[Addendum: I'll leave this review as it is, with its many edits, as a sort of chronicle of my journey with this game. TL;DR I kinda love the crap out of it now.]

This is clearly one of those secret galaxy-brain games with really purposeful controls & mechanics that most people will find "clunky" (it's not like these devs haven't made plenty of games with more traditionally "good"/self-explanatory controls in the past) but I'm not smart enough to get the full extent of its design & what you can do in it. I can tell the jumping controls are like that for a reason & the very unique combat would likely feel immensely worse with a more traditional jump. I can tell the slow weapon-switching is meant to encourage clever planning & routing, and that the order in which you're handed weapons is very important - it's not just about hoarding them & quickly switching to whatever fits the given situation best. As of now though, I'm pretty terrible at this game & I feel like I'm missing a bunch. Still having a great time however and I'm sure once it clicks it'll click hard.

Edit: Yeah it's not really a "click" as much as a steady learning process, everything making more & more sense with each step. There's a lot of strategizing after memorizing the levels & this game's a very replayable, mastery-based affair. I respect the devs for making design choices most people are going to find "cumbersome" for the sake of more thoughtful & unique gameplay. The controls become second nature the more you play & make for a pretty unique feeling.

Edit 3: 1CCed Normal, reached the final stage on Hard. Any lingering misgivings I may have had about the design are gone. I guess some might take issue with how the jumping mechanics jive with the platforming, but they were mainly designed for the high-commitment combat and the jump extend (down + jump in midair, tap for more distance) immensely helps with non-combat jumping. Beyond that, I have no issues with the item system; having to go out of your way to avoid touching items you don't need to not mess up your inventory might bother people, but it's still something that's within your control and easy to deal with after multiple playthroughs with properly strategized routing. You won't have to kill yourself to avoid a crappy item a la Ghosts n' Goblins/Ghouls n' Ghosts.

this game isn't like skibidi toilet

*del tha funkee homosapien voice* what is a woman and how will i know if i'm raping it

Fun and charming game, bonus points for the protagonist dishing out Offspring references. I might write a more elaborate and analytical review later, but as of now I'm just glad they reversed the censorship.

A very fun game; simpler and more accessible than the truly arcade-style run & gun shooters and shoot-em-ups, but still quite challenging if you want to get good ranks. The art style is a near-perfectly accurate adaptation of 30s rubber-hose animations, bringing back the aesthetic appeal of the musically-driven Flesicher and Disney cartoons of old. Which brings me to my most important point... where is all the racism? From my earliest introduction to classic black-and-white animation as a wee lad, the seminal "Popeye The Sailor with Betty Boop" (1933), even my prepubescent brain could easily grasp the thematic importance of Popeye using a lovingly blackface-rendered Person of Color as target practice at the fun fair. It's not a real 30s cartoon if you don't get to rock and sock a few Africans or Native Americans and I am frankly flabbergasted that, for all of their high-level understanding of the medium and history of animation, Studio Moldenhauer could make such a flagrant slip-up.

Quake is, obviously, a good game; a downgrade from the unfettered design genius of Doom 1 and 2, practically the Super Mario Bros 1 & 3 of old-school first person shooters, but what it lacks in perfectly timeless enemy & level design it makes up for in sheer atmosphere; whereas the atmosphere of Doom was an over-the-top heavy metal song, Quake is a dark, atmospheric and moody Nine Inch Nails album... quite literally; the soundtrack was, after all, made by Nine Inch Nails. These kinds of unique artistic statements are what indie devs behind such obnoxious "retro-style" FPS games as Strafe and "GUN GODZ" (all-caps, for extra zaniness!); games which replicate only the dated blockiness of the graphics for vapid "such a geek" ironic appeal.

So why am I downvoting this? Well, putting it simply, this version offers far less content than the fan-made QuakeSpasm engine; the latter makes the enemy animations more fluid, offers more control options and, above all else, actually allows you to hear the iconic NIN soundtrack assuming you have the audio files on your computer. Not only does it offer less options overall, the Steam version failed to include one of the most important and memorable aspects of the game - because iD Software/Bethesda are just really, really poor and can't afford to license the soundtrack again, I guess? Regardless, I'm not paying for what is clearly an inferior product compared to what I can get with an ancient copy of the game run through a fan-made program, so I'll return this as soon as this review is posted.

The only issue I could personally find with QuakeSpasm was that, by default, the engine smudged up the textures into a disgusting mess; you can fix this by simply typing GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR into the console (`/~ key, or creating an autoexec.cfg file containing that exact command and placing it in the iD1 folder (or the main game folder, not sure)).

Yes, I HAVE had a bad day today, why do you ask.

I feared this game would be a impenetrable given the rather niche & very nerdy target audience of French Bread doujin games, but it's actually quite friendly for a fighting game casual baby such as myself. I'm someone who's only ever played Street Fighter semi-seriously nearly a decade ago, and who enjoys King of Fighters despite being pathetically awful at it, yet I found it quite easy to jump in. The more unique mechanical aspects of this game, such as the GRD bar that assigns mid-battle power-ups to players based on combat performance, don't create a huge inaccessibility wall - they're a "simple to understand, hard to master" kind of thing. GRD even works in conjunction with the normal special bars present in most other fighters, adding an extra layer of strategy. There is far less to take in before you can properly get started when compared to something like King of Fighters, with its many dashes and dodges; it's more akin to Street Fighter in that regard and it should be easier to get your normie friends to play.

Sadly, the lack of an in-game tutorial is definitely a flaw, especially since the online video tutorial is Japanese-only and the fan-made translation is not perfect, along with the tutorial itself leaving some thinsg out. Nonetheless, it's the best you have. Since I still recommend this game despite this glaring flaw, I will instruct you on how to get the best out of said tutorial. Simply search "Under Night In-Birth Exe Late: Basic System & Mechanics Tutorial" on Youtube and watch both videos while keeping these things in mind: "blocking hitstun" is a strange choice of words, as it simply means "in the process of being attacked while blocking". The numbered inputs such as "1/4/7" refer to numpad directions, so simply look at the right side of your keyboard. KD simply means "knockdown". "Tech" means escaping from a combo by pressing A, B or C and a direction. Force function is B+C.

Netplay is hit-or-miss. Sometimes you'll easily find people to play with, sometimes not so much. I recommend finding at least one friend willing to play with you regularly before buying. Though to be fair, there is still an aspect of online competition even when playing against the computer - in the form of time attack mode, survival mode and whatnot.

Visually, the game's definitely more good than bad. Some of the character designs have a sort of visual novel blandness to them, lacking the unique appeal of the super-iconically designed Capcom & SNK fighters (or at least strong influences; Street Fighter borrowed a lot from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure after all), but they're definitely not tasteless and the stand-out characters are super appealing; my favorites by far being Merkava, an Evangelion Unit 01-like monstrosity with shape-shifting powers and fittingly beastly attacks and animations, and the obviously Cyborg 009-influenced Akatsuki, cameo-ing from the game Akatsuki Blitzkrampf. The animations, though, are where the game shines from a visual perspective. They might not be as mind-blowing as the stuff you'll find in games like Darkstalkers or Garou: Mark of the Wolves, but they're still quite impressive. Even looking at Merkava's idle animations should be enough, with his hyper-fluid and organic breathing animation and his ethereal flowing hair both resembling something out of an anime with particularly high production values.

The Infinite Worth animations are suitably over the top, yet they go beyond mere serviceability with a really cool detail that goes a long way; they are punctuated with brief, snappy, yet fully-animated sequences taking up the entire screen vertically. It's a great way of adding cinematic flair to a game without sacrificing gameplay.

The music hasn't hugely grabbed me, but it definitely adds to the overall cool feeling of the experience.

Overall a fun game, well worth the 7,27€ I paid for it. If you're not reading this review during a sale, then just give it a shot and see if you like it.