Recent reviews by Marty Wallace

Overall it's a decent game. The visuals are S+ tier if you're into the art style and it's very enjoyable when you're in the mood for something a bit more laid back. It does however lack depth in a lot of the systems which lets it down, especially in terms of replayability.

Good stuff:

- The artwork is very very good. A lot of care obviously went into the environments, mobs, bosses, animations - really everything. It's full of little touches like effects applied to the characters when running behind water that make the game very immersive. The mechanic that allows you to change the time of day makes the world feel a lot more dynamic as well.
- The sound track is decent. Not S tier like a Nobuo Uematsu OST or even reaching something like Hollow Knight, but definitely diverse, enjoyable and memorable.
- The variety of locations, monsters and bosses was very high. I can only think of one instance where something was recycled and this seemed to be intentional or at least the team was self-aware as there's an achievement literally called hey, that's a reskin! associated with that particular content.
- The combat system was enjoyable late game, once all of the different characters and abilities were available to you and the bosses had more sophisticated lock patterns that actually needed some mental effort to properly deal with.
- The animations for the cutscenes were really nicely done and helped make the story more immersive.
- I completed all but 1 achievement and found that the postgame content like the arena and the fights against The Queen that Was and The Fleshmancer pretty good - actually some of the better parts of the game overall. It's a shame more of this wasn't sprinkled in around the campaign.
- I was actually in the mood to sink a couple dozen hours into collecting stuff (Rainbow Conches and all the treasure chests) so even though this probably isn't a popular part of the game with the broader audience, I really appreciated it for my playthrough.
- The tone of the game was well done. It did a surprisingly good job of balancing a pretty grim world and setting with a lot of lighthearted dialogue and moments.
- The level design is good. World puzzles do a good job of balancing making the world feel interactive and not completely linear with not being too confusing and frustrating.
- Character design was done well. Each character felt distinct in how they were written and their aesthetic.

Less good stuff:

- The combat system was pretty boring for the first at leat 50% of the game, when only 2 or 3 characters and a small subset of the combo abilities are unlocked. I found myself trying pretty hard to avoid encounters for the middle portion of the game because the combat was becoming tedious and the rewards for doing it were negligible (random items for food recipes if you were lucky, basically no EXP once you passed a very clearly set threshold the developers expected you to be at for that area i.e. it would suddenly drop from 3,000 EXP to 250 EXP after gaining 1-2 levels). As I mentioned above, it did pick up right at the end when encounters started becoming more sensitive to resource management (mana and live mana on the field, combo points) to make sure you could stop abilities that were actually threatening and have enough MP for consistent heals etc. I don't think using the relics that increase the difficulty artificially would have helped as the problem was more about the flow of an encounter (needing to swap around characters to use the correct combos to break locks etc) rather than the pure difficulty.
- The progression systems were... not very interesting or engaging. The player can choose from 4 stats to invest a little extra oomph into when they level up (alongside some default gains) but it's pretty obvious which stats fit which character archetype and even if you wanted to try be creative, the values you pick from are certainly not game-changing where you can carve out a really interesting build of your own. Weapons and armour don't contain any special properties and are a purely incremental increase to ATK or DEF all the way through to the end of the game and postgame (I recall there even being a self-aware joke referencing this early on). The abilities available to each character are unlocked automatically throughout the story and the combo abilities are generally planted in easy to accidentally stumble into locations - there is no system of assigning or choosing abilities to customise your loadout in any way.
- Items were unfortunately pretty uninspired and simple as well. Every consumable is some combination of restore HP, restore MP or revive a character. No buffs, no items that can cause damage or potentially even apply damage of a specific type to further expand the lock system. It's a real shame because the cooking system would have paired really well with a more sophisticated item system.
- The pacing of the story and the introduction of the world and setting to the player was a bit... off, especially in the first half of the game. It felt like I was missing some kind of pre-requisite knowledge because dialogue and events would reference a lot of information that didn't mean much to me until I got further into the game and did some extra-curricular reading into the lore etc. This may have been intentional to avoid a lot of exposition on top of the already quite lengthy prologue, but it made my experience a bit "I don't know what's going on" all the way until at least The Dweller of Woe.
- Exploration could have been tightened up a little, especially once the world opens up and you have more freedom to move around the map. Even with The Vespertine and flying unlocked, I'd often pull up Google to remember how to get back to a specific location like the kid where you hand in your rainbow conches.

I enjoyed my ≈50 hours with Sea of Stars but I don't see myself in any rush to pick it up again. I recommend it to people looking for a visually excellent, low mental overhead RPG to chip away at on their Steam Deck on the lounge or to mostly zone out to with a beer.

This game is one of my top 10 of all time. I have completed it dozens of times across different platforms (PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5, etc). The short campaign length and high replayability potential with the 4 different scenarios and multiple difficulty options make it perfect for picking up and doing a run through in a single afternoon sitting, which is great when you're someone that works full time with a family and don't want to commit to 50+ hours when you start a game up. The atmosphere is unmatched and the systems and gameplay are very fun. It also runs very well on the Steam Deck.

It's a good game worth picking up when it's on sale (I got it for under $9). It took me just under 15 hours to complete with 18/20 achievements.

I enjoyed the art style and variety of enemies a lot. The difficulty was just right for me (not trivial but not unforgiving either). The exploration is fun for the most part but could use some quality of life improvements to reduce the amount of time you're just running the full way back and forth between rooms and save points, especially if you want to unlock all the optional stuff such as the sword of light. The items are interesting and unique and the optional quests and unlocks felt worthwhile.

One thing for me that would have been a huge improvement is the different gear actually appearing on your character model.

I really wanted to enjoy Destiny. The gameplay is pretty fun and the co-op experience was put together well, at least relative to other multiplayer games I have played in the past.

Unfortunately, there were a few major issues for me.

1. I have not been more confused about the plot, world, characters or generally what the hell is going on in my 25+ years of playing video games. I understand that this game does not focus on the story but my god the execution they do have is an absolute dumpster fire. I had to spend a couple of hours researching online to realise that the storyline is basically buried behind quest markers I could never find and the game is designed to throw you into the far end so you can dive straight into playing cooperative content with your friends. I can appreciate this approach but the implementation is just terrible and leaves players that are completely fresh to the game/series watching cutscenes of characters they don't know doing things they don't understand or have ANY context for. As a result, the immersion factor was zero and it was impossible to feel like you were part of a world rather than just a dude shooting things to make your numbers bigger on the inventory screen.
2. I was hit with a BROCCOLI error every hour or so, which made the game basically unplayable for more than a few hours. I spent a lot of time online trying various combinations of settings, driver updates, windows updates, using windowed mode etc but no luck. I have a GTX 1080ti.
3. I became aware very quickly that the game was going to become incrementally moving my "power level" by a few points every time I did some content, for an infinite period of time. I understand that this is pretty typical for post-game content in an online game, but the fact that there was no story to get through before I ended up here meant the game just felt like a pure grind from the very beginning where you couldn't set any concrete, achievable goals (like finishing some quest line or unlocking some specific feature or something).
4. Whenever I queued for raid content, I would get paired with players significantly higher level than myself that wanted to blast through ASAP. Often I ended up spending the entire raid just chasing the other player trying to keep up rather than actually getting to shoot or do anything. Luckily the content I played only needs three players which is a pretty achievable amount of friends to recruit but it makes playing on your own a pretty awful experience.
5. Unless I missed or skipped something by mistake, almost none of the in-game systems are properly explained, leaving you to fend for yourself on wikis or Reddit for information on how to use certain functionality and features.

The good stuff:

1. The base game is free. Even if you enjoy the game just for a few dozen hours, that is very good value. The actual production quality of the game is very high (graphics, sound, combat mechanics, etc). It's just a very hollow experience, which may not matter to you.
2. As I mentioned, the gameplay itself (combat, exploration, etc) is good and fun. The variety of weapon types makes combat fun and interesting and clearing rooms of enemies feels enjoyable and rewarding. I could easily see myself investing another few dozen hours if there was an actual storyline to follow along with to make the progression feel more... existent.

I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone that's looking for anything more than a mindless FPS. It pairs well with a few bourbons on a Saturday afternoon with your friends or when you have an hour here or there with literally nothing better to do. For me, story progression and a properly fleshed out world and characters matter a lot, things which are definitely not present here.