Recent reviews by Final Contra

I like the theme and making the pottery but this really is just a stripped down MOBA once you actually start playing it. You try to destroy the enemy's base and protect your own while playing as 1 of 24 champions (8 pottery shapes x 3 sizes), each with just one special ability and very poor visual distinction between them leading to frustrating encounters. Combat feels very basic and feels particularly unresponsive when trying to stop a pot from charging into your base and dousing your kiln with anything but the largest pots.

There isn't much of a "party" aspect to this game that describes itself as a "party brawler". There's no local splitscreen support, not much there to help less skilled players have a good time, and no party game should ever have its losses come from poor team comp or not following the current meta. In fact, if someone shows up to your party and mentions either of those things, politely ask them to leave.

The game also currently prevents new players from making the biggest, strongest pots until they hit level 6 which I hit around the 1.5 hour mark. This is a huge problem because there's nothing stopping the other team from being all massive pots that can easily spawn camp the bejesus out of new players that are stuck in pots that will break from 3-4 basic attacks. Anecdotally, getting steamrolled by seemingly unkillable enemies caused the only other person I know who bought this to refund it.

Until Kiln becomes an actual party game or a better MOBA, I don't recommend playing it.

This review is spoiler free. I enjoyed enough about Resident Evil Requiem (RE9) to recommend it but this is low on my Resident Evil tier list.

RE9 is a very strange game that you can best summarize the gameplay by saying you alternate between playing slower survival horror sections as Grace and playing a horror themed action game as Leon, swapping between them at very irregular intervals. Grace's plodding hide 'n seek horror sections wore out their welcome quickly but her more traditional Resident Evil formula sections are great. Playing as Leon feels so jarringly like a power trip of action focused gameplay for the first half of the game before the game jumps a series of sharks into an incredibly odd second half leading him to more evenly matched encounters. These still are fun but never get close to the heights we know Capcom and Leon can give us with games like the RE4 remake. Grace's sections that feel like the RE2+3 remakes feel good but I really wish Grace's stealth sections had more to them than the slowest crouch walk imaginable and I really wish Leon's action heavy sections had the weapon and enemy variety of games like RE4.

The first half of the game gets a very easy recommendation from me. I was ready to declare this as the clear winner out of 7, 8 and 9 until about halfway through the game when my enjoyment fell off a cliff and never fully recovered. The second half experience is just so fragmented, wildly varying in quality, peppered with RE6-esque gameplay nonsense, leaning on nostalgia, full of bad story beats that range from "that's dumb" to "confirmed gas leak in the Capcom writer's room", and rounded out with SIGNIFICANT retcons to the franchise's storyline.

Overall I still enjoyed the game but the second half was disappointing. It's really tough to rank this one above or below RE8 because they're both incredibly fragmented games that trade blows on horrible story beats. If someone held an oversized revolver to my head, I would probably say RE9's highs beat RE8's highs so we'll go with that. Here's my mainline franchise rankings as of the beating this, now split between the classic era and the RE4+ era since it's impossible for me to fairly compare them.

Classic Era

1. RE1:Remake
   
2. RE2
   
3. RE3
   
4. RE0
   
5. RE1
   
6. RE:CV

RE4+ Era

1. RE4
   
2. RE4:Remake
   
3. RE3:Remake
   
4. RE2:Remake
   
5. RE7
   
6. RE9
   
7. RE8
   
8. RE5
   
9. RE6 (the only game I DON'T recommend playing)

Your path through the game is carved not only by your deliberate choices but also by what limbs you may have lost along the way. I was not sure how much I was going to be into the sillier tone but a surprising amount of the jokes landed for me with at least 2 or 3 actually making me laugh out loud. It's definitely worth a playthrough.

This is a good time but it's such a highly patchable shame that this is anything less than great. They made the baffling decision to make the campaign mode the only way to unlock characters while not letting you set the difficulty. This is a problem because the campaign mode is tuned so easy that in a 2 player run with a friend we literally didn't have a single character die in a roughly 3 hour playthrough. If you want difficulty options you need to play arcade mode but that doesn't allow you to unlock characters and must be finished in one sitting.

Hopefully they change their character unlock requirements and allow difficulty modes in their campaign mode because otherwise it's a lot of fun beating the crap out of anyone in your way with your tag-team of choice across the 15 playable characters that all have meaningfully different move-sets. You're likely going to bounce of some characters but you're also going to have some surprise hits. My friend has never cared for Ghost Rider but loved playing as Cosmic Ghost Rider and I went in assuming Wolverine and Venom would be my team but quickly demanded that She-Hulk needed a permanent spot on my tag-team after realizing she can air-grab juggle giant space worms to death.

Even with its current flaws, I'd still recommend picking this up on sale and playing through it co-op.

If you haven't played this, I really don't think you need to. If you pick this up and feel like you really just aren't having fun around the 3 or 4 hour mark, just quit. In hopes of playing long enough to experience what 96% of reviewers see in this game, I spent 14 hours to roll credits with a single digit death count only to walk away feeling about how I did around hour 4. Just going zone to zone hoping it will hook me like it hooked the others if I just push through a little longer.

Hollow Knight in a map-less, hype-less vacuum is just ok. Art and music are the clear high points, characters have some charm to their minimal opportunities for expression, combat is very basic but gets better towards the end of the game when you have more abilities to spice things up, the story is barely even here for people not trying to 100% the game, the difficulty is engaging enough to be fun, and the corpse-run system is an entirely throwaway waste of time. This is a middle of the road game but a genuinely impressive debut from a tiny, passionate development studio. In that vacuum, it's a weak thumbs up from me.

Now let's look at this game not in a vacuum starting with the map. Oh my god, the map. Since at least Super Metroid, Metroidvanias have had maps that auto-discover as you walk through them with the added bonus of sometimes finding a map that reveals all of a zone's unexplored areas too. In Hollow Knight, you have NOTHING every time you enter a new zone. You will not have a map in a zone until you either buy one off an NPC that's temporarily available in each zone OR if you already left a zone he will leave a note where he was saying you can buy the map back in town. This is really annoying because you likely didn't realize he was gone until finding the note meaning you need to navigate out of there mapless, go to town, buy the map, and go back to the zone just to have the most basic quality of life standard of the genre. Once you have a map for a zone, you don't discover the areas as you explore them. Nope. You need to buy an item for that. Oh you thought you could chart the map as you go? Nope! Go explore blindly then find a bench to actually draw out the map of areas you entered. Want to know where YOU are on that map? You need an item for that too! Want any type of actually useful landmark auto-mapping for where you may be able to use your newly gained ability? Nope. Here's some purchasable generic map markers that you can personally place and decide what symbol means what. I hope you bought them in time to place them on their associated obstacles! Metroidvanias are only as good as their maps and this one was just painfully designed. The unintuitive flow of its exploration just left me wandering for most of my first 5 hours with it until I looked up the really helpful "just complete the game" path map in a Steam guide when I was on the brink of just moving on to another game and it STILL was difficult to follow since you don't have an in-game map to follow the guide's map. This whole map and exploration system is shocking bad, especially considering how central it is to the genre in a game with a reputation of being an all-timer. It is such a shame because this feels so easily fixable.

Let's get into the hype and reputation of the game. Amazing story, exceptional punishing but rewarding gameplay, and common claims that it's the best Metroidvania ever made. Sound about right? Well my lightning round of addressing all this is there VERY little story if you're not grinding out resources for the TRUE endings, basic ending folks watching "Hollow Knight Story Explained" Youtube videos after rolling credits will be hilariously confused where any of these details came from, the serviceable gameplay was only legitimately difficult on the final boss and illegitimately difficult on an optional boss I stumbled into that I was so underpowered for that I couldn't even clean up the swarms of homing adds faster than the boss could spawn them let alone do any damage to them, and here I am as a fan of this genre giving this an 800+ word thumbs down.

I thought this was a shoe-in for my top "late to the party" games for this year but it was just disappointing. I wouldn't recommend it but if you have $7.50 and some free time you can form your own opinions next Steam Sale.

It's sweaty, 3D, dual analog stick Vampire Survivors with a z-axis, movement that takes some finesse, and a soundtrack that is way better than it should be. There's a lot more to interact with on each map and a very welcomed strategic element to the timing of when you kick off the final boss fight and how long you stick around when defeating them. It's a ton of fun!

Battlefield 6 is an ok shooter and a bad Battlefield game.

Battlefield will always be best when classes offer meaningfully different gameplay experiences, vehicles are a significant threat and a primary focus of moment to moment gameplay, and maps are large enough to flex the chaos of all out warfare in for the series' flagship "Conquest" mode. This just doesn't hit those marks for me.

Classes in BF6 are just secondary equipment and a very minor stat buff. All primary weapons can be used interchangeably between classes and everyone can drag downed squadmates to safety and revive them. Playing different classes runs together, weapon and general gameplay balance go out the window when every class excels at every effective range and everyone could be a sniper with a rocket launcher, and I still can't stress enough how detrimental to the feeling of Battlefield the BF5, 2042, and now BF6 "EVERYONE'S A MEDIC" design decision is to the flow of the game even more so now that they can drag people to safety first. It downplays the risk of engaging in medium to long range firefights so much when people can just have a friend of any class in cover next to them reviving them every time they lose the game of whack-a-mole.

If you also play Battlefield primarily for the large maps, this game is just disappointing. "Large" maps are medium sized at best and very clearly want the focus to be infantry battles with their sprawling indoor areas and cramped outdoor areas.

Conquest also has been on a decline since Battlefield 1 thanks to UI changes. Prior to BF1, the UI did not show any indication of an enemy threat in a zone until a team's majority in the zone flipped. It was possible to "stealth" cap a control point by being in a zone while heavily outnumbered but not detected until you outnumbered the number of players there and actually began capping. BF1 and BF5 both show a meter indicating the friendly vs enemy player ratio in the zone that give away that enemies are there while BF2042 and now BF6 take this a terrible step further and show you the exact number of people each team has in the zone. This drastically alters viable strategies since the second you step in a zone and are clearly outnumbered, enemies will not only know they have an unwelcomed guest but they will know exactly how many people they need to kill to defend it. Not only are stealth captures not a thing but all contested zones sort themselves out quickly when a team can clearly see lopsided, "just rush them" match ups like a 2v6.

You can still enjoy Battlefield 6 for what it is but it feels incredibly watered down and missing fundamental pillars of what makes the franchise great coming from someone who started playing on Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on the original Xbox, bought an Xbox 360 to play its next gen port, loved Battlefield: Bad Company, will spawn camp you on the glorious hill that is "Bad Company 2 is the undisputed best game in the franchise", and thoroughly played and enjoyed Battlefield 1943, Battlefield 3, and Battlefield 4. Battlefield is NOT back and I'm genuinely surprised more lifelong fans aren't echoing the same thing.

They did it. They made a truly skill based, turn based RPG. We've had timed attacks at least as far back as Super Mario RPG on the SNES making offense more skill based but Clair Obscur's contribution to turn based RPGs is PROMINENTLY stapling a dodge and parry system to its combat so you can take 0 damage on any attack in the game if you're good enough but you totally eat ♥♥♥♥ if you aren't. In that regard, it really appeals to the souls-like fan in me where half the thrill of beating bosses is learning how to dodge their frequently awkwardly timed attacks that can wipe your health bar. Offense is also really fun thanks to timed attacks, a massive range of equippable powerups/modifiers, and character specific systems that add character specific strategies to what skills may want to equip and when you may want to use them. The combat is genuinely fun and exciting.

Beyond the combat, the quality of life features are fantastic, the art direction is great, the music is very worthy of its awards, the characters range from somehow grounded in this absurd fantasy world to delightfully NOT grounded in this absurd fantasy world, and Lune assigns you a foot fetish.

Honestly the only spoiler-free gripes I have with the game are with the story pacing and the story itself. 70% of the game's backstory comes from long exposition dumps whenever you stop at camp, the main plot felt back-loaded, some aspects of the story were underwhelming, and some things happen that I feel were very out of character. The story is enjoyable but its highs and lows average out to just ok for me.

Definitely pick this one up!

I like Blasphemous 1 more but 2 is still a good time. Both have cool art, fun combat, and great bosses. I think 90% of me liking 2 less is that 2 is more of a traditional Metroidvania than 1 and I think Metroidvania's live and die by their map design.

I think 2's map can be difficult to navigate and they give you too little quality of life features to track where to use what abilities when very intentionally designing their map to have late game abilities scattered through all of it making it very hard to intuitively find what dead ends you can now get through. They also decided to hide the person that upgrades your rosary bead capacity in a 100% optional, mid-later game area so I had 19 beads before I gave up and looked up where to go so I could equip more than 1 of them at a time. Other than the map design, I think the modern anime style cut-scenes are a huge downgrade from the pixel art of the first game, think the new guilt system really downplays the value of recovering your body and just adds more busy-work to restore the full capacity of your fervour gauge, and feel that 2 just lacks some of the good edges that 1 had that made it feel distinctly different than the sea of Metroidvania's out there.

With all that said, 2 also has 3 weapons to play with including a big mace / funeral incense thing on a chain that's fun to crack enemies in the face with. I'd recommend playing 2 but I would play 1 first.

Great atmosphere, art, and sound but that's where it ends. There isn't much substance here and it's not well executed. The gameplay consists of listening to the radio, answering knocks at your door by potential new roommates, talking to your new roommates, spending very limited resources to "test" them for being a visitor by checking things like eyes, teeth and ears, and potentially killing them if you think they're not human. The test system is shockingly bad to the point where shooting someone with a red iris and nearly a goat-like pupil shape granted me the achievement for killing a human. That moment made it feel like there isn't any method to the madness and soured me on the rest of the game.

After getting a trash ending when forced to literally guess out of the 5 remaining options I deduced could be a safe answer, the terrible save system made it so I lost several in game days of progress. I looked up the other endings and I really didn't miss much. I really would recommend skipping this one or just watching a playthrough of it if you're really that curious about it.