Recent reviews by carl ruins everything

i never asked for this, but i love it anyway

RUINER is one of those occasional things in life where it's not what you wanted it to be but you're still okay with it.

The game feels, and also bills itself, like it wants to be Hotline Miami if Hotline Miami was Ghost in the Shell; yet when I first sat down to play it I quickly realized that it was actually Furi if Furi was Ghost in the Shell. Normally, once this sort of dissonance between what a game wants to be and what a game actually is becomes apparent, it means that the game is going to end up being unbearably ♥♥♥♥♥♥ once it gets going, but RUINER ended up being an exception.

It turns out that, despite not being what it wanted to be, RUINER is still somewhat aware of what it is. Its (impressive) visual style already makes it clear that this game is in part a love letter to the works of Shirow Masamune and the retrofitted vision of the future embodied by Blade Runner, yes, but the hub world and its merging of old Asian tradition with modern technology, parking garage junkie gangs, and a crazy cat lady with a mission for you, among many, many other things serve to drive the point home. It lets you have access to all sorts of over-the-top weapons and abilities, and lets you swap them out at your own will to play around. One of the characters is quite literally a giant hovering blob of fat, and your character's name is "puppy." It knows that it's not a work of art, and that even though it wants to channel and embrace the energies of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell it'll never quite carry the same power, and as a result it embraces the sort of "stuck in the middle" position with elegant goofiness.

All in all, it's a fun little game that's worth your time. I can neither confirm nor deny that it's worth a full 20 dollars, because that depends on how much fun you had with Furi and how comfortable you are with some parts of the hub world feeling like a playable Perturbator music video, but if this goes on sale and you're interested you should definitely give it a try. Go get 'em, puppy.

8.5/10, it wasn't art but i sure enjoyed it

An absolute work of art.

haunted astolfo costume that corrupts your save files and names your character "gay"

In so many words it's a direct improvement over the predecessor. While in the previous game there was all this esoteric lore nonsense that fell flat on its ass and a lot of the things that the game had to offer felt like they were either rushed or half-assed horribly in some manner, among other things, LINK has pretty much none of those problems going.

You're free to stand by whatever servant you favor instead of getting corralled into any particular route cough cough the first game forced you to side with nero cough cough, and battles are won not by taking over arbitrarily-valued territories but by kicking the enemy's ass, which are both good examples of what in general makes this so much better - the game is aware of what its strong points are and focuses on those more than anything else.

This was the biggest problem with the predecessor. Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star wasn't aware of what it was and why people played it. It wanted to be a visual novel even though it was clearly a Warriors-style hack and slash. It thought it was a piece of complex and deep storytelling even though most people bought it because they just wanted to bone an R63'd King Arthur. In direct contrast, however, Fate/EXTELLA LINK knows that it's a hack and slash at its core, and while there's certainly some VN-type stuff going on it takes a page out of John Romero's book - it only exists to tie the action sequences together and fill in some of the characters, and takes a backseat as soon as things start happening.

While with the OG Fate/EXTELLA I could only recommend it if you were someone that enjoys the Fate series and Musou-type games, and even then not wholeheartedly because of the price tag, with Fate/EXTELLA LINK I can safely say that this is worth your time if you're someone that enjoys the Fate series OR if you're someone who likes hack & slash games, and even then with more confidence than before in defiance of the hefty price tag. All in all, it's a solid game that's refined itself into a similar yet entirely new and entirely more entertaining beast compared to what came before it.



There's also the fact that the importance of random combo attacks seems to have been diminished in favor of strategic management of abilities and skills, which is EXTREMELY welcome considering that now you can't just cheese your way through everything like in the first game (cough cough extella maneuver cough cough) so there's some actual sense of risk and reward to things. Which is absolutely a welcome touch.

9.5/10, good ♥♥♥♥.

Probably the first thing that jumps out at you when you play this game is the sheer amount of effort and that went into the visuals here. Everything here is pixels, ostensibly to sell the "hell yeah old arcade games" inspiration under the hood, yet at the same time there's so much detail crammed into literally every single sprite that if you tried to boot the game on a Genesis it would explode and destroy your living room. Seriously. Even the knives, which are literally like 2 pixels wide and 8 pixels long and are barely even animated, have enough detail to make them really stand out.

What also stands out here right off the bat is the sound design. It just... it's good. The music is going to grow on you. Trust me.

However, the main thing here that makes this a, uh, gem is that even though you can clearly tell that a hefty portion of the budget (and also some art monkey's wrist) was blown on making the game look pretty, and a lot of what was left over probably went into the music as well, this doesn't actually cut into the experience in direct defiance of what is normal for games these days.

Usually, when this much effort goes into sound and visuals, you can physically feel the lack of effort that went into the rest of the game as a result. And this goes doubly so for any game that comes from a small publisher whose graphics can be summarized as "pixels" or "voxels." Yet, Luna Nights actually ended up being fun as hell, and while a lot of that is just because the metroid/castlevania/insertanothergamepeoplemindlesslybrand"metroidvania"here formula is good in general, just as much of that has to be the fact that the developers were smart about the game and its intricacies.

I don't want to get to into what I'm talking about, partially because I might blunder into spoiling something and partially because it's a little better to discover these things for yourself as you play the game, but just trust me. You'd expect this to be a total cheesefest, given how it's basically "metroid if samus was dio," where you can just brute-force your way through literally everything by freezing time, but the game still does a great job making sure that there are some things where freezing time is an active detriment, mixing up the way things work on you to keep you on your toes, and giving you a persistent sense of challenge even after you've got all the good stuff and are basically more heavily armed than the average Branch Davidian.

Of course, no game is without its flaws. If you're good at BUZZWORD THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED-style games then this is going to be a little short for you at the moment seeing as the bonus after-final-ish-boss stage is in development, repeatedly mashing the time stop button and using the chainsaw skill at the same time can take a 30-minute boss fight and condense it to 10 minutes, Sakuya is invincible while she's playing the nothing personnel kid 1000x knife animation due to what I assume is an oversight, the lightsaber thing either has a mistranslated description or is actually unnecessary, so on and so forth.

But hey, most of this is just nitpicking. The game and its mechanics are very well designed, and do a great job of rewarding high-risk fast-paced trial-and-error-but-mostly-error gameplay a la Hotline Miami instead of just staying still and cheesing everything with your time stop ability a la coldsteel the hedgeheg. And this, combined with how visually stunning it looks and how great it sounds, makes the game a total blast to play. Probably one of the better things I've purchased on here.

tl;dr 10/10 absolutely f@&king stellar job Ladybug, well done

it's rough around the edges, but it's good. think totally accurate battle simulator if it was a battlefield clone.

the only real problem i have with it is that it looks like some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ open-source project that was made for mac and hastily ported to pc as an afterthought, but that can easily be excused by the fact that this game is in early access and is being developed as a hobby project by one person. is that same fact enough to excuse the price tag? who knows. at least it's pretty damn fun either way though

ah yes, pain, physics, and royalty-free ukulele BGM. my three favorite things in the world

The problem with forming and articulating opinions about Terraria is that comparing it to Minecraft is impossible to avoid, but also a terrible comparison to make.

The best way I can try to illustrate this is by talking about what a new player needs to do if they get lost or confused. In Minecraft, when you need to be guided through something, you are expected to either open the wiki in your web browser or obtain a physical guidebook and have it open next to you on your desk.

In Terraria, when you need to be guided through something, you are expected to walk up to the NPC who is named "guide" and ask him about what you should be doing next.

This is the reason why, unavoidable as it may be, comparing this game to Minecraft is not a very helpful comparison. Both are sandbox titles that revolve around survival, resource management, and manipulating an open world. Terraria, however, has more in common with an RPG than Minecraft does. The fact that there is permanent character progression and NPCs probably should have been a pretty clear sign of this.

Anyway. Do I recommend Terraria? Absolutely. It's an endearing game that's jam-packed full of little things to do and explore and play with, and whenever you start to hit that inevitable "i did the things i want to do" glut you get in a sandbox game, there is a structured enough story and progression system that you can always find something else to work toward.

Just don't go into it expecting 2D Minecraft, because you are not going to adjust to this game very well.

good luck knowing what the hell you're supposed to do in this game because there's thirteen million different important aspects of in-game economy and fundamental game mechanics that you need to be familiar with as soon as you possibly can and the game only bothers to explain like four of them to you in any capacity