Recent reviews by unc00l

tl:dr - Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a good game, with potential for growth, but has some glaring issues that will hopefully be addressed sooner rather than later. Overall, I would recommend (especially to people who enjoyed Monster Hunter style gameplay loop), despite its flaws but if I had to give it a number rating, it'd be like a ~7.5/10 right now due to the issues.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is an action game with RPG elements involving characters from Granblue Fantasy, a turnbased gacha game, but thankfully has no gacha elements (so far) when it comes to obtaining characters (and hopefully stays that way). The combat is smooth, not too simple but not too complicated either, and is somewhat reminiscent of a faster paced Monster Hunter. The (Japanese, not sure about English) voice acting is on point, although I've heard complaints about the accuracy of the subtitled translations due to localization (not a huge issue to me but might matter to some). The music is good and fitting but nothing to write home about. In general, the core of the game is solid.

But now let's dive into more specific things. The majority of the game is about you and your party (1-4) members, going through missions. The story is... VERY short and that's an understatement. You also can not play through the story with other people (your other party members will always be controlled by bots in the story), but that's almost irrelevant, given how short and cliche the story is. For what little of the story there is, the choreography is pretty well done, but this is not a game I'd recommend for people looking for a long and not cliche story. The real meat of the game starts after the story anyways, where you're put into a gameplay loop similar to Monster Hunter where you'd fight certain bosses to get loot, use the loot to upgrade your characters, gear, sigils, use the better equipment to tackle harder bosses, and repeat. The difference is, you use characters from the gacha game, each with their own distinct play style and whatnot. You can definitely play thru all of this solo, with bots as your party members but, in general, the game is more fun when you play online with other people. The multiplayer missions are generally very simple; Unlike Monster Hunter, where you have to find and hunt down your target, the majority of the missions will put you straight into an arena with the boss(es) and the fight starts immediately. This results in much quicker missions, where you only need to learn about the boss mechanics, but unfortunately, this means almost no interaction with the environment outside of a couple missions. A couple things to note, matchmaking on steam is soft locked by your download region and you might need to change your download region to match with other players if your region is having problems finding people to play with. There's also no crossplay between PC and PS4/5 unfortunately (for now anyways but probably not likely to change).

Some minor issues - game is designed with controller in mind and feels a bit awkward for mouse and keyboard sometimes, but you get somewhat used to it. Matchmaking is also kind of weird, if you finish a mission, and 3 out of 4 people vote to repeat but one person doesn't want to, instead of just queuing the 3 people up and trying to find just one more player, it'll just kick everybody back to their individual town sessions which sucks if you had a good farming group going.

On to the two biggest issues which really detract from the game in my opinion.
1. The damage cap system. The game has a system in place that limits how much damage you can possibly do. This damage cap can be increased by your equipment (terminus weapon, damage cap sigils, and overmastery) but there's still a limit on how much you can increase it by. This is done to prevent players from building absurdly minmaxed builds and completely overpowering content but this leads to the problem that the damage cap completely invalidates the majority of alternative gear/sigils. Once you get your Terminus weapon, even if you max out your damage cap trait from sigils, one attack/damage sigil will put you at damage cap for most characters' normal attacks and skills. Using any weapon other than the Terminus weapon is undesirable since the Terminus weapon also increases damage cap while the other weapons do not (additionally, it's also the strongest weapon out at the moment). Every character build will be practically the same, 4 damage cap V+ sigils, supplementary damage to give you an extra line of damage that bypasses the damage cap, war elemental (if you're lucky enough to get it), and the hero specific sigils+ if they're any good, crit to reach 100% crit chance, and one attack/damage sigil or two just to hit damage cap. There's no difference whether you put in 2 or 12 attack/damage sigils due to the fact that you'd be hitting damage cap anyways. And this will never change unless the damage cap system is changed somehow (using any other build will result in you dealing subpar damage).

2. The transmutation system. This is one of primary ways to get sigils and wrightstones (things that add traits to your weapons), and the only way to get character sigil+s (sigils specific to the character with an additional trait). Unfortunately, this is hampered by low item caps (you can only hold up to 999 vouchers and dismantling can give you up to 50 vouchers from one item) which leads to a lot of going back and forth between menus. It's a terribly cyclical approach where you dismantle unwanted sigils/wrightstones for vouchers (but you can't even do it in one go most of the time due to the 999 voucher cap), use the vouchers to summon more unwanted random sigils/wrightstones (remember, most of them are unwanted due to how useless the damage cap system makes them), then go back and dismantle more sigils/wrightstones, including what you just summoned... and it repeats over and over. It can take hours just to clean up your inventory just a bit. The worst part is, you can only summon one at a time and it's accompanied by A VERY ANNOYING PARROT who screams at you every time you summon. Turning off the sound to this game becomes practically mandatory whenever you transmute. This hopefully gets addressed soon because inventory management should not consume more time than actually going out and doing the missions, nor should it be so annoying.

Overall, I'd still recommend this game, despite its flaws, but hopefully Cygames does fix some of these issues soon.

There isn't much I can say here that hasn't been said by all the other positive reviews about this game so I'll be brief. It's a great factory building game with exploration elements. It's very satisfying when you finally get everything working properly and in alignment, and progression feels good. Music is great and relaxing, there are times when I just sit back and watch the stars and other celestial bodies in the night as my machines are doing their thing.

I would say the only downside (well, for some people anyways) is that the production objectives are easily met over time and people who have trouble setting their own goals, or people who don't find pleasure in building more than just what is necessary to achieve those objectives, may find difficulty in playing this game for long (although I suppose these kind of people wouldn't be terribly interested in a factory builder).

This game isn't about structure building, gear progression, loot collecting, crafting, or flying around shooting laser beams (Although it contains all of the above and more). This game is about having fun. Whether you play with friends or solo. Everytime I start a new character and/or world, it's fun. Bang for buck, this is probably the best game ever.

*edit*
Years later, it's still amazing every time I start a new game.

I really love the X-Com series. I remember spending hundreds of hours on the Enemy Unknown and Terror from the Deep as a kid and loving every second of it, even the long and tedious multipart ship terror missions and the alien base missions with tentaculats and Lobstermen behind every corner. The 2012 remake was a welcome addition to the series despite it being simpler than the original.

And I definitely like X-Com2 for the most part. Unfortunately, I just can't recommend it.

To begin with, there are the performance issues. Random frame drops and stutters should NOT be happening with a GTX 1080, especially during in game cinematics. Then there's the occasional hang ups on enemy turns. The AI that usually takes no time to perform actions suddenly takes forever to decide what it wants to do for a turn, and then goes back to normal the next turn. I still have no idea what causes this as it seems to happen at random times. Also, there are weirdly long (relatively) load times when you're heading back to your main ship. It really shouldn't take longer to load the base than it does to load a procedurally generated map but... it does.

The RNG is still, and will always be there. Miss a million shots at 95% chance to hit, fail an 81% hack, get no engineers for the first two months but get 5 scientists, need an acid bomb/grenade but get everything but acid, get a useless (for your build) random skill from AWC, the list goes on and on. You either deal with it by crying or savescumming. But it's not part of why I don't recommend the game.

The main reason why I don't recommend the game? The pacing. I get it. Timed missions make things more difficult since you have less opportunities, so you gotta make the best choice with what you got. My problem with it isn't the difficulty as I've been able to consistently finish all the timed missions (without DLC bosses randomly showing up that is). My problem with it is that it takes away most of your choices on how you want to play the game. You have a myriad of options on how to bumrush to the objective (relatively) safely, such as smoke bombs, mimic beacons, etc but the fact remains is that you have no choice but to bumrush the objective. In Enemy Unknown, there was some risk vs reward element there. You can choose to take the additional risk of rushing to get meld, the reward. Here, you have no choice but to rush and the worst part is that 80% of the missions have some sort of timer (whether it's a real timer or one civilian dies every turn timer). Majority of my missions consists of kill first enemy pod asap, destroy wall, and either put specialist behind cover with LoS to objective and hack objective or destroy relay. Timed missions get a bit harder, as they introduce enemies with more health/armor/abilities, and then significantly easier as your specialist improves to reliably control mechanical units and when you can bring in Psi Ops who can dominate the tougher biological enemies, but it doesn't make the repetitiveness less tedious.

The next offensive part about pacing lies in the strategic part of the game. Want to make contact with a new region? No problem, just 5 days of scanning. Except you scan half a day and ALERT, gotta fly off to save an ally VIP. Spend half a day flying to the mission, do the mission, get that engineer drop that you desperately need, but it unfortunately requires 7 days of scanning. So you scan half a day of that before getting dragged into another mission that you NEED to do to prevent the dark event from adding more points to the avatar project, come back to scan for the engineer, scan a couple hours and ALERT!, your allies are being attacked, if you don't save them, you'll lose the relay tower you spent so many supplies on, so off to save them, and just when you think it's safe to try to scan for that engineer again, ALERT! Resistance forces have disabled a train full of supplies so you gotta fly over and raid th- MOTHERF****R JUST LET ME F*****G SCAN IN MOTHERF*****G PEACE!! It's offensive to the point where instead of getting your monthly pay immediately, you have to scan 3 days for it; 3 days that'll most likely turn into a week or more after all the interruptions.

And now you have a doomsday timer too, in the form of the avatar project. Let the bar fill up and you have a set period of time to reduce the bar or it's game over. So when you're trying to prioritize a path to reducing the avatar project and you get interruptions after interruptions, it gets assinine really quick.

And yes, I understand that there are mods that can change the pacing but from my point of view, mods shouldn't be necessary to make the game enjoyable. Not to mention, updates can easily render mods obsolete, make your modded campaign unplayable, etc

Anyways, XCom2 isn't a bad game. At its core, once you get past the mission timers, the tactical combat is great, the soldier customization has been significantly improved, weapon customization is nice, and certain things are less tedious (like having to manufacture new primary weapons and armor for each new rookie, you have a simpler upgrade system for the most standard stuff), and they actually made explosives super useful (makes the first couple missions on normal way too easy though). The storyline also isn't bad (still ridiculous at points though) and leaves room to be interpreted whether it ties into the ending of X-Com Bureau or whether it's foreshadowing Terror from the Deep or Micronoids, etc.

tl:dr
I like this game but overall, I can't recommend the intended (unmodded) version to the majority of people as most of the game feels like there's only one way to play (rush objectives because 80% of the missions are timed and prioritize avatar project stuff) and that shouldn't be the case from a series that gave you so much freedom in your methods in prior games.

Note: My review is only based off of the experience that I've had during the free weekend trial that recently occurred.

Mordheim: City of the Damned is a very good game. It consists primarily of two parts, the first being warband management where you hire/fire/manage your mercenaries, deal with their items/skills, and fufill your wyrdstone delivery. The second, is the primary part of the game, which is the turn based tactical strategy where your warband squares off against another warband in the ruinous city of Mordheim. The graphics are decent but feel slightly dated if you zoom in a lot (a High-Res texture pack would be nice but definitely not necessary) and the sound and music are very fitting for the game. However, graphics and sound aren't as important; The strategy is where the game truly shines as there can be a lot of depth, planning, and positioning involved to come out victorious on the battlefield. Unfortunately, as good as the game is, I can only recommend it to people who are okay with the following points.

• Early game difficulty - The game can be extremely brutal to players early on in the game if not played properly. As you progress through the game, you'll gain access to better gear, enchantments, etc that increases your troops' effectiveness and reliability to the point where you'll consistently win if you don't make terrible decisions/mistakes.
  
• RNG screwing you over - The RNG can screw you over. Now, to make it clear, there are a lot of reviews out there that claim that they miss consistently with 80% chance to hit. I would just like to point out that most of these people are missing the fact that the enemies tend to be in a defensive stance at the end of their turn. You need to pass the chance to hit roll AND the enemy has to fail their dodge/parry roll in order to hit. But back to the point of RNG, early game is where RNG is the most volatile and 60% chance to hit feels like 20% and 80% feels like 50%. I've had times where I failed a climb up with 82% and then failed the proceeding one at 92%. Or times when you attack one single enemy with 4 of your units and they all miss. There were some runs where most of enemy team spawned closer to my cart than my own team did. It's RNG, the only thing you can do is learn how to improve your chances or how to handle it.
  
• The game is extremely TEDIOUS - Some of it is due to bad design (I'll expand more on that later), and progressing through the game can be very slow at the beginning since the battles can be VERY time consuming, especially since you want to minimize risk at the beginning. And if you want to complete the side objectives for additional Exp and items, you'll usually have to do it after a good majority of the enemy team is dead but before they rout meaning you'll have to keep several of them alive on purpose and tank them in order to do the side objectives. You can spend hours on a character only to have him/her fall in combat once and all of a sudden, he/she is missing a body part and is now suffering from brain damage and now has to pass stupidity rolls every turn (It IS possible to get a full recovery after falling in combat but is very unlikely without using an item). Or he/she is dead. Hours of work down the drain from one mistake. But that's life.

The AI is decent but isn't always consistent. There are times that they'll see you, hide out of line of sight, and then flank your archer out of nowhere but there are also plenty of times where they'll run into your band one or two at a time and you can basically overpower them if you've kept your band together. There are also pathing issues that are very apparent when they run into an invisible wall such as a long wooden ramp leading up into a broken mansion and they get stuck there, allowing you to slowly whittle them down with your ranged units. The AI also seems to have more health and deal more damage than you do. I suppose it's to compensate for their lack of human ingenuity, but I've never liked artificially inflated difficulty that's achieved by throwing in more health and damage.

There are also a lot of design choices that don't make any sense to me. For example -

• Jump up in place a couple feet (if you can). When you land, do you feel like it hurts more than jumping off the third floor?
  
• Put your hand on your keyboard. Now move your body over to the left or right about an inch. Are you suddenly unable to touch your keyboard anymore?
  
• Are you often unable to put any textbooks into a schoolbag because you've already put 4 pencils in that bag?
  
• Do you often go to work and at the end of the work day, leave work immediately without your belongings or your paycheck because the work day is over and you must leave exactly on the dot?
  If you've answered yes to these questions, then you are probably existing in Mordheim! OR you're an out of shape Tyrannosaurus Rex with huge pencils and a possible developmental disorder and you should probably go to a doctor to get it checked out (the out of shape and huge pencils part that is, being a T-Rex sounds awesome).

If you fail a climb up, you not only fail to climb up (duh) but you also take damage, up to 13 for jumping up a couple feet (Skavens do land on their back, I'll admit, they deserve that damage). Most of the time, I've been seeing 9+ damage for failing climbs... Meanwhile, failing a roll for jumping off the floor is... 6-16. And this is entirely unaffected by the armor class you're wearing. So it's very VERY possible for you to be wearing cloth armor, jump up a couple feet and take MORE damage than you would if you were wearing heavy armor and jumping off the third floor.

The next couple design choices make the game extremely tedious. You get action prompts for certain things in the right positioning, such as picking up wyrdstone. Unfortunately, move a pixel and poof, all of a sudden you lose the prompt for it. I can't recall how many times I've gotten the prompt to do something, double clicked but apparently shifted a bit, and boom, I'm in dodge stance. It's even worse when you do it in front of your wagon chest, as not only are you unable to deposit your items with that character that turn, you also block the your other characters from depositing items because no matter how close they are to the chest, they have to stand on THAT particular spot in order to open the chest. Another time this gets tedious is when you're picking up Wyrdstones and they're all in a group. You'd think you can pick them all up in one go if they're that right next to each other but NOPE, you have to pick them up ONE AT A TIME. And sometimes, you're not in range for a particular wyrdstone EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE PRACTICALLY ON TOP OF IT. Which means you'd have to move and that costs a strategy point because you'll perform an action. And items (other than gold) don't stack either meaning a wyrdstone fragment takes up the same amount of space as a piece of armor. This makes ferrying items to your wagon chest extremely tedious. And the worst offender in this game? The battle ends as soon as the enemy warband routs or their last member dies. You immediately leave the map without being able to pick up any items. Yes, a small portion of whatever is left on the map is picked up when you win but you have no control over it so it could be (and usually is) the most worthless stuff in the map while you ended the match in front of a whole bunch of wyrdstone clusters. All these design choices make the game THAT much more tedious and difficult in a bad way.

I also found myself constantly opening the map to check my positions (that map also needs a car mirror/camera disclaimer that objects on the map are closer than they appear) so a mini map would make that part of the game that much less tedious.

Overall: Recommend but not for everyone.

tl:dr - If you want a challenging game that involves preparation, risk versus reward management, tactics in a lovecraftian setting with great narration and music, GET THIS GAME.

Darkest Dungeon is an adventurer managing game that mainly has two phases. The first phase is your Managing phase where you upgrade equipment, buy trinkets, teach skills, and watch your adventurers relieve their stress by meditating in calm seclusion, praying to whatever deities exist in this land, drinking til they get drunk and lost for a week or two, or just go out wenching (hey, whatever works), etc... While your adventurers are relieving their stress or getting rid of a bad trait, they are unavailable for the next phase, the Adventuring phase. It is in this phase that your adventurers head into a procedurally generated dungeon with an objective (scout, find specific quest items, clear rooms, kill bosses, etc) to find loot, glory, fufillment, or just get their brains scrambled by stress and die while gibbering in fear.

Your success during the dungeon phase primarily depends upon how prepared you are and what risks you are willing to take. Certain heroes are better than others in certain types of dungeons and will give you an easier time. Your party composition is extremely important along with your heroes' positioning and selected skills, as most skills can only be used in certain positions. The last part of preparation, which also ties into risk management, are the items that you take with you into the dungeon. Before you head in, you can buy usable items such as food, torches, bandages, potions, medicinal herbs, etc. They cost money so it'll cut into your gains (and possibly create a loss) and might be a waste if you buy too much and don't use it. However, buy too little and you'll run into RNG risks non-stop. If you run out of food, your heroes will lose hp and gain stress when they're hungry. If you don't keep your torchlight more than 3/4 full, your party positioning has a chance of being switched around when you enter combat (the less light you have, the higher the chance of your party being surprised by the enemy when you enter combat and that switches your heroes around). However, you can also prepare for this by equipping skills that move your hero around so that you're not caught completely with your pants down. Most of the interactable objects you encounter in the dungeon are NOT completely safe unless you use a certain item (such as bandages for a rack of blades, if you don't use a bandage when you interact with it, you MIGHT get some items OR you can get injured and start bleeding).

Don't stay too attached to ALL of your heroes (especially early on in the game), as death comes rather easily if you tend to take risks. Sometimes, you just don't have the proper counter item in your inventory as you approach an interactable object; you'll have to make the choice of whether to risk it for loot or just walk past it (Of course, we risk it and end up getting diseases which gets our hero killed). If your heroes build up too much stress, they can get an affliction which makes things rather difficult, as they might start doing things that are out of your control, such as automatically repositioning themselves, refusing to let other heroes heal them, increase other heroes' stress, etc... At some point, if you're not confident you can complete the dungeon, it's sometimes better to retreat (your heroes will gain stress from failing however, and if you don't have enough money to help them relieve their stress, you'll have to recruit new heroes and try again).

The game can be rather unforgiving, but the more you play, the easier it gets, even after failed ventures. Venture into the dungeons and you'll find heirlooms that you can bring out with you, and this will allow you to upgrade your facilities so that you can recruit more heroes, have more openings for relieving stress, relieve stress for cheaper, upgrade to better equipment, etc... Eventually, it'll get cheap enough that sustaining some heroes and removing their bad quirks becomes viable, so you can keep the heroes you like. The downside is, when your heroes' levels get too high, they refuse to take on the easier dungeons, so you'll need to rotate some fresh blood into your hero pool to do the easier missions.

1. The game's ambience is incredible. The art style, the music, the characters, etc... Everything just ties in so well to make you feel the sense that horror does stalk this land.
   
2. The narration is one of the best that I've heard in a video game and seriously adds to the Lovecraftian feel of the game.
   
3. Challenging decisions - In other RPGs, choosing a skill, leveling the skill, and upgrading equipment just bumps a number up so you can kill something 3 seconds faster. Here, choosing the right thing to level with your limited resources means the difference between life and death. All optional equippable trinkets have a positive and negative aspect to them which makes choosing even more important. Inventory management is another challenging decision, as you need to decide on what to keep, what to hold on to, whether you should toss that counter item for a possible interaction, etc...
   
4. Combat - You're almost always on your toes in combat, as even the easy monsters can ruin your day by adding serious amounts of stress to your heroes. Even more so if you ran out of light and your positions get switched around, or if you were ambushed while you were making camp.
   
5. Replay value - Many different ways to play. You can play safe and carry around enough torches to maintain your party formation, or play risky by bringing only heroes that have skills that reposition themselves while attacking for more loot from the darkness. Or you can constantly make short incomplete trips into dungeons while switching and discarding heroes left and right. It's up to you how you want to play.

1. Early Access - At this point, there's only 3 areas for dungeons. Can't sell trinkets yet either so your trinkets chest just gets increasingly cluttered. The Hero list also gets slightly cluttered if when you have lots of heroes and it doesn't stay sorted the way you want it too. If you've upgraded all your town buildings (this might take a while though), your heirlooms are useless. Occasional bugs here and there.
   
2. Bosses - Difficult in a bad way. Namely a "if you don't have the right team composition, you'll probably lose" bad way. You'll probably either have to look them up or lose a party to them to figure out what party composition you should bring.
   
3. Not being able to bring any of your higher level heroes on lower level runs is designed to make things more difficult, but kinda makes leveling unwanted since I can't play with heroes that I've grown attached to.
   
4. Lack of inventory space makes it so that there is less incentive in running the longer dungeons. You either spend so much money buying supplies to last through it, that you won't make as much of a profit (and you can't carry as much loot out), or you end up not finishing it, which means that doing the shorter dungeons would've been more profitable as you can get the quest rewards for finishing it (and you don't have to deal with failure stress). The only incentive for finishing the longer dungeons then is possibly for the trinket.
   
5. Time only progresses when you go adventuring. Even if you have excess gold and want to take a week off of adventuring because your main heroes are spending a week relieving their stress, YOU CAN'T. At the very least, you'll have to send a team into the dungeon every week, even if you immediately abandon the quest as you enter.