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A featureless, shallow, bland and thoroughly turgid experience, Sabec’s “Bowling” is poor even compared to the bowling mini-games you find inside other games, like GTA IV. It doesn’t follow the rules of bowling, isn’t fun to play and lacks even a hint of personality.
Whilst not the deepest or most realistic of Trials-like games, it makes up for it with silliness and charm.
Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated is probably one my favourite 3D platformers of the generation, offering up an experience that’s more Ratchet & Clank than Yooka-Laylee.
The concept of Waking is an admirable one. To place the player at the centre of the narrative and mechanics of a game, tailoring it to their choices, is a lofty goal and one that it falls well short of. Rough visuals, clunky and repetitive combat and a narrative that spectacularly misses the emotional connections it attempts to evoke, Waking makes you want to do anything but.
If you need a Metroidvania in your life, it’s a good one. It’s simple to grasp and is very appropriate and playable for kids. It’s got a lot of charm. It’s just not very memorable for those of us who have played the greats of the genre.
The Anniversary Edition is a much better looking version of the original Edna and Harvey – The Breakout. Despite updated visuals though, there’s still some wrinkles that haven’t been ironed out, notably with sound effects and animations. The move to controller support on consoles has been a little rough on the playability too. The core concept, narrative and personality of the game is quite ingenious but the backtracking, inconsistent lunacy and uniquity of some of the puzzles mean it’s sometimes tough to get through.
Koa and the charming world of Mara is enough to keep an eye on this one, but it’s too big with not enough depth and that makes Summer in Mara far from essential.
However rigid it may want to be, up against the big hitters already available on Switch especially, and with a way-too-short campaign? It doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
With a vast interconnected cave system to explore, and all the genre trappings and pitfalls, Outbuddies has the elements most will be looking for in a new digital spelunking fix, just without the flair to find its way back to the surface.
It may seem daunting at first, but stick with it and a massively varied stealth and tactics game opens up over time.
The moments of quiet crafting and contemplation in Isle of Spirits is what this game does well. The core loop of collecting a small pool of resources and putting what you can towards a unified goal encourages a chilled out, relaxed experience. Unfortunately that’s often at odds with the core of the game which is filled with cheap perma-death dangers and trial-and-error repetition.
It’s one of those games I never really knew I needed until it came along and thankfully, exploring the story of Alice through her headphones was as cleansing and as wondrous as I had hoped it would be. The music is wonderful, the art style is remarkable and the story wants me to keep going back and discovering what may happen if I chose the left option instead of the right. Did I do right by that character? Was I listening correctly when I made *that* choice? Across the Grooves is stacked full of decisions that leave question marks on your conscience.
Warborn is a stylish, smartly designed and content packed sci-fi strategy game. The 30~ hour campaign tells a fun narrative, despite a rocky start, that tests the player to overcome a decent variety of foes and puzzle like missions. With a tactical depth that’s immediately clear but surprisingly deep, it’s a joy to play both on and offline. A few niggles aside that could be fixed post release, Warborn is one of the better strategy games you’ll play this year.
I certainly felt that once I got my head fully and completely bamboozled by the intricacies of Do Not Feed The Monkeys, it was over. Fortunately the game is replayable to the nth degree due to its central mechanic of playing the game particularly how you want to, no matter how stressful each playthrough was always going to be.
Memories of Celceta is like a bite-size RPG for kids or for the millennial with time constraints who still wants to play RPGs, but can’t commit to 100-hour behemoths like Persona 5. It’s fun and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Combat is fast, but it also suffers from being simple and heavy on the button-mashing. The story takes you for a ride, but it’s also pedestrian and does nothing new – it’s like deja vu, in that it feels like an RPG story you’ve heard time and again.
It may not look next-gen on your 4K TV running through your PS4 Pro, but it doesn’t need to. Conversely, I thought it was well suited to something like the Switch: much like a comic, you hold it in your hands and flick through at your own pace. In that regard, Atomic Wolf have nailed it.
Gamers who like a cruel, twisted challenge to keep them awake at night whispering just one more jump over and over again will find a decent game and one almighty almost insurmountable challenge here.
A bopping 8-bit soundtrack and an interesting variety in game play-altering hats are the main positives from Many Faces, a retro shooter that’s otherwise short on content and game modes. If you’re hankering for a game that looks like it comes from the late 80’s/early 90’s and can keep you busy for an hour for a few pounds Sterling, that’s what you’ll get here. It is sorely missing multiplayer, leader boards and game modes that could really elevate it to bigger and better things.
When Potata: Fairy Flower is doing what it does best – tense platforming among open, branching levels loaded with danger – it’s excellent. Sure, it can be punishing at times but it has been quite some time since a game made my palms as sweaty as this game did at times. For that, it has to be commended. It’s a shame these moments are offset by meandering, sometimes nonsensical quests coupled with reams of text to read, some of which are confusing, and puzzles which grind the game to a halt. As a melting pot of ideas, a few too many counter-intuitive mechanics rose to the top in Potata: Fairy Flower which wow’s you with its visuals one moment then puts you to sleep with an unnecessary and cumbersome conversation the next.
A Fold Apart ends before it manages to make the most of its genuinely unique puzzle mechanics. It feels like there should have been another chapter to the game, really diving into the ingenious mesh of puzzle elements that too often require little more than a few seconds of trial and error to solve. The story A Fold Apart tells is a powerful one, unfortunately undercut by the way it is delivered at times but a beautiful piano soundtrack and art style that’s deeper than it first appears helps it stick the landing.