Recent reviews by Salty Justice

Note: I was a backer since early in the game's development and have been following it since early on. At no point was I impressed by any of the demos, as they screwed up basic gameplay features. If you want to experience the game to see if it's worth your money, find the demos and play them, because they accurately represent the first 3/5ths of the game.

Starting in area 4, the game becomes blatantly unfinished. Considering the dev cycle has been over 8 years at this point, do we really think allowing more time to finish it would matter? The basic gameplay sucks. Dialogue goes on forever, platforming is not fun, the map design is awful, feedback on fighting enemies sucks, and then the voice acting just sort of stops because the game's not done?

If you want to enjoy the adult parts of this game, find them on youtube or whatever, and maybe throw 5 bucks to the spriter if you liked them. If you want to play a game, you can find Megaman X on virtual console for cheap and the intro stage to that game has 100,000 times more fun in it than the 6 hour playthrough of this dumpster fire yields.

Awful. Don't support this developer.

A good game, but for a 20$ price point, is a little high. I'd recommend it around 15$. In any case, the developers put the work in and deserve to be paid for it, so buy the game.

Most of the game's content is in the demo, and having played the demo and seen everything in it, I was fairly disappointed by the final release. While the game looks like it has many different upgrades paths and builds, it really doesn't, because the resource costs of higher level upgrades outscale their usefulness versus the lower, cheaper upgrade in another tree.

At no point do you do anything clever. No clever dig paths, no clever tower placements or choices. Once you know the optimal strategy, you are done the game. You get a couple gadget choices through the game, and the community has figured out which ones are the best. Certain gadgets are better than others because the ultimate goal is to get stuff out of the mine and into the dome, and defend the dome, and gadgets rarely interact with both systems. Instead, you can measure the usefulness of a gadget by how much it speeds up getting resources out of the underground.

You will enjoy the game for about a week and then forget about it forever. Having already played the demo, I suspect that's how long it will last.

A wonderful throwback to the old style of PS1 game. Made with a lot of heart, and has a conscientious dev who adds content and patches bugs. Very approachable due to optional autoaim, character upgrades, and a fairly forgiving melee combat system.

While the game itself is fun, the devs are utterly and thoroughly irresponsible. Bugs remain unfixed for months to years at a time. Communication with the community is non-existent. Hackers run rampant and the developers haven't done anything about it ever, though they have added an anti-cheat which was broken on the first day.

If you enter a round and encounter hackers, just give up.
Don't spend money on this, and don't support Landfall. They are not good developers, they just accidentally made a good, fun game and supported it like trash.

Knowingly, consciously unfair. The game even has achievements for losing unfairly and has a special level modifier that deliberately guarantees the level can be solved without guessing.

Excellent music and visual presentation, lots of item variety, and very enjoyable when it decides not to screw you over. Becomes considerably more fun when you get Spy III and can actually use gleaning to attempt to counter the random guessing.

If you think losing a 1 hour run because you guessed wrong on the last tile on the board and the enemy within one-shot you is fun, you'll love this game. I'm still going to keep playing it, just let this serve as a warning. This game can't wait to ram its fingers in your eye sockets.

An alarmingly good game. If you haven't played it, you should. If you have played it, go back and do it again.

Dark Souls 2 is a good game. It is good, not great, not fantastic, just good. It is deeply flawed, and I do mean deeply.

The Souls series follows the same logic that Castlevania (for the NES) followed: High difficulty and a steep learning curve, but fairness in that difficulty. You know what you did wrong and get better each time. Once you know what you're doing, the game is a cakewalk. Each attack can be avoided and countered, and smart play, combined with patience, are rewarded.

Dark Souls 2 stumbles on this formula, particularly in the DLC. This is a shame, since there were many parts of the game that were highly enjoyable and challenging. Invariably, the comparison to Dark Souls 1 will be made:

Dark Souls 2 is mechanically superior but suffers from an inferior sense of design. The weapons are better, the port is better (The DS1 port has serious framerate issues), there's more magic, more build options, everything is better.

However, most of your enemies are dudes with weapons. While DS 1 had a lot of this, it really shows in DS2. After battling my way through the Lost Bastille, fighting dudes with weapons (and some dogs), I catalogued the bosses:
There is a miniboss (The Pursuer) who is a dude with a two-handed weapon.
The mid-boss is three dudes with two-handed weapons.
The final boss is a dude with a two-handed weapon.

Lazy. Just straight lazy. The bosses who are really enjoyable are fairly easy while the bosses who are dudes with weapons are, while not particularly difficult, tedious. They have a lot of health and do a lot of damage, so you dance around while chipping their health off for 5-6 minutes at a time. Yawn.

In DS1, we all loved the clever level design. The levels were vertically stacked corkscrews with clever dropoffs and shortcuts. DS2 has barely any of that, with poor or no shortcut placement and tedious straight pathways. The DLC is easily the worst, with Crown of the Ivory King forcing the player to fight through 20+ of the same enemy to reach a bonfire. You cannot go around them (they will chase you quite a distance and have ranged attacks) and there are no shortcuts or dropoffs or anything at all. They take 2-3 full stamina bars to kill and deal a lot of damage. It's just boring.

Finally, DS2 is fascinated with group combat. You will fight large groups of enemies (mostly dudes with weapons) who cannot be pulled individually, they are chained together. Attack one and they all come. The entirety of the battle consists of dodging until they all attack at once and give you an opening to poke them. Screw up and you die. Yawn.

This is not to say DS2 is a bad game, it's just a good game. It's not great, and that's its biggest issue. If you're a hardcore fan and want to play all of them, play DS2 once and then forget it. If you're looking for a game to start in the series, try Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, or Bloodborne (a PS4 exclusive) first. Leave this one for last if you do decide to play it, because it's a letdown.

It just could have been so much better. What a shame.