Grime II

Review by [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34633003-Gaming-Masterpieces/lists/] Gaming Masterpieces [/url] - The greatest games of all time on Steam. Is this game a masterpiece? Well, it certainly comes close. Gory, gritty, and brutal—in other words, totally entertaining. At least that’s what the new Metroidvania promises, if it follows in the footsteps of its excellent predecessor. Great news for me—one of my absolute favorite games of recent years—the 2021 Metroidvania GRIME—has gotten a sequel. GRIME was too gross for some of my friends, but I was hooked. Killing enemies and absorbing their powers was just brilliant, and that’s exactly where the sequel picks up. GRIME II builds on the first game and transports us back to the same surreal world where we can once again dismember and assimilate enemies. The 2D Metroidvania gameplay remains intact, though the graphics look a bit better this time around. We crawl into the world as if from the primordial soup—a world full of disgusting creatures and slimy puddles. We ourselves actually look relatively human—a muscular body, a head without recognizable features. Very quickly, we also have our first weapon in hand, a sort of axe. We can jump, dash, parry, and strike (especially hard) right from the start as we roam the world in search of prey. We don’t just kill our opponents; we also learn from them and extract body parts that we can use ourselves to gain special attacks—as soon as we’ve assimilated enough enemies of a certain type. We also absorb their breath, which we can use to heal ourselves. The creatures roaming around are surreal—hands in the ground, spiky creatures with legs, fingers with legs—but soon we’ll also encounter beings we can communicate with and, of course, boss enemies that make life difficult for us with multiple phases. GRIME II offers the standard features of a Metroidvania—such as an automatically generated map. As a special feature, your most recent path is always marked with dots on the map—this is incredibly helpful for navigation. This makes the genre-standard backtracking (returning to previously visited locations because you’ve since learned new movement abilities) a little easier. An inventory lets us switch armor and equip various weapons; in the character overview, we can see our current stats and abilities as well as the loot we’ve collected so far. If we die, we’re reset to the last save point. There aren’t different difficulty levels, but you can increase or decrease the damage taken/dealt—though doing so will prevent you from earning achievements. Gamepads are, of course, supported. GRIME II runs pretty well on my Lenovo Legion S handheld—but only after I significantly reduced the graphics quality. With high texture and shadow quality, the device struggles and the graphics stutter. But if you turn the quality down, it runs smoothly—and still looks damn good. [u][b] Conclusion:[/b][/u] GRIME II is a brutal action RPG set in a surreal world. And it’s good—damn good. Unfortunately, it’s also merciless—not for the faint of heart. Kill enemies with living weapons and devour their remains to strengthen yourself. The world is disgusting and brutal—fans of saccharine Disney graphics should play something else. But if you like challenging Metroidvanias with a focus on melee combat, you’ll love GRIME II. Great graphics, gameplay, and epic boss battles leave no room for criticism—highly recommended!

I will start this review off with an important statement: I VERY rarely write reviews for games. Grime 2 is honestly an under rated masterpiece. I am a huge fan of metroidvania games in general. I wouldn't completely compare this to a game like Hollow Knight or Silksong, but honestly it is VERY close to them. When you think of games in this genre, it is somewhat common for them to be uninspired, bland, or just copies of other titles. This is ABSOLUTELY not the case with Grime II. It has some of the most creative things I have seen compared to most other games in this field. I'll break down some things that really stood out to me (I will also include some negatives at the end). The World - Holy beautiful. There is so much variety in this game's world. There are quirky and fun characters, cute little guys you run into, amazing enemy diversity, beautiful scenery, vastly different design in the zones, many biomes to explore, fantastic connection between the world, and a fantastic sense of exploration. There was clearly a ton of love poured into this world that has been built for us to explore. The combat/movement/abilities - I won't go into any spoilers, but man, this game just does it differently. So many metroidvanias have done the same thing... "double jump, dash, wall jump" and it's not a horrible thing to have basic movement and abilities like that (they just work well), but there is something special about games that stray from the norm. Grime steps out of the norm with it's movement abilities in a pretty big way. This ties into how well the exploration feels with extremly satisfying platforming and exploration. Lacking a double jump and other movement also really allows combat to shine focusing on the grapple mechanic and parrying. I could say a lot more, but again, don't wanna soil stuff too much. Fantastic creativity from Clover Bite. The story - I'm not gonna say it's the best story in the world, and is slightly on the vague side (like many stories especially in this genre). I find myself not caring about the world and story in many games, but this game's atmosphere and characters really pulled me in. It starts off quite strong, and gives you a pleasant sense of mystery and intrigue. As stated before, the characters in this game are heavily varied. It was a cool mix of quirky, cute, dark, mysterious, and spooky vibes all mixed into one experience. THE NEGATIVES - not much honestly. There are a few wonky things such as the map not being perfect, some weird collision issues when platforming/respawning in weird spots, and animations not being perfect. Ultimately, the game starts off a little slow, and seems pretty basic if im being completely honest. Nothing is bad, but my experience with the game just got better and better. Everything mentioned above continued to grow, improve, and expand far past what I expected. If you get this game, and find yourself not super engaged at the start, I HEAVILY implore you to continue. The payoff is most definitely worth it. Thank you SO much to Clover Bite for making such a wonderful and passion filled project. If you are reading this, please for the love of god buy and play Grime.

Loved it. Excellent metroidvania, with top tier world- and enemy designs, pretty unique platforming, great exploration, bosses with spectacle and slower paced, hard hitting combat. Not everything hits 100%, the enemy mold system is pretty easy to ignore as you just hit enemies with a stick and some of the writing is so-so. It also has decent amount of jank. Some animation bugs, weird collision boxes, camera is often misaligned with platforming, the fog of war in map screen sometimes has a life of its own (randomly spoils secret paths for you and sometimes refuses to update even after finding it). Even with its faults, its an easy recommendation for people who like slightly lower paced, exploration heavy metroidvania with unique style and punishing combat.