Recent reviews by iwsfg

The game is kinda ass. Core mechanic is well executed and is fun to play with for the first few minutes, but it is a chore to play because of certain design decisions game designer had made.

First and foremost, the goal for what you're trying to achieve is never clear. Half way into the game it starts to throw multi-step puzzles at you and it just assumes you know what needs to happen. But the thing is, on your first playthrough, you don't. And there probably won't be second one, since you'll already know all the answers. And so rather than acting strategically, planning your moves ahead and slowly moving to the goal you're just mindlessly spinning the cube around for to see what could possibly match visually and watch things happen. Certain actions trigger cube faces to change sometimes as you advance through the game, and it only makes it worse. You don't get to celebrate you just feel like the goalpost have been moved forward.

There was one time where I clearly saw what game devs wanted me to do, and I tried connecting the puzzle, but it didn't work, because they wanted me to do something else first. This is bad design. If the pieces are there, let me connect them. If it's too early, don't present them to me. I believe this has only happened once, but it affected how I viewed the game for the remainder of my time with it.

Visual storytelling thing does more harm than good here. Apparently the game was trying to tell me a very serious story, perhaps even a personal trauma or someone's life story or something. But it took me a bit to figure out that that is what's been going on. Instead for a good while I was wondering how these locations are connected - perhaps they're parts of the same location with different views and I need to advance through it? No. I wish they were. Instead it's just different episodes of some dude's life. Cool. Low poly photo cards hidden in various places told me nothing and the whole artsy-fancy-no-words-spoken environmental storytelling is not my favorite genre. So with me being late to the party it was hard to be suddenly invested into it, I kinda just ignored it for the rest of the game.

I think they have been guided by the wrong priorities with too much emphasis being put on the story and visual presentation. If designer wanted you to witness a cool visual transition or for some Rube Goldberg machine to work, physics of the real world went out of the window. Things that happen on the screen often aren't very logical, it's more like a child's fantasy going wild: "and then water goes FSHOOOH, and BLAM, and it's all sunny and rainbows". I actually hated it.

Once you finish the game, the game gives you an ending cutscene and loops to the beginning. Knowing what I've learned from the first play through, I guess I could've had a smoother experience on a second one, but after experiencing it once and all the issues I've outlined above I didn't felt compelled to play it over again in the slightest. They should have approached it differently: ditched the storytelling part and just made cool disjointed puzzles. Ones with the end goal clearly visible, so you can more easily measure your progress and where it would make sense to learn your environment. Game should be fun to play first and foremost, if I wanted to experience a good story and not a good game I'd have read a book.

TL;DR: There are few (very few) good aspects about, but overall it's not a good product. Animated backgrounds and stickers in the Points Shop are nice though.

Mid as a game, mid as a fap material. Art is the only thing that's actually good. Rigging in h-segments can be hit or miss, sometimes it is pretty crappy. Writing is piss poor and very much passable, English localization is abysmally bad, full of weird punctuation, mixed up genders and just awkwardly sounding phrases, Some Lines Have Each Word Capitalized For No Reason. My best guess, it was machine translated. Thanks to that certain lines come across cringy as hell.

And the whole pirate thing is just a very loosely attached "theme". There's very little rhyme or reason to the characters you meet or situations you meet them in. "Oh, here's a cat girl ninja who's lost in the cave, let's bang", or "oh here's a random nun standing here, let's bang"... I mean, Rance had the similar approach to life, but here it's all very much on the surface. This game makes no attempt to tell an interesting story in the process, the dialogue bits are only there to glue different scenarios together.

Exploring the levels was fun and was probably the best part of the game tbh, but it was hard to be immersed. Shooting/slashing enemies is not bad, but it's no Hotline Miami either. You really can't ignore some of the weapon options game offers you and choose to power through the whole thing with the sword - you have have to take them. Once again, encounters with pirate catgirls felt somewhat random: most of them just sat in random buildings or corners of the map waiting to be found. Some environmental storytelling could have improved situation, but I don't think people that made the game know what it is. Also characters can exist in multiple copies on the same map if you ignore the objective and go explore a little further which added to confusion. Merchant selling upgrades does the same thing. I have mixed feelings about it. Some of the bosses were alright, while others are just bullet sponges. Hey, at least it didn't rain with achievements.

The ship, which serves as a hub area is half-broken. Some of the characters there have a popup with their bio stylized as a Wanted poster which shows up upon interaction, others for some reason are trying to start a dialog with you. And when they do it for the first time, game throws you into the hentai scene with the wrong character. Then it fixes itself on the subsequent entries.

UX around VN segments is actually awful, you can't click outside the dialog UI to progress, turning of auto mode doesn't turn it off right away, you have to wait for the current line's timer to run out, most of the time you can't hit Spacebar to continue, but every once in a while it lets you do that but just once. Esc key doesn't close some pop-ups and always brings the Main Menu.

Do not waste your time and 3 euro. But do look this game up on the Steam Points Shop, they have nice backgrounds for the steam profile there and animated stickers for the steam chat are nice too.

The game is really solid. Both in terms of game design and mechanically. Steamrolling opponents feels really nice, but game rules are set in a way that still lets underdogs come out on top and turn things around the last second. This is good, because team on top has to always be cautious and teams at the end of the scoreboard are competing for the objective until the last minute, even when things look grim. The way that game/show is presented is awesome, commentators' commentary is on point and adds a lot to the immersion. Soundtrack is nice, maps are hella pretty. TTK feels just right, shooting is pleasant. New weapon additions to the classes are good. Battle passes don't feel greedy at all, rather on the contrary. UI is neat and occasionally surprises me with something (like you can drag-scroll with Mouse 2). I don't think there's anything I don't like.

Embark did an incredible job with this game. I like it a lot

It's really good

Hate what they did with second game, but The Division 1 is a work of art. It looks beautiful, has one of the prettiest UI in any of the video games and Survivor DLC takes an interesting spin on the gameplay. Very immersive and even if you don't touch the Dark Zone, PvE content alone is worth it.

Next time you walk on the streets of in-game New York do yourself a service and look up, it looks gorgeous.

♥♥♥♥ the sequel though.

what a ridiculous game

Maybe I should go outside more often

very good

it's good

It's more of interactive movie than a game. A walking simulator set in the dystopian future with a couple of jump scares on top. Story is okay but it dragged for a little too long and it really felt like they tried to stretch it by making you walk painfully slowly most of the time.

The main challenge comes from remembering layout of intertwined corridors of the apartment complex where most of the story takes place and running circles around it, Kind of similarly to RE7 or Cry of Fear's map in this regard - multiple floors, lots of pathways. A few chase and a couple of stealth segments in turn weren't challenging and instead were just annoying to deal with. And as a cherry on top very low FOV value (probably 60 or 70) that game doesn't let you change through the settings gave me headache.

It was fun to see the story unfold, but it overstayed its welcome and for the last 1.5-2 hours I just wanted it to end already.

Also, as it turns out devs released remastered version of the game about a year ago (as a separate title, purchased separately), maybe it's a little bit better pacing-wise or at least you move a little faster in that one. I want to believe, but I have no idea, probably not.