This DLC is all about the Deathwishes and they are abysmal. High difficulty is good but only when a game can actually handle it. If you demand precision from the player, you must provide the tools to actually do it. A Hat in Time was not built for this. High difficulty represents a convenant between dev and player. It says, "hey we made this and assure you it's solid, please play it." But if your game isn't up to snuff, the cracks show. A Hat in Time is not made for this. It's way too glitchy and also clearly untested. Hat kid cannot turn fast enough, she doesn't have enough air control, the camera becomes a problem, the game's bad hitboxes are exposed, janky prompts and input detection issues are realized, inconsistency is revealed and frustrating. All these things you won't notice in the normal game because it didn't push beyond it's bounds. The game lacks the polish in it's controls, movement, mechanics, detection, for what the Deathwishes demand of you. It's unbalanced and poorly made. The experience of trying to complete most deathwishes is so awful it overrides the positive feelings the base game gives you. If you want to push players, you need to have proper polish. But what this does is expose faults in the gameplay and its glitchyness. Yes there is an easy toggle after the game kills you enough, but that locks you to only 1point possible to earn and much content is behind doing bonus challenges. So the easy mode isn't an option. It shouldn't be there. Instead of easy modes, just balance your game properly. Make challenges it can actually do. Most unlocks aren't great either. Most challenges are tedious. A handful of creative ideas but those are very few and can't fix the problems and frustration you will face because the devs honestly did not do their job properly here. A Hat in Time is carried on it's charm. It's cool from the variety of stuff you do. It's not gameplay focused and with this it tries to be and it's just not good enough to handle it.
Cuphead is firmly Good, and I'd much prefer creative and solid experiences like this than any corporate bloat, but it's honestly overrated and very much carried by it's art and music for those without a critical eye to see the problems. If a game wants you to play on it's highest difficulty and go for ranks, which this does, then it HAS to hold up it's end of the couch and Cuphead fails to do so. There are numerous problems that are outside the player's hands, resulting in too much luck rather than skill. Even though this game has stellar art and music, what matters most is gameplay and controls. On a brand new controller (no problem in other intense games like doom eternal or Tekken 8), this game has some dropped input problems and issues with it's jump. It has problems registering another jump when you hit the ground and problems with sensitivity in tapping it to change your jump height. These are big problems because of how demanding the game is. You'll take a lot of unnecessary damage because of the control faults. And any damage at all ends a run for rank. It has collision detection [hit/hurt box] problems which is extremely sad to see in such custom art. Inconsistent in quite a few places including the plane parry which is a BIG one. It has some very bad RNG where attack combinations can be literally impossible to dodge and since HP is the only metric that honestly matters, that's a game over. It also has RNG problems in that too often you get no pink parries, or pink parries you cannot reach, which are required. Some of the ranking criteria was not tested properly due to the aforementioned pink parries and some time limit issues. A few bosses simply do not have enough time by quite a few seconds even using the most damaging weapons and constantly attacking. A casual experience is Good, but to play this game for its meat, you're in for a frustratingly imbalanced time which isn't worth it considering the problems and RNG luck.
It's a solid and well presented game. For the casual experience it will be quite good. However, the player is meant to pursue ACE rank in all missions. Normal mode was decent but NG+ is where the game reveals it's problems with balance and mechanics. For a short action game, it's not as fine-tuned as it needs to be. Inconsistency is the key issue. ACE rank can be too dependent on RNG too often. Feels like luck of spawns and patterns over your skill as a pilot. You need high amounts of enemies killed quickly to score, but it just doesn't give you that. Mechanical inconsistency too like timings of hits and evades. Two examples: dash mod is too wide that you kill ships without being close to touching them. And even the final final boss scripted 1st attack has a bizarre delay on it where you dodge, it's not even on screen anymore, and it kills you. Weird magnet effects and collision detection problems due to mechanics or wonky hitboxes. After getting ACE ranks in all missions on both difficulties, I cannot shake how miserable that experience was. Clearly there are mechanical problems and balance issues. Some, but still TOO many, levels in particular seem to have never been tested by the developers because no metric on earth can justify how horrible they were to ACE. Some were fun indeed, but all were overshadowed by the depth of frustration due to the bad. It started nice, but became more frustrating than fun. Practically work. Maybe some of my experience was impacted in that I used a controller or my computer has high FPS. It was a nice little secret on NG+ presented well. Music and Art were good. But the gameplay is what matters most and the flaws I encountered really ruined it on NG+. Arcade mode is a neat addition but after the negative time I had ACEing, I don't care about it. I'm left with no happy memories of the game and it completely soured the experience.
Great sound design! Enjoyable graphics and presentation. But the stuff that matters most is gameplay and story. It's no Undertale or Hollow Knight. All the makings and components of good story and gameplay are here but it doesn't really pull them together well. The story clearly had a lot of thought put into it, but it feels like it was written by a person where English is not their first language and they are speaking to you underwater. Many things are not presented, concluded, or otherwise explained/implied well. Some dialogue is misleading, tone deaf, or simply bizarre, with many contrived events and detours. There are WAY too many unlikable characters because of their near constant hypocrisy and a few unforgivable actions you are expected to ignore. I'd list it all but GOG doesn't have enough space. By far the worst character is also the clear favorite, Agent Black. The game tries to tell you they are a tragic figure (even has a boss fight in the rain with sad music to match), but that's only quite some time AFTER you have seen them commit numerous and personal evil atrocities, so it fails completely. It pulled the Abby mistake from Last of Us 2 before LoU2. Gameplay is alright. Simple, but it never truly takes off, tests you or cuts you loose. It's mostly puzzles, even the bosses. Some annoying enemies due to invincibility modes forcing you to basically wait. Finding secrets, moves like cranking power posts and ziplining are fun and satisfying. However, the rewards are bad. You find materials for the game's badge system but almost none of the badges are any good. That makes exploration a bit of a let down. While it looks good, during some boss combat, it can be VERY cluttered. Characters, screenshake, dialogue boxes, sfx, numerous projectiles (some bad and don't stand out properly) all distracting and obscuring you while you try to figure out what to do. Some bad hitboxes too: can be hit by some bosses while nothing is touching you and you are behind them.
No nostalgia here like all other reviews; this game sucks. It doesn't look good, it doesn't play good, it's not fun and it's very short. I bought it because it was on sale for $2.50. The fact that the game is over in 1 hour and has no replayability and yet they are charging $25 for this is nothing short of a crime. I finished it on normal missing only 0-3 enemies on each level and 1 death on level 6. It took me literally one hour. There's a cheat menu after you beat it where you can level skip and get god mode and stuff, but there is no point because there is nothing left to do or see. The only good thing was the music. But that's it. Even the sound is bad. There is no impact to anything. The game is really dull. No power ups, no branching paths like Star Fox or After Burner Climax. There is no story, you don't know who you are, what the factions are and why you need to fight. There is talk about a Dark Dragon in opening text but it's called Prototype Dragon in-game so they can't even get right something that basic. It doesn't look good, but environments are servicable. Enemies look like crap and are hardly distinguishable. Bosses are mostly nonsense shapes. Nothing animates well. Your dragon's movements hardly match whatever flying is onscreen. You shoot a gun that looks like a dumb rock. It doesn't play well. Movement is bad, aiming isn't great, shooting single shots sucks so the lockon shot is what you'll use 99% of the time, no exaggeration. There is no attack telegraphing so many attacks are poorly done. The game's gimmick is that you can rotate the camera around you in the 4 main directions to find and shoot baddies. But you can only move when you are facing North. You are stuck in one place in the other 3. This makes dodging anything terrible. And your only indication of enemies is a minimap in the top right. So you'll be looking at that more than what's in front of you. 1 star for the music and 1 star because it's technically a functional thing.
Only fanboys will have heard of this title and that's why the scores are so high. It's skewed by nostalgia and anime lovers. I happened to stumble across it from a random youtube video and seeing all the comments praising it while it tries so hard to be profound is what got me investigating this apparently legendary VN. It's production value is good and that's why it gets two stars but it's writing, while competent enough in execution, the content of it is trite and full on babytown philosophy and massive contrivance. It's sophmoric, embarrassing and contradictory. It's also what you'd expect from something Japanese. Praisers generally haven't read more than a manga in their lives so they don't know what good writing really is. They probably found it when they were an impressionably young and it was their first exposure to the evils the game displays so it stands out to them and they think that shock value equals quality. It's just edge, to an embarrassing degree. It contrives it's central conflicts by claiming there is an unbreakable law that for every evil person killed, a good person must be killed too. You can already tell where the story will force itself to go on that alone. Throw in predictable character archtypes and it writes itself. But also the rule alone breaks the philosophy of the VN. If good and evil are subjective and it's a matter of perspective, then who is this objective judgement deigning some people good vs evil? It's contrived for the sake of drama. Another fundamental issue with the law of balance is that it thinks good and evil are equal. They are not. Society literally could not function if that was the case. More good is the status quo. It's how people can actually conduct business and build things. So everything is basically awful all the time through contrived, trite rules with no nuance or intelligence. Therefore it's just melodrama, the worst kind of drama. I don't have enough space for more. Remember 11 is an actual good VN.
F small character limits in reviews! Don't buy into hype and marketing. The core is a nice card game with a creepy atmospheric backdrop. You want to know what's going on. It's got great presentation and it's compelling! But not-to-soon you realize it's only surface deep despite it's attempts otherwise and that's where the problems are. Beat it once, and then the unlocked mod mode is what you'll be playing and that's good enough! For the main campaign, it does a neat job of expanding it's "in-universe" game, where, through 3 acts, you experience 4 "rulers" and each "area" offers a slightly different take on the core mechanics. Act 1 is the main way. Act 2 "unlocks" the other 3 folks and their flavor of playstyle (kinda like Slay the Spire but with all 4 characters at once). Act 3 is basically Act 1 but with the flavor of one of the remaining three entities overlayed on it. That will not change between playthroughs though, it's intentionally static so it can tell the narrative it wants to tell. And that's the problem. If you play it, you'll understand what I mean by all those quotation marks. So core mechanics and presentation are good. But I wish there was better music once the atmosphere wears off quickly. The problems with this game are everything outside of it. The shoehorned "realworld" aspects. Those are cringeworthy as hell and severely drag down the experience perhaps to the point of ruining it. Because of it, I really wasn't invested in much past Act 1 and definitely not in Act 3. The game isn't about you in a cabin forced to play a death card game with a creepy murderer and uncovering things...but some fake-ass youtube twat who finds this "cursed" game on a floppy disk and some conspiracy with the company and who gives a fuck. It's like that stupid part of Superhot. It tries to be like Undertale but fails. God, dare I make some mention of the Blair Witch Project? I don't have enough space to explain why this is bad and harms the quality of the game.
Pretty ugly design, unintuitive navigation, poor navigation, boring. Top part of screen pointless. No substance/identity of the main character in the demo. Less of a game and more of a visual novel with more clicks. Felt impossible to lose. Not really any point in the demo where you use your brain. Somehow less engaging than danganronpa's gameplay, and also the demo story didn't bring me in at all. I had one stuck point where I clicked everything, read everything, all check marks gained, all evidence collected, seemingly nothing else to do, and I couldn't progress in an accusation. You can click on drones and security cameras, but you don't acutally see anything through them or move them around. Somehow I'm reminded of a text based adventure but with circles to click. three out of the five dots in the game summary are these: hack security systems, personal computers and safes -- you click on them. they open. rebuild CCTV camera footage -- you click on blurry things. they unblur. run biometric analyses during questioning -- you look at their heartbeat number, if you even notice it. and didn't even require it in the demo. I was just bored and strongly disliked how it did it's menu-based gameplay and that's the main source of engagement.
Wonderful aesthetic. Very creative. Everything fits together, looks good, humorous. Music except the main theme sucks though. However gameplay is what really matters and once you get passed the surface level stuff it's the same problems as all others of the rogue genre. It's not skill-based as it is luck-based. You success depends almost entirely on the drops you get as typical of a rogue. It's frustrating and annoyingly rare to get any good items and guns, or even just ones you like. And it takes too long to unlock good ones that you still won't get because the item pool is huge. So what that means is it takes too long before you can finally start to have fun. Playing the easy first level over and over again with the terrible starting pistols is just abysmal. At some point it should have at least allowed you to take in one mid-tier weapon for fun's sake. And the game does have the same issues like others that adopt its top-faced camera angle like Wizard of Legend, Hyper Light Drifter, etc. Pits and walls-as-cover are not graphically or mechanically precise so far too easily and often you can fall into a pit or get hit by a bullet when it flagrantly should not happen. And each hit matters greatly for games like this because healing is difficult or currency is scarce. Also problems with the accuracy of aiming. Even with accurate guns/items, sometimes it just doesn't shoot where you are pointing. I have brand new controller and mouse. For a game that demands precision as well as luck, you can't have bullshit like that. A rogue game gets away with unbalanced gameplay because death/replays are intentional. But due to the dependency on items, it is still not much of an excuse. As far as rogues go though, this is still better than most. Annoyingly obscure progression. So many secrets impossible to find without an online wiki. But fun references. Recommend, for pretty much everything but the core gameplay which will frustrate you more than give you fun.
GOG does not have enough characters. A very atmospheric and suprisingly dark little game. A decent indie title that suffers from lack of polish, mechanical skill and a few misguided ideas. It's got great presentation. Combo of Evangelion and Samurai Jack. But it does and says very little with them. It's just cool imagery. Nice when it occurs, but shallow. Functionally, the game has significant play issues. Mainly the controls. It drops inputs or queues them wrong FAR too consistently even on a brand new controller. When the gameplay heats up, which isn't often, coupled with some really bad hitboxes (eg. samurai boss), it becomes a really frustrating experience. I honestly think the alpha was smoother. Issues with getting stuck on corners and when you use objects as cover, enemy attacks can sometimes still hit you when they pretty flagrantly shouldn't. It happens enough to note. The flagship feature is the chain dash which is underutitlized and has really inconsistent timing. I've 100% the game twice so I know what I'm talking about (now and in 2016, even the unreasonable 800 dash challenge). The aiming of the dash is not as calibrated as it needs to be. Basically the game demands precision in it's big challenges but it doesn't mechanically give you those tools. But the game is easy so you probably won't notice until the challenges. The map is terrible. An aesthetic over function choice. Finding secrets is fun but can be frustrating thanks to that. The game can be extravagent with it's animations that take too long and make replaying annoying. But a first time play is generally fine. It would have been nice if the sword cosmetics were consistent. The menu and gameplay colors (hilt) don't match. Seems a basic thing to get right/fix. Didn't even know the outfits had effects. Too subtle to notice. Shame the final cloak can't be taken into NG+ and there's no areas to use it after getting it. I hope the devs got better with combat mechanics.
