Recent reviews by WakerLink

Before I kick things off, I just want to immediately say that this DLC is a 6/10 at best on a good day in my own PERSONAL OPINION. But now, let me explain why.

WARNING: THERE WILL BE HEAVY SPOILERS

First of all, as most have already pointed out, the art direction of this expansion is amazing, and is what I can agree on wholeheartedly. The new environments look stellar and definitely stand out with their stylistic choices, as well as new enemies and bosses, unless you count animations, because there are a lot of reuses from older games that FromSoft have made...

...and that's about the only positive thing I can say about this DLC besides all the new weapons and talismans as well as armor, but, genuinely speaking, there's not much reason to use most of them in my personal experience so far. Why do I feel that way? Well, a huge amount of them are extremely gimmicky and are more useful in PVP than PVE, as well as the fact you just won't get much use with them in the base game considering you gotta kill Mohg of all things to even get access here, and Mohg is considered a late-game optional boss with scaling akin to Malenia... which brings us to the next bullet point, scaling!

Clown emote me all you want, but yes, the DLC genuinely has a difficulty problem, with it being a gross yet logical power creep from base late game. Needing 60 vigor was already a wild glaring flaw of how stupidly high the damage has gotten in base game around Farum Azula, and now you're straight-up not allowed to breathe around bosses without it here, even with blessings. Oh yeah, blessings! How do we force the players to explore as well as excuse inflating the stats of every single enemy to oblivion? That's right, force them to collect upgrades all around the scuffed map! But in all seriousness, while they definitely help with your damage, they do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for your defenses. Even at blessing level 12 I still get like two-three tapped by the final boss even with protective talismans, and it's a common theme in the entire DLC. The difficulty is most definitely without a shadow of a doubt overtuned, from insane damage and health amounts of everyone to microadjusted timings on boss attacks that force you to predict, not react. If you try to react to most attacks from the main bosses, you WILL get hit.

By the way, I mentioned a scuffed map, so let me elaborate on that. While the environments are beautiful and way more jam-packed than base game, holy crap are they designed in the most retarded way possible. How did we go from linear region access to hiding paths to new whole parts of the map inside random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ caves? Like, I'm genuinely malding over the fact that a location that leads to two other ones and has a whole quest line with remembrance boss is hidden away inside a hole that IS too deep to fall down (you gotta fall onto a small thin ruined railing to survive and you still get damaged, fall anywhere else and you die). The fact that this is a common occurrence genuinely makes me severely disappointed. So far I have counted 4 instances of this exact thing happening on the world map. Oh, speaking of the world map. So, one of the last locations is a huge empty set of aquedect ruins high up in the mountains. Wanna know where you get a map for this whole region? BINGO!!! Inside an optional path from a random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cave inside a completely different region with the path barely overlapping with the region that you need!!! At least the legacy dungeons aren't nearly as bad, however they have another problem - they are genuine labyrinths where you can end up going around in circles and get lost for annoying amounts of time. So far the only legacy dungeon that I kind of liked is the very last one.

On the topic of the final location, I want to dedicate a whole section for just the final boss. THIS IS THE LAST HUGE SPOILERS WARNING.

So, the final boss... Remember how killing Radahn was necessary to get access to DLC? Yeah? It's Radahn. The final boss is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Radahn. They genuinely reused a main boss from the base game as a final boss of the one and only expansion. Obviously, it's not the same fight, since it's supposed to be Radahn at his "prime" during youth and before he caught space STDs from Malenia... But, despite this being his peak, bro has like 4 moves with annoying timings that are microtuned to mess with your reaction time and he keeps throwing meteors at you and pulls you in with his cry across the entire arena in almost an instant. Oh, but it's not just Radahn, no, it gets "better", as we finally get to see Miquella during the second phase, boasting about Radahn being his promised husband, and the real circus begins. This phase is like an amalgam of all the worst things about Elden Beast, as well as Pontiff Sullyvahn and Twin Princes from DS3. The fight turns into a genuine mess of AOE spam with every single attack that Radahn does, as well as his moves start getting repeated multiple times in rapid succession akin to Pontiff's clone attacks but on steroids, not to mention the fact that Miquella sometimes also just shoots holy nukes that take up like 60% of the arena. This whole boss just makes me sad for both gameplay and lore reasons. Why is Radahn even the final boss? Because Miquella had a vow to get married with him, apparently, before Radahn's death, and resurrected his soul using Mohg's flesh (which is why this Radahn also uses bloodflame sometimes). So it literally went from gay incest to gay incest again. Is it stupid? Yes. Does it make sense lore-wise? No, not at all. Why the ♥♥♥♥ would Miquella care about Radahn more than his twin sister who he literally devoted his life for to try and cure her of rot? God knows.

Okay, enough of the rant, because the final boss was just a cherry on top of this dung pie of a DLC, and I genuinely can't recommend this to anyone who truly loves this game, unless it's on a heavy sale at best. All the design decisions are baffling in the same outlandish way like DS2 design decisions are, and it genuinely feels like some other company made this, it just feels so off the mark compared to base game. If the patches change this expansion enough to make it actually enjoyable, I'll update this review, but for now please reconsider wasting your time, nerves and money on experiencing this.

small update: so one thing I forgot to mention that I was pretty sick during the whole first week of the DLC release, and it's actually covid which got diagnosed today. I guess that might explain my heigthened frustration with this expansion due to my less than satisfactory physical condition, but my opinions still stand firm. Just thought that might be a good thing to add.

small update 2: alright, so, a couple days have passed and I have finished up the rest of the DLC and decided to do a rerun on my main NG+1 character with a cooler and clearer head (quite literally, crazy how much covid can affect your ability to focus). Final thoughts before any patches come in - all my opinions stand firm. Open world is extremely empty, even emptier than base game, with a lot of rewards being quite underwhelming (one region of the game has like 3 items and one legacy dungeon and literally nothing else). The general level and world design is absolutely atrocious and I have no idea how someone's going to figure out how to access whole regions of the map without a guide, with verticality being a huge hindrance to this especially. Shadow Keep having like 3 different areas it can lead to as well as having a main progression boss hidden away is honestly WAY too packed in comparison to the rest of the areas and can lead to players missing a crap ton of stuff because of this inconsistency. Running out of space in the review, but the genuinely only overtuned thing is the final boss. It's just genuinely unfun. Everything else is bearable difficulty-wise. That's it for now.

It's been YEARS. We get that Steam brings enough cash, but it's not a reason to ignore your responsibilities as creators of this game, Valve. Fix TF2. Fix Counter-Strike. Fix your ♥♥♥♥.

I want to preface this review with the fact that I really do like this series, and have poured a decent chunk of time into it (mainly RoR2). When I heard that RoR1 was getting a remake, I thought "hell yeah, that game would really benefit from one", mainly because it is pretty damn old at this point and has some glaring gameplay issues, mainly the balance and just overall outdated gameplay design in some aspects. Needless to say, I was thoroughly disappointed when I got to actually play the game, since it's quite literally just RoR1 in a brand new coat of paint with some sizable changes in areas that didn't really need it, or just actively made things worse.

First of all, let's start with the actually good changes, and the first one that deserves attention in my opinion - killing enemies after the teleporter has charged is no longer necessary! This might not seem like the most groundbreaking thing, especially considering the new content (that we are going to talk about in a minute), but holy crap does it save a ton of time and cuts the tediousness that was present in the original game and just makes the game more enjoyable to play in the first place. Now, for the actual biggest chunk of new content - alternate skills like in RoR2 and the new Providence Trials. Alternate skills do provide a lot of nice variety and unique gameplay changes (like Chef just straight-up making temporary items) and are just overall a welcome change, however, a lot of them at the moment of writing this review are extremely underwhelming and a lot of the times just honestly worse than the stock in most scenarios. As for the trials themselves... they are fun! Definitely the highlight of the new content, those trials are essentially just short, bite-sized missions that force you into a specific unique task or playstyle, and give you a very specific objective to do in a defined amount of time (usually, at least). Those can range from a race track where you try to get to the finish in time with the ability that will get unlocked once you do so, or something very gimmicky like trying to prevent mobs from touching the ground. You can clearly tell that the devs worked on this the most, because a lot of them are quite unique and pretty fresh to see. However, some of them are just absolutely miserable to play through, which would be fine honestly speaking since you have an alternative option of unlocking skills barred behind the trials, except for one small detail - they block progress towards other trials due to a "skill tree" type system that you have with them. You beat one - you unlock adjacent ones (if you have the needed character unlocked for them in the first place, that is). This turns this into an absolute slog, where you either have to suffer through trials that you genuinely don't like in the slightest, or grind away at some ridiculous goal like collecting 400 total items on one character. This is, mind you, only available for *alternate skills*, so if the trial does not give you one, you are royally screwed.
Alright, enough about the trials, let's talk about other positive new things. There are obviously new items (most of them coming back from RoR1 and new additions from RoR2), as well as new survivors, which are, you know, always welcome in a game where that's what the main content is made of. Besides this, the thing that requires special attention is reworked multiplayer! You can finally just connect via Steam, with lobbies akin to RoR2, without any other hassle. Besides this, they even added some nifty options, like "Forced Item Sharing", which prevents people from hogging all items on the stage, which leads to a more balanced and fun session for everyone. You also turn into a drone on death in multiplayer, akin to a little ghost buddy in Binding Of Isaac during co-op, and can fly around and scout the location (as well as pick up Artifacts, not Logs though), or help in combat, which is honestly not a good idea because you have pretty low health and abysmal damage in this form.

Aaaaand that's about all the positive things that I can say about this "remake". It all goes downhill starting now. You know, you would most likely expect significant changes from a remake to how the game plays in general, right? Perhaps even a rework to the general gameplay loop if it's flawed. And this one doesn't deliver AT ALL in the slightest on that front.
All the glaring issues from 1 are still more than present and thriving here, with stuff like janky controls and aiming, scaling of the enemies and their spawn rates, spawn rates of chests (which are even lower due to all the new drone ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that they added like factories and scrappers) and their locations, RNG being way too decisive in the balance department, ropes being a janky mess that feel like a lazy solution to the lack of vertical movement for most characters, stages being too big to traverse, and so on, the list just goes on. Pretty much none of this was addressed in this remake, or made actively worse, like the aforementioned drone-related interactables being very situational and hogging up precious chest locations.
However, despite all of this, my genuine biggest gripe with this "remake" is the lack of proper balancing. You still either are getting absolutely shafted as some melee characters due to how the combat is in general, or are absolutely unkillable due to regular abilities (looking at you, Miner). Besides this, you have ZERO mobility or survivability at the start, and funnily enough, the white tier items that focus on this barely do ♥♥♥♥ unless you get multiple stacks of them (except the Goat Hoof, of course, but you need to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unlock it first). You can barely heal back any damage that you take without getting drowned in those healing items, and good luck finding anything mobility related, since most of those items are either green or red (stuff like Red Whip or the jetpacks). So what does that result in? A miserable early-game where you spend way too much time looking for anything that could sustain you because the locations are way too big for their own good and the chests are few and far between, leading to enemies scaling pretty harshly if you don't get away from the level in like 5 minutes. Literally nothing changed about the flawed gameplay formula of RoR1 in this remake, which is honestly baffling considering how perfect they got the balance and the general feel in RoR2, which one would think they would apply here. Oh, also, HUGE SPOILERS, but they decided to give Providence a third ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ phase with giant lasers for some reason??? Like, he was already decently challenging before, this just feels like overkill honestly speaking.

Either way, I can't recommend this "remake" in the state that is in with all the original issues still intact, HOWEVER, if you've never played RoR1 and really want to try it out, you should get this instead of the original just purely because there is more to it. For those who played the OG and didn't like it though, just save your money, it's not worth getting it since it's literally more of the same flawed aged rogue-lite.

cool, short, sweet game, that has very satisfying movement (please give this dev money for other projects so he can make more stuff)

this is worth playing just for the soundtrack alone

What if you took Wario Land 4, combined it with classic Sonic games, and made it extremely goofy by nature by making the art style heavily resemble cartoons from the 90s with very disproportional characters and expressions? You would get this game in all it's glory.

This is definitely one of the better platformers that came out in recent years honestly speaking, considering how it takes the not-so-very-used formula of Wario Land 4 where you have to escape from the level after activating something, and turned it into it's own thing, feeling more like a spiritual succesor, rather than a modernized and stylized copy, mainly due to the fact that this game focuses on speed and tight controls WAY more than the source of inspiration. Peppino, the main character, controls very fluidly and has a rather complex moveset that can take a lot of time adjusting to if you want to use it for maximum potential, but is still relatively easy to pick up when starting out, and the brilliance of level design in this game highlights this very well. See, the thing is, a casual playthrough of this game is a lot of fun by itself, especially considering how varied every level is and how each one of them has a unique gimmick (yes, every single one has something unique), and the level design is made to be rather linear to help guide players in the right direction. However, that linearity also serves another purpose - making a giant ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ race track that people going for the elusive S and P ranks will have to go at pretty much full speed most of the time to make in time. That side of level design is made even more clear when going for secret levels in quick succesion, because if you get a good understanding of the controls and "flow" of the movement, it won't feel like you're stopping momentum at all, which is what I think not a lot of people bring up when discussing this game. The pure sheer momentum makes this game feel like an adrenaline rush that you can absolutely blast through with fluid and complex movement, but the neat part is - you don't have to. WL4's formula doesn't force you to go fast in the first half at all, you can take as much time as you want, which makes Pizza Tower have two completely different playstyles even with the same moveset and level design.

Anyway, while I can praise the movement and level design for much longer, I feel like I should mention a couple of other aspects too, with the first being graphics. The whole game OOZES charm, with the art style being both goofy and grotesque in the best possible way, kind of mirroring early days of the internet and the whole Newgrounds era, as well as what I mentioned above, 90s cartoons. There is so much happening on the screen at all times, yet it's perfectly clear if you're actually playing the game. It's honestly kind of genius how the developers managed this balance so well. You can clearly see how much passion developers put into the game purely because of the art, but that thing that elevates it the most is the soundtrack.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the soundtrack. All of it is like a giant mess of midi and soundfont music with funky/jazzy influences, and sick-ass guitar riffs that come out when you least expect it! I genuinely had a panic attack the first time I went into the second lap because of the guitar riffs of The Death That I Deservioli really highlight how it's a mad sprint to the finish with seconds on the clock. Honestly, the soundtrack just makes everything in this game hit harder into the excitement and other emotions, with the final fight being the perfect example of this besides the second laps, but I obviously won't talk about these in more details because spoilers.

Overall, I genuinely can't imagine something topping Pizza Tower in "The Goofy Platformer that goes way too hard" department anytime soon, and I honestly hope that Pizza Tower and ANTONBLAST start the new era of Wario-likes, because this gameplay loop formula is genuinely fun to play.

And, lastly, MASSIVE shoutouts to my friend SaltyTrouble for gifting this, the madlad is currently drafted in mandatory military service and did this as a surprise, absolute chad

(spoilers inbound)
i spent 4 hours by killing 6 bosses with a wand that spawns like 10 explosive boxes that explode with the range of a nuclear bomb and another wand that literally shoots out a blue walls of impenetrable lasers that pierce everything and home in on enemies, as well as trying to create a literal sun but ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up somewhere in the process and the sun stone just disintegrated somewhere and i ended up blowing up the entire moon in the process

besides that i also: went to hell just to touch an orb, turned the final boss into a giant walking gourd, went to the same parallel world multiple times because i'm a dumbass who kept taking the portals, and finally tried to fight a giant worm maggot boss but died because i overdug and couldn't get out in time despite having a seizure-inducing lightspeed teleport wand

10/10

This game will make you ♥♥♥ in seconds

pain

As of writing this review I've only played 10 hours, but hot damn is this game good in so many ways. The gameplay loop is great, lore and characters keep you entertained and interested, visuals are fantastic, soundtrack is really good, voice overs are nicely done and I genuinely can't come up with a single con, only pros.
There are some things that I want to give special attention to, and the first being how the game gradually introduces new characters and mechanics. You think you've seen all the mechanics by now? Nope, here, have a new way to permanently upgrade yourself. Secondly, this game surprisingly handles roguelite upgrades a little bit different, where instead of unlocking new items that you get on your runs you unlock new possible rooms and objects that can spawn in there, which can indirectly boost your stats during a run (for example giving you money which you can spend in a shop). The fact that you can also ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fish and furnish Hades' domains is a definite plus. Honestly, I don't think that I can give this game anything lower than 9/10, and considering how I objectively can't find a single flaw I say this is a 10/10, at least for me. If you are a fan of roguelikes/roguelites - get this, you won't regret it.