Throw in the superior character portraits, art, and musical score and Mercenaries Blaze represents a confident step forward. Of course, it’s not of the standard of a Fire Emblem, Disgaea or God Wars, but for people that enjoy the core gameplay loop of the tactics JRPG – and it is a very compelling one – Mercenaries Blaze is a lean and effective example of it.
SEGA snookered itself a little with the original Puyo Puyo Tetris. The reality is that that game was so perfectly complete that whatever came next was going to feel slightly diminished because its core strength - the ingenious ability to combine two very different puzzlers in a cohesive manner - was no longer new and exciting. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 does everything that original game did. It's every bit as charming, entertaining, and downright fun. The problem is, it doesn't have the same impact now, and if there is going to be a Puyo Puyo Tetris 3, the development team is going to need to come up with a new trick, else the prestige of the oddball crossover is going to start to fade.
The reality is that at this point Dragon Quest XI is an older release, and Dragon Quest XI S: Definitive Edition is itself not really that new. I have no idea what percentage of prospective Dragon Quest fans have somehow avoided playing this yet, but I imagine it's a now a very small number. With that being said, that "8-bit" mode really is a breath of fresh air to the original 3D game, so if you don't own a Switch and haven't had the opportunity to play this game that way yet, then it's actually worth the upgrade and replay even if you own the original.
Root Double lets itself down in the way it indulges nonsense like scientific explanations and science fiction when really it wants to be a taut psychological thriller about a group of people caught in a truly desperate situation. Thankfully, when it focuses on what it's best at it's a near-on perfect example of the genre. It can be both bewildering and exhausting, but one thing Root Double will never let you forget is that it is also compelling.
Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate was excellent on PlayStation Vita, and it remains excellent on Nintendo Switch. There are a lot of roguelikes available on this console at this point, but there's something about the classical elegance and adherence to genre tradition that makes Shiren the Wanderer appealing. It's a little like how some people still love the sound and experience of vinyl records, really. You're not going to be blown away by innovation with this game, but you may well find yourself in love with its sincerity and near-perfect refinement.
Anyhow, I digress again. LoveKami, for better or worse, is the kind of game that, for all its merits, is going to keep driving you back to its most overt elements; those giant cup sizes, and the costumes designed specifically to highlight them. That will put some people off immediately and irrecoverably. Others will come to the game entirely because that's what's on offer. In the case of both groups, there's an enjoyable reflection on a very Japanese way of thinking in the game that is going to be overlooked for interest in the fan service... but then I imagine that my efforts here of trying to intellectualise this game has been one giant exercise in futility.
There is no doubt that Project Highrise is a more dry experience. Its minimalistic kitsch is a stark contrast to Mad Tower Tycoon's bombastic colours and bright energy, and I'm certainly aware that there are a lot of people that would prefer the higher energy approach. Assuming, that is, that the game is patched to the point that it becomes playable.
That aside, Planet Coaster is indeed the best theme park creator we've ever had. In Australia, there aren't many theme parks left at all (can you believe that Sydney - a major global city - only has one theme park, and it's a tiny space that can be walked across in a few minutes), but there was a big one when I was growing up, and this game takes me back to looking forward to going to that theme park every so often. There are some UI issues, and one or two clunky moments within the management side of the game, but nothing that detracts from the sheer creative joy of playing around with those coasters and creating the park of your dreams. I can almost smell the churros.
I haven't been as conflicted about a rhythm game as I have Melody of Memory. On the one hand, the rhythm game action itself is wonderful and the music, across 140 tracks, is sublime. On the other hand, being forced to play through a truncated and baffling summary of the Kingdom Hearts narrative just to unlock those tracks has done little to enamour me to the series, and there are far, far too many little additions that distract from what the game does best (i.e. the rhythm action). The grand sum of it is that Melody of Memory is much more a game for existing fans of Kingdom Hearts than it needed to be, and once again Square Enix has struggled to fully capitalise on the rich opportunity that the Disney license provides them.
I wanted Replica to say a lot more than it did. We're living in a time where governments are becoming more aggressive in snooping into people's lives and for the first time since McCarthy, being branded as a "communist" is shifting from being someone who the right-wing impotently laugh at to someone who could be in some real danger. Replica does the right things in many ways, name-dropping real-world events and giving it enough context that the game is clearly anti-fascist in tone. Unfortunately, it lacks the intelligence and emotional resonance to be the interactive Orwellian experience that it wants to be.
There’s not much else that can be said about Pure Pool (also we’ve reviewed it previously, so check that out). VooFoo Studios has successfully made a game that remains relevant and feels current over half a decade after it first released it, and for “sports games”, that’s a rare achievement indeed. You’re not going to find better ball porn anywhere, and so, even though this is a port of a six-year-old game with very little added to it, it’s great that it’s now portable and on the Switch.
Serious Sam remains the perfect foil to all the self-serious and often toxic shooters that we see today. All three games (and the two DLC expansions) that are contained in this collection are pure, unmitigated fun, and there's not a single (admittedly high-quality) rendition of Ronald Reagan across any of them. Not coincidentally, while I've already deleted that CoD off my hard drive, the Serious Sam Collection will stay on my Switch for quite some time to come. In short bursts - particularly on the commute after a hard day's work - there's nothing more cathartic.
The narrative that it weaves are great. The presentation is impeccable, and each and every one of the characters are fun to play with.
Demon's Souls kicked off what has become an exhausting caricature in the games industry. From "git gud" to comparing every halfway difficult game to the Souls series, Demon's Souls is ultimately responsible for that. It wasn't the most commercially successful game in itself, but word of mouth earned it a cult status and was directly responsible for the very mainstream Dark Souls. And now people can re-discover the dark majesty of that series foundation. It's a game that deserves to be elevated beyond the jokes and seen as a genuine piece of video game art. I would be very interested if those who have come to the Souls series later will find the deliberately unpolished elements of this remake to be as appealing, but given that FromSoftware will almost certainly never touch the King's Field series again, for me, personally, this is as good as it's ever going to get. As a PlayStation 5 launch title, it's a fascinating example of something that is both deliberately old and a brilliant use of the console's very new hardware, and brought together, Demon's Souls is reason enough to own the console, all into itself.
I've never played a game more thoroughly unpleasant than Black Ops Cold War, but since this is the video game industry, the only thing I'm meant to be talking about is how much fun it is to press those buttons. So, let's finish the review and do that (since I know this conclusion is all most people are going to read anyway). Yes, it is fun to press buttons. You can even press buttons in multiplayer, and after however many Call of Duty titles now, the half dozen development teams that worked on this thing know how to make multiplayer button pressing fun. There are standard multiplayer modes, and classics like Zombies are back because people like those modes. It's all very accessible since this series is as mainstream as they come and Activision would hate for people to find it overwhelming. In short, if you want to play Black Ops Cold War as a completely passive sponge, then you'll have a lot of fun pressing those buttons. This score, below, is for you. For anyone else who is even mildly interested in thinking about the games they play, I can't put into words clearly enough how unacceptable I find this game to be.
I don't want to take anything away from Sackboy: A Big Adventure. Platformers are one of the genres I am least inclined towards, and were it not part of a (fairly limited) launch range on the PlayStation 5, I might not have been inclined to play Sackboy at all. I am glad that I did, though, because for pure whimsy and quality level design it's a real challenge to Nintendo at its best in this genre, and that's no mean feat. Just don't go in expecting the same qualities that made the LittleBigPlanet series itself so beloved.
It's easy to be charmed by Café Enchanté, which brings together whimsy, romance and humour together with one of the more understated joys - having a favourite café and being able to take a moment out to enjoy both it, and the company that it brings
Having written visual novels myself I know just how difficult it is to turn decisions and branching narratives into something cohesive and interesting, regardless of the direction that the player takes through the narrative. I shudder to think what a wall of sticky notes would look like to map out a game with 600,000 words and nearly 2,500 decisions. Choices That Matters is a game of breathtaking scope that takes place in the most modest kind of game possible; the humble text adventure. That it tells such an excellent page-turner of a story with all those words and branching paths is the icing on the top.
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is a genuine cultural artefact. It never forgets the need to be entertaining and engaging, but every facet of the game is invested in communicating the Japanese cultural perspective on the world, from how we see the divine, to the respect that we should hold for the very staples that sustain us. This is a game that transcends the conventional expectations of video games, to deliver something much grander and more inherently valuable than passive entertainment to consume.
That being said, as far as the gameplay is concerned, this series is going nowhere interesting at this point there while there will be more, and I really implore Ubisoft to take a good, hard look at the bloat and consider whether a more streamlined approach that doesn't get in the way of the best feature (the history and narrative) would not be wiser next time around.