Recent reviews by Mothra

Extremely pleasant to play, I enjoyed this a great deal by firing it at night and doing another leg. Visually it is clean and colorful, with background details providing useful puzzle-solving hints (which can be toggled on and off!), and the music fits the speed and the tone of the game in keeping it all low-pressure and curious. I think that's my favorite element of Derelict Star, it is an exploration game that rewards curiosity, and there is no crisis to avoid or enemies to struggle against. Many Metroid-like games seem to think combat is a necessary part of this equation and, at least for me, it has always seemed like a distraction from the quiet and the contemplative tone.

Would definitely recommend, I had a great time with this.

Excellent, excellent Descent/Forsaken-style game. The first game I've seen that captures the solitude and the exposions of violence that make Descent so much fun. Desecrators does the isolation better, and I really really love the rival system, where other Desecrators will appear and you must fight them off in a little boss scrap.

Love the bot/monster design and their behavior, poses a genuine challenge while largely feeling earned. There are a few enemies - namely the laser ones - that don't seem dodgable, which it a little annoying, but for the most part you can weave around their weaponry and feel like any engagement is entirely winnable.

Add to that co-op for more than 2 players, fun weapons that are easy to use, and a really ideal rougelike system that gives some stakes to the thing... this is definitely my favorite game of the year.

I have a few gripes: There are a few situations where you will trigger a button or switch and it will spawn in a bunch of enemies, or open a door full of them, and sometimes there simply isn't a path to escape, you're just boned. I think this has to do with the random-gen level thing it has going on, something that I think works well but isn't really my favorite - I like an intentionally-designed level. Random-gen leads to scenarios like this, where you're put into an unfair or unwinnable situation due to bad luck, and well, it sucks losing a run to that.

Overall, absolutely love it. Definitely recommended.

Fantastic DLC campaign. Ended up liking quite a lot more than the main one. It is immediately a lot more difficult, the story and the cast is more interesting, and I felt myself genuinely challenged in a way the original never quite achieved. Final boss took me about a week to beat on Hard.

The fact that you are reservists thrust into an invasion by mercenary groups ends up being a lot of fun, the unqualified vs the unprofessional. It does have a real "the villain is way cooler than anyone on your team" situation going on, but, didn't mind. Would be cool to fly in Orion Team at some point.

I had an absolute blast playing this game, what fantastic successor to the Ace Combat series. Frequently thrilling and gripping, with gorgeous visuals, a (largely) cool story, and a far wider variety of environments than I expected. PR makes a lot of great use out of its post-apocalyptic California setting, popping in cool volcanic areas that are the sort of thing you'd never seen in AC.

I didn't dare hope Project Wingman would live up to the dream of carrying on the Ace Combat lineage, but it's done so, and done so with an abundance of style. I have now started on the DLC and am happy to say that it is exactly what I hope for with DLC: It continues the challenge incline of the campaign and tests what you've learned so far.

Fantastic title, definitely recommend.

Really enjoyed playing this game with three other friends. The exploration is really the meat here: there is plenty to find, plenty of new realms to go into, the story is pretty decent, and the things you find are often delightful. A good number of quality-of-life improvements on this type of crafting game are present: You can share recipes, you can move your spawn base around, you can auto-stack to boxes.

There's a lot of gripes, of course: Inventory manage, as ever, sucks. Combat is still not really fun, partially just due to how easy it is for the enemies to hit you. Melee in particular suffers from not having much of a way to not take an enormous amount of damage - compare this to Grounded, with a rock-soild parrying mechanic made melee very fun and viable. The engine has some jank, but nothing that is really bad enough to focus on.

So, overall, I had a great time with this game, and would heartily recommend it as a multiplayer game in the style of Grounded or The Forest. There is certainly room to improve as it leaves Early Access, but in terms of content, there is a great amount of fun to be had here.

Extremely impressed by this title. This team clearly has a passion for PC-88/FM Towns VN/dating sim games of that era, and they do a perfect job translating the best elements of these into Stories from Sol. The music is great, the characters are appealingly of the Gunbuster asthetic, the characterwork is well-done, and the sounds... the sounds are crunchy in just the right way. I love finding little bits and pieces through my own interest and having those elements pay off as I play through the game.

I'm also happy to see a lot of modern improvements made on this format, from letting you pick your gender and pronouns, to having all spoken dialogue easily reviewable in a log, to including an easy task list for when you're not sure what to do. It's just very frictionless. There's very little to distract you from the extremely good vibes, and I appreciate how it lets you get sucked in. Definitely a game I caught myself staying up to the early hours playing.

Excellent tactical roguelike, I'm having a blast. The art is wonderful and the animations are incredibly charming. I'm a huge fan of the Loony Tunes energy to combat, it operates off of cartoon logic a lot of the time, meaning abilities are creative, weird, and often quite funny.

Things move quickly and without friction, which sets this apart from a lot of similar games. You get into the game quickly, you grab your guys, and you're into a mission in a snap. I love it.

This has been a game where I can just fire it up and have fun. That is not the case for a lot of strategy games, and it's a testament to well-deserved and kintetic game.

As others have said, this is very similar to Into the Breach, which I consider a create compliment.

Dude... don't do it.

As others have said, the story for Homeworld 3 is quite bad, which is a surprise considering how stellar the story was in the original. The decision to focus on individual named rendered characters is also extremely not-Homeworld - the original only had two characters, The Mothership and The Higaraans. The Mothership (Karan) was the caretaker and leader of the Higaraans, and she was quite literally the fleet, able to hear all chatter and speak with their command staff. There was this wonderful, solumn distance between The Mothership and any individual, and instead, she could only speak to and interact with the people as a whole. H3 doesn't really grasp that idea, and instead, it is one hero and one general, and the Higaraans are just units to be commanded.

I think another gripe is that control is very frequently pulled away from you as a player, for the next objective to be read. This was an issue in the original HW, but here it happens constantly as you are handheld through every mission. I think there's room for improvement there, especially if the intent is to allow you to enjoy the slow, drifting scale of the world.

On the positives, the game is beautiful, the sound is great, the music is solid and combat I found quite fun. I think this is what ends up saving the game for me: I simply enjoyed ship combat a lot. I also found the environments to be great, particularly the ice shelf. Perhaps a few too many "big abandoned slab of hulk you move about" maps, but I'll certainly take those over open space.

The campaign length is strikingly short, taking me just 8 hours to complete. I was pretty surprised when the storyline never quite took off, and instead was as it appeared at the very start: An evil Karan Sajet-like character wants to rule the galaxy, and you need to stop her, and that's the whole thing. It feels like they had to cut a much larger story, but, the game was delayed often to get it all right, so it doesn't seem like they were for want of time.

So, overall, this is a sort of C+ kind of game. I think it is worth playing through, but I don't think it is worth $60. Perhaps when it's on sale for $20.

Really had a lot of fun with this game. If you're looking for more The Forest, this game does the trick. It is a must to play with 3 or more friends and just wander the woods. This game really is the fun of being lost in the woods, but with the added bonus of there being something to find or do out there. Exploring the island never stops being a joy, and the game itself is beautiful. The monsters are also ghastly and unique, and the comedic elements of the game are very enjoyably implemented.

I have some gripes. The story does not cohere, certainly not in a satisfying way, so you're left with a sense of "huh, that's odd". The central antagonist of the game, for example, is not really introduced or explained outside of some reading material you may or may not find. There are also a number of things you can do, build, use, or interact with, that I had no clue were in the game until I had finished it and read posts from the community. These kinds of things should be able to be discovered in-game in a reasonable way.

The challenge is also very light, and could've really gone for stronger or more numerous enemies - something to use the weapons and tools we've crafted. The idea of upgrading anything, for example, seemed laughable due to how overpowered we already were.

So, I hope they address some of these in the next game, but I also am very much looking forward to the next game. This is such a fun multiplayer series.