Mantissa 最近的评测

Edit: Yeah, I'm solidly mixed on this game. The core mechanics feel excellent, but they're marred by what feel like a lot of questionable design decisions (or perhaps oversights?) in the name of difficulty or even aesthetics.

There are 50 waves (you can think of them like levels) in the main gamemode. Every wave is similar each time with some variation. When you die, you HAVE to start from the beginning. There is no option to take a checkpoint at wave 40 if you died at wave 49. You just have to start from zero. I would have less issue with this if there was more variation in the waves, but there aren't. Go spend 10-30 waves blowing up baby ships again before you're allowed to attempt the hard stuff.

There are frequently options to take random upgrades which can just totally ruin your run, depending on your current build. At any point in the run. You're a glass cannon? Here, have this upgrade which causes your thrusters to set you on fire if you use them too long.

Aiming the harpoon is really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ finicky. Hitting small stuff in particular I will regularly have to try 2-3 times, which just doesn't feel very good regardless of the difficulty implications. The game has aim assist but it's only for fast-moving objects like missiles or drones, and I've turned it off because it messes me up more than it helps.

Death/taking damage often feels cheap. Maybe I will change my opinion on this as I play more (which I will be, hence the thumbs up), but whenever I take damage (or lose a run) it's usually due to me losing track of the direction my ship is facing and completely cancelling out my velocity while I am in the middle of an enemy or missing harpoon shots because something is tiny and I've slightly mislead, and I NEED to tether to that something in order to not take damage, i.e. to clear a status effect.

Mechanics feel like they disproportionately punish the player as the game goes on. I conceptually like that fire, acid and electricity can damage both you and your enemies, but ♥♥♥♥ man it's just annoying to have a battlefield littered with AoEs that will only ever touch me and never enemy ships, which will degrade half my shield in a handful of seconds.

♥♥♥♥ torpedoes, especially when there are 6 of them all flying at you simultaneously AND two mine layers in the same wave. Taking damage is just random at that point.

Runs take hours. There are no time limits in this game and it's described as a "puzzle roguelike" for a reason. Ships are tanky. Tethers reel stuff in very slowly. Sometimes the best option in any given situation is to just wait for dangers to clear.

It's just often hard to tell what is going on because everything is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ red or yellow. I really wish there was a "sacrifice style for visibility" option. The default screenshake and visual effect settings the game uses for feedback are also really overtuned, but at least there is an option to turn them down.

This game technically has 7 input buttons (WASD, Left Click, RIght Click, Left Shift), and they start to feel overloaded after a while. I feel like this was a "design by subtraction" decision where fewer buttons are just inherently "better", but throwing the option in the game to bind certain active abilities to 1,2,3,4 would've been nice. I wish there was a "click to tether, release to untether" option for controls; as it stands, left clicking so much gets tiresome.

There is one boss that you must kill with a specific ship to unlock the alternate variant of that ship. That boss has what feels like a 10-30% chance of actually spawning, per run, on wave 20. Why not just... Attach the unlocking of the alternate variant to wave 20? Or 25 if you really want players to earn it? Why is it randomized like that?

Over all I'm really enjoying the game, just, these things are CONSTANTLY bothering me while I play it. I gave it a thumbs up for a reason, I just wish it was less doggedly punishing and difficult in ways that feel somewhat arbitrary and pointless.

BTW whoever is doing the music, the track that plays from waves ~4-6, that ♥♥♥♥ slaps, more of that guitar lick please.

Mechanically, this is probably one of the most fun roguelites I've played. Yes, it competes with the big boys like the Hades series, Enter the Gungeon and Dead Cells; I suspect if this game had come out during peak roguelite fever it would've been massive.

This game probably sounds gimmicky; topdown roguelike SHMUP where you have the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2. But the developers do a LOT with it. The various powers and buffs you can acquire combined with the surprising number of base, built-in mechanics involving the gravity gun and physics objects stack up to actually provide a huge variety of viable builds. This game manages to walk the very fine line between "the player is too powerful and every build is viable"; and "you need to get exactly the right rolls for your build or you might as well abandon the run," without things feeling repetitive or boring.

If you like games with good, satisfying parry mechanics, I think you'll find a lot of joy in this one. Not necessarily because there's a lot of timings to get right, or an explicit parry button, but because pretty much every moment of this game has your brain thinking "how can I use my enemies' weapons against them," "can I bank a shot off the wall and get some bonus damage with this high-value throwable," things like that, where you're doing more than just shooting a gun or swinging a sword; defense and offense are fluid and tie into one another.

Using an object to kill an enemy may deprive you of valuable cover from a ranged attack; getting near a melee enemy may be risky, but you can grab them and throw them at another to deal damage and get them out of your face.

The environment and your opponents' identity and composition heavily affect your approach and play into your build. Your decision of which paths to take throughout the world will depend on which enemies you are strong or weak against, depending on which particular physics objects you benefit from the most, for example.

Just as the game is getting a bit stale and you start to think "well there's only so many ways I can throw rocks at bad guys," it introduces quite a few more powers and modes that add a good amount of variety to the gameplay.

Some of my favorites:
- "Line of Mines" drops very damaging mines continuously as you dash. In other games, I can't stand mine-laying abilities, but the mines are physics objects, and their fuse is halted while you hold them. It feels like dash-dancing in Hades but is totally emergent.
- "Shrapnel Spray" causes ANYTHING you destroy, as long as you had some hand in dealing the damage, to explode into a damaging shotgun-like cone. Combined with other abilities, it's pretty easy to set up chain reactions that clear rooms.
- There is a trio of abilities: One gives you a shield whenever you grab something. One shields whatever you grab; and one causes shields to detonate whenever touching an enemy.

It's great. It feels fresh, the combat earns its complexity and difficulty, producing highly dynamic chaos where your goal is to manage and manipulate that chaos to your advantage. The mechanics are tight AND physics-based, which is pretty rare, if not nearly unique.

Another thing this game does well is that your build doesn't need to be laser-focused on one thing for you to succeed; if anything, it rewards diversification and having multiple answers to different situations by throwing enemies with VERY different strengths and weaknesses at you, as opposed to everything being a bullet-spewing damage tank that only varies in attack pattern. A single ability can totally change the way your operate your build and run, and many abilities stand on their own well, and synergize even better with others. A roguelite without excessive minmaxing is pretty rare.

Okay, critique: I think this game's biggest weaknesses are probably the story and the traditional SHMUP gunplay.

Story: I haven't quite finished v2.0 yet so it's possible there is some big cool twist waiting at the end of the extended content, but if the main story is any indication I'm guessing not. It's all fairly flat. A yandere anime AI girl creates you, then her two sisters and her vie for your attention and loyalty. Everyone betrays everyone else, things somehow turn out peaceful in the end. None of the plot threads introduced at the beginning of the game are resolved (I was assuming there was some subtle foreshadowing going on- There was not), no new subplots are really introduced, all of them are evil and equally hateable/mildly likeable in various ways. They at least don't make any annoying loli noises. So yeah if stories make or break roguelites for you for whatever reason you probably won't like this one.

The more interesting criticism though is regarding the guns. The gravity gun gameplay is stellar and is THE core mechanic of the game; you always have the gravity gun, regardless of class/weapon/build/gamemode, and it's always fairly powerful. Even if you myopically build for weapon or minion damage, your gravity gun is always useful because it scales with enemy strength and can be used defensively; ripping enemies' weapons off of them and using them against them, or throwing explosive barrels that always do a ton of damage or produce a valuable debuff.

The regular weapons which you also often have, and select at the start of a run Hades-style, are unbalanced at best and fairly forgettable at worst. The sound design for them sounds weak, quiet, and unsatisfying; over half the weapons produce the quietest, wimpiest pew-pew noises you've ever heard. Some weapons feel blatantly better than others; in a game where you ALWAYS have access to a solid ranged option, melee weapons that deal more DPS and burst are just going to feel a lot better. It feels like most weapons just feel like some slight variation on "machinegun" or "laser". A lot of the weapons that are unique don't really feel like they have a ton of build variety because most powers focus on the physics-based aspects of the game and not the guns. Many weapons that do feel unique have some major drawback that can't be mitigated, or isn't well-designed around.

The major critique I have with the weapons though is that they feel like they exist in complete isolation from the rest of the game's mechanics, which is the biggest missed piece of potential here. The gravity gun pulls and then throws. Adding weapons which push, tether, reflect, bounce and stick, weapons which enhance or alter physics objects, which are defensive or supportive in nature, which allow you to control enemies or act as catalysts that can be triggered as other mechanics, feels like the natural and correct way to design weapons for a game like this. But instead they're all just full auto bullet spitters that do direct damage and have little variation.

If I could ask the developers for one thing it would be a Hard difficulty. The base difficulty is your classic roguelike; things are generally pretty difficult at first, but once you get a grasp on the mechanics it lets up. I find myself winning probably 4 runs in 5. I dislike games like FTL where you are designed to lose like 90% of the time, but this feels too far in the opposite direction.

The runs also feel a little long, but no longer than something like Hades.

Oh one last thing: If you're a content weenie, this game has tons of it. It really does not feel like an obscure, less-known indie roguelite. There are plenty of bosses, areas, enemies, gameplay mutators, etc. to keep things fresh. It's not the same herculean volume of content as Hades 2 but the variety is solid.

tl;dr solid roguelite, one of my favorites so far, something different, it's like if you took Soulslike parry mechanics and expanded them into a whole game. Looking forward to more from this developer.

Solid game in the not-populated-enough-genre currently dominated by Brigador. It's a fairly simplistic take on the top-down MechWarrior formula, but it's still in early access and appears to be moving at a promising pace.

Cute little game, short and sweet. Quality over quantity.

If there's one thing you take away from this review, I just want to tell you that all of the criticism of this game is valid, but it shouldn't discourage you from playing it if you even remotely like spaceship flying RPGs. Freespace, NMS, Elite: Dangerous, SPAZ, Endless Sky, the space section in Halo: Reach, if any of those were something you want more of, this game has it in spades. It earns the Very Positive rating it has, it's an excellent game holistically.

Okay, regarding that criticism- Yes, this game can get a bit repetitive at times, but it's much better than its first iteration in that regard. There are more enemy factions with their own gimmicks, and there are tons of mutators on gameplay that will force you to toss up your strategy and approach, especially the closer you get to the endgame. There's also way more equipment, better equipment balance, and way more ships, so you'll have a much better time finding your niche. I found that I really had to bend the rules of the first game to play the way I want, meanwhile in this game I felt plenty powerful once I got my build going, while the game still remained regularly challenging.

The biggest criticism I see of this game is the story, and honestly I think it's a bit overblown. My largest problem with the story is, just like with the last game, our protagonist, Johnathan Space. He is the most... Avengers Captain America buzzcut ass generic hotshot ace pilot white guy you've ever met. If you can stomach that, the story's actually pretty decent. I'd call it on par with something like... The Dying Light series. Maybe not quite that bad. The dialogue and voice acting can be clumsy, sometimes the game takes itself too seriously or not seriously enough at the wrong times, the missions can meander pretty significantly from the main plot thread, the villains are all moustache-twiddling comically evil psychopaths, but the arc is over-all compelling and the twists, while somewhat predictable, have emotional weight. If you don't go in expecting like, Halo 2 or Halo: Reach, you'll find the story does exactly what it needs to do for a game like this: It drives the action, and it does it pretty effectively. It is way better than No Man's Sky's story, not even in the same league.

Another critique I see tossed around is the puzzles, which this game has in spades- I actually quite liked them. They presented a nice break from the combat. Don't go in expecting Baba is You or The Talos Principle- Think more Legend of Zelda: Windwaker or Skyrim and your expectations are set right. One compliment I'll actually give out here is that the puzzles are actually all unique- I have yet to encounter a reused one. And there's easily a few dozen of them strewn throughout the game world. Each one is hand-crafted and I actually had a good few "aha" moments amongst the more common very-obvious-square-block-square-hole puzzles. The criticism regarding spending more time finding the puzzle pieces is also valid- The developers could have done a better job of leaving breadcrumbs as to where all the pieces are.

Outside of those three major points- Repetition and somewhat underwhelming story- This game is excellent. My wife hates sci-fi and comments on how beautiful it is every time she walks in. It is completely, 100% bug- and stutter- free, even running on Linux/Nvidia. Mechanically, it is perfect. Ships have this realistic weight to them that was missing in the first game. Watching a missile arc in to deal the final blow on a hard target, or amping up a really good weapon drop you found with modifications and upgrades feels exactly how it should. You don't really encounter a point in the game where you are too lacking in power or are too powerful- The progression feels well-paced. I find myself actively going out of my way to attack random enemies just because it's so much fun to engage in dogfights, something I don't really do in other games. The loot is fun and varied, and I found myself wanting to try out almost every weapon I came across and often being pleasantly surprised that a weapon whose stats don't look all that great makes up for it in other ways. The faction count has gone up from 2 in the first game to... 6? 7? Unique factions, some having very different mechanics than the others. You can genuinely play your way, there's a ton of different playstyles to try out.

Bonus points for having one of the best climactic boss fights in any action game I've played. It just put a big smile on my face, you'll know it when you run into it. I wish it was the final boss fight, and I wish there were more dynamic encounters with that kind of scale and mechanical complexity in the game. If Everspace 3 adds anything, more encounters like that specific bossfight are what I want out of it.

I think the one thing I missed from Everspace 1 was the roguelike gameplay loop, and I can see why some people are disappointed that this game... Doesn't entirely do away with it, but it's a postgame thing and even then calling it roguelite is a stretch, it's more of a gauntlet mode. I feel like when each encounter meant the reset of a run, dying had a lot more weight. Something I'd love to see out of an Everspace 3 is a more open-ended roguelite mode, something akin to Noita. I feel like that'd be such a fantastic crown jewel in the Freespace gameplay loop.

Tl;dr play Everspace 2. It's a good game. You'll notice the flaws, they aren't subtle, but the good more than outweighs the bad.

Singleplayer camapign is unplayable after 2.0. There is what feels like a second or two of... Input lag? Bad input registration? I'm not exactly sure what. I presume some input latency was added to support multiplayer but it's ruined the singleplayer experience, which really sucks.

Good game otherwise.

This game is not what you think it is. Whatever you have in your head, throw it out. There are plenty of other reviews trying to liken this game to others, and, don't get me wrong, it definitely shares traits with those games but... It's just so strange and different that it isn't really doing it justice or describing it well.

Like, sure, you can say it's like Terraria (Calamity mod specifically) and World of Goo and Noita and Carrion and Spelunky but with tons of tower defense genre DNA and also there's Hollow Knight style walljumping oh and it has the Klei artstyle but with steampunk apocalypse themes and surprisingly good dialogue. And the protagonist is a robot anime maid, and the game's developer probably still listens to Steampunk Giraffe to this day.

But... Even babbling all of that out doesn't really capture it? This is a rare, truly unique-feeling game. It's not like, completely original, don't go in expecting that, art is never truly original. But it's taken the DNA of so many other games and mashed it up together with the author's own very unique style and sense of art, while still somehow remaining coherent, that it's hard to say "if you like this, you'll like CleanFall."

Someone else said that this game feels like someone took an early '00s flash game on CoolMath.com and turned it into its own complete thing with writing and story and more than just a one-trick gimmick, and that's accurate in the best way. It has that same... Auteur madness that stuff like Motherload or Linerider had.

If you like trying new, weird, good food, you should try this game. If you're more of a "I just want more of what I already know I like," you probably won't like it.

I really like it.

Plenty of folks have already said plenty of good ♥♥♥♥ about this game, the biggest thing I want to point out is how many different ways there are to play it.

You can go in without proxy mic and sweat your ass off on a three-man team like it's Tarkov with stronger PvE elements. Or you can hop in solo and have just as good of a time playing the recorder and singing over mics and gather up a big band of merry men, loot the whole map and dance on your way down the extraction elevator.

This game was lovingly crafted. The strong PvE elements and limited inventory sizes combine with the proxy mics in a perfect way to give players a sense that banding up can lead to better loot than going it alone. The Epic weapons give you just enough of an edge over other players that they feel worth it, but you can still totally win a fight against an endgame player using a free loadout if you play it smart and know what you're doing. The world is shockingly rich for an extraction shooter and it feels alive in a way that no other extraction shooter has felt to me before.

Worst part of it is the store prices for cosmetics, but personally I don't really give a ♥♥♥♥ about that so that's up to you as to whether or not it's an issue.

This is an excellent game marred by one specific thing- Pretty much every death so far has felt cheap. Some enemies, bosses in particular, will carry armor-piercing ammunition meaning that they'll just kill you in 2-3 shots even when you have some of the best gear in the game; meanwhile they can take several magazines to take down. There are invisible enemies that show up at some point with no warning and will kill you in two hits, directly following a door locked with a consumable key. There is no opportunity to react or adapt- You just die and have to corpse-run.

On that note, this game has corpse runs (below certain difficulties), which made me realize how little separates the soulslike genre from the extraction shooter genre. Really, I would call this game closer to a soulslike top-down shooter than an extraction shooter- And it has all the issues that a soulslike does.

finally, skong

Okay, seriously though. This game is a masterpiece. Hollow Knight was the result of a small, dedicated team putting their vision and only their vision into place, limited by what little time and money they could scrape together from Kickstarter. Silksong is the result of that same team having effectively unlimited resources to create whatever they wanted. Somehow, none of the success went to their head. Silksong feels... Pure, in a good way. The clean expression of a creative team's vision with little to no external influence. It's one of the few games I've played that suffers almost none of the downsides of being a sequel.

To be clear, this game still has flaws, but... It feels like Team Cherry was aware of them, and they were treated as necessary tradeoffs to achieve the vision, as opposed to just accidents.

Before I talk about those let me be clear- The game is nearly perfect in every respect outside of these very specific and narrow criticisms. The combat feels immaculately clean and precise in most cases, builds have much more variety, and in general silksong feels like it supports "play-my-way" a lot more than the original. The music is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing, the art is flawless, the attention to detail is often delightfully surprising, characters are well written, the lore and story are a perfect followup- They neither went too big nor too small. It is functionally glitch/bug-free, even on Linux with an Nvidia GPU.

Anyways, on to the nitpicks. It is a true sequel to Hollow Knight in almost every way- The biggest criticism this game has received is the sometimes obscene difficulty, which picks up almost exactly where Hollow Knight's optional, already incredibly difficult content left off. The difficulty goes to the point of being anti-player at times, with very long runbacks and appetizer gauntlets to certain bosses which can feel like padding especially if you're stuck.

Really though I didn't mind all that so much- If this is your first action platformer you're going to throw your controller through the wall, but if you're coming from even a reasonable amount of Hollow Knight or similar games you'll enjoy it as long as you don't try to finish all of it in one sitting. I never beat even regular Radiance, and never touched Godhome, and was still able to 100% skong without getting stuck for more than an hour or two.

Honestly my biggest criticism is that MANY secrets are SO well hidden that I can't imagine sanely completing this game without at least peeking at some kind of guide. It's not like HK where you could feasibly organically find all of them without smacking literally every single inch of every wall and ceiling with melee or a very slow, charged-up secret-revealing ability you get in Act 3.

The game also takes this somewhat odd attitude of significant optional progression and content being locked almost entirely behind secrets. It feels like >50% of bosses in this game have no direct reward outside of map progression- Not even money. MOST of the content is hidden behind a breakable wall or a well-obscured passageway. Hell, entire regions and main story routes are secret in this game. It's not necessarily an objectively bad thing, just something I disagree with. I like secret hunting but would've preferred something closer to Hyper Light Drifter's design philosophy, where secrets are well-telegraphed but require some scouring to actually unlock or enter. A lot of Skong's secrets are just walls or ceilings that nearly perfectly blend in with the surroundings that you have to hit or run into to even know they're secrets.

My other big criticism of this game is that some bosses feel artificially difficult, in the sense that they try your patience as much as your skill. Going back and fighting some of them again, I feel less like this is the case, but that doesn't invalidate the fact that I was rolling my eyes while I was learning them. Some bosses just like to sit on the other side of the arena and absolutely spazz out, spamming projectiles and AoEs in a dense cloud that just leaves melee combat impossible.

Looking back on it, I think the intention is to encourage you to use the game's many ranged options or just be extremely aggressive and sacrifice health to get hits in due to the healing mechanics that you can very much so amp up with different build options. This really feels like a big, conscious trade-off in terms of game design; HK1 felt like it very much so encouraged heavy melee builds and an aggressive don't-get-hit playstyle due to the sheer number of charms that could buff the nail to obscene damage numbers, while spells were often best spent on utility, and healing opportunities were so rare in lategame fights that you effectively had as much health as you went in with.

The tradeoff is that while some boss designs can feel like absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spamfests, they are... ONLY if you are trying to play the game like HK1. If you're trying to completely avoid getting hit and trying to win the fight almost entirely melee-only. I think this playstyle remains and is INTENTIONALLY the hardest playstyle for many bosses, but the boss design also allows for way more diversity in playstyle, which I think is a net win. It's like Elden Ring vs the earlier Souls games; the equivalent of pure magic spam builds are completely viable in Silksong, if you prefer the fantasy of that and/or want to make the game (marginally) easier.

My last criticism is that the game feels... Weirdly physically small? Despite how enormous the map is. I think this is partially due to all the secrets, and partially because Skong is just a more platforming- and combat-focused game than Hollow Knight was. It feels like exploration took a back seat; which is fine. You can't optimize all these things; by making the map more sprawling and explorable, they would've have had less time for bosses, gauntlets and enemy design, and they clearly wanted to make a game where those things were pushed to the extreme for the formula. A lot of secrets just straight-up lead to a single arena, platforming challenge, boss, reward or shortcut with little branching.

In total, this game is amazing. If you like metroidvanias, soulslikes, or 2d action platformers in any capacity, you owe it to yourself to play. And be patient, creative and to keep your ego in check while you navigate the very steep difficulty curve (even if you're coming from HK1- Skong's movement and combat mechanics are familiar but totally different, it's effectively an entirely new game to master).

Oh and I love how this game is making AAA devs and publishers salty. Keep shining Team Cherry, you and all the other indie powerhouses out there are turning this industry on its head in the best way possible.