Recent reviews by Alaith

Do you like gardening?

This game has great exploration mechanics, and is great to take at a slower pace.

Some of the controls are a bit jank by modern standards, but I still had a blast.

A fun exercise for people who have some Japanese language knowledge. The voice acting is clear and well done. I like that there are a variety of actors so you can hear the same words spoken by different sounding voices. The environments are cute and well crafted.

There is little replayability value in the game. I'm very sceptical that this "teaches" 650 words. I think that this game is a fun experience for someone learning, but you will need to use some kind of spaced repetition system like Anki to retain vocabulary from the game. I doubt I'll remember any of the new Kanji I experienced in this game unless I put them in my Anki deck.

Since there is no explanation of grammar and you're just matching concepts to individual words or particles; I could see myself being quite confused if this was my on-ramp to Japanese. I would encourage actual Japanese Language beginners to learn Hiragana and Katakana elsewhere online, and disable romaji in the game's settings before playing.

When I initially heard about this game two years ago I hoped that there would be some procedural generation involved. That way you could come back to it many times and reinforce your understanding of the Japanese without being able to simply recall each scene. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Still, I feel like it is a fun exercise if you're learning Japanese, and worth playing.

Fantastic addition to the genre and great sequel to PoE. Feels fresh and is a good challenge.
I recommend using WASD for movement, or use a controller.

Friendly AI makes single player frustrating at "intended" difficulty level during early missions.
I hope you're not planning to play this game by yourself.

Game looks and sounds great like you would expect from a AAA game. The campaign is very exciting to play through and definitely epic.

You feel powerful fighting individual enemies as you would expect from this genre and setting.

Once you're past the first half of the campaign where there is a lot of focus on protecting a teammate or an objective the friendly AI's lack of intelligence becomes much less noticeable.

The post-campaign content is fun and has enough variety to get your money's worth out of the game.

Other than the friendly AI making single player very frustrating at higher difficulty settings I have a couple other complaints:
- The damage and flawless aim of ranged enemies can be quite frustrating to play against with no cover mechanic and general lack of cover available in most fights until the last couple campaign missions.
- Being locked into non-cancelable special attack animations where you don't have any i-frames is annoying especially when one of those animations is triggered by what is supposed to be a recovery mechanic (gun-strike) which hijacks your ranged attack to lock you into a long animation with no invulnerability.
- The dodge/parry indicators are very inconsistent. Sometimes you have to delay your parry/dodge, sometimes cannot delay. It would be less frustrating if you could use the audio/video cue to always know when to perfect parry or dodge. If you can see the attacker you can usually judge which it is, or at least learn over time. However a lot of the time you can't see where the attack is coming from because of the low (and not adjustable) FOV. So you have to guess, and if you guess wrong you will often be stun-locked until death.
- Friendly AI do not try to complete objectives i.e. placing a bomb for 10s, even though that would be more immersive and fun.

Based on my experience I can't recommend the game at full price for someone playing solo, but if you have a regular squad of friends who are excited about playing it will be worth it.

Revised after some more time in multiplayer: This game really shines when you get a squad together that communicates and is working towards the objective with synergy. I think that if you can handle burning through the campaign solo, or have a friend to play through it with and can make it to multiplayer operations then you can really enjoy this game and I would actually recommend it.

Super cute style ARPG rogue-lite x colony manager. Love the cult theme and VO work. Game is still buggy and locks up pretty frequently, but saves frequently and restarts quite quickly. Overall I recommend checking it out if you enjoy ARPGs and colony managers.

Supreme flexibility. Amazing tool for connecting and spending time with friends and family remotely.

Amazing Story and Music. The gameplay isn't slacking either.