Recent reviews by 「Kida」

As someone with 1.8k hours in 100% Orange Juice... I say it has potential.

Getting the descriptor out of the way:
Astral Party is a multiplayer board game with anime styled playable characters. They are played in a board game with different panels which produce different random effects, give players coins or cards, or cause damage. There are playable cards which affect stat points, lay traps or attack enemies at a range. After reaching a certain number of coins, acquired through passive means like start of turns or panels, or more aggressive such as defeating other players, a player can go back to a Home panel and level up. After reaching level 3, they win the game.
The game contains gacha elements which are used to unlock characters, get profile, dice, and effects customization, and gifts to gain relationship with characters, which unlocks further items. Everything can be obtained by simply playing the game and claiming free rewards, but an option to pay for these items is also available.

Now, onto what's getting this game lambasted:
Having played through both demo/beta testing periods, I saw it actually being updated and what changes were done, even if small, so it makes me believe the game will get further updates where they will improve on the game. They have in fact
announced on Steam News that most of the things people are complaining here about or that I saw as lacking in the demos are getting updated, added or fixed, so that's great news for everyone.
TL;DR: they are adding x2 speed, fixes to bugs and translation, skins actually showing ingame, voices (which was a stretch goal on their funding, so not really something they could have done at launch), card history, etc.

As for the gacha mechanics, personally I don't mind them, I enjoy playing the game and passively getting currency to later unlock the characters is fine by me. But I understand this is a matter of preference, some people will prefer to directly pay upfront to unlock a character, and that's totally fine, I do buy all 100%OJ DLC so just buying the new updated character pack and getting to play it immediately is a good thing.

So, back to back comparisons:

Gameplay:
Different enough. Combat doesn't stop you in the panel you challenged, instead you keep going, which allows a different depth of mechanics, where you will likely be attacked back since you're now ahead of the person you just fought. In general, the game is more combat oriented, as the great majority of cards targeting other players usually involve lowering their HP, while self targeting ones are more about boosting your own stats. Combat will be your main source of income, as other methods of gaining currency will likely be too slow to keep up, and as a difference to 100%OJ, any ranged attacks you directly target an enemy with will actually act as if won in combat, transferring half their coins to you.
Instead of drawing your hyper, your ability is simply a button on cooldown, which means you can always have that ace under your sleeve, plus the cooldown is usually fairly low, so using it liberally is also an option.

Characters:
We have Pandaman and Padman. There are male characters. If that's not your style, there's Z3000, a literal trashbin.
If characters breastily boobiling around the stage aren't your type, that's understandable. There is a "Naive Angel Mode" in the options which alters the designs to be more conservative, so if you still want to try the game but don't want people looking at your screen think you're playing a porn game.
As for gameplay, they're all fairly unique in design and have their own stats, passive and skills. Stats come in play mostly in combat, as they dictate your minimum roll for attack and defense, and each character plays fairly different from each other, some requiring a bit more thinking to use effectively.

Boards:
In this game they're more Mario Party styled, each one featuring some kind of gimmick with more "random events" type of panels, plus even the coin draw panel works basically the same as Mario Party. They also are omnidirectional, meaning you can go in any direction you want, even switch it on the fly with the use of a card.
Creating more boards that feel nice to play which also include some sort of gimmick is difficult, so I understand the lack of content on this side.

User experience:
Probably the weakest part of the package. The options menu clashes with the rest of the style, you can't see enemy buffs/debuffs (though to be fair it took OJ a fair amount of time til they implemented this function too), translations are a bit iffy, you can get lost in menus even if they're not many, and while mentioned that it was being added in a later update, the lack of a card history function makes following the game a bit more difficult. I won't mention other details as they mentioned earlier as they are being worked on.
Also, personally, I love the emoji only chat.

Music:
A small section but still warranted. Music is good, yes. There's a limit to how good a song can be when it's played on loop for 90% of the game. More variety would be welcome.

I've been having fun with the game, despite the long match time and bugs. I would say give it some time to sort itself out and it will become a good alternative to 100% Orange Juice, at least one with huge bahonkazongkahonos.

If you love Vampire Survivors (or similar "bullet heaven" genre) and aren't allergic to anime, it's necessary you try this game. A weeb card isn't required.

Holocure is part of the many VampSurv clones, however it goes above them and I'd say it even stands next to the game it takes inspiration from.
The gameplay loop is the same as every other: kill things, grab XP, level up, acquire items, become strong, reach the time limit and win. At the 20 minute mark, a boss will spawn which you will have to defeat to beat the stage. The currency you gained in the run can be used to further upgrade your character for an easier run next time.
The main thing that set it above are the small differences to other games:

Free aim! No autolock into enemies, so there's a bit more skill involved. You have the option to play in a similar way to Vampire Survivors (with a button to "lock" aim so you can strafe), but there's also an option to play with mouse or analog stick which gives you 360 degrees of freedom to aim. A lot of VampSurv clones now have this option, but at least back when this released it was a pretty innovative mechanic.
Movement also feels snappy and responsive, not much to comment other than analog stick gets 360 degrees of movement, while obviously keyboard only gets 8. No way to control with mouse.

This juice is banging yo

Weapons come in different forms, mainly categorized by being Melee, Ranged, or Multishot. Each one interacts differently with Items, passive boosts to the character stats, to healing capabilities, or other effects. These items are acquired through Level ups or HoloBoxes, which will randomly pick one from the entire pool. These boxes also have a small chance of rarer, stronger versions of Items with added bonuses
Another drops apart from the common healing item being Food, there's a chance for Anvils to drop, which will allow you to either level up an item for free for faster scaling, or to Enchant them for an extra bonus stat to the Weapon for a cost.

Called Evolution, Fusions, and other names elsewhere, Collabs are your main way to gain better firepower, by merging two different weapons after maxing their levels out. Collabing two weapons with an Enchantment will also allow you to keep both Enchantments for both weapons for a souped up version. Of course, if this isn't enough for you, you can merge a few of these Collabs with Items for a Super Collab, a very powerful weapon with the limit of only being able to equip one of them.

There are currently 38 characters in the game, each one with their own unique stats, weapons (that acquire a new powerful effect one you max its level out), set of three passives, and Special Attacks (a powerful ability that recharges over a long period of time).
These are unlocked through Gacha with in-game currency which you acquire by simply playing the game. While the random mechanic of getting characters sounds a bit weird, getting duplicates of characters causes them to grow stronger, plus if you happen to want a character and aren't lucky getting it, you have a currency you gain as you obtain dupes, which will allow you to unlock the character freely after about 7 dupes. This currency can also be used to unlock skins for the characters, which can range by character from 3 total skins to none (if the character was recently added).
Between 16 weapons, there's a total of 46 Collabs possible (3 Collabs available per Weapon), plus 4 extra Super Collabs, all tracked in the Armory for those completionists.
There are also 5 Stages, with 3 of them having a Hard Mode version, plus an Endless mode where you compete for high scores in online leaderboards, and also a Time Mode where you play in a unique stage to try to defeat a number of enemies in the fastest time you can.

In case you're having difficulty beating later stages, worry not for the HoloHouse comes for those.
Unlocked after beating the first stage, this is basically your respite, where you can farm, fish, cook foods with buffs for your next runs, and hire workers to idly farm for more coins.
There's also house decoration included, for those players who have TOO MANY COINS and don't have much to spend as a way to money sink the rest of your coins.

The devs are very passionate about Hololive and have stated they plan to include all Hololive Talents in the game, which currently means the cast will expand up to 65 characters, with each patch including around 10 of them, plus a new Stage and a Hard Stage; on top of that, as confirmed for next patch, there'll be a Dungeon Crawler style minigame as an alternative gamemode for extra content, and a teased Casino, so they definitely don't plan to stop anytime soon.

Great weapon variety, snappy controls, nice graphics and music, tons of content (about 160 hours for me to 100% the game (i am a bad gamer)), anime girls if that's your thing, all for the price of free. At least worth a try. Definitely recommend

Yous have gotten +400 songs for 30/35 dollars, hell even as low as 20 and you complain about a pack with just 10 songs? Take a 12 step program off a 10 step pier.

If you're here looking for reviews to purchase the pack, THIS is the game. This is the meat of the content and all of this being available for this cheap compared to most other rhythm games with paid content is insane. The amount of different genres, difficulties and charts you get is more than worth the money. Consider supporting the developer, since other than individually buying packs off the Android store, this is the ONLY post-base game revenue they can get, especially now that they're basically self-publishing.

To put it short, if you did enjoy Just Cause 3 despite its faults, it's very worth it to get this DLC. It adds a ton of interesting and more "out-there" content to finish completing the game, or just to have a reason to come back.

Short review: Very fun short DLC,
Weapons and equipment: Adding a rocket wingsuit to help with airborn movement is a neat idea for end-game, adding guns and rockets to it to help with combat is also really fun for doing a quick sweep.
Story: YES. This is how a villain should really feel. This is how a campaign should be, with bosses and challenging events that aren't made trivial by just having stuff unlocked. I really enjoyed going through the campaign, even if I was reminded a bit of a certain other robotic overlord managing a huge facility.
Side activities: Wingsuit galore. I feel that on keyboard and mouse it's very hard to control the suit, so they feel way harder than they should be. Couldn't 100% them and they will likely be the last challenges I will have in the game.

Short review: Bit disappointing, but the mech is a nice addition.
Weapons and equipment: Mech. It's a bit weird to control as it needs its legs to be in a certain position before it can start accelerating, but it's a powerhouse and it's super easy to max its gear and become almost invincible. The gun is a bit underwhelming, having only 2 shots and mainly being meant for Bavarium shielded vehicles, which you can often just take down with another weapon from the same "Special" slot.
Story: It's basically the main story, liberate nearby towns to then access the story mission to destroy the main base. There's very little explanation over what's happening so it's just going through the motions.
Side activities: They drag on for waaay too long, and thank god it's just two mech battles. Basically, enemy waves come in and you have to use your mech abilities to rack up combos and points. Very easy to 5 Gears quickly if you know what you're doing, but they take time.

Short review: Enjoyable piece of content for probably the least utilized form of transport in the game. The rewards for it are very worth it.
Weapons and equipment: The Loochador and the eDEN Spark are the best weapons of their category. While there's one of two faster boats, the Loochador has a much longer boost capacity, plus homing missiles help it become a destruction machine. The eDEN Spark is also an orbital strike meaning that it will disintegrate whatever it comes in contact, as long as it's not under a ceiling. Both are incredibly strong and helped finish up any remaining extra bases or races I had remaining.
Story: Not so much present in the main missions, where it's just another "Can I really trust Sheldon?" episode, but it explains the upbringing of the eDEN corporation and how it came to be what it is, giving it an interesting backstory.
Side activities: There's only a single side activity, which is destroying boats with the eDEN Spark. Serves as a good training course on how to use it. Probably not the correct thing to consider them side activities, but finding Tapes to discover more about the corporation you're attacking is interesting and answers some questions about who they are.

Just Cause 3 is a videogame about destroying things and freeing a country from the evil dictator. Your grappling hook, parachute and wingsuit help you move around the island so you can destroy things quicker with your expansive arsenal of weapons and vehicles. If that got you interested, get this game on a big fat sale.
I really wish I could give this game the most neutral score possible. Not because it is bad, but because what I described is what you do in the previous games, and at least the second one does them much better.

TL;DR at the bottom, lots of complaining incoming.

The core loop is there and it's even improved. Going around the island is much quicker thanks to new and improved movement options, between the wingsuit adding a method to go faster horizontally and the slingshot ability to add further specialized movement. Destructive elements are more sturdy but can be quickly destroyed by hitting a specific weakpoint that you have to find yourself, sometimes behind a gate or by destroying a specific part. Activities like races, going through rings or destroying things now have a reason to be completed, being what unlocks new powerful abilities.

And I think that's where I run out of positive things to say about the game.

Locking character progression behind doing races and stuff is boring, especially because cars in this game SUCK. I cannot believe they were almost boasting about getting "Criterion Games" developers (from Need for Speed fame) to do vehicles, and they end up feeling the worst in the franchise. They have a weird "weight", like if Rico was actually handling the steering wheel inside the car, and like he needs to fully turn it to neutral before turning to the other side quickly. Cars are also made of paper mache, both because they lift into the air at the smallest bump and also because of how quick they explode over the smallest crash. Bikes are no different and this problem is visible, turning to one side physically rotates the bike and the character leans to that side, and so to be able to quickly turn to the other side they first need to lean back to neutral position, and then lean to the other side, making the action have a weird delay and like you're lacking control over what you're driving. This game didn't need realistic driving. I can't believe the most shared tip to complete a specific difficult bike race in the game is "Spawn a car before starting the race, then ride the car instead of the bike".

Storywise it starts somewhat interesting, Rico coming back to his home country and fighting over freeing his old friends, and hearing his origin story, and having conflicting decisions over who to trust. And it very quickly drops the ball, introducing reoccurring characters with no influence in the story, making conflicts be quickly resolved with no afterthought, making super weird plot decisions that no sane human being would actually do... they said they wanted to make the story more serious compared to JC2, and I don't think it worked out for them. The villain felt actually threatening, sure, more cunning and smart, but he didn't have the power or weaponry like Baby Panay in JC2 to back it up. I literally two shot the dude in the final fight.

And for a quickfire round for random problems I have with the game:

• WHY DO YOU BLOCK SUCH A BASIC THING LIKE AIMING BEHIND PROGRESSION?!?!?!
  
• Why is the best handling, heaviest, most durable car in the game an F1 car.
  
• I understand that for explosive challenges I am driving an explosive car, but could it not blow up at the smallest bump in the road? People are calling these missions bugged everywhere else when searching how to complete them.
  
• Why is turning with a plane bound to Z and C, and I'm unable to rebind it to something sane like Q or E because E ejects me from the plane with no way to rebind that. At least I got to use my controller I guess.
  
• Why do homing missiles on my fighter jet stop working for the entirety of the play session if I decided to AIM DOWNSIGHTS with my weapon ON FOOT at any point before?
  
• Why is my camera so far up my ass, and no FOV slider? I need a third party program to be able to edit it every single time I ran the game, it's honestly uncomfortable, and while it was close to the player in JC2 it was still at a more comfortable distance than now.
  
• The minimalist HUD, probably intended to have less things on screen while you fly around, really plays against you. No way to track health, no way to track oxygen for the 3 times in the entire game that you need to go on water, randomly getting two shot because I didn't hear that the only indication of my health, a heartbeat sound which was drowned by gunfire, hadn't completely faded out, which meant I was still regenerating health.
  
• Was my soundtrack bugged? I see the game has over 20 songs, but it felt like the same 3 played all the time, and it forced me to just mute the music about 30 hours in. I'm honestly playing some of these songs on Youtube and I have never heard them ingame.
  
• Why is Denuvo still in this game 7 years after being released. Why do I need to confirm I still own the game every week. Please Square Enix.
  
• After about 2-3 hours the game starts to break down on me. Particle effects stretch across my screen, models start stretching weirdly, low poly models don't unload; my GPU isn't running hot enough to cause this and the problems have persisted through driver updates.
  
  Also to note, I almost immediately blocked this game from my firewall, and installed a "Skip Intros" mod. Doing both massively speeds up the game boot up time from over 3 minutes down to like 20 seconds at worst. The only multiplayer element in the game is Leaderboards so I really see no reason to have online activated. And disabling it improved my game performance.... what?
  
  The only thing I'm missing to complete is the DLC, and I will update this review when I finish them.
  
  I'm very critical over this game because I like the franchise. I like having this big fat "Ubisoft open world" map that I can quickly traverse across and cause chaos just because xd. Having them regress so much after a successful attempt, with no one catching it or recommending changes is baffling to me. I understand it was a "team B" developing this game while the "A team" developed Mad Max, but were they so far up theirs thinking that they were able to create a better game than the other team and just completely ignored all feedback, or even worse, thought that the game was fine? Did Squeenix force them to just launch the game as it was, but they weren't able to release bugfixes or changes to make the game feel better? I honestly need a post-mortem of this game, hell even the franchise in general, where did it go wrong?.
  
  TL;DR: If you like shooting things that explode and cool fast movement systems and don't care for story, get this game on a big sale. It's a great experience for those factors I myself wouldn't recommend it to people coming from Just Cause 2 because it's honestly so rough seeing these changes. But it's not a bad, unfinished game, it just has weird changes, and maybe you can live with them. If so, hope you have fun. I certainly tried to.

After tumbling down a hill, Sonic finally recovers itself and takes a step forward.

Frontiers throws Sonic in an open "zone" environment, with fairly expansive islands to explore and run around. In a new collect-a-thon style for the series, there's several collectibles around the map that are needed to be picked up to progress through the story, and they can be found in the form of small platforming challenges or short stages called Cyberspace. To take a break in between these are sidestories, small snips of (finally much needed) dialog between characters, and combat.

Exploration is good for me, I've always enjoyed walking around a big map and collecting things, doing the dreaded "Ubisoft towers" to reveal more of the map, using the character abilities to help with discovery. Normally for other games of the same genre I've needed a third party website or app to be able to get all collectibles, but for Frontiers everything was in the game, so that's a good thing in my book.
Movement and controls were good for me, Sonic felt good to control and I felt like I wasn't just being flung in a direction hoping I hit the correct angle. There were a few times where I kinda flew off in another direction but at the same time I couldn't really tell if it was my fault or if the game was a bit jank. I know several people who are put off by the boost style of movement but I also never played Sonic Adventure as a kid, so I'm unfazed by the kinks this system has.
Combat is fairly simple, with a parry system and combos that can be executed with a combination of buttons that some enemies will need to be defeated more easily. The new Cyloop ability also gets its use, although it feels it's more of a crowd control than means to do damage. These abilities are unlocked by progressing through the game, so it's a good way to slowly introduce these moves and experimenting with them.
Oh my god they put Metal Gear Rising boss battles in this game. Every single one actually put a smile on my face over how cool they were. I can't really say much other than they are very cool.
Story definitely takes a background role in newer Sonic games, but it was definitely a step up from previous entries. Going from Sonic "being tortured for months" to Eggman being the plot twist every single time, it's a breath of fresh air, allowing itself to reference past games and stories and expanding on them to build a grander narrative. Voice direction also gave the game a more serious tone, and not in a Forces way where everything was edgy, but more like being a dire situation. Sage also cute.

Going to the negatives, which I at least feel are fairly minor:
- Cyberspace feels underworked, I found the stages fun to experience but having the same 4 reused tilesets for the entire game gets tiring after the second island. It is technically explained later in the story why this is the way it is, but I'm not sure if it's an intended plot point or just an excuse. At the very least that's just visual; in terms of difficulty, the first 2 stages are the hardest in the game, with the rest having wildly varying levels of difficulty going from "completing all missions in one go" to "I just cant seem to get past this one part". Rearranging the stages or changing their S-rank times/rings would help them. Thankfully Cyberspace is just a very small part of the game (I would say about 1-2 hours in the +35 it took me to 100% the game) which simply serves as a way to add some diversity to the gameplay loop.
- The parry system is *way* too forgiving, you are frozen in place and are safe from almost all damage for 15 seconds. If there was an incentive to time the parry for more damage or just a shorter parry window I feel I would have used this feature more than when I was required to, to not feel too cheap about beating enemies. Very late in the game the ability gets a bit more sensible to use, but the feeling of "as long as I hold two buttons I'm safe" doesn't really go away.
- Please Sega what are these graphics options... Graphics: "High" or "Low" is something for a mobile game, not for a full 3D PC game release.
- Oh my god what do you MEAN i need to upgrade 99 levels of speed and ring capacity one by one, with like 10 seconds of delay between each level.

I enjoyed my time with Frontiers, even if there was a bit of jank I found in there the great majority was spent having fun with a speedy movement system through expansive lands, collecting items and seeing number go up release happy chemicals. I would definitely recommend it to Sonic fans, and the people that have been interested in a Sonic game but are "scared of it not being good", I've seen people that have never touched a Sonic game saying this was their favourite game of the year. Definitely a must play, especially in these times of uncertainty for the Sonic franchise. alsosegastoprushinggamestosellonholidayseason.

My previous review criticized the announcement of the game going into F2P, and how many of the advertised changes just altered the outlook of the game from something casual where you'd play the game, gain currency according to your skill and collect cosmetics to a prediction of something along the lines of a grind to be able to gain any cosmetics with little incentive to win. I am glad to inform this isn't the case. It's much worse.

I'll go point by point over my previous review, to see how things have changed:
Update frequency:
Its literally been 2 weeks since the new Season started its true i asked for more content but I'm not asking them to die over adding new stuff. I will update this in the future.

Currency:
If only you knew how bad things really are.
Crowns, a currency gained for winning games, are gone and are instead downgraded to be an XP system for crown ranks, a long investment cosmetic unlock. With long investment, I mean I've been playing this game since launch, top played hours on my friendlist, average skill tbh and I'm not even 10% done with it. 800 wins for a nickname is just insulting. Separating costumes by 300-500 wins is even worse.
Kudos, the free currency, have been reworked into this "drip fed" currency where you can only get 200 of daily, compared to before where just playing would give you ~250 average per match. Kudos items have also become very scarce, very unattractive and honestly overpriced for what they actually are. Having to wait a week to get a bowler hat or a fanny pack feels like spitting on the face of your free players, taunting them by showing the cool paid items first in the shop.
Show-Bucks are the new currency in the shop, acquirable by purchasing them for eye-gouging prices or by getting them through the Fame Pass (battle pass), where free players get 300, while players who purchase it get to buy the next pass and have 550 to spare. When the cool looking costumes cost 1200. So I need to save up for 6 months or fork over 20 dollars (!!!) to be able to purchase a single costume, when previously winning a couple of times was enough to guarantee the purchase and any future one.
Dev's gotta eat I suppose 🥴

Epic Store move:
So the game is off Steam and its available for free on the Epic Games Store! That means a lot of players have joined in from there!... No, really the best influx of players are consoles, which I see a lot more than people playing from PC. So the move hasn't really done anything for Epic other than make them lose a potential playerbase and more money-I mean customers to support their barebones store. If anything I saw more people purchasing the game on Steam before the switch so that's probably where most of the revenue came from.

And some extras...:
What did they do to this game? In the 2 weeks I've played since the new update I've experienced more bugs and game breaking issues than in my previous 2 years of playing this. Rounds where the game freezes for you, where spawns are in the wrong locations, where you're thrown into uneven versus games, games where it just boots you out to the splash screen because "a critical error occured" while everything was working fine... I understand porting to consoles is a big ordeal but that's why you have a porting studio helping you with development, so you can focus on the content and fixing while they focus on getting the game working on other platforms.

So why am I focusing SO much on cosmetics being paywalled? Because that's actually half the game. The first part being the funny bean game where you jump and fall and that's fun, that's mostly intact, it SHOULD be, nothing was drastically changed on that side. The reward system that comes from performing well in the games however is busted, to the point that losing on the first round over and over nets you more experience than actually playing the game to the finals. There's no incentive to win, which WAS the points of the cosmetics, if anything completing your Daily/Weekly challenges now are of most importance, which most of the time involve just playing the game more than trying to improve on your abilities, to be able to actually have a decent chance of completing your Season pass or levelling up your crown rank. Free to pick weird and fun looking mix and match beans are no more, plain colored beans with normal boring accessories are the norm now, and I couldn't be more sad about it.

This is the best fr*cking game I've ever played

I've sweat and cried 10 buckets of fluids just from laughing at the mess we did

Unironically the best game

Click the cookie, get a cookie.
Click a few more cookies, get a grandma.
A few cookie clicks later, you're altering the reality of other clicker games so that they generate extra cookies to help with the effort of slowing down an unknown covenant causing all grandmas to rebel against you, forming a single mind hungering for control, all while you do gardening, maybe invest in stocks, with C418's music in the background.

One of the grandfathers of clicker/idle games, can't go wrong if you want a distraction while waiting for something to finish, or if you just wanna have it in the background to tab out whenever. Do turn up the volume, that music jamming.
Main reason for me to get this was the Steam Cloud integration, which saves me the hassle of needing to carry around a .txt file or posting and updating the save file somewhere private but online if I change computers or something wipes my (browser) cookies, which was always an issue I had with the browser version.
I await the Workshop integration to see what kind of stuff people will throw in there.

verry goode jogo

Townscaper is a simple "toybox" sandbox game that allows you to build simple towns based on a grid. While the concept doesn't seem much of a game, it's a nice chill experience to unwind and to see what the algorithm will do if you place one house over here... maybe put some around this tower and make it taller...