Recent reviews by vasi

cats

It's a really good puzzle game, with simple core mechanics, that quickly become complex once interwoven together.

The optional objectives are there to serve as a hint on what you can do at each level and it pushes you to think more about each skills potential. Yet, the replay option also means that you can go back to previous levels later, so you have an easier time completing those objectives in case you missed it.

I really thought I was smart when I beat the final level without the hint, until I tried to complete the 2 hidden achievements on that level.



Stories are okay, it's pretty interesting and it does feel connected with the skills that each characters have. Storytelling and script writing are good, I feel invested and want to know more about each characters.



In case it wasn't obvious enough, recommended!

plate up if you have no friends

FFXIV raiding with cute bunnies. Shame there's no catgirls.

Despite some of the game's balance that's still not there (e.g weapon balance), the recent controversy and how their CEO responds makes me believe that the game is in good hands and that they're trying to bring the game to the correct direction.

Therefore, I'll be changing my review.

I've played almost 80 hours now with an almost lv 100 character, so I feel like I've seen most of what the game has to offer.

Leveling is quite good in this game, you have a lot of skill options you can go with. Unlike PoE, skills are unlocked based on levels and the amount of passive points you put into a tree/mastery. Skill specializations are unlocked gradually as you progress, so you can get some variety on your build while not getting overwhelmed at the same time.

You can skip most of the campaign via dungeons, so that's another plus too.

There are a lot of viable builds for every mastery. In fact, you don't need to look up a guide, and cook your own build, and you'll be fine until the mid/high corruption in Monolith. Changing from 1 build to another is already pretty easy around the mid game. Re-specing passives is cheap. Skills have minimum level that increases as you progress, allowing your skill to start at level X instead of 0, and any skill that's lower than your highest skill gets a boost in skill exp, allowing you to level it much faster.

Mastery balances are a bit off however, as masteries that were released latter tend to be a bit too strong compared to the ones released previously.

Definitely one of the biggest strength of the game. I think crafting is pretty well defined. You can craft affixes that you want. You can remove/re-roll/seal affixes you don't want. There's a lot of options here. Unique items having Legendary Potential, where you can essentially slam a non-unique item into it, inheriting a random 1-4 of the affixes from that non-unique is great for minmax-ing your build.

Highest crafted affixes tier is T5. Items with T6-7 affixes are called Exalted items and are drop only, meaning you want to look for
these exalted items with good stats on it, with potentially good implicits, for your crafting base.

I only have small complaints about it. I wish we can see all the possible suffixes/affixes for a certain item type. A lot of times when I already have 2 prefixes/suffixes and I want to chaos one of them, I have to resort to 3rd party website to see what are all the other available options.

Buying Runes of Shattering is also tedious. You can only buy around 7-9 at a time, and it resets every 20mins. Making it stack over time in vendor as you complete maps would be a lot better, allowing you to buy it in bulk.

Combat is okay. It's similar to other games, nothing too special.

You'll need to build your character around multiple defensive layers, like health, ward (shield in other games), armor, dodge, res, etc. Having capped res is not mandatory (obviously higher is better). You also have things like idols/blessings giving you some health and/or res, so if you want to replace a gear with resistance with a gear that have offensive stats on it, you can swap your health idol to a resistance idol instead, allowing for greater flexibility in your build.

The endgame combat currently revolves around 3 things: monolith, dungeon, and arenas.

Arena serves no other purpose other than to flex your wave count in the Ladder system. The reward for doing it is not worth it.

Most Dungeons have so-so mechanic and so-so rewards. Temporal Sanctum being the exception, since you need the eternity cache at the end for your LP. Lightless Arbor is a gold-sink, paying gold for explosive rewards, but due to how expensive it is, you'll be farming for a week, stockpiling 2-3M before spending it all in 1-2 runs.

Monolith is the bulk of where the endgame is. Scaling up corruption with harder enemies in exchange for better rewards is good. There are 10 different timelines, each with its own reward pool and blessings. Blessings from certain timeline are drop-oriented, increasing drop rate for certain item type or combat-oriented, increasing your offensive/defensive stat, allowing you to target farm and customize your build more efficiently. Each timeline also have their own boss version, allowing for more fight variety and/or replayability.

Understandably, there's not as many options here as compared to PoE, but it's a good starting point and has a lot of potentials to expand.

QoL in this game is the best I've seen in this genre. Stash tabs are purchasable via in-game gold, and golds are automatically picked up, as your character move over them. Affix shards, glyphs, runes are all important crafting materials, and they have a vacuum loot, where you only need to pick up 1 and it will also pick up nearby crafting mats around it. They also have their own "pouch" so they don't take up inventory space.

My main gripe with this is that the mats you picked up from the ground go to your inventory first, and then you have to click a button to transfer these items to their "pouch". There's room for improvement here, and make it so that picked up crafting mats go to their "pouch" automatically, just like how gold is.

The game has its own built-in Loot Filter. There's room for improvement to allow for a more fine-grained tuning, but it's good enough to use as it is now.

Overall, the game is still worth buying IMO. There are still server issues, but it's nowhere near as bad as the 1st week of launch. The game itself is still pretty fun and has a lot of potential.

The game pokemon wish it can be

Short, but good. Simple in concept, yet complex in execution.

The addition of a third time portal really messes with your brain in the beginning and add another layer of complexity in problem solving, with levels that gradually introduce you to new mechanics related to this new portal.

It's a love-and-hate relationship.

The game is fun, a lot of fun, especially if you like stealth.
But it's also missing a lot of basic & critical features.

- Stealth gameplay itself is a lot more fun vs PD2, although the pre-planning is arguably worse than PD2.
- You can do a lot more with casing mode compared to PD2.
- Areas are divided into public, private, secure, and changing difficulty that can change a public area into a private area is pretty cool.
- Weapon attachments system, although not perfect, is a lot better than the random card rewards from PD2.

- Some skills/items are bugged which makes it pretty annoying/broken. Cover-up being able to make you kill a lead guard, and not have to deal with his pager continuously every minute, or Glitch Protocol not resetting guard fully sometimes. Motion sensor stops working after a while, amongst other things.
- Some heist rewards are pretty unbalanced outside of the main objectives. UtS VH gives 900k-ish for all 4 main objectives, yet only gives 1.1-1.2m total for all loot. NRFTW OVK giving like barely 500k for all loot runs despite it being one of the hardest heist to do feels like a slap in the face.
Meanwhile there's heists like G&S and Rock the Cradle that gives a lot more rewards vs time spent compared to other heists.
- Skill progression is tied to challenge system. A lot of those are weapon kills challenges, which leans pretty heavily into loud gameplay.
- Assault strength are tied into your heist progress. So if you do let's say a heist, you complete all the main objectives, and went to loud before escaping, it goes straight to final charge, like wtf.
- Mini circle mini-games for WiFi is pretty annoying to do if you're solo. This would be a lot better, if they scale this up/down based on the actual players in the lobby.

Overall, unless you really like PD2 or you enjoy stealthing regardless of the rewards, I would wait for either a sale or a patch first before buying this.

it's okay