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Overall I love Forager for how simplistic it is in it’s design, and how grand it is in it’s execution. It’s a very cute game with lots to do and explore. Behind the minimal exoskeleton lies a really big game that I just keep coming back to, even after 10 hours of playing. If I had one complaint, it would be that, as a crafting game, it does get very grindy if you don’t choose the right skills. My second go around I had a much easier time, but an option to respec somehow would be a nice addition. I would definitely pick this up for the small price that it is. As of writing this, you can get the game for about $16.99 on Steam, which is well worth that price.
Dark Devotion was a game I didn’t think I’d like at first, but then it drew me in. Still, I think that overall it’s not really a game for me. A lot of players will have a hard time with it because of it being a Souls-like with rogue-like elements. So many players might get stuck unable to make progress, or eventually quit as the game wears down their desire to keep playing. I definitely like the dark story, though. I’ve got well over 30 hours in the game at this point, but there is a lot more gameplay than that if you try to unlock everything in the forge or go for all the achievements! Dark Devotion is available on Steam and the Humble Store for $19.99. It is also coming to Nintendo Switch and PS4 this year. Do you have what it takes to make it to the deepest depths of the fallen temple, or will its dangers and secrets be too much for you?
Overall, I did rather enjoy SENRAN KAGURA Peach Ball, though I feel it will mostly appeal to longtime fans of the series. It’s fun and colorful with good replay value, but it also feels very repetitive and lacking in terms of content. I saw there’s a tab in the game shop for DLC, which makes me hopeful they will add additional character packs later on. But I still can’t help but feeling they should have loaded the base game with more content from the get go. Cause while I do feel you get your money’s worth for $39.99, I also feel there could be much more variety here. That said, I easily got some 10 hours playing through campaign, and it will take many, many more hours to unlock everything. If you’re a fan of SENRAN KAGURA, you’ll find a lot to love here. If not, you might want to wait for the next main game in the series.
Redout is a game with beautiful visuals and great music to go with its incredibly enjoyable, fast-paced, and challenging gameplay. I do wish there was a local multiplayer mode and not just the seemingly dead online multiplayer, but there’s a wealth of single-player content with over 200 missions in its career mode that I wasn’t able to get all the way through in the roughly 20 hours I have between the Switch and PC versions. There’s a decent amount of variety through the different event types, ships, and stages, and with how much fun the racing itself is, even just knocking out a quick single race is a good time. It runs for $39.99 USD, not a bad price considering the surprising length of the career mode. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who misses F-Zero, or whoever wants a fun, fast, challenging sci-fi racer.
Overall, Moonchild is an intriguing story driven by satisfactory depth and palpable emotions expressed through several memorable characters. The narrative is the high point, a feature most fans of RPGs will appreciate and the entire story will easily hold your attention and interest throughout. Familiar gameplay and commonplace aesthetics neither hurt nor help the experience, but again, I know Aldorlea is capable of more. A first playthrough will take you around 15 hours and fortunately most of those hours are an enjoyable time. Despite its flaws, Moonchild is a pleasure to play and regardless of whether you’re a casual player or true RPG enthusiast, Moonchild has plenty of charm for all.
What I would love to see is a similar situation to Fairy Fencer F. That game also felt rather incomplete when it came out, but Advent Dark Force definitively cleaned up all those issues for me and ended up being a truly great game. Dragon Star Varnir isn’t a bad game, but it does need some more time in the oven to make it a lot better. Even the story itself felt perfunctory at times, and the game was pretty short for a JRPG, even if you aren’t rushing through in order to prevent Little Sister deaths. It only took me 40 hours my first time, with a severe Madness Ending (I was pretty much 100% Mad by Chapter 9 out of 11), and about 20 hours to get the Normal Ending. That is pretty standard for a AAA game in other genres, and justifies its $59.99 price tag, but for a JRPG that is pushing the limits of size. But overall the combat and characters do make up for a lot of the shortcomings, and more than likely another reviewer might have enjoyed it more if they like brutal and dark stories. So, not exactly what I was looking for, but I don’t regret playing it either.
I honestly feel that Furwind had all the elements it needed to be a great game, it just put them together in the wrong configuration. Had this been a metroidvania like I thought, one with well translated text and more diversity of challenges, it would have been fantastic. Instead, we get a throwback to games of the past that felt awkward and disappointing. While it’s pretty affordable at $9.99, and I did get about 6 hours of gameplay out of it, it’s really hard to justify buying it at full price. I respect what I think JanduSoft was trying to do here, but it missed the mark. Here’s hoping they take this constructive criticism in the spirit it’s intended and make their next game a masterpiece.
I spent 22 hours to complete the main quest and there is some postgame content to delve into as well. If you’re a fan of the series you’ll probably want to pick this one up as well. It will be worth the $49.99 asking price. While it’s not as good as other spin offs there is still some value here. If you are new to franchise this may not be the best entry point, but you don’t need any knowledge of the rest of the franchise to jump in either.
Overall though, I did rather enjoy My Friend Pedro. It’s far from perfect, but there’s lots of ingenuity and ambition on display here from the folks at Deadtoast. Though the plot was a bit psychotic and hard to parse at times, the humor kept me invested. For $19.99 I got about 10 hours of gameplay out of it, and had a good time. If nothing else, this is another worthy game that Devolver Digital has in their stable. Now I just hope we get a sequel that smooths over the issues I mentioned and explains the ending of the game…
I don’t like to equate money to time spent on a game. I think that’s a horrible way to value a game. I also don’t like to say that a game isn’t worth playing because some other game is better. However, this game utterly fails to be compelling or unique. There are so many better games in this genre, with so much more vision and so much more effort. In my opinion, this is simply not worth your time, and absolutely not worth your money.
All in all, I did enjoy my time with Space War Arena. It wasn’t perfect, but for $14.99 this is a very solid and enjoyable game. Though I would have loved a few things to be different, I’d say this is an easy recommendation to any strategy fan. Granted, the game isn’t for everybody. But if you want a complex yet simple game that’s easy to play in quick bursts, then Space War Arena is the game for you.
My issues with the story are that it tells you the specifics once, in large information dumps during key scenes, and then expects you to remember it all through the depressing dialogue and obtuse combat. I wanted things to be more fun, I wanted the dialogue to make me laugh and be full of hidden jokes and respectable interactions. Instead, everything is a chore to read and a punishment to experience. I really wanted a fulfilling journey for Alex and his friends, and I didn’t feel like we earned that goal based on most if not all of the dialogue in this game. It was all very depressing and felt like it had been written specifically with self-reflection in mind. I felt like YIIK was a game made to analyze. I wished it carried those critical elements of fun and enjoyment. Even though the world was beyond interesting to look at, its contents and message were just unnecessarily padded with inner monologue. It took me roughly 30 hours to beat the main story and begin some of the side extras. YIIK will cost you $19.99 on PC, PS4, or Nintendo Switch.
I can’t say Just Shapes and Beats is a bad game, just is a game that’s not really for me. I prefer my rhythm games to be a bit more tactile in nature. If the core gameplay looks compelling to you, there’s certainly a lot to get out of this game here. A pretty sizable soundtrack, even a co-op mode with both local and network support. There’s a total of 39 songs, though you’ll have to unlock a good amount of them. There’s a challenge mode that tasks you with clearing two songs and a boss, and you earn in-game currency based on your performance used to unlock more songs. The playlist mode is basically just a free play, no string attached mode. This is the Hardcore Edition of the game, which also adds a Hardcore difficulty to both the Challenge and Playlist modes. This mode makes each song quite a bit harder, and changes up the experience quite a bit for each song. If the normal difficulty gets a bit too mundane for you, this should spice things up a bit. I don’t think I could personally recommend this game, but if the idea of it sounds appealing to you, it might be worth the $20 asking price. The story only takes a few hours to get through, but if you enjoy the gameplay, there’s tons of replayability to be had.
Even if this is the last major game for this handheld console, you couldn’t ask for a better way to send the system off. This is easily one of the best games to ever be released on the Nintendo 3DS, and perhaps over time it may be selected as the overall best. Not only do you get to enjoy the characters from Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4: Golden, and Persona 5 one more time, but there is a good overall narrative here, and their interactions with their counterparts from other games are a delight to behold. Persona Q: Shadows of the Labyrinth was a great game, but the sequel Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth improves upon it in every way. The sequel is slightly shorter than the original, but features much more story, the time saved is entirely in the amount of dungeon crawling. But there is still enough there to more than satisfy, it took me 84 hours to complete the game, complete all 45 special screenings, complete 100% of the Persona Registry, and defeat all Velvet Room trials. That is a lot of content, especially for a game that is only $39.99, and you can tell the developers put a whole lot of care into the translation of all these beloved characters. So I cannot recommend this game enough, it’s vying with Sekiro for my favorite game this year, and it would be a strong candidate any other year as well. And more than that, it’s a strong reason to keep that 3DS charged up and ready to go.
My time with The Swords of Ditto: Mormo’s Curse was undeniably an enjoyable one. I was initially attracted to the art style alone, but I found the game as a whole to be equally as appealing. Despite the formula occasionally feeling a bit repetitive, my roughly 25 hours of playtime left me feeling very satisfied. I can’t speak for the original base version of this game, but the updated version feels like a well-polished product. It’s also worth noting that this game can either be played alone or with one additional co-op player. Sadly, I did not get a chance to test that functionality but I can easily see multiplayer adding an additional layer of entertainment. The Nintendo eShop listing for Swords of Ditto is priced at $14.99 and I think that is a very fair price for what you’re receiving. If you enjoy games with lots of bright, vibrant colors, cartoon art styles, puzzle-oriented dungeons, and a wide variety of customization options, this one is definitely worth your time.
It seems like the narrative is supposed to carry the day, what with the gameplay being rather uninspiring. However, after a little under five and a half hours, I got an ending which left several plot points unresolved and felt like sequel bait. There’s little reason to go back to it, outside of finding the collectibles. Even then you can’t see them outside of when they’re picked up, so it’s just for those desperate to say they accomplished everything. In the end Close to the Sun is a competently made game, but one with more style than substance. Its backstory and setting end up being the most engaging parts, with little else to keep the player slowly jogging deeper into the bowels of the Helios. For $30, there are more fulfilling and better executed experiences to be had.
I have to say I had a lot of fun with Void Bastards. The artwork is here amazing. I loved all of the different designs for the enemies and comic book style cut-ins are just a pure joy as well. The quirky British voices the aliens have and just the overall silliness of what you’re doing gives you a big smile. The shooting here is pretty tight and there are a few different difficulty levels to choose from, if FPS games aren’t really your thing. At the $29.99 price you get a nice 15 hour campaign that has New Game + so you can keep collecting and killing bigger aliens. This might seem a little steep, but PC games go on sale often, so if you wait for sale you’ll get an even better value here. I would recommend this one to anyone that has a passing interest in rouge-like or FPS games. This is one very unique title. It does have some quirks and you will get screwed over by the rouge-like nature of it, but there’s nothing else quite like it out there.
Last year was such an amazing year for indie games that it felt like CrossCode got a little lost in the shuffle. I would strongly suggest people who missed out on the game initially check it out now. The 1.1 update added some free content including a major arena mode that adds even more longevity to the game. Casually it can run you between 10-20 hours depending on how much of the sidequests you want to engage in. While the NMG (No Major Glitches) records are currently hovering just above two hours, it’s also a fun game to just take your time with like you would in a real MMORPG, and for $19.99 that is frankly a steal. While there are obvious comparisons to be made (story-wise) to the massively popular Sword Art Online, the gameplay was a whole lot tighter. As a result, with a whole lot of practice, Lea feels much more like a real badass who responds exactly to how good you are at the game itself.
Honestly for $19.99, it’s hard to go wrong with the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. It’s packed with great retro gaming, easily 10+ hours worth, and tons of lore about the series. It should put a smile on the faces of many fans. I definitely feel like more of a true fan after playing it, and gained new appreciation for what Konami accomplished back in their glory days. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned glitches and frankly inexcusable lack of a music select, I couldn’t give this a perfect score like I wanted. But if you’re a fan, old or new, of Castlevania and want a handy collection on any current console, you have plenty to sink your teeth into with this.
Much as I enjoyed playing the game, it left me a little conflicted. While the style and controls are fantastic, there just isn’t a lot of meat on the bone for ravenous Metroidvania fans. That said, I enjoyed all the time I spent with Gato Roboto, and other than the aforementioned glitches, it played effortlessly. For $7.99 I couldn’t put the game down, and that says a lot. Once the developers manage to fix that glitch, you can add another star to my score. But for now, I could only highly recommend this one to other hardcore Metroidvania addicts like myself. Here’s hoping we see more adventures with Kiki from doinksoft in the near future.