Gaming Professors

Atomic Heart is a highly successful take on the legendary BioShock series, from which it clearly draws heavy inspiration. The retro-futuristic Soviet Union setting is exceptionally well-executed and breathes new life into a familiar concept, including a cast of enemies featuring robots and mutants. You’ll enjoy the combat all the more because you can see the damage you’ve inflicted on enemies or even chop off their limbs. The graphics are impressive, and others could take a cue from the optimization here. The sound design, and especially the soundtrack by Mick Gordon, successfully evokes the right atmosphere. However, the game is let down by a relatively underutilized open world, minor bugs in scripted events, and the requirement to use a US keyboard layout. If you liked BioShock, enjoy taking down robots, and want to experience a story with two endings, this is the game for you.

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Minor hiccups aside, Frostpunk is a great city-building strategy game. The difficulty is set just right—you can always scrape by, but at the same time, you’re already forced to start tackling the next crisis looming on the horizon. Only players who like to play cautiously or have empathy for their workers should steer clear. The game is primarily let down by its underutilized alternate history premise, which could have yielded so much more. Beyond that, certain decisions regarding the DLC offerings also smack a bit of cash-grabbing.

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Cyber Shadow is a very solid retro platformer that brings back the golden age of a particular era in the gaming world. There’s clear inspiration from the legendary NES title Ninja Gaiden, which is definitely a good thing. It’s a fairly difficult but fair game that doesn’t try to be anything it’s not and delivers exactly what you’d expect from it. The progression through the game, where you grow stronger and use your wits and skills to take down enemies across original levels, is truly well-executed. The level design, variety of enemies, and smooth gameplay, combined with the well-designed ninja gear and abilities, are the title’s main draws. However, that sense of a great game is dragged down by the emphasis on difficulty, which forces you to rely mainly on precision and timing toward the end of the game, and the fact that some sections are heavily unbalanced. If you’re a fan of the genre, love retro NES platformers, and enjoy a challenge, you definitely won’t be bored.

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At its core, Unsouled is a fun 2D pixel-art action RPG set in Japanese culture. The game focuses primarily on combat, counterattacks, and chaining them into powerful combos, which serve as its cornerstone and driving force. The icing on the cake in this regard is the partially destructible environment, which you can use to your advantage when fighting enemies. You’ll find solid RPG elements here that liven up the gameplay. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of flaws that drag the game down. Enemies are severely unbalanced, regardless of the difficulty level chosen, and the desynchronization of sound with movement spoils the good impression of the combat. Unsouled is definitely not for everyone; it’s more of a title for fans of the gameplay style, the visual presentation, or players seeking a specific challenge.

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In my opinion, Distant Worlds 2 is an unfulfilled ambition. The game is great, well-designed, and offers nearly unlimited possibilities. However, if your preparation goes wrong, it will haunt you until the very end. Furthermore, the glaring lack of need for the player to control anything—except for the most minute management tasks—and the overwhelming complexity of the game’s building tables are terribly detrimental. Players unfamiliar with this genre will struggle, as they’ll never get the chance to even attempt to unlock the game’s full potential. At a price of just under forty-two euros, it’s also a hell of a lot of money for very little bang for your buck.

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Multiversus is a free-to-play game in the style of Mortal Kombat—a 2D side-scrolling brawler. Publisher Warner Bros. Games provided the developers with a wide range of licenses, and the team at Player First Games made the most of this opportunity. The game runs smoothly, doesn’t crash, and features interesting animations and sound design. Crossplay lets you play with friends on almost any decent gaming device, so you can have fun together in yet another great multiplayer title. The downside is the single-player mode, which lacks anything to keep you engaged for long. The biggest flaw, however, lies in the game’s overload of microtransactions, which eventually become quite annoying.

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The Dead Space remake is truly outstanding, sure to delight both die-hard fans of the series and complete newcomers alike. Isaac Clarke is back in top form, thanks in part to new mechanics like the Intensity Director. The brutality is amped up even further, and the already intense atmosphere is even more terrifying. EA Motive crafted this project with great love and respect, and it shows.

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Boxville is a truly delightful point-and-click adventure with a unique charm that you don’t usually find in games. Thanks to its picturesque graphics, sophisticated perspective, polished audio, touching story, and relaxing atmosphere, it’s a game that everyone—young and old, big and small—can enjoy. The entire production reflects just how much love and care the creators poured into this project, making its peaceful message impossible to ignore. Nothing should be overdone, but still, I wish I could spend just a little more time in this cardboard city.

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Whateverland is a charming point-and-click adventure game that strives for originality wherever possible. It succeeds in this, particularly in terms of building an unconventional world, its rules, characters, and logic puzzles, which do a great job of livening up what would otherwise be monotonous gameplay. Lighthearted humor, combined with a well-chosen soundtrack, enhances the dark atmosphere reminiscent of Tim Burton, but everything might feel a bit rushed. The game still requires a fair amount of work and fixes to offer players an uninterrupted experience.

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SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake certainly lives up to its TV counterpart and is a great game for your kids who love Bikini Bottom just as much as I once did. So if you’re a SpongeBob fan or just want to treat your kids to something fun, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake is the perfect choice. The overall experience is marred by just a few minor flaws—for us Czechs, mainly the lack of a Czech localization, which I would have expected for this type of game. Seven and a half out of ten.

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Hi-Fi RUSH burst onto the scene and instantly captured massive attention thanks to its star-studded soundtrack, rhythmic gameplay, action-packed combat system, and the main character’s slightly clownish nature. The game will get you in the mood with its rock tracks, set off a wild ride, and you definitely won’t want to get off. A game this well-made certainly deserves better pricing, because for very little money, you get way too much—and way too good—music.

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Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel isn’t a bad ghostly adventure, though I wouldn’t exactly call it a horror game. To a certain extent, the game manages to create the right atmosphere that we’ve all come to love in legendary horror classics like Amnesia or Penumbra. Unfortunately, this great experience is somewhat marred by action elements and repetitive environments. The enemies look more amusing than they do scary. I consider the time-shifting through the camera an interesting idea that definitely adds a nice touch to the game.

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Cuphead is undeniably an original and well-crafted game overall, and not just within its own genre. The game’s setting, inspired by 1930s cartoons and slapstick comedies, is both original and very elegant. While this visual style may not be to everyone’s taste, it lends a unique charm to the story and the fantastic characters that is sure to captivate players. Cuphead is definitely not for everyone. The game clearly targets a specific group of players who enjoy demanding challenges and overcoming obstacles. The icing on the cake is the gameplay and the fantastic soundtrack, which further enhances the atmosphere and enjoyment of the game.

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No More Heroes III is a mixed bag. It offers dynamic combat, great humor that isn’t afraid to poke fun at other pop culture franchises, and a perfect soundtrack. Unfortunately, the terribly botched PC port, overly complicated controls, and lackluster graphics do the game a huge disservice. Fans of the series will also get bored by the repetitiveness, which, fortunately, can always be spiced up with some entertaining side activities.

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Scarlet Tower is the third game in a new genre from Pyxeralia. In an effort to compete with Vampire Survivors, it offers more engaging and visually appealing graphics. However, it doesn’t have much content to offer at this point, and regular players will likely get bored of it very quickly. In the context of the developers’ work, this is unfortunately yet another half-baked product they rushed to market, and it may well be another one that gets abandoned mid-development.

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In every respect, Garden Simulator is the kind of game primarily intended for players who already have some connection to the activity in question. In this case, we’re talking about gardening, which is handled quite well in the game, but it won’t appeal to everyone—especially not to those looking for long-term entertainment lasting dozens of hours. If you’re a gardening enthusiast, definitely pick up Garden Simulator and add an extra point to your final score. But if you’re a player who likes to try out simulators just for fun, save your money and invest it in a different, more entertaining simulator instead. Unfortunately, I belong to the second group, and from this perspective, I have to give Garden Simulator only six out of ten points.

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You’re playing at a real job—that’s how I’d sum it up. It’s not bad, certainly not. If you want to become a seasoned, wealthy shareholder one day, The Invisible Hand probably won’t help you achieve that as a game. The self-regulating market is perfect (though stock market activity is greatly simplified), as is the everyday hustle and bustle going on around you. Hundreds of millions rolling into your account—sure, why not. If you’re lucky, you can even make a billion in a single day, and that’s enough money to last ten lifetimes. But as a simulator, the game is missing something: all that life outside the office.

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If you have half an hour and someone to play with, you can fire up the game anytime and it’ll always keep you entertained. It’s simple, fun, and funny. Unfortunately, it gets old quickly, and there are very few players online these days, so you have to wait a long time for multiplayer challenges—which is a huge problem. It’s clear that Tricky Towers is built primarily around multiplayer. However, that doesn’t work without players, and not even the cute little wizards stacking blocks can save the game from this glaring shortcoming today. Fortunately, the block-building gameplay will always have its place here, because literally everyone gets it.

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Despite its minor flaws, One Piece Odyssey is a fantastic game. While it clearly has a specific target audience, it is precisely this group that will buy it, play it, and adore it. This doesn’t diminish its quality; on the contrary, it enhances it. Non-fans of the series will naturally feel more lost, and many things won’t make sense to them, which might even put them off. The repetitive combat certainly doesn’t help. However, the polished graphics, music, voice acting, and the simplicity of the battles are all appealing, not to mention the great story full of humor, friendship, and awesome one-liners.

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Cryofall is a low-key, simple sci-fi survival game that turns you into a castaway à la Tom Hanks, with a fully open world ahead of you where you can do almost anything you set your mind to. While the multiplayer mode lacks players, you’ll still find opponents. Even so, I still maintain that it’s better to set up a local game and spend dozens of hours playing it.

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