Recent reviews by umberger

Incredibly good idle / incremental game that has one of the most unique presentations in the genre. If the dark aesthetic of the screenshots appeals to you, and you enjoy watching numbers go up in an exponential fashion, this game is for you. Excellent art, fun puzzles, great atmosphere. An absolute steal at $8.

Amazing little incremental game! Has really great pacing with meaningful upgrades, and a fantastic soundtrack to go with it. My only complaint is that the Mining Drill alternate ammo feels like a downgrade when you get it, but otherwise everything else is really great. Absolutely worth picking up!

Very fun incremental with great pacing of upgrades, and some cool alternate game modes to keep things going once you finish the main game mode. Simple but good art, as well as some great sound design (no massively over-layered sound effects, and the soundtrack is very relaxing to boot). Major props for making it not actually require clicking. Devs are very active on their forum and already planning a few more modes as of the time of this review. Hope to see more from them!

I really liked this game and feel it's even a bit underrated, personally. There are certainly valid critiques you can make about it, but as long as you're willing to look past some indie jank, there's an enjoyable experience to be had. The animations are a bit rough and combat can feel a little floaty. However, the unique setting / art direction, the killer soundtrack, and the heavy BLAME! inspiration all more than make up for that. It's short enough to not overstay its welcome, but not too short to where it feels like you aren't getting your money's worth.

The world design is surprisingly good, with solid variety of architecture, plenty of shortcuts to unlock, and a vast interconnected world that actually makes sense. I think they absolutely nailed the exploration aspect of things, really giving you the sense of being on a quest into the unknown. Each area feels visually distinct, cramped sewers, vast cloud-shrouded towers in the sky, the depths of a flooded city stalked by otherworldly leviathans, fields littered with machines, and the enigmatic center of the Omnistructure itself. It's such a cool world overall, and despite how enormous the environments are, they managed to make it not feel empty or just big for the sake of being big.

It can be easy to get lost in some zones at first, but fortunately if you spend some time orienting yourself you'll figure out where to go pretty quick. There is an objective tracker to help you out, as well as lots of environmental cueing in the form of red lights. Fast travel is unlocked from the start, and you're given an item that acts as a mobile checkpoint as well (you can place it wherever you want, but if you want to change its position you'll have to find one of the "permanent" ones), both of which really help with traversal. Bosses are by and large good, but the Shadow of the Colossus-style "climb" gimmick is a bit weak, and it always felt faster / safer to just use the bow to bypass it altogether.

Overall, it's a solid 7/10 with some impressive scope for such a small team. There are tons of weapons and armor to find, plenty of hidden secrets, a crafting system that's actually useful and easy to engage with, and a lot of charm. And again, the soundtrack is fantastic. Easy recommend on a sale if you like Soulslikes and can live with a little indie jank.

tl;dr - Worth it at full price if you've never played NG2 and like character action games / spectacle fighters. If you've only played OG NG2 and want to be able to play it on PC, it's worth checking this out over NGS2. If you've played NGS2, pick this up on a sale, download the Ninja Gaiden 2 White mod, and have a blast with the best version of the game.

Still a great, but flawed, character action game. I am heavily biased by nostalgia for the original version as well as the Sigma release on PS3 back in the day. Having just come off a playthrough after hundreds of hours with those two versions, I'll say that I still find it very enjoyable, and the fresh coat of paint is gorgeous. Moment-to-moment gameplay is great, combat is largely tons of fun and back to being the over the top bloodbath it should be, and the weapons are all fun to use. Hitting a Flying Swallow or Izuna Drop never gets old, and for newcomers there's a lot of fun to be had in learning all the ins and outs of the combat: chaining UTs, effectively using Shurikens, crowd control, etc etc.

Now that being said, a lot of the issues people had with the original game are still unfortunately present. Some bosses are just straight up not fun to fight (Chapter 3 boss...after all these years, why?), enemies are very grab-happy, and the higher difficulties are still a bit projectile heavy (though nowhere near OG NG2). The extra chapters that Sigma added are back and still feel like a weak point in the game, but that comes down to personal preference as some may appreciate the opportunities to play as the other characters. They did add some unlockable costumes, but only a handful, which again is a bit disappointing when there have been so many designs across the older versions that they could have pulled from. There are a ton of cosmetic mods to download if you do want to change things up, otherwise it's not really an issue anyway.

If you've never played a Ninja Gaiden game, or if you're coming here from NG4 looking for more, pull the trigger, you'll enjoy it. If you've played the game before and just want to see everything in really pretty upgraded graphics, maybe wait for a sale. This is the definitive edition of the game (at least for PC users, it's better than NGS2 in my opinion), but if you've already played Sigma, there's really not a ton of difference. HOWEVER, when you play with the Ninja Gaiden 2 White mod...miles ahead of Sigma, and worth the price of admission for that alone.

Really enjoyed the story / characters and overall gameplay, but the alchemy itself is a little too simplified compared to other games in the series. There's still plenty of fun to be had experimenting with the alchemy / crafting system, but it's deceptively easy to break, and once you do it loses a lot of the puzzle element that gives the system its charm.

That being said, everything else about the game is a lot of fun and it's a good entry in the series. Here's hoping we get a Yumia 2 with a bit more complexity to the alchemy system!

As a dad to a senior corgi (just turned 14!), I'll have you know I only cried 5 times playing through this game. Genuinely such a wonderful experience that'll tug at the heart strings of any dog owner, really exceeded my expectations going in to it; could really see a bunch of my own corgi in Bong-gu, which made it that much more personal feeling. Beautiful all around, and a joy to play (even with aforementioned crying). 10/10 easy recommend if you even kind of like dogs and are in the mood for an emotional story. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a dog to go hug and spoil.

Excellent horror game, and very much so worthy of the Silent Hill name. The two biggest sticking points for most people are going to be combat and having to do multiple playthroughs.

Combat I really have no major tips for. Horror game combat has never really been awesome, and here it's just alright. I did one playthrough on each of the 3 difficulties, and honestly would say to just leave Action at Story Mode for your first playthrough and decide if you want it to be harder from there. I didn't notice a huge difference in resource availability, but there is a major difference in enemy health / damage between them. There's not a huge variety of enemy types, which wouldn't be a problem for one playthrough, but it does get old fighting the same things the second and third time through. Do yourself a favor, stick to Story unless you want achievements.

I would liken the multiple playthroughs thing to something more like NieR Automata's Ending A and beyond, in terms of it being more than just "the end cutscene is different". It took me around 20h of actual playtime to see all of the endings, your first playthrough will probably take 7-9h, your second will take 5-6h, and any after that will take significantly less. Mercifully, you can skip all cutscenes, and the game will tell you if you're skipping a new / extended cutscene. In addition to the new cutscenes and ending options, you also will find new lore notes throughout, but beyond the second playthrough there are admittedly very few of these. That being said, I did each of my first 3 playthroughs on different Puzzle Difficulty settings, which kept them fresh enough for me.

I will say that if you're wanting to just look up the other endings, you'll be missing a lot of story from the extra notes that get added in playthrough 2 / 3. If the idea of playing through again is really grueling, go for more of a video essay or see if you can find all of the notes posted somewhere.

Really solid horror experience overall, great atmosphere, sound design, and story. Easy recommend at full price if you're a fan of the genre, wait for a sale if the idea of replaying it multiple times is off-putting to you.

tl;dr - For what Lies of P is to Bloodborne, Wuchang is to Dark Souls 1. 100% worth it at full price, wait for some patches if you're worried about performance.

Really great Soulslike that nails the sense of exploration and interconnectivity that Dark Souls 1 had, but benefits from years of QOL improvements the genre has had since then.

Gameplay is, for the most part, slowed down compared to more recent Soulslikes. Area enemies are threatening and the zones themselves serve a purpose of more than just "narrow hallway to get to the next boss". Lots of shortcuts, stuff winding back towards the hub, and plenty of scenic vistas to give you that "I can't wait to go there" excitement. Enemy variety is pretty good, with some good surprises here and there.

Leveling up in this game is fairly unique for the genre. You have a skill tree that has 6 branches from the center: one for each of the 5 weapons (longsword, one-handed sword, dual blades, spear, axe), as well as one "general" one. The trees themselves have nodes that grant you stat points, so you don't need to worry about looking up builds online to find out what arbitrary soft cap you should hit before putting points in your chosen flavor of offensive stat. Most importantly, you can respec at any time for absolutely no cost, encouraging you to play around with multiple weapons for different scenarios if you'd like. This even extends to weapon upgrades, which are done through "Mastery" nodes in every tree. So say you want to play longsword and have found a few weapon upgrade materials: spend the materials on the tree, and now every longsword you have / find is +3. Don't like it? Refund them and swap over to the spear tree and now every spear will be +3. That single feature is such a good solution to the classic weapon upgrade problem, and I really appreciated it in my playthrough, as it let me try weapons I otherwise definitely would not have in a typical Soulslike. You can certainly beat the whole game with just one weapon type of your choice, but some bosses do seem a bit easier with certain playstyles (e.g. the longsword parry window is insanely generous, but doesn't work against unarmed strikes). Even though there are only a few weapons for each class, they did an excellent job giving you a unique reason to pick each one: there's a longsword that extends like a whip, an axe that lets you launch yourself into the air, and even a spear that does the Pilebunker / Wylder ult. They did an excellent job of experimenting with fun weapon ideas, and it really pays off.

Bosses are good, but there are only maybe 1 or 2 super memorable ones. The act 1 bosses are mostly a joke, then there is quite a sharp increase in difficulty for the capstone boss, then the game does stay difficult for the most part until the end. There could probably be a more smooth curve towards the difficulty of that boss and beyond, but at no point does the game feel unfair. In fact, even said "wall" boss feels really easy once you really "get" them. There isn't really any one boss that reaches the heights of e.g. Malenia, PCR, Isshin, but every boss was at least fun to fight and none of them feel "samey" at all.

Graphically, the game is gorgeous. I play on a 4090/13900k, which can brute force their way into a smooth 4k experience, but there are a lot of reports of poor performance despite meeting / exceeding recommended specs, so make of that what you will.

There were some issues that bugged me throughout my playthrough: the get-up animation is too slow / has too few i-frames, which feels unnecessarily punishing / causes you to be true-comboed if the AI chooses to do so. The developers have already noted this as a pain point from player feedback and sounds like they want to change that, so hopefully they do so. There weren't too many bosses that took me multiple tries, but for those that did, it does get frustrating to do your runback and then have to manually skip the cutscene every attempt. Minor gripe that some other animations feel pretty slow for how frequently you do them, namely picking up items, praying to shrines, and getting on / off ladders. Lastly, this game needs an option to auto-skip cutscenes you've seen before. I'd also like to see an option to save "armor sets" due to how important it is in this game (i.e. sets that are good vs slash/stab tend to be bad vs blunt/elemental and vice-versa). As awesome as it is that transmog is available from the start, I wish you could see the name of the armor piece you're selecting the appearance for in that menu, as it does get hard to tell the thumbnails of separate pants and bracers apart from one another, but they can have drastic differences in appearance ingame. These are all things that could be very easily fixed by the developers, and with how active they've been I am optimistic they'll continue to make changes.

Music is great, no notes. Lots of good variety in the boss themes, even between phases.

Overall, great Soulslike and exceeded my expectations. Bought the Deluxe at full price and feel I more than got my money's worth; they've already said they'll be adding even more to it, so looking forward to that too. Insanely good for a first showing, the developers clearly "get" what makes a Soulslike a Soulslike, and I think it belongs up there with the upper echelon of "essentially a FromSoft game" in terms of polish and design. Here's hoping we get more!

tl;dr - A steal at full price if you like walking simulators, cosmic horror, or looked at the screenshots / trailers and thought "that looks kind of cool".

Genuinely my favorite walking simulator I have ever played. Gameplay consists of...well, walking around while occasionally getting bits of story. There is light platforming, though with no fall damage (!), very good controls, and a remarkably snappy respawn if you tumble off a cliff. The levels are an absolute joy to explore, and the (largely minimalist) story is very interesting if you like cosmic horror at all.

The art direction is incredible; I took nearly 400 screenshots during my playthrough, and had about as many "whoa" moments. The Labyrinth's areas range from oppressive, uncaring brutalist behemoths of stone and marble, to endless, awe-inspiring fractal cities with unfathomably large structures reaching into and from the surrounding void. No matter where you are in this game, the visuals are striking (and not just in fidelity). You will wander through shifting halls, ascend hauntingly beautiful towers, and [spoiler, you'll have to see for yourself]; each area both familiar and yet just disturbingly alien enough to remind you that you do not belong. Truly no notes, and I sincerely hope the team is putting together a physical art book of some kind.

Sound design can make or break games in this genre, and Blackshard delivered in spades. ALT 236 and AL9000 made a phenomenal score: meditative and peaceful, yet isolating and haunting. An excellent soundtrack for any wanderer. The low rumbles of the ambiance when music is not playing immerse you in the enormity of the zones you're in, sometimes making you wonder if you truly are alone in there.

From a technical standpoint, I did have a crash when loading my save once, but this got fixed by updating my GPU drivers (and the developers are very active / aware of the issue). Otherwise it ran like a dream and had none of the stereotypical UE5 issues like stuttering.

My blind playthrough ran just shy of 9 hours, with plenty of exploration being done, and only one small secret being missed. If you like to take your time with exploring zones, you'll be surprised how reasonable getting all the achievements is / seeing everything the game has to offer, even blind. I highly recommend playing this game blind and not in a hurry. It truly gains so much from letting you be the one to slowly unravel its secrets, and to get the visual treat of seeing a new zone for the first time. As said in my tl;dr, I feel like this game would be a steal even at full price, definitely a must-play for any fans of exploration in games, walking simulators, or cosmic horror. Makes an excellent case for the argument that video games can be art. (but really, please make a physical art book)