Recent reviews by Reyos

Literally the first video game to win a Hugo award, something it would take 3 years for Baldur's Gate 3 to win again. The story is great, gameplay is fun, it gets difficult to complete things after the main story is finished, but that's how games should be.

Honestly a great game. You can finish the basic premise of the game, getting to room 46, without any deep puzzle solving skill, but the game is easier if you can figure it out, until it's not and you start trying to track down deeper and more intricate side puzzles, puzzles that can't be solved on a single run, and of course always relying on the luck of the draw to some level. Even 40 something runs in I occasionally build myself into a corner in the first two rows.

Take all the best things about the Horizon games and all the best things about the previous Lego games... and throw them out the window to leave behind this.

Levels are way too short, there's no real exploration, no puzzles of any kind, nothing to really collect, even when I raised the difficulty on starting a game it was pretty trivial in combat... And I am about half way done the sacred lands at this point.

Collecting the mini figures was something that took effort before, they're gone. Red bricks, gone. Getting enough studs in each level to earn rewards, gone. And also if you get a gold brick at the end of every level, and that's the only way to get them, they are just a progress marker not what they always were before.

Decent pinball game with some more mature themes (horror not nsfw) The table challenges and cosmetic unlocks are fun enough to keep you retrying and the daily challenges are nice... as long as you have the tables at least.

Playable but far too broken. There's a bug, one that is well known and reported, where when you put one of your guns down (and you do for all of them at some point in the story) when you pick them back up they don't have their upgrades, any upgrades, all the damage, ammo and other boosts are gone except the mods. It makes it really harder later on when you have base gear.

This game is short. The run time I have of 6 hours is padded by doing this game when multitasking most of the time. There's some graphical issue I was running into, which could have been intentional, it looks like the distortion I remember from old CRT tvs and VHS tapes. If it was intentional they should have offered a way to turn it off, if not it should have been fixed, it made it hard for me to play the same way motion blur (which the game had but you could turn off) does. The characters are poorly written, the two main characters have an argument part way through that felt so unbelievable.

The game feels like a glorified tech demo honestly, that it was made to show off the fluid physics in the gunk more than be an actual game.

I will probably recommend this game eventually, but there's too many issues to recommend it now.

Controls:
For a game that pretty much requires a controller to play, interacting with the menus and any screen other than combat with the controller is terrible. Some of the issues are just unintuitive controls others are controls that are just not there on controller. I am guessing that last one was less noticeable for the developers since they probably tested in Chinese, where the text doesn't take as much space to say the same thing and there's no need to scroll.

Translations:
There's some major issues here, from bugs that show Chinese text when playing in English, to inconsistent translations that matter. The status effect Electrocute is called Shock on some drivers, and the game refers to Tenacity Break and Stance Break which seem to mean the same thing. At least I assume these are all the same things, it doesn't explain some of them very well...

Guidance:
Like I said the controls and functions aren't very intuitive, in that case the game should guide you a lot better you would think. It doesn't. It doesn't really explain breaking down prosthetics, or building and enhancing them. It doesn't explain that fused drivers still have their individual parts working as before.

The gameplay itself is fun, the story isn't bad, but it just needs some reworking and polish before it's something I can suggest people play.

A massive improvement over Doors, Boxes just has so much more inside.

The puzzles were better, I had been stumped for a bit now and then, the ability to manipulate items adds a little more to the puzzle solving than find item, use on obvious spot.

There was a bug that made one of the puzzles (5 shields above a throne) not register as solved when I had the right answer. I know I had the right solution because I skipped it and it set the result to a solution I had already tried, but that's the only time I had to skip a puzzle.

I saw this and was thinking "Great another game like The Room" I've wanted more games like that for a while. This game looks good, the doors look beautiful artistically, but that's kind of where the good ends. I gave the game more credit than it deserved when doing the "puzzles" they were too simple and quick I have now 100%ed the game in 6 hours, and that was including walking away and doing other things in that time while it was running. The game was too easy, the collectable gems and scrolls were barely hidden, half of the time the game does everything but put out a neon sign (arguably they do that too with how the gems glow) so you don't miss the hidden optional collectables.

This game mostly reminds me of Dead Cells, so much so I checked to see if they were made by the same company after playing it the first time. The game is good, and I am still going through it (I think I finished it once, at least I got to a cut-scene kill). This is a good thing, Dead Cells is probably my favourite game in the genre.

It does feel lacking in content however. That may be because I am so early on still after only 7 hours, but the weapons seem all the same, and new one blueprints are hard to come by for more, which makes me wonder if they are just made rare because the haven't created that many different options - using so many of the same weapons all the time gets repetitive though. Permanent upgrades also seem a little limited and easy to get. I've unlocked the first tier of pretty much every permanent upgrade option at this point, and many just feel underwhelming.

All that said it's still a decent game, and worth the price I paid for it during the sale, with hopefully more content to come.