Joseph Pugh's Reviews
Balatro takes a simple concept that pretty much anyone could grasp, and feeds you with meaningful decision points at every turn. Which blinds to play and which to skip? What Jokers to buy? How should you modify your deck? And how much of a risk should you take when actually playing your hands? It’s a fantastically fun degree of agency to have in an otherwise simple card game.
Uncle Chops Rocket Shop is going to turn off a lot of folks. The things it wants you to learn and the effort it takes to learn them are going to feel a little bit too much like work or school to some, and that’s okay. For the right audience, however, Uncle Chops Rocket Shop is a challenging toy box of satisfaction, the type of satisfaction that only comes from learning to overcome a challenge, not with reflexes, but with your own cognitive power.
These Doomed Isles is a refreshing unique spin on the deck builder genre, one that gives you an efficiency puzzle to try and solve without tripping yourself up, while also fending off the occasional raid.
It’s frustrating because Starship Troopers: Extermination has a lot of cool ideas and some matches are blood-pumping spectacles that feel fantastic. Yet, the lack of structure dictating the coordination of 16 random strangers and the unfinished feel of the game brings the experience down far too often. These issues can certainly be addressed, but whether or not the game’s player base will sustain it long enough to see any meaningful updates is completely uncertain.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is very nearly a fantastic mech game, an incredible sandbox of mech mercenary ecstasy. If you happen to have friends willing to play it with you, it is one. However, if your mecha fan club is a party of one, flying solo can be a truly miserable experience thanks to brain-dead AI-controlled squadmates. Your mileage in single-player will vary on your ability to tolerate them and the impact they have on the financial management side of the game.
I really ended up loving Wild Bastards, especially once I unlocked the procedural campaign mode. Every run is its own open-ended puzzle of clearly defined rules that you have to solve with both, strategic planning and real-time combat. Both aspects influence each other in clever and satisfying ways using a really cool roster of unique and colorful outlaws.
For me, many tower defense games feel like DPS checks against each wave, while Orcs Must Die feels active and engaging. Maybe it’s because it’s less about towers and more about traps, or perhaps it’s because of the physical nature of how the Orcs react to your traps, such as getting rag-dolled and knocked down. Either way, Orcs Must Die 3 is a clever game that combines strategic planning, creative trap laying, cooperation, and action into a tight little package of entertaining slaughter.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a unique kind of experience you usually only see in indie games. Its core mechanics of being an action-focused mob management game in the veins of something like Pikmin, works incredibly well. However, the time waster of a base building system brings the experience down far too often. All games have their tedious moments, but few have made me put the game down and stop playing the way Path of The Goddess did.
Plate Up was certainly a fun experience and I enjoyed unlocking each new dish. But in an ironic twist of fate. Despite being a rogue-lite game I ended up putting a similar amount of time in Plate Up as I did Overcooked, a game I criticized for being too short.
When I first started playing, I thought for sure I had a game-of-the-year candidate in my hands. If Dragons Dogma 2 wasn’t such an unbalanced mess, it would be one of the best games released this year. The good news is, Dragons’s Dogma 2 can be fixed. We shouldn’t have to wait or hope for it to be fixed in the first place, but Capcom could certainly address the issue in an update. I sincerely hope they do, because Dragon’s Dogma 2 is begging to be a great game, the awful lack of scaling is the only thing standing its way.
Helldivers 2 is my forever game, one that I will play for years, and where I look forward to each day, because who knows what new additions the ongoing galactic war effort will bring? Today a mech? Tomorrow a new weapon? Who knows, and that’s the beauty of it!
Granblue Fantasy Relink is the greatest game I don’t want to play. Its stellar combat, great AI, interesting world, and epic quests forge the experience to a sharp point, but the lack of any meaningful challenge severely dulls its edge.
Curious Expedition 2 offers such a satisfying level of strategic decision-making and replay value within the confines of a totally unique gameplay loop that it’s easily one of the most cerebrally enjoyable games I’ve ever played.
Remnant 2’s story is as obtuse as the secrets it keeps. But from a pure gameplay standpoint, it’s a phenomenal game and incredibly replayable whether you’re flying solo or with a couple of friends. It’s just a shame that so many of the game’s secrets were designed to be solved by a Google Search rather than the player.
This Means Warp is incredibly fun and shines the brightest with friends. It could do with a bit more variety in some places, but the biggest thing holding it back is the crashing issue, and I sincerely hope it’s resolved soon.
Ultimately Dredge is a charming, atmospheric game with excellent exploration gameplay and clever puzzles punctuated by tense moments of fear and dread of what lurks in the dark. I just wish it leaned more into being the game it pretended to be with a larger focus on its simulation gameplay. Because in the end, Dredge makes you think you’re getting a fishing sim with horror elements when what you’re really getting is an enjoyable adventure puzzle game with tacked-on simulation elements.
For better or worse The Pale Reach is quintessentially more Dredge. It doesn’t improve upon or expand any given gameplay mechanic or feature. Nor does it address any of the problems I had with the base game. At the same time, the region it offers is as interesting and varied as the rest and fits in quite well. The Pale Reach simply adds a simple dessert plate to Dredge’s seafood dinner and extends the adventure just a tiny bit.
Swinging around New York is still an entertaining ride, and the graceful flow of the combat still makes you feel like Spider-Man. But there’s a lot of dead weight tangled up in what ultimately feels like an underdeveloped web.
Starfield joins the ranks of one of my favorite games of all time by sharing the mantle with Skyrim. While some aspects can be improved, and I certainly hope that over time they will be. Starfield offers an experience that can only be found in the other Bethesda games that predate it. It’s an epic space adventure that offers you the freedom to enjoy its vast universe in whatever manner you choose to lose yourself in.
Exoprimal’s core gameplay is stellar. The exosuits are a blast to play, and the game’s entire structure lends itself to team play really well, even with randoms. Its novel blend of PvP & PvE is incredibly unique and makes each match a fluid ever-changing experience. The game’s use of epic 10-player cooperative raids to break up the cycle is a nice touch. You always look forward to them, but the fact that they aren’t used constantly keeps them from getting stale.