Fliff

WHIMSY ALERT, WHIMSY ALERT, incredible platformer that easily captures the magic of early platformers and outshines nearly all of them save some of the best of the best.

I really truly wanted to love this game, it has a lot going for it from the art style, to the music, to some tight boss fights, but to me it's greatest sin is that it is completely uninterested in being a Metroidvania and desperate to be a Soulslike. For a game as long as this, I felt like I acquired more powerups, and vastly more INTERESTING ones, in MVs of 1/10th the length of HK. 85% of your exploration here just results in getting money, money you will likely have no use for outside of Grimm Troupe by the 1/3rd mark. Getting MONEY is the absolute bottom of the barrel reward any MV can resort to; it's uninteresting, it's not rewarding, and it makes you feel as though you could've skipped exploration altogether when combat would give you the same thing. This game also loves to waste time. Huge portions of map that you just slowly walk across, backtracking, LOOOOOOONG boss runbacks, and literally punishing you with a lost trinket slot if you so deign to want to SEE YOUR LOCATION ON A MAP. This is not a challenge, this is not interesting, this is punishing your player for wanting some basic QOL and to not keep a sextant on hand to chart every turn, drop, and jump they make. Obviously I'm being extremely harsh here with little praise, but frankly this game fails at nearly EVERY criteria for a great Metroidvania. For my final saving graces in this game, I will say the combat is fun and fluid, bosses are occasionally very cool and fun, and the world is unique. Aside from that this game shouldn't have pretended to be what it's not, and just gone 100% in on being a Soulslike.

A beautiful game, and ok in short bursts, but the combat is either too easy and repetitive on normal enemies, and just feels spammy on boss fights. Most enemies you'll just perma stun til they die, since you get locked into long combos, but those same long combos will just end up allowing bosses to chunk your health as their attacks have little windup and you have no chance to dodge without just already knowing what they'll do. It is visually great but nothing feels satisfying on a gameplay level.

Great old school survival horror. You can see a lot of the Silent Hill influence (and influence is putting it lightly) with a touch of Resident Evil in terms of item management. In some ways it does what Dead Space did for RE to Silent Hill; a much more cerebral, emotional survival horror game... in SPACE! The art style in game is great, I will say the anime waifu stuff is a bit odd and feels like it goes against the overall vibe of the game, but the game is a bit Evangelion so I suppose that's fitting. Overall the puzzles are very good, the gunplay is fun, and the narrative is very interesting, even if it wants to be more obscure than it really should be for most of the game. My only gripe is the item management sometimes feels like it's more of a chore than a boon for the gameplay, I personally would make some of the key items not take up slots, as later game you sometimes need 5 or more puzzle items, so you just have no room and need to backtrack a lot for items. I also would be remiss not to mention the sound design, incredible ambient sounds, musical numbers, and enemy noises. Truly high quality stuff, especially for an indie game. As for the story, it is more about emotion in my opinion than actual storytelling, very much vibes based, but the vibes are great and the worldbuilding is great too. After looking it up to confirm my interpretation was generally right, there's not a TON of logic to this one, but there's sort of the bones of a story underpinning it all in order to create an emotional and thematic backdrop for an interesting dystopian world and emotional narrative.

I really, really wanted to enjoy Cryptmaster, and I wont say it's outright bad, but it's one of those games that really doesn't do much to evolve it's basic core concept. On paper (heh) it's a really interesting idea focused on typing in spells/abilities unlocked through combat and solving riddles. The core issue is that once you get the basics down... that's kind of it. You'll be doing the same thing on repeat throughout. Solid narration, some funny jokes, and good writing are the star here, the gameplay is novel but half-baked at best. I feel there is a huge missed opportunity here to incorporate more interesting gameplay and puzzles. A lot of the riddles are really not very difficult to boot, relying on some riddles you've probably seen in a very similar, or outright identical, form in a middle school puzzle book. Given how unique the concept is, it basically plays like a mediocre dungeon crawler where you type a spell in instead of just selecting it. A cool idea for unlocking spells, a good narrative, and some good riddles (if a bit all over in quality) make for a game I would recommend at least trying, but not one I can say is absolutely worth your time.

Incredible love letter to OG Resident Evil and Silent Hill, with a fun, tongue in cheek tone. People complaining that aiming is difficult... yeah it's supposed to be. That's the entire challenge of the game outside of dodging enemies. Improve at the game maybe? This is not something devs need to "improve" and if aiming was super easy and you never take a hit, it wouldn't be survival horror.

Even ignoring the controversy this game is as mediocre as an open world can be

An incredible game and an incredible remaster. For $40, I honestly expected this to be more along the lines of a visual touch-up, but this is as close to a remake as a remaster can get. Nearly everything has been redone from lighting, to textures, and even the majority of models. Metroid Prime looks like a new game, and at it's core it is still the legendary experience it was when it originally released.

Terrible gameplay, terrible art, terrible game. Sometimes you give unknown games a shot but this may have soured me on doing that.

An extremely well made puzzle game with a pretty intense learning curve. New abilities and upgrades are not enough to brute force your way through this game; you will have to learn the strategies and combos to make it through even the first boss. The controls and art style go a long way to making a very busy game readable and easy to play, so you can focus on the challenge of the game itself. The Shovel Knight world fits very nicely into this style of game, and the strength of the characters built up in the original game go a long way in making a charming atmosphere here.

A great collection of old Capcom classics. For around $40 you get 32 games ranging from the very early days up to early 2000's titles like Progear. What you get are mostly great entries, but there is some unnecessary overlap with 3 versions of Street Fighter 2, and the variety of games basically boils down to platforming, shmups, fighting, and beat em ups with an emphasis on shmups and beat em ups. The game modes available are really fun, and give a score-chasing element like you'd get if you were actually at the arcade. This is aided by the presentation of each game on a cabinet of your choosing, with options to change filters, cabinet type, or regular screen presentation with border images. Some of the earlier games have poor scaling, not quite filling up as much screen real estate as they should, and I've heard some games have some moderate emulation issues, but as a relatively casual player I didn't notice any issues with the vast majority of the games. Overall, a great collection of games with a few issues, and at a pretty reasonable price even before any sales. Give it a shot.

3 of the best games of all time, not much more to say. The collection is bare bones, it includes the soundtracks for each game and some little tidbits of info, and the improvements are mainly resolution and some FPS stability, but the games are unmatched in the genre.

Fantastic polish on nearly everything here. I have almost no complaints about the execution of these games, they're extremely well done, and the intros are entertaining and helpful in learning the ins and outs. There are some duds here. War was included, which is a pointless time waster. I can understand playing this game when you have nothing else but a pack of cards, but there's no reason to play this on a Switch. Chess, Shogi, and Backgammon, on the other hand, are fantastic and are classics for a reason of course. Fantastic games, and they nailed the execution. Overall for what games were included this is a great time. They could have subbed in some better games than some of the luck based ones here, but a lot of that comes down to what games you prefer, and I'm sure implementing games like War didn't take up much dev time. The only major exclusion I think would have elevated the package is Go. Instead this game only has Gomoku, which is very fun in it's own right but lacks the same depth.

The negative reviews are just complaints from people who can't run the game properly. This is an absolute marvel of technology, and a base to make the most incredible representation of the world ever put to code. That said, you'll need a beefy rig to run this well. I have a Threadripper 1920X and a 1080ti and This game will chug at 4k high-end settings.

A very good game, and fills a rarely touched niche of Samurai games, especially for a western dev. Everything is fairly fluid and the visuals are absolutely gorgeous. The combat is flashy and punchy, but is a bit too simple for its own good, particularly for a game of this length. By the time you reach the second section of Tsushima island, you will be incredibly overpowered and capable of demolishing most encounters, and the game does fairly little to challenge you from there on out. As an open world game, Tsushima shoots for the Horizon Zero Dawn method of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It's a fairly generic open world structure; you take over enemy encampments, run random tasks for the inhabitants, and find points of interest to get cosmetics and various upgrades and items. Some aspects of the game are a bit buggy or unpolished. The camera can become a monster in close quarter encounters; you may end up looking at the middle of a clipped-through tree while Jin gets wailed on by people you can't see or dodge. This isn't usually a problem in open plains or more spacious villages, but fighting indoors or in the denser wooded sections can be genuinely impossible at times. Fighting works pretty well usually, but you will have to adapt to a weird and stiff pseudo-lock on system. Jin will face an enemy, and begin moving slowly, and it can be a bit sluggish to jerk him out of that to target another enemy that's further away. Archery feels great, but drawing and knocking is inconsistent. If you press R2 too quickly after L2, Jin will just sit there and wait for you to repress R2. On that note, R2 is used far too much for context sensitive actions, crawl into a stealth area? R2. Pick up items? R2. Talk to people? R2. Grapple onto something? R2. Pull up your quick swap menus? R2. This all works ok, but can get awkward when you're collecting items and instead your menu comes up and slows it all down. It feels poorly thought out. Overall these gameplay issues are fairly minor, but they will cause some annoyance pretty regularly. The side content is consistently passable, although the mythic quests are particularly good. The general structure of most content is talk to a peasant, go do thing for them, oh no! They lied about something! Go tell them they shouldn't do that and get your reward. It's not very interesting but the combat and exploration is fun enough to carry it. The mythic quests bring a little more intrigue, usually bringing in some mystic or legendary elements and have much better set pieces about on par with the main story. All in all, **** Punch set out to make a fun, polished, open world Kurosawa-esque samurai flick ****, and they succeeded. It won't blow your mind very often, but it will **** you in with its setting and visuals. With a little more care, the combat could've stayed fresh throughout, and some of the padding could've been cut (we don't need to follow a fox for 20 seconds 49 different times, please and thank you) to make the stronger content really shine. I'd probably give this an 8.3 or 8.4, maybe an update will smooth out my issues and push this closer to a 9.

Probably the best Animal Crossing has ever been, and to fans of the series it does enough to update the core gameplay loop to keep it fresh and interesting. The negative reviews all seem to be people who have never played Animal Crossing before. The one island setup is intentional and has been a thing forever.

This collection is worth the price of entry for Mega Man Zero 3 alone, and Zero 1, 2, and 4 aren't too far behind. I only have limited experience with ZX and ZX Advent, so I won't touch on those in this review, but that would not affect the greatness of the first series nor the score this package deserves. With the Zero series, Inticreates perfected the movement and combat that Mega Man X pioneered while putting a new emphasis on close quarters combat and an exponentially greater emphasis on speed. Mega Man Zero is a solid action platformer. A few odd choices, like the almost RPG-esque but wholly pointless star system, weigh it down a bit and keep it from being as good as the games that follow. Mega Man Z 2 adds some interesting new weapons, much better bosses, and overall provides a significantly stronger experience than the first entry, but it's clear there was greater potential here as well. Mega Man Z 3 leaped ahead of Z 2 in nearly every way. A great new weapon, the recoil rod, gives Zero insane close range, multi-directional damage, and rounds out Zero's arsenal into an extremely varied kit, and 2 weapon slots gives you some room to experiment. One of these weapon combos is bound to click with you, and when you find that one this becomes one of if not the greatest action platformers of all time, with 11 main bosses, consistently fantastic level design, and fast, fluid, and challenging gameplay throughout. Mega Man Zero 4 is a bit of a letdown as a finale, but mostly holds up as a solid entry somewhere between Z and Z 2 in quality. The enemy weapon stealing system is pretty fun and interesting at first, but gets stale fairly fast. Otherwise the bosses and stages are a bit too much of a rehash of the series successes, but not done as well as before. This game feels like the most by-the-numbers of the bunch, and where 2 and 3 made major improvements, 4 goes backwards while doing little of interest to make the game fresh. This series wasn't as groundbreaking or iconic as the original Mega Man or X series, but it is all about distilling the base given to it by the X series into it's purest, hardest, and fastest form, and it is successful across the board. The series doesn't fluctuate in quality as wildly as the X series either, which is nice. There aren't any bad games to dread getting to through all four games. I can't overstate this, Mega Man Zero 3 is a masterpiece and deserves every bit of recognition it can get, and I hope this package could mean a new entry in the series at some point.

I'm not sure I can compare Outer Wilds to anything else, it's just such an incredible and unique experience. It's the purest kind of exploration and discovery I've ever experienced in a game, and it drives you purely with the promise of gained knowledge and an understanding of everything going on around you.

This is the type of game that is much better going in blind. It's an incredible exploration game, layered with intricate puzzles, fun movement, beautiful art design, and at times genuinely unsettling settings. This game is the antithesis of handholding, you essentially go into this solar system blind, and as you discover things you gain new ways of exploring the world. In that way, it's like a metroidvania where progression isn't gated by an item, but by the player's knowledge. Everything in this game just meshes togetger into such a magical experience.

I'm not really sure how this game came to be praised so highly. It's a severe case of story over gameplay. The combat is repetitive and incredibly simple, and only barely evolves as you progress through the game. The only two things I can recommend this game for are the visuals and the story, which are both very well done for the most part. Geralt can get a bit one-note at times with his whole gruff demeanor, but there is some good characterization throughout. The visuals are stellar, but the controls are abysmal and the animation during gameplay is janky at best. So again, the story and maybe the visuals are why you should play this game. Beyond that there is very little depth to gameplay, the loot system is worthless, and the world is basically lifeless if you stare at it for more than 10 seconds and realize 99% of the people you come across are essentially just window dressing. TES has many, many faults, but I think Witcher shows me why TES is so well done. The world feels alive in TES, each NPC has a path and purpose, and the world genuinely feels alive, not just in cutscenes but everywhere the player goes. The world of Witcher 3 feels lifeless in comparison, it's all just there for you and the handful of NPCs who can actually give you a quest or play Gwent with you.

Fantastic Zelda game, and just made better here with some tweaks and enhancements. Anyone saying this is a "6 hour" game is either lying or has beaten this game multiple times before. The only real issue I've run into is framerate dropping when entering new zones, otherwise this is basically Link's Awakening perfected.

I wouldn't say I'm necessarily a huge fan of character action games, but I've played a lot of the big name one's; Devil May Cry, some God of War, maybe the Arkham series kinda fits in, but Bayonetta 1 and 2 are just in a league of their own. The polish, the combos, the game elements like Witch Time just elevate this game to a different plane of existence. Few games capture that intense speed while also feeling completely skill based and rewarding the player for getting in the zone. Bayonetta 1 is great and I love the story but 2 really does up the ante in almost every single way. 2 is more fluid, more colorful, more open, better balanced, and just all around more spectacular. Can't recommend these games enough if you like action games at all.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Nintendo, as always, pushes the envelope and made something truly unique, innovative, and fresh. Lots and lots of fake 0/10 user reviews, always a good sign that the game is well worth it.

There are a lot of troll reviews, let that be a testament to how incredible this game is. Of the indie darlings it is easily the most unique in story and character.

Yes it's indie, yes the grains ****, and yes it's a great game. It seems most people are bashing it solely on its graphics and indieness, but that's shallow. This is a very good game with a little bit of stealth, action, and tactics.

This is a great addition to Tri. If you didn't play Tri this will be amazing,if you did this is great, but be ready to plow through the first few monsters you face. I did because they give you 50 bonus defense (which is dumb in my opinion) and I am also more skilled at MH from Tri. If you loved Tri get this, of you haven't played Tri or any MH for that matter, GET THIS. Don't listen to the 0 written review, he just hates Nintendo because they have Monster Hunter.

Best in the series in my opinion. Sure it's more of the same, but that just means more amazing. Greatest game in the greatest Megaman series. If you haven't played this, get the collection on DS, you won't be disappointed.

This is without a doubt the best game on the App Store. It is one of the few, if not he only, game that is not hindered but bolstered by touch controls. It also looks simple, yet beautiful in a very Mirror's Edge sort of aesthetic. Get it then get true second one when it comes out.

This game takes turn based tactics and perfects them. As a fan of Fire Emblem, I can honestly say this game ranks on par with them, or even surpasses them. If you're a fan of tactics, you don't have a lot of recent of options with recent games, but this is a sure buy.

This is the best 2D stealth game I've ever played, and is only beat by the Arkham games for general stealth. Being reckless will get you killed as it should in any stealth game, but even an action approach, if done correctly, can take down a room full of guards. This opens up various options for combat, or even pure, violence-free stealth.

This game sets out to do something and does it perfectly. It is risky to cut out what most would consider the game and use only boss fights, but this tactic packs all of the adrenaline, and artistry, into one tight bundle. This is nothing short of perfect, yet it may not have everything some may want in a game.

Minecraft, with a few temporary downgrades, but with split screen. If the developers follow through and update this game quickly, I'm sure it will be the best arcade game on xbla.