Recent reviews by CataChrome

This game has been an incredibly rewarding and consistently fun experience throughout my playthrough and, having finished the game, I came out having wonderful time, even if its not entirely perfect.


Firstly I want to go over a lot of my positive thoughts:

This game's style is EXCEPTIONALLY strong, both in it's visuals and audio. The game has a really strong visual identity, with lots of bight and vibrant colours mixed with some excellent character and environment design, that work together to create a world thats an absolute treat to experience. Similarly with the audio, the music is constantly upbeat and energetic, really adding to the game's unique visuals and enhancing the experience as a whole.

Control-wise, I feel its really important to go in understanding that it doesn't play like a lot of other 3D-platformers. The game implements a duel-stick scheme that allows you to control Penny and Yo-Yo independently of one-another, and makes it so that the only buttons that are needed are triggers for things like jumping and rolling, though thankfully you can still use the face buttons for those and other actions too! Having messed around with it, once you get a feeling for how movement and controls work, you can tell these levels were designed around allowing for a lot of momentum and movement, as well as to allow for sequence-breaking and flexibility for how you choose to traverse them, and it fells INCREDIBLE to play! I recommend really spending some time to get a feel for the controls, as once you figure out the full potential of them, your options when it comes to movement and traverseal open up tremendously!

This is all brought together with exceptional performance on PC! On my set-up with an RTX 3070 Ti and a Ryzen 5900X, I was always able to play at a locked 120fps with no drops nor stuttering, and it felt incredible to play at that kind of framerate! Similarly on my OLED Deck, it ran locked at 90fps at max settings, so it seems like this game is very well polished on an optimization level!


While I've had a great time however, I DO have a few critiques about the game:

Physics can be a bit janky in sections that require more precision, as I found certain sections I had to play more carefully in order to avoid the physics causing me to fall-off a platform and die. This also extends to some gameplay issues in-regards to collision as there were several points where things like Yo-Yo or even Penny herself would get stuck on geometry, keep hovering in mid-air on certain platforms, or in some cases even getting soft-locked into parts of the level geometry. Thankfully the game is pretty forgiving in this sense with no lives and being able to restart at checkpoints instead of the beginning of the level, but they were something that could occasionally cause some frustration and break the flow of gameplay.

Another issue for me stemmed from some general polish issues in regards to cutscene presentation, as the cutscenes that are in-game felt like they needed another pass in terms of animation, as they felt rather unpolished and rough around the edges. Same with the pre-rendered cutscenes, though Id argue to a lesser extent, as well as there being some general issues with sound-balancing throughout both certain cutscenes and gameplay.


Overall however, despite some of my issues, I've been having a GREAT time with this game, and would absolutely recommend it to those who love 3D-platformers and especially those looking for something more experimental and faster paced! Its got it's quirks that I hope will get addressed in the future, but stick with it and you'll find a game thats bursting with charm and character and that will keep you coming back to replay and master for a long time!

As someone who's been playing Project Diva for around 2 years now and has owned both Future Tone and Mega Mix each for at least over a year, I've been VERY eagerly waiting for a native PC version of this game, especially with the headaches and issues I've had getting the arcade version of the game to run on PC in the past. So needless to say, FINALLY getting a native PC version of this game after so many years has me extremely excited, and after spending some time with it, in my personal experience/opinion, this is easily the best way to play the arcade style of Project Diva to date, hands-down.

Pros:
+ Looks fantastic as usual, and the option to switch between the FT/MM rendering styles is VERY useful.
+ Native support/UI for multiple controller setups, INCLUDING arcade controllers and keyboard.
+ With the DLC, almost EVERY song that's appeared in AFT is accounted for, and even without the DLC there's still a lot of content here to enjoy.
+ Easy to set-up mods, making the amount of current and potential for future additions to content much higher.
+ Plays VERY well and from my experience has very minimal input-lag/stuttering. (This may depend on your set-up, I personally HIGHLY recommend using wired headphones/controller to have as little latency as possible.)

Cons:
- Even though I personally haven't had any issues with it, Denuvo should absolutely NOT be in a game that requires as little delay/lag as possible to play effectively, and the fact that its causing the game to be unplayable for some is a sign that it needs to be removed sooner rather then later.
- Only 3-4 songs from AFT are not accounted for here (Nekomimi Archive, Hato (White Dove), and Ievean Polka), however these can thankfully be very easily restored with mods.
- Hard framerate cap at 60fps. (Which can ALSO be easily fixed with mods.)
- Some PVs that got updated in F/F2nd have still not been updated for this game and because of that, certain PVs for songs can look pretty dated in terms of lighting, effects, and overall quality of the actual music videos.
- Can be a hard sell if you've already owned/played any of the past arcade-style Project Diva games (I.E., Arcade Future Tone, Future Tone (PS4), Mega Mix (Switch))

Overall this is a FANTASTIC version of an already amazing game, and moving forward I think will easily stand as the best version of the arcade style of Project Diva. With the amount of content currently present in the game, as well as the promise of mods and possibly even more content being added in the future, there is simply no better time to get into this game and check out what it has to offer. It stands as an amazing version of what I feel is easily one of the best arcade-rhythm games out there.

(Specs: i5-6500, GTX 1070, 16GB DDR4)

Played through this entire game twice and I can say very confidently that its one of the best 3D-platformers ever made, PERIOD.
The visual design of this game still holds up INCREDIBLY well despite it's age, the writing and characters are still incredibly charming and memorable, and the level design is on a whole other level when it comes to it's theming and variety.

While there are some general quirks with some of the platforming and progression, especially if you're going for 100%, those issues are nowhere near enough to take away from everything else this game does right, and you'd be doing yourself a huge disservice not playing it.

I can't recommend this game enough to people, especially if you're a fan of platformers and more story-focused games, its an absolute must-play in my eyes. And Id argue there's no better time to jump into it with the sequel on the horizon.

Sonic fans and fans of the 16-bit era of gaming will fall in love with this game. It has the insane fast-paced speedy partforming you expect from a Sonic game, while also having cauos and lots of explosions like in the hidden gem "Gunstar Heroes" on the Sega Genisis. Not to mention the amazing soundtrack and the gorgeous pixelated visuals that this game has to offer truely make this an outstanding game. If I had three words to discribe this game it would be "Buy it Now!". Simpilly put, This is an amazing game that I highly reccommend to fans of platformers and action games and In my opinion is a must own game to all Sonic fans and fans of platformers in general.