Recent reviews by Sairek Ceareste

Can't really recommend it even as a free to play title.

Game feels slow and floaty with network, crashing and desync issues out the whazoo and very bad input delay. The game had issues on beta but it wasn't this bad or numerous. Can't tell if the network code even improved when 80% of the matches are interrupted with a "Network desync error. Exiting match" message or someone starts running off the stage over and over because they crashed/disconnected mid-game.

The optimization issues alone are astounding - there's no reason being ABOVE the recommended requirements for this game runs between 20~33 FPS despite being on the lowest possible settings; Unreal Engine 5 shouldn't be performing this badly, let alone for a game that's only a 2.5D fighter. This isn't something everyone experiences it seems, but I certainly do and can only review from my own personal experience.

For some reason, they thought slapping a bunch of currencies making everything confusing and convoluted (and even more expensive) was a good idea. It's like they're afraid of people running out of grinding to do. Of course, the game doesn't have the courtesy of auto collecting rewards for you. It feels like a mobile game, having to click on 20 different things through equally as many menus to get rid of a red "!".

I can see value in the game if it ran properly and some of the design issues were smoothed out - the foundation is there, but the technical issues plague this game far too much which is insane after dying and being down for an entire year after a beta that, for a time, was incredibly successful. All of these issues should have been ironed out to be better - not somehow become worse while failing basic UI and game designed 101.


EDIT: Today in the game's Discord, it was announced today that the "feature" in the Rift on harder difficulties, that the description of the difficulty setting where you have limited lives which, I quote: "(You can purchase more)", with a very intentional pop up to purchase more lives that will come up if you run out of them and "Game Over", is SOMEHOW an "unintended feature" and is a "BUG".
...As if bugs somehow program very coherent code and sentences that are translated in multiple languages about how you can buy more lives. This was somehow an 'accident'.


You cannot make this stuff up. What an awful attempt at gaslighting the community for rightfully being called out on their predatory practices at monetizing in an attempt to dodge accountability.

The "recommended" way to progress in combat at the start is three options:

1. Die and die and die and watch ads or pay per death to slowly work your way through a dungeon for an RNG drop to get a better weapon and a shield, so you can actually stop dying — plot twist, you can't watch ads on Steam, and so no in-combat revive for you without paying the 40 cents per death

2. Pay for a VIP subscription so you can skip watching the ads and revive in combat for "free"

3. Buy a combat bundle so you just start off with the gear you need to actually do combat.


It's a literal, genuine pay wall. You cannot get past without cheesing for hours, carefully killing a "slime" which has a chance to drop a reagent to which you can craft one of many, many, many small HP potions you'd need to brute force your way to the "goblins" which have a chance to drop the gear you need to start actually progressing. We're talking genuine hours of dying over and over again hoping to get random drops if you don't want to go to mobile for the in-combat revives with advertisements (which by the way, they'll then be able to sell your data), or pulling out your wallet.


7.1 hours. I think I gave it a pretty fair shake, but this is where the monetization reached offensive levels of egregious. This game does not and will not respect your time in any capacity.

I've spent more time sitting back, eating popcorn, laughing my ass off like I'm some kind of super villain as people die to my devious creations, than I have actually doing anything else in this game.

It's easily the best part about Meet Your Maker.


While many of the thumbs-down reviews complain that people don't need to finish levels to publish them, it simply wouldn't work with how the game works. The game heavily encourages builders to adjust, modify, change, alter, replan or whatever other word you want to use, over and over again for the same build, and to constantly create new builds, since builds have a finite life span for which they can provide you resources. Dedicated builders would easily need to retest and republish their levels dozens of times a day or be forced to make hidden dev exits.

The harvester system exists so that all levels are possible, without having to constantly replay your level to publish, and while it can stifle creativity sometimes, nothing has stopped me from making a backdoor for the harvester, putting an obvious front door, and the vast majority of people just running through the front door anyway rather than going through the easy backdoor.

Also there's been no build that's been impossible to complete so far from what I can tell. So I think the harvester system, while flawed in some ways, is doing its job and intended purpose. It stops people from making huge labyrinths with the only way forward hidden among thousands of blocks through a holographic cube that only disappears when you can extremely close to it.

Oh and you don't even lose anything if people do successfully raid your bases.


The game is good and it's a fun time, and I heartily recommend picking it up, though I can understand the $30 price point will probably ward off others from trying it. If the price is too much to ask, and you own a Playstation, you can play it for free with Playstation Plus as well. Otherwise, I recommend waiting for a sale unless this type of game is really your jam.

Getting the elephant out of the room first, it's a damn shame we don't have NA servers and are forced to use the Taiwan servers (which means if you play the global version, you can't transfer your progress over). It's kind of a slap in the face for anyone living in the west and this automatically marks the game as "not recommended" to me due to the sheer disrespect of the customer base... but let us talk about the actual game itself if that alone doesn't matter to you:



As a gacha game, it's... okay. However - this is a gacha game with a Mega Man coat of paint — not a Mega Man gacha game. What do I mean exactly?
Well in Mega Man, your skill matters. A lot. In X DiVE, your skill matters very little. Your stats and numbers (and your credit card) mean everything.
Have you ever played a Mega Man game when you can shoot or slash an opponent and connect your attack with their hit box, but your "HIT" stat isn't high enough compared to their "LUCK" stat, so you deal 0 damage as the enemy "DODGES" instead? I bet you haven't, because that doesn't happen in Mega Man games. When you hit the thing, it takes damage, and probably dies in one hit if you hit it with a hard hitting attack. Here you can try that, get a "dodge" and probably get slapped back because now the enemy you tried to kill just shot you in the face.
How about only being able to deal 1 damage (IF the enemies don't "dodge") when opponents can have over 100,000 HP and can one shot you because your attack and defense stats are too low compared to theirs?

This game is a prime example of why Mega Man and RPG stat-line mechanics shouldn't be mixed. You could play skillfully, sure, but it won't matter too much as eventually you WILL hit a stat wall, though this stat wall thankfully gets more forgiving the further along you go. At 370k power, I can push up to a 550k power stage relatively comfortably using Zero [Z] - an A rank character before bosses start two-shotting me. Ironically, this is actually when the game is at its best and feels closest to a Mega Man game as there's actual challenge to the game instead of enemies only dealing 1 damage to me when I have 92k HP.
Starting off as a new player however, being even just 5K power under the recommended can be a death sentence while being 5k power over means you 1 shot everything and enemies can't damage you. So you're either overwhelming strong or overwhelmingly weak. There is no good balance in the early game, so it literally takes weeks for the game to actually even have a chance to be fun.
Surprisingly, lower tier characters CAN actually be quite good which is nice. Maybe not meta but they are quite component and can hold their own. You won't need to shell out money to succeed. In fact, I recommend you don't, as a high-ranked lower tier character is usually better than a low-ranked high tier and they require far less resources to set up properly. Getting an S-tier-anything you want is extremely stingy and expensive and their availability is extremely limited with FOMO tactics. A and B tier characters do not have this problem and there are ways to get them that don't involve throwing premium currency at banners.

Unsurprisingly, the game is quite grindy. You'll be repeating the same content over and over again everyday quite frequently, especially if you are not a whale and definitely so if you are completely free to play. It's literally 90 minutes on average of playing the same daily recycled chore content. This cannot be automated. The player level EXP curve increases substantially at level 70 and this is when progress slows down.

Stage design is boring. Each area has 6 stages that go into platforming sections with enemies, and then a forced gauntlet fight, with a mini boss in stage 3 and a boss in stage 6. Stages very rarely have something unique in them that makes them stand out from one another. Each area is mostly just a different coat of paint and music. The ice area may have (annoying) ice physics and this factory may have elevators, but that's about it. There aren't even any water stages.
Bosses are all over the place. Some bosses telegraph and are too slow. Some don't telegraph at all. A few feel just fine. It's like different people made them with different opinions on how boss design should work. It doesn't help that your hitbox in this game is ridiculously huge. You need to give attacks an extremely wide berth to avoid them or you'll clip them and get hit.

This game has co-op: But the stages are easily solable. Even in challenge mode (though you need a partner to get the weekly rewards). Due to the aforementioned lack of proper servers, you'll usually have your co-op partner disconnect at the beginning instead of being able to run through the stage with them. Basically, it sounds fun on paper, but it's executed very poorly in X DiVE.

PvP is a joke. It is completely unbalanced, with peer 2 peer netcoding, making it laggy, and meaning opponents can hit you where you show on THEIR screen and not where you are on yours, making lag switch cheating easy. Not only that, but several S-tier characters have literal one-shot abilities and while power level is removed from PvP, literally nothing else is, meaning again, your skill doesn't matter while how many times you swipe your credit card does.
Apparently most of the people know PvP is crap because the vast majority of people are either AFK farming wins or will even trade you wins if they meet you again and I can't blame them. But even if it was balanced, the netcode is too terrible for it to be fun anyway.

The game controls okay with controller but it's not as responsive as a proper Mega Man game and it seems to drop inputs now and then. This is the only Unity game I've had this issue, and it happens even when I tried it on mobile as well, so I don't think it's an issue with my hardware. Mobile controls are technically playable, but not good.

The music is pretty good, for what few original tracks there are. The majority of the music is recycled music from various other sources, which is a shame. They like to use Maverick Hunter X boss music way too much, though.

Graphically the game is... really bad. I know it's a mobile game, but the outline on the models is lazily implemented and creates bad aliasing issues and it just oozes of laziness. For example, they took the background of the forest from Mega Man ZX, a game meant for a 256x192 resolution screen (DS), and just upscaled and didn't even fix the transparency of the edges properly.
Here is what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/Fv7hpBy.png
And here is the original background source they took from: https://i.imgur.com/vF95kEi.png
Again, this is a game released in 2020, using assets from a 2D game made in 2006, which were just upscaled six times their original size and wasn't even cropped properly. It is no wonder the game doesn't look good. However as far as showing you what you need to see, it is fine. Enemies and hazards are obvious, enemy projectiles are usually pretty clear (a couple of exceptions this isn't the case), what is part of the stage and what isn't is pretty clear.
Optimization wise, I've had no problems. It's a mobile game, so not very difficult to run. I've noticed no memory leaks or anything like that. There have been a couple crashes when a new day rolls over or, ironically, when trying to exit the game, but I've yet to crash when playing the game during a stage.

RiCO is Alia 2.0 and it's annoying.



All in all, I don't recommend this to the average user, but not to the point where I would say it's not worth trying if it really piques your interest or you want to try it as a casual time waster. Rather than quenching one's thirst for Mega Man, it often leaves you dehydrated, and you'll have to play a real Mega Man game or 20XX/30XX to have that thirst properly quenched.

It may not be the first game of the genre, but it's the one that put the genre into the spotlight.

What a long, long history this game has been through of... well, of not much happening, to be honest.

This game is not what it once was. I won't be reviewing it based on how it was in the alpha, but there are a few key points to still note.

• No official Windows 7 support. Meme all you want, lots of people still use Windows 7. A fan made fix has to be used to play this game on Windows 7. It does seem to work for almost everyone, though crashes are more likely and the game won't close properly.
  
• This is not an RPG anymore. Yes. I know it says it's an RPG on the store page next to the video. It's a lie.
  
• This game does not have XP, or leveling anymore. Yes, I know it says "Level" on the character select screen and when you open up the inventory.
  
• This game technically has infinite progression, but it's in such a thinly veiled way, that Euro Truck Simulator 2 has more infinite progression than this game does.
  
• This game does not have FREE exploration anymore.
  
• No official modding support.
  
• A lack of guidance at all for new players which makes the early game that's already tough when you DO know what you're doing, a living hell.
  
• Balance. Game has basically none of it, anywhere. Mages are OP. Both player class, and the enemy arch type, and the game constantly stat checks you that any skill to show your competence in the combat is nearly rendered
  moot.

• Regions. The entire game revolves around this mechanic. Some biomes include plains, deserts, dusk woods, lava lands, forests, ice lands and oceans. There can be little sub biomes in some of these, such as a very mountainous zone in a plains biome.
  
• Basically an infinite world, most of things of interest are going to be copy and pasted things you see before, but think Minecraft world size and landmass generation in this regard.
  
• Quests. All of them are combat-related. Every single one of them. There's little to no variation to this. Sometimes a quest will want you to destroy a demon portal, or to dismantle a "mana pump", but to do these, you have to beat the bosses guarding these objectives anyways. It's basically the added objective of beating up a helpless inanimate object at the end. You can't destroy them before the boss is down.
  
• Dungeons. There's also almost no variation to these. Just basically pre-made rooms plopped down here and there with random mobs in them with no cohesion. Occasionally you might get a castle, or a dungeon. All of these are also combat based by the way.
  
• Artifacts. These are the things you play the game for. More on them later.
  
• Glitches. A good number of them! I guess that's not exactly a good thing to have. Some of them are fun though, sort of in that Skyrim sort of way.
  
• A two-man dev team that does not communicate at all to their player base and may disappear and update their game a whole six years later.
  
• Steam mods who actively deleted civilized, polite critique and criticisms about the game. Yikes.

As I said before, the game relies entirely on the region mechanic. Everything you find in a region, is only usable in a region. This includes gear you find, special items you find, any mobility items like boats, reins to ride your pet, or hang gliders to fly in the sky. If you pass the border of your region, your gear immediately becomes useless, even the hang glider you was just using 300 feet in the air. Will poof from your hands, and you will be sent plummeting 300+ feet to your death.

Nothing you earn in a region stays with you aside from two exceptions.

1. Gear that you obtain with a + at the end of their name will work in ADJACENT regions from the region you obtained that gear in (this is usually six more regions). These are exceptionally rare. You're lucky to find more than 1 of these in 8 hours of constant play time, let alone one of high quality to actually aid you much.
   
   
2. Artifacts. As I said, artifacts are the reason you do anything. These offer permanent utility buffs. Unfortunately, the buffs are very small. Such as 2% bonus to your swimming speed. 0.2 meters of light radius on your lamp (default is 4 meters). It can take up to 6~8 hours to get a couple of these, if you're lucky that multiple of them spawn in the same region before you have to leave your region and restart the gear grind again. Also, these artifacts soft cap. That 2% speed bonus eventually turns into 1.5% per artifact. Then 1%. Then 0.5%. Then 0.25%, and so on. The more of the same type you collect, the less potent the ones you collect afterward will be.
   Artifacts increase your level -- level literally does nothing. It just counts how many artifacts you've found. Believe me, I've tested. A level 9,001 character with no gear has the same combat stats as a level 1 with no gear.

Not so good, I am afraid. Enemy AI is incredibly basic. An enemy that detects you will run towards you until it's close enough to smack your face, or to shoot you with something. That's it for 90% of the enemies. Occasionally a humanoid enemy will use a heavy attack, or a skill after a set amount of seconds, with no variation. Maybe a humanoid enemy will run away to heal to chug a potion, or burrow itself in the ground to heal.
This means that the AI is, unfortunately, incredibly easy to cheese, and it makes combat boring and repetitive as all the enemies are basically the same, with just slightly different attacks which for the humanoid enemies, are the same ones you can use.

This is bad, because combat is what you do for half of the game. The other half is walking to your destination, which is also boring because it's walking and doing nothing. Getting to your destination can take up to 10 minutes, and there's usually literally no reason to smack mobs in between, unless you need money.
You won't ever need money past the first couple hours.

This means the game play loop is to beat weak things for gear, to upgrade your armor and weapon level, to fight slightly stronger things, doing quests that match your weapon and armor level because you won't be able to even damage things that go more than a little bit beyond your gear zone, to tackle the dungeons after 5~6 hours that hold the artifact(s) in the region to get your permanent +2% swimming speed bonus or climbing speed bonus, to then move on to the next region of your choice which means you basically hard reset and do the same thing. Again, and again, and again, with no purpose.

After you've completed the first region, you've basically seen the entire game. Nothing changes beyond that point other than the coat of paint you're in.

• It looks pretty -- although the optimization is fairly bad (lower end CPUs will be destroyed by this game).
  
• The foundation for interesting things is laid. A more meaningful progression system and more content that the game sorely lacks would go a far way to quickly make this game more worthwhile. Unfortunately, I cannot review a game on what it can be -- only for what it is.
  
• Can be fun with friends. Take that for what you will. Even Fallout 76 is fun with friends.
  
• A very, very loyal and dedicated community. Even though we've been at each other's necks during the beta test, it's all because of our passion.

Either have lots of friends to play with, this can make the grind a lot less painful (and quicker), wait for a month or 2 and see if the devs take this in a better direction/add more content (and not vanish for 6 years again after a couple weeks) or see if people can fix this game via mods, or finally, wait for a massive discount of at least 50% off or so.

After waiting to do so through 9 years of early access, I can finally whole-heartily recommend this game properly with a clear conscience.

The Hawk character can certainly plays differently from both Ace of Nina, since she is basically what you could consider the "mage" character due to her own personal unique powers that she can find.

Even without her powers, her whip certainly adds a new element to the game with the usage of the base powers you can collect after beating their respective bosses.

Hawk in my opinion, shines with the most fun, when you just get that run where all the stars align and you just get this overpowered set up where you're just blowing things up left, right and center and rocket jumping your way across stages. But that doesn't mean she isn't unfun to play with super hard difficulty set ups either, as the use of your powers will require more tactics, since the whip by itself is not exactly a very good weapon and you are stuck with it being your primary, so learning to use every power effectively is certainly key on harder difficulties and that's not something you can just do easily without some mechanical skill. Her only downside and probably lack of enjoyment for people who like to just run in immediately, guns or swords blazing from the get-go will probably find her unsatisfying, as Hawk takes a few stages to ramp up to the point she can do this and if RNGesus is willing. Not finding any of her special powers, whilst very unlikely, is still possible. And of course, once you run out of energy, you have the downtime of rapidly whipping foes slowly to get your energy back up, although as a run goes on, you will have to do this far less frequently.


In the end however, Hawk is a unique play style, that certainly fits well in 20XX to spice up the gameplay considering she is only $3. And people who are fans of Castlevania's Simon Belmont will probably appreciate her whip playstyle and one of her unique powers for sure. She's fun, but also is not designed to be completely overpowered to where she outshines the two original characters either.

Though she is more flashy with bigger explosions and fire and energy pewpews. But when was blowing evil robots up with bigger explosions ever a bad thing?

If you're looking to buy this game, I'd say wait.

The core concept is very neat. But as of right now, this "game" is barely functional. Constant crashes, the controls are sluggish and horrible and you have to exit OUT of the game to even configure them (the options menu is embarrassingly bare). The "combat" is non-existant (just point at enemy and spam the left click on your mouse), and apparently it likes to reload my auto save out of nowhere just randomly, making playing the thing even more difficult if it doesn't decide to crash in the first place. The performance also isn't great, but it's the least of its problems when compared to all of the above. Either way, as far as basic presentation goes, it has failed every aspect of it, which is disappointing for a game that has apparently been in Early Access for over 2 years. I would have figured these kinds of things would at least be somewhat ironed out by now.


I wish this game well and hope that in the future that it will be a game worth trying again, but as of right now, it's suffering from far too many Early Access pains to even be worth playing, if you can even get it to work properly. As of right now, it has a very neat concept, but that's the only real appealing thing it has going for it. Hopefully the actual gameplay will become appealing some day, too.

This game is hardly functioning. Literally.

Crashes after crashes after crashes after crashes. Nearly 2 hours of trying to play game and I only got in for 6 seconds before it literally crashed again with a visual runtime error.