James Cunningham
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.
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.