Assault Android Cactus is a big, bright, blast of twin-stick shooting action, filled with personality and clever design.
While the PC port of One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 is weak in technical terms, the game itself is very playable. The Dynasty Warriors formula has been honed over endless iterations to be great fun, and if it's a bit on the easy side that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Planet of the Eyes is a short but memorable trip through a weird-worlds sci-fi alien landscape. The strange creatures and fantastic environments create a nicely bizarre landscape to platform through, and the audio logs give a concise, well-acted story of a ship worker whose only friend is the AI he created.
It's hard to fully recommend a game with inconsistent controls, but The Swindle is awfully close to being excellent. There are a huge number of enemies with different behaviors and the randomized level generator is more than happy to put multiple kinds together in ways that require different strategies to handle.
Zenzizenzic is a massive dose of twin-stick action, demanding a learning period to master its systems, but rewarding players with a finely tuned machine of destruction for their effort. The various weapons and tools fit together perfectly, but the game never becomes a pushover even with the knowledge of how to use all that power, or even anything less than major challenge on the higher difficulty levels.
While The Road to Gehenna may not be as expansive as its parent game, it provides exactly the kind of devious challenges its fans are wanting more of. The difficulty starts at the same level The Talos Principle had in the latter half of the game and doesn't let up, although it doesn't get much harder either.
Spectra is a fantastic little track-racer with a killer beat and instantly accessible gameplay. Each song is long enough to provide a good challenge as the track gets more cluttered the longer you play, and the percentage bar showing how much song is left means you're never left wondering if it's ever going to end.
Neon Struct isn't a perfect game, and technically its main gameplay focus of stealth is fairly simplistic. Enemies aren't that smart, darkness is overpowered and once you've learned its rhythms it's very easy to remain undiscovered, or at least not get caught if you're seen.
I have to admit that I wasn't easily sold on Not A Hero. It was difficult to figure out how it wanted me to play at first, and even the easiest levels saw a lot of dead BunnyLord minions due to arguing with the combination dash/cover button and forgetting to keep an eye on my ammo count.
Action Henk is easily one of the best speed-runners in years.
JumpJet Rex should be a resounding success. It's got all the elements there but they don't quite fit together right.
While not exactly a top-tier shooter/RPG hybrid, The Weaponographist is still enjoyable. The humor running throughout its dungeons made it fun to see what the next monster would be, and while it would have been nice to see more than the twenty regular enemy types and eight magical ones, that's because of the inventiveness in their abilities.
Crypt of the NecroDancer is a phenomenal dungeon crawler. It's loaded with personality, great music, fun characters and deep action that only appears simplistic on the surface.
Titan Souls is a quietly beautiful little epic. The contrast of the boss fights with the peaceful exploration works to create a world of contrasts, broken but not dead.
We Are Doomed was a great twin-stick shooter last year and it's only gotten better with the year's worth of upgrades. The enemy types and challenges are carefully tuned to allow massive destruction, but still require good planning and split-second decisions as the safe areas gradually disappear.
That's not as negative as it might sound, though, because huge AAA games with massive production and marketing budgets have come out and been completely forgotten in the seven years since Super Stardust first landed on the PS3, but the advantage of a great arcade game is that it's timeless. It's just as much fun today to blast through massive fields of rocks and dodge-y, twisty, explodey enemy waves as it was in the early days of the PS3, and if the rumored (but incredibly likely) Morpheus compatibility works out then it will be great in VR, too.
The sad thing about the controls is that everything else in Grow Home is so well done. Exploring the world, gliding around on a leaf, climbing to the bottom of an island, and growing shoots to new areas are a lovable traits.
Fortunately, it falls apart in a semi-entertaining fashion; not in a "so bad it's good" way but rather a "can't look away" way. For all the well-deserved kicking I've given Zombeer, I also pushed through to finish the game not because I was obligated to for the review, but because I was morbidly curious as to where it was going.
The problem with reviving such an excellent series is that comparing it to past games is both completely fair and also a bad idea. It's easy to look at all the things Geometry Wars 3 leaves behind while neglecting that it's a still a fun, challenging shooter.
Race the Sun was a load of good arcade-style fun on PC and the PS4 version is a near-perfect port. The heart of the game made it intact and, while it's a shame to be missing the player creations, the daily challenge is always worth returning to.