But Why Tho?
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Hardspace Shipbreaker has cemented itself as one of my top three games of the year. It’s not without faults, like its superfluous room you’re forced to visit. However, the complete package is marvelous in the way it tells a powerful story mixed with chill, yet stressful gameplay.
For most of my time with Diablo Immortal, I was pleasantly surprised. But when I reached the endgame content it became clear that all of that was to trap me in an exploitative revenue scheme. I would have been more than willing to buy a battle pass here and there or even some cosmetics or expansions to support Diablo Immortal into the future, but its bold and scummy approach to manipulating vulnerable players not only soured my entire experience with the game but marks a dangerous cornerstone in the monetization of similar products in the future.
Card Shark is a truly unique experience that shouldn’t be slept on. This is the game for those who don’t like card games. The developers have made a very fun experience that builds on itself fluidly in a way that many other games don’t seem to get right.
If you had to pay for Roller Champions, I wouldn’t say “grab two friends and start a match” but it is free and man that makes the difference. While this one is going to rely on patches to fix stability post-launch, there is something there to love.
Sniper Elite 5 does what the series does best: letting you kill Nazis with unrelenting fury. You can be as strategic or guns-blazing as you’d like, and the number of options will have players coming back for more quite often.
While Dolmen offers fun, challenging, and rewarding gameplay and a rich crafting system, its other features are a bit of a hit-and-miss.
Evil Dead: The Game is a blast. It’s fun to play, difficult in spots, and something I can see myself returning to again and again just to keep exploring and learning, as well as unlocking new things as I’m sure they’ll become available over the games’ lifespan. Plus, for Deadites out there, it’s beyond a great buy with lore plugged into just about every design choice, line of dialogue, and piece of the landscape. So pick it up and all the king baby.
Salt and Sacrifice is still a very worthwhile sequel to the original. While some of the elements don’t work as well as others, the game’s combat and build variety offer players a great sandbox to play around in.
Trek to Yomi raises the bar high for historical accuracy. It’s clear how hard the developers worked to make this game feel like an act of love and admiration for the Edo period of Japan. However, the well-written story, great voice acting, and beautiful setpieces are held back by the combat. For a substantial part of the game, swordfights feel stale. Especially with little use for combos which are given a big emphasis via unlocks. If the combat was given the attention that every other facet of this game got, Trek to Yomi would have been a big contender for my Game of the Year.
Overall, Dorfromantik lives up to its billing as an incredibly relaxing game. It’s the perfect game to play while on a train or just lounging around the house. It takes seconds to pick up, and can easily provide seemingly limitless hours of gameplay. If you are in the market for a chill, calming game, you can’t go wrong with Dorfromantik.
Kaiju Wars is a very fun spin on the turn-based strategy genre that brings a lot of style along with it. Its gameplay stands up to its striking visuals, and the few weaker points of its design do very little to detract from the overall experience.
While not being memorable for its story, The Last Friend shines brightly with its mix of level variety, beat-em-up combat, and dogs. There are no stale moments, which is hard to pull off for a Tower Defense-style game. Even after thinking you have a handle on how to conquer a level, a new curveball is thrown your way. Overall, Every dog lover at The Stonebot just showed how great man’s best friend truly is. There is love and care in almost every aspect of this game that will make The Last Friend stick with me for a long, long time.
If you played the game on any other console, the Wii version of the game ported to the Switch isn’t the way to go when Xbox Game Pass has the game available on the Series X|S. While the story still hits, the gameplay is beyond dated and ultimately the motion elements remove any feeling of combos and replace them with constant wrist flicks and frantic waving.
Unfortunately, the aspects of Winter Ember surrounding its core gameplay loop are so lackluster. The game’s stealth mechanics and tight design have the potential to be a solid new entry in the genre, but the game’s less polished parts ultimately hold it back.
Watching your cat cafe slowly expand and customizing its decoration is very rewarding. The experience is only hindered by its mechanics’ more clunky elements and lack of meaningful endgame content. However, the game is a perfect jumping-on point for newcomers to the genre.
LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga is a massive achievement for a beloved anthology franchise that needed to change. There are so many new welcome additions that I hope become staples for the future. But there are just as equal parts that felt unnecessary. These 3 years since the LEGO games last release and recent revelations were hopefully taken in as a learning experience
MLB The Show 22 is a finely-tuned baseball simulator that offers a nice range of options depending on your patience but is possessed of a nearly insurmountable difficulty curve for beginning players, especially those who are either uninvested in the sport, more accustomed to simpler arcade-style baseball games, or even fans of other popular sports simulators that require less pinpoint accuracy to succeed in. Fortunately, if you’re determined enough to learn to play the game, there are endless pitches to swing at and new games to start over as you fine-tune your button-pressing timing.
Despite the confusing narrative, In Nightmare is still fun. The puzzles are varied and delightful to work through. And while not the scariest game I’ve played, there’s plenty of anxiety to be had sneaking around enemies and solving puzzles under duress.
Weird West is like a love-hate relationship. It can be extremely frustrating one minute, and you want nothing to do with it. Then, the next minute, you want nothing more than to keep playing…However, all of it comes together to create an impressive world that WolfEye Studio should be proud of.
Overall, NORCO is a game I could not stop thinking about. Even long after completing my first playthrough, I find myself thinking about Kay, Catherine, the AI security robot Millions, Private Investigator Leblanc, and the multitude of ordinary citizens I encountered that profoundly impacted me throughout my time in NORCO. It’s been a while since a game has managed to cause so much emotional damage in such a short period of time, and I cannot recommend NORCO highly enough.