Recent reviews by krimhorn

This is a fine Zelda-like.

It's impossible to oversell just how ridiculous and fun this game is. 100000/10

The combat is much improved over Bloodrayne but bad combat has been replaced with boring to fight damage sponge bosses and infinite wave enemies combined with frustratingly badly implemented "puzzles" geared around harpooning enemies then "throwing" them into specific environmental objects. What's cool as a bonus way to fight is terrible as a puzzle solving mechanic when you have little control over where the enemies fling nevermind getting them to a specific interactable. The story's fine but not worth the frustration of the rest of the game.

Woof. Such a product of its time. Before Devil May Cry and God of War really defined the third-person action genre the implementations ranged from bad to terrible. Bloodrayne sits somewhere in between with attacks that often feel ineffective and are really awkward to perform (the shoulder button on a controller is NOT the button to be using for melee attacks). The story is fine and Laura Bailey gives a solid performance as Rayne its just not a good game by any day's standards even if it might have been acceptable in 2002.

if you have great memories of this game leave them at that. If you don't then you're probably not going to get some playing this. It's a series that would be great to get revisited with modern third-person action design principles at work but, as is, skip.

What if Zelda but tax evading turnip?

Setting aside the "LOL, JRPERGER reissue naming" this is a wet noodle of a game. It starts with a solid feeling of being Not Every Other JRPERGER (the "Shadow Hearts" vibe I got from the art style and initial cutscene) and continues to try and sell itself with a combat system that could be described as "turn-based-real-time" but then it never really comes together. The combat system has that JRPG issue of throwing too many ideas at it and having most of those ideas not be relevant until much later in the game. By that time you've totally forgotten about 90% of what the combat system can do because you've literally never used any of them. Only, here, the game's difficulty spikes dramatically about a third of the way in until you realize that one of the mechanics that wasn't relevant until now is the way to win. So every fight becomes "run with machinegun -> kill with pistol -> repeat". A combat system that had some interesting ideas devolved to the most basic parts of itself repeated ad nauseum. It doesn't help that character levels are tied to the weapons (shooting earns weapon levels, character level is a sum of your handgun, machinegun and grenade levels) and it's suboptimal to have each character using more than one weapon type which means getting more HP tends to become a grind.

The grind is another issue the game has. Getting the parts necessary to build the weapon accessories you need to stay relevant with the enemies is a huge grind. As is getting the map tiles needed to uncover the map. The good part about that last part is it's generally possible to get to any story location just by using map tiles you've obtained through normal fighting but you won't have nearly enough tiles to activate map bonuses for dungeons (which can cut down the grind or level the difficulty a bit). It's just not fun especially given the above "correct" way to play fights being so boring itself.

Which brings me to the story. Uhh...there's one? Maybe? Question mark. The characters you play as go around doing odd jobs that have no connection to anything and as the game progresses you find out what the connection they have to the bigwigs in the world is. Those bigwigs are also saying things during the chapter end cutscenes. Things about quartz and people dying to their quartz being destroyed and a Prelate who died and they're somehow God things and...it's all disjointed and doesn't come together in any way. If there is a narrative throughline I have no idea what it was.

It's just not a good game.

Solid brawler platformer with a light metroidvania tinge.

It's Half-Life as you remember it.

There's not much to say. Squidlit is an absolutely charming platformer in the style and with the presentation of classic Gameboy platformers. Short but immensely fun and charming throughout.

Simply put this is one of the best games based on a movie franchise ever made. It holds up incredibly well today.