You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/katana-kami-a-way-of-the-samurai-story.1308/

Now I’m not acquainted with the Way of the Samurai series⁠—I may even go as far as saying it’s not a series I’d heard of before playing this game. What drew me in wasn’t the brand, though I’m sure it might for existing fans, it really came down to two factors: random dungeons and fun sword-oriented combat. These are two of my favourite things in any kind of game, and to see them melded together is always a joy.

The game opens with you arriving at a small mountain pass. There’s not much here. You have a blacksmith, a tree, and three paths leading to different territories. As you walk closer to the blacksmith, you see an altercation: Dojima the blacksmith owes money, and it’s a not-insignificant amount. To that end, his daughter is taken as collateral, and as an upstanding citizen it’s up to you to see her returned safely home. It’s here the gameplay loop begins.

It’s simple, but fun all the same. To pay off the debt, you have several aspects to manage: the blacksmith itself, the balance of power and tension of the three neighbouring clans, and the mysterious dungeon that only appears at night. You explore the dungeon by night, completing quests, collecting bounties, and gathering items. Then, when you’re done, you make use of the newly acquired resources in the day around the blacksmith. Through Dojima’s smithery, you can upgrade your gear, making it easier to venture further into the dungeon, but really this is secondary to the fun you can have messing with the three clans.

You see, each new day brings new orders for swords. When you start, none of the clans are particularly fond of Dojima’s smithing skills, but accept he’s really their only choice. The small Post Town generally requests one or two swords each order, but the other two clans can go as high as 25; of course, you can always send more swords, or kit out the clan you dislike with fakes. It feels like a bizarre addition to a game like this, but it’s one I find remarkably amusing. Nothing is without risk, naturally. Each of the clans happens to run a small market stall outside the blacksmith, and if you get on the wrong side of them, they’ll stop selling to you entirely. You lose out on items, upgrades, and much more if you’re not careful. To mend broken bonds with the clans, you can always send them a ham if you happen across one in the dungeon, but most of the time I just wrote them off as collateral damage and kept the hams for myself.

There’s a certain intricacy to be seen in how you best utilise the three clans. You want them to hate each other, but not you. You want to incite war, but without necessarily shutting out any one group⁠—war sells swords after all. Maintaining this balance is ultimately an optional challenge, but it’s an incredibly satisfying one all the same.

With the day over, the second part of the game gets its limelight: mysterious dungeoneering. Well I say mysterious dungeoneering, but this isn’t a Mystery Dungeon game, instead a more action-oriented isometric dungeon crawler. You go from floor to randomly generated floor, defeating enemies, and picking up weapons and items. At set floors, you’ll have boss battles and challenge rooms you’re required to beat before allowing you to progress, but also allowing you a way out of the dungeon without having to reach the end. Through these, you can get a sense of steady progress while your weapons are still weak and you’re still getting used to the way the game plays.

Combat itself is frankly a joy. On paper you have a strong attack and a weak attack, but as you progress and continue to use your weapon of choice, you naturally unlock new combos. Your experience is constantly warping and changing, and yet can stay the same if all you want is a bit of mindless button mashing. It’s not dissimilar to Dynasty Warriors in that respect, but perhaps has more depth in what is possible should you want it. To diversify things further, each weapon type comes with its own unique blend of Katana Time: a powered up state you charge as you attack enemies. In this state, you’ll do incredible damage in a variety of different ways. Some swords will grow extremely long to hit more enemies at once, others will end their combo with an explosion; with nine styles to play with you’ll find one to suit how you enjoy playing. When it comes to picking a favourite part of the combat system, it’d definitely be the counters. Usable by either a well-timed dodge, comparable to how the Adept Style of Monster Hunter Generations works, or by a well-timed guard, these counters give you a brilliantly satisfying reason to learn enemy attack patterns. They’re flashy, bold, and most importantly work in the game’s online PvP.

Encountering other players in the dungeon is a mixed experience, but generally one that ends in a duel. As you explore and venture to a new floor, another player has a chance of appearing. Through simple button presses, you can decide whether you want to be cooperative and clear the floor together, or the opposite, and fight to the death. Interestingly, this isn’t a decision you have to set in stone. You can approach a player with the white flag held high, before swiftly stabbing them in the back. It’s incredibly human in its implementation, and really pushes you to either stick with or abandon an honour system. Thankfully, if a player does defeat you, you’re only thrown back to the start of the floor minus some money, in oppose to being thrown from the dungeon with nothing as you’d expect in a game like this. It’s worth saying you can play with friends, but I didn’t get to try this as nobody I knew decided to grab the game. 

The dungeon itself is a bit of a mixed bag for me. While I enjoy the randomness it offers to keep the experience fresh each run through, I feel it doesn’t necessarily do enough to hook me from start to end. With only 20 floors, and set bosses locked to the halfway point and the end, it manages to feel repetitive while in actuality being different each time. This sameness does get broken up from time to time; you get portals to skip floors, mystery floors that can either reward you with treasure or give you a challenge battle, and danger floors, which are a few floors significantly harder than what the game otherwise offers. They’re all fun for the first five, maybe the first ten times you play them, but the more you play the more you grow accustom to it. As you’re paying Dojima’s debt, your mindset shifts from wanting to explore the dungeon, to questioning whether you really need to in order to hit the next payment deadline. The gameplay remains fun, but there just needed to be more. More bosses in the mix, more enemies to encounter, variations, deviants, something to surprise you each time you go back to it. You get something like this at the end of the game, but you have to question whether weaving it into the standard gameplay loop would’ve been better than an almost-tacked on postgame. 

As things stand, Katana Kami is the best game I’ve played this year. It being the rear end of February, that might not mean much to some, but I enjoyed my time with it more than I ever could have anticipated. Through its interesting combat, great variety of weapons and styles to experience, the combos, the counters, and even the online PvP, I enjoyed my time and was left wanting more. It’s more than worth the price of admission, and I find myself able to recommend it to any lovers of fun swordplay, dungeon crawling, or the vibe of a Mystery Dungeon game in a different form. It’s a blast. 

You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/cololight-pro-rgb-panel-lighting.1299/

I’ve always wanted what I call “fancy lights”. Not just your average light bulb, a light with flair and colour, customisation and diversity. I see these lights in my keyboards, in my mice, but I’ve never taken the plunge to get a standalone set. With offerings from Nanoleaf, Phillips, and a myriad of minor brands, I’ve put it off for one reason or another. Too expensive, too much hassle, how many GBAtemp reporters does it even take to screw in a smart light bulb? When given the chance to review Cololight, I for all intents and purposes leapt with joy, and haven’t looked back since.

The unit I received was a six panel starter kit with stone base, retailing at £79.99. In this kit, quite unsurprisingly, you get six panels, a stone base, and one control unit. They arrived in a delightful black tube and felt well-protected for the journey, none of them displaying any sign of fault after a few weeks of use. The idea when setting them up is a simple one, you attach the control unit to one of your panels, and then attach the other panels in sequence. With their hexagonal nature in mind, you can come up with some really creative configurations with only a few real limitations.

Setup is a relatively painless process. Once you’ve attached the control unit to a panel, the lights are on and you’re good to go. Tapping on the back of the unit will cycle through a few on-device configurations, but the real fun comes from making your own and the more complex features. To access these, you’ll need an Android or iOS device. Once you’ve grabbed the app from the relevant store, you make an account, sync the control unit by following a few simple instructions, and you’re set!

The app itself is an interesting affair, and perhaps where the majority of my criticism lies with the Cololight Pro. Much like the control unit, the app is loaded with a great number of pre-configured setups. From a dynamic rainbow pulse to a genuinely striking cherry blossom effect, there’s enough to keep a less adventurous user content. For those wanting more, you can go to the lab and get stuck in.

In the lab, you can design your own static or dynamic colour schemes, where a dynamic effect is a series of static frames run on a loop. Each panel is made up of 19 individual lights which can each be configured here. Instead of each light being distinct and defined, they blend together wonderfully; this is particularly nice with the app only allowing you to pick from one of 12 colours. Though a little limiting, and definitely not on the same spectrum as the Philips Hue and some of its other competitors, I never felt particularly held back. If anything, it drove me to experiment with blending to see how different lights together would look. I felt like a child again with my little set of paints, mixing them unknowing of the result. The bigger limitation to newcomers may in fact be how lights are coloured by distance from the control unit. If you connect your panels in a sequence one after another, each can have their own individual light setup. If however you attach three panels to a single one, each of those three would share the same lighting, as they’re the same distance from the control unit. Though it is simple, it takes a bit of time to get your head around it when coming up with new lighting effects.

Cololight Pro also supports some fun features that I have somewhat mixed opinions on. The most popular of these is likely the Alexa and Google Home support, letting people control their lights with their voice. It’s not something I’m personally into, but for the sake of the review I gave it a shot and, well, I just couldn’t figure out how to set it up. The Alexa app simply wouldn’t find the lights, so I gave up. I do strongly believe this is the fault of my home network, with issues like this cropping up in the past, but with that in mind I can’t really put an opinion to this either way. I can’t imagine it being more complex than “Alexa, turn the lights on”, so if you’re into that, it might be a nice feature.

What I was more interested in was the timer functionality, automatically turning the lights off and on at specified times. With the right setting, you could turn it into an incredibly fancy alarm clock. Setting this up is just as easy as setting an alarm on your phone: pick a time for them to turn on, a time for them to turn off, and which days you want to use it on. It did work, but it wasn’t perfect. For some reason, the lights turned on at 4am instead of 12pm, waking me really quite abruptly with bright rainbow lights. The device does have a time zone setting, which is set correctly, so I have no idea why it decided to run eight hours fast. Taking this into account, the timer is still perfectly functional, but it’s an issue that shouldn’t exist all the same.

With six panels and a great deal of enjoyment behind me, I was left wanting more. Six was fun, but I wanted wilder designs, more vibrant and creative configurations. So eager was I that I went out and bought ten additional panels, coming in at the low low price of £99.99. The interesting thing about having 16 panels is seeing just how far I can push them with only one control unit. Cololight themselves advertising that one unit can power roughly 20 panels, I was curious to see just how accurate this was; while not necessarily wrong, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate either.

Setting up my set of now-16 panels, they performed admirably on the default setting of 30 brightness, but what about 100, the maximum setting? Well on the maximum setting, they simply freeze. Dynamic effects stop working and the lights won’t communicate with the app until they’ve been unplugged. I’m not entirely surprised⁠—100 brightness is bright, and these lights can be powered with as little as a Switch dock’s USB port (note for testing I was using my tablet’s plug, not the Switch dock). From my various tests, I’ve found the lights run well at around 60 brightness with the full 16 connected. It’s a bit of a shame you can’t buy control units, the means of providing power, individually to support these growing setups for enthusiasts; your only choice is to buy another starter kit.

You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/arc-of-alchemist.1293/

Idea Factory are a company I love to see. Though somewhat formulaic, the games they publish appeal to a specific audience, and they know how to hit the mark. From Hyperdimension Neptunia to Moero Chronicle, I’ve enjoyed and eagerly anticipated their games. They’re by no means for everyone, but they hold a special place in my heart all the same. As with their other titles, I loosely followed Arc of Alchemist‘s PR campaign across social media, quietly looking forward to what I hoped would be another by the books Idea Factory game, unknowing of what was to come.

As openings go, Arc of Alchemist sets out as it means to go on: poorly. From so much as the introductory cutscene, you can tell you’re in for a choppy experience, and that’s putting it lightly. For me, the game falls short in three primary areas: plot, performance, and gameplay.

On the surface, the game’s plot has a great number of interesting points. You have a post-apocalyptic environment with a bit of backstory to how the planet got this way. Wars, destruction, all that good stuff. It’s incredibly standard, and as I said in the introduction, that’s not always necessarily a negative point, especially with Idea Factory games. The backstory of the world behind you, however, you’re thrown into what feels like the middle of an adventure. You join a party of adventurers in the middle of a desert, the creatively-named “Abandoned City.” Why are you there? To find the also brilliantly named “Great Power,” in hopes of reviving the world…or something. In all honesty, though uncreative, the character motivations aren’t where I find issue; it’s standard, but it can work. Where the plot leaves me wanting is in how we appear to join our party in the middle of some grand quest, not at the start. They refer to each other with titles, and sometimes ranks. Some party members are older, some are younger, but we don’t really know anything about them. Much like a standard RPG plotline, this kind of setup can work. I understand the benefits of starting a story mid-way as to jump straight into the action, but it requires effective writing to prop it up. What does Arc of Alchemist give you? Exposition, or simply nothing at all. “Ah thank you Character B, I knew I could count on you, my best friend of six years whom I grew alongside in the great caves of Brighton.” I’m being facetious, sure, but at times it really does feel forced to that degree. You see the characters work together, even sometimes with short attempts at comedic skits, but it all falls flat when you’re not invested in their personality or wellbeing. There’s a chance this improves later into the game, but I didn’t make it far in at all.

When reviewing games, I don’t always feel it necessary to play to completion. This is a divisive point among some, but to me there’s often a point where I think “yep, that’s it,” where the ideas are fully formed and the game has presented itself in a way of such consistency where I can feel confident in my opinions. With Arc of Alchemist, I didn’t get to that point, and as such, the game may improve down the line. What stopped me playing here was the performance, and I can say this isn’t something that frequently holds me back. Arc of Alchemist is nauseating, at least on the Nintendo Switch. With a framerate encroaching on that of a 2007 gif, I struggled through headaches to even play as much as I did. It’s an utterly vile experience I couldn’t recommend to another person. Having a brief look online, the PS4 version looks tolerable, but sadly that isn’t the version I have in front of me. As it is, I would say this game should have never seen a Switch release, and I say that with a heavy heart. Visually, it does a few interesting things, but I don’t see how any single technique would make the game perform so poorly. The system has had far more taxing games grace its shores and has handled them admirably. I can only hope a patch will come, but I’m not holding my breath.

Looking at the gameplay, I find myself conflicted. As an ARPG experience, it’s barebones. The combat is about as simple as it could be, but in this simplicity I do find some semblance of satisfaction. I’d compare it to the joy of playing a Warriors game, it’s mindless. Mash A for a melee combo, hit Y for a ranged attack, maybe reposition yourself in battle if you’re that way inclined. It’s fun to beat up enemies, and I feel they did a good job in the feedback you get as you do so, but that’s about it for depth. You gain experience as you win and you level up every so often, but it doesn’t feel as though the levels do anything. Where the feedback for fighting enemies is satisfying, there’s really little fanfare for level up. It’s a case of looking back at the game and thinking “huh, the number got higher.” Ultimately it fails to keep you hooked on this combat because it just feels like you’re making no progress. Alongside your standard combat, there’s some base building and character customisation via equipment loadouts possible, but I wasn’t able to experience much of this myself with how much time I spent with the game.

All in all, Arc of Alchemist is a great crater of squandered potential married with a completely unpolished user experience. What good is here is completely outshined by the game’s performance issues, resulting in something really quite unplayable. It’s a shame. I want to see more of Compile Heart on the Switch, more of Idea Factory. I want to see Neptunia grace the system, but not like this. I can only hope they look constructively on what went wrong here and use the information to ensure it never happens again. I know they’re better than this.

You can find this review in full at GBAtemp.net:
https://gbatemp.net/review/roccat-kain-200-aimo-gaming-mouse.1290/

Roccat are a brand devoted to delivering interesting and often proprietary approaches to gaming accessories. From keyboards to headsets, stands to mice, they have a great range of products each tailored to fill a niche, and please an audience. Having previously reviewed their Vulkan 120 AIMO keyboard, I know they deliver quality, albeit at a steep price. Does the Kain manage to reach the same heights?

Sleek and clean, the box puts forward a professional and high quality aesthetic. Housing the mouse itself, as well as a Micro USB cable, a wireless dongle, and a USB extension, you have everything you need to jump straight in without any unnecessary clutter. The mouse has a lovely matted feel to it, and housing its RGB lighting only in the Roccat logo and on the mouse wheel, it isn’t as in your face as other gaming mice sometimes are. Immediately though, there is a caveat: this is an exclusively right-handed mouse. Though the lefties among us can often work around mice with buttons on one side by simply forgoing them, Roccat went further in an attempt to delivery an ergonomically sound design, and while I do think they did a great job, I can’t help but feel sad for those it doesn’t cater for. Unlike the ambidextrous mice out there, the Kain features a slanted body, the left click higher than the right to assumedly support the curved nature of a resting hand. Holding it with my left hand, it feels as though my grip extends too far. I wouldn’t call it uncomfortable, but I’d say there are most certainly better experiences out there. With my right hand however, it is a joy.

The Kain has everything you’d expect of a modern gaming mouse, albeit a little light on your fun configurable buttons. You have your left and right mouse clicks, the middle wheel, the forward and back buttons on the side, and a DPI button that can be configured via Roccat’s Swarm software, but more on that later. One thing I really would like to draw attention to with the design is almost not the mouse itself, but the port for the Micro USB cable to connect. At first glance I lamented the use of Micro USB over USB C in a time where standards really are moving forwards, but on further inspection, it became less and less of an issue. This comes down to the cable Roccat decided to bundle with the mouse. Instead of a run of the mill cable, it features grooves on the end, not unlike the Vita’s charger. These slide effortlessly into the front of the mouse to give you a wireless mouse that can genuinely feel like a high quality wired mouse when desired. The cable is secure and you wouldn’t know it detaches without somebody pointing it out to you. It’s not to say you can’t just use any Micro USB cable either. As long as the end isn’t overly chunky, it’ll fit in all the same.

Looking at it from a wireless perspective, it performs admirably. To my eyes, there’s no difference between wired and wireless. It’s fantastic. Perhaps what I love most is that I can just leave the wireless dongle in one laptop, and have the mouse plugged into another. To switch between systems, all I have to do is unplug it, the mouse fully charged, and turn it on. It’s a bit of a niche setup, but one I’m grateful for all the same.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the intricacies of mice. I don’t have much in the way of a comparison for Roccat’s Owl-Eye optical sensor, but I can say even at 16000dpi it feels divine to use. Toying with a high DPI on other mice, I found the experience jittery and in general really quite difficult to get to grips with. On the Kain however, it just works. It’s smooth; really quite fast across my screen, but smooth all the same. I can make the tiniest of adjustments with an equally tiny movement, and when I want something a little slower, I can use the device’s DPI button to scale it back to a much more manageable 3000. It’s a joy, and much to my surprise, one I can appreciate without having to keep Roccat’s Swarm software installed.

To avoid confusion, Swarm is a fine piece of software for the most part. It’s about what you’d expect from a big brand, you have button configuration, lighting settings, and some of the configurable settings mentioned in the tech specs. Where I previously found fault in it was its tendency to crash when reviewing the Vulkan 120 keyboard, and when it crashed, it broke all of the keyboard’s configurable settings. No macros, frozen lights, sad times. I can say with genuine content that it is no longer the case, or at the very least, it doesn’t matter if it ends up happening. Thanks to a huge 512kb of internal storage, all your configurations are safe. You can setup your mouse how you like it, uninstall Swarm, and be on your way. If you choose to keep it installed, it doesn’t need to stay open. This step away from the ever-increasing list of background programs is a huge positive in my eyes, and one I didn’t expect to see. You can check out some screenshots below with the settings on offer.

It’s all fairly standard stuff, the most interesting in my eyes being the layered inputs. By assigning one of the buttons to Easy Shift, you can access a second layer while holding it down. It’s nothing necessarily new or groundbreaking, with Razer having something similar, and even the KLIM mouse I previously reviewed having something along the same lines, but it’s a feature I appreciate all the same. I managed to create the same setup I had with my old mouse with very little effort.

When it comes to battery life, the Kain advertises around 39 hours of charge, at least according to its page in Swarm. Though I haven’t used it wirelessly for 39 hours straight, my setup of having it plugged in half the time largely keeping it on full charge, this number doesn’t surprise me. I used it as a media controller as I marathoned series, and even forgetting to turn it off while the episodes were playing, it remained steadfast. With automatic standby functionality, as well as a low power mode that triggers upon reaching a configurable percentage of charge, Roccat definitely went beyond when considering how to get the most out of its wireless nature.

All in all, the Kain 200 AIMO is a great mouse. Functional both wired and without, it is responsive, customisable, and doesn’t need software installed and running to get the most out of it. At £90, it might not be for everybody, but I am happy to see the Kain 120 AIMO retailing at £63 for those who don’t need the wireless capabilities on offer. From what I can see, it’s functionally identical, but without one at hand I can’t say much more on it. If you have the cash to splash, be sure to check this out.