Evan Norris's Reviews
Shuten Order may be Kazutaka Kodaka’s most ambitious work, but it’s not his best. Its multi-genre experiment, while bold and brave, doesn’t work as intended, resulting in an uneven adventure with several shallow, overlong vignettes.
It suffers from some flaws, mostly related to narrative and visual components, but it delivers where it counts: mechanics, systems, and gameplay. If you can power through its lackluster story and forgive its dated assets, you'll find a remarkably deep, daring mech action game.
Metal Eden owes a lot to games like Ghostrunner and Doom, but it's far from a slavish clone. Thanks to its far-future setting, dystopian premise, core-ripping mechanic, and bold production design, it feels like its own thing.
It may not be the best game of its kind — its uneasy relationship with the weekly bazaar makes sure of that — but it provides the comforting, enriching, reliable farming and life simulation you've come to expect from the Story of Seasons franchise.
A solid action-platformer with likable characters, irreverent writing, rewarding backtracking gameplay, and lovely art and music. With greater mechanical depth, a mapping system, and more to do and explore, it could be even better.
A few missing console ports notwithstanding, Gradius Origins is a fantastic collection with a preposterous amount of bonus content. By preserving and enhancing six classic shooters and keeping the IP alive with its own Salamander III, M2 has demonstrated how much it reveres and understands the franchise.
The four games included feel more complete than ever, thanks to helpful manuals, eye-opening gadgets, multiple control and display options, several regional variants, remixed "easy" modes, and the ability to save and upload play data at your convenience. And while some of the original warts remain — Operation Wolf is imbalanced, Operation Thunderbolt is too hectic, and Night Strikers is insufficiently complex — they're less problematic than before.
If you anticipate another twisting, branching murder mystery from the brilliant mind of Kotaro Uchikoshi, you're going to end up disappointed. If, however, you expect a less consequential, more comedic side story that places beloved characters in new, deadly escape room situations, you'll emerge after 15 hours quite happy with your experience.
This is the killer app on Switch 2, thanks to snappy controls, imaginative art direction, a mysterious "journey to the center of the earth" premise, rousing music, rewarding exploration, and the intelligent, thoughtful deployment of voxel technology, which provides players exhilarating navigational and problem-solving freedom.
The base game is clunky, shallow, short, and repetitive, and the additional bells and whistles, while nice, don't do anything to elevate the core experience from 1991. If you're a Game Gear fanatic who doesn't want to pay $200 for a hard copy, you might want to consider picking this up, if only to help complete your collection. But remember: just because something is rare doesn't mean it's any good.
There's a fair bit of tedious backtracking and the detective segments don't require that much actual sleuthing, but those flaws are overshadowed by great art direction, exceptional combat, an addictive demon fusion system, and lots of rewarding, engaging content.
Despite the lack of ancillary features, Volume 3 is the best installment of the Irem Collection so far. Not only are the games here rarer than in earlier volumes, but they're better. Indeed, there isn't a bad one in the bunch; all of the titles range from good to great. If you're a diehard shoot-'em-up fan on a budget who wants to invest only in a single volume, make it this one.
By retaining the core components of the franchise — farming, fighting, and flirting — and infusing them with addictive town planning and people management aspects, deeper tactical and strategic combat options, and more meaningful romance pathways, Marvelous has pushed the franchise forward in a bold new direction.
Judged on its own mechanics, systems, and merits, it's a brilliant racing game, a GotY contender, and one of the finest entries in the entire Mario Kart canon, not to mention another in a long line of exceptional launch titles from Nintendo.
Survival Kids on Switch 2 is a middling game — not because it doesn't follow the template of the Game Boy original exactly, but because it fails to leverage its rules and mechanics in interesting, engaging, and dangerous ways. As it stands now, it's fine for younger and less experienced players, but not ideal for those seeking something more involved, challenging, and long-lasting.
If Fast Fusion featured online multiplayer, better image quality, and 6 or 7 more race tracks, it would enter the game-of-the-year conversation. Even without those things, it's yet another gem from Shin'en Multimedia. The Munich-based studio has once again punched above its weight, delivering a blisteringly fast, mechanically nimble futuristic racer with outstanding track design and excellent music.
No matter how you experience Capcom Fighting Collection 2 — online or offline, in single-player bouts against CPU opponents, or in versus mode against human rivals — you're likely to have a good time.
Going into Deliver At All Costs, you would understandably assume it was mostly about driving, destruction, and Grand Theft Auto-esque high jinks. And for its opening hours — its best hours — it is. But the game quietly and gradually moves away from open-world mayhem toward a more focused, intimate narrative adventure, gaining emotional heft but losing some ingenuity and player freedom in the process.
Last Defense Academy has a lot of disparate parts working simultaneously, but it never creates any sort of disharmony. If anything, the visual novel, turn-based strategy, resource collection, and relationship management aspects complement and reinforce each other, creating a product far greater than the sum of its parts.
All the things that made the game special in 2015 — extraordinary world-building, impossibly deep role-playing systems, an obscene amount of content, and a unique gameplay loop that at times straddles the line between RPG and MMO — are present here, along with new story elements, mechanics, and quality-of-life updates.