Recent reviews by Skyibis

Another Yoku's Island Adventure in my books

Fun game, fun weighty combat. It's punishing and harsh, which fits in the environment. Enemies do fly fast, there is significant advantages and disadvantages to playing with heavy weapons to light. I can see this game becoming heavily focused around parrying with some builds. It reminds me a lot of transitioning from Bloodborne to Sekiro, I died a whole lot my first run because I was so used to how forgiving Bloodborne is compared to Sekiro.
As for progress, I've currently just reached Sacrament and wish I could play it all day. I played with keyboard, but I highly recommend controller for now. There isn't mappings, and it feels like you are emulating a controller with a keyboard, not playing a native keyboard game. Its somewhere between Dark Souls I keyboard and Dark Souls III keyboard controls. There are a lot of performance issues, but I trust in Moon Studios to get them worked out. Transitioning from Unity to their own in-house engine apparently came with a lot of hiccups in that department.

The animations are fantastic, when I hit something with a greatsword it hits. Very immersive, very fun. I normally am a dex guy, but I just couldn't put down the greatsword.

What isn't immersive is the terrible performance. I have a 3060, well above minimum spec, but I struggled to get 30 fps in most areas. I didn't mind it in combat due to how slow it is (and the isometric view helps imo), but cutscenes are nearly pointless. It goes from 30 fps to 5-10 fps. The sacrament intro was literally a slideshow, with the audio out of sync completely. I can still play it (and want to), I've played way worse, but it definitely isn't what I'd call an acceptable level for most people

If you can handle (in cutscenes) stuttering, bad antialiasing, and some pretty bad dithering (the clouds lol), and some choppy bits in game, then I'd strongly recommend it now. Otherwise, wait for some performance patches to come out.

Phenomenal game that I took way too long to pick up. It's short, ~7 hours to 100%. The story had me guessing what was happening till about 80% through the game, and I was fully engaged trying to piece together what exactly is the Ultravoid. The finale was amazing, satisfied everything I could want from a Heart Machine story.

The gameplay didn't change at all throughout the game, but it didn't bother me once. The movement is fluid and engaging, and the game isn't long enough for anything to get too repetitive. The story was what kept me engaged, the in-between did its job at firing the dopamine receptors. The game is a platformer, combat only exists to be a small obstacle. Each area added new depth to platforming, so job done in my book.

The world was beautiful, and awesome to explore. Real mastery of level design. Every secret is naturally found, hints along the way. I always got that "Aha" moment finding the last few logs in an area, but never was frustrated. The side quests are perfect in difficulty, I usually get annoyed in story heavy games like this, but each one helped me piece together what the ending was going to be like.

I also loved the voice acting. I saw some negative reviews that the quips took away from the experience, but I honestly believe it wouldn't be the same without the personification of Rei. The story wouldn't work without Rei being her own person, and her not being vocal about her surroundings leads to her just being another self-insert. It showed Rei's light-hearted personality in the face of death (and adds impact to the emotional moments, where that facade cracks when she finds each runner).

Overall, easily one of my favorites of all time. Seriously had me drop everything and play through it for 7 hours straight. I haven't done that since the release of Hollow Knight.

Good story adventure, wonderful soundtrack.

Great game, having a fun time with it. Definitely small community, but I don't have many problems finding a match in the competitive mode (definitely against some of the same people in some instances). If you aren't willing to play in EU or US East though, I'd watch out. The servers in the other regions have almost always been < 3 people whenever I've checked.

Also locking moves behind rank (which is XP based, not anything to do with your skill) is a bit absurd, especially for a game with as small of a community as this. It hasn't limited my fun yet, but I can see how frustrating that would be with those just trying to play with friends.

It's a fun game, but is missing that final polish to really drive it home. This is just a review on the immediate mechanics and movement of the game, since I haven't seen the full content yet.

It comes so close to perfectly scratching that fluid combat itch
For my tastes, something just feels off with the movement and attacks. The movement feels like a generic unreal engine template, which is a shame for a game that has such cool combat mechanics. These mechanics also clash with the combat animations, as pretty as they look, they feel like they don't have impact when they should (see swinging a massive hammer into an enemy, and them just standing there afterwards like nothing happened).

I also don't think the combos flow between light and heavy well enough. There is a delay that really prevents you from going moment to moment with enemies as much as you might think given that there is both melee parrying and range interrupts (there are recovery frames that prevent you from immediately attempting to parry a move, for better or worse. You definitely won't find spamming to be a prevailing strategy across the game. You do actually have to think of openings to push for). This could be a skill issue since I'm still new at the game, but so far I found it was more efficient to play it like slightly faster Dark Souls instead of Bloodborne or Sekiro's hyper-aggressiveness.

Overall I think the game has quite good potential despite this. If you enjoy indie souls-likes its definitely in the top tier of them. The moves are still pretty, and the mechanics are interesting enough to keep playing, but it constantly keeps me wanting more from it from how close they got to really getting me hooked. I haven't gotten a chance to fully explore the skill tree, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I don't think my core opinions on the animations are going to change.

Really something special, the flow and feeling of the game is right up there in my top 10 metroidvanias. A diamond in the rough for the current year.

If you are used to beta/alpha testing games, and are a huge space engineers type fan looking for that multiplayer experience that space engineers denied you, this is a great game to try. I love the dev studio behind it and they are active and engaged with the community. Its NOT for everyone in its current state, major bugs abound and features missing, but its fun.

Edit 8/24: Wanted to add that most of the enjoyment in the game right now comes from the ship designer for me. Mining is a necessary evil that takes forever and PVP is a rare thing that has yet to be expanded (with capital ships etc), but my god the ship designer is addictive. If you love modelling and designing, would highly recommend the game. Its like being thrown in a CAD software but easy to pick up. Super fun even if only a fraction of what I create will ever be printed into the game.

This game is like cocaine to my eyes and hands, never thought a game which only had 3 implemented stages would hook me so easily. Must buy, even in its EA state its so polished you would only notice the lack of the 100's of items roguelites normally have.

Super fun game, so sad to see it in such decline. Still has a solid base if you get together with some friends to play. We had a 3 man and only had to wait a minute or so to find a match, even at 2 am.