Recent reviews by IDLT

Contexte:
Je stream et critique les jeux vidéos professionnellement depuis plusieurs années maintenant.
Ainsi, rares sont les jeux que je joue sur mon temps libre, ils doivent être vraiment, vraiment bons.

• Le jeu est une claque visuelle, il est ma-gni-fique. Mêlant un style sombre avec des tons joyeux et satyriques avec brio.
• Les animations, sont tout aussi travaillées.
• Le pacing est excellent, on a toujours quelque chose à faire,
• Les builds sont funs.
• La musique a du charme, douce quand il faut, pêchue en combat.
• Les biomes sont variés, et leur ambiance visuelle/sonore est très réussie.
• Les ennemis personnifient tous des fléaux (les catastrophes naturelles, les addictions, etc) ainsi on se bat pour une bonne cause.
• Les histoires, dialogues et descriptions sont régulièrement drôles.
• Le jeu n'est pas très long (env 10h).

- Équilibrage un peu au fraises (mais c'est fun d'avoir un build pété).
- Une Interface qui pâlit à coté du chef d'oeuvre qu'a produit le département artistique.

J'aurais souhaité payer plus cher / attendre plus longtemps pour avoir les deux petit bémols de corrigés.
J'espère que Have a Nice Death serve de preuve que Magic Design Studios savent faire de la très haute qualité. En jouant à d'autres roguelites ma seule envie était de revenir dans ce monde et repasser dire bonjour a tout le personnel.

Poco's animation is the cutest thing.
And the music is surprisingly good.

Shame there are no multilingual translations though. (Even AI ones would have been completely fine.)

But it's Charming, Fun and Free, a YEA from me.

Very modern.
Tons of quality of life features making the whole package easier than previous titles.
You'll have a fun time, but wonder where it all went.

The music, the world, the endemic life, there is tons to see. But the way the game makes you speed trough everything is a shame.
What this game needs to be memorable is harder content. And activities that make you stop and think. Both would add a change of pace, enabling you to appreciate all the work that has already been put in.

Ok ?
Je n'ai pas pas payé un seul centime pour ce jeu.
Et je souhaiterais tout de même être remboursé.

Reviewer’s background:
I have 100+ hours in Ravenswatch. I have 100%ed Curse of the Dead Gods (Passtech’s previous roguelite). I bought the Supporter Edition because I believe Passtech can make great games. I have been streaming and reviewing games professionally for years now.



- Recent Players list now works.
- You can browse menus while matchmaking, perfect for theorycrafting.
- Achievements added. An actual reason to play different heroes!
- and, you know, I played +95hrs more hours and even created a guide.

- The core combat, heroes, art, and banter are excellent. I keep coming back because the gameplay feels great.
- Despite patches, the game still cannot shake it's Early Access feel (online features, difficulty design, and incentives). So you're left trying to invent your own incentives keep playing.
- Verdict: Recommended with caveats. If you value combat/theorycraft and play with friends. Otherwise, wishlist and watch for updates to Online and End game challenge and progression. I’ll update this review.




Onto the review..

- Hero design is Fresh!
Example: Wukong's has a "Firey Eyes" talent that actually changes your skin for the whole game and has exclusive VFX/SFX that everyone can see! So neat!

- VO + banter are Fun!
(yes, Hon-hon, ze French accents give it flavor 👌). Very funny especially when someone dies repeatedly and they get dunked on. Personality++ love it.

- Cosmetic Unlocks!
In an age of MTX, feels so good to have exclusive skins for difficulty clears, special playstyles, and hidden unlocks! 🍲

- Theorycraft is where it's at.
Once you level up your heroes, experimenting is so engaging. I hit credits around ~10 hours and the next ~90 were just build tinkering because the combat is THAT satisfying.


Online/Comms
- No text chat and not even emotes. (Come on, I would buy emote packs!)
- Voice Chat is inconsistent across platforms. PC players disable it, Console players.. forget it's on.. So you listen to them arguing with their wife. 😅.
- We're left with ping-only communications which leads to abuse.
- Client-hosted with no host migration. So if host leaves, your run ends. In a 45–60 minute session ⇒ Everyone Disliked That.
- End-screen callouts highlight “most deaths” and "most shields to themselves" instead of celebrating teamwork. This pushes solo and greedy play.

Matchmaking stability + flow
- Occasional freezes, often false “player disconnected” messages, The "ready" check always flickers.
- The matchmaker does not avoid matching you with players picking your main hero; So you can end up waiting 10–15 minutes.. 🤦

Difficulty & longevity
- Higher difficulties currently just add time, not meaninful depth
I : All acts,
II : All acts, but we add 10 monsters at the end
III: Oh yeah and here's one boss now.
These adds minutes. Barely a 4% difference for a whole difficulty setting! Not meaningful!
- There are modifiers (great!) but they’re underused (shame).
No achievements tied to them and zero bonus XP. So most players ignore them. :(

Variety & clarity
- Act bosses play differently, but they all look/sound samey (red palette, same arena). This is one of the reasons people criticize the game as "repetitive".
- Teammate build visibility is missing. Heroes like Beowulf/Scarlet can be heavily support-dependent; not knowing how your team is building hurts gameplay depth!

Quality of life
- Resolution: Some main menu text, icons are tied to textures, making them look low-res despite a high resolution screen. (I had to add ReShade sharpening). And 3D hero previews in lobbies are just low really low res for some reason.
- The game immediately auto-queueing you, despite still being in the end screen of a 1-hour run is plain tiring. Please don't.
- Friend/profile layer is basic. It's a shame there’s no Monster Hunter–style profile to showcase stats, achievements, and builds!


1️⃣ Making Better Difficulties: Using the Modifiers!
- At each tier, add a forced default modifiers, but then, let each player pick 1 of 3 random mods!. This way, every run is a new strategy puzzle (just like the high level MOBA Pick/Ban system) and as a bonus, existing content gains life!
- Offer +XP multipliers per modifier and achievements tied to mod clears. You could even use seasonal/rotating modifier pools to keep it fresh.
- And tie daily quests "The Raven's Challenge" to clearing the Modifiers of the moment.

2️⃣ More flexible Communication
- Add at least a radial emote/ping wheel (Need Help, Danger Here, On My Way, Ult Ready, Thanks, Sorry, Laugh).
- Default to Voice Chat to push-to-talk.
- Display when you are talking (very possibly the reason why people forget it's on).

3️⃣ Stability and host migration
- On host quit/DC: automatically migrate host to the lowest-latency player.
- Allow players to rejoin within a 2–3 minute window. 🙏

4️⃣ Matchmaking health
- Make the matchmaker automatically avoid players with your hero.
- Don’t rematch the same pair that just had a hero conflict for X minutes.
- Let lobbies OR have a modifier that allows duplicate heroes to reduce friction!
- Eliminate "Ready" flickers and false disconnects through stricter state sync.
- Don't let the countdown go into negative numbers (yes, it sometimes goes : 3..2..1.. 0.. -1..-2..-3.. I've seen -18! 😅)

5️⃣ Scoreboard/medals that encourage good play
- Support medal: prefer ally shields/heals, enemy-debuff uptime, damage enabled, damage mitigated on teammates.
- Survivability medal: reward damage avoided and deathless segments.
- End screen: Add Titles!
"Elite Killer” (most elite damage),
“Trash Cleaner” (most enemies killer),
“Globe Gobbler” (most healthglobes gathered),
“Pathfinder” (most % map uncovered),
“Clutch Reviver” (most revives)
etc. Don't glorify “the best at dying" ...

6️⃣ Pacing
- In wave events, add an interactable to call each wave early for bonus XP/score. High risk, high reward, higher skill ceiling.
- Turn auto-queue OFF by default after run end. This will have the side effect of improving matchmaking by removing all the disconnects from players who got falsely matched in their end-game screen!

7️⃣ Boss Variety
- Give each act boss a distinct arena + palette, unique hazards/telegraphs, and themed music stingers to differentiate the climax moments.

8️⃣ Visibility, profiles, and compendium
- Show teammate talent picks on Pause Screen!
- Allow a player profile where they can show stats, achievements, favorite heroes, notable clears, etc.
- Surface all achievements in the Compendium with progress tracking. While adding a section for “Modifiers Completed”.

9️⃣ Visual Polish
- Upscaled textures would be nice for the blurry menus. (RIP my eyes)
- And just bump the hero viewer render resolution x2. Small tweaks, big perception win.

Passtech’s art, sound, and hero identity are top-tier. They have already proven that they get Ravenwatch's real potential. The core of the game is so strong that I invested 100 hours despite all my friction. And that’s the point: the game is one good pass away from being a top recommendation. So ..

Recommended, with caveat

Search for :



This will bring
- Dynamic scaling of the UI for Ultrawide support
- Disable 30FPS cap in cutscenes/photo mode
- Remove pillarboxing/letterboxing in borderless/fullscreen.
- FoV tweaker to fit your viewing comfort
- Allow frame generation in cutscenes
- JXL screenshot quality option and fixes hitching while taking screenshot.

Not affiliated in any way.
They fixed this port, for free, even before the game's release, and it's great.

Played this from start to finish with my little sister in 2 runs. One that started miserably and failed just as bad. We ended the first day having only gained a level.
The second one where we knew what to focus on and managed to get the best gear, all Mormo anchors and bonus side quests done with celestial shards to spare (timey rewindey money).

The art is amazing. Love the Steven universe vibe it has too it, music is neat too, never got bored of it.

Gear "toys" are fun. Though once you've used them once it's pretty easy to figure out if you're gonna use them since some go from variying degrees of usability (eg:Bowling Ball) to omg this is insane (eg:Yoyo) though the game does give you very respectable starting weapons that find their use all along the game (Bow and Torch)

Stickers are a great addition, mixing up your playstyle, or more likely, min-maxing your character even more. And the fact that leveling up adds sticker slots helps too.

Combat is nicely done. All the weapons feel great (sword animation hitboxes need to be checked though) with a dodge roll and cool mechanics to boot. Bow has laser sight, Bowling Ball and golf club can knock enemies into each other, you can light your arrows firing them over braziers, rolling around while on fire greatly helps extinguishing flames .etc Neat stuff.

Some things I did not like:
- Ressource gathering. Money in this game has to have completed its animation to be picked up. It takes about upwards of 1 second to finish bouncing around, per coin, in a game where you're racing against the clock, and you need all the money you can get, you get the picture? Which makes the Vinyl (the Zelda boomerang) one of the must have weapons because it cuts huge patches of grass instanly and retreives any item it passes onto.
- Content. For a 20€ sure its short and sweet but tiles are overused. Dungeons all have that dark underground look with no spice to it, you run into the same rooms, our randomized character managed to be close to the exact same.
- Tutorial. The beginning one is good for the first try but you shouldn't have a tutorial everytime you start again. And some weird unexplained mechanics like vendor's stock that replenish randomly? (I'll be looking at the sticker collection only to comeback 20 seconds later and they have new stock! When you can spend a whole day and not have any new ones reappear!) You sometimes collect stuff you have absolutely no idea what it does until you go and spend enough time to figure it out by yourself.
- Playing coop. You have a shared inventory, but you can't use it at the same time... The player that pressed the pause button is the one in control, for his character and his character only. So you find yourself pressing pause, telling your friend to prepare to press pause, unpause, and then he pauses. Or friendly fire. Its off, but it isn't? Elemental weapons car affect your character, so you end up poisonning/setting ablaze your coop partner. But it doesn't deal damage. But sometimes it does. Its so confusing.

My proposed fixes:
- Make ressources slighty be attracted to you. So that they travel to you by themsleves. Or make your sword be able to pick them up.
- Add more dungeon tiles and bosses. Fire Dungeon, Ice Dungeon, Dark Dungeon, Underwater Dungeon, all proven ideas that work, none present. Make it happen.
- Making most of the animations skippable. We know you like your work but at the end of the day its an interactive medium for a reason.
- Being able to use the inventory at the same time. 1 Blue cursor, 1 yellow cursor, Done.
- Add a time clock. You only know how much time you have left when its too late. Even a simple sun/moon phases clock would help a ton.

Great premice, great art, questionnable design decisions, a fun but flawed experience, can be fixed easily. :)

Originally posted by author:

TL;DR : A wasted potential. Middle Earth : Shadow of War stopped looking around for better ideas after the critics praised its Nemesis system and built their sequel game around what is, in essence, a gimmick, all to cash-in on it's good name.

Reviewer's Background :
I completed Shadow of Mordor and thoroughly enjoyed it, with some minor gripes (bland level design, uninspiring story)


Main Story : Coming from the previous instalment you would figure out the opening would make sense. But no. Only a few minutes in and it goes all over the place Talion being a stubborn donkey for petty means and Celebrimbor constaly arguing with every decision he undertakes makes the opening act very confusing. Add to that new characters that are so obviously one sided that their alignment is basically written on their forehead and you quickly get the message that the story has once again been overlooked. Its served as crudely as all the sidequests, go to that point, do a random mission, that somehow magically ties in your everyday open world activities to the main plot, and get kicked back to the open world. The guys knew so well it would make litle sense that they had to break up everything into acts. I'm sorry but when you need to 100% the side quests to understand at least half of the story something went wrong in the writing process.


Ending : The major "plot twist" aside the story ends in an, once again, uninspired boss fight that is a "more cinematic" version of every miniboss you encountered up to now. (Hey at least its not a QTE). And leaves you asking where's the other 50% of the story. "Ah well you see, the movies..." Alright we get it, you didn't want to break the movie lore but Shelobb is a lusty maid, Orcs raise Balrogs and Celebrimbor is now part of Sauron otherwise that's cool! Oh and if you want the true ending (aka, a cinematic) enjoy defending your baseS against ever increasingly higher level armies which require you to reorganize all your defenses and individually level them up... TWENTY ONE TIMES!


"Who wants to buy a lootcrate?"


Power Curve : Shadow of Mordor's power fantasy of starting out simple but finishing as a god was satisfying enough. In this one though you don't have upgrades so much as side grades. When in SoMordor you could stack all your skills, here you have to chose between one of 3 upgrades which artificially creates "playstyles". Once again, when the previous game taught you the best way to play, there isn't any reason to pick anything else than what you already know.


Gear Progression : And when it comes to gear, You have gems that give minor buffs and that's quaint but compared to SoMordor's Runes... well this paint's a grim picture. You now have set pieces of gear with rarities going from Common, Rare, Epic to Legendary except EVERYTHING is randomized.

• So you could very well find a Rare dagger with 30% crit damage bonus, ok sweet.
  
• Or. You could find a Legendary one, that casts Poison on an enemy, every 25 seconds, ON LEGENDARY A FIRE SET.

And Ho! Get this, you can't reroll items! The only way to get new ones is to Kill Legendary captains. Easy enough right? Well if there actually weren't so damn missing from the party, it would be! In my 64 Hours of playtime I have met 12 Legendary Orcs. So 12 Legendary pieces you say? Haha, Nooo child!
Because you need to kill Orcs from a distinct class, in a distinct tribe, at a distinct rarity!
...
So having finished all side quests and the main story, I never finished the set i was going for, nor any of the dropped ones for that matter. Thanks.


"Lootcrate anyone?"

• The interface looks really cheap. Way too modern for LOTR and worse than SoMordor.
  
• The main menu background is a Slideshow. Where the previous one showed talion in the different states as the story progressed.
  
• This inventory that makes no sense. Just tabs, from left to right. Open excel, name your columns with body parts and voilà a "new" inventory. Don't fix what ain't broke.
  
• Carnàn's voice is very, very irritating. To the point that you're wondering if coping with this bit of the story is worth you mental health.

All in all Shadow of War feels misguided. They already had the gameplay formula and all they had to do was focus on the story and the world building and how they could merge everything together. But here in the sequel, its just another serving of nemesis pie. With the whole game serving as platter to hold it up, playing to the light, enticing you to have a bite, only for you to throw it straight back into the waiter's face when you realize it was empty all along. But they sure do advise you to get their "complimentary lootcrates" to wash away the taste.

The Witcher 3 is the "final" chapter of the Witcher video game series and epitome of more than 10 years of experience from CD Projekt. Everything that they have learnt finds it culmination in this masterpiece.

- Brilliant scores that convey the peticular dark fantasy theme of the Witcher world while perfectly underlining the greatness of its landscapes.
- A story that takes cues and ties ends to the previous chapters and the books. That is superbly written and does absolutely not take you for granted. With characters that you will find yourself coming back to their company after your perilous and diverse side quests. And a point must be made on that note:
- Side quests that actually are not filler! Real stories, multiple choices, that influence in one way or another the rest of your journey, that are not a slog but actually a joy to complete just to accrue knowledge about the spwrawlingly deadly fauna that your job is to weed out. You, the mutant, the freak, cat's eyes, puss peepers, the White Haired One, The Witcher, Geralt of Rivia. You are no hero in this world. Every decision is morally grey. Its up to you to make the "right" choice, if there ever was one.
- And boy do you have some! With more than 150 hours of content, 16 FREE bits of DLC and 2 large Expansions. CD Projekt Red has 1Upped the whole industry. With games nowadays filled with appropriately named "filler content" on top of barebones games that nickel and dime you the whole way through, having Game Developpers actually caring about making good games and treating their audience as Fans and not Customers is such a godsend. These tiny little guys, in their humble Polish studio, making such a masterpiece; the pride of their country I tell ya.

So YES, Buy the Witcher 3, Buy The Witcher games (and import your saves), Support game developpers that make great games and have the time of their lives without their wallet in the other hand.

P.S. There are so many more things about this game that make it what it is (Gwent, Voice Acting, Native Dualshock 4 support, An Awesome modding community [this game is absolutely gorgeous and tweaked to perfection], DRM Free Policy, etc.) but you realize this would get very drawn out, very quickly. :)

A shame games cannot be reviewed just for their art.[/i]

Beatbuddy is a 2D exploration game with the whole game universe based on Music. The presentation is really creative, and the art original. The worlds are varied (with the exception of enemies only two in the entire game...) the Musc is very enjoyable and the fact that it builds up as you explore further gives a really gratifying feeling.

However while the artsy part of the game is great, the "Game" part really doesn't keep up.
For starters the narator has a tendency to mimic DJ scratching when he speaks. While it is a very interesting idea the result of it are cutscenes that are painfully long because of him, delaying any sense of conclusion at each and every sentence. Thank god they appear only rarely in the game.
The whole game is underwater which makes it impossible to have granular control. You'll often find yourself restarting mutiple times parts where very precise tasks are required to be done in very little time. Furthermore as you don't gain short invulnerability when hit and enemies love to push you around when they hit you will find yourself being bounced about to your inevitable death. This happenning quite often it is one of the main reason while you will start cursing the game for not being forgiving.
Level design is not very well thought out either, you will often find yourself trying to find out why you can't go there, if you are actually supposed to be there and stuck because you went somewhere you weren't supposed to be.
All these issues lead to a hot mess of frustration and anger, powerless against a game that punishes you for being to curious.
And it really is a shame that the actual gameplay is the worst part of the game, leaving what otherwise would've been a enjoyable experiment.

Even though BeatBuddy has the looks of a fun rythm/exploration game, it's faulty game mechanics and ill conceived levels put an swift end to any enjoyable experience. Therefore I cannot recommend this game.