Matthew Pollesel

Ottawa

209 games reviewed
71.3 average score
70 median score
47.4% of games recommended
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Jul 12, 2022

Sixty Words is a decent choice if you're a fan of word searches and you want something different. It won't take you more than a few hours to finish every puzzle, but during that time, it'll serve as a pleasant enough diversion.

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Jul 14, 2022

The real draw in Neon White is the action -- the pure, unfiltered, adrenaline-pumping action that feels like it brings together the best thing about games like Devil May Cry or Ghostrunner or Mirror's Edge or Sonic or whatever else you play when you want to go as fast as possible while slicing and shooting through every single enemy in your way. It's a pretty exceptional game, and it's unlike anything else out there.

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Jul 15, 2022

If you're into simulating menial blue collar jobs, you could certainly do a lot worse than this.

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Jul 18, 2022

Unless you really enjoy half-finished stories, Paratopic never really builds on its great aesthetic to be a game worth playing. It may aspire to bring you back to the late '90s, but given how disjointed it all feels, it never achieves its goal.

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Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is great if you want tennis, and nothing but tennis. It'll give you ample opportunity to play match after match, and it never bogs you down in the extraneous nonsense that seems to plague most sports games. But if you want to do literally anything more than that, you might find your attention wavers long before you come close to finishing your career.

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If you've never played the Jackbox Games before -- or even if you're just looking for a Greatest Hits version of the series -- the Jackbox Party Starter is the perfect introduction. The three games are completely different from each other, but taken together they show why the series has so many ardent fans.

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Jul 22, 2022

It feels as if the developers wanted to make a different, more interesting game, but couldn't figure out what they wanted to do with it, so instead they turned it into a sequel for a game that wasn't particularly good or memorable in the first place. You're left with the feeling that they didn't really care about Freddy Spaghetti 2 -- and really, neither should you.

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All in all, though, the two games are highly enjoyable. I don't know if KLONOA Phantasy Reverie Series is going to be the game that finally gives Klonoa the audience it deserves. But if there's any justice in the world, it will be.

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B - APICO
Jul 26, 2022

The more I play APICO, the more convinced I feel that I'm playing it wrong. It calls itself "a laid-back beekeeping sim game about breeding, collecting, & conserving bees.” The Steam reviews are overwhelmingly positive, praising it for being calm and relaxing. And me? All I can think whenever I play is how stressed it makes me.

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Jul 28, 2022

If you're just looking at it from the perspective of how much fun you'll get out of those two hours, then Bright Memory: Infinite becomes a lot harder to beat. It crams everything it can think of into that short runtime and is dripping with style for every second of it. I can see why it may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it certainly is mine.

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Jul 29, 2022

Blackberry Honey is pretty harmless and inoffensive. It doesn?t ask anything of players and it probably won't stick with you for very long after you finish it, but if you're in the mood for reading something long and unobjectionable, you could probably do worse.

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Aug 1, 2022

If I'd gone into Coromon blind and someone had told me that it was a Pokémon game, the only reason I'd have to be suspicious is that there's no Pikachu in sight.

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D - XEL
Aug 2, 2022

XEL isn't a great game. It's not even a mediocre game. It's a half-finished mess that shouldn't have been released in this state.

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Aug 8, 2022

It's not going to blow you away, and unless you're really into the genre it's probably not something you need to play, but it's decent enough that if you're a fan of Silent Hill and Resident Evil and all their descendants, then it's definitely something you'll want to at least check out.

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Aug 9, 2022

This game is terrible in every way. Whether we're talking major aspects of the game or simply minor little details, everything about it is awful.

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Aug 10, 2022

Summertime Madness doesn't last long, and it can easily be finished in under two hours. But it's also not the sort of game that needs to go on forever, either. It's a challenging, engaging puzzle with enough plot to last through its runtime, and that's enough to make it well worth a look.

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I don't foresee Sword and Fairy: Together Forever garnering the kind of following here in the west that it has in China, but if you just want to kill lots of monsters and watch lots of dialogue, it may be worth your time.

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Aug 17, 2022

Digimon Survive is a talk-heavy game that expects you to spend a lot of time reading, and a little bit of time fighting. That may not be the most enjoyable thing if you just want a Pokémon substitute, but as visual novels go, it's one of the better ones.

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Aug 18, 2022

Cursed to Golf is designed to challenge you, frustrate you, and punish you -- and even if real golf does that, this game takes it to a whole other level. If you're the kind of person who doesn't usually give sports games a second glance but loves difficulty ramped up to an insane degree, this should be the one sports game you make an exception for.

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Aug 19, 2022

Severed Steel doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world where Neon White (to say nothing of Max Payne and Superhot) not only also exist, but are much, much better options if you want this kind of gameplay. With competition like that, Severed Steel doesn't quite match up.

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