Recent reviews by armabe

It is not a horrible game. But I would hesitate to call it "good".

Note that this opinion is of someone that would consider himself intermediate (to upper intermediate in some games) in terms of general FG skill and experience.

In no particular order, I have the following misgivings with this game:
- throws seem extremely weak. Range is extremely short, and they can be broken even with inputs that are not a "throw", i.e., this is a two-button-throw game, yet you can break throws by effectively mashing your light attack.

- pressure structure, to me, is unenjoyable and one-dimensional. I did not play this game before the dash-L pressure, but it's still often enough your best plus attack that also covers decent space.

- having cooldowns on your special attacks feels fundamentally wrong. I recognize and accept the balance implications, but it's too different for me to truly accept it.

- simple inputs. Instant reactions with 0 trade-offs against traditional inputs is unpleasant in how it makes the actual pvp gameplay feel.

- combo structure. While it's a fact that people will default to doing the same few combos every time they get an opening, GBFVSR somehow feels worse in this regard. It feels like everybody is autopiloting the exact same things. At its core, all combos are just hitting the same button three times into special, into more of the same buttons. It gets a little better if you spend extra resources, but it still felt more limiting compared to other games. Plus combos technically have a hard limit. While preventing infinites is good, the limit feels very un-fun.

- Slowdown and hitstop on specials, and ultimate skills especially, feels too aggressive.

- visual clarity is quite lacking. While nowhere near as hectic as VS games (e.g. Marvel, DBFZ, Skullgirls, Power rangers: battle for the grid), the lacking foreground-background contrast and richness of particle and screen effects seems to cause a surprising amount of eye strain for me.

- Most supers are way too long. I generally like cinematic supers, but it's too much for me here.

- server connection. When booting the game it takes an ungodly amount of time to even let you into the menus. ASW didn't learn their lesson from Strive with this. I shouldn't have to wait up to 5 minutes if I just want to lab something.

Overall it's perfectly serviceable game. All the fundamental gameplay aspects are there, and they work well enough, my personal misgivings notwithstanding.

However, this game gave me probably the lest enjoyable rank-up experience I've ever had across approximately 15 different FG franchises. Rank distribution is completely whack. You could easily fight the same couple of people all through the lower ranks until you hit the 'entry level' rank where almost everybody else is concentrated. You will see very little character variety until then, and will learn little as everyone there is playing a single player game.

It gets considerably more enjoyable once you've powered through that, but trying out different characters through the introductory ranks felt very boring as a result.

Much better than I expected.

It controls well, sounds good, animations are good and smooth.
Allows for quite a bit of build variety, but is also seems quite heavily reliant on RNG if you want to get a very specific build.
However, it doesn't matter much, because the game is fairly easy overall. It's perfectly viable to just facetank every area boss with 1-2 healing items stocked

Overall - it would be entirely accurate to think of it as "Rogue Legacy, but horny".

The entire cast is very promiscuous, and the game doesn't take it itself seriously at all, which certainly works in its favour.

Recommended if you think using a power-tool mounted dildo to finish of a boss, then celebrating it with an orgy as an afterthought is an amusing and campy idea.

Probably avoid if you heavily self-insert as the playable character in games.

Censorship (especially of complete non-issues) can never be supported.

Event placeholder (but it's a great game).

Disclaimer: I pre-ordered the game on release, but was disappointed with it, so don't actually play it anymore.

Street fighter V is a full-priced game that originally came out with a lousy f2p model tacked on for the hell of it, and it now has also included extremely shoddy looking ads on the characters. Yes - advertisements in a full-priced buy-to-play game.

Certainly, the ads can be disabled (although the are opt-out by default, which is scummy in and of itself), but this kind of practice should not be encouraged or excused, ever.

Product placement in video games is not new or evil by default, but there are better ways to handle it than lazily pasting a logo all over a character as the default.

Having played this game for nearly 2 years (570 hours on Steam and estimated ~200 on android), reaching top competitive ranking in all formats and having spent quite a bit of money on the game, I can no longer recommend it to anyone that's looking a decent competitive experience.

While Cygames has always adhered to the phiolosophy of quick games and powerful enders, there is only so much one can take of auto-losing to often unpreventable cards. While they have definitely improved with the latest expansions (by providing some more counterplay options, or making previous ones more playable), they haven't really stopped printing dumb cards that put a hard limit on the length of the game.

If you are looking to play the "control" style, then look elsewhere. In addition, the vocal parts of the community scream bloody murder should anyone suggest that games should be able to last more than 10 turns. Apparently the game is not designed to accomodate anyone with an attention span beyond 5 minutes.

The best part of the game remains that you are greatly rewarded for playing it regularly. If you keep up with your dailies and events, you will likely not need to spend any money, and be able to play the meta decks for most factions, although not immediately.
Being able to play you account both on Steam and on your phone/tablet (both iOS and Android) is also great, but that is hardly an innovative feature these days.

Having played many of the survival games available on Steam and elsewhere, I became upset at the state of things. Most were either too gamelike, too stylized, or hardly even survival-focused.

The Long Dark was exactly what I was looking for - a good balance of realism and fun, no trendy environmental threats, a survival-atmoshpere. My first few attempts ended with freezing to death or starving. Then I ran across wild animals that were not particularly hospitable. Then froze to death again because I got caught in a blizzard with insufficient clothing, no firewood, too much weight in my inventory and no clue about where I was due to poor visibility.

If you are looking for an honest survival game that does not hold your hand, does not throw unreasonable threats at you, and actual aims to provide an enjoyable and authentic survival experience, this is likely the game you were looking for.

Basebuilding is fun and theoretically allows for a large variety of base designs. In reality you are forced to build in unituitive ways to annoy potential raiders, unless you're fine with your base never making it through the night.

Crafting system is simple and understandable, but you are forced to farm blueprint fragments for a long time untill you get what you want, and all the really useful stuff is in the higher tiers. You can eventually trade for them, but...

People act like rabid dogs essentially everywhere. Anyone you do not know from elsewhere is more than likely to kill you on sight, regardless of what you try to communicate. Many will vandalize your base as well, given the chance.
Furthermore, you will often encounter either psycopaths or people roleplaying psycopaths, or someone spouting memes while trying to sound tough. Take extra care in finding a properly moderated server.

Solo play is possible, but severely limited at this point in time. As a single person you are almost unable to raid anyone, while being an easy target for any group. Solo play centers around keeping as low profile as possible. Lack of any endgame or pve can make this boring in the long run, depening on your preferences.

Performance is spotty for most people. With a 4790k/780ti/16gb ram/SSD I get a fairly solid 60 fps @1080p (capped fps, so maybe more in reality), so I can't complain.


CONCLUSION:
Game is fun enough and I got my money's worth of fun. As primarly a lone-wolf player, lack of any endgame and being severely outclassed by any group play, it has little to keep me interested for longer atm.