Recent reviews by Neutrino

Before the Steam Workshop support, it was furry Super Smash Bros for PC. Now it's MUGEN Super Smash Bros for PC.

No beating around the bush: this game is merciless, sometimes unfairly so, but it's also an experience to behold. It gets rather grindy past a certain point, dodging attacks (and sometimes connecting them) can be hit or miss, the fact it's a half-hearted PC port is pretty evident, and its monetization shows its ugly (or sometimes stylized, adorable and chibi) face at every single turn, but it's also a game full of Suda51's irreverence: a game that kicks you in the nuts, tells you to go suit yourself and then asks if you want another go. The bosses have a top notch design, and I really dig the aesthetic even if the levels themselves can get repetitive and samey. However, if you're expecting a deep narrative just because it's Dark Souls-esque in gameplay, you'll be sorely disappointed, and although the game has SOME of it, with a few choice bits being particularly good, the story serves the game rather than the other way around. Just don't fall for the common newbie traps (Don't use Death Metal on revives- ever, use it on storage expansion, stagger your freebie one-day passes to maximize rewards) and you'll have something to have fun with for a while.

Conclusion: 6/10, fun game marred by being a mediocre port, odd design choices and its monetization, a shy recommended with the gotchas I mentioned earlier.

After playing Destiny 2 for a while I'm truly torn on whether to recommend it or not, and I'm gonna say "yes" but with a few gotchas.

I'll start listing out the good bits:

- The game is gorgeous, and it lets you know that at all times. Environments look great, the weapons look great, the enemies look great... it definitively has plenty of AAA polish.

- The gunplay feels great, which is good considering it's the main focus of the game. Although most guns feel samey (more on that later) when they do land a hit, you sure get to know it and there's satisfying feedback in knowing you landed a precision hit kill (Precision being what other games call a "headshot", although the head is not always the vulnerable bit in Destiny 2)

- There's good lore if you know where to look, unfortunately new players are kinda dropped in with little context, overhearing NPCs and other players about how sad they are they killed a very important character (Who it is becomes immediately obvious, though) so I'd recommend taking some time to do the older story missions so you have some context on what's going on.

Now here comes the bad:

- Although the core gameplay loop is fun, it definitively gets very monotonous very quickly. Bosses look pretty much like souped-up regular units, there's not a lot of variety when it comes to enemy units within their faction, and the most damning bit is that most weapons of the same category just pretty much handle the same with very minor differences. What I mean is: if you've played with a pulse rifle, you've played with all of them, likewise with hand cannons, shotguns, auto rifles, SMGs... sure, the game pushes you to upgrade weapons and seek perks for very subtle upgrades that you won't probably ever get to feel, but a combination of sunken cost and placebo effect makes it "seem" like it was all worth it. The only exception to this rule comes with exotics, which all have very noticeable special abilities and truly feel like they add something new to the mix.

- This is going to be a hot take and I'm sure people will disagree with me, but likewise, all classes in Destiny play very similarly to each other and in the end, it'll be a choice in aesthetic flavor rather than any meaningful gameplay contribution. Even more similar are the different subclasses among a single class, except for the center one, which really feels and handle differently from the base but is behind a paywall.

- Here's a quick jab: although most maps look beautiful, and huge... they *only* look huge. The actual playable bits are just a tiny part of them, and even the few maps that look and are genuinely big are only very sparsely sprayed with content.

- Finally, the most damning bit about Destiny 2 and what nearly drove me off was the monetization. "But Neut," I'll hear you say, "How can you say that now that Bungie has freed themselves from Activision's clutches? They've made the base game for free and even threw in old expansions for free too for good measure!" to which I say: Activision wasn't the problem with Destiny 2's monetization. The greediness shows its ugly face sooner than later as soon as you stumble upon the in-game shop, the Eververse.

Gone forever is the chase for Bright Engrams, instead now we've got a battle pass that... yes, you can pay money for, along with paid expansions and tons of cosmetic mictrotransactions that the game loves to proclaim that may be there today and gone tomorrow. There's a very limited selection of things available for Bright Dust (the free currency) which, again, is on a constant short rotation with no guarantee it'll ever be back. The game plays on Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) really, really hard, even with paid content! Remember how I said they had now included older expansions? Well, they only exist there for lore reasons and there's no reason to revisit that older content otherwise, likewise older versions of weapons and armor, some of them exclusive to a given expansion's raid, have been rendered obsolete for the most part.

------------------

So with all what I've said, I'm definitively gonna say Destiny 2 is very much a "try before you buy" game. I say if you want to give it a try, make a different character for all three classes and play them until you get to the soft cap at 900 (Considering everybody starts out at 750 now, it really won't take that long) to see how you're liking the gameplay and if you finally decide it's your thing, go buy Forsaken, which is the superior from the two paid expansions, then *maybe* the season pass so you have something to chase after between the different expansion bits.

Back when Steam didn't actually have bona fide porn games, this one kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. Sure enough, it's not actually explicit in none of the "game overs" but it's not hard to see what's actually going on either. If you're into cute furry critters and transformation, then this is probably your game if you can put up with a little bit of jank.

Some questionable design choices from the authors and a quirky scripting language (GDScript) are just about the only two gripes I'd have about Godot. Ignoring that, it's an extremely capable engine that has matured a lot over the years and is no longer the undocumented mess that largely kept me away from using it in any half-serious way. Fantastic community and a dizzying amount of features that could easily rival commercial offerings such as GameMaker or even Unity. Two thumbs-up.

A beautiful game mired by overly aggressive monetization despite being Pay-2-Play. People are very quickly separated between haves and have-nots. Thus I cannot in good conscience recommend this game, in spite of how fun it /can/ be.

Don't let the name or its genre fool you. Out of all "idle games" out there, this is perhaps the most in-depth one I've ever seen. There's a deceivingly vast amount of content to find and, ironically, if there's any major gripe I may have, is that depending on your strategy or approach, it might require a little *TOO* much attention. Still, it's free, so might want to give it a shot.

Far better than I expected to be honest. And my expectations are already low when it comes to F2P games- and idle clickers* at that. It might not have the kind of breadth that Clicker Heroes has, but the aesthetic style is quite pleasing, the music is pretty damn great and there are a few things to do and collect, so you won't get immediately bored of it.

I do certainly wish you could disable the sound effects while leaving the music on, they quickly become quite grating.

* You CAN (and indeed should later on for the tougher bosses) play out your heroes' abilities manually, but for the bulk of the game, auto mode will suffice

Disclaimer: I've been a Second Life user for over 10 years, so I'm no stranger to virtual worlds at all.

So here is Philip Rosedale's newest project, a man who had already founded what still is the most successful and enduring virtual world thus far: Second Life. For High Fidelity, I feel like it was a "back to roots" endeavor: Focus on the platform itself, trying to leave it as open as humanly possible, with a heavy focus on VR. And indeed- HiFi is very much a VR-first experience, as keyboard controls are certainly nothing but an afterthought, this being my first gripe due to the fact I have a very much conventional setup!

Still, from what I've seen and heard, if you're the lucky owner of an Oculus Rift or a HTC Vive and the needed tracked motion controls, you'll find much of it fairly pleasing, and certainly the way the sound blends in seamlessly with proper directionality according to the direction your avatar's head is facing helps with the suspension of disbelief quite a bit. This also supports the fact it's voice communication-based, as there aren't even any means to easily use text-based chat in world, so do keep this in mind and make sure your microphone is not muted when you decide to jump in.

All in all, extremely rough around the edges, and non-VR users will find a rather mediocre experience. Still, very promising and I feel this, rather than Linden Labs' future Project Sansar, will become what virtual worlds are meant to be.

See when they mean "Ninjas Play Free"? Well, they really mean it.

There's almost nothing (Save some TennoGen cosmetic items) you can't get for free given enough grinding, even most vanity things. Sure, there's lots and lots and LOTS of grinding, but as long as you bring a friend, it'll be fun grinding for the most part. There are some questionable decisions from the devs and I wish they'd address some of the game's sore points, but even as it is, Waframe is an incredibly solid offer.

Highly recommended,