save file through continued play. While this is rewarding and encourages the just-one-more-run mentality, your first few runs may appear quite similar, with a relatively small pool of enemies and available guns. Entire game systems like consumable storage, charge weapons and cooldown skills must be unlocked during gameplay by engaging with small challenge rooms. The game effectively becomes deeper and mechanically more complex with subsequent playthroughs.

The player character possesses a long jump capable of clearing most enemy projectiles and repositioning at a moment's notice. Air control takes some getting used to, it feels a little slippery, wider horizontally than vertically (though this may just be a side-effect of the isometric perspective). Precise jumping is sometimes required due to the abundance of damaging surfaces. Some surfaces are bouncy, some disable your guns, some are damaging, some are damaging only after you stand still for a second, some are poisonous or radioactive, et cetera. Navigating islands can be more dangerous than the enemies that inhabit them.

It should be noted too, the game feels far better with keyboard and mouse than on a controller. Whereas the controller is perfectly responsive, it just feels a bit odd with the crosshairs locked so close to your character at such an irregular perspective. Consistently hitting enemies was much more challenging for me on a controller than with a mouse.

Overall, would definitely recommend this title to anybody who enjoys twin-stick roguelites. I'm very keen to see future updates and hope the game does well enough to keep the studio afloat. Would happily support continued development and improvement.

Having completed Tokyo 42’s story campaign and discovered most of its secrets and collectibles, I’m more than a little conflicted writing this review; it’s undeniably stylish and tickles my fancy for Japanesque cyberpunk, but there are a host of issues holding it back.

The story is told from the perspective of your faceless, voiceless protagonist, a concession likely made because of your ability to switch character ‘skins’ at a moment’s notice to blend into the crowd and lose pursuers. The skin-swapping mechanic is fresh, but underused at best and completely worthless at worst: it will not throw off any enemies when inside gang strongholds or during infiltration/assassination/arena missions–in other words, the vast majority of missions. This power also costs half of your energy bar, which doesn’t replenish unless you die and respawn or stand on infrequently-placed charging tiles.

Most missions will allow you either the stealthy or the guns-blazing approach, though either playstyle has its own set of glaring problems. Stealth is simplistic and functions on a line-of-sight basis: a bar fills above an enemy’s head when you’re within its cone of vision, and if you’re unable to break LOS before the bar fills, it and all nearby enemies will switch to alert status and start shooting at you. It doesn’t matter if you murder another character in plain view, as long as you’re able to break LOS in time and aren’t using a gun or grenade. Bodies are purely cosmetic and will not alert guards. Unless you’re fortunate enough to discover a silenced weapon–of which only one is immediately available behind a series of obtusely-hidden buttons–you will be limited to using a katana or a golf club during a stealthy approach.

It is during open firefights against multiple opponents that the game starts explicitly failing. You can only move the camera in sharp 45-degree increments, which is consistently jarring from the start of the game to its conclusion. Because the game is set on a flat-lit isometric perspective, your view is aggressively anti-perspective: waist-high cover, walls, stairs and uneven terrain are liable to be completely invisible depending on the angle of your view. It’s almost like M. C. Escher himself stirred from beyond the grave and decided to code an isometric cover-based shooter. And although you may struggle to adjust after a camera turn, enemy AI is always precisely on-target; enemies will expertly lead their snail-speed bullets to catch you as you dash between cover, and will bounce their grenades through and over any obstacles like a physics major playing Beer Pong. Any confrontation with multiple gunmen will inevitably boil down to a trial-and-error slog, given that it only takes a single bullet to set your character back to your last checkpoint. Additionally, because of how far out the camera is, run-and-gunning is almost always a bad idea because it’s borderline impossible to keep an eye on your own character while aiming at your enemies.

The story as a whole is comical but largely uninteresting and (barring a few references to some pulp cyberpunk like Ghost in the Shell, Bladerunner and Redline) serves only as a container for your character to bounce around Tokyo completing cold-blooded contract murders to clear his name after being framed for cold-blooded contract murder.

Ultimately I have to conclude that Tokyo 42’s weaknesses outweigh its strengths, but despite that I still felt compelled to finish it, so it isn’t completely unenjoyable. You might find that the game's aesthetic is sufficient encouragement to keep going, depending on your tolerance for unintuitive camera control. I just can’t help but wish that it was better than it is.


+ art style, environmental design, color palette
+ cyberpunk narrative centered around assassins in a semi-open playground world
+ some of the platforming puzzles are pretty neat
+ numerous secrets
+ motorbikes are cool and so are cats

+/- nemesis system is a neat idea but functionally means that occasionally you may be gunned down by a random civilian while you’re focusing on something else

- surprisingly, shootouts with multiple expert marksmen in an absurd Escherverse where depth only exists in an abstract sense can be frustrating
- logimax robots launch grenades at intervals of about a second while drowning the player in machine gun fire
- motorbike controls are rough
- by extension, time trials on foot also occasionally rough
- stealth is based on timed line-of-sight and is extremely basic
- discounting the setpieces, story is kind of mediocre