GreenMachineG

This Legend of Zelda/Rogue Legacy mash-up game is extremely unique and fun, and the addition of rhythm makes for an even more unique experience, but the gameplay just feels lacking overall. -- C+

Not A Hero is a super fun, 2D, run 'n' gun game that feels like Contra with stealth aspects mixed in. Comedic aspects that resemble something from Adult Swim takes this game over the top! 8.0/10

A creative edition to the drop-down puzzler genre, but unnecessary X-rated vulgarity brings the experience down. A great puzzle game brought down by a sub-par dating sim. 6.5/10

This War of Mine: The Little Ones is an extremely difficult survival game. Though the game adds more realism that a lot of survival games avoid, the lack of an actual story to back up the realism, and the almost unfair gameplay makes this title a little too cumbersome. 7.0/10

Another LEGO game with everything you love! New open world is huge and robust and a lot of fun to play around in, but the wide array of games this title covers hurts the LEGO charm a little too much, as you lose on some jokes if you haven't seen every Marvel movie right before you play as it doesn't just cover the Avengers movies. Not enough added to improve on the LEGO series. 7.5/10

Fun, arcade-y, twin stick shooter with a lot of positives! Lack of depth in gameplay and limited modes makes the game no more than a good time killing game, however. 6.5/10

Game impresses with how it looks, and the super powers are masterfully done. Sadly, an array of bugs, poor story, and stupid enemy AI brings this game down. 6.0/10

Amazing game! Puzzles galore, if you aren't patient or determined I would not advise playing, but this game is so deep and complex that you can't stop playing. Beyond a masterpiece! So many secrets! 10/10

In Kingdom you embark on a quest to start a new kingdom in a far off land, but beware the creatures that lurk in the forest. Are you prepared for the Blood Moon? Kingdom is a 2D side-scrolling, tower-defense-esque strategy game. The game is simplistic, yet brutal and demanding, and I loved it. In the game you gather coins through hunting or farming to be able to pay for increases in population, or defenses. The point of the game is to outlast the nightly onslaught of demons from magic portals in the forest edges. It isn't a very deep strategy game, but the game still manages to be very brutal and exhaustive in what it needs, and if things are completed in a timely fashion, then you have no chance of survival. The one downside on that is that you could argue a lack of replay-ability as certain things must be done to survive, and if they aren't done exactly right you won't win. Kingdom features an 8-bit graphical style, with nice overlays and a dark color pallet. The soundtrack is ominous and really sets the mood for what comes out to play every night. My knock on the game is it only has a single save file, and the game re-does the intro sequence each time you start over. You do have the option to skip through it, but it seems that could have been avoided entirely with multiple save files, and a game that remembers if you've done the tutorial. Maybe even a check box at the beginning of the game to let you choose to do the tutorial? I feel like I am nitpicking, but it did bother me at every restart. The game really hit home with me, and is one of those strategy games that I lose myself in for hours and hours. I would definitely recommend the game to just about anyone. Each night is exciting and anxiety-filled, and the daytime is such a rush of getting as much done as possible and choosing what is most important. Oh **** many days until the Blood Moon? It's tonight? Uh oh. 8.5/10

In Saturday Morning RPG you enter a dream world where you use a magical notebook given to you by "The Wizard" to do battle against classic D&D/G.I. Joe type characters and to complete quests. Saturday Morning RPG is an episodic, strategic, turn-based RPG. This game is a huge button masher, in nearly every possible scenario. Attacks are based on either button mashing speed or accuracy, your bonus abilities are based on how quickly you can "scratch" the stickers on your notebook, etc. If you aren't a fan of button mash gameplay then skip this one, as it's literally all you do over and over again. You, and the enemies, are 8-bit, but in a 3D world. It's a cool idea, but the 3D world is just a top-down, lower quality/resolution landscape. The game doesn't blow you away graphically, but is still unique. Rad soundtrack throughout, however, and reminds me a lot of the music that played on the old 80's/90's cartoons. Overall the game is alright, and is fun at times, but it's reliance on button mashing gets old, and that hurt the game a lot. 6.5/10

Do you want to play a game like Dark Souls where it is nearly impossible to beat, or even progress from location to location, and have it be done with a very slow-moving character, with less quality overall? Play Lords of the Fallen. 5.0/10

Oxenfree is one of those games that takes everything I want in a video game and rolls it into a perfect experience. This is one of the greatest experiences I have ever had in a video game, and I am so happy I was able to play it. Oxenfree is the story of Alex, a young girl with a darker past, who goes to Edwards Island to celebrate her junior year of high school with a group of friends. Events occur and the adventure that follows is something like I have never been able to take part in. No wonder the creators of The Walking Dead already have the film rights to this game locked up as of a few days ago! A lot of people are calling it a mix of the TV shows Freaks and Geeks and Lost, and I would agree with that very much so, with maybe a little bit of the movies Groundhog Day and Interstellar thrown in! So amazing! The art style is beautiful, and very pleasing to the eye. It almost looks like clay-mation, but everything is just drawn so smoothly. Love the look of the game, and the use of color and shadow is really emphasized throughout; very well done! The main feature of the game is so cool and unique. You use your radio to do various things, and I love how the tuning slide looks against the background. It doesn't look intrusive or out of place at all! Very unique puzzle cracker, love it! The dialogue is to die for. It definitely took me back to high school banter, and had me cracking up over and over again. The game is extremely well written, with perfect pacing, dialogue, and one of the best video game stories of all time! My only issue is I encountered a couple of bugs that were a real bummer. Three times while playing I had a bug stop progression of the game, and I would have to go back to the main menu and start the segment I was in the middle of over again. I did, however, notice that this usually only occurred when I was rushing things along and didn't let the other characters get to where they needed to be before I started clicking away. So I only slightly blame the designers for that, and even with the bugs the game was totally worth going through the restarts for. This is a game people have to play, I cannot urge that enough. 9.5/10

Shovel Knight is a very solid platformer. Good fun, and replay-ability. The game did fail to keep me interested however. The gameplay mechanics felt a little wonky at times, and didn't feel very good to me. I also found myself dying way too often due to missing a jump and not timing the enemies correctly. A good game for sure, and I would recommend it, but keep your expectations tempered. The old-school game lover of Metroid, Mega Man or the like should definitely feel some nostalgia with this game, but if you didn't play those or weren't fans of them I would move past this title. 7.5/10

I was not a fan of Resogun. I found the gameplay too repetitive, which killed it for me. The game has a great art style, and the fast-paced gameplay feels nice, but it only kept my attention for a very short while, and after that I felt myself playing the game like a zombie hoping something new would happen. The game is very arcade-y. The game is definitely for some people, just not me. 6.0/10

Attractio is cool, and is the first 1st person puzzle game I have played since probably Portal 2. Luckily, the game borrows a lot from Portal, with a little bit of The Running Man mixed in to make a really cool back story. In the game, characters are competing to get though the puzzles the fastest in order to win prizes they have selected. Each character has a unique back story and reason they want/need to win, and that adds to the fuel they have to compete. Instead of Portal guns the game utilizes gravity to make it's puzzles, which is quite an interesting concept, and works! The game looks nice aesthetically with a definite Sci-Fi/Spaceship theme as you are on a spaceship above Mars. Think of it kind of as a dark/evil version of the Portal courses. One negative note is the controls are very touchy, and sometimes it is a pain to make a jump, or get box placement just right. Also, the puzzles aren't always all that intuitive, meaning in a lot of puzzle game scenarios you can really look at everything and game plan for what you need to do to complete it, but this game at times isn't like that and really just needs repeated trial and error. The mechanics aren't always taught well, so you just have to start doing things to figure it out. A good experience overall, and for anyone who loves Portal this will scratch the urge for sure, but definitely don't go into this thinking the two are on par, as you do have to force yourself through some of Attractio. 7.0/10

5 Star Wrestling: Regenesis is not a game I could recommend anyone to play. It isn't close to on par to any wrestling games I have played in the past. To start the background music in the menus is atrocious. For example, one of the songs is just a basic rock beat with the singers just repeatedly yelling "America!" over and over again, but then when in the actual match there is no music, or noise at all. Silence. The controls are so bad it's crazy. The game doesn't feel good, and the controls don't make any sense. To top it all off the gameplay isn't fun, and is quite boring actually. With no sort of story/campaign mode to help it out and just plain matches the game really doesn't have much for redeeming qualities. There isn't even a tournament mode where you can play several matches one after another. I can't recommend the game to anyone, sadly, unless maybe you are a huge fan of the characters in it. 3.0/10

A Boy and His Blob has a lot going for it, but sadly felt too wonky and slow-paced to make it into something spectacular. The game features a sort of Winnie The Pooh-esque art style with a rustic aesthetic. The controls don't feel good, and you move quite slow. I found myself not knowing where to go a lot and with the movement speed and lack of intuitive controls the game was hurt a lot. A very unique idea, and I loved having my little Blob friend follow me around, and the usage of beans to transform him is super cool. Besides the cool bean mechanic this game really does have slow-paced gameplay with semi-unresponsive controls and I found myself getting hit by enemies while standing on platforms above them somehow, which felt quite unfair as the level starts all over at death, adding to the painful slow pace. I found this title uninspiring in a market filled with amazing platforming experiences. I can see why people like it as it has a lot of charm, but the gameplay downsides hurt the title. 6.8/10

Klaus is the story of an ordinary office worker who wakes up in a strange place with no idea who or where he is, with nothing but the name "KLAUS" tattooed on his arm. Klaus is an exciting platformer from the guys at La Cosa Entertainment, and they've done well. The art style reminds me a lot of a Don't Starve-esque way of drawing, and the mechanical aesthetic mixed in makes for very pleasing gaming. The jumping is quite hard to figure out at first and judging distances takes a bit to get used to for sure. It does get better the more you play, but feels off at first. Don't let this bother you though as the game is worth continuing through. I did find, however, that the use of the touch pad felt like it hampered the experience more than added to it. You use the touch pad to take control of different platforms to help navigate you through the courses, but the touch pad in general isn't very intuitive. I applaud La Cosa for using what they had available, but the touch pad is just lacking. This game has such a cool story, filled with twists around every corner. You get a pretty in depth look at the psyche and life of the main character, and the game just makes you want to keep going. The dialogue isn't actually spoken, but plastered onto the environment as you traverse the course. Very cool and unique! There are some cool secrets to find, so make sure to check all directions you can take on every level! The game definitely borrows a lot from Super Meat Boy, but at the same time adds so much more that it made it it's own. Overall the game is extremely well made, and puts you through some things I have never seen in platforming. The general platforming rules are set by the kings of platforming, but Klaus breaks all the rules and sends you through one of the best platforming experiences I have ever had in gaming! Extremely well done! 8.8/10

Croixleur Sigma is just bad, and is not recommended for anyone to play. Navigating the start screen and menus was a pain at first because the button lay-out is really odd. You use the circle button like you normally would the cross button and vice versa. Also, I hit a bug where they switched for a minute, no idea why. The game is a smash-em up brawler, and the basic point is to navigate level by level up the tower fighting increasingly difficult enemies. The enemy AI is off, and they mostly just wander around and don't tend to all come at you at once for some reason. It also gets extremely difficult really quick, where you aren't even allowed to hit a button at times before you die. The game has a poor story and also has really drawn out dialogue, that really wastes your time, unless you are a fan of tons of sexual references out of nowhere. There were also a few issues in phrasing in the English translation, and there were even some misspellings. Save your time and money. 4.8/10

**** Vanguards is a fairly basic couch co-op battle arena game, much like Towerfall Ascension or Duck Game, but sadly it is no where near as good as those two titles. The game features the 8-bit art style more similar to Towerfall's style, but is based in space. Unlockable modes and difficulty abilities are available, making for a little bit more of a diverse time, but the combat is so bland, and the character moves quite slow, and unresponsively, that the game is just not good at what it is trying to do. Not recommended. 5.0/10

Baseball Riot is a physics-based puzzle game in which you play as a disgruntled baseball star who is taking revenge on fans and players by hitting them with baseballs from stage to stage. The game is the same idea as the iOS game Stupid Zombies that came out back in 2011, where you have to aim and have your ball bounce off walls and obstacles to hit all the enemy units. Baseball Riot is a fairly simple and basic game, and a good time-waster type game, just like most phone games are. I like this game, but not so much on consoles. Grab this game for free on iOS, and use your $5 to buy something else. Overall this game is good, but the console port isn't the place I would play this, and the fact it really is just a copy **** with more diverse enemies and weapon types brings this game down a bit. 6.0/10

Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter is an emulated game from the PS2 onto the PS4. The emulation quality is fairly good, and you can definitely tell there were some touch-ups done. The game features fun space combat, and on the PS2 the game would have been so far ahead when it comes to aerial combat games, but the game doesn't really hold up well with a kind of limited control system of the ship you pilot. I also noticed the hit boxes on enemies were huge, and if you just get the ship aimed anywhere in the vicinity and shoot 3-4 quick shots you got the hit. Overall the game is okay, and anyone who loves Star Wars or aerial combat games will have a good time, but I wouldn't expect this to blow you out of the park. 6.8/10

Blood Bowl II is a great mix of Football/Rugby and XCOM, and is very enjoyable. The game has a cool intro with some really quirky characters and awesome dialogue! The game overall is a unique concept, with fun overall gameplay. There are a ton of different strategies you can use during play, but my major issue with the game is that I wish the dice rolls had less to do with what happened on the field, and I also wish there were more diverse abilities. 7.8/10

Act It Out! A Game of Charades is the best charades aid I have ever played, and is perfect for any party, or group of friends wanting to play a fun game around the couch! The game features two initial game types: Classic and Variety. Basically Classic is exactly what you would think it is, the upside being that you get to choose a category before acting out your word/phrase, and Variety actual switches from not only "Acting" but also allows you to potentially sing, describe, or draw instead of acting, but Variety doesn't allow a choice on category, it is just completely random. From there you choose the number of players and how you want to play, between All Vs. All, Cooperative (where you all work together towards a high score), or Teamplay. Then you choose from 3 lengths of games, ranging from 15 minutes to one hour plus, and the game begins! I love the amount of choices in gameplay you have and the replay-ability here is almost endless with deep categories and choices as well! You have a certain amount of time to guess, and the score given depends on how quickly you get the answer right. The categories to play from are as follows: Film, TV, Books, Theatre, Music, Phrases & Proverbs, Video Games, and a Random category. Great categories, with almost no overlap after the amount of time I played, but the categories also limit the audience who should play, as they are all almost pop culture references, and are very much so focused on newer pop culture for the most part. I am not sure how well it would go playing this with your family for example, but a group of 16-30-year-olds would have an amazing time guaranteed. Overall I loved this game and would definitely recommend it to anyone who just didn't want to have cards, or didn't feel like coming up with stuff on your own, or to any group of younger people hanging out at a party or get-together. 8.5/10

World of Tanks offers up great tank combat, and a good overall time. The game is Free to Play with in-game purchases, which usually means they are trying to money-grab you, but the upgrades can be bought with in-game currency. The game has good graphics, with size-able battlefields that offer tons of obstacles and cover for you to sneak your tank through, including trees, rocks, houses, etc. The physics are great as well as you crash realistically into objects and other tanks and even run over fences and trees. The obstacles paired with the large amount of tanks that can be on the battlefield at once allows for quite a bit of strategy, and the big battles are so cool. There is a great diversity in tank upgrades, and lots of different types of tanks. Also, if you want a little something to do besides the normal game they do have a neat little mini game that is basically the same thing as the normal game, but it is top-down and is a survival mode where you are attempting to reach a high score. A good, solid experience. 7.5/10

The Deadly Tower of Monsters is a hack-and-slash puzzle game with the most unique setting I have ever had in a video game. The game takes place inside a DVD-release of a 1950's sci-fi/monster movie in which the original director of the film is recording a narration for the commentary on the DVD. They capture the general look of 50's films stereotypes perfectly, with scratchy film, stop-motion monsters, and the perfect 50's style "actors". The dialogue is extremely clever, and the director is so funny, and had me cracking up over and over again. They capture nearly every trope of 50's sci-fi: you fight dinosaurs, ape-men, and have a robot sidekick! The point of the game is to traverse the tower (Deadly Tower of Monsters) all the way to the top to defeat the "Emporer". You fight through tons of monsters and solve puzzles along the way. I really enjoyed this game, and would recommend it to any film-loving gamers, or people who just really enjoy comedy in video games. 8.0/10

Tachyon Project is a top-down, twin-stick shooter where you control a little spaceship "virus" if you will and defeat enemies to hack into places. The game has a bright, neon art style that is pleasing to the eye. Controls are intuitive, and feel really good. The tutorial explains everything very well so that's a plus. The interesting thing about this game is the health system is completely time-based, as in killing enemies and collecting the orbs they drop increases your time limit to beat each level, and getting hit by enemies decreases your time limit. The game also throws in some more interesting concepts with "stealth severs" where the enemies can only see you when you make noises (shooting, bombs, etc.). This allows for a hint of strategy/stealth to be thrown in to the usual non-stop hold down the trigger approach of a lot of twin-stick shooters like this. The story is poor, and I almost feel the game would be better without it. The story is of two hackers who create a program that in essence is you. You are this ultimate hacking machine they use to get dirt on people, and hack companies, etc, but then they get raided by an unknown group and they release you into the internet. From there your dialogue comes across as somewhat childish, not knowing what do in the world wide web, but also the dialogue has some poor attempts at humor that turned me off to the story/dialogue quite a bit. I feel like the story could've been much simpler and it would have made it cooler, rather than looking for your missing "parents". Good arcade-y gameplay, and a fun twin-stick shooter, but a poor story and dialogue brings the game down, rather than distinguishing itself from a genre with a lot of good examples. 6.5/10

Journey as a green LED mysteriously trapped inside a dying boombox. Bring electronica, dub and disco music back to life! Inside My Radio is a rhythm-platformer, meaning all actions besides movement must be performed with the beat of the music. Picture it being kind of like Sound Shapes on crack. It features a very cool neon art style with changing environments based on the music of the character you are using. The game features very cool beat puzzles throughout, with every type of puzzle you could imagine. From a Tetris-Guitar Hero puzzle, to boss battle dance-offs, to timing-rhythm fights, you won't be bored with the diverse types of rhythm puzzles in this game! There are also some cool easter eggs/references throughout so make sure to explore a little while moving through the levels. The story is quite interesting as well, and if you really think about it it is quite clever, with spiders taking over and killing the boombox, just as would happen if you let your actual boombox sit around without use for years. I have three knocks on the game, however. Sometimes the music is to faint to hold onto the actual beat of the music causing some frustration in timing your jumps and dashes, but luckily it does have a metronome that can be put up around your character for those situations. Also, the final boss fight gets a little unfair, but it is doable. Lastly, the length is really short. It only plays about 2 hours or so all the way through, but sometimes it is nice to be able to pump right through a game, so that could be a positive or negative. Overall I really enjoyed Inside My Radio and would recommend it to everyone who like platformers or rhythm games. Great mesh of the two genres. 8.0/10

G Prime Into The Rain is a confusing puzzle game, that shouldn't be played. I loaded up the game and for 15+ minutes had zero direction as to what was going on. I moved from menu to menu with no idea what to do or what the game even was. I finally stumbled upon a page named manuals and directions, only to have it be for the PC version, even though I was playing on Xbox One. Finally, I clicked on the right thing and discovered the game was a puzzle game where the point was to shoot a rocket through checkpoints while clicking through each checkpoint, before moving onto the next one. In between each level you are given a seemingly random amount of money for completing the level, but it gets worse sadly. The game gets so frustrating so quickly, and the ability to pass some of the levels is nearly impossible as they start to take away basic aides that were nearly required to hit some of the targets. I spent an hour alone on one level in the TUTORIAL and couldn't beat it for the longest time, so when they took your sights away the game got impossible. Not recommended. 4.0/10

The Banner Saga has an amazing art style that reminded me of a classic disney-esque or 80's cartoon type style. The game is drawn beautifully. Dialogue is well done, and having choices is always a plus. XCOM-style strategy/tile turn-based combat is one of my favorite types of combat so that being in this game was a blast. The only knock on the combat is it didn't feature much in the way of obstacles like XCOM, it was always just an open square where you had to just place your guys in the right places and hope you didn't get surrounded. This also made retreat almost useless, so really all you could do is line them up and smash each other until you won or lost. Great story though, and a truly solid game overall. I would recommend The Banner Saga to anyone interested in Norse mythology/history, or to anyone who is a fan of turn-based RPGs or strategy type games. 7.8/10

Dogchild offers up a lot of great ideas, but sadly it has a lot of bumps along the way. The game is about a boy named Tarpak and his dog Tarao as they "fight crime" together and try to save animals. The game does feature a cool puzzle system where you have to switch between Tarpak and Tarao to get through certain areas, and the targeted audience being for young children so they learn to be nice to animals is a great premise for a game, but the mechanics and controls fail over and over again. The combat is pretty bad. I got surrounded and shot with a taser several times by the guards, and the time it takes to knock out and tie up a single guard always seemed like just enough time for every other guard to get to you. The controls are not intuitive, and don't work very well. A very wonky game. It is also quite short, but I was ready for it to be over, sadly. A good try, and good ideas, but unless you are setting this up for someone young it isn't something I would recommend. 5.2/10

Papers, Please brings a lot to the table, and I enjoyed everything it brought! The idea of the game is fairly simple; identify discrepancies in people's passports and papers as they try to enter your country, but things get interesting when events occur that switch you from a complete robot mentality of finding the issues and denying people, to the moral conundrums of working for a totalitarian government, and whether yourself, and family are worth putting on the line for the greater good. Great gameplay mechanics, with good difficulty progression. The game always explains exactly how to identify the next set of discrepancies, and gives you all the time in the world at the beginning of each day to make a game plan. Amazing replay-ability. With 20 different endings Papers, Please offers up the ultimate game of choice. Can they enter Arstotzka? 8.5/10

Tharsis is brutal. There really isn't a better way to put it. It takes the intense brutally challenging game type, and makes it into a digital board game experience that is to die for. This game, though hard, does it right, because unlike games like Bloodborne or Demon Souls, Tharsis' matches are so quick that you can run through a dozen matches easily in a half hour or less. (Depending on how often you die, which is a lot) When you start playing Tharsis you really have to prepare yourself for 10 rounds of space hell to try to get your failing ship to Mars. Tharsis goes to the next level when it bases itself around taking that space hell simulation and wrapping it up in a blanket with cannibalism and dice throwing. What isn't there to like? The game forces you to be calculating as you must decide whether to prioritize food, or repairs, or crew members lives in general. You really have to sit and mull over each move to get the most out of each character. My only negative to the game is that it is almost completely luck-based. Some people have figured it out completely and can run through without much issue usually, but I couldn't figure out the intricacies that thoroughly, so my matches just came down to dice throws being good or bad. Luckily, even when you fail over and over you can unlock some characters with better abilities to help you actually make it to Mars. The game seems like it would be too weird on the PS4, but it works somehow, and I am loving it! 8.0/10

Gone Home is a must-play game. Period. Do yourself a favor and play it right now. Do not look anything up for the game, just go for it. The game keeps you guessing around every corner and turn, and the brilliance in story-telling here is something you won't want to miss. Steve Gaynor and team brought a master-piece to the gaming world a few years ago on PC, and bringing Gone Home to consoles for more to play makes me so happy. PLAY IT! 9.0/10

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India definitely fails to transpose the AC coating to a platform-style game. The combat is horrific, and the stealth, though challenging and mostly intuitive gets so unfair at times that it is hard to call it a good stealth game even, with cheap shot after cheap shot. The locale of India is pretty much lost. You would think with Assassin's Creed finally getting to a more exotic location that they would use it to their advantage, but bad dialogue, and zero story makes for a waste of location beyond the random tigers and Indian-looking buildings. Left me wanting way more. Very disappointed in this title. 5.0/10

Rebel Galaxy shows you a lot of what you want in an open world space RPG/Adventure, but doesn't quite fulfill everything I would have hoped. It doesn't allow for any sort of vertical navigation of your ship, making the combat feel much more like traditional naval combat in an ocean, but the combat is still good. I am a little surprised you can do as well in a fight as you do from the get-go when you supposedly are getting a semi-poor quality ship, but can be fine in almost every fight. I wish it had forced you into more smuggler/run-away tactics than the straight full-frontal combat I used, but you could always just do that anyways. The errand-palooza the game is mission-wise can get a bit dull, but thankfully you can take the missions/combat in different ways so you can make the endless "run here, now run here" grind more interesting. I enjoy the dialogue system, I just wish what I said actually meant something, where what you actually have here is the choice between either being a jerk or just getting to the point and starting the mission. The graphics are phenomenal, and I honestly had the most fun running around getting into space fights and discovering locations in the galaxy, rather than going through the mission grind. A decent space game, that fell short for me, but has a lot of good qualities. I do find myself jumping on periodically if I want to just mess around and blow stuff up, much like I do in GTA, but other than that I would mostly say you can pass on this one. 6.9/10

That Dragon, Cancer is an emotional voyage through the eyes of game creator Ryan Green and his wife as they slowly lose their young son to cancer. The journey is such a soul-crushing and heartfelt sentiment, and evokes all sorts of emotion into the player. The game is well written, well-paced, and overall really well done. My biggest issue with the game, and I really tried to get past it, were the bugs and glitches. Several times I found myself losing sound, or having to re-start because the game would freeze up. I even hit a glitch where the beginning of the 3rd scene wouldn't continue because a visual cue wouldn't trigger, and no matter what I did I couldn't get the game to continue. Luckily, you can skip from scene to scene and I was able to continue past the 3rd scene altogether. Other than that the game features a neat polygonal art style, and cool point of view work, where you are constantly switching from who or what you are seeing the story unfold. The game uses point and click to do everything, include walk around (no WASD used), which was okay. If you get past the technical issues, and just take the emotion beat for beat as you go along, this story will touch you, and for anyone out there that has lost someone to cancer this game will take you right back to that time. The story and dialogue are out of this world, and some of the ideas are so out of the box that you have to give it a good thumbs up in those departments. I would definitely recommend everyone give this a play-through, and with proceeds going to charity there is no good reason not to try it. Well done Nominous Games! 7.2/10

My initial thoughts on Amplitude are that it is just straight rad. Totally totally rad! There is no need for any guitar controller, or outrageous price to get your rhythm game fix, as I think that Amplitude owns the single player rhythm genre! This game is much better than it's rhythm rival Guitar Hero Live for single player gameplay. The game has a vague sci-fi back story happening that never really gets explained, but it is enough to make you understand what exactly you are doing with your little ship, and is enough to make you care for what is actually going on here. Amplitude features intuitive controls with exciting electronica tracks that lead you pulse by pulse through the levels. If you aren't a fan of electronica, however, I might warn you as this game is nothing but electronica. I find it to be perfect for the beat simulator, so that didn't bother me a bit, and I definitely preferred it to random songs that either made no sense, or I had never heard of. There are a few cool ship designs, that don't really differ, but add a nice touch. Great mechanics are featured throughout, and the difficulty is perfect from level to level, and progresses nicely. The only real downside is that the game is quite short, but for $20 you can't go wrong, and the progressive difficulty allows for a lot of replay-ability, and urges you to master each track and every difficulty. If you love Guitar Hero or Rock Band, play this game! 8.0/10

Unepic is a great RPG, but the clever dialogue, and added pop culture references adds the comedy needed to spice up the sometimes bland dungeon crawl. I thoroughly enjoyed my play-through of Unepic and found myself wishing it wasn't over as the final boss battle concluded. Unepic is a game that uses the comedic trope of the main character knowing he is in a "game", but it isn't at all too trope-y. The game has a fairly deep character progression system, with tons of variations in weapon abilities and exciting special weapons earned after quests. The side quests are almost too quick however, with them taking only a couple minutes, but it does keep you directed towards the main overall quests as much as it can. The menus are easy to navigate and the ability to have three separate sets of quick slots is a nice touch. Definitely worth a play-through for any RPG/Adventure/Dungeon Crawl players out there. A fresh take on the genres! 7.8/10

Cubot does exactly what it says it will, but the console version feels a little out of place, even though it is a good game. This game originally came out as an iPhone game and you can tell, but it is done extremely well. This puzzle game is challenging, and addicting, and is a great time killer type game. The addition of different colored blocks that go in different directions or go a different number of spaces is such a simple, yet cool addition, and makes the game so much more challenging. I do think it's home on the Xbox One is a bit misplaced though, as most people don't jump onto the Xbox One to play a game like this. I personally do a lot of different things at the same time (Netlifx, YouTube, Gaming, etc.) so a game like this is perfect for me when I want to pay attention to a show and do some gaming at the same time where I don't have to give it my all, and for anybody who likes difficult puzzle games this is for you as it definitely succeeds and is one of the best straight puzzle games I have ever played, but I would recommend grabbing this title on your iPhone or equivalent, unless you do the same thing I described above. REMEMBER: This review is platform specific, and the location of this game doesn't fit as well, but I want to make it clear that this game is brilliant, and needs to be played, just on your iPhone. 7.0/10

Super Toy Cars features some very good qualities, but sadly falls a bit short. The game definitely is a lot like Mario Kart in that it seems to be targeted at a younger audience with subject matter and track locations, but it also features a similar weapon system where you drive into items to use against other drivers during the race. The collision mechanic in the game is cool and exciting. When colliding with other drivers during the race it looks and feels nice, and i found myself truly enjoying causing massive car pile-ups. The game also features a great number of cars to grab and the upgrade system, though very basic, is intuitive and understandable. Also, even though the track did feel like a re-tread at times, looking around and taking in where you were at definitely made it feel like you and a bunch of other little cars were racing around a candy shop or garage. However, the downsides of the game cannot be overlooked. The collision mechanics of the game, though fun when out in the open, are also a little off. The collision box on the cars and items is larger than the actual items, and I found myself several times running into nothing when trying to sneak through tubes/obstacles and between two cars. The weapons in the game also feel a little random and out of place with one of the launch-ables being a giant billiards 8-ball for some reason. The tracks, though cool when looking into the horizon, are somewhat empty. In a game like Need For Speed or other driving games where you are driving on streets it makes sense to just be driving with no obstacles besides the other cars, but when you have a car battle racer like this you need a little something extra, and the tracks really didn't have anything extra besides a couple alternate paths. My biggest issue with the game however is the driving mechanics in general. You maintain a higher rate of speed just holding down the accelerate button and pushing as hard as you can around corners (even when bashing into the walls and other players) than you do using the drift function. Drifting nearly takes you to a stop, and even through repeated trial and error trying to blame myself for it I could not figure out how to maintain speed around curves better than to just turn. This made for extremely boring game play, because when in the front you have very little you can do in the car battle department with nothing more than mines or oil spills to lay, and a tiny screen that only sort of shows if anyone hit your launch-able. Overall I like the idea, and basing game play off of Mario Kart is a good direction, but flawed driving in a driving game really hurts this title. 5.8/10

Hardware: Rivals is an exciting car combat game, with a lot of issues. The game is fun for a short while, but lack of vehicle depth and very few maps makes the game get old after only a few matches. I always find when a game has no single-player they tend to be harder to enjoy at length, but this game isn't great in the multi-player department either. The game was pretty much just okay all around. The physics were weird; for example when two cars crashed into each other they always land back on their tires for some reason, which felt like a cop-out to avoid ramming damage. This is a very basic car combat game, and if you are a fan of them, such as Twisted Metal, then why not give this a shot, especially for free with Playstation Plus, but otherwise I would stay away. 6.2/10

Pony Island is a hard game to describe without spoiling. It’s an “experience” game, one that simply must be experienced. It follows in the footsteps of games like The Stanley Parable, Her Story, and Undertale. At it's core Pony Island is a simple endless runner with hacking puzzles thrown in, but where the gameplay falls lackluster the story and atmosphere make up tenfold. Even with sometimes repetitive gameplay the game can still really surprise you. If you have a soul to spare and like ponies give this game a shot. 8.5/10

Lovely Planet brings a lot of character to the table in a basic idea, but it works. This game features a conglomeration of shoot ‘em up gameplay with time trials, and toned down Jumping Flash!-style jumping physics. It is addictive and extremely fast-paced; the character felt like it jumped off the screen when I moved around for the first time. The basic idea is to run through different courses featuring enemies and obstacles as fast as possible. It has a star-scoring system, in which you must complete the course to gain one star, defeat all enemies to get the next, and beat the course within a certain time limit to get the third. A great game overall! Lovely Planet has a nice aesthetic to it, with a sort of pale pastel color palette that reminded me a lot of the Katamari Damacy art style. This was backed up by the enemies seemingly screaming at you in what appeared to be Japanese text. The game was also very unique in art style in the somewhat random things featured in the world. You were basically running through the levels on clouds with very slight Japanese influence, but there were also things like giant fish floating through the sky, and far off spaceships, that added just enough to entice the eye to look around. I found myself figuring out the point of the game fairly quickly with no major set-backs. The game has very basic controls with the only options being to move, shoot, or target lock, which is nice for later in the game where more complex controls would be lost in the speed of things. I was delighted to find out the game, which was meant for speed, could also be played in a different style for the more casual player, with a slight exploration aspect to the game. I discovered several secret areas, as well as short-cuts, which allowed for multiple paths of discovery. The levels progress in a Mario-style “World” system where each location, be it the “Village” or “Forest” features around 20+ levels a piece with increasing levels of difficulty. As I moved forward, however, I found myself being forced into speed more and more. I didn’t find this to be an issue, but I found myself more and more frustrated by some courses, and the discovery from the early game was left behind for intense, quick twitch FPS gameplay. I will say that the levels never felt repetitive, but the memorization is key in late-game, and unless you remember every step you won’t pass the levels. A major negative I found was an extremely trolly enemy placement at times, where it felt very unfair, and like the designer just wanted you to run through the course again. When I say trolly I want to clarify I don’t mean the designers placed enemies around a corner to immediately kill you; they did that, but what I am referring to as an issue of mine were the times I would get to the end of a level and find I had missed an enemy somewhere along the way, and would have to start over. After repeated attempts I could not find the enemy for the life of me, only to discover the enemy floating high up in the air at the very beginning of the course. I did not appreciate that, but luckily that only happened in a few courses. I would say the game’s difficulty progression is fair, and progresses nicely, but it does get extremely brutal later in the game, and anyone who isn’t good at those twitch-based shooter games won’t be able to make the precise actions needed to progress past the second world. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game, and found myself having to come back and play more even after the frustrating bits here and there. Give this game a go! 7.0/10

inFamous: Second Son is an amazing game. It was one of the first titles I grabbed for my new PS4 and I couldn't have been happier with it. Fun open world, with a lot to do. Great story. The customization of superpowers adds something special to this game, and I loved the protagonist of this game. Definitely worth your time! 9.0/10

Watchdogs is a good game in the Ubisoft family tree of titles that are extremely similar. It has all the same types of elements to it as Far Cry or Assassin's Creed does with the collect-a-thon map searching, etc. Good idea, and decent story, but the hype hurt this game as it fell short of expectations and promises. I still had a good time with this game, and it is worth playing if you are a fan at all of the other Ubi titles. 7.2/10

A masterful sequel to Season One, and another crowning achievement in the growing list of titles out of Telltale Games that are superb, and show us the meaning of amazing story telling. If you aren't a fan of story-based games or are bored easily in dialogue, then you won't like this or any other Telltale title, but the people who are all about the story, and love the major decisions in story you influence through the dialogue options, then this is a must-own game. No other way to describe this game other than amazing. 9.4/10

More Madden. If you are a fan of Madden games and buy them every year, then no need to stop here. Nothing major added and no major upgrades to graphics, the downside of yearly released games. 7.5/10

Axiom Verge teleports you back to the prime of Metroid-Vania platforming. If you loved Metroid or Castlevania as a kid then you MUST play this game. The retro aesthetic and gameplay feel exactly like a game in those veins. I give a salute to the creator for matching up with how the old games felt and played, and the additions made in this game are tons of fun! Definitely a game worth giving a shot! I will however say that in the modern age of gaming that games such as these are easily overtaken by bigger games, and if you are a modern gamer exclusively who only plays big name titles, then I would skip this as the old school gameplay will probably bore you, which is a shame. 8.0/10

Rocket League is good. The game mechanics are superb and the controls are fluid. I enjoyed playing a few matches of this game, and this is a game I go back to from time to time and have fun with, but the subject matter isn't something that interests me as much. Not being a fan of racing/car games or soccer this game did a lot even getting me to try it out, and I am glad for all the time I have played it, but I wouldn't give it a whole lot more than being a great and unique idea, with perfect controls and matches. Not my kind of game, but definitely one I understand people loving. 7.9/10