Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

@RogerRoger I'm hoping for more than 30, but I've learned before that setting my sights too high is a fine recipe for disappointment! Playing through some of these random Steam games will help make that more achieveable, though. I'm trying to veer away a bit from the 80-hour epics I tend to gravitate toward.

RE: Wizorb - It's too long in some ways (I don't really want to just sit around and play 12 levels + a boss fight in a single go), and not big enough. If they'd added more story to it (it really is rudimentary), spiced up the town-building element a bit, split the chapters in half (so, double the number of chapters at half the length), and then added some sort of 'arcade/endless/whatever' mode, or even post-game content, it would have been really good. As is, it feels like a shell of a full experience. Which sounds scathing, I'm aware, but what's there really is fun. But it needs more.

Now that I'm onto it, they should have added unlockable magic spells as well. Skill trees would have been cool, too, to personalize your playstyle over the course of the game.

With that said, it gets away with its averageness because there just aren't a ton of games like it out there. Most indie developers would rather design the millionth Metroidvania or rougelike dungeon-crawler, by the look of it.

RE: Scores - You're right. My first review or two in this thread was scored, and I think I adopted it more explicitly before I created this thread. I guess at some point, I decided that assigning numerical values to complex experiences was stupid and abandoned the practice, but now I'm back where I started. I'm going by the NL/PS scoring policy now, since they describe what each value 'means' in a fairly satisfying manner.

I'm going to go edit in scores to my older reviews now, because the lack of consistency is going to drive me nuts.

@Ralizah I know what you mean. I look back on this topic and see that I sometimes managed to knock out reviews almost weekly, but they were rare occasions. No chance of doing that halfway through a sweeping epic (especially if it has a Photo Mode)!

Your suggestions for Wizorb improvements don't sound impossible; in fact, they read like patch notes for some kind of Definitive Edition, so you never know (although you've completed it once now, and I somehow doubt it's something you'd rush to replay). As you say, complacency about being "the only game in town" amidst neverending Metroidvania roguelike dungeon-crawlers would unfortunately seem to suggest otherwise. Why innovate when there's zero competition?

Ah, I thought so! My experience scoring the eight Sonic retrospectives was tough, so I think I'm travelling in the opposite direction to you on this particular point; it worked within the confines of a self-contained series, where you can directly compare one Sonic game to another, but... I dunno, I like being able to give things the benefit of the doubt, I guess!

Which totally isn't a criticism, by the way. I'm keen to see where your scores end up, and sticking to a uniform criteria will help. That must've been a lot of editing!

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Completion Status: Adventure Mode only; completed game and then also completed all available time trials

Crash Team Racing originally launched on the PS1 in 1999 as a Playstation-exclusive answer to Nintendo's hit Mario Kart franchise. Despite mechanically being a clone of Mario Kart, it benefited, like Diddy Kong Racing on the N64 before it, from a robust story mode, a feature Mario Kart games have generally lacked. Naughty Dog's racer has been fondly remembered by older Playstation fans for almost two decades, so it's probably not too surprising that a remaster was eventually released last year on modern-gen platforms. I initially didn't plan on playing it, but Nintendo recently made the full game available for free to NSO subscribers for the period of a week. I jumped in 2 - 3 days into the trial period, so I figured I'd spend four days or so thoroughly experiencing the game's Adventure Mode to get a feel for it. As a result, my review/impressions are incomplete, as I'm talking exclusively about the game's story mode.

Crash Team Racing begins when an alien named Nitros Oxide shows up and threatens to destroy the Earth unless a suitably skilled representative from the planet defeats him in a race. Not the most engaging plot on Earth, but it's a decent set-up for a racing game, and, hey, if that sort of plot worked for Urusei Yatsura, why not this? Anyway, in the Adventure Mode, you'll pick a character from the series and a vehicle and drive around a number of hub worlds finding races to engage in. The game is structured so that you have to come in first place in a set number of races in each world before you unlock a boss encounter. Clear the boss, and you'll gain access to the next hub.

Normal races play like Mario Kart: manipulate items and shortcuts to try and sabotage the competition so that you can pull ahead of them. I was surprised to find that, even on the normal difficulty, the game doesn't make this easy. Other racers are savvy and rarely screw up, so even a single mistake can lose you the race if it slows you down sufficiently (like flying off the side of a course). Thankfully, most stages here are fairly reasonable in terms of the way they're designed, with the only stage hazards I found to be particularly annoying being the piranha plants that littered one particular stage, which spend their sweet time attacking you and have an enormous attack radius. Cruelly, the game oftentimes placed items near them. I also noticed that, at some points, they were placed so that you couldn't seem them until you went down a ramp and were blindsided. But, in general, it's not the norm.

Stage design itself is... OK. Impressive considering they're fairly faithful to the source material, and are solidly more impressive than what Nintendo was doing years before in Mario Kart 64. Of course, the stages are a bit bland compared to the polished, rollercoaster-like extravaganzas of Mario Kart 8, but that's hardly a fair comparison.

In addition to normal kart racing modes, each stage also has two alternate gameplay modes. In Relic Races, you speed through a course as quickly as possible, collecting crates that will freeze the timer for different numbers of seconds. Rather than focusing on improving core skill, though, these races incentivize hitting as many of the time crates as possible, which makes for a rather interesting spin on speedrunning that made this mode a lot of fun. In the CTR challenge mode, the letters "C," "T," and "R" will be hidden throughout a stage, and you have to find them to complete the challenge. So they're like the racing game equivalent of the KONG letters from the Donkey Kong Country series. Unfortunately, I found this mode to be rather tedious, as I wasn't fond of completing levels over and over, poking through every nook and cranny and hitting every possible object to find these letters. I completed every course in the game in normal and relic race modes, but after completing one CTR challenge, I didn't bother playing any others.

Boss stages in this game are probably my second least favorite after the CTR challenges. After a brief voiced cutscene, you'll have a one-off race against villains who somehow manage to drive way faster than you are able to by default and constantly spew items out the back of their kart, meaning you spend almost the entire race trying to avoid hazards to catch up to them. I appreciate the attempt by the developers to give the game a satisfying structure, but I don't think boss encounters work well with this style of game, as they generally end up just feeling annoying. Interestingly, the difficulty of these encounters is all over the place, and at least a couple of the normal bosses are more difficult than the final encounter with Nitrous Oxide himself.

Throughout the Adventure Mode, a sentient tribal mask called Aku-Aku pops up to interrupt your gameplay experience and explain Really Obvious Things to the player, like one of those annoying sidekick characters that'll keep popping up in Legend of Zelda games. The thing interrupted the flow of gameplay enough that even my character became annoyed, and started glaring at him whenever one of his explanatory cutscenes was triggered.

Annoyed Coco

The game has a reasonably large cast of racers to choose from, although it's hampered by only being limited to Crash Bandicoot characters (with the notable exception of Spyro the Dragon as a downloadable character, although his availability seems to be sparse if you didn't compete in the event that unlocked him in the first place). Crash, Coco, and Neo Cortex are iconic, of course, but aside from them, you're stuck with a random assortment of animals and minor villains that I barely even recognize. Maybe the character selection is better for big fans of the franchise, but I found it a bit underwhelming. As with Mario Kart games, there are also baby versions of certain characters to unlock. I just stuck Coco Bandicoot, since her older brother Crash has always seemed a bit... high-strung for my liking.

Control-wise, the game holds up fairly well, although I really didn't like how drifting was handled in this game. Not only did it make me feel like my kart was out of control, but, when navigating tight curves and twists in the game's various courses, I had a hard time keeping an eye on the visual indicator at the bottom right of the screen to see when the exact window for activating a drift boost was. Supposedly if you're using a kart, there's a feature that makes it where your tires will glow when a drift boost is available, but playing a hovering, UFO-esque vehicle, I didn't have that luxury. And, in general, when I'm playing, my fingers are already glued to the buttons they're on, and it's difficult to think to move them to click a button to activate a boost. I won't count this as a flaw, but I really prefer Mario Kart's system of drift boosting, where you release a drift in order to activate a boost.

Performance-wise, the game is lacking across all console platforms. Like on PS4, the game is capped at 30fps, which is simply not ideal for racing games, which benefit tremendously from smoother performance. On Switch, it remains mostly stable, although small dips to sub-30fps happen here and there. The bigger 'sacrifice' in the Switch version is image quality: texture quality is worse, some visual effects are missing, and the game is notably lower res, topping out at 480p in handheld mode and 720p when docked. Despite these low-ish numbers, I actually felt like this version of the game looked better when undocked. The image is notably 'soft,' but aggressive use of motion blur and the heavily cartoonish art-style masks much of the dip in image quality (in motion, at least; screenshots look horrendous with the blur effects). In isolation, the idea of playing an undocked Switch racing game at 480p/30 makes me cringe, but, in practice, it worked out well. The game's vibrant art style still makes it one of the better looking handheld kart racers I've ever played.

Musically, Crash Team Racing is a massive disappointment, unfortunately. There's nothing aggressively bad about the OST, but the entire game is filled with very generic, samey kart racer tunes that sound almost like the same track, with only slight variations distinguishing them.

There's also a classic music option in this game that allows you to switch to the music from the PS1 version, but somehow those tracks are even worse than the remastered ones. Halfway through, I just decided to mute the game and put on my own music. It also meant I wouldn't have to hear the same canned trash talk lines over and over. If I had to hear Coco yell "get in the slow lane, buddy!" one more time, I might have gone nuts.

It's difficult to overstate how much the variety of modes, boss battles, overworld progression, cutscenes, etc. available in this adventure mode boost this game as a single-player experience. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe unquestionably shines in the multiplayer department, with smoother performance, better level design, gorgeous music, and so on, but that game is unquestionably disappointing as a single-player experience because of the lack of a sense of narrative or progression to it. It feels like a collection of (really great) levels and little else. Crash Team Racing's Adventure Mode, on the other hand, feels like a proper game, even putting aside the apparent wealth of content available outside of the Adventure Mode that I didn't engage with. CTR ended up being pretty decent, even if the music, several design choices, the roster, and a specific gameplay mode ended up rubbing me the wrong way. CTR's Adventure Mode gets a 6.5/10 from me.

@Ralizah Ah yes, the "other" kart racer (and no, I don't mean a certain plumber; this came out a couple weeks after Team Sonic Racing back in 2019, otherwise I might've gotten it for myself, simply because of the PS4's prior lack of karting games).

Good to hear that there's a core adventure to be had with it, though. Racing games can scratch an occasional itch I sometimes get, but the act of actually completing a race is relatively interchangeable, so it takes extra effort to ensure I stick around. You're right, I've mostly played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe alone on my partner's Switch, and it just gets repetitive and boring after a cup or two.

And yeah, I've never rated the music from this franchise, either. Those four tracks you've embedded are criminally similar. I guess I haven't stuck with Crash long enough for anything to really take hold; I had a playable demo from The Wrath of Cortex when I was a kid, and then I climbed aboard the N'Sane Trilogy hype train, only to kinda rush through all three games and then go "Was that it?" I have the original Crash Team Racing sitting on my PS3 as a PSone Classic digital download, and I'm thinking that it'll be enough for me, especially in light of your review.

Oh, and self-aware annoying (Aku-Aku) is still annoying.

So I'm sorry to read that you didn't get along with it as much as you could've done, but I'm grateful for you describing its issues (or at least, the issues you personally had with it) in such informative detail. I felt like you'd be heading towards a slightly lower score, but I get a sense that you're trying hard to be objective, which I appreciate. We all have our preferences, after all.

@Ralizah Appreciate seeing a review of CTR. Admittedly my opinion of CTR kinda sunk a little while after the game came out, mostly due to most of the new stuff being locked behind the in game currency that wasn't easy to get a good amount of. I still enjoy the game myself, but if the game doesn't grab you with what's already there, playing the game alot just for the content probably isn't worth it.

That said, I swear I feel like the only Crash fan here and it hurts

@DerMeister Crash 4 was my GotY last year, so you're not alone.

@RogerRoger I'll be honest: I totally forgot Team Sonic Racing was a thing.

My score is actually lower than the fun I had with it, if that makes sense. Despite my complaining, I think the core single-player story mode is decently solid and meaty. Most of my gripes aren't huge, but they start to add up after a while, and I felt it necessary to address them as fully as possible.

Also worth reiterating that this is only for the story mode, which doesn't really touch the pit stop, mtx element, or the bevy of modes and stages outside of it.

@DerMeister It's a Playstation fan website, so I highly doubt you're the only Bandicoot fan here.

And yeah, I recall the premium currency situation souring @Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy on the game a bit as well.

@DerMeister I'm also a fan of Crash. Haven't played Crash 4 yet since I only completed Crash Warped late last year, but I'll get round to it eventually.

@Ralizah Interesting writeup. Crash Team Racing took me a while to get used to, mainly due to how drifting is very different to the likes of Mario Kart. The best times in Crash Team Racing all require keeping up the drift combos for as long as possible, to keep the boosts going. But once it clicked, I had a lot of fun tearing through the tracks.

The big positive of the game for me is the amount of content. There's a lot of tracks once you count the CTR, Crash Nitro Kart, and the free DLC tracks. Then there's all the modes for each track.

My main problem with the game was the shop system and microtransactions. The single player is (or at least was) very stingy about collecting coins, making it take a tedious amount of time to unlock characters. Multiplayer was supposedly much better for collecting coins, but I didn't do much of that.

@Ralizah It's okay, I think a lot of people did.

And gotcha, thanks. That's actually even more telling, when you recognise that minor issues are minor, but you can't help but notice them the more you play. There are plenty of games I love which admittedly aren't perfect (he wrote with a straight face) but I'm able to park their shortcomings and enjoy myself regardless; it doesn't sound like you've been able to to that here. That's the dealbreaker.

But it's good to read others reacting to your review as well (and don't worry @DerMeister, I love Crash in principle, and will likely play Crash 4 at some point, so you're not that alone!).

Thanks for tagging me @Ralizah as I'd completely missed on these reviews of yours and @RogerRoger! (I'll be sure to give Wizorb and Squadrons a read later on guys!)

I actually wrote a review for CTR:NF on here ages ago... It was before you created this specific thread and I was actually planning on re-writing it and re-posting it for this thread (Pretty sure me and you talked about it then pretty extensively too)

I think I read somewhere that they actually made Oxide easier because of how hard he was. He's really quite hard to beat in the original and he was a challenge when I played CTR:NF not long after this released. At least I think that's right? I dunno.

I haven't played Mario Kart since... Mario Kart DS (I did play Wii too but I don't remember it at all) so I can't quite comment on the track quality being lower then Mario Kart Deluxe 8 (Though seeing as CTR's a remaster of a 20 year old game and the tracks are exactly the same for the main adventure mode it does kinda blur the line a bit.)

I'll admit to massive notaliga for the original game too with it being one of the first games I played with my kids and being a pretty big Crash fan in general.

Still good review Ral and I agree that the "trash talk" lines are pretty terrible too... Well except for maybe Bandicoot Power!

@RogerRoger Sorry, only just now read your Squadrons review. I agree with pretty much all you have said. I played the entire campaign in VR and have started getting weekly multiplayer sessions together with mates to play with two of us in VR (typically in Fleet battles against AI which is very hard!).

VR adds a lot to the experience, I can't lie. I tried it with and without and being able to look up and down makes a huge difference. In my mind, this game was designed for VR and then made to have a non-VR mode.

However, as a package, I'm really impressed. I bought it at launch at retail price and I think EA did fairly well by the game. It is a niche game in a lot of ways. The campaign was fun, had some exciting moments. The multiplayer is also fun, all packaged up at an affordable price with a lot of replayability. No crazy monetization, just a game that it encourages you to play and enjoy for a fair price. One of my mates who I play with is addicted to it as Xwing and Tie Fighter were his favourite games when we were growing up. Great review!

@Rudy_Manchego No apology necessary; it's not like I keep a tally or anything... [reaches for notepad and crosses Rudy's name from an enemies list] Thank you!

Glad you agree, and thanks for adding the VR perspective! Good to know that it adds to the experience and you're right, I wouldn't be surprised if it was created as a VR project first, before somebody pointed out that between it and Vader Immortal, there might've been some fans unhappy at having to shell out for an expensive headset to keep current. Luckily, it works well enough, but I can always tell when I'm playing against VR players in dogfights and Fleet Battles. They have an edge, no doubt about it.

Sounds like you and your buddy have a lot of fun, which is great to hear. I just purchased and downloaded the original TIE Fighter, having played nothing but a very short demo of it eons ago, so I hope to be agreeing with that particular friend of yours soon enough!

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@mookysam Thanks! Yes indeed, that was the rarest of sightings, an actual RogerRoger LOL (although it was my inner monologue that said it, so... that's my defence, and I'm sticking to it). Alas, despite Rudy's positive comments about VR, I still wouldn't trust myself with it. Had I found Squadrons an unenjoyable, clunky mess without it, then I might've given it a second thought, but you can genuinely forget about it, at least during the immersive campaign (and I didn't expect to be any good at the multiplayer anyway, so getting blasted over and over by VR players is no skin off my nose).

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Thanks! Yeah, I'm pretty sure your review was what prompted the discussion about the microtransaction element of the game originally. I actually combed through the thread looking for the review until I remembered it was probably written before this thread became a thing!

@crimsontadpoles There is a crapton of content in this game. From a single-player standpoint, it's probably one of the best I've seen on that front. The mtx element is unfortunate, and probably the reason I won't end up purchasing the full game, though. Not sure I want to support that business model and/or not have access to certain characters.

That was a very fun written piece @RogerRoger for Star Wars Squadrons... I'm glad to see the return to this unique writing style. Is this something we'll see going forward for every star wars game or just the more multiplayer focused ones?

Have you dabbled with the mulitplayer modes since you wrote this review?

Some very nice screenshots by the way! It looks really quite nice. I can only imagine how even more effective it'd be in VR.

Having only glanced over the screenshots of Wizorb the other day before actually reading over the review properly today I have to admit I was lulled into thinking it was much older then it actually is @Ralizah (Probably because I hadn't heard of it til now and the Breakout/Arkanoid gameplay)

It's a shame it doesn't do quite enough to help make itself really unique or even some basic replayability. Still at least you had a good enough time with it and it's interesting to see you returning to a numbering scheme (I didn't even notice it for Crash Team Racing)

RE: Ever since you made this thread I did think of putting my previous reviews over into here... But with my style having changed so drastically I'd have to rewrite them all for my sense of consistency and that sounds especially daunting having left it so long

-EDIT- Not to mention I still having a number of reviews still waiting to be penned...

@RogerRoger I needed something to occupy my mind going into the weekend. It's hard when I can't go out, although I know everyone is in the same boat. Anyway, I played and completed Batman A Telltale Series - I got it working finally. Had to just keep trying to download it successfully. Took around 5 times. odd.

I had some strange technical hitches on PS5, but those aside, presentation wise it's much more polished than their GoT effort. Pacing is much better. Tighter. Good runtime, and the story is actually entertaining.

@TheIdleCritic Yeah I think I had the same technical issues. Glad you enjoyed it. Was that the first season or second?

@JohnnyShoulder It was the first. I might get the second at some point, but I'm a little burnt out on the Batman/Joker arc. Although, if they do a slow burn before he becomes Batman's nemesis, that could be interesting.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Thank you! Am not really sure whether I'll do more reviews in that style; I think it was more a worry that I drone on about certain things all the time, and don't wanna bore anybody with yet another wall of text about yet another Star Wars game! We'll see. Might just approach things on a game-by-game basis. I had more fun writing it, so it might become my new normal.

And yes, I've played quite a bit of the multiplayer now. It's rather well-balanced, despite my obvious lack of skill against human players. A lot of "die, respawn, boost forward, die, respawn, boost forward" and suchforth, but I can see me jumping in for a few rounds on in-between days.

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@TheIdleCritic Sweet, glad to hear you enjoyed it (especially after all those technical issues; would've sucked if you finally got it working and then ended up hating it)! The presentation only gets better in the second season, which I highly recommend if you're not there already, and the story builds to a spectacular crescendo. It's a shame Telltale went through the wringer, albeit for completely understandable reasons, because I'd have loved to see the series become a trilogy.

@TheIdleCritic Ah cool. Think I enjoyed the first one over the second series, which I wasn't too impressed with. Seem to remember having a few technical issues on PS4 too, nothing too major but stuff like stuttering and the sound cutting out. I did leave it a couple of years between playing as I think I've grown a bit tired of those kind of games.

Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition for PC. The executive edition is just the normal version of the game, after receiving a free expansion that added in some extra areas and a new route. I played this game last year and was very fond of it, but never got round to making a detailed write-up. Now seems like as good a time as any, so here goes.

The story revolves around Brian Pasternack, who is arriving at the office for his first day of work. Naturally he gets to do the mundane office activities such as meeting his co-workers, logging on to his computer, and grabbing a cup of coffee. A stereotypical office is not the most exciting of settings for a game, but don't worry. This office is far from stereotypical.

Just an ordinary first day of work...

It soon becomes apparent that there's a lot of sinister things going on in the shadows. People disappearing, areas that are considered unsafe, that kind of thing. Rumour has it that a witch has cursed the company, and is causing these problems. Naturally, the game does get dark in places, and a few parts that made me jump (though admittedly I am quite easy to scare).

The gameplay is an adventure game with some survival horror elements. It involves Brian exploring through the 10 floors of the building as he tries to complete his tasks and uncover the mysteries of what's going on. There will be a lot of backtracking between the different floors, but the handy elevator makes it quick to navigate the building. The office is in a poor state of disrepair, so there's a lot of dark rooms. The ever useful flashlight can help, but make sure you don't run out of batteries for it.

Surely they're straining their eyes by typing in the dark

There's plenty of hazards to watch out for. As he's just an ordinary person and not a skilled fighter, Brian will have to avoid enemies where possible. Health can only be restored by eating food and drink, but there's usually plenty lying around. Scavenging the various drawers is encouraged. While items are in a limited supply, there's generally more than enough to be found. So you don't have to worry too much about running out of things as long as you're careful.

What helps to give the game its charm is the various co-workers that make up the cast. Most of them are somewhat deranged, treating the strange occurrences as an everyday part of their lives. However, they're also full of personality. There's a lot of charm and humour in the dialogue. Their often lighthearted banter helps to balance out the darker elements of the game.

Just your everyday work colleagues

The soundtrack is rather good as well. The soundtrack was created by the same person who made the VA-11 Hall-A music. There's a nice mix of relaxed music for the safer office parts, and more dramatic or emotional music elsewhere when needed.

Overall, I really like of this game. The little touches help make this game special, and there's plenty of secrets and surprises along the way. The variety of characters adds plenty of charm. Plus there's always trouble lurking nearby to keep you on your toes.