Recent reviews by Gav | Zero

It's basically Nier Automata, but you swap the extensive weapon selection for an extensive outfit collection.

The combat does suffer a bit on the variety level, as the degree in which equipment affects combat is strictly number based.

While you do get skill points to unlock different combos, for the most part you're going to stick to the core mechanic which is parry / dodge + punish.

Unfortunately, some attacks are deemed by the game as dodge-only or parry-only which constricts how combat plays out, often summarized as: wait for boss to telegraph attack, choose between dodge or parry depending whether the enemy shown a glow or not.

If it was glowing, it can be blue (dodge forward), purple (dodge back) or yellow. (Let Jesus pick a direction and mash that dodge button, because the camera will probably decide to look anywhere but the boss prior to it hitting you.)

If there was no glow, you should parry. While you can dodge, you're throwing away an opportunity at retribution, which is the equivalent to an "I win button".

If the enemy is not attacking, and likely won't immediately attack you're welcome to shoot it or run a combo on it, but for the most part you're probably better off just leveraging the dodge / parry system and here's why:

1. Combos don't deal as much damage as punishing.
2. Combos lack variety, and may lock you into an animation in which the enemy not only can, but will hit you.
3. Enemies don't seem to be affected much by being hit, unless hit with a crit or special skill. They will punch back in the midst of your combo.
4. You will miss opportunities to punish.

So in other words, a spicy rock paper scissors. (A very fun one nonetheless)

Here's however some really neat aspects of the game:

There is no direct level system. Enemies in the beginning can be as threatening as in the end. The only thing that truly scales is your damage as you upgrade your weapon, and the number of "estus" you can carry.

Grinding only nets you materials, of which can be crafted into consumables or used in fetch quests.

Multiple foes are dangerous. Unlike most games where enemies will kindly line up and take turns dying, enemies will not wait, and will mess you up in a matter of seconds. Pick your fights, and make sure you prioritize the right enemy.

Similarly to Nier, in a few instances the game will completely transition to a different game style (the underground facility). An interesting change of pace if you ask me.

The soundtrack has some good songs.

Devs did some devious placement of items and secrets. There's plenty to explore.

Interesting, and intuitive platforming.

Here's some really annoying ones:
- Enemy attacks are at times homing, so the enemy may glide or twist in odd ways to land a hit on you, if you didn't properly dodge.
- As mentioned before, the camera hates you, and will sabotage you at really random moments.
- Random slow motion (or FPS drops?) will mess up whatever timing you were planning for your reactions.
- Default button mapping is odd, and at least for me needed some running.
- The soundtrack, and some locations have some really short annoying songs that repeat indefinitely.
- Devs hid goodies in well hidden locations, however finding them is not enough as you may also have to find a password. (Making exploration by itself unrewarding at times)
- Interesting platforming that's at times VERY poorly implemented. (I'm looking at you platforms with Sony's controller button symbols)
- Alternative gameplay sections have weird difficulty variations. (Too easy, or too contrived)

All in all, a fun, competent and challenging game. Not necessarily fair, but achievable.

(I'm still far from finishing my first run, this is more of a first impressions rather than a proper review)

TL;DR: It's a fun time sink.
Play for 4 hours without mods.
Then install QOL mods and you should be good to go.

My thoughts:
It's a fun game where the main goal is to gather resources and craft the next tier's super doohicky, which requires 200 of the previous doohickeys and takes twice as much time to make.

You'll find yourself progressing and then either having to rebuild everything, or start another factory, due to new unlocks. (Either more efficient recipes, or needing 10x the throughput for the next step.)

The process for updating everything is contrived and time consuming, so personally I rather just migrate to the next compound and salvage anything worth saving.

I know that sounds rather overly critical, however I actually enjoy some of that aspect of the game, as you become familiar with the game and it's mechanics you start improving your designs and overall understanding of the game loop, and by forcing you to either redo or move the game allows for the player to grow and experiment.

Now, I do have some serious grievances however:

1. End game is boring, as everything's cost grows exponentially and takes exponentially longer to craft.
2. Combat is an absolute slog, and honestly I wouldn't blame anyone disabling it. I feel like it's only tolerable when exploring, and even then its still so clunky and janky.
(I admit I'll never get tired of the spinning ragdolls)
3. The pace for unlocking traversal tools is odd, with some real head scratchers.
4. The lack of physics for buildings can be very jarring, and while I understand it can end up acting as a very time-consuming chore, I feel like this game could have easily implemented at least something to prevent me from casually laying down a one wall tower to the heavens with platforms to every major biome.
5. There's a semblance of a plot, and an interesting side plot about aliens. It doesn't matter.
6. The environment antagonizes you exclusively. Nothing damages buildings vehicles, and you don't need defences. (WHY NOT?!)
7. The map is static, meaning there's very little replayability once you're familiar with it.
8. Biomes don't matter much, with very few traits being unique to each biome. (How buffs / debuffs like having temperature impacting machine efficiency?
9. Slugs/somerloops/Mercer spheres are great fun to find, quite useful and offer varying levels of challenge, but don't seem to scale well, and end up losing value relatively quickly. (Why not have slugs that have special modifiers, such as reduced energy consumption, or requires less base materials)

Game is extremely fun, and despite limited in mission variety, it never felt stale.

Great fun, and active development pushing new functionality, maps and equipment pretty consistently.

Edited: Sony turned around on account requirement. Adjusting review accordingly.

I'm having a hard time coming to understand what people like about this game so much.

If you boil the game down to it's core mechanic, you're left with a never ending fetch quest where your most common enemy is the terrain, and one would think that this means there's a multitude of ways to circumvent adversity,... and there is a bunch of tat you can build/use but at the end of the day the game designers that built the environment specifically created environments that require a specific solution.

For an open world game, it feels heavily scripted, and the game severely punishes you for trying anything slightly off course.

Your very next enemy is the inventory system, which starts off as an impressive feature, and ends as a bothersome chore, both when managing it, and when carrying it.

If these two points didn't push you away, you're now faced with the biggest issue of them all. The characters.

For a game about exploration and discovery, the amount of exposition puts a compilation of all Metal Gear game's cutscenes stitched together to shame.
There's little for you to pursue, as the side characters do not shut up and keep babbling information hoping that somehow you'll pay attention to it all while juggling cargo.

I've only played the game for 4 hours, and the number of times I heard some character calling the protagonist's name over and over got to the point where I just started using the mousewheel to skip through dialog...

But wait! It gets worse.

Sam Death Stranding Reedus America Porter Bridges Mikkelsen Jr. has to be the most door mat character I've ever seen.

DeadManDude: "Sam. You need to do the thing SAM."
Sam: "Sam doesn't wanna do the thing. :("
DeadManDude: "Sam. Your mom would appreciate if you did the thing. Sam." *touches shoulder*
Sam: "Sam doesn't wanna do the thing. Don't touch me :("
DeadManDude: "Sam. I'm sorry, I forgot Sam doesn't like people touching Sam. I won't do it again Sam. Although I still will on the next cutscene. Now please do the thing Sam."
MommySister: "Sam, I'm dying/captured. Please do the thing Sam."
Sam: "Ok. My name is Sam."
DeadManDude: "Sam. Thank you Sam."
MommySister: "Sam. Thank you Sam."
*Sam steps one foot out of the base*
DeadManDude: "Sam. I just wanted to let you know that you're saving America Sam."
*Sam steps another foot forward*
MommySister: "Sam, make sure you get all the chiropractors working, so you can keep carrying inhuman amounts of garbage around."

I get it. The game is unique, there's cool features, but it's clearly not for me.

Interesting premise, cool mechanics, and fun customization, but at the same time rushed, poorly planned, and suffers from a very abrupt ending.

The game starts you off with a nice tutorial, that for the most part covers what you need to know, and allows you to explore around with a warning that the clock is ticking and you need to reach a certain destination fast.

A player's first instinct is to understand urgency and proceed towards the goal, following their own methods, but then as soon as you arrive at the destination the game completely switches its rules and forces an unprepared player into a situation where only certain strategies work, some still completely unfamiliar to the player, and depending on how the player arrived at the destination, locks them into a losing situation that only a new save can fix.

Turns out ignoring the game's warning of imminent doom is the right choice, and instead the player should turtle their way towards the objective and set up small groups of allies surrounding the objective.

I can understand the artistic value of subversion of expectations, but in this case it feels more like a dishonest and cheap tactic to raise the difficulty and switch the gameplay focusing mostly on punishing first time players.

I understand that the game's supposed to be played multiple times and grants bonuses for each retry, but this feels incompatible with the way one plays this game, as choices in this game don't really matter much, aside getting a new character or not, and if you played it once, you've seen most of what the game has to offer.

Especially the ending.

The ending is no ending. It's a handful of lines, title drop, to be continued, main menu.
Honestly, after so much sweat and blood, I am unfulfilled, frustrated and having the alarms of the game echoing in my mind over and over again.,

Do I recommend getting it at full price? No.
Do i recommend getting it discounted? Watch a play through on youtube and see if you feel like having a go. If you don't, skip this game.

I was going to originally refund the game, until I saw I had 9 hours in it and and the end of the day I did get some entertainment out of it.

This game suffers from a weird inconsistency in quality, where certain aspects are very polished and others are excessively barebones.

While the graphics are pleasing, and the supporting cast is well designed, the story and gameplay are unengaging and lackluster.

But let me focus on the gameplay, or lack thereof.

The game can be resumed as: "navigate to small claustrophobic arenas with bland looking, dull and exploitable enemies and spend too long trying to kill them."
The regular enemies are nothing but a chore to deal with and bosses are cheap bullet hell sponges.

Firearms pack no punch, despite the cool and interesting customization features, and are even further nerfed by limited but regenerating ammo.

Difficulty levels only make enemies tankier, more numerous and dealing more damage, but not exactly more of a challenge.

Researching new engines/os/architecture could have been an interesting feature, but it boils down to the same ol' min maxing galore with very few skill-based non-passive upgrades.

I don't know, you can see there's love put into this, and I can see the makers truly enjoy customizing mechs but this game just isn't for me.

Atrocious writing, 20 missions with little variety, all over the place voice acting, terrible AI, floaty controls, inconsistent weapon stats, unbalanced parts/weapons, uninspired plot, enemies that feel out of place and bought directly from an asset store.

But there's passion.
Albeit clumsy, amateurish and unpolished, this game is a love letter to mecha games. A genre that kind of vanished in the recent decade.

I can't recommend this to anyone who wants a proper polished experience, but it can be a fun time killer for those really needing another hit of mecha for cheap.

If you like Persona you might enjoy this game way more than you'd expect.
Personally I enjoyed playing Tokyo Xanadu way more than Persona 5. Although I do have to say that Persona 5 is objectively a better game.

Trillion is a perfect example of a very interesting concept, great story but flawed execution. I still recomend it tho, and here's why:

Trillion is a game where you, the great overlord from the underworld, find yourself, your underlings and your world being threatened by a nearly invulnerable and unreasonable entity (Named Trillion) that seeks to eat the world's core. (In otherwords, destroy your world.)

Nothing new here as plenty of JRPGs seem to follow a somewhat similar structure. What this game has different from the others is how powerless the main character (you) are and the fact that you need to strictly depend on your underlings (the seven overlords) to defeat Trillion.

Your underlings must train to take your place in the fight against the monster that threatens the very existance of the world, however there's a catch. You can only send one underling at a time, the reason being that they can only survive the miasma surrounding the antagonist if they carry a ring holding your soul.

In very simple terms, you're sending one of your best soldiers against a god-like creature. Most of them will not come back alive.

You have to do your best to train them so they can chip away the most out of the HP of your enemy before they die.

Your characters will die. There's no way around that.

This would not be a problem if said characters were expendable boring and lifeless npcs, however here's where the story, or should I say character development, kicks in.

The game makes sure to introduce each character and have them interact not only with you but also between each other making it hard for you not to care about them.

Every death of a character will be unpleasant, and nearly certain.

That is a very interesting concept and a rather refreshing one if you ask me.

Now here's where the game shortcomings come into play.

The gameplay is generic and menu based, being very limiting and stale which gets boring after a couple of hours, making it hard to power through to watch different endings.

Your characters can learn many different skills, but there is little variation between those making choosing a skill a chore instead of a strategic choice.

You simply cannot change characters, and at the start of the game you can only pick one of the 3 fixed characters off the character rooster, forcing you to either let them all die so you can get other options, or fight an extremely hard battle to keep them alive if any of those is the one you're interested in keeping alive.

In order to try and improve the player's mood after the death of a character the remaining ones will grieve for a very short time and then suddenly have a very jarring change of attitude that seemed rather forced to me.

It is understandable that keeping a melancholic and sad ambience in a game can cause some people to walk away from the title, however I feel like the sudden change in pace ruined the impact of each death.
By no means I wanted the game to wallow too long over the death of a character, however cracking jokes shortly after one of your friends sacrificed themselves to save the worlds is rather aggravating.

The training methods offered by the game consist of either a very forgiving quick time/button mashing event or a random single floor dungeon exploring mini-game, both feel very flat and unimaginative.

My experience can be resumed into powering through the very lackluster training/fighting in order to know more about the characters and see their endings.

TL/DR; / Conclusion
I cannot recommend this for someone wanting to play a JRPG for gameplay, but if you're here for an Interesting VN and you don't mind the clunky mechanics then please do consider picking up Trillion.

Insanely fun doesn't even begin to describe it.