Leonardo Faria's Reviews
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.
Some of Shantae‘s gameplay and design choices don’t exactly hold up, but I’m somewhat glad WayForward decided to re-release the game the exact way it first came to the world a whopping nineteen years ago. This is still an impressive achievement for a Game Boy Color, be it due to its visuals or level design, and it’s still really fun to play on the Switch in 2021. Not to mention that you won’t need to spend four figures on a mint copy in order to finally own it!
In short, Fez is as good now as it has always been. The reason I call this version the best way to experience this indie game is mostly due to the perfect combination of the Switch’s portability and its screen being much larger than the Vita’s. This is easily one of the best indies ever made, and one of the most important games of the past decade.
If you can ignore the fact that this is a twenty-two year old game, then you’ll have a great time with Shadow Man Remastered. There’s a lot to like in this game, namely the fantastic level design, creepy setting, and pseudo-metroidvania progression system. Sure, it looks and feels a bit janky for 2021 standards, but I’m happy with what Nightdive has managed to deliver.
Stitchy in Tooki Trouble is the quintessential “run-of-the-mill platformer”. It’s such a harmless outing; a game that doesn’t impress at all when it comes to its graphics, controls, and gameplay loop, while also featuring enough content and technical polish to be considered “just decent enough”. It’s hard to find flaws or positives about it. It simply exists. It will entertain die-hard platforming aficcionados and be mostly ignored by anyone not part of this very specific demographic.
More than just a funny game, Rain on Your Parade is a fun game. Its absolutely idiotic premise works, not only because of how cathartic it is, but also because the developers took their time to cram it with as many settings, objectives, and destructible objects you can imagine. It offers a staggering amount of bang for your buck and will give you a big dumb smile from beginning to end.
This is a slightly janky shooter, but it’s a unique take on the genre, with its bizarre setting and slight RPG mechanics. If you can look past its technical shortcomings, Poison Control is an easy recommendation.