Niche Gamer
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RPG fans who missed this on PlayStation 4 and already traded their console for a Nintendo Switch will likely get a lot of enjoyment from Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom Prince’s Edition. Young gamers especially will be enchanted by the whimsical setting and premise. The action style combat is also easy to pick up for eager kids who want to cut up some monsters.
There was never any doubt that Anodyne 2: Return to Dust would look and run exactly as the designer intended on Xbox Series S. It feels very tight and responsive at all times; the 2D action sequences especially have no noticeable input lag.
Despite it not being the best version, Ion Fury‘s greatness still shines on the Nintendo Switch. Hopefully some of its minor roughness gets ironed out to make it perfect. Good first person shooters on Switch are uncommon, and this one ranks high.
From its graphics to the gameplay, Ion Fury is everything I wanted and more in a bite sized 90mb download. Ion Fury does not rely on nostalgia alone and instead takes the charm of classic FPS games and pushes the boundaries of what can be done, creating a new standard for retro games going forward.
When doing our In My Shadow review, we found it’s the kind of indie game that is so poor it becomes interesting. The layers of incompetence compound on themselves to make something worth talking about and is dense with examples of what not to do when making a game. At times, it’s comical that something like In My Shadow can exist and cost more than some original Xbox games in the Xbox Store.
Probably the biggest and easiest missed opportunity to get players on board with some of the characters they know nothing about would have been to include a cartoon episode for each character. Instead there is nothing but still images. For $49.99 USD, this is a rip-off and is a wasteland of content. Maybe Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl will get better with updates, but it would take a miracle to salvage this pile of slime.
Overall, this is a weird game that shouldn't have been released. Even at around 15 dollars I feel ripped off. The plot is an incoherent mess and the combat is buggy and broken and worst of all, it's just not fun.
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition deserved better. Never mind the lack of parity across all the versions- each platform gets its own flaws to deal with. Sadly, Nintendo Switch is the console that gets the absolute worst way to play any of the games in this trilogy.
There is a lot to like about Disco Elysium. Its unorthodox and detailed world is beautifully rendered, and the characters are excellently voiced. There is a ton of style that makes it appealing, but none of it matters if the current build is broken and unplayable.
The simplistic gameplay could have carried the sloppy story if it was more polished. Animation breaks and the bugginess of the collision happen far too frequently in such a short game. If Sea of Solitude: The Director’s Cut was marketed as a satire of pretentious, arty, non-engagement style indie games, it would probably fool everyone.
When Cyberpunk 2077 works right, you can manage to have a fair bit of fun with it. Unfortunately, even on PC, the game is in a truly embarrassing state right now. The bait and switch CDPR has pulled on us is comparable to No Man’s Sky in many ways, and they absolutely should be held accountable for releasing a game in such a buggy and broken state.
Ultimately, Valhalla Hills fails to be an engaging city builder, and at best is a mediocre casual game better suited for mobile devices. Players who want a fast-paced and casual city builder might be this game’s niche audience and will enjoy it; but I doubt a majority of players will find anything in Valhalla Hills that isn’t done better somewhere else.
It is one of the great lies of our times that the shoddy quality added “charm” to Deadly Premonition. If Swery could choose to release Deadly Premonition 2 flawlessly optimized, he would. It is extremely remote that anyone would purposefully intend to release a broken product.
At that stage it was looking at around a 7/10 from me. Certainly room for improvement, but there is the core foundation of a decent enough digital adaptation of an awesome board game.
If Element Space worked as intended, it would be a fairly bland but otherwise playable tactical RPG. You know, one of those games that you might pick up because its 75% off on Steam. A game that you wouldn’t quite call “good,” but it isn’t so bad that you’d go through the trouble of asking Father Gaben for a refund. Unfortunately, “doesn’t work as intended” is the definition of “normal” for Element Space.
Stygian ultimately makes for an unfinished, buggy, disjointed, and confusing game. The madness suffered playing isn’t worth the time. Life was better before The Reign of the Old Ones.
Wolf Brew Games have acknowledged the glaring flaws and bugs reported in the forums, and they've promised to release an update fixing them. However, my review and judgment cannot be based on promises, and until a fix is released, my score will stand.
Anyway, if you are a horror junkie you will probably find something to enjoy here and I would recommend it for the thrill of the initial level alone if you are a fan of the genre. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing yourself a disservice by skipping this one. I'm not going to outright not recommend it, by all means, try it out yourself if you want.
This could have been like a Sonic Mania, but for Alex Kidd; instead of a celebration of what made Alex so great, this feels like a eulogy of why he died. The original game is borderline a blank canvas for potential, almost anything could have been done. But other than the beautiful pixel art, it is the same.
Considering the fact that Book of Heroes doesn’t even feature a real story or coherent character progression, then I don’t think that even die-hard fans of The Dark Eye will really enjoy it. I don’t know who this game is supposed to be aimed at, but for me it was one of the most boring RPG experiences I’ve had in a long time, and that’s before even getting into all the bugs and genuinely awful design decisions.