Recent reviews by BONKERS

REQUIRED READING https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MKX5F7TLS3SaEnZZVufLy5zkvNAYpvi5N7kUJOZrnBQ/edit?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&gid=5#gid=5

Super helpful document with quest info, items and other tid bits.

L1+R1+START+SELECT for easy in game reset to title screen. I wish I knew about this before I hit 60+ hours lol.

I'll write an actual review some day when I feel like it. But this game is brutal. And addicting somehow. I love it.

Let's get this out of the way, requiring EGS and an account MP despite having said NOTHING about it pre release is an idiotic decision. Plenty of other games have cross store play without requiring a separate account.

Otherwise aside from that this is the SAME JANK Sandlot has been doing for a few decades now, flat out REFUSING to learn anything from the improvements, QOL features and actual gameplay changes that Yukes and Vicious Cycle brought to the table with IA, IR and WB. Least of all to say the technical improvements they made on a visual and performance level.

While this is the best performing version of EDF Vanilla yet, it still is constantly dropping frames with what I honestly almost expect is because perhaps their frame limiter is targeting 59.94hz instead of 60.xxx (Or you know leaving it arbitrary). According to DXVK's development EDF 4 and 5 those games constantly were turning Vsync on and off on frame presentation https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/2128
Dynamic vsync is still present here where it will occasionally show torn frames like in those games, but not nearly as severe. So who knows why after all this time and money they can't even get something so basic right or learn from the spin off games. Pick those engineer's brains, because you would have to actually try HARD to get IA, IR and WB to drop any frames or stutter at all. They just work flawlessly even the games on UE4, an engine notorious for shader stutter. You can force Vsync off or on through a new GPU driver profile but it still stutters. It's not a GPU issue either, 3080 Ti here and get the same results whether running the game at 1920x1080 or even as high as 4800x2700 (Which only uses roughly 70% of the GPU).
It stutters despite still having PS3 era levels of LOD pop in, super low resolution shadow maps and basic lighting/


They also have removed settings, no option to turn off the god awful SSAO (Which is maybe on par with the quality of SSAO of Crysis from 2007 if you are generous), there's no option to change the HUD size (Stuck with so big we assume you are sitting 10 feet away). Which is something 4.1 offered 10 years ago. While adding some nice new ones like where to put damage counters or turn them off.
A personal gripe for me is Anti Aliasing, like EDF5 they only offer FXAA when 4.1 showed the engine actually supported MSAA (Which was broken and worked in the menus but didn't work in game and was never fixed. You could enhance it on Nvidia GPUs with SGSSAA and see just how GOOD the game could look if Sandlot was competent and spent an actual budget on their games instead of treating each like a low budget expansion) as it would make the game look miles better in motion as there is subpixel information galore everywhere with the wrecked city scape and whatnot.


I'll update the review if they ever update or patch the game or once i've spent 50-100 hours with it like other EDF games.

If you like TD games then this is essential, there is a ton of depth to the game play and a huge incentive to keep replaying the game.
I'll keep this review with my more common [Pros] | [Cons]

[Pros]

• Full controller and KB&M support with separate UI for each. Along with icons for Xbox, Valve and PS controllers.
  
• A New Game + mode that not only adds to the gameplay with increased difficulty, it expands upon the story and offers behind the scenes commentary. Along with an extra Hero Mode (and + ) to make for a ton of replayability.
  
• Excellent writing and characters, even if they are a bit on the brief side.
  
• Excellent art direction and scaling of 2D sprites. This guy knows how you should scale low res sprite work cleanly and how to update that for a higher res version. You get the choice of OG sprites, backgrounds and cutscenes. They both look great.
  
• PSI energy is a unique game mechanic for a TD game.
  
• Good soundtrack with some minor issues.
  
• Battles never drag on too long, which makes it a great game you can just pick up and play for a little at a time without having to invest too much time.
  
• Tons of accessibility and QOL features to reduce the grind after your first playthrough.
  
• The game ranges from just difficulty enough to extremely difficulty on later runs. You control really how much you want to take on and it never feels unfair, you just have to think of the right strategy and experiment! The game freely lets you remake your units skill allotments as you see fit for a small fee.

Cons

• The game crashes. A lot. Thankfully it auto saves your progress constantly. But I probably had 24+ crashes over the course of play. Regardless of whether I used the OpenGL version or the DX11 version of the game.
  
• The graphics can occasionally become corrupted, displaying black squares instead of a sprite or the entire map. Usually this is followed with a crash, but not always.
  
• The game can sometimes become confused if you hot swap between KBM and Controller, displaying hotkeys over controller prompts.
  
• The music looping system needed some kind of crossfade to blend the end/beginning of music loops as the songs are sadly a bit on the short side. Leading to some audible pops and clicks as the end of the audio track doesn't have any time to RT60 before it abruptly goes back to the start.
  
• The codes for the secret skulls are nearly impossible to find without a guide on Steam, and the game doesn't always indicate that you have correctly gotten the input right. (The Konami Code for example).

While my initial experience with this game was a bit iffy, (Hit by infinite loading screen bug very early, stutters with performance that I fixed by using DXVK. Game isn't clear about how many logs exist in each chapter like first game,stupid forced on DLC but not the actual DLC) the more I played it; like the first; the more I wanted to keep playing. It hits it's stride and keeps going.

Also: I cannot state this enough, these games are worth getting an OLED for. IPS and VA displays with their myriad different but equally frustrating problems with very dark content cannot do the horror of the darkness this game portrays justice. In particular, calibrating and using a slightly darker gamma of 2.3 to 2.4 really makes those areas without light or very little appropriately hard to see in and you never know what's going to pop in where. It didn't happen much with the 2nd game, but DS1 is the first game I can recall in maybe 20+ years that actually had my heart racing so much. haha.
Mind you, using an OLED will make more visible a critical flaw in the rendering used in DS1 and 2. In particular the precision of render targets for things like the lighting/HDR/Bloom/etc. There is banding. A LOT of it. If you can deal with it, no big deal. It's not as noticeable on IPS/VA displays because their particular issues prevent it from being as easily visible. They are still there. Alternatively, by using Reshade and a well tweaked Debanding shader (Or your TV's debanding) and some film grain will fix a huge amount of it and looks great.

I do have some minor issues with the story as I feel they didn't quite go as quite in depth in the world building as the first game did. And having some mislabeled logs in the game added to the confusion. Some that were numbered for a certain character but those other logs aren't actually in the game.?
I feel like they chose at the last minute to exclude some things (Seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmySwqKhu-Y )and I think that hurt part of the story a little bit. Like it leaves a few too many threads unturned. Unlocking a bunch of logs after completing the 1st round like in the first game would've been helpful.

Worth 60$? I absolutely think so.
For newcomers, this is a great place to start as well. The game makes a lot of great QOL changes to the formula that Sandlot should absolutely adopt.

However, it can fall into the same trap as all other EDF games once you try to get to higher difficulties at times.

You either have to grind a mind numbingly large amount of time to get better weapons and armor. (In this game mostly armor since Yukes sees the obviously stupid flaws of Weapon pickup crates in Sandlot's games. And reduces that grind a ton. Thank you yukes.)
Or.
You have the best weapons the game will give to you (IE: Level 3 weapons on Hardest in this game), but then the game throws at you enemies (IE: Mission 55) that make the game mechanics completely fall apart.
If you've been playing normally up to this point, your average Brother has probably 2-5000 armor points.
That means nothing as the game will throw waves of enemies that either can kill you in 1-3 hits.
Use those same moves but essentially aimbotting across the entire map (Queen Ant, King Spider).
Or all of the above, AND the enemies attacks can clip through any and all geometry at random so you can't hide at all from the majority of the attacks and you are stuck with pure luck being able to survive. (You are limited by normal working collision detection. Not Ant and Spider attacks. Sometimes they are blocked by geometry. But rarely. And if you think you can out speed them, good luck. Even using a boost from something like Jet Trooper or a Jet Lifter will still get you instantly wall hack killed easily)
Meanwhile the weapons you have available barely put a dent in said enemies. But you can't get anything better because you are locked out by difficulty. (You can't get level 4 weapons unless you play Inferno. Can't unlock Inferno unless you beat Hardest. The one change I don't like that that Sandlot actually got right)
Normally this isn't a problem as you can kite around long enough to kill them. But in missions like 55 (Can you guess i'm salty about it?), that's nearly impossible due to the above problems.
Well you stop and say, well doesn't Royal Brother have a Shield you can deploy? Why yes, and it's extremely helpful against flying enemies and bees (And their stingers) and energy weapons. But Ants and Spiders? Lol, we are back to the typical Wall hack jankiness of those enemies like in Sandlot's games. Almost like it's some kind of feature, not a bug.

That only leaves the awful option of the grind for Armor. While Yukes made some great choices here like in previous spin offs and the amount you can get per mission can be decent comparatively (Sandlot's insistence on not actually improving their game mechanics or QOL features is the bane of my existence and what ultimately kills my enjoyment of EDF games and causes me to get burned out. Having to run around giant maps to pick up armor and weapons. It makes grinding so much worse) it's still an extremely dumb way to pad out the game as you hit extreme difficulty spikes requiring you to farm for more HP. At best if you are lucky Wing Diver/Pale Rider type Sisters/Brothers will get less than 100 armor points per level.


I feel like I could talk about this too long. This is a great game, honestly. It runs smooth as butter, not a single dropped frame unlike Sandlot's badly optimized engine. (And Yukes actually does a decent job of patching what minor issues there are. Unlike Sandlot. For many, EDF 4/5 are nearly unplayable on PC with numerous technical problems)

You don't have to hunt for armor, and Weapon crates. (You just need to win and pick up the Brothers and Sisters in each map. From 2-4) The huge number of playable characters is a huge plus as every one of them feels unique with their own special abilities, pros and cons. Being able to use 4 different characters a ton of fun that adds a lot of variety to how you approach missions.

The characters are a blast and the writing/characters is immensely entertaining. The banter between them is hysterical at times and the 4th wall breaking along with references to each previous game are a great touch. It's akin to Red vs Blue level of fun banter occasionally even! You can listen in English, Chinese, Korean or Japanese.

The soundtrack as usual is A+++ with tons of songs from past EDF games included along with another fun feature many may not notice! Certain songs when playing will add a double of the lead melody with an instrument that changes depending on what Brother or Sister you are using at the moment! It's a lot of fun to stop and listen to the instrument choices! They aren't super advanced or realistic samples, sometimes humorously along the lines of a Korg M1, Roland SC-55 or your average SNES game. But it's a great touch that shows how much love went into this game. I wonder how they implemented this in the game considering the quality of the samples. It almost makes me think it's running a MIDI sequencer in the background just for these instruments! :P

I can't think of many other games more perfect to play on an OLED display so you can experience true darkness and nearly ♥♥♥♥ yourself!

Play on Normal if you are alone. Only play harder difficulties with friends until you can grind to a high enough rank.
Less missions than regular EDF games but make up for it with length. And especially near the end, the amount of ridiculousness you have to put up with.

Simple but absurdly charming game from Falcom's golden era on PC.
Probably one of the best implemented and least intrusive camera of any platform game. It never gets in the way and ruins the game play like a lot of early 3D action platformers. Rotating is easy and the lock on button is super useful in boss fights. Occasionally it can be hard to judge jump distances. But the game is very forgiving.
30FPS here gets weird and drop a bunch of frames and stutters like mad randomly. (Behaves differently whether you use 60hz vsync or 1/2 refresh rate vsync.) But you get it used to it.

You can force really high quality Anti Aliasing on Nvidia cards here:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=5048447&postcount=2959

Alternatively on AMD you can also wrap the game to DX11 with DGVoodoo2 and force MSAA from that. (Beware you may have to spend a little time getting Vsync to work properly without stuttering massively)

Next to Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter EX3 is my #2 SF game. I always wondered why the characters in the EX games didn't show up elsewhere. I didn't realize of course that Arika (Thankfully) not only owned the characters but the incredible music. It's a shame it took so long but this game is fantastic. Easy to pick up and difficult to learn and master but it feels great once you "get it".

The AI can be a bit uneven at times though, sometimes it plays as if it knows every move you will make, and will seem to impossibly block everything you do. And another times it feels like it puts up a fair fight.
Arcade mode's Battle 4 and Battle 8 always seem to turn it up to straight up unfair territory however.

The most frustrating aspect of this port and a lot of UE4 games in general these days are asinine technical limitations when it comes to proper arbitrary resolution support.
The game ALWAYS starts in Borderless Fullscreen for starters, this is bad for a number of reasons. The biggest being Input lag, this is the difference between having discreet control over overall latency and being at the mercy of windows DWM adding up to a frame+ of lag. If you are on Windows 7 and use Aero it will be significantly worse than Windows 10. Frame pacing will be worse among other things.
So when you start the game, you Always need to go into the graphics settings, set it to Borderless and then back to Full Screen.

The second problem being that it does not respect your screen resolution one bit, it's another UE4 game shockingly limited to a small tiny set of resolutions and the game may not even properly detect and use your resolution properly. Leading to ugly scaling, or glitches at resolutions like 4k (If it will even let you set it properly). .INI overrides are a thing of the past in many UE4 games and it's infuriating.
Want better Anti Aliasing and supersample the game from a higher resolution like 4k to 1080p? Even if custom resolutions are set up, or DSR/VSR the game does not respect this and will ALWAYS only run FSE mode in what it detects as "Display native resolution". If you set your desktop to 4k first it will only work in Borderless and that's a hard NOPE.
It doesn't sadly just apply to high resolutions, low resolutions have just as many problems. Just look at the forums with people unable to run the game at their display's native resolution.

Come on Arika! Don't artificially limit the reach of your game for PCs of the future! How can you get something so right like going back in and adding RollBack Netcode and still not just let the engine run and scale at any arbitrarily detected resolution??
Trying any of the unofficial methods out there to inject other resolutions into UE4 games just results in the game crashing. It's a real shame.


There can also be some issues with the music, occasionally if a match has been going on for more than a few minutes the music will bug out and quit playing.


Buy the game because it's worth it , but I hope you can find a way to work properly on your setup.

I could waste a lot of time doing a write up, but I can't articulate how much I love/hate this game.
Even if you only play it once on Normal or Easy, it's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ over the top it's worth experiencing for the story/Sega/Capcom easter eggs alone.
Every single facet of the game holds up incredibly well in 2020.

Beat on: Normal, Hard, Infinite Climax and all 50 achievements.

I will talk about some technical problems though.
Tech talk

• There's no getting around the stutter bug that seems to be prevalent among all Platinum games releases. It's a damn shame that it is such a blemish on the best version of the game out there.
  You can mitigate some of it by setting a custom refresh rate of 59.94hz (Actual) using Custom Resolution Utility. The game will run smooth and won't start getting the recurring stutters until much later than if you were using 60.00Hz. At 60hz the game always stutters out of the gate no matter what and then after a few minutes starts this recurring stutter. At 59.94hz the frame pacing works properly and the major stutter bug will only show up after 30-90 minutes or so. There are minor stutters (Such as when the game has to load things, save a checkpoint or during cutscenes on a camera cut) that are impossible to avoid.
  The game is so well optimized that it's not a huge deal to quit the game and restart it to reset the stutter bug so you rarely see it. On a modern NVMe drive you can quit the game start it back up and be back in game within 30 seconds.
  
  Here's a visualization of the stutter/skipped frame after time has passed
  https://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/droppedframes60hz.jpg
  Look at the top graph. Notice the little white blip every so many frames that goes below the line. That's the stutter.
  
  
• There's no controller remapping. Which kind of sucks if you don't like the scheme here. And I can see that on some stages, especially on Infinite Climax where remapping would be very helpful (and hurt your fingers less).
  
  
• The SSAO is mediocre and is a waste of performance. The game's lighting has a lot of baked in shadows, it all works so well that you really don't need it. And if you force or enhance better Anti Aliasing then SSAO will tank the performance even further.
  
  
• Incredibly well optimized. You can run this at 1080p60 16xAF on a huge range of PC hardware. It's baffling the recent console ports are limited to either 720p,1080p or only 1440p without any Anti Aliasing and very low quality AF.
  
  
• To that point, you can really make this game shine and look incredible on PC, with CG like image quality with an Nvidia GPU. Either Forcing SGSSAA with the flag 0x000012C1 (enable AA fix) using Nvidia Profile Inspector. Or turning on the in game MSAA and using "Enhance application setting" to enhance that with SGSSAA as well as using Nvidia DSR on top. (EX: You use 2.25x or 4x DSR as your resolution and then enhance 2xMSAA in game with 2xSGSSAA and enable driver FXAA on top. This gets you comparable to 8xSGSSAA at native res with better performance. See thread here: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/nvidia-anti-aliasing-guide-updated.357956/page-237#post-5837351
  https://imgsli.com/MTUwNDI
  
  Enhancing is recommended after playing through the entire game with both Forced and Enhanced modes.
  As forcing 8xSGSSAA requires more performance and will eat even an RTX 2080 at 1080p for breakfast. It will hit 60FPS 99% of the time but during bandwidth heavy sequences that aren't gameplay critical it will hammer the GPU and drop a few frames. Most of the time 8xSGSSAA uses 40-60% GPU. Where as 4xDSR+enhanced 2xSGSSAA + FXAA will use slightly similar but lower GPU and never drop frames in the same sequences. Not to mention a lot of the post processing scales with resolution and will look much nicer in the hybrid setup.
  
  The in game MSAA is very welcome as a performance option. As it doesn't require much performance and does a decent job with geometry. However, Bayonetta has a metric ♥♥♥♥ ton of texture,alpha test,shader,specular and sub pixel aliasing that MSAA can't touch.
  
  Here's some more comparisons:
  8xSGSSAA vs Hyrbrid solution
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/6748
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/6749
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/6750
  (These above are based of screenshots of lossy encoded videos so not as sharp as the real thing ^^ )
  Comparable 720p version vs PC with hybrid super sampling at 1080p
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/5805
  Same but at 4k https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/5806 (This is just 2x enhanced SGSSAA+FXAA)
  8xMSAA vs 8xSGSSAA
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/7169
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/7170 (Great example of the huge amount of texture aliasing present in the game.)
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/7171
  https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/7172