Recent reviews by Keebz

Game has been a lot of fun. They can (and should) improve the performance further for those having issues, but I have not found the experience lacking despite that. I can only hope it continues to captivate, but 10 hours have flown by so far. Enjoying the skill tree + free respecs + transmog this game offers.

Dune

"Now THIS is PC porting!"
-Anakin, probably

Fun little bullet hell game that doesn't overstay its welcome. Takes about 5h to beat on Normal. Made by 2 guys.

Really dig the unique setting and overall vibe of the game, and it runs incredibly on the Steam Deck. So far the story has been well-told and well-acted, and the atmosphere immersive.

The Breaking Bad game I've always wanted, just missing rooftop pizza.

As far as Hades-likes go, this one seems quite competent. Great art, voice work, and MUSIC! Theme song slaps.

First impressions of inZOI - the Sims competitor from the PUBG studio:

It's a solid starting point for a game that will undoubtedly evolve in exciting ways over time, and it's really pretty (despite some heavy pop-in when moving around). The "Flight Simulator" of life sim games.

That said, around 7 hours in I was already starting to see the limits of this first early access phase. I'm not concerned--this is what early access is for, after all--but it's definitely a game I'd tell most people to wait for (unless you want to spend most of your time designing things) because there isn't a ton of actual gameplay content yet.

It has crazy, cutting edge AI features. Like getting texts from people and being able to respond however you want (still in development) or AI generating 3D models, custom patterns or designs that you can put on anything.

However, I'm not entirely sure how this SmartZoi tech works (powered by NVIDIA). It was touted as a big deal but it's unclear what it's actually doing when enabled. I don't really see a big difference. You can enter any prompt like "talks about burgers all the time" and supposedly it will have some effect on your Zoi's actions and personality, but the only thing I've seen it do is change some of the "inner thought" bubbles above their head.

Another cool thing though: you can copy motion / poses from any image or video. I imported someone doing the floss dance from Fortnite and my Zoi replicated it surprisingly accurately, for the most part, and can now do that any time.

Amazing customization and house designing content, but definitely not a lot of direction, objectives, fail states, etc. in its current state. I'm still very excited for its potential but I'll probably let the devs cook and wait for a few content updates before I dive in more.

I really love some new things, but there are others I'm uncertain about. Open world exploration and building are fun additions. However, coming from Ryza 1 (the only Atelier game I've played to completion) it feels like they might have lost sight of a few elements that make this series stand out.

The combat, gathering, and alchemy systems seem to have been over-simplified in this iteration. I'm not far enough into the game yet to say how this will affect my long term enjoyment, but my gut feeling is that they may have dumbed down a few too many systems.

In Ryza, discovering new recipes was a satisfying "maze" where you had to build items in a certain way to unlock new recipes. Now recipe unlocks are just a single menu with no "gameplay" to unlocking them.

Manual synthesis doesn't seem as important. The game isn't hard enough to demand it (so far) which is a shame because that's the main thing that sets this series apart. The satisfaction of manually cooking up an amazingly powerful item that you couldn't have auto-crafted was really fun. Even on "very hard" difficulty I am destroying most enemies.

Gathering also has no challenge to it now, as everything can be gathered with your starting tool. I miss having different gathering tools I could unlock as the game progresses.

The new combat system is mostly button mashing with minimal strategy involved, though on "very hard" difficulty it can be more fun, as you actually need to pay attention and dodge attacks.

Building is fun, but they could have made it serve more of a purpose. It seems mostly cosmetic. The game also should offer you an option to move your main Atelier to one of the other build sites.

Most of these aforementioned elements are a step back from Ryza, in my opinion, BUT the overall feel of movement, the visuals, animations, the story, etc. are all steps forward.

I still recommend the game, and I'm addicted to it. It STILL has a satisfying gameplay loop. It plays great on the Steam Deck. But what they need to do going forward I think is blend some of what they've done here with those other cherished elements from Ryza that they've let go of. If my review sounds overly critical it's just because I really LIKE the game, I just want them to make it (or its sequels) even better.

This game is straight up fire. One of the best indie games I've ever played. Such a good "flow state" game where you just chill out and destroy enemies while doing cool tricks. The traversal is so much fun.