Recent reviews by zrotalent

Love to tap on numbers and then be reminded of another miserable thing that happened last year again. If I clear enough of the puzzle am I also going to find a pixel graphic of when I was laid off? Good lord is this bleak.

Wasn't impressed at first glance from the tutorial races, but once I got into some real tracks with boost pads and actual turns I could taste the juice. This one's got it.

Costume Quest 2, like Costume Quest, is not a JRPG. The J in JRPG stands for Juice, and Costume Quest doesn't have the juice.

For years Metal Slug Attack was a curio, something I'd never play because of the infinite spend gacha, but would constantly be reminded about when I saw they'd added Mutant Catgirls or giant space butterflies to Metal Slug. Reloaded functions as an archive of that mobile game, rebalanced to be more of a game than a slotmachine that begs for your creditcard. It's a weak game ultimately, but has a similar flashing lights appeal as Vampire Survivors. This is a weak recommendation for that feature, and for the archive of new metal slug art that doesn't look as awful as their new 3D mobile game.

Unfortunately Shattered Space, coming a year after Starfield's original release, contains no meaningful changes to Starfield's lackluster presentation. Base building is still a chore, everything about combat feels like a synecdoche of a real game, and the writing, the one thing they could have gotten a pass on the rest of this mediocre package for, still feels like talking to a customer service agent.

If you convinced the AI phone operator at Hertz Rent-a-Car to be your gamemaster for a D&D session it would give you about the same quality of experience. Either their team isn't allowed to go weird in their setting, or they think this is weird, and that is very sad.

It's the humor that really pulls this together, and the way the script is able to stay coherent with small edits based on your choices between the event loops is a feat of writing.

So long sweet prince.

Star Ocean 2 remains the only happy middle point the franchise has had between the franchise's maximalist combat and crafting systems, and the pure syrup straight from the machine anime storytelling that overwhelmed later Star Ocean games. A warm blanket of a game, and the subtle updates to gameplay and appropriate aesthetic decisions for the new graphics just make it toastier.

The worst written game in Bethesda's history. Every character in the game is unflinchingly nice and conflict adverse, and somehow every questline is copoganda. The alien powers, a feature of combat and traversal as core as your shoot gun button, require you do to a terrible minigame bookended by seven load screens and 4 minutes of walking in a straight line, 24 times in a row to access. The entire planet system breaks the core wandering appeal of these games, because you can always fast travel right next to mission critical locations, and you have to choose to go very far out of your way for side content that's never worth the trip.

Building spaceships and outposts is kind of a pain, but I expect them to patch in some QOL to improve those. Starfield's core problems are unpatchable.

Believe the hype. This is it.