Rice Digital
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It’s simple, straightforward, and most importantly, damned fun — so if that’s what you’re after from your games, this is absolutely a worthwhile pickup.
About the only thing the game has going for it, as noted in the introduction, is that the sprite art is all quite nice and well animated. But aside from that, this is absolutely not eastasiasoft’s finest hour.
In many ways, Variable Barricade can be seen as a bit hit and miss. It does a few things refreshingly different for the genre, such as making Hibari truly her own character and with her own development, but manages to slip up when it comes to completely embracing its premise; it has some bizarre diversions that could possibly make or break the game for some players.
Atelier Sophie 2, unsurprisingly for the newest installment at the time of writing, feels like one of the most refined, polished entries in the series to date. It gets underway quickly, it allows experienced players to get right into the meaty stuff without scaring new players away, its characters are likeable and interesting and its mechanics are solid. Plus it looks lovely, sounds great and is just generally satisfying to play. It’s a game that wants you to enjoy it — and it makes a point of placing minimal barriers in the way of that enjoyment, right from the moment you fire it up for the first time.
It’s all too real, and seeing a video game as ruthlessly unforgiving as this depict it in such a surprisingly nuanced and delicate way is ground-breaking. In a doomed world, no amount of escapism will save us — and that’s a fascinating concept to explore, even if it’s pain inducing and frequently starts up the waterworks.
Of course, these days we recognise that this is because the hardware of the period was eminently suited to this sort of game — plus developers were excited about the continual refinement process of making their own twists on a genre of gaming that had been a thing since the very beginning. Dangerous Seed certainly fits into that context nicely; while it may not strictly speaking be innovative, its exact combination of different elements makes it stand out as a distinctive work worth exploring — and taken purely on its own merits, it’s a well-presented, attractive shoot ’em up that is worthy of your time and attention.
Moto Roader MC’s appeal for the solo player is undoubtedly fairly limited; there’s nothing to unlock and no real incentive to replay beyond trying to set better times in the game’s Records menu. Sometimes you don’t need an incentive, of course, particularly when the core gameplay is as straightforwardly fun as it is here — but it’s clear that Moto Roader MC is designed to be best enjoyed with friends. And if you get the right group of people together for a full five-player match, you will have an absolute blast with this.
I don’t want to sound like I’m being too harsh on Beat Souls here, because it really is an excellent, compelling and highly addictive game that is very much worth your time, attention and money. And if it does well, perhaps we’ll see Zoo take the opportunity to try again with another similar game — after all, their past track record has certainly shown they are definitely not afraid to iterate on a formula!
Frustrations aside, though — and I’ll emphasise that your tolerance for such frustrations will likely be largely dependent on if you grew up with PS1 and PS2-era racing games in particular — Hotshot Racing is a fine addition to today’s lineup of modern arcade racers. It’s not so long ago that the arcade racer was considered to be a completely dead genre — but between a variety of very different takes on it that we’ve seen over the last few years, including this, Slipstream, Cruis’n Blast, Horizon Chase Turbo and Inertial Drift, it’s clear that it’s not just alive and well, but thriving.
To sum it up then, Grapple Dog is a great game, albeit one with more than a few elements which give me a certain amount of pause in recommending it unreservedly. For some, these issues won’t matter at all — in which case I encourage you to pick Grapple Dog up right away. For others, though, you’ll need to weigh up whether the promise of an extremely solidly designed platformer is enough to make up for a few potentially significant annoyances along the way.
Steel Vampire is an excellent, unconventional shoot ’em up that is well worth taking some time to get to grips with. It’s a game that rewards continued play over the long term — and which is enormously satisfying and enjoyable in the short term. If you enjoy playing this kind of game very aggressively, this should be an essential purchase — and if you’ve been bottling up a bit of stress and are looking for a good outlet, this might be just the thing for you! Get blastin’!
It’s a straightforward, simple, arcade-style game that rewards your continued engagement not with cynical “player retention” systems designed to keep you grinding and/or paying up for microtransactions — a noteworthy point, particularly considering poncle’s background in making online casino and slot machine games — but with additional ways to have fun. It’s considerately designed, it’s highly entertaining, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
Definitely a great game to have available to you when you want something a bit more “gentle” to just sit back and relax with — just try not to feel too bad as the end of your century rolls around and Amaterasu looks really sad about having to part ways with you!
It would have perhaps been nice to see some discrete difficulty levels — and it definitely would have been great to see online leaderboards — but if you’re a shoot ’em up fan and you pick this one up, you’re going to have, if you’ll pardon the expression, a blast.
To put it another way: in Needy Streamer Overload, you should be prepared for failure, because you’re likely to encounter it in one form or another before long. But that doesn’t mean you’ve “lost” or that you’ve played the game wrong; the one advantage that this game has over reality is that you can go back and try again to see what results taking a different approach might yield. Who knows? You might even find some helpful insights to consider for yourself along the way, too.
For those hungry for “content”, Cake Invaders is going to disappoint you, because it is what it is and absolutely nothing more than that. But for those who remember — or at least appreciate — the good old days of a game having absolutely no shame in simply being a game and nothing else, you’ll have a good time with this one. It’s a great game to have installed on your Switch for when you just fancy a quick blast between more substantial gaming sessions — and in that sense, it fits right in with the rest of Zoo’s excellent library on the platform.
It’s a fun puzzler worth spending some time with, then — but as a Miku game, it is left considerably wanting. And that’s a bit of a shame; past Miku games have felt as much like a celebration of Miku and the culture surrounding her as anything, but here it just feels like she’s been slapped on a game that had its origins elsewhere at the last moment. And at this point, she deserves better.
It’s clear that was the sole intention behind this game — and in that regard they’ve succeeded admirably. Whether or not you love Nep, this is a delightful arcade-style game that pays loving and respectful homage to an all-time classic — and which provides enough twists on the formula it’s referencing to feel like its own distinct and worthwhile experience in its own right. A definite winner. Top Nep indeed!
Queeny Army presents a stiff challenge. It’s perhaps not quite as brutally hard as the developers tried to position it as on its original PC release, but it does provide an authentically challenging retro-style experience that nicely captures the feel of NES games in particular. It has an endearingly sort of “home-grown” feel to it thanks to a few rough edges on the character art in particular, but this just helps to distinguish it from big-budget titles and make it clear that this very much was one man’s passion project.
To put it another way, Moon Dancer is, appropriately enough, a good game to “graduate” to once you’ve got comfortable with something more straightforward and traditional like Raging Blasters. The core skills of paying attention to enemy attacks and avoiding bullet patterns will serve you well in Moon Dancer; you then simply need to layer the skill of effectively using the lock-on laser atop those fundamentals in order to see some success.