James Cunningham's Reviews
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
The important thing is that what's available now is really good, utilizing a fighting engine that rewards creativity in using its moves and set in a dungeon loaded with replayability. The art nouveau style is more apparent in the 2D character portraits than the polygonal graphics but still give the game a unique tone, like playing a Grateful Dead album cover.
Lichdom: Battlemage is a big, complicated, awesome beast of an FPS. When you've got a system down and are tearing through enemies you feel like magic incarnate, wielding the secrets of the universe to eviscerate all in your path.
Randall should be better than this. It's got all the elements in place to be good but they just don't work right.
Lovely Planet looks great on paper. Flat-shaded polygons, whimsical level structure, dozens and dozens of challenging little levels and a fun sountrack should have made for a great round of enjoyably strange FPS action.
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.
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.
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.
Ray's the Dead is a hard game to either recommend or trash, balanced neatly between being a charming and much-smarter-than-it-looks zombie-fest and a buggy mess punctuated by painfully blatant '80s nostalgia.
Skelattack doesn't know what it wants to be but despite this I did end up getting just a little more enjoyment than aggravation out of it.
Sonar Beat is a clever rhythm game with a pleasant soundtrack and a good visual style.
Despite its issues I kept on plugging away at Crimson Keep, not just to review it, but because it feels like if I can just figure out how to work around its shortcomings there's a great dungeon crawl waiting to be found.
Tenta Shooter is a perfectly decent bullet-hell arcade game with a simple mechanic that provides nice flexibility in both score-chasing and surviving the levels.
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.
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.
Drive!Drive!Drive! has the heart of a great arcade racer, but isn’t quite there yet.
DOGOS is close to being a fantastic free-roaming shooter and only held back by a few small issues and a giant glaring one.
Time Machine VR is the kind of game you tend to see at the start of a new technology.
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.