Recent reviews by rainx.0™

Vampire Survivors is very good and a great take on roguelike shoot'em ups. It ended up being the defacto genre defining game, but HoloCure is just as good or better. HoloCure is much more refined than Vampire Survivors and stands at the pinnacle of roguelike shoot'em ups alongside Vamprie Survivors. I had 0 interest or knowledge of Hololive but I still enjoyed this game for strictly for it's gameplay.

tl;dr Game is grindy and dependent on completing 6x of the same content every week. Your progress is heavily gated to completing grindy content. New player experience is terrible. You will have to solo. Bad story, bad voice acting.

I really can't recommend this game to new players. It's very grindy, currently plagued by disconnect bugs, auction house search bugs, bots, and a lot of monotonous content.

The game now has powerpasses available for purchase that will allow new players to skip straight to Tier 3. There are 3 tiers of content made available after you reach level 50. You will have to start honing your gear to increase your item level to move onto each subsequent tier. Each tier presents a gear reset. Playing through the story from level 1-50 takes roughly 30 hours. Those early continents are mostly barren of players aside from bots. You will fail to matchmake with anyone in those early game dungeons 99.99% of the time. A new player going from level 1 to 1302 (the start of Tier 3) will probably have to solo.

The game also has no form of server transfer available (unless you count server mergers due to population counts). If you and your friends join different servers, you cannot party up normally. For end game content, there is a 'party finder' tool that will allow you to start an party and allow people on other servers to apply to join. The game does allow you to add friends from other servers to your friends list so you can invite them to your 'party finder' party. Keep in mind that 'party finder' is mostly for end game content, guardian raids (poor man's Monster Hunter), abyssal dungeons, and some random stuff like platinum field (gathering, fishing, mining, chopping materials map). You can't use 'party finder' for stuff like story dungeons and such.

Aside from the new player leveling experience, the game presents some fairly interesting and fun content. There are the end game legion raids, abyssal dungeons, boss rushes, etc. The only problem with those is that the game is very alt character heavy and repetitive.

The legion raids where you face off against the commanders of the enemy forces with 7 other teammates (3 in one of them) are very mechanics heavy. They all have set mechanics that occur at certain hp bar counts and after certain non-set mechanics. They fill in the gaps between those set mechanics with an assortment of random and non-random non-set mechanics. It's fun to learn those raids with your teammates and develop your strategies. However, after week 2 or so, the amount of learning parties dwindle heavily. Even during week 1, you are expected to have watched a video or have a cheat sheet of the mechanics up. This game is far behind Korea's version so the mechanics and fights have already been heavily documented and strategies have already been developed. But once you are familiar with the content, you should be able to easily run them. Additionally, as your increase your ilvl (item level), the content will be easier as there is no scaling involved.

There are game design issues in legion raids such as the legion commander boss being able to go right up to the edge of the map. This makes it very difficult for classes that rely on back attacking to attack them because their back is facing an invisible wall. They should have made a border slightly smaller than the map that the boss can't cross. That way, there would be a small amount of space for back attacking classes to attack. Vykas, a legion commander boss, can also dodge attacks via the z-axis and move around there for awhile. When she is in the air, she is invincible and players are left just waiting for her to land again.

Despite those issues, the legion raids are by far the best content in the game. The problem arises when you have to play that content 6 times a week (6 is the max amount of characters you can set to earn gold from content). Compound that with there being 3 legion raids and it starts to breed toxic attitudes in some gamers (3 is the max amount of legion raids you can complete on a character). Many end game players are either playing 3 legion raids a week or 2 legion raids and an argos (a non-legion raid boss). Valtan (1st legion commander) has 2 gates while the latter two have 3 gates each. Gates are essentially a checkpoint after completing a significant phase of the raid. In both scenarios, the player is completing 8 gates a week on a single character and 48 gates if they are playing on all 6 gold earning characters. Progressing through the raid would normally be fine, but if people are trying to complete 8 gates 6 different times, some people can become pretty toxic and gate keep. They want to finish things in a single push and not have to deal with mistakes.

Those legion raids are not the only content people are playing. Playing that are still progressing to end game will be completing abyssal dungeons for gear. Abyssal dungeons have slightly longer mob fights between bosses than legion raids and have bosses with much less mechanics and health. These players will have to complete them every week.

Going back to end game players, there are also other stuff but it's the same deal.

And then there are the daily tasks. There are 3 daily quests, 2 chaos dungeons (mob cleanup), and 2 guardian raids to do. Chaos dungeons are your main source of tripod materials. Tripod materials give you a chance at increasing the level of your individual skill modifiers in your pseudo skilltree. You want to upgrade these as they can provide a DPS boost. You can choose to not do these dailies to gain rest bonus which provides more rewards though.

And finally, there are islands, chaos gates, and world bosses. The islands are interesting and some of them have very different gameplay mechanics to switch things up. But in order to obtain some of the rewards, you have to do them many times. Some of them only spawn on a set schedule so you have to plan around them (whether by the hour or day). The chaos gates and world bosses spawn on set days every hour. The world bosses also provide good drops. Some world bosses have to be farmed for potentially months in order to obtain a collectible item. You can also only do a chaos gate and world boss once a day each. You need these collectibles because there are NPCs that will provide you with skill points and useful rune modifiers for your abilities. You cannot reach max skillpoints for upgrading your skills unless you obtain these collectibles. These skillpoints and runes can provide a substantial DPS boost.

Players call these weeklies and dailies homework for a reason. Of course you don't need to do all of these consistently. I have 9 characters and I stopped doing that to avoid burnout. Just know that legions are your main source of currency and progression. You NEED legion mats to upgrade your gear.

The game also has some bland decisions with class designs. Every class has 2 class engravings. One of those engravings usually removes the identity skill of the class. Some classes have more variety in builds, but many classes are stuck with a couple of cookie cutters. Auto/basic attacks are also mostly ignored. The game also revolves heavily around burst damage and burst windows. A lot of builds are completely dependent on a set bonus that supports have to use that provide additional swiftness. There are also a lot of useless skills or tripod modifiers.

The voice acting is very poor in this game. The story is also poorly translated and not very good.

They also use a pheon currency system as a tax against you in the auction house. Pheon cost is dictated by premium currency conversion rates.

The definitive version of Pac-Man. It includes all of the old school gameplay that everyone knows as well as new game mechanics that synergize well with the rest of the game. It does not lock you into a tutorial like Championship Edition 2 or cater to casual play like 256. ..........