Recent reviews by knighty

As far as I'm concerned, Slice & Dice borderlines on about as perfect as a roguelike can get. It's often hard to strike the right balance in a roguelike. The feeling of "breaking" the game is always fun but you don't *really* want to break it, you want to feel like you have, and that happens all the time in the last few rooms of a run. It's also hard to strike the right balance when it comes to adaptation vs build crafting and S&D does this exceptionally well. I've done many many runs of this game (mostly on mobile) and every time it's been ridiculously different because of the huge variety of items and characters, yet you always feel like you have meaningful choices to make to get you closer to where you want to be in the mid game. The amount of options and variety is unparalleled, helped of course by its very simple style making it easy for the devs to add a large number of characters and items but there's also a stack of modes too. Heavily recommend, though I think this is the perfect example of one of the few games I'd rather suggest you get on mobile where it consumes almost no resources and is instant getting in and out of, perfect for playing on the toilet...

I think the only thing in particular I really don't like about this game is a problem shared by both Gunfire Reborn and Risk of Rain 2: The final boss feels like an entirely different game. Your build up until it can be steam rolling through groups of enemies then suddenly you hit Iris and you're doing nothing because you didn't spec for single target damage. In theory you could argue this means you have to build around dealing with both but in reality, Iris is the only ever stumbling block for me which tends to lead me down the same routes and away from explosives which are pretty much always going to be weak vs Iris.

What I think is a shame is that during the run, the goliaths present a generally excellent middleground where you're in arenas that test both single and multi target damage while Iris is just a giant DPS wall check. Clearly it'd requite a lot of fundamental changing to the fight to make it more balanced but I would really love to see this addressed because it's quite infuriating that both the other games I mentioned feel like they share this problem.

I also think the movement options in the game with all the gadgets unlocked is a bit over the top. Yes you can disable them of course, but are you going to? Probably not. You're probably going to opt to fly around endlessly without touching the floor which is fun but at some point feels like you're not all that mentally engaged with the environment.

Finally, I think the game would do with some more build variety. There's a lot of weapons and items but too often they're just "do more damage" in however roundabout way. More purple items with significant up and downsides to encourage genuinely different play styles would go a long way to mix things up. Even though I think it's an issue I would still say the game walks the fine line between making the player change their ideas on the fly and enabling you to go in with a plan. With a roguelike I think it's important that you can have a plan but you're still forced to adapt with what items you get. If you're just going to make all the decisions in the spawn room and then wait for the items to inevitably pop up the player is likely to just do the same thing constantly. It's really hard to get this right and I'd say Roboquest is at least 80% of the way there, maybe leaning too far into being too easy to pick the same things every time as you unlock more shops (ESPECIALLY once you get semi-free rerolls)

Really those are my only notable issues with the game despite it filling out a few paragraphs. It feels amazing to play, the graphics are fantastically readable and clear, soundtrack is excellent. Definitely worth the asking price.

(Playtime does not reflect Gamepass time)

Hi-Fi Rush is pretty much what it looks like from the outside, a merger of DMC and rhythm games, and that merger is extremely successful. The depth in your arsenal and moves is less than DMC/Bayonetta but plenty of variety still, and all the moves have some kind of use outside of just combo styling which I find is the case a lot with those other games.

Presentation is top notch, basically no bugs in my playthrough. All I can think of is that the XYXY -> Peppermint combo sometimes sorta sticks you through the floor, and I broke the first bosses AI on one occasion. Other than that, framerate is flawless and the game looks great. Outside of just being very stylish it makes everything very easily readable. That's one of the most important things in any action game, when you get hit it needs to feel like it's your fault. Everything is telegraphed visually and audibly in HFR and I would say I almost always feel responsible for being hit, though there are some very quick attacks that can be troublesome especially with the camera.

There are some issues though. Replaying through the game reveals that not much thought was put into this process as the tutorials and platforming are largely unskippable and really frustrating to deal with if you want to go through S ranking levels. Especially when the game wants you to do this on 5 different difficulty modes to properly complete it.

Bosses are another weakpoint for me. They look great, are very flashy and work well in the story/plot of the game but they have the same problem bosses have in a lot of action games. Usually action games either work best with lots of enemies or single enemies depending on how they're built. When you have a game built around managing multiple enemies and air juggling, having those mechanics removed in a fight just diminishes the experience. They also love to just run away non stop in this game, and it feels like there's minimal back and forth. You just smack them around and learn the parry timings of their moves. Serviceable but weaker than the core combat for me.

Lastly on the weak front are the way assists work. Having toggleable state is always a pet peeve of mine in action games because you're trying to remember which you have selected instead of relying on muscle memory. Having *THREE* assists is very annoying when trying to toggle between them and stay on beat and having to use specific ones to deal with shields. In my head I see no reason why these couldn't have been mapped to LT + X/Y/B which would have removed the need to remember state instead of using LT to swap and RT to attack.

Outside of those nitpicks though, the game is a joyous experience. I don't want to dip into the nostalgia baiting because I think that takes away from the qualities the game has. It should be judged on its own merit, and not its cultural relevance. I would be remiss not to at least mention some thoughts on the delivery of the game though. I really hope this game proves you can launch a *good* game without wasting money on marketing because word of mouth means so much more for a game like this. If you drop a marketing budget than costs as much as the game development itself you can sell half the number of copies and make the same profit.

If you like action games or rhythm games, or even better both, you are doing yourself an immense disservice not playing through. The story and characters are charming too, and I won't spoil any moments but...whirring....some of these scenes man.... Got me a little misty eyed

Also play Mad Rat Dead. It's the platforming version of this game and just as fantastic (and desperately needs a PC release)

Good platform that has introduced me to board games I've bought and played in real life. Shame the devs are too weak willed to not give into people who don't even care about playing games anyway. A masterclass in making everyone angry, you'd think people who grew up on the internet would understand the way things work but apparently they don't.

Pathetic is really the only word that exists to describe this situation. A sad reflection of modern reality. If you have reasonable, genuine and non hateful concerns about what your money goes to support (as you should to an extent) I would recommend checking what the devs do when under any kind of pressure, hence this review which I hope goes some way to rescinding some of my financial support of them.

Imagine releasing a game that looks this bad and yet can only just about hit 100fps on small maps with low settings and 50% render resolution (3440 x 1440 native) on a 2080 Super. Absolutely nothing has changed from the betas, pathetic.

Warning: Game may have adverse affect on being able to function like a human being. Side effects include (but are not limited to): seeing everything in real life as a bunch of 4x4m walls and wanting to press 'O' to speed up boring parts of life.

Seriously though, this is it. It's been a decade and this is /the/ true sequel to RCT3. If you loved RCT3 there's minimal chance you're not going to love Planet Coaster. The visual style is charming, the terrain tools are the most powerful I've ever seen on the consumer side of a game, the building tools are solid and the roller coasters SOUND amazing.

There's some issues with various things. Paths can be finnicky and require a bit of learning to get over their quirks, the management side of things isn't as much of a leap as you'd expect in a decade and I'd have liked to see more evolution in the piece by piece building but it's still a very worthy addition to your library.

Whatever time you see for me in this game, add another 5-600 for time I've played in alpha and beta....yeah it's p.good.

Mouse is a total joke, inverted look for controller doesn't save, graphical bugs, game crashed as I was exiting Neptune's Bounty, losing an hour of gameplay. What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess.

Only redeeming thing they didn't screw up from the original is it runs fantastically. Over 100fps at 4k for me mostly on my gtx780.

Also the developer commentary sucks from the brief part of it I watched.