Recent reviews by MGBlaze

What's here is very nice and the animation work is obviously great, but there really isn't that much here considering the game has been available through early access for 4 years and has been in development probably for much longer than that, at least in terms of the structured campaign.

The sandbox is fairly robust, with various rotating events and npcs in the game, which have all had some impressive writing and art done for them.

Some really basic stuff is absent, like being able to quickly store or buy multiple items without having to go through an additional sub-menu, or being able to remove a constructed building if you decided you would have rather chosen something else. It is also strongly implied that you'd need to win over the character Goldra as she point blank refuses to accompany you, but then she's available as a recruit anyway.

It needs more time in the oven if you don't just want a sandbox monster breeder h-game experience... which, as I already said, sounds silly when it has already been in development for at least four years.

You get flashbanged at the start of every chapter.

A very cute puzzle platformer. Short, though it effectively serves as the prologue for Moss Book II. You can high-five the mouse.

Very neat retro-styled metroidvania game. Lots of emphasis on movement abilities with little emphasis on combat outside of two bosses. The game could REALLY do with having an in-game map as it's easy to get horribly lost, but it's generally short enough that you largely learn the layout after a while.

Full disclosure, I did a lot of QA testing for this game (hence my inflated play time) and have an old personal friendship with the project lead.

That said, I'd like to think my recommendation is still genuine; all the characters are exceptionally well written, with a lot of depth and thought put in to the background of the world, all of the characters have their own believable motivations and world view, and the game features plenty of memorable moments and quotes, and some surprisingly heavy-hitting questions I wasn't expecting from a future space dating VN. The game is relatively short owing to its nature as a VN, but it is worth playing through multiple times to see everything everyone has to say.

The voice actors also knock it out of the park, which adds a lot of extra weight to the heavier emotional moments presented through the story.

Pretty decent sci-fi FPS game; short but an enjoyable enough experience. The recent patch has addressed a lot of the more common criticisms (especially Lucia's dialogue which is now fine). Reloading is still a little bit unsatisfying as all you're basically doing is hitting a button on the gun model, but that is a significant improvement over holding the gun close to your head and waiting for it to reload itself. It also causes far fewer problems when using the controllers as a point of reference for your movement.

The game is still quite hard to run whenever you put the settings over "performance" but the game does look visually quite nice regardless. I'm running a 3070Ti and I noticed significant framerate and ghosting issues until I adjusted the game's settings down, even though the recommended in-game settings were set to "visuals." Not sure if something is borked with my setup or if something is borked with what the game considers 'recommended settings.'

Overall mediocre. There's certainly fun to be had and the gunplay is pretty good, but the game also has a lot of problems that dampen the experience.

The campaign is a somewhat-disguised corridor shooter; the apparent wide open first mission is nice but afterwards the game quickly devolves in to running through a series of streets and trenches, with occasionally frustrating checkpoints setting you back multiple enemy waves.

The enemies themselves have AI that is passable, but their oft-repeated voice lines grate in short order, and lead do some confusion as they seem to select a voice line to randomly shout out every few seconds. "Pushing, cover me" when they aren't moving, "Under heavy fire" when nothing is happening and "Enemy Tlalokii ahead" when they ARE the Tlalokii. Additionally the voiced dialog spoken by your allies comes pre-censored with radio bloops and static, and can't apparently be turned off, because god forbid we have naughty language in a game where we're mowing down waves of enemies.

I personally have also frequently had my character pull the pin on a grenade with their teeth when attempting to stow them on the chest rig, which was very frustrating and also highlights that this game has a very strange and selective relationship with "realism."

One of the most interesting features in the game is how you can unlock a lot of special weapon skins by finding those same skinned weapons in the levels; which I would compare to finding secret enemy Aces in older Ace Combat games when you replay a level on NG+ and unlock special skins that way. But even this has some questionable implementation as a lot of guns refuse to unlock the found skins if you find them too soon (and when the game decides you get to use them ISN'T tied to when you unlock the base weapon), and some weapons will pop up how you have unlocked that skin, but then it turns out it isn't available in your armory after all. This even extends to attachments, as my game never seems to have unlocked flashlights even though they should be a level 1 unlock, and some attachments (namely flashlights and laser pointers) can't be removed once you attach them for no discernible reason.

In summary, if you can turn your brain off then it's fun, but if you're like me and can't then it will be frustrating in equal or greater measure.

Note the vast majority of my playtime was pre-New Genesis base PSO2, which (though it had its issues) was generally a very fun time that I enjoyed quite a lot, though I did have a friend that had a very bad experience due to the unhelpful support team. This review is for New Genesis specifically.

Almost two years later, New Genesis is in the state it should have launched as. There is an actually complete story thread, a world map with four regions, a decent variety of character classes and some quests that make levelling your first/primary chosen class to 70 or so go by relatively quickly.

Once you complete the story, though, the game's barren content landscape becomes apparent. And if you want to level up any other classes you'll be grinding a lot in the game's combat zones, and that takes a very long time if you decide you just want to try a different play-style. And there's like... one dungeon. There are a lot of comparisons that can be made between New Genesis and the original FFXIV - the one that got completely replaced by the far superior FFXIV A Realm Reborn due to how how dire it was in almost all respects.

I don't know how Sega managed to take a game like PSO2, with so much potential, and so thoroughly botch it. I'll probably pop back in every now and then to see if matters have improved but I'm not hopeful given the agonisingly slow drip feed of updates.

New Genesis' main saving grace is that it's Free to Play. The focus on micro-transactions will absolutely be an annoyance as well but the game is at least worth checking out if you want to have a game you can play for a couple of days and probably have at least some fun with.

Cute cat game

Broken. Inexcusable for a game that at its core is over a decade old.

Without going in and adding the line "[HAVOK] fMaxTime=0.01111" to the ini file the intro will break and send the cart and you with it spiralling through the air and break the intro, and Bethesda couldn't even be bothered to do something as simple as THAT for you.

Even after that, the character creation screen breaks and I would need to do more troubleshooting to get past that.

I wanted to like this because L4D in VR sounds amazing, but the implementation just isn't there. It's jank, and not the fun kind of jank.

The biggest problem by far is actually finding a party as there's no guarantee anyone will even be playing at any given time, let alone on the same difficulty and map you selected. The matchmaking similarly doesn't help matters as there is no way to queue for a general difficulty setting; you have to select specific maps, and when you select multiple maps to search for a party in the game will pick one at random rather than make a generalised search for any party on any of those maps. There is also no separation between people searching for a Mutated run on a map that is currently open for that run and people searching for a normal game - which leads to problems when most Mutated runs are excessively difficult unless you're already completely kitted out. This leads to the best solution being to join the studio Discord server to ask for games there, and in my opinion having to rely on an external tool to do basic matchmaking is inexcusable.

All the other problems mostly follow on from that, with uneven difficulty scaling above Veteran, the AI party members being unforgivably dumb (constantly walking in to your line of fire to block your shots, standing in one place and allowing the snowbreed to kill them, poorly kiting around specials and being completely useless for the big Smasher at the end of a run), various bugs in the level geometry that can make items irretrievable, other bugs in the level geometry that lets items sink under the terrain in a way that you can still pick up but can't see, small annoyances like getting stuck on level geometry and dying as a result (And no checkpoints so you go right back to the start of any run if your party wipes, no restarting from the last safe room), and the various dumb bugs that have gone unfixed like a particular mod for the auto shotgun giving it essentially infinite ammo.

The last much more subjective gripe is how the game is designed around an automatic reload system. You press a button to eject the magazine, then bring the weapon to your chest and the game does the rest of the reloading for you. I suppose it's fine on its own, but it makes the gunplay deeply unsatisfying. And while the game does have a manual reload option (called 'advanced reload') that gives you a 50% damage boost, that has its own issues where the game can take a few frames to register you've either initiated or released your grip on parts of the firearm, leading to jank like accidentally un-cocking the SMG or Tommy Gun because those weapons fire from an open bolt, and the game sometimes doesn't realise you let go of the bolt soon enough to stop your character's hand from moving the bolt forward again. To say nothing of how the community generally agrees that you actively detriment your party (when you can find one) if you use the advanced reload on Nightmare or Horror.

There's a good game in there somewhere, but it's buried under too many problems for me to recommend.