Recent reviews by Wasabi Ice Cream

Sphere to Square, sisters!

Have fun steamrolling all the mobile players and/or bots.

Great looking game, and the ladies are sexy, but then there's the part where you have to play it...

Okay, I wrote a few meme reviews before I'd settled on my actual feelings here. This'll be a weird one...




The Juxtaposition here did not feel right initially, but I think is correct for me. Neither "I don't like this because it is bad", nor "I like this because it is good" fits here. However, I think that most of the discourse surrounding this game ends up at one of these 2 ideas. Everything you've already heard about this game is true. I think what I want to do with this "review" is just tackle a couple of the common points I've seen about the game. I'll avoid spoilers in the main text, but will get into specifics in the comments if it gets to that.




Probably the claim that I see put forth the most about this game is that you need to play x amount of hours before it really gets good. I also believe this to be true, but only half. I'd say that it's more of a sine-wave of quality. It gets better, and it also gets worse. It actually always got worse, every high point I had with the game had an equally low trough on the other side. Typically, this involved the game setting something up that seemed really cool and exciting, then completely fumbling it when the moment came. A small example, I recruited a new follower who'd never seen anything off her home planet, and listed off many things she'd always dreamed of seeing. Naturally, I was excited to begin showing her the galaxy. I take her to all of those places, and she has nothing so say about any of it. No reaction at all. There's another character that enjoys reading, and requests you to bring her some new books when you see her. She even requests some specific books. Again, I make a mental note of these (There is no quest for either of these), wanting to surprise her with these gifts. Grabbing the many books I find on my travels. You literally can't give her a single book. I'm not even sure if the specific ones she asks for are even in the game.


Those two specific examples might seem like cherry-picking, but it's really not. This trickles into the core role-play aspects. The problem is that you cannot do anything in this game unless there is either a quest and then a dialogue option letting you do it. You can shoot a guy and it be "bad", but killing the same guy after selecting the "[Attack]" option in the dialogue tree makes it totally fine. Most named NPCs can only be killed after selecting the "[Attack]" option in the dialogue, otherwise they are invincible. The whole game works this way, so an NPC just saying "I always wanted to visit Earth's Moon!" doesn't do anything unless it adds a quest to your log. You're not allowed to shoot the guy that just threatened your life because you don't get any dialogue option that allows you to just shoot him. When I realized this, it ruined the "murderous scumbag prick" character I was trying to role-play as, but also any idea of doing anything cool outside of the hard limits the game presents to you directly. The options that are presented are so rigid, that they often just funnel down the same road anyway. They set up something exciting, and it always turns out to be a bummer on the other side.




This is a claim I've seen on many reviews of this game. Or, "It's a Bethesda game". Again, I definitely agree with this. It's probably the easiest shorthand to TLDR what this game is. It's good in many of the same ways these games are good, and also bad in the same ways as well. The second half of the previous sentence is the problem for me. Todd Howard has been making the "Bethesda game" for over 20 years now. It's absolutely baffling to be that they're still making the same mistakes with this game that they've been making since Morrowind. Even worse is where some things in this game have gotten even worse than they were in previous games, and you don't even need to go any further than Fallout 4 to see this. They take the crafting and base building from Fallout 4, but remove the ability to scrap all misc items to their base components. This single change now makes looting all misc items useless (unless you're selling them), but also make it more tedious as you now need the exact specific items for whatever you're building. Also in Fallout 4 was the ability to see both player inventory and NPC inventory when trading/looting. In Starfield now, it's a single screen that you need to swap back and forth between. Weapon mods are destroyed if you try to remove them. Vendors don't have enough credits to sell all your loot, their stock will reset if you wait a couple days, and the wait menu is incredibly slow. It's impossible to match an NPC's walking speed when following them. They had to patch in an FOV slider.


Admittedly, these issues are relatively small on their own. They don't ruin the game for me individually, but it all piles up. Most of these are annoyances that have existed in their previous games. I just don't think it's acceptable anymore. From the studio that invented the "Bethesda Game", that only makes the "Bethesda game", how do they keep messing it up? Every time they re-released Skyrim, and never implemented any of the bug fixes or quality-of-life improvements that modders did before them. This is still that, whether you like it or not. And this is where "The modders will fix it" comes in. Still, I agree with this. However the vast majority of people who play these games never touch mods. Also, console players will have a severely limited modding experience when compared to PC. Ideally, the modders shouldn't have to fix it. In 2021, Todd Howard claimed in an IGN interview that the SkyUI mod, and one that adds fast travel markers to player homes were among his favorites (although he couldn't remember them by name). He then goes on to jokingly state "Why don't we do that?". Indeed...




Really, this is all that actually matters. I like Starfield despite it being a bad game. It's a "Bethesda game" in the way only Bethesda dares to make. Its high points are high, its low points are low. I'm going to mod the ♥♥♥♥ out of it. I don't recommend it.

What I expected: Earth Defense Force with Dinosaurs
What I Got: Overwatch with Dinosaurs

Great game, great soundtrack.
Wish the NPCs had more dialogue for the different items you show them. They all say the same exact things every time.

Lazy port of the mobile version, where most of the UI still says "Press Here". It's got all the Korean free-to-play ♥♥♥♥ you expect, but purchases are never needed unless you want to pay for storage, which you will want to do if you play enough, because there's like 50 different currencies, and they just give it away so frequently that your inventory and free storage will be full, and most of the currency stacks only in small amounts, so you'll have like 30 different stacks of 20 of the same item for no reason other than to get you to buy storage.

The really cool part of the game is the Path of Exile-style skill system, where you can build your own skills, and chain-link different modifiers together in crazy ways. There's also the Zodiac progression system which is a lot like the Grim Dawn Devotion system. The game is worth checking out for these alone, but otherwise is quite boring in every other way.

Once a game decides to charge real money, regardless of its point in the development cycle, you're a product worthy of full criticism.

I'm not even a Smash fan, but even I can respect the absolute quality of work that went into Smash Ultimate. Every aspect of that game is dripping with an attention to detail that's lacking in every other half-hearted attempt. It's a labor of love at the very least, and at this point, a museum of gaming history. From the menus, the soundtrack, character and stage design, animations, etc... There's an overwhelmingly high level of consistency in Smash's presentation that is almost completely absent here. It seems the most focus went into the characters' movesets, which are very diverse and dips into their lore and history, but everything else is completely unremarkable, especially the stage designs and the soundtrack. The UI glitches out and breaks until I reset the game sometimes. Gameplay feels somehow stiff and floaty at the same time, animations aren't great, not a fan of the art-style as a whole, there's no block, only dodge, and you can infinite dodge, and it just never feels good... I said this same ♥♥♥♥ about Brawlhalla, and that's one of the biggest games on the planet, so what the ♥♥♥♥ do I know...

Scooby's Haunted Mansion is a dope stage, though. The walls and floors collapse, and its dynamicity led to some on-the-fly decision making while trying to avoid the stage hazards. This is the only stage that left any impression on me.

MultiVersus is fun to play. The 2v2 dynamic puts a greater emphasis on meaningful team play. The roster of characters is varied, and each support different play styles, so you can find ones that vibe with you. With the Warner Bros. backlog, there will be tons more of exciting characters down the line. There are 17 total characters in the game right now, with 4 of them being in a random rotation who can be played for free. The free characters rotate every 2 weeks, while anyone not in the rotation must be purchased using either in-game currency or real money. The in-game currency is given out pretty quickly at first, but drastically slows down within only a few hours. You'll have enough to buy at least 1 character, but the cost varies for each (Taz is worth 1500 Coins, Batman is 2000, Tom & Jerry is 3000). If you go the real money route, it's $7 per character, but you can only buy the paid currency in increments of $5 or $10, so you have to spend at least $10 to buy just 1 character. Or, you can spend $40 on the Founder's Pack, which gets you "15 Character Tokens for instant character unlocks", which still isn't even enough to unlock all the characters included today.

All that to say, you don't need to unlock all the characters, and you shouldn't. You can try ALL the characters for free in the game's practice area (The Lab), and from there, you can figure out which ones you actually want to invest time and/or money into.

Basically, the game does the thing where it'll matchmake you against bots, but will give them fake usernames and platform icons to make it look like they're actual human players.
Pick Finn the Human, use his aerial Down+Special which drops a pickup on the ground, and watch the AI fumble trying to pick it up (Which, the AI is broken here, because the opposite team can't pick this item up anyway). That's if your AI teammate doesn't instantly snatch it out the sky, with a reaction speed that a human player would never have. All the bots seem to always want to go for item pickups as soon as one is spawned on the map, and you can break their AI at times by exploiting this.

Maybe 1 out of the 10 games I played within 2 hours were with an actual human. This was also the only player I ran into that didn't hit the "Rematch" option after the first round, where it seems the bots are programmed to always instantly ask for a Rematch. I'm not totally sure why they felt the need to implement these bot matches, because the game has a very healthy player-base right now.

The most profound experience I've ever received from a video game, or any other piece of entertainment media. There are no words that can fully convey this. Just play it.

The game is a bit bland compared to most other Diablo-like options, but it's a solid game that offers the one thing I'm looking for in these games, which is a dedicated controller UI (very similar to Diablo 3 on consoles).

It's got many interesting options for some pretty diverse character builds within each class, and the game allows you develop and swap between 4 different builds during gameplay.