...a lot has been said about the good stuff, so I'll focus on the bad and say why you might want to NOT buy CrossCode: right now I'm about 18 hours in, and strongly feel that most gameplay elements overstay their welcome. Each new enemy gimmick and puzzle mechanic is thoroughly ran into the ground. It's not low-effort content by any means, but by the end of most areas and dungeons I was sick of them. The a-ha moments are gone about halfway through, and then you're just going through the motions. That's not even going into the material grinding required to get most gear which is thankfully mostly optional. Some of that can be seen as embracing the MMORPG/JRPG tropes and fitting into the whole meta narrative, but characters in the game empathizing with me about stuff being tedious to do doesn't make it any less so. If you're a gamer with a strict time budget, or just like tight experiences and tend to feel that less is more. CrossCode may not be your thing.
It's alright. Looks nice and runs well. I didn't encounter any glaring bugs. The UI is pretty good with some fairly minor nitpicks, fiddly zone adjustment being one. Both UI- and gameplay-wise, everything in the game mostly works how you'd expect. One small gripe I had with balance is that towers might as well be made out of wet tissue, they get melted in seconds during raids, and have to be rebuilt every time. Dynamic world with predator-prey interactions is neat but doesn't really make the game deeper or anything. No interesting decisions beyond the very early game, thus little replayability. I filled out the tech tree and the "goals" in the base freeplay mode on hardcore in around 7-8 hours. Disasters and attacks honestly weren't very punishing. To sum up, a comfy builder with good feeling of progression that may take up a lazy Saturday or help you relax over a few evenings, but not something with enough substance that you'll keep coming back to it.
Thronebreaker tells a compelling story about convincing and interesting characters, but the gameplay, both inside the battles and outside of them, is a mind-numbing slog. You're tasked with collecting meaningless heaps of resources to the point that you're drowning in them, which in turn render all the "ethics at hand vs resources for long term success" similarily meaningless. You can also invest some of that ridiculous amount of resources into improving your camp, which makes your already overpowered cards even more boring to steamroll the opponent with. Also of note are terrible optimization issues when the AI is looking for a move - more frames dropped than rendered on a reasonably powerful PC. Mostly a sign of bad programming because nothing about the card gameplay is realtime.
Rime has some wonderful visuals, atmosphere and music, but the experience is ruined by the TERRIBLE optimization, frustrating sloppy movement, and shallow busywork puzzles.
