Recent reviews by zᶻᵒᶻᶻˡᵉ

This is great. I have purchased many online courses for other topics, and this is one of the best I have done. For the price, it's a steal.

Risk of Rain 2 art style, MOBA characters, and Lost Ark bosses.

Sometimes I just want to play a low-investment game to relax. This has excellent controller support, allows you to pause / resume runs, and the combat feels very polished.

There are some balancing issues and other nags, but nothing major.

Imagine Elden Ring with a 30 min run back to the boss, an enemy randomizer which changes each time you die, and your 2 teammates are purple spirits from DS3. If that sounds fun for you, get this game.

No doubt this will make you a better player. I find it a reliably frustrating experience which does not feel very respectful towards my time.

I recommend the base game. The DLC is subpar for a number of reasons as other reviews point out, but my criticism is that the DLC is simply not worth buying. A few main things are to blame:

- The lore makes no sense
- New spells are worse than base game spells, most being meme build trash
- Upgrade materials and souls do not reflect the difficulty (low level materials everywhere)
- Mandatory collection system (like sacred tears) which adds multipliers to defenses and damage
- New system does not carry over to base game

All new bosses and basic enemies are tuned around having maxed out fragments. Without these, they simply do way too much damage and have unreasonable health bars. As a reward for gathering all of these fragments (which is similar to getting maxed flasks in the base game), enemies are at a reasonable difficulty level. This does not feel like your character becomes more powerful from a baseline, but rather feels like undoing a serious nerf to character power. This system does NOT carry back over to the base game.

I did not enjoy the DLC, most of the enemies and boss fights just felt like ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pranks. There is no real reward for doing it early unlike the DLC in previous souls games.

I bought this game after reading "buy this game if you like Terraria, but your girlfriend likes Stardew Valley". This game solidly fills a niche between several other groundbreaking games, and has very low frustration co-op gameplay.

- Fun digging and exploration like Minecraft
- Simple farming, base building, and decorating like Stardew Valley
- Bosses and gear progression like Terraria
- Skill system like OSRS (sort of)
- Automation and circuitry like Factorio (sort of)

This feels really similar to early Terraria. Solid systems, fun gameplay, well thought out identity, just missing a little bit of polishing. If the devs continue making improvements, I can see this becoming as big as the other games I compared it to. Adding some more gear, bosses, zones, and QoL features will make this even better. HUGE potential.

A "souls-like" only in the sense of difficult enemies, and lore which is full of angst and completely obscure. It falls flat compared to actual souls games due to a lack of cohesive mechanics, and a writing team who would think Zanzibart is profoundly deep. Every boss is an endless gank of trash enemies, the world does not encourage exploration, the builds and items are wildly unbalanced, and the story does not make sense. Ultimately, the developers seem to not understand what makes a game great, and the mostly empty areas with copy-pasted assets are a good indicator of the level of thought put into the world.

Essentially a souls game due to a lack of Armored Core's characteristic build variety. The max lock on range is low, ricochets make many weapons useless at range, and the stagger mechanic is required to deal / avoid damage. This means the only consistently viable option is rushing bosses hyper-aggressively, and staggering them before you get staggered. Not many builds can do this, and it means "doing damage" with conventional weapons is not feasible. Parts can be swapped at checkpoints, so there is no incentive to create a well thought out build for each mission.

Using a med-heavyweight build with dual melee weapons and an empty fist highlights the intended game strategy. Assault boost kick in, full charge melee, punch (staggered here), swap melee, punch, full charge second melee, punch, repeat. Most bosses will lose at least a third of their hp while unable to react, and all arena encounters will get killed in one true combo. I was hoping to recreate the lightweight gun builds I had from earlier games, but they do not work.

One of the worst running games I have played, on the tier of Cyberpunk. Horrible FPS, constant crashes, and tons of bugs in game. Aside from being unplayable, it appears they are pulling the scumbag Borderlands 3 DLC strategy of selling multiple season passes, which goes against the industry standard definition of "season pass".

Same developers as Fallout New Vegas, and it shows. A huge amount of effort was put into a unique world, including the systems like crafting, survival mechanics, and world exploration. Without going into much detail, every system in the game makes sense and feels thought out, unlike the vast majority of "open world co-op survival craft" games. So far, it has been a great co-op game further enhanced by a theme which keeps it novel and fun.

I have played many hours on switch, and finally decided to grab it for PC. The switch has a hard time handling the graphics and weapon aiming, which the PC version completely solves.

This game is a modern version of the nostalgic multiplayer games from an early 2000's childhood. It feels like reliving the days of Conker's Bad Fur Day, Ratchet and Clank, and Goldeneye. The whole toy soldier aesthetic is very well done and incredibly fun to play. This makes for a really good background game when hanging out on discord.