Leonardo Faria's Reviews
Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World is a Mega Drive classic with a modern coat of paint, which isn’t a bad thing. Some aspects of its gameplay take some time to get used to, but you cannot deny it’s gorgeous to look at and way too charming to ignore.
The vast majority of these games have aged surprisingly well, being as fun and challenging now as they were back when they were first released. Sure, games like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and Bionic Commando are way too clunky for today’s standards, but when you have dozens of other extremely fun games at your disposal, you’ll ignore the fact some of them aren’t worth your time anymore.
RWBY: Grimm Eclipse Definitive Edition falls under the same category as most average-at-best licensed games out in the market: if you like the show, you’ll love this game. If you don’t know anything about RWBY, you basically need to be a die-hard hack n’ slash aficcionado in order to truly enjoy it. It’s not bad, far from it, but it’s just a safe action game with a bit of fanservice, decent controls, and not enough people to populate its online lobbies.
It might still not be a very good horror game overall, but Layers of Fear 2 is a much more enjoyable experience than its disappointing predecessor. Its story and premise were much more interesting this time around, but its limited gameplay and the fact it’s just not scary at all left a lot to be desired.
It tries to tell a story in a minimalistic way, but fails to deliver due to its poor presentation and awkward cutscenes. It wants to exude style and a hip hop aesthetic, but its disappointing soundtrack is comprised of short samples being looped ad nauseum. Finally, its gameplay is too shallow and uninspired to make you want to play it for more than a few minutes at a time.
Essays on Empathy feels like a collection of elevator pitches, of small technical showcases of what Deconstructeam will develop from now on. Some of the games in the collection are too vague and occasionally way too pretentious to be fully enjoyed, but other titles in here, while short, ooze potential.
Jetboard Joust masterfully blends retro aesthetics and the simplicity of arcade games from decades ago with an extra dose of challenge that makes it even more replayable. Being able to play this on the go is just the cherry on top of an already tasty cake.
In all honesty, yes, Subnautica: Below Zero is just more Subnautica, but don’t think of that as a bad thing. It might not have that many new features when compared to its predecessor, but considering how excellent the original game was, having yet another well-designed Subnautica, with a brand new map to explore and challenges to overcome, will always be worth celebrating.
The Colonists is a game whose main gameplay loop makes up for how underwhelming its controls and excess of busy work can be at times. Not exactly the most creative of city builders in the market, but just like most of its peers, once you figure out how to properly make your city grow in a sustainable way, you won’t be able to stop playing it.
Skate City isn’t terrible, but I can’t help but feel that I could just spend my time playing a lot of much better skateboarding games out there instead of this one, be them indies or AAAs. It has good ideas, but its execution feels undercooked due to its unnecessarily confusing control scheme and pitiful amount of content.
If I had to tell you which version of Layers of Fear is my favorite, then Layers of Fear VR takes the cake. Not because it makes its pseudo-horror experience more immersive, but because I could occasionally forget about its mundane plot and dumb jumpscares and fool around with its silly physics and glitches in VR.
-Type Final 2 is a hidden gem. It’s a love letter to a small but ultra-dedicated fanbase of a cult franchise, something we rarely see in this day and age. It doesn’t try to reboot the franchise or make it more accessible to newcomers: all it wants to do is celebrate the history of the R-Type series with what we love the most from it, namely a stupidly challenging but addictive gameplay loop and a jaw-dropping amount of unlockable content.
It might offer just the bare minimum to immerse you in a virtual reality world, but it features so much content and so much delightful fanservice, that it’s impossible not to love playing a few rounds of a nearly-realistic VR pinball experience while Grogu looks at you from a distance.
New Pokémon Snap is great. Some of its new gameplay features, such as the four-star photo system, are unnecessarily convoluted and its story couldn’t have been more forgettable. However, this is exactly what we’ve been asking for the past twenty-two years: a bigger, prettier sequel to the 1999 classic, with more areas to explore and more Pokémon to interact with.
Mom Hid My Game! 2 might be short and a bit too simplistic at times, but this charming little piece of weirdness is still a fun pastime for a few hours. Especially if you miss the absurdist experimental games that would come out of Japan a few decades ago. It’s entertaining, occasionally smart with its puzzle designs, and most important, very funny.
MLB The Show 21 isn’t just worth playing on the Xbox Series S and X out of novelty. It is a pretty good baseball game that’s shockingly accessible to people who know absolutely nothing about the sport, while being exactly what veterans and fans would expect from a yearly update of a sports franchise.
Terminator: Resistance Enhanced is a shockingly competent title that deeply respects its source material (in some ways, even better than the producers of the latest Terminator movies), despite being janky and somewhat unpolished. You can clearly notice the developers love the franchise and worked hard in order to deliver the best they could with the limited resources at their disposal.
Issues aside, Space Otter Charlie is a fun little title whose main gameplay gimmick is strong enough to keep you entertained until the very end of its duration. It’s a simple game, devoid of hard puzzles or meaningful combat, but charming enough to warrant a purchase.
MotoGP 21 is a pretty good racing simulator, but once again: it is catered towards a very specific niche, it’s not terribly newcomer-friendly (despite being a LOT more tolerable than the Ride series), and it’s not very different from last year’s iteration.
A few well-crafted character sprites and a passable J-Pop soundtrack don’t make up for the poor localization and a nonsensical fighting system.