Recent reviews by Drex 🗡

Slay the Spire's true rival

It definitely shows the effort that the devs put in over all these years, amazing game.

Many many more enemies, more weapons, tools, better gear system (crests), more bosses, more areas, more secrets, they definitely fulfilled if not overachieved what a sequel should be. Hornet is awesome, all the npcs are unique and fun, great storytelling and plenty of hidden lore for those who want it.

I suppose my main complaint would be that many people will just assume the game ends after act 2, and feel especially disappointed since that boss took me 1 attempt. I had to have a friend tell me there's more after i reviewed the game earlier, and had to google the steps to even start the act which was kind of a hidden mess, reminding me heavily of fromsoftware's style of hiding things and lack of explanation. It's also hard to tell people that the game doesn't end there because some find it to be a "spoiler", but if you don't know there's a 3rd act then you miss out on all the more challenging bosses, more areas, more secrets, more gear, and a better story/end.

The secret area stacking into more secret areas for very important portions of the game can feel a bit strange, almost requiring a few google searches or a comical amount of time spent smacking and jumping into walls.

Some people are complaining it's too hard but I never felt any challenge until the last 4 bosses, which still didn't take nearly as many attempts as an average dark souls boss. Final fight aka the true ending fight took me 8 attempts with no tools or silk skill, but I did have the maximum upgrade for the needle, which I realize took a few convoluted and annoying fetch/speedrun quests to obtain. I can see the damage being an issue if you didn't want to do these beforehand. All I can say really is to just search for some proper routes and strats to make those quests easier for yourself, but I understand that these speedrun and fetch quests probably shouldn't be so annoying for such a vital upgrade, even if it is "rewarding" in that sense. I personally didn't mind them, but I did search online for strategies.

So the game wasn't necessarily "hard" for me but I can see why some people would struggle more based on completion rate and tedious tasks. Although.. I definitely would never negatively review a game for being too hard if the difficulty has a clear path to success and is well thought out, even if I can't do it. Kind of sad seeing the overall rating of the game do worse than it's predecessor because of this, but I don't think anything should be nerfed, as that would make things significantly worse. Maybe the reward for the courier rasher run quest could be changed? Don't know how exactly but I'm no dev.

Without any online researching, I can see some players getting lost and frustrated, similar to Elden Ring, which makes this game unfortunately not for everyone. Edit for clarity: I only searched anything online for the game after I had already beaten the act 2 final boss and had 70% completion. GG tho 9.5/10 game

Good and fun game but do NOT play this if you haven't beaten or at least gotten very far in regular Elden Ring, not just for spoilers sake but for gameplay and controls. This would be a nightmare trying to learn as a first time player since it's Elden Ring controls, which are already unique, topped with more added control complication from character abilities, odd ui (for a first timer), and gameplay being much faster paced since it's on a timer due to the zone closing in. You don't really have any chance to learn fights due to this 1 life system but for better or worse 90% of the fights are from the base game (or dark souls) so you can learn them there.

Edit: turns out solo is also very very viable if not easier than matchmaking
and everdarks are cool

The game ran good *enough* for me with my high spec pc, so this negative review isn't actually going to be about that, but the optimization will likely be an issue for many. The game is funny, looks good, sounds good, but just barely misses the mark.

My real issue with the game is that it lies in a very strange place between too hard for casual players and yet the challenges and gameplay isn't quite right for high level speedrunning or completionists either.

I imagine this game is too fast paced for many, and frustrating when dying is very fast and often seemingly unfair. Maybe the Anger part was actually the player's anger. I'm used to this kind of constant repetition for challenges and completion, but I feel like most people aren't. If your goal is to play every level once and just get through the game, it's probably not that bad, but I don't play that way.

I went into the game going for 100% challenge/star completion but quickly realized that some of the challenges (which you need to do for new shoe unlocks) are fine at first glance but atrocious in practice. For example this game literally has no way to open doors without sending them flying and killing people behind it, yet asks you to complete certain levels without killing a single enemy, and worse it does so in a level where there are 10+ grenade throwing enemies which kill themselves and other enemies, which may or may not actually harm your pacifist progress but I gave up on that after 20 minutes of trying regardless of the grenades. It's like walking through a minefield that's in an apartment complex and the only way forward is through 20 exploding doors, but nobody is allowed to die. It seems heavily luck based but who knows maybe I missed something.

It also has missions where the challenge is to complete the mission without being hit, yet all the gun enemies are hitscan and you have no way to dodge other than to wait behind a wall and kick them around the corner. Do I complete the whole game and maybe find that one of the shoes lets me dodge bullets, and then make me go way back to do those challenges later? Maybe! I don't know! Comparing this to "I Am Your Beast" and other similar games, you could always do every challenge before even attempting the next level, which is ideal for completionists.

I sit somewhere on the line of recommended and not recommended, it's not for me but if none of the above applies to you then try it out.

Play this if you like Ultrakill, Trepang2, etc

balatro

-This review is spoiler-free other than a few boss names and vague complaints-

I started the expansion at level 107 with 30 vigor, using Morgotts cursed blood blade until quickly switching to the Milady for the rest of the playthrough. Explored absolutely everything I could, and fought Messmer at scadu tier 10, and was I think scadu 17-18 by the final boss.

The major bosses were all very very well created and just the right amount of challenging movesets and learning how to fight them is considerably more fun than 90% of the base game bosses.
My only move complaint is when Gaius charges at you, its a 50% chance of getting hit when dodging horizontally because he reacts and turns too quickly and has too long of a lingering hitbox, and the only way to make it consistent is to make yourself light load or use an ash like bloodhound step, but it really is just that one attack that is the issue with the fight.
Messmer is a perfect step up from Malenia in a way that felt similar but less obnoxious, had hard moves but very learnable and very fair. At no point did i feel frustrated when fighting him, it all just came down to my execution of it.
DBDL (Ill use acronyms for spoilers sake) is a brilliant design, the music was amazing, and the movesets were once again learnable and dodgeable but with the right amount of challenge. Also creepy af.
BTD is by far the coolest and well designed fight i've ever seen and played in a souls game, especially for *that* genre of creature, which notoriously is not done very well in FromSoft games.
"Cave Yoda" caught me off guard and is hilarious, thank you Miyazaki.
RTMK reminded me a lot of Nameless Puppet from Lies of P with their moveset, and honestly I think this boss should've had a cutscene. At first they seemed impossible and constantly countering my every move, but within 7 attempts I started seeing the patterns and learned it, which some newer fans of the game seem to not be able to understand, and expect everything to be readable immediately, and thus claim "game too hard". Patience and Pattern recognition is required for souls games and a lot of people don't seem to have that. You should always first assume you are the problem or are missing something important before blaming the game, especially in a game like this. I understand fights can seem unbalanced but if you go watch any good player do the fight, you will realize you are most likely the issue.

They implemented a system called "Scadu Fragments" which has been very controversial among players. I immediately saw the fragments as a way for people to be able to play the DLC at any level as long as they've beaten Mohg, as it "balances" your damage and defenses for the DLC fights, while being disabled outside of the shadow realm. Others saw it as a required "explore everything or else you can't fight the bosses" or "free cheat items" which is somewhat understandable but is not very smart considering the whole consensus around souls games, ESPECIALLY Elden Ring, has been "if you can't even get close to beating a fight, go explore other areas and come back later, most fights are not required for progression". People seem to get mad when their level 300 character gets one-shot right when they jump into the expansion, but if you bought the expansion just to steamroll all the bosses... that would be a waste of a DLC and $40. So I think the scadu fragments are a smart way to balance out everything since there's no real way to know what level you are "supposed to be" at any point in Elden Ring.

Performance issues seem to be a huge issue for a lot of people, which makes sense to negative review for, especially if that same pc was able to play the game perfectly before the expansion. However I did not have any performance issues and only a few lag spikes after having the game open for 5+ hours.

I felt the world was much larger than I expected, which is nice, but some places felt really really empty, like the Finger Ruins, Hinterlands, and Abyssal Woods. I expected so much more and some places all we got were some smithing stones, a talisman, and a boss fight that we already had 3 times in the base game. I understand time crunch and money issues, but I really think Fromsoft should have spent a lot more time on having more unique enemies/bosses because going into the DLC and seeing 3 dragons that are identical to base game dragons except the element is ghostflame, 3 more dragons that are just Agheel but with some of the most pathetic lightning attacks I've ever seen, another fallingstar beast, 2 ulcerated tree spirits, 2 death rite birds, a tibia mariner, another ancient lightning dragon, 2 tree sentinels, a leonine misbegotten, and a magma wyrm, is incredibly disappointing to say the least. There's also SO MANY NPC FIGHTS at the end of long dungeons or caves which is so infuriating since the NPC AI is garbage and so many things just cheese right through them. That being said, all the NEW bosses are decent at minimum and amazing at best.

In regards to disappointing areas, Abyssal Woods deserved to be scarier especially with that haunting message setup in the beginning which actually gave me chills. I was hoping for a giant shadow creature of sorts to be wandering around but instead we got an average Assassin's Creed stealth mechanic, hiding in bushes from a few creatures that were not scary in the slightest, that just walked back and forth in a small line.

Questlines are as vague and convoluted as always, and I don't know if this was the case before, but requiring you to summon a quest NPC for a very important boss fight (including the literal final boss), thus increasing their health pool and getting a useless teammate that dies in a few seconds, to proceed a questline is ridiculous. I did not use summon ashes the whole game and I did not want to start by summoning Thiollier the Useless at the finale.
(Update: supposedly the boss health bar does NOT increase as long as the summon symbol is inside the arena, not outside)

FromSoft please fix the NPC AI, they don't know what to do against the Wing Stance heavy attack and u can literally just hold LT and click RT for every single NPC fight (except lamenter)

Good game, a bit easy for a souls-like maybe

...is that Michael Reeves?

Best flash game series ever created

Very solid game since the Heaven And Hell update
Lots of little references to other roguelike or pixel games
Like 30 classes
Solid stat and inventory system
Several ways to make the game harder for better rewards/xp
Just needs more content (only version 0.2.0 as of now, so hopeful)
epic good 8/10