Recent reviews by Headburstopen

Certainly worth a play. It's like a mixture of an old Legend of Zelda game with broader ARPG, rogue-lite, and modern indie-game mechanics. The art style is truly wonderful and makes the game stand out in comparison to basically everything out there. It looks kind of like a cartoon-network show from the mid-2000s. And it has similar humor too, which I can appreciate but by the end the quirkiness started to feel less "Adventure Time" and more "Le Ebin M'Lady." There is a main storyline, but again by the end of the game I was completely tapped out and skipping through the dialogue. I was hoping for more from the story in the beginning.

The gameplay is solid. Getting through the first dungeon as a rat was horrible, and I almost considered just quitting right there cause I disliked it that much. However, once you get more forms and abilities the addictiveness of the combat truly sets in. But the game never really makes full great use of the form mechanics. By the end I had several forms that were left to be unlocked. And I really tried to get all of them, but I ultimately ran out of dungeons to farm XP in. It felt like the world was smaller than I had hoped and there were less dungeons than I had hoped. Or more accurately, the dungeons quickly get incredibly repetitive. Some of the tasks for certain forms were horribly balanced, where some were incredibly easy and others ridiculously difficult. I tried for a ridiculous amount of time to get the 20 familiars summoned and just couldn't pull it off.

So while there is something of a mix of good and frustrating here, this is a good, fun game. A proper fully fleshed out sequel to this could be incredible.

There's a decent little chunk of gameplay available right now. I couldn't actually bring myself to finish this though, I don't know if this one is a little worse than the original but it just gets so tedious at a certain point. Like I didn't want to travel ridiculously far back and forth just to get one resource that I needed.

The game looks pretty but there is a bit of a lack of variety across everything. Not a ton of different creatures, and the creatures that are in right now are a bit... alright? Acceptable. Not as interesting as the first game for sure. The biomes here are also alright but will hopefully be expanded later on. The game is all around very glitchy, like extremely so. Which is sort of what I expected, it's still essentially playable.

It is generally a pretty game though. Especially during the day, with certain colors in particular really popping in some of the biomes. Base building is still fun, if a bit frustrating. What is in this version of the game right now is mostly focused on horizontal exploration, as opposed to vertical exploration, which I don't find as interesting. One of the best parts of Subnautica 1 was going deeper and deeper feeling like surely this next biome/depth threshold will be the last one but then there's more to explore. You don't get that here with what we have right now.

Which is to say that you have to take this for what it is currently and decide if it's enough. For me, I'm basically satisfied, it could have been better, but it also feels like there truly is a lot here when you consider that this is the first public release! This is a solid base to build a great game off of. But regardless, I think that you should only get this if you're okay with maybe 10-ish hours of a bit of exploration, some crafting and base building, with tiny story elements, and it's all a bit tedious and very glitchy, knowing that you're playthrough is sort of building up to nothing for the time being.

An okay idea, just not executed very well. I found it fun for at least a few hours, but beyond that point all that you're doing is just spending an annoying amount of time cycling through turns so that eventually the opponent's ai makes a dumb mistake and you can manage to safely get a single hit in. The early combat is fun but too simple. The later combat is boring. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a solid middle-ground.

The art style and music are fantastic, and I do appreciate that instead of just being a generic rogue-lite game that it has a bit of a narrative and campaign progression to go along with it. It's clear that people did put genuine effort into this game. I just wish that I could really whole-hearted recommend it as a fantastic game, but I can't. It was fine for like a couple dollars basically.

I have some experience with CRPGs, but not much, so my first time playing this represents to myself a sort of "proper" entry into this style of game. Without any particular nostalgia related to it, Baldur's Gate still in the 2020s manages to feel charmingly old without being unreasonably archaic. Familiarity with any variety of newer RPG games works as an effective foundation for understanding and enjoying the mechanics of this game. The only place that seemed sort of lacking is particularly in the mainline story and its tonal consistency. It is incredibly simple, but the trajectory of your actions as the main characters can cause a variety of different outcomes, which in the moment leads you to think that the game is trying to take on this kind of "grounded" or "realistic" set of consequences to your actions, but it's ultimately dropped pretty soon afterward in the main storyline. It feels like the growing pains of a development team and company trying to expand the scope of its storytelling in order to be capable of comparing to "serious" storytelling that can be found in traditional media such as literature and film. The attempt is admirable, but also awkward.

I at least beat the entire main game on normal difficulty, and I hope to return and play through the DLC at a later point.

Not as good as the original but it's alright.

Genuinely sort of fun with friends, but still sad to see how far a series like this can fall from its incredible heights. It might have been Code: Veronica which started the tonal decline of the series, but this entry is probably the easiest to point to in regards to being totally unrecognizable compared to the first three entries.

And growth is good, right? It is supposed to be a mechanism for positive change, on a variety of different scales, from the way that it effects an individual all the way up to how it can change an organization or brand. But that viewpoint is naive without wider contextualization. Maybe part of the issue is that Resident Evil 5 essentially represents a brand which had become insanely corporatized as the industry grew around it. Small, dedicated teams turned into massive ones, beholden to several layers of corporate management. And ideas which would be deemed too niche to be financially probable at scale now become intrinsically non-viable.

Consider that ultimately the line of thinking that lead to this game ended up not necessarily even being correct. Because it's predicated on the concept that at the point in time when RE5 came out, a massively successful game would need to be so many specific things in order to reach the broadest viable consumer base. In order to fit into the mid-late 2000s video game ecosystem, and in order to be a AAA, brand-defining financial success it would need to completely lean into the militarization, video game action, entertainment, spectacle, mainstream action cinema, co-op, and series legacy elements, among many other things. Potentially this is even true, that the average AAA video game audience wanted specifically these elements, and nothing that couldn't be assimilated into them.

But despite the financial success of both this game and its mainline sequel, they would both directly lead the entire franchise into complete stagnation, being so utterly dire that supposedly Capcom was considering pausing the entire brand for a considerable portion of time. So Resident Evil 7 and the REmakes ended up being the vessels which would save the financial viability of the entire brand, and here we are a decade later. Not discounting the fact that certain elements of these more action-focused games were retained into the series revival.

I guess the point that I am trying to make is both RE5 and RE6, along with the newer RE7+ entries are fundamentally indicative of the time-periods that they were developed and released within. But crucially RE5 and RE6 are undeniably attempts to turn Resident Evil into something which is inauthentic to the RE brand. RE7 and the newer games happen to work better because they represent this extreme appeal to Nostalgia, being like remixes of the original four mainline entries with new influences harmoniously assimilated into their identity.

In a sad sort of way Resident Evil 5 is almost poetically similar to Albert Wesker. And Resident Evil 7 is Chris Redfield. My final thoughts are that Resident Evil 5 works as entertainment in a fundamentally broken, dejected attention economy where people can't even believe that anything is really worth doing anymore, so you may as well maximize your own entertainment. Speaking broadly, the more elements of "artistic expression," that are brought into a creative endeavor, the further we would like to think that that endeavor is in comparison to entertainment. Because this framework dichotomizes entertainment as immoral passivity and art as righteous activity.

Which is a ridiculous, self-congratulatory, self-absorbed viewpoint which serves to only make an individual feel better the more that they indulge media, when the whole point of meaningful media is supposed to make us all better people, who can fundamentally have a more positive impact within our communities and societies. So I'm not saying that liking the OG REs makes you a better person. But I do think that RE5 is a weaker vessel for meaningful artistic expression as compared to the first three entries in the mainline franchise.

After trying twice now to get into this game I am simply at the point where I don't think that I will ever really enjoy this game and am recommending that others should generally avoid it. The game opens with an overbearing tutorial. The set/visual environmental design is mostly uninteresting, looking like a generic "futuristic prison," similar to how you've probably seen them across so, so many different "modern" video games. And it just hits you over the head with big popups telling you what to do step-by-step, even though the chance that someone who is playing this hasn't played a Souls game is basically zero.

What's even worse is that the entire opening tutorial area and then the following city segments will have you just fighting the exact same dudes over and over and over again. Like, just give me anything different within the first two hours of the game. Let me fight a toaster or something, like the bar is literally that low. I can't pinpoint exactly what's doing it either, but I get headaches trying to play for longer than 30 minutes.

Seriously lacking in terms of content. There isn't enough variety in the gameplay for me to recommend this game at full price, but on sale it is at least fun enough for a while. There are only four "regions," which to me is just not enough, so now that I've seen all of these areas and beaten my first run of the game I think that I'm just done. It's like they have part of a really neat game, but one that feels definitely unfinished.

The overall styling is great though. It looks really nice, and everything is stylized as a Metal Slug game, however the gameplay itself really doesn't even feel like it has Metal Slug in mind. Overall, sort of disappointing, however I did have fun with my time.

Fun, but it gets repetitive very quickly. Nothing is explained in much detail so you're basically just thrown into the combat and supposed to figure things out by doing them and experimenting. At first it's pretty overwhelming and some of the card mechanics are worded in a way that comes off as unnecessarily confusing, but you get into the cadence of the game's systems very quickly.

The art style is great, animations are simple but pleasant, without being too distracting, and the enemies and environments are memorable. The mechanics all come together to make an experience that is pretty addicting, however there is a nagging feeling that comes after getting through all three of the levels that kind of lingers in the back of your mind. There's a sort of "is this really all there is?" Because while the card mechanics are complex and the game delivers plenty of novel goodies to throw at the player, you will very quickly end up having seen what feels like most of the enemies after only a few hours of play time. This cuts the amount of time that I would be willing to put into the game by a considerable amount. I don't want to fight the same set of enemies over and over again. This game would have been greatly improved with a longer campaign, and generally more content. But it's still fun and more than worth it if you can pick it up for a few dollars.

Better than Dragon Age: Origins. I played DA:O a while ago and had a generally negative experience with it. I love RPG games, especially anything that leans more heavily into narrative focused experiences, even though I do like ARPGs as well. And I like older games in general, I get that they have quirks and glitches and technical difficulties but I don't mind, if anything it's a bonus. My previous experiences with Bioware had also, obviously, been incredibly positive. Mass Effect is great, even Andromeda at this point, KOTOR is legendary, there are some smaller but also well regarded projects that they've been involved in too, and I had previously played Dragon Age Inquisition, which I enjoyed a great deal.

However, despite all of that, I just did not like DA:O. The characters weren't interesting to me, the overall story didn't grab my attention, and I hated the way that it felt like the game forced my hand, and after enough time the gameplay itself started to become increasingly annoying. My playthrough of DA:O ended in disappointment.

But when it comes to Dragon Age: 2, I had always heard generally negative things about it. Not much in particular, just negative things. That it doesn't live up to DA:O, that the gameplay is wildly different, that some people actually really like it but basically never as much as the first game. In this case, for someone who didn't enjoy DA:O, I figured well maybe DA:2 could actually deliver a different enough experience that it might be what I was looking for with the first game!

And in the end, it was. Dragon Age 2 just clicked with me. The cast of characters is great, from the companions all the way down to the minor characters who reappear throughout quests and storylines. The romance options all enrich the story, weaving into the narrative in a way that feels right. There are probably less quests than in the previous entry, and overall less quests than one would hope for, but almost all of the quests have some kind of memorable and involved story to tell. And one of the most special aspects of DA:2 is that as the player you are given a genuine sense of agency in decision making. And decisions almost always end up ricocheting into increasingly larger consequences.

Dragon Age 2 brings a different sort of mentality to the combat. There is a noticeable lack in variety of maps/levels, and so many maps are heavily re-used. And the maps tend to not be very detailed or long. Instead of longer stretches or full levels with meticulously placed enemies there are now basically battle arenas where several waves of enemies will spawn in. Some people will certain dislike this combat setup, and it can undeniably get annoying, but some people also do actually enjoy this sort of setup. It tests your ability to manage your resources against increasingly stressful scenarios, without just implementing purely longer battles. It's unique and ultimately, I appreciate that. Overall, I had more fun with the combat of this game compared to DA:O. I did miss mana clash though, popping mages in the first game is absurdly entertaining.

The art design is mostly lackluster. Most of the maps/levels are pretty bland, small, and lacking in fine details. This is not a very good looking game. Some areas are slightly better, like the area by the sea is a bit more visually open and lets you see some landscapes, as opposed to the completely claustrophobic levels in the city. However, even that map is pretty much washed out and lacking in fine details like vegetation or interesting set pieces. You can seriously feel that this game was rushed.

Even considering that, this has been one of the very best experiences that I have ever had with an RPG game, and it is probably my favorite Dragon Age game. The story is incredible, taking us through so many different twists and turns, forcing us to make difficult decisions, letting us make genuine connections with the characters that come along for the ride, and culminating in a tense and chaotic, downright explosive final stretch that wraps up the story of our main character. There is a dynamism and intricate naturalness which stitches all of the events of the game together. I'm sure that almost everyone will walk away from Dragon Age: 2 with a slightly different story. When I was thinking about what sort of story this was, I kind of felt that it was a sad one, but the more that I thought about it I realized that it was also, for my Hawke, a happy story as well. I'm so glad that I spent the time that I did with this game, and I know that it has moved in a way which will keep me thinking about it for several years.