Recent reviews by Azerate

It is cutesy and wholesome on the surface, but the reality is there's not much deeper to it. Gets boring quickly.

Yeah this is pretty cool, especially considering the low price. The difficulty gets brutal at higher levels though.

It's fine. Nothing that's gonna blow you away but there's some solid JRPG gameplay here to enjoy. If you still haven't tried some of the high profile JRPG games I'd pick those up first though.

Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness is a great game that suffers from some very questionable design decisions and brutal difficulty – the „I want to waste your time” kind of difficulty, which will put off a lot of people. If you are not into that, you most probably won’t enjoy it. It’s not buggy nor glitchy, but it’s very unforgiving and may be downright unplayable without at least minor modding.

The first big problem is the game mode selection, which sounds good at first because it makes it seem as if there is more content in the game. The reality is that the original story-based game mode is really a form of a tutorial for the main mode of the game. All shops, crafting and leveling are very limited, which you are not told. The real game gets unlocked after beating this 3-5 hour „intro” based on the original story. This also makes it seem as though the game is very short. The length of the main story is already listed as 4 hours on some websites, which is false, as this is not the real game mode but just a sneak peek into what’s to come.

Once you get to the „Deep Abyss” mode, which is the actual true gameplay of Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness, is when things get real. The difficulty ramps up in a crazy way. Hp, food, stamina meters, bag capacity, limited fast travel, curse of abyss and worst of all: Infinite enemy spawning behind your back after 5 minutes of exploring will all be things that will accompany throughout the journey. Thankfully, there is a community made mod that removes the Infinite enemy spawning, which for me personally, was what made the game playable. If you’re planning to get the game please get it for your own mental health. The devs have posted that they are looking into bugs and game balance so maybe this gets fixed in the future by them, but we will have to wait and see.

The gameplay loop itself can be fairly enjoyable. You set out to explore the abyss, each layer divided into multiple areas. You harvest supplies, kill enemies, navigate cliffs and so on. The game follows a main story quest and also offers a lot of side quests, both randomly appearing as well as available in the guild location in the city. Once you set aside the game’s issues it will be a great experience for any anime/manga fan for sure. In the game you can explore up to and including the 5th layer and meet many of the characters from the original story on your journey. Beating the whole game took me about 40 hours. Then there’s also a good couple hours of ‘endgame’ content, you can keep leveling, getting gear upgrades, and there are actual optional side quest lines including characters from the original story.

All in all if you can get over the punishing difficulty there’s a lot of fun to be had here, especially for enjoyers of the original material. The general reception wasn’t that great so you can probably expect discounts soon. Get it then, if you’re on the fence.

The game is great for very young kids who like Peppa Pig, obviously. The gameplay is is very accessible to the point where a 2-3 year old child should be able to play the game fine. Gameplay is smooth, activities are simple and fun, sometimes slightly educational. You get to interact with the main characters.

The only downside here is that it's a bit short and the price/length ratio is really bad, so only get it on a sale of some sort. You can exhaust the game's content within 2 hours, so I wouldn't say it's worth 40$, but if money's not the issue I can wholeheartedly recommend this game.

Very bog-standard 'souls-like' arpg. Combat is pretty basic and doesn't feel too good. The plot is presented in a way similar to visual novels. Not cutscenes or animations, just pictures and text on the screen. If you're looking for a good jrpg with arpg-like combat I'd suggest the YS series, or Tokyo Xanadu instead.

For a modern FPS it is a pretty solid game with good gunplay, and it is also a clear improvement over SS3, but this review will still be negative to incentivize further improvements in next installments. This is coming from a point of view of someone who has grown up with TFE/TSE. Croteam have seemingly decided that they do not want to go back to the roots ever again, and are headstrong to continue iterating on many systems that old school players never really wanted, and now we have even more of these modern systems that have no place in an old school game such as SS.

This time around we even have a talent system, which albeit has some cool things in it, like dual wielding in the main game without modding, but also has questionable things monsters dropping loot or just downright power boosts to your weapons and speed ups for movement. The game also has plethora of weird tool-type items and health packs that you can carry and inject yourself with when low on HP.

Also, the game still penalizes you for exploration, much like in SS3. Points are deducted for staying too long in a level, as well as for saving too many times. This makes completely no sense in a game which should encourage searching for secrets and attempting higher difficulties. Constant quicksaving used to be the staple of these kinds of games back in the day. Actively combatting that just doesn’t feel like a good design choice in my opinion. There are also some technical problems with the game and buggy graphics, but these do not affect me personally too much so I won’t go into detail on those, except maybe the game crashing on cutscenes sometimes with a critical error.

The “Legion System” itself and its implementation was a disappointment for me and kind of killed the whole final level. It’s nothing more than just an endless spawning of minor enemies as long as the big ones are still alive. The whole final battle is essentially you hitting big bio-mechs and khnums from behind soldier lines for like 40 minutes until it triggers a cutscene and progresses to boss battle. You have endlessly spawning ammo for best weapons & hp items at your disposal. Might be the worst final level in any Serious Sam game, including SS2. The boss battle that comes after isn’t the best either. First jumping around the boss using a grappling hook while he fires at you with homing missiles you have no way of seeing and then just pummeling it with a mech, which is way too easy.

All that said it’s not a horrible experience overall. Some improvements on SS3 have been made and I personally prefer SS4 over SS3 any day. Many of the classic enemies are back and some of the newer ones that didn’t work are out. As far as the enemy roster it feels much more classic than SS3 (and obviously SS2, but let’s not mention that game ever again).

The game no longer feels claustrophobic like a huge part of SS3 and even early parts of the classic installments like TFE. However, it feels like the devs overcorrected. Areas don’t feel claustrophobic at all now, but instead are too open and too vast for the numbers of enemies that attack you. You often find yourself running (literally) for minutes before you find an enemy to kill. Don’t get me wrong I like a huge arena with hundreds of mobs but that’s not what’s going on in SS4. It’s just a lot of empty labyrinth running, or traversing a massive open area with occasional pack of monsters to kill. Think Grand Cathedral penultimate open area levels of huge, but instead of 1000 enemies you have like 20. As you progress through the game the hordes of enemies get bigger obviously, but the vast areas of space with nothing to do still persist.

Ark of Napishtim and Oath in Felghana are hands down the worst installments of YS available on Steam, and which one is worse will probably depend on some personal preferences. Ark has lower difficulty boss difficulty and is probably easier overall, but is probably more grindy in a manner that cannot be overcome with skill. Sometimes you will enter another screen and you will find enemies to be multiple levels higher. Sometimes you will find yourself unable to harm them without grinding in the previous spot.

I love the YS series but would recommend playing literally every single YS installment before this.

Absolutely love the YS series, but I would only recommend this if you're a hardcore fan of the franchise who wants to experience the old entries. The game itself is a solid arpg with an okay combat system. The boss encounters however feel bad due to dated graphics which make it hard to navigate and avoid attacks and badly telepgraphed mechanics, which will often leave you with a feeling of disappointment after thinking you've avoided something but the game disagrees and kills you. There's also a lot of randomness and one shot attacks. A boss can be a cakewalk if it randomly decides to use the attack that exposes it to damage twifce in a row, or it can be undoable if it chains an attack that's close to unavoidable 3-4 times. Would definitely not recommend playing this on higher difficulty settings, this is likely to just end in frustration and/or require excessive grinding to even stand a chance.

This isn't PSP port as one might think, so it doesn't have a New Game+ mode, and all the changes from the newer version, such as elixirs giving +10 hp instead of +1. All the challenges and achievements that require you to complete different difficulty levels require playing from scratch every time, and because the game offers no variance at all it just gets boring.

A cool game for Demon Slayer fans, but too expensive for the content it offers. Avoid buying at full price, if possible. This is a major problem because since release there has been no significant discount on this game as far as I'm aware. I would only recommend this to fans of the series.

PROS:
-Easy to learn and fun combat system, similar to that of Ultimate Ninja Storm games
-Cutscenes & video material is cool for Kimetsu fans

CONS:
-Fairly small roster. There is one DLC and another coming but that's an additional cost on top of the 70$
-Story mode ends at Mugen Train and will likely not be extended further.
-Story mode walking content is very bland, there are collectibles but they are spread over a small map that is fully shown to you, feels like an easy chore rather than actual gameplay of any sort.
-Training mode is a cool idea but you quickly realize that every character's training gives you identical tasks, just shuffled.
-Online scene is completely dead and has no matchmaking of any sort, so you're gonna get destroyed by that one guy who plays this 24/7
-No possibility of turning the 2v2 combat gimmick off in versus mode like in Storm, so you are forced to play with assist characters
-No possibility to play controller vs. keyboard locally, which is by design as confirmed by the devs, only controller vs. controller local
-Demon characters are unplayable in most modes, and in versus where they are playable, they can only go solo which means you can't break other people's combos by assist