Recent reviews by Squamata

A love letter to the beautiful 40k universe.

A cute, short, free game. Funny writing and environmental storytelling, no pressure to be any good at the game, but extra challenges if you want them. A good use of an hour or two of your time.

Best horde shooter since Left 4 Dead, bar none.

Pretty excellent and chill game. Deadlines are there to give you goals but are generous enough that you don't have to sweat them. There's a lot of small variances in game play, most of them hits and inevitably a miss or two. Glad I picked this up, was worth every dollar and more.

I don't even like tower defense games and I've sunk over a hundred hours on this game (including mobile, which it has 100% crossplay with). Very satisfying to figure out the right strategy for every map, and then find more strategies for the different modes on each map.

Simple, addictive fun. I didn't think I'd like it, but for 5 dollars, I gave it a shot. Ended up loving it. Probably the second best bang for your buck on steam, right under Terraria.

A unique, if not repetitive, experience.

As a huge fan of xcom I was excited for a game with such unique characters. However I found that with no "recuperation" mechanic, it relied heavily on whittling down enemies on stealth rather than through tactical combat. This in and of itself is not a bad thing; its fun to silently stalk enemies, pick them off, and suddenly be the one outgunning the much larger group you initially encountered.

My problem with this is that it never really changes besides the enemies getting tankier and forcing you to rely on crowd control for stealth kills. Every encounter becomes the same formula: Hog-Rush a single target you can't kill in one turn, take out weaker enemies until Hog-Rush is available again and repeat until there's one group that can't be picked off. With few exceptions, I was rarely getting shot at by the enemy, which was good because recovering health was limited to medkits (of which there are a finite amount of) or a rare skill that often took the place of an important one (and could only be used in combat and ambushes despite functioning as a recuperation ability).

Gameplay getting stale aside, the game is excellent. The banter between characters is great and the world it builds is engaging. The numerous ways the party can interpret something as simple as a boombox or keyboard is amusing, and its always satisfying to find those relics.

The game has a demo, so give it a shot. If you like it in the first half hour, you'll probably like the rest of the game too.

Widely considered the worst Dark Souls, but I think that's unfair. Dark Souls certainly deserves credit for kickstarting its own genre and franchise, but I believe the games got better in succession. The launch state of Dark Souls 2 was a bit of a mess but that is long past the game. Scholar of the First Sin edition is well above Dark Souls 1 in quality and variety. It even does a few things that 3 could have used, like power stancing and the variety of infusions. The biggest issue with 2 that remains to this day is Soul Memory, but even that I think is better than Dark Souls 1's system that easily allowed people to twink out characters and bully new players.

Despite the name, Monster Hunter Stories does not break the convention of Monster Hunter games. Like every installment, it has great gameplay and a colorful world, but with a pretty weak story. After finishing the game, I really only have two complaints.

1: The story is predictable and nonsensical. If you can't guess what the big twist is after an hour of playing, you're probably playing it with your brain off, which is a perfectly acceptable way to enjoy the game and you might actually have more fun with it if you don't care about the story. There's also a few points (with area 3 and 4 of the game being the biggest offender) that will take you out of the story completely if you're somehow still invested in it by some extremely strange and unexplained behavior from the characters. That said, when the cutscenes are focused on action, it can have its cool moments reminiscent of monster introductions in other monster hunter games.

2: The game limits your party composition not just by the balance of your "attack types" (Speed, power, technical) but egregiously so with ride abilities. You get 5 slots for monsters with the 6th being reserved for the main monster character. There are seven abilities that let you traverse the world. None are required, but you'll miss out on a lot of exploration and loot if you don't have one of each. Which, at least during the story, you can't. No monster has two traversal abilities. Any monster without a traversal ability (like roar or stealth) isn't even worth bringing because you'll miss so much by not taking a traversal ability.

That being said, let me lay in to some positives. As this game has a lot of similarities with pokemon, I'll be making some comparisons.

1: The game does not punish you much for changing monsters. EXP is shared evenly with the entire party, and monsters significantly below your rider level get huge boosts to their EXP gain to catch up. I changed my party a lot throughout the game (traversal abilities permitting) and got to use a huge variety of monsters, especially in the beginning to mid game where I didn't have enough traversal abilities unlocked to limit my party.

2: The game is a sweet spot of difficulty. At no point in the game did I feel like I had to grind or abandon what I was doing because it was too hard. With persistence and the right monsters, you can tackle just about any challenge. Occasionally it got easy when I had some really strong monsters, but I was humbled by the end of the game with a lot more powerful monsters.

3: The combat is a bit RNG, but mostly a blast. The game starts extremely simple with rock-paper-scissors. In this case, its power-speed-technical. Even on the surface there is a lot of things you can do with it, but it keeps getting deeper and deeper. Like any good monster hunter game, prep and knowledge will see you through it. Diligently gather herbs and honey on the way to fights? You'll have lots of healing potions. Do sidequests to learn how to craft traps? You'll be able to stun a predictable monster. Elements, status effects, kinship abilities and a bunch of weapon types- you can be learning new things 30 hours into the game.

4. MH Stories, like most MH games, has a post-game that adds more challenge after the story is done. I've barely gotten in to it, but I've heard from several people it can add an extra 30 hours to the game for completionists. I personally love the way you get new monsters in the game and I'll probably be trying to max out the game myself.

5. The game offers a lot of options to min-max for people who want it. Monsters are hatched at different rarity, making them start with different abilities than a monster of the same species. Not only can they hatch different, you can also splice them together (it's less horrifying than it sounds). A 3x3 grid of abilities with different colors and icons allows you to match genes 3 in a row- a bingo bonus- to enhance different elements and ability types. Not only that, but you can transfer any one gene off a monster to a different one; you could spend hours farming the perfect eggs to craft your perfect monster. I spent maybe two hours out of 51 doing this with my favorite Zinogre and Tigrex, but there's nothing stopping you from putting together unstoppable monsters with this system.

All in all, if you appreciate the world of Monster Hunter and want to see it faithfully recreated in to a turn-based RPG, this is that game. It has the weaknesses and strengths of monster hunter- and in my opinion, the series' pros have always far outweighed its cons, and this one is no different.

EDIT: Unfortunately the gotta-catch-em-all aspect is slowed down significantly by the fact that many of the monsters that only appear in the post game only do so in dens that have a less than 1% chance to spawn (Super Rare Dens), and then the eggs themselves have a similar chance to be in the one nest. The only way to do this faster is to play multiplayer. You can do the co-op solo with a bot and each den has 4 nests instead of 1, but you also need to grind for the tickets to go in to these multiplayer dens. After about 10 hours of grinding these super rare dens with my friends, I got two of the twelve super rare monsters and he got three. If you're not a completionist this isn't a big deal, but its a bummer for people who want to be able to 100% the game.

Me and my friend picked this up as a co-op game, and initially it reminded me of Divinity: Original Sin 2, an amazing co-op experience. It has fun combat (we played on Ranger and it was very challenging) and we enjoyed messing with the different builds you can make. The writing is also fantastic, we were frequently laughing at the witty bits of lore and dialogue. Its one of the few games I really wanted to talk to every npc to get all the lore and learn as much as I could about every character.

It has some great co-op systems too. The biggest positive is that every nearby character contributes to dialogue; if character A starts the dialogue and character B has the persuasion skill, character A can use that skill too. I wish every co-op rpg did this. I've praised the game a lot, so why don't I recommend it?

Bugs. From minor annoyances, hair pullers and game breaking varieties. A minor bug is that my controls would frequently be disabled and you have to open the game menu to re-enable them. Not a big deal. What made us stop playing was our first boss fight. First try, one of our guys gets to go before the enemy for some reason, when normally one team goes at a time. Then our enemy goes, my friend's turn.. except he has no AP to act. So we reload. We position our team this time before starting the fight. As soon as the conversation ends, our medic gets teleported into a corner where she can't move or attack anybody, so thats one ally down. We bring the boss down to about 10% and the combat ends... and then immediately starts again, so the initiative is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and the enemy gets an extra turn. Then on my turn... I have no AP, so I have to skip. Reload again. At this point, we're about ready to quit if we get another bug. As we finish talking about that and load in, we lose all our AP. Again.

I look forward to playing this game someday when it gets fixed.