Recent reviews by Vivelin

Balatro is excellent, and the sheer amount of possible combinations and unlocks give this game an insane amount of replayability for how simple its concept is.

Be warned that it does very heavily rely on randomness and chances are, only 5% of your runs are actually going to be fun. But if you do get a run going, you're going to have a great time.

Very rough around the edges still; bots tend to run in front of you while you’re shooting, or throw molotovs at you or places you need to go, and the Act 4 boss is buggy and not very well designed .

But despite all of that, the gunplay is great and adds a lot of variety alongside the deck building mechanic. The levels and characters are interesting and varied as well. I've played all of it co-op with someone from another continent and neither of us has noticed any networking issue, no significant latency or anything.

Here's hoping Turtle Rock Studios will either make a Back 5 Blood or otherwise a new game in this style.

Two suggestions:

- I don't know what sempai/kouhai mean, that should probably be explained or reworded, especially if it ends up being a question
- An option to automatically move dialogue without pressing a button would be nice to have

I appreciate the extensive demo, because now I know I won't be playing this. It's still a tentatively positive review, because there's a lot of interesting changes from the normal Personal formula, and I could see a lot of people enjoying this.

However, it's not for me. The characters, the story, the overall setting and aesthetic just aren't for me, at all, and while I usually love Persona-style games, the combat alone is definitely not enough to keep me interested if the rest of the game bores me.

The demo mostly ran fine for me, except for a few areas in particular which had incidental stuttering. I also wish there was an option to turn off or at least reduce the screenshake, because during the intro it was particularly bad.

The biggest problem, however, are cutscenes being locked to 30 FPS. And with how much of the demo was cutscenes, I think that's pretty important, not to mention how jarring it is to go from 144 FPS to 30 FPS back to 144 FPS.

That said, I still had a lot of fun with the demo. It's just the start of the game, and you can save your progress for when the full game comes out.

Finished the intro, then got dropped into a world absolutely filled to the brim with player bases.

If you're like me and you like the concept of survival games but you've yet to play one that was actually fun... well, keep looking, because this ain't it.

A modern remake of a point-and-click adventure game close to my heart, it's faithful to the original from 1997, but with enough changes to keep it fresh and interesting (although whether it was necessary with a game that old, I'm not sure).

The game looks as beautiful as it did back in the day, except this time it's not pre-rendered and runs in real-time. Unfortunately, I don't have the space for a VR setup, because I can only imagine what that would be like. By the time they remake Myst III: Exile, I should get that figured out. The Amateria ball puzzle would be amazing to see in VR.

Dragon Age: Origins was an amazing game back when it came out. The story, of course, is still very strong to this day — some of the origins have some very satisfying payoffs later.

From a technical perspective, however, the game is pretty dated. Some issues can be remedied with mods (4GB patch can help with crashing, FtG UI mods can help with some of the UI on 4K screens, and there's fix packs for both dialog and combat), but there's still a memory leak that makes the game slow down to a crawl over time. Oh, and the servers seem to no longer be available, so unless you have an existing save, your previously saved unlocks are gone.

The combat is... fine. My biggest issue was the pathing — as a melee class, I found it very odd how "polite" the pathing is. Your Warden will nicely get out of the way of enemies trying to run past you, or wait for them to pass before trying to attack them. It ends up overstaying its welcome near the end, but if the base game is all you want to play, install some mods and consider this a positive review.

But the DLC... I forced myself to play through Awakening and Witch Hunt, because I remember very little about them, and now that I've finished them, I realized why: because there's very little to them, and the combat definitely makes this feel padded. The story is boring, inconsequential and your origin barely matters anymore, and the combat is repetitive. Even as a warrior with maxed out physical resistance (150), the grab/overwhelm spam is real, and the other issues from the base game are definitely still very much an issue, too.

If you're just playing the DLC so you can make your choices and import them into Dragon Age II, just use one of those save generators, or skip both, use Dragon Age Keep and play Dragon Age: Inquisition instead.

I ignored the videogamedunkey fanboys and gave this game a try on its own merit rather than because a funny YouTuber published it. I'm glad I did because this game does a lot of things I like:

• I love Metroidvanias, and ANIMAL WELL is uniquely creative with its progression items and their uses.
  
• I love puzzles and exploration, and this game has LAYERS of puzzles. Seriously.
  
• I love animals, and ANIMAL WELL is themed around them.
  
• In a time where most games take up to 100 GB of disk space and motherboards have limited M.2 slots, ANIMAL WELL's 33 MB (yes, megabytes) is a really welcome sight.

A handful of puzzles and platforming sections were a little annoying, but that's to be expected. Of these, most get easier with a different approach, and the rest won't take you too many tries either way. You probably already know whether this is the type of game you'll like, but if you're on the fence, give it a try.

Helldivers 2 is great, but between the steep skill curve, devs adding more premium stuff instead of fixing bugs or improving game balance, and the new PSN requirement (why can they even do that after the fact?), I can't recommend this game anymore.