Recent reviews by Goldkin

Game's good once it lets you play it, performance issues notwithstanding.

Wilds' take on storytelling is extremely polarizing, and my best advice is to slog through it quickly to high rank if what you want is a functional Monster Hunter title. What story there is is good, the characters are charming, and the cinematography is top notch! But the theme park experience on rails for the first dozen hours or so sucks.

This early experience sours an otherwise excellent game that follows it. Expect to be frequently chastised for walking off to go gather materials, be expositioned on repeatedly without having time to fully digest the plot or build any agency in the world, then be railroaded between story beats without many pauses to actually play the game. It's baffling, because so much of the game's design says "go out there and do stuff", only for the early game to tug your leash back to the plot again and again for no good reason.

Not that the story is bad -- quite the opposite. It's full of vibrant characters, interesting set pieces, and a world brimming with character. Which makes the awful pacing and railroading hit so much harder, doing both the story and the game a significant disservice. It made me want to throw things at the screen instead of enjoy them.

Anyway. Once you clear the first quest in high rank, Wilds plays much better. Story beats start being spaced out openly between hunter rank levels, side quests and events open up, and the whole world becomes explorable without the constant nagging of NPCs to follow the plot. This is where the majority of the game is, and it's frankly wonderful.

My desire in every Monhun game is fairly simple: I want to be able to go out into the world, solo or with friends, find an arbitrary monster, and bonk it until it stops moving and loot pops out. Rinse, repeat. It's a simple, kill-the-wildebeest primal brain loop that keeps me coming back to the series, and it's important to me that that works more than any other feature of the game.

Once you hit high rank, Wilds does that exceedingly well. It compares favorably to some of the better freehunt systems in earlier titles -- think Moga Woods, Expeditions, and the Guiding Lands for those that remember them. And it seamlessly comes together in a satisfying way, since I can walk between regions and bounce between hunts without having to break back to village or wait for loading screens to complete.

That gameplay loop, the core, fundamental hunting system being satisfying, is why this gets a positive review from me. And it will likely also garner hundreds of hours from me for this game in the same way its predecessors did for that fact alone -- hunting feels good here. It's fast, it's fluid, it's refined, and it's easy to pick up and put down when I want to.

So, yeah. If you're like me and wanted it for those reasons: get the story done, then go out into the world and enjoy it. It's a much better game than the first dozen or so hours present it as, and that's what matters the most to me.

It's legally distinct Advance Wars with a stronger infantry game and a fun take on multiplayer.

If you know what that means, you'll have a good understanding of what's going on here. If not, let me explain.

Advance Wars was/is a series by Nintendo dating way back to a game called Famicom Wars. It's a chess-like tactical strategy game that was especially popular in the early 2000s on the GBA and DS (hence, "Advance" Wars, for Game Boy Advance). That is, before it disappeared for a span of 15 years until the 2023 remake, Reboot Camp 1+2.

During that decade-and-a-half dry period, the community came together through fan works and an unofficial online clone called Advance Wars by Web. This community would go on to make maps for each other, play online hotseat games via AWBW, mod the earlier games, and debate (read: half discussion, half flamewar, as is par with strong opinions) on how to expand on missing features.

Athena Crisis is essentially a successor game integrating feedback from that community. What you're buying here is an account and a game client for a web application, with many of the features feeling like direct lifts from forum posts over on AWBW.

Specifically, this means:

1. While the game is Advance Wars themed, it features an expanded unit roster and set of powers not found in those games. This means that while it follows a rock-paper-scissors-like unit balance, the interplay of units is a bit more complex (but not overwhelmingly so). Many of the units are direct lifts and play similarly to their Advance Wars counterparts, but have slight differences in terms of move distance, damage, and other characteristics.

2. The game is multiplatform -- buying it through Steam gets you a license the same as buying it on the website, just with a fancy client to play it from. This means you can play the same account through a web browser or on your phone, but it requires an internet connection to work (other than a preloaded offline campaign).

3. The game includes a map editor and at this writing, has several community and curated campaigns and maps on top of the official ones. These also serve the purpose of divvying out different unit and ability unlocks, which you can then bring into other maps and campaigns.

4. Games can be freely spectated, and there's even an invasion mechanic that drops other players into an existing map. Invasions are manually activated by the game's host, and it's more of a gag than anything else. But the reward is currency that lets you invade more or buy cosmetics from the ingame shop, and that's neat.

Overall, it's pretty great for $20, especially if you were starving for an Advance Wars clone like I was. Outside of that niche, the game probably has more limited appeal. But, I'm happy so far.

Thank goodness you're here! I was looking for someone to write a review for me, about a slapstick, unreasonably English midlander comedy that'll have you saying "aye" before your first cuppa morning tea.

The review, just like the game, won't take you very long. Be sure to tell folks about the recurring slapstick jokes, ranging from those Monty Python blokes' fare to jokes best remembered from the telly. Just be sure to pick up mum's haggis on the way and remind the handyman that I'll have his tools back for him shortish.

Thank you ever so much!

It's launch day for Caves of Qud, so it's probably a good time to give it a review after years of play during Early Access.

Um. Where to start.

Let's say you took a traditional roguelike (as in Rogue). Added a bit of prosaic spice. Made it open-ended and open world. Added more spice. Set it in a post-apoc gammaworld variant somewhat reminiscent of Dune, but with its own character and charm. Added still more linguistic flourish. Gave players increasingly transhuman and lgbt-friendly peoples and lore, alongside other quietly powerful characters and creatures mostly doing their own thing. Still more spice to the language and lore. Then capped it all off with one of the most deep and rich simulations this side of Dwarf Fortress.

Caves of Qud is simultaneously wonderful and alien while being accessible, affirming, and shockingly cozy. There's really nothing else like it in terms of setting, system, or lore, albeit with the steep learning curve quite a few other games in this space happen to have.

Expect to spend a lot of your early time figuring out what the heck everything is around you. While the glyphs that it currently uses are readable and good at describing the general layout of the zone, creatures, and items, figuring out how to differentiate a witchbark from an urberry, and what the properties of each happen to be, is part of the learning curve of the game. Starting small and, if desired, in any of the least permadeath options with the tutorial enabled is a good idea until you get your footing in this strange land.

Unfortunately, this also means that Qud is very difficult to watch and stream. There's a sense of the action that's happening onscreen and what the player is doing, but being able to read and understand each screen is a challenge many have failed to surmount. This led it to being quite obscure through early access, and having been very difficult for multiple streamers I've watched as they tried to share it with their audiences.

Maybe that thaws now that the game is fully released, maybe not. But regardless, if you enjoy mechanically rich, lore-and-prose-heavy, and unreasonably weighty world and setting in your traditional roguelike, give Qud a try.

And as always, be sure to live and drink, friends.

tl;dr, I like and recommend it.

Cursebreaker is an unabashed Old School Runescape (OSRS) clone fused with elements from earlier CRPGs. Its primary focus is its skilling system and limited inventory, which is designed to both get players to explore, set goals for specific skill and quest milestones, and build routines to reach and optimize those goals.

It's an unforgivingly grindy game, and that's kind of the point. The appeal is to build a routine, set a goal you want to achieve, and optimize for it as a puzzle using the tools, world, and resources you find within the setting. Once you do that, the grind kind of falls away in favor of discoveries that bring you closer to those goals and the slow dripfeed of dopamine and serotonin as you complete milestones.

Beyond what makes the game tick, what you have here is a surprisingly well-realized world with fun gimmicks, fairly good writing, and a plot that keeps it running well enough. The sidequests felt much more appealing than the main game, and the areas all felt cozy to find, revisit, quest in, and skill up my character around while I played actively and treated some of its elements as its own idle game.

If all of that sounds appealing and cozy, then this is an easy recommend. But if the idea of spending hours poking at trees and fishing sends you running the other way, then consider giving this one a pass.

Game good. The difficulty curve is a bit uneven, leaning on unfair in certain sections, and could definitely benefit from more playtesting. But what's here is an amazing showing from such a small team and shows a lot of love went into it.

Solid combat upgrade to Prodigal. It's faster-paced, more colorful, and more full of life in every animation, but the social and exploration aspects are largely absent here.

If you preferred the combat over exploration, there's a lot to love here.

The game is presented linearly, with chapter select and NG+ aspects that make it easy to return to previously-explored areas and collect everything. Even though the game is presented top-down, there's a distinct Castlevania vibe this time: the tone is darker, church bells and organs are more prominent in the soundtrack, item and secret pickups are toned to match, and a couple shoutouts to that setting appear in gameplay. It fits the narrative well this time, which is best experienced without spoilers.

If you preferred the exploration and social aspects, there's much less here than in previous installments.

The characters this time are fun to talk to and just as full of life as in Prodigal and Curse Crackers, but there's far fewer to interact with, and the depths of those interactions are limited to exhausting their dialog and small quest chains (plus a few spoilers to discover). The inevitable Dark Souls analogy readily applies here: the game is linear and most of the storytelling is in lore that's picked up over time instead of told through gameplay. That'll likely improve in downstream patches (Colorgrave has a habit of adding significant amounts of extra lore and secrets after release), but the writing felt much less integrated with the story and gameplay this time compared to previous installments.

The gameplay feels much more satisfying to play than in Prodigal, and about as satisfying to speedrun as Curse Crackers.

You're given plenty of tools to play around with, some better explained than others. Just as in Prodigal and Curse Crackers, you can absolutely fly through the game when you know what you're doing, owing to several tools that the developer intended to let you skip or cheese through major sections of the game. This style of letting the player choose how much they want to interact with the combat and puzzles of the game, vs just zooming through, feels incredibly satisfying and is one of my favorite aspects of the games so far. It'll also make for a satisfying item randomizer when the community gets there.

I was less of a fan of finding secrets this time, and some of the story elements confused me in ways that I haven't fully wrapped my head around yet.

There's a quest helper feature in the options menu, which does... something? It would have been nice to make these elements easier to pick up in postgame, and I'm guessing that'll be improved later like it was in Curse Crackers, but it's a bit rough at this writing.

Overall: game good.

I'm still scratching my head on how its lore and technical pieces fit together, but I had a good time playing through, and it's an easy recommend along with the other games in the series so far.

Fun but buggy. Still, I had so much fun playing through and collecting things that it was pretty easy to forgive the bugs right now, especially from a solo developer.

This is a follow-up to the previous delightful platformer collectathon, now with two player and new levels. While some of the collectible bits got repetitive, I really liked the gimmicks to each stage, and really liked the boss encounters. And even though the hitboxes and telegraphs felt off a lot of the time, Renata has so much health that it wasn't really an issue.

Didn't get to test coop play, but it seems like it'd be neat and work well. The camera angle seems to be very tightly constrained to each part of the map to maximize visibility (unless you're speedrunning or going places you're not supposed to), which suits both single and doubles play.

Did have some weirdness with restarts over a death plane resulting in the game showing the loading screen indefinitely. Once I figured out the menu was still there and I could guess where restart was, it was less of an issue, but this should be patched honestly.

Overall: it's fun. If you like old school platformers, it's an easy recommend.

Very rarely review individual DLC, but this is long enough to be a game on its own (much longer and larger in scope than typical Dark Souls expansions). And the tl;dr before anything else is: it's more Elden Ring with better story and writing, so if you liked that, chances are you'll like this as well.

The structure of the DLC is substantively different than the base game however, so I wanted to add my own review to touch on those differences, especially for folks that might not expect or desire some of its changes.

The Good:

* The DLC maps are absolutely gorgeous. Especially compared to the base game, they demonstrate more visual polish, attention to detail, and much more storytelling than is typical of FromSoft, and you can tell a lot of love went into crafting the world.

* The pacing and progression is faster, arguably much better overall. The base game seemed to have a lot of filler areas and bosses written to quota, so reviewers could say "contains hundreds of hours of gameplay" and get that out in ad copy. Without that constraint, most of the set pieces tell their story, give the player their respective lore dumps, and then let the player get on with it without overstaying their welcome or repeating themselves in carbon-copied areas and bosses later. This gives them a lot more individual charm in my opinion.

* The story of the DLC is much more coherent and easy to understand than the base game and previous FromSoft entries. There's still plenty of lore bits to be found and to speculate on, but the main story is actually explained and easier to follow, leaving a lot less guesswork and fan speculation to fill in the gaps. The world also feels a lot more "lived in" instead of being the standard Souls crapsack world where everyone does nothing and is miserable, which makes it much more believable.

* The DLC is largely complementary in terms of build pieces, item availability, and farming options. The new items and gear are great and fun to play around with.


The Bad:

* While the bosses are mostly visually distinct and interesting, their attack patterns and strings of combos lack individual character. Regardless of the boss being vaguely humanoid or a giant hulking monstrosity, most follow a script of 3-4 stage combo, face attack, ranged attack, phase two, ultimate attack, without much variation or individuality. This leads to fights that largely blend together and aren't terribly memorable.

Yes, we like this style of boss and expect a few of them, but printing them over and over again makes them less impactful. Though if you like that style of boss, there'll be plenty of them in jolly cooperation I suppose.

That said, there were several smaller bosses with more individual character that I liked more (the mausoleum bosses especially, plus one on main story), so they exist. But the more varied bosses seem to have been relegated to minor optional content instead of fights most players will face.

* While the DLC looks at first glance to be an open world, progression is exceptionally linear compared to the base game.

Travel between regions is either an affair of following the main story graces or finding obscure hidden paths that you're not likely to stumble upon without a soapstone hint or walkthrough. Travel between regions that looks reasonable from the map is almost always meticulously blocked off in some way, forcing the intended solution by the developers (unless one results to speedrun tech).

This approach to "no fun allowed" open world progression just plain sucks. Exploration does get rewarded with a ton of optional items and cool little story beats, so there's stuff to do, but it feels more like a maze run than having freedom to explore. NPC stories are, at least, much less easy to break because of the linear progression (kind of similar to DS3 DLC for those who've played it).

* Crafting is still boring, and filling my inventory with crafting ingredients is similarly boring. Bell bearing vendors mitigate this, but having to do that work instead of just buying consumables off of a merchant still feels clunky and not fun.


The Highly Technical and Extremely Dubious:

* Hitboxes, animation timings, gamepad input speeds, and overall performance are all over the place right now. This may get improved via patch, but given FromSoft is generally light touch on such fixes, hard to say. Expect mods to fill the gaps.

An especially big middle finger send-up for dodge timings being dependent on framerate, and FPS caps being largely uncontrollable as of DS1 remake and base Elden Ring. The timing windows are much better than when FromSoft first introduced this feature, but it's still supremely frustrating to know you hit a dodge window or attack cleanly and have it fail to connect because of uncontrollable frame delays and performance drops. My rig is an overpowered monstrosity, so it's not my particular setup causing these either.

This is a highly technical gripe, but it comes up far too often with enemies having lingering hitboxes on their attacks much more of the time in the DLC. Seriously FromSoft, hire someone from the fighting game scene to clean this up and give us technical breakdowns of frame data and hitboxes, it would do a world of good.

* Occasionally the game will just lag uncontrollably for a full minute, similar to problems folks had with the base game. This seems to largely be caused by a raytracing and visual bug with the game, but it's annoying this hasn't been fully fixed this far after the original release. (Others are reporting this, so it's not unique to my particular setup.)

* Seriously, just look up a walkthrough if you can't access an area of the map. Aimlessly traveling around for an hour trying to find a way over only to discover the "shortcut" you need is highly missable or practically requires a guide sucks, especially if you can see the place you want to go. I get that this is so they can pace story and bosses along those routes, but putting them in big arena fights instead would have been fine, and having multiple ways to get somewhere like in the base game also would have worked out.


Overall? It's alright. It's a good expansion to a good game, it values player time slightly better, its story beats are great, and its rough edges can be sanded off by dipping into a guide when you need to. Series fans will loudly proclaim it's a 10/10, and I'm sure it'll garner a war chest of awards by end of year. But ignoring that noise, it's about a 7 or an 8 in my opinion, and that's good enough to pick it up.

If the phrase "Ultimate Chicken Horse, except kart racing" appeals to you, stop reading right now and buy the game. It's exactly that, and it's incredibly fun to play.

If you have no idea what I'm on about: Make Way is a party game where you construct a track then race on it against your friends, enemies, frenemies, or bots. Play sessions are generally pretty short for a full 4-player lobby (around 10 minutes), and after playing this a bit with friends and solo, it deserves high enough marks for a recommend.

There are some issues with it, however:
* The game doesn't explain itself or its controls especially well for newcomers.
* Its couch and online coop both have input detection issues, frequently detecting multiple devices on the same machine.
* The game can be somewhat unstable with larger maps and control layouts. Not terribly so, but we had it crash during couch play on the Steam Deck, and Proton was possibly at fault there.

But these are all bits of tarnish on an otherwise fun and short party game. Still a recommend, especially on sale.