Recent reviews by Waffle

You cannot convince me that Wheel of Fortune has a 1 in 4 chance of activating. You are actually lying to my face right now.

I've marked this review as "recommend to other players", but don't let that fool you into thinking that I think this is a satisfying entry in the Tetris series. It is satisfactory at best, but at worst it is a deeply underwhelming experience. Also note that I haven't used the VR mode, which may dazzle me so much that I completely change my mind, but to be honest I sort of doubt it.

This game is by no means a bad game. It has a decent main campaign (if you can even call it that), and a passable selection of side modes. People who just want to play some Tetris will find that this game scratches that itch, and hardcore Tetris fans... Well, you've already bought it.

The issue is the fundamental selling point of the game. It's sort of an immersive VFX showcase with Tetris plopped into it, and I think that that works perfectly well--It's certainly exciting first time around--but it fails to introduce anything seriously dramatic or brilliant visually. Do not expect an experience like Disney's Fantasia. You're more looking at a VFX student showreel with middling 2000s pop music.

The audiovisual experience is, to put it nicely, thematically trite. It's a lot of stereotypical stuff nicked from a bunch of different cultures without ever seriously engaging with them on a deeper level. The entire game feels like if the Beatles went through their psychedelic era but displaced by a couple of decades. I found myself thinking the word "Oscarbait" from time to time, and I think that term is actually decently accurate; at least to the idea of it being a very milquetoast and surface level gesture towards introspection and soulfulness.

You know, there's some really interesting stuff to say about Russia and its history with mysticism, religion and spirituality. It would be really great if a Tetris game about those themes could actually bother engaging with its own source material and origins. Maybe people like me would actually risk learning something new about stuff that we don't usually see portrayed in media. Hey, and where the hell is A-Type? Onion domes? Hello? Tetris already had culture in it that I really appreciated, you know.

I don't know which Tetris game added this feature, and I'm going to assume that it's this one, but I am not a fan of the letter-grade ranking system, at least for the side modes. My goal in Tetris is to beat my own high score, not to be told to beat someone else's ideas about what my high score should be looking like. Did anyone ask for this?

If you're going to commit to having one place to consistently come back to for your live-service Tetris experience, you could do better. If you want one place to come back to now and then just to try beating your own high score, then you could do better. Tetris DS has some fun side-modes, and Tetris NES is always there, and always a lot of consistent fun.

Every original idea this game has is a good one. Gameplay-wise, you're looking forward to a highly replayable and deeply innovative experience. It's fast-paced action tied to some pretty decent music. I'd describe its raw appeal as being not too dissimilar to Rayman Legends' music stages with lane runner elements similar to modern Sonic the Hedgehog games. Don't let the comparisons fool you though; its gameplay is truly a creative marvel to behold.

Thematically, however? You're looking forward to a lot of tropes from the past decade reused without bringing much to the table. In a lot of ways, it feels very regressive, and I fear that the game will struggle to age well. The tarot cards, the zodiac, the naming schemes, the Japanese onomatopoeia... No matter how tired a trope is, it can always be utilised cleverly. You just won't find that here.

The story is also sort of wishy-washy and vague, but I think there's some amount of intention to its vagueness, and I can sort of appreciate it. The game's most interesting "narrative" is really the way its gameplay evolves and changes, rather than its story.

If the trailer and description has you interested, it'll be absolutely worth your time. If you're on the fence, then you'll still get SOMETHING from it, but I can't say it'll be the intended experience. Still probably worth it, though. Just don't expect more than an hour or so of game content before the credits roll.

If you like Queen Latifah, however, you should buy this game.

Pizza Tower is one of the finest things to grace this earth.

This game will tell you absolutely nothing about how to enjoy it. The game will subject you to some of the most egregiously unhelpful tutorials ever known, yet leave you in the lurch when it comes to anything that it truly expects of you.

If you are, as I am, the sort of person to take this as a challenge, you will find a surprisingly well crafted experience underneath; particularly when it comes to the leaps and strides that have been made in improving the experience since launch.

As always, the lesson that Sonic Team never learns when it needs to most (and particularly the one it seems to not have learnt by Frontier's final major update) is that good game design is worth as much as you can convey it to the user. Sonic Frontiers is a brilliant poet with the vocabulary of a toddler.

ok heres the thing. i discovered this existed through an out-of-context dialogue line posted on an instagram rant about how problematic andrew hussie is. this perfectly sums up the thematic elements and elevated my immersion in the experience tenfold.

on a more serious note, i felt that the story and many of its elements resonated with me in a way that was totally unexpected and i had forgotten was even possible of a story. i havent been able to stop thinking about it, and i cant help but feel like my own personal experience with the game was fate or something stupid like that. this already means a lot to me. thank you.

This game is amazing and is undoubtebly the best Sonic game to come out since Colours (Maybe Generations). The game is full of vibrant and fun worlds, minigames, bosses, and a LOT of creativity from the dev team. If you are dead-set on getting the game on PC, I have no clue why you're wasting time reading reviews. Get it already. If you weren't, then you may want to consider getting it on another platform (the Switch version is apparently the best one), as the PC port is already infamous for having a type of DRM called Denuvo which is often cited as being so poor and difficult to deal with that it is often called malware by those who know a lot about it. So not me. I haven't had any problems with it; and it's not like the game can't play without internet because they fixed that already.

Don't let the negative reviews deter you from Sonic Mania, but do let them teach you about the PC port. I can assure you that not a single one of them is negative because of the game itself.

My computer coudn't handle the extreme mp3 requirements and now it broke.

Overall I would say it was an okay experience.

Ehhhh...

The parkour system isn't too bad, but it's still bad, and the same is with the wisps. The game just feels like a mario game with sonic's skin. The atmosphere feels more mario than it does sonic, and that's probably because there are no factory or plants around. And no, frozen factory and... Volcano zone don't count, because there are no flashing red lights or pink liquid, or anything to make Dr. Eggman (And the Deadly six) feel evil. The game over-uses do or die situations, especially with the red star rings. This makes the game seem hard, but really it just sucks. And also the drill wisp controls like the sonic heroes special stages on drugs.

TERRIBLE port of a great game. download it only if you can get the better sadx mod working, otherwise you're better just emulating the dreamcast version.