Recent reviews by zozo

Runs better than Elden Ring at launch but has performance issues. Has a big memleak which causes freezing for over a second after a few hours.

Issues:
Unfortunately it has been another 3 years(Since ER launch) and we're still in 60 fps gaming. While this is more of a qualm with the industry as a whole, it has gotten old.

Allegedly the stuttering doesn't exist on computers with older hardware. I'm not going to hypothesize but I've been having some grievances with <large company>'s drivers for some time now. The in game graphical settings do not alleviate the issues.

Once again, certain keybinds are not in the keybinds list. While the controls have been a bit simplified and changed(for the better), I'd love to put the menu on something like tab so I don't have to lift my hand completely in the middle of running around to reach the esc button. Also, sprint/dodge is still on one button.

The absence of crashing--on my and my friends' setups at least--is a warm welcome compared to Elden Ring's Launch, but once again: fps cap, no fov settings, no widescreen, etc. However! They did put in the toggles to disable "Camera Auto Rotation" and "Camera Auto Wall Recovery" so the camera doesn't randomly spin out of control AND these settings pop up on the screen on first play.

As a last weird note: the name filter is a bit weird. I aptly named my character "head empty" and for my friends, "ead" is censored. Apparently, this is short for eat a d-. While I'm not going to get into the weeds here, the filter is probably a tad too sensitive if it's breaking normal english words.

The Game:
As for the gameplay: the game is good. The fast pace and souls difficulty keeps it fun across runs and the simplification of stats into character classes is nice. The new GIGA sprint button is great for both map traversal and for dodging certain attacks. Playing together with friends is an excellent experience and the res mechanic allows you to make some mistakes while punishing you for making too many: it is harder to resurrect someone who has already died in the current encounter. The roguelike meta progression is cool and it's enjoyable tweaking the setup for different bosses or character strengths. Also, the ui is better than ER's.

The major complaint from my friends is that the targeting of downed allies with certain attacks/spells is scuffed. While one solution is to just not succumb to skill issue, it should be possible to make this feel a little bit better. Also, a chatbox would be nice.

tldr; 1. performance needs help. 2. after having beaten some bosses last night, I'm excited to go agane with the boys this evening and beat a few more

This game is incredibly smooth and fluid. It's a great experience that's even better in coop
I actually have zero complaints

looking forward to the full game, gl to devs

Lovely, wish I had games like this when I was learning to code!

Also has some fun problems to solve if you know what you're doing

☑ good combat
☑ hard game
☑ multiplayer
☑ replayability
☑ fun
☑ solo dev, indie game???

get it now

tldr; core gameplay loop = pokemon arceus + ark survival + disclaimer: Early Access

Pocketpair took what they had learned from Craftopia and made something better.

In my opinion Craftopia is decent but is missing something at its core. Palworld on the other hand, has a very good core gameplay loop and anyone who enjoyed the newer Pokemon games despite how they are will find this a great experience. The only potential let-down besides the obvious Early Access tag is for people who want a story.

Do you want a mix of fps, pokemon, and survival/crafting open-world with optional multiplayer? This is it

Played on a high-end pc on Linux and experienced no graphical issues/glitches, frame drops, or crashes at all after over 13 hours.

I played very un-optimally mostly because you can easily run around for an hour having fun either exploring or catching monsters until your inventory fills up and you return home to update your base.

It's a good early access game and I expect to easily pass the $1/hr mark. If you like the genres I would recommend getting it.

• ai pathing can get stuck on corners/pillars/trees/certain terrain or elevation differences
  
• some building piece snapping is scuffed: mostly angled roof pieces
  
• qol: keybinds & settings fixes (some settings are inverted or don't work)
  
• some abilities don't target well while mounted
  
• only major bug experienced was that while dismounting from a monster in the middle of taking a hit from a large charging monster the dismount location was pushed just below the map floor and the character fell for a few seconds until the game teleported me to my base

• monster battling/capturing gameplay loop w/ 3rd person shooter
  
• exploration, gathering/mining/etc, dungeons
  
• main progression though "tech" unlock tree
  -upgrade points are gained with character level and some can be found in the world
  -separate character skill points: health/attack/carry weight etc
  
• secondary progression through leveling up your base
  
• additional progression via monster collection and open world resources
  
• monsters captured have their levels scaled down to your current level
  
• fairly deep world settings
  
• and more but that gets into spoiler territory

• base-building with utilities/farming/decorations/etc
  
• hunger gauge for both you and monsters
  
• hot/cold gauge
  
• exploration/gathering (classic survival elements)
  
• different crafting facilities for different resources
  
• automation through monsters on your farm

• This is not a 'very early scuffed classic trash EA' game and is actually a good playable experience. In comparison to a lot of similar games I don't have strong complaints/issues after playing for over 13 hours and I'm just having a good time
  
• leveling xp is primarily from capturing monsters, but also from fighting, gathering/exploring, crafting, and passive xp from monsters at base
  
• it has some difficulty from varied enemy attacks that can also target player instead of only monsters
  
• it's very open world/grindy but it doesn't feel empty or too little

edit: formatting

This game takes only the best part of 3rd-person action games(the bosses), has very short load times, very fast fight restart times, and most of all, no running for up to a minute+ before retrying a fight or long unskippable cutscenes.

The timing required is tight but not too tight and the game allows for learning and optimizing over time easily with basically instantaneous fight restarts.

I never have inputs dropped, the game never stutters, and everything felt smooth (disclaimer: I have an expensive and recent pc, but that doesn't stop some other games from running like **** anyway).

At first, the goal is to learn the combat and boss movesets while getting absolutely destroyed. After much learning and skill improvement, beating a few bosses and learning the game, chasing S rank clears is a good goal which requires no healing and few large mistakes. S ranks are not too difficult to achieve, partly because the S rank clear time requirement is fairly generous and doesn't need much optimization: parrying the majority of attacks at the correct timings is enough.

After getting S ranks, optimizing for time becomes more fun by chasing real optimizations. Discovering every opening in boss attacks that are punishable is great fun and made easy with fast fight restarts and low(ish?) kill times. Certain bosses allow weaving attacks(quickly alternating with parrying) within their attack combos and finding which patterns have openings and at what times is great fun for anyone who likes optimizing their play.

In the main area there is a billboard that shows a list of every boss with your rank and clear time as well as the sum of all clear times--this is a great motivator because not only can you chase down individual boss times but seeing the cumulative time go down through minute barriers is very satisfying.

So far I've only optimized a bit over half of the fights at my current skill level and once I finish I think I'll have attained sub 11 minutes and pushing sub 10 will probably be a real challenge and may require me to chase more absurd optimizations which I might not even know exist yet that will come with a deeper understanding of the game.

It really has been a true joy so far and in just these few hours I can recount leaps in skill from learning different new things. This is the type of satisfaction every game with good bosses COULD have, but is less common in games where it can be an arduous trek to GET to the boss from a save point which is a real shame because many bosses that I would probably love I'd instead rather only beat once. While I'm complaining about long treks to get to bosses in other games, I would also like to complain about long unskippable cutscenes before interesting bosses as well--over time it slowly ruins the excitement of optimizing a boss, especially if it happens to be a day where your patience has worn thin due to external factors and you just want to game.

Anyway, mini-rant aside this is a major reason why I pretty much always love boss-rush type games or games that have a boss-rush mode unlock after beating the game(provided of course, that the bosses are good). Certain stories can be very enjoyable but at the end of the day, if I'm playing an action game I'm here to GAME and this game lets me do it, over and over and over again.

• Camera is smooth and has no jank. The only complaint I could have is when dodging a sweep attack while under an awning that I experienced on maybe only one of the levels(requires jumping), the camera has to go into/through it but this is pretty minor and didn't even bother me(it was smooth and didn't throw the camera all over the place).
  
• Inputs are cleanly detected and all mistakes felt like my own. Every death or amount of damage taken was a mistake by me for any number of reasons: skill issue, mistiming, knowledge gap, etc.
  
• Graphics are clean and environments do not distract nor interrupt gameplay(nothing to get stuck on, etc.).
  
• Game has a clear theme and style and everything feels like it fits.
  
• It is possible to get certain boss attacks to be janky in their targeting but this only happens with mistimed inputs.
  
• UI is simple and clear enough to understand all elements even when only using peripheral awareness.
  
• Music and sounds felt natural and nothing was out of place.
  
• Effects and gameplay elements are satisfying and intuitive.

I'm excited to play again and I'm excited to replay bosses I've already optimized times for because I know that even though I've done pretty well, I'm quite far from the skill ceiling and this game is fun enough that I want to get closer.

and the cute models are a plus, so 11 if you're a weeb or like the style.


note: never really got around to playing Sekiro and not really a souls-gamer (yet?)

All I want to do is explore, survive, craft, and build. This game offers all of those things but...

It's absolutely awful.

Every planet is essentially identical with the same uninteresting terrain, resources, and POIs. Even the underground relics you find are the same identical trapezoidal prisms.

Every planet has some type of hazard: acid rain, blizzards, etc that will kill you in 30 seconds or two minutes outside of storms.

You must constantly hunt down the same two resources to charge up your suit and avoid dying and losing all your items or just swap gamemodes off of "survival" to avoid the tedium of snail-pace progression.

And once you do, it doesn't get any better.

You do the same thing over and over, with uninteresting gathering, hunting down the same exact things on every world. A task gets boring on one world after three times, enjoy doing the same thing on the next identical world with the same boring terrain.

Surely other aspects of the game are actually fun right? Well, no.

It's the same with flying your spaceship around, there's nothing exciting about it and after one unfun slow dogfight the rest are the same. Flying from location to location is just a glorified idle animation as you wait to automatically land without any input upon reaching your destination.

It's arguably worse with alien npcs--you get some gutted version of interaction because you don't know any of their languages and you can only learn one word at a time. After seeing multiple pois with npcs speaking absolute gibberish and learning a dozen words, you still can't communicate. Of the words you learned, you see zero to one of them in each sentence the aliens speak. Then, you figure that maybe you can go research the language to speed this up or something. Of course not. It's all one word at a time.


So the survival loop is awful, the worlds all have the same flat terrain, the flight is boring, the dogfights are slow and uninteresting, the npcs are useless, what else is left? The "story" and the quests I suppose. But don't worry, those have the same issues.

The quests are buggy and don't track properly if you already have items in your crafted in your inventory. Surely that's not so bad since you can just craft more?

Let's step back for a moment and consider what I had to do to go run off to this location and get the items in question. My first trip I make it to the location and on my way back my shields deplete. There are no resources to recharge my suit nearby because I picked them up on my way there. I die, losing everything and respawning with nothing.

I decide to try again with a more roundabout path because I need resources to keep myself alive. About 3/4ths of the way there, a blizzard begins and I have no shelter, nowhere to hide, with no caves in sight. My temperatures are dropping extremely fast and my screen is becoming covered in ice. I can barely see anything. It's too early in the game to have any tools to dig a hole yet. I die, losing everything again.

The third time I finally succeed making it there and back again only to discover that the secondary resource needed for the craft is oxygen, which I constantly deplete just to stay alive. Each plant I can get oxygen from on my ice planet gives 5-8 oxygen. The craft needs 30. Recharging my suit fully takes some absurd amount well over 50.

I have to make multiple trips away from my stranded ship at a snail's pace: sprinting and using the jetpack depletes oxygen at a far higher rate, so in order to survive and not deplete the oxygen I need for the craft I must walk everywhere. Hundreds upon hundreds of steps and the minutes keep rolling by. Finally I return to my ship with with something like 35 oxygen, my suit almost entirely depleted.

That sounds alright though, surely the ship replenishes your oxygen so this didn't take too long or too many trips right? Of course not, the ship only protects you against hazards like blizzards and acid rain, it doesn't replenish oxygen. You have to go out and farm oxygen manually and if you're on some ♥♥♥♥ planet where the oxygen is extremely sparse, you're doomed to a hell that's twice as unfun as other planets where you still have to deal with the same awful systems.

Alright so I've finally repaired my ship and I can fly off of this awful hellscape and the game will open up and be fun! No. Of course not. I'm sent to an extremely toxic planet with constant acid rain where I interact with aliens that I don't understand. Each "unique" alien is essentially reduced to the same uninteresting interaction where I press a dialog option that teaches me one singular word of their language...unless the option I pick is one that they dislike and I learn nothing. I end up learning like THREE words from them, none of which are used colloquially.

I play a little more for around an hour, before deciding to restart on a different difficulty setting because I refuse to believe that the game was this unfun and awful.

In this journalist difficulty mode, I never die because of how slowly my suit's levels deplete and I progress at around 3x-5x the pace. Unfortunately, the relaxed exploration did not yield any better results. It was arguably worse because I wasn't distracted from the ♥♥♥♥ gameplay loop by the constant threat of death and losing my entire inventory. I gave it a few hours, in the hopes of...something. I reluctantly tried again another day, optimistically pulling hope out of thin air. No dice. It sucks.

Easily the worst money I've ever spent on a game, even at 50% off for $30. I did not for a singular moment consider that a $60 game, years after release, would offer such a gutted survival experience. You are unironically going to find a better experience playing a free to play mobile game.

Also if you do play, turn off vsync: the game will use half the gpu resources and pump out more fps. Don't ask me why because I don't know. Oh yeah I almost forgot: after I had gotten through the intro cutscene and finished my graphics settings (you know, removing motion blur and tweaking settings so that 240fps doesn't look like 24fps) my shields were nearly depleted and I was almost dead. This would have been a fun shock into an intense survival experience if the game wasn't awful. Obviously I died, because you can't scan for resources to replenish your shields at the start. And even if you could, they weren't nearby. Oh and this was on the ice planet so my screen was frozen over and I couldn't see anything anyways.

I have no clue how people review this positively, stay away unless you have money to burn.

I actually died to the first boss on its first attack because the game stuttered through whatever happened. Apparently you die in two hits, and I died in none. Seems fixed

Considering that I'm still playing after my initial review, I feel obliged to "cautiously highly recommend" despite my experiences: it will stutter and it will crash. Seems to have been fixed in the years since release.

Stutters in this game seem more prominent early on, possibly due to a desire of serving a visually strong experience to players as the game begins. Seems to have been fixed in the years since release.

All in all: fun game, would recommend but has issues that are exacerbated on m&k. This is one of the best games of all time. Also, can now easily use mods to remove whatever may cause issues.

Switching this review to positive in 2024 as the stutters and crashes appear to have been fixed since I first played at launch years ago. Also, many toggles options were added in settings. New 2024 edits are in italicized text. Some old text removed.

After launch, they've added lower mouse sensitivity--prior to the update it was absurdly fast at the lowest sensitivity, forcing me to use 400 dpi which was very inconvenient for menu navigation because I had to move twice as far as I was used to. Unfortunately, a few other issues also make/made gameplay annoying:

1. Auto-camera: They added a toggle to disable it. The issue at the time was if you were moving left and the camera was turning left but you needed to aim to the right (aka moving mouse to the right) the auto-camera would fight the mouse input and cause stuttering/jittering. This was disorienting and over time caused headaches and other issues. Also since directional inputs are relative to the camera this can cause you to move in a completely different direction than intended even if sometimes only slightly--this can(infrequently) result in getting hit by a boss or falling off a ledge.

2. Dodges are buffered through staggers. Inputs can also be buffered through your own attacks, but this feels inconsistent to me so it could be due to stuttering or some other issue during combat. I'm not experiencing this anymore so either it has been fixed or it doesn't happen because I'm more precise with inputs.

3. Putting multiple movement actions on one button is just stupid(backstep, dodge, & sprint). At some point it will perform the wrong input. It feels like the game sometimes "eats up" dodge inputs, but I suspect it occasionally considers them a sprint instead--at least when not during a stutter. Still an issue but I'm more careful/precise with my inputs now so the occurrence is rare.

4. Not all actions appear in the keybinds list. Some actions are not bindable to mouse buttons. Still true, still silly, not much to say.

5. Even with motion blur off, turning in this game feels particularly awful. My brain adjusted after a few hours but not before dealing with headaches and discomfort. Feels fine to me now without auto-cam stutter, without stuttering overall, and without chromatic aberration. I suspect the biggest culprit was the camera stutter as that causes a huge disconnect between input from hands and output to eyes and the brain/body get confused.


The camera smoothness suffered from the following:
1. stutters (uses avg. <30% cpu and <50% gpu at max settings, 3 year old pc) Seems fixed
2. 60 fps and below Fine without stutters but 60 fps cap is rough on pc
3. fighting auto camera with camera input causes additional shaking Can now toggle off
4. high sens mouse camera--fixed(in 2022)
5. lock-on is a bit goofy and for m&k users keeping it mostly off but sometimes toggling it to "aimbot" certain attacks, especially against dogs or flying enemies works well. It'd be nice if they have a better camera in a future game, but after the initial bad experience I don't mind it anymore. They also added some toggle options for camera settings that help.

If you'd like to mod some display/QoL stuff, very early on fps cap removal, increased FOV, and widescreen were added. By now, you can toggle anything else if you grab some mods which takes like 5 minutes tops. Back in 2022, the increased FOV greatly helped with my disorientation with stuttering and auto-camera jitter. Huge props and thanks to modders!

Fps cap at 60 is forced due to it having some ties with physics but it turns out that only a few things break. Without stuttering it feels ok but at the end of the day, 60 fps is still awful for pc, especially with the other performance issues at the time(stutters, crashing, etc). It can work with 2D or certain artistic styles, but for 3D games with camera turning 60 fps will always be objectively bad.

--

The game is very pretty with beautiful scenery and great effects. I've had a great time exploring the map and fighting enemies. The world feels full and has good variation in verticality. Bosses are varied as are their movesets. Many have mechanics designed to increase suffering, but that is to be expected.

The story is not "handed to you". If you have any interest in understanding any of what is going on, you have to be quite active. Many open world games use a "main storyline/sidequest" strategy which sometimes have boring/useless sidequests, but since you generally cannot discern which is which here, everything explored feels like it has some significance. There are rewards for doing all manner of things, allowing you to journey however you like. You may frequently find yourself in higher level areas, allowing you the decision of turning back to explore more of what was behind or to forge onward towards more difficult battles. The only issue with this style is that for a few sidequests it is hard to figure out where to go. Otherwise, it's perfect and it is done very well.

While it IS a good and playable game, I find it important to be harsh about the disappointing performance and the blatant lack of certain features. I will happily change my review to positive when I experience a day with smooth fps and no crashes with other issues fixed. The game has literally crashed every session. One error even caused me to expect save corruption. No longer experiencing crashes in 2024 so changing my review. I'm still criticizing just HOW awful everything was on release. Now that the large sweeping issues like crashing and stuttering are gone and some toggle settings were added it’s fine but at the time it felt like "AND THIS TOO?!".

Despite my harsh review due to performance and other issues, I still had Elden Ring as my game of the year. It is one of the best games of all time and is much smoother now in 2024, highly recommend. Happy New Year, game is still in the steam winter sale for a bit so grab it if you haven’t already!

---EDIT: Many of the issues below have already been fixed and the game is VERY actively being updated and improved.

Great game albeit short

From the very start, the atmosphere created with the combination of sound and graphics was excellent. I was instantly impressed.

In just over four hours I've beaten the game twice--first on "Revenge" and then the unlocked "Hell" difficulty, but the core gameplay is fun enough that it makes up for the brevity of play.

Mistakes set you back to reasonable checkpoints, keeping you in the action and avoiding replaying an excess of content just to get back to where you were. To keep up the pace even more, ammunition is generously given to the player and even returned upon death(no retrying a boss with 0 special ammo in this game).

For replayability of difficulties, there are few cutscenes you can skip for subsequent playthroughs which is annoying--since the game is so short, I get to rewatch cutscenes I saw less than two hours ago. More cutscene skips have been added.
The game has a very fun balance between difficulty and fun gameplay--it's not an unfun waste of time to go through Hell mode and you just have to play better (either faster or safer, depending on your style).

The game runs well in comparison to modern fps games: a stable 144 fps on max settings, which is almost unheard of in modern gaming(AAA xd?). For this type of single player title, I didn't feel it necessary to uncap my fps and try to push to 240+fps and it was VERY playable on max difficulty(2080 super 23-25C ambient).

This game also supports NVIDIA Reflex and DLSS which felt great: I had zero input or latency issues, and only two brief instances of fps drops.

The sound design/music are excellent. Absolutely amazing.

Shooting feels good. Abilities feel good. Movement feels good, but it took me a moment to realize how to avoid dodging while trying to sprint since both dodge and sprint are one button. If you only sprint with W, you will never misinput a dodge as there is no forward dodge.

The game allows you to change settings before throwing you into gameplay and story, allowing you to ensure that you don't nearly go deaf and also change some graphics and control options which is an issue in more games than it should be(even in 2021!! ridiculous!).

There are a few issues such as:
Sliding into objects and jumping onto certain things can get you stuck, but I was always able to slide out. edit: A lot of places where you can get stuck have been fixed.
Enemies can be pushed behind walls, but luckily the walls I did this on were plants and I could shoot the enemies through them.
There are one or two areas where fps tanks every time I get there, but it recovers within about a minute or so. I did not test this enough to give more clear feedback and instead enjoyed playing the game. The rest of the game is smooth. fixed
Enemies can spawn VERY close to you. Feels a bit weird, but I only suffered one KO from behind.


---The remainder of this review may contain spoilers---

A few (subjective) criticisms:
Some of the abilities put you in a very long animation that leave you very susceptible to instantly dying or losing almost all of your health and as a result, there are 3 abilities I rarely use. edit: Some abilities now have a short period of invincibility after activation.
QTEs are unnecessary.
There is some amount of sway on the sniper while moving which I personally do not like, but I understand if it's necessary in order balance the weapons.
Since the game is so short, upgrades do not feel extremely significant, but they still add a lot of damage and are useful. I'm unsure how to word my feelings on this.
The sneaking sequence is a bit annoying. Killing someone from behind sticks you in a long kill animation. Killing someone from the front is instantaneous. This means killing someone from the front and narrowly avoiding maxing the detection bar is safe but if you kill someone from behind and an enemy walks close to you during this long animation, you are guaranteed to die unless there nearby cover, which quite possibly wont help at all as all enemies have been alerted. It IS possible to clear the entire area after having alerted the guards, but that doesn't excuse the issue.
It wasn't obvious to me that I was invisible in the grasses because of how easy it was to see through them, but I did figure it out quickly. I assume this is a necessary evil due to camera position.
The weapon secondaries, although they are all unique, feel like they should be saved to kill bosses faster, which puts them in a weird place. The sheer damage benefit from nuking boss hp with the secondaries feels like too much to give up for destroying normal enemies with ease.
While abilities work well on just two buttons and there was clearly thought put into how to make that work, I would prefer if they were split across more buttons.

Objective criticisms:
It's too short.
For stealth areas, there is a sound alert when you are close to being detected, but it is delayed and it does not cancel if the bar is nearly empty--I had many situations where I was almost detected, killed an enemy, and when my bar was more than half empty, I got the loud warning noise. Currently, the warning noise is kind of useless.

Random notes:
The game gives you enough tools to play extremely aggressively without ever retreating even once, but also allows you to play safely from a distance or even mix the two.
There is a good variation of dodging vs blocking. Small learning curve, good gameplay variation, feels good. I still need to mess around and see if how much I can use aerial gameplay to dodge, as that would likely be quite fun.


Thank you for making this game, and further, for releasing it for free to those who had purchased Bright Memory a long time ago! Although this game is short I quite like it and will be buying some dlc in support. I do wish for more content for this game, but I will happily wait to see what comes next, as I have done prior with the first Bright Memory :)

Finally, a melee VR game that has a good solution for easily exploitable swinging mechanics. This is easily some of the most fun I've had in VR.

Good, fun, roguelike with a good variation of enemies and bosses with nice difficulty change over levels

Enemies from multiple directions allows for immersive use of playspace with good dodging mechanic

Would recommend for any VR user looking for a good melee experience