Recent reviews by Rum Tum Tugger

Fantastic game. The inputs are very simple and easy to approach for new players. despite the homogeneous inputs and relatively small move lists, each character feels unique and has their own identity to bring to the table.

The game is free, with a weekly rotating cast of 5 characters you can play, with Gran always being available. Every character is *technically* available to buy with earnable in-game currency, but this would take literaly years on constant grinding to do and is not a realistic option for F2P players. Of course you can buy the full game to gain access to every base-game character instantly.

Once you have a grasp of the basic controls, you can pretty much work out ~90% optimal combos for most of the cast. For some people this is a plus, for some this is a minus. There is less combo variety compared to other fighters, but there is room for some combo expression for optimals or due to screen position, or your current cooldown / meter.

Graphics are simple, but do their job well. The game isn't bursting with style, but it's readable and the characters themselves are all distinct and interesting.

Great variety of music, with every character having their own theme, plus unlockable music tracks through the in-game store (purchasble with earnable in-game currency), and battle pass rewards. The sound design in match is good, with consistent sounds across characters for supers / ultimate skills to make certain attacks reactable. You have the option of either English or Japanese voices, both are fine, though personally I lean towards Japanese due to some annoying English battle chatter (Cagliostro, Charlotta).

I have no trouble finding matches online in ranked or in lobbys (NA). Though I've heard this is region dependant, with OCE and EU having trouble in off-peak hours. Though the game generally feels very good even with high ping (max ~200) so changing region can be an option to help find matches.

The training mode is robust, with frame data, combo trials, recordable dummys, punish training all available. You can't, however, train with or against characters that you don't own, so no labbing against characters unless you own them.

Arcade mode is pretty standard, there are a few secret bosses to fight if certain requirements are fulfilled during your run. ArcSys added a pretty fun survival mode, you have 100 total rounds to beat with unlockable random perks every 5 rounds to help you through the trial.

Grand Bruise is an interesting Fall Guys clone, I only played it once but it's a fun option for those that are interested. I've heard that games can be very hard to find and you may need to join the Discord to find the specific time that people agreeed to play to find a good match.

Lobby mode is cute, you control a small chibi avatar, with chat abd arcade machines to find matches against anyone regardless of rank. There's a little bit of exploration to be done in the lobby, but it's mostly just a place to chill between matches.

I haven't touched the single player, so I will not comment on this.


Overall it's my current favourite fighting game with good balance between characters, frequent patches to change things up, good variety of things to do, high quality gameplay and netcode. Low skill floor but still has a relatively high skill ceiling for those willing to put in the work.

8.5/10

Beautiful game in almost every aspect; music, voice acting, direction, graphics, story.

The music is thematic, extremely varied, with multiple unique battle themes for every distinct zone.

The voice acting, in English, is high quality, natural sounding, and emotional. There is some wonky lip-sync going on pretty regularly, and if I were to have a small nitpick, to me the main female cast all sound pretty similar to each other. This does not detract from the overall high quality of the voice acting as a whole. however.

The game makes good use of the UE5 engine, I have a beefy machine and have had very few issues when it comes to performance. The one issue I have is a consistent small stutter when loading into battles. The scenery is gorgeous across the board, with fantastical, varied zones which are beautiful to just look at.

The story so far is highly emotional, melancholy, and mysterious. The game starts very early with some hard-hitting story beats and doesn't drop in quality from there. The player is drip fed information on the nature of the continent through journals left by previous expeditions, this gradual unravelling of the nature of the the land does has yet to grow boring or tedious for me.

The combat plays somewhat like a mashup of Persona 5 + Sekiro. Turn-based but with *heavy* focus on the dodge / parry mechanics. Enemies, on expert difficulty at least, will kill you extremely fast without regular success at the dodge / parry system. I can't speak to the lower difficulties, but the dodge timing is pretty generous if you cannot get the parry timing down.

I've seen complaints of a lack of build variety due to you theoretically being able to parry every attack, thus making defensive stats useless. Early on I would've agreed with these people, but as I am crossing into act 3, the "1hp inverted glass cannon" builds can only realistically get you so far. Enemies have long attack combos with odd-timed attacks that can be hard to parry consistently. The same argument could be made for the Souls games. Yes, theoretically you can dump all defensive stats and run a no-hit glass cannon build, but for the majority of players it's just not feasible. If any of the "there's no build variety" people are reading this. Just try speccing Maelle with focus on defensive stance, high hp, AP to party on parry, taunt, +shield in defensive stance etc. Even on expert She becomes extremely tanky and feeds buffs and AP to your actual damage dealers.

Overall, for me, this is an easy early contender for GOTY. The game would be a top-tier entry for any AAA developer, but for it to come from a new developer to the scene, it's nothing short of amazing.

In my opinion it's the best Bullet Heaven game out there. It's completely free and full of content.
I don't know anything about the Holoverse and this does nothing to detract from the quality of the game.

Good stuff.

Game good

Good game

good game

Tripped over a traffic cone; got eaten. 10/10 would become food again.

Good Stuff