Recent reviews by Zantoma

Another fantastic little slice of game from moi rai.

first one was better

Cute little puzzle game. The concept alone made me give it a try and it was a fun, short campaign. The cleanup phase at the end of missions is a little tiresome in some maps, which is the only thing that'd hold me back from a 10/10 as far as cute little puzzle games go. Overall solid recommendation.

Overall one of the highest-quality game experiences I've played in a long time. Fair price, excellent core gameplay loop, lots of content, good dev support, fun co-op, friendly community, and no bad monetization practices. I could see it getting a little repetitive after long enough, but I'm not there yet.

I'm not much of a roguelike player but I really like Rivals of Aether, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Story was fairly predictable from early in and nothing groundbreaking, but that isn't a dealbreaker for me.

It was a decent enough time while it lasted - fights sometime felt like too much of a slog, with neither side really making any progress until the RNG said we could. My primary complaint is a lack of variety with only four characters and upgrading feeling very limited. There's also simply not that much content actually in the game. Story mode took me a couple of hours, and then I finished the Challenge mode in a couple of tries. I don't feel inclined to push for a high score or anything because the scoring seems fairly straightforward as to what the best strategy is.

As of writing, I probably had about 12-13 hours of actual gameplay to 100% the game, and probably won't be putting any more time into it. I would not recommend the game at this price.

Not a good game, but a very unique one. Feels like meeting an old friend every time I come back.

Kinda just not fun. Restrictive turn limits and a lack of an "Undo" button result in a generally low quality of life experience.

crashes constantly on my 1080ti

original full positive review for Switch version can be found here
https://twitter.com/Zantoma/status/1375917716058603520

Edit: There is a community mod (REFramework) that fixes the crashing I experienced, which is the sole reason I left a negative reivew on the game. I still consider random crashes as a reason to maintain a negative review, and it is not the community's job to fix Capcom's mistakes. I do recommend Monster Hunter Rise with the caveat that you may require community mods to have a stable game experience.

I think that when reviewing games, it's always important to give a frame of reference for where your opinions are coming from.

Hi, I'm Zantoma. I usually stick to multiplayer games. I don't have much experience with RPGs or Metroidvania-style games, but I have played several, though mostly many years ago. (Paper Mario 64, Golden Sun 1 + 2, Darkest Dungeon, Metroid Fusion + Zero Mission + Prime 1/2 are the most notable examples.) I do love me some Pokemon though, so the idea of a monster collecting game with elements of the exploration of a Metroid game seemed interesting to me.

When it eventually made it to the front of my backlog, I could barely pull myself away from it. I may only have 32 hours played listed as of this review, but it's worth noting that that playtime was put in across three days total. I only stopped because I ran out of game to play. As of this writing, I have completed all of the Steam achievements and optional challenge fights. I found it to be pretty delightful all things considered. A few elements in no particular order;

Exploration - Pretty fun experience, I accidentally wandered my way into areas considerably more advanced than I was a few times and found the backtracking with new abilities interesting. Each of the monsters having their own exploration ability gave me more of a reason to collect all of them, and I very nearly caught 'em all by the end of my playthrough because I didn't want to miss any of the exploration abilities. The game could communicate some of the required tools a little better. I went through most of the game wondering if I was doing something wrong with a certain interactable but it turned out to just require a late game exclusive ability. The exploration abilities remind me of like a map psynergy from Golden Sun or a partner ability from Paper Mario or a Pokemon HM, except it also encouraged me to snap up every monster I could find to look for new toys.

Story - don't care lol, did its job, not much to say about it, not particularly interesting. That's fine with me.

Combat - Heavily buff/debuff/dot focused system. Not really much Pokemon inspiration here imo, but like I said at the top, I haven't played many RPGs. There seemed to be a variety of viable strategies from poisoning and burning enemies to boosting up allies for massive crits to infinitely stacking bleeds. There is a combo system where the monsters that act later in your turn will have stronger attacks, so it encourages you to run at least one buff or heal focused monster which helps avoid the ingame Pokemon strategy of "hit it until it dies". I found the unique equipment effects to be generally pretty interesting, and enjoyed checking out each monster's semi-unique skillset each time I snagged one for their exploration ability. Battles occasionally got stalled out for fairly long periods of time, but I didn't mind that aspect too much, since it was mostly because I wasn't utilizing good counters to what opponent lineups were doing. There was a mass buff "critical mass" sort of gameplay in those endgame fights, where I just had to build up enough power to eventually shatter my opponent's buffed up monsters, and then the reinforcements were immediately put down the following turn. I know of at least two ways I could've avoided most of this through teambuilding, so I'm going to chalk that one up to possible user error.

On the topic of those semi-unique skillsets, in addition to each monster having its exploration ability, they also each have a customizeable skill tree that lets you choose what active and passive skills each monsters have. Many of the abilities are shared between similar monsters, but each of the game's 101 species (as of this writing) has a different combination of the four trees that they can fill out. As an example, a basic Blob (slime) can focus on lowering enemy damage output, dealing extra hits to set up combos with unaspected or water damage, healing allies, or poisoning and otherwise inconveniencing enemies. Mine served me well until it was replaced with an upgraded version toward the end of the game.

Difficulty - Felt like a pretty smooth experience. The 6v6 battles against NPCs were significantly harder than the open-world 3v3s, but I didn't have to adapt my strategy too terribly much beyond adding a second party for backup or situational counters. I see the other reviews talking about a late game difficulty spike, but I didn't really feel that too much, so it may have been changed in a patch. I think throughout the story and all optional content, there were only 2-3 battles I had to try more than once or change my team for, and that includes 5*ing all of the graded fights. I'd say that overall I felt like the difficulty was "pleasant" playing on "normal" for the first time, not too easy, not too hard. I probably would've set it to be on "Master" difficulty if it had been an option at the start of the game rather than set mid-game, and that may have suited my tastes a bit better as a Darkest Dungeon enjoyer.

There didn't seem to be very much grinding - I almost hit level cap by the final boss, and just had to do a couple of random encounters to ding max level before taking a crack at it. Future monsters were very easy to train up thanks to the generous amount of "rare candies" you get, plus the high starting level newly hatched eggs came at. Getting a new Monster battle-ready for me at this point in the game is as simple as equipping held items, leveling it up a few times with consumables I have laying around in piles, and then filling out its skill tree. Very accessible and easy to flex new party members in.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this game. It isn't something I'd play for thousands of hours like Dota, but it's just a nice little game, and the world needs more nice little games. Heavy recommendation.

gwentycards