Recent reviews by BrianH1988

I have firmly changed my review to a do not recommend. The exclusive reason: the servers are in a place where they're never going to be good for NA players. Move them to say, Texas. Get your servers out of Cali, Sega. You were insane to launch a game with servers in that have to route through California at any point. This was never going to end well.

I've been playing VF5 off and on since VF5 Online on 360. Before I can proper articulate what the game actually is, and what I see a lot of people in the reviews getting wrong for lack of info, let me clarify three things upfront.

1.) I played the Beta test of the netcode. It was impressive how close they had gotten, back then, to the soul the original arcade game and expanded 360/PS3 Online back in 2005 was trying to convey.
2) This is NOT a straight port of anything. Final Showdown was a cut down version of VF5 itself with slightly improved lighting and much cut down movesets. RGG reverse engineered both this and Ultimate Showdown, whereas this is not a 2.0 of Ultimate Showdown, but a version clearly intended to bring back the flow the game had heavily disrupted (and seldom replaced) from the cut down 2012 and 2019 releases respectively while attempting to refine the moveset compared to either to be far more fluid and satisfying in combat.
3) To our great dismay as fans, Ultimate Showdown never left Playstation. I've seen quite a bit of it played and frankly, it had even worse balance and graphical issues than Final Showdown did, and ultimately RGG didn't fundamenally get at the time how to actually keep flow and balance in mind very well. There were numerous early slipups that nearly killed the community around the game, as well as complete lack of rollback netcode, which was at the time becoming more and more the gold standard people expected.

So here we are. It's finally out. Virtua Fighter 5 REVO is a different beast than either Final Showdown or Ultimate Showdown, and using the same code they reverse engineered Ultimate Showdown with, rather than being Ultimate Showdown's update, this heads back to the purity old fans of the series wanted. This version is focused on the fluidity and depth of moveset that made VF5 as legendary as it was. As a Sarah Bryant main I can happily attest that most of her moveset is most certainly there. Not all of it, but enough to sell it far better than Final Showdown or Ultimate Showdown did.

That being said, this lacks entirely the feature set that made offline and local play great in VF5 Online and its equivalents/peers. No dojo mode, no offline tournament mode (that I've noticed), no fairly in-depth accesory/outfit, not even a much-needed combo mode, given the complexity in the game. I really wish they would have made SOME effort to bring back the great training content of old. The dojo mode in VF5 Online that had you travelling offline while challenging various sega arcades, while you wait for a match, would have been an incredible addition, and one I hope they add later, as it was genuinely formative in teaching you how to play the game reasonably well compared to anything else I've seen done in a fighting game since.

I will come just short of calling this a cash grab, as I understand there is an insane amount of development that goes into making a fighting game satisfying, and something like Virtua Fighter where the emphasis is on fluidity, they could only bring this to us by stumbling for four years and change with Ultimate Showdown, on which this code is based. RGG has pretty well nailed it here. They have made it nearly as satisfying as the original was to play, and for that they have my kudos. Keeping your flow to maintain combo routes is essential. You will not find a single move that breaks animation. They GET IT now. I can't say the same for the netcode implementation so far as that just plain needs more options, but it is entirely serviceable, I'd say at a KOF XV level- plug in your settings, train for a while as it finds a match, find player. This is the only real gameplay loop. It need more, badly, but what's there is a great skeleton to bolster, assuming they'll bother outside of costumes, and if the recently announced VF6 retains most of this purity of gameplay, I will be happy to make that a day 1 purchase (provided it's not $70 at launch).

Overall evaluation- 3.5/5
Pros-
Far closer to the original VF5 moveset older fans know and love.
Built on the experience and mistakes of VF5 Ultimate Showdown to create the direction fans expected since the beginning.
Is not replacing VF5 Ultimate Showdown for those that prefer that meta.
Graphics are greatly improved from any prior version, not a single complaint here.
All the roster is here from prior games!
Rollback netcode with what appears to be a fairly solid implementation.
Immediately recognized my fight pad.

Cons-
No modes that defined the VF games. Rather sick of the cutting down of VF5 since 2012.
Severe lack of customization options which they're trying to sell us as DLC, just like Ultimate Showdown did.
Pretty much no offline modes to speak of.
Complete lack of offline tourament support.
Be aware that keyboard and mouse disconnecting WILL stop gameplay and prompt you to reconnect it.

Overall: I would heartily recommend this game ONLY once they fix the netcode and move the servers away from a place fraught with awful infrastructure- the NA servers are in LA. Your move, SEGA. When that happens, it's a solid game capturing the essence VF5 had all those years ago properly for the first time in 19 years. It is far closer than any of the other attempts to what a VF game is supposed to be. That being said, I would strongly recommend you find a copy of 5 Online for comparison as well, as you really don't know what you're missing without the modes that made the series, and those have aged like fine wine. At the very least the tournament mode will kindle people's spirit to fight for as long as they support it, I hope.

I want to play this game so badly... alas, it can't stop itself from crashing every few minutes.

I need practically no time in this game to see it's a shoo-in for my 100 hours + list. It will savor that honor in no time flat, doubtless, assuming the mobile version doesn't consume my time instead. Nominated for Best Game on Steam Deck Award and Sit Back and Relax Award for the Steam Awards 2024, and I can't think of much that really gives it solid competition, at that. The last time I purchased a game twice this quickly, I was staring at Dead Cells! And at that, the mobile port is every bit as solid (and properly supports my phone's 21:9 aspect ratio!) LocalThunk, please add cross-save support, if possible!

Based on the state of the game as of 11/25/2024. I have a deep understanding of the game and its mechanics so I can tell you exactly why this an objectively- not subjectively, objectively- badly designed game- and in theory it wouldn't take much to fix it- given time. Perhaps to your surprise I'm also not going to call it a bad game. Many of my subjective takes on why the game is bad have little to do with the countless specific gripes (often understandable, TDU2 was a very specific thing for people) various TDU2 devotees have placed it on a sadly understandably lofty pedestal to achieve. Most of them aren't even adjacent, in fact, so if you're interested read on.

The OBJECTIVE reasons this game is bad:
-AI: THE biggest objective reason why this game is badly designed is the way the AI fundamentally works. Even if they added all the Forza Horizon-esque features people seem to want out of this game, you will always be facing AI at some point, no matter how many are playing the game. So your AI needs to be beatable. Sane. You can argue particulars on that but the AI is neither of those things. They have taken measures to make it better since launch, but the AI is currently very, very good in MOST measures at being a good opponent- except the one that matters most- pacing. If an AI car gets in front of you, it will apply what appears to be a multiplier to what it is allowed to do compared to the upper limits of a human driver, up to a factor of 2. It's a crude way to describe it but it's as far as I'm concerned the most apt way. The AI, especially over longer races, will get better and better at its job, and that multiplier is only infunced in your immediate vicinity where you see it otherwise. This is absurd, objectively bad design, and needs to be fixed as soon as humanly possible. This is not speculation so much as it is observation paired with literal interviews, by the way, they have literally admitted the AI is capable of twice those limits in interviews. This applies to all races, without exception all the way up to and including Crown Jewel Ruby, a 69.7 mile race takes over 39 minutes to complete under the most ideal human circumstances- the AI will frequently run it as low as 32.

-Race rewards: Giving the exact same amount for every single race, regardless of length/difficulty, is an bad design choice, objectively, for any purpose you would use it for in a racing game. Every race starts with a base of 15000 payout, which, sans first time bonus, will net you between 10000 and 27000 extra. Once you have done everything, this is what you're left with. It's absurd and given they bill this as something they're effectively building into a racing MORPG (there's no massive, it's instanced), you need varied rewards to incentivize players to play and compete. The only exceptions to this are the Crown Jewels, which you get at the very end of the game and pay out from 50000 to 22000 (meaning the most you will realistically ever make from a single race is 380000). As if to add insult to injury, doing the race more than once in a day PENALIZES you. You will get diminishing returns for each successive same race you do in a 24 hour period.

The above have been mentioned ad nauseum and I doubt many people will find disagreement that those two factors alone are beyond damning for the game. They need to be fixed before I could in good faith give the game a passing grade.

That being said: Let me opine on the good for a bit, for there is much! Note I never said this was a bad game. In every other respect, it had an audaciously rocky launch (which I observed major fixes to within a few days of the 'early access' week) that has slowly been on the uptick.

-Physics: If you do any amount of research on this game you'll no doubt find blooper clips of cars flying into the sky like a player in Skyrim hit by a troll. Practically gone are those days. They've been running a fine-toothed comb through their map and I seldom find a place where this now occurs. it happens, but it's not going to ruin your race unless you're already driving poorly. Add to that the handling model- which is generally a fine line between arcadey and realistic, but with real-time weather that syncs to the server time and actively influences your car's handling, as well as nuance on road conditions the extends so far as 'it's night, your car will have less traction' and 'that puddle will make you regret turning in to slowly to that corner.' It's no Project Cars, but on the whole it's damned convincing. These are pretty much live 'track' conditions, for all intents and purposes. This is also one of the only open world racing games that actually DOES this, It makes joyriding immensely fun, and fast speeds appropriately dangerous.

-World design- This is, without question, the most complicated map ever recreated on a 1:1 scale. I looked it up for good measure, it is a safe bet to say HKI has far more roads to drive than Forza Horizon 4 and 5 combined. The foliage is constant, lush, incredibly detailed and destructible, no part of the city outside of the hotel feels low-poly, and racing down the road I daresay this looks like one of the most photorealistic racing games on the market, easily. Is it photrealistic in place? Not so much. But you will always feel exactly the sense of speed you should as the ATD rush by.

-Wheel support- With the glaring ommission of proper support for 900-degree steering (I would recommend 360 or 540 at most), this game has excellent and fairly customizable wheel support. It instantly recognized my G920 and H-Shifter and the game works wonderfully with the presets out of the box.

-Sound design: Barring some glitches that have cropped up on occasion, the sound endpoint is among the best I have seen in a racing game. Cars sound closer to Forza than Gran Turismo- they have very natural sounds to them, and while many of them are unified, it all sounds right. Little details like blowoff valves, the game sounding fundamentally different when you put the top down, the various sounds of the city... it's all there to thoroughly immerse you into your time with it.

Now we have to get into the SUBJECTIVELY bad:
-This is a TDU game, but it doesn't feel like one: probably the most common complaint. I would point out TDU1 was drastically different than TDU2, and much of what I've seen people gripe about is planned as future updates. They're very valid gripes. This isn't Drive Club. This isn't Forza Horizon. This game is in the TDU franchise and with that comes an expectation that currently just isn't met- the social features are incredibly lacking to nonexistent outside of races, about the only place you will see other people is in the customization area and rarely the hotel, and there is zero reason to engage with the world around you outside of racing or joyriding. You can indeed test drive a car you don't own, for all of two minutes. But there's no glue keeping the community coming back in that sense, and the events give you meager cosmetic/sticker rewards, never anything meaningful.

-Matchmaking: my gripes here are unlikely to be similar to others'. I have zero problem with facing bots in races so long as they're good. I don't even have a problem with the total lack of playlists, fundamentally. The problem I cannot abide here is that there is no indication outside of a tiny icon that anyone is... *anywhere*. You don't see "insertnamehere" is starting a race, you have x time to join them, which would probably be the easiest fix to the lack of lobbies. Given the excessive need for POI travel, trying to roam in packs often fails, too. Online almost ends up feeling like an afterthought, rather than the core thing. Just the Sharps and the Streets that you can join at level 12 (which allows you to basically gain a guaranteed 50K every day you play if you're a Sharp).

I'd like to opine more... but Steam review character limit. I'd say I got 95% of my point across anyway so.......

I wanted to like this game. Everything about it is glorious. And then on the final world, my computer blackscreened and my save wiped out of nowhere. While I'd like to blame this on literally anything else, that the save wiped firmly has to be on the way the game writes the save and thus is a critical problem I cannot possibly recommend the game in good faith on account of. Also has obnoxiously bad tearing on AMD hardware (observed on a 7900XT), and I recall it having the same fundamental problem on NVidia hardware (on a GTX 1080). Vsync is literally broken, as in does not work, and this is something I confirmed back closer to its launch with other people that played the game that was never fixed.. Would strongly suggest the devs come back and fix their code, because this isn't going to bode well for an otherwise fantastic game.

This game is so very, very addictive in short spurts. It immediately commands all the the same notes their previous title, Donut Dodo did, and gives us even more frantic arcade action. Relatively easy to learn, certainly not easy to master. Will doubtless get many happy hours of play from me over time. As with any truly divine arcade experience, simply describing the gameplay loop cannot possibly explain why you should give this a shot. This is, like Donut Dodo, incredibly refined and would be right at home next to arcade classics like Pac-Man. If you really want the 'oh boy I'm going to be here a while' factor, keep the movement on slippery (it's now the default), It adds a dimension of immediacy to your actions that will actively force you to play better and just feels more cohesive to everything. Playing without is like playing a Mario game without the momentum physics- it just doesn't feel right.

Before I leave the review... $25? Really? Sheesh, drop that to $10 and people are more likely to find this outside of keysellers (like I did on Fanatical) and you have a better chance at people giving it a shot. Doesn't matter that this is the most refined shmup I've played in a good while, when it looks like this that's going to be a very hard sell even for diehard fans of the genre. The game does itself no favors for being that expensive, and I almost ticked no when I saw the price they were asking. But this game is too good for me to dock it points on price, for once. It's usually so easy to do that with these outings, but this game? It hits different. It's built different.

What you see in the screenshots betrays the actual gameplay loop. This plays much slower than its tate-bound peers, or right-to-left peers even, with abilities to offset that a bit with some skill. This is intentional- you have fewer enemies engaging you at most times, but what you do with them is closer to a dance than your traditional 'damage and take damage with contact' affair. Even your run-of-the-mill enemies can send your car to the scrap heap in sufficient number, and repair power ups are both hard to come by and essential to survival, meaning you're going to have to pick and choose carefully when you want to ram, when you want crash on the side of the road (that's a thing, and the clever player can use this heavily in their favor, though just often enough to make it a more extreme option), when to hang back and fire away, and when to activate your super (which can and will frequently be a salvation to your run). There's a post-apocalyptic pseudo story going on in the main mode, which plays at having some rogue-lite elements to it, including upgrading your vehicle and its capabilities over time (and generally making your driver more of a capable death machine the more you play). It's all in a very refined overall package that oddly reminds me of the Skyforce games on mobile back in the day- slow, deliberate, very well-crafted, among the best shmups tate or otherwise I have ever played, and this one for the quality feels right at home at that level of greatness. Highly recommend if you can find it for $10 or less. The developers nailed pretty much every aspect and the simple presentation is a strength, not a weakness.

First thing's first.
It's actually easier to define this game by what it is NOT:
1. A typing game. I know what it looks like. I know there is the urge to call it one. See 2.
2, A game where you at any point type full words. That just wouldn't jive with the level of reflex decision making going on here (which is easily the most addicting part of it).
3. A game that uses the full keyboard very frequently. Your six most used keys by far will be q w e a s d.
4. A game that will hold your hand or explain its mechanics. It doesn't need to, it's a very simple design where everything is clearly communicated and you learn what to do or your run will end.
5. An easy game. The last time I was playing something this unapologetically difficult to progress in, it was Exit the Gungeon.

Don't be put off by any of this. Persevere you will find an instant classic in this game.

This is exactly what I expect a San Francisco workplace to look like. 10/10.

All joking aside, this game's sense of humor taking a massive comedic dump on the hellish work conditions of <insert coastal city with major corporate office> is well-written, pithy, and has a fun little roguelite with simple but visceral controls and a lot of fun in it. Would recommend in a heartbeat.

I gave it a shot, turned out to be absolutely and unequivocally a waste of my time. And for once for the quality of it, I'm not giving a thumbs down on that. It is abundantly clear that an absurd amount of love and detail has been put into Orteil's creation and I could not conscionably say that if you go for this thing (there was a time in my life when I found great value in these things, don't take this for a lukewarm opinion), I would not recommend it. Not even close to an eh, either. This is, hands down, the best clicker I have ever played. I have played many, many a clicker at this point, many of them... questionable in content or padding shall we say, but this one, for its absurd amount of effort and detail, takes the cake.

Sadly this is where the story takes a rather dark turn on my enjoyment. My friend, Erbkaiser, made an 'autoclicker' mod for this game called Frozen Cookies. He devoted a ton of time to updating it (and likely will still in the future with substantive updates) and frankly, it's the reason I was interested in the game in the first place. I saw it on sale for $1.50 knowing my friend had made a mod for it and had mentioned it and spoke of it incredibly highly, and without hesitation I got it.

I do not regret a cent of what I spent for it. For the five or six hours I tried messing with it myself before I decided to have a little fun with my friend's mod, I was treated to the most in-depth clicker I have ever played in my life once I did, and I learned just how deep the rabbithole actually goes, and why it was so utterly complex for my friend to update his labor of love mod for this labor of love game. Orteil EARNED that money. I also came to realize... what am I wasting any of my life or time on this for? I have so many other things I want to play (you can have this open in conjunction with other Steam games, blessed be). I realized that, for when I'd acquired this, this simply wasn't something I could find it in me to fit time for in my life,

Again, none of this is a negative in the slightest, only a reflection of my disposition with an already absurdly large games library (over 4000 at present) just on Steam, to say nothing of the rest of my backlog elsewhere. If you take anything from this review know that this is of such excellent quality that enjoyment of it made me have an existential crisis on the level of time commitment I was giving it. I may yet find a time when I choose to come back to it. Now was apparently not that time, but when I do, I know that it'll hook me like nothing else, because I've been down this road with so many other games of exquisite captivating quality like this.

These things used to be a stolid love of mine to waste a little time on and blow a little steam off with. I can tell you without reservation this is the most detailed, the best. The attention to detail in every facet, to the point where a CLICKER has a legitimate meta that is still largely argued over on min-maxing, is nothing short of astounding. And overwhelming number of these ordeals are 'min-max = highest thing, the end' with little further thought given to it. This is not that game. Not even slightly. This is the kind of game that is so complex in the meta department my friend wrote a script in the megabytes to figure out how to 'solve' it... only to find there were still further things to solve, and supposedly Orteil wants minigames for every building in the game, not just the four that are present that already make this incredibly engrossing and interesting well beyond the purview of your average clicker.

This is a continued labor of love, and my hat's off and I'm taking a bow to the two individuals responsible for this wizardry (in JAVASCRIPT! What a feat!). I didn't think it possible to feel this strongly about a mere clicker. But a mere clicker this is not. It will absorb your life and, so long as you're not in the rare position to turn it down in the first place like I was, you'll probably love every second of it doing so.