Recent reviews by Nipukka

The game isn't terrible by any means. Graphics are absolutely gorgeous and environments are quite interesting to explore and go through. Very interconnected design, though can get exhaustingly complex at times. Animations are OK, definitely janky and a bit stiff but tolerable nonetheless (aside from the spear animations, those are horrendous). Voice acting is moderately weak but story doesn't matter in a game like this anyways.

I enjoyed my time with this game but whilst exploring an expansive castle level I got hit with the unmistakable feeling of sheer boredom. It was caused by an abundance of enemies that are almost all reused from the very first level onward. Basic mage stick guy, two-handed mace guy, crossbow dude, one-handed mace shield guy and some dogs over and over and over again.

The Umbral Realm is even worse about this. It's just a bunch of waddling zombies and occasionally a fat fly, rare sickle dudes and a few big guys who only take damage from behind. But it's just 99% waddling zombies which gets very old, very quick.

Enemies you encounter as minibosses are quickly turned into mob types that are littered throughout the next levels, only adding to the tedium as you become more familiar with them. One of the worst offenders is a large two-handed weapon type of enemy that has a few distinct models but each one uses the same exact moveset.

I'm no stranger to reused enemies, I love Elden Ring and it has plenty of recolored / reused enemies. But ER nonetheless has a vast quantity more enemy variety compared to this game. Even Limgrave and Weeping Peninsula alone has probably triple the amount of enemy variety compared to this game.

Initial impressions were decent. Game felt smooth, graphics and art style are excellent and the character controls well. Dialogue was sappy but tolerable.

However, two aspects killed the experience for me before it properly even began.

Firstly, the limited customization for controls. I always rebind dodge to the B / Circle button on a controller, and the default binding for dodge in this game is RT. No big deal, just change it to a different button, right? Wrong. There are three preset options for controls, and if I wanted dodge on B, it convoluted the skill casting controls (to a clunky combination of Y+Shoulder buttons instead of RB + Face buttons) and attacks were moved to shoulder buttons as well. I could have perhaps gotten used to this if it wasn't for the second point that made me ALT + F4 after beating the first boss of the game.

Without a hint of exaggeration, this game has the worst UI bloat I have ever seen before. And the only customization given to you is the option to disable the map.. that's it, nothing else. When the party members joined in during the boss battle, I knew I couldn't play this game further.

In no particular order you have:

1. Boss healthbar on the top of the screen. Not even at the very top, it's offset from the edge of the screen in a way that leaves around 10% empty space at the top of it, leaving less room for the actual game and making things feel more cluttered for no reason.
   
2. Permanent quest objective displayed at all times at the top right of the screen, again placed at an annoying offset that leaves wasted space above it.
   
3. Enormous, glowing percentage number on the middle right of the screen that says "LINK X%", embellished with sparkles and unnecessary art around it. Directly below it are lists of team members whom it can be used with, further cluttering the screen.
   
4. Hideously massive list of controls on the bottom right of the screen, showing you a permanent tutorial on how to attack, jump, dodge and so on. Even sprinting and pause menu is permanently visible for some reason. This is something that you can not turn off, and it takes a significant chunk of an already cluttered screen.
   
5. An indicator directly next to your character, showing some kind of a level that your skill has reached. This font is big enough that it's 15-20% as big as your character is, with zero transparency to it. I have never seen a more obnoxious UI element in a game before, so that's cool.
   
6. Mandatory damage numbers that of course can not be edited or turned off.
   
7. Even the lock-on icon is a massive circle instead of a relatively innocuous dot or a similar icon like most games use.
   
8. On the bottom-left there's further instructions on how to guard and lock-on. Of course offset about 10% from the side so as to constrict everything nice and tight. Next to it is a permanent, glowing list of consumables for your viewing convenience.
   
9. And the absolute worst offender of them all, the teammate list. This takes up the top-left of the screen, stretching down vertically all the way to the middle of the screen. It lists out every single team member's health, buffs, icon, element type and some kind of an orange bar. It is extremely distracting and annoying to look at. It even lists out the blue-haired girl as "GUEST" at the very bottom because apparently that's important information for us to see during battle.

I'm willing to tolerate annoying UI elements to a degree, but this game goes above and beyond with its incessant UI bloat. People make fun of ubisoft games for obnoxious UI, but at least in those games you can turn off most UI elements as you please. There is such a beautiful, fun game here but unfortunately the developers have done their very best to hide as much of it as humanly possible.

The variety of digimon available to use is really impressive. The digimon models look phenomenal and are very detailed even if the game itself is no graphical powerhouse. Combat system leans perhaps a bit too heavily on matching weaknesses for my liking but so far it's felt alright. Being able to freely assign various different skills to digimon helps building a versatile team for many different encounters.

On hard difficulty the normal fights have felt easy but boss fights can get a bit tricky, which is a fine balance.

Evolving mons is fun because it silhouettes the digimon prior to evolving, so it's always interesting to see exactly what you get. But the menus and systems involved with it are a bit clunky to use. The digifarm system especially is in need of an update as it's just tedious to browse and use. The menus overall are not the best but not outright terrible either.

Dialogue is so-so, passable but at times infuriating. The game loves to repeat the same key points over and over again which gets frustrating after the first few times it's been heard. "Could these two events be connected?" is especially something that the game refuses to shut up about.

But despite the shortcomings this is an easy recommendation for me.

Bought this on sale a while ago and fired it up on a whim. Game seemed to run fine aside from some initial stuttering but it did level out. The core idea behind this game is cool, blending melee combat and weapons together for a cool arcade-style FPS. There's even air juggling with your sword, and it swings very fast. Enemies did blend into the environment quite a bit and it was often difficult to see them, though I suppose it makes sense since they were wearing military uniforms and the weather was very gloomy in the first level. There's a moderate amount of jank but that's fine.

But buyer beware, this game has some intense screen shake effects for nearly everything that's happening. Even a simple jump makes the screen visibly shake upon landing. And it just seems to intensify during combat. There are options to disable motion blur but absolutely no options for the obscene screen shaking. The camera also bobs around very excessively when running around. I have played many different FPS games in the past and none of them felt quite as.. "unwieldy" as this game did. The camera shakes around so much in this game that it straight up ruined the entire experience for me personally.

I'm not particularly sensitive to motion sickness but I could tell that had I kept playing this for longer, I would be dealing with a nasty headache sooner or later.

This game is something I had expected to massively enjoy, but ultimately could not. So in the absence of a "mixed" review option, I'll lean toward the negative recommendation. Entirely because of the gameplay aspects of the game, not the narrative aspects.

I liked the heavy presence of skill checks in this game. Interacting with objects and dialogue choices often had several different options to choose from. Just from a surface scratch I could see that there's a tremendous amount of depth in this game. Character models look excellent, dialogue was engaging and the story hook at the beginning is a strong start to the game. The game oozes atmosphere from the very beginning. I was clicking and going through everything, and read everything I could get my grubby hands on.

But the game began to feel tedious, even after such a cursory glance at it. Going through a dungeon is a painfully slow process as many rooms are laden with traps. Juggling torches also seems like it could be annoying, though I did pick a race with superior nightvision so I didn't have to deal with it.

Healing is a fairly limited resource in this game, and that only serves to make combat encounters very lopsided. You either carefully prepare and near instantaneously obliterate the enemy after a big advantage, or they do the same to you. There is an enormous emphasis placed on environmental effects. Single-use items like grenades can be devastating if they set off an environmental effect. There's very little in the way of a battle of attrition, if you let things drag on then you are going to get overwhelmed. On paper all that sounds thrilling and fun but I only found it exhausting and boring.

But by far the worst aspect of this game for me is the short / long rest system.

This system effectively serves as your cooldowns. Many abilities require a short / long rest before you can use them again. And that is where the tedium really kicked in for me. I began to try and get through combat encounters while using as few of my abilities as possible because I didn't want to keep spamming the rest feature. I used a spellcaster, and spells are categorized into several tiers. And you only get an extremely limited amount of casts of tier 1 / 2 etc. of spells until you need to rest in order to regain your casts once more. There is a limited quantity of points you can get back out of combat without resting but that just adds to the micromanagement tedium. There is a specific category of spells that do not require these spellcasting points, but they feel a bit boring to use after a while.

Having to so heavily ration my abilities and spells really sucked the joy out of the game. And even if I strictly didn't need to ration them so heavily, I just felt like I had to. I am not fond of survival games at all precisely because I dislike these kinds of central rationing mechanics in games, though I am very fond of turn-based games and RPG's. Working with a mana reserve or cooldowns however is far more preferable compared to this system.

abysmal

90% talking and walking with 10% combat. The environmental damage in combat was novel and interesting at first, but it seems to be all there is to this game's combat. I'm not the biggest fan of card games but this game's card decks seem quite boring, especially when beginning the game. Dialogue is filled with unnecessary quips and jokes, most of them veering into cringe territory. Tony Stark is especially obnoxious in this game. The dialogue is not all bad but a lot of it feels stiff and awkward, be it due to the lacking facial animations or just lukewarm writing.

Healing in combat is very limited, and with three card plays available during a turn, there's absolutely no way of taking out all enemies before they lay heavy damage on you. There are cards that refund their use during a K.O, but fishing for a particular card with redraws is annoying and tedious. There is an element of strategy when taking into account a hero's position and which way they can knock back an enemy, and the combat animations are flashy and cool.

But even early on in the game I ran into a problem of enemies with bloated health bars. You can take out regular enemies with a single strike but elite enemies have enormous health bars. Which in itself wouldn't be a huge problem if the game didn't insist on bringing in reinforcements after every turn. The very first side mission I went on was annoying but I got through it.

Then on the second side mission I ran into an elite enemy with 90 health + 45 shield while my heroes had around 60, 80 and 90 health to them with no way of replenishing it outside of lifesteal cards on one of my units. That elite enemy was grouped with three regular enemies and two 36 and 60 health units as well. Then on the next turn, after I had dispatched all the regular enemies and the 36 health enemy, four reinforcement units arrived, one of my units was stunned by the 90 health shield unit and almost every single card that was drawn was unusable whether it be due to lacking "heroism" resource or the hero itself being out of commission from being stunned.

Closed the game and deleted it after that experience.

This isn't an irredeemably bad game. The map's fine, cars are detailed and there are a lot of them. The driving is very arcade-like but that's the point of this game really. Graphics are gorgeous as well.

• The dialogue in this game is horrendous, and I recommend setting voice volume to zero
  
• The game slaps an event screen in your face every time you start it up and loading times are considerably long. I also got an unskippable trailer for a premium edition of the game when I launched it after a hiatus so that was a bit obnoxious
  
• Some menus feel sluggish and the map is absolutely bloated with icons to the point that they overlap with one another
  
• This game takes up around 140+GB from your hard drive to keep it installed
  
• The characters are very ugly and unpleasant to look at

I do not recommend this game if you wish to use a wheel to play it.

My personal preference for all driving games is to use a wheel controller. After owning one, I can't really go back to a controller for dedicated driving games. Unfortunately, this game does not work well with wheel controllers.

I initially had a Logitech G29. The game certainly recognizes it and it does work, but the settings are a nightmare. The wheel always felt too stiff or too light. I looked up several different configurations and tried them all to no avail. The wheel always felt bad to use in this game.

Recently I have aquired a Moza direct drive wheel. It required some manual tweaking to set up in this game but the settings worked fine. Problem is, as soon as I input anything from the wheel, the framerate instantly drops from 180 to 60 locked with enormous stuttering. If I run the benchmark tool without input from the wheel, I get perfect framerates and little stutter. When I input something from the wheel and run the benchmark again, framerate stays at 60 and stutter count does to over 2000 for the duration of the benchmark.

I was never looking for a hardcore racing simulator experience from this game, but I certainly didn't expect wheel controllers to feel as bad to use as they do in this game.

Ghostwire: Tokyo succeeds in creating a thoroughly atmospheric and detailed city of Tokyo to explore. Crammed buildings, small streets, alleyways and numerous landmark locations bring this concrete jungle to life, albeit devoid of any actual living beings. The only company to be found in this game are otherworldly visitors called 'Yokai'.

Collectibles are fun to seek out since they are all unique, and get added to a database that contains information related to the collectibles that you pick up. Each enemy, food item, landmark etc. have their own categories in that database as well. The entries are written well enough and make for good reading.

Combat is serviceable, and is definitely not a highlight of this game. It works well enough for what it sets out to do. It's just.. there. Certain enemies are painful and tedious to fight, especially the ones added post-launch.

The overall exploration, atmosphere and quests are the strongest points of this game. Some side quests especially are very intriguing, at times even veering into outright horror. Beware of Hanako-San.

The port is far from flawless. Though not as rough as it was on launch, it remains shaky. I have a beefy system with a 6800XT GPU / 5800X3D CPU and the game simply drops frames in certain areas, guaranteed without settings having any effect on it.

95% of the game holds a steady 120fps but then I get to certain areas where the game almost halves my framerate and chugs along with stutters aplenty. Some enemy attacks also obliterate the my frames, at times turning the game into a veritable slideshow until the particles have dissipated.

I love this game but the technical issues are very real. I would recommend anyone interested in the game to try it within steam's two-hour refund window to see if it runs decently on their system before fully committing to their purchase.

I got hooked to the gameplay from the very first sword swing. This game just feels good to play when mowing down hordes of enemies. Ultimate attack animations are very flashy and there's a good variety of characters to play as. I wouldn't recommend playing this for the story, it's nothing special. This game's best for just seeing cool characters in action.