Recent reviews by DiabloGraves

(Note: I left it running in the background a lot which is why there's so many hours on it)

Final Thoughts: It's not *great*, but it's still pretty good, except the pacing never picks up the way it feels like it should. Combat starts off fun and interesting as you learn the mechanics, but it never really gets more difficult or complex, there's just *more* of it, and the addition of traps and a few other things that keep the pacing slow left me wanting to just skip combat after a while except for the boss fights, and even then it was really just to see if I could steal some unique loot from them or see if they had any wacky mechanics to them.

The story is... weirdly enough, kind of the same way. It's never *bad*, and if you like stories about magic schools and have an aching void in your life because you can't look at Harry Potter the same way anymore, this isn't a bad way to fill it. It's just that the journey to get to it becomes kind of cyclical: go to new place, fight some monsters, get a teeny bit of lore, and now if you want to know more you need this new McGuffin or talk to this other person whom no one thought to talk to prior so now we go to a new area and do it all over again.

The whole thing is about 20-25 hours long, and somewhere around the halfway mark I started feeling like I just wanted to get to the end so I could have all of the mysteries unraveled and find out what actually was going on and how it turns out. So yeah, turned on Combat Skipping and just played out fights when I felt like it, and at that point it started to be fun again because the pacing sped up a lot and I was able to get through the rest of the story. Again, not a *great* story, but pretty good.

All in all, it's worth playing if either the premise of young adult magic stories or timed tactical RPG intrigued you, although you'll probably want to tweak the settings at some point unless you just REALLY can't get enough of that combat, in which case, have at it I guess :)

Maybe I'm missing something, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of poker in this poker game. On offense, you can't tell what your opponent is going to respond with, so unless you have a really high single card or a decently high pair, it's basically random chance whether or not your attacks will work. On defense, you can see what you're being attacked with, but you have to use the same number of cards as your attacker, so having an actual poker hand doesn't matter in this scenario. The abilities are either incredibly niche or require you to already have specific cards in your hand, which, if I had the right cards in my hand, I wouldn't need abilities in the first place.

Also, really? Two pairs aren't valid? I get that it would be overpowered, but it really throws a bad first experience when you finally get something cool and you can't even do that... make it worth 3 damage or something?

As far as story goes, the introductory story was okay, but then when I went to select a new one, it wasn't a story at all, just a big board of encounters and path choices, which kind of undersells it on the whole "Adventure" part of the title.

Like I said, it's possible I'm missing something here and maybe it gets better later on, but this was a pretty underwhelming first impression; seems like it could've been a cool idea that just gets muddled up pretty hard in the execution.

Typical game:
Your Turn 1: You have one available move
CPU Turn 1: The board is rearranged to give the computer 10 straight turns, including 6 +10 Skull attacks and abilities that wipe the board and do 100 damage to all of your characters. After the final explosion:
Your Turn 2: You have one available move again
CPU Turn 2: The computer continually takes turns until all of your remaining characters are dead.

A fun little game; the only thing that I was disappointed in was the lack of ability to utilize order of operations. For example, if you needed to add 36 to a number, you can of course do +36, but if you don't have a 3, +6*6 isn't an option (you have to add 6, enter the change, and then multiply by 6, which gives you a different result), or +4*9 if you don't have a 6. If you wanted to get REALLY wild, there could be a parentheses button: it would have to work in pairs (pressing it the first time for "(", then you have to use ")" before you can finish the calculation), but it could open up even more avenues of manipulation. Admittedly that might be a lot harder to code, and there might be some functions it wouldn't work for, but I still think it's worth a shot. Regardless, still had fun with it, I like the different calculator ideas and the variety of functions and types of buttons. Will probably tinker with it now and again, especially if there are more updates.

This game is terrible. I can't appreciate its beautiful scenery and interesting plot lines and characters because I'm too busy angrily mashing my face against the same optional boss for three hours. I don't even feel great when I beat one of these bosses, the only accomplishment is not having to face off against it anymore (at least until the inevitable NG+ run).

Alright, now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go play Elden Ring for another 250 hours.

If the point of this game was to show that police are lazy, useless morons, it has succeeded spectacularly. If the point of this game is to provide an interesting police simulator where your choices actually matter... not so much. The story is okay, but it's not worth drudging through the endlessly repetitive and frustrating gameplay. Towards the end of the game I stopped caring if I lost a few police officers as long as they were the low-ranking, easily replacable ones, but really it didn't seem to matter; my best detective could still screw up a case by deciding to get constantly drunk or just not show up for work several days in a row, and if I fired them and replaced them with someone else, the replacement would be just as awful. Train them, don't train them, fire them, keep them, nothing makes a difference in performance. You might as well just flip quarters for the 75% of the game that isn't cut-scenes. Also, why does City Hall make municipal requests that require multiple officers at 2 AM? Some parts of this game don't even make sense, and the last mission you might as well look up the answers online because otherwise you'll just be guessing at whatever the game designers originally intended. Even the final day is buggy because the intended music and the song selection both try to play on top of each other. Overall I'd just say if you really want to know what happens, find a video of the cutscenes on YouTube and save yourself the headache.

I don't think anything can ever recreate the feeling I had when I first played The Stanley Parable. But that's okay. Ultra Deluxe is a fun game that blurs the lines between sequel and expansion. It's pretentious, but it's fun in its pretentiousness and totally willing to make fun of itself at the same time. It's a little buggy, but not frustratingly so and those will probably be fixed. There's more fun, more weird, and occasionally more scary and even more endearing. It still won't change your mind if you don't like weird games like this, but if you do, give it a try.

This is mostly a mixed review, but the farther I get in it the less I want to recommend it. The intentionally-bad jumping mechanic is manageable at first, but once you get to sections where you're required to jump out of a liquid and it becomes maddeningly inconsistent, or these absolutely terrible Mega Man style block jumps, you start to wish you hadn't sunk so much time into the game that you're determined to see it through.

Granted, there's one part of this game that's the worst of all; I would tell it to you, but you'll have to go find it. I've hidden it in a treasure chest between 832 and 967 rooms to the left of your current position, and in order to get that chest to open you'll have to click on the secret comment I've hidden somewhere on the forums of a popular gaming website. To find the secret code that tells you what website it's on: take every 17th letter in this review, run it through a rot13 cipher, decode it using base64 and then the secret decoder ring in your Cracker Jacks box, and then throw all that out and just use a guide to get through this game because these puzzles are massive trolls.

Only beat the game to show that it wasn't just me being bad at it. Gave it one final chance, got absolute garbage from it, uninstalled.

Hmm. On one hand, I did enjoy the game. The Zelda-like description for gameplay is pretty accurate; top-down exploration, venturing through dungeons, powering up (although this game is a bit simpler than Zelda in terms of attacks and abilities). The plot was interesting; a bit obtuse at times, but overall an interesting take on what I assume to be self-reflection and issues with depression and anxiety. I enjoyed it... but I'm not sure there's $10 worth of play time here unless you're a 100% completionist or if what you've read about the plot speaks to you on a personal level. If it goes on sale at all though, I'd say give it a shot.