Recent reviews by vanquishedValiant

A delightful collection of combat doll and cyborg ero-guro animations wrapped up in a serviceable 5-6h sidescrolling survival-horror shooter.

If you like watching barely-dressed sci-fi women with occasional ♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ each other to death and dismemberment while acting out an abridged parallel to Signalis, Cyan Brain has you covered.

If your favourite part of MMOs is doing dungeons with a party of 4, but you're disappointed by how simple and easy the dungeons are in FFXIV, or don't want to keep up with the baggage of playing retail WOW, then Fellowship is exactly what you're looking for.

Fellowship is a nearly 1:1 recreation of the "Mythic Plus" Dungeon system from World of Warcraft; with none of the massive open world or long levelling requirements. Controls, movement, class mechanics, and even aesthetics will be instantly recognisable to any veteran of WOW from the past 10 years, but there's no long levelling process to get into the good part; you can jump straight into a dungeon with well-scaled difficulty, diverse monster types, and engaging bosses alongside 3 of your friends only minutes after installing the game.

The downsides; Dungeons are the focus of the game, and it doesn't have room for much else. There's no open world here, no deep character customization or personalization, and not much room for roleplay. You play a stock Hero setup; a personality, visual, and set of abilities in the same vein as a character from Overwatch or DOTA, only that you're picking between WOW style MMO holy trinity classes.

Second; the solo queue is... hit or miss. Make no mistake; this game is best played with friends. Even duo queues aren't so bad, but if you plan to go at this alone, you'll be subject to both the best and worst that party finder has to offer- and usually the worst. It's not totally intolerable, but it's not great, and as of Early Access in October 2025, the game is missing some important social tools to assist with this.

Still, I think what's on offer is well worth the asking; the second my group got into the flow of clearing dungeons together like the glory days of WOW, we felt right at home, and you might too. Give it a shot!

An RPG that demands your attention from the very first moments and delivers the same quality of gripping storytelling and emotions every moment through.

Many have praised the gameplay, but honestly it's pretty typical JRPG fare with a heavy-handed focus on the timed parry mechanic. Perfectly serviceable, but can overwhelm the rest of the experience on harder tuned fights.

Where this game really shines is everywhere else; the story, the music, the atmosphere and writing, characters and humour, every bit of this world draws you in and makes you want to stay, even when you know you shouldn't.

A must play.

Kazutaka Kodaka wrote a Yuri game with a trans girl in it! It's premise, plot and characters is easily as strong as any of his other works, and Shuten Order keeps offering new delights and surprises all the way through its runtime.

Translations issues reported by some are extremely minor, and won't interrupt your experience at all.

If you like mystery VNs, you'll have a great time with Shuten Order!

Oozes style and knows exactly what it wants to be. This game is a joy for those who love the Villainess archetype and want to experience it honestly- not replacing her with a typical heroine. The writing is witty, energetic, and tongue-in-cheek, embracing the anachronisms of the setting fully with a natural balance of noble etiquette and modern humour. The art is beautiful and well stylized, and the music is exciting and well suited.

It's easy to learn and fast to play, a tactical map that steadily evolves into an almost grand-strategy style front management campaign that asks you to genuinely consider the choices you make as you cede and gain ground and make specific plays to achieve your goals. The turn based RPG combat for individual battles is simple but quite snappy, and doesn't shy away from making individual actions really matter.

And of course, it's gay as hell. More than enough for my approval.

Game's great. Just don't expect to play it on your 10 year old school laptop.

Edit on February 17 2025, post Second Demo edition:

The developers released a revised demo before the games release, and have shown significant improvements to the areas I'd highlighted as problems. Some of these have been features clearly already intended for full release, while others are clear responses to feedback on the demo, but both are fantastic to see and show that the developers care about the game.

The feel and balance of the game are much improved, and though the reserve card mechanic was retained (with the enemy building reserve even encouraged directly) it already feels far less punishing with adjustments made to the difficulty of the boss featured in the demo.

We've also been shown a second faction with a satisfying gameplay mechanic, and a meta-progression system that looks to provide lots of replay value.

I'm impressed, and am now looking forward to it.

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Game looks and feels good in its core gameplay. It's simple and intuitive to understand and fun to play in practice, making you want to experiment and figure out how to best create lines and avoid gaps in the familiar Tetris method.

Unfortunately, the building tiles tend to cause a bit too much friction with the Tetris mechanic, having quite strict demands on what tiles they want to be placed next to while also having variable shapes- one corner piece building requires that at least 5 of the 7 tiles surrounding it be exactly one type to receive an appropriate bonus, or else receive scarcely anything at all from placing it.

The major problem this causes with the current demo build is that those rewards and accompanying challenges are just scaled much too hard for the tools and difficulty settings that are given to you. To a certain degree in any roguelike it's fine for it to be difficult and for RNG to be involved, but with the displayed difficulty scaling and no apparent 'meta-progression' it seems unlikely to be enjoyable at any difficulty higher than the 2/5 that the demo allows.

Resources for upgrades are quite scarce and precious, and its also highly likely that you'll find yourself only 1 or 2 short of a meaningful upgrade with no way to use the remainder. This is mostly fine for peaceful maps, but when it comes to military maps...

Enemy garrisons numbering 20 or even 30 dwarf what you can manage without near perfect and RNG favoured play. The most reliable way to compete with the enemy is to abuse the reserve piece mechanic to make it so that one of their buildings doesn't end up on the board at all, which feels exploitative and overly restrictive.

The first step I'd ask for is having the piece that is kept in reserve be played at the very end- this prevents the player from exploiting it to hide enemy buildings and instead look for the most favourable place to use each piece. The second thing I'd recommend is to increase the military output of most player military buildings. The problem isn't so much the number of enemies as it is the miniscule friendly values that you can generate.

This game's concept is fun, and the visuals, audio, and tactile feel are great! It just needs a little more attention paid to rewarding player skill and mitigating randomness.

Wizards. Nuff said.

Great tactics game for lovers of XCOM and other military breaching tactics games, but with Wizards.

Good humour, good plot, good worldbuilding, good gameplay.

Really lets you unlock the maximum potential of your units without arbitrarily limiting combos. By late game you can truly break things wide open, and the game rewards you for the creativity!

Absolutely oozes style, using every aspect of the trope archetype to its utmost for zany over the top fun.

A fun and promising demo, though also mercilessly difficult, I half wonder if the act 1 map needs toning down a bit or if the demo just included the hardest possible difficulty, it seems pretty punishing for what amounts to a tutorial map.

Definitely looking forward to seeing more of this.

Greedy update ruined the game, removed content and build variety and reset all progression without adding anything new to progress!

Just do everything over from the start, there's less ways to play and more ways to pay! And when we're upset about this the devs just say we don't understand and are playing wrong!

Well, I'm just not going to play.

Was looking forward to this update while in development but now the game seems like it doesn't have a future.