Recent reviews by fancydink

The dialog in this game is kind of cringe and irritating, but I'm more interested in the combat, platforming and exploration anyway.

And exploration and platforming are pretty good. This game is full of unique and interesting level design on these little self-contained islands, each of them a miniature Metroidvania with its own style and set of mechanics.

I did run into some issues with the controls, where ledge grabs don't always work and your jump feels strangely inconsistent. Character movement is just not very polished on the whole and design decisions never seem to favor the player or the fun factor. It's a shame.

The game's combat is where most people are going to have a love-it-or-hate-it moment. There is a lot of complexity in these systems but it all feels weirdly stiff and awkward to use for me. Most enemy encounters wall you off into a small arena and I found this to feel tedious pretty quickly. Enemies aren't super dynamic, and your job in combat is to go through a checklist of who to stun and eliminate in a very regimented, boring way.

Sound design here also leaves something to be desired, giving no feedback for many of your skills and lacking any sense of impact or visceral gratification.

It's still a good enough game for its platforming sections, with solid level design for the most part. Although I could do with fewer blind drops. If you're into strategic and methodical combat you're likely to enjoy the game, but I think a lack of just... fun, and immediate satisfaction, is going to alienate a lot of players.

Maybe a recommendation for genre fanatics, but not a great pickup for most.

This game is fine, but it's wildly overrated.

The presentation is great, from the art style to the music and sound design, But the gameplay is so overwhelmingly mediocre that it serves as a grim reminder that the people who love games are not always the people games are made for. So long as it looks cool, who really cares about gameplay?

The action-roguelike part of the game is basic and flaccid. It works, it's whatever. The developers went out of their way to avoid doing anything unique or interesting, so it's just a very safe and paint-by-numbers series of rooms to hack and slash your way through, with very little variety.

The base building part of the game is worse, and of course it's the part you'll spend most of your time on. Probably against your will. There are no meaningful choices to be made here, but a lot of things to invest in and walk around clicking on every day. It's a very small step above Farmville. A compulsory chore that offers nothing to the experience apart from padding your playtime and distracting you from how obviously bland the roguelike part of the game would be if that was all she wrote.

And so the only interesting thing about the game is the combining of two disparate genres into one pretty little package. And while it IS pretty, one should question whether or not the pairing is actually an improvement to either game type. And it's just absolutely not. By making the game half this and half that, the end result is half of two games. Go figure.

This game has a lot of bugs. From errors popping up reporting missing game assets, to random crashes, glitches that kill you for no apparent reason, and one instance of my entire computer locking up and needing a hard reset. It's an obviously unfinished game and that sucks.

There is a lot to like about it otherwise. The art direction is stellar, even if it's not very original considering the pedigree of the developer. The world is at least interesting, and there are a few really cool setpiece moments.

But the gameplay itself isn't fantastic, even without the bugs. The mechanics are extremely limited, and nothing very clever is done with them. It gets boring pretty quickly. A much bigger problem though is just how unpolished things are, from janky animations, nonsensical invisible walls, controls that don't quite work half of the time. All of those things break immersion, and they are constant, which makes it really hard to appreciate the good bits. Few and far between as they are.

Can't recommend without a plethora of improvements, and a price drop to like $10.

It's a-me, not Mario Party.

Kind of janky, but still a blast to play with a group of friends. It's far and away the best Mario Party clone on PC, which is not so much a testament to the game's quality as it is to a lack of competition. For better or worse, this is as good as it gets.

The boards are actually pretty interesting and varied. But the minigames are hit and miss, and the worst offenders are borderline unplayable. However, they're quick and simple enough that you just kind of deal with the crappy ones and move on.

Might be hard to excuse buying copies for EVERYONE in a group, to play online, but buying one copy for local games is an easy recommendation. If you don't own a Nintendo console.

A fun-enough survival sandbox that doesn't strive to do anything new with the format. There isn't a lot of interesting content here, but the game is very polished and might make a solid base to build upon in the future. As it stands right now, there's just no reason to recommend this over myriad other similar games.

A survival game with deep and complex simulation systems, and surprisingly fun, if basic mechanics for combat and exploration. It's one of the best virtual worlds I've ever encountered to just wander around in, build a house and make some spaghetti.

It doesn't take very long to start to feel like there is a lack of actual "stuff" to do, when you get bored of playing house, but the game's mod community makes up for that in a pinch.

Highly immersive environments and simulation-like ghost hunting mechanics make for a really captivating and unique experience, but once you learn the ropes the game has very little left to offer. There are only a few maps, and while different types of ghosts have slightly unique abilities, almost every game plays out the same way when you know what you're doing.

Still a good pickup on sale, and leaps and bounds ahead of its competitors in terms of polish.

Great game. A vast, rich world to explore. Super cool boss fights. You know this.

But it's not for everyone. It should probably say on the box that this game is going to take the average player something like 120 hours to get through, and the second half of that experience is a bit of a slog. The game is pretty bloated, and a lot of that content is not unique or particularly fun to experience repeatedly.

But if you're looking for a game to devote yourself to for a month or more, there really is nothing else quite like it right now. The difficulty should be manageable for pretty much everyone, because you can always grind and overpower the content if it's too much for you, but that also speaks to the massive time commitment you're making by picking up this game.

Fun, satisfying combat, but the game suffers from a lack of content, and character flaws that can't be overcome with content patches. AGS designed the world to be generic, resulting in a game with no real identity and no apparent aspiration to obtain one.

A true survival game, where an injured leg or scarce ammunition have to be taken seriously, and you've got to stay one step ahead of the apocalypse with your plans each day.

Unlike most survival games, 7 Days has a quest system that pushes you through a lot of tailored content, akin to dungeons. By the time you get to the highest tier quests they become quite expansive and elaborate, and all of this just serves to give you a sense of direction if and when you need it.

The game is sometimes lacking in polish, but if you can handle a game that's a bit rough around the edges, it's great.