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I've put quite a lot of time into this, at some sort of castle now. It's kind of not what I expected, in that I imagined a very DMC5-style linear parrying action game. It's a parry game for sure, with lots of defense mechanics that have different reasons to use them. But it's not linear, it's this kind of hub 'wide-linear' type of thing. Almost reminds me of Alan Wake II in a weird way, or a less polished GoW 2018. Storywise, I'm not too into it, but I really like Musashi. One thing Onimusha has always been really really good at are cutscenes. They had these really cinematic ambitions in Onimusha 1's opening cutscene, it was almost like they were shooting an arthouse film with that. Onimusha 3 has this awesome martial arts action magic thing going on. This is also more on the action side, and the cutscenes are the type of thing you watch and go 'I would watch this if it was a film'. They're these really well shot, slapstick samurai action type of things. Kind of forgot that Capcom used to be renowned for this sort of thing, back in the PS2 days. We don't see this as often now. Not every cutscene is like that though, and the story can be pretty boring for long stretches in the hub area, and it all feels really loose and disconnected. It's super weird, and I've forgotten what the story is even about tbh. I'm not going to get into things like how the combat and action feels. It does get harder than the demo, but it takes a very long time to get there. There is a lot to study in the issen, parry and reflex dodge mechanics. Issen is the strongest but least safe option, but it's the classic skill flex in Onimusha, doing a critical attack with parry timing but without parrying, maximum risk maximum reward, and you can chain it to different enemies. They really dripfeed this stuff though so it takes a very long time for these systems to really amount to much, which is why I want to give it the benefit of the doubt. I already know that parry-focused combat isn't really my thing, but I'm fond of those PS2 games and ultimately, it's Issen you want to eventually master, which is a level above the parry. One thing I ended up doing was setting the whole game to 21:9 even on a TV, because the FOV is way too tight and was making me sick but in ultrawide it gives more horizontal room, which makes putting up with borders worth it. I think it works though, looks proper Kurosawa (ok, not proper, he would never compose an image this badly, but fuck it)

Managed to resist just buying MGS4 on PC and not playing it, and want to see how far I can get in a series marathon instead. Skipping MG1 and Peacewalker, cause both those games are ass imo. But MG2 is one I've always been curious about cause I heard it's where the formula all comes together. So I installed it on the steam deck last night and am going to try and complete it. Tbh I might not bother with the marathon and just play this game, cause it's all relatively new to me. I always heard that MGS1 was a sort of spiritual remake of it, and I can kinda see it. The bit at the beginning where you have to crawl into a vent instead of going in the front door of the base, the prison section in the basement with floors that open up. Some of the visual language feels a lot like Metal Gear Solid, the alert sequences and such. Visually, I think it looks great in spite of its age, much better than MG1 Also, Colonel Campbell giving completely useless advice. He tells me what the speed of sound is, and how to arch your foot in order to sneak quietly. What? Don't call this motherfucker for tips ever, call not-Meryl (Holly), she actually tells you useful things about the base. Metal Gear Solid is basically a 2D game with 3D graphics, but the game design makes more sense in this one I think by being fully 2D. It feels much more like Pacman and some of the 3D flourishes that MGS adds to the formula don't really add a lot, other than a spider rifle and rocket launcher mechanic. You spend a lot of time looking at the radar, seeing where the white dots are cause they are the guards. The thing that fucks you in this is you don't have vision cones and you need to remember that just cause an enemy is on another screen doesn't mean that they can't go into the one you're on. At least they can't see you until you can see them

I just completed the prologue of this, which according to the game timer took like less than 2 hours or something, maybe 90 minutes. But steam says 3.8 hours. I don't know why games do this. Anyway it's a very Witcher 3 type of thing, maybe a bit more AA than Witcher 3. It's very hand-holdy in the opening and has a ton of dialogue to the point it almost feels like a TellTale game. Not necessarily a complaint. It's hard to get a grasp of what impact the time mechanic will have early on. The way it works is that a quest takes a 'chunk' of time, which you can see in the screenshot on the top right here. It seems like early on the time 'chunks' are always 1. Sometimes, you will have a dialogue option in a quest that will take some time, so you get more opportunities to talk to characters and do stuff, with that as a kind of trade off. What impact this will have in the main game, I'm not sure, but reviews indicate it's not as pressing as it might seem and is actually quite generous Either way, it adds an interesting dimension to the decision making economy, I think. Certain skill ups also cost time. None of this has been really pressing so far. One small thing I did like early on is when I turned a quest in, I got a dialogue option to ask the quest giver to follow up with another character instead of me doing it or going with him, cause I had other things to do. It's a little small touch that makes it feel a bit more immersive. Other people will find things like this annoying, but I like it What's the game actually about? It's about these motherfucking vampires who have asserted dominion over a 14 century central european town which was suffering the ravages of the Black Death, and the vampire's blood is the cure. So they've swept aside feudal structures and tithes, all that Kingdom Come Deliverance stuff and replaced it with thralldom to bloodsuckers. Every full moon, the village has 'Communion' at a church and well you can imagine how that goes. It's some pretty good world building so far My complaint is the main character. He ain't no Geralt and he suffers badly so far from that AAA issue of constantly talking to himself, but not in a cool Geralt way. It'll have to be seen how he develops. Other complaint might be that the combat is very parry heavy, like every other game nowadays. But I get the sense you could probably figure out how to trivialise it later on, I don't know. There's some interesting day/night mechanics, you can't use food to heal at night so you have to drink blood of your enemies. If your health falls too low, your dialogue options can randomly fail and you just succumb to hunger and devour who you're talking to. This sounds like it could be really crazy if you just embrace it and not try to save scum all the time.

This starts off with a bunch of rowdies entering the jungle and blasting loud music, so the three marsupilami decide to kick their butts to have some peace and quiet. As far as videogame backstories go, rarely have I seen one so relatable. This is a fun game to play because it reminds me of the classic videogame approach of building a game and using the foundation and assets to improve and elaborate on it with a sequel. You know, before studios got closed after their first game, that time period. So this feels both very familiar to the first but also drastically different in other ways. The most obvious change is that the three characters now have distinct tools, like in the big ape game that this has always been inspired by. One of them can glide, one can double jump and the third one can turn himself into a ball. The latter is quite unusual and has a bit of a learning curve to it – it turns him invulnerable to stage hazards and normal enemies while also increasing bounce effects, all at the cost of precision. Every stage sends you out with two predetermined characters and you can switch on the fly. You rarely have to though, so it doesn't really break the flow. In fact, most of the stages can be completed just sticking with one, though you might need to switch around for secrets or Salsa Mode*. The control scheme has also been reworked and attacking is no longer mapped to the same button as the roll, which takes a bit to get used to but is a net improvement. Another area of improvement are the stages, as they are way more elaborate than in the first game. It pretty much starts where they left off with the dino DLC, so there's no handholding island with baby levels and instead throws some neat ideas at you from the get-go, and regularly adds nice visual flourishes like slightly angled perspectives for chase sequences and such. It's still not an incredibly difficult game, but noticeably more challenging than the first, and also has proper boss battles this time around as well. As in most 2D platformers though, they are the weakest part of the package. The secrets I'm less convinced about. You now collect notes in a stage, but also receive some depending on the amount of fruits you collect (lives are gone). To get all the notes, you have to complete *Salsa Mode, which is unlocked after first beating a stage and is some kind of pseudo-time trial mode, in which collecting fruit fills a bar and continuously collecting them adds a multiplier to them, but if you fail to keep the streak going it goes down to x1. I don't really like this one because breaking the streak in the last third of the level basically means restarting to get the best result, so I think I might ditch the idea of going for 100%. There's unfortunately no gallery or extras menu this time around, so completionist stuff might only unlock achievements. Not sure on that yet though. There's also some challenges, solo and multiplayer, which I haven't looked into yet. Really good sequel though. It doesn't have that 'wait, this is really good' kind of moment because I knew better this time around, but it's a really solid sequel that improves in the right places but maybe stumbles a tiny bit here and there with the optional challenges. It doesn't seem to be much longer than the first, but the islands have more stages and the stages are bigger, so it might end up being a 4 hour game instead of a 3 hour one, at the very least. Music is also way better that in the first game as well, which was quite forgettable bar one or two exceptions.

This is the Avatar Game where you Fight. I ran online and I guess I did around 15-20 matches altogether. So I have gotten the day 1 humiliation ritual out of the way of getting my ass beat, after trying to lab some stuff on Katara. I did manage to win one fight, but couldn't tell you why. The big thing that stands out about it is this 'flow' thing. You press A and push in a direction and scoot around the place, with a powered up version of your dash (at least on Katara, but I think this is a general thing with other characters). You can cancel that dash into flips and back dashes (again, on this character) and out of that you get buffs to your other moves, which will set up other combo routes and options I suppose. I guess it's like drive rush, but non-linear in its applications, and it can also be used for defense (Katara has a flow that ducks under overheads). It also shares a meter with your super, so I guess you have to choose schmovement or anime attacks. The combos I've gotten done to me definitely make me feel out of my depth in some of these beta matches, but that's cause I think there's either no skill based matchmaking in the beta, or it's taking a while to get me into the shitter leagues. Katara's whole thing is her water whip. You can do specials and do a stance cancel into your whip stance, which sets up midscreen lows and mids, or close range launchers. You can also use flow during her whip stance and hit people with attacks that feel like EX attacks. She can also do some light screen control with icicles and clouds. But the more crazy thing in this game is that each character has three 'supports', which buff certain parts of the character. The default one I'm on with Katara is faster whip cancels, which lets you craft pressure concepts with how quickly you can threaten the whip, and you have all these combo extensions. For some reason, the whip cancelling archetype is represented by an old lady, I don't know why, I don't watch the cartoon, maybe she beats the shit out of people with a whip in it. There's another archetype that's all about faster dashing (maybe this is where you should start with her tbh), and another that lets you do her icicle zoning more quickly. There's other things going on in the game where certain characters have certain buffs or states if certain things happen in fights, but I don't understand this aspect yet. I'm just trying to get my light light medium heavy forward heavy forward quarter circle light back stance cancel medium BnB down. Also if I can learn a cool conversion out of her heavy forward heavy launcher, that would feel cool. It seems like a deep game with really high execution, but it will be nice when it launches proper and matchmaking is working a bit better. Lots of high ping matches out there right now. I did see online that the PS5 beta seems broken, so probably not worth pre-ordering on that (maybe they might extend the beta though...) One complaint I have is the animations are pretty choppy. My other complaint is this Azula asshole. Play this character if you are looking for the annoying character, it's important to know who the annoying character is.

I'll just put a thread here, rather than chat in twitch thread. Anyway, for all the stuff about fighting games being easy/hard, I think I find this a substantially harder game to get comfortable with than Avatar cause of how chaotic it is. The tags/assists/extending pressure/looping them in combos and all the universal mechanics make it a bit much at times It's easy to see that if you are into comics, then this is a cool and stylish take on them. Has a similar vibe to Marvel Rivals, but while that game felt like it was duck taped together and had a mobile game vibe, this feels properly AAA and expensive and is pretty much guaranteed to be a massive hit cause of how full a package it is and how great it looks. Also it helps that the skill floor relies on powerful autocombos and defensive counters. So you can find big, explosive looking combos that just automatically go into your level 3 super or whatever. Me though, I like to start things off gentle I'm going to spend a bit of time trying to understand the combo building, cause you're supposed to combine some autocombo gatlings with your regular normals/specials and assist to bridge it all together. The combo building is a bit hard for me to get used to, but I saw a relatively straightforward BnB with Magik with wall carry. I'd like to learn one clever setup with the portals, some sort of anti-air (you can combo from her DP, and assist can always extend things), and that will be my project for the open beta.

Berry Bury Berry... Honestly, words probably won't do the description of this game justice. I'll start with the trailer. So, it's a first-person incremental game set in a saccharine sweet, incredibly bright game world. Berries are generated from the plant in the area near you, and you're tasked with popping said berries into the bottomless pit in the ground. Your character's name is Berry. So Berry buries berries. Hence the name. Anyway, each cycle is timed, and you get around 70 seconds to stuff as many berries as you can into said pit. After the timer ends, the lights go off, and you go to bed. Before starting the next day, you get an upgrade screen. So far, so incremental. As you progress, you gain access to Berry Buddies, which are little plant pots that toddle about popping off berries from time to time. There is a story attached, but to say anything on that would render most of the game pointless. I've seen two YouTubers play it from start to finish, so I already knew the story, but what's there is really cool in my opinion. It's all revealed via cassette tapes around the world, which add to context to the wider concept. So you get this drip, drip, drip of information that pulls things along beautifully. It didn't hamper my experience, though, because I knew what I wanted to play this for, for ages. Numbers go up. Back to incremental stuff. It has all the usual suspects. Rebirth/Rewinds make progress significantly easier. The hole gets bigger the more you shove in there. You can eventually escape the confines of the starting area to discover what's scattered about. It's not a huge game, I managed to get the Platinum in about 12 hours, but if you want to switch your brain off for a few hours and discover a story that's slowly revealed as you get more power-ups, it's definitely worth a look.

I only put in about an hour, as I'm still pretty deep into STS and context switching into another roguelike while learning another is a bit much. But the gist is it's kind of a Final Fantasy Tactics type of thing, but with cats. You go on a run, you level up your cats and then retire them after a run, at which point they become use for cross-breeding certain traits into cats that you bring on future runs. Your cats can die, and stay dead. Retired cats can also be thrown into a bin and given to other NPCs in the game, but I'm not sure for what at this point. You can also get new cats by waiting a day or two and some strays will wander in, but you need to have enough food if you wait around (which you get on runs) The combat is a grid based type of thing where you have movement and mana resources and cats have different roles like mage, tank, dps or ranged and there seems to be quite a lot of interactions and combinations of buffs, tile effects and side effects from attacks to consider. I'm very far from understanding any of this, as my tank cat went crazy and farted everyone to death cause of a passive trait it had that means it can't distinguish friend from foe, all felines get farted on. I still won that fight cause of how tanky he was, but I quit afterwards cause all my other cats died and then I was left with only my original two, so I put it down to come back to later. It seems pretty deep, and its sense of humour is very 2005 Newgrounds-coded (I saw online that Chris Chan of all people provides a voice-credit to the game, which is fucking weird, but anyway). I'm not quite hooked yet and the type of humour it goes for is something that stopped really appealing to me a long time ago, it's just a bit mean, but I think the breeding and chaotic strategy of fights is where all the intricate parts of the game will be. I think this is just on PC currently, but I imagine it will run on anything that runs windows/linux. I'll say that the Steam Deck controls are a bit rough, you have to use the stick or the trackpads to move the cursor around and it doesn't really feel suitable for it yet, which might explain why Switch and other consoles aren't ready yet. But you can make it work I'm sure, but I think a dedicated mouse is the way to go here. Visually it's pretty much perfect on steam deck, no compromise whatsoever and the UI scales purrfectly (I'm so fucking sorry)

It's finally here and I've been playing it... 😁 Off the bat it looks and feels fantastic, I've really gotten used to these games feeling fairly heavy to play and this feels no different... it's got a nice sense of inertia on the characters and if you've played any of the remakes I think you'll feel right at home. Grace seems like a cool character, I really like the small touch with her hands shaking as she aims due to her being terrified... whereas Leon is just a bad ass from the start, I've never been a Leon fanboy but I already like him in this much more... maybe it's the age thing. Probably played for around four hours so far but I've not made too much progress due to deaths/reloads... I'm playing standard difficulty with modern saving on my first playthrough... just picked up the level one wristband. Also stuck with third person views for both characters. Rhodes Hill seems like the closest thing we've had to that classic Resident Evil mansion or police station we've had in years... the zombies are amazing and there's more things to avoid in this place as Grace than we've ever had... it's constant cat and mouse. I can't wait to pile hours in to this...

That is '1000 times resist', according to one of the creators I think. I put this on hiatus a week or so back, but wanted to write down my thoughts on the first half anyway. I think some of us have this on our backlog It is a sort of 'walking sim' type deal set in a very Yoko Taro-coded version of the future. A mass extinction event occurred, aliens invaded and spread a virus. The game jumps back and forth through time via a sort of memory technology called 'communion'. You're playing as this character called 'Watcher' and you live in this enclosed, somewhat infantilised sisterhood where everyone's names is their role. Nobody can ever take off their mask. There's a sort of COVID allegory to some of it, but also as the name suggests there's a theme of resistance and cycles which gets into slightly more interesting real world allegories, which I'll leave out here but they're mentioned in reviews if you're curious. Put in simple terms, it's an interesting sci fi story with lots of overlapping layers that develop its themes in interesting ways and are successful at generating empathy for their characters. Playing the game is a real struggle though, which is why I put it on break. You just talk to people in it, and you navigate these really confusing environments. It all sort of looks a bit like a second life level, or a custom map from VR chat or something like that. In a way the aesthetic is kinda refreshing or maybe nostalgic if you've ever played F2P MMOs from the noughties or something. The game does find some neat tricks with perspective, how it changes camera angles from third person free form to first person to fixed angles, trying to inject things with a cinematic flair. But it is a bit like doing the fetch quests in FFXIV or FFXVI and having being a bit traumatised by that design it makes it very hard to recommend. You'll see a few articles on some gaming sites praising the story, like massive praise calling it the greatest of all time. I'm not on that level with it, but I do think it's doing something interesting but in a way that's kind of draining to interact with, personally speaking. So I'm very mixed on it, but I'll probably try to see through the second half over Christmas. It seems like the kind of story where you can take an intermission cause of how it's structured

Terratech Legion is one of those Bullet Heaven/Survivors type roguelites, where you're driving a little vehicle against hoards of robot enemies. It's the first one of these kind of games to really grab me since Vampire Survivors (and to a lesser extent Ball X Pit). I'm having a great time with it, I feel it's destined for my Steam top 20 most played quite soon at this rate. The hook is the vehicle building mechanic. You pick up parts crates by killing enemies carrying them, and each time you level up an upgrade station drops onto the map near you which you drive into to open your parts crates, and select a new weapon. The building part in fun and very flexible, you can strip everything down to the cab and rebuild your vehicle from scratch if you wanted to, and can end up with some really outlandish looking machines. As for content - there are 4 biomes with three difficulty levels and a survival mode for each, unlocked as you progress. There are 4 characters each with a different vehicle, which have different abilities. Each vehicle also has an individual upgrade tree, and some unique blocks in the parts crates. I think my favourite is the one which gets shields when you boost. One run I went all in on impact damage and turned it into a battering ram which killed the stage boss in less than 60 seconds.

Thought of dumping this in the PC bucket, but I'll put it here. I don't think we have a thread for it yet. Quit my Eternal playthrough cause that mod I downloaded is too much for me, so I'm trying this again. If you haven't played Ultrakill, it's this PSX-styled very intense FPS game that sorta looks like a roguelike, but it isn't. It's more like Devil May Cry, when you die on a mission you just get a worse rating and can reload from a checkpoint, but that's part of the learning curve as you push for higher difficulties and ratings. You kill things with skill, you heal more health the more variety you use in combat. You have to get up in the enemies face when you kill them, to drink their blood and get healed. So it promotes this very in-and-out risky and varied gameplay, and you have dashes, wall jumps and ground slams to complement your guns It's very heavy on parrying though, my kryptonite. Feels like you're meant to punch motherfuckers a lot. You have one really cool gimmick weapon in it, which is a gun where you toss a coin in a random direction and shoot the coin to do extra damage. It's a great way to get killed by ignoring all the enemies, trying to shoot this fecking coin when a shotgun to the face would get the job done. Actually, a lot of the weapons seem to have a drawback, like overcharging the shotgun blows you up, things like that You can tell by the graphics that this is a PC game, you need the highest end hardware to run it. This guy has weapons I've not unlocked yet, looks like it does turn into something cool eventually.

Finally bought a new game for my PC. Sure, it was 37 quid and looks like Skyrim, but that's neither here nor there. I think everyone knows it's a bit of a TES clone, down to most of the controls (at least on Xbox pad) being in the same configuration - Y for jump etc. I'm expecting, over the course of the next 50 hours, to be questing, lock picking, alchemy-ing and, most importantly, collecting flora and fauna for the cooking of. My build will be one handed with shield for parrying, and a side line in conjuration. So, pretty much my favourite TES build. Played an hour. Couldn't be happier. For now, at least.

Started playing this a few nights ago thanks to a free 30 day code I received from a guy on another forum, always wanted to give it a go but didn't want to pay the money to take the plunge I suppose. Decided on a Female Miqo'te (Seekers of the Sun) Lancer with the Oschon Guardian, I'm situated in Phoenix in the Chaos server, Level 8. No idea really if any of what I picked is any good. The game put me into 'Grimaldia' which is a set of forest cities. As for the game itself...still undecided really, very early days 4 hours into an MMO but I like a few things about it and dislike a few things about it really. The world itself seems cool, the servers are stable and even though the graphics aren't upto 2015 standards really it looks alright, runs incredibly well at 1080/60 and I've been using the GamePad throughout without any major problems except I can't seem to find an option to invert the right analog stick which is annoying, but I've got used to playing in default now, despite it not feeling wholly natural. The way they introduce you to the game is very good, you're definitely eased into it, in one little secluded area of the map (Grimaldia), everything is told to you simply and tutorial boxes pop up for pretty much everything, there is still a lot to take it but it doesn't feel like you're bewildered or bamboozled by information and the world itself like other MMOs I've played in the past. Only really explored Grimaldia and its surrounding but it is pretty cool, the scenery is nice, the buildings have a lot of character to them and its cool seeing people potter about with Chocobo's in tow (how the fuck do I get one of them?!). My main gripe though at the moment is the quests, they're all very fetch-questy and traditional MMO staples as 'kill 6 of this creature', 'deliver a message to this person', 'go round up these naughty people and tell them to come back' etc. the coolest one I've done was some woman that was being accosted by this bloke that was a criminal and asked me to meet with him on the edge of town instead of her to see what his deal is, every other quest has been incredibly forgettable and dull, I've played 4 hours and these quests just keep popping up and up and up, they don't seem to go away, but there's not really anything else to do so I keep on just doing them regardless. I didn't understand why I couldn't complete some of the quests earlier, the little 'complete' box was not able to be clicked so I just left these quests uncompleted and went to do some others, tried again later into my session and realised if I pressed left or right on the d-pad I could select a quest reward, once selected the quest was able to be completed felt so stupid. Another stupid moment I had was when I had to get Level 5 gear to do a quest, went to the shop, dropped a load of cash on a set of Level 5 stuff and then realised after that I could've got all of it from the quest rewards I was missing all that money wasted, oh well :oops: Not sure about the Fate-public event quests either, it's a cool concept and when they work and loads of people come to one spot to batter some cunt its a nice spectacle but most just get in the way and are annoying really, only had people turn up in 1 or 2 out of all the ones I've attempted. The combat is really cool though, I mean you can just sit back and just press 1 button here and there, it's not very involved on the face of it, but you feel involved in it which is the key thing, and it feels satisfying enough that when you defeat a tough-ish enemy you're slightly elated. There's definitely something compelling about it though, it just feels like it could be a standard RPG at the moment, it doesn't feel bewildering at all really and I'm just pottering about doing quests, thinking about upgrading weapons, armour etc. like I would a regular RPG, I do hope the quests get better the further it goes on though as I think I'm out if it's another shit-ton of hours of these quests.

I know they've never had a breakout hit, but I kinda love dontnod's work. I adored Remember Me. Life Is Strange was so cool, and Jusant was just sublime. For whatever reason, though, Aphelion isn't quite landing for me. I'm not sure if it just feels a bit barren (there's no combat, and no real stakes beyond a quick reload), or what's going on, but something is just missing the mark. It plays nicely, and some of the landscapes are gorgeous, too. The story is nice enough, you play as two characters trying to find each other on an alien planet after a crash landing. You're stalked by a weird ass alien 'thing'. The chapters are kinda following the same format. To the point I'm predicting where the chilled climbing ends and the chase scene begins. What I'm trying to say is, like a lot of this dev's output, it's something to buy when it's on sale or play on PS+/Game Pass. Like, I like it. But also, it's very meh.

I played the opening hours of this, it's a sort of mission based Monster Hunter thing. Party based combat, you have a shitload of 'crew mates' you can recruit to go beat up goblins with, who are AI controlled (tho you can swap to them in the pause menu). It's a bit of a mashy party based character action game, and it's very very easy. But from what I hear the real game happens in postgame. The story is basically a long tutorial, apparently. It's kind of annoying, but it can also be pretty hype when you party syncs up their limits breaks. I read a comment somewhere that this is like a PS2 game with all the budget, and I think that explains it. If you want a PS2 game with modern graphics, get this. The characters I'm mainly playing are Narmaya, who I played in the fighting game. Like in the fighting game, she's a stance based character with a katana. She goes between crowd control and one-v-one damage based stances, and can switch and combo between them. Pretty standard archetype. The other is Rosetta, who's more interesting. Kind of a support role, very slow and hits things with a big vine whip and plants roses everywhere. Her combos create party wide buffs, and the roses can be used to distract enemies, beat them up, and be re-positioned to pressure/explode enemies. There's another character who's a fencer who has an ability that makes everyone invincible. There's a ton of characters, so a lot to learn. There's lots of items and resources for upgrading weapons, skill trees and such. There's nothing here that's all that surprising, really. It's just a Capital C Content game, you do lots of side quests and unlock missions and characters and fight things and level everything up forever and ever. Story wise, I've skipped every fucking cutscene. I cannot stand how these characters sound when they talk. I've gathered that they are sky pirates and they're off fucking around the place, fighting monsters and rescuing people. That's all you need to know. But the fighting can be cool sometimes, when you can see what's going on. I genuinely get dizzy sometimes trying to keep track of things so I've set the battle effects to the lowest setting and screen shake off. Even then, it's a challenge to parse.

I played 30 minutes of it. It asks you to create a bethesda account before even being able to play which is really annoying but you can get around by setting steam to offline. Anyway it seems good. Kind of more focused on just murder arenas from the look of things. But I'm totally ok with a game like that. You can turn HUD off but it's hard to play. The HUD is a bit much tbh, I need to spend some time figuring out what parts I can turn off. Playing on ultra violent

Played through this roughly a month ago but never made a topic. But I feel like I need to lure @Nag away from the dinoboobs so he can play something decent, and I also just dabbled a bit with New Game+ earlier (not sure if I have an entire second playthrough in me, though it is a very nicely paced, frictionless ride). In any case, this is a bit of a weird one because the game called Echoes of the End that got panned by critics upon release and the one you can buy now are two totally different beasts. I never played the original version, but from reading through what they added with the Definitive Edition – skill trees, stat-altering accessories, craftable armour – it must have been very barebones and empty at launch. Not so anymore. In short what it does is put you into the shoes of Ryn, a vestige, which is this universe's moniker for someone who can use magic, in Ryn's case: telekinesis. It's a very personal story mostly revolving around saving your brother from an evil army, but it does feature some believable character development on the protagonist's side. Some key plot points don't hit as hard as the writers probably wanted, but at its very wholesome conclusion I did want to spend more time in that universe and with those characters, so I did something right, for me at least. On the gameplay side it comes as no surprise then that your telekinetic abilities play a big role, in either combat, platforming and puzzle solving. Because this is a good, old-fashioned videogame where you do a little bit of all three of those things in regular intervals. Platforming is self-explanatory (you jump and climb), while puzzles are actually quite well-designed in the sense that you're rarely doing one sort more than once. Some of the more basic stuff, like shifting platforms around with telekinesis, is a more frequent sight, sure – but the rest is mostly unique to the area you're currently in, like navigating desolate ruins with fake mirage bridges, or channeling your powers through a stone that can shift between two time periods, like that one level from Titanfall 2. There's no real headscratcher in there, but they're also not mind-numbingly easy – just a good mix to give you something to do other than jumping and fighting. Combat is probably where the most effort went in, though mostly in terms of polish and options, not necessarily depth. The aforementioned skill trees allow you to develop pure martial art, telekinesis powers, defensive abilities and coop manoeuvres (there's an NPC following your around for most of the journey). You can max out three out of four of these in one playthrough, so it's not primarily about choice but rather about the order in which you unlock stuff. Combat itself is a classic light/heavy attack affair with dodges and parries, plus a couple of telekinesis stuff. The latter feels a bit half-baked early on because the manapool is so low, but in the late game it becomes a bit more integral to the fights. It can be a bit clunky at times – the developers didn't go to Remedy's school of snappy object throwing – but it works well enough and gives you more options than just slashing your way through (which does, at least, feel quite impactful and satisfying). And I think 'well enough' describes this game perfectly: absolutely no part of it stands out in any shape or form, but for a debut title (from Iceland no less, don't think I've ever played a game made over there) it's very confidently put together, it has barely any lengths or annoying bits, doesn't repeat its major ideas and set pieces, feels well-balanced on normal. Overall a really solid 7 that could pave the way for an extremely good sequel if they ever get a chance. It's also that rare breed of a game that is an excellent piece of advertisement for UE5, because it looks technically phenomenal – albeit a tad orthodox in terms of environmental art – and runs at a rock solid 60fps throughout despite the developer's meagre resources. It does have a quality mode, but for some reason activating it makes the game bug out and crash, but I never saw a reason to play it like that anyway, considering it would severely impact two out of its three major gameplay facets.

I got my first match nerves out of the way so I'll start the thread up, but also as a way to encourage others to download it 👀. I ran online with Luna Snow, I think her name is. Did 2 matches and won both 2-0 (best of 3). Chucks healing ice at people and wears booty shorts. I think I did reasonably well with 0 experience in the genre and no idea of how to strategise. I just chucked ice at things if they looked like they were dying, if I even noticed them, and other healers did the same for me. In the second match I did here it looked like there was one Wolverine who clearly got the memo "kill the fucking healers first". Brains and brawn that guy Seems fun but chaotic and hard to get a handle of the UI you're supposed to be looking at. Luna has a move on the shift key which increases her DPS and HPS, I think. She has a move on right click which delivers a freeze on a target and heals her, so that's her self sustain. Her ultimate gives HPS and DPS depending on pressing Q to toggle. E is a sort of tethered heal between you and another character, to give them a passive defensive buff. Very straightforward with Luna, easy to get to grips with in a game that's sort of overwhelming. Healers have always been my preference. That said I don't think she'll be a long term pick, once I get comfortable. I'm interested in the more complicated ones eventually, and I'd like to try a tank as well so I have an alt if the strat role is taken, leaning towards Steven Strange because he's voiced by Grimoire Weiss and thinks with portals, so his match chatter actually sounds good I've also played Cloak and Dagger, who's harder to heal with but the stance swap thing seems interesting. Can't quite figure out the shadow powers, apparently they blind and hide people but I feel like I have to be on the receiving end of this in a match first before I even know what this means and how it impacts strategy. You can shoot a rectangle line AOE heal at people and a little healing bubble which if FFXIV has taught me anything, fucking nobody will be standing in that thing Anyway two people on the first match had 0 percent accuracy on some rounds, it was hard and I was sad. But I got MVP in my 2nd match with her tho, maybe she's cool I'm liking what I'm seeing with Iron Fist, for DPS. He has a defensive stance which procs a stinger attack and can triple jump, all his attacks reduce the cooldown of his defense stance. He also has self sustain with E. He's really agile, just seems like the goto for that role and I don't think I'll be changing my mind

The game is a 3D puzzle platformer with collectathon elements, and a fun building mechanic. You play as a robot trying to collect the parts to repair his spaceship, each level is fairly contained and the point is to reach the box at the end containing the item you need. To do so you collect scrap lying around the level and build structures to help you solve the particular problem on that level. There are variations which require you to build a robot to either ride, or build a path to direct it to the correct end point. The build mechanic is simple, but enjoyable. Despite clearly being a low budget title, the style works well and it looks great. It reminds me of a PS2 or N64 game, or another recent game that knew it's scope and executed it really well - Tinykin. For £10, it's a bargain.

I don't know how to give impressions on this without getting in the weeds. In terms of features it's an old fashioned 2D fighting game. You have an arcade mode (which is kinda interesting in that the better you do the harder the end boss gets) and there is a story that is literally an anime that you just watch, which is what the last game did too but it's still wild to me. There's also a pretty intense Mission Mode that does it's best to teach you the deeper mechanics of the game which if you're the studious type could work pretty well. I could do with spending more time in it myself but getting wrecked by someone using my character then trying to rip them off in the next match is more fun for me. It's the good netcode that saves it though. Well, the matchmaking is pretty rough at the mo but it plays really well in game. It just means there's always people to play with. This came online at midnight and I was ready to play it so I went to the east coast of USA since it was a more sensible time there and while it was a little choppy visually my inputs were barely delayed, if at all. I really hope they put this in a DBFZ2, in fact it would be shocking if they didn't. I've not saved many fights yet since I think I'm still pretty scrubby but my Gio is coming along a little. And this fight with Zato was fun when I wasn't put in the corner with all his nonsense:

Singleplayer first mission done and will admit its just as much fun as before, I love a bit of gears and thi has cheered me up! Graphically its better but not sure how much better tbh, can't play too much as other half wants to play it. Am i right in thinking all the other gears games will work off the xb1 as well now?

Apparently have 4 hours in this already, which must include some alt-tab time, I'm not sure. I nearly beat the third area on my first run but since then it's been a string of failures. It's pretty much the same thing as the first game, but better looking. There's 5 characters now, I've unlocked 4. Two of the new characters are 'Regent', which is a class based around summoning a sword and 'forging' it to deal more damage. I didn't get far with him, but he has a second resource on top of energy to cast certain powerful cards, so there's multiple things you have to manage and build towards to make him powerful, between forge, energy and the mana stars. The other new one is Necromancer, I haven't used them yet. On my Ironclad run I didn't see much that was new, but I did have a card which lets you hatch a bird and play a powerful 0 cost card to deal some damage. The build I tried to do was limited in terms of block and relied a lot on vulnerable, but I just couldn't do enough rounds with the last boss to keep up. There's also some new mechanics for The Silent, one called 'Sly', which is a property which executes a card if it's dismissed directly. A discard build seems powerful with that class. As it's Early Access, it has some placeholder art, but it's the best placeholder art ever. Otherwise I'm not sure right now you could tell this is an EA game, it feels really polished. It's mostly an iteration of StS1 as far as I can see. My biggest weakness remains not being more disciplined about picking cards which have direct synergies with what I already have and ending up a bit too bloated.

Spent about 5 hours with this yesterday and just left the first planet. I really like that sort of game design in open world games. A complete but bite sized chunk to get you ready for the rest. Places like White Orchard in The Witcher 3. As for the game, it's okay. Crushingly okay. There's nothing in the game I don't like but there is nothing I love either. The writing is pretty good and there have been a few funny moments but there hasn't been a character introduced yet that really connected me to the world and the world itself is your generic capitalism gone wild scenario. Which I like, I'm an easy sell on that sort of thing but it's been done so often that it's just okay. Combat is okay. Loot is okay. Graphics are okay. Character creator is okay. Skills are okay. Player choices are okay. You get it. I'll be putting some more time into it today so hopefully it just starts off slow because there is definitely potential but I worry that they have spent so much time on giving the player a million different choices that none of them really mean anything.

Maf refused to create the thread for the weird Russian nun game I put about 4 hours or so into it the other day, cause the description sounded pretty weird. Anyway it's sort of a third person narrative adventure with a focus on puzzle solving and platforming. It's set in a surreal realisation of 19th century Russia. You're playing a nun at this like Orthodox covenant, everyone hates you for some reason. It blends together a few styles, mainly the TP narrative thing mentioned but also 2D platformers, which indicates a split in the period of the narrative (the 2D bits are the main character's memories). The 3D sections is fairly standard block pushing type stuff, but also an interesting environmental manipulation gimmick involving prayers and shame, it's like the environment gets all DmC for a bit. There's a few strange things with the setting, a kind of steampunk thing going on and one section with unreasonably huge fish. It sort of straddles the line between feeling like this ironic sendup of... something but also using genre conventions from games and maybe some eastern european cinema to chat about guilt, religious conflict, sexual repression, v. standard stuff. It's alright, I expected it to be weirder tbh. Make sure to light up these Christ icons so you can get a high score and level up your Christian guilt skilltree (points are pointless)