Gabs Tanner's Reviews
The base gameplay of Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter allows you to pick the brains of the great detective while testing your deductive skills. It's just a shame that long loading times and grating puzzles constantly interrupt any intrigue found within the vague stories.
Highway Blossoms may not bring anything new to the table through its story, but it gets you emotionally involved through the cute, and relatable characters.
VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action excels through relatable characters and stories that are worth listening to, even if its gameplay aspects can appear to be non-existent or tedious.
Anarcute will put you in a good mood through its happy art design and music. The strategy gameplay is simple, but still fun, while providing a decent difficulty curve along the way.
Crush Your Enemies hides a surprising strategical depth behind its crude humour. Whilst simple, it provides just enough challenge through the fast pacing to keep you engaged until everything in your path has been destroyed.
Phantom Brave requires a lot of time to delve into all of the mechanics and systems available to you. The emotional storyline makes the somewhat tedious grinding worthwhile though, resulting in a great time for fans of more intricate JRPGs.
Human: Fall Flat has awkward controls and camera angles that make even basic actions a chore to execute. Luckily, the ragdoll physics puzzles, combined with a fun co-op function, can keep you entertained throughout Bob’s short journey.
Blade Arcus from Shining: Battle Arena has beautiful art design and a number of difficulty options, but the limited fighting styles result in a lack of any real depth.
Ray Gigant follows a lot of the RPG dungeon crawler tropes, while changing up the protagonists and enemies just often enough to keep things from getting boring. It’s not a challenge by any means, taking the focus away from grinding, and instead onto sitting back and enjoying the journey.
Okhlos is organised chaos at its best. The challenge level may provide moments of frustration, leading to multiple viewings of initial areas, but it’s easy to lose hours of time from the determination to send every God back to Olympus, where they belong.
Livelock provides decent twin-stick shooter gameplay, for a good time with friends. It’s just a shame that the title doesn’t do anything new, focusing on an information-heavy plotline instead of providing any solid emotion.
Interest can be found within MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death’s story premise and customisable Guardians. Unfortunately, the positives fall flat much too quickly, as there isn’t enough depth to keep them from getting stale.
Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness is a visual novel that kept me interested through its characters, world, and story, while constantly engaged by the player choices impacting on the plot. There’s a bit of information overload at times if you haven’t seen the anime, but that shouldn’t be enough to put anyone off.
Steins;Gate features heavy scientific themes combined with a confusing choice system in a slow-paced story. Any problems are easily ignored when you really get into it though, with the relatable characters, voice acting and storytelling promising an unforgettable, emotional experience.
Tokyo Twilight Hunters Daybreak: Special Gigs is made up of solid concepts that get forgotten due to lacklustre tutorials. Additions made to the story and gameplay improve upon the original title, leading to a decent experience, but only if you’re willing to stick with it.
Exist Archive: The Other Side of the Sky has a solid foundation in its art style, characters, and combat. It’s just a shame that a lack in variation holds it back from being something truly engaging.
Root Letter’s intriguing premise was just enough to keep me playing, despite the lacking tension that was initially promised.
Steins;Gate 0 easily lives up to the emotive journey of the original, delivering a darker half of the story that fans didn’t know they needed.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun provides a satisfying challenge, making gamers feel like a badass for even the smallest of victories.
Rise & Shine has a lot of interesting ideas to keep players on their toes. It’s just a shame that some of the fun turns sour due to repeated puzzles and poor gun accuracy.