For those looking for a well-made 3D platformer that follows a good linear story, this is close to a must play. The levels ooze with creativity and character, from the themes to the actual challenges. The production values are also significantly higher than I imagined going in - this is in fact a big game, including an enormous overworld hub. It should be said, however, that the collectathon design is severely lacking at times, mainly because the worlds are a linear sequence of events rather than open wide spaces. The game will often trigger cutscenes without your input, forcing you to leave collectibles behind (even when they're on plain sight). i really have no problem with backtracking in games like this, but when the need to do so comes from this sort of pacing problem, it can lead to some frustration.
Our hobby is home to a few truisms, but this is at its core: games are meant to be fun. It's a simple assertion, but the job of turning ideas and lines of code into memorable moments is everything but 'simple'. This is something I often come to when thinking about creativity, and it gets exponentially more fascinating whenever a video game manages to transcend the confines of what it apparently should be. **** Valley, a life simulation game inexplicably designed by a single person, gave me a lot of fun. But also so much more. In the game, your customizable avatar has inherited a patch of land on the countryside and, tired of the demands of modern life, decides to bring an old farm back to life. From there, it's all about buying seeds, planting crops, nurturing them. Then eventually building a coop, a barn, buying animals, selling their produce. It's a soothing cycle that can be laid-back fun, but also a fine challenge for those looking to micromanage everything and being as productive as possible. It's really up to you to approach farming life however you want. The first indication of something special lying beyond first impressions is how everything in the farming mechanics comes so naturally. There's no true tutorial here, not really; most of the whys and hows are presented as you go, with nothing to break the immersion. You just go about your business, figure things out, and they happen. This is why **** Valley is a game better experienced by not looking anything up in advance; just start a file and let it flow. Soon enough, you'll realize this is not simply a farm sim. You'll walk to nearby Pelican Town and get to know its characters, its locations, its wonderful idiosyncrasies. If you're anything like me, you'll be amazed at how those little pixelated beings can pack so much personality, thanks to the game's excellent writing. You may feel a little silly after turning off the console and realizing just how involved you are with virtual characters you like or dislike. That warm, persistent, almost indescribable feeling you get all the while makes it all worth it, though. Some may even call it 'fun'. And then it goes on. Months pass, bringing new events, local holidays, quests. Seasons come and go, meaning you have to change crops. You go foraging, fishing, mining. You meet mystical beings, you join an adventurer's guild to fight wild creatures and monsters. You realize there is so much more to everything in the game, to the point that there's secrets to uncover and new things to see dozens of hours in. There are new areas and gameplay mechanics you never even imagined when you started a modest farm so long ago. You feel so much joy for helping Pelican Town be the best it can be, you start feeling genuine camaraderie towards this or that character (yes, pixel characters on a pixel town). Suddenly you're not just midlessly experiencing a recreational activity, but also feeling immersed, enthralled by a certain sense of wonder that only the best works of art can bring about. This is further enhanced by the absolutely phenomenal music, from upbeat spring songs to ydillic summer tunes to melancholy winter ballads. And I guess I mentioned all of this was made by a single person? TL;DR: **** Valley is one of those special treats that make me such a believer in the independent game scene. It's overflowing with passion and care, and those are the only factors that can explain how a single person managed to develop such a deep and involving title. By taking the farming sim genre and adding large helpings of exploration and combat, as well as a cast of characters that feel extremely real in spite of their pixellated origins, this is a game that has etched itself into my gaming life in a very precious way. At the end of the day, my time in Pelican Town is (not 'was', as it's still ongoing for the foreseeable future) the very definition of fun. But also so much more. Rating: 10.0
I may be wrong, but I think the original Steamworld Dig was my first indie purchase on my 3DS. So, in a way, it's the precursor to the love for downloadable titles that has defined my gaming habits this decade. I guess one can only wonder how much stronger that effect would have been if that game was Steamworld Dig 2 instead, as this sequel takes an already addictive formula and goes completely nuts with it. In a good way, if you can't already tell. You play as Dorothy (or Dot), who gets to the city of Tumbleton looking for Rusty, the player character in the previous game. The game's world is a post-apocalyptic yet colorful land, inhabited mostly by steam-powered Robots, and strange earthquakes have been worrying Tumbletonians about the city's future. As such, Dot agrees to enter the mines below the city, previously explored by Rusty, to investigate, while looking for her friend's whereabouts. The gameplay follows closely in the footsteps of the first title, meaning it's got an extremely addictive loop. You go down the mine, dig around, collect minerals, find new weapons and upgrades, then comes back to the surface once your backpack is full. The main difference is that, quite literally, the entire world of the first Steamworld Dig is a single are in this sequel. I know, bigger isn't necessarily better, but my goodness did Image & Form deliver the goods when it comes to gameplay progression. This is, simply put, one of the most satisfying metroidvanias I've ever played, by virtue of how it manages to keep giving you new abilities that seem overpowered in the surface, but feel just right in practice. They make traversing previous areas a breeze, but are integrated into new ones in smart ways, so that the difficulty curve never feels dampened. It's really a masterclass in open 2D level design. Aside from the 'main' weapons and items found in secret chambers, Steamworld Dig 2 allows you to use cogs (which are found during your exploration) to upgrade various aspects of Dot's abilities. By going back to the surface, you can add new cogs to new slots, or even exchange old ones, and as such customize your own skill tree. This helps immensely in the exploration, which is the game's true meat, but also in bosses (which, sadly, are few and far between) and puzzle-solving. If you manage to get 100% of the items in each of the game's various areas, there's also post-game content in the form of a series of gauntlets. Those dial the challenge all the way up, requiring you to truly master everything you've learned during the game if you hope to succeed. TL;DR: The first Steamworld Dig was a lovely and unique metroidvania. This sequel is exactly that, except with an incredibly larger scope, featuring many more areas, themes, and mechanics. With a super addictive gameplay loop and almost perfect design in levels, puzzles, items, and abilities, Steamworld Dig 2 is destined to go down as one of the original gems in the Switch indie scene. Rating: 9.5
I have to hand it to Ubisoft: the marketing strategy for Mario + Rabbids has to be the best in recent gaming years. In hindsight, it's so simple: 1) leak a rumor for a Mario & Rabbids crossover; 2) let people make fun of the concept for months on end; 3) have a big reveal at E3, after the joke has already died down, and show to your unsuspecting audience that the game actually (gasp) looks quite promising. I mean, I can think of no video game characters more openly loathed than the rabbids. They're ugly, dumb and obnoxious, and that has usually been a big enough problem to all but suppress their comedic potential. Mario and his gang, obviously, are the complete opposite, with people who haven't even owned a Nintendo console in decades having a soft spot for the plumber. Of course, having the rabbids parody Mario could have backfired pretty hard. Luckily, the writers for Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle managed to find an elusive fine line between parody and flattery, and as a result... the rabbids are suddenly funny. I mean, yeah, some of the jokes in the game do fall a bit flat, but it's all mostly very well done, with the selfie-taking Rabbid Peach a clear highlight. And yet that would all be for nothing without compelling gameplay. Luckily, Ubisoft also delivers in that front, offering beautiful worlds to explore and fight insane turn-based battles in. Each character has their own strenghts, complete with a skill tree, and strategizing around them is super fun. Combat has a surprising amount of depth, and seamlessly integrates the comedic value of both worlds into a single whole that actually manages to make sense while also including, of all things, guns. Now that's positively an accomplishment. In fact, the amount of care put into this little package is a sight to behold. There's a level of polish and a sense of joy in all sections of the gameplay that makes the game feel like a laid-back funny adventure even during the most grueling battle sequences (and trust me, they can get pretty grueling). Yes, there's the camera, which is quite annoying during the light-exploration moments, and some momentary technical hiccups that have frames freezing for a good few seconds, but it's hard to get hung up on the game's shortcomings when there's so much to actually enjoy here. TL;DR: Nintendo has been hinting that it's more open to lend beloved franchises to third parties since Hyrule Warriors was announced. With Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, that stance pays off in a big way. Against all odds, Ubisoft's debut Switch exclusive is a surprisingly engrossing turn-based RPG that has the Mario gang (and Rabbid versions of them) adventuring through a Mushroom Kingdom in lovely disarray. It's not perfect by a long shot, but there's obviously so much passion poured into it that this hardly matters. Kingdom Battle hits plenty of notes where it counts: gameplay, production values, and, yes, humor. Rating: 8.0
In 2015, Nintendo struck gold when it decided to put its quirky spin on the online shooter genre. The result was Splatoon, which is bound to go down in history as one of the company's main victories in the underappreciated Wii U console. A couple years later, we get a sequel on Switch that manages to one-up the original by pretty much every metric (one which, thankfully, isn't called Spla2n, no matter what kids these days think they want). Splatoon 2's real meat is in its online play. In a nutshell, players gather in teams of four to duke it out by shooting ink at each other, with the objective of covering most of the stage's ground in their gooey substance (well, mostly; there are additional modes geared at the more competitive players). Aside from shooting, characters are able to transform into squids and swim through ink of their color, aiding with quick movement and refilling the ink tank in one fell swoop. This is, for me, one of two genius ideas at the heart of the franchise, as it helps tie the whole gameplay together while offering opportunity for players to move up walls and through grates. The weapon selection is vast, and it's gradually unlocked as you gain levels. It includes traditional weapons like quick revolvers and gatling guns, but also stuff like rollers, brushes, and umbrellas, offering a wide array of playing styles. The fact that the main objective is covering the ground in ink is the second genius idea, as it means even players who aren't good at (or dislike) the precision of aiming at opponents can help by devising smart ways to cover large swaths of ground. New to Splatoon 2 is a horde mode, called Salmon Run. It can be an absolutely exhillarating experience, as you team up with three others to kill invaders and collect salmon eggs for a hungry bear. The one caveat is that you don't get to choose which weapons you wield, relying instead on a randomized selection. This can be pretty annoying, as sometimes you'll just dislike how a specific weapon plays (hey there, splat charger!). Like the first game, there is sadly no option for split-screen play, but this is where the Switch's portability is a godsend. I never went to the trouble of taking my entire Wii U (with a television to boot!) with me to play online modes together with a local friend, but I have already in many occasions taken my Switch with me for that purpose. The single-player mode was also extended and improved, thanks to the addition of weapon selection instead of the small gun-only approach of the original. Stages are insanely well-designed linear platforming-and-shooting romps, with the exception of one open-ended but self-contained stage in each of the game's five worlds. The one glaring omission from the first game is a minigame to distract yourself while waiting for enough players to join a match. The one available in the original Splatoon was just the kind of arcade fun I need to make the waiting, which is one of my biggest qualms with online multiplayer, more tolerable. TL;DR: Splatoon is the most important new Nintendo IP in many years, and this sequel improves over almost every aspect of the excellent original. Shooting your ink around is as fun as before, and the new horde mode makes things even more varied for online players. Offline has also got a big improvement, as the level design remains incredible while weapon selection was significantly increased. As such, Splatoon 2 is a more than worthy sequel, and one that thoroughly deserves to continue the series' success. Rating: 9.0
Handheld devices (or, in the case of the Switch, hybrid ones) lend themselves pretty well to twitchy, arcade-like games. As far as the Switch's rapidly growing library goes, few games will manage to scratch that quick gameplay itch as formidably as Gonner, a tough but fair platformer with a super stylish presentation. It's hard to grasp the story, as the game mostly uses images to convey its plot, but basically you're playing as someone who is apparently dead. Initially starting with a limited set of abilities, you're soon able to find replacements for your gun, backpack, and head (yep), which then become available from the get go for each new run you attempt. These items aren't necessarily better; instead, they're different, allowing you to approach the problems in the game in different manners. You may, for example, get a head that allows you to float mid-air, or a gun that's stronger but slower and with less ammo, or a backpack that gives you a super jump. An annoying problem is that, given the game's quiet approach, you're never explicitly told what each new item does, having to find out through trial and error by donning them yourself. Luckily, doing so can be loads of fun. The game is divided into worlds, each of them containing a main theme scattered through a few procedurally-generated levels and a boss. Aside from the items that allow you to customize your abilities, there are hidden stages that put each world's theme to good use in a specific fashion. The controls are extremely tight, ensuring every death is your fault and yours alone, whereas the physics have a pleasant cartoonish edge to them. Then there's the game's presentation, which is like the cherry on top of a tasty sunday. The graphics are stylish and unique, while the music is nothing short of phenomenal. There's a specific hub stage theme that made me, on several occasions, delay entering the passage that would lead me actual game, just so I could listen to its awesome twitches and throbs a bit longer. TL;DR: Gonner is a hard game, but one that gets addictive enough to ensure your perseverance. The extremely tight platforming gameplay is further enhanced by pretty graphics and an incredible soundtrack, making a very attractive package for those looking for an arcade-like experience to play in short bursts. Rating: 8.0
Ah, Lego. One of the absolute joys of my childhood, unfortunately, hasn't really managed to impress me in the realm of video games, aside from the underrated former Wii U exclusive Lego City Undercover. Lego Worlds, however, had my attention. I mean, we live in a world where Lego-inspired Minecraft is one of gaming's biggest franchises, so taking the Danish toy and building a compelling open-ended survival game around it should be fine and easy, right? Well, with the caveat that game design isn't ever really easy, I still mantain Lego Worlds should have hit it out of the park. The idea is super neat: you pilot your spaceship through procedural worlds, solving quests and unlocking different pieces, objects, characters and buildings for use on a big sandbox-style mode. Basically, it mimics how we all played Lego in real life, except we get to earn the pieces through gameplay instead of badgering our moms to open their wallets and go to the closest toy store with us. Of course, having a good idea is only part of the process; you have to actually execute it to earn your payday. And that's where Lego Worlds, sadly, begins to unravel. The procedural worlds are fun at first glance, but end up being a series of empty, boring wastelands filled with meaningless fetch quests. You're never really compelled to immerse yourself on each planet, as the characters you encounter there are mindless drones who keep repeating requests with no rhyme or reason. Worse still, there is virtually no power curve to be seen. Almost from the get-go, you can solve a puzzle that requires you to, say, climb a mountain by simply opening a menu and making a helicopter. No effort necessary to earn anything, and as a result no truly compelling gameplay hook to latch onto. The sandbox mode, then, could be the game's one saving grace... except for how annoying it is to make the clunky interface do anything you want. This is obviously a game much better suited to mouse and keyboard, as doing what Lego Worlds asks of you with a controller is a borderline masochistic ordeal. Finally, there's the coup the grace: the game runs terribly on Switch. The frame rate is sketchy, draw distance is laughable, optimization is virtually nonexistant. Characters will walk on air, hang onto nothing while suspended, get trapped nowhere specifically, all of this with floaty physics and controls which are extremely erratic. TL;DR: Lego Worlds is a great idea. No, really, coming from a former Lego kid, it's honestly one of the coolest ideas for a video game I've seen in recent years. The execution, however, makes it all come apart, with terrible controls, mindless gameplay loops and truly putrid optimization. The worst part is that the sheer potential on display makes it all the more frustrating to behold just how much of a hot mess the end result turned out to be. Rating: 3.5
Making its debut on Nintendo platforms, Nippon Ichi's premier franchise is beloved for its turn-based gameplay and its pretty much infinite replayability, thanks to some of the very neat ideas it has on display. It can also border on the obnoxious by just never knowing when to stop and take a breather, and the complete version of PS4 original Disgaea 5 is no different. The game features an anime storyline, and when I say that, I REALLY mean it in the most literal sense. I mean, think of the most cliché anime story you possibly can, and chances are you won't be too far off Disgaea 5's storyline. Somber, scarred main character? Check. Giddy girl who constantly makes advances towards him? Check. Big, dumb allied warrior? Check. Annoying but cute little critters? Check, check, check. Late in the game, I just stopped caring about the story and resorted to button-mashing my way through the way-too-long dialogue sequences. Gameplay itself fares a lot better, thankfully. Disgaea's turn-based combat is absolutely insane, with plenty of over-the-top movements and a lot of nuance for those looking for it. It can be very intimidating if you're dipping your toe in for the first time, but the game does a good job of introducing new mechanics on a steady but fair pace as you progress through the campaign. It should be said that the game doesn't really know when to stop, though, as the amount of side-mechanics introduced border on the insane. Only a few of them pull their weight, but those that do are a treat. Case in point: the 'Item World', which allows you to enter mini-universes included in every single item you can get, from equipment to healing objects. Once inside, you force your way through randomly-generated battles; the longest you remain, the more powerful the item will become. To give you an idea, I had an item that gave +5 to every stat of its holder; after I was done with it at Item World, it gave +120 to each stat instead. This means you can grind to your heart's content to end up with some pretty busted equipment setups (with the downside of making the campaign a veritable breeze). It also means that the game can go on as long as you want, as the plethora of items you come across offer pretty much infinite Item World replayability. As far as production values go, Disgaea 5 isn't really anything to write home about. The graphics are cheap, offering an isometric view which often gets in the way of battles, while the music is pretty bad. The track that plays during every single second you're in the game's main hub is especially grating with its cheesy vocals and repetitive nature. I can't imagine most people liking it, even if they're J-Pop aficionados. TL;DR: Disgaea 5 is definitely a niche game, as its extremely deep mechanics, along with the fact it isn't particularly easy on the eyes or ears, will probaby put off a lot of players. That said, if you manage to persevere through its more inane sections, you'll be left with a very competent turn-based RPG, and even with the odd genius idea (like a mode that lets you enter items to grind and increase their stat boosts). If you're on the market for a turn-based RPG that offers an uniquely unhinged take on the genre, you could do much worse. Rating: 7.0
When I got back to being a big console gaming geek around 2009, one of my cravings was to see just how Sonic was doing. I used to be a fan during the Master System days, but I knew from word of mouth that his games had taken a dive in quality (which yeah, was true). Sonic Mania, then, is a return to form of sorts; although it's fair to question just what kind of a form that one was to being with. You see, Sonic Mania is pretty much a fan game. It's made by fans who have made a name for themselves by developing unofficial titles for Sega's mascot, and who obviously have a lot of passion for the franchise. In that regard, Sonic Mania succeeds where many other Sonic games have failed, in that it pretty much feels like a long lost sequel to the Mega Drive series. There are a lot of new and returning zones, and, most importantly, new and returning ideas that mostly feel fun and do justice to the best moments in the hedgehog's existence. The thing is (and for that I apologize to eight-year-old me), the original Sonic games had some pretty egregious level design flaws. They were games that had to focus on speed by virtue of just who the main character was, but at the same were at their best when they focused on exploration and the hunt for the elusive chaos emeralds. This led to some pretty schizophrenic levels, which constantly propelled you full steam ahead while luring you with secrets and alternate paths that could only be enjoyed by stopping and carefully acessing your whereabouts. As fun as midlessly running around can be, the completionist in me has a huge pet peeve with this approach, especially since you have to find all chaos emeralds if you want to see the true ending (the 'bad' ending for Sonic 2 on the Master System left my young self preeeeeeetty traumatized, let's just leave it at that). As such, my playthrough of Sonic Mania was an experience that got extremely fun at times, but also often felt uncomfortable in its gameplay non-sequiturs. TL;DR: Sonic Mania is pretty much the sequel to Sonic 3 we never truly got, complete with beautiful 16-bit graphics, catchy tunes, and (yes) weird level design. It should be a blast for fans of the original games, as it follows them to a tee, adding fun new ideas on top. It should be said, however, that the tension between speeding ahead and stopping to explore doesn't do the game any favors, even if ultimately this is a lovingly crafted (and at times loads of fun) homage to the hedgehog's origins. Rating: 7.0
Originally released on mobile platforms, Oceanhorn is a title that has been on my radar for a while now. That's because it's impossible to not get the feeling that this is a game majorly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, which is one of my favorite games on one of my favorite franchises. After spending twenty hours to 100% the game, I came out impressed, even if, as expected, originality isn't really something that's all that present here. Truth be told, Oceanhorn is less Wind Waker and more Phantom Hourglass, the direct sequel to the former game that was released on the Nintendo DS. Like the latter, it's played from an angled top-down perspective, and the navigation through the open seas isn't directly controlled, but pre-determined, with a few shooting targets here and there to keep you busy while it happens. Luckily, the controls don't really mirror Phantom Hourglass (or even Oceanhorn's own original mobile version), meaning the game has complete support for physical button inputs. The story is simple, but it does have some nice moments. Your character wakes up to find a note from his father, explaining he's gone away to fight Oceanhorn, a mythical monster who terrorizes the seas. From there, it's up to you to go after him, exploring the ocean and a good number of island scattered through it. Like expected, the game play as a top-down Zelda, meaning you'll come across quests, different races, and, of course, dungeons. Also like Zelda, each dungeon provides you with a new weapon, allowing you to reach previously unreachable areas. The overall game design is fair and the gameplay itself is very fun, but it has to be said that the puzzles are more simplistic and far less imaginative that the ones in Nintendo's franchise. The one exception for this is the Island of Whispers, which is a late-game discovery that was by far my favorite part of Oceanhorn. The island was originally a post-launch downloadable content, and it shows, as the quality of game design goes dramatically up. Not only that, the island offers a parallel, self-contained story about a mysterious kid whose ambition led to the end of the local civilization. Figuring out what exactly happened, piece by piece, was an extremely engrossing experience, and the closest the game got to Zelda levels of excellence. As far as production values go, I have to say the game far exceeded my expectations. The stylized graphics are crisp, colorful, and very pretty. Even more impressive is the soundtrack, which is nothing short of phenomenal, and is complemented in the audio department by excellent voice acting. TL;DR: There's no two ways about it: Oceanhorn is a Zelda clone, lacking originality to stand as its own thing. Luckily, it features a nice campaign and a surprisingly interesting story, even if the overall game design is a bit more basic that I would have hoped. Each of the game's explorable islands are self-contained isometric playgrounds that are a lot of fun to pick apart, and it all looks great (and sounds even better). For someone looking for a Zelda-lite experience, you really can't go wrong here. Rating: 7.5/10
It's fair to say Mighty No. 9, Keiji Inafune's spiritual successor to the dormant Mega Man franchise, was a disappointment. A successful Kickstarter campaign was followed by numerous delays and bad game design decisions. Mighty Gunvolt Burst, then, is an attempt to salvage the franchise by making a crossover with Inti Creates' well-received 3DS series Azure Striker Gunvolt. The result, surprisingly enough, feels like the game Mighty No. 9 should have been all along. You can play as either Beck (Mighty No. 9's hero) or Gunvolt, and there are enough gameplay differences to make two playthroughs an interesting proposition. For example: while a certain collectible allows Beck to do an air dash, it makes Gunvolt to do a double jump instead, meaning the player will be required to find different solutions to the same environmental hazards with each character. Thankfully, the game doesn't dwell too long on the story: there's a small bit of exposition in the beginning, middle, and ending, and that's it. It works just like the NES Mega Man games in this regard, instead of forcing the player to go through copious amount of bad storytelling nonsense like later games in the franchise (and Mighty No. 9) did. It all begins with a short introductory stage in which some of the game's main mechanics are explained. The main new thing here is a 'burst' combo system that kicks off when you defeat enemies at close range, which is, frankly, kind of forgettable. Otherwise, the game controls just like you'd expect, with responsive inputs and tight physics. There's true innovation here, though. You start with a simple shooting weapon that can be upgraded by a plethora of modules, which are scattered throughout each stage. Those will, for example, allow you to add a waving property to your shots, or shoot diagonally, or have more bullets on-screen, or any number of cool customizations to make perfect weapons for every situation. There are a bunch of slots for those, too, and you can change between weapons at will. Whenever you defeat one of the eight robot masters, you get a special module that allows you to add elemental properties to your weapons. So, for example, defeating Cryosphere allows you to add the 'cold' property to your shots, which will be effective in some situations. This is a bit unintuitive when you're playing with Beck, as that character has access to cosmetic changes to his bullets. This way, you can have, say, a fire shot that won't really work as intended without the specific elemental property. This struck me as a very weird design decision; the 'heat' elemental module and the fire-looking shot should be the same thing. After I got over this small confusion, however, I just lost myself for hours in the customization possibilities. This is really an extremely cool feature that allowed me to perfect each weapon in order make the most out of it. Here's an example: the fire boss, Pyrogen, is vulnerable to the wind element. His 'ultimate' attack involves summonning fire projectiles from walls, which are very tricky to dodge. So I had an idea: I added a charged-shot property to my wind weapon that made it swirl around me like a shield. And bingo: this allowed me to stay in place during that attack, completely invulnerable to the tricky fire projectiles. It felt awesome. I do have some pet peeves with the weapons structure. Changing between them takes a few more clicks than it should in the pause menu, and there's no quick-change option. Also, as the bosses have no invulnerability period after being shot, you can barrage them nonstop, making it harder to discern which weapon is more effective against them. An excellent sollution could have been to add different frames of animation to each enemy when they're hit with their weaknesses. All of this fades to the background, however, in face of another trump card: Mighty Gunvolt Burst actually features excellent level design. Each stage forces you to flex your platforming muscles in different, fun ways, and gone are the unpolished sections and ridiculous difficulty spikes that plagued Mighty No. 9. TL;DR: Mighty Gunvolt Burst genuinely surprised me with it slick action gameplay. Better yet: it adds true innovation in the options to customize your weapons, allowing your own creativity to take over. Yes, there are interface problems that are reminiscent of Mighty No. 9, but the vastly superior level design makes this a much better game, a must-play for Mega Man fans, and a safe recommendation for anyone interested in action platformers. Rating: 8.0
It's commonplace nowadays to refer to The Legend of Zelda as formulaic, but the franchise is no stranger to sweeping change. From Ocarina of Time's 3D revolution to the touch-based DS experiments, Nintendo's flagship adventure series has tried quite a few new directions, with varying levels of success. None of those experiments, however, were as comprehensive as Breath of the Wild. And none of them were ultimately as fantastic. This sense of newness is made clear from the beginning, in which the player gets immediately cast as a long-slumbering Link, without any sort of exposition. The character has no memory, and only wakes up from his ressurection chamber following a mysterious voice echoing in his head. The first moments of the game are spent exploring the Great Plateau, a location in central Hyrule that serves as an introduction to the game's main mechanics. However, after you're able to exit the Plateau thanks to your paraglider and tablet-like sheikah slate, you can go anywhere you please, including straight to the ruins of Hyrule Castle, where Calamity Ganon, the entitity who brought the world to ruin 100 years ago, waits. For a series that has become heavy on hand-holding, things are off to a great start. The astounding level of freedom given to the player is only possible thanks to Link's game-changing ability to climb almost any surface. Previous Zelda titles would separate areas of the game by throwing unpassable mountains between them; here, each mountain is simply a new invitation to explore. The full-fledged physics engine, meanwhile, makes traversing each area even more addictive, as things just click together in a very organic way. As someone who loves seamless exploration, I can get frustrated by intrusive story-heavy sections, all-too-common in releases nowadays. Breath of the Wild eschews this approach in a genius way: Link is soon able to recover several pictures in his sheikah slate, apparantly taken by Princess Zelda before the calamity. By finding the spots in those pictures, he can recover his memory piece by piece. This makes the story essentially a collectible, to be experienced according to the player's investigation skills, and one of the many reasons to thoroughly explore the world. The game's Hyrule is a character unto itself: a post-apocaliptic world with signs of war and destruction at every corner, but which manages to also be extremely inviting in its pastoral beauty. Scattered over 15 seamlessly-connected, sprawling regions are plenty of ruins, but also towns, stables, landmarks, quirky characters, enemy camps, and (of course) a large number of secrets to uncover. Curiosity is always rewarded, sometimes with weapons or smaller collectibles, sometimes with large boss-like enemies or shrines. Oh yeah, the shrines. You see, one of the longest-running Zelda traditions are its dungeons. You'd get to them (usually in linear order), solve their puzzles, collect treasure (including the special items needed to complete them), and beat the boss at the end. Breath of the Wild, however, completely reimagines how this works. There are 120 shrines to find, and those are like bite-sized dungeons with puzzles and treasure chests. At the end of each of them, you get a spirit orb, needed to permanently increase energy and stamina. I'm of the mind that some Zelda titles can overdo dungeons, making them interminable sections of puzzle after puzzle in which I'm unable to even save and continue from where I stopped; for that reason, this new approach was a huge breath of fresh air. It also helps that the puzzles here are modular: many of them have several possible solutions, depending on how creative you want to get. Of course, dungeons had an imponence that smaller shrines just can't match. This is where the actual stand-in for dungeons come into play. There are four of them, and they are probably the most epic thing I've seen in any Zelda game, ever. They have some key differences from traditional dungeons in how they work: each is one giant puzzle you need to solve progressively, and the ingenuity of their interconnected designs made me feel like an engineer at times for mastering them. Speaking of story, this is a series-best. The melancholy of a devastated Hyrule can make each memory you recover extremely bittersweet, as you meet the champions that were supposed to fight the calamity, each with their own particular relationship with Link, and delve into the most well-developed Princess Zelda character we've ever been graced with. it's weird to admit it, but Breath of the Wild single-handedly makes the entire catalogue of previous 3D Zelda games somewhat obsolete. Going back to the old approach would mean abandoning the extreme sense of freedom that pushes this game so much above everything else that's out right now. Either under the lens of the Zelda series, the open world genre, or gaming as an art form, Breath of the Wild is nothing short of a masterpiece.
My opinion on the relationship between gaming and storytelling is... well, complicated. Stories have always been a very efficient way to make players emotionally invested in a game, but the trend of turning all of the spotlights to the story, while actual gameplay takes on a supporting role, isn't something that usually appeals to me. This is pretty much what happens in Night in the Woods, and yet the game's many charms kept me coming back until its shiver-inducing ending. You play as Mae, a 20-year-old female cat who drops out of college for initially unknown reasons and decides to come back to her parents' home in the idyllic small town of Possum Springs. Once there, Mae gets to explore the town by walking around with mild platforming elements, such as jumping onto wires and tops of buildings. That's all there is to the game's platforming side, though, as there is virtually no challenge to Mae's jumps, no new abilities to unlock, and no enemies to kill. Instead, Night in the Woods plays out like an animated indie comic book, and in that ambition it's truly something special. The lovely Possum Springs is home to inumerous antropomorphic animals, many of whom Mae can interact with. The town has clearly seen better days, as most of Mae's chidhood places have closed up or exist in significantly decayed forms. The bulk of the game consists in developing Mae's relationships with the townsfolk and rekindling her old friendships, while slowly uncovering the mysteries pertaining both to her past and to the weird happenings around town. The writing is, for the most part, excellent, even if some of the text-heavy sections can go a little overboard on the innocuous worldbuilding details. It certainly helps that the game's graphics and sound are nothing short of phenomenal. There's a sense of peace about just wandering through the game's world, making small talk with the townsfolk, while admiring the colorful art direction and soaking in the subdued, melancholy soundtrack. Small details, such as the raccoons and squirrels interacting with background objects, the cars passing by in the Towne Centre, or the leaves flowing in the wind as you walk nearby, give the whole experience a sense of joy that's hard to explain with words. Night in the Woods progresses at a slow pace, which fits the decadent small town vibe. This, however, can be a problem in regards to the exploration. Even though new areas open up every now and then, the days can sort of blur together as you walk the same streets, check the same places, and talk to the same people. There's a monotony about the experience which simply isn't much fun. Like the name of the game suggests, however, there's a fair tinge of suspense about the storyline, and that's what keeps things interesting. At some point the strange occurrences, which are initially only hinted at, start piling up quickly, leading to a final chapter which is truly phenomenal from a storytelling standpoint (if even less exciting than the rest of the game when it comes to actual gameplay). Then there's one of the game's most interesting aspects: Mae's scrapbook. Her drawings are essentially collectibles, gotten after experiencing specific passages of the game's story. This is a fine reason for the player to try and develop the various minor storylines Night in the Woods offers, several of which can be genuinely funny, creepy, heartwarming, of all of that at the same time. My big complaint here is that you can't fill out the scrapbook in a single playthrough, as choosing to spend time with a specific character will often mean eschewing a different storyline altogether. TL;DR: It's hard to judge a title like Night in the Woods. The coming-of-age story hit all the right notes with me, with lovable characters, an excellent setting, and just the right amount of creepiness and serious themes. The truth is, however, that the gameplay itself left me entirely unimpressed, even bored at times. I kept wanting the game to offer exploration that's more interesting outside of the story progression, to no avail. If you want a challenging platformer with pleasant gameplay progression, you should probably look elsewhere; if you don't mind lackluster gameplay in name of a truly excellent story, however, this is a game you won't soon forget. Rating: 6.5/10
As a Brazilian, it should come as no surprise I have a keen sense of nostalgia for the Master System. It was my second ever console, after the NES, and it went on to be a staple of my childhood. The Wonder Boy franchise (which was localized in Brazil as Turma da Mônica, after a popular comic book series) has always stood tall among the console's library, and now one of its best titles has received a loving remaster for a new era. The Dragon's Trap is one of gaming earliest metroidvanias, predating even that particular term. You play as the titular Wonder Boy (or, in the case of this remaster, as Wonder Girl if you want), who is soon placed under a curse and turned into an anthropomorphic, fire-spewing lizard. Subsequently, you're thrown into a big 2D open world and it's your task to explore it in search for new transformations, each with its own abilities, which in turn allow you to explore new areas. The game's graphics have gotten a much needed coat of paint, making it look absolutely lovely. The hand-drawn animations are crisp and detailed, in stark contrast with the Master System original's rigidness. In fact, the graphical work is so well done that it completely changes how the controls feel in regards to the in-game physics, even though those remain 100% unchanged (as the original graphics mode, accessible by the mere click of a button, can attest). It's amazing how the mere addition of extra frames of animation can turn a control scheme that's overly slippy into something that feels just right. As a clear labor of love for the original, however, Dragon's Trap misses an excellent opportunity to solve some of the game design quirks that haven't aged well. A few of the game's many secrets, for exemple, are almost impossible to find without a guide, and each new sword or piece of armor hold new powers that are never properly explained. For example: there's a sword which allows the player to transform between characters at any moment, an extremely important ability, but you'd never know it (or how to actually do it) unless you go looking elsewhere for the information. TL;DR: At around 5 hours to get everything, Wonder Boy: The Dragon's trap is a short but sweet metroidvania platformer. The new graphics are nothing short of stunning, and the extra frames of animation single-handedly manage to fix the otherwise unchanged physics system, which used to feel overly rigid and slippy. Some of the more obtuse conventions from back in the day, such as new powers that are never properly explained, sadly remain, but the game still emerges as a lovely experience that can appeal to gamers old and new. Rating: 7.5/10
It's commonplace nowadays to refer to The Legend of Zelda as formulaic, but the franchise is no stranger to sweeping change. From Ocarina of Time's 3D revolution to the touch-based DS experiments, Nintendo's flagship adventure series has tried quite a few new directions, with varying levels of success. None of those experiments, however, were as comprehensive as Breath of the Wild. And none of them were ultimately as fantastic. This sense of newness is made clear from the beginning, in which the player gets immediately cast as a long-slumbering Link, without any sort of exposition. The character has no memory, and only wakes up from his ressurection chamber following a mysterious voice echoing in his head. The first moments of the game are spent exploring the Great Plateau, a location in central Hyrule that serves as an introduction to the game's main mechanics. However, after you're able to exit the Plateau thanks to your paraglider and tablet-like sheikah slate, you can go anywhere you please, including straight to the ruins of Hyrule Castle, where Calamity Ganon, the entitity who brought the world to ruin 100 years ago, waits. For a series that has become heavy on hand-holding, things are off to a great start. The astounding level of freedom given to the player is only possible thanks to Link's game-changing ability to climb almost any surface. Previous Zelda titles would separate areas of the game by throwing unpassable mountains between them; here, each mountain is simply a new invitation to explore. The full-fledged physics engine, meanwhile, makes traversing each area even more addictive, as things just click together in a very organic way. As someone who loves seamless exploration, I can get frustrated by intrusive story-heavy sections, all-too-common in releases nowadays. Breath of the Wild eschews this approach in a genius way: Link is soon able to recover several pictures in his sheikah slate, apparantly taken by Princess Zelda before the calamity. By finding the spots in those pictures, he can recover his memory piece by piece. This makes the story essentially a collectible, to be experienced according to the player's investigation skills, and one of the many reasons to thoroughly explore the world. The game's Hyrule is a character unto itself: a post-apocaliptic world with signs of war and destruction at every corner, but which manages to also be extremely inviting in its pastoral beauty. Scattered over 15 seamlessly-connected, sprawling regions are plenty of ruins, but also towns, stables, landmarks, quirky characters, enemy camps, and (of course) a large number of secrets to uncover. Curiosity is always rewarded, sometimes with weapons or smaller collectibles, sometimes with large boss-like enemies or shrines. Oh yeah, the shrines. You see, one of the longest-running Zelda traditions are its dungeons. You'd get to them (usually in linear order), solve their puzzles, collect treasure (including the special items needed to complete them), and beat the boss at the end. Breath of the Wild, however, completely reimagines how this works. There are 120 shrines to find, and those are like bite-sized dungeons with puzzles and treasure chests. At the end of each of them, you get a spirit orb, needed to permanently increase energy and stamina. I'm of the mind that some Zelda titles can overdo dungeons, making them interminable sections of puzzle after puzzle in which I'm unable to even save and continue from where I stopped; for that reason, this new approach was a huge breath of fresh air. It also helps that the puzzles here are modular: many of them have several possible solutions, depending on how creative you want to get. Of course, dungeons had an imponence that smaller shrines just can't match. This is where the actual stand-in for dungeons come into play. There are four of them, and they are probably the most epic thing I've seen in any Zelda game, ever. They have some key differences from traditional dungeons in how they work: each is one giant puzzle you need to solve progressively, and the ingenuity of their interconnected designs made me feel like an engineer at times for mastering them. Speaking of story, this is a series-best. The melancholy of a devastated Hyrule can make each memory you recover extremely bittersweet, as you meet the champions that were supposed to fight the calamity, each with their own particular relationship with Link, and delve into the most well-developed Princess Zelda character we've ever been graced with. it's weird to admit it, but Breath of the Wild single-handedly makes the entire catalogue of previous 3D Zelda games somewhat obsolete. Going back to the old approach would mean abandoning the extreme sense of freedom that pushes this game so much above everything else that's out right now. Either under the lens of the Zelda series, the open world genre, or gaming as an art form, Breath of the Wild is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Given how I love open-ended adventures with a focus on crafting and building, you'd think I'd be all over Minecraft. However, some of that game's quirks, such as the first-player perspective, questionable character design, and lack of objectives, are too off-putting for me. If you change all of those to something more akin to my tastes, you get Dragon Quest Builders, and that makes Square Enix's take on the survival genre a game I surely won't soon forget. One of the most obvious ways in which Builders expands upon Minecraft is in how it plops an honest-to-goodness RPG on top of the formula, complete with quirky characters and great dialogue that sometimes gets lough-outloud funny. Your character is the legendary Builder, who after a long slumber wakes up in a time humans have lost the ability to build structures. The goddess speaks to you in order to get you on your way, and from the get go she clarifies you're not a hero. This means no matter how many monsters you defeat, you never get stronger. What you get, however, is loot, which is used to craft structures, rooms, equipment, and whatever else strikes your fancy. The game is structured in chapters, and there are four in total. In each of them, you'll help the population of a portion of the game's world, striving to return ruined settlements to their former glory, before finally tackling a boss battle. Each of the towns you help bring back to life has a different focus (which I won't spoil here), and this makes the whole thing feel fresh each time. Depending on the needs of your fellow countrymen, you'll figure out new recipes to use in the game's several different crafting stations. Of course, it also helps that each section offers a gigantic open world to explore, which means Builders's four chapters feel like four different games, each with the potential to last for dozens of hours. There are many missions to undertake in each of them, along with tens of secrets to unveil. This is a game that truly rewards the curious, as every new biome you come across is sure to present a bunch of new enemies, plants, minerals, and assorted materials to help you in your building quests. The depth is huge, and the gameplay loop is so addictive that I often found myself almost physically unable to put the controller down. If you fancy just sitting back and building to your heart's content, without the pressures of a plot and specific missions, the game has got you covered with Terra Incognita, a full-on sandbox mode. Here your settlement can span an entire continent, and you can even share specific structures with other players online. As you progress through each of the game's main chapters, new islands become available in Terra Incognita, allowing you to get previously unavailabe materials. You'll often get frendly mosters visiting your settlement, and can even take them on foraging missions with you. You can't really talk to them like you can to the humans in the game's main mode, however, and can't really assign rooms or buildings to them. This makes your settlement feel like a ghost town, and I have to admit it made Terra Incognita's novelty wear off a bit fast. TL;DR: Dragon Quest Builders is a gem of an adventure that allows you more freedom that any entry or spinoff in this beloved series. It takes the Minecraft formula of building and survival and adds a Dragon Quest RPG on top of it, complete with quirky characters, epic missions, and the franchise's well-known wildlife. It enthralled me for weeks with its depth and its charm, and has become one of my favorite PS4 games so far. Rating: 9.5/10
Two of the Playstation brand's most celebrated mascots, Ratchet & Clank arrived on PS4 in this remake of their original PS2 title. Having never played the series, and being a fan of 3D platformers, this was a game I eagerly anticipated. What I found out is that the series (or, at least, this particular game) lacks many of the things that made me love the genre in the first place. As the game opens, Ratchet is a mechanic apprentice lombax who lives on a peaceful planet but dreams of going in adventures and becoming a hero. One day, has a fateful encounter with Clank, an escaped robot from a grim warbot factory in another planet. Clank wants to stop the evil Chairman Drek from destroying planets with his newest weapon, the deplanetizer, and so the duo embark on an adventure to warn the Galactic Rangers. Yes, it's all very derivative of Star Wars, which is a real bummer when one considers the endless possibilities for a cartoonesque space opera universe. The titular duo's gameplay partnership is reminiscent of one of the genre's pinnacles: Banjo-Kazooie. Ratchet walks, jumps, and attacks enemies, while Clank, affixed on the lombax's back, aids the gameplay with special movements such as shortly hovering in mid-air. That's where the similarities with Banjo stop, however, as R&C features linear, story-driven progression instead of the more open-ended format seen on Rare's classic series. Collectibles are present, although the linear story-driven nature of the game hardly compelled me to go out of my way to find them. The most important items are the many wacky guns and weapons you can acquire, which help Ratchet defeat enemies in a variety of ways. They're fun to use, but the lack of a Metroidvania-like push for backtracking feels like a wasted opportunity. It should be said that the game's performance and production values are stellar. Graphics are crisp and colorful, while movement is extremely fluid. The music is at odds with this, as Ratchet & Clank's soundtrack eschews catchy tunes for generic orchestrated action themes, usually seen on big-budget animation movies. Sadly, the music isn't the only time the game shows its obsession with being a big-budget animation movie, which is generally to its great detriment. The strict adherence to a script brings forth problems such as the aforementioned linearity, which is frustrating in an universe full of potential like this one. Characters also constantly banter on screen, spewing out tired quips and ho-hum jokes. This is bad by itself, but gets aggravating fast in more difficult sessions, since you'll have to listen to every single line again after each time you die. The game can certainly be fun, however. Like I said, weapons are a highlight, and there are several action-heavy sequences that can be exhillarating. What is missing is a way to just sit back and explore after each of those sequences, or at least meaningful reasons to do so. As is, Ratchet & Clank ends up feeling like a mere tie-in to their first movie, which was released concurrently, or a warm-up for young players before they get into other franchises in the genre with deeper, better-designed gameplay. TL;DR: I think the main problem with Ratchet & Clank is not that it lacks ambition, but that its ambition is woefully misdirected. Instead of wanting players to discover and explore its admittedly alluring universe, it wants to strictly guide them through a mediocre movie plotline. I mean, they released an actual animated movie alongside the game, so why not try more of a focus on open-ended exploration here instead? Rating: 5.0
I never owned a Wii or a Gamecube, as both those consoles were released during an extended break I took from console gaming. So when I got the backwards compatible Wii U in 2013, as a huge Zelda fan, one of the first things I did was to get Wii's Twilight Princess. Halfway through the second dungeon, I gave up, as I simply couldn't stomach playing through a 3D Zelda with motion controls. Twilight Princess HD, then, was a very welcome way for me to cover this particular hole in my Zelda backlog. The first thing you have to know about Twilight Princess is that it was supposed to be a 'back to basics' of sorts for 3D Zelda. After two entries that successfully strayed from the Ocarina of Time blueprint, Nintendo probably thought it was time to be less bold. The result is a game that doesn't offer a lot in terms of innovation in the gameplay loop. Thankfully, this allowed a razor-sharp focus for the game design, resulting in a thoroughly fun experience. Link starts his adventure by helping solve problems in his pastoral hometown, which offers some basis to a few of the game mechanics you'll come across later on. Soon enough, however, a strange portal rips reality apart, sending forth otherwordly, hostile beasts. As a result, all of the town youngsters are kidnapped, and Link ends up transformed into a wolf for trying to cross the portal. He's then immediately acquainted with a strange little creature called Midna, who goes on to serve as the title's gameplay companion (and is thankfully a vast improvement over Ocarina's Navi). Overall, the storytelling is pretty good. Midna is an interesting character with intentions that are less than clear initially, and it's nice to watch as her bond with Link unfolds through the game. The cast of NPCs are all the right kind of quirky (you know, classic Zelda), which also helps in regards to the numerous side quests they present. If there's one thing that actually stands out here, though, it's the dungeon design. I admit I've always been more of an overworld guy, meaning I usually prefer to explore the vast wilderness of Hyrule, and see dungeons as a fun diversion instead of a main gameplay focus. In Twilight Princess, however, the dungeons are so excellently designed that I found myself constantly yearning to find the next one (although yeah, the blandness of the overworld probably helps here, too). Two absolute standouts are the Goron Mines, with its extremely cool use of the iron boots, and the Yeti's Mansion, which has a strangely ominous atmosphere and has a progression theme that's unlike anything the series has ever done for a dungeon. TL;DR: As far as 3D Zelda games go, Twilight Princess might be the most formulaic of them all. Still, this is the Zelda formula we're talking about. Even if the game plays it mostly safe, it's still a compelling, expansive, extremely well-round-out adventure. And yes, it features some of the most impressive dungeon designs to ever grace the series. If, like me, you missed out the first time around, Twilight Princess HD is a great way to remedy that. Rating: 8.5
Looking back at my video-gaming life, I don't think any franchise has gotten more of my hours than Sid Meier's Civilization. There's just something extremely alluring about starting a small stone age empire and expanding it as you see fit until the actual future, and the turn-based nature of the series gets me hopelessly addicted every time. Civ VI was no different, even though at launch it didn't quite rise to the heights of the last couple of numbered entries. If you're a newcomer, here's how it works: the game begings by placing you (or rather, your first settler) in a suitable spot for a first city. You immediately build it and start managing several outputs, such as gold, production, food, science, faith, and culture. Each output allows you to develop your empire (for example: science allows you to discover new technologies, while production lets your city generate buildings and military troops). As you explore, you'll come across new landscapes and natural resources, which allow you to build better troops and new structures, including wonders of the world. And of course, you'll come across other civilizations, which can be befriended or antagonized at your leisure. Civ VI's biggest innovation is how it utilizes tiles around each city you build. Now, each new building, zone or improvement has to go on a specific tile. This means you'll end up with cities that are more focused than before, which adds a lot of strategic nuance. If you settled near a mountain, a land feature which gives several science bonuses, you'll probably want that city to focus on science. Likewise, desert tiles allow you to build important one-per-world wonders, such as the Pyramids or Petra. This sort of decision making is what makes Civ amazing, and here the process is improved by the added depth. With the steps that were taken in order to streamline this entry, Civ VI is probably the most accessible the series has ever been. That's certainly a good thing, after all, Civ's barrier of entry can be sky-high, with a veritable encyclopedia of concepts to grasp. Some of those decisions go over less well in the strategic side, such as not limiting resource usage to the amount of sources you have. Still, that's a minor qualm in the big scheme of things, and it does mean less numbers to track. Artificial intelligence, which has historically been a sore spot in the series, is an actual problem, however. In fact, at launch, it was nearly non-functional. For example: a neighbouring civ who is much weaker than you in every way will keep sending prophets to convert your cities to their faith, even after you threatened them with swift military action. This makes it very hard to play that oh-so-satisfying diplomatic game, although this has been cited as a point of continuous improvement by developer Firaxis. TL;DR: Civ VI is awesome, but then again, it would take a lot of effort to make any Civ game anything but. It still ranks behind IV and V in my book currently, but the new foundations are solid enough that I can see it overtaking those beloved entries as Firaxis's continuous quality improvement does its thing. Until then, what you need to know is that it's as addictive as ever. Just take care to not have an entire weekend pass in the blink of an eye while you explore, build, and wage war. It's certainly happened to me, uh, a 'few' times in the last twenty years. Rating: 9.0
Initially announced as Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is an Atlus JRPG that mixes several elements from those beloved franchises. Luckily, the result is a game that's very much its own idea. The protagonist is Itsuki Aoi, a high school kid who finds himself involved in an interdimensional war with mythical beings of another world. The force that allows humans to fight those beings is called 'performa', which gets more powerful depending on each person's artistic talents. As such, the cover-up for Itsuki and his ever-growing group of comrtades is Fortuna, a developing talent agency. In his quest, Itsuki roams Tokyo to find special gates to another dimension (called the Idolosphere), where colorful turn-based battles take place. Exploration of the overworld is very limited, as the game's Tokyo is made of several self-contained spaces instead of a single open world. Each of the game's several Idolosphere-based dungeons, however, offers more secrets and hidden passages to uncover. One of the game's best traits are the battles, which are extremely colorful turn-based affairs. They're technically deep without being overwhelming, and require players to carefully choose between several attack types and magical elements in order to maximize combo sections. The enemies are all based on the Fire Emblem universe, which adds a great layer of fan service. Equally interesting is Tokyo Mirage Session's focus on the Japanese music industry. As the story progresses, Itsuki and his friends go through several side quest to awaken their performa, which invariably lead to music videos showcasing their development as artists. Now, I don't really know the first think about J-Pop, nor am I really interested in it, but even so I though this was a pretty nifty idea. The music itself, while not my cup of tea, should be pleasant to fans of the genre, and the insight into Japan's ubiquitous idol industry makes for a novel background. There's also a weapon-crafting side that's vital to progression in the game. Each character has their own weapons, and each weapon offers different attacks and static abilities to learn. There a lot of depth here, and I often spent many minutes lost in the intricacies of transforming hard-earned loot into fine new swords, lances, and axes. The one problem is that the process is a bit obnoxious, as you're forced to skip the same animation every time you make a new item. Finally, there's the elephant in the room: the censorship. This is something that almost never bothers me, and sometimes it even rids otherwise fine releases of cringe-worthy sections. (Hey there, petting minigame in Fire Emblem Fates!) But here, there's no two ways about it: it's a problem. It gets to the point that whole plot points stop making sense altogether until you search the web and discover that critical details were censored. It's a bummer, and makes it harder to actualy care about the story. TL;DR: TMS has all the characteristics of a classic Atlus RPG, which means satisfying turn-based combat, but also some anachronic conventions (such as limited exploration and animations that get repeated over and over). Although marred by censorship of critical plot points, the final package is a fun adventure with a music industry-based background that I hadn't seen in a game before. It's admittedly a niche title, but if you're a fan of JRPGs, or Fire Emblem, or J-Pop (or all of the above), this one should be right up your alley. Rating: 7.5
Sony has been getting a reputation for its story-driven games, and in that regard the Uncharted series is the company’s crowning jewel. I’m usually not very fond of such titles, as they can often get lost in their movie-wannabe aspirations to the point of severely affecting the gameplay. Uncharted 4, however, won me over by combining pristine level design with an unusually slick amalgamation of gameplay and storytelling. Like other games in the franchise, A Thief’s End is a linear story-driven adventure. It puts you in the shoes of Nathan Drake, who’s like a modern-era Indiana Jones (a somewhat smug, yet ultimately likeable treasure hunter). As the game begins, Drake has left his globe-trotting life behind him, and now has a happy marriage, a job, and a pretty much regular life. Of course, that generally does not a good story make, and soon enough unforeseen circumstances force our hero out of retirement. My favorite thing about Uncharted 4 is how it manages to feel open and expansive in spite of its extreme linearity. The game spans many settings, from Italy to Scotland to Madagascar, and your path to each section’s main goal is filled with small environmental details and incredibly beautiful vistas. The nature of the gameplay organically guides you forward, and there’s not a single invisible wall to be seen. All of this adds up to a great sense of immersion, which is only broken by having to go through the same in-game dialogue each time you die. There are basically two types of gameplay sections here. The best are focused on exploration, in which you’ll perform all sort of dexterous climbing and platforming, while continuously moving towards a goal. There are also collectibles to find in each area in the form of small treasures, which unlock cool novelties in the ‘bonus’ screen, such as graphical skins, sound effects, and gameplay addons. The not so great sections are the ones which involve cover-based shooting. Don’t get me wrong; those can be kind of fun in small doses, but I felt Uncharted 4 features a bit too many of them. A plethora of different weapons, each with its own benefits and weaknesses, help to make things a bit more interesting, and there are a few genuinely exhillarating moments (such as a car chase that’s worthy of the most insane action flicks). Of course, we’re talking about a story-driven game, so an action movie is very much what Uncharted 4 feels like. Surprisingly, this isn’t often to the detriment of the gameplay, as the spot-on level design means even the extreme action sections in which you don’t really do much feel superbly rewarding. The story itself is, well, an action movie’s story, meaning it’s at times fun and compelling, but also filled with some pretty egregious plot holes (such as the remote, ancient pirate recruiting challenge that obviously would need to be rebuilt from the ground up after each time someone failed it). TL;DR Uncharted 4 is a fine final chapter to Nathan Drake’s adventures. The sense of immersion is excellent, which often makes you forget (or just don’t care about) the game’s lack of an extensive world to explore. Given that the best gameplay sections are precisely the exploratory ones, this is quite a feat of game design. Even though the storytelling isn’t without its cheap devices and plot holes, the writing is pleasant enough to round up a very nice package. Rating: 8.0
Back when I was getting really into video gaming, 2D fighting was all the rage. It all started with Capcom's Street Fighter II, but soon it was another japanese company that established itself as the absolute master of the genre: SNK. With Capcom's recent ill-advised handling of the latest Street Fighter title, it seems fitting that SNK's premier franchise, The King of Fighters, would end up being the best option for those who want to get a brawl going on the PS4. Unlike Street Fighter V's reinvent-the-wheel crap, KOF XIV goes absolutely old school when it comes to main gameplay modes. Yes, there is an arcade mode here, and cheap tries to go all cinematographic on the storytelling are nowhere to be seen. There's an excellent local versus mode, too, as well as offline challenges and online multiplayer (although I haven't really devoted time to those last two, as they're just not my thing). Like traditional KOF titles, battles are mainly done three-on-three (as in: you choose a trio of characters, and control each of them at different points), which has always been one of the series' defining traits, but there's also an option to go simply one-on-one. The roster is a big highlight, as it includes a lot of old favorites, a bunch of cool newcomers (and some not so cool, such as sleepy-Chinese-guy), and also a few SNK characters who were never before on a KOF title, such as Samurai Shodown's Nakoruru and Fatal Fury's Tung Fu Rue. Controls are responsive and intuitive, and the developers went the extra mile to make the game accessible. For example: a simple sequence of quick, connecting weak hits will automatically develop into a very cool looking, if not necessarily efficient, special combo. Speaking of combos, my main complaint about the game is that they went perhaps a bit overboard with them. You see, I'm a casual player at heart, and I have no intention of memorizing move priorities or hitbox minutiae. As such, I'm all for mastering character strategies and special moves, but I'm just not interested in chaining ridiculously long combo sequences that all require absolute precision. Seeing how those can end up depleting over half of your opponent's life bar, such moves become an absolute must against even the CPU on higher difficulties. A focus on shorter combo sequences, giving opponents more shots at recovering, would do a lot to make the game feel less like a mathematical chore in these situations. TL;DR: Capcom dropped the ball big time for me with its Street Fighter V, but leave it to SNK to pick it back up and deliver an excellent fighting experience to everyone, and not only the most hardcore tournament players (even if an overreliance on long combos actualy threatens this premise). A great roster and excellent, responsive controls, along with a smattering of different modes, ensure King of FIghters XIV is so far the best new way to relive the early 90's fighting craze this generation. 8.0/10
It's ironic that Axiom Verge was released on Wii U on the same day Metroid Prime: Federation Force hit the 3DS. That's because, while Nintendo's own portable title largely failed to entice those clamoring for more Metroid, Thomas Happ's indie homage to Samus Aran's adventures is nothing short of a masterpiece. The game begins with a quick story introduction: you're a scientist who went through a mysterious lab explosion and, instead of dying, woke up on a very strange world. You start pretty much helpless, but soon, with the help of a mysterious voice in your head, manage to get a weapon to start things up. The basic gameplay is all classic 2D Metroid: you'll explore the many interconnected sections of the world, all the while looking for power ups to attack and energy, as well as new weapons and abilities that open up previously closed paths. What makes Axiom Verge something truly special, aside from its sheer mastery of the metroidvania formula, is how it differentiates itself with some honest-to-goodness innovative gameplay elements. Almost all of the new abilities you come across refuse to follow the tried-and-true foundations of the genre; instead, they're exciting new solutions to the same gameplay challenges, making the whole thing few extremely fresh. The best idea on display is the Axiom Disruptor, a weapon which allows you to "bug" (or "debug") certain enemies and structures. Whenever an enemy gets hit with a strong enough blast of the weapon, they will get all glitchy, reminiscent of actual 8-bit glitches from back in the day, and this will change their properties and behavior. This is used in incredibly clever ways, allowing you to solve puzzles, open secret pathways and find collectibles all over the game world. To make everything even more enjoyable, the story manages to be a real highlight (and given how I'm generally quite unimpressed with video game stories, that's really saying something). This is a tale of strange phenomena in a very peculiar reality, and how a scientific mind might react and adapt to them. There are some genuinely touching moments here, with a healthy dose of goosebump-inducing macabre details. If there's something that might elicit complaints about Axiom Verge it's how the game requires absolute dedication if you want to see everything. Some of the more obtuse secrets can be kind of a pain to track down, especially given how the game lacks a quick-travel device. This is kind of a bummer to completionists such as myself, especially since it's impossible to actually get every last weapon in a single playthrough. Lastly, there's one big plus to the Wii U version, and that's the gamepad. Being able to check the map and change weapons without pausing is a godsend, as it allows the game's excellent sense of immersion to remain intact at all times. TL;DR: Axiom Verge is pretty much everything I could ever hope for in a new Metroid game, with the added perk that it manages to absolutely be its own thing. Come to think of it, as a big fan of innovation in games, that makes it even more memorable than a brand new Super Metroid could probably be to me. It's one of the best games of recent memory, and definitely one of the crowning jewels of this generation. 9.5/10
Helping fund a game through Kickstarter is often a dangerous proposition. Some end up not getting made at all, while others go through changes in scope or release plans. Hyper Light Drifter is an example of the latter; I was really looking forward to play the now-cancelled Wii U version, especially because of a the map possibilities of the gamepad. Thankfully, it did get released on PS4, and it very much lives up to the hype. There's little story in the game, or at least little discernible story. Everything is mostly told through textless cutscenes, and it's pretty tough to follow. You play as someone who's obviously sick, coughing blood and experiencing hallucinations, and the plot (supposedly) revolves around searching for a cure. It's unfortunate that the details are so fuzzy, because the world is absolutely gorgeous, with excellent stylized graphics, insanely good music, and an ominous atmosphere that allows for some pretty exciting exploration. Hyper Light Drifter plays similarly to top-down Zelda titles, albeit a bit more on the high-adrenaline side. Action is often relentless, and dungeons are very well-designed, making the gameplay loop quite addictive. Combat is one of the best aspects, as every single enemy requires that you learn a pattern instead of mindlessly button-mashing. The search for collectibles is also quite engrossing, as the game gives subtle clues that always make you feel smart when you spot them. The lack of clear communication with the player can sometimes be a problem here as well, though; for example, you probably won't find out what exactly each new set of clothes do unless you google it up. TL;DR: If you enjoy top-down action-adventures, Hyper Light Drifter is a game you should not miss. With great graphics, music, and a very peculiar feel to its worldbuilding, it offers quite a few hours of great, fluid gameplay. The storytelling and overall communication could afford to be a bit clearer, but it's hard to get hung up on that when there is such an awesome setting to explore. 8.5/10
A few years ago, Square Enix released Bravely Default, a little masterpiece of an RPG that got sadly dragged down towards the end by an insane amount of grinding and repetition. For the sequel, I was hoping they'd avoid this sort of thing. Instead, we get what amounts to a few dozen extra hours of, well, repetition. Good things first: the game still looks and sounds great, while the job wheel got expanded and is as fun as ever to slowly discover. The turn-based combat also inherits the excellence of the previous title, with options to take extra turns, save turns for later, and even new additions such as the ability to chain battle sequences and gain more experience. All of this makes battles a lot more dynamic than usual for similar titles. What begins to pull the whole thing apart is the world map choice. Basically, it's the same as the first game, with the addition of a few scattered new explorable sites. This means we get much of the same towns as Bravely Default, and (gasp) even some of the exact same dungeons. This is especially frustrating after the aforementioned grind that was the first game's ending; I already explored these same locations five or six times there, so chances are giving me more of the same here wouldn't really be a good idea. The story, sadly, is also much weaker here. Bravely Default's late-game grind was at least justifiable story-wise, and you got to feel that pleasant sting of realization when you figured out just what was going on all along. Bravely Second's tale, by contrast, feels largely soulless, with some atrocious dialogue sections and inexplicably lame catchphrases ("for the gravy", really?). Even the reveal of the subtitle secret, one of the coolest moments in the first game, falls completely flat by virtue of just how forced it is. I truly feel Square Enix has the makings of another classic RPG franchise with the Bravely series. Bravely Second, however, is a step backwards by pretty much every metric. If we ever get a third game, let's hope they finally decide to move on to greener pastures instead of trying to retread the same content over and over and over again. Rating: 5.0
After a protracted development period that saw many early supporters turn to non-believers, Keiji Inafune's spiritual successor to Mega Man proves it wasn't really worth the wait after all. Mighty No. 9 follows closely the formula of Mega Man X games, with an initial stage followed by eight freely selectable master robot levels. It strays where it matters the most, however, as the level design spans the spectrum from passable to absolutely atrocious. Unlike masterpieces like Mega Man 3, the difficulty spikes feel supremely forced instead of organic, making some of the sections an exercise in frustration. The game introduces a dash mechanic that is actually a pretty neat idea: you first weaken enemies, then have the opportunity to quickly dash through them to get temporary power-ups. Sadly, other gameplay details are less then acceptable. There's the inability to change weapons while paused, for example. Or the E-tank replacement that inexplicably vanishes after each death, preventing hoarding and pretty much completely undermining the item's usefulness. Then there's the fact that the game looks, in a word, horrible. The graphics are all blurry, filled with low-definition assets and those already infamously bad explosion effects. If you're a fan of Mega Man (like I am), Mighty No. 9 can scratch the itch for a few hours. After that, chances are you'll feel so unenthusiastic that it's gonna be hard even finding the will to see it through.
The indie game scene has become pretty much the only place to get your fix of 2D metroidvanias, with quite a few excellent titles in the genre released over the past few years. Chronicles of Teddy, the latest of them to reach Wii U, is an interesting game to review, as its absolute excellence in adventure design is almost matched in intensity by the numerous development problems that used to plague the game upon release. Chronicles of Teddy features only minimal storytelling, but this suits the game's mood very well. You play as an ordinary girl who is called upon by a magical teddy bear to help save a fantasy word, located through a door on her basement. The worldbuilding is awesome, with an ever-present ominous vibe permeating several intricately detailed, pixel-based locales. This is further exarcebated by the incredibly beautiful soundtrack, which is constantly veering across the melancholy and the eerie. A huge library acts as an overworld hub; from there, you'll access the game's four excellently-designed main worlds, as well as several smaller locations and plenty of secrets as well. In true metroidvania fashion, each of the worlds feature a new piece of equipment, which helps you reach previously inaccessible sections. Aside from that, there are a bevy of collectibles as well, and the good news is that they're all consequential in some way. This means that backtracking for them pretty much never felt like a chore to me (even if more "quick-travel" options would be welcome), and the beautiful graphics and music certainly helped in that department. Perhaps the best gameplay quirk is the musicom, an instrument that allows you to communicate to inhabitants of the world in their own music-based language. To do so, however, you must find runes, each of them representing a syllable and accompanying musical note. Not only that, you have to actually learn words from the inhabitants. It's a process that made the game that much more appealing to me, as I honestly had never seen something like that in such a game. So yes, this was turning out to be a pretty unforgettable adventure... until the bugs started mounting. Most of them have thankfully been squashed by now, but that doesn't make the state the game was released in any less ridiculous. Often it would just freeze while you were going through a door. Sometimes the sound would glitch out (and remember, due to the musicom, the game is significantly sound-based). Other times, there were some pretty severe frame-rate drops (which remain to this day in some areas, like the secret Catacombs section). Chronicles of Teddy wouldn't quite have been a ten without the glitches (combat, for example, can be a bit too dodgy sometimes), but it would be pretty damn close. With most of the bugs gone by now, this is a game I do recommend in a heartbeat, but the experience was certainly soured a lot due to the sheer amount of problems I experienced. This means my memories will be forever tainted by faulty development, and as they say, first impressions do matter. Rating: 8.0
Following the success of Fire Emblem: Awakening in finally making Nintendo's storied strategy series popular in a large scale, it was inevitable that we'd get more Fire Emblem action on 3DS. This came true in the form of Fire Emblem Fates, an exciting follow-up that keeps a lot of what made Awakening great and brings its own new ideas to the fold. To further help capturing a more 'casual' audience while keeping hardcore fans happy, FE Fates was initially released as two separate games: Birthright, tailored to be more forgiving and simple, and Conquest, which features harder and more intricate objectives. I chose the latter, as the unforgiving aspect is what made me connect with the series in the first place. While this Pokémon-like release could be seen as a cash-grab, it does make sense in that both games feature completely different campaigns, each with its own recruitable characters. No matter which one you choose, you can get the other as downloadable content for a fraction of the price, which is a nice touch. There's also a third game, called Revelations, which was released exclusively as DLC and works as a mixture of Birthright and Conquest. Bottom line: there's plenty here to sink your time in, provided you don't mind paying a bit extra. Even if you want to get only one of the games, you won't be wanting for gameplay time: I spent over sixty hours to get to the end of Conquest. The gameplay is classic SRPG, consisting of several separate battles in different maps. As you progress through the game, you unlock more and more characters to add to your army, and it's loads of fun to fine-tune each of them with different classes, weapons and stat-boosting items. As usual, the game features permadeath, meaning that dead characters stay dead. This can be turned off, but in my opinion doing so undermines the emotional connection and the battle tension that make the series so great. There are also several difficulty options, which can be toned down (but not up) at any time during the campaign, meaning the game definitely finds a nice middle ground when it comes to accessibility. A returning feature from Awakening is the ability to make children. By making characters fight alongside each other, you can boost their relationship, which can eventually lead to marriage. Doing so will generate children, who can then join your army. The fact that each child inherits abilities from both parents is a great way to try and 'engineer' perfect characters, adding to the strategic depth. It's a bit awkward, from a storytelling standpoint, how children can immediately join the fray; in Awakening, this was explained by time travel, but Fates makes such a mess out of its own explanation that it's better to just ignore it. Speaking of which, this has to be said: the story in the game is the one element that is veritably atrocious. Awakening didn't exactly feature stellar writing either, but here things get taken to another level entirely. Several plot points are so incredibly convoluted as to stop making sense altogether, along with drab dialogue that made me wish the game spent less time trying to establish the tale before each battle. Luckily, there's one new feature that's great, and it's called My Castle. In it, your army gets to sit back at your own custom castle in between battles, where you get to walk around, build structures, harvest crops, buy items, and partake in several small activities. You also get to fight online against other player's armies, either by visiting their castle or having them visit yours. This is not really online multiplayer, as the armies are computer-controlled, but it's still loads of fun. All in all, this is a great addition to the series that can be exponentially expanded upon in future entries. Even though it's not as groundbreaking as Awakening before it, Fire Emblem Fates nevertheless carries the series's torch more than admirably. Being in fact three different games, it potentially offers even more playtime than usual for the franchise, while still making you feel quite satisfied if you only want to go through one of the adevntures. Just choose your path and let the fun begin. Rating: 9.0
I'm not sure why 3D platformers have fallen so out of favor with the mainstream, but I sure wish it wasn't so. Thankfully, more and more indie developers have been taking up the mantle in recent years, and the lastest result of that effort is FreezeME, a fun title that has genuinely surprised me. The game puts you in the shoes of R, a little girl trying to rescue her dog from the evil Fat the Cat. To help her along, she has a very special camera that allows her to freeze enemies and objects in place. This is the mechanic that's at the heart of FreezeME, and it's incredibly well-implemented. It's used as the solution to puzzles, often in really clever ways, and it never overstays its welcome. It also happens to put the Wii U game pad's touch screen to very good use, bringing fun, intuitive gameplay innovation to the controller. Thankfully, exploration is a pretty big focus here. From the game's overworld, you get to access a total of four fairly large worlds, and each of them holds various secrets for you to uncover. The main collectibles are golden cubes that function much like the stars in 3D Mario games: there are several to track down in each world, and getting one will bring you back to the overworld. Aside from those, there are also red pig coins (which replenish your life meter), green pig coins (mostly found by helping the cute pig-people who inhabit the worlds), and hidden salamanders that should be photographed. All in all, it's a fine selection that manages to extend the play time in quite pleasant ways. The overworld also holds several challenge rooms, and here the results are more mixed. They're mostly time trials, but the controls can get a bit shaky, often making the difficulty feel unfair. This is a problem in the later sections of the campaign as well; the final world, for example, features quite a few tricky jumps which, due to the lack of precision in the controls, can be immensely frustrating. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the game is the fact that it was developed by a single person. A 3D platformer is significantly trickier to design and program than a sidescroller, and it should be said that the developer did a surprisingly great job given the circumstances. On the other hand, it's easy to see that some sections of FreezeME could have used a few extra hands, as there are aspects of the game that are poorly optimized. The camera is the worst offender, being shaky at best and quite unreliable at worst. There are a few annoying bugs as well, but thankfully a lot of them have been corrected by a patch since launch. Even with its flaws, FreezeME is a game that should be a pleasant treat to platforming fans. The graphics and music are perfectly serviceable, and the fact that some of its sections feel perhaps too close to Mario games (especially in the first world) is mitigated by the honest-to-goodness innovation of the freezing mechanic. The later sections can suffer a bit from a design standpoint, but the basics are all here, making FreezeME a fun adventure that brought numerous smiles to my face over the course of ten or so hours. Rating: 7.5
One of my most anticipated titles of this generation, Xenoblade Chronicles X is certainly not your everyday game. It's a massive sci-fi RPG, with probably the largest open-world I've ever seen. All of its charms, and even its flaws, come from the fact that this is an enormously ambitious undertaking, presenting players with a huge playground of a planet that is ripe for adventuring and exploration. In the story, you're one of the few survivors of Earth's demise. Having crash-landed into planet Mira, the last remaining humans set up the city of New Los Angeles, which acts as an ever-developing hub for main-story missions and sidequests. The plot could be described as a distinctively Japanese take on something like Star Wars or Star Trek; there are sentient alien races to find, fight, and befriend, as well as a plethora of wild lifeforms (called indigens) to hunt down for experience and materials. The story has its highs and lows, and often requires healthy doses of suspension of disbelief (not unlike the aforementioned franchises, to be honest). The open world comprises two sets of locations. First, there's the city of NLA and its various districts. There's lots of stuff to do here, but it does feel a little stiff when compared to cities in other similar titles. One of the reasons for that is how unwieldy it is to find your way across the city, with loads of information to keep track of (such as locations for recruitable characters, regular missions, and affinity quests) and no easy way to display all that data on a neat, organized manner. Also, here some of the game's technical compromises become clear, as textures can be a bit too muddy, and the lack of collision detection with moving cars can lead to unintentionally funny moments. It's all for good reason, though, because then there's the true meat of the title: the Miran wilderness. Each of the five massive continents has its own identity, from sprawling plains to massive forests to desertic landscapes, and they're all beautiful, with detailed environments and a rather large draw distance. Of the seventy hours I poured into the title, the vast majority was spent exploring its many intriguing locales, battling indigens and instaling probes to map out the planet. It helps a lot that the entire world is pretty much seamless: unless you use fast-travelling, there's not a single loading screen to be seen outside of story missions, which is a phenomenal accomplishment in a world this big. Another defining quality of Xenoblade X is the depth of its mechanics. Make no mistake: this is not the kind of game you just pick up and play. There are a lot of concepts to grasp, which may warrant a few looks at the virtual manual (or at an online wiki, which I'd say is very recommended). The good news is that, unless you want to tirelessly micromanage everything, you can probably ignore a lot of the minutiae once you get the grasp of basic combat and exploration. Aside from the first few hours, I only cared about equipping arts and skills, relegating other needlessly complicated features (such as soul voices and some of the equipment characteristics) to their automated setups. And of course, there are the skells, which are the all-powerful mechs that become available for your team six chapters into the story. Better yet, later on you can get the flight module, allowing your skells to take off. If you think Mira is an alluring place to explore on foot, wait until you start soaring above the beautiful landscapes, being able to reach literally every single place you lay your eyes on. It's a true game changer, and takes Xenoblade X from a great adventure to truly beathtaking stuff. Saying RPG fans should at least try out Xenoblade X is an understatement. The dedication it requires, both for exploring its vast open world and for mastering its more obtuse mechanics, means it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. But if you're in the market for spending dozens upon dozens of hours on truly immersive and compelling gameplay, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try. Rating: 9.0
The original Yoshi-based adventure game, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, was an excellent late surprise in the SNES library. Released as Nintendo's focus was already shifting to the Nintendo 64, it was a breath of fresh air with its highly innovative platforming mechanics and fresh pencil-like art style. Yoshi's Woolly World takes that game's legacy and runs with it, and while it doesn't offer a lot of innovation this time around, it's the kind of sequel fans of the original game would undoubtedly sign for. Gameplay-wise, Woolly World is a fairly normal 2D platformer. You'll tackle different thematic worlds, each containing a few separate stages, as well as boss battles and a secret level. Yoshi's moves, including the air flutter and the egg-throwing mechanic, are back, and they remain excellent additions, even if they don't make quite as big an impression as they did when they were actually new ideas. Collectibles are present, of course: flowers unlock each world's secret level, special gems unlock Miiverse stamps, and the different-colored yarn rolls (my favorites) unlock fun new thematic costumes for Yoshi. While the level design is actually pretty great, even I must admit to feeling a little burned out by Wii U sidescrollers at this point, as the game's overall structure doesn't do much to differentiate itself from the likes of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and New Super Mario Bros U. It's comfort food, then, and not necessarily a game people will fawn over, but it's so pristinely crafted that the experience ends up quite fulfilling. As you may infer from screenshots, the art direction in the game is absolutely fantastic. The yarn theme is beyond adorable, and the characterization of the overworld as an actual table with knitting supplies goes a long way to pull players into the game's schtick. Both Yoshi and his enemies are all wonderfully animated, full of quirky little mannerisms, and the laid-back soundtrack offers the perfect vibe to just sit back and enjoy the whole thing. Sometimes things get a bit too laid back, though: the actual level of challenge on most stages is a bit too low, making most of the game too much of a walk in the park, especially when compared to the excellent Tropical Freeze. Exceptions are the secret levels, which often require precise platforming skills and masterful use of Yoshi's abilities. If you're going for 100% completion, you'll also find a very good challenge in tracking down all of the collectibles, even if some of them (specifically, the twenty marked gems in each stage) feel a bit unneeded in the face of more rewarding items. Still, it's a shame that more stages couldn't go a bit further in the difficulty department, especially with the level design being as good as it is. The game also features great local multiplayer mechanics and neat costume-based amiibo integration, rounding it up as a neat package for platforming fans. Even with an overall structure that has begun feeling a bit old again, Yoshi's Woolly World is a worthy entry in the series, and quite likely the best one since the original initially surprised us more than twenty years ago. Rating: 8.0
Whenever I hear of a quirky role-playing game, I immediately think of one of my favorite game series of all time: Earthbound (a.k.a. Mother). That series's cult following has spawned quite a few projects inspired by it, and Undertale is the latest in that club. What sets this particular title apart, however, is that it has loads of original ideas thrown in the mix, providing an experience that is honestly unlike anything I've ever played. A mere clone this is not. The world of Undertale is characterized by a struggle between humans and monsters. Humans, possessing stronger souls, won the war and confined the monsters to the underground. You play as a human child who inadvertently fell through a hole, finding himself stranded on monster land. From there you'll encounter a host of quirky characters in your quest to get back to the surface, experiencing some pretty great writing along the way. The musical score is also worth mentioning, as it's a superb collection of intensely hummable chiptunes. What makes Undertale truly unique is how it allows you leeway on how you want to go about the adventure. Every single battle you enter, from random encounters to boss fights, can be solved through non-violent means (some of which further showcase the funny writing). Deciding whether to engage in combat with any given foe can have big consequences on the storyline, too, including future interactions with new characters. If you do choose to battle, though, you'll be treated to several different real-time, minigame-like sequences that make the whole process an absolute blast. At around five hours from beginning to end, Undertale is short as far as RPGs go. This means, however, that the prospect of doing additional playthroughs, making different decisions along the way, becomes a lot more palatable. Right after I was done with the completely mind-blowing final boss fight, I immediately rebooted the game to start over, which really is a testament to how interesting the world and lore in the game are. Undertale's main flaw, in my eyes, is how sometimes the storytelling takes away from the challenge. Often you'll be faced with a seemingly awesome puzzle, only to soon realize you'll never even get to solve it, all for the sake of a punchline. Other sections are so heavy in storytelling that gameplay end up all but absent, save from button presses to switch from a block of text to the next. It helps that, like in Earthbound titles, the writing has a pretty great mixture of comedy and poignancy, with doses of plain weirdness thrown in, which in turn makes you care enough about the characters that the extended dialogue sections aren't a chore to go through. My main impression after finishing the game twice over is that the hype is certainly justified, as Undertale is a game that won't be easily forgotten by those who play it. Even if you're not that big on RPGs, there are enough quirks and new genuinely good ideas on display that just maybe you'll find yourself as enthralled by this curious little title as most people seem to have gotten. Rating: 9.0
I think it's fair to say that the Western open-world genre has become quite formulaic over the years. Yet, with The Witcher 3, developer CD Projekt Red proves that it's still possible to have a seriously amazing experience without necessarily innovating the genre's tried-and-true foundations. The game puts you on the shoes of Geralt of Rivia, a witcher (monster hunter) who roams the Northern Realms in search of Cirilla, his foster daughter, who is being chased by a supernatural army called the Wild Hunt. Having not played any of the previous titles, I found myself initially intimidated by the storyline background; luckily, the game's tale is written in such a way that you can mostly ignore the finer details of Geralt's previous sagas if you want to. The story itself is likely to please fantasy fans. It is a fittingly epic tale which uses the invasion of the Northern Realms by the southern Nildgaardian empire as a background, and it's reasonably fun and interesting. It does have its fair share of clichés and at least a couple of significant dei ex-machina (I'm looking at you, Dudu the Doppler) that render it hard to be taken entirely seriously as a piece of adult-oriented storytelling, however. In his adventure, Geralt roams several open spaces through the Northern Realms. The landscapes look absolutely gorgeous, filled with impressive lighting effects and extremely detailed textures. One of my favorite aspects of the setting is how it mixes traditional fantasy with a bit of horror, leading to some pretty scary enemies and scenarios, but without resorting to cheap jump-scares. There is a lot of ground to cover in the several open-world environments, with numerous towns, villages, sidequests and hidden secrets to keep you busy. Roaming the land in search of experience and loot is extremely satisfying, thanks in good part to the intuitive controls and the fluid action (no, there's not a single quick-time event to tell of, thank you very much). Like any good RPG, there are also extensive options to craft and/or buy gear, weapon, potions and assorted items, which manage to be intricate without getting overwheming. There is only one significant deviation from this formula: gwent, a simple strategy card game, played by Geralt and several NPCs, in which you amass an army (represented by separate character cards) and control the weather to defeat opponents. As basic as it is, it's a surprisingly addictive little diversion, and sometimes I found myself setting the main adventure aside just to wind off against NPCs and win new cards. Basically, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt plays brilliantly, looks gorgeous, and offers dozens upon dozens of hours for you to lose yourself in its very appealing brand of horror-tinged fantasy. With its compelling world, an equipment/potion/addon system that is deep yet easy to grasp, and a set of main quest missions that doesn't try to break its own boundaries in annoying ways, you have one of the best releases of the year for fans of epic adventures. Rating: 9.0
There are often times when I can't, for the life of me, understand why everyone in the western part of our world drools over a particular game. I believe there's no better example for this as The Last of Us, a title that got tens all around and was praised for its supposedly incredible storyline. Even though I had experienced several sections of the game on a friend's PS3, the PS4 was my first chance to try it for real, and I walked away sorely unimpressed. First of all, I fully admit to getting kind of worried whenever a title gets praised more for its story than its actual gameplay. It's the latter that will always matter the most in a game for me, and in this regard The Last of Us is passable at best, extremely forgettable at worst. It consists of a series of linear, quick-time-event-heavy, cover-based shooting stages that get repetitive really fast, with only mild incentives for any kind of exploration. Even though the game does feature a lot of actual cutscenes, its gameplay sections are made in such a way that main character Joel is always talking and interacting with other people somehow. I admit I can see how some people would enjoy this playable-movie vibe, but it's definitely not my thing. Often I would just get annoyed when a cutscene would end, just because I knew it meant I'd have to start actually playing. This made me start holding the opinion that The Last of Us would be better suited as, you know, an actual movie rather than a game. Speaking of which: yeah, there's a cool story here, with some well-written emotional gut-punches. But unlike what I've read around the web, it's absolutely nowhere near the level of the true storytelling masterpieces of our time, from A Song of Ice and Fire to Breaking Bad to The Sopranos (and yes, I've seen comparisons to all of those). Maybe that's because the script just feels like a known quantity in the time we live in: it has a post-apocalyptic setting (check), a hardened man getting to terms with his own emotions (check), zombie-thingies (check), dialogue sections filled with wise cracks that aren't all that fresh (check). It was just too 'been there, done that' for me, even with the emotional turns, and as a result I never really felt the father-daughter relationship between the main characters as apparently most people have. It may be one of those cases in which a game is just not for me, especially because I fully admit I've never been that interested in post-apocalyptic settings and its tropes. Still, just trying to analyse The Last of Us from a detached standpoint, I fail to see why it's had such an extremely enthusiastic reception. I wouldn't say it's a flat-out bad game, but there are numerous realistic-style titles with more fluid and satisfying gameplay, there are numerous non-games with better stories, and it is my honest opinion that this is not one of those cases in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think this is the kind of game that everyone should at least try, if only just to see what the fuss is all about. If your gaming tastes are anywhere close to mine, however, you'll probably get entertained for a while, then start seriously considering just searching for a cutscene compilation on Youtube instead. Rating: 5.5
My favorite metaphor for the GTA franchise is this: imagine you have a friend who you often meet at parties. Whenever you do, you tend to have an awesome night of silly conversation and drink-fueled, reckless fun. But every now and then you meet them in a more sober environment during the day, and when you try to strike a conversation... it's just kinda awkward and not the same. Likewise, in Grand Theft Auto V you'll often find yourself immersed in the most crazy, action-filled, over-the-top criminal adventures. But every now and then, an extremely mundane section comes along and ends up feeling like the sober day job part of the characters' lives. Oh well, a night-only friend can still be a great friend if you just focus on what makes the friendship tick, and the same happens with Rockstar's latest. GTA V has you playing as three main characters: rookie hustler Franklin, retired thief Michael, and complete-freaking-nutjob druglord Trevor. Their stories start intertwining as you make your way through the game's campaign, and the writing is decent enough that the many cutscenes are actually very enjoyable to watch. The gameplay is your typical GTA fare: a very competent action-adventure romp that throws you into an open-world city (or, in this game's case, an entire small state) and tasks you to survive by making it big as a criminal. You'll steal vehicles, drive around town, enter gunfights with rival gangsters, run from the police, and ocasionally pick up a hooker. Controls are mostly intuitive and the action is responsive. Like in pretty much every GTA game since the first one, the real star of the show is the seamless open-world exploration. GTA V's state of San Andreas features a whole bunch of different environments, from the bustling metropolis of Los Santos to small villages up north to vast patches of mountain wilderness. There are a lot of cool details waiting around for your attention, such as the entire episodes of fictional TV shows you can watch. Just wandering around can be pretty great; at one point, I stole a jet-ski and went around the state, just looking for stuff. I found a deserted beachside camp with more jet skis, then tried to find my way back to civilization while terrorizing wild animals and unsuspecting citizens unlucky enough to be driving nearby. It's this sort of mindless fun that's arguable the game's greatest strenght. But of course, there are also more structured missions. This is where the game (the franchise, really) fluctuates wildly in quality for me. I mean, stealing a top-secret army weapon or torching a competitor's meth lab can be fun enough. But then you end up doing stuff such as operate a crane, tow a car, or going drinking with a friend for no discernable in-game benefit... and frankly, those can get so dull that it beats me why they're even in the game (and worse, some as mandatory campaign missions). Some other missions have different problems: the worst offender in my eyes makes a minigame out of a brutal torture section. I fully believe that game violence can be done in a mostly harmless way, especially when it's as wonderfully overblown (and tongue-in-cheek) as it generally is in GTA. This sort of thing, however, feels like taking a turn for the disturbing just for the hell of it, especially because the actual gameplay in the aforementioned mission is completely dull and uninteresting. Controversies aside, it's hard not to admire GTA V for what it does well. It's a game that is fun a lot of the time, especially because it eschews any sort of faux-serious vibe, opting instead for the serie's trademark penchant for the zany. It may be overrated in my eyes, but it's still worth your time.
My interest in Year Walk should probably be attributed to a browser-based PC game called The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo. That's because after I had a surprisingly good time playing that title (seriously, it's free, so give it a try), I realized that I don't really hate horror titles as I thought before; I just hate jump scares. **** is creepy in a more psychological manner, slowly making its way to giving you goosebumps instead of blatantly screaming at your face while holding a chainsaw, I discovered, I'm more than willing to let it do its thing. Year Walk seemed exactly this kind of game, and I wasn't disappointed. As you find out soon after booting the game, year walking is a practice in Swedish folklore in which a hapless chap starves himself then goes walking through creepy, snow-covered Scandinavian woods right before midnight at New Year's Eve. The purpose is making your way to a church in the middle of the forest, where you'll get a glimpse of what the coming year holds for your future. Along the way, chances are you'll come across some nightmare-inducing mystical creatures, having to appease them if you want to successfully complete this disturbing mission. The game absolutely achieves the sort of mood it sets out to, with great stylyzed graphics and a wonderfully eerie soundtrack (by the way, wear headphones). The setting is so effective, in fact, that even the beginning of the game, when you set out to meet your forbidden love inside a windmill in broad daylight, is significantly ominous. The gameplay is from a first-person perspective, but not in the way you may be accustomed to. The exploration is done in a 2D manner, with several separate sections of the woods to go back and forth through. There is extensive use of the gamepad's gyroscope, but don't worry: even I, who absolutely hate motion controls, was surprised in a good way by how the game plays. There are several puzzles to solve; some are quite easy, a few are a bit obtuse, but others are borderline genius in the way they make use of every single aspect of the Wii U hardware to set up the game's macabre mood. No spoilers, so I'll leave it at that. What ties everything together and lies at the heart of the entire experience is the story. It begins as a simple tale of a poor guy who's going to desperate lenghts to try to get the love of a rich girl, but it soon becomes obvious that there is a deeper, more interesting and even creepier tale being told here. There is a secret second ending to pursue after you finish the campaign; one that sheds light on previously unexplained aspects of the plot and concludes everything in a way that's as memorable as it is sinister. Suffice it to say that even writing this gives me the shivers. Even if it sadly doesn't last more than two or three hours, Year Walk struck a nerve with me. It's a wonderful horror adventure that manages to be terrifying while mostly avoiding jump scares (yeah, mostly; be advised that there are a couple in there). You'll have to be perseverant and curious to see it through to its conclusion, but once you do, it will be hard to forget. Rating: 8.5
We're in the midst of a small wave of indie interest in 3D platformers, and the thought of an impending full-on revival of the genre, much like what happened to 2D sidescrollers, makes me all giddy. Of course, there are several different shades of 3D platformers; my favorites tend to be the one that are more open and quasi-seamless (and, I confess, the ones with three bajillion collectibles to track down). Legend of Kay is not any of that; it's very linear in its strict level-based progression, but it does offer fun moments if you look beyond its flaws. As you may have imagined, you play the game as Kay, who is an teenage anthropomorphic tiger. After a villanous band of gorillas invade the country and throw its inhabitants into slavery, it's up to him to set things straight. The story is told mostly via spoken dialogue, some of which is delivered in comic-book-like cutscenes. The writing is subpar, which is annoying given the story focus of the game, while the voice acting is mostly bland and uninteresting. The game plays as a simplified action title, which frankly isn't a problem in my eyes. I was never really that into the complicated combo system for most modern beat-em-ups, so it's refreshing to come across something less intricate. Going through each stage can be a lot of fun at times, as the game offers pleasant environments with beatiful (if a bit antiquated) graphics and some pretty cool tunes. Some small details are also nice, such as when Kay gets out of a swimming section and proceeds to endearingly shake waterdrops off his fur. There are collectibles to look for in each section, but the fact that you can't go back to previously completed locations is very annoying in this regard. Levels end quite abruptly, too, meaning sometimes you won't really be given a fair chance at getting everything. Worse yet, you can't really keep track of available collectibles until you finish each level, making the game's collect-a-thon side a bit pointless. All of this severely dampens the adventure feel of the title, which could have been one of the game's best aspects if done right. It should also be said that, technically, the game feels extremely half-assed at places. Kay's damage-taking animation, for example, is so stiff that sometimes you won't even realize you lost energy, leading to some frustrating deaths. The camera is a nightmare, and should have been completely reworked for this version. It's a shame, because it feels that, even with the oversights I mentioned in the last paragraph, this could have been a very good linear action-platformer if only there were more attention to those **** aspects of the gameplay. If you're starved for 3D platformers (as I certainly am), Legend of Kay Anniversary might be worth a try. You'll have a good time if you like simple-yet-effective action, and especially so if open-ended exploration isn't a must for you. I must say I expected more, but the good aspects of the title kept me playing for a decent chunk of time. Rating: 6.0
That Friday, I went to work knowing it was gonna be tough to get through the day. Whatever day job tasks I had in front of me, I could only focus on one thing: the Mega Man-themed level I was going to make when I got out of work, bought my shiny new copy of Super Mario Maker, and scurried home. That's the kind of thing Super Mario Maker does to you: the very idea of such a game-slash-development-tool, a first in the Mario franchise, and quite likely the defining Wii U gamepad-centric title, is enough to inspire obsession. I believe there are two kinds of people who will want this game; let's call them Teddy and Jimmy. Teddy wants Super Mario Maker because he can't wait to see what shenanigans other players will come up with. He doesn't feel particularly excited with the creative challenges of coming up with his own levels, and as such that aspect of the game doesn't appeal to him. Is Super Mario Maker a worthy buy to Teddy? Perhaps. I can't really tell, because I am no freaking Teddy. No, my friends, I'm a Jimmy. In fact, I'm the Jimmiest Jimmy you can get. You see, Jimmy fancies himself a creator. He likes that extremely satisfying feeling of dreaming something up and watching it unfold. Jimmy likes to write songs, to create stories, to think up ideas for video games. Jimmy spent years as a kid inventing fictional countries with his brother and a couple of friends who lived next door, and went to the trouble of coming up with every imagineable aspect of said countries, from their ancient history to their soccer teams to their musical charts. Okay, maybe it was specifically Rick who did that, but you know what? If you have any crazy creative exercises you like to go through, you're a Jimmy. And you'll love Super Mario Maker. The game is a surprising addition to the Nintendo catalogue and, at the same time, exactly what you'd expect from the Kyoto company. It has one of the most brilliant presentations I've ever seen in a video game, with wit and charm permeating every tiny detail, no matter how inconsequential. It has an extremely well-thought-out interface that's easy to use and get the hang of, and it offers hours upon hours of lighthearted yet challenging fun. Like I said, this is all very Nintendo. What is not is the degree of freedom the game gives you, and that is a very welcoming change of pace for the company. With a gradually-unlocking set of tools that covers a limited chunk (more on that later) of Mario history, Super Mario Maker allows your imagination to go wild. You can make regular Mario stages, of course, and it's very advisable that you start there. As you get the gist of how things work, however, you'll be able to think of novel ideas, interesting ideas, and yes, utterly crazy ideas. Even within its limitations, the game is a veritable blank canvas for a tireless Jimmy mind. The process of unlocking tools is, at first glance, kind of cruel. After fiddling with the "Make" mode for five minutes, you have to wait one full day until the next unlockable update... or do you? As it turns out, you don't. If you, like the good Jimmy you are, start obsessing over every new unlocked set, putting it immediately to good use on a new stage, you can get the next delivery in a matter of minutes. This process also helps you start by thinking small, which I hear is very advisable in order to become good in any creative craft. With so many possibilities to pour your hours into, it's hard to fault the game for what it doesn't do. But, my friends, I told you I'm a hardcore Jimmy. I don't merely want to make my stages and call it a day. I want to come up with my own graphic backgrounds. I want to make new enemies and bosses. I want to access more power ups, such as the ice flower or the frog suit. I want to write my own tunes in a Mario Paint-like composer. Sadly, those aren't options here. But hey, downloadable content is a thing, so who knows? Maybe Nintendo isn't done throwing us delicious creative bones just yet. The good news is that, by playing with the available tools, you'll be surprised at the amount of ideas you can build from the ground up. For example, that Mega Man level I wanted to make? I spent fifteen hours (I kid you not) fine-tuning what was a very ambitious idea, and even though I had to make cuts to what I originally envisioned, it worked and I'm very proud of it (it's at 9438-0000-005A-C6FA if you feel like checking it out). So let me flat-out say it: Super Mario Maker is the real deal. I keep occasionally lamenting the lack of a few features (and especially the half-assed music-making options), but those are immensely overshadowed by what I am, in fact, allowed to do in the game, especially on the "Make" mode. The pixel-perfect Super Mario physics, as well as the creativity of a big international community, probably make the game still worth it if the only mode you wanna rock is "Play"... but Teddy boy, let me tell you: you're missing out. Rating: 9.5
Back in 1996, a cousin introduced me to the first SimCity, and it just blew my mind. I was accustomed to games being fairly linear affairs, giving the player a lot of tightly orchestrated fun but very little control. In time I moved my strategy PC gaming from city simulation to stuff like Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic, in no small part because, after SimCity 2000, most games in the genre failed to really entice me in a big way. Cities Skylines, however, managed to rekindle the proverbial spark, especially because developer Colossal Order seems hellbent on undoing all the damage done by EA's immensely disappointing SimCity reboot a few years back. So yeah, forget all about that always-online crap, or the offensively tiny city sizes, or the lack of features. Cities Skylines works because it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, instead focusing on the simple stuff that made those 90's city sims so addictive in the first place. It perfects several tried-and-true mechanics, such as residential, commercial, and industrial zoning, as well as the spread of electricity and sewage/water supply. Almost everything here seems like it was design to cut the fluff and allow you to focus on the actual fun part of making your city prosper. One of the defining characteristics of Cities Skylines is its focus on customization. And that's obviously awesome; after all, if I'm building my own cities, I want them to be unique, with their own structure, monuments and landmarks. For this purpose, the game features an extensive set of editing tools, encouraging players to try and bring their own ideas to life. If you're not editing-inclined, worry not: it's extremely easy to browse the Steam Workshop for new assets to add to your city-building options, from real-world buildings and landmarks (although, to be honest, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want those things in their custom city; but hey, that's me) to a large amount of original stuff, including alternate designs for the in-game assets. But that's not all: at this point, savvy creators have already came up with some very useful mods, allowing you, for example, to better manage your bus/subway lines, to zoom in and take a first-person walk through the streets, or even to fly a plane over the city. This process of creation will obviously continue for as long as the game remains popular, adding more replay value to a title that already has lots of it. Of course, city simulation involves many different variables, meaning some less-than-polished aspects are bound to show up from time to time. Sometimes a building will have a crime problem that doesn't seem to get solved even when you surround it with police stations; other times your landfills won't send out its truck fleet even with a huge, six-lane road clearly in front of it; or maybe you'll have a lack of workers on industries that just won't go away, no matter how many residential areas you build nearby. These problems can get frustrating sometimes, but they'll more often be submerged by the sheer amount of stuff that works great. You could say the city simulation genre was one of the big epiphanies in my gaming life, and Cities Skylines more than does it justice. It's an addictive, well-designed, ambitious title that actually knows why these strategy games tend to glue enthusiasts in front of the computer, making it by far the best city sim released in a long time. Rating: 9.0
3DS-owning fans of strategy RPGs have a cool new way to scratch that waiting-for-Fire-Emblem-Fates itch: Mercenary Saga 2, a well-designed little package that's as addictive as one would hope for an entry in the genre. Better yet, it's a title that's as large in gameplay time as it is cheap to get. The game follows the titular Order of Silver Eagle and its members as they try to unravel a conspiracy to assassinate their monarch. The plot is pretty much what you'd expect, and truth be told, it's there more to add flavor to the battles than to wow anyone with storytelling. In this, it works, and it avoid some ultra-cheesy plot pitfalls seen in games such as Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for the DS. If you're acquainted with the genre, there really isn't much to say of the gameplay, except that it works very well and keeps you coming back for more. If you're not, here's how it is in a nutshell: you have to position your characters on a battlefield and engage enemies on different landscapes. Each battle may have a different win/lose condition, but most require you to wipe out the opposing army while making sure the same doesn't happen to yours. Eventually, new characters start to join your group, adding more and more strategic decisions pertaining to each unit's style of gameplay. There's no permadeath, meaning characters that are defeated can come back for more in subsequent stages. Between battles, of course, you get to level up your soldiers and buy gear for them, which is one of the more interesting aspects of the game (and of the genre as a whole, really). Each character class can be eventually evolved into more specialized jobs, with the additional perk that characters get to keep all of the abilities they unlocked on each job as they go after a new one. Aside from the regular weapon/armor shop, there's also a neat magic-item-crafting option, where you get to try and forge the perfect gear for each of the characters (be prepared to pay steep prices in the in-game currency, though). Mercenary Saga 2 is a surprisingly engaging little game that packs many hours of strategic fun. Its deepness doesn't really compare to more fleshed-out (and full-priced) entries in the genre, of course, but what's here should be good to last you quite a while. Design-wise, everything is in its right place, and the sum of its different parts makes the game very much worthy of a spot on your 3DS library. Rating: 8.0
Nintendo has a well known modus operandi, choosing to pave its own way rather than follow industry trends. For the most part, this is precisely what has kept me so interested in the brand over the years, although there is a particular trend I wish they'd show more interest in: open-world gameplay. Sadly, Wii U has seen only a few such games, meaning the existence of Watch Dogs, which is supposed to be Ubisoft very last non-casual offering on the platform, is welcome. The game puts you in the shoes of Aiden Pearce, a vigilante with a somber personality that also happens to be a highly skilled hacker. The main idea is that, as you explore Chicago and follow through the story, you'll use Aiden's skillset to hack machinery, cameras, ATMs, cellphones, traffic lights, and whatever else strikes your fancy. It's certainly an intriguing gameplay premise, and it often works well. For this setup to even be plausible, the game's Chicago has to be a highly connected city. Here, there's a single operational system which controls pretty much everything in the city, and that's why Aiden gets to hack everything so easily from his cellphone. Of course, that is something that no public administrator would ever think of as a good idea, precisely because it makes everything so vulnerable. This, coupled with some pretty unbelievable cellphone apps available to the player, makes it hard to truly believe in this world as a living, breathing place; given that the games goes for story-focused realism, this is a problem (although one that plagues many similar titles, to be honest). When it comes to the actual action, results are varied. Some story sequences are great, others not so much, thanks in part to the less-than-ideal driving controls; the same can be said of non-story objectives throughout the city. Exploring the city should be cool, as there are many points of interest along the various neighborhoods, and the game allows you to "check in" to each of them and learn a bit of history while you're at it. One thing that bothered me is just how easy it is to get money: basically, you just need to walk across a citizen with money in the bank, effortlessly hack his phone and steal his credits. It's an interesting idea at first, but it quickly grows stale from the lack of challenge. As filled with things to do as Watch Dogs is, I couldn't help but feel it was a bit stale in the end. It boasts such a cool premise that the execution simply falls short of everything that could have been. It also suffers from frame-rate problems, sometimes quite severely, even if the graphics are serviceable enough. It's a cool option for open-world fanatics on Wii U, but far from a game that will be remembered as a bastion of the genre. Rating: 6.0
I have something to confess: I'm not big on online multiplayer. The lack of face-to-face interaction generally means I simply don't have as much fun as when I gather friends on my living room to play, for example, extended sessions of Super Smash Bros. What I am big on, however, is great gameplay, and in that regard Splatoon made me a believer. Thirty-five hours in, I'm utterly enthralled by its endless stream of addictive three-minute ink-shooting matches, and I'm convinced this new franchise is going to be a massive player in the Nintendo IP roster going forward. As you're probably aware, Splatoon is a third person shooter with a focus on online multiplayer matches. When it comes to shooters, however, I don't think there's ever been anything that plays quite like it. You play as inklings, squid-human hybrids that shoot ink instead of bullets, and while you can (and certainly should) shoot opposing players, the focus is on covering the battlefield with ink. It's a genius approach for a couple of reasons: first, because it positions the shooter genre into Nintendo's family-friendly approach in a convincing and utterly addictive way. Secondly, the "shoot the environment" mechanic is a great way to make novice players feel useful even in a highly competitive environment, as it's more about clever strategy than it is about precise aiming. Splatoon was launched with only one online multiplayer mode (called "Turf Wars"), but has since gotten several free updates. As I write this, there are two other online modes available, with a few more planned for the next months. At this point, we have already experienced a "Splatfest": an online event that makes players pick sides and battle it out for their team on a big day-long stravaganza. All of this makes the game feel like a living, breathing thing, rewarding early adopters and keeping the hype ball rolling well beyond release. It's a smart strategy that has been compelling me to keep playing. Of course, the game also has an offline side: it consists of around thirty levels of inkling war against their hated octoling enemies. The level design is simply astonishing, throwing loads of clever twists on the ink-shooting formula as stages go on. There's an overworld to explore and find new stages, but most of those stages are very linear; some, however, are more open affairs, in which your character has to fight octolings in larger environments much like the online multiplayer modes. It's a mixture that certainly works, even if I'd have preferred more of the latter than the former. The single-player mode has another crowning jewel, though: the boss fights. They are five overall, and they're all so entertaining that I got genuinely surprised. When it came to the final boss battle, my expectations were through the roof... yet the game somehow managed to surpass them entirely. I won't spoil anything here, but suffice it to say that it's a lenghty, challenging, and massively fun war against what's probably my favorite character in the entire game. It's probably a bit early to say, but I'm guessing I'll forever look back to it as one of my favorite boss fights of all time. There have been criticism thrown at some of the game's quirks, such as the lack of online voice chat (which would be useful to some, even if it's not really my thing) or the poor local multiplayer options (and I fully believe a Goldeneye 007-like four-player split-screen mode could be absolutely fantastic). Taken for what it is, however, Splatoon is nothing short of a rousing success for Nintendo. It's innovative, it's addictive, it's got great graphics and music, and this is why it's probably one of the games people will always bring up in the future whenever talking about the Wii U. If you're on the fence, absolutely give it a shot. Rating: 9.0
Originally released for PC two years ago (and, subsequently, for the Playstation 4 and Vita), Don't Starve is a gem **** that stands as one of the most unique titles in the Wii U e-Shop. From the get-go, it drops the player into a Tim Burton-esque fantasy wilderness filled with resources, animals, monsters, and what seems like an endless string of open-ended gameplay possibilities. Your goal is to find a way survive, one day at a time, and perhaps some day build your very own one-man empire to rule these lands. Before that, though you'll die. A lot. Don't Starve could be described as a hybrid of action-adventure, survival, and real-time strategy. It features a randomly-generated open world, which means that no two games are ever the same. In this way, it reminds me of some of my favorite strategy titles of all time, such as the Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic series. Unlike those games, however, Don't Starve is minutiously crafted to give the player an ever-present feeling of unease and unsafeness. You have to manage three aspects of the character's well-being in order to succeed: hunger, health, and sanity, and that's easier said than done. Days turn to night, by which time you'll have to build a light source (unless you want to be murdered in the dark by an unseen entity). Resources run out and the food you gather spoils over time, meaning you have to frequently search for more. Seasons come and go, each of them bringing new environmental hazards to protect yourself against. There's never a dull moment here, and this helps make the game even more enthralling. The best part about the experience is seeing your character make slow progress over time. Eventually you'll have enough resources to start building a base, where you can settle for a slighlty less desperate lifestyle. You can build farms for food, plant groves for logs, herd animals for meat and manure. Of course, you're never truly safe: wild hounds will attack you periodically, and each season has its own boss: giant, free-roaming monsters that could eventually find you and, if you can't lead them elsewhere, wreck everything you've worked so hard to build. That, incidentally, is one of the aspects of Don't Starve that could turn off some people: it's ruthless to a fault. The game features permadeath, meaning that, once you die, you're truly dead: your save file is automatically deleted and you have to start over from scratch. As you progress, you'll find ways to overcome that, from craftable items like the meat effigy to randomly-placed structures like the touch stone. Still, the fear of dying is very real all the time, forcing you to micromanage everything and take every decision super carefully. This sort of challenge is obviously not for everyone. If it's for you, however, you're truly in for a treat. The game has an incredibly deep crafting system, allowing hunderds of different ways to make items, structures, weapons, and dishes. There are a lot of less obvious mechanics as well, such as feeding meat to the pig-folk that roam the land and turning them into temporary allies. It's all so deep, by the way, that the several Don't Starve wikis available online will prove an invaluable resource if you want to succeed, especially since the in-game information is surprisingly scarce. I get that this is intended to boost the "survival" feel, but it's disappointing that they don't even allow us to take notes while we play. I mean, the gamepad's touchscreen is right there; let us put it to good use. Luckily, a good chunk of the main information will become second nature in no time, allowing you to need less and less outside help with each playthrough. All in all, Don't Starve is one of the most addictive experiences I've had in quite a while. As I write this review, I'm 30 hours in, which is incredible for a fifteen-buck e-Shop title. Even more impressive is the fact that I'll surely keep coming back over and over for more playthroughs for as long as my Wii U is connected to my TV. This is the sort of game that can inspire lengthy dedication, and at this point I think I might just be already hooked. Rating: 9.0
If you ask any Zelda veteran to name the most unique entry in the series, Majora's Mask is likely to be their choice. The original Nintendo 64 version followed in the footsteps of Ocarina of Time, which was a pioneer of 3D exploration and is considered one of the most important games of all time. This makes Nintendo's decision to go fresh here even bolder, and the resulting title will, at many times, make you wish more developers followed this philosophy more often. Since this is one of the few straight sequels in the Zelda series, the Link here is the same one we got to know and love in Ocarina of Time. While adventuring with his horse Epona, Link ends up tricked by an entity called the Skull Kid, losing his horse and weapons and transformed into a Deku shrub. He then finds himself in the city of Termina, where, due to the Skull Kid's meddling, an extremely creepy-looking moon will crash land in three days. Of course, Link is the Hero of Time, meaning he can keep using his ocarina to relive those tree days over and over again in order to gather masks, weapons and embark into missions to stop the catastrophe. Without spoiling anything, this intriguing plot leads to some of the best storytelling the series has ever seen. Characters in Termina (and in the many surrounding areas) are your usual Zelda fare of lighthearted personas, but the creepy atmosphere and the very real sense of danger affects their story arcs in a way that can get truly touching. Specifically, one of the optional sidequests gets so poignant towards its end that it seriously got me to the verge of tears. This is not something that usually happens on a Zelda game, so it was a truly gratifying surprise. Another interesting aspect here is that the game offers only a few traditional weapons. Instead, most of Link's abilities come from masks, which are rewarded for completing missions. Some of the masks (namely, the ones that transform Link into new creatures) are necessary to the main campaign, while others are useful items that can be collected as rewards from sidequests. Getting all of them will be challenging, but extremely rewarding. Great exploration is a mainstay of the franchise, and here it's no different. I had a blast adventuring though each of the game's several areas, figuring out puzzles and looking for those all-important masks. The perpetually ticking three-day clock is a neat addition to the overworld, as there are some events that can only be witnessed at certain periods of the cycle. Managing time gives the game a sense of urgency that works wonders with the "impending disaster" vibe, especially given how the music becomes creepier and more urgent each time the final day comes. And then there are the dungeons. Like I said in the last paragraph, I love the game's implementation of a clock; in the final hours before the moon crash landing, you'll always have to play your Song of Time to get transported back to Termina city on the first day, making you lose all of your "expendable" items such as bombs, arrows, and bottle contents. This works great for storytelling, for side quests, for environmental puzzles in the overworld... but it absolutely does not work for dungeons. If you've played any Zelda game at all, especially a 3D Zelda, you'll know that dungeons are a slow, methodical, puzzle-heavy affair. You often have to think long and hard about what to do next in order to conquer them. And yet there's that freaking clock, ticking away relentlessly. It won't even stop during boss battles, meaning there's a very real danger of having to stop halfway through the fight and start it over in a new three-day cycle. It absolutely doesn't work, making the dungeons in the game, which are all excellently designed (yes, even the water dungeon), feel like an absolute chore. Each dungeon also features fifteen stray fairies; should you collect them all, you can take them to a nearby fairy fountain to get a special item or ability. This is a great way to compel players to search every single corner of a dungeon... yet fairies are considered an "expendable" item, meaning you'll lose all of them every time you reset the clock. You can't even take the ones you got to the fountain before playing the Song of Time; no, sir, you have to get them all in a single three-day cycle. This is what infuriated me the most about the clock implementation on dungeons, and made me simply give up altogether on fairy collecting, a gameplay mechanic that I otherwise loved. Majora's Mask is a game of extremes: there's pure bliss in the way the story unfolds and the majority of the game plays, there's an unprecedented degree of innovation... and then there are the dungeons. In adapting it from the original, Grezzo tweaked a lot of the elements that didn't age up well, and yet left the dungeon problem unsolved. If it were otherwise, it could be the best game in the entire franchise. Alas, it was not to be, and as such it will remain a flawed masterpiece.
Recently, I decided to give another try to Zelda II: Adventure of Link, the NES game which took the beloved series in an interesting new direction. Sadly, I realized there was a small detail I had forgotten since I played it as a kid: the game is frustratingly, unfairly difficult, even with the advent of save states. I still love its structure, however, so I was quite pleased by the announcement of Elliot Quest, a game directly inspired by Link's second 8-bit outing. After playing it for much longer than I anticipated (over 20 hours), I was left pleasantly surprised by the sheer quality of its design. Elliot Quest tells the story of, well, Elliot. He's a man who, after trying to commit suicide over his wife vanishing, found out that he's unable to die. The tale develops over quick cutscenes, showing Elliot's interaction with his newfound power and trying to find answers from Rasa, the local wise man. It's a great little storyline that is directly influenced by player decisions through the game, becoming surprisingly poignant at some points. The gameplay is where the similarities with Zelda II become obvious, and in this regard Elliot Quest absolutely excelled my expectations. It throws you into an interesting top-down, open overworld where you'll have a lot of freedom to explore and access new side-scrolling stages, dungeons, and towns. The game features loads of items, weapons, and powers to collect, as well as a customizable levelling system. Some of the items can be head scratchers at first, as their effects aren't really well-explained by in-game text, but most should be relatively easy to figure out. Along with the truly top-notch level design, perhaps what impressed me the most about the game was just how filled to the brim with secrets it is. Those secrets are quite well-hidden, too, requiring careful exploration and backtracking to uncover them all. This is precisely what extended my playtime so much, especially since the game's world is so much fun to delve into. If that doesn't sound like your cup your tea, worry not: it's fully possible to finish the game without caring about optional aspects like the crystals, the extra boss fights, the paintings, and the many hidden unique objects scattered through the world. That's your loss, though, because those ended up being the real meat of the game for me. As excellently designed as it is, Elliot Quest unfortunately presents some technical optimization problems. Most of them are mild annoyances, such as frame rate drops and slight graphical glitches. Some, however, are more problematic. The entire graveyard area, for example, is filled with bugs, and that even made me unable to access the secret boss located there. This was really frustrating, as the game had otherwise compelled me to try and get a 100% completion rate. Maybe a patch will fix that in the future, but that didn't happen during my playthrough. Even considering that, Elliot Quest is a game I'd recommend in a heartbeat. It truly feels like the Zelda II Miyamoto and co. would have put out if they had access to 20 extra years of game design technology, with compelling storytelling thrown on top of it. It certainly put Ansimuz and Playeveryware on my indie studio watchlist, and I'm eager to see what they bring us next. Rating: 8.5
One of Nintendo's surprise reveals during E3 2014, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker takes the adorable character (along with the even more adorable Toadette) through dozens of diorama-like stages in search of coins, golden mushrooms and golden stars. It's easy to think the game is merely more of the same puzzle action seen on the special stages in Super Mario 3D World, but if you do, you'll have another thing coming. Flavored as "chapters" in a book, Treasure Tracker's stages take place in incredibly polished self-contained mini-worlds. Captain Toad can't jump, due to his heavy backpack, meaning you'll have to use your brain in order to reach some places. That said, getting to the golden star at the end of each level is generally a very easy, laid back task. Much more challenging is the path to 100% completion, however: each stage tasks you with finding three hidden gems, as well as completing a specific objective that can go from collecting a number of coins, finishing without taking damage, killing all (or no) enemies, and so on. Those are generally very fun to try and attain, offering replayability and longevity to the game. The graphics, music, and sound effects follow very closely on the footsteps of Super Mario 3D World, which obviously mean they are top-notch. The game features some very beautiful landscapes that are a joy to just stare at. Sometimes you'll want to zoom in on your character to properly complete some tasks, which is easily attained by pressing X. It should be said, however, that the camera is not always ideal, thanks to the isometric view and the increasing intricacy of the stages as you go further into the adventure. Sometimes there will be no completely comfortable angle to witness a given part of a stage, making for a bit of trial-and-error. Tilting the gamepad also functions as camera control, but I found that to be more annoying than beneficial, preferring to use the right analog stick. Then there are the stages that throw the entire thing on its head. There are boss battles (which, granted, could be more varied throughout), endless-running levels, bonus stages that task you with all sorts of shenanigans (including my favorite: collecting as many coins as possible while trying to escape from one or more mummies), and even first-person shooting segments which put the gamepad to great use. When it came to extra content, I was particularly pleased. I won't spoil anything here, but suffice it to say that, aside from the game's three main "books", there's a fourth one. Some of the content in there requires you to have Super Mario 3D World save data on your system to access, while others are unlocked after beating the game, and still others require a 100% completion rate in every stage. Those (especially the two latter groups) can be incredibly tough to beat, but they're so well crafted that it all ends up being completely exhilarating. Even if it's not necessarily a title that will lend itself to extended mega-sessions of gameplay, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is one of the best puzzlers to grace the Wii U. It features plenty of content for every kind of gamer, with great graphics, music and level design, and with loads of attention to detail. Hopefully, this will be only the beginning of what could be a brilliant new franchise. Rating: 8.0
You're supposed to be a mindless clone inside a huge, mysterious facility. But, as luck would have it, you ended up defective in a crucial way: yearning for your freedom. This is the rather intriguing premise for Stealth Inc. 2, a sprawling Wii U-exclusive platformer that mixes metroidvania exploration with focused, self-contained (and sometimes super-hard) puzzle levels. Stealth Inc. 2 is certainly a sadistic game. During your adventure, your arch-nemesis (an ambitious facility worker who's trying to "scrap" you) will constantly communicate with you via sentences reflected on the walls. He'll tease you about upcoming hazards and mercilessly mock you when you inevitably face a gruesome death. This, and the gradual revelations about what exactly is going on, adds tremendous appeal to the title's minimalistic storytelling. While the game plays mostly like a metroidvania platformer, it's very peculiar in that it features numbered "test chambers" on each section. This makes it feels a bit more linear than usual in the genre; it's like the overworld is a big open map that actually tasks you with finding each stage. This could be very interesting in theory, but the game has a few problems that hinder the exploration. For example: eventually you learn to tell which sprites are solid walls and which aren't, but it's not always clear, which sometimes can become an exercise in frustration. Furthermore, areas look very similar to one another, which certainly doesn't help the player feel familiar with the overworld's structure (and remembering which secrets to backtrack for). Once you cleared all test chambers in a given area of the facility (including some pretty climatic boss stages), you're treated to a new gadget that helps you keep exploring. The test chamber themselves can get quite hard, and many of the puzzles are more cerebral than particularly fluid, meaning you'll certainly die a lot. I have mixed feelings about this; in the best-designed levels, it can be exhillarating, but the difficulty can feel cheap and boring in other sections. The gadgets themselves are quite well-designed, even if some are way cooler than others. Sometimes you'll be required to use them in very specific ways, and each of them features particular controls you have to master. I like that kind of challenge, however. What I dislike is how the game forces you to soft-pause in order to change gadgets, especially with the big gamepad screen available for on-the-go switching. One of the game's better ideas is a neat way to help with the difficulty: the Miiverse integration, which lets other players place clues all over the overworld. This can be turned on and off at will, and can come quite handy whenever you're stuck on a particularly cryptic section. The well-made level designer mode also means that you might get mileage out of the game even after the credits roll. Stealth Inc. 2 showcases an interesting way to design exploration-heavy 2D platformers, certainly offering thrills along the way, but it doesn't hit all the marks it sets out to. It has a great little story and a setting that can get enthralling, but some less-than-pleasant design decisions mean that it doesn't really compare favorably to other metroidvania titles on the Wii U e-Shop. Rating: 6.5
The first Gunman Clive was a pleasant surprise on the 3DS e-Shop, with its peculiar aesthetics, tight platforming, and budget price point. This sequel is everything a fan of the original could hope for, keeping what worked and bringing about some excellent new features. The most obvious of those features, of course, are the colors: now each stage features a different predominant tone. The colors are used in very simple ways, just like the original title used its greyish brown hues, but the variation improves the atmosphere of each stage and makes them stand out from each other. Also importantly, the minimalistic usage of colors preserves the series's appealing visual simplicity, letting the gorgeous animations of characters and environment stand out in a very particular way. If the original game threw us for a loop with its mixture of 1800-era cowboys with futuristic robots, here creator Bertil Höberg decided to go deeper into the time-defying setting shenanigans. This way, you'll get dinosaurs, samurai, European aristocrats, and a plethora of steampunk flavors here and there. Needless to say, this is awesome, keeping you on your toes about just what you're going to find next. Most of the gameplay borrows from old school 2D shooters like Mega Man, featuring fluid platforming action that is very satisfying. Each of the three initially playable characters plays differently: Clive is the all-rounder, Ms. Johnson is slower but can float for short distances, and Chieftain Bob, with his limited melee attacks, acts as a veritable super-hard mode. If that's not enough variety for you, fear not: several stages are seen from a 3D third person perspective, and have your character shooting enemies while riding horses and aeroplanes. Of course, being a budget title, Gunman Clive 2 doesn't really last for long, although the different characters and the post-ending special mode give it replay value. Perhaps the game's duration could be further boosted by a few secrets here and there, which are virtually nonexistent as is. Given all of the game's great setting ideas, it would be excellent to be given incentives for exploration; sadly, this is a missed opportunity, and while excellent at pretty much everything it sets out to do, the game ends up a bit too linear. It's hard to harbor any serious complaints, though. This is one of those games that seem way too good for the price point ($3 at release), offering tight controls, gameplay variety and excellent setting ideas. It's an improvement over the first game in pretty much every imaginable way, and a great option to have on the go. Rating: 8.0
WayForward’s Shantae is one of those series I’ve heard a lot of good things about over the years, but never actually got to play until now. Luckily for me, it seems Pirate’s Curse is the most ambitious game in the franchise so far, with a vast archipelago of quasi-seamless, differently-themed islands to explore. It’s one of those games that manage to strike the elusive balance between tight platforming, exciting exploration, and a very fair difficulty curve. The title chatracter is a half-genie (the offspring **** and a human) who lost her magical powers at some point in the franchise’s storyline. To combat the rise of the undead Pirate King, she has to team up with Risky Boots, a pirate who lost her crew and weapons, and who happens to be Shantae’s original arch-nemesis. As you start the game, Shantae only has her hair whip attack to defend herself against the hordes of monsters you’ll encounter, but, true to the game’s metroidvania aspirations, each island you explore holds one of Risky Boots’ lost weapons inside a dungeon, which Shantae can use to help her in the quest. Each weapon is assigned to a different button, meaning you don’t ever need to switch between them. All the while, the gamepad functions as a sort of backpack, holding expendable items (available to use by touching), a quest and collectibles log, and a map of each section of the world. The storyline is nothing to write home about, but manages to entertain with its self-aware, silly humor. The characterization of each island is top-notch, and the platforming is very rewarding, mixing action and puzzles in a way that feels just right. Everything is in its right place, with the level design providing many of the “a-ha” moments that tend to be so enjoyable in exploration-heavy titles. Another point of note is the soundtrack, which was written by indie darling Jake Kaufmann. From the arab touches on Shantae’s home island of Scuttle Town to moodier compositions in darker parts of the world, your ears are in for a treat. It doesn’t soar quite as high as his impeccable work on Shovel Knight, but then again not much does. It’s hard to find any significant problems with Shantae’s third adventure, making it a very easy recommendation for platforming fans. It’s not the most innovative game around, but it distills its metroidvania sensibilities is such a flawless way that it’s going to keep you entertained for a significant amount of time (I spent over 11 hours to get 100% without outside assistance). Add the goofy characters and clever writing and you have a title that’s quite easy to fall in love with. Rating: 8.5
So here we are: over fifteen years after its debut on the Nintendo 64, Super Smash Bros. went from interesting oddity to one of gaming's premier franchises. As expected, this Wii U version is a collection of superlatives: Smash never looked better, never featured so many characters, never offered so many gameplay modes, and (perhaps most importantly) was never quite as crazy as it is here. If you’re new to the series, here’s all you need to know: Smash is about having every big Nintendo game star, as well as a few important mascots from third parties, battling it out in crazy free-for-all bouts. To sweeten the deal even more, you'll be able to grab famous items from past games (such as Mario's mushrooms, Kirby's star wand or Earthbound's Franklin badge) and use them to defeat your foes, as well as summon literally hundreds of other characters from in-game trophies and poké-balls to help you out. It's deliciously chaotic, but also features a lot of depth in its controls; so much so that a sizeable part of the fanbase is made of cutthroat tournament players, who will eschew the game's more quirky aspects (such as items and variable stage designs) in order to get a more streamlined one-on-one fighting experience. I gotta be honest and admit that the hardcore tournament side of the franchise doesn't interest me much, so I won't be able to comment on that and still know what I'm talking about. What I do enjoy, however, is how crazy Smash can get when all you want to do is have some friends over and battle the day away. Every character has the same set of move commands, so the game is relatively easy to just pick up and play. The results of each command, however, will vary immensely from one fighter to the next, making it quite a joy to explore the 40-plus character roster. Speaking of the roster, one of the best side aspects of Smash is how it gets every nostalgia muscle tingling. There's just something about seeing Mario and Sonic go at each other (something that would be unthinkable back in the time I started gaming). When, say, Mega Man and Donkey Kong join in, it just becomes the sort of thing that would blow the mind of young me. The game also features a host of trophies to collect, representing characters (from the usual superstars to long-forgotten sidekicks), items, and, uh, assorted inanimate objects, such as a can from Hogan's Alley. Better yet: every trophy comes with an accompanying paragraph of text explaining the origins of whatever's being represented. It's the kind of attention to detail that makes me pore over a title for more than its gameplay. As you may know, Smash for Wii U has no shortage of modes to conquer and things to do. Aside from regular Smash battles and the trophy gallery, you have a music player with dozens of tunes from old games (even if some of them are re-arranged in unfortunate ways), a fun board-game mode, a very handy (if sometimes laggy) online mode, and more alternate ways to play than I could list here from memory. Of course, there's also amiibo integration, allowing you to summon whichever figurines you have with you to join the battle and level up accordingly. It's a cool little feature, even if it doesn't really amount to much. Customization of characters and stages is also available, and it's one of the features that had me most excited prior to getting the game. The character creator works perfectly, allowing you to create fighters out of every Mii you have on your console, and customize each one with different moves and characteristics. The stage creator, on the other hand, was my biggest disappointment here. While it puts the gamepad to very good use, the options are very limited when it comes to actually crafting your stage, with just a few background options instead of a fully-customized editor. There are cool things you can do with it, but sadly there's no easy way to share your creations online, which further dampens its appeal. As you can see, yes, Smash for Wii U features a nearly intimidating number of features, and it gets the vast majority of them absolutely right. Be it playing against the computer, online opponents, three other friends on your couch, or, ahem, up to seven others in eight-player battles (trust me, it's one of the most hilarious experiences you can have with any video game, ever), the game oozes the kind of wide-eyed fun that is the very reason most of us play video games in the first place. It's poised to be one of the evergreen masterpieces of this generation, and it's an absolute must-buy. Rating: 9.5
