Recent reviews by Auphilo

Was on a Slay the Spire binge recently and discovered this. Nice to have more deckbuilder roguelites to play. Great game! If you like anime style games and you like StS, you'll definitely like this. It also has a lot of lore/plot which is a nice bonus. The music is great, art is decent too (but could be better imo, looks a tad amateur).

Only issues I have are some minor bugs (not very impactful), and that the balance isn't quite as good as it could be. Some characters are noticeably significantly weaker than others.

Only a minor gripe but I hate the modifier you can get that gives you a bonus reward for beating a boss within a time limit. I assumed it meant turn limit, which makes sense as it's a turn based game. But no, it's a real timer. In that case it gave me roughly one minute to beat the boss, no ifs ands or buts. I managed it, but I'm definitely never picking that modifier up again. In my opinion real timers don't belong in a turn based game (cough cough FFVIII). Part of the fun of turn based games is being able to sit back and take your time pondering decisions, in my opinion.

More of this review was complaints than praises but it's really a great game. I highly recommend it, and will be looking forward to any future titles from the developer.

Fun, but currently has a lot of bugs/crashes so be wary. Needs vehicles. Not a fan of the "battlepass" system.

If you enjoyed the gameplay and progression of the base game, and wanted to do it over again, this is the DLC for you. If you mostly care about story this is definitely a pass. Combat styles and character customization/apparel are great additions. Glad that boards weren't carried over from the postscript, honestly hope those get removed from the base game sometime in the future, they're terrible. Speaking of the postscript, if you didn't enjoy the postscript random dungeon you likely won't enjoy the dlc, as it's completely focused on an improved version of that dungeon essentially. I'm not a huge fan but I enjoy the combat and progression so much it doesn't matter to me.

Anyways I rambled, but essentially this DLC has good combat and progression (same as base game mostly), everything else about it is so-so but if you're looking for more of the same as the base game, $9-10 for ~20 hours of content is a steal. I hope the developer makes more games like this in the future. EDIT: Ah, they did bring back boards.... I just wasn't far enough yet. Too bad.

Fun, but very simple and too easy until you unlock higher difficulties. Good timewaster, especially for the price. Good game to play on the Steam Deck, if you have one.

Have yet to finish but am at the end of chapter 5. First RPG I've played in years that I felt was amazing. It's hard to say any one thing is the reason, it's just overall great. It has a good soundtrack, and the art is charming. Gameplay is a lot of fun, not only increasing your stats and getting equipment, but increasing your own skill as a player. It's one of those games where I can laugh at how bad I was at the beginning compared to now. Using the possession skills (basically magic) in combat and mixing it in with your regular attacks feels great.

There was a couple "systems" I don't like. The Libra (one aspect of character development/gearing) system, I don't see the point of its existence, its basically set and forget unless you really want to swap stats constantly. I found the amount of semi-useless consumables in the game annoying. Like torches, lanterns, and keys. All three of those are fairly easy to get, but you constantly need more. Feels like a pointless tax, wish they just had infinite uses. Also each chapter has 5-10 (on average) hidden chests with great loot, which is nice in theory but it results in feeling obligated to scour a level before you finish it to make sure you got everything. You can come back to levels later but only at certain (regular) points.

The story is enjoyable, but I wouldn't say it's groundbreaking or anything. I found it pretty depressing so far, but that's up for interpretation I suppose. Not exactly a con, but a few times a chapter (depending on the chapter) there's basically horny 13 year old humor, which feels pretty out of place with the overall somewhat serious plot. It didn't affect my enjoyment, I just pressed through and ignored it.

Highly recommend playing using a controller, feels great that way and seems intended to be played that way. I personally played it on my steam deck. A lot of the combat involves repeatedly pressing the attack button, so prepare for a sore thumb if you play for extended periods of time.

Overall if you're interested in a polished indie Japanese RPG. Would only not recommend if you think you wouldn't enjoy the combat. I didn't think I would at first but ended up enjoying it.

EDIT: Just finished. Very enjoyable and highly recommend. Only complaint is that the append/post-game chapter felt very unnecessary, almost like filler. Enjoyable filler but still. The new systems introduced there felt awful too, but it was easy to use it at least. Game didn't need enhancing/boards. At least you have control over enhancement, but boards are so powerful and almost completely beholden to RNG that it's unfun. Fortunately those systems only affect a small part of the game. Plot overall definitely wasn't great, it's all about enjoying the journey.

This review would be mixed if that was an option. The core gameplay is fun and the heists are solid (as pretty much a newcomer to payday, barely played 2). The problems are everything else. You can only level up with challenges, which just force you to grind the same heists, same weapons etc over and over. The UI in game to view challenges is basically unusable, making it near impossible to find the challenge you're looking for. Thankfully, someone made a site called pd3.gg that makes tracking challenges way easier. If you don't complete a challenge in a heist, you get ZERO xp.

Weapons have levels, which are ridiculously slow to level up. Weapon mods are basically pointless however, barely affecting your guns. There is a currency called C-Stacks that get more expensive the more you buy, with costs resetting weekly. This is basically a weekly lockout like an mmo would have, which fits very poorly here. You can't vote to kick, you can't unready up. You can't mark lobbies stealth or loud. You can't view loadouts in the pre-match screen. While the heists are alright, overall there's only so many of them.

Despite my complaints, this game is a great foundation to be built upon, assuming the devs are willing to stick with it. I'd recommend keeping an eye on it for those who haven't purchased, as once it gets some love it should be quite fun.

Decent, but sadly like the rest of the series it's gone a less schizo mindbending direction, or at least it seems so far. Feels like a lighthearted shonen anime more than anything. Art is great, but still feels like a downgrade compared to other sci;adv games. Not a fan of the emote system. It's good, but doesn't seem $60 good, so unless you're an avid sci;adv fan, I'd wait for it to hit ~$30.

UPDATE:
Although overall it was enjoyable, the characters are flat and get little development. The tone is overall very light which is disappointing compared to other sci;adv vns. I expected it to be short, but at just short of 11 hours for my playthrough, it was very underwhelming value compared to other quality vns that reach sometimes 80 hours long for a similar price. In my opinion, it's the weakest of the mainline sci;adv vns (not including DaSH which was a joke, or O;N). I'd say wait for $20 if you're not that interested, and if you're more interested wait for $30.

The game is fun, and relatively bug-free compared to other Bethesda titles. I went in with low expectations, assuming it would be better Fallout 4 in space. It met those expectations. The main story is incredibly boring until you get to the last 30% or so, where it becomes alright, but not great. The faction questlines were decent, though not incredible. Most systems in the game could be described the same way, "decent but not incredible". One of the main issues I had with it is the amount of loading screens, the cumbersome travel system, and the ng+ system. The ng+ system encourages you to grind out 10+ ng+ worlds before doing everything, which is not fun. Overall I'd rate the game 7/10, though if you're a huge fan of scifi like myself you may enjoy it more than that. It doesn't stand out in any particular way but it's alright at everything it tries to do. I could see myself getting 80+ hours before mods, which to me is worth the asking price.

I love trying out random visual novels to see if I can find a diamond in the rough. Sadly, this one has a lot of issues, most major of which that it doesn't advertise itself as incomplete or early access.Pros:- Great sprites, and even better CG art- Decent setting- Likable characters- Price is greatCons:- Decent setting is established, but nothing is done with it- Characters have zero depth- Ridiculous amount of spelling and grammatical errors (1-2 every other line)- Protagonist hardly does anything himself, just uses his extremely convenient connections seriously the rich, the mafia, an underground resistance type deal, a megacorporation, hackers. Even though he's just portrayed as an average person.- Protagonist gets out of life threatening situations more than once with Death Note tier ridiculousness. Except this visual novel doesn't even pretend he's some kind of genius, again he's supposed to be average. He's an average random nobody yet he convinces the mafia to their face while under threat that he's not involved in a murder even though they have several facts connecting him - Romance is weird. I went in blind and I figured it would either have routes or have a central heroine or not have romance. I assumed most of the way through that the last must be the case since it wasn't really built up to, but suddenly romance was shoved in with one of the characters with no input or foreshadowing.- I assumed this was a complete game as it wasn't listed as early access or advertised anywhere on the store page as incomplete. Imagine my surprise when I reached the end where nothing was solved, a new plot point was introduced, and the protagonist had barely interacted with two major heroines and one major character. Then I get a full screen that says something along the lines of "Thanks for playing up to here! We plan to keep updating the story absolutely free!".- Genre shift spoiler The last few lines of the visual novel shift the genre from urban apocalyptic to some kind of fantasy, maybe sci-fi? It's unexplainedOverall, it's a mediocre chapter one of a multi chapter visual novel, that's advertised as a complete project. As far as I can tell the last actual update was in early 2022 (looking at the steam patch notes), so I'm doubtful as to whether we'll ever see the full release of this.

Best Project Moon game so far. Recommend playing Lobotomy Corporation or at least watching the cutscenes on youtube before playing this game to understand the story, since it directly builds from that.

The story is great, the music is some of the best videogame music I've ever heard, the worldbuilding is one of the best I've ever seen in a game, and the gameplay is addicting.

Hopefully the next game post Limbus Company builds from this, if it does it'll be a day one buy from me.