Leonardo Faria's Reviews
Virtual reality makes PowerWash Simulator more intuitive and immersive, but still very relaxing. Sure, the convoluted nature of having to put a visor onto your face for lengthy periods of time means that this game won’t be played in sessions as long as the ones you’ve been playing on PC or console. Still, you’ll still have tons of fun with PowerWash Simulator VR. I sure did. The superior control scheme, and the novelty of playing such a game on VR are enough to make this particular port of the cult hit my favorite, even though I don’t think it’s the best one, at least technically speaking.
In short, Assassin’s Creed Nexus was one of the most impressive surprises of the year. I wasn’t expecting much from it due to Ubisoft’s lack of pre-release promotion, but what I ended up getting instead was a true testament of what the Quest 2 can do, and how to properly adapt a third-person action-adventure series into VR. It’s shorter than your average Assassin’s Creed, but still substantially meaty for a VR game, complete with occasional pseudo-open worlds with extra challenges to discover.
Barton Lynch Pro Surfing satiates, at least momentarily, the need for a surfing game. It’s such a shame that it’s so utterly hideous to look at, because, for the most part, it is indeed a decent game, with intuitive controls and enough content to keep you busy for a while. If you really want to play a surfing game, this works out just fine. If you’re not particularly into the sport, I doubt there is anything in here that will grab your attention for too long, however.
Don’t get me wrong, Until the Last Bullet is far from being considered a good game. With the exception of admittedly having a good usage of the Joy-Cons’ gyro functionalities, this is a super low budgeted shooter that is so unbelievably crappy-looking it almost looks endearing. But this is what makes it oddly charming in some twisted kind of way. It feels honest in its crappiness.
Sociable Soccer 24 impresses with its ludicrous amount of playable clubs to choose from, but I think that’s basically where the novelty ends. At its core, it’s a fun little throwback to simpler electronic footballing days, but maybe it is TOO stripped down of features. Even other titles from the 90s featured more mechanics and customization options.
Apparently, it only took Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio six months to develop Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. I would like to laud each and every person in this team for coming up with this magnificent entry to the franchise in such short amount of time. It might be shorter, but its story is a lot more focused. It’s still packed to the brim with side content, with the Coliseum being one of the most entertaining (and hilarious) side modes to have ever been added to a Yakuza game.
Godzilla Voxel Wars is a novel little thing, but it’s also a game that overstays its welcome quite quickly. As unique as its concept and gameplay loop can be, there’s not a lot of variety in its stage design, presentation, and puzzles. Sure, there are hundreds of them in this package, but they aren’t exactly that unique or different from one another.
There are elements in which Alien Hominid Invasion feels like an improvement over its predecessor, whilst it feels like a step back in a few others. It is vastly more accessible, being easier to detect and avoid enemy attacks, with slightly improved controls, and its mission-based structure makes it a perfect fit for a portable like the Switch. On the other hand, it is a lot more repetitive, and its level design doesn’t feel as inspired as the sheer lunacy featured in the original Alien Hominid.
I’d have appreciated a bit more genre variety, but I was impressed by the technology powering Let’s Sing 2024, as well as the fact it has a career mode.
Even if the controls are still a bit confusing, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 feels a lot less janky than its predecessor. In fact, it's a vast improvement over it in basically every single aspect. It looks slightly better, its framerate is a lot smoother, it features more characters and stages, and it's chock-full of single and multiplayer modes, with endless replayablity and a lot of unlockables.
I had a pretty good time with Air Twister, even though it did feature a myriad of shortcomings, from its boring plot to its short duration. It’s a somewhat limited game in terms of scope, but it’s Yu Suzuki at his best: this is pure arcade fun, the kind he used to churn out with gusto back in the 80s and 90s.
Whenever you are thrown into one of its shooting sections, it is easily one of the best first-person shooters I’ve played in a long, long time, as well as an impressive showcase of what smaller studios can do with Unreal Engine 5’s tools. It’s just that impressive. Whenever you’re told to perform street patrolling or detective work, it’s still a decent, time, but you’ll wish you’d be thrown into another action-heavy set piece instead. Nevertheless, despite some pacing issues and an occasional lack of focus, I’m very impressed with what Teyon was able to achieve.
I was sure Skull Island: Rise of Kong was going to be a surefire disaster of biblical proportions, but its Xbox Series port just ended up being a halfway competent, albeit an utterly mediocre platformer. It has some borderline acceptable controls and performance, but is marred by poor level design, uninteresting combat, hilarious cutscenes, and possibly the worst sound design to be included in a commercially released video game.
It’s funny, it’s crass, it is super entertaining with a friend or by yourself, but also brutally unfair. Alien Hominid HD is a pretty good remaster of a cult class of an arcade game, but be ready to scream at it from time to time. It’s straight to the point: a solid revamp of a silly run and gun shooter from back in the day, complete with visual improvements, solid performance, and a ton of side content to keep you busy if the main campaign is too stressful for newcomers.
This brand new 10th anniversary remake of Slender: The Arrival might be an impressive visual overhaul of what was once a cheap-looking horror game, but at its core, it’s still the same janky and frustrating walking simulator released ten years ago. It may be a cult hit in the horror gaming community, but I didn’t find it very scary, nor compelling. I will give Blue Isle Studios credit for showcasing what Unreal 5 can provide to smaller games and teams, but sadly, mechanic-wise, nothing else of importance has been added.
The idea of making a story-centric truck simulator isn’t inherently bad, but Truck Driver: The American Dream, as a whole, felt incredibly unfinished. Between the dated visuals, amateurish physics, poor controls, and myriad of game crashing glitches, there isn’t a lot worth praising in this janky trucking simulator. The voice acting was good, but when everything else surrounding it was just doing their best to make me want to rage quit, I don’t think that’s exactly good enough of a positive to make you want to consider purchasing it.
Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 is, admittedly, a somewhat lazy remaster collection. It includes two copied and pasted efforts by Bluepoint released a decade ago, and a shoddy port of Metal Gear Solid, most likely taken straight out of the guts of the PS1 Classic. With that being said, those are still phenomenal games (well, Metal Gear Solid has aged like spoiled milk, but the point stands), and well worth your time.
I couldn’t have been more surprised. Hello Kitty and Friends: Happiness Parade Hops is a great rhythm game. It’s the perfect combination of great controls, great performance, an addictive gameplay loop, and an impressive library of stupidly catchy tunes. I never thought I’d end up playing a Hello Kitty game that did not suck, let alone playing a Hello Kitty game that would win me over, but this little gem did so.
If the developers’ intention was to make this game look and feel like a Nintendo 64 platformer, then Cavern of Dreams has succeeded. It looks the part, it feels like one of those games, for better or worse. With that being said, it managed to look like a mid-tier platformer from that era, something akin to Gex or Tonic Trouble, and not exactly a big player from the system’s upper echelon.
Asterix & Obelix: Heroes isn’t technically broken, glitchy, or even aggressively bad, but it’s completely devoid of life or joy. It’s a soulless attempt at making an Asterix-themed Slay the Spire clone, without any of the challenge or roguelite aspects that made that game so appealing in the first place. What we have instead is a linear take on the formula, with uninteresting cards, boring visuals, nearly no sound to speak of, and little to no incentive for you to play it for more than maybe ten minutes at a time.