NOT RECOMMENDED. Not fun. Most of the game is focusing hard to not step on the many barely visible mines (some of which release spawns of enemies) on almost every single screen dozens of screens per level. When that does not kill you, the beefy enemies rushing you in groups at lightning speed will in a second or a half. When you die, all of your stage progress is wasted. Roguelites are supposed to give you something when you die so that it does not feel like grinding the same level over and over again without changes. The enemy cheapness has many levels. My favorite is the generic ice enemy that fires a trishot from outside the screen and a single tri-shot has a massive hitspot that covers almost half the screen. Even on Easy, you cannot take more than a couple shot without dying and there is no reliable cure for the insanity that cannot be reliably reduced. The main game content consists mostly of you dying and wondering why you are still wasting time on this non-fun game. The Cthulhu theme is just an underused skin in the game - it wants to be some kind of difficult isometric view shooter, though the appeal of a game that requires perfection and perfect focus for hour on end will wear out its welcome fast. The pixel graphics make the details look crummy and the many mine objects difficult to spot. Oh and one of those "mines" will spawn parasites that will touch you and give an insta-death timer. So your dude will explode and your progress get wasted unless you find items that game is not likely to give you. Lowering your difficulty does not make it any less unfair. You have to have some kind of unhealthy redemption complex to like this game. The game runs okay, might choke a bit at times and the loading times are quite long. You will be loading quite a lot because of dying. Get NetHack instead. Now that is a roguelike. Or you could try Door Kickers - that game is fair and fun in co-op, they say.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It is one of those games where you fight against the controls to keep your dude moving and you are bored and wondering when it will end. Plot is so clichee you are going to know exactly what is going to happen once the characters are introduced. None of the characters are developed at all. There is no unique or exciting content to look forward to. It is the same carbon-copy stuff that has been done better decades ago. The character animations are the only relatively good part of the game. The plot is dumped at the beginning and the end and your gameplay is essentially wasted effort as you can get the essential parts by watching the game endings on a video site. The controls suck in two (2) irritating ways: 1) Your character freezes in place if you attack and will stay rooted until the weapon attack has been finished. Stiff as concrete. This makes fighting more than one enemy at the time almost impossible. You cannot do any cool dodging as it will with you eating a couple of hits in rapid succession and die instantly. 2) Because the controls are so stiff, you have to keep focusing on babysitting the character. As soon as you momentarily loosen focus, thinking you can routinize this, you are DEAD in a nanosecond. The game does not drop MP recovery power ups, so most of the game you cannot cast spells. There is only spot in the starting area that spawns MP orbs, so you have to go there and to refill your magic points that are barely enough to cast two spells. MP recovery item drops are rare. In late game you get MP regen equipment, though at that point it is no longer useful. Half the play time is spent on trying to keep your MP and HP bars from emptying and dying and losing progress because having no reliable saving in a game where you can die in half a second is garbage. You will lose so much progress and whatelse because you are more concerned about being set back and having to replay parts over and over again instead of advancing in the game.
NOT RECOMMENDED. The movement controls floaty and finicky to the point jumping over a stationary spikes becomes difficult. Everything goes too fast and there is no time to react. Add in abundant kamikaze bomber enemies and you have game that is made only for crack addicts. Your carefully played game progress can instantly be deleted by a couple of bombers coming out of nowhere, blowing you up and you landing onto spikes before you can grasp where you are. This is seriously bad. Even if you added fixes like slowed down gameplay, movement taps on keyboard that does not accelearate you halfway across the room and even if jumping was a bit more floaty to make it easier and more fun to do, the game has content problems. With all the journal entries, the perks, blessings etc., I got the feeling this is a barebone game setup padded with a bunch of items and silly minor features. It feels like just another kill-everyone game without any kind of purpose or unique content that makes it worth picking out of thousands of similar games. I feel bored making this game and spend most of my energy on trying to jump and failing half the time, a thing you do constantly in this game. It is not fun. It is boring, old-fashioned and lazy. Also very unpolished. The controls make you slide all over the place. The best control in the game is unistall button. Oh and the 8-direction ranged shooting is a major issue since the enemies rarely line up with the 8 directions without you moving. On top of that, those 8 directions arch with gravity, meaning you will end up shooting weird angled shots and you do not time to be careful with shots when you can be rained with enemies at any moment and both your melee and ranged attacks are slow as molasses while enemies are faster than Satan is at making friends with an Iraqi leader.
RECOMMENDED for a cheap price AND ONLY IF IT WORKS WITH YOUR SYSTEM. Please test its workability with the free XIII SP demo. If you like comic book stuff, you might like this. The rest of the people should do research before committing to a purchase. This game is not as approachabe as a comic book game as Freedom Force games are. This is much more serious and drier than it, though there is some sparse humor in it. Ultimately it comes down to being an FPS and gunning down some plot-relevant gunmen. Technical warning: Most likely. This game will not run out of the box. If you do not install the x86 .DLL files that come with e.g. dgDoom (D8D3, D9D3, DImm and DDraw) to the XII\System directory, you will most most likely get any of the million possible Direct X errors from missing files. I got the D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE one. Installing them to the executable directory will override the system DLL's that tend to be incompatible with games in Win10 and Win11. Test it with the demo if unsure. The game in short: 5/5 cutscenes and storytelling MINUS the super-predictable twist at the end and 2/5 as an FPS because of super stiff, console-aim-assist-riddled gunplay. So basically, even if you shoot at the head with most guns, the bullet will not go there because of the aim assist. The assist is lessened with shotguns and the crossbow, though those ones tend to deviate from where you shoot the enemy. For example, the shotgun shots to the neck tended to hit as headshots despite not aiming there. After the initial campaign playthrough, there is no replay value in the story mode. Though because this is an Unreal Engine game, the bots are available and solid, so you can play even when offline and Unreal bot matches are quite entertaining. Though you might as well play Unreal instead. I feel this game does hold up today when it works, though its tone and main content are not appealing. The stealth missions are infuriatingly picky, no saving at will and check points not common enough
STRONGLY RECOMMENDED IF: you are okay with a casual content length of 5 hours and know that you are getting a style-over-substance product. Most importantly, the GOG version has no online co-op (only local co-op, assumedly by plugging in USB controllers and pressing buttons in the character select screen, I have not tested it). The levels are varied and their content has minimal overlap. There are character voice acting, fleshed out character development and humor, so it is not just "rush to the right" kind of ultra deja-vu adventure. It has unique flavor worth recommending. There are different difficulty modes for challenge. The "challenge" mode is generally easy except for the 6th one involving 2 extra difficult enemies and not being allowed to get hit. You can probably triple the game length to 15 if you do all the difficulty modes needed to unlock all the extra character skins. There are a couple of technical glitches in the game. 1. The control scheme goes back to Alternate every time you boot up the game and you need to switch it back. 2. If you disable Bloom in graphics options, all you will see is a blue background. 3. Sometimes the attack keys get disabled until you on-the-fly change a character. Also, it is a 3D Unity game and 3D Unity is badly optimized. It will burden the CPU core like crazy even when in menus. It might lag you enough to make you get hit when you otherwise would not. The gameplay is pretty simple. You have two attack buttons, of which one you mostly use against cannonfodder hordes and the other one for everything. You can do an air juggle with up + attack. You can attack high-mid-low of the enemy bodies depending on what you press. Yes, you can hit downed opponents in this one - SoR4 this ain't. The fighting system works, thouh there is about 0.5 s delay before moves other than parries extend. You can parry hits and projectiles to create a counter attack and you can also dash. The parry / guard stuff w/ a keyboard strains fingers.
NOT RECOMMENDED. It simply is not fun It is too difficulty-padded to have any simple appeal. A common player should watch a playthrough instead for max enjoyment of this product. Your main gameplay content is watching your death counter go up i.e. you get nothing. The game is 5 to 8 hours long and the side content is collectables. It is a Unity game. You would think using an existing engine would enable more time spent on making content other than challenge screens and you would be WRONG. The gameplay does not change that much from the start to end. The levels are boring and even when you are moving to the right direction, it feels wrong. As most of the game is about artificially difficult platforming, it is a drag to move around, a feature made worse by the back-tracking-intensive level design. The challenge posed by the game is made worse by how slow you move and the angled projectiles and enemy approaches. There is no practical way to block projectiles in most situations. There is no sense of progress or achievement. (BTW, no achievements in the GOG version and the one in the Steam version are milestone and collectable related, nothing too exciting.) The quality of life features of modern game design are not there. If you miss a piece of information, you will never get to re-discover without starting the game from the scratch. The lack of those features reduces the fun factor. You are better of playing other games with such features. Of the same genre, I recommend Castlevania: The Lecarde Chronicles 1 and 2. They are free fan games.
NOT RECOMMENDED. There are free (Flash) games with more content and better controls. Get Hollow Knight or even Shovel Knight instead. Hell, even Meat Boy i.e. its obvious replication template does what this one tries infinitely better in every way and you can get it for free. No reason to get Sunblaze. That is how lukewarm and unable to stand on its own it is. It has no content besides the bungled jumping controls. Do not let the promotional graphics fool you, the in-game graphics are smaller and less detailed. It looks like a game put together with less than 5k USD. Possibly under 2k if programmed by oneself. There is a strange stiffness with jumping that makes something simple incredibly difficult for crappy-implementation-based reasons. Multiply this issue several times in each level and that will be your gameplay content. This makes playing the game much more concentration-intensive and stressful than it would be in a better designed games. Simply reducing the falling speed and making jumping more light and less deliberate to use, would help a lot. Additionally, you need to be insanely deliberate and accurate with your button presses. Not in a telegraphed timing way, no, it is of the unforgiving and non-fun trial-and-error kind of a deal. The puzzle levels feel so hastily put together they are. This game concept clearly would have benefited from a lot more time in the development oven. It is so raw and misses the actual fun mechanics (instead of mandated one-way-or-death soulutions) to work. There is also a glitchy speed up that sometimes happens. None of this is explained in the game. The achievements are all about collectables and challenge-related stage clear stuff. Unless you have a redeement complex (that one should probably take care of), you will get nothing out of this game. It is just another cheap Unity game riding with the established genre of past superior video game classics while retaining no one of the ingenuity or soul of those games.
STAY BACK. NEVER RECOMMENDED. This is bottom-of-the-barrel tier stuff. Barely a game. A typical plays-much-worse-than-it-looks clunky Unity game. Lemmings or fun this is not. Pixel graphics, yet runs like trash. The controls are terrible and the gameplay is not at all designed to work with the clunky, imprecise controls. There are annoying glitches such as the units turning back from instead of attacking a marked target. The gameplay gets old fast after a couple of levels and it drags on for dozens of levels. The gameplay system does not work and is not fun. It is a struggle. You go to work to take a vacation from this game. Game design is nuts. Let's take pausing - it does not stop time unlike in other games. Now consider that there are time-based challenges in this game. If you do not do the challenges, it devolves into an awful grind until the level ends. The zombies have no lasting power at all, so you are pretty much baby sitting dozens of units all at once or you will quickly lose. Generally, just one mistake or a moment with not enough pausing-and-microing can easily cost you the level. You are not given any fun leeway to experiment. Unless do the level in a specific way, you will lose. The solutions often involve the most video-gamey, real-life-illogical choices. For example, bunching up your dudes to rush a shotgun dude with less casualties is an viable strategy instead of a suicidal disaster it should be. Get Lemmings game instead. I recommend Xmas Lemmings. It is short, fun and the levels are well-designed. The punishing element is not there. It does not try to be your job.
CONDITIONAL. Not all games are worth the money. Buy only the games you want. Most people like the Yakuza Bundle i.e. 0, Kiwami 1, Kiwami 2 games. The Remastered games i.e. 3, 4, and 5 are disliked, Y3 being borderline unenjoyable. Yakuza 6 has some of the Kiwami 2 aspects, though has boring and cut content issues, so it is between the two game bundles quality-wise. If you want only the best stuff, get the "Yakuza Bundle" instead that includes Yakuza 0, Kiwami (1) and Kiwami 2. Those games are the best, though you might want to skip Kiwami 1 as it is a hollow experience. So if you are extremely budget-minning, try to find CD keys of 0 and Kiwami 2 and ignore the the rest. Kiwami 1 feels a bit off to say the least. Summary: Yakuza 0 is a fan favorite and great and unique content such as the disco stuff and the extremely enjoyable, polished cutscenes. Features Majima best gameplay. 8/10, 11/10 if you like Majima. Yakuza Kiwami 1 is a remade pitch games with some issues. People call it "Yakuza 0 DLC" for a reason - does not stand on its own and the plot is lame outside some key moments. Majima Everywhere System adds more (amusing) Majima content over the original. 5/10 Yakuza Kiwami 2 - great plot, great execution, great polish. Better than Y0 in some aspects and technically superior. 9/10 Yakuza 3, nicknamed Blockuza. Unless you play on easy, common enemies block everything. Not fun, very raw experience. 2/10 Yakuza 4. Tanimura's game, other segments sub par, features 4 characters. Improves Y3's issues, though adds new lesser annoyances. The plot is full of holes made by rubber bullets. Multi-char grinding sucks. 5/10 Y5 - barely features yakuza themes and mostly focuses on Haruka and experimenting on drama content in Shinada's segment. Kiryu's taxi driver segment ok, Saejima's still lacks content. Multi-char grinding sucks. Most grindy game. Side Stories rule. 6/10 Y6 - a lot of drama. Same technicals as Kiwami 2. Cutscenes long and boring. Short content. 7/10
RECOMMENDED. The ability to quickly end random encounters with picked up weapons makes this game vastly more enjoyable than its preceding entries. Most aspects in this game were later improved in the Yakuza Kiwami 2 remake-release. If you can get the game on a steep discount, it might be worth it because of two solid, arcade minigames: Puyo Puyo and Virtua Fighter V Final Showdown. VF 2 is much less appealing than VF5FS. The game is obviously rushed and misses some places and content such as the gambling hall minigames and coliseum. Most substory rewards are worthless. The Amon one gimmicky and super annoying. Ranks behind 0 and 2 and before all the Remastered releases in quality. The Clan Creator DLC is not worth it as you can get the similar assets by inputing promo codes from a guide in-game. It starts as something with a yakuza themed scenes like Little China Ed one and then devolves into full-on J-drama cutscenes that drag on forever and feature dramatic overacting. The drama is boring and not yakuza at all. Twists are all predictable, so it is not exciting in the least. Most cutscenes do not advance plot and lack substance. Someya's character is neat. The plot is a disappointing mess of running between the two locations at a rapid pace. Also insanely over-compl. and explaining. You go do a couple things in one place and then go back. It feels silly and unorganized. Segments with Haruka, the baby and the endless father talk are awful and often hamfisted. Includes substories that involve minigame challenges. The batting center ones are infuriatingly demanding. The game state is behind the visible state as usual, so timing-intensive minigames (batting center) are random result-wise. The fighting is as stiff as ever. The kick animation starts delayed - annoying. Timing counter moves is much more difficult and obscure than before. Mostly well-optimized. Kamurocho at night with extra pedestrians and Onomichi after that one ship start to chug noticeably.
