Recent reviews by kubikill

PopCap founders after selling the company to EA:

Fun rogue-lite rhythm-based twin-stick shooter. It has some neat ideas on how to integrate rhythm into the gameplay - weapons fire to the rhythm and add to to the music, and to maximize damage you need to time your power attacks well, or else your main attack will stop firing. If you liked Ballhalla's humor, this game has it too but not nearly as much. The only thing I didn't like is that some upgrades are highly situational or are useless if you don't have specific upgrades.

It's cooked to perfection. Gameplay is incredibly fun and the controls are easy to learn, hard to master. Suits both casuals who just want to beat levels and have fun as well as hardcore players who are bold enough to go for P ranks. The artstyle is wild and crude but very expressive and well animated. The soundtrack is full of bangers. A worthy GOTY contender.

I've been playing this game for a while, not reached all of the content available as of EA launch day yet and honestly, if Steam allowed to give Mixed ratings instead of just a Yes/No system, I would definitely use it here. All the artwork and the soundtrack are fabulous and I've been enjoying the story as well but the gameplay, while serviceable, is barebones so far.

The devs said this game isn't supposed to be CSD4 and they're completely right here. The gameplay of CSF seems to strike a direct contrast to the CSD games: it's nowhere as complex, much less hectic with no time management needed, much more forgiving, no pushing for perfectionism and controls are greatly simplified to the point where you can play very well with just one hand. A relaxing, casual cooking game compared to CSD's hardcore restaurant simulation.

That's not a bad thing by itself and I appreciate the devs trying different ideas but the game does feel empty.

There is nothing to do between days - all you have is a menu that lets you select the next area you want to start your day in. There is a very small selection of foods between days: you have to pick 6 out of 12, and from what I seen it's not always the same 12, but only a few change each day. However except for aesthetics the foods don't really seem to change much. I also expected Brie who joins you in the cooking early on in the game to have some gameplay function but there's none of it here. Maybe it could serve as an idea for later updates? The tutorial is also quite basic, it doesn't explain everything and there are no options to view it once again (except for resetting your save). I do appreciate the perk system that gives you control over difficulty and rewards taking riskier perks for faster progression.

As of launch day, the game is in a pretty rough state, since it's in Early Access after all. A lot of QoL features are missing like pausing video cutscenes or subtitles, however the devs have a good track record of listening to community feedback in their past games and they are already taking notes of all the feedback coming in as seen in the CSD Discord server, so I'm pretty sure it's only a matter of time before those issues are taken care of.

The gameplay definitely needs more work but the story, soundtrack and artwork are worth putting up with it for now. I feel like this game could've used a bit more time in the oven before the Early Access release. If you don't mind the rough edges and want to support the development then I'd say go for it, as this game has a lot of potential, otherwise I'd recommend waiting and coming back after more updates come out. I'll be updating this review as I progress through the game and more updates come out.

Really good soundtrack, I've always loved the island and city music and their night variations, they're just so relaxing to me.

There are FLAC versions too, which is nice.

Now if only we could get the Gothic soundtracks available digitally too :)

One of the best stories in the Yakuza series, good combat, kickass soundtrack, all the funny side content you'd expect from a Yakuza game and a good PC port. Loved it!

It's hilariously stupid... or stupidly hilarious, probably even both, and I love it.

Pack up, Microsoft. The king of solitaire games is here.

It's a game about clicking cookies and watching numbers go up, and yet it still has better gameplay than some of the AAA games out there. Would support the devs again.

A sequel to Retro City Rampage and spiritual successor to GTA 1/2. I was excited for this game when it was announced as I loved RCR. It's a great open-world game, but not as good as RCR.

Gameplay is mostly the same, so if you played RCR, you'll feel right at home. There are some differences, like new different weapons, the ability to swim and use boats and there are now 3 protagonists, which honestly feel useless as you spend most of the game playing as the CEO anyway and none of the characters have any unique gameplay traits. Also there's now a business incremental-like minigame where you buy properties on the island to earn as much money as possible. It's as simple as "buy properties and watch the daily revenue go up", and it's fun to watch the map as the buildings on it turn golden over time.
I really liked the business world satire in this game. The game makes fun of pretty much every single modern trend or shady business practice: subscription models, fine prints, abusing legal loopholes, convenience fees or even lootboxes.
There's over 100 story missions to do but they're all short, like they were designed for handhelds. They were also fairly easy on normal difficulty (which is the highest difficulty at the moment of writing), until the last few missions where bulletproof enemies show up.
The ending and final boss are disappointing. I wasn't even aware when I was fighting the final boss, and when the credits rolled in, I was like "wait, THAT'S IT?". They could've gone with something bigger, like a huge overseas megacorporation suddenly trying to take over the whole island.
There's not much worthwhile to do in the open-world, except for shakedowns. There are the gym and aerobics minigames, but there's no reason to do them at all. You can search for charging cables, but you only get an achievement for finding them all. I wish there was more to do. However the locations are very beautiful. The pixelart looks nearly perfect and the animations are fluid. It's also really cool that almost everything can be destroyed. You can drive through fences, burn down trees or mow tall grass with assault rifles (because who needs lawnmovers?). There is a time cycle (that is hardly noticeable, most likely to not obstruct vision), but no weather system, which would've been nice. The soundtrack, while not as large as RCR's, is really good; it straight up sounds like 80's music from a Genesis/SNES game.

Shakedown: Hawaii does improve on some things from RCR but it needs a better ending and extra side content (which will most likely receive sooner or later, judging by how much support RCR had). A weather system and a hard difficulty mode would be nice, too. It's a worthy purchase but if you didn't play RCR yet, I'd recommend playing that instead.