Recent reviews by tay

THE staple of roguelike deckbuilers, Slay the Spire has consumed my heart and my soul. I've easily put hundreds more hours on this game on other platforms, it is one of my favorite games of all time. It's extremely addicting to get better at continuously changing and improving a deck, whilst also playing that deck over and over against a wide variety of enemies. The soundtrack is great, and the artstyle is so captivating. I love that you have to make important decisions that could shape your run over and over and over, and I've been sucked into analysing my decision making and improving my understanding of math and probability to hopefully make me a better player. I've really come onto my own at high difficulties when I realised that it's much more valuable to think about decisions through the lens of needing to be able to beat many specific fights as the game is so short, rather that thinking of appealing to certain archetypes. Suffice to say, you can really no-life this game, and I think you should give the game a try even if you wouldn't want to do that.

This game is crack, I love it to bits. It's undoubtedly my favorite game.

Very unique kind of game, and I find playing it was challenging but pretty fun. I don't think I'll have the time to sink in enough hours to consistently win runs, or even win my first run (the difficulty floor seems very steep to me), but I'll always enjoy myself win or lose because I love deckbuilders and OSFE allows for you to think for ages about optimal play. That's the case when it comes to mechanical skill in playing fights moment to moment or with established card game theory (pathing, draw, energy, building an engine, managing currency, etc).

Extremely fun and responsive gunplay that you can tailor to become extremely difficult if you so desire. The sounds and the guns and the enemy design are very doom inspired and I personally find playing endlessly satisfying. The control over the builds you can make, whilst not really changing what you'll be doing which is always shooting enemies and shooting them in their weakspots (the only exception I could think of is buffing your melee damage), is still enjoyable enough. It's fun click on the items that increase your damage. I haven't yet felt like the decisions I've been making have been difficult, as in there's never been nuance between the options I have where it feels like if I had superior knowledge on how the game works I'd be able to squeeze some extra value of the choice, it's always felt relatively straightforward what the best option is. Maybe that's enjoyable to some however, which is perfectly valid, and there is always a chance that as I continue along my journey to beating every mission on Nightmare I would appreciate the gun/perk/item system more.

I wouldn't play this game for the story, I think it was very simple, but yet the main character's voice actor really allowed me to enjoy hearing his lines over and over, and I sympathised with him. Overall the story/setting allowed for an in universe reason why enemies got harder as the game progressed, allowed for organic moments where you could be tutorialised for something or another, and never really was in the way.

I hope more game devs take notes of Deadzone Rogue, because I suddenly find myself wanting to play more roguelike FPSes. 10/10 experience.

Terrible latency on multiplayer + frustrating controls + jank physics puzzles = An experience I wouldn't recommend. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the game at parts in spite of what I think are shortcomings because of the ability to cooperate with friends. For anyone considering playing the game for the first time if you have joint problems in your fingers know if you don't rebind m1 and m2 you will be holding those buttons for long periods of time whilst dragging the mouse around to puppet the player character. It could could hand or wrist strain.

Minor spoilers for the games theme's below.

The noexistencen of you and me is a visual novel that tries to have a deep message but to me comes across as shallow. The game wants to sell me truths like "people often have secrets", "in fictional stories you choose to immerse yourself in a world that isnt real" and "people often have their own subjective experiences about events" as somehow being profound never before heard of observations, but they're not. A child knows of these things. Additionally, whilst playing you get constantly reminded you are playing a game and that I should always be thinking about the fact that I am playing a game, but that just ruins my interest in learning about the characters and in caring about what happens next. Does the game want me to care about Lilith or not? Odd choice for a visual novel, if I don't see this world as real or these characters as alive, then I am not invested, then I feel nothing as things happen. If I am reminded that this is purely a work of fiction that satirises dating sims where nothing important will happen whether I continue reading or I don't, then I think you have royally messed up as a story teller because eventually the player will just believe it and stop playing.

I should also note that this game was clearly made for a cn audience, and the english localization is pretty clunky at times. It's fine when there's simple back and forth dialogue but as soon as the themes of the game are being explained to you I found some of the dialogue to be very difficult to understand. Here's an except from the first 5 mins of the game "The existence of certain cakes is not known to people in a literal sense, yet their very being points to the existence of other cakes in a symbolic way—that is, the belief in the existence of ovens serves as faith or a hypothesis for the existence of time machines (and an inexplicable motive at that) experienced by people.". This is meaningless. I have zero guesses as to what this paragraph means. It could be a moot point as to whether or not it matters that I understand the words being put in front of me in a different game, but I don't think it is in this case because I think in a visual novel that's trying to explore how we perceive stories you should be presented with legible sentences.

Sometimes I think I'm truly pathetic, but it ALWAYS makes me feel better to remember the BHVR dev team exists

約束された勝利の剣エクスカリバー——！

Got gifted this game and whilst I thought this would be another flavour of the month type of game that seems to be becoming a trend as of late, this game was certainly a lot more deep than that. I don't know if its the scale, or the length of expeditions but I found myself genuinely immersed in climbing the mountain with my friends. When I started I was joyful and optimistic, when I started getting injured I did my best to keep up without feeling like a burden on this person who depended on me, and I him, but eventually when we both died it felt like a true sombre end to a multi hour climb.

Now I imagine there's much more to the game, if you're interested in playing optimally it feels like there's a lot of depth in item decision making and pathing that could take you many many hours to master, but what I got out of the game was a very new and interesting way to bond with my friends. Would recommend, and even if I'd have paid full price I'd have felt for how cheap the base price of the game is it was money well spent.

I love Helldivers 2, but I can't recommend it in it's current state. The atmosphere, worldbuilding, and feeling of being part of an elite military branch is really sold to you, and the design of the enemy factions are sublime. Its audio design stands out to me, too.. The soundtrack and sound effects do a great job of heightening the atmosphere. Unfortunately, I play games to master them, and I feel like the buggy nature of the game ruins any feeling of improving my tactical and mechanical skills. Deaths often feel unfair and not like a mistake on my part. Bugs/design issues I can think of on the top of my head include (not exhaustive)...
- Explosions knocking you back through walls and terrain.
- Damage inconsistently causing knockback, and knockback causing huge "impact" damage that can one-shot you depending on random slope or terrain factors.
- Additionally, you cannot heal when being ragdolled due to knockback.
- Stealth being unreliable — enemies can call reinforcements even when unalerted and far away, and they can do so long after engagements have started, which prolongs fights.
- Enemy hulk corpses have massive hitboxes that block your shots, but not enemies'.
- Enemies don't pathfind around factory strider or hulk corpses, and they will often get stuck in them and shoot you through them.
- Some dead corpses can be bugged and a point on their body will be stretched into infinity, which is super distracting.
- Ally body parts can go invisible, removing their player marker and making them easy to accidental friendly fire.
- Stratagems bouncing off seemingly random pieces of terrain to then land in places you don't want them to be.
- Stratagem menu or sprinting being completely impossible mid mission or from the start of a mission, which can cost you an operation (quite rare, only happens about once every thirty times I open the game).
- And finally, the randomness of the amount of difficult enemy spawns. I sometimes play missions that have a relatively large amount of natural heavy spawns over others, or missions where I have a lot of factory striders spawn from bot drops. I wouldn't be sure how to make enemy spawns feel more fair or enemy reinforcement "aggression" being more deterministic without giving the player too much power, and I don't at all have a problem of randomness being in games period, but this serves to further the feeling of playing where I feel like my agency is removed from me and I simply have moments where I feel screwed over.
Furthermore, I find the progression to be pure mindless grinding, and supercredits in particular are very hard to come by, which pressures you into buying microtransactions. Personally, I don't even think microtransactions should exist in a game that base costs £34 without any dlc included.
I want to recommend this game. I enjoy playing it. I'm happy the devs continue to add cool content and weapons, along with occasional bugfixes. But until the devs fix the foundational issues of buggy gameplay and having mission success feel less out of my control than I would like, this feels to me less like a satisfying hoarde shooter and more like a frustrating endurance test. Your success should never hinge on whether the physics engine flips a coin in your favor.
Just buy Deep Rock atm. Arrowhead ily.