Последние обзоры Goldkin

Game good. The difficulty curve is a bit uneven, leaning on unfair in certain sections, and could definitely benefit from more playtesting. But what's here is an amazing showing from such a small team and shows a lot of love went into it.

Solid combat upgrade to Prodigal. It's faster-paced, more colorful, and more full of life in every animation, but the social and exploration aspects are largely absent here.

If you preferred the combat over exploration, there's a lot to love here.

The game is presented linearly, with chapter select and NG+ aspects that make it easy to return to previously-explored areas and collect everything. Even though the game is presented top-down, there's a distinct Castlevania vibe this time: the tone is darker, church bells and organs are more prominent in the soundtrack, item and secret pickups are toned to match, and a couple shoutouts to that setting appear in gameplay. It fits the narrative well this time, which is best experienced without spoilers.

If you preferred the exploration and social aspects, there's much less here than in previous installments.

The characters this time are fun to talk to and just as full of life as in Prodigal and Curse Crackers, but there's far fewer to interact with, and the depths of those interactions are limited to exhausting their dialog and small quest chains (plus a few spoilers to discover). The inevitable Dark Souls analogy readily applies here: the game is linear and most of the storytelling is in lore that's picked up over time instead of told through gameplay. That'll likely improve in downstream patches (Colorgrave has a habit of adding significant amounts of extra lore and secrets after release), but the writing felt much less integrated with the story and gameplay this time compared to previous installments.

The gameplay feels much more satisfying to play than in Prodigal, and about as satisfying to speedrun as Curse Crackers.

You're given plenty of tools to play around with, some better explained than others. Just as in Prodigal and Curse Crackers, you can absolutely fly through the game when you know what you're doing, owing to several tools that the developer intended to let you skip or cheese through major sections of the game. This style of letting the player choose how much they want to interact with the combat and puzzles of the game, vs just zooming through, feels incredibly satisfying and is one of my favorite aspects of the games so far. It'll also make for a satisfying item randomizer when the community gets there.

I was less of a fan of finding secrets this time, and some of the story elements confused me in ways that I haven't fully wrapped my head around yet.

There's a quest helper feature in the options menu, which does... something? It would have been nice to make these elements easier to pick up in postgame, and I'm guessing that'll be improved later like it was in Curse Crackers, but it's a bit rough at this writing.

Overall: game good.

I'm still scratching my head on how its lore and technical pieces fit together, but I had a good time playing through, and it's an easy recommend along with the other games in the series so far.

Fun but buggy. Still, I had so much fun playing through and collecting things that it was pretty easy to forgive the bugs right now, especially from a solo developer.

This is a follow-up to the previous delightful platformer collectathon, now with two player and new levels. While some of the collectible bits got repetitive, I really liked the gimmicks to each stage, and really liked the boss encounters. And even though the hitboxes and telegraphs felt off a lot of the time, Renata has so much health that it wasn't really an issue.

Didn't get to test coop play, but it seems like it'd be neat and work well. The camera angle seems to be very tightly constrained to each part of the map to maximize visibility (unless you're speedrunning or going places you're not supposed to), which suits both single and doubles play.

Did have some weirdness with restarts over a death plane resulting in the game showing the loading screen indefinitely. Once I figured out the menu was still there and I could guess where restart was, it was less of an issue, but this should be patched honestly.

Overall: it's fun. If you like old school platformers, it's an easy recommend.

Very rarely review individual DLC, but this is long enough to be a game on its own (much longer and larger in scope than typical Dark Souls expansions). And the tl;dr before anything else is: it's more Elden Ring with better story and writing, so if you liked that, chances are you'll like this as well.

The structure of the DLC is substantively different than the base game however, so I wanted to add my own review to touch on those differences, especially for folks that might not expect or desire some of its changes.

The Good:

* The DLC maps are absolutely gorgeous. Especially compared to the base game, they demonstrate more visual polish, attention to detail, and much more storytelling than is typical of FromSoft, and you can tell a lot of love went into crafting the world.

* The pacing and progression is faster, arguably much better overall. The base game seemed to have a lot of filler areas and bosses written to quota, so reviewers could say "contains hundreds of hours of gameplay" and get that out in ad copy. Without that constraint, most of the set pieces tell their story, give the player their respective lore dumps, and then let the player get on with it without overstaying their welcome or repeating themselves in carbon-copied areas and bosses later. This gives them a lot more individual charm in my opinion.

* The story of the DLC is much more coherent and easy to understand than the base game and previous FromSoft entries. There's still plenty of lore bits to be found and to speculate on, but the main story is actually explained and easier to follow, leaving a lot less guesswork and fan speculation to fill in the gaps. The world also feels a lot more "lived in" instead of being the standard Souls crapsack world where everyone does nothing and is miserable, which makes it much more believable.

* The DLC is largely complementary in terms of build pieces, item availability, and farming options. The new items and gear are great and fun to play around with.


The Bad:

* While the bosses are mostly visually distinct and interesting, their attack patterns and strings of combos lack individual character. Regardless of the boss being vaguely humanoid or a giant hulking monstrosity, most follow a script of 3-4 stage combo, face attack, ranged attack, phase two, ultimate attack, without much variation or individuality. This leads to fights that largely blend together and aren't terribly memorable.

Yes, we like this style of boss and expect a few of them, but printing them over and over again makes them less impactful. Though if you like that style of boss, there'll be plenty of them in jolly cooperation I suppose.

That said, there were several smaller bosses with more individual character that I liked more (the mausoleum bosses especially, plus one on main story), so they exist. But the more varied bosses seem to have been relegated to minor optional content instead of fights most players will face.

* While the DLC looks at first glance to be an open world, progression is exceptionally linear compared to the base game.

Travel between regions is either an affair of following the main story graces or finding obscure hidden paths that you're not likely to stumble upon without a soapstone hint or walkthrough. Travel between regions that looks reasonable from the map is almost always meticulously blocked off in some way, forcing the intended solution by the developers (unless one results to speedrun tech).

This approach to "no fun allowed" open world progression just plain sucks. Exploration does get rewarded with a ton of optional items and cool little story beats, so there's stuff to do, but it feels more like a maze run than having freedom to explore. NPC stories are, at least, much less easy to break because of the linear progression (kind of similar to DS3 DLC for those who've played it).

* Crafting is still boring, and filling my inventory with crafting ingredients is similarly boring. Bell bearing vendors mitigate this, but having to do that work instead of just buying consumables off of a merchant still feels clunky and not fun.


The Highly Technical and Extremely Dubious:

* Hitboxes, animation timings, gamepad input speeds, and overall performance are all over the place right now. This may get improved via patch, but given FromSoft is generally light touch on such fixes, hard to say. Expect mods to fill the gaps.

An especially big middle finger send-up for dodge timings being dependent on framerate, and FPS caps being largely uncontrollable as of DS1 remake and base Elden Ring. The timing windows are much better than when FromSoft first introduced this feature, but it's still supremely frustrating to know you hit a dodge window or attack cleanly and have it fail to connect because of uncontrollable frame delays and performance drops. My rig is an overpowered monstrosity, so it's not my particular setup causing these either.

This is a highly technical gripe, but it comes up far too often with enemies having lingering hitboxes on their attacks much more of the time in the DLC. Seriously FromSoft, hire someone from the fighting game scene to clean this up and give us technical breakdowns of frame data and hitboxes, it would do a world of good.

* Occasionally the game will just lag uncontrollably for a full minute, similar to problems folks had with the base game. This seems to largely be caused by a raytracing and visual bug with the game, but it's annoying this hasn't been fully fixed this far after the original release. (Others are reporting this, so it's not unique to my particular setup.)

* Seriously, just look up a walkthrough if you can't access an area of the map. Aimlessly traveling around for an hour trying to find a way over only to discover the "shortcut" you need is highly missable or practically requires a guide sucks, especially if you can see the place you want to go. I get that this is so they can pace story and bosses along those routes, but putting them in big arena fights instead would have been fine, and having multiple ways to get somewhere like in the base game also would have worked out.


Overall? It's alright. It's a good expansion to a good game, it values player time slightly better, its story beats are great, and its rough edges can be sanded off by dipping into a guide when you need to. Series fans will loudly proclaim it's a 10/10, and I'm sure it'll garner a war chest of awards by end of year. But ignoring that noise, it's about a 7 or an 8 in my opinion, and that's good enough to pick it up.

If the phrase "Ultimate Chicken Horse, except kart racing" appeals to you, stop reading right now and buy the game. It's exactly that, and it's incredibly fun to play.

If you have no idea what I'm on about: Make Way is a party game where you construct a track then race on it against your friends, enemies, frenemies, or bots. Play sessions are generally pretty short for a full 4-player lobby (around 10 minutes), and after playing this a bit with friends and solo, it deserves high enough marks for a recommend.

There are some issues with it, however:
* The game doesn't explain itself or its controls especially well for newcomers.
* Its couch and online coop both have input detection issues, frequently detecting multiple devices on the same machine.
* The game can be somewhat unstable with larger maps and control layouts. Not terribly so, but we had it crash during couch play on the Steam Deck, and Proton was possibly at fault there.

But these are all bits of tarnish on an otherwise fun and short party game. Still a recommend, especially on sale.

Absolutely fantastic little love letter to SaGa (or as we knew them here in the states, Final Fantasy Legend) 1 and 2 for the Game Boy.

A bit too much of a spiritual successor, arguably. The majority of the combat system, selectable races, and many of the items and systems are direct lifts from those games. Fortunately, each item has been reimplemented, coming with general bugfixes and quality of life improvements, and a story that's close enough to be a spiritual successor but entirely its own spin on the series' concepts and lore.

For those wholly unfamiliar with the series that inspired this game, the most recent RPG Limit Break (2024) on Twitch featured SaGa 1 and 2, and pulling a VOD will get you up to speed. The short version is: unlike most traditional EXP-driven RPGs, SaGa (and thus, this game inspired by it) is a more item-and-build focused affair requiring some tactical awareness to succeed. It's not so strict to be an outright puzzle (like Atlus RPGs and their ilk), but it does require some awareness of the game's mechanics and build decisions to succeed.

Since this means you can't always grind your way out of bad situations, this clocks the game and the series it's inspired by as more challenging than your standard Final Fantasy of the (spiritual-successor-to) era. But what's here is honestly very accessible, mistakes can be mostly rectified quickly, and every item and enemy is rigorously documented via the game's info tab. Meaning: even if you're a series novice, you're likely to puzzle through it just fine.

The game is also fairly short, but not so short as to feel unfulfilling or incomplete. It tells its tale and doesn't overstay its welcome, and that's truly admirable in a modern era of games that try to monopolize attention. Also, it looks great on both PC and the Steam Deck, with different layouts designed specifically for each setup.

So yeah, SoVa stands up pretty well and is an easy recommend for folks who want a simple-but-challenging JRPG experience (or just happened to grow up on the games that inspired this like I did). It's good and, given the number of Steam reviews so far, could definitely use more attention than it's getting right now.

Fun game, helpful community, banger soundtrack, with good documentation to get started on its wiki and Steam pages. Absolutely not for everyone; keep reading for why.

In a nutshell: this game is best for players who enjoy, or want to learn to enjoy, messing with anything not bolted down in videogames. Coding experience is not required; in fact, this will give you plenty of challenge to learn good programming and security principles. But the meat of the game entails learning and failing in a sandbox environment that isn't always your best friend.

For those unsure if this is for you, I would say: if you're already involved in programming or computer security, you more or less know what to expect here and the experience is very enjoyable. If you're not, but want to learn in a structured environment with incremental challenges, try the catalog of Zachtronics and Zach-like games first to see if the text style of programming challenges meets your fancy. If it does, this will give you a community and fun environment to learn in that wouldn't be available in a structured, singleplayer experience.

In other words, there's more risk and more reward to this experience than the standard fare of programming puzzle games, and this experience is complementary with those styles of games. There's also very little like this out there (short of community programming/capture the flag competitions, which are typically more limited), which makes me happy this exists.

As for price: it's set pretty high for folks that don't know what they're getting into, and there are optional things you can pay for in-game if you want to support the developers (which raise the sticker price even higher, but are not required or pay-to-win). Because of this, I'd recommend reading the wiki first (https://wiki.hackmud.com ) to get a feel for what you're getting into. If it's your thing, it's worth it.

Review as of the start of Early Access: pretty good so far.

What's here currently is satisfying and polished in terms of gameplay over dozens of runs. However: determined players will quickly hit the "to be continued" screen in terms of story. There's a couple bugs I experienced during my runs, as well as some dummy assets and pieces that are clearly not finished pending later patches, but nothing too terrible so far. If you expect all of this going in, everything else is a bonus so far.

Without giving away the mechanic, I really like how they did dynamic difficulty to account for varying levels of player skill in this one. This is added on top of having fewer build pieces and upgrades to work with earlier on, and I loved to hate how it worked.

While it's theoretically possible to clear on a first run (and the game has multiple save slots to try this, for the so inclined), time is better spent collecting resources and upgrades to tailor to your desired builds and to get the story started. In addition to unlocks for gameplay and hub interactions, challenge modifiers also eventually become available (as is tradition), giving you good control over how spicy or smooth you'd like your time to be -- and presumably mods will add more eventually.

Compared to Hades 1 specifically, combat is a bit more methodical, more focused on area denial and grouping enemies vs dodging and positioning. It's a refreshing change, and just different enough to keep the gameplay loop fresh.

The story so far is also pretty good. It's not yet as deep or complex as other full Supergiant releases, but it builds well on Hades 1's familiarity while focusing on new characters that have their own stories to tell.

Overall, as at the top, pretty good especially for early access. Though with strings attached, and definitely will be better the longer it brews in the pot.

In short: it's not bad, but it's not polished at this writing.

First off, there's no co-op to speak of currently (at best, you solve puzzles side-by-side with other players). As such, expect up front a mostly solo puzzle experience with other people vaguely there around you.

For the puzzles and gameplay, this is mostly a mashup of the Talos Principle, The Witness, solving Korok puzzles everywhere in Breath of the Wild, and the open world puzzle experience of Warframe all housed under the same umbrella. The puzzles are varied, they're well-implemented, and they're presented in slowly expanding variety spread out over a Disney-park-esque few acres of in-game property. This is all connected via a thin story, mildly frustrating social tools, netcode that's right ♥♥♥♥ but likely to improve, and a free season pass level tracker to drive that good-ol'-engagement-model forward, with a very well-presented and familiar FPS interface that is somewhat lacking right now in terms of options and accessibility.

The puzzles are varied and fun, the open world exploration is implemented well, and the scenery and ambiance of the game fit together well. Puzzles are swapped in and out of the world at a reasonable enough pace to keep previously-explored areas fresh, with light Metroidvania elements to entice you to come back as well.

Less fun is the netcode for the game, which is fine during sparsely populated times of day, but stutters and chugs and teleports noticeably during higher traffic. Seeing other players solving puzzles in the world also generally feels good, except when they occasionally run by and snipe a perception puzzle you're working on preventing you from finishing it. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's annoying. (This might be a bug; most puzzles in your session otherwise do not seem to "solve" competitively by other players.)

I also had a few puzzles despawn out from under me because they rotated out, but that seems to happen very infrequently. This is probably a bug that they'll fix, so I can't begrudge it too much.

But these all have been infrequent frustrations overlapping an otherwise good experience so far. The puzzles remain fun after 10s of hours so far, flow together well, and the back half of the game adds creative meta-puzzles to the mix that are a joy to solve without hedging too far into pixel hunts or inscrutable puzzle developer logic.

That said, with much of the current game tied to a live service instead of standalone presently, I expect this to eventually collapse under its own weight, limiting the value of a purchase. But for $30 for what it is right now, it's engrossing enough to recommend for a few dozen hours or so, more if you particularly enjoy games you can pick up and play and drop off just as easily during a coffee break.

In short, again: the current game won't exactly thrill or inspire, but it's a relatively safe and fun puzzle game for folks with good spatial reasoning skills and comfort with FPS controls. Which is good enough for folks that enjoy this particular niche, but a less solid recommendation to puzzle fans generally.

Nice little niche game for the overlap of three types of players: those who like Zachtronics-style programming puzzle games, sysadmins, and anyone who broke their brain trying to code in redstone in Minecraft.

Without spoiling the technical aspects of the game (which correspond to real networking concepts described in the collectible in-game manual), expect roughly three levels of time investment:

1. Finishing story. Takes maybe a couple hours, less if you rush it.
2. Connecting every puzzle room without solving them. Roughly double the time of story.
3. Solving all of the puzzle rooms, refactoring, and achievement hunting. A lot longer.

In all, I spent 30 hours building an efficient network and tinkering with all of the puzzles before I was done, taking the extra time to build it properly instead of hacking everything together.

The level of polish here is high enough that had they added a solitaire clone, I would have confused it with a Zachtronics game. And at $6, that's pretty solid for the price.

Unreservedly recommended, even if it's not on sale.