Recent reviews by constantcompile

This game deserves all of the praise it has received. It deserves all of the criticism, too.

There's a frustrating "high-low split" that I'm encountering with increasing frequency in puzzle-type videogames. A game's core experience will be a relatively well-tuned experience that something like 95% of the audience will engage with, enjoy, and move on from. But outside of that core experience - outside of that golden path - the game has sprinkles, dashes, or an entire buffet's worth of supplementary clues that are really only intended for about 5% of the player base.

These clues confound and confuse regular players, because they are either an order of magnitude more difficult than the game's typical fare, or they straight-up aren't intended to be solved in isolation. When does a solution cross the line from esoteric to obtuse? If you walked the golden path just fine, but found yourself profoundly irritated by the extracurriculars you wished you'd known to steer clear from, how do you score the aggregate experience if you're dropping the game well before engaging with its ARG-level complexities?

That pretty well summarizes the dilemma with "Metroidbrainia" games like Animal Well. But there's an additional wrinkle with Blue Prince: Namely, the sheer capricious sadism of the RNG.

I cannot tell you how much rage I experienced from never finding something when I needed it, or not having any satisfactory options, or having a barrier appear that I didn't have the means to defeat. You will have the most phenomenal start you've seen in days ended prematurely by something completely beyond your control. You will spend hours trying to set up statistically-improbable combinations to find solutions and it will simply refuse to happen. Most critically, there is no mid-run "Save & Quit" option that suspends your game and preserves your run - you must always end the "Current Day" before quitting the game. It's impossible to know, when starting a run, whether it will require twenty minutes or two hours to really succeed in all the dimensions you're hoping for. For all those reasons, this is not a title for those who expect a game to respect their time.

Ultimately, while I enjoyed getting to Room 46 well enough, I did not enjoy the "next level" of puzzles layered atop that experience. And that's why I chose to walk away from this game after rolling the credits. Like the puzzles, I can recommend this game to a "High-Low" mix of people: Those with a truly boundless appetite for brain teasers, no matter how inscrutable, and those who are capable of looking at a baffling clue, shrugging their shoulders, taking a screenshot and moving on.

With those many caveats, I will still give a thumbs-up and say recommended.

Other reviewers are right: This should've been Early Access.

However, this game is too innovative and compelling on a mechanical level for me to not recommend it.

The way repairing units works. The way transports work. The way capturing works. The fact that every CO Power is targeted rather than any being global. If you've been starving for a proper Advance Wars successor, you could pick this up for $27 right now and feel you got your money's worth from the campaign alone, provided you played on Brutal difficulty.

That said... man. This should've been an alpha version. Even still - recommended.

If you have a rotation of party games you like to play with friends or family, Which Way Up: Galaxy Games (sheesh, what a title) is a worthy addition to that roster. It's quite a looker for an indie party game; the main menu is especially well done. And the combination of game modes with the tricky physics engine makes for a genuinely enjoyable pick-up put-down experience with others.

At $15 full price, if you're interested in couch gaming, it's worth the buy for that alone.

The single-player is where this game really falls down (so to speak), and as such, I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone who won't be playing with others. The mechanics are too fiddly for how tight the medal requirements are, the writing fell very flat for me, and the mini-games on offer simply aren't as fun if you're playing against the clock instead of human opponents. And if you have friends, playing single-player will widen the skill gap between you and them, meaning you'll either need to intentionally play poorly or just stomp them outright, which isn't fun for anyone.

I'd had really preferred if this game just doubled- and tripled-down on multiplayer, investing that development time into alternate color palettes for the characters and making more game modes. However, the multiplayer in its current form will still suffice for a thumbs-up from me.

Recommended if you have friends to play with. Steam Remote Play means that they don't need to own a copy of their own.

This DLC tries so hard to make Fenyx Rising into a different game. A cooler game. A gamer-y game. It fails spectacularly.

"Forget your custom-made protagonist, and forget about the garden-variety human you played as in Myths of the Eastern Realm. You're playing as a silver-haired, purple-eyed twenty-something woman, because white-haired women are cool. Look at Ciri. Look at 2B. Third-person freecam? That's for casuals. Real gamers use isometric cameras. Look at Diablo. Look at League of Legends. You're getting an isometric camera because those are cool. Damage buffs? Bro. Bro. Nah bro. You need a million different tchotchkes and a million slots to put them in, because that's cool. Look at Final Fantasy. C'mon, keep up. Exploration? Exploration? Bro, do you even game? This DLC is one hundred-thousand percent about combat, bro. Combat, combat, combat. That's what gamers want. That's what's cool."

What a mess.

The Lost Gods feels completely claustrophobic in comparison to the base game, because your camera is completely fixed on the y-axis at a nearly top-down view. There's no way to get a lay of the land unless you're great at forming mental maps or until you jump from high heights in the late-game. Enemies are absolutely everywhere, and will spawn in on top of you in random ambushes, and will spawn extra waves on top of that, and will respawn every day-night cycle! You can't walk ten steps in this game without drawing aggro from trash mobs, and because even a low-level shielded enemy will interrupt your attacks, they will always be a hassle to deal with. You don't regen stamina with every sword-strike like in the base game, and your base stamina regeneration rate in combat is still painfully slow. And who took away my i-frames?! Who's the genius who decided that ganking the player with half-a-dozen enemies spawning on top of them and attacking was still too easy unless they could still be interrupted and damaged while using the core powers of the game?!

The essences are garbage. If you have a 9% chance to proc something - anything - it functionally cannot factor into any tactics or planning, because you'll never be able to rely on the effect being generated. Why would I spec into dealing damage in a straight line behind the enemy when I never know whether the effect will trigger? Why would I spec into reducing defense if I don't know whether the enemy will be on its last legs at that point anyway? Why would I freeze an enemy if they are immune to damage while frozen? It feels like more than half of the buffs on offer had no thought put into them beyond making them passably distinct from the others.

And wow, the pacing. Why is the ability to sprint locked behind a quest you won't complete until three-quarters of the way through the campaign? Why is swimming? Why is gliding? These are incredibly basic traversal skills; why are you kneecapping the player by withholding them for the majority of the game? Why is the very first dungeon the most combat-heavy instance in the entire DLC, being sprung on the player when they are the least equipped to deal with it?

Even when I snowballed in terms of power and could dumpster the mobs I drew aggro from on the way to my objective, I ended up not bothering, because I already had more bottom-tier loot than I could ever hope to use and battling them felt like a waste of time. I'd just beeline to my destination and hide in a bush until they went away.

The puzzles in this DLC are the weakest they've been, and the platforming - if you can believe it - is still terrible. The art is good, the writing is adequate, but the core design elements of the game are such a poor foundation to structure all of these assets that the whole thing feels like a disappointment and a waste.

I spent 12 hours of my finite life and even more finite free time grinding out this DLC because I wanted to finish out the content and storyline of Fenyx Rising. It was not worth it. You can skip this one.

Not recommended.

Myths of the Eastern Realm is essentially a whole standalone game, with a new world, story, and characters bolted on to the engine and animation rigs of the base Fenyx Rising game.

To me, nothing about this felt "cheap." The campaign length is certainly abbreviated compared to the base game, yes, but they didn't call it "Fenyx Rising 2" and release it for sixty bucks. For a DLC, the amount of creation-per-dollar you're getting here is insane.

The English voice acting isn't great, true - but that's because the voice actors are clearly ESL and have strong Chinese accents, predictably meaning that their emphasis is hit-or-miss and they're sometimes difficult to understand. Personally, I changed the spoken language to Chinese and just read the subtitles, and that worked great. The Chinese VO seems well-acted to me and I could hear the emotion despite the language barrier.

Puzzle-wise, I liked the murals but disliked the new emphasis on precision with moving objects. Combat-wise, the LB+A ability (I forget the name; Ares's ability from the base game) has received such a huge buff that I made it my bread and butter for combat and never regretted it. The other abilities all seem downgraded. Fashion-wise, man, there aren't many options and not all of them even look good. But the base game had plenty of duds, so eh.

I wasn't familiar with any of the dieties depicted in Myths of the Eastern Realm, so there was a good amount of enjoyment from the sheer novelty of the experience. This was a nice 11-hour romp after the base game and the first DLC and I generally enjoyed my time with it.

Recommended.

Mostly Negative? Man, y'all are harsh.

If you enjoyed the vaults from the base game at all, boy, is this the DLC for you. A New God has a tiny "open world" in comparison to the base game (if anything it's more like an expanded mission select hub) but doubles-down on the presentation, length, and challenge of its instanced trials.

The strengths and weaknesses of the main game carry over. Combat is still pretty fun, platforming is still terrible. Wisely, most of the traversal challenges are centered around flying, not platforming.

In any case, if you enjoyed the base game enough to beat it, there's absolutely no reason not to play through this DLC, as well.
Recommended.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is not a must-play.

The writing is pretty weak, especially in the early game. There's a forced punchline after every bit of narration and it gets quite grating. The puzzles vary wildly in complexity; occasionally surprisingly clever, but usually hovering near "busywork" territory. Platforming mechanics are, believe it or not, just bad. Invisible-wall "cones" will forcibly nudge you away from landing on visibly flat surfaces, grabbing ledges to salvage jump attempts is horribly inconsistent, and the combat powers they've shoehorned in to augment your traversal moveset are straight-up not fit for purpose. It simply does not feel good to have movement abilities that shunt you a set distance along the x- or y-axis and then completely stop your momentum dead. And Ubisoft Connect; ugh. The servers were down one day, and it took me a good ten minutes of fiddling with the settings to get the offline mode working. Not great.

So why am I recommending it?

Well, because despite all of that, there's still a lot of heart and care put into this game, and because flying around a map collecting shinies and murking fools is still a good time. The combat is solid; I don't know whether the sweaties would consider the parry system to be acceptably exacting, but personally, I played on Normal difficulty and enjoyed steamrolling every encounter using i-frames from combat powers in lieu of parries.

The writing does have its moments, as do the puzzles. The platforming... is pretty much always terrible, but you can see from the level design that the developers were doing the best they could with what they had. The microtransactions are limited to cosmetics, which you are never lacking in any case, and halfway through the first DLC, I'm comfortable saying the Gold Edition is worth springing for at its current deep discount.

Oh, and the HDR is amazing. This game has the most visually-impressive HDR I've played on my monitor.

So even though nothing about this game is great, most of it is pretty good. I beat the main story in under 40 hours - collecting, I estimate, about two-thirds of all available map icons. Most of that time was decidedly relaxed, rolling over enemies and going through the motions of the puzzles.

At its current firesale $9 price, you could certainly do worse.
Recommended.

This is one of those games that you hesitate to recommend, because it's so compelling and so engrossing you almost want to tell people "save yourself!"

There's unfortunately not much story to speak of, it's mostly vibes and mechanics. You and your people against the storm. Your surroundings get more hostile every year, and you're fighting to snowball faster than the ambient dangers are. And you can turn the difficulty up, let me tell you - it doesn't just go up to 11, it goes up to 20.

The developers are still actively updating the game, and listening to fan feedback - to the point that there's a "request feature" button in the main menu.

I forged a Platinum Seal at Prestige Level 5, with 93 hours logged and no failed settlements. I'm walking away from the game now, not because I don't want to keep playing, but because it's interfering with my responsibilities. It's that addictive.

Highly recommended. Just, make sure you know what you're getting into. This can be hard to put down.

Sometimes, the appeal of a videogame is knowing that you'll experience the end of it. There's nothing groundbreaking (ironically) about AGADAH, it's just a charming, scrappy first-person-excavation game taking place entirely in and underneath some rando's backyard.

The presentation is quite basic; there's no music for the bulk of gameplay - I put on the Minecraft OST to listen to in the background. The terrain deformation mechanics are adequate but unimpressive - bits of ground stay hovering in the air even with nothing anchoring them, and I had more than a few instances of small bits of terrain (only a few pixels thick!) inflicting fall damage, interrupting what should have been a freefall.

But you know what? I bought this game to dig a hole, and I dug a hole, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much that I fired up a new game to get the speedrun and other assorted achievements.

I 100%'d AGADAH in about three-and-a-half hours, and found it to be worth my time and my money. It's no GOTY, it might not even be the best game you play this month, but it's a fine palette cleanser, with a price point to match.

Recommended.

You can play Bopl Battle for ten minutes or two hours and have fun.

You can play it casually or get really sweaty with it and still have fun.

You can play with players of almost any skill level and still have fun.

Well worth full-price but an absolute steal if it's on sale. One of the GOATS. Highly recommended.