I appreciate that the game's also attempting to throw in some bullet hell elements and so on, but it's only middling at that kind of action too. There might be some limited interest in Deathstate for people who like to overcome difficulty spikes, but to be honest, you're better off dusting off that copy of the Gauntlet remake instead.
All in all, it's a generally smooth game let down by its idea of scale.
What Flinthook does do well is keep the variety of enemies, rooms, and environments strong from start to finish, and, generally speaking, the difficulty curve is reasonable. There's always the risk that random elements means a game will take massive momentary spikes in difficulty when you get unlucky and the algorithms work against you. Flinthook avoids that, and progress through the game does feel good, but it struggles to be compelling.
Unfortunately, Operation Babel: New Tokyo Legacy just asks too much of its players. An overwhelmingly pointless narrative, coupled with archaic systems and a user interface that tries to fight with the player at every turn make for a game that really drags at times.
Syberia 3 feels like a game that was made because everyone involved in the project felt an obligation to make it. It has its moments, and as a fan it's great to see Sokal's work reach a proper conclusion, but it's also difficult to see how this game will find an audience; even among existing fans of Syberia, tastes change over 13 years, and it's hard to see how this game has done anything to encourage people back for one more spin with Kate Walker.
Properly articulating what Birthdays means to me is difficult. It is the embodiment of the pure joy of gaming, where I can sit down and simply immerse myself within this space without feeling pressure or tension. There's nothing to "win," but everything to enjoy while, at the same time, the game is pointing out, in its very innocent and heartfelt way, a very simple but so important environmental message.
I've rarely been as delighted in simply immersing myself into a game as I've been with GNOG. It's weird, it's colourful, it's creative, and every time I completed a puzzle box, and was given another "parcel" to unwrap and unlock another puzzle, I couldn't wait to tear the parcel open, if for no other reason than to see just what kind of beautiful lunacy I'd get to see next.
It might not be the most refined experience (something young Burton's films were often guilty of as well), but that vision, and the rare mastery over a horror many of us feel but struggle to articulate, makes this game frequently surprising, intense, and always sublime.
It's the eye for historical detail that has always made Romance of the Three Kingdoms games so compelling. Like it shows with the Dynasty Warriors series, Koei really knows - and respects - ancient Chinese history, and while the Fame & Strategy expansion pack makes the base game even more strategically complex, the stories that the game tells, even when you'll be spending most of the game looking at a beautiful, but dry, map, makes this also one of the most accessible 4X strategy games ever created.
There's not much else I can say about Chaos Code. It works, but it's in an overloaded genre where, not only do you have big "blockbuster" options, from Dead or Alive through the soon-to-be released Tekken 7, but there's also a real wealth of options in the niche spaces, from BlazBlue through to a game featuring all your favourite characters from Nitroplus' game franchises.
As a horror experience Outlast 2 works as a bit of grindhouse exploitation. It's intense, it's sharp, and it's a grisly, beautiful game. But it's also so linear and tries to be so cinematic that it opens itself to comparisons to similar stories told in other media, and as weird as it is to say, Outlast 2 is also far too safe.
I've played a lot of visual novels in my time, and a lot of them are favourite games, but I've got to say, as a student of Japanese history, and a lover of good storytelling, Hakuoki is right up there with my favourite games ever made. Any game that, after finishing, I can put down and say to myself "if that story was presented to me as a novel I would have loved it just as much," is a good game, as far as I'm concerned.
For all its wealth of content, Puyo Puyo Tetris does rely on developing and then maintaining a strong online community for truly long-term value. As a local multiplayer game, you'll be glad to have it around for the parties, and it'll help plane trips and other long travels fly by in a snap. Get hooked into the game's steep learning curve online, however, and you'll have a game that you'll be playing for months, if not years, and not once, for even the briefest second, will the game lose its charm.
Dragon Quest Heroes 2 is undeniable proof that the mix between a genuine JRPG and Warriors game works, and now it's time for a Final Fantasy Heroes, methinks.
ArmaGallant is a budget production, and that means that it will likely not sustain the community that a game of its nature needs. I'm already finding myself queuing for ten minutes at time to get a match going, and that's really disappointing, because this is one I could see myself playing for quite a while yet, given half the chance. It also helps that I am, to date, actually undefeated. Bring on a world championships and those eSports sponsorships, please, I want to turn pro at ArmaGallant.
As Nintendo's second big release on the Switch following on from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I have no trouble believing that this will solidify the console's rapidly-growing reputation of offering far more than people thought it would prior to launch. It might be a flawed experience, but that's almost irrelevant when you consider just how much of it there really is on offer. This is how you do a "HD remaster".
There's a lot to like in Vikings, even if the game's never able to effectively articulate how it's different to the genre's greats. It manages - just - to be more than a by-the-numbers Diablo clone thanks to the creative energy that went into its bosses and environment design, but it relies too heavily on that, and the assumption that you'll be playing the game in multiplayer. As a single player experience, the limits on what Vikings can offer become distracting; making it good for a lazy afternoon of grinding fun, but not something that you'll remember over the longer term.
It's a good package of entertaining games, and is presented beautifully, but it's also not essential.
Goichi Suda's love letter to Noir is so striking and vivid that it's a game I'll not soon forget. By turns shocking, darkly humorous, confounding, and always creative, this was Suda-san's first game as an independent game developer, and through it we see so much of what would become Suda's trademarks; that same transgressive attitude, the same love for classical film and literature genres, and that same intensity in his storytelling (that will ultimately get overlooked by most critics).
Mervils: A VR Adventure relies too heavily on a gimmick it doesn't even use properly, and that's the very definition of a limited experience.