Recent reviews by Flanders

ORIGINAL REVIEW
Outstanding. Feels amazing to play and the depth of content is staggering. Buy this immediately. This needs to be the top-selling/top-grossing Dragon Ball game of all time.

AFTER 50 HOURS
I'm much more mixed on the game, now. The gameplay is much more oriented around counterplay than the originals were, which leads to high level play being focused on using resources and timing to negate your opponent's plays. As a result, high-level play results in long vanish battles and relatively short combos.
The 'fun' for me in Sparking! games has always been an offensive playstyle where I can perform flashy moves and combos. That core has been largely excised. Becoming 'good' at a fighting game should always result in me having more fun, but I find it's less.

Single Battle is mostly restricted to a handful of 'viable' characters, who are much better than the rest. Team battles are too long and unrestricted characters on your team means a group of five is likely to consist of the heavy hitters. DP Battle should theoretically be the best mode, but it's heavily unbalanced in favor of large teams of weak, cheap characters. The best of these characters use Afterimage Strike. It's not that hard to deal with, but for 15 seconds, you cannot attack the opponent directly outside of throws and ki blasts, so you just have to turtle up. Your 'turn' playing is over for now. It's unfun and tedious to go up against.

The game is also glitchy, too. Oftentimes in ranked, I'll find my super attacks are mapped to the same buttons with the wrong glyphs displayed, or even basic control issues where you stop punching for seemingly no reason. I wouldn't necessarily mind this sort of thing, except that it's been well over a week since the game was in the hands of the public, and no patch has been made or even announced. Gameplay desperately needs tweaks, but the developers have made no statements of intent about fixing issues. Worse still, the story mode reeks of a game that ran out of development time, with early parts of the story filled with what-ifs and branching paths, but later parts feeling barren and empty. Character exclusions that datamines show were cuts for time are sorely missed, and DLC seems to be solely new characters, not completing the game that's already out.

This game is still a recommend, it's very good. But it's got too many finicky little issues. Menus are slow and unresponsive in the effort to be cute. Lobbies can't be edited once they're up and instead you have to make an entirely new lobby to change rules or modes. There's no way to upload standard replays, only replays of bonus battles. Custom battle creation is very difficult and scuffed, with no search feature to sift through the thousands of lines of dialogue to tell the story you want to tell.

Almost all of my issues can be addressed with patches. I dearly hope this game will be supported by patches and updated over time. I will update this if/when any of this is addressed.

The best game of 2024, no contest. Please be a part of this once in a lifetime gaming experience.
Together, we'll save the galaxy. For Super Earth!

Voted for Game of the Year. I'm doing my part!

Hololive Fishing Simulator has finally arrived, and it feels so good. There's a pretty cool minigame where you fight some fans, too.

For real, though: I have played this game since the day it first came out, and it completely supplanted my favorite game at the time, Vampire Survivors. I have hundreds of hours in this game, and it has never gotten old. There's always a new way to play, a new thing to do. This game is a perfect representation of Vtubers as a whole, because once you go down this rabbit hole, you are never coming out. I 100� the game in 0.5, and it's a huge game just from the update content to 0.6, let alone for a new player.

Addictive, exciting, and absolutely packed to the brim with references and love for the source material, this is the greatest free video game in the world. It's absolutely insane that this is free. Even if you don't care for Hololive, you will love this game.

UPDATE:
0.7 has arrived, and it's brought a casino, Jump King, mining grinding, nine new characters, three new items, and three new collabs.
How is it? How has the long-awaited update felt to play after waiting over a year for it????

It's aight.
I like it.
I like the characters, they're good.
First Holocure update where I haven't fallen in love with the game all over again. 0.6's changes to the collab balance haven't been reverted, so it's Holocure 0.6 , which is... Still not as good at 0.5. My oshi was added this time, love Coco. The casino was fun for ten minutes. The new characters are fun enough.

A new player will play this to death. For me? I'm just... Kinda disappointed that the actual game of Holocure has seemingly fallen to the wayside compared to a bunch of new stuff. I probably would have liked the Casino more if the Holos had dialogue, like I could play Poker or Blackjack with them. I just don't like the mining/woodcutting mode. The Jump King was a one-time distraction. The characters are good, but the actual game is mostly unchanged.

It feels like after the forgettable Holo X Break, Kay Yu and the team returned to Holocure kind of sick of working on it. Here's hoping they can make 0.8 a return to form, perhaps with Advent and Justice??? I can't wait for that.

Lost 45 hours of play because the game has one save and I hit new game by accident
85% completion, would have had it at 100% within 4 hours
No steam cloud backups, no recovery save

Thankfully, I was able to recover the save data using EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. If it hadn't been for that, I'd have put this game down forever. As it is, this is unacceptable in a title from the last decade.

It's one of the greatest games of all time. You probably don't need me to tell you that. Have fun in Los Santos!

Disregard my time played, I have played over two hundred hours on PS4.

I have played a lot of Poker games. I spend most of my time on PokerStars VR, due to the experience VR can provide that can't be replicated by any traditional Poker game. However, if you can't get a VR headset, this is the best multiplayer one available. The UI is easy to understand, the three multiplayer game modes are representative of the three best ways to play Hold 'Em, and the amount of drops you get is fair.

On the downside, I've never gotten a decent voice chat room going. The playerbase is on the lower-end of ability, and it's difficult to get to the cream without some serious grinding. There really isn't enough emotes for every situation at a Poker table.

Despite this, there is no better game of this kind in traditional PvP Poker multiplayer. The presentation is slick, the enjoyment factor is high, and I still play a decent amount of it even after I got a VR headset. I highly recommend it.

I want to start this review with something no other game has been able to deliver. Upon booting the VR version, and looking at the RMS Britannic at night, with the calming music and the beautiful sky, I cried. It's hard to understate how tragic of a waste it was that this ship sank without a peacetime career.
That experience made me want to review this game. There are things I would like to talk about that are not positive, as a kind of feedback. But nothing I say will top that moment where I felt like I was walking this ship if the war hadn't happened. If you read nothing else, this game is worth your money if you are invested in the Olympic-class liners.

Now to the faults:
- During the later part of the sinking, you lose the ability to walk on the deck, which is to be expected. However, you cannot traverse walls that should be perfectly easy for you to navigate if this was actually happening to you. Traversal in general is pretty slapdash, and really needs to be finetuned. I could not make my PS4 controller work with the game in normal mode, either.
- The fact that you cannot enter the Grand Staircase during the sinking is criminal. There is an option for "midway" in the sinking, IE when water is beginning to interact with the forward well deck, the lowest part of the ship you can visit in the sinking mode. The water simply clips through the model anyway, so they might as well have included the Grand Staircase. This is not a physics simulation, we're not expecting it, either. The worst part is that you can see interiors during the sinking stage, and they're just out of reach. There's a small area on A Deck which has some beds in it, an area that would have been the promenade. If you sequester yourself in there, you'll see that as the water is rising and the trim goes up, beds slide over to the wall, and cabinets fall over. It's almost worse that this is in the game, showing what could have been.
- There are no information markers during the sinking, either, which would be highly informative for people not as acquainted with the disaster as the enthusiasts like me and probably you, if you're reading this. Even if this game is directed at the hardest of hardcores, at least having subtitles appear at relevant times would improve the experience greatly. Even something as simple as "Boat 12 is leaving the starboard side in 3 minutes!" would be a massive improvement.
- The fact that the Grand Staircase level is not attached to the exterior level is baffling. I can literally stand at the door and look inside and see the staircase! I'm assuming it's an issue with load times, or perhaps with the game running properly. But surely things like that could be explained?
- Some tour levels have much more comprehensive information markers. The Grand Staircase, for example, has many. However, the night exterior has none at all that I could find.

Overall, the game is in what I would consider alpha. It's not polished enough to be called even a beta, since elements are strangely missing. To be honest, I don't really understand some of the decisions that were made when this game was being made.
But on the whole, my issues can be ignored if you're just wondering if you should buy. If you are interested in a demonstration of an accurate sinking, plus some cool tours of the hospital ship HMHS Britannic, as well as the ocean liner RMS Britannic that never came to be, this is an easy purchase. It's the price of a museum ticket, but what a museum. I am hoping that these issues I brought up will be resolved in updates, so that I can unreservedly give praise to this incredibly necessary game.

FORMER FAULTS:
Here are parts that were originally in the faults section that have been addressed. I am truly grateful to the team for their work, but I feel that the original text should be preserved. These are not relevant to the current build of the game.

- The controls in VR are some of the worst I've ever seen, they're so slow that it over a dozen seconds to do a 360 degree turn. You can't move laterally, either, you move forward and backwards from where you're facing, and as I mentioned the turning is slow as death. You also cannot jump, or manually set your height, which is ridiculous.

10/10 would soda again

I like the artstyle, I might play some more after the sale

Congratulations on reaching release, guys! Been loving this game for well over a year now.

As for the game, it's basically hands-free strategy on an accurate map of the world. You influence your contagion to go different places faster, in hopes of killing off everyone. It's exactly what it says on the tin, and it's addictive as all hell. Play it!

This is a great game and it should be in your library, gamer man!