CrossCode (PC): The MMO I always wanted.

Despite what people a number of people feel about them as a gaming news site, I read a fair bit of Kotaku in my day to day life. Mainly because of a few select writers who I enjoy the work of and have some pretty similar interests as far as games go. One of those writers is Mike Fahey, and in his write up at the end of last year he listed his top ten games of 2018.

One of them, I had never heard of before. Wasn't even remotely on my radar. Had nice looking pixel graphics, and boasted itself as an MMO that's really not. Strange, I thought, but ultimately clicked away. But then I started to see the title popping up in some other sites top 10 lists. Now that had my attention. How can a game that appears on so many people's best of lists get by me? Well, that merited a deeper look.

CROSSCODE (STEAM)

CrossCode opens with us in control of a dark haired woman racing through a dark foresty area. She is on the hunt for her brother, and shadowy voice implores her to stop. She vehemently denies, saying that she is trying to stop her brother from working to death. The voice spawns monsters to stop her which the girl quickly dispatches. After tearing through the enemies put before her, she does find her brother just to see him collapse from exhaustion.

We are woken up in a different location. Our hair and outfit are slightly different. An operator tells us that our name is Lea, and we are actually logged into an avatar of the futuristic MMO called CrossWorlds. In the vein of Sword Art Online, Crossworlds is a game where the players are actually implanted in the game to a heavy degree of the 5 senses. Unfortunately, we are told there has been an accident and that we are in a coma in the real world, and we are being placed into the game to try to find out what happened.

To make matters worse though, our speech unit is damaged. We can understand fine, and give minor visual responses but we are told that in order to solve this issue and hopefully find some answers, we need to play the game just as if we were any other player in the game. Lea remembers the basics of how to use her Spheromancer class in the game and after running into a friendly Pentafist named Emilie in the rookie island, she and her new friend jump into the game of Crossworlds to hopefully learn what's happened to her.

Loaded for bear

CrossCode is going to be an interesting game to try to review because the mechanics of this game borrow from so many different various elements that it doesn't really fall into just one genre of game. For example like I explained that the Lea is logged into an MMO, but you would incorrect to assume that's what this game actually is. The MMO aspect of the game is used as a framework for the story and the world.

What I mean be that is, yeah there is some questing that is done in the style of an MMO. You need to go talk to NPCs who give you quests to do, and you'll go into the world and fight mobs to collect items or kill a certain amount of enemies. As you wander around the world you'll see other players just running around, fighting their own things, or just hanging out. All of these are computer controlled. This is a fully single player experience, but it does a very good job of presenting the illusion that this is a living world with other players doing their own thing. 

When I describe the game, I describe along the lines of a 16-bit Zelda game such as A Link to the Past.  It's stylized in a way that it would look at home on the Super Nintendo with a top down view of the world, primarily a 2d play, but there is some degree of verticality to the maps which allows for some platforming and parkour when wandering around the world.

The combat is going to be the real meat and potatoes of this game. It's core is a hack and slasher with bit of Souls to it. You can run around and slash with a couple of swings with a single button press, you have a block that pulls up a shield and can parry if timed correctly, and you have a dodge move that has some invulnerability frames that lets Lea gracefully spin from harms way, which she can do up to the three times. 

But it she wouldn't be a Spheromancer without some spheres, and that's where her ranged attacks come in. When using the right analog (or I assume mouse on PC) the combat becomes almost a twin stick shooter. Holding a direction will bring a pair of lines for Lea's aim together, and once lined up you can unload a continue stream of projectiles at an enemy, which is handy for fast or flying foes. You can also charge up your first shot to ricochet off walls or break enemy guards.

As you play through the game and unlock your circuit board, you open your skill tree which allows you to learn multiple techniques for special moves for your Melee, Ranged, Dash and Shield. What is nice about this is as when you commit to an ability path, once you fill out the 3 spaces for it you can actually flip between your options so if you don't care for how one ability plays you can try the other option to see what works for you better. Even further in the game you start unlocking elemental grids which provide you with even more options to fight with, so you do have a bit of freedom to design your character.

Having familiarity with your Techs will let you set up the right attacks for them

Now while I've gone into the specifics of the combat and referred to it as the meat and potatoes of the game, it would actually be pretty foolish to assume the game is just battling. That's what I did and I was promptly set up for some gameplay whiplash. As you play through the "story" for Crossworlds you come onto these "instanced" dungeons where you have to go without your party. And while these do contain a significant number of fights usually capped off with a spectacular boss fight, you learn that CrossCode is in fact a serious puzzle game as well.

Actually, when thinking about it, this game might actually be more of a platform puzzler than it is an action adventure because depending on the size of your giant space brain, the puzzles can be a major stumbling block. I am more than man enough to admit that there were a number of that I had to look up a solution for because I just was not seeing it on my own.

I love Emilie. She is just the right level of earnestness and naivety to make her impossible to hate.
Might be one of my favorite iterations of the best friend character. 

Sometimes the puzzles are just a matter of following the right path, and parkouring off the right environment pieces to get you from A to B. Sometimes the solution will require you moving around bits of your environment so that you can fire a projectile in the proper path to hit all the necessary points before coming on a final switch. Sometimes you will have to use the temples element for an environmental variant to the puzzles.

All I can say is some these will TEST you. Which can be frustrating because the story frames solving these dungeons like races against your friends. Like I said, I got stuck a lot. It wasn't until a friendly fan of the game in my Twitch chat told me to use visual cues on the floors of the puzzles to get a better idea of how to solve some these. It really did help a bit, but sometimes you can forget early mechanics that if you didn't use, would make the puzzle unsolvable, like remembering you can hop on fences.

So close, yet so far away

Outside from the puzzles, the actual combat can be very challenging as well. A lot of the enemies that you come across have their own unique weaknesses and patterns, so very rarely is just running and slashing away going to be the best way to dispatch something. It can work, but not always well. Then you have to bear in mind unless you use limited items to recover health, it doesn't restore until you finish fighting your combo chain. The more you beat enemies, the more valuable drops they give you, so its beneficial to beat a long string of baddies, but you have to be careful to mind your health.

To the CrossCode's credit, the options provide a very significant amount of customization to the overall game. Right from the onset, you are warned by the developers that this game meant to be a challenge, but if it's proving so difficult that you are not having any fun, you have options to bring down the battle and puzzle difficulties. It's a nice gesture and it gives the "git gud" scrubs less of an opportunity to be so insufferably smug when someone is struggling.

In addition to learning attack patterns and elements, you have to be mindful of ledges too.

CrossCode was a very weird game for me, because it was a game that I kept putting down. It's not because of a lack of interest of will, it is just a game that constantly got caught up in a retail release schedule as I played my games through the year. But there is something so inherently charming about it's whole presentation that always kept it in my mind. When I was playing something major like Red Dead Redemption 2, I always kept thinking "Soon as I finish this, I can get back to CrossCode".

It's story is interesting because it deals with a lot of fronts. First we have Lea's primary story, which is about her trying to figure out what happened to her. This is expounded to her by a character who is developer to the game, basically speaking to her directly. Then we have the Crossworld's "story mode" which is what we learn as Lea plays through the game with the friends she meets, and her interactions with those characters. Then we also have the front of what Crossworld's actually is, which we had a glimpse of at the start of the game and is told in flashback sequences. There is a lot to take in, but it does eventually tie together, (mostly. I'll get into that).

The game also has a sense of humor about itself. Lea, despite being a generally mute character is a very expressive character. She responds with overblown physical comedy and it really goes a long way to accentuate her personality depending on the scene. It also works for scenes when Lea was visibly emotionally shaken. Radicalfish games did an excellent job of finding a way to make you empathize with a silent protagonist.

And man, CrossCode LOVES pop culture references. I basically freaked out when in the very beginning the game when one of the first npc quests parted me by saying Aziz Ansari's big line from the "Steak Night" episode of Scrubs. You find an "Umbrella corp." in one of the cities and you can't enter because of an outbreak they are having. For the Halloween event, you have to collect "Jack's flames" for a character that is CLEARLY Oogie Boogie from Nightmare Before Christmas. I can see from the coming update that there are more character references to be made soon.

Soundtrack is pretty good and it was very fitting for it's overall theme. Described by it's composer of Deniz Akbulut, the CrossCode OST is heavily inspired by Japanese game music of the late 90s using electronic beats, melodic tunes and epic JRPG Scores. This is a fair way to explain it, because the best description I had for it was "Video Gamey" which again, is perfect for it in this case because of the visual styling, story delivery, and accompanying gameplay. There are handful of decent tracks, but I wouldn't consider too many of the 60 to be overly memorable.

Oh Look. Its Doogie Noogie from A Bad Dream Before Kwanzaa. 

There really isn't a lot I have to complain about on this one that isn't in some way addressed. Like for example, when I complain about this game, I would often comment that these puzzles really do make me feel dumb as hell. It was very rare occurrence that I ever jumped into a room, saw the puzzle, and figured it out at a pretty quick clip. Now you can argue that having a solution guide embedded into the floor design is technically good game design, but there was very little indicating that's what they were doing. There was too little visual cue because I pretty much never noticed it until it was pointed out to me.

I could complain about the combat challenge, but I can only think of one real instance where I actually had to turn the difficulty down on a mob fight just so I could actually complete the quest. there was a pretty significant amount of frustration and trial & error, but outside of the one instance there was no fight that I wasn't eventually able to overcome under my own skill level.

Because the game is framed like an MMO, I could complain that some of the questing is the same MMO grind that bores me when I try to play a game like that, but it didn't bother me in this one. This is probably because the game is not an MMO. There is a story at play here with a defined ending, and because I'm not just killing mobs to open the next mission, I am motivated to continue because I want to see how things unfold.

I loved lightning techs, I used them almost exclusively because I love rapid fire damage.

And without spoiling anything? The ending feels unfinished. I get that this was a kickstarter game and they were probably trying to make a deadline to appease their backers, but it was a mild let down. In my first playthough I got a bad, pretty unsatisfying ending. I come to find out that you have to find a very out of the way NPC to trigger a small quest line which slightly changes the ending, but allows you to open the path to good ending.

Thankfully I could reload my save, so I did so. The ending changed by a few lines and actions, and just as I got ready to proceed further and see where it was going?  Nothing. I was able to go back into my game and do missed quests, but the option to go "to the future" was locked off, because that content isn't there yet. Or at least, it's heavily implied that the content will be added later. So I don't get to see how the story actually ends, and the dangling plot threads are left untied. Ironically, the NPC players are suffering from the same fate, because when you get to Crossworld's final dungeon, they players are all lamenting that it hasn't been included in the game yet. Misery loves company I guess.

Smug Lea is best Lea.

But my biggest problem is the confusing and somewhat annoying equipment system. See, you an buy equipment in towns, and that is usually enough to keep your gear leveled with you and the area, and that's fine. But you are told that getting item drops to trade for equipment is usually better. This is where the fight combo chain thing I mentioned earlier comes in. But even if you get your combo chain to S-rank and hold it for a long while, it still takes quite a bit of time to get the drops you need for some items. Almost 90% of the time by the time I got the drops I needed for an item it was already outclassed by the new stuff I bought,.

Or, more frustratingly, when it wasn't? It didn't seem like the equipment is actually better. This is a game that has a friggen ton of various bonus effects to each item, so its incredibly hard to outfit your character. It feels like its giving you a lot of room for customization with items, but its so convoluted and confusing I never know if I'm making the right move. Like say I have a weapon that gives me decent stats, but has no effects. Then I find a "better" weapon, it has a brawler stat, and has a status effect, but then it gives me a massive ding to my HP and attack. I'm being told that this is the better weapon, but it never feels like it because they are unbalanced by what is taken away. It was frustrating because it made trying to grind for items feel like an arduous chore that wasn't worth the effort.

I can only wonder how much faster I could have beaten
 this game if I understood what most of this shit meant.

But its hard for me to complain that much because no matter how many times I put it down, it was a game I kept coming back to no matter what made me put it aside in the first place. Once I really started to understand how the puzzle mechanics work and story really got rolling, I found myself incredibly immersed in this one. I am looking froward to some DLC updates because I really do hope this story continues, because its the only dimmer on this overall solid experience, and even then it was a mild disappointment at best.

CrossCode came out to little fanfare, but its certainly starting to catch the right set of eyes. And now this once PC only experience is about to come to the Switch and the PS4, and that is only a good thing to help this game really get out there. More people should play this game. It's an incredibly solid experience that blends a lot of familiar game elements to make it feel truly unique. It's got a sense of humor about it that keeps it from taking itself too seriously, but also does a good job delivering it's emotional punches of the story. The puzzles are well thought out and clever, the combat is fun and challenging. Its only 20 bucks and is at least a 50-60 hour experience with updates on the way. I can't ask for an better entertainment dollar and give CrossCode a strong recommendation. 

Also, with a code, Lea will idle and do Caramelldansen.
Fucking. Sold. 

GRIS (PC): Short but sweet

It's always a risky when a creator you know changes up things. Sometimes is great, and you get the jump from Evil Within to Evil Within 2. Sometimes it's not great, when you jump from The Black Album to Load. Creators are ultimately artists and it is certainly their prerogative to do things differently if they so chose. But in the realm of video games this can sometimes be a gamble.

So you can imagine my surprise when I started seeing screens and gifs from Devolver Digital for an upcoming artsy platformer. This is a company that produces silly and quirky games like BroForce and Enter the Gungeon. But a pretty looking indie platformer? That's not their normal wheelhouse. That being said I was hearing some very positive things about it, so with a free gap in my stream schedule to use, I took the plunge into.....

GRIS (PC)

As is with most indie games, there is no vocalized story. It's a journey you have to go on to interpret your own meanings. The game begins with young woman eponymously named Gris curled up in a cracked stone hand. She beings to sing but as she does, the hand beneath her beings to crack further and fall apart. Suddenly the girl loses her voice and cannot sing. She rushes to the edge to evade the cracking fingers, but the hand breaks apart and Gris falls down to a white and grey colorless void. From here, we take control.

This is going to be a tricky review for a number of reasons. Mainly because I don't want to provide any spoilers if you are looking to try this one for yourself, but also because there are not a lot of mechanics to this one, and there is a reasonably short playtime. This might actually be one of the shortest reviews I write come the end of this.

So when you assume control of the game all you can really do move left and right. When Gris (as I believe she is actually called) gets some speed to her step, you will be able to jump. Another button will show her lift her arms and tilt her head back, but it does not do anything.

As you walk through the stages you will come across roadblocks and gaps that you will need to find ways across. When you come across a gap you typically will be noted by a some chimes of sound and what appears to be a hollow constellation. As you continue, you will be herded to find what appears to be stars in the environment. These will connect on the gaps where you found the constellations, and will sometimes provide you a light bridge to cross, or a new ability to use, or fly up into the sky to a constellation that you will continue to build on as you play through the game.

There are only a small handful of mechanics to this game, but the game does use them in interesting way to create a slew of puzzles as you progress through the game. Some of them using more than one if not all of them, on top of some other mechanics that are introduced specifically for that section of the level. Some examples are some red butterflies that allow Gris to essentially launch into the sky, or a line that when you break through it flips and inverses the gravity. The game also uses some water mechanics as well.

For lack of a better explanation, the games elements are somewhat founded by the use of their colors. As Gris progresses through the game and you hit checkpoints, the game will explode with a splash of a specific color, and that will introduce a new environment mechanic. Such as when I hit blue, all of the water based mechanics and puzzles came into effect. Now that I am reflecting on it, the puzzle elements do have a symmetry to the color used for that specific portion and is very cleverly done so.

There is also a degree of inspirations to similar games of this type. There is a segment very early on that is basically a stylized variant of something that happens in PlayStation's indie game Journey, right down to it occurring in the colored level that would closest match Journey's setting. There are a couple of little nods like this, so I see them more as homages to inspirations rather than lifting an idea.

The visuals in Gris are simply stunning. The entirety of the game is drawn in a stylized hand painted water color. It has almost a comic line coloring to it, but as I streamed it was told it reminded one viewer of a movie called Fantastic Planet for its uses of silent and flowy animations. As I played through it, I couldn't help but feel a drawn comparison to the Cloud segment of the old anime Robot Carnival, another film drawn in that 70s animation style.

Its score is just absolutely gorgeous. Somber piano notes, strings, wind and occasionally some accompanying vocalization.  It blends with Gris' visual design seamlessly, and fits with the indie narrative that it is trying to tell. It's an incredibly chill and beautiful soundtrack, and kudos to the Berlinist for their work on it.

I could almost make the complaint that the its soundtrack is too chill. I had this same problem when I played Nier:Automata that when I was playing the early stages of the game, the slow pace of the progress combined with this chill (but beautiful) OST was quite literally putting me sleep. I'm trying to host an interesting stream and I am yawning and struggling to keep my eyes open. It is not a good look and not doing the game any favors.

The puzzles are well thought out and use a number of the mechanics in interesting ways. Although outside of a few of them, I wouldn't say that the game is very difficult. There were only a handful of moments where I got slightly hung up as I was trying to solve the game or gather a collectibles. The collectibles in the game are called "memories" and when you finish the game you can go back to previous levels to try to find the rest of them. If you do, you can unlock one more final scene to the story.

Doing this can add some length to the game because like I said earlier, it's not very long. I played the game on a stream and start to finish I had the main playthrough done in just about 3 hours or so. I am not sure if going back to find memories allows you to use the abilities you gained in the playthrough, but I feel at best this would only add maybe an hour or two of extra gameplay tops.

So this begs the question, is 16.99 worth three hours of entertainment to you? I managed to nab the game for 15.29 so I suppose I can say I got the same amount of experience that I would have if I spent that money at the movies. If that's the comparison I am using, that's probably fair because that means that Gris is not overstaying its welcome, and it wrapped up its story before its actual gameplay mechanics started to feel samey and derivative of its own experience.

On the other hand, I am also a gamer and it's hard for me to not feel short changed sometimes when I buy a new game and inside of a sitting or two I have done all that I can with it. Like I've said in other reviews, replayability is a big factor for me when it comes to buying a game, and it's hard to say that Gris really has any if I can do all the game has to offer in only 2 or 3 sittings.

With a game like this it's not easy for me to give a a proper recommendation because you sometimes have to look at these kinda indie games as the art pieces they are.  If you are the type of person who is okay parting with 20 bucks for 3 hours of an experience then I would absolutely say to try Gris. If on the other hand you are one who really needs a game to have some meat on it then you could probably get by watching a stream or let's play of it.

But that really is the best way to describe Gris at its whole: it is an experience.  A beautifully scored, very pretty experience. I'd think part of the fun of it is to play through and talk to others about what you think the game meant, and what you took from its visual cues. While I didn't have the same emotional connection I did in a game like Journey, I still enjoyed Gris very much. Whether you opt to buy or view it, it's absolutely worth your time.

The stick legs and arms were an odd choice, though. 

Battle Chef Brigade (PC): Part of a balanced meal

So every so often, in between streaming planned games on my rinky dink little channel, I will toss out a poll or ask for random suggestions for stuff to play.  Sometimes I get good ideas, other times I get random stuff out of the blue. This one was suggested to me by a friend and while the title rung a bell, I knew it was a game I had never played before.

But I knew that Amazon Prime had been giving away a bunch of games to Twitch Prime users, so after getting the suggestion I took a look and lo-and-behold I actually had a copy of the game. Never downloaded once and never played. So I figured why the hell not?

BATTLE CHEF BRIGADE (PC)

Taking place in a fantasy setting, the story of Battle Chef Brigade takes place in the nation of Victusia. A world where the fantasy races were once overrun by monsters, a group of people discovered that not only could monster meat be edible, but can also be deliciously prepared.  This group eventually became an elite brigade of individuals who would be known as Battle Chefs.

For the past 100 years, people from all over the land would meet in the capital city to compete for their right to join their ranks. This is done so in a tournament when aspiring chefs are given a time limit to hunt for and prepare a specific monster type, while also catering to the individual tastes of their judges. Those who progress would earn their right to join the Battle Chef Brigade.

In the Windy City off the main continent, A young girl named Mina lives a happy but unfulfilling life working at her family's restaurant. She is a very good cook, but she longs to be more creative and experimental with her cooking. She dreams of one day leaving home and joining the Brigade, and practises her cooking and magic daily to do so. And when the tournament finally comes around, she swindles the money she needs to take her chance at entering the tournament.

If that sounded to you like I was describing a fantasy version of Top Chef on Bravo, then you would be absolutely correct. That is almost exactly what this game is. It's a bit of a mish-mash of gameplay elements but when put together it certainly comes out interesting. I would say that it breaks down into 3 major elements to its palate: Story, Cooking, and Hunting. 

Typically, between the chapters and during the town segments of the game is where much of the characters and plot get fleshed out. Everything operates on the 2D plane if you compared it to the town segments of Dragons Crown you would be in the correct ballpark. I don't want to say it does the visual novel approach because It doesn't use that specific style. It would say that it's a more comic book style of delivery the way it's presented, but with the anime inspired characters I would say that visual novel isn't a stretch either. 

When in town, you can talk to and challenge other chefs and people to cooking battles, work side jobs to earn some extra money, and use the shop to buy new recipe books a cooking equipment. There are three major tasks you can do, two of them for cooking and one for hunting.

The cooking mechanic in this game is done via a puzzle mechanic, although the rules of this change depending on what cooking task you are doing between battling, research, and making money. Typically you add you ingredients which have a set of colored circles representing elements of wind, fire, and water. To make a quality dish, by spinning them in squares of 4 you line up 3 of the same element together, causing them to merge into one LV2 core of that element. Those LV2s can then be done again to become a LV3. You want to squeeze in as many as you can while using the ingredient given in the battle rules, while having more of the judge's preferred element.

As you play through the game, it throws in other pieces that can affect your dish like poisoned pieces that explode if jostled too much, cracked pieces that can break after three moves, bones that can be turned into wild card pieces, and so on. Some of these can be maneuvered or changed on their own, but sometimes you might need to use an additional cooking tool to remove them. Some tools have very specific uses, others will provide better bonuses while you cook.

But the ingredients are not just provided to you, oh no, you have to go and hunt for you ingredients. So if you leave your Kitchen just to the left, suddenly you are in a 2D hack n' slash game in the vein of Muramasa: The Demon Blade or probably more appropriately Dust: an Elysian Tail.  You run and jump along multi tiered levels hacking, slashing, and casting spells at monsters and why they die they drop a series of ingredients to bring back. You can only hold so much but you can make multiple trips at the start to have a cache ready to go.

Because of the radical and jarring switch, it can lead to a hilarious moment for someone who might not be paying attention. I had a friend watching me stream, she looked away for a second and I had gone from cooking with a pan, to jumping around throwing whirlwinds at a dragon. It's both sweet and savory as it was ridiculous and fucking awesome.

Combat is kept relatively simple with one button for physical attacks and one for magical that have different effects depending on what direction you are pressing, which allows for just enough nuance for you to really sink your teeth into combos to find something you like to do. In my case I love to combo followed by a sweep that causes knock up, then jumping after them for a air combo. I am all over combat like this like butter on a baked potato.

Now if these were the only two elements in the game this would probably be enough to carry the game, but I mentioned before that they spice up the cooking mechanic with the different jobs you can do. Basically it changes the rules. When doing cooking research, you are given a set score and set ingredient and you need to figure out how to match that score using only what you are provided with. You can do it as many times as you like, but you need to strategically move things to get the best possible outcome without wasting any of your pieces.

The other is basically working as a short order cook, and here the woman who runs the restaurant is not looking for haute cuisine. These are people who know what they want and know what they like. So you are given puzzle, and they just want you to match the pieces as the customer asked for it. Some of them are pretty easy to do, some get more involved, and you want to get them all out as fast as you can so you can earn more tips over the course of your shift.

There is also a hunting task to do, but it ultimately doesn't change the core combat mechanic. You usually are just provided a goal of how many to hunt, or what specifically to hunt. But it does push the story further with a specific character, so it's a nice little side dish on top of making some money with it. 

As I write this review, I learned that there is apparently a whole number of game modes I didn't even notice when I started playing. The game also features a split screen multiplayer mode, online leader boards, a free play mode, survival mode, restaurant rush, and "break the dishes" mode. That is actually a pretty meaty amount of content outside of the main story. 

I seriously had no idea these existed till I started writing this. 

I really don't have very much to complain about on this one, really. Just a handful of minor complaints. To the game's credit it does have a very unique and well designed set of characters. Everyone who has any kind of major speaking line is very much distinguishable in their appearance so there is little room to confuse characters. That being said? There is a sore lack of actual animation of this. 

Picture a series of hand drawn anime cels, and then give those characters a series of different poses and facial reactions. It really does go back to the visual novel appearance without the tight zoom in over the text box. Characters just jump from pose to pose, which again fits with the comic aesthetic it appear to be going for.  But when you jump into the combat portions of the game you will notice that while there are definitely more frames for animation for some of the actions, it definitely does have a 8 or 16 bit RPG animation style. The run action might be just 3 or 4 frame cycled through. The plus is they move fast enough and fluidly enough with the controls that while it's noticeable, it's not jarring of off putting. 

The music really isn't anything to write home about. This is really a big kneecapping of the fantasy genre as a whole. Unless you have a truly unique melody that catches the ear and keeps in fresh in your head, the all fantasy themed game music is really just going to sound bland. Everything feels fitting about it, but none of it is remarkable. 

The voice acting a strange mixed bag. I don't know how to explain it. The voice acting is well done. It's competently delivered with out feeling to cheesy or hokey. But there is a roughness to it that makes it feel unpolished. I don't know if I can describe it, it feels like the audio is not mixed properly. Lines are delivered with the gusto, but perhaps without an understanding of what it is they are actually reading the lines for.  Sometimes dialog feels too abruptly cut, sometimes it feels like voice lines are too loud for the scene.  There's just an...... off-ness about it. You'd have to hear it to get what I mean. 

I would very much like a clearer understanding of what catering to a judges taste actually means during the actual cooking battle portions. One person will tell me to cook with wind, so I will prepare a dish that is filled with LV3 wind pieces, and then in my judging she'll fucking complain about it. Bitch, have you tried to instill dragon's flavor in the air? It hasn't really affected my ability to progress in the game, but I don't know if I actually understand what I am being scored on. 

Now, from where we stand you are probably thinking sounds pretty stupid. And I'm not going to lie to you I was right there with you. As I was streaming through the first few chapters of the game, I certainly was having fun with it, but it was always prefaced with a laugh about how dumb this game was. But at the end of chapter 2, I got slapped with a story line twist I did not see coming. I closed my stream short after that, but after maybe about 30 minutes I couldn't help but want to see what was going to happen next.

The game pretty much had me at that point. I had to go back for seconds because after that first taste I was hungry for more. I gave up the premise of making it the next weekly stream because I couldn't wait to get back to it. It was genuinely fun to play by not taking itself too seriously, yet earnestly delivering its tale it was impossible to not fall in love with it or its characters. 

At the time of writing I haven't finished this one because I have so many other games on my plate, but I absolutely intend to finish this one. Like I have alluded to at the start of this review it borrows a some tried and true game elements and doesn't really reinvent the wheel, but the obscure combination hack n' slash and puzzle with a fantasy cooking theme that they put together some how managed to fit together beautifully. 

It's campy, has fun characters, fluid combat, an engaging puzzle mechanic, and a surprisingly deep and interesting storyline. It's because of all these that I'm willing to give Battle Chef Brigade a recommendation. Is this a world beater that will be showered with accolades? Of course not, but it currently sells for 19.99 on Steam, PS4, and Nintendo Switch and you will definitely get more than 20 bucks worth of entertainment out of this one.

I give this game 5 star review on Whelp!.... Get it? Cuz it's fantasy? And Whelps are baby dragons? Ehh? EH??.... Ok... I'll stop now.

"You need to prepare a dish with fire, wyvern blood, pixie wing and your mystery ingredient..... CHICKEN!"
"FAAAACK. What the fuck is chicken?! How am I supposed to work with that?!"