James Cunningham's Reviews
SteamWorld Dig 2 is a huge, expansive and utterly fantastic mining/platformer, with a great variety of challenges and plenty of tools to attack them with.
An Oath to the Stars is a fairly basic bullet-hell shooter, colorful and packed with swarms of firepower, but it never really takes off.
Redeemer is at its best when being a brawler, which it does most of the time.
While a bit slow to get going, there's a great amount of variety in Iron Crypticle once the action heats up.
Nex Machina is an utterly fantastic arcade twin-stick shooter that doesn't so much revolutionize the genre as get almost every aspect just right.
Serious Sam's Bogus Detour is a surprisingly large shooter that takes the long-running arcade FPS and translates it perfectly into a new genre.
Tormentor X Punisher is loud, mean, occasionally unfair, intentionally ugly and thoroughly awesome.
While To the Top may be a bit short on polish its sense of movement is fantastic.
Randall should be better than this. It's got all the elements in place to be good but they just don't work right.
Despite all its issues I honestly enjoyed SmuggleCraft. The tracks are a bit lonely, the challenge level is fairly low even when a mission says Death Trap and the menus desperately need another round of polish, but the courses are beautiful and fun to fly through in their detailed, low-poly way.
By the end of Thumper, the speed is insane, the music wild and oppressive, and the feeling of just barely holding on to a beast that wants to send you flying so it can gnaw your bones is disturbingly strong.
Mages of Mystralia is an energetic and clever action-RPG, set in a vibrant and colorful land with a dark history.
Strafe falls short of greatness, but is definitely great fun.
Birthdays: The Beginning is a cute and clever world-builder where simple actions can have deep, complicated results.
Immortal Redneck is an absolutely fantastic FPS-roguelike.
While Voodoo Vince Remastered isn't a classic of the platforming genre, it's still very good.
Bullet Soul is a fairly basic arcade shooter that gets by with hyperactive energy and lots of pretty explosions.
When Slime-san works as intended, it's an incredibly clever platformer, filled with endless challenges that constantly come up with new riffs on its themes.
Graceful Explosion Machine is fantastic arcade action where being able to plan while forced into close-quarter shooting is the only way to survive.
Circles is a relaxing puzzle game that can still be surprisingly tricky, sometimes exasperatingly so. Making precise movements while taking the level's rotation into account and also keeping the speed up because the circles in the level grow larger the faster you move can take more than a few tries to get past, but those sections are the exception to the move laid-back nature of the rest of the game.