Recent reviews by ciel

Another drop in the growing sea of slay the spire clones. The complete lack of satisfaction in any of the gameplay makes me appreciate how well designed the levels in Peggle are.

I was interested to explore planets, so i finally got this game. But the game wants to stick me in a tutorial building the same generic square survival structures as every generic open world game and it's been 3 hours. even if the developers recovered from their botched launch, it seems all they've done is bring the game up to pace with an absolutely mediocre industry standard.

play this if you hate yourself

it's clunky. the novelty of building in first person wears off quick when you're constantly needing to get specific angles to get the belt tool to snap to structures, or climb up high to be able to place things at all. early game power generation is so unnecessarily tedious that it makes me quit every single time i try this game. in most cases, I would push through that tedium, but the first several hours of gameplay fail to convince me that this game has anything special to offer compared to other factory and automation games. flashy and impressive, but little substance to back it up.

ironically, for a game calling itself "everything," the game contains so little substance that there's hardly enough there to criticize at all. it's bland and domesticated, garbing itself in signification without actually saying much.

get this game if you love being strung along by the gambler's fallacy and dying in one hit

One of the most consummately beautiful things I have ever witnessed. Every moment drips with a particular haunting precious solemnity that reminds me of the countless nights I would drive dark Appalachian backroads to clear my addled head, a yearning I feel even thousands of miles from them now.

If you're mad that the game's final chapter hasn't released yet you're a ****ing moron who will never be able to understand this. Or a Yankee. Or both. You've wasted your time playing chapters 1-4.

Destiny 2 had me for a good few weeks, I will say. I had thought it looked interesting back when it had launched and a lot of VG media sites and streamers were showing off the gameplay. It looked cool, and I love cooperative stuff, but my financial position doesn't allow me to buy full price games, let alone two copies to play with my girlfriend! I was very excited to hear that Destiny 2 was moving to a free to play model.

I followed the tutorial, eventually spat out in the EDZ starting zone and did a few missions and started getting gear. Immediately I was hooked on exploring, once I learned there were feats to earn for clearing all of the hidden caches and lost sectors. The sparrow, your personal hoverbike, became one of my favorite things and I took great joy in learning how to pilot it elegantly, especially once I got an exotic that could do air flips! I spent most of my time zipping around trying to basically clear all the markers for points of interest on every map I was on.

Eventually, after having cleared my first couple of planets, I clued in to the fact that I had sidestepped the story content, through whatever incident missed something in the tutorial telling me I had to "purchase" them from a vendor. I thought that this was what was to blame for my lack of engagement, I merely made a mistake and didn't pick up the story quests that explain what's going on in the world! So I got to chewing through the free seasons' story stuff. It rubbed me the wrong way that the missing half of the turorial was part of the first campaign, which the game had somehow enabled me to miss. The only characters I really felt in any way invested in was Failsafe, the charming schizophrenic AI, and Banshee, the Exo gunsmith with a severe memory loss problem, who my only interaction with was as a vendor, but he seemed like a sweetheart.

The other characters however? Completely forgettable for me.

As I began to immerse myself in the lore, more and more I couldn't stop drawing comparisons to Warcraft. ''The Light'' being their source of power betrothed from something alien, the very heavily Tolkeinesque swords and sorcery inspired aesthetic and storytelling, the reliance on the character tropes from that genre to make up their main cast. It's not actually sci-fi, as one's first brush might indicate, but a fantasy game wearing a sci-fi aesthetic but with none of its speculation on the future nor its retrospective criticism of modern society and politic. Just the same tired "oh no, the earth is in trouble!! you need to kill guys that aren't like you to fix it!!" The alien races seemed far more interesting than the guardians once I learned about them! Extradimensional visitors whose "Magic" is based in the fact that language is the very fabric of the plane they come from, A hivemind of liquid machine initelligence that dominates entire reaches of space because they simulate all possible pasts and futures to build their plans, and the crumbling leftovers of a society forced to scavenge in the wake of what havoc was wrought upon their society in the wake of The Traveler ostensibly giving them the same gifts as the Guardians all seem much more interesting than "generic D&D party stereotypes but in spaaaaaaace!" with zero self awareness, worshiping some stupid space orb whose intentions are completely unknown. Ghost unnerved me especially, being a creation exclusively of The Traveler, considering that his role in the story is to be the most obnoxiously human presence there, to basically make up for the fact that the PC is mute. It seems insidious that it tries to be so relateable.

So as my engagement with the writing and the world began to wane, and I ran out of missions to do, so too did my enjoyment of the gameplay. I found myself fatigued every time I had an enemy encounter, the sheer volume, lack of variety, and frequency of the combat encounters wore on me as I joylessly completed objectives, relishing using the time traveling to find cool places to do flips on my sparrow.

The game seeks to keep you invested and entertained through constant stimulation. At the beginning, every drop you pick up is probably going to be better than the last one, it looks new, and sometimes even plays new! You get pulled into this gameplay loop of upgrading your gear. Typical MMOG stuff. Swarms of enemies are always around the corner meaning you're never doing nothing, world event missions are constantly popping off, etc etc. But as I played on, I began to feel more and more like an animal inside a box being shaken. The sheer volume of bounties you would complete on a day to day basis, and the fact that they're constantly asking you to switch to different weapon types, different gear types, or fight a specific enemy made it hard to feel like I was actually in control of my Destiny ( 2 ). It seems to try to keep you engaged through any means but making the gameplay more varied or interesting. The game got repetitious, and one day I realized upon loading in that I simply didn't want to play any more and closed the game and haven't touched it since.

Destiny 2 is in no way a bad game. It's competently put together. The weapons feel nice and chunky, as do the melee hits. The world is quite pretty in places and getting to customize the colors of your gear with such a plethora of shaders is something that all games with a dress-up aspect to them could stand to copy. But I don't think it has the makings of a game that will be remembered as a turning point for the whole of videogames as an art (as Halo was, in Bungie's past). Its highly polished surface leaves no room for kusoge-like charm of "so bad it's good" like the thousands of unity horrors on Steam, but doesn't truly do anything particularly well, new, or unique, thus damning it to mediocrity.

One cat's opinion.

white gameplay objects on a white background. why??? maybe i'd learn if this game is any fun if the eye strain didn't make it way not worth it. Just go download all 4 Chromatron games if you're looking for laser logic puzzles. They're all freeware and don't have the worthlessly clumsy attempt at imitating zachtronics all over it.

Like too many games, this seemed so promising when it was in the kickstarter phase and then ended up being a disappointment. It displays a "cargo cult" mentality towards game design and homage. Many people will claim that this is a spiritual sequel to JSR/F, but the similarities are superficial, taking visual inspiration and the idea of skating against a totalitarian state apparatus, graffiti, even going so far as to comission Hidieki Naganuma to make 2 tracks for the game, but the similarities end there.

It has none of the charm that JSR presented, the few music tracks other than the ones composed by Naganuma sounding incredibly generic, all of the character designs are super bland compared to JSR's iconic designs which were able to stand on their own with almost NO dialogue, whereas Hover is rife with unfunny, droll, wordy and at times completely gramatically broken dialogue. The levels are simultaneously cluttered making for potentially frustrating moments, while at the same time feeling like a vacant, lifeless space. Because of the skill grid system they added at some point in the beta to make up for the complete lack of investment or progression in earlier builds, your character's physics are constantly changing making getting a handle on how to effectively navigate difficult until you realise the trick is to buff your jump skill enough that you can just rub your face against walls and mash the jump button to get up and over everything in your way.

The missions get really samey after a while. You have races, and you have gameball. There are some fun races, I'm especially a fan of the ones in the gamer HQ and some of DarkGamer's races that take you through a whole level feel really satisfying to learn to trace effectively. Gameball, however, is universally either dull or frustrating, turning into either a steamroll against the AI opponents or a complete wreck where your AI teammates who never score keep stealing the ball and letting the opposing team take it. This all comes to a head when it turns out that THE FINAL BOSS BATTLE-- a mission following a huge setpiece race through a special course in the last area of the game that combines most of the mechanics you've learned up to that point that would have made for a much more satisfying climax-- is just an egregiously poorly implemented gameball match that suffers all of the problems of a normal gameball match x10. Your opponent is unbeatably faster than you, so your only hope is that you can get lucky and get the ball first and just stand under where it drops, otherwise you're gonna be screwed if your teammates or the admin gets a hold of it, since you have to do wacky platforming to score whereas the admin has a goal that's on the floor of the arena.

I wanted really badly to like this game more, but after trying to extract some sense of enjoyment out of it repeatedly, I can only conclude that the developers have no idea what made Jet Set Radio so fun and iconic.