Killa Penguin
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I enjoyed the original game greatly, but its sequel surpasses it in almost every way; whereas the original game was a highly enjoyable distraction, One Finger Death Punch 2 quickly becomes an addiction that you can lose huge chunks of time to without noticing. This is simply a bigger, more complex game sporting more moving parts, and while its changes take a little getting used to at first, it’s such an improvement that the original pales in comparison.
Tomb Towers is a game that I’ve been quite fond of since I first played through it in its Early Access incarnation 11 months ago, and that time allowed me to totally lose any gameplay skills I may have once had and experience it as though for the first time. That’s important, too, because Tomb Towers is a deceptively difficult game; all movement snaps to a grid, and the difference between success and failure often comes down to engineering a near-miss that sees spikes or an enemy come within a single grid space from instantly killing you. Add timing elements into the mix, and you have a recipe for something truly tricky. Still, the bite-sized approach of its rooms helps to keep this from becoming so rage-inducing that you’re inclined to quit, and the absence of lengthy solutions also benefits the pacing, providing you with a constant sense of forward momentum.
Of course, the way you move from left to right is by manipulating a giant contraption through a series of buttons that you have to manually run around and press, relying on a sail and the release of steam built up by its engine to maximize your speed and distance while minimizing the amount of fuel that you use. It’s a bizarre concept that ends up being incredibly entertaining, and while FAR: Lone Sails may only last 2-3 hours, it’s filled with more than enough memorable moments to be worthwhile.
As desperately as I wanted to love Grimshade, it’s a broken game—its mechanics are a mess, popups that explain how things work are either needlessly vague or outright empty, bugs lurk around every corner, and it’s difficult to understand what’s happening at any given point because the dialogue is filtered through a prism of typos and wrong portraits/names that make it impossible to tell who’s speaking during conversations.
Unit 4 demands consistency and precision from the player, but sports unpredictable mechanics that often kill you through no fault of your own. This is a game about careful movement where maneuvering is a total crapshoot.
Claybook is a racing game, a physics platformer, and a resource management game at different points, existing as a kind of playground for numerous different experiences of wildly varying quality, but all of this evens out into a “jack of all trades, master of none” type of game that’s surprisingly easy to walk away from.
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.
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 truth is that you never know when a game will change your mind about a gameplay style, and I had high hopes that this would be the case here. If anything, though, Wargroove solidified my distaste for this flavor of attrition-friendly turn-based strategy.
Degrees of Separation is a charming puzzle-platformer, though that charm occasionally gives way to devilishly challenging puzzles designed to prey on your expectations and force you to think outside the box. It’s easy to respect the amount of effort that went into the constantly varying puzzles and puzzle mechanics on display here, even if one or two gameplay twists end up being more trouble than they’re worth.
All of these elements coalesce into something unexpectedly coherent and interesting, and while there are some minor performance issues to contend with on the Switch, Airheart‘s gameplay loop and general oddness make it a good fit for the platform.
Arcade Spirits is a game about working in an arcade while striving to balance practicality with idealism, but more importantly, it's also a celebration of gaming and all of the distinct but nevertheless overlapping subsets of gamers it inspires, articulating all sorts of familiar little joys and fears and motivations that are bound to reverberate with many—if not most—of us. This isn't even as heavy-handed as one might expect; Arcade Spirits' preoccupation with bizarre humor provides enough distractions that you'll rarely see emotional moments coming, and they never outlast their welcome.
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.
Thea: The Awakening is one of many games that ended up slipping through the cracks around here for one reason or another, meaning the Nintendo Switch release is my first real experience with it, but all of the talk I’d heard about how it incorporates a number of totally different genres without becoming defined by any of its disparate elements was 100% accurate. Chatter about Thea: The Awakening‘s PC version being superior to its console counterparts also ended up having some substance behind it.
I played FutureGrind until my thumbs were so bruised from the controller that my fingertips remained numb for several days, and a game inspiring that kind of in-the-moment tension and compulsion to improve is always a sign of something great.
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.
That’s not to insinuate that Override: Mech City Brawl is perfect or anything, as the general combat is kind of floaty while the unwieldy camera makes responding quickly to your opponent more difficult than it probably should be, but that’s ultimately forgivable given its clear party-game aspirations. Put simply, this isn’t a game that’s trying to be an immaculately balanced fighting game experience for die-hards so much as it’s the kind of game that you end up playing after getting drunk with friends, only stopping once someone passes out or gets frustrated and throws a controller across the room.
As an unrepentant strategy-RPG snob with unrealistically high standards for the genre, though, I can definitively state that it’s 100% worth fighting through all of this early awkwardness because of how amazing things eventually become. While Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden‘s early fights feel like uninspired battles of attrition, the later gameplay weaves the destructible environments of Silent Storm with the overgrown and reset-world vibe of the original Fallout, all while giving you numerous tactical options that can see you doing things like aggroing hostile robots so that they’ll also turn against other enemies.
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.
Valkyria Chronicles 4 is a game that tries to embrace its past while also taking a step into the future, and it fails spectacularly on both fronts. The story is incoherent, the characters are developed poorly, and the gameplay's constant gimmickry and penchant for not telling you the rules quickly becomes fatiguing. That's not even getting into the unskippable cutscenes and numerous technical shortcomings, either. The original Valkyria Chronicles is a classic, but it was clearly the beneficiary of beginner's luck that's depleted in the decade since.