Wuthering Waves

A timely review for once. I hopped onto the Wuthering Waves train at launch, and I've been playing it a good few hours every day since. I wouldn't normally be so eager to try a new game, but you know how it is with gacha / live service games - every day you're not there, you're falling behind on the curve. Being forced to play daily is a sad thing for any game, but the live service model has proven very successful, so it seems here to stay.

If you want to stop reading early, then all you need to know is that Wuthering Waves is literally the same as Genshin Impact. It can in no way be said they just took inspiration from it. They very blatantly copied most aspects of the game, renamed them, and reskinned them. I am honestly appalled. I do not know what they were thinking with this decision. Surely they didn't hope to just flat out beat Genshin, which is still one of the most popular games in the world, and has multiple years worth of extra development time and content. Maybe they thought people just wanted more of Genshin. That seems like the most reasonable explanation. But let me get into more details on the differences.

In case you don't know Genshin, it's an open-world action JRPG where you have a team of characters where only one is on the field at a time. The characters synergize with each other, incentivizing cycling through all of them instead of staying on your strongest one. As for the differences in Wuthering Waves... On the gacha front, it's almost a 1:1 copy. Same for crafting and leveling. Any differences are not worth mentioning. About 90% of the innovations are in the combat department. Everything else is lifted from Genshin. And honestly, I feel they did a good job with the combat - it rivals or maybe even exceeds Genshin's combat, which is quite the achievement, considering I think Genshin's combat is top-notch.
Wuthering Waves reduces the team size to 3, but each character becomes more complicated. Aside from their skill which is only limited by cooldown, and their ultimate, which is limited by cooldown and energy, each character also gets an intro and outro skill which occur when swapping characters, under the condition that the corresponding energy bar is full. Aerial combat is also slightly improved, with some characters having air attacks, and plunge attacks being possible from even just a basic jump height. There's also a larger emphasis on skill, with dodges being rewarded by a special dodge counter, and interrupting certain enemy actions via a sort of parry staggering them. More interestingly, each character gains an enhanced version of one of their existing abilities or attacks which is charged by some special mechanic unique to that character. This really sets each character apart.
If it just added onto Genshin's combat, Wuthering Waves would most certainly have superior combat, but they're missing my favorite mechanic - the elemental reactions. They do have elements, but aside from a rudimentary resistance and status effect system that you almost never think about, they amount to little more than having differently colored numbers. I'm not even sure why they added them.

I personally place a lot of focus on skill expression in combat, but the sad reality is that gacha games aren't really about that. They need to appeal to a wide audience, which includes casual mobile players. Therefore combat is mostly determined by your stats, not your skill. Sure, you can beat a significantly stronger enemy by being skilled, but the game doesn't expect you to, and the fight will just be against a damage sponge that one-shots you with any hit. In areas where it matters, you'll be on a timer, meaning even the best players won't be able to have their skill compensate for the lack of time investment into building their team.
But worse still is that these games often aren't focused on combat in the first place. Most of the content is exploring the world, collecting thousands of collectibles, and doing hundreds of quests. And this is where Wuthering Waves quickly falls behind. Their story just isn't interesting, and the English dub is terribly directed on top of that.

I'd love to tell you more details about everything, but this review is getting far too long. So, to summarize: Wuthering Waves is a carbon copy of Genshin, but with a worse story, less content, and a different-yet-possibly-better combat system. However, because skill expression doesn't matter in a game oriented towards a wide audience, I must mainly judge this game on the non-combat aspects. And based on those aspects, I find little reason to play this over Genshin. Thus, I can't really recommend it. If you want to play Genshin, go play Genshin. If you want something different, then you won't find it here.
If I had to predict, I would say Wuthering Waves is headed the way of Tower of Fantasy. The population will halve each week, until it almost settles at maybe a few percent of the popularity Genshin has. This will still earn them millions every month, so it will be enough to keep things running, but I doubt it will ever grow into something greater.

Monster Sanctuary

I kind of wanted to like Monster Sanctuary. It's a combination of Pokémon and metroidvania. Clearly a lot more effort has been put into the creature collecting and turn-based combat side of things as opposed to the world exploration, but the way the meroidvania aspect is implemented is quite unique. You see, usually you'd find a powerup in some part of the world that allows you to now get to an area you were previously not able to get to. Here, however, the monsters you collect each come with some ability that can be used outside of combat. So now, exploration is gated by having to first find an area where this monster exists, and then collecting them. It's functionally the same, but it fits very nicely into the world.
I would most certainly not recommend this game for its metroidvania aspects. The platforming and level design are both simple, clearly meant to exist as a somewhat novel way to guide the player to go to one area or another. I can't tell if the game might have been better off without it, because it's easy enough to not really cause any frustrations, but also too easy to not provide any joy in interacting with it.

As for the combat, it's both more deep than I expected, but somehow still lacking. Combat is done with a team of 6, 3 of whom are in play at a time. Each monster has its own basic stats, but also an element its weak to, and a whole skill tree with roughly 100 nodes. The skill tree gives you your abilities, upgrades them, and also gives a whole slew of passive bonuses. As you end up getting about half the nodes, this really gives you a whole lot of customization options for your party, from trying to match your monsters to hit the enemies' weaknesses, to having buffers, debuffers, damage dealers, defenders, and healers. There's also a combo system incentivizing to think about which monsters to attack with first, and 4 pieces of equipment you can give each monster. It's a lot, and this can be either a really good thing, or not so good if you're like me.

You see, I can appreciate the depth of the customization, but there is a problem in the effort-to-payoff ratio. I'm spending more time on customizing my party, choosing skills and equipment for my monsters, and picking the optimal turn order, than I am actually fighting. So much effort goes into being optimal, but then the fights don't really feel all that rewarding for it. And this is not the first game I've had this problem in. I think many games fall into the trap of giving the player more knobs to turn, more systems to interact with, while not considering how fun interacting with those systems is. More isn't necessarily better, because I can't just ignore these systems now that they're in the game, and the game has been balanced with them in mind.
I think deep customization fits when you have only one, or maybe a small party of (up to 4) characters you need to customize. It feels really rewarding seeing these characters become something unique to my vision, possibly different from most everyone who played the game, if only by a little bit. But I just don't have the energy to do it over and over again for tens of characters.

So, is Monster Sanctuary a bad game? I wouldn't say so. But I also wouldn't recommend it, unless you have a lot of time, and wish to spend it on customizing your zoo of monsters. It's polished, has a lot of content, looks nice, and the combat is pretty deep. Still, I feel it's not good enough that I'd be willing to spend so much time on preparing my party instead of playing the game. If that aspect feels like something that's right up your alley, you can give it a try, but for others, I would suggest finding something else.

Crusader Kings III

It's been a bit of a rough month for me, which is part of the reason I've released no reviews. I finally got around to playing Crusader Kings III though. Played it with my friends during the recent free weekend, although Crusader Kings has never really been much of a multiplayer game. Fighting against one another is quick to lead to someone being knocked out of the game, and there aren't a lot of opportunities for co-operative play. Sure you could form an alliance, or invite each other to events, or divvy up the land, but you're not really having too much of an impact on each other.

While I was thinking about what to write about, I went back to read my Crusader Kings II review. I realized not much has changed, so you can go read that, and then return. There definitely are some differences, many possibly arising from the 8 years between the release dates of the two games. I would overall say Crusader Kings III is better, because it just refreshes the game. The UI, graphics, and presentation is more modern, and a lot more accessible. One could argue that the additional accessibility makes the game easier, but I've never felt that difficulty through obtusity is a good thing in any way. A lot of it also comes down to personal preference, or a preference for the old game, because it's already familiar. I definitely think some things have gotten worse, while other things have gotten better. They're still making updates 4 years in, so I have faith there's more improvements to be made yet.

Overall, Crusader Kings III is very similar to its predecessor. A bit too much so, if I were to be honest, where I didn't really get a novel experience playing it. Ultimately, I'm okay with this. I think the game has improved, and making the same thing, but better, is a valid direction for a sequel. To that end, I'd recommend Crusader Kings III just as I recommended its prdecessor. In fact, I'm replacing it in my favorite games of all time list, because I don't see a reason to go back to the old game.

Eronoctosis: Put Yourself Together

A short game this time around. I played it on a whim because it was free, co-op, and promised to be at least somewhat of a fun time. It's Eronoctosis.

It's a two-player co-op horror game that's probably inspired by the old games like Slender. You have to collect a bunch of cauldrons, bring them back to a point, and not get caught by enemies that are chasing you all the while. I'm not entirely sure, but I think each next cauldron makes more enemies spawn. You can't really outrun these enemies, but instead have to work together to defeat them. One holds a flashlight that they must shine on the enemy, and the other holds a camera that must focus on the enemy before it can take a photo and destroy the enemy. While it sounds simple, the timings for these are quite tight, meaning splitting up or miscommunicating can quickly cause enemies to catch up to one player and end the run.

It's not very scary, and it is very short. It took 30 minutes to beat it across 4 attempts, so probably less than 10 minutes for a full run. At least, for the free version. The paid version has 3 more maps, and probably more enemy types, but I didn't play it.
That's about all I have to say. It's charming and well made for the low price of free, but I was hoping for something a bit more original. It's not bad, but there are better co-op and horror games out there, even for free, so I can't really recommend this.

Helldivers 2

How unusual for me, playing these highly popular and newly released games so soon after launch. This time it's Helldivers 2, which caught my eye because it reached nearly half a million concurrent players, and because I almost enjoyed the original Helldivers, which came out nearly a decade ago.

Conceptually, it's the same game. You play in a party of (up to) 4 and drop onto a planet to complete a mission, be it killing a bunch of enemies or gathering stuff (while also coincidentally killing a bunch of enemies). The focus is still on the same goofy stuff - accidentally killing teammates, physics bouncing a grenade off some obscure surface back into your face, or crushing a teammate with a drop pod. But not only has Helldivers 2 expanded into the third dimension, they have added a whole lot of production value to the game to the point it feels close to a AAA game now. For the most part, it's all around a better experience.

Now, about the negatives. There are a lot of problems with network errors and crashes, but I don't want to hold it against the game too much, since I believe they'll be fixed - it's only a matter of time. Still, it currently poses a problem where people will randomly disconnect from your mission (or disconnect you from their their mission) and you won't get a new teammate because their system doesn't like assigning new teammates to existing missions. Don't get me wrong, this absolutely ruins the game at the moment were I not playing with friends who can reconnect at any time, but I believe it will be fixed.
The real problem, I'm afraid, is closer to the central design of the game. This is a third-person shooter about killing hordes of aliens. Sure, the missions are nice, but everyone just wants to kill stuff. Problem is, the design is conflicting, where drawing aggro has no benefits, and a lot of negatives. You do not have enough ammo to kill everything the game throws at you, and so you'll be quickly overwhelmed if you try. No, the real strategy is to ignore as much fighting as possible, running around in circles, splitting up, and trying to sneak objectives between dying.

The core gameplay is fun, and the combat feels good, even if it takes a bit of getting used to. Everything in the game feels like it has real, tangible weight to it, and that's odd if you come from games with very snappy movement, but I learned to absolutely love this feeling. There's also not too much content, but I believe that can all be fixed. If the developers decide to change the design to really encourage combat, which is where this game shines, I think it can become something really enjoyable to play, even if you were to grind the same style of content over and over.

At present, play with an established friend group, and don't feel bad about sticking to lower difficulties if you want to actually have fun and kill the enemies. For players who want to be more dedicated or run solo, I'd advise waiting another few months to a year and hope the game's still alive by then. I hope they'll fix the crashes. I hope they'll change the design to incentivize combat. And I hope they will add more content. I would love to play more of it, but as it stands, I can't quite recommend it.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink

Covering a relative recent game for a change, it's Granblue Fantasy: Relink. I'm always on the lookout for new multiplayer games to play, and I saw this having over 100k concurrent players even weeks after release. I pitched it to my friends, got a couple of them to agree, and so we set off.

For a bit of background, Granblue Fantasy itself is a 10-year-old turn-based mobile gacha game. Relink is nothing similar. It's not available on mobile devices. It's fully action-based. And there are no microtransactions. The characters are the same, and it takes some thematic ideas, but the games are completely different. Relink has you controlling a single character in a party of four. There are a total of about 20 characters, with more on the way, and each character has a unique moveset, as well as a choice of 4 abilities out of 8 (usually). Each character also has several different weapons (stat differences only), as well as a pretty lengthy yet linear skill tree and 12 sigil slots for slotting various powerups.

The game is essentially divided into two parts. The first is the ~20 hour singleplayer campaign which tells you the story and runs you through most of the game's content and mechanics. You can already do some missions on the side in multiplayer as you progress through the campaign, but for most people, the majority of the game is after you've finished the campaign. Basically, you play through isolated encounters of harder and harder versions of the game's content, mostly bossfights, as you evolve your characters on the side. This part is entirely multiplayer, with each person controlling a character, and while you can play it solo with bot teammates, the game heavily recommends you play with others (premades or randoms). It plays quite a bit like Monster Hunter, except without the tedious bits of tracking and chasing the monsters, instead focusing on getting straight to the juicy combat. The combat also just feels better than Monster Hunter, at least in my limited experience, perhaps because of the flashier special abilities all characters have. Overall, it was just a real joy to play. The bossfights, which there were dozens of, were some of the best ones I've ever experienced, and that's already reason enough to recommend it.

Now, this is already 40+ hours in, and well past the end of the campaign, but it does eventually start to settle into a bit of a grind, and not the best kind. Despite the very fun bossfights, I feel the difficulty wasn't balanced all too well. For most of the game up to this point, encounters were never a question of "will I win", but rather "will I get the best grade", so running through them felt like a bit of a chore. Eventually, the missions do get more difficult, but then you're left to farm older missions for resources. Sadly, it's generally not the most difficult missions that give the best rewards that you should be playing over and over again, but the easy ones, which doesn't feel so great. I'd love to just do some of the hardest missions I can until I've progressed enough to move on, but that's not how the drops system works.
In the end, it took me about 70 hours to beat the final boss, and while I was nowhere near maxing out even just one character, I didn't feel like continuing to grind out more progress. Due to only being able to use a single character in combat, there was also little reason to heavily invest or even ever play other characters, which I feel was a missed opportunity, considering how well made most of them were.

Despite most of the game being too easy, and the part that wasn't too easy forcing me to play the not-so-enjoyable content over and over, I must say I still really liked Relink. The quality of the gameplay, the animations, the voice acting (I still wish they'd stop with the annoying high-pitced helper NPC trope), and most importantly the epicness of the bossfights was really, really good. I would recommend at least playing through to the final boss, and maybe if you like the grind more than I did, to see how much further you can take your characters. The harder bosses also have new moves, so there's fresh gameplay for 60 hours, and then grind for another couple hundred hours, if you're so inclinced.
For my final verdict, despite its flaws, this goes onto my list of the best action RPGs I've ever played.

NGU Idle

I got the craving to play an incremental / idle game suddenly, so I looked up what the highest rated ones were on Steam. After Cookie Clicker, which I had already completed, the second highest rated one was NGU Idle, so I took it for a spin.

Somewhat anticlimactically, despite my urge to play an idle game, that urge soon vanished. Not that there was anything wrong with NGU Idle. I just realized that the good feeling of seeing a number go up was countered by the feeling of wasting my time just clicking on things. Kinda silly of me to say that - that's the point of idle games after all, but for a "good" long-lasting idle game, you need a lot of mechanics, a lot of features, a lot of buttons to press. And yet, the act of managing all my various bars and numbers is not quite a full-time enough experience to qualify as playing a game. On the other hand, I still have to put in enough effort that I can't just leave the game running and go do something else without the time spent idling being basically meaningless, at least for the first 90+% of the game.
A similar problem of a system being neither here nor there is that the gameplay is not braindead enough to allow me to do it without any thought at all, e.g. while talking to someone or watching a video, but is also not meaningful enough to make me really think and care about what I'm doing. I need to level things up and click certain buttons eventually, but the exact order in which I do stuff isn't terribly important, so there's no excitement of figuring things out.

Overall, this review isn't about NGU Idle but more about idle games as a whole. I think there's definitely room to "fix" these issues I spoke of, and there are definitely more involved "idle" games out there (though I suppose they wouldn't qualify as idle games then), but I also think some people like them as they are. If I had to say a few words about NGU Idle, then it certainly has a plethora of things to do. The quality of those actions doesn't seem that high, and the look and feel of the game isn't polished (there's no audio at all, for example). Other than that, it's a pretty standard idle game. So if you like idle games in general and like quantity over quality, go try it. As for me, I think I'll skip generic idle games for at least a few more years.

Baldur's Gate 3

I've been wanting to play Baldur's Gate 3 ever since it was announced back in 2019. The developers' previous two games, the Divinity: Original Sin series, were my two favorite turn-based RPGs ever, and considering their success, I was hoping their next game would be even better and more polished. Definitely wrong of me to get hyped, but looking back at it now, it sure delivered, right? Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really require me to say anything about it, as it's one of the most popular and highest rated games of all time now, not just among RPGs. I played through it in co-op with a friend. But what did I think about it?

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that runs in real-time as you move about in the world, but once you switch to combat, everything goes turn-based. It is almost entirely based on the D&D 5e ruleset, and so I dare say has very traditional RPG combat. Thinking about it, I couldn't really highlight any elements of the game that were really unique to it. But then again, with how well everything is executed, it doesn't need to do anything unique to be appreciated.
I do have a problem with how directly it copied the D&D experience. See, D&D is a great tabletop game, because the rules are deep enough to allow for a myriad of different possibilities at the hands of a dungeon master, while being simple enough to be fulfilled by the players and the one running the game. I don't think they're a good fit for a video game though. Despite how many different outcomes and scenarios the developers wrote into this game, a program still doesn't have the creativity of a live person responding to the actions of the player - that is not the strong suit to play for in a video game. Meanwhile, the mechanics of tabletop game are simple due to necessity, not because that's the most interesting option. A video game could do much more by delegating work to a computer, and I feel sticking to closely to the tabletop rules fails to take advantage of that. And I write about this in such detail, because it's by far my biggest problem with the game. I believe that mainly due to this, the gameplay is not fun. It's fun experiencing the story, and finding creative ways to approach the problems it gives you, but I find the combat quite sub-par.

Now, arguably a bigger problem, although one that I don't take as seriously, as it's not deep-rooted and will hopefully be fixed, is how full of bugs the game is. The first act is relatively polished, but acts 2 and especially act 3 is where everything starts to break down. The most jarring problems being quests that are left in broken states, unable to be finished. The worst of that being the main story quest that prevented us from getting to the end of the game. With a bit of cheating through modding we managed to resolve the issue, but I'm quite certain more than 90% of the playerbase could not manage to do so, and would have been forced to start a new game.
Aside from the extra bugs, I found act 3 to be the weakest act overall. This was in part due to the game being far too long in total. When I heard it was a long game, I was expecting 90 hours, not the 150 hours it took us. By act 3, I was already slightly exhausted with the game, and with the quests now just being thrown all over the map with no clear order in which to do them, completing them felt all the more tiresome.

Despite all my negativity, I still liked Baldur's Gate 3. It's just that, as I said, it doesn't really have anything unique to talk about. It's really well made in general (bugs aside), and is the closest thing you could get to a giant, well thought out D&D campaign in a video game. I just feel the focus was too much on the story and the many ways you could go about it. That's not something I care about, and I even believe that the more branches you allow to the story, the less the maximum potential of the story is. Meanwhile the gameplay was quite uninteresting, and even too easy, despite playing on the hardest difficulty (on release, not the new Honor mode). All in all, I would still recommend it to anyone who likes turn-based RPGs, and especially to people who like stories in their RPGs.

Final Fantasy XIV

As the next MMO release is perpetually one year away, I decided to give one of the latest released MMOs a try. Latest being 2010, so almost 1.5 decades ago now, but sadly, that's the state of MMOs these days. I'm talking about Final Fantasy XIV, which I got a bunch of my friends to try out using the free trial.

I'm going to be brief, and just say that it was just about the most disappointing experience I could have had. If I had to name one unique thing about this game, where it showed innovation that MMOs before it didn't do, then I couldn't. Not only was the level up process, questing, exploration, combat, and everything else I could think of, as generic as possible, it was also downright bad.
We started off in a "recommended" server, which doubled all our experience gain. This meant we were always overlevelled for all content, making every encounter in the game trivial all the way up to the end of the trial. An exception was cases where our level would be brought down for doing the content, removing some of our stats and skills, effectively nullifying the point of leveling up in the first place.
The quests were not only very basic, only being "go there and talk to that guy" or "kill X monsters", but they were also placed in the most incovenient manner, where you couldn't even go gather all the quests in an area and then go do them. Most quests were locked behind other quests, and the amount of running back and forth between empty swathes of land (or trash mobs you had no reason to kill) seemed as if it was purposefully done to inconvenience players. Without exaggeration, about 80% of the game was not "gameplay" by my definition. It was running from place to place and reading/skipping dialogue.
Exploration felt nonexistant. No secrets, no collectibles, no areas of note as far as I found. There was no reason and nothing to be gained from running to an area that you weren't asked to go to.
Combat, what should be the most important part of a game like this, was also laughable. Not only was it outdated, it was already outdated in 2010 when the game released. Animations were not synced up to damage, everything just hit air in everyone's general vicinity, abilities couldn't even be queued up, and there wasn't much strategy in selecting which skills to use. Just run through your standard rotations and apply buffs as you can. There was also no customization to your character, as all skills were gained through levels (or quests locked behind levels), allowing no option to specialize in one skill or another. All equipment just gave stats, not requiring any thought what to equip.
And finally, of course the multiplayer was nonexistant. Players are segregated for hours at the start, depending on the class they choose. Content would frequently force you out of your party for some instanced content. Open world content had little reason to be played together, and dungeons, while requiring a party, could also be done with NPCs.

I didn't go in expecting anything I would have actually stuck around with, but I wasn't prepared for how dated the experience felt. To me, it seems like it was around the early 2000s that people realized that the... well... everything this game did, was not a good way to build an MMO. Every other popular MMO I've played that has released around the same time (Tera, Rift, Guild Wars 2) has been way better, and I'm genuinely surprised why FFXIV has been the one to stand. This is not even counting MMOs that have dared to do something different like Runescape or Mabinogi, which were way better. Anyways, not that I could recommend much any MMOs anyways, FFXIV would be just about my last pick, if I absolutely had to pick something. Support innovation instead, and support MMOs doing something different than what they've done for 20 years now.

The Dungeon Beneath

The Dungeon Beneath is a fun little roguelike-like game combined with an auto battler. You have a team of 4 characters and a hero placed on a 2x3 board, and you fight the enemy's hero and whatever minions they fit on their board. There's a good amount of variety in the characters and their special abilities, but especially due to the limited board size, the synergies don't get too crazy nor exciting. The gameplay consists of arranging your team before the battle, and then maybe rearranging some units between each round of battle. The caveat to rearranging mid-battle is that (most) rearranged characters then skip their turn, so for many battles you don't give any input at all. There's about 40 floors, a bit less than half of which are combat encounters, and the rest are shops or treasure rooms for swapping out your party, getting new equipment for them, or something of the sort.

I found the game more fun than I expected, but I find the main problem to be that it lacks replay value. I beat the game on my first try, and then beat New Game+ on my third try. That's not to say it's easy - the victories were quite close and the New Game's go up to at least New Game++++, I believe, which will certianly be more challenging. No, the problem is more that the runs don't differ from each other too much. Sure, you get a different hero, and different artifacts, and you even unlock new units between runs, but the units still feel kind of similar, and while the dungeon is branching and somewhat random, the enemies themselves are always the same. I did a few runs, beat the game twice, and I feel I kind of experienced all the game has to offer in those few hours.

Overall, I'd give this a partial recommendation. It was fun, but nothing amazing. If it was longer, had more enemies or randomized enemies, a larger board, more synergies, or other things that would make it more replayable, I would definitely have liked it more, but as it is now, it's just a bit too unambitious.

Dark Souls III

I finally, finally, got around to playing Dark Souls III. I think this took extra long because I had had enough of the previous two games, so I wasn't even considering playing it for a while. Yet here I am.
I'd hope Dark Souls requires no introduction. It's really a genre-defining game, even if that genre is mostly just "a difficult action RPG". Sure there's also the "convoluted, interconnected level design", and "world state persistence through death" aspects, but at the end of the day it is just an action RPG.

I'm going to be brief today, and mostly refer you to find my review for Dark Souls II. I couldn't get into the third game. I couldn't get into the previous two either, but I think this one was even worse somehow. Perhaps it was the experiences of the previous game still being fresh enough in my mind (it's only been several years after all) combined with this being just... more Dark Souls. Aside from being two years newer, I didn't see much innovation, just new content with a fresh lick of paint.
I'd like to add to what I previously said. I think difficult games have the obligation to be fair. It is important that if you're going to make the player lose, that they feel mostly responsible for that loss. Dark Souls III still hasn't managed to properly port their game to PC, because the keyboard and mouse support isn't of acceptable quality. I do not have sufficient control of my character - I execute certain actions without meaning to. Be those attacks which are triggered by a button combination that has an ambiguous meaning, or the game sometimes not intercepting mouse clicks in menus (so they still perform an attack, plunging me off a cliff or attacking a friendly NPC). There's also issues of enemies hitting you through solid walls, or level geometry making you think you get somewhere, only to be interrupted by invisible walls or bumps, again, causing you to lose. These are not super common occurances, but they happen far more often than I find acceptable, given how punishing such issues are. And I won't repeat what I believe to be persistant issues in level design.

Honestly, my opinion on this isn't really important. I'm happy for what the game has done for the genre, and I know there's plenty of people who enjoy it. Good on them. I find this brand of difficulty to be more frustrating than fun, and I get bored of playing the same content over and over again until I'm perfect at it. Recommending this, or not, is simple. Did you like the previous Dark Souls games? If so, you'll probably like this one. If not, you probably won't like this one. If you haven't played any souls-likes, then maybe the best comparison would be to the more recently popular brand of "difficult" games that you see streamers playing. Getting Over It, Jump King, etc., except instead of being just difficult, with no substance, Dark Souls is the same brand of difficult, but with a lot of substance. Regardless of this, I don't enjoy this kind of difficulty, so I can't recommend it. Perhaps my opinion would be different if the game was of a higher quality, but it isn't.

Fury Unleashed

I was incredibly put off by Fury Unleashed for some reason, as soon as I saw its store page. I think it was the old Flash game art and animation style that caused me to be biased against it. Still, because it had relatively good reviews at the time, I decided to add it to my backlog. Looking at it again now, the reviews had definitely taken a turn for the worse. But what did I think about it?

Fury Unleashed is a platformer shooter. You go between small rooms, evading traps, killing enemies, maybe a boss every now and then. You have a gun, a melee weapon, a special ability, some grenades, nothing unique really. The levels are randomly generated, and there's a focus on fast-paced gameplay - building combos and getting a high score.

Well, truth be told, I didn't get very far, so I can't speak much for the actual depth or difficulty of the game, but I can say that it feels like it looks. The movement and combat is very floaty and does not at all feel expertly made. You can just spam your weapons, you're really mobile, and there doesn't appear to be any weight to neither the attacks nor the movement. The game's also quite zoomed in, as if it was made for a smaller screen, which limits the amount of stuff that can be happening at a time. I wouldn't really say the game feels casual, more like really outdated and cheap. I definitely saw no redeeming qualities in it, so combined with my intial bias, I was quick to toss it aside, and move on to the next game.

So, in short, I think my personal dislike for Fury Unleashed is greater than the game is actually bad, but regardless of that, I can't really see anything unique or particularly well-executed in the game either. It's just another action platformer with an emphasis on speed, which is another thing I personally dislike. In any case, I can't recommend it.

Sea Salt

I think I picked up Sea Salt because of its interesting visuals and the unique concept of controlling a swarm of creatures, instead of just a few of them.
However, interesting concepts do not always translate to interesting games. You see, Sea Salt is a very simple game, with effectively two actions you can do. You can tell your swarm to go to a place, and you can tell your swarm to attack. Considering this, I'm amazed there is no mouse support, as it can be quite annoying to switch directions with how slow your cursor moves with the arrow keys. I guess you can also choose which units you summon, but that's only an action you can do every once in a while. Your swarm handles the pathing, which includes evading obvious danger, except when attacking, then they just diregard their safety to strike. There's various enemies, and numerous bossfights with different mechanics, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to positioning and choosing when to attack, because that's all you can do.

I don't have a lot more to say about this game. There might have been something here if there were more options, both in terms of controlling your army and general things to do. As it stands now, I very quickly got bored of both the simple gameplay, as well as the subpar execution. The AI was dumb enough to constantly force me to question its decisions, be it splitting up the swarm, or focusing the wrong things during attacking. The graphics were perhaps a bit too pixelated and hard on the eyes, and the music, while fitting, wasn't very enjoyable either. Overall, I can not recommend playing it.

Atomicrops

Atomicrops combines twin-stick shooter roguelike gameplay with a farming simulator. It's a game that's visually very exciting. I suppose that's half the reason I picked it up. Looking at the screenshots on the store page, the graphics are quite stylized, and there seems to be a lot going on at the same time. None of that's wrong, but perhaps the busyness of it all is actually a downside.
See, the game gives you a brief tutorial on how to shoot, how to till your fields, plant crops, water them, and then harvest them. That's all fine, but that's a small portion of things that you can do. The game starts off slow with a small patch of land and enemies only appearing at nighttime. It feels manageable, but you quickly realize you can decide to just ditch your land and go to another area to fight enemies instead. You also run out of seeds, because harvested crops don't drop new ones. You don't really know what the right course of action is, and the game doesn't lean you into it either - everything's available straight away, and time is ticking away. Each next day is harder, and each next season is harder, and each next year is harder. Sure, you get some upgrades between all that, but still. So at least I was quicky overwhelmed, trying to juggle somehow getting new seeds, not leaving my farm unattended, planting, watering, harvesting, and defending my crops at the same time, all the while trying to figure out if I might be playing the game entirely wrong.

In the end, after a few failed runs, not that the game expects you to get far at first, I gave up. Part of me feels like I should've stayed for longer to see more of what the game had to offer, but my experience thus far was stressing and confusing, and that's not something I want from a game. I was constantly out of seeds, but I also couldn't go get any because I was always being attacked, and I felt like there was some way to get better crops, but the game didn't teach me any of that, and then every plot of my land was instantly overcome with weeds, or short on water, or in need of tilling, or... You get the point - I always had to do something, and I didn't get much more action speed as the game went on, but I was expected to attend a larger field and defend it from more enemies.

Atomicrops is definitely more of a twin-stick shooter than a farming simulator. I'm not convinced it's a bad game, just a bit unapproachable. So if you're looking for a twin-stick shooter with a twist, then it's possible you'll enjoy Atomicrops. I didn't experience it enough to really tell, so from a personal standpoint I can't recommend it. I couldn't get over trying to do too many things at once, and for a combat-focused game, I can't say I found anything special or particularly enjoyable about the combat either.

Children of Morta

I picked up Children of Morta, which I had sitting in my library for quite a while. I don't remember where I got it from, and I didn't think I'd enjoy a random game, but it turned out to be quite fun, and I'm not even entirely sure why.

Children of Morta is kind of like a mix between an action roguelike and an RPG. The bulk of the game is the campaign, where you run through a series of around nine stages, each comprised of a few randomly generated maps. During a stage, your character gains gold, experience, and items. Items expire at the end of a stage, but can grant powerful active or passive buffs. Experience can be used to upgrade your character on their talent tree, while gold can be used to purchase upgrades for all your characters. You have a total of 7 characters who lore-wise form a family, each playing like a different class. Slow, fast, ranged, melee - something for everyone. There is a minor incentive to actually try different characters, as leveling each gives passive bonuses to all the other ones, and playing one for too long inflicts a debuff on them that decreases as you don't use them.

There is also a more roguelike mode, which does not let you get any upgrades between runs, but makes the runs 13+ maps long, and gives you a a random choice of powerups upon level-up, as well as a lot of currency to purchase and upgrade items at shops that occur every now and then. I found this mode both more fun and more challenging than the main story mode, although there are basically no gameplay differences. It just adds more randomness, and lets you more heavily customize your character with items before the run is up, potentially unlocking very strong combinations.

There's no mechanic that stands out, and I can't say the game's super well made either. I definitely found some smaller bugs, balance issues with certain characters or upgrades being too strong or weak, visual clarity problems, and other imperfections. I think the strong side is the storytelling. The main story actually has a voiced narrator, and the characters have a lot of animations and well-defined personalities that make them feel more alive. Of course, I've never been one to prioritize that too much, so why do I, despite the unimpressive gameplay, like this game? I thought about that for a while, and I actually don't know. Perhaps it helped that I played it in co-op, sticking mostly to ranged characters. Most characters felt too slow for me, some being so immobile and slow to attack while having very few upsides, I wonder why anyone would want to play them at all. I did find one character I really liked who could attack and move at the same time, which caused me to play a lot of the game like a twin-stick shooter instead, but then again, what's stopping anyone else from doing that too, if that is the most fun way to play.

While Children of Morta is far from my favorite action roguelike, it's definitely up there. From a more objective standpoint, I don't think the game's all that good and there are probably similar games out there that are better, but at the end of the day, I liked it. So personally, I would recommend it. It's not super long, not super replayable, not super difficult, but I got a good amount of fun out of it and perhaps you will too.

The Finals

Another recent game for a change, because a friend invited me to play it - it's The Finals, a 3-player-team-based first-person shooter with destructible terrain.
I suppose the reason I agreed to play was because it is free to play, and the low barrier to entry is always nice, but I quickly got bored of it because it really doesn't stand out that much.

There are a couple different game modes, but they're all about collecting, then depositing money, basically like a capture the flag game mode with a slightly modified ruleset. You have a choice of three classes from light to heavy, with heavier classes generally having more health, slower movement speed, and weapons / abilities that are, well, heavier. A light class can, for example, go invisible, use a grappling hook, and use a sniper rifle or submachine gun. A medium class can heal or deploy a jump pad, and has an assault rifle. A heavy class can ram through walls or deploy a barricade, and use a rocket launcher. This is not the full list, as each class has 3 abilities, a couple unique deployables or grenades, as well as the default pool of grenades, and several unique weapons.
Still, having some variety is the baseline minimum I feel a game could do, and with just three classes with abilities that don't majorly define their playstyle and differentiate the gameplay experience, it really just felt like a bland and small round-based shooter. The destructible environment is a cool gimmick, but I don't feel it created many unique or memorable scenarios.

Overall, while The Finals doesn't have any outstanding flaws, it also doesn't have any outstanding qualities. I'm neither for or against FPS-style gameplay, but I don't enjoy most round-based games. So that's the main reason I couldn't recommend The Finals, but even if you were to compare it to any other round-based FPS like Counter-Strike, Overwatch, or Valorant, I don't feel it is in any way better than them, nor different enough to provide a feeling of freshness.

Songbird Symphony

Songbird Symphony is a platformer and a rhythm game. You explore different levels, doing platforming puzzles and collecting some items, and end each level with a rhythm-based boss fight.
I was quickly put off by this game, as it felt a bit too childish for me, with a big focus on the cute and happy art as well as silly lyrics and animations. I've never been too good at rhythm games, and I don't like them a whole lot either, but I still think that the timings of the rhythm bits were quite bad, and the visuals weren't clear if you opted to ignore your ears and follow your eyes instead. Similarly, the platforming seemed quite simplistic, with more time spent trying to figure out where to go than how to complete some part of the platforming.

A short review for a game I didn't spend long playing, but I don't feel like I missed much. The game advertises itself as a metroidvania, and I'm not sure I'd quite agree on that. It's really more of an exploration game, with subpar platforming and rhythm aspects, and probably only enjoyable if you value the style and theme over the gameplay. As for me, it's a most definite no.

Opus Magnum

I'm only 6 years late, but Zachtronics just doesn't miss with their games, and even in all these years, no one has managed to compete with the absoute brilliance that are their puzzle games. I completed Opus Magnum, and while it wasn't my favorite Zachtronics game, I sure as hell enjoyed it.

Opus Magnum is a game about assembling (or sometimes disassembling) compounds from atoms or other compounds. You have an infinite hexagonal grid, arms that can rotate, extend, and move along tracks to move these atoms and compounds around, as well as mechanisms for bonding, unbonding, and altering them.
As usual, there aren't a lot of different mechanics, but they work together very well to create interesting puzzles that have a lot of different solutions. In fact, as far as I know, it is not too difficult to create puzzles with just a single solution, but Zachtronics' games are good, largely because he consistently manages to leave the solutions up to the player's personal creativity.

The reason Opus Magnum is not my favorite from the series, is because the infinite boards give us too much freedom, and make the problems a bit too easy. Of course, having a low skill floor is not too big of an issue, because a big part of Zachtronics games has always been getting high scores on the leaderboards for making good solutions. Still, even in terms of going for high scores, some categories seemed more tedious to set up than difficult to come up with, such as minimal cost solutions, which usually just had one or two arms along some track, and very, very long lines of instructions stashing and retrieving pieces in elaborate ways to prevent collisions.
The appendix was actually space-constrained, and the journal offered more difficult puzzles, but they were not part of the main story, and thus not the bulk of the game.

Regardless of all that, I still heavily enjoyed Opus Magnum. Perhaps due to its lower difficulty, it is the highest rated Zachtronics game, so even if you don't think highly of your puzzle solving capabilities, it would probably be the best Zachtronics game to try, if you were going to try any. I would absolutely recommend it, and I hope to get around to playing the next game in not too long of a time.

Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa

I'm on a roll with these sub-hour games. Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa is a horror game in the same vein as all those really short and badly made ones you saw YouTubers playing for a single video. Perfect for that, since after 30 minutes you'll be done with the game either through completing it, or by having enough of trying to do so. And it relies on cheap jumpscares to get funny reactions. This one's Touhou-themed, so you get anime girls too, oh joy.

Honestly, I didn't have high hopes for this, but I thought it would have at least a little more substance, humor, dialogue, or anything, really. You run around a maze with some rooms, trying to collect 6 books while two 2D sprites chase you in the dark. It takes 5 minutes if you know what you're doing, though as it gets harder with every book, the last ones are quite difficult.
Honestly, it's just bad. I don't like horror games, but that has nothing to do with how low-effort this is. Only the power of memes, anime girls, and cheap horror keeping this afloat, and that ain't enough for me. I'd recommend staying away.

Return.

I probably wouldn't give such a game a try these days, but since it was already in my backlog, I had to play it, and since I already played it, I have to talk about it. It's Return., and it's a free 30 minute platformer about returning an antropomorhic axolotl to life, or something.
It's really basic, with just movement and a tiny little hop you can repeat 3 times. Why they opted for 3 hops instead of a single larger jump, I'm unsure. It was quite unintuitive how to get enough air time at the start, but apparently I just had to mash jump really fast. The game looks like it could have some clever little secret with the progress bar stopping at 2/3 of the way to the finish, but apparently that's just a bug. There's no secrets. You just finish the game, and that's it.

There isn't really anything here to talk about. It's a free game that lasts half an hour. Less if you're good at it. Not that it's particularly challenging. There's no secrets, no branching, no particular story, and no reason to replay it. There's nothing bad about the game per se, but the platforming is just underwhelming enough that it's not even worth checking out, not even for free.