Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival is a fantastic rhythm game that is now available on all platforms. It offers a nice selection of songs in different genres, feels great when played and is very colorful and weird. Using a virtual city as a menu isn’t great and not being able to just play and get all the experience points to level up feels bad. But it’s still a fantastic title that looks and sounds amazing.
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Only after a few hours of play and probably unsuccessful runs through the Black Iron Prison does "[Redacted]" really begin. These first hours are tough and often even quite boring as you constantly expand your arsenal of weapons and improve your stats. If you make it over this barrier, you get a solid twin-stick shooter in a fun roguelite package. Unfortunately, the melee combat doesn't feel good at all. "[Redacted]" is not a new star in the sky for the genre and would work as well as it does in the end even without the relationship to "The Callisto Protocol". If you need more in a fairly saturated genre, you might make a much worse choice than with "[Redacted]".
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In some regards Slitterhead is fantastic. It offers an engaging story told through the perspective of several characters, a simple yet fun combat system that excels through the ability to possess different people at any moment and super cool monster design in the Slitterheads. Unfortunately a lot of the other aspects feel very underbaked. Stealth isn’t engaging at all and sometimes kills all the momentum the game had going, the controls are always snappy enough for what you want to do and some aspects of the presentation feel very oldschool. As a package the game is a lot of fun though and offers a glimpse into what the developers at Bokeh Game Studio are able to do in the future. That is certainly bright and hopefully brings more somewhat unique titles like Slitterhead certainly is.
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New World: Aeternum is a good MMO addition for console players. The combat works great with a controller even though that leaves it with a relatively low number of usable skills per weapon. Being class agnostic makes it so you can do whatever you want whenever you want. It also means that everything can just be overwhelming cause you are constantly leveling up different jobs, weapons, regions and even your own house. While the PVE side plays it relatively safe and almost boring New World offers a fascinatingly deep PVP aspect that you can really dig into.
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With a length of about four hours, "Speedollama" is short, but still stretches its time. The core gameplay is entertaining and feels good apart from the wall jumps, but there is simply a lack of variety. Especially the coolly designed boss fights seem particularly lame. Nevertheless, it's definitely harder to invest your money if you're in the mood for an old-school run-and-gun shooter.
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If you liked Dead Rising then you will love Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. It’s still just as much fun to take out hordes of zombies using a stack of CDs, a giant parasol or various gardening tools. Compared to the original “Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster” is a much smoother and painless experience. This might be a problem for the people who already adore that game. For everybody else it makes it simply much more enjoyable. While the auto-save can be largely ignored if you want, there is no way around having a much easier time while taking calls from Otis or using guns. Being able to save and skip time in the bonus mode on the other is probably something that everybody will be happy about.
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Gory: Cuddly Carnage is cute and a bloody good time. It’s a fast and brutal 3rd-Person action game that excels in its fight and high speed chases. Unfortunately the camera is often fighting against the player which makes some of the later fights exhausting as well as precision platforming unnecessarily difficult. Gori is a lovable protagonist though and thanks to the fast paced levels it won’t get boring despite its technical issues.
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The design, the creatures, Ava herself and the story are imaginative, profound, beautiful and thought-provoking. In the first few hours of the game, it is incredibly fun to discover new animals, tame them and save them. This part is loosened up by shallow puzzles and a few jumping passages. However, this feeling quickly wears off and it feels more like you just have to tick off a few mission objectives in a game. The combat system is not very entertaining due to the camera and variety is only written in capital letters in terms of environment and design. "Creatures of Ava" can entertain for a few hours and having a game without violence and instead a nice message is definitely very desirable.
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As an overall package “Dustborn” is an absolute delight. Believable and lovable characters are combined with an intriguing story and a wild mix of gameplay variation. While the combat is mediocre and gets stale quick, the variety of little vignettes is outstanding. The voice acting is stellar and the music might be more Pop-Punk than Punk-Rock which doesn’t make it any less awesome.
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As a package Super Woden GP II is an absolute love letter to the last three decades of racing games. It offers smooth and fun racing as well as a ton of tracks and cars. It is old-school by design, with all its pros and cons. Thankfully the gameplay is as good as it is because the menus are frankly a bit of a mess and the AI of the other drivers is stubborn and destructive. Yet it is a great racing game for a low price from a clearly talented developer that loves the genre, warts and all.
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Being a simplistic game doesn’t mean that “One Btn Bosses” is boring and simple. It has a surprising amount of depth and can offer an enormous amount of replayability if you’re into chasing highscores or the roguelike-mode. The campaign is a fantastic tutorial but the story and the presentation of it are rather lacking. It plays fantastic on a Handheld-PC and can offer fun for hours and hours if you’re willing to dive into the additional challenges of beating the five floors of R&D.
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Fate Seeker II is simply overwhelming in most aspects. With 20 fighting styles that each sport an enormous amount of attacks and combos, a plethora of side activities and a main story with more important characters than I could count it is just a lot. But a lot of this works surprisingly well despite all of this. The puzzles and investigations are especially great as is the main story and its cast once you start to see how everything and everyone is connected in one way or another. Unfortunately the combat itself is mostly dull, the English translation feels a bit shoddy and the technical aspects are middling at best. And yet it is an oddly compelling title that offers an interesting look at a different type of game from China.
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Dungeons of Hinterberg' combines three genres into a lovely package. The smart and varied puzzles are very entertaining without ever getting too complex or samey. The action-RPG is very solid but the unwieldy camera and rather boring gear system make it an uneven and only sometimes uninteresting aspect of the game. The social-sim isn’t very deep but makes that up very easily with a super charming and well written cast of characters. If somebody is into all of these things then Dungeons of Hinterberg is a very easy recommendation because it combines them with a good anti-capitalistic story, pretty visuals and a very soothing soundtrack.
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The core mechanics with the backpack are ingenious. It's not unique, and there are now several games with similar mechanics, but it remains fantastic. Packing your backpack as skillfully as possible and creating a deadly build for your character is fascinating over and over again. Unfortunately, most of the other aspects of "Backpack Hero" are mediocre at best. The story is boring and becomes almost unbearable due to a miserable font. The construction of Haversack Hill is confusing and unnecessarily complicated. The fights sometimes lack balance, which is why you are quickly too strong or too weak. In addition, the menu control with controller and virtual mouse cursor is neither pleasant nor intuitive. Nevertheless, the core mechanics manage to entice you again and again with another run and have fun with it.
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With "The Final Form", Destiny developer Bungie is taking no risks and presenting an expansion that builds on the strengths of "Destiny 2". Awesome gameplay with gun and space magic that feels as fresh as it can be after more than 6 and 10 years respectively due to a new focus and a new race of enemies. If you like this gameplay or story, you get a fantastic conclusion to the first saga of the universe. Even though the game is slowly showing its age more and more, it is still a lot of fun and if you only want to get involved in the game once a year and don't feel like the live content, you should not miss this expansion.
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Both the jokes and puns as well as most of the puzzles can be enjoyed by people of almost all ages. Duck Detective: The Secret Salami offers a short narrative that doesn’t overstay its welcome and is for the most part very engaging for two to three hours. The English voicecast is fantastic but with the text only being available in English as well it’s unfortunately not accessible all around the world.
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xDefiant presents itself as a very strong foundation of a game that is supposed to last for all the content to come and hopefully many years. It is currently plagued by some technical issues that can cause severe frustration but the developers are already aware of those problems so they will hopefully be fixed in time. The gunplay is more than solid and the base experience is fun and thrilling.
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Hauntii is certainly stunningly gorgeous and can make you feel incredibly smart whenever you find and solve one of its many puzzles. Unfortunately the game demands you to find and solve almost all of those puzzles which isn’t always easy to do. The map doesn’t offer a lot of help and it can lead to pointless and frustrating roaming around. The slower Twinstick-Shooter gameplay on the other hand is not too challenging but offers somewhat relaxing action moments.
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The developers at Odd Studio have brought a daring project to the market with "Indika", which is difficult to classify. This review can be reduced to the following: you have to have played "Indika" to really judge it. Despite the rather dull gameplay, which is sometimes even boring, I had a fantastic time. This is due to brilliant performances by the main characters, an interesting and philosophical story, as well as the studio's daring approach to voice acting, soundtrack and art styles. With a playing time of maybe about four hours, you can quickly get to the credits, but you have spent the time with a title that may not let you go so quickly.
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