Recent reviews by AntennaAngel

Quite different from its predecessor, Axiom Verge 2 actually sits more on its exploration and story progression than on its boss fights and combat. I stacked like 38 hours into the game and then realized I was right on the edge of several achievements and so redownloaded to do them, and enjoyed doing so because I wasn't ready to be done with the world yet by the end.

Playing both, this game CLEARLY learned so much from the first, with a better map and at least some guidance. The whole world is a bit of a puzzle that you'll have to interlink in creative ways to get 100% map completion. And I enjoyed it a ton.

I highly recommend this game and the first one, though they are different from each other. I got them on sale, myself, so they were very worth it to me.

A cursory glance at the Store Page's screenshots will tell you most of what you need to know about this game and how inspired it is by Metroid. I was critical of it at first and there's maybe some components that could have been different but look up how many people developed this, and you won't mind that either.

I would have liked maybe different damage types. There's tons of weapons that mean very little but are insanely hard to acquire. As with some other Metroidvanias, guidance is minimal and backtracking to random rooms trying to find my objective did eat up a chunk of my playtime. The first three or four bosses were so easily cheesed that I started to lose interest. And then the game picked up and I started WANTING the next boss. My advice is, if you find yourself struggling, just look it up. There's too much stuff to find and some of it is hidden in the most insane ways, you'll not find it all without help.

I got this on sale. If you catch it on sale too I highly recommend it and its sequel, though the sequel is a very different game imo.

An absolutely lovely game. High opening difficulty might turn a few people sour early on but I very much recommend sticking with it. I enjoyed so much of this beautiful world and interesting characters, and our main character Little Blue the Deadsuit, is a fascinating mystery. It is a true shame this game isn't more popular and well known. My friends and I talked about which parts of what other Metroidvanias we could feel in this game, very positively. And as far as backtracking the map, I've spent the past couple weeks with my arm in a sling playing Metroidvanias I got in a sale, and this game is HARDLY the worst, if you can't handle this then Metroidvanias largely probably aren't your thing (and that's ok).

I got it on a steep sale price so my assessment of its value to me is based on that, 44 hours of high enjoyment for only a few dollars to me. If its 20 buck price tag doesn't appeal to you maybe wait for a sale.

A fun racing game for anyone that liked Hot Wheels as a kid and isn't too fond of hyper-realistic racing games, some complaints I see merited maybe a bit more research on the customer's part before buying. Lack of steering wheel support is something I knew about before buying. Same with excessive and annoying character cars, I was able to find this out early before ever putting dollars down. YouTube reviews are all it takes.

The game economy is... silly, really. It makes little sense, but is ultimately tolerable if you don't mind grinding races to earn cars. There IS an abundance of character car DLC, introducing themed uncustomizable vehicles. It's disappointing, more recognizable cars might have taken their place, but knowing this I still bought much of the DLC.

The racing is FUN. The tracks are complicated, and I honestly get similar vibes from old GTA5 racing control. There's a 'plot' of sorts but it's ignorable. The cars have no character drivers, no forced reasoning for why the game world works, it's just die-cast cars on awesome tracks, the way kid you imagined.

TLDR; I caught this game on sale and I highly recommend you do the same.

Update. Season content was not my favorite change, and now the game feels unnecessarily bloated. What was once a fun challenge to clear a cave completely, is now a chore, like an actual job, and once you exhaust the collectibles of any one type of puzzle, there's no point to even do it anymore, but it'll still randomly generate in your caves instead of something more fun or rewarding. Wish the game had stayed simpler, now it's just unpleasant busy work.

Original review:
Take the cave-diving and resource gathering of Minecraft, and combine with the hordes of Left 4 Dead. Mix in some different objectives, and a handful of dwarves with guns.

I genuinely didn't expect to get into this game much, I'm not usually one for loops of gameplay, but I've put in days of solo and team play and I just keep coming back. It really does remind me of L4D for how easy it is to keep coming back. And the community is among the better ones I've interacted with. This is one of the most worthwhile purchases I've made in a while.

The graphics are simple but lovely, the music is stunning (get the soundtrack), the environments are unique, the worlds feel lived-in and alive. Genuinely fun play and some very good challenges, now with cool season content. I'll be playing this for a while. ROCK AND STONE

I'm on an i7-8750H, 32gb DDR4 with a GTX 1060 6gb on m.2 SSD. Graphically this game is stunning, beautiful, adorable, and visually interesting. I've encountered no running bugs so far. Updates will follow below the original review. Final review TLDR: This game deserves a much better sequel where they learn from the failures of this one, because there is so much here that could have made this Fallout-level good. I plan to slog through and finish because the parts that are good are solid.

This review will have spoilers. I mark as recommended, though I may change my mind in the future, despite many cons, which I will list first. If these are enough to turn you away, the pros won't change it. I still recommend the game as of this writing.

Cons
-Far too frequent interruptions for complicated, sometimes confusing and often nonsensical exposition
-Complicated upgrade/level up systems that feel out of place
-Unexplained events in game, like enemy faction leader having dialogue directed at you immediately after you choose the opposing faction despite not being anywhere present at the time, a creature in a wheelchair scaling out of a huge hole you had to climb to leave, talking about the tree of life without my ever having seen it directly, etc. (heavy ludonarrative dissonance)
-Some controls are not as fluid or responsive as I might have hoped
-Very repetitive world objects, the same broken down truck in every area you enter for example

Pros
-Awesome fighting, at least for the Saboteur class that I'm playing with
-GORGEOUS world art, adorable characters
-Ki power upgrades seem awesome and fun to use
-A cool weapon and gear system I've yet to fully explore (sadly this long in I have no customization items yet...)

I hope that some changes might get made moving forward to improve the game, even if they have to be big ones. I feel truly like it doesn't know what kind of game it's trying to be. There's a ton of promise here, and I've been keeping loose tabs on the creation of this game forever, so maybe take my bias into account. I think a fair number of people are disappointed in this game so far, and I too may reach that point (I'll sure update if I do) because of expectations of what this game would be vs. what it actually is right now, and I don't fault them at all given my list of cons. I will still give it a chance, and maybe the game will open up and be better as I progress.

4 hour update: The game DOES get better. Lots of the mentioned flaws don't necessarily go away, but there's a lot more to do now. Though I consider it a hefty oversight that it took me 3+ hours to pick up customization items and stop having constant story dialogue interruptions, the game now is starting to make me think of a combination of Mini-Ninjas and Fable, but with a more fun weapon customization and crafting system. I'm liking it more than I was for certain, once you get some powers (though a few are confusing to use and not well explained before you unlock them) and weapons under the belt. Still struggling to incorporate the parry system. But now I feel much better about recommending it for sure.

14 hour update: There's so much to do in this game. Lots of territory capture. Factions. Crafting, upgrading, powers. Imagine if half a Pixar team got together with half of the Red Faction team to make a game, except they never quite settled on some details, got rushed in the 11th hour, and did the best they could to make it playable without everything quite in good order. That's about what this game is. Objectives have zero pacing, and zero time restraint. The narrator gives ominous warnings about night, and you can rest until morning at campfires, but night itself is no different than daytime. I've found the combat to be very fun if not always fluid, dialogue is fairly predictable and binary with lots of what feels like filler in absence of context or better words. Lots of things that give you the impression they make a difference actually don't.

And the game DOES have some bugs. Changing out my top for example, on my avatar the upgrades I've made on my equipped top will remain if I change it to a new one. Shop selling lists often mark the wrong items as being equipped. Small stuff. While lots of stuff feels unfinished though, what is finished is quite fun, and my honest review is this: This game deserves a much better sequel where they learn from the failures of this one, because there is so much here that could have made this Fallout-level good. Better even. I hope it survives the bad reviews to get that much.

This game is absolutely killer. 8/10.

I have an i7-8750H, GTX 1060 6gb, 32gb DDR4 and an m.2 drive, and yet even on some slightly reduced settings, I notice the framerate stays below 80 fps in-game, which is irritating to say the least, however I experience no other problems or bugs and the game looks gorgeous.

Compared to previous, the multiplayer is less like Unreal and more unique despite being somewhat less like normal PvP combat. On the other hand, unfortunately, compared to 2016's 54 possible achievements, this game has a paltry 33, which I personally find very disappointing.

In-game, so many of my complaints about DOOM 2016 have been rectified, and many things I didn't even know I wanted have been added. I LOVE the campaign (except that effing Marauder). My chief complaint about the extra lives system actually has more to do with the terrain than the lives. For example, it is VERY easy to get stuck, crammed in a corner or stuck against a wall surrounded by enemies even when you keep moving. You'll find yourself sometimes getting stuck on nothing but a terrain oddity. I lost 3 lives to Cacodemons in just a few seconds this way. Also there are several no-no areas where even if you're clever enough to reach certain spots, the game will count you as out of bounds and bounce you back to the main level, though this is mostly an annoyance.

Traversal, one of my biggest game gripes, is so awesome now I don't know if I can go back to 2016. Graphically this is a delight, the world is SO MUCH more amazing than previous with so many things going on in the background. The environment itself is alive where 2016's entry was frequently bland and stagnant. Color-wise too this game manages to maintain the same and better dreary, creepy, dark environments while being magnitudes more visually pleasing.

I think I've put more time in just in the few days since it came out than I did for the first year of 2016's release. But to be truthful, this isn't even the same game as that was now. It's a whole other level, and the Doom Slayer of 2016 is back to full form as opposed to the fresh-from-the-coffin figuring things out mode. It plays and feels very different.

In the 2016 entry, it was too easy to settle into your favorite weapons and mods, and never use any others. Some were clearly better. In Eternal, you will HAVE to change up your weapons, swap mods, and adopt different strategies immediately while getting health, armor, and ammo directly from your enemies' corpses. It's so much more interactive this way and I love it.

Aside from occasional environmental failures mentioned before, the only thing I really felt bothered by was how unserious lots of components of this entry feel, from goofy sound effects to general silliness of the overabundant references throughout the game, which makes it kind of hard to take the Slayer or the story as seriously as I'd like and I feel this contributes to why it doesn't exactly feel like a perfect sequel. But these things have managed to grow on me and I love to visit the Slayer's room in the campaign to check things out. I highly recommend this game with praise.

Neat little game, beautiful music. I put almost 6 hours in and got all achievements.

The game is all about exploration. You're given a boat with a motor to travel from place to place in this drowned city, looking for the things you need to save your brother.

Pros:
-My genuine compliments on the boat. A+ boat experience, very comfortable and fun once the boost is well upgraded.
-The music is lovely and fitting, though feels somewhat limited
-The world is beautiful and the creatures and environment interact with you wonderfully, with dolphins swimming nearby as you coast on the water and waves that can change your direction.
-This is a perfect game to start someone who doesn't think they can be good at games

Cons:
-Traversal was WAY too limited for what this game is supposed to be.
-The character moves kind of slow.
-The types of on-foot traversal, from broken outcroppings to vine walls to climbable pipes, all felt pretty basic, EXCEPT for the single-time use of a zip line (twice technically but you're using it to get to a collectible and then again to leave) which really threw me off considering it could have been a fantastic mechanic for going from building to building and just wasn't used. Add to that, the fact that the second zipline shows your character jumping nearly twice her height to reach it when she can only jump so high any other time.
-The buildings themselves are irrelevant and might as well be trees or hills you're climbing since you enter exactly one of them.
-A TON of logical consistency is missing to the degree that even in game it feels like it shouldn't be possible. What's fueling the boat? Wouldn't the propeller snag those vines? How come I can slam full speed into a breaching whale and still stay upright? There's just enough little things all together that don't do a great job of making the world feel reasonable even to itself.
-There is zero threat or danger or really anything else to do except travel and pick things up (and that's all less than unique or special), enough that I wonder if this could be a phone game. I might have liked this exact thing more as an animated feature for how little my player impact is.

This game is an art piece. It tells a wonderful combination of stories and leaves plenty to the imagination. The play is very casual and I happily recommend this to people I know who don't play games because they think they can't be good at them. However, it's easy for anyone to be good at this game because there is ZERO danger or time restraint, meaning you can do this at any pace. Which is fine except a lack of unique things to do and little tangible story or change in gameplay means that I'm taken out of the story entirely sometimes because I'm trying to find the only hidden zip line in the game or reclimb an entire building to get a collectible I missed in early game, so that I can just get all achievements and not do it again. It's a wonderful artistic expression, but it's not necessarily a wonderful game.

I have an 8th gen i7, 16gb DDR4, GTX 1060 6gb, and m.2 drives.

I have always been on-board for waiting for games to improve. ESPECIALLY early access games. This isn't an early access game. This is supposed to be the game. I loved the show and I wanted the game just because but frankly I wish this hadn't been made.

The fights are clunky, the characters are imbalanced, the story is genuinely trash. It honestly reminds me of some of the worse DBZ games, for how thrown-together this game feels. The attempts to be true to the art style were admirable, but honestly the modelling is bad. The levels go for the big-arena feel but they're walled in. You don't get much free movement, like playing with constant target lock. This game could have been so awesome, but now the running word seems to be "Wait for a fix," which for a 'full' release game like this, is godawful.

And those are just problems when the game actually works. Since I bought it I haven't been able to run it, with the game immediately shutting down just after the launcher goes away, until I set the resolution to 1280x720, which is insane since I actually used multiple much lower resolutions and it didn't work at all. Add to this the slew of people having frequent in-game crashes and frankly this game just isn't worth that price tag, in ANY way. If this were, say, early access, I'd be 100% on-board. Instead it feels like a luke-warm cash-grab aimed at Kill La Kill fans with little to no honest attempt to make a good arena fighting game.

And I really hate to say that because I love Trigger and Kill La Kill. This game should either not have been made, or should have been made more competently by anyone else.

The levels are gorgeous, every movement looks amazingly hand-drawn and smoothly animated. The music is haunting and wonderful. While a 'Dark Souls' comparison seems appropriate, this game is easily a beatable Metroidvania platformer. The combat is tough, and you have to adapt strategies on the fly, especially late game, and sometimes literally on some kind of fly. I've not spent so many hours in a game like this in a long time and I can't wait to see the sequel.