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There’s so much to do and Sunbreak offers you even more ways to do it with the new flexibility found in its updated combat features and absurd amount of new content that will easily take you hundreds of hours to get through. So whether you’re this is your first time in the Monster Hunter universe, or you’ve been playing since the very first one, I strongly advise you to get out there and enjoy this amazing game, as the best actually managed to get better! There has absolutely never been a better time to get into it.
Messy as it is, Sonic Origins is still a collection of the best 2D entries the franchise has to offer. It may not be as dense in content in comparison to prior compilations like Sonic Mega Collection or Sonic Gems Collection, but it does just enough to not get in the way of what made these games system sellers in their heyday. While I was hoping for an easy touchdown, this ended up being a fumble recovery instead. Hefty price tag be damned, new players deserve to see why people like me keep going back to what many consider the reason people loved Sonic in the first place.
Lest that feel like a sharp criticism, though, I want to make it clear that this is not a bad game by any means. I enjoy it. I have fun with it. I think it’s a crisp, responsive, and neat hack-and-slash title wherein my biggest criticism is that the strategic depth it has is enough that I want more. And considering that I expected the game to have less depth than its predecessor, I am comfortable and happy to report that it instead highlights and manages its depth, keeping itself a sprightly and engaging title while also giving players a lot of chances to take more tactical control. So in summary, Three Hopes is really good. Really, really good. If you’ve already loved Three Houses, this is beyond a worthwhile purchase. If you haven’t, then here’s another point of entry to a world I love. And considering how different this game is from its predecessor, it makes me happy to see that the game’s setting and characters can hold up even in a very different context.
All in all, playing Birushana: Rising Flower of Genpei was a real treat. It has its moments where the story can feel like it’s dragging, as well as a few grammatical errors here and there, but if like me you have aged out of cutesy, under-developed romance games and prefer more mature themes and realistic (albeit still animeish) characters, I recommend you pick this up.
If you’re a hardcore Ninja Turtle fan or someone looking for a fun as hell beat ’em up to play with friends on a pizza-filled Saturday night, you’re going to have a lot of fun no matter what crowd you find yourself in. It succeeds in bridging the past and present, and knows how to hit the mark for any fan. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a worthy follow-up to an arcade/console classic, and a game worthy of counting itself as one of the genre’s best examples of how to do a beat ’em up right. This is Turtle Power at its absolute best.
More than anything, Card Shark is an experience. It’s not an exceptionally long game, coming in at eight hours, but it very much suits its length. I wasn’t left unsatisfied, nor did it feel padded. The emphasis on the tricks themselves was oddly compelling as well. By the end of the game I had learned the theory behind a good number of techniques, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to practice some of these for real.
Even with the heavy hitter Dragon’s Trap missing from this selection, Wonder Boy Collection is still a great option if you want to experience a more obscure retro franchise for the first time, or go back and revel in nostalgia.
A lot of effort seems to have gone into certain aspects, such as the level design. But the game is held back by some poor gameplay design decisions that incur frustration, a UI and controls that feel rudimentary, a multiplayer feature they seem to not want you to use, and a lack of inspiration. If this game cooked for another six months to a year, the devs could take it beyond just having the basics to being something truly special. But as it stands right now, this game does not really offer enough satisfaction and enjoyment to be worth its asking price.
While I do think that my teenage self would have been way more hyped about getting to experience a vampire-filled adventure of Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong’s caliber, I can confidently say my adult self was also quite amused. I really liked what this game’s story had to offer, and to be honest it has been a while since I had to think so hard about the hows and whys of the choices I wanted to make in an RPG. I could have done without the tedious and buggy gameplay and the oftentimes janky visuals, but when the credits rolled, that wasn’t at the forefront of my mind at all. Instead, I thought about how I wanted to play the game again and go back and do things differently.
Neptunia x SENRAN KAGURA: Ninja Wars succeeds at being a fun crossover and a decent enough game to play. It’s solid enough to satisfy fans and newbies alike, has a solid gameplay foundation, and isn’t afraid to let loose when the time calls for it. There’s enough here to keep you busy, and everything involved is at least competent enough to keep your attention. So long as you aren’t expecting Game of the Year material, you’ll find yourself having fun with this one. If your aim is to coast and relish in a little bit of cheesy ninja action, this definitely fits the bill.
Trek to Yomi is a game with a voice and a vision. The title takes every liberty to adhere to its inspirations without ever feeling like a film masquerading as a game, and the reverence the development team has for that era of Japanese films can be felt in every aspect of the experience. The dynamic camera, the gorgeously realized environments, and the personal, character-driven narrative work in tandem to deliver a game that’s wholly unique. It might not be an easy recommendation based purely on gameplay alone, but it’s certainly easy to recommend for just about everything else.
The glory of The Stanley Parable was always that it was a game supremely confident in itself, giving you branching choices that were not choices, inviting you to push up against the boundaries of its world and see how far you could go. The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe expands those boundaries and gives you new things to explore, and in the process it managed to surprise me even as someone who had picked over the original game quite extensively. While it may not be as truly groundbreaking as the original, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe is a must-play for fans of the original – and if you’ve never experienced the game, it’s the perfect place to learn what made the original so brilliant while finding a number of new twists.
Once again, like its predecessor, this is a much shorter review than is typical here at Gamer Escape, since there’s not really much to review here. Even less, really, since our What the Dub?! review mostly applies to RiffTrax: The Game as well. It’s a simple but well-put-together party game that’s easy to set up and play, whether with friends at home, online on Discord, or streaming to a Twitch audience.
Rogue Legacy 2 is a wonderful, beautiful, crazy-hard-and-yet-not-at-the-same-time game. I can hardly stop playing it long enough to finish writing this review. It is hard to find flaws in this game without resorting to extreme nit-picking. Every aspect of it just oozes polish. The replayability is off the charts, even after you finally reach the ending.
I want to like this game, I really do. When it works, it works really well. The core gameplay loop is satisfying, the two ideas mesh believably, and figuring out how best to manage the species on a given level is like a fun little puzzle. Actually reaching later planets makes me feel like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, with the content I’m repeating feeling no different than it did an hour ago when I started my last run.
The problem is that not only are those few missteps there, the goals it's aiming for are already far lesser than I would expect from the game as a whole. It promises something that is nice, fun, comfy, and cozy. While the game is certainly light and avoids getting bogged down in unnecessary detail, it also fails to really capitalize on its ideas and winds up being a bit unbalanced, a bit undercooked, and a lot underserved compared to a lot of other entries in the field.
It’s buggy, the balance is off, and a good 80% of the locations only really serve as random sidequest destinations. But the storytelling drew me in, the stealth worked rather well, and on the occasions when I felt like I had resources to burn it was just so dang satisfying to slow motion dive out from behind a corner while blasting a barrage of shotgun shells.
All in all, this was actually a very bittersweet review for me. I am a huge Rune Factory fan and have been excitedly waiting for this new entry in the series. Unfortunately, I can’t say that it met my expectations. The good news is Rune Factory 5 is a familiar experience for those who are used to the genre. The love interests are a bit cringy, and it has god-awful graphics, but if you have a bit of patience and don’t nitpick as much as I do, it will be a mostly enjoyable experience.
In many ways, I keep going back and forth on Triangle Strategy. On the one hand, it’s not exactly the game I was hoping it would be when it was first announced. On the other hand, it’s also not fair to hold that against the game; it’s not whether the game is what I dreamed of but what it is actually trying to be and how well it succeeds at that goal. On the third hand, there are some actual issues there with what the game is trying to be, some places where it winds up falling short of the marks it sets for itself.
With a more concerted effort to keep the experience exciting as the playthrough carries on, Young Souls could have easily been so much more. Instead, you have a game where you’ve seen the lion’s share of what it has to offer after three or so of the game’s ten hours. And yet despite the lack of variety in the encounters and the receding relevance of an initially intriguing storyline, I never wanted to put it down thanks to an abundance of heart. It’s charming, it’s a joy to look at, it’s challenging, and its accessibility options are lightyears ahead of most beat ‘em ups, but what you see is what you get in Young Souls: a demonstrably good game, but not a great one.