I can’t tell if SkateBIRD is a sincere attempt at a skateboarding game with a gimmick, or of it’s meant to be something akin to Goat Simulator, where it’s sort of bad and janky on purpose to be funny. The controls and actual skateboarding mechanics are so bad that it’s hard to imagine this being a real attempt to make something fun, but it also doesn’t lean into being goofy and weird enough for it to feel like that’s what it’s going for.

The controls are unresponsive and clunky. They are reasonably intuitive; if you’ve played a skateboarding game in the vein of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, this will seem familiar. As you start to skate around though, things will just feel bad. Something as simple as turning around can cause your bird to just fall off the skateboard. Things like grinding rails feels like a 50% chance you’ll actually grind it and 50% chance nothing will happen. When you go up a quarter pipe or half pipe ramp, the camera doesn’t change perspective at all. This means that if you want to spin your bird to the right, you actually have to hold left on the control stick.

Granted, what tricks you do don’t particularly matter. You’re not really playing for score much, just doing random missions scattered throughout each map. However, the skateboarding arguably has less nuance than skateboarding games from the N64 and PS1 era. It’s incredibly simple and basic. If you’re looking for any sort of contemporary features, you won’t really find any. You can make your bird scream though, so I guess that’s something unique this game offers.

There really isn’t a lot I can say about the gameplay. It just feels bad. The missions you have to do are all pretty generic filler. Do some tricks on or around certain objects. It’s really no different than a lot of things the THPS games might have you do, but it doesn’t have the solid and fun skateboarding to make it worthwhile. So it just ends up feeling like busywork. Playing this game was honestly exhausting as it’s a struggle merely to control it. As I mentioned before, simply turning around too fast can cause the game to think you’ve landed a trick wrong and send your bird flying off the skateboard. The trick detection is incredibly dodgy, so every step of the game feels like you have to actively fight against it.

The story and presentation of this game is of equally similar quality. You’re a bird, there are other birds, there’s wacky dialogue between them. Perhaps some might find it charming, but it just didn’t land for me. Throughout the game you’re trying to help out “big friend” who I’m assuming is the birds’ owner. Nothing wrong with the concept, it just doesn’t really lend anything to the game. Visually the game is perfectly mediocre, not exactly ugly, but nothing that will impress you either. Soundtrack is the same thing. None of the music is grating, but as soon as you turn the game off, you’ll struggle to remember any tunes.

I simply can’t recommend SkateBIRD. If you want a good skateboarding game, this certainly doesn’t provide that. If you want something kinda janky to laugh at, it’s not good for that either. However, if you’re curious how a skateboarding game could arguably feel worse than the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater, you can check this out for $20 on Steam. All its content will probably take about 10 hours to get through, though I can’t imagine there’s very many people that will actually make it through all of it.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: SkateBIRD appeared first on oprainfall.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers is the second EDF title from developer Yuke’s, the first one being Iron Rain, which I also reviewed. This EDF is a little bit different than what you might be used to. A blocky aesthetic and character swapping mechanic sets this apart. It’s also much more lighthearted and self-aware than other EDF games. Initially, World Brothers seems like it’s doing its own thing — a far cry from Iron Rain for sure, with an identity unto itself. However, the key word here is “initially.” Once you get into it, a lot of the same problems that held back Iron Rain still show up here, with some of them being worse.

World Brothers starts out with the world being destroyed and split up into fragments, and it’s up to you and Urthda Fender to reform the EDF and save the world. Aliens invading earth is nothing new to this series, though the earth being split up into fragments provides context for one of this game’s new mechanics: there are edges to each map that you can fall off of. This doesn’t really add a whole lot to the game, in fact in some missions you might not even ever see the edge of the map. It’s something you will, occasionally, have to be aware of, and that’s about it.

The new mechanic that’s a much bigger deal is the character swapping. In previous games, you had to select one character class and play as only that class for each mission. You might think this gives you a ton of freedom and options, but it’s not quite as it appears to be. Rather than unlocking weapons, you unlock characters, done by finding them in various missions, and they’re generously marked on your mini-map for you. I do think this beats farming for weapon drops any day. However, characters are inherently limited. They have one weapon, a unique ability of some sort, and a big SP move that does a ton of damage or provides some passive benefit like healing.

Rather than getting the character classes you know and love, you’re getting basically a small slice of them in each character. You do have wing divers and fencers, but they feel like simplified copies. In addition, World Brothers has a bunch of its own unique characters, hailing from all different regions of the world. Unfortunately, I found a lot of these characters to be very gimmicky. It reminded me of how many Iron Rain weapons felt like they were focused more on being goofy and weird than actually practical to use. Most of these characters you’ll try out once, and immediately decide to never use them again. The worst types of characters are ones with melee weapons. For starters, the camera will ensure that when you get close to an enemy, you won’t be able to see much of anything at all, as your own character will obscure large parts of the screen. They also just don’t have the range or the damage output to be anything more than a liability, and are completely unusable against flying enemies. The Fencer doesn’t have this issue as much, as he typically hits really hard and even has his boosts from previous games, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have to deal with just not being able to really see what you’re hitting.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers brings in a hodgepodge of enemies from across the series, which in some way feels like a celebration of everything EDF, but also feels like a step back from EDF5. I mentioned in my review of that game that I thought some of the new enemies were a big step forward for the series and were a lot more fun to fight than older enemies like the Hector, giant lumbering robots. Including them in the game isn’t a bad idea, but putting them in pretty much unchanged was maybe not the best. It just feels like I’m playing EDF 2025 again, except it doesn’t control as well. The major issue comes from when enemies from different games all show up at once. Or Iron Rain enemies show up.

I’m not sure on what the exact differences are between how Sandbox designs AI and missions in the mainline games and how Yuke’s designs theirs. What I do know is that in EDF2025 or EDF5, no matter how many enemies the game threw at me, I always felt like it was manageable with whatever weapons I had on hand. In Iron Rain and World Brothers though, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed and even be just stun locked by nonstop enemy attacks. The first mission involving flying enemies will make you aware of this. You can’t help but be surrounded and constantly pelted by attacks, and the only thing you can hope to do is kill everything before your health gets whittled down. This issue gets compounded when you have characters that mostly feel like they’re just lame gimmicks. The normal movement speed just doesn’t feel fast enough to actually avoid enemy fire, and only a couple characters have reliable ways of dodging. Almost all of the unique characters lack this, so using them felt more and more like a liability. I spent the vast majority of the game just using classes from older games rather than anything new.

The controls also aren’t as good. Earth Defense Force 5 is snappy, fast, and shooting guns feels satisfying. Something about World Brothers just feels off. Everything feels slower, perhaps to make characters that can fly or sprint more appealing. Guns don’t feel as good to use. Assault rifles feel like pea shooters, shotguns don’t have any punch to them at all. It’s hard to articulate in words. There’s probably subtleties in the animations and sound design that I don’t even notice. But, if you play both this and EDF5 back-to-back, I think the difference is readily apparent.

The gimmicky weapons also play into this. There’s things like crossbows that shoot out explosives, except the explosives travel in an arc, and you have to hold down the trigger to charge it up to make it shoot further. Only, predicting where the explosives will land is basically just a whole lot of trial and error, as you get nothing to indicate where they might end up. There’s another character with a shotgun that shoots in a completely horizontal spread, meaning you can either do a tiny bit of damage to a bunch of enemies, or you have to get right up in an enemy’s face to do any respectable damage.

Characters are meant to fill in one niche, I suppose that’s why you choose a team of four; however, the result of this is that most characters just feel bad to use in all but the one very specific circumstance that they might be good for. They’re too specialized and missions are too varied. It’s entirely likely you’ll have to retreat from missions and start over because you’re put in a situation that none of your characters can really deal with. There were more than a couple missions where I felt like a flying character was a necessity and the game does nothing to communicate what types of characters you might want to use in a mission.

It’s hard to say if Earth Defense Force: World Brothers is better or worse than Iron Rain. If you stick with tried and true EDF characters to play as, it’s probably better. If you try to use its weird gimmick characters, it’s probably worse. While some missions in an EDF game can be a bit frustrating, I definitely think they do their best to make each mission fun. Even at its worst, it still controls and plays well. In both of Yuke’s Earth Defense Force games, I feel like frustration is the status quo. Enemy placement seems less thoughtful and even when the enemy design isn’t something you have to struggle against, you’re still left with the controls not feeling very good. Between that and so few characters feeling good to use, the times in which I had fun in this game are few and far between.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Earth Defense Force: World Brothers appeared first on oprainfall.

Loop Hero is a hard game to really define. It has rogue-like elements, and it’s certainly billed as a rogue-like, but that doesn’t adequately encompass the whole experience. I’ve adopted the term “reverse tower defense,” but I doubt it’ll catch on. The premise of the game is that the world has been consumed by darkness by an evil Lich. For some reason, you, the hero, have survived and now have the chance to rebuild your reality. This comes down to walking down a road that loops back on itself, building things as you kill monsters and collect cards from them. The game is fairly light in its story, though there’s some lore that I’ll talk about later. For now, we gotta dive into the complex mechanics of this game.

As your hero travels around this road, he fights monsters, gets cards, the cards can build things like vampire mansions, groves, cemeteries, all sorts of things that cause even more and stronger monsters to appear. You might ask, well what’s the point of doing all of this? Why do anything at all? Well, you wanna rebuild your world, right? The world has bad and good in equal measure, and everything you build in this game gives you benefits but also puts some kind of obstacle in your way. Groves are necessary for getting wood, but they cause ratwolves to come out and give you a hard time. Villages can heal you, but as you build them, you also cause bandits to show up beside them.

If you simply never build anything and just do nothing but kill slimes that randomly populate the road, you’ll never accomplish anything. So, you have to intentionally put danger in your hero’s path to get anywhere. It’s a pretty fascinating concept. You’re in complete control over everything the hero has to deal with. In addition, you also have a base camp of a handful of survivors, and for some reason only the hero seems to be able to make any lasting impact in terms of building anything that could provide food, shelter, or other amenities. So, you also have the futures of others to worry about. Throwing yourself into danger is just the only way to make any progress.

What you can build is also determined by cards, and you can customize what you have in your deck. This allows you to customize exactly what sorts of things you want to fight, what resources you can get, and your overall approach to playing the game. The deck building aspect of this is fairly simplistic, which I think is a good move. The effects of each card are very straightforward and direct, so it’s easy to think up ways to synergize the cards to get something you want. For example, forest cards will increase your attack rate, and river cards double the effectiveness of whatever tile is right next to them.

Where and how you build things is also a large consideration. Should you put certain things at the beginning of the loop, where your hero will be more refreshed? Or would it be better to put it near the end where you’ll have had the chance to get better equipment for that particular loop? Field cards like meadows, mountains, and forests are all placed around the road rather than on it, but even then you need to consider where to put them and how much of it you want. In the early chapters of the game, you’ll never fill up the entire screen, but by chapter 4, you’ll have the screen jam packed with things. Forests increase attack rate – should you stack them as much as possible? What about deserts that can lower enemy health? It’s a tough balance, and figuring this all out is part of the experience.

In each chapter of the game, your goal is to build enough to make the boss of that chapter show up. You also want to make sure you’re fully prepared to fight them. It’s important to try not to stock up on too much of one specific card. Field cards provide great buffs, but if you’re not fighting enough enemies, it’ll be much harder for you to get equipment that’s good enough. This leads into actually fighting monsters. It’s the only thing in the game you have no control over. You can control exactly what enemies the hero fights, but not the actual fights themselves. Though to say it’s purely a stats game doesn’t do it justice. How well your hero fights is a direct result of how well you’ve prepared them. While it is possible to simply be unlucky, if your hero is struggling to fight, it’s generally because something in your “build” is amiss. “Build” here refers not only to your hero’s equipment but also your deck and how exactly you’ve placed your cards on the field. All of it is important.

The learning curve to this game is fairly large, but also gradual. Every attempt you make, you’ll have learned something. You’ve also probably gained some resources that you can use to purchase upgrades that make your life easier. I’m always a little wary about upgrade systems in rogue-likes, I often find that it takes much too long to make any real progress, but progress is pretty smooth here. It’s rare that you end a run and aren’t able to get something that can help you out.

Some of the biggest features that can help you out are additional classes. You start off with the knight, and it’s pretty straightforward. Hits decently hard, but not too fast, and is reasonably defensive. Personally, I find it to be the hardest class to get winning runs with, as it can be very easily overwhelmed by certain enemies with a bad build. The second class is the rogue. As a trade off for not having much in the way of defense, he gets two weapons and is very fast. Also, the way the rogue gets equipment is a little different. Rather than enemies dropping equipment, they drop tokens that get turned in at your camp, and you get equipment then. So you only get them at the start of each loop. This is important to consider when it comes to how you play your cards.

The third class is the necromancer, and for me it was the class I beat the final boss with. It can feel very weak at first, as it lacks any defensive equipment, and its own attacks are also weak. It’s entirely dependent on its summons to do damage and protect you, which is also dependent on your equipment. If you find yourself struggling with it, focus on max summons and skeleton level over summon strength. Skeleton level is a mysterious stat, but it affects how often you’ll summon advanced skeletons, which you want, even at the cost of them being technically a little weaker.

The gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying, as each run tends to be fairly short. The great thing about this is that when you get to camp at the end of each loop, you have the option of ending the run, and you keep every resource you’ve gotten. So, it’s totally possible to just focus on collecting resources to get upgrades rather than every run being explicitly trying to kill the boss. My favorite aspect about the game is that you really are in control of everything that happens to your hero. If your hero dies, it’s because you constructed a scenario that he couldn’t handle. It’s a game that requires careful consideration and a lot of learning by doing and messing up, and realizing that you messed up. It’s not an incredibly hard, impenetrable game though.

The visuals of the game are simplistic, but charming. Overly detailed visuals in a game like this would turn it into an unreadable mess, so the simple visuals are a good call. Music is a good assortment of chunky chiptunes that starts out pretty lowkey early in a run but ramps up pretty hard the closer you get to a boss.

I mentioned there’s not much of a story, and it’s true, but you can unlock lore about the game’s bosses, enemies, even mundane items. You do this by expending a particular resource, so you might even find yourself specifically farming for items just to get more lore. I’m not gonna say this game has particularly excellent world building, but I had a fun time reading through some of the little short stories about certain enemies. Also worth mentioning is that when you go back and fight bosses again, you get brand new dialogue. The final boss has the most dialogue, so you can find yourself still going in after beating the game just to get that. That for me was most of the replay value. Once you’ve beaten the game, you’ve sort of cracked the code and most runs after that will look much the same. This is pretty unlike most rogue-likes where there’s still more to do and see after hitting the end. I can’t really complain though, as I spent nearly 50 hours with the game.

Loop Hero is a lot of fun, and gives you that “one more run” feeling that great rogue-likes tend to do. It’s incredibly unique also, there really isn’t anything out there like this. If you like rogue-likes, if you like strategy games, if you like card games even, I think each of those are vectors that one could take to find enjoyment in this game. For $15, you can’t go wrong with this.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Loop Hero appeared first on oprainfall.

Pendragon is a turn based strategy game. The story of the game is rooted in Arthurian mythology. On a large scale, the game is about King Arthur clashing with his son, Mordred. You have the option to play as a handful of characters that decide to take up arms in this conflict. This game focuses more on the small scale though, as the narrative events play out in response to your actions. Characters can be friend or foe depending on conversation choices, and battles can change at a moment’s notice depending on how you approach them. It’s a very dynamic story, and I’m not sure if it’s procedurally generated. The point is, replayability is a very large focus here. When your main character dies, you also start over from the beginning. One might be tempted to then call this game a roguelike, but aside from that, it doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to that genre.

Well, it’s a bit hard to critique the story because the changes depend on who knows how many factors. The developers have even stated that they want some of the mechanics to be opaque so that you can’t manipulate things entirely in your favor. Though, because of the nature of the game, the overall narrative never particularly deviates from your main objective: getting to King Arthur. As such, most of the events of the game consist of things like happening upon a village, the villagers are supportive of your cause, and they give you some rations. Or some events can simply be stumbling across some bears in a forest and you need to dispatch them. The characters though have a bit more going on and are where most of the meat of the narrative lies. As you play the game, you’ll occasionally have the opportunity to sit around a campfire and exchange stories, where you learn more about characters from Arthurian myth — Lancelot, Guinevere, and Morgana la Fey, among others. I’m no expert on this subject, so I can’t speak to the accuracy, but I found the characters interesting enough to want to keep going through the game to learn more.

The narrative is also intimately tied to the gameplay. The game describes itself as a story that unfolds with every turn you take, and this is pretty accurate. The gameplay is a little hard to describe, in part because of how opaque some gameplay elements are, but I’ll do my best. Every new location you visit, you start on the left side of an isometric grid, and moving your character takes one turn, and then enemies or any neutral parties take their turn. Movement and combat are very simple. You can initially only move one square on the grid per turn. As you move, grid squares you’ve moved across come under your “influence” and it becomes possible to move further on squares that are under your influence. You can also change your stance to move diagonally, but if you’re doing so, you cannot attack enemies, and switching back to your normal stance costs a turn. Combat is incredibly simplistic, but rather brutal. In my experience, a single hit will kill you, but is also enough to kill your enemies. After I got some allies, I could occasionally withstand one or two blows, but that’s still enough to take you out of that fight immediately.

Strategy and patience are very important, as a false move can be your undoing. Fortunately one of the ways the game is transparent is what enemies can do. Selecting an enemy gives a detailed breakdown of all of their abilities and behaviors. So, if you do die, there’s little to blame besides yourself. You can also get abilities of your own, with stuff like being able to attack diagonally, additional movement, and other rather simple upgrades. Due to the nature of the game though, very simple upgrades can make a world of difference though.

Something that’s constantly hanging over your head is morale, a system that I’m not very clear on how exactly it works, and it’s intentionally obfuscated. Put simply, if your morale hits zero, then you’ll immediately retreat from whatever battle you’re involved in. Morale goes down if battles go on for too long or allies get hurt. As for what builds it up, it seems to recover naturally after a day has gone by and your party rests, but also sometimes goes up after favorable events happen. It was never a major concern for me, but if you’re not careful, it can make progressing through the game much harder.

The developers claim that each move you make unfolds the story further, and that’s pretty accurate. There’s very few just straight up fights in this game. Like other aspects of the game, it’s impossible for me to tell what exactly influences how events play out, or if some things are simply random. They really don’t want you to try to take direct control over the course of events, and I can appreciate that. The game is less trying to figure it all out and exploit all the systems to your advantage, but just kinda going along for the ride and using whatever you happen to have. “Optimal play” isn’t much of a thing in this game.

The main issue for me is that no matter how much variation there is to how the story plays out, the story itself never veers into any new directions. Even battles themselves don’t have a lot of variety to them, a consequence of just how simple and straightforward the gameplay is. There are multiple playable characters and they all present different challenges, but for me it just didn’t vary things up enough. Once you’ve fought a couple bears a few times, no matter how you go about it, it just feels like doing the same thing over again. The core idea here, a narrative that responds to your actions dynamically, is a really neat one, but I feel it’s just underdeveloped. In practice, it’s just small, incidental things that change. At best, you can learn more about the characters and the backstory; at worst, they can feel more or less like filler.

Pendragon has me a bit conflicted; there’s nothing about it that’s bad, I just wish there was more of it. It’s a bit difficult for me to recommend, too. I feel like you really gotta be into the idea of a dynamic narrative and doing playthrough after playthrough to learn more about it. Had this been a more unique setting with unique characters, it might be a different story. It all being Arthurian mythology means that I have at least some familiarity with what happened and who everyone is. How long this game lasts is gonna vary wildly. You could be like me and luck out on your second playthrough and get to the end, and decide that’s enough, but that’s not really a full experience. You could spend a few hours or maybe upwards of 10 hours if you’re into the concept enough. $17 on Steam is a pretty reasonable price, if this sounds like your thing.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Pendragon appeared first on oprainfall.

The premise of Tears of Avia is about as bog standard as you can get. You and some compatriots stumble upon some ancient evil and must work to vanquish it. The world unfolds as you progress through it, and there’s clearly some work put into this setting, but I can’t say any aspect of it was particularly memorable. It’s just sort of a mix of things you’ve already seen before: a running theme throughout this game. I don’t think a game being derivative is an inherent negative trait. Copying good things other games do and adding a spin on it can lead to refreshing experiences; this, however, isn’t one of those games. I can’t think of any new thing this brings to the table. Instead it copies a slew of other RPGs and instead of adding its own spin, it just sort of makes them worse. Lets go into why.

You have a handful of party members, each with their own unique set of skills. Each character has three separate skill trees, similar to what you might see in Diablo type games. Each skill tree focuses on different things. For example, your physical attackers might have one tree for offensive move, and one for defensive moves, one for support skills, etc. You might think this means you have to carefully consider your builds, but you really don’t. There’s a lot of overlap between abilities, though that doesn’t mean you won’t feel like you might have wasted some of your skill points. Some move’s abilities are simply not very good or just far too situational to justify keeping it around.

You also can only have a handful of skills active in battle at any one time. Weapons also have their own abilities attached to them as well. This is theoretically a neat idea. It could promote planning around your units synergizing with each other. For example, your mage could burn enemies with fire magic and then a warrior can use an ability that does bonus damage if an enemy is burning. Unfortunately, the game is so incredibly easy that you can play completely haphazardly with barely any planning and you’ll probably be fine. Simply sending out your units and using whatever your best attacks are gets the job done most of the time.

To say the map design is incredibly basic would be an understatement. I’d consider most Fire Emblem games to have pretty rudimentary map design, but generally have some fun, memorable scenarios. No such luck in this game. Maps are as generic as they can be, and enemy placement feels, at best, random. Most maps won’t even take you more than two or three turns, maybe a bit more if the game feels like it wants to put the slightest bit of pressure on you. This also conflicts with the design decision to have your abilities be on a cool down rather than using up some resource. Most maps are so short you’ll only have the chance to use any ability once, very occasionally twice.

When you’re not fighting things, you’re walking around some town hub, and also probably lamenting the fact that there’s no map of any kind to properly indicate where all the shops and whatnot are located. When you do finally find a store, you’ll then be lamenting the worst inventory system I have seen. Items are displayed in a grid, with seemingly no way of actually sorting the items that you have, and no way of sorting through the items you can buy. At the very least, you can compare items you have equipped with items you can buy.

Visually, this game is not going to turn any heads. Perhaps you’ll turn your head when you see how bad some of the attack animations are, but that’s about it. With how uninteresting attack animations are, you can turn them off, thankfully. Animations aside, the game just looks really bad. On the audio side, about the only thing noteworthy is the voice acting. I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t vouch for its quality, but it didn’t come off as bad as the rest of the game, so that’s a point in its favor.

Overall, I can’t recommend Tears of Avia at all. At the price of $20, there’s far more tempting offers on Steam than this. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, and it doesn’t do the things it borrows from other games particularly well either.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Tears of Avia appeared first on oprainfall.

The core gameplay of Dreamscaper is an action game with a top-down perspective, not unlike many rogue-lites you’ve seen before like Enter the Gungeon. This game is focused on melee combat, with a whole host of abilities. You have your melee weapon, a shield with which to block and parry attacks, a dodge roll to avoid attacks, bombs to clear obstacles and do big damage, and projectiles to attack from a distance. In addition, you have up to two big magic abilities, often doing a significant amount of damage and require a cool down after using them. You also have a meter that fills up as you kill enemies that allows you to slow down time, and you can toggle it on and off to use at your leisure.

The feel of the combat is great. Attacks feel meaty, but responsive and quick too. You have two types of attacks with your melee weapon. A light attack that can be pressed repeatedly for a combo, and a heavy attack that will knock most enemies down, and depending on the weapon, can send them flying back too. With the light attack, you’ll also notice your character will flash white at certain points, and if you hit the attack button again right at that moment, the next attack will come out faster and will be stronger. A really cool idea, and mastering the timing during intense combat can take a little while.

The most unique aspect of Dreamscaper is what goes on outside of combat. You’re playing as, presumably, a rather ordinary woman who gets whisked away to some weird dream world when she sleeps. When she’s not sleeping or working, you can travel around the city she lives in, meet people, and chat with them. Developing stronger relationships with characters is how you unlock new things. You can also craft gifts to give to the people you talk to that increases your relationship more than just chatting. Of course, you’ll need to deduce what sort of things each person likes. The items required to craft gifts are obtained by defeating enemies, so the two sides of the game feed into each other quite nicely.

The good aspect of this system is that you can clearly see what advancing a relationship with a character will unlock. This allows you to aim for specific upgrades. The bad part is that this is the primary way of upgrading. Progressing through the actual rogue-lite part of the game doesn’t actually unlock anything for you. Fortunately, it seems like the game is balanced well enough where you never really need any of the upgrades to actually get to the end. This does mean that getting upgrades is always done at a fixed paced. You can never have a really good run where you managed to unlock a whole bunch of stuff.

The actual characters you build relationships with don’t seem to have a whole lot going on. Interacting with them gives you just a generic “You spent time with ____” message and that’s it. When you level up the relationship, you sometimes get a conversation. It doesn’t start out with much, but hopefully when you level them up a lot you get something more substantial.

Going back to the rogue-lite parts of Dreamscaper, the level design is a bit less than impressive. Each area is comprised of a series of really small square rooms. I’m just not a fan of this sort of thing in rogue-lites. Having closed off combat rooms just always slows the game down, and it feels like you spend just as much time walking through doors as you do fighting things. Some rooms are also puzzle rooms where you solve a relatively simple puzzle to get a treasure chest. These also just feel like they don’t really fit and only serve to slow the game down.

I’m also not the biggest fan of the enemy design. Most of the enemies don’t have particularly striking visual design. It’s enough to be able to tell what an enemy is at a glance, but none of the enemies really feel like they’re a part of the world they apparently inhabit. Also, a lot of enemies are just stationary turrets. True to their name, they don’t move, and the only thing they do is occasionally shoot at you. These don’t make for engaging enemies and are just boring to fight, yet they take up such a large percentage of the enemy roster. I said at the beginning that the game is apparently near feature complete, so unfortunately I don’t expect much of my bigger issues to change. I can’t see the level design changing dramatically with the game close to being finished.

Visually, the Dreamscaper looks quite nice, particularly during the rogue-lite dream segments. I was worried initially about the game being hard to parse with environments being as detailed as they are. The good thing about the enemy design is that they’re made to stand out with bright blue flashing bits on most of them. The use of high contrast in the enemy design is very effective in terms of following the action, I just wish they looked more interesting. The soundtrack is also pleasant, with more subdued music when exploring that kicks into high gear during action.

The combat in Dreamscaper is certainly good, and there’s fun to be had, but I just didn’t find myself pulled in. In great rogue-lites, I have no problem jumping right back in after a death. With this game, the glacially slow pacing means repeated playthroughs are going to really drag. The game even seems somewhat aware of this, as when you defeat a boss, you can simply skip it in later runs. It’s not a bad game either though. It’s fairly middle of the road with some genuinely good QoL ideas like being transparent about how to unlock certain things. If you’re looking for a new rogue-lite, you can do a lot worse than this. For me, I had probably about 15-20 hours of fun, and for $20, that’s certainly not a bad deal.

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Fairy Tail is an RPG based on the manga and anime of the same name. I should note that I’m writing this review from the perspective of someone that doesn’t really have much knowledge of Fairy Tail in general. The game starts off rather confusingly if you’re like me and haven’t watched or read the series, as you’re fighting a villain with no context as to who they are, or what they’re after. After some events that are there mostly to teach you how the combat system works, the story finally settles in after a time skip. Or rather, time has passed for the rest of the world, but the main characters have stayed the same. In this new world, the Fairy Tail guild, a sort of collection of wizards that help the populace with various tasks and fight other wizards, has fallen from grace. So it’s your job to salvage its reputation.

Its a pretty appropriate set up for a game, but I’m not sure how smart of a move it is to start your video game more than halfway through the series. As someone that’s unfamiliar, I think I would’ve appreciated a more gradual introduction to the cast rather than essentially everyone being introduced immediately. I’m sure plenty of fans enjoy earlier arcs, and for someone like me, it just makes it hard to be invested in anything going on. The game sort of expects you to know who these characters are. However, I don’t think this is an example of a game that’s mostly just for fans. I feel like even fans will grow frustrated with the game.

In terms of story, many characters from the original series are just non-existent. Many events of the series are simply told to the player in quick summaries. You’d find better descriptions of some of the events on a wiki page. So while it does have scenes from the anime/manga, they’re heavily truncated versions of them. Oftentimes without voice acting, without key characters, and the briefest of summaries for events that can’t be portrayed with a turn based RPG battle. For example, there’s a magic tournament at some point in the game, and part of the qualifier is a race through a labyrinth. You don’t participate in the race at all. You’re just told how arduous the race was as the game basically just fast forwards to whatever the next story beat is that can allow you to have a RPG fight.

This happens very often throughout the game. Parts that are more faithfully adapted end up being heavily truncated with details seemingly left out and characters missing. Some characters are there, but only sort of there. By that I mean, they have no character model, and you never actually see them on screen, except for text boxes with a portrait of them. This confused me a lot until I realized that the game was more or less implying that some of these characters are just always conveniently off screen.

To call this game cheap feeling would be an understatement. I’ve never seen a licensed game that was so obviously impacted by either lack of budget or lack of time. To newcomers, the narrative seems rather boring and characters very one note, and I imagine fans would be frustrated at how poorly this adapts the source material.

In terms of gameplay, it fares a little bit better. It’s all pretty solid and competent stuff. Battles are generally fun and not overly long, and each mechanic feels meaningful. I do feel like the game leans more towards the simple side, presumably to accommodate the younger crowd that this series targets. I don’t have any real complaints about it, but not much here that’s praise worthy either. It’s all pretty bog standard stuff. One thing I appreciate is you can tell which enemies are going to attack which of your characters. Its a very nice thing for a RPG to have.

The combat system is about as typical turn based as you can get, with a few little extras here and there. Enemies occupy a 3×3 grid of squares, and your special moves have area of effects. So battles more or less become figuring out which moves can most efficiently take out the enemies based on where they’re positioned. You also have moves that can knock enemies back to alter their position, though I found this to not always be useful.

As you attack enemies and take damage, you’ll slowly build up the magic chain meter. When this is full, this allows you to fire off a series of attacks, the number of which is based on the level of your characters. This allows you to do a lot of damage at once. Another mechanic is the awakening meter that each character has. This is just something that boosts the stats of your character and refills their health and magic points, and for some characters, allows access to new attacks. This meter builds up the same way as the magic chain meter.

Overall, Fairy Tail works perfectly fine. There’s nothing bad about the battle system, and you get to see characters doing their big attacks from the source material. To speed things up though, you can turn the animations off. The main way you progress through the game are quests. Some have story behind them, some don’t, but ultimately they all kinda boil down to fighting enemies. Your guild headquarters serves as a sort of hub where you can buy items, upgrade characters, or upgrade the services your guild offers. The services you get include an item shop, a crafting system, and buying food that can give you passive buffs for a certain length of time. Upgrading these services just makes them offer more things. These are all done with resources you get from defeating enemies. It’s a pretty satisfying gameplay loop, and I’d say its the strongest aspect of the game. It’s very well paced, you’ll almost always be able to upgrade something after a quest or two.

There’s decent quality of life features to go along with this as well. If you need specific items for something, its very easy to look up what each enemy drops when you defeat it. If they’re quest items, you’ll have quest markers on the maps where they’re located. So you’ll never be running around looking for something for very long. The developers behind this game have been making RPGs for quite some time, and these sorts of features are where their expertise shines through.

That said, another point of frustration is just how few locations there are in the game, and how small they are. It won’t take you but 5-10 minutes to explore the entirety of a brand new location. You’ll also be going back to them very frequently for quests or upgrade materials. Each location also feels pretty generic. I don’t know if they’re pulled from the source material, but there’s very little that feels unique about them. Just your garden variety RPG locales. Forests, beaches, mountains, very safe locations.

The game visually looks pretty nice. Nothing to really complain about in that regard, though I found character animations to be a bit lacking. The battle animations look really nice, but when they have to move and act outside of that, it just looks really awkward and stiff. I don’t normally comment on a game’s performance, however I couldn’t help but notice some massive framerate dips during some attack animations. It kinda takes some of the cool factor out of these attacks when the game suddenly starts dipping below 20 frames per second. The music fares a lot better, it’s quite good. As far as I can tell, the game doesn’t use any music from the show, but the tracks here all fit the mood of the game perfectly.

I don’t think I can recommend this adaptation of Fairy Tail. For people that aren’t fans of Fairy Tail, there’s not much here other than a mostly competent RPG. For people that are fans, there’s just heavily truncated and compromised versions of the things they like. There’s some fun character interactions in the side quests, but I don’t think it justifies a $60 price tag. It’s a fairly lengthy game at around 40 hours, but most of this time is spent just being disappointed. If you’re a real diehard fan, and you just have to play this, then I’d at least recommend waiting for the price to drop.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

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The visuals in this game seem nice at first, but it isn’t before long that problems of simply parsing the environment come into play. When the scenery is full of dense trees, its really hard to tell where you can actually walk and where you can’t. Not to mention, the trees obscure your character, and of course obscure any enemies you happen to be fighting. You still can see a silhouette of them, but it’s hardly ideal.

The sound design is also particularly grating at points. The footsteps your character makes I can only really describe as obnoxious. Rain effects sound like someone balling up a piece of paper. The portion of the game I played lacked music as well, so there’s just little to appreciate here in this department. Attack sound effects when you hit an enemy sound fine, but combat has other, much worse problems.

You have but one attack, and at the start you have a few different attack options, the sword, the spear, and the axe. Your sword has a standard slash, the axe has basically the same thing but is slower and hits harder, and…I’m not sure what the spear does. If it has a longer range, then I was unable to tell. Your attack range in this game is pitifully short. The hit detection is also so incredibly wonky that you can be mere pixels away from an enemy, and the attack just misses for some reason.

The enemy design in Elden is pretty unremarkable, pretty much consisting of things that run directly towards you, or things that shoot you from afar. This game also puts a heavy emphasis on combat, which is baffling considering how very little there is to it. You can occasionally get locked into combat rooms where you have to fight what seems like a dozen enemies or more. With combat that feels slower and more limited than Dark Souls, a game where engaging with even three enemies can be dangerous.

To make matters worse, your movement speed is extremely slow, for no discernible reason other than that’s just how Dark Souls is. Yet, your movement feels even slower here. The problems don’t stop, to cap it all off, the only way the game visually communicates that you’ve hit an enemy is a simply unacceptable amount of screen shaking. I’m not one to get nauseous at screen shaking, but with how aggressive it is, and how frequent combat is, it’s shaking all the time. It is incredibly disorienting. You can turn the screen shaking down, but as I said, it’s kind of crucial to the combat design. Even with it turned down as far as it would go, I still think it’s far too much. Oh, and also the same screen shake is how the game informs you that you’ve been hit as well. So combat just kinda becomes a mess of pixels shaking around on the screen.

I just did not have fun with Elden, and with nothing to go on in terms of story, premise, characters, etc., I feel little desire to look into it more. The combat in Dark Souls was never its main attraction for me. So a game that just takes the combat, makes it slower, and adds more of it, just doesn’t work out. There’s a lot of Souls-like games out there making waves, but Elden: Path of the Forgotten is maybe a ripple.

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The story kicks off with a man named Duke on some sort of mission, only to be met with unspeakable, unknowable horrors. You’re the chief of a local band of Hunters, and you set off to find what happened to Duke, your close friend. When you find him, he’s become blind, and a shell of his former self. From here, you set off journeying across desolate, monster infested wastes. Perhaps even discovering what truly is going on in the world in the process.

Alder’s Blood introduces you to all the core gameplay elements quite nicely. If you’ve ever played games like XCOM or Valkyria Chronicles, you’ll find it to be fairly familiar. Any actions you take require a certain amount of stamina. This game is pretty generous though and allows you to move a certain distance before it starts using up stamina. Much like the other games I’ve mentioned, each map has a certain objective you have to complete. It’s up to you to use your units wisely in order to achieve that.

What’s unique to this game though is the emphasis on stealth. You’re generally not going to engage in open combat very much in this game. If you do, it’s usually a sign that something went wrong. The general idea is to sneak up behind enemies and backstab them, leaving them in a downed state. From their, you can whittle their health down. Or, if you’re in a bit of a hurry, you can Banish them, killing them instantly. However, this does cause a lot of corruption in the Hunter to build up.

Of course, sneaking up behind enemies isn’t trivial, especially because you don’t have to just worry about the monsters sense of sight, but their sense of smell as well. All your Hunters give off a scent. This is seen with a visible trail coming off of your Hunter. This means that even when hiding, an enemy can still become aware of your presence. It’s a really neat mechanic, and I’d probably say a turn based stealth game like this would be made trivial were it not for this.

Another difference from other games like this is the fact that there is no accuracy stat weapons have that can cause you to just miss your enemy. If you’re in range of an enemy and have line of sight, you will hit them, every time. Of course, gunfire makes a very loud noise, which can ruin your stealth, so you want to be cautious when using firearms. To aid in stealth, you can very easily see the vision cones of each enemy. This means that there’s never any guesswork involved to stealth. If you get spotted, it’s because you were careless.

Alder’s Blood is fairly forgiving though, at least on normal mode. You can save at any point, even during battles, and if a battle is going completely the wrong way, you can just restart it with no penalty of any kind. Battles generally only take a few minutes, so it never feels like a huge loss of time.

Your units are also completely disposable, as is usual for this genre. Hiring new units is always an option, though you do want to keep in mind that the more Hunters you have, the more food you use up each day. You’ll likely go through a lot of Hunters though, and not just from them dying. I mentioned corruption a little bit ago, and that’s the main reason you’ll be replacing Hunters. I wasn’t able to completely nail down how this stat works. The only thing I know for sure is banishing enemies builds it up a lot, and killing enemies normally builds it only a little bit. It might sound bothersome, but so long as you keep a decent rotation of Hunters, and sacrifice Hunters when their corruption gets a bit too high, you shouldn’t have any problems. Your Hunters can level up, but leveling up mainly just grants passive bonuses. I don’t think you could ever end up in a position with “underleveled” Hunters.

Alder’s Blood isn’t all just turn based strategy, there’s some survival elements that you’ll have to deal with on the map screen. Venturing to new areas costs food, which can only be obtained by resting in certain locations and going hunting. It’s a pretty simple matter, but it is something you always have to keep in mind. There’s other resources like money and crafting materials as well, things to ensure you have plenty of. I never found myself starving for resources, but you do always want to be mindful of them.

Camping is a necessity to gathering resources. This allows you to search for food, as well as craft new items. There is an ever-present danger though, if you don’t have Hunters guarding your camp, you could be easily ambushed by enemies. Or one of your Hunters could suffer an accident and lose health.

Also worth mentioning that if you want extra challenge, there is an “iron man” mode, where you can’t manually save at all, the game only auto-saves. This means of course that if you make a mistake, you can’t just roll it back. I’d recommend playing it without this first though, at least until you learn the nuances of the mechanics.

Visually, the game is a treat. Great 2D art that perfectly matches the dark tone they’re going for. Eldritch creatures and horrors of all kinds. The sound design and soundtrack make for perfect compliments, making for a very dark and brooding game. The voice acting was also pretty unexpected. You’re not getting star performances here, but it was still enjoyable and added to the overall experience.

Alder’s Blood rather surprised me. It’s in a genre that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but executes it very well, and does a lot to make it stand on its own. It’s fun and satisfying in the way that strategy games like this usually are. There’s also added satisfaction when you perfectly execute a plan without ever having enemies being alerted to your presence. The story is really interesting, and I quite enjoy the characters. If you’re a fan of this genre, it’s an easy recommendation.

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The gameplay is as simple as the story is. Shoot bandits to kill them. However, ammo is in extremely limited supply. If you’re lucky, you’ll have maybe a dozen or so bullets at your disposal for any given gun. There’s separate ammo types too, so you won’t always have the bullets that you need. Ammo is dispensed in crates you can destroy, but you’ll get a single bullet from them, maybe two if you’re lucky. Enemies frequently drop ammo as well.

Ammo isn’t overly scarce though. If you’re rigorous in searching for it, you’ll be sure to find some. It’s just scarce enough to get you to make your shots a little more calculated. You can have up to two weapons at once, so you’ll want to switch between them frequently. An ideal mix would be a gun that’s very powerful but slow, and one that’s fast but weaker. Given the setting of this game, there aren’t exactly machine guns around. You get single shot rifles, shotguns, the fastest thing you can get is a six shooter revolver.

Reloading is also particularly important in this game. A lot of guns only get one or two shots before needing to reload. Reloading also has to be done manually, it won’t just do it automatically when you run out. It might seem annoying, but it’s just another way the game forces you to pay attention and make very deliberate actions.

Stealth is going to be your biggest asset in this game. Enemies don’t just immediately come after you, you have to draw their attention in some way. Given how guns are in this game, this isn’t the sort of thing where you want to fight large groups of enemies, so methodically taking enemies out one by one is the best course of action. Sometimes though, tossing a stick of dynamite can solve a few problems at once. Or, you could simply sneak past a big group, or find another path, if it looks like it might be too much for you.

You won’t want to sneak past stuff too much though. This means you won’t have many opportunities to pick up more ammo or new weapons. There’s also hostages scattered around and saving them gives you crucial upgrades. I’d only just avoid enemies if it looks like there’s too many to take on at once, and you’re lacking dynamite.

As one might expect, you die pretty easily in Colt Canyon. Yet, it does a lot to make sure then whenever you die, you always feel like it was more of a failure on your part rather than a failing of the game. Its very easy to spot enemies before they ever see you, and there’s plenty of cover and tall grass to hide in to evade detection. If you end up having to tangle with enemies though, you have a dodge roll if things get too dicey. It’s rarely ever totally necessary though. Enemy attacks can be avoided by just careful movement, since you’re relatively quick.

Instead of running around a maze-like area to find the room that just happens to take you to the next area, Colt Canyon keeps things straightforward by asking you to just run to the right. If you’re moving towards the right, you’re moving towards the exit. Occasionally there’s some dead end paths, but they usually contain ammo or dynamite anyways. It does a good job of keeping a very quick pace despite how methodical the game is.

Something I really appreciate is that there aren’t discrete combat rooms. It would ill-fit a game like this, and they seem like the de facto way to make action oriented rogue-lites these days. In most games, they tend to just slow the game down to a crawl, and also severely restrict how you can approach enemies. This game doesn’t mind you making a tactical retreat. Enemies will lose your trail after awhile, so if things go awry, you can book it out of there and try a different approach.

All the game’s systems work really well with each other to create a pretty tense experience. Simply missing an enemy feels like a huge error, as you wasted a bullet, prolonged the fight with the enemy, and potentially even alerted other enemies. The pacing is excellent, and it’s fun to play almost immediately. Its a game that derives its enjoyment not from item drops, but just from its core systems. So it doesn’t fall into the trap where the first 10-15 minutes of the game are really boring because you simply don’t have a lot you can actually do.

The visual style of the game is quite nice, emphasizing more on just being able to easily parse what everything is. Characters are silhouettes, so it’s easy to tell at a glance what enemy types you’re dealing with. The big draw with this style is how bloody the game gets. After the smoke has settled after a gunfight, blood marks stretch across the landscape as a testament to your brutal victory. It’s not over the top, but it lends itself to the sort of violent Wild West setting its going for.

Colt Canyon is still in development, so I do hope that the final product has a bit more in the way of variety. Unfortunately, I think they’re kinda trapped in a corner here. With the game having a very specific setting and premise, they can only do so much. You’re in the Wild West, so presumably all the environments will be some manner of desert, and the enemies will be some manner of “guy with a gun”. Though the build of the game I played said flat out that there’s a lot of content that isn’t here. So perhaps the final product will surprise me. I think the core gameplay is really solid, and whether or not it has the content to keep people attached is ultimately up in the air. I think it’s something to keep on your radar.

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Dandy Ace is a rogue-lite developed and published by Mad Mimic. You play as a magician, presumably the eponymous “Dandy Ace” who finds himself trapped in a cursed mirror and has to fight his way out. That’s about as far as the story goes right now.

Its a 2D, isometric game where, in rogue-lite tradition, you trek through levels to find where the stairs are to the next level. You fight enemies and hopefully collect some goodies along the way. Superficially, the feel of the game is pretty similar to Transistor, even down to a similar HUD, but this is a pure action game. Your abilities are tied to pick ups, and unfortunately, this is where my issues with the game start. There is no default method of attacking or even defending, it’s all luck of the draw. The game seems somewhat aware of this, as one of the starting abilities is always a dodge, but seeing as how the number of abilities you have are limited, it feels silly that one will be occupied by something that feels necessary.

I tried plenty of times playing the game without the ability, and while it might be theoretically possible, it for sure makes the game a lot more tedious. Attack abilities are also not created equally either. Sometimes you can get really strong abilities at the start, other times you’re left feeling incredibly weak and just hoping to find something better quickly.

That said, when you have decent abilities, the game feels pretty fine. However, it doesn’t take long for another issue to crop up. The game is a slog. The very first area of the game can take 15+ minutes to clear through, and most of that time is spent dealing with combat rooms that lock you into a specific zone. Combat rooms in rogue-lites are typically not great together. rogue-lites are all about resourcefulness and clever thinking, and sometimes strategic retreats are part of that. Being able to fight enemies on your own terms. To make things worse, you sometimes have to deal with multiple waves of enemies. Its just a very slow game, from your movement speed to your progression.

Rogue-lites should generally try to have pretty speedy first areas. You’re going to see that area more than anywhere else in the game, so forcing players to trudge through it just makes the game more tedious. The actual combat itself is serviceable, nothing about it is particularly egregious. I do wish your movement speed was faster, but that’s about it. Give the game enough time and you might find some abilities that make the game a lot of fun, but I personally think it takes far too much time to get to that point. Standout games in this genre are instantly fun, and it’s something this game unfortunately lacks.

Your combat abilities range from some simple projectiles, laying down cards that act as mines, teleports that do damage around you, manifesting giant fists, and who knows what else. There’s plenty of creative stuff here, but the game can kinda hang you out to dry at times. There’s an ability you sometimes get at the start that’s like a spread shot, and its easily the strongest ability you have at that point. Even then, it can feel rather weak against certain enemies. I’d reset if I couldn’t get this ability for the sole reason that there are enemies that can spawn outside of the area you can actually walk in, and you need ranged attacks in order to hit them.

The aesthetic is one of the game’s strong points. There’s a sort of stage play / cabaret / casino vibe to it that’s really fun and vibrant. Enemies are all manner of wild creatures. The music suits the style its going for well enough. I just wish the game was as fun to play as it is to look at.

The build of Dandy Ace I played is a very early one, and there’s not even a release date planned, so I don’t know how much of this might be smoothed over when it’s complete. If they make abilities a bit stronger, increase your movement speed, and maybe tone down how much damage enemy attacks can do, it might be worthwhile. Something I feel very strongly about with rogue-lites is that being successful shouldn’t really be down to finding good drops. You should be able to clear the game with just about anything, so long as you’re good enough. I do hope there is polish yet to come, as I think this could turn into something really fun with the right tweaks.

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If you’ve played Dead Cells to any substantial degree, there’s a similar sort of feeling you get when you have a good run going in ScourgeBringer. When you have good weapons, and you’re just zipping through enemies effortlessly. A really nice flow. ScourgeBringer distills that specific feeling and makes an entire game around it. Your moveset consists of an attack, a heavy attack, a gun, a jump, a dash, and that’s basically it. Mobility is a big feature of this game, so wall jumping is here as well. Very rarely are enemies just on the ground, the majority of them are flying through the air. That’s no big deal for you, as your dash can maneuver you through the air as well. Attacking enemies also causes you to basically “stick” to them, and after you’ve dealt with one enemy, you can dash over to the next one.

You can clear entire rooms of enemies without ever touching the ground. The heavy attack is pretty weird, as it doesn’t do what you might think it does. It’s mainly for stunning enemies, it doesn’t actually do much damage. Hitting an enemy with it makes them stagger a bit, but if you hit them right before they attack, you can stun them, allowing you to go to town on them. Your gun is your strongest weapon, and as such, is limited by ammo. Knowing when to use your gun to take out enemies is gonna be key to surviving, because this game doesn’t pull any punches. Rooms often lock you in with no way out other than killing everything in it, and you die very easily. You’ll probably die a handful of times before ever making it to the first boss.

Fortunately, there’s some permanent upgrades you can unlock that will alleviate some of the difficulty and even expand your moveset. One upgrade gives you an attack that charges up over time, and when it’s fully charged, it inflicts massive damage on everything in the room. I feel like perhaps the game is a bit overly difficult though, the biggest thing being that your dash doesn’t have invincibility frames. However, I do appreciate the game not having a “panic button”, so to speak, that gets you out of danger immediately. Giving you enough mobility to just avoid enemies without that can help keep the game fair. The skill tree is very simple right now, with only a few linear branches. There’s not much decision making required, simply unlocking the next skill available to you is as much as there is at this point. Hopefully as the game progresses through development, we get some more interesting upgrade paths.

There’s three boss fights in the game right now, and all of them are a lot of fun and also very difficult. I feel like many rogue-like bosses tend to rely a bit too much on having a decent assortment of items and being able to just deal with them as fast as possible. Dead Cells is like this a lot, even some of its more fun boss fights can be beaten in seconds with a good setup. There’s no such easy way out here though. You might find a really powerful gun, but ammo being very limited means you still have to learn the fights.

ScourgeBringer is in very early access, only having just launched a couple months ago. As such, there’s not a whole lot of content and I’m sure there’s balancing and tweaks that need to be made as well. Still, this is about as rock solid foundation as one could hope for. It feels fun to play immediately, which is pretty important for rogue-likes. I’m definitely gonna be looking forward to seeing how this game develops.

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Editor’s Note: Due to the postponement of GDC, oprainfall has taken it upon themselves to help provide coverage to developers who were going to showcase their games there. Evan’s Remains is one of those games.

Evan’s Remains is a puzzle platformer. Someone named Evan that’s been missing for a rather long time has sent out a letter asking another someone named Dysis to come find them on some uninhabited island. So you set out, and quickly find that this uninhabited island was definitely inhabited at some point. You can solve puzzles, or just walk around them if you’re so inclined, as you unravel the mystery of what’s going on.

Its a pretty straightforward game with a simple premise, and unraveling the mystery is one of the biggest draws, so I’m not gonna go into it much more than that. I can talk about the gameplay though. The whole game is a series of little logic puzzle challenges solved via platforming. The platforming itself is very basic and not demanding at all, the difficulty comes from the puzzles themselves. There’s no tutorials whatsoever, you just learn by doing. Jump on platforms to figure out what they do and reach the exit of the puzzle. After a couple puzzles, you get a bit more story, so the game keeps up a decent pace. You’re never bogged down by any one thing.

You can also just skip puzzles if you’re so inclined, which is contextualized by the protagonist Dysis simply walking around them. It does make me wonder why in-universe she would decide to mess with them though. She offers some explanation that its simply something to do, but then hints that there’s some other deeper reason. They never really go into what that reason is. The puzzles are giant hieroglyphs that spell out a message, and a really easy explanation could’ve been that you have to solve the puzzle in order to figure out what the hieroglyph is. Maybe skipping puzzles could result in the other person on the island, Clover, solving the puzzle instead.

Its a really minor complaint, but after beating the game, I couldn’t help but feel that the puzzles were literally just there to have something to do. They weren’t bad puzzles by any means, and I enjoyed doing them, but they just didn’t have any sort of place in the narrative. I’m not sure if I would’ve even felt this way if the characters never bothered to call out the fact that the puzzles are kind of pointless. Though perhaps I only did them because I chose to believe they were important, even when the game said they weren’t.

The puzzles themselves are fortunately engaging enough, never becoming overwhelming, but also never becoming predictable. It slowly introduces more and more gimmicks like teleporters and platforms that can change into other types of platforms. It does so at a brisk pace, so you never feel like you’re going through the motions. That said, I feel like they also never really reached their potential. The mechanics here could’ve led to some truly devious and tricky puzzles, but that also just wasn’t the goal of the what the game set out to do. The real draw is the mystery of the story. The game comes close to interweaving its gameplay and narrative, but it doesn’t go all the way. Ultimately I think someone that skips all the puzzles would end up with a fairly similar experience to someone that didn’t.

Evan’s Remains looks quite nice with some very charming sprite art. I found the character portrait art to also be very well done and captured the character’s emotions wonderfully. I do wish the puzzles were a little more visually varied, but considering the reason for the puzzles to exist in the first place, it makes sense that they look very similar to each other. The music is all very relaxed and ambient electronic pieces. Nothing so tense or dramatic here, it makes the perfect accompaniment to methodically solving the puzzles.

Evan’s Remains is a neat little game, it’s only a few hours long, but I enjoyed my time with it. A good and fun mystery to unravel with some nice emotional moments and some puzzles to solve. As good a recipe as any, I think. The release date is a ways off at June 11^th, and there’s no set price yet. Even though I think this game comes short of being something special, if you like puzzle platformers, this is worth putting in your collection.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Evan’s Remains appeared first on oprainfall.

Dead Cells is a 2D platformer rogue-like. This review is focused mainly on The Bad Seed DLC, however I’ll be going over some basics of the game itself as we don’t have a review of that. You are The Beheaded, a prisoner trapped on some island that’s been laid to waste by some ailment known as the Malaise. So you sally forth to see what’s what. The story in this game is fairly light, being mostly contained in “lore rooms” that are sprinkled throughout the various levels. There’s even an option to turn them off if you just really don’t care. The reason why you play this is the gameplay.

I’m gonna cover the basics of the game just for context, but I’m also going to assume folks reading this are mostly familiar with the game, as it would take a significantly longer review to cover the game in its entirety. Its a rogue-like, so you proceed from area to area, exploring, finding loot, and killing enemies. That really sums the gameplay up quite nicely, but the combat is just absolutely superb. There’s so many varieties of weapons, so many different possibilities, and all with controls that are just buttery smooth. Enemies are wonderfully varied and all have distinct behaviors that make combat really engaging and fair. Every attack is telegraphed well in advance. Because of all of this, if you die, it really just feels like your own fault. You will die quite a bit too, as you’re learning.

However a concept pushed by the developers is that “death is only the beginning” and that rings true. Every time you go back in, you’re a little bit better, and a little more knowledgeable. Or for a more tangible difference, you’ll occasionally unlock permanent upgrades called runes that open up whole new areas to explore. This is where the metroidvania influence comes from. There’s one that lets you teleport between certain statues, one that lets you grow vines to access certain areas, one that lets you destroy specific floors, and one that lets you wall jump. Each one of these upgrades unlocks a potential different path to take, giving a lot of variety to each playthrough.

It should be noted that this Dead Cells DLC requires you to have the Vine rune and the Teleportation rune, which are found in two of the other first areas, Promenade of the Condemned and Toxic Sewers. This DLC aims to increase some early game variety. The game can broadly be split between two main “paths”, and this kinda adds a third one for the first few areas of the game. There’s two new areas, one new boss fight, and an assortment of new weapons. The first new area is the Dilapidated Arboretum. Its a level filled with really densely packed rooms, and the notable new enemy is a giant mushroom man called a Yeeter. He uh, “yeets” little mushroom babies at you. This is particularly troublesome as the mushroom babies become enemies themselves that can knock you about and do a surprising amount of damage. In terms of difficulty, I think its easier than Toxic Sewers, but harder than Promenade of the Condemned. Its a good middle ground.

The second area is Morass of the Banished. I think this area really ramps up in difficulty. There’s giant flea monsters that serve as mini-bosses, blow-gunners that can harass you from afar and can jump away to avoid you, spear wielders that can drop down from the ceiling, among other nasty things. It’s just as dense as the Arboretum, though this level is much more vertical, whereas the Arboretum was very horizontal. In terms of aesthetics, I really like what both bring to the table. Arboretum is this lush greenhouse type area, and Morass is a sort of dirty swamp type area.

This brings us to the boss fight, Mama Tick. In terms of first boss fights in this game, I think this one is my favorite. I really get the sense that their boss design has improved since the base game, as my favorite boss fights are all from the DLC. This one just has really fun patterns, and you can absolutely melt through it if you’re really good at parrying. Its also reasonable to not get hit during the fight, allowing you access to a legendary weapon after it. The other fights, Concierge and Conjunctivius are both pretty tough to not get hit, especially if you have a melee build.

After this, you get access to two of the mid-game areas, Stilt Village and Graveyard, though the second is only available with the spider rune. This is one of my favorite features of the DLC, being able to access the Graveyard from a different path. Before, the only way to get there was by traversing the sewers and fighting Conjunctivius, which is my least favorite fight. So in terms of levels, this DLC accomplishes what it set out to do and then some. It adds variety to the early game, and opens up other areas that previously could only be accessed in one certain way.

Lets get to the weapons now. There’s three melee weapons, one ranged weapon, and two powers. The first melee weapon are the Flashing Fans, a set of fans that can parry projectile attacks, after which it gains critical hits for several seconds. A really fun weapon that gives you some defensive options if you don’t have a shield, though the damage outside of critical hits is pretty low, so you better be good at parrying. The second weapon are scythe claws, unique because they take up both weapon slots. If you alternate between the left and right claws, you can get critical hits. This weapon is really slow, but the damage is insanely high, well worth foregoing defense for it. The third weapon is a stringed instrument called Rhythm ‘n’ Bouzouki. This hits slow like the greatsword, but if you time your attacks correctly, you’ll do massive critical hits that hit all around you. If you have really good timing, the weapon essentially has an endless combo. Tricky to learn, but so rewarding.

The ranged weapon is the blowgun. Nothing really fancy here, but you get critical hits if you attack from behind an enemy. The first power you get is a smoke bomb that makes you invisible for several seconds, and increases the damage your next attack does by 50%. The second power is the mushroom boi. It gives you a tiny little mushroom baby as a pet that will follow you around and attack enemies. Its attack has quite a lot of knockback, so it can definitely get kills in with good positioning. You can also tell the mushroom to explode, which of course kills it, and also probably kills anything in the immediate vicinity. All the weapons are a lot of fun, and it’s hard to pick favorites. I’ve had successful playthroughs utilizing all of them, so they’re all pretty strong.

There is one thing I dislike about the DLC, which is what happens when you don’t actually have it. The door that leads to the Arboretum is still there in the first area, the game just tells you that you need the DLC. I really kinda dislike this sort of thing, where it feels like the game is dangling a carrot in front of you to get you to buy it. Its always gonna be there as a constant reminder. If it just didn’t show up, I’d find that to be preferable. As it is now, the game is gonna feel pretty incomplete to folks that don’t care to put more money on the game down.

Still, I do think the DLC is well worth it if you like Dead Cells. It’s more of a good game, and I’d argue that it’s some of the better content, at least as far as the early game goes. The weapons are all really fun too. It’s $5, and even though you can technically see all of the content within 20 minutes, this is a rogue-like. You’re gonna be replaying it quite a lot, and on a larger timescale, which adds quite a lot of variety. The base game is $25, and while that might seem somewhat steep for what the game is, I’ve put over a hundred hours into the game, so it’s well worth it.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Dead Cells: The Bad Seed DLC appeared first on oprainfall.

Banner of the Maid is a strategy role playing game set during the French Revolution. Or rather, an alternate history of that time period. One where Napoleon Bonaparte has a sister, Pauline, rising through the ranks of the french army. You play as her, caught up in the struggle between France and its bordering countries, as well as the internal strife that seeks to supplant France’s current ruler. In addition, she also bears a special gift, that of being a “Maid”, a woman who holds mysterious powers that can influence those around her. The story proceeds through the historical events of the French Revolution, albeit from the perspective of this fictional sister of Bonaparte, who also influences some of these events.

The gameplay itself will be fairly familiar to anyone that’s played SRPGs before, in particular Fire Emblem. The game proceeds from battle to battle, and gameplay involves moving your units around to accomplish whatever goal the game sets for you. Characters exist in different classes, where their effectiveness is determined by simple rock, paper, scissors rules. The main character Pauline is a fusilier, which is most effective against heavy cavalry. Heavy cavalry is then effective against light cavalry, light cavalry is effective against foot soldiers, and foot soldiers are effective against fusiliers.

Battles start out with you selecting what units to use, and where you want to place them. Each map has its own objectives, usually being just killing every enemy. There’s some that mix things up though, like having to reach a certain area, or defeating an enemy before they reach a certain area. When its your turn, you can move your units however you wish, and when you no longer have any units to move, it becomes the enemy’s turn.

It’s a bit nitpicky, but the distinction of fusilier and foot soldiers feels redundant in this game, since on the surface, they’re exactly the same. They’re both soldiers with guns. Only one group of them is effective against cavalry, and the other group of them is effective against the other group. To be honest, if it wasn’t for the game constantly displaying which classes are effective against what on screen, I’d probably never remember. The distinction between heavy cavalry and light cavalry also seems largely pointless, both are mounted units. The light variant can just travel further, and for some reason is more resilient to gunfire.

In addition to these, there’s two classes that kinda exist as their own thing. The first is artillery, who can bombard units from afar. Then there’s support units that can play music that have effects such as healing others increasing morale and giving units another turn, among other things. They’re both very weak defensively, so you have to protect them. You’ll definitely want them though, as artillery does very high damage, and obviously healing units is important.

Despite the lack in intuitiveness of some of the classes, the system still works well enough. You have to consider which units to deploy in each battle, and consider your overall placement. However, I found foot soldiers to be ridiculously strong, or at least you get a few characters in that class that just happen to be really strong. They could often kill other soldiers and fusiliers in one round, and could sometimes even take out cavalry, the unit they’re supposed to be weak against. In contrast, some units ended up woefully weak, only doing minor damage to even units they’re strong against. I don’t know how stat increases work when you level up, if its random or something, but I’m leaning towards that being the case.

Each class in Banner of the Maid also has unique skills they can learn that will augment their abilities. Foot soldiers can get attack boosts by standing next to other soldiers. Heavy cavalry gets attack boosts if they move a certain number of spaces before attack. There’s a ton more too. Considering your skills and making the most out of them is pretty important the further you get into the game. Weapons have a limited number of uses, but thankfully it’s only limited per map. For example if a weapon has 14 uses, that only applies to the current map you’re on, and it will reset afterwards. So you have to consider what weapons you want to use, as better weapons will have fewer uses, but it avoids making you want to just hoard all of your good stuff. Healing items don’t recharge though, so if you have to use them, you’ll need to buy more.

The battles themselves are all varied and distinct. Most of the time you’re just eliminating every enemy on the map, but there’s often restrictions such as a time limit or needing to keep certain characters alive. You’re also more than often outnumbered, so you can’t just send your units over to just bulldoze over enemy forces. The map variety here is pretty great, with very few battles feeling like just a retread of an old one. They do their best to always keep things fresh and interesting.

That brings us to what you’ll be up to in-between battles, and the faction system. There’s different factions in Paris, each with their own motivations, and getting close to them offers perks, such as new stuff to buy. I do wish the faction system factored a bit more into the story though, and was more fleshed out. Gaining reputation in any faction is only ever a universally good thing. Its not like building reputation in one will cause you to lose reputation in another. They’re basically just stats that you want to get as high as possible.

You build reputation occasionally in the story, but mainly through side quests. Side quests are actually pretty substantial in this game, existing to flesh out a lot of the side cast that might not get time to shine in the main story. They also are a good source of money, which you’ll want a lot of. Buying new equipment and items is pretty costly, and then there’s items to promote units, which are very important. When your units get to level 15, they’ll no longer gain experience. You have to use an item to promote them. Though getting an item to promote them costs money and then actually promoting them costs money, which feels pretty redundant to me. You’ll likely end up in a situation with plenty of characters at 15, but can’t promote them because you don’t have the money to buy the item and promote them.

By the middle of this game, the difficulty starts increasing pretty dramatically. Many maps will have time limits or you’re forced to keep one unit alive, and battles only increase in scope as the game goes on. Some maps could take me over a half hour to clear. The game is also just really, really long. It took me about 40 hours to get through it.

Unfortunately I found it pretty hard to stay invested in the game, mainly due to the localization. It’s just very poor, to the point that its hard to pick up on character personalities, or tell when a character is joking or being serious. Its not incomprehensible, but its far from ideal, and it ultimately hurt my enjoyment of the story and characters.

Visually, the game isn’t super impressive either, but it doesn’t look bad by any means. The character sprites and maps are all pretty well detailed. I do think attacking animations are a little bland though. The character art is where this game pays particular attention, and it all looks really good. I did feel that there was some discrepancy between the art for the male characters and the art for the female characters. The easiest way to put it is that it looks like much more time was spent on the female characters. Still, the art is quite nice for all of the characters.

Despite some qualms here and there, I overall enjoyed my time with Banner of the Maid. It’s not exactly the best in its genre, but it manages to carve out its own niche. Its a rather unexplored time period in video games. Most RPGs and SRPGs tend to just go for a medieval fantasy setting, or sci-fi setting, so something like this manages to stand out. It’s $17 on Steam, which is a very fair price for this. I could recommend this if you’re wanting a SRPG and can forgive a rough localization.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Banner of the Maid appeared first on oprainfall.

Black Future ’88 is a rogue-like styled action platformer. The setting of the game is a perpetual 1988, so naturally, things aren’t looking too good. Nuclear bombs dropped by a man named Duncan ravaged the Earth and now the world is covered in perpetual darkness. Because of this, lives aren’t measured in years, weeks, or even months, but minutes. You decide to brave Duncan’s tower to try to put an end to the constant nuclear fire.

You have 18 minutes to get to the top of the tower, which doesn’t seem like much time at all. However this game is both very short and very difficult, so you’re gonna spend a lot more than 18 minutes on this game. Starting out, you have a choice of only two characters with marginally different play styles. You do unlock more characters, but your character selection only really affects how you play the game in the very beginning, or basically the first 5 minutes. As soon as you start finding new weapons, it can start playing very differently.

The basic structure of the game is jumping, shooting, slashing, and running through rooms until you reach the boss of the sector you’re in. The game is kind enough to point you in the exact direction the boss is, so you can go directly to it if you so choose. However, you could be missing out on lots of fantastic upgrades or new weapons. With an 18 minute deadline, you might think you should waste as little of that as possible. With how fast you can explore areas, and a robust fast travel system, it doesn’t take much time at all to go out of your way, and is often rewarding.

In each area, you fight your way through hordes of enemies, collecting valuable money they drop. Then you hunt out item shops in the hopes of acquiring more health, more ammo, a new weapon, maybe even a passive upgrade. You don’t want to spend too much money though, as most of this stuff can also be dropped by enemies. An interesting aspect of the game is how Skymelt works. It’s basically the collective AI that you’re fighting against. As you destroy enemies, if you don’t pick up the money they drop quickly, that will go towards upgrading Skymelt. This results in tougher, more numerous enemies, special hunters sent out specifically to kill you, and tougher boss fights. So its very important to be thorough when mopping up enemies.

One of the more unique aspects of this game is how the right combination of passive upgrade and a certain weapon can give you a whole new, significantly improved weapon. For example, an upgrade that causes your dash to do damage to enemies in combination with a “night” weapon, a weapon that causes you and the enemy to switch places, results in a much stronger version of that weapon. Personally, I’d always try to get this combination whenever possible, as it seemed so much stronger than anything else. It could even take out multiple enemies at once if they were close to each other. It was able to destroy boss fights in seconds. I’m sure there’s other combinations that are just as effective, but as soon as I got this one, I just started blazing through the game.

Making you feel overpowered is kind of a trick the game likes to pull though. Getting a really strong setup in the early game should be your goal, as once you get a couple bosses in, it won’t be pulling its punches. Enemies get exponentially tougher, and being careless can result in quick deaths. The constant timer wants you to rush and make mistakes, but you need to find a good middle ground of being quick but not careless. Time itself is a resource, and is one that can be spent in the purchase of items as well. Or you can purchase time with your own health. Managing time is the key to this game on top of everything else.

The boss fights are a highlight of this game. They’re fun and engaging, and occasionally overwhelming. Their attack patterns are kept relatively simple, with the game being on a constant global timer, and dealing with things quickly being the whole idea. It doesn’t take too long to learn how to deal with a boss, but that doesn’t mean none of them are tricky. These fights are why it can be worthwhile in the long run to go out of your way to find new weapons. A strong weapon can mean the difference between a fight taking a minute and a fight taking 20 seconds, and seconds are precious.

An interesting design choice of this game is the fact that aiming isn’t something you actually need to do. You can if you want, but simply pressing the shoot button will cause you to target the closest enemy, and the auto targeting is extremely reliable. This means that you can devote most of your focus to just dodging attacks. With a very responsive dash that even cancels out enemy bullets, you’re more than equipped to not get hit. Defeating bosses even lets you upgrade your dash in various ways. You can get an extra dash charge, allowing you to dash multiple times in succession. There’s also upgrades to make you dash further, or the ability to heal by dashing through enemy projectiles.

When you inevitably die, its not like you don’t get anything for your troubles. You gain experience and level up depending on how well you did. Leveling up gives you access to new weapons and upgrades, which should make your journey a little easier. You can also unlock new characters that might fit your playstyle a little better. My personal favorite character has an ability to slow down time, and has a higher chance of finding better weapons.

Visually, the game is a treat, having good looking sprite art and a strong 80’s neon aesthetic. I’m sure there’s more accurate, artistically savvy descriptors for this, but if you look at the game in motion, its really quite something. So much so it can almost be distracting. When there’s a lot of stuff happening on screen, it can be very easy to lose track of your rather diminutive character among all the gorgeous lighting. As much as this game’s visuals are a treat for the eyes, the soundtrack is a treat for the ears, with plenty of synth beats to accompany that fast and frantic action.

Black Future ’88 surprised me quite a bit. It’s a very rewarding and addicting game, and you’ll catch yourself saying “just one more run” every time you die. Its short length and fast pace makes it very conducive to replaying, and unlike some rogue-likes, it’s fun to play pretty much immediately. Even in a genre where a game like Dead Cells stands tall, this can certainly stand on its own merits. If you like rogue-likes and platforming action games even a little bit, this is an easy recommendation. It’s $20 on Steam and the Nintendo Switch eShop, and even though a successful run lasts 18 minutes or less, you can easily sink 10+ hours into it.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Black Future ’88 appeared first on oprainfall.

Bug Fables is a RPG that takes more than a little inspiration from Paper Mario. I have a bad history with games styled after Paper Mario, however this one was a pleasant surprise. I’d even go so far as to say that mechanically, its a little bit more interesting and challenging than its inspiration. I don’t think the story quite captures the charm of Paper Mario, but its a commendable effort, and it still manages to stand on its on.

The premise of the game is that a beetle named Kabbu and bee named Vi are both attempting to join the local Explorer’s Association. A group of folks who are essentially treasure hunters that ultimately work for the Ant Queen to find ancient relics which allegedly lead to something called the Everlasting Sapling. Supposedly an object of great power that the former Queen spent her life trying to find. In addition, you’ll also take on small odd jobs requested by various characters.

Kabbu and Vi both found themselves not being up to snuff to become explorers, however when they team up, they manage to make the cut. During their first excursion, they find a moth named Leif captured by a spider, and rescue him. Turns out he can wield ice magic, and they now gain a third addition to their team. From there, the team sets off to hunt for these relics.

The story might not start out as particularly interesting, especially with there not being much of a major antagonist. However the personalities of the characters are enjoyable enough. Kabbu is a straight up and honorable warrior, Vi is a hot headed child, and Leif is there to offer grounded sarcasm. In comparison to its inspiration, Paper Mario, it’s nice having protagonists with dialogue, personalities, backstories, and motivations. Some of the side characters might not be as charming or unique as some of what you’d see in Paper Mario, but there’s still enough here to be engaging in its own right. I do wish, however, that the goal of the story wasn’t just the acquisition of some object of nebulous power. Still, it was a fun journey.

The gameplay is I think where this game shines the most. Having three characters already increases the possibility space over Paper Mario, where you only have two. It makes good use of these characters as well, as they each have different roles. Kabbu can break through enemy defenses, Vi can hit enemies out of the air, and Leif can hit enemies underground. That’s just the surface level though, they all get special attacks with a variety of effects. These attacks use a resource called TP. Think of Flower Points from Paper Mario. In addition, there are medals that can give you new abilities, augment your abilities, and increase your stats. These are basically badges from Paper Mario, and similarly, equipping them requires medal points or MP.

When you level up, you have the choice of boosting either your health, maximum TP, or maximum MP. Unlike some other RPGs, your characters don’t increase their attack or defense values naturally at all. You don’t even get new equipment that boosts your attack. Instead, you’ll have to rely on medals, items, and buffs to increase your attack. Medals are crucially important in this game. My advice is that MP should be increased as much as possible on level ups, and only increase HP and TP if you feel they’re lacking. There is an option near the end of the game to reset your level ups, but it’s fairly costly.

There’s also a medal that puts the game on hard mode, and despite it seeming optional, the game is actually balanced around this. You also get additional medals for beating bosses on hard mode, so it’s well worth the extra effort. Hard mode is quite challenging though. You’ll definitely have to properly plan things out and come up with good medal loadouts to tackle them. It’s not super complicated though, its just figuring out effective ways to maximize the damage you can do while minimizing the amount of damage enemies can do.

Something fairly unique to this game is that you can freely alter the position of your party in battle. You can choose who attacks when, and you can even give up one party member’s turn to give it to someone else so they can attack twice. Though when you do that, you suffer a small reduction in attack power. The only issue I have with this is that you’re limited in what the party positioning is. You can only go through a handful of configurations. If you want to perhaps put Kabbu at the very back and Vi at the front, you can’t. Its a bit bothersome, especially since there are medals that modify the stats of whoever is in front and in back.

Kabbu has a taunt ability that makes it so enemies will only attack him, so a strategy I would use is keeping him in the back, buffing his defense, and then he can shrug off almost any attack. Another strategy I liked using is putting Vi in front to give her an attack bonus, and using her abilities that lets her bypass enemies defense stats. Unfortunately, you can’t use these strategies at the same time. Though perhaps that’s intentional.

Being a RPG, the occasional dungeons pop up from time to time with their own puzzles to solve. Each character has a couple abilities they can use outside of combat to facilitate this. Vi can hit objects from afar with her boomerang, Leif can freeze water and enemies to use as platforms, Kabbu can dig underground, among other things. Some puzzles require just the basic use of their abilities. If there’s a switch across a chasm, you need to use Vi. If there are water droplets to freeze to make platforms, you need to use Leif.

Every now and then you get puzzles that require unconventional usage of your abilities though. For example, Vi can keep her boomerang spinning in place, and when you call it back to her, it first zooms to wherever she was standing when she threw it. You sometimes need to use this to hit a switch in order to solve a puzzle. It’s not immediately obvious that this is a thing that the game expects you to do though. These sorts of things come up so infrequently that its easy to forget about them. I wish there were more puzzles that required thinking outside of the box rather than the basic “see problem X, use solution Y” sort of approach.

Visually, the game very obviously takes inspiration from Paper Mario. Characters are completely flat in an otherwise 3D world. It looks great and still manages to have a unique vibe to it. The one thing that bothers me however is there doesn’t seem much reason to have Paper Mario’s visual style other than to hearken back to Paper Mario. In those games, it leaned in a lot on the paper visuals. Characters would occasionally literally behave like paper. Mario even had an ability in Thousand Year Door where he’d transform into a paper airplane. There’s nothing of the sort here. It’s not a major issue though. The sound and music are also nothing to write home about either. Nothing really bad, but I just didn’t feel compelled to listen to the music constantly while working my way through dungeons.

Bug Fables starts out as a totally fine homage to Paper Mario, but as you play the game you realize that the game has a lot to offer. If you really want something in that sort of ballpark, this game is definitely worth your time. If you don’t like Paper Mario specifically, then its a bit harder to recommend. It’s currently $20 on Steam, and beating it will likely take around 30-35 hours, and if you’re a completionist, it can easily get over 40 hours. I think it’s a little too long for its own good, but still worthwhile.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling appeared first on oprainfall.

Shovel Knight: Showdown is one of the last expansions to Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, and this one stands out as being a multiplayer focused fighting game rather than a 2D platformer. It still feels very similar and familiar since it’s also 2D, has mild platforming, controls basically the same, but the point of the game is of course very different.

The story takes a backseat in a game like this, but there still is one. A magic mirror sucks the various Shovel Knight characters into its weird dimension, they fight it out for one reason or another, and then defeat the mirror and go back to the regular world with the events of this game essentially never having occurred. Even though it doesn’t affect anything in series canon, its still an enjoyable story with the same fun writing that exists in Shovel Knight and its expansions.

One would not be entirely inaccurate to compare this game to Super Smash Bros. There’s a story mode where you take a character through various fights, occasionally with different themes. These can be 4 player free for alls, 2 vs 2 team matches, 1 vs 3 matches, matches against a horde of opponents that die in one hit, among other things. There’s even a mini-game where you have to destroy targets using your character’s unique moveset. The normal versus mode is probably where you’ll spend the most time if you’re playing this with friends, and you can customize game types to your exact preference.

To be totally accurate with this game, I think its better to say it’s much more Shovel Knight with a versus mode twist, rather than a fighting game in the style of Shovel Knight. Most of the mechanics work exactly how they did in Shovel Knight, but with some tweaks here and there. Each character has a life bar of only 4 pips. Every attack in the game does exactly one pip of damage, and after taking damage, you’re impervious to further damage for a couple seconds. This means you can’t just go to town on someone. Combos are definitely not a thing in this game, you’re basically just trying to land a single hit at a time, which is often harder than it sounds.

Characters only have a handful of attacks, what with there being only two attack buttons. Some attacks require holding the button to charge it up first, some attacks have directional inputs, but its a very simple system. You can come to grips with how a character plays in seconds. There’s no complicated inputs or executions to master here. As fighting games go, the barrier of entry here is very low. Your movesets are smaller even than your full movesets in the other expansions.

Unique to this game is a parry move, which negates any attack. The parry isn’t too good however, as it doesn’t give you a free hit. Your opponent can still move out of the way, or do their own parry. This is why its often hard to land an attack. Rushing in with no game plan means you’ll often just be shut down with the parry. The best way of attacking is to punish attacks that have a long recovery in which your opponent can’t parry. Many characters can also set up situations in which it’s difficult to parry attacks. With the game having basically no execution barrier, its entirely about outsmarting your opponent.

The two main game types are simply beating your opponent until they run out of lives, or stocks, if you’re used to Super Smash Bros. The other involves collecting gems that spawn around the map, and whoever has the most at the end of the round wins. Functionally these two aren’t too dissimilar, as defeating your opponent causes them to drop some of their gems. There’s plenty of ways to customize your matches too, the time limit, how many lives you have, you can even turn off items and stage hazards if you want a more pure versus experience. There’s also “cheat” options for fun things like making all attacks a one hit kill, making players giant, increasing jump height and run speed, among other things.

Speaking of items, most of them are just small little assists rather than anything that changes your moveset. The game being very simple, items just do their own thing, like a laser that automatically shoots periodically, or a pet that follows you and attacks others.

The story mode is where you’ll be spending probably most of your time if you want to unlock the full roster of characters and stages. Each character has their own story, though it basically just consists of a few cutscenes. Still, it has some charming dialogue. The story ends with, obviously, a boss fight. However given the boss fights in the rest of Shovel Knight and its expansions, I found this end boss fight to be pretty lacking. I won’t spoil what it is, but after the first time fighting it, I was pretty unimpressed. Especially because given the random nature of the fights in the story mode, it can generate fights that are more challenging. Though, I suppose not many people will play through this expecting fantastic boss fights.

If you don’t want to bother unlocking characters and just want the full roster immediately, there are some cheat codes you can enter to assist you. There’s a cheat that unlocks all characters temporarily, and won’t save your game after entering it. That way if you want to unlock everything the traditional way, you can still do that, and have everything for if you want to play with your friends. Or you can just unlock everything permanently. I don’t know if there will be Shovel Knight: Showdown tournaments, but if there are, then there’s no worries about having everything available.

It should be mentioned that there’s no online multiplayer here. Running multiplayer servers is probably beyond the scope of a small developer like Yacht Club, unfortunately. I wonder about the future of this game. I just don’t see a lot of folks playing this in the future, though I suppose I could be wrong.

Evaluating this game is pretty tricky. I certainly had fun with what I played. As far as being a versus mode of a much larger game, its a neat little novelty that some folks might play around with for a couple hours. As its own game? Hard to recommend, unless you maybe have a friend group of passionate Shovel Knight fans. Though in that case, I’d assume they would have Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove already, and thus this is just a free update. It’s $10 on its own, which certainly is a fair price. However, I’d say Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove at $40 is a better deal. With that you get Shovel Knight and three additional full campaigns, as well as Showdown. At that price, you’re basically getting Showdown as a free bonus.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Shovel Knight: Showdown appeared first on oprainfall.

Disc Creatures is an interesting amalgamation and love letter to various classic monster collecting games. Whether you were into Pokémon, Digimon, Dragon Quest Monsters, or even SMT, you’ll find a lot here that feels familiar. The unique twist here is that creatures are kept on discs, and people that use the creatures are called DiskRs.

It starts out feeling very similar to Pokémon. You wake up in your house, with this being the day you finally get your Disk Kid, an essential tool of the DiskRs that allows them to control and manage their various disk creatures. After getting it and choosing a set of three creatures to use, you immediately begin helping out your local town. The game is split into chapters, with each chapter starting with checking out a billboard to see where your DiskR talents are needed. These quests sound simple, but involve exploring some new area, tangling with a boss or two, and then heading back home to repeat the process.

There really isn’t a big overarching narrative, each chapter is fairly self-contained. The first one is about checking out some abandoned house, the second was about a haunted forest. The third is when they started getting more involved with people poaching and killing creatures for profit. Disc Creatures tends to follow a minimalistic approach, where you get just enough story to know what you’re doing, but cutscenes are rarely ever more than 30 seconds or so.

An interesting thing about the setting is that the creatures that populate it seem to be sentient. Or some of them are at least. They can own houses and such. Some are content to just live in the wild and attack people though. The way you catch creatures is by burning their data to a disc. The questionable part about this is that creatures you’ve burned to a disc can’t talk, and are effectively your servants. Do they have a will of their own? Are they just copies? Perhaps its best not to think about it.

The gameplay is fairly similar to Dragon Quest Monsters, while have the type advantage system of Pokémon. You have a party of three creatures, but can’t carry any additional creatures with you. You fight 1-3 other creatures at a time. Battles start by queuing up your attacks, and then they all play out. The fastest creatures attack first, of course. The Pokémon-esque type system comes into play and works basically the same there. Each creatures has a certain type, and types are weak against moves of certain other types. For example, fire type attacks do extra damage against grass type creatures. This game has some unique types like magic and spirit to give it its own flavor.

Much like any other of these games, as your creatures level up, they learn new moves. They can only go into battle with four of them, however you can freely select what moves they have from their whole move pool when not in battle. This gives you a good deal of freedom in choosing your moves, but also necessitates some strategy. You need a good balance of offensive and defensive abilities.

The presentation is very bare bones, probably even more so than Pokémon Red and Blue. So much so that it can often impair you in battles. Some enemy attacks have effects that aren’t immediately intuitive. Also text prompts that pop up detailing each attack scroll by extremely quickly, with no way of altering their speed. It does mean that battles go by quickly, but if you’re not paying very close attention, sometimes things can happen and you don’t really understand why. The game would show what types enemies are at the start of a battle, which is handy, but if they became inflicted with a status ailment, it would no longer display this. It wasn’t a very big deal, but when you really wanna know what moves to use, it can be disruptive.

Battles are fun and engaging though, particularly boss fights can be surprisingly tough and involved. Bosses tend to attack in rigid patterns, so their power is offset by their predictability. You need to be able to deal with lots of strong attacks and status effects, so getting a good team together with good movesets is key. There are healing items to keep your creatures in top form, but they cost money and money is extremely sparse. You really want your creatures to be able to be self-sufficient in most ways. Items should be mainly a backup.

There is however one major hiccup to this, and it unfortunately soured much of my experience. When you get a new creature to use, that creature starts at level 1. This alone sounds like it’d make most of the game extremely frustrating, but there is one saving grace. There’s a restaurant near the starting town where you can eat meals that increase a monsters level to a fixed number. What level you can get them to depends on your story progress.

This sounds all well and good, but its very limiting. The most obvious thing is just that if you’re not near the restaurant, any new creatures you get are just gonna sit on the bench. Though more important, it feels like a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist. Why not just make it so creatures are at the same level you got them? The restaurant could still be really useful for getting underleveled creatures up to snuff. This just results in situations where you’re really far away from that restaurant, and you basically just have to try to chug along with what you have, unless you want to take the long trek there, and then trek back to where you were. It’s an inelegant solution to a problem of its own invention.

Disc Creatures is still a perfectly playable and generally fun homage to monster collecting games. This problem is like a constant weight around its neck though. To compound things further, you can only ever have a team of three creatures with you. If you could have extra creatures with you that didn’t fight but still gained experience, it’d be fine. However when any creature you have with you has to fight, it just means, at best, you’ll be handicapped when using lower level creatures. At worst, they’re just gonna immediately die to whatever you’re fighting and not be able to gain any experience anyways.

For a game that otherwise feels very modern and well thought out, this sort of shortcoming stands out as odd. In some places, it kinda got to the point where my team wasn’t built around any sort of type advantages, but which could survive and do respectable damage.

Visually the game definitely invokes old Game Boy games, though with a resolution that’s much higher than those games had to work with. The music also captures the feeling those old games had as well. Creature designs are pretty cute, though some have a very bootleg Pokémon feel to them, and some others just aren’t particularly memorable designs. Interestingly enough, there’s no evolution mechanic here. The creatures stay the same, with the only exception being that you can fuse two monsters together to create a new one. You need to have the recipe though, and you can’t just mash anything together, so its a bit limited.

I can certainly still recommend the game, but mainly only for those with nostalgia for those old monster collecting games. If you don’t like them, this won’t change your mind. If you do, it might be worth checking out, if you feel like you can get past the weird leveling quirk. It might not blow you away, and it might make you just want to play those old games instead, but its got its own twists that you might end up really liking it. It’s $15 on Steam, and should take at least 20 hours to play through it, and I’d say its worth it.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Disc Creatures appeared first on oprainfall.

Plunge is a rogue-like/rogue-lite developed and published by Spooky Buns. The premise is fairly simple. You’re a newly convicted criminal about to be sent to prison, but the prison is overcrowded, so you get sent to wander a dungeon and maybe fight your way out to earn your freedom. That’s basically it as far as story goes.

Plunge on the surface plays like most other grid based rogue-likes. Navigate a dungeon floor to find items, defeat enemies, and search for stairs to proceed to the next floor. The big gimmick in this game, though, is that when you move in a certain direction, you’ll move as many spaces as possible until there is something obstructing you. Think of it like permanent ice physics, but far less annoying than that sounds. With this weird movement, simply navigating each floor of the dungeon becomes a little puzzle in itself. Fortunately, floors are very small, so it’s never tedious to navigate them.

Enemies are also there to pose as obstacles, and they all follow fairly predictable behaviors and attack patterns. Some of them can move randomly, but it’s pretty easy to tell what they’re gonna do. Planning out how you approach enemies is key. Speaking of keys, you have to find one on each floor in order to progress. The key is usually just hanging out on the floor somewhere, but enemies will pick it up if they move over it, so you have to defeat them to get it.

Actually killing enemies is mostly optional in this game. There is no leveling system, so the only benefits to killing enemies is just removing them, or getting an item they have. Enemies can have food, which restores health, and pieces of armor, which essentially act as extra hit points. More interesting are potions, which have a wide range of effects. Some can heal you, some can increase your damage, some can make you invulnerable for a time. All the effects are temporary though, and when you pick up a new potion it will be unidentified, so you have to use it to know what it is. Fortunately if you pick up the same potion again, you will know what it is immediately. I’m not a big fan of this sort of system, but most potions are beneficial in some capacity, though there is one that can poison you. Dying because of that always feels incredibly cheap, even if it is infrequent.

The dungeon is separated into several sections, each one containing 30 floors. Every 10 floors in each section you get the opportunity to get an ability, free of charge. This can be simple stuff like just doing more damage, or doing more damage based on how many squares you moved towards the enemy. There’s also weirder stuff like dealing more damage on even-numbered floors, or making it so when there’s one enemy left, any attack you or the enemy does is an instant kill. I never had a run where I ended up with just totally useless abilities, so it all seems fairly well balanced to me.

Also worth noting is that floors in this game aren’t completely randomly generated. The layouts used are all intentionally designed, though the order they appear in is random, and what enemies they have are also random, with some exceptions. The first handful of floors in each section are all predetermined so that you can get used to whatever new enemies and traps that section has first. Traps include stuff like spike traps that will just do damage to gas traps that will reverse your controls for one turn. The 30^th floor of each section is a boss fight, and beating it will unlock the next section. Once you unlock it, you can start future runs right from there.

Overall I don’t think this game is too hard, but it does test your patience, more so than a lot of other games. Because of the predictable nature of enemies, if you end up in a position where you can’t avoid taking damage, it’s usually because you just weren’t paying attention enough or were trying to rush. You can play this game very quickly. Before too long, I found I could clear floors in mere seconds.

This mentality can backfire pretty hard though. You can go from breezing through the game to running headlong into your own demise pretty quickly. It can be a frustrating game to play, but mostly because you know that your deaths were entirely your own fault. Death is just a momentary setback though. A run through a section probably won’t take you more than 15 minutes. This game being as fast as it is, I always found myself thinking “alright just one more attempt” whenever I died. Before I knew it, I had spent several hours playing it.

To add to the variety and replayability, you also have a bunch of different characters to play as, with different abilities. The starting character gets a lot of health. One character gets armor, while another allows potions to last longer. My personal favorite character was one with low health, but after you attack an enemy, they take extra damage in subsequent turns. I do wish the game told you what the requirements were for unlocking characters. I unlocked a few after each run but after that it felt random, though I assume there were some requirements I had to meet.

Visually the game looks nice enough. The dungeon has a fairly simple look so that it’s easy to parse. There’s a sort of intentional “griminess” to the art style that compliments the game taking place in this dilapidated prison dungeon. Plunge delivers a bit less on the music department though. Each section just plays a single track on repeat, and they’re not bad, but they’re not exactly memorable tunes either. I ended up muting the game and playing it while listening to podcasts and such.

Overall I don’t think it’s one of the best rogue-likes I’ve played, but I think it stands above your garden variety rogue-like. Its gimmick makes playing through the game really fast, yet it still demands careful planning. For just $8 on Steam and the Switch, it’s not a bad deal at all if you’re looking for something on a very low budget. It’ll probably last you 10-20 hours or so, depending on just how good you are at playing cautiously.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Plunge appeared first on oprainfall.