UsernameIThink

Aegis Defenders is a pretty good game that deserved to get a bit more attention than it did. In some ways it succeeds and in others it fails, but I would still recommend it to most people interested in Tower Defense/indie games with a good art style. The game is a mix between a TD and an action platformer, with 1 or 2 players controlling 2-4 characters (the number increases the farther you get into the game). Each character has specific structures that can be built (some of which require ingredients from 2 or more players), unique weapons, and a special ability. Every element can be upgraded. Personally, I challenged myself by finishing the game on 1P mode and insane difficulty without backtracking to previous levels. I suggest others do the same if they don't have a friend to play with. The game succeeds in being engaging, even if not always extremely fun. You quickly get thrown into this gameplay loop of challenge rewarded by extra story and your own choice of upgrades. In terms of story, the game is pretty good but not excellent, though it hits high notes from time to time. The characters are only decent. Outside of the story, the game has enough variance to where it hardly ever feels boring. Over time, certain structures start to be unlocked and some structures lose value as you generally have more resources available. At some point, I felt I had reason to use almost every structure, weapon, and character at least a few times. The flaws that this game does have are pretty huge. For one, there were a few minor glitches I encountered. Besides that, most levels have an exploratory phase before the tower defense phase. These are used for tutorials and puzzles (of which only a few are excellent), but hardly ever for platforming. Even the tower defense has more platforming because it requires you to collect and manage resources with a time limit. While juggling between characters to accomplish this is fun to some extent, the AI is too incompetent when you're not controlling a character. It's always rooted in once place and doesn't attack unless an enemy is very close, and when it does it's at a low firing rate. While the character combat is made more engaging by having to stay on your toes and adapt, fighting enemies usually means staying in one place and shooting. Some of the systems in place are easy to forget about. The game gives you a limited number of player hearts, but they are easily replenished so they're mostly easy to forget about. On occasion, I even forgot some of my characters had special abilities because I hardly used them. That being said, adapting around some of the game's flaws is much of what makes it so special. You have to see what works and what doesn't with your limitations and understand how to manage characters most efficiently. For example, it might be necessary to bring a character somewhere to repair buildings, another to work on a resource generator, another to stand by an enemy spawn where the enemies are of the same color so they take extra damage, and another to be controlled to extract resources. Then you can use one of the same characters as an anchor, using the "follow" command to bring the resource miner back more quickly. It's stressful at first, but once you get used to it it's all good, strategic fun with a huge level of depth and variety. Overall score: 7.5 out of 10

Psychonauts is a great game, and I only give it a mixed review because I'm reviewing it by 2018 standards. The gameplay is quite varied with platforming, fighting, solving puzzles, and looking for secrets and collectibles. The platforming by itself is nothing special, but once you unlock a telekinesis ability (which feels incredibly satisfying to use), you have the movement options to quickly bypass a lot of it. As many people have said but also exaggerated, the camera is a bit clunky sometimes. What's actually worse is a clunky menu that you have to navigate a lot. The story is about a psychic who runs away from home to a psychic summer camp in the hope of becoming a psychic secret agent, or a Psychonaut. It's a kids' game and follows a very cartoonish logic while also managing to be surprisingly captivating, funny, and even somewhat mature at times. The first third of the games actually turns out to be a glorified tutorial for the last two, as the main character is suddenly forced to go into the minds of a monster and insane asylum patients. Most of the games' levels are based around going into peoples' heads and, in the second two thirds, fixing their problems. Each of the minds has its own unique art design, quirks, and story to tell that reflects the person's psyche. The game never feels dull, and its interesting aspects expertly disguise what is actually some pretty mediocre gameplay. It's a bit difficult to talk about the game without seeing it in parts. The first third of the game is fairly linear and mostly involves platforming and simple combat, as well as unlocking most of your psychic abilities. This leads to what I found to be the game's main problem. Once you reach a level known as The Milkman Conspiracy, you're unexpectedly forced into puzzles without knowing about it and into a progression wall. There is an ability you need to unlock by finding collectibles, as well as an expensive item that the game doesn't tell you that you'll need to progress. Once you start to understand how the game works after this point and overcome this wall, it becomes dramatically more fun and easy to figure out what to do and use your psychic powers in interesting contexts, such as using telekinesis to move pieces on a board game or using clairvoyance to see yourself through a character that can see in the dark. Even around the end, the game is not very difficult, but it's at least not brainlessly easy. The game lasts 13-14 hours, and for its current $10 price, it's easily worth a buy.

This review is for the Battle Royale gamemode. I played this game out of boredom, and I somehow ended up more so than I started. The main problem with the game is that nothing happens. There is only any tension for a small fraction of the game and gunplay for an even smaller fraction of the game. Worse is that when you find another player and engage them in combat, nothing interesting is going on. It's the generic FPS fare, with strategy that involves jumping up and down while shooting at another player. Player health is low enough that the few interesting conflicts that pop up never last long. Some people can actively use the building mechanic as a tool, but this does not make the combat much better unless you're willing to master it. Wandering around the map and looting feels boring when there is too much loot and none of it (besides maybe the legendary weapons) feels both rare and useful. You can either try to win by doing nothing the whole match or risk losing by running into the action if you want to have fun. The game is only enjoyable when playing with friends, but only because it makes for a basic talking point when something actually happens. You have to be alert for other people the whole time and stay increasingly near the center as the match goes on, so it's not a very passive experience. However, if you want to have an active experience playing a video game, you'd be better suited playing something like Paladins, Overwatch, Siege, Splatoon 2, CSGO, or CoD. Even Minecraft Hunger Games is better than Fortnite because of smaller maps that often have interesting design quirks, more health so that conflicts last longer and feel fair, and there is a variety of interesting loot that pops up. Anybody could just ignore the game and move on, but if you're a fan of Paragon (a much more artistically inspired and fun game in comparison) it means that your favorite game is being cancelled because of Fortnite's mainstream popularity. As a game, it's not as offensively bad as I've made it out to be and at the very least it's free (unlike another battle royale game), but it's worthy of its current user score.

This is a good game to play if you want to just chill out. It's a game where you can become "everything" (excluding abstract concepts). You can possess some objects when you're close to them as another object. You can try to be as large or small as you can be, you can make yourself large, become something else, and descend again to see how quickly you can become a lot of different things. The visuals are fairly bland in a game that would have benefit from better graphics. Though it might look pretty from time to time, I could never see true beauty in it. The music is calm, and supplements the type of experience it's aiming for. There is also some philosophy. You find it in these text boxes that you can see when objects speak to you (it's a very psychedelic experience). There are enough common themes that the game's messages don't feel entirely disjointed, but a lot of it comes out of nowhere - though it might be appropriate for a game called Everything to have so little focus. It acts as food for thought, but most of it isn't anything that stands out from other philosophy. What feels nice is that the game is not pretentious enough to suggest that it has the full meaning of the universe (in fact, it goes out of its way to show that what it says is not the end-all-be-all of philosophy). There are audio logs to collect in the game on top of the text, and these are excellent. They are pulled out of real voice clips from Alan Watts, who expresses fascinating ideas that are coherent and worth pondering as more than pseudo-intellectual philosophy. There are also some pop-up messages which are very striking in contrast to an otherwise calm game and make some interesting suggestions that I'd rather not spoil. The game develops a few mechanics as it goes on and gives an interesting final message. If there are common ideas in the game, they're about the benefits of changing perspective, letting go, and of seeing ourselves as changing parts of the universe rather than outsiders looking in, whatever that may imply. Until the ending, however, it seems like there is little point for the gameplay and philosophy to be in the same piece of art, which is the main problem. This game had a profound impact on me and supplemented the way I see the world, but that is only because of the Alan Watts clips.

Even though my review is mixed, Golf Story is the most fun sports game (besides Rocket League) I've played. There is a lot of side content and just the right level of challenge and variety to be enjoyable. The story is goofy and doesn't try to be serious or a masterpiece, which makes it special. All the worlds have side quests sprinkled around them which all put a unique spin on a game that would otherwise be full of rigid golf courses. Even though the different courses each had unique mechanics, I never felt like they were ever very important. Luckily, the basic mechanics have enough depth that it is still engaging. There are a few places where it's easy to not know what to do and get stuck, but a quick search online will make what to do clear. One personal gripe I have that probably arose from my own stupidity is that for almost the whole duration of the game, I thought that hitting a ball into water did not force you to waste a turn. Do not make the same mistake I did.

Celeste is my favorite game so far this year, and for very good reason. I bought it the day it came out because I was so excited for it, and was happy to see that it still managed to blow my mind. The platforming is tight with controls that, though initially frustrating, can eventually be mastered. Each level felt like a treat to experience. Most people will only play to the ending and collect the many strawberries lying around in the game, but that is only the surface for people who want to take it farther. Each level develops its mechanics and reinforces them in enough ways that they feel well used. Then, the more difficult B sides continue to use the levels' mechanics in new, inventive ways so that they still feel fresh. The C sides string them together into challenge gauntlets that feel satisfying to complete. After that, there are golden strawberries to collect for finishing all the levels without dying. The game allows you to start at multiple places throughout its levels, so you can practice them to your heart's content before doing the run. Still more, the game keeps track of your fastest times completing each level.

Horizon Zero Dawn is an all-around solid game with flaws that don't distract much from a great overall experience. The game is an open-world action RPG done right. It is obvious that the graphics are among of the best of this generation. The game's varying locales make sure that the game's aesthetics never become dull. Great graphics still have the disadvantage of long load times. Make sure you have something to distract yourself with while you're playing this game. Even though the world is large, every place you can go to and activity you can do has a high bar of quality set for it. The world has reason to be exactly as large as it is. I would not suggest going through all the content, but at least finish all four cauldrons, override all five tallnecks, and get blazing sun ranks on all 15 hunting trials. Though there are leveling elements involved, there is a substantial feeling of progress and difficulty (which is best set at normal and never changed). Some of the resource systems feel annoying until you upgrade inventory size. The resources used to make arrows are so common that I never felt like I actually had to think about that system. There are enough unique enemy types to where it feels you have something to sink your teeth into, and you also view them differently as you progress through the game. A robot that gave you some trouble or you avoided at the beginning of the game now feels fairly easy (but not mindlessly so) to take out, and this feels great. Each robot has a complex array of weak points, points weak to certain types of damage, points that you can shoot off to disable some of the robots' attacks, points that you can shoot to make them explode, points that you can shoot off to use against the robots as weapons, points to shoot of to disable a robots shield, points to shoot off to disable invisibility, points that are only exposed by shooting other points, points that the robots only expose on occasion, smaller points that are detachable for some quick loot, and points to shoot loot crates off of the backs of machines among other things. On top of an intelligent AI, there are lots of ways to fight these guys. You can take some time to lay out traps and stock up on health reserves or perhaps override some machines to fight for you. At the same time, you're not too disadvantaged if you just want to get into the action immediately. Human combat, on the other hand, mostly involves shooting people in the head and exploiting AI. It's not awful, but it's pale in comparison. The variety of viable tools you have at your disposal is as wonderfully deep as the robots' design, and somehow the game's mechanics still do not feel bloated. The story is a mixed bag. It starts out very captivating and is enjoyable all the way through, but there is little to no character development or interesting voice acting besides that of the protagonist herself. Only one character besides Aloy (Sylens) felt fleshed out enough for me to feel satisfied. Though the character models look beautiful, the lip syncing is pretty bad. It was by far the most enjoyable when delving into the ruins of past civilization. There you find text logs, audio logs, and holograms that tell a detailed story of humanity's efforts to exist past an apocalypse. Each mission along the main path explains another aspect of this story, and it gives you enough information to satisfy you yet also want to find more. The story only had one part where I really felt emotionally invested, and that was on the second to last mission. The ending is a bit disappointing. Also, for a game that has tons of battles against giant robots, ending the game by fighting an enemy type that has already popped up many times before is underwhelming. The game's ruins show some colossal, ancient war machines that perhaps could have been corrupted by the game's main villain to make for a great final boss.

Once you get used to the controls, this game can have some fun challenges in store, especially with the survival challenges on the "bro" difficulty. The "get to a place" levels weren't very fun, but I pored hours into the first LEVEL on that difficulty with enemy variety. Just turn up the difficulty if you don't like the game.

More people need to start playing this game right now. Whenever I find myself getting a good time after a difficult and creative challenge, I see myself at around 5th place or even higher on the GLOBAL leaderboards, and it saddens me that there aren't more people playing this game already. Gameplay consists of jumping from platform to platform very quickly using your thumb to slide in any direction while avoiding obstacles. More and more come the farther you get through the game, which keeps everything fresh. The levels are very short but difficult. There are also some secret levels that have a new type of challenge, but that's something you'll just have to see for yourself. It's not ridiculously difficult to access them, anyway. There are only 2 real downsides, and they barely even hinder the game at all. When you start the level, it won't allow you to jump immediately and it can be a little difficult to tell when you're going to start. I've also noticed that if I play for long enough the game can start to lag. However, simply restarting it fixes the problem.

This game has a LOT of replay value. The upgrades are inventive, the styles really do feel different from one another, and the backgrounds...well...they don't really add to much. I was reminded of Spelunky and Nuclear Throne while playing this game. It's obviously a roguelike, but you fall onto enemies at a rapid pace with heavy rewards for chaining gigantic combos. The upgrade system is a little like Nuclear Throne's and I noticed a lot of similar upgrades, but it was able to stay fresh. If you finally beat one of the most difficult bosses in the history of anything ever, you'll gain access to a hard mode with new enemies and challenges for every zone. If you're okay with the difficulty, I suggest that you give it a go.

This may be my favorite game I've played so far. Let me explain. This game has near perfect difficulty spikes and, overall, including the expansion,18 levels on multiple difficulties and bosses, too. It also has a multiplayer mode (even more expansive than the single player) and a trials mode, in which you have to quickly destroy dummies to get a good time. It's a lot more fun than it sounds. Extra MLG people can also try to beat a level on a hard level without dying for a gold skull. They can also learn a surprising lot of special maneuvers to become even better. This game had me playing for multiple days of time so far, and I went for a lot of the extra challenges (I don't even want to leave it yet, either.). Now, there is one major problem I have with this game. It's not the local-only multiplayer (I prefer local only, since this is a game that's meant to be played with other people. Beginners could also breeze through earlier levels by playing online with other people using co-op.) The problem is the co-op. It makes the players much more powerful, and allows them to move through the levels all too easily. It makes my achievements (except for the gold skulls) feel much lesser. My advice? GET THIS GAME AND IT'S EXPANSION.