Recent reviews by iriyap

"A brawl is surely brewing, you're up!"

I want to talk a bit about the difficulty, because it can be a little overwhelming at first and might scare off newcomers, but the game is actually not that hard, it just throws you into the thick of it while you're still learning the controls and how the game is meant to be played.

By which I mean, it's a boss rush game, there's no "beginning area" where you can fool around, it immediately opens up with a multi-stage boss fight pelting you with projectiles. In addition, the default control scheme is a little strange, to say the least. I recommend rebinding right away to e.g. LT = aim lock, RT = shoot, X = dash, A = jump.

Granted, there are 2 side-scrolling levels with no bosses per each world, but they're paced like Ghouls 'n Ghosts stages with constantly respawning enemies and deadly hazards. While the rest of the game is elaborate boss fights with many phases.

Is it harder than Dark Souls? Yes, you can't level up, there's no healing, no OP builds, you die in 3 hits. The game plays more like the classic run & guns like Contra Hard Corps, Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier, except there's virtually no punishment for death, aside from restarting from the first phase.

There's a shop where you spend coins to buy a variety of weapons, e.g. a spread shot for close range combat, a charge shot a la Mega Man for potentially the highest damage but you'll need to constantly charge it and aim well. You can carry two weapons into battle and swap between them. There are also passive charms, most people will probably settle on the smoke bomb which adds i-frames to your dash. If you own the DLC, you can immediately visit the DLC area to unlock an additional character who has 1 more HP and a few extra moves (such as double jump and dash parry) to make the base game a little easier.

In conclusion, you'll get your face smashed in when you start, that's normal, don't rush to refund the game, because 15 minutes later you'll be dabbing on bosses once you get used to how the game plays. I wouldn't say it's a try hard game, I'm pushing 40 and awful at games, and I'm doing just fine (cleared the first two worlds in 5 hours and 50 deaths). If you're able-bodied and don't have anger issues, you can beat this game and have a lot of fun doing it!

No spoilers.

Finally beat the game, it's around 60-70 hours long if you complete the majority of side content, which is all of excellent quality. There are whole optional areas with handcrafted level design and unique assets, completely new enemies and bosses that do not appear anywhere else. The level of effort that went into this game is honestly extremely impressive.

If you enjoy RPGs with gripping and emotional stories, you'll love this. If you enjoy high octane action games with tough bosses. you'll love this. Yes, this is a turn-based game, but you don't just stand there, you need to dodge or parry enemy attacks, else you'll take a lot of damage. They later switch it up by adding jumping as well as super attacks that must be parried with another button and a different timing. The game will always keep you on your toes. It's amazing how a simple addition of the Sekiro style parries/counters can make your typical "X dudes in a row" JRPG combat so incredibly engaging.

But does it get stale, you ask? You'll figure out the timing and then just press the same buttons over and over? Nuh-uh, every new area has new enemies. The only repeats are pretty much just the overworld encounters (when you travel between the areas on the world map). The attacks are all greatly varied, e.g. early on it can be a 3 hit combo where each hit gets progressively faster, then a 5 hit combo with a required jump in the middle. Ground waves, explosions, wide swings that must be parried by the whole party (and then the entire party counters back with a cool animation and a truck load of damage, which is incredibly satisfying).

But that's not all, the graphics, the animations, the voice acting, the music are all so well done. The music! They recorded over 8 hours of beautiful music with numerous vocal tracks performed by an opera singer singing in French, English and Latin. Just when you think, okay I've probably seen everything, the game can't surprise me anymore, and then it does! You'll enter a new area and it's as majestic as Elden Ring's royal capital and has a mesmerizing soundtrack.

The dialog! People talk like normal people, there are no exposition dumps, no ham-fisted moralizing, everyone comes off as natural and very real. People talk over each other even! The English voices are great, the female lead is voiced by the same actress (Jennifer English) as Shadowheart from Baldur's Gate 3. And there are also French voices, which I'll use for my next playthrough.

This game is a lightning in a bottle, and these kinds of games only come out once in a blue moon, so do not miss out on it! Highly recommended.

The hookshot mechanic just doesn't work well with this camera and controls. It's fine in earlier levels where you can stop and aim carefully, but later on you need to chain multiple shots over bottomless pits and it's a complete crapshoot whether it works or not.

The game has multiple levels of elevation, but you can't aim up or down, you can only shoot straight in front of you, and the camera is zoomed out and almost isometric (though you can rotate it freely), so it's just very hard to aim this thing with any precision. It seems like the developer also realized this, and there's a bunch of band-aid solutions like auto-aim and 45° snapping, however the 45° snapping prevents you from shooting off-center which is required for some jumps, whereas the auto-aim can make you target a nearby enemy instead of say the spring you need to hit mid-jump, so you just die.

I'm a platformer nut and play a lot of these games, so I was genuinely trying to give it my best shot (hah), but you can't really 'git gud' at this. You just turn on auto-aim, nudge the joystick in that general direction and hope for the best. Oh and make sure not to miss the specific level of elevation, shoot too soon or too late and you die. This game requires both speed and precision but the controls do not provide it which results in a frustrating experience. Say you need to hit a switch, but your aim was like 5° off so you hit the wall instead and your character pulls up to it and dies.

Apart from this major fundamental issue, the game is fine and very cute. The PSX-like graphics are done rather well and the sound effects and music are all on point.

I'm conflicted about this game. It's heavily inspired by A Hat in Time, which is one of my favorite games, the base moveset is very similar (double jump, wall climb, dash) and the swappable horns act exactly like the hats (the first two sets even have the same exact functions). 3D collectathon platformers are also a rather rare beast, and this one comes with great production values (as opposed to all those N64/PSX inspired indie platformers), it runs on Unreal Engine 4, has RTX reflections and the worlds are very spacious and detailed. And overall, it's just a fun game with a lot of content to chew through, and a great soundtrack to boot.

But there are some fundamental flaws.

First off, the obvious one, the humor and themes. While this game might play like A Hat in Time or Super Mario Odyssey, the setting and writing are much closer to something like Postal 2 or Happy Tree Friends. It opens with the MC rubbing one out. There are nazi turds and flying vaginas shooting tampons. It's very crass. There's gratuitous gore and animal cruelty. The reason it took me until now to finally give this game a chance is because I'm not a fan of these themes, and I'd assume a lot of people would also find them off-putting. It's not all piss and vomit though, there are a lot of cool moments as well (e.g. drug trip level where you shotgun high af raptors to a catchy vaporwave track, 80's rave level set in a jungle cave, French restaurant with a critic to please a la Ratatouille), which is frustrating because I feel like this game could really shine if it reeled back the toilet humor just a bit. And yes, it's much more gross than Conker's Bad Fur Day, in case you were wondering if that's a good point of comparison, it's not.

Second, the main gameplay gimmick that sets this game apart from other 3D platformers is this cherub chained to the MC. You can swing him around as a melee attack, but more importantly he can be used as a hookshot. Except anywhere, in the thin air. Okay, you think, so that's like an extra jump. But you can do it multiple times, up to 5 (!) times once upgraded. And this is in addition to your double jump, air dash and a spin attack that also acts like an extra jump (a la Jak and Daxter). What all of this means is that you can ignore 80% of the platforming, and just fly everywhere. There is very little challenge, you just gain height and look for collectibles. The swings aren't even on a cooldown, touching the ground once instantly restores them all, so you can fly off again. This kind of moveset is just too powerful and trivializes the game completely.

All that said, I still had a lot of fun 100%'ing the game, so I'm giving it a thumbs up, but it's a flawed experience.

Go tell Aunt Rhody,
Go tell Aunt Rhody,
Go tell Aunt Rhody,
That everybody's dead.

Resident Evil 7 is very different from the other games in the series. Most Resident Evil games offer a good mix of both horror and action, while in RE7 they went all out on horror. Which means a lot of walking through dark and cramped environments, a lot of jump scares, various chase and stealth sections. It's a lot more like Silent Hill and P.T. The story and setting are very different as well, it's basically Texas Chain Saw Massacre meets J-horror, and the connections to Umbrella, bioweapons and other RE mainstays are minimal. And finally, it's a first person game, and the protagonist is very slow and sluggish, which does does add to the horror factor, but can also be frustrating.

You do get weapons after a rather prolonged intro, but the combat mechanics are rather weak. Your movement speed is greatly reduced when strafing or moving backwards, so if you want to make some space between yourself and the enemy, you have to turn around first before you can start sprinting. And since it's a first person game, you now can't see what the enemy is doing. But that's when you have the room to maneuver, because a lot of the time you don't, so you just try to get off as many shots as you can before the enemy closes the gap, and then block. Blocking is rather overpowered, and reduces all sources of damage by 75%. There's no timing element to it either, you just hold down a button.

To be perfectly honest, this game took me some time to get used to, as I was expecting something more like the RE2 and RE4 remakes. But once I did, I was able to enjoy it on its own terms. The American South setting, the Baker family and their past and present, are all very fleshed out, and the game can be very immersive. There's a fair amount of puzzles and inventory management, similar to other RE games. So it's not that different in the end, once you get used to the new camera perspective and the redneck setting.

Cons wise, the game does eventually devolve into a corridor shooter in its later parts when you leave the Baker estate, and those parts are rather monotonous due to the weak combat mechanics and very low enemy variety. There's also a pointless Bioshock style "choice" about 2/3 in (don't pick Z, you'll get a bad non-canon ending hours later).

The DLC is all excellent, and each one features completely new mechanics, enemies and story content. I highly recommend them all. Just don't look up the store descriptions or promo materials, as there are spoilers.

It's not that bad. If you want more of RE2 and Raccoon City, this will do nicely. But that's all it is, a 6 hour long DLC for RE2, sold as a standalone game. I'm not going to complain about many things from the original game not being present in this remake. Reimaginings are fine in my book, but there's simply not enough content here, and 6 hours is not an exaggeration. Capcom spent a lot of money on the RE2 and RE4 remakes and they're amazing 10/10 games, but RE3 got the short end of the stick, and while this remake is a fun action romp, it's over way too soon.

There aren't even any bonus modes or side missions, just the main campaign. Granted, there are 5 difficulty modes and various unlockables to offer some replayability, but most players probably won't care to grind those out.

In short, play the RE2 and RE4 remakes first, and if you still want more, grab this on sale.

This game is a lightning in a bottle moment and won't be surpassed by anyone for a long time. A must play for both CRPG fans as well as newcomers. Insane amounts of reactivity in both dialog and combat, you can replay this game over and over and still find new stuff. The budget is through the roof and even random unimportant NPC's with 3 lines of dialog are fully voiced and mocapped. You can drink a potion and talk to any animal, and they all have defined personalities. The combat has a lot of physics interactions, you can play a barbarian and throw anything for damage, including other enemies. There's virtually no filler and all encounters are handcrafted. This is the kind of RPG we dreamed about when we played Dragon Age: Origins back in the late 2000's.

Whether you enjoy Tunic or not hinges on the following question: do you think it's clever when a game hides vital mechanics behind unintuitive button combinations and doesn't tell you about them until hours later? You could level up and fast travel right from the start, but the button inputs are so unconventional, you'll never figure them out until after you find a developer message that explicitly tells you how to do it.

The same design philosophy permeates the whole game. Oh, you unlocked a shortcut that leads back to a checkpoint. Except you didn't unlock it, it's a false wall that's been there all along, but you have to bump into it for 2 sec to go through, so you wouldn't have found it. Some people think it's clever, personally I just felt cheated, it's forced frustration, the developer is just messing with you. It's like an elaborate prank.

This design culminates in the end game where they tell you that the whole game actually had The Witness style pattern recognition puzzles all along, they just never told you about them or how to engage with them, so now you need to backtrack everywhere and solve them all in order to get an ending that doesn't suck. And instead of playing a cute Zelda-like you're now scribbling things on paper, and feeding ~20 inputs to the game, one room at a time. After looking up just how insanely tedious the final puzzle was, I gave up and moved on.

Significantly worse performance than the base game, constant stutters when moving through open world areas, and any time there are big particle effects (which is every boss fight) your frame rate will tank.

This was my first Darksiders game, so I dived in with no expectations, but ended up really enjoying it. The user rating is really unfair in my opinion, this is a pretty nice and polished game, although not without flaws.

It's not really a souls-like either, there are only some superficial elements, like the "bonfires" you respawn at, the "estus" like healing, animation commitment (can be turned off via the "classic" mode, which I recommend). The game has a 2 weapon combat system, you fight with the whip + one of the 4 elemental weapons (dual chains/fire, spear/lightning, hammer/gravity and dual swords/ice), and there's also a chakram/glaive as your sole ranged option. The combat is much faster paced than Souls and there's a lot of combo potential, e.g. you can do Scorpion's "get over here" thing (from Mortal Kombat) to catch an enemy with your whip and then juggle them. You can also jump, stomp, do charged attacks, and there's even a Devil Trigger like super transformation.

You can't block and the dodge is just a short dodge step, no rolling. The only defensive option is the dodge counter a la Bayonetta/Oneechanbara. You dodge at the last second, the game slows down and you press one of the attack buttons to counter, which deals a lot of damage and has very satisfying animations. This also usually breaks the enemy's combo, thus making a lot of 1v1 fights quite easy. Just bait the first hit, then counter and go ham.

However, the combat system shows its flaws when it comes to group fights. The game loves spamming large groups of fast enemies and even with the whip's wide, sweeping hitboxes it's still easy to get overwhelmed and chain stunlocked, as you can't really dodge counter when surrounded by multiple enemies, so you kind of just pull back and mash. The camera is not the best either, it's too low when locked on, with Fury partially obscuring the opponent.

The enemies hit hard and it's possible to get 2 shot, especially early on when you're low level and don't have any upgrades, however the game offers a plethora of difficulty options to accommodate all skill levels (but none of them will let you just button mash through the game, you still have to counter). I recommend playing on balanced (aka normal) + classic mode (you can dodge cancel your attacks).

There are a lot of boss fights, but none of them are too hard, except for maybe Lust who's a double boss fight very similar to Ornstein & Smough in Dark Souls, as well as the last boss in the Void Keepers DLC who's a little overtuned.

The game is set in a large interconnected world with no loading screens and numerous shortcuts and secrets to find, and you can tackle the areas and bosses in a non-linear fashion. There are also metroidvania elements, you unlock 4 elemental powers and each comes with multiple new movement abilities (e.g. high jump, wall jump, gliding, walking on water etc). There's a fair amount of platforming and even some puzzles (although nothing too crazy). The game has no map and you're thrown in with no guidance or handholding, which I found really refreshing and fun. The exploration is excellent, you pick a direction, drop down a hole, and can end up somewhere really cool.

While the game is not AAA, the graphics are quite pretty, and the animations are very smooth. The cutscenes are very cinematic and the voice acting is solid. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4 and I haven't encountered any bugs or issues (aside from the missing texture for a shipping container, which you can fix using this mod[www.nexusmods.com], apparently the texture got lost in one of the updates).

Overall, if you're a fan of challenging action games and metroidvania like exploration with no guidance, Darksiders III is lots of fun and an easy recommendation.