Jake Arias's Reviews
Everyone is selfish, and this is baked into the game to a certain degree—even a story in which the choices were clear and I was able to wrap things up in a less-selfish way was still plagued by flashbacks in which all of the characters acted in unreasonably selfish, egocentric ways. When I went to try and help someone, only for the game to interpret my aid attempt as an attempt to humiliate them, though, I mentally checked out of the entire experience.
Originally released in October of 2017 for the PC, it’s now making its way to the Playstation 4/Vita, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, but I’m reviewing the PC version because it allows for a broader range of useful review experiences. Also, I was immediately struck by the art style, and in a flurry of naked enthusiasm, requested a key for it without doing my usual exhaustive research. You may notice that those two reasons are mutually exclusive, which might lead you to think that one of them is a lie or exaggeration, and I can think of no better way of explaining this game’s vibe than that; this is a game where all roads lead to something horrible and some mysteries are never resolved, but one in which such outcomes are consistent with the state of the world.
I was asked to review this, and while the results are exactly what you’d expect from throwing someone who’s dead inside at a tearjerker, it was at least interesting.
That’s not to insinuate that my experience with Ash of Gods was anything resembling good, though, because this game is capable of disappointing entirely on its own merits. Everything about it fails in one way or another, from the confused analogies that read like a drunk Tolkien as performed by Google Translate to the combat alternating between being pointlessly easy and groan-inducingly tedious. The visuals and music are the only things that don’t disappoint in some way, but they alone can’t support this game’s full weight.
Tempest Citadel is a strategy game that defies a more detailed genre classification. In many ways it’s a 4X game, and yet it also infuses just enough XCOM elements into the end product that using either as an example of what to expect is ultimately misleading. There’s also a great deal of real-time strategy combat to take into consideration, though battles resolve automatically (by default—you can choose to jump in and micromanage at any point) based on the strategies you come up with beforehand. Other expectations you may have are likely to be similarly subverted.
Basically, it’s a movement-based puzzle game where you’re tasked with using distractions to vandalize a spot and get away from police. Things obviously become more complicated as you go, but the difficulty is all over the place, confusingly enough; I had more trouble in one of the earlier levels than any of the mid-game levels ever gave me, and there are numerous difficulty spikes that combine with player-unfriendly mechanics to suck the joy out of the gameplay.
Looking at it now, there’s no denying that the amount of quality, complementary content here is staggering.
RPGolf doesn’t make a particularly memorable first impression, but this is one of those games that exerts a certain pull that sees you continuing to play despite not understanding exactly why that is.
[Y]our chances of making it through Coffee Crisis without seeing a game over screen are frustratingly luck-dependent because of the way the game handles powerups.
“Odium” is a remarkably accurate name for a game like this, as its inadequate controls and constant stream of cheap shots conspire to turn certain levels into a maddeningly Sisyphean experience bound to infuriate anyone who values their time.
I have to reach back 18 years and invoke Majora’s Mask in order to have something to meaningfully compare Omensight to. Not only do the deep hues of Omensight’s art style invite such comparisons, but the time travel loop has you similarly exploring the the same few areas during different parts of the same day and finding new things as a result. Granted, the structure here is entirely different, but the focus on a small cast of characters who are subjected to surprising moments of darkness (made more palatable by a veneer of quirky animal companions) hits many of the same buttons that Majora did.
Given a handful of patches, Safe House could become a bit of a flawed gem. Right now it requires dodging far too many random issues and complications to be recommendable.
Much of Towards The Pantheon is strange like that, and yet these assorted pieces of genre-defying weirdness all coalesce into something that, against all odds, functions as a coherent whole. Its strangeness makes it difficult to compare with other titles, though it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that it fits the Earthbound/Undertale mold to a certain extent in terms of presentation and tone.
Really, with a few tweaks this could become easily recommendable, but the inconsistency of the current experience, combined with some inexplicable slowdown that made carefully maneuvering around hazards more difficult and imprecise than it needed to be toward the end when levels would get busy, is just enough to cause me to hesitate.
[I]t’s obvious that a lot of effort was put into addressing criticisms while keeping the core of the game intact for those who enjoy a little grinding. The end result is a charmingly chaotic pixel shooter with different modes designed to accommodate different types of players.
Simple words can’t alter the fact that this game is irredeemably bad and so far beneath DONTNOD’s previous efforts that it’s hard to believe the same studio is responsible.
If you’d have told me that one of my favorite games of 2018 would be a rhythm game originally released as a freemium mobile title in 2016 and only now receiving a paid version on the PC and Nintendo Switch, I’d have laughed in your face. Lost in Harmony is that game, though, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that this game is playable art (for the most part, at least) now that there are no freemium currencies and ads trying to worm their way into the experience.
If you’ve never played an artsy mobile puzzle game before, Starman makes for a great crash course in what they’re like, as it shares all of the same intrinsic qualities you’ll find repeated in other such games.
The story might as well not exist, the mechanics are clumsy and prone to screwing you over through no fault of your own, enemies come at you in endless numbers to make destroying things a deeply annoying and repetitive experience, and the slightly upgraded textures—which are the only real difference between this version and the original apart from some newfound performance issues—are virtually imperceptible because of the uninspired art design that's still trapped in the Guerrilla-era war against colorfulness.
Insane Robots is a wonderful example of how complicated situations arising from simple mechanics can be fun, but it’s also an amazing example of how a good thing can be ruined by cramming it down your throat for too long. That’s to say that Insane Robots suffers from some of the worst pacing issues I can recall in a game, allowing you to glide along for 4-5 hours before stopping you in your tracks with a player-hostile final map that’s filled with cheating AI, sentient weather effects that act solely to inconvenience you, and randomized characters that ensure that you have to go back and engage in 20-30 hours of grinding in order to stand a chance.