Recent reviews by Sciyo

This game has a -lot- of issues, but none of those issues are a major obstacle to the fun factor. If you want to play Stardew Valley in 3D, this is the game for you.

Good:

• Good and long story
• Endearing three-dimensional NPCs
• Satisfying gathering and crafting systems
• Lots of content (every time you've reached the end, the map expands again, and again)
• The game has a quicksave key. This is amazing, especially in regards to mitigating the impact of certain game-breaking bugs (see below).
• The voice acting (at least the English VAs) is amazing, for the most part. And there are a -lot- of recorded lines.

Neutral:

• Stamina. Like other games of this type, stamina is required for all actions and only regenerates when you go to sleep. This system is necessary for the game to work, but it's not flawless. For instance, I dislike the fact that combat also costs stamina, in a game where enemies linger around most gathering nodes (meaning you have to choose between either killing the enemies and wasting stamina, or tanking unnecessary hits).
• The character creator is okay, but not amazing. You have free RGB selection of skin and hair colour, but you can only choose from a set of preset faces without any real facial feature fine-tuning possible afterwards. I also find the hairstyles a bit lacking, but that's subjective.
• The music is okay. Not a soundtrack I'd listen to outside of the game though.
• I found the clothing choices somewhat lacking, but that's of course also subjective. The game does have a severe and disturbing lack of black and purple clothes though.

Bad:

• Bugs. This game has more bugs than any game I've played in recent years (and some of them are quite game-breaking, like broken cutscenes, vanishing NPCs or NPCs that teleport into the sky and are now uninteractable, or outright softlocks as something doesn't load right).
• The performance is not great. The more moving pieces are in the scene, the worse it gets. This also means that the game really struggles if you expand and decorate your workshop to its maximum potential.
• Combat. I was personally not a fan of it. More tedious than anything. There is no depth at all with each weapon type only having a 5-hit key-mash combo, but that part's to be expected in a game like this. But each weapon animation also leaves you completely immobile during the animation (think: Monster Hunter), which is very frustrating in a game where the enemies are constantly moving around while you're fighting them.
• The progression feels a bit "off". In the early game you'll never have enough stamina to gather all the resources you need for missions; by endgame you'll have more resources than you'll know what to do with and will be going to bed with a full stamina bar most days, since there's just nothing you can productively spend it on anymore. I would have preferred it if the early game items/commissions cost less resources to make and the late game items/commissions cost considerably more resources to make to balance the stamina consumption a bit better. This is, all things considered, a minor gripe though.
• Commissions (your main way of earning money) are extremely tedious to do. A commission is a villager asking you to build something. They do this by putting up a commission on the commission board. You accept the commission there and then you build the items they want, but in order to actually complete commission, you have to go find and talk to that villager directly. This is extremely frustrating, as (as mentioned above) NPCs randomly teleport across the map or just vanish from the map entirely; alternatively your machines just take too long to make the necessary items and the NPC has gone to bed by then, locking the doors and making the commission not completable on that day (which nets a penalty compared to same-day deliveries). Not to mention that every house, including your own, are a separate instance, separated by a loading screen, so if you have to deliver 4 items to 4 different NPCs in 4 different houses, you have to sit through at least 7 loading screens just to complete those commissions every day.

This game is a mix between an idle clicker and a survival crafting game. It is an indie game, so expect some jank, but overall it is quite fun. There are not a lot of games where your base can suddenly start filling with water because a lake is beginning to form where you put your base down. Moving all my stuff out of there in time before it got completely submerged was a very memorable and fun experience.

I recommend playing with mods that allow crafting from storage containers and hotkey-depositing directly into nearby storage containers, otherwise you'll have to endure a lot of tedium.

It's an MMO gacha. If you're a fan of FOMO and you're from NA, you may like this game. For someone like me who is not from NA, though, the game is borderline unplayable since there are no servers outside of NA, which means you're playing with at least 100ms ping the whole time. This game has highly reactive combat with iframes and precise dodge timings. For that kind of game, such a high ping just doesn't work and is not acceptable.

I love good indie games. I especially love indie games that are better than 95% of AAA games. This is my undisputed favourite game of 2025. Some of the best farming, exploration, crafting, and atmosphere I've seen in recent times. You thought Dark Souls had amazing level design with its interwoven shortcuts leading back to different parts of different levels? This game does it even better.

People complaining about bullet spongey enemies in endgame are not using their equipment correctly. Different enemies have different weakness types, and at that point in the game you have over two (probably three) different wacky weapons at your disposal to exploit those weaknesses with. Use them. Bring a little mayhem. Be the mad scientist you were always meant to be.

If you're a fan of fun action combat and you don't care too much about story, this could be a good game for you. If you play Final Fantasy games mainly for the world and story, I'd recommend skipping this game.

+ Very fun combat
+ Great visuals
+ Sick anime eikon moves
+- Okay soundtrack has some great tracks, but the soundtrack is severely lacking in variety, leading to you hearing the same few tracks over and over and over
+- Graphics are already beginning to look pretty dated on max graphics settings, with some very washed out textures on many objects and faces
+- Voice acting (Clive and Cid have great VAs, the rest of the cast is mostly forgettable)
- Derivative and uncreative story
- One-dimensional characters
- Terrible writing on many of the sidequests
- All sidequests are just glorified fetch quests
- Absolutely terrible pacing (you've just gotten to the end of the game, you're about to head into the grand finale— oh, wait, hold on, player! We've just unlocked 13 more long and boring sidequests for you! You love doing these, don't you? Don't worry, the Big Bad Guy will wait! For sure!)
- Extremely long walks between quest locations and hunt marks (seriously, I feel like at least 30% of my playtime is just walking between places)
- Some very questionable hitboxes on enemy attacks, especially charges/dashes (which is a problem given that the game places a huge emphasis on properly timed dodges/parries)
- The companion AI is more of a hindrance than a help, as all they do is aggro enemies onto them, making it more difficult for you to group them up and annihilate them with a well-placed eikon ability

What I expected: game where you play as cute cat

What I got: game with a rich story and lore, fantastic gameplay and music, adorable interactions, where you also happen to play a cat.

I mentioned in my earlier review that I could not recommend the game at this time due to the near constant stuttering even on high-end graphics cards. This problem has since been alleviated significantly, at least on my system. The game still feels rather poorly optimized and crashes every few hours, but it is definitely playable and a lot of fun. A must-buy for any Soulsborne fan.

For everyone who is not already a Soulsborne fan, you'll have to make your own judgment. In my opinion (and this comes from someone who has finished a Bloodborne All Bosses BL4 run), Elden Ring is by far the hardest Soulsborne game to date. Many bosses have multi-hit attacks (meaning attacks that hit faster than you can dodge, requiring you to remove yourself to a safe distance instead) and many boss attacks straight up one-shot you if you get hit by them, even with good gear and levels. Even non-boss enemies deal significant amounts of damage and drain significant amounts of stamina per block. The good old "become Havel the Rock, block everything" playstyle is no longer viable in Elden Ring. The game requires a more tactical approach to most encounters than any other Soulsborne game to date. I like it personally, but it's not something I would recommend to a total beginner.

What a fantastic game! I'm not usually much of a racing game person, but this game is not a racing game. It's a 3D platformer in which you just happen to control a car. And it works beautifully. All the mechanics and controls come together to form a wonderfully coherent whole. You can even take your car and, through the use of really difficult but fully intended techniques, fly over whole stages!

Anyone who's a fan of platformers or TrackMania should love this game.

I wish I could recommend this game, but I can't. Even after all the updates – which did fix a great number of problems – the core of the game hasn't changed. The world still feels ... dead. Artificial. I want to go to a club and dance. I want to sit in a bar and order copious amounts of dubious-looking liquids. I want to get my hair done at a barber and get tattoos in a tattoo shop. I want to ride on a train or take a sky taxi, join a gang and beat up some rando who didn't pay his bills.

But you can't do any of these things. You can count on one hand the number of places where you can actually interact with the game world. The rest of the time you're just going through the motions, doing what feels like the same missions over and over, just in different locales.

This game is not an RPG. It's an open-world shooter. If you're looking for the chance to immerse yourself in a cyberpunk world, you'll need to look elsewhere.

You click on the water to build buildings. The game puts a building where you clicked. You can then click on top of the building or to the side of the building for additional building blocks.

Except it's much more complex than that, because depending on the exact configuration of the blocks and all the surrounding blocks, the appearance of the building(s) completely changes. You can make harbors, parks, lighthouses, bridges, benches, stone walls, and much more just by clicking with your mouse. As a programmer, the algorithm powering all this fascinates me.