Neue Rezensionen von Mxblah9990

The fifth (and final?) entry in a venerable series that began in the Newgrounds / flash games days. If you like the previous Epic Battle Fantasies, or turn-based combat RPGs in general, you'll like this one. The dev has shaken up the formula somewhat since EBF 4, though not too much to make it unrecognizeable to fans of the previous games. I actually do like a lot of the changes:

- Skills are now on cooldowns rather than an MP system (forces you to diversify and not rely on spamming the same skill plus a magic potion every few turns)
- Swapping party members is fast and effective (I ended up switching in and out most of my team in many fights; the system encourages its own use)
- Various QOL improvements including the ability to save equip loadouts
- A not-unreasonable story and some decent dialogue, especially if you go outside the main path, and reasonably challenging / strategic combat.

Overall, fans of the EBF series should love the improvements made here. Newcomers to the series should find it an accessible, in-depth turn-based RPG with a lot of strategic options. Main story probably 20-ish hours, sidequests probably another 20, 100% completion probably 20 more, though I'm not totally sure. Currently somewhere in the middle of the sidequests at review time.

Edit: Editing solely because I forgot to mention the foe-capture / summoning system, which is in-depth and provides a lot of tangible benefits. (Another strong improvement over the previous games in this series.)

Unclear if this is just for keyboard players (the game does say "use a gamepad, but I don't have one), but the controls are just not good. The game demands precision in your platforming, but unlike better designed precision 2D platformers I do like (Celeste comes to mind), controlling the character feels terrible in pretty much all situations. Especially when wall-jumping, when left/right become your jump buttons instead of up, the jump button for the rest of the time. Nothing new here to recommend.

Coming from Factorio, the poor UI and lack of ability to properly customize, utilize, or optimize a lot of the components of the factory/kitchen just made even the *first level* past the tutorial an annoying slog. After completing it, I uninstalled the game. There are other automation games much more worth your time.

A must-have for anyone with a VR headset. The music included is fairly good on its own, as is the campaign (excluding those stupid levels where you need to move your hands at least X meters and I could only barely manage it by ignoring the song and windmilling my arms for two and a half minutes), but the real meat of the game lies in custom songs. Mods can help make it easier, but the game does natively support adding custom songs even without mods. It's an extremely fun game that can double as a workout and a reminder to drink more water. What's not to like?

A game for efficiency aficionados. If you like obsessively tweaking, changing, organizing, tidying, upgrading, and optimizing an endless loop of conveyor belts, train tracks, drone networks, and production lines, this is the game for you. Just keep in mind it'll usually all turn into a spaghetti mess in the end anyway.

A cute and fun little game with a surprisingly strong core cast and a surprisingly compelling story. Not for those who want a challenge, but for those who enjoy music and a nice, emotional, well-presented little tale about a world trying to stay alive past its time, it's a solid experience.

Overall, a fairly good action / puzzle / platformer game with a good artstyle and soundtrack, and a much more intricate and darker story than one might expect from the trailers. Some gameplay was irritating (hard to move around, sometimes fiddly aiming, some mechanics could use more explaining, some hidden doors that are story-critical aren't easily locatable) but overall it works out well enough and is at least moderately engaging. I did have to look up a guide at least twice, once for a puzzle and once for a boss, because I straight up could not figure out where the hidden door was or how to damage the boss.

Overall I'd say it's a nice little game that can get you about 12 hours on your first playthrough. I don't feel the need to spend more time after the end of the story, however, as much of the stuff I found annoying was the optional secret-finding.

A sort of cross between a graphic novel and a management sim, where you manage assignment of police resources and balance the competing needs of the mayor, the mafia, and the citizens. There are some little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I don't like, such as the voices and game volume being mixed poorly, or the fact that if you have no officers left alive, the day continues on and forces you to watch the crimes mount up without being able to call in officers from reserve, or the fact that you're forced into working for the mafia. Still, absorbing enough to keep my attention for several hours at a time. I'd say it was worth the $4 I paid on sale.

Hollow Knight is a good 2D platformer overall, with excellent story, atmosphere, music, and yeah gameplay *I guess*. Seriously though, it's quite good. Since that's the case, I'm going to focus mostly on the bits I didn't like with the understanding that everything else is quite good.

The bits I didn't like:
* It's unnecessarily punishing. When you fail a boss fight, you have to walk *all the way back* from the last bench, which can take upwards of several minutes. If you keep dying to the same boss, this can get highly annoying.
* The movement is weird. A lot of the time, I didn't feel fully in control of my character. The walking doesn't have any wind-up or cool down, and is very slow, the dashes always seem to be slightly too long or too short, and I just never got the hang of it entirely.
* The shadow dash never seems to be long enough to dash through enemies. Sure, a nitpick. But it's infuriating.
* Healing is really hard. You're stuck in one place with no defenses (unless you have certain charms) and the bosses always seem to attack too quickly for you to be able to actually heal anything, leading to getting hit again. Also, there's ending lag after you're done, leading to losing the HP you just got back an infuriatingly large percentage of the time. This makes it really difficult to recover from a small mistake in a boss fight and can leave to a "♥♥♥♥-up cascade," as Yahtzee puts it in a review for a different game. This is unnecessarily punishing.

Overall, it's very good, but my major gripe is it's too punishing. Sure, it's supposed to be hard, but I think difficulty / challenge can be had without being frustratingly punishing. Anyway, I still recommend the game.

NOTE: I'm recommending this game, but *DO NOT BUY IF YOU HATE BUGS.*

There is absolutely a good game hidden under all the bugs. Sure, it's still in alpha and some bugs can be expected, and I suppose even some gamebreaking bugs can be expected. That's why I'm still giving it a thumbs up, since I'm a big fan of how it works *when it works*. The game is great, the bugs are not.

Here are a few fun ones I encountered:
* Baggage trucks will sometimes get stuck on the conveyor belt and just sit there, not loading any flights, until you notice and reload your last save to fix them.
* If one gate is delayed long enough, sometimes *all* airplanes will just decide not to land until you notice and reload your save to fix it.
* Sometimes a plane will decide it has infinite baggage to unload and keep unloading, delaying all other flights on the gate, until you notice and tell it to go away without its baggage. (Reloading your save is not required for this one).
* I couldn't repeat this one, but once a fuel supplier charged me 100x the price of fuel as it was refilling my tanks until one of my fuel trucks showed up, returning the price to normal. This resulted in the theft of $500,000 from my airport.

So yeah, I'd highly recommend turning on autosave, despite the 2-3 second freeze every 20 seconds or so as it runs (its interval isn't configurable), so you can reload whenever something breaks. But once these bugs are ironed out (and the rest of the features are implemented, but mostly the bugs), this game will be great.