Recent reviews by Bantarific

I am thoroughly convinced that these positive reviews are just the developer's friends being supportive.

With about 3.5 hours clocked, I'm done with ~11/15 chapters and I have 0 intention of ever finishing this.

Characters: The main character is *insufferable.* Everything is a childish witticism. Think of a random generic Marvel/Star Lord quip. He says it. "Well that just happened!" "That's one way to make an entrance!" "You really think I'd slip? *slips* Woaoaaaah!" He's a petulant, annoying, childish moron. I don't blame the VA here, they're trying their best, but it seems like their stage direction was "sound as much like a bratty man-child as possible" and they said "Okay, boss!" Characters try to be helpful to him or just explain something and he responds with insults and pre-pubescent rage. It's just unbearable. Jen/Walter are less insufferable but are just walking stereotypes of "snarky but helpful robot" and "Competent science lady who shakes her head and sighs as the boys have a pissing contest but has a soft spot for our protagonist despite him being a man-child."

The puzzles: What the hell happened? There are no puzzles. You walk around and find the correct button to push, have a looped version of yourself push it, and walk through the door that it opens. Oo but wait, sometimes you have to have *two* copies of yourself push *two* buttons. But wait, wait! Sometimes you have to put a key in a lock, except instead of just carrying it to the lock, you have to put the key into a recharger on the wall every 10 seconds and wait for it to recharge and then keep carrying it to the lock. Or, what about this, instead of being able to teleport the key with you, you have to chuck it over a wall, then teleport to the other side of the wall and pick it up again. Mind blowing stuff.

The puzzles are designed as though this is the first puzzle game you've ever played and have the learning capacity of a carrot. The vast majority of time spent on them will just being wandering around trying to *locate* the buttons and locks you need to finish the level. The puzzle that took me longest I was briefly excited because I thought I may have to actually use my brain, but then I realized I just missed an awkwardly placed button that activated a bridge, trivializing the puzzle.

Either: the puzzle designer has no idea how to design puzzles of any complexity, or they intentionally made them like, childishly easy for whatever reason. I kept playing with the hope that they would ramp up the difficulty, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that even 3.5 hours in on chapter 11/15 the difficulty is at the same level of the maybe the opening tutorial levels of Portal 1/2 or Talos Principle 1/2.

I won't spoil the actual plot, and maybe it would've been interesting enough to keep me playing had the puzzle design at least been average, but it's really just piss-poor across the board here.

The best thing I can say for the game is it ran well on my (strong) PC and I didn't run into any obvious bugs or crashes.

10/10 No notes.

Immediately dropped after the horrific opening voice acting, writing, and the very first encounter I had involved an enemy dying and dropping a bomb with 7 different detailed statuses

Good. Doesn't overstay welcome. Very pretty graphics. Alternating between first person horror and third person action was good to keep the gameplay constantly fresh.

Enjoyed the art and the interesting "other world where you hang out with the archetypes of the human psyche" thing, but the cast of the game was so utterly insufferable that the stakes meant nothing to me, with some of your "friends" doing nothing except whining and complaining and crying 95% of the time they're on screen.

I also have to question the "My grandpa is so emotionally healthy that he just loves getting cucked and explicitly loved less than someone else by grandma. Doesn't bother him at all. What a truly healthy man." That's not healthy brother, that's called deep self-loathing.

The story is heavily railroaded, with most of your decisions leading to really no meaningful differences in how the story ultimately plays out, and the "true" ending was particularly lazy with how to resolves the conflict.

Prose was alright, but nothing special, and soundtrack was forgettable.

Clearly needed another editing pass to weed out gems like
"Sometimes the right thing to do is unethical."
and
"It's hard to go missing on an island like this."
"How many people go missing?"
"Who knows, they go missing all the time."

Obnoxious narrator never shuts up insulting you ever time you die and repeats his voice lines every time you reset level.
Very obnoxious aiming where you have to full sprinting shoot a large bubble so that it only overlaps with one of the two objects in a small hallway.
Can't see where death lasers are as you're jumping over them so distance judging is imprecise.
Game has worst speed mechanic I've ever seen where you just have to constantly left click spam blue "speed up" bubbles at your feet literally every 0.5 seconds to maintain max speed.
Just not worth the time.

Beat half the game a got a top 500 speed within 20 minutes of launching, so no it's not copium.

Fun with friends and has a good amount of content. It's not an all time masterpiece like other FromSoft games but it is a great romp if you've wanted to play more Soulslike content in a dedicated co-op format. I wouldn't recommend for solo players though, as it's quite clearly not designed for it, with a significant increase in enemy quantity and bosses with multiple entities.

Not sure why my hours are at 2, I've beaten the game.
As usual Mimimi games are quite good strategy/stealth games. Each level is essentially a series of "knots" where you have to slowly untangle (kill) the guards in such a way that you can get your objective without being spotted. Sometimes this means dealing with incredibly tight timing windows and enemies placed, no doubt with a devilish grin by the developer, to be as annoying as physically possible. That said, it is always satisfying to coordinate a perfect combo execution and have the plan go off exactly as you imagined.

The story is better than one might expect but nothing crazy. The characters are fairly interesting and each has their own subplot and interactions with the rest of the crew that can be somewhat amusing. The game has a ton of extra challenges and such, so be warned completionists.

Gorgeous graphics, great writing, some of the best side quests in gaming, Night City is incredibly well realized and lived-in, and while the combat does break down as you reach end game due to how absurdly OP you become, and hacking is actually a viable combat strategy and never ceases to be amusing. Truly a shame the game released in a buggy state because it has become one of the best games of all time.

Game seems to want to be tactical and focus on things like verticality, but unit controls are so slow and imprecise that actually getting units to behave is half the battle. Just maneuvering the big carrier around is incredibly painful.

The standard camera is so claustrophobic given the gigantic nature of the maps that you spend the entire game in the sensor view which turns all your units into tiny little dots with no sound effects, which kind of ruins the spectacle.

Also has a Company of Heroes style veterancy system for some reason, but most units die like flies in 2 to 3 shots so there's really no way to protect them, especially from the sensor map where you spend all your time and can barely distinguish between units.

Story was actually interesting but I gave up about halfway through.