Recent reviews by Vivace

If you ain't wyvin', you ain't livin' baby

Total War: Warhammer III is one of my favorite games. I've put nearly a thousand hours into it, and I will no doubt put another thousand in before I find something to replace it.

That said, don't buy this game. Since its release, the developers have allowed numerous bugs to persist, some from day 1 and some put in years later. Some of these bugs are annoying but benign (units doing weird spirals and breaking out of formation when being directed to move, single entities running around other single entities and never actually attacking, as they have been ordered to), some of them are outright beneficial to the player if they want to take advantage (Kairos' infinite Winds of Magic, several diplomacy-based bugs, etc) and others are gamebreakingly bad.

Right now, Lizardmen and Tomb Kings are busted. Their major lords will take maybe a couple settlements. Conquer their first province. Then they just sit there. Endlessly waiting for the End Times to be upon them. Frequently they'll be overrun and wiped out by the first faction that encounters them. Oxyotl doesn't get detected by Kairos, so instead Kairos goes north and takes out Kroq'gar and Tiktak'to as they passively and nervously watch their clocks hoping the Great Plan comes to fruition before turn 20 when they get taken out.

This is a game where a giant mammoth covered in spear-flinging northmen can charge a defensive line of zombies while fire rains from above. It's a game where a dwarven gun-line can be tested against the might of some ferociously hungry ogres as Ride of the Valkyries plays in your head.

Ever want to see a bunch of meth addicted rats fire machine guns at a dragon?

I wish I could say this was the game to do those things in, but for now I recommend skipping the title entirely. Sega won't let CA make this game into the incredible work of art it could be, and you as a player deserve better than what can be offered right now.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is an incredible game that I want to be able to recommend. It is, in all aspects of the word, a true work of art. From the haunting beauty of the story to the detailed and mind-blowing scenery that Team Cherry has rightfully become renowned for, this game is a marvel to behold.

Which is why it truly pains me to not be able to recommend the game at this time.

Let's start with a comparison to the original game: To begin with, Hollow Knight is a metroidvania with the prerequisite tight movement controls. You start off with a limited ability to traverse the world and as you defeat bosses and reach the limits of one form of movement, you'll find ways to unlock new means of traversal. This is true of Silksong as well, though Hornet is inherently more nimble and agile than the Knight from game 1.

Team Cherry has done an impeccable job of making Hornet feel as acrobatic as she is when you encounter her as the Knight. Your down-air attacks cause you to flip gracefully away after landing a strike. When you gain the ability to dash, you'll find yourself gracefully pirouetting past their ability to counterattack. Getting into the flow with this character is one of the most satisfying things I have felt in gaming, period.

Bosses in Hollow Knight tend to have 2-3 mechanics, each of which is designed to be avoided or exploited. One of the first bosses you encounter will smack you with an enormous hammer, or smash the ground to create a wave projectile that will do double damage if you don't jump over it. Beyond that, he's pretty easy to exploit.

The boss mechanics in Silksong are faster and more complex, reminding me of the rhythm of an Elden Ring boss. They'll have a larger number of abilities and they'll execute them in such a way as to give you less breathing room than most bosses in Hollow Knight. They're thrilling, engaging fights that make you feel like a god when you finally manage to beat them.

So...what's the problem?

For the first six or so hours of the game, I felt like I was progressing fairly rapidly. Enemies have been tough, but reasonable to deal with after learning their patterns. But the last few hours have given me a creeping sense of frustration.

To begin with, there are two main types of currency: bug parts, which power the tools that Hornet uses in place of spells; and rosary beads. Rosary beads are comparatively difficult to come by: just about every enemy in the game (with the exception of a couple of new factions) drops them. They're everywhere, and if your abilities are expensive, you can just backtrack to gather more parts and maybe use the tools more judiciously. Rosary beads are exclusively dropped by "sentient" enemies - usually pilgrim bugs. If you die, you lose your rosary beads until you recover your cocoon, and they're lost permanently in the event of a second death before you recover. This is a pretty minor frustration and if this was the only issue, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the game in spite of it. It's punishing, sure, but there are little circuits set up in game to allow you to farm up a good amount of rosaries in a relatively short period of time.

But then we come to the way the game is balanced. As of this review, all bosses will do 2 masks worth of damage no matter what they hit you with. You start with 5, which means the maximum number of hits you can take is three until you've managed to locate enough mask fragments to give you an additional 2 HP (10 hours in, I have only found 3 mask fragments out of the required 8 to do so, which is admittedly, a skill issue). I just killed Sister Splinter, who you can knock off of the ceiling in her arena by doing enough damage to her. During one attempt, I had taken one hit from an add she spawns, then took a hit as I dealt damage to knock her down, and then she landed on top of me, which killed me and sent me back to my bench.

My reward for finally killing her? Nothing. A big fat goose egg. No bug parts, no rosaries. Just an open and very punishing path. This is typical of most bosses at this point in the game. Defeating them will unlock no new abilities, grant no bug parts to make up for the tools you used to kill them, and no rosaries to help you unlock the next bench.

Oh yeah, and virtually every bench you come across outside of the starting 2 or 3 zones will require you to pay to unlock them. So if you take an alternate route to your cocoon and find a bench that would be a godsend of convenience, you're out of luck unless you've managed to farm a good amount of beads. If you get unlucky on your way back, sorry. You're screwed.

Past the first two zones, every enemy (even the little baby ones) will require a minimum of three hits to kill, and the vast majority will average between 7 and 13. 10 hours in, I have not encountered a way to upgrade my pin. I'm positive there is one, but as of right now every enemy on the way back to a boss or your cocoon drastically increases the chance that you'll die on the way considering how long it takes just to kill them. It means you're fatigued by the time you get back to the thing that killed you. Healing takes up your entire bar, as well. So if you only lose 1 or 2 masks, you'll have to decide whether to be inefficient with healing yourself, or if you want to risk fighting a boss or an enemy knowing it'll only take 1-2 instances of damage. Invulnerability seems to kick in later than it would in Hollow Knight as well, meaning it's entirely possible to take two hits at once and instantly die if you're not at full health.

I want to be able to recommend the game, but I know only a couple of people masochistic enough to have fun playing past the very early stages of the game. I'm not sure that *I'm* masochistic enough for it, and I love it so much already. The game feels like Team Cherry got so good during playtesting that they felt the need to ratchet up the difficulty for themselves, and forgot that most people are gonna need the learning curve to not look like a 90 degree cliff.

If they up the damage the basic needle does, or give you a means of upgrading it earlier, or nerf the amount of damage bumping into a boss does, I'll gladly change this review in a heartbeat. But for now, as much as I'm in love with Silksong, I don't know anyone I hate enough to recommend it to.

Edit: Leaving the review up, but changing my overall recommendation. Team Cherry did adjust some values, and bosses feel much more satisfying overall. In addition, store values were updated so I no longer feel impoverished, just desperately poor.

If you liked FTL, you will like this game

Elden Ring: Nightreign is not Elden Ring. It is a different take on the genre. If you can be okay with that and you enjoy roguelite/roguelike elements in addition to the challenging mechanically focused gameplay of Elden Ring, you'll have a fantastic time.

If you're a little ♥♥♥♥♥ baby who is furious about not getting Elden Ring or Bloodborne 2 and are willing to allow that to overshadow the fun of the game, you probably won't like it, and you ought to go find a bottle.

Solid roguelite autochess game.

They finally added a vampire

Could this be dog?

Peggle roguelike!

Game improves once you realize that singleplayer is significantly easier than MP