Recent reviews by TheAustin

An enjoyable Metroidvania romp. Has a unique setting and pretty good graphics for the most part - especially backgrounds and other world art. I'm not sure that I'm a huge fan of its whole bloody, gory gross vibe at times, but that's a preference thing. Controls are good and maybe one thing I would like to see them improve in a sequel is the animations of your character and enemies. Maybe remove the "execution" system because those look pretty bad.

But anyway, I'm nitpicking. I pretty much picked this up and played until I finished, had overall a really good time. I've played tons of Metroidvainias, tons, and I would say this one's definitely on the upper end of quality as far as the full package goes. Would I say this is better than Hollow Knight? No. But it's better than a lot of others. If you're going to release a game like this in such a saturated genre you want it to stand out and I think this one does!

(Early Access Review)

I wasn't sure how I felt about Menace for the first couple hours of play. I've enjoyed games like XCom 2 and Battletech in the past, and this looked up my alley, but I was getting frustrated at some of the systems in the game, particularly turn order.

Once I began to understand the systems, I grew to really enjoy Menace as well. The basic gameplay loop here is satisfying: you select a multi-battle operation for a faction, choose which missions you want to complete based on their difficulty and rewards for completion, and then try to manage your squad health, equipment, and the mission objectives on the tactical map. After you complete the operation, you spend promotion points to upgrade your squad, go shopping at the black market, and unlock passive bonuses for your base (your ship).

The strategic layer in early access is simple but still enjoyable. You build up your squad leaders with unlockable perks and new equipment. There's a slow roll of more powerful and simply unique weapons, vehicles, and accessories that you can purchase in the black market and then try out on your team. You can hire new squad leaders as you go along, which come with their own special abilities that differentiate them from the squad leaders you've already been using.

For tactical battles I enjoyed the mixture here of squads and vehicles. Vehicles can move farther, have more armor and health, and can sometimes transport your squads. They tend to have heavier weaponry attached too. But - vehicles cost more of your "supplies" to field and are not able to move between buildings or use cover like squads can. Squads are able to have higher concealment too, so they are better at sneaking up on and taking out enemies.

For an early access game there's quite a bit to do here. I put in a little over 20 hours in one playthrough on Normal difficulty. I think I'm going to wait for a few more updates to pick this up again and play through again on a higher difficulty. Looking forward to it!

Short 'n sweet. I beat the game in about two and half hours collecting about 75% of the items. It's like Mega Man X with collecting upgrades in stages and fighting bosses but with the controls of Shinobi - in other words, plays great! Difficulty was pretty manageable, I would say it's about on part with something like Mega Man X, but with equippable items that lower it such as health back on defeating an enemy or a double jump. I'm not sure if there's anything to unlock if you collect everything, about to look that up, but it was a really enjoyable little 2 and half hour romp.

A weird, often repetitive, charmingly-trashy survival game. You play as an impoverished person banished to a slum during a fungal pandemic. Dark humor abounds as you find yourself turning trash into treasure, becoming a slum lord by building up your revenue chains through bizarre and deranged methods such as mass-mailing forged bills to people, distilling smashed infected poop into alcohol and selling it, or simply breaking, entering, and stealing everything not nailed down. Everybody else in your city block is equally shady and miserable, so you're really just fitting in.

This is still an early access game, has something like 25-40 hours of things to do at the moment with the "mines" update. There's no official ending to the game yet, but I did enjoy my time with it and whenever the next update comes out I see myself picking it up again, starting fresh, and working my way back up with the knowledge I gained on my first playthrough. Not every session was equally fun, some of them were a slog, but then I found a new, ridiculous recipe to make, a smile came across my face, and I dove back in.

This is a flawed, buggy game, but it offers something that others don't with its unique, beautiful, and dangerous world. It's similar to something like Fallout 4 in many ways, but with a tone that is much darker and is slower paced, letting the environments you're in breathe a little more and feel more real. You don't level up your character: you build up your equipment, upgrading your armor and weapons and switching out to better ones as you find them. It's apocalyptic survival fantasy with a sci-fi, horror edge.

This game is huge, complex, and rewarding. It's space-empire fantasy, somewhere between Star Trek and Star Wars. You can really dig down into the details on how you outfit your ships (and later, your fleet) - choosing what type of weapon, the manufacturer, the specific upgrades you want to apply. While you're flying around dog-fighting and defending the galaxy from malicious AI, you can set up your empire to run itself - traders selling goods between your stations and fighters patrolling your sectors for trouble.

Not everything in the game is perfect mind you - the scope of the game means that you'll run across bugs. I had only two hard crashes in about 60 hours of gameplay - everything else was just down to some clipping, some broken AI, that sort of thing.

But yeah: I like this. It tickles that itch to explore the black and build your way up to a trade empire with a military force to be reckoned with.

Massive game, kind of repetitive gameplay, not every area is fun but most of them are. It's a good game to play casually, explore a bunch, slowly work your way up to power. Can be frustrating if you bash your head against a boss you're not ready for yet. Having played the Dark Souls series and other FROM games like Demon Souls, Bloodborne, there's nothing incredibly new here aside from having a mount, but everything here is pretty high quality. Bosses are often recycled, but there's enough variety there that it isn't a huge problem. I've put 180 hours in at the time of this review, so that says a lot I think. Multiple playthroughs.

Exploring abandoned tombs, poisonous sewers, lakes of blood, castles of undead: if that's your idea of a good time, then recommended. This plays very similarly to the later King's Field games but with better. more fluid controls. I only have two real criticisms: 1. No real map, the closest thing you get is that you can unlock teleportation to different areas. 2. The menu interface is clunky. Neither of these things really disrupted the fun I've been having exploring a grimdark, deadly, massive dungeon.

Things I thought were good:
Graphics are nice and it's pretty interesting to see how the designs from an old game have been facelifted to actually make visual sense with modern graphics.
It's neat to see areas from the original game realized in full 3D.
Although I'm not sure I like every new thing added to the story, I think overall the story here is better than the original game. Makes more sense, is better translated into English. The characters are more developed on the whole.


Things I was mixed about:
Feels totally different from the original game. It just doesn't have the same cyberpunk-y vibe, it's much more lighthearted and optimistic than the original game on the whole I would say.
Although the combat is very accessible, I would say it felt maybe a bit too simplistic.


Things I didn't like:
Very repetitive and every battle more or less was feeling the same after a while. Quests are repetitive, combat is repetitive, and things are so slow paced because the game focuses on Midgar and stretched out events that I feel like the pacing doesn't quite work as well as the original game.
Although the story is better than the original game objectively, I still didn't really care for it. I guess I don't know what I was expecting, but it's very, very anime in this game. Trope after trope after trope.

So: I don't really recommend this. I put about 10 hours in. About to uninstall and probably won't go back to it. It's just not very deep and although I appreciate that it has an audience, maybe folks without nostaliga for the original game, who don't mind kind of easy/repetitive combat, I don't think I'm it.

First off have you played "Horizon's Gate" or other games by this developer? If not, I would try Horizon's Gate first simply because it's a lot easier and if I'm being honest I prefer that game to this one. It would also teach you how to play this more difficult game since the combat systems have a lot in common.

This is a lot of fun though. I would describe this as having the feel of something like Castlevania in that it's about exploring one large location in depth instead of being a world-trotting adventure. You can do a lot of exploration here and it's freeform - you're not locked in to doing the game in any particular order and can skip a bunch of stuff. But, that said, I mean this isn't Skyrim right? This game was primarily made by one developer.

Gameplay here is a tactical RPG where each class has its own specialties, active skills, passive abilities, and stat boosts. You mix and match two classes together for each of your characters so that you can do things like play a mage that specializes in fire magic mixed with a tanky character that moves the enemies around the battlefield. So you would do stuff like put a bunch of flames everywhere on the ground and then shove enemies into those flames.

One really neat thing the game does is to have secrets hidden everywhere that you can come back and discover later once you upgrade your abilities - and the abilities you upgrade don't always need to be from certain classes. So, for instance, if you see a boulder that's preventing you from leaping across a gap you might come back later and realize one of your characters gained an ability that lets you drag enemies and objects towards you from a distance. Now you can move that boulder into the pit, leap across, and find a new area to explore.

Really want to emphasize here that Kingsvein is pretty difficult. You can definitely stumble onto battles that are so far beyond the abilities of your characters as to be nearly impossible. There's quite a bit of small things that lead to success in this game: making sure you equipped your team well, making sure you're taking your turns in the right order, making sure your characters are positioned correctly to help your other characters land their attacks. I played on Normal, I've played Fire Emblem games and other tactical RPGs and I would say this is harder than a large part of them.

All that to say: I like it, you should play Horizon's Gate first because it's better and this is harder, but this is still good and worth buying.