Recent reviews by LazyAntelope

+Very quick queue times
+Helpful tutorials and ability to spectate high level play
+Gacha elements do not affect gameplay at all
-Holy smokes, the STINGIEST gacha I've ever seen.

Coming from games that often give free pulls, and where pulls are generally guaranteed characters (like yeah, they'll be trash dupes, but at least they're something) this game you can drop $30 (USD) to get a 10-pull, and each pull only has a 5% chance to draw *any* character. Not a rare character, *any* character. Sure you can wait for events that have rate-up for the ones you want, but there's no way around the fact that if you want a certain character it is going to be EXORBITANTLY expensive. Most of the time pulls are just giving you gifts (for bond level on the characters you don't have) and minor flares like a slightly different colour when you call Ron or declare Riichi.

Overall still pleased with this as a service that allows me to play mahjong frequently and without much wait, but absolutely no intention to engage with the pay-for-waifu part of it.

Liberty Prevails!

If you are a fan of this series and don't mind that this game is basically a cave raider power fantasy, this is a lot of fun. The timescale of the story beggars belief, in that you go from a red whistle to a white whistle in what feels like a couple weeks of cave raiding. I really feel that some time-skips would have mellowed the experience, but they probably didn't want to do models and animations for child-PC, adolescent-PC, and adult-PC. Understandable. The game also has you complete several feats that feel deeply excessive (You fight with Ozen and Bonedrewd and win, although the Ozen fight is optional.. You also wind up collecting a number of relics that you have no business having (Blaze Reap, Thousand Man Pins). The original story doesn't add much to the world, the game is primarily a vehicle to explore the locations and characters established in the manga/anime. If you're looking for something to let you do new and different things inside of the Made in Abyss universe, this game will disappoint you.

Gameplay-wise, learning how to strategically navigate a cliff face so that you can recover your stamina part way through a climb or descent or planning out the optimal return route from a few layers down feels like you're personally progressing as a cave raider with your own little tricks and strategies. Eventually though you get stamina perks that make climbing mostly a breeze, and you get fast travel from higher layers when you progress through the Cave Raider Whistles; both of these changes kind of trivialize a lot of learning and hard work you do before unlocking them. Taking a risk on a climb you're not sure about, but managing to get where you want without falling feels very cool, meanwhile perking to the point that you can just free climb from the bottom of a cliff to the top without any strategy is boring.

Combat is kind of a snooze once you get the hang of it, especially if you employ some of the better options available to you. The only enemies I really struggled with were Madokajacks in the third layer and Orb Piercers in the fourth layer. Also, for Orb Piercers there turned out to be a frustratingly easy way to beat them, and once you know the trick they're trivial. When I played at release, there was an annoying issue of mobs spawning in ridiculous numbers once you'd been on a layer for a couple minutes; I do not know if that's still the case, but I used a mod to decrease the spawn rate to something less unreasonable, and it saved me a lot of frustration. Some may complain that I removed the combat difficulty I complained the game was lacking, but even with the insane spawns it wasn't difficult so much as incredibly annoying. After the tutorial section, all weapons have durability that decreases with use, so the extra mobs were just a logistical problem that'd artificially inflate how long the game takes to complete (i.e. with weapons breaking much more often and having to carry many more weapons that eat up your carrying capacity, having to do more trips to the same locations). I don't regret at all modding the spawn rate down a bit.

Atmospherically, the game captured the Abyss very well. The portrayal of most of the major landmarks was great, especially in the first layer and Ido Front (did not like how they did The Garden of the Flowers of Resilience at all though, felt cramped and not how it was in the manga or anime. The soundtrack was a miss for me. I just turned off the in game music and played the anime OST instead.

Overall I enjoyed it. I'd give it a B grade.

Slow-moving twitch shooter. Map awareness is key. Best with friends, since the community can be really toxic.

Pros:
-All of the character classes feel powerful and unique
-Fun, fresh, procedurally-generated maps that don't feel 'samey' very often
-Between mining yourself a path and using your class's traversal tools, moving around the level feels great
-The different difficulty settings feel nicely balanced to keep things challenging as you progress

Cons:
-A few of the gun options feel really weak until you've completely upgraded them
-No storyline besides the game's basic premise

All in all, I really love this game. I don't feel like it's lack of a story really hurts it. At its heart it's a cooperative social experience. 8/10

There is a really strange sort of grind wall in this game that feels inappropriate for a simulator. You need to use the starting weapons and equipment for a lot of hunts (and I mean A LOT) before you really get an opportunity to branch out, which feels unusual. Don't get me wrong, you *can* hunt just about anything in the game with those starting weapons, they just sometimes feel inappropriate depending on what it is you want to hunt.

If I want to hunt moose with a shotgun, birdshot's not really reasonable. But to actually unlock slugs, you need a crapload of shotgun xp. In that sense, it forces you to play through hunts you might not want to; which to me is a negative for a proper simulation game. I've seen similar sentiments, usually angrily opposed with dismissals of "THIS ISN'T CALL OF DUTY, GOD! IF YOU WANT TO RUN AND GUN AROUND GO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE!" Which is just kind of missing the point. If I want to go bow hunting for small game, or boar hunting with a pistol, or moose hunting with a 12 gauge, I should be able to do those things without spending 70 hours genocidally eradicating the roe deer population first.

TL;DR: The progression system feels like an out of place effort to get more play time out of the game. I wish the dev's would trust me to hunt how I want and enjoy it enough to keep playing that way.

Lots of fun! Decidedly unlikely for the alien to win, but still feels very suspenseful throughout.

It's pretty much a VN, but... it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard. I've been playing for 3 hours and I've been poisoned, shot, stabbed, killed with magic, lost a war, and broken my neck by falling out a window. All of which was good fun.
8/10

Engaging characters and setting, and emotionally charged. Highly anticipating the second installment.

Surprisingly good game; Like a mix between the world-building excerpts from Mass Effect or Dragon Age and a standard Visual Novel. Lots of fun piecing together what happened to the colony ship, and a thoroughly spooky quasi-apocalyptic world.