Serial Cleaners improves a lot of components from the original, especially when it pivots towards a more story-driven interface. The voice acting and the overall creative choices make it an indie game worth trying out for the story and also for its unique way of telling a crime story from a different perspective. The best part of the game is interacting with the unique cleaners that give Serial Cleaners so much character by utilizing creative ways to tell the story through different eyes. Above all, there’s the enjoyable stealth action that takes you from start to finish, allowing you to tackle each level at your own pace.
The Diofield Chronicle excels with fantastic strategic elements that give a fresh take on the genre. The game moves away from the traditional turn-based chessboard movement system and allows for a deep real-time strategy involving a diverse unit customization system. However, The Diofield Chronicle fails to deliver a solid overall experience because of its basic plot, bland visuals, and lack of engaging side activities. Players don’t have a reason to get attached to the characters and the story, making the playthrough a tedious one. The game certainly shows promise, and it looks like the developers have a solid framework they can work on here, making us look forward to what the next iteration of The Diofield Chronicle will look like.
Steelrising is a game changer for more casual players that want to experience the genre. The Assist mode is truly a gift, offering a good compromise for both sides of the difficulty conversation while alienating none of them, allowing both newbies and veterans to easily jump right in. What awaits players is a game with a frenetic pace and fun combat, topped off with a serviceable story to keep you interested and motivated to keep going.
Inscryption is definitely a game I’d recommend trying for its unique experience, and I’m happy to get a chance to play it on a console a year after sticking to the PC. It’s a perfect synergy of roguelike deck builder and horror mystery that’s engaging from the moment you start playing until after you’ve completed the story to further explore its many mysteries. While it does have its issues and it may require a little bit of effort to gain momentum, it’s definitely worth the reward as you uncover Inscryption‘s many secrets and become fully involved in its world. It’s exhilarating, anxiety-inducing, and you may even get a laugh from its quirky dark humor; taken as a whole rather than the sum of its parts, this is where Inscryption truly shines.
Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed is a fun romp now as it was back in the day. The charm of the game is easily felt, and going through its varied arsenal to explore its many different areas is certainly a highlight. THQ Nordic has preserved the content of the game while giving Crypto a facelift to modernize the series. The humor may not work for everybody, but given the chance, it is a fun game that you can clear over the weekend by yourself or with a friend. Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed is a breath of fresh air, and while it doesn't attempt to do anything needlessly clever, it is an honest game doing what it does best: to entertain.
Saints Row doesn’t exactly add anything new to the franchise, taking a back-to-basics approach and reliving what made Saints Row 3 a fantastic title by building up on that. While the reboot makes it cater to certain sensibilities, the new direction will not be for everyone. Hopefully, it won’t deter you from having a good time. The series fanbase will either love or hate the game because of this sharp change in direction, which is especially felt in the new cast of characters and the writing. Should you choose to overlook these, you can expect a lot of mindless and unapologetic fun for hours. Saints Row is not a perfect game, but the components that make it a good game are good enough. The visuals and presentation could've used a bit of work, and some bugs could have been squashed first, but Saints Row delivers on an open world front that is somewhat fun and entertaining despite the tired formula that could use a fresher take next time.
Cult of the Lamb deserves a place in your library with its perfect blend of both thematic elements and gameplay mechanics. It’s a stupendous balancing act that takes its roguelite elements and community management and starts out as something simple and accessible, then expands to a robust and complex game that keeps you coming back for more. Just like its cult themes, Cult of the Lamb draws you in with its creepy-cute charm, and even as chaos ensues, you watch it unfold like a slow-moving train wreck. When the shoe drops, you’ve realized that its tentacles have taken hold and you find yourself completely hooked on its dark and demented world.
Endling: Extinction is Forever has moments of heart and engaging gameplay with its interesting blend of survival management and immersive narrative adventure. However, it screws the pooch by giving us too much of its message while not motivating us to play more because of its slow pacing and unclear tutorials. Don't be mistaken, there is an excellent game underneath the many frustrating elements.
While I didn’t have a good impression of Stray in its first hour, the succeeding adventure won me back with its interesting story and lore. If they did away with the button prompts and the curated cat activities, the exploration and experimentation by the player could really stand out, allowing for a more organic experience. Stray really comes alive once B12 has been introduced and then the world fully comes into view. B12 and the cat’s dynamic completed the game and really opens up the world, introducing the culture and society of the Companions. In a world that’s devoid of humanity, these AIs really capture what it is like being human, warts and all. For a game that’s about the end of humanity, it is actually quite hopeful and bittersweet. This year alone, most of the games I’ve reviewed dealt with a post-apocalyptic scenario with varying levels of bleakness. Stray stands out from the clowder, so don’t let its limitations lead you astray.
Deliver Us The Moon, I would say, deserves a place up there with the likes of Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Gone Home. It presents an engaging story and an even deeper sense of immersive storytelling seen through the collection of codex, environmental cues, and exciting set pieces that propel us to find out the answer to the ultimate mystery. While it is a short experience and replayability is relegated to completing your codex, Deliver Us The Moon is a title that should be experienced to be believed. With good use of gravity mechanics and actual cues for adventure, your first run of the game will surely be a blast.
Your dose of nostalgia, especially from 90s fighting games, will be realized with the Capcom Fighting Collection. With ten unique games to choose from, it’s definitely worth the price of admission especially if you’re a die-hard fighting fan looking for a great time by yourself or with competitive play. As a fighting game casual, I still found myself enjoying the single-player options that many of these titles offered. Whether it be for the more popular titles like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Hyper Street Fighter II or the more obscure ones like Cyberbots and Red Earth, the Capcom Fighting Collection is a superb compilation that shows the great lineage of Capcom titles.
OlliOlli World: VOID Riders adds a ton of value to the base game with a new technique, new cosmetics, and new backbreaking challenges to keep you playing. It makes an amazing game even better, with the caveat of getting good if you want to enjoy the elite rewards. VOID Riders is a great expansion that adds more of what made OlliOlli World an already fantastic experience, and that’s definitely not a bad thing in our book.
The Quarry doesn't hit the same highs as Until Dawn, with very simple QTEs and the lack of good and genuine scares that do the game a disservice. It is unfortunate because the star-studded cast delivers the goods but isn't enough to lift the game to the heights that it aimed to reach. I commend how The Quarry attempts to stand out with its accessibility and slightly revised mechanics, but for all intents and purposes, it is an overpriced version of Until Dawn. The Supermassive formula is begging for a refresh, and The Quarry is its latest victim.
There’s a lot of enjoyment to be had with Metal Max Xeno Reborn in the long run, but it’ll take a long while before you get there. The moment you’ve established your base of operations, recruited all your survivors, and maxed out your tanks, there’s a real cathartic way that the post-apocalyptic world of Dystokyo comes to life with its intense bounty hunting and fetch quests. However, the game terribly suffers in its early to mid-game, which can be a bit of a disappointment due to its rushed tutorials and unforgiving difficulty spikes. As a longtime JRPG fan, it really reminds me of old-school JRPGs that had a bit of jank but had their unique charm. As with classic JRPGs, it also comes with its quirks that make the game frustrating, especially when starting out and getting lost in the process. It gets better in the endgame if you last that long.
For fans of the series, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong would hopefully quench your thirst until the eventual release of Bloodlines 2. However, I feel that newcomers to the series will have varying degrees of enjoyment regarding the lore, and if you’re not a fan of reading, it’ll be a bumpy start. The magic of Swansong is that succeeding playthroughs will definitely get better as you learn more of the lore and paint a complete picture of the whole mystery. If you have the patience for all that legwork, more power to you to be able to unravel every one of its mysteries. It also really doesn’t help that the puzzles are quite obtuse and the visuals aren’t as inviting as something like Vampyr or Detroit: Become Human.
Card Shark is a rather unique game with an interesting premise, but I strongly suggest you try out the demo before committing. The aesthetic and narrative are entertaining enough, but require you to learn a rather tedious mini-game system whose costs outweigh the rewards. There are a few strange design decisions that prevent the enjoyment of Card Shark, as a simple manual save could save us a lot of grief going through the journey. The tutorials are quite obtuse, but the early quests keep it easy that when it starts to combine variations of techniques, there’s no way to review old tricks to keep the momentum going.
Sifu is a definite must-experience beat-em-up for 2022, and for those who have passed on this title because of the crushing difficulty, you can rejoice in the fact that the developers have added difficulty settings that allow you to experience the game at your own pace but still keep the overall experience. While the original really pushed for the aspect of lifelong mastery through its difficulty setting, the new update really opens up the game to a fuller experience that a wider base can experience instead of being intimidated by it. There is more to Sifu than this, boasting its atmosphere and immersion to breathe life back into the beat-em-up genre that’s really been relegated to retro games or remakes of retro games.
Road 96 is an enjoyable narrative journey that makes the most of your first run to the best of its presentation. While it may not win over gamers of certain political mindsets, its strengths are more derived from how it made a narrative game entertaining enough that doesn't forget that it's a video game first. I'm always looking for creative ways to tell a story and these vignettes that chronicle a country's turning point through the eyes of its disillusioned youth are what inspire me to continue perusing interactive media as it pushes the boundaries as a storytelling medium. Long story short, Road 96 is certainly a journey worth taking.
Personally, I appreciated A Place For The Unwilling due to its atmosphere and unique way of interacting with the world. The title really makes you feel the alienation and awkwardness of being a stranger in a strange land, while always having you be on your toes for an unseen danger. However, from a gameplay perspective, it is marred with inconsistencies that rob the game of its enjoyment.
Weird West is a game that I enjoyed because of its unique take on both the Western and Weird sci-fi sub-genres, making it an impressively immersive RPG experience. What sullied my experience were the multiple glitches on top of the repetitive quest system, preventing me from completing the story because I played the game the “wrong” way. Weird West is designed to be free-flowing but these glitches are fundamentally the antithesis of what they’ve designed the game to do. I’m a patient gamer when it comes to gameplay bugs, but when glitches stop story progression because of something the game has been designed to do, it’s really a red flag going forward. It can be patched eventually but until then, minus points for now.