While sat having a chilled out session of Dungeons & Dragons (or one of many available pen and paper games), the four main characters are teleported into a strange world. Waking up naked and alone, without a single tool or weapon at your disposal, you must find your friends and work out what the hell is going on. It doesn’t take long until your first job is to save a friend from the top of a tower, and the opening section provides you with the knowledge needed to play, thanks to a decent tutorial. After bumping into the physical embodiment of Destiny, you learn about three tyrants who must be defeated in order to return home.

There’s no audible dialogue, instead opting for conversational bubbles and the odd quip in text. The writing is fun and fundamental, and acts as a nice gap between the times you are out trying to gather enough resources for crafting. This is where Doom & Destiny Worlds feels laborious at times, as you’ll do a lot of grinding by breaking rocks, chopping trees down, and gathering materials for what you need. Certain elements of crafting and farming aren’t as well explained as they could be, and gathering so many blueprints can lead you feeling lost, especially in the early stages.

There’s a lot to get your head around, and with a messy inventory, it’s easy to get lost in there. Much of the learning is done on your own, and it would have been nice to have a little more guidance in how to craft items, or a clearer UI for how to build things. You can craft a whole manner of things from armour, weapons, and building blocks to traverse across the islands, and when you do begin to grasp these mechanics, Doom & Destiny Worlds can be fun. There’s just a lot to take in and a lot to manage, and with four characters all needing to be equipped with tools and such, it’s easy to forget where you are.

One thing I did like was how streamlined the combat is. While it can become repetitive, it’s easy to get to grips with. Each enemy has a health bar and an energy bar. The energy bar provides the ability to use certain skills, and while you and your foe has it, it needs to be broken down until the health can be depleted. Once the energy is removed, the health is the only thing keeping their hearts beating. it also acts as an extra level of defence against enemies, feeling just as much of a shield as a way to dish out certain spells and attacks.

Doom & Destiny is gorgeous. The pixel art allows the developers to get creative with the sheer amount of islands available, and I’m a sucker for this kind of art style. Heartbit Interactive has made a charming adventure, and I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. The music was wonderful as well, and provided the perfect soundtrack to my journey to find the tyrants and go home. It’s humour is great, and the relationship between the friends is relatable. As a DnD player myself, I appreciated how the nuances of the game were implemented into certain aspects of it.

It may become quite the chore to grind for resources or to craft a particular item, Doom & Destiny does reward you for your dedication. The art style and music is wonderful, and the world is vast and ripe for exploration. Combat is straightforward and often fun, although it can become repetitive when enemies keep rushing towards you. It won’t be for everyone, but the charming characters and opportunities to craft some cool equipment is present throughout.

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The world of Ashan is under attack from a demonic otherworldly force, and it’s turning the five kingdoms against each other. With all the world leaders brutally murdered by this devilish foe, the only ones left to save the day are their young heirs. You’ll need to gather allies, legendary units and powerful artefacts from across the land if you want to win this war, so get ready for an epic fantasy adventure full of drama and battles.

Each combat encounter in Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes takes place across two halves of the screen, the top half belonging to the enemy and the bottom belonging to you. Both of these areas are filled with coloured units, and on your turn you can pick them up and drop them wherever you want. By lining up three identical units vertically you’ll activate them and a few turns later they’ll charge at the enemy, whereas lining them horizontally will turn them into a defensive wall.

Once a unit has charged up and is ready to attack, it’ll head straight upwards into the enemy forces. If it’s strong enough it’ll take down any walls and units in the way and reach the back of the army and deal damage to the enemy commander. Winning is (usually) as simple as dealing enough damage to reduce their HP to zero, but that’s easier said than done when the enemy is trying to do the same to you.

One way to get the edge over your opponents is to delete individual units to set off chains of matches and gain extra turns. You can also activate units of the same colour at the same time to set up a combo, which powers up the units enabling them to deal more damage. There are a lot of intricacies to this fantasy puzzle game, and you’ll need to keep them in mind if you want to deal some serious damage.

Another thing you’ll need to keep in mind are the differences between each of the units. You’ll start with simple archers that attack really quickly but don’t deal a ton of damage, but soon you’ll get hard hitting bears, soldiers, and even elite units. These special units are way more powerful than the rest of your army, with powerful special abilities like the deer that can jump over enemy walls, or the Treant that drains HP from the enemy and gives it to you. You’ll unlock all sorts of mythical creatures as you play, and can level them up to make them stronger too.

That’s right – Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes isn’t just about puzzle gameplay, it’s a full blown RPG. You’ll gain experience for your general and units after every battle, as well as resources to buy elite units and equipment that will add some interesting passive buffs to your team. The progression is really satisfying, and will ensure you stay interested for the entire lengthy campaign.

The story isn’t just made up of back to back battles either, there’s a world to explore, side quests, puzzles and boss fights packed into the twenty hour runtime. Separated into different chapters where you control different armies, there’s a wonderful amount of variety in this engaging puzzler.

Once you’re finally done with the main campaign, you can head into versus mode and take on bots, local friends or people across the globe. With a variety of different characters and units to use in this competitive mode it’s a blast taking on your friends, and it’s certainly a lot easier than online play was on the DS.

There’s not a whole lot to complain about in Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition, but calling it the definitive edition does feel a bit cheeky. The visual overhaul isn’t exactly jaw dropping, and the additional content is a single piece of non-story DLC. It’s a good job that the game was so good the first time around, and still feels fresh today.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition is a wonderful match three RPG that’s just as good in 2023 as it was in 2009. The army battles are thoughtful and engaging, and the campaign manages to change things up constantly throughout the twenty hour runtime. The Definitive Edition doesn’t add a whole lot of content, but if you missed it the first time around then this is your chance to play a classic that’s aged like a fine wine.

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Remnant 2 is a sprawling, multi-branching labyrinth of a game. Each of its worlds is procedurally generated, as is your path through them. You’ll have a random starting world each time, and each of these worlds is broken down into random dungeons, objectives, and bosses. The idea is that no one will have the exact same experience, and it works incredibly well. There are overlaps, obviously. You’ll meet the same bosses over the course of several runs, and the items crafted from boss materials feel a little too restrictive, but ultimately your story will be yours alone.

Although, the story itself has a tad more setting than actual substance. Set some years after the first game, the Root has been effectively pushed out of Earth thanks to the actions of the Wanderer, Founder Ford, and your allies in From the Ashes. However, it hasn’t been fully vanquished, and the canon choices made at the end of the previous campaign have left many other worlds open to invasion. In Remnant 2, you’re the Traveler, a new protagonist who must take up arms against the Root. You’re joined by allies new and old, with many of the past game’s characters returning here, much older and more hopeful, living in a small town built above Ward 13. It’d be a nice place to settle down, but when your friend is dragged through the reactivated crystal, you’ve no choice but to go in and get them back.

The issue here is that because the worlds are so procedural, there’s little room for actual narrative development. Things just happen, and there’s very little growth and no real defining character moments. Characters who seem important initially get side-lined very swiftly, and the whole thing feels more like a device to give the action some context. Maybe that’s all it needs to be, but it would be nice to see Gunfire Games really lean into the characters they’ve created. More effort has gone into the individual stories of the worlds you visit, admittedly, but the motivation in each is often the same: We have a corrupted god that needs killing, go kill it, please.

Before you go on your deicidal rampage, though, you’ll need to select an Archetype from the initial 4 (5 if you pre-ordered and got the Gunslinger early). Although there’s a great deal of build diversity later, the first Archetype choice will greatly inform your play style for at least the first 10 hours. I went with Handler initially, as the option to take a brave little doggo into Hell with me was too much to resist. And when the time came to select a second to combine with Handler I chose Hunter, a long-range specialist whose skills and perks seemed like the perfect choice for my play style, which was to send the dog in to take threat while I fired from cover and used AoE weapon mods to slow the enemy.

Even in the early stages, I found the build compositions refreshing and exciting. The system has been massively overhauled from Remnant: From the Ashes, though. For a start, there are fewer armour sets and they no longer convey set bonuses. Instead, most of your stat bonuses and passive abilities come from Mutators and Relic Fragments. The former slot into your weapons, allowing you up to three. These can have a multitude of effects from increasing Weak Spot damage to reload speed, and many have multiple effects as they’re intended to replace the first game’s armour set bonuses.

The latter slot directly into your Relic. Initially, this is the Dragon Heart, but there are other versions to find that change the Relic’s effects the way you can change the Estus Flask in Elden Ring. The fragments themselves improve things like melee damage, crit chance, and cooldown timers. It means armour is mostly cosmetic, although elemental resistance still differs between articles of clothing.

As with any game of this depth, one or even two playthroughs isn’t sufficient to fully understand the build economy in Remnant 2. There are weapons, items, mutators, modifiers, and traits you won’t even earn or find without multiple playthroughs, which will keep even diehard min-maxers busy for a long time. What I will say is that I missed having the armour sets, and I hit a point around 12 hours where I’d maxed out my 10 Vigor points and had to look for other trait cards and mutators to increase my survivability further. Even if this is purely by design, it felt a little restrictive that I couldn’t improve my armour and health points for such a long time after only a dozen hours of play.

The weapons and gear you can find and earn feel good though, and I was always happy to return to Ward 13 after slaying a boss or completing an encounter to see what I could craft from the parts that dropped. The more I played the more I felt the need to investigate the mutators and mods I was collecting, to tweak and adapt my build in order to survive. As always though, there’s the sense that it’s only in the endgame that you’ll find the best gear.

Although, you can start the endgame fairly early in Remnant 2, sort of. After you finish whatever your first world is, you’ll have the option to switch to Adventure Mode and replay any worlds you’ve completed as many times as you like, with random dungeon rolls. You use the same character as your current playthrough, so any items and XP you collect is carried between the two. It’s a really fun way to level up a second Archetype without affecting your story progress. The campaign itself isn’t particularly long for the genre, but as with Remnant: From the Ashes, the idea is to replay and explore, uncovering all the secrets you can. And as the worlds are so diverse, it’s hard to get bored.

Remnant 2 is insanely creative. Not only in the appearance and tone of its worlds, but in the creatures within, and the boss fights and dungeon encounters. Not every dungeon has an actual boss fight, either; many have encounters instead. For example, in one area in the forest world of Yaesha, the finale of the dungeon saw me trying to outrun a huge contraption to the bottom of a massive helix as it crumbled around me and disgorged countless enemies. I also couldn’t go too fast or slow and had to periodically clear the mechanism of debris, meaning I had a genuine challenge on my hands.

The bosses themselves are almost all phenomenal. Some are smaller, more intimate encounters, such as the bow-wielding ghoul, Shrewd, or the giant Bloat King, a huge sewer slug possessed by an otherworldly wisp. But there are also large-scale fights against gargantuan creatures that almost feel like something from Returnal. Two in particular are very close to bullet-hell, and although I didn’t relish the thought of fighting either again, the experiences were exhilarating. The final boss in particular is incredibly tough, and had me re-speccing and upgrading for a while before I could beat it.

It’s hard to say exactly how deep Remnant 2’s various rabbit holes go. Some puzzles can be solved immediately, such as a clock tower puzzle in one of the Bloodborne-inspired districts of Losomn: Dran, while others require the passage of time and even repeat playthroughs or Adventure Mode runs to solve. There are mysteries everywhere; a door you can’t open here, a key that has no lock there, maybe an item you cannot reach, or an enigmatic item sold by a vendor that no one can identify. Every time I rolled Adventure Mode, I found at least one or two areas I’d never seen, and the ones I had seen were different, with new enemies, items, or tilesets mixed in with the familiar.

It helps that each of Remnant 2’s worlds have a distinct visual identity. N’Erud is a vast desert walled off by poisonous sandstorms and patrolled by rogue machines; Yaesha is a woodland world of eldritch forests and overgrown jungles; Losomn is split in half between the apocalyptic, Victoriana-themed Dran, and the lofty, gaudy Fae, a realm itself caught between two changeable world-states. There are a few other locations, too, and each has the same strong sense of place and purpose. It’s almost a shame that so much work and effort has gone into the lore and backstories of these worlds and not into the narrative itself.

Yet I find it hard to vehemently criticise Remnant 2 for the shortcomings of its story. It is, as the first game was, deliberately, bloody-mindedly obtuse. There’s more joy to be found by applying your own head-canon to events than having everything spelled out for you, in a similar vein to From Software’s Souls games. It’s all unknown, so that when your protagonist admits regularly that they don’t know what the hell is going on, you can relate. And as they gain understanding, so do you. I’m not saying it’s a masterful technique, but at no point did the story, or lack thereof, impact my enjoyment and investment in the game.

The shooting is as tight and precise as any 3rd person shooter I’ve played, with impactful, imaginative guns that can be modded and fitted with mutators or modifications that alter their appearance. Most of the best weapons are crafted from bits and pieces of vanquished gods and monsters, so there’s some very weird stuff in here. Wait until you see the gun covered in wriggling fingers, for example. If anything I’d have liked some choices thrown in here, or at least the need to grind some of these bosses for parts. Most of the time, a boss material will make either a new mod or a weapon, and that’s it, one item per material, with no real incentive to replay bosses besides a free upgrade. I’d have liked to see rarer models for repeat kills, or even choices that force you to replay a boss to collect everything. As it is, it feels a little limited.

In fact, that might be Remnant 2’s biggest problem. In creating something so modular and procedural, Gunfire Games have unleashed a behemoth in terms of balancing and build diversity. As such, they’ve had to impose limits elsewhere to wrestle it back under control. Therefore armour is limited, weapon crafting is simplified; even the story has to play it safe enough to allow players to experience the entire campaign in a totally random order, even down to the minutiae of which bosses they kill on the way. It’s a game positioned to receive regular content updates and tweaks, but that leaves the base game feeling just a little undercooked in certain areas.

Yet this is still an incredible achievement. Either solo or with others, the sense of wonder, curiosity, and sheer explorative joy can’t be denied. Every time you step through a new portal, you’re heading into a dungeon or area you can’t predict; every foggy boss door leads to a fight you can’t fully prepare for because you don’t know what’s coming. There are secrets on secrets, things you’ll walk right by the first time. There are multiple choices within each world, too; which characters to kill, and which to side with; whether to bend the knee or stand defiant; whether to save a world or doom it for your own reward. Despite a few shortcomings, Remnant 2 remains one of the most creative, fascinating, and compelling games of the last few years and stands as a testament to what this developer can do when they aim to impress.

The post Remnant 2 review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

The aim of each stage of Let’s! Revolution! is to find the king who is hiding and chase him off, until eventually you catch the corrupt monarch and fight in the final stage. This is easier said than done though, because each grid based level has a road running through it with a few enemies on. Any non-road space has a number that represents the number of roads next to it, so that’s how you avoid it and the enemies that inhabit it.

The issue with this is that the king is hiding on one end of the road, so you need to figure out where the branching paths of this concrete line come to a halt. As well as His Royal Highness you’ll also find helpful extras like shops and chests (more on them later) on these dead ends, so getting your head around how to follow these paths without getting in too much trouble is the name of the game.

Which class you’re playing as makes a huge difference in how you accomplish this though. You’ll start as The Trooper, who is awarded extra cash for killing all the enemies on a stage and has a skillset to help him do so. This includes a whirlwind attack that deals damage to all squares next to him, and a bow to finish off anyone further afield. These attacks cost stamina to use and have a cooldown, but you can earn this back by revealing tiles so it’s worth using when you’re worried about bumping into an enemy and taking damage.

The next class you unlock is completely different, using stealth to find the king and leave the map as uncovered as possible for bonus gold. Switching from the violent Trooper to the stealthy Shadow takes a lot of getting used to, but with a little help from smoke bombs you’ll be able to hide any enemies you accidentally reveal and make your way to the king.

Finally you’ll unlock the Oracle, who gains a whole heap of extra wonga if she reveals all the tiles on the map that don’t contain a road. With powers that reveal how many enemies are in a certain column and the ability to teleport, this class is particularly hard to master and definitely not for the faint of heart.

No matter which class you pick, you’ll need to take advantage of all the shops, gyms and weapon vendors you find on your way to the showdown with the king. From health and stamina upgrades to perks like gaining interest on your money or even brand new attacks, there are plenty of options to try out on each ten to twenty minute Roguelike run you set out on.

By collecting special gems from chests you’ll also unlock more upgrades and weapons for the future runs, as well as the classes that aren’t available to you yet. The starting pool of upgrades and abilities is pretty small, so adding a whole lot of extra options always feels rewarding.

It probably won’t take you too long to overthrow the king and succeed in a run for the first time, because Let’s! Revolution! is designed to cleverly make you feel like a genius by keeping the initial difficulty on the manageable side. Once you do complete a run as a class though you’ll unlock new game plus mode which gives you new negative traits and less health to work with, and if you manage to beat that yet another level of new game plus will unlock. It’s a wonderful system that ensures there are a whole load of challenges to take on if you dare.

As well as being a thoughtful and engaging puzzle game, Let’s! Revolution! is also absolutely lovely to look at. The pastel cartoony art style brings this game that could easily be made up of just numbered squares to life, and adds an unnecessary but lovely level of charm to this grid based world.

If I had to complain about one aspect of Let’s! Revolution! it’d be about the fairly lackluster onboarding, especially when it comes to the new classes. It’s really hard to work out the best way to succeed as the two less combat focused classes, and a tutorial or two for each of them would have saved me a lot of heartache and failure.

Let’s! Revolution! is a wonderful Roguelike puzzle game that uses familiar mechanics to create a truly unique experience. With new game plus modes and plenty of additional content to unlock, this game will keep puzzle fans busy and satiated for a heck of a long time.

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Viewfinder sees you transport between levels in a variety of ways. Sometimes you might need to locate a couple of batteries to power up a portal; use sound to initiate a path of electrical current; or stand on platforms to charge the gateway to another world. Much of the early stages see you finding photographs or paintings to then place in the environment, allowing you to pass into them and use whatever might be present in them, such as walls and ceilings as bridges to the end portal. These early levels aren’t particularly challenging, but they give you an idea about how the fundamental mechanics work.

Once you get to grips with how Viewfinder works, it decides to step things up and provide you with a camera that you can take your own pictures of the world with and then utilise them to find the right path to your goal. You might need more than one battery to power a panel, but by taking a photo of a battery or using a nearby photocopier, you’ll gain access to a second one, thus allowing you to complete the puzzle. Things get even wilder when parts of the environment disappear after taking a photo, or the negatives you gather start to play with the environment.

It starts to get more complex as you play, with some levels pushing your own creativity of what is possible. There are often multiple ways to solve something, and that was something I loved about Viewfinder. Much like it celebrates art in multiple forms, it also wants you to experiment and find your own way through the game. When it combines different styles of artwork by allowing you to travel through watercolour paintings, sketches complete with crosshatching, children’s drawings, and even cartoons, it becomes so fascinating you’ll often wonder how it was possible. It feeds on creativity, both in the designs of its puzzles and the ever-changing aesthetics of its world.

I never felt overwhelmed by the challenge, giving off similar vibes to Portal in how it layers new mechanics, however, the final puzzle, without giving anything away, requires both speed and creativity, forcing you to make use of everything you’ve learned up until that point. It’s the toughest part of Viewfinder, but it’s not without success if you have remembered everything up until that point. Scattered throughout the levels are telephones where someone called Jessie is communicating with you, offering some background to the narrative.

You’ll also meet a digital cat called Cait, who feeds you with little bits of the story until you realise what is going on, and there’re also gramophones that offer sound files from various characters who play a role in its tale. Viewfinder also has collectables scattered across the levels, and there are even optional puzzles that don’t need to be completed to progress from one hub to the next, but they add to the length of your playthrough. Once you’ve solved all the necessary puzzles, you’ll hop in a cable car and head to the next hub. It gives you a nice pacing between the worlds, and a brief respite before putting your brain to the test once again.

I was impressed with Viewfinder, especially with how it blends a variety of art with its puzzles. You’re constantly tested with new mechanics and ideas, yet it never throws too much at you. It looks incredible, and there’re also a few secrets and moments of warm silliness that further add to the charm of its gameplay. You will be challenged, especially towards the end, but it’s well worth playing if you want something that dares to push the boundaries of what’s possible within the single player puzzle genre. The story might be a bit hard to follow, but the world is filled with wonder.

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You manage a secret multinational military organisation known as the Xenonauts tasked with ridding the world of a new alien threat. Despite the combat being filled with options, you’re given a deep tutorial that helps you to become familiar with the nuances of war. Spending your time between upgrading and improving the Xenonauts back at base, you’ll also be tasked with various objectives that often result in all-out warfare. It is in these battles that it becomes a tense and fulfilling experience where anything can happen, and one wrong decision can have dire circumstances.

You control your soldiers from an isometric viewpoint, where the map can be rotated and zoomed in and out of, offering different angles for you to see what is going on at any given time. Each soldier has a particular skillset, complete with a variety of weapons from snipers to shotguns. At first, the map is shadowed out in places, forcing you to explore the unknown and walk a fine line of risk and reward. You could see an abandoned house in front of you that seems empty, but as you approach, an alien can come out of nowhere and shoot you dead.

It’s imperative to make use of cover, plan every action with precision, and use your action points to move cautiously. Each soldier has a set amount each turn, and if you use all your action points to move, you won’t be able to fire a weapon, launch a grenade, or use something else in your arsenal. Everything costs AP including crouching, so you’re also forced to think about cover from fellow soldiers when exploring a seemingly quiet location. If your assault rifle can’t be used due to a lack of AP, a pistol can be fired, but they’re not going to do as much damage.

When you do engage in combat, you can see the route of an attack and how effective it will be before you action it. The environment is destructible, and sometimes it’s necessary to blow up barricades in order to get the shot on. Enemies are lurking everywhere, and you can be cut down at any point, making each turn as stressful as possible. It’s exhilarating as it is frustrating, but the more you research back at base and upgrade or unlock new equipment and skills, your next fight will be a little more bearable.

Through autopsies and recovery of alien technology, you’ll be able to use their own minds against them. It makes battle more complex and consuming, as hours pass and you realise just how much of a hold this game has on you. I failed a lot. I lost soldiers through death and panic, feeling as though I was losing the war. Yet despite these failures, I began to get better – began to understand what I was up against – and the gameplay loop started to feed my success.

There’s a lot to familiarise yourself with, but by playing through and reading the text that’s available, you begin to improve your base and it air force, leading to an empire of strongholds across the globe. Outside of missions (which are varied in what you do), you’ll have to take out UFOs in air combat, although these play out automatically, taking into account how strong your aerial assault is. It’s the boots on the ground elements of Xenonauts 2 which is where the most enjoyment to be had is, as that’s where you feel your tactical prowess is allowed to flourish.

Graphically, it’s relatively basic. There’re no bombastic cinematics or animations, yet the crispness of gameplay is enough to keep you enthralled in the visuals. Being Early Access, not all the text is completed, which is something that will grow as the developers add more content. It’s not a dealbreaker by any means, and if anything, it means the plans going forward for Xenonauts 2 is at the forefront of Goldhawk Interactive’s mind. What is here currently is more than enough to give fans of turn-based titles plenty to do.

Xenonauts 2 is a rich strategy game that gives you plenty of options in combat. The missions where you are in charge of your soldiers are consistently evolving, forcing you to think on the fly and change your tactics with every turn. Whether you have to kill al enemies, find vital intelligence, or face the Cleaners, these fights are tough yet satisfying, and I enjoyed just how much there was to do in the heat of battle. It’ a shame that most of the maps feel familiar, but if you like the variety of its gameplay, it’s not going to pose too much of a problem.

The post Xenonauts 2 review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

Essentially Trails into Reverie is a continuation and ending of two different story arcs, the Crossbell arc (made up of the recently released Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure) and the Cold Steel arc. That’s six massive games that you pretty much need to have completed to fully enjoy the newest entry in the series, or you’ll be as lost as I was thanks to my lack of Cold Steel experience. I at least recognised Lloyd and the other SSS members though, so at least that’s something.

Recognising a few characters in a game with this many people in every scene is simply not enough, especially once you leave the first story route focused on Lloyd and his Crossbell friends. From start to finish big reveals were lost on me, but if you’re up on your Trails then this game is like Avengers: Endgame on steroids. Even without that required knowledge though, Trails Into Reverie is an epic tale with sensational turn based combat.

Trails Into Reverie has similar combat to the Crossbell games, with characters taking turns to use their Arts and Crafts. Crafts are individual to each character, use CP and can do anything from damage, heal or deal painful status effects. Arts are the magic of this series, and although they take time to cast the elemental effects they unleash are more than worth the wait.

To ensure you have the right Arts for the job you need to equip Quartz to your characters, which are basically gems you put into a little grid. Providing passive buffs and access to powerful Arts, you’ll want to experiment with these colourful rocks to create a team of powerhouses. Since Trails Into Reverie expects you to be familiar with the series, your characters come equipped with some decent Quartz from the jump, and you won’t have to worry about lengthy tutorials and boring battles in the first few hours.

This is especially true when you take into account all the special attacks and complex systems you’ll be expected to remember and use right away. S Crafts are special attacks that use up all your CP but can be used even when it isn’t your turn. Then there are follow up attacks that use up teamwork points and special Order Commands that apply buffs. It might sound a bit overwhelming at first, but before you know it you’ll be a master of combat and beating up bosses with the best of them.

To level up your team and be ready to save the day you’ll need to head into the True Reverie Corridor. This weird pocket dimension houses a big dungeon full of enemies, treasure and items called Sealing Stones which unlock characters, mini games and bits of story that help fill in some narrative gaps. You’ll spend a lot of time in the True Reverie Corridor, so it’s a good job it’s full of as much interesting stuff as it is.

All the best RPGs have plenty of mini games to invest your time into, and Trails into Reverie is no exception. There’s the series staple of fishing, a card game (be still my beating heart), and a quiz which is probably more enjoyable if you know the series inside out. When you don’t fancy whacking mechs with an axe, they’re the perfect distraction.

The biggest shock for me coming into Trails into Reverie were the 3D visuals. After the 2D chibi character models and isometric perspective of the Crossbell games it was interesting to see some of my favourite locations and party members in all their high fidelity glory. The visuals are nice enough, but I think I preferred the charm of those remastered PSP games.

The English voices were an unexpected addition too, but they’re certainly a welcome one. The audio in general is absolutely top notch, with some fantastic tunes waiting for you both in battle and while exploring the world. I’d expect no less from a Trails game, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive.

I played through Trails into Reverie entirely on the Nintendo Switch, and unfortunately that meant dealing with an inferior version of the game. The framerate of the game is shoddy at best, and while exploring the 3d world and moving the camera about the slowdown is real. Fortunately the combat isn’t really affected by these issues, but it’s pretty damn distracting and disappointing regardless.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie is clearly an epic RPG set in a deep and interesting universe, but unless you’ve played through at least six massive games before this one you won’t really understand what’s going on. Even if you’re a Trails veteran though I wouldn’t recommend you play the Switch version, and instead find another way to enjoy this brilliant and much anticipated game.

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The “story” this time around is just as boring and unexciting, with a bunch of teen or teen-adjacent space pilots on a journey through multiple galaxies while listening to cool songs and playing playground games. Within just a few levels I was rolling my eyes and jabbing the “skip dialogue” button, because I just feel this stuff was getting in the way of the actual gameplay, which in itself is pretty damn good.

By now, if you’ve played any Invector game then you know the drill. You have a spacecraft that flies along a fairly narrow space corridor, and you gather speed by hitting button prompts as you pass over them. At the lowest difficulty you’ll need to worry about LB, A and sliding the left stick to and from to shift left and right, while occasionally hitting the left trigger to boost when the meter is full.

At higher levels it increases the score threshold needed to pass a level, and adds new buttons into the mix. The jump from Casual to Normal still feels almost abusively steep, though, and even on the former setting the game will occasionally throw a sudden curveball your way, such as changing the mission parameters for one seemingly random level.

It’s a beautiful game though, even if you don’t really get to enjoy a lot of it because it’s whistling at such a speed. The colours are stunning, each environment carefully crafted to deliver a sense of pulse-pounding speed, as though you really are blasting through a cosmos of light and colour.

Obviously, though, it’s the soundtrack that makes the difference. With 40 tracks to fly to, there’s a superb selection of songs from Royal Blood to Tina Turner, few of which are repeated to the point of annoyance. Free-form single and multiplayer modes allow you to experience any song you’ve already unlocked as many times as you like, too. You can also extend the lifetime of the game by jumping into the multiplayer and challenging others to beat your score.

Invector: Rhythm Galaxy plays wonderfully well. It’s smooth and responsive, although it could use a little more rumble in the feedback. I played a lot of it on Steam Deck, where it looks beautiful, by the way, and it was smooth here as it is on PC. There is a sense here though that the series has kind of run its course. If you’re a fan of the genre and franchise then you may well advocate for more of the same each time, but the truth is that if you’ve played an Invector game before then you’ve kind of played this already. The songs may be different, but the gameplay is almost unchanged.

Controlling your spacecraft through floating rings, and hitting jumps and boosters just right still feels incredibly satisfying, but we’ve definitely done it before. It also feels weirdly anachronistic that one of the very best experiences that Rhythm Galaxy has to offer is playing a level over Tina Turner’s “The Best “, a song released way back in 1989.

Ultimately, Invector: Rhythm Galaxy is a very good rhythm game, of a calibre befitting a studio that has been making them for as long as Hello There Games has, but it’s also very safe and very familiar, doing little to freshen up proceedings besides adding an uncomfortably out-of-place narrative. There are some great tracks here, and it’s certainly beautiful to look at, but there’s not a lot here to really get your blood pumping.

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Jagged Alliance 3, as you may have guessed, is not a serious war game. It’s a turn-based tactics affair that sees your team of relentlessly mouthy, inexplicably cheerful international trouble-makers swan from place to place, putting bullet holes wherever they see a clean surface and generally saving the world one president-slash-dictator at a time. It doesn’t take itself seriously, which is a good thing, because it makes the jank in the tank much easier to swallow.

Because Jagged Alliance 3 is very janky at times. It bugs out now and then, enemies and mercs glitch, or the AI freaks out and doesn’t follow orders. But worst of all is that the Dreaded Chance-to-Hit Mechanic, also colloquially known as “That Fucking Chance-to-Hit Mechanic” is more of a menace here than it has been in any game since the first XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

How you can be a veteran globe-trotting gun for hire when you couldn’t hit a floor you’re lying down on is anyone’s guess. In the initial stages, the merc you just spent $12000 to recruit for seven days turns up packing precisely one handgun and maybe a pair of pliers or a med kit depending on their “specialty”, and then proceeds to miss any target that isn’t actively French-kissing the barrel of their gun. It wouldn’t be so bad if Jagged Alliance 3 didn’t have so many tools that are supposed to make shooting more accurate.

You can target individual body parts, use free aim, or even spend more Action Points to make the merc bite their tongue and knot their brows and really concentrate super hard – and they can still miss centre-mass from five feet away. It’s arguably the most irritating mechanic in gaming, and the genre has made great moves forward recently (see Gears Tactics and Showgunners, for solid examples). Jagged Alliance 3 isn’t interested in all that modern convenience, though: if the wind blows or a fly lands on a blade of grass nearby, the shot will spoon off into the bushes. And because of friendly fire, I had one merc outright downed by a teammate because he was within three feet of the 6ft doorway she was aiming through.

It’s a shame, really, because AI aside, Jagged Alliance 3 is a really fun, very entertaining tactical shooter. A lot of this comes from the mercs themselves. Each is fully voiced – and there’s around 20 of the buggers – and has their own personality. You can take any combination in, or even field two teams, and they’ll all comment on their own actions, your decisions, and events that happen around them. More than this, though, they’ll all talk during the static conversation cutscenes, meaning it feels slightly different when you replay levels with different mercs.

The story campaign is, overall, pretty serviceable. It doesn’t contain many surprises as this is no narrative-heavy adventure, but the plight of the fictional nation of Grand Chien (which I’m pretty sure means “big dog” though my French is rusty) is fairly easy to understand. The president has been kidnapped and the country is on the verge of civil war. So you need to prevent war by murdering all the enemy soldiers before they get the chance to mobilise properly. You do this by interacting with the people, including the loyalists who fight desperately against the evil Legion. While you will have set objectives across a given sector, you’ll also be given side quests that require you to go off the path to explore.

Travel between sectors takes time, which will in turn shave hours off your mercenaries’ contracted terms. In between objectives you can undertake various activities, such as treating your wounded, ordering supplies, or training the locals as militia fighters to defend places you’ve already liberated. This uses up some resources or money, or both, but it’s worth doing to keep your mercs fighting fit and your freed towns in-side.

The more you use each merc the more XP you’ll earn to unlock permanent perks that improve a multitude of different stats and abilities. These perks help shape your gung-ho mercenaries into much more dangerous fighters, and so that initial feeling of being about as much use as a chastity belt made of gummy worms doesn’t last for too long.

While you explore the terrain you can uncover boxes and crates or other lootable items containing body armour, clothing (non cosmetic, sadly), weapons, ammo, tools, bandages and ingredients for medkits and pills. Hitting alt will highlight items you can loot, and looting one will clear out the area immediately for your convenience. You can crouch and use stealth for silent takedown or to rob an area without being seen. Once you are spotted, though, you’ll enter the combat phase.

Here you move your mercs around a grid-based map, using full and half cover, overwatch fields of fire, explosives, special abilities and outright attacks. It’s very similar to any other TBT shooter, and fans of the genre won’t have any problems getting to grips with the mechanics. You’ll need to be mindful of elevation and distance to target, and whether or not it’s worth using a grenade to save a single mercenary. That said, the enemy AI isn’t great and they’ll often leave themselves open to flanking, or cluster in convenient grenade-ready groups.

Graphically, Jagged Alliance 3 is pretty enough but rarely spectacular. I suffered a little slow-down here and there during combat and I was playing with high settings. There’s a nice attention to detail in environments, and while the enemies are identikit, each merc has a distinct visual personality to set them apart.

You can play the entire game in online co-op mode if you choose, taking control of two or more mercs each, to coordinate actions, flank, and harry the enemy. You can’t explore separate map sectors or anything, but you can vary your tactics to tackle a given situation. The campaign is fully playable in coop, and both players can take part in conversations with NPCs.

There’s a lot to unpack and a lot to like in Jagged Alliance 3. The merc management system is solid, the gear system works very well, and it’s fun helping to manage and protect towns you’ve liberated from the enemy. The combat, too, can be very satisfying, particularly when you’ve been around a while and your mercs are well kitted-out and more likely to hit a wall from the inside. But the inconsistent AI and the awful chance-to-hit can occasionally threaten to unseat the whole experience. That it remains in the saddle is testament to how playable and likable Jagged Alliance 3 is.

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The main campaign is made up of six missions with various stages which take you through various environments like deep jungles and weapon facilities. Choosing between four weapons and a handful of grenades, you’ll have to kill a lot of enemies. The pistol is a simple weapon to use, however, it won’t cut the mustard when you’re facing down burly men wielding grenade launchers or helicopters. The submachine gun has an unbalanced spread of bullets, but as long as you’re pointing it in their general direction, you’ll be fine.

The other two weapons on Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission require two hands to hold, but I found the shotgun to be clumsy and pretty useless. Meant for close combat, I was rarely near enemies without more breathing down my neck. You don’t feel comfortable using it as at times there can be a lot of enemies shooting at you, making the assault rifle a much better choice. I seldom used anything else because it was the most effective. You can throw grenades into swarths of soldiers for quick bouts of destruction, too.

By killing enemies, you’ll earn more ammo, and there’re also various chickens and pigs that can be shot at to bag yourself a few more rounds, ammo vest, or first aid kit. Hostages are also scattered around the jungle, and by blasting off the cabin doors, you’ll free them to earn a first aid kit. Exploding barrels can be fired at for a nice explosion, and some enemies will drop special weapons in the form of a rocket launcher and grenade launcher.

There were other cool moments that pop up and mix up the gunplay, such as a stationary rail gun. Enemy soldiers come out you from the sky, sneaking around a building or from a local barracks. There are tanks, helicopters, and even boss fights at the end of each stage, always providing a challenge or two. The on-rails nature of combat is smooth and lacked any kind of motion sickness for me, and the difficulty didn’t tend to put an end to my run. Even if you do die, continues throw you right back into the action. All in all, Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission is fun as hell, albeit a tad repetitive and far too short.

You can obviously replay the campaign to get a better rank which is based off how good your combo kills are, how many first aid kits you use, and how much damage you take. I rarely dipped below an A rank, but the difficulty can be changed if you so wish. The only other mode is a survival mode where you pick a stage and fight off hordes of enemies until you die. There’s not a lot to do outside of this, but if you’re looking for something simple and quick, it might be worth a go.

Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission is a basic on-rails shooter, but its gunplay is pretty decent despite the shotgun being a little redundant. It’s too short and there’s little to do beyond the campaign and survival mode, yet it kept me interested. The story is daft and never takes itself seriously, but I found that refreshing as it was all about the chaos and gunfire. It tries to mix things up as it goes, and the easy controls make it a good jump in and play type of game.

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Our protagonist Marie isn’t the potion making whizz kid you’d expect from an Atelier game, she’s actually the bottom of her class at school. In order to light a fire under her posterior, Professor Ingrid gives her one final test, in the next five years either make an item worthy of a true alchemist or be expelled from Salburg academy. This isn’t long for Marie to step up, so get ready for a big adventure with a healthy dose of time pressure.

Although based on a game well over twenty years old at this point, the gameplay loop is pretty similar to the alchemy games we all know and love. You head out into the wilderness to gather materials, fight a few monsters along the way, then make your way back to the Atelier and make some items. Even in the simpler form of this older title it’s a great hook, and has all those lovely levels to raise so you improve along the way.

What makes Atelier Marie Remake different though is that five year time limit. Every action you take in the game uses up at least a day of your time, and they tick down fast. Gathering materials at a shiny spot, fighting monsters, and even going home to your Atelier will take a day of time away from you, and if you’re not careful those five years will be up before you’ve become a master cauldron mixer.

Alongside this overall time limit, there are also mid-semester assignments and quests from the inn that have their own deadlines. Whether you’re being made to gather a bunch of herbs or make friends with a certain number of the townsfolk, having a month to do so might sound like a breeze, but before you know it you’ll have spent a week fighting blue slimes.

The combat in Atelier Marie Remake is about as simple as it gets for a turn-based RPG. Marie and anyone she hires to adventure with her can attack, use an item or use their single special ability, and that’s pretty much it. That doesn’t mean that the battles aren’t enjoyable, but if you’re expecting to have to think long and hard about moves to use and different combat systems then you’ll be disappointed.

Alchemy is a lot simpler than it gets in later entries of the series too, and pretty much just involves finding the right items and hoping your alchemy levels are high enough to make a handy new bomb without anything going wrong. Crafting as much as possible will help level you up though, and with a bit of cash you can buy more recipes from the academy shop and extra equipment to make more advanced items. Although it’s lacking the puzzling elements of games like Atelier Sophie and Atelier Ryza, it still feels pretty good when you realise you can make something new of a decent quality rating.

Although the combat and alchemy feel a little dated compared to modern games, the visuals are fresh and modern. The chibi style character models work perfectly with the isometric viewpoint, and I loved pottering around the village and looking at the other adventures and NPCs doing their own thing. The music is delightful and catchy too, which is pretty much standard for the series at this point but appreciated nonetheless.

There is one aspect of Atelier Marie Remake I really need to bring to people’s attention, and it involves the five year time limit. This game is a pretty lengthy RPG that you’ll likely put dozens of hours into, and if you fail to make a good enough item once the five years is up then you simply fail. There’s no way to get extra time or rewind and make the game easier, you just have to start all over again and try harder next time. There is a difficulty mode that negates this (at the cost of a few story elements) but don’t go into the standard mode expecting to relax and take it easy if you want to actually finish the game.

Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg is an interesting look at the genesis of a popular RPG series, but compared to more modern entries it’s hard not to be a little underwhelmed. The time pressure you’re under provides an interesting hook, but the simpler combat and alchemy just don’t cut the mustard. If you’re looking for an RPG history lesson then you might get a kick out of Marie’s adventure, but don’t expect it to hold up to other recent releases.

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Oxenfree 2 takes this intuitive system up a notch. The dialogue rarely stops, informing as it does so much of the narrative, but it’s some of the best writing and voice acting I’ve heard in such a small-scale game. In fact, Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals is that perfect kind of sequel that uses the original game as a solid foundation, and then builds upon it in every way it can.

Perhaps the most telling element is the “Netflix” logo that fades in as Oxenfree 2 begins. This feels like a game made for the Stranger Things generation, as indeed the first one was before Stranger Things was even a major hit. The “small town gone bad” theme is prevalent, evoking parallels with Netflix’s paranormal TV show.

We’re introduced to protagonist Riley right away, as she prepares to start her first shift working for an environmental research department, planting radio transmitters along the coast near the small town of Camena. It sits opposite Edwards Island, the small lump of rock and sand that served as the setting for so much calamity in the first game. What begins with a simple radio chat with Evelyn, Riley’s supervisor, soon degenerates into something much creepier. Shortly after meeting her co-worker, handyman Jacob Summers, Riley finds herself repeating the same moments again and again thanks to a transdimensional anomaly on Edwards Island.

It doesn’t take long for Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals to become unsettling. Together with Jacob, Riley is tasked with planting four transmitters at the highest points around Camena and the nearby abandoned ghost town of Garland in a bid to overpower and remove the anomaly. But rather than this be a breakneck race to the finish, it’s much more intentionally slow-paced. Jacob and Riley have no vehicle, and must hike and climb to their destinations, dealing with increasingly hostile spirits trying to break into our world, and what may or may not be a sinister cult known as Parentage who have a connection with Camena’s checkered history.

Riley is a great protagonist too. A former resident of Camena, she joined the military to escape a broken home and has returned now, in her thirties, with secrets of her own. She’s strong, and confident, but carries an air of someone who has earned that confidence through training and conditioning, and developed that strength by fighting her whole life. She’s outdoorsy, athletic, pragmatic, but she’s also a realist who has little time for flights of fancy or what-ifs. Jacob is the perfect foil. Mild-mannered but courageous when his loved ones are in danger, unsure of his place in the world and living in the shadow of his more successful, estranged twin brother.

The interactions between Riley and Jacob power the beating heart of Oxenfree 2 in a more vital way than the relationships between Alex and her friends in the first game. It helps that these two are world-weary adults instead of snide teenagers, but it’s more than that. As they face increasingly messed-up, occasionally terrifying phenomena, they come to rely on each other, encouraging and supporting one another. Of course, you can choose to play Riley as a stone-cold bitch at times thanks to the dialogue system, but I found the warmer version to feel more natural.

It would have been quite easy for the writers to skew the dynamic between Jacob and Riley, to either include romance or, worse, make her a Mary Sue and him a bumbling cliche. Instead we get a relationship that feels believable, and proceeds along a natural course given the events that unfold. But it’s not just these characters who grow and change as the story progresses. Without spoiling too much, there are also “cult members” to contend with, who seem hell bent on opening a portal to let the Sunken into our world.

These antagonists continue the plot from the first game. Sailors on an experimental submarine, lost at sea thanks to a tragic friendly fire accident, now trapped in another dimension and seeking a way to return no matter the consequences – the Sunken are a terrifying, single-minded presence in Oxenfree 2, often possessing the living and steering events out of your control. Beyond that, though, Riley has a walkie-talkie with which to communicate with various other residents of Camena, including Evelyn, park ranger Shelley, fisherman Nick, and scientist Hank. Through your actions and choices these and other characters may or may not survive the night, adding an undercurrent of menace and accountability.

Outside of one moment in the first hour that felt a little slow, the 5-hour campaign is incredibly compelling, pulling you from mystery to mystery, exposing the secrets and pain of Riley’s haunted past, but also offering flash-forwards to a potentially grim future. I say “potentially” because, again, your choices will inform multiple events and endings.

While I felt the first Oxenfree had some issues with pacing, Lost Signals has no such shortcomings. There is, as I said, a moment early on where I was running for a long time with little to do, but in fairness I had gone the wrong way and had to backtrack. And the running was still filled with exposition and character building, so it wasn’t a waste. Arguably, Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals lacks big “wow” moments. There’s a few larger set-pieces in the back half, but it rarely comes close to thrilling, instead pulling you along with its incredible atmosphere, smart writing, and likable characters.

It doesn’t hurt that it’s gorgeous. Characters are animated with exaggerated personality, slumped shoulders, waving arms, ragdoll physics when they fall that add an unsettling air to moments of crisis. But the backdrops are often beautiful, and the environmental detail and juxtaposition of muted colours with the sharp, digital aesthetic of the otherworld are always effective. The map seems much larger than it actually is, and travelling anywhere never feels laborious, even if Riley has a tendency to force you to walk sometimes.

Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals is a special game, one that feels almost old school at times despite the modern spin on dialogue and storytelling. It’s a small-scale adventure with far-reaching consequences, starring characters that are never sure whether they’re saving the whole world or just their own skins – or if they’re imagining it altogether. You don’t necessarily need to have played Oxenfree to enjoy Lost Signals (though I’d advise you to anyway because it’s a great game), but knowledge of the characters and events would help you understand some of the intricacies of the plot and the backstory of Camena and Edwards Island.

It’s not often a game of such comparatively small stature keeps its claws in after the credits roll, but Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals will likely stay with me for much longer than just another playthrough. Partly, this is down to the mysteries and secrets, some of which you just won’t see in one run because of the weight of choices you make. It’s occasionally scary, often funny, consistently creepy, and manages to be moving, usually when you’re not expecting it to be. But it’s also good-looking, fantastically well acted, and very clever. It’s quite light on puzzles and things to do beyond running, climbing and talking, but I devoured it in two sittings and couldn’t wait to play it again to make different choices, and find all the things I might have missed along the way.

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What happens next is the start of a strange, supernatural journey for our heroine. Regardless of which option you choose, an ethereal force won’t let Angie walk away, nor will it allow her to die. Even when you succumb and kick the chair away, the beam above cannot take the weight, and she lives to see another day. At this point, the decision is made to accept the offer of employment, with a view to earning enough to vicariously fulfil the dying wish of her late husband, and see the beautiful cherry blossoms of Japan.

The new gig is, on the surface, as a live-in carer to an old boy ensconced in the Devon countryside. This idyllic scenario takes a distinct left turn when Angie discovers a portal to another dimension behind a creepy door in the basement of the farmhouse. It transports her to the purgatory-like alternate reality known as Burnhouse Lane, where she is challenged by a mysterious feline to endure a veritable gauntlet of five horrific tasks, which if completed, will grant a cure to her lung cancer. As gaming scenarios go, this is a doozy.

Gameplay is a combination of side scrolling platforming and exploration set between Burnhouse Lane and the farmyard. There are puzzles, items such as keys to be found, and branching dialogue paths that affect the direction of the story. There are even combat sections that are evocative of other survival horror titles from days past – if you are a fan of the creepy and macabre stuff like this, then you will recognise these when they occur.

There is no dressing up the fact that there are some very disturbing sequences and adult themes at play, which I will not spoil here. There is a very good reason that you get a content warning when you boot this one up, something that Switch gamers may not be used to. Pikmin, this ain’t. It touches on things that some of you may find abhorrent or disgusting and unable to deal with.

As the plot thickens, things do also become a bit hammy and suspension of disbelief becomes impossible, particularly if like me you are English and know what actually goes on in the Devon countryside. Harvester would have you believe that it is a lawless land packed with firearms and crazed serial killers. It also becomes apparent that a lot of the game is actually taking place in the “real” world, as opposed to the vastly more interesting, monster-infested Burnhouse Lane.

This macabre, arcane horror is helped along nicely by the extremely effective soundtrack, which has a splendid post-rock feel, and is deployed with a light touch. Voice acting is a mixed bag, but there is some sterling work on display for Angie and kindly farmer George. The visual style is also a treat, employing a clash of styles which blends quirky hand drawn characters with backgrounds and environments that almost appear photoshopped.

The gameplay is not the most dynamic exploratory platforming you will ever experience, but it is soaked in atmosphere and intrigue, as well as being memorably disturbing to the point where I found myself thinking about it during a recent restless night. If like me you are like a moth to a flame for this kind of oddball folksy horror, then I would advise you to take a look – just be warned, it isn’t for the faint-hearted.

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It’s a decent port, though. It tells the story of two warring Knights, Theoderich and Ulrich, formerly best friends until the latter claimed a powerful, evil relic at the tail end of the Crusades. The story is pretty good, though the telling of it suffers at the hands of an engine that struggles with the in-game cutscenes. Theoderich is a strong enough lead, if a little comparatively dull. All he wants is to live a quiet life away from war and bloodshed, but with Ulrich going off the reservation and raising an army to sack Britain, Theoderich has no choice but to get involved.

During fights you’ll be directing squads of troops around the battlefield. You’ve swordsmen, spearmen, archers, mounted knights, the usual assortment, and there’s a pretty simple loop of damage where one soldier type is more effective against another. Because the camera stays above the action, you’ll have a pretty good view of who’s doing what and where they are.

Each mission will have clear objectives as well as various side concerns. From all-out assaults to escorting VIPs, there’s a decent variety of missions across the 16 main stages. Your soldiers and hero characters all have unique abilities you can call upon, which never stray too far into fantasy. You won’t be summoning demons to fight or anything, but you can buff your squads, charge the enemy, or deliver precision volleys. You can even find loot such as special weapons and armour to outfit your men for war. It’s not the deepest system but it adds another layer of customisation and tactics.

Moving your squads around the battlefield is easy enough. You may well start an engagement in a position of advantage, but it does often last. Skirmishes are highly mobile, with enemies coming from all angles and directions. You’ll need to split your forces often in order to defend multiple fronts or flank the enemy where possible.

The Valiant plays great on a DualSense 5 controller. There aren’t a ton of button combos to worry about, and activating specials is as simple as hitting the corresponding button. I did find that it felt a little unresponsive at times, and my troops would just mill about a bit until I repeated a command. It’s also not always super clear to see what’s happening as the console version has no close-up zoom. Your men all blur in with the enemy after a while.

The console version launches with the main game, Skirmish mode, the online multiplayer, and the Last Man Standing horde mode where you just need to defend a trio of heroes against waves of enemies for as long as you can. It’s a great mode for those who crave a solid challenge, but the multiplayer will give you much more to think about. Adding other players into the mix is always a great way to increase the challenge, but arguably The Valiant doesn’t need it. It doesn’t add anything new to the overall experience, but rather changes the way you approach the core gameplay.

On PS5, The Valiant is just as playable and enjoyable as on PC, even if it’s not quite as good-looking. The control scheme works well, and there’s enough content across the different modes to keep you busy for a little while. There are better top-down strategy choices out there, such as the aforementioned Company of Heroes 3, but this is great if you’re a particular fan of medieval warfare. Whether you’re looking for an interesting if in-spectacular story campaign, or a challenge to stretch your tactical brain, The Valiant is a pretty solid option.

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My main takeaway from playing this one is that it actually does a surprisingly good job of simulating the technical aspects of running and working on a crab-fishing vessel. In keeping on-brand to the Discovery channel, Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe offers up some narration, which led me to wonder whether one day we will also see a Worm Dung Farmer sim, or Alligator Egg Collector: The Game.

There is an impressive, if somewhat banal, amount of depth to process, with multiple considerations to be made such as forming your crew (naturally, you do this by visiting a pub), buying the necessary supplies needed to entice the delicious pincered beasts, and then the art of actually netting the blighters. My knowledge of catching deep sea crustaceans is patchy at best, but it turns out that the best way to do this is submerge a crab pot, essentially a giant 750lb cage that crabs can enter but not exit, and play a waiting game as they become trapped. This means a degree of in-game waiting, too, before you get to the next step of processing and grading the crabs.

Now, the world of high-risk crab fishing has a pretty hardline set of rules and regulations. Equipment must be of a certain standard and tagged by the powers that be to prevent illegal and over-fishing. And it is also illegal, for obvious reasons relating to conservation, to flog crabs of the lady variety. What this means for Deadliest Catch: The Game players is that until you earn enough in-game clout to get some other AI mug to do it, you will have the ball-aching pleasure of spending long periods of time examining and sexing eight-legged sea critters.

Once you have sorted your crabs, you return to shore, cash in, and then upgrade your ship and crew to repeat the gameplay loop afresh, and hopefully catch even more crabs the next time around. It soon becomes very dull, very quickly, but is also annoyingly finnicky. There are a number of steps needed to be adhered to when lowering or cracking open a pot, with a whole bunch of different levers, pulleys and buttons to worry about. Accidentally dropping a whole cage full of hard-earned crabs is a real possibility if you lose concentration on the task at hand.

The presentation is as choppy as the seas upon which you carry out your arduous task. The graphics are merely functional, with some strange pop-up and clipping, weird character models and animations and unimpressive environmental effects. Considering the gravity and drama of the television show, which portrays one of the most dangerous professions imaginable, the dull music and lack of atmosphere or sense of peril is distinctly lacking.

Deadliest Catch: The Game had the almost admirable ability to make me not want to either take up crab fishing in real life, nor to find out what the eventual endgame of its videogame counterpart was. Unless you really must get heavily involved in looking at a shitload of crustacean genitalia, then my advice would be to have a look at the dramatic and compelling television show, which will make you think twice next time you hear rappers like Rick Ross boasting about chowing down on expensive crab meats, and be more inclined to hit up your local estuary and try to bacon-bait some little UK crabs into a bucket.

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As you can imagine, this has driven the cost of a PAL version into the realms of the ludicrous. More people should have had the chance to play this one back in the day, but timing is everything: Super Mario World had set the gold standard for the genre, and over the next 18 months HAL Laboratory spawned Kirby into the public consciousness. Thank goodness, then, that Bitwave have done the right thing and ported this charming platformer to modern consoles.

The most striking thing about Gimmick! Special Edition is how good it looks and sounds. The team producing it knew that they were having to compete with the superior graphical capabilities of the newer 16-bit machines, and managed to employ some clever tileset trickery to squeeze every drop of juice out of the ageing console. The art style is an evocative blend of cutesy influences from the era. There are shades of Jaleco’s magical Rod-Land, Taito’s Bub & Bob saga, and even first party Nintendo fare, but somehow it retains its own identity. The soundtrack is an eclectic blend of freewheeling jazz, pop and rock, with Sunsoft’s in-house composer Mashashi Kageyama taking a leaf out of literally nearly every 1980s footballer interviewed by Shoot! magazine in citing jazz-funk legend George Benson as an influence.

You take the role of super cute Yumetaro, a plushy whose child owner has been abducted to an alternate realm by the disgruntled remainder of her toy collection, seemingly borne of their jealousy towards how enamoured the kid is with the little green fella. To rescue his owner, Yumetaro has to adventure through over a half-dozen teak-tough platforming stages, employing use of the magical stars he carries above his head to take out enemies, but also to use as rideable platforms which can be used to reach hitherto unreachable areas.

You can ping the stars off the scenery and employ timing to hop on top of them, a bit like leaping on your own bubbles or rainbows in the aforementioned Taito classics, albeit with trickier physics and timing at play. There are other collectable projectile attacks to be had in the form of potions, and each of the six stages has a super-secret hidden treasure to find, as well as a boss character to defeat. Completing the game by simply acing the six levels and bosses will see your quest to rescue Yumetaro’s owner grind to a Ghouls ‘N Ghosts-esque halt, as you are sent back to the beginning. In order to get the true ending there are conditions to be met, which add a ball-achingly tough extra layer of longevity to what is already a tricky experience.

This is the ultimate remaster of the 1992 lost classic, and as such comes with a variety of extras, including some in-game achievements and art galleries. Best of all is a rewind function which really takes the sting out of some of the hairier platforming moments.

Unlike Cyber Citizen Shockman, which also allowed you to wind back proceedings, the actual physics, collision detection and platform positioning of Gimmick! Special Edition are on-point and, despite the high level of challenge, it never feels unfair and is very satisfying when you manage to ride a magic star all the way to some lovely treasure. It was a tad unfairly maligned at the time of release and stands up very well to some of the other NES and PCE titles of the time. This deserved a wider audience back in the day and is well worth your time if you are a fan of old-school platform hopping fun.

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Even with the full range of desired weights and stick modifications, it has to be said that the unit does feel a little plasticky and lightweight compared to what you may expect from a pro grade and premium priced controller. It weighs in and is physically a bit smaller than the official counterpart. The additional customisable shoulder and trigger buttons on the rear of the controller are a nice addition and have a satisfying click. I do like being able to map button combos to these in my fighting games, and I am sure that they will be a boon for FPS fans. The actual face buttons on the other hand feel a bit strange. Unlike the official Microsoft versions they feel a bit springy and don’t have the right amount of “click” for my taste.

It is also a tad disappointing not to be able to play wirelessly given the relatively high price, however the cable provided is going to be easily long enough for most gaming spaces. Nacon swears by the wired option to reduce lag and latency issues, but the reality is I was unable to detect any difference between this and the variety of other wireless controllers I use at home.

Nacon have produced the Revolution X app as a means to customise and map your controller to within an inch of its life. In theory, being able to choose between a set of pre-loaded schemes, such as one for sports games, another for fighters), there seems to be a lot of emphasis on stick sensitivity that will go over the heads of most players, and likely isn’t technically precise enough to cater to high end pro esports users. There is nothing in the way of handholding or tutorials, so it is actually quite tricky to understand what is going on when you really delve deep into the options. I found it all a bit of a chore, but there is clearly the perfect profile in there for you if you are willing to work for it. The way you can quickly remap buttons, and even aesthetically alter the colour of the LED ring around your right stick is cool, as well, mind you.

One area where the Nacon Revolution X Pro does excel and even gets one over on Microsoft is the support for Dolby Atmos sound, if of course you have a headset that can deliver this superb, immersive audio. I thoroughly enjoyed blasting through Gears 5, hearing every little nuance of splattering Locust and space marine grunt. I had been tipped off that it is a particularly great title to experience with Dolby Atmos, and I was not disappointed.

Offering a wealth of customisation options and some cool features, the Nacon Revolution X Pro is a fine third-party controller, which falls just short of the best devices on the market by virtue of a slightly high price point, lack of wireless connectivity, slightly cheap feeling build and a tricky to negotiate and very finnicky app. At the RRP, I would suggest looking at one of the cheaper options on the market, although it is currently hovering around the £60 mark, which for me constitutes half decent value.

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Bullying is something we’ve either witnessed happening to those we know or to us ourselves. It can destroy confidence and a will to live, ruining lives and impacting childhoods well into becoming adults. Maybe we can blame the bully’s upbringing or the things going wrong in their own lives, but when those being affected are feeling crippled by that oppressive hold it has on them, crying in toilet cubicles afraid to leave, or refusing to get out of bed in the morning, it’s upsetting to see. Gylt starts off with a girl finding an alternative route home because she’s afraid of the bullies who are heckling and taunting her, setting the tone for what’s to come.

In the fictional town of Bethelwood in Maine, USA, Sally finds the town isn’t what it normally is, embodying the Silent Hill switcharoo, where weird creatures lurk in the shadows, streets now void of life. It’s spooky but not outright terrifying, and that’s fine. Gylt isn’t trying to be a brash and offensive bloodbath awash with mutilated bodies and shrieking banshees. The creepy monsters aren’t cutting you to shreds or impaling you with razor-sharp tendrils, but rather hunting you down and forcing you to start over from the last checkpoint, minus the grisly end. In an effort to avoid being spotted, you must sneak around the shadows, hiding behind bushes, crates, or whatever you find.

Each enemy has a field of vision, although you’re never quite sure what this is as darkness doesn’t always mean your invisible to them. It simply provides a better cushion of protection. They walk the same paths, so it’s easier to work out when they’ll start circling back towards you, giving you plenty of options to sneak past them and get to the next area of safety. You have a flashlight that can highlight a way through in the darkness, but it will also fend of monsters in a similar way to Alan Wake. These encounters aren’t particularly scary, and dealing with enemies can feel repetitive, but it doesn’t carry the same level of monotony other horrors have a tendency to exhibit.

Gylt has the occasional puzzle involving familiar tropes of the genre, such as finding certain keys or turning valves and moving climbable platforms, but they work well with the confines of the environment. You’re never stuck, and that simplicity makes for a nice flow to gameplay. The visuals look great on PlayStation 5, despite some of the darkly lit areas, yet environments like the arcade are brimming with vibrancy and offer a nice alternative to the gloom and eerie hallways of the school. It’s a pretty game, making the switch from Stadia exclusive to multi-platform very well.

As Sally searches for Emily, her missing cousin and another victim of bullying, the story fleshes out somewhat, although there feels like some omissions into the overarching narrative. It’s emotional at times, but some of the answers I had didn’t feel like they were answered. You can find letters and documents scattered around to provide some backstory, but I didn’t feel satisfied by the time it reached its conclusion. Others may feel different, and it may have a bigger impact on those that have been victims of bullying, but I didn’t get out of it the answers I wanted.

Gylt is enjoyable albeit familiar. with many mechanics seen in a fair few games before. Puzzles are relatively easy to solve, but they offer a nice break from the stealth elements, always giving you something to do while searching for your cousin. While the story is enjoyable, I feel like it could have done more in explaining things. It’s gorgeous to look at, touching upon a style of horror seldom seen in the medium, and despite it being on Stadia for almost four years, the transition to modern consoles has done it the world of good.

The post Gylt review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

When it gets down to brass tacks, action inside the ring is relatively simple and addictive. Despite it being clunky at times, that feel of No Mercy and WrestleMania 2000 from the N64 days has been faithfully recreated, and more often than not, the gameplay is straightforward. The fundamentals are easy to master. You can punch and kick to deliver short combos, and lock in a grapple to perform a handful of moves. You can Irish whip an opponent into the corner or the ropes, and perform a few simple aerial moves off the top rope.

The move sets aren’t too varied, but it’s the ease of performing that makes it engaging. Some of the basic moves like picking up an opponent off the mat or turning them round for a grapple from behind aren’t detailed anywhere, so I had to work them out for myself. It’s a little frustrating, especially as some of the best signature moves are performed from behind. However, once you work it out, matches can flow reasonably well, and when you incorporate diving moves like the Tope Con Hilo et al, action is frantic. One of the coolest aspects of AEW: Fight Forever is how you can keep performing signature moves without losing the ability to do so.

For example, in one of my first matches, I played as Kenny Omega and hit a Dragon Screw Suplex, followed by a V-Trigger, then another couple of Dragon Screws. In a game that doesn’t take the realism too seriously, it adds one of the most realistic aspects of professional wrestling to it. Many matches will see a signature move performed a couple of times in succession, and it’s good they’ve incorporated it here. To perform a Special, or finishing move, you simply have to taunt the opponent with the right stick, then get in the correct position and flick the right stick again.

With most of the signatures and specials, you’ll get a quick replay that adds to the arcade feel, and it’s wonderful to watch. My biggest gripe, though, is that matches can be won in under a minute. Now I know this does happen, but AEW is known for its epic matches, and these quick finishes diminish the grandeur of getting Bryan Danielson to step up against the likes of CM Punk or Jon Moxley. It’s not the worst thing imaginable, but I often refused to pin an opponent because I wanted the matches to keep on going. The way you get to the point of pulling off a fancy move is by building momentum, and this can be done by executing different moves or gaining buffs for specific actions during a match.

It has a nice flow to it, and in 1v1, AEW: Fight Forever is excellent. Tag matches are also a lot of fun, as are the triple threat and 4-way matches, however, the real stars of the show are the Lights Out and Exploding Barbed Wire Matches. These are the moments where it doesn’t take itself seriously. Lights Out offers players a ton of different weapons to use against an enemy, such as a mop wrapped in barbed wire, a football helmet that can be thrown on an opponent, a baseball bat with nails attaches to it, golf clubs, and the more traditional weapons like steel chairs and tables. You can reach over the barriers and pick up a weapon quickly, making these matches even more enjoyable.

As for the Exploding Barbed Wire Match, after a certain time, the barbed wire that’s replaced the ring ropes will explode, greatly damaging anyone close enough. The Casino Battle Royale is also in AEW: Fight Forever, as are ladder matches, giving fans plenty of match types. It would have been cool to see trios matches included, along with the Iron Man match, Blood and Guts, and a few others, but in many ways, it feels like the game isn’t the complete package.

AEW: Fight Forever has a limited roster. Some professional wrestlers are being added, but there’re some notable omissions like The Acclaimed and Swerve Strickland, and future DLC additions like FTR, Keith Lee, and Hook should simply be a part of the original roster. I’m hoping that other professional wrestlers will be added later down the line because it does feel like it’s missing some key members of the roster. In other ways, AEW: Fight Forever feels massively out-of-date, and that they got to a point where they had to stop updating or else it would never be released, however, Ortiz and Santana are nowhere to be seen.

The Road to the Elite mode acts as a career of sorts, and Omega’s influence is felt right through it. He’s a massive fan of the Yakuza series and developers Ryu Ga Gotoku, and a lot of interactions have a similar humour and presentation. It’s silly at times, but I loved it, probably because I adore Yakuza as well. The mini games are also a ton of fun and again, feel like they’re a respectful nod to RGG as well. It only lasts for a year, but each block is made up of four weeks where you can go for a meal at a local restaurant or sightsee at specific places depending where Dynamite is being held; do some training at the gym; appear on a talk show; and even compete on Dark and Rampage, followed by competing at one of the four major PPVs.

Each week, completing these tasks help to improve your motivation, energy, skill points, and cash. The higher your energy and motivation, the better shape you’re in for your weekly match on Dynamite. The more skill points you have helps to upgrade your created wrestler’s (although you can play though the career as an AEW wrestler), and cash can be spent on unlocking weekly perks, however, I never felt like I needed them as the time I had across the week gave me enough opportunity to maximise things like how motivated or recovered I was. When it comes to the weekly match, stories from AEW’s early years feature, such as Inner Circle and MJF’s rivalry.

It is in these moments that it feels out of date the most. I get it’s celebrating its beginnings, but showing video packages of Taz introduce the FTW belt feels like a lifetime ago. Maybe I’m being too picky, as the actual flow of Road to the Elite is nice and quick, arcadey, and funny. Watching Hangman and me pose in front of the Lincoln Memorial, or getting a boop from Kris Statlander while eating my New York Hot dog shows how it doesn’t take itself seriously, as well as paying homage to RGG Studio. There’re also a ton of Easter eggs and in-jokes, including a few references to WWE thrown in for good measure.

The custom suite isn’t packed full of options, but there’re some decent enough options in the custom arenas. The custom wrestlers are limited, though. I couldn’t find a decent beard at all, and I hope these get added to the in-game store. By the end of my year in the career mode, I had so much cash I didn’t know what to do with it, so fingers crossed more stuff gets added. While it doesn’t feel unfinished, it does feel outdated at times, but thankfully it’s so much fun to play.

The gameplay in AEW: Fight Forever isn’t going to blow fans away, but it does remind me of the times spent on my N64 pulling off quick and simple moves that look awesome. Some of the wrestlers don’t look like who they’re supposed to be, but the characters are more cartoony than lifelike, and I’m fine with that. This isn’t a polished 2K WWE-style game. Fans might not like that, but I honestly enjoyed getting involved in matches. It’s quick and easy to jump in, and I hope more gets added to it over the coming months. It would be a shame if, after a few DLC drops, that’s all we get.

While AEW: Fight Forever does feel a little empty and outdated, jumping into a match as Chris Jericho, Orange Cassidy, and Britt Baker is so damn cool. I love this company with all my heart, and while I might have been down on it at certain points, I’m in no way disappointed. I just pray to TK and Yuke’s that there’s more to come from it down the line. Still, the developers have reminded us why they were so good at making wrestling games fun, just like what All Elite Wrestling has done for the sport as a whole.

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Our chunky hunk of a protagonist Dave is enjoying a relaxing afternoon, when his phone goes off. On the other end of the line is his friend Bancho, who tells him about a mysterious place called the Blue Hole. This bizarre patch of ocean changes every single day, and contains fish from all over the world. Bancho wants to open up a sushi restaurant here to capitalise on this wonderful resource, and hopes Dave could be the one who brings in the fish. Being the helpful guy that he is, Dave hops on the next plane over, and is greeted by an underwater adventure featuring sea people, deadly sharks, and some seriously varied characters.

Your time in Dave the Diver is split into two types of gameplay, diving into the sea in the daytime to get fresh produce and running the sushi restaurant at night. Diving easily takes up the most of your time, lasting as long as you want it to as long as you don’t run out of oxygen. Exploring the wet and wonderful world below the surface is an absolute delight, with a huge variety of sea creatures to hunt and plenty of danger lurking around every corner.

Most of the fishing in Dave the Diver is done with your harpoon gun. By holding down the A button you’ll slow down time, and a cone is placed in front of you indicating where you can aim and stab an unsuspecting sushi topping. Stabbing this into a tiny fish like a blue tang or a clownfish will usually catch it instantly, but bigger carp or puffer fish might take a few jabs and trigger a button bashing or stick twirling mini game. If that was all you found in the beautiful Blue Hole then Dave’s life would be pretty easy, but it won’t take you long to discover the darker side of the depths.

More aggressive sea creatures don’t take kindly to being turned into sushi, and will gladly attack our heroic diver to prevent this. Dodging and weaving isn’t easy when you’re underwater, but is essential if you want to keep your oxygen levels up (which doubles up as your health). Tougher threats like sharks probably won’t be beaten by your harpoon alone either, but fortunately the sea is home to guns like shotguns, snipers, and grenade launchers to help deal with Jaws and his pals. If you’d rather focus on getting higher quality meat that’s been slightly less exploded, there are also tranquiliser pistols and net guns to blast at the fish. The weapons are surprisingly diverse for a game about underwater fishing, but diversity is Dave’s middle name.

Once you’ve gone for a dive or two, time passes to the evening and you’ll be expected to help out at the sushi restaurant. Dave is assigned to the front of house, and is expected to serve up dishes, clean up plates, and even take drinks orders. It’s a mad dash to keep everyone happy, especially once the mini games start and you’re expected to pour out the correct amount of miso soup in a hurry. It won’t take you long to realise that when more customers arrive as the restaurant grows that Dave the Diver will be horrendously overworked, and you’ll need to hire some help.

Hiring a waiter to help serve up salmon rolls will help take the pressure off on a busy night, but obviously cuts into your profits. It’s essential though, and once you start catching higher quality fish, upgrading your dishes and getting more followers on social media the money will come rolling in. More money means more to spend training staff to cook faster or making them able to help serve drinks, and before you know it you’ll have an unstoppable team of elite waiters and chefs.

Just like in the real world, money can get you all the advantages you need in Dave the Diver. The most important of these are equipment upgrades, which will make your life so much easier in the Blue Hole. Wetsuit upgrades enable you to explore deeper into the ocean, oxygen tank upgrades ensure you can last longer without drowning even when battered by barracuda, and a bigger storage crate for storing your haul as you explore means you can get more stock before resurfacing. Every upgrade you purchase feels incredibly meaningful, and you’ll be ready to take on the toughest challenges once you’ve bought a few.

One of the aspects of Dave the Diver that impressed me the most in my playthrough is how well the game keeps you motivated with new missions. There was never a day of my sushi focused life where I was just grinding to get basic stock – instead you’re presented with all sorts of missions from your friends and patrons, ranging from preparing a specific dish to finding the remnants of a mysterious civilisation under the sea. Even alongside these more official missions you have checklists of specific invasive creatures to take down or shells to find, and you’re always rewarded handsomely for doing so.

Even more impressive than the steady stream of missions though, is the sheer variety of unlockable abilities and mechanics that just keep coming. From start to finish Dave the Diver throws new ideas at you, and whether it’s equipment to pick up sea urchins without hurting your hands or a whole new way to stock up on fish without even getting your feet wet – it always took me by surprise. I won’t spoil any of those surprises here, but the sheer density of ideas is almost unbelievable and ensures you never have the chance to get too comfortable with the gameplay loop.

For the entire 20+ hour runtime of Dave the Diver I never once got bored of going diving for scaly treasure, and part of that is because of how gorgeous the randomised world under the sea is. Upon first glance the fairly lo-fi pixel art graphics didn’t impress me too much, but once I got down into the deep blue and saw all the beautiful coral and tropical fish it really took my breath away.

The only thing more colourful than the visuals of Dave the Diver are the characters. The cast of weird and wonderful humans are always a joy to interact with, from the eccentric chef who trains like a samurai to make the perfect sushi to the idol obsessed gun expert who sleeps with an anime body pillow. I wasn’t expecting to get hooked on the humans in this fishing game, but here we are.

I have very few complaints when it comes to Dave the Diver, but I do have to admit that a section in the middle of the game was a little on the slow side. This particular large environment didn’t contain any fish to catch, and you’re expected to travel back and forth across it to complete the story missions in that chapter. Ultimately it’s a fairly short section of a phenomenal game, but it was a little on the dull side.

Dave the Diver is a sensational game that combines deep sea diving and restaurant management to create an experience that must be played to be believed. The amount of ideas packed into this adventure is ludicrous, and thanks to a whole lot of varied missions you’ll always have something to be working towards. If you play one game this week, play Dave the Diver – you won’t regret it.

The post Dave the Diver review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

First looking in depth at the display. The 4K, 120Hz display allows for a crisp, high quality experience which cannot really be disputed. The inner workings of the Titan do aid this. The model we looked at had within a 3080TI, and a 12th generation Intel Core i9 processor: this is a serious bit of kit and allowed for very high performance without any dips impeding the experience when playing a game. However, like most laptops it greatly benefits from being plugged in while playing for it to maintain its top performance. Even so, its performance when on battery is still impressive, though it’s best not to push it to full 4K with all the bells and whistles.

A downside though, is the noise it outputs when performing at a high level. For something so high-priced you would expect it to not be as loud when wanting to use it to its full extent to the point that you can physically feel it whirring and being as loud as it is when in use. However, the MSI Titan GT77 has the kind of power that is unlikely to struggle with any workload you hand it. Any design tools and multi-tasking is fine, you’ll only find more capabilities in a desktop (and likely one you’ve built yourself), which could be bought for the same price or cheaper, but obviously is not portable like the MSI Titan GT77.

Looking at battery life, when doing day-to-day tasks its battery life is decent, at about six hours of life, but only if you stay away from anything gaming or high-intensity. Introduce a game you may want to play and it plummets to about an hour-and-a-half to two hours of use, which compared to elsewhere on the market, is pretty decent anyway. While it isn’t recommended to use it to play games away from mains power anyway, 6 hours of use when considering the power of the laptop is fairly decent when you consider how much power it is likely to be using in that time. This isn’t a laptop designed to be used for more standard activities, instead it is likely to be useful for slightly more niche activities like editing videos, podcasts etc.

In terms of built-in hardware, the speakers are above average. They’re pretty loud but the top-end is slightly tinny and the bass is a bit of a let down, which is disappointing. As mentioned, the keyboard is great. The MX Cherry switches allow for a quiet but responsive experience holding the 45g actuation force of a typical Mx switch with its bottom-out being typically 65g of force. They are much more suited to gaming than to typing especially with the incredible light amount of force needed for actuation. In correlation to the keycaps being typical of a standard keyboard (what you would expect and that are necessary for a keyboard) it means that you may often press the wrong key which could get extremely irritating to some points. The largest disappointment, however, is its webcam. Being only 720p on a laptop with the Titan’s price range feels like a bit of a slap in the face.

Its design is massive, being both heavy and incredibly thick, wide, and essentially everything it can do to be outrageously large. The heatsink and fans at the back measure to be about 70mm long and as wide as the laptop itself. It doesn’t really try to be sleek or small and really just puts itself out there as a statement. Comparatively to other laptops or portable PC’s, it isn’t the standard shape either, due to the fans at the back of it. The huge chassis means it has plenty of ports, three full-size USB ports, two USB-C ports, a HDMI port, ethernet, the latter all you might expect from any laptop. It also has an SD Card slot for various reasons you may need it for. In terms of IO, the Titan really offers little to complain about.

The MSI TItan GT77 is a hugely powerful machine, and if you’re looking for the fastest gaming laptop possible with no concern for cost, size, or how loud it may be sometimes, it is guaranteed to please. That said, if you’re not looking to blast an eye-watering amount of money on a laptop, or need it to be slim, and quiet, the Titan might not fulfil your needs. Let’s be clear, regardless of a few minor issues that aren’t exclusive to laptops (webcam, speaks, etc), the only real downsize here is the price. Offering great performance and statement looks, you won’t need another laptop for a long time should you choose this one, but it really is hard to fully recommended at that price point.

The post MSI Titan GT77 review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

After finding yourself dead in the middle of a junkyard, you play as a spirit with no memory of who you were or what happened to you. It’s a simple premise at first, but one that grows into a much bigger conspiracy that has you hooked throughout. While some of the gameplay can drag due to its linear nature of solving puzzles and tons of dialogue, it was still enjoyable, and the various people you encounter along the way are full of surprises. In order to complete certain puzzles, you must possess different objects during ‘Trick Time,’ and these can range from a spinning Christmas decoration to a screwed up piece of paper.

Each area is self-contained in Ghost Trick: Phantom detective, and you can travel to a new location through the phone wires. At each area or chapter, you’re tasked with solving a certain puzzle. I’d have liked to be able to try different methods in order to do so, but it’s more a case of finding the one way to solve whatever your presented with. Thankfully, they’re varied enough, keeping things fresh as you press forward. Some are much more complex than others, and some are as simple as knocking a pair of headphones into a fish tank.

Other puzzles join together to create longer conundrums to solve. One had me trying to get a rat from the attic to fall down to help a posh, terrible mother find her dictionary that you need to possess. As she moves you over to her table, you can then take control of a desk lamp that makes her mess up her typing (she’s writing a smutty novel, obviously) and throw a piece of paper into a bin, with you having to possess the paper at the right time so you go flying across the room with it. Some objects can’t be used, acting as a pathway to a more useful one, however, there’re plenty of ways to get the attention of the living and complete these puzzles.

While most of the challenges give you as much time as you need, there are specific sections that rewind back to four minutes before a death (and there’s a lot of dying), where you have to find the solution quickly or else you’ll fail. You can of course replay these until they’re solved, yet they offer a nice bit of pressure in order to progress. As you get used to moving around the screen and switching between Ghost mode (the time when you can move around as a spirit and possess objects) and the real world, Ghost Trick: Phantom detective is at its best.

One of the biggest downsides for me was the amount of dialogue you have to read in order to actually play. This could be story-building, or it could be a conversation, a thought going through someone’s head, or even Sissel’s (that’s you!), always popping up when you’re eager to start solving the latest puzzle. While some of the writing is funny, it’s also unintentionally so, however, there’s just too much silliness, even for me. If you can get past these awkward moments then there’s plenty of enjoyment when it lets you play.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is gorgeous to look at, and every environment is packed full of detail. The character animations are smooth, and while this is a HD remaster of a Nintendo DS title, it looks great on a PS5. The music is always funky and upbeat, with a vast soundtrack for you to enjoy as you play. You can check out a fancy gallery to listen to the excellent music, as well as unlocked artwork. It’s presentation is one of its biggest plus points, and I never grew tired of the visuals or the score.

If, like me, you never got to play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective back in 2010, then now is a great time to experience one of the most inventive point-and-click puzzlers ever made. While there’s plenty of dialogue and little freedom, the variety in how to solve puzzles and get through the story is varied enough to hold your attention, and with a killer soundtrack and beautiful visuals, it still holds up almost 13 years later.

The post Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

There’s an evil lurking within the town known as the Greed. At first, you’re not too sure what they are or where they came from, but as you progress through the episodes, you understand your own family’s involvement in their emergence and what your relevance is in the story. It’s often played out through 80s-style cartoon cutscenes between episodes and after spending coins to dig deeper into the lore. Even the story feels like a homage to classics from the time, and it really comes into its own after arriving on Main Street.

I’d never played a Kingdom game before, and its base-building elements were a nice surprise. Each episode follows a day and night cycle. In the day, you spend coins on expanding and reinforcing your base, hiring local kids to become builders or warriors ready to defend against the Greed when the night falls, and finding other ways to help your fight. You can head east or west of the base, chopping down trees to connect your base to the next area (wherever a traffic cone is present), while at the same time finding other objectives like recruiting one of your friends to help you out, or unlocking a new bike or mode of transport.

At the same time, you can upgrade your base to allow better fortifications against the enemy, and in turn unlocking a dumpster to help protect you as you push towards whatever the episode’s main objective is. As the day unfolds, you’ll earn more coins by finding chests or telephone boxes; collecting them off the kids within your camp who might have killed some nearby animals; through jobs the kids can complete like fishing or being a lifeguard; and more. The more coins you have, the stronger the base can become, and as you progress, new things can be constructed to help you out, such as turrets and laser-firing robots.

Kingdom Eighties has a nice flow to it, with the day and night cycle and the ease of dropping a few coins into something to either build or harvest, and there’re a ton of secrets to find that offer some really cool Easter eggs. My favourite involved a certain scene from Back to the Future Part II and an iconic skateboard, but there’s much more to find, and fans of pop culture from the time are going to have plenty of fun finding it all, with nods to E.T., Gremlins, and more.

When the night rolls around and the Greed begin to attack your base, it can be a tense experience, especially when you’re trying to decide whether you have time to fortify before one of the little creatures takes out a worker, or whether five archers are going to be enough to fend off the next wave. When I first started playing, I felt lost when it came to earning coins and what to do, as there was little guidance other than a floating figure who told you to go to something and pump some coins into a building or object.

You do begin to work out what you need to do, but the enemy can be relentless, and if they knock the crown off your head and take it back to where they came from, you’re screwed. Thankfully, the more coins you have and the better your defence, it starts to become rather satisfying. As the Leader, you start to unlock your friends to join you. The Champ is a jock with the ability to fend off the Greed with force; the Tinkerer is able to tweak inventions and help to fight the Greed; and the Wiz is a tech-loving nerd who helps with certain contraptions and problems you encounter.

The pixel-art is stunning, with various neon signs and homages to the 80s done so in plenty of detail, with gorgeous colour in everything you see, whether it’s at the camp you initially start at or the mall, it just looks so good. Even the animations of the various iterations of the enemy look great. The soundtrack is also a great addition to Kingdom Eighties, helping to bring the era alive and create both tense and beautiful moments throughout the story.

I love Kingdom Eighties. Not just because of the era it was set in, but because the gameplay is so addictive. The base-building elements and the exploration make every new episode exciting to play, and the different ways you must progress all pose interesting challenges. It was tricky to get to grips with at the start, and unless you’re fully prepared it can be easy to lose your crown. Regardless, I had so much fun with it, and I fell in love with the story and animation.

The post Kingdom Eighties review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

The series as a whole was not exactly groundbreaking in terms of dynamic platforming, but did stand out due to the anime-inspired characters. Whilst it’s sequel had more of a straight up Rockman/Mega Man feel, the first game in Winds platforming mini-saga is more of a scrolling hack and slash platformer, with a nice structure that allows you to choose your destination through the game using a Super Mario World-esque map.

You play the role of one of male/female due Tasuke or Kyapiko, who have been given crazy cyborg fighting upgrades by a mad scientist, so that they can take on the nefarious the rogues gallery of classic baddies. There are Gundam style robots, cybernetic monkeys (a real mainstay in games of the time, see Strider and King of the Monsters if you need further evidence) and even one dude who looks like a knock off of Darth Vader. Beating stages and rescuing citizens in distress allows you to buy stuff in shops to upgrade your character. But each boss you take down will also give your hero a permanent upgrade too – such as an improved energy bar, or boosted defence.

The stages look like you would expect from a 1989 PC Engine game – decent pixel art, some interesting, if heavily recycled enemy sprites and bosses, some of which have really lovely designs. The music is very much of its era, but suits the action perfectly. There is a two player coach co-op, and some lovely comfort options such as the now-standard scanline filter mode.

So far, so good….except for the fact that, sadly, the game just isn’t a very good one. The problems surface immediately and tell you that you are in for a bad time. The physics are all to-cock, with the inertia of movement an absolute pain. Acceleration is slow but once you do build any momentum it is hard to slow down. Dinky little platforms and this kind of setup are a terrible mix, and negotiating even the most simple level can be a traumatic lesson in pain. Throw into the mix some of the most outrageous collision detection I have experienced for many moons, and you have a game that is hard to recommend to anyone but the most hardcore PC Engine fans out there.

But then, thinking about it, this kind of title and its annoying unpolished controls were ten a penny back in 1989, and I would have probably still played it to death just out of sheer determination and spite. I can remember other platformers around then having similar issues, with the NES Turtles game being a prime suspect; and I must have spent weeks on that excruciating mess.

So what I am saying is, this is a great little piece of history, a gaming museum piece, and a labour of love that deserves a bit of respect, even if it is a pain in the arse at times. For the meagre asking price, you get some nice artwork and renderings of the original packaging and manual, the aforementioned filter and screen curvature options, and even have the ability to rewind gameplay which, admittedly, does take the sting out of some of the more precarious, anxiety inducing leaps of faith. But all told, if it’s better gameplay you want, then track down the far superior sequels.

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It’s a side-scrolling action-adventure game with more than a gentle dusting of Prince of Persia that won’t eat up much more than three or four hours of your week. What threatens early on to open up into a sprawling Metroidvania keeps things refreshingly tight, presenting a solid action game with a cool core mechanic and a handful of new ideas.

If there’s anything that feels undercooked though, it’s the narrative. Nocturnal tells the tale of Ardeshir, a soldier who has returned home to find the island he grew up on ravaged by a terrifying entity known as the Mist. With his family slain and his sister missing, Ardeshir must brave the horrors of the dark with only a huge flaming sword and infinite restarts to help him.

I joke, obviously, but the truth is if you want to learning anything about the world or the Mist or the Sacred Flame Ardeshir uses to imbue his sword, you’ll need to explore every nook and cranny. What story there is is told in tiny scraps of text split across twelve collectibles, which you’ll need to find and arrange. It’s more than a little annoying, especially as the mysterious old woman who keeps turning up would be an ideal exposition tool instead.

The fact that the devs even refer to it as a “love letter to the original Prince of Persia” should tell you everything you need to know here, though. Nocturnal is beautiful, fluid, and a joy to play, even if it does occasionally throw just a little too much at you.

As Ardeshir you must ignite your blade to carve a path through the darkness and defeat the tortured souls claimed by the Mist. The flame has a short timer which you can extend by spending Ash on a small upgrade tree. Once the light goes out, you’ll begin to take tick-damage until you expire or you cab reach another torch. Most are unlit, and the focus is on spreading the flame from point to point to create pools of luminescence that weaken your enemies.

The various contraptions such as lifts and doors are also powered by fire, necessitating speedy platforming between points. The jumping and dashing is precise, but when you start mixing it with sword swipes to light torches and activate ledges, it can become a little difficult to nail the timing. Likewise, there are times when you’re thrown into combat with multiple enemies and a rapidly dwindling flame, which feel frantic and desperate as you try to stay alive and reignite your blade.

A three-hit combo, i-frame dodge, and handful of special abilities make combat feel slick and rewarding, especially when you manage to fight your way out of a pile of enemies. The flames heal can heal you, but will be extinguished when they do so, forcing you to think carefully and adding an element of danger even to restoring your health.

About a third of the way in you’ll unlock a throwing knife for use in puzzles and combat, which will also ignite when it comes into contact with fire. This gives you more combat options – as does a powerful move that you unlock for the back half of the game. Nocturnal has cool ideas throughout, too, such as being able to set fire to dried vines and tapestries to create light and reveal puzzle solutions.

There’s a definite sense here that Nocturnal may have been envisioned as a Metroidvania once early in development. For example there are sometimes multiple routes, but it’s fifty-fifty if you pick the route that leads to a secret or the route that locks you into the critical path. Sadly, there’s rarely a way to tell which is which, either.

A small but well-thought-out skill tree allows you to improve your stats and abilities as you travel, and the core conceit of having to literally fight against the darkness trying to choke you is such a powerful and respectful homage to PoP that I couldn’t help but smile even when it became frantic. It’s never too stressful though, as regular checkpoints reduce the amount of retreading you’ll do even when it gets tough.

After only a few areas and a handful of boss fights, Nocturnal ends without much flourish, and left me wondering if it’s a secret proof of concept for a much grander sequel at some point down the line. For all that I appreciate the brevity, I kind of hope so, because Sunnyside have something very special here that could easily stand with the best if it had just a little more story and content.

The post Nocturnal review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

For the uninitiated, these are chirpy, super enjoyable romps through first-person dungeons, which were just about perfectly designed for the original DS thanks to the way you are tasked with drawing your own maps as you proceed. You can still use the Switch touch-screen or manual tools to do so if you are docked, and there is a surprisingly effective auto-map function that does it for you. If you wanted to, you could also grab a bit of paper and write it down, old school-style.

There is a loose story and theme running through each game, but strong character-based plots have never really mattered too much in the series – it is all about the art of looting intricate dungeons. The gameplay loop is essentially edging your party deeper into each of the gorgeously designed dungeons, battling enemies in turn-based fashion, and crapping your pants every time the scary, intermittent FOE super beasts appear; before returning to base camp after each crawl to level up using acquired skill points and improve your party and its gear. You get to keep a guild of characters that can be switched around between sorties, so you can work out the best possible combo for each situation.

Effective mapmaking is a key skill, as it will enable you to find crucial save points which enable you to complete your escape when the going gets tough. Customising your party and skills offers the player an almost endless number of combinations, based around different weapons, classes, and their associated abilities, buffs, and status-altering possibilities.

As the series progresses the maps become more sophisticated with more symbols and customisation, and new, exciting class types are introduced. The first two are still excellent games in their own right, but there is no doubt in my mind that with its seafaring theme and most refined systems, the third game is the clear pick of the bunch, and as such, given the quite high price of the package as a whole, would perhaps steer first-timers toward a solo purchase of that one, instead.

As a package, this is pretty bare bones and I am a little surprised that the quality of life features that Atlus put into their superb 3DS games are not present. The remastered graphics do look fantastic, however. And even though it hasn’t been refined at all, you get to experience your dungeon adventures with superb soundtracks from one of the greatest of all time video game composers Yuzo Koshiro, who started scoring RPGs back in 1986.

In a nutshell, even if you do spring for the whole thing, it will cost significantly less than it would to legally track down the originals, so there is that. There may not be any real new features to speak of in Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection, apart from a difficulty selection and a lick of paint, but there is still a huge amount of very enjoyable gameplay, which stands the test of time well, and is a great way to while away a few hours of your time.

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Dr Fetus has been thwarted by Meat Boy more than enough times now, and he’s got a new plan to deal with this platforming problem once and for all. By cloning the square red hero he’s hoping he can abuse his power to do those dark deeds he’s so famous for, but this scientific endeavor isn’t exactly simple. The Meat Boys he’s producing just aren’t quite right, so to try and weed out the good ones Dr Fetus is throwing them all into deadly test chambers and hoping the best evolve into something resembling his rival. It’s a gloriously stupid concept, but it gives you a reason for the upcoming chaos.

Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine is at its core a Puyo Puyo game, but if you’re not familiar with this particular puzzle game then this is how it works. Sets of two coloured clones slowly descend from the top of a stage, and your job is to rotate and place them together so that at least four of the same colour stick together. When this happens they’ll disappear, let any clones on top of them drop down, and give you more room to place more blobs.

This probably sounds pretty easy, but the real trick is learning how to place the clones so you can set off combos of matching colours. The easiest way to do this is by placing colours on top of each other so that when a set of clones is cleared the ones above them fall into place and connect with matching Meat Boys, but it’s easier said than done. High level Puyo Puyo gameplay is particularly mind blowing when you see the chains and combos start popping off, but Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine is less about high scores and more about bloody carnage.

What makes this Meat Boy spinoff different to other puzzle games are the hazards that litter every single stage you’ll be presented with. Saw blades, swinging chainsaws and spooky ghosts litter every single level of this colour matching puzzle game, and are hell bent on ruining your carefully planned combos. If you happen to hit any of these hazards with your descending puzzle pieces you’ll immediately lose the level and have to start from the last checkpoint, but if they hit any of the clones you have placed on the ground they’ll just destroy them and leave you with less to match with. Navigating the hazards and making matches is hard work, and unfortunately not a whole lot of fun.

There’s definitely a reason why most puzzle games don’t have the constant threat of your coloured pieces being sliced into a pile of viscera, and that’s because it massively takes away from thoughtful gameplay. Even in the first world of Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine it’s rare you’ll find a moment to put together a clever combo of clones, because there’s either not enough room to set it up or there’s a saw blade waiting to clear it away after a few seconds. Even dodging the obstacles as your pieces fall is annoying, and the punishment of having to start over after one accident with an enemy is way too punishing. I ended up turning on invincibility on the accessibility menu so I could actually enjoy the game, but in doing so was basically just playing standard Puyo Puyo.

There are a couple of clever ideas in the game that are supposed to mitigate the difficulty somewhat. One of these is the temporary invincibility you get when you manage to pull off a combo. This would be really helpful if setting up combos was easier with all the hazards, but it’s a start. There are also checkpoints in the middle of stages that ensure you don’t end up losing too much progress when you die, and getting enough matches to trigger them is pretty manageable. Each level will still feel like a grindy war of attrition as you slowly manage to make your way closer to the next checkpoint, but it at least makes it plausible to make it through a level.

I’ve been hard on Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine, but it isn’t without its charm. One part of the game that’s undeniably great is the soundtrack, which is consistently banging. There are also some interesting elements that change as you progress in the story, like the designs of the clones as they evolve. It’s a cool visual twist that fits the narrative, and although not exactly important to the game as a whole I thought it was really neat.

Dr Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine makes a great case for why you shouldn’t add dangerous platforming hazards to a perfectly good puzzle game. All the intricacy and combo planning that goes into a good round of Puyo Puyo is lost when dealing with Fetus’ saw blades, and I just ended up feeling frustrated. If you’re a real puzzle game whizzkid who’s looking for a challenge then maybe you’ll have more fun than me, but otherwise it’s worth keeping Puyo Puyo and Meat Boy as far apart as possible.

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This bundle of retro games is predominantly made up of the four classic Sonic games that we all know and love. Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic 3 and Knuckles and Sonic CD are where you’ll spend most of your time in this collection. These (mostly) fast paced platformers are as much fun as you remember, with corkscrews, loop the loops and springs aplenty littering the colourful stages and ensuring you have a fun time spinning about. If somehow you haven’t played a Sonic game before, the blend of satisfying momentum through a stage and hazards to deal with is truly 16-bit magic, and you should get to beating Robotnik as soon as possible.

Another great reason to have all these wonderful Sonic games in one place is because it means you can have fun with all the different bonus stages. I absolutely love the various levels housing Chaos Emeralds in these titles, from the spinning mazes of Sonic the Hedgehog to the tunnels of rings and mines from Sonic the Hedgehog 2. A fantastic feature of Sonic Origins Plus is the ability to retry these stages when you fail at the cost of a measly collectable coin, which means gathering all the gems and turning into Super Sonic is more manageable than ever.

There are a few other helpful features that make the games less punishing too when you’re playing the Anniversary versions of the main titles. One of these is the removal of lives entirely, meaning that death no longer has a consequence other than pushing you back to the nearest checkpoint. You can also restart stages at any time, which is great when you miss out on gathering enough rings to unlock a bonus stage. Finally you can save your game at any time and play something else, which doesn’t exactly sound like a feature but back in the good old days you had to beat Sonic in one sitting or start over.

The ability to play a few dusty old games probably doesn’t fill you with the urge to spend £35 on a new video game, but there are a few extras that add some value to the package. My favourite of these are the missions, which are specially designed mini stages with objectives to complete and a time limit. The variety of these missions is pretty fantastic, with some showcasing Knuckles flying to kill enemies, as well as pacifist missions and specially designed mazes that’ll really test your skills. You’ll be rewarded with those precious coins for getting a good rank too, which you can spend over at the museum.

The museum houses all sorts of artifacts from the history of Sonic, from concept art to videos of live concerts playing the themes we all know and love. It’s a cool thing to explore for hardcore fans of the series, but after unlocking some of the cooler animated story scenes and music I still had a whole lot of change that I wasn’t bothered about spending on pictures of crabs.

Pretty much all these features were available in the original Sonic Origins when it was released last year, so why buy the new Plus version of the game I hear you ask. Well the main reason for this is supposed to be the added Game Gear games. These twelve portable titles originally released on Sega’s ill fated handheld back in the day, and it won’t take you long to notice their limitations thanks to that. Honestly these additional games are barely worth playing, with massive framerate dips, subpar level design and horrendous sound quality. There are much better versions of some of the games included on other systems too (like Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine and Sonic Spinball) so including these piss poor versions feels like a bit of a kick in the teeth.

The other new feature of Sonic Origins Plus is the addition of Amy Rose as a playable character. Playing as the adorable pink hedgehog brings a couple of very minor changes to your moveset, but for the most part she’s pretty close to a palette swap of Sonic. I like the idea of adding a new character to the collection, but it’d be nice if her addition had shaken up these classics a little bit.

When playing Sonic Origins Plus, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d played loads of better collections of Sonic games in the past. When I bought Sonic Mega Collection on the GameCube in 2002 it included most of the games you’d want to play from this bundle alongside classics like Ristar, Sonic 3D Blast and Mean Bean Machine, so the selection here just feels a bit lackluster. The games are still great of course, but especially for a more complete version of Sonic Origins it feels way emptier than it should.

My final issue with Sonic Origins Plus is one that can’t really be helped, but is still very unfortunate. The music in Sonic 3 (which for those who don’t know was initially developed in part by Michael Jackson) can no longer be used for licencing reasons, and it just isn’t the same without the tunes from my childhood. Obviously there’s no easy fix for this, but it’s a shame nonetheless.

Sonic Origins Plus is a great way to play four fantastic games, but the overall package is a little bit weak. The new additions to the Plus version are weaker still, making it hard to recommend even the budget priced upgrade let alone the full package. Despite this though you simply can’t deny the quality of the fantastic games in this collection, and if you’re desperate for a way to play them on modern consoles then you’ll probably still be happy spinning your life away.

The post Sonic Origins Plus review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

So let’s start there, because it might be a bone of contention to some, but even as someone who is pretty heavy on a fightstick, the buttons feel durable yet incredibly responsive. I was a little concerned initially with how sensitive the buttons were, but my worries were unfounded, as these are a superb, and premium feeling component. Likewise, the stick (eight-directional) itself feels high end, and exactly how you imagine, or would want a stick to feel. I’d argue that at a lower price, the stick itself feels similar to more premium priced sticks, and only the buttons feel slightly different, though at the point where it’d become an issue, you’d be talking about competitive play and preference to a longer or shorter throw button.

The HORI Fighting Stick Alpha does actually feel premium, and very well made. A clasp on the back allows you to open the entire box up to make any adjustments or repairs you might need and it’s all colour coded for ease of access, and while I didn’t go deep into the internal customisation, it all seems fairly simple, even down to changing the artwork on the top of the fightstick.

The inside section also hides the cable when not in use. There isn’t a huge amount of space inside the Alpha, so you will need to wrap the cable around the prongs inside to keep it away from the components and allow you to shut it easily, and while I’d have preferred a detachable cable, it’s not the end of the world and a nice solution to keep things tidy. It’s a nitpick, too, but it’d be nice for there to be a “click” to the clasp holding the box shut, too.

Another boon to the Alpha is how customisable it is from a software perspective. If you fancy connecting the stick to a PC you can use the official software to customise it even further, swapping buttons around, etc. It’s a nice option, but I suspect most people would be happy with the stick out of the box, and won’t need to play around with any of these options.

The Xbox version of the stick I looked at has multiple additional buttons (perhaps more than I’ve seen on a stick anywhere), with no doubling up on standard controller buttons: everything has its own functionality here. From left to right you’ll find everything from stick buttons, screenshot, share, and in a seriously nice touch, even mic controls like the option to mute. These are all well away from the main Hayabusa buttons and there’s no chance you could hit them by mistake in the heat of the moment.

Speaking of headsets and audio, there’s a standard 3.5mm jack on the left side of the fighting stick if you want to connect a wired headset, but generally speaking, the combination of buttons and functionality means that if you’re using the Alpha on a console, you can do everything from the fight stick in front of you, without needed to take your hands away for anything else.

Having mostly tested the Alpha with Street Fighter 6, and being by no means an expert (I’m getting too old to be good), the most important thing about the stick is how well it actually plays. The sensitivity of the Hayabusa buttons was an issue at first, but after a while you realise it’s an intentional design choice. The Alpha wants your thoughts turned into actions instantly, and that’s definitely something it succeeds at. In terms of the stick, it really is a fantastic piece of kit, and I found it helped my consistency for pulling off moves thanks to how accurate and well made it is.

Elsewhere, the matte finish is just fine, but at the price point I’d maybe expect it to be a little less plastic-based. It’s also a lot lighter than most other sticks I’ve used. Now that’s neither a negative or a positive, but is worth noting because the size of it might make people think it’s a heavy unit, but it’s actually quite light, comparatively.

These are, however, minor issues with an otherwise stellar product. The HORI Fighting Stick Alpha isn’t cheap, but it is cheaper than some of the competition out there, while retaining quality parts and a brand name you can trust. For fighting game fans, it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling let down with the Alpha, though depending on past experience with sticks, there may be a small adjustment period needed for the buttons. This really is a superb way to play your favourite fighting games.

The post HORI Fighting Stick Alpha review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

You’ll then proceed to tackle some more escapes centred around each of the three main suspects in the murder plot. Once you’ve completed each one, you’ll then be summoned to try and figure out who is responsible for the attempts on the headmaster’s life as part of the grand finale.

Gameplay remains pretty much unchanged from the main Escape Academy game. You’re pitched against various puzzle environments, where you have to move around and solve puzzles, crack codes, discover lock combinations, and more. There’s a set time for each one, although should you run out of time, you can always ask the game to add some more on for you, which is particularly useful if you’re right near the end and close to escaping. The hint system also returns, providing cryptic clues to progress to the next section of the puzzle, normally revealing just enough information to get you back on your way. Using hints or time extensions hinders your performance grade at the end though. So those looking for a sweep of A plus scores should try and steer clear of these and crack the escapes on their own.

And that feels perhaps slightly more plausible this time around. Escape from the Past feels slightly simpler compared to the Escape from Anti-Escape Island DLC, or indeed perhaps the more taxing parts of the main game. That’s not bad in itself, but those looking for the definitive challenge with this DLC may feel slightly disappointed. Sure, the countdown timer and large escapes add to a sense of anxiety and pressure. But in reality, most Escape Academy veterans shouldn’t struggle too much with the puzzles in Escape from the Past.

It’s difficult to say whether the timer just feels a little more generous or the puzzles just click now after so much practice, given this is the third time sampling the grey matter-whirring puzzles of Escape Academy. Either way, I definitely didn’t feel as pressured whilst playing, or nervous I’d run out of time as I did with the previous DLC. That’s not to say of course that it wasn’t fun. Escape from the Past is more Escape Academy in a good way in that the puzzles are varied, warrant exploration into all the nooks and crannies, and each task is a fair one, never feeling obtuse or forced. More often than not, you’re clear about what you need to generally, it’ll just be the how that stumps you for a while.

Escape to the Past is an interesting setting too because we’ve been here before – well technically after, chronologically – and so you’ll likely be familiar with a lot of the puzzle rooms you’re traversing. Sure the decor and clues are all mixed up, and some tweaks have been made, but you’ll remember a lot of these areas from the original game. And coupled with the fact you play as Solange, it’s a nice nod for fans of the story.

The flipside of that of course is that the puzzle rooms don’t feel as “new” as they usually do. And whilst there’s the usual “Oh that’s this area” each time, I still think the new and different areas in Escape from Anti-Escape Island felt fresher because we were exploring them for the first time. That said, the climactic moment of the the murder-mystery puzzle is well done. It requires you to piece together evidence making you feel like a modern-day Poirot, admittedly still with some dashes of Escape Academy bonkers puzzling thrown in too. It’s a nice little twist that gives the DLC purpose and a point of difference from the main game and other DLC.

Escape from the Past, then, is a nicely-crafted slice of escape room fun. It boasts the same level of quality, variation, and balance of head-scratching despite being fair puzzles that you’ve come to expect from Coin Crew Games in Escape Academy. It did feel slightly easier this time around, but the puzzles definitely will still stump you for a while. The murder mystery angle reaches a satisfying crescendo which leaves you in the driving seat to solve, and gives Escape from the Past its own vibe, despite looking very familiar thanks to its historical setting. This DLC is well worth a look for all Escape Academy fans.

The post Escape Academy: Escape from the Past DLC review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

As is traditional in any farming game, you start your botanical adventure as a young whippersnapper who has inherited a farm. This time it’s because some relative has passed away, which means that the family dream of owning a successful farm falls to you. After getting a bit of help from the community you’re expected to get your hands dirty and sort out some produce to sell, so grab a hoe and some seeds and go hit the field.

If you’ve indulged in a bit of virtual farming before you know what to expect from the fruit and vegetable side of the game. First you’ll need to use your hoe on the soil to prepare it for planting, then pop a seed in and water it regularly until it starts producing food. It’s about as basic as farming gameplay gets, but when coupled with a need to manage your limited stamina every day it can become a little more strenuous.

It’ll take a while for you to really have to worry about getting too tired to finish your chores, but you should still prepare for this moment by learning to cook some stamina boosting snacks. You’ll find recipes for tasty meals dotted all over the village, but you can also experiment by cooking a couple of ingredients together and hoping for the best. Shoving a few vegetables together in a saucepan will probably produce some sort of tasty soup, but once you start finding scary mushrooms and dairy products it becomes a little trickier to freestyle your way to culinary greatness.

If you want regular milk and eggs for the kitchen (or just to sell for cold hard cash) you’ll need to get yourself some animals for the farm. At the start of the game you’re given a cow you can milk daily for a tasty sellable beverage, but with a bit of love, food and space to roam your livestock will become happier, produce higher quality goods and potentially even breed to give you even more furry or feathered friends. As long as you remember a few simple rules (like not letting your animals outside when It’s raining) you’ll have an endless supply of money and tasty food just waiting to be collected each morning.

An idyllic farm life is nice, but it’d be nicer with someone to share it with. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life has you covered in this department, with a whole host of potential spouses just waiting to be swept off their feet if you give them enough gifts. Each love interest has different present preferences, so you’ll need to learn what your bae likes if you want them to move in. I personally went for the aloof girl who liked my fish because it was easy to get these for her, but if you’d rather pick flowers or whip up a tasty treat to impress someone then that’s an option too.

The first few days at the farm will probably seem a little boring, but before you know it you’ll discover all the extra things you can get up to to fill the hours of the day. Fishing is an easy option with plenty of opportunity for making money, but you can also go to the archaeological dig site and find some precious artifacts or head to the notice board and solve some of the problems of the other village people. Whichever route you take, with a bit of hard work you’ll soon start turning a profit which means more seeds for the garden, more animals, and plenty of kitchen upgrades to invest in if you really want to live the high life.

As much as I’d like to pretend that this loop of farming and chores is engaging in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, it doesn’t take long for the whole experience to start feeling a little tedious. Everything just moves a little bit too slowly, and none of the side activities, festivals, or locals can distract from that. The lack of a hook to really pull you deep into this picturesque world just means it feels like a chore to play the game, and I think a lot of that is because of the outdated source material.

Not all aspects of Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life feel old fashioned though. The character creation features the option for a non-binary character (which definitely wasn’t available on the GameCube!) and all the romance options are now available to you regardless of the gender you choose. It’s a relatively small change that doesn’t really affect how the game functions a whole lot, but it’s lovely to see a remake focusing on making the game more inclusive the second time around.

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a perfectly adequate farming game, but compared to some of the fantastic modern options out there it’s really hard to recommend. There’s just not a whole lot of interesting progression hooks to keep you invested in this world of countryside industry, and although the updated gender and relationship options are fantastic everything else about this game just feels dated.

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Set in the early 90s, the residents of Greyhill are under the impression the government are covering up an invasion by extra-terrestrial life. You play as a guy called Ryan Baker, and his introduction to the story instantly highlights the weak acting and writing. Listening to a radio conversation between Ryan and a few of the locals, you’re provided with some idea of what’s going on, albeit done in a way that lacks any kind of interest in the characters.

What makes it worse it that Ryan’s son is an annoying brat who’s lying in front of the TV as you hear some strange goings on outside. The character animations are lifeless, and as you go back and forth looking for a crowbar to open the shed, he just remains there not seeming to understand the gravity of the situation. What makes this opening section worse is how you have no idea where to look for the crowbar, or even that it’s a crowbar you’re looking for, as the dark environment and lack of polish muddies your field of vision. Unfortunately, this lack of direction is a constant theme throughout.

Ryan wanders around Greyhill with no way points or markers, instead heading in various directions hoping to find whatever it is you’re looking for. It’s only when he says something along the lines of “I shouldn’t go that way” do you get any sense of where to go. It ruins the tension and makes for a painful loop of exploration, and I often found my time wandering around was filled with nothing but acute frustration. Maybe I missed something here, but there wasn’t a time when I ever felt as if I was doing the right thing until I luckily stumbled upon it.

The aliens are supposed to be the main enemy here, but in Greyhill Incident, the AI is. Sometimes they’ll spot you instantly and send you running away for a brief respite of peace, and other times they don’t see you at all, even when you’re in the same field of vision. It’s completely unbalanced, taking away the fear of getting caught. Even when you do get attacked, the animations are comical, but you can swat them with your baseball bat (that takes far too long to do successfully) or blast them with a revolver.

The stealth mechanics are poor. You can hide in a trash can or an outhouse, but there’s no way to know if you’re safe once re-emerging. Sneaking around is slow in Greyhill Incident, and the stamina gauge for running around takes ages to refill, meaning you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It’s baffling just how unbalanced everything is, and when you’re playing a survival horror, you need at least some kind of lifeline if you’re trying to survive.

With poor writing and acting that never delivers, unbalanced gameplay with zero support or any kind of tutorial, and alien threats that are never threatening, Greyhill Incident is a big misstep for the genre. I wanted to find something I liked, but it just became painful to play, even with a mildly promising start. Sometimes the environment looks pretty, but more often than not it’s just too dark. It’s littered with issues that are never resolved, and one of its only saving graces is the short runtime. With games like Amnesia: The Bunker and Layers of Fear releasing recently, there’s sadly just no reason to give this a chance.

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Let’s be clear for a moment, though: this is very possibly the best Aliens game we’ve ever had. It knocks spots off titles like Colonial Marines and Fireteam Elite. Dark Descent is to Aliens what Isolation is to Alien, and that means both good and bad news – though mostly good.

For example, it still paints the Colonial Marines as tough but dumb hombres more likely to charge headlong into the unknown than analyse a situation for five minutes first. It still has a plot that relies on people making the worst possible decision at every moment. Case in point is how Aliens: Dark Descent begins. You play initially as Maeko Hayes, a Weyland-Yutani administrator aboard Pioneer Station, in orbit around the planet Lethe. When a xenomorph and a bunch of face huggers get loose aboard the station, Hayes’ first thought isn’t to run like hell or even sound a station-wide alarm. Instead, she goes and investigates. Alone. Without a gun.

It’s in service to the gameplay, of course. This section acts as a tutorial as you control Hayes around the darkened corridors towards the main control mainframe, looking for a way to stop the aliens getting off Pioneer station and down to the surface of Lethe. Sadly, it all goes completely arse-up and Pioneer is all but destroyed, as is the USS Otago, a huge military transport vessel analogous to the Sulaco, which crashes on Lethe along with Hayes and Jonas Harper, a marine sergeant thrust into a position of leadership because everyone above him is dead. They soon learn that Lethe is already infested, and if you ever want to get out you’ll need to work with Harper’s surviving marines, physicians and engineers to salvage parts and get the Otago starside again.

It’s a classic Aliens set up, and Lethe may as well be LV-426 based on the way it looks and feels. But it’s deliberate, evoking the sense that all of Weyland-Yutani’s facilities are churned out on a production line with little thought for the people who will live and work in them. What’s crucial here though is atmosphere, and Dark Descent nails the ambience of James Cameron’s 1986 masterpiece at every turn. Much of the game takes place in the corridors of various colony settlements, abandoned mines, refineries, science facilities, off-planet locations, and even the windblown surface of Lethe itself.

What makes Dark Descent feel so authentic though is the marines themselves. Ostensibly you are Hayes, directing the squad from the Otago while Harper provides support from the ARC. This allows him to move around the map at your command so you can ferry marines to the objectives, pick up survivors, and provide ground support with the ARC’s huge pulse cannons. While the hub activity between missions feels very XCOM, the missions themselves actually remind me more of Red Solstice 2: Survivors, eschewing turn-based tactics for slow-burn exploration and creeping terror interspersed with fast-paced, desperate firefights against the Xenomorphs and… other enemies.

Having played every Aliens game back to the ZX Spectrum version, I wasn’t prepared for Dark Descent to be as tense as it is. Usually these are games designed around shooting galleries, as Aliens gallop at you in groups eagre to choke down your hot lead. While they do their fair share of zerging here, most of the time you’ll be dealing with single drones that can pop out of vents or appear on your motion tracker, hoping you don’t make enough noise to attract more. When higher category Xenomorphs enter the fray, you may well spend some time playing cat and mouse to avoid them altogether.

The mission structure is interesting though. There are multiple objectives in each area, and you’re sometimes allowed to complete them in whichever order you choose. Because your marines are only human, they will get tired, scared, and stressed out. You have limited medkits containing bandages and mood stabilisers, but once your marines are in a state of panic you need to get out as quickly as you can. At this point they become irrational, missing shots and fumbling reloads, and if they’re tired and exhausted they can be dragged away by drones and never seen again. Worse, they will develop traumas such as pyrophobia, paranoia, and PTSD that you’ll need to treat case by case.

Of course, you have more than a few tricks up your sleeves, too. You can deploy sentry guns, mines, or pull out flamethrowers and handy shotguns for close encounters. As with XCOM, marines who survive missions will earn XP, which means you can promote them and alter their class. Snipers, medics, teckers, officers, smartgunners; all are available and critical on mission. Bear in mind, though, that death is permanent in Aliens: Dark Descent. Lose a marine and don’t have a good autosave to reload, and they’re gone forever. You can’t save-scum as all saves are automatic, and it can get incredibly hectic when a horde attacks you. Sometimes you’ll need to buy yourself some time by welding a door, which can also grant you a shelter to relieve stress and, with the right perks, heal or resupply your squad.

What makes it tactical is that everything requires a currency. Medkits to heal, tools to weld doors and hack terminals, Command Points to use shotguns, flamethrowers, mines – or to lay down suppressive fire, which is like a mobile version of the overwatch mechanic. As you move around mission areas a counter will tick away until the Xenomorphs come for you en masse. When this happens, deploy whatever defences you have and dig in. You can either slow or pause time for breathing room, but every time this happens it feels desperate and terrifying. If you’re unprepared or all in strung-out shape, you’re better off leaving and coming back later.

The story weaves in and out of your missions, and in the central hub you’ll upgrade, train and customise your soldiers, develop new weapons, research the xenomorph threat, and treat the wounded and traumatised in the medibay or therapy room. In order to make things happen you need to advance the day, and each day that passes sees the infestation escalate. This is your Death Clock, and when time is up, it’s game over, man.

So you’ll develop strategies that see you get in, complete objectives, and get out, salvaging as many supplies, medkits and ammo packs as you can, ready to refresh and try again the next day – but always with the knowledge that every dalliance brings you a step closer to destruction. Of course, completing major story objectives can knock the infestation level down a little, as can some of the random choice-based events that occur whenever you advance time.

That being said, the story will move on when you complete certain tasks. It tells an interesting tale too, dealing with not only the xenomorph threat but also secrets hidden in Hayes’ and Harper’s individual pasts, as well as a doomsday cult that worships the alien. It’s pretty par for the universe, but I found myself engaged with the two leads throughout. And your marines, too, become familiar to you as you play, so that when you lose a character you’ve named and shaped for hours, it hits harder.

Aliens: Dark Descent does struggle a little in the visual department, however. While environments and animations are great, the character models aren’t so impressive close up. The lip-synching in cutscenes is also weird, and characters have a bizarre rubber mask look. One guy in the first few scenes just looks like a Spitting Image puppet of Elton John. It’s a little weird, but not a major issue as you’re rarely dealing with characters up close.

The audio kind of makes up for it, too. From the iconic chitter of the M41-A Pulse Rifle to the beep of the motion tracker, Dark Descent nails the sound design throughout. There are sounds that have come to be considered quintessential to the franchise and they’re all present here. By God though, does it need some more dialogue lines in mission. You can only hear “Come on, team!” so many times before it starts to annoy.

But Aliens: Dark Descent is more than just another game wearing Aliens clothes and mimicking its catcalls. It’s a genuinely tense experience that strives to make use of the license at every opportunity. The way your marines can retreat while shooting, the lines of dialogue lifted from the movie, and the look and feel of the environments, weapons, and enemies, all combine to produce something incredibly faithful to the source.

It’s only really let down by glitches that may well be patched out in launch week but which did hamper my enjoyment a little. Occasional crashes, progress bugs, visual glitches, and noticeable framerate slowdown and texture pop-in plagued me throughout, and I dearly hope Tindalos gets it sorted sooner rather than later.

Anyone waiting for a genuinely good video game adaptation of Aliens can finally breathe a sigh of relief, though. Far more than any FPS or squad-based shooter, Dark Descent feels like something worthy of the name. It’s not perfect, of course; the technical issues require swift attention, and there are moments of frustration thanks to your squad’s occasional clumsy pathfinding, or sudden spikes in difficulty that you just can’t see coming, but it’s also one of the most immersive and exciting tactical shooters I’ve played, and a worthy successor and tribute to Cameron’s sci-fi classic.

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Park Beyond never makes much sense in the context of the real world, so don’t worry too much about this being some hyper realistic sim. It begins with you tossing a paper aeroplane out of your bedroom window that just happens to hit a young lass jetpacking over the city. She works for Park Beyond, and the ride you sketched on said paper plane lead to her auditioning you for a job by having you build a rollercoaster in the city. It makes absolutely no sense, but it’s a decent tutorial.

It’s a weird one though, since rollercoasters take up much less of your actual time in the game than, say, making sure park visitors can reach a toilet in time. Because once you start actually working for the company, your biggest concern is raising a currency called “Amazement”, and rollercoasters just don’t seem to cut the mustard. They also cost a lot, take ages to build, rarely turn a profit, and are just kind of “meh” altogether. See you’ll always begin in a place fairly packed with landscape features and adjusting the terrain always feels like busy work. Because even laying paths can be weirdly awkward (they have a tendency to bend how they want like those plastic snake toys you had as a kid), a lot of the time I found myself just making do.

See, every ride must have a queue path and an exit path, which must sometimes account for inclines and raised areas. This can often cause a problem because if people have to queue for too long without a toilet, food shop, or bench to squat on they’ll get fussy and your overall happiness rating will drop. In order to raise Amazement you need to keep the park fun, so that people can go ride to ride quickly, stuffing their faces with junk food and sweets on the way, or stop to puke in a convenient bin whenever they need to.

Of course, this means hiring entertainers, handy people, cleaners. Luckily your visitors tend to be pretty docile folk who never kick off; they just sulk and leave in a huff, and your overall positive ratings drop. You’ll unlock Modules as you raise your park’s level, which include extra themes for your rides and shops, or they’ll unlock new rides altogether. And when you have enough Amazement, you can impossify a ride, shop, rollercoaster, even a member of staff. This raises the effective level of the target, and allows you to generally charge more money per ticket.

Having a giant octopus ride that submerges the guests is great, but if you’re not turning a profit you may eventually start to struggle. There’s not much micromanagement here, though. Yes, you can adjust the prices of everything up to the toilets, and the individual items in the shops, but I never really struggled to make money. Individual rides, like the aforementioned coasters, don’t always turn a profit, but Park Beyond is more focused on having fun. Even when you’re introduced to your big rival, you won’t really feel the stress of competition; the name of the game is fun and, of course, impossification.

Weirdly, you have tons of decorative items unlocked from the start. Fountains, signs, lights, statues, trees, flower beds and various things like giant Rubik’s Cubes or prop vehicles are all available, but they’re purely cosmetic. Putting them all over the park can improve it visually for your benefit, but does nothing for the actual park so it’s not worth the effort unless you’re really into it.

Your board of directors in Park Beyond will throw in some challenges along the way, which you can find by mousing over the little red icons in the park. Annoyingly you can’t build on them or remove the icons, as they exist as physical things in the world even when you’ve beat the challenge. The board will also meet with you at the start of every “mission” to discuss the direction you want to take the park in. Izzy is concerned with money, eccentric millionaire Phil wants to have fun, engineer Sophia just wants you to challenge her. You don’t have to appease any of them if you don’t want to, as your focus will be on specific demographics.

Your visitors come in three categories: adults, teens, and families. You can zoom right into them (even body-jumping so you I can experience the park in hands-off first person), and this will help you understand whether they’re enjoying themselves, which rides they enjoyed, and how amazed they’ve been. It’s all much simpler than it sounds, and although you can get into the nitty gritty of what you pay your it staff and how much you charge for a candy apple, I rarely had to worry too much about it. If people get fussy, they usually just want more bins and services. Completing challenges is the biggest, well, challenge, but you usually have a few to aim for and can skip some of the tougher ones if you want to.

Park Beyond looks and sounds pretty good. I like getting down to ground level among the music and bustle, and it can be fun to ride your own rollercoasters, especially if you get creative and have them weave between your rides and landmarks like canyons and natural rock bridges. It’s a nice, accessible, mostly stress-free park building experience that may lack a bit of meat on its bones for fans of things like Rollercoaster Tycoon, but it’s a great way to kill a few hours nonetheless.

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For those not entirely sure what Layers of Fear is, it tells three stories. One of which is about a successful painter who begins to struggle with creating the next masterpiece; the other is about an actor who arrives on an ocean liner after being hand-picked by the director; and the final one is from the viewpoint of a writer who has been given the opportunity to write about the tragic lives of the previous two creators. The themes seen in the game touch on some rather heavy subject matter, yet they’re handled with sensitivity and are never gratuitous or unnecessary.

Neither a reboot or remake, Layers of Fear starts off where you play as the writer. Set in the mid-1950s, you have won the opportunity to write about these troubled artists at a creepy lighthouse. From there, you start to play the original game with voice-overs from the writer at certain points, along with returning gameplay sections where you explore the lighthouse and start to hear and see a plethora of creepy occurrences. Once the story of the painter has finished, you’ll explore Layers of Fear 2 aka The Actor, and it follows a similar pattern until the end. You’re also free to dive into the two additional stories that provide background to the wife and the daughter of the painter, and it all ties together in one seamless narrative that explores insanity and passion, both for those we love and the works we create.

The Painter’s story is perhaps my favourite. Set within the confines of a Victorian mansion, you start to uncover how a talented artist starts to struggle with the weight of success. On the outside, it looks as though he has it all: a loving wife, a unique gift, and a beautiful daughter. However, through letters and scraps of paper, and objects scattered around the house, you learn of a crumbling marriage, a crippling obsession with success, and a slow decent into madness. It’s psychological horror at its finest, drip-feeding you with details about where it all went wrong and what led to his shattered mental state, and at times it’s upsetting to see just how a broken home starts to form.

The story is further explored with the included DLC which follows his daughter years later as she returns to the house. It further cements ideas in your mind about their relationship, but also offers more sorrowful realisations about a man who couldn’t give his daughter what she needed. The new addition to Layers of Fear is ‘The Final Note,’ a short yet impactful insight from the viewpoint of the wife. Without being too spoiler-heavy, she was a talented musician that became a muse for the painter, but after a tragic accident, she struggled to remember who she was, leaving her feeling less of a woman and unloved by her husband.

While I didn’t enjoy the actor’s story as much, I still found it interesting and absorbing. Set on board the ocean liner, you start to uncover the intentions of the director and the relationship between the two siblings at the heart of everything, Lily and James. You are there to embody the role through method acting, something which is a relatively new concept in early 1900’s Hollywood. While it has parallels to the original, it’s able to create a dense narrative that almost always delivers. Having all of these stories in one game helps to create such a profound thesis on the mind and mental health, which is something I’ve not seen done as well as it is in Layers of Fear.

Each story isn’t solely told by reading documents and listening to the characters. The way the environments move and change without you ever noticing is incredible. Like a walk through an Escher painting, the world around you contorts and moves. As you enter a room and then turn around, everything is different. Walls close in on you, furniture slams into walls and lights flicker and burn out, floors disappear beneath you and your entire existence shift in the blink of an eye. The new technology makes these transitions flawless, leaving you constantly unsure and off-guard, and the effort put into this state of uncertainly is anything but harmonious.

Layers of Fear uses the environment to take your breath away when you least expect it. Sure, there’re jump scares at times, and maybe it relies on them a bit too often, but the real terror is never knowing what to expect. It subverts expectations from the genre and provides its horror through the way it manipulates imagery and your surroundings rather than a lazy reliance of blood and gore. It’s beautiful at times, and you forget about the tragedies if only for a second to appreciate how stunning it looks. The lighting is phenomenal, and even plays into the gameplay where you must use a torch to reveal secrets and dispel a woman that haunts you around the mansion, or animate static dummies in the actor’s story to aid you as you explore.

At times, movement can be a little slow, especially in the painter’s story, and the exploration is more on-rails than it is freeing. Travelling from room to room, you’ll route around your surroundings to find items of note or key information to read before moving on, but I enjoyed its pacing as the stories gripped me throughout. Layers of Fear also features a handful of puzzles which you must solve before leaving an area. Sometimes they’re engaging and get you thinking outside the box, where others feel arbitrary. One puzzle in the painter’s story has you moving around a room looking for a particular view through easels to unlock a door, where another sends you on a linear traipse through rooms to find a selection of keys with animals on them.

They’re an attempt to add gamey elements to Layers of Fear, and while they don’t always hit, they can be a nice distraction. What makes Anshar Studios and Bloober Team’s reimaging stand out are the set pieces. With visuals that constantly wowed me throughout, certain moments blew me away. It’d be unfair of me to ruin them for you now, but as each tale delves further into the human psyche, events get weirder and more abstract, and I was impressed with what the developers have done on the PlayStation 5.

Layers of Fear deals with trauma delicately while still managing to create scares throughout. Its brand of horror focuses on the psychological, leaving you uneasy every step of the way. It’s a visual masterpiece within the genre, and the stories tell a clear and terrifying tale, all tied together by the inclusion of the new character of the writer. Even if you’ve played the originals and liked them, there’s so much more at play to offer a new way to experience a series that helped to redefine what horror can be, and even now I can’t stop thinking about it.

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So this Precision Drive technology. Are they just fancy buzzwords akin to FIFA’s HyperMotion, or does it actually offer something that’s noticeable while playing? Well, I felt the controls were clunkier last year, and while they were an improvement on the series, F1 23 is a huge step up. Regardless of whether you’re participating in F3 or F1, the changes are pretty obvious. Gliding around the track at breakneck speeds isn’t as intimidating, and the ability to overtake and get up close to other drivers won’t strike fear into you.

Weaving on longer straights and even going into corners offers up a ton of precision with the smallest flick of the left analogue stick, and breaking feels more responsive. These are powerful cars, and Codemasters has found away to balance precise handling with managing their power. It feels easier to overtake despite the dangers still being present, as acceleration is more accessible across all areas of the track, however, breaking is balanced and provides more control, especially going into tighter corners. There’s a focus on grip coming out of corners as well, and it feels as though the developers have listened to feedback from last year.

In terms of the latest chapter in Braking Point, the concept is much the same, however, there’s more reaction to both your performances on the track and off. It didn’t seem to matter how you performed before, as the cutscenes and feedback were all prepared for simply completing objectives. While this is still the case with the cutscenes, your actions are highlighted on your social media feed and in the newspaper headlines. For example, one of my objectives was to finish higher than the cocky Devon Butler, but I ended up landing the podium in second place.

This was pointed out on my feed, as various people were tweeting commenting how impressed they were despite the issues surrounding Konnersport Butler, the team I was racing for. Other objectives such as fastest lap are also mentioned, along with reactions to other happenings going on throughout the season. Aiden Jackson’s story now follows him racing for a new team who are having their fair share of engineering problems, not to mention being a teammate of Butler, owned by his manipulative father, Davidoff. It also introduces F2 maestro Callie Mayer to the frame, and watching everyone’s story unfold was rather fun.

In the past, EA hasn’t always got it right, but there’s proof that when it hits, it hits hard. Take for example the first entry into the NFL’s Longshot storyline; evidence that story can find a place in sports games. Braking Point 2 is no different, and while some of it is a tad predictable, and how much Jackson starts off rather arrogant himself, I still liked it. As various characters, you’ll choose how to respond to certain questions from the press, offers from the media, and conversations with team mates and employees. Seeing Casper Akkerman return was also cool, especially with his inclusion into Konnersport.

The Career mode feels similar to last year, although there have been some refinements to reflect the real-world ratings of teams and drivers. There’re more racers to choose from, and the inclusion of the 35% race distance and red flags can now be selected for the most up-to-date, realistic experience. You can also participate in the Las Vegas and Qatar circuits for complete immersion in the sport, and the general animations feel more varied that F1 22, adding new visuals along with an immerse commentary set up. While there aren’t any massive additions, it feels as though Codemasters have gone for balance and refinement, which both seem to have been easily achieved.

F1 World seems to have combined the lacklustre F1 Life and its online elements to provide a bulkier experience. You can unlock supercars, create your own, and customise your appearance and your home, while at the same time take part in races that reflect the real-world season. Unfortunately I couldn’t try the mode out due to pre-release, but I love how it looks, and making the mode feel more important and a lot more substantial is definitely a step in the right direction.

Whether you’re looking for the most realistic F1 experience in how it controls and looks, EA Sports F1 23 has nailed it. Races are thrilling and the attention to every little movement to the controller is reflected instantly, providing complete control on the tracks. Visually it’s impressive, both with how the courses look and how the animations are presented, and the sounds of the cars on the circuits are more than impressive. If you felt like last year’s entry wasn’t quite enough, or didn’t offer you the best racing experience it could, this is definitely a big step in the right direction.

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Liva’s Story acts as a prologue to the events seen in Gerda, and follows a woman called Liva as she has to escape Copenhagen with the members of her resistance after a failed mission, on the run from the Gestapo with the goal of setting up a new base of operations in Tinglev. While Gerda was known for being an everyday citizen who was thrust into dangerous situations, Liva is familiar with conflict, and isn’t afraid to do what is needed, even if that resorts to violence.

Much like Gerda: A Flame in Winter, Liva’s Story is superbly written. When a game can convey emotion through words you’re reading on a screen, it highlights how good the writing is. As you progress through the story and are forced to make tough choices, the actions of your own decisions play a big role in certain outcomes, and I was always impressed with how both Liva and her teammates deal with them. As the leader of a resistance, you’re responsible for making tough decisions and earning the trust of your men, and more often than not, you won’t be able to please everyone.

You’ll choose what missions to accept, whether you deviate from your main goal to help others, and which people you’ll choose to focus your attention on. It was never going to be easy being The Sparrow, and Liva’s Story constantly reminds you of that. I found that while there were certain characters I grew fond of, the need to help everyone could never be satisfied. Everyone in your team has a story to tell, all with their own personalities, but there is only so much you can do. These choices affect how you’re supported, and it’s down to you how that support is used.

Most of your choices are based on three specific skills. Duty is all about following the mission to its end and refusing to deviate; Care allows you to be more compassionate; and Fury often ends in violence towards the enemy. How you respond earns points towards each skill, which in turn can be utilised for specific responses as the game goes on. Virtual dice rolls also play into whether certain decisions are successful or not, so if you don’t have a lot of points in one category, you’re more likely to be unsuccessful.

Gerda: A Flame in Winter – Liva’s Story manages to offer players a chance to see war from all angles, and leaves you questioning your decisions throughout. The writing is excellent, and the same art style might not appeal to those wanting crisper or more detailed environments, however, war was never beautiful painting. It was messy, violent, sorrowful, and tough. Liva’s Story is all of those things, but at the heart of it is a woman who believes she knows what the right thing is, and will do whatever she can to achieve her objective.

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Although the PC version had its share of technical issues, the PS5 version is mostly stable. The concessions come in the form of some of the texture work, with notably less detail and crispness to environments when zoomed in. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s something worth noting as you head into the two campaigns.

As stated in our PC review, both campaigns are pretty good, although it’s fair to say that the Africa campaign is just more interesting. This is partly down to the setting, as the brass tacks of both campaigns are largely the same. You split your time between controlling squabbling generals on the overmap and your soldiers in the mud, with the latter offering considerably more entertainment per minute. The overmap gameplay is OK, but you’ll spend more time choosing sides between your own commanders than engaging the enemy. And when you do engage, it rarely feels particularly difficult to move forward.

Much more involving are the strategic combat missions that put you in command of several squads of soldiers. Here you’ll advance in increments, capturing essential assets that allow you to create more unit, heal and reinforce your existing squads, or field vehicles to help turn the tide. These missions are the bread and butter of Company of Heroes 3 – Console Edition, and are responsible for every shred of genuine excitement and tension in the game.

You’ll need to keep squads in cover, lay down covering fire, deploy paratroopers and heavy artillery. Italy in particular has a couple of standout arenas along its fairly drab campaign where you’ll engage the enemy in urban areas, blasting snipers out of bell towers and taking cover behind ornate fountains.

Arguably there’s more fun to be had in either solo or multiplayer skirmishes than in the campaign. Following the story is entertaining enough, but there’s a childishness to it that feels at odds with the whole “theatre of war” thing, where your commanders sneer and jab at one another like school kids. Ultimately, it also doesn’t any matter much who you side with in the long term, as either path tends to be equally as tough or easy depending on your standpoint and the actual story isn’t nuanced enough to be affected.

You’re better off getting stuck in with your soldiers, who can be controlled in groups or individually, to flank the enemy, set up vantage points, or cover one another when needed. You will burn through men, but even when you are the dialogue is always genuinely chuckleworthy as the men trade barbs and words of tactless squaddie encouragement.

Unfortunately, translating the controls isn’t as smooth as it could be. We’ve yet to see a standardised version of gamepad controls for tactical squad games like this, and Company of Heroes 3 – Console Edition further highlights the need for it. It’s incredibly fiddly to select a single unit out of a group, and a lot of the commands are bogged down in menus and radial dials. It’s not helped by that loss of visual fidelity when zooming in, which compounds the issue.

One thing missing from the PS5 version in particular is haptic feedback. While it works best for fighters, racers, and FPS games, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity given the amount of explosions and heavy vehicles at play here. Ultimately this is a mostly competent port of a very good tactical WWII game. It’s nice that console gamers can get their hands on it, but it still feels like a series that very much belongs on PC.

The post Company of Heroes 3 – Console Edition review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

The main story follows a woman called Polly who returns home after a long time to find out what happened to her mother, who has gone missing. A simple premise on the surface, but one that gets much bigger and important after discovering her connection to a mystical realm known as Reverie. It is here where she meets the Aspirations, individuals that embody the aspirations of humanity, such as power, chaos, and glory. The choices you make in the real world of Atina will affect what happens in Reverie, eventually choosing who will rule over the realm.

In Atina, you realise that the once peaceful community is under the watchful eye of a megacorporation, ruling with somewhat of an iron fist. They are ruining the very heart of Atina and all that reside there, forcing people to live in fear, struggling to have their voices heard, and having their unique history forgotten. When you’re responsible for certain decisions that affect both worlds, and not being able to reverse certain choices you make, there feels like there’s a lot riding on everything you say. It’s hard to say more about the story without ruining anything, but I became fully invested in Polly’s story, and the supporting cast of characters were all beautifully written.

While there’s an overarching story that manages to pack a lot of character development and grandeur into it, I became fascinated by the more personal story of family and love at its heart, and how important the ones in our lives are. The voice acting is strong throughout, especially some of the aspirations, and it always manages to throw some interesting decisions your way, whether they’re unexpected or inevitable.

The focal point of Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is the Augural. It is a map of choices, including ones you’re about to make, ones you can choose to make later on, and ones that can’t be accessed because of previous choices already made. The risk of saying the wrong thing is always at the front of your mind, and it offers an interesting mechanic that hasn’t really been seen before. You could say something that will upset someone, or you could play it safe and say what they want to hear, but how will it help you find out where your mother went?

Other choices can affect your relationship with the Aspirations, and knowing who to side with for the right result all plays into the risk and rewards of using your words correctly. It’s impossible to know where the story is likely to go, so your basing your path on the chapter that lies before you, however, there’re certain tells that give you an idea of what might happen. Still, I found this approach to the choice mechanics fresh, unlike many visual novel games that feel rather barren of variety and personal sacrifice.

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is a beautiful game. The visual novel style may feel restrictive to players not familiar, as being able to explore so many gorgeous environments would have been a joy, but each scene is filled with vibrancy and attention to detail. Atina is a summery town and the sun-kissed streets and colourful backdrops are always beautiful to look at. Reverie is equally stunning, and I was always finding new locations as my favourites. There’s an almost old-school Disney charm to the style, and it’s definitely one of its strongest features.

Harmony: The Fall of Reverie challenges you to make the right choices although the chances of missteps are littered throughout. You learn through your mistakes, but they can often be costly to later chapters and story beats. It is the small realisations of your choices that highlight how strong a game it is. While the visual novel style might put people off, the writing is excellent, and probably DON’T NOD’s finest effort to date. The art style is delightful, and the way everything feeds into everything else shows the work put into its diverse story.

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In this lo-fi fantasy world, everything has pretty much gone down the toilet. The king has been betrayed and murdered using the titular Bleak Sword, and darkness has descended across the realm. Now nowhere is safe, and the only one who can change that is our white pixelated hero and his sword fighting skills. As you can probably imagine the story isn’t supposed to be the star of the show here, but it certainly sets up your time stabbing in this desolate locale nicely.

There’s not a whole lot flashy about the combat in Bleak Sword DX, but everything it does, it does perfectly. Your character has a light attack for quick strikes, a heavy attack for extra damage, a dodge roll and a block – and that’s it. It’s how you use these abilities that matters though, and how you manage the stamina meter that drains once you do use them. You’ll need to master parrying and countering attacks, dodge rolling out of harm’s way and knowing when to time your strikes if you want to survive the simple square stages, and even then you’ll probably die a lot.

Although each level takes place on a single screen, there’s a nice variety throughout Bleak Sword DX. Some stages feature fog that obscures your foes, others have wind that’ll blow you about a bit and impact your ability to dodge, and the best of all are the horseback stages. You can’t block on these tricky scrolling levels, but instead can jump to dodge incoming logs or attacks. These variations in the environment might not sound like much, but it makes a huge difference to how you play.

If the different levels don’t excite you though, the enemy variety will. Every single foe (be it a basic bitch grunt or a big ole boss) in Bleak Sword DX requires a different strategy to deal with, from spiders that lunge at you at top speed to flying demons that throw spears at you from afar. Working out which attacks you can block and which require a well timed roll is just as important as your ability to time your attacks and blocks, so make sure you fight smarter not harder.

If you’re really struggling with a certain stage though, you can always go back and grind on some earlier easy battles. You earn experience for every level you complete, and every time you level up you can choose to upgrade your attack, defence or maximum HP. These stat upgrades make a huge difference, and going back to previous worlds after a few levels up will make you feel like a god.

Alongside getting experience, there’s also a chance you’ll find an item when you beat a level. You can hold two items at once, and they come in the form of equipment that boost your stats and consumables that health your hp or provide a more temporary boost. If at any point you die though these items will be taken away, and if you die a second time when you go back to beat the stage to retrieve them they’ll be gone forever, along with any experience you have towards your next level up. It can feel a bit harsh when you lose a load of XP and some particularly good items, but it worth remembering you don’t actually need any of the buffs they provide to progress.

If you’re able to beat the campaign of Bleak Sword DX, you’ll unlock a whole host of extra difficulty levels and modes to dive into for more slashing action. Boss Rush and The Arena are fairly self explanatory, but the mode I enjoyed the most was the randomiser. This mode shuffles the enemies you’ll encounter on your quest entirely, and is a whole lot of fun if you don’t mind the balance being thrown out the window.

One aspect of Bleak Sword DX I wasn’t sure I’d appreciate at first was the visuals, but after playing for a little while I realised just how much they add to the game. The simple three colour palette and chunky pixel aesthetic really suits the dark fantasy setting, and also ensures that you always know exactly what’s happening in the heat of battle. I’d advise that you don’t judge this book by its cover.

Bleak Sword DX takes simple action game mechanics and polishes them to near perfection. The combat is immensely satisfying, and the enemy and level variety keeps things interesting from start to finish. How much you get punished for dying can feel a little harsh, but as long as you become a master of the sword and board you’ll save the kingdom and feel great doing it.

The post Bleak Sword DX review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

In our preview, we acknowledged that MotoGP 23 is going to be a tough cookie to crack for new players. While this is still the case, there’re various options known as Neural Aids that can help you drastically, if a little too much. On the most easiest setting, all you have to do is use basic turning to remain on the track. Acceleration, breaking, and controlling the bike is practically done by the game itself, meaning you have little control over the bike. It’s a good feature if you’re coming in fresh, but the stabilisers feel well and truly stuck to you without any real wiggle room to move.

If you feel too constricted this way, the next setting is much more relaxed, but the difficulty spike is rather large. Learning every aspect of the nuances of handling is going to take time, along with many falls off your bike, but if you’re willing to stick to it, there’s a challenge that once conquered, makes MotoGP 23 a thrilling racer. It’s tough, especially when the new dynamic weather plays a part, but learning the importance of when to break, take advantage of tight corners and long straights, and track layouts, is all part of the fun, and teaches you to become a better driver.

The dynamic weather is an excellent feature in MotoGP 23. You might start a race with the weather being a touch overcast or even sunny, and after a couple of laps the heavens will open and you’ll be forced to change how you race. With rain pouring down onto the tarmac, it’s easier to lose control. In one of my races in the Career mode, I had the red flags stop the race due to dangerous driving conditions. While it was frustrating as I’d fought hard to take the lead, I like how the real-life elements show themselves.

The Career mode is the best feature of MotoGP 23. Starting as a rookie, you’ll race to win and rise the rankings, all while having to deal with other racers through social media. Certain people will message you, be it a rival or someone within your own team, and how you respond can affect the way they race against you on the track. Do you want to create a salty atmosphere and risk aggressive driving, or play it safe and be nice? The option is yours, and while I noticed some of these choices come in to play, it wasn’t always obvious. There are also objectives like beating a rival in a competition or finishing in a certain position, giving you something else to work on while playing.

As you progress through your career, you’ll be able to upgrade your bike, choose teams to race for, and more, giving you plenty of things to think about in-between races. While the career has improved since last year, the racing is where MotoGP is at its best. What makes this better is how good it looks. Tracks around the world are intricately designed, as are the bikes and their racers, but so too is the weather. When it rains, you’ll see rain drops on the screen which can affect how cautious you have to be, all in all creating a realistic experience.

The haptics on the DualSense are remarkable, with every small bump or terrain change felt, along with gear changes and throttle being felt in the controller. A lot of focus has been put onto how MotoGP 23 performs on modern consoles, and it’s more than noticeable. While there aren’t a ton of modes to choose between, you can still create your own Grand Prix, take part in time trials, and go online against other racers. There’s also a ton of customisable options for your racer, adding a personalised touch to proceedings.

MotoGP 23 is an improvement on last year, with a Career mode that’s trying out new features to make each season feel different to the last. The dynamic weather is a standout, as it forces you to change on the fly when the rain starts to fall, and the visuals elevate the feature while also leaving you impressed with how good it looks. While it still features a tough learning curve, there’re aids in place to make the transition between difficulty levels easier, helping to offer a smooth racing experience whatever mode you’re in.

The post MotoGP 23 review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

Essentially what Metalhead has delivered is a terrific balance of humorous, over the top cartoon charm, and a surprisingly deep set of gameplay mechanics that improve on the previous entries in the franchise and makes it a must buy for fans of America’s favourite pastime.

Whether or not you are familiar with the sport, the fundamentals of pitching, hitting and throwing are all implemented in a way that makes gameplay enjoyable, intuitive, and accessible. Striking the ball effectively is a simple case of getting timing right, whilst pitching is handled by using a simple aiming cursor. Being able to change the difficulty can make things easier and more simplified depending on the skill level of the player, meaning this is truly one that can be picked up and played by all.

There are a ton of features that offer all-new experiences or build on existing Super Mega fare. The level of customisation is frankly ridiculous and puts most fully licensed sports games to shame. The Shuffle Draft is one such winsome addition, which allows you to pick a roster that includes the fictitious (and nearly always highly charming, and hilarious) Super Mega stars with genuine licenced MLB legends like 25 time All-Star and in-GOAT-conversation Hank Aaron. There will also be over 200 other Legends that will be rotated in and out of rosters in the online Pennant Race mode.

The Franchise Mode is sensational, and one of the most enjoyable I have played in ages. You now have to be extra mindful of the chemistry within your team, and how the decisions you make will affect the morale of your team. An excellently implemented “loyalty” meter can swing both ways depending on how you deal with your charges. In keeping with the rich vein of humour that runs through the entire game, some of the player reactions will genuinely crease you up.

If you can develop a squad with pockets or cliques of players that share the same chemistry then it can give you buffs on certain traits. In game currency points enable you to upgrade the stats of players, and you can do so at whichever pace you wish: saving them to use down the line and rely on the chemistry and your own skill, or splashing them all in one go for instant baseball gratification.

However you decide to play, this is a superb looking title that is brimming with hilarity and comedic timing, with something for everyone. The presentation is whimsical and enticing and capable of drawing you in, but Super Mega Baseball 4 has massively addictive hidden depths that bely the cartoony feel, and for me place it amongst the best sporting titles to have dropped this year. It begs to be played in couch multiplayer with a few cold ones over the summer, but the franchise play will keep you going way beyond that. A home run.

The post Super Mega Baseball 4 review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

You play as a French soldier called Henri Clément during WWI who, after evading German fire, winds up on his own in a bunker plunged into darkness. After attempting to find your bearings, you realise you’re not alone. A nightmarish creature is stalking you, and when you first start to become aware of his presence, things go from bad to worse. As much as I hate this level of tension, I’m also enamoured by it. I struggled with Alien: Isolation for the same reason, except this time, you have less help on your side. There’s no handheld monitor, only your wits, and take it from me, they’ll end up being cut to shreds.

The first time I heard the growls of the beast through the crumbling walls, I felt my heart stop in my chest. I stopped dead in my tracks and tried to pinpoint whereabouts the sounds were coming from, but just like that, they fell silent. I had a crappy little dynamo flashlight that made a lot of noise every time it needed winding up, a revolver with a single bullet, and little else. You feel helpless, even when you start to gather other resources like flares and grenades, and that anxiety and fear is down to the exceptionally built moment-to-moment action.

You’re supposed to struggle at first. You’re supposed to feel like you haven’t got a chance of surviving. Every idea you have is either going to work or fail miserably, but the more you play and the more you experiment with particular outcomes, you start to gain a bit of confidence that everything is going to be alright. Of course, that confidence is dashed when the roars of the monster get so close and you run frantically back to the light, the safe space, or anywhere to get away from those horrifying noises. The first time I got caught, I audibly shouted myriad curse words at my screen, followed by pausing and stepping away for a while.

Amnesia: The Bunker is petrifying in the best possible way. Why did I continue to play when I knew that I could die at any moment? Why put myself through it again and again? Simply put, it’s incredibly smart. Despite it being rather dark at times, it pushes you to improvise, utilising the environment around you and the tools at your disposal. The freakish entity isn’t a fan of the light, and there’s a generator that can be re-fuelled with gasoline, and you have a stopwatch that syncs with the generator to tell you how much time you have left.

If you stray to far from the generator and the lights go out, there’s more of a chance you’re going to get caught. Using your flashlight is going to attract its attention if it’s relatively close, so is opening cupboards and doors, pulling cranks or running, and there’s little you can do to slow it down. You’re not entirely helpless, as the revolver can scare it off with a well-placed shot, but bullets are few and far between. You can use the fuel to pour onto the ground, then light it up to place a temporary barricade of fire, or place explosive barrels at certain spots that can then be blown up, and lead it towards wired explosives.

If for some reason you get injured, an untreated wound can cause you to lose blood, leaving a nice trail for the beast to follow. However, this can be used to your advantage if you’re happy to play with fire. I did it by mistake, but by bleeding all over the floor, I led it straight towards a barrel, and when turning around I was able to shoot it and send the monster fleeing. You have to use your initiative wherever you find yourself underground. While there are multiple options for you to escape, that sense of dread is always there, and it might be too much for some. I had to step away multiple times because I couldn’t cope with the anxious exploration, but it’s this fear that made me want to keep playing.

While exploring and searching through desks, cabinets, and other areas, you’ll start to piece together a narrative of what’s going on in Amnesia: The Bunker. It provides some background to the experiments being performed underground and to the various soldiers that have been a part of it, and while I found it interesting, the real story is the one you create for yourself. You learn about Henri, but it is how you play, the choices you make, and the encounters with the beast that will end up giving you the memorable moments of your own personal tale. There are rooms that require codes to get into, other sections of the bunker that will let you find new ways to survive, and countless documents and letters that sometimes offer clues.

Amnesia: The Bunker is not for the faint of heart. You’re always on edge and never truly safe, but it gives you multiple ways to escape being mauled by the beast and find a way out, all while setting the scene through various photos and documents. No items remain in the same place, meaning you can’t go back to an area and expect to find that item you need on a second attempt, and the claustrophobic nature of the gameplay is always ready to mess with your head. Frictional Games has set a new standard for horror games while pushing the boundaries of the Amnesia series to a whole new level.

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If you haven’t played a Katamari game before, the concept might sound a little unusual. You play as a little green fella called The Prince, and the aim of each stage is to push a ball (the Katamari) around the environment and roll up as many objects as possible. As the Katamari grows due to the amount of cakes, bottles of super glue and small children stuck to it you’ll be able to assimilate bigger objects, usually to a fairly ridiculous degree. It’s an extremely satisfying process, only made more entertaining by the silliness of the environment, lovely (updated) visuals and wacky soundtrack.

Controlling The Prince and his big ball of bits is rather unusual too, but once you get used to it the control scheme really works. To move forwards you hold both sticks forward, and can steer by releasing a stick or turn sharper by pushing the sticks in opposite directions. There are a few fancier manoeuvres too, like a dash done by pushing the sticks in opposite directions repeatedly. I know it sounds a little odd, but in the end it gives you a great deal of control over your Katamari.

You might be wondering why The Prince is so dedicated to rolling up objects. Well once a Katamari reaches a certain size it can be sent into orbit to become a planet obviously. This time around though The King of All Cosmos isn’t sending you on missions with the purpose of making planets, in a very meta twist you’re actually just taking requests from fans of the series and the planets are more of an afterthought. It’s nonsense at its finest, and the King especially is a truly wonderful character to interact with.

Once you’ve found a fan to help, you’ll be sent to a level to roll up some bits and bobs. Your standard stage of We Love Katamari Reroll sees you dropped into a location like a school, bedroom or zoo, and given a time limit to reach a certain size. It almost always feels like there’s easily enough time to accomplish this task, but at the end of each level you’ll set high scores and be generally moaned at by the King of All Cosmos for your poor performance which might make you go for a replay.

As someone who hadn’t played this particular game in the series, I was surprised by how many stages of We Love Katamari Reroll strayed from this tried and true path though. There was one stage where I had to light a campfire with my Katamari which meant avoiding water and constantly moving to keep the fire burning, in another stage my Katamari was replaced by a slender sumo wrestler who needed to bulk up for a fight so had to be fed as many kilograms of food as possible. My favourite stage though is set on a racetrack, and although it seems like a regular “get big” challenge you move ridiculously fast and do laps of the course while absorbing all the other racers. The variety is fantastic, and no matter what you’re doing it’s always a whole lot of silly entertainment.

There’s one part of We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie that’s entirely new too, and that’s the Royal Reverie bit. This mode takes you into the memories of The King of All Cosmos, when he was just another small dude pushing a Katamari. These five brand new stages are all pretty challenging, with some wild conditions to fulfil if you want to beat them. Personally I thought the difficulty of these made them the least enjoyable part of the game, but if you’re a long time fan starved for ball rolling content then you might feel differently.

It’s the little things that make We Love Katamari Reroll special. Things like when you finish a stage and can find out how big your Katamari is by comparing it to everyday objects. I absolutely want to know that my big stupid ball is as big as 54,609 pencil sharpeners, and the fact you can keep spinning a slot machine to change the comparison object is genius. I also love dressing up my little prince in unlockable accessories, and taking selfies mid level for no reason whatsoever. We Love Katamari Reroll knows it’s completely daft, and embraces it with gusto.

There’s not a whole lot to complain about in We Love Katamari Reroll, but one aspect of the game did irritate me a little. The King of All Cosmos likes to pop up and talk while you’re in the middle of a mission, and when he does this he blocks the whole screen. Honestly it’s not a particularly big issue, but it was enough to interrupt my good times a little.

We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie is a lovely remaster of my new favourite game in the Katamari series. The nonsense the series is known for is here in full force, and the variety of missions is fantastic. The new content isn’t incredible, but if you missed out on this game on the PS2 then you’ve got a hell of an opportunity to rectify that.

The post We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie review appeared first on GodisaGeek.com.

You play as either male or female Agent 11, a Bourne/Bond-esque super agent tasked with infiltrating and dismantling six global gangs or agencies from the inside – often by smashing in faces and snapping femurs. There’s no spy work at play here beyond slapping the shit out of everyone who gets in your way.

It’s structured like a turn-based tactics game, with you allocated a set amount of movement and action points referred to as Momentum. Moves are dished out on cards, and you’ll begin each fresh run by selecting a deck with a certain theme. The default focuses on a mix of offence and defence, but others have specialisations or mixtures. You will need to unlock further options through progressions, so if you find yourself muddling on a little, hold tight and push through as you’ll eventually have a decent choice available.

I found most of the more successful runs to be book-ended by difficulty, particularly before I had unlocked enough new decks to vary my tactics. The challenge ramps up fast, too, as the game throws more and more enemies at you in small spaces crowded by vaguely defined furniture and scenery. The cards give you a good variety of attacks and defensive moves, but you must build up Momentum before you can spend it. This means playing certain cards tactically where possible, though there are times where you’ll have to make do.

Ultimately, you’ll be aiming to take out your enemies as quickly as you can, utilising the surroundings if possible. Smash their heads off a pipe or convenient for all works a treat, or booting them out the nearest window. The cast of enemies have various strengths and weaknesses, and it’s up to you to identify them and use them against your foes. For example, some enemies will attack with wild haymakers, and so luring them within range of their buddies will cause a chucklesome “accident”. Some have firearms and other weapons that you can manipulate and exploit.

The roguelike nature of the default difficulty means you’ll replay a lot of earlier missions (which you can skip after a certain point), but this has the upshot of getting you intimately acquainted with the mechanics of each enemy and card you can pull. You can also allow for replayable missions if you’d like a less strict challenge.

Another inspiration from John Wick Hex is the action replay when a mission is done. Ostensibly this is to show off your cool moves and level-headed tactics, but it suffers in the executions. It’s not smooth enough, and even with the dynamic camera on it judders and stumbles in motion. It doesn’t produce the kick-ass fight sequences it aims to, but it’s still a nice touch to have.

Fights in Tight Spaces has a solid core concept that mostly works in practice. It’s held back in some ways by its difficulty, which often demands perfection from the player and so leaves little room for real experimentation or risk-taking. Yes you can ultimately try different decks and combinations, but one wrong move can destroy you and so you’re discouraged from using tried and tested methods for each type of enemy.

Still, it’s a fun and stylish take on the turn-based tactics genre and blends deck-building and roguelike progression in a unique way that feels like it almost has a genre of its own. The replay system needs some fine-tuning and the difficulty may put you off at first, but it’s a decent game for those after a different kind of challenge.

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You split your time between two protagonists: lowly engineer Carter Diaz and decorated First Officer Jara Rydek. As the former you’ve been part of the crew of the U.S.S Resolute for a while, having been around six months before when an warp drive experiment almost obliterated the ship, and killed 20 crew members including the previous First Officer. As a result, tensions are high as Starfleet prepares to return the Resolute to active service despite the concerns of her crew. As the latter, you’re attempting to fill the shoes of your popular and highly thought-of predecessor.

It’s a narrative juxtaposition that mostly works, although Diaz often comes across as the slightly bumbling well-meaning sidekick to Rydek’s hyper-competent, no-nonsense leader. As both you’ll need to make decisions that impact how the supporting cast view you and, subsequently, treat you. A dangerous anomaly early on allows you to find your feet where the narrative is concerned, setting out your stall early doors in terms of who you’re likely to get on with better. From stiff upper-lipped Science Officers to enthusiastic fangirls, or from old friends joining the crew to a stuffy Vulcan Engineering Chief, there are plenty of faces to get to know and plenty of decisions to make.

Oddly, I much preferred the character stuff to the gameplay sections. You’ll often be asked to solve engineering issues as DIaz, for example, which are often so simple as to become a little tedious after a while. You also can’t invert the controller axis, which really irritated me when I was called to fire a phaser or pilot a ship, or even sneak around in some of the clunky stealth sections.

Star Trek: Resurgence is at its absolute best when you’re living out your Star Trek common fantasies, making split-second decisions on the Bridge or when out investigating alien worlds, solving problems that only you can solve. But as soon as it attempts to cut this with action-oriented gameplay the limitations of the engine simply can’t be ignored. Stealth in particular feels weird and awkward, and if you only had to deal with it once or twice I’d ignore it, but it becomes fairly frequent later on.

It’s a shame, because the setting, characters, writing and events are a Star Trek fan’s dream. Environments, particularly on the ship, are faithfully created, and all the technical jargon flows like a waterfall. Warp bubbles and tricorders and dialithium crystals may not mean much to the layman, but Trekkies will feel comfortably at home.

Where Star Trek: Resurgence really struggles, though, is in the visual department. It just doesn’t look very good, strongly resembling something like Mass Effect: Andromeda where character models are concerned. Dead-eyed stares, out-of-place expressions, weird pauses between lines of dialogue, and an overall woodenness to the animations compound to take you out of the moment time and time again. The models themselves are also far too uniform, and regardless of species every body shape is the same and only the head and hands appear alien, giving the impression that everyone is just wearing Halloween costumes. Starfleet in Resurgence seems to have a rigorous recruitment drive that requires everyone to wear the same size uniform with zero exceptions.

But as I said, die hard Star Trek fans will see past these imperfections and enjoy the ride. From escorting political ambassadors to heading into the unknown as part of a shore team, commanding a ship from the Captain’s chair to fiddling with the engines of an actual Federation Starship, there’s enough here to let you live out more or less any Star Trek fantasy you want to – within limits. A few famous faces from the greater universe also pop up from time to time, but it’s more fan service than crucial characterisation.

All in all, Star Trek: Resurgence offers a genuine thrill for big fans of the series, and more of a curio to anyone else. It’s neither as tightly crafted nor as good-looking as a Telltale game, but leans heavily on similar systems. Characters are largely well-written, and it feels authentic and true to what Star Trek is, but if you’re not much into the universe there’s little here to really hold your interest.

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The Nacon Daija is not cheap, let’s just get that out of the way. At around £240 (€279.90) it’s a high end model, and is for people who are pretty serious about their fighting games, and the hardware they use to play them. But this thing is an absolute beast, offering the potential to be your stick for a long, long time to come.

Nacon has partnered with Kayane, and says it’s been designed with professional esports players in mind, and I believe that wholeheartedly. With SANWA sticks and buttons, you know you’re getting a high quality action, here. But note that I said “sticks”, and that’s because there are two different stick heads included. The ball-head is attached out of the box, but open the case up and not only are there tools to change settings, but there’s a teardrop head as well, for those of you who grew up playing on Mortal Kombat cabs. Inside the Nacon Daija itself is where you’ll find the extras, and it’s nice to see the innards are well labelled, so if you do have to make any adjustments or fixes, most novices could even have a go.

Back outside, there eight button config feels great, and the stick is responsive, but not too sensitive that you’ll make mistakes on it. There’s a textured rest for your palms at the base, so if you’re playing with the stick on your lap, you can be comfortable with it there. The share button, touchpad, and other buttons all sit on the right side, while there are clasps on the right and left to unlock the box and open it up. A 3.5mm audio jack is also on the case so you can connect a wired headset if you need to, and the faceplate is removable so you can put your own in there instead of the Nacon branded plate that’s included.

A particularly nice touch is that the braided USB cable (A to C) is detachable. So while you can store it inside when not in use, because it’s the same cable that you’d use to charge your standard PlayStation DualSense (or other peripheral), the 3 meter cable means you can actually use it as your main charging cable for PS5 devices, as well.

Profiles and programmable buttons (with software) allow you to select between setups, and the Daija is compatible with PC as well, if you fancy that. Ultimately, though, there’s just no getting round the fact that this thing feels incredible premium. There is no part of this fightstick that feels cheap, or easily breakable. The buttons are great, and satisfying to get carried away with, and there’s even a lock button if you want to ensure nothing gets pressed by accident in the heat of battle. The Daija is a heavy stick, I will say that, but that’s to my tastes anyway, as it just makes it feel that much more expensive to hold.

It’s difficult to think how the Daija could actually be improved, and if you find a way, the likelihood is that thanks to it being customisable, and the tools to do so being included, you can make it even more to your tastes. So that’s a seriously appealing looking stick, great components, easy to switch components if you do want to, comfortable to hold, and responsive to the touch. Yes, it’s a lot of money, but it’s a premium product aimed at people who want that kind of fightstick.

I once thought I would never need another stick, but times change, hardware moves on, and new consoles come and go. However, what I do know now is that the NACON Daija is going to be my PS5 fightstick for the foreseeable. It has everything I want, and feels heavy in a way I appreciate. There’s nothing much I’d change about this stick, aside perhaps alternative face plates being included, since it’s a higher end model, price wise. Given that my only other experience with Nacon as a peripheral manufacturer is the RIG headset range and the Nacon Revolution X controller, this is a brand I’ll be paying a lot more attention to. The Daija is essential for fighting game fans who are hankering for that arcade feel, and I’d be surprised if anything else could come close to how good it feels.

You can grab the Nacon Daija directly from the company’s online store, here.

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The X Slayers are a powerful group of radical people who have sworn to fight the Psyko Sindikate. Our awesome protagonist Zane is a member of this badass group, and has pledged to defend the people of earth “even though they’re bleep-holes to us and don’t even deserve it”. When the Psykos find the Slayers’ secret base all bets are off, and only Zane remains to get revenge on these punks.

So you’re probably thinking this sounds like an awful story, and not necessarily that weird. Well, bizarrely, what makes this game interesting is actually the “developer”. This boomer shooter was masterfully crafted by the fictional character Zane Lofton from Hypnospace Outlaw. In that game he was your typical 90s teenage internet troll, and this is the video game he was drawing pictures of when he wasn’t bullying people online. Now in modern times Zane has found these old design documents, and enlisted a friend to help him make the game reality.

The end result is finally here. Slayers X is your typical DOOM/Quake inspired FPS, with 2d pixel enemies, big guns and a whole lot of gore. The pace is fast, the secrets are hidden, and the bad guys are plentiful. If you’ve played any of these classic shooters you’ll feel right at home, but at the very least Zane controls really well and is packing plenty of heat to deal with the Psykos.

You’d think given the fact that this game was “created” from the mind of a dickhead teen that it’d have some fairly outrageous weapons to use, but honestly they’re pretty standard. You start with double pistols, then as you progress through the levels you’ll find a shotgun, machine gun and rocket launcher to fill out your armoury. It’s for the most part a decent selection, but not necessarily a daring one.

There’s one gun that’s an exception to this rule though, and that’s the Sludge Launcher. This crossbow-like contraption fires globs of sludge which explode on impact like grenades, and also attracts rats which gnaw on the baddies. Some of the more standard guns have some interesting elements too, like the shotgun that fires glass instead of shells which means you can gather extra ammo by smashing shit up.

The enemies you use these violent tools on are, however, a little disappointing. There’s not necessarily a shortage of enemy types (from walking turds to demonic heads) but they’re all fairly stationary which makes fighting them feel a bit dull after a while. Even when the levels got fairly hectic later on I rarely felt worried for my health, and knew that as long as I just kept firing my explosive ordnance into the crowds I’d be okay.

The main reason for this game’s existence wasn’t to create the greatest FPS of all time, though, but rather to demonstrate what would happen if you allowed an awful teenage boy to create a video game. This means constant references to turds, one liners that disrespect the enemy’s mother and a whole lot of bragging about how cool the protagonist Zane is. I expected to absolutely love this downright stupid idea, but it turns out that even though it’s done ironically it’s still incredibly cringe-inducing to walk past shelves full of turd cereal and diarrhea burgers. The same can be said for the cutscenes that feature a main villain who constantly brags about banging your recently deceased mum. I guess I just don’t have a lot of nostalgia for my days of being an intolerable little shit.

There is one sin that Slayers X commits though that is far worse than any of the attempts at comedy. This sin is the fact that the glass shotgun feels way too weak, and shotguns are pretty much all I ever use in boomer shooters. It isn’t the only weapon that feels a bit pathetic either, which is a real shame.

Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer is a ridiculous concept for a video game, and it turns out there’s a good reason for that. The teenage boy inspired comedy just didn’t land for me at all, and the boomer shooter gameplay is just okay. As a massive fan of Hypnospace Outlaw I was really expecting to love this bizarre spinoff, and to say I was disappointed would be an understatement.

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For a relatively short game, Convergence packs in a serious amount of gadgets, powers and collectibles. It’s a MetroidVania at heart, as you bounce back and forth around small, compact areas, utilising Ekko’s suite of trinkets to get from A to B – and sometimes C.

The story focuses on the rivalry between two organisation, the Ferris Gang and the Poingdestre Family, who are locked in conflict over a rare mineral scattered across the city of Zaun following the explosion of a huge Spire. Joining forces with a slightly dodgy future version of himself, Ekko has no choice but to answer the call and put an end to both gangs before they can do permanent damage to the city.

Equipped with various time gadgets, Ekko is a pretty resourceful kid. Able to rewind time to undo damage or get out of scrapes, he is also able to combine a multitude of traversal moves to get around. You can wall-run, rail-grind, wall-jump, even teleport, and you’ll steadily unlock more and more powers such as the ability to slow time, and activate distant switches with a well-aimed throw.

Combat is a fast-paced affair, with a simple enough mix of melee attacks, parrying, and dodging through enemies. Red attacks can’t be dodged or parried, and later encounters become dense with enemies and projectiles. It’s not quite a bullet hell, but it feels close at times. You will need to utilise all of Ekko’s considerable abilities to survive.

Regular boss fights pit you against the controlling forces of the gang and the family as well as their toughest minions. It’s usually a case of pattern recognition and timing, but it’s easy to rely too much on the rewind mechanic and leave yourself open to attacks. Silly mistakes are costly in these boss battles, but the rewards are plentiful.

There are tons of collectibles to find in hidden chests that allow you to exchange goods with Ekko’s friends. You can customise your appearance, unlock special moves and skills such as a ground slam, and even assemble gadgets that can be equipped to increase Ekko’s innate abilities such as attack speed and survivability.

Convergence: A League of Legends Story doesn’t do anything really new or unique, but it’s a beautiful, fast-paced adventure nonetheless. It reminded me a lot of F.I.S.T: Forged in Shadow Torch, another superb steampunk-inspired Metroidvania. It’s aesthetically beautiful, incredibly stylish with some great animations that really convey the sense of speed well.

It’s all so wonderfully fluid, too, so racing from one place to another and solving puzzles to reach hidden chests never stops being fun. Some sequences require fast fingers and precise timing, holding platforms up with the power of time or slowing huge presses in a steampunk factory so you can dodge under them without being flattened.

Occasional issues with precision can mar the experience a little, though. Ekko has a time splitting technique that does massive damage to nearby enemies and it has an inexplicable tendency to just trigger on the other side of the screen – unless I missed a tooltip somewhere. Also, the platforming can sometimes feel a bit imprecise and fiddly, especially during challenge sections where the game is hurling enemies at you in quick succession.

Once again, though, Riot Forge demonstrate a commitment to this universe that goes far deeper than simply making bank. As with The Mageseeker and The Ruined King, Convergence is a fully fleshed-out experience that feels like it could exist completely separately to the larger franchise. It’s slick, good-looking, and very well-made, and developer Double Stallion have done an amazing job imbuing Zaun and its environs with colour and personality.

If you’re a fan of MetroidVanias, feel free to jump in with or without prior knowledge of the larger League of Legends universe. It’s a fantastic game in its own right, only held back by a few inconsistencies in the platforming. It may not bring anything truly new to the genre, but Convergence is a great time nonetheless.

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As the last of an oppressed species called the Gloomfolk, our protagonist Gloom Girl isn’t really in the best position in life. It seems to mainly involve hiding in dank caves from her oppressors, at least until a voice calls out to her from the depths. The voice is that of the Doomblade, a sentient red sword that’s been sealed away due to its destructive power. Destructive power is what it’ll take to overthrow the Dread Lords, so “Doom and Gloom’ team up and embark on a journey of slicing and dicing.

Before you make friends with your stabby new pal, moving Gloom Girl around feels slow and sad, but that all changes when you’ve got the Doomblade. By moving the right stick you can aim the blade at any enemy visible on the screen, and with a push of the right trigger you’ll dash straight towards them and ruin their day. Before long you’ll be bouncing from enemy to enemy to get around at breakneck speed, and it is glorious.

In earlier sections of the game most ledges will have handy respawning enemies on them so you can climb up them easily, but it won’t take long for you to realise that new powers will be needed if you want to overthrow the baddies. Gloom Girl’s jump isn’t particularly useful in most situations, but an added air dash will help you reach places without enemies and make bouncing across the screen even easier. You’ll then get the ability to fire out an electric ball that activates certain contraptions, and powers that help you cut through vines or smash through weird blocks made of eyeballs. All the new powers you unlock are extremely useful, and will make sure you have plenty of new (and old) areas worth exploring.

I want to mention one other upgrade specifically too, because when I unlocked it (fairly early in the game) I couldn’t believe how much it changed everything. The Shadow Form ability allows Gloom Girl to travel through walls to attack enemies, which means as long as there’s an enemy placed on the other side of a solid object then it’s no longer a problem for you. Suddenly every area that had you stumped will be totally accessible with your new power, and you’ll have a whole lot of new routes to explore. Designing this world with all these different powers to keep in mind must have been a hell of a task, but Muro Studios nailed it.

Outside of these main powers, there are plenty of handy collectibles to find in Doomblade. Heart pieces will (as you might expect) give you more health after collecting four of them, there are also artefacts that boost your power and different relics and artefacts that you’ll be paid in bones for destroying in a big furnace. These bones can be used at the shops throughout the world for more handy but less essential upgrades, like the ability to absorb health pickups from a distance. There’s a constant feeling of progression and power gain as you play Doomblade, and you’re really rewarded for checking every nook and cranny with new abilities.

You’ll need all the help you can get against the enemies of this miserable world too, because they are armed to the teeth and happy to send you packing back to your last save point. The majority of the bad guys in Doomblade have projectile attacks, and you’ll probably get sick of them pretty quickly because dodging them is a chore. Since Gloom Girl is pretty sluggish when she isn’t zipping around with a big demon blade dodging bullets with her isn’t ideal, but often sword dashing towards an enemy to move out of the way will just send you straight into the path of more bullets. It can get pretty frustrating, and you just don’t have enough health to be able to shrug off a few hits.

While the regular enemies didn’t do a whole lot for me, I found the bosses in Doomblade to be a lot of fun. These more structured fights against massive monstrosities always have a specific strategy you’ll need to beat them, but once you know what you’re doing then whittling down that health bar will be totally manageable. Using your slashing powers to dodge screen filling attacks always feels fantastic, and I can’t think of a single boss I didn’t enjoy fighting.

Although I really enjoyed my time with it, there are a couple of other issues with Doomblade worth mentioning. Some of the environmental hazards (I’m looking at you lightning barriers) are just plain annoying to deal with, and when combined with the bullet shooting baddies can lead to some really frustrating sections. The story is also a bit on the dull side, with loads of walls of text to read about the Dread Lords that get a little old. None of these issues are deal breakers, but they do distract from the sheer joy of slicing.

Doomblade is a wonderful MetroidVania with fantastic locomotion and a whole lot of new abilities to shake up the game throughout. Exploring the world is a joy thanks to the Doomblade, and there are plenty of collectables to make it worth your while too. Some of the enemies and hazards can be a bit of a chore to deal with, but not so much that they ruin the fun of slicing shit up as “Doom and Gloom”.

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