Recent reviews by Pistol Cat

This is an extremely shaky recommend. I wish there was a 'maybe' option. The game is absolutely stuffed with content to bursting, for $20 especially - even if it were 60. It's beautiful, platforming feels good, the music is nice throughout and if anything ever happened to Sherma he'd be Daisy and I'd be Doomguy. That said.

This game is excessively brutal or, as a friend of mine put it, it's a mean game. Enemies have double digit hitpoints within an hour and movesets that are just bossfights from Hollow Knight but you fight multiple of them. Group fights or any fights with lots of wffects make it near impossible to track enemies because it's 2D, so, if they overlap. Oh well. Good luck.

Runbacks are also kind of miserable. Even the shortest ones in late game have several animations between them to get through to get back to the bossfight. It can be fun optimizing some of them but most of the time it's just frustrating.

There are tons of enemies who fly or teleport, I'd wager about 40% of the enemy cast can do one of the two and enemies who fly typically fly up and back and huck projectiles at the same time, leading to more frustration given their healthpool. The early game platforming is about as demanding as mid-late game Hollow Knight and only gets worse, with a few fun exceptions.

There's a particular runback that's 12 screens of platforming in to an arena fight, enemies on the path will spawn in front of you, fire projectiles at you - not in a fixed arc - and jump backwards constantly, and then despawn so you cant even hit them for healing.

Bosses and challenging areas don't drop anything, save for a small handful of key items, which means all the effort you put in to them feels unrewarded, and you need rewards. I spent maybe 15 hours or more just grinding money so I could buy things or replenish my equipment, this is just raw tedium.

Many many things deal 2 damage per hit or per contact. This is 2 out of 5 hp. Sure you can heal for 3 if you have charge and time but that's difficult as well when you die so fast you can't learn patterns. It took upwards of 30 hours for me to blindly reach 7 hp, out of a max of 10. Some things are just absurdly hidden which is personal taste but after so many long runbacks it becomes fatiguing going places and doing things so. Ymmv here.

The high points are so high and the low points are so low.

There are some bosses who feel really good to fight, their animations are good, their health is reasonable, their patterns are tight but learnable. I can think of more than a handful I wish I could just fight in a boss selection because they were enjoyable! But then there are others. There's at least one boss who has, as far as I can tell, a 50/50 where you literally just have to hope you responded to their move correctly or you take damage. But! If you can just not do the thing that makes it use that you're fine and it becomes much more fun.

Silk skills are a weird one, they use your silk bar which you need for healing as well, they're typically slow and leave you open for hits and one is just outright useless because its effect area is random, I had it just not hit a boss 3 times in a row. Overall, I don't use them much, even with the things that power them up, because healing is just better usually.

Equipment can be very strong but it requires its own currency to replenish, thankfully at any bench, but again, more grinding. On replays I can see myself just taking an infinite equipment refill mod. It's well balanced enough, aside from that, but once I found a particular item I never put it down because it's just so universally good. That leads to the equipment system.

So many slots just don't help. You almost never want to take off the compass because most things in its category aren't more helpful. Other passive items are pretty negligible, to where again, you just pick the one or two that help you and ignore the rest for forever. Maybe it's that way in Hollow Knight too, it's been like 5 years since I played it.

I recommend the game because it is well made, mostly, and people will probably like the brutality. I'm currently on the final boss and it's just so hard to even see what it's doing that I'm stonewalled because I literally can't see its attacks coming. So maybe it's a git gud issue but really, a lot of the difficulty feels kind of fake to me, between bloated health, some really awkward platforming areas (IYKYK), insane enemy damage output, lack of worthwhile options etc. But it's still fun, I guess?

Genuinely the best RPG I've ever played.

Only purchase the DLC so you can get the items. The DLC itself is mostly okay in the open world but many enemies and all the bosses feel like a classic arcade game quarter eater that are hard for the sake of being hard so Fromsoft can say "look how hard this is git gud scrub", because every boss has constant 360 degree spin attacks with just enough room for a charged R2 if you're REALLY tight with it with a fast weapon, or an R1 from any other weapon, with bloated HP pools that are only alleviated by the Scadutree system. This system doesn't make the game better it just makes it easier in the sense that you have to engage with the bad design less because things are dying faster. Wait for a sale, then just save edit the items in, because lots of the new weapon types are REALLY cool, but the DLC experience itself is bad save for exactly one fight near the end.

Why add solo player perks when you can keep adding co-op perks.
Why let players even kind of choose what perks they get on legendary hunter skins when you can give them a bunch of niche garbage perks?
Why give solo players any kind of benefit at all when you can make the game work best as a ponzi scheme of needing people to beg other people to play so you can have a chance at winning past being headshot by someone in the middle of dealing with their teammate.

Killers feel like garbage to play as. First few times Devs played killers they got buffed. Otherwise it's survivor central. Let it die. I regret buying this and any DLC I picked up.

It's okay for a couple minutes I guess.

Step 1: Buy two seater planes
Step 2: ???
Step 3: White picket fence

Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it Buy it buy it

Great game. Fast paced combat, very good balancing. Stats are only there to compliment skill instead of being the only thing that matter. Overall, it's wonderful!