Recent reviews by RaRaMi! // Senja

In short, currently DJMax RESPECT V is one of the highest production value on PC Rhythm Game (although in terms of software development, osu!lazer wins a mile than this game), and maybe even beating most of Arcade Rhythm games due to song and MV production.

(I don't know the cost, but I can estimte for every DLC, NEOWIZ have to spend ~10-15k USD to pay the artists, notecharters and devs)

I really wish the prices can be cheaper, but that may cause cutting corners, so rather than hoping for cheaper, I better pay for getting more money lol

People seem to be harsh on Nightingale recently due to recent official server removal (replaced by self-hosted), and pointing on bugs, balancing and the content.
---
Tbh, that was unfortunate, but not "bad" enough to play this game, as people somehow ignore the best effort dev poured into this game: Audio Visual.

The game is basically "what if we turn UE5 tech demo back then into full-fledged game?", and they delivered. The environments, the effects, and the "dolby-atmos theatre like" audio effects trickling your ears and eyes. It's embodiment of Unreal Engine 5 prime. The world is not always hostile, so you can roam around nicely... yet it still does a favor to combat if you prefer to.

Bonus, their crafting system is delicious. It's a simple [ingredients => factory] style, but the ingredients modifier are very vast and impact the result, so even with same "recipe", your equipment may have different stats.

Now onto the "unfortunate" side:
- Yes there are bugs. The stuck was very common; even the devs prepare the unstuck button (lol)
- The AI is... uuh... down bad, for both companion and enemy. Only the boss have "okay" AI (which because the boss has its own arena and triggers). There are some interesting mobs to fight because their behaviour are unique, but in the end the combat loop is constantly same.
- Despites having a extremely good visual environments, the combat graphics are meh.
- In-game text (like damage and hover) is way too big and too opaque. It's not blending with environment.
- Player HUD is meh. It's your "average RPG crafting" UI with everything boxy/squared, and item icons being all similarly diagonal angled. Thankfully the font is nice and the food icons are the only one who has best visual.
- Performance is a bit poor. If you ever run UE4Arch products, it has quite same framerate as that, given also similar visual. It's almost like this game is a product of 3D arch designer rather than regular game dev.

Yes, the downsides are quite many, but I think their best effort on visual paid off as it's the main selling point of Nightingale. And the only breaking part of the game is AI stuck, which the world itself can be reset to "unstuck" them,;so it's as I said, just "unfortunate".

In short:
- Buy only when the price under $5
- Game is extremely mixed bag on very good and very bad experience

Long Review:
I wrote this review assuming and ignoring their past EA history and its 10year+ development limbo, as now (July 2025) it's stated as STABLE RELEASE.

The game is really on a mixed bag on very good on some aspects, and very bad on the rest, such as:
- Great atmosphere, great textures & models, but janky, meh animation and world is overall static
- Game is moddable, extensible and configurable, yet the documentation is extremely sparse and tripmine everywhere. Expect frequent breaks when installing mods altogether.
- Game progression (exp, skills, unlocks) are present and varied, yet the progression is very constant linear without any surprise progression or specalized unlocks
- Sandbox is very customized, yet it's blocky design (like minecraft) on realism, non-blocky world. The result is awkwardness custom design
- World is vast and procedural, but dull when it was too large. Smaller generation will give more density than large map.
- Music is dynamic and rich, but unfortunately IMO it doesn't invoke any memorable moments. It's not even a good cues.
- Current state is pretty stable, less bugs and performant, yet it's still very barebone, like not all features are present (feels like cutting corners)

TBH, the base game is really ehh, and mods are there to fix it. It's very lucky the game has very good extendability so lots of mods are fixing the problems (like SMX/SteelUI fixing the bad game UI, and some QoL mods to fix game behaviour)

But still, the core problems are:
- Zombie variety and progression. It's straight up zombie level up with bullet sponge and attack damage. No tricks, no proper AI behaviours. And the zombie selections are even barren for a RPG/sandbox style. Left 4 Dead even had more unique zombies than this.
- Level Editor is very unintuitive. Though I can't complain much for this, as rarely game dev excels on this. Still, for a game that relies on UGC, their SDK/editor/KB should be more engaging.

Subjectively, I passionately hate this game UI. Feels like they have no frontend/UI team at all. Even their website (TFP and 7D2D) are plain blogspot-like without any game spotlight. It's really weird. I know sleek UI may not be essential to the game, but come on, this game was funded big time.

Excellent quality of mod with little down nitpick

The VO, level design, content and gameplay are absolute top-tier. The creator tried to reflect how Valve works, but still push his own style so it feels a mix of both, in terms of originality and vibes. The story chews, the snark hits, and the difficulty smacks.

The only little nitpick/subjective from me (again, nitpick, not downsides, it's objectively very good as it is):
- This game has lukewarm ending. The team pushes more puzzles more than the actions, so obviously the tension will be lower. Good thing it has an epilogue to wrap up the story.
- The level design are extremely good, but sometimes the difficulty progression are flipping each other. Some puzzles in the mid game are harder than in the near-end game.
- Some puzzles look "easier" than they're supposed to be, so when it was solved, the solution looks a bit underwhelming.
- Also, some puzzles are "harder" than they look. I also noticed some people also gave up midway. While it means the puzzle quality is very good, it was unexpected for "regular" players to encounter hard puzzle in the middle of progress.

While I recommend this game, I am a bit disappointed that the level design world interactivity is very low, which tbh in this kind of game, that experience is basically the "expected".

Gunplay is satisfying, difficulty was OK and coop play is.. while rather simple, it works. The level design also acknowledge co-op gameplay, so it's a quite a plus.

Fortunately, this game is not too pricey and occasionally goes into sale, so it's very good as VR collection.

If they are making co-op/versus multiplayer next year with concept of para-competition (like legion TD), we'll be doomed.


inb4
"Penyakit Balatro Gila"

TBH this game only lacks in balancing and content, which is why it's early access. Other than that, it's already complete in terms of technicality and game mechanics. I'm surprised Manor Lords runs very well with decent optimization (looks like the dev are really familiar with the UE5 intrinsics).

I really hope for more starting perks and variety when it's fully released.

I just want to play rhythm game, not my feelings :')

but seriously, for indie segment, this is absolute class. There are some flaws, but the presentation of the game outshines the downsides. The music treatment is above this price tag. And what I love is the world design (Island), which is pretty balanced on vertical and horizontal spaces (so it's not too large or tall).

Talking about VA, Fubuki and Polka does a very good acting voicing Monica and Tania, while Noel tbh did quite poor voicing Vanessa. The intonation is too bland, despites Vanessa was supposed to be expressive and hold important to story and it feels quite a letdown tbh.

Other than that, the game is solid. for 100k IDR (indie pricing), you get well developed action game with quite high attention to main character details (animation, voicelines, etc.). Game is not easy but not that hard, and progression through games are OK.

Though, spell is quite not balanced IMO, which in the end you mostly only cast lightning/thunder spells if you have good precision and reaction speed (since it has very high damage, long range and in the end has very low cooldown)

I recommend this game due to high subjectiveness towards this game (since I want to support my own country game products). But details below. (TL;DR, I subjectively like, but have serious concerns objectively)

Things I like (subjectively):
+ Bahasa Indonesia translation is close to superb. Usually, localized games tend to have a lil bit weird of Bahasa Indonesia, this one really clicks and a homage of classic Indonesian TL'ed games
+ Art is solid and cute, and most concepts of the game are pretty much delivered. I can see why this is quite appealing by Investors
+ Almost crash-free and good game stability
+ UI design is pretty nice

Things this game took a wrong turn:
- Game balancing is pretty poor. I kinda see this game took inspirations from Ragnarok Online, but seems to forgot that RO world is vast and large in scale, so farming/grinding phase becomes painful in this game with no alternatives.
- AI is pretty weak. This causes boss fighting feels so far from being epic, and all the time you can just simply dodge with good timing to fight bosses.
- Audio treatment in this game is lukewarm. Sometimes it sounds crunchy, sometimes it feels muffled. I kinda understand tho since there was no dedicated sound engineer on their team.
- Content is pretty much linear and short. I have a hunch the game got crunch time and most of the codebase are hardcoded, since there is no content updates for a year.
- Basically coop is just try to share fun with two players, rather than getting different experience by doing teamwork, since there are no coop specific features or combos.
- While there are no crashes, fighting usually have bugs that either make enemies stuck, or player being unable to play.

Overall, I want to like this game and basically recommends it since it's still playable and clearable (and the cute things are passable and consistent), but if you quite nitpick and hard to ignore flawed things, this might be what you don't like.