Recent reviews by missing_link

I've tried to enjoy this game, I really have, and I know it's an indie game from a small team or whatnot, but this game just isn't worth your money. It's spent years in early access, and it still can't figure out what it's supposed to be. It's grindy, unscary, and relies heavily on custom rulesets to be fun, custom rulesets that don't pay enough to contribute towards the grind for usable gear. The game does not explain it's own mechanics to a way that make it enjoyable, requiring outside resources to be fun, outside resources, mind you, that are heavily frowned upon by the devs? The pacing of new content is agonizingly slow. I myself don't take issue with asset flips, and yet the devs would rather remodel one old map per year instead of addressing the core issues, like the balance, or the monotonous gameplay loop, or how the proximity chat that adds so much to the game breaks constantly, or how the VR they made this game for initially is basically unusable. For as long as I've owned this game they've had a tab on their setup menu for some kind of cosmetics, which have been "Coming Soon" for as long as I've owned the game.
But so what? The game is grindy, sure. It gets old, yeah. It's a small team, of course updates are slow. But my problems aren't even these, my problem is that not only are these updates
-virtually nonexistant
-solve problems nobody had
-ignore problems everyone had
...but every one of them is vastly outnumbered by merch colabs, if you see Phasmophobia on your Steam news, it isn't because they released something new, or did some big fix, it's almost always a way to get more money for the game, which, reminder:
This is an EARLY ACCESS GAME, AND HAS BEEN FOR FIVE YEARS NOW.
There have been
-Phasmophobia plushies
-Phasmophobia clothing
-A Phasmophobia music box
-Talks of an official PHASMOPHOBIA MOVIE
And yet the game still takes something like 50 hours to get to the "good part" where instead of always dying and losing your stuff, you never die because you've optimized the fun out of it, until you crank the difficulty and suddenly it's too hard to have fun, or just plain boring as you stare at a camera and wait for it to do something.
If you're dead set on playing it, which is fine, as a social experience it still has it's merits, I highly recommend looking up the "Unofficial Phasmophobia Cheat Sheet" because one of the things that hurts this game is that the notebook, which is supposed to be your guide to figuring out the ghost, actively lies to you about the criteria for finding ghost, tells you almost none of the dedicated tells, and still doesn't register the Mimic properly as having 4 evidence, which will give you a lot of false negatives.
Realistically, I want this game to succeed, but not like this. Not as some barely touched 5 year early access junk that gets more merch than it does actual updates. I'll be keeping an eye on it for now, but if these trends continue...

It's VF. It's supposed to be a good game, an easy slam dunk. However, SEGA seems to have noticed how well we were speaking of them and felt the need to kill the mood.
The recent Title Update "World Stage", added a few things, like a singleplayer mode, and crossplay. It has a new DLC character you can pay for, and to ensure it sells and would not be cheated in, SEGA added, with zero notice, Kernel Level Anti-Cheat, specifically EAC.
Overnight, VF went from a gold standard software, running nearly perfect on modest hardware, to one many users now have to actively mess with to get working properly, and even when it does, much of the online experience people play this game for has become noticeably choppy and unstable.
SEGA, remove EAC. You are damaging your reputation right now, and the whole point of bringing back VF5 and adding this crossplay was to get people talking about you again. Trust me when I say this is not how you want people talking about you.

I love Tekken. I loved this game at the start, but the longer this game lasts the worse it seems to get. The devs are being forced to over-monetize the product in a way that isn't even an appealing sell, and have done nothing to address balancing issues. The only adjustments they seem to have made are nerfs to characters undeserving of them, buffs to characters that didn't deserve them, and system changes to worsen the overarching experience. I want to love this game. I really do. I just wish that this experience didn't feel so tainted. I will rescind this negative review when the game makes enough positive change to feel fun again. Until then I shall unfortunately count myself among the negative.
I wish the best of luck to Harada, Murray, Ikeda, and all the other developers on staff in dealing with the corporate overlords at Bandai-Namco. I have faith that those detached from the development will learn to trust in the developers and communities that have kept this franchise alive.

Update: September 30th, 2024
Bandai-Namco in all it's infinite wisdom has decided to sell a new stage.
It is not included with THE DELUXE EDITION, THE SEASON PASS. OR THE WASTE OF MONEY THAT IS THE ULTIMATE EDITION.
Why Bandai-Namco?
You were so close to redeeming yourselves!
I saw all the improvements made, and for the first time in a long time I felt optimistic about the game, and I log on to find the game I already spent $100 wants more AND IT HASN'T EVEN BEEN A YEAR.

Good luck Namco.
And thanks for taking down all the cool worldbuilding in Urban Square and plastering my go-to training map with Nike ads.

Update: SEASON 2
Bruh.

I have somewhat expansive repertoire of fighting games under my belt.
My friend picked the character with the beyblade.
Guess who won?
(It wasn't me)

I went out to find some shiny rocks and accidentally killed an eldritch horror.

Last time I entered a public lobby I got ostracized and cursed at for picking a pistol instead of a rifle.

A little while back I heard yelling noises in my head. Where were they from? I pondered this for some time.
Then I remembered.
It was Rock Howard using Neo Deadly Rave.
Weeks earlier I had spent the better part of half an hour trying to get the timing right on just that one move and I do not appear to have psychologically recovered from this.

Wonderful Disco game. I hear there's a story mode too, but I haven't really looked at it too much.

I bought a car.
It go vroom vroom.
Now what?

Red Dead Online.
The game suffers from a severely unbalanced economy, a monotonous gameplay cycle, and a grossly unprofessional "Spend weeks grinding for this premium currency or buy it so you can actually progress", a monetization scheme that should belong, if anywhere, in free-to-play titles, not a game I already had to pay for. This is without even mentioning how comically unrestricted the cheating in this game is. You can just load into a server and get stuck in an infinite death loop because somebody spawned X amount of explosions on a whole field. There is a rather easy band-aid solution: Since the developers already decided not to go through Steam and host the servers themselves, why not add crossplay? One of the largest factors in not getting crossplay is that you can no longer rely on the console's servers, but Rockstar already uses their own servers, SO WHY NOT ADD IT? I know that Rockstar has the money to make the programming work, they made GTA V, a game that is still listed as one of the most sold games ever, I am confident that they have the funds.

What frustrates me most of all is that this barely functioning (oh yeah, it completely breaks itself on the regular) game was nominated for the 2023 Steam Award for "Labor of Love". If you're going to rig an awards show, please at least try to live up to it.