Recent reviews by AxeBane

I would die for Rove

:)

Absolutely stellar game. Worth your time.

Gearbox is an absolute joke of a company.

Has bnuuy? Has AoEs placed on my leylines?

Yeah this is XIV

Stellar game. Screw Microsoft for shuttering the studio.

Extremely fun gameplay loop. Somehow manages to avoid feeling grindy despite most of the endgame unlocks being locked behind some quite significant grinds, purely through force of fun gameplay.

Microtransactions exist but are not required as the only 'premium currency' can be found in-game and no battlepasses expire with time. However, the currency drops are in somewhat small quantities, so I can see this becoming an issue as the years go on with more battlepasses releasing if the quantity dropped doesn't increase, since as it stands if you just play regularly, you will naturally save up enough to afford a warbond when it releases, but if you're a new player joining you have some catching up to do.

SONY attempted to force PSN linking which was exasperated by Arrowhead devs not clearly communicating the requirement on launch. This has fortunately been walked back.

I got to watch someone blast the Big Bang Theory OP thru proximity voice chat as they jumped from the ship during landing and promptly died.
11/10

TL;DR: Overall, a rather stellar game that clearly has a lot of love and passion invested into it. Tells a compelling narrative, and generally has a wonderful soundtrack.

I recently finished my playthrough at about 16 hours in, which seems to be slightly faster than average but about on-par for the course. I'll be attempting to avoid outright spoilers as much as possible here, so feel free to read before buying.

The Story
The narrative is primarily exactly what it lays out within the course of Act 1, focusing heavily on the rampant corruption in the legal system that AA-style games are practically trademarked by, as well as certain other broader issues at play. The narrative does a wonderful job at bringing characters from previous acts into newer ones, so you can look forward to the possibility of seeing a returning cast with, in some cases, actual character development! The final case of course does its best to tie up everything and resolve things where needed. One criticism I feel I must level is a flaw shared by the vast majority of games following this style -- characters are frequently uncharacteristically dense, to the point where they can blatantly miss clues or fail to reach obvious logical conclusions, resulting in an irritating situation where you the player are aware of what happened, but the characters are completely ignorant. This is occasionally toyed with intentionally, to invoke some actual dramatic irony that works wonderfully when it's employed, but it's fairly obvious that not every instance of this is intentional, and it harms the overall experience. Still, the instances of this are inoffensive enough that I wouldn't say it majorly detracts from the story.

Characters
Just about every single character has left a lasting impression on me, and most have genuinely felt unique and interesting. The characters you will see the most screentime for are the titular Tyrion, Celeste, and Aria -- the rival prosecutor of this game. Tyrion primarily remains a static character throughout the story, though he does have moments here and there of characterisation and development that show he's more than just an audience surrogate, and has actual emotions behind him. Celeste has a steady burn of development that is openly acknowledged by her peers, with her relationship with Tyrion coming off as wonderfully organic and believable. As for Aria, she's a breath of fresh air as far as her archetype is considered -- it's incredibly rare to encounter a primary rival prosecutor who's outright fair and friendly right off the bat, and her ultimate goals and motivations leave me respecting her a great deal. Also, she's cute.

Gameplay
The vast majority of the game plays out exactly like you'd expect a PW-style game to play, and frankly, that's not a bad thing. It feels very comfortable and homey, and the new mechanics introduced are pretty easy to grasp from the start. One new addition to the evidence system is the introduction of spells that you can present -- though each case does erase your known list, so you'll never have a spell there that isn't in some way related to that chapter, though I personally felt that the system wasn't utilised to its fullest, as very often the times it was relevant, it was extremely surface-level details such as the colour, size, or duration of something.
One personal bugbear I do have with the game, though, is that each individual case can only be accessed through the "New Game" option on the main menu. I understand why this happens on a technical level, as each case is probably entirely compartmentalised from the others, but I strongly feel the game would benefit from a seamless transition between cases, rather than the frankly wrong-feeling means of having to pick New Game when you're entering the 5th case...

Soundtrack
Frankly speaking, the vast majority of the OST was absolutely stellar. It does start to feel limited in the later chapters, as repeat tracks start to overstay their welcome perhaps a bit too much, but overall just about every song is something I'll happily listen to outside of the context of the game. The sole exception to this is unfortunately the "Intense Testimony" tracks (with perhaps an exception for the final act's version); This opinion is purely subjective of course, but I feel that the song does a bit too good of a job of being chaotic and stressful, to the point where it makes it genuinely hard to focus on the text being read. If I had to hazard a guess, I imagine the original testimony theme was made first, before an intense version was made which upped the BPM and introduced new instruments, without accounting for how it'd affect the song's tonality as a whole. Outside of that one specific gripe, however, as stated before... it's stellar.

Astarion.