Recent reviews by FlashStep

The game feels like it does few things very well, and few things very poorly - and unfortunately, the parts it gets poorly drag down the experience quite a bit for me.

Firstly, the music and look of the game is great, and I enjoyed most of the stages going for the golds - the game is fine on this front, these are its strong points.

The camera control is truly awful, and while there's an "8 directional lock" mode, it doesn't feel very useful when its an ordeal to just line up the ball in the direction you want to go. There's no button to move the camera outside of moving the character as well, so if you need to turn around, you have to actually move the character all the way around to see where you're going. This leads to some rather annoying scenarios.

The arcade modes feel really poorly done as well. The first few are a total joke, and then the later ones are all backloaded with some of the most inconsistent levels in the game, where you're required to either send it and launch yourself into the air and hope you get the right bounce, or fight against the camera & inconsistency of the controls on super tight precision levels which don't fit the mechanics of the game.

Other complaints are small stuff/QoL. To retry a stage, you have to go into the menu and hit restart. There's no quick retry button. Why? This is 2026 - even if the game was made to look like a PS1 game, it doesn't have to have QoL like one too. Another is the sound/voice acting. The dude's voice saying "go!" and "goal!" every stage was really offputting to me, I had to mute the sound after the first few levels.

Kill Knight is an excellent twin stick shooter filled with style, gore, intense music and challenge. While it may feel short to some, the experience is filled with unlockables, different difficulties & ranks you can obtain, culminating in a final challenge mode called "Sever", which is all 5 stages ("layers") in a row, including the final boss. Highly recommended, hope to see more twin sticks like this.

I appreciate an action game where you play as a pacifist - Bloodless's protagonist has abandoned the life of a samurai and has chosen to never kill again. One of the best parts of this game is that you can see her actions and choices change the lives and sometimes beliefs of the characters in game. I'm a big fan of the graphics style, and while it may look weird in screenshots, it truly works well during gameplay.

While overall a positive experience, some of the fights (notably the arena challenge fights) are a bit overtuned and the games mechanics don't feel like they are fully designed to tackle these challenges without some luck. A few of the english lines are also a bit off, missing random words or just feeling unnatural. For most players I don't imagine this detracting from the experience too much, but they stood out to me as the game's main negative points so I thought i should mention them.

A promising game at first, this game shows within the first few hours that it's a buggy, unpolished and super shallow mess.

Sometimes you'll do a weapon skill and be stuck in the air for 10 seconds and can't do anything, enemies will randomly get stuck on lower parts of the map and you have to go look for them before you can progress, bosses will just stand there after doing a certain attack and look as if they're glitched out while letting you hit them for like 5 seconds straight. My first kill of the last boss, he glitched out and just stood there for like 30 seconds straight. It's also comically easy to break the game once you do a run or two and understand how it works (and here's how - do each abyssal rift that you see completely, and it will make you so strong it's impossible to lose).

All of that being said, the game really shows you how ♥♥♥♥ it is when you play the "Hideout" mode. This is essentially a 12 minute enemy-rush that ends in a boss battle against one of the games bosses. There are three areas total, and the latter two areas are unlocked by beating each subsequent area. The main issue here is that the enemies simply do not stop spawning at any point. In the first area this isn't that big of a deal since everything is rather weak, but in area 2 for instance the enemies get significantly stronger, but your character loses all of the boons & upgrades you get from area 1 (which is a really stupid choice, in my opinion) and you're forced to bring in only the gear & weapon you got from area 1. The fun part: if you die in this area, you lose all of that - and then you have to do an earlier area again to get a weapon that can even stand up to the enemies in the later areas. There are too many enemies to deal with it, and you don't have enough stamina to dodge/parry all of them - so your character essentially just burns out and you die. The only way to beat this is to keep grinding and leveling up the shop and getting better gear to where you're one shotting pretty much all of the enemies. There's basically no skill involved in this whatsoever, it's exclusively a grind.

This game would've been pretty alright with a bit more care and polish, but it ends up feeling half-assed and like slop.

Genre-defining masterpiece that will change RPGs for the foreseeable future.

Easily the best first person melee combat I've ever experienced in a video game, Mortal Sin offers a truly strong 'Berserk'-inspired experience where you can really feel the brute strength of your character. The game offers a ridiculously hard challenge in the true last boss for those who desire it, and for those who do not, you can easily avoid it with no penalty and enjoy the core combat loop of the regular game.

While the core gameplay loop is fun for a little bit, it quickly becomes stale once you realize that the game is, at its core, a pure grindfest with not much else to it. There's not much content in the game at all, and most of the progression is just straight metaprogression (which is ultimately necessary to beat the bosses, because when you encounter a new boss, you're usually way too weak to really do anything - and the next time you get to it, you usually steamroll it.)

This is paired with the fact that when you beat the extremely short amount of content in the game and clear the final boss, you unlock "New Game Plus 1", which adds 5 levels and of course, sets you back at the start. That's it. There's not much else. The devs clearly intended for you to just play the same content over and over, and on multiple characters, because there's achievements for level 60 in *all* characters - which there are 7 total, and for each NG+ cycle adding 5 levels on the base max level 20, makes for 7*8 = 56 clears of the game, at LEAST, to get to max level with all characters. Fifty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ six.

What I don't understand is - why. They clearly planned for this, so why do that instead of making a more fleshed out game with actual content and value?

So far the best iteration I've played of the fairly new "rhythm game FPS" genre. With fantastic movement mechanics, satisfying weapons/items and cool music, this game really stood out in this genre for me. High recommend.

An incredible soulslike that's like a perfect combination of Nioh & Sekiro. Combat is incredibly satisfying, the story is pretty solid & the characters are really cool. The only gripe I have with the game at all is that it repeats some of the bosses in side missions, but it's not a big deal since basically every single boss is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ incredible. Highly recommend to any action fans.

Truly an excellent and innovative game, combining a dungeon crawler with a riddle/puzzle and typing game. Very cheeky and fun, highly recommended.