Recent reviews by Matty G

ESA starts out as a relatively simple Metroid-like game with challenging but fair bosses, and having to persevere treks between them and acquiring a selection of items. But beyond the game's first ending and acquiring peak player mobility, it does a bait-and-switch into something vaguely La-Mulana; the gameplay largely shifts to solving the station's cryptic and esoteric mysteries. And there are many of them.

While not entirely unexpected today (as the developer had especially worked Baba Is You and Noita later), it's worth mentioning because those effectively become ESA's meat and bones on the grand scale, and the real reason why anyone would want to play it. Conversely, those interested only in the Metroidvania part will probably be left unsatisfied. ESA's mysteries can be legitimately compelling at times and feel rewarding in themselves, but it also involves going back-and-forth all over the game map a ton regardless of the player's excellent movement by that point, scouring it for every fake wall and feature that may or may not be relevant to the current mystery you're trying to solve. Text hints may be minimal, easy to overlook or miss with no logbook reference feature, or involves some deciphering on your part.

It is still a well-put together game that stands out from the sub-genre because of this. Its transformation into a cluster♥♥♥♥ of cryptography is simply not for every Metroidvania fan, be it blind or even with help - ESA will ask for a lot of patience.

Ironically, AoE I DE is now more akin to an awkward stopgap game not unlike how AoE II HD is now, effectively arguably lacking purpose because the Return of Rome DLC for AoE II's own Definitive Edition effectively supersedes this one in regards to "Age 1 but modernized".

I would suggest either:

• Getting a copy of the original and installing UPatch for running it on modern Windows. That also formed the basis of DE's balance adjustments, should you want those.
  
• Playing Return of Rome. It only has some of the original campaigns (that may be ironed out overtime), but also has three new ones, enjoys many modern QoL and amenities from being ported to AoE II DE's more modern engine, and is otherwise the current version maintained.

'Full coverage of all the campaigns but in fresh paint' is otherwise the only thing going for AoE I DE in the meantime, and even then it has heavily altered or even replaced many of the scenarios; your mileage may vary. It is intentionally also more conservative than Return of Rome, but that version ended up adding things that people actually wanted in DE. Neither release really has active online in English-speaking communities.

Ultimately, your decision between either version should depend on what it is you're after, but DE's offerings are perhaps the weakest of the three.

It's a multiplayer VR sandbox. In contrast to its contemporaries, it makes them look like spectator mode and allows for some legitimately neat creations, even ethically questionable ones. Even if you aren't one for technical things, the ability to simply drag and drop or use your clipboard to share multimedia in-world is absolutely genius, letting you share images and videos from your PC or the internet very easily.

That said, there are some caveats. The new user experience starts more impressionable than its predecessor, but there's still quite a steep learning curve around the game's fundamentals of using in-world Inspector panels, various tooltips, and also a visual scripting language if one wants to get the most out of their experience. These tools are all quite powerful especially in the hands of anyone familiar with 3D game development, but anyone who hasn't will need a hand. Somebody setting up a VRC avatar they got from Gumroad will definitely want a hand, or at least find someone who has already setup the same one before.

It should be mentioned that Resonite is essentially the developers' continuation of an older project, ditching a crypto-crazed CEO and ultimately resuming development. Even so, it's still technically in the early stages and it's yet to get things people want like a proper physics engine or adult verification. Overall polish across the board is also a bit lackluster currently, and the game is not performant at all with all kinds of stability and framerate issues. Resonite also much prefers faster CPUs in this department, and the 16 GB RAM recommendation is also quite lowballing it for VR users; you'll likely run out of memory and crash within any relatively populated session in no time. You'd want 32 GB at least if you're not staying in less heavy places.
Though desktop mode users could be fine with less, you won't get the most out of the game without a VR kit.

The community that's around shows a good deal of loyalty to the game and its developers, but it must be said that it largely consists of furries. Considering they make up much of the tech industry, if you can tolerate them then it shouldn't be too hard to find someone knowledgeable if you ever need a bit of help. Apart from that, there are a lot of people sitting in private worlds and there's the other issue of not knowing however many of your contacts are on unless you're also friends with them on Steam or use a third-party Android program.

In summary, there's still a lot of work to be done. But it is free to try out at least, it's just that you're probably best knowing a friend to help introduce you to it.

It's effectively 90% the same game as the original down to the game feel before considering the visual facelift into proper pixel art and new content and balance tweaks, with very greasy Gearbox taking up 75% of the game credits for a meager fraction of the actual work.

Most of the new items entailed are essentially a curated backport of RoR2's actually useful ones, and Artificer is just as bad here as she was there; some things never change. The other new survivors are otherwise good, there's a 'that kid' unlock process, a few more artifacts hidden around, and there are some new stage variants to shake things up a little. But there's no actual 'new' stages proper, and the soundtrack is still mostly the same outside of a few cases. Still a fantastic one as ever, though it may create something of a juxtaposition with the game walking a blurred line between remaster and remake between the gameplay and visuals as-is.

Whether game balance is any much better is debatable; some survivors got notable tweaks, flying enemies are far stronger, chest distribution seems to be worse, some enemies now climb ropes, many of the less useful items are still bad, and while Infusion is actually balanced with Glass active so bad players can't cheese it for free damage, other changes make playing that artifact more annoying than challenging. Unmodified gameplay may still result in fighting rather spongy enemies. Percentile modifiers to damage given/taken though do provide a solid alternative but will realistically be abused by many to unlock content reliably.

The most notable new feature in Returns otherwise is a bunch of pre-made trials. They vary massively in difficulty and fun, rewarding more unlockable items but also notably as the method to get RoR2-style alternate skills. Sadly, many of them suffer the same problem, that by comparison to the original they're either a straight upgrade or so gimmicky, that they're basically designed around its trial.

Being able to use Steamworks to host and join games with ease than having to deal with any port forwarding is a good point worth noting over the original, but sadly it's limited to four players until modding finds a way around that. Dead players now also become drones and have an opportunity to collect dropped items if they survive in that form.

In the end, it's a fine re-release and it's still classic Risky with some welcome amenities here and there. But it also does have to compete with the selection of mods available for the original, including Starstorm - which one of the developers for Returns worked on originally.

Neos VR was a passion project that stagnated for almost two years straight, mostly because the CEO wanted crypto. The main developer and his crew have recently jumped ship with a spiritual successor, and most of Neos VR's community will very likely follow suit.

It goes without saying on what the fate of this game will be.

If you're a preexisting player, it's best you find a downloader tool to get your stuff from your cloud storage.

Make no mistake, PSO2 is a far better game than NGS will ever be if the latter stays in its current lack of direction. However, the train for the original has long-passed and Sega is bent on slowly making it irrelevant with only doing the bare minimum for 'maintenance mode'.

The unfortunate truth of the original PSO2 is that it became increasingly reliant on a lot on scheduled urgent quests as part of gear progression - even if deterministic in nature, and active campaigns for levelling and catch up were also common. All that's left are random urgents and one day each month for assorted boosts (with one of its best things also removed). Without these, starting fresh will take noticeably longer and gearing up to the actual relevant content will be overall slower, not to mention the game having only but a handful of strayabouts sticking around as far as a community is concerned.

Even when it comes to cross-game affairs for obtaining fashion items and the freemium 'SG' currency, this has been left in a relatively sour state. Prior to the launch of NGS, with just one dopamine-laced quest Sega brought hyperinflation into PSO2's economy which despite the quest's benefits for augmenting gear, has been an overall net negative by making everything expensive. Several repeatable weekly activities with good incentives were replaced for far less useful ones, cutting people out of another reason to play PSO2 regularly even if just for those. Newcomers are left with one-time SG rewards that will dry up eventually.

It should be noted that it is also now completely impossible to make best-in-slot gear in the global version of PSO2, unless you were hoarding up the now-unavailable mission badges in the hundreds since 2020. It's only still possible in Japan due to a companion mobile game the west never got. Granted, min-maxing is a very expensive affair in this game with strongly diminishing returns at a given point, but if you were to get really stuck into PSO2, reaching the absolute zenith isn't happening. In this same line of thought, Global only ever ran one quest that dropped a certain weapon popular for Endless runs only for a limited time back in early 2020, making it incredibly rare on these servers partly due to neglect. Essentially, fashion isn't the only thing that was subject to FOMO.

The only amenities PSO2 has received since NGS took front and center were some additional weapon camos in one badge exchange when the game launched on another console, and yet it's still missing a significant amount of pre-NGS ones only Japan has. For some reason, more functionally irrelevant content has been shoved into the random urgent rotation since.

Ultimately, Sega is trying its best to make you not play PSO2, with a lackluster 'maintenance mode' until it inevitably gets EoL'd, what with plenty of finer elements overlooked that could've been resolved with ease, yet haven't. The meat and bones are still there, but getting up to speed is a lot more dry than it was in its heyday, as you try to figure out your way through a game that was more dependent on a schedule and wider community.

All of this, by the way - was just to make way for another game that somehow still struggles to get on its feet today, more than two years since it launched. At least most of PSO2 generally knew what it wanted to be.

Return of Rome is a 2-in-1 DLC, being much lighter on AoE II content while porting the original Age of Empires once more to do it justice.

For the AoE II side, you just get playable Romans. They're essentially another infantry/cavalry-focused civ on the pile with some quirks that make them a contrast to the Byzantines, preferring food and gold-heavy units and Galleys instead of cheap counters and Fire Ships. However, they are let down by a lack of a playable campaign or scenario of their own. Their inclusion did also trickle down a siege ship to other civilizations.

The meat and bones of the DLC on the other hand is a surprisingly competent port of Age 1's gameplay onto II's engine, which is probably what people wanted out of AoE DE. For the uninitiated, it's a noticeably faster-paced and more aggressive game (as many RTS were at the time) with its own quirks and oddities, and AoE II's amenities 'backported' don't break away from how the game is played too much. Reconfigure your hotkeys to match, and the game will go down much more smoothly.

DE's balancing has carried over and been expanded on, now giving every civ a team bonus passive. Secondary tech requirements for lategame unit upgrades were outright culled (ie no Fanaticism required for Legionaries), a counter triangle was further reinforced in Tool Age, and gates are also introduced. Garrisoning units into TCs and towers is a thing, but it doesn't yield any attacks or extra arrows like AoE II so it's only a purely protective measure for fragile-as-ever villagers in the earlygame.

For skirmishes, AoE II's numerous game settings are present for Return of Rome and also a large amount of new random map types based off of II's own (ie Black Forest, Arena, Land Nomad, etc) are also available, more than doubling what AoE DE had. Unfortunately there's no Regicide equivalent (or Battle Royale) and D3 is restricted to two map types, so not everything is ported wholesale. 200 population cap games are also the default than the original's 50.

The campaigns available are three newer ones (in what is probably to entice DE owners), which they also demonstrate that they can use AoE II's map scripting abilities and production quality, coming off as a lot less dry. But only a handful of AoE I's campaigns were ported over nearly a year later, and this is the only real thing that stops it from possibly replacing AoE I and the almost-obsolete DE version outright.

In summary, this DLC was a decent change of pace to offset the bloat, though the AoE II side is a little lightweight. The AoE I part is still good, merely lacking all the campaigns if you're only in it for that, though the new ones are still pretty good. The online for it isn't doing so hot though, so its future is a bit more uncertain.

BDO's chief problem heading into 2023 is - ironically for an MMO, a general lack of encouraging people to actually play with one other. But unlike many other contemporaries today it's not due to a reliance on being narrative-driven or anything (especially for a game known to have some of the worst questing), but it's that grinding mobs solo is more than sufficient in reward while having the convenience of being mostly independent, outside of using the marketplace.

The act of grinding mobs in itself isn't bad at all and the devs have made sure to make a lot more zones viable, but every other part of BDO is feeling a lot less relevant when a mid-game player can make 300-500m+ worth of silver easily without much risk of being PK'd if at all. Older systems in the game that were formerly more important in the past such as the worker system also matter a lot less. The developers can add in as many journals or questlines as they want but they are just temporary distractions.

To the game's credit, it has seen a lot of good QoL tweaks and other changes in the past several years, and the 'need' for going AFK overnight is nowhere near as strong depending on what it is you're doing. But many older problems such as the notorious enhancement system, cash shop, and higher FPS = faster combos still exist however subdued or mitigated they might be, and the current direction of the game sees newer ones like the sheer bloat in class count and legacy systems becoming irrelevant as mentioned before.

I would probably give a neutral rating if it were possible but even during a season (which a new player should be doing) it's hard to sell someone on Black Desert already especially when arbitrary self-goals are all I've got to go off. Having an MMO where you actually have to get around the game world without fast travel (Magnus travel costs are not insignificant) on top of having interesting combat systems and some side activities with their own mechanics do all sound nice on paper, but the game is now much more of a mob grinder first (and trying out things in advance for DokeV second) than it used to be and what there is of an endgame is not worth the trouble.

BnG plays great and features a soundtrack frontloaded with bangers, caked with a visual style that makes it feel like an evolution of PSX Wipeout while still being its own thing. With a healthy amount of content and challenge that can also be further bolstered by modding capabilities, the game is easily worth the modest price tag.

SotV has had several updates to it now that make the unmodded experience less miserable what with the worst of the problems gone, but it's still questionable on whether it would be worth even $10. The music is good (as expected from Chris), survivors are fine and the stages are decent (by the game's low standards of them), but half of the new items are overpowered, all the void items are corruptions of already good items, half of the introduced enemies are overtuned, and the DLC's boss sucks. It's also themed upon the worst side area of the game.

With Risk of Rain Returns on the horizon, if this is the send off for RoR2 then it is still a fairly poor one. There is a combined evident lack of both ideas and also playtesting that was very evident on release - as well as a fairly significant amount of unused content in the files, that collectively imply there simply wasn't a lot of energy at all, much like RoR2's early access cycle in general.

Strictly speaking you could pick SotV up on a sale with a steep discount but the release of this DLC and what it went with weren't particularly impressive. If RoR2 sees a post-Gearbox ownership DLC, then it better be good enough to warrant breaking all the mods again because this wasn't.