VGChartz's Reviews
The straightforward combat hits the spot, particularly with a friend along for the journey, and the ancillary modes aren't half-bad. That said, it's hard to overlook the general clumsiness of the game. Stages are generic, enemy patterns are sloppy, and boss battles are slow and undemanding.
Earthion is a beautiful love letter to the Sega Genesis and the 16-bit era in general, co-authored by someone who helped define its greatness — Yuzo Koshiro.
Borderlands 4 is rife with countless hours of thrilling, solid RPG-shooter gameplay that just feels "right", neat regions with greater depth and verticality to explore, and a slew of cool new guns and goodies to gather.
An origami-themed puzzle-platformer that's a treat for the eyes, but mechanically crumples under any scrutiny.
Shuten Order may be Kazutaka Kodaka’s most ambitious work, but it’s not his best. Its multi-genre experiment, while bold and brave, doesn’t work as intended, resulting in an uneven adventure with several shallow, overlong vignettes.
It suffers from some flaws, mostly related to narrative and visual components, but it delivers where it counts: mechanics, systems, and gameplay. If you can power through its lackluster story and forgive its dated assets, you'll find a remarkably deep, daring mech action game.
If the first half of Silksong was sold separately, I would call it the best Metroidvania since Metroid Dread. If the second half was sold separately, I would call it shock therapy. Put together, Silksong is essentially the exact sequel you’d expect, for better or worse - epic, brutal, fun, and infuriating. A massively impressive game to be sure but, held back by a few design choices, it falls a tad short of the potential you see so clearly in its early stages.
Metal Eden owes a lot to games like Ghostrunner and Doom, but it's far from a slavish clone. Thanks to its far-future setting, dystopian premise, core-ripping mechanic, and bold production design, it feels like its own thing.
It may not be the best game of its kind — its uneasy relationship with the weekly bazaar makes sure of that — but it provides the comforting, enriching, reliable farming and life simulation you've come to expect from the Story of Seasons franchise.
A solid action-platformer with likable characters, irreverent writing, rewarding backtracking gameplay, and lovely art and music. With greater mechanical depth, a mapping system, and more to do and explore, it could be even better.
A few missing console ports notwithstanding, Gradius Origins is a fantastic collection with a preposterous amount of bonus content. By preserving and enhancing six classic shooters and keeping the IP alive with its own Salamander III, M2 has demonstrated how much it reveres and understands the franchise.
The four games included feel more complete than ever, thanks to helpful manuals, eye-opening gadgets, multiple control and display options, several regional variants, remixed "easy" modes, and the ability to save and upload play data at your convenience. And while some of the original warts remain — Operation Wolf is imbalanced, Operation Thunderbolt is too hectic, and Night Strikers is insufficiently complex — they're less problematic than before.
Through its multi-layered combat tempo and sharp design, Wildgate soars among the best extraction shooters.
If you anticipate another twisting, branching murder mystery from the brilliant mind of Kotaro Uchikoshi, you're going to end up disappointed. If, however, you expect a less consequential, more comedic side story that places beloved characters in new, deadly escape room situations, you'll emerge after 15 hours quite happy with your experience.
This is the killer app on Switch 2, thanks to snappy controls, imaginative art direction, a mysterious "journey to the center of the earth" premise, rousing music, rewarding exploration, and the intelligent, thoughtful deployment of voxel technology, which provides players exhilarating navigational and problem-solving freedom.
By interrogating and reincorporating some of its previous tricks without addressing the fundamental issues, this sequel's more likely to extinguish interest rather than revive it.
With a simple scoring system, Strange Scaffold turns a polished action template into an improvisational ballet of spent rounds, thrown knives, and exploding barrels at a breakneck pace.
The base game is clunky, shallow, short, and repetitive, and the additional bells and whistles, while nice, don't do anything to elevate the core experience from 1991. If you're a Game Gear fanatic who doesn't want to pay $200 for a hard copy, you might want to consider picking this up, if only to help complete your collection. But remember: just because something is rare doesn't mean it's any good.
Limited launch content aside, Sloclap's mechanical deviations from the status quo successfully distill the beautiful game's essence.
Visually appealing, well paced, full of content, and well balanced in terms of challenge level, it’s a good long-term RPG for those who are ready to invest the time (and a bit of money) in it. Still, a relative lack of effort and freedom in terms of character development places it behind notable competitors in this field like Honkai: Star Rail.