Recent reviews by Mentality

It's a neat little game. It's a very simple stat management game with a few cg's and lazy bad endings. The game really doesn't present as much of a tragic atmosphere as the store page would leave you to believe, and the translation is pretty damn lackluster with typos and engrish everywhere. I wish they held back a little on the sexual stuff until further into the game, there's really not enough foreplay and it starts too fast.

But Liz is very cute and the game does a good job getting you attached to her. I went on a cg hunt and the true intellect ending hits hardest despite being the least lewd. I recommend only doing it after you get the other endings. The contrast between it and them helps make it more impactful.

Please implement a one-handed control scheme.

Lame story, lame characters, lame world, lame races, lame progression, lame ost. Virtually everything about this game is dull past the first few hours.

First up is the boring presentation. Racing games from the past used to have so much style and flare in everything they did, from the menu UI and SFX, to the soundtrack, to the artsyle. This game, on the other hand, as virtually none of that. You can certainly tell that this is a Microsoft game because the menus are all very flat and boring with bland, minimalistic sfx and the metro style UI that the company tends to be so fond of these days. The soundtrack has a few good pieces that are mostly relegated to the Horizon XS radio channel, and the rest is boring fluff that you'll forget as soon as you turn off the game.

Next is the story. Or, more appropriately, the lack of one thereof. You show up, and you just kind of do random things throughout the entire game. There's no real cutscenes after the start of the game, no storyline tying everything together. There's the occasional "story mission" that has you do relatively "unique" missions in them (ie. here's a few waypoints to go to) but these are very few in number and they're pretty much reserved for when you're setting up a new festival checkpoint. In other words, there are about six or seven in the entire game.

The characters are extremely bland and uninteresting. There is not a single one who's name I can remember after putting nearly 50 hours into the game. This doesn't even feel like Mexico. It's a bunch of "wholesome" millenial hipsters constantly talking about how much they care about nothing but family and cars. In the Horizon world, Mexico is comprised 90% of individuals with ear-grating british accents, and 10% comprised of obvious Americans who occasionally speak Spanish in the middle of their sentence. There was also that one Aussie who shows up out of nowhere at some point with his extremely exaggerated accent. They were willing to add "accessibility" option in (the otherwise non-existent) character customization like pronouns/prosthetics because that was easy and nets them free brownie points, yet adding any standout aspect of Mexican culture that I would've liked to see gets tossed to the side because these people aren't actually so considerate as they want you to think. Even the music, something about Mexico that people tend to easily default to, barely even seems to be a factor outside of one specific menu that you barely interact with. I don't care about diversity quotas or any of that crap; but Microsoft constantly claims to. I'm frequently told that the point of things like that is to make their worlds feel "real," yet that's not at all what I got from this. "Mexico" feels tacked on to this game forcefully because the devs wanted to add in a few Mayan temples. Other than that, there's no reason any of this couldn't have taken place in some generic American countryside. Also, everybody acts so soulless all the time, with not a single interesting trait to their personalities. One of the most standout examples of this was the jockey of the Vaporwave radio station. Filled with annoying dialogue about how #Relatable she is to the all the #Gamers out there.

Luckily, nobody seems to care if you're racist to the British, so I'll say this: You would hear significantly fewer complaints from me if you outright scrubbed them from the game.

I think one of the biggest thing that kills the game's experience for me is it's "progression." You start off with a Ferrari, a Bronco, and a Supra right off the bat. They are your literal starter cars. That's insane. On top of this, you constantly get handed luxury vehicles left and right through missions that hand them to you for free, and through the roulette system. It deflates any enthusiasm to continue because I already have an insanely fancy supercar straight from the beginning. If I have this, why would I care about some c or b grade sedan? Starting off with boring cars is insanely important for games like this, yet the game doesn't even allow you to look forward to what's coming unless there's one very specific vehicle you came to the game for in the first place.

Luckily, that was the case for me. I went straight to the Hot Wheels DLC, got far enough to unlock my Deora II before promptly ignoring the rest of it and going back into the base game. Pretty much sailed smoothly through the game with said Deora II because I know what I came here for, and it's not the Bone Rattler.

On the topic of the cars themselves, something that's worth mentioning is the atrocious quantity of DLC for the game. It's a pretty mid experience when you pay $50 for the Ultra Supreme Hyper Deluxe Edition or whatever the hell the most expensive bundle is called, just to click on a relatively cool car in the car shop and be asked "Hey kid, you wanna buy this DLC?" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I thought I already did! What did the the fifty bucks go to, again?

I will say, the car customization was very enjoyable. I souped up my Deora II for S-class races and tinkered with things like the tire pressure, to get it as good as it could be above it's recommended spec. I painted it black, put some decals across, and put my waifu on the side of it. And I was very fond of this experience, looking back. They have a "test track" that basically allows you to roam the entire overworld without having to deal with any traffic, while allowing you to change just about everything about your car on the fly. This part of the game felt very well thought out, and I wish the rest of it got as much attention.

This was initially supposed to be a small, mixed review with a reluctant recommendation. Despite this, I couldn't stop writing my full thoughts, as I'm prone to doing whenever I write one of these. If I could, I'd rate it a 3-star despite it being a plainly bad game, because I really did get a lot of enjoyment out of all the ways I customized my Deora. Unfortunately, Steam took away more detailed review scores a long time ago, so I am forced to go with the more unbiased perspective of telling you to look elsewhere for your racing kicks. The genre is pretty lacking in a lot of ways right now, so I have no idea where you'll get your kicks. But I doubt it'll be here unless you simply have low standards(something that, admittedly, describes a great deal of Steam users). I'm not even really a car buff, and I'm constantly told that this is the defacto "normie" racing game. Yet I received almost no enjoyment out of it and have been met with pretty harsh buyer's remorse.

But on the other hand, it has the Deora II. And that's pretty neat.

Strong recommend for any civilized individual.

Some aspects of the translation are pretty sketchy, though.

So, it's been a bit over half a year since this game launched. It's been a very positive experience, with thankfully more ups than downs. And I have a lot of thoughts. It's not every day I write a more long-form review about a game while actually recommending it, but I feel that I've put enough time and attention towards Palworld; to the point that'd it be a waste for me to not get my thoughts across.

The overall designs of the Pals are great, and range anywhere from cute to breedable badass. My favorites are Lamball, Bellanoir, and Kingpaca. Jormuntide, Astegon, Menasting, Helzephyr, and Lovander Nox are some others. There are a few unappealing stinkers like Verdash, but most of them are pretty consistently solid and remind of those older designs from Pokemon before the 3DS era, where their quality started to fall short of my expectations. A complaint I do have about the Paldeck at large, however, is one of bloat; there are so many Dark-types. It feels like every other encounter with a new Pal was a Dark-type of some sort. The game has eight other types, but it's very clear to see that some degree of favoritism is going on. If it exists, there's about a 30% chance that it's Dark-type. Is it not Dark-type? Then give it a subspecies and make THAT one Dark-type. Most of my favorite Pals are Dark because there's so many of them and they all have some pretty damn badass designs. I like to have a balanced team comprised of many different types, and this issue screws with me. Please introduce more variety. Please.

I have no doubt that this is because many designs are pretty blatantly inspired by them. Make no mistake, this is a good thing; Palworld SHOULD be ripping off the good things about Pokemon. There was a lot of drama from Nintendo fanboys around the time of the game's release, but anybody who actually thinks Palworld even remotely poses a threat to Game Freak is delusional because the actually gameplay is so radically different. I've fallen out of Pokemon because it deteriorated so much in quality, and it's interesting to see so many Pokemon fans on Twitter who have so little confidence in a brand that they've deemed to be so important to them. It really makes you think.

The quality of the islands you can explore pretty wildly varies. You can tell that a lot of the earlier areas got more care and attention put into their landscape, and into the dozens upon dozens of varied Pal species that you can find within each one of them. As opposed to some the later ones, which range from very flat and non-detailed, to just a plain nuisance to travel without a flying mount. They also generally tend to suffer a lot in terms of how interesting they are to explore, because there's virtually no interesting loot and most of them have the same 3 to 4 Pal species dotted across the entire landscape.

An extra detail I'd like to mention is that Pals out in the wild don't really do anything. They just kind of wander around randomly upon spawning. I really want them to react more to their environment. I want to see flying Pals perched on trees, and I'd love to see some Relaxaurus preying on Pengullet like you see in the trailers. The game actually doesn't really give you anything more than wild Pals eating the corpses of deceased ones that have already been killed. Two species will sometimes wander into each other's proximity, but they rarely react in any meaningful way.

There are some things I'd like to mention about the tower bosses. To be frank, Pocketpair is absolutely slaying it with the female designs. Zoe, Lily, and Saya are all incredibly cute. But I wish they were more in the way of detailed characters. The game has some journal entries lying around in the game and some of those said journals are focused on them, but I'd like to interact with them in a way that involves more than just fighting them for about 10 minutes and then promptly forgetting that they exist. I want to know more about their personalities, and why they're in the circumstances that they're are. I want to know why their organizations are warring with each other, and maybe bring them to heel. I definitely have a few ideas of all the things I'd love to do to with Zoe if she were to ever visit my base after I befriended her.

I understand that this is a survival/crafting game and that grinding is inevitable. I don't necessarily mind, it can be fun sometimes. But one thing I hate is exactly HOW grindy it gets once you're in endgame, especially after the latest update. Gathering important resources is an absolute slog. You will play for dozens of hours before any substantial progress is seen, in the most tedious and repetitive ways imaginable. Some of these things definitely need to be reworked in the future, because it just gets incredibly boring after a while. It feels more like busywork than anything else.

Speaking of the latest update, I will say that progress on the game has been pretty slow in terms of new content being introduced. I'm hoping this doesn't continue to be the case and that all this time spent fixing bugs and issues with the mechanics isn't a sign that we will constantly be waiting in half-year intervals for new reason and opportunites to actually to play the game. In terms of any new locations to explore, the newest Sakurajima island is pretty small and there's only really the newly added oil rig beyond that. The latter of these two is something that you will become especially tired of seeing over time, because there will be MANY repeated visits for the sake of grinding oil at any suitable rate. I also find the latest armor to visually unappealing, and I would love to have some way of customizing it in game to my liking ionstead of relying on external mods to make my character look cool. I do like the fact that there is now a skin feature to customize your Pals with. There currently only seems to be one, but I'm hoping that the devs either add a crap ton of them in the future or at least open them up so that the modding community can easily add it's own.

Overall, I recommend this video game. I love monster collecting, but I'm not the most fond of craft/survival. I have 200 hours in Palworld, however, and have have unlocked all 31 achievements. I have completed the Paldeck, beat every boss, bred many Pals, and built about 20 different bases. The amount of obsession I have experienced at the hands of this game is pretty insane. It's pretty easy to tell why this game is in Early Access at times, but it has a great deal of strengths and I'm hoping it's rougher aspects get smoothed out moving.

Recently, Palworld announced that they were partnering with Sony of all companies to "enhance their global brand," or whatever. I'm not about to be all doom-and-gloom about the game over it, but It's always a shame to hear about any activity having to do with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ company like Sony. I'm sorry for your loss, Pocketpair. We saw how Arrowhead got screwed over by Sony's enforced policies, and I'm hoping that you don't get similar treatment. You have something very good going here; don't screw it up just to chase after the mainstream appeal that you've already acquired.

Just give me a damn Lamball plush, already.

I have often contemplated how to put what I'm about to say into words. I have thought a long time about this game, and my feelings on it. It has been over a year, at the time of writing, since the game initially released. And my opinion towards it has shifted over time.

"It's not a great game but it has some brights spots and I hope for improvement."

This is arguably the most popular cope of the average Sonic fan. And I initially possessed it myself when looking at Frontiers. However, as time went on, both the good and bad parts started to look worse.

How much I actually get across, depends on Steam's character limits.
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Let's begin with the writing, centered around one individual by the name of Ian Flynn.

One thing I can say with confidence, is that he is absolutely the wrong writer for this series. And that I am absolutely amazed that he has been hyped up to hell and back by the fanbase that claims to want improvements in that regard.

There is some good to discuss:

Tails' writing flaws from prior games are addressed. The insecure fox who would develop strengths during older games, just to revert during modern ones is now recontextualized into him being a young boy who's growing up and making mistakes in the process. Knuckles' friendly rivalry with Sonic returns, and laments that his life has never fully been his own. Something that his experiences with Sonic have helped him to realize.

However, Amy's interactions range from being nothing to absolutely butchered. Her charm from prior games was that she was simply a normal girl; one who looked up to Sonic as a love interest and inspired her to makes strides in her own life for his sake. She had no powers, no magical abilities. Just a heart that was as big as her hammer. This game, however, does it's best to change that: Suddenly, she is now a psychic that draws Tarot Cards to hover in midair and predict the future. Her iconic hammer barely makes an appearance. When met with a response from Sonic that she doesn't like, she antagonizes him. In the update DLC, she even has the "strong independent woman" speech, insisting that she does what she does out of competition towards him rather than admiration and love for him. The cute innocent girl with a heart of gold is replaced with someone arrogant and self-serving, and it's extremely off-putting. Do not let a westerner write your female character, folks.

Sonic's attitude from the 90's and early 2000's has been lacking for quite some time now in the series, and I'm sad to say that this game is no different despite the change in writer. Ian Flynn has his writing roots in the comic industry, and it shows. Sonic's personality was largely apathetic with sass. He was no superhero who did what he did out of some sense of heroic righteousness; merely a fun loving hothead who would often clash with Eggman because he genuinely enjoyed it and found it fun. Between these moments he would eat chili-dogs, and lazily take naps because he was bored without an adventure to set out on. In stark contrast, Ian Flynn's depiction IS that of a contemporary superhero. He's an everyman with little in the way of spice to his dialogue. He exists as the sterotypical golden boy who is there for everyone but himself. Even when interacting with others, he's there as the fold to give everyone else his wisdom and help them on the path that Ian Flynn wanted them to go down. This can work for many characters in media, like Superman. But it is not Sonic, and it does not feel like I'm listening to Sonic. I want his snarky and laid-back personality to return. And Frontiers does not give me that.

There are so many forced references to prior games when they don't make any sense. It's not occasional. It's frequent. To the point that it basically plagues every other cutscene. There was one point where the game delivers a half-baked acknowledgement of Tangle, a character from the comic books written by Flynn. Because the man just can't resist tossing in his OC that nobody cares about, and making them canon to the mainline entries in at least the vaguest way possible.

I'm not a fan of the plot. I will spoil nothing here, but I will say this: It explores the origins of the Chaos Emeralds. There are two problems with this. One, it ruins the mystery of the Emeralds and makes them significantly less interesting as a result. Two, it does it with the biggest wet fart possible. You will gather a vague idea of what the story is going for very early on, and yes: It's exactly what you'll think it is. The "lore" of the Sonic universe is prioritized here, to the game's detriment.

Overall, is it an improvement compared to the slop from prior entries, Generations and onward? I would argue it's not. Almost any change here is garbage: They merely substituted the self-aware diaper humor with something bland and uninspired. The minor justice they do with Tails, Knuckles are compensated for by the lack of attention towards Sonic and the butchering of Amy. The highlight of the writing involves Eggman and Sage, but I would easily sacrifice those moments to get rid of the others that the game introduces. Any advantages are eclipsed by it's downsides.
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Next up is the actual gameplay.

The open world isn't great. Basically, there are five islands, and every one of these islands except one serves as a marathon where you do tedious platforming challenges and collect items for completing them. It's mostly boring, but Sonic is at his fastest here so it's sufferable.

The cyberspace levels are horrible. They are absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and anyone should feel ashamed for saying otherwise. I am amazed that the devs looked at them and thought to themselves that this was enjoyable enough to leave in the full release. Many of the stages are themed after one of three environments: Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and (for some reason) generic unspecified city locale. In terms of actual stage design, many are just worse versions of stages from previous games. For example, imagine SA2's White Jungle, but worse and with a Green Hill coat of paint. To add insult to injury, Sonic feels slow as molasses and didn't have any momentum until an update added it in retroactively. Running forward or to the side makes Sonic run at the pace of a light jog, and boosting barely even speeds you up.

The game's "combat" plays-at it's best-like a geriatric Devil May Cry, with none of the complexity or depth. You have an RPG-like leveling system where you gain more moves as you play, but most of them couldn't matter less. Just unlock the quick cyloop, and the game practically plays itself. If that's not braindead enough, just hold L+R. You'll get a free parry that can be held for an infinite time until an enemy tries to hit you and gets punished for it. I'm not joking; they took a mechanic famous in other games for rewarding precise inputs, and turned it into an instant win button. Incredibly comedic in it's potential for abuse.

The bosses that you hear and see everyone cooming over online are entirely carried by their soundtracks. They just play basically the same way every other fight in the game pans out: You spam the most powerful attack you have, with the occasional flashy QTE between those moments. Then the boss has a cutscene at the middle of the fight, after which you pretend that there's something interesting going on for about 2 more minutes before the boss dies. The best boss fight is Knight, hands down. Because the fight makes you think about how you approach him for at least five seconds.
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To be honest, I think this is my last Sonic game. Mania was a drop in the bucket. Frontiers is horrible. Superstars recently came out, and it's the worst 2D game in the series. The last fun 3D Sonic game was Generations back in 2011. Sega/Sonic Team clearly do not know what they're doing. As a long-time Sonic fan, I feel like I've been chasing a ghost for over a decade, and I'm tired. I'm not waiting another 12 years for something enjoyable.

I have mixed feelings about this game. On one hand, the character customization is top notch, the graphical style is relatively unique, and the game controls well. On the other, it's story is uninteresting, it's design is bogged down by numerous questionable design choices, and it contains a difficulty "curve" that equates to climbing up a cliff then jumping back off of it.

Most of the enemies and bosses are jokes. 90% of the time, you'll see any enemy that looks intimidating just to think "Wow, that was it?" to yourself by the end, which will generally take about 3 seconds. The other 10% of the time, you'll be faced with mundane nuisances that serve more as a test of patience than skill. The former unfortunately made up the bulk of the game, boring me in the process. The latter generally involves the game throwing a wave of enemies at you with no consideration as to how these enemies actually function together. Dark Souls often feels hard but fair during a first play-through, while Code Vein can often feel cheap with it's approach in contrast.

The bosses were one of the most disappointing aspects. Most of them were piss easy; I died to each of them once or twice at most. Several times, I achieved easy wins by simply having the boss target me while my partner dealt all the damage. Speaking of partners, the game was clearly designed with them in mind. This is a problem for three reasons. #1: Some partners are clearly better than others. #2: Your reliance upon them means that their inconsistent AI can sometimes screw you over. #3: Boss difficulty is balanced by having your partners draw some of their ire. They either produce AOE attacks that you can't reliably get through, or have attacks with both minimal wind-up and cooldown. It is certainly not impossible to do a solo run, but you have your work cut out for you. Not in a "difficult but reasonable" sort of way, either. It's more of a "I'm going to sit here for the next 10 minutes, slowly chipping away at this damage sponge" sort of situation. On the other end, most of these bosses are easily cheesed merely by having one of the better partners with you.

Stat customization is EXTREMELY shallow. What little can be influenced is mostly influenced by your weapon and armor alone. Leveling up increases the same stats every time, and by a paltry amount per level. Blood Codes fill this hole in the customization in theory, but none of them ever really felt distinct from one another in practice. The most they ever offer you is unique active and passive abilities, which also never really felt like they did much outside of the occasional damage-dealing projectile.

English VA's were horrible and off-putting. As is usual with Japanese produced games, they don't capture the emotions that the context of the story should give. I switched to Japanese VA's with English subs about twenty minutes into the game, because I just couldn't take it anymore. I don't actually understand Japanese aside from the occasional Arigato, so I can't criticize or praise the Japanese VA's. I did, ultimately, find them much more sufferable.

Also, ♥♥♥♥ the City of Falling Flames. Mandatory damage, fire walls with bloated hitboxes, crowds of fast enemies huddled together, and your partner AI refusing to provide needed revivals because of said fast enemies keeping them too busy to do so. Everything wrong about the game merged into one area.

Gameplay: 4/10, for reasons listed above.
Controls: 9/10. I saw other negative reviews mention them, but I personally had few problems.
Graphics: 9/10. Art-style is great, and I really dig the early 2000's style edge. Really nice vibe.
Music: 7/10. It's just okay. Don't really remember much of it.
Stability: 2/10. I experienced one crash a significant distance away from a Mistle. Elevators wouldn't function properly and take me to my destination without temporarily lowering the max FPS to 60. It once gave me a blue screen near the beginning of my play-through, forcing me to repair Windows with a USB and reinstall Discord, because it was broken and wouldn't launch. There is no excuse for these issues, especially so many years after this game's initial release.

Overall, I'd give it a 4/10. It's closer to DS2 in quality than 1 or 3. The best part is the character creator at the beginning. The actual game part of this game, though, is incredibly mediocre. If you're so desperate for a new Souls-like that you'll even play a paltry one, get this on sale. A good sale. I'd say it's worth 10 bucks at most, and that's WITH the DLC. Don't pay more than three bucks for that garbage.

If you look at the most popular reviews on the store page, it's full of people giving it undue praise, or the usual unhelpful ones screaming about anime titty and how much they like it. Don't get it twisted, I like titty as much as the next guy, and there's no crime against enjoying flawed games for whatever personal reasons you may have. I genuinely don't understand how Code Vein ever receives it's praise, though, and it's concerning to see so many people ignoring it's faults outright. Steam reviewers just have lower standards, I guess.

It is a shame. That character creator is REALLY good.

Edited in on January 12th, 2023:
Hey, this review is gaining traction and there is one more thing I've found out about. It may be important for people to know, since a lot of eyes seem to be catching this.

It turns out, this game has Denuvo. This is not clarified on the Code Vein store page: You can only find out about it by reading the Terms of Service. You know, that thing you never read because it's long and filled with legal mumbo-jumbo that you probably don't understand.

So yeah, add it to the long list of reasons not to buy this game. It sucks, I was too easy on it.