99 Bottles of Beer on the wall

A good game is a good game. I think it was Plato who said that. He said a lot of smart things. A good game is good, because it is good. Sounds self-evident. If the game has good gameplay, good graphics, a good story, it’s good, right? Anyone can agree with that. In fact, saying it out loud makes it sound kinda dumb. Maybe this Plato guy was full of shit. One day one of his students asked “master, can a bad game be good?”. He stroked his beard for a while and said “lol no”, and executed his student.

This question has plagued gamers since then. Can a bad game be good?

Today I will try to answer that question with Road Trip, a racing game for the PS2. It’s a weird mix of janky driving controls, oddball physics, low budget and graphics that look like something that would get laughed off the PS1. When you look at its individual parts, on paper, it should stink, but it doesn’t. It’s like smelling cheese. It reeks, but when you taste it, it’s wonderful, and you can’t reconcile that idea too well.

Read on to find out why you should play Road Trip, a game that’s both good and bad in equal measure.

Gameplay

Road Trip (2002) is an open world racing game for the PS2. The President of the world is sick of his job, so he posts an open challenge: Anyone who beats him in a race will become the new President. To do this, you must complete a series of races to get your C, B and A licenses, then participate in the World Gran Prix. This crowns you as the number one racer, and allows you to challenge the President, so you can get a chance to rule and abolish the concept of taxes. At least, that’s what I’d do.

To become number one, you’ll to trick out your car with the best parts. To do this, you’ll need money. Tons of it. You get it by winning races. Win races, get money, use that money to buy better parts, then win more races to get even more money, and the cycle repeats.

The game’s big selling point is that it’s an open world RPG. A Car-PG, if you will. You start in a little suburban town called Peach Town, and you can participate in basic races to fill your pockets. Then, the game hints that you can drive on the road to the next city, and there you’ll come across an old school samurai village. The game has nine different cities, each with its own quirky theme. They each have NPCs to talk to, quests to complete, races to participate in, stuff to find and stores with unique parts.

You make your way through each town, getting stronger and progressing through the ranks.

The cool thing about the open world is that it’s completely open from the start. There are no cordoned-off areas. You don’t need upgrades to get to (most) places, you can drive where you want and find something to do. The game offers a neat sense of freedom that most open world games don’t.

Since this is a racing game, you’ll do a lot of driving, which I have to go into detail on. It’s not as straightforward as it seems. It has its own unique jank, that gives it an interesting flavor.

Driving

You’d expect a racing game to have decent driving, at a bare minimum. If the handling sucks, the game sucks, but Road Trip breaks this rule. It’s an arcade racer, with simple controls, but it takes grip into account. The game’s physics are bizarre in unimaginable ways.

In a regular arcade racer, you’re practically glued to the ground. You can take a turn at a hundred miles an hour, without having to brake. Grip isn’t really taken into consideration. What matters is that you keep the car inside the road, and off any walls. Even this is ignored by most games. Slam against a wall and ride it instead of turning the steering wheel. There aren’t many consequences unless you slam head-first into an obstacle or fly off the course.

Road Trip does things a bit different. It looks like a cutesy arcade racer, but it takes grip into account. You can’t take a turn at a hundred miles an hour. You have to brake, a lot harder than you’d think, take the turn slowly, or you’ll end up under steering. If you lose grip, you have to wrestle with the car until you get some traction going, or you’ll slide around like your car is wearing Soap shoes1.

Grip plays such a prominent role in the game’s handling, that it extends to things other arcade racers don’t consider, such as acceleration. If you have a powerful engine, you can go fast. That’s self-evident. In most simplified racing games, you get the most speed possible, and just gun it. If you try that in Road Trip, and don’t have the right tires, you’ll end up wasting your power doing burnouts. If the tires aren’t grabbing the road, they can’t push you forward.

This emphasis on grip makes the game a lot more involved than you’d expect. You’d think that the cutesy game about chibified cars would be one of those where you never have to let go of the acceleration, and you fly through tracks like nothing, but it’s not. You have to learn each track, find the best lines, brake at the right times, and make sure you have proper traction to avoid sliding off the track.

That’s not to say the game is a simulation. It’s far from being Gran Turismo, or even a more semi-simulation like Forza Horizon, but it’s not a straight arcade racer, either. It’s approachable, and simple, but it’s not a cakewalk. You have to learn how it handles, and be mindful of how you’re driving. It takes some getting used to, and you need some level of skill to do well in it, and I really like that. You don’t need to have a full simulation where you model everything from the traction of each individual tire, all the way to the loose change rattling around in the cup holder. You can have a fun, challenging game by adding one or two skill checks, and Road Trip does this well.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Sure, this game gives you baby’s first taste of under steer, and that’s fun and all, but there are some strange quirks and features here that aren’t all that great.

For starters, the controls are fully digital, meaning everything in the game is either on or off. Zero or a hundred, there’s no in-between. If you press the accelerator, you’re slamming the pedal through the floor and into the asphalt below. If you steer right, you’re jamming the wheel to the right until the driveshaft starts squealing. There is no graduation to anything, even if you use the analog stick to steer. It’s D-pad driving, and you slam the brakes anytime you want to make an adjustment.

This is okay, for the most part. The game is designed around this. Again, for the most part. The steering is a problem for most of the game. Even though you’re pushing to one side when you steer, your car barely turns. This game has some of the stiffest steering I’ve ever seen. It’s like you’re trying to steer the car with one of those anti-theft clubs stuck to the wheel. This is at its worst at the start of the game, where you have the default steering. Your car turns like a sixteen wheeler, with a turn radius the size of a city block. Driving around with it feels like you’re pleading with your car to turn, and it doesn’t want to listen. The first thing you should do in this game is go into the shop and buy the 2X steering upgrade.

Even with the highest-tier steering upgrade, it still feels less responsive than it should. It takes a while to get used to, and you eventually manage to live with it, but it makes some of the exploration a pain in the neck. You’ll drive past a collectible because you couldn’t turn quick enough, then spend the next few seconds pulling a massive U-turn like you’re piloting a cargo ship, to go for a second shot.

Even the AI opponents have trouble with basic handling. You’ll often see them clustered up in a corner next to a sharp turn, stuck there, unable to move. This little bit of information is ominous foreshadowing for later.

The game handles well in the tracks, where the added nuance of grip and other mechanics makes it a challenge. It encourages you to learn the tracks, look for lines and use the brake. It’s not as technical as Gran Turismo, but it gives you something to think about and master. The driving kind of stinks for more casual cruising out in the open, where you’ll be fighting with some of the more unique parts of this game’s physics engine.

Physics

Gravity is weird in Road Trip. Say goodbye to your preconceived notions about that fundamental force. 9.8 meters per second per second is a myth. Parabolic arcs are a government conspiracy. We’re breaking the conditioning here. It won’t always make sense, but that’s how things work.

Look at this nonsense

A normal parabolic arc looks like this

It follows a standard trajectory. The same one you see every day, if you’re launching cars off ramps. There’s a rise and a smooth drop as gravity and the forward momentum carry it back down to the ground. Everything is as it should be. There’s even a happy little dog there watching it happen.

Now this is what happens in Road Trip

You jump off the ramp, and the car follows the trajectory up as if were still on the ground. At some arbitrary point in its journey, gravity switches back on and the car gets pulled down. It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and looks down. There’s no parabola, nothing works as it should. The little dog couldn’t take it. He was so distraught by this, that he started smoking with cigarettes and joined a gang.

Any time there’s a jump in one of the tracks, you’re at risk of getting sent into space. You can mitigate this by slowing down before a jump, but sometimes there’s no helping it. A tiny bump on the road can send you flying upwards if you hit it at a wrong angle and with enough speed. It’s rare, but it happened to me twice during my playthrough. Once it sent me into the sky so violently, that I broke through the track and got an instant disqualification.

Tracks

There’s a good selection of tracks in Road Trip. They’re varied, with different visual themes, complexity levels and racing surfaces.

There are the basic Mario Circuit type races, which are laps on a closed circuit. Very simple, but the higher difficulty ones will test your skill and car tuning. There are off-road tracks that are a lot more slippery than the paved roads, even with high-grade off road tires. These are more difficult, but at the same time they make your opponents make way more mistakes. There are a lot of tracks that mix both off-road and paved surfaces. This leads to some interesting choices when it comes to picking your tires.

It offers a good variety of challenges and it tests different skills. There weren’t any tracks that stood out as particularly heinous. The closest would be Snow Mountain Raceway. It’s an ice track, the only one in the game, and it’s slippery, even with ice tires. It’s kind of long and there isn’t much to do in it. The visuals are nice, at least.

The only other stand-out track is the post-game Tin Raceway. A massive, hellish nightmare of a track with weird platforms, multiple branching paths and no guard rails. It’s floating in a void somewhere in space, like Rainbow Road. Unlike Rainbow Road, there’s no Lakitu to put you back on the track if you fall. You just fail the race. It’s the hardest track, but it’s optional. It’s a lot of fun, too. The game is easy, overall, with one exception, so the challenge is welcome.

Exploration

Road Trip is one of the few games where the open-world aspect doesn’t feel like filler. It’s central to the game’s identity. You can drive to any location on the continent from the start, you can go off-road, drive on the bottom of the ocean, drive up a river. It feels free, and it makes sense to drive everywhere since you’re a sentient car.

There are nine cities in the game. Each one has its own unique look and feel, from a basic small town, to a Christmas village, and one that’s just Las Vegas. Every city has basic amenities, like a parts shop and a place to change your car’s body. All shops have their own unique inventory, making them feel even more distinct.

You can go to any city in any order, but the game strongly hints at a recommended route. There are signs from the starting area that say “Next town”, and following them guides you to towns with increasingly more difficult races and more expensive gear. There aren’t any barriers or gear restrictions (except for the last town), so you can make a beeline for Papaya Island from the start, grind out some money and buy the biggest engine available. It’ll take a while, but you’re free to do so.

Visiting every location is rewarding on its own, but there are also a lot of things to do in each town. There are dozens of mini games to play, with most cities having at least one. You can climb a mountain, race to the edge of a cliff (without falling off), play beach flag or even catch fish. The Las Vegas city, Sandpolis, has a ton of stuff to do, as you would expect. You can participate in difficult driving challenges like you would see in Gran Turismo, play car soccer before Rocket League, explore ancient ruins and of course…

You can gamble with your car! I once gambled with my car in Vegas. I no longer have a car.

Towns are full of NPCs driving around or in their own houses. You can bump into them to chat. They usually ask if they can join your team, but a lot of them have side quests for you to do, or information about stuff to do around town. Side quests are usually simple. They’ll ask you to go somewhere, where you’ll find an item you have to return, or talk to someone.

None of the quests or objectives are marked on the map. If you want to find something, you’ll have to pay attention to the hints you’re given. This makes exploration feel more rewarding. You’re not following waypoints or lines on the ground. You’re driving around, looking for landmarks and familiarizing yourself with the world. It’s like back in the day before GPS when you had to ask people for directions, and they’d give you some vague ramblings about street names and buildings. It’s right behind the pharmacy, next to the big tree on River street, where old man Jenkins lives. Just take a left after the liquor store, you can’t miss it.

Along with all of that, there’s also a bunch of crap scattered around for you to find. Coins, gems, and other collectibles. There are over one hundred Quick-Pic shops, where you can go and take a picture with your car awkwardly super-imposed over the local landscape. You drive in one direction and you’re bound to run into something to do, someone to talk to, or just something cool to look at.

The map is full of interesting stuff, but there’s also a lot of nothing if you stray from the path. The ocean has one or two spots to check out, but the rest of it is empty, with no real indication that there’s nothing more to do. There are areas that are open plains of flat ground, that have a weird liminal vibe to them.

These areas should have been used for something, even a pointless collectible, but they’re unused. This is a low-budget game, so I blame that on the lack of care in some areas. It also explains the weird physics.

With all that said, exploring the world in Road Trip is a ton of fun. Anywhere you go, with one or two exceptions, there’s something interesting waiting for you. Even with some of the empty areas, the world feels more alive than most of the open worlds in modern games, which are vast and spacious, but full of tedious tasks and copy/pasted assets. The world in this game feels big enough to hold a lot of possibilities, but small enough to travel in without it feeling like a chore. With how different every location is, it really feels like you’re discovering something new at every turn. The shops and gear you can get also lend the game a good feeling of natural progression. It’s a real adventure, as you’d expect from an RPG.

The World Grand Prix

The game’s end goal is to win the World Grand Prix to become the best racer and challenge the President. This is a seven race tournament, with one race in seven different cities. You get points based on your placement in each race, and at the end, it tallies it all up and crowns a winner.

I’ve said this game is easy. It is, it’s pretty simple. Once you get used to the game’s weird handling, and learn to use the brake button, it’s pretty smooth sailing. To get to this point in the game, you need to place in the top three on each track, and you need to replay races a lot to earn money to buy gear, which you need for the Grand Prix. At this point, you know how to play the game, and you’re good at it. When I tried this, I was at that point. I could get first place in each race consistently.

That means I cleared this on the first try and became President in no time, right?

Well, do you remember the times I mentioned the AI in this game? The same ones that are so bad at driving they wouldn’t even get hired as a Swift trucker?

You need to team up with them.

You can get first place in every race, but you have two lead weights bringing up the rear down in 20^th and 22^nd place, earning zero points each. Then the team that has been consistently getting 4^th, 5^th and 6^th win with their cumulative points. It doesn’t matter that you lapped each of them twice in one race, if your team is to busy sniffing a wall, you’re going to fail because of them. It’s like playing DOTA with cars.

You can buy new gear for your teammates. You can deck them out with a monster engine, the best tires, the fastest transmission and top of the line brakes, but they won’t know how to use any of it. They will be driving into walls in one million dollar cars, like giving a toddler a Lamborghini Aventador.

You can win the Grand Prix. It’s possible. I tried multiple times, and reached a point where it felt legitimately impossible to do, but you can actually finish this, and even in first place. All you need to do is grind for hours to the point where you can buy your idiot teammates the most expensive engine and the best tires. You’ll also need a set for yourself, which will run you over 200,000 dollars. You can get a few thousand dollars here and there, and it’s not on the same level as the grind in some MMOs, but it’s a lot more than you’d expect from the racing game where you can be a lady bug and drive on a rainbow.

This part of the game is a sudden, unexpected wall that blocks your path, much like the ones your teammates keep slamming into. It’s a chore, completely unfun and a grind. You have to equip your team with high-end gear, and then, on top of that, hope that their AI doesn’t shit the bed, while also hoping that your opponents do.

It’s a seven race dice roll. You can cruise your way through the first five races, then during the last two, your teammates decide that driving is for chumps and they fly off course to go stare at some grass. There isn’t any way to retire and restart, either. You have to finish the entire thing, or start and quit every race individually, which means getting to each town, starting the race, and retiring. Repeat seven times.

I managed to beat this challenge, after retrying more times than I care to admit. There was one effort that was ended by the physics glitch I mentioned earlier. I drove into a bump, it sent me flying off the face of the Earth, and I got an instant disqualification, causing me to get no points in that stage of the Grand Prix, and I lost with two races to go.

Despite all this hardship, I won, became the number one racist, and challenged the President to a one-on-one race. I was ready for anything. I took my best gear, my strongest engine, my most expensive tires. I grit my teeth and got ready for the game’s final boss.

Then I beat him in one go because he got stuck to a wall.

Presentation

Plato once said “there are two kinds of disease of the soul: bad graphics, and annoying audio design”

Road Trip’s visuals are unique. They’re low fidelity, but they have a ton of charm. Everything is lit in a very basic way, it’s all flat. Cars don’t have much texture to them, and don’t look like they’re made of metal. Textures, especially the ones for the ground, are low resolution and messy. The game looks its best during the pre-rendered dialogue scenes.

Despite these technical shortcomings, it has a lot going for it thanks to its unique style. The cars are real cars, shrunken down and made to look cute, but they keep all their identifying features and details. The designers did a fantastic job at keeping the car’s original lines and look, while stylizing them.

Even if the game doesn’t look the best, it makes up for it in the variety on display. Each city has its own aesthetic, with different architectural styles. Each town is hand-made, and all the little details, like shop signs, are all made to fit the theme of their city.

It won’t win any awards for its graphics, but they do a lot with what little they have. There are less copy/pasted assets here than in modern triple-a games. It has a ton of character, and a lot of work was put into making their cheap little game look as good as it could.

It looks like it was made by an elementary school student, but one that’s really hard-working.

The music is actually pretty good. It has two radio stations for you to listen to as you cruise around. Peach FM has smooth, jazzy midi songs. Like the graphics, they’re low-fidelity, but made with care. Each track is catchy and gives off a warm, nostalgic vibe.

The other station plays four songs from a real-life band called the Push Kings. The songs are extremely compressed and staticky. It took me a few listens to realize the lyrics were in English. These songs used to creep me out as a kid. They barely registered as music. It was like some eerie recording playing from some spooky old record player. Listening to them now, they sound alright. The fuzzy sound combined with the unmistakably late 90s/early 2000s sound makes them even more nostalgic now.

The sound effects are where the lack of a budget is evident. There are only two sounds for driving; one for paved roads and one for off-road. When you lose traction on dirt, the game plays 3-second sound that loops infinitely in a distinct rhythm, making it grating and impossible to ignore. There are around ten engines to choose from, but they all sound the same. Speaking of the engine, none of the driving sounds have enough bass. They’re tinny and weak. The soundscape is definitely the game’s weakest aspect.

Overall, I really like the game’s presentation. It might be my nostalgia blinding me, but I think this game looks good. It obviously doesn’t look good on a technical level. It looks underdone, like it’s missing textures, but that gives it a janky charm. I can’t say the game looks like garbage when I can drive to nine cities, each with their own unique layout, look and hand-crafted buildings. I can say the game looks cheap all I want, but the car models are genuinely amazing. I love the way they deform the original models into chibi caricatures while keeping the spirit intact. The kooky extra cars are adorable, too, like a rocking horse or a lady bug.

This game has soul. It oozes charm. This game’s so cute, I’d pinch its cheeks if I could.

Conclusion

With all that said, is Road Trip a good game? Is it a good racing game? Can I say it is with its stiff handling and bizarre physics? With its imprecise digital controls? The Grand Prix, the game’s big, final challenge, is a clown show that puts this game’s worst features under a microscope for you to gawk at.

The game also looks bad. The colors are weird, the textures are minimal, the shading is basic. It looks like a PS1 game with some makeup. The sound isn’t good, either. They’re low quality, repetitive and thin. There’s no satisfying engine sound, which is a basic need for a racing game.

With all that said, I recommend Road Trip. I think everyone should try it out, if they can. Even if it’s for a little bit.

The game has a lot of very glaring, obvious flaws, but the sum is greater than its parts. The driving is weird, but it’s fun. It takes some time to get used to, but it rewards skill. By adding a simple grip system, it elevates the experience. It’s not technical or anything like a simulation, but just by being a little more demanding, it makes things interesting. I could see an improvement in my placements and lap times as I played and learned more, even if I had the same gear.

The exploration aspect adds a lot to the game. The map is small compared to the massive digital countries we get nowadays. Unlike those games, Road Trip’s map has stuff to do. Things to look at, places to go. Each town is made to be unique, to encourage you to look for it. They’re full of little shops, stories happening, NPCs to talk to, side quests to do, trinkets to find. It’s similar to the Ubisoft busywork, but its simple structure, combined with the freedom it gives makes exploration feel natural and rewarding.

It’s a simple game that does a lot with its limited resources. Since their budget is limited, they have to justify every inclusion. That means every piece has to be unique and interesting, they have to make the rivers accessible so they add fun stuff like water skis and propellers, they add the ability to fly, just because it’s fun, and you use it as an alternate route to the last area.

They used the driving for everything. Racing all the time will get boring, and we can only design a small number of tracks, so let’s have the player do some driving tests, we can reuse this area. They program some basic ball physics, and now you can play golf and soccer. Why? Because it’s an easy way to get some extra fun out of the driving. There’s even a special race that’s a point-to-point trek across the whole continent. They thought of everything they could to make the most out of their driving game, while keeping it fun and exciting, and I think they succeeded.

I’ve been playing this game on and off since I was a kid. I admit my opinion of it is colored by nostalgia, but I wouldn’t have played through it as a cranky old man if it weren’t at least fun. I enjoyed my time with the game. Even though I know all the areas and the tracks, I was still charmed by the car game for kids.

If you like racing games, you should give this game a try. It’s not as fast as something like Burnout or Need for Speed, nor is it as arcadey. You can’t drift, which is a weird thing to leave out. It’s not a simulation like Forza or Gran Turismo. It’s a silly little driving game that just wants you to have a good time. Drive around some cities, play some mini games, earn some money and buy parts to make you go faster and win more races. If you’re an indie dev, play this game, and get inspired to make something like it. It’s an untapped spring of potential. If you like fun, check this game out.

Like Plato once said “The years wrinkle our skin, but a lack of Road Trip on the PS2 wrinkles our soul”. Maybe he wasn’t so full of shit, after all.

If you’re going to play the game, check out the Road Trip guide. Someone made a detailed guide for this game, in 2026. Truly impressive.

Load Last Save has been acquired by Tencent

Hey, everyone! Or should I say Ni Hao!

As you can see, Load Last Save has been bought by Chinese gaming juggernaut Tencent. This presents a whole host of new and exciting opportunities for content. Same humor, the same informative game reviews, but now with 56% more value to investors!

Here’s a list of the new features coming soon to Load Last Save!

Wow! Look at all that synergy! We’ll be leveraging our assets in no time. The investors are really gonna like this, but so will you, dear reader! We may have changed owner, but we’re still committed to delivering high-quality games journalism. As a third priority. Fourth, actually, once you take taxes into account.

Battlepass

Read Load Last Save articles to gain Experience! Level up your battlepass to gain cool rewards, like skins and charms for your gun. There’s a paid track, which has all the good stuff, and the free track, which has one reward every ten levels, and it’s all junk. Just by playing, you can earn skins for Roger, like a recolor, or one that makes him look worse than his base skin.

Each article grants you 10 Exp, and you need 1,000 Exp for each level. If you want to skip the grind, you can buy a booster, which grants a whopping 50 Exp, for only 5,000 Roger Points!

Roger Points are sold in multiples of 47.

• 141 points: $5.99

• 423 points: $11.99

• 1,269 points: $26.55

• 2,118 points: $41.33

Each item can be bought with an esoteric combination of two or more points bundles. They’re mathematically engineered to leave an inconvenient amount of points after a purchase.

This will generate approximately 4.45% more investor value than not having a battlepass.

NFTs

A new series of Roger-themed NFTs. They each have different shirts, accessories and more. There are four rare Rogers, that unleash their respective Horseman of the Apocalypse when they’re generated!

AI Integration

Using new advances in Artificial Intelligence, we can integrate large language models into Load Last Save, cutting down on time spent on things like creativity or actually playing games.

Here’s a sample of the kind of quality you can expect from our cutting-edge AI RogerGPT.

Prompt: Generate a funny, snarky review for Deadlock.

Deadlock is a third person moba shooter developed by Valve. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Valve as any of numerous mechanical devices by which the flow of liquid, gas, or loose material in bulk may be started, stopped, or regulated by a movable part that opens, shuts, or partially obstructs one or more ports or passageway. Uh… I guess that’s a thing.

You’ll be zipping across the map playing as one of 20 cool new heroes, such as Abrams. Heart-pounding gunfights, edge of your seat action, and magic collide to bring you an experience that’s not just a game –it’s a fight for survival. Studies show that people who play Deadlock -- have a 23% increase in penile mass. He’s right behind me-- isn’t he?

Fascinating! With this new system, our writers can spend less time writing, thus less time getting paid. The results are indistinguishable from their usual output. Now we can cut spending, and increase profits by transferring them from the writer’s room to one of our many cobalt mines.

With this AI, we can even generate the art for the articles, freeing up our artists to -you guessed it- spend more time down in the mines.

Wow! Look at that quality! You can barely tell it was made by a machine. We still can’t explain the sigil, though. Every time we prompt it to remove it, it gets more visible, and our engineers start speaking backwards and bleeding from their eyes. Maybe our datacenter needs more RAM.

DLSS5

With this new AI, we’ll be able to implement DLSS5, giving you articles with up to 50% more frames per second. There will be a slight increase in power consumption. Each article will require, at minimum, an RTX 6090Ti and 500 Watts of power. We recommend hooking up the graphics card to its own circuit, so it doesn’t blow a fuse.

Lay-offs

After that, we’ll be laying off 80% of our workforce. All those AI advancements aren’t cheap, you know. We need to pay for the data centers, thousands in power and water bills, RAM prices are insane, we need thousands of GPUs and we have to pay the armed guards to keep the copper thieves at bay.

After all of that, if we eliminate 80% of the employees at Load Last Save, we can generate more profits, none of which will go to the employees. Employee, singular, I should say. Roger would be the only one working here. He’ll do the job of all the other employees, producing lower and lower quality articles until he dies of overexertion.

Lay-offs 2

Everyone else is being laid off. Including me, the guy writing this and handling the acquisition.

HERE COMES THE AI

End of Service

Running a business can be tough. Employees, rent and balancing the books are all things you must consider when running a business. These are expensive-- and spending money is bad for business-- you need to profit. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines profit as “a valuable return”. It was Socrates who once said “get money, fuck bitches”. Here at Tencent-- we don’t only get money-- we fuck bitches-- by bitches we mean employees-- and by fucking them-- we mean-- well, you know what that means (fish).

After we have gotten rid of all the useless workers in our company-- we can finally reach our zenith-- not just our zenith, but our peak, top and apogee. Zero human interaction-- the real end game-- the thing we strive for. AI won’t just replace the workers-- it will replace the consumers, too. You, dear reader, will also be replaced by AI. An AI that can read each article two billion times faster than a human. Each article will have trillions of views just seconds after publishing. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines publishing as-- “the business or profession of the --commercial production and issuance of literature, --information --musical scores --or sometimes recordings, or art. Not just art --but art.

Conclusion

We-- At Tencent-- hope you’ll enjoy your time-- not just your time-- your time in the cobalt mines. Load Last Save will continue to run until the heat death of the universe, pumping out reviews every second-- these reviews will be read billions of times by robots-- generating infinite profits-- the line will go up-- forever-- we won’t stop-- that’s not a thing-- content is infinite-- it’s battlepasses and lay-offs all the way down.

Awkward!

Ascent into madness

Cyberpunk media is supposed to be cautionary. It extrapolates our current technological landscape, and takes it to its most dystopian logical conclusion. It shows what can happen if technology progresses unimpeded, along with extreme profit-seeking. If you think your current job sucks, imagine if you had to do it with a microchip in your head that tracks performance.

In a really dumb way this review is also cyberpunk. It’s a cautionary tale against the march of technology and profit-seeking. The march of technology being you downloading this game, and profit-seeking being the developers asking for you to buy this game. You shouldn’t do either of those things.

Much like some weird cyberpunk contract where they rent out your brain to mine crypto, I was duped into this game. The store page makes it look like an interesting RPG shooter, and it looks like one. It also plays pretty well, for the first hour. It has all the makings of the kind of game you recommend to your friends based on first impressions, but don’t be fooled. It never improves. It doesn’t offer any interesting RPG elements, the shooting gets stale after a few hours because of the repetitive encounters, there’s no story or actual roleplaying and the worst part of this game…

the thing that makes this go from cyberpunk dystopia to a literal hellscape is that this game is boring.

Read on to find out why you should not believe this game’s lies.

What is it?

The Ascent is an isometric shooter/RPG. Set in a cyberpunk dystopia, you play as a person who must do tasks for other cyberpunk entities. You run and gun through neon-lit streets, shooting at anything and anyone that gets in your way. Level up, get loot and grow stronger to take on the city’s many challenges. Allegedly.

Shooting isn’t the thing you’ll be doing the most, but it’s the most important. It’s a cover-based shooter, which isn’t common in isometric games. You can crouch behind walls and blind-fire over them. Enemies can, and will, do the same. The cover system interacts with the game’s main mechanic, which is the two-tiered height gimmick. When you shoot, you shoot at the enemy’s center mass. If you press right click, you go into an aiming stance, and you shoot at their head. This aim stance lets you shoot over low cover.

There are some RPG elements. You level up, gain points to improve different attributes. Every time you upgrade something, it makes a number go up, which is good, in theory.

You can also find gear and loot. There are different guns to find and use, such as shotguns, pistols, plasma rifles, and armor to make you more… armored.

Along with all that there are modules that give you different abilities. Of course, they’re cooldown based, and for some reason they also use mana, because double limiting is a ton of fun.

These game systems are all there, on the game’s description, but I honestly can’t tell you if they’re in the game or not. They’re so inconsequential, obtuse and ineffective, that I could just say I hallucinated them and it wouldn’t change anything.

You’ll see what I mean as I get more in-depth with the game, starting with the shooting.

Shooting

The Ascent’s shooting mechanics are surprisingly competent. It’s a standard top-down shooter. Twin-stick controls, you can shoot in all directions, you can move and shoot, etc. Very standard, but it works.

The interesting part is the aforementioned aiming system. You can hold down a button to enter an aiming stance, where you raise your gun and shoot at an enemy’s head. Headshots have a much higher chance of staggering an enemy than body shots. Each enemy has a stagger bar, which, when filled, makes them stagger for a second. This is useful for crowd control, to stop enemies from rushing you and to make an enemy stop shooting you.

When it works, it’s a good bit of fun. You have to prioritize targets to get them to stop/ If you’re getting rushed by a melee guy, you can pop him a few times to get him to stand down while you run, or get someone far away to stop shooting at you while you reposition.

The shooting itself is decent, too. The guns have a weighty, tactile feel to them. There’s recoil, but it makes sense. You can control it by tapping your shots instead of letting them rip on full-auto, and it doesn’t feel intrusive.

The gunplay encourages a slower, more tactical play style. You have to pick your angles, fire at priority targets, and move when you can to get into a better position. There is some good moment-to-moment decision making. You can pop a guy real quick to stagger him, then use that small window of time to reposition, or just run in for a close-range kill.

This is all fine and good, but it has a lot of problems, too. The stagger system is cool, in concept, but a lot of times you end up killing an enemy before you get to stagger them. Then there are others, like the melee enemies, that don’t really care about being staggered. They fly at you before you can see them and, like I just said, shoot them, and they just die. More on the enemies in a moment.

The cover system is also half-baked. The vast majority of cover in the game consists of chest-high walls you can crouch behind. It’s not like the cover system in other shooters, where you get close to a wall then suddenly snap to it like it’s magnetized, which is good. Here you can move in and out of cover naturally and easily. Points for that. The problem is that you can sit behind cover and shoot with very little penalty.

When you’re crouched behind a wall, you can aim to blind fire over it. Unlike the blind fire in other games, this one has the same accuracy as regular shots. Since this is a top-down game, you can shoot from cover all you want and you can always see your target. This means most firefights devolve into you sitting behind cover taking shots at another enemy, who is also behind cover, like that one scene in Naked Gun 2 1/2.

If we took the shooting aspect of this game, in isolation, it would be fine. Some good ideas, alright guns, and an interesting approach to crowd control in a shooter. It falls apart once you introduce every other aspect, starting with the enemies and how you fight them.

Enemies and enemy encounters

If you have a cover system in a game, you don’t want the player to sit behind a wall forever. It’s not engaging. At least, that’s what I think. A lot of other cover-based shooters I’ve played seem to be content with letting you sit in a corner and exist for as long as possible. The Ascent puts a lot of effort into chasing you out of cover, which is commendable, but it does this a little too well.

Enemies in this game are split into two broad categories: melee and ranged. Melee enemies will run at you, trying to get close enough to hit you with whatever stick they have on hand. To contrast this, ranged enemies will run at you, trying to get close enough to hit you with their bullets. As we all know, guns are notorious for being close-ranged weapons.

This is one half of the game’s biggest problem (with the combat, at least). Enemies, regardless of their role, all act the same, and will rush you. This makes them all feel the same. It doesn’t matter if they have a high-powered plasma sniper or a regular baseball bat, they will both run at you. Most fights feel like you’re playing a zombie game.

The other half of the combat problem is the movement. Since the game is designed around taking cover, your movement speed is relatively slow. This means you can’t really outrun melee guys, and you can’t dodge shots. Most enemies, when they actually get around to firing their gun, shoot fast, accurate bullets that you can’t move around. Some use plasma shots, which are slower and can be dodged, but most use regular bullets. If you can’t move fast enough, you get a dodge roll with invincibility frames. It has a cooldown, because why wouldn’t it?

A top-down shooter with a dodge roll reminds me of Enter The Gungeon. The difference is that, in Enter the Gungeon, you could avoid getting hit by moving around. The dodge roll was there as a last resort to get through certain bullet patterns. In The Ascent, your dodge roll is your only lifeline against offense, other than sitting behind a wall.

The way fights are structured really contribute to The Ascent feeling like a zombie survival game. While you’re out in the open world, you will run across random hostile mobs. They look like the regular NPCs walking around, they just get really angry when you walk past. Once they see you, they come running in from off-screen, from all angles. I’ve even seen them climb over balconies to flank you. They spawn from everywhere, like rats pouring out of sewer grates. Now you’re surrounded by a pack of ravenous cyberpunk thugs who don’t respect your personal space. Try getting behind cover when three dudes spawn right behind that same wall.

The Ascent’s fights are all the same. You enter a room or pass by a random NPC, a bunch of enemies start pouring in, they run at you and you try to use your little noodle legs to get to safety while plinking away at them with your little pea shooter. Every day is black Friday, and you’re the last air fryer on the shelf.

But this is an RPG, right? Surely, if things get too hectic, you can just upgrade your gear, or use a cool ability, or level up. Get more numbers and overpower your foes.

Weeeelll… about that…

RPG Elements?

Calling The Ascent an RPG is like calling a Snickers a protein bar.

The game’s description on the store page says:

Customize your character with cyberware that suits your playstyle. Allocate new skill points as you level-up and try various augmentations to take down your enemies in new creative ways.

It sounds cool, and you’re probably imagining something like Diablo, where you level up and build a character with skills and such, right? It’s nothing like that.

First, the store page doesn’t tell you that you’re limited to two abilities at a time. Just two. You can’t really customize a build with two active abilities. Second, the abilities are limited by mana. Nothing new, but the ones here use up a ton of mana, and it recovers slowly, making the abilities feel even more limited. Third, you don’t get a lot of them.

In other action RPGs, like Diablo, or Titanquest, you get abilities as you level up. You pick a character class, and go up a skill tree as you progress through the game. The Ascent is a Marxist utopia. A truly class-less society. You create a character, and put numbers in some vaguely defined categories, and that’s it. Your skills don’t come from leveling, you have to buy them or find them out in the world. You’d have a better chance of finding the Holy Grail at your local park than you do of finding a skill in The Ascent. Buying them is the best way to get them, but they are insanely expensive. In five hours of gameplay, I got enough money to buy ONE skill. ONE.

You don’t even get a chance to try the skill out before buying it. You get a short little description of how it’s supposed to work, in a perfect world. It’s like those problems in physics textbooks. Take a spherical object of this mass, assume perfect energy transfer, no friction and disregard air resistance, calculate its trajectory.

I bought a skill that spawns a little robot to fight for you. That’s what the description said. Like everything else in this game, it’s technically correct (the best kind of correct). It does in fact spawn a little robot to fight for you. Snickers do in fact have protein in them. The robot spawns, stands there like an idiot, rushes at an enemy and dies before it can be useful. Fantastic. Glad I spent three chapters’ worth of earnings to buy a low-functioning suicidal android. At least I have my punch skill to fall back on- OH WAIT- activating the robot used up 90% of my energy. Now I can’t use my punch, either. Fantastic. Amazing. Subarashii.

Leveling up is another deep-state conspiracy. You gain levels and upgrade your skills. What do they do? Who knows. They increase numbers. You have the usual health increase, mana increase, resistance to stun. Then there are more esoteric stats like dodge roll cooldown, weapon handling and reload speed. Sure, these are easy to understand at face value, but when you think about them for a bit, they don’t make much sense. Aiming? Sure, it reduces bullet spread, but bullet spread is already a non-factor. The guns are accurate, and whenever you fire at something, it’s a few inches away from you, so weapon spread doesn’t matter. Reload speed doesn’t matter much, either.

An annoying bit about these skills, and a huge pet peeve of mine in general, is that they represent their increments in percentages. The reload skill gives you 6% weapon handling per point. Six percent of what? Does that mean six percent faster reload? Six percent faster weapon swapping? Is that six percent off the time it takes to reload? If it takes one second to reload, if I level it up, will it take 60 miliseconds less? Will I even notice that much of a reduction? The aiming stat goes from 0% to 92% with one point. Does that mean I’m now 92% more accurate? The numbers, Mason, what do they mean!?

There’s a stat for critical hit rate. I thought I was already getting critical hits if I aimed at the enemy’s head, but apparently not. There’s a separate skill that rolls a dice for it.

None of the stat upgrades feel interesting. You get more energy. That’s great, it means you can use your abilities more often. That much is true, but every individual level only gives you enough energy for around 30% of the ability’s cost, so you don’t get an extra use out of it. You need to level up a few times and invest deep into it to see some results. Even then, you have to remember that the skills are all snooze fests. You spend 4 levels investing in the energy stat, only to get an extra cast of your ability, which does a little damage and has a long cooldown. It’s a waste of time.

The pace at which you get everything is painfully slow. I had the same ability for the first four hours of gameplay. Then I managed to get a new one. It was the same with gear. I found one or two new guns, and new armor, but they just increased my numbers here and there.

The lack of options and drip-feeding of content was a common complaint I saw online. Most people echoed the sentiment that you don’t get anything interesting for hour and hours. Builds are nonexistent. Some say that the game does allow for builds once you get into the mid-game, but getting there is a slog. You have to play for around 10 to 12 hours to start getting into the more interesting parts of the game. That’s a huge let down for me.

Even if you get access to more skills later on, you’re still limited to two active skills at a time. With how weak these abilities are, I don’t see how you could make an interesting build with them.

Then there’s the leveling up, and the fact that it just gives you passive number increases. This is nothing like any other ARPG I’ve played. I’ve never felt so restricted in this type of game before.

I would like to go more in-depth with these systems, but there’s one big problem with The Ascent.

It’ SO BORING

I tried to get the facts in first, with my opinion on the systems, but what I really want to say is that this game is boring. It’s the most boring thing I’ve played in a long time. It’s so bad, that I found it unplayable. The little bit of content you get at the start, and the pace at which it’s dripped to the player bit by bit is horrendous, yes, but there’s also a bunch of walking. This game has more padding than a drag queen’s bra.

Everything in this game is between endless walking sections. If you have to do a quest, you have to walk to some guy, talk to him, then walk all the way across the city to the destination, then walk around to do the mission, then walk all the way back to complete it. It’s mind-numbing. I’m not exaggerating when I say every mission starts with at least five minutes of uninterrupted walking. You end up getting your 10,000 steps in for every quest.

There are subway stations you can use to fast-travel, but they’re spread out across the map. You still have to walk to them, then walk from them to your destination. Even with the fast travel the map feels too big and empty. It’s pure padding. Also, if you really need to use the subways all the time, then what’s the point of having a huge map?

Adding to this soul-destroying feeling of boredom is how pointless everything is. This game turns you into a nihilist. What’s the point of fighting a group of enemies? They don’t give you anything for it. You don’t get loot in this so-called looter shooter. You get experience, but so what? So you can level up a few numbers? That’s not fun. If you stop to fight them, they just respawn after a while. You don’t fight them in interesting areas, either. They come out of random spots while you’re walking through a crowded hallway. It’s not fun or challenging to fight them. Since you have to walk 500 miles and then walk 500 more, you’re going to end up encountering dozens of enemies during your painful trudge. After a while I just walked past every enemy and ignored them.

This means that the only place where you should actually fight is in the missions, but it’s pointless there, too. The basic shooting is alright, yeah, but every single encounter plays the exact same. You get swarmed by crazed freaks that run at you and you use your two rinky-dink abilities to kill them. Then at the end of the mission you get a tiny bit of money, and maybe a piece of gear that gives you more numbers.

Something I use as a metric for how much I like a game I’m reviewing, is the amount of time I play it while taking notes. If it’s a game I like, like Wanted: Dead or Katamari Damacy, I’ll play the game for a bit to double-check something in the review, but then I’ll end up playing it for 20 minutes more than I’m supposed to, because I just want to keep playing it. With games I don’t like, such as with Gungrave GORE, I only play enough to get the notes I need and that’s it. With The Ascent, I could barely tolerate it for notes. I opened the game and thought twice about getting past the title screen. I’d think “No one’s going to read this. No one cares about The Ascent. I can just say it sucks and be done with it”, but I wanted to justify my reasoning, even if no one’s reading this. If I didn’t explain why it stinks, someone might think I misunderstood the game and go try it for themselves, and I want to prevent that.

Conclusion

I do not recommend The Ascent, under any circumstance. It’s a boring, trudging game with too much padding, terrible pacing and repetitive combat encounters. You spend 80% of your time in this game walking from point A to point B in a cluttered, messy city. The small amount of time you spend in combat is sleep-inducing, thanks to its terrible fight design.

You can’t even push through the game with the promise of building a cool character, since the RPG systems are as shallow as a puddle. There isn’t any real build-crafting. Every ability is too expensive, they don’t do much and even if you do find one that’s interesting, you’re still limited to two active abilities. Same with the weapons, you can only carry two at a time. That doesn’t allow for much player expression.

The RPG elements are also a complete lie. There aren’t any decisions to make. You don’t play a role in this game. It’s extremely linear. It would be more accurate to call this a bad top-down shooter with slight RPG elements. It’s like an RPG-flavored LaCroix. You get the faintest hint of an RPG somewhere here.

I didn’t even mention the horrible map. Anytime you have to get somewhere, you have to open your map and pick through the hundreds of little icons to find your destination. Same with finding any shops. You go to one of the crowded city centers and navigate a maze to get to a shop. The map says it’s right in front of you, but it’s actually three floors below. Go find the elevator, dummy.

I usually cover the presentation in these reviews, but I don’t care enough about this game to do so. I only want to discuss as much as I need to about it. I didn’t mention the story, either, even though this is supposedly an RPG. I didn’t pay attention to the story. Maybe if the game were any good I’d want to know what was going on.

The main reason why I wrote this whole thing is because I am a scorned customer. I bought this game because I was fooled by its marketing. It looks cool in the trailers, its basic gameplay is alright, and it promises a lot, selling itself as an arcadey action RPG shooter. It’s a cool game, in concept. In reality, it’s none of that. It’s false advertising.

I was the third in a chain of Ascent-based disappointment. A friend of mine bought it on a deep discount because it looked cool. He played it for a few hours. As he was playing it, another friend of mine saw him play it and asked “What’s that? I’ve never seen this before. Looks cool”. He told him it was The Ascent, and it was an action RPG, but that he was waiting to see if it got more interesting, because it plays alright, even if the RPG stuff isn’t too deep. Maybe it gets deeper down the line with more upgrades. That other friend played it, I saw him playing it and the cycle repeated.

Hours later, one by one, we all came to the same conclusion: This game stinks, it’s nothing like it was advertised. We each paid $5 for it, and we felt like we needed a refund, but we played past the 2 hour mark for refunds hoping the game got better. It never did.

If I can save at least one person from buying this, I’ll consider this review a success.

I hated my time with The Ascent. I didn’t complete it, and I have no intentions of ever re-visiting it. I didn’t like what I saw, and I don’t want to see anymore of it. I don’t care if the game opens up after a while, I think a game should be good from the start. Either way, even if this game triples in quality past a nebulous “mid-game” point, it’s still going to be terrible. It’s like saying a cake made of shit gets better after a while because there’s ice cream in the middle. Sure, it’s better, but you’re still eating ice cream covered in shit.

I play it for the plot

Dead or Alive? Good question. I’d say dead. At least it has been since the release of Dead or Alive 6. Now it’s going to be brought back to life with the release of… Dead or Alive 6 again? Is this like in math, where you multiply two negatives and get a positive? If that fails, we still have the upcoming seventh installment in the series to look forward to. For a while, at least.

Today I’ll be talking about Dead or Alive for a bit. Giving my opinions on the franchise, why DoA 6 failed and how this all relates to the fact that no one wants to play fighting games, and how Dead or Alive 7 needs to learn from 6’s many, many mistakes.

and, yeah, we’ll discuss the boobs, don’t worry.

Some Context

To really discuss Dead or Alive, we have to go a little further back, for context. You see, back in 1822, a man by the name of Charles Babbage invented a device we now call a computer. Then SEGA used this computer to make Virtua Fighter a couple of years later. Tomonobu Itagaki played Virtua Fighter and dared to ask “what if Virtua Fighter, but boobs?”, so he made Dead or Alive.

The franchise kept going for several installments. Each of them had fun, polished gameplay with deep mechanics. It was easy to learn, hard to master, much like its predecessor Virtua Fighter. You had three attack buttons, 3D movement and the hold system, which was a kind of parry/counter feature that made defense something the player actively participated in. The games were genuinely well crafted, top-tier arcade experiences.

Along with the gameplay, the series was pioneering graphics. Smooth polygons, motion captured animations and beautiful stages… and bazoogas.

From Dead or Alive 2 onwards, the franchise focused a lot more on its female characters. The first game featured them prominently, but it also gave the guys some of the spotlight. Afterwards, they were there for legacy’s sake, and all eyes were on Kasumi and the others. Made sense, honestly. They were popular. So popular that they got their own spin-off, Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, where they’d parade around in swimsuits. It even had a cringey commercial with a bunch of guys about to start a group goon sesh.

This shift in attention and aggressively-breasted marketing re-branded Dead or Alive from the fighting game with the girls, to the girls with that fighting mini-game. Public perception split. People who never played the games claimed the series was just softcore porn for horny losers. Since they were not horny losers, they didn’t play the games. Another vocal group, who also never played the games, said the games were fun, but they were put off by their overt sexuality. The people who actually played them were too busy- you know, actually playing the games- to give their opinion. They voted with their wallet, and the franchise kept going strong.

Then, for some reason- probably because Tomonobu Itagaki had left the company- the developers decided they needed to make a new Dead or Alive game that would be taken seriously. By whom? By the aforementioned people who never played the games in the first place.

How do you make Dead or Alive more serious? By aligning the series to the new Core Values.

Core Values

Dead or Alive 6 was going to be a REAL fighting game. Not like the previous games in the franchise. This one was going to focus on competitive play. It’s E-sports time, and that means they needed to appeal to advertisers. Get those titties out of here! Everyone knows there’s nothing advertisers hate more than using sex to sell products. Dead or Alive was now E-Sports. If you didn’t like it, you were just a dumb gooner who wanted to see 3D titties. Go watch porn instead, sicko!

Everything was lined up for Dead or Alive’s big comeback. Kasumi wasn’t in her iconic dress, she was in a full-body ninja suit. Not a sexy catsuit, you perv, a tactical suit that covered her up completely. The men took center stage, being shown throughout most of the trailer, and the game emphasized its brutal, realistic fighting. It was Dead or Alive for REAL gamers.

Then this happened

During a livestream for the game during Evo Japan 2019, the two presenters Saki Yoshida and Yuka Kuramochi (two swimsuit models) gave a live demonstration of the game’s jiggle physics. The suits didn’t like that. The livestream was interrupted, and the two were presumably given a stern talking to.

This incident was so horrific, that Joey Cuellar, the then-president of Evo, issued a tweet saying that what happened didn’t align with Evo’s Core Values.

One year later, Cuellar was removed from Evo following accusations of sexual misconduct with minors. This is one of the few cases where even I think making a joke here would be in poor taste.

The situation soured Dead or Alive 6’s reputation, the incident became a big joke, and Dead or Alive 6 never appeared as a main-stage game at Evo. The game sold poorly. Its confused marketing put off its already dwindling fan base and failed to attract the people who would never play the game in the first place.

Ironically, the game that built its reputation on bouncy girls was destroyed by bouncy girls.

The game would flounder for a bit, then go free-to-play, which led to a few downloads. Support for the game stopped shortly after release, leaving almost no DLC for fans to buy, unlike the previous Dead or Alive game, which has over $1,000 worth of DLC on Steam. Dead or Alive 6 has sold over 900,000 copies as of writing this. That may sound like a lot, until you compare it to another Team Ninja game. Nioh 2, which released around the same time, had sold over 2 million copies in one year.

Now you might be thinking “Of course Nioh 2 sold more than Dead or Alive. DoA is a niche series”

Dead or Alive (and fighting games) are niche

There has been a lot of discussion on the viability of fighting games as products. There’s a long article floating around titled “Fighting Games Have a Product Design Problem”. As the title suggests, it’s about how fighting games fail to provide a decent overall experience when compared to other types of games. It’s well written and worth a look, but I’m not going to dissect it here. It has a lot of suggestions, mostly good, on how to make fighting games more complete and more appealing to newer players.

This article has a lot to do with 2XKO’s apparent flop. 2XKO, by the way, is the League of Legends fighting game. I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing that because 2XKO is a terrible name that doesn’t remind anyone of what it is. The game released, but no one really seems to care about it, and Riot laid off most of the team working on 2XKO. There’s a lot of speculation as to why, and I don’t know anything, so I won’t comment, but things look gray.

The problem the article, and many others, point to is that fighting games need to change to appeal to more players, so they don’t flop. I appreciate the passion, and I understand wanting fighting games to succeed, but I respectfully disagree.

I don’t think fighting games need to appeal to non-fighting game players. They don’t like the games. If you change your game, you’ll just alienate your audience chasing after potential buyers. Sure, you can get a hit here and there, but you have to remember that fighting games is a niche genre, and that’s okay. You just need to make a decent game with good features, at a reasonable budget, and sell it to the diehards.

Dead or Alive 7 won’t sell like Nioh, but it’s not supposed to. Developers should be fine with that, but they’re not. Fighting games were made in the arcade, and they sustained themselves on that business model. They thrived in that space. Some of the greatest fighting games ever came from the arcade, stuff like Guilty Gear, Darkstalkers, Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, Samurai Shodown and of course, Dead or Alive. They made their game, sold the cabinets and made their money back.

Now that developers hit the lottery with some mainstream success, they can’t go back. They had a taste of the multi-million sales figures, the season passes, the DLC, the giant prize pools at Evo.

Don’t try to chase an audience that doesn’t play Dead or Alive, don’t try to go for Evo or e-sports. Just make a game with cute girls, nice graphics and the classic hold>strike>throw triangle.

Fighting games are like classical music. Everyone likes to pretend they like them, but no one actually does.

The Discourse

Now that you have all the context and my thoughts on the whole thing, I’ll use my powers of clairvoyance to discuss the talking points that will enter The Discourse in the near future. That’s right, it’s opinion slop on events that haven’t even happened yet!

“I don’t play Dead or Alive because it’s gross, it’s just tits”

It’s more than just tits, but you wouldn’t know. You don’t play the games, and you were never going to.

“I like Dead or Alive, I just don’t play it because of the tits”

You don’t like the game, you like to tell others you do. If you did, you’d be playing it.

“Dead or Alive doesn’t appeal to me, because of the tits”

Perfectly understandable. It’s not for everyone, and if I have a right to like it because of that, then you have a right to dislike it for that reason.

Another point I can see coming up, which I have only hinted at, is the game’s monetization. I mentioned earlier that Dead or Alive 5 has over $1,000 worth of DLC. 99% of it is cosmetic. Glorified dress-up. The excuse here is that they need the DLC to keep the game running. Sure, I understand. Servers cost money, and nowadays you can’t make a game and sell it, you need to make it last forever with endless updates. The thing is, knowing Koei Tecmo, they’re going to sell the game for $70, and charge for seasonal DLC and cosmetics on top of that. Sure, you can opt out of the cosmetics. They don’t affect gameplay, but the DLC will. Like every other fighting game, they’ll release characters over time, and you’ll have to pay up despite having spent $70 for the base game. It’s standard practice in the industry, but I hate it.

We’ve seen how bad it can get with Dead or Alive 6, and how it charged players a dollar to change a character’s hair color.

It’s also pretty bad when you go to a game’s Steam Page and see hundreds of dollars of DLC waiting there. You know the game’s going to do its best to crowbar your wallet out of your pocket.

Netcode is another sticking point. DoA 6 uses delay-based netcode, which sucks. Rollback should be the standard by now. It should have been the standard when GGPO made it easy to implement rollback into anything, and that’s been working well since at least 2011. The updated version, Dead or Alive 6: Last Round hasn’t been confirmed to have rollback. It probably still uses the old, outdated delay-based netcode.

Cross-play is extremely important, too. DoA 6 doesn’t have it, and the Last Round update won’t, either. Seven needs to have crossplay. Like rollback netcode, this should be standard by now. Not offering this would be leaving money on the table. Guilty Gear Strive, Street Fighter 6, Virtua Fighter 5 REVO and City of the Wolves all have crossplay. They also use rollback.

Include those quality of life features, and I’m in on day one.

I’m still skeptical. DoA6: Last Round is coming out soon. Same game, no improvements on the netcode, no crossplay and they’re removing Kula and Mai. It’s Dead or Alive 6, with less content. I saw some apes on Reddit saying how this wasn’t a big deal, but it is. It’s a big deal. Why would I pay $40 for the same game, with less characters and no improvements?

I’m going to huff an entire tank of copium and say it’s because DoA6 is already made, and there’s no way of changing it. I know that’s bullshit, but again, I’m on copium. Maybe they learn from this and fix it in 7. Maybe.

Conclusion

I want Dead or Alive 7 to be an unironic “Return to Form” for the series. It should be a lighthearted game with surprisingly deep mechanics that can only be enjoyed by the people who actually play it, and not the kind of puritanical weirdo that calls things like Marvel Rivals a gooner game. They’re not going to buy the game. Stop appealing to them. The only thing they should be buying is soap.

If the game is another attempt at being a serious fighting game for big boys, it’s going to fail. Dead or Alive 6 tried that. It didn’t work. Forget trying to appeal to the EFF GEE SEA’s core values. The only core Dead or Alive should focus on is the softcore.

Fighting games are a niche thing, and Dead or Alive is a niche within a niche. Give the fans what they want, and you’ll be rewarded. Don’t go chasing waterfalls, or a potential audience that might buy millions of copies of your game, if they somehow decide to like it now.

As long as the game plays like the previous games, has rollback netcode and crossplay, it’s an easy buy for most people, myself included. And, yeah, keep the boobs in.

Read part 1 here.

Croak

Extreme frog platforming for the modern age.

Croak is a 2D platformer. You play as a little green frog with a crown. Your job is to get to the end of the level, as is tradition in these games. You do this by jumping and using your tongue as a kind of grappling hook. Master all sorts of puzzling platforming challenges in this fun little game.

The game’s star mechanic is the tongue. You press a button, and the frog sticks out his tongue, and it looks funny. It’s also great for platforming. You can latch onto walls with it, and pull yourself towards them at high speed. Then you bounce off the wall. You can bounce in the direction of the wall to go forward, or you can keep the tongue button pressed to keep pinballing off walls. It’s a very intuitive mechanic that gets put to good use here.

The tongue’s platforming potential is on full display thanks to this game’s level design. Each stage is a series of interconnected platforming challenges. You first need to figure how you’re going to do what you need to do, in a bit of a puzzle platformer sort of way. Then, once you figure it out, execute using the game’s tight controls.

The levels are full of creative gimmicks. There’s a block that looks like a square hedge, which you can bonk with your head to make it slide. You can ride it as it’s moving to slide over spikes or other hazards. Some of the challenges have you making big leaps onto moving blocks, which is satisfying and cool to see. There’s another gimmick with some birds that act as platforms. When you press the jump button, they phase in and out of existence. You need to figure out the correct number of jumps you need to make to get them in their platform state as you jump. Then they combine the hedge block and the birds in a cool sequence where you have to jump to activate and deactivate the birds to let the hedge pass, while avoiding the spiked floor beneath you.

The game’s cool gimmicks, tight controls, and neat tongue mechanic all add up to a great platformer. The levels are very tight, too. Zero downtime. You’re constantly pressing forward and jumping on stuff.

There are also a ton of secret areas with optional challenges. It reminds me a lot of Celeste. Even the way you get the hidden coins is similar to how you get the strawberries in Celeste, where the collectible follows you until you exit the challenge area, and then it goes into your inventory.

The presentation is a clear highlight here. Beautiful hand-drawn animations that are fluid, bouncy and with a lot of personality. The frog’s design is adorable, and all his animations look fantastic. My only complaint with the visuals is that the pink spike hazards could be a little more vibrant, so they’d be easier to see. I’m a little colorblind, so that might be contributing to my inability to see them well, but they could use a bit more contrast.

Overall, a great time. It’s easy to pick up, full of cool little tricks, and it gets to the action instantly. It doesn’t waste your time onboarding you. It explains the basic mechanics and then throws you into some tricky platforming. There’s a medal system, too, which tracks your performance in a level and awards you a medal. I can see myself replaying these over and over for those medals. Highly recommended.

You can download the demo for Croak here.

Firestarters

It’s like that other rollerskating shooter, but faster.

Firestarters is a score-based first person shooter. You skate around an arena, shooting at enemies to get points. Fly around at ludicrous speed, grind rails and ride half-pipes to gain momentum. It has a neat resource system that feeds into itself, which I always like.

Your objective is to survive multiple rounds in an arena, and get a good score. You get points by shooting enemies, and doing it in style. You can press the right mouse button to skate, which makes you go insanely fast, and changes how your momentum works. You can also use the skates to grind on rails. Kill enemies while grinding, going fast or jumping to get a better score.

You get a few weapons to help you dispatch your enemies. There’s the basic dual pistols, a baseball bat, and a mining laser that fires a heat beam. You can pick up other weapons, like a shotgun, between rounds.

These three weapons have their own use. The pistols do damage, but have limited ammo. The bat has unlimited ammo, as bats tend to do, but it’s melee ranged. The mining laser sets enemies on fire, but it overheats quickly. The bat and the pistols interact with each other. The pistols need ammo, and you get ammo by killing enemies with the bat. Hitting enemies with a bat also resets your skate meter and your other air moves; the double jump and ground stomp (which sends enemies flying like the one in ULTRAKILL).

The game’s presentation is fine. It looks a little unfinished, but everything is clear and readable, even at 88 miles per hour. Except for that one part where it puts you in a sand storm, cutting off your visibility. That one sucks. Hopefully it’s a one-off thing. The game has a style of its own, which is nice. When you hit an enemy, a short phrase pops up on screen, and some of them are a bit cringey, but it’s manageable.

Firestarters shows a lot of promise. It’s a great movement-based shooter with great speed and cool ideas. The only nitpicks I have with it are the roguelite elements, which are kind of out of place, and the grinds. In games like these, with grinds, you usually snap to the rail when you initiate a grind. Here, you snap to it if you land on the rail with pin-point accuracy. I wish it would have more leniency, because there were times when I tried to grind, but missed the rail by half a pixel and killed my momentum.

Either way, I recommend Firestarters. Download the demo here.

Hotwing Hellions

>Looking for a new shmup

>Ask gamers if it’s euroshmup or bullet kino.

>They don’t understand

>Pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is a euroshmup and what is bullet kino.

>they laugh and say “it’s just a bullet hell, sir”

>Download demo

>it’s euroshmup

Hotwing Hellions is a 1v1 vertical shooter. You pilot a ship and dodge bullets. Reach the end of the stage before your opponent, and you win.

Before I get to the game, I have to define a “euroshmup”. It’s a term I first heard from Mark of The Electric Underground. It refers to a shmup that has a set of mechanical quirks: Inertia, big ships, weak weapons/tanky enemies, few enemies, progression, and an unsatisfying presentation. Negative connotation. It’s a derogatory term. It specifies “euro” because these types of shooters were typically made in Europe, in contrast to the more polished Japanese games.

Hotwing Hellions isn’t a full-on euroshmup, but it’s uncomfortably close. It doesn’t have inertia, thank goodness, but it has some other stuff. Most notably, the weak guns. Either your cannons were loaded with mashed potatoes or every enemy is plated in adamantium. Whatever the cause, enemies take too long to kill. They linger on screen while you plip away at them.

The demo level is pretty bad. It’s a long stretch of seemingly random enemies flying in with no real sense of pacing. Enemy formations fly in, and they shoot at you. They feel haphazardly thrown in. There isn’t any real synergy between the enemy types. Their shot patterns don’t make you move around the screen, nor do they try to trap you in any way. They come in, fire in your general direction, and that’s it.

The movement is alright, the shooting feels limp and the enemies stink. You have two little bits (things that float near your ship) that can shoot, but their main feature is that they block enemy fire. You can position them in front of you and camp behind them for most of the stage. Like I said, it doesn’t encourage you to move around much.

I mentioned that the level is long, but did I really emphasize it? It’s long. Noticeably long. It might appear longer because of how boring it is, but it’s a slog. I don’t remember the first level of Dodonpachi or any other shmup taking this long.

The game is not awful, but not good. It’s dull, which is arguably worse. Everything about it feels basic, and random at worst. Enemy placement and patterns are uninspired. There aren’t any clever bullet patterns that test your skills. It’s very underwhelming. Hard 4.5/10 vibes. Juuuust below average, but not in an interesting way, much like how my teachers described me.

I think I’d be able to tolerate the game more if it had a better presentation. The graphics in this one are ugly. It looks like the post pixel art Cave games mixed with a more decroded Akiragoya game, if it were made in Flash (back when it was still called Macroemedia Flash). If you understood any of that, I invite you to come to therapy with me next week. It’s hideous. It has this high-contrast pre-rendered look to it that is equal parts uncanny and off-putting, but not in a cool horror way, like Angel at Dusk (Akiragoya’s most decroded game).

The demo stage is a perfect showcase of this game’s lack of aesthetics. The background is one continuous rock texture. Noisy, overly detailed, and like most other things here, thrown in without much rhyme or reason. It distracts from the already hard to read action in the foreground. There’s an option to turn it off, which I appreciate. Staring at that background for so long was giving me pink eye.

Overall, I didn’t like this. It’s just kind of boring. The only really notable part about it is its horrible visual design. It’s grimey, ugly and unappealing. It also affects the gameplay, since it makes keeping track of all the projectiles and other nonsense needlessly difficult. An easy skip.

You can download the demo for Hotwing Hellions here. I’d rather just get real hotwings.

Turleon

That’s it. You’re all banned from making beat-’em-ups. No more of these until you go and play Streets of Rage. You don’t even have to beat the whole game, just play one level and get a feel for what this kind of game should play like, at the minimum.

Turleon is a 2D beat-’em-up. You walk right and fight cops. You have a basic combo, some heavy attacks and specials. You’re going to need all of them to take enemies down, because you do no damage.

The demo starts with a long tutorial that presents the information in the least intuitive way possible. It shows you different button combinations you can press, just floating in the air, with a transparent animation of what it’s supposed to do. No real indication as to what the move does. The prompts also use the worst font ever conceived by man (or animal).

The game has a jump button. Why do I mention that like it’s a feature? Well, because the game has wall jumping. Guess which button you press to do it. It’s not the jump button. It’s the attack button… AND the dodge. Both. You hit the wall, then dodge off it to wall jump. You need to do this multiple times in a row to get up a building. It’s incredibly unintuitive, and it requires a precise rhythm to pull off, otherwise you’ll jump off the wall before your air attack’s secret cooldown is still going and you’ll press the button and nothing will happen. Then you drop like a rock.

I soldiered on and managed to clear the wall jumps, only to get rushed by enemies. Tanky enemies that take forever to die. I smacked them with my little arms for what felt like hours.

As a beat-’em-up, it’s very bad. Your range is low, your attacks affect a small area, and it’s focused on doing combos, which translates to tanky enemies that you have to punch forever. There aren’t any cool moves to do, either, so your combos are just mashing on one button.

The presentation is off. It has 2D sprites on a 3D background. The retro styling extends to the UI, where it has an unreadable pixel font that makes your eyes bleed. There’s also a bright green scale pattern over most UI elements that squeezes lemon juice into your already bleeding eyes.

The camera is also pulled back really far from the action. It’s like playing a game from a spy satellite.

Overall, don’t recommend. D- see me after class. Homework: the entirety of Streets of Rage 2. I am also patting myself on the back because I made it through this entire section without calling the game Turd leon. Wait, I just did. Damn. Oh well.

Download here.

Scott Pilgrim EX

Not this guy again!

Somehow, Scott Pilgrim returned. Scott PilgrimEX is yet another beat-’em-up. This one has more of an adventure theme going, like River City Ransom. You walk around the town, complete quests, get money, buy items and get some light RPG progression.

You have a basic light combo, a two-hit heavy combo that sends enemies flying, a knockdown attack and a special. It’s a competent arsenal, perfect to deal with any situation. The controls feel responsive, punches come out when you press the button and they feel powerful.

This level of competence shouldn’t be surprising, given the developer’s previous work, but it’s surprising to me… given the developer’s previous work. They made the previous Scott Pilgrim game, which I didn’t like. I wrote an entire review pointing out its many, many flaws. The fact that they could turn around and make a decent game is impressive. They learned something in the decade or so after the first game.

The presentation is great, the art is fantastic, the animations are delightful, the colors are wonderful. It looks amazing, even better than the first one, and the graphics were that game’s only redeeming quality. The music in this one isn’t as good, but it’s alright. It gets the job done.

It’s a decent casual beat-’em-up. I think it needs a few tweaks, but that’s because I’m an annoying elitist. Enemies should have get-up attacks to stop you from camping, the levels are a bit too big, there’s a lot of wandering and downtime between objectives. There should be more enemies in each encounter, and the fights should have fewer interruptions. Other than that, it’s fine.

I recommend it to anyone looking for a casual beat-’em-up similar to Shredder’s Revenge. Not really something for enthusiasts. It’s still miles better than the original Scott Pilgrim game, and immeasurably better than any of the other slop brawlers I’ve tried in this Next Fest.

Download the demo for Scott Pilgrim EX here.

Gambonanza

Balatro, but chess.

Gambonanza is a chess puzzle roguelike. Balatro, but with chess. You play out small chess puzzles, buy pieces, get modifiers that affect how you play, modify your board’s tiles and fight devious bosses. Your goal is to finish 5 rounds, like in Balatro. Each round consists of two challenges and a boss. Like in Balatro.

Between each blind you can visit the store to buy stuff to improve your run. You can buy card packs- I mean- piece packs? They give you a random piece. Just like in Balatro, they’re randomly selected. It made sense in that game because of the trading card pack themeing, but here it’s kind of weird. It’s not themed around anything, you just buy chess booster packs. Why? Because Balatro did it.

Each round you win gives you money. Money accrues interest over time. Like in that other game.

The puzzles range from 200 ELO chess against a toaster, to “oh the other guy has an indestructible Queen. I guess I’ll go shove my pieces up my rectum”. You’re winning, until you’re not.

Unlike Balatro, your pieces can be destroyed. If you sacrifice a piece, a move which is extremely common in chess, you lose it. You need to replace it by buying them in the shop. This leads to moments where you enter a puzzle with three bishops. Stalemates can, and do, occur.

The game’s presentation is Balatro. Literally just Balatro. From the wavy tie-dye background, to the UI elements, the music, the effects, the shop. There’s even a little Jimbo character that talks to you every now and then. It’s so blatant that it crosses into being a rip-off.

The thing is that, the presentation is nowhere near as good as Balatro’s. That game was a masterclass of tactile UI/UX design. Every little detail in how the game worked, was geared towards making the experience as engaging and addictive as possible. It made playing digital cards feel good. The interface was clicky, lively, interesting. The one in Gambonanza is like the diet version. Wait, that’s too much of a compliment. Diet Balatro would imply it’s still good. This is Diet store-brand Balatro, room temperature and flat.

The game itself has some interesting concepts, but some weirdness. I’m a lousy chess player, and I found some of the puzzles to be insultingly easy, but then I came across one where the opponent had a queen I couldn’t capture, and it just flew across my army, committing war crimes against each one of my pieces, while I sat in the cuck chair and watched.

You are the white pieces, so you move first. In chess this gives you the advantage, you can take offensive positions. In this game, it means you have to jump into the enemy’s formation. That’s what the game tells you at first, and what it heavily implies. In practice, you can wait or move a random piece, and the enemy will be forced to move. This leads to situations where you wait in your side of the board while the enemy marches a pawn down in a straight line directly into your line of fire.

This is the kind of game that needs a few dozen hours to see if it’s solid or not, or at least a good chess player. I’m bad at chess, and I don’t have dozens of hours to stress test this. All I have are my mixed initial impressions.

All I know is that, I think it feels a bit lopsided. What makes Balatro work is that you have all your cards in your deck at all times, but they’re limited to your hand. If you have a joker that gives you bonus points for playing club cards, you can use it. You might draw a hand or two without clubs, but they’re in your deck, so they’ll come up eventually, and you can use them.

In Gambonanza, there are piece-specific modifiers. Things that affect pawns specifically, or rooks. That’s all fine and dandy, if you have that piece. You start with three random pieces, then buy random pieces in the shop, one at a time, with your limited money. You don’t have a full board of pieces to work with. You don’t start the round and pick from every piece, deciding on what to put on the board to maximize your modifiers while limiting risk. It’s random.

I thought it worked different than that. You get a modifier that skips an enemy’s turn if you capture a unit with a pawn. You enter the round, you set up your board and weigh your options. Sure, you could do all pawns, but maybe you’d want to play a knight, because that’s what the enemy board would be weak to.

That’s not how it works. You enter the round, you sacrificed your pawn in the last round to prevent a stalemate, so now you have a pawn modifier and nothing to use it with. You’re stuck with three bishops. It’s like if in Balatro all your cards were destroyed when you played them. It’s like if every boss was The Pillar.

Then again, if you could build your own board, you could break the game by always playing the same optimal set-up, but hey. I’m not the game designer. Balatro solved this with randomness. Maybe go one step further and copy Balatro in that, too. Have all 16 pieces available, but each move is a hand, and you have to make a winning chess hand at random, and play that.

Sure, you can stock up on pieces and not sacrifice them, but come on. Good luck playing chess without gambling a piece or two.

What really sours me about this game is how blatant it’s trying to be Balatro. It comes off as a coat-tail rider. Sure, there are a ton of Balatro clones, and they’re deservedly mocked and derided for being Temu rip-offs, and I think Gambonanza should be, too. It takes more work to try to imitate Balatro than to make your own thing. This game is like vegan bacon. No, it doesn’t taste anything like bacon, it’s a lot of work to make, and if you really want me to try vegan food, just give me a slice of eggplant. The slice of eggplant in this strained metaphor is something that isn’t trying to replicate Balatro.

Also, making the game so similar to Balatro seems like an easy marketing tactic, but it also opens it up to getting compared directly to Balatro. That’s not a favorable comparison. Bacon versus vegan bacon, again. Dr. Pepper versus Diet Professor Spice.

This is what they look like side-by-side in my Steam library.

You can download Balatro here.

I mean- download the Gambonanza demo here. Try it out for yourself and see if I’m being too rough on it for no reason. I’m open to opposing viewpoints on this one.

Super Meat Boy 3D

Time to play with my meat… in 3D!

Super Meat Boy 3D is a 3D precision platformer. Run across multiple miniature stages packed with platforming challenges that will test your skills, and patience. It’s Super Meat Boy, but with a whole new axis to misalign your jumps.

It does a great job of translating Super Meat Boy into 3D. The movement feels good. Fast and nearly unwieldy, but still manageable if you know what you’re doing. The levels are quick, short bursts of platforming. It’s still a save-state game where you retry the same three seconds over until you get it right, with very little downtime or consequence.

The only thing that got lost in the transition to 3D was the style. I’m going to use the dreaded S-word: the 3D version has a lot less soul than the crude flash-animated graphics of the first game. It’s also made in Unreal Engine 5, the anti-soul engine, and it shows. There’s volumetric fog (anti-soul gas) everywhere, it looks upscaled even at 100% resolution scaling, there’s weird aliasing and everything looks semi-realistic but also like it’s made of the wax they put on the outside of cheese. The intro cutscene looks like one of those “X game, in Unreal Engine” videos. The kind that have people ironically chanting “Nintendo, hire this man!”. In fact, the whole game looks like that. “Super Meat Boy, but realistic”. Dr. Fetus’ animations at the end of the level are incredibly stiff and charmless. The game doesn’t look bad, it’s just very bland.

If you like 3D platformers, but haven’t found one to really test your skill like the 2D ones do, give Super Meat Boy 3D a shot. It’s tough, but fair, and it manages to feel like the original. Now cue someone with 6,000 hours in Super Meat Boy telling me about how the acceleration formula is slightly different, and how that affects the rest of the game, and it’s in fact NOTHING like the original.

Download the Super Meat Boy 3D demo here.

Divinum

If I had a nickel for every 2D Devil May Cry inspired game with a female protagonist, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Divinum is a 2D hack and slash. You go around levels and get put into combat arenas, where you fight a variety of monsters using your sword. Slash at them with combos, send them flying with an uppercut and keep hitting them in mid-air, use magic attacks and anything else you can think of to style on your enemies.

You have a wide variety of attacks. There’s a basic sword combo. Mash the attack button for a combo. If you pause after the first hit, you get an alternate combo. Send enemies flying with an uppercut, follow them with an air combo and slam them down with a helm breaker. There’s a lot of them, and they feel great to use. They have large hitboxes, which lets you smack a lot of enemies at once, making them feel powerful, and you can combo from one into the other as you’d expect from this kind of game.

Along with your sword, you have some magic attacks. You start with a flame shot and a healing ability, but you can swap them out. Me being the combat goblin I am, I got rid of the healing spell the first chance I could and replaced it with one that erupts spikes from the ground and sends people flying. Much better than a healing spell. The magics are basic, but fun to use, and they complement the fighting well.

There’s defense, too. You can parry, and roll. The parry is useful, but you’re not required to use it. It’s there to take your turn in specific situations, but it’s not a “my turn, your turn” parry game. You can move out of an attack’s way to dodge. You can also roll, which is good to roll past enemies, since you don’t have the benefit of a third dimension here. The defensive options work well, are useful and they don’t feel like they stop the flow of combat like they do in a lot of parry-focused games.

The presentation is great. Simple, low detail pixel art that looks clean and readable. The animations are buttery smooth, with tons of frames, but they don’t feel slow or overdone. The music and sound design are also very good.

I recommend Divinum. It has a fun combat system with good combos, solid fundamentals and a defense system that doesn’t make you stop dead in your tracks whenever an enemy’s eyes glow red.

Download Divinum’s demo here.

Underkeep

Under where?

Underkeep is a first-person dungeon crawling RPG. You grab a party of four adventurers and go exploring. Complete quests, explore dank dungeons and fight monsters.

There are the usual classes to choose from: Warrior, archer, wizard, etc. You can pick from different races, each with their own innate stats, and give them an active ability. Solid party building.

Combat is turn-based. You explore in real time, but when you run into an enemy you go into a turn-based mode. Each hero gets a turn to attack, then the enemy. Repeat until someone dies. Preferably the monster. It works fine, and the abilities available at the start are useful.

The presentation is nice. Detailed pixel art, interesting monsters, and a good sense of atmosphere. It has a very classic retro look, which fits the retro wizardry/DnD game it’s going for.

The demo is very short, but it shows what the game’s going for. You only have one basic quest to complete, but you can finish it in two ways, which is cool. I hope the other quests have that level of freedom. It’s not much, but it’s more than what other games give you.

These games are all about long, arduous journeys into hostile labyrinths, so I’d have to see a real, proper dungeon before casting full judgement. Fifteen minutes isn’t enough to see the progression. Can’t tell if the classes evolve in interesting ways, or if they gain any noteworthy skills, or if it’s just numbers going up.

From what little I saw in the demo, it looks promising. A simple, solid dungeon crawler for all the uncs out there who mapped their own dungeons. It’s not as tough as the old games (for now, at least), but if it delivers on what it promises, it’ll scratch that dungeon diving itch well.

Download the demo for Underkeep here.

Conclusion

That was the Next Fest for February 2026. Lots of demos played, not very many good ones. The ones I did play that were good, were pretty great. Divinum, Soul Quest, Denshattack! and Don’t Kill Them All were my favorites. The others I recommended, I’ll keep an eye out for, and the ones I bashed can stay buried in the backpages of Steam.

This Next Fest had a lot of multiplayer demos I ignored. A lot of open world survival craft stuff. Not for me, sadly. Same with the dozens and dozens of Vampire Survivors clones. I can’t believe we’re still copying Vampire Survivors, and at such an insane rate.

I keep telling people indie games is where the creativity is at, then I see the new section in Steam, and it’s full of Vampire Survivors clones. Or “X game, but other thing”. Makes my arguments hard to defend.

Not to mention all the AI garbage. I don’t care if you only use it for your game’s cover, I don’t like it. It’s lazy. That’s the first thing people see, and if I see it’s AI generated, I’ll assume the rest of your game is just as lazy.

Despite all this, and my negativity, I’d say I enjoyed this Next Fest. Finding games like Denshattack! And Croak made the whole thing feel worth it. That’s how it is with gaming, in general. There’s a sea of garbage, with one or two diamonds hiding in it. You just need to put in the work to dig through it and sort out all the slop. There’s a fortune that’s yours for the taking, but you’ll have to find it first. I left everything I own in One Piece.

In this case One Piece is any game that doesn’t make you feel like shit while playing it.

Now, join me in a celebratory sea shanty to close out the day’s events!

YAYO YA-YO! DREAMIN! DONT GIVE IT UP GAMER.

The Demo Man Returns

Thousands of demos have been unleashed on an unsuspecting public, and I’m here to play a very small fraction of them and tell you what I think.

Demos are listed in no particular order.

Wild Blue Skies

A group of former StarFox 64 devs got together to make another game about furries in space. Wild Blue Skies is a spiritual successor to Star Fox, which is to say, it’s Star Fox again. I’m a huge fan of the N64 game, so I welcome it, but at the same time, I’m thinking asking myself why I’d play this when I could just play the original. The devs answer by making a game that’s both reminiscent of the old, with enough new to keep things interesting.

Wild Blue Skies is a 3D rail shooter. You fly around in a little space ship, shooting at enemies and avoiding obstacles while constantly moving forward. You can move in all eight directions, boost to move a little faster, brake to slow down, and do a barrel roll to reflect incoming projectiles. You can do everything you could in Star Fox 64, with the exception of the loop-de-loop. A glaring omission, in my opinion.

For offense you have your laser, a lock-on shot and a bomb. The lasers are your basic shot, good for shooting at stuff. You can’t rhythmically tap the shot button to get rapid fire lasers anymore, which is a bit of a shame. That was a nice little bit of tech you could do in the N64 game which gave it a little bit of depth. The lock-on shot explodes when it hits an enemy, letting you take out multiple ships at once, giving you a score bonus. The bomb is sort of there.

Star Fox 64 wasn’t a difficult game, so Wild Blue Skies tries to be a little tougher to please the more hardcore fans who have replayed the original dozens of times. They do this by adding more enemies, which is good. They also made them a lot tankier, which isn’t very good.

Your basic laser is weak and can barely take enemies down, and some enemies can’t possibly be killed with them before they vanish from the screen. The upgraded shot is a necessity here. This is especially obvious during the boss. If you don’t have the good laser, you’ll develop a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome and die of old age before you defeat it. Other than that, the enemies shoot more projectiles, but they’re still passive. It feels more active than its predecessor, but it’s still a bit on the easy side.

The game’s presentation is a mixed bag. The graphics look nice, and the game runs well, but enemy designs, at least in the demo level, are very boring. They’re all dark, abstract blobs. Sure, the Star Fox series has always had these types of enemies that are just polygons stapled together, but they had better silhouettes and designs. The ones in Wild Blue Skies are rounded little blobs with not much to differentiate themselves. They also blend in with the demo stage’s dark, dreary background.

For me, the worst part about the presentation is the sound design. It’s limp. The voice acting is fine. It’s cheesy but endearing, a lot more Saturday morning cartoon than the N64 game, but every other sound lacks impact. Star Fox 64’s sound are iconic. The harsh, wobbly slapping sound that enemies make when shot, the crisp explosions, the way the pick-ups bleep and boop, and of course the wonderful explosions from the bosses. They were great with how the wind whistled. It was a great suite of sounds that gave the game a strong audio identity, one which Wild Blue Skies is sorely missing.

Your shots don’t make much of an impact when they hit, explosions are weak, the boss explodes but he just sort of poofs out. The pickups don’t make any interesting noises. It’s like every sound in this game needs a shot of espresso to perk it up. Make them louder, brighter, give them more oomph. The explosions need more bass. It’s one of those games you could play with your headphones off.

The game plays a lot like Star Fox, as you’d expect. The ship handles smoothly, it glides across the screen, there’s just enough inertia to sell the flight fantasy without making things unwieldy. It keeps a lot of the mechanics from its inspiration, like how your allies will ask for help during missions. It’s a lot more focused on routing. This time around there are more missable enemies. If you’re not ready, you can miss out on certain foes that show up for a few seconds, and you have to position yourself in advance ready to take them down. There are more complex enemy formations that require better preparation to take down in one shot, for maximum score. They added collectible letters, like the ones in Donkey Kong Country, where you collect WILD, each little token hidden in special enemies across the stage. It also gives you a medal for the stage if you beat a target score. You also have new scoring bonuses for completing the stage without taking damage, with your squad alive and for killing the boss quickly. It’s a faithful recreation of its forefather, with some fun new twists.

I recommend Wild Blue Skies. If you like Star Fox, you’ll like this, since they’re pretty much the same game. If you’ve never played Star Fox, you should still give this a shot. It’s fun, and the demo is really short, so you won’t waste much time if you don’t like it. The sound design is like having a wet noodle in your ear, though. They really need to fix that.

Download Wild Blue Skies demo here.

GUN.DOG.REVENGE.

Your dog’s been taken, now you gotta take… revenge!

GUN.DOG.REVENGE. Is a retro-inspired 2D shooter. You walk to the right while shooting enemies and avoiding the dogs. You can’t hurt the dogs. If you do, you get a negative score penalty. Everything else is fair game.

You walk at a slow speed, but you have other ways of avoiding the enemy’s bullets. You can crouch underneath them, jump over them, or hide in a doorway. When an enemy shows up, shoot them. They won’t let you just kill them. People tend to avoid that sort of thing. They can duck under your bullets, too, and return fire from a crouched position. This simple high/low system gives the game a surprising amount of decision making. You always have to consider the possibility of an enemy dodging your shots, so you’d best be prepared to take action against it.

The shooting is complicated a little with the addition of a reload. This is one of the few instances of a reload done right. Your pistol has a limited magazine, but you get unlimited magazines. After eight shots, you need to reload manually. If you don’t you can’t fire. While reloading, you’re stuck in place for a second, so you need to find the right spot to do it. This gives you something to manage, and it introduces a nice wrinkle into the gameplay. It never feels intrusive or flow-breaking. If you find yourself with an empty gun, or just want to conserve ammo, you can also slash at enemies with a melee attack.

The game goes for a deliberately minimalist retro look, which it pulls off well. Everything is easily readable at a glance, and it looks nice. You can always tell what kind of enemy you’re facing and what they’re doing thanks to some clear, if funny looking stances. The music is good, too. High-energy synthwave tracks to keep you trucking forward.

The game is very basic, but a lot of fun. It feels like a forgotten classic from the NES era. The few mechanics it has are used very deliberately and to great effect. It captures that “simple, but tough” feeling of old-school games perfectly. It’s easy to learn, but when you’re up against multiple enemies, all firing at you, things get intense. I recommend it to anyone who wants a quick game that gets straight to the point.

Download the GUN.DOG.REVENGE. demo here.

Soul Quest

2D Devil May Cry, with better pacing.

Soul Quest is a 2D action hack n’ slash character action game. You beat up various magical enemies using your stylish sword skills. Send them up into the air and juggle them for as long as you can, thanks to the game’s generous air combat. There’s also some platforming thrown in, which is less intrusive than in other games like this.

The combat is the game’s main focus, and there’s some cool stuff here. You have your basic 3-hit light combo, a 3-hit heavy combo, and a bunch of air moves. You can chain from almost anything into anything; it’s very free-form.

The combat’s mostly about launching enemies. You can send enemies flying very easily, and you can keep them in the air for as long as you can manage.

The way you can maneuver in the air and juggle enemies reminds me of Smash Brothers, but a lot more exaggerated. Air movement is a little floaty, with full control over your jumps. You can launch enemies, then re-launch them in midair, or spike them down. There are a lot of aerial moves, like a cyclone attack and a lunging drill. They all combine to make a very intuitive air combat system. You can throw enemies around with a lot of control, letting you move them to more advantageous positions, or just send them off a cliff into their death.

With these sorts of games, whenever you introduce air combat, there’s always a risk of it being the dominant strategy, but Soul Quest manages to work around this well. In similar games, when you launch an enemy, you keep them in the air while their buddies are stuck on the ground unable to do anything to you. In Soul Quest, there are a lot of enemies that can still hit you in mid-air. Enemies that launch projectiles, others that fly or some that are tall enough to just smack you out of the air from the ground. This ensures that your air combos are earned, and still dangerous. A good compromise, which lets you style on your enemies while still keeping some brain activity going.

There is a slight downside to the air combo system. It’s a little easy to send an entire room of enemies flying and keep them there, disproving that Newton guy who said “what comes up must come down”. What does he know? I think this could be remedied by limiting how many air moves you can do in one jump. You can keep cycling your re-launches and other options, and never come down. If you had to touch the ground to reset your air options, it would make the combat a little more challenging.

That’s not to say that the game is easy. The enemies you face are pretty simple, but they are combined well to make fights more difficult. You have to maneuver around the enemies, and find ways to bunch them up, or focus on the more dangerous enemies first. The combat is very active.

The game’s presentation is great. Clean pixel art with great colors and smooth, cool looking animations. The enemies all look interesting, with clear silhouettes. The music ramps up as you fight, getting more exciting the higher your style rank, and it stops when you get hit. The music itself fits the game well. It’s nice and upbeat. The overall sound design is good, too.

I recommend Soul Quest. It’s a solid action game with some cool mechanics and great fights. There are some platforming sections, and they don’t interrupt the flow of the game like in Bayonetta or DMC. If you like stylish action games, give this a shot. I suggest playing it on hard for the full experience.

Download the Soul Quest Demo here.

RUIN: Beast City

You’ve heard of Suda 51, now get ready for Suda 5 and a half.

RUIN: Beast City is a boss fight action game heavily inspired by Killer7 and Furi. You take on various bosses in close-quarter combat. It looks like one of Suda 51’s lost works. One that should have stayed lost.

The game is style over substance. You start by walking to the boss in an auto-walk sequence like the ones in between the bosses in Furi. Then you fight a boss. The fights are fast close-quarters affairs where you and your opponent trade blows. It sounds great on paper, but falls apart in practice. Much like paper, the combat is also thin and flimsy.

The boss fights are parry-fests that play out more like a game of Simon Says than an actual fight. You dodge when the boss does one attack, parry another and use your gun counter when he uses the gun counter attack. When you survive the boss’s attack string, you get your turn to attack. There’s no spacing, movement doesn’t matter. All you do is parry and attack when the game says you can.

I beat the first boss of the demo with one hand, using two buttons: parry and attack. It’s like a rhythm game without a beat.

The game uses a unique health mechanic. It’s unique in the same way making a house out of Styrofoam would be unique. Sure, it’s new, but why would you? Your health and the boss’s health is tied together in a sort of tug of war system. You attack the boss, you recover it, he attacks you, you lose it. The goal is to get your health bar to full, then you can win the fight. The problem with this is that, if you make a mistake, the boss heals. This makes fights go on for longer than they should. Instead of chipping away at the boss steadily, your progress can be erased if the boss decides to string together a few attacks.

The game’s presentation is pretty bad. The graphics look nice. They’re reminiscent of Killer7, near to plagiarizing, but it looks slick and stylish. The animations, on the other hand, are pretty bad. Attacks are weird looking, stiff and happen quickly, which is terrible in a parry-focused game where you have to react to your opponent’s attacks.

The sound design is non-existent. Every attack has the same cheap “whoosh” sound and a metallic clang if it’s parried. The characters don’t have any voice acting, not even a grunt here and there. It makes the game sound empty. There’s a looping drum and bass track over the whole thing, because of course, drum and bass/breakbeat is the hot new shorthand for style thanks to ULTRAKILL. It just plays. I’m serious about the looping thing. It loops over and over, re-starting with the intro. It’s not even a clean loop.

There’s also a ton of slowdown and hit-stop. Whenever you land a hit, the game stops for a few milliseconds, to make it look impactful. This makes the game feel choppy and slow. Every single attack triggers hit stop, every dodge triggers a slow down, certain moves put you in a long block animation. It’s like trying to play the game by sending your inputs through carrier pigeon.

I do not recommend RUIN: Beast City. It’s pure style over substance, and what little substance there is isn’t worth checking out. If this game looks kind of interesting to you, go give Furi a try. I guarantee you’ll have a much better time with that one.

You can download the demo for RUIN: Beast City here, but I don’t think you should.

Mace Knight

It needs a little something.

Mace Knight is a top-down wave survival game where you attack with a big, heavy mace. Instead of swinging it around, like some boring, normal knight, you drop it on the ground and then it flies back to you, killing anything in its way.

The mace mechanic is interesting. Its chain has a limited range, so you have to position yourself well to use it, then put the enemy between you and the mace to kill it. It keeps you active and moving around the stage, interacting with the enemies and such.

The game’s presentation is alright. Catchy chiptune music and the graphics are colorful and neat looking.

The thing is that the game’s main mechanic is very simple. It’s fun at first, but it doesn’t have anything else going for it. Once you use it a few times, you can’t help but think “that’s it?”. There aren’t any cool tricks to pull with the mace. It doesn’t have physics, so you can’t use its acceleration to swing it around or do anything like that. Once you put it down, it’s a static interaction. You let go, the chain retracts, enemy dies. It doesn’t have any other features. There are different maces you can unlock, like one that heals you if you hold it, but that’s it. I was expecting more.

The enemies are pretty interesting. It takes a while to ramp up in difficulty, but the boss is tough, and it has some interesting attack patterns, but the way in which you interact with the game world with the mace is very one-note.

I didn’t really like it, but you could check it out if it looks interesting. It’s a cool concept for a game, it just needs a “but”, or something to add just a bit more depth.

Download the demo for Mace Knight here.

Portal Brawlers

I’m always on the lookout for a good beat-’em-up. I’m still on the lookout for a good beat-’em-up.

Portal Brawlers is a 2D beat-’em-up set in a fantasy world. It takes some inspiration from Golden Axe and Chronicles of Mystara, with its spells and light RPG mechanics. They were inspired by those games. I don’t think they actually played them. Maybe they saw them in a magazine or something and thought they looked cool, because this game was made by someone who has never played a videogame before.

I like beat-’em-ups, and I am very critical of them. I hold them to a higher standard. They’re not button mashers. Sure, their gameplay is simple, that simplicity means you can’t skimp out on solid fundamentals and good basics. You have to be able to see those fundamentals, and appreciate them.

I don’t even have to break out the fancy concepts for Portal Brawlers. It just sucks, on every conceivable level.

You can move around, and that’s about it. That’s the only thing the game does right. Your punches exist, and you can use them to hit the enemies, and when you do you stun lock them for ages and they die. The enemies don’t have access to this arcane magic known as “punching”. They walk up to you and put their faces out for you to smack them. Even saying “them” is generous. There are at most three enemies on screen at a time. Most of the time you’re going up against one guy, and they don’t do anything.

Your punches do a better job of stunlocking you, in fact. If you do your basic combo, you get locked into a long animation, and you can get hit out of it. That is, if there’s another enemy on screen.

If I actually try to look at this as a beat-’em-up, it’s missing the most basic things. It has a jump attack, and it’s just there to send an enemy flying. Your jumps are extremely floaty, it’s like you’re on the moon. There’s a dash attack, but it usually misses, and for some reason, whenever you dash attack you slow down to a crawl like the game suddenly went down to 2 frames per second.

The presentation is a mess. The graphics look amateurish, but kind of okay.

The sound design is demonic. It’s like something that would be used by the CIA for interrogation purposes (allegedly). The game starts with a two second music loop that sounds like a Casio keyboard drilling your inner ear. This repeats all throughout the first stage. The second stage’s music has more than four notes, at least. They broke the bank and went for five. It still sounds like an alarm clock from hell. The enemies all make this horrible grumbling noise when they’re hit.

It’s surprising how everything in this game is terrible. I hate to be rude to indie devs like this. They work had on their games. I don’t feel bad for ragging on Portal Brawlers.

Don’t download the Portal Brawlers demo, but it’s here if you still want it.

Tax Return

Tax Return? More like Return This Game. If the devs don’t put any effort into their game, I won’t put any effort into roasting it.

This is a 2D platformer shooter. You play as a guy with a shotgun. It’s very bad.

Your gun has less range than a punch, enemies are mostly static and throw stuff at you, the levels look like they were randomly generated. If they were designed by a human, they should say they were randomly generated, because claiming authorship for these levels is like claiming responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis. Just say the machines did it, and absolve yourself of the guilt.

If I had played this for free on Newgrounds back in 2005, I would have asked for a refund. I feel I’m owed reparations for playing this thing.

I’d tell the developer to try harder, but that would imply he tried in the first place.

Here’s the demo, but why would you?

Ekoman

My first draft for this section would have gotten me banned off Substack.

Ekoman is supposedly a game. I don’t know what it is. The trailer on the store page shows some kind of 3D brawler. I wouldn’t know. I started the demo and it had a terrible, unskippable cutscene. AI-generated voice reading off a terrible script written by someone who hates language. You can press space to fast forward, but it just overlays the dialogue while playing the cutscene at regular speed.

It says the game used AI for the translation. Translation from what to what? From slurs to English? Is this even English?

Even typing one paragraph about this game feels like too much work. Whoever put this on the store should be shoved in a locker.

Not linking to the demo for this one.

Slash-Out

It’s Punch-Out.

Slash-Out is a first-person 1v1 combat game. It plays like Punch-Out.

The main difference is its directional attack system. In Punch-Out, you dodge attacks that can come from the left or right. In Slash-Out, they come from the right, left, top or bottom. Four ways. You can block in those directions and attack in those same directions.

The four way attack thing sounds cool on paper, and it’s what made me try the game, but it’s kind of flat in practice. Like paper. Wait, I made this joke already.

The direction in which you attack doesn’t seem to matter. At least not in the first two fights. I thought since you could attack in any direction, it meant you had to attack in certain ways to hit specific parts of your enemy. Like if they have a shield on one side, you hit them on the other, but no. Your sword just hits the enemy, doesn’t matter where. You can’t attack from certain directions to intercept enemy attacks, either. You can only hit your opponent when the game lets you. There’s a discrete attack and defense phase. It’s not like in Punch-Out where you can weave in quick jabs between dodges if you find an opening.

The game has a cool retro pseudo vector graphic look to it, which is nice. It sounds okay.

The game’s directional gimmick is just that, a gimmick. It never uses it for anything interesting. Like RUIN: Beast City, which I mentioned earlier, the fights are very Simon Says. This one is almost literally Simon Says, since the second boss previews her attacks before she does them, so you have to memorize her sequence and then repeat it when she tries to hit you.

The base concept is alright. This is a very alright game. It could have done a lot more with its base mechanic, a lot of obvious things, but it doesn’t. It takes a lot from Punch-Out but it feels like a step back in every way, from the characters to the game’s speed and pacing, the challenge and the player’s freedom. Punch-Out is already a very binary game, making it even more railroaded is impressive.

Download the demo for Slash-Out here.

Dyping Escape

Mario teaches typing spooky creepy pasta.

Dyping Escape is a text-based interactive story. You type the sentences that appear on screen, and spooky stuff happens. It breaks the fourth wall, telling you things about your computer, specifying individual parts and referring to them by their name and anything else you can get by querying MSINFO 32. It’s about a spooky entity in the game trying to take control of your PC and then you.

It has some neat tricks. The aforementioned PC info stuff is interesting. A spooky game that breaks the fourth wall is always enjoyable, but when it starts mentioning your RAM’s memory, it adds a little sprinkle of something extra on top.

The presentation is great, with lots of glitchy effects to simulate your system taking a dump, and some well done minimalist drawings. Good atmosphere.

The thing with this one is that it’s not really a game. You interact with stuff every now and then, but you’re not really doing anything. You type what the game wants you to type, and you watch stuff happen. It’s like a cutscene with really long quick time events.

I thought this would be more of a puzzle, where you had to figure out loopholes to what the game is trying to get you to type. Maybe there would be some meta-puzzles, where the game does some weird stuff like write to a .txt file and you look for it, or do some basic problem solving. Anything, really, other than just typing to advance a predetermined cutscene. I think you can fail, if you run out of time, but the timer is so generous I never saw anything come of it. I didn’t want to sit and wait for it to countdown, either. I didn’t have all day.

It’s a neat little experience. Check it out if you like horror fiction with a technological theme, or if you like more story-driven, less interactive games. I don’t think I’ll be checking it out when it releases. Again, I just with it had at least a little bit more to it than the typing. This kind of story game isn’t for me.

This one was requested by GreatGoose. Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t mesh well with these kinds of games. “Games”.

Download the demo for Dyping Escape here.

Denshattack!

Bouncing up and down, doing tricks on it (and by “it” I mean… my train)

Denshattack! Is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but with trains. Sort of. Lionel’s Pro Trainer. Lionel coin bank, Lionel coin bank, Lionel coin bank. You drive a little train across different levels in a Jet Set Radio version of future Japan. Drive dangerously, avoid obstacles, jump and do sick tricks while keeping your speed. It’s more like SSX with a train, now that I think about it. Lionel coin bank.

Your movement is limited to the rails, as is tradition with trains, but there’s a lot to do while going clickety clack down the track. There are obstacles in the way, that force you to switch tracks, or jump over them. There are turns, and you need to brake to take them without derailing, which has a little mini-game where you time your brake to get a boost. You can also jump and do tricks in the air.

Each stage plays out like a Pro Skater level, with different goals in each stage. There are collectibles, a secret tape, stage-specific challenges like destroying two bridges or finding toolboxes. Each stage also has bonus points for completing them under a set time and without crashing, which is a lot harder than you’d think.

The trick system is taken from Skate, of all places. You flick the right analogue stick in different directions to do kickflips, heelflips, impossibles and all sorts of flip tricks. It’s a train, you can’t really do much other than flip it. If you do more complex movements, you get harder tricks that give you more points. It was a cool system in Skate, and it’s translated perfectly here into Denshattack!

The game’s presentation is a highlight. The graphics are bright, colorful and cartoony. Everything is stylized, with thick outlines and flat, saturated colors. It takes inspiration from Jet Set Radio, but it has its own visual identity. It doesn’t feel like it’s ripping it off. The UI and loading screens are fantastic, too, with monochrome illustrations that look very striking. It has an anime-adjacent art style that looks cute.

The music is a lot of fun. High-energy, funky tracks to get you in the mood to flip a train. The sound design is a bit weak, unfortunately. Sound effects lack that metallic punch you’d expect when jumping a train 60 feet into the air. Riding on the tracks doesn’t make any noise, nor is there an engine sound or anything like that. If you don’t notice it, it’s not too bad, but once you do, it’s hard to ignore. Their absence is felt.

The game manages to mix in enough little mechanics to keep it from feeling too restrictive. You’re still tied to tracks, and most of the things you do are reflex/timing challenges, but it’s a lot of fun. It has a very arcadey feel to it. It has big, ridiculous set pieces, where the camera goes flying all over the place, and you ride into a volcano and dodge flaming rocks, or ride on top of a giant ferris wheel. It reminds me of the insanity you’d see in old Midway games like Arctic/Hydro Thunder. The fact that you have to memorize the stages to optimize them gives them an arcade feel, too. Some good ol’ routing and optimization.

I recommend Denshattack! It’s a ton of fun. Its premise is unique. Making a game about a train means there are some limitations, but the developers found very clever and creative ways to circumvent them, while also implementing them into the gameplay in interesting ways. The end result is an engaging, chaotic thrill ride that’s sure to entertain anyone with a pulse. Lionel coin bank.

Download the demo for Denshattack! here.

Airframe Ultra

Combat and racing that combine like graham crackers and spray cheese.

Airframe Ultra is a futuristic combat racing game. Drive hover bikes like the ones in Jet Moto, use weapons, hit your enemies, make them feel pain. The game is split between two distinct modes: combat and racing. You race, then you fight in an arena. This repeats a few times until a winner is you.

The racing controls feel great. The machines have a nice sense of weight and inertia to them, and the analogue acceleration and steering give you precise control over them. The steering is arcadey, and fun.

Too bad you spend only half of your time racing. The other is spent in a battle mode type deal where you drive around a small arena shooting at your opponents. You pick up weapons, and use them. You can’t just pick them up, no, that’d be too easy. You need to buy them, and to do that, you need money. This leads to moments where you’re waffling around the arena trying to pick up a pea shooter, but you keep getting blown up by someone with a handheld nuke. Imagine if you had to buy the rocket launcher in Quake.

There are also some on foot arenas, which are baffling. Your character lumbers around, shooting at others with auto-aim. There doesn’t seem to be much finesse to it. It’s like playing Street Fighter with your little cousin and you’re both mashing.

The game’s presentation is interesting. The visuals are meant to emulate a PS1 game, but with every screen effect thrown on at the same time, like the artist just discovered the filters in photoshop. The music is the standard drum and bass you put in these retro-inspired games. Drum and bass is to modern indie games what chiptune was to indie games in the 2010s.

The game is fine, but I would have liked it to be purely about racing. That’s what I was expecting, at least. Truth be told, I don’t really know why I thought it’d be about racing. Maybe because it looks like a Jet Moto clone- I mean- spiritual successor, or “inspired by”. I assumed that because of the jet bikes, but that was me making assumptions. I’ve seen videos of this game on YouTube a few times in the past years, and every one I’ve seen just makes it look like “Screen effects: The game” and hints at some racing aspect.

I don’t really gel with the battle half of the game. It’s like all kart racing battle modes, kind of fun for a few minutes, then it gets annoying. Except in this one, you don’t just grab a power up and use it, you need to go through the rigmarole of buying them with money, which you get by racing. This is a winmore mechanic. If you’re ahead, you get more money, which you use to get better guns, to stay ahead.

I don’t really recommend Airframe Ultra. It’s nowhere near awful, but it’s not for me. Its racing basics are nice, but underbaked, and the battle part of the game is really weak, but you’re forced to do it. It’s like playing Mario Kart with that one annoying kid that kept making you play Battle Mode. The fact that the camera doesn’t stay behind you while driving is a sin, too. I know it’s so you can see around you during the battle mode, but it makes the races a pain in the ass. Again, the battle mode dragging us all down.

Overall, a weird mix that doesn’t really go together, but there might be a niche for it. Kind of like pregnancy craving snacks. No one in their right mind would eat an oyster, jelly and pickle sandwich, but hey, if you get the itch for it, it’s available. Or if you’re the annoying kid who makes everyone else play battle mode. This game’s for you. Maybe next time they’ll make a game for the kid who invited you over to his house to play videogames, but hogged the PlayStation and made you watch him play singleplayer games.

This is a multiplayer game, by the way. I didn’t know at the time.

Download the demo for Aiframe Ultra here.

Escape from the Black Monolith

Escape from the Black Monolith is a first person shooter. You’re falling out of a building, and you can move in all four directions, avoiding enemy fire. There are other weapons. I think.

The gun you start with is slow, and it only has two shots before it needs to reload. Enemies don’t do much. They sort of float around and fire at you every few days.

I made it to the first boss, then it gave me a prompt which was on screen for around 0.5 seconds, then I got jumpscared by a giant pyramid eating the level. Then the level restarted, and I moved too far to one side and got jumpscared by the giant pyramid again. It has a long animation before you can retry, and the game wasn’t grabbing me, so I didn’t want to wait for the game to reload.

The presentation is mixed. The graphics are amateurish, but charming. The audio design is where this falls apart. I’ve found that most of these games are mixed in a tin can. The music is a grating loop, perfect for enhanced interrogation. Every other sound is like a mouse fart. I will not elaborate.

This is a game jam project by one developer. It will be free on release. That seems a bit expensive to me. I’ll wait for a sale.

Download Escape from the Black Monolith here.

Super Alloy Crush

What if Mega Man… but bad?

Super Alloy Crush is a 2D beat-’em-up/shoot-’em-up. It’s Mega Man, but boring. You can pick between two characters: Zero with boobs (I know Zero had boob lights, but this one has actual gazongas), or Mega Man with a scarf. No, not the Mega Man with a scarf from X Command Mission, or Proto Man. You go through levels and shoot stuff.

I can’t really say you do much of anything in this game. The demo stage is the most boring thing imaginable. There are a few enemies along the way, but they’re so passive they might as well be training dummies. They don’t react to your existence, and they can be ignored safely. They’re not placed in inconvenient locations or blocking your path. Not that there’s a path to block, since there isn’t any platforming to do. Sure, you jump to get to a higher elevation, but there are no stage hazards, no pits, no moving platforms, nothing. You can get to the end of the stage by walking past everything.

Each character has their own combat style. Boob Zero uses her claws to do melee attacks. She has all sorts of big attacks with cool animations and combos. Too bad you never use them against anything that can defend itself. It’s like you’re Mike Tyson beating up an 80-year old. Not-Mega Man uses a blaster. It shoots.

The presentation is nice. Good pixel graphics, nice colors, okay art style, cool character designs, smooth animations and Boob Zero bounces on the pause screen. The music is pretty good. It’s copying its sound from the PS1 Mega Man X games, and those sound amazing, so its derivative would sound decent, at least, and they nailed decent.

Can’t say the same about the rest of the game. Mega Man games are simple, mechanically speaking, but they make up for that with great level design and enemies that are actual obstacles to overcome. Super Alloy Crush does neither of these. It has a boring level with big, empty rooms, senseless platforming, no obstacles and enemies that are about as threatening as those letter your ISP sends when they catch you torrenting.

I got conned by this game. It appealed to my Mega Man fan brain, and it betrayed that trust. It stinks. It’s dumb and mindless. Why would I bother with this when I could play any other Mega Man game?

If you say something like “it’s just the demo, maybe the rest of the game gets better” no. That’s bullshit. Why would you put out a demo featuring your most boring stage? You’re supposed to hook the player, make them want to play more, not give them an empty room and a promise that the rest of the game might be better. Better than what? Than the nothing you gave us in the demo? You have to give the player something to trust before making that sort of proposition.

I don’t recommend this. They have the building blocks for a game, now they just need the game part.

Download the demo for Super Alloy Crush here.

Don’t Kill Them All!

You’ve heard of Tactics Ogre, here we have Tactics Orc.

Don’t Kill Them All is a turn based tactical game where you manage a party of orcs and try to keep their rage in check. Your goal is to go to an area, and get resources to upgrade your base. You do this by defeating enemies in turn-based battles. The enemies will try to kill your orcs, but more importantly, they want to destroy your resources, and you can’t let that happen. Every time anything happens to an orc or a resource, the orcs get angry. If they get too angry, they go into an uncontrollable rage and act on their own, hitting enemies, allies or any resources they find. If all your orcs rage, the expedition is a bust and you return to base empty handed. Then you probably get flogged or something.

The game’s rage system is a unique take on the health bar. Instead of life, your orcs’ existence is dictated by their rage. Taking damage increases their rage. If a resource is destroyed, they get angry, too, meaning that if the environment takes damage, so does your party. Enemies will target resources as often, if not more often than your own units, so getting them away from your precious treasure is a top priority.

To keep their grubby mitts off your stuff, you have a variety of options. You can smack them with your weapons, which is inconvenient but gets the job done. You can also use a variety of displacement abilities to move the enemy or the resource. If an enemy is about to hit a rock, you can push the enemy away, and they’ll attack the ground next to the rock, or just move the rock out of harm’s way.

You can also move your orcs around, which is useful when enemies attack. When an enemy is about to strike, it marks an area, and any orcs caught in it can’t move out of it without triggering the attack. They can’t move on their own, but they can be moved. You can push your allies out of the way, or move the enemy so they attack somewhere else.

The meat of the game is about moving things around so you can attack without ruining anything. Your orcs’ attacks are massive and brutish, as you’d expect form an orc. Every weapon has an area of effect, meaning if you want to attack an enemy in one tile, you have to hit an entire city block as well. The hammer, for example, hits a 3x3 area of 9 squares, which is massive. There’s never a 3x3 area clear of resources or allies, making this a tough weapon to use.

The massive attacks are a bit limiting. Maybe I’m playing it wrong, but most of the time, I found I couldn’t do much with the hammer because there’s always something in the way. The maps are too small for that kind of tomfoolery.

The displacement aspect reminded me a bit of Metal Slug Tactics. Deceptively simple tools that have a lot of applications. Things like moving a unit one square don’t sound very exciting, but in the game’s context, it has a lot of powerful applications.

Each combat feels like a complicated puzzle. There are layers of intertwining attacks to consider, optimal turn orders and multiple hazards to watch out for. It only takes one stray hit to break a random log, which sends your entire party into a cursing fit of rage. It’s very intense, and a lot of fun.

The game’s presentation is fantastic. Extremely polished. It has Klei’s signature cutesy Tim Burton-adjacent 2D/3D art style, which is weird since this game isn’t from Klei. It looks one-to-one like a Klei game, though. I love how those games look, and I love how Don’t Kill Them All looks. The orcs are dopey and cute, ironic for a bunch of bloodthirsty killers. Each enemy has a nice design, you can tell what they are at a glance, the battlefield is clear and readable, and the UI elements do a good job of telling you what everything does and where. Inventory management and other things might become a problem down the line, as it tends to happen in these kinds of games, but from what I’ve seen, it looks like they know what they’re doing.

I’ve been complaining about sound design a lot, but finally, I get one that sounds good. The music is unique, with catchy melodies. Each area has its own theme. The music is nice to listen to, but it doesn’t get annoying or interrupt your train of thought. Everything has its own little sound, like the subtle clicks when you hover over the tiles, attacks sound like they should and I like the orcs’ dumb little grunts.

I recommend Don’t Kill Them All. It’s a promising tactics game with some solid problem solving and fun mechanics.

Download the demo for Don’t Kill Them All here.

Espectro Fighter’s Focus

Still looking for that one good beat-’em-up.

Espectro: Fighter’s Focus is a beat-’em-up. You walk to the right and punch people. There’s not much to it other than that.

The stages are huge and empty for the amount of enemies you fight. This is something it has in common with previous heavy-hitter Portal Brawlers. You never go up against more than three enemies. You punch them, they get hit, then fall down. They don’t have any get up attacks, they’re easy to dominate and they don’t have any interesting behaviors. They walk up to you and present their face for punching.

When you grab an enemy, you can’t throw them. Baffling decision.

The presentation is bad. I kind of like the graphics, but the music is grating and the sound design stinks. It’s not good, which is another way to say bad. This paragraph is three sentences long and I’m already repeating myself.

I don’t recommend this. It’s bad, but it’s still kind of competent, at least. After playing Portal Brawlers, this looks like Streets of Rage- wait, no- let’s not get carried away.

Download the demo for Espectro: Fighter’s Focus here.

End of Part 1

Read part 2 for more even more demos.

A-Maze-Ing

The world is a lot simpler once you squish it down to a binary. Are you with us, or against us? Do you approve of this or disapprove? You might think there are two choices, but there are usually more, it’s just more convenient to simplify it.

Some things are more complicated, sure, but they get reduced to yes or no because they’re complicated. Taxation? Yes or no? Immigration? Yes or no? Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk? Yes or no?

Wait, that last one is complicated. VERY complicated, in fact. So complicated, it requires a massive, rambling screed to discuss.

Today, I’ll be taking a look at Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk. A game that I played for over 60 hours, but still can’t decide whether I like it or not. It has a lot of good things, and an equal number of bad things. It’s a mess of systems that are never explained, but those same systems are somehow harmonious and fun to play around with. The game doesn’t ever expect you to, sadly. The game doesn’t expect much from me, much like my dad, but it’s still a good time that’s marred by terrible choices and some annoying UI mistakes.

Read on if you want to know which side of the binary Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk falls into. Should you play it, or should you Labyrinth of refrain from playing this?

I’ll see myself out.

Gameplay

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a first person dungeon crawler RPG. You make a party of little puppet soldiers, then descend into a dungeon where you explore, find treasure and fight monsters in turn-based battles.

The dungeon exploration takes place in first person. You move around in real-time and navigate a maze. Your objective in these is usually to find a red exclamation mark and get an event that progresses the story.

Whenever you run into an enemy, you go into a turn-based battle like in most RPGs. Here, you give orders to your soldiers to attack, defend or use other techniques to defeat your enemies. Your puppets can attack with weapons, use different spells, or block to defend. You can also give them individual orders to use items, or boost their attack and/or defense for one turn using a limited resource called Reinforcements.

This game’s most prominent feature is the Covenant system. Instead of having a party of five characters, you have a party of five Covenants, which are groups of soldiers. Instead of giving orders to each party member individually, you do it through their covenant. If you have a group of 3 guys in one party and order them to cast Fire, the entire group will use their collective stats to cast one instance of fire, not 3 separate fires. Attacking is different. When you attack, they attack individually. There’s a lot to cover in that system, so I’ll elaborate on it a little further on, along with a lot of other systems.

The basic flow of the game is what you’d expect from this kind of thing. You explore the dungeon, fight enemies, find items and loot, level up your characters and take on more challenges.

There are different character classes, ways to re-level your characters to make them stronger, item synthesis, which lets you make stronger equipment, and many more ways to make your numbers go up.

It’s a pretty convoluted tangle of rules that work alright with each other. To better understand them, they have to be explained, and there’s a lot of them, but the general idea with them is that they’re okay on paper, have a lot of problems in execution, but somehow manage to be a little greater than the sum of their parts.

These systems are a little wasted in the game, since you don’t need to use them too much to beat the game. The game is hard, but in an RPG way, where you need bigger numbers to progress at certain points. Good thing there’s a system to increase your experience gain. That sounds like it’s a convenience for the player, but in reality, it’s a sign that you will need to stack EXP to level up in astronomical quantities, which isn’t far from the truth.

There main problem with the game’s difficulty is its RPG aspect. You have all these mechanics to work with, but for most of the game, you can get away with over leveling and brute-forcing most of the challenges. This is a problem I have with RPGs in general.

The game does require you to understand and use its multiple systems at the very end, which is frustrating. Most of the game is a numbers-based cakewalk, then the second-to-last boss and the final story boss both make you wail and obnubilate as you get clobbered by “The Spell That Kills You” over and over without really knowing how to mitigate it.

The core gameplay is relatively simple, just some RPG combat and number-mogging. The dungeons are quite straightforward, with not much in the way of puzzle solving, just a few traps that boil down to “this place is full of poison gas”, which is a bit of a letdown, but it works fine for the most part.

There’s a story there, too. Lots of text. So much so that it even gets its own section here.

Before that, we gotta elaborate on the gameplay, which means taking a magnifying glass to this game’s pile of seemingly incongruent systems. Get ready, because this is going to be almost as long and bloated as the game itself.

Covenant system

To really understand how Labyrinth of Refrain works, you need to understand the covenant system. In most RPGs, I’d say around 99% of them, your characters are the basic building blocks of your party. You have a character with a class and stats, their own identity, and they have their own job and role in the group. If you have a wizard named Merlin, he knows the fireball spell and maybe lightning, as an example. In Labyrinth of Refrain, things work in a different, and much less intuitive way.

Instead of having your characters be the thing that knows spells and such, these are handled by the covenants. Covenants are like squads; groups of characters you put together within your party, and they act as one. They attack as one and defend as one, with some specific exceptions. In Labyrinth, Merlin isn’t the one who knows fireball and lightning. Merlin doesn’t know anything. His covenant is the one that dictates what spells he knows. If you want Merlin to cast fireball, you have to put him in a covenant that knows fireball.

These covenants can house up to three characters in them, but most covenants have less slots. Your party is made up of five covenants, meaning you can have up to fifteen puppets in your party. Fifteen active combatants. Once supports get involved, that number balloons up to 35.

This system, like everything else in this game, is like a russian nesting doll of mechanics, so I have to explain the supports. Each covenant has slots for supports, which are characters you put in the group that don’t do any active fighting. Having them in these slots provides passive bonuses to the active guys. Each covenant has specific slots with specific bonuses. VERY specific. For example, one covenant might have a support slot that gives you a 25% bonus to defense. Specifically the third support slot. So you put a puppet in the third slot, and you get that 25% defense bonus.

Now, if you thought this system was already restrictive and specific, wait ‘till you hear about the conditions. Some covenants place restrictions on what type of characters can be put in certain slots. There’s the Gossip Pact, which can only be filled by female characters. Some have class limitations, others require specific nature types, and some have slots that can only be filled if a character has an even lucky number. It’s rules on top of rules.

Now, with all these stipulations and conditions in mind, you can imagine how annoying it is to fill a party. First you need to find a covenant that does what you need. If you have one. You scroll through the list and read what spells come with each covenant, using the inconvenient UI. Then you place the covenant in your party. Next, you hope and pray that the characters you have can fit into that specific covenant to make use of it, and get some filler puppets to warm the benches in the support slots. Now that you have accommodated all your little guys (or gals), you can finally go on your way adventuring.

This system is a pain in the neck. If you need a specific role filled, you can’t just create a character to fill it, you need to get a covenant for it. Need some heavy magic damage? Look for a covenant that has offensive spells. Need regular damage? Things get complicated.

Covenants drop like items. There are some you can get by defeating specific bosses, meaning you only get one copy of it at a specific time in the game. Others drop like regular items, so if you need a specific covenant, you have to go hunting for it. You can have multiple copies of these. This means your party’s composition is dependent on what kind of covenants you have on hand.

The conditions aren’t as limiting as they seem on paper, but it’s still a nuisance. Most covenants are neutral, but whenever you want anything that’s actually useful, they usually have restrictions.

The worst restriction is the character limit. It’s like twitter back in 2009. Once you play the game enough and see through the matrix, you’ll realize that the most efficient strategy is to use as many 3-character covenants as possible. Each character you have out is an additional attack, so you want more of them, regardless of the covenant’s utility.

There are exceptions, like the offensive magic covenants, but these often have one very specific restriction: one or two characters. Most have only one.

Why is this a problem? Well, because everything in this game is numbers, and magic takes a lot of numbers to use. Spells are very expensive mana-wise. A character will have only enough mana to cast two or three spells before they run dry, and for most of the game, a single character’s spell power is very low. This means your very expensive fireball will only tickle your enemy and warm them up a bit.

This can be remedied by having more characters. Each character adds their mana to the covenant’s mana pool, which means more resources to cast spells. The less characters, the less mana, and the less attacks you can make per-turn.

There’s one covenant, Pecco’s Pact, that has very powerful elemental spells and even some healing magic. It’s limited to one character, and a few supports. It has a lot of utility, but you can’t make much use of it, since every spell is expensive and you only have one person in the slot. On top of this restriction, you have more conditions. In order to use the elemental spells, the thing you’d pick this for, you need to put supports into specific slots. If these slots are empty, you can’t use the spells. When you have someone there, it lets you use the spells, but it also doubles their mana cost. So you end up in a situation where you have one mage all by themselves, who can barely cast a spell, then you need to get another body in the support slot to use that already expensive spell, and it raises the mana cost by even more.

Some covenants require you to sacrifice a support to use, adding even more limitations to an already restrictive system.

One more thing. Covenants also cost reinforcements. That’s… that’s another number I’ll explain in a second. Just let me catch my breath. The more powerful covenants tend to be more expensive, but as you use them to fight, they level up, lowering their cost.

You can also put each group into either the front or back lines. Combining these gives you formations. Enemies are more likely to target the front line, but I’ve seen the back line take backshots just as often as any other. Maybe it’s a placebo or a very small statistical difference. Formations are pretty cool, giving you a layer of strategy to what physical configuration you put your army in. They give you bonuses to things like defense to certain positions, extra damage, more magic power and, if you put everyone on the backline, it lowers their damage but raises their defenses and makes them more likely to flee a battle. There’s some good stuff in this sub-system. Good job, devs.

Then there’s the items and how they interact with the covenants. You have three people in one slot, and everything affects them as one, but whenever you use an item, it affects them individually. If an entire group is killed, you have to revive them individually with items (in battle). If you want to heal them with a potion, individual target. Same thing with the very limited and frankly useless resistance items. You have to waste a character’s turn to give someone a resistance item that lasts for three turns. Same with the attack/defense boost; it only affects one puppet in a group.

This constant tug of war between individual and covenant is a lot like the conflict between the individual good and the greater good in society. A load of malarkey, and the tragedy of the commons sets in and no one thinks it’s their job to sweep the living room. What was I even talking about? Oh, right. The game.

A quick word on magic

Now that you have the context for how weird it is to find a spell you want, and how convoluted and expensive it is to use, then surely they must be extremely powerful.

They are. Contextually. They’re strong, but balanced by all the ridiculous limitations put on them. You don’t get any useful magic covenants for the first part of the game, and when you do, you can only use their spells once or twice before running out of mana. This isn’t much of a problem thanks to another mechanic I’ll get to later, but it’s still a limitation. In the early game, they’re the only way of dealing damage to multiple enemies, and they can deal decent damage to enemies that are weak to a specific element.

Utility spells, on the other hand, are kind of useless. First off, good luck finding any. Everything goes back to the covenant system, so if you want a specific utility spell, go look for that needle in the haystack of covenants clogging up your inventory. Once you find one, see if it meets your requirements. It usually won’t. For example, I had a hell of a time finding a useful defensive covenant. There were some that had defensive buffs, but they were weak, expensive and specific. If I want my frontline tanks to shield the rest of my party, I can’t, because the spell raises their own covenant’s defense, not everyone else’s. I could put my squishy little guys in that covenant and have them protect themselves, but I’d rather have them use their powers to kill monsters. Once I actually found a covenant with defensive buffs, I found it was more useful to just have my tanks block and take damage regularly. Tanks don’t have much mana to cast spells anyways.

Then there are the active defense spells, which are complete nonsense. These can counter specific types of damage. Again, like everything in this game, VERY specific. You have to go over every single covenant with a magnifying glass looking for the spell that reflects the one type of damage you want. You found the spell that reflects pierce damage, now you can use it against the boss that keeps piercing your dudes and turning them into shish kebabs. Great. You go into battle, you activate the spell and the boss doesn’t target that covenant with an attack. No big deal, just re-cast it in the next turn. You do that, and the boss hits you this time. Great! But he hit you with an attack that wasn’t piercing damage. Not great. No problem. I’ll re-cast it for a third time, and then I’ll get that juicy reflect aaaand your covenant is out of mana. The only reflection happening here is you reflecting on your choice to play this game.

Worry not, there’s the Phalanx Pact, with its wonderful Phalanx defensive formation! A late-game pact which has a stance that lets you reflect damage, no matter the type. Amazing! Finally, a defensive spell for the working man, and the covenant even has three slots! What a bargain! Except you didn’t read the fine print. The phalanx stance gives you a chance to deflect damage. For one turn, and it’s expensive. With bitter disappointment, you go back to guarding like normal.

There’s also the magic version of the Phalanx, which has a chance to deflect any magic damage. I used it on the final boss when it uses its “Spell that Kills You”, and it didn’t reflect. It doesn’t work against that one. Then I went against another boss and used the reflect spell when it unleashed its signature “Spell that Kills You”, and it didn’t work. It doesn’t reflect that, either. Whoops! Silly me. I guess I’m a drooling dumb-ass for thinking the magic reflect spell would reflect magic. Oopsie!

This is a perfect segue into debuff spells and their complete lack of purpose. Debuff spells in Labyrinth of Refrain work like debuff spells in any JRPG, meaning they don’t work. First off, finding a debuff in this game is like finding a vegetarian tiger. They’re just as useful as one, too. If you’ve played any JRPG, you know that bosses are immune to every single status effect. Same thing happens here.

There are some exceptions. There are two covenants which have a debuff spell that actually works. The reason why it works is because they’re necessary to fight specific bosses. One has a spell that SPECIFICALLY and ONLY works to debuff one of the secret bosses so you can damage her. The spell lists that one boss by name and the description is basically “Use this on Junon so you can actually damage her”. It’s technically a debuff since it removes her armor, but without it you can’t really damage her, so it’s less of a real debuff and more like using the blue key card on the blue door. That spell has zero effect on anything else. There’s also the Great Sage pact, a covenant with only ONE spell: a debuff for the final boss. This one is even more questionable, since it says it “weakens final boss and seals its abilities”. It doesn’t do that. When you use it, the boss takes a little more damage, and its spells only do 99% of your maximum health instead of killing you instantly.

If you’re thinking that the debuffs could be useful on regular enemies, then yeah, you’re right, but why would you do that? Why would you waste a turn putting a weak debuff on a regular enemy when you can set your party to auto attack and wipe them out without using any resources? Regular enemies don’t need any special strategy. Just whack them over the head until they die. You’ll have to fight an identical group of them again in a few seconds anyways. Save yourself the trouble.

I swear Dragon Quest is the only JRPG series where debuffs are actually useful. Stranger of Sword City, another dungeon crawler, also has spells that actually work. They even work on bosses! Imagine that. Using a debuff on a boss and have it actually do something. What a concept.

Character classes

Now that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the minutia of these convoluted systems, I can finally talk about the actual characters you use.

The game features eight classes (called “facets”). You start with six and can unlock two more as the game goes on. Since you already know that the covenants are the things with the spells, you know that the characters don’t do that. What do they do, then? They provide numbers, and a weapon.

Here’s a quick breakdown of each class so you know a few of their quirks:

• Aster Knight: The closest thing to a regular fighter. They’re well-rounded and use a spear to fight. They can have high damage and defense, depending on RNG, since a lot of their skills are luck-based. They can be male or female.

• Shinobushi: The assassin. Can dual-wield weapons if they’re proficient in them. Their main form of defense is dodging, and can deal a lot of damage with some preparation. Can be male or female.

• Theatrical Star: Dancer. A support-oriented class that uses a bell. Large mana pool, high charm which means they get targeted often. Usually put in the back row. Can be male or female.

• Marginal Maze: Mage. Since magic is tied to the covenants, these are mostly mana batteries. They have high magic power and a large mana pool. You can make a lot of these and put them in the support slots to boost magic. They fight with a lamp and can be in the front or the back. Can be male or female.

• Peer Fortress: Tank. Highly defensive, beefy class meant to take hits in place of your other soldiers. Uses Katars, which are bladed shields. Can intercept attacks meant for other targets. Can be male or female.

• Mad Raptor: Archer, but the game also mentions how they’re good at magic for some reason. They are backline assassins that dodge attacks and do big damage with random critical attacks. They use a crossbow. They have a skill that has a 10% chance to unleash a storm of attacks on every single enemy, which is great when it happens. These, like the shinobushi, can deal tons of damage in theory. We’ll get to that in a second. Can be male or female.

• Gothic Copellia: This is a coinflip character. They can deal massive damage at random, and they have a chance to stun their target. The first of the two unlockable classes you get later into the game. They use a hammer. These are useful as fodder for the upgrade system, which I’ll get to in a bit. This game has way too many systems, but I’ll cover them as they become relevant. This class is gender neutral. A true they/them. I thought this meant they could be put in any gendered slot, since they’re neutral, but no. Apparently they’re not neutral, but NOT-female and NOT-male at the same time. If a covenant slot requires a specific gender, they can’t be put in it. Some very rare covenants require Gothic Copellias specifically. They are very weird and when you get them, you don’t really know what to do with them, since they don’t seem to fit anywhere, and they’re new, so they’ll be a lot lower level than your already established party.

• Demon Reaper: Even more murderous assassin. A weird berserker. Like the other assassin classes, can theoretically deal a lot of damage, if the stars align. There’s a lot of RNG in this game. They’re ultra-high risk characters that thrive on danger. They gain more damage as they take damage, and become stronger as they lose parts. They use scythes, which are bizarre weapons that put everything into attack. When a scythe is equiped, it takes up both hands and the feet, meaning you can’t equip leg armor or a shield. Demon Reapers can only be female.

Like a lot of aspects of Labyrinth of Refrain, the characters seem deep and complicated at first, but you can flatten them down to their most significant bits. Mad Raptors are described as being “good at magic”, but then you have the Marginal Maze class which seems to do magic, too. Which one is better? The one with the highest numbers, which is the Marginal Maze. It has more magic power and a larger mana pool. You could also, theoretically, and if you’re being as efficient as possible, use only Aster Knights and Marginal Mazes and ignore everything else. The M. Maze has better numbers in magic, which means they can use support magic more efficiently than the dedicated supports, and the Aster Knights can deal damage and tank, which means they can replace every other class.

I ran a relatively balanced group thinking that each class had something to contribute to the team, but after several dozen hours, I found that you could overlook most of their traits and focus on numbers.

They have other traits, too. A lot of them. Stance, which is either Sun or Moon, which determines if they’re defensive or offensive. Changes very little, but some covenants restrict the stance type. Lucky number does something unexplained, and there are covenants that use the lucky number, including one late-game covenant that requires an even lucky number. You don’t know that until you get it. They have growth types, which determines how their stats are distributed when leveling up. Then there are their skills, which are class-specific and they are unlocked as the character gains levels. These are used in the Soul Transfer.

Guess it’s time to explain yet another system! Wahoo!

Soul Transfer

This is the class change/prestige system. You can take a character and transfer them into another body, resetting their level to one. With this you can change their class and even their stance and gender.

Why would you want to demote a character back to level one? To gain more numbers. When you transfer them, they get a stat called “Soul Clarity”, which means their base stats get higher. The more soul clarity, the more numbers. You can raise this up to 99. When you transfer a character, their level adds soul clarity. If you transfer a level 99 character, you get +20 soul clarity. This increase in numbers is considerable. A level 10 soul clarity 1 character is significantly weaker than a level 5 soul clarity 20 character.

When a character is transferred, their skills can be brought over, too. This lets you build stronger soldiers with cool skills. For example, take a Mad Raptor, take their Fancy Footwork skill, which raises your attack every time you dodge, combine it with the Theatrical Star’s Actor’s Tenacity skill, which also raises your attack when you dodge, and you get a character that can’t be hit, and gains massive attack boosts when it dodges.

There are a lot of combinations to mess around with, and the system is genuinely fun. You can make strong characters with weird traits, but there are some caveats. For one, transferring is best when you can get the skill you want and +20 soul clarity, and that’s done by taking a character to level 99 before transferring, which means a lot of grinding. The really good innate skills from each class can’t be transferred unless they’re level 99. The other thing is that a lot of the good skills are locked behind specific weapons, like the Mad Raptor’s skill where they can attack every enemy on screen multiple times, which is locked to crossbows only. You can plan around that sort of thing, but it’s still more restrictions.

This mechanic lets you make powerful characters, but it takes a long time. You have to raise your little puppets, give them a ton of experience and then transfer them to gain power. Some classes, like the shinobushi, are very strong, but they need some soul clarity and skills to get to their true potential, which isn’t obvious at first. Not much in this game is readily available.

I like this system. It lets you plan a build, and make something of your own. It’s one of the few mechanics in this game that isn’t a mess of RNG, so you feel like you have some control over it, and that you’re doing things strategically and with purpose. It’s also rewarding seeing your weak little puppets suddenly crit a boss for six-figures when they were struggling to kill a basic goblin a few hours ago.

Speaking of RNG and critical hits...

Gore system

If you’ve been good and RNGesus smiles upon you, you can perform something called a “Gore hit”, which is a double critical hit. It’s a super damaging attack that destroys a piece of the enemy.

Cool. That means you can target specific limbs on an enemy, and deal damage to them to weaken them and prevent them from doing stuff, right? Like, you have a tanky enemy, so you break its shell or something, and then it’s vulnerable to attack, right?

Well, that’s how it would work if this game were designed by rational people and not by flipping a coin. The gore system is presented as this grand, wonderful thing that will add depth and strategy to the game, but it’s another blast of RNG, and it’s completely antagonistic to the player.

First off, you can’t target body parts. If you get a gore hit, the part that gets damaged is completely random. This would be a problem, if gore hits had any strategic value, but they don’t. You can destroy an enemy’s parts, but it has no effect on them. Break a sword wielder’s right arm? They can still attack. Break their leg? Does nothing. Break their head? Nothing happens… to the enemies, at least.

If you remember the game’s lore, your little characters are all wooden puppets. If they take too much damage, they break. If an enemy lands a gore hit, they can break a random part. If they break their head, they die instantly. This means your little guys can get randomly one-shot, if the dice rolls against you.

Breaking other parts has negative effects, too. If they break an arm, they can’t use it. Even if it’s their weapon arm. If they break their legs, not much happens, if they break their body, they take an absurd amount of damage, and as mentioned earlier, breaking their head kills them instantly. Breaking any part lowers their maximum health.

To fix this, you need to go back to base and pay a few silver coins to have your puppets repaired. If a puppet dies by having its head crushed, you can’t revive them unless you take them to the repair shop.

This system exists only to punish the player. You can use it, in name only. You can, and will get gore hits on enemies, and it will do a ton of damage, but it won’t change anything meaningful. It’s just a red critical hit. You can supposedly headshot an enemy, but in my 80+ hours of gametime and hundreds of battles, I don’t think I’ve seen it happen once. I have had a lot of puppets get headshot. That I have seen. Multiple times.

The gore hits are another mechanic that seem to provide some sort of depth, but they’re just convoluted ways to present more numbers. It’s for the benefit of the enemy, and to the detriment of the player. I would have liked it if it had any actual tactical value, like how anyone would think a mechanic like this would work. Not even enemy drops are affected by gore hits. You don’t get better loot by breaking specific parts like in Monster Hunter.

Dungeon Design

Hey did you know that the dungeons in Labyrinth of Refrain are labyrinths? Wow, yeah. Who could have seen that one coming?

This game is around 60 hours long, and it has 6 dungeons. If your hair isn’t standing on end, it should. There are more post-game dungeons, and there’s one which I’ll get to which is technically three dungeons, but expect to spend a significant chunk of time in each one.

Each dungeon is a maze of dead ends, countless enemies, vague objectives, confusing layouts and evil tricks. Normally, I’d go over each of the dungeons but this review is already longer than a novel, and I think highlighting one particular dungeon will explain every pro and con of this game.

The Three Towers of Umbra

This is a mammoth dungeon that happens just after the game’s halfway point. It’s the biggest main dungeon. As the name suggests, it’s made of three towers, and each is almost its own dungeon. It’s a horrid, mind-numbing slog of backtracking that shows the lowest of the low this game has to offer.

The Three Towers sounds simple on paper. Three towers, each with a ruler, they’re at war with each other, and you are caught in the middle. Since you’re an amoral murder hobo, your goal here is to kill everyone, regardless of allegiance. You do this by ascending each of the towers to fight their respective boss. Pretty straightforward… right?

WRONG, bucko! Each tower is connected to the other in certain floors. The flow of each tower, which is supposed to be up or down, is complicated by which floors connect to which tower, where and in what direction. Other than the bridges, each tower is its own separate entity. You can enter one tower and get to the top, but to get to the other, you have to go up to a floor, go into the second tower then you can ascend or descend there. For the third one, you have to go down into the basement, then go into it because it has no other connections.

You gradually find this out thanks to the wild goose chase you’re sent on. You have to go up and down each tower like you’re a kid playing in an elevator, talking to NPCs which give you vague hints about the tower’s story. You end up in situations where you go all the way to the top of one tower, talk to someone, then they tell you to go talk to the guy in the other tower, so you go to that other tower, and that guy tells you to go talk to the leader of the tower you were just in. Then it turns out you were supposed to go to a room you walked past dozens of times, which now has an event to view, and THEN you go back to the top of the tower you were on, so NOW it can tell you to go to the other one.

All the while you’re dealing with a massive map full of dozens of rooms, with enemies crawling along every surface, and giant elite enemies patrolling.

As the final cherry on top of this rancid sundae, the dungeon’s map is messed up. For some reason, going up the map shows you the floors in descending order, and going down the maps shows them in ascending order. So if you’re on floor 4, and press down thinking you’ll see the map for floor 3, you get floor 5. This is obvious if you look at the floor numbers, but when you’re first mapping this out, and you don’t know where anything is or how it connects, it’s another bit of confusion thrown in for no good reason.

The whipped cream on the cherry of this stretched metaphor is the fact that the top floor and the bottom floor are next to each other on the map. The basement level is above the top floor in the map rotation. If you want to see how the basement connects with the first floor, you have to scroll all the way through to the top, then remember where the stairs are, and scroll all the way to floor one. Sounds like a mild inconvenience, if you’ve never had to deal with it in-game.

The elite enemies are a kind of guard that roam around the map in a fixed sequence. These are denoted by their purple icon and little horned enemy logo in the mini map. They’re extremely difficult, being several levels higher than anything else in the dungeon. Extremely difficult in this game means that they do a ton of damage to everyone in your party. You have to sneak past these guys, and avoid them at all costs. They roam narrow hallways, so if you see them you have to run back, and if you bump into them in a blind corner, you’re put into a battle that almost guarantees one of your puppets is going to die before you can escape. Escape, as you can guess, is dictated by RNG.

On the subject of randomly running into something that can cave your head in: the events. This game’s entire point is to get to a little red exclamation mark on your map. These are events, and they move the story forward. You never know what an event will be. It could be a random NPC telling you something irrelevant, a story event or a massive boss that will murder you in one turn. You can’t escape from bosses, either.

With all that, you can imagine what a pain in the ass the Three Towers of Umbra is. It’s a massive, multi-hour dungeon full of time wasters and nonsense. I had to save before every event because there was a chance it was either nothing, or a boss that was way higher level than me. The dungeon’s story tries to guide you in the right direction, but it makes no sense. You’re told you can pick a side in the war, but when you do you’re still expected to kill one of the bosses first, then the other. Then one of the bosses you’re supposed to kill disappears into a hidden part of the dungeon, with zero indication. So you’re stumbling blindly around until you find where you need to go.

This dungeon is full of unmapped areas, which are dark sections you can’t map. They show up as black on the mini map, and you can’t see the walls or anything unless you look at the actual, physical walls with your eyes. This section is also full of poison gas, which slowly kills you until you unlock a skill that negates it.

This one dungeon took me over ten hours. At one point I stopped calling the game Labyrinth of Refrain and just called it Towers of Umbra, because all my play time for multiple sessions was spent in this one godforsaken dungeon. I must have gone up to the top and down to the bottom of each tower over twenty times each, looking for the next thing to do, fighting horrid bosses and getting stuck. The towers are also full of dead ends with mirrors and masks in them, which seem like they would be part of a puzzle or something, but no, it’s all just set-dressing. You don’t have to solve a puzzle to progress, you need to find the right breakable wall, bash into it, and then continue. Literally hitting your head against a wall until you can go forward.

The game overall has a lack of any puzzles or interesting dungeon mechanics. It’s all just poison gas and cryptic events. One dungeon, The Verdant Phenom, had me running around like a headless chicken looking for a fairy that just kept popping up in random event locations to giggle and run away. Then after hours of this nonsense, I found another fairy that told me to go kill a giant flower that was terrorizing the garden. I got a skill that let me go into the poison area, and went in. There, I found a giant flower that was terrorizing the garden. It started a boss fight, and it killed my entire party in one shot. I didn’t see any other indication of what to do, and I was told to kill an evil flower, so I did a lot of grinding to see if I could kill it. After hours of trying, it still kept clobbering me into the dirt. I kept wandering around aimlessly until I ran into an event in an area I had already been in multiple times. I triggered the event, and lo and behold, an evil flower showed up. A different one. It started a boss fight, and I was so over-leveled from being lost that I killed it in one turn. Then the dungeon continued. Hooray?

This is something I read others were going through in the Three Towers of Umbra. I read a forum post where one guy got so lost here, and spent so much time trying to find the exit, that he accidentally over leveled and, when it came time to fight the real boss, he killed it in one go and kept steamrolling past the rest of the game.

The dungeons in the game aren’t anything to write home about. They’re vague, cryptic and their objectives are just “go to this location, then go to that location” with no rhyme or reason. There’s a vague sense of progression. Some have you going forward, others have an obvious up or down flow, but most have you zig-zagging across the entire thing like you’re in a Scooby-Doo chase, going in and out of hallways, talking to random people, and going back to the same room you’ve been in twenty times, but this time a new event showed up because you unknowingly triggered something while goofing around four floors down.

Then there are events that are just a cutscene, then you have to go back to base to report to the witch. It happens multiple times, and it completely kills any flow you might have going. You find an event after scouring the dungeon, only for it to be an unrelated story cutscene that ends with “go home, Roger”. You go back to the base, and your next objective is to go back to where you were and trigger another event, which then tells you to go back to base. It’s infuriating.

The dungeons are designed to be so long and exhausting because they can be, thanks to the game’s mud exit system.

Stop and go design and the mana rope

At some point in the game, near the beginning, you unlock the ability to use a Mud Exit. This lets you escape a dungeon at any point. Once you get the ability to create two mud exits, you can place them down, use one to go back to base and the other to teleport back into where you were in the dungeon. This completely kills the risk/reward associated with regular dungeon crawlers, and gives the developers free rein to make the biggest, longest most convoluted dungeons, simply because at any point, you can fly back to base, recover and go back.

This invalidates things like the limited mana pools and other risks. You can spend all your mana, or have most of your party get killed, then you place two exits, go back, heal and return like nothing happened. This is also necessary because of what I mentioned earlier with the events. Exiting a dungeon and saving before an event is mandatory since you are always at risk of going into a boss encounter.

Now that the developers have a way for you to go back to base on demand, they can do what they love best: making flow-breaking events where you go back to base.

Mana is another thing that limits your exploration. This isn’t the mana you use to cast spells, that’s donum. This kind of mana is called Reinforcements. A lot of actions you can take in-game cost reinforcements. You start with 99. When you go into a dungeon, the total cost of all your active covenants is subtracted from this number. If you use any of the party abilities; using stealth, breaking walls, placing mud exits or anything else, it costs reinforcements. When you’re in battle and you stock exp, it costs one reinforcement per battle. In battle, if you want to use an item, it costs one reinforcement to use. If you want to assign specific actions to a character inside a covenant, it costs reinforcements. If you want to boost a character’s offense and/or defense in a turn, it also costs reinforcements.

This one mechanic is incredibly overloaded. Everything deducts from it. The most important part of it is the wall breaker. You need to break specific walls to progress in certain dungeons, and this costs five reinforcement per use. If you don’t have any more to use, you can’t break walls, meaning you can soft-lock and have to either use an item to go back to base or reload a save. I don’t know why every single action costs reinforcements.

Maybe they felt they needed something to limit how much time you spent in the dungeon. There already is a limit, both a hard and soft limit. The soft limit are your resources: your characters’ health and mana, but you can refill that by going home at any point. Then there’s the hard limit. If you spend too much time grinding in one area, you reach a “mana saturation” and get attacked by special ultra-high level enemies that will do their best to outright kill you.

The constant need to spend reinforcements, their low maximum and the mud exits all combine to give this game an annoying stop and go rhythm. You explore for a few minutes, notice you’re running low on reinforcements, plop down two mud exits (which cost 15 reinforcements each, so 30 in total), return to base, save, and go back. Repeat endless times while you explore a massive maze.

This serves to both break any tension with risk/reward, making it trivial to go back to base when the smallest inconvenience happens, and it makes exploration feel choppy. It becomes a chore.

There is an element of risk to exploring, if you decide to use the EXP stock system.

OH GOD ANOTHER SYSTEM HELP ME PLEASE (Experience Stockpiling)

This is another glorified number slop-type mechanic. You can stockpile experience after each battle. Once you start, you start gaining an extra percentage of experience on top of the one you gain after a battle. The more battles you do in a row, the more the extra mana gets multiplied, up to a maximum of a 16 chain.

If you guessed that this is yet another system that’s presented as a benefit for the player, but it turns out to be more numbers, then you’re 100% correct.

If the game gives you a way to get massive amounts of experience, it sounds like it’s for you to get experience and level up, right? What this means to me, and the reality of the situation is, not that this is an optional little thing to boost your levels for convenience. No. It means you’re going to need to do this to keep up with the astronomical amounts of experience needed to level up. Especially when you’re leveling a transferred character with a higher soul clarity.

This is also affected by RNG, because there is a chance to encounter named critical enemies. I call them critical enemies because they spawn in with the same black and red effect of a critical. These are regular enemies, but with significantly more numbers. You can be stomping through a dungeon, killing little bees and slimes, when suddenly one of them becomes a Devious Bee, which means it has 3 times more health and each of its attacks is an almost guaranteed gore hit. You can either take the fight and hope to survive, or run. If you run (meaning, if the game rolls the dice and decides you get to escape), you lose all the experience you had stocked up until that point. All of it. You don’t just lose the inflated extra experience, you get nothing. Nada. The EXP you’d get from all the fights goes into the bank when you start stocking, so you lose all of it.

That’s the only risk/reward left in this game, and it’s aggravating. Nothing like dropping a chain because of a random enemy encounter that had an Overlord regular enemy with EIGHT TIMES their normal HP and doing critical attacks every round.

Which brings me to the game’s difficulty

Difficulty

If you’re familiar with JRPG “difficulty”, then you know about bosses that just do a bunch of damage to all your party. That’s it. That’s the difficulty in Labyrinth of Refrain. The boss shows up, and it does 4,000 points of damage fifteen times in a row in one turn, hitting your entire party multiple times.

There’s one giant robot boss, the D.E. Machina, who just pummels your entire party for thousands of damage each turn.

“But Roger!” you shout. “That’s an optional end-game boss. Of course it’s going to be really difficult.”

Yes, it is an optional end-game boss. It is very difficult. What makes it so difficult? Is it the fact that it’s a thought-provoking challenge that tests your knowledge of the game? Or is it because it hits your entire party for 80% of their maximum health five times each turn?

If that’s not enough, this game also has something I like to call “The Spell That Kills You”. I’ll give you three chances to guess what it does. As the game progresses, the bosses just start doing an attack that goes one-by-one over your entire party, killing them. There is no other way for me to explain it, other than that. It’s just a spell… that kills you. They cast Death.

You can try to use defensive magic, if you can find a covenant that has it, and if it even works, like the aforementioned magic mirror spell which has a chance to reflect magic damage (except for The Spell That Kills You, that can’t be reflected. You were supposed to know that. How? Don’t ask me.), so that’s a gamble. You can’t debuff the boss, because debuff spells don’t work on bosses, other than maybe some defense lowering spells that reduce defenses by a smidge for three turns. Any of the actually useful disruptive statuses don’t work, except for poison, if it hits, which is also up to a dice roll.

I’ve had to look up how to beat some of the bosses, because this is that kind of strategy guide game, and they say it’s like a puzzle. You have to build a party and optimize for the specific situation at hand. That’s all fine and dandy, if it weren’t for one thing:

The items.

Items

There’s very little you can do against massive damage in this game. If boss battles are like a puzzle, then your pieces are your equipment, and they’re all blue center pieces that don’t fit, and the puzzle you’re trying to build doesn’t have any blue.

What I’m saying is that they’re ineffective. If a boss is smacking me over the head with blunt and fog damage, like it’s hitting me with a rolled up swisha and blowing smoke in my face, I will want armor that has resistances against blunt and fog damage, right? Well, there isn’t any. Armor gives you defense, in general. A number that somehow interferes with the enemy’s attack numbers. The higher that number is, the less chance my characters have of getting their organs crushed. What’s the correlation? Is there a formula? There probably is. I don’t know what it is.

Each piece of gear has a purpose. Armor, meaning the thing you put on your chest, gives you defense, like I said. Helmets/headwear give you a tiny bit of defense, but it’s mostly HIT, a chance to hit. Shoes/leg armor give you evasion. Your hands don’t get armor, that’s where you put weapons. Unless you grab a shield, which gives you defense and a chance to block damage. Then there are the amulets, which give you resistances.

There it is, then. Amulets. If I want to stop getting blunt smoke blown in my face, then I need an amulet that gives me resistance to those types of damage. Well, there’s a problem. Several, actually. First, you need to find the right amulet. Items are random drops, with random stats, so getting one that has the resist you need is the first chore. If you scour the dungeons and find an amulet with fog resistance, congratulations! Now you have an item that gives you… 4% fog resistance. If you’re getting hit for 4,200 fog damage, this little thing can lower it down to 4,032. Not great but, it’s something, I guess. Too bad my tankiest puppet has 5,600 HP. That’s good. The second tankiest has 3,500. That’s not great.

Then comes the blunt damage. There are three types of weapon damage: blunt, piercing and slash. Equipment doesn’t reduce them individually, so I can’t find anything to reduce the specific type of damage that’s turning my party into a smear on the wall.

My only hope is to grind to get bigger numbers, but with that approach I can get a high enough level to kill anything with no effort.

I could always make the equipment stronger by Synthesizing it...

Synthesis: ANOTHER SYSTEM OH GOD IM GOING TO PUKE

Another poorly explained complication to get bigger numbers. Here, you take an item, throw it in a pot and throw other stuff with it to make its numbers bigger. If you throw other stuff, you can give it different numbers. I think. It’s never really explained in-game, guides are scarce and a lot of this is hearsay.

The way I think it works is that you put an item, then put similarly powerful items with it, and the items’ collective stats will combine, get averaged, then run through an RNG dice roll, then the resulting numbers are added to your item. I think. Maybe. All I know is, I put something in, put other stuff in, press a button, and my item now has more numbers.

Sometimes when I add items from other categories, like an amulet to a weapon, it gives it a slight increase from one of the amulet’s stats. If I put in a fire resistant amulet, my weapon can get some fire resistance. How much? About 1%. That’s not a stat increase, that’s a numerical slur.

I fumbled around with the synthesis system and managed to get some improved gear, but I can’t say I mastered it, or that I really understand what’s going on.

Making new items is fun at first. You put bigger numbers on your gear, which is neat, but after a while, it’s not enough. You don’t need to use synthesis at any point in the main story, except maybe at the final boss, so you can mostly ignore this mechanic, but when you get to a point where you need better gear for the optional bosses, you’ll be left at a loss. It’s poorly explained, esoteric and the way it works is obscured behind hidden stats and dice rolls.

You can make good gear, if you know what you’re doing (unlikely) and if you mash together a lot of the same high-tier items, but that’s a huge chore. Getting high tier items is relatively easy, but getting the good ones is another gamble. Each item has a list of possible descriptors that affect their stats. Things like “lucky”, or “divine”. There are a total of 26 of these. Some of these are negative, like “unlucky”, which reduces your luck, “wounded”, which reduces your chance to guard, and “broken” reduces the item’s stats to less than ¼ of what they should be. The game never tells you what these descriptors mean. You can look at the stats and infer, if you have two of the same item with different titles, but how are you supposed to know that “lustful” reduces Charm? It’s like giving an item the “gooner” descriptor, and it lowers your horny stat.

From what I’ve seen, most people just save scum to get better items. They make a save point in front of a drop location, grab the randomly generated item and reload the save until they get something good. That doesn’t sound like something I’d want to do.

On top of all that, synthesizing multiple items is like trying to eat soup with chop sticks thanks to this game’s annoying UI.

UI/UX complaints

98% of Labyrinth of Refrain takes place in menus. For every minute you spend walking around a dungeon, you’ll spend five more fiddling with different text boxes. You’d think that, because of this, the game would have a smooth, optimized user interface, but that’s not the case. It has some good things, but there are a lot of constant little inconveniences that pile up over this game’s bloated run time.

Synthesizing is a smooth process, but finding what you want to upgrade isn’t. For example, if you want to upgrade Merlin’s armor, you can’t go into his character stats, select his armor and upgrade it from there. No, that’d be something a reasonable person would do. Instead, you first check what armor he’s wearing, and make note of the exact name if you have multiple copies. You notice he’s wearing a Bomboclaat Wizard’s Armor. Now you go into the synthesis menu, pick the main ingredient, scroll to the armor tab, then scroll through all your other armors until you find the Bomboclaat Wizard’s Armor. Wait, you have two of them. No problem, just check which one is marked as “equipped”, and you’ll pick the right one. Slight issue here. Both of your Bomboclaat Wizard’s Armor are equipped, and the game doesn’t tell you who’s wearing it in this menu.

Multiply this process by each piece of gear you want to upgrade. You have up to fifteen active puppets, each with six pieces of modifiable equipment, for a total of 90 pieces of gear. Looking for a needle in a haystack to find the item you want, then going through the whole rigmarole of actually doing the synthesis. It’s annoying.

When a puppet is injured, you can repair it from the puppet workbench menu. If you don’t have the pieces necessary for the repair, the game asks if you want to buy some, and if you pick yes, it automatically buys the piece and repairs the puppet in one go. Simple. That’s good.

What’s not good is that, if you want to do anything else in the puppet workbench and you don’t have the pieces, you can’t get them from that menu like you can with parts. If you want to create a new soldier, or transfer one, and you don’t have the parts for it, the two options are greyed out. It doesn’t tell you why they’re unavailable. If you try to use them, it says “Unavailable at this time”. You have to go to the market screen, buy the parts and then you can use the menu options.

While on the subject of equipment micromanaging, I should mention the stats screen. When you view an item, you see their stats in a little window to the right. This has all the item’s numbers. Each item has a lot of numbers, so the information is spread across multiple pages. If you’re comparing an item to one you have equipped, the game will show you the stat differences with plus or minus numbers. This is okay, but remember, there are pages of stats. If you want to see differences across multiple stats, you have to go back and forth through each page to see what changed. There’s no way to compare two unequipped items directly.

If one item has stats that the other doesn’t, they won’t show up. For example, if one piece of armor increases your fog resist, but another doesn’t, the second one won’t have a fog resist stat at all. Meaning you have to go through the pages looking to see if the stat is even there in the first place. There’s no fixed “fog resist” stat you can check.

When choosing items for synthesis, you can’t compare their stats to the item you’re upgrading.

You can buy a list of the treasure available in each dungeon, but you can’t view that list from the dungeon selection screen. You need to go into a dungeon, open the map then view the list. You can at least look at the list of the other dungeons while in one, so you don’t have to go to each level to check its drop table.

Miscellaneous Mechanics

There are a few more number modifiers to cover before getting on to the presentation, for the sake of being thorough. There’s an entire relationship system that, as your puppets fight with each other, they gain each other’s trust and become friends, which lets them do chain attacks more often. These give you slight attack boosts and seem to happen at random, much like everything else. I never played with this in mind, I just considered it a nice bonus when it happens.

Something similar happens to magic if you cast several in the same turn. It triggers a Donum Ressonance and causes your magic to deal more damage. You can chain off an enemy’s magic and an enemy can chain off your cast. It’s another inconsistent mechanic that seems to happen at random.

If anyone has any concrete info on these, please let me know. To me, they’re non-essential, and just some neat fluff.

Presentation

The game looks nice, at least. It has that signature Nippon Ichi look to it, drawn by Takehito Harada. Most of the characters look like edgy cats, with their big heads and massive, angry eyes. Their designs are memorable, and they look like they fit in the world of Refrain, which is a vague JRPG dark fantasy thing.

The stand outs, to me, are the monster designs. There are some truly disgusting things on display here. The type of foul creatures you want to gore hit to death. There’s a lot of creativity on display. You have your standard slimes and such, but they have their own style to them. They look less like the cutesy regular slimes from other rpgs, and more like decrepit monsters. Then there are the suspicious white slimes in the pleasure area of the Tower of Umbra. Almost every enemy encountered is some horrific eldritch thing that would be better off as a stain on your sword. Except for the gnomes in the second dungeon. Those little guys are alright, but you have to slaughter them anyways.

The bosses have a great look to them, too. They go all out with the incomprehensible horrors. Eldritch monsters, masses of damned souls, disembodied heads, it’s all horrific, and really cool. These hideous beings contrast very well with the protagonists’ cutesy designs.

Each dungeon has its own unique look and feel to it. The first dungeon is green and decaying, covered in slime, giving it a sickly look. The Verdant Phenom is a strangely grassy and natural area inside the labyrinth, that looks nice and autumnal, with fairies and other mythical creatures. Then it turns out they all want to kill you. Even my most hated dungeon, the Three Towers of Umbra has a great visual identity. Each of the towers has their own look, color palette and ambient. It’s palatial and upscale, but full of creepy shadows and things hinted at going on in hidden rooms. Then you get to the third tower, and it’s a quiet, decaying version of the other two, full of flies and ruins. A lot darker and the weird details from the other towers look more ominious here, like the masks everywhere, now on the floor in piles of rubble.

The game looks great, even with its limitations. Characters aren’t really animated; they’re single images that hop around or squash and stretch to show their current state. It’s typical for this kind of game, but at least the illustrations look great. The dungeons also have a lot of personality, making exploration a treat, not knowing what kind of monstrosity you’ll run into next.

The music is very baroque and bombastic, to the game’s detriment in some cases. It sounds good, and it’s unique. If you’ve heard the music in Disgaea, you have an idea of what this sounds like. I know I just said it’s unique and compared it to something else, but these two games have similar sounding music, and their music is instantly recognizable and doesn’t sound like anything else. The compositions are catchy and fun to listen to, but the constant change from dungeon to battle to menu makes their unique qualities into sticking points. Like having a pebble in your shoe for the entire day.

Each song has a distinct, pronounced intro. Lots of flourishes and percussion, very grand as if to introduce a King or a story book character. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were listening to them on their own, but the game plays the song from the start every time you switch states, so you end up listening to the first five seconds of each track over and over and over and over again. You enter the level, hear it, get into a battle, the battle theme plays, you end the fight, go back to the level, the music restarts, you take two steps, battle, back into the level, the intro plays again. It’s a nightmare.

Take this video, and listen to the first ten seconds. Then skip back to the beginning, and listen to them again. Do this about ten times in a row, and tell me how you’d feel about that happening for over eight hours. It’s a shame, since the compositions themselves sound great. It’s just that I don’t want to listen to the first bit of it every time I exit a battle. I have the Verdant Phenom’s intro whistle burnt into my brain for all eternity.

The voice performances are good, too. I played the game in Japanese because I’m a massive weeb, and because when I played it in English the characters kept yelling “I’m coming!” when they attacked, and I couldn’t take the game seriously. The Japanese voice actors all embody their roles well. Dronya, the main character, has a wide range, going from a calm, almost motherly tone to a more sinister villainess at the drop of a hat (she is a wicked witch, after all), and they both sound convincing and like they fit the character. Luca sounds adorable and manages not to be grating. The little characters all have different voices you can assign to them, and they’re inoffensive. At least in Japanese.

Labyrinth’s presentation is great. I like how it looks and sounds, even if it has a few setbacks. The characters are appealing and memorable, the enemies look horrific and interesting, the environmental design gives each area its own unique look, and the music and visuals combine well to make a compelling atmosphere that’s both whimsical and creepy.

The only area I think is objectively bad is the second-to-last story dungeon, The Last Morgue. It’s a giant, boring crypt with copy-pasted rooms. The objectives there are about following a little girl and reading a story that you have no involvement in. Much like in the Towers of Umbra, you have to go back and forth through the whole place, up and down it, interacting with events that aren’t placed in any coherent way. The area is massive, and full of long hallways and winding paths meant to waste your time. There’s nothing good to say about this dungeon. It’s a slapped-together piece of filler meant to pad out an already long and bloated game.

Story

Discussing the story? In a Load Last Save review? Well, this is an RPG, and part visual novel, so I have to mention the story, at least in passing.

Starting off with how it doesn’t interact with the gameplay at all. One of the reasons why I don’t pay much attention to the story in a game, is because the gameplay and story live on separate continents and they never interact, so if I skip the story, I never miss out on anything. Labyrinth of Refrain is a terrible instance of this. The story and the gameplay are completely unrelated for 80% of the runtime.

No spoilers but, you play as a book. The main characters, Dronya and Luca, have their own little thing going on. Your goals are aligned. Dronya wants to find some magic keys inside the labyrinth, so she throws you, the book, in there to find them. That’s where the alignment stops. From that point on, all the way to the end, your goal is to roam the labyrinth and come back every now and then to get an upgrade or watch an unrelated cutscene. You might be exploring an underground cave, then you get an objective to come up to the surface, so you go back to base, only to watch a little scene about Luca cooking potatoes. Then you go back into the maze to continue what you were doing. Luca making potatoes is cute, but I don’t see how that has anything to do with me going through a troll-infested cave, and why I need to stop that to go see that scene.

This happens constantly. You get interrupted to watch something happen that’s completely unrelated to your current mission. The scenes themselves aren’t bad. The game’s story is alright, it’s a decent mystery and the relationship between Dronya and Luca evolves nicely, but it has nothing to do with the gameplay.

I have to reiterate that you play as a book. You’re a prop. It’s like if you played as Cloud’s Buster Sword in Final Fantasy 7. Even less personal, in fact. You’re a potion in Cloud’s inventory. Dronya doesn’t struggle through the Labyrinth, and with you being a book, you don’t experience any change or character growth since- well- you’re not a character. There is some mystery surrounding what the book is, but it’s ignored throughout the whole game and only gets semi-resolved in an exposition dump right before the final boss. If you want more info, you have to do the optional content, post-game dungeon and get the TRUE ending.

I always complain about how, in games, you’re watching a story play out coincidentally while you play the game, with no interactivity, but Labyrinth takes the cake on that one.

The game is supposedly part visual novel, too, but there isn’t much in that department other than the mucho texto and static character portraits. You don’t make any story decisions. Could be because you’re a book.

Overall, a decent story, but you don’t have anything to do with it. If you’re the type that likes stories in games, you might enjoy this one. It’s alright. Be warned that it does get pretty dark at points. There’s some sexual assault (of adult characters) and some abuse (of child characters), but it never crosses the line into explicit or tasteless territory.

It’s a bittersweet, tragic story full of mystery, twists, turns interesting reveals and a small cast of characters that are well developed and interesting. That’s my spoiler-free review of the story.

Now, on to the spoilers. You’ve been warned.

--SPOILER WARNING--

I will be discussing some specific plot points here, so skip to the conclusion if you don’t want to see them.

HERE GOES: The story’s big twist is dumb and revealed at the very end of the game, literally right before the final boss. The first big reveal, that Madam Dronya, the big bad witch, is actually a puppet is a pretty cool one. There are vague hints at first. She has a prosthetic leg that keeps breaking, but there’s a parallel story in the form of a puppet show she puts on (as a front for why she’s in the town, she says she’s a travelling puppeteer, hence all the puppets) and the show’s story is fairy tale of two brothers who get punished by an evil demon. The demon takes one of the brothers’ eyes and the others’ leg. The red herring here is that Dronya is the one missing the leg, and that Marietta is the one missing the eye. Turns out her fake leg was just part of her puppet body.

The real mastermind and puppeteer behind all this is the ultra-powerful witch Mezzaluca, a character that is revealed at the end, but was with you the whole time, because she’s just Luca… from the future. Yeah, there’s time travel here. I was disappointed when it happened. Luca from the future orchestrated the events of Labyrinth of Refrain by sending the souls of different important people through history back to the past to play the shitty games that suck ass- sorry, it’s a reflex- back to the past to stop Baba Yaga, the true antagonist of the story.

Baba Yaga is a god-like being who was a regular witch but transcended time and space in search of immortality, and now she’s basically an eldritch god. The only way to stop her was to send people back in time to before she gets her full power. The book you play as, the Tractatus de Monstrum, is a book written by Baba Yaga during her first expedition into the Labyrinth, but Luca got a hold of it in the future and sent back a soul into it to guide her past self to get the magical MacGuffins and stop Baba Yaga.

I don’t like time travel stories, nor ones where everything was planned and calculated from the start, nor do I like stories that have a huge exposition dump at the end. Labyrinth of Refrain does all three of these.

The story itself isn’t bad, except for that last bit. The characters are interesting. Dronya starts off as an irredeemable witch but slowly softens and shows some good. I like that evolution, but I knew it was going to happen. I kind of wanted Dronya to stay en evil bastard and embody being a true wicked witch. She could have kept her arc where she grows closer to Luca, but keep her as a wretched schemer.

The reveal that Luca was behind it all from the future is pretty dumb, in my opinion. I know RPGs love doing this, this whole thing where the world ends so they send something into the past to prevent it, but I just don’t like it. Mezzaluca is from the future that Baba Yaga wins, becomes the eldritch being and eats the world, so she sends souls back in time to stop that from happening, but then she seals one of their memories so Baba Yaga doesn’t know, but she does, but- it’s a mess. I’m sure there’s sense to it if I read it through, but it’s still kind of dumb.

-SPOILER END-

Final verdict on the story: It’s fine. I would have liked this more as an anime than a story spread out through a 60-hour game.

Conclusion

After this long, drawn-out review, the question still stands: Do I recommend Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk? Hell, do I even like this game?

From all the complaints I have with this game, and how convoluted it is, you’d think I don’t. Sure, the game is bloated. It has systems on systems on top of systems with mechanics sprinkled on top. There’s a tutorial happening every few minutes explaining all the weird, esoteric ways you can increase numbers. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

It doesn’t help that most of these systems can be compressed down to “make number big”. The game doesn’t explain them much, and quite frankly, doesn’t expect you to use them for 99.9% of it. You can get past most of the game’s challenges by simply grinding and raising your characters’ levels. Sure, you’ll need to get better equipment, but you can get by with the stuff you find in the dungeons.

Most of the “challenge” in the game can be overcome by sheer brute force. Even the final boss- the regular one, not the TRUE last boss- can be beaten with numbers and a specific covenant. I saw discussions online saying how “nah man a squad of level 99 puppets isn’t enough, bro, the final boss is gonna wreck you and it’s really tough and yadda yadda”, but I beat it with a squad of regular level 99 puppets. I had two that were transferred, so they had better stats, but I transferred them before I researched that system, so their gains were minimal. It wasn’t a fully kitted out end-game party, it was a bunch of numbers in shiny armor.

I only had to really engage with the synthesis system and think about what I was doing near the end of the game, right before the final dungeon when you fight the pre-final boss. It was a huge difficulty spike and I needed to grind and get optimal equipment and form a decent team to take it on. There were other difficulty spikes before, but none as sharp as the second-to-last boss.

This lack of difficulty spikes could be due to the horrible Towers of Umbra dungeon. Much like that guy whose post I read on GameFAQs, I also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find my way through that damned place, and ended up accidentally over leveling. When I got out of there, I thanked God for an hour straight and then turned into a human Killdozer and barreled my way through the rest of the game -up to the last bit. I went down into the secret area to beat the secret boss and get the secret covenant, which are not secret at all because they’re needed for the final boss, but the game never tells you, but I did all that like it was nothing. I auto-piloted my way there, turned the boss into a puddle of soup in a few turns and went for the final boss. Then I got spiked by the Second-to-last boss. I’ll call it Bob for now, since it’s a spoiler and writing the phrase second-to-last boss is annoying.

After defeating Bob and surviving its signature Spell That Kills You, I went in to the final area expecting a challenge, but again, I plowed through it like a joke. Then I came up against the final boss, which used its Spell That Kills You and I had to grind again. Then I killed it. The boss that’s supposedly ultra hard and recommended to kill on New Game Plus.

Then I went on to the optional bosses and got rocked by more Spells That Kill You.

Why am I telling you all this? For one, to tell you my experience with the game, but also to demonstrate that, for some reason, I decided to keep going with this game. I could have stopped at the final boss. Hell, I could have stopped at any point before, since the game doesn’t really evolve in any meaningful way, and my thoughts at hour 30 were the same at hour 60, but I chose to keep playing.

I wanted to do the optional content to see if it forced me to engage with all of the game’s bizarre and poorly explained mechanics. I wanted to get a real challenge, and I got it, but it came after 60 hours of playing.

This is why I can’t simply say if I like the game or not. It’s annoying, long, bloated, padded and horrifically paced, with confusing systems that don’t seem to do much covered in a thick layer of randomness, but it’s not bad.

I like how obtuse the game is. It lets you discover things on your own. Your objectives and goals are vague and confusing at times, but it doesn’t hold your hand. You’re dumped in the labyrinth, and other than a few too many recalls to the base, it lets you do what you want. You can make a sub-optimal party, as long as you can beat the checkpoint bosses. You can spend as much time as you want messing around the dungeons, getting as strong as you wish. You can play around with the optional systems and trivialize the game if you want. You can make an ultra-powerful level 400 puppet, then put it in a solo party and one-shot bosses for the fun of it. Sure, the game can be tedious and frustrating, but it’s a videogame first and foremost. It gives you a bunch of rules and tools and lets you figure them out.

All these seemingly disparate mechanics also work together surprisingly well. They manage to give you something to work towards and plan around. You have the tools to succeed, with enough randomness to trigger your gambling instinct and notable number increases to keep the dopamine flowing.

The exploration is also fun. Sure, the dungeons are very straightforward, there aren’t any cool puzzles to solve and navigation can be a bit of a headache, but it scratches that autistic dungeon crawling itch very well. It’s a lot like Wolverine: it’s good at what it does, but what it does ain’t pretty, and that is to give stat-minded players a very smooth, borderline cozy exploration game with a ton of numbers to wrap your head around and calculate.

I recommend Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk to a very specific niche of players. Those who like dungeon crawlers, and those who appreciate massive, systems-driven games full of numbers.

It’s a very tenuous recommendation, though. When compared to other dungeon crawlers I’ve played, which isn’t many if I admit, this game has a lot of the same pitfalls, some things it does worse and some things it does well.

Compared to something like Stranger of Sword City, it’s a lot more forgiving and fair, but this kind of game isn’t supposed to be fair, it’s supposed to be a constant knowledge check full of traps. Labyrinth has a lot of knowledge checks, but they’re not as brutal as the ones in Sword City, which can be a positive or a negative depending on how masochistic you are. The two games’ debuff system is night and day, too. In Sword City, your debuffs actually matter, and work on bosses. You can lower their accuracy, or their dodge rate, as if they were a regular enemy. In Labyrinth, bosses are pretty much immune to most of the useful debuffs… if you can find any covenants with debuffs in the first place.

This game is also a lot longer than most games. It’s JRPG length, if you just go through the regular story. If you do the additional content, you can expect another 20 hours on top. It’s a bit much, really. Too much.

I think the game would have been better if they trimmed some of the fat. Take out an entire third of the Towers of Umbra. Make it the Twin Towers of Umbra- wait no, that’s a terrible idea- but the thought still stands. There are only six dungeons (and one post-game) and one of them is a complete copy/paste job with boring aesthetics and nothing going on. They could have cut a lot of this up and added more interesting, shorter dungeons.

I don’t recommend this game to anyone who wants a simple game, or something more polished. This isn’t for the average gamer, or for people who like JRPGs. There aren’t any fancy cutscenes, the characters are off-putting to the regular viewer, there’s a ton of reading and the game is too dense and long.

If I were to answer if I liked it, I’d say I did. I went back and forth on it, but I guess I enjoyed it more than I disliked it, even if there is a lot to dislike here. The combat is smooth, it works, it’s fun to see it play out. I liked forming a party of weirdos and playing around with the different classes and planning builds, even if there are very simple “meta” builds that are more efficient. You can play this with a guide, or you can discover things for yourself, which is more fun, but you will need that guide for the optional content, since finding it is very cryptic.

I liked the exploration, since I’m a sucker for dungeon RPGs. You throw me in a dank cellar with a sword, limit my movement to a grid and I’m already having a blast. I think this game does a decent job of that, even if it’s a bit too forgiving. I didn’t like how you could go out of the dungeon at any point with the mud exits. I think the designers took advantage of this and made the dungeons more annoying than they needed to be knowing the player could go back to safety at any point. It makes resource management a lot less interesting, too.

In closing, Labyrinth of Refrain is a heavily flawed game that manages to be interesting even through its many missteps. As a dungeon crawler, I don’t think I’d recommend it over something like Stranger of Sword City or Zanki Zero, but it’s still worth playing. At least I think it is.

When it comes to this game, I’ll reject the binary and embrace the third option: both. Yes and no to Labyrinth of Refrain. Yes to the good parts, and yes to anyone who likes this kind of game. No to the bad parts, and no to anyone who thinks this looks off-putting. It’s simultaneously good and bad, but I choose to enjoy the good.

Everything else can fit neatly into the binary. Videogames are serious business.

Chat, is this real?

If you like stylish action games, you should check out Mightreya. It’s from the developer of Assault Spy, a Devil May Cry inspired game where you play as a corporate spy. I wrote about it in a short article I did last year. You should check that out, too.

Before you get the demo, I think I have to do some white-knighting for the game. It’s a ton of fun, and it has a lot of new, interesting ideas. Thing is, those same new ideas and approaches are what make the game unfriendly to beginners. It’s a bit of a mess at first, with a steep learning curve and a disorienting combat system where you fight in mid-air while the camera tries its best to keep the action in frame.

It’s the kind of thing new players will bounce off instantly. It’s like the game is made of trampolines. You boot it up and go from zero to full motion sickness in a few button presses. This isn’t good as a first impression, but if you stick with it, it’s a rewarding game with well thought out mechanics and satisfying combat. That’s if you stick with it, which is a huge qualifier for a demo, which is supposed to grab you in the first few minutes like an over-eager first date.

I’m here to say, MIGHTREYA is a fun game that I recommend, but you need to be in the right frame of mind for it. I’ll try my best to ease you into the experience, and tell you one or two things the game doesn’t so you can get to enjoying the game before the spinning camera makes you uninstall.

Gameplay

MIGHTREYA is a 3D Character action game. You play as Reya, a girl who fights Kaiju (big monsters) on stream. You have a basic combo, dashes, and a ranged shot. This doesn’t sound like a lot of tools for a character action game, but what is here is used well. Each attack has a timing mechanic, where if you attack at certain points when you see a blue flash, you get a “perfect” version of the move with added damage.

The game’s combat gets a lot more complicated once the third dimension gets thrown in. This is a truly 3D game. You fight in mid-air, and you have to keep track of enemies that can attack from above and below. There are also attacks that take advantage of the elevation system. You can launch enemies higher, or slam them down to the ground. You can jump higher or dive down. This gives you different ways to avoid attacks and new angles to attack from.

For defensive options, you have a dodge and a parry. Timing the dodge to when an enemy attacks lets you phase through the attack and counter while the enemy is vulnerable. The parry, as you’d expect, is a defensive technique you use just as an enemy’s attack is about to hit you. It knocks the enemy back and stuns them for a bit, letting you beat on them freely. The thing with the parry is that it’s done by pressing the left analogue stick towards your opponent. If you mistime it, you can’t fall back on a block or anything like that. It’s a high-commitment option, which I like.

All of these attacks and techniques chain together into one another, letting you juggle opponents, slam them down into the ground, punch them up into the air all while zipping around. It’s a ton of fun, and feels great once you get into the groove.

Thing is, the game does a lousy job of teaching you any of it.

Bad Onboarding

Surely, you could learn all of these important techniques in the tutorial, right? Yeah, you can. After you finish a fight. For some reason, the tutorial comes after the introductory fight, where you’re expected to take down some enemies and a large kaiju at the end. If you fail, you restart. The controls are on-screen, sure, but you have no idea how to use any of them, or what they mean. It doesn’t tell you about any of the techniques or why you keep turning blue seemingly at random.

It’s an easy fight, and I got through it, but I had played the previous demo and had already gotten over the hurdle of learning the game. Even then, I had to dust off my knowledge and try a few times as I remembered how it all works. I can imagine it must be a lot tougher for a new player. Especially in a demo, where you’re supposed to get a taste for the game as quickly as possible.

You should still give it a try

When I played the demo, there wasn’t a tutorial option in the menu, it might get added later, but there is a training room. Go there and move around for a bit, getting used to the controls. You have your basic combo on the right bumper by default, if you play on a controller, which I highly recommend. Use left trigger to dash around and get a feel for how Reya moves and, more importantly, how the camera reacts.

Once you feel comfortable with the game, start the game. Use your basic combo to deal damage, and jump out of the way of attacks. Once the big guy shows up at the end, press the right trigger to charge a massive punch that will almost kill him. Press grab (x) to finish the fight.

After that, you’ll finally get thrown into the tutorial, where everything will be explained properly. Then you can complete a regular level, and fight a boss at the end.

The Boss

The boss needs a lot of work. It’s a huge difficulty spike, not because he’s tough, but because he zips around constantly, making it nearly impossible to keep track of. Even the lock-on has trouble with this one. He’ll circle around you, making attacks miss, and he has a nasty habit of zooming past you, teleporting to the other side of the arena, zooming past you again, then disappearing. It’s like trying to fight a fruit fly with a hammer.

The boss fight wasn’t nearly as bad in the first demo. Here, they gave the guy a pitcher of red Kool-Aid and now he’s running all over the place, blue in the face, with his ADHD acting up in full force. It’s genuinely frustrating how much he moves around.

The boss has a break mechanic. Once you deal enough damage, you’ll break his guard and he can be combo’d. In theory, at least. For some reason he can recover from hit stun just as quickly as he can while he has his armor, so anything other than mashing the regular combo will give him enough time to recover and attack you as you’re trying to hit him.

The bosses in Assault Spy had a similar mechanic, but once they were in break, you could smack them around and get stylish. They could still attack, but only if you left them alone. The boss in the MIGHTREYA demo attacks like nothing’s happening. It honestly feels like a bug. It’s not supposed to do that. You smacked him into break, you should get to beat him down for a bit and show off. The break timer is already laughably short, so it seems like you’re supposed to have a few seconds to unleash your most damaging combo, not mash away hoping the boss doesn’t swing at you while you’re readying a punch.

Conclusion

Even with all those negatives in the way, I still recommend the MIGHTREYA demo. I had a lot of fun with it, and I played through it multiple times, even if it wasn’t much different from the demo I tried a few months ago. It was more polished, and it added voice acting, but the game was the same.

The combat is fast, fluid and satisfying. All of your options feel strong and useful, and they flow into each other, letting you make cool combos on the fly. You can dash into an enemy, hit them with a flurry of punches, then smack them into the ground, follow them down and slam the ground for more damage, then dash back into the air to fight your next target.

Even with all the dazzling, disorienting action going on, the game’s core combat fundamentals are solid. You can dash out of the way of attacks and out-space them with smart movement. You’re not forced to use the perfect dodge or the parry; you can move out of the way. The dodge is useful, and it has a place, being a riskier defensive option for attacks you can clearly tell are coming. Same with the parry. If you risk getting hit, you can use the parry to open up an enemy, but it’s up to you to do so. It’s not like in a lot of these games where you’re forced to parry, since the enemies are always tracking you with their attacks and sticking to you like burnt cheese on a pan. There’s actual spacing. What a concept.

There are downsides, as I said. The new player experience leaves a lot to be desired. The game is a bit overwhelming at first (and afterwards), and it might put someone off. That’s a shame, since I think the game is great once you can actually play it. When you can parse what’s happening on screen without having a seizure or puking from motion sickness, you’ll find that MIGHTREYA is a fun, fast-paced action game with a lot to offer.

Except for the boss fight. Treat it as a kind of final challenge. I managed it, and I suck, but it was a test of my patience more than anything. After finishing it, I felt less like a pro gamer and more like a Zen monk.

Download the demo now! I highly recommend it.

Put That Cookie Down! NOW!

I’ve been playing a lot of Deadlock lately. By a lot, I mean an excessive amount. There was a huge update that added a new mode, changed the UI, re-worked the bases, added new items, then a balance patch came out and they’re also rolling out two new characters per week. They’ve been busy over at Valve, and I haven’t, because I’ve been playing Deadlock instead of being busy.

There’s a lot of new things to be excited for in the game, but today I’m going to ignore all that and focus on possibly the least important thing in the update: a little tin of butter cookies.

It’s one of those Danish butter cookie tins you get during Christmas. At least, that’s when I usually get them. I’m sure they’re on sale year-round, but it’s something I don’t notice outside of its designated season. Like candy corn. Sure, you can grab a bag of it at any point, but it’s physically invisible to me until the first of October.

That little tin of cookies got me thinking about “soul”. Not the metaphysical kind, but the “soul” in a work of art. It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, like its sibling “slop”. Two vaguely defined terms that, when used, mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. The listener gets to join in on the interpretation, too. They get to project anything they want onto those terms. It’s a linguistic Rorschach test.

I’ll try my best to define what soul means to me, with a few examples, counter examples and a digital tin of fake butter cookies.

What is Soul?

Soul is when you can tell that something was made by a person with a specific vision and intention. When you watch a movie, or play a game with soul, you can see someone’s fingerprints on it.

It’s also kind of related to effort and, to a degree, uselessness. The phrase that comes to mind is “they didn’t have to do this” or, as the kids say, “they didn’t have to go that hard”. Going the extra mile.

I say kind of related to effort because not every soulful detail has to be a thousand-hour process. It can be something as simple as a character waving at the camera when you look at them, like in Hot Shots Golf Fore (which I didn’t mention in the review for some reason). In the review for that I made a comment that a low poly cow in one of the courses has more soul in it than any Sony published game after 2012.

The developers didn’t have to include that little cow, but they did. It adds personality to the course it’s in. It’s an entire cow with less polygons than Kratos’ index finger, but what it lacks in graphical fidelity it makes up for in artistic detail. A 3D modeler sat down and thought “how can I capture the essence of a little cow in just a few triangles?”. Then they put it in the game, and gave it some moo sound effects, and made it react to you when you look at it. Why? Because, if the player sees a cow on the side of the course, they’re gonna want to take a closer look at it, and if they do, the cow should do something.

Following things to a conclusion is also an aspect of soul. Thinking that, if something happens, something else should follow. If the player keeps interacting with the same NPC over and over, of course the NPC is going to get annoyed, and they should react accordingly.

Old shooters had soul, in the sense of small consequences. In Quake, if you use the lightning gun under water, you get electrocuted, because of course you would. You’re using lightning in water, so you should get electrocuted. Same with the old Build Engine games. Duke Nukem is full of interactables to a ridiculous degree. You can piss in a toilet, use a sink, see yourself in a mirror. Why? Because all those little details make sense to create a more believable world. The old Far Cry games had details such as grass and other foliage burning when you used a flamethrower near them. Someone tested the game and saw that you could use fire next to dry grass and thought “that would catch fire. You know what? It should.” A lot of modern games lack those little details. When was the last time you saw a functioning mirror in a game?

Nice little touches that show that someone was thinking about them when they were made. Details that someone less interested wouldn’t bother with, because they’re unnecessary. To me, that’s a large part of what soul is, but it’s not all of it.

So just attention to detail?

In a reductive way, yes, but not always. There has to be a vision guiding the details.

Sometimes “soul” can be a synonym for charm.

Some examples

Here are some examples from previous reviews.

In my review for Wanted: Dead, I said it had the “soul and jank of an unfettered creative”. Wanted: Dead doesn’t have a particularly strong art direction, and it’s pretty generic in its themes and setting, so why do I say it has soul? Because it’s a bizarre mess that could only come from someone with a clear vision. A team whose reach exceeds their grasp. They wanted to make a big action game with cutscenes and lore, but made a low-budget absurdity. It’s the kind of weirdness that comes from people who wanted to make a game at all costs.

Its soul comes from its gameplay identity, too. Soul isn’t just about art, effort or extraneous details. It’s about a vision. A lot of games don’t have a solid, core mechanical identity. They do stuff and that’s it. Staple on some souls-like combat because that sells. Add some RPG elements, and of course it needs a parry. Back in the early 2010s every shooter had to have a two weapon limit, hit scan enemies, regenerating health and a state-mandated turret section. If you compare the first three Ninja Gaiden games to Ninja Gaiden 4, you’ll see that the core mechanical identity is gone.

In my review for Pizza Tower, I said “There is more soul in one single frame of Peppino’s animation than there is in the entirety of Forespoken (sic)”. That one’s easy. Pizza Tower was made by one guy, with help from two music composers. It’s a very specific, singular vision. The comparison to Forespoken is an easy pot shot. That game has nothing going for it. It has a weird unnecessarily realistic art style with unimpressive character designs, generic quipyy dialogue, set in a fantasy world that looks like they took a can of store brand Fantasy and poured it on premade assets. Comparing Pizza Tower to Forspoken is like comparing… well, like comparing Pizza Tower to Forspoken. It doesn’t get any more unfair than that.

On the subject of En Garde! I wrote: “It perfectly captures the swashbuckling spirit with an endearing cast, excellent music, great visuals and a whole lot of soul.”. This one’s a lot more vague out of context. The game itself has a very solid identity as a swash-buckling saturday morning cartoon. The characters, plot, voice acting and music all contribute to this feeling. The most impressive part is how the gameplay also manages to capture that fantasy while still being a cohesive package with mechanics that work well and make sense. You can swing from chandeliers, kick enemies away, trick them by putting pots on their head. Storm a busy banquet hall and throw an entire roast turkey at someone. It takes all the tropes and quirks you’d expect from a cartoony adventurer and puts them into the game, and it lets you do them. The developers love this kind of thing, and it shows in-game.

In my impressions for Highguard, another Forspoken-like, I said it was:

“A soul-less product churned out to maximize profits while limiting risk. It touts it’s from the developers of other, better, more successful games, but it doesn’t have any trace of their magic. This game might as well be AI-generated.”

That one is self-explanatory. Highguard takes every fantasy cliché and mixes them together until it’s an unrecognizeable mush. It has vague Chinese elements with some of its character designs, but then it throws technological bits on them, then it tries to make it look medieval because fantasy is medieval, but the armors are too perfectly machined and detailed so they look modern. Then it throws actual sci-fi technology in, but it has Celtic influences here and there, then the maps look like they take place in a stock photo of a grassy field. The game’s currency is crystals, and they look like what you’re imagining right now, with no variation. Just crystals. It’s an unidentifiable mess of everything at the same time, with an uncanny level of polish that sands off any rough edge, making sure there isn’t a trace of personality visible.

Hey, that sounds a lot like AI.

Some long-running franchises are good examples of soul vs soulless. The Tony Hawk franchise was always a commercial product, but it was steeped in the skating culture of the time. It had the kind of music they’d listen to, collaborations from brands and magazines in the scene, an irreverent sense of humor and it translated skateboarding into a fun arcadey game. Then Pro Skater 5 came out and you could tell no one cared. The game lost all its edge, the physics were changed, features were removed and it felt like some generic game wearing Pro Skater like a skinwalker. Kickflip? More like asset flip.

The Pro Skater remakes are a good example of this, too. They sand off the game’s edges and change what made them unique. It removes the blood, which you could say was unnecessary, but it’s part of the original. They altered how the games play, changed tricks. It doesn’t feel the same.

The Grand Theft Auto remakes infamously ruined their games. They went over the entire thing, using AI to upscale things for better resolution, completely demolishing any artistic details from the original. The limitations made the artists make specific decisions, and the machine upscaling just shellacked over them with two pounds of computerized slime. It shipped full of bugs because hey, there’s a deadline to meet, and they can’t be bothered to mess with all of that. Besides, no one’s going to notice, it’s just a bunch of inconsequential detail, right?

What about the butter cookies?

The butter cookies were what started this train of thought. It’s just a little tin of cookies on a table. Why do I think it’s worth mentioning?

The little table is there because of the new character event, where you vote for who you want to come out first. There’s a ballot box with some ballots showing a picture of each character. The box is on a table, and the table has a little tin of cookies, some cups and a coffee pot.

There is no reason to have all that in the game, but it’s there. If you’ve ever been at a meeting, or a small impersonal social event, the kind you don’t organize for leisure; something like a PTA meeting or a small orientation, you’d know there’s always a table with some refreshments. Someone at Valve thought to put the ballot box on a table in a physical space in the hideout to make it look more interesting. Then they thought “they’re going to want some refreshments. Let’s put some there”.

They had a weirdly specific vibe for that set-up, a quick meeting with refreshments, a singular vision. It came from someone’s experience. When I saw it, I knew the feeling. I’d been there before. The little cookies don’t add anything to the game in a practical sense. They didn’t have to do that, but someone thought it would be nice if there were some snacks on the table, and they thought about what specific kind of snacks, and what the cookie tin would look like.

To me, that perfectly summarizes what I think soul means.

In Memory of Highguard

The word slop gets thrown around a lot these days. If you don’t like something, slap it onto another word as a suffix, and you have a complete opinion. Multiplayer game you’re not interested in? Friendslop. Souls-like? Soulslop. The word gets attached to specific things, too, like AI. It’s so common to pair the two, that “AI slop” is practically its own word now, and it’s being used so much it’s overshadowing regular AI. Everything is slop. This article is opinion slop. This paragraph is intro slop.

The overuse of the word slop muddies its meaning. Ironically, mud is a type of slop. It’s anything that’s slimy. Something that falls on your plate with a wet thud. Processed gruel with no real defining features, unique qualities or identifiable ingredients, other than wetness. If you combine every dish in a restaurant into one, you’ll end up with a plate of slop. Mix every color together, and instead of getting a magical rainbow, you get grayish brown slop.

Mix every mechanic from every shooter in the last ten years, and you get Highguard.

Gameplay

Highguard was a free-to-play first person shooter that released in 2026, and was shut down the same year. Its main gameplay loop was unique for a shooter. It was mostly menu-based, unlike the action-oriented gun games we know and love. You enter the menu, and you have a long list of things on offer. These range from costumes, to mounts, to little trinkets you can hang on your guns. You had to buy these with points. To get those points, you had to go to another menu and use real money to buy the points. This is where the first real challenge begins.

The points are sold in predetermined quantities. There were different tiers, each offering more points than the last. The trade-off for more points is that they cost more money. These point amounts were never enough to buy the thing you wanted. If you bought a higher number of points, you’d be able to purchase your item, but you’d have some points left over which you couldn’t do anything with. It was like a kind of puzzle game. You had to carefully plan which tier you’d buy in order to purchase your items by wasting the least amount of points. You’d always have some left over, it’s part of the core design. It wasn’t about preventing that from happening, but using your skills to minimize it when it inevitably happened.

The really interesting part of the game comes from how you earn that “money” to buy the points in the first place. You, the player, needed to get something called a “job”. This wasn’t done in-game, you had to go out somewhere else to do it. These “jobs” could be anything, anywhere. You could work at a restaurant, be a security guard, become a teacher, or sit at a desk and fill out paperwork. The choices were nearly endless, but the system itself was a bit imbalanced.

Once you had your job and your money, you could buy all the points you could afford. Then, you’d-

What?

What do you mean that’s not what Highguard is about?

Okay, if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what Highguard is about? It’s a hero shooter? What? Where’d you get that idea? From smoking weed? Were you puffing on the ganja like Seth Rogen?

If this was a hero shooter, why did it launch with 8 heroes? Yeah, I know Team Fortress 2 only has 9 classes, but they’re different characters with unique attributes, weapons and playstyles. The 8 guys in Higuard all use the same guns. Overwatch launched with 15 heroes. Deadlock, which isn’t even technically in beta, had 19 heroes on launch, and they each have their own weapon and 4 abilities. The dudes in Highguard- sorry, the WARDENS of Highguard- have one ability and one ultimate.

Alright, bring in the Gameplay header back. I’ll go over the shooting mini-game, which is apparently the real game.

Gameplay (for real this time)

Highguard was a first person shooter. You used guns to shoot your enemies from a first person perspective, and buying cosmetics wasn’t the primary focus of the game. Each match was a “raid” where you had to destroy your opponent’s base. Each match was segmented into different phases: the setup phase, looting/gearing, capturing the shieldbreaker, then the actual siege where you invade the enemy base and try destroy their generators. Destroy two out of the three generators, and the base explodes. The match ended once a base was destroyed.

The best way to talk about this game is to go over each of its phases. Starting with the setup.

Setup Phase

You and your teammates start in a base which has three generators in it, each housed in a room. Your job here is to put reinforcements on the walls, to make them hard to breach for the attackers. Each team member had a limited number of reinforcements they could place on any destructible wall they chose. Picking the correct walls to block off was an important part of the strategy.

While you were reinforcing the base, the attackers would use little remote-controlled drones to scope out your defenses a plan an attack route. They could ping your traps and tell their squad mates what to look out for-

Oh, sorry, my mistake. That’s Rainbow Six: Siege. I got mixed up there for a bit. It’s just that Highguard starts the same way, but it’s a lot less interesting. There were a lot of walls to reinforce, but you could comfortably protect the objectives. The destruction engine wasn’t anywhere near as detailed as in Rainbow Six, so you couldn’t create holes in walls to walk around or create vantage points. The walls either existed, or they didn’t. It’s was a binary state.

There weren’t any traps to put down, either.

This phase took up the first 50 seconds of the match. Then came the looting/gearing phase.

Looting/Gearing

You and your two teammates would then run out on horses, or paid cosmetic mounts, and go look for chests with loot in them. The loot was color-coded, as was the style at the time. The better the color, the better the numbers on the item. You could find guns or armor.

That’s it. That’s the looting phase. You grabbed gear. Sometimes you could find rare stuff with slightly better numbers.

There was also a really bad system where you would mine for money to use at a shop. This is a real in-game shop that sold you guns, and you bought them with fake money. Not the real money shop which is the core focus of the game. Don’t confuse the two.

You’d get money by mining crystals that were also conveniently placed next to the chests and shop. To get the money, you would whack a crystal with an axe over and over. There was a little mini-game where you could do more damage to the crystal by timing your melee attacks. Yes, this is a lot how you would get materials in Fortnite.

This looting/gearing phase would take up around two minutes of the match.

Shieldbreaker

You can’t attack the enemy base without the Shieldbreaker, a magical sword that spawns after the looting phase. Its location is announced to the players, and both teams rush to get it. It was the first time in the match where you would encounter real combat.

Since this was a big, magical sword, you’re probably wondering if you could do anything with it. Well, you could stick it in the enemy’s base and disable their shields, starting the siege phase.

Now, on to the siege phase-

What? You want me to tell you more about the magic sword? I just told you everything about it. You couldn’t use it for anything; you couldn’t swing it, attack with it, it didn’t give you any cool buffs. In fact, it wasn’t even like a flag in a capture the flag mode where it disables your weapon and your teammates have to cover for you while you run it. It’s a thing you interact with and it disappears into your character. That’s it.

Yeah, it’s even more disappointing than you thought. Shocking, isn’t it?

The Siege Phase is up next.

Siege Phase

This phase started when the sword team put the big sword in the enemy’s base. This triggered a sequence where a giant siege engine materialized on the map and started ramming the enemy base. This would go on for around 40 seconds, while both teams sort of sit there staring at the machine as it broke the shield. The game made a lot of noise and played generic fantasy horns to make it seem epic, but it was a glorified loading screen.

After the shields fall, you can finally enter the enemy’s base, or have the enemy enter your base. Then it would turn into more of a close-range tactical affair, with tight angles and small rooms.

The attacking team would plant a bomb in one of the bomb sites, and the defenders would have to either prevent them from planting or defuse the bomb once it was placed.

The attackers could use their abilities or breaching charges to break down walls to enter the bomb rooms. The newly destroyed walls changed each bomb room significantly, creating new lines of sight and altering the pace of the match. Each round was a living, dynamic interaction between attacker and defender spoken in the medium of the map itself. There was one character, Thermite, who could blast through the once inaccessible reinforced walls with a giant- wait, sorry, I’m thinking about Rainbow Six: Siege again.

Once the siege machine destroyed the wall and you went in, the game started to make a little more sense. It was extremely generic, sure, but at least you were doing something other than looting or standing around waiting for something to happen.

Unlike Rainbow Six: Siege or Counterstrike, Highguard had respawns. Killing a defender would put them out of the game temporarily, and killing an attacker would do the same. It wasn’t a high-stakes situation where one wrong move could take out an important member of the team. It was a messy fight where someone could spawn near you.

What was more likely to happen was that the defenders would die, then respawn and die instantly all over again. They would speed run the cycle of life and rebirth, since the spawns were questionable, at best. You’d die, spawn into an enemy’s active ability, and die again. You had people spinning around the wheel of Samsara at 7,000 RPM.

The gear system rears its ugly, balding head here, too. There was armor in this game, as was tradition with all battle royales, and you lost it on death. Thing is, in other battle royales, when you die you’re either out of the match, or you respawn on the other side of a continent where you can try to scrounge some equipment.

In Highguard, you would die, lose your armor, and respawn in your base with no armor. You were double-cooked. In theory, this meant you could knock out a well-geared player and have them be less of a threat, but in practice, this was a poorly thought out mechanic that encouraged the losing team to lose even harder.

Not only were you stuck in your base dying over and over again, you were doing it in the nude.

Fear not, nudist loser. The game had a fail-safe installed to prevent one team from steamrolling the other. In theory. After around 2 minutes of sieging, the match would reset and both teams would be plucked back into their respective bases, starting the whole process over again. That meant back to the setup, the looting, the shieldbreaker and sieging. If you left the enemy’s base near death, but ran out of time at the last moment, you’d have to play another 10 or so minutes of the game just to chip away at the last bit. That is, if the enemy team didn’t swing the match back on you. Then the games would go on for more than 30 minutes.

Mechanics

Time to get into the weeds of the mechanics starting with the shooting. This is going to be very technical, so buckle up. In this game, you had guns, and you shot them at other players.

That’s it. If you want more, I could tell you more. Every gun, save for the rocket launcher, was a hit scan weapon. Point and shoot, no bullet travel time. They all had recoil, as is tradition. There were a few guns. A fully automatic AK-47, a fully automatic SMG, another fully automatic gun, a burst-fire pistol, a sniper and a shotgun. There was also a revolver somewhere. Maybe a crossbow?

It’s surprising to me that, in a world of magic and sorcery, the weapon of choice is still a regular-ass AK-47. Same goes with the other guns. They’re not magical guns, they’re the same kind of guns you see in any other game. You could go to a bass pro shop and get something similar. I’ll talk more about the guns and their aesthetics later.

The game’s movement was also incredibly bog-standard. Slow walk speed, a sprint that makes you slightly faster, and a slide. Oh boy, a slide. How exciting. Every single shooter made after 2018 needs a slide. It’s a law. What does the slide do? Nothing, really. It’s a small speed boost. Kind of like a double-sprint.

This brings me to the game’s overall momentum/velocity system. There is the faintest hint of it, but like most games, it’s a prescribed interaction and not a natural mechanic. When you’re running, you slide and your speed is transferred to the slide, which then quickly stops. You can’t transfer that velocity from the slide into something else, as you should be able to. You can’t slide then jump out of the slide to jump further at high speeds. Your speed is artificially limited.

Compare this to Deadlock’s slide. Deadlock uses real momentum calculations. If you are going fast and slide, that speed is transferred into the slide. If you keep sliding, you stop, thanks to friction. If you jump after sliding, the jump will have the velocity you had while sliding. This means you can go really fast, slide and jump and you’ll still be going really fast. The game doesn’t stop you from running like an angry hall monitor once you hit an unwritten speed limit.

This is especially infuriating, since Highguard was made by ex Titanfall developers. This was the most advertised thing about the game. The reveal trailer barely gave you any sense of what the game was about, and it contained some false advertising which I’ll get into later, but it made DAMN sure to tell you it’s from the developers of Titanfall.

You know what Titanfall has that Highguard doesn’t? Other than an active player base, fun gameplay, different game modes, a good visual identity, creative twists on the first person shooter, cool equipment, good maps, uh… what was I talking about? Oh, right. Movement. Titanfall has excellent movement, with natural momentum. Highguard didn’t. Don’t try to sell your game by naming Titanfall if your game moves like you have an anchor strapped to your waist.

The movement clashes with the game’s time-to-kill. In tactical games like Counterstrike, you move slow but you die quickly. This emphasizes taking angles and patient play. Hence the “tactical” denomination. On the other end of the spectrum, we have arena shooters, like Quake. In these, you move a lot faster, but it takes a long time to kill someone, emphasizing movement and aim.

Highguard’s approach to its tactical identity is a lot like it’s approach to everything else: half-baked. The movement suggests a tactical shooter. It’s slow, but you have to traverse a huge map full of nothing. The solution to that were the horses. Mount up and ride across the vast wasteland of a map. Then, when you’re in the siege phase, the movement makes sense since you’re fighting in small, cramped areas. It doesn’t really work for anything in between. If you get caught in a fight outside of the designated areas, meaning, the 80% of the map that’s an empty no-man’s land, you start to feel the limitations of the movement.

The game’s time-to-kill was too high for its slow movement, making gunfights turn into a slog. In extreme close-quarters situations, you could kill people quickly, but at any other range, it didn’t work.

I almost forgot this was a hero shooter. There are eight of them, and they each have one ability and an ultimate. You charge your ultimate by fighting or by getting ultimate chargers from loot. These charge your ultimate, as the name suggests. Once you have 100% charge, you can unleash a special ability. Rampart, for example, could summon a mobile minigun which-

Rampart? That’s Apex Legends. My mistake. Again. I keep mixing Highguard up with other games.

In Highguard you have someone like Slade. His ultimate is firestorm. It rains fire down in an area. That doesn’t sound too exciting. Then there’s Redmane, who could roar and destroy walls in an area. Wow. That’s really underwhelming.

The shop is a waste of time, too. You can buy high-tier weapons to guarantee a drop, or buy armor because you need it, but everything is expensive and getting any significant amount of money takes a while.

Characters

There were eight of them. EIGHT. For a hero shooter. Just eight. I know Big L said 8 is Enough, but I mean no disrespect to the late L when I say, no. Eight is not enough. Especially when they’re this bland.

We got Atticus. Man with the requisite side-shave. He throws lighting.

Condor, who constantly reveals enemies around her. Her ultimate throws out smoke grenades from Valorant, because this game doesn’t lift from enough shooters.

Kai is a guy who is made of ice, and he’s not nice. He can repair walls. With ice. Or make walls. Of Ice. Or turn into a demon. Of ice.

Mara, a woman that kinda looks like Moira from Overwatch. She also uses balls. She can shield a player. Her ultimate makes a spawn point. Riveting.

Redmane is a beastman. He can swipe and break walls. His ultimate breaks walls.

Scarlet, a girl. She throws daggers.

Una, a woman that looks like Grimstroke from Dota. I saw her in a match once, and genuinely have no idea what she does.

Then there’s Slade, who is just Ken Masters, from Street Fighter. He throws fire. His voicelines are really cool and original. Stuff like “heating up” and, “fire up!”

If I sound unenthused about the characters, it’s because I am. I don’t like any of them. The only one I kind of liked was Slade, but then again, he’s just Ken.

I thought every character was boring and/or ugly to look at. Their designs are a mashup of every modern fantasy trope combined into an incongruent mess. Their costumes are vaguely Asian-inspired, but not fully, with flowing monk robes and Redmane’s steppe nomad look. Then on top they have some weird futuristic details, like armor pieces that are too perfectly contoured, perfectly machined metal bits or overly detailed geometric pauldrons. Kai has some ports on his back that look like a Flux Capacitor. Some have pouches, vests with zippers and leather belts that look like something from a futuristic military shooter.

It’s a mess, much like the rest of the presentation.

Presentation

There are two words to describe this entire game: Inconsistent and Generic. Also “end of service”, but that’s a phrase, not two words. The design mashes a bunch of fantasy tropes together in a way that doesn’t look aesthetically cohesive or appealing. It’s such a mish-mash of every single thing that it ends up looking like nothing and everything at the same time. It’s an entire Thanksgiving dinner put in a blender, including the Pumpkin pie and the wine.

The graphics themselves are poor, on a technical level. Sure, the characters all look detailed, as is standard for this kind of thing, but you can barely see it under 60 pounds of Unreal Engine 5 slime. The game is upscaled by default, and you have to go into the config file and change a lot of parameters to turn it off. This means the game looks blurry, since it’s rendering the game at a smaller resolution, and stretching it to fit your monitor.

This is also one of the most Unreal Engine 5 games ever. Everything has that telltale plasticky look to it, like it’s molded from PVC. Things that should be rough like rock walls or floors look like they’re melting. There’s volumetric fog over everything, obnubilating the proceedings. The aforementioned DLSS makes everything blurry, there’s horrible dithering on the hair and grass. The lighting, shading and materials are all the most default-ass Unreal Engine 5 looking things I’ve seen since Evil West.

Even with the game’s many, many graphical compromises it still manages to run like garbage. A lot of people reported stuttering and framerate drops. I couldn’t get a consistent framerate. I did the most I could to get the game running okay while looking decent, and I couldn’t find a good middle ground. Not to mention the fact that, to me, the game looks like a screaming turd even on the highest settings. You still can’t get rid of the Unreal Engine stink unless you go diving into the config files, and I ain’t got time for that.

The music is also incredibly generic. Look up “10 hours of fantasy music” on YouTube and you got what this sounds like. Constant fake-epic horns and battle music. The kind of thing you hear in a trailer for a movie where two armies of CGI creatures run into each other. I’m trying to remember any song from it, but I just keep getting random drums and horns that could be from anything. I think the one I’m thinking of is from The Witcher, and I played that game over a decade ago. I just closed Highguard while taking notes, and I still couldn’t hum a song from it.

I just realized, the song I was thinking of was the menu theme from Mordhau, a game I haven’t played in 6 years. Calling this one generic is an insult. At least it has personality, with the clanging of swords making up the percussion. It’s good. Highguard doesn’t have anything nearly as good.

Was it really 3v3?

Yeah, this was a battle royale type game, with a huge map and massive, epic battles, that was played between two teams of three people. Imagine playing Apex Legends with just six people. The map wasn’t as big as the one in Apex or any other battle royale, but it was still huge. It was the kind of map suited for a Big Team Battle in Halo, with vehicles and everything, but with just six scrubs running around on horses (or your choice of cosmetic mount for a few dollars).

The trailer shows three people at a time, but it never explicitly states it’s 3v3. From watching the trailer, you could assume it’s a large-scale game with multiple squads of 3 people, like Apex Legends, a game mentioned in the trailer.

There’s a moment of outright false advertisement in the trailer. At the start you can clearly see the player shoots at four enemies in one continuous take.

The store says, down in the body of the game’s description, that you “Pick from an ever-growing roster of Wardens, and form up in teams of three “. That’s technically correct (the best kind of correct), you go out in teams of three. It’s just that the game’s advertising never explicitly states it’s TWO teams of three.

The team size was one of the many, many, many missteps that lead to this game’s cancellation in the summer of 2026. It bleeds into every other aspect of the game, and negatively affects it. The map is too big for just six people, skirmishes feel small, the fantasy of a massive siege or a “raid”, as the game calls it, sounds like it needs way more people. In fact, this is called a RAID shooter, and a raid is a term borrowed from MMOs, which means a large number of people participating in an event.

Now, I have to make something clear. Having more teams would not make the game better. The game, at its core, is a bland, mediocre shooter with too much going on. No amount of players will fix the rigid pace of the matches, the amount of downtime there is, the boring characters, the bad armor system, the underwhelming siege aspects and the lackluster destruction system. That’s not even mentioning the generic guns and the basic movement.

The bases are built for small teams, too. More than six people fighting in one of these tiny spaces would be even more of a mess than it is now.

Suggesting fixes isn’t warranted, since this game shut down.

Conclusion

That’s the most anyone will ever write about Highguard. I will admit my bias. I was incredibly disappointed with this game’s reveal at the Game Awards 2025. They saved it for last, like it was some huge thing, and sold it as “from the developers of Titanfall”. It looked extremely generic, because it was, and I admit I came into it with an extremely negative perspective, but I went into it. I tried the game. I gave it a shot. If I’m going to be a hater, I want to hate with precision. I won’t take someone else’s word for it. If I took second-hand opinions, I’d still think Bioshock is a good game.

I tried Highguard, and didn’t like it at all. At its best, when you’re fighting in the base, it’s just generic. At its worst, with its constant downtime and infuriating resets during the siege phase, it’s boring. You don’t want something to be boring. Boring is the worst thing you can be. There’s nothing in boring. The reason why people watch movies that are “so bad it’s good”, is because there’s some entertainment to get from watching a train wreck. Highguard is a train wreck, but not an interesting one. Instead of a fiery crash like Concord, this is a gas leak in the dining cart. The passengers are all dead and the train just stops slowly. It’s really sad and morbid, and you don’t have any fun watching it.

I try not to use the word slop to describe things, because it’s reductive and doesn’t reflect anything real. Slop is a thought-terminating cliché. You say something is slop, and everyone else is supposed to understand what it means, but in reality, they’re just projecting their own idea of slop onto your words. I’d rather explain why I don’t like something rather than use a pithy little slogan.

I put up that whole disclaimer, and this entire essay, to say this: I think I’ve earned the right to call Highguard slop. It’s slop. It’s a thoughtless amalgamation of every trend, gameplay mechanic, scummy business practice, and everything released in the past 15 years, all put into a corporate blender. A soul-less product churned out to maximize profits while limiting risk. It touts it’s from the developers of other, better, more successful games, but it doesn’t have any trace of their magic. This game might as well be AI-generated. It lacks the spark of divinity. This was made in a boardroom by people who don’t play games, for people who don’t play games.

The part about better, more successful games is fresh on my mind. When you play Highguard (which I don’t think anyone should), you can see bits and pieces taken from much better games. The base sieging with the destructible buildings? Rainbow Six: Siege did it way better. Comparing Siege and Highguard is like comparing a Michelin star restaurant, to a McDonald’s that kicks you in the balls instead of serving Big Macs.

It has the 3 person team of heroes thing from Apex Legends, but the guns are worse, the loot is not interesting, the characters are a lot less fun to play as, the movement is worse, the respawn mechanic is worse.

It borrows a little from Counterstrike with its tactics, bomb sites (Siege also took from Counterstrike, so you can trace the family tree back to Counterstrike) and economy, but Counterstrike is a much better game in every way, and its design decisions are coherent and make sense. In fact, I wouldn’t say Counterstrike is a better game. There isn’t a comparison. Counterstrike is a good game, while Highguard is barely a game.

It has the destructible environments and resource gathering of Fortnite, but you can’t play as Homer Simpson or Hatsune Miku. Also, the gameplay in Fortnite is better, too, but come on. What other game lets you play as a squad of Homer, Naruto and Chun Li?

What if Highguard had more teams of 3? Would that make it more exciting? No. It wouldn’t. If you want a team-based first person shooter with way better destructible environments, go play The Finals. It’s galaxies ahead of Highguard.

There are countless other games you could play that do what Highguard does better than Highguard. In fact, I’d recommend Marvel Rivals over it, and I really don’t like that game.

In short, I don’t recommend Highguard. To ANYONE. This game isn’t worth playing even to make fun of it. I regret my time with it. It’s free to play, and I still feel I’m owed a refund. If you want to laugh at it, wait for your favorite YouTuber to make a video on it. I see Dunkey released his Highguard video as I’m writing this. Watching him is more fun than playing that. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, I love Dunkey. I’m saying that you should watch him instead of playing this crap.

It’s sad when a game fails and people waste their time and work on it, but this game has to fail. The industry needs to be sent a message that we don’t want this garbage. Stop spending millions of this boring live service garbage, you apes. This game is fully released, and it still has less polish and content than Deadlock’s pre-alpha. It has just 8 playable characters, but hey at least the shop works, right? SPEND YOUR MONEY!

This game sucks, I’m glad it’s gone.

The only thing that could be worse than this would be an actual, flaming train wreck. Something like Kane and Lynch, but who would play that. Much less review it…

Addendum: After Highguard’s Shutdown

Everything before this point is left unedited, as it was written and published on January 28, 2026. This section was written on March 12, 2026, when Highguard’s servers officially shut down.

As you saw in the original article, I predicted this game would shut down, and wrote the review in past-tense, as a joke. I thought it would last until summer, at least, but it didn’t even make it to spring.

I said all I wanted to say about Highguard in the review, but after a few weeks, I have one or two spare thoughts rattling around. The first being that I wasn’t mean enough to the game. Everyone else was thrashing it, and I didn’t like it at all, and actively wished for it to fail, but I don’t think I communicated how meaningless it was.

I compared it to a lot of other multiplayer shooters. It takes mechanics from Rainbow Six: Siege, Counter Strike, Apex Legends and even Paladins. After the review, I went back to play Siege, and realized just how much better that game is compared to Highguard. Every other game Highguard stole from, is orders of magnitude better than it.

I know some people had fun with Highguard, and you’re free to like what you like, but there was no reason to play it over any other shooter on the market.

I tried Marathon during its open beta test, and I didn’t mesh with it too well. I don’t like shooters that take place in a massive map where you have to look for people and get sent to the menu if you die. It’s why I don’t play battle royales. I prefer games where the match starts and you’re shooting at someone within seconds, but Marathon had some really cool stuff. I liked how it felt, the world was weird and interesting, and I like the fact that it’s an ultra unforgiving hardcore shooter for a specific audience. It has its own flavor, one that I could see myself developing a taste for, if not for the $40 price tag (and the fact that I have no one to play with).

I can’t say the same for Highguard. I played it for a bit, and honestly didn’t want to touch it ever again. It was insipid. Bland, boring. It brought nothing to the table. I didn’t want to explore its systems, or engage with it. When I first played R6: Siege way back in the pre-historic era in 2015, I was terrible at it. I would get sniped from angles I didn’t even know existed, but the game was so interesting and full of nuance that I spent the requisite 20+ hours of pain learning it, and memorizing the maps. I didn’t care that I was getting hit through walls, or spawn-peeked. I was having fun learning the game, and I wanted to see more of it. Same with Marathon. I played it for a bit, didn’t really gel with it, but afterwards I kept thinking “what if I had given it another shot?”, and still consider playing it every now and then.

To re-conclude, Highguard was a boring, worthless game that no one should have played. It should have never been made. Anyone who played it and had fun with it was probably getting dopamine hits from playing something new.

I wasn’t mean enough to Highguard, but in this next part, I’m going to be EXTREMELY mean, to the point of bullying, so if you dislike negativity, skip ahead.

I’m glad it shut down, it was trash. I’m sorry to anyone who lost their job working on this, but this was not worth it. People from Respawn quit their jobs at Apex to come make Highguard. It’s not nice to make fun of other people’s dreams, but- if you believed in Highguard so much that you quit your job to go make it… HAHAHAHAHA!

What the hell is wrong with you? How is this anyone’s dream game? This is Gray Slop: The game. It’s the NPC meme put into an EXE file. This is like saying your dream job is to fill out spreadsheets in a cubicle for minimum wage. I refuse to believe anyone thought super-gluing five different shooters together was the next big thing. Your dream was a live service shooter with micro transactions and regular-ass guns? This game was an offense to the very concept of creativity. It spits in the face of human ingenuity.

Game sucked, the idea sucked, the execution sucked. If I were working on this, at some point during a play test I would have stood up and said “I don’t want my name on this” and just walked out of the building forever.

Old Man Yells At Games

This one’s a lot more negative than the last ones, but there are still some good games to discuss.

2023

2023 was a year full of games I found intersting, personally, but I’ll start with everyone’s favorite section: The stuff I didn’t play!

Starting off with Forspoken. I swear this was a good year. Forspoken was a… game. Third person action/adventure, horrific dialogue, terrible soul less graphics, generic fantasy setting. Some vague magic elements. Certified triple-A slop. It got clowned on for its horrendous dialogue (rightfully so), but some said the gameplay was okay. I didn’t play it, but the gameplay looks incredibly boring. The whole game looks like a complete waste of time.

On that same wavelength we got Starfield. Another one of those open world Bethesda RPG things that are light on everything. Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. You travel around a mediocre world to take on mediocre missions where you do mediocre shooting in service of a mediocre story. This is bread and water soup, and the bread wasn’t even toasted.

Moving on from the games I didn’t play because they look like torture, we got the games I didn’t play because my backlog is too long.

First is Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. It’s Jet Set Radio. Grind around a city, do tricks and spray graffiti while listening to a funky soundtrack that includes music by Hideki Naganuma, the composer for the original Jet Set. It seems like fun, should get to it at some point.

Dave the Diver was a surprise hit that released this year. Run a sushi shop at night, and during the day, you forage for ingredients under water. It’s a neat concept, with some interesting gameplay loops. I got a taste of this game in the unlikeliest place of all: a mobile gacha game crossover. It had an event in Nikke: Goddess of Victory, which included a mini game which was basically a small version of Dave the Diver. It was fun. I haven’t gotten around to it because I forgot about it. This game had some controversy because it was published by Nexon, and people were arguing if it counts as an Indie game or not. I’m not sure on that end.

Baldur’s Gate 3 was another arguably indie smash hit. It’s a massive RPG from the creators of the Divinity series, which are also massive RPGs. Form a party and take on an epic quest that is a faithful adaptation of Dungeons and Dragon’s mechanics in videogame form. I haven’t played it because it’s a 100 hour behemoth, and I ain’t got time for that.

This was also the year of Lethal Company. One of the first in the revolutionary Friend Slop genre, where you and three other friends get spooked for funny YouTube clips. I didn’t play this because I don’t have any friends- I mean- it’s not my cup of tea.

What did I play this year, if not those big releases? Some indie nonsense no one’s heard of/cares about? You betcha, buddy. It wouldn’t be a Load Last Save article without irrelevant games!

The Ninja Saviors was a remake of a game for the Super Nintendo. It’s a 2D Sides-scrolling beat-’em-up where you play as a mechanized ninja android. Demolish dozens of soldiers and thugs through seven stages of arcade action. It’s pretty straightforward, but a lot of fun. It’s not exactly a remake, it’s more like a remaster. It spruces up the graphics a little, adds some new features and two new characters. Good stuff, overall. Tengo Project makes good games. Go check them out.

There’s Turbo Overkill, a first person shooter where you have a chainsaw leg. Speed through cyberpunk levels shredding countless bio-mechanical monsters. You get a nice arsenal of weapons to play around with, great mobility, a kicking soundtrack and some great level design. I recommend checking it out. I’ll review it at some point.

Hrot was another first person shooter. This one’s a lot less mobile than Turbo Overkill. More like a traditional boomer shooter, heavily inspired by Quake. Shoot irradiated monsters in Czechoslovakia in this horror-adjacent shooter. It’s a good time. I wrote a quick little recommendation for it as part of the 2025 Christmas series. Read it here.

Chants of Senaar was a puzzle game where you used language to solve problems. It has a nice, unique art style, great music and the gameplay is simple, but effective. I wrote a whole review for it, which you can read here. I recommend checking it out.

I also recommended Kill the Crows. It’s a single-screen arcade shooter where you shoot evil crow guys in the wild west. An enjoyable, short arcade game you can get for $5. I also recommended it for the Christmas thing. There are a lot of games from this year that I covered here. Even more in the extensive favorites and runners-up section.

To round-off the small indie games section we got Stonks 9800. It’s a relaxing life sim/job sim/idle game where you play as a Japanese stock broker in the 80s. Buy low, sell high, watch the little lines go up and make enough money to buy a house, a car and anything else you might want. The game is getting some notoriety now thanks to its great aesthetics. There’s also Amy, the cute secretary that talks to you during the game. It has some light dating sim elements, too. It’s still in early access, as of writing this, but it gets updated frequently with new features added every few months. Worth checking out.

This year gave us fighting games, too. Street Fighter 6 came out to mark a new chapter in the now 30+ year old franchise. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of good fighting and some dumb mechanics, but I still enjoy it. I’ve written about it several times, and keep playing it on my off-time. It worked well on launch, which was surprising, given how poorly Street Fighter V performed on release.

We also got Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. This long titled game is another fighting game, set in the Granblue Fantasy universe (it’s a mobile game). This is an updated version of Granblue Fantasy Versus (without the rising) which added some new features, more characters and better netcode. It also messed with the game’s core systems and shifted it from a more neutral-focused old-school fighter to something more in line with a regular anime fighter. It’s still more grounded than most in its genre, but its offense was made a lot more oppressive, combos got longer and damage was turned up to ludicrous levels. It’s still fun, but it has its rough edges, like dash-in light attack (66L).

Speaking of mistaken updates to games: Overwatch 2. I wasn’t much of a fan of the first one, but I did play it, and I also gave its sequel a shot. I didn’t like it much. A lot of the same problems were carried over from the first, along with a slew of new imbalances that come from the game shifting from 6v6 to 5v5. Having your tank countered in a rock-paper-scissors way isn’t fun.

Out of all these noteworthy games, which one was my favorite from 2023?

My pick for 2023: Pizza Tower

Mamma Mia! That was an easy pick! This game is fantastic. It takes heavy inspiration from Wario Land, but it manages to do its own thing. Great controls, great levels, it’s full of wacky, creative ideas and it has a ton of soul. It’s a rare game that can be enjoyed casually, and it really shines when you learn to play it and go for speed run clears.

I could go on and on about it. In fact, I did. I reviewed it back in 2024. Read it here.

Runners up:

Roboquest. This roguelite first person shooter has you shooting your way through hundreds of robots. It’s fast paced, really tough and an an overall excellent game. There’s tons of stuff to unlock, different characters to play as, co-op, tons of weapons to discover and some great movement. Highly recommended.

Deadlink. Another fast-paced first person shooter roguelite. Shoot robots here, too, but it’s cyberpunk themed. Take on challenging arenas where you fight for your life using a clever resource system that encourages you to play aggressive. I wrote a small review for it as part of the Christmas thing. Read it here. I highly recommend it.

Hi-Fi Rush. This extremely charming rhythm-based hack and slash is a ton of fun. It’s like a simplified version of Devil May Cry where you time your attacks to a beat. It feels like a PS2 game, in the best way possible. Its core gameplay is straight forward, but satisfying and polished. It’s brimming with charm, with goofy characters and a cheesy story that is kind of dumb but also comes off as sincere and heartfelt, the graphics are wonderful, the music is top-notch and it’s a blast to play all the way through. Hi-Fi Rush gets an easy recommendation. I should review it at some point.

En Garde. Another fun, cartoony hack and slash with Saturday morning cartoon energy. Play as the swashbuckling Adalia de Volador and take on guards and noblemen with your fencing skills. Kick people into pots, swing from chandeliers and dazzle them, or take them down with regular old sword skills. I gave it a glowing review, which you can read here. Yet another easy recommendation.

This was a great year of games, at least for indie games. The bigger stuff was a bit… lacking. We need less triple-A slop, and more small games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less. That’s where the real gold is hidden. Let’s see if 2024 brings us more, of it’s just a stinky snore.

2024

We got big releases! Big, stinky releases! The gaming industry is recovering from the effects of the pandemic, and they’re back to their regular bowel movements, giving us the best of the best gaming has to offer, all for the low low price of $60!

Starting off with Rise of the Ronin. Nioh was Team Ninja’s first souls-like. It combined the formula with more action-heavy combat and set it in a dark, yokai-infested Japanese setting. Then Sekiro came out and did the same. Now Team Ninja answers back with a Sekiro-like. Is it any good? Well, take Sekiro. Now, imagine if it sucked. That’s Rise of the Ronin. It has an open world that dilutes the gameplay and makes you travel from mission to mission to pad the runtime. Combat relies heavily on parries, like Sekiro, but you can’t move out of the way most of the time since enemy attacks track magnetically. There’s a Diablo-style loot system, like in Nioh, where you get constant junk dropped in your inventory that may or may not have more numbers. There are a ton of fighting styles and weapons to use, but you have to unlock them slowly. They’re drip-fed over hours and hours of gameplay. This game’s huge, but it’s padded to hell and back. It’s an hour of gameplay stretched out over 90. Very stinky, no good.

Stellar Blade was also a stinky action game. Before I talk about Stellar Blade, I have to go on a tangent.

This game proved to me that most Internet game critics are slop consumers that don’t know what they want. You see, there’s these game reviewers that claim to be against how modern gaming sucks nowadays. Old games were better, they claim. They look at a game and claim that it sucks because it doesn’t have titties or because the story has woke elements. They would constantly rail against these kinds of games. They don’t want Forspoken, that game’s woke. If they made games like they used to, it would be better. I always thought this sounded like a bunch of nonsense. They’re not engaging with the game as a game. They see it as a pawn in a stupid Internet culture war. They don’t dislike the game because the mechanics suck, or because it’s a mess of filler, they say it sucks because it’s “woke”. I thought that if a game as bad as Forspoken came out, but it had a chick with huge knockers in it, they’d love it, because they don’t play games. They argue about them.

Turns out I was right. Stellar Blade is a crappy game, but the Internet critics liked it because awooga bazooga, big booba and ass. I usually don’t weigh in on those kinds of culture war/political topics, but I will do so here. First off, I don’t know how having a sexy girl in a game is political. Titties are apolitical. Second, this game stinks. I wanted to like it; it’s an action game with pretty graphics, cool monsters and yeah, the girl is hot and I wanted to look at her, but the game is just so boring. The combat is stiff (boner joke), you only fight things with parries and basic attacks, there’s constant “exploration” that kills the flow of combat, constant cutscenes and all that bad stuff. It’s a very poorly made action game that misunderstands all the fundamentals of combat. But hey, she wears a skin-tight suit, therefore this game isn’t woke, therefore it’s good, apparently.

To complete my fence-sitting journey, I’ll say the other side is bad, too. This game isn’t bad because it objectifies women, or because it promotes unrealistic body standards, or because it’s gooner-bait. It’s bad because the core mechanics leave a lot to be desired.

We now return from our little break to talk about Tekken 8. It’s another triple-A disappointment. I got this game on release, because I liked Tekken 7. I was excited for it. Then I played it. This doesn’t feel like Tekken. It’s mostly about throwing out big, safe moves, you can’t sidestep most attacks, the Heat system is annoying and mobility overall was toned down. Matches devolve into what looks like a slugfest inside a phone booth as both players throw out big, gorilla attacks with no real care for spacing. Not to mention all the dumb 50/50 coin flip situations where you guess wrong once and lose 90% of your health. I don’t like it.

Multiversus came out this year. A Super Smash Bros style platform fighter featuring characters from Warner Brothers. You could have Lebron James fight Arya Stark. The game won Best Fighting Game at the Game Awards this year. Nothing bad happened with this game. It’s still going. Forever. Bugs Bunny fighting Rick and Morty, and they’re dancing, dancing. They say Multiversus will never die.

Zenless Zone Zero came out this year. It’s a huge mobile gacha game. I played it for around 30 minutes and didn’t think it was interesting. You press one button and that’s it. It’s the videogame equivalent of jingling keys in front of a toddler. Except the keys here are anime titties, and the toddlers are unemployed 20-somethings.

Speaking of free-to-play key jinglers: First Descendant. A looter shooter where the characters are all Korean models. It’s like Warframe, but with plastic surgery. I played it for a lot longer than I’m willing to admit. It’s dumb, but decently entertaining to play with friends. It’s engaging enough to keep you playing, but repetitive enough that you go on auto-pilot and can talk with your friends. It’s a podcast game.

There was Black Myth Wukong. It’s yet another souls-like. Or is it a Sekiro-like? I don’t know what this is. People claim it was an action game like Devil May Cry, with combos and style, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look too interesting.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 was another big release I didn’t play. I’ve heard not so good things about it, but I liked the first one, so I might check it out at some point.

I did play Slave Zero X. I wish I hadn’t. I wrote about why I dropped and refunded that game in an article I wrote a while back.

There was also Call of Duty Black Ops 6. These games keep appearing, and people keep buying them by the million. All I know about this game is that it’s a complete aesthetic mess. You can play as Beavis and Butthead and shoot Nicki Minaj with a futuristic rifle. It’s like if Fortnite has less soul. It’s a corporate product made by automatons and consumed by people who might as well be automatons.

Marvel Rivals was another corporate shooter that released this year. It’s Overwatch again, but with Marvel characters. It was a massive game for a few months. I played it with friends for a bit, but it’s not my thing. It has the same problem Overwatch did where both teams sit and poke at each other until their ultimates are up and that’s it.

There was a re-release of Horizon Zero Dawn? Why? That game is only 7 years old. I can barely see any “improvements” in the re-release. They just yassified Aloy a little. What an absolute waste of resources. Graphics haven’t improved in a decade.

Last but certainly not least we have Concord! The greatest game ever made. An incredibly original idea: a sci-fi hero shooter, wonderful cooldown-based abilities, slow combat, beautiful characters that everyone loved, an incredible art style that looked like a low-budget cosplay contest at a UFO convention, it was a sure hit. It released to massive hype, and everyone sang and played instruments, and Concord was dancing, dancing. Concord said he’d never die. Then a week went by and the game was shut down. Years of work gone in an instant. Millions of dollars poured into a horrible idea for a boring game in a saturated genre. A great snapshot of the games industry at the time. Triple-A games have to stop. I’m serious. They’re disgusting. We don’t need to spend millions making bad Overwatch clones, you numpties.

We also got Dragon Age: The Veilguard. A big, fantasy RPG that looks like garbage, plays like garbage and has a script written by a group of illiterate chimpanzees high on paint fumes. I’ve never played a Dragon Age game, and I doubt I’ll start with this one.

Most of these games sucked. What did I pick for 2024?

My pick for 2024: Helldivers 2

Sometimes Triple-A games get it right. One out of every 20 games. Not a good percentage, but every now and then, when the stars align and everything goes right, you get a decent game. Helldivers 2 is proof of this. It’s an excellent third person shooter with meaty, satisfying gunplay, it’s challenging, it has a lot of different weapons. The games as a service thing is a detriment, since it’s getting updated constantly, and those updates aren’t always improvements, but it’s a solid time. Fun with friends, too.

I wrote a review for it, which you can read here. It’s the first thing I ever reviewed on this site!

Runners up:

Starward. It’s Gundam Versus, with anime girls. It’s a lot of fun, but incredibly hard to learn. Its player base is practically non-existent, too, which makes finding a match a pain. It’s also a gacha. Look, it has a lot of things working against it, but I like it. The core gameplay is solid.

Metal Slug Tactics. A tactics game based on the Metal Slug franchise. It does a great job of translating the run and gun aspects of the arcade game to a turn-based tactics format. I recommend it and wrote about it on the Christmas thing, read it here.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. Super Mario 64, but with a taxi. Super Cario 64. I also wrote about this for the Christmas thing. I wrote about a lot of games for that. Metal Slug Tactics is great, go play it.

Balatro. A roguelite poker deckbuilder. A simple, genius idea with wonderful execution. I wrote an entire review glazing it. You can read it here.

KILLKNIGHT. An arcade-style shooter where you survive waves of horrible monsters. Its mechanics loop into each other, it’s intense, it has a simple yet effective scoring system and it’s overall a great game. Go play it. I wrote about it, go read it here. I should give it a full review at some point.

Shadow of the Ninja: Reborn. Another Tengo Project ninja game. It’s a platformer. Tough, with great levels, challenging enemies and hellish bosses. Great old-school gameplay that will test your skills. Amazing presentation, too. I wrote a full review. Go read it here.

That was 2024. Yet another year of great indie games set against a backdrop of absolute garbage triple-A slime. All the money in the world can’t buy you any taste. These games have no style, no grace, absolutely not worth touching even for free. Then we have indie games made for 10% of their budget, with smaller teams, and they’re miles above those crappy, corporate products.

Onwards to 2025.

2025

Now we’ve reached the end of this series. I could keep writing summaries for 2026, 2027 and so on, but they haven’t happened yet. It would be like that one scene in Space Balls where they watch the movie as it’s happening. The other years will be done one at a time. For now, enjoy the summary for 2025.

Starting things off with the release of the Switch 2. Nintendo’s long-awaited follow up to the insanely popular Switch is finally here. I didn’t get one, so I missed out on all the wonderful Switch 2 games like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza and… that’s it? Mario Kart and Donkey Kong? I mean, they look like fine games, but that’s what the console launched with? There’s Kirby, too, that’s cool. You can play the Yakuza games on it, but I wouldn’t buy a Switch 2 for Yakuza. I can play those anywhere else. I can’t play Mario on PC or Xbox (legally, at least). Only time will tell if the console is any good.

Monster Hunter: Wilds was another game I didn’t play. It’s Monster Hunter World, but with even less color, more cutscenes and more of an emphasis on story. It also runs poorly. It doesn’t sound like something I’d be interested in.

Same with Avowed. Obsidian is a company that everyone keeps telling me is the greatest. They make the best RPGs. I’ve played some of them, and seen the others, and I can’t really find any of that RPG magic. Are they like Blizzard, where they made some amazing games back in the 90s and have been resting on their laurels ever since? I don’t get it. Avowed definitely won’t change my opinion on them. It looks like an unfocused mess with no real core identity. Graphically, it also looks like the most Unreal Engine 5 game ever made. A friend of mine who loves RPGs told me to steer clear of this one, and I heeded his warning.

I didn’t play Blue Prince, but not because I didn’t want to. The backlog is out of control. I’ll get to it at some point.

Civilization 7 came out this year, too. I didn’t play it. I’m not going to pay $70 for a base Civilization game. I’ll wait for a few years until the definitive expansion comes out, then I’ll give it a shot. Even then, it’s not a guaranteed thing. It looks like it builds off Civ 6, which I don’t like. Maybe I’ll save the money and use it on something else.

That something else won’t be Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. “But Roger!” you exclaim. “Ninja Gaiden 2, the greatest game ever made, is back! In remake form! How could you not love it?”. It’s Sigma again. This is the twentieth time they re-release Sigma. I don’t care if they put gore back in, it’s still Ninja Gaiden 2: Sigma. The objectively inferior version. I want the original. Until the original is back, please don’t call me.

This year also gave me another Ninja Gaiden disappointment with Ninja Gaiden 4. I know a game is bad when I have to keep playing it to see if I like it, and I have been chipping away at Ninja Gaiden 4 for a while. I still don’t like it. The weapons are limited and samey, combat is mashy, enemies are annoying, the new camera supposedly fixed the problems with the previous games but enemies still manage to hit you from off-screen, the aesthetics are awful, Yakumo is a shitty protagonist, there are too many one-button platforming sections, and even playing as Ryu feels bad. The boss fights are long and boring, your damage is too low but you take too much damage, every combat encounter feels the same and the sound design is weak and flaccid. I can’t find anything to like about it. It’s so bad that I want to write a full, proper review for it, but that would mean playing the game in-depth to get notes, and I can barely stand it for more than ten minutes at a time. After NG3 and Yaiba, I said this series should remain dormant, and I meant it back then. I REALLY mean it now.

This year gave us Supervive, a MOBA combined with a battle royale. Made by a huge team of ex employees from Riot and Blizzard, this game took the world by storm. It had a huge player base and it was the talk of the town for a few weeks. Then the advertising budget ran out and everyone forgot about it. Player count dropped off a steep cliff and the game is set to be shut down in 2026. It lasted longer than Concord, at least.

SplitGate 2 seems to be going down that same path. Sorry, it’s not SplitGate 2 anymore. It’s SPLITGATE: ARENA RELOADED. They took the money they made from the original SplitGate and said they would make a new high-quality game with it. They made SplitGate 2. It’s a first person shooter with portals, but now the maps are bad. They’re smaller, less vertical and with less surfaces to put portals on. The game was retooled into a weird semi class-based shooter. It plays fine, but it’s a downgrade from the first. Shouldn’t have messed with a good thing.

There was a remake of The Talos Principle. Why? That game’s only… eleven years old. Oh, it’s over a decade old. I remember when it first came out. The original game is good, I can’t speak on behalf of the remake. The original still runs well on modern systems, so I don’t think the remake is necessary.

This year also saw the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, the most anticipated game of all time. No one could believe it, but it was finally here. The greatest game ever. Then a lot of people started complaining because it was too hard. Was it too hard, or is this a case of “hollow knight fans play hollow knight for the first time”? I’ll tell you when I play it. If I play it.

Out of all these wonderful, exciting and high-quality games, which one did I pick as my favorite for 2025?

My pick for 2025: Clair Obscur Expedition 33

Wait no! I haven’t even played this yet. Get out of here!

Sorry about that. That game shows up anytime a winner is announced. It’s like a virus.

My real pick for 2025: Peak

Climb a mountain, have fun. It’s ingenious in its simplicity. A great hangout game.

Runner Up: Virtua Fighter 5 REVO. It’s Virtua Fighter 5. Again. This game is almost 20 years old at this point, and it still beats every other fighting game, and it’s better than 80% of videogames released after 2006. See why I’m so negative?

Conclusion

Here’s where I end this overly long, convoluted retrospective on any notable game I could find across my 30-something years on this Earth. Up to today, when I’m typing this in 2026. I’d have to go back and read the whole series, but from what I can remember, it was quite the ride. Starting off with decent games in the 90s, then a huge mess of classics around the 2000s, then a marked decline around the early 2010s, to finish off with a completely split industry in the 2020s. We got multi-million dollar games on one side, indie greats on the other. The multi-million dollar ones are all boring, derivative trash that runs poorly and plays even worse, and the indie ones tend to be entertaining games you actually want to play.

I don’t mind that too much. Doing this series has reminded me of all the great games I haven’t played. I have a backlog that stretches back to 1991. Games could stop being made tomorrow and I’d still have enough to play until I’m 90 years old. The other day I did a quick calculation of how many hours worth of RPGs are sitting in my library, unplayed, and it’s around 1,000 hours. On unplayed RPGs alone. Not counting all the stuff that got added recently.

In my opinion, games are getting worse and better at the same time. Triple-A is getting noticeably worse. Gone are the days where you could spend $60 on a big name franchise and get something worth playing. Any big, new IP has a 90% chance of being a huge disappointment. Just a bunch of boring, soul less junk running on Unreal Engine 5.

That’s if you’re not actively looking for the good stuff that’s hidden away. The ones that don’t have millions to spend on advertising. As long as good indie games are being made, there will be something new to play.

And as long as I feel like it, this blog will be around to tell you about any game I find interesting, be it because it’s great and you should play it, or because it made my blood boil and insulted my lineage.

Go out there and play good games. They exist, you just have to look. If all else fails, know that there are over 40 years of games you haven’t played yet. Your new favorite might be lying in some dusty old basement somewhere, waiting for you to pick it up. Or emulate it, most likely. Just don’t tell Nintendo I said that. They’d kill me.

More years, more games, less enthusiasm.

2017

What was happening in the world? Despacito?

Who cares? The Nintendo Switch is here! Nintendo’s new console was a massive hit, and it brought with it some incredible new games like ARMS, which no one remembers and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I haven’t played. We’re starting early with those. I haven’t played Breath of the Wild, but I have played versions of it, since this is one of the most influential and copied games in recent memory. It made a Ubisoft style open world with some stuff do do and explore, and it introduced the climbing stamina system every other game would go on to adopt.

For the other Switch games we got Mario Kart 8… again! That’s right, that Mario Kart game you were already sick of on the WiiU is now on the Switch. Who am I kidding, no one played it on the WiiU. No one bought a WiiU. I didn’t, but I did play Mario Kart 8. It was alright.

I didn’t play Lawbreakers. I wasn’t the only one to not play it. In fact, not playing Lawbreakers was the style at the time. You might be asking yourself “what the hell is Lawbreakers?”, and you wouldn’t be the first or the last to ask. It was Cliff Bleszinski’s answer to Overwatch. A hero shooter where you could go into zero gravity areas. The art style was boring, the characters were unappealing, the gameplay looked slow and heavy, and it flopped in a few weeks. No one remembers it. I’m sure nothing like that happened again. I never played it for the aforementioned reasons.

In the same realm of high-profile flops I didn’t play, we got Mass Effect: Andromeda. A terrible follow up to the besmirched Mass Effect franchise. We all thought Mass Effect 3’s ending was the worst thing to happen to the franchise, but along came Andromeda to show us true horror. Poorly made, riddled with bugs, and with a script that redefines millennial writing. Constant, unfunny quips, baffling turns of phrases like “My face is tired from all of this”, and awkward cutscenes. All from a franchise known for its writing and cinematic presentation. The gameplay was hot garbage, too, apparently. Allegedly. I didn’t play it. You couldn’t get me to touch anything Mass Effect related after 3. That wound runs too deep.

We also got a new Bubsy game for some reason. I don’t know who asked for it, but we need to find them and put them in jail. Same for whomever came up with the game. Matter of fact, find anyone who bought the game and put them away, too. The only good thing we got from this game was an episode of Oney Plays. That’s it. I didn’t play it, either. What? You think I’d play the new Bubsy game of all things? I have questionable tastes, but I still have some discernment.

I did play Nioh, which also released this year. It was Dark Souls in ancient Japan, before Sekiro. Then Sekiro did Dark Souls Japan, but at that point it was Nioh without stamina. The web of comparisons is weird, but the game was fine. It had a dumb loot system that had you collecting hundreds of junk with slightly different numbers, which was infuriating. The overall gameplay, combat and mechanics were good, at least. Tough as hell, too.

Tekken 7 came to consoles after being out in the arcade for years. It was fun. The rage system was a bit annoying, but it was still a good time. Then the game kept getting updates and DLC characters, and it stopped being such a good time. Then Tekken 8 came out and 7 started to look a lot better again, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Capcom didn’t want to be left behind in the fighting game arena, so they released Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite. We wish they hadn’t. It was the long-awaited follow up to Marvel vs Capcom 3. When the game was announced, the hype was immense. We couldn’t believe we were getting a new entry in such a legendary franchise. Then the trailers dropped and opinion quickly turned sour. It looked like a mobile game. It didn’t have one third of the love and care the previous games had, it had a much smaller roster and it was missing fan favorites like the X-men. The overall negative attitude towards the game and lack of support in the esports scene led the game to flop like a fish out of water. The game itself was fine. It was a degenerate tag fighter, and the infinity stone system just led to longer combos and more oppressive offense. Not much different from the previous games.

Prey came out this year, too. Not that Prey. That was a sci-fi first person shooter with horror elements where you go around a space station full of aliens. This one was a sci-fi first person shooter with horror elements where you go around a space station full of aliens. Wait a minute. This version of Prey is an interesting game. An immersive sim with a good amount of freedom, creative problem solving, spooky moments and some neat ideas. This game is what Bioshock should have been.

There was Cuphead, the indie darling that introduced millions to the concept of “difficulty not in a Dark Souls game”. It had gorgeous hand-drawn graphics and a great soundtrack, but it wasn’t all style and no substance. It was a genuinely fun run and gun shooter with some good challenge.

Speaking of highly-regarded indie darlings, we got Hollow Knight. A metroidvania with heavy dark souls influence. You can’t discuss games after 2014 without mentioning dark souls. Dark souls this, dark souls that. I didn’t like Hollow Knight. It’s incredibly slow in its progression, and it’s a lot of walking and basic platforming. Oh, but it gets really hard later. Yeah it gets hard eventually, just give it a moment. This doesn’t usually happen, I usually get my double jump upgrade sooner.

While I’m tanking my credibility by admitting I dislike beloved games: Nier Automata. I know everyone loves this game, and they think the story is so deep and they jork themselves raw over 2B, and yeah, 2B is cute, but damn is that game boring. My God. The combat is shallow and repetitive, I didn’t like the empty world and the “exploration” and backtracking. The presentation is great, but I couldn’t bear the gameplay enough to get through it and enjoy the story. Even on that front, I think The Talos Principle did a better job of questioning the nature of existence and consciousness, all while having fun gameplay.

Indie game speed-round: Fight n Rage. It’s a beat-em-up where you pound furries into submission. With your fists… not- not like that. Nex Machina: arcade style shooter with seizure-inducing graphics. It’s a lot of fun when you can actually see what’s happening. Overcooked is a multiplayer cooking game that has the uncanny ability to start arguments. Slime Rancher was a cozy game where you catch slimes and profit off them. Very relaxing.

With all this heresy out of the way, let’s get to my favorite game of 2017

My pick for 2017: Battlerite

If I could take Hollow Knight’s popularity and give it to another game, it’d be Battlerite. Battlerite was a 3v3 moba battle arena. It took the fun aspect of mobas- the part where both teams are trying to kill each other- and made an entire game around that. No towers, no farming, no items, no objectives, just pure chaos, and it was wonderful. The characters were well designed, with interesting kits and abilities, the flow of each match was fast and satisfying and it was all around a blast. Too bad no one played it and it died a few years after release. It had so much potential. To this day, I consider it the greatest moba ever, even if it wasn’t really a moba.

2018

Did 2018 happen? I don’t think so. Filler year.

Starting off with a quick foreshadowing, we got Among Us. A little indie deduction game that went under the radar on its release. I’m sure nothing will come of it in a few years.

If you wanted less fun and more stress in your game, Darkest Dungeon had you covered. A brutal dungeon crawler where one wrong move could send your entire party into a schizophrenic meltdown. You didn’t even have to be the one to make the mistake. Sometimes they’d just start killing each other because they got spooked by a roach. It crossed the line from “challenging difficulty” all the way into “oh my God why would I even bother with this shit?”.

Assault Spy was a game where you played as Dante from Devil May Cry if he were a salary man. I did a quick write up recommending this one for Christmas, and it’s probably getting a full review at some point.

This year was huge for the kind of multi million dollar triple-A game I don’t play, but everyone else seems to love.

We got God of War again, but this time, Kratos is a dad! This is a more serious, mature take on those immature God of War games you liked as a kid. Those were videogames (derogatory), this one is closer to a movie, therefore it’s art. It’s still about clobbering fantasy creatures, but you’re not supposed to enjoy the violence. It’s just the focus of 99% of the game because- uh- well- uh- we’re making a statement about how violence is childish and you should be a dad… with axes. It’s high art, dammit! The fact that you’re questioning it means you’re not ready for it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 took this concept and ran with it to the point of parody. A giant, massive, bloated game that puts everything over the gameplay. It plays like a regular cover shooter from the 360 era, with no real changes or improvements, but hey whenever you’re looting something you have to take every item out individually! Isn’t that neat? In terms of gameplay it’s Red Dead Redemption one, but with a lot more talking, but you don’t care, do you? The graphics are incredible and the horse’s testicles shrink when they’re in the cold! Gaming isn’t about the gameplay, it’s about horse balls. We need to make our employees work 70 hour weeks to get those horse balls juuuuuust right.

Monster Hunter World also attended the same school of design as the others. You won’t see any of those details on the monsters, there are other games for that, but it did introduce a lot more story elements into a franchise previously known for its gameplay. It also drained it of all its color. It’s Monster Hunter, but with less of what made the previous games fun, but it was still a worthwhile experience. Even if some of the monsters were a complete pain in the ass, especially in its Iceborne expansion. Looking at you, Blackveil Vaal Hazak. It would take another entry for the franchise to go fully triple-A, but I’m getting ahead of my self.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance came along to show you could make a high-end story-driven game, while still being fun. You just have to trust that your player is capable of figuring out what to do, and how to do it. Judging from a lot of the reviews complaining about the combat, it sounds like the developers had a little too much faith in the average consumer. This game’s great. Its systems work well together, there’s a good sense of freedom to what you can do, the quests are interesting and the combat is weird at first, but satisfying once you get the hang of it. I especially liked the archery mechanics. The section in the monastery could have been removed, in my honest opinion.

2018 was also a good year for Mega Man, and re-releases of Mega Man. We got Mega Man 11, a great new entry in the franchise after over a decade of inaction.

We also got four other Mega Man games. Wow! Four new games? Yeah, four new re-releases. We got the original franchise with the Legacy collection and X in the X Legacy collection. Wait, that’s two games. Where are the other two? They’re right there. We split both collections in two games for some unknown reason. This is even worse if you remember the Anniversary collections that released back in 2005. They had every game in their respective franchise in one disc, for $30. I still bought the legacy collections because I’m a good little consumerist piggie.

We also got a re-release of Burnout Paradise. Wait, why? That game isn’t old enough to warrant a remake, it came out… a decade ago? Oh no. I remember buying the original at Gamestop like it was yesterday, and now it’s getting a re-release? Damn. Time really do be progressing in a linear fashion.

There was also a re-release of Ressonance of Fate. Sorry, let me use its proper title: Resonance of Fate^TM/END OF ETERNITY^TM 4K/HD EDITION. That’s its actual name. That’s how it shows up on Steam. This is an HD remaster of a relatively unknown JRPG where you shoot trolls with guns. It has an interesting combat system with a steep learning curve, but once you figure out how it works, the game doesn’t ever really evolve past it. The combat is one puzzle, and when you solve it, the same solution applies to every other fight. It’s fine, but since it’s a JRPG, it means it keeps going for around 50 hours, which leaves the gameplay feeling a bit thin.

There was also a re-release of Dark Souls (there it is again), but now it’s in High Definition. Wait, why would you re-release Dark Souls? It’s only seven years old at this point.

We also got Super Smash Brother Ultimate. It was not as good as Melee.

On the subject of fighting games that aren’t very good: BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. Like Smash Bros, it was also a crossover fighter. This time, it combined all of Arc System Work’s most famous fighting game franchises, like BlazBlue, Under Night In Birth, Persona- wait, Persona?- and RWBY. What? RWBY? That isn’t even a fighting game! Did I forget to mention Guilty Gear? No, because this Arc System Works fighter doesn’t have a single Guilty Gear character in it. It does have Yumi from Senran Kagura. Not a fighting game, either. The game was an unbalanced mess of degenerate strategies, unblockables, touch-of-death combos and unreactable crossups. If you managed to find someone to play with, you could suffer through this game’s vomit-inducing netcode. A waste of time and money for everyone involved.

Out of all these, which game gets the dubious honor of being my favorite of the year?

My pick for 2018: Celeste

A neat platformer with a great soundtrack. It’s one of those save-state games where you can retry the same jump 300 times in the span of one minute. It’s still a good time.

Runner up: Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I’m serious about that monastery section.

2019

Let’s start off by addressing the indie elephant in the room: I haven’t played The Outer Wilds. I know I should. I’ll get to it at some point.

What I did play was its similarly named compatriot, The Outer Worlds, and I sure wish I hadn’t. I only played a couple of hours of this, but by golly gee willickers, this has to be the most boring thing I’ve ever played in my entire life. I got so bored at one point that I had a near-death experience. My body detected a lack of brain activity and said “well, I guess my time’s up”. If you measured my brain waves while playing it, it’d be a flat line. The gunplay was terrible, the guns felt like garbage to shoot, enemies were spongy and dumb, the dialogue was horrendous, the characters gave me kidney stones, the moral choices were so asinine they made me curl up into a ball and weep. I can safely say that I hate this game. It’s a void of boredom that destroys joy and personality. It’s the videogame equivalent of getting stuck in an elevator with a redditor. I truly understand the Angry Video Game Nerd now, on a spiritual level. Having a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in my ear really is more appealing than playing this terrible game.

I think the same would happen if I had played Kingdom Hearts 3. The long-awaited third installment in this mess of a series. It came out, and I don’t know if anyone cares anymore. I sure didn’t.

I didn’t care about Jump Force, either. It took all your favorite Shonen Jump characters like Naruto, Luffy and Goku, and had them fight in typical 3D arena fighter fashion. It was a terrible cash-grab game that ran like garbage. It made every character look like a cheap, plastic knockoff of themselves. It was like mashing two TEMU action figures together under a strobe light.

Since I’m ripping on games, let’s transition into Metal Wolf Chaos XD. Metal Wolf was first released in 2004 by Fromsoft, the makers of Dark Souls (see what I mean? You can’t talk about games without bringing that up). It’s a game where you play as the President of the United States and you use your presidential mech to bring justice! It sounds like fun on paper, but in practice you end up shooting stationary targets that take 40 seconds to destroy. Not fun. Boring, in fact. My fellow Americans, it is with great displeasure that I announce that Metal Wolf Chaos XD is a stinky game. I did not have fun relations with that game.

I’ll be talking about Disco Elysium now. The fact that it’s here and not at the end with the runner ups and the favorite should tell you something. This is foreshadowing. It’s a literary technique. Disco Elysium uses a lot of literary techniques. It has amazing writing. Shame about the gameplay. It’s like a visual novel, with filler. I wish this game were a real novel. A book. I’d read the hell out of it. Not too enthused about playing it, though. I found it to be kind of intolerable. Inland Empire: Now you’ve done it. You went and tipped the Disco Elysium fans’ bookshelves. You practically pissed all over their library with your… “hot takes”. You’d best say something nice about another popular game, or your four subscribers will see through your cheap charade and go read something better.

I didn’t like Katana Zero. It was Hotline Miami, but side-view and a lot less free-form. Very restrictive save-state gameplay. Not fun.

I think I’m done speaking ill of videogames for 2019. The only other game I’d poke fun at is Death Stranding, the first strand-type game, but I didn’t play it.

Indie game lighting round: Baba is You is a creative puzzle game where you switch out attributes to make new situations. It’s hard to explain in one little blurb, but it’s a lot of fun.

My Friend Pedro is a side-scrolling shooter where you dual wield guns. Good stuff, even if some of the later levels do away with the dual wielding gimmick.

Ion Fury is a first person shooter made in the Build Engine. It’s good, has some really chunky sound effects, and I recommend playing it, even if they overuse the tiny skull enemies. Seriously, you can’t go more than 20 seconds in that game without seeing at least one of those.

SplitGate was a fun first person shooter with portals. Cool maps, satisfying guns and some neat game modes made for a great party game. I sure hope this game lasts for years and never does anything stupid. Foreshadowing is a literary device.

We also had Dead or Alive 6. It was fine, I liked it. No one played it. It tried to do away with its sexy image and it made an effort to present a more serious tone. You can’t try to be serious and also charge hundreds of dollars for swimsuits at the same time. One or the other, Tecmo. Preferably the former. If people didn’t like the sexy girls, this franchise wouldn’t have six installments. Now is not the time to change course like that. I have very little hope for DoA 7.

Another long-running fighting game got an installment that no one played: Samurai Shodown. The game itself was good, offering that classic Samurai Shodown experience you know and love. Well, a small number of you know it. The problem is that its launch was a mess, and it was on the Stadia. Remember the Stadia? Google’s streaming-only game console? That was a fiasco. The terrible launch soured any chances this game had at an audience. This is Samurai Shodown we’re talking about, so its chances of having an audience were near zero anyways.

Devil May Cry 5 also came out this year. Pretty good. Haven’t really played enough of it to give a definitive answer. From my first playthrough, I found that the combat encounters were pretty sparse, and the environments felt very samey. You spend too much time wandering around the sinewy tree thing. Maybe it gets more enjoyable on higher difficulties? I don’t know. I’ll find out when I get to them.

There was also Code Vein, which was Dark Souls again, but this time it’s anime. I have this game sitting in my library, but I’ve never played it.

Hey I haven’t mentioned Dark Souls enough so let’s talk about The Surge 2. It’s a souls-like, but technological. You dress up like an accident at an appliance store and go cut people’s limbs off. It’s an enjoyable game, even if the difficulty spikes its way into complete bullshit every now and then.

There’s a game called Zanki Zero that released this year. It’s a dungeon crawler with survival elements. It’s fun, but it outstays its welcome and falls apart near the end. I’ve been chipping away at it with intentions to review it, but that last segment is a bit of a slog. A long dungeon full of tough, annoying enemies and tons of environmental hazards. Not to mention that the story devolves into nonsense and goes out the window. That’s what I get for following a game’s story.

With so many games mentioned, what was my favorite for this filler year?

My pick for 2019: Slay the Spire

I wrote a weird review/extended skit thing about the game, which you can read here. It’s a great game, go play it.

Runners up: Yeah, this year had multiple games competing for the top spot. Imagine that.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It’s the game that started the parryslop movement, and arguably the only one that did it well. It’s a great, well-crafted game with a lot of cool ideas. Its gameplay is single-minded and sharpened to a fine edge. It does one thing, and it does it well.

Oxygen Not Included. A base management sim where you have a bunch of little guys and you give them orders, which they complete at their own leisure. You also have to keep them fed, happy and comfortable, or else they’ll refuse to work or just outright die. It has a ton of complicated mechanics, and you have to familiarize yourself with thermodynamics to keep your base cool.

The game is on the same level as Civilization or Factorio for me. A game so addictive and complicated, that I banned myself from playing them. I can’t trust myself to play them for a healthy amount of time, so I just got rid of them. That’s a glowing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one.

Mordhau. A first-person medieval melee game, like Chivalry. Great, satisfying combat and simple mechanics with deep uses.

That was a fine year. Hopefully nothing happens to ruin it.

2020

The pandemic hit.

At least we had games to keep us busy. We got the release of the hotly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. It was a disaster. A complete, unmitigated mess, full of bugs, crashes and unfulfilled promises. Then the game was supposedly fixed, and everyone says it’s good now, but I don’t believe them. That game’s problems can’t be fixed with a few patches. They’re buried deep in the core mechanics.

If you still want to scratch your cyberpunk itch, you could check out Ghostrunner. It’s a first person game where you speed through levels killing dudes. Everything dies in one shot (usually) and you combine parkour and ninja skills to complete your objectives. I had fun with it, even if I died to the tower boss over 5,737 times.

This was also the year of Genshin Impact, the game that spawned a million gachas. I don’t like it, and I don’t like its derivatives, either.

Not all live service games released this year were as long-lasting as Genshin. We got Dota Underlords, a game that tried to capitalize on the auto-chess fad that was growing at the time. It existed for under a year, then it was unceremoniously abandoned by Valve.

There was also Bleeding Edge, a kind of moba brawler hero shooter thing. No one played it and it died. A lot of that had to do with the fact that the game looked horrible. Maybe it’s a matter of personal opinion, but I hated how the characters looked. They were ugly, terribly designed, with weird silhouettes, disparate and busy designs with no real rhyme or reason. I played it for a bit on Gamepass just to see what it was, and I still don’t know what it was supposed to be.

At least there was Deeprock, which was also a live service multiplayer game. This one lasted longer. I don’t like Deeprock. It’s a chore simulator, and the chores aren’t particularly fun to do. If only there were another multiplayer shooter where you complete tasks while getting attacked by aliens. Foreshadowing is a literary device.

Hades dropped. I haven’t played it. I’m sure it’s fine. Same with Ghosts of Tsushima. Apparently it’s good. I wouldn’t know.

Wow there weren’t any games. What did I pick, then?

My pick for 2020: Streets of Rage 4

A fantastic game and a worthy installment in the legendary Streets of Rage series. It has a ton of playable characters, an interesting chaining mechanic that encourages you to keep a full combo going without distracting too much from the core gameplay. It has modern additions like combos, while keeping everything else extremely old-school. You don’t have a dodge, for example. If you want to avoid damage, you have to walk out of your enemies’ range. Actual spacing in a modern game. Wow. Imagine that.

Even in a scarce, starved year such as this, there were runner ups.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The Yakuza series was always a kind of JRPG, but now it fully embraces that with turn-based combat. Great characters, interesting battle mechanics, an neat job system that lets you build powerful characters, and a ton of stuff to do. The financial minigame was my favorite.

One Step From Eden. I wrote about it for my 12 days of Christmas series, which you can find here. It’s a fast-paced take on the Mega Man Battle Network formula, which turns it into a roguelike. Highly recommended.

2021

Nothing was happening still, but we got more games.

What could be worse than Cyberpunk at launch? Balan Wonderworld. A game by the legendary minds behind Sonic 2006, this revolutionary game managed to piss everyone off with its terrible gameplay and laughably awful presentation. At least you could get some entertainment by laughing at it. Yuji Naka, who created Sonic and Balan, was arrested shortly after the game’s release. It was for insider trading, but I like to think it was because of Balan Wonderworld.

Monster Hunter came back and gave us Rise. It was a lot closer to the old Monster Hunter games, with more color and monster variety. It was much better than World, in my opinion. I hope they keep going down this evolutionary path, and make the games less like World. Foreshadowing. You know the drill.

Ninja Gaiden got a re-release with the Master Collection. It gave us Ninja Gaiden 1, 2 and 3. One and two were the Sigma versions. Again. Three was the improved Razor’s Edge edition, at least. It’s good to see these games again, but stop with the Sigma. Please.

We got Guilty Gear Strive. It’s Guilty Gear, but geared towards beginners. Simplified characters, less Roman Cancel options, and more of a focus on neutral. Then the DLC came along and threw this base premise out the window. Now it’s another convoluted mess of anime nonsense and characters that can kill you in two combos from across the screen. Not to mention Happy Chaos. Fun.

Halo Infinite came out this year. It was promptly forgotten.

My pick for 2021: None.

I’m serious. I like Monster Hunter Rise, but I wouldn’t call it a favorite. I used to enjoy Strive, but then Happy Chaos happened, and now I actively hate the game. I like Ninja Gaiden, but the Master Collection is just a re-release of the inferior Sigma versions.

What a year. Hopefully 2022 is better.

2022

This year starts off strong with High on Life. Oh God… the Rick and Morty shooter?

Maybe there’s something better. Here we have Babylon’s Fall. A game made by Platinum Studios, so you know it’s good. They made Nier: Automata. Wait, I didn’t like Nier. This game was a live service MMO slop thing that only lasted a few months before getting nuked. I don’t know what it was about.

Surely it has to get better at some point. Here we have Phantasy Star Online: New Genesis. That’s good, right? Phantasy Star Online is a great game. This new update completely overhauls the game, getting rid of everything that made it good and replacing it with nothing.

That can’t be right. No way they took Phantasy Star Online 2 and turned it into a dull, content-less void with nothing to do other than grind numbers. They- they did? Oh my God. This is worse than I thought.

What’s next? A free-to-play mobile game version of Diablo? Foreshadowing is-

We got Diablo Immortal. A free-to-play mobile game version of Diablo. Full of micro-transactions and other garbage.

Quake Champions got its official release this year. I played it in Early Access years before, and it was already losing players. It came out to zero hype and completely fizzled out. No one noticed. It was Quake, but with hero shooter elements. Not a great combination.

Enough about live-service games, let’s talk about actual videogames. Starting off with Gungrave G.O.R.E.- son of a...- Can’t we get anything good?

Gungrave G.O.R.E. sucks. It sucks so much that I wrote an entire review on it. Read it here.

There’s also God of War: Ragnarok. More man and his boy.

Surprisingly, that wasn’t the biggest game of the year. That honor goes to Vampire Survivors. A five dollar indie game where you walk around a stage auto-shooting things. It’s incredibly simple to the point of boredom, with a bunch of skinner box mechanics to keep you engaged. Not my cup of tea. It forever changed the gaming landscape and ruined the Bullet Hell tag.

We also got Need for Speed Unbound. I played it, thought it was fun. Didn’t review the game, but I reviewed every song on its soundtrack for some reason. You can read that here.

There was also Stranger of Paradise. A Final Fantasy game that gained notoriety for its absurd cutscenes about killing Chaos. The funny, corny parts are few and far between.

Out of all this, what did I pick as my favorite of the year?

My pick for 2022: Sifu

Become a Kung-fu master and avenge your father’s death by beating the tar out of everyone in the neighborhood. It’s a great 3D brawler with big fights that really capture that kung-fu movie feel. It strikes a good balance between modern parry games, including a stance bar like Sekiro, combined with more traditional options like dodging. It’s short and it has a lives system, so it’s the closest a modern game is willing to get to an arcade experience. Decently challenging, too.

Runners up: There were runners up, it’s just that they were the only games from this year that I had anything positive to say about.

Postal: Brain Damaged. A first person shooter loosely based off the Postal franchise. Use a grappling hook shotgun to fly around levels at high speeds, shooting hallucinations and other monstrosities that lurk in The Dude’s mind. It has an incredibly juvenile sense of humor like the mainline games.

Prodeus. It’s DOOM, again. There’s a base being overrun by demons- I mean- creatures from another plane, and you have to rip and tear until they’re all dead. Or until you find the blue key card to open the blue door. It’s a bit on the easy side, but the well-crafted levels and excellent sound design keep it interesting.

Madcap Mosaic. A weird little deckbuilder where your cards are tiles. Walk around the board to activate them and win fights against monsters. It’s an interesting concept, and it provides a fresh twist on the card game formula. I expect this to be copied by every other deckbuilder in around four years.

Thanks to over at “I Play Games So You Don’t Have To” for recommending it. Go read his article on obscure games. There’s sure to be another hidden gem there for you to discover.

Conclusion

That was 2017 to 2022. An overall poor stretch. There are definitely a lot of indie games I didn’t cover, but I did my best to mention any that I’ve played. Had to do some digging and check my Steam Library. If there’s one you think I missed, comment it down below and I’ll give you my uninformed opinion on it.

Next time, it’s the final stretch; 2023 to 2025. There’s a lot to cover at the end. Tune in next time!

Gunpoint? More like Funpoint

First we got Assault Spy, then Deadlink and now Gunpoint. Three games about corporate espionage. I swear I didn’t plan this. I don’t plan anything, unlike in Gunpoint, where you have to plan things. I promise it’s a lot more fun than what I just described.

What is it?

Gunpoint is a 2D stealth puzzle game. You play as a corporate spy who takes missions to go into offices and steal company secrets. Break into the building, hack the terminals and manipulate the security system to do what you want. Then, sneak around, avoiding guards and disabling lights to get your prize and escape. You can be a ghost and avoid detection, or go feral and smack all the guards while making a racket.

Each level has an objective you have to reach. It’s usually locked in a room inside the building. You can see every room at all times, and you can see all the electronics and how they connect to each other. Your first step is usually to enter the building. Find the right door and get in. Next, find the room with the control modules. Hack those, and you can take control of the security system. Next, use the system to your advantage. You can change connections and mess with circuits. You can take a security camera, hack it and make it open a door instead of activating an alarm. You can even hack a guard’s gun to and have it negligent discharge when something else triggers it.

At the end of the level, you get rated on your performance, and given a quick review labeling your playstyle. If you do a level without getting caught and being very tricky, you get the titles of ninja, ghost and thoughtful. I’m not 100% sure what they mean, but they act as a way of acknowledging your efforts. You also get a letter grade and your completion time. You can replay missions for better outcomes.

Once you’ve cleared a path, sneak into the building and find what you need. Then make your escape. The game is a mix of puzzle solving and stealth. Both halves of the equation are well made and offer their own unique challenges, and they blend well together.

Short

Gunpoint can be completed in around 3 hours. Throughout its length, the game offers a good number of puzzles. They start off somewhat simple, but quickly get more and more complicated. You’ll have to think them through for a bit before attempting. Then you need to actually pull the heist off, which sometimes exposes holes in your planning.

Three hours might not sound like a lot, but it’s enough. It offers good, varied puzzles with multiple mechanics in its short runtime.

Worse Graphics

Gunpoint goes for a sleek style. It’s detailed enough to be interesting and convey information, without being too busy, cluttered or visually noisy as to be a distraction. It looks kind of like a flash game, which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not the latest in graphics technology, so investors won’t want anything to do with it. Even if you sneak into the shareholder’s office and download their browsing history.

The characters don’t even have faces! How’s the audience supposed to connect with a character if it doesn’t have a face?

Speaking of connecting with characters, to add some weird irony here, the game has way better writing than most triple-A games.

There’s a soundtrack, too, and it’s good. Jazzy spy music that sounds like a smoky bar. Good, warm bass and sultry sax licks accompanied by subtle electric guitars that say “this guy’s up to no good”. The soundtrack is nice, but I turned it off. I don’t have the cerebral bandwidth to do puzzles and listen to music at the same time.

Made by People Paid More to Work Less

Gunpoint was made by Suspicious Developments, a small indie team of “usually 3 people”, as it says in their Twitter bio. Gunpoint was solo developed by Tom Francis, back before they were a team. He made it using Game Maker in his spare time over the course of three years. It was successful enough that it allowed him to quit his job and go into development full-time. Since then, Suspicious Developments has published more games, including Tactical Breach Wizards.

A small passion project made in someone’s spare time out of love for the medium. Gunpoint was even nominated for a BAFTA back in 2014. Sounds like it’s better than working 60 hour weeks at Rockstar.

Conclusion

Gunpoint is an interesting game that combines puzzle and stealth well. You can find cool interactions between the devices in a stage, sneak around with some competent stealth (even if the AI is a bit trigger-happy) and the game is also funny intentionally and unintentionally. It has a dry, sarcastic wit to it, but the biggest laughs I got from the game were from whenever a plan failed spectacularly. Once I had calculated every move, and went to execute it. Everything went without a hitch, until the very last door that I opened. I had opened every door on that floor, and once I opened the last one, it left a clear line of sight from one side to the other, where a guard I had forgotten about popped me in the head the instant I got into his vision.

I definitely recommend Gunpoint. You can get it for just $10. Totally worth it at full price, in my opinion.

This one doesn’t have anything to do with videogames.

Shinichiro Watanabe is a name that every anime fan is familiar with. He’s the man behind Cowboy Bebop, one of the highest rated animes of all time. This info isn’t from the scores at My Anime List, mind you, they have Frieren as the number one show of all time, head and shoulders above everything, with Cowboy Bebop down at number 48, but still, it’s a hit with critics and fans alike. It’s really, really, really good. One of the few pieces of media that deserves its incredible hype, kind of like Breaking Bad.

Watanabe then went on to make Samurai Champloo, which was another instant classic, blending hip hop with samurai. Before all this he directed Macross Plus, an astonishingly beautiful movie set in the Macross universe, with a great story and fantastic visuals. Seriously, go watch it, it’s criminally underrated. In 2013 he made Space Dandy, a creative sci-fi comedy that managed to combine high-minded scientific concepts with funny plots. One episode was a spat between a four-dimensional universe who is in love with someone from a 2D universe. It was like if you made an entire show out of only the good episodes from Futurama.

All this preamble is to set up what kind of work he’s done, and why he has such a lofty reputation. One day, Adult Swim approaches Watanabe to strike a deal: Make us an anime. Now, that’s like going up to Michelangelo and asking him for a mural. When word got out, we were expecting gold.

Thing is, Adult Swim went and said “Hey, you know that Cowboy Bebop thing of yours we aired twenty years ago? That masterpiece that got great ratings and helped bring anime to the west? We want that again.”

Watanabe: You want me to make something as groundbreaking as Cowboy Bebop?

Adult Swim: No, we just want you to make Cowboy Bebop. Again. Maybe call it Rancher Jazz, or something. I don’t know. You’re the ideas guy. Surprise us, but not too much. We still want Cowboy Bebop.

That’s like going up Michelangelo and asking for him to paint the Sistine Chapel again. “You know that thing you did with the ceiling and all the saints and the little angels? Could you do that again? Just that, but like, different, but exactly the same?”

That’s how I imagine the meeting went, because that’s what Lazarus is. A half-hearted retread trying to remind everyone of Cowboy Bebop. It had similar promotional art, a jazzy soundtrack, a team of weirdos lead by a cool guy, with a girl, a younger hacker girl and a little mascot animal.

The show itself is incredibly underwhelming. It’s about the end of humanity. Dr. Skinner announces that his wonder drug, Hapna, will kill anyone who took it. Anyone who took it means almost everyone on the planet, since a huge percent of the population took it. We’re never given a concrete figure, but it’s assumed to be around 90% of the population. They have 30 days to live. If they want the antidote, they have to find him. That’s where the Lazarus team comes in. They’re going to find Skinner, and get the antidote to save the world.

This incredibly lofty, high-stakes plot is mere set dressing for a slow, trudging series of events that has all the urgency of a trip to the corner store for a pack of New Ports. The world is going to end in 30 days, but no one acts like it. Everyone’s calm, they go to work, there aren’t any riots. You can walk the streets and go to the mall, and every store will be open, with the lights on, with no one looting.

Now that you have the appropriate context (that isn’t really necessary for this, but we proceed) I can move on to the point of this post, which is about one single scene. A scene that stuck with me for a while.

The Elevator Scene

I’ve included it here for your viewing pleasure. It’s only one minute and thirty four seconds long, and you have to watch. It’s required reading for this lesson. It has audio, but it’s not essential. I’ll be going over this one scene bit by bit, and trying to figure out what’s going on.

What’s the context of the scene? The main character has to go into a building and do something, and some guards risk life and limb to stop him. Friendly reminder that they all have less than a month to live, and instead of spending that time with their families, they’re about to have sex in an elevator.

Wait, what? That’s not what happens. It’s a fight scene. Sure it looks weird at the start, but that’s how every good fight scene starts, with palpable sexual tension. Don’t you remember all those steamy action scenes in Mission Impossible?

After that bodice-ripping setup, we get an insert shot of another main character saying something in Japanese. I’m sure it’s something important to the plot, or a funny, Marvel-style quip. “I hope Axel is retrieving the thing he needs and not having intercourse in an elevator”. I need to workshop that one. That’s his name, by the way. Axel. Not the guy quipping, Axel is the guy in the elevator. He’s Jesus. More on that later. Back to the elevator love scene- I mean- fight scene.

Suddenly, Axel is beset on all sides by baton strikes from all the guards, which he dodges with relative ease.

He lands in a hand stand, landing with his face inches away from a guard’s knee. The guard, being the specially trained killing machine he is, remembers his Green Beret training, and recognizes he’s in position for maneuver 46A: KNEE-INDUCED DEATH.

He slams his knee into Axel’s jaw with the force of a mighty bronco. A hit of this caliber would pop any normal man’s head like an overripe watermelon, but this is Axel we’re talking about. Axel, who is literally Jesus Christ. Axel, whose name I’m not 100% sure I’m even spelling right, but I’m not going to fact check this because this is a ramshackle operation I’m running here. Axel doesn’t care for things like physical force exerted on his face.

The force of the knee, backed by years of Army training, is enough to send Axle into the other guard, knocking her over, but he remains calm. Somehow, he uses that momentum to flip the guard over onto his head.

The guard, who I’ll call Bradford from now on for no particular reason, decides to stay on his head while Axel fights Jawson over there. Why does he stay in that position? Is it because it was easier to animate, and it clears the elevator so Accel can have his moment? Probably. I like to think it’s because Bradford has been trying to do a headstand for months, but never got it down. Now, he gets put into that position, and he thinks “Damn, I need to kill this guy, but I just hit a sick headstand. Let me see how long I can hold it.”

While Bradford is hitting a sick freeze, Axcsel fights Jawson. They swipe at each other in a really weird, strobing staccato rhythm that looks more off-putting the more I look at it. It’s like the reverse of one of those magic eye posters. It starts as an image, but the longer you look at it, it devolves into nothing.

Suddenly overcome by Axel’s masculine charm, Jawson leaps into the air, begging him to choke him out (Jawson’s kinky like that. I don’t judge)

Once Jawson gets his fix, he falls onto the ground in pure bliss, Billy sees an opportunity to deal some quick damage while Axel is in counter hit state during his recovery frame. Thing is, Billy forgot Axel has super armor on all his normals. Billy’s punches are ineffective.

That’s when Bradford comes back to life and goes for round two. After being in a headstand for so long, for the first time in years, enough blood reaches his brain and he formulates a thought. He’s going to press the advantage, and end Azxcel once and for all.

He reels back, storing up momentum and goes in for another top-secret Army technique… THE KILLER-

The killer… hug? Headbutt? Oh no. Don’t tell me he heard the phrase “chin strike” and thought it was an attack you did with your chin. He rears back once more and… does it again? I genuinely don’t know what he’s doing here. It’s like a really bad headbutt, or maybe he’s trying to squeeze him between his chin and his chest, like when you want to carry three things but you have your hands full, so you tuck your phone under your chin? That’s not an Army technique. Maybe he’s trying to bite him? Blow his nose on him so he gets a cold? Either way, Bradford gives it his all, but it’s not enough to take Axhel down.

Billy, inspired by Bradford’s tenacity, throws his own weird chin strike, which bounces off Axel’s bullet proof shoulder.

Axel fights them off- wait, he doesn’t fight them off- he kind of stands there and they tire themselves out.

Then there’s a really long sequence of Jessica trying, and failing, to choke Axel out. There’s a lot of choking going on in this scene. Again, not kink-shaming, just pointing it out. Axel just stands there.

She punches Axel, tries to strangle him, does everything in her power, but Axel is protected by plot armor, so he doesn’t face any hardship or challenge. She’s fighting a brick wall, but instead of bricks, it’s Jesus.

Then there’s this wonderful shot. I don’t have much to say other than that’s a great face.

Axel uses his Stand, Go With The Flow, to redirect momentum once again, and turns the tables on Jessica’s attack. Now he has her in a headlock (more choking) and uses her as a human shield while Jawson comes in and punches her-

Jesus Christ, man! Not Axel Jesus- the real one… Jawson just straight punches her right in the crotch. Jawson, man. You gotta stop listening to those podcasts.

Then there’s some more… fighting? Tussling? This barely even looks like scrapping. They’re just shoving each other with their shoulders, but somehow Assel is winning.

He goes on the offensive for the first time, and starts beating Billy like a piñata, while Bradford and Jawson are taking their afternoon naps. They’re very eepy, and need to take a quick lil’ snooze.

Then Axel, sensing it’s been more than ten seconds without strangulation, chokes Jessica out for the heck of it.

Axel steps out of the elevator, victorious in his fight, where he… stood there and let the guards tire themselves out.

This scene is bizarre and incredibly funny to me. The weird way in which it starts, the unfitting music, the janky animation, the way everyone morphs around from pose to pose, the baffling direction. There’s a solid chunk of the scene that’s spent from the perspective of the wall behind Alex, where 80% of the frame is covered by his back, and all you see are the two guards trying to bite him. It looks less like a fight scene, and more like an abstract mukbang video by David Lynch.

The first time I saw this with some friends, we were laughing and audibly going “what the hell is going on here?”. We still don’t know, and it’s been an inside joke ever since. It’s not even a particularly clever joke, we just mention “lazarus elevator” every now and then.

That was the Boxing Day special, I hope you enjoyed-

What about the Jesus thing?

Oh, right. That.

There is a review on My Anime List (a website to catalogue and discuss anime you’ve seen. Kind of like Letterboxd but for even bigger nerds). That review is massive, rivaling a typical Load Last Save dissertation. It’s somehow even more insane, too. It goes on to analyze most of the show, not all since it was written before the show finished airing, and it has a lot of weird theories, but some that kind of make sense. One of those more coherent theories is that Axel is Jesus, or more precisely, a Christ-like figure.

The show has a lot of biblical references for its theming. The name, Lazarus, comes from the biblical story of Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrects. Skinner refers to his plan of killing everyone on Earth as “blowing the seventh trumpet”, a reference to the book of Revelations. The basis is there for the connection.

The review mentions that, in the show’s end credits, we see the camera zoom around a street littered with what looks like dead bodies. Then near the end, the camera focuses on Axel, who’s laying on the ground, as he suddenly gets up, seemingly being resurrected. The review also mentions Axel’s use of the color red, as in the color of blood, as in the blood of Christ.

The review also mentions how Axel hangs out with outcasts and sinners, as Jesus did. Going into more dubious territory, it references Axel’s prison sentence. In the show, Axel is in jail for an unknown crime. His sentence is 888 years, a number associated with Jesus in gematria/numerology. His original sentence was 3 years, but it kept getting increased every time he tried to escape. If we put on our tinfoil hat and take our InfoWars brain supplements, we can assume that this is also a Jesus reference, since he was falsely accused and imprisoned, and the 3 years of Axel’s sentence can be read as Jesus’ 3 days spent “dead”.

I read this review along with the same friends who suffered through Lazarus with me, and we already had a joke about how Axel was Jesus, since he is completely immune to everything and can never be in trouble. The review’s confirmation of this, along with how off-the-rails it goes, stretching into connections that would take an actual author to make, made us keep coming back to it. One of these galaxy brain reaches is that Hersch, the director of the Lazarus project, is named that because Hersch translates to “Deer”, and there are mentions of deer in the book of Psalms. Reed Richards couldn’t stretch that far. This is the kind of thing that would have your English teacher saying “The curtains were just blue, bro, let it go, there’s no deer symbolism”.

Thing is, the joke was then taken to the extreme in a later episode when Axel fights an antagonist, and is suddenly speared in the side and suffers a seemingly fatal wound. A pretty blatant reference to the spear of Longinus and Jesus being lanced on the cross.

This led to a moment where we thought the reviewer was right, that he was some sort of savant that had cracked the code of Lazarus, and that the show was going to turn into something a lot more interesting/crack-headed than it was.

I even came up with a theory that the show would lean into the Axel=Jesus thing and give us an ending where Axel’s blood is used as a component for the Hapna antidote.

Nothing like that happened. If it had happened, I could at least excuse the show and enjoy it for being a bad retread of Cowboy Bebop with a hackneyed biblical parallel on top, but no. It wasn’t anything nearly as shocking, creative or interesting. It was the opposite.

In fact the ending was more of a reference to the movie 12 Monkeys of all things.

Imagine the most boring way the show could end. With the plot summary I gave at the beginning, you already have the information you need. Just think of the most dull, unimaginative ending possible to that set-up, and that’s the ending. I don’t have to spoil it, you can do it for yourself.

Try to guess the ending, dear reader

In fact, post a comment guessing the show’s ending, and I’ll tell you if you’re right. You probably won’t be. I think you’ll come up with something more creative and interesting than the real ending.

Conclusion

I don’t recommend Lazarus. I saw the first few episodes because it was a Shinichiro Watanabe production, and was sorely disappointed. Then along came this episode with that wonderful elevator scene, and I thought the show would keep delighting me with funny weirdness like that, but it didn’t. It kept trudging along, each episode more boring than the last. No laughs, no mockery, just quiet boredom.

That was the non-videogame Boxing Day special. I hope you enjoyed the nonsense and got a laugh or two out of the scene. It amused me so much that I had to write an entire article on it. This also serves to let off some steam after deciding to make daily content for 12 days, in the middle of Christmas. I probably won’t do that again.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Kwanza, Happy Festivus, Merry Wintereenmas, Happy new Year and all that other stuff.

And a happy Decemberween.

A sincere thanks to everyone who tunes in to read this nonsense, and to all my subscribers, including my future readers. I hope you come back next year for more Load Last Save ramblings.

I’m Having a Blue (revolver) Christmas

Short games were king back in the day. Arcades were founded on them. You’d pop a quarter in, press start, and the game would try its best to grab your attention as fast as possible. You were meant to get on the machine, have fun, and move on so someone else could have their turn. Today’s game, Blue Revolver, aims to recreate that experience, and it hits its mark. Enjoy arcade-perfect gameplay in the comfort of your own home, without getting your ear drums blown out by the DDR machine.

What is it?

Blue Revolver is a vertical bullet hell shoot-’em-up (shmup). This is a real bullet hell, not a Vampire Survivors clone. You pilot a space ship across five levels, dodging hundreds of projectiles arranged in dazzling patterns. Try to make it to the end of the game using limited lives all while aiming for a high score.

The base gameplay is solid. Your ship handles well; not too fast, not too slow. It lets you dodge easily while also allowing for finer control to weave between small gaps. Holding down the shoot button slows you down even further, so you can precisely squeeze through tiny gaps like a cat squeezing itself into a shoebox one third its size.

Besides the buttery smooth handling, you have your weapons. The game gives you two types of shots: the regular bullets and a special, more powerful shot that’s limited by ammo. The regular shot feels nice and powerful, able to clear most enemies quickly. There are three playable ships, each with their own shot type, including the standard regular, wide and specialty shot. In this case the specialty is an aimed shot that follows your movement. They’re all pretty standard, but there’s enough variety between them to give you a fresh experience.

The power shot ties into the game’s scoring mechanic. The power shot is a secondary type of shot that deals more damage, but it’s limited by ammo. When you defeat enemies, they drop ammo for this weapon. If you defeat an enemy using the power shot, they drop crystals, which award you points. The higher your chain, the more points you get, with 8 being the chain’s maximum. The game’s rhythm is to get your chain to eight by taking down regular enemies, and then using your powerful shot to take down larger targets for big scores. This scoring system is simple, but effective, and it gives the game a nice ebb and flow. You’ll need to learn the stages well to find ways to make the most out of your shots and be efficient.

It’s a great, well polished shmup with solid fundamentals and an enjoyable scoring mechanic built on top.

Short

It’s only around 20 minutes long. That might seem short, because it is, but you have to remember this is an arcade-style shmup. That means those twenty minutes are pure gameplay at the highest intensity. You’ll be dodging hundreds of shots every minute. It packs more fun and excitement in its short runtime than most modern triple-A games do in their first five hours.

Blue Revolver is meant to be replayed. It’s challenging, which means you’ll have to learn its stages and get good at it to beat it. Then there’s the scoring system, which will encourage you to replay the game for more points. There are three ships to try out, each with three different power shots that change how you play, three difficulties, challenges and a hidden final boss.

The amount of content on offer is great, especially when it’s all polished to a mirror sheen.

Worse Graphics

Blue Revolver goes for a retro look. It’s not arcade retro. It has a restricted color palette, and arcade games were all about pushing out the fanciest graphics possible, so these are worse graphics by arcade standards. They’re also not done in Unreal Engine 5. It doesn’t even have ray tracing, so the graphics are bad, by modern standards.

The game looks great. Its limited palette is used to great effect. It gives each stage its own unique look, while keeping the visual clutter to a minimum, which is important in this type of game. Enemy shots are always bright and visible, and so are the enemies.

I think the game is going for a specific retro look, but I can’t pinpoint what it is. Maybe someone will enlighten me in a comment and say something like “it’s obviously a tribute to the Wonderswan”, and I’ll probably believe them. All I know is that I love how the game looks. The sprites are nice and chunky, the colors work well together, and the game’s overall aesthetic is very clean and charming. I especially like the designs of the boss ships.

The soundtrack is fantastic, too. Ultra loud, high-energy techno that would fit right in with the rest of the cabinets at your local arcade (assuming you have one. Those aren’t really around anymore, sadly). It’s very bright and synthy, a perfect fit for the visual chaos on screen. It’s like listening to an energy drink.

Made by People Paid More to Work Less

Blue Revolver was made by one developer, Danbo, along with a few collaborators who helped with art and music. The game took around two years of on and off work. Years after the game’s initial release, the developer gave it an expansion/update for free. This was purely a passion project, and it shows.

I can’t find much about the development, but I can say it probably beats working at Activision Blizzard.

An interesting note is that Danbo, the game’s developer, thinks most games, including short roguelites, are too damn long. He’s right in some capacity, but it’s funny to think that someone out there would take some of the games I would put in my short games list, like Synthetik, and say they’re too long.

Conclusion

Blue Revolver is an excellent shmup. If it had come out during the 2000s, or if it had Cave’s logo on it, it would be considered a classic. Its base gameplay is solid, and polished. The movement is smooth, the shots feel nice and the scoring system keeps things interesting. The pacing is great. The first stage on-boards the player a little, but after that it fires on all cylinders.

It’s a great game that everyone should try. Its availability and the fact that it’s a little easier than other shmups makes it great for newcomers, too. It’s still not easy, though. It’s easier compared to some of the old-school games, but it’s still tough. It’s like Mushihimesama, which is considered an entry point into the genre but it’s still a gauntlet for 99% of gamers.

I wholeheartedly recommend Blue Revolver. You can get it for $15 on Steam, or on sale for less. I recommend it at full price. It’s a great game.

CAW CAW

Yeehaw, partners! Load up your six shooter and lace up your boots, we’re going back to the old west to kill some crows. Hundreds of them. Don’t worry, they’re not the little black birds you know. These are evil constructs made of darkness and fueled by malice, that are also weak to bullets somehow. Doesn’t make sense, but at least the game is fun.

Read on to find out why Kill the Crows is a short game and such. You know the drill.

What is it?

Kill the Crows is a top down shooter. Fight incoming enemies with your trusty revolver until you kill enough of them and a boss spawns. Keep going until the final boss or until you can’t go on any more. All the action takes place on a single screen, like an old school arcade game.

Everything in the game dies in one hit, including the player. This means every enemy attack is lethal, but it also means you can take anything out with just one bullet. This lets you make quick decisions on what to take out first, and the constant, brisk pace of the shooting puts you into the flow state easily. Even the bosses die in one hit, but they have shield mechanics that you have to deal with before you can shoot them.

There are different types of enemies to keep you moving. There are melee guys who rush you with axes, gunslingers, snipers, exploding guys, shielded brutes and some more specialized units that show up later to ruin your day. Each of them has a clear purpose and design, and they work to keep things interesting.

Other than shooting, you can dodge and use a special dead eye attack. The dodge moves you out of the way of enemy attacks and gives you a few frames on invincibility to avoid danger. The dead eye attack charges up as you kill enemies. Once the bar is full, activate it to kill any enemy you mark when it activates.

The game is very simple, but fun. It’s like a flash game you’d play back in the day, instead of paying attention to computer class.

Short

The game is extremely short, meant to be completed in under 15 minutes. It’s a quick, bite-sized game. There is some replayability to it. You can unlock a lot of equipment. Things like revolvers, new dead eyes and accessories that provide passive benefits. These change up how you play, and offer some variations on the base formula.

The game is really short, but what little content it has it does well.

Worse Graphics

The game has that low-res pseudo retro look some pixel indie games have. It gets the job done. Enemies are clear on screen, they have good designs, their attacks are telegraphed and you can always tell who’s doing what.

The color palette is limited, but it looks good. It conveys the grim atmosphere well, while offering enough color to make everything look distinct. The graphics are very utilitarian, proving you don’t need much to make something that looks decent.

Made by People Paid More to Work Less

I’ll have to get back to you on this one. This was made by 5MinLab, a Korean indie team that also made Smash Legends. They have different games listed in their Steam page, iStore page and on their site. There’s an Itch.io profile under that name that has different games, too. Their Android store has some recent games that look like they use AI art for their promotional material.

I don’t know what’s what, but I’ll assume they don’t pass in this category. Or maybe they pump out games on their lunch break while making a decent wage? I don’t know.

Conclusion

Kill the Crows is a very short, simple and to the point. It’s only a few minutes long, but it’s solidly made, and its short list of mechanics is well executed. It gets you into the flow state quickly and you’ll find yourself trying one more run to try to get a higher score. I can’t vouch for everything the company has made, but I can at least say I enjoyed Kill the Crows and recommend it for anyone.

You can get Kill the Crows for $5 at full price. On sale it usually goes for $2.50, which is less than the price of a cup of coffee. Give it a try.

One Step From Eatin’ All The Cookies

Remember Mega Man Battle Network? He’s back! In roguelike form. Tougher, too. A lot tougher. He turned his mind to steak and weights like that one kid in that Bromheads Jacket song, and came back with a vengeance, and it’s shockingly good.

Read on to find out why One Step From Eden, also known as Battle Network for masochists, is a game that you should play.

What is it?

One Step From Eden is a roguelike deckbuilder with real-time combat. You pick a character and go on your way, fighting enemies, collecting new cards to reinforce your deck, and you go on in typical roguelite fashion going into random encounters until you fight a boss. Fight the big boss at the end and win.

If you’ve never played the Mega Man Battle Network games, I’ll explain the gameplay real quick. It takes place on a grid divided into two sides: your side, and the enemy’s side. The two are separate, and you can’t cross into each other’s space, except when using certain attacks. You move around the grid one square at a time. Your goal is to deal damage to your opponent until their health reaches zero. You use cards that get discarded once they’re used. You need mana to use the cards. Mana regenerates slowly over time. You move around the grid, dodging enemy attacks, waiting for your mana to replenish, so you can attack with what you have in hand.

One Step From Eden takes this concept and cranks it up to eleven. The grid has an additional row and column, which doesn’t sound like much, but it makes the play field significantly bigger. It speeds the game up significantly, and it makes enemies more aggressive and gives them larger and more complicated attacks. The only thing that isn’t a version of something from Battle Network on steroids is the fact that you can only have two attacks equiped at once, and there aren’t any combinations like in Battle Network.

The game is a great action game. It’s fast-paced, the enemies have interesting behaviors and attack patterns that get you moving across the board. You have to think on the fly because you only have two cards on you at once, so if you want to make combinations, you have to weigh the risk and rewards of waiting for another card, or using what you have on hand, even if it’s not as powerful, but safer.

The deckbuilding aspect is strong, too. There are different “schools” of card, each classified by what they do and how they play. There’s the elemental school, which focuses on elemental damage and simple status effects, the miseri cards focus on poison and trading your own health for damage, there’s one that specializes in deck manipulation and another based on defense, among others. They all have interesting synergies, allowing for varied and effective playstyles. My personal favorite is the Miseri brand. I like the risk/reward of fighting at low health and stacking big poison.

Each school of deck types corresponds to a character, and there are ten of them in total. Each has their own basic attack and gimmick. They each represent their decks well, and you can pick cards from other decks to make new synergies. There are some that are simple, like Saffron, the game’s postergirl, who focuses on elemental spells, attacks that do straightforward damage, and she has a second life. She’s great for new players, but is versatile enough to keep veterans interested.

On the other end of the spectrum there’s Violette, one of my favorites, who is a violinist. When she attacks, she spawns musical notes in four directions, and you can catch one for different effects. Keeping track of all her buffs/debuffs while dodging attacks takes a lot of mental work, but once you master it and it becomes second nature, you’ll be dancing across the grid, and it’s extremely rewarding.

Short

It’s a roguelite, so each run takes around 30 minutes. During that time, you’ll be engaged with the game at full intensity. It’s dense, and wastes very little time. There are ten characters, most locked from the start, each with a second version to unlock and multiple endings. The game is very replayable, and it’s perfect for a quick run whenever you feel like it. It’s also tough, which means you’ll be able to play it over and over again and get better at it. Once you get the hang of it and start doing well, learning enemy patterns and finishing levels without getting hit, it’s a huge dopamine hit. Very few games leave so much room for players to grow skill-wise. Except maybe for Shmups, which this plays like at high intensities.

Worse Graphics

The game has 2D graphics with low-resolution sprites. They’re chunky and you can count the pixels on everything at a glance. This is a big no-no. Developers think gamers want high resolution 3D graphics.

The game has a solid art style. Each character is very well designed, with great silhouettes and color palettes. The enemies also look great, with varied designs that hint at their function. The animations are well done and the special effects are good at conveying what each attack does, even if it gets chaotic and hard to follow sometimes.

The music is great, too. Ethereal piano melodies for the calmer moments (few and far between), and everything else gets Mega Man inspired electronic tracks with thumping percussion along with airy melodies layered with synth accents.

Made by People Paid More to Work Less

One Step From Eden was made by Thomas Moon Kang, a solo developer. He used to work in web development/UI/UX and went into game development to make One Step From Eden. He hired other freelance artists to help with the graphics and soundtrack.

The game was published by Humble Games, the publishing branch of the online game store Humble Bundle, which started off selling indie game bundles. They help with funding and let the creator keep full control of the IP after publishing and allow for full creative rights. Sounds like a good deal.

The fact that Thomas quit his job to work on this game means that, to him, it was better than working a nine to five office job. That sounds like a good gig, and that he was paid more to work less. Maybe he worked more since he’s a solo dev, but working on something you love for eight hours straight is way better than working a boring job for half as long. I count this as a win in that department.

Conclusion

One Step From Eden is a great game. It’s intense, tough, and frantic, but at the same time incredibly rewarding and fun to master. It offers a lot of variations on its solid base gameplay with its characters and cards, which makes for a replayable experience. The card mechanics are well-implemented, allowing you to make powerful builds and experiment freely. It’s a great deckbuilder with fantastic gameplay.

You can get One Step From Eden for $20, and again, sing along with me if you know the words, it goes on sale frequently. As of writing this, it’s on sale for 60% off at $8. In my opinion, this game is more than worth it at full price. I really enjoy it, it gets the Roger Renfro stamp of approval, and it will get a full review at some point.

Deadlink would make Ganondorf Very Happy

Canceling a monthly membership is a pain in the neck. They always hide the option to cancel behind several menus, links and vague prompts. If you manage to find out how to stop getting charged, you still have to sit through several screens full of grovelling begging you to reconsider, using that horrid HR casual corpo-speak. “You’re a heckin’ awesome customerrino! Please stay with us! We’ll throw in a 0.6% discount on your next purchase (only valid for purchases over $200)”. In the future, it’ll be much easier. You just need to download your consciousness into an android and storm their headquarters while armed to the teeth. This was supposed to be a joke for the opening, but it’s starting to sound like a fedpost, so I’ll stop the train of thought here before this goes from “funny article introduction” to “actionable threat admissible in court”.

What is it?

DEADLINK is a roguelite first person shooter. You’re a brain in a jar, and your mission is to run combat simulations where you send a robotic body to conduct corporate espionage by shooting the company into oblivion.

Each stage is made up of several combat arenas. You enter, fight all the enemies, and go on to the next one. Between each stage, you pick one of three. This could be anything from weapon enhancements, character upgrades or, the more common option, implants that give you special powers. Pick wisely, and build a killing machine powerful enough to take down anything in its path.

The implant system is like any other roguelite power up thing, but the way it works here is different. Each implant is linked to one of your character’s abilities, and they activate when you use it. For example, you get an implant that lets you deal more damage to stunned enemies for a limited time, you attach it to your stun ability, and every time you use the ability, you get the temporary buff. Each implant has a power rating, from one to three. This indicates how much power they need to activate. Basic actions like switching weapons have a power of one, while using your stronger abilities has a power rating of 3. This system makes it so you need to be mindful of where you put your implants. The slots are limited, and you have to remember to do the action associated with it to activate them.

The game itself is a very fast-paced shooter. Enemies will swarm you from every direction, there’s constant danger, and you’re meant to move and act quickly if you want to make it past the first stage. There are four playable characters, each with three abilities and two weapons: a primary gun and a secondary heavy weapon. The primary gun has infinite ammo, the heavy needs ammo. You shoot your primary, use your abilities, and get resources to beat each level.

Resources are given to the player in an interesting way. There’s armor and ammo. You get these by defeating marked enemies. You can mark enemies by using your character’s skills or with a grenade. Grenades and abilities are limited by cooldown, which means you need to cycle through them to get the most out of them. Defeating marked enemies for armor is one of the few ways to stay alive, since your health does not regenerate during fights nor afterwards. The only way to heal is to buy healing at the infrequent shops. Your best bet is to keep getting armor so you never take damage to your actual health.

Movement is another way to avoid damage. You move at a regular pace, but you have a dash, which can also be used in the air. The dash is short ranged, but it’s enough to get you out of the way of enemy shots, since they’re projectiles. Circle strafing around enemies is very effective. You’ll be moving around a lot to collect ammo, resources and to get into better positions to attack. The game encourages constant movement, and rewards you for doing it well.

It’s a great shooter at its core, and the roguelite and resource management elements on top add an extra layer of depth to everything. It’s very well-thought out, and most importantly, a lot of fun.

Short

It’s a roguelite, which means a run can be done in one sitting. They last around 40 minutes to an hour, but you can get the time down as you get better at the game. It’s very arcadey in its progression. There isn’t much variety in the sense that there aren’t any platforming sections or anything to distract you. From the moment you start the run, you’ll be blasting enemies frantically until you end the run, but I think that’s a good thing. I don’t want anything unnecessary distracting from the fantastic combat.

The game is highly replayable. It has four characters to unlock, each with unique abilities and playstyles. They each have similarities, like how everyone has a movement ability, but they are different enough to bring some variety into the mix. There are also multiple difficulties to tackle, and each changes a lot about the game, mostly numbers. Enemy speed, damage and health are all affected, as it always is at higher difficulties, but the game also tweaks things like how long enemies can be marked, how many shields they drop on death, experience after battles, shop prices and player income. Each difficulty makes the game significantly harder in multiple dimensions.

Worse Graphics

Deadlink uses simple 3D models that look untextured. It doesn’t go for a photorealistic style. It goes for a chunky cyberpunk look, and it pulls it off well. It uses its limited visuals to full effect, creating stages that look different, but still into its world.

Enemies are well designed, with unique silhouettes that are easy to interpret at a glance, even through fifteen layers of explosions, armor drops and other particle effects.

The soundtrack is a high-octane blast of pure synthwave that will send you into fight or flight. Couldn’t ask for a better backing track to the chaos on screen.

Made by People Paid More to Work Less

Deadlink was made by Gruby Entertainment, a Polish studio. On their page they mention they’re fully remote, so they don’t have any of the overhead costs that come with having an office. I can’t find much info on their team, but they’re funded by Tencent, so they must be doing alright financially. They have other projects in the works, with not much information.

They seem to be doing alright, and they make the games they want to make, and they seem to be able to take their time with them.

I find it kind of ironic that the studio that made a game about wrecking mega corporations is partnered with Tencent, a giant multinational mega corporation.

Conclusion

Deadlink is a fantastic first person shooter. It’s fast paced, action packed and a real challenge. It has some neat roguelite elements with unique implementations, and a solid and well thought-out resource system that encourages active play. If you’ve ever seen how intense games look in old commercials from the 90s, you know what it’s like to play Deadlink. Give it a shot.

You can get Deadlink for $25, and it’s available on consoles, too. As with the other games I’ve mentioned up to now, it goes on sale often, and you can get it at half price. I think it’s worth it even at full price.

Mayan God of War

This game looks and plays like a God of War clone, but you do a lot of platforming in the jungle accompanied by a floating, talking mask. Sounds more like Crash Bandicoot. Either way, Marlow Brigs is a short game with worse graphics made by people who were paid… less? I’m not sure on that last part, but it’s still worth checking out.

What is it?

Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death is an action/adventure game. Play as the titular Marlow Briggs, a man who dies and is brought back to life by a mysterious mask. Fight your way through a bunch of explosive action sequences to save your girlfriend and enact revenge on the guys that killed you. It’s a low budget God of War that’s actually pretty decent.

It’s a mix of combat, platforming and light puzzle solving, as these games tend to do.

The combat is competent. You have access to four weapons which you unlock gradually throughout the game. Each of them has different attributes, such as speed and range. This game is from the times before we had magnetic combat, so your attacks don’t home in on enemies from across the arena. This means range actually matters. It does the God of War thing where the combos have specific purposes, like a dedicated shield breaker combo, a launcher and such. There’s also magic you can cast, which are big, screen-clearing attacks that do a lot of damage.

Between combat encounters you’ll be doing some platforming and traversal. There are some sections where you have to time your jumps and go through giant death traps that feel like something out of Crash Bandicoot. There’s also some light puzzles where you pull levers or move a cube around. They’re simple, but at least the characters aren’t barking the solution at you after four seconds like in the modern God of War games.

The game is very of its time, for better and worse. It’s very videogamey, which is good. It copies the original God of War pretty closely, heavily borrowing from what made it work. It has a constant forward pace, you’ll always be moving forward, no backtracking, constantly changing environments and making your way through interesting set pieces. The combat density is a bit low, but when there’s combat it’s as an obstacle to your objective and you have to fight the enemies, it’s not like in some modern action games where the combat is completely optional. If you want a good, solid version of what we used to get back in the Xbox 360 era, give Marlow Briggs a shot.

Short

The game can be cleared in around 4 hours. Its brisk pace and constant, forward-pushing momentum makes it easy to get through in one or two sittings.

In terms of replayability, it has a “HARDCORE” difficulty option you can unlock after beating the game. It’s the same game, but a bit tougher.

There are some optional challenges, which are sections from the game presented in minigame form.

Worse Graphics

The game is old, so the graphics look dated, but even back when it released it wasn’t a looker. It does a lot with what it has, at least. Most of its environments stick to a closely related theme; you’ll be spending most of your time in areas that are “jungle, but with X” after you leave the oil rig. Jungle, but with ruins. Jungle, but in a cave. Jungle ruins, but up in a snowy mountain. That sort of thing. It works because it keeps things varied, but it also ties everything together with a coherent theme.

The music is good. Bombastic orchestral movie soundtrack type music. It gets the job done.

Made by People Paid More to Work Less

I think this one counts are “People Paid to Work”. This was made by a now defunct Slovanian studio Zootfly. It had a budget of $5 million, and it made back approximately $45 million. That’s a pretty good return on investment. This game was a downloadable title on Xbox Live Arcade, so there weren’t any manufacturing or distribution costs.

This is why I advocate for smaller games. A budget of five million is a lot more than the other games I’ve covered in this series. I don’t think Hrot’s solo dev spent anywhere near that to develop his game, but it’s nothing for a game in 2013. God of War 3, which this game kind of rips off, came out three years prior in 2010, and it cost $44 million to make. Over eight times Marlow Briggs’ budget. Keep things lean, and you can make more profit while experimenting. Marlow Briggs didn’t experiment, though. It just did God of War again.

Conclusion

I might have made this game sound underwhelming, but it’s not. What makes this game special is that it’s good, even if it shouldn’t be. Everyone who plays this has the same experience. It starts off, you see the crappy visuals, the weird set-up, the janky animations. You think you’re in for a mess of a game, but then it starts, you play it a bit, realize it’s literally just God of War, feel some disdain and disappointment, keep going and slowly, you find that you’re having fun and the game is actually really solid. It surprises you. Sure, if you read this review, you might come into it expecting it to be good from the get-go, but it’s still worth checking out. It’s short and to the point. You get a fun, explosion-filled game for a few hours, it’s good, it doesn’t out-stay its welcome and it’s gone. It’s like a bag of chips.

It also costs about as much as a bag of chips. You can get Marlow Briggs for $5 at full price. It goes on sale every few days, and you can grab it for 99 cents. You get a full Xbox 360 game for the price of a bag of Doritos.

There’s no excuse not to give this one a shot.

Run and Gun Meets Stop and Think

Remember Metal Slug? He’s back! In Roguelite form. It’s not a run and gun action roguelite, either. It’s a… turn-based tactics game? And it’s really good somehow?

Today I’ll be telling you why Metal Slug Tactics is a short game and all that other stuff yeah YOU should play it.

What is it?

Metal Slug Tactics, as the name suggests, is a tactics game based off the Metal Slug franchise. You assemble a team of three soldiers, place them on a map, and complete missions. These include things like killing every enemy on the map, surviving for a set number of turns, escorting a friendly unit to another part of the map and other things. After each mission you get money and experience. Money can be used to buy upgrades, and experience lets you get new skills for your soldiers. You do this until you’re strong enough to go fight the final boss.

The game does a great job at translating the run and gun aspect of Metal Slug into a turn-based game. You’re rewarded for moving far in one turn. The more spaces you cover in one move, the more adrenaline and dodge you get. Adrenaline is what you use for your special abilities. It’s like mana for your spells. If you move five spaces, you get three points of adrenaline, which you can use to cast a powerful attack. Dodge is a defensive attribute. It blocks damage. If you run five spaces, you get two points of Dodge, which means you completely negate any attack that deals two damage or less.

It’s a lot to take in, without the game’s context, but it’s an intuitive system. It’s heavy on risk and reward. Dodge and Adrenaline are powerful resources, but to get them, you have to make big moves, which means ending up in possibly dangerous situations. Knowing how far you can push it, and getting the most resources while also ending up in a safe spot is a great puzzle. Whenever I got a huge move with a ton of points that landed me behind cover in a perfect spot, I felt like a genius.

Positioning is extremely important in the game. The are walls you can use for cover, which reduce the damage you take. If you combine the Dodge with cover, you can survive getting hit with a nuke.

Where you stand relative to your teammates is also a key factor. Whenever you attack, you can do a Sync, which means that if any of your units can shoot that target, they do so. This adds another layer of strategy to the mix, since you have to balance running around for adrenaline, with ending up in safe spots, while also setting up syncs with your team.

Trying to calculate all these things is already tough, but this is a Metal Slug game, so the enemies have to be tough, too. There’s a huge variety of things to shoot at, and get shot by. There are guys who attack up close, others that throw grenades that deal damage in an area, shielded enemies, snipers that shoot from afar, and even tanks. It mixes these units in really interesting ways, so you always have to be on your A-game to figure out who to prioritize and how it affects your positioning.

The roguelite elements are well done, too. You start by picking from one of the three available worlds: the jungle ruins, the desert and… the other desert. I have to admit, the choice to have two desert maps is strange, but at least they’re different in how they play. When in the area, you pick a mission. Missions will reward you with money, experience or ammo. There are also extra objectives to complete for more resources. Once you finish a level, you get to pick one of three. There are skills for your characters and weapon upgrades. Each of these adds a new dimension to your playstyle, and changes things up in a cool way.

The skills available aren’t very flashy at first, but they allow for a lot of creativity. Fio, for example, has an ability where she can move an allied unit. This can be used to give an ally a head start so they can reach a position far away, or to move them into safety once they used their movement for that turn. Simple, but what if you combine it with Marco’s skill that lets him move after being affected by a friendly skill? And combine that with his ability to give others a free turn, which can be looped into itself multiple times? They’re very basic, simple abilities that start to interact with each other and form complex webs of loops and other cool stuff. Real big brain smart people nonsense.

All the systems come together beautifully to make a really complex, but easy to understand, web of decisions that doesn’t hold your hand. It’s tough, but very rewarding.

Short

It’s a roguelite, and like the arcade Metal Slug games, it can be cleared in around 40 minutes to an hour. That’s not to say there’s a lack of content. There are six characters to unlock, each with their own set of skills and unique playstyles. Playstiles, plural. They each have a number of unlockable skills that change how they play, and alternate loadouts, too. You can take a character and change them into a close-quarter powerhouse, or a support. Six characters in name, but with each having different ways to play them, you end up with almost three times the number, in practice.

There’s also the alternate difficulties. These not only make the enemies tougher, but they introduce new enemies with different tactics, so each difficulty is like unlocking a new expansion for the game.

There’s tons to do in the game, so even if you can clear a run relatively quickly, you’ll want to come back again and again.

Worse Graphics

This is the only game on the list where I can say that the graphics are in fact worse. If you compare Metal Slug Tactics’ graphics to those of the arcade Metal Slug games, they’re technically worse. They have fewer frames of animation and a lot less detail. The graphics in the old Metal Slug games still hold up to this day. They’re masterpieces of sprite work that haven’t been replicated since. The ones in Tactics aren’t as impressive.

That doesn’t mean they’re bad. Far from it. The game looks fantastic. The graphics may be a lot simpler, but that makes it even more impressive. They managed to take the ultra-detailed art from the arcade games, and simplified it so it looks recognizeable, and it’s also good. They took the most important aspects of each design, and highlighted them. The animations are still fluid and detailed, with more of an emphasis on good poses and clear, exaggerated actions. The art style is a lot brighter, too, with more saturated and varied colors compared to the more natural/militaristic greens, browns and beige of the originals. It’s a fresh take on Metal Slug’s iconic visuals, with a really great art style of its own.

There you have it, actually worse graphics for once… and the worse graphics still look fantastic.

The soundtrack is great, too. It remixes some of the tunes from the arcade games, with recognizeable motifs and melodies, while also giving them a new spin.

Made by People Paid More to Work Less

This game was made by Leikir Studios, a French indie development studio. The French are doing great work in videogames. America needs to step it up, not gonna lie. They are a small studio, not much information on them, but they’ve been making games since 2012. Metal Slug Tactics is their biggest game, in the sense that it’s a licensed title working with a publisher. They announced the game back in 2021, and it released in 2024. When it was revealed, it already looked far into development, which makes me think it was being worked on for maybe two years before being announced.

It’s a small studio, they put out the kind of games they want to, and it looks like their partnership with SNK and Dotemu to make Metal Slug Tactics was a good one. They approached SNK to work with them, and they let them make the game they wanted. Sounds like it’s better than working at Blizzard.

In one interview, one of the lead developers says he’s a huge fan of Metal Slug, specifically Metal Slug 2. That explains the multiple desert levels, and why Tactics has a lot of material from Metal Slug 2.

Conclusion

You should play Metal Slug Tactics. It’s complicated, and dense, but it’s very rewarding. The basic system is strong, and the skills build onto it, adding a new layer of challenge. The missions are well paced and ask the player to play in interesting ways. It’s a creative take on Metal Slug. If you’re in the small overlapping section between “fans of run and gun arcade games” and “thoughtful turn-based games”, you will find a lot to love in Metal Slug Tactics.

You can get Metal Slug Tactics for $25 (which would be 100 quarters at an arcade).