Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

@NeonPizza You can play DOOM Eternal with gyro on PC and Steam Deck, you know.

@NeonPizza PC games on Steam don't need to be updated to support gyro. If you're using a controller that supports gyro, you can configure pretty much any game to support it through Steam, and then customize the settings to your exact liking. That's what I did with RE2R, for example. Made headshotting zombies so much easier.

IMO if this is an important thing to you, you're doing yourself a massive disservice not getting a gaming rig.

@NeonPizza I use the DS4 for my gyro-controller needs. Works well. I've never used a Dualsense.

I'm growing to really like the Series X controller, so I'm pretty stoked they're finally making them gyro-enabled. At last, I'll be able to play all of my PC games with the same controller!

Okay I laughed pretty dang hard at that final part because I can relate to that so much thanks to a number of acquaintances... And I say that as a vegetarian too

Poor you for Daisy fans being so... Rabid and poor Daisy for having fans like that.

I'm surprised she has fans at all really as I don't recall seeing her in any of the Mario games I have played... Just knowing she existed for some reason and was trotted out on occasion exactly like you described.

Also I've known from previous conversations that you didn't like World but... Wow I didn't know you disliked it THAT much. That's heresy among the Mario fanbase isn't it?

Also that Odyssey boss fight sounds awesome.

@HallowMoonshadow lol I'm into fasting and keto and am probably insufferable about it, so, you know, I can't judge too much.

It's not uncommon with fans of niche characters like that. Or niche products. There's a hipster-ish appeal to being really devoted to something that's not popular, and it tends to make it where the fandom gains fervor over time.

Yeah, it is. Not just among the Mario fanbase, either. Most people like to act like the SNES was this absolute goldmine, and I think it's primarily nostalgia tbh. We went with SEGA that gen, and coming back to the SNES years later, some games absolutely deserve their hype (Yoshi's Island and Final Fantasy VI immediately come to mind), but others just seem sort of... mid. Super Mario World is the epitome of mid. The music is dinky and weird. The worlds aren't nearly as creative as in SMB3. There are way fewer power-ups than in SMB3. The boss fights still suck. Ghost Houses were the worst addition ever to a platforming series (yeah, dude, I really wanna spend ten minutes figuring out how to escape a room in a MARIO game). Fewer minigames. The controls are weird and feel much less tight. I 100%'d that entire game, and I just don't understand the love for it.

And, being brutally honest? While I put it ahead of SMB1 and SML in the interest of objectivity, I will happily replay those games over SMW any day. It's just such a disappointment.

Odyssey is filled with cool boss fights tbh. I have a few issues with it (the forced motion gesturing to pull off certain moves can bite me), but the more time goes on, the more I'm impressed with it.

I could get into how Super Mario 64 is also an overrated POS compared to later 3D Marios, which is also controversial, but I at least recognize its place in history. The game quite literally was one of the first to show off the potential of 3D movement from a third-person perspective in a major release. It was practically an 'inventing sliced bread' moment for the industry. And it got SO MUCH right out of the gate. So while I have a love/hate relationship with it, I do deeply respect what its creators accomplished with it.

SMW, though? It did almost nothing better than SMB3, and a lot that was worse. I don't think it'd be half as loved if most of the people who moan about it hadn't grown up with it.

@RogerRoger lol thank you. A Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker 2 would be a day one buy for me. Absolutely loved the original. And yes, as much as I enjoyed this, 3D World still stomps this game. It's crazy to me people were angry about it on the Wii U. Now that people got their sandbox Mario with Odyssey, I've been happy to see folks going back and appreciating it for the wild, creative game it is.

I guess the thing for me is that you already have Nabbit, who literally can't take damage, from what I hear, so I'm not sure why they needed a second layer of accessibility mechanics. Or have the badges available in a separate mode. It's such a bummer that the characters all play the same.

With regard to the level design, it's hard. Like, the levels themselves are nothing special, but literally every one has a Wonder Flower that does something crazy, which kinda makes every level memorable? I dunno. I prefer when the creativity is injected into the stage design itself versus setpieces, personally. Designing levels around setpieces is something I've always criticized Naughty Dog for, and I won't stop just because Nintendo is doing it now with my beloved plumber.

"written a harsh review about a delightful experience" is about as good a summation as any of what I wrote. I stand by everything I said. But... it's Mario. It's fun. And it's beautiful. I enjoyed pretty much every moment with it. So despite walking away being pretty happy with it overall, there's still so much to criticize.

I guess I feel like a 2D Mario game in 2023 shouldn't have some of the shortcomings this one does. Especially the total lack of boss diversity. Is there some unwritten law somewhere that states that 2D Mario games have to have crappy boss fights? Because the people at Nintendo adhere to it like someone is gonna shoot them if they inject an ounce of creativity in those. It's weird. Especially when the 3D games do such a good job with it.

New 2D Mario and Sonic games releasing so close together is very funny in general. I was kinda curious about your reaction to Superstars. Have you not played it yet? You're about as devoted a Sonic aficionado as anyone I've ever met, so I kinda expected you to be all over it.

Thank you for reading, and the delightful commentary!

Ha! Granted over here in the UK we had a more limited lineup with the games but I've said before I had a SNES growing up but I could only play it for like an hour at most before I got bored with it and would then ignore it for days at a time.

Only with the PS1 (and Resident Evil) being the gateway that actually made me interested in gaming. The game I probably played most on the SNES was SMB3 and even then I never got too far into it.

I wonder if my general disinterest in Mario as a whole stems from my days as a Teen with a SNES...

And I'm just realising your stance on SMW is quite similar to my thoughts on FF VII Ral

@HallowMoonshadow I hated the All-Stars versions of the NES trilogy lol. Something about the music and controls on SNES vs. the NES originals just feels bad. Def. try SMB3 on the NES instead one day if you get a chance.

I've always been a gamer, although I will say the PS1 is also when I became more passionate about it. Still a top three console overall for me. I LOVED the early days of the Playstation brand.

lol come on, don't do FFVII like that. SMW does almost nothing to improve itself over its predecessors. FFVII is, at the very least, more of a SM64-style experience: a radical, groundbreaking release that arguably aged poorly in a number of respects, and people who grew up with it will never truly understand the criticisms of people who played it years later, because it's their gaming safe space.

@RogerRoger Yeah, it can be... illuminating going back to older games. Some stuff never took off, but it aged SO well. Like the bizarrely good and prominent voice acting in cult PS1 survival horror JRPG Koudelka, for example, on a console where you got precious little of that. And then other stuff you remember loving can be... so bad. That was my experience with Crash Bandicoot: Warped. I was shocked at how bad it was when I replayed it several years ago.

Building games around certain gameplay features is always how Ninty does things. They said it quite explicitly when talking about Splatoon. It's why they cobbled together the fairly strange setting where you're playing as intelligent squid people in a post-post-apocalypse, since they thought up the movement/battle mechanics first. It's a style of design I tend to think is good in terms of leading to cohesive experiences, but... I dunno. I play Mario for fun levels, not for constant weird gimmicks.

"As a long-term fan of its first-party games, do you feel that Nintendo listen to fan feedback, and incorporate it into their sequels?"

Depends on the property. They've quite clearly taken the reaction to previous games into consideration when designing new Zelda games, for example. Twilight Princess' dark, realistic style was explicitly a response to the outcry over the cartoon stylings of The Wind Waker, for example. And it does strike me that the Zelda game we got immediately after Skyward Sword was Breath of the Wild. Skyward Sword was heavily criticized for how little room there was for player agency or freedom. Whereas BotW... well, I think everyone knows by now that it's one of the most free-form AAA gaming experiences ever.

Monolith Soft is also pretty good about this, I think. Xenoblade Chronicles 3, for example, addressed nearly every issue people had with the previous game.

Broadly, though, I think Nintendo just sort of does what it wants, and players go along with it. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. They're definitely the least crowd pleasing of the big three manufacturers.

Well, I look forward to your eventual Superstars review. I'll probably grab it myself once it drops in price a bit, since it looks more like what I want from the series than recent 3D games OR something like Mania.

Alan Wake remastered review. - A very solid scary action title from Remedy Entertainment

Right so first some background. So Alan Wake remastered is an action game from Remedy Entertainment, the developer behind the first Max Payne games and some other titles such as Quantum break and Control. Now Alan Wake was first released in 2010 as an Xbox 360 exclusive game. As Alan Wake remastered was released in 2021, the title came to the PlayStation platform for the first time which was very good news to me as I did not own a Xbox 360 but was interested in the title back then. Now what do I think about Alan Wake remastered?

I think the game did not disappoint me at least. I did not have very high expectations but I was delightfully surprised by what I found out to be a delightful experience.

I think in general the game reminded me quite a bit about an early and maybe more elaborate version of an entry in the Silent Hill series which is a very good thing in my opinion. I think the game keeps you on your toes most of the time. I in general find it cool that at least I became more and more interested in the characters and the Bright Fall location as the game progressed. I don't think that it is an overstatement to state that Bright Fall becomes almost the main attraction of the game in the end actually.

Maybe the main drawback of the game I would say is that some combat encounters can feel a bit frustrating, mainly because of a lack of ammunition in some places. But it does not bring the game down much in my opinion.

@oliverp I enjoyed what I played of the game back in the 360 days. Currently have Alan Wake, the American Nightmare DLC, and Control in my Steam library, and will probably be exploring those on Steam Deck soon. Like Silent Hill, the setting is definitely a focus of the game, and both tap into a vein of inspiration from the work of Stephen King (although AW definitely moreso than SH).

Thanks for sharing!

Finished up Valkyrie Elysium (PS5) yesterday. It's a bit brief by RPG standards (I finished it in just about 20 hours, & I believe even managed to get the best ending), but that wasn't a big deal because there's not much story to it (most world building & background lore is relegated to environmental pickups called Hollow Blossoms & Verdant Blossoms which give you notes about the state of the world, and the latter particularly are important for getting the best ending. Also, you learn most of the deeper aspects about your party members by completing each of their own side quest lines, though I don't think these effect ending outcome).

Combat is really quite fun & snappy (you can lock on & zip to enemies from quite a distance away), and there's a lot of different ways to get the edge on your enemies (each enemy type is weak to one of the ten or so different weapons you collect, and each also has one of 5 elemental weaknesses, which you can take advantage of with magic attacks. Also, each of your party members has an elemental affinity & summoning them to fight by your side will coat your weapon with their element & amp the effectiveness of your magic attacks of the same type), with bosses usually having different points you can attack & dismember from them. That said, at least on Normal I was able to get by easily enough just by taking advantage of element weaknesses (I usually only took the time to take weapon weakness into account as well during boss fights).

It has a few small issues, like the fact that it doesn't feel buttery smooth 100% of the time (this is a very mid budget cross gen title, so the PS5 shouldn't have any issue at all), but the drops weren't as noticable as they were in Star Ocean: the Divine Force (which I also really enjoyed, BTW), so not a big issue. Also, you can only have so many weapons, magic, items, etc. equipped to their various quick access slots, so in the latter parts of the game I often had to pause at the start of nearly every single combat encounter in order to reassign slots (usually magic, since there are only 4 quick access slots, but 5 element types + healing magic, the latter you'll want to have equipped to a slot at all times since use of healing items negatively affects your mission completion grade if that matters to you. Grades don't effect which endings you have access to though, so it's not a big deal if you don't grade well).

Also not really an issue, but I get the feeling that a 5th party member was planned but cut at some point. There are enemies that are weak to Darkness, and while you do have access to Dark magic to counter them, there is no Dark element party member you can team up with to get the boosts you can get with the other element types. Plus, none of the bosses are weak to Darkness, even though there are a few that aesthetically/thematically SHOULD be (they're usually weak to something random like Lightning, or even weirdly enough Light, which is thematically their own element).

Anyways I picked it up during the PS Store's Black Friday sale for $30 (it also came with a free copy of one of the older Valkyrie Profile games, which I'm not sure if I'll play), and am glad I gave it a go.

@RR529 Nice write-up. I've gone back and forth on Valkyrie Elysium a few times. It sounds fun enough, but also short and apparently narratively unremarkable, so probably something I'll snag when it's $10 or less in a sale.

Would you say combat is more hack and slash, or deliberate like a Souls-style action game?

@Ralizah, definitely more hack & slash. You'll sometimes be facing up to a dozen enemies at a time, occasionally coming in 4 or 5 waves, & the higher your combo count the more souls & gems (upgrade materials) will drop upon an enemy death.

As I mentioned in the main writeup, you can tether & launch yourself towards enemies from pretty far away as well, that way you can quickly get from one to another if need be. This mechanic is also used for some platforming in the level design (though only the first region, which you visit in chapters 1 & 2, really has the verticality to make it a regular part of the gameplay loop. It's used much more sparingly afterwards, usually just to grab a collectable on the occasional ledge or some such).

Mighty No. 9 for Wii U. The game is a 2D action platformer, and is basically a spiritual successor to Mega Man. The player controls a robot called Beck, who has to defeat the 8 robot masters before defeating the final boss. Each time he defeats a robot master, he'll gain access to that boss's ability.

I was one of the backers of the game back when it was on Kickstarter, but I lost interest before the release, and didn't get around to playing it until now. So, was it any good, or did it make me cry like an anime fan on prom night?

Overall, it wasn't great. The biggest issue with the Wii U version was the performance. It suffers from slowdowns and lagginess, despite it being a 2D game with fairly basic graphics. The game has plenty of precision moments where one wrong move will drop you into a pit or a deadly obstacle, so I died more than a few times due to performance issues. The loading times also felt fairly slow, especially for this kind of game where I'd want to quickly get back into the action when I die. I also had one glitch that caused me to fall down forever, forcing me to have to restart that level from scratch.

In terms of level design, most of the levels are fairly unremarkable, with clunkiness in places. There's a few levels that at least try to mix things up, but even they run into issues. One of these levels is basically a large loop, where you can go either left or right (instead of the standard "go right" levels) and eventually get back to the original position. That should have been a fun level, but a lack of checkpoints along with instadeath traps makes it more frustrating than anything. There's also a couple of levels that require the use of moves that previously weren't needed before that moment (that the player may well have not used yet), with instadeath awaiting if the player messes up.

One aspect where Mighty No. 9 differentiates itself from Mega Man is with its dash ability. When dashing, Beck can move quicker and cross large gaps easier. The dashing goes well with some parts of the game, but there's some places that feel as if it doesn't fully fit in with the level design. The dashing mechanic is also used with the combat. After dealing enough damage to an enemy, it goes into a "weakened" state where the player is supposed to dash into it to finish it off. That can be a bit tedious though, particularly when you accidentally collide with a non-weakened enemy as you're trying to dash into a weakened enemy.

One positive about this game is that the main theme is great. Most of the other tracks are alright, though some of them are fairly forgettable.

So in conclusion, I'd definitely suggest avoiding the Wii U version due to the performance issues. If the performance is any better on other platforms, then expect the game to be a mediocre Mega Man-like game if you do decide to play Mighty No. 9.

Alan Wake II

Containing all of my favourite ingredients and bolstered by sky high reviews, along with an earned appreciation of Remedy’s art, Alan Wake II was a sure fire hit in my mind. Rarely have I felt so at odds with the near universal critical acclaim a game has received. That’s not to say Alan Wake II is a bad game, it touches brilliance in many ways. It just cannot get out of its own way. Perhaps fittingly, the Jekyll and Hyde affliction gripping the titular character bled into my own reality, leaving me with a frustratingly uneven gaming experience.

Firstly, the game is stunningly beautiful, a masterclass in setting and tone. There is little question as to how you’re meant to interpret its world at any given moment. Sparingly used light paints a consistently dark, foreboding and oppressive atmosphere, highlighting incredibly memorable and detailed environments, amplified by an appropriately considered soundscape that runs the gamut from nightmarish to tranquil to benign, yet always remaining eerie and unsettling.

Live action segments, at times juxtaposing the interactive, further cement this assured vision while state of the art motion capture translates the cast’s excellent work. If only they had more to work with.

The two protagonists at the centre of this tale, Saga Anderson and Alan Wake, couldn’t be more narratively uninteresting. Both are little more than whatever mystery lies in front of them and neither experience any meaningful growth or change. They are only reactive and completely at the whim of their environment. Ironic, considering the world altering mechanics at play. Here begins the incongruence that permeates virtually every other aspect of this experience.

The defining mechanic for Saga’s campaign is the mind place, a hub retreat in which she assembles clues on the case wall, profiles characters, watches collected t.v commercials, reads manuscripts, upgrades weapons and can listen to the radio, not unlike the home base in Death Stranding. Impressively accessed at any time by the press of a button, it’s a really neat concept. In practice, it’s just another pothole on the road to fun. The main offender is the case wall.

It’s just not fun. It’s tedious and Saga’s little revelations as the case comes together are basic plot points that the player would have easily put together 15 minutes prior by just paying attention. She’s forever ten steps behind the player, which became a legitimate problem when the game actively blocked my progress on numerous occasions despite knowing exactly what to do and where to go all because I hadn’t placed a clue on the wall for Saga to have her ‘aha’ moment thus rendering the obvious path forward suddenly viable.

Credit where credit’s due, the mind place isn’t completely superfluous and does indeed tie into the narrative in a satisfying manner. Profiling is interesting and well presented and having access to the games original music and genius commercials is a nice touch. So goes the yin and yang of playing this game.

At certain save rooms, the player can switch realities and enter the dark place to take control of Wake, his and Saga’s stories overlapping and bleeding into each other. It’s really well implemented and aids the trippy and disorienting narrative delivery. I sense a “but” coming. Regrettably, major plot turns become complete non-moments specifically due to this structure, utterly robbing the game of some of its mystery and tension. I deduced one late game reveal so early that I thought for sure it was a red herring of some kind. Boy, was I disappointed. I would have preferred Remedy to have chosen a specific narrative trajectory that served the story better.

Wake’s defining mechanic is his writer’s room. It’s analogous to the mind place in almost every way, save for the plot board. Here, he can apply plot points to a scene, changing the environment, allowing the player to progress. He also finds a deluminator of sorts, which oddly works the same way as the plot board but with much less fussing about. It’s literally the same mechanic, just…different. Anyway, the ability to change the landscape is enjoyable and its inclusion drives some of the game’s best sections.

Combat is encountered in equal parts by both Alan and Saga and is the textbook definition of clunky. This can work in a survival horror game as a viable strategy to create tension and a feeling of helplessness, which it does here too but is let down by poor scenario design and a severe lack of enemy variety. If I wasn’t succumbing to a cheap death, I was more often than not just slowly moving backwards, unloading obscene amounts of ammunition into cardboard cutout sponges until they finally dropped. Once the dark shield was burnt off of them, of course.

Boss fights do change things up a bit but I found their scenario design to be archaic at best, unintentionally comical at worst. One fight continually glitched out on me, turning an admittedly terrifying initial encounter into something frustratingly hilarious. A real shame, as true scares are few and far between. There are a few good ones but unless the thought of shadows endlessly gurgling Alan Wake’s name keeps you up at night, you’re left with the game’s complete over reliance on the cheapest of jump scares: at any given point, a distressing image accompanied by a loud screeching noise can flash across the screen. It scared me the first time the same way it scared me the hundredth time. Shame on me for having eyes, ears and a pulse.

Thematically, there’s not a lot to chew on here. Like the rest of the game, it’s all style over substance. Mind you, that style is striking but ultimately it feels like much ado about nothing.

It’s worth noting that I had quite a few bugs and glitches during my play through. I’m generally not too bothered by these but two especially egregious ones hit me within the last quarter. One, I couldn’t interact with the item needed to upgrade my inventory. This made some of the final encounters less than ideal. Two, I was stuck with the “R2 Ignite Flair” prompt stuck in the middle of the screen, unable to be removed. I realize that mileage varies in this regard but I can’t say that it didn’t negatively impact my experience.

Alan Wake II is a game at odds with itself. It contains some genuine standout moments, brilliant direction, a plethora of great ideas and a palpable sense of mystery and dread too often undone by its own clunky mechanics, disjointed structure and its blatant pursuit to be overtly weird. At its most earnest and flamboyant, it touches greatness but these moments are stitched together by what is really a pretty mediocre game. It’s carried almost entirely on the shoulders of its incredible style, the unique way it brings all of its disparate parts together and its rock solid sense of identity.

I applaud Remedy for pushing themselves creatively and am excited to see what they do next with the fascinating world they’ve created. I gleaned a lot of positives from my time with this game but overall, I’m completely flabbergasted by the heaps of praise it has received. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent game, I just can’t, in any reality, see it as the genre defining masterpiece it’s being touted as. What am I missing?

7/10

@Jimmer-jammer Hey buddy, really fantastic review! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It’s extremely well-written and I appreciated the description and the clear outlay of your concerns with the game (and praise for it too). I’ve played neither AW2 nor the first game and I feel like I more lucidly understand the series and its strengths and shortcomings from your review than from anything else I’ve read about it.

And just in case you worry that your brutal honesty about the game’s undue hype is unfairly turning people away from playing it, I am actually still curious to try the series. Even if they are 7/10 games, there’s plenty to like about them, it seems. There’s plenty of 7’s that I adore and hold dearly in my historical catalog. If anything, your review may have heightened my curiosity even more. The only part that really is a deterrent is the report about the bugs. I don’t want to deal with that. Hopefully they are patched eventually.

@Th3solution Thanks for reading! I don’t really write reviews but felt very compelled to do so in this case due to my strong reaction to it. The very fact I was provoked in such a manner tells me Remedy is doing something very right! Glad to hear you’re not deterred, as that’s not my intention. It’s fascinating and interesting on so many levels but that alone doesn’t translate to a great video game for me. A great game has to be holistically fun to interact with and I just hit too many roadblocks there despite deeply enjoying the areas I felt it excelled in. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts when you get to it!

@Jimmer-jammer Sometimes it’s well worth the effort and time to play a middling game if there are moments of creativity or excellence sprinkled throughout. The last game I finished, Disco Elysium, is a great example. It has a large cult following and receives consistent very high praise. If I have to compare my final thoughts to the open majority, I’d have to say it wasn’t quite as transcendent as I was led to believe and had several aspects in which it fumbled the execution. But as a whole there were many more great moments and innovative ideas that I am so glad I experienced and I would consider it a high recommendation to others. But it’s probably between a 7-8/10 whereas I was led to believe it was a 10. Still wonderful game and one which I still ponder on!

I feel like maybe Alan Wake will be like that. So many cool and creative ideas that are worth experiencing, even if they don’t always gel together quite right.

I’ll definitely leave impressions if/when I get around to it. My large backlog is well documented, as well as my turtle’s pace for game completion, so who knows when it will be. I dusted off Kupka/Titan last night, which was seriously the longest boss fight I think I’ve ever engaged in! The boss fight itself was longer and more changes in setting and gameplay than some entire games! so I’m moving along through the second half of FF16 slowly but surely. I suspect I’ll eventually want some horror/thriller but not yet

@Th3solution I agree and that’s a pretty spot on comparison as you’ve described it. Glad to hear Final Fantasy XVI is still clicking with you. What a ride!

@crimsontadpoles It's wild to think about how things have changed since Mighty No. 9 was first announced. I've always wondered if it was as bad as people make it out to be, but reviews like this, and even my nephew buying it on Steam and then refunding it an hour later make me glad I never bought into the Kickstarter hype for this.

I guess the good thing is that the noise generated by its success is probably a big reason why Capcom finally started doing stuff with Mega Man again. Even if that's only a bunch of collections and one mainline sequel, it still semi-resurrected the property.

The 'like Mega Man, but with a differentiating gameplay gimmick that isn't terribly fun' reminds me of one of my main issues with another (and probably much better) Mega Man-like, Azure Striker Gunvolt.

Anyway, thanks for posting! And I appreciate the warning for the Wii U version specifically, for all five of us who still have one and play it occasionally.

@Jimmer-jammer Nicely nuanced and detailed impressions on Alan Wake 2! It can be easy to get sucked into excitement by well-received new releases. It sounds like AW2 is an ambitious game that ends up trying to do too much and ruins the flow of the gameplay as a result.

The issue you had with the way the detective writing/mechanics work is unfortunately a probably inherent issue with games that tell mystery stories (Ace Attorney comes to mind). You want to walk through it for players who aren't as good at paying attention to narrative cues, but you end up boring people who figure things out quickly and want their gameplay experience to reflect this. I guess you could get around this with a structure that allows the player freedom to solve a case faster when they pick up on subtle hints that other people might miss, but most games aren't designed with this degree of structural freedom.

The way the hubs sort of factor in throughout the game and tie into the story reminds me of another horror game I wanted to like but struggled to appreciate: Silent Hill 4.

I liked the original Alan Wake. How would you say this compares in terms of its atmosphere and overall moment-to-moment gameplay?

Fantastic post.