maluigario

TL;DR: An exercise in tedium and repetition, New Pokemon Snap takes the relaxing idea of being a wildlife photographer in the Pokemon universe and instead forces you to repeat the same levels over and over in the hopes of capturing minute differences in Pokemon behavior between runs while stopping your progress with inane cutscenes. New Pokemon Snap is a game where you're a photographer helping the region's Pokemon Professor explore and document the area by taking pictures of Pokemon in their natural habitats. Much like the original Pokemon Snap, the game scores your pictures on a variety of things, like ensuring the Pokemon is in the center of the frame, facing towards you, takes up most of the frame, and so on. Also like the original, the game takes care of moving you along a set path and gives you some items to help you change the behavior of the Pokemon to get the perfect shot. Where this game deviates from its predecessor first is that every single Pokemon has 4 "behaviors" that must be documented. They all have their "calm" state, but then they all have 3 other states they can be found in. You may have to throw food for them to eat so you can capture them eating. You may have to bop them with your food so you can capture their confused look. You may have to play music so you can capture them dancing. This would be all well and good, except that each of these behaviors needs to be caught on camera separately, and you can only turn in ONE photo per Pokemon per trip, meaning it would take a minimum of 4 trips through a particular area to document all of the behaviors of a particular Pokemon. Not only this, but Pokemon behavior changes the more times you go through an area, so it may be impossible to document a behavior until you have made several trips through an area already. On top of it all, every area you can go through has both a day and night mode. While this ocassionally means finding new Pokemon, most often it means that you're taking pictures of the same Pokemon, just asleep now. As the final cherry on top, until you have seen the behavior, you have no idea which behavior the Professor wants to see, so you just have to experiment over and over: Try feeding it during the day. No? How about at night. No? Okay, well now you've levelled up the same area's day path, try again, maybe they'll act different now. No? Okay, back to the night version. Oh, hey, there's a branching path. Guess I'll have to do this level twice now to make sure I catch everything. What you end up doing is just repeating the same levels over and over trying to get whatever specific shots the Professor wants to see and trying to get enough points to unlock a new area so you can start the process all over again. As a minor insult to injury, the Professor and his other assistants will give you hints in the form of "Requests". They'll say they tried to capture a certain behavior of a certain Pokemon at a certain point in the level but failed, would you mind trying? But the requests stack up quickly. You'll get two requests for every level you complete and find yourself going back to try and catch one thing, miss it, and have to start over again. At least the old Pokemon Snap was kind enough to give you a speed-up button. This one doesn't even give you that. As if the game wasn't already busy wasting your time, once you've unlocked a new level, the game can't just give you a popup to tell you. You have to go back to the lab, watch a cutscene of all the guys in the lab being excited that you get to go somewhere new, and THEN you can go out. All in all, for a game that should be all about the relaxing idea of you going out and taking pictures and having a good time at your own pace, New Pokemon Snap instead insists on you playing the game ITS way, on ITS time, with no respect for your time as a player.

TL;DR: You're an engineer in a spaceship who has to dismember crewmates-turned-murderous-horde. One of my all time favorite games. Dead Space puts you in the role of Isaac Clarke, an engineer as part of a small crew heading out into deep space to help repair a mining vessel who sent out a distress call. The game takes the survival-horror genre and flips it on its ****, more specifically, off its head. Like a typical zombie survival horror, the members of the spaceship which you're there to repair have all been transformed by some unknown force into horrible mutated facsimiles of life. The twist here, however, is twofold: 1. You don't play as some combat-hardened soldier or a police officer or other witty, battle-ready bloke. You play as an engineer. Your department is brains, not brawn. The feeling of despair you get of being out of your depth, of resolve in using your brains to survive, and of sheer relief and exhausted elation when you eventually reach the end of your journey are that much more palpable because any one of us would be just as unprepared and just as lucky to make it through this nightmare as our silent protagonist. 2. Instead of shooting enemies in the head for massive damage, the enemies in this game have to have their limbs shot off. Instead of a pea shooter and a shotgun, you get a laser cutter and a chainsaw. Instead of stopping when their heads are gone, these undead horrors will keep coming until they are incapable of locomotion. This makes the enemies themselves infinitely more terrifying, as you can't just cluster your shots towards their heads but have to individually hack away at every single individual limb of every fast-running hell spawn headed for your delicate face. This game nails the atmosphere, nails the combat, and nails the character. Whatever Isaac is feeling, you're feeling. Every enemy killed feels like a small victory. And getting away alive from this feels like a true accomplishment. I won't compare this to the newly-release remake, since I haven't played it, but this game has gone down as one of my top 10 personal favorites.

What I imagine organizing an actual warehouse on my own would feel like: Cathartic to find a place for everything, joy in being able to find anything at a moment's notice, and repeated bouts of frustration when I'm forced to reorganize YET AGAIN to make room for the new items we need to carry or because the big cheese wants us to carry 18 crates of something literally no one has ever requested from us. And just how many different colors of bullseye do we need in here, CJ? Also, the ending will absolutely wreck you emotionally.

This game is what happens when Dark Souls and Maple Story have a baby and it's got the art style of Adventure Quest. Salt & Sanctuary was made by a very small studio; it's a labor of love, and it's well done, for what it is. It's a niche pick, but very fun (like a 7-8) if you're in that niche. If you're not, this is going to be like a 3-4 for you. Let me start by saying the graphics were the hardest part of S&S to get over. As I stated, this was not some high-budget, AAA title. As such, I wouldn't expect mind-blowing graphics. But flash-based 2D RPG is not exactly my favorite graphics style. Considering this was touted as "the best 2D Souls-like game out there", it was jarring to get into it and see Adventure Quest-esque graphics with a gritty filter on top. That being said, they do a lot with the graphics they have. The bosses are unique, some being large enough to not even fit on your monitor. Each in-game location has a theme and are all immediately distinguishable from one another with enemies that mesh with their environments. As for gameplay, Dark Souls meets Maple Story is as apt a discription as I can think of. You've got all your SoulsBourne staples: dodge rolls, parries, single-vs-two-handed combat, "bonfires", magic and prayers, weapon upgrades, using boss items to make special weapons, "souls" in the form of salt, a plethora of medieval weaponry, and even your choice of going with shields or going full hunter mode with a pistol in your off-hand. But then they added jumping. And not just basic jumping: full-blown Maple Story jump-quests, except instead of jumping while dodging patterned moving obstacles, your jumping through the trees and taking on enemies that are leaping around and firing with bows and arrows. If you misjudge your jump even once, "YOU DIED". This particular incident in my memory was the low point of the game for me. Jumping is an integral part of this game, and very often you'll find yourself dead from not perfectly timing your jumps or feeling like you need to trust that there is something below you only for there NOT to be something **** gets frustrating. That all being said, once I got past the treetops section, game play went much more smoothly. You begin to understand the floe of combat. It is a Souls-like, after all. S&S just runs at a different tempo. Most bosses can be overcome with only a few tries, and I beat around 1/3 on the very first try. All in all, the game is interesting, well put-together, mostly-fun, and will certainly press the Souls button many players out there have these days.

TL;DR: Tangentially-related story to the events of the first game, non-linear gameplay, and odd mechanics make this an enjoyable experience, albiet not one I'd recommend unless you really enjoyed the base game. In Mooncrash, you play the role of some guy working for a rival corporation to the one your main character from the base game works for, and you use the super future tech and a black box recording to relive the experiences of 5 people who were on the moon when the events of the base game take place. (NOTE: The base game does NOT take place on said moon, so it's not the same location being reused.) You start with only one "scenario" unlocked, and completing specific objectives will slowly unlock the other 4. You are meant to replay these scenarios over and over, so a roguelike element was introduced to change up what enemies and environmental difficulties you'd face. Playing well nets you points you can use to equip your characters in better gear before each attempt. It essentially turns Prey into a roguelike dungeon crawler: multiple characters to play as, multiple objectives to hit, all of them trying to get off the moon alive. This can make the game feel a little repetitive, since the actual layout of the moonbase never changes, only which paths through it you may traverse. Another gripe I have is that I found the map very difficult to navigate. Your objective may have you needing to go to one area of the base, but the way to get there has been disabled by the RNG for your run, and you can't remember the long way to get there, and you spend forever trying to figure out how to get there. Considering the base layout is more or less circular, there are always 2 or more ways to reach any given area, but the wayfinder doesn't do a great job of helping you find the way that is actually available. Then in later scenarios, the game starts throwing in this "corruption" meter that basically acts as a time limit for you to complete the scenarios. This means I spent a lot of time rushing around trying to beat the clock and desperately trying to find my way somewhere. Overall, I had fun with the DLC, but unlike the base game, I see little reason to go back and play it again.

TL;DR: This is an FPS in space with mutant powers. It's awesome. This game is a first-person action RPG. There are two styles of combat: guns and mutant powers, the latter of which you unlock by recycling the organs of defeated monsters. You can use recycled components to upgrade your weaponry. The story is intriguing and keeps you engaged throughout. There are plenty of side missions that net you those all-to-necessary upgrade resources, and books and audio logs scattered about to fill out the ambience of the world. My main gripe with the game is that you spend too much time doing inventory management. You have a system similar to RE4, with each item or gun taking up some number of slots that you're busy shuffling around and debating which things to toss and which things to keep to try to drag to the nearest recycler. If their goal was to try and limit how many of the game's various guns you could have on you, or to limit the number of other tools, they could have implemented something a little more elegant that wouldn't have left you slugging down 13 cans of various drinks you'd intended to take to the recycler but now have to be tossed to make room for the extra wrench you found whose materials are more valuable to you. All in all, an awesome game, worth the buy.

TL;DR: Blazing fast combat with an emphasis on stealth and parrying in feudal Japan make this a fun, though sometimes frustrating, game. There's a reason SoulsBorne isn't usually called SoulSekiroBorne: This game shares little in terms of core mechanics with any of the other games in FromSoftware's action-adventure lineup. The combat is incredibly fast-paced; none of the skills you learned in the other Souls titles will help you here. You focus more on depleting an enemy's stamina by perfectly parrying their attacks than you worry about depleting their health, as an enemy with an empty stamina guage is left open for a death blow. Sneaking and verticality also feature as core mechanics. One of the big cons in Sekiro is that the emphasis on parrying can make the process of tackling bosses feel more daunting as you try to perfectly learn their attack patterns. While a SoulsBorne game give you dodging, shielding, and parry/riposte as defensive maneuvers, Sekiro's only defense is the parry mechanic. This means advancing the battle requires perfect parries to deplete their stamina; there is almost no way to use hit and run or make a "heavy-strength build" that focuses on dealing damage. This can mke the process of learning the bosses attack patterns feel daunting as you keep dying, and you can't "panic parry" your way to victory. The other drawback compared to other SoulsBorne titles is the lack of replayability. The game has a New Game+, but playing the game again offers little variation upon return. There are no "new builds" for you to try; you have your one weapon, and you invest your upgrades on Shinobi Tools you mostly won't use and Shinobi Arts that I personally got almost no use out of. Even with its drawbacks, Sekiro is a stand-out title. The combat is fun and a nice change of pace from FromSoft's other titles. It's a breath of fresh air that's absolutely worth your time.

TL;DR: A lot of nothing interspered by repetitive combat and uninteresting enemy and level design. Games have roughly half an hour to an hour of my time to maintain a 6 or above score in my head before I determine they're not worth giving more of my time to. This game did not pass that mark. There was no hook here: The game gives you little to nothing to do and an enormous amount of space to do it in. It gives you tiny threads of a story, none of which were enough to make me want to slog through the tedium. The combat is very basic hack-and-slash platforming. The enemy design is boring; there are maybe 3 enemy types you come across, and the first boss is just a bigger version of one of those 3. I can sum up the first 30 minutes with a series of "Why?"s: Why are tentacles dragging me away? Why do the green plants that look exactly like the rest of the environment hurt me? Why is the weird black crystal talking to me in some faux German/Gaelic language? Why do I have a dodge roll in a 2D hack-and-slash platformer? Why aren't there any combos? Why am I going through 5 minutes of world travelling without encountering a single enemy? Why do you unlock doors by smashing future crystals? Why am I doing anything? Why am I here? Why am I still playing this game?

Dark Souls 3 - Shields + Lovecraft = Bloodborne This game is fast-paced melee combat that rewards aggression far, far more than passivity. You get in there and YOU be the monster that all these horrors fear, not the other way around. The bosses are awesome, greusome nightmare-beasts. Some of rhe monsters and settings skeeve me out and still give me chills. And the DLC is some of the best content in the game, with awesome new weapons and one of the most difficult but most fun boss battles in the entire SoulsBorne set. The one and only mark I have against this game is its "Chalice Dungeons", randomly generated content-padding that you NEED to go through to get all the achievements and SHOULD go through if you want the best upgrade materials for your weapons. These areas are tedious, time-consuming, and monotonous. Despite that looming black mark, Bloodborne remains a top 10 game for me, between its fun combat and Lovecraftian worldbuilding.

Dark Souls 3 - Shields + Lovecraft = Bloodborne This game is fast-paced melee combat that rewards aggression far, far more than passivity. You get in there and YOU be the monster that all these horrors fear, not the other way around. The bosses are awesome, greusome nightmare-beasts. Some of rhe monsters and settings skeeve me out and still give me chills. And the DLC is some of the best content in the game, with awesome new weapons and one of the most difficult but most fun boss battles in the entire SoulsBorne set. The one and only mark I have against this game is its "Chalice Dungeons", randomly generated content-padding that you NEED to go through to get all the achievements and SHOULD go through if you want the best upgrade materials for your weapons. These areas are tedious, time-consuming, and monotonous. Despite that looming black mark, Bloodborne remains a top 10 game for me, between its fun combat and Lovecraftian worldbuilding.

Easily my favorite of the trilogy. The bosses are cool, the lore is cool, the level design is gritty and dark, and the combat speed was upped, helping it stand above Dark Souls 1 & 2 in terms of replayability years later. The new combat features like twin weapons feel good to use (unlike 2-handing in DS1 or power stances in DS2). This game rests up there with Bloodborne as my favorites among the FromSoft titles.

The beginning of a delicious series of games and creative brethren. The graphics and combat don't hold up as well post-Dark Souls 3/Sekiro/Bloodborne, but this game still holds a place of honor for being the birth of an absolute CRAZE in new gameplay design. It did for action/adventure games what FNAF did for horror; it changed the way everyone looks at the genre and forced the entire game industry as a whole to shift, so much so that Steam now has a "Souls-like" category. That should speak for itself.

The least consequential Dark Souls game of the franchise and its spin-offs. It's an okay game, still worth playing once maybe if you like the franchise. It does a lot of what its predecessor and sequel did, but worse: worse combat, worse controls, worse boss design, worse level design, worse music, worse characters, worse lore. This game essentially exists to show that the cycle of linking the fire from game 1 is indeed an unbreakable cycle and that humanity tries again and again to perpetuate or break it. Dark Souls 1 sets the story up better, and Dark Souls 3 concludes it better, and both of them have much cleaner visuals, much better environments, and much smoother combat. It's also the hardest one to get all the achievements for, as my 450 hours of game time should attest to compared to 1 & 3; it's the one I liked the least and the one I was forced to play the longest to keep my record of 100% all the FromSoft games.

Listen. It takes a lot for me to review a game. And it is very, VERY difficult to get me to DISLIKE a music-based combat game. So when you mess up #2 enough to make me #1, we have a problem. The game is SO CLOSE to awesome. The beats are bumpin', the premise is lost in the acid trip, and your little space beetle beats up voodoo faces to the thumpin' sounds of the cosmos. There's only one problem: there is one master volume control and that's it. So this super fast-paced reflex-heavy DDR for your fingers has no way to tune the sound effects, music, and specific sound queues that alert you to what's coming up. Like, the music is supposed to be like call-and-response: you hear *thump thump clap clap* and you know that you've got two jumps and two turns coming up. But the sounds effects of your jumping and smacking your hull off the walls mixed with the little DING you get for doing it perfectly in sync with the beat PLUS the sounds of you racking up points drowns out the NEXT set of queues. Before you know it, you've got nothing but a maddening cacophony in your ears and your beetle is moving far too fast for you to play by sight alone. Obviously plenty of other people played this game and can hear just fine. Maybe I'm in the minority of those whose auditory senses get overwhelmed to the point where all the noise just blends together. But this would have been easy enough to remedy if I could have turned the music and sound effects down while turning the sound queues up. Instead I just have tinnitus and a blood pressure problem.

TL;DR: Fun, hilarious, and cute. If you have had an iota of fun with a twin stick shooter or want to try one for the first time, GET THIS GAME. DISCLAIMER: Got this game free on Epic Games. I had seen this game from afar, never committed to buying it. I'd never even enjoyed a twin-stick shooter before. I don't think this has changed my opinion on the genre, but I LOVE this game. Everything in this game is stylized to the max, with every enemy being a gun reference. The enemies are bullets that hold guns that shoot bullets, and your job is to shoot bullets at the bullets while dodging their bullets while not taking contact damage from the gun-weilding bullets. Sometimes your bullets are actually fish. Sometimes your gun has a mermaid tail. Sometimes it's a reference to a unique gun from some other media, like Halo or Hyper Light Drifter or Judge Dredd. And sometimes your gun is a bullet that shoots guns that shoots more bullets, so you can shoot guns full of bullets at the gun-weilding bullets. The bosses are hysterically named and genuinely difficult to fight. There's a gorGUN, or AMMOconda or a king bullet **** on his flying throne of guns. There is so much to unlock in this game. Besides your 4 starting characters, there are 4 more unlockable characters. There's an actual story in here worth digging for. There's like 4 different extra modifiers for different ways to play, like a Turbo mode that speeds everything up or a challenge mode that adds a random challenge to every room and boss. The one and only beef I have with this game is that some of the quests you have to do to unlock everything can get a little tedious. And that's a small beef for something that a player not interested in unlocking EVERYTHING will not even endure. The fact that I could get some 40 hours of gameplay in what is essentially a roguelike with a small fixed number of floors before finding something tedious is a testament to how fun this game as a whole is. I've unlocked everything and I still play this regularly just for fun.

TL;DR: A cool mobile game, except it's not on mobile and they're charging $20 for it. DISCLAIMER: Got this one free on Epic Games. This game reminds me a lot of some card-based dungeon crawlers on the mobile scene, something along the lines of "Night of the Full Moon" or "Dungeon Tales", I think both of which have been likened to "Slay the Spire" in some way. Get cards to equip your character, decide whether to fight or sneak past enemies in a ring, and escape to the next room as you attempt to get to the end of the dungeon and get one of the game's two endings. No doubt about it, I found the game fun, if not frustrating at times (par for the course in RNG-heavy roguelikes). But I guarantee I'd have never paid $20 for this game. If I had spent $5 on Android, I would have felt like I got about what I paid for. I got one of the endings in roughly 8 hours of in-game time and didn't feel compelled to go find the second ending.

TL;DR: If you loved the original game or love NES-era action-adventures, you'll love this. Otherwise, best to skip it. This game is a basic old-school platformer from the NES era that has received updated graphics and music. On the one hand, the new hand-drawn visuals are beautiful. On the other, if you were expecting any kind of revamp to the game such as new mechanics, this isn't for you. The one really neat feature is that at any time you can switch to the old graphics or music. This serves as a two-edged sword, however. It allows you to see just how much love and effort went into the new graphics and music while still being 1:1 faithful to the original. With the press of a button mid-combat, I can see just how this boss fight looked back on its original consol and just how much my attacks and hit boxes stay true to the original. But this then means that they were absolutely committed to keeping the gameplay identical to the last detail to the original. No improvements to platforming, no new features, nothing aside from graphics to bring this game into the modern era, and the switch-between-modern-and-retro button means I can see, when I'm frustrated by the controls or the hit boxes or the level design, that it's exactly the way it was back in 1989.