Recent reviews by Wolf Bonne

First 2D fighter I've seriously gotten into. The fact that the easy inputs do 15 percent less damage across the board means that high level play can involve you weaving quick simple inputs with tapped out motion inputs for extra damage. Spending a rage point to get out of a combo or continue your own, with the trade off of permanently lowering your armor up to 3 times makes for some interesting strategies. It cleverly shrinks the floor to bring it closer to the ceiling, and I feel like some people take the simple inputs as the opposite, but it really does add its own form of depth. The training mode does a good job at giving you information (including frame data and a short summary of how a character is intended to be played), as well as genuinely useful starter combos for a lot of characters.

I'm not overly familiar with Granblue, but this has definitely sparked a lot of interest in the franchise, much more so than Relink. They really did a great job giving everyone a vibrant personality, and being able to pick someone from the roster to cheer you on between games adds so much to the experience in getting attached to a specific fighter.

My only issues are that logging into the game can feel like an eternity. I wish there were more reward tracks and rewards in general. Aside from some occasional match hiccups, online match making has been mostly solid, the playerbase is relatively small in the early ranks, but rarely did i spend more than 5 minutes matching up with someone, just sometimes that someone is... one person over and over.

I've been slowly discovering over time that I generally don't care for the metroidvania genre, mainly due to finding myself getting to the mid point where the games tend to slow down as it stops dishing out so many new ideas and tools and asks you to retread your steps to find that one room with that one ledge that you can now double jump up to, that you may or may not have passed a dozen times because the path looks unassuming to begin with.

Momodora solves a lot of those problems for me by being lean, with small areas that are mostly painless to backtrack through. The art is charming with a comfy, slightly foreboding atmosphere, I love the maple leaf as a weapon and motif, it feels great to use. I found the enemy encounters and bosses to be very satisfying even though I'd not describe any moment of my experience either difficult or demanding. After getting the "true ending" I felt like I got my fill, though the game does suggest having some extras to discover for more than one playthrough.

My few complaints are that I never found myself using most of the utility items you can pick up or purchase along the way, the bow feels a bit under utilized, and could've had more interesting or robust puzzle platforming sections to get a bit more out of the given toolbox. Fully possible that a second playthrough addresses my complaints, it still would have been nice to have gotten a bit more out of my initial run.

Assaulting, traumatic, vulgar. A simulation of what it's like to dissociate, do your job, and be so high on the harshest drugs imaginable that you feel like maybe this is fun. A sandbox of capitalist fueled violence and incomprehensible geometry. Dues Ex if it was distilled down into its purest form and inhaled through a glass pipe.

HATS