Évaluations récentes de chowr

Hollow Knight is painfully simplistic for its runtime. That isn't to say that it's a bad experience, but it doesn't change all that much over time.

You start with a slash move, a heal that takes time to use (we'll get back to this), and a ranged attack that requires the usage of a resource called SOUL.
It's not that complicated, soul is simply a resource you collect by attacking enemies, and it can be used to do certain spells such as the ranged attack, and to heal, "creating a dynamic" where you need to decide whether you will heal or use a spell.

And it's here that things already start to fall apart. It's blindingly obvious that every boss fight was designed with the time it takes to heal in mind. You have little to no breathing room in many fights, and as a result risking a heal often results in a net neutral or worse getting hit multiple times, due to the decision to make the bodies of the enemies act as both a hitbox and a hurtbox. Getting grazed by a hit is not uncommon because the models for the bugs fill up a lot of space, and touching them hurts you, and every hit you take interrupts whatever you were doing.

This isn't necessarily bad on its own if the boss fights varied more during the game, but I can confidently say almost all of them ended up presenting more or less the same challenge. Spam your single attack move over and over on the boss, dodge their body and attacking projectiles until you can attack them again. If you get hit, you might have a short window where you can heal one point of health, but that's most of it. Charms allow you to offset this interaction somewhat, but not enough to change the overall pattern. No amount of making the execution of the task more difficult makes it much more interesting or allows you to optimize beyond taking advantage of the narrow attack windows presented.

It speaks volumes when the most significant upgrades to combat are the ones that change your stumpy fast slash attack into a faster or longer slash attack. Your movement options don't really change the experience of combat, because you'll either be so mobile they become trivial or you'll realize they were a crucial element for that encounter to make it more manageable as the fights get faster and more hectic. Your attack moves remain limited, because the "nail arts" you get, amount to charged attacks that suffer the same problem as healing. You have to hold a button for a prolonged period of time where you'll probably get interrupted before you get a chance to use the move. So your best, and for most purposes, only option is to spam your single attack move, or use a spell that is competing with your heal meter.

Exploration is arguably where Hollow Knight shines most, but I found myself glazing over at how blocky and rigid all the environments were. It became more an exercise of navigating geometry then forging my way through a hostile world, and it made me incredibly aware that I was playing a video game. On top of this, enemies respawn when you switch screens, so you'll be blitzing your way through chumps the whole time, and that soul bar will be used near exclusively to top up after getting nicked by some random bug you accidentally touched.

Or you'll be using it to heal after encountering a jumping puzzle for the umpteenth time, this time with spikes, or sawblades, or some enemy sitting in the way. Which will take life from you every time you fail and reset you back to a checkpoint. By itself this isn't so bad, but it gets compounded by the death system which will lock away a portion of your soul meter, and force you to fight a shade of yourself to get it back that might have spawned in an inconvenient location. And jumping puzzles do have sections where you'll be stuck between spikes, and you'll either make the next jump, take damage and reset, or die.

These all sound like small issues, but they add up over the span of the game because it's all you'll be doing over and over. And unless doing platforming across and around rectangles with a sprinkle of hyperfocused single attack combat does it for you, then that's really it. You won't be able to progress without accepting that this is the reality of the game.

I don't like being mean, but I need to be honest; I wasn't impressed with Hollow Knight. I can see that a lot of work went into the environments, creatures, and expanding the map to include an exceeding amount of content for its price tag (all things considered, Hollow Knight is an excellent product). But the execution of its ideas is lacking in flavor. This game shines as an example of how increased difficulty doesn't add depth, it only forces near optimal execution into being a necessary way to play. And if those strategies and interactions don't have variety, and the gameplay boils down to muscle memory and repetition, then the experience becomes homogenous and tedious -- for me, and that often doesn't add up to much.

Atomic Heart can best be described as an art exhibit of a USSR post WW2 that managed to become the scientific and economic power of the world, with excellent shooting mechanics, feel, and spectacle.

Let's linger on the combat for a bit. Each weapon has a weighty feel to its attacks and sounds, compounded by how the enemies will stagger from your hits and shatter into pieces, explode, and overall visually become damaged as you hit them. I think it's the best thing that Atomic Heart does, making your attacks have impact, in a genre where enemies are infamous for being sponges that seem to be impervious to all notions of physics and force, this game, by contrast, will have its enemies become battered and smashed to bits in satisfying ways.

That experience however is hampered by dialogue interruptions and unskippable cutscenes. At the very least, it became expected when a cutscene would happen so I could let go of the keyboard for a prolonged period of time and enjoy the well-crafted models and animations, but the dialogue suffered from the same problem that almost all dialogue these days suffers from, you don't know how long it is, and if it will get cut off by triggering another event. That said, while the protagonist does come off as insufferable at the beginning, I began to enjoy his idiosyncracies (with the many moments of "A locked door? What do I have to do? Open it?" and other nuggets of brilliance).

What's important to understand about Atomic Heart however, is that the main thrust of the game isn't really to deliver a compelling shooter (which it ended up doing anyway), or well-written unique characters (of which the main cast can and are almost certainly written off for being tropey and tired). It's more about delivering an interpretation of the vision of the idealistic dreams of the communists, and how it came crashing down because of one critical factor, a lack of respect for the dignity of the individual for the sake of the supposed "greater good."

The ballerina bots, the extravagant visuals, the over the top self-assurance, make no mistake, these aren't to promote the USSR as some great society of the future, or to simply appeal to our modern lesser vices. It's to highlight the vanity and arrogance of its leaders, and to juxapose it with the several sacrifices of the brilliants minds and workers that made it that way.

Nationalism and nationalistic narratives are nothing new, but Atomic Heart brings to life the fiction that the very real USSR believed, in a way that is so close to the chest. That said, it feels more or less like a tech demo, and while it has some truly commendable parts to its gameplay, the overall product still ended up much like other mediocre triple AAA titles. What distinguishes Atomic Heart from the others is that its strong commitment to its world and robots gives it a unique feeling and look among the rest.

One thing though, I cannot emphasize enough. The gun play in this game is very fun.

Endless Space 2 is another game from Amplitude Studios that captures the imagination and majesty of the frontiers of space like few other studios manage to do. From merchantile frogpeople, a civilization of clones, bloodthirsty bioengineered conquesting cyborgs, and polygonal creatures from another dimension, the potential of "what is out there" seems, well, endless.

Painstaking efforts have been made to make each race of aliens unique, with unique focuses, playstyles, and storylines, that are rich in worldbuilding and introspection about their place in the universe.

At its heart, Endless Space 2 is a long scale board game, that will take many hours to days in order to complete a single game. Each turn will require many decisions to be made or planned out in advance, while the AI or your human opponents do the same. Endless Space 2, as far as 4X games go, is on the simpler side. There is inevitably a lot to process and make sense of, and its very easy to lose track of what you're doing as the seemingly nonstop flow of new things keep being introduced.

But after a while, once you've become accustomed to the experience, it can feel like the fate of the universe is in the palm of your hand. And few games manage to imagine the breadth, scale, and beauty of space so well.

Omori stands out for its fiercely childlike yet still evocative and well-crafted artstyle.

The twist that the at times cheery and idyllic story has a dark undercurrent is not all that unexpected, but what is perhaps more compelling are the recreations of how those darker elements manifest themselves in the present day reality and escapist dreamscape of the protagonist. However, it could be said that Omori is riding on the player's attachment to the characters to carry them through the experience. And if that attachment fails, there isn't much left for the player to latch onto.

The combat system is unique, but many of the fights for what could be considered the "true ending" do not require you to switch up strategies all that much or change your understanding of the underlying systems. That said, there is another path which I did not do which is more involved (though admittedly I haven't done it. Make of that what you will).

Overall thoughts on the story (spoilers!): Omori's story as a whole is overly contrived to me, and the conclusion left me confused if anything. It's weird to say that a story that handles such a topic matter could come off as forced. That said, the relationships of the characters throughout the game do much to uphold the integrity of the themes. But it does feel like the game is missing something in its plot.

I reluctantly recommend Panzer Knights. Even though the balance is off and the only stat that really matters is penetration rate, there were some moments where I was wheeling around blasting tanks and having a good time.

I've never played a game that focuses on tank shooting, but if I had to give a review, I'd say it felt pretty spot on, as far as my tank knowledge goes. You're limited in how much you can move the crosshair, each shell takes a while to reload, and you have to manuever the barrel and the body of your tank constantly to get it into the right position. All the while you're getting shot at by other tanks doing the same thing. I think it's great.

And a perk on top of all of this is that the members of your tank crew will shout random miltary speak in Japanese as you go along.

There isn't much to say about Panzer Knights besides the gameplay. The story is kind of there, but not really. You play through the lens of one of Germany's elite armor division in WWII at the tail end of the war, but it comes off as more of an excuse to shoot tanks than to retell history. There are also side stories with the characters you put in your tank crew, and they were okay, but honestly I can't remember any of them.

There are problems with optimization, there were lots of times I was noticeably chugging, and it can get pretty messy with how many tanks are thrown at you.

Overall, I think it's an excellent look at what a tank shooter game with anime girls could be, I'm just waiting for that concept to be delivered in full.

Iron Harvest is cool, in the way that it's super boyish with all the gritty alternate WWII era inspired mechs, with big cannons, big bodies, and big sound effects. But play around a bit with them, and you'll quickly find out that they are painfully slow moving.

From a certain perspective it makes sense, these lumbering masses of metal are not the shining picture of speed and elegance. However, when practically every scenario is eventually taken over by mechs, and when you need to mobilize them to the other side of the map, Iron Harvest can feel like a watch mechs crawl across the map game more than a war game. I think it's strange that these machines that are meant to conceptually replace tanks and other vehicles of war in this alternate reality are almost entirely incapable of keeping pace with infantry.

A lot of the specialized infantry are quite slow too, and it makes the game a real hassle to defend multiple important areas, to the point where I find myself spamming the weakest infantry units just to feel like I can respond in time.

I want to say more than just, "everything is slow," but that's really it. Everything else about Iron Harvest I like, controls feel good, the campaign is fun, the gameplay when it's just the early game infantry is just right, and the aesthetic is second to none. If there were a rebalance to the movement of everything I think I'd really love this game.

But when it's taking me several minutes just to get one unit to join up with the rest of my fighting force. I start to get frustrated, and a bit sad that I'm not enjoying the part of the game I'm playing for the most.

Lost Technology is simply amazing, and gets my bid for "Best Game You Can Buy for Under $15." Because it's simply unfair how much this game achieves.

A fully simulated map with several different fleshed out fantasy factions each with a seriously engaging storyline (most of which have been translated) that is each like its own little game.
I've never seen a project this ambitious be executed so well, and have so many nuances in gameplay that make each faction feel unique (at least at the start of each run).

Admittedly the game is not much for looks, each combat scenario will be fought by little static 2d sprites on a plane that will essentially toss particle effects at each other to fight. What little voice acting is present, occurs during combat where character portraits will pop in and shout something. There's not that many triggers that causes them to speak, but because every unique character has voice acting (and there are a lot of characters), they'll overlap and interrupt each other.
But if you aren't inhibited by old looking graphics and janky gameplay, you will find that this game can be really charming and spectacular. End game battles are a blur of particle effects, random characters shouting, interrupting, and overlapping each other, and little static sprites wiggling against each other simulating combat.

Perhaps my only complaint is that there isn't more to the world map beyond beating the other factions. Once you understand how each faction works, which you'll more or less end up doing on any playthrough, and how the AI plays, each time you do a different playthrough the game will play out more or less the same. The one extra element to the map, the demon faction, "Crime," only ever gets triggered by the player, so if you want to beat them, you can beat the rest of the map before them and roll over them pretty easily.
What's also sad is that despite the Crime faction having as much effort put into their lore and characters as the other factions, they're unplayable. There also seem to be some extra factions like Sin, and an undead faction that never came to be.
There's also no cloud saving for game progress, so if you complete a campaign and unlock some special goodies. You'll have to replay that campaign or do some file hacking or something similar to get that progress back on another system.

But don't take any of that to mean that the game doesn't have enough to stand on its own. This game lingers in my mind like a bug because I haven't played through every faction (I really like the stories), and because the world on its own is so interesting. A fantasy game with Frogs, Lizardmen, Elves, Dragons, Dwarves, Demons, Beastmen, oh my! It's a real treat to see this kind of premise so well done, and a crying shame that Lost Technology is not a critically acclaimed well known title. Play it. It's an absolute steal at $5. There's really nothing like it that I've seen.

My only regret is that I bought this game on sale.

A review is a poor place to talk about video games sometimes. Often, a review gives you an idea of what the premise is, some tidbits about the story, and what the mechanics are - you know, things that tell you what the game is. Though a problem naturally arises when you're dealing with a game who's experience is best had fresh, first-hand, with no prior knowledge or expectations.

If you haven't guessed by now, Inscryption is obviously just a rogue-like deckbuilder game. You play with a shadowy figure who acts as your GM as you move from node to node across a tabletop map, collecting more cards to improve your deck, buffing the cards in your deck, removing them, etc. The kinds of actions that tend to show up in deck-building games. And of course, when you lose, you have to restart a run from scratch.

Unique to Inscryption however, is that you actually play a card game against an AI opponent (though they have different rules to you). Each turn you play creatures on a board to fight against your opponents creatures, or attack the opponent directly. Each point of damage you do adds a weight to their side, and each point of damage they do adds a weight to your side, and your win condition is to add enough weights to the opponents scale to tip it all the way over on their side. This kind of system leads to a very dynamic kind of game, where either side can quickly turn it around if things are going bad.

But it's not really "just a card game," right? (spoilers for the demo)

At the very start you are given a card named "Stoat," who seems to know more about the situation than what appears. He communicates to you through text that he's being kept here to be tortured, but also that he knows "a way out for both of us." Pretty ominous.

Eventually, you'll be told to look around the room you're playing in. You'll notice that there's quite a few things that will grab your attention on the walls. Click around and you'll find that you can interact with them. Evidently there's something going on beneath the surface here. But that "something" is up to you to experience.

Or you'll watch someone else play it and be spoiled anyway. Oh well. Can't say I didn't try.

Final thoughts:
Inscryption is a game that does not lack in spectacle and style. From the board, to the boss fights, to the room. Each moment is packed with a certain flair and character. There's an unsettling atmosphere that oozes throughout this game, and it's incredibly well done.

Something else I want to mention is that the gameplay is super smooth. No effort has been spared in making every action you want to make super intuitive and near instantaneous. If there's one big non-spoiler takeaway I'd be comfortable leaving in this review, it's that I wish more games paid attention to quality of life aspects like Inscryption has.

This is a pretty neat game.

If you've ever watched professional Dota 2 or League and were confused about the whole draft phase and why it exists at all, this game simulates the importance of draft rather well in a simplified manner.

In this game, you play as...
Yourself! In an alternate universe where you became a god gamer and conquered the world of e-sports for 20 something years or something (very true to life, I'm sure). You are tasked with managing the training regime of your players and interpreting the metagame of the "game" within the game, in preparation for the main bulk of gameplay: draft phase.

During each match, you will have to navigate the pick/ban phase in an attempt to build a team comp that can potentially outdo your opponents which your AI-controlled team (literally bots) pilots into victory. While each player on your team may be skilled rather highly, the value of those stats will not matter if they get a terrible team comp or hard countered. Meaning that in order to succeed in this game the most important thing to learn is how to draft.

To help you in this goal, a lot of information is provided to for you to make an educated guess about what you should be aiming for. You can look through "champion" (the characters you use to make team compositions) win-rates, pick/ban rates, damage dealt, received, etc. as well as match data from other "e-sports organizations" in your bracket, and the team compositions they used. There's also a "Composition Test" which allows you to simulate a battle between any two comps in case you have some experimental ideas about compositions you'd like to try.

However, even if you manage to navigate the current meta well, the in-game devs will adjust the numbers of the champions randomly, making some picks much stronger or weaker, or usually not changing anything significant at all (just like League in real life). New champions will also be added over time, making determining what is good or not in differing drafts all the more complicated.

The system works well to make an underappreciated aspect of games with pick/bans more tangible to people. And if you've ever been interested in this kind of stuff, I encourage you to try it.

Now for some in-depth stuff:
There are a few changes that I'd like to see to make the game more easily legible, that is to say, currently, too much information is hidden away or obscured.

The obscured information results from a translation which works well enough generally, but isn't as concise or clear as it could be. This isn't too big an issue, but it should be fixable.

The hidden information however, is a bigger issue. Champion skills don't show numbers at all, meaning that it's harder to tell how good or bad they are until you're in a match. For a game that's all about drafting picks, I think it'd be good to provide the player information like skill damage or healing, otherwise champions like the Swordsman don't seem all that impressive, until he's doing a ridiculous amount of damage despite having some of the lowest offensive stats in the game. It also becomes harder to gauge his viability over time because it's hard to determine how much the nerfs or buffs affected him, if at all. In general, I can guess that attack damage nerfs hurt him, but I can't determine to what degree they affect him, and I'd say that's a problem.
Providing the numbers on the skills could also also open up space for the "in-game devs" to tweaking those numbers, which could make the game's patch cycle more dynamic and speculative.

I would also like the numbers from individual matches to be viewable from the team data screen. It's strange how I can view the damage dealt and received numbers during a match, but not after it's over. Arguably, one of the biggest boons to learning how to draft would be learning how one team performed another in a specific draft. I think it would be a great resource to provide.

My final suggestion would be unlocking or loosening the restrictions on the composition simulator. The only tangible benefit to its use is to experiment with alternate comps that you could have used in a certain match. Restricting its use to one per week is too limiting.
Maybe this restriction exists to discourage too much thinking about team comps and to instead lead players to play matches instead, or to prevent someone from brute forcing every possible team composition. In any case, I think that whatever the restriction is trying to prevent or possibly simulate is not conducive to the overall experience of the game, and places an arbitrary restriction on a resource that gives only abstract in-game value.

I hesitate somewhat to make these suggestions. As the game currently is, I think it's pretty good. I simply hope that future updates could go a few steps further beyond simply adding more champions, and I look forward to what is in store for this game.

To anyone who has bothered reading this far, I thank you.

Here we have a game built from the ground up as a "hero-based" battle royale, with clean mechanics and an interesting method of acquiring loot. Describing it as a MOBA is misleading, there are no lanes, no towers, just players. If you're familiar with "jungling" in League of Legends, you could almost describe it as "Jungle Pathing: the game."

Let me explain: in typical battle royale fashion, your main objective in the this game is to find the best loot for your character while your playfield shrinks. Where this gets interesting is that you actually have to craft most of the gear rather than find it from random item drops. Each area has a set amount of materials that are used for crafting gear, and as a result each match is more consistent than other battle royales because you can reliably find what you need for good gear.

However, other players are doing the exact same thing, and there's only so much of what you need in one area. The game remains tense regardless of whether you're ahead or behind your opponents, and I found I had to constantly adapt in order to survive. I'd be scouring boxes to complete my final items and killing chickens for consumables, crafting as many healing items as I could up until the final moments.

The design of heroes is very similar to League of Legends, lots of skillshots, dashes, and potential for flashy plays. Except, of course, flash is absent. This results in many close chase sequences, which, in addition to the cramped urban map design, complements the other gameplay elements perfectly, contributing to an overall scrappy environment.

I don't play battle royales, but I have played a fair amount of Dota 2 and League (maybe close to 2000 hrs combined). And I would seriously consider abandoning League entirely for this game (not dota tho). It's a fresh take on both battle royales and RTS Hero games, mixing elements from both that interact in interesting ways. And you don't have to play with toxic defeatist teammates.