Recent reviews by Nighthawk

Extremely good with only a few minor gripes throughout an entrancing experience. Roleplay as a cop that lost their entire sense of being and figure out the world, themselves and much more. Begs to be played at least 2 or 3 times, but that's not my style. Needs an inventory sorting system and some minor bug fixing, not much else to be almost perfect experience to drain 20-40 hours per playthrough. Probably should avoid this one for if you don't like reading critically a bit because my god it is quite the verbose game and that is coming from someone that tends to prefer reading for fun.

It's absolutely an early access game with plenty of rough edges to polish but if you liked terrorist hunt in rainbow six siege, this is fairly similar and will scratch that itch. In it's current state it is annoying to play solo but very enjoyable to play with a friend group. (cough cough)


My two largest qualifiers to my friends/complaints to the devs is every mission type bar one ends the exact same way, you get to an extract point and have to hold out against a large portion of enemies. This makes the assault rifle class and high end SMG classes the dominating weapons overall due to their overwhelming DPS and completely removes a lot of the randomness to me as you'll always end up taking the exact same angles to hold off the exact same fights no matter how different the entire level beforehand was. Ideas like skipping the extract if you manage to stealth a whole level or the extract having to suddenly change areas after you arrive would help spice this up a lot.

The second is the skills system having three extremely powerful perks. Regenerate HP passively over time, Regenerate armor after kill, and armor durability. If you get all 3 of these you WILL be far more powerful than any other combination out there. I assume the devs that may read this have played payday because of things scattered throughout the game and might even know what i mean when i say it's like getting anarchist and hostage skills without the drawback anarchist normally has of eating your HP. These skills are randomized every run so you may not get this lot of them sometimes but they all feel extremely powerful (especially regenerating armor after kill) and make the rest of them feel quite worthless in comparison. I hope they add more meaningful tools for player power/scaling to add variety or honestly nerf/remove these perks in some way.

Sadly I cannot recommend this heist as 2/3s of the loot is hard to spot with not just myself but multiple people in my friends circle glossing over the same "visible" loot multiple times before finally noticing it making us wonder if it just spawned in later.


The rest of this review is me just complaining to the air from coming fresh off a session salty.

The heist can also take the length of about 4-8 other payday 3 heists if you wish to go for all loot with all favors active which is a comically difficult challenge for you and your friends that comes with a pitiful reward of roughly 2k exp and 1.8 million dollars on the overkill difficulty- something that can be easily achieved with syntax error in about 13-18mins. They could have already learned this loot lesson from how the revamped cook off was received but instead of doing the robbing, I feel robbed of my time. A casual playthrough of this heist a couple of times intentionally not going for all loot is the best way to experience this but sadly that is not really how payday 3 seems to want you to play if you like seeing your level numbers go up.

I have two final short complaints about this heist. Firstly I still have no idea why they used the butcher again when her original actress has passed away years ago iirc. Given the state of the game and companies marketing it is blowing past tone deafness to downright being offensive to me. I hope it's just me reading too much into things and this has not hurt her family and friends in any way.

Secondly, is the overall narrative we seem to be going down. The entire payday 3 storyline was teed up to raise the narrative stakes slowly with the big apple arc ending robbing the new york stock exchange. Meanwhile, in year 2 and 3 we have deescalated massively (especially due to a lack of content) and this really crimps on the power fantasy when we are heisting.

Its easily as addictive as borderlands 2 with much more modern movement and flow. The open world and poor general optimization are a huge drag but my system can easily handle it after increasing the shader cache limit

I'm not the largest killing floor fan to the point where i can wax on about why it's different, better or worse than killing floor 2. All i know is it's fun with friends but unacceptably buggy and inconsistent. The actual time the player gets hit from the zed doesn't correspond with their animation, reloading with underbarrels on automatic rifles is so buggy your underbarrel can become automatic and your auto gun becomes single fire, etc. dosh does not actually throw out when the button is pressed and so many many more frustrations layered onto this.


At some point the real game becomes working around all the bugs and the rest is just social lubricant for you and your friends. Do not buy this if you don't have friends, do not buy this if bugs completely ruin the experience. Do buy it if you have a group of friends as this is somehow one of the better modern coop FPS games currently out with a decent amount of replayability. This review will likely change if tripwire can patch out the rough edges. As of the first major update, they did do some tweaks to make the game less about the bugs, but i'm still not satisfied when playing. especially when i spend five+ mins loading shaders to try out the game only to get into a map and stutter when zeds are on screen.

I really wish i could recommend this heist, but after running it through a few times in loud I can just straight up say that it is not fun. I'm sure some people will disagree but i intensely dislike heists where you have to run through the map while gathering unmarked, non descript loot from all over the place while snipers overlook you. If you enjoyed heists like border crossing from payday 2 you'll probably like this one

I fundamentally cannot recommend this game in it's current state unless you purchase it on sale. The tl,dr about why I feel this way is that this game's story would have been better as a picture book or short animation designed to help people deal with loss.

To breakdown why, an extremely brief summary of the story is that you control a drawing of a seemingly sentient hero that is representative of the "artist": a real life person that has lost their spouse and is immersing themselves in pen drawings to cope. To process their grief they gave this drawn hero a wife only to separate them and have the hero suffer by being forced to solve physics based puzzles in order to get back to their wife.


As the player, you will have to guide the hero through these puzzles all while finding collectibles hidden throughout the landscape. Conceptually, this doesn't sound like a thumbs down review right? Sadly, the main problem with the puzzles is they massively suffer from tedium. You'll likely solve them long before you actually implement the solution due to your relatively slow movement speed or issues with depth perception causing you to to fiddle with the snap on feature that some puzzle pieces have. You can even see an example in the trailer, at the very end of it there is a character running in circles on a square. This may likely be a metaphor about the artists spiral into darkness but it is also the real solution to a real puzzle and the main mechanic of the area focuses on that solution. So, for what is already a very short game, you will be spending quite a lot of it walking around and/or spinning in circles. The devs seemed to know this time waste exists as they added collectibles hidden throughout the background that you only have to click on to collect. However, it also is time waste as it will full stop the game to tell you that you picked up the collectible and how many there are left requiring another input to resume the game if you press this twice, you may even cancel the interaction you were doing and have your hero walk to where you spammed to get past the collectible screen.

Despite the game only being roughly 2 hours long, I still feel like i wasted my time. It is quite sad as the general story it is trying to tell is beautiful, real and something almost everyone on this earth can relate to all while having pleasant music and a stunning medium turning ink alive in front of my very own eyes. Yet, despite after writing all of those positive qualities about the game I can write so many negatives as well.

I don't know the full story about this game or why it seemed to get a full relaunch many years later after starbreeze published it, but I genuinely wish the staff the best as I think there is very clearly a lot of skill at display here in this title, especially with the art and music but it was frankly used ineffectively here.

It's a fun little anime game that was made by a very small team where you cook foods and equip weapons to fight against a whole bunch of stuff to harvest their bodies to cook more food and equip more weapons you'll talk a large cast of characters, all with humorous dialogue along the way.

It's fairly linear with a few secrets hidden off the beaten path, and if you enjoyed terraria's combat you'll likely enjoy this one's on a sale. The largest selling points to me though is that the soundtracks are pretty good and for whatever reason they managed to get the person that plays holo in spice and wolf to do a very similar voice for one of the main characters in a separate voice acting DLC.

The two asides to those on fence that i would mention:

-It definitely lacks a perfect polish in terms of bugs to the point where i mention it here but it was entirely playable in my experience.

-It's not a game that i would recommend blindly to everyone that i know, because it's overarching plot is VERY anime and would really only suggest it if you enjoy such things and can lean into it.

If you don't have a sense of rhythm you'll probably hate it unless you use the accessibility settings, but as someone who generally avoids this genre for having to memorize combo inputs while also dodging and using them effectively i found this game and it's use of rhythm as a pace mechanic for both you and the enemy to help me jam through combos phenomenal to play.

I don't think it captivated me with slick polish to most every system like persona 5 royal did, but it certainly captured me with the characters and their friendship far more than i was expecting. The music, the overworld combat, dungeon exploration and daily schedule life are really fun and jam packed with stuff to do and learn. I'd unironically suggest either keeping a notebook or a steam guide on hand just to try and remember it all if you are not able to binge the game and remember it all that way.

Generally the things that detracted from my experience the most are the god awful default keybindings and mouse settings, the extremely short supply of MP until you get to the endgame and the list of daily tasks you do every day in order to succeed in the game. (i.e wake up and take a shower for exp, and have that plus the other stuff tack on a minute or two of breaking your flow of playing). I also noticed many model clipping things even in important cutscenes, the most frequent being a fellow you'll meet with large ears clipping into their outfit quite often.


Regardless I do think all of that is worth looking past for an extremely solid entry into atlas' portfolio of games if you are a massive fan of their works. definitely worth picking up the persona 5 royal/metaphor bundle i see on the store page right now if you are a fan of rpgs or looking to become one.