Recent reviews by Miles Bluefalls

You know what? I was going to put a review of this out after it was out of Early Access. I don't like buying stuff in Early Access anymore, but I have family and friends who wanted to multiplayer the hell out of this, so there you have it. And it's good multiplayer fun.

So for now, this review is here only for the Steam Awards, to remind people:
Buy and nominate this game for the Steam Awards.
To spite Nintendo.
To spite the "leave the billion dollar corpo alone, they're right to make sure you can't make anything without their lawyers tying your hands" morons.
All of the spite.

It's also definitely worth the price tag on sale if you're just buying it to mess around with friends.

It's Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 3. But it's got Gal Gun characters, instead of Bloodstained characters. No, this doesn't actually affect the gameplay or design at all. It's also gone from "8-bit" aesthetic to "16/early 32-bit" aesthetic.

It is NOT a Metroidvania, and I don't know how people ever labelled it as such. It is the same format as Curse of the Moon 1 and 2. You have 7 stages, you go from start to finish, you kill a boss, next stage. There are multiple paths thru each stage, which will have different power-ups and collectables. Instead of up to 4 (8) characters to collect and swap between with their own abilities, you have 2 characters, each with their own quirks, who each get a collection of subweapons as you progress thru the stages (which just happen to mostly cover the traversal and utility weapons from Curse of the Moon 1/2).

You get a new subweapon each stage for each character, subweapons can be freely selected at any time, and you can revisit previously stages at any time. THIS IS AN AWFUL IDEA to do right as you're starting the game, is a waste of time in-genearl, and again, I don't know whoever started throwing the "Metroidvania" tag out there, because it is WRONG. Whereas the format of the previous Curse of the Moon games was "beat game, new quest available with other characters/characters you didn't have at the start before", the format of Demon Purge is "beat all the stages, get booted back to the start with all your gear and upgrades for Lap 2, get ending depending on how much work you put into combing the stages for stuff".
Read: there is almost zero reason to replay the stages until you've beaten them all once, and collected all the subweapons. Don't make the same mistake I did.

Did you like Curse of the Moon 1 and 2? You'll probably like this. Did you like Gal Gun? They made a Curse of the Moon game in that setting, good for you. The game itself is overall easier than those, to note, unless you go for the hardest options (which, again, mirror the other Curse of the Moon games). After clearing the game outright, you have the option to do a collectathon, involving combing EVERY nook and cranny of every path of every stage, for an alternate ending, but that's really for the most dedicated people. (No, really.)

Wait, I never made a review for this? Really? It's pretty great.
I know people say "Wario Land 4", and yeah, there's a LOT of that DNA in there, but the speed and the action is just on another tier. It's not a HUGE game, with about 20 or so stages, but you need to understand, they are polished to a mirror sheen, and they are TEMPTING you to get your skill level high enough to S-rank, or even perfect-rank them. Once you have a hold of how the complete suite of movement in the game is implemented, you reach that conclusion, that "man, I could push myself even FARTHER, and dare I say, get good".

And almost every one of those super-polished levels has some kind of "gimmick" to them to change it up, but not enough so that once you have a grasp of the basics, you'll probably at least clear each stage first try. Pushing that grade up is then in the domain of "how far can I push my own self" (condolences to those with slow reflexes, getting a P-rank in this thing turns Peppino the Pizzaman into a constantly dashing, constantly parkour-ing, dynamo of destruction).

Oh, and the SOUNDTRACK. The soundtrack (especially after you've cleared the stages) is an absolute joy. I'm talking "there's no bad tracks, just your least favorite ones". And, ...oh, wait a minute... the soundtrack has everything except the level clear jingles? GARBAGE! 0/10, forget I said ANYTHING.

(no really buy the game this was in the pipe for so long and they listened to so much feedback in the right way it's good money spent)

Why get a remake that removed content and squashed meme-y goodness? Get this one, and get the HD mod, and you're set for life.
Still arguably the best Resident Evil game, even competing against its own shinier copycat.

Here's the thing, see that amount of time played there? Yeah, I clocked in plenty of time in original PSO2, and been playing New Genesis (NGS) since launch. I paid for Premium status for well over half a year. PSO2 was a game that I was playing regularly, and enjoying. Keep that in mind if you can get thru the wall of text below.

PSO2 is notorious for not being officially available outside of Japan for almost a decade, almost the entire period when they were coming out with new content for it. But here's the thing: on its own merits, it's a good game, especially when looking at it as a successor to the original PSO and PSU. Basically, it follows the same formula as the older (PSO) games. You and up to 3 other friends (or randoms, or "rented" AI avatars made by other players) go to pick a dungeon/duty to do, run in like loonys, and beat all the loot pinatas you can find, usually ending in a final area boss. Most of said dungeons are semi-randomized, and can have the enemy difficulty cranked up to keep up as you level up. The action is an evolution of the original PSO, where you can choose a class (which can be changed at any time, unlike the original), run free-form on a field and smack/shoot/spell things to death, with the addition of jumping, dodging, and other actions depending on your class. It's a solid formula that REALLY works well on a casual level, since most of the dungeon runs that you do won't take more than 1/4 hour or so, if you're thorough, and it's easy to get people to just get in, do a run, and get out.

Added to that are client orders and daily missions, which are essentially just "go to NPC, get some kind of extra activity to do while you run dungeons, get rewarded with extra stuff". Don't have a set goal in mind when you sit down to play? Just grab an order, and work around that. There's also things like Time Attacks, Advance Quests (remix dungeons with twists), and other variants to change things up and drop alternate loot. Added to all of that are "Urgent Quests" which go on at the top of the hour, every few hours or so, which are the "raids" of the game, where a couple of parties-worth of people can go into the same instance of a boss (or boss rush), special dungeon, or special mission. There's about a dozen of these "Urgents", and they each tend to drop their own rewards.

OK, so does that sound good? I thought it was good. I STILL like it. It's a good, solid game with enough content and player classes to mess with to keep one busy for a good chunk of time, especially if you're playing with regulars. But here's the thing...

OG PSO2 was winding down, in terms of content, before they released New Genesis. The "storyline' was finished up, a final boss raid was introduced, all that kind of stuff. Everyone knew that was coming, with the advent of New Genesis. HOW-freaking-EVER...Sega kind of went that extra step to burn the bridge and salt the earth, and more or less took PSO2 out behind a woodshed and shot it in the head. They took all the effort to localize it, then ran it for about a year, and now it's pretty much "hey, stop playing this and play the new thing". They aren't re-running seasonal events, they aren't doing any more limited time events at all, they got rid of Mission Passes (which were sets of tasks you could do every week for a month to earn things like cosmetics, furnishings, and other useful things), they aren't re-running the Fresh Finds Shop (where you could trade in freemium currency for cosmetics that otherwise weren't available anywhere), they don't have any kind of social things like casino boosts or item enhancement boosts, and they aren't re-running most of the old gatcha ticket content (again, especially for seasonal stuff). Oh, and they don't run all of the Urgent Quests anymore, and there's no schedule for when they occur anymore.
Sega more or less have gotten rid of ANY of the old reasons for people to log into OG PSO2 on a regular basis, gotten rid of a lot of the things people (especially free-to-play people) could do to earn nice things, and generally made it more of a pain to do several endgame-type things.
But the main thing one should take away from this is the sheer amount of things that are more or less lost forever for anyone thinking to start playing PSO2 right here and now, post New Genesis. If you weren't playing PSO2 from Day 1 here and gotten everything they had offered the first time around, a lot of it is gone for good now, and that isn't even getting into how borked the player economy is.

All right, so that must mean the new game, New Genesis, must be SUPER GREAT for Sega to do THAT, right? Yeah, well...
Here's the rub: New Genesis is not like the other old PSO games. It's got a more open-world setting now, "dungeons" aren't really a thing, and all of the "combat areas" are relegated to 3 portions of the current world map. You don't "dial up" a mission anymore, you just go out and smack things wherever and collect loot. Up to 8 people can run around in a "combat area" at once, or 32 people in an open area, and EXP and loot is gotten by anyone in the vicinity of a kill regardless of who is in what party. The main "gameplay loop" is "go to a combat area and run in circles, chain-kill everything you can in a spot in the hopes of triggering a frenzy of mobs that culminate in a sub-boss, then repeat until bored". That's...pretty much it. They've had the same small world map they've had for the last half a year, and the same dozen or so mob types and handful of "boss mob" types. "Urgent quests" are back, but again, since launch, there's only 3 of them, and 2 of them are just "kill existing boss mob but BIGGER!", and one of them is kind of a defensive mission recycled from PSO2. The level cap is 20 as of now, and you will hit that REALLY quickly, especially after you've got one class up there already.

On the plus side, the combat itself is pretty darned good. It's not like previous games, is a lot more kinetic, and is based around dashing, jumping, dodging, countering (melee classes are VERY counter-centric), and thus feels a lot more centered around player skill. A lot of the class actions from PSO2 have been consolidated and streamlined to their NGS counterparts, and results in what feels like a lot more flexibility with a lot less needing to fiddle with the limited number of button presses you can assign skills to. Make no mistake, NGS does have SOME really good groundwork for what COULD be a good game...

...if there was anything to do. You have this big open map to run around and parkour in...with no real reason to do so other than gathering. You go to the same few spots and grind the same mobs over and over, until you hit max level, and then grind more. There's the same 3 urgent quests, which have no scheduled times, so you just have to hope you're lucky to be logged in when they happen. All those "Client orders" from PSO2? More or less, they don't exist in NGS right now. NGS feels like an over-glorified tech demo, a proof-of-concept with barely any content to go along with it, and I really don't care what the "roadmap" is, it's been that was for the first half a year since launch. This ALSO makes what is said above about Sega just dropping any reason to go back to OG PSO2 that much more painful.

Bottom line? Whether the NGS fans like it or not, as of now, October 2021, PSO2 is still the main event here. It's a finished game full of content, still enjoyable, which is now hamstringed by Sega not just pretending it doesn't exist, but by gutting things to seemingly shoo people away from it and into NGS. NGS is pretty, has good combat fundamentals, and is generally a fun experience, that has no real content past the week or so it would take you to blow through everything currently available, and seems to be kept afloat right now by free-to-play players grinding currency to buy dress-up parts.

Oh ye gods, the music in every area is awful and it's on like a 10 second loop and it makes me pine for death. It also feels like they just try to do the collectables the same format they do in the base game but it's like 100x more obnoxious in the way they're placed and having to come back after arbitrary upgrades. Easily the worst of the "original 4" DLC.

For a game about digging shinies out of walls while Giant Space Bugs chew, shoot, explode, and generally violence you, it's surprisingly relaxing. Even playing with random people is a decent experience. Solo play is actually not only tolerable, but kind of a Zen experience.

A good amount of mission types, with a good amount of settings, and more to come. It's pretty much a co-op no-brainer for the "should I try it" question.
Now with giant free battle-pass style update that you can complete at your leisure, and will stay even after the season, because the devs are just cool like that.

You know, as so many others have said before, "I wish there was a button to give a middling review of something, not just thumbs up or down". Here's the thing, and I'm sure it's been said like a thousand times, Rage is a perfectly OK shooter. It doesn't do anything new. Or interesting.

You get the usual suspects of guns, pistol, shotgun, rifles, sniper, rockets, you know the drill. The guns all have alternative ammo types that do other more useful/situational things, and the guns all work well and feel satisfying to use, the ammo types all work well, it's all perfectly OK.

The stages (yes stages, your open world just leads you to one story mission to clear after another in a line) are all straightforward shooting galleries, where you go from point A to point B, occasionally finding some goodies in a side area, and the stages are all perfectly OK. If not a little on the brown and/or dark side. You know the time period this game was made in.

The enemies are nothing special; you've got "chaotically moving feral thing that charges at you and can climb walls", you've got "bandit/soldier guys who shoot you", you've got "bandit guys who charge you to melee" and you've got "larger guy with heavy weapon and is tanky". They work well to eat bullets, and they'd be perfectly OK, except you're really not going to see any other variety of enemies, and thus the enemies are probably the weakest point of the game.

You've got a car, the car can be used for combat, racing, and combat racing, and it exists mostly to go "oh hey look what we can do with our game engine". It's all-right, nothing special, perfectly OK, and you can use the car til you get bored with it and move on.

I spent 24 hours on Rage, and I don't regret it. I probably won't play thru it again for a while. It's...again...perfectly OK as an experience. I tried to 100% it as best as I could, until I got bored with the side activities, then just pressed to the end. It's fine.

It's a bad port. It's a bad port which the problems have been known for well over a year. It's a bad port which the problems have been known for well over a year, and NIS has seemingly just decided they weren't interested in fixing.

Here's the thing: the game itself is good, for what it is. I'd recommend buying it on some OTHER format than PC. My biggest problem with the game itself is the lack of an in-game manual or references for you to look up the game mechanics, which is kind of important in a game where the stats, character creation, and other nuances are REALLY important. To reiterate: I like this game. It does what you would expect from the genre quite well.

But that's why this is such a kick in the gut. About halfway thru the game now, and I've encountered a problem that has been reported over and over, but has been apparently ignored, and buried under a lot of "well I don't have that problem so it must not exist!" comments/reviews.

The issue is the game just outright crashing or having the screen freeze up/black screen during combat or during floor transitions. SPECIFICALLY THERE IS A POINT HALFWAY THRU THE GAME that has been pointed out to the developers, over and over apparently, where this issue is so prevalent, it makes the game UNPLAYABLE. There is no workaround, no fan patch, no way to avoid it, as far as I can see. I've tried putting all the game settings down to minimum, disabling the Steam overlay, shutting off EVERY other process I can (including antivirus), and nothing helps.

I am currently playing this on a machine that runs games like Code Vein and Doom 2016 on near-highest graphics settings, at 60fps, running smoothly and with no issue, even loading from an external drive. There is zero excuse for this to be happening.

Don't buy this on Steam. Get it on console. And NIS should be ashamed for letting this happen. From what I hear, a number of their PC ports are subpar. That's a fine way to treat the people who had previously been begging them to bring their games to PC for years. Disappointing.

In all seriousness, let's get right down to it: the main downside of this game is that there just isn't enough of it. If this game was the "scope" of, say, Saints Row 3, with the same main mission structure and the like, it'd be fantastic. It's "Saints Row 4, but more of it, with more interesting powers and a fun setting". It's still great fun in co-op, it's still great little romp. But that's the thing...it's a little romp. It's like "Saints Row 4: Condensed Version". While not a BAD thing, ultimately it leaves you wishing it was more fleshed out. And that's a shame.