Recent reviews by Ryuneko Meowtoi

Cute, pretty faithful adaptation of Pathfinder 2e. The voice acting was about the quality I would expect at my table. I played on hard and was lucky enough with my rolls to do it in one run. I actually stopped playing Tears of the Kingdom for this and don't regret the little detour lol

Good game.

TL;DR: a fun new xcom experiment that the developers have offered cut-price to show you that this wasn't intended to be a true sequel to xcom 2. It's buggy as hell though but I suspect that will be different in the future. It feels like the sort of game that will be patched with new things in the not so distant future.

XCOM: Chimera Squad to me plays like a conversation between a team of passionate developers at fireaxis. Almost every choice in the game feels like a sit down discussion they had to make an interesting new game on the side while they try to think up what the next full XCOM game might look like.

To give some examples I imagine conversations were had of situations they want to change up in future games and how they decided to experiment:

Question:
"Players have only ever been playing as humans for the most part and we want more room to add in fun abilities right from the get go."

Answer:
"Let's make it so that this time they can play as the aliens but are also along side humans as well.

Question:
"Players find some missions long and tedious as you have to be so careful in your approaches to make sure you're not ambushed by a squad."

Answer:
"Now players are thrown right into the middle of battle each time and don't have to do any legwork."

Question:
"Players can just instantly kill all the enemies in a room if we throw them into the thick of battle."

Answer:
"Let's change it so there's an order to combat rather than Player goes, Enemy goes and so on."

Question:
"Players liked concealment but wanted more from it. Some mods have added in systems to this. How can we find a middle ground?"

Answer:
"Let's make it so that rather than just being dropped into battle, you now breach into rooms in a somewhat more guided way than how concealment worked."

The list goes on but you get the point. I think for every new idea in the game some real thought and discussion went into it.

My main issue with the game is that they decided to make this one much more story based and gave all the character unique personalities rather than just be ones you created but ultimately don't do the best job at this.

Characters will have light conversation when you're back at base and some of the exchanges are funny, charming and even a little heartwarming. But these conversations never happen during battle and there's no way to build up relationships between them all.

For those of you who wanted Fire Emblem relationship styles you're not going to find them here. I'm not saying Fireaxis should of copied Fire Emblem but what I'm also saying is that they should of just copied Fire Emblem. War of the Chosen allowed two of your characters to build up a relationship and pull off interesting skills together. So I'm not sure why that doesn't carry over to this game. I suspect they simply might of just ran out of time. Characters could of built up Fire Emblem-esk style 'support' and had some fun, meaty conversations that gave small boosts.

I'm not asking for weddings at the end of it all but it would have been nice to learn about the history of the world more along with each character from this dialogue. At one point Cherub reveals in one of these casual conversations while planning a mission he is in the process of being adopted by the people who found him in essentially a giant test tube. I'd love to hear him discuss this more. Perhaps you could of created a "commander" that characters could talk with too to have conversations more centred on themselves and then leave the banter to other things. I'd love to know more about why the aliens and hybrids chose to fight on the humans side along with how they are adapting to day to day life. This dialogue is in the game but it's random as to when you get it.

I think there's real potential for a XCOM: Chimera Squad expansion or sequel if they make it more character driven and as you can tell from my review I think about that potential all the time. When it comes to the more gameplay driven parts I think there's plenty of great reviews you can read on steam and online a lot.

Edit: After completing the game I'm happy to say I still stand by this review. There's still a big list of things that need fixing.

Edit Edit: 05/01/2019: While I have all the DLC for the game now I can't seem to install one of the DLC's on my Macbook. I could troubleshoot this a lot more but I would.. Much rather play newer games. I posted about it in the discussion group a while back in steam but haven't got a reply. Here's to hoping in the future.


This is one of those reviews where I wish there was a neutral review! As there is so much to love about this game.

But here is the TL;DR: Regalia is a game that just oozes with surprisingly high production values, art, voice acting and music (Fully orchestrated!) but stumbles with a long, long list of core gameplay bugs and head scratching choices.

When it comes to presentation Regalia does have that unity engine game "feel" with chunky buttons and menus. However the artwork for the game is bright, colourful and clear. It's an absolute joy to look at all the characters portraits and expressions during cutscenes. Voice acting ranges from "Hey that's pretty good!" to "Ehhhhhhhh" but it’s all very welcomed. The music is a highlight with some nice tunes.

The game has social links and a calendar much like the persona franchise. Each couple of in-game months required you to complete a number of tasks (mostly simple ones that benefit you generally for doing them) and a general quest. Coming from Persona 5 only a few weeks ago I had no issues with this system at all. I enjoyed doing the little social links with various characters as it makes them feel a whole lot more alive and not just "shopkeeper" or "weapon crafter". I had a close call at the end of chapter 5 to completing the quests but managed alright.

Going onto the main map has you going from location to location doing dungeons with various nodes that will be a battle, campsite or a choose your own adventure like story. Campsites are where you can save and revive dead party members and on release you could only save once at a campsite, but this has now (THANKFULLY) been changed so you can repeatedly save but only revive your party members once. The choose your own adventure stories are usually fun and you can get some fun little quests, items, stories or just end up going into a battle.

Battles are the the real let down of the game though and the main reason for why I give this a negative. Most characters have some fun powers and passives even if it might seem strange at first they have all their skills available from the game go. The enemy designs are good with their own passives, skills and such that are all fitting to what you’d expect. However most enemies are masses of HP and sometimes possess skills and abilities that punish you in overly for merely attacking. A good example of this is an enemy that gains extra turns when you miss it or another that will regain all of its HP back and more in the form of shield points which might as well be normal HP when fighting most of your characters.

If you've seen the other reviews or discussions you will see that accuracy in the game is a big point of contention and I agree. There are ways to make sure your attacks always hit with a number of unmissable abilities but when you are swarmed with enemies that benefit each other with large health pools and abilities that make them stronger the more you hit them. There's a frustratingly high amount of enemies that gain benefits when score a hit. I have sunk all of the characters weapons and perks into boosting accuracy which seems to only very slightly offset the issue, but this accuracy doesn’t appear to account for the enemies dodge stat. The accuracy issue also seems to come from, if I'm not mistaken, that the chance to hit is essentially rolled twice: Once for the players accuracy and then once for the enemies chance to dodge. What makes missing so frustrating is that a lot of battles can feel like a slog with your whole team surrounding one moderately powerful enemy and each character taking anything from 10-15% of its health each turn. I actually kept getting flashbacks to this CLASSIC movie scene as my party repeatedly poked an enemy: https://youtu.be/W4tVH7BPb-Q?t=1m19s

One reviewer pointed out that (while I haven’t confirmed but seems to be true) enemies scale with your characters level that only makes their attacks hit about as hard if not harder as the game goes along and their pools of HP a slog to get through when it feels like just under half of your attacks are missing.

Line of sight can be extremely annoying as well when your party members block the line drawn to enemies. It makes using “large” characters that take up four tiles more of a hinderance. There are perks that remedy this for some issues but it’s not great.

Each battle will have challenges as well to complete. I recently replayed Chroma Squad and remembered the fun challenges at the start of each mission that you could do for bonuses at the end. However these challenges range from “possible” to “are you actually joking”. The worst ones are challenges that want you to not use your character's main skills, not enter battle with a full party, not lose a point of health on any character and never miss an attack. A lot of these challenges are simply based on dumb luck if you want to succeed. The rewards just simply aren’t worth it.

I do enjoy the perks part of leveling up though. Having a bunch of small perks you can unlock and then stack up on your party members that change their skills to ignore line of sight, do more damage, shorter cooldowns, etc.

...Also I don’t like fishing. I’m not a big fan of any game that has you hammering a button for an extended period of time over and over. Should of just copied Torchlights fishing mechanic, wouldn’t even of been mad.

The bugs are what really brings the game down currently. Many of the skills, perks, status conditions and other various parts of the game are bugged and don’t function correctly making it even more frustrating. I could go on about these but this review is already so long I’m sure most of you have switched off. I’ve seen the devs been so kind to take people's saves and edit them so they can continue with their progress in the game. Which is super nice of them but still won’t feel like a true solution.

To end this review I want to say I kickstarted the game and don't regret it for a moment! Regalia has the potential to be an absolutely excellent tile based RPG but it currently isn't in that state. I'm also a strong believer a game should be reviewed in the state it launched in (or within the first few days) and not after X amount of patches. I'm sure I'll be changing this review to a recommended in the future once issues are solved. Devs are quick to answer any bugs people have come across though. I will likely finish the game in time and maybe even do a second playthrough when they add all the features they didn’t have time for in the initial launch and patches that help the game. I’m excited for when this game is fully ironed out!

Van Helsing is a great loot based game akin to Diablo, Torchlight and games such as those. Probably what makes it stand out is that the character you play, Van Helsing, has such a more engadging personality than most almost voiceless heroes of other similar games. There's some great chatter between him and his AI companion who is incredibly useful and easy to set up. In addition to this the people you meet are voiced well, over the top in so many ways and also fun to interact with (We are talking Vampires with the oh so wonderful Transylvanian accent.).

Combat is about to be as expected. I've gone with a ranged firearm build. it works well and hits hard. But likle most ranged characters in this genre you are always limited to what you can see on the screen. So you usually only have a chance of having a real ranged battle with enemies in the top right and top left portions of the screen.

Probably one of the best things when it comes to loot in this game is that you get an incredibly useful breakdown of how it will increase your stats. Unlike Torchlight II which I have also played recently, it does all the maths for you and will say how much your DPS will be improved for everything that increases damage in some way. i.e Damage, Extra Elemental Damage Bonuses, Critical Chance, Critical Damage, Attack speed, Stat increases and so on. The same goes for things like protection and so on. This means less time agonising over what new weapon or armour to equip (I'm looking at you Torchlight & Borderlands) and more time getting stuck into the action. The skill trees are straight forward as well and you can reset your stats in the game almost whenever you like back at the main hub.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the game is that it frequently crashes. I've been playing for sometime now and have had over 50 crashes to my desktop. The majority of the crashes are usually when you teleport to a location or you accept a quest which automatically takes you to a new area as well. But there are a number of other minor causes as well. Automatic save points are frequent though so you never feel like you have been cheated out of a quest. But nevertheless it happens over and over again.

Other things to mention are neat features like a Tower Defense game that pops up later into the game which is fun to play and simple management of upgrades for your main hubs and shops. This game also has multiplayer which I have yet to play but I have not heard great things about.

I recently got a 50% off voucher for the next game in the series. So I am eager to pick it up once I have completed this one!

Overall I recommend this game highly if you see it at a reasonable price and you enjoy the genre!

Honestly one of my favourite games out there. I love this game.

There was a DLC for this they never released on pcbut I worked with a user named SirNinja to help get the console one on it, which surprisingly ported almost perfectly. Sadly there was a bug or two with it that broke a very very useful item in the DLC. Ignoring that you can pretty much get the full experience of it. Highly highly recommended.

One of my favourite games ever. It's fantastic and it's only downsides is that there isn't enough of it. The animations look great, the combat is great and everything about it rocks. If you ever wanted a sort of puzzle focused game but with RPG elements this is the one to get. It comes just before puzzle quest in my opinion.

Capy is a fantastic developer.