Reviews

Ruiner is a cyberpunk twinstick shooter that feels a bit experimental.

What I like about Ruiner: fast paced action, great visual style, a fitting but forgettable soundtrack, and a variety of skills, guns, and weapons that you can experiment with at will. The game is just short enough to avoid becoming stale before the end. Any longer, and it would've felt monotonous and repetitive.

That being said, I wish the game was longer and had more variety to the enemies and bosses. There really is poor variety, and it only gets away with it because it's a 5 hour game. It simply doesn't have enough content to justify $20. There is some amount of replayability in the form of collectibles and a "Speed Run" mode for a more arcadey feel, but you'll just be repeating what you've already done.

I'm neutral on the game's ranking system and difficulty. Each "fight" will end by showing you your stats and giving you a rank, from D- to S+. I'm unsure if this had any effect, but I still liked to try to get a high ranking on each level. I would've liked to see some sort of reward system, or even a way to track my rankings over time. Most of the time, the difficulty felt just right playing on Normal. There were a couple points where I thought that it felt too easy or too broken, but feeling overpowered towards the end of the game felt nice. On Hard, the game sometimes felt too punishing for the amount of visual feedback you could discern among the chaotic gunfights. When I played on hard, I'd often find myself suddenly dying and not knowing what killed me. Unfortunately, Arena Mode is only playable on Hard. The arena was more frustrating than fun, so I skipped it altogether.

Ruiner shines brightest when you're gunning, gunning, and slashing your way through chaotic gunfights and getting into the rhythm of battle. Would recommend for fans of twinstick shooters or more experimental titles. It doesn't have a whole lot to provide in terms of story or world, which mostly serve to give you more shit to kill. 

   Banished is one of my all time favorite city builders. You're put in charge of a group of people cast out from their medieval society, forced to start a new life in the randomly generated wilderness.
   Unlike other city simulators you have no direct control over your citizens, as you can only assign jobs to them. This makes it hard to get things done hastily (not that anything in Banished is accomplished with anything resembling speed) and makes the game much more difficult than most others in the genre, since the goal is less about building a sprawling city and more about keeping your populace alive and kicking. Maintaining a careful balance of jobs and resources is crucial to avoid having your town fail before you can get it off the ground. Each new home you build allows for a new couple to move in, and since your villagers breed like rabbits, it's crucial to not expand too quickly, as you'll soon have too many mouths to feed and not enough food to go around. It's incredibly easy for a town to crash and burn, and once famine or hypothermia or disease begins to decimate your populace the domino effect will make it hard to recover.
   Eventually, all towns will fail. Even if you manage to dodge famine or plagues or anything else the game throws at you, at some point you'll run out of room to expand and your population will become too old to have more children. There's a constant feeling of impermanence to the game as a result, and that's okay! Everyone gets bored of their town at some point in every city-builder. Banished is a lot more about seeing how long you can last, rather than how expansive and impressive your city can become.
   The difficulty (which can be tweaked, either through settings or mods) makes the game much more intriguing as a light strategy game. However, once you've "solved" the game, no matter how hard it's been made, the difficulty becomes almost trivial from that point on. There's a lot of crop and animal types to collect through trading, but after a certain point they're mostly for breaking up the monotony of the fields rather than providing any real tangible benefits.
   The trading system might be the weakest part of the game. After a trading post is built, boats will start showing up from time to time with a random assortment of resources to barter for. On the harder difficulties, towns start without any farm animals; crucial for the development of a town. Sometimes they'll offer up sheep (or cows, or chickens) to trade on the first boat, but I've gone for in-game decades before finding them before. It's one of the most aggravating parts of the game, as a city's growth can be hampered by nothing more than bad luck.
   Banished might not have the same long-term appeal as games with cities that can last forever, but it's the one I've returned to the most over the years.

Evokes Symphony of the Night really well. Some of the secrets can be incredibly obtuse, which would be one thing if they didn't smack you over the head with how you miss the true ending if you didn't get all the secrets. And unfortunately some of the late game areas feel really disconnected from the rest of the castle. It makes sense for the first area as a tutorial but not so much

Some of the bosses are great. The tower of twin dragons and the coin guy at the very end were cool and what I expect from this style of game. The more 1:1 fights like Zangetsu and even Gebel, plus other spoilery ones, are just grinds - high HP and high damage output. Teleport back to the town (you do that a lot and it's not interesting, specifically because of how out of the way it is), buy your arbitrarily limited supply of potions and elixirs (why are these two types of items the only ones with a limit), guzzle them down as you whittle down their health. It's just not an interesting fight nor does it really "test" anything I've learned throughout the game.

So much "stuff." Tons of crafting. There's even a sidequest chain that has you making food. Which ok, it's kind of a tutorial. Except the second recipe you have to make involves ingredients that you ALSO have to craft, each level requiring tons of ingredients that aren't common so require either grinding or just buying them, which is boring. And the reward is nothing. There are sidequests that involve just killing a certain number of monsters. Weapons and armor can be crafted but are rarely better than weapons and armor you find. You can upgrade your shards - sort of a replacement for ability upgrades but also Castlevania type secondary weapons - but also collecting more than one of each type makes them stronger, which isn't explained (each shard has a grade AND a rank AND familiars have a level??), even though you're kind of encouraged to sell them. Some ability shards let you upgrade the ability - longer teleportation, higher jump, etc., but it requires you to lose that ability or grind and, again, it's not explained. There are so many weapon types, some with special moves and even unique weapons that have their OWN special moves, that each do a different "type" of damage (slashing, thrusting, etc.) plus there are element types (fire, ice, dark, light, etc.) plus all kinds of status effects. And yet again, it's very sparsely explained and not worth digging for. I get they're encouraging you to explore and experiment but there's just too much.

Right now it's an overall solid Castlevania. Would have been a great one had it pared back the fluff, leaned into the big monstrous boss fights, toned down the bad melodrama story, and improved some of the obtuseness of SotN, or at least made the obtuse secrets more optional. It still does a good job evoking SotN, better than a lot of other Castlevanias, but comes with its own new set of problems, made even worse by how superfluous they are.

Horribly paced and poorly plotted, Resident Evil 5 is a perfect example of a series that has lost the pulse on what its fans loved about it in the first place. Ditching the horror elements of previous titles for a focus on action would have been fine if they committed fully to the concept, but holding onto old series tropes like limited inventory space and relatively rare ammo make the game a slog at points, with a number of frustrating ui decisions that continued to hamper my good time. 

Things are passable for the first 3 chapters, but the back half of the game turns into a real slog once it becomes a cover based shooter. I understand that the Gears franchise was huge when this game came out but aping mechanics from others franchises that do it better leave large chunks of the game feeling dated. 

The plot is atrocious, even for resident evil standards; I had no real motivation to care about any of these characters. Chris is one dimensional, Sheva is barely introduced, Sheva's friend is just there to show up when you need a third character in the mix, the villains motives are vague and the characters themselves are cartoonish. The ending string of fights are truly atrocious to play, with me and my friend who I co-oped the game with left wondering if we were even doing any damage to the bosses due to a lack of feedback from getting hit. Overall, I would not really recommend this game unless you are a fan of the series and looking to play something with a friend. If you are looking for a single player action horror experience, stick with Resident Evil 4!

   A young priestess, knowing little of the outside world, sets out on a pilgrimage to sacrifice her life to bring a temporary peace back to the world, accompanied by a group of friends who protect her from every danger and evil in the world (except the one that will kill her at the end of her journey). Unfortunately, I'm not talking about Final Fantasy X, but Tokyo RPG Factory's debut game "I am Setsuna."
   I am Setsuna manages to have one of the most boring takes on the Active Time Battle (ATB) system (not a very exciting system in the first place) I've ever seen. The combat is vaguely reminiscent of Chrono Trigger: fights occur wherever you are on the map instead of being teleported to a separate screen, and you and the enemies use attacks to move around the arena, being forced to wait until a character's gauge fills up before they can act. It has a handful of twists on it, namely being able to fill up multiple gauges so you can take a few actions at once, but none of the changes are very interesting. It was a neat idea in the 90's, but is a little lackluster at this point.
   It really reminds me of games like Bravely Default or Octopath Traveler; newer games attempting to capitalize on the nostalgia of the golden era of 90's JRPGs, but Setsuna never manages to pull off the same kind of polish and charm that they do.
   The plot does very little to differentiate itself from Final Fantasy X. The main character is an assassin sent to kill Setsuna before she can complete her mission of… dying... which I thought was an interesting twist, but he immediately gives up on killing her and joins forces with her about ten seconds into the game. The characters do have some charming designs, especially Setsuna herself. Personality wise, they mostly fulfill the same tropes you've seen a hundred times before. There's dialogue options, but none of the ones I saw have any kind of visible effect on the story, or anything else for that matter.
   At the end of the day, I am Setsuna is fine if you're a JRPG fanatic desperate for a new game to play, but it banks too much on nostalgia and not enough on substance to be a must-play.