Jake Arias's Reviews
Focusing on its strengths makes a huge difference, as it turns out, and there are a handful of miscellaneous elements that only serve to elevate it further despite one or two minor issues that take a little getting used to. Overall, The Mooseman is a great experience that’s artsy without coming across as pretentious, unfamiliar without becoming overcomplicated and confusing the player, and easy to pick up without sacrificing a number of optional challenges for those looking to obsess over hidden collectibles.
The Nightmare Princess feels like it was made by people who were forced to work on a Deception game that they wanted nothing to do with, and, harboring nothing but contempt for it, worked to undermine its development at every juncture. They succeeded at doing so, creating something so abysmally contrary to the spirit of the Deception series and painfully un-fun in general that we'll likely never see a true Deception game again.
Even the areas that can be bent in significant ways have serious and sometimes baffling limits that force you into one or two envisioned solutions by entirely sabotaging other approaches. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course, as many excellent puzzle games have specific solutions, but where Semblance fails (and does so big time) is that it gives you the impression that you’re being afforded the freedom to come up with your own approach, only to consistently snatch it away from you while the controls undermine you and the simplistic two-tone visuals give you a migraine.
Developed by Brazilian developer SpaceGiraff3 and possessing many of the dialogue quirks that tend to pop up when Brazilian Portuguese is translated into English, TRAGO is a flawed gem that has one foot firmly planted in reality while the rest of the body is drunk in some parallel reality lacking any of the same rules of causality and chronology. It’s a magically psychotic game with a tone unlike anything I’ve ever played, and while it’s relatively short (even with a ton of experimentation, it lasted me a little over three hours), it’s an inexpensive slice of madness perfect for when you’re burned out on more “normal” games.
Honestly, I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to finish this one, with numerous bugs and missing English-language lines (there are entire conversations that play out as a series of empty text boxes) making doing so impossible. According to Steam, I’ve played Noahmund for 8 hours, while the in-game timer of my most recent save reads 4 hours and 52 minutes, with the difference between the two being progress that was lost because of bugs.
While this may not be what many players originally envisioned the launch version of We Happy Few being like, it’s hard to deny that it’s one of the more consistently interesting open-world games I’ve played, sporting deeply enjoyable lore and writing that make up for some gameplay shortcomings.
Something I've come to realize over the past year or so is that I have a strange fascination with confusing narrative games. There's a crucial difference between confusing and nonsensical, obviously, but games that have you questioning the sanity of their playable character and constantly wondering if they're an unreliable narrator or simply lucky/unlucky enough to be wading through uniquely bizarre circumstances are a real treat, and Elea – Episode 1 falls neatly into that category. Taking place in a future with space travel, sentient AI helpers, and a pocket full of reasons to leave Earth behind in search of greener pastures, it begins the story of River Elea Catherine Jones as she looks into the fate of her husband after his expedition to colonize a new planet goes silent.
Shadows: Awakening inherits Vikings‘ repetitive and gimmicky boss fights, while its shifting rules and general inability to explain how certain things work can turn its frequent puzzles into a slog. Add a slow movement speed and too few teleport points on top of that, and you have a game that, while enjoyable overall, fails to live up to its potential.
I’m very much on the fence about this one, admittedly, as buying new equipment that allows you to effortlessly carve through waves upon waves of enemies can be incredibly rewarding, and a lot of the underlying ideas here are solid. The execution just trips up often enough that Ninjin: Clash of Carrots‘ attempts at variance start to feel like unfair gimmicks.
There’s a point in the Punch Line anime where main character Yuta Iridatsu says something about how the spirit world functions similarly to a video game, and there’s really no denying that time travel and abilities that become better as they’re used are the types of things that lend themselves perfectly to gaming. That makes it all the more surprising that the Punch Line game adaptation is a visual novel first and foremost, then, forgoing its gameplay in favor of its story.
There's a lot to love about Depth of Extinction, and that'll be doubly true once the bugs end up being patched out, but a game needs more than excellent combat to stand out.
As you’d expect, there’s a general sense of welcome levity to everything that happens, though I honestly can’t remember Warren uttering a single word, and that hints at an underlying truth here: while the more playful tone of this DLC is infinitely preferable to the crushing darkness of the base game, The Good, the Bad, and the Augmented exists mostly as a series of maps designed primarily for hardcore players to grind on for tech scrap and new equipment.
There are little things that I adore such as the way your ship crew sings as you sail around (with the songs even changing to reflect the gender makeup of your crew), not to mention a small handful of quests that eschew the rigid, game-y formula plaguing most of Odyssey‘s content in favor of something more organic. The problem is that all of this accounts for between 5-10 hours of content of the 60 that’s pretty much a minimum because of the backwards leveling system and abundance of filler content. The weakest parts of the Assassin’s Creed series have also been retained, while the things that were unique have inexplicably been de-emphasized and complicated to make way for a mashup of features shamelessly borrowed from other series in the hopes of lightning striking twice. The end result of all of this is that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is an overlong, uninspired mess that feels watered down to the point of meaninglessness.
There are undeniably some issues that need to be ironed out, most entertainingly highlighted by NPCs gleefully ignoring murders in one stage so long as they’re performed with a forklift, but the underlying promise here really shines through when everything is working as expected. The biggest issue is that things don’t always work as expected; during one stage that begins by forcing you to kill four bikers with your “ultimate” attack, a randomly-wandering NPC was placed close enough that the police were chasing me seconds in through no fault of my own. You can forget about evading police in Party Hard 2, as well, with the pairs of officers that show up having a preternatural talent for knowing where you are and boxing you in.
Newbies with no real attachment to the Soulcalibur franchise will find that reversal edges only go so far and quickly become frustrated by the underlying complexity, while old-timers will quickly get sick of CPUs (and trolls online, no doubt) spamming reversal edges to slow down and drag out matches. At first glance, Soulcalibur VI looks to take the balance of Soulcalibur V and marry it with the better characters and story of the early games by returning to the events of the Dreamcast original and Soulcalibur II, but it falls all over itself in too many ways to recommend to fans or newcomers.
TSIOQUE does a laudable job of creating a suitably magical atmosphere for the 2-3 hours it takes to reach the end, mostly because of how much personality the visuals and sound effects have. It's just difficult to recommend a game with such awkward puzzle design and annoying minigames.
Valkyria Chronicles 4 is a game that tries to embrace its past while also taking a step into the future, and it fails spectacularly on both fronts. The story is incoherent, the characters are developed poorly, and the gameplay's constant gimmickry and penchant for not telling you the rules quickly becomes fatiguing. That's not even getting into the unskippable cutscenes and numerous technical shortcomings, either. The original Valkyria Chronicles is a classic, but it was clearly the beneficiary of beginner's luck that's depleted in the decade since.
As much as I like twisty-turny stories, they have to at least be vaguely coherent, and Incredible Mandy layers so many strange plot developments onto each other that it’s borderline impossible to get a sense of what this game is actually about. The gameplay similarly suffers from some pretty serious issues, most notably an unwieldy camera prone to undermining your platforming with unexpected teleports and boss fights that are equal parts confusing and tedious.
As an unrepentant strategy-RPG snob with unrealistically high standards for the genre, though, I can definitively state that it’s 100% worth fighting through all of this early awkwardness because of how amazing things eventually become. While Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden‘s early fights feel like uninspired battles of attrition, the later gameplay weaves the destructible environments of Silent Storm with the overgrown and reset-world vibe of the original Fallout, all while giving you numerous tactical options that can see you doing things like aggroing hostile robots so that they’ll also turn against other enemies.
That’s not to insinuate that Override: Mech City Brawl is perfect or anything, as the general combat is kind of floaty while the unwieldy camera makes responding quickly to your opponent more difficult than it probably should be, but that’s ultimately forgivable given its clear party-game aspirations. Put simply, this isn’t a game that’s trying to be an immaculately balanced fighting game experience for die-hards so much as it’s the kind of game that you end up playing after getting drunk with friends, only stopping once someone passes out or gets frustrated and throws a controller across the room.