Adrian Cozmuta's Reviews
Throne and Liberty impresses with its scope, guild-focus, presentation, technical ability, and potential to become an MMO worthy of your time. However, it is also rough around the edges due to its safe story and combat, intimidating UI, and a plethora of bugs at launch.
Capes has several good ideas that it grapples with, although its potential is not fully realized. The title impresses through its solid tactical combat, compelling characters backed up by mission-based characterization, challenging action that will make you think, and a stable performance on the Switch.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a great game hindered by the outdated hardware it fights against. Saber has done its best to port the title on the Switch and maintain a serviceable graphical fidelity. While Kingdom Come features a unique story, setting, and believable characters, it is wrapped within a mixed technical presentation that will be sure to test your patience.
System Shock has been lovingly restored in this authentic remake. The game impresses through its environmental storytelling, challenging gameplay, great presentation, and stable PS5 performance. Nonetheless, the game suffers from outdated gameplay mechanics, stiff controls, awkward UI, and an unbalanced difficulty. These limitations are mostly a by-product of staying faithful to the original game.
Casper Croes and company deliver a great throwback with Alisa through its campy story, low-polygon presentation, exceptionally eerie original score, and retro gameplay. However, its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. That’s because the gameplay jankiness is still present for accuracy reasons, alongside several smaller challenges, including disorienting fixed camera angles, iffy auto-aim implementation, and a reliance on accepting a campy story.
Hidden Through Time 2 is not your typical game. It is often easy to dismiss the unconventional as unworthy of attention. I’m happy to say that this nifty hidden object puzzler grabbed hold of me with its quirky and charming presentation and made me stay for its accessible and addictive gameplay loop. This sequel improves upon its predecessor in every possible way. While the very light campaign story, small optimization issues, and the lack of DualSense implementation detract from the overall presentation, it is not enough to affect my enjoyment of the game.
In many ways, Bear and Breakfast reminded me that taking it slow in a game is absolutely fine and even encouraged for exploration and world building. Nonetheless, it has some limitations, including the lack of quality-of-life features, the absence of an item sale system, curtailed player choices, and the lack of DualSense features.
Spider-Man 2 is great fun — a very concise package of technically exceptional set pieces webbed together by compelling characters dealing with friendship, loss, and trauma. The story, however, is unevenly paced with a short and quick tail-end, leaving players asking for more.
Little Kitty, Big City is not a perfect game by any means, but it just may be the right amount of purrrfect given the heart and love that it exudes. Kitty is a great game that shines due to its wonderful sense of exploration, charming art style and presentation, addictive and mischievous adventures, and generally polished Switch technical implementation. However, the light story and abrupt ending, often challenging camera, sometime imprecise jump controls, and lack of multiple save slots per playthrough detract from this enjoyment.
Magical Delicacy carves itself a niche place in the cozy game market. It stands out from the crowd by its mix of Metroidvania platforming and cooking mechanics. The title is a delightful offering of cozy exploration, resource gathering, and hands-on cooking. Magical Delicacy impresses through its pixel art style, town exploration, hands-on crafting mechanics, soundtrack, and accessibility. Nonetheless, the sluggish platformer mechanics, a slow and often confusing story progression, and cumbersome cooking and delivery UI slightly affect this enjoyment.
Promenade is a surprise hit of early 2024. I hope it will be on the radar of many as it deserves so given its gameplay diversity, great level design, inventive puzzles, supremely charming presentation, outstanding soundtrack, and great technical Switch implementation. A light story and character development alongside several small technical mishaps do little to challenge this otherwise outstanding childhood fantasy.
Relink impresses with its fun, addictive, accessible, and diverse character combat, tightly paced story, lovable characters, and beautiful presentation. Several aspects detract from this experience, including the surface-level complexity of the hub, side mission, and exploration system, the simplicity of the Mastery Points system, and some technical challenges like the lack of online quest cross-play between PC and consoles, frustrating lock-on targeting camera, and the PS5 Performance graphics mode resolution.