Gabs Tanner's Reviews
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus lives up to expectations of the franchise through its fun gameplay and lewd humour. A little too much focus has gone into the characters, leaving levels to play out rather similarly, but at least it's consistently fun to kick some ninja lady booty.
The Incredible Baron delivers a fun, light-hearted humour that shines through its simplistic tug-of-war strategy foundation. There’s just the right level of challenge for a casual playthrough, while offering enough depth in the different difficulties and species research mechanics to keep you coming back for more.
Excubitor has a sound concept, with the shooter and tower defence genres working really well together. So it’s a shame then that a lot of the details equate to heavy, inaccurate controls and a cruel difficulty level, limiting the amount of enjoyment that can be had.
Overfall successfully mixes some unlikely genres to create a fulfilling experience, both through its brilliantly written dialogue and stimulating tactical combat.
RefRain -prism memories- may lack a few details, but it more than makes up for them with the variation between playable characters and a satisfying attack system.
Beauty and challenge are supposed to be Hyposphere’s strong points, but the heavy reliance on these areas end up being its downfall. The abstract art style lacks personality, while the difficulty level mainly comes from awkward controls and unfair level design.
I Want To Be Human does little to match the great titles under its genre. There is an existing charm to the concept and art style, but fiddly controls and non-existent upgrades leave much to be desired.