Recent reviews by MukiEX

While at times gloriously frustrating (the stim button is the least reliable machanic I've ever used in gaming), this has been one of the coolest games I've played. PvE at an insanely large scale and higher difficulty levels that CAN get overhwelming but more often than not are exhilarating. The studio's put together a great game.

Reviewing it because Sony turned around a less than pleasant mandate in record time and I hope Arrowhead is rewarded for this.

The good: The art is nice. They do a great job with the segmented 2D character models and the "card flip" animation reminds me of the Saturn version of III, which is always a plus. The music is entirely on point. If I never played it, like, solid 9/10.

The bad: While the basic gameplay response is okay, the actual mechanics are really poor:

1. The well doesn't auto-replenish to 3 lines, which results in a much stronger need to manually lower new blocks in.
2. There's no point to chaining more than 2 reactions together. If Magical Drop III was a fighting game where combos could do 2-10x as much damage as basic hits, Magical Drop VI combos stop at 2x damage. You're better off repeatedly stringing 2-chain combos together than anything above that number.

The latest update makes the game a little bit less of a pain (more than 1 character unlocked by default), but the actual puzzle mechanics still make the game much slower than it should be. Hopefully this becomes a positive review inside of a couple months.

If this is your first foray into Project Diva, it's a pretty good starting point. Tons of songs, easily runs on most PCs, short load times, etc.

Works with the HORI Arcade-style controllers from a couple years ago, which is legitimately all I cared about when I came in. Specifically, the NSW-230 'n (probably) PS4-161 controllers work in "Arcade Mode", where the game gets a more accurate read of the touch strip on the controller.

The good:
Runs well on surprisingly low-end system (tried on an Ivy Bridge i5, INTEL graphics, ran fine w/o shadows)
Everything good about DOA 5 is present here, which is a lot. The fighting system is far better tuned than any previous DOA and it's a far more "tourney-capable" title as a result.
Supports 4K resolution!

The bad:
PS3 textures/effects. No option to scale the general fidelity up or down aside form shadow map resolution.
Resolutions are all hardwired, so you cannot custom-set the game's resolution. 4K is nice, but being able to set my own resolution would be better.
That wouldn't be bad, but it's $40. So PS4 pricing for PS3 detail levels.
No online 'til June 31st? Kind of a downer.
ZERO real Steam integration. No cloud saves, no achievements. Maybe when online arrives?

So the good is that it's DOA5, the bad is that it's probably this team's first PC game. They don't have any credit with me at the moment, so do NOT buy this game unless what's already present is good enough for you. It's definitely there for me, but YMMV. Here's hoping I have a FAR more optimistic follow-up to this in three months.