Nick Mangiaracina's Reviews
Offering an incredibly fun story, lovely characters that will stick with you, a timeless art style, and a vast open world that will suck in hours of your time. Sand Land made its mark on my year and you should make room for it to make a mark on yours.
To say I’m surprised by how much I’ve been enjoying Hundred Heroes is an understatement. Truly, I cannot wait to not only finish this game. I’m also really hoping the passing of the great Yoshitaka Murayama doesn’t slow Rabbit & Bear Studios down because I would really love to see more RPGs in this vein.
A stunning visual feast for the eyes that managed to create a fun and challenging set of gameplay rules that carried me through to the end in a few days.
It wasn’t a gripping experience, I wasn’t enthralled playing Open Roads, but it succeeded in what it attempted narratively and gave me a pretty satisfying conclusion and truly, that’s all I could ask for. Open Roads may not be an exciting experience for all but it was for me and I’m pretty satisfied with it.
Hot off of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, I was hoping for something a little more narratively deep but even with the story’s simplicity, I really enjoyed my time. More importantly, there’s a new strategy RPG on the market, and one that’s approachable enough to bring in new fans to the genre to hopefully bolster it. Unicorn Overlord does so much right, I feel grateful for having experienced it.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden surprised me with its combat and gameplay but kept me interested throughout with its compelling narrative of love, loss, and sacrifice.
A surprisingly fun and competent genre-bend from Pixpil that's a must play for fans of Eastward.
With fun turn-based combat, enough strategy development and random elements outside of combat, and a decent primary objective, Dicefolk refines an existing genre to make something both unique and recognizable. Dicefolk isn’t just for genre fans, it’s a very enjoyable game all around, especially if you dig turn-based combat.
Games should exist and designers should always make games but Gordian Quest offers nothing new and does nothing exceptionally well.
Though not without issues, I think Silent Hope is a good game at its core and is hopefully a jumping off point for more games like this from Marvelous in the future.
Goodbye Volcano High tells the tale of eight high school students living out what's possibly the end of their existence and determining what is important to them as they face the end.
The pillars holding up Eternights; Narrative, Combat, and Characters, have lots of cracks and didn’t take long to start crumbling. As impressive as it is that this game was made with such a small team, I can’t recommend this game.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood broke me by the end, I was in tears, and I’d encourage you to let it break you too.
LISA: Definitive Edition takes all the good and bad of the original game, improves on it, and makes it more accessible for a new generation of people to experience.
Darkest Dungeon 2 brilliant, stunning, and an absolute blast to play, an exceptional evolution from the first game.
Atelier Ryza 3: Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key offers so much and is really the ultimate game in the Ryza series. It just wasn’t for me.
Tchia ended up becoming a frustrating and boring mess of a game.
There’s a fine balance struck in The Last Spell between Tactical RPG and roguelike. I think Ishtar Games did an excellent job adapting the genre to a roguelike. Initially hesitant at first, The Last Spell won me over with its fast paced battles, hero customization, and light town-management gameplay.
Interconnected stories between games are always going to be fun to me. Anyone who enjoyed Backbone will most assuredly love the world being explored in Tails. I hope they continue this trend because Eggnut has created a very interesting world to explore.
I can’t think of a game in the genre I’d recommend more right now than Fashion Police Squad.