Recent reviews by Trophi

This is one of the few fighting games I would recommend to both people who like fighting games and people who don't play them. I don't need to tell you this game is good, you've probably already heard it's good.

Just finished my first full run, but there's still other characters, weapons, and upgrades left to unlock.

I can already see this becoming one of my "default games." It's the kind of game you gravitate towards when you want to play something, but you don't really know what to play.

The gunplay is really fun and satisfying, which is what this game lives and dies on. The roguelike elements are a neutral factor to me. For me, the fun of this game is found in the base satisfaction of pressing buttons and clicking on guys, which Gunfire makes especially fun to do.

Between the silliness of some of the guns, the cute mascot characters, and the stylized low-poly aesthetic, this game feels like an elevated PS2 game, and feels like home for someone who grew up in that era.

One of my favorite community sims AND one of my favorite roguelikes in the same game.
It's shorter than I would have liked and I wish there was more endgame content; but that doesn't make this game any less worth it.

Dark Souls 2 gets a bad rap, but it's truly a great game. Not the best in the series, but probably not the worst.

I will say: If you've never played a Souls game before, I would NOT recommend starting here. There's much better games for onboarding the series (Namely DS3 and Demon Souls), but if you like the Soulslike genre and are fluent in the mechanics, DS2 is a fantastic entry.

Best music, story, and atmosphere in the whole series. Includes unique mechanics and weapons not seen in any other souls game. Fashion in this game is top-noth. The open world has so many ways to approach it, and if you struggle with an area, there's always at least 2 other possible paths or areas to explore instead. The boss fights vary wildly in quality, but there's like 66 of them or something, so there's bound to be a few you like in there.

I love challenging games. Absolutely adore them. This game is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I love the idea of a game where every single combat encounter is a struggle and you have to make the decision of fighting, sneaking by, or fleeing for random monsters on the road... Until every road is flooded with 3 groups of 2-3 enemies that are all stronger than you.

I love the idea of a game where important quests are time sensitive and there's a sense of urgency... Unless you don't actually give the player a way to track the time left on a quest, and punish them with an entire lost day of time if an unrelenting monster chases them down in the middle of the road. And then give them a permanent, game-altering penalty for failing the quest. And giving you several of these time sensitive quests at a time so once you fail one, you'll probably fail them all.

Just walking from one city to the next is an impossible challenge, and one where there is a steep penalty for things that sometimes aren't even your fault. Trying to get to the next town to finish a time sensitive quest? Better not get bitten by one of the 17 feral lizards on the way there a single time, or you will get sick, slowly die, pass out for 8 hours, then sleep for another 10 to get rid of the infection. Hope you don't have 3 time sensitive quests running that you didn't even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ choose to accept.

Fighting is a non-option too. Enemies don't act like real people or monsters. They sit and wait for you to do anything and react to a button press the second you make one. If you click to attack, the enemy rolls away on the same frame. But on the other end of things, the AI is so buggy, there's a variety of super cheesy ways to pick off single enemies. The devs knew this, so they account for it by always putting enemies in groups of 2, making even single fights ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ impossible. You can try to be smart and lay traps for enemies and lure them in to even the odds, but the traps hardly do any damage. The bleed effect they give is really good at slowly killing you over the course of a few minutes if YOU step on one, but enemies don't need to be alive for a few minutes, since they kill you in four or five hits.

I love disempowerment games. Games that make you feel like you're always on the back foot. But this game feels like you're playing with a dungeon master who wants to beat you at DnD. I can feel them snickering with every death and feeling so clever about their game. Isn't it so hard? Isn't that so cool?

If combat felt more organic, if just getting from one place to another wasn't so frustrating, and if there weren't so many things that cheapen the experience, this would be an amazing game. I WANT to love it. But it doesn't feel like it loves me back.

(EDIT AFTER THE DEFINITIVE EDITION CAME OUT)
I'm having fun now. I don't know if the game changed or I did, but I'm having fun.

Buyer beware, everything I said above is still true. However, I learned that you can enable the cheat menu to be able to save your game, and that alone makes every problem with this game tolerable. Honestly, I understand why saving isn't part of the game by default. Dying has severe consequences that being able to save completely undermines. I get it. Counterpoint: having your entire file ruined because you died too many times isn't fun.

The game still feels overly antagonistic towards the player, but I kind of like the antagonism if I know I can fine-tune the experience via the cheat menu. For instance, the very first time I got bit by a hyena, I got an infection that (being a brand new character) I didn't have a cure for. This means I would have to cut into the limited time I had for my quest to go back to town to spend the money I needed to gather for the quest on a cure. A 1/10 dice roll on an attack effectively would make me death spiral and fail the quest, which would result in me losing my house. So like, I just spawned in the cure and moved on with my life. You can do that, nobody will judge you.

The cheat menu is your safe word. The game will go as hard as it possibly can on you with no levity. It's your responsibility to decide how much you're willing to put up with before you need the game to back off.

This game genuinely has a lot to offer. The super severe survival aspects are really fun in a vacuum. Honestly, from a sheer survival aspect, I think it's the best survival game I've played. But the questionable combat system and level designs don't always support the survival system to make it as fun as it can be.

Enmerkar Forest (which I hadn't had a character go to on my first review) is such a great example of what this whole game could have been. There are lots of strong single-enemy encounters in a sprawling forest that you can approach and explore in so many ways. The swamps of the Hallowed Marsh and the deserts of Abrassar (which I played on my first few playthroughs) actively punish you with poison swamps and heat exhaustion if you dare to take your time and explore the area. They flood you with monster swarms that will hunt you to the ends of the earth, and they're full of craggy mountains and winding paths that can get you stuck, lost, or cornered while trying to explore.

In conclusion, if you want to have a good time with this game, do the following:

- Enable the Cheat menu and don't feel bad about using it. Don't abuse it, but like, save and fast travel when you feel like you deserve a treat.
- Start in Berg. Seriously. Treat the other two areas as non-options.
- Magic sucks, don't fall for it. It's fun and cool and interesting and the casting system is really creative and unique, but it's really really bad and you will regret the max HP and stamina you spent to unlock it. Just get a bow.
- Find a spot in every city to drop your ♥♥♥♥ in. Your carrying capacity is precious and your items don't despawn, so just drop all of your consumables and food in the corner of the nearest city until you need them.
-Make training a priority. Trainers can buff your maximum stats, which is the only way for you to get stronger other than buying gear.
-Avoid taking new quests until your log is cleared. Almost every quest is timed and the timers tick down simultaneously. Don't talk to anyone or go into new buildings unless you want to risk automatically getting a new quest.

This game at it's core is fantastic. It's the best installment of a Dragon Ball fighting game since Tenkaichi and Budokai. Each character feels diverse, the combat system is very fun and has appeals for casual and harder core players, and the story mode is surprisingly interesting.

This is why it is a bleeding shame that BanDai turned it into a P2W DLC fest.

You may not care if you do not plan on playing PVP at all. If not, I completely recommend this game. However, for the full DLC package of $10 per package with 2 DLC packs out now and another one on its way, the price for winning becomes very steep very quickly. These DLC packs include equipable items and super moves that go against the design of the combat engine and make winning matches versus those without the DLC free. Some of these include a Z-Soul that recharges your stamina when your opponent deals damage to you, a super that freezes your opponent for a set amount of time and disables their ability to vanish or use escape moves (which no other move in the game disables, including *paralysis moves*), and a DLC fighter (Nuova Shenron) that is strictly better than all other default fighters.

It's unacceptable and blatant P2W, which is strictly unacceptable for a game that already costs $50.

This may actually be one of the worst multiplayer games I've ever experienced.

The worst part is that it's tagged and marketed as a fighting game, or at the very least a MOBA with fighter qualities. This is an outright lie. The "combo system" is about as complex as meleeing sombody in tf2, the ranged and close quartered combat systems do not synergize well at all and the characters are really irritating and hard to like (yet overly sexualized in a way that isn't even sexy).

The biggest problem with this game, I think, is the fact that they try to make it a fighter at all. It's clearly not meant to be one, but that is the prominent tag for it on steam. it's really more of a MOBA/3rd Person Shooter if anything, but those tags don't even pop up unless you click view more tags.

I know it's easy to dismiss all of this because of the little time I spent playing this game, but I couldn't will myself to play any more than I did. If you're into mobas, you might like this game, but don't expect a quality F2P fighter out of it. You'll be sorely disappointed.