Recent reviews by Naitrate

I want to preface this by saying that this review is more about the development tools, as of the time of writing this review. It's less about the game portion, as I would likely be a broken record in that regards and say things that have already been said. I've been keeping tabs on this for years, even when it was centered around Unreal Engine 4 as a base.

For those coming and expecting Garry's Mod, it's more like Roblox and a custom game engine wrapped into one, with a Sandbox mode tacked on as an afterthought (I mean this in both the complementary and pejorative sense, this game was designed from the ground up around custom game modes, so it's more like Roblox in that regard, but the new sandbox mode is likely nowhere near as in-depth as Garry's Mod). One of the big draws around Garry's Mod was the custom game modes, and the sheer amount of content on the Steam Workshop. However, unlike the Steam Workshop, you can't subscribe to individual game modes and maps, often resulting in excruciatingly long download times, and in Sandbox mode specifically, there's a load of broken assets and entities in the browser that get downloaded from online when you select them. This game would have benefitted from a more flexible system in that regard, I would like to not have to wait for long downloads and to deal with a load of crap in the menu of the Sandbox mode. A game mode about mowing grass which has a similar gameplay loop to those game ads that appear when you don't pay for Duolingo being one of the most played games on S&box at the moment really tells you all you really need to know.

I've heard of more people being interested in this game from the aspect that it's one new option in the game engine space than people who are interested in the game portion, because, well, the focus on the Terry avatar and the lack of good games despite being in early access for years is a sore spot for many. The idea of a publicly available Source 2 (despite Valve promising nearly a decade ago), WITH C# on top sounds extremely enticing. With the $20 price and the current issues, you're essentially buying into a promise. It would've been less of a PR nightmare for Facepunch if they just used Steam's early access program to show that it's in active development even if they felt like it was in a good enough state to release to the world.

From a development standpoint, the lack of Linux binaries and a Linux editor is laughable. Godot has good support, Unity's is fine, and Unreal's is busted but functional under specific circumstances. But for those who dare to try to get the editor running on Linux through Proton, you have to edit the appmanifest VDF file for the editor's AppID to redirect it to the actual S&box install folder, then you have to launch it once, and then install and launch protontricks to install the .NET SDK through the installer located in "_redist" in the S&box editor's Proton prefix because it's technically another Steam AppID and that AppID doesn't consider .NET SDK as a pre-requisite on Steam. Even after that It seemingly doesn't detect any of the natively installed system editors outside Windows (For example, I have Jetbrains Rider and Antigravity installed), the top bar that shows the File/Edit menu is cropped out by the KDE application window bar, there's stutters and constant error popups in the editor viewport about DPI functionality that QT uses which hasn't been implemented in WINE, there's strange mouse flickering when the right mouse button is held down to move the camera in either the editor or Hammer, and when you're previewing the level, it doesn't consume the mouse input resulting in you not having full mouse movement in-game. Facepunch has only really announced that a client for Linux is planned, and so is a dedicated server tool, but no words on editor support on Linux yet.

Now, coming from something like Unreal Engine, there's quite a bit here that needs work. One thing is that the material graph editor by default doesn't support custom shading models, and you need to download a fork of that from the addons section, and then modify the code from that to get them working. The second is that in the standalone view, you don't have control over the splash screen, you don't have full control over SteamInput (full action based rebinding support rather than just the Xbox controller emulation that's going on in base S&box), and there's likely a lot of Steam related functionality that would need to be reimplemented. But another thing that comes to mind is how devs are going to support mods in their own games, is that something that has been accounted for in Facepunch's agreements with Valve regarding standalone builds, how does redistributing editor tools and such work? There's a lot of stuff which still is up in the air. There's little to no interoperability with the new scene editor and Hammer, or at least from what I've seen by dragging a vmap file into the scene editor, it doesn't do much. There's a load of things regarding being able to tune the player physics and how the player controls feel which feels subpar compared to Unreal. For example, let's say I want a standard third-person character, why does S&Box not give you the option to have the camera part of the player controller have it so the character doesn't look in the direction the camera does (I mean orbiting around the character), and why dont they have the option where the player can move the opposite direction from the camera without strafing? What strikes me as crazy is that you can't make custom entities (i think) and be able to load them from Hammer, so you really have two competing editors in the engine. Allegedly, Facepunch removed Steam Audio from Source 2 alongside server-side anti-cheat. I could probably point out more things the more I mess around with these tools, but honestly, I think the fact that the core non-source 2 specific functionality that Facepunch added are open sourced is nice for extending the engine, and I feel like these kind of hitches will get better overtime. I do appreciate that they're unwilling to compromise on performance, and that they're not going to use techniques that reduce image quality and introduce ghosting by sampling many frames.

But currently, from a development standpoint, I feel like there's a bunch of problems, and there's no real good reason you should pick this over something like Godot. Godot feels much easier to hit the ground running, custom shading models are really easy to support, and the engine feels like it's past it's infancy stage so there's a load of libraries, addons, assets, and tutorials. I can't currently recommend paying $20 for this, outside of enthusiasts/tinkerers, people legitimately interested in boosting the amount of content in it's ecosystem, and early adopters. I hope I can update this review soon, and I wish Facepunch the best of luck.

Oh, and despite playing before April 23rd and having early access at least a year before launch, I did not get the QA tester shirt cosmetic.

My only two complaints with the game is that the raytracing options are a mixed bag (You either get RT with barely any shadows, or path tracing with completely different lighting, and at least on AMD and Intel PT isn't even a option), the camera lock-on during aiming when you decide to hack, and that you don't immediately go back to where you were at when you died for levels that are very long and drawn out (much like your average /v/ user pitching a tent when they see Diana's toes). There's a fair bit of backtracking, and some of the enemies and bosses are a bit punishing, but it feels rewarding when you finally push through. The game runs like ass on the Steam Deck, 720p with the lowest settings and FSR 3 set to Ultra Performance mode, it looks barely legible and it dips well below 30FPS at times. Why does Valve give the "Verified" tag out like candy to games that run terribly. The Switch 2 probably runs this game better. But on my 5060ti, I was expecting the game with pathtracing to run worse. With 3x multi frame generation, mouse aiming still feels fine, at least much better than your average Japanese PC port where the mouse just emulates an analog stick.

Alongside RE9, I think both are GOTY material. A game that was 6 years (or longer) in the making that didnt turn out to be abysmal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (with fundamental flaws that patches couldn't fix) is a welcome surprise for once. The finale was really good, but the ending hit a little too close to home for me. This game reminds me of Vanquish, strangely enough, and Platinum Games back when they actually made good games.

The character dynamic between Hugh and Diana was really good. Although admittedly given some details he gives, like about him being adopted and such, I kind of had a feeling where things would go. But despite that i still think it's far better written than God of War 2018 or The Last of Us in that regard. There were a few points during the game's story where I legit almost cried. I do wish Eight had more character development, let alone fanart (lol). Really emotionally touching story, don't let the "uoh"-posters scare you away from trying this game. I'm probably one of the first people who would circlejerk Japanese games being dead due to how much corporate pandering they do, but I genuinely think that Capcom are the only developers in Japan that can actually put out a fun game that launches in a technically sound/competent state anymore.

I hope the team behind this game gets to cook more stuff, doesn't even have to be a sequel or anything, like a new IP or something.

Came for Mesugaki Regent, stayed for the rougelike card game gameplay.

It's tough on your own, but it seems more balanced around playing with friends.

Not much to complain about on the technical side of things, outside of maybe how strange the save system is and how i need a separate mod to keep my modded save together with my main save, which for some reason doesn't work on my desktop running NixOS or my Steam Deck, but does work with the Windows version under Proton. Well, that and not having DualSense prompts, or the option of just using the prompts that SteamInput comes with rather than the stock Xelu Xbox prompts.

Right off the bat, the game has pretty extensive mod support, the devs are using a common C# modding library called Harmony, and you can even unpack the game files and run them inside of MegaCrit's own version of the Godot editor like it's the actual game project files. Even if I didn't enjoy the game, I would support this out of principle.

EDIT: Looking at the reviews, my problem isn't really with the difficulty, but how unstable the game is at the moment.

EDIT 2: I don't care about the balance changes that breaks some stupidly OP builds that people used to cheese through the game. I don't care that Anita Sarkeesian (the grifter in the 2010's on a scam kickstarter) is "consulting" on a game that from what I see has very little content that's offensive and is still up in the air about what specifically she affected (well outside of how ugly some characters are). I care about the fact that the game is so unstable and crashes VERY often, even without mods installed. That and how frustrating some of the cards you get tend to be, where the RNG consistently ♥♥♥♥♥ me over and doesn't give me enough defense.

This is just if you threw Onechanbara and DMC's Bloody Palace thrown into a blender, and gave it the incredibly braindead enemy AI that you'd expect in Senran Kagura. Not bad, and I was surprised by the 200MB install size, until I actually played it. There's only a few zones, and a few different enemy types. It feels like there's a lack of variety in attacks, and the gameplay loop gets really repetitive. There is a small bit of story, but it's definitely one of those stories that are lacking and only really exist to serve as an endgoal for the gameplay. You use your melee attacks to recharge your blade, you can launch a special attack when enemies turn red when you slash them enough, you can also use your sword meter to quick charge hold attacks.

Also, the game caps out at 63FPS and only goes up to 1080p resolution, and the game's built-in controller support is a mixed bag (but that's to be expected of something using DirectInput), so honestly, this is a decent pick up and play game for the Steam Deck if you get it for the $2 on sale. If this was $20, I wouldn't recommend it.

The Locust ladies with their cleavage hanging out are better than the 10ft tall fancy-larping reddit lady.

Probably the best Resident Evil since Resident Evil 4.

The little I saw from the trailer during TGA, and the 4chan leaks had me a bit skeptical about this game, but I am glad that I was wrong.

The scarce resources can be quite painful in the Leon portions of the game, but that very thing made Grace's feel way more terrifying. Despite some parts which seemed really frustrating due to scarce resources and some level design choices, I had a blast from start to finish.

Grace is not a girlboss character (a tired trope at this point), and the depth that Leon and Grace's motives are shown during the game, and their character dynamic was pretty good. Emily (and Chloe) are cute. I really like the Heath Ledger vibes that Gideon gives off.

I love the callouts and stuff that references the previous Resident Evil games. The part where you go to the Racoon City Police Department gave me chills when the music started playing. Between that and some of the convictions that Leon deals with in this segment makes the game feel like a RE2 sequel. I went crazy when Mr. X appeared.

I'm glad that the game has both survival horror and action segments. I think it has downtime done right. If this game was originally two separate games (one being a multiplayer open world game), I would say it's a happy accident.

If no other good games come out this year, this might actually get my Game of the Year.

Came for Ann-Daughterwife, stayed for Ninja Nier (I didn't ask for parryslop though).
Such a cute and funny little cinnamon roll like her turning into a pod is my personal 9/11. Killing her was hitting the pentagon, and where I decided that this game can't be saved with patches. The second half of the game is just "what if the yokai were good, actually".

EDIT (3/12/2026):

Before anyone asks, Yumiko and Kumiko and Rika are cute and delicious too, alongside Ann 🤤

But after playing quite a bit of the game, it feels very underwhelming for something that has been in development since 2018 at the earliest (making it 8 years). Honestly, there's certain aspects in the 2022 gameplay trailers that strangely look better than the final product, like with character animations, but that might be down to personal taste.

The story is fine (so far), but most of my criticism goes towards gameplay, which is an important thing for an action game to nail, setting aside some localizer nonsense regarding honorifics in a game that is peak "Place, Japan" and made by Taiwanese developers to boot (so not even Japanese), so it's likely due to Playism or something. 4channer's calling this "yuri-slop" because one of the achievements involving Ann clearly haven't played the game as it's yet another nothingburger like yuri shipper grifters on Twitter misinterpreting a certain scene from something like Girls Band Cry, but that's another topic altogether. I legit played the game to the point where I get that achievement, and it's a nothingburger, you don't get it from a side objective, it's just something you unlock in level 4 from an obligatory cutscene, and your dialogue choices earlier in the game don't really matter either. In fact, I'm a little underwhelmed. There's some characters, for example, like the oppai loli with explosives named Rika which just appear once, and then just ♥♥♥♥♥ off and vanishes somewhere.

There are currently a bunch of optimization, stability, and gameplay issues that coalesce into something that I can't recommend and feels like a good case study of the dark age of action games we are going through right now. We haven't seen a single action game that has came close to Devil May Cry V or even Ninja Gaiden 2 (Yes, a much older game than DMCV but still) since 2018.

As someone else might have mentioned, the game lacks a mechanic from DMC where enemies that are off-screen won't attack, so you don't get attacked while doing combos on enemies, but there's also how enemies will just straight-up die even if they're airborn. Or how the grabbing mechanic that you'd expect from Nero in DMCV or the ability to push you towards an enemy (like with Chai from HiFi Rush) are tied behind a meter that requires quite a few attacks or parries to get just to do it once again. These are things that actively restrict player expression. You unlock all of the game's combos by the third level, and the abilities (that you can use with the left trigger and one of the face buttons) by the fifth. This still feels like quite a step backwards from something like say, God Hand from 2006. The scoring system will penalize an absurd amount of points even if you get hit once, which realistically given how the enemies are designed, mixed with the frustrating camera controls, is an inevitability. As a result, the combat depth feels shallow as a pond, and the platforming somehow feels more enjoyable. I think a fixed camera might have benefitted this game more.

This game is overly-obsessed with parry as a mechanic, and I think it's at the detriment to the gameplay how often it's used, to the point of repetition. I am however glad that there's no witch time mechanic to be seen. But there is something to be said that between this game, and Stellar Blade, Sekiro has had a negative influence on action games. Honestly, action games need a reboot like what Resident Evil 7 did to survival horror, because the entire genre lost it's way since all of the cheap Soulsborne copycats became a thing. If someone can deliver an action game with no target suck, no parry, no witch time, no soulslike mechanics, and that takes inspirations from it's origins again (beat-em-ups and the puzzles+exploration in resident evil), it genuinely will be a breath of fresh air. But that's another topic.

The dodging feels really good, but there isn't much of a reward that you get for successful dodges/dashes. The movement speed would also benefit from an increase, or at the very least a hold to tap option for dashing/dodging, because my hand hurts from an hour of pressing the right trigger because the default movement speed is too slow. The combat in this game isn't challenging, it's however more repetitive and unforgiving towards player mistakes that are more on some of the game's design decisions more than any actual player accountability. This might be a minor UI nitpick, but there's also the lack of any roman lettering (SSS, S, A, B, C, D) on style grades, so if you aren't familiar with kanji or can't discern gold from bronze due to the color palette choices in the UI, you are going to have a hard time.

The pod shooting has a cooldown meter, which can make certain bullet hell segments a bit painful to get through.

Usually missions in other action games are 20-30 minutes, but unlike HiFi Rush where there's a bunch of interesting stuff going on, I think the problem with the levels in Homura Hime is that they drag on for way too long. It feels like after I get done playing a level of Doom Eternal, but rather than needing to take a break due to feeling overstimulated, I need to take a break for the complete opposite. How can you have a game that is like 12-15 hours at most (which is fairly short), while simultaneously feeling like a slow-burn drag at the same time.

There's one segment in chapter 3 where there's a rail sequence that you literally do nothing in for 30 seconds. In Chapter 4, there is a rail segment, and you can jump, parry spikes, and switch between rails, but much like with Ninja Gaiden 4, I can't be expected to believe that anyone who plays action games would enjoy something that is ripped out of Dreamcast era Sonic's playbook.

I haven't even touched on performance yet. The game is very GPU demanding for what essentially looks like a PS3 game. I have to lower my resolution down to 720p at times to not dip below 120FPS, and at 1440p (not even 3440x1440 because the game doesn't support ultrawide), there's points where the game dips below 50FPS. There's no graphics options outside of resolution either. The game runs horribly on the Steam Deck, and there's several issues with Proton on Linux, where the game won't show cutscenes or subtitles, or the main menu background.

There's several other technical issues with the game, such as the camera sensitivity being tied to the game's framerate. The game has native PS controller support, but you wouldn't know that if you have SteamInput enabled, because the game doesn't seem to have checks in place to see what controller type is being used for the input handles with SteamInput.

I'm interested in seeing what Crimson Dusk works on next, but I do admit that there's quite a few misses here. But hearing that the devs are actually looking to patch a bunch of the optimization and some gameplay issues (well, that's if the publisher doesn't pull that ability away from them), I'm interested in seeing where this goes, because most Japanese devs wouldn't even bother with fixing their games post-launch. I can't really recommend this game in it's current state, but hopefully that will change soon. Worst case, we have Mightreya that is coming soon (as of writing).

EDIT 2: You can find an unofficial ultrawide fix for the game here:
https://github.com/reogrym/HomuraHime-Ultrawide-Fix/releases

I could come up with an original review, but since the devs didn't bother with an original game, i don't feel bothered to write something original either. This is just Realm Royale but with full of visual artifacts because you need to play the game below 720p for a playable framerate.

Online Error: Your connection to Highguard has been lost.

I am going to preface this by saying that I say all of this from genuine appallment, not out of award farming or rage-bait grifting.

I was already skeptical of Code Vein II straight before the announcement, I figured, with the stuff Bandai Namco has been dabbling in, there would be no way that a proper sequel with the same grit and transgressive themes (like fanservice) could be made today thanks to Bandai Namco taking money from massive banks (their shareholders), the Cool Japan Fund (basically a public fund Japan has that pushes monetary funding for companies to push certain narratives for the purpose of soft power), DEI initiatives, and platform holders (the real canary in the coalmine for all of this) breathing down their throat.

And boy, was I absolutely right.

Before we get to the massive elephant in the room, let's talk about how this demo runs. It's using Unreal Engine 5. I really don't want to elaborate on this further, because anyone with enough pattern recognition and brain cells will know what this entails, but the game barely even cracks 40FPS in the character creator on a GTX 1080ti even with the lowest resolution upscaling possible. Only way the game runs smoothly is if you play at 720p with low settings and FSR scaling set to 40% but even then it only cracks 90FPS. The first game runs far smoother than this, and it's bottlenecks were purely CPU side. I doubt a modern midrange GPU is going to run this game much better. And a Steam Deck will pull what the US government claimed happened to Jeffery Epstein trying to run it. The only thing I can really give this game credit for on PC is that they're supporting ultrawide resolutions this time, something that required mods for the first game to accomplish, but would've been trivial to support given that most of the UI elements worked just fine.

They do not have a body type A/B thing (Which admittedly is the most soulless corporate and blatant form of not wanting to anger twitter individuals with dried eggs or low testosterone), but rather it's a feminine/masculine physique selector. Somehow, this feels like a cowardice gesture. The hair styles are universal, which isn't much different from the first game, so I won't give them flack for that, as I feel like games could do a better job at long hair options for men (With someone who prefers long hair, let me play as Griffith if I want to). The smallest and skinniest proportions are still fairly small, same for the head size slider, you have extremely limited control over the eyes and nose. If you're a twink or petite IRL, you are gonna be disappointed, but there's plenty of options for Jamal-Kun post-breadtube egg-cracking to be happy. All of the pre-made presets for female characters looks like some Nightmare Kart/Bloodborne PSX Demake/Dread Delusion slop. There's even fingernail paint pattern options (Oh hey, welcome back Forspoken) and no way to turn down the nail specularity. The character creator was dipping below 30FPS for some obtuse reason. There's an empty mansion area you explorer after creating your character, again why is this a 30GB download, and why is there Denuvo on the game demo?

Did I ever mention this? Go onto YouTube, look up "CODE VEIN II - Revenant Springs Trailer", notice how the thumbnail is the most milquetoast yurislop that is still enough to bait a clueless dude or god forbid a #BoycottGenshin kind of Genshin Impact player into watching, just for the main video to be a bait and switch live action comedy skit of gay dudes in a sauna. Oh there's also the "Create a Character Presets" trailer which showed that most of the screentime was on a Debrah Wilson stereotype just to bait in the bipoc crowd.

$70 for this slop, or $100 (minus sales tax) if you want to play three days early.

Just go and play Arknights Endfield or any of the infinitely better Chinese or Korean games that have been releasing recently instead of buying whatever washed up and compromised 50 year olds from Japan with cuckold+NTR fetishes think we should buy.

Get this game on sale just to play the multiplayer. The guns and movement feels really nice. I actually really enjoy the sliding and dive mechanics that are in recent shooters. Just disable Search and Destroy in your matchmaking settings, because otherwise, that's like 90% of the matches you're going to get.

Don't bother with the campaign, zombies, or warzone. There's also the fact that it doesn't work through Proton or the Steam Deck (Better hope you have a spare Windows install handy, thanks ring-0 kernel level anti-cheat), the skins are insufferable or peak FOMO, and the game requires a constant internet connection even in the campaign. I can't really speak much on the SBMM, I haven't felt super frustrated playing the game yet.

Don't bother buying Black Ops 7, get this instead. Although I do admit that this recommendation isn't without caveats.