Recent reviews by mAce

A not-quite-turn-based, deck building card game with insane depth, an incredible soundtrack, and an intriguing, engaging story that'll push you to keep going so you can see what comes next. Fights will frequently end up feeling almost like puzzles, with you desperately trying to figure out how you can squeeze out a narrow victory, only to be met with an even harsher foe the very next stage.

If you can handle the difficulty and are willing to learn a complex battle system, then I cannot possibly recommend it enough.

A friend of mine pointed out to me that I must have Stockholm Syndrome from other gacha games (notably Fate/Grand Order), because I was genuinely weirded out by how generous this game is with its gacha mechanics.

If you're a fan of Project Moon games, this is well worth a try. There's no need to worry about endgame content if you're only here for the story, so while there is grinding to be done, it's entirely optional (though you do miss out on substantial rewards).

You can't fix her.

I died a lot in the tutorial
I died even more on the first real boss.
I love this game.

Armored Core 6 is an incredibly fast-paced action game with an utterly absurd amount of customization, both in terms of visuals and, much more importantly, your gameplay experience.

Want to be a super fast lil' guy that can jump across the battlefield and run circles around your enemies while dicing 'em up with a sword? You can do that.
Want to be slow, clunky, four-legged behemoth that launches an endless barrage of explosives while hovering above your foes? Got you covered.
Maybe you just want to be a literal tank. Maybe you want to be a FAST tank! Hell, maybe you want to be a pile of walking junk parts that just punches and kicks! Anything's possible, and I absolutely adore it.

The difficulty is extremely erratic, admittedly, and not every mission is a winner, but my God, when it everything clicks, it's just magical. I genuinely don't remember the last time I've had this much pure, unbridled FUN in a game.
If you can handle the difficulty and the steep learning curve, you're gonna have a fantastic time.

I bought this game after seeing a lot of people recommending it, even though I was a bit put off by the graphics, and I am so glad I did.

I think this game is an absolute masterpiece. I can think of no other word to describe it. Calling it a diamond in the rough would be doing it a disservice, because the only thing rough about it is the localization being just a little bit spotty at times (but never enough to be an issue, I have to stress).

The gameplay is fairly basic, but it evolves as you get further and you can customize your loadout a fair bit. In the beginning, your moveset is quite limited, but you will quickly find yourself unlocking more options that dramatically increase your versatility, as well as alter your approach to combat. One of the greatest strengths of the combat system in this game is that you can re-allocate your stats at will at zero cost at almost any point in time. If you want to be more tanky at the cost of your damage output, you can do that. If you want to have far more potent magic, but be squishy, you can do that. Want to make your attacks obscenely powerful at the cost of dying in one hit? You better believe you can do that. It offers an insane amount of freedom when it comes to how to approach any given fight, and I frequently found myself changing my stats and weapon loadout to better suit a new challenge.

The music, weirdly, is phenomenal. One of my favorite tracks in the game, I discovered, was a vocaloid track from almost a decade ago, which was pretty shocking. The variety of songs and how well they are used really caught me off guard, and there is a surprising amount of certified bangers included. If you had a vocaloid phase, or just listen to a lot Japanese music in general, you'll probably like a lot of the songs this game throws at you.

Graphically speaking, it's obviously not gonna win any awards, and the animations are a little on the stiff side, but your character's armor and weapon actually do affect how their sprite looks. Literally every single weapon and armor piece, and even some accessories, dramatically alter your sprite, which is a frankly absurd amount of effort to put in. I went through most of the game using sub-optimal gear just because I liked how it looked.

Lastly, I have to mention the story, and I have nothing but praise for it. I very rarely get invested in stories, but this one caught me hook, line, and sinker. I've ruined my sleep schedule staying up late to play this game because I just had to find out what happened next. I implore you to go in as close to blind as you can, so that nothing gets spoiled for you, because the twists and turns this rollercoaster of a story throws at you are genuinely some of the best I've seen in any video game, ever.

The sheer amount of content is also staggering, and it's all well-made. There are some instances of bosses being reused, but it was never distracting or even close to being a bother. I cannot stress enough just how much content is crammed into this game, and how it just keeps going and going long after I thought it would be over.



TL;DR: I love this game more than I can possibly express with words, and if you have even the slightest interest in this type of game (or even if you don't and are just feeling experimental!), you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

This game has recently been receiving a ton of negative reviews, and that's almost exclusively because a lot of people are upset that the (completely free) DLC characters that have just been announced are guest characters from Fate/Grand Order instead of returning characters from prior Melty Blood games (or from the new Tsukihime visual novel).

Please do not let this affect your views on the game itself. It is a very clear case of review-bombing, and it's so very frustrating to see.
While I am not fond of some of the game mechanics myself and think the netcode isn't perfect, this is still a fine fighting game with a lot of nuance and depth, as well as some of the best support I've ever seen for any game, period. It is easy to pick up and learn, has an active user base, a solid OST, plays very well, and it's clear that the developers are listening to feedback and working to improve the game itself. I only play it casually, but I can easily recommend giving it a try if you're in the market for a new anime fighter to try.

It is mind-boggling to me that people would complain this much about new content being added for free, even if they disagree with the choice of content. These are the 7th and 8th DLC characters added to the game, and just for the sake of comparison, the season pass for Guilty Gear Strive costs 25€ and contains only five characters.

This game has been horribly slept on, and it's a dang shame.
It looks, sounds, and plays great, and the story and characters are enthralling, making you press on just a bit further to find out what happens next.
My sole gripe is that the gameplay doesn't change meaningfully throughout its runtime, meaning you're likely to grow at least a little tired of it as you get near the end. Your first and last hour of gameplay won't be meaningfully different.
On the plus side, this means that the gameplay is engaging right off the bat, as you're given access to just about all your tools pretty much immediately.

If you have any interest in this, I highly recommend it. If you can withstand a tiny bit of tedium, you'll be rewarded with a great story and a feast for both your ears and eyes.

I feel like you can decide right off the bat if this game is for you or not, so I'd highly recommend trying it out if it interests you at all. Two hours is plenty of time to get a feel for it.

The gameplay is fun, the controls are responsive, and the graphics are (mostly) animated beautifully. I do think the music is pretty forgettable, but you can easily just play some tunes of your own in the background if you so desire. Overall, I think this is well worth the asking price.

I bought this game with high hopes of playing a great sidescroller with some farming simulation between stages. That expectation was partially met, but I'm sad to say that the sidescroller segments are, at best, thoroughly mediocre. I've played a lot of 2D sidescrollers, from Megaman, Metroid, Castlevania (and a ton of Metroidvanias), and so on, as well as a whole bunch of 3D hack-and-slash games in the vein of Devil May Cry, and it pains me to say that there are just too many issues with the core 2D gameplay of Sakuna for it to even hold a candle to most of them.

I'll start off by listing the positives.
- The visuals are great, especially the lighting. It's a gorgeous game, and the way stages change with the time of day is very impressive. What was a beautiful, lush forest in the afternoon becomes haunting and creepy at night. The water effects stand out as well, as does everything to do with farming.
- The voice acting seemed phenomenal. The titular Sakuna especially really nailed it for me. I do want to mention that the singing cutscene had not been dubbed, likely because that would require composing an entire song and matching it to a set of pre-made animations, but that's hardly worth complaining about.
- Farming gameplay felt genuinely great! It was tedious, but incredibly satisfying. Tilling the field, planting the seeds, keeping the water levels just right, and so on and so forth all felt very rewarding. It wasn't necessarily fun in the moment, but it gave a genuine sense of accomplishment when you were done. I have zero complaints with the farming gameplay, outside of how it's taught to the player. More on that later.

Now for why I sadly don't recommend Sakuna.
- A big gimmick of this game is the ability to grapple enemies and either fling yourself past them or fling them towards you. Or towards each other. Or fling yourself towards walls. Or fling them into obstacles like spikes. It's a really neat idea, but the execution just wasn't there. It immediately felt like a far more cumbersome version of Nero's Snatch ability from the DMC series, as there's no lock-on, only a finicky auto-aim that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, or manual eight-way aiming. The game REALLY wants you to make use of this ability, as there are plenty of enemies that are flying around in spots that are hard to reach with melee, but well-within range of your grapple, and enemies that have been knocked down cannot be hit by regular attacks, but can be launched into the air for a juggle by grappling them. It's clear that a lot of emphasis is placed on this mechanic, but it unfortunately just feels very unwieldy, frequently hitting the wrong enemy, hitting terrain in the way of the enemy, not locking on to what you'd expect, flinging you into an awkward position, etc. This seems to be the most important part of combat (certainly the most unique part), but it's just not doing it for me, and it's actively being a bother during most battles.
- I've fought three bosses so far, not counting the tutorial boss, and only one of them was unique. The first was just a larger version of a basic enemy with a single extra move, and who clearly had not been properly play-tested, as you could stand right next to him and spam your light attack chain without him ever being able to hit you with his basic attack. It looks like it should hit, but it just doesn't hit right next to him, apparently, unless you're against the wall. The second was a new foe, but the very next stage introduced this boss as a regular enemy. I don't know if the third one will become a regular enemy too, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me. More important, however, is the fact that they were all accompanied by infinitely respawning adds. The bosses themselves pose zero threat to you, and are only dangerous because you need to deal with a constant barrage of enemies that get in the way. This feels like a really cheap way to make a fight challenging, and it mostly just caused me to ignore the mobs entirely. Besides, unless the enemy has ranged attacks, if they're on the other side of the boss, they can't actually reach you, which feels and looks very awkward. You can end up having a conga line of adds standing around while you smack the boss over and over.
- There is no dodge or parry button. You dodge by double-tapping a direction to go either left or right. This means that dodging an attack takes significantly longer than it should, and also means that attempting to make small adjustments to your position - which you will be doing frequently, since this is a fast-paced action game - can cause you to unintentionally dodge, maybe even putting you in harm's way. It's not as big of an issue for parrying, but I would still much prefer having it be on a separate button. I have had plenty of times where I parried attacks by complete accident, since I just happened to be trying to move at the right time.
- The game does an absolutely dreadful job of teaching you its mechanics, which is strange, because it does have a tutorial. It has multiple, in fact! And yet, it fails completely at providing you with key information. Everything I just said about dodging and parrying? I discovered that *on my own*, long before the game thought it would be a good idea to tell me about it. You don't get told that you can dodge or parry until well after you've cleared a multitude of stages, including the first boss, and even then, you're only told in a scroll that you have to go and manually look at. This is even worse with regards to the farming aspects. I like the farming, but I would probably like it a lot more if I had been told how to actually do it. Instead, you're given very, very basic instructions and then let loose to do whatever you want. I'm guessing they want you to mess up at first and get better over time, but it genuinely feels like I just did not have a chance to succeed on my first go. So much information is completely hidden from you until you either happen to figure it out on your own, like I did with fertilizing the soil, or until the game decides that it's time, usually way too late.
- Your stats are very, very important, and you gain stats in bulk. Whenever you finish a rice harvest, your stats increase dramatically, and this can be a massive boost in power and defense. This is a problem because of how it will essentially just gate off areas until your next harvest cycle. I went into an area and tried my hand at clearing it, but I thought I was doing way too little damage. Sure enough, one harvest later and my damage output had literally doubled. I hadn't gotten better at the game, and I hadn't learned anything or even really done anything, I'd just twiddled my thumbs until it was time to harvest, at which point I was good to go for the next area.
- Lastly, I just think movement and combat in general can feel very sluggish. Notably, it can be very frustrating just to turn around during combat. If you're facing to the right and you start your basic combo string, then you're not gonna be able to switch to facing left during that string. You'd have to manually cancel it with a dodge or some such thing just to re-orient yourself. For a game with such fast-paced combat and an emphasis on dealing with large groups of enemies, this feels weirdly stiff. I would say that this is the kind of thing I'd expect from a slow, clunky Soulslike sidescroller, but even those don't make you commit to a direction to this extent. Really weird choice, and I don't think think it fits the game at all.

To briefly summarize, in case you don't feel like reading all of the above: I think the game does a very poor job of teaching you a lot of its core mechanics, and I think the 2D sidescrolling sections are really bad, and I don't think the excellent farming simulation and visuals do enough to make up for it.
It's a real shame, 'cause there's a lot to like here, but I feel like it just stumbles right at the finish line.

Very solid metroidvania. The combat is nice and satisfying, you have a ton of build variety, the exploration is rewarding and doesn't waste your time, and the story, while not amazing, is interesting enough to keep you engaged.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.