Ian Howarth's Reviews
Now, it might seem like I've given it quite a hard time but Flat Heroes isn't bad.
Fox n Forests isn't for everyone – it feels more like a game development experiment that resulted in a nice bite-size nostalgia trip and was released just for fun.
Underneath it all there's genuinely something interesting here – it just needed to be more focussed, polished, moulded into a vision instead of left as a loose idea. The gameplay and story need working on heavily in their own way. I'd definitely come back to check on a sequel but it would be out of wary curiosity, not excitement
Even from an objective standpoint, I honestly can't think of a part of Celeste I didn't like.
Even though the main game wraps up the story nicely, albeit with a fairly predictable ending, now that we've seen it's possible to both add depth to the characters and their lore, and push the gameplay to the next level with the Nightfalls DLC, we want more.
Truly, Penny-Punching Princess feels more like an indie experiment than a full-fledged game and that's totally fine.
The game is seriously addicting thanks to the gratifying mechanics and simple, fun premise that it's built on. I can see myself jumping online almost daily to claw my way through the ranks but I do worry that the long wait times for matches will only get worse if High Horse Entertainment don't manage to pull in some more players. I wish them all the best and hope to see Disc Jam continue to be supported by them for the foreseeable future.
A basic platformer with the same old clichéd mobility tools and a pretty underwhelming world to be a part of just isn't enough to make its mark these days, making Shu feel a little played out. It's by no means a bad game, but hardly a good one too; it falls quite neatly into the comfortable, average middle-ground.
It may sound like I'm dishing out a lot of praise but I think just 'fun' describes Aegis Defenders quite perfectly.
That's pretty much Fallen Legion in a nutshell – it has its fair share of ups and downs but I still really enjoyed my time with it.
The challenge and fun are waiting right there at the end for those who want to power through for it. It's just a shame there are so many little things that pile up against the experience, like the pokémon-infused pokédex that never stops asking the same questions over and over or the lack of Pokémon-worthy music.
In all I'd recommend A Hat in Time as a quick pick up game when there's a lull in the market (which 2017 definitely hasn't had), but not at it's current price.
Whilst the game is densely packed with a ton of stuff to do, I still believe most of it is much too easy or repetitive – resulting in it feeling mostly like constant fetch quests.
conclusion, with the interesting part kicking in way, way too late into the game and being left quickly after with an unsatisfying conclusion made me feel like I had simply wasted my time. Having to drone through shallow plots and mysteries that the player figures out ages before Katrielle does just left me wanting to skip directly to the next puzzle or go back and play a much better Layton game.
All of these little pieces come together to form something completely new and intense; I hope to see a lot more like it in the future.
Even the upgradable powerups, such as slowing down time or raising a shield have shared cooldowns, forcing both players to communicate their usage and what they're going to be attacking to avoid tackling the same enemies and inevitably being overrun.
Simply put – Samus Returns is the new benchmark against which all other games of this genre will be measured against.
It just feels so unnecessary and obnoxious to, in my opinion, ruin a mechanic that has been used time and time again in combat-based games as a test of skill and timing, as well as a nice way to reset the battle from a distance.
The final word is the game is great, with a lot of content for those that can't get enough, and should be played by any platformer lover, whilst the soundtrack needs to be listed to by absolutely everybody with ears.
I'm not sure I'd ever go back to play Detached again and it's definitely not making it into my 'impress first time VR-users' catalogue. In fact, it has instead become my go-to example for how VR standards must be respected and how ignoring them can potentially ruin what might have been an otherwise fantastic experience. I'm not sure I can put it any better than that; great game but unplayable.