MegaTagmension: Blanc + Neptune vs. Zombies is another entry in Compile Heart's massive moneymaking monstrosity, the Neptune universe. As with previous versions, the characters are all anthropomorphized versions of consoles, game companies, game journalism magazines, and other game-related stuff. Depending on the game, they go to school, conquer the world, have adventures in old, broken game consoles, and a ton of other wacky adventures. Seriously, the franchise has covered almost everything now. I'm just waiting for a Mario Party game to seal the deal.
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Megadimension Neptunia VII (pronounced V-2) is one of the better entries in the series. IF seems to have fine-tuned their formula to an exact science, the graphics are top-notch, and the characters have enough style and humor added to them that it makes playing the game less of a slog than it might have been normally.
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The new Mega Man-themed roguelike platformer from Batterystaple games combines two genres known mainly for their difficulty: old-school platform games, and roguelikes. The issue with this combination is that old-school platformers trade on repetition, muscle memory, and pattern recognition to move their players through the game, and roguelikes usually throw most of this out the window, meaning the players have to learn more to rely on skills and powerups than figuring out level layout.
In theory, it's an excellent idea, marrying the difficulty and skill-honing of roguelikes with the quick-reaction ethos that drives older platformer games. In practice, however, it's a nightmare.
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Unfortunately, City of the Damned isn't anywhere near as fun as the original product, and that's important to recognize. It tries so hard to get there, and maybe it even does in places-- the atmosphere, setting, and presentation are all fantastic-- but in the end, the mechanics are so byzantine and the gameplay choices are so confusing that it really doesn't make the end product particularly appetizing. Add to this an unfair learning curve that kind of shrugs and says "This is a difficult game and you're supposed to learn from your mistakes," and what you have is less a fun game, and more a byzantine slog for people who find Darkest Dungeon charming and too easy.
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Roger Ebert once said "Of each thing, ask, who is it for?" He was of course talking about the medium of film, but it's a useful metric for criticism in general. For instance, critiquing a racy visual novel on the quantity of fanservice is kind of useless, since that's exactly why people are playing it. Similarly, critiquing a fighting game for average fighting game things isn't really intuitive to the people who want to know if a fighting game's any good, regardless of whether or not the reviewer is actually any good at fighting games.
So with this in mind, I decided to figure out whether or not Koihime Enbu, the 2D fighting game based on the Koihime Musou visual novel series, is a good fighting game, regardless of whether or not I like fighting games all that much.
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It's difficult to tell, sometimes, whether a game's difficulty and controls are truly to blame, or whether it's just that I've got really stupid fingers. Brigador is one of these times.
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Having been an afficionado of adventure games over the years, I understand that they aren't without their difficulties. For every Monkey Island or Space Quest, there are four that take the route of Phantasmagoria* and about six different games featuring puzzles with solutions that read like poorly translated stereo instructions. While it's the easiest genre to design for (no combat algorithms or anything like that, clean narrative with a few branches) it's also one of the easiest to screw up. All it takes is one puzzle where processor speed determines difficulty, or pouring whiskey into the gas tank of a car to fuel up a spaceship, or an infuriating pixel hunt and instantly people will throw up their hands and uninstall in annoyance.
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Okay, so for the past few years, there's been a franchise known as Hyperdimension Neptunia. The general conceit is that the games industry is anthropomorphized as a land called Gamindustri, ruled over by warring goddesses who have "console wars" to determine supremacy and games companies are depicted as anthropomorphized anime characters.
Inexplicably, this has grown into a massive franchise of games, one of which is Hyperdevotion Noire, an alternate universe game where the anime goddess representing the Sony systems has taken over everything.
It's also not very good.
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Marble Mountain, the new game from LightningRock Studios, is relaxing. With its bouncy synth soundtrack, bright color palette, and levels with just the right amount of challenge, it isn't the frustrating grind of most other arcade style games, but offers more challenge and depth than the average casual game. It's the perfect chillout game, the kind of thing you can do when you just need a break from everything. While not without its flaws, it's just a low-key, fun game, and that's really all it needs to be.
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So first, a disclaimer. Because of the episodic nature of the game, and because this is The Last Door: Season 2, I strongly suggest you go to either the website or Kongregate and play The Last Door: Season 1. It's not the most necessary thing in the world, but it'll fill in the blanks as to Devitt, the weird eye motif, the Four Witnesses, and the secret society known as The Playwright. While the prologue chapter can answer one or two of the questions, a lot of them will be answered by just playing season 1.
But with that out of the way, if you're looking for a surreal horror game with a ton of atmosphere and a lo-fi aesthetic that manages to play perfectly with the player's imagination and delivers old-school adventure without all the pointless death, you need look no further
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Zombasite, currently in beta from Soldak Entertainment, is the most fun you will have not knowing what it is you're doing.
And before that sounds too much like faint praise, allow me to explain, it is a lot of fun.
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There's not much to say about The Culling, really. It's the kind of game that, if you like arena-based deathmatch shooters, you will probably like. If you don't like multiplayer arena-based deathmatch shooters, you will not like it. That's pretty much the delineation.
Granted, as far as arena-based deathmatch shooters go, I like it a lot more than most, but it's going to be pretty clear when I describe the mechanics whether or not this is your kind of thing.
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Blood Alloy: Reborn from Suppressive Fire Games is an arena-style platform shooter with a 16-bit aesthetic. It promises fast-paced gameplay, fully traversable terrain, swarms of enemies, and an awesome soundtrack. And, for what it's worth, it delivers on at least some of those things. But overall, the game is a weird, messy thing. It's an arena shooter that behaves like it's a platformer, a game that requires more precision than either the controls or the game type allows for. But even if this were all, its flaws far outweigh its strengths, and the game ultimately falters in spite of itself. But more, as always, below.
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Okay, so let me lay it on the line right here: If you have recently seen an action movie and said, "I would like a game that lets me do that," then SUPERHOT is the game for you. If you have ever seen a gunfight and wondered why first-person shooters don't give you the same ability to be a badass, this is the game for you. And, well, if you have recently seen Deadpool and want to turn literally everything within range into an instrument of murder, chances are SUPERHOT is your kind of game, too.
But allow me to explain.
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Overfall is a game with a lot of good things going for it. It has a distinct art style, an excellent modular story engine, some interesting tactical combat, and a very dynamic setting. It's a game that promises a staggering amount of depth, especially when one gets into it. It's a big, expansive game with a big expansive map and big expansive ideas.
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Why should you get this game? Because for the first time in it's long and checkered history, the cult horror game Pathologic is finally in a playable form. The graphics are better, the English translation actually matches up with what's being said in the game, and many of the truly game-breaking bugs are nowhere to be found. For the first time, players are finally able to play a rare gem in the form the authors intended it to be played.
Why should you play Pathologic at all? Well, that's a lot more complicated. The short answer is simple:
Everyone needs their mind messed with a little sometimes.
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There's a very easy test to see if you'd like Sublevel Zero, the new PC game from Sigtrap Games. I'll even link it here. Go on. I'll wait. All right, did you like what you saw there? Then congratulations, this is the game for you.
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I just trashed a city's infrastructure for the mob.
I was totally justified in doing so. My character was serving the Commercium, the entirely unscrupulous merchant's guild who runs the trading quarters in every major city. They plot and conspire all over the place to topple the ruling houses in the cities where they work, and they're pretty much the closest thing this world has to the mob. So now, because of me, they control the city's military as it descends into lawlessness, and they could probably take over whenever they like. The scary part is, that's probably not even the nastiest thing I'll do this playthrough.
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Maybe I'm just spoiled. Maybe that's it. I've been going over and over in my head exactly what it is about Cross of the Dutchman that makes it so unsatisfying to play. It's not a bad game. It's definitely not like Chariot Wars or The Weaponographist, where I was able to pinpoint (violently) what I disliked about it. I don't dislike anything about Cross of the Dutchman, it's a perfectly okay small game about a folk hero and his attempt to drive the Saxons from his homelands. Violently. With his fists. The art style is pretty terrific, the controls aren't too bad, and it's a nice little hack-and-slasher.
But the game just falls a little short. Maybe not in what it is...it's a hack-and-slash actioner and that's really all I expected from it after a few minutes' play. But definitely in what it could be. I just felt like after playing it, I hadn't experienced anything that I would really take time out of my day otherwise to do. And I suppose that's the real issue.
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I had a lot of fun with this one.
Fairy Fencer F is kind of a unique experience among JRPGs. It throws a tremendous amount of stuff at the wall, and most of it actually winds up sticking pretty well. It's a game where you can release an ancient evil god for special powers, accumulate sword spirits like crazy, have to pay an info broker repeatedly to progress in the story, and where the hero really doesn't want to do anything he doesn't have to.
And it is brilliant. More, as always, below.
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