GRIME Reviews

i mclove it 10/10

Underrated 8.5/10

The game is awesome 😎

A must play if you like metroidvania genre

A[i] breath [/i] of fresh air.

100% the game at least 3 times, not counting the NG+ mode. I liked it

I would put this game in the same position as Blasphemous I. Wouldn't recommend it in its initial state; after many patches and 4 (free!!) expansions it is just a great game!

Loved this game! Once you get over the mechanical learning curve, it really is a solid metroidvania with some good puzzles and a really nice boss soundtrack.

I adore this game. The world building, the story, the art direction and the designs all absolutely sing. For a game called Grime it really shines and stands out from the rest. Gotta love that the devs obviously poured a lot of love into it, with multiple updates over the game's life and free expansions. It could lean a little too hard into the Soulslike aspects for my tastes at times, but the art direction and story kept me going. As others mentioned, runbacks could be frustrating and more than a few platforming puzzles annoyed me with 'you died because you couldn't see ahead of you' shenanigans. Thankfully, the only thing affected by death is your damage / currency multiplier, so the progress was the only real setback. The game runs incredible on the Steam Deck but put this on the biggest screen you can. Some of the set pieces are really awe inspiring. Can't wait for the sequel.

If there was one word to describe this game, it would be 'frustrating', but not in a challenging, difficulty kind of way, in an annoying kind of way. I did enjoy a lot of the game and sunk around 27 hours into it, but I just really can't bring myself to recommend it to others. Firstly the positives. I loved the boss fights. They're the best part of the game (once you get past the comments below). They all felt unique and were a nice challenge to overcome, each having their own mechanics to learn and master and made great use of the game's abilities. I loved the music, especially during the boss fights. It added to the epic feel that it was really life or death. I also loved the atmosphere of the game. It was visually cool and I thought the dark and bleak world was great. Finally I did like the 'upgrades' you unlocked in the game, from the talents, to the weapon upgrades, to the 'hunt point' upgrades. Felt like there was a nice progression curve. Now, let's talk about that frustration... My main negative is the fact that everything seems to take forever, and I assume that's what the devs were going for, but it really wasn't fun for me. You need to have some serious patience to complete this game. The force bar (energy bar) - I think this is worst part of the game for me. It's a little frustrating how much everything revolves around the force bar. Everything has a force cost - jumping, dashing, attacking... everything except moving side-to-side - and it really makes the game slow to play. You're constantly waiting for your force bar to recover. Not only that, but it doesn't even START to recover until you've stopped performing any resource-consuming actions for 1 second, which may not seem like a lot, but during combat you really feel it. You pretty much have to stop doing anything except moving side-to-side in order for to recover force, as any action pauses the recovery and you need to wait the 1 second again for it to start regenerating again. It also takes time to refill the bar to full, so that drags out the time even more. You attack a few times - better wait 5 seconds as your force bar is now empty so you can't do anything. What's that - you dashed a few times to dodge some essential mechanics - better wait 5 seconds as your force bar is now empty so you can't do anything. Combat feels sluggish and slow because of this. Your force is used as soon as you press the attack button too, so then if you need to interrupt your attack to dash, your force is still lost, and sometimes because of the attack, you can't even dash because you have no force left. Very frustrating. The majority of the game's general combat complexity is based around resource management, and that just wasn't fun to me. The game has several items. They're cool and interesting to use, however not only is there not really enough of them, but some of them also take an eternity to use. You're in a pinch and want to use an item to recover force or health - well that takes about 2 seconds to use, so better just stand there vulnerable, doing nothing. The game's limited heal is also a little annoying. It costs another resource, the breath bar, to use. The only way to get breath is to use a very niche and well-timed ability on an enemy - so it's very risky with the more challenging enemies, leading to a lot of frustrating deaths. It also takes what feels like an age to actually heal. You can choose between a minor, slow, heal-over-time or stand there for 2 seconds channelling a big heal. Just needless frustration when you're in a pinch and low on health. The 'respawn' points are few and far between in some areas. It gets annoying, fast. You're low on health and no way to heal because you are out of breath - better be careful - ah you just came across a new enemy or trap and it one-shot you - now you have to spend 5-10 minutes running back to where you died because you respawn so far away. Not fun. Some areas of the game have challenging enemies or mini bosses, which is great, but dying and having to spend longer running back to where you died than the combat length multiple times is really infuriating. Unlike most metroidvanias, you don't simply unlock the map as you explore, instead you have to reach "beacons", which THEN allows you to unlock the maps as you explore. This would be fine if they were right at the start of an area, but often they are not, and are either half-way through or near the end of an area, making navigating the world long-winded and very frustrating. There's also a bit of misdirection on where to go. You'll have an objective set on your map, but to get there you actually may need to backtrack to another part of the world and pick up a new ability, which can get very confusing when there's no kind of quest log/dialogue box. There's definitely some aimless wandering around. Finally to briefly mention performance - most of the time it was perfect, but there were times where I suddenly dropped to about 10-15 FPS for no reason and it made the game near unplayable. There was no reason for it either - sometimes it would go after a few seconds, sometimes tabbing out and in fixed it, sometimes I had to restart the game to fix it. More time used. Frustrating. So that's my opinions. I know loads of people enjoyed this game, which is great, but to me it was great, but *just* frustrating enough that I really can't recommend it.