James Cunningham's Reviews
The most important thing to keep in mind about Gex Trilogy isn't about how good the games are in 2025, but rather seeing their place in history.
Like SnowRunner before it, RoadCraft is a game of slow construction-machinery satisfaction rather than adrenaline-fueled action.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is a fully 3D open-world Metroidvania, where each new upgrade opens up new paths to useful resources in the earlier areas
I, Robot is an incredible sequel to a lost arcade classic, instantly playable by fans of the original but with new gameplay hooks to stand on its own.
Rusty Rabbit is a story-focused, level-based Metroidvania, which admitted isn't really how Metroidvanias tend to work.
Crashlands 2's crafting, building, exploration, story and even the combat all come together to make a ridiculously fun adventure.
Each level ups the stakes until the fight is an explosion of attacks, effects, purple danger zones, support heroes and carefully-managed chaos.
Everhood 2 is all over the place with changing art styles, a unique combat system and a plot that somehow makes more sense as it's getting weirder.
3D Don't Die Mr Robot is a ridiculously-playable arcade game that feels great whether just making things explode or chasing after a new score.
Techtonica is more story-oriented than most games of its type, but it's still an automation game with a good hundred hours of assembly and debugging.
Shady Knight's first-person action is as much about movement as it is hitting things, and both features are used in multiple ways.
The thing that sets Enotria: The Last Song apart from other games in its genre is that it's set in a theater-fantasy version of Italy.
In a game with the scope and polish of Satisfactory one hundred hours can be just the beginning of building the industrial powerhouse of your dreams.
Core Keeper is a strong survival game that can easily chew through the hours, providing a great balance between adventure and homesteading. There's a sense that no idea was left out, whether that be a constant pet companion or minecart rail lines, and while these may not get fully fleshed out, this is a rare occasion where quantity manages to make up for depth. The pet levels up and sometimes enemies drop treats that give it a nice experience boost, and that's all it needs to do. Minecart goes on tracks, riding it beats walking and maybe it doesn't need a complicated system of switches and sidings to get the job done. The underground world of Core Keeper stretches on for functionally forever, filled with chasms, monsters, resources beyond measure and even an underground sea. There's a huge amount of ways to play with it all and sometimes that's more than enough.
Race to get better. Race for self-improvement. Race to understand how knocking a few hundredths of a second off a best time can feel like victory.
The heart of the game, though, is that it just feels good to tinker with electronics, with almost no penalty for experimentation aside from the bomb levels that run on a generous timer. A few hours with its logic and you'll be putting together intricate machines while prodding at the shape of a solution, hooking up multiple components of varying complexity with only a bit of rewiring when it doesn't quite go to plan. The dozens of parts and change in puzzle style for each chapter of the story keep Linkito moving along from start to finish, and it's hard to stop before every last bit of stray content is fully solved.
POed: Definitive Edition is an excellent version of a middling game, with only some of its problems due to it being early days for the FPS. It's hard not to feel affection for what it's trying to do, though, and you can see as you play how it fits into the evolution of its genre. It would have been nice if the game had figured out an identity, either leaning into the weirdness or going for straight sci-fi action, but it's almost thirty years too late to fix that now. POed's legacy was almost nonexistent, that of a kind of ok-ish game that landed right in the middle of the FPS genre figuring itself out, and from a gaming history perspective that's more than a good enough reason to check it out.
Animal Well is a stunner of a metroidvania, usually charming but frequently creepy, mysterious but by no means unapproachable, and filled from top to bottom with secrets that are always satisfying to uncover.
Phantom Fury simply doesn't feel like it's ready yet, with too many bugs and nowhere near enough polish to become the game that it could be. Too many encounters are designed to only be beatable once you memorize enemy placement and a giant-mech boss shouldn't be an easier, more enjoyable encounter than a handful of guys in a hallway. Bugs are also abound, with enemies zipping between cover points while stuck in the kneeling position, music that you can almost hear playing in the background despite the volume being maxed out, or getting trapped in an elevator when its doors won't open. "Reset to checkpoint" is always an option, but in this case it was an open service elevator, and while sticking to the '90s/early-2000s gameplay convention of a hero who can't hop over a waist-high obstacle is authentic, it's the wrong kind of authenticity. Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison has the potential to be a great 90s throwback character, but Phantom Fury is nowhere near what's needed to see her reach her potential.
It would have been nice if Planet Crafter had gotten the AAA budget and polish, but the game as it exists nails all the important parts in ways that can make multi-hour gaming sessions fly on by in minutes. It's a dead cold rocky ball without a hint of life when you get there, but each new crafted item is another step closer to the terraformed paradise it can become.