Recent reviews by water drinker

A monk moved into the guild and started beating the stuffing out of my adventurers at the tavern over drinks and she won't leave us alone until we 1v1 her.

Maybe I haven't seen it yet since I'm still in the lower ranks, but the toxicity that people are talking about doesn't really seem to be there yet. I've been solo tanking with randoms and people have been either totally silent or willing to help when I ask. Just need a Party Finder ala FFXIV and it'll be pretty much perfect outside of more content releases tbh!

It's *fine*, but this is the most hesitant recommendation ever.

If you remember playing Tera when that came out, it's somewhat similar to the vibes of that game in terms of the moment to moment gameplay and the (lack of) story. It even has the endless deluge of random boxes to open with 500 different materials that all do different things.

A plus is you do get more buttons to push than you would in some other anime games like genshin or wuwa, every class has their basic attack, an innate skill, and an ultimate. After that, you have 5 skill slots with which you fill from a pool of ten or so options. That, and each class has two choices of specialization that can change how your basic, innate skill, and ultimate work. On top of all that, there's two additional slots for "battle memories" which are more or less skills borrowed from bosses and elite enemies that you can craft.

This all means the classes are pleasantly difficult to optimize rotations for, at least I can say as much on Beat Performer. You can set up auto-combat to mash buttons for you but the default behavior isn't really good at doing optimal rotations outside of keeping your stuff on CD. It's *definitely* not a good idea to use during bosses since it won't dodge for you either.

So the combat and dungeon/boss gameplay is fine and frankly better than you'd expect, but that's really all it has going for it. If you're okay with that and just want a game you can grind gear in with an anime aesthetic, then this isn't the worst thing you can play. Though, you'll have to close your eyes and plug your ears when it comes to the main monetization which is of the fashion. If you can do that and you're looking for the above, you'll probably enjoy it.

I think I like it but it's hard to tell because the game crashes to desktop about once every hour. Between crashes it's a perfectly smooth experience but randomly when loading a new area it just gives up for no reason orz

I guess the negative reviews are from people who don't play action games or something and also had a kneejerk reaction to seeing a leveling system, you don't even remotely need the unlockable talent trees to beat a run once you learn the patterns and do your best to build accordingly for the area boss.

The game is super good, I spent an embarrassing 6 hours glued to my chair playing after installing it for the first time. It's so mechanically crunchy in all the right ways and it has moments of figuring out a synergy and thinking "is... this intended?" in spades. The art style and especially the music are varied and interesting, i can see myself putting another 100 hours into this without issue.

If it's on sale, it's a no-brainer pickup. For $25 USD it might be a bit steep given that each murder case, if you're playing what I feel the devs thought was "as intended" will take you about 2 hours. There's more to the game though than just one case, you can continue your character in the city, slowly building up a database of the citizens you interact with, buying stuff for your house and permanent upgrades for your character.

The biggest issue though is that the game is just a bit too easy, there's no long-term punishment for stealing or breaking & entering or knocking out everyone you meet to get the evidence you need. If you get caught trespassing or doing anything illegal, just running out of the building for a minute is enough to make everyone who caught you completely forget about you.

Despite this if you roleplay a little bit and don't intentionally abuse the system the game is insanely immersive and will have you trotting around the city chasing leads and following up with NPCs connected in very natural and human ways like finding out when they go to work and confronting them in front of their office, or tailing a suspect home to find out where they live, or bribing a landlord to give you access to the resident records of the building, anything to get the connections you need to find out whodunit.

The biggest shame of the devs not doing any more updates for this game outside of bugfixes and minor updates is that the NPC conversations you see are the only ones you're going to get for the entirety of the game. They don't react to the world in as satisfying of a way that would elevate this game from "good" to "generational" unfortunately. Even something simple like allowing NPCs to lie to you would add a nice layer of uncertainty. Also what gives, why can't we march our prime suspect down to the precinct in cuffs? That's the most iconic moments of detective fiction, having to handcuff them and just leave them there awkwardly while you sprint to city hall takes you out of the immersion so fast lol

tl;dr - the negative reviews are valid but a bit doomer, the game IS good for what it currently is and 100% worth getting on sale but $25USD is a little steep given that it falls a little short of what it promises to be

Made by a developer who doesn't know when to Stop Making More Game. The Story/Tutorial will probably take you ~10 hours or so. After that is an infinite yawning abyss of more upgrades, more endgame systems, more creature and player customization, more side content, it just goes on and on and on. Somehow it never feels overwhelming given that you're only given little pieces of the puzzle at a time and the game respects your intelligence enough to put the pieces together on your own and come up with a strategy

It's more like heroes of the storm than it is dota/league of legends. Not a very difficult game mechanically, easy to pick up, you're rewarded more for high level strategy decisions than you are micro moments. There's some standout balance nightmares at the moment (seablossom) but overall the game feels fun still. Also the novelty of being a boat is just cute, great theming.

The best kind of game for people who say things like "I think fighting games are cool but I can't do the execution."

Yomi Hustle is purely the strategy part of fighting games, outplaying another human being who also has access to a diverse toolkit of options that make you die if you predict wrong. Seeing the match played back at full speed at the end is really fun, turns that felt super tense in the moment being just frames in the replay never stops being cool.

Much more fun than I expected. If you're the kind of person easily lured in by old MMO nostalgia bait, this will absolutely tick all the right boxes for you. Mechanically you have a bit of PSO, Ragnarok Online, and FF11 all mixed in. Right now you can see all the bosses (on the lowest difficulty level, there's multiple level scaled versions of both dungeons) in about 5 hours of playtime give or take so there's not a lot to do outside of grinding levels and min-maxing your gear just YET but I suspect this will be fun to return to when new dungeons and the like release.

note: this game is very punishing if you're not blocking/parrying attacks so don't forget!