Minishoot’ Adventures may just be a Zelda game with twin-stick combat, but that description sells it short. It’s obvious SoulGame Studio has put an enormous amount of care and consideration into every detail, from upgrade frequency and enemy placement to boss behavior and world design. It takes all the right lessons from Nintendo’s beloved franchise and puts them to good use in a new package. Sure, the enemies might be forgettable visually and some of the upgrade paths might be a little slow, but this is a minimalist action-adventure game very much by design. It’s how that unique mix of formulas is combined that keeps Minishoot’ Adventures fun all the way until the credits roll and beyond.
I loved every step of my obsessive, Monstie-collecting journey in Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection. It smooths over the mild frustrations and complaints I had with its already great predecessors, leaving only a finely-tuned loop of hunting, hatching, restoring, and upgrading that perfectly feeds into itself every step of the way. The joy of finding a new cool monster, figuring out how to build its stats and skills to best fit it into my team, and finally riding off into the sunset with it is unmatched. Twisted Reflection shines as another excellent spin off of one of my favorite series, but it also just stands as a fantastic monster-collecting RPG all on its own.
I played several different classes to level 80 in the pre-patch event, which included most of the class changes for Midnight, focusing on my trusty Marksmanship Hunter main and the new Devourer Demon Hunter that unlocks with the expansion. I'm not ready to pass judgement on any spec until I see how they play at max level in difficult content. But as far as Marksmanship goes, I mostly agree with the changes so far thematically. Aimed Shot should be a big nuke that takes a long time to cast. But with the removal of talents like Streamline, the damage needs to feel a lot chunkier than it currently does to earn that fantasy. Our final apex talent, which will give it a 100% critical chance at level 90, could be the answer. We'll see. [Review in Progress]
Scott Pilgrim EX is the latest in a long line of retro revivals from Tribute Games, and like all of its previous works, the developer has done an admirable job of producing a beat ‘em up that builds on its predecessor while adding much appreciated gameplay depth and plenty of replayability. I love EX’s RPG systems (simple as they are), its world, and how there is always another interesting character to try when I get bored. But it’s also a game that grapples with the passage of time, even if it perhaps doesn’t mean to. The modern beat ‘em up exists because of the games that came before, but they were often far more limited. With the passage of time, we’ve returned to those ideas and refined them. Like Scott Pilgrim itself, those games have gone from something that was new to something that is now referenced. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but a bittersweet one, and Scott Pilgrim EX understands that. You can go back in time, but you can’t go back to the way things were. All that’s left is to appreciate where you’ve been and enjoy what’s here now. And you know what? What’s here is pretty fun.
Pokémon Pokopia is a real treat: an enjoyable building and town simulator that capitalizes on the charming personalities of its monsters in a way that appeals to both the creative and collector alike. It's packed with fun things to do and worthy rewards for doing them, and strikes a healthy balance between freedom and suggestion in its building mechanics (despite a few precision nitpicks). All of this is housed in an adorable adventure through an interesting and surprisingly deep setting that presses all the nostalgia buttons for longtime fans. And it all shines especially bright in its lovable protagonist's blobby pink hands.
Under Night In-Birth 2 is simply one of the most well rounded modern fighting games out there, with a large roster of excellent characters, fantastic learning tools, great netcode, and incredibly well thought out mechanics that equally reward aggressive offense and precise defense.
Like the result of an experiment conducted in an underground Umbrella Corporation lab, Resident Evil Requiem successfully splices two separate strains of survival horror together into the one highly infectious new mutation. It signals the return of a series legend and the arrival of a likeable new lead, amps up the gore to a new stomach-turning standard, and unleashes a scarier breed of zombie alongside some truly beastly boss fights. The lack of any meaningful side content like The Mercenaries mode is a touch disappointing, and I do wonder if a slightly more consistent balance could have been struck with the ebb and flow from jaw-clenching moments of tension to all-out assault, rather than frontloading the story with frights before giving way to a more bullet-riddled back half. Even so, from my first trembling steps into its shadows all the way to the tremendous, titan-sized takedown at its climax, Resident Evil Requiem kept me completely absorbed and consistently entertained whether it was all hair-raising or all guns blazing.
