Recent reviews by artcellrox

I've had Signalis on my radar for a couple of years now, brought to my attention thanks to a friend. When I finally got to play the demo earlier this year, even as someone who always avoids horror games, I knew there was something special here. Months later with the game fully out, I'm happy to see that it's absolutely exceeded my expectations as an experience.

To quickly get the cons out of the way first, there's a slight bit of clunk to the menus in the game. You can back out of the character menus easily enough with B/Circle/Back, but you have to manually navigate to the Continue button in the main menu and save menu. Beyond that, the game doesn't have a proper fullscreen borderless mode, so Alt-tabbing out does feel a little dangerous. I've had one crash while playing so far but that's probably more due to my own setup having hiccups than the game itself.

In being such a lovingly crafted and faithful homage to the survival horrors of old, the inventory system in Signalis might come off as a bit clunky to some players. There is a tension in trying to juggle slots between consumables that you have to use, and the key items that you need to solve puzzles, but personally, repeated trips back and forth actually tone down the horror a smidge, since one can easily become familiar with how to avoid and move through enemies.

However that matters not for Signalis because the duo at rose-engine and composers 1000 Eyes and Cicada Sirens have managed to craft and environment and atmosphere that never stops being oppressive. The mix of clashing and droning noises when enemies are alert to your presence, the randomness in when an enemy respawns after you kill it, the very walls around you feeling like they're going to suffocate you; all of these work together to make sure no amount of repetition ever really makes you feel safe in the game. Best of all, everything is done without any cheap or loud jumpscares and instead just grate away at your character's sanity (and potentially your own as the player).

Signalis also presents a small cast and a story that doubly pulls you into its nightmarish sci-fi settings. If the surface level look of the game takes the most after Dead Space, and a lot of its gameplay takes after Resident Evil, then the influence that drives one's journey through this the most is Silent Hill. There's a whole world built on top of everything in the documents you recover, personal experiences hinted at from the game's own hints and solutions, and a narrative that only serves to intrigue the player when they play as Replika unit Elster, trying to fulfill a promise she made a time back. Speaking of puzzles, thankfully nothing while playing the game is so obtuse that you need prior trivia knowledge to solve it. Even the most "trial-and-error" puzzle(s) in the game will have a hint telling you how its own rules work.

That said, there IS a level of esoteric when it comes to the replay value here, and this is where minor spoilers might be implied via existence of certain systems. As Silent Hill was also... "weird" with its ending requirements, Signalis follows a similar suite in how it does its endings. The main ones are supposedly determined by your play style during the game, but what really makes up said "play style" is still a little debatable. The secret ending is unlocked instead via hidden collectibles, but so far I have not seen any hint at all towards why the collectibles are in the places they're in and how you're supposed to get them.

All in all, Signalis can be described with a lot of words: haunting, eerie, hellish, mysterious. None of them are at all negative descriptors. This is a game that set out to tell a sad story in the same way its biggest influences did in the past, and it's an immaculately well-crafted love letter to that era and style of horror games. It absolutely stands out in the terror and insanity it can inflict on your psyche, and might even leave you wanting more like it. Anyone too scared of horror games should definitely give this a try either way, and actual fans of said horror games will find a potential best of the year title in Signalis.

Handful of hours out of Steam, even more on Steam. Hades is proof that, even in a market as saturated as the action roguelite genre, Supergiant Games stands second to none among indie darlings.

Load up some metal tunes of your own and go to town with the rhythm driving you. Minimalistic as hell but easily one of the most fun and addictive action games of the year

Performance: 8/10
It would have gotten a 9 for being a decent port but then more issues started popping up. The most constant issue for me was a stutter which got especially bad during the second Nishitani fight. Wasn't able to pinpoint what the cause was either. The inventory glitch is still a bit common too, requiring people to save as often as possible so as not to lose too much progress. Nevertheless, I'm not that picky, and the game ran decently enough, especially after Sega released a patch to fix the crashes (which are far more gamebreaking to me). My rig is an i5-4460 3.20GHz, 16GB of RAM and running a GTX 1060.

Visual Presentation: 9/10
The game being a PS3 to PS4/PC port shows. This is no God of War or Killzone. Still, it's quite a looker during the fully rendered cutscenes. It's a bit jarring to have three different styles of cutscenes though, especially when they don't make for a good segue from one to the other. Minor nitpick by the end when you start to get more engrossed into the game. The locale is also vibrant and alive as all hell, capturing the original setting of Kamurocho (and later on Sotenbori) in a far brighter, neon tinted light of the 80s. Very little left to be desired unless you care too much about graphics hampering the experience of a game.

Audio Presentation: 10/10
The punches sound great and meaty, the chatter in the open areas never stop, and oh my god the OST. This game has its sound and music down pat, which is to be expected given that this game marked the 10th anniversary of the series. The voice acting is top notch as always, combining with the visual direction to provide for a near authentic Japanese crime/yakuza film experience. Special props to Hidenari Ugaki as Goro Majima for perfectly portraying the rising despair slowly driving a man to snap and go on a rampage against those who wronged him.

Gameplay: 9/10
This is the peak of the gameplay in this franchise. It's especially apparent if played immediately after playing the first two Yakuza games on the PS2. No more inconsistent dodging, the camera is far less restricted, there's far more variety in the combat, and to top it all off, there's TWO vastly different characters to play as. For the most part it's a standard 3D beat-em-up, and this can cause the first boss battle to be a bit cumbersome when it ends up being a wake-up boss. However, unraveling more of the skill trees for each style on each character open up the possibilities. This doesn't just end to more super moves, but also bonuses and perks for being at a higher level of meter (called Heat in the franchise). This adds a deeper layer of meter management in the game. Do you want that extra bit of damage by unleashing the super move? Or do you want to retain that heat to bolster your defense against some of the stronger weapons the enemies will wield in the game?

There's also a whole plethora of minigames and sidequests to do as well. Ranging from typical bar games, to rhythm games, to even a passive/idle incremental income game and a Diner Dash styled cabaret club management game. Notable also is how, even though a bunch of the sidequests can seem like fetch quests, they never ask you to go all the way back to point A once you're at point Z. It saves you a lot of time backtracking, AND you get a decent ending to most sidequests to boot, especially a number of them which relate to characters from the previous games.

However, even if the combat itself has been refined to a T in this entry, there's some bits that remain rather flawed. The catfight betting minigame is confirmed to be 80% rigged against your favour, and the constantly lurking Mr. Shakedown scales to near infinity after a point, making you wonder if it's really worth constantly grinding such a simple and mind-numbingly boring enemy. Then again... money IS how you gain skills too, and he does drop a lot of it if you beat him...

Story: 10/10
The real meat of Yakuza 0. The story takes place in the same red light district in Tokyo that was made famous 13 years ago in the first place. It follows, in an alternating fashion, a green 20yo Kazuma Kiryu trying to make it as a yakuza thug only to be framed for a murder he didn't commit, and a questionably stylish 24yo Goro Majima, serving out an exile in another city and given a chance to get back in good standing through murder as well. Many of the pivotal characters from the first game also return in the game, alongside a cast of equally despicable and likeable characters. The series is known for its conspiracy and intrigue lacing the action packed plot and 0 is no different. Without giving too much away however, it elicits a number of feelings when going through the story, ranging from nostalgia, melancholy, happiness, to despair, rage, and ultimately bittersweet when going through this origin story of the franchise's two most iconic characters. It's a welcoming start to newcomers as well, making sure they're prepared to handle the rest of what the series can throw at them.

Final Verdict: 10/10
I came into this game with a lot of high expectations, knowing that it's basically the culmination of all that makes this series badass, feelsy and unique. Parts of it certainly felt parallel to certain plot elements of Yakuza 1 and 2 but 0 itself never feels like a retread of the two. The distractions are fun while they last, and they'll last for quite a while, but the plot and the combat are easily the driving force of this game. It all comes together to make one of the best executed narratives in gaming in recent time, and easily makes its way to even my top 10 games of all time. This is a big recommend through and through.

Something should be said about a game's actual, core enjoyment and quality when it fills with me with so much ambivalence about it, and yet I STILL come back after 600+ hours in it. Warframe is messy, it's filled with lazy people in a broken economy, and the devs make some dubious decisions at times. But my god, is it honestly so hard to put it down after you invest enough into both the grind AND the story with oodles of potential hidden within.

Let's see how long it takes for the ride to finally break down for real at this point...

Face melting, high octane, slightly minimalist, subtly haunting, infuriating, challenging, rewarding. There's a lot of words that can be used to describe this game's insane roguelite platforming action, its crazy bosses, its enjoyable (though sometimes wonky) multiplayer, its absolutely surreal and spine-tingling OST, its everything. But the one word that probably stands above the rest... would be "worth it".

Visually magnificent, aurally stunning, an intriguing plot, and a rich and deep gameplay system meshed wonderfully with a unique twist on world building. Supergiant Games have far and above surpassed what they first began with Bastion, as Transistor has very easily become one of my favourite games, if not the very top, of 2014.