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Tchia has heart, a beautiful world, and some cool gameplay concepts. The story is filled with emotion but also grounded. Exploration is easy and rewarding, with a lot of great sights to see and interesting characters to interact with. Even the ukulele mini-game associated with musical numbers works.
The Forest Cathedral is an interesting experience but does not fully work as a video game. The narrative it is telling is based on a real-world person but introduces many elements that are anachronistic to the period and to her life. Maybe the main character should have been named something else and her story should have only hinted at the real-world scandal surrounding DDT and other pesticides.
Rogue Spirit’s unique idea is great, enhancing the action game with its fun implementation. It’s a pleasure to move from body to body, discover their capabilities and then create a deadly chain of attacks, shits, and abilities. Bosses pose a clear challenge but are not unfair.
Have a Nice Death is a good combination of action and rogue-lite, with a good balance between the difficulty of the combat, especially the boss fights, and the pace of the unlocks. It pays to focus on one weapon and really learn how to use it and when to complement it with a spell or secondary attack. Boss engagements are all about patience and pattern recognition.
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is an interesting mix of ideas, most of them familiar, with some unique twists. The hand-to-hand combat focus is good, although it takes a lot of experimentation to do everything right. The world is intriguing and surprising, especially when it comes to character and enemy design.
Rough Justice ‘84 has a very good core idea and impresses in terms of atmosphere. The music, the character portraits, and the design of the cases, all work together to immerse players and keep their interest level up. I would love to see a TV series that uses some of the featured agents.
Terraformers is an engaging game that can deliver that “one more turn” feeling that strategy fans crave. The interplay between resources, cards, leaders, and terraforming efforts requires careful thinking and asks players to make difficult choices. There’s a lot of variety both when it comes to scenario objectives and the planet setup.
The Last Spell is a great package, integrating great core combat mechanics with both management and plenty of progression opportunities. Trying to take down mutant waves by using the minimum amount of resources, while pondering what upgrades can improve character performance never gets old.
It’s rare these days for a survival game to put narrative and resource management mechanics on the same level, and do both very well. Overall, I think The Pale Beyond tells a captivating story while torturing players into finding the best solutions for keeping their crew alive.
Wo Long: Dynasty Fallen is pretty much a more approachable version of Nioh, but with some very interesting twists on the formula. Despite the fact that many of the mechanics and the gear might seem intimidating at first glance, you’ll do just fine strapping on the armor with the highest stats and disregard any of the suffixes and bonuses they provide.
Aces & Adventures has strong deck building and an inspired twist on the card-driven combat concept. There are enough abilities that players can develop strategies and perform cool moves but poker combinations are random enough that the results are never guaranteed.
Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator has a good idea and some decent gameplay mechanics. It’s somewhat fun to discover the techniques associated with a new dish and then aim to create a perfect take on it, complete with a radical and interesting plating that will revolutionize the fine-dining world.
Company of Heroes 3 is too conservative in terms of gameplay and fails to make its big new mode work as expected. Battles, from skirmishes to bespoke missions in the Italian campaign, are great fun and offer cool tactical puzzles to solve. The strategy map does add another dimension to the experience but patches are needed to realize its full potential.
I can totally understand why Journey To The Savage Planet has been received with mixed reactions by gamers out there. It somehow created high expectations on the fronts it’s not necessarily interested in, such as combat.
Meg’s Monster is an emotional journey with a lot of depth, a twisty narrative, and some great character moments. I loved spending time with Meg, Roy, and Golan. Combat isn’t very challenging but still generates tension. I actually wished that the game offered more to do because I wanted more time in its universe, even if I think it’s perfectly paced to deliver its payload of feelings.
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a well-written, very classy point & click adventure game with an interesting ending that might be hard to digest. Thomasina’s fate feels like it’s been sealed long before the young archeologist arrives in the small town stuck in time. There’s a certain inevitability to her story that makes the ending even more sad than it is.
Blood Bowl 3 is a great video game adaptation of a popular board game, using an updated set of rules and great presentation. The 12 featured teams offer variety and plenty of surprises on the field. The mix of careful planning and chaotic execution means each match is filled with surprises and reversals.
Atomic Heart has all the premises for a great game. That is why so frustrating that Mundifsh dropped the ball by trying to do too much, and botching up some gameplay mechanics, and also by releasing a game that desperately would have needed more time for fixing the bugs that poison the experience. And while the latter can be solved through patches, some peculiar game design choices and compromises take away from the overall value.
The Settlers: New Allies has a good core loop that, unfortunately, lacks a solid connection with the series' history. There’s too much military action and not enough focus on delivering products to citizens. The land-claiming concept is interesting but under-used.
Ten Dates is a very classic full-motion video experience. It has a clear theme and manages to make the dating elements, especially for the initial speedy encounters, feel fleshed out. There are some interactions that feel forced and a few changes of tone that miss the mark. But this is a competent romantic narrative with light gameplay.