Recent reviews by Jorbyte

Really fun leaderboard driven game. Learning the levels to figure out shortcuts is awesome. Optimizing your run is fun. Beating your friend's scores is fun. Trying to get top 100 on the global leaderboards is fun. This game is fun.

I wish that you could "follow" other people instead of having to befriend them. It'd be nice to follow some twitch streamers and compete with them.

masterpiece

It's a very good Halo

This expansion feels like it's quite literally *years* from being ready for release. I can't believe they put this out.

it's perty good

I think this game has a lot of problems. One problem is that it's very bad at explaining itself. It starts by telling you what to build, but not why you're building it. There's a lot of icons on screen that have no explanation when you hover over them. The only way to find out what they are is to peruse the handbook (accessible from the top right while in-game) and try to find the icon in its many pages. Once you start to figure out the basics, it does absolutely nothing to help you learn the best way to build things and keep your "network" healthy. Sooner than later you're going to have buildings which aren't producing, colonies not getting enough food, etc. - and the game won't really help you figure out how to help.

Outside of that, the writing is not at all what it's been hyped up to be. The AI main character is written in the most simplistic, child-like way. You hear the AI's internal monologues while you're playing, and none of it is interesting. It's all generic "Am I starting to feel feelings?" type stuff - and it's completely lacking in subtlety. If this is your first foray into the world of self-aware AI then maybe this writing will do it for you - but if you've any experience with science fiction then I think you'll find the writing to be ham-fisted.

I didn't have to play this for very long to get that I really didn't like it. It's a shame because this game, from a bullet-point perspective, is exactly what I should like.

Each patch makes it work less.

I've played through this game twice, and it's easily one of my favorite games now. It's extremely pretty, the gameplay is fluid and tough, and the platforming is superb. I don't normally get into games like this but this is a great exception.

It's metroidvania, which means it's about exploring and finding secrets as well as back-tracking through previously unlocked areas to get to new ones (with new found powers). Right out of the gate it told me exactly where I'll be going throughout the game, and it did a nice job of letting me go back through areas to find stuff I missed the first time. You can't re-explore dungeons, however, so try to get everything done in them before you finish them. Part of the fun actually came from exploring areas that I had already been to, because the new powers did a great job of making me think of new ways to traverse areas and get through obstacles.

The platforming is very fluid and fun. I quickly unlocked wall jumping and double jumping, and the game has a heavy focus on movement instead of attacking. The main attack is a lock-on, which removes the need to aim at targets while jumping around. This does not make the game any easier however, it simply makes the focus on more on movement instead of shooting ability. Enemies were pinpoint accurate and quick, and many of them killed me instantly. My ability to do damage while weaving between them and avoiding projectiles was the deciding factor in getting through.

The save system is another thing I love. It's a nice compromise between saving anywhere and having to use saves sparingly. Save points can be created by holding B on the gamepad, and they use 1 energy cell. The first energy cell regenerates slowly over time, but saving too much can be detrimental to playing. Especially since certain doors and other actions use energy cells as well. At first I forgot to save a lot, which lead to some frustration when I had to repeat longish sections of the game that I knew I could have saved after. It quickly taught me to save pretty often though, and after the first major area it became a non-issue. It was fun to place save points in the perfect spot so that I could quickly retry an obstacle over and over until I nailed it perfectly, in a similar fashion to games like Super Meat Boy which let you restart after dying near instantly.

The gameplay is the main draw for me, but the art style, music, and story (albeit simple) was icing on the cake. It's definitely one of those games where I wanted to own the soundtrack, and I have a folder of screenshots from some of my favorite moments in the game. The game opens with a powerful scene that tries right away to tug at your heart strings, but the rest of the story is uplifting and really ties everything together. I also really appreciated the way the characters were written - simple, but well done.

I tried to like this but I couldn't.

The gameplay, particularly the part involving shooting people, is mediocre. I thought the sky rail system would come into heavier use but most of the time it just transitions you between fighting arenas. Once you're in the arena there is hardly anything to do tactically. You might go behind cover while you figure out which vigor you want to use, but the decision process for that is simple. If it's a bunch of dudes with guns, choose a damage vigor. If it's a bunch of dudes with guns and a turret, use a vigor to hack the turret. That's about it. Sure, the vigors all have pretty effects but they pretty much do the same thing. They disable your target and then damage it.

The guns are everything you'd expect as well. You have a standard pistol, a machine gun, a carbine, a sniper rifle, and an RPG. Not exactly the craziest lineup of weaponry for a game. You also have vigors, which are inherently crazy, but like I said above: They all do practically the same thing. They disable or hinder your target(s) and damage them. There's a few outside of that scope that are worth mentioning, like the one that hacks turrets, but most of them hardly ever get used outside of specific situations where the game practically yells in your ear: "HEY LOOK AT THIS, YOU CAN USE THAT VIGOR NOW!"

The atmosphere is great, just like in all Bioshock games. The music is great, the art direction is awesome, and the fact that you're in a floating city is pretty rad. That said, the NPC's are wooden and completely jarring. They have terrible facial animations, and some of them don't even move their mouths when they talk. I was completely taken by surprise at that.

Elizabeth, as a character, has depth equivalent to a Disney princess. She's a princess locked in a tower who wants to go to Paris. I mean, come on - I've read or seen this a million times. She's surprised by the nastiness of the world, blah blah blah, she loves and hates the main character off and on, and you're expected to bond with her throughout the game because she throws you money and ammunition from time to time. Oh, and she's gorgeous (of course). I know a lot of game's main women characters are pretty but she's been locked up in a tower away from human beings all of her life, but she applies her makeup perfectly and dresses like she's going to a ball or something. Here's a challenge for future developers: Make your main female character unattractive. If players can't connect with her, then your writing sucks.

I'm unable to progress in this game due to the boring nature of its gameplay, so I can't comment on how the story turns out. I will say that, from the beginning, it creates some mysteries which I do have an interest in learning the end to. Unfortunately that desire is not strong enough to make me play any more of its boring gameplay.

If you like South Park, you'll like this game. I've always found South Park to be funny and I enjoy the general sense of humor the show's creators have, but I actually don't actively watch the show and have probably only seen bits and pieces of the first 5 or 6 seasons (and the movie). You do NOT need to be an active viewer to enjoy this game.

The gameplay mechanics are fairly simple and straightforward. It uses turn-based combat with lots of variety in weapons, and a bit of variety in spells. Throughout the game you have "Magic," which is basically different types of farts which all seem to primarily gross out your opponent and drop their defense/attack. You also have "Abilities," which I think are more interesting than Magic. Each one is very unique to the character you're controlling, whether it be a party member or your main character. Some of them will be things from the show, like Stan's dog or Butter's secret villain identity, while others are jokes about gaming tropes and other surprises. You earn abilities for your character based on the class you chose, and all of them are pretty funny. You can also use your magic outside of combat to change the environment or even add negative status effects to your enemies before you actually engage them in battle.

During combat you're actually being more active than simply choosing an attack. Many attacks have unique instructions that you need to follow or else you will fail. For example, a specific attack of Kenny's requires you to hit the right button at the right time or the attack will fail and have a hugely negative effect on Kenny himself. You are required to block enemy attacks by pressing 'A,' and some attacks are very difficult (if not impossible) to block succesfully. The game gets less difficult, I found, as you progress through the story. By the end of the game most of my characters had very powerful battle-ending abilities that made fights pretty easy.

So the combat is actually pretty good for a satirical RPG, or at least it serves its purpose. The map of South Park is actually quite large and has a lot of secrets and fun activities for you to explore. Lots and lots of jokes are spread all around South Park and it's probably impossible to go a minute without a good laugh. There's a lot of references to other games, especially Skyrim (I swear Obsidian is obsessed with Bethesda), and even a few good movie references which made me laugh quite hard.

Finally, people who know South Park probably aren't surprised about this but this game makes you do some pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up ♥♥♥♥. I was just fine with it, because I thought it was funny, but other people might be a little less willing to go along with some of the very *very* dirty jokes in this game. Let's put it this way: Do not play this game in front of any family members that you don't want looking at you weird. It's South Park, and it does not shy away from being South Park.