Recent reviews by gwaldo

A well-done visual novel!

Carrion's alternate title would be "The Thing: The Metroidvania".

I had a lot of fun with this. There were puzzles that took several times to get through, but not too many. There were pitched battles that could be challenging, but I found that one of two approaches would work: Be sneaky and monstrous, or be bold and monstrous. Some fights can't be won just by blitzing everything, and some it is THE WAY.

There were times where I had no idea where to go next. Having a map or more in-world wayfinders would be helpful, but it makes sense in the game's universe.

I thought it was a very interesting consideration that your speed slows as you get larger, and also that at your maximum size, it can be difficult to steer a mass of teeth and tentacles. These things make sense in the world, and are nice touches.

I had fun being a formless hungry puddle of anger.

It's a game that I want to love. The story is concise and doesn't overstay it's welcome, but the ending is a bit... hrmph. The key question of the story is vaguely hinted at, but not resolved.

The voice-acting and music are superb.

The biggest problem with the games are it's puzzles. No, that's not right. Most of the puzzles are fine. But what can make this game frustrating is that the rules of dimension-shifting are inconsistent. Taking my time, it took me 4 hours to play through, but without fighting out obtuse parts of puzzles or the physics, it would have easily been less than 3.

There were times that the game just wasn't fun. And that's a shame. There was a great game in here that just didn't quite get the polish needed to put it over.

I enjoyed the story and gameplay for the most part. That most chests only reveal give cosmetics feels like a waste. The boss combat was frustrating at times (admittedly this is my first Souls-like), but being able to lower the difficulty kept the game as accessible as I wanted. There were a fair amount of graphical glitches like clipping that were distracting.

There was a significant amount of characters popping in, especially when loading from a respawn, in which the scene would load, but the characters hadn't, and it was unclear if they wouldn't be loaded until you walked by and found yourself taking damage from behind. Likewise, you could see the enemies load in phases; first a static character model, then it would start moving in a hovering fashion, then the animations would kick in, and finally the normal behavior. I appreciate that the devs were trying to keep load times as low as possible, and JIT as much as possible, but I think they erred a bit too far toward "fast loading" versus "complete loading".

The last thing that I want to touch on is the map. The map is one of the best implementations that I've seen of a 3d space. The map controls are intuitive, but the panning seemed to have odd speeds at times. The main improvement that I'd like to see are waypoints and a pathfinding feature. When backtracking through, some areas were still very difficult to navigate, even with the map. (I'm looking at you, subterranean Dathomir ...)

All in all, I enjoyed Jedi Fallen Order, and would like to see more like it.

The last Soulcalibur that I loved was SC2. SC3 actively cheated, SC4's inclusion of Star Wars characters was novel, but they were all broken, and SC5 was just weird with so many replacement characters.

SC6 looks and feels good. I've mainly been playing the character stories (as meaningless and silly as they are), and have mainly been enjoying it. There are the occasional oddities, but the game feels solid and responsive. I don't regret purchasing this.

This is a lot of simple fun. Intuitive controls (which may be tweaked for your "inversion preference") andunderstandable physics, combined with very quick loading times make this great for some low-pressure fun. While the pressure and cost of failure are low, trying to pull off high-point stunts is exciting.

I wouldn't call this a "relaxing" game, but it is a lot of simple fun.

If you ever wanted to play along with a song, for real, this is the way to do it!

If you're new to performing music, this is a great way to get into guitar: teaching you how to play the songs you love!

This game is a big pile of stupid fun, and I love it. The names are silly, the tongue-in-cheek descriptions are amazing, and bros can be women, too!

On one hand, I wish that I could swap between characters at will, but honestly, I probably get much more out of them being random, being forced to change playstyles for each character.

The increasingly frustrated "You failed" dialog is awesome, and makes me laugh. The game also manages to reload the beginning of the level, not making you wait to start over. I wish more games treated your failures like an 80's montage like Broforce.

This is a lot of silly, mindless, irreverent fun, and you won't regret it!

I've completed this in iOS, and it's fantastically beautiful and fun.