Leonardo Faria's Reviews
Even if I didn’t care at all about its plot, and there were a handful of issues with its gameplay, namely feature creep, I played it for hours and hours. The brilliant mixture of Nioh, Sekiro, Bloodborne, and even a bit of Battlefield resulted in a game that feels familiar and fresh at the same time, and one of the most exciting action RPGs released in recent memory.
It is an ungodly flawed game in need of some patches, without a doubt. Some of its design choices are questionable, to say the least. Yet, somehow, I still liked Clive ‘N’ Wrench way more than expected. By no means was this up to par with some of the other love letters to the collectathon genre released over the past decade, but its charm and creativity somewhat outweighed its cons.
So this basically ends up being the typical licensed game that feels like a godsend to fans of the franchise in question, but is a cautionary purchase for everyone else. Gigantosaurus: Dino Kart is easily 3DClouds’ best attempt at a kid-friendly racing game, and it has enough mechanics to make it feel like the perfect introductory racing title for your kids before you teach them about the horrific tale of the Blue Shell, but it’s a bit too brief in terms of content.
The classic case of a jack of all trades, master of none. I also have to commend the developers for a truly gorgeous presentation, decent tutorial and a user interface that isn’t half-bad, despite being made with a largely forgettable gameplay loop in mind. We have enough city builders and strategy games out there right now. Just get one of each and enjoy their vastly different purposes. You don’t need a game trying to be both at the same time.
With that being said, this is not bad DLC. Far from it. This is the perfect kind of content I’d want from a PowerWash Simulator crossover expansion. The Midgar Special Pack uses the base game’s inexplicably appealing gameplay loop as a foundation for players to immerse themselves into some extra Final Fantasy VII content. It’s lengthy enough, giving fans of both franchises more of what they love, be it some healthy doses of fan service or just more horrendously dirty machinery to clean up.
Sure, a full-fledged remake of Like a Dragon: Ishin! would have been the better deal, but finally being able to play a localized version of this ludicrous Yakuza spinoff is still great. Even though it’s a bit dated for those used to the Dragon Engine, the controls are still excellent, the sheer amount of content is staggering, and the combat styles at your disposal are some of the best the franchise has ever seen. This is what we’ve been asking for years, and Sega delivered. I can’t complain that much.
Inti Creates knocked it out of the park with a game that feels right at home on the Nintendo Switch. What little I have to complain about is so minute it feels like nitpicking. If you’re a fan of Castlevania, but are fed up with the sheer volume of metroidvanias flooding the indie scene nowadays, Grim Guardians: Demon Purge is the perfect pick.
If this is what Atari will keep releasing from now on, I’m game. It might be a brand new title, but Akka Arrh feels like the perfect marriage between the Atari of old and the technology of today. It’s also weird as hell. It took me a while to understand what on Earth I was supposed to do in this game, but once I got the hang of it, I had a blast with this bizarre mixture between a space shooter, a puzzler… and a golf game.
Just like other FMV-based games by Wales Interactive, Ten Dates is not an easy sell. You need to be into this different kind of visual novel with limited interactivity, you need to like dating sims, and you need to like rom-coms. With all that said and done, Ten Dates might be my favorite Wales Interactive game so far.
I feel like this particular version of Zero Wing isn’t the one that should have been preserved. Or, at the very least, the folks at Bitwave Games should have added the option for us to change between the arcade port (the better one, mechanically speaking) and the Mega Drive port (the one with the meme that made it famous) via a menu option. It’s not a bad game, far from it, and Bitwave did a good job at porting and remastering it, but this was a missed opportunity. Vanilla Zero Wing just doesn’t have that many interesting elements that make it stand out from the ten billion other space shooters released in the early 90s.
Red Tape is a really tedious and mundane game… and weirdly enough, that’s why I actually kinda liked it. The joke was turning Hell into a boring and bureaucratic office building where you’re told to spend the rest of eternity as an intern doing pointless jobs, and against all odds, the joke landed. The fact the game was short and, oddly enough, somewhat visually appealing, also did help a bit. It’s not for everyone, and there are other office-like comedic games that are way more enjoyable, but for the minuscule price tag the publisher is asking for, you could do a hell of a lot worse.
Pharaoh: A New Era doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to city builders. As a straightforward remake of a 1999 game, it did gain a much better UI and faster gameplay, but it’s still a slow-paced experience focused on micromanagement and logistics. Only a specific niche of city building fans will really get a kick out of this game, but it’s still one worth checking out if you’re into strategic titles which reward patience and long-term planning.
This is how a remaster of a Nintendo game should look, run, and play. What was already near-perfect is even better, all thanks to Retro Studios just improving upon every single aspect of the original game, making this particular version of an all-time classic the ultimate way to play it. Not to mention the fact you can now take it on-the-go. I may have one or two small issues with it, but to call them deal-breakers would be damn near blasphemous. In short, grab Metroid Prime Remastered.
There’s more to it than your average demo, but way less content than your average sports title. It’s very simplistic, feeling like a remaster of a Nintendo 64 sports title at times, but it’s cute, runs well, and its controls are pretty good. Also, as a means to test the Western public’s perception on a Japanese-as-hell franchise, this isn’t so bad. And considering it costs a mere dollar… eh, what the hell, we only live once, go for it.
There’s nothing inherently bad about Rhythm Sprout, nothing that makes it a deal-breaker. Sure, it gets repetitive after a while, but considering its level-based structure, you can easily play it in short bursts and have quite a bit of fun with it. It’s a very competent rhythm game with cutesy visuals, a decent gameplay loop, an adequate difficulty curve, and a sizeable amount of content.
As you can clearly see, I loathed playing Albacete Warrior. It’s not just because it was painfully unfunny. It was the fact it had NOTHING else to offer besides some of the dumbest jokes ever put into a video game, since the game completely failed elsewhere as well. Bland visuals, terrible cutscenes, bland music, awful sound effects, terrible level design, and controls that don’t work… all while forcing you to play as a character that made Duke Nukem feel and sound as classy as Leslie Freaking Nielsen.
We know we are probably not going to get a new Wario Land anytime soon. As a result, Pizza Tower feels like a massive breath of fresh air. It took everything that worked in those games (excluding the portability, unless you’re a lucky Steam Deck owner), added in a truckload of funny, 90s-as-hell imagery, and dropped it into Steam like the homage we’ve been waiting for.
This was a bold attempt by Microsoft. I applaud them trying to adapt the most mouse-friendly game in existence to a console, with a controller. It’s still fun, and it’s certainly very playable, but it’s off-putting. It’s far from being the ideal way to experience this classic, and to be fair, the PC version isn’t even THAT demanding, even on laptops. I really don’t know who this particular port of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is for.
Fashion Police Squad does get repetitive and annoying after a while, but I cannot deny how creative this title is. The idea of a fashion-based, death-free DOOM clone sounded ridiculous on paper, but the developers sure delivered a brand new take on retro-styled shooters with an additional layer of puzzle-solving, dad-worthy puns, and a ton of color and personality.
Backfirewall_ is filled with creative puzzles that are never obtuse. There are a few collectibles here and there. The script may have never made laugh out loud, but it was clever. The game may not be as memorable or replayable as its sources of influence (then again, that’s an incredibly high bar), but I had a pretty good time with it. It’s funny, well-designed and unique, with the latter being its most important quality.