Killa Penguin
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Yes, you can interact with some of the animals in minor ways and use trees to give yourself a burst of forward momentum. Yes, you can throw seeds down to create trees. Yes, you can create bridges and wander around a handful of different biomes while the scenery grows around you. Without a goal driving you, however, this carries the same amount of weight as being lost in a supermarket.
Insane Robots is a wonderful example of how complicated situations arising from simple mechanics can be fun, but it’s also an amazing example of how a good thing can be ruined by cramming it down your throat for too long. That’s to say that Insane Robots suffers from some of the worst pacing issues I can recall in a game, allowing you to glide along for 4-5 hours before stopping you in your tracks with a player-hostile final map that’s filled with cheating AI, sentient weather effects that act solely to inconvenience you, and randomized characters that ensure that you have to go back and engage in 20-30 hours of grinding in order to stand a chance.
There’s a point in the Punch Line anime where main character Yuta Iridatsu says something about how the spirit world functions similarly to a video game, and there’s really no denying that time travel and abilities that become better as they’re used are the types of things that lend themselves perfectly to gaming. That makes it all the more surprising that the Punch Line game adaptation is a visual novel first and foremost, then, forgoing its gameplay in favor of its story.
I’m very much on the fence about this one, admittedly, as buying new equipment that allows you to effortlessly carve through waves upon waves of enemies can be incredibly rewarding, and a lot of the underlying ideas here are solid. The execution just trips up often enough that Ninjin: Clash of Carrots‘ attempts at variance start to feel like unfair gimmicks.
There's a lot to love about Depth of Extinction, and that'll be doubly true once the bugs end up being patched out, but a game needs more than excellent combat to stand out.
Newbies with no real attachment to the Soulcalibur franchise will find that reversal edges only go so far and quickly become frustrated by the underlying complexity, while old-timers will quickly get sick of CPUs (and trolls online, no doubt) spamming reversal edges to slow down and drag out matches. At first glance, Soulcalibur VI looks to take the balance of Soulcalibur V and marry it with the better characters and story of the early games by returning to the events of the Dreamcast original and Soulcalibur II, but it falls all over itself in too many ways to recommend to fans or newcomers.
There are undeniably some issues that need to be ironed out, most entertainingly highlighted by NPCs gleefully ignoring murders in one stage so long as they’re performed with a forklift, but the underlying promise here really shines through when everything is working as expected. The biggest issue is that things don’t always work as expected; during one stage that begins by forcing you to kill four bikers with your “ultimate” attack, a randomly-wandering NPC was placed close enough that the police were chasing me seconds in through no fault of my own. You can forget about evading police in Party Hard 2, as well, with the pairs of officers that show up having a preternatural talent for knowing where you are and boxing you in.
TSIOQUE does a laudable job of creating a suitably magical atmosphere for the 2-3 hours it takes to reach the end, mostly because of how much personality the visuals and sound effects have. It's just difficult to recommend a game with such awkward puzzle design and annoying minigames.
Some people can tolerate vague metaphors in the name of artiness, but what frustrates me so much is that GRIS managed to provide me with a real attachment to a minor companion character over the course of 10-15 minutes.
I managed to make it through my first playthrough with only relatively minor bugs posing a problem, but my second attempt was so fraught with technical issues and crashes that finishing it proved impossible. Robothorium is built around a single autosave, and certain configurations of levels crash 100% of the time, meaning you can find yourself saved into an unwinnable situation.
There’s not a huge amount of variance, but that’s to be expected of a game with 4 worlds, and it allows Overcome to be a very tightly-paced experience—I ended up finishing the game a couple minutes shy of 1½ hours, while I could see someone more at home with difficult platformers finishing in 30 minutes to an hour. Average players, on the other hand, might end up needing 2-3 hours.
The story is vanilla to a fault, the mechanics are clumsy and imprecise, and the methods used to ramp up the difficulty aren’t always fair (or even fair-adjacent), but Eternity: The Last Unicorn has that nebulous spark of magic often referred to as “heart” burning beneath it. As always seems to be the case with such games, that means that there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll either love it or hate it.
[T]he moment-to-moment gameplay is actually remarkably solid when everything is working as expected, and the underlying brilliance of the gameplay systems and their numerous tactical possibilities shines through even when it isn’t. With some rebalancing, quality of life improvements, and bug fixes, Zombotron could be quite the special game.
All Pirates of First Star had to do was end before its gameplay wore out its welcome. Instead, its second half sees numerous difficulty spike enemies who compelled me to switch to the easy difficulty in order to lessen the grind required to beat them, and even then, one or two fights still required a ton of grinding. Beating an enemy is no guarantee that they’re actually beaten, either, as I’ve had fights that simply refuse to allow victory, either freezing on the victory menu or outright crashing.
Pantsu Hunter is a game centered around a guy looking for romance and trying to find a partner based on his belief that women’s underwear best summarizes their personalities. Whatever you expect based on that description, however, is likely to be completely different than what you’ll actually get; there’s undeniably a perverted panty-snatching element here, and yet characters who initially appear skin-deep wind up with sympathetic backstories that explain everything from their quirks to why furniture has the odd habit of killing you instantly.
Super Dodgeball Beats is unquestionably one of the most stylish rhythm games I’ve ever played. It’s also one of the least readable, with the timing of your inputs being dictated by quickly closing circles that frequently get covered up by opponent powerups and jostled by a screen shake effect that can’t be turned off. If you can get past that and are merely looking to play a multiplayer game that’ll result in someone throwing a controller across the room, Super Dodgeball Beats could very well be the game for you. Anyone looking for a single-player campaign that plays fairly is in for a rude awakening, however, with a number of the underlying design decisions here proving downright player-hostile in the harder tournaments.
Feeling railroaded and wanting to have something to show for my troubles, I shrug and press the button, wiping out an entire town with the kind of insouciance you’d expect from someone throwing away a food wrapper; no one who lived in the town was particularly memorable, and the party member who initially protested never brings it up again, so it’s hard to care. The Outer Worlds tries to replicate the magic of Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas, but it suffers from many problems and moments like this that become increasingly prevalent until the illusion is shattered and you realize that it’s just a hollow pretender.
I really liked this game at first, but only while operating under the assumption that everything would be polished up; Infected Shelter‘s release state is so repetitive and RNG-dependent that less than 1% of people have reached its ending. I’m part of that .9% percent, and it’s hard to recommend this anymore.
It’s easy to feel like every single mid-to-late-game map in Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is soul-crushingly awful, but in reality, only around half of them are. That’s still far too much gameplay that’s held back by busywork, especially since the explosion of status effects that most often bogs down Fell Seal‘s gameplay can cause the bad maps to last 2-4 times longer than the good ones, but there are glimmers of potential that shine through all the way through to the end. It’s just hard to give the game credit for the things it does right when the things it does wrong are so egregious.
As much as I like twisty-turny stories, they have to at least be vaguely coherent, and Incredible Mandy layers so many strange plot developments onto each other that it’s borderline impossible to get a sense of what this game is actually about. The gameplay similarly suffers from some pretty serious issues, most notably an unwieldy camera prone to undermining your platforming with unexpected teleports and boss fights that are equal parts confusing and tedious.