Recent reviews by [WC] Scott Sterling

This was the worst experience I have had with a game in quite a while. It took 7GB off my data plan and did not run, because it apparently depends on the outdated Ubisoft Game Launcher. Not only is it apparently not compatible with Windows 10 (error popup on start), it just closes with an undescriptive error. How this game can still be sold for money is beyond my grasp.

Spent hours trying to get this game to start beyond the patcher. Tried the community-based Tweaker software. Reinstalled it entirely. Ran as admin (why does a game require admin permission everytime it starts?). Game just closes silently. What a waste of time.

This game really is something. On the one hand, the idea is great, the setting is amazing and I love the voice acting.
But boy, have the devs overplayed the game. You really get the feeling that whoever designed the levels played them for hours and hours and eliminated any and every convenient way to pass the mission in a smooth way. Instead, clever skill-usage is blocked by some annoying object so your skill doesn't reach the enemy by one pixel. Way too many enemies roam around, making it impossible to keep an eye of all of their movements at once. The controls are horribly overloaded and almost impossible to handle in fast succession. How many times have I tried to make a character walk a finely grained path, only to have them stand up and run and get killed, because that is what a double-click does?
Really, the first few levels were a breeze. But the last five or so were pure agony to sit through. And there are achievements to do to missions in different ways (all requiring you to do the actions and timings the devs had in mind?) or even not use certain skills that give you at least a bit of a breather? Hard pass!

This game went from top to flop in a matter of minutes. The artwork is beautiful, the story is engaging and I like the concept of tower defense meets platforming meets puzzle game.

But man, do the developers try to throw a wrench into the works. Some levels and mechanics are designed around being obstrusive and annoying. Why on earth am I prevented from building a tower in a convenient spot, if this is supposed to be a tower defense game in parts? You have very few seconds between rounds to collect resources and build your defenses, which in itself is tedious, since you need to take care of both, colour coding and combinations of your defenses. Resulting in you doing a bulk of the work during the rounds which is, paired with the absolute asinine controls (left shoulder buttons control switch through characters and bind them to first or second player, while right shoulder buttons switch through the characters weapons -- don't get me started on how many times we tangled up the controls, trying to switch a character between the two players).

All in all: this game is very ambitious in trying to be many things at once. As a result, it does nothing really good and falls short in every regard.

This is a great game with fantastic character design and -development. I just love the graphics and the overall presentation, as well as the controls. Although they are a bit hard to master at first.
It is one of those "you are stuck in an MMORPG"-animes or -games, but done right this time!
I am not an avid player on very hard games myself. And CrossCode is indeed very challenging at times. I personally have to give it my best or try challenges multiple times before succeeding, but I never feel the need to grind or feel overly frustrated.
Same goes for some jumping puzzles with not so obvious solutions at times. This goes especially for situations where the height of platforms is not really distinguishable due to the representation.

But the devs themselves said that some of the hardness comes from their bias of testing the game over and over and they are constantly improving the game through patches.

+ lovely design
+ great characters
+ interesting story
+ mostly balanced difficulty
+ challenging puzzles

- sometimes a bit too hard
- visual puzzles, such as jumping over platforms, are sometimes needlessly hard to figure out

9/10