Leonardo Faria's Reviews
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.
My complaints are very minute. I simply loved Hi-Fi Rush. I just wasn’t expecting for such a banger to drop without any buildup, coming from such a talented team, right at the beginning of the year. It’s a magnificent mixture of tons of games from the mid-2000s, resulting in a unique combination of gameplay styles, sense of humor and visuals that easily stands out from the rest of Microsoft’s current exclusives.
This is still the GoldenEye you have loved for the past twenty-five years, with just enough quality of life improvements to make it feel at home in a modern console. It runs well (though not at 60fps), its new controller scheme is a godsend, and the godlike soundtrack remains intact. It’s more than just nostalgia bait: as a shooter made in a time when console shooters weren’t a thing, it has aged surprisingly well in most aspects besides its visuals. I love that I can finally play this on a modern system, with a decent controller, for the foreseeable future.
The mishmash between retro aesthetics and modern quality of life improvements creates a game that doesn’t innovate at all, but never needed to. Dread Templar is a stellar retro shooter that shines with its fast-paced gameplay and utterly stellar level design, with most of its issues being minute things such as poor (but very occasional) voice acting and some bizarre key mapping.
The improved framerate alone makes this next-gen version of Kakarot the ideal way to play the game, but considering the original build came out three years ago, you may have already played it to death. It’s still getting DLC, sure, but it’s the same old Kakarot. You need to either love it to death or have never played it before to fully enjoy this brand new version. It’s still a repetitive game full of padding and pointless filler, sure, but it’s also a phenomenal celebration of the anime, and pretty good action RPG in its own right.
If you were wondering if Persona 4 Golden would manage to stand the test of time, don’t worry, it did. Playing it on a console is still as fun as it was on the PS Vita. Even if its visuals aged like curded milk, and the dungeon crawling segments aren’t that engaging, the rest of the game is just too damn entertaining to complain about. The music, the characters, the setting, the fusing system, the fast-paced combat, the utterly fantastic plot… Persona 4 Golden is just great.
I’ll confess that I expected little from The Legend of Tianding due to its origins as a remake of a Flash game, as well as the minute amount of hype garnered when it first came out last year, but I was really pleased with the game as a whole. Even if its art style is hampered by some dull level design, and its pacing can occasionally be a bit dull, its gameplay was just good enough to make me (mostly) ignore these setbacks.
These issues were minute, however. I still wholeheartedly recommend picking NeverAwake up, even if you’re just moderately acquainted to bullet hell shooters. Its gameplay is actually innovative, in a genre known for rarely experimenting with new control schemes or gameplay loops, and its visuals are just amazing, being the perfect blend of something from Tim Burton and old-school Sega. Even if its story was forgettable and its duration wasn’t that impressive, its core mechanics more than made up for any setbacks found along the way.
To Codemasters’ credit, it is the full version of GRID Legends, but now available in VR. It’s not a simple “VR experience” either: there’s a truckload of content in this game, making it one of the beefiest titles available on the Quest 2. However, the horrendous visuals, disappointing controls, and lack of immersion make this one a tough sell to all but the most die-hard VR enthusiasts, those who were eagerly waiting for a full-fledged racing sim on the system.