MonsterVine Staff
This author account hasn't been claimed yet. To claim this account, please contact the outlet owner to request access.
Writing For
MonsterVineLatest Reviews
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.
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.
Aside from some launch issues, Destiny 2: Forsaken is everything that it needs to be and more. The content is engaging, progression is slow, steady and rewarding. Mission structure is novel, even if some of the morals of the story can fall flat. With the Dreaming City as amazing and dynamic as it currently is, I couldn’t be more excited for the new Strike and the Last Wish Raid.
With all of that said, I think the combat in Shadow of the Tomb Raider suffers the most from series fatigue. By no means does that mean it’s bad, but it’s largely the same from the previous entries. Despite feeling like I had a lot of options for combat, many of the enemy encounters felt stale compared to the rest of the game.
The game offers a sort of career mode to give players a good sense of some of the tactics that will be useful online. However, I wish the single player mode were more fleshed out. It’s totally serviceable, especially for helping me learn its concepts. But given its length, which is a bit long, I had hoped that there was more to it than just bouncing from race to race. Outside of the career mode, and custom game mode for offline, there’s not much else to do. Online seems to be the main hook for players to come back to. But as of the writing of this review, even multiplayer is sparse without the inclusion of a ranked mode, which is coming down the line.
AO International is not by any means a bad game. It delivers on what it sets out to do, which is a simulated tennis experience. The action it depicts is arduous and as a result, victories feel like a real accomplishment. Yes, the learning curve left me feeling clumsy as I tried to learn the game’s mechanics. And yes, the sluggish inputs were a detraction from the experience. But AO’s biggest fault is that its end result, despite the ups and downs it provides, is a stale experience.
This is not to say Elex doesn’t have its redeeming qualities. There’s certainly a lot of content to blow through if you’re feeling like a good ‘shoot stuff and explore’ simulator. The combat is decent, due to the wide array of genres you get to pick up guns, magic spells, sci-fi weapons and your more traditional swords and shields. Plus, depending on what faction you’re aligned with you can pick up interesting late game upgrades. Managing your stamina, weapons and abilities coupled with decently strong enemies meant that putting one down was rarely a pushover and felt genuinely satisfying. At one point I aggro’d a bunch of bandits and chased them into a troll who promptly beat them into a pulp. However these moments felt more like mechanics which happened to overlap rather than an experience intended by the developers.