Recent reviews by Cebo

This is the kind of game that makes me wish Steam had more than just a "thumbs up/down" review. This game is very different from the previous one and overall, I don't think it really holds up to AV1. Id give it probably a 7/10: Better than average, and outside the context of its predecessor, it was still a very solid game. Some of the best exploration in a MetroidVania I've seen in a while, satisfying traversal, fun and interesting power ups, satisfying story, great world design, great music, the works. The combat however was fairly mediocre. But that's really the only major flaw in the game.

They took the foundation of the last game, being a 8-direction shooter, and all of the design that comes with that, and they turned it into a predominantly melee experience. The enemy design however was not sufficiently changed. The enemies still felt like they were designed around being able to fight them from a distance and kite them. The ground enemies were extremely fast or had extremely low cooldown ranged attacks, sometimes literally undodgeable, and the aerial enemies would always sit just out of range of your attacks while firing their own ranged attacks, meaning you could only damage them with your very weak boomerang attack. The melee attack also wasn't even particularly good at dealing with them when you could reach them either; it was fairly weak, didn't have much knockback, and the hitbox was fairly high up so you often missed short enemies unless you stood still to crouch or aim diagonally, but you usually got hit for doing that. There was also a hacking mechanic, which would allow you to slow most enemies, among other effects. While it was occasionally useful, sometimes even fixing the undodgeable attack problem, it was slow to use, required you to get basically into melee range to use, meaning you'd usually get hit anyways, and the effects didn't actually do enough to justify using it most of the time.

It seemed like the best strategy in combat was almost always to just tank a hit, and then smack them to death during the invulnerability. This strategy worked quite well for the entire game; there was enough healing and checkpoints to generally negate the damage. But it led to a fairly disappointing combat experience when it felt like that was the only viable way to approach it that wouldn't take minutes per enemy to kill with your very weak boomerang and hacking.

For the most part, it usually ended up being more enjoyable to just run past most enemies when you could, killing the few that were in your way. It became a lot more fun once I treated the enemies and combat as just a device to enhance the exploration by adding some stakes and mild danger, not so much an integral part of the game on their own like in games like Hollow Knight or Dark Souls. But seeing as the game seemed to be much more heavily exploration focused, that style of gameplay actually worked pretty well once I shifted my mindset, especially as it got later in the game where I had more abilities to facilitate the exploration. As with most games in the genre, towards the end of the game you are running all over the map completing various tasks and finding all the stuff you missed on the way, usually ignoring enemies anyways. The game shined best during the second half for this reason. In the same vain of exploration there were very few times where I had the classic Metroid moment of "where am I even supposed to go?" The world and minimap designs and the very generous fast travel system made this almost nonexistant. I only got totally lost 1 singular time at the very end of the game, but it was partially my fault:

When you are looking for the last upgrade, there is a specific room you need to use a specific ability in to get to it (the "Goodbye" room). While there was a visual indicator in the room to use that ability, I somehow missed it and left that room without realizing what I needed to do. Due to the way the map and abilities work and happened to combine just right in that room, there was absolutely no indication on the minimap that I had missed something; no empty neighboring room, no unchecked doors, nothing. So I spent about an hour running around looking for where to go, completing a bunch of side content before I gave up and checked a walkthrough for how to get passed this one part. Annoying but I don't really fault it too much since it only happened once and I had missed a very obvious indicator of what to do. Maybe they could fix this in a patch with some sort of minimap indicator, but I'm not really sure how.

Lastly, the lack of proper bosses was a bit unfortunate, but also I didn't really miss them that much. There were only 2 mandatory bosses and both of them were fairly trivial; if you die you literally respawned directly in the same room without losing progress, so you couldn't fail. There were also optional mini-bosses around the world, but they weren't anything super special, definitely didn't scratch the Metroid boss itch. It wasn't really a big deal though, there was at least a proper final boss and escape sequence, and with the combat being what it was, it might've been more annoying than good to have more classic boss fights. Not really sure what to make of it.

Overall, solid game. As much as I did a lot of complaining, it's just because it got so much right and it was so close to greatness. I did actually have a lot of fun playing it. The exploration and atmosphere were really top notch; it absolutely nailed that key aspect of the genre in allowing yourself to seemingly get lost in an interesting world without ever actually getting properly lost and not knowing what to do or where to go next. The combat was really the only problem with the game and frankly, they could probably fix most if not all of the combat problems via a patch; there were no foundational problems with the combat, it just needs a little polish.

Has one of the best tutorials of any game I've ever played, which as far as I'm concerned is one of the most important features of this game or any other complex game. So many complex games just leave you to figure it out by sheer stubbornness and hours researching online and grinding in a training mode, but this game actually has the tools to teach new players (like myself) how to play, including the very fundamentals. It's a very solid game; the graphics are great, the characters are interesting, the controls are super smooth and relatively forgiving without being brain-dead easy, and the netcode is insanely good.

GG Strive was one of my first traditional fighting games (non-Smash-like). I played Tekken 7 for about a week and was entirely lost; it provides literally ZERO resources for new players to learn the game beyond a move list and sample combos for each character and a training mode. It didn't explain how high and low attacks worked, it didn't tell you how to block, how running works in that game, what a guard crush is, how to move in the z-axis, ANYTHING. I also played a bit of SF3, which also gives no resources for a new player, but is at least a simpler game overall and is also 25 years old so it gets a soft pass on accessibility. Needless to say I was very turned off of traditional fighting games for a while after those.

On some recommendations from Reddit and YouTube, I tried GG Strive and specifically, the tutorial mode. It is very brand-new-player friendly and very comprehensive. I actually learned how to play the game, and was able to learn enough that I was able to jump into online play and actually be competent enough to play against other low-level players. I was also able to learn most of what I know and most of my characters bread-and-butter combos just by playing and experimenting. I am now around floor 9 or 10 in the ranked ladder, and am almost entirely self taught. By now I've looked up a few combos and counterplay for a few of the other characters, but probably 90% of what I do I learned myself. That is the most rewarding feeling in any competitive game as far as I'm concerned, and this game does one of the best jobs of any game I've ever played at enabling that.

This game is for a particular kind of gamer. If you are that kind, you will really love it. I however, am not that kind of gamer. I'd give it like a 5/10. Good enough that I put ~11 hours in and finished the first major story arc, but I don't think I'm going to keep going.

If you don't typically care about story in games, then this is plainly not worth it. The plot-line involving the relationship of Kratos and Boy is actually pretty good, and the cinematography is incredible, but all of the plot involving gods and magic and stuff is about on par with Marvel movies. Take that as you will.

The gameplay is pretty weak in isolation. It's plays out like a big auto-scroller occasionally split up by combat. And the combat is just "okay"; it gets pretty repetitive pretty fast, feeling more like a QTE than an execution challenge. Decision making in combat is pretty minimal, it's mostly just time your dodges and mash left click until you can execute the enemy, where you get to watch one of maybe 3 execution cutscenes that's reused for just about every enemy in the entire game.

Additionally, this game absolutely did NOT need to be jammed full of RPG elements. Nothing ruins the pacing and immersion of a game built around taking place in a single continuous camera shot like menus full of numbers and equipment and skills. I just want to run around and kill things.

The majority of people should stop after the normal ending.

The game is really good up until that point. Strong visual style, great music, good Zelda/Souls-like gameplay, combat, and adventure, satisfying upgrades, satisfying world to explore. The game does a really good job of always giving you enough information to figure out what to do by yourself. 100% worth playing as a solid tribute to A Link to the Past. Similar to Hyper Light Drifter in all of these ways.

This game however does ol' bad ending / true ending gimmick, but it doesn't do it particularly well, and it seems other reviews are in a similar boat. The main game is all Zelda/Souls like, but once you reach the end game, in order to unlock the true ending, the game switches completely to a puzzle game not dissimilar to The Witness. It's not a bad puzzle game by any means; some of the puzzles were reasonably creative and fun to solve and very well hidden and integrated into the existing world. But the whole switch to puzzles is just so disconnected from and unrelated to the gameplay that I had thought I paid for and that I spent the previous 15-20 hours playing that it wasn't particularly enjoyable or satisfying. It also involves pressing sequences of buttons without any visual indication of what you're doing until you've finished the entire sequence, which since they can be up to 50+ buttons long, can sometimes be a little awkward. And a number of the puzzles literally *require* you to use a pen+paper to write stuff down, which is a bit of a bummer imo, even for a dedicated puzzle game.

The actual ending sequence, the unlocking previously locked places and the alternate ending cutscene are reasonably satisfying in themselves, but I don't think they are worth it enough to justify the jarring genre-shift required to unlock them. You are probably better off just watching the ending online or just looking up the solution to the puzzles to skip to the ending.

This is the best Smash game.

For people who already played Factorio:

Satisfactory is very fun, but it's not just a 3d version of Factorio. There is a much higher focus on exploration, intermediate product chains, and building for aesthetics and less focus on 'pure' logistics, maximizing throughput, and large scale transportation of resources. Enemies in Satisfactory also don't ever attack your base; they are only out in the world to make exploration more challenging (I personally prefer it this way). These different focuses aren't a bad thing. It just prioritizes different parts of the larger "logistics game" experience compared to Factorio.

If you liked Factorio for the puzzle of figuring out how to chain the different machines together to create a final product or if you liked building a cool base, you will probably like Satisfactory even more.

If you instead liked Factorio because of the logistics challenge of managing resources across the map, of connecting multiple full-throughput factories, and because of the oh-so-satisfying train mechanics, you may not find Satisfactory to be as satisfactory (see what I did there?).

It's not that Satisfactory doesn't have these mechanics, but they are either de-prioritized in the overall gameplay experience or only introduced to the player very late into the game. Trains are the clearest example of this, being available in Factorio as soon as you unlock steel and allowing you to completely change the way that you approach factory design going into the mid-game towards a more decentralized system of sub-factories with a number of advantages (and some disadvantages). Satisfactory has similar rail mechanics but they are a end-game technology that you only gain access to once you are all but done with the macro-level design of your base. You either have to explicitly plan to have trains early on, and sacrifice efficiency to work over large distances before you unlock them, or you build everything pretty close together the whole time and you never really find yourself needing trains unless you plan on building a full on late game mega base.

TLDR: This is a solid game, well worth the price and a solid weekend worth of game play. It's not without flaws, but since the major patch a few days ago, I can genuinely recommend this game to people who like 3d adventure games.

My old review was lengthy and detailed a bunch of problems I had with this game when it launched and basically said "if they don't change anything I'm not going to finish this game". A few days ago they released a huge patch including a bunch of the fixes and balance changes that I asked for. Needless to say I tried again and finished it this time. Huge kudos to the dev team for listening to user feedback and fixing the biggest sore spots.

While the game is certianly not perfect still, I can actually recommend it to people. Roughly speaking, its general vibe and game play is most similar to 3d Zelda Games, but with Hollow Knights aesthetic. The platforming is pretty solid, the combat is okay (grounded combat is pretty good, aerial combat is pretty bad but greatly improved by the patch), the world is well designed, areas are visually distinct and interesting.

The main weaknesses are in the plot and the boss fights.

The plot overall just seems sort of thrown together, they make out this big world with deep history but there isn't really that much to support it other than several cutscenes and npc's who talk about the world.

The bosses are relatively uninspired compared to the rest of the game. The first 2 bosses literally have only 1 attack. After that, they start to improve and get a little more complicated by adding in multiple phases, but each phase still only has one attack pattern (multiple different attacks, but always in the exact same order). There is very little variation between multiple attempts at the same boss.

I do have a lot of various stray thoughts about this game, good and bad, and I would love to share them with the dev's if they had a user feedback form or something, but I think that the game is in a good enough spot for me to feel confident recommending it to people now.