Recent reviews by Da Feli

I've been a patron of Cinnamon Switch for a long while and have been playing on various early builds on itchio, don't let my low steam playtime deceive you; I'm actually quoted in the special thanks as one of the many proofreaders :p

Don't be misled by the adults only tag; this isn't porn, this is erotica. At least the way I personally define them, the nuance between the two categories is that the latter possesses actual value and merit outside of the sexual nature of the work. And porn being more common than erotica on steam, I thought it relevant to mention.

In fact, I'm actually ace, and spent most of my playthroughs skipping past the sex scenes. What you're left with is a touching and maturely handled adult (in the sense of target demographic!) tale about the interweaving of sexuality, gender, the furry fandom, and fetishes. The game wears its LGBTQ tag on its sleeve, with multiple trans and bisexual characters, includinga main character figuring out their trans identity on screen, which you sadly never see in mainstream media.

So yeah, if an ace girl is telling you to check you this 18+ game? That's a sign it's REALLY good stuff.

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12 bucks is way too high a price for a game as short as this one. It took me 81 minutes to complete all challenges (including extra conditions). It's a shame to have such a strong concept and incredibly well developped engine and artstyle only to have so few levels. I'm not just left wanting, I'm left disappointed.

On top of that, sequel-baiting in the credits leaves me really confused. Why would I buy your sequel if I feel I didn't even get my money's worth the first time?

Well, the game has been out for less than 24 hours and I've already clocked in almost 17 hours. You might say I'm a big fan, basically, though it feels like I'm not even done with the tutorial yet (I'm definitely not done unlocking the whole roster at least!). The story is serviceable, the dialogue is objectively a negative point since it's often way too cheesy and quippy, but Magik is a standout character (though really, Laura Bailey instead of an actual russian voice actress?).

The gameplay is great though. Playing goon bowling is so fun. My biggest issue is that the ratio of time spent in the abbey vs time spent in missions is pretty whack. I've started skipping through dialogue just to get back to the actual meat and potatoes of the game faster, and I'm *still* mostly spending my time exploring nooks and crannies in a confusing maze of a free roaming hub. Not that the abbey gameplay is bad per se, it's just... idk, dreamlight valley grade, which is strangely out of place in a tactical strategy. Collect mushrooms, talk to people, grind relationships, unlock (the purchase of) cosmetics... It is the way that it is and I double negative don't not vibe with it I guess.

If you were one of the folks crazy enough to play marvel's avengers, and you liked the free roaming bits in the helicopter and the anthill, this is more of the same pushed to 12. In fact, the gameplay loop is super similar to Avengers, just with comboey beat em up combat replaced with card turn based strategy combat.

Originally, there was another review here. I am updating it as my thoughts on the game are changing.

If you want a tldr: I *really* wish there was a way to give a side-thumb to a game. Though I'm hoping that eventually, enough updates and bug fixes will come to be able to lift that thumb to recommending.

The game oozes with charm, you know it, you see it, you've seen the trailer, it is self-evident and instantly apparent.
The haggle card battles are about 25% of the game, the system is super neat and fun to play around with and to upgrade your deck as you find cards that fit your strategy better.
The VN / Dating sim part is another 25%. The characters are beyond charming, the animation-work is stellar, the writing is sound, each character's musical theme is a treat to the ears. It is never a bad time hanging out with anyone, and if it weren't for potion-making, it'd be such a relaxing experience just talking with these new friends.

But as you might've guessed from that last paragraph, the potion-making system is mired with very apparent, glaring issues. And when the game is split 25-25-50 in favor of potion-making, that drags the experience down.
The inventory is a total first-in-first-out mess, neither sorted nor sortable, and unfortunately, the main shop works on the same rules as far as I can tell. The ingredients aren't placed in any logical manner, and just happen to be whichever order you gave them to Quinn in.
Too many ingredients are unwieldy to the point of uselessness. If its total magimin contents are an odd number, or if its magimin type spread corresponds to no potion recipe, they might as well just be clutter in your inventory and loot drops.
And overall... Both the potion-making and ingredient collecting are tedious, complex work that just require you to crunch numbers so you can access the other half of the game. You have so many things to do on every in-game day that everything slows to a frustrating slog. The first 10 days will pass in a flash, but as more and more things are thrown at you to take care of, as the numbers on the ingredients get more complex to work with, the time it takes to just *do things* balloons up over the course of the game.
And when you feel like your real life time is so necessary to just get any amount of progress done, the charming animations and "hello", "goodbye!" barks from characters all end up feeling like a test of your patience. If you have to make potions, that's 20 minutes agonizing over your cauldron. If you need to go to town - which you should very much do at least once per ingame day - that's easily 30 minutes going from shop to shop to talk to everyone and do all the things you need done, especially expeditions for ingredients, which are vital and time-consuming. And then the game throws more cauldrons at you for more concurrent potion-making. And then you get plants for another source of ingredients to micro-manage. And then you get aging barrels to maximize your gold gain. And the game adds more, and more, and more onto you, and you're just expected to keep up.

And that 25-25-50 ratio dips, dips, dips further. The balance is unstable, and the potion can't brew.

Managed to snag it at 90% off, aka $1 / 0.81€ . When it's *that* much of a deal, it's too good to pass. Idle champions' packs are usually so overpriced it's hard to find something to buy at a fair price to thank the devs with. Would very much be willing to buy a lot more $1 and $2 deals if they're going to be that ridiculously good.

I can only review yes or no. I'll be generous and review yes. But my true feelings? They're a total meh.

The game has plenty of issues. There's something good buried underneath them.

First off: Bugs at launch. They happen. They're annoying. This game's bugs are more major than I'm used to. I'm currently softlocked into a side mission and I have nothing to do but wait for hotfixes to come in. If they *don't* happen in the coming months, *don't* buy this game. You don't want to have your fun swept from under you by a nasty glitch tanking your save, trust me. I'll come back and edit this review in time.

Second off: the game balance is... lackluster. Maybe my feelings will change on a second playthrough, but traps seem useless -- and from how deeply the marketing makes you think they matter, that's not a gameplay system you'd want to mess up! Nothing traps do isn't better done by a bunch of muscle minions and a well maintained cover op. And even the latter becomes useless once past the mid game, as investigators will then start to enter your base through the helipad rather than the casino.
Speaking of the mid and late game... Nah, no such thing. Not really. Any plausible threat to you happens as you scramble to set up your base with your ragtag of low tier minions -- by the time you unlock the last tiers, you're untouchable. Nothing threatens you. The game just becomes a step by step crawl of waiting for the passive generation of money and intel to allow you to click one button and move on.
The intel, especially, will be the ressource bottleneck, and with no way to automate the interrogations, you're down to either the menial work of always having to empty your prison cells manually, or not bothering with the thing and just leaving the game running twenty minutes at a time just *waiting* to hit the ridiculously low 99 intel cap so you can do three missions and go back to waiting.
That's the three headliners of this category, but even the details aren't out of their own devilish issues. Overpowered Symmetra (and Rogues in general), side missions that just don't plain *explain* that yes, your generator issues isn't a glitch, they're a scripted part of the mission, emergency generators that are useless outside of those aforementioned power tanking missions, ridiculously slow research, 300 minion cap, which sure is a lot to run simultaneously but is also way not enough for a full size 5 levels base, multiple unnecessary research branches... Look, the list goes on.

But.
But, despite all that, and provided the bugs do get fixed, I would still recommend the game. Why?
Because it's damn fun. I know the phrase "makes you feel like X" might as well be a tired game review meme by that point, but ♥♥♥♥, does this game fulfill the fantasy of playing a Bondesque megalomaniac doomsday villain well.
I *want* the game to fix its issues. I *want* the game to be good. Because it can be. Because there's something underneath. A diamond in a rough.
Just... Don't let it die in that state. I'm begging you, EG2 devs, please, fix your game. It could be a masterpiece.

(also, that's a complete sidenote, but it is jarring to see a gender and race inclusive minion autogeneration system which truly feels fit for the modern age, and then Fugu Furukawa is such an offensive depiction of a japanese stereotype complete with, as far as I can tell, a white voice actor playing up a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ "Japanese Ranguage" accent talking about Honor and Loyalty, and we're rightsmack back into the parts of 70s Bond movies that *should* have been left in the past.)

If you possess Darkest Dungeon, you'll receive a 66% off coupon for this game right now (as of 14/Dec/2018). This game is damn worth full price, so 66% off? You'll get your money worth a dozen times over!

This is an amazingly streamlined take on Diablo. And when I mean diablo, I don't just mean diablo-like... It *is* diablo, but with all the faff cut out to its most essential and most fun. The game is already quite an excellently paced dungeon crawler in and of itself, and the depth for experienced players comes in switching equipment on the go during battle, which can get intense.

If I had one complaint, it's that the humor is mostly hit or miss... Or rather, mostly miss. It's a bit crude and very cliché, but like that's the main appeal of the game anyway.

For transparency I'll admit that I've had the occasion to play beta versions of this game for about, like, one or two years now? Can't even remember.

Anyway, this is a damn good rythm game. The gameplay is sound and visually satisfying, it definitely gets trickier the further you go, and the soundtrack and the aesthetic are golden.
The levels have a good length perfect for replayability, and there's extra content after the main story.

The story is serviceable, and that's perfectly fine since it obviously wasn't the main focus.

So, yeah! A nice, good game that provides a nice, good time!

This is a game that deserves all the positive reviews and exposure it can get.

It's the touching tale of Alex and her friends, young girls in 1999 drawn together by their love for a magical girl show in an era where internet was still in its enfancy. And Andy is here too, I guess, but he's an ass.

There's an underbelly of suffering behind this story that I greatly understood. This is very much a personal tale from the author told through the characters of Alex and Samuel.

I wish them to find happiness in their future.