Recent reviews by Abbe

Its an incredibly fun game marred with some glaring issues that can be mostly but not entirely ignored.

If you dont need to play it right this very moment, I would recommend you to wait a month or two more to see if they release more patches to change things up, but no need to wait for a sale, if you like it you WILL get your money's worth.

Fun:
Exploration
Wide berth of different systems and activities to do
Very good performance for the amount of details in the world

Issues:
Story have been chewed up and spit out back in incomplete chunks.
Quests and activities are hidden behind other quests and activities that are not showing up on the overworld map.
Skin deep

Its an incredibly graphicly detailed and large world to explore. A lot of it reminds me heavily of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but with a lot more different (but repeating) activities to do. Most items can be picked up and use in some way, if not in gameplay you can use them as decoration in your house or sell it for some coppers.

But most activities are also skin deep at most, this is no RPG so you cannot really choose anything and nothing really matters once you move away from there.

The many systems are fun to engage in but a LOT of things arent properly explained by the game, be prepared to ask your friends or have youtube ready to fill in with actual tips.

My biggest complaint is that the story is a MESS, first few hours will feel like a fever dream and the last few chapters are extremely rushed. My guess is major rewrites and no real time to correct it with new voiceovers. Some part of me would like to have a behind the scenes documentary of how the game, story and world was expected to play from the start, because they have clearly done a lot of late changes.

I liked it a lot! I'm not the biggest fan of WH40k by any mean so my knowledge of the universe is spotty, but theyve done a great job in getting you into the world so even without perfect knowledge i really enjoyed living in this world for a while.

Unfortunately its also STILL quite buggy, if there is a next time playing the game I will install the fan patch to see if that improves cutscenes and events that have been acting weird.

I can really recommend installing the mod "Enhanced Controls" to get permanent and a more relevant object highlight, because the default one in the game is just too much.
Toybox can also be good if you wanna goof around or dont wanna redo a fight because you forgot to save in the fight and did the wrong dialog choice.

Gameplay is fun and the talents (perks/upgrades) you can build your characters with have a lot of depth and weird synergies once you get into the upper levels.
Especially when you get into the "exemplar" levels and talents which can really make some classes pop off and clear the whole board of enemies, this is also the point where you probably have looted a bunch of items that further synergise with the talents.

However there REALLY could be some QOL around the leveling, Ive spent probably 10hours scrolling in that damn talent list because relevant skills arent grouped up together. you would expect melee skills to be in a collected group or talents that are relevant to other talents to be grouped also.
10 hours is about 5% of my playtime, just looking at talents, over and over again...

Still, the game is really fun and it has some nice twists and turns and side content that kept me fully engaged until the end!

I havent reached the end of the current Early Access content yet but I had to write a review anyway.
I played and liked the first game but my final memories of it is the feeling of "I just want to be done with the story so i can quit", that was at a final point of 14hours, and I was glad to quit it.

At close to 12 hours at this point im still enjoying it a lot and look forward to testing the stuff I havent unlocked yet.
They have really worked on keeping you hooked and interested for a longer time, and all of the different systems and upgrades in the town will hopefully keep the game fresh for a longer time. Plus while you are in the portal world you spend a bunch of time building your backpack by the interesting combo/puzzle-like interactions of the different worlds, really neat and breaks up the monotony a lot.
As an example i think i spent close to the same time LOOTING the chests as i spent killing the boss just so I could maximize gains back in the store, fun!

Unfortunately the store system is a lot like the first game, testing prices until you find the different ranges of prices that the customers want.
I'd honestly want a "grace" system that slowly gets more certain the more you sell a product rather than you having to guess the prices over and over to try and find the perfect number for all the ranges.


As a side-note with some speculation:
I think the strangest thing about the game is that Will sounds like a girl, its almost like you have the sound effects of his sister, the effects are not androgynous enough if thats what they were going for.

Considering the sister have a very similar backpack I wouldnt be surprised if you could switch between them in the future, maybe the sounds are just not made for Will yet? Time will tell, but would be fun to switch to her and potentially use different weapons, moveset or something else.

Love it! With some caveats...
The biggest new feature is the burst mode and as a fairly casual enjoyer of the previous lumines I really like it! It can really help in saving your run when youve managed to make 10 bad placements in a row.

They feature some nice additions to make the game easier, I have seen the options but not tested them yet myself, but if you found the previous games a bit too hard to get into these might just give the reprieve to ease you into it more.

In continuation from the previous games its a combination of visual and musical experiences, much like in tetris effect they have done a wonderful job in the graphical area and the music is mostly good and to my tastes.
What i feel might be lacking is in the sound effects, where the previous games had a lot of supporting effects when you moved the cube around I hardly hear these effects in this game in a number of songs.

What I also miss from previous games is a more smooth/faster transition between themes, while the break is nice to get, it also kind of gets you out of it, only the final theme (which you cant choose in the playlist for some reason?) that have a really nice seamless transition between multiple themes and I would love some more themes like this.
As a petpeeve: while the transition between themes might be a good time to pause the game, you need to wait until the transition is done before you can pause for real...

My biggest critique is that some themes have TOO MUCH going on and is lacking in contrast, in a theme the squares are mis-aligned, rotated and transparent, with neon lights both in the cubes and the background.
In another theme they have water refraction and stuff filling up the playfield and that is very cool, but hella annoying.
I can give several more examples but you get the point, its just a bit too hard to see properly and you end up squinting or pausing the game to try and get some clarity of where and what blocks you have down.

While the burst mode is awesome, if you manage to do a big one the screen will be filled with the small avatars and you can literally not see the playfield for a little while, the blocks that fall down are still solid so you might end up in a real risk of dying if you are on a theme with a fast fallrate...

I havent explored the options fully to see what you can do to reduce these annoyances, but theme contrast might not be a thing that i can adjust, but hopefully getting less things in front of the playfield would be nice.

Overall ive massively enjoyed the game so can fully recommend it!

I liked it a lot but it could use some QOL fixes and polish. If you liked the first game but had some issues with the second game this might be interesting to check out!

Its a return to the form of the first game so the amount of oversaturated color and cartoony zombies have returned to the more realistic style again. Much appreciated as it fits the theme. overall the theme and feel of the game is much better than DL2!

Some bugs and areas with non-interactable safes and a key to a locked door bring down the experience. only sidecontent but annoying when you encounter.
Driving felt good for the most part but combine this with a hard challenge with a tight gold time, and the continous random reactions to hitting things made the "marathon" challenge especially the "random" challenge. Will you get exploding zombies this run or will the road blocks completely stop your car this time? Its all random!

Performance could use some real polish as well, with more proper options to increase FPS, its a gorgeous game but at sub 60 and hitches its not too nice to play. Putting the texture setting to the lowest (which is medium) mostly solves it for us with only 8gb VRam, but even then i still had several times when i hit the memorycap and loss of FPS.

Still with these issues i had a great time, but I wont 100% the achievements as the grind would be too much, im looking at you "upgrade all blueprints to the maximuim" achievement... Maybe with cheats, but adding around 8+hours of pure grinding to get the materials I wont do...

As i said, most of my issues is Quality of Life, had fun playing it!

Isnt downloaded as files with the game and isnt available at the outpost as another steam user have mentioned.

Its a negative review, but if you loved the game as a child then it still might be a nice purchase. But as we all know children have no taste for whats good. ;)

Its a negative review because while they have done several improvements to the game its still a really confusing mess.

Thankfully they have added most things to the map and the adventure journal, the map is a return from the original but seems less useful than i remember..?

BUT as you can sequence break some things AND some things arent properly added as a goal the game will be really confusing and just trying a lot of different things. Part of my playthrough have been from my memories of when ive played the original.

As for the good things (and most are really good!):
No more switching between stances. If you dont know what this means, you really dont need to know, just know that its better this way. :)
A much more fluid playercontroller, and no more stunning yourself when running into walls.
Better fighting with less stunlocking, but still really awkward. Dodge button really helps with reducing stunlock situations.
Bouncy ball lock-on targeting! But the lock-on distance doesnt update even if you have a much longer range of the ball...

As for negatives:
Some achievements are missable and might require a reload/replay, if you like to do achievements, do a manual save after each larger step in the story, i dont think the adventurebook have missable things that you cant return to get later, but this might also be the case.

Encountered a few times where i got locked into places and couldnt get out except for a game load.

Also encountered a state where i floated a few cm over the ground and couldnt interact or jump, a reload of the save would have fixed this but i didnt feel like losing progress, but i eventually hit a slope which reconnected me to the ground again.

Last fight is still really odd, there is an achievement where you push him off but i still dont know if theres any other way to finish that fight as he seems to have infinite health until second stage. Pushing him off is also awkward as hell.

So in the end I liked to return to a childhood game but the experience still left a sour taste.

This truly is a monument valley game.
If youve played one youve played them all and ive youve liked one you will probably like getting more of the same!
Art is wonderful, music and sound is wonderful, and it is NOT the dark souls of puzzle games.

Just enjoy the vibes and have a nice play. :)

Apparently later on they will release a free update with something more added to the game, which will be interesting to see.

PS: The soundtrack is 39 songs and runs a total of 1h35minutes!

Wont get into too many details, but this game can be roughly described in 40h segments:
40h in: love it, holy smokes its so fun!

80h in: its getting quite tedious to do everything and transport everything across the map back and forth. Also its running a bunch slower.

120h: i just kind of want to be done with it but its so much work. Also i have to quit to menu so the game unloads areas that have too many sparks and complex paths so i get back some frames.

Roughly at 110-120h i reached the actual endgame in the final section of the map and instead of doing that i started optimizing other areas as I so far just look at the final area and just cant be bothered to unpack everything i need to do to make it work.

Its still a great concept but it needs a lot of QOL and optimizations for the large scale of construction that you need to do in the endgame. In the end I still leave it as a recommendation as the first 40-80 hours are a blast.

Wonderful game, got kind of obsessed with it!
Was a bit doubtful of it at first glance but the free weekend won me over completely so I bought the supporters package even before the free period was over.
Finished it and got all the achievements at 37.5h, some played in Coop.

Great:
Just nice world to explore in general, gotta do a bit of grinding and set up a house with a farm to really get the economy rolling but its never too complicated so the easygoing feeling stays until the end.

Things to complain about:
Not enough slots in the hotbar, theres a LOT of unecessary switching of things when you really want a few set slots for healing, food, shield and the various resource tools. I would love if each path in the skilltree ended with a hotbar slot.

I get the point of armor dummies but i would love if you could equip everything in a set directly from the inventory, or better sorting of the pieces. Arm and legpieces look almost the same and they just blend together in a mess.

Underworld/Caves are a bit too samey and gets grating to explore, i like the different locations you can find but its just too little in the long run for the amount of effort and time you have to spend to explore it fully. But its at least twice as good as the underworld in Tears of the Kingdom.