Recent reviews by Yal

It's basically Dark Souls but better. I'm never going back to a Souls game without a teacup arrangement simulator ever again.

The most wholesome and cute game to ever feature x-ray scans of cat skulls, an industrial slaughterhouse, and celebrity drug addiction.

Hellpoint is a soulslike that combines the two most repulsive horrors known to man: Lovecraftian elder gods, and 1950s architecture.

The world is the big star in a soulslike, and Hellpoint has a very different take on the world design: levels are massive, has several alternate paths, and to top it all off you can choose three different "first areas" at the start. The levels end up interconnected later on, which means that no matter where you're going, you're going to find progress sooner or later. The drawback is that it's easy to get lost - especially when you spend a lot of time in indoors spaces without landmarks at the horizon - and have an overwhelming amount of options to choose from.

The unique gameplay twists include a jump button, a clock with special events happening a few times per hour (such as the enemies respawning or challenge rooms opening), a firearms weapon class, and a system where you equip upgrade chips in your weapons to give them special abilities like buffs, passive stat boosts, and special combo attacks. Some upgrade chips gives you elemental or gun-based damage on melee weapons, letting you focus on a stat of your choosing without losing out on options.

I find myself more "enduring" than "enjoying" the core combat loop (which gets kinda janky a lot, especially when fighting large groups of enemies) but the sense of desolation and exploration are both top-notch. At first I was lukewarm to the long stretches of connective tissue - with nothing in particular happening - connecting all the "interesting" bits, but having some time to wind down and collect my thoughts in anticipation for the next area I'd stumble into grew on me over time the more I played.

15 hours in, I'm still only 30% done with the game, and I don't think I've ever played another game where my understanding of an area has gotten gradually LESS refined the more I explore it. You mostly stumble around blind with no real guidance, and if you like finding unexpected areas in a giant space city but don't care all that much for fashion or smooth combat, this game's for you.

Pretty competent mix of Double Dash and F-Zero mechanics set in the Touhou world. Genso[kyo] Skydrift is really polished, but a bit lacking in content with 15 racetracks, 2 of which are harder versions of another track. I'm a bit disappointed there's no Rainbow Road knockoff thrown in as the climactic final stage to complete the experience (we got Mute City, after all) and overall there's not a lot of new stuff compared to the old version, but now you can play this game on Steam with an english translation and stuff!

The game has a number of interesting ideas to spice up the racing game formula. Instead of collecting items through item boxes, you can roll for a random item at any time; this consumes magic power which accumulates over time, and faster if you're behind. You need to make a call on whether to save up for a stronger item or use multiple weaker ones, and it's possible to save up for the best items even if you're first. The "blue shell" style items are character-specific Last Word spells that needs a lot of magic energy to charge up, and everyone is only allowed to use one of them per race.

Also, since you control two characters at once, knowing how to build a good team is important. You need to both pick two characters that can compensate for each other's weaknesses, and know when the best time to switch is. Switching gives you a speed boost, but also makes you completely unable to turn for the duration of the animation, and it consumes magic power you could've saved up for items.

After a pretty generic start set in redneck halloween land, DUSK's level design goes off the rails and lets you straferun your way through nuclear reactors, flying cities, eldritch ruins, and a giant meatgrinder with parkour elements. While the first half of the game feels a bit streamlined, polished but without much that stands out, the second half of the game more than compensates for it, having some of the most creative level design I've seen in years and sends you on a rampage through a bizarre world where every level stands out in at least three ways. Pacing and variety is stellar and it's a joy to run around at breakneck speeds while juggling three shotguns trying to figure out where to go next while being constantly barraged by slow fireballs, alcoholic vomit, and threatening whispers.

AoCF is a fighting game with a pretty large dose of shmup mechanics, most notably you fly around instead of walking on the ground (being able to "jump" both up and down, rather than having fully free movement). Like Tekken Tag Tournament, you control two characters at once, and can switch at any time (including mid-attack) to spice things up. Between that mechanic and the three types of super moves each character has access to on top of their normal attacks, this is a game where you press buttons and things happen and you don't really see the connection, but since it happens at such a breakneck pace, you learn to stop caring and just go with the flow.

Best played with friends that are as clueless as you are in how all the moves interact with each other. With how easy it is to end up in spectacular firefights (some characters can cover one third of the screen in bullets), this is the perfect party game if you're casually interested in classical 1v1 fighting games but don't really feel like investing the time to get good in one of the big names.

I didn't know what to expect when getting this game, other than the screenshots looking pretty nice, but the mix of Diablo-style hack-n-slash with a chunk of Pocky 'N Rocky-style projectile-based combat turned out pretty nice. The game has some clunkiness, and it's clear the production values weren't super high, but the gameplay is silky smooth (as long as you're not in a platforming section) and just moving around feels nice.

Most of the variety comes from mix-and-matched groups of enemies, but usually the enemies go down so quickly you don't get to see and appreciate their movesets. The game rewards you for playing aggressively by boosting your attack power and item drops based on your combo counter, and while being hit resets the counter, you can stop the reset if you deal another hit quickly enough. These things tend to make me rush from one encounter to another (to prevent the combo from ending due to timing out) and try to drag in as large groups of enemies as possible at once to maximize combo buildup, then spam the spin attack to cancel out any enemy counter-attack damage while finishing them off. Since most of your attacks can destroy basic enemy bullets, there's not a lot of reasons to play defensively.

The game is overall a bit on the easy side, but there's a "bullet hell mode" setting in the options launcher with big red text telling you to not enable it unless you know what you're doing, and the bosses have consistently been pretty big leaps in difficulty forcing me to re-evaluate my strategies and focus more on dodging and projectiles than just spamming melee attacks. It's gonna be interesting to see how the game evolves further in.

Tons of stuff to do, great co-op, high skill ceiling but still easy to learn, focus on gameplay over storytelling or graphics.

EDF5 mostly is "EDF4 but better", but most of the changes have a pretty huge impact on overall enjoyment. Enemy spawners now are towers that force you to split your attention between the spawners' weak point and the hordes of enemies they throw at you instead of kinda just hitting both until they stop being a problem, Wing Divers can charge up attacks at a safe distance to have more power left to fly around, Fencers still are a nightmare to control efficiently but much more manageable for your fingers than the shield-cancelling meta technique used before. You get to keep some items if you die, so you can get through a hard mission just by bashing your head against it if you just can't figure out the right strategy.

But let's take a step back, what is EDF more exactly? It's a cooperative arena shooter thing where your mission in every kilometer-sized level is "kill all the giant insects / robots / dinosaurs". That might sound like it gets old quick, especially when there's 100-ish missions to beat with 4 different characters, but the level design is stellar enough that it doesn't FEEL like you do the same thing in every mission. Every mission has something unique, whether it be in setpieces or enemy combinations. Giant hordes of red ants might be manageable if you're in a city full of cover, but what if they all storm at you in an open field? Fighting underground? Hope you brought some weapons that's good for defending narrow chokepoints!

The cooperative aspect (2 player local multiplayer, 4-player online) mostly comes in play due to the game's need for strategizing. Weapons usually are situational with clear advantages and drawbacks, and you can only carry a few at a time. The four playable classes are essentially so different to play it's 4 different games. Playing together lets you cover each other's weaknesses and launch devastating combination attacks, and there's a number of items purely meant for supportive use (like the laser pointer that lets you guide every homing missile on the map, healing dispensers, and vehicles with extra gunner seats) which shines in co-op play. One of the classes is purely support-based, coordinating long-cooldown airstrikes for massive damage and deploying tanks and other vehicles, but having almost no direct means of fighting, relying on buffing allied NPCs or other players in-between air raids. They're either the most powerful or the most useless unit in the battle, depending on your strategy, often alternating between the two extremes in the same battle. The other three classes are more standard faire: a normal soldier guy that uses standard weapons, lacking weaknesses but also strengths, a flying girl with energy-based weapons that excel at taking out a single priority target quickly but require precise positioning (often at melee range) and have limited capacity to fight enemy groups, and a heavy weapons guy that wields FOUR weapons at once and excel at taking out groups of weak enemies but lack the mobility or concentrated power to deal with a single major enemy efficiently. Each class has access to dozens of weapons, and with all the missions having different structure, there's plenty of variety and plenty of room to customize your playstyle.

TL;DR, a must-play if you like stupid fun awesomeness.

TL;DR this in the only Dark Souls clone where one of the bosses is a Metal Gear, you should check it out if you're even remotely interested.

Since everybody is gonna assume The Surge 2 is "dark souls but in the future", I'm gonna blow you mind with a completely unexpected revelation: it is. Like, literally. The developers figured most of the stuff that deviated from the Souls formula were the reason Surge 1 was bad, and fixed that by just stealing MORE ideas from Dark Souls. And it's a much better game for it.

How is it like dark souls, you wonder? Read on, it's at the end of the review. First some miscellaneous details.

The game's mostly about navigating ruins, taking down various challenging enemy encounters using some combination of your wits, your reflexes, and the environment. There's a great variety in enemy placement and equipment, and plenty of encounters with trash mobs are memorable because of having some unique twist that sets them apart from the filler. You mostly fight humanoid enemies with melee weapons and shields, and you mostly crawl around in ruined once-great city ruins. Enemies occasionally have guns and take potshots at you from a distance, but you have a number of gun attacks as well. The gun is pretty weak, but tears through enemy armor really quickly - with some quick thinking and a few well-aimed shots you can instakill an enemy at full health. Robotic enemies are very different from humans, ranging from automatic turrets that die in one hit to gigantic dog-mantis things that electrocute you and hit you with the force of a small car.

One of the game's main gimmicks is being able to target enemy limbs and cut them off if you damage them enough: this is the main way you unlock new gear. Cutting something off gives you its crafting recipe and crafting/upgrading materials, so you're encouraged to kill enemies in different ways to keep your supply filled up. Attacking armored body parts deals less damage, but you only get upgrade parts from cutting off armor, so there's a risk-vs-reward system involved in how you engage every enemy. Typically, even enemies of the same type has variations in their armor layout, so just going for the head every time won't get you far - one of the first bosses' weak point is their left leg. Most bosses in Surge 2 also are of the "hit the thing until it dies" kind instead of being puzzle bosses, which makes for an overall more fun experience.

The environments are labyrinthine and full of shortcuts. I feel like they're often TOO labyrinthine, with no clear path from the start to the end. Exploring them the first time is fun, but when you specifically want to go somewhere and don't know how, it's easy to wander around aimlessly for what feels like hours. There's no prism stones or other items you can place down to keep track of where you've been, except the graffiti messages, but it's hard to tell them apart from other players's.

Weapon-wise, the game has a pretty decent variety: punching gloves, swords, spears, greathammers, and a special dual-wielded weapon that can be split into two fast weapons or combined into a large slow weapon. There's also a number of guns for your drone. There's plenty of weapons with elemental damage and status effects, both in your hands and being used against you. While there's essentially just 5-6 types of weapon, the elemental flair and differences in moveset and other properties help make them feel pretty diverse. Weapons found later in the game come pre-upgraded, and there's no weight penalty for equipping multiple weapons, so you are encouraged to experiment with everything you find.

So, about the similarities with DS? I'd say the level design is very much DS1 in nature: you spend most of the time in a city region with tons of interconnectivity and verticality, most of it covered in rubble and makeshift repairs that has turned it into a labyrinth. Exploration is rewarded with plenty of little shiny goodies, but enemies lurk around every corner. The gameplay has a much more Bloodborne-style feel, though. Playing aggressively rewards you with plenty of battery power to charge up your healing items and other consumables, and you can dash and jump incredible distances. Since both your gun and healing items are activated using robotics, you can trigger them in the middle of attack animations or when you're knocked prone on the floor just fine, and since the game is aware of this, it shows you no mercy. Every encounter becomes an exercise in quick reflexes, battery and stamina management, flashing steel, and multitasking.

Oh yeah, major thing worth pointing out: there's no co-op multiplayer (or invasions). Online elements are all passive stuff, like leaving messages or getting bounties for defeating enemies that kill other players.

Overall, I'd say it's one of the better soulslikes out there, with nice and rewarding core gameplay... although it suffers from level design that is too inconvenient and confusing to backtrack through. If you want more Souls and don't know what game to play next, get Surge 2. If you like Mad Max style apocalyptic fiction and/or cyberpunk, you should consider it too.

Anodyne 2 is a game that toys with your expectations a lot, gradually delivering a much deeper story than the almost ironical exposition early on would hint at. The hub world, which initially feels like huge swathes of meaningless emptiness, becomes both a welcome break from the 2D Zelda dungeons which is where the main gameplay takes place, and the emptiness gives you time to think about the game's heavier themes. The game toys with your expectations in many ways, breaking up both the suggested progression loop and your assumptions about how the game even would work to either deliver story beats or provide you with new tools to progress through it. 7 hours in, I've experienced it becoming up to four layers of meta deep at times, and I have no idea what lurks about the next corner. Telling you what happens would spoil the surprise, but let's just say it's good at wanting you want to know more, to explore more.

The game's 3D sections uses intentionally low-res polygons to first evoke old N64/PS2 games, and later to hint at the world itself being digital. It starts off feeling a bit bland, but it gets a lot more enjoyable later on when you realize that most of it has what-you-see-is-what-you-get collision checking, allowing you to reach all sorts of places you thought were out of bounds. The NPCs are weird creatures that doesn't look like anything in particular most of the time, giving off a surreal vibe that I'm not sure I'm enjoying (and which I fear makes people write the game off as "a weird artsy game" without giving it a chance), but you certainly can't blame them for being forgettable.

The real gem is the beautiful 2D sections, though, where each world has an unique theme representing the mind and memories of the person you're trying to save. Whether you're running errands on the balconies of a megacity for a fashion designer on behalf of a megalomaniac AI, or listening to a family argue about the state of the neighborhood as their posh villa sinks into a worm-infested mud patch, I can guarantee there is not a single level in the game that you will forget.