Recent reviews by PASSiG

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I happened to buy Sekiro without knowing it was a FromSoftware game, and by then I never had any interest in the souls series and the souls-like genre, so this is the first time I played something of the sorts and I didn’t know what to expect. It instantly became one of my favorite games: it was so good that after I finished I immediately started a new playthrough, which is something I never do. I kept learning the fun combat system until the end, and still wanted to learn and engage more with it. After playing Elden Ring a couple years after, it made me appreciate this game much more because of how much it has done right and that’s what I want to share in this review.

First of all, I was impressed about how Sekiro is such a “complete” game, for lack of a better word. It has a good story, cool characters, interesting lore and an amazing world to navigate with its own mythical creatures and awesome mobility tools. It has cinematic action sequences, it can be a stealth game at times, if you want to, and the boss fights are the best I’ve ever seen by far. The pacing is on point while also giving the player freedom, with many optional paths and enemies. The game is challenging, but always fair. That’s what I mean about this feeling like a complete game, because even though it has the best action combat system out of any game ever made, it doesn’t use it as a crutch and still delivers some amazing experiences outside of that. Just like the combat system itself, the whole game is extremely well designed.

I’ll mainly discuss the combat system: why do I think it’s the best? There are a multitude of factors that combine with each other very well, and they basically are:

Mechanics: It starts with the posture system, which is similar to a second, independent health bar. When the actual health bar reaches 0 or the enemy posture maxes out, you’ll get to deal a finishing blow to the enemy. This system brilliantly rewards constant pressure and not allowing your opponent to regain their posture, helped by the fact there is no stamina system, but will still work if you have a slower and more defensive playstyle. The replacement of the cheap hidden stagger mechanic is welcome and results in a more transparent system in which the player has both enough information and control of the situation at any given time.

A complement to this system is the refined implementation of deflections (or parries), which greatly impact the enemy posture while creating openings for the player to be offensive at the same time. For that reason, deflections are the bread and butter of Sekiro’s combat and is the first skill you’ll want to master since it opens so many choices and fundamentally changes how you approach combat.

Flow: The responsiveness of controlling your character that comes from forgiving timing for button presses and cancels is a major part of what makes the intense combat sequences possible. This means you are not punished for the tiny input mistakes that are bound to happen and a lot of the time you can recover from mistakes if you correct your actions in time. You can almost always cancel a move soon after starting it, and what is even better about all of this is that the enemies will react to the attacks starting just as well as the cancels. Sometimes they might cancel their attacks to block a swing you made even if it wouldn’t connect. Such a simple detail goes a long way into making a better and more fun fighting sequence, giving the opponents more options and different reactions to the player’s moves.

To prevent the player from spamming attacks, bosses will usually deflect one of the attacks after some time, which buys time for them to make their own move. Some of these moves are called perilous attacks and each one has their own strengths and weaknesses that require different countermeasures, but these are basic mechanics that the player has access to, including even basic movement, which is enough to deal with some of them. This creates a back and forth that will go on until the player or the enemy make a mistake, and these situations can get really intense - the best fast paced and involved combat there is. You must think about when to attack and how to attack, and how the enemy can defend and what defense they choose to do to react accordingly and plan ahead. Doing this all in one big sequence, without leaving room for Sekiro and his enemy to recover their posture is what I strive for while playing, because it’s a really unique feeling, pure action packed fun with non-stop decision making.

Balance: By balance I mean two distinct aspects of combat: the player must use most of their tools to be the most effective and how well all these tools work.

While you don’t have to actually engage with most of the tools and combat mechanics the game offers you, it highly rewards you for doing so. Some will reward a certain playstyle more than others, but with very few exceptions, each one of them are great for a specific situation. Aside from basic mechanics like the satisfying Mikiri Counter to counter thrust attacks, the player has access to prosthetic tools and combat arts.

Prosthetic tools are more specialized, but extremely powerful in the right occasion. These are weapons and utility tools and while some counter specific types of enemies, others can help you with defense. They might seem simple and even weak at first but integrating them into your game plan is very exciting, since they can complement your strategy or fill some gaps. I’ve been surprised multiple times how fun it is learning how to use a new tool effectively.

There are also combat arts, which are basically a selection of unique fighting moves from different martial art styles. Some of them are versions of moves of bosses and specialist enemies, like ninjas and monks and they can be focused around utility, mobility or their damaging capabilities. They are a form of progression, functioning like a skill tree, and there are quite a few of them. Just like prosthetic tools, combat arts are also incredibly fun to integrate into your gameplay, learn and eventually master.

Enemies: Enemies in this game are amazing as well, mostly because they are designed specifically for Sekiro’s toolkit. This might sound silly as a statement but it’s the opposite approach of regular souls-like bosses which have exaggerated movement, tracking and large area of effect attacks to account for every player build. This results in bosses being more interactable while still allowing different playstyles, since there are multiple good solutions for a huge majority of their moves because of precise hitboxes and good telegraphing done via animation.

Since the game knows you have the tools at your disposal, it will test how you use them. There are specialist enemies that have defined strengths and weaknesses and will usually teach you a lesson about a new tool you might not have thought to use before. The variety of enemies is pretty surprising too, the game has cinematic bosses, strong warriors, big beasts, specialists and even has a puzzle boss.

I feel like learning and mastering the combat system is plenty of fun by itself. The combat might be daunting at first, but there’s a common saying within the community that once the combat clicks for you, it’ll be a breeze. It means after understanding it and experiencing it a bit, you’ll have plenty of options. At the end of the day, all these mechanics give you freedom to play your preferred way, and that’s one consequence I really treasure this game for.

Every once in a while I revisit this game to challenge a random boss and I have already done three playthroughs to see different endings. I intend to keep returning to it to scratch the otherwise unscratchable itch of the best combat system ever made and that's why I highly recommend playing this game.

Thronefall is a strategy game, but not like any other I have played before. I must say that my love for the game started when I watched the trailer: an honest, to the point short video explaining what the game is about with gameplay footage, which is incredibly rare nowadays, as silly as it sounds. So I will also recommend watching that if you want something in addition to this review to help make you a decision.

The game has a lot of tower defense elements, but with a bit of management and real time strategy sprinkled in. Each level starts with you on an empty land and your goal is to create and defend your little kingdom until the waves of enemies stop coming. There are two really distinct stages to the gameplay: the day, when you plan your economy and defenses, which doesn’t have a timer, meaning you can plan as much and as slowly as you want to, and the night, when the enemies come and you’ll defend your castle. Each successful night creates a checkpoint so you don’t have to redo the whole level in case you fail.

There are many different ways to play the game. You can pick different weapons, buildings, perks, mutators and make your own plan about how to get enough economy to build your defenses and what these defenses will be. You can focus on towers and play it like a tower defense game, you can focus on units and command your big army during the nights and you can also focus on your own character and become unstoppable, along with many in-betweens.

A weapon must be chosen at the start of each level and they are activated passively while around enemies, with even ranged choices. Each weapon also has an active ability which takes a few seconds to recharge, depending on the ability. These can be quite powerful and enhance your strategy even if it’s not completely related to the weapon choice, so there are a few important choices to be made even if you don’t plan on having your character fight the enemies directly.

Perks are passive modifiers to your character, buildings, economy, units or even game mechanics. There are currently 54 perks in the game, and you can choose up to 5 for each level and it’s a ton of fun mixing and matching them to find your own preferred way to defend the kingdom. There are many options to boost your economy, so you might want to pick one of these to get a boost and get stronger faster. Some of them let you recover from mistakes so the gameplay can be more relaxing if you wish. A lot of them will improve a really specific offensive or defensive tool at your disposal. They are presented really well too, incorporated into a progression system that unlocks them as you play the game, so you’ll never feel overwhelmed and also get incentivized to revisit played levels and play them differently.

There are also quite a few different buildings, with up to 4 upgrades available for each one of them. So you can specialize your towers so that they snipe enemies from far away or they barrage enemies nearby. All the units also have variety, having 4 different choices for melee units, ranged units and the hero unit which you can only have one of per building. The upgrade system is really fun and can really change how you play the game, which is something I deeply appreciate. The buildings go in predetermined spots, meaning you can’t build anything anywhere, so there is more adaptation to be had instead of focusing on only one aspect of your defense or offense.

All levels will give you a score depending on how you play, and this arcade-like implementation is amazing. You’ll see the score changing after every wave, and it clearly tells you what it considers for scoring: a flat amount for surviving, percentage of total buildings defended, and a time bonus to reward quickly clearing the waves. At the end of the level there there is another modifier to your score: if you didn’t need to use the checkpoint to go back a day at any point during that level, you’ll get a score boost, incentivizing no-restart runs while also not being a multiplier that huge which would invalidate other attempts to get a high score. There’s a simple leaderboard on every level so you can see how well your friends did, and as a competitive person I really enjoy that, and have some high scores to challenge you with, in case you end up playing the game.

There is actually one more mechanic that can boost the score: the mutators. This is where things get really interesting if you’re like me and enjoy a challenging game. Mutators are challenging passive effects that will either lower your capacity to defend or make your enemies more powerful, for a sweet reward of a score multiplier at the end of the level. There are 18 total and you can pick up as many as you want, as long as you can handle them, which is something really hard when they stack on top of each other. So to get a really high score, you’ll really have to endure a lot of mutators.

This concept is presented at side objectives available on each level, which require a specific combination of weapon type, perks and mutators to complete. This is a really good introduction to the system, since it amps the difficulty significantly and shows pretty soon that there is a lot more to do in this game aside from clearing the levels once, which are easy, so the challenge is really welcome.

I love how enemies are designed in this game. There are a lot of different enemies and they each have their own characteristics, such as behavior, strengths and weaknesses. The wave composition highlights this, grouping them in ways that can give the group a unique characteristic resulting from their own, meaning dealing with them will have a different solution than each group of the same enemy on their own.

Another brilliance of game design is displaying the amount of each type of enemy in a certain wave even before you reach that. From wave 1 you can easily read about the enemies on the pause menu and look at what the next waves are gonna look like composition-wise, so you can plan ahead and not be surprised by a sudden hard counter to your strategy. There is also indication of where the enemies will spawn, since the levels have multiple entry points, which is important for planning a more focused strategy.

Aside from the highly replayable ten available levels, there is a well implemented endless mode with a twist: it’s not an endless level, but a progression system which starts with short levels and gets harder every time, while letting the player pick the next level and some perks that come with it. So as the levels get harder, the player gathers more perks and can deal with stronger enemies. This is a much more interesting way to have a meaningful endless mode, since the easy way of doing it on a single level wouldn’t be as interactive and wouldn’t require adapting your strategies as much, since decisions are final during each level. There are also 15 more challenges that put a different spin on game mechanics which are all really fun too.

With the charming art style, great base mechanics that make the game highly replayable, the gameplay as easy or as hard as you want it to be, the fun arcade experience and many different challenges to tackle, I highly recommend Thronefall if you're looking for a unique strategy game experience.

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I usually don’t play incomplete games, but since I was given a key and was really curious about it, I decided to give it a shot because Path of Exile 1 (PoE1) is one of my favorite games of all time. In this early review I’ll mention problems I encountered with the game. Some of these will be fixed but I assume most of them will not, as they are core design principles. I’ll go from the ones that I think are most likely to be fixed by the game’s release to the ones I don’t think will change at all. For some context, I’ve been following the development of this game for years and watched multiple developer interviews and Q&As. I’m pretty sure I’m not included in the target audience for this game, but I’ll give the perspective of a PoE1 veteran (~5000 hours played).

Collision Boxes: Playable characters, enemy units, and even environment objects have HUGE collision boxes. The game tries to take combat very seriously and this issue makes the movement aspect of the combat completely unpredictable. I found myself stuck on empty pathways or corners multiple times even during the first couple levels of the game (the jungle level was especially bad about it, but it’s a problem all around). Playing with friends, where every character has a huge collision box is laughably bad. A single character standing on some narrow pathways might block anyone else trying to go through it, even when it’s clear it occupies much less space. Something happened that I had to stop playing and point it out to my friends when two thin skeletons were blocking a really wide corridor and I couldn’t move around or between them. It’s just that silly, and it’s crazy to me how this version launched like this, since it’s really easy to spot during the first minutes of gameplay, which makes me think it’s intentional.

Loot: Loot is scarce, and I mean really scarce. After getting your first good magic items, it will take tens of levels to find upgrades, because even if you get an item with a better base, pouring all your resources into it might just not make it into a good enough item. By the way I played Path of Exile Ruthless mode on hardcore and solo self found and completed the campaign, which is the biggest challenge in the game aside from seasonal gauntlet events, and it might be even harder than those, and I had fun for the challenge, but wouldn’t like to play a seasonal game this way. To me, the loot in PoE2 feels much worse than in PoE1’s Ruthless. There was a conspiracy theory that an event a while ago that had Ruthless with gold was a taste of PoE2, and that’s exactly what it feels like. There are many more problems with loot, such as an overabundance of flask drops, when you only need one of each and you won’t even upgrade them every hour of gameplay.

Crafting: Either currency drops or rarity needs to be tweaked, since you can disenchant rares for regal shards and some of your best chances of upgrading equipment comes from regals, it’s really important, but I dropped like one rare item every hour. For most attack based characters, the weapon, just like in PoE1, must be upgraded frequently to keep up with the content. If you have a streak of bad luck (like it happened to me) then you simply won’t keep up, even though all your resources might be going into finding a better weapon. The lack of a crafting bench amplifies this problem, since you have very few options on how to improve items now. Just pull the slot machine lever and pray. Feels like the item progression barely exists anymore, because when you find an upgrade it’s never a big one, since you’re working with fewer starts for a longer time.

Early Options: One of the biggest problems of PoE1 was that the campaign was boring to many players. Now we have a shiny, new campaign but they didn’t even bother understanding why players dislike PoE1’s campaign. The main factor, at least for me, is how limited you are in viable skills early on. You’ll get more skills as you level in both games, and some of them are just much better than the alternatives. This is natural, of course, but what bothers me the most is that no effort goes into ever solving this. In PoE1, we’re really lucky if there’s a single change during the whole year about a starter skill. They don’t seem to care here either. You’ll be overwhelmed with options, but quickly figure out most of them just aren’t even worth using. Some skills are so bad that you’re better off using the default attack in attack based characters, that’s how bad it gets, because all of the other options are too slow and the scaling for the auto attack is different from the fun skills. And I’m not only talking about skills, the difference between classes is insane. I was playing with a friend and before I could fire a single crossbow shot sometimes, a single spell from him would hit and instantly freeze any trash mob we encountered and would last until its death, trivializing the whole game, especially ads from bosses.

Staggering Bosses: Stagger is a mechanic that I really dislike, since it makes any game it is in shallower. I understand PoE2 is supposed to be a shallow, more accessible version of PoE1, but I don't think the designers would want that for the combat. In PoE1 you’d rarely get to completely immobilize a boss until you’ve got a min maxed character because these status effects were based on the damage. In this game, you can simply force it with specific skills. It’s really unfun and feels like cheesing when you use this mechanic and trivialize the boss, basically being handed a win. If so much effort was put into these bosses, which are mostly really well done, why have a mechanic to trivialize them and ignore this big part of the game? Seeing all these huge bosses dropping like sacks of potatoes is such a shame, really takes you out of the game and I wonder why they didn’t change this old game mechanic that is recycled way too often nowadays.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of other considerable changes that were made from PoE1 that didn’t solve the problem it was attempting to solve, just changed for the sake of changing but mostly made it worse. Like currencies, crafting, passive skill tree, attributes, ascendancies, gems, flasks, crowd control, item progression, level progression, gold, vendors, respecing and the list goes on. There are so many new limitations and obstacles to creativity too, the passive nodes are one of the worst offenders at that, being really bland.

All in all, I understand PoE 1 and 2 are completely different games and I’m not expecting them to be the same, I just hoped the big problems from one game didn’t end up being even bigger in the newer one. I was already expecting to not enjoy the game, and now that I have played it, it’s clear the game is not for me, as every aspect I love about PoE1 is gone in this game. I never understood how a game with so much character customization could have a combat like this without extreme scenarios of a character being way too bad and being unable to progress or way too good and trivializing everything, and obviously that’s exactly what happened as you can see in other reviews or player experiences. I believe a slower combat like this can work really well, but in a much simpler game such as a regular souls-like. I don’t see how this weird mix can work past the early stages of a game this character customization system, even if really limited compared to PoE1.

I plan to update this review when the game launches. Until then, welcome to all the new people playing the franchise. I hope this review helps if you are undecided on getting the early access, for veterans and newcomers alike. Don’t come in expecting a game as intricate as PoE1, meaningful customization was sacrificed for a slower combat which works fine until your stats don’t match your enemies’, because sadly we now have less choices to make to build a character and the remaining choices matter less too.

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I played Elden Ring (ER) at launch, but had to refund it because it was riddled with performance issues. After a couple years I returned to it, and it did manage to reach the locked target of 60 FPS, which is unacceptably low for a modern game, but I was glad I finally got to play it, so let’s start. I don’t think ER is a bad game, but the design flaws are way too big for it to be good enough for me to recommend, as I only personally enjoyed about half of my time with it, while the rest wasn’t really that great, it was mostly wishing it to be done already or waiting for it to get better, but aside from a couple bosses I really enjoyed, it peaked at the first few hours and went downhill from there for me. ER has some good highs, but extremely deep lows. The highs you probably already know about, so I wanna talk about the lows that really bothered me.

First and foremost, I want to address the combat, which is what you’ll be doing in the game for over half of your playtime. During the tutorial, I tested all the defensive options and eventually the dodge roll. If you’re like me you’ll figure that it’s an instant, forgiving invincibility button for an unreasonably big amount of time. That’s it. Defense is solved. Why would you do anything else if you can be literally invincible? I wish I was exaggerating, but correct me if I’m wrong, the dodge roll is invulnerable to everything except grab attacks, which are extremely rare. It doesn’t matter if your body would be split in half, if you’re rolling then you’re immortal. Most of the time you don’t even have to think about where you're rolling, since if you time it right, you’ll have enough time to either punish the enemy for “missing” a swing or, in case it’s still attacking, guess what? Dodge roll again, because why would you do anything else?

Dodge rolling being that powerful has big consequences. The bosses are tailor made with that in mind, balanced around it. You can say the game can be challenging, but never unfair, after all you can press your invincibility button whenever you feel like it. But this remark is not about fairness, but how weird it makes the boss encounters. In ER it feels like every boss is on top of a roomba with insane tracking for every sidestep the player does. There are some slow attacks that you can keep walking around the boss and it might as well turn 360º before the swing finally reaches the end, because of the delay they have to add to bait players into using the dodge roll they have available at all times.

There are other really stupid examples: it’s pretty common for bosses to have abilities with huge areas of effect, obviously most of them are unblockable, unparryable and you get lucky if you can jump some ground attacks, but of course the invincibility button works perfectly well. Who would guess that when making an instant invincibility button for the player would require them to have crazy long chasing attacks, with insane tracking and huge area of effect abilities? And the worst of all it’s that most of them are still easy to dodge. Sure, a delayed hit might get you the first time you see it but that’s the end of it. You might not believe it but there are attack delays so big that you can roll three times expecting it to happen if you haven’t seen it before and the fourth roll actually dodges the attack, this ridiculous example happens in more than one encounter by the way, it just shows how the game is balanced.

I’d like to finish this dodge roll rant by adding it to a list of mechanics that trivialize the game if you use them. Yep, there are more of them that will make you wonder if you really should be using them at all. Second item on that list is the horse. It trivializes most of the overworld the instant you get it, which is really early by the way, since most enemies can’t react to a mounted slash fast enough. The third item is summoning, which can divert the attention of a single boss for up to the whole fight while you just mash the attack button until it’s dead.

A fourth one that I personally extremely dislike as well is the stagger mechanic: it’s common for bosses to drop like a sack of potatoes every now and then and become totally defenseless, just for them to stand up again and continue fighting as normal after a few hits. I don’t need nor want these freebies so I can get a few hits in, it diminishes the whole experience.

Fifth would be the leveling interaction with the combat. It turns out that at the start of the game I headed to a suggested location and it had seemingly higher level enemies - something I noticed after going back to adjacent areas and destroying everything else with ease. The game does direct you where to go for the main story, but there are huge sections which you have to guess what should be the correct order to explore. Of course you can always go back later but the challenge completely relies on the stats of your character, and having them out of sync can mean you’ll struggle a bit in a place and then overwhelm everywhere else following that. It destroys the pacing and progression of the game, and most of the bosses I don’t even remember the name of came from this routing decision I made. Was I simply unfortunate?

But why am I even talking about this list? It felt like I was being robbed of a good experience by using these things. Should I not use these mechanics? I learned not to use summons because they were indeed overtuned, but where should I draw the line? It’s a mystery to me how dodge rolling went through QA like that. Is the only way to enjoy some of these fights by doing the difficult self imposed challenges you’d see on youtube? It’s especially sad when I was told since the beginning of the journey about an unstoppable enemy just to beat him effortlessly in my first try because I used regular combat mechanics. Perhaps I would have to put some thought into the interactions with the boss if I hadn’t dodge rolled away to a one-shot? Is that really what the designers wanted?

The lore is so scarce too. There is something there if you really want to find it, but it’ll be mostly in item descriptions or the designated lore-dump NPC, which is disappointing to see. It’s a shame since the locations and some of the bosses are really cool, but it really feels like you are not rewarded for exploration. There are other mechanics that contribute to that, like most items you find being disposable consumables or worse, crafting materials for said disposable consumables. In a world so vast there are also so few NPCs that don’t attack you on sight, it really bothered me and definitely took a toll on exploration.

I’m also really shocked by this game’s multiplayer system, it is legitimately the worst one I’ve ever seen. Yeah, I know it’s a tradition from the souls series, but there is so much potential there. Instead, what you actually get is invasions and messages from other players polluting the in-game world. There is also the arena which is interesting and a really limited co-op experience that could be a whole new way to play if they put effort in it.

By the time I got to around 60% of the game I just wanted to get it over with. It’s not that bad as I’m making it sound, it’s just that my experience was so tainted because I completely solved the defense in the first couple combat encounters of the game. I rarely think fondly of the game, since I can’t recall most of the bosses because they were not challenges to overcome: I didn’t have to improve to defeat them, I just had to adjust the timing of my overpowered move that made me invincible. That’s what comes to my mind when I think about this game, and it’s why I wouldn’t recommend playing it.

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Balatro does not exactly give away at first glance how good of a game it really is. It is masterfully designed and is much deeper than it seems, and it manages to be as fun on the first hour of playtime as it is on your hundredth.

The charm starts with the poker theme that is used for the basic scoring rules and for the playing cards. Those familiar elements ease the introduction of the mechanics, some of which are editions, enhancements and seals that are some different but simple effects that can be added to or come already on a playing card. Different decks are also available that change the starting conditions or some basic rules, which are amazing considering the diversity of playstyles this game offers.

You’ll play poker hands by selecting up to 5 cards from your hand which can hold a bit more. The best combination will score and the rest will be discarded, and you’ll draw until your hand limit, which can also be increased. You can also discard cards without playing if you’re trying to fish for a better hand to play. The score is divided in two parts: chips which usually is the raw value of the cards you play, like an Ace being more valuable than a 2 and multiplier, which simply multiplies chips by its value.

Nothing too crazy so far since these mechanics will just boost your score as you keep playing regular poker hands, so it’s time to introduce the real stars of the show: the jokers. Jokers are passive modifiers not only to your score but also the rules of the game, and you can have multiple of them for some really fun combinations. There are 150 of them in total and by default you can hold up to 5, and that’s why your runs will never feel the same.

The amount of jokers wouldn’t really mean much if they weren’t balanced, but I’m still caught off guard by how viable they all can be when you build around them. I’ll go on a bit on how they function: Some boost your score with a condition, incentivizing fulfilling that condition as often as possible. The balance of flat score increases and multipliers is really well explored by the joker mechanic. Some can alter the rules a bit in your favor, like adding hand size, a discard, getting some more cash at every round and so on. Some of them can scale as time passes or as you use them, so you can get them early and they’ll be really strong at the end of a run. Some of them are great for starting a run, some for finishing. They can even completely change the poker rules, like having straights be possible by skipping cards, like in the sequence 3 5 6 8 10.

For example, you could have a joker that boosts all diamond cards played. Then you can have another one that makes hearts and diamonds count as being the same suit. On top of that you could be playing a deck that starts with random cards instead of the regular 13 of each suit and end up with 35 red cards. It doesn’t stop there, as you can convert most of the black cards from your deck to red ones making it really easy to hit non-stop flushes, a naturally high scoring hand. You could get a joker to boost flush score and top it off with one to generate tarot cards which can often give you planet cards to upgrade the flush hand even further.

Tarot and planet cards are consumables that can apply some of the mechanics mentioned before to your playing cards, allowing for great customization of your deck and playing cards. Maybe you’ll want a deck with many aces, with face-cards only, or perhaps without any 2s, 3s and 4s, and it’s with these tools that you would achieve that. You have plenty of time to interact with all mechanics, since you can check the shop pretty often and there are also other ways to generate them. The game economy is also a really fun and well-thought aspect to try and maximize.

Going through the levels, the score thresholds will increase, but every third level there’s a boss which not only increases the threshold but also modifies some rule to try and mess with your strategy. You can see the boss effect as soon as you enter his “ante” as the game calls it, making it fair and giving you enough time to prepare or manipulate its effect. A regular run would end at the 8th boss, but you can always opt to play endless mode and go as far as you can. The challenging modifiers from bosses and the harder difficulties are really fun too, really makes you approach the game in a different way to overcome it.

It’s always a big win in my book when a roguelike does not put heavy restrictions and limitations on the possible accrued power. This game embraces it and does a really good integration with endless mode that you can simply choose to continue your run after you beat the 8th round. I can’t overstate enough how well Balatro does this, as the multipliers quickly rise until they need to use scientific notation for later stages. It seems silly, but you can actually achieve this in many forms and finding a combination on your own is very satisfying.

As if it weren’t enough, challenge mode offers even more variety by turning different knobs to alter rules and starting conditions that wouldn’t be possible in a regular run. I didn’t even mention all the game mechanics, but I hope I could convey to you how exciting it is to toy around with them, plan a strategy and execute it. The key to the genius design of this game is the immense creativity and how much fun they could pack in it from such a simple starting ground. So many interesting and imaginative ideas and mechanics and so many variations of each one of them make for an endlessly replayable marvel. It is a game that respects your decisions as a player giving you plenty of opportunities, necessary information and options so you can build your own experience.

Balatro simply never stopped surprising me with fun combinations of its amazing mechanics and even after a hundred hours played I still deeply enjoy my time with it. There are not many games that can replicate the joy of getting a straight flush centered run going. You can really tell the designers had the goal to make the game as fun as possible and they clearly aced it. That’s why I 100% recommend giving Balatro a shot.

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I have easily over 1000 hours of Overwatch 1 in battle net, so why don’t I recommend Overwatch 2? Simple, it is a downgraded game in pretty much every aspect and the game I loved and played for so long is now gone. I don’t think anything improved in fact, having some side grades for UI and some sound effects at best. Some of it is subjective of course, but allow me to explain it.

The main gameplay change here is going from 6 to 5 players in a team, which means we have one less tank as it was the least desired role before. The thing is, tanks were the most important pillar for tactics and strategy in the game, so now the game becomes way too simple and the characters/roles that needed protection from the additional tank the most fell apart and weren’t completely accounted for in their redesign. Having a single tank is enforced by the role queue system, which stops any kind of flexibility we could have in a situation like this.

Having a single tank per team in mind, the developers redesigned every single tank. Now every tank is way too strong and much more powerful than any other non-tank to the point I jokingly call them raid bosses. Now it’s almost impossible to outplay a tank or win a 1v1 against them if you’re not a tank, because their character is simply much stronger than characters from other roles. A single tank can’t do the job of 2 tanks like in OW1, so this changed the tank’s job to be completely straightforward and you can’t do much else without harming your team’s chances, which completely obliterated the experience of having multiple hard choices as a tank player.

This review is coming from a perspective of a master player that played primarily tank but also support and what I miss the most from OW1 affects both roles greatly: a second tank could protect the backline composed of the team’s most fragile heroes from flankers, which could also be an off-tank and would make this dynamic pretty fun to play considering so many more directions a game could go. Some plays could have both tanks go forward and transfer the role of protecting against flankers to a DPS player, others could have a more defensive stance with off-tank bouncing around poking, diving and defending their own backline.

The dynamic of having two tanks would go way beyond that. So many strategies and tactics were lost with a tank going away to the point I wish I was kidding when I’m calling the game plan straightforward now. You could have one tank attacking on each side with sub-teams, you could have a huge group up and manage to protect the team with the main tank protecting the front and offtank the sides and back. You could have the main tank swap positions for a while with the off tank for a surprise attack. You could coordinate jumps, dives and high utility ultimate abilities from tanks. Not anymore.

There’s so much more that could happen with this composition of 2 tanks that can’t happen anymore, and the fact that I could make all of these decisions was the most fun part of being a tank player to me. I also loved that, like supports, tank players could get away without being as good mechanically as a DPS and offset that by calling shots and doing smart plays, but now there is little room to make these plays as you’re doing the single tank's streamlined job and the shots you call are much more obvious since the same situations happen more often due to lack of composition diversity.

Playing a squishy healer with little mobility is also much worse now because of this, punishing harshly characters like Zenyatta because your only alternative if your tank is not covering you is to hug walls to stay out of line of sight of some of the ranged DPS (including newly released characters) that can instantly kill you the moment you show yourself briefly in high level play.

It’s of course expected that a live service game won’t last forever, but having OW1 deleted like this for an inferior product so soon in its lifetime feels like a punch in the face. I didn’t even touch on the horrible monetization for the new game, throwing away probably the only good implementation of loot boxes ever from OW1, in which you were showered with them every time you leveled up and participated in events and had plenty of cosmetics without spending a single penny in them.

Not only do we have an extremely dry battle pass that made everything you could get before much more expensive without ever giving the resources to allow that, it now includes playable characters in a game where counter-picking is fundamental and balanced around, which is unacceptable. You can skip tiers with money so of course people who pay will have an advantage for the new releases, something that blizzard stated that they would never do. With unlockable heroes in the game you may run in a situation where your teammate doesn’t have that character to execute your strategy or counter-pick your enemy, and then the whole game falls apart.

If only those were the only downgrades OW2 had, but no. The ranked system got much worse, with a horrible system that only lets you see your progress every 7 wins or something silly like that and placements were absurdly worse, having some professional players being placed on platinum, which is around the average player's rank. Servers being much worse because they probably couldn’t handle the F2P load of players. A game mode and many maps were completely removed from the game and were replaced by a badly executed new game mode made for the new plain gameplay of OW2.

Overwatch 2 is not the game I loved and I honestly think it’s not even a good game anymore, since much of what made Overwatch 1 great was lost with the transition from 1 to 2. Since Overwatch 1 doesn’t exist anymore, I sadly consider this the death of Overwatch and I would much rather go back to Team Fortress 2 for a good game from this genre than revisit this dumbed down sequel.

I feel this is a good time to post a review of a game I played a long time ago since the next-gen patch just dropped so I can probably help someone who’s on the fence about buying the game. I’ll go through my impressions that came up during my incomplete playthrough and why they made me drop the game.

First let’s take a look at the main quest: soon after the tutorial ends, you get an objective to find someone, and oh boy, I hope you enjoy that, because in all the time I played this was literally the only recycled objective for the main quest. You ask people if they have heard about the person you’re looking for, they say they’ll tell you if you do a random personal task for them but they don’t actually know about the person and only some vague direction will be given to you after you help them. After that you head in that direction and this whole thing repeats more times than I could endure.

That’s unfortunately all there is to it for a huge part of the game, you can even check the quests that fit the description above by their name for yourself if you don’t believe me: Lilac and Gooseberries, The Beast of White Orchard, In Ciri's Footsteps, Bloody Baron, Family Matters, A Princess in Distress, Hunting a Witch, Wandering in the Dark, Ladies of the Wood, Pyres of Novigrad, Novigrad Dreaming, Broken Flowers, Get Junior, Poet Under Pressure, Missing Persons, Nameless and maybe even more that I might have missed while looking for them in the wiki.

These quests overall make for a unengaging way to tell a story since Geralt is forced to accept whatever request that the people that claim to know anything about the destination could ask him. This long chain of “looking for someone” quests don’t make for a great journey and barely have any story of substance or memorable characters. It definitely feels like it’s just a lot of filler content and plays like it too.

There’s really not much to write home about side quests either, but I found Geralt’s actions really out of place when he asks for payment to help a village having trouble with flesh-eating monsters attacking the villagers but can easily accept a fetch quest to get a frying pan for a complete stranger. He mentions the Witchers code as a reason, but when he goes around doing silly chores for random people it just makes his character inconsistent and the player doesn’t even get the choice to role play to help in cases like the example I mentioned. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if this game wasn’t a role playing game, but this is and the role play limitation makes itself known right from the start.

The populated places such as villages in this game are full of people but you can’t speak to most of them, making them just feel empty considering the content. There are just shops, quest givers and occasional Gwent players. Since all the time I spent playing the game I was looking for someone, it makes Geralt look even more inconsistent since he can’t ask the people around him about it while desperately needing the information.

But at least combat has to be good… right? To me this game commits one of the biggest sins of game combat, at least regarding the RPG genre, which is having enemies "take turns" to hit you in battles with multiple enemies. Every combat system like this ends up being extremely easy and consequently becomes a very boring part of the game. It’s a huge immersion and gameplay sacrifice just to make the player feel more powerful and in my opinion this mechanic should stick to action-oriented games and does not belong in a RPG at all, as it wastes the player’s effort in coming up with a strategy, item combination, skill build and so on since the enemies have such bad AI making that none of these mechanics require any thought.

In case you’re like me and disliked the main quest, you would do most of the side quests to minimize the time doing the main quest and you’ll find yourself eventually becoming really overleveled, which really requires a good combat system so that you don’t steamroll everything but that’s not the case with this game’s attack-and-dodge combat loop, which is a shame because I found a lot of the enemies to be pretty interesting.

The game does have some merits, it’s really well optimized considering the good graphics, but it wasn’t at launch because, of course, it’s CDPR we’re talking about so it took a while for it to get good. Also the new next-gen patch that recently came out is in much worse condition than the base game was at launch regarding performance, with people comparing it to Cyberpunk 2077 levels of bad performance, which is basically as bad as it gets. I’d imagine it will get fixed just like the base game was, but it’s just another red flag that I’d like to let you know.

Horse riding and exploration are alright, mostly because you’re not engaging with the bad quests and poor combat. The alchemy system is interesting too and seemed to have a lot of potential. There is also Gwent, a card game in this world, that is really cool until you face an opponent that has cards much better than yours, then there’s nothing you can do but come back later. If you want a good Gwent experience, I suggest any of the Gwent games that came out to expand on it for a better experience.

During my playtime I found the story, action and role playing elements severely lacking in quality and there was only one quest that I can say was really good. The majority of other quests were drastically below what I would expect and the combat ends up being shallow and repetitive as I mentioned before. Even if the game somehow becomes good after a couple dozen hours, that’s not a game I would ever play or recommend people play, as all this time can be better spent elsewhere. I found this game to be a big step down in quality compared to both previous Witcher games (the first one still being my favorite despite not aging well) and still can’t wrap my head around a game with flaws this big being this overrated.

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I wasn’t expecting much from this game since I dislike looter-shooter games because it’s a genre that’s built on the foundation of aiming but rarely rewards a good player for doing it well, since the loot usually overpowers these core mechanics into a non-factor. As a fan of roguelikes I gave it a try anyway and got positively surprised that this game marries the looting and shooting mechanics better than in any game I’ve seen so far, and you are extremely well rewarded for your good aim, so that’s a huge positive already.

There are two lootable kinds of items: weapons and scrolls. Weapons have modifiers on them that can change everything from stats to fundamental mechanics of that weapon with the legendary mods. Scrolls are your usual rarity tiered artifacts with varying strength and all kinds of different passive effects. There is a huge variety of both weapons and scrolls and there is a lot of room to adapt to play the cards you were dealt, considering you will drop a lot of both of them. The weapons particularly stand out as really creative because there are so many different and unique mechanics for them, some borrowed from the best shooters out there and some that I’ve never seen before and they’re all really interesting.

The weapon system has more things going for it, you can carry two weapons and you’ll always have a third basic weapon in case you run out of ammo, so you can cover for your weakness in clear speed, single target damage, range, etc. with a specific set of weapons. The damage stat is upgradeable at the vendors you encounter so any weapon can scale into late game. There’s also a special gemini mod that can be rolled or etched into a weapon, a power mod that activates only when both your primary and secondary weapons have the same gemini mod.

The characters each have a unique set of primary and secondary skills, sometimes with specific resources too. While the primary skill works with a cooldown system, the secondary skill will consume a commonly found resource that is unlikely to run out unless you rely too much on it. These skills follow a theme and allow different ways to play the characters, some making characters generalists and others more focused at a couple specific things. You don’t even need to utilize the whole character's kit, sometimes enhancing just one of the skills is enough to pull off your build successfully.

Building on top of the characters’ strengths and weaknesses there are more systems to make the game even more fun and varied through the talent tree with both generic and character specific passives that you’ll unlock as you finish your runs. But most importantly is the ascension mechanic, consisting of powerful character exclusive passives that the player picks from 3 choices at the end of every stage, multiple times per act. This is one of the main tools to control the randomness of the game elements and feels really good since you can always adjust your build to succeed, since they usually can cover both offensive and defensive needs.

This is only systematically allowed because of how strong your options can be. Weapons, scroll combinations, talent trees and the ascensions you pick can make you very strong and you always feel you achieve that with a good strategy and some adaptation. Because of that, there are multiple viable builds for every character, even including different weapons, or even sometimes no weapon at all by focusing on your character's skills. I love when a game is not afraid of having the player become too powerful, so you can enjoy executing the end game of your powerful strategy whenever you get one.

Another good thing going for this game is the meta progression pace through the talent tree. At first you’ll grow slowly while learning the basics and then after a while you’ll start getting the talent currency and unlocking weapons and scrolls considerably faster as you start winning your runs. The stronger the talents make you, the higher in difficulty you can go, but the higher difficulties expect you to have all the talents so don’t worry if you can’t clear them at the start.

After the 3 standard difficulties there will be a new scaling difficulty called reincarnation. In this mode you can spend the currency you used to complete the talent tree that you now have an abundance of to get extremely powerful mods at the start of each act. This makes the game a whole new level of fun, allowing even stronger builds, like having a Headhunter effect from Path of Exile, stealing enemies’ modifiers as you kill them. You can also turn on bizarre dream modifiers in this mode to add synergies or increase the challenge.

The enemy design is really well done as they all have telegraphed attacks and there is a good variety of them as well. My experience with deaths and errors are almost always of being overwhelmed or not paying attention to some of them and I never felt robbed of a win because of that. Even monster modifications (for higher difficulties) are well signaled and are a fun challenge. The boss fights are also fun to play, with simple but interesting mechanics.

The game provides plenty of information about all the weapons, scrolls and monsters. Combined with a complete run history, you get your own personal stats including use details for each weapon and milestones such as faster clear and highest damage dealt, which is always a feature I appreciate.

Multiplayer works flawlessly and it’s a joy to play with friends, creating more possibilities of builds since players can share their drops with each other while the mode ramps up the difficulty just the right amount to make up for additional players. The resurrect mechanic is really forgiving and helps prevent the snowballing effect of a team member dying.

Last thing I’d like to mention is that the team working on the game really cares for it and they do constant patches even outside of their organized roadmap. The first DLC recently came out with two extra characters (and a few other things) and they have some pretty unique mechanics and are great additions to the roster. There is more stuff on their roadmap and I’m sure they’ll keep improving on this amazing game.

I never got into fighting games (FGs) because even though I liked the idea of these games, I always ended up finding big issues that turned me away from them, until I played Guilty Gear (GG). I started with the previous GG title, but I got it at the end of its lifespan, so Strive is basically my first real FG experience. I started basically from scratch and reached the highest rank and even achieved top 200 for my main character. This means I’m far from bad but I’m not on a competitive level either, so take that as my credentials. I mentioned that because I’m writing this review mostly for people new to FGs, so check this review if you’re interested in a perspective from someone who is not part of the FG community and not a fan of the genre as it is, but a fan of the potential it has and how I think Strive manages to reach new heights.

First I’d like to mention the problems I have with most FGs that are largely solved in Strive. I think the worst possible experience you can have while learning a FG aside from the dizzy/stun mechanic, is getting hit by a combo so long that it makes you want to drop your controller because there is nothing you can do to stop it. Long combos are fun to practice and to finally pull off, but being on the receiving end is not fun at all. Strive solves this with the most important feature in a FG in my opinion that is the Burst mechanic, a slowly recharging ability to get the opponent off you (many other games also have it). One of the best things about burst is that you can also block and punish it if your opponent is predictable, making for some of the most fun gameplay decisions during the matches. Another part of the solution comes with systemic changes that make combos deal a lot of damage while not being too long, making it so they are easier to learn while still being flashy and fun to pull off without having to rely on auto combos.

In a similar vein, another big issue for me in traditional FGs is how the corner situation is handled, where you get stuck and it’s extremely hard to get out of. In Strive, combos near the corner can break the corner wall and both players are sent to the center of another stage. To compensate the player that cornered the opponent, they will have extra combo-ending damage from the wall breaking and positive bonus, a powerful temporary buff. Even with this huge reward, it’s not uncommon to see a top player choose to keep the corner pressure over it because of how good it is like in any other game, but just having the option available does so much for the decision making and of course it makes the lives of newcomers easier.

While playing or watching FGs you’ll find tons of counter-intuitive moments regarding the possibility to add another hit to a combo due to the height gained after each hit and the recovery of a character after a finished combo. In many games that I have played or watched I haven’t seen enough consistency to the point it almost becomes arbitrary. Strive’s system is so consistent that you can eyeball and link hits on the fly. Combined with the fact you can’t recover any sooner than the natural timing makes the game much easier to understand, so anyone who learns the basic mechanics can intuitively adjust accordingly.

Another old (and bad, IMO) tradition this game breaks is adding more counterplay to invincible meterless reversals, or a dragon punch (DP) as most would call it. It’s not like DPs are overpowered in other games, as they can be blocked and punished just like in Strive, but having the throw option beating DP makes for so many more possibilities and layers instead of a silly obstacle that slows the game down since its presence is so powerful that you must to give up your pressure to respect this option.

Strive has the most elegant use of resources I’ve ever seen in any fighting game. With 50% meter every character has access to 4 different Roman Cancels (RC). The RC system acts as a set of ever present options that range from offensive to defensive, really boosting the depth of the gameplay. Faultless Defense is also a really cool defensive mechanic that pushes your opponent farther away when you’re blocking for the cost of meter. The more defensive options, the crazier the game can get with offensive options too, and this game manages to reach that balance successfully, as it feels as good to maintain pressure on an opponent as it is to disrupt that with the options available.

Back to the innovative side of things, Strive is one of the first big FGs with proper rollback netcode, which is an alternative to delay based netcode most games have, and it is a much superior solution for online play, and the implementation of it is really good as well. While in delay based netcode you could find hitches every slight connection instability, rollback covers for that and you’ll only really notice when playing either really unstable connections or someone that lives really far away from you. Also, crossplay between PS and PC is coming and it's another great feature that adds to the longevity of the game since there will be more people to play with.

This brings me to the ranked system, which is something I can safely say I prefer compared to traditional matchmaking for this genre. You explore player populated lobbies based on their skill level or a big unranked lobby if you want an unranked experience. The player’s access to the ranked lobbies is analogous to rank groups like medals, making it so that they can only play with opponents from at least their own rank. There are several advantages to this method, like if you and your opponent want to keep playing together, you still can even outside of the allowed number of rematches any FG has, but my favorite has to be the ability to refuse matches. You can also explore higher ranked lobbies and offer to fight there for the extra challenge or if you think you can handle them. But one of the best parts of this to me is how quickly a good player can move up the ranks, making it so that the ones that don’t make it to the top have more balanced matches. If you dislike the ranked system you barely have to interact with it either, as quick play options are available too.

It goes without saying that this game has unparalleled visuals for the genre, not only in the beautiful 3D graphics but also animations and visual design overall. Aside from the subjective side of it, the animations do an amazing job of emphasizing the characters movement making moves easily recognizable, which is a staple in FGs because of how important it is, but there is a lot more detail to that, like having small color coded particles that make the game much more pleasant to the eyes. Things like the big counter hit text that covers the screen may seem silly at first but it’s a really smart and effective way to tie the game mechanics to visuals while giving the proper weight to the actions happening on screen and I would never imagine I’d like it as much as I do.

As for the audio, it’s as amazing as the visuals. It’s a running joke in the community that Strive actually is a rock/metal album that comes with a game because the songs are just that good, having unique experimental combinations of subgenres for each character’s theme and the title song. Even if you don’t enjoy the songs for Strive, you can replay songs from any older GG title too. The original Japanese voice acting is brilliant and you also have the option to switch to EN or KR too. Just like I mentioned in the visuals, the gameplay is enhanced too by the weight each sound effect brings to the battle, making every blocked or successful hit feel significant with consistency.

Strive has its flaws but there is much to love about it: the unique cast of characters, beautiful visuals, amazing music, accessible gameplay, intuitive and consistent battle design, deep mechanics and not being afraid of changing the old stale FG formula, and that's why I think it's the best FG out there.

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It's honestly really hard to believe this game came after Mini Metro. They are similar games at their core, with similar mechanics, visuals, goals and challenges, but somehow Mini Motorways gets a big downgrade in multiple aspects and exposes design problems that were already solved in Mini Metro.

During your first playthrough you'll easily notice and appreciate the differences if you were already a Mini Metro fan and wanted more of the same style, but the more you play the more you'll find the issues I mentioned. Of course that as a smart player that keeps improving, you'll find solutions for these eventually, but you'll realize the solutions are not really that fun and then you'll notice you're playing in a completely different way from the seemingly intended route just to get around some bad mechanics.

But is it really unintended if you’re overcoming a challenge with a good strategy? I’d say yes because it almost feels like an exploit. In Mini Metro, the origin and destination of the transportation users are not exclusive to a single type. In this game, if there is a house that goes to red colored destinations, it will always go exclusively to the color red. Quickly you’ll find that there is no reason to make interconnecting roads if you could just lead them straight to the red destination.

By playing the game this way, you’ll have a bunch of roads that connect one or more clusters of houses of the same color to a few destinations of the correct color with as little intersection of roads as possible, being 0 the most desirable number. Yes, having disconnected roads is a much superior strategy. This would never work in Mini Metro because the source location can spawns users that will want to reach all different locations, making so you have to manage a connected train network that is much more fun and satisfying and also presents different challenges to the player, incentivizing to really work on bottlenecks and optimizations. So here you just end up with these disconnected roads that only tie a color of houses to the same color destinations which is neither fun nor realistic, with the consequences that it doesn’t bring the same cool and diverse challenges as before.

Another bad mechanic is the spawning of the house clusters and the destinations. The houses spawn one by one, so if you want a really efficient road to connect to your network, you’ll have to wait for all of them to spawn. Otherwise, by building the roads as soon as possible, you can have really bad spawns of the houses from the same cluster and end up wasting a lot more road and space on the board than you would by waiting it out.

The destinations are mostly fine, but having set entrances really makes them a lot more RNG dependent than they could be without adding much to the game, since the board is on a grid unlike Mini Metro, heavily limiting your pathing possibilities to the destinations. Just having dynamic entrances would add a lot more fun to the problem solving aspect instead of just rolling the dice and hoping for the best.

A smart way to block bad spawns is to build disconnected roads on top of the areas for the sole reason that you don’t want anything to spawn there. Then you’re wasting a lot of road resources just to tilt the RNG in your favor as a workaround for how bad the spawn mechanic can be. I actually got pretty excited when I found out about this strategy on my own, and I’ve seen other people have also found it but for me, after playing with it for a bit… it’s just not fun. I’m not playing the game as it’s supposed to be played but we all came up with this strategy because it would be a lot less fun than allowing the game to give you really bad luck. It just adds a huge layer of micro-managing spawn blocking and changes the resource management aspect heavily as you now have to keep enough to block the bad spawns.

Coming back to the big downgrades this game got compared to previous one, the power up system is a big thing that comes to mind. The traffic lights upgrade is so weak and barely accomplishes what it’s supposed to. A lot of the time it’s just worse than not having anything because of how the car AI works. The roundabout is much better, but is really huge and still not simple to use effectively, but since the alternatives are bad you’ll end up having a lot of them, which don’t really diversify gameplay. It’s hard not to compare it to the Mini Metro upgrades and how fun and how much you can tailor them to your network’s design.

The game of course is not all bad, the new motorway mechanic is plenty of fun and allows a huge range of possibilities to play with, from smart and cool designs to quick fixes and desperation moves, buying time so you can fix your routes. The new challenges are also a good addition and clearly there is still fun to be had with this game, it's just that it looks poorly in comparison to the previous one.

I didn’t come to Mini Motorways expecting Mini Metro 2, but considering how similar the games are and also how many system downgrades it has, I can’t help but compare the two as much as I did. A realization that I’ve already said at the start but it’s worth saying again is that most of these problems were already solved by Mini Metro’s design. Mini Metro is an awesome game and does pretty much everything better than Mini Motorways, so I can safely recommend that you skip this one and play Mini Metro instead and you'll have a more complete and overall better experience.