Emery 最近的评测

Honestly, I don't think this one's got the juice. I did a couple of runs and it seemed pretty obvious immediately that the defense type was probably the best just because of its ability stopping stamina drain, so I went all in on that one and never felt like I was even close to losing after the first cooldown upgrade. Then I tried to commit to the rest of the types and realized every other option except the ghost aren't even worth considering because they're so weak, and ghost is an instant take because it goes invincible and then does a shockwave that usually wins the round outright. It doesn't feel like there's anything resembling balance going on here, and not in the fun way where the game wants you to break balance over your knee as a design choice.

I also wasn't impressed with the shop items, "deal more take more" is like the lowest rung of priority to me so I was really disappointed to only see things that gave me the same downside as it gave the opponent. The point of the items is to tilt the game in my favor, right? I didn't encounter a single thing that would have given me an advantage without a weakness that completely negated it. And sure, there's one obvious synergy, which is Fortress + more damage from terrain since Fortress is immune to terrain damage, but Fortress sucks and its ability to even function seems gated behind getting that in the shop, so like... what am I looking for in the shop except the Ghost? I'm literally always better off saving my money and upgrading my defense type, so the game's entire economy, aside from giving no indication how it works that I saw anywhere, is basically just whether you want cooldown, weight, or stamina, and that's not an engaging choice.

Really though, the thing that bothers me the most is that there's zero graphical options in the demo. Hope you like borderless fullscreen, that's the only window option, no FPS controls, absolutely nothing to add like a color palette over the harsh black and white to make things easier on the eyes, there's zero quality of life stuff here at all. Maybe that stuff is all in the full release, but at a minimum basic graphical options NEED to be in the demo, that's non-negotiable. There's even a lack of QoL in the gameplay, for as simple as it is, and I cannot believe no one encountered this in testing the game. One of the core mechanics is supposed to be type matchups and swapping tops to counter your opponent, so imagine my surprise when I tried to switch, only to have it instead launch the wrong top four feet to the left of the arena, where I immediately lost a life. Why is outside the arena considered a valid target for your launch? Why is top selection a set of floating panels with gaps you can click in between and not an actual box or menu to prevent this from happening on a misclick? This happened multiple times over a small handful of runs, so again, I can't imagine that no one in the design team had encountered this before.

For me this is really a case of a great idea I'm super into, delivered in the least appealing way possible. I love every concept here, but the execution just makes me want a better version of this game instead.

I'd probably give this one a few months. I'm having really consistent problems with events not recording my results or not counting things it clearly should be counting, which is a real issue when the only thing to do is grind out hundreds of objectives to unlock missions. I've had targets I'm supposed to hit not load in properly, designated areas to do a trick that didn't register, "do all the challenges in one run" missions where it was impossible to get all of the objectives with one run without doing some clearly unintended stuff, and this is when it's not outright crashing. When I booted the game up for the second time, it threw me an error that said my GPU had been unplugged and I had to uninstall and reinstall to fix it. I tried to play some co-op but my friend kept turning invisible and the first 3-4 attempts to group up failed to move me into the same instance as them but still put us in a party together, after saying we'd failed to group up. Most of the time tricks work well and you get what you intended to, but it really struggles with up versus up-left or up-right probably because it's trying to be too generous, I don't have any of the same issues doing a nollie kickflip on demand compared to a regular kickflip. Manuals are also a gigantic pain in the ass, they kill the sequence in events where you'd want to use them as filler, the range is incredibly small to start a manual when you're at speed so most of the time you just prepare to jump instead, and when you do get the manual it eats so much speed that you get basically nothing out of it. I would also love to see the "crouch and grab board" function completely removed since as far as I can tell it does nothing and I would love the ability to prepare to do grab by holding the triggers when approaching a jump, but instead if you press the button slightly early you lose the ability to jump entirely.

When the game works, generally it's pretty fun. It's just that solidly 85% of the time I can point at something on my screen and go "that's not supposed to be doing that", when I'm not having to force shut down my PC because skate locked up again.

I hate that I don't like this game. Visually it's gorgeous, full of interesting little touches and cute details, the soundtrack sets a great tone for each area, it makes a lot of really good changes from HK like the moveset modifications, and really most of Silksong is exactly what I wanted the sequel to be. The problem is, it doesn't matter to me how good your game looks or sounds, I want the gameplay to be good, and this game does NOT feel good to play moment to moment.

Hornet's moveset feels clunky and unwieldy no matter how many upgrades I've gotten. The dash is a perfect example, rather than having i-frames and functioning as a dodge you instead have a platforming tool with just enough startup that you'll fling yourself off platforms with it before the game allows you to jump. The default jump attack is a little dive at and angle, but it's so short range that I often found myself completing the attack before I reached an enemy and then crashing into them for contact damage, and when I got a different version of that attack that was a large crescent instead, Hornet drifts downward for a quarter of a second before swinging and gets hit before the attack comes out. The basic attack is a wet noodle with zero range and all of the upgrades are so far into the game that they may as well not exist, and just like in HK, as soon as the game expects you to have that upgrade, every enemy will just have double HP to offset the damage gain. I don't think I used a tool a single time after the first area or two because they were universally too slow, too weak, or too high commitment, so I had an entirely worthless currency I kept getting "rewarded" with when I explored little offshoot paths. I only found a handful of mask pieces through the entire game, all of which were useless because every enemy and environmental trap deals 2 damage and you start with 5, so the single extra health I found had literally no impact on my playthrough, I died in 3 hits the entire game. Eventually I did get a grapple move that was interesting and felt good to use, but unfortunately it uses the same resource as your healing, so that was immediately not an option until it was mandated to progress, and then I had to constantly wait to regenerate a tiny amount of silk to use it again which made already difficult platforming feel terrible, because now I can't heal if I make a mistake. It's the same story for the silk skills, they were simply not an option for me because one use means no healing for an extended period and the health was always more valuable. Even playing the Needolin costs silk, a thing you do exclusively to open one type of door, everything actually interesting has to be used sparingly because it runs on your healing economy.

Speaking of platforming, you like Path of Pain from the first game? People talk about Act 2 being a filtering point for people when it turns the difficulty up, but there are segments far earlier where the premise of them is "do hard platforming perfectly with zero checkpoints". If you want to have hard platforming be the thing the game is centered around that's fine, but what isn't really forgivable to me is how progress gets hidden from you by design. There's a bench in Sinner's Rise that immediately comes to mind, you do a fairly difficult area with tons of dead end offshoots and endlessly spawning enemies while avoiding falling in the water and getting a status effect that slowly eats away your healing resource. If you want to get rid of the status, you either have to build enough despite the meter draining to do a heal, which does not heal you and only clears the status, or you need to sit on a bench. You finally get to the top of the area and think you're going to get to rest, at which point the game goes, "What are you, stupid?" and kills you. No, the REAL bench was 3 rooms over in a dead end path, down a random hole (the other ones are full of instant kill spikes), behind a fake wall, in the status effect water. This is probably the most egregious example, but consistently throughout the game I'd reach some kind of roadblock, exhaust myself combing through an area, look up where the thing is, and find out it's in some insane place you'd literally never look unless you already knew it was there. *I had to go to an optional area nothing ever told me about in order to get a double jump, 85% of the way through the game.* I constantly feel like I need to read the dev's minds to make progress, and that's not a problem I've had since like the SNES.

They're patching a couple of the early bosses, great, but while you're at it, take another pass on every flying enemy in the game, especially the guy who throws half screen sized bombs and takes like 15 hits to kill. Regular enemies are such a pain in the ass that I actively just ran through a lot of areas and ignored them whenever possible. It really feels like they spent years playing their own game and getting really really good at it, and because they're so good at it and know exactly how they're supposed to do everything the game felt too easy, so they kept cranking the dial on health and damage and added dodges and blocking and range, and oh what if we hide this power up, what if we don't give them a bench in this area, until we got to the state we're in now. It's almost like they went silent for half a decade and never showed the game to anyone at any point during this process, so nobody ever playtested the game to tell the team all of these really obvious issues. My hope is that in a few months, maybe by next year, they'll have done enough quality of life updates to make the game actually fun and not a frustrating grind interspersed with looking up guides.

I like this game, but I really cannot recommend it. Leaving bugs aside because those are fixable, my biggest issue with the game is that there's just not enough going on with the characters. It takes a while in the main story before you start doing normal fights against normal enemies, and once you branch out to other characters than Ichigo it becomes really apparent that anything nonstandard is going to have a really hard time functioning. Some characters like Chad feel like they will just never work that well when he needs to root himself in place to charge for 7 full seconds to access his gimmick, compared to someone like Renji who can press one button and cover like a quarter of the stage with a hitbox. The other aspect is that characters don't have enough attacks to keep things interesting, with Kurotsuchi being a standout with his endless basic attack strings to force a guard break into a Mortal Kombat style Get Over Here pull on your wakeup to loop it. The first time I fought Kurotsuchi in the story that was all he did over and over again. Imagine my surprise when I checked the movelist and found out that's literally all he CAN do, he doesn't have any other moves except a poison cloud to pull you through. Even Zaraki was the same, do one combo then do his Up+Y lunge to close the gap, on hit just loop it. There's just really nothing here on a basic systems level to get interested in, you do your character's one thing over and over and that's it.

I'm also really not happy with the quality of the story retelling. The voice direction is really all over the place, with some characters feeling very true to what you would expect, while others are... well it's just kind of dire. Half of that is the terrible job the localization team did, which is astounding given that they're copying a story that was already written and translated like 15 years ago, but the other half is the baffling pace and intonation swings and complete lack of consistency. This is further hurt by the animations, while the combat animations look great, all of the cutscene animations seem to be canned assets from whatever engine they built this in. There was a scene early on where Rukia and Ichigo were running around, and I actually had to stop because I was laughing so hard at how bad Rukia's animation was, and it doesn't seem to get any better as I go along. I would genuinely be embarrassed to stream this to my friends to introduce them to a series I have a lot of love for because it's so inept at reproducing something that already exists.

I'm gonna end up playing more of this and probably beating it eventually, but I'm doing it out of my own nostalgia more than anything else. Even though I like the gameplay somewhat and Bleach as a whole, there's just not enough here to hold my interest.

Edit: As a final note, I'm like 85% sure that the narrator between various story chapters is AI, it screws up all of the names in wildly unnatural ways and sounds like it was chopped together. Can't say for sure but it's noticeably unnatural to my ear.

This is pretty good, I had fun with it, but I'm also a little frustrated with it. The soundtrack is great, the sense of speed and momentum feels really good, I like how the controls feel, visually the game is pretty nice to look at with some really lovely portraits for the characters, I like the roguelike sort of aspect to things and the powerups like time dilation are pretty fun even if not always useful, really there's a ton to love. My frustration mostly comes from the lack of leniency at the very start of levels with the damage wall following you; it's a pretty common occurrence to get dropped into a level and get caught by it on the first jump before you've had a chance to really build any speed or boost, and it's especially deadly at the very start of runs early on as you get used to how everything works. My other big frustration is just that I don't really know where I'm going, the levels are generally designed to funnel you toward the exit but the boss fight in the demo, whenever it jumped it was a complete mystery where it actually was relative to me and I really could have used a "Go Here" arrow just to get myself aimed in generally the right direction. I think if I had an indicator for generally where the goal is, a little more leniency at the start of both runs and individual levels, and longer levels to really enjoy the speed and momentum of things, this would become something I play all the time.

I think Hades II is a significant downgrade to the first game in nearly every regard.

The characters are flat and lack a cohesive voice, most often just talking to fill space rather than provide any useful information or interesting story implications. Mel especially compared to Zagreus just does not have enough going on with her, she feels like an entirely tacked on addition to the story the first game was telling and the lack of setup for her existence in the first game weakens her tremendously as she tries to fit into non-existent gaps in the narrative. When Zagreus spoke, you listened because he was always saying something insightful or revealing of his character and it was always relevant to the overall plot and his goals. Mel doesn't seem to have a goal or purpose of her own, she's basically doing this because Hecate told her to, and while she very rarely muses about what the family she's never met might be like, it's never consistent and it's never about defeating Chronos or anything she personally desires. Mel feels completely unneeded as a character within the narrative and her overall weakness means that nothing her supporting cast does really connects or matters either.

The weapons generally do not feel good to use and have been designed so that there's only one "correct" way to play each form, each weapon generally forcing you to commit to a charged up special attack that uses MP to do reasonable damage. In the first game, sometimes you would take a weapon with the intent to focus on one type of attack, only for the RNG to give you something completely different like cast support, but that never felt like it crippled your ability to play well and win. In this game, you'll get an endless stream of choices and almost all of them you won't consider for even a single second because 2 out of 3 options are worthless and the one that does work for you isn't that strong and needs 4 more boons scattered among the various gods to start to work well. You never have a situation like you did in the first game where you get something and feel like that run is a guaranteed win, and no individual boon is all that strong compared to the previous versions of it.

Beyond just feeling weaker and more limiting, the weapons are also just clunky and not fun, and the emphasis on locking yourself in place and charging for 2 seconds to do real damage makes the pacing of the combat feel janky and confining. Weapons don't have any features that work off of your basic attacks and are made specifically so you only do their omega versions over and over, which is the least fun way to engage with the game's systems. I'm not quickly reading and responding to attacks in melee, using my 4 dodges to zip in and out while dealing damage the whole time, I'm trying to dash away to create space and getting stuck in a no i-frames "run" animation just so I have enough time to charge up my one omega attack that does damage and use it 5 times to kill a normal enemy, emptying my entire mana pool, and then wave 2 out of 4 spawns.

Speaking of changing system mechanics people liked for no discernable reason, Mel's dodge is worse in every way compared to Zag's. This hold the button to run thing is absolutely worthless to me, I never do it on purpose for any reason and it only exists to make dodge timing more punishing for no reason by making you vulnerable sooner. The boons attached to it are bad and take up space something actually useful could occupy, except the one that deletes all projectiles near you. The game is just worse to play because this run function exists, but it has to exist to give you a way to make space for your charged moves. The bad decision to emphasize charged attacks and resource management forced the movement to be worse to accommodate running away from enemies constantly, the weapons to be worse because they all had to feed into charged attacks as the focus, the enemy design had to be worse with massive projectiles from offscreen or absurd gapclosers because otherwise they'd be trivialized by being slightly far away, the boons had to be worse because they all had to feed into charged attacks or be worthless, the room rewards had to be worse because there's an additional max mana reward in the pool now so your charge attacks can actually function, and it goes on from there. The chain reaction of committing to the worst, least fun way to play the game has made Hades II a significantly worse experience from top to bottom.

I really loved the first game, and I had high hopes for this, but every update has just made me dislike the game more and more. I don't have fun with this the way I did the first game and I don't think there's a single aspect of the experience I wouldn't trade for its Hades 1 equivalent.

This racing game is maybe one of the most baffling I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. The design decisions from top to bottom just do not make any sense to me whatsoever, and universally it's a negative for the player. In literally every car game ever made, the gameplay loop is that you get your starter car, you do some events, get some parts and money, buy a better car and upgrade it so you can progressively win harder and harder events. In Motorfest, in 6 hours of gameplay through 4 complete playlists of 8-10 events each, every single event has forced a loaner car, *even in situations where I owned the car it forced me to rent*. This means I got my starter car and never used it in a race, got dozens of upgrade parts I couldn't equip, won millions of dollars to spend on cars I can't complete events with, and all of the cars I imported from The Crew 2, which was a HUGE selling point for me, have been absolutely worthless. There's absolutely no in game reward for anything that I've done in the entirety of those 6 hours because every "reward" is solely for the rotating weekly events that always need you to buy about 4 vehicles to get any results.

I want to get this out in front: THERE IS NO FAST TRAVEL IN THE GAME UNTIL YOU COMPLETE 10 PLAYLISTS. In Crew 2 you can just teleport to the start of events from the menu, it's incredibly easy to get where you need to be to do a race. I booted up the game today and had to drive 12 in game miles to activate a playlist, it required me to buy a car I cannot use in that playlist because it's all loaners, I couldn't afford the car because it was a million dollars and races pay out like 20k if you're lucky, so then I drove 6 more miles to the nearest next playlist I didn't have to buy a car for and activated it instead, so i could then drive 4 miles to the start of the first race. 22+ miles driven *just to get to the start of an event*. 10 playlists means nearly 100 events if not more before you can skip directly to where you want to go, and that is absurd. I'm a grown ass adult with limited time to play games and when I only have an hour, 10 minutes of commute in my video game before I get to PLAY play is frankly unacceptable. It also makes it really inconvenient to meet up with someone before you've both done all the content when you can't teleport to each other or to a common location.

I also really don't like the shift in the driving mechanics from Crew 2 to Motorfest. That's not to say the driving in Motorfest is bad, it's genuinely pretty good and that's the sole redeeming factor of it, but the problem is that it's a much more sim-adjacent style compared to C2. In the last game almost every corner was a question of controlling speed and you'd coast through most corners, only braking for the most severe turns, it was a very easy to pick up casual friendly experience that I was able to enjoy with my friends that didn't play a lot of racing games. Motorfest is going to make you miserable until you get used to braking early and taking turns at 50 MPH, it's a game that wants you to understand how to race in a more realistic (though not sim level accurate) way and is clearly aimed at a more serious audience. The problem is that it's advertising itself as more arcade-y fun vacation adventures and then it delivers you a handling model that demands constant discipline and speed control with a careful touch. The other problem is that if I wanted this kind of sim adjacent experience, there are cheaper games with better campaign design that I already own where I could get that, AND upgrade and use a car I like for events in it.

I tried playing this with a friend I also played Crew 2 with, and it was genuinely a really miserable experience trying to fight past the ubisoft overlay and get into the same game together. Then, I was in the middle of a playlist so I invited him to the event, and it advised him that he would get zero progress for completing it. In the last game, if I had unlocked an event he hadn't, he could just complete it like normal alongside me with no fuss if I invited him to it. Instead, I had to go back and replay events I had already done while still locked to the loaner vehicle even after I'd completed it once in order for us to do them together.

I just... I don't know who this is for? It's definitely not for me, and I like a more serious racing game generally, and it's not for people like my friend who wanted a fun arcade-y experience either. It doesn't make sense to me why you'd make a racing game like this with all these polished driving mechanics and then surround it with nothing but the most miserable tedium and inconvenience and wrap it in a colorful veneer to pretend it's casual friendly. It's like everything except the gameplay was built by people who don't understand racing games, and the gameplay was built by people who didn't play Crew 2 or get what made it fun. I caught this on a decent sale for 20 bucks and it's really not worth that when Crew 2 goes on sale for 3 dollars sometimes and is a substantially better game. If I had to do it again, I'm waiting until it's 10 bucks or less, and even then it's iffy if it's worth the 10 if you don't like a semi-realistic driving game.

This is really one of those games I wish I could give a sort of wobbly "eh" hand to. I came to this game for some simple arcade racing fun and that's exactly what I got for about 65-70% of it, 9 GPs with fun tracks and great music, and I was excited to try the different characters and see which one I liked the best. I had a great time doing all of the different championship tours. The drifting generally feels really good, sometimes it's a little finnicky about when you're building turbo with it and when you aren't but I found it really easy to get to grips with how the game expected me to play it.

Where I started not really having fun was when I started getting gated by the side challenges before I could unlock new characters. The challenges themselves are things like "drive through the gates" or "pass the checkpoints while boosting" which is fine in theory, but in practice the game has problems detecting that you crossed a gate or are boosting, and I often felt scammed out of success as I drove through a flagpole or had my boost stolen not by touching a wall but just being slightly too close to one. This feels extra bad when gold ranks require perfection; if you need to hit 90 cones for a gold, there's going to be exactly 90 cones on the track and you should just start over if you miss one. Pair this with the actual layout of the obstacles/objectives themselves being annoying at best, absurdly demanding at worst, and you've got a recipe for frustration.

The worst part is though, I really could have saved myself a lot of trouble and probably half of my playtime if I had realized sooner that handling is a fake stat for suckers and you should just play as Tommy if you want to win every race. I swapped from Tommy on everything, to Hawk on everything, to Pepe on everything, those three feel nearly identical and Tommy is like the first character you unlock. I did all the hard work beating those rough side missions so that I could unlock all the characters, and then I made the mistake of using Lucy for the final series and realized even a perfect run on one of the Rally style tracks could only get me 4th place and I literally always had a CPU in my rearview when I'm used to pulling away by multiple seconds.

Of the probably 55-ish tracks in the game, I'd say solidly 52 of them are just a blast, absolutely zero complaints, would definitely run them again. The only standouts in a bad way to me are actually two of the character unlock courses. One of the earlier characters I was up against used the no-walls dock map but seemed to be completely devoid of any arrows or indicators of where the track was, so that ended up being a process of remembering there's a turn when the track goes underwater. The other is Lucy's track where you start on an undulation in road that will slide you off to death if you don't instantly countersteer it at the start of the race, and then goes into one of the least readable and most incomprehensible pile of struggling camera angles I've ever seen in a racing game. Nothing else in the game is even remotely like Lucy's map design-wise and that's a very good thing.

At the end of the day, should you buy it? Yeah probably, 10-15 bucks is probably fair for it. The lows were pretty low, but the highs were pretty good, I don't regret my time with the game but I do wish I'd caught the launch sale.

If you're looking for a solid enough golf game, this'll do the trick. It's got everything you'd expect in the places you'd expect it, no real surprises, just refinement of what was in 2k21. It's fun, it makes you feel like you're a pro, the concept for rivals is interesting, there's a lot of courses and customizability. That said, almost all of my complaints come from what feels like a lack of polish on basic systems, things that weren't issues in the previous edition. In a practical sense, every round you'll see a number of... not problems, because it won't interrupt your gameplay too badly, but jank would maybe be the best word? Inconsistency? Sometimes the game just will not behave as you expect it to.

The course conditions in general are fine, but the inconsistency is a real pain here. Sometimes for one hole the fairway and green will be extremely fast out of nowhere and a perfect tee shot runs out to 350 and into the rough. Sometimes when you start a round on the easiest weather conditions, you'll end up playing 18 holes in 10-15 mph winds anyway. Sometimes a 2 mph headwind steals 10 yards off your approach, and sometimes it does absolutely nothing and you soar over the back. Sometimes 0 mph winds actually *are* a wind you need to account for. Sometimes the wind direction and speed changes wildly mid-setup, making it impossible to properly account for. Sometimes hitting out of a bunker or the rough will actually eat 60% of the distance, and sometimes it won't take anything out of it at all. My 3 wood for some reason comes up 20 yards short from the listed distance the game gives me even on a perfect lie. Making reads on putts and around the green is a particular challenge as identical looking shots will behave in entirely different ways the moment they touch the surface, sometimes breaking far more dramatically than it would suggest or running ten feet long into an uphill on a chip. It's only happened to me twice, but I've even had it where the putting grid on the green was straight up wrong, and was showing me the direction of the break in reverse.

The inconsistency here can be absolutely maddening at times when it feels like the game just took a shot out of your hands entirely, but despite how it sounds, none of these things have ever cost me more than a single stroke and never pushed me into bogey territory. I want these issues to get patched and dealt with, I want the information the game conveys to me to be correct, but the game is totally playable and enjoyable in spite of it.

Aside from that, there's a lot of little things that can be bothersome but overall aren't that huge of a deal. Highlight cut-ins of your rival are incessant, but also display incorrect scores and play incorrect announcer lines. I'll get a rival highlight that says he's -3 on the 5th hole and the announcer says he's ahead of me, and then it'll go to the leaderboard between holes and he's -5 on the 12th, while I am 14 under on the 12th hole. It's not really a problem though, because you can turn these off in the settings and doing so immediately cuts the time a round takes in half, so you should just do that.

Something else is your own "nice shot" highlights. Sometimes it's like the game doesn't know what to do with the camera, so you'll get 22 yard chip ins where the whole highlight is the camera on your golfer's face and you never see the ball, or it'll cut away abruptly right as the ball is about to drop into the hole. When it works properly, you can get some nice looking angles, but I'd really like to see them forgo the PGA coverage imitation and do more to ensure that your cool shots actually make you feel cool when you watch them.

Other people have complained about the microtransactions, and I'm not gonna go over all that again. They really don't need to be here but it's a cash grab move everyone's making. Pay to win, however, it is not. Just playing the game normally, no money spent, no special golf balls, just using whatever stuff I earned from sponsors and rivals, I have lost a grand total of a single round. You absolutely do not and should not spend money on this game thinking that's the key to success, because it's not, and you can absolutely win without any of it.

Rivals and sponsors are a cool idea, but all there is to them is making a selection from a menu and playing golf, plus getting the aforementioned wrong highlights. I really wish there was anything akin to the player interaction moments from an NBA 2k game, not as a whole narrative but maybe just some smack talk on the course, or maybe your rival could issue some of the on-course challenges. Maybe for a par 3 your rival goes, "Hey I'll bet you 200vc you can't beat my approach shot, clean 1000 for a hole in one". Something more direct and head to head would have been very welcome here, instead of the more abstract numbers comparison at the end. I mean hell, even actual tournaments sometimes have prize holes for like, hitting a hole in one to win a car and cash, or a longest drive competition on a particular par 5, and that sort of thing is totally absent. Is it a touch more arcade-y? Sure, but not in a way that messes with the mechanics and for a single player mode, that's fine.

I'm putting this as a recommendation, but I wish I could choose 'Mixed' as my answer there. Does it have problems? Yes. Are they that bad? No, not really. Do you have any other decent options for a PGA video game? Also no.

If you're seeing this and thinking, "I love roguelikes but I'm bad at/don't enjoy FPS games", yeah, I said the same thing when I got it recommended. Here I am 50 hours later and I had a great time for just about all of them. I will say, if you're getting it, get a couple gift copies for friends, this is definitely a game best played in multiplayer.

If you're familiar with the roguelike formula, you won't find many surprises here. It translates to an FPS just about how you think it would, with randomly generated guns and various flavors of both run specific and permanent character passive upgrades. This is why I say you should play with friends, actually: Gunfire offers a lot of QoL options I wish were available in games like Risk of Rain 2. Almost all drops in this game are instanced until you share them with your group, and almost all of the things that you get in a run save for character specific Ascensions (level ups at the end of each section, basically) can be freely dropped and swapped around. Say you got a Scroll that gives you more damage for hitting things further away from you, but you're running shotguns and your friend has all the sniping stuff this round. You can just drop that item out of your inventory for them, and they can do the same for you, so you help each other make the strongest build you can. I never have a moment in this game where I feel like I can't do anything to contribute.

Let's be clear though. The game is HARD, especially at the start, and some confusing choices with the talent trees leave essential upgrades behind things like putting a single point in heavy ammo and reaching level 10 (the box at the start of each run spawns 3 gun options, make sure you grab this). Working together with your team means up to 4 times the chances of seeing what you need to complete your build, and until around level 60 or so (account level, which increases every point you put into the talent tree) I never felt quite powerful enough solo to feel like I was making much progress, while with even one more person I found way more success. To give some context, I won my first solo run on Normal mode directly before writing this review, 52 hours in, at level 100 exactly, and there's two more difficulties above that. By contrast, my first multiplayer win was the week after I got the game, and I've gotten 3-4 more since then, with players of completely different skill levels and time put into the game.

All in all it's a definitely early access, there's a consistent bug at the start of bosses in multiplayer where your dash button instead opens your menu if playing on controller, which has definitely led to deaths against moves that seem to have a "right answer" in terms of pickups. In fact, there isn't full controller support for the game yet, but most things you'd expect to work, work. Change your sensitivity to about 10-15, 20-25 scoped, and turn off aim assist, you'll thank me later. Still, it's an easy recommendation to make. I'm sure I'll end up putting another 50 hours into this as the new content is released.