Recent reviews by Kitswulf

Please note I played the Demo to completion as well, so my "hours played" is closer to about 8 at the time of this review.

It's got a nice solid demo so I made the purchase pretty certain I knew what I was getting, and what I saw is what I got. It's got a cute-but-maybe-not-deep JRPG storyline that's enjoyable to follow along without really challenging me, I enjoy the character designs overall, the music is surprisingly good, and the match-3 mechanics work well enough. This isn't something with tense forethought to each move like Puzzle Quest. It's not a huge-and-intricate-build-your-team P2W like Gems of War.

What it is, instead, is fun. I can launch the game and have chirpy little anime waifus and furries shouting as I match gems, not think too hard, and after an hour or two have experienced some chill, low-effort entertainment that still engaged my hands and eyes.

It's not perfect, certainly. I share the general complaint that debuffs are king (against the player) in this game, and so almost all of my strategic thought goes into trying to minimize getting debuffed. But thanks to the tavern-meal mechanics one CAN decide to nullify most debuffs before any fight, and there's a nice touch of realism in that all my dungeon-delves are on the short leash of having enough provisions. My other complaint might be a bug: if a downed character is swapped out, once they're healed up and active again you can't swap them back in, either in the current fight or any future fights. I have to manually reset the party formation to move them back to my active team. But these just don't rise to the level of "ruins experience" for me.

I like the game and will likely continue playing it. Since the devs provide such a robust demo, I'd strongly recommend you download and give the demo a try. It matches the actual game pretty tightly, and if you're having fun with the demo, you'll have fun with the main game as well.

This expansion put in a graphical upgrade that added mandatory blur and bloom effects to the world and removed the option to turn them off, which previously had been available (at least since ARR, when I started playing). As a result, I have about a single hour a day I can play before the eyestrain, headaches, and other sensory issues make it too unpleasant or painful to continue. I'm lucky I don't have worse health reactions (some folks have gotten seizures or vertigo to the point of vomiting or being unable to walk, supposedly) but it's hard to play an MMO on a single carefully-budgeted hour once a day. Square Enix has said the new required bloom is "working as intended" when users reported the problem, so I'd recommend avoiding FF14 going forward.

It's a bit of a cute game but a lot of the QoL issues made it unpleasant to play. The game window kept forcibly resizing back to a default that was larger than my monitor no matter what setting I messed with, and the tooltips on controls only show once the first time you play, which I missed because loading the level caused the game to resize. Again. There are no options to bring it back up or refresh the "tutorial" such as it is. I'm afraid this one needs more development time until it's ready for presentation.

One of my favorite VSlikes/Bullet Heavens/Whatever we end up calling this genre. It has really interesting build variability with lots of interactions, numerous endgame builds that feel distinct while being viable, and several solid QoLs (achievements increase exp gain so you can meta-progress while you meta-progress, for example) compared to the genre's default. As of writing this I've only played for for 65 hours ("only") and stopped because I had consumed all the content made, but it's an EA title with a developer roadmap they've been meeting the milestones on so I suspect I'll be back playing it soon.

It offers what it says on the tin. It's an L4D3 that can't quite capture the magic of its predecessor, but is solidly fun and I enjoy playing it with friends.

If a less-famous studio tried to do what Bungie has done here, it'd be considered a scam and removed from the market. Caveat Emptor, much of the stuff promised here is no longer available in-game, but they'll happily take your money. (:

This is a really frustrating review to make because there's some real highlights to the game. The story and aesthetic choices are quite good and the very light meditations on AI ethics and philosophy that pop up throughout the game evoke science fiction writing at its finest.

Shame about the gameplay, though.

The problems are pretty deep into the core gameplay loops, and so far the patches have been mostly bugfixes without dealing with some very fundamental design choice problems. For example, the prioritization system for your drones is binary. Something is either a priority or not. This, combined with entropy making your drones wear out over time, means that there is no way to have drones prioritize their own existence above all else, leading to arbitrary death spirals that started hours back but you're only finding out about now. Upgrading resource extraction sites is ALWAYS a waste, as it merely increases the speed it draws from the finite pool of the resource, and it's cheaper and more sustainable to simply build another mine over another node of the resource. This becomes especially true when it turns out the degenerate strategy is to spawn new landing sites because new landing sites guarantee at least one of each resource node nearby, the only way to ensure you get a particular resource if you're short on one. This leads to silliness, for example in one run where since I can't mine the water now unreachable underneath the Martian lake, I'll have to launch a rocket next to my current launch site to get a water node to spawn.

At the moment, the dev team is working on bugs (quite a few, but not abnormally more than for an Early Access title, which this functionally is) and superficial annoyances that are easier to patch (one involves the story arc where you can get access to nukes that until recently did not give you access to the radioactive materials contained within the nukes), but I think the problems with the game go pretty deep into the guts of the design and I'm not seeing many alterations in that area yet. And by the time I had played long enough to be sure it wasn't just a fluke, it was past the refund stage, so buyer beware.

An excellent 50's housewife simulator in the same vein as "The Yellow Wallpaper" or "The Haunting of Hill House". Play it if you'd like to experience the struggle of plating eggs and bacon for family that takes you for granted and all the pathos such a core gameplay loop brings.

So, I bought this game on the strength of how good Siralim 2 was, and I deeply regret it. The game starts off by explaining that everything the player character did in Siralim 2 was actually EVIL ALL ALONG and that anything you did or enjoyed in the previous game was awful and needs to be ruined. So, I guess thanks for breaking me of the desire to ever get Siralim 4 before I get too attached?

Mechanically, most of the fighting from Siralim 2 is still there, with one particular change: there's no breeding for pedigrees anymore; breeding's only purpose is unlocking new monsters. While I can understand pedigrees basically became the dominant source of stats in previous games (and thus allowed people to brute-force fights by just having legions of eugenically-enhanced monsters) it also cuts out the ability to nurture particular monsters you've grown attached to but lack the right stats to compete at high levels. It also means that you can end up in death spirals early in the game, where your build is vulnerable to one of the bosses, but you lack access to a sufficiently rich diet of monster cores to shuffle your team, and you can't level up enough to brute-force it on your own.

Another problem is that now drop rate is linked to Steam Achievements. Want to play how you enjoy? Too bad! Play for cheevies or you get NOTHING. More seriously, I really do resent having to summon a bunch of monsters I'll never use, go around shattering breakables for no reward, and doing PvP to get the various achievements for them just so my drop rate increases. It's a moderate annoyance but it absolutely sucked the fun out of the game for me. I wasn't playing because I enjoyed it, I was playing to get achievements, and I was playing BADLY to get some of those achievements.

Finally, less a concrete complaint and more an observation: Siralim 3 is really made to cater to the hardcore PvP crowd in the sense of the players that chewed up and spat out Siralim 2, and wanted more complexity and more focus on postgame. It feels very circa-mid-2000s where the story and such are just the tutorial so you can get to the real game of PvP and puzzle bosses. I think people new to the series will face more trouble just by dint that this game is very much not for them.

Overall, I'd say stick with Siralim 2. If you want that Dragon Warrior Monsters feel, Siralim 2 is a really fun game. This sequel, not so much.

The game out-of-the-box was actually pretty fun, with some slight changes from TWWH 1 (some refinements, some twists), but the way they handle bugs and DLC means that every time a new DLC piece comes out, it breaks a chunk of the base game, and the only way to fix this is to buy the DLC.

For example, when I played the base game at release, I was able to confederate with other members of my faction race, rebuild and upgrade captured cities from other factions, and construct the full building chains of my faction's buildings. After several DLCs, I can no longer do any of these things on an arbitrary and whimsical basis. The official solution to all these DLC-introduced bugs is "buy the DLC".

Which, hey, I like this game enough, I was sort of planning to, but the number of DLCs has ballooned out in cost such that I can't judge this as a $60 game anymore, for basic bug-free functionality you need to shell out about $100. And no matter how much you shell out, you're on the hook for the next DLC just to play what you already have, so who knows how much this game will cost you in the end?

TL;DR: Base game is broken and buggy, only patch is DLCs, each new DLC re-breaks the game so if you want to play the base game, you'll need to buy every new DLC they produce in perpetuity.