PROJEKT GODHAND Steam Charts & Stats

i am so rhythmed,m

my keyboard is broken

I popped key caps off my keyboard and caught a heat stroke playing this game. After that my asthma was healed.

Right now this is a miss for me, with a conditional 'keep an eye on it' as applies to most EA games (remember when EA Games meant something different? anyway). It seems like a lot of my problem with the rhythm genre, having grown up on DDR, Stepmania, and other 4K variants, is that even towards the higher difficulty/complexity in those games, the charts already felt a bit cluttered to me, and I got out of the scene long before air/jumpstream was commonplace. As a result, if a rhythm game with identical or fewer lanes of expression has charting that relies similarly on simultaneous notes, I'm immediately dissuaded from the experience because it's already tailoring to the sensibilities of my least favorite chart type in the genre. Maybe it was my mistake for looking at a game with 4 keys on each side and assuming I could play it with anything other than 4 fingers on each hand, but the 'mashing' hook the game sold me on doesn't really feel like it comes out in gameplay--in reality these charts are quite easy to read, but getting my brain to adjust both to simultaneous 4 fingers on each hand (I play piano and this still isn't easy to acclimate to) as well as attempting to read the clustered charts that seem intentionally obfuscated by the arbitrary nature of the lanes for single notes is a struggle and a half. The worst part is that the challenging sections aren't long streams of fast notes or things I'd otherwise be incentivized to mash through--they're simultaneous notes or holds, and while mashing does help with those to an extent, I can also blatantly tell how to do them and when I'm missing them just as a consequence of muscle memory. So this is the case with any rhythm game, but it became apparent to me every time I tried to boot this game up that I wasn't going to like it as much as a basic 4K game--at least while there are no quality of life/usability features like note value colors, custom noteskins, etc.. Being able to adjust scrollspeed is nice but that's a given in the genre by this point. And if that was the only issue I had, then I wouldn't be leaving this review. My issue on top of this is the pricing model. I've said publicly before that I don't believe any EA game should be founded on a model that allows or encourages paid DLC to be made or sold before the game is officially released, and I stand by that. You are selling, by definition, an incomplete experience, and the reason I am paying for it now is because there is the condition of you improving and expanding that experience, given the payment I have already handed you, until it is a finished product. I do not want to have to give you more money to play something I already paid for. I'm aware the vast majority of rhythm games out there function on paid DLC models by this point, and I have no problem with that--I just have a problem with it being both the inclusion and one of the primary focuses of the team when the core game experience isn't finished. Add that to the clunky nature of the charting, the superfluousness of the note placement in anything other than multi-notes or holds, the lack of usability features that I'd expect as standard, and the core hook not really being as interesting or fun as it says it is, and this ends up with the 'not right now' that I originally said it would--it just took a long time to get there. Will happily update this review in the future if the core game experience evolves significantly, or, heck, even if I can just change the note colors to match their subdivisions/values at some point. Right now, not feeling it.