Recent reviews by Flames99Fuse

This is basically just ARK: Survival Evolved with a pokemon-flavored coat of paint. If that sounds fun to you, then you should try it! Pretty damn addictive and fun, easy to lose your time in. The challenge isn't too much, and you can certainly rush the game faster than I am if you want more. That being said, progression is a bit messy. My base is about level 16 right now and the typical progression is three levels of no challenge I can pound out in 20 minutes followed by one really hard one that locks me up for an hour or so. It feels kinda bad to finally figure out where to get the one item you need, break through a wall, instantly do 4 more levels, then get stuck again because you don't know where to get the next item you need.

Pretty relaxing game. All you do is design, customize, and care for a fish tank (or multiple). The music is clean, the gameplay is simple, and the only challenge is going to stores to get rare fish before they close and making sure they don't kill each other (there is a no-death mode). The game does EXACTLY what it sets out to do, be a chill simulation game. There's hardly any actual gameplay, and it feels more like something you boot up to wind down after a rough day, or leave running on an extra screen for some ambiance.

$25 seems pretty steep to me, though. I'd recommend $10

Armored Core 6 is a mech-based fast-paced action game with an engaging story and totally no underlying political commentary whatsoever, no sir.

(Minor spoilers ahead for the first 5ish hours of gameplay)
This game is *very* anti-capitalist. I haven't played the previous games so I can't say the entire franchise is, but judging by the world and story that has been set up, I think it's a safe assumption that it is. Your character's identity is never their own, its always someone else's that they stole or had thrust upon them. Almost everybody dehumanizes you, calls you a dog and treats you like a tool or weapon. Everything is so impersonal in fact, that in one mission you will destroy a fortress owned by a corporation, and kill hundreds of their personnel; then in the next mission that corporation will offer you $300k to go to some other place and do it all over again to someone else. They don't care that you just single handedly wiped their base off the map and murdered an entire wing of their staff. To them, you're just a weapon to use on their enemies, and you don't even get any say in the matter as your handler accepts the jobs on your behalf. Nobody treats you like a human being until you meet Rusty. He tells you that the corpse expect you to die, he calls you his war buddy after the fight. Rusty is the only person who doesn't see you as just some random number, he sees you as Raven, which is a poached identity but its the intent that really matters here. There are more things I *want* to say, but I want to avoid any major story spoilers in my review.



This is not the game to play if you enjoy power fantasy. Yes most of the enemies you will face will be random mechs with small amounts of health that die to a couple bullets, but that won't last long before you're thrust into a boss fight.

Every boss makes you fight tooth and nail for your victory. No coddling, no participation trophies, just raw, difficult fights. Even the tutorial mission's boss is surprisingly difficult and killed me more times than I care to admit. Each boss has a distinct weakness (strike this spot, only has melee attacks, staggers very easily) that you need to figure out and exploit in order to defeat them. You WILL NOT stumble into a victory by accident. Especially since every upgrade in this game is very minimal and expensive. You won't be going into every mission with a fully kitted out AC specifically designed to kill this boss; you'll be going in with your favorite build with some slight alterations to exploit their weakness. You WILL die, you WILL struggle on certain bosses and fail a lot more than you want, but that makes the success all the sweeter. (No, my search history isn't filled with "AC6 how to kill [[boss name]]" shut up...)

My main two gripes are unlock speed and transparency on missions. It takes so long to unlock new parts, which is only exacerbated by the fact that a lot of the part upgrades are underwhelming. You struggle through an entire chapter for three hours, unlock new parts, and all it does is give you 100 more AP, increase your Boost Speed by 3, and decreases your EN load by some arbitrary amount. Like, I guess it makes online PvP a bit better because it means even the best mechs will only be marginally more powerful than mine and I can still win through skill, but it doesn't feel great grinding a tough boss for half an hour, doing math for 5 minutes to make sure the new stuff can even go on my mech, just to have no visible effect.
Then mission transparency! There have been a couple of times where I'm presented with a wide open map and no mission objective. The NPCs on coms tell me what to do, but they don't tell me if I should go left or right and I don't have a marker. Even worse is if you DO have a marker, but the intended solution is stealth, you are given no indication of where to go for the stealth route. It just marks your end goal and says good luck. No matter how many times I die to an enemy AC, an environmental hazard, or a boss, I'm never given any tips or advice from the game.

Overall I give this game an 8/10.

Fun little management game with great art, quirky characters, and a fun, goofy story. If you like lighthearted non-serious games, this is one for you. Typical gameplay is balancing work, self care, training, and fighting by using your limited time every day. Train too much and you'll struggle with cash, work too much and your stats will start to fall. For a $10 pricetag, this is a pretty solid game.

Although, it is extremely difficult. Because stats decay over time, and you can get robbed if you have too much money, the game punishes you severely for trying to set yourself up. Can't work three days straight to get mega moola, you'll regret it quickly. Upgrades get very expensive very quickly to the point where you're punished for not going in with a build in mind, so first time players are going to struggle. Plus, it's possible to softlock yourself. I got to a point where I couldn't win any fights, which means I couldn't get any upgrade points, which means I couldn't buy new attacks, which means the only way of improving was raising stats at the gym. But, stat gain is so slow I couldn't get them to a reasonable level before I had to work and lose much of that progress. I'm sure there was some way out of the loop that I just didn't know about, but it's frustrating nonetheless.

Chuck E Cheese's the video game, but like, actually good.

I love fighting games, but am absolutely trash at them. I love turn-based games, and am typically pretty good at them. The base four classes are pretty solidly balanced and the gameplay is tight. The modding community seems pretty active too. I absolutely love the playback of the fight at the end, makes you feel very badass.

I just wish there was a mode where you can fight a CPU to practice...

Really great game! Fans of the HP Universe are surely going to enjoy their time in Hogwarts.

Exploring the world is really fun, finding tons of collectibles, each with their own lore tidbits that expand upon the already well established world.
Combat is a bit bland, I'm still not too far in the game so hopefully this changes, but so far it's basically just a game of Simon. Cast a spell the same color as the enemy's shield, left click if they don't have one.
The story is alright. A bit tropey, but not unbearably so.
Graphics are fine enough, but loading screens are really long. The game does its best to avoid loading screens, realistically you'll only get them from fast travel. Lower end hardware will probably struggle.
The characters are extremely well written, every single character I've encountered in the main story so far feels fleshed out to the point I can't really say much else, it's just done well.
The game also supports creation of transgender player characters, as well as having a trans NPC. Her name was a bit of a rough choice, but otherwise the representation is handled much better than most media.

Don't get me wrong, it's a really fun and enjoyable game. I've only had it for a week and already put over 11 hours into it. The gunplay is cool, the environment is well crafted, and the story is gripping.

BUT

It's still a buggy mess. Multiple times in my playthrough, cars just *spawn* directly beneath me, models would T pose during cutscenes, a cop car in one cutscene got stuck as it drove away so i heard the siren over the entire cutscene, cops aggro me for no reason, one quest tracker refused to load, and a small number of purely visual bugs that can be easily forgiven. My main gameplay complaint is stealth builds are kinda bad because most enemies are grouped up staring at each other, preventing stealth takedowns.

I enjoy the game so much that it pains me to give it a thumbs down. But, $60 is just too much for what it is. I got it for 50% off, which I think is a much more fair price considering the bugs and issues. A permanent price cut, or even a good bug fix update would immediately change my review to a thumbs up.

Great roguelite with a variety of unique heroes, countless weapons, and plenty of different builds to try for. Enemy design is great, the art style is amazing, and the game is balanced fairly well. I highly recommend this game to anyone looking to scratch that roguelite itch. The base game is well worth 20 USD, and the Visitors of Spirit Realm DLC adds two great characters as well as a handful of interesting and fun weapons. Definitely a great game.

My main complaint with the game is that it must be forcing a connection to the servers to play even in single player, because I've had plenty of experiences that are really only explainable by having high ping such as:
Attacks missing enemies at point blank range
Enemies teleporting short distances
Randomly being unable to move for a moment with no clear reason
Traps instantly killing despite not standing in their range.
These aren't too common, I notice one or two every run, but that's about it. It is infuriating when these issues cause you to die though. I have no clue what could be causing these issues.

I never knew I needed a cop-themed tactical RPG. It's a simple police dispatcher sim with occasional gameplay breaks of XCom style tactical RPG. The voice acting is a bit weak, but other than that I think the game is very well put together. Some of the missions are frustratingly difficult, but there's nothing you can't beat without excellent strategy and perfect execution.