Recent reviews by Sesujin

One of the best games I've ever played, wish I could stare into some goat's eyes and go back in time 20 hours so I can play it again.

This game teaches you about panama disease

Edit 2/6/24: It's been about 4 months since writing this review and a lot of the issues outlined here have been fixed. Over the past month or two, there has clearly been a huge effort put forth by the devs to overhaul a lot of the game to make it a much better experience. While it still has some quirks, I think that this game finally has enough polish and oversight by the developers to make it the one of the best mahjong clients out there, if you can play in Japanese or Chinese that is. Certainly, if you're looking for a mahjong client that's not as serious as tenhou, but not quite as anime inspired or over the top as mahjong soul or riichi city while still having a bunch of characters to play as, this is the best client for that.

This is quickly becoming my favorite mahjong client, but god the lack of quality control and self sabotage is so frustrating.

To start, the elephant in the room is no English translation. They said years ago that they were working on one, and there is absolutely nothing. I genuinely think that if this game had an English translation, it would be seen as one of the best mahjong clients with mahjong soul and riichi city. As it stands, they only have a japanese translation, which isn't even finished. I understand some japanese, so I play in japanese, and around a third of the game is still in chinese, not translated into japanese years after release. It's unbelievable how lazy it is.

There are also a bunch of really awful quality quirks that just never get addressed for some reason. For example, for some reason the server has no way to reliably sync players if a round ends in a draw, so you'll be sitting on the draw screen for 30+ seconds like the server thinks someone disconnected, waiting for it to time out so the game can resume, every single time. Also, if the final round of the game ends in a draw, it softlocks the game, and you have to restart the entire client. There's more too, just a few days ago the battlepass (yes this game has a battlepass) changed to the October one which is advertised in game to have a new outfit for a character to unlock, except the game reverted to LAST MONTH'S BATTLEPASS. So this new outfit they're advertising for this character is impossible for anyone to unlock, because the battlepass from September just restarted, meaning you'll get the exact same rewards you got last month, you can't unlock what's advertised, and it's been almost a week at this point with absolutely no fix to be seen whatsoever.

The sheer incompetence is astounding, and it's really sad to because this game has so much potential. There's so much this game does that's better than the other mahjong clients: they have decent events, they give you a lot of stuff for free, they have more customization, they have better animations, the game presentation is much more grounded if you don't like the over the top anime style of riichi city. However, it's hard to see any of that really matter or gain any recognition when there are so many glaring problems with the game, and the developers are too stubborn or lazy to fix any of it.

There's also some other negative that I primarily see in chinese and japanese. One I keep seeing over and over again is that the game is rigged to benefit certain players. Some are saying that beginner players are given better hands, I've seen a few chinese reviews saying you get better hands after you pay money. I'm not a good mahjong player, but I'm both a beginner and have bought something in game before, and haven't noticed anything different from any other mahjong client. I think it's a load of BS. Another I see is people saying the number of people in the queue is inflated, which may or may not be the case. The player count on steam is very low, but the game has about as many downloads on android as mahjong soul, and chinese players have a separate client, so it's hard to say. It takes about a minute to find a game in the beginner queue, and I've noticed the level of play is considerably higher than in mahjong soul or riichi city. If more experienced players are queuing into the beginner queue just to find games, there's probably some truth to it, so it's something to keep in mind if you're a high level player.

I really like this game, I'm going to keep playing it, but god it's hard to justify investing into it at all when it feels like absolutely no one cares about this game.

I'm one of the clowns who pre-ordered this game. I've actually played it and haven't spent the last 3 days staring at a matchmaking screen. Regardless of the server problems, Payday 3 is not good. At least, not right now.

I see a lot of people comparing Payday 3 to Payday 2, and I also see a lot of people saying it's not fair to compare the two because Payday 2 had so many years of content put into it. As one of the clowns who also pre-ordered Payday 2, the thing that kept me playing Payday 2 when it launched was that it was vastly different from Payday The Heist. It was new, it was innovative, it the heists had good variety and were interesting, it was very much its own game, and did everything to set itself apart from its predecessor.

Payday 3... doesn't do any of that. It's not innovative, it doesn't feel new, the heists feel like rehashes of Payday 2 heists, it's repetitive... it simply feels like a lesser Payday 2 in just about every way except the stealth, which isn't enough to carry it. Payday 3 thinks making you stand in a circle in the middle of nowhere for minutes in multiple heists is the innovative gameplay to set it apart from Payday 2, and of course it's not.

Just think for a second about the new ideas Payday 2 brought to the table from Payday The Heist at launch: mask customization, crime net, skill trees, stealth mechanics, safe house, offshore accounts, weapon customization... is there even 1 thing that Payday 3 does that's in any way equivalent to any of these things that Payday 2 did? Mask customization is basically the same as Payday 2, skill trees are presented differently but are effectively the same, crime net no longer exists, safe house no longer exists, perk decks no longer exist, new gameplay mechanics don't do anything to actually change the feel of the game ,etc. The only thing that can be even remotely be considered innovative from Payday 2 is the rush/edge/grit system, which is frankly very shallow and doesn't change the game at all.

Just about everything (besides stealth) is the same as Payday 2 or worse, in no way is Payday 3 trying to be it's own game, in no way are they trying to do anything new. Payday 3 is trying to be a game that directly competes with a $10, 10 year old game with an unbelievable amount of content and brings nothing new or worthwhile to the table besides a new engine and non-functioning servers that can't even achieve the bare minimum.

Payday 3 is simply lazy; it gives no incentive to play it over Payday 2, it does nothing to differentiate itself from Payday 2, it doesn't even try to bring anything new to the series. It fully relies on the Payday fanbase believing that the game will improve with time when it can't even do the bare minimum today, which gives me little confidence this game will do anything other than solidify Payday 2 as the best game in the genre while Payday 3 is neglected by the fanbase and gathers dust over the coming years. I would love to be wrong.

Forces you to opt-in to voice data collection in order to use voice chat. Planning to use faceit, what's effectively kernel-level spyware for anti-cheat. The degree to which this game breaches your privacy is disgusting, and they don't even disclose it anywhere on the store page. I refunded, I guess this is where the industry is at now, where even small indie devs don't care about your privacy anymore. They just assume that you play games that already breach your privacy and carry you phone with you everywhere to have it spy on you, and not consider that maybe, just maybe, there are still people who do still care and don't do those things. It's sad.

"Oh, this game's cute and fun, let's try online"
dandan chikaku naru...

Maybe if they spent even half as much time on the game as they did the soundtrack it wouldn't be so short and repetitive. It's a $10 game at best; no level variety, uninteresting tacked on mechanics, an ungodly amount of filler to pad the length of the game, the boss in every single level is a rehash of the first boss for god sake. It's just lazy, not even close to the asking price of $30.

•Releases broken game
•Waits 2 months
•Says there will be a balance patch at the end of August
•Releases a patch that deletes Swift Master and does absolutely nothing else
•Game's still broken
•Leaves

Normally, I prefer playing these types of games on keyboard and mouse. I played through Nioh and Nier using keyboard and mouse, but negative mouse acceleration absolutely kills this game's playability on mouse and keyboard. There's also no .ini file or anything like that to turn it off. If you're like me and don't have a controller, don't bother.

The netcode sucks and the matchmaking is god awful. Takes up to 10 minutes to find a game, and the online feels like the worst of both delay and rollback at the same time. Easily one of the worst online experiences I've ever had in fighting games.