CrossCode

The game looks gorgeous, it nails the 16-Bit aesthetic rather well, but improves on them in subtle but noticeable ways. The music is rather nice too, catchy chiptunes all the way, pure joy. It certainly has the classic jrpg look. So I prepared myself for a funny action adventure. Only the game is neither an rpg, nor an action adventure. It is a twin-stick-shooter with an attached rpg mechanic. You have a ranged attack, which demands absolute precision and fast reflexes, even on the lowest difficulty settings. The target overly might from time to time be missing, depending on the readiness of your ranged weapon, and might blend in rather splendidly with rain and other (stunningly beautiful) graphical effects. And you will need it, for puzzles (with timers, none the less), and enemies which stay away and force you to shoot them. (You could try with the mouse, here at last aiming is better. But then you have, different from the controller, to click spam your attacks with the mouse buttons. This is Carpal Tunnel in the making.) Dodging and your shield is bound to the very same button (not customizable), the action depending on your character moving or standing still. Enemies will absolutely throw themselves or their attacks onto you perfectly zeroed in, so you are forced to dodge with lightning quick reflexes or eat up the damage. But, this is an action rpg? For sure a bit of actual action should be expected? Yes, of course. But. Above mentioned elements are not woven into the rpg system. You can't level to increase your dodge time. You can't spend experience points to make targeting more forgiving. Hence, those elements are dependant on your reflexes and raw skill, so "get gud" or leave. It's like buying Mass Effect, but instead getting thrown into a round of Fortnite against a bunch of hyper skilled twelve year olds. If I wanted to play a brutal action game, I wouldn't have bought an rpg. Pity.

I've only played for about 2 hours, but wow. The game looked amazing from the screenshots and video, but I didn't expect to like it this much. - The puzzles are fun, even if they aren't anything particularly new. - Gameplay is a good balance of difficulty and skillfulness. - Characters are pretty cool, although I haven't gotten too much into the game. - Haven't gotten to the open world aspect yet, so not sure how that works - Just barely got into the RPG element with the skill tree, and it looks really cool! Definitely not overwhelming either. - Ok that's all I have for now. Fun Game! :)

For me, a large part of an RPG is the story. The game should be a vehicle for the story. In Crosscode, there is almost no story. It's driven by side quests, and this to me is terribly boring. It's the reason I don't play MMOs. Most are very dull.

The devs have poured their hearts and souls out into making a game with really satisfying controls, a combat system which I've found to be a nice healthy level of challenge and depth, as well as music and pixel art that really sucked me into the world. If the early access notice put you off, have no fear. The game is styled as an mmorpg with new areas and quests being added with each update. And the current game (0.9.2 at time of writing) has a looooot of content. In my opinion, you'd be getting your money's worth of game time as is. It's not the perfect game of course, you might find some of the fetch quests a bit disappointing, or the start of the game feeling a bit slow. But I didn't have any problems with that really. If you're having trouble, try stop and think for a sec, and use the tools available to you! This is definitely one of my favorite games. Don't miss out if you like rpgs!

So I got this game on Steam in some bundle while game was in alpha phase. I din't know which bundle but I suspect it was 20 games for 5€. Honestly, I still have no idea which 19 games I got with Lichdom Battlemage. This one might be but I really don't know. Anyway, I'm 100% I got in some bundle like this. Some way or another I saw it, checked it out and downloaded it. IIRC, I installed it on my Linux machine because this one is one of few that run on Linux back then. AND I LOVED IT. I don't rack 60h on a game which resets your progress after every patch (it was alpha). I replayed same same sections of a game a dozen times and I liked it every time. After I saw it on GOG I decided to buy it. It was on discount at the time so I thought a second and went with waiting for it to be off the discount to buy it full-price, that's how much I like the game. Now, or at least after I'm done with final assignment, I'm going to replay it again on Steam to get all the achievements there are which were off when I played it in alpha. Then I'm going to replay the game on GOG just because why not. IIRC it'll get NewGame+ (or it already has it) so I'll play it some more because I f****** like it. It's a shitty opinionated review of a fanboi (as fanboish as Wervyn) but what's there to write from technical standpoint and what isn't already said in other reviews? Game works, is fun, I suck at reviewing, I love the game. Now, if I only had free time. A lot of free time. I'd dump all of it on this.