Blind 2

Story Positives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Loading screens. Little tidbits of history and additional flavor thereof
2. Atmosphere: While there’s not a substantial variance between the styles, the ships themselves do look and feel legit out in the open waters

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Mechanic: Ship building, being such a core part of the gameplay, is incredibly detailed in what it offers and allows. Dynamics and differences between lengths of turrets, armor placement and type and amount, shell styles, firing arcs, beam, and more than a dozen other options…
2. Core Mechanic: …for a full…
3. Core Mechanic: …three positives
4. Core Combat: Naval battles. They’re honestly quite simple, but they’re still fun for what they are, and do offer some level of tactics
5. Viscerality: There really is something enjoyable about the big guns in the combat mode
6. Info In Game: This is a weird one, because essentially all the info necessary IS in game, but…

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: 5 minute load times at start, and massive load times constantly. This is technically optimization but for organization purposes we’ll call this a bug
2. Crashes: Crashes and audio glitches. Up to three crashes as of typing
3. Controls: Similarly, the way the game controls during the sea battles is even worse. Ignoring the obvious near total lack of precise control over anything, or the related feedback issues, the game once again just controls wrong periodically. Randomly ignoring inputs, or deciding without rhyme or reason to combine navy groups (which actually completely screws with their ability to function), and a lot of obtuse and barely explained menuing
4. Controls: The game controls terribly in the map and menus, without proper drilling down or up, awkward inputs on the map (one map speed combined with the map’s related issues), but what really pushes this past minor irritation into full negative is the controls during build mode which actively drop inputs, ignore what you’re trying to place or why (having to repeat ‘remove part’ three times, or clicking for several seconds to get it to recognize that you’re trying to pan the camera). This honestly feels like an outright bug more than anything, but it’s immensely irritating
5. Strategic Layer: Campaign mode in general. For a mode that has as much going on under the hood as it is, it’s kind of puddle-deep in terms of gameplay, especially since so much of it is removed from player control. It’s a war game where you only control the navy, which probably could have worked with some real care and polish, but absolutely does not
6. Core Mechanic: Naval Invasions (initial requirement). So… track me on this. It takes 100k tonnage to start an invasion, and the amount required to DO an invasion depends on the port you’re invading, often much less than 100k but it can be higher too. But you HAVE to have that 100k to start. (Almost nothing tells you this by the way, see: Tutorialization negatives) This is further compounded by the fact that Naval Invasions are actually a fairly complex mechanic that’s barely explained in game, and is one of only two methods of conquering territory in a game about conquering enemy territory…
7. Core Mechanic: …for a full…
8. Core Mechanic: …three negatives
9. HUD: Lack of mouseover. There IS a mouseover function but it barely works right, inconsistency and weird ‘lag’ in it making it so I have trouble telling what I’m looking at half the time
10. HUD: Lack of proper organizing and sorting to… everything. Related to the Controls issues.
11. Info In Game: …despite so much info being in game, good luck FINDING it. There is no real pattern to its presentation making finding what’s going on an absolute chore, and all of that is on top of having no search or filter functions anywhere
12. Info In Game: War reparations screen and the total lack of map helpfulness. Hope you have locations memorized!
13. Interface: The interface in this game is not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s down there. It’s so bad we’ve pieced it out into multiple categories, but the interface as a whole deserves mention. I honestly find it hard to explain how much of a colossal pain this interface is to navigate and control. Bad placement with bad interactions with inconsistent inputs with variable HUD usefulness, but I think that ‘inconsistent’ thing is the worst bit to me, because it’s training me the longer I play it to ignore certain types of actions because I don’t know when I’m doing them right or wrong…
14. Interface: …for a full…
15. Interface: …three negatives
16. Map: This isn’t the worst map I’ve ever seen, but it is one of the worst. First of all the map doesn’t wrap, which is… just bonkers, but then consider that there’s no filter or search on a map that relies on you knowing what’s where, and the aforementioned one map speed, on top of having badly laid out text that in some cases is literally hidden by other elements of the interface…
17. Map: …for a full…
18. Map: …three negatives
19. Music: I played with music on off camera for a bit (to avoid Copywrong) and it’s grating and generic, but what really makes it a negative is the usual problem games have; short loops and lots of repetition
20. Saves: Autosaves overwrite your manual save if you don’t swap slots periodically so… that’s cool. Also no loading from in game
21. Seconds In Minutes: There’s actually less than you’d think, but it is there
22. Sound Design: Buggy and disinteresting. Literal start-stop sound effects in some screens
23. Tutorialization: So first the tutorials; there aren’t any. In a simulator-style game with ludicrous amounts of options and no designed tutorial
24. Tutorialization: Then we have to talk about how much tutorialization the game requires and technically has in its built in wiki. Because good luck finding anything in that mess. This is actually several problems because first, not all the info is actually in the built in wiki (see; Naval Invasions details), but then we have issues with just FINDING the info. There’s no search function, and critical information is usually only placed once in the entire wiki, and not always in the section you’d think it’s in, essentially mandating you just read the entire wiki to figure out what’s going on…
25. Tutorialization: …for a full…
26. Tutorialization: …three negatives
27. Party AI: Or lack thereof. They, again, aren’t the worst I’ve seen, but…
28. Core Mechanic: Auto resolve. As with virtually every game ever, it’s awful
29. Interface: Feedback, or lack thereof
30. Early Game: Inability to really do much
31. Mid Game: Getting mired in endless warfare
32. Late Game: Mines, subs, research issues, and getting mired in slog

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: It’s vague and indistinct but the backgrounds add some lovely noir flavor to things
2. Character: Ora is fascinating and arguably the best developed character
3. Cutscene: The final two cutscenes are damned good, both audibly and visually, but also in what they mean for the rest of the game
4. Cutscenes: Love the art style and direction thereof
5. MSQ: The plot as a whole. There’s some good early tidbits showcasing where things are going, and the reveal is pretty legit
6. Sound Design: Some great sound design adding to the scenes (crows, rain, lightning)
7. Voice Acting: Generally high quality throughout
8. Animation: Solid, very stylized, in and out of cutscenes

Story Negatives:

1. Outro: Both endings honestly fall really flat for the build up

Gameplay Positives:

1. All Roads Lead To Rome: It’s intermittent based on the stage, but several specific areas have multiple possible routes and actions to get through them
2. Animation: Really solid feedback on the visual design
3. Difficulty Curve: Really solid difficulty curve throughout most of the game
4. Difficulty Options: Optional hard modes for rewards
5. Intro: The entire Intro is just solid, between tutorialization, escalation, and general quality
6. Kit: The killing kit is legit, with traps for stealth and fun quick kill stuff for loud
7. Level: The Inner Keep is exceptionally fun
8. Level: Generally great level design through out…
9. Level: …for a full…
10. Level: …three positives
11. Level: Dosan 1 and the escalating difficulty based on the order you do the traps in
12. Lives/Penalty For Failure: Gradient discovery failure
13. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Here and there the mid mission checkpoints are really solid and compliment the per-room puzzle design
14. Minigames: Optional mean puzzles which are fun
15. MSQ: Hold The Line missions. There’s only two, but both are probably the best designed sections in the game
16. New Game Plus: Exists
17. Outro: The final stage (the actual final stage) is really solid. Good, multi-routed, properly difficult fun
18. Power Progression Curve: The different modes, upgrades, and rewards for the optional hard mode stuff
19. Sound Design: Really solid feedback on the sound design
20. Tutorialization: There’s a lot of really solid tutorialization in this one, not just at the beginning but across the entire game as it keeps introducing new mechanics…
21. Tutorialization: …earning it two positives
22. Visual Distinction: Colors, shading, interactables
23. Yoshi Drums: Good dynamic music depending on events and areas
24. Replayability: Between options and modes and stage select, good second Replay positive
25. Terrain Design: Varies, but generally good throughout

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Camera: The game really does not like letting me look at where I want to look, often interpreting where the camera should be and getting me killed more than a few times as a result
2. Controls: So the controls… are not good. They’re serviceable, but a bit clunky and awkward, and the game does this weird thing where certain types of actions are spread out across too many buttons, and others are too ‘one button’ problem… in short, if you’ve ever played an old Assassin’s Creed you already know all of this. The awkward, semi bizarre scheme leads to a near constant irritation across the entire game…
3. Controls: …for two negatives
4. Core Mechanic: Stealth gameplay issues. Similar but inverse to Dishonored 1, where killing is fun and not-killing… isn’t. The kit is slanted towards killing, with lots of fun neat options, and not-killing is just irritating
5. Graphics: Blur and lighting issues
6. Level: Trial and error gameplay issues
7. Mid Mission Checkpoints: It’s periodic, but here and there the checkpoints just kind of suck and require you to redo irritating segments over and over
8. Options: Cannot rebind controller (which is weird because you can rebind keyboard)
9. Visual Distinction: Blending and blur

Story Positives:

1. Atmosphere: Corporate espionage, oozing from every pore
2. Brickwork: General. Every area is the same tileset but it’s a well done one, and adds to the corporate espionage angle
3. Intro: Starting on the back foot is a nice hook and a good setup for the campaign
4. Voice Acting: Same generally high quality from Mark of the Ninja
5. World Building: Little tidbits in the background
6. Characters: Mostly centered around Central and Monst3r but they’re pretty legit
7. Animation: General art style, especially in the cutscenes
8. Doodads: Generally good Doodad design

Story Negatives:

1. Outro: Same general problem as Mark of the Ninja; very abrupt and unsatisfying ending

Gameplay Positives:

1. All Roads Lead To Rome: By natural consequence of the procedural level design and wide variety of kit
2. Builds: Different agents, different augments, different equipment
3. Core Mechanic: Incognita, programs, and daemons
4. Core Mechanic: Knockout timers and pinning is a nice risk/reward thing
5. Core Mechanic: Visibility indicators and interaction with line of sight and detection
6. Difficulty Curve: Security Level escalation and related risk/reward with stalling or rushing
7. Difficulty Options: Bonus points for having presets for the setup options labeled as difficulty options
8. Difficulty Mutators: All the new options and alarm consequences of the DLC
9. Encounter: Generally well designed spread of enemies throughout stages
10. Enemy AI: Surprisingly well designed in how it reacts to things
11. Info In Game: Lots of specifics on what does what, where, and how
12. Kit: Augments, equipment, characters, and variety
13. Level: General design (hard to judge in something this procedural, but there is some clear thought put into the puzzle pieces)
14. Level: Special praise to the DLC only mission which had some cool enemies, concepts, and design to it
15. Lives/Penalty For Failure: Rewind mechanic. Optional, with optional amount of uses, and a nice recovery mechanic if necessary
16. Replayability: Lots of options for replay
17. Starting Options: So many it’d take a hot minute to list them all. Tons and tons of options, and a good gradient of said options, that allow a tremendous amount of customization in your campaign…
18. Starting Options: …for a full…
19. Starting Options: …three positives
20. Visual Distinction: Both colors and the ALT button
21. Outro: The final mission and its additional agents and challenges was a nice setup
22. Yoshi Drums: Dynamic based on alert, phase of mission, etc.
23. Music: While a bit repetitive at times, there’s still some good stuff in this one

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Interface: Unscalable font size which is already an issue, but combined with…
2. Interface: …the entire UI scaling badly (or rather, not at all) and the whole game becomes hard to read and parse, which isn’t great for any game, let alone a tactical stealth one
3. Options: Resolution options, or lack thereof
4. Visual Distinction: Some issues given how ‘high’ the visuals are for terrain and interactables
5. HUD: Small but consistent issues with parts of the HUD literally obscuring other parts, making it hard to see what’s going on or what to do
6. Tutorialization: More specifically, the tutorial itself, which skips over some critical information and is not very well designed as a whole

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Stylized and unique
2. Animation: Hilarious and well designed
3. Humor: Mostly due to the ridiculous nature of it
4. Atmosphere: That particular Fallouty silly tone
5. Background Lore: The tidbits of backstory peppered throughout

Story Negatives:

1. Pacing: By necessity, but it’s worth noting that due to the massively backloaded narrative you can go huge, huge swaths of time in between issues

Gameplay Positives:

1. Builds: Lots of options for setups and customization
2. Controls: Hotkeys and keyboard layout
3. Controls: Priority system and the well designed indirect control mechanisms related thereto…
4. Controls: …for two positives
5. Core Combat: Or more accurately, core loop. Need, requiring more, requiring more
6. Core Mechanics: Air. Or, more accurately, gas… for there are many, and they require a lot of thoughts in how they interact with each other…
7. Core Mechanics: …for two positives
8. Core Mechanics: Comfort similarly has a lot going into it, between clothing, decor, and routing…
9. Core Mechanics: …for two positives
10. Core Mechanics: Food, similarly, is a whole thing. Relatively easy to cover early on but at the same time requiring very valuable time and resources
11. Core Mechanics: Processing, turning things into other things, of which there is a great deal of depth
12. Core Mechanics: Temperature, certainly a bit of a long term and late game problem but one that must always be kept in mind
13. Core Mechanics: Water. Another situation, like air, that has multiple routes and solutions but all of them require some good work and thought…
14. Core Mechanics: …for two positives
15. Early Game: Challenging and brutal in all the right ways…
16. Early Game: …for two positives
17. HUD: Filters, lots of filters on what you see and how
18. HUD: Lots of information readily available on the default screen and well readable…
19. HUD: …for two positives
20. HUD: Tooltips and mouseovers
21. HUD: Visible modes, so many and with so much info…
22. HUD: …for two positives
23. Info In Game: Stats in wiki, and so many details…
24. Info In Game: …for two positives
25. Interface: Cross referencing. Lots of instances of proper cross referencing
26. Interface: Searches and filters all over the place
27. Late Game: Rockets and all that entails
28. Levels: Biomes. There’s several, with their own design and style
29. Mid Game: Automation and keeping the station working smoothly
30. Minigame: Sandbox mode by itself deserves a nod
31. Mod Accessibility: Steam Workshop of course, but also a Mod menu in game
32. Mod Kit: Moddability
33. Music: Audio issues aside, the soundtrack is legit
34. QoL: Priority button, deconstruct, cancel, copy, and so many others…
35. QoL: …for a full…
36. QoL: …three positives
37. Replayability: First, obvious…
38. Replayability: …and definitely the second, for variety in playstyles
39. Saves: Good saves…
40. Saves: …good autosaves
41. Starting Options: So, so many, I couldn’t possibly list all of them…
42. Starting Options: …for a full…
43. Starting Options: …three positives
44. Starting Options: Sandbox mode and related options
45. Visual Distinction: Everything is very good, very distinct at-a-glance…
46. Visual Distinction: …for two positives
47. Party AI: Jokes aside, the dupes are actually really well designed and really smart in how they operate…
48. Party AI: …for two positives
49. Sound Design: Good audio design in indications and problems
50. Levels: The Lab levels and their manually crafted challenge mode stuff

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: Cursor issue. Periodically and for no demonstrable reason the cursor just offsets on screen, and only restarting the game fixes it
2. Core Mechanic: Power grids. Even with a few small fixes the system could work, but you have terrible and inconsistent power sources which barely provide that much power which bleed out power (nothing explains this of course) while being required for literally everything in the game… but even all of that I could stomach if not for the fact that the grid design is too realistic and has wattage limiters built into it, making dealing with power a nonstop hassle and aggravation the ENTIRE game…
3. Core Mechanic: …for a full…
4. Core Mechanic: …three negatives
5. Info In Game: A few noteworthy holes. Sometimes simply finding what’s wrong is more obtuse than it should be
6. Mid Game: Treadmill problem. Just… entirely too much spinning the wheels solving the same problems over and over
7. Sound Design: Audio balance issues. Really had to finicky with sound design, and that doesn’t fix it in all cases too
8. Tutorialization: The game tells you absolutely frickin’ nothing, in a way I can’t even properly type up. There is so, so much trial and error in this game it’s insane…
9. Tutorialization: …for a full…
10. Tutorialization: …three negatives
11. Walkthroughitis: Everything to do with mid and late game. Hope you’re ready to trial and error or have a wiki up
12. Walkthroughitis: Related to the tutorialization problem but good luck figuring out how certain mechanics work without just plain old trial and error (or Youtubing it)

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: General. Most of the areas are hard to really appreciate, but there’s some clear design going on
2. Visual Storytelling: Special mention to the Farm and the Furnace for being goddamned terrifying
3. Hub: The ‘town’ area is actually quite well done
4. Atmosphere: Yep this is bleak and depressing as hell
5. MSQ: Horror and the Furnace and exactly what that place really was

Story Negatives:

1. Writing: The overtness of the story kind of bothered me pretty fast (come along Puppy!)
2. Outro: That was a weird attempt at a last minute twist, and it falls a bit flat due to being overly broadcasted and improperly followed through on

Gameplay Positives:

1. Boss: Sick Sisters is the one good boss in the game, with multiple weak points, actual arena design, trash, recovery, and mechanics
2. Builds: Good combos of abilities across the setup, and with the super respec option you can play with whatever
3. Core Combat: The core combat loop is very tight and fun and didn’t quite have a chance to get old
4. Enemy Variety: Not a lot, but it’s there
5. Kit: The abilities and skills are varied and fun to use
6. Kit: Weapons and their highly disposable nature along with variety thereon
7. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Pretty good and pretty frequent…
8. Mid Mission Checkpoints: …even in the middle of fights or encounters
9. Music: It’s a bit of a sensory overload, but the music IS good
10. NG+: Usual Dark Souls method of new game plus
11. Pacing: Surprisingly good pacing for such a frenetic game
12. Respec: So the respec is already there and infinite in both directions…
13. Respec: …and also can be done literally in combat
14. Tutorialization: Video shorts displaying how abilities work
15. Minigame: Built in speedrun support, and the arena mode
16. Viscerality: For all the noise, it is a fairly visceral game

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: Aiming. The game aims just a bit wrong because it’s a 3D game pretending to be a 2D game so it’s just a liiiittle off which takes getting used to
2. Camera: Nausea inducing
3. Difficulty: Overtuning. Things will absolutely smash you
4. Difficulty Options: Lazy difficulty
5. Graphics: The glitchiness and red are neat but legitimately eye straining and headachy…
6. Graphics: …for two negatives
7. Level: Arena design… isn’t
8. Padding: Boss refights (I mean HOW many times did we refight the cyborg?)
9. Raspberry Jam: AND low health beedleeps
10. Outro: The actual final level is an endless wave fight against stuff we’ve fought before in an empty circular room. There is no final boss
11. Visual Distinction: Periodic, but occasionally it’s just hard to tell what’s going on

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Level 1, City of Sanctar. The bedroom, with the temple, the windows, the cozy vibe
2. Brickwork: Level 2, Foliana Heights. Foliage, cases, dirt, and wicker
3. Brickwork: Level 3, Transidor Crossing. This one’s seemingly simple, but the interior, the cozy lighting and wood paneling, and the staircase
4. Brickwork: Level 4, Waters of Balnea. Naturally we’re going to have a bathroom here, and the tiles and the pipes
5. Brickwork: Level 5, Lands of Ambrose. Now we transition to the kitchen, which keeps the trend of keeping things distinct, flavorful, and interesting
6. Brickwork: Level 6, Celerion Park. Finally, the playroom. This one’s a fun one,
7. Visual Storytelling: Not a lot, but we do see some here and there (especially in Level 2)
8. Doodads: Level 1, City of Sanctar. The layout of the temple, the bedroom, the usage of the bookshelves and television…
9. Doodads: …easily two positives
10. Doodads: Level 2, Foliana Heights. Brush, bramble, exhibits, bug town areas…
11. Doodads: …another two positives
12. Doodads: Level 3, Transidor Crossing. Lots of debris here, but all of it the kind of things you’d see in a staircase
13. Doodads: Level 4, Waters of Balnea. The toilet paper, the sink, the toiletries…
14. Doodads: …for two positives
15. Doodads: Level 5, Lands of Ambrose. This one’s really impressive, above and beyond the others, with a crazy amount of detailing in the cupboards, farmlands, fridge, sink, etc…
16. Doodads: …for a full…
17. Doodads: …three positives
18. Doodads: Level 6, Celerion Park. Toys, kid’s stuff, beds, shelves…
19. Doodads: …easily two positives
20. Animation: Smart and bubbly
21. Storytelling Mechanic: Text styling, showcasing tone and intent just in text
22. World Building: Quite a bit, mostly about the politics and culture of the various bug peoples
23. Lindblum Effect: This really feels a lot like an actual, lived in area
24. Atmosphere and Tone: Light and bubbly throughout… with an undercurrent of real social politics and cultural divides
25. Sound Design: Lovely, bubbly sound design
26. Spritework: While it causes a few issues on gameplay, the 2D sprites are nicely drawn and animated
27. Outro: I was actually impressed with this one. The entire sequence concludes the all but one of the arcs of the game, while still leaving some threads for a future

Story Negatives:

1. Pacing: A whole lot of the actual plot is shoved to the beginning and end with only tiny tidbits in between

Gameplay Positives:

1. Intro: Tight and well designed lead in to the primary gameplay loop
2. QoL: Several with regards to controlling the tinykin (spawning on the spot and instantly climbing, accelerated tossing while holding button down, summoning from anywhere)
3. Yoshi Drums: Extremely dynamic music. Each stage has its own song which varies based on which region of the stage you’re in…
4. Yoshi Drums: …for a full two positives
5. Music: Helps that those songs are bangers
6. Guidance And Flow: Let’s get this out of the way; the guidance and flow on each stage is legit and worthwhile by themselves of a positive. Each stage has thought and effort put into how each region flows internally, and externally. This is true for every single stage…
7. Guidance And Flow: …so one for Foliana Heights…
8. Guidance And Flow: …one for Transidor Crossing…
9. Guidance And Flow: …another for the Waters of Belnea…
10. Guidance And Flow: …the Lands of Ambrose…
11. Guidance And Flow: …and of course, Celerion Park
12. Terrain: Extremely good terrain design across each stage…
13. Terrain: …for a full…
14. Terrain: …three positives
15. Level: General level design for the beats not otherwise specifically covered. The City of Sanctar and its simple escalation
16. Level: The Foliana Heights and the introduction of the vertical elements
17. Level: Transidor Crossing and some great platforming
18. Level: The Waters of Belnea and the increased emphasis on precision platforming
19. Level: The Lands of Ambrose and the puzzle platforming everywhere
20. Level: And the Celerion Park functioning as a final exam
21. Visual Distinction: In the terrain, in the animation, in the HUD, in everything really, with usage of colors and outlining…
22. Visual Distinction: …for a full…
23. Visual Distinction: …three positives
24. Tutorialization: Good and bad, but still some good
25. All Roads Lead To Rome: Lots and lots of collectibles… the overwhelming majority of which are not mandatory, allowing the player to choose exactly how much they want to do and which things they want to do specifically
26. Kit: The Tinykin themselves, of course. Grabbers, exploders, bridge builders, electric gappers…
27. Kit: …but special mention for the portable tower guys which are a GREAT inclusion by themselves. Can plop down added height basically wherever, and however high you can make it based on how many guys you have
28. Interface: Info on what’s collected and where, and well sorted
29. Replayability: Yeah this one’s pretty solidly replayable
30. Visual Navigation: Wonderful usage, per every single stage, of landmarking and navigation…
31. Visual Navigation: …for two positives
32. Core Mechanic: Fun factor in collecting
33. Lives/Penalty For Failure: No lives, just location reset to last safe spot, helping with the all important flow

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Graphics: Some depth issues with the 2D sprites making some platforming aggravating
2. Camera: So during the races the game removes camera control from you, which makes them even more irritating than usual (they are VERY tightly tuned)
3. Tutorialization: For all the good tutorialization, there’s also really aggravating tutorialization
4. Save: Forced ironman mode
5. Save: Only one save slot
6. Map: Or total lack thereof, which makes navigating between levels more irritating than it should be

Story Positives:

1. Animation: Great attack and movement animation
2. Brickwork: Decent background designs setting the stages
3. Localization: I’m honestly surprised at how good the localization is, considering
4. Spritework: There’s only a bit (mostly the main character, Akasha, and your dad) but they’re really solidly done

Story Negatives:

1. Character: Main character. She’s just… she’s so, so aggressively unlikable
2. Dialogue: Excessive and unnecessary, almost to the point of Empty Text
3. Humor: She’s so dumb isn’t it FUNNY
4. Plot: Yeah so… sure… okay… huh? Even while tracking some of the plot, there’s clear holes in everything
5. Voice Acting: Irritating and auto ducks even when off
6. Writing: I’m sorry WHAT? Okay so there are these weird swaths of plot where they assume they’ve explained or exposited on things and they… have not. So characters suddenly are aware of plot points that have never been brought up and act as though they’re fully on board with said points
7. World Building: Or lack thereof. In fact the game goes out of its way to destroy its own world building frequently
8. Outro: So it’s already a wonderful culmination of awful, awful story in so many ways…
9. Outro: …but then there’s the ‘non ending’ right at the end

Gameplay Positives:

1. Boss: I’m really quite a fan of the Dad fight. He’s readable, reactable, and properly intense
2. Boss: Stage 2 boss, the Grenademan homage
3. Boss: Stage 4’s boss and so many variables to keep track of
4. Core Combat: Reflecting, combos, and dash attacking
5. Core Mechanic: OHKO mode in general. To be clear, the time rewind is functionally a health bar, but it changes the dynamic of how the game plays and makes for some fun moments
6. Core Mechanic: Rewind, Rewind refill, does not allow suicide rewinds
7. Difficulty Options: Actually changes how the game plays instead of lazy difficulty
8. Intro: Solid. The stage is a bad tutorial, but the boss does the real heavy lifting here, being a well designed smooth tutorial of deflecting, avoidance, all while varying up combat per phase of the encounter
9. Level: Stage 3, with some creative rewind and lava mechanics
10. Level: Stage 4, really escalating the rewind interactions with the level design
11. Level: Stage 5 is MOSTLY a good stage
12. Music: Pretty solid bangers…
13. Music: …for two positives
14. Viscerality: Yeah no it’s pretty solid, mostly on the visual side of things
15. Level: Remixed stages get a general polishing pass mutation positive
16. Controls: Tight and responsive, as they need to be
17. Enemy Variety: Pretty good throughout
18. Boss: The remixed fights in general, but special mention to the final boss
19. Outro: A decent stage and a nice hyperbeam moment
20. Level: Level 0 bonus stages remixing

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Boss: By contrast I am NOT a fan of the Akasha fight, which is mostly one long invuln phase which is just a wee bit too irritating to break her out of (the vulnerable points tend to hover in the air lowering the hits you can get in on them per round, and a lot of her attacks are guesswork as to which they are, which is important considering they require different approaches)
2. Boss: Stage 3 boss. Both phases are, in a vacuum, decent… but the total lack of checkpointing is awful, and the number of instant kill attacks that come from off visible radius and the ease of being essentially softlocked in lava makes the whole thing more sloggy than it really should be
3. Core Combat: Hurtboxes. I’m most reminded of Donkey Kong Country, where the hurtboxes are just… inconsistent, and not where they arguably should be
4. Core Mechanic: Jumping. This one will take some explaining but (explain later)
5. Level: The segment from hell on Stage 5 is complete bullcrap
6. Pacing: Textbox interruptions, especially early on
7. Tutorialization: First stage. For all the boss does right, the stage does wrong
8. Mid Mission Checkpoints: So first there’s none in general in boss fights, which is generally irritating…
9. Outro: …but the final boss fight takes the cake on this one. A generally fun fight ruined by lack of checkpointing

Story Positives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Built in glossary, helping with historical information about areas, places, concepts
2. Animation: The animation in the game is… weirdly good. There’s not many frames to it, but they do a lot with what’s there, and there’s tons of little details that are almost imperceptible but add to the believability of the scenes. This one easily gets…
3. Animation: …two positives for animation
4. Brickwork: I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the style of artwork, but I’d be an idiot not to recognize how well done it is. The detailing, the brush strokes, the accurate depiction of this sort of ‘medieval’ style of art, it really makes the town and surrounding areas pop…
5. Brickwork: …for an easy…
6. Brickwork: …triple positive
7. Spritework: Same story with the sprites. Each character is easily distinct from each other (harder to do than it sounds with such stylings, and very important when it comes to a character driven game like this), and is well drawn and well presented…
8. Spritework: …earning another…
9. Spritework: …triple positive
10. Storytelling Mechanic: The text rendering. Different font, fixing issues, changing ‘writing’ speeds to indicate tone, even little sound effects that vary based on tone…
11. Storytelling Mechanic: …for a double positive
12. Doodads: Weird to think of in this case since it’s mostly static images, but it still counts. This is especially true for the indoor areas
13. Animation: Background brickwork animation, really helps make the scenes look better than still paintings or otherwise lifeless
14. Storytelling Mechanic: The books themselves. Characters entering and leaving them is interesting if pointless, but what pushes this into positive territory is how they will frame themselves within the stories they enter. Illuminita standing before the burning woman and kneeling in prayer as she laments her lot in life, to name one example
15. Storytelling Mechanic: Thought bubbles! Another way to see insight into our character’s thoughts, and to add flavor to ourselves, the scene, and our choices
16. Lindblum Effect: Background elements, lots of named people with their daily lives and mannerisms, pets and how you interact with them, things like that
17. Animation: I must give a bonus point to how much detail goes into the animations. Tiny, little stuff that I appreciate tremendously
18. Atmosphere: Historical vibes and attention to detail in the grounded nature thereof
19. World Building: This is a weird one, since this is just real life history instead of something crafted, but effort and care was still put into researching and properly using history and historical norms in culture, technology, song, visuals, etc.
20. Atmosphere & Tone: The down-to-earth, grounded nature of the story does it tremendous credit and is a continuous thread throughout…
21. Atmosphere & Tone: …earning two positives
22. Dialogue: The dialogue pops (of course it does, it’s an Obsidian game) and while there are only a few ‘voices’ in the cast, they’re still there and they’re still distinct. Each exchange feels like a real conversation and doesn’t stumble over itself…
23. Dialogue: …earning a double positive
24. Internal Continuity: As it essentially needs to be for a detective, mystery style game like this, the internal continuity is extremely tight. The game absolutely has details everywhere and keeps track of them well…
25. Internal Continuity: …for a full…
26. Internal Continuity: …three positives
27. Secondary: There aren’t many, but the few optional side quests are surprisingly engaging. Helping a family pay their rent, or an old man get some ointment, things like that
28. Intro: A nice, slow burn. Establish the town, the characters, the setting
29. MSQ: Act 1. The murder of an awful, awful man who has power and wealth, and thus we have our threat. The stakes are very high, but very personal, and as you unveil more of what’s going on it just gets better
30. Visual Storytelling: The meals. Every meal in the game does something to indicate the standing, the situation, the family’s relative wealth, and their character. It’s brilliant, subtle, and incredible…
31. Visual Storytelling: …for a full…
32. Visual Storytelling: …three positives
33. Moment: The revelation of the fate of August is exactly as impacting, awful, and powerful as it should be
34. MSQ: Act 2. Once again we start off somewhat lower tier, but with high stakes; a rich noble, an oppressed peasantry, and us smack dab in the middle. The escalation throughout the Act…
35. MSQ: …deserves its own positive and mention, as things keep escalating from the moment the murder happens onwards. As things continue to spiral out of control we reach a critical point…
36. Cutscene: …the Act 2 finale. Everything about this sequence is just great, culminating in the most horrifying moment of the game…
37. Moment: …everything will go back to the way it was before
38. MSQ: Act 3. The change in perspective, the changing of things, things getting less bad
39. Cutscene: Christmas Eve. The long shots, the details in the background of how people are reacting to the dinner, great stuff
40. Moment: Andreas’ return. It was well foreshadowed, but it’s still a great moment, and seeing him and Claus reconcile and lay things out was legit
41. Cutscene: Andreas’ descent, and return from his own mind
42. Outro: The final ultimate reveal of Thomas’ motives and involvement, and the reveal of Amalie as the final victim
43. Character: Andreas. The broken man, broken further by the events of his home and the chapters of the game, as so wonderfully shown by his thought bubbles, dialogue, and interactions
44. Character: Thomas. I say without hyperbole this might be the most evil character in fiction. There’s layers to him too, and he’s fleshed out quite a bit across the whole work, and at no point do I think he’s too much or too little, but instead he is exactly on brand and in character… and it’s absolutely awful…
45. Character: …for a full…
46. Character: …three positives
47. Character: The Brothers, Fathers, and general abbey cast. They really manage a full gamut of variety of a typical clergy here; corrupt, harsh, considerate, rules-mongering, kindly, helpful, and rule-bending
48. Character: The Sisters. Just like the Abbey, the Convent is a good spread of different types of people from different walks of life
49. Character: The Gerter family in particular gets special bonus points for being more well developed than most of the characters in the game, and investing me in their fortunes more than once
50. Character: Magdalene and Claus, effectively carrying Act 3 on their shoulders, especially with the tragedy that befalls Claus
51. Character: The supporting cast in general are very well fleshed out. Distinct, varied, and memorable. We also see a lot of different perspectives from a lot of different walks of life…
52. Character: …earning the townsfolk two positives
53. Themes: The one right there in the title; the truth under the obfuscation, and all that that implies

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Options: Decent accessibility options, including built in TTS!
2. Choices: The choice of who to dine with is a surprisingly subtle, well done point. It changes options, quests, and gives plenty of additional lore
3. Choices: Act 1. As should be true in a game like this, our choices are king. They change who we can convince, what information we get, and how time passes…
4. Choices: …for two positives
5. Choices: Act 2. Even more so than before, with a much tighter time budget, and much less clear paths forwards…
6. Choices: …for two positives
7. Choices: Act 3 doesn’t have as many, with a fairly linear path, but you still determine how characters’ stories go and how the mural ends up
8. Core Mechanic: Time management. You can do many things, in many orders, but the game (usually) warns you about something that will advance time, and you are always on the clock
9. Core Mechanic: Limited information. This is a true oddity (usually I’m in favor of MORE info in the player’s hands) but here it works for what is functionally a logic / detective game. You’re always working with limited info, what info you have depends on your choices, and you aren’t given the ability to get more really
10. Intro: The player can actually rush through this very quickly if they’d like, but if they want they can also really take their time here, and that’s awesome, putting total control of the pacing into the player’s hands. It also establishes the general concepts and mechanics of the game quite nicely
11. All Roads Lead To Rome: There’s some branching and some pruning, but mostly each act funnels into the same destination… but the path you take is very, very player dependent. Near as I can tell there’s no actual failstate here, which is fascinating and actually works for this structure of gameplay
12. Replayability: Too many choices and options not to get the second Replayability positive

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: Movement controls are… wrong. It can’t take ‘held down’ inputs, and doesn’t always acknowledge ‘repeated press’ inputs
2. Controls: Hard to describe, but there’s a wonkiness and weightiness to it that just plays badly
3. Saves: Mandatory autosaves and no ability to load separate saves
4. Seconds In Minutes: Scripts, walking around, a few tidbits here and there definitely add some padding that drags a bit

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: Michael Ironside. I mean come on of COURSE he’s awesome here. Not just for the meme’s, he really does sell the precise tone needed to make this work…
2. Voice Acting: …and it deserves a double positive
3. Atmosphere: Tutorial videos, weirdly enough, give some interesting insight and flavor to Fischer and the vibe of the game as a whole
4. Banter: Enemy banter is consistent and amusing
5. Banter: Party banter is even better
6. Characters: The party as a whole forms a nice support network of characters for Sam, and good for him to bounce off of in the aforementioned Banter positive
7. Character: Sam himself is a weirdly interesting and good character. He manages the fine line between old bitter man while still retaining his ability to care (his heart, if you will) and his snarking while completely deadpan really adds to it
8. Humor: Interrogations. No, seriously, these are a highlight of the game. I will often go out of my way and spend more time on an encounter just so I can grab someone in case they have an interrogation for me to enjoy. These are consistently delightful…
9. Humor: …earning two positives
10. Sound: Good general audioscape. It varies in quality of course, but it still adds to the mood
11. Internal Continuity: Acknowledgement of optional objectives in dialogue as missions progress
12. Moment: There’s an interrogation option in the New York blackout mission (mission 4) which is just… weirdly wholesome and awesome at the same time
13. Writing: As per usual for this type of thing, the general vibe and tone of the spec ops / military campaign writing is interesting, and as usual it manages a few ‘big moments’ pretty well
14. Brickwork: Hokkaido. The japanese bathhouse look, the wood and paper, it’s a good aesthetic
15. Brickwork: General. It’s a PS2 game, with all the baggage that implies, but some effort was still clearly put into several aspects of it
16. Brickwork: Seoul. While a bit claustrophobic, the intent is still clear, and it still feels like the wartorn swath of city that it is
17. Moment: Rescuing the pilots (optionally!) from the wrecked plane crash in Seoul. It’s pretty normal all things considered, but what sells it is Sam himself. “Medals don’t help me sleep at night.”
18. MSQ: Seoul in general. Again, the entire city under siege, the attackers not checking fire, the drones, the whole thing does a good job of getting across how ugly urban warfare is. Further, while we primarily are going after North Korean troops, that’s not all we’ll find, and at a glance you can barely tell the difference
19. Music Direction: Usage and tone establishment

Story Negatives:

1. Writing: So… Clancyisms are in full display here (even though I bet he had nothing to do with writing it). For all the interesting and engaging moments, there’s a pound of nonsense leading up to it
2. Cutscenes: Okay I hate to do this but… the truth is the direction, pacing, and tempo of the pre-generated cutscenes are kind of awful. Cutscenes cut off weirdly, often-times seemingly in mid sentence or mid sequence, but no they just… stop. And then they play another seemingly unrelated scene, which has the same issue. It’s bizarre
3. Plot: So I just… I don’t get where they were going with the Shetland thing. His motive rant comes out of nowhere and falls flat
4. Outro: What in the world was that? The whole sequence just sort of peters out, and then we have a literal Wah Wah ending, aaand then it just… stops

Gameplay Positives:

1. Tutorialization: The tutorial video does nevertheless get credit for how it shows button presses and highlights as doing actions to allow for internal integration
2. HUD: Light / sound indicators. These are gradient, helpful, and good even at-a-glance
3. Core Mechanic: Light. Probably the central mechanic of the entire work, and visibility issues aside (discussed in Negatives) this is still a good mechanic that the game does a good job with…
4. Core Mechanic: …for two positives
5. Core Mechanic: Sound. This is just as important as light, but instead of ‘painting’ light values across the map it’s the relative amount of ambient noise that covers your footsteps. People have a reasonable hearing range, and for the most part areas that should have blanket noise do…
6. Core Mechanic: …for another double positive
7. Core Mechanic: A final bonus point for how gradient the stealth is in general. It’s possible to be noticed but not observed, and to retreat from potential alert breaks
8. Kit: Ranged nonlethal, ranged lethal, ranged hacking, sound generation, variable movement speed, remote camera, EMP. All of this gives us some good options for how to deal with things as we progress through the level…
9. Kit: …and, especially thanks to the remote camera, earns a double positive
10. Kit: I will also acquiesce to a positive for how you can interact with the terrain, that is to say; doors. Peeking through, slamming to stun or make noise, opening if you’re in a hurry, or stealthing through
11. Sound: It’s not as good as the greats (like Thief) but there’s still several segments where you can hear a problem before you see it, notably soldiers patrolling and cameras whirring
12. Saves: Save anywhere and load anywhere… but only one slot and lord it takes forever. Still good though
13. Music: It’s been inconsistent, but when it’s there it’s solid
14. Enemy AI: Weirdly enough I’m with the enemy AI. Oh I’ve seen better, but they will behave more or less exactly how I expect. Hear a sound? Go investigate it, then check around for a sec before returning. Something off about their patrol? They’ll look into that too. Spot Fisher but lose him? Fire where he used to be. Et cetera
15. Intro: Level: The first stage is fairly linear but well laid out, with multiple methods to deal with objectives and enemies, and of course optional objectives…
16. Difficulty: …and those optional objectives are a natural and dynamic way to up the difficulty of a given mission
17. All Roads Lead To Rome: General. It’s not as much as, say, Dishonored, but it’s still there
18. All Roads Lead To Rome: The Bank mission (level 3) is solid on this front. Multiple vectors and routes and methods to accomplish your objectives
19. Encounter: Some solid variety and types of obstacles to overcome in Level 3
20. Level: And a general aggregate positive to the Bank level for being fun across the board
21. Level: Mission 5, the Displace office building. While some of the layout is frustrating and relies on more backtracking than I would like, there’s still plenty of interesting tools for progression and the specifics of dark areas, doors, and the glass to keep things interesting and fun
22. Level: Mission 6, Hokkaido. While it has a few layout issues, the sudden removal of most of the high tech sides of things, forcing the player to lean almost entirely on more natural things like candles and silence. This could be annoying but the emphasis on layout helps tremendously, as there’s lots of very dark places to hide…
23. Level: …earning a solid double positive
24. Level: Mission 7, Battery. There’s one really, really irritating moment which gets its own negative but aside from that it was actually quite solid. Good layout, good flow, and good positioning of troops and lighting
25. Level: Mission 8, Seoul. Same general quality of level design we’ve seen for several missions, both good and bad. Some cool interactions and good encounter layouts, variety, and usage… but also super tanks with perfect vision and stealth guns, as well as some flow issues in progression
26. Level: Mission 9, Bathhouse. The early portion has some decent stuff in it, good routing and good layouts
27. Outro: Encounter: I will give you the ‘capture’ sequence in the final mission. It’s simple but it works
28. Replayability: Generally replayable, mostly in difference of approach (loud, interrogating, killing or not)
29. New Game +: Level select
30. Co-Op: Limited due to the platform, but it’s there

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Tutorialization: The tutorial itself is… problematic. They’re videos, which are ‘fine’ but they also throw a LOT at you rapid fire with no real way to ‘navigate’ the tutorial video except by starting it over
2. Level: Mission 2, the goddamned boat. It’s not the worst level ever and there’s still some decent design on display, but navigating it is a pain, the tight corridors make for aggravating avoidance and detection, and there’s a literal portion of it where detection means binary failstate
3. Map: Difficult to parse, difficult to navigate, no indicator of self or direction
4. Controls: It’s hard to put into words but man there are a lot of button presses to accomplish fairly basic things. There’s this constant mental checklist I’m running through to make sure I don’t hit the wrong button, because doing so means being detected and reloading. The layout of the buttons, the steps you have to go through to enter certain ‘modes’, it’s aggravating
5. Visual Distinction: Or lack thereof. This is separate from the lighting issue, we’ll talk about that later, it’s just frustrating to tell what you’re looking at a lot (this game feels firmly in the Brown Era)
6. Options: Near total lack of options (even basic things like subtitles or audio control)
7. Level: Mission 4. There’s some navigation issues which tend to lend themselves towards irritation and backtracking, on top of the damned cameras…
8. Encounter: …but what really gets to me is the damned punchcard puzzle and a total lack of feedback from the game on how to even start the puzzle. The puzzle itself is fairly intuitive once you know what it is, but nothing indicates that and in fact it indicates invalid interactions
9. Bugs: It’s a Ubisoft game, come on
10. Encounter: The elevator in the Battery mission. This one elevator is absolutely awful; a fast closing elevator (which is apparently just an issue with the PS2 version), the horribly positioned camera, the nearly fully lit room, the guy sitting staring at the door, and the retina scanner. This is so bad that it’s the type of design one would assume means ‘go somewhere else’ in level design… especially since this very game has employed that type of level design already! But no, this is the bottleneck, live with it. To make it even worse, apparently there IS another way through… but not on the PS2 version
11. Lighting: So, the game is dark. Like, hard to see dark. And that’s not great from a gameplay perspective, but that’s okay because there’s this night vision mode to help…
12. Core Mechanic: …that absolutely SUCKS on the PS2 version. It’s not well designed, the color usage is bad, the glare is awful, and it has awful film grain cranked up to 11 making it literally headache inducing to watch. So the game is dark, and discourages you from using the tool it gives you to bypass that. It should be mentioned this is only an issue on the PS2 version, I checked on the PC version and it’s fine there
13. Kit: Grenades kinda suck. Wall mines, similarly, not great
14. Level: Mission 9, Bathhouse, falls apart completely the moment it ‘goes loud’ and you start fighting thermal vision wearing people in tight quarters while also dealing with a timer on bombs which you can’t plan ahead for or diffuse out of order
15. Sound Balancing: So… music is too loud, people are too quiet, and the dynamic music kicks in at the worst of times
16. Interface: Feedback issues here and there. You do the right thing, but do it wrong, and nothing indicates that so… you try something else
17. Outro: Level: So there’s something approaching good level design here, but there’s too much jank and lack of polish for it to pop. So encounters that should be interesting (like the escalator going down into the 360 camera and the three insta-kill guys) instead is frustrating due to detection issues, bad placement of hitboxes, and weird corridor design…
18. Outro: Level: …for two negatives

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: Surprisingly good for what it is
2. Visual Storytelling: The war itself. There’s almost always some fighting going on somewhere nearby, and it really helps sell the scene
3. Characters: The faction heads and their respective rivalries
4. Atmosphere: Mercenary campaign vibes

Story Negatives:

1. Brickwork: Brown and gray sludge
2. Outro: The ending cinematic build up is whatever, mostly just another base infiltration mission…
3. Outro: …but what pushes this into awful is the ending cinematic. All like, 1 minute of it, and it’s just ‘we did it woo’ and then a very brief acknowledgement of who claimed North Korea, aaaand that’s it. It’s awful…
4. Outro: …and deserves its own double negative

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Mechanic: The entire ‘loop’ falls under this, one of the bigger aggregate positives I’ve given lately. The core loop of finding out about the 52 (either naturally or via intel emails), finding and killing/capturing them, and using that bonus money to progress forms a nice loop
2. Map: Surprisingly good for what it is. I wish it was a bit better labeled when zoomed out, but it’s still good
3. MSQ: The initial ‘tour the map’ quest chain is surprisingly good at introducing the types of missions and general layout of the map
4. Mutator: Optional money objectives. Nice bonus hard stuff to do for extra money, usually a decent chunk too. Sometimes it gives you extra options on a mission, which is also cool
5. Itemization: Lots of bonus ways to earn money, and ways to spend it
6. Itemization: Guns and vehicles are plentiful, both in random spawning and in static spawning
7. Kit: Guns and vehicles also have some decent spread between them to give you options
8. Core Mechanic: The core Disguise mechanic is actually pretty interesting… if you know how it works. Visible cones, different audio detectors for footsteps and guns, and of course hiding inside a vehicle
9. QoL: There’s a few. Being able to drop what you need on the spot is nice, the fact that the game remembers your previous vehicle (and fully repairs/refills it) after missions is nice
10. Music: Very Star Wars, but in a good way
11. Level: So, as much as I dislike how it’s presented, there is some nice routing and options in how you progress through missions, which also leads to…
12. Replayability: …not the first, but definitely the second positive
13. Power Progression Curve: Finding and unlocking via exploration and missions
14. Level: The last few Russian missions in the final act are actually kind of interesting. The ambush and having to hold the line would be irritating, but the game gives us a nice defensive spot and an armored car to do it with. The identifying which targets to kill is interesting, and has multiple approaches to find your targets… or you can just kill them all
15. Level: General aggregate for the South Korean missions
16. Cheats: Built in Cheats that you can learn via emails and mission progression
17. NG+: Exists, and carries forward money and unlocks

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Options: Or lack thereof
2. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Or lack thereof. These are already bad (as they usually are…) but get further compounded by…
3. Difficulty: …the paper thin armor/health we have. It is entirely too easy to die to incidental damage, and death means restarting a mission from scratch. And all of this compounds a related issue…
4. Backtracking: …the walk back problem. The Time To Reset is terrible. Most missions start at the base in question, but actually take place 3 minutes thataway. It’s the GTA4 problem all over again, and it makes redoing missions awful
5. Difficulty: A bonus negative for the lack of health problem. Even ideally I would sometimes make my way, painstakingly, in a TANK, to the destination only to die in two or three hits. For those unaware, tanks aren’t very fast, so that’s several minutes walk-back time with irritating controls all to die instantly
6. Level: Ace of Clubs. The placement of enemies and guns, the patrolling ARMOR, and the irritating jammers limiting options, alongside some really janky and irritating terrain
7. Visual Distinction: Or lack thereof. Sure there’s fog and blur everywhere, but the problem is a lack of color distinction. I got into a fight at one point with the Chinese, South Koreans, and North Koreans. Vehicles are actually pretty well labeled with their flag, but the people? Not so much. And that’s ignoring all the times I literally couldn’t tell it was two people instead of one, or having trouble finding the guy shooting me. It’s hard to see what’s going on is what I’m getting at
8. Level: This is a weird one. So of course the game offers options for avoiding detection, and that’s cool, but near as I can tell it’s either luck based or just plain jank because sometimes I’d still be ‘spotted’ killing one side or the other and lose rep when I clearly shouldn’t have been
9. Info In Game: General, and little things, but quite a few
10. Core Mechanic: Jank. It’s everywhere and while it can lead to some funny and interesting sequences, it can also effortlessly lead to near-instantaneous death for having done nothing wrong, and forcing a mission restart
11. Level: So… this is a weird one, but the game really leans on Trial-And-Error gameplay in its level design. Once you know the terrain, the enemies, the placement, the objectives, you can strategize and plan and route through the map, and that’s awesome… but the only way to DO that is to go through the mission in advance and screw around, ‘Hitmanning’ your way through
12. Core Mechanic: The disguise mechanic is… very clearly unfinished, barely utilized, and worst of all almost completely unexplained in game
13. Level: The final few China missions… suck. In particular, the last mission involves being dropped onto a small spot where there’s only one way to progress, with waves of enemies in the way which happen to include two jammers, three APCs, and multiple tanks, all before you hit the NEXT wave of stuff which includes even more hardware. Just getting off the metaphorical beachhead is difficult and irritating
14. Seconds In Minutes: Lots. My personal favorite is how you have to ‘buy’ items from the shop to be able to… buy them. And you can only have so many of certain types of items equipped at once, which can lead to constantly re-entering the shop to re-equip the thing you want
15. Audio Spam: Tons of it. People will NOT shut up as they’re trying to kill you, and there’s so many of them
16. Outro: I’ve played worse Outros in my life, but that’s not saying much. Let’s go through this sequentially; First, there’s no mid mission checkpoint in a fairly long and easy to die mission, even though there’s a very clear ‘halfway point’ which would be perfect for said checkpoint. Second, everything else about the mission. I hate to be so generic but no really, this entire mission is awful. Waves after waves after waves of tanks and APCs and gunships and people with rocket launchers, all obliterating everything in the narrow path you have to progress through, followed by very carefully designed fences who’s entire purpose is to prevent you from bypassing them. This is absolutely awful and I honestly gave up and just turned on invincibility (for the first time in the whole game!) to bypass the onslaught of deaths…
17. Outro: …earning it a solid…
18. Outro: …triple negative

Story Positives:

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

Gameplay Negatives:

1. MTX/Launch: Literally robbed me of the game. I bought it, it’s unplayable, and they refused a refund. What more do I need to add…
2. MTX/Launch: …other than of course…
3. MTX/Launch: …three negatives
4. MTX: Cosmetics. Oh so many cosmetics. And they’re just the most ridiculous, Fortnite’y cosmetics too…
5. MTX: …for a solid…
6. MTX: …triple negative
7. Interface: The entire launch ‘page’ is smattered and smeared with the latest deals and buys and other in-store bullcrap being shoved into your face unapologetically…
8. Interface: …earning a solid…
9. Interface: …three negatives
10. MTX: Oh you can buy stuff that actually has stats and gameplay benefit too. Not much, in fairness, but still…
11. MTX: …a second negative worthy
12. Crash: So, the game crashes with near 100% certainty upon launch, with no bypass…
13. Crash: …earning a solid…
14. Crash: …triple negative
15. Bug: So. I can’t play the game, at all. This is the literal definition of a game-breaking bug…
16. Bug: …and earns a solid…
17. Bug: …three negatives

Story Positives:

1. Sound Design: Does a good job of emphasizing the vibe and tone, along side…
2. Music Direction: …the good usage of the music to keep the…
3. Atmosphere: …atmosphere going of this lonely, broken down, busy station spinning silently in the void
4. Spritework: The drawings and sketches of the characters are really top notch and do a great job of helping get across their personality…
5. Spritework: …for two positives
6. World Building: Quite a bit, almost entirely woven naturally through the work. There’s indications of how things work coreward, how the corporations operate, unrest back home, how things are affecting the periphery, all sorts of juicy stuff…
7. World Building: …and all well told
8. Characters: Supporting cast in general. Lots of flavorful and interesting characters…
9. Dialogue: …who each have their own voice, with well written and distinct dialogue throughout…
10. Dialogue: …earning double positive
11. Characters: Lem, Mina, & Castor earn special bonus points for complexity and adorableness
12. Characters: Feng & Hardin are another interesting dynamic in that both serve as a bit of poster children for the station as a whole
13. Intro: Feng, Hardin, and Ethan’s chain. Might as well be the closest thing to the Intro we have here, despite its length. Learning more about how the station operates, unlocking multiple interactions, seeing both sides of things, escalating into things getting serious, and all while being hounded by bounty hunters seeking to cash in
14. MSQ: Hunter, Navigator, Killer, and Gardener. This one probably should have more positives, but the game doesn’t really develop the transhumanism ideas of being an AI past the basics… but what is there is still interesting, and still makes you feel bad for Hunter and Killer
15. MSQ: Sabine, Rabiah, and Yannick. The local mafia which is more complicated than you’d think and actively helps the community, run by someone doing suspicious work literally using his guard as cheap guinea pigs for corpo experiments
16. Prime Opt: Emphis’ chain and bartender’s chain. Optional but interesting as we learn yet another side consequence of how the corpos do business, the consequences thereof, and of course how our own body operates (thanks to the delicious food, wonderfully written)
17. Prime Opt: Ankhita, Bliss, Moritz. The merc who’s never known kindness, the odd confrontation (which was weird honestly), but then the story of Bliss finally making it big after being screwed followed by the handoff to Moritz, good stuff
18. Internal Continuity: Only once, in the DLC, but it worked

Story Negatives:

1. Plot: Meandering after Act 1. Once you deal with the tracker issue one way or another, there’s plenty of individual threads, but no real throughline
2. Outro: The endings are… not good. At least one of them is fully realized (that’d be leaving on the ship with Lem and Mina) but most of the other ones feel rushed or ill-thought out
3. MSQ: DLC. The story has several issues here, perhaps bolstered by how experimental it is, but most notably how slanted and rushed it all feels
4. Characters: DLC. Several of these new characters are effectively shoved into you with a ‘you should care about them’, and sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it does not. But worst is it’ll occasionally introduce new characters for what amounts to no reason
5. Internal Continuity: The entire rest of the game, a near total absence of internal continuity

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Mechanic: Controlled success states and dice allocation. The very central Dice Placement mechanic is as interesting as it usually is, allowing the player a degree of control and design over what goes how well and where…
2. Core Mechanic: …further bolstered by the ‘leveling’ system which allows you a degree of bad luck protection, as well as some smart…
3. Encounter: …encounter design, such that there’s usually at least one thing somewhere which benefits from higher or lower dice, leaving you unlikely to be truly screwed over by randomness
4. Core Mechanic: Resource bars and replenishable management. It feels weird to give ‘health and food meters’ a positive but here we are. There’s a lot of clever thought that goes into how you can restore both, how they can both be spent (or lost, as a penalty for failure), and ways of dealing with that open up as the game goes on
5. Core Mechanic: Time management & timer management. This is our final puzzle piece for the central gameplay; everything is cycle based and thus managing your actions per turn (which dovetails into your health, as higher health means more actions) and staying under red timers (doomsday clocks) helps keep things interesting
6. Encounter: Escalation of types of encounters and their requirements
7. Encounter: Specific design of types of actions to benefit those types of perks (direct example: Later on there’s a dice action to gain energy back which is Endure, the perk of which gives a chance to gain energy upon successful Endure action, thus doubling down)
8. Interface/HUD: Indicators of success and modifiers as well as good color coding
9. Intro: Early Game: Lean into mechanics (free food/dose first time, free house first time, repeatable income source at start, obvious early guidance
10. Info In Game: General, but quite a bit. How much the dice rolls will impact, what can be used where, what perks do
11. Visual Distinction: Surprisingly good for such a visually simple game
12. MSQ: Slowly unlocking (via dice actions) more interactions and progression. This arc forms a weirdly good…
13. Power Progression Curve: …arc, where as you develop and complete quests you gain access to more methods to be able to work around difficulties and issues
14. Interface: A surprisingly good quest log, which also keeps track of where you can go to progress said quests
15. Itemization: Good layout for procurement and variety of usage of items throughout

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Save: Forced ironman mode
2. Interface: Very few, very small, but consistent irritations in interface interactions (dragging items to complete quests, swapping between inventories and visual layers with no hotkeys, having to ferry manually between zones)
3. Late Game: The core mechanic starts to spiral a bit into dull territory when you reach a point where you’ve sort of got nothing to do and are just waiting on timers
4. Outro: Pacing: Also, the DLC stuff starts relying on timers… which is by definition at a point of the game where you’ve already done all you can so you’re just sitting there, waiting for the timers
5. Outro: Padding: DLC. The early and mid game do some good stuff with regards to multiple paths and options, but the DLC leans heavily on ‘spend dice to fill very large quotas’ and… that’s it
6. Itemization: DLC: Items just sort of stop being relevant by the time you hit the DLC, other than to keep your meters up

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Some surprisingly decent designs in the backgrounds of several zones
2. Spritework: The main character themselves is pretty nice, but also worthy of note is the various… I hesitate to call them NPCs but don’t know what else to use here
3. Moments: There are several small, optional cute moments throughout

Story Negatives:

1. Brickwork: For every good brickwork, there’s one that’s bad. Empty, irritating, and/or poorly tiled
2. Spritework: And ditto for spritework. Some of the interactable characters just look awful
3. Tone: So, this is the very thing that most people would probably list as a positive. This game’s overall atmosphere and tone is that of confusion and weird, and it’s disorienting and nebulous without any real point or purpose to any of it…
4. Tone: …and it’s one of the worst games of this variety I’ve ever encountered…
5. Tone: …thus earning the sacred third negative
6. Outro: Vague and nothingburger. Cute combo. (I mean honestly, we lay a bunch of eggs in the dream then go commit suicide in real life. What?)

Gameplay Positives:

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Guidance: What guidance! I should mention there’s several aspects of the same general type of ‘where do I go?’ ‘how do I interact with this?’ throughout but this is probably some of the most above and beyond stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s rare that I feel the need for a walkthrough to understand basic possible interactions with the game in question…
2. Guidance: …and so this, by itself, deserves two negatives
3. Info In Game: Then we get into how things work. Oh not just the items, but how those items can and do interact with the world around you. It’s very Point & Click, aka use every thing on every location / person
4. Walkthroughitis: Then there’s the fact that the game more or less mandates a walkthrough constantly. I should mention this is just the aggregate negative, as individual sequences get their own negatives
5. Graphics: Several examples of issues (like the neon flashing lights or the flashing static), all of which make for some legitimately eye hurting visuals
6. Traversal: You have three options. Walking (which is very slow, in nice big areas), bike (which is barely faster and prevents several interactions), or bugging out the game (which also counts as a bike). All of this is made worse by…
7. Overworld: …the overworld design. Almost every area has the thing you need to get to just out of visual range, or in an area you can barely see, with lots and lots of looping screens. So it takes a while to get around, the distance is just long enough to get disorienting, and all of that contributes to…
8. Guidance: …inconsistency. So here’s the deal. If you establish something in a game, the player then takes that in and says ‘okay, this is how this works’. So if a player goes to a dead end and, surprise, there’s nothing there, they think ‘this is a bonus area’ or something similar. What they do NOT think is ‘this has about a 10% chance of being an area which I need to progress’, which happens to be true
9. Gotcha: Of the troll puzzle design. Have fun going down a road with no indicator you’re supposed to turn around after a certain point. There’s several of these, by the way
10. Music: Repetitive and piercing. I honestly hesitate to even call this music so much as ambient noise
11. RNG: So we almost never give an RNG negative. I honestly forgot we even had a category for it! But here we are. Multiple things require RNG to progress, several of which are mandatory, and they are aggravating to roll and reroll and reroll until you get the desired outcome (oh and nothing indicates this, of course)…
12. RNG: …so that’s a double negative
13. Level: An invisible maze against an epilepsy inducing static flash (and noise!). Also I’ve looked at the layout of this maze, it has deliberate ‘screw you’ hallways to mess with you. The literal method of progression here is to check every wall on all four sides at every point… or just have a map, while the screen is flashing static at you
14. Padding: Several examples throughout. Almost every time you need to do a thing, it’s deliberately elongated to make it longer with no additional interactions. Like walking down a long, looong hallway with nothing to see or do to access an item
15. Level: So, in order to get the Puyo Puyo you have to re-do the entire route to the Fat thing, then talk to a RANDOM NPC in town (where they all look alike, and roam)…
16. Level: …which is already bullcrap…
17. Level: …then navigate to another town on suddenly an overworld map and then off to the back of the town and then to the hidden area of the town
18. Level: Absolutely everything to do with the looping red maze. In addition to the usual problems, it also has jackasses that can reset your progress, and on top of that it’s legitimately painful on the eyes
19. Save: Very, very bad save placement, which can lead to a lot of lost progress. By the way there’s only one save point, and it’s the furthest away from every single puzzle and maze as is possible
20. MSQ: Everything to do with the Infinite Wilderness. This ties into the inconsistency problem with invisible map warps and and the usual looping ‘maze’ problems. To talk about this briefly; When you have a looping empty map you have created the worst kind of maze. Actual mazes have walls and signposts (literal or metaphorical) so the player can navigate them. They can see where they’ve been and where they’re going. The looping empty terrain maze accomplishes the same objective but removes all player interaction other than counting steps or getting lucky (or having a walkthrough…)
21. Secondary: Everything about reaching Mars. Go through an RNG check to use a specific item (or two) to get to a room to sleep for another RNG check to walk for a while to use a third item to see a guy playing a piano. I think?
22. Backtracking: Quite a few examples throughout. Multiple of the progression items flat require redoing areas and then going down a different path
23. Terrain: Awkward navigation. So, you can only move on the cardinal directions (up, down, left, right) but a lot of areas are diagonals. This just makes navigating them awkward and frustrating
24. Replayability: There’s a weird negative of replayability here, gameplay wise. The puzzles don’t change and the areas don’t change, and there’s nothing to it but the maze aspect itself which is now a solved issue

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: For what it’s worth, the brickwork’s actually pretty solid here

Story Negatives:

1. Atmosphere: Jump scares
2. Brickwork: Generic and bland
3. Animations: I usually don’t like to come down on something like this, but the animations in this game are uniquely bad. Very stilted, very awkward
4. Tone: So… this game is weird. Not in a surreal way, not in an interesting way, just in a ‘random stuff that happens for no reason’ way. In fact it might be the worst example of this I’ve ever seen…
5. Tone: …and it deserves a solid…
6. Tone: …triple negative
7. Outro: So we have the first ending, which continues to be a total nothingburger…
8. Outro: …but we actually have a much more aggravating to procure second ending which is somehow even worse!

Gameplay Positives:

1. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Shockingly, yeah, some pretty good checkpointing here

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Level: Street World. Inconsistent hurtboxes, clunky and inconsistent movement, and instant kill triggers (which are… avoidable due to bugs??)
2. Encounter: So there’s this puzzle; Get 351 to access a conveyor to bypass a monster. Sure. Thing is, you don’t just… punch the code in, you hit levers which randomly make numbers show up. With no pattern to how the levers change said numbers
3. Lighting: I just canNOT see what the hell I’m doing in this game. It’s irritating in general…
4. Lighting: …but it also gets in the way of platforming
5. Level: So, the Docks World. Everything about this sucks. You have instant kill water, instant kill bird women, and imprecise platforming…
6. Level: Guidance: …a total lack of guidance on what to do or how to do it with the Yen…
7. Level: Backtracking: …and you have to traverse the entire level several times even if you know what you’re doing, and especially if you don’t
8. Graphics: Bluuurrrr BLUUURRRR…
9. Graphics: …the bluuurrrr
10. Level: So the Barracks. Set up the plank (huh?), place the eyeball as bait (huh???), and then lure Pacman over. This is already obtuse and stupid…
11. Level: …but then we have the problem of actually getting the stupid furball up there. It’s hard to explain how frickin’ frustrating this is. There’s only one viable path, it’s easy to screw up, and the timing is entirely too tight
12. Level: Walkthroughitis: Okay so you’re in the destroyed school. You hit a few levers, and navigate the terrible physics and awful platforming to make your way up the only way to progress, and nothing happens. So, uh… it’s actually even worse, because there’s several problems colliding here. First is what’s already mentioned…
13. Level: Lighting: …then there’s the fact that due to a lack of proper lighting it’s hard to see what’s going wrong with said jump (or just navigating the school at all)…
14. Level: …then there’s just a general lack of feedback on what you can do and can’t do. I actually solved this whole area super early… and didn’t realize it
15. Level: Let’s talk about Block World. First, the static camera continues to be a questionable choice, which already gets in the way of things in general…
16. Level: Guidance: …then there’s the nature of how you’re supposed to progress which, as usual, is obtuse. But even that can be excused (sometimes) if not for the fact…
17. Level: …that even actually finding the damned people once you know that you’re looking for them and how to ‘peek’ at their location is a thing, thanks to…
18. Level: Terrain: …the terrible terrain design of how the platforms don’t flow into each other.
19. Level: Encounter: And now I have to bring up this one particular person to find on Block World. This ONE person is triple negative territory. There is NO clear path up to them (I had to look up two separate video walkthroughs to find it, one of them included a person lost on the exact same point), it’s incredibly easy to lose all progress up the path, and once you’re up top there’s no indicator (past memorization… you memorized where they were, right?) of where to fall…
20. Level: Encounter: …earning this one puzzle…
21. Level: Encounter: …triple negatives
22. Level: Then there’s Snow World! This is actual insanity. It’s an infinite maze (already problematic) but it’s somehow even worse than usual because…
23. Level: Visual Distinction: …the graphics are extraordinarily generic. As in ‘difficult to discern between one thing and another’ generic. This is obviously a problem for things like Brickwork and Spritework but here it gets in the way of basic..
24. Level: Visual Navigation: …navigation. There’s NO real indicator of where you are or where you’ve been and randomly roaming does not help anything at all. We spent a VERY long time just trying to find a single landmark, and got VERY lucky in finding an actual guide on where to find the person so we could progress
25. Lighting: One last Lighting complaint. The way you know you’ve completed a stage is an egg shows up next to the door. Good luck seeing them or understanding what that means!
26. Outro: Oh and the final ‘boss’ starts off with randomly trying every door in a multi door room until one works…
27. Outro: …and then doing a near-blind jumping puzzle in near-pitch blackness…
28. Outro: …followed by a blind leap of faith into nothingness
29. Backtracking: Lots. Far, far too much really, made even worse than the last game thanks to the absence of the bicycle
30. Replayability: As with before this qualifies for a negative on replayability
31. Controls: Good luck forcing the game to do what you actually want it to do
32. Map: Absence of a map isn’t usually a negative, but in this case there are no other tools to navigate in MANY areas
33. Padding: General, but everywhere
34. Save: No saves at all! Just the forced ironman mode
35. Sound: Quite a few times where the sound indicators to showcase that you, y’know, ‘did a thing’ were either indistinguishable from the music, too quiet, or didn’t exist at all

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: General, but good. The three areas look distinct and give across the proper vibes, especially of a world already ‘dying’
2. Cutscenes: Art splashes and panels. There’s several, and they’re good stuff. Special mention to the dream sequences
3. Humor: More than a little bit
4. Music Direction: Definitely helps set the overall…
5. Atmosphere: …atmosphere of melancholy and gloom
6. Dialogue: Surprisingly well written stuff here. Good distinction of voices and tones
7. Character: Supporting cast in general. Not a lot of screen time for any given character, but they do good stuff with it
8. Character: Niko. He’s adorbs, honestly
9. Storytelling Mechanic: Portraits. Expressions and ‘voices’ and tones conveyed in surprisingly good sprites
10. Writing: So, I’m not sure I’m on board with the meta narrative, but it is solidly written, internally consistent, and presented
11. Pacing: The entire Solstice arc is far better paced than the original one, with things moving at more or less exactly the pace they should
12. MSQ: The entire escape sequence from the mine, the sacrifices, the stakes, work surprisingly well
13. Moment: Niko freaking out in the minecart as his young mind is crushed under the weight of things suddenly getting serious
14. Moment: Flying, the squares, the realization of the plight of the siblings, followed immediately by some light humor of them yelling at each other as Cedric jumps off with the parachute
15. Outro: The final few scenes with the World Machine are surprisingly sweet and sad, well written and well presented. They also lead neatly into…
16. Outro: …the credits. A very clever way to do credits, and a nice moment besides

Story Negatives:

1. MSQ: We’re putting this in MSQ because I’m not sure where else to put it exactly. The entire first arc of the game is… weak. It’s not terrible, but it’s disjointed, doesn’t really do what it needs to in order to build up the Solstice payoff, and it just feels… well, like a First Game. Go figure…
2. MSQ: …earning itself…
3. MSQ: …three negatives
4. Pacing: The entire first arc of the game is… pretty bad about pacing. Stilting, forced pauses, and weird lengths of stretches between events

Gameplay Positives:

1. Fast Travel: Surprisingly decent for what it is. A menu usable outside loading specific cells
2. Core Mechanic: Black Clover.exe and how it’s utilized to add a transparent window to progress through the Tower maze

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Walkthroughitis: Why was it in the documents folder, of all places? Poorly labeled too. Also there’s several instances of this periodically throughout…
2. Walkthroughitis: …made worse by the fact that said files are in THREE distinct folders on the computer

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: It varies, but there’s definitely some decent stuff on display
2. Brickwork: Hovering cities and frozen landscapes below
3. Brickwork: Factory workscapes in general. These are generally better done than the frozen hellscapes, especially because…
4. Doodads: …the doodad design. The fact that you can plow through all of this just adds ot it
5. Spritework: What can I say, the mechs themselves look pretty legit
6. Spritework: Special mention for the bosses too
7. Intro: Effective and immediate exposition. Who we are, what we’re after, and just enough to get us interested
8. Tone: Corporate mercenary hell. This is very Mechwarrior Mercenaries but even worse (that is to say, darker)
9. Storytelling Mechanic: Briefings in general are pretty well done and executed
10. Brickwork: The Strider also served as a fantastic backdrop for the stage. And, uh, the stage itself
11. Moment: The spectacle of taking this thing down was fantastic
12. MSQ: Balteus, spectacle similarly was amazing
13. MSQ: Ayre, and things getting real
14. Character: Supporting cast. Several memorable and fun characters
15. Character: Special mention to Michigen, Chatt, Carla, and Rusty
16. Moment: The arrival of the PCA is an appropriate ‘oh crap’ moment
17. Moment: The arrival of the Ice Worm. Good lord, that thing is absolutely terrifying
18. Cutscene: Ice Worm spectacle. I have no words, this is just a generally fantastic sequence
19. Plot: The entire Ice Worm sequence is probably the best part of the entire plot. We’ve had our introductions, the PCA has shown up, and now we have a colossus to kill. The corporations group up on this thing, and you end up going toe to toe with the monster. It’s great
20. Brickwork: Final battle, on a ship plummeting from orbit, with an atlas tower in the distance
21. Brickwork: The overall aesthetic of scale is honestly crazy. These things are huge, all of them
22. Atmosphere: ALLMIND and horror. Enough said
23. Internal Continuity: Usual Fromsoft quality of internal consistency

Story Negatives:

1. Dialogue: Dialogue has… a few issues. Maybe it’s localization, maybe it’s style, but there’s a lot of really crude diary discussion going on instead of conversation. It’s not terrible, but it does get jarring now and again
2. Dialogue: Okay so, the further into the game we get, the worse the dialogue gets. Empty dialogue, meaningless advice, weird repetition. It feels like a noticeable dip down from the early game
3. MSQ: Chapter 5, first playthrough. This whole sequence is… fine, I guess, but ultimately just a bit too impersonal and a bit too disjointed. Twists and ideas are thrown left and right and suddenly you’re making a choice the game barely emphasizes, except that it changes who you fight…
4. MSQ: …this persists in the second playthrough as well, and both lead into the first two endings
5. Outro: The first ending is… fine, I guess, but ultimately very unsatisfying. Yes I know it’s not the real ending but that’s almost the problem isn’t it
6. Outro: The second ending is… a nothingburger. It’s exactly what was promised (everything burns) but that’s… it. And honestly given all we’ve seen of Rubicon (blasted hellscape) it’s hard to… care that it’s all on fire again. I honestly felt more invested in the character stories, all of which have long since stopped
7. Outro: Okay so… Iguazu being the pathetic rival who somehow is the final boss is a trope that’s almost never worked for me, and it super does not work here. Him usurping ALLMIND is just… sure
8. Outro: But then there’s the actual ending. This is interpretable, of course, but… initiating combat mode? Did we literally just create eternal valhalla? This line reframes the entire ending as us being the friggin’ bad guys and ruining everything forever
9. Plot: What was ALLMIND’s plan?! We at least know what Walter wanted (blow it all up) and Ayre’s is to just kind of… hope for the best I guess, but what the hell did ALLMIND want?

Gameplay Positives:

1. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: These are really, really good. First, they’re well distributed, and almost always right after segments or right before bosses. Second, they refill your resources. And third, there’s no penalty for using them outside of losing S Ranking. These are great…
2. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: …easy…
3. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: …triple
4. Difficulty Mutator: S ranking and supply drops on bosses
5. Intro: Basic tutorial on maneuvering followed by a barrier boss which more or less forces the player to understand basic mechanics
6. Controls: In combat the game controls extremely smoothly. The whole thing is very fluid, and there’s a lot of little things happening all the time to help adjust you to what you ‘should’ be doing…
7. Controls: …another solid…
8. Controls: …triple
9. Pacing: Some missions are run throughs, some are mulchers, and some are bosses
10. QoL: Change loadout on death. This by itself deserves mention as a great QoL feature, only really hampered by the Money Problem listed later
11. NG+: Mission Replay with rewards, as per usual
12. Flow: The game is exceptionally fluid in combat, playing at exactly the pace you want to play it…
13. Flow: …another easy double
14. Cosmetic: Mech customization, decals. Custom decals, placements, good stuff
15. Cosmetic: Painting and materials. This is a much more fleshed out system, and does tons right with letting you customize your mech, from options to do the entire category or each individual piece…
16. Cosmetic: …easy…
17. Cosmetic: …triple
18. QoL: Full refund on selling gear. Weird to see a common gameplay feature from builder games here, but here we are. It’s one of the only reasons the Money Problem isn’t worse
19. Level: Initial bundle of actual tutorials. Past the first mission is a bundle of what can only be called breather missions which do a good job of easing you into things, letting you play around a bit, and get some… money
20. Level: Strider. The giant laser tag sequence, the climb up the legs, blasting the power nodes, and finally taking down the head, surprisingly fun setpiece mission…
21. Level: …for a double
22. Level: Operation Wallclimber. Enemies all over and seemingly rabble, but some smart positioning of artillery and support makes the approach interesting
23. Boss: And of course it concludes with the Juggernaut boss. A fairly simple but solid boss design; Weak from the rear, very fast, and surprisingly agile
24. Level: Investigate BAWS Arsenal No. 2, and the case of the stealth bots. These are fun, with multiple ways to deal with them, and of course a big culmination fight
25. Level: Attack the Watchpoint. Hope you enjoy long chasm approaches littered with snipers! Cuz I do
26. Boss: Balteus. I was torn on this since he’s so infamous, and lord knows I died a couple of times too, but I think this is still a well designed barrier boss. There’s multiple ways around him, his barrages are very telegraphed, and his phase two adds a nice pseudo melee facet to the fight…
27. Boss: …for a double
28. Level: Infiltrate Grid 086. Fun level design and nice trash and minibosses
29. Boss: Smart Cleaner. This is another one I was torn on (I actually died more here than on Balteus). Ultimately his biiig obvious attacks which hit far further and larger areas than they look like, combined with two weakpoints (which can be attacked on different vectors) makes for a fun fight…
30. Boss: …and a double positive
31. Level: Steal the Survey Data (and the first arrival of the PCA squadron)
32. Boss: Dual SPs at the end of Refueling Base. These were interesting; one’s bigger and meaner, the other’s faster, both try to double team you but can be isolated with some good maneuvering
33. Level: Attack the Old Spaceport is a fun take on a run and smash. You have a window to crush as many ships as you can, while dealing with screen defenses
34. Boss: The original Raven fight. Mean, in all the right ways
35. Boss: I’ve been chewing on this for a bit, and I think one of my favorite fights in the game is the Enforcer. There’s no gimmicks to speak of, no irritating terrain, no cheap crap or HP barriers or anything else. It’s just a solid, brutal, fast fight…
36. Boss: …for a double
37. Level: Underground Exploration, Depth 3. Simple maneuvering with cover and snipers, then a pressure fight against a healing defender
38. Boss: Coral Convergance’s Ibis mecha. This thing is wild; very fast attacks, but also very limited in range and reach, so possible to bypass and dodge. Also has noticeable pause points in its attack patterns
39. Level: Escape… in a pile of junk! Actually this is surprisingly well designed. You have a chaff launcher (stun / escape), a machine gun (stagger), and a spread bazooka (kill), and there’s plenty of cover…
40. Level: …easy double
41. Viscerality: Sound design is lacking, impact is variable, but visuals? This game has amazing visual viscerality, top to bottom…
42. Viscerality: …an easy…
43. Viscerality: …triple
44. Enemy Design: The unique designs of the Arena fights. Every enemy there is using player-available parts. In other words, they’re pseudo PvP matches
45. Leveling: OS Chips (from the Arena) which give straight stat ups as well as a few other neat features
46. Kit: Weapons… on the hands. There are many, many good weapons that stay good the entire game. The fact that the starter sword stays relevant into the third playthrough speaks for itself, but there’s also tons and tons of good stuff here…
47. Kit: …for…
48. Kit: …triple positives
49. Kit: Weapons… on the shoulders! There’s even more amazing options here, with different styles and options and cooldowns and stats and spreads and aims…
50. Kit: …for an easy…
51. Kit: …triple
52. Kit: Then there’s all the other parts! Yeah I know, clumping them all together, but they’re mostly for refining and the like. Also we have those friggin’ explosive armor parts
53. Kit: I chewed on this for a bit, but the ability to slot a hand weapon to slot in and out of your shoulders deserves its own mention for how much it opens up kit
54. Build: Parts, the way parts interact, the multitude of options, there’s tons upon tons of Builds and a huge number of them are viable, accommodating a large range of playstyles. I struggled for a bit for how many positives to give this considering how well done it is, so what we’re going to do is give several…
55. Build: …for the ‘lesser’ parts…
56. Build: …like core, head, FCS, etc
57. Build: Then we’re going to give a few for…
58. Build: …just…
59. Build: …weapon selection and combinations
60. Build: Finally, we have legs…
61. Build: …and generators, which sort of complete the set
62. Level: Escort the Weaponized Mining Ship. Mean, but a great indicator of what’s to come, and surprisingly well designed enemies that cover each others’ weaknesses
63. Level: Defend the Dam Complex, aka fight two ACs on a timer before a third shows up. They’re all well designed fights but what is really interesting is how the two initial don’t really support one another until so far into their health, and the third shows up on a timer specifically
64. Level: So this is functionally an aggregate. There’s a few partial variant missions in route three that have some good side / new fights in them
65. Level: MIA is exactly as hectic and frenetic as it should be. Also it’s a long corridor ending in a huge open area with a primarily aerial boss fight
66. Core Combat: Yeah I’ll give you this, the core combat is legit
67. Enemy AI: Not too shabby actually, though it has a few hangups
68. Replayability: Definitely the second positive. Tons of stuff to encourage replay

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Interface: Mech customization. The controls in doing the mech customization, especially the decals, is honestly pretty maddening
2. Interface: There’s a… UI scaling issue where parts of the visuals are just not properly sized for some resolutions. This dovetails into…
3. HUD: …the HUD issues. There’s a fairly large amount of info on screen and this game is incredibly high intensity, but the really relevant things are duotone (usually red and white, or just yellow) and are portrayed by tiny slivers of HUD. And with no options to scale or change colors, it can be frustrating to time things in the heat of combat. I’ve honestly gotten to the point of doing mental countdowns for reloads or lock ons instead of bothering to distract my eyes
4. Seconds In Minutes: Buying and selling.. Money in general, really. This one’s a weird one and is functionally a Money Problem, and it adds a bizarre amount of negativity to a game otherwise drowning in QoL features. So you earn money from missions to buy parts, sure, but you also sell back at 100% efficiency (which is nice), meaning the only thing preventing you from having access to all the weapons you’ve currently unlocked is your willingness to go through the menu options. Unequip all, switch to store, sell all, buy what you want, switch back, re-equip, try out. It’s a minor thing but like the category implies, this adds up. Speaking personally this also de-invested me in trying out new builds, since swapping was a minor irritant each time I’d try it. Ultimately this isn’t a huge issue, just a weird asterisk
5. Enemy Design: Some enemies are very clearly designed to be taken down with a specific build and actively punish everything else. This dovetails into the Money Problem mentioned above
6. Level: Enforcement Squads. No checkpoints, melee focused miniboss in an enclosed space with interruption doodads? Not fun
7. Level: Destroy the Drive Block (navigation)
8. Boss: Snail. This is an awful and miserable fight. He has entirely too much health, requires a pretty specific setup, is at the end of an otherwise not-good mission, and worst of all his purple phase-changer beams are absolutely insane to dodge. The tracking on them is ludicrous, he spends the entire time zooming away from you, and there’s RNG involved in where they even spin towards regardless of the attack ‘attack’ phases…
9. Boss: …screw this fight. This fight made me put up the cheat flag
10. Padding: Unlocking the third ending. I’ve chewed on this a bit, but the fact that almost the entire second playthrough (and a chunk of the third playthrough) is just the same missions without any variation is not great. Mechanisms already exist to encourage players to replay missions with different builds or on different routes, straight up mandating you do several of these two or THREE times is ridiculous…
11. Padding: …and earns…
12. Padding: …a full triple
13. Trash: Michigan. Thing is, he himself is fine (relatively easy, honestly) but you have to endure an absolute SLOG of trash to get to him, and while fighting him. Also you HAVE to kill all the trash to win, so just having a nuke build to kill him will not work. This is already irritating…
14. Trash: …but then you consider this game is just not designed around mass pulverizing enemies like this. There ARE weapons designed to do so… that are awful for bosses. And hey, you fight two minibosses and Michigan himself too. And remember, ALL of it is mandatory
15. Audio Spam: So… nothing in the game prevents audio clips from replaying. This is in a game which heavily encourages replaying, both to get past difficulty walls and to try out new builds (and get optional collectibles). This is… pretty bad at times, but gets even worse when you think about how much the game would be improved by a simple toggle; “Don’t replay lines”. This would mean the only dialogue you hear is new to you. This game has a LOT of dialogue for different situations and scenarios, seeking it out could be an additional replay motivator, in addition to serving as feedback for you having done something different. But no, it just all plays when it plays, turning it into a bit of a background drone…
16. Audio Spam: …that never…
17. Audio Spam: …goes away
18. Level: Prisoner Rescue. Requirements to fight ahead (which means mandatory memorization), no checkpoints, and an IDIOT escort pilot who runs RIGHT into damage or, and this is my personal favorite, sits there at ground level like an idiot while getting shredded
19. Level: Underground Exploration Depth 2, playthrough 3. No checkpoints, level geometry where it has no business being, and an incredibly annoying arena to fight in
20. Mid-Mission Checkpoints: Weirdly enough, sometimes there just… aren’t any. In some cases it makes sense, in others it doesn’t, and in all it’s frustrating
21. Outro: Boss: So, uh, the final boss. What really frustrates me is this is pretty close to being an awesome last boss, but because of two relatively minor problems it goes from being awesome to aggravating. First, the first phase which… honestly shouldn’t exist at all. It’s a bundle of Get Back Here trash that just serve to drain your healing and irritate you. Phase 2 is actually pretty solid, phase 3 is pretty good in terms of intensity, but there’s also issues with the final phase having just a bit too much health (on the adds, specifically). So… not a big fan of the finished product…
22. Outro: Boss: …for a double
23. Visual Distinction: Periodic, but every now and again the nice dull grey backdrops and gunmetal enemies don’t work super great

Story Positives:

1. Humor: Dialogue. I mean, it’s one of the better parts of the story
2. Animation: Jack is hilariously, wonderfully over the top with how violent he is…
3. Animation: …in general fights and in killing blows
4. Moment: Bullcrap. (Limp Bizkit)
5. Brickwork: Sastasha, weirdly enough. Nice color usage, good cave design
6. Brickwork: Palamecia. Nice castle setup, nice literal bricks
7. Brickwork: Tower of Zot. Mechanical and cold (and in space!)
8. Moment: Even though it fails at the end, I still like the Lich interrupt
9. Brickwork: Mako Reactor, the underwater one. Again, very cold and mechanical looking
10. Background Lore: Load screens and log entries
11. MSQ: It’s totally unearned and honestly should probably be more than one positive, but having to take down your own team is a surprisingly well executed sequence
12. Music Direction: The music choices in the finale and final boss are all surprisingly good
13. Spritework: While there’s some… questionable choices here I DO actually rather like most of the player options
14. Brickwork: Lufenia. It has a few issues gameplay-wise but it still looks legit
15. Moment: Jack’s response to Nil’s big monologue is great
16. External Continuity: Weirdly, yeah. No not with FFI, not at all. But with Dissidia

Story Negatives:

1. Voice Direction: Grunts. Yes I know it’s a thing so I try not to ding it unless it’s pretty bad but… it’s pretty bad here
2. Voice Direction: Pretty bad consistently for every character. Wrong tones, wrong presentation, it’s obvious no one told these actors what the scenes were they were speaking in…
3. Voice Direction: …which is consistent and persistent…
4. Voice Direction: …and detracts from every single cutscene
5. Dialogue: Awful. As funny as it often is, the dialogue is legitimately terrible
6. Pacing: Some very strange pacing issues in cutscenes and story
7. Moment: Neon’s reveal. I’m… not even sure what they were going for here other than people ‘just going with it as if nothing happened’. It reminds me of the opposite of Consequence Storytelling
8. MSQ: Early stuff. Jack’s memory loss, party chatting nonsensically, everyone acting like things are normal
9. Cutscene: Tiamat post scene. I don’t have words here it’s just… a lot of nonsense
10. Story Sequencing: Stuff just… happens, with no rhyme or reason to it. In one particular case I remember us being attacked by this massive firestorm, there’s a fade to black, and then we’re chatting on the space station. What?!…
11. Story Sequencing: …for two negatives
12. Banter: Just… not great. A lot of repetition and a lot of very generic, plug and play dialogue, if you can even call it that
13. Storyboarding: There’s… issues with the storyboarding in almost every cutscene
14. Visual Continuity: There’s a general lack of cohesion with what is where and how, despite having an actual map
15. Character: All, really. Non characters who have moments which fall flat and have no build up
16. Cutscene: So hey, Jack sees a cutscene, gets angry about it, then has a flashback to it seconds later, then demands answers out of nowhere, and… what?
17. Brickwork: The Floating Continent. Gross and bland makes for an interesting combo but here we are
18. Pacing: Cornelia fleeing. Seriously, it goes straight from success to failure, which… is a pretty common issue in this game honestly
19. Empty Text: Bahamut. This is the definition of empty text. Lots of (short) cutscenes that say… nothing. This is all nothing new, even if you’ve never played FFI, and a lot of the sort of basic platitudes that sound meaningful and say nothing
20. MSQ: The entire Gilgamesh arc is… not good, at best. Gilgamesh is absent his usual boisterous humorous self, cutscenes are weird and poorly stitched together, we fight Gilgamesh several times in a row just to find out it was actually this other thing entirely, the end
21. Cutscene: Not a fan of those cutscenes I just mentioned either
22. Consequence Storytelling: Or a lack thereof
23. Localization: Some clear issues here and there
24. Outro: I’m going to be nice and only give each of the Outros a single negative. They were all pretty… not good enough for a neutral

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: Decent rebinding options
2. Core Combat: Of course the combat’s one of the selling points of the game. Fun, fluid, and enjoyable minute-to-minute with the ability to emphasize dodging, blocking, parrying, or any combination thereof…
3. Core Combat: …for a solid…
4. Core Combat: …three positives
5. Music: Several good tracks, and good overall
6. Enemy Design: Solid enemy design, good attacks and weaknesses
7. Viscerality: Attacks feel good, attacks sound good, and attacks look good…
8. Viscerality: …for a very solid…
9. Viscerality: …triple
10. Party AI: Party members aren’t useless! I’ve seen slightly better, but these are still very good…
11. Party AI: …for a double
12. QoL: Auto dismantle plus settings for customizing said auto dismantle
13. QoL: Auto loot filter settings, in case you only want to pick up certain types of things
14. QoL: Leave mission retains progress
15. Co-Op: Some niggles here and there, but otherwise good drop in and out co-op and with good campaign co-op support…
16. Co-Op: …for a double
17. Animations: Almost every attack has good animation design. It’s mostly on the bosses, really…
18. Animations: …but even the base enemies have a few things here and there
19. Difficulty Options: You are able to lower the difficulty basically on the fly in mid mission, and turn it back up and down outside of missions freely
20. Kit: Sword & Board moveset
21. Kit: Greatsword moveset
22. Kit: Katana moveset
23. Kit: Mace moveset
24. Kit: Greatsword moveset
25. Kit: Fist weapons moveset
26. Kit: Daggers moveset
27. Kit: Spear moveset
28. Kit: Staff moveset
29. Kit: Gun moveset
30. Kit: Classes. These change your standard ability (like Adrenaline or casting) and have a few other side stats and benefits…
31. Kit: …for a solid…
32. Kit: …triple
33. Build: Jobs and weapons. What jobs you select, and how you set up your weapons and your moveset…
34. Build: …is already good build design
35. Build: Affinities are another layer of Build, giving you passive abilities the more you stack per class. These are mostly stats at the lower levels, but when they get up there the combinations get really fun…
36. Build: …and the synergy design starts to show up
37. Build: Gear customization is another layer of this. Being able to rejigger gear is great, and being able to decide what you prioritize is similarly great…
38. Build: …for another double positive
39. Alternate Leveling: Smithy in general. Being able to upgrade a piece you like, or a suffix, or swap it, is a great progression concept…
40. Alternate Leveling: …for another double
41. Boss: Totally Not Garland is a great tutorial fight. Good range of moves, good introduction into what to expect from boss fights in general
42. Level: Chaos Shrine. Good looping and shortcutting and some nice rewarding side paths
43. Level: Sastasha, again has some decent layout and design to it
44. Level: Palamecia and the gimmick of the artillery works weirdly well, especially since it A: Hits enemies and B: Can be blocked by terrain
45. Boss: Black Knight. Horse-mounted charger followed by a much stronger, more agile melee bruiser
46. Yoshi Drums: Quite a bit actually, either based on phase of a fight or just being in combat at all or not
47. Level: Tower of Zot. Switches and traps
48. Boss: Tiamat is actually a really solid fight, one of the funner and more memorable bosses to me. Great range of attacks (both short and long), good animation indicators, and…
49. Boss: …a second phase where her health abruptly becomes irrelevant and it’s all about breaking her
50. Boss: Marlboro Tyrant. Simple yet solid, good attacks and good spread
51. Level: Fire Cavern, weirdly. Re routing based on lava, good flow
52. Boss: Marilith. As you might imagine, good reach and fast attacks
53. Boss: Dragon Zombie. Area denial and big, sweeping hits
54. Boss: Lich. Another fun but simple fight
55. Boss: Kraken is great. Has big obvious tells before gaining insane reach and tracking, plus nice vuln periods…
56. Boss: …double positive worthy
57. Boss: Ultima Weapon. Great mobility, great moveset, great tempo
58. Boss: Chaos. Nice theming and variety of attacks
59. Boss: Warrior of Light, sort of. He’s a solid boss (all three versions of him…) with a solid moveset and telegraphs
60. MSQ: Chaos mode in general. Even more upping of difficulty, rewards, and mechanics, and lots of ways to reward players for redoing missions
61. MSQ: Bahamut is in a similar place, also allowing for some vendor usage to try and bypass bad luck streaks
62. Minigame: Gilgamesh mode. This is fun in general, with its own little gimmicks (like raising your minions)…
63. Minigame: …and for those wanting endgame to keep going with the game, climbing ever further up the tower is a nice, brutal option
64. Boss: Gilgamesh. We fight him too many times, but he’s still a decent fight (except for Jump)
65. Boss: Death Machine. This is one of the better fights in the entire game, weirdly. Very fast and with great range on its attacks, but with good pause moments and recovery periods in between pressure segments…
66. Boss: …making for a very solid fight
67. Itemization: In general
68. Boss: Mateus. A lot of his Dissidia moveset, which works very well for this type of engine and is just generally fun
69. Replayability: Yeah alright, I’ll give it the first one…
70. Replayability: …and it obviously deserves the second one
71. Cosmetics: Quick and easy transmog setup with presets
72. NG+: Stage select and all that entails

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Tutorial: Initial tutorial is… not great. It’s a combination of ‘you must do this’ and ‘not explaining much’, but ironically gets worse when…
2. Tutorial: …a ton of pop ups start spamming your face constantly with too much info (which also massively interrupts the flow of things)
3. Interface: Lots of issues. Very small for the most part, but it’s a nonstop hassle. Very Koei Tecmo interface. Inconsistent coding, indicators, bad at-a-glance, inconsistent tunneling, issues with comparisons, weird usage of real estate…
4. Interface: …it’s all…
5. Interface: …pretty bad
6. Itemization: Gear spam. The game shotguns loot at you. Yes I know there’s ways to avoid this, but it doesn’t change the fact that it diminishes the relevance of gear itself, and it is entirely too easy to clog your inventory and be forced to deal with it in an annoying way (because both of the better designed methods to clean up inventory require being at an orb or on the map)
7. Controls: Lock on is… weird in this one. I have no idea how it decides what you lock on to but it’s only occasionally what I want to. Also sometimes it’s hard to even tell if you are locked on at all
8. Co-Op: Why do we have to break and reform room for cutscenes?
9. Minimap: Lack thereof. For the overwhelming majority of the time it’s fine but there are several stages where its absence gets aggravating
10. Level: Floating Continent, navigation, and visual issues
11. Level: Cornelia 2 and the absolute bullcrap of enemies. They just hit really, REALLY hard and you need to smash through them in a small area with no terrain or otherwise to help out
12. Grind: Enemies that can literally three shot you
13. Difficulty Curve: Or cliff, in this case. The WoL fight, which is mandatory I remind you, is a hell of a cliff
14. Core Mechanic: Systems. So… so many systems. Too many. This, by itself, over-complicates the game…
15. Core Mechanic: …especially since each DLC…
16. Core Mechanic: …keeps adding more and more complications, but then it runs into a Problem of…
17. Info in Game: …how little proper information on these mechanics is in the game (I should mention that even after looking it up I’m still not 100% sure how all these mechanics work)…
18. Walkthroughitis: …and having to look up basic functionality
19. Grind: Drip-feeding your way through the Bahamut DLC is kind of… awful. You grind out Bahamut Treasures, and every so often unlock another 30 second cutscene. This feels… bleh
20. Padding: Gilgamesh. It’s a fun fight, so why do we have to do it three times? In a row, even
21. Info In Game: Okay so, the end game problem. There are a lot of cool, interesting systems and builds and other fun stuff (that got positives) aaand not only is it barely in the game, but in almost every case it’s extraordinarily misleading in terms of what info it shares and where it shares it…
22. Info In Game: …earning it…
23. Info In Game: …a triple, but also…
24. Walkthroughitis: …there’s so much information that you have to go look up to figure out what abilities synergize with what other ones, where to farm what, how attacks and abilities work…
25. Walkthroughitis: …which all then runs into the final problem…
26. Grind: …the grind. You need to get the right type of item, the right blessing, with the right amount of blessing, the right affinities (twice, so that’s two separate rolls), and all of that is baseline. There’s other micro-optimizations on top of that with Chaos suffixes, but the point is to even get started in the late game and endgame stuff you need 5 separate successful rolls per slot. It’s…
27. Grind: …a bit…
28. Grind: …much
29. Level: Lufenia. Bad visual distinction, weird layout, lots of invisible walls

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Potcrock. Seriously, the detail and storytelling and tone setting of the brickwork here is hard to even put into words it’s so good. I have no real choice…
2. Brickwork: …but to give a double
3. Doodads: Potcrock also has absolutely tons of doodads…
4. Doodads: …for a double
5. Visual Storytelling: Potcrock. Rust, grass, debris, and lighting. Everything about this place immediately indicates the underground, ramshackle, post-apocalypse that it is
6. Animation: The animation on characters is bonkers good top to bottom…
7. Animation: …from enemies to bosses…
8. Animation: …to random background characters
9. Spritework: Bonkers good spritework here. The characters are very detailed…
10. Spritework: …as are the enemies…
11. Spritework: …as are the bosses
12. Brickwork: Supermarket area. Again, wonderful detailing here…
13. Doodads: …in both
14. Lighting: Darkness and sunlight are used really well in the early parts of the game. It really contrasts the darker underground area vs. the areas where actual sunlight exists
15. World Building: We learn a decent amount about exactly how insular and messed up this society is, both in Potcrock and Greenburg
16. Character: Potcrock supporting cast. The asshole, the bullies, the mayor, the coworkers… Miyazaki for some reason…
17. Character: Sam. She is just the right brand of kind hearted and naive without drifting into irritating
18. Intro: The entire intro arc is solid. Saving the mines, how unreasonable the mayor is, the school sequence, the lucky coin getting things started, fighting up to the surface, and the initial exile…
19. Intro: …solid stuff
20. Moment: Charon smashing into the Mayor’s place on its way out is just… amazing
21. Moment: The music, light, and visuals as we finally hit the surface
22. Brickwork: Forest biome. As usual, amazing brickwork across the board here, and in great contrast to the underground trash heap…
23. Brickwork: …for another double
24. MSQ: Fleeing the Miasma in Greenburg is exactly as horrifying as it sounds
25. Brickwork: Upper New Dam City. I just… I’m running out of words to describe these…
26. Brickwork: …so there’s a double
27. Doodads: Upper New Dam City
28. Brickwork: Princess Avenue. Crazy detail here…
29. Brickwork: …some of the best…
30. Brickwork: …in the game
31. Doodads: Middle New Dam City
32. Doodads: Alva’s shop
33. Doodads: Shops in general
34. Doodads: Rocket Mansion (which makes sense given how often it’s on screen)
35. MSQ: Lee, the casino, and the dishes. This whole sequence is one of the better ‘plot’ elements in the entire game. We use a lucky coin to accidentally rip off a crime lord, who then tasks us to cook for him, and here we are
36. Moment: While it stumbles a bit, the loss of Alva does hurt
37. Brickwork: Monkollywood. It’s not nearly as detailed as previous areas but it’s still good
38. Brickwork: Ester City. Still some amazing visuals and details here…
39. Brickwork: …for the usual double
40. Doodads: Ester City, again
41. MSQ: Okay I actually do like the groundhog day segment. It’s… VERY abrupt and not properly laid out and it still has a couple of holes, but it’s mostly self consistent and they don’t spend too much time on repeating themselves
42. Brickwork: Charon. It’s… appropriately empty and bleak
43. NPC Set Dressing: A pretty recurrent element, even in areas we only visit a few times

Story Negatives:

1. Atmosphere: The game likes to be quirky and weird. That’s fine, really, but it also likes to be nonsense at the expense of the narrative. The amount of times I’ve mentally tuned out because I couldn’t parse what was happening is larger than I’d like…
2. Atmosphere: …for a double
3. Plot: Or lack thereof. There’s a central plot to be sure, but it takes such a back seat it’s silly, and it also suffers from some pretty bad…
4. Pacing: …pacing issues. There’s no real rhythm or pattern to events, and some things drag while others have far too little focus
5. MSQ: Jasper and the crabs. This is just… irritating, honestly
6. Character: Jasper in general. He’s annoying and a hindrance in every scene he’s in
7. Character: Solomon. I can’t even get a read on this idiot. He’s some edgelord idiot who is just… frustrating every time he’s on screen, especially given his importance to key events
8. Consequence Storytelling: Or lack thereof
9. Story Sequencing: The way some of this sequences just does not track logically at all (see the Atmosphere negative further up)
10. MSQ: Monkollywood non sequitur. Seriously there’s just this weird… padding segment of us making a film for, near as I can tell, absolutely no reason that then nonsenses into Solomon somehow being back, here, and… in charge? This whole sequence is honestly just pure unadultered…
11. Padding: …padding. And it interrupts the flow…
12. Pacing: …and pacing
13. Story Sequencing: So we go straight from the time loop to the monkey train (still in the loop… somehow, despite no resets happening) to Ester City to our first time loop again and… what??
14. Moment: The time bubble collapsing kind of… messes with the continuity of how it’s portrayed time travel, but it’s all done for a teaser ‘we knew you once upon a time’ sequence which isn’t even satisfying
15. Outro: So apparently Alva died at some point (maybe when she merged with the train??) and she then… merged with the train to… make a bunch of new clones of her for some reason? Also death is good
16. Writing: Lack of explanations. The game builds up plenty of things (Miasma, Charon, cycle, Isabela, us, Solomon, time loop) and explains… none of them. This is immensely dissatisfying…
17. Writing: …earning itself it sown…
18. Writing: …triple
19. Outro: So… just… I’m lost for words. First we get bombarded by nonsense…
20. Outro: …then some unsatisfying answers…
21. Outro: …then some seemingly wise drivel…
22. Outro: …and finally ends on a dull flop

Gameplay Positives:

1. Map: Shockingly good map. Indicative, helpful, and distinct…
2. Map: …for a double
3. Music: Intermittent, but good when it’s good
4. Itemization: This is a weird one. Upgrades are bottlenecked by hidden treasure chests but the actual main attack goes up via plot, so there’s no ‘falling behind’. Enemies drop plenty of salt, which you will in turn burn on convenience features and ingredients. Overall the curve feels very smooth…
5. Itemization: …easy double
6. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Essentially every screen, which is good… though it can lead to softlocking if you enter a screen at low health and with no healing
7. Lighting: Weirdly good lighting, especially given how much of the game is interior or underground, in contrast to the surface areas
8. Tutorialization: The first combat room is weirdly well designed. This one room quickly tutorializes interacting with the environment (crates that are a different color than nearby crates block the way), combat (basic and charge attacks as well as ‘aiming’), and puzzle design (enemies on power node draw attention to generator, which then leads to the conclusion of how to redirect wiring)
9. Intro: Good, solid initial stages. Really does a good job of introducing new mechanics and then testing you on them, and escalating enemies
10. Minigame: So, Earth Born. This is an entire rogue-progression mode which is weirdly well thought out and designed for what it is. Enemies change based on the day, steps determine passage of time, and you have 7 days to win before forcing a fight with the final boss (and probably losing). On the face of it it’s decent, but it’s heavily slanted against the player in ways I’ll discuss later, so for now I’ll give this surprisingly competently designed minigame a single positive
11. Level: Supermarket stage. Good tutorialization, good fan gimmick, good introduction of the golfing mechanic, and great flow in general…
12. Level: …easy double
13. Boss: Supermarket boss. Lighting to indicate attacks, terrain being your main obstacle, and using a mechanic introduced in his stage
14. Level: Prisoner caves. Steam vents and switches and dual player fun
15. Level: Forest. More combat heavy than previous areas but still some decent stuff here
16. Boss: Robot. Basic attacks but each time he’s hit he drops a mine which he can also be damaged by
17. MSQ: Fleeing the Miasma is a great, intense sequence
18. Level: Oldtown. Some basic but solid stuff here, nothing super noteworthy but still good
19. Boss: Oldtown boss bot. Good telegraphs, good variety, and you can still hit him with his own bombs
20. Kit: The refill cooldown (which can even be used mid-boss fight!)
21. Level: Rustyard. Starting to get clever with some of the switch characters, bomb flinging puzzles here
22. Level: Dam, Lower. Really starting to flex with stage design now; only a few screens long but very dense in puzzles
23. Level: Dam, Upper. Ditto, per the lower Dam area. I really had to think on several of these
24. Boss: The Solomon… fly… thing. Quick, mean, reactive, good vuln periods
25. Level: The monkey train. It has a few issues (like the stealth section) but it’s still fun and has some solid puzzle design
26. Boss: Solomon… uh, train version I guess. Actually pretty standard but good. Each phase escalates and introduces new mechanics and nice big vuln periods
27. Level: Honestly I kind of liked the Eternal Tower. It’s… basic compared to earlier dungeons but the timer puzzles are still fun
28. Boss: Isabel. Full parry fight, but good escalation and good indicators. Nine parries and she’s out
29. Music: A lot of the later music in the game slaps, earning that second positive

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Sound: The audio balance is actively awful in the Earth Born minigame
2. QoL: So… Sam’s hurtbox also counts as yours. This is only occasionally irritating, but irritating it is (especially given another problem I’ll mention in a second), because it effectively doubles your hurtbox and makes dodging much more irritating. And this coincides with…
3. Core Combat: …the stun mechanic. When you take damage you’re ‘stunned’ very briefly, but your iframes only last as long as said stun. In other words it’s pretty easy to get mobbed and stunlocked to death if you’re not careful. This leads to situations where you’re either ‘completely fine’ or ‘instantly dead’ and not a lot in between
4. Encounter: So, enemies like to mob you. This isn’t an issue by itself but ties into the previous two issues, making it so that combat encounters can be frustrating…
5. Enemy Design: …especially since most enemies are designed to get right up in your hitbox and out of range of your attacks. And speaking of your attacks…
6. Kit: …everything but the pan kind of… sucks. The gun does damage, sure, but it stuns you on using it so you can’t be mobile, making it substantially less useful given the above issues. And the flamethrower is even worse. Even with a fully upgraded gun the friggin’ frying pan was more consistently useful and worthwhile, even on bosses
7. Controls: So this is one I’ve been chewing on for a bit; the game has some inconsistencies related to the above, but it also has input buffering, which can really throw you when you need precise timing; Like when being swarmed, or fighting a boss with a parry mechanic

Story Positives:

1. Plot: The core premise is admittedly quite interesting. We’re on a generational colony ship and we’re not the first or last generation, so this stupid ship is just our life
2. Atmosphere: Depression. No, seriously, everything is awful and forevermore shall remain so. There is no hope
3. Music Direction: Depression. Again, seriously. The music is a constant reminder of how horrible everything is
4. Doodads: The Pit. Lots and lots of lovely details
5. Brickwork: Hydroponics. Plants, towers, hexagons, growth pods
6. Writing: Actually really solid writing top to bottom throughout…
7. Writing: …for an easy double
8. Dialogue: Essentially all the dialogue is all well written too
9. Prime Opt: Who controls the Pit. Three options, all bad in their own ways, and it’s moderately engaging
10. Doodads: Armory. Again, details
11. Brickwork: Armory also has a nice styling to it
12. Secondary: The courthouse quests are actually fascinating. Everyone is given a chance to defend their position in combat, given rights and weapons and a venue, even public defenders. And the prosecution’s job? Is to kill them, or die trying
13. World Building: Lots. Lots and lots and lots. Let’s go down the list shall we? First we have the nature of how the Pit operates and how it’s stayed separate from everything else, how many issues they have keeping it habitable due to the area not being designed to be inhabited, and the weird pseudo community vibe they have
14. World Building: Then we have the Habitation ring. People keeping things working, the usefulness of algae, the purpose of the frogs and the mutant plants
15. World Building: The Armory, the history thereof, the bandits, the ‘silk road’
16. World Building: Weirdly the least world building went into the three Habitat areas. That is to say, it’s still good, but all three combine get about as much detail as a single other zone so far. We do learn a bit about how all three factions operate but even that’s a bit surface level
17. Moment: Sneaking into the Black Hand fortress is honestly an awesome moment, but what I wanted to comment on is how many of these the game has. As I mention down in gameplay, it feels rewarding narratively to be able to outmaneuver and outflank your enemies and just wipe the floor with them…
18. Moment: …and these moments deserve…
19. Moment: …recognition
20. Internal Continuity: Lots. Game does a lot to keep track of what’s going on, where, and how…
21. Internal Continuity: …especially important in a game that has this much Choice gameplay
22. Brickwork: Habitat area, all three. They’re… pretty similar to each other actually, but still well done
23. Brickwork: The Engine (or the Heart if you prefer). Big, pulsating, terrifying engine core
24. World Building: The Engine, the mutants, and their… interesting culture
25. Moment: The bridge reveal is honestly just as horrifying as it really should be
26. Branching Narrative: Not a lot, but still enough to qualify

Story Negatives:

1. Pacing: The entire final chapter is just… racing, to the extent where it sort of loses cohesion
2. Outro: The endings are very flat and very sudden. The fact that this was designed for a follow up is quite obvious

Gameplay Positives:

1. Difficulty Options: Two default styles, which clearly indicate what they do, but also well designed difficulty in terms of what it changes…
2. Difficulty Options: …and gradient options to customize how you want your experience to go
3. Character Creation: Pretty solid, all things considered. Bunch of options and possible builds
4. Interface: While it has a few issues here and there, I do like a lot of the information on display. Decent mouseover, decent cross referencing, and decent comparisons between equipment
5. Leveling: Good implementation of ‘use it to level it’ skill system, with tons of opportunities to use each skill across the game and obvious benefits for doing so
6. Leveling: Feats also feel weighty and useful, even on an individual basis, helping with ‘staircase leveling’
7. Inventory: No weight and no limits, plus a few sorting options
8. Fast Travel: Quick and easy to use with good spread of travel points…
9. Fast Travel: …for a double
10. Saves: Ease of saving and loading
11. Saves: Good quicksave and quickload
12. Saves: Good autosaves and loading
13. Core Combat: So the core combat itself is very solid. Turn based initiative based rounds combat, with basic attacks, strong attacks, fast attacks, burst attacks, aimed attacks, and a focus on AP instead of actions to juggle all you can do per round. There’s a few issues with terrain I’ll mention later, but cover is obviously relevant (and you can ‘knock’ someone out of cover by threatening them in melee), and all spare AP at the end of a turn gets converted into Evasion for the remainder of the round. Overall very solid…
14. Core Combat: …easily worth a double
15. Terrain: So I mentioned this earlier but terrain is… better than some games of this genre (a lot have effectively no terrain at all in game design), with actual cover and attack vectors, but it’s still pretty basic and suffers for some particular encounters. Still good enough for a single though
16. Kit: Somewhat basic, but still good. The gun variety changes what kind of attacks you have access to and their effective range, and melee weapons are fine, but what really works for Kit is actually the extra stuff like grenades and gadgets, which is where it really shines. Shields, disruptors, poisons, smoke clouds, great stuff
17. HUD: While there are a few issues here and there, the HUD is overall pretty solid, especially in combat
18. Kit: Skills. This is out of combat, of course, but the Skills are legit in their spread and, most importantly, usefulness. In a lot of RPGs the ‘talky’ stat is king, and functionally mandatory. Here they did some very good design in spreading out the types of talky, and stealth, and stealing, and computers, and so on. Every Skill has use in general, but also has at least one or two moments or quests where that particular skill really gets to shine. And the moments when they all come together (Sneak and Computers, to use a specific example) are even better. This is some of the best Skill design I’ve seen in an RPG…
19. Kit: …earning…
20. Kit: …a solid triple. This is of course related to…
21. Build: Reasonable build potential, though given the nature of the game you’re naturally locked in to one of four specializations (kill, steal, talk, tech) but you can still go with one, maybe two, of the spokes and the game is very well designed to make sure each of these is viable to some extent or another
22. Power Progression Curve: Power progression of skills. This is even optional (thanks to the difficulty options earlier), but how well your skills progress and (more importantly) the difficulty of the checks both follow a pretty smooth curve
23. Options: Really solid options menu overall
24. Overworld: General. This ties a bit into the next few points, but there’s generally good design to the zones
25. QoL: Not only is there a ‘point of no return’ indicator, it specifically tells you what you’re missing
26. Choice: As per usual for a good CRPG, great choices gameplay…
27. Choice: …for a solid double
28. Encounters: Pit encounter design (especially around the Courthouse, but plenty of others too)
29. Encounters: Factory encounter design. Same general pluses as before
30. Encounters: Reactor core encounter design. You get the idea
31. Encounters: Mission Control encounter design. Lots of fun, optional, mean stuff here
32. Encounters: Hydroponics. Some really solid, properly mean encounters here
33. All Roads Lead To Rome: Pit quests, of course
34. All Roads Lead To Rome: Factory quests
35. All Roads Lead To Rome: Habitat quests (yes all three)
36. All Roads Lead To Rome: Reactor core quests
37. All Roads Lead To Rome: Mission Control quests
38. Enemy Design: Almost every enemy in the game is basically you. In other words, same stats and gear you have access to
39. Enemy AI: Pretty solid for the most part
40. Replayability: I mean the options and branching alone guarantee the second Replayability positive

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Map: Or lack thereof. Irritating given how large areas are and how indistinct they can be. This honestly ties into…
2. Interface: Quest log. It’s… really, really threadbare, and this can get to the point of ‘just google it’ more often than not, leading to…
3. Guidance: Issues being able to tell what is where or, in some cases, what you can even interact with at all. I’m talking basic stuff like “Hey I want to go to the warehouse in this level” “Okay where is it?” And the answer is to go google it
4. Interface: A bit of a lack of feedback / confirmation issue periodically

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: So, the voice acting is bad. But in some cases, it’s actually bad in just the right way (probably coincidentally) to make people sound drugged out and/or wrong, which helps the scenes more than it probably should
2. Camera: Sometimes the camera usage is legit, leading to some really engaging cutscenes
3. Moment: Seeing a weird thing through another thing while not thinging the thing thingy
4. Character: James, who is just so… James about everything. I’m hard pressed to name someone as uniquely clueless, actively suicidal, and socially inept as James
5. Cutscene: Angela and the knife. This is just as horrifying a scene as it probably should be, and the usage of the mirror and the small details (like her flinching away when James reaches out for the knife) are awful
6. Animation: Surprisingly decent animation throughout
7. Music Direction: Decent usage of music…
8. Music Direction: …for a double
9. Sound: …and sound to keep things properly…
10. Sound: …for a double
11. Atmosphere: …atmospheric nightmare screaming…
12. Atmosphere: …for a double
13. Foreshadowing: Lots, dovetailing into…
14. Babylon 5 Effect: …things being noticeably different the second time around
15. Visual Storytelling: Water. It’s obvious and constant, but what’s most interesting about it is how interpretive it is. Does it represent grief? Regret? A desire to be cleansed? Sickly rot? All are valid
16. Visual Storytelling: Disgusting. That is to say, the rotting, broken, cracked, ‘looks like it’ll infect you just by walking on it’ aesthetic. This is a bit less interpretive but the idea of the town (pretty much top to bottom) being a visual indicator of just how rotten and horrible either James feels about himself, how Mary was in her final years, or both is pretty legit
17. Brickwork: General, but mostly for the fog and its usage
18. Moment: Maria’s death and James’ reaction to it
19. Cutscene: Eddie in total denial about everything (and most notably confessing to two things in his ramblings; He’s guilty, and he killed a dog)
20. Moment: Okay so this is a weird one. The big reveal cutscene is honestly pretty bad, but it does one thing notably right; James suddenly, and for arguably the first time in the game, starts actually emoting. This completely tracks with the idea that he’s been emotionally disconnected and wearing a mask the entire game, until he finally confronts the truth here. It’s nicely done
21. Theme: So you’re probably expecting me to praise the themes of grief and regret and punishment. I will do no such thing (as mentioned in negative 8, I actually think they’re kind of poorly done). No, what I do like is that the theme itself is entirely dependent upon the player’s interpretation, and retroactively the game supports any of the three major branches of said interpretations. This will no doubt come up in the Outros as well
22. Voice Acting: I will give the game this. Mary’s voice actress kind of nails it when she needs to. You’ll notice this positive is right at the end of the document, and this is almost entirely for her performance during the ending
23. Outro: Mary’s letter

Story Negatives:

1. Voice Acting: The voice acting varies in overall quality. Sometimes it works for the mood and scene. Sometimes it does not
2. Camera: Some usage of the camera in this game is honestly pretty textbook bad camera design (especially leaning on over-usage of the dutch angle)
3. Atmosphere: Everything to do with the Angela boss fight is unacceptable on every level. The immediate disgust speaks for itself…
4. Atmosphere: …but what really drags it up is how unnecessarily vulgar the entire thing is…
5. Atmosphere: …and how unnecessary it is in general. Even in a horror game it’s a line that there was no reason to cross, and accomplished nothing outside of being disgusting for a bit before moving on to Eddie and his issues
6. Cutscene: So… the big reveal scene is… not very well done. I did a bit of a test to track my thoughts on this (since I knew the twist walking in), and the results were actually unanimous; People just could not understand what was being revealed in the scene. So this is a negative for just the presentation itself
7. Cutscene: Angela’s final cutscene is just pointless cruelty
8. Theme: So I know this one is going to raise some eyebrows but here we are. The game’s central theme is interesting… what is NOT is how the game actually portrays it. Excessive sexual imagery instead of leaning into any of the other feelings James has, large swaths of nothing which don’t really convey anything at all, and a general lack of production values across the board that makes it seem like James is just… badly localized and voiced rather than someone who is wrestling with sanity-shattering emotions. I will acquiesce to the idea that his voice acting lucked into making this work, and it does (and it got a positive for it), but in every other way the theme of the game is barely present IN the game. The closest it comes to really nailing it, in my opinion, is right at the friggin’ beginning with James staring into a mirror
9. Localization: Pretty standard for the time, honestly
10. Outro: So this ties into something I’ll talk about on stream. Each of these endings is… not very good. They’re too vague, too badly presented, too little meat on the bones. They remind me of Dark Souls endings. We can talk about the significance of these endings, which may or may not exist, but in reality the actual scenes themselves just do not hold up to scrutiny. Even the suicide ending, which had the most potential, just falls flat. Overall…
11. Outro: …very…
12. Outro: …unimpressed

Gameplay Positives:

1. Intro: Tutorialization: Surprisingly good stuff right out the gate. Only one way to go at the start, enemy and blood on the ground, follow the blood streaks, and now we have a weapon and an understanding of what the radio noise means
2. Guidance: Surprisingly decent for the most part. Most notably the way James’ head will actually adjust to look at anything interactable
3. Combat: I know this sounds bizarre, but put me in the category that thinks combat being awful is a good thing here. Attacks are clunky and require entering a stance, wind up is slow, and follow through is slow
4. Sound Design: Enemies and puzzle design helped by sound cues
5. Camera: This is functionally a form of guidance. The manually crafted camera does a great job of indicating what you need to interact with and where you should go for the most part
6. Map: Weirdly enough the map is actually pretty solid. It’s clearly indicative of the area you’re in and where you’re at, as well as what you’ve already tried, and things like if a door will never open, if it needs a key, and if it needed a key and you already opened it
7. Encounter: Surprisingly decent encounter design. Most enemies are easy to deal with by themselves, making any multi-encounter noteworthy. It also helps that enemies stay dead (in dungeons)
8. Pacing: Weirdly, yeah. Combat, puzzle, navigation are equally well paced
9. Controls: Okay so this is weird, especially since I already gave this a negative, but when actually out in combat the controls are exactly as clunky as they need to be. It almost feels turn based with how structured and spaced actions are
10. Difficulty Options: I really like the puzzle difficulty options, and how they fundamentally change how the puzzles work
11. Itemization: Another of those ‘weirdly good’ ones. Good spread of items (affected by difficulty, too, so I’m told) and good rewarding for exploring
12. Replayability: Weirdly enough, mostly the second positive

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: The controls are terrible, let’s just be honest about it. Sometimes it works for the game’s favor (usually on the story axis) but that doesn’t stop these from being awful controls. This is especially true with any amount of navigating the menu or map, as well as interacting with objects in the world
2. Level: The Apartments dungeon can go directly to hell. First, entirely too much backtracking involved even if you know where you’re going, in a game where just moving around is slow and clunky
3. Guidance: Second, there’s a general absence of guidance
4. Walkthroughitis: And finally some of the tidbits are actively misleading (the trash chute and the key for the SECOND floor fire escape both come to mind)
5. Graphics: The film grain. It’s… really an eyesore. Thanks to a little gameshark code we actually know what the game looks like without it, and the difference was stark
6. Level: Hospital, backtracking (even if you know where you’re going)
7. Traversal: Walking and running
8. Difficulty: Hard mode issues (mention the Pyramid Head chase)
9. Level: Prison. Search every single individual cell, most of which you can’t, to find the items to progress, on top of the usual issues
10. Interface: Feedback, and lack of it. This crops up constantly; Trying to interact with the right part of brick (the others give identical reactions), interacting with the right part of a fence, rowing, et cetera…
11. Interface: …earning itself a double negative
12. Padding: Walking to town
13. Padding: Walking around town
14. Padding: The Hospital, navigation
15. Padding: Rowing… and rowing and rowing and rowing
16. Level: Having to ditch all your stuff was actually kind of neat, but losing the map for it sucks. And there’s the usual backtracking padding issues in the hotel
17. Overworld: Large and empty
18. Outro: Okay so bosses aren’t the game’s strongsuit to begin with but the final boss is really bad even by this game’s standards. It’s just the same ceiling enemy from earlier in the game but with a moth attack and a bigger arena