Recent reviews by Ultraviolet Combat

[Disclaimer: I got two free keys for this game, one to use and one I gave to a friend. I also got to play this early.]

This is a surprisingly-addictive card game. The mechanics are fundamentally simple, and there's no outright-broken abilities or effects (except for maybe the skeleton champion's), but all the depth comes from one seemingly-simple aspect: in most card games, something that can trip up or slow down gameplay is figuring out the order of operations and what takes priority when cards come into conflict. Think of the stack in MtG, or the chain in YGO.

The stack/chain in those games is where some games are decided, and where errata tends to reign, as figuring out how to resolve a stack of potentially-conflicting effects stemming from complex cards is something that could catch players out. In Blades, Bows & Magic, however, not only is this the core of the tactical depth in this game, it's also laid out in a fairly simple manner.

The gameplay works simply like this. Warriors beat Archers, which beat Mages, which beat Warriors. Effects that trigger at the same time are given priority based on the type of ability (transformations, then defensive, then offensive). There's a bit of weirdness for some cards that have multiple things occur in one effect (like the Elven Archer), but otherwise, it's fairly straightforward to figure out. You have champions that you can select that have their own abilities, and those also get high priority.

It helps that, while there's not a lot of cards to collect so far, each one does have a unique effect that doesn't make it too broken. Each card's strength comes from how you use it, i.e., where in the order-of-operations it comes into play. A properly-ordered stack of 3 cards can make all the difference between a losing round, or a round where you knock out the enemy. It's best to use your champion's ability in conjunction with your cards, in the right order, to completely knock out your opponent's cards and their abilities.

This stuff does matter, too. You have a Mage that can turn into a Warrior when facing an Archer, Archers that can similarly counter others at the right opportunity, Warriors that can shield themselves or others, and cards that otherwise nullify what might be an advantage.

Don't worry too much if keeping track of when and where effects trigger sounds too complex, though. I didn't find myself needing to use my brain too much to beat the existing campaign when I got to play it early. The trick comes from figuring out how to use the cards you're dealt to engineer a favorable outcome, though I did still get caught out by overlooking something crucial. I rarely, if ever lost a fight entirely, though, I simply just had some losing rounds or took longer than I thought to win.

Additionally, the art is really nice. I like how there's a 3D effect on the cards when you mouse over them, and the character designs work well enough for how low-res they seem to be. The audio design does feel a little stock, but it's not bad. If there's one criticism I could level at it, it's that the camera is wonky on the world map when moving around long distances, but it's not too annoying.

Overall, this is a really neat game with a high hookability factor, and for the price it costs, you could do worse. The demo is hopefully also available, and it has a decent amount of content in it for a demo.

Not bad for a short demo. The premise and setting are interesting all on their own. This type of game isn't usually my bag, but from what I've seen in the demo, I might like the full game. Encountered a few bugs, and navigating the datapad could be more intuitive, but those are my biggest complaints so far.

This was a pretty neat game. The rock-paper-scissors foundation and the order-of-operations gives this just enough tactical depth without overwhelming you with combinatorial explosions. It's perfect at making you go "a-ha!" when you win a round.

What else can I say? It's a passionate fan project that takes Half-Life and reimagines it in HD. It's not a 1:1 copy of HL1 in Source, it's a massive expansion on the original that showcases the years of hard work of the dedicated fans who worked on it. I only wish it had built-in co-op.

I recommend this game with some caveats: it's rough, it needs some more polish, the difficulty balance is probably skewed for single-player, and right now, it's not worth getting either of the DLC for it.

That being said, I had a blast with this game. To be able to play with Clan mechs, from a POV not seen before in BattleTech games, and with a higher emphasis on story and narrative than most of the MechWarrior series has dared to do, has been a treat. I love the care and attention paid to representing the BattleTech universe here.

The gameplay is mostly as solid as ever. Clan mechs are quite powerful, and while you're not invincible, you can absolutely inflict some mayhem. Customization seems fine, though I admit I barely ever used the new MechLab outside of swapping Omnipod loadouts wholesale. The new battlegrid command system, while too clunky to really take advantage of in the heat of combat, is welcome and appreciated.

Again, the difficulty balance and the escalation could have been better, at least for single-player. Tonnage limits escalate to the point where, by endgame, you *must* bring all Assault mechs, and the tonnage limits themselves could have served the gameplay better: instead of being a hard cap, why not let me go over some and reduce my rewards, or let me go under and reap bigger rewards?

Perhaps the answer to that is down to the more fixed progression in Clans, with no throwaway procedurally-generated missions to let you grind XP and resources (your only option for improving yourself between missions is replaying old missions in the Sim Pod to grind pilot XP as well as chassis XP and milestones).

And, of course, the difficulty of the missions can feel lopsided at times, like the kinds of gauntlets you thought only existed in less-than-precision-crafted ball-busters like the old Armored Core games. By the second half of the game, you will be fighting multiple lances of enemy mechs in succession, capped off by a bigger wave of enemies or possibly a DropShip boss fight. It can feel like an uphill slog at points, in a way that Mercenaries somehow managed to avoid (with notable exceptions). Even things like ammo resupply crates or the occasional repair bay can barely ameliorate the struggle the missions present, and I had to drop the difficulty down at some point just to keep going without restarting every mission at least once.

Not helping things is the AI not being that useful to you. Your fellow Starmates, when AI-controlled, have a problem with keeping themselves in the fight, not helped by early-game mechs only mounting weaponry in the arms--when they run out of weapons to use, they will punch out automatically, and you are down a teammate that could at least run a distraction. The aforementioned battlegrid system badly needs an RTS-style stance system, or at least a button that tells your AI teammates to fan out instead of following in a line or balling up (especially as murderballing is not a very viable tactic in this game).

With all those complaints, however, I still recommend the game, because there are points where it just *clicks,* where you feel like a purpose-bred badass crushing all enemies before you, and no number of Draconis Combine MechWarriors in their rinky-dink mechs can stop you, even with a tonnage disparity. And, of course, PGI hired Top Media Crew, the creators of Hired Steel, to make the cinematics for the game (which I wish were in higher-quality, at least audio-wise--I have no idea if they lowered the audio quality to try and conserve on filesize, or if their in-game video player just kinda sucks). TMC absolutely COOKED with these cinematics, with animation that I daresay is a notch above Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance (which debuted the same day as this game!), good voice acting, and an obvious love for the BattleTech source material they drew inspiration from.

If there's anything I'd like to see for this game in the future, besides improvements addressing the issues outlined above, it'd be new campaigns, either something picking up Jayden's story where the game leaves off, or even a campaign taking place from the POV of a Star from a different invading Clan. Or, perhaps, even bring things back to the Inner Sphere side, maybe even a Battle of Tukayyid DLC.

It's an idle game, you can make fancy marble tracks, if you've ever watched those marble run videos on YouTube, then you should just get this game now.

It's a bit unlike me to write a review for a single-player game with an actual campaign when I haven't yet finished said campaign, but this game has thoroughly wowed me. As someone who's known about this series for years and listened to its renditions of various anime themes, I'm glad to finally be able to play one of these games on PC. Short version: get it and the DLC while it's still available, you don't want to miss this if and when the licenses expire.

Somewhat longer version:
SRW is the tactical JRPG in my mind. There are other strategic/tactical RPGs from Japan, but this one is somewhere at the top of the hill. The premise is simple: gather up the various mech pilots from different anime series (or games or other media), deploy them in missions, smash them against the enemy until you win. The tactical depth comes from keeping your units alive (not too hard a task, but every so often, one of your mechs will take a hard hit that makes you worry about their continued survival in the mission) and efficiently eliminating the enemy by clever management of abilities.

Position units, buff them with Spirits, hit "Start Battle," and watch the animated carnage unfold. Use Supporter Commands to grant extra buffs, use Extra Actions to make each unit's action count for more, use your warships to protect, attack, and heal. Between missions, you can upgrade your units to incredible heights of power, give their pilots extra skills to improve their combat abilities, and equip Power Parts to grant passive boosts or enable active abilities like a repair kit or an all-team Spirit.

The gameplay loop is surprisingly addictive, and I have to tear myself away from playing more of the game when I need to end a session. And within that gameplay loop, there's the story and character that truly makes this game: you pick a player character (male or female) and embark on a grand tale of fighting for justice, recruiting mech pilots either already living in the world, or dumped there by dimensional rifts. Within just 10 of the hundreds of missions in the campaign, you'll have amassed a sizable force that can stand together against any foe--and it just keeps growing from there. You meet and join up with all sorts of characters, from the stoic, to the hot-blooded, to the young and idealistic, to the wizened and cautious.

The contrasts are obvious, with characters drawn exactly in their artstyles from their respective source material (so you'll have the very Go Nagai-style designs of the Getter Team next to the Hisashi Hirai-drawn Rabbits Team from Majestic Prince, alongside the 70's Combattler team next to the 80's L-Gaim characters), but those clashes and contrasts are truly what make this game special to me. This series seems to have always been about celebrating the mecha and tokusatsu genres (or, at least, this game definitely is, going so far as to include the recent Netflix iteration of Ultraman alongside SSSS.Gridman), and it is just plain fun] to pick such wild and diverse mecha to use on a mission, such as the small Scopedog, the human-sized Ultramen, the massive Voltes V, the literal train-mecha Shinkalion, the squat steampunk mecha of Sakura Wars, the wild Eldora from Gun x Sword, and a whole gaggle of different Mobile Suits.

It truly is like a well-produced anime fanfiction, or something like a playable Daicon movie, with characters interacting from their own perspectives and helping each other develop and grow. Every mission has an anime-like title screen to start off with, and every time you return to the title screen, you get a random dialogue section styled like a next-episode preview. It's one of the best games I've ever bought, and while I would highly recommend you get it and the DLC on sale when you can, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I never considered myself someone who was able to stomach a FromSoft game--Dark Souls and the like never really appealed to me, even though they did look kinda cool when I watched others play them. However, I am a huge mecha fan, and getting to play the first ever Armored Core released for PC may just have been the best opportunity for me to see what the hype was all about. So here's my takeaway as a complete newcomer to Armored Core and FromSoftware:

This game rules. I could go into a more detailed breakdown of each of the game's aspects, but I feel that's somewhat unnecessary. This is a review, though, and so I will try to sell you on this game if you're on the fence.

The gameplay is what you might expect. Customize your AC how you see fit, take it into a mission or the Arena, and have fun. The speed is almost mind-bending at times, and while combat may roughly resemble FromSoft's Souls games, there doesn't seem to be quite as much timing needed in combat. Timing your movements and attacks seems like it certainly helps, but I managed to get through the game while hammering my mouse and keyboard and didn't need to restart from a checkpoint quite as much as I expected. I even forgot to use the lock-on function to reduce having to manually swing my view around, and I still did fine.

Indeed, difficulty-wise, this really doesn't seem too punishing in gameplay, despite surface appearances. You can always tweak your build before restarting from a checkpoint (though I do wish that they gave you the ability to also do so whenever you used a resupply point in the missions), and most fights do really boil down to overwhelming and pseudo-stun-locking the enemy, which often can involve getting in their face (presumably why they give you so many melee weapons, which I admit to not using).

Sure, a lot of the harder fights were won practically by the skin of my teeth, and I ran through most of my ammo a few times, but I still managed to clear them. All in all, while I can see where people struggled (and I shared some of that struggle myself, don't get me wrong), I think I was really in my element once I got past Chapter 1.

It is a bit repetitive, there is a meta both in single-player and in PVP, and I do wish the game actively encouraged certain kinds of builds or styles of combat for some parts of it...but it is damn hard to beat the simple joy of boosting towards an enemy and unloading dual shotguns at them.

Thus far, they haven't nerfed any weapons, only buffing some instead, and I managed to one-try the Sea Spider before they nerfed it and a few other bosses. (I almost wonder if it helped that I have played a modest amount of the original Gundam Breaker for the Vita, which is a similar kind of third-person mecha action game with boosting, limited ammo, customization, and such.)

Levels are nicely self-contained and not open-world. In fact, they're rather quite linear, with few shortcuts or alternate routes, though there are side paths for secrets. That all being said they make these levels huge. The scale is really mind-blowing, and it does conspire to make your AC look small at times, and you might start to suspect that this is a reskinned Souls template (that being said, modders have found out, from plopping them into other FromSoft games, that ACs are indeed as big as they should be--not Mobile Suit-sized, per se, but genuinely as big as mecha should be). However, the diverse environments do help to remind you of the scale you're playing at sometimes, and I think you really get the sense of your AC's size in the home base, and this is where I have to mention the presentation.

This is competently-done sci-fi, the aesthetics are pretty spot-on for what it's doing. I've seen a little of the Y2K-ish aesthetics of the old AC games, and while I wish there was some of that flair in the home base menu, the in-game UI is really not bad and is probably an improvement on the last couple generations of games.

The HUD is simple, but still stylish and quite readable--the target lock crosshair with all the meters flanking it is a good way to present crucial information in a game as frenetic as this (though I kinda wish the radar, speedometer, and altimeter were closer in, it's hard to notice them at the edges of the screen). The little in-game cutscenes for loading your AC for sortie, or for the Supply Sherpa, or boss introductions, are all classic FromSoft and very nice touches for presentation. The briefing/message UI is also really not bad.

As to the rest of the presentation, ACVI feels like a rare game in which your imagination is left to ponder on certain aspects. You never really see anyone else's face (maybe Handler Walter and 621 were shown in one of the trailers?), only hear their voices and have to match it with their ACs--though this hasn't stopped people from drawing fan art of them, which I like.

There's a mission where you're being assisted by multiple ACs who successively have to retreat, though its shown as their machines going down as if being destroyed--is this the only way they could show these guys being driven away, or are they supposed to be simply punching out? In most, if not all fights where you defeat another AC, there is the tacit implication that you have killed the other pilot--there doesn't seem to be any ejection, no command couch or escape pod shooting out.

Entire story-changing twists can occur off-screen (and you learn about these in cutscenes), there are enemy movements and fights happening where you aren't, and while you can suspect that every character and faction has their own agenda, you'll probably never guess where it's going or coming from. This isn't Half-Life, I shouldn't expect an immersive POV into the story, but it's all fascinating nonetheless even if I didn't expect this kind of storytelling. I'm under the impression that this is kind of just how FromSoft do their storytelling, and I really can't say I dislike it. NG+ and NG++ do have more twists and surprises, so I'd say doing a whole three playthroughs is definitely worth it (and each one can be shorter since you'll have done the missions before!).

And the customization, oh man. It says a lot that the one complaint/desire players seem to have is about the ability to change the brightness of the little running lights on your AC. Not only can you swap parts and build your AC as you see fit (albeit with resulting quirks to movement and having to keep abreast of load limits and EN consumption), you can customize the paintjob to a surprisingly-granular degree. Change the color of one of seven elements on a part, change its luminosity and finish/weathering, save the paint scheme into a block of custom player paint schemes, slap one or more decals on it, make your own decals or download some from other players, there's so much freedom to make your own unique high-speed death-spewing (not-)plamo robot.

As for the port quality: it seems pretty good! The default controls are kinda weird for M+K, but I could just rebind them and play it with my weapons all on my mouse. Graphics are buttery-smooth on a 3070 even with only mild tweaking of the settings, load times are tolerable (the absolute slowest loads were when restarting Arena battles, and took less than 12 seconds, and all this was probably because I forgot to install it to my SSD--I imagine it's lightning-fast there), and the sound is great.

Overall, this is a great game, one of the best I've ever played, and it makes me happy that we get such a good mecha game just as the general genre of mech games is rumbling back to prominence. Here's hoping this is the start of a new wave of mecha action.

Brigador is the game I never knew I wanted or needed. It wins on both the gameplay and presentation fronts: a combat vehicle pseudo-simulator in an isometric 2D world with gorgeous and detailed artwork, rippling firepower at your disposal and oodles of destruction to inflict while accompanied by a well-crafted synthwave soundtrack.

The campaign and the freelance mode both present a sort of destructible sandbox, one where you get leeway to experiment with your playstyle. A good run or mission will see you blasting your way through scores of enemies, smashing buildings as you go and using the inherent chaos of battle to your advantage--if you can play smart enough, that is. Mastering the quirks of your mech, tank, or a-grav craft is key to inflicting maximum destruction before you run out of ammo or get ground down to death.

The plot and lore are unobtrusive, but they're still there for those who are intrigued. The setting itself definitely makes me want to dive in deeper. I want to know more about this sci-fi pseudo-cyberpunk planetary war story the developer has crafted.

If you're a fan of BattleTech, Command & Conquer, Warhammer 40K, or any other strategic sci-fi thing, Brigador should be exactly your jam. If you still need convincing, just go watch MandaloreGaming's video. I know that sold me on playing through this, and I'm still not done with all the game's content.

Update 10/22/2022: some new thoughts, original review follows below this:

This game is a masterpiece of design, art, and gameplay. This is more than a roguelite game with a simple, addicting loop. Every aspect is tightly-interwoven to make for an amazing experience start-to-finish. Even when you think you're done, there's something extra to find, something more to unlock.

I almost envy those who get to experience this game for the first time post-v1.0. They're going to get to experience going from almost nothing to becoming a walking powerhouse in the game. This game is the ultimate power fantasy.

If I had any criticisms now that this game is in its very-near-final form(?), they're mostly minor:
*The game becomes a sensory overload at points (but that's to be expected, and they do warn you at the start), and it can be hard to keep track of things once the screen gets busy enough.
*I liked the sense of humor of the older stage descriptions, and I think it was mostly lost now that the current version re-wrote them (though the new ones are more flowery and kinda better overall).
*Related to the above: I don't know how to feel about the very loose narrative on display. Without spoiling anything, it seems like there's something to unpack, and yet, this game also doesn't seem like it's the kind to accommodate any lore of any depth (but then, some of the content doesn't necessarily feel like it's all a joke, but it's also not very serious either).

But those are really the only wrinkles on what is an amazingly-bonkers game, a game that will surely not be forgotten anytime soon, despite the roller-coaster ride from this game's early success to its final(?) release today.

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I haven't gotten sucked into a game like this in a good while. The concept is deceptively simple, the gameplay is surprisingly intense, and it has a deeply addicting loop. Every run has you striving to make that build you want work, and the nice thing is, it is hard to go wrong with any one build. Unlocking everything is a fun goal to work towards, and you start to strategize every run.