Recent reviews by PRAECESSOR

What is the purpose of difficulty in games? FromSoft knows the answer. Team Cherry does not.

Silksong is an overtuned mess. Incoming damage is cranked up the point of making upgrades feel pointless. Many bosses have 1-2 frame attack telegraphs, meaning that they are designed not to be beatable on your first attempt. It is very clear that Team Cherry wanted players' deaths to be a large fixture in the gameplay loop, and yet many runbacks are needlessly long and full of 2-mask hazards that force you to both be extremely slow and careful, and also force you to use only one of two movesets that have a reliable down attack. It's a game that gives you many different tools to succeed, but punishes experimentation.

Clearly Team Cherry wanted this game to be a more soulslike experience than the original game, but they went with the simplest and dumbest approach possible. They balanced health and damage to create a more punishing experience without accounting for this massive design change in any other aspects of the game, which has led to a game that punishes players for experimenting with new gameplay additions like the hunting tools, and undercuts the satisfaction from engaging with the core elements of the genre like exploration and movement. As a 2D-soulslike, it's decent. As a metroidvania, it's mediocre. And as a sequel to Hollow Knight, it's outright terrible.

4.5/10, a sometimes enjoyable experience but mostly a frustrating slog that lacks the attention to detail and artistic heart of the original. There are a lot of good metroidvanias that have come out in the past eight years, and this isn't one of them.

I honestly can't overstate how much I love this game. It is the perfect sequel, refining and expanding on everything people loved from the first games and overhauling everything people didn't. For me personally, it has set a new standard for how sequels should be designed, to the point that it has legitimately ruined my enjoyment of other game sequels that I've played since. It hits the perfect ratio of authenticity and fun, both in its gameplay and in its writing. It's like ELEX meets Oblivion meets Yakuza, polished to a shine, and then given an absolutely amazing soundtrack.

I love KCD:2. This DLC is a waste of money. I'll admit that solving the riddle to find the armor was fun, but this armor is so good and so easy to get that it basically ruins the first part of the game. I recommend this only to people who don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about immersion or authenticity, or to people who just want to support Warhorse.

No spoilers.

Spider-Man 2, Insomniac's third Spider-Man game, suffers from the exact same problem that Sam Raimi's third Spider-Man movie did: brainless corporate interference has stripped out the soul of the previous entries and replaced it with shallow portrayals of popular villains and focus-tested gobbledygook. In fact, in might even be the same morons sticking their braindead fingers where they don't belong, because it was Sony doing it back then, and it's Sony doing it now.

Every comic book story has its problems. At the heart of every good superhero story, there's human conflict. But it's not uncommon for Marvel or DC to give an entire run of comics to someone who has basically no understanding of the source material or of why the titular characters appeal to people. In these cases, the human conflict is low-effort and ham-fisted. Well-loved characters do incredibly stupid or evil things that are completely outside of their established personalities, all for the sake of creating cheap meaningless drama and generating online controversy. Everyone's heard of Paul, and everyone hates him.

What happened with this game is sort of like that. Whether it was a single hack writer, a team of hack writers, or a team of creatively bankrupt suits from Sony or Marvel, a decision was made that cramming as many villains and characters in front of your face as possible was more important than creating a game that was fun or innovative. Story is replaced with shoe-horned set pieces. Every story element is given the exact minimum amount of thought and effort required to be mostly coherent before it's completely ejected from the game. This game feels like a bunch of trailer moments strapped together with duct tape instead of a cohesive experience. Ultimately, Spider-Man 2 feels more like a game that was designed to be marketed, not played.

The reason I'm not recommending this game has to do with the nature of what I believe a good sequel should be. In my opinion, the goal of a sequel should be to basically just be a bigger and better version of the last game. Refinement and innovation is important. Improve the things people disliked about the original, while also offering something new that complements the things people loved. And I think that many of my problems with this game can be traced back the design team being unable or unwilling to follow these principles. The new side stories, minigames, and combat systems have seen refinements and additions, but not in ways that improve them and in most cases they are just outright worse than in the previous entries.

It's not to fair say that there are no positives about this game. Getting to swap between Peter and Miles is awesome (although you can only do it at certain times in the overworld), and they both have some very nicely streamlined move-sets. But now there's a parry mechanic along with a Sekiro-like indicator for which moves are undodgeable and unparryable on top of the existing dodge mechanics from the first two games, and the visual language is extremely poorly thought out. If you want to use the parry mechanic, you have to watch virtually every enemy on the field all at once because even though there is supposed to be an indicator for which attacks can't be parried, ranged attacks can't be parried and yet they don't have this indicator. Along with the insane level of other types of audiovisual indicators and incredible flashy moves from some of the new enemy types (specifically the enemies that swarm you in large groups, come on guys), you are forced to ignore this parry mechanic and dodge everything, up until the moment you run into a mini-boss enemy that can only be hurt after it's been parried and then a sniper on the other side of the arena one-shots you the moment you're distracted. Yes, there are people on the dev team making thoughtful improvements. And then there are others saying "Sekiro was popular, let's put Sekiro in it" in between lines of cocaine.

And then there's Miles. Poor, poor Miles. He's just gone. Sure, there's a character model in the game that other characters will refer to as "Miles", but any trace of personality or individuality have vanished. He exists only as a collage of "woke high schooler" stereotypes, used as a vehicle to appease what I'm sure was a very vocal minority complaining about how he was portrayed in the last game. I know that makes me sound like some deranged culture warrior, but he seriously feels like an afterthought. Every time he's in a scene without Peter, he's either doing something super predictable or super lame. Literally his primary emotional conflict mirrors Peter's at a certain point, but there is ZERO effort by the game to address this or to tie their two stories together ever at any point in any way up until literally the very end. They are definitely giving him the side-character treatment for this one. Just make a Spider-Verse game already, you COWARDS!

All in all, yeah. This is the definition of a phoned-in, designed-by-committee sequel. Definitely not worth full price unless you are just the biggest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Spider-Man fan on the entire planet and you just absolutely need another forty hours of mindlessly fighting nameless goons with a combat system that's in some ways worse than the previous two games. 4/10.

Spoiler-Free Review:
The first half of the game where you play as Ryuki is pretty good, and then the second half (more like 55-60%) is very dumb. There's a big pointless twist that only exists to confuse the player, and the ending, while flashy and entertaining, is extremely cheap and brainless. The characters are at least entertaining, but the B-stories aren't nearly as thought-provoking or hard-hitting as the first game. It's fine if you're just looking for ~25 hours of mindless fun, but it's nowhere near as good as the first game. Definitely not a $60 experience and imo not really worth your time.

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Warning: Light Spoilers Below, including for the first game!
nirvanA Initiative completely lacks the build-up and thematic resonance of the first game.

In the original game, the alternate routes had different a main character throwing a different possibility at you for who the killer(s) were/was or what their motivations could be. Sometimes you'd learn a key fact about the killer(s), but the focus was mainly on the psyche of the supporting cast. Each alternate route would help you understand one or more of the supporting characters more deeply, letting you appreciate them more and understand their motivations and actions in other alternate routes.

The game tackled intimate, personal themes and issues in a way that elevated its overarching narrative, and the ultimate reveal of the killer(s) was mind-blowing and crazy and it felt earned because of the stories and themes that the game had covered up to that point.

In nirvanA Initiative, I'm sorry to say, the alternate routes/endings in this game are cheap, phoned-in, and feel more like someone ticking boxes than a set of cohesive plot-lines. Whereas the first game's protagonist almost never takes his A-eye off the ball (get it?), in NI nobody really seems to give a ♥♥♥♥ about the identity/motivation of the killer during these parts. The first B-story is okay, but the issue being discussed isn't treated with enough seriousness to be impactful and the ending is pretty hand-wavy. The other B-plots are 2 nearly-identical, beauty-and-the-beast stories. Literally, they just told the same story twice with different characters and slightly different circumstances, and they are played one right after the other. The lack of creativity here and at the end of the game in general is pretty staggering. And none of the side stories have ANYTHING to do with the game's primary themes of alternate realities and timelines or enlightenment. For the most part, the supporting cast and their stories feel like brainless imitations of the cast and story from the first game.

And the main story...simply put, it sucked. There's a big twist about 80% of the way through that is genuinely just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid. It's not clever, it's not thematically relevant, there's no real explanation for why it happened. It feels very cheap and meta to the point where I got the impression that they just forced it into the game to intentionally make the story more confusing only so they could have their signature Spike Chunsoft reveal at the end.

The reveal of who the killer was was also incredibly lame. I can't really get into it without just saying who it is, but...genuinely, I would have a harder time coming up with a lamer villain for your time/reality-bending murder mystery game. Their motivations are cheap and cartoonish. Every time you learn more about who the villain really is, they become less interesting.

Everything that happens while you're playing as Mizuki in the last half of the game is insanely stupid. Flashy and entertaining, but insanely stupid. It feels like they were making a good game with Ryuki as the only protagonist but halfway through some suit said "actually Mizuki has to be the hero that kicks everyone's asses and saves the day" and this was their phoned-in compromise. Ryuki is barely present at all in the last half of the game, and when he does finally show up right before the game's climax, all of the problems he was facing were solved off-screen and then he pretty much immediately vanishes again until right before credits roll. An absolutely massive waste of potential with the dual-protagonist concept, especially when one of the protags is dealing with mental illness.

I will say though that the secret ending was super interesting. I doubt it will be used as the canon ending for future games, but it would be pretty mind-blowing if it did.

SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF nirvanA Initiative:
THE KILLER IS LITERALLY JUST SOME GUY! SOME GUY YOU NEVER MET AND WHO WAS KILLED OFF SCREEN BY THE MOST BORING ONE-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER IN THE GAME! YOU NEVER EVEN GET TO CONFRONT HIM, AND HIS MOTIVATIONS ARE SO STUPID AND BRAINLESS!

SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF nirvanA Initiative AND THE FIRST AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES:
AND WHY THE ♥♥♥♥ DID THEY HAVE TO MAKE HIM SO'S BASTARD SON??? AND IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO THAT, HOW ARE YOU NOT GOING TO EVEN MENTION THE FACT THAT HE'S IRIS'S AND SAITO'S HALF-SIBLING??? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??? ARE SO SEJIMA'S BALLS THE ONLY SOURCE OF EVIL IN THE WHOLE WORLD???

There are many things wrong with game and there are many things that are right. I really couldn't say at this point whether this game deserves your money because its future is very much up in the air. But as someone who has worked on and is working on a gameplay-heavy dating sim in the same vein as Subverse, I wanted to say that I feel things are moving in a positive direction. Not all of Studio FOW's recent changes to design philosophy are good, but a lot of them are, and I think that in a broader sense they deserve credit for making hard choices and doing whatever it takes to improve the game.

But even though this is a positive review, I want to comment on the big mistakes that I see them making. There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm going to focus on the things that I can provide a unique perspective on as a dating sim developer. To start, let's do the big one.

1 ) Lack of Focus/Vision

This game doesn't know what it wants to be. Maybe Tibor or somebody else had a real vision, but either that vision was incomplete or it's been watered down as more concepts and ideas were introduced during pre-production. Somebody in charge needs to decide what this game really is. Is this a dating-sim with RPG elements? Is it an RPG with dating-sim elements? Is it a visual novel? Is it a bullet-hell game? Is it x-com?

I'm not saying that there isn't a good way to blend all of these elements together, but it needs to be done with intelligence instead of just slapping these systems next to each other with no interactivity. The game lacks cohesion and intention. You could strip out 100% of the combat and lose NOTHING in terms of player experience because there is ZERO interaction with your crewmates during these sections apart from a handful of scripted events. Consider how the Fire Emblem and Persona games made this work.

But there are so many things about the game's overall design and UX that feels either bloated, riven, or just flat-out wrong for this game. The ship feels like a menu screen instead of a location. The girls feel like cardboard cutouts outside of their initial cutscenes. The PANDORA system is even worse than you guys seem to realize. Somebody in charge needs to take a step back and come up with a grand plan that blends these elements together. Integrating sex scenes with sidequests is a good start.

2 ) The. Dialogue. Is. Terrible.

The dialogue is terrible. I think I need to say this a bit louder because I know a lot of people are telling you differently. THE DIALOGUE IS TERRIBLE.

Games that try to be 100% jokes do not work, and 100% of this game is jokes. And worse than that, it's all the same joke! How many times during this 20-hour campaign am I supposed to laugh at the "haha LOOL sex=funny" bit? Everything from your main characters, to the ships, to the world you've created is the exact same joke told a hundred different ways. The panties should have come off the Captain's face within the first 30 minutes.

I'm not saying that your game shouldn't be funny. There's obviously a place for humor in games, I'm not insane. But if everything about the story you're telling signals to me that I shouldn't be taking it seriously, then how am I supposed to get invested in it? This leads to the next point.

3 ) The story is pretty bad too.

And before you think, "oh but it's just a sex game, the story doesn't matter", ask yourself this: why the ♥♥♥♥ are you making a game in the first place? Why isn't Subverse just a bunch of animations on your Patreon? The entire reason you make a game like this is that CONTEXT matters. Adding CONTEXT and BACKSTORY to a sex scene helps the viewer get into it more. Give me real reasons to give a ♥♥♥♥ about any of the characters in your 20+ hour space opera RPG!

There are way too many bizarre and overreaching plot threads with intrigue and backstabbing and recurring characters and yada-yada-yada who gives a flying ♥♥♥♥ about any of it? Not me. And not anyone else who takes several-month-long breaks from your game between updates. Pick a single, simple concept that makes the player feel like an underdog badass and stick with it. You should still have world-building and side stories, but the less important things need to be built into sidequests and other interactions outside of the main story. The central plotline should be simple to understand and continually lightly re-emphasized. The Bioware RPGs are good examples of how to do this effectively. If you want the main emphasis of your game to be on the character writing, then you don't need to be afraid to rely on tropes to help with your narrative.

I don't know why you guys didn't just make this game ME2 with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. This game, at its core, should be a dating-sim. Otherwise, you're wasting your time. A huge majority of your quests and cutscenes should be about the Captain getting to know his crew and making choices that affect their relationship. You know, like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RPG would do.

4 ) The Voice Acting and Rendered Animations

You guys are really dropping the ball here. This isn't a comment on the VAs themselves, they're doing a great job. But why the ♥♥♥♥ are you already paying for voice actors!? Why are you already spending so much time working on these pre-rendered cutscenes!? Voiced cutscenes should be some of the last things you ever add!

Unless you've already got every scene and cutscene, every line of dialogue refined to its final, final, final draft, you should not be wasting money paying for VAs when you know the dialogue can change. And especially for your first game where development will take much longer than usual (since we know for certain that your project leads have no experience in game design), having VAs work in short bursts throughout development is a surefire way to weaken their vision of who that character is supposed to be, which will likely weaken their performances.

Adding voice acting at this point feels like setting money on fire. If you need to rewrite something, you end up scrapping work you've already paid for, or you decide to stick with an inferior script. Neither of these are good options.

Conclusion )

I'm just gonna summarize my main pieces of advice to the devs here.

Take a step back and establish a stronger vision for the game. Your storytelling and gameplay elements should feed into each other.

Humor in a game is fine, but making your entire game out of cheap boner jokes is stupid and starts to grate after the first 10 minutes. And if every other line is a sex joke, how am I supposed to take your over-bloated space opera seriously? Everything about the writing feels like it was made to be overly whacky or fake deep to get cheap reactions out of people.

Cut down on overhead. Things like voiced and pre-rendered cutscenes should be added when you guys are much closer to the end of development. I know you guys got a lot of money, but you should be it using to make the game better instead of just setting it on fire or painting yourselves into a corner.

I think this game will end up being okay. At least the porn will be good. But it'll be a few years before we can really tell, so...yeah don't buy this game. If it gets good, you'll hear about it again at some point. If it stays bad or gets worse, you'll see clips of the sex scenes on reddit. Good luck, StudioFOW.

Side note - Bangkok )

I don't know the circumstances behind you guys replacing Tibor, but I'm not sure getting someone like this guy to lead your project makes any sense. The reason this project has been floundering for so long is that you don't have anybody at the helm with experience making a game like this. And this guy's credentials are that he is a "gamer" and a "hentai enthusiast"...which I'm pretty sure applies to everyone else who's playing this game. It doesn't inspire confidence is all I'm saying.

This game is a terrible, buggy trashfire that is a chore to play. It is littered with broken, unexplained, poorly-designed mechanics and contains plenty of save-ruining bugs that can delete literal hours of playtime.

But I love it so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ much.

There is so much heart and love pouring out of every part of the world. The writing and voice acting is well-acted and there a ton of genuinely heart-warming scenes. You can tell that Warhorse has a real passion for the time period and a talent for creating relatable, likable characters.

Like I said, the game has a TON of problems. Combat is the jankiest part of the game, and there are tutorial tips that just LIE to you about things like parry mechanics. But once you've got it down, the whole world opens up. Somehow, in creating such a broken mess of a combat system, they've created something that is genuinely a pleasure to learn and master. I used to not be able to win 1v1 fights, and now I can take on a dozen guys without breaking a sweat. The game just has this strange, soulful quality to it that makes me feel like I'm playing Oblivion again for the first time. And there are so many different game systems to master that it feels that way every time I start a new file.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, do not buy this game on a console. You will want to die. But on a PC, where you can tweak individual gameplay elements and fix broken quests? It's a beautiful game.

But the DLC is way overpriced, don't even bother unless you're a hyper fanboy like me. Wait for the deepest of deep sales, like +60% off.

In a defining moment for the franchise, Gunfire Games makes the switch from a Zelda hack-n-slash derivative to the worst souls-like game I have ever played. I have beaten every Darksiders and Dark Souls game until this one, so when I first felt the changes in combat in Darksiders to a more soulslike formula I was actually pleasantly surprised.

I like both Dark Souls and Darksiders combat quite a bit, so I thought that a fusion of the two could be really good if done properly.

It was not done properly.

I'll demonstrate by going over a key mechanic of souls-like and character action games that Darksiders 3 gets wrong.

The Healing System:
In Dark Souls 1 and 3 your main method of healing was estus flasks, which were essentially health potions that refilled every time you activated checkpoint(bonfire). Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne rely mainly on healing gems, which add an annoying farming aspect to both of these games.

Darksiders 3 takes a bit from all of these games. You have health potions called Nephilim's Respite. They have a chance to refill every time you kill an enemy, and lock you in place until you've finished drinking it (though you can roll out of the animation and gain full benefits).

There are many problems with this approach. The biggest problem, most obvious problem is that you start with a maximum of 2 flasks and reaching a checkpoint doesn't refill it. When I played, the first thing I did after reaching a new checkpoint was get myself killed so I could respawn with full flasks for the next zone. That sucked, any tells me that they didn't care enough to get testers to play this game for more than a few hours.

This system also sucks for boss fights, since there's no way to regain flasks during the fight. And boy would those extra flasks come in handy. After defeating Sloth, I can say that every boss battle after that I won because I started grinding for stats and healing shards. A slow and deeply flawed rolling system and bosses that don't telegraph their attacks for more than a quarter second make for a piss poor experience. The Envy fight where he telegraphs his attacks very clearly may be the only good boss in the game, and that fight is straight-up lifted from Dark Souls 1.

The rolling system is something that I wanted to mention. In Darksiders 3 after each roll you take about a full second to recover before you can move again. Darksiders 2 had a similar system, except you would have that delay after 3 consecutive rolls. The idea behind the DS2 system was that players would be able to roll and being attacking again quickly, but couldn't just panic and spam roll to survive fights. The idea behind the DS3 system seems to be to slow down every fight and make each encounter as grueling as possible.

You fight a lot of crowds in Darksiders 3, and I would say that roughly 80% of my deaths in combat came from being 3-shot by a basic unit instant transmissioning my ass from 10 feet off screen. It feels like half of the enemy attacks in this game occur instantly, giving you absolutely no chance of dodging. The other 20% were from being hit during my counter, which might be the most soul-crushing and infuriating design choice in the entire game.

Arcane counters are a special attack you perform after doing a perfect-dodge after an enemy attack and are your main method of dealing damage other than combos, which you also can't use because you run the risk of being instakilled by some off screen skeleton archer if you don't chip-and-run in every fight. For some ungodly reason the devs decided that they would make you vulnerable during your counterattack, meaning that if you are fighting more than one enemy it makes more sense to try and avoid perfect dodges so you can keep attacking without being stuck in place.

There are so many poor design choices made with the combat I have to wonder if whoever designed it has ever even played a Darksiders game, or any other character action game like DMC or Bayonetta. Even the problems health system wouldn't matter if the dodging system was fixed, because at least then I could feel like I wasn't cheated by the game. But right now combat is a soul-sucking experience, with every single fight with an enemy feeling like a coin toss between a victory you feel like you didn't earn or a 90 second walk of shame back to the location you died in.

I'm 10 hours in and I'm up to the Gluttony boss fight, but I don't know that I'll ever play this game again. Even if they fix the problems that I mentioned, I've just lost all faith in Gunfire as Darksiders developers and I feel like I'd just be wasting my time getting excited for the next game. I just don't understand how they could fail so fundamentally.

I do have to say though, the art is absolutely beautiful. The only reason I made it as far as I did was because I wanted to see the design for every new character. I do have to say though that the environments don't feel Darksiders-ey. They come off as pretty generic, especially after Darksiders 2. Big stuff like hallway architecture gets reused in environments that shouldn't have anything to do with each other. It makes a couple of environments feel same-ey.

I love the Darksiders games a lot, and I enjoy the art and mythos enough to probably end up buying the 4th game on a sale (if it ever gets made), but this game feels like the developers didn't care about making a game that was good, they wanted one that would sell well. One that looks really pretty sitting on the shelf and is actually enjoyable in the demo sections, but is completely devoid of polish and passion anywhere else.

I recommend that you don't buy this game until the devs address player concerns about these problems, because playing it in its current state might ruin Darksiders for you like it did for me.

Best investment I ever made.