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Sable is a disappointment. It’s a high-minded concept, and at times the audiovisual package carries you to the game that was meant to be. When you get a few minutes without bugs, without camera issues, without your bike trying to return to its home planet, you can slide into that beautiful atmosphere. You can start to feel the pull as you wonder what’s over that mountain. You become entranced by what that flashing light in the distance is. At its best, the game promises to hook you and immerse you completely. But it doesn’t last. Before long, the camera will clip through the ground, or you’ll see some rogue UI element stuck on the screen, or your bike will do a triple lutz. The immersion will fade away, and you’ll realize you’re just sitting in a desert, desperate for something to connect to.
Boyfriend Dungeon is a unique game, but it hits every mark it aims for. While parts of the visual design don’t pop as well as the gorgeous character art and animated scenes, that’s a minor element of an amazing experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re solely a fan of dungeon crawlers or dating sims. Boyfriend Dungeon makes a compelling argument to be a fan of both.
The game has very low requirements to run properly, and I could max the settings with a 1050ti. However, in terms of performance and graphics, there is nothing to highlight. There are many bugs and glitches that can affect the performance and most of the scenarios use dark colors with slightly to no details.
While even the simplest quests can take a grueling amount of effort to complete, they’re also hampered by the poor UI and system performance. Playing the game on the Nintendo Switch means weathering a lackluster resolution and fluctuating framerate. There were even a few game-breaking bugs I experienced which required me to restart the game. An added frustration to the poor quest system is that the music (one of the best parts of Summer in Mara) becomes grating due to the repetition.
Coffee Talk utilizes all of its aspects of relaxing atmosphere to tell a meaningful narrative. From the dialogue on the interpersonal issues characters are facing, to the short stories which are created by Freya, the writing is overall excellent. Characters go through meaningful arcs that are measured eloquently. Even though you don’t choose what your barista says, when they help someone out it is still immensely satisfying.
In terms of longevity, it took me around 3 hours to complete the entirety of AVICII Invector’s collection of music. As I completed each song, I also gained access to their harder counterparts. The skill-ceiling is moderately high and required me to practice and memorize sections in order to get higher grades. It will take me a while to fully master each of these tracks, and thanks to an online leaderboard I’m motivated to keep attempting to raise my score higher.
As with any RPG, the pure addicting joy of getting gear with higher and higher numbers is enjoyable. Despite my many qualms with Anthem, it’s an investment game and I have indeed become invested. My Javelin’s gear score is currently at 470 and I look forward to earning more Masterwork and Legendary gear to max that out, although the enemy scaling doesn’t lead me to believe that it’ll make that much of a difference.
Resident Evil 2 is equal parts terrifying, satisfying and interesting. There are tons of reasons to play through the various campaigns again, despite their slightly disappointing similarities. There’s never a boring moment in Resident Evil 2, making for a survival experience that’s just as horrifying as it is fun.
Overkill’s The Walking Dead seems to suffer universally from technical issues. While the visuals weren’t terrible, they also weren’t particularly great, but the performance of the game may lead you to believe otherwise. On my mid-tier PC I was, on average, just shy of 30fps on High settings at 1080p. There were frequent issues with the menus, matchmaking systems and controls. Enemy NPCs seemed overly simple for the human enemies and overly intelligent for the walkers.
Similar to how I felt in my review of Dynasty Warriors 9 from earlier this year, I feel like there’s a better game hiding beneath the surface of Warriors Orochi 4. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock more and more characters. It plays into the story, but I wish it translated into the gameplay in a meaningful way. While playing, I imagined battles being immensely more difficult if I was unsuccessful in recruiting new allies. I imagined my roster constantly increasing and decreasing based on my success in battles. But nothing like that exists in the game. Instead, if you fail in a battle, you have to redo it until you win. It all felt too safe, a huge problem for a story that creates a dire situation that what is actually reflected in gameplay.