Recent reviews by Amethyst Espeon

Bought the game WAAAY back in early access. Was fun then, still fun now! I love the way the upgrades work with the weapons (and sometimes ship and whatnot) to make insane amounts of builds. Now, I did just win the game on my first try in 1.0, but I had been doing massive lategame score runs before, so I had just picked one of the more consistent builds from there to do so.

The new (at least to me) animations for some of the super mods are absolutely amazing looking. The final boss oozes danger, I love it! Excited to see what else is new in store for it!

For the 'should I buy it?':
What you see in the trailers IS what the game looks like. Most of the fun comes from theorycrafting and executing, not from wild skill plays (though it CAN be done, I remember seeing some wack 'only use my thrusters for damage' runs). If you're into theorycrafting and seeing if your build works, this game is probably close to a 10/10. Lots of interesting combinations to have fun with. If that's not your thing, it's still probably worth it on a sale to go through and beat a time or two.

At the moment I don't believe this game is particularly worth playing in a competitive mindset, at least in doubles. The movement feels very wonky, but it works for what it is. The combos are fairly tight and you get punished HARD if you drop one since the opponent can dodge away and is almost immediately actionable. But these aren't enough to make me thumbs down a game.

My main objections at the moment are the lack of any form of hitbox/hurtbox viewer, janky mismatch between the hitbox/hurtbox and the model on the screen, and where it feels like moves can never trade. Sometimes you'll have something like a batman down air collide with someone else's uptilt (or equivalent), where your foot clearly hits their hand. Things like this happen across characters. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that I can't figure out what the hitbox actually looks like. If I could see that their move is big in the lab, then I could know to avoid it. But I have *no* idea how big each move is.

Another problem I have is the abundance of super armor. Super armor is just a bad mechanic, kinda in general. Using it sparingly is fine, it can add character to some...characters. But it feels like half the cast has it in some form or another, and I don't mean the focus armor that stuff like wonder woman down-special gives. If it was clearer visually that moves had super armor (Rivals of Aether gave much thicker outlines and an extra white outline to theirs, I believe Project M made them flash yellow during the attack), then again this would not be as much of a problem.

The rollback feels...weird. Most of the time, rollback is supposed to skip a couple of frames. At worst, the opponent teleports and that never feels good. Sometimes in this game, you'll have like 1-3 second skips where suddenly you'll be on the other side of the screen next to a blastzone. Or dead. It's very strange, I don't know what's causing this and even if all of the gameplay stays the same I would expect this one to be fixed (feels more like a bug than anything).

Lastly is that some of the stages are B A D. Having people live at 180% randomly because they bounced from ceiling to floor to ceiling to floor is just not fun. I'm not sure how ranked will work, but since so many of the stages feel like counterpicks (or just straight casual stages) I would expect a ban phase similar to Rivals of Aether. If that's the case then I don't mind this at all.

The voicelines, interaction between characters, animations themselves, the characters'....character, all of those are top notch. I love that part. As it stands, it feels more of a party game than smash does, even with them advertising that it has an 'intense competitive experience'.

tl;dr: Pretty fun casually, not worth the time competitively.

I originally played it and beat it on the Wii, which while fun had some flawed controls. Everything other than the controls on that version was stunning, the story, the gameplay, the puzzles. Now on the computer the controls are snappy and responsive, even on mouse and keyboard, which fixed my only problem with the game. This is one of my favorite games of all time. Even if you're not interested in the game itself (which is a steal btw, game has a LOT of content. Much more than I have put in), at least look up the music. The music for Okami is a masterpiece (my favorite is Ryoshima Coast I + II).

I plan on continuing to replay it on PC and probably 100% it eventually.

Killed a dozen mice
Destroyed my social life
Gave me carpal tunnel

Would buy again 10/10

This game has a great community, though not very big. The developers are quite committed to the game, and probably won't put the game down for quite a long time. I definitely suggest this game to anyone and everyone who wants a good time. Even on the lowest settings, the game is REALLY beautiful :)