Recenzii recente de Yal

As a casual fan of Shin Megami Tensei I gotta say this game just feels like a direct improvement mechanically. Instead of RNG dialogue choices when you try recruiting enemies, you play a bullet hell minigame, and deploying said minigame uses the same energy bar as the strongest attacks and utility skills like the scanner - which fills up when you hit elemental weaknesses. It all ties together into the ebb and flow of battle. Overall there's a lot less RNG to contend with - the two instakill elements are gone, recruitments are guaranteed if you clear the minigame, accuracy is basically not a factor unless buffs and ailments is involved.
Dungeons are handcrafted and really intricate, the FIRST DUNGEON after the tutorial gives you poison floors and one-way doors and it's all escalating from there. The game's overall brutally difficult and really pushes you to mess around with the fusing system and party compositions. Even resource management is a factor since there's no free healing and running out of battery will lock you out of a LOT of systems. But on the flip side, the game has mercy on you and lets you continue after a partywipe with no progress lost except EXP, and the party customization mixed with the "use effective moves to recharge your super meter faster" mechanic gives you tools to deal with whatever it throws at you.
(Oh, and the music is nice)

Tons of people have said "temper your expectations, AC6 isn't gonna be a Soulslike", and yeah, they've got a point. But AC6 still has two important cornerstones of the other FROM games: cool boss fights, and character customization.

At its core, Armored Core 6 is a game about movement. Movement feels good, movement depletes your stamina bar, and you want to make sure you don't run out of stamina in the middle of avoiding an enemy missile. You have automatic aim (which is influenced by what targeting computer you have equipped) so shooting isn't really a question about aiming for enemies, instead you wait for the right opportunity to fire and focus entirely on moving: find cover, aim for the backside of armored enemies, and so on. For how frantic the gameplay looks, you generally make very calm and informed decisions as far as shooting is involved.

Mech customization is RIDICULOUSLY in-depth, and you need to take a lot of things into account (such as choosing parts that work together), one of the primary unlockables are blueprints that lets you just pick things that work according to the developers but there's plenty of room to customize your playstyle. The main four types of gameplay are allrounder, dodge-focused, flying and heavy weapons, with plenty of options to branch off in each. For instance, flying builds can use both quadruped legs (can hover at lower energy cost) or bird-style legs (jumps very high so you can engage flight easily) and work well with both grenades and homing projectiles, but if you don't mind getting launched into the next neighborhood every time you fire you could also use them with a railgun and use your altitude to bypass cover. Dodge-focused builds can capitalize on their speed by using armor-piercing melee weapons but also get more mileage out of energy weapons that run off your stamina bar (since they naturally have more energy), and so on.

But it all really boils down to just finding stuff that works together - find the movement style you prefer the best (hit-and-run? in-your-face melee? carefully sniping from afar?), pick weapons that let you fight that way, and then build a mech body that supports those weapons as best as possible - for high recoil weapons you want slow stable legs, for hit-and-runs you want the biggest jet engine your weight limit supports, and so on. When people say "your mech really feels like yours", this is what they mean - incrementally arriving at a built that you enjoy playing is a really fun process and you can feel every step of the way.

Content-wise the game does that weird thing Nioh also did where you get tutorials AFTER the point you would've needed them, like the detailed explanation of basic mechanics only after you beat the tutorial boss (which is a pretty massive difficulty spike on par with Iudex Gundyr from DS3), and the challenge is generally pretty high, but a lot of it generally comes down to picking the right loadout for the situation (you can change it after dying if you realize you choose poorly, thankfully) and missions are generally pretty short, mostly having just a handful of encounters and maybe a boss at the end (though chapter finales will have multiple back-to-back bosses)

The game is surprisingly short if you just plow through it (people have reported 20 hours, I can't confirm this first-hand yet since I just beat the first chapter), but if you speed through the game you're basically playing it wrong - there's extra-hard missions exclusive to New Game Plus, arena missions that are just 1-minute miniboss fights, hidden collectibles to find, and of course replaying missions trying to get the best ranking. All of this stuff contributes to unlocking new robot parts, since the store upgrades whenever you reach certain completion scores, and of course the money you earn will be needed to buy parts.

All in all, this is a really good game and now I wanna go back and play all the other Armored Core games sometime (and then get disappointed they don't have all the cool QoL and polish 6 added, presumably...)

Remnant 2 is pretty much more of the first game (Dark Souls With Guns) but with tons of improvements all around. The level design and enemy roster is a lot more varied and sometimes I forget the dungeons are procedurally generated, there's level gimmicks and events giving every optional side area some unique flavor, bosses have actual attack patterns now instead of relying purely on spawning minions, and you get more active abilities to compliment your guns now and they've all got interesting effects. (Setting your shots on fire to damage hit enemies over time, creating temporary shield walls that you can shoot through but not enemies, throwing calthrops to slow down any enemy that hits them, unleashing poison gas every time you reload...)

If you think it sounds scary that stuff is randomly generated, don't worry - there's plenty of human-designed stuff sprinkled in (including a dungeon puzzle that had me stumped for like half an hour) and there's something really cool about exploring a dungeon knowing it's actually unexplored space that nobody else has experienced. (Once a level has been generated it stays the same forever, so you can learn a layout as you chip away at a dungeon or leave it, do something else first, and come back to the same dungeon for a later reattempt)

The whole thing can be played in co-op as well, REAL co-op instead of the Fromsoft soapstone shenanigans where you spend more time setting up a session after every failed attempt than you do actually playing - the game even lets you invite your Steam friends directly from the pause menu, no session setup and passcode shenanigans necessary.

If you think the biggest problem with Baba Is You was that the "LEVEL" keyword wasn't used enough and would like an entire game about it... well, you're looking at it.

The big feature of Patrick's Parabox is that the level is an element inside itself, and a lot of puzzles are based around moving things into and out of the level depending on where the level is situated in itself. And that's just one layer of recursion, it can go deeper than that.

I just cleared a puzzle where I needed to swap a clone of the level with the real version so I could push the real level into itself so I could exit it into a section of the level I couldn't reach when I pushed the level onto a switch needed to activate the goal. And that was still the TUTORIAL section of that world!

Depending on if you think this stuff sounds cool or dangerous to your brain, you probably already know if this is a game for you.

EDIT like a year later: okay everything I had complaints about before has been fixed now, this is now my favorite non-Fromsoft soulslike! The environments are visually striking and full of so many hidden paths you can walk around for an hour in just the hub zone, the perk system has some really gameplay-changing effects, there's decent enemy variety and you need to change up your strategies between humans and minibosses. You can place a portable checkpoint anywhere you want; it's so easy to get lost you often need to place it because you're worried you'll never find your way back again. (But in a good way.)

Overall Bleak Faith feels like an extension of the first Dark Souls: areas are larger, stamina management is more important, attacks are slower, there's more room for build variety. If you wanted more DS1 and dislike how FROM focused more and more on quirky dodge timing you'll love Bleak Faith. But expect a little bit of jank going in.

(original review below)
Apart from the weird mechanic where your regular attacks is a rhythm minigame that can fail if you get the timing wrong, really bad feedback to things like BEING HIT, and all the menus being a non-intuitive pain to navigate (why am I being asked which slot I wanna equip something in if I equipped it by selecting a slot instead of from the item list?) it's actually pretty fun to play. It's no Elden Ring but it's objectively superior to Hellpoint in every way while still playing to mostly the same strengths (brutalist industrial environments, tons of moody lighting and cool skyboxes, very open-ended levels), and the perk system where you choose a small handful of massively gameplay-changing effects (e.g. "you've got a second stamina bar for blocking") looks really promising.

I got way more addicted to this game than I thought! The metaprogression is based around you clearing stages over and over to unlock all its cards, and every time, that stage gets permanently harder. Really good way to ease the player into Lunatic difficulty gradually. And deploying a magic circle to turn hundreds of bullets into hundreds of coins never gets old.

It draws you in with a mix of Zelda and Souls callbacks, then gradually turns you into a corkboard-and-red-wire conspiracy theorist as you get dragged into more and more obscure mysteries with the game world. Make sure you play it blind, learning anything about how the game works will rob you of an incredibly satisfying feeling of discovery.

Alternate title: "This was possible all along?: the official video game".

Even after looking up guides and figuring out how the game works (which is a necessity if you don't speak japanese), the control scheme makes the game impossible to play. Your one attack button can do dozens of different moves depending on context - the problem is, those moves can be unintuitive and unpredictable as heck. Say, you're in a level where the walls hurt you, so you stand still and try making precision attacks. PSYCHE! The "stand still and press attack" button is actually a long-range dash attack that uncontrollably sends you into danger. And this isn't the only example of a move that does the opposite of what your gut feeling says the input would achieve, far from it.

Just like all the preceding lane fighters (Hopeless Masquerade onwards) the game ends up feeling like it's playing itself and your input has nothing to do with what's happening, and while that's OK for a casual party fighter, it's completely unacceptable for a difficult boss rush game. Stripping the controls down to just a single attack button isn't making it easier to play, I would've much preferred having predictable attacks I can rely on over being able to pull off shiny combos that just get me killed through no fault of my own.

Also, just like the mainline Touhou games, the game has plenty of bullets that blend into either the background or the shiny particle effects, which is KIND OF PROBLEMATIC in a game where one of the core components is avoiding bullets.

Demon Slayer Akagi is basically a homage to that weird first Touhou game everyone's forgotten about these days, which means it's part breakout clone where you can accidentally kill yourself with the ball, and part bullet hell boss battles. (Bosses definitely is the largest part of the two)

The game's kinda held back by its graphics (bosses' dialogue portraits look a lot more stylish than their in-game sprites, and having some pyramids and mountains and stuff in the level backgrounds would've done a LOT for immersion) but the gameplay is smooth and the bosses are high quality challenges, especially if you're going for a 1CC (clearing the game without using continues). Definitely recommending this (and totally not because I know the developer *whistles innocently*)

The coolest feature probably is that the story changes depending on difficulty, with Akagi getting more confident the higher difficulty you play at. More games should do this.

You're probably wondering, what's the deal with this obscure Japanese series that everyone's talking about, and why are all the reviews just talking about beer? Well, keep reading and I might tell you =w=

Touhou 18 would be another iteration of the formula the last 12 games has used, except it suddenly decided to become a roguelike. You dodge bullets (in large quantities) and try to shoot enemies down before they become too much of an issue, with a handful of screen-clearing bombs as a last resort if things get too overwhelming. Each character has unique quirks, like homing bullets, and you can switch between two separate modes (mobility or power) on the fly to adapt to the situation.

So what about the roguelike aspect? Now the game has collectible cards, which are randomly available after bosses, each giving special effects of some sort. There's four main types: consumables that instantly give some boost, passive effects, "equipment" which are passive effects that show up physically in the world (e.g. a shield), and active-use cards. Active-use cards in particular change up the game pretty noticeably, being able to deploy a protective magic circle to cancel out bullets in your immediate surroundings is pretty nice, and you can even summon an extra miniboss out of the blue for a risk-vs-reward challenge.

Any cards you've unlocked becomes permanently available as starting equipment, letting you pick your favorite strategy for later runs and gradually amass more power as you get better at the game: most of the really good cards are expensive, and since you lose a bunch of coins on death, you need to figure out both the best way to get as many as possible during the stages (killing enemies in the right spots so you can actually get their coins, using special cards that turn bullets into coins, etc) and keep them through the boss fight.

The game doesn't have an official English translation, but at the time you read this, there's probably over 50 fan translations covering everything from English and hispanic languages to Klingon. Just look up the "Touhou Community-Reliant Automatic Patcher" and you should find all the info you need.

So yeah, about that Touhou lore lesson I promised at the beginning? It's a game about magical girls that are canonically drunk all the time, that's all you need to know, really. (This will be on the test btw)