Leonardo Faria's Reviews
I have to admit that Sharknado VR: Eye of the Storm ended up being much better than expected. Granted, it’s still a terrible game, with absymal visuals, sound effects, and a grand total of half an hour of content, but considering its source material isn’t exactly Lord of the Rings, I expected a lot worse.
Wurroom is really unorthodox, trippy, abstract, experimental, and any other fancy adjective used to describe something that is just plain weird. It sure looks nice and I do appreciate its usage of the Vita’s screen, but this is barely a game. It features the minimum amount of interactivity to make it qualify as a commercial video game. It might work as a very brief (and very forgettable) art presentation, but as a piece of entertainment, it’s just not good enough.
Had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants been released in, say, 2021, I would have definitely complained about it, but I would have also said there was no better option for us fans out there. In a post Cowabunga Collection and Shredder’s Revenge world, however, this game feels almost like a joke. I don’t know who this game is for. By being so dull, so lifeless, so devoid of joy and excitement, Wrath of the Mutants actually stands out like a sore thumb.
Sadly, even though there was some potential in its premise, Witch Rise is the kind of the game that will attract players based on how easy it is to get some trophies, not its actual features.
With such a paltry amount of content and limited gameplay loop, there’s little else that can or should be said about Pickleball Smash. Even if it’s not glitchy or broken, it’s just really boring. There’s not enough substance to keep you entertained for more than a few minutes at a time. The pickleball ruleset also doesn’t translate very well to an arcade-like environment, with matches possibly lasting for a damn eternity if players keep breaking each other’s serves. There is no reason to grab this over any other racket-based sports game, even if you, somehow, prefer pickleball over tennis.
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.
Redfall might not be the worst game released in 2023, but I don’t think I have played something more uninspired. It looks dated, its performance is disappointing, its plot is bland, the controls are glitchy, and the entire gameplay loop is the most generic and passion-devoid AAA schtick you could think of. If Arkane clearly wasn’t willing to make this game, then why would any of us should or want to care about it? Not even the fact it’s on Gamepass makes it being worth downloading it and playing for a day or two.
Watching demons’ guts fly through the air is fun at first, but the repetitive encounters, poor presentation, bad framerate and minuscule scope all make Demonic Supremacy feel underwhelming. It’s the poster child of the saturation of the retro-styled first person shooter genre, being lackluster in terms of vision, presentation, polish, and gameplay.
I get that Flutter Away was made with the best of intentions, but I can’t, for the life of me, even begin to question who is this for. This feels less like a game and more like a competent student project, lasting for about an hour, meant to showcase some mechanics and some cute visuals. As a game, however, I just don’t see its appeal. There is no catharsis, no semblance of a challenge, no rewarding for complete its mundane objectives.
I guess ACL Pro Cornhole does a good job at recreating all the sheer excitement of cornhole to a virtual environment, but here’s the very obvious issue: this is too boring, and not particularly exciting to be played as a video game. Cornhole can be fun on a county fair, or when you’re a freshman in college, but as a game being sold for thirty outrageous bucks? Yeah, there’s just not enough substance and content to justify its existence outside of a minigame included in another, much larger title.
What a massive disappointment. Sure, the fact this overly ambitious game was a single developer effort is something worth commending, for the scope is quite surprising, but this ended up being its main issue as well. Molly Medusa shouldn’t have been this ambitious, or at least it should have spent more time in the oven before being sent out to the public. It’s chock full of terrible gameplay decisions, poor puzzles, and nauseating camera controls.
At the end of it, I couldn’t help but just constantly ask myself, “what’s the point of all this?” I will never not appreciate a developer for coming up with a unique premise for a game, but make it fun, or at least moderately coherent for it to justify its existence as a piece of entertainment.
Krut: The Mythic Wings is not a downright awful game. Out of so many games released in 2022, it’s nowhere near as infuriating as crap like Postal 4 and Destroy All Humans! – Clone Carnage. It has some interesting ideas and I like its premise, but this is a textbook example of a game completely devoid of redeeming factors when it comes to its execution. Average-at-best visuals, a weak framerate, no interesting sound capabilities to speak of, and a really poor combat system all result in a very harmless yet underwhelming experience.
The Origin: Blind Maid is further proof that having great ideas for a game is just 50% of what makes it a banger. If you can’t deliver on your vision, all you’ll have to offer is a disappoint game that will reek of “what could have been”. The ideas are there, the ambition is laudable, but the execution left much to be desired.
More than just a really bad soulslike, Dolmen is a major disappointment. After more than half a decade waiting for this game, as well as constantly losing faith in it ever being released, I was expecting for these constant delays to result in it feeling more polished, more akin to more modern soulslikes. What we ended up getting was the complete opposite: a clunky, shockingly behind-the-times husk of an action RPG which would have been considered dated back in 2016, let alone today.
The worst kind of bad game isn’t the one that is a total and complete train wreck. In Nightmare is the worst kind of bad game. It’s just absolutely uninteresting. Not good enough to be worth tackling, not bad enough to be enjoyed as a “so bad it’s good experience”, but also flawed enough not to be considered just downright mediocre. It’s boring and poorly designed.
Between its mediocre visuals, unappealing presentation, borderline mindless gameplay loop, and complete lack of interesting set pieces or boss battles, there is really no reason to give this aggressively bland title a go, when there are literal dozens of much better dungeon crawlers available on the Switch. Ironically enough, most of them coming from NIS America themselves.
The fact that its aggressively bland campaign is, by far, the best part of the package says a lot about the overall quality of what this game has to offer. A multiplayer mode so clunky and so hell-bent on making you spend money on microtransactions to a beyond insane degree, you can’t even play it ironically, in order to make fun of it.
Remember that time the great Michael Bluth said, “I don’t know what I expected” on Arrested Development? That’s me with this PlayStation 5 version of Jumanji: The Game. That game was beyond salvageable back when it first came out; brute forcing it with improved hardware specs in order to look, sound and play like a mediocre last-gen game wasn’t going to be a solution.
I don’t remember the last time I have played a game published by a major corporation that felt so soulless like WarioWare: Get It Together. Yes, even by some of the usual suspects. What was once Nintendo’s go-to franchise for zaniness, creativity, and actually taking advantage of every single feature included in a console’s hardware has been reduced to what mostly resembles a lazy and rushed job just to ensure the publisher had something to sell during a particular month.