Recent reviews by SeeBeeOss

Great ports of the DS originals. Two amazing Castlevania games in one, and then Order of Ecclesia.

The most fun I've had playing a game in a long time.

Cool game but not optimised for people like myself who primarily game on the couch using a TV and controller.

- No UI scaling. I sit about 5 metres away from a 60inch 4k display and much of the text is next to impossible to read.
- Feels awful to play with a controller. Skills either don't lock on properly or seem to randomly fire in a different direction to where you expect / have tilted the stick. And navigating the UI is so bad that I ended up playing with a wireless trackpad on my lap.

I refunded and will not be purchasing until these issues are fixed.

I can not get my head around this game. Maybe its just not for me.

I love Metroidvanias. I love platformers. I love difficult games. This is all three of those so I should love it, but they don't blend together in way that's fun for me. Platforming sequences that require pixel perfect execution, with enemies that do contact damage, where you have three or less hit points, and where failure sends you back to your last *manual* save? That's an anti-pattern for a Metroidvania, which is supposed to encourage taking risks and exploration.

Its a shame because the visuals and music are genuinely breathtaking. It's clear to me that's doing a lot of the heaving lifting here and giving a badly designed game much more attention than it deserves.

An excellent little Metroidvania that I enjoyed quite a bit.

- Great sound design. The general sound effects of the game are somewhat muted, such that the beautiful music really stands out and provides an ethereal, almost dream like experience.
- Snappy, responsive movement with reliable i-frame dodging and counterattacking.
- Challenging but fair soulslike combat, that hits just the right level of difficulty where you never feel like you're blazing through it, but nothing is ever so insurmountable so as to cause frustration. Same goes for the bosses.
- Great level design that encourages exploration.
- The map manages to be both helpful and unhelpful in the right ways - you get a sense of how the stages fit together, but because it isn't a 1-2-1 representation there's a sense of mystery in each stage that will surprise you and hide secrets. I also liked that it tells you if you've found everything in a given room - it made backtracking after finding new powers quite fun.

There are only a few minor things that I didn't like:
- Visuals are hit and miss. Generally I like the hand-drawn look but some of the animations are a bit janky.
- Levelling system is absolutely redundant and adds nothing to the game.
- The spirits are a cool idea, but most feel like an afterthought. I never found myself wanting to use any others than the ones you get from the main bosses. Also, as they're mapped to three face buttons, you have to toggle between two sets which is awkward. Some of them don't even work properly - for example the ones that have you summon a minion will cause the minion to disappear if you switch set.

Lmao what a monumental ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a game.

Of the 9 times I launched this game, 8 of them ended in a crash. And every single session was littered with performance issues despite my mid-high end machine. We're talking freezes every minute of 5 seconds or more, and general jankiness throughout. The first settlement you reach is almost unplayable with the amount of lag.

Also, what the heck kind of third-person action game released after 2015 doesn't have native controller support?

Tutorial boxes are blank and, upon reading online, would require some messing around with my controller settings to work.

Nah, you’re alright. Sort your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game out, lmao.

It's a difficult choice, but I've decided that "Not Recommended" is sadly my rating for this game.

On the surface, this game looks, sounds, feels and plays fantastic. The way they've perfectly captured the aesthetic of old-school SNES action RPGs (It reminds me a lot of Terrinigma), whilst also being cognizant of modern design principles is an incredible achievement. You can tell how much passion has gone into this project.

So why the negative review? One word - pacing. Pacing is really important in games, especially one as long as this. You've got to delicately balance the players time between flow states where you're going through the motions and doing something fun, whilst ensuring that there's just enough variety to alleviate the risk of boredom. Too much variety, though, or too many interruptions to those flow states, makes the game feel tedious and frustrating, like it's constantly right on the precipice of being fun but struggling to get there. That last part? That's how playing CrossCode feels.

Right at the start of the game, after the tutorials, I'm thrust into the gameworld proper - a beautiful, autumnal forest. I'm enjoying the overworld combat, which is challenging but feels fair, at least at first. Because a couple of screens later - that's not even 30 minutes into what I consider to be the true "start" of the game - enemies are starting to feel a little too spongy, and I'm dying more than I feel I should. After throwing myself at it over and over and realising that it can't just be that I suck, I turn to Reddit who instruct me to check my gear. Unfortunately, upgrading my gear involves going through a tedious and unintuitive trading system in which you need to find twigs and acorns and other crap to trade for screws and apples which you can then trade for armour and weapons. Its utterly ridiculous that not 30 minutes into the game, I'm already having to grind for new equipment just to keep pace with standard enemies. And sadly, it seems like each new area is exactly like that - wander in, get totally wrecked, TP out and grind in the previous area until you can pass the gear check, repeat.

I powered on to the first real dungeon of the game - about 5 hours in - where I enjoyed the puzzles...at least at first. The first dungeon, without any exaggeration, contains more puzzles than the first Portal game, though sadly not anywhere near as fun or interesting. I've not finished it yet, but apparently its about two hours long! There are some fights interspersed between the relentless onslaught of puzzles, but there's not nearly enough to counteract the sheer tedium of having to do your 5th sliding block puzzle in a row.

All in all, the game just left me feeling exhausted and frustrated more than anything, wishing constantly that it would stop trying so hard to get in its own way. It feels like a Kojima game, except if he enjoyed puzzles rather than long cutscenes. And apparently the whole 50+ hour game is like that - meaning that I can only guess that at least half of that is grinding and slogging through boring puzzles.

Got this on Switch on launch day and have 50 hours. Double-dipped on PC for the expansion and plan to do at least another 50 more. There's so much variety and depth here that changing to a different weapon can feel like an entirely new game.

Its worth pointing out that this shouldn't be thought of as a successor to the equally fantastic Monster Hunter World. They are both completely different games outside of sharing some core mechanics. World is a true next-gen title, with significantly better visuals and a focus on immersion and world-building, whereas this game is more of a throwback to the classic Monster Hunter experience. What little story there is serves only as an excuse for you to go out and kill stuff via its fantastic combat. It's faster paced and arguably more fun than World - the introduction of Wirebugs allow you to zip around the much more open and vertical maps (hence the name "Rise", and give you a number of new moves in combat, many of which are customisable to your playstyle.

Having said that, I do sometimes miss World. Not only for it's far superior visuals, but for its immersion. It did a great job of making it truly feel like you were discovering a strange new land & its inhabitants for the first time; I loved the loop with each new Monster in which you'd get a lead from your research team, track down clues, and then finally come face to face with it, then with each subsequent encounter learning even more about its behaviors and weaknesses. The whole thing was a bit slower and more methodical, and it made the game world just feel a bit more alive - you could genuinely sit and watch these Monsters go about their business and interact with one another, they felt like real creatures rather than just another boss encounter to kill and wear its skin as armour to help you kill its friends.

But hey - the core of these games is the combat, and as I said, I think Rise edges out on World here for sure. Hopefully the next big entry in the series will be a blend of both.