Recent reviews by infinite phantasm

a delightful sort of strategy/time-management game about ghost girls & repairing generators, made by the same individual behind Helltaker.

gameplay is mostly simple; after a certain period of time, a generator will break, and you need to go and check on what it requires. once you see what it is, you need to get that object, then put it inside the generator to repair it. simple enough, right? well, that changes once you repair a generator for the first time.

once you do, you are chased by a ~scaaary~ ghost (girl), that has the sole purpose of taking you down through whatever powers they have. get hit, and your drone will tank the hit, leaving you vulnerable for 10 seconds until it comes back. get hit again, and you restart. repair enough generators without dying, and the level is complete.

it's a pretty reasonable and simple formula, but eventually you'll start seeing new ghosts with different powers, level hazards, new objects to put in generators (some of which you need to make in advance!), and sometimes even multiple ghosts in the same level! it introduces a lot of nuance and challenge, and in the end, was pretty rewarding to clear on the normal difficulty.

music's great (by Mittsies, yet again) and really fit the vibe, and the familiar artstyle fits in just fine, especially with the much different choice in coloring compared to Helltaker. all in all, makes a fun lil' game you can probably beat in about 1-2 hours; maybe more if you get overwhelmed by the higher difficulty.

i'd end it there and just say 'go play it', however, before that, i will let you off with a warning: unless you truly, honestly hate yourself, do NOT play hard mode unless you *really* like throwing yourself at a brick wall for several minutes at a time. not only does it strip you of your drone shield, but you also have stricter timers on repairing generators.

if the game was designed around you lacking a shield, then i'd be more inclined to say it's fine and that i'm just bad. however, more than half the time, you'll be put in 'no-win' scenarios where you'll either be completely cornered with no chance of avoiding damage, RNG item scenarios where you'll be pacing back and forth between multiple stations, often running out of time before you can get enough items to repair multiple generators, or just plain surrounded by level hazards and other damaging objects you simply can't avoid.

this is *especially* a problem in the last few levels, and you'll probably be going through them for half an hour-an hour or more just to get past it, when the generator order is random, the items are random, and the ghosts will just swarm you in unreasonable ways you can't deal with.

for your sake and sanity, please just play the main game and then look up the extra concept art you get for beating hard mode on YouTube or elsewhere. it is not worth the heartbreak of trying to go through it unless you are completely masochistic and stubborn like myself.

other than that, very fun new game from the Helltaker guy! give it a go; and if you aren't sure if you can beat it on normal, there's no shame on trying easy mode instead. you won't get punished for it; as far as i know, anyways, i hadn't actually used it.

fun little social game with lots of minigames, interactive stuff and things to grind up, create and explore. it's got its faults at times in a few places, but it's something i believe is worth playing, especially with a group of friends to see everything there is to see.

thought maybe replaying this after a long while to experience nostalgia from when i played this years and years ago on the 360 would have been fun, ended up extremely bored and annoyed with many things.

the main mode, 'endurance' is just a very, very long slog of a trek in one direction to get to 5000 blocks traveled for the achievement. the only primary threat in this mode is the absurd amount of random enemy spawn zombies (and very rarely archer skeletons that almost never matter as long as you keep moving) that jump 80 feet in the air and move like crack addicts, and take away more than half of your healthbar if they get close enough. they are literally the *worst* part of the game in my opinion.

if you remain in their range for more than 3 seconds you're probably already dead and you get sent back to spawn. you can't outrun them even when abusing a bug that seems to let you move faster when moving diagonally and if you don't have a good enough gun to kill them (melees are borderline useless in almost all cases) they're impossible to deal with. your only saving grace is the fact that you have regenerating health after a delay, but you can't reduce any damage you take in any way.

there's also dragons, but when you get a decent enough gun like the laser assault rifle (which only takes a few hours at best, much longer at worst to get in one playthrough) they practically become jokes up until the undead dragon, which even then was less of a challenge than dealing with the random zombies nearly killing me quicker than the dragon would. any other enemy in the game, aliens, skeletons, archers, hell lords, are almost exactly like this. too slow to keep up, too weak to be a threat, and too brittle to stay around for long.

the other modes are pretty much only just slight changes to the main game, and mostly are pretty much aren't worth playing in comparison to the main mode or...literally anything else.

the sound design is also really painful at times, the amount of stock enemy sound effects that will fill your ears every few seconds gets grating after so long, and some of the items are just a pain on the ears to use (laser sword in particular makes the *loudest* idle sound that no other item has, and an equally as loud item usage sound that overlays onto it).

i can see why people are nostalgic for this but this game is just an actual chore to play and not anywhere near as fun as i remember. just grab minecraft and play with a modpack that has guns or whatever and it'd be far more enjoyable than this.

vampire survivors: hololive edition

still playing this after like 10+ years because i've lost all sense of control in my life and i feel the need to play the HL2 campaign 20 times with random NPC models and call of duty MW2 weapons because it's funny

if you value any amount of time and want to play an actually good rhythm game, stay as far away from this game as possible. don't even touch it because it's not worth your time.

the great window for judgements/timing is completely missing, many, *many* songs are locked behind either a monthly subscription or in-game currency, everything about it feels slow, awful-looking and miserable because it's just a direct port of the already-awful mobile game, and despite being called 'O2Jam Online', there is nothing online about it aside from a leaderboard. no multiplayer at all.

please, keep your cursor *away* from the 'play game' or 'add to library' button and play literally anything else. go support DJMAX RESPECT V or EZ2ON REBOOT : R (and THEIR O2Jam DLC which is a million times better) with both your money and time because they are far more valuable and fun than any amount of time spent on this game will be. or hell, just go to a private server for O2Jam and play that instead since it's more authentic and is also legitimately free.

♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 'remake' and everything behind it.

EDIT: oh, also there's nProtect GameGuard. free rootkit for awful rhythm game yay

it's alright. nothing spectacular, it's portal but with improved graphics + raytracing. it runs about fine on my RTX 3060 Ti with DLSS reflex boost in performance/ultra performance, and it looks nice enough. there's some apparent issues in more than a few places graphics wise (disintegration doesn't look right, energy balls no longer have transparency or color shifting, the ending now looks awful because of how the lighting is), but it's okay. kinda just a neat looking tech demo for people with decent RT-powered cards.

you can still load custom maps and such into it so that's pretty funny though

extremely wonderful story with a great artstyle and great soundtrack. can't really say much else, it needs to be played blind to be truly enjoyed.

i honestly thought i was gonna regret purchasing this after the initial, rocky launch, however, after giving it some time during the steady flow of early access updates, i'd say this is a really good comeback.

there's a great selection of songs to be played from all of EZ2's history, and there's been constant patches with new songs to play. gameplay's more oriented towards keyboards, which is great, and makes it more 'intense' compared to DJMAX, which is more controller-oriented. and to top it off, the remastered BGAs make a lot of these songs all the more awesome to look at.

and as of recent, multiplayer and network leaderboards have been added, and there's plans for DLC for stuff from EZ2AC games like TIME TRAVELER and NIGHT TRAVELER, so all in all, i'd say they've been really hitting all the right notes with this. and DLC is priced at only $12.99! that beats DJMAX by a long shot.

seriously, if you want a good commercial rhythm game, get this one. it's got a lot of promise and a fantastic set of songs & features that already exist.

pretty fun action side-scroller that also has pixel art h-scenes built in
maybe don't play on hard unless you hate yourself but hey i beat the game with it