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I was really hopeful in the lead up to Jump Force, because I love most of these characters, and the set dressing for the concept is often very cool. The visual style was even something I thought I was getting used to as the character reveals rolled in. But once the game was in my hands, reality struck me like a Detroit Smash and what I had before me was a mess. Jump Force is ugly, janky, confusing, and far too simple. It does what other games have already done before, but with far less confidence or success. It tries to hide its misgivings behind cool special moves and motion blur, but fails at that too. It's a total swing and miss, but hopefully just a bump in the road for Shonen Jump games in the long run.
Super Street: The Game is a disappointment in all aspects. Clunky driving, a blurry presentation, generic sound design, boring upgrade options, and mind-bogglingly terrible physics all mash together into one “arcade” racer you're better off avoiding, especially at its launch price of $49.99 USD. Its two saving graces are possessing a decent selection of cosmetic options and split-screen support, but those features do nothing to make this game worthy of a purchase. The game has already been out for over a week, and its online population is nonexistent. The developer has also not issued any sort of patch to fix some of the more glaring issues. If that's a sign of what to expect when it comes to post-launch support, racing fans should look elsewhere to get their tuning fix.
I've seen low-effort cash-grabs by people with no imagination, and Strange Brigade isn't that. The folks at Rebellion had a unique vision for Strange Brigade that wasn't content to merely tap into the typical 80s nostalgia or other hot cultural icons of the backward-looking 2018 pop culture. So there, I guess I found something nice to say.
At the end of the day, Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is a cautionary tale. Jokes are not funny just because you say them. Nor are they funny just because they raised over $450K. But being not funny isn't a cardinal offense for a video game. Being dull and soulless mechanically is.
When all is said and done, the handful of people sitting in the middle of the Venn diagram marked "doesn't own a PC" and "wants a hardcore train simulation" still deserve a game that isn't buggy, runs well, respects their time as a user, and one that provides more for their money than this one does. On the upside, the trains are so detailed here that if anything happens to the driver on my local route during my commute, I'm pretty confident that I could take over and nobody would be late for work. I can't promise strudel, though.
It's not the dated graphics. It's not the inexplicably long loading screens. It's not even the fact the hammy voice acting, or the fact that the game has a pretty steep price point considering what it has to offer. The main thing that stands out in Beast Quest is the lost potential of what it could have been: a rich, engaging RPG about a young knight finding his feet in a magical world. It wouldn't have reinvented the wheel, but it could have at least tried to give us something more to work with than the bare bones of a game from the 2000s.
I honestly dislike coming down on a game, because I know the developers behind it usually put their hearts and souls into their finished product. Perhaps if they baked their ideas a bit longer, fine tuned the controls, and fixed some of the latency issues (especially with loading), Divide could have been the big sci-fi adventure they clearly aimed for. But as it is, I was only relieved it didn’t take too long to complete.
Even as someone who doesn’t have a deep affinity for Ghostbusters, I can’t help but feel that the license deserves a better game than this. It captures none of the camaraderie or the imagination that’s seen in the films. There’s no personality here, and gamers are left with a $50 twin stick shooter that doesn’t have a single interesting idea in it. Play Furi, Nuclear Throne, or Enter the Gungeon instead. There’s absolutely nothing here worth your time, especially if you “ain’t afraid of no ghosts.”
Anima: Gate of Memories is a crushing disappointment. There are plenty of places where the love Anima Project’s team has for its world is evident, but they’re buried under an avalanche of stunningly poor design choices. Being forced to listen to the terrible voice acting and relentlessly unfunny humor of protagonist Ergo made me wish for his quick and agonizing death — but even he’s not as painful as the game’s punishingly poor level design. Maybe there’s a way to make the world of this tabletop RPG fun and interesting when translated to the video game medium, but the developers sure didn’t find it this time around.
I absolutely adore VEV: Viva Ex Vivo‘s concept, which only serves to make me more disappointed in the final release. Exploring these different microscope slides should be exciting, but instead players are left frustrated due to awkward controls and bored by how little there is to do.
I spent every minute in Small Radios Big Televisions waiting for it to become enjoyable, and then before I knew it the credits had hit. There was no magic moment where everything clicked, nor did the worlds I was viewing ever become something more than just a cool visual. This may be an audiovisual treat, but there's absolutely no substance backing it up.
With all the bad I have said, there is an audience out there somewhere for Natural Doctrine. If you enjoy mindless hours of grinding with no clear goal or instruction, and if you enjoy hour long battles on the "easiest" difficulty setting where you still feel underleveled no matter how much you grind, then this game could be right up your alley. The system is there to try and be a good game, but it is given no chance to shine and no clear direction on what to do, leaving you with a mess of missed opportunities and frustration.
Fluster Cluck seemed like it might be fun and have potential as a party game, but I would honestly be more embarrassed to load this up and try to convince people to play it. Some people may be attracted to its simplicity and quick nature, but the frustration will quickly set in as the floaty controls, lackluster design, and poor explanation of the gameplay become apparent. You can buy a lot of things with $9, but Fluster Cluck shouldn't be one of them.
But that feeling only lasts until you're accelerating out of the final corner like you've done sixty times without issue in this event and your bike decides for no reason at all to rear up like freakin' Seabiscuit, throwing you to the ground an inch from the finishing line. At that point, the promising feeling drips away, and you start to think that given this is the 15th racing game Milestone has released on PS4 in four years, we could be in for a real treat when they slow down and actually finish one.
From an accessibility standpoint, however, HIVE: Altenum Wars does little to make the player feel welcome, and even less still to reward their perseverance in staying. It feels very much like an alpha gameplay demo for a game years down the pipeline. HIVE is a shooter that misses the mark almost entirely, but does, at the very least, provide a very solid foundation upon which Catness Games could build something truly special with more time spent iterating and refining the process.
Besides the HD visuals, Ben 10 feels like a licensed title from a decade ago. Most of the game is comprised of inoffensive mediocrity, and rarely is there anything that feels inspired. Kids will likely have some fun smashing around levels as their favorite characters from the show, but there's simply too little content for it to keep attention spans occupied for too long.
If you are looking for a game you can pick up and put down in short spurts, then Tokyo Tattoo Girls might just be perfect for you. There is a good strategy system to be found here, just really nothing else. The story is almost nonexistent and there really aren't enough options here to build upon the strategy, or give you something to break it up a bit. If you are OK with the lack of options and just want to take over Tokyo and look at some nicely detailed tattoos, then Tokyo Tattoo Girls should be on your radar. Just don't expect much more outside of that, because there isn't anything.
To put it bluntly, sitting through a Tijuana back-alley dentistry that would be more enjoyable than this disaster. Unless a major patch hits soon, this is a procedure that has graduated from terminal to dead on arrival.
Mark McMorris Infinite Air is not the snowboarding game that fans are looking for and that’s a huge bummer. There’s still hope that titles such as Steep and Snow can fill that void, but I know for sure that Mark McMorris needs to stick to riding down real mountains instead of virtual ones. Avoid this poorly structured game as if it was a tree in your riding line.
Besides the core concept being interesting, I really don’t have any other compliments to give Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet. It’s a disappointment for a number of reasons, and it really sucks that a lot of North American gamers’ first experience with the Touhou series will be this bad spin-off. Hopefully one of the entries in the main series, or at least the PS4 fighting game, will come stateside and get this bad taste out of my mouth.