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This is unacceptable for a $5 game, let alone Crimson Keep’s $20 asking price. After dozens of attempts and five hours I will never get back, I managed to get to the third level once, then almost immediately starved to death. Crimson Keep is a thrown-together mess that feels like it only got halfway through its development cycle before being shoved into the limelight. The only people I could possibly recommend this game to are the most hardcore eShop collectors, but that’s only if my conscience stops screaming at me to take that statement back. I don’t know if the Steam version is any better, but because of this I have no desire to find out. Give this a hard pass and randomly generate your way to something better.
I simply can’t recommend SkateBIRD. If you want a good skateboarding game, this certainly doesn’t provide that. If you want something kinda janky to laugh at, it’s not good for that either. However, if you’re curious how a skateboarding game could arguably feel worse than the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater, you can check this out for $20 on Steam. All its content will probably take about 10 hours to get through, though I can’t imagine there’s very many people that will actually make it through all of it.
Having just finished playing Outbreak: The New Nightmare a couple days ago, it’s almost impressive how forgettable it was; I had to keep going back to the game to remember what I saw and experienced, even after going through every Campaign and Experiments mission, each of which lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. Sadly, this has the look and feel of an incomplete Steam game, and I had to triple check the price for this because I couldn’t believe that it really is $13 on PS4. Given the short amount of time between most releases in the Outbreak series, I can only recommend that the developer spend much, much more time on each entry. That way, maybe the next one will play better and the visuals might not only look better, but consist of way fewer reused assets that didn’t look so good in the first place. I realize this will fall on deaf ears since Outbreak: Lost Hope, the fourth game in the series, will likely be out on PS4 by the time this review goes up. Maybe (or should I say, hopefully) the later releases are better, because this is priced way above what it’s actually worth.
I just have a really hard time recommending this. Even if you really like sim games like this, there’s so much better options out there. Even for a child, a lot of the game is so repetitive, and the game is so long that I don’t think it would hold their attention. For older folks looking for perhaps more robust games out there, I’d give this a hard pass. That’s especially considering the game is $60, which is far too much for a game this lacking. The game is pretty long too, probably about 30-40 hours, but it has such a paltry amount of content. There’s far better out there for far less money.
Indiecalypse stands as an example of misplaced effort. Instead of being one polished game, it’s a cobbled together mess of several different incomplete builds of games. Even the Kickstarter backer list seems rushed, since none of the names are in alphabetical order. The humor isn’t dark so much as desperate and annoying to a degree that even Meet the Spartans thinks it’s overdoing it. In a way its portrayal of video game fans and developers reminds me of the movie Ready to Rumble, which is about pro wrestling and designed for its fans, but ends up depicting those fans as dumb, immature, irrational troglodytes. This game isn’t even four hours long, but not only did it feel much longer, I had to keep taking breaks every twenty minutes or so. Sometimes I just had to play something else, but usually I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling because this game’s sense of humor has that effect. $12.99 is far too much, and I’m not sure any sale price could justify ever buying this.
Answering the question from the beginning of the review, this game had me frustrated rather than cheerful, even for only $4.99. It feels like a boring slog through multiple levels doing the same thing over and over again, which is a shame because there’s a lot of untapped potential here! If Many Faces didn’t punish you for using powerups, I think this would be a great easy title to run through a few times when you’re bored.
Overall I think this game is a bust. Sure the visuals are pretty, the puzzles are fun, and the soundtrack is fantastic, but it’s just not enough to distract from the fact that this game is really bland and has a lot of really glaring problems. At $19.99 you get about 10 hours worth of content which is good for the price, but I can’t in good conscience recommend this game unless you really enjoy the puzzles.
The best thing I can say about Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is the good production value. Visually, the game looks very nice. Every line of dialogue is voiced. There are even short animated cutscenes every now and then. But this is all surface stuff. Dive into the game, and it becomes apparent very quickly that most of the focus on the game was just making it look good. It’s a game that barely manages to hold your attention for several hours stretched to almost 30. At a $60 price tag, I’d give this game a hard pass.
In the end, Azure Saga: Pathfinder unfortunately is a sub-standard RPG. It has a good idea going for it, but it is simply the execution and stale style of the game that brings it down. As a writer myself, there are things I would change such as how characters interacted with the world around them. If one doesn’t rush through the game, the game goes for 30-50 hours depending on how much side content the player does. Even for $12.99, a small price drop feels warranted. Overall, I hope MassHive Media’s next attempt fares better, since it is obvious they actually tried, even though they didn’t succeed.
Chain Blaster was a good attempt by G-Style at a portable SHMUP experience. If anything, I hope this isn’t their last foray into the genre, because a larger, more comprehensive and varied experience would be outstanding. If they decided to publish a game for more money with a larger experience, I would be all over it. Ultimately, the game doesn’t quite merit the $6.99 asking price. If they ever decide to discount this game, however, I would highly recommend that any SHMUP fan with an itchy trigger finger pick Chain Blaster up.
By and large, Where the Bees Make Honey is more of a linear, semi-interactive series of stories than an actual game. I didn’t find any of them to be particularly engaging or meaningful, though I again take no pleasure in saying that. This is a rather short title clocking in at around 3-4 hours, but it tries to pack a lot into that short span of time. A few reviews back, I was rather preachy about the concept of games being an art form. While I don’t intend to get back up on my soapbox, I must say that I think this game was trying just a bit too hard to be artistic and different. The concept of playing through childhood memories in fantasy worlds based on them sounds great, but I feel that none of them correlated and they were way too linear. If your intention is to hearken back to the joys of being a child, then the ability to explore is very important. The gameplay was indeed varied and took on many different forms, but the execution of each (with the exception of those Fez-like levels) was very disappointing. Had the existence of constant bugs and glitches not been present, I could have justified a slightly higher score. I appreciate the great deal of effort that I’m sure went into making this title, but unless some serious revisions are made, I can’t recommend picking this one up, even at its current price point of $9.99.
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.
Overall, while I enjoyed aspects of Cryptark, the unbalanced nature of the game and perplexing difficulty spikes made it a unfortunately frustrating experience. Though I did spend a couple hours with the game, I was unable to beat Campaign mode once, and had zero chance in Rogue mode. While I admire Alientrap Games for their art and sound design, the gameplay needs much more balancing before I can recommend it to any other than the most hardcore of fans, at least without massive future updates. Here’s hoping Alientrap learns some lessons from Cryptark and manages to make a more enjoyable and approachable roguelike game in the future.
There’s a beautiful game in Regalia, but it’s sadly hidden behind a massively cumbersome and counter-intuitive interface. While I’ve been told that there’s an update in the works with numerous fixes planned, and even several for issues I mentioned, I’m not entirely sure though it will fix all of my complaints. Frankly, I’m a bit shocked the game got through Nintendo’s testers in this state. The game costs $24.99 on Switch and provided me at least 30 hours of playtime, and while I can see the good here, it’s currently outweighed by all the bad. I will note that if Pixelated Milk is able to fix the majority of the problems I mentioned, my score would likely be double what it is currently. I can respect the effort here, but it’s hard to recommend Regalia: Royal Edition in it’s current form. Here’s hoping it gets the loving care it needs soon.
Much as I wanted to love Woven, I left the experience quite disappointed. There was promise here, but for whatever reason it wasn’t met. If you don’t mind clumsy physics and very complex and vague puzzles, you might enjoy what’s here. Even then, it’s a hard pill to swallow at $19.99. Though you can beat the game in less than 5 hours, it took me around 9 due to getting lost repeatedly. So at least you’ll get some bang for your buck. This is one of those games I recommend you pick up on a sale. Hopefully Alterego Games has more ideas they can breathe life into in the future, cause I’d honestly like to see them succeed. In the meantime, I’ll lament this tale of an elephant and his firefly buddy.
As can be expected, if you’re still with me reading this review, no I cannot and do not recommend Loop8: Summer of Gods. It’s a shame because I really thought this would be a fun summer adventure and was pretty disappointed that it wasn’t. Not only that, but I know XSEED Games does some really nice physical editions. Maybe you want to pick it up if you collect XSEED’s physical releases. Still, I would suggest you wait on a good enough sale for that, because this game is not worth it. Although, if this game were to ever be made into an anime instead, one where all the repetitive nonsense is skipped over, I could see myself potentially enjoying it.
Overall, I can’t recommend Tears of Avia at all. At the price of $20, there’s far more tempting offers on Steam than this. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, and it doesn’t do the things it borrows from other games particularly well either.
I can’t say I really enjoyed my time with Assault Gunners HD Edition. I think the control scheme is terrible, the music is bland, the mission variety is lacking, and the story is uninteresting. I spent about six hours with this one and completed all 35 missions and the 12 DLC missions. Inferno mode is also included. This is a horde mode where enemies come in waves, so if this gameplay is your cup of tea this will extend playtime quite a bit. If you’re really starved for a mech game you might find some enjoyment out of this if you can look past all these issues, since it’s not very expensive at $11.99 with the DLC. Otherwise you should likely wait for a better offer down the line.
Overall, Super Skull Smash Go! 2 Turbo was a relatively dull experience. The game, even when 100%ing it, is only about one hour and a half long. For the asking price of $9.99, it’s best to wait for a significant price drop on Steam or PSN. The game is a platformer but not truly a puzzle platformer as advertised to be. Not a bad game, but it could’ve been expanded on more interesting puzzle elements and ideas. Hopefully, TACS Games can learn from this and improve any future titles they develop.
It’s disheartening to see a game with a solid concept that badly needed more work before being released. With how exploitable the AI is, I wound up needing less than nine hours to finish Story Mode, four of those coming after discovering the “V” strategy. Even if the bugs were fixed, Ganbare! Super Strikers has some glaring problems in its game mechanics which lead to lopsided teams and unbalanced matches. The limited customization and lackluster Story Mode are the missed penalty shot that seals it for me. I do hope the developer keeps updating and adding onto what’s here as I did enjoy the core gameplay. However, for $10 I can’t in good faith recommend this in its current state.