Recent reviews by Aetheriant

hit with a near lethal dose of stress whenever I boot this up

Feels really unpolished

The gameplay is really fun for a bit, but gets old very quickly without much effort put into variety or replayability. This can be fixed with some content updates though, and the foundation is actually super solid.

My main gripe is just that the story is treated as an afterthought. Makes me wonder why they tried to emphasize it at all, the characters and dialog are completely uninteresting and remain boring all the way to the finish line. Its a whole lot of "telling" and almost zero "showing".

The other side characters are just props that sit in a hub world and appear maybe once or twice in a challenge minigame. The rest of the time they are just portraits with mundane small-talk dialogue that interrupt your run in between levels. I stuck with the writing the whole time but it failed to ever hook me.

Probably still worth the buy if you are into this sort of thing, the first time you progress through each biome and fight the 3 bosses is super cool. Sort of takes a nosedive once they start recycling them though, there's little to no novelty beyond the first 3 fragments.

Uhh boss rating

Jumper is cool and fun and hard yes yes
Convoy has incredible presentation and is easily my favorite, just a little too easy and stays easy in refights
Snake is weird and janky and doesn't feel great, either gets cheesed or cheeses you
Final Machine is a complete joke I don't think they even got to finish it

If the game gets good updates on such a good foundation its gonna be a monster in the genre, otherwise its just "decent" as is.

I love watching

if you come to my burger shop and order a burger with 3x mayo and 3x lettuce I am shooting you

looks worse and performs worse than world right now, give it a while

devs ignored player feedback and then abandoned the game

I have a lot of faith in the team, but this is an extremely rough launch.

I don't care to judge the game based on any of the technical issues since its more or less a given that they'll be fixed, but even aside from those, the gameplay has a lot of jank to it right now.

First off, this game does not actually procedurally generate terrain. Ever. The devs generated around a dozen maps, maybe tweaked them a little, and points of interest are placed onto those presets. Problem is, these curated maps aren't of any obviously higher quality. They still feel like bland, repetitive, procgen hills. There's not really any interesting terrain formations, and you will quickly find that exploration is one of the weakest aspects of this game. You will almost immediately find yourself playing the same maps, just with buildings and enemy camps switched around.

It should be a surprise to nobody that "Infinite Open Worlds" was hyperbole, but to this extreme?

Executing melee combos on a singular enemy feels good enough, but as soon as you're surrounded by enemies circling you with their flanking AI, you realize that you cannot rotate your character mid-combo, and cannot animation cancel around half of the melee attacks, chosen seemingly at random. Alongside the parry mechanic feeling incredibly janky, and certain enemies (DOGS) having very poorly telegraphed attacks, this makes melee incredibly frustrating at times, especially during bosses.

You will find that most of the damage you take comes from completely off-screen, and large groups of enemies are pretty much entirely impossible to approach in melee range early on. Certain enemies are just completely immune to stagger on hit, and its never made clear which ones, you will just have to find out each time you get hit through your combo. I would have liked to interact with the melee more but the game seemed to really push me to just sit back and spam ranged attacks + Amp abilities on packs.

That said, recovering health in this game needs work. You do not start with any medkits, needing to complete your first cycle to gain access to the first one. Once you have the slot though, you still need to forage for green cube flowers during your run in order to craft them. This wouldn't be too bad on its own but the cost scales per medkit, and persists the entire cycle. You can start a brand new run on the same world, and find that your next medkit costs 10+ medigems.

This kills the pacing of the game for me, needing to run around and pick flowers to create healing items, alongside most of the damage I take feeling unfair, either because an enemy hits me through my parry, I've been locked into my combo animation with no way to cancel it, or I touched the wrong bush on the ground and it bled me for half my health.

The bosses aren't anything special, having 1-2 actually threatening attacks while the rest are mostly for show. They make up for this by endlessly spawning minions, regardless of what phase you're on. These minions will be the reason you struggle at all with these fights. It feels more like the minions are the actual fight and the boss is just a stage hazard. The bosses need to have buffs to their mechanics, and the minions need to be given their own phase, summoning animation, etc.

It needs a lot of work, and it doesn't feel right to recommend it right now.

It is Heart Machine's first early access title, so I'm still optimistic they can pull through. Currently I'll only really be putting hours in to provide feedback.

peak

its silksong

its out

this is the game