It’s disheartening to see a game with a solid concept that badly needed more work before being released. With how exploitable the AI is, I wound up needing less than nine hours to finish Story Mode, four of those coming after discovering the “V” strategy. Even if the bugs were fixed, Ganbare! Super Strikers has some glaring problems in its game mechanics which lead to lopsided teams and unbalanced matches. The limited customization and lackluster Story Mode are the missed penalty shot that seals it for me. I do hope the developer keeps updating and adding onto what’s here as I did enjoy the core gameplay. However, for $10 I can’t in good faith recommend this in its current state.
Indiecalypse stands as an example of misplaced effort. Instead of being one polished game, it’s a cobbled together mess of several different incomplete builds of games. Even the Kickstarter backer list seems rushed, since none of the names are in alphabetical order. The humor isn’t dark so much as desperate and annoying to a degree that even Meet the Spartans thinks it’s overdoing it. In a way its portrayal of video game fans and developers reminds me of the movie Ready to Rumble, which is about pro wrestling and designed for its fans, but ends up depicting those fans as dumb, immature, irrational troglodytes. This game isn’t even four hours long, but not only did it feel much longer, I had to keep taking breaks every twenty minutes or so. Sometimes I just had to play something else, but usually I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling because this game’s sense of humor has that effect. $12.99 is far too much, and I’m not sure any sale price could justify ever buying this.
Having just finished playing Outbreak: The New Nightmare a couple days ago, it’s almost impressive how forgettable it was; I had to keep going back to the game to remember what I saw and experienced, even after going through every Campaign and Experiments mission, each of which lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. Sadly, this has the look and feel of an incomplete Steam game, and I had to triple check the price for this because I couldn’t believe that it really is $13 on PS4. Given the short amount of time between most releases in the Outbreak series, I can only recommend that the developer spend much, much more time on each entry. That way, maybe the next one will play better and the visuals might not only look better, but consist of way fewer reused assets that didn’t look so good in the first place. I realize this will fall on deaf ears since Outbreak: Lost Hope, the fourth game in the series, will likely be out on PS4 by the time this review goes up. Maybe (or should I say, hopefully) the later releases are better, because this is priced way above what it’s actually worth.
This is unacceptable for a $5 game, let alone Crimson Keep’s $20 asking price. After dozens of attempts and five hours I will never get back, I managed to get to the third level once, then almost immediately starved to death. Crimson Keep is a thrown-together mess that feels like it only got halfway through its development cycle before being shoved into the limelight. The only people I could possibly recommend this game to are the most hardcore eShop collectors, but that’s only if my conscience stops screaming at me to take that statement back. I don’t know if the Steam version is any better, but because of this I have no desire to find out. Give this a hard pass and randomly generate your way to something better.