Recent reviews by Sticky Viking

Amazing deck builder with a lot of variety, replayability and challenge. Tack on a well crafted visual style and a banger soundtrack and you got yourself a winner.

For an hour or so, my group of friends and I had a blast throwing spells at each other and screaming in panic when someone stumbled into some scuffed monster for the first time, it was chaotic and funny. But once that initial novelty wore off, it became clear that the game is waaay too barebones and directionless.

The core gameplay loop is simple: explore a castle at night and break objects to fill a quota. You get three nights to do it, and once you succeed, the quota doubles and you repeat the process. As the quota increases, more monsters spawn. This leads directly to the game’s biggest problem: the monsters.

Despite having a large arsenal of spells, almost none of them are useful against enemies. Most spells don’t even interact with monsters at all, meaning your only real option when you encounter one is to run. There’s no strategy, no clever spell usage, just avoidance.

This gets even more frustrating when you factor in the objective of breaking objects. You’re basically forced to carry the starting wind wand at all times, since most other spells are terrible at destroying anything. Experimentation is actively discouraged, because trying something new usually results in nothing happening.

It feels like the developers had the idea of casting spells using voice commands, but never figured out how to build a meaningful gameplay loop around it. The result feels less like a finished product and more like an early alpha with a fun gimmick that wasn’t fully thought through.

The game is visually impressive for its time and has solid voice acting, but the story and terminology are given so little context that unless you read the wiki to understand the lore and the terms, it all just seems like nonsense.

The characters have a bit of charm, but for the most part they’re fairly shallow and somewhat boring, and ends up being one of the most soulless Final Fantasy games I have played so far.

The combat system is somewhat interesting because it’s different, but by the time I reached the end it starts to show it's cracks. It becomes too rigid, and every enemy is dealt with using “buff ourselves → debuff enemies → burst damage → heal → repeat until dead.” A few enemies require a Sentinel in the mix to tank heavier hits until you’re done buffing and debuffing. Combine this whith there being no builds or abilities that really change anything, everything is just “get +X more stats”, making me feel like the only difference from my first battle to my last was bigger numbers.

Lastly, most of the game is designed to be slow and cumbersome, to the point where it feels like they’re deliberately trying to waste your time, with it being a backtrack bonanza and playing lengthy animations and unskippable text-boxes for almost every action you take.

I did enjoy some of what was here, but I don't think I would have bothered to finish it if I hadn't been sick while playing most of it and needed something mindless to keep my brain occupied for a week.

The campaign is mostly dull and uninteresting in terms of story and mission design, but the survival mode scratches a lot of the same itch as They Are Billions and offers a compelling survival RTS which will keep you entertained for a while. It's nothing special, but worth putting some hours into if the setting seems interesting to you.

The game is a barely functioning broken mess, but functional enough that it never crosses over from fun into frustrating. Maybe a bit too long for it's own good, but overall I had a blast playing this with two friends.

It is stupid and glorious.

What a bipolar game.

The map design goes from being among the best I’ve experienced in all of Battlefield, with a good mix of open field, dense cities, and downright gorgeous maps, to the most dull three-lane claustrophobic corridor maps or flat open maps where the team with the most tanks or the best pilots wins by default.

The class design combines some of the smartest choices they’ve done, like Recon, which has a kit that makes them more of a flanker/pathfinder for the team rather than just a sniper and scout in sharp contrast to the fact that Assault has both the best primary weapons and all the anti-vehicle gadgets and launchers, which is just ridiculous.

The graphics, animations, movement and destruction are also on point. But I would have wished for a bit longer time-to-kill or less accurate weapons to create a more intense shootout experience rather than a meatgrinder.

I kind of regret not picking this up earlier, like a year after launch, when it would’ve been possible to get some friends on board, because playing with random squadmates is also a complete coinflip in terms of skill and general game awareness.

Oh, and the campaign is quite poor. Linear corridors where they take some puzzling liberties in re-telling mostly unknown tales from WW2. As a Norwegian who has been told about the Rjukan-operation since I was I child, I can't get why they didn't just go with the real life story rather than making up their own.

Why DICE even bothers wasting resources on making campaigns when they’ve never managed anything better than "okay+" in the Bad Company games is something I'll never understand.

8/10 for the multiplayer.
5/10 for the campaign.

Gameplaywise it is tight, heavy and the best feeling Gears todate, with a stupid amount of content and variety between the Horde, Escape, Versus and Campaign modes.

The campaign's ending is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and the open world missions wasn't really to my tastes, but aside from that this is in many ways one of the best Gears of War games, and probably even one of the best third person shooters of all time.

9/10

Get strong, smash Kefka

Beatiful graphics, excellent voice acting and motion capture, the music is on point and the turn based combat with QTEs realy works. The story and themes lingered with me for a while after completing it, which is something that rarely happens.

I also stumbled into an optional boss who dropped an outfit, now I look like a french mime with a baguette strapped to my back. Baguette/10, GOTY material right there.

Side-note: I had some graphical issues, mainly flickering edges, which was solved by turning of all post-processing effects, and then setting the general option for post-processing to low.

I have to admit I didn't get this game. It is weird, yes, but I never felt like it used that weirdness to go anywhere with either it's story, gameplay or characters. Combined with what is essentially a walking simualator with some light puzzles, this felt like a chore to play through.

I will also have to add that I had a gamebreaking bug in one of the platforming sessions where Indika just kept falling through the platform, which was fixed by restarting my computer AND reverting to an earlier save.