Recent reviews by Roberto

A truly unique puzzle game that utilises tech I've never seen before in gaming. A fairly simple puzzle game once you get your head around how the systems work.

I would be tempted to call it a new age Portal but I have to be honest... as much as I liked the systems, the puzzles, the music, the graphics, the atmosphere... I had to mute the voice acting and turn off subtitles. After a few minutes of talking where nothing of value was said I knew it was safe to turn it off. It just feels like it's there to fill dead space when it doesn't need to be. There might have been a cool story in there somewhere but I didn't want to listen to any more mindless chatter.

Overall it's a cool game that's well worth playing which will keep you busy for an afternoon. Maybe a day if you aim to 100% it like I did.

This game is two parts murder mystery and one part figuring out the overall why. Where it's never revealed if you were right or wrong in fingering a suspect. Which means there is no wrong option only right ones, though some are more right than others.

You are given a small amount of time to investigate more options than you can possibly check in a single playthrough. Leading to the illusion there is more to the game. In fact you'll find about 85% of all the info every single playthrough so followup playthroughs don't really change or reveal anything you didn't alright sorta know. You can go down different paths and still end up with roughly the same info.

The final act is just going over information you've been picking up throughout the game just encase you missed it. Meaning a lot of it feels like filler. I don't want to go into any more info to avoid spoilers.

I feel like the game's main draw is it's appearance. It's got a unique art style as well as an interesting font choice. Where the text is written out in a style related to each persons education, even with typos that are corrected. For a while it looks great... after a while you'll realise it takes ages for each line to be written and it goes from charming to just being pretentious. When going for a second playthrough it makes the game feel so tedious as pretty much everything said is just repeated from the first playthrough.

After my first playthrough I was on the fence if I'd recommend it or not, more leaning to yes but the 3rd act really hindered the game, then I decided to see if any choices actually made a difference in this choices matter game... they didn't. That's what put me off recommending this to anyone.

(I left the game running if you're wondering about playtime.)

A game filled to the brim with personality. There's so much content that even 30-40 hours in the game is still introducing new things to the player. The game also manages to keep surprising you with new mini-games out of the blue.

A game this cheap has no right to have so much to it. To the point the most common complaint I've seen is "there's too much content and that makes it hard to 100%." So if you're a completionist you have a good 100 hour game on your hands.

For the price it's well worth a try; it's a chill game with some management aspects that can be a little overwhelming until you get to grips with how much there is to do.

As someone who's a fan of the travelling from left to right puzzle/platformer genre; this game feels lacking.

If you compare it to games like Limbo/Inside the puzzles are almost nonexistent. There were only two puzzles in the whole game that actually made me recognise they're a puzzle and stop to really look at what it was I had to do. Everything else was just going through the motions.

Though games like Limbo/Inside managed to also have a sense of tension, a kind of unease to push you forward, even just a curiosity about the world that makes you want to see more. I'd even say the Far games (Lone Sails and Changing Tides) manage to capture a sense of almost panic, pressuring you to succeed. Where Planet of Lana I just never felt any real engagement from the game, no reason to feel like I wanted to see more. The game just feels slow without that special something to make it stand out.

The game also does the telling the background story through the... well background. Finding collectables to explain whats happening in the world but, it all feels very surface level. You can ignore the collectables as it's very easy to predict the plot just from a few hints the game drops early on. There's no twists, no turns, just what you'd expect it to be.

If this game existed in a bubble where there was nothing else like it I'd recommend it, but if you compare it to similar games I just can't recommend it. It's just it feels like there are a lot of repeated scenes and puzzles to stretch out what little play time it has. There's even a few slow panning scenes with emotional music with nothing really happening just to admire the scenery if that's the type of thing you're into. Oh there's even some QTE sections which, for me, kinda killed the tone of the scenes. Like there's a scene from the early trailer but it's not gameplay it just has some button prompts plastered over the top of it.

This game is not a remake, if you come into this without playing the original you'll be lost. The game doesn't so much as reference the original but repeatably show cutscenes from the original. Including the final cutscene, it even recreates the final battle. Meaning if you don't already know their connotation, it'll all be meaningless to you.

Where to begin with this...
Honestly the game feels like a hybrid between FF13 and Kingdom Hearts. It has FF13's famous long boring corridor level design and the stagger combat mechanic. Then Kingdom Hearts flashy combat and convoluted narrative structure.
It feels like every scene of this game is twice as long as it needs to be and then half of the scenes are just filler to pad out the playtime. Then you have the plot holes.

I think the easiest way of describing it would be that the original game was a very silly/funny game with serious moments to keep it grounded. Whereas this is a very serious game with comedy sections that make it feel kinda tone deaf. To the point I'd almost call a lot of them irritating, so much so I ended up skipping a few scenes that I can only assume were meant to be funny. Like "LOL so many fat guy jokes because Wedge is bigger" or dumb bandits not knowing the meaning of things... or a very poor DDR mini game out of nowhere.

So the game manages to achieve what most action JRPGs manage to achieve. Being neither as tactical as a turn based game or responsive enough to be a decent action game.
Your party members don't really do anything unless you directly control them. After the ATB bar has charged you can order them to do a single ability but unless you take manual control it can take forever to build. Then you'll notice that if they just auto attacked it would build so much faster and they actually do decent damage with just autos... but they don't.
The game loves it's flashy effects with every ability and as the game goes on they get flashier and flashier. To the point there were a few battles near the end I honestly couldn't tell what was happening most of the battle. Then the game isn't responsive, there's such a delay from pressing an action to it actually doing it. So it makes things like dodging pointless, it doesn't help how most things will track as well. Dodging is used more as a quicker run than trying to avoid damage.
You also have FF13's stagger mechanic. Meaning there are a handful of enemies that feel like you do next to no damage to until you hit the stagger bar, at which point you can do maybe 1/4th of it's health before it runs out and you have to start it all over again. It makes some battles go on forever. If you happen to not have their weakness ready to go it's slow and tedious going.
Luckily you can get through the game by blindly mashing attack for 80% of it then ordering people to heal you for the other 20% on normal difficulty. If you put it on easy you can even skip the healing. By the final boss I realised if you just use counter stance and mash attack you'll beat almost anything.
Not to forget, the game loves it's chain stuns. One enemy will status you then one will grab you just for another to grab you next thing you know you've not had any control for the last minute and you're almost dead.

Then the level design, it feels like so much of this game is just long drawn out corridors. Paths that used to be a single screen in the original are now 15 minute long tunnels with repeating "puzzles." Passing through sector 6 used to take a few minutes at best but now there's multiple giant hand/crane moving puzzles. The fact there's a giant robotic hand to move containers is one thing, the fact it's also attached to the ground, powered, with working controls, and maintained to be in working condition for you to move stuff is a bit of a stretch... there's 4 of them in 3 separate puzzles... it makes no sense! It's all there just to bloat the game. This feeling happens multiple times throughout the game. Like stuff is just there for padding. Places like the train graveyard go on for what feels like multiple hours. There's a point in Shinra Tower where you are locked in a room while the game explains who the characters are... the game has already had multiple cutaway scenes to show you who everyone is so the whole thing is just there to waste your time. There's also so many slow moving squeeze past/under something to slow the game down even more. Then a bunch of climbing and crawling scenes that drag on when there's no need for it.

So now the plot holes and contrivances. Guess this might be a bit spoilery as a heads up.
There's a point where one of the sectors falls and crushes the slums. As your passage through sector 6, where this has already happened, you can see that everything gets buried under tons of rubble. Nothing survives. Whereas in this version you go back into the sector to look for survivors... you see the wreckage from above... there is nothing left. Everything is buried... but you still go back and help people... even people survive... how? Just how? It makes no sense how anything can live through a city falling on another city. It's not just a few building falling over in an earthquake but a city, it's infrastructure, and it's foundation falling on top of people. The whole part about going back just seemed so comical in how unrealistic it was.
We actually see a member of SOLDER in this version of the game. He shows up, acts a bit of a nuisance, then saves you and vanishes. Nothing of substance happens. The whole thing is just a time waste to pad out the game. Same can be said of the rest of AVALANCHE, there's apparently different sects within the terrorist group, they show up once to save you for no explained reason and that's about it... both of these could be cool elements to expand the world's lore but no. They're kinda just there for a quick way to save you and then they're gone.
Then the main plot issue which would feel at home in Kingdom Hearts with it's messed up narrative at this point. Changing the future means you also change the past... wait. What were they smoking when they came up with that? So that basically means most of the main characters who died in the original are still alive. By the looks of it even the ones who died in order to get the characters to their starting point so the whole game is becoming a paradox. Though I guess that's a problem for the future games. As this is only a part 1 of 3 game where it's a 30-40 hour game that was only the starting 6-8 of the original stretched out to be "worth" a full game price.
There are a bunch of "but why though" moments in this game and it boils down to: it's weird and doesn't make any sense because the devs wanted to differentiate this game from the original, despite it being called a remake. It's hard to make a comparison because I honestly can't think of any franchise, in any media, that when making a remaster directly uses scenes from the original to show that it's changed. The closest you'd get is maybe the Spiderman movies with 3 Peters. Though that stops at making references, at no point does it show the final scene from the previous movies half way through the movie. So yeah, the whole thing just feels like someone's fan fiction so it doesn't need to make sense as long as they had fun writing it...

With that in mind, I got this game at a 54% discount. I don't think it was worth the money. Honestly I don't think it was worth the time investment. I think I would have been happier watching someone else playing it so I could skip ahead all the slow parts and the filler to see what was actually new. Not to mention that the asking price of this is looking like it's going to be £200 for the "full" completed story. Ignoring any story dlc they want to cut out and sell back to us then still leave huge plot holes because they closed the studio before it was really finished... like they did with FF15.

Honestly the game quickly began to feel like a chore than actually fun to play.

Almost every level felt like one of the gimmick levels from previous games, the ones you're thankful are only short so you can get through them quickly... but the levels are soooo long they just keep on going. Then they get to the point of being long enough to tie in what feels like multiple different gimmick levels into one.

I recently managed to replay and nearly 100% the original trilogy without any help since the games were so straightforward. This game however... by the 3rd level I gave up trying to get the collectables... normally a huge part of the game and a way to get the true ending and it was so much of a chore to do them I just didn't care. This quickly became the theme of the playthrough.

By about half way through the game I just began to sprint through; I just wanted it to be over. I stopped even trying to get boxes and fight enemies, just get to the end of the level as fast as I could. Even then the number of lives I had kept going up. I was dying more often than any other Crash game but the game just kept throwing lives at me. Why the game gives a modern and retro option at the start seems so pointless. It's like game's own design is confused. On retro you collect fruit for lives, in modern fruit is pointless other than for skins... wow... much fun. Then even in retro you have more lives than you can burn through.

Just don't bother. Play the trilogy remake.

Remember a few years ago when Deus Ex tried to sell single use skill point microtransactions in a single player game and it went so poorly for them they never made another game in the franchise? Well here we have the same thing happening again but they're trying to keep it quiet to avoid the inevitable backlash. Just to be clear, it isn't single use per save. It's one use ever. The confirmation if you're still not sure [imgur.com]

That alone isn't the reason for a negative review though it certainly puts the game in a bad standing. The fact they also increased the games price after release also doesn't help the game much when talking about the game's value.
If you haven't played all the other games in the franchise I would recommend literally any of them over this for the price to content/quality ratio. Also since this is a kinda fan service throwback game a lot of the references to characters will be lost if you haven't played at least the main Yakuza franchise without the spin offs.
Then you also have the stuttering and 30fps lock in cutscenes, boring repetitive substories, then incredibly grindy crafting mechanics.

Every new action requires the game to render the shader for the animation. (Not too dissimilar to the issues The Callisto Protocol had/has on release) This means the game will stutter every time a new animation is played for the first time. So every heat move, every unique boss battle, every time you use a new weapon with a new glow on it. The game can be running a solid framerate without ever dropping in gameplay but then stutters like crazy for anything new. It basically ruins any interesting boss battle. "Oh they're doing something cool... oh I missed it because the game was stuttering... I can only hope they do it a second time or I'll never know what happened." This also happens in the 30fps cutscenes... so playing it a second time for NG+ you won't have these issues but you also won't have any of the dlc you paid for (including what you got from the deluxe version.)

Then the lacklustre substories. At this point I've played pretty much every game in the franchise plus the spin off games and I honestly can't think of any game that had so many boring repetitive substories. So many are just you come across a person, they want an item, you give them an item, wait a minute later and give them the same item again, repeat 10 times and that's a substory complete. There's not even a unique interaction every time you give them something outside of the first interaction and the final item. This is the vast majority of substories. This isn't the maxing out a shop owner either, which feels like it takes a lot more transactions than it does in previous games as well. There are a few unique substories but they feel so rare. This makes the substory from zero about getting toys from the claw machine for the little girl look like a breath of fresh air since you actually have to do something before you return and do the same task again and again.

Then the crafting. Honestly playing on hard, just ignore it. The whole mechanic is so grindy for so little reward it isn't worth the effort. It feels like something that's there just for NG+ and the new difficulties that come with it where everything has it's numbers bloated. You can buy weapons very early on that are better than 3/4th's of the swords you can craft. Then you're given weapons through main story battles so you never need to craft anything yourself. It requires so much money to level up the crafting to be able to make something better than what you can already buy elsewhere then the costs to build stuff is crazy. You do get 200 ryo for completing the game which will offset a lot of the costs, hence it feels like a NG+ thing. Also I dread to think how much grinding you would have to do in the battle dungeons to unlock all the materials you would need to craft anything worthwhile.

All in all outside of the main quest and the minigames there isn't much in this game to recommend. In previous games the substories were some of the best parts. They were always so crazy and unique almost every time whereas in this they're all so mundane and they feel so copy and pasted in what you have to do. The game has performance issues which we're still waiting on getting fixed. Then the monetisation of the game is questionable at best. If you really want to play the game I would wait until a deep sale, maybe by that point the game will have it's performance patched so its enjoyable to play on the first run not just the second. Also if you do play I'd highly recommend getting a trainer, something like WeMod or something, in order to get what you would get from the paid consumable dlc for free. It would also remove the grinding if you really wanted to craft something for yourself.

This game wears it's influence on it's sleeve. The art style and some of the combat mechanics are akin to Chrono Trigger. The story and characters feel like they're taken straight out of Final Fantasy. The story starts off feeling very FF9 then slowly starts taking plot points from 6/7.

I wasn't expecting much from the story but I found it a lot more engaging with a lot more twists and playing with expectations that I was anticipating.

They also came up with a combat mechanic to really switch up the old JRPG formula which is equally refreshing and infuriating. Early game when you're still getting to grips with the game it's a make or break moment if you like it or not. It's basically a momentum bar that goes up with each attack and down with every guard or a random type of ability. It also goes up every enemy turn, even if they don't attack you. Keeping it in the green means you take less damage and use less energy to use ability. Get it in the red and you take way more damage. Early game going into the red can be basically instant death. Paired with it being a random type of ability to cool it down means that sometimes the RNG is just against you then after a few goes it's just on your side and you don't understand why you struggled.
Honestly when I started I hated it and it very nearly stopped me from playing altogether, but once I got the hang of it I didn't mind it.

The exploration is fun with the different bios and the mechanics for some of the areas keep it interesting. The mech you get also changes up exploration allowing you to fly over the maps for anything you've missed. The mechs themselves are customisable with gear and skill levels adding another layer to what you can do with the game.

There's plenty to do in the end game, a bunch of quests and unlockable characters, as well as ultimate weapons as well as gear for mechs.

I'd struggle to come up with any negatives other than nitpicks. JRPGs are my favourite genre and I might have become really picky about what I find as a good game in the genre. I might just be bored of the choice of empty/incomplete open world and corridor simulator JRPGs over the last few... decades. But this was well worth the time investment, so much so it was pleasantly surprising.

I finished the game and my thoughts walking away were, boy do I regret that time investment. Even ignoring the price tag I wish I didn't put this much time into it, it didn't deserve my time. At no point was it hard, just features and events constantly slowing you down for the sake of "challenge."

It starts off as a cool idea with pretty graphics and some great music but once you finish the prologue it starts to fall apart. Even the games performance starts to suffer by the mid game and late game it really starts to chug.

The game is a battle against a decaying ship that needs a constant supply of resources and the more you try to do the more it needs. So early game it's incredibly slow going as you're using everything to just keep the status quo and actually trying to expand to increase your production takes forever. Tied with the fact random accidents happen almost constantly which put your people out of work slowing things down even more. Since being overworked and understaffed cause more accidents It's very easy to end up with a spiralling cascade of errors in which it feels like you'll never get anywhere. Luckily by mid game you can ignore most of the issues as you've got to the point of being self sufficient and there isn't really any risk. Though that said even by the end of the game with 5-7 happiness/stability accidents were still daily, even with "optimal" staff.

Then the bugs. Plenty of times the crew just don't want to eat despite having power and food. They'll consume the food but still angrily starve to death. The only fix is to reload a previous save as once it starts it'll keep happening until everyone dies. While moving the ship batteries don't power sections, sometimes it's the whole ship. The batteries will be fully charged and they'll slowly empty but nothing is powered and once again everyone will slowly angrily starve to death. Luckily travelling is only a short time so you can recover from it... well as long as you don't have low trust/hull.
Oh I had a great bug in the ending which when I press the "this will end the game" button, the game would pop up with a game over screen rather than the ending cutscene. So I had to go through the whole ending process 3 times to actually get an ending.

Then the story, I was on board to see where it was going. Until the end I guess. I won't go into details to avoid spoiling people but the game apparently has multiple endings based on your choices throughout the game. I don't know what any of these choices were. There wasn't anything note worthy as a real choice throughout the whole game. Sure there are choices for greater or lesser rewards. Such as a science crew dying or getting more science points for research but nothing that felt like it'd have any impact on the events of the story. Then to get locked into an ending I didn't want because of these "choices" just left a sour taste.

So when I walk away from my time with this game the only thing that held up was the music. The gameplay was needlessly slow and tedious. The performance got worse and worse as the game went on. Then the final story arc was... disappointing. I did replay a few chapters and nothing seemed to change, it's pretty fixed as it's events go, so it doesn't even really have much replayability.

I've seen this game compared to Obra Dinn a few times and I would say it's a valid comparison. It's a simple puzzle game where all you do is observe a scene, with no interaction, and try to piece together what happened and who was involved.

For 80% of the game I managed to breeze though it without really slowing down, there was a few little red herrings but for the most part it was pretty straight forward... then the last 20% makes sure you were paying attention to the greater story linking everything together. So I would recommend trying to play the game in as few sittings as possible to keep as much information fresh in your mind as possible. You can always quickly go back to previous cases to check what happened but it's much easier if you can remember off the top of your head.

My only complaint is the one time I used a hint, it wasn't much of a hint. "You've seen half these guys before and the other half are new, work it out" oh thanks... I hadn't noticed... luckily there isn't really any negatives for using them it just felt pointless the one time I did.

Personally I'd say for the price point it's a perfect length, it doesn't outstay it's welcome and drag on, nor is it too short to leave you wanting more.