Recent reviews by Lemon Meringuin

I'm still only partway through, but this is an excellent follow-up to Frontiers and the Shadow portion has genuinely felt good to play so far.

I am a dwarf and I am digging a hole.

Breath of the Hedgehog May Cry: Pro Skater - Ikaruga Edition.

Definitely my favorite game in the franchise since SA1/SA2, but not without flaws. The worlds feel good overall and the writing is actually good. Controls are good in the open worlds, but suffer in the cyberspace levels. It is worth playing and I highly recommend picking this up on a sale.

Graphics, music, and voice acting were very good.

Characterization was mediocre, though average for "Tales of." Some character arcs were life-changing and went by in the span of a few hours in a single story arc, others were dragged out and repeated endlessly.

Combat had some good concepts, but quickly became repetitive and the enemies were the definition of damage sponges (especially lategame).

The story had obvious issues. I am willing to forgive the tropes (once again, "Tales of"), but was weaker than normal and had multiple holes.

Exploration was non-existent. There were no puzzles, there is no world map, there is no fog of war in dungeons - only hallways. The entire game was walking from point to point for more combat or dialog.

While not a bad game, I definitely cannot recommend it over other games or previous entries in the franchise. Unfortunately, bland is often worse than bad and this lacks the spirit to swing it to either the good or bad side of the spectrum.

I truly want to like this game. That said, I cannot begin to recommend it in its current state and hardly expect it to change.

The developers promised a complete game on launch and delayed launch to polish. It could not be more clear that this game required at least a few additional months for playtesting.

The story was okay, but not great. Certainly acceptable by looter-shooter standards, but standard, all over the place, full of giant plot craters, and huge leaps that make no logical sense. That said, I still enjoyed it for what it was given I didn't think too hard. I honestly expected far better for something that Square would publish. While I can say that I generally enjoyed my playthrough, it is hardly something I would recommend.

The gameplay was okay, but not mindblowing in any way. Builds are limited, bullet builds are king. Cover does not exist for you, it exists for the enemy. Be ready for constant backspawn flanks and attacks from off the screen that make dodging not an option. Healing through the enemy damage is the only real solution.

The opening weekend had constant server outages. While some issues are understandable; this was a database issue and something that did not appear in the demo. Seeing as this is a solo / co-op game, always online gameplay is already questionable and connections are very spotty with frequent rubberbanding that could have been avoided with p2p connections.

The second weekend is far worse. Many players are experiencing character wipes and reporting gear with random stats being restored. Having trouble connecting to servers was bad enough - now we have to be afraid of losing characters?

When running a challenge, my lobby randomly got switched to 'open' and I had pub players join . . . While lobby modes should not randomly change, I am okay playing with other players. That is when I noticed another huge issue - There is absolutely no in-game communication. No text chat, no voice chat, not even a ping system. The random teammates didn't understand the objective and there was no way to communicate the next step with them. How is this acceptable? If you are afraid of players communicating in a co-op game, do not include public matchmaking.

In addition to this, scaling is completely messed up. In their effort to prevent 'powerleveling,' in addition to world tier / difficulty scaling, there is also background scaling for your gear. I pushed ahead in challenge tier, and upgraded some of my equipment; imagine my surprise when shop costs skyrocketed to accommodate slightly higher level gear, then I went back to clear a few levels down only to realize that my power was now scaled down so that my higher level gear did less damage than before I upgraded at lower level. The reward for powering up equipment? Lower level weapons now work better - no clue how that ever makes sense.

The launch also introduced severe graphical / stuttering issues that were not present in the demo. While the first patch seems to have smoothed a number of them out, it has introduced a number of other issues.

The first patch included nothing but nerfs and without getting too far into it, does not bode well for the future of the game. Build diversity is extremely limited and honestly, the first patch just makes it even more limited. The devs were upset that some players were clearing their endgame too quickly, so they implemented nerfs across the board that further limit build diversity and couple very poorly with the scaling issue mentioned earlier. Once again, was this playtested?

At this point, it will take very sweeping changes to polish this turd of a game and it has been stated that the launch product would be final and that it is not designed as "games as a service." This is a clear case of rushed development, no testing, and yet another poster-child for why always online games (that can't even be paused) are a terrible idea. This is completely inexcusable for full-priced AAA titles. I looked forward to this game and truly want to like it - instead, I am forced to recommend literally any other title in the genre over it since most at least have something that they have done well.

---

As a heads up, if you have installed this dumpster fire of a title, check your crash logs. They are hidden inside your appdata folder and contain 300MB+ crashdumps for every single crash. I strongly suspect most players that have made it through to endgame have a hidden folder measuring well into GB of data.

%localappdata%\Madness\Saved\Crashes

Capture the flag Joust with a snail boi.

You can remote play with friends and try it. Multiplayer is cross-platform party with Switch and Discord and really helps the playerbase.

Some of the best gameplay I have seen in years. The formula is simple and addictive. Grab a copy and bring your friends.

It's okay

Very good game that scratches the itch that Left 4 Dead and Payday left. If you enjoyed these games, Vermintide is a must.

My biggest complaint lies with the fact that games are locally hosted and reliant on Steam. If your steam connection drops for a second (thanks "maintenance"), you get thrown out of the match.

Great game. Too bad I bought it and found the awful Denuvo DRM that Sega didn't even bother to mention prior to release. If you can, buy this on another platform. It's totally not suspicious that the PC release came out late only to have surprise DRM. I will gladly change my review if they remove the DRM.

The devs made their money and never developed the game. Games like this give early access a bad name.