Recent reviews by Nice Nature from Umamusume

Fun game, decent developer. Very silly game with a lot of emergent gameplay opportunities e.g. "battlefield moments" and it's fun learning all the quirks of the enemies and objectives to spread MANAGED DEMOCRACY across the galaxy.

The overall vibe is fantastic and I recommend it if you like co-op shooters of any kind. Just don't take it too seriously and embrace the inherent comedy of dying in increasingly unfortunate ways.

This was a thumbs down while the publisher was doing something incredibly bad but I would like Arrowhead to succeed and people to dive and the crisis seems to have been averted.

Some qualms from someone who has played too much:

New gear introduced has been generally half-baked. Armor sets' choice isn't very engaging, skins are usually odd looking relative to the normal Helldiver aesthetic, and with locked armor passives ontop I find little reason to use any more than the one I always do. New weapons are usually poorly balanced and/or have large overlaps in purpose with each other with a clear better option.

Balance of weapons and stratagems has been in broad strokes punitive nerfs of whatever the flavor-of-the-month is while underperforming things will generally not get much so long as they have some niche use case. Without better knowledge of the level at higher difficulties you're jumping into (Spewers? Shriekers? Gunships? Stalkers?) you're still incentivized to bring the same range of general-purpose equipment in unless they've been unseated from that range. You tend to lament the need to always bring similar things.

The game's engine performance has been wildly fluctuating with a recent fix bringing it back into line, while it's working well enough now, the fact that it had gotten so out of hand to be playing Helldivers: Powerpoint Edition before last patch at the time of writing doesn't bode well for me running on a pretty middling system.

Great game, it's been one of the ones I return to pretty consistently since early access with a static team and occasionally with randoms. Feels like old-school co-op games, your very first run you have access to everything and consequently everything is about learning and improving your own gameplay and understanding. The only forms of progression are cosmetic unlocks and finding consumable boosters that last for 1~3 runs each. A lot of the fun is finding the best way to handle anything thrown at you both personally and as a team and occasionally push the limits and do really silly stuff stacking boosters.

It has matchmaking if you don't have friends but I would recommend forming teams via the official Discord server, and as much as I hate having to join yet another Discord server for anything you end up with much better players who have also passed the filter of the minor inconvenience and also beginner's resources.

It can be unfair, very unfair if you're on a first blind run of a level and suddenly handed a terrible curveball, but that's part of the point. The better you get and the better your teamwork gets you'll be surprised how fast you adapt to those surprises on the first try, or you can do some looking around on how other groups approach those moments, since the only randomness is in enemy and object placement. The encounter and level design isn't always perfect, but it typically feels very intentional and there's plenty of moments where you open a room or punch in a terminal command and just immediately know a developer set it up solely mess with you for the fun of it. If you fail you just aim to demolish it the next time.

Ammunition economy can be very important and you're expected to do a lot of sneaking in most levels to alleviate the starvation especially when first starting out. As you get better you begin to realize just how much you can get away with in melee and begin to question the need for sneaking (and maybe shooting outside of alarms) at all sometimes. The feel of the actual shooting is good in my opinion, it might be rough starting out as it's very deliberately designed to reward good shot placement and controlled bursts to consistently stagger and kill. Some weapons have a much easier time with handling if that ends up being an issue. As you get better you're more efficient and have more ammo to dump in the emergencies that will happen less often.

As for complaints/shortcomings, for networking stuff: the lobby system can be a bit janky but creating a new one or switching hosts typically fixes issues. Since it's peer-to-peer hosting sometimes latency issues crop up but I've only ever personally had egregious issues over very long distances or specifically bad hosts. I've had progress not save to the master server maybe once or twice over the years and had to rerun a level those times.

For gameplay stuff: Rare bugs can crop up with objects becoming uninteractable or players being stuck carrying objects, with a possibility of being softlocked for that run and having to restart. It can be a real buzzkill but it's happened less and less often as time's gone on. (I still make sure I drop objective items during a checkpoint scan, one fear) The first go-to solution for most issues is having the affected player leave and rejoin provided they're not the host.

Overall been a blast and the latest set of levels has been really fun with the types of shenanigans the devs are pulling. If you have the time and patience for it give it a shot.

Cute game, fun mechanics, had a blast with it when it first released and plan on finishing it at some point. Other people's Qualms with the difficulty curve are valid, you're under time pressure with a limited amount of turns, and if players don't figure out that you need to aggressively focus on unlocking new ingredients for each competition you fall behind really, really hard.

My only real issue is I'm wanting for an endless mode or postgame, It's actually shocking to find out that it doesn't have any. I'd like to see more of the game without having to restart everything and just experiment, unlocking everything, making wild stuff with all the tools available and no time pressure.

truly one of the video games ever made

Great city building, love the aesthetics and flavor and genuinely enjoyable to watch your town expand. Having weight to the decision of which of the many buildings you build next or resources you prioritize, and allowing you to make mistakes and learn without holding your hand is nice. Feels somewhat like old city building games I used to play when younger (e.g. Impressions Games titles) and I very much appreciate it.

My issues are with the AI. First and foremost the villagers would rather have the entire village die than disturb the concept of the nuclear family. Couples will not have children in a house occupied by one of their parents and their parents won't move out without Thanos snapping the house out of existence. If you don't build or rebuild houses by the time the couples are no longer able to have children, your population crashes and your village enters a death spiral. It's a constant problem, and having to micromanage the strange death cult you're responsible for is genuinely unbelievable in an otherwise very grounded experience.

The AI pathing and prioritization is, despite being better than originally, still an issue. This can be related to the former issue as at times townspeople will move or be moved into houses far away from their jobs and be walking very far to do anything, or maybe they just wild out and do it without much reason. Other games and older games of the genre solved some of this with obfuscating and/or simplying the mechanics behind this stuff and maybe that really should've been the play here. You can have people spending their day just walking to and back from the place they want to work without actually doing much. You can force everyone to pick jobs near them but that doesn't mean the townsfolk ideal for the job are there to do it, just that the nearest townsfolk are.

Both of these issues can and should be alleviated with mods or simply cheating, in my opinion that's fine. The workshop for this game's great, too. Use it. If you can overlook or mitigate the very deep flaws this game has, it's very enjoyable, but I can't recommend it unpatched.

Enjoyable atmosphere and cute characters, but I seemed to run into some issues partway through. Possibly my computer did not meet the minimum specs?

Picking Monika seemed to resolve them, however, and I was back on track in no time. Had fun!

A fun exploration game involving wandering around a barren landscape. It comes with a very wide selection of explorers but admittedly all of them are Caucasian. After a couple hours I found a large network of crevices that, although having no loot or reward, had some enemies to fight, and at one point I was enveloped in a large smoke cloud and was forced to become a TIE fighter. I eventually levelled up, and the system was interesting, but I found the shovel I was given at the start to be too useful to replace.

Overall very positive experience!

A fun puzzle game involving clicking on small shapes in a desert landscape. Clicking the correct shapes gets you points, until there are no more. You get an abrupt Game Over screen when one sees you, which can get somewhat frustrating, but otherwise it's quite great.

Hello Guards.
Look at your knee, now back to mine, now back to yours, now back to mine. Sadly it has an arrow in it. But it wouldn't if you had belly full of mead. Look down, back up. Where are you? You're on guard duty in an undefended settlement. Look up, back down, what's in your hand? It's your sword. Look again, the sword is now curved. Anything is possible with my honeyed words, and the lollygagging your adventurer could do.
I'm out killing dragons.

John Madden