Recent reviews by Umbreon™

Really did not enjoy either version of the game, open beta or official release. It just doesn't seem like the kind of game it strives to be, like the dev is more interested in putting the player in their zone of control as much as possible, that being in the actual game controls, the weird new pve progression, character unlocking, and the loads of microtransactions. It feels like I'm playing a game that got reworked to ingrain all the mobile game tactics you probably know well by now.
Honestly I don't hate this game. But it feels like this game hates me. That's what this game makes me feel like - Having to set the game to Easy because the next difficulty level ("Experienced"), that I assume should be the Normal equivalent, actually makes the AI deal about twice as much damage but receive about half damage from you, and the AI itself is set to a higher difficulty. It should really just be a better AI with no benefits or disadvantages. Let the damage reset between attempts, that's fine. But why does it deal so much damage and take so little? It feels terrible and like I have to first progress on Easy and maybe buy my way up to unlock a character I'd actually be okay playing.

Speaking of unlocking characters, just how long do I have to play to unlock something at all? I was looking forward to trying Joker, but I have to play quite a lot just to maybe get to unlock him, and I don't definitely know how much I have to play to get enough of the character unlock currency for Joker. I don't feel like grinding my way through the game using a rather underwhelming rotating cast of characters. Increase the base (permanently available) cast and maybe also increase the rotating cast. This game genuinely just makes me feel like the devs hate me, and like they wish to make me endure stress before I can possibly try to see if I'll truly enjoy this game after enough enduring through needless restrictions.

The controls are still shoddy and honestly they feel worse now. It feels like that's the new thing for smash clones. Controls appear to be the most afterthought thing in these games now, like if it doesn't matter at all that the player gets to control their character properly. Dashing sideways needs you to first hold the movement button before pressing the dodge button, can't just press both at once. Why do they keep doing this? Nick Brawl also did this. It makes me feel so restricted, not to mention the movement feels much more floaty than even SSB4.

I don't know man, I feel like this game isn't made for me or anyone looking to just play a fun game. You are made to first endure quite a lot of weird mobile game design before you can maybe figure out if you like it.
I don't feel like this game is worth even a few more minutes of my time. It makes me feel bad about myself. Only a few games achieve that. So I'm just going to assume this is a dead genre, and the only thing I can possibly look forward to now is Rivals 2, but honestly the Rivals of Aether devs aren't exactly the brightest out there, like at all. Feels like they make better non-smash games than balancing their smash clone, but that's a matter for a different discussion.

I guess I would rate this game 5/10. It's not horrible, it's not good, it's definitely not worth my time. Sorry that the devs hate the player I guess. You might find some fun in it if you happen to like it the way it is. I really don't.

A genuinely interesting followup to the best 4X game I've played, but it suffers from really bad AI.

This game was effectively abandoned by the devs for about 4 years straight, and while they made a major update recently with the help of two major modders for the game, they didn't touch upon the biggest flaw for this game: the fact the AI cheats in your face.
Every single run i've made in this game has been met with an AI cheating moment. Every single time. I could be having a lot of fun doing my thing at my own pace, everything good, until at one point the AI does something that is absolutely just cheating.

Riftborn colonizing everything around you and generating gigantic military fleets out of nowhere very early into the run (see: less than 40 turns).
Vodyani being needlessly aggressive and making itself angry in diplomatic relations due to a bug that has yet to be fixed (this is a bug, it needs to be fixed, not just played around).
Lumeris colonizing several (four or more) of your target systems extremely early into the run (less than 30 turns).

But the worst of it all is when the AI ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you with pirates. The Major faction AI literally collaborates with the pirates when they feel like it. Watched the lumeris effectively utilize a pirate ship to attack my fleet but the pirate ship didn't attack the lumeris fleet in the same system, even though you're supposed to only be able to target the strongest fleet orbiting in the system. The pirate ship effectively guarded the lumeris long enough to take control of the system (and yet the pirates didn't even affect the lumeris outpost there, really curious how that works).
Now my most recent run had several moments where the AI clearly watched my fleet movements and situated pirates in my exact path where it would be indefensible at that exact point of time, specially by abusing the fact that I can't move my ships until I've dealt with the constant forced notifications at the start of each turn (please just let me minimize ALL notifications, or delay all of it until im ready to see it). The AI has the advantage of moving its ships almost immediately at the start of the turn but you have to go through 5 or more notifications yourself before you can even get access to your ship movement.
The AI spawned a pirate ship exactly in the path of a citizen ship (containing 3 minor faction populations units) where I could not defend it, even though there was no sign of that pirate ship existing anywhere in that path, as I had military ships orbiting several points of the path with the intention of escorting it. The pirate ship disappeared afterwards, never to be seen even by the other military ships around there. Then comes a fleet with a colony ship I was dragging from an evacuated, far system that was assimilated from a minor faction, no pirates in sight, until it finally reaches its end point, a system right next to my other main systems, only to find that a pirate literally spawned right there. I had military ships guarding both ends of the path through my systems. No pirates were ever found by them, and yet a pirate literally spawned within my borders and only on the lone system that I intended to colonize. Of course, it just wrecks everything and makes me unable to set down that outpost, and even worse, it proceeds to despawn the pirate ship. It just disappears. Nowhere to be seen by other ships. It caused its damage immediately and removed the ship from the board just as quickly.

My other runs have had several similar moments with the AI doing insane things that it should not be able to do. This is genuinely not a good game. You'll have the time of your life for a few hours for a few days each, until it suddenly pulls some massive AI cheat on you. It's a whole other level of anger inducing.
Don't waste your time playing this. If you're interested in the Endless games, play Endless Space. That game was fantastic. The AI there was rather easy, and you run out of content after a few runs, but it was just fun. Better a fun, good game that doesn't have much replayability than an extremely anger inducing game that throws a cheating AI at you entirely at random.

I feel like I wasted my money. My time, around 25$, and my mood for the night all went down the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I refuse to ever buy an Amplitude game ever again. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell.
9/10 before the AI cheats. 2/10 when it finally materializes a knife in your side.
Don't bother. Just don't. Play something else. Save yourself the future anger. Just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ don't.

Battlefront Classic Collection is nothing but the original console experience ported to PC. You do not have the few PC enhancements that we got long ago, in exchange of the original experience. It's the exact same but with new bugs and exploits.

Multiplayer IS playable, but only to a very limited extent. Most servers falsely report being full, or fail to report their real playercounts, there's some kind of invincible roll spam exploit, and the servers all end up crashing when the match is over, without fail. It just crashes and you get stuck for a bit in the connection screen. By the way, there's no crossplay. So it's bound to die sooner than expected.

Everything is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AI upscaled. The textures, UI, the FMV videos, the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ font itself, and, probably the worst one, all post processing effects are also AI upscaled. This means everything is blurry and smudgy as hell. I can hardly see anything in this game.
This really is deserving of the negative reviews it's getting, and quite honestly, it should be even lower. This is not worth keeping in your library at all.

Genuinely one of the most terrifying games I've ever played in my life. The horror in this game goes beyond all expectations, even if you may have seen some really gruesome fangames back then and such. The way the puzzles are laid out for you can take you hours on end to solve, if not entire different sessions for a refreshed view on the section you're looking at.

Play this as blind as you can. Try to push it as much as you possibly can without searching guides, maybe ask a friend (one that's not going to play) for a pointer to get a clearer view of the overall puzzle. Preferably play this with company.
I've played Amnesia, FEAR, Spooky's house of jumpscares and a few spooky fangames. To be honest, none of them come close to the level of terror I had to experience just moments ago. I hope I didn't wake up my neighbors.

EDIT: I beat the game two days ago at the time of writing, and honestly, I can't stop thinking about this game. It was such a great ride all the way and I wish I could keep playing. It's all over my mind and I hope the dev expands upon their series with more game content soon, maybe even give us an option to play the game with previously cut puzzles in order to get to replay if we wish. It's just a fantastic game all around.

An absolute relic of a better time, released well over two decades of the games it took inspiration from.

Pizza Tower is honestly one of the best games I've played in recent times, even from sheer happiness of seeing a game that is just fun to play. The gameplay, artstyle, music, audio cues, the little moments all just come together to make a game that is more like what was made in the times of the GBA. If you played Wario Land 4 you'll be right at home with this game, and if you can still remember some of the funny bits throughout that game you might also smile with this one.

There's quite a lot that can be said about this game but most of it are things that are best seen by yourself. I went in mostly blind and had a really good time. But here's what you should know about this game: it is a fast paced platformer intended for 100% collectible speedruns, although you can certainly play without focusing on getting a perfect run or anything like that, the game doesn't punish you for it, all you need is the important items kind of like picking up the crystals throughout a Crash Bandicoot stage.

The best part about this game is looking at the small details like the backgrounds and the subtle audio or animations from some characters. I loved looking through each level at a leisurely pace before later coming back to get anything I missed and when I finished the game I went attempting to get every pickup and secret.
You should really try this game if you're really just looking for something that's just a nice change of pace.

Overall my score for this game is a very genuine 10/10. It's really fun from the start to the end, and it actually made me happy throughout my playtime.
That's not something you can say for most games nowadays.
Personal nomination for the Steam 2023 "Game of the Year", "Best Visual Style", "Best Soundtrack" and "Best on Steam Deck" awards.

Very interesting and unique game, however it's held back by surprisingly mediocre level and enemy design.
This game really can be fun at times but honestly, dealing with the different tools thrown at you all the time, being forced into using a Slow Motion power to be able to get proper scores, weapons looking and feeling the same all around, the weapons you're given per level are almost arbitrarily chosen, a weird reliance on shooting explosive barrels, some enemies looking almost the same, a hard requirement to headshot the bigger enemies (that also seem to have smaller head hitboxes than the smaller enemies?)...
I'm feeling more frustration than enjoyment trying to get good scores in this game. Maybe that's where the real issue is, trying to get good ranks on each level. But it's a speedrun shooter, that's the whole point, and it's not doing well enough at what it aims to be.

This isn't a bad game by any means, but I'd say this is more of an overpriced game. It feels like something i would have played a long time ago, as a Shockwave 3D flash game but with better graphics than what that engine could handle.
It's a nice little way to burn some time but maybe only buy this on a good discount under 10$, and don't try too hard to get the best scores because, quite honestly, there are better games out there more worth of your efforts.

EDIT: By now this review may be outdated. The problems noted here may or may not have been fixed but I can't be bothered to make the research on whether or not any of it got fixed. My review remains for posterity, specially to showcase what this game came out with, that being extremely glaring issues that shouldn't have gone past testing (if there was any), and weren't fixed for atleast two weeks since the initial reports.

While this game looks interesting, it is currently plagued with severe performance issues, seemingly none of which are brought up in the reviews for this game.
This game is visually capped at 30 fps anywhere except while manning a turret, and ontop of that it feels like there's mouse smoothing (hard to know with 30 fps, though) so it feels extremely sluggish. Resolution, refresh rate, vsync settings don't change anything for this. The worst part is that it seems to render an indefinite amount of frames in the background, because my GPU was literally at 97% usage and my clock speeds were capping out in vain, with the temperatures rising way above what I'm comfortable with. Once it hit 75C I decided to just close the game to keep my GPU from sustaining any damage if it were to keep rising.
Who knows if the people in the glowing positive reviews even realize they might have this issue and just don't realize those are 30 frames on their screen, specially since the game defaults to 60 fps but it certainly doesn't feel like 60.

I bought in because it looked fun and was going to try it before getting my friends in, now I'm requesting a refund to maybe look back in some months from now. The GPU clock issue and 30 visual fps cap both don't really warrant keeping this game around in hopes that it improves in the future. I'd rather just look back later on.

Removing or editing concept art is borderline sacrilege. You are destroying the work of past developers, and effectively erasing development history.
All because of trying to fulfill the agenda of twitter drones and such.

I love Skullgirls but all of this is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unnaceptable. No mental gymnastics can make this "okay".
Don't buy this game.

Hot garbage.
I got this because I accidentally forgot to skip the humble monthly for April (shame on me), tried the game for the hell of it, and man it's just so disappointing.

The gunplay is atrocious. There's very little feedback, the audio is just bad, nothing feels good about it. The only real feedback is the headshot sound effect which I love but that's it. It feels like I'm just spraying bullets out of thin air.

The encounters are fun at first, and then you realize it's all the same thing every time. The game doesn't stop throwing the same things at you, at one point I was starting to just instantly headshot enemies off their spawn points. The waves repeat themselves in a very predictable manner I actually ended up just staring at my screen in boredom.

The graphics get very samey on some spots, and I'd say they look alright, but it's ruined by the devs developing with TAA in mind and blurring the hell out of everything. Lowering antialasing to "off" doesn't actually disable TAA, as it seems to use some form of TAA + FXAA (please stop doing this ♥♥♥♥). You can force disable TAA through the ini, which I did, and it leads to worse aliasing than a game usually could have with antialasing off. I dealt with that because it's better than excessive blurring, but this is still a real negative for the game.

The dialogue makes me want to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crush my mouse under my palm. The forced diversity from the announcer character is really bad, and it's made much worse by the fact that it's clearly not voiced by someone fitting the ethnicity of the character, and the speaking pattern is just not realistic, and there's lots of mispronounciation. I hope you don't happen to understand spanish while trying to play this game on english. It'll set you off when you hear the mispronounciation of typical spanish slang. But it's not just this, the dialogue is full of unnecessary quips like "IT'S JUST A FLESH WOUND!" and childish things like running into a big room and the announcer jokes to test the echo of the room.

The UI aesthetic and its dynamic feeling is fantastic and that's really the only good thing this game has going for it.

I reached the first checkpoint of the first mission and had just about enough, and just Alt F4'd out. I don't care if that's too little time in the game. I saw as much as I needed to see and I hated what I saw. This is a hard 3/10 for me. Wish it was good.

EDIT: The devs have announced the end of active development for this game. Do NOT buy this game as it is quite literally a scam with fine lettering to make it look like it's all fine.

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Fantastic fighting game with a great story, but ruined by changes to development direction.

I really, really want to recommend this game as it is one of the most well designed games I've ever played, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I'd be lying if I said I trust these devs in any shape or form. They've been changing their development direction ever since the game's inception, though it never *actually* hurt the game until what they had done to it a year ago.

It's frustrating, and maybe even depressing to look at this game's announcements. They've completely shifted aside the story mode and they just focus on new DLC which people (mostly the big fighting game fans that cycle between the games as they go up in popularity) swear is required to be in the game because "other fighting games do it too". Then the comments section is just as frustrating, mainly because they have one dude trying to shut down any criticism ever made in the forums, to the point it feels toxic. If I kept my comments open here I'd probably get a reply from that one dude, if my review doesn't just get flagged and taken down.

We were given the (over ambitious) promise of getting the entirety of story mode complete by the end of 2022. Obviously, that was too good to be true and it was clearly a big promise made to be reduced to much less than that, so it'd be foolish to blame them for not delivering on that. However, they didn't deliver even a bit. We got absolutely *nothing* for the story mode. Not one chapter or even any previews for the next one, literally nothing. They just brought up a season pass DLC that they claim you "don't have to buy" and that if you don't like it then you don't have to get it, etc etc, you get the idea.
The most we got was them claiming that the story mode is indeed "in the works", and that's it. But now we got yet another DLC reveal and there wasn't even anything for the story in the announcement for it. Hopefully I'm just speaking too early and the next announcement has real details about the upcoming story chapter and not just "yeah it exists". But even then I'd expect the release of just one chapter to be delayed to the very end of this year, and that feels like too much to ask for at this point.

It doesn't just stop there, though. This game is pretty much well on its way towards an early playercount death, even during their cherished DLC scheme. The playercounts are REALLY LOW. And to be honest, a lot of people are swayed away from the game solely for the fact that it's a "pony game". It is by all means a "pony" game, and I could try all I want to say otherwise (like the fact there's actually only one pony character), but it all comes down to the same thing: People know Them Fightin' Herds as the MLP fighting game. It's the hard truth and i've watched multiple fighting game fans completely avoid this game regardless of how good it might actually be, solely because it is what it is.
So here's the thing, they don't even actually get to attract these players with their DLC season pass scheme, because those people are NOT going to play anyways. And all they do is scare away other potential players AND existing players due to the questionable pricing. The game has been price hiked AND it has multiple DLCs now, seriously.

I really want to say what's actually good about this game, but it kinda falls flat because the best thing about it is the story, followed right up by the actual gameplay. Both are absolutely just great. I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love this game. But the story has been outdated for years, and all we're getting is DLC. I seriously cannot recommend this game to anyone, I'd have to lie to your face to do so, and hide all the little details about what's wrong with this game.

EDIT (DLC2 Update): It gets worse and worse. New update has absolutely zero mention of story mode (effectively shelved), and moving forward new stages aren't going to have fully dynamic music like what TFH always had. It's become a pretty terrible DLC platform in my opinion. I advise you do not buy the DLC for this game.

Honestly, I don't even want to actually give this game a rating. It's almost perfect, but the DLC hell and the broken promises are just making it so I get really angry just looking at this game. I'm now setting it to hidden and possibly looking back later this year, but with low standards.

Should you buy this game? Only if you absolutely ONLY want the gameplay and nothing else. And only if you're okay with later having to pay 20$+ to get the DLC. And if you're okay with the development direction changing regularly. And if you're okay with the potential death of this game in a not so distant future. EDIT: DON'T.

Man.

EDIT 3 (Announcement of no active development): Literally everything I said got validated. All that shilling for DLC was for nothing. No story mode, no further content, the last bit of "content" we're getting is a reskinned character. So ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool.
This game quite literally destroyed my faith in indie devs. I always felt these devs were untrustworthy, and now they've really confirmed it.
Get as far away as you can. It's over for this game and these devs. Do not look back, there is only a hollow shell of what could have been.