Recent reviews by Clyceer

It's like a case study in almost making a good game, but falling short in every possible way.

Power Progression:
-The game is extremely grindy. I feel like I spent around half my playtime grinding and yet still ran past enemies 16 levels above me on my way to the final boss.
-As far as I could tell, nothing provides flat stats in this game, so your character level has inflated importance.
-Your weapon has to be leveled up too, mostly via combat exp. There are items that exist just to give weapon exp, but not really enough of them.
-The crafting system seems mostly to be present as an excuse to never put anything good in a treasure chest. I don't remember a single chest besides at the end of a random dungeon containing an "Aspect", which are what serve as most of the game's equipment. Also, crafting itself is just simple material farming and picking an unlocked recipe.
-Despite occasionally removing allies from your party or forcing the use of specific ones, the game naturally has no exp gain for inactive party members. You can get an Aspect that fixes this a few chapters in but finishing the quest chain to unlock the recipe and getting materials for a copy for each inactive party member is time consuming.
-Being able to effectively grind seems to rely on getting an item known as an Egg Hunt Sigil. While it does get used up, using one often leads to getting another, so once you have one you can just save before using each. I didn't get my first one until chapter 7 though.

Combat Itself:
-Overall fighting is mostly fine, although only a few enemies are really threatening (Marksmen and bosses) so it's mostly not that interesting. With the main character I found myself using the same combo of attacks, a break attack, and a Round Slash for pretty much the whole game. I guess occasionally I'd use an elemental sword skill.
-Changing which character you're controlling is clunky: you have to open the pause menu and arrange the party so they're in the left slot.
-It's like consumable items were included because most RPGs include consumable items and not because they had any idea how to balance them. It seems like an attempt was made since different items have different quantity caps, but you can use them from the pause menu in combat without so much as an item use animation or cooldown, which is simultaneously broken and necessary.
-Getting ambushed is just boring. The whole party is stunned for about 5 seconds. No counterplay. Even when you encounter an enemy head-on, you can still get ambushed so have fun with that.

Other:
-Even visiting locations is repetitive because there's one town in the game with one exit and the only fast travel is using an item to warp back to town.
-I'm very tired of skidding to a stop out of battle while running, especially followed by the slow material gathering animation. I didn't even do that much material gathering. Most of my endgame Aspects were storebought.

I could nitpick more, but let's just say overall it's extremely mediocre, between a rather generic RPG plot and the flawed yet serviceable enough gameplay.

I'd grade Ghost 1.0 a B. It's a decent, but unessental Metroidvania.

The primary action is running and gunning to survive waves of enemies thrown at you inside locked rooms. There is some light platforming, and the occasional puzzle or opportunity to thin out enemies using the game's posession mechanic, but surviving waves of enemies is the game's bread and butter, as most alarms are completely unavoidable. There is the occasional boss fight as well, one of which was somewhat interesting to figure out.

Although it would be hard to call this game anything other than a Metroidvania, it may be worth mentioning that there aren't any upgrades in the game that allow you to reach or get through anything you couldn't before, besides keycards, which can leave the exploration feeling somewhat linear.

The writing can be hit or miss. It's fully voice acted, which is alright, but at times the cutscenes can drag a bit or a reference to movies or other games will feel a bit forced. Also, the text doesn't always match the voiceover, which can be somewhat jarring.

One unfortunate mechanic is that most powerups that are found throughout the game involve finding something hidden that sprays "souls" all across the room, then running all around the room to gather up the souls. As the gathering can be done in ghost form it's nearly completely without danger, and seems to serve only to waste the player's time. I feel like they should just give you the item. Most of the best upgrades are bought with the in shops as well, with the souls often leading to weak healing items and joke items that toggle references, rather than passive upgrades.

I'd say this game deserves a B.

On the positive side, the powers the game has, although few in number, are at least fairly unique and it's interesting to go through rooms for the first time. Zoe controls well and mistakes will generally feel like the player's fault. The puzzles are decent as well, although there aren't a lot of them and they remain fairly basic (which may be another positive for some).

On the negative side, the boss fights are highly repetitive and generally depend on getting used to dodging or blocking 1-2 moves that repeat. The enemies in the game are also mostly uninteresting to deal with, although that's somewhat mitigated by the game's focus on trap placement over enemy usage. Also, collecting optional items just doesn't seem worth it: none of them do anything individually, and even put together they're somewhat underwhelming compared to the effort involved in tracking them all down.

A solid improvement over the first game, I'd give Card City Nights 2 a rank of A.

This is a collectable card game in which cards are handed out pretty freely as you play, the writing in the story mode is silly, you'll see characters from some indie games as well as other Ludosity titles, and the core gameplay is pretty fun. The largest change is that it's played on a combined board, which adds to the risk of using cards with low arrow counts, as your opponent could block you (and, conversely, new counterplay opportunities arise since you can block your opponent). Since the first game the variety of cards has definitely expanded as well, leading to a number of viable midrange decks.

Hyper stalling feels like it has been toned down a bit, as they're feeling the lack of any cards that mill the opponent's deck and there are fewer Heal 2 effects, although there are a few ways to expand your own to make sure your opponent fatigues first if you can survive to it. Since decks are only 24 cards big, milling likely would've been somewhat over the top in power. Disruption options have been expanded though, with "cage" and "silence" being keywords, as well as stealing cards already on the field being a new effect, although disruption now requires dedicated cards: you can't forgo dealing damage in order to disable a card anymore. Hyper aggression also seems somewhat weaker, although I'm not confident in why: perhaps if I had tried the multiplayer I'd find I was mistaken on that point.

After beating the story, a number of challenge characters open up which look like interesting ways to play through the game again by adding new rules that affect either the player or the player and their opponents, and really add some longevity to the single-player side of things without needing to make the main playthrough get excessively difficult. The end boss of this game's postgame is defintely counterable.

There are also some minigames. I didn't think they were particularly good, but they're not mandatory.

Copy Kitty is already high quality and packed with things to do, even as an Early Access title. A+

The game is made up of a ton of short levels in which you're thrown into an arena with some walls, platforms, enemies, and sometimes other things like conveyor belts, doors that are opened with electricity, or other more unique objects. You blast your way through all the Target Enemies using powers picked up in the level, then repeat for each other level. Variety comes from being given different weapons, fighting different enemies, the occasional boss, and of course, the worlds' unique gimmicks. The basic gameplay flow may sound repetitive, but the game generally stays pretty fresh, largely thanks to its great weapon variety, when considering how many ways there are to mix weapons.

Since both characters are dramatically different, including in how their weapons act when they have the exact same weapons available, and since stages are completely redesigned for Hard mode, it's perfectly reasonable to want to fully clear both difficulties as both characters, which added up to about 28 hours for me. This included a enough of a dip into endless mode to unlock some bonus stages that required it, but not even trying everything available in endless mode, doing much with custom stages, or playing much with some of the gameplay modifiers that are gradually unlocked.

The writing of the game is decent enough, but mostly wisely stays out of the way of you destroying more robots.

The game's difficulty felt fine to me. It's a decent challenge, but not amazingly difficult. My deaths per stage stayed within the single digit range, with my overall average even including normal mode remaining below one.

A fine addition to the Ittle Dew series, this game remains similar to a Zelda game in that it's about exploring and finding items for solving puzzles, but has only a few unique tools that are really exercised with some good puzzle variety, rather than simple puzzles that are trivial applications of your tools. Another benefit of the small number of tools is that you never have to go to the menu to select them: they fit right on all your face buttons if using a controller.

The game features more emphasis on combat and avoiding traps than its predecessor, but still brings some great puzzles, largely focused on either putting blocks on switches, hitting switches in sequence, or hitting multiple crystals within a certain amount of time of each other. This time they went with a more non-linear design, which limited the amount of puzzles that could combine tools for most of the game, but I still enjoyed the in-dungeon puzzles a good amount and found the wand they replaced the portal wand with to be interesting to work with. The variation on the ice item compared to the previous game was interesting enough as well.

On the unfortunate side, most of the combat in the game just isn't satisfying. It's often sufficient to just flail your melee weapon at the enemies until they die. It might cost some health, but with frequent shortcuts that can be opened up throughout dungeons, dying isn't much of a problem. The bonus dungeon bosses are somewhat of a challenge, though.

Also, as perhaps a matter of personal preference, I didn't really like the overworld's puzzles, which were largely based on noticing stuff or remembering clues from NPCs. I prefer having all the puzzle elements directly in front of me to work with.

Overall, I give this game an F. Though the "obsessions" system is mildly interesting, the game is poorly executed. The obsessions system refers to characters occasionally taking extra actions which may either be harmful or beneficial, based on some character-dependent trigger. For example, there's a healer who will beat up your team for a bit if she is hit too many times, while the main character will sometimes take an extra attack and buff nearby allies after he attacks enough. As the obsession meters don't empty between battles, many of the negative ones feel annoyingly inevitable, though some can at least be played around. Overall I didn't actually like how it played out, but it was at least an interesting idea.

However, I wasn't really a fan of the writing, and there were enough bugs that I noticed and poor interface decisions to dedicate most of the rest of the review to them, though I'm probably missing some because I played this about 10 months ago or something.

Bugs:
-Sometimes your action bar doesn't light up, making the only way to end your turn to basic attack an enemy (which must be done by right-clicking the enemy, because you can't choose the attack command).
-You can't click on an enemy if there's an object (like a building) between the camera and the enemy.
-You can softlock the game just by moving around in a narrow area due to the behavior of allies moving out of your way. This can happen both in and out of combat.
-The top right save slot doesn't work. It can't be clicked on at all.

Poor interface decisions:
-Tiles you can move to don't light up. If characters moved a consistent number of squares this might not be a big deal, but different terrain types have different movement costs, so the main way to tell if you can move somewhere is to try it. Many turns started with pacing around the outside edge of my movement range to see where it was.
-Nothing in the game tells you the range or mana cost of any skill. Or that ranges seem to be in absolute distances rather than tiles (you can shoot an arrow 2 spaces normally, but if aimed at an angle you can actually hit someone three spaces away, like a Knight's move in chess).
-Selecting a skill will sometimes automatically move your character and execute the skill if there's only one thing in range, which may not actually be what you wanted.
-There's no sort of highlighting of enemies behind objects like buildings.
-The buttons on the status screen for changing among characters can blend in with the decoration a bit. They're hard to spot until you know they're there. I've seen a question on the Steam forums about it, so it's not just me.
-The transition from non-combat to combat gives no opportunity to set up a formation or anything.

In short, the game barely works and doesn't do enough good stuff to redeem itself. I only finished it due to a 2016 New Year's Resolution to finish games already in my library (and it wasn't hard to get 100% achievements, with a guide for where the 1-Up Mushrooms were, and I was tracking my average achievement percentages pretty closely at the time).

Although the game seems like it should be some sort of joke, this is a high quality puzzle/platformer, featuring rooms which each individually fit on your screen. Very light on explicit tutorials, yet carries a pretty good variety of objects. Reasonable to get through all standard levels with no walkthrough, although finding the optional bonus levels is a bit of a "guide dang it". At least out of what I've done, the bonus levels seem to focus more on pure platforming than on puzzles, so they may not appeal to people who like the main game anyway, though.

Overall evaluation: A decent but non-essential choice for fans of the rhythm game genre. Maybe about a B-

While notable for being one of the few games that not only generates gameplay from music but also is actually a rhythm game, and for generally generating notes that fit the song, I find the game has a series of minor flaws that hold it back a little.

For a complete list of what bothers me:

• Notes placed immediately after a part where Melody jumps down to a lower level can feel cheap, as they aren't on screen very long before you need to hit them.
  
• There's no ok/good/perfect evaluation mid-song so it's hard to tell how you're doing besides hit/miss. To be fair, it would probably be hard to look at the evaluation anyway.
  
• There's no real attempt to communicate to the player exactly what the visual cues are and, at least when moving slowly, I found it hard to hit notes at first. It seems like the center of the notes needs to be at the right edge of the character model.
  
• Sometimes in the menu after canceling a choice it's necessary to hit Right instead of A if you actually wanted the original thing. Seems to happen when you could've also canceled the choice with Left.
  
• When going through a folder of songs, the game only remembers how far you'd scrolled the folder after playing a song, not which one was selected, so when playing with a controller one often has extra scrolling down that seems unnecessary.
  
• Playing with an XBox controller makes it really easy to lose your chain due to extra control pad input since the directional pad really likes throwing in diagonals if you're a little inaccurate. Maybe that isn't completely fair to the game, but it does seem designed with XBox controllers in mind, with the default note colors clearly referencing the colors of the ABXY buttons.
  
• After failing a note represented by a solid object, you need to rewspawn and sometimes notes right after the respawn are difficult because while you don't exist it seems that you aren't supposed to press anything. Keeping track of the respawn timer and rhythm at the same time is pretty difficult.

I didn't try out the appearance editor, but will mention it seems necessary to browse the game's local files to find it.

A clever puzzle game which does a great job of teaching game mechanics without explicit tutorials and is entirely beatable without a walkthrough of any kind. Lived up to my expectations after Blocks that Matter.