The least worse non-discord fighter at the moment.
Yea 66L and BC are kinda dumb, but it's far less offensive than what you can find in other modern fighters. Besides those 2, it's a good lazy-friendly fighting game centered around fundamentals.
It's nothing deep, it's not a complex game that requires ton of labbing or training, if you know how to play fighting games you'll be competent in 5min, and honestly that's for the best.
Technically the game is very competent, online is top notch, it's pretty, no issue with controllers or remapping, functional training mode and lobbies, ...
Only issue I have with it is the price of the dlcs/season pass and the in-game shop, but once you are settled on a character it doesn't matter.

Early positive review just so that this game get a chance to be picked up by steam's algorithm
This is an interesting game, but you should not expect to approach it like a traditional bullet hell shooter (in fact, there's no shooting in this game).

The most satisfying part of the game is learning how to move around in my opinion, as you need to control 2 hurtboxes with deep controls and possibilities.

Now let's talk about why it shouldn't be approached like traditional bullet hells. So first for context, the game will go through pre-defined patterns screens/scenes in a somewhat random order. Each pattern scene is named, and have seemingly completely fixed patterns (bullet spreads will always have the exact same positions (non rotated on bosses, rotated for stages); furthermore, stage patterns will have green bullets that you need to collect if you want a good score (and/or to refill your life gauge). Due to the play area being circle and patterns coming from any direction, and eventual patterns spawning from the center and forming many virtual walls, there's no general value difference between different areas of the screen. Since there's no ennemies to kill you have to deal with all the bullets coming up, most bullets are crazy fast with many unreactable patterns, and the green bullet collection for score will force you to go through a specific path; these systems allow for no "on-the-fly" player adaptation nor decision making. There's also no resource management and survival (in arcade/green mode) doesn't rely much and how many lives you've lost on previous screens/stages as it refills between screens.
If while discovering the game and its patterns you can attempt to bruteforce through it using your gaming sense, long-term (if you want to aim for a 1cc or for clearing the harder modes) it's a game that will make you focus on 2 things: routing and memorization.

This may sound scary and/or repetitive but it isn't actually! This just means that the preparation is more important than the rest, and that the difference between a good and a bad player is strategy and knowledge. You can see each screen as a little puzzle with a guaranteed optimal solution intended by the dev, once solved these impressive boss patterns can be consistently dealt with after training.

One game mode (red one, forgot the name) makes you go through harder versions of the patterns in the other 2 game modes, but have a save progression and only requires you to go through each pattern once. So if you don't like the idea of training for full game sessions, this is a bit more of a Kaizo-style game mode where you deal with crazy patterns in succession and can forget about it.

Anyway, the game have a demo anyway so you should stop reading my nonsense, just try it, and if you like it, it's super cheap to get.

Run away from this game if you value your free time, because this game will take it all!
I don't write reviews that often, but by writing this I'm hoping that people in my friendlist eventually see it and that it can convince them to try the game, because it's that great.

So far I've went through journey mode in hard difficulty, did all missions, and played a bit of multiplayer with a friend. I didn't do survival mode or much ranked mode yet (due to server issues atm)
It's the first Lumines game I'm playing, so the game's systems were entirely new to me; so because of that the game was more interesting/fun to play (expecially through journey mode) than tetris effect (made by the same devs).
Tetris effect is great, but modern tetris isn't all that engaging especially if you are familiar with it.
Lumines is more niche, and you are more likely to not be proficient at it, this means you'll care more when you go through it! In terms of survival and scoring it's also a lot more engaging.

Unlike tetris and other puzzlers, the main gameplay loop requires you to be synchronized with a timeline that will only periodically allow you to erase blocks; which means that to improve, you'll hit a ceiling much closer if you only focus on pure speed; the bonus/chain system also forces you to do lots of risk/rewards decisions that involves waiting/delaying for the next period.
Surviving is both more engaging and harder than in similar games (assuming no gimmicks are applied) due to this synchronization mechanic as well, because difficulty can be created from the usual faster dropping speed, but also by changing the variations/speed of this timeline; so you'll have to constantly adapt.
This game, similar to tetris effect, also have a meter-based mechanic that allows you to stop time in order to either save yourself from mistakes; it feels good to use, though I'm unsure if the gimmick work that well for single player/scoring; however it makes a lot of sense for multiplayer (allows for multiple micro-interactions between players).

Game mechanics overthinking aside, this game have a lot offer regardless of if you want to play it casually or deep dive into it.
The journey mode lets you go through various levels with their own visual show and dedicated songs, imo this game is one of the most visually impressive games out there. Overall I felt the game as more emotional than tetris effect from visuals/audio, both because the visuals improved a lot, but also because (I think?) the music and lyrics were not trying as hard to be spiritual and felt more human.
The tutorial is actually great and respects your intelligence! You have 2-3 lessons about the base game mechanics, and then it gives you ~50 puzzles to solve, not giving you cues and just expecting you to figure it out yourself.
Mission mode is where the "main dish" is if you are looking for hard single player challenges (especially if you aim for S ranks), you get the main gameplay loop with extra gimmicks, such as unusual blocks patterns, restricted play areas, invisible pieces, ... It manages to renew challenges surprisingly well, to the point that for some of them I actually laughed when I understood what they were going for (adding a new color to the game, making you draw numbers, ...)
Multiplayer only have a versus mode for now, it however makes a lot of sense especially with the burst mechanic explained earlier (you'll react to it mostly as a race, and then you fall behind you have malicious options to attempt, such as activating it earlier if you think the other player would be in a bad position to build a big burst once you are done). Netcode between players is rock solid, however servers are having issues with matchmaking at the moment, probably due to overload during release period (?)
Some single player modes (unsure how they are called english, time attack?) are hidden in the multiplayer lobby by the way.

Minor gripe: most of the avatar/profile elements needs to be unlocked via a gacha and grinding, I know why it's there; but it's annoying.

Major gripes: there's no "endless" mode (playing in the same environment for as long as you want) or a training mode that allows you to control the fall speed and timeline for labbing; I also feel like some of the gimmicks of the mission mode (hiding current piece, 3-colors, auto/rhythmic fall, ...) could be options of the playlist (freeplay) mode as it could allow to make your own little fun training.
And finally the most important problem in this game: there's currently no way to buy the soundtrack and listen to it outside the game!

Anyway, regardless if only for the visual show or for actually diving deep into the game's systems, there's probably something you can find in this game.

It's not something to recommend in its current state.

I'm new to the everybody's golf series, so I don't know if that's something usual in the series (and frankly I don't care), but too much of the content of the game is hidden behind grinding.


There's also a lot of minor annoyances i'm having, such as characters yelling "TAKE THE SHOT" if you take more than 10s to play, weird aliasing in the menus (???), some weird blurring options being on by default, ...
Graphically it's not too impressive, which is fine, however i don't know if I have just bad eyes but I'm struggling a lot to see the direction of the horizontal slope in the putting section. I also heard from friends that the online mode is half-functional, but didn't test it myself yet; there's lot of people having performance issues as well.

Besides those gripes, the core gameplay is fun and i'll try to play it regularly in short sessions, but please don't give money to bamco until they fix at least some of these issues

EDIT: The putting section about horizontal slopes is on me, did not understand that the dots on the grid was indicating that as I was trying to look at the terrain itself, only remembered the parts about colors from the tutorial

Slower paced shmup/bullet hell with some dense patterns and very unique levels.
A very clean and memorable game both due to its presentation and mechanics, personally not too motivated atm to attempt a 1cc; but learning the levels with limited lives was already a great experience