Quantified Fun

A while back, I wrote about the 4 Types of Fun. They were originally 3 types, with the third type being “no fun at all”, so not really a type of fun. I didn’t make the rating system, it was made by someone else, and I adapted it to videogames. It was mostly about how you feel during and after the event, but recently I came up with my own chart. It’s split into four quadrants, with two axes, because it makes more sense and people online seem to like this sort of thing.

Effort Axis

How hard are you trying? High effort means you’re doing more than usual. It might be that your actions per minute are higher, you’re pressing more buttons, exerting physical effort. It could also be mental effort; you’re actively thinking through your best strategies, trying to outplay your opponent or the game itself, thinking five or six steps ahead. Using 100% of your brain to focus on one thing, with no distractions. It could also be a combination of both mental and physical strain.

There are a few games that come to mind here. Granted, it’s when they’re played at a higher level, but they demand more from the player at a baseline. Super Smash Bros. Melee is a good example of mechanical effort. When played at a semi-high level, you’ll be wave dashing, which needs three button presses to complete, over and over again. If you’re not doing that, you’re probably dash dancing back and forth, waggling your joystick from side to side, with an obvious dick joke here. Even playing neutral in Melee puts a strain on your controller. There’s also a mental component to the game, with outplays and predictions, sure, but I’m focusing more on the mechanical aspect.

Games that require a lot of mental effort are usually turn-based. The most obvious one that springs to mind is Chess. Every move you consider has dozens of alternate paths you can go down, and it gets more convoluted the further ahead you plan. You can stew over how to move one of your knights for an entire minute, suddenly find the perfect move which will start an avalanche of trades, only to make the move and realize you just left your Queen open and you flip the board. Unless your games devolve into fist fights, Chess doesn’t ask much of you on a physical level.

For a game that overheats your mind and body, I’m going to skip the obvious StarCraft shoutout, and go for Quake 3. Dueling in Quake is a test of every skill you could have while playing a game. You need spatial awareness, to know the maps, where you are and how to navigate them at high speeds. Know the optimal paths between power ups, the best angles and what to avoid, where the weapons spawn. You also have to keep track of where your opponent is at any given point, and predict where they might go. While all this is happening, you have to keep a running timer in your mind for when the power ups spawn. Whenever you fight your opponent, your aim and movement are put to the test. A slight mistake could mean a few milliseconds where you’re not damaging your opponent, and they kill you. Then there are the projectile weapons like the grenade launcher and rocket launcher, where you have to think about angles, leading your target, how they’ll bounce when they’re hit, and all that fun stuff. It’s very demanding, and rewarding, on both ends.

Another high-impact struggle game is Deadlock. It’s a whole-ass MOBA combined with a whole-ass shooter. Each half of this game, on its own, would be a complicated, fully-fleshed out game. Combine them, and you get something that makes your head and hands hurt in equal measure. You have to keep track of all the nonsense that comes with a MOBA; 48 different abilities and their cooldowns, the map state, infer enemy positions when they’re not visible, keep track of the timers for the different sources of income, like the sinner’s sacrifice or the jungle camps. You have to think of what items you’re building and why, and compare that to what your team is building, and take into account any items your enemy might have, and their cooldowns. Make snap decisions on who to target in a fight based on their importance, relative power to your and your team. Can you solo kill that Haze as an Infernus, or should you go farm the nearby camp, which is near where you last saw the enemy Yamato a few seconds ago, and judging by the game state, she could have gone to push the lane on the other side of the map, so you decide to farm. Then you realize you left your Queen wide open (you used your cooldowns to farm, and Yamato killed you) and you flip the board (scream at your team in voice chat).

Try to do all that with your mind while your hands are busy trying to slide cancel into a frame-perfect corner boost into an air-strafe all while trying to keep your crosshairs on an enemy’s head, all the while they’re doing their own Saturday Night Fever disco dance trying to kill you.

The opposite end of the spectrum is low effort. You don’t have to do much. You press a button every now and then, or you don’t have to think much. You can lay back in your chair for these, usually. These are more easy-going games like Balatro, where you click around for a bit, do some light strategy, and relax. Cozy farming sims like Stardew Valley fit here, too, unless you’re min-maxing some industrial power farm. Idle games are the bottom of this axis. You don’t have to do anything. The name says it all, “idle”, you click every now and then, but you engage with the game around 1% of its total run time.

This whole chart is relative, but I’ll try to keep this axis a bit more objective. Sure, effort is different from person to person. Maybe someone like Hungrybox doesn’t struggle with the inputs while playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, but you can still see that he’s pushing a lot of buttons.

The effort axis makes more sense when we introduce the second line: Enjoyment, which is more subjective.

Enjoyment Axis

This is whether you like the thing you’re doing, or don’t. Pretty self-explanatory, and very subjective, but you know when you’re at each end.

The fun end of the spectrum is fun. You know what that feels like; F is for friends who do stuff together, U is for U and me, that sort of thing. I don’t think I need to sit here and define what fun is, but for the sake of being thorough, I’ll do it. You are happy, you’re entertained. You are having a good time with what you’re playing, regardless of effort. You have a silly propeller hat, and a big lollipop and you’re kicking your little feet with a big grin on your face.

Miserable is also self-explanatory. It’s the opposite of fun. What most people feel while they’re at work. Games that sap the life out of you, leaving you as a husk.

I won’t come up with examples for this spectrum yet, since I can’t mention one game and have it be universally understood. I can say something like “Dr. Boring’s Accounting Simulator”, a game where you fill a massive spreadsheet with numbers, and there’ll be at least one person who’ll say “that’s the one on the fun end, right?”. I’ll leave the games for the end, where I’ll rank a few games on the chart. My opinion, of course.

The real fun comes when we combine the two axes, and finally get around to discussing the thing we’re here to discus.

The combination of both spectrums gives us the Gaming Experience chart. Name subject to change. Here we can classify most, if not all, gaming-related experiences. Of course, it can also be used to classify any other activity that has both aspects.

Now that you know how everything works, I’ll detail the four main quadrants.

Sweating

Part of the high-effort half, Sweating is playing like you mean it, but without meaning. You struggle, and it’s all for nothing. This could be giving a record-breaking performance, but failing to achieve anything with it, or trying way too hard to accomplish something that, ultimately, isn’t worth it.

This has some similarity to Type 3 Fun, where you suffer through the experience, then suffer afterwards. It doesn’t make a good story, but contrary to Type 3 fun, this could be an okay story, you could laugh about it afterwards. It’s just a game, after all, but there is no fun to be had, especially not for the insane effort put forth.

In competitive gaming terms, these are those hopeless, uphill matches where you try to carry your team, but they won’t let you. Maybe you’re playing Overwatch, for some reason, and you’re the tank. You’re jumping into the enemy backline, taking out their supports, doing some insane outplays, but then you turn around and you see the Soldier 76 on your team pop his ult, and somehow miss all his shots. You’re playing Winston, and the enemy team can’t stop flaming you on all chat for being such a nuisance, but your supports are acting like the American healthcare system and refuse to heal anyone.

The other aspect of this is when you get severely outplayed. Not so hopelessly stomped that you have no hope, that’s another quadrant, but when you’re using 110% of your effort, but you still fall short. This is like if you were playing Dota2, again- for some reason, and you’re hitting your item timings, you’re controlling the map, you’re doing everything right, but the enemy team seems to be doing way better than you. You’re breaking your record for most gold per minute, and you’re still an entire item behind the enemy carry. You place an extremely clever ward in a devious spot where no one will find it, and the enemy support shows up a split second later and dewards it as if he knew what you did. You pop a smoke for the sickest gank ever, but they were expecting you and kill you in a 3v5. Basically, you tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end it didn’t even matter.

It’s when you throw your hands up in the air and say “there’s literally nothing more I could do”. When you’re locked in, you can look at an incredible play you made and say, with pride, “I got the entire enemy team in an ult!”. When you’re just sweating, you look at that same play and moan “I got the entire enemy team in an ult!”, with despair in your voice, because despite your best effort, you were running in a hamster wheel going nowhere.

You don’t have to lose to end up in this quadrant. There are Pyrrhic victories. Times where you win, but you expended so much effort, and it was so grueling, that you can’t even savor it. The screen says “VICTORY”, and you have a green mark on your match history, but on all levels including physical, it was a loss.

I try to avoid playing miserable games, but a lot of competitive games can fall into this category for me sometimes.

I’m going to get this out of the way, since I’ll be mentioning it too often:

DotA2 fits into every category here. Deadlock is similar, but it’s exclusively in the high effort zone. You can’t take it easy in that game.

It’s hard for me to come up with examples for this category, since I try to get some enjoyment out of what I play. After years of playing competitive games, I’ve learned to mostly enjoy the process, and not worry so much about the outcome. If I try hard, and do one thing well, even if I don’t win, I’ll still have a little fun, or I can learn something, so I’m not completely miserable. If I play Street Fighter 6, and go up against an opponent that’s significantly better than me, I can learn something from it. It’s a bit of a cop-out answer, I know.

Since I already copped-out with my answer, I’m going to double down and just talk about Dota again, even though I said I wouldn’t. Don’t worry, this is the last time (in this article), I promise. The kinds of matches that give me this in dota are the ones where I seem to get outplayed in every aspect. These make me miserable because there’s so much going wrong at once, and I’m playing to the best of my abilities, so I don’t learn anything other than “play better”. I’m just stuck in a 40 minute match where I have to keep up an unsustainable level of play just to not get ran over.

Locked-in

On the other hand, when you do well and succeed, you’re Locked-in. This is when you’re firing on all cylinders; you’re playing to the best of your abilities, and you can see the positive impact you’re making. In my opinion, this is where gaming is at its best. When you’re pushing your skills, and being rewarded for it.

I have a few personal examples for this, starting off with Ninja Gaiden II. It’s the first single-player game I mention here. It’s so tough, that it plays like a competitive game. You have to really try to make it through this game. Enemies are relentless, they outnumber you, and they want you dead. There’s nothing more offensive to them than your mere existence. You have to be mindful of every enemy on screen, take note of all the projectiles flying at you, know what buttons you’re pressing for each attack, basically be aware of everything. Once you play the game enough, It’ll seem less overwhelming and you can get through a lot of it relatively easily, but it’s still a game that demands you pay attention. If you get comfortable for a little bit, an enemy can sneak into your range and grab you, taking off half your health in the process.

Shmups fit here pretty neatly. One of the reasons why I like Blue Revolver is that I can feel myself locking in when I play. Hyper-focusing on a bullet pattern, and threading the needle through it feels great.

Sekiro is another I’d put here any time. It’s tough as nails, and it demands all your concentration, but it’s a lot of fun. I wouldn’t put the effort too high, since in terms of mechanics it’s more about rhythm and reactions, nothing that would break your fingies. It still puts me in the zone, where I focus on one thing, like parry timings. It’s always a cool feeling when you automatically react to something and dodge it even before your mind registers it, and you go “holy crap, I actually did that?”.

Speaking of rhythm, rhythm games certainly fit here. I don’t play many of them, but when I do, I lock-in. Heck, one of the first times I noticed that feeling of being fully immersed and “in the zone” was while playing Dance Dance Revolution as a kid. Nowadays I stick to rhythm on a controller, since I don’t want my downstairs neighbors to think I’m holding an unsanctioned horse race in my apartment, so I’ll put Miku here.

Running it down.

The exact opposite of engaged and thriving, is bored and dying. Running it down comes from MOBA terminology. When someone has had it with the game, they’ve given up completely, they “run it down mid”, which means they run down the mid lane and die over and over again as a form of protest. It could also mean “running it down” any lane, doesn’t have to be mid lane. It’s when you’re completely and irredeemably DONE with it. You’re not having fun, and you’re not really trying. You’re barely playing the game.

Since this comes from MOBAs, the generic example would be a game where you’ve died 20 times, you’re way behind the enemy team, and any and all efforts you make end in failure. Not like when you’re sweating. You’re not really even able to try here. Your plans don’t make it past the drawing board. You start drafting a strategy, and the enemy team breaks into your room, snaps your pencil and sets your notebook on fire, then they give you a wedgie.

A lot of people seem to have this experience in fighting games. They try something like Guilty Gear, or Blazblue, and they end up in a 20 second combo, or blocking for ever, only to get hit once and die. They can’t even move, or attack or do anything. They’re watching their opponent do a combo video with them as the training dummy.

I’ve played a lot of fighting games, and I managed to make it past the phase where I get beat like an old carpet, but there are two games that are sticking points: Marvel VS Capcom 3 and the aforementioned Blazblue. I always get stuck in some weird cross-up in MvsC3, or fall for some left-right mix up that happens in less than 0.001 seconds. While I’m still trying to figure out how to move my character, the enemy Magneto square jumps at me, covered by a Dante assist, gets me in a touch of death combo, then my incoming character gets crossed-up and I watch as I lose two thirds of my team to two mistakes. Same with Blazblue. Anytime I play that one I end up in a 30 second block string. This is purely a skill issue on my part, I admit that 100%. I’ve had “get better at MvsC3 and Blazblue” on my to-do list for years, but it’s not a priority.

A game that neatly combines low effort with low fun is Gungrave G.O.R.E. It’s one of the first games I reviewed here on Load Last Save, and it’s a miserable time. You mash the fire button mindlessly through stages that are too long for their own good. There’s no difficulty, no strategy, nothing that would make you want to stick around. Enemies are like grass, they exist to be mowed down, and offer no resistance. From the start to the end of the game, you’re mashing the fire button with no real concern as to what’s happening in the level. It’s a snooze fest. Read the review for more insight into this terrible game.

GGEZ

GG EZ is a victory lap. You’re not trying, but it’s not a bad thing. This is calm, relaxed fun. Playing a game you’re really good at, that you’ve beaten hundreds of times. It could also be playing a game purely for fun with your friends. Winding down with some friendslop like Peak. The videogame equivalent of slapping each other with pool noodles for a bit. In a competitive/versus setting, when not playing with friends, it could be stomping on some noobs. Maybe you pick a character you’re not familiar with, and you mess around, beating people, or using dumb ineffective gimmick strategies. Going off-meta in games is usually this; enjoyable, as long as you can ignore your team’s wailing.

A game that comes to mind for this one is Balatro. I always think of this one as Slay the Spire’s more relaxed cousin. It’s not as intense, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think its mechanics are still solid, and there’s some thinking involved, but it’s not the min-maxed turbo efficiency you need to clear a run of Slay the Spire. Pick the funny Jokers, play pairs and watch the numbers go up and make dopamine-inducing noise.

Tower defense games go here. Some, like the bad ones I mentioned in my post about them, go in the miserable section, but the good ones like Bloons 2 and Kingdom Rush are good, easy fun. Some of the later stages get kind of difficult, but it’s still low-stakes enough to not go too far up the graph, while staying entertaining. Plus you get to watch the towers kill the little monsters (or balloons) and that’s soothing in its own way.

Playing a secondary character or going into unranked matches in some fighting games is GGEZ. Sometimes, when I play Street Fighter 6, I go into unranked, pick E. Honda, and spam headbutt like an idiot. Try to frustrate anyone who can’t deal with it. It’s mean, but it’s fun in its own right. Same with picking a supposed low tier character like Zangief or General Raam in Killer Instinct, and grabbing people for insane amounts of damage. True glue-eater behavior. It’s dumb, and it won’t help me improve, but it’s fun.

Conclusion

I recommend playing videogames. then quantifying your experience using an unscientific vibes-based chart. It goes without saying you should stick to the quadrant you’re most comfortable with, which is probably the two on the right, and avoid anything on the left. Unless you like feeling miserable, for some reason. Maybe you really love emo.

All this is purely subjective. A game I put in lock-in could easily be someone else’s “running it down”. The same game can fit into multiple categories, depending on how you play it and why. I can play fighting games in a serious state of mind to lock-in, or I can go mash buttons and play like a chimp for a few cheap laughs.

I think games should cover both the high and low effort sides of the fun chart, but there’s also something to be said about games that can cover multiple sections. Deadlock, and the other one I said I wouldn’t mention anymore, are both incredibly deep, complex games, with a lot of room for you to grow and improve, but that also means there are moments where you’ll fail and have absolutely horrific matches. I take it as a testament to their wide range of skill expression, but then again that could just be another cop-out.

Another cop-out is that, if you play competitive games, you won’t be able to completely avoid the left side of the graph. It comes with the territory. The thing to do is to try to learn from the misery, and make the most of it. Enjoy the process. Just try to avoid the “running it down” quadrant at all costs. There’s nothing to gain there. If you’re really not having fun, you can go play something else. It’s just a game. I don’t advocate ragequitting or leaving mid-match, but maybe consider not queuing up again. Play some Blue Revolver instead.

Have fun putting games in the quadrants and sharing it with your friends. If someone already did this, let me know. The chart, I mean. I’ve seen similar charts, but not one exactly like this.

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I Still Remember the Dot Com Bubble

The economy isn’t doing too hot. Everything keeps getting more expensive, and we still haven’t gotten all that money AI is supposedly raking in. Things have gotten bad even for us here at the Load Last Save offices. I’ve had to cut employee’s pay by 90% just to keep paying myself my exorbitant CEO salary, and even then I’d had to make some lifestyle changes. I’m down to just one luxury bag per season.

In light of all that, I’ll be giving you a guide on how to game while the economy crashes and burns all around you. I’ll give you some tips on what free games you can play, where to score some deals, and what to avoid at all costs. At some point we’ll have a serious discussion on emulation, and why it’s a bad, evil, no good practice. You’ll have enough games to keep you busy while Sam Altman sends you that check.

This article will focus mostly on PC games. Most of the deals explored here are in USD, and the prices apply to the US. There might be some discrepancies when converting into other currencies, and deals might not be the same in other countries.

This was mostly inspired by the Cheap Seats segment on ’s podcast , Crash to Desktop, which you should go listen to right now. Listen to it while you read the article for maximum gaming overload.

Starting off with the cheapest of the cheap: absolutely free.

Cheap As Free!

Back in my day, getting a game for free would have been absolutely unheard of, but now we got companies just giving them away. Sure, a lot of them are monetized up and down, charging you a couple of dollar here for this, a couple of dollars there for that, but it’s mostly for cosmetics. Cosmetics that they’ll advertise every three seconds you spend in the game, and really, are you so broke that you can’t afford a $20 swimsuit for your waifu? They need that money to keep the game running, you know.

The first game on this list is one that’s completely free: Dota2. Now, I know telling people to play dota is like asking them to drink bleach, but hey it’s free. I’ve had my soul shaved down over the years, so I can tolerate dota. It’s a great game, on a mechanical level. There’s such an absurd amount of depth to it, that you can play it for over a decade and still find new things. It’s a marvel of game design, if you can handle the rat eating pit-dwellers that make up its player base.

The reason why I recommend Dota2 specifically is because it’s completely free. All you have to do is install the game, and sacrifice a portion of your humanity to play it, but that’s not a monetary investment. You have every single hero unlocked from the get-go, and there isn’t anything you need to spend money on. Everything in the shop is purely cosmetic; nothing affects the gameplay.

Compare that to League of Legends, Dota’s main (and admittedly only) competition. League has 173 Champions to pick from, but only 20 of them are free at any given time. The rest are locked. Sure, you can unlock them with currency you get by playing the game, but it’s going to take you several matches before you can afford your first champion, so if you watched Arcane and want to go play as your favorite character Vi, and go exercise excessive force on some punks, you’ll have to wait for her to go on the free rotation, or shell out a few bucks for the privilege.

This is also the only reason I’d recommend Marvel Rivals. It’s free, completely free. You can play as any hero just by installing the game, none of this unlocking nonsense. You have access to every character, every map and every kind of game mode without having to spend a single cent, unless you really want that aforementioned swimsuit skin.

If you prefer your shooters with less man chest, you can try Counter Strike 2. Valve is back on the list giving you another completely free game. It’s the time-tested tactical shooter that defined the genre, complete with its deep strategy and angry screaming Russian teammates calling you ancient Slavic slurs for not rushing B fast enough. Recommending this one is a bit obvious. If you’ve had a PC for more than a week, chances are you’ve tried Counter Strike at some point.

To complete the Valve three-piece we have Deadlock. It’s another MOBA, which will turn a lot of people away, and it’s also another shooter. It’s completely free, with every character available to play from the start. The game is still in secret closed alpha, and it’s not monetized at all at the moment, so this is subject to change. The fact that all characters are free isn’t likely to change. It’s a fantastic game, but its high skill requirements and barrier of entry make it suitable only for the most dedicated, or least employed, gamers out there.

If you still need more freebies, you can always do what I used to do as a kid, and go play some Flash games. Sites like Armor Games and Newgrounds are still up and running, offering a wide variety of flash games for no money down. They were good enough to keep an entire generation entertained during the 2000s, and they still get the job done today.

I personally recommend:

• Submachine. A point-and-click room escape puzzle game with an eerie atmosphere. It spawned a whole series. Think Myst but with actual puzzles.

• Kingdom Rush. A tower defense game. Build towers along a path to keep enemies from reaching your base. A solid tower defense game.

• Bowmaster Prelude. A mix of tower defense with physics-based archery. Aim, draw and shoot your bow at incoming armies. Very satisfying, tactile gameplay.

What About Emulation?

Emulation is a legal gray area. Emulation is technically legal, but at the same time, it isn’t. Making an emulator is legal. Using a console’s BIOS when making an emulator isn’t legal, as the BIOS is proprietary, copyrighted software. Taking the BIOS from a console you own and applying it to the emulator is legal. An emulator is okay as long as you don’t distribute it with the BIOS file.

Can’t get the games, unless you own them and dump the ROM for your use. One copy per person.

Wait, what if I want to play God Hand, and I buy a used copy of the game, then dump it, can I play it? What if I then give that physical copy away to someone else? Do I have to get rid of my legally acquired ROM, too?

That’s a question for a copyright lawyer, which I’m not. If I were, I wouldn’t be writing about games for free on the Internet. The answer is probably whatever would make the company the most money, and would cause the most inconvenience to the consumer, so you probably have to erase the ROM once you no longer have access to your physical copy. What if the copy is damaged, or stolen, and you can’t use it? Uh… erase the ROM and buy a new one?

This whole business of buying used games is good and all, but I remember back in the day when game companies went after Gamestop for their used game model. They would sell you a game, then re-buy it as a trade-in, then sell it again. They’d sell the same copy of a game twenty times over in an act that could best be described as staying hydrated by drinking your own piss in an endless loop. It wasn’t okay for Gamestop to sell the same copy of Super Mario Sunshine seven times and make profit off it, but if I want to play Super Mario Sunshine, I have to pay 80 dollars to some skeevy dude for his scratched, cigarette-burnt disc? Nintendo doesn’t see a single cent from this transaction! What do they care if I emulate Chibi Robo? They sure as shit ain’t doing anything with it!

The same argument applies to abandonware. Abandonware is software that hasn’t been sold in years, leaving it in a state of abandonment. There’s no legal way to get it, and a lot of times, doesn’t really infringe on anyone’s copyrights.

Think back to a few paragraphs ago when I said that thing about copyright law, about how the correct interpretation is usually the one that inconveniences the end user? Well, abandonware is still illegal. Unless the company that owns the software declares it abandoned and gives it to the public for free, it’s still illegal to download and use.

DOOM 1993 is open source. Anyone can port it, play it and use it how they want. Same thing with Unreal Tournament 1999, and 2004. They were made publicly available.

Adobe Photoshop CS has been discontinued and abandoned by Adobe, but it’s still illegal to download and crack. You can buy a key off ebay, which I think is dubious, and you can use it if you own it, but you can’t download it, despite it technically being abandonware.

Same thing with games you can’t legally buy anywhere. If you want to play Universe at War: Earth Assault, you’re out of luck. It doesn’t matter that the game hasn’t been on sale since around 2011, that it’s been delisted from every store front, and the game’s servers were shut down. Someone owns the rights to it, and they can sit on it for as long as they want because, what if they want to release a remake of it at some point? You downloading the original would cut into their profits. That is a real argument I saw someone use online.

Even if your favorite online reviewer recommends something like Downhill Domination for the PS2, developed by a studio that doesn’t exist since 2009, a game that hasn’t been sold since 2005, isn’t available on any digital platform, you can’t play it. Unless you buy a used copy off ebay, because technically Sony owns the rights to the franchise. Same way Blizzard owns Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. I don’t even think they know they have it, but it’s theirs, and they will sit on it forever if they want, until they decide to add Glitch as a hero in Overwatch or something.

What if you don’t get caught? 99% of people who emulate don’t get caught, unless they make a big stink about it. I’ve seen big name streamers emulating to thousands of viewers on Twitch and they don’t get anything, but our lawyer made us change the name of this song- I mean- our lawyer made us say that emulating is bad, and even if you won’t get caught, it’s still wrong.

Except for Nintendo games. If you emulate those, Nintendo will send a squad of highly trained Goombas to stomp on your face.

So buy games, because when you buy them, you own them. Wait, that’s not true, either. Everything you buy on Steam is merely a “license” to the game, which can be revoked even after you pay for it. Same with the digital stuff on PlayStation and Xbox. It’s not really yours. Physical games are becoming rarer and rarer, and subscriptions are becoming the norm. We won’t own any games, and we’re supposed to be happy about it. The companies can take the games you bought and remove them from your account, but you can’t pirate the games they don’t even sell in the first place.

I’m going to jump off this train of thought before I write something that would get me a knock on the door.

So whatever you do, do NOT download and configure Retro Arch to play old, forgotten games. Also also, do NOT, under NO circumstance, should you download FightCade and use it to play Bubble Bobble with your friends. Do not use it to play obscure japanese Beat Em Ups like Denjin Makai 2, either. Wait for the company that owns the rights to Denjin Makai 2 to re-release it legally with rollback netcode and- pfff AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that’s a good one. I can’t even keep a straight face on that one.

Not-so-free

There are hundreds of semi-free games out there. I personally don’t recommend them, since they’re a lot more aggressive with their nickel and dime tactics, but others seem to like them, so I’ll give them a shoutout.

Overwatch. Formerly Overwatch, then Overwatch 2, now back to Overwatch. This is free to play, technically, but you have to unlock most of the heroes. I bought the game back when it was still a paid game, and have access to all the heroes, so I don’t know how the free to play experience is, but I imagine it’s some crappy nightmare like most of these semi-free games.

There’s also a whole host of predatory gatcha games out there that exploit your thirst for anime girls to great effect. One that I kind of sort of semi-recommend is Goddess of Victory: Nikke. It’s not much of a game, and it’s very obvious that it’s a phone game designed to get in your pockets, but it’s the only gatcha I’m involved with. The mini games they have are the real star of the show. They seem to get bootleg versions of popular games as side-activities for their events. They had Suika game when it was popular, and they also have a Kingdom Rush knock-off that’s, unironically, one of the best tower defense games I’ve ever played, and you know I like me some tower defense.

Games for Cheap Bastards

What if you’re more affluent, and can afford spending a few bucks on a game? Well, in this section, I’ll tell you about some affordable games you can get for $10 or less.

Starting off with Peak. This fun little friendslop game puts you and three of your friends on a mountain, where you have to climb to the peak, and get rescued. It’s a very simple premise that’s executed perfectly. It offers a good challenge, it’s full of moments that require teamwork, and it’s casual enough for anyone to learn quickly. It’ll keep you and your friends busy for a while, and it only costs $8.00. Highly recommended.

Meccha Chameleon is another meme-worthy multiplayer game you can grab for a few bucks. Paint yourself to blend into the environment, flexing your artistic skills in this clever twist on prop hunt. For only $6.00, you can convince your friends to get it, too.

Dustforce DX is a technical platformer/speedrunner. Play as a janitor and speed your way through dozens of complex levels where you have to maintain your momentum with precise jumps. Tight contols, great physics and levels that put every mechanic to the test. A great, underlooked gem for only $10.00.

Volgarr The Viking is a tough as nails arcade platformer inspired by Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts. It uses fixed jump arcs, which means you can’t change your trajectory once you jump, like the old Castlevania games. Every stage is full of precise jumps, deadly enemies, secret rooms and hidden treasure. If you think modern games are too easy, give Volgarr a chance, all for just $10.00.

Streets of Fury EX is a comedic beat-em-up with some serious gameplay underneath. Go through the mean streets of Paris kicking gangsters in le cule. Twelve stages over two campaigns, a ton of playable characters to pick from, a good amount of depth, guest starring the Nostalgia Critic himself, all for $10.00. If that’s not enough to convince you, I wrote about it last year, go read more about it.

Quake is, in my opinion, still the best first person shooter out there. You can get the original, ported to run on modern systems, with the expansions, with the soundtrack fixed, all for just $10.00. An unbeatable deal.

This was just a sample of some of the games I could find for $10 or less. There are a ton more great games out there, waiting to get snatched up for cheap.

What if you want to go look for your own deals, or find something a little more recent than Quake?

Deal Sites

Isthereanydeal.com is a great tool for tracking sales and prices (for PC games). You can sign in to the site via Steam, import your wishlist, and get alerts when they go on sale. You can set price thresholds so you won’t get alerted unless there’s a deep discount, or set it to let you know when it goes under its asking price even for a penny less. The site gives you graphs showing the game’s lowest price in the last few years, so you can see if the deal you’re getting is the best one all year, or if you can wait another month for it to go back on sale. The site also has filters, letting you browse games that are 50% off, 75% off, or at their historical low.

It’s a great way to see all the deals scattered across dozens of sites. The kind of flash sales that happen outside of the normal sale schedule, which you’d normally miss, unless you were obsessively checking every storefront for deals on a specific game. I use isthereanydeal all the time, and I’ve found better deals there than on any Steam sale in the past few years.

GG.Deals is a lot like isthereanydeal, but this one also covers console games and key sites.

Wait, KEY SITES!? The heckin’ evil greymarket sellers that reddit warned me about? Things like G2A, where they literally rob babies at gunpoint for their Steam keys?

The sellers on GG.Deals claim to be legitimate, and I have bought games off some of them, and they have delivered working keys with no issues. I’m not affiliated with them in any way(I’m not affiliated with anyone in this article), and I’m not responsible for anything that happens with any purchases there, but I haven’t had any trouble with them up to this point.

I keep track of deals on both sites, and have used them both extensively. They make shopping for games a breeze. If you have your eye on a game, you don’t have to wait for Steam sales. There are dozens of little shops out there that have sudden sales, and you can’t keep track of all of them, so let these two sites do it for you. Pick your favorite and stick with it. They’re functionally identical, except for the key site thing.

Humblebundle.com has a ton of bundles, as the name suggests. Grab a bunch of games at discounted prices. They also have a monthly selection of games you can get for a few bucks.

Not really a deal site, but PC Gamer keeps track of the free games Epic gives away each week. You can check on the store itself, but this one’s good if you want to see it without logging in, or if you want to check previous weeks’ offerings.

Your Backlog

Don’t think I don’t see you there, with all those unplayed games in your library. I know you went to Humble Bundle and got seven games for two dollars, and haven’t touched any of them. Why do you want to buy Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced? Because it’s new? No, it’s not new. It’s a remake of a game that came out 13 years ago! You probably played it already. Go play all those games you got on sale.

Now that you know what to do to game on the cheap, here’s a little reminder of what not to do.

Things to Avoid

Don’t buy games on release. Unless you’re a reviewer, or someone who has to play the newest games the moment they come out, you can probably wait for a sale. If you are someone who reviews the newest games, you probably get paid to do it, and can write it off as a business expense. I’d like to be able to do that. Not only to be able to earn money by doing what I’m currently doing for free, but to be able to buy some degenerate weeb game like Akiba’s Strip, and be able to write it off as a business expense on my taxes. I think it would be funny.

You don’t really miss out on much if you don’t get the latest, hottest Unreal Engine 5 Triple-A game on release. Sure you can’t join The Discourse^TM on social media, or you might get some parts of the game spoiled, but those two things can be solved if you stay off social media. If you want to get it to play with your friends, then feel free to do so. They’ll probably move on to the next new thing in a few weeks, so play it with them while it’s in their attention span.

There are a ton of games to play already. Too many, in fact. Even if games were completely cancelled from today, with no new games ever coming out again, you’d still have enough to keep you busy until you retire. I can bet a substantial amount of money that none of you have ever heard of Under the Skin, much less played it, and that came out over 20 years ago. You’ll never really run out of things to play.

If you can get the newest and latest games, for full price on release, then what are you doing here? Get out of here, Richy Rich, this is way below your tax bracket.

Whatever you do, avoid Harmful Park at all costs.

Conclusion

I recommend gaming, especially if you can do it on the cheap. You can find hours and hours of entertainment for a few bucks, or completely free, if you’re willing to do the legwork to look for it. There are even sites, like isthereanydeal.com and GG.Deals that do all the hard work for you, leaving you free to consume at your own leisure.

Just make sure you avoid buying Harmful Park. No matter how tempted you may be by High Brow Gag and Pure Shooting. Also, never, ever, ever pirate, even if the game hasn’t been sold in over 20 years, and the studio behind it doesn’t exist, and no one has thought of the IP in decades. It’s still illegal somehow. Don’t let Nintendo know, either, unless you want a knock on the door and a green shell down your throat. I’ve heard some of you are into that.

I hope you found all this information useful. Soon, when AI goes into full swing, and the GDP doubles, we’ll be living in a wonderful Fruitiger Aero utopia, where anime is real and we use Bitcoin to buy groceries. We will definitely benefit from this. It won’t be something that only benefits a small clique of Silicone Valley nerds. It’s most definitely not a bubble that’s going to burst horrifically. This is most certainly not a string of sarcastic sentences. Emulation is wrong.

The thing with all this AI mess is that, it’s supposedly good for the economy, but I don’t see any benefit. The green line goes up, Open AI makes billions somehow, investors invest the same bags of cash in the same ghost companies in an endless cycle, billions get circulated across two or three companies making it look like there’s a lot of economic activity, in an act that can only be described as staying hydrated by drinking your own piss in an endless loop, the green line goes up, but I’m still broke. I still have to pay ten dollars for a pound of ground beef. Then, when this whole scam finally collapses, and the bubble pops, we’ll be getting the short end of the stick. So AI does well, line goes up, we see no benefit, we pay ten dollars for beef. AI does poorly, everything collapses, we see no benefit, we pay thirty dollars for beef.

If it all goes down, at least you know how to get games for cheap, so you can spend your money on other luxuries, like food and shelter.

Up In My Evil Tower

Games have always been subject to fads. The mascot platformer craze of the 90s, Arena shooters, the World War 2 shooters of the early 2000s, the shovelware of the late 2000s, and now we’re up to our necks in extraction shooters and gacha games where you gamble your paycheck hoping to get your waifu. These come and go, and are usually forgotten, only to be brought up by Internet content creators looking for something to talk about.

I’m one such content creator, and this is one fad that’s near and dear to my heart: Tower Defense games. These were some of the kings of flash games, along with escape the room puzzles and those anime dating sims where you meet a nice girl and don’t do anything unchristian with them. Gaming trends come and go, but man’s thirst for anime girls is eternal.

Tower defense games are a mix of building strategy and an idle game. You have a map with a path on it. Enemies enter the stage, walk along the path, and try to get to the end. If they get there, you lose a life. You don’t want that, so you set up a bunch of towers outside the path to shoot them before they get to your base. The thinking part comes with what towers to place where. You press play and watch as your masterfully placed defenses tear the monsters to shreds, in a relaxing, satisfying way. It’s like setting up dominoes and watching them fall, but the dominoes are screaming orcs.

Today I’ll be looking at tower defense games, specifically the ones found on Armorgames.com. These are well-preserved, and work fine in modern browsers. Part of why I picked them is so you, the reader, can play them.

I’ll start by playing a few of the highest rated games, then I’ll talk about the lowest rated ones, for some contrast. The games will be presented with their rating on the site (out of 100) in parenthesis.

The Good (According to ratings)

Kingdom Rush (97)

Kingdom Rush is the other well-known tower defense flash game. It has a good selection of towers, great levels and a very clean presentation that’s very “of its time”. It looks like a cross between a flash game and a mobile game, but in a good way.

Each tower has its own use, and they’re nicely varied. The arrows do constant physical damage, death by a thousand cuts. The mage towers are slow but do good single-target damage, the cannons do area of effect damage, and there are upgrades for each, which change up their properties in interesting ways.

The most noteworthy building is the soldiers’ barracks. These spawn soldiers that block the enemies’ path. These are used to create choke points. Knowing where to place these adds a good amount of depth to the game, as it lets you control the enemies. There are only three soldiers per barrack, so if there are more enemies, they can slip past, which makes you build more elaborate choke points to keep the swarms at bay.

The levels are designed to get the most out of every tower placement. There are stages with multiple lanes and simultaneous spawn points. These split your resources, forcing you to come up with creative ways to take out a lot of enemies with a limited number of towers. There are some levels where moving a squad of soldiers a few inches to one side meant the difference between life and death.

There are some levels that have gimmicks. There’s one recurring hazard that freezes your towers, and you have to click on them to free them, which is annoying. It’s more of a distraction than anything. It happens a lot in the final level.

It’s great in a mechanical sense, but its speed makes it a bit annoying to play. The levels are small, but the enemies take forever to get to the end. Each unit moves at a few pixels per day. They’re in no hurry to kill you. On top of that, each unit has way more health than they should. You can watch a single, solitary goblin waltz across an entire field of arrow towers, getting turned into a pin cushion, and he just keeps going. I felt like my towers were flicking rubber bands at them. Every level is a multi-minute slog where you sit there and watch everything play out in slow motion. There’s no fast forward option, either.

The game’s well made, and a lot of fun, but its sluggish speed kept me from loving it. Some of the later levels are demonic, with waves of hundreds of enemies. Then, as it happens in every one of these games, there’s the obligatory difficulty spike. This was usually one wave in some levels, where you suddenly get washed by a tide of orcs twice the size of the previous wave. I would retry a problematic stage, bored out of my mind, watching hundreds of monsters die of old age, just so I could get to wave 49 where the real challenge was, and see if I could survive it. If I didn’t, it meant another 10 minutes of waiting.

Gem Craft (95)

In Gem Craft you craft gems. Take different colored gems, smash them together, and make powerful towers to stop monsters. It’s great… in theory.

I remember this game from back in the day. I didn’t like it. It was a bit too convoluted for me. Instead of towers, you have a bunch of gems with different colors, each with a different effect. The red gems shoots fast, the green gem inflicts poison, so on and so forth. They all have the same shape, and it’s confusing at first. I had to keep hovering over each gem to find out what it does, and if I wanted it. After a few minutes, I gave up, and didn’t try it again. Now that I come back to the game as an old man, did I change my view on it?

At first, I liked it. After groaning through the first few levels, asking myself “what does this thing do, again?” and wrestling with the weird mechanics, I found I was having an okay time. I didn’t see much of a difference with the gem combos, but I was willing to look into the game more.

Your gems are limited in the first few stages. You get two or three colors, and you familiarize yourself with them. As the stages progress, you get more colors to work with. It sets up an interesting difficulty curve.

Then comes the difficulty spike, the one all of these games have. This one is the “epic” boss stage. It’s a regular stage, up until the last three waves, where all Hell breaks loose and you have to take out hundreds of invincible enemies, then fight a boss. That’s when I lost patience with the game.

The gems are alright at first, but there’s one problem with them that becomes apparent when you actually need to place them: They’re randomized. Every time you buy gems, you get random colors. That means random towers, which means random effects. If I want the purple gems, that lower an enemy’s armor, I have to buy a batch of gems and pray that I get the one color out of eight that does what I want. It’s infuriating.

Even if I get the gem that does what I want, it does it poorly. It’s like finally hiring someone as a chef, but they only know how to heat up ramen noodles. The purple gem has a percent chance to strip armor. A chance. If you upgrade it to a high level, it goes up to 20%, which is a one in five chance of stripping armor, when you need it to strip armor 100% of the time. When things get hectic, this thing hits an enemy once or twice, so its effect is lessened even further.

The solution is to get a bunch of purples, but that just brings me back to the original problem. I have to gamble for them.

Ah, but there are area of effect gems. Splash attack and chain attack. I can combine the purple gems with those, and get area of effect armor reduction! Or so I thought. These special gems apply their effect to the first target they hit, so no cheeky area of effect armor dissolution. What? You thought this was a well thought out mechanic?

The first few levels come down to placing towers at the start of the level and slamming gems together to level them up. No real consideration to placement or gem types. Just mash whatever you find, put them near the enemy’s spawn and press “next wave” over and over and watch the enemies get decimated. Then, in the one level where you have to play smart, none of it matters.

This game is very highly rated, and I remember it being one of the most well-regarded games back in the day, too, but I don’t get it. I will admit defeat and say I couldn’t get past the boss level. I tried and tried, but nothing worked. I tried getting a bunch of towers, getting a concentration of high-level towers, focusing on purples for anti-armor, creating massive choke points, hoarding lives to give the boss two laps around the stage. Nothing worked. No matter what combination of gems I used, the third to last wave waltzes past my towers, taking nearly no damage, and the boss comes out, gets pelted by every single thing, and doesn’t even get to half health. Every wave before that gets destroyed before they can even pass the first bend, but those last ones beat any strategy I could come up with.

The game has a scoring system, and each stage has a high score to beat. This makes me think there must be something more to it. The better you score, the more skill points you get to level up skills. They don’t matter much until higher levels, where you get bonus damage to your gems. Stuff you need, but you unlock it late.

With all that said, I gave up on GemCraft. My opinion on it didn’t change much, but it’s more refined now. It’s like the difference between spoiled milk and cheese. My first opinion was stinky, and so is my second one, but the second one has a more complex stink to it.

Cursed Treasure (94)

Cursed Treasure is a solid game. It tries to get fancy with its different terrain types and a mana system, but they don’t complicate or convolute the game. It has an interesting set of enemies that require different tower configurations. There’s also some spells you can use, which cost a ton of mana and aren’t really very useful, but hey, they’re there if you want them.

The way the game handles the player’s lives is a more interesting innovation. Instead of taking damage once enemies get to a certain point, they instead carry gems out of your base. Enemies have to go in, take a gem, and exit the stage, taking damage all along the way. If they die while carrying a gem, they drop it, and another enemy can then pick it up. This makes you rethink your tower placements in a dynamic way, setting them near any gems. It also adds a ticking clock element, since the distance the enemies have to travel with the gem gets shorter every time they pick it up. It’s a cool variation on the lives mechanic.

Each tower can only be placed on their specific terrain. Arrow towers on grass, crypts on ice and fire temples on rock. This seems like it might limit your choices, but this tiny mix-up adds a good layer of decision making. Your tower placement choices are limited by type, but instead you focus on which ones to place first, and which ones to upgrade. This also forces you into making hard decisions on making the best out of a sub-optimal option.

There are also high ground placements that give extra range to any tower built there. These have no terrain restrictions, meaning you can build any tower on them. You can have AoE towers that cover a huge area, or make sniper nests that rain arrows on enemies as soon as they appear.

The balance is all over the place, like it is in most of these. It’s easy going for the first few levels, then there’s a massive difficulty spike at level 9, then it goes back down to easy with some levels having one wave that can end you if you don’t prepare for it.

I think the lopsided balance could be due to the tech tree. It has a progression system, because of course it does, every one of these apparently needs one. The upgrades are boring; plus 5% to damage, small incremental stuff like that. Then at the end there’s one that adds a special effect to towers of that color. I went with the green tree, because it offered more gold. It has a poison upgrade, and it makes quick work of most things in the game.

Outside of its alright gameplay, the most memorable thing about this is the sound design. When you build towers, you get this admittedly satisfying hammering sound effect. Build a lot of towers, and it sounds like you’re in an old-timey shipyard. Whenever you kill an enemy, they do a cartoonishly loud death scream. It sounds like they recorded someone getting a safe dropped on them. The hilarity of the sound effects is canceled out by the droning 2-second loop they use for the music. It’s the kind of low-level water torture the CIA would use as a complement to their more advanced interrogation techniques.

Day of Meat (94)

Day of Meat isn’t even a tower defense game, it’s an idler. You have one building, it shoots automatically, monsters come in and you die. You’re supposed to die. You get some money before you die, and you use that to get upgrades so you can last a little longer next time. Then you die, and repeat the process. That’s it.

There’s no real strategy to this. Given some time and training, a chimpanzee could fumble its way through this one, but having a chimp play this would be considered animal cruelty. There’s nothing to this game. In fact, I hesitate to call it a game. It’s a widget you click on every now and then and it makes noise while numbers go up. It’s a Skinner box. The kind of thing you have open in another tab in the background while you’re supposed to be working, but every other game on this list- well, almost every other game- does that better. They have something for you to do.

I don’t like this, and I don’t know why it’s so highly rated. It’s from 2019, too! Over a decade after the tower defense craze, and it’s worse than the others.

Bloons (85)

Bloons TD is probably the one most people know. A nostalgic staple for zoomers, but its first outing was a very simple thing. You have the monkeys, and they really hate balloons. Place monkeys to shoot the balloons.

There are different towers, but none of them matter. All you need is the dart monkey. Shove them in the middle of the map like you’re trying to compress them into a space-saving brick, and let them go wild on the bloons. Add as many as you can after each round, and you’re good to go. You can get through all 50 waves without losing a single life.

This is a very early attempt at a tower defense game. Not chronologically, since this is from 2008, the same year as Gem Craft and others, but it’s still pretty early. It makes a lot of mistakes that were corrected later on. The tower placement is too free, letting you pack monkeys like sardines, the enemies are too simple and it relies on just throwing a bunch of them at you.

The one map you get is very simple, too. It’s a winding path with too many corners and a double path in the center. There is no real wrong place to put a monkey. The middle is more effective, since the towers can focus fire the wave in two directions, but you can place them almost anywhere and you’ll have a lot of the track in the monkey’s range.

The second game in the series fixed a lot of these problems. More complicated maps, varied enemies that require different strategies, more difficulty settings and all that, but that’s a topic for another article.

Defend Your Honor (84)

Defend Your Honor can be described as easy, prescribed, pre-solved. There’s nothing to this game. The fact that it’s rated 84 means these ratings have no weight to them. Well, I should have known that when they gave Day of Meat anything above a 10.

This game’s gimmick that you buy units before the level starts. You get them at a shop, then place them at the start of the stage. You can place every one of your units at once. Once you do that, the level is solved. There isn’t any on the fly decision making, no adjusting your strategy, just place your guys and they do their thing. Not much else to do other than upgrade the units.

You can get away with this thanks to the game’s many flaws. the levels, for one, are mazed poorly. You can’t place towers wrong. The stages swirl and curve like pasta, making a tangle of closely-knit paths. You can place a tower anywhere, and it will always be at maximum efficiency, with tons of track underneath it.

If the stages weren’t bad enough, there’s also an issue with the tower’s ranges. When upgraded, they all have absurd ranges. They can hit anything from anywhere. If you thought you could maybe possibly make a mistake with your tower placements, you can’t. I’d have to double-check, but I don’t think there’s a single tile in any level that’s a bad spot.

The game describes itself as: A mixup of the Tower Defense with a dash of strategy. I wanted to create a tower defence game that didn’t become stagnant, so each battle is short and sweet, and feels like a smaller part of the grande scheme of things, rather than wave after wave of repetition. The strategic placement of units is the key to victory!

This isn’t strategic. It’s the opposite. Throw all your units on the map without rhyme or reason, and you’ll get through the level. It’s completely stagnant, since you solve the level before the first wave spawns. You come with the same number of units, in the same configuration, throw them anywhere on screen and you win.

This game shows the importance of spacing through its absence. The maps are small, and the unit ranges are massive. Any unit can hit almost any point in the map from anywhere. Even the more “strategic” units, like the cleric that buffs nearby allies, or the bard that slows enemies, can be placed at random. Upgrade them enough and they can do a good job from wherever. Ideally, you’d want the bard at the start of the course or at choke points to cluster enemies up, but you can place them at the end of the track, and after a few upgrades they’ll be at maximum efficiency anywhere.

I tried doing the final stages by throwing towers onto the map at random, and upgrading them at random, and I managed to beat the game. Didn’t lose any lives with that technique, either. This stinks.

The Bad (According to Ratings)

Picnic Panic TD (29)

Picnic Panic is the mirror opposite of Defend Your Honor. The only thing they have in common is that they’re both bad. Instead of small maps, you get one large map with 4 screens. With a map this big, you’d expect your towers to have a similarly large radius, but no. The game goes a truly innovative route by giving you towers with microscopic range. You’re fighting ants, after all, so it makes sense. The towers were too strong in Defend Your Honor, and here they’re useless.

Nothing has any explanation as to what it does. The towers have names that imply what they do, but there isn’t any real information. The ice tower is the ice tower, it seems to hit in an area and you’d expect it to slow enemies, but it doesn’t seem to do any of those. You take it on faith that it’s doing that, because none of the towers do much in general.

The worst thing about this game is that it’s boring. The towers feel limp, and everything happens in one map. If there is another map, I didn’t see it, because I couldn’t be bothered to play this for more than a few minutes.

Ammo Towers (25)

This is the lowest rated tower defense game on the entire site, and I can see why. This is a very basic tower defense game with one grating gimmick: reloading. Yes, everyone’s favorite thing in the universe. Stopping the action to reload. This guy must’ve been a huge fan of Bioshock. You place towers, they shoot, and as they shoot they consume ammo. Click the ammo button repeatedly to reload them.

The game leans heavily into the idler side of tower defense games. When you die, you keep your money and upgrades, and try again. You’re supposed to keep dying over and over until you can keep going.

There isn’t much for me to say about this game other than “it’s bad”, and I already said that, I think. The other thing I can say is that this was made in 2018, a full decade after some of the others on this list. With this and Day of Meat, I can say there’s proof that games have been getting worse.

Miscellaneous

Grid Forge TD (76)

I sorted the games by “newest” and found Grid Forge TD, uploaded in December of 2025. Sure, it’s a demo for a Steam game, but still, it’s a browser tower defense made in our Lord’s year of 2025. I know there are tower defense games still being made on Steam. If you think of any dead genre, there’s a good chance there’s an indie dev making a new game for it (except MMOs. Those are gone.), but the novelty factor is still there, and it’s enough to get me to try it.

It’s the only TD I’ve covered here that has mazing, which means you create the level. You place obstacles that influence the enemy’s path, so you can make them zig zag around and take longer, more winding paths. This is neat. It adds a new layer of strategy.

I started the first level, placed a block, put a tower on the block, started the wave, and I promptly died. You get 5 lives. The second wave has 5 enemies, which you can barely get by with one tower. The next wave overloads you, and kills you.

I took stock of my options and found there’s a shock ability you can use by clicking. It costs mana, but you can spam it for a bit until you run out. It’s necessary to clear the first waves, since your single tower isn’t anywhere near strong enough to do anything on its own. I don’t like getting mechanically involved in tower defense games. Most of the satisfaction comes from seeing a well-laid plan playing out. In Grid Forge, I had to click on the enemies, cleaning up my tower’s incompetence like I’m its mom.

The next wave came along, and I could finally afford a second tower. Golly gee, I get two whole towers. How generous. The wave started, I clicked at the enemies while my towers dribbled shots at them, I was overwhelmed and died. Now there wasn’t anything for me to do there. I had clicked until my mana was dry, and even if I had optimized everything down to the pixel, I would have been left with over seven enemies to deal with at the end.

It was then that I felt an itch at the back of my head and looked at the tags. Incremental. Oh, it’s one of those. I dislike progression and tech trees because, most of the time, they lock the cool stuff behind arbitrary grinding, leaving you to fumble with the inadequate basics. They have to make your basic stuff bad so you’ll want to play more and upgrade them. Incremental games take this concept to its absurd finale. You need to progress to unlock the basic stuff. Instead of starting at a power level of 1 and working up to 10, you start at -5 and claw your way up to 1.

You’re supposed to die in the first few runs. Only then can you get the meta-progression tokens to unlock the numbers you need to clear the first waves. Then you’ll get to a point where you can’t progress anymore, die, and use the tokens to clear that hurdle. You’re not limited by skill, you’re artificially limited by time.

Wasteland Defender (69)

Wasteland defender. This one seemed promising at first. Good tower variety, interesting enemy compositions, decently designed maps, that sort of thing. It was easy at first, but I kept going to see if there was a difficulty spike, and there was. There was a massive spike the size of the Seattle Space Needle at the second to last map. I was ready for a challenge.

The game has an upgrade system like the other games, but this one resets after each map. You can upgrade stats like all the tower’s fire rate, range and damage, along with more technical things like their experience gain and money generation. You get a point after each wave, so you use them to scale and plan ahead. I liked this feature a lot. It gives you a sense of progression, but it doesn’t limit it to the wider game, which means you don’t have to grind multiple levels across different maps just for some stat increases.

The difficulty spike map made me min-max the progression. There’s also an achievement mechanic, again reset on a per-map basis, that awards you with extra money if you hit certain milestones, like a specific number of enemies killed or a number of towers built. After losing a few times, I started planning my builds around those monetary bonuses. I was deep in the numbers.

Even with all that I kept failing. I tried different tower combinations, and managed to get further, but there were waves with a ton of heavily armored enemies that could take an entire war’s worth of ammunition and survive. I couldn’t crack it.

They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. There should be a second definition: spending too much time varying the same process to a nonsensical degree. It’s like if you find you don’t like spinach, but you try different dishes to see if you like them, hate all of them, then you start making batshit insane dishes to convince yourself you might like spinach in some configuration. Maybe you mix it with Fruity Pebbles and mayonnaise. If you iterate through the near infinite possibilities, you’ll eventually stumble on a configuration that works. That’s where my head was at with this game. I started throwing down towers at random and trying insane builds to see if I could glimpse some hidden truth.

Then I did something no sane man would do: I read the comments. On purpose. There I saw one guy who had a simple recipe, one that would make me like spinach once and for all, metaphorically speaking: build a cannon tower, upgrade its fire rate seven or eight times, then max out the fire rate skill.

Once I did that, the game stopped being a game. The cannon deals a ton of damage, but it’s limited by its slow fire rate. You can upgrade the fire rate to the point where it becomes a machine gun, completely invalidating its drawback. Once your cannon is firing 30 shells a second, you can upgrade its range to cover the entire map. Now you have a rapid fire mortar. The damage it puts out is so unhinged, that it can take down those overpowered boss waves on its own. It goes from a cannon, to the solution to every problem in the game.

Now this has the same problem as Defend Your Honor. Your cannon is too strong, and it can shoot anywhere on the map. The element of strategy is gone. Sure, this one isn’t very obvious, but it’s there. Once you see it, you can’t ignore it. In fact, some of the waves in the last two levels get so absurd that the only way to beat them is to do this tactic. This makes me think it’s the intended way to play the game.

Getting an overpowered build and breaking the game is kind of fun at first, but it’s dumb. This only works if there are different, interesting ways to overpower the game. You have to work for it. If you find some niche synergy that turns you into a god, you feel powerful. If you can press the “make me strong” button over and over again, you’ll get bored real quick.

It’s a real shame, though. The game was decent, up to that point. The developer put thought into a lot of the mechanics and how they would work, but left that glaring flaw in there. I say it’s a flaw, because it completely ignores 90% of the game’s systems, but like I said earlier, some of the waves later in the game seem like they can only be stopped with a few rapid fire nukes, so it might not be a flaw. Either way, I don’t like it.

Conclusion

I recommend Tower Defense games. Some of them, at least. They’re a neat little genre with some interesting ideas, that were probably all explored back in their day. The good ones inject a good amount of strategy and problem solving into the mix, making you think about optimal tower placement and compositions. The bad ones are broken, boring messes at best, and idle clickers at worse.

It’s a simple genre that can either be good or bad by messing with a few numbers. If you make the towers have too much range, you get rid of the need for decision making and smart placement. Make your towers’ range too small, and no matter where you put them, it’ll be wrong, and it’ll make you feel bad. Something as simple as the number of turns on a map can make it go from a tactical challenge, to something so easy, a bonobo ape wouldn’t bother with it.

If I could pick and choose from these and dream up some tower defense of my own, here’s what I’d do. I’d take the map design and tower variety from Kingdom Rush, but I’d make the enemies way less tanky. I’d give it some more complicated enemies, like the ones in Cursed Treasure. The enemies in the latter are good, if you’re not shooting them with an omni-ranged mortar.

Range is another aspect. It represents spacing. I’d have towers that have medium ranges, so you’d have to overlap properly and think about making chokepoints, and not just littering the outside with towers.

Personally, I’d get rid of the progression systems. I don’t care for meta progression, and tech trees that give you +5% to damage. Get rid of all that. Have each map be its own thing, have the sense of progression come from upgrading your towers on a per-level basis.

There should also be wrong answers. Spots on the map where, if you place a tower, you don’t get much out of it. Make the player think before putting something down. On the flipside, make several spots that are too good to miss out on, so the player has to weigh which tower would be best on those limited golden spots.

I could get into the economy of these games, but that’s getting really deep into the technical details, and I’m not qualified for that. Make sure the turrets aren’t too cheap, nor the upgrades. With the money, it always seemed strange that it’s tied to how many enemies you kill. If you don’t kill any, you don’t get money, and how are you supposed to fix your formation without money?

I like the genre, but I think it’s run its course. There are ways to make good, new ones, and some ideas to play around with, but I haven’t seen many that do anything worth mentioning. Except for one which will be discussed later. Not many of the new ones that I’ve seen seem to be anything new. Sometimes it’s okay for a genre to come and go. There’s a time for everything. A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to play Quake 3, a time to play Fortnite, a time to play Tower Defense games, and a time to play whatever flavor of the month happens to be in vogue.

If you have any more tower defense games to suggest, let me know in the comments, and I’ll make a part three. Part three? Yes. Part two will be focused on Bloons. There are some tower defense games on Steam I haven’t checked out, and some less traditional popular ones like Orcs Must Die and Sanctum.

I Was Not Familiar With Your Game

Back when Roller Drome first released, I didn’t think much of it. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with guns is an interesting premise, but the promotional material didn’t make it look too competent. The tricks weren’t anywhere near as cool, it looked floaty, and you couldn’t even wipe out. What’s the point of nailing a sick-nasty nose grind if there’s no risk of grinding my nose against the pavement? The shooting didn’t look too great, either. Enemies sort of stood around waiting for their demise. It even won a BAFTA. No real game has ever won a BAFTA1. That’s for interactive movies. Me being the elite(ist) gamer that I am, I brushed it off.

Well, today I’m here to set the record straight on Roller Drome: I was wrong. If you’ve heard of the game, but haven’t tried it, then someone’s made a terrible mistake. If you’re reading this, you should try Roller Drome. It takes the simplified tricks and shooting, and merges them seamlessly into an incredibly satisfying core gameplay loop that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It even has a scoring system that pushes you to engage with the game’s mechanics.

You can skip to the game’s Steam page and try it yourself, or you can scroll down and read my ramblings on why you really should play Roller Drome.

Gameplay

Rollerdrome (2023) is a third person action sports shooter. You play as Kara Hasan, a rising star in the deadly art of Roller Drome, the sport that makes roller skating cool by mixing it with fire arms. Each stage puts you in an open arena full of ramps to trick off and enemies to shoot. Complete the objectives, get a high score and, most importantly, try to stay alive. It’s half Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, half Max Payne.

The game has a simplified trick system. There are grinds, but you don’t need to balance. You can do as many flips and spins as you want in the air, and you won’t wipe out, even if you land on your head. There aren’t any fancy connecting moves like reverts, manuals, wall slaps or lip tricks. The tricks are designed to work whenever you need them to, and while that might sound dumbed-down compared to Pro Skater, it has a good reason for it.

The other half of the game is shooting. You have four weapons, each one unlocked as the game progresses, and you’ll use them to take out anyone in the arena that isn’t you. The shooting, like the trick system, is also simplified. There’s a generous lock-on, so if you want to activate someone’s life insurance, all you have to do is put your crosshair in their general cardinal direction, and blast away, assuming you’re in range, of course.

On their own, these two halves of the game are unimpressive, but the real magic comes when they’re working in tandem. The tricks are used for points and style, but their most important role is to reload your weapons. Now, you’re not doing backflips for the love of the game, you’re flipping for bullets. You’ll be gliding across the arena, shooting guys, weaving in tricks to refill and planning the best route to do it, all while dodging lasers and explosives, and it all feels wonderful.

Combat

The game’s main objective is to shoot guys. Defeating enemies is what ends the level, and the tricks are in service of the shooting. Even the game’s combo system keeps track of kills instead of how many sick-nasty stunts you’ve pulled off, so I’ll look at the combat first.

There are four guns in Roller Drome: Pistols, shotgun, grenade launcher and a rail gun. They each have their own stats and characteristics. The pistols are long-ranged, fast firing but deal little damage. The shotgun is shorter ranged, but it can stagger enemies. The grenade launcher has very little ammo, but it’s a grenade launcher. It launches grenades. Then there’s the rail gun, which can charge up to fire a long-range laser.

Ammo is shared across all weapons. If you run out of pistol ammo, you’re out of shotgun ammo, and if you do tricks, you fill up all of it. This splits the trick/shoot gameplay loop into distinct chunks of decision making. You see an enemy, decide what gun to use on him, then trick to refill your ammo to then pick the gun for the next enemy. You don’t have to worry about managing individual ammo types. You know that if you do a gnarly 900 tail grab, you’ll land with a full magazine.

Each of the guns is good at defeating specific types of enemies, but it’s not in a color-coded way. There aren’t enemies that are weak only to the shotgun, for example. You won’t be using the blue gun to shoot the blue enemies. It’s more natural than that. There are enemies that put up a shield after taking damage. If you hit them with a grenade, they take a ton of damage, but they won’t die, so they’ll put up a shield to protect their last sliver of health. If you use the pistols on them, you can deal constant damage to them until they die, giving them no chance to put up the shield. The guns also cause enemies to stagger at different rates, with the grenade and shotgun able to stagger in one hit.

Once you understand how each gun works with each enemy, you’ll see how the decision making plays out. You skate towards a shield guy, you check to see how much ammo you have. You see you don’t have enough pistol ammo to take him down in one go, so you go for the shotgun, to do a good deal of damage, activate his shield, then do some tricks to reload and look for another kill since your combo meter has some time left on it. Maybe use that newly acquired ammo to send a railgun shot straight between the eyes of that annoying sniper on the other corner of the arena.

There’s a bullet time mechanic that helps you blast enemies while speeding past them. It’s tied to a gauge that depletes over time. It’s generous, and it refills quickly when not in use. It slows down time, but lets you fire at regular speed. You can use it to unload an entire magazine into an enemy mid-grind, or to slow down and line up a grenade shot.

If you dodge an enemy’s attack at the last moment, and activate the bullet time, you get super reflex. It’s an enhanced bullet time that adds a lot more damage to your guns. It lets you take out tough enemies in one shot, and it lets the pistols stagger armored enemies. It’s great for killing pesky Pyrobeams with one rail gun shot.

Dodging at the right time counts as a trick. It gives you some points, and more importantly, refills a little of your ammo. Using up a magazine to take down one enemy, then timing a perfect dodge can give you enough extra shots to finish the enemy off. It’s also good for killing enemies in a pinch, to keep your combo going.

The enemies are varied, and act more as decision checks and obstacles than traditional enemies. Most don’t move at all, and they have one specific job in one specific place. They’re like stage hazards. Really persistent, annoying stage hazards with pinpoint accuracy.

There are snipers that lock on to you and fire from wherever they have a clear line of sight on you. There are the melee guys that just sort of stand there waiting for you to skate at them so they can hit you with a bat. The aforementioned shield guys, and some more guys that try to kill you. I won’t list them all individually.

They do a good job at influencing how you play. Since killing them is the main objective, you’ll have to navigate around their attacks and hazards, and know the best way to kill them, and in what order, to have a successful run, keep your combo, and stay alive.

My only complaint with the enemies is with the Pyrobeams. They’re an annoying enemy that runs away whenever it takes damage. They attack by shooting a continuous beam of fire, which tracks. If you dodge, the beam still follows you, leaving fire trails all over the place. They’re annoying as hell on their own, but the game throws a ridiculous amount of them at you near the end. It gets to the point where it starts to feel like a troll level with how many of these they spam.

A not so minor complaint is with the auto-aim. It locks on to the nearest target. It works well most of the time, since you’ll line yourself up to shoot one guy. Sometimes it locks on to things like enemy missiles or other projectiles, because they get closer for a few frames, even if you’re steadily streaming lead into someone already. I’ve had moments where I’m blasting down a shield guy, they launch rockets, the targeting switches to the rockets and the guy puts up his shield, all because the game decided I wanted to defend myself. I get it, rockets are scary, and shooting them down is a good idea, but I’d rather eat a missile than drop my combo.

Stages

What you’re doing is important, but so is where you’ll do it.

The stages in the game aren’t bad, but they aren’t great. They’re mostly large, open areas, shaped like a big bowl, with a few ramps in the middle. Some, like the Green Bay Mall, have some verticality to them, but they’re mostly similar.

Enemy patterns are very alike, too. They mostly dot the snipers and pyrobeams around the outside of the map, while throwing in a few of the others beneath them, and some melee guys and the tougher mechs at the center near the end of the round. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this. It’s a good, solid configuration that plays to each enemies’ strengths, but they get a little repetitive after a while.

The stages do a good job of letting you do your own thing. They’re open-ended enough for you to carve your own path. There aren’t many obvious lines, which is good to keep you from feeling railroaded, but at the same time, it lacks that same flow you’d get from a Pro Skater stage2.

Each stage gives you ten different goals to complete. There are repeating goals, which are constant throughout each stage; things like getting a high score, collecting combo tokens and doing a specific trick on a trick token. The other goals vary from stage to stage. Things like defeating a specific enemy while doing a specific grind, finishing a level using only the shotgun, or completing a section under a set time.

The goals do a great job of teaching you the game. There are some that ask you to defeat an enemy with a specific weapon. I learned about the pistol’s ability to kill a shield enemy in one go thanks to a goal that asked me to do that exact same thing. They hint at ways you can use your weapons to their greatest effect. I like these.

The problem I have with the goals is that they don’t really make use of the peculiarities of their stage. There’s one goal in the aforementioned Green Bay Mall that asks you to shoot an enemy from the second floor, which lets you know you can get up there, but the other goals don’t have much personality. They’re interchangeable most of the time.

Another strange decision is having goals that are mutually exclusive. One level asks you to shoot an enemy with the grenade launcher, but it also has a goal of finishing the level using only the shotgun. It’s bizarre, and it makes it so you can’t complete some levels’ goals in a single run, which is a neat challenge you can choose to do in the Pro Skater games. It’s a minor nitpick, but it matters to me.

This is in part due to the stages themselves. They don’t have many unique land marks or set pieces to play around with. The ski stages have areas you can fall off from, that’s something. Other than the different color palettes and tile sets, there isn’t much to differentiate them. Sure, you can say that it’s because this is a formal sport, so the stages are arenas, but we’re shooting people with railguns while backflipping. My disbelief has been suspended enough to allow for some wacky stages. Give me something like in Pro Skater 3, where I’m skating in a foundry, jumping over vats of molten metal, and give me goals that interact with said dangerous workplace hazards. Have me committing some OSHA violations.

Decent stages. Not much to them, sadly, which makes them blend together after you play. With a few tweaks we could have gotten a much more memorable set of levels, with more interesting goals. While some of them do a good job of teaching you the game, they could use some more specificity and creativity. I could hand you three goals: Perform a Prowler grind, shoot 5 mines, dodge 2 sniper shots at the last moment before they fire, and ask you if where they’re from, and you wouldn’t even know they’re from different levels.

Conclusion

Roller Drome is a great game. The core gameplay is extremely solid. The two halves of tricking and shooting go together like C4 and an unassuming spark, to create something impressive and entertaining. It has an addictive loop that understands arcade design well, giving you lots of micro-decisions to make at a rapid rate.

The controls are great, very responsive. The simple trick system allows for a lot of error, so you’ll never feel like you’re being held back by it. If you think it, you can do it. It works perfectly fine, most of the time. Sometimes momentum transfer is weird, leaving you with less speed than you thought you had. Another issue I had is that wallrides don’t work like they do in Pro Skater. They don’t give you a magical burst of speed and vertical movement. Here they sort of stick you to the wall at a weird trajectory. Other than that, the game handles well.

The shooting is easy to do, like the tricks, which lets you focus on decision making. There’s enough nuance here with how the guns affect each enemy so the shooting doesn’t get boring. You won’t be going on auto pilot, there’s always a choice to make, of what to shoot next, where to go and how to weave trick into your route to maximize ammo and points.

The combo system is very simple but it keeps you moving. Each kill resets your combo, and you can extend the timer a little by doing damage. This keeps you moving across the arena and planning around your next kill. Trying to maximize each jump for maximum ammo regeneration, and each shot for the quickest kill. It also introduces an element of timing, where you’ll weigh not only who to kill and where, but when, so you can space out kills to get more time to reposition.

An enemy that I think works great with the combo system is the Mecha Brut. It’s a large 4-legged tank with two flamethrowers. Get too close, and it’ll roast you in seconds. It’s a huge, tanky obstacle that blocks off a large portion of the arena. You can take out its flame throwers, and they each count as an enemy. Whenever I see them, I route them in as if they were three enemies, taking out a flamethrower when I need a quick refresh on my combo. It goes from being a huge threat, to +3 to my combo, and a new part of the level to play around.

Enemy spawns are fixed, so you can plan a route through each level, but there isn’t a clear best way to do things. There’s always an “or” thrown in there to keep things interesting. You can start the level and fight your way through the ground floor killing the melee guys, or you can skate past them and focus on the snipers to circle back to the melee guys, putting you in position to kill the flyers that just spawned in, or you could do x y and z and so on. Sure, there’s always an optimal way to do things, and a “correct” route, but it’s not completely obvious like those pre-solved puzzles modern games like to do.

Even with its sometimes annoying enemies, slightly inconsistent targeting and admittedly uninspired goals, it’s a good, solid time with a fantastic core gameplay loop.

I highly recommend Roller Drome. It is an video game. It has mechanics that work well together, a brilliant core gameplay loop, and some smart concessions on its systems to make them sleek and responsive, letting nothing get in the way of your rampage. It’s also a decent challenge. The later stages can get a bit ridiculous with their enemy placements, but the game itself can keep up with it, which is impressive. There’s even a diabolical new game plus mode that makes the game even harder, for real masochists. I loved playing it, and if you like video games, you will, too.

Will this experience make me less prejudiced towards games? In a way. I’ll keep a more open mind. Whenever I see score-based games, I tend to write them off if they’re not from some obscure Japanese developer. Games like Bulletstorm have taught me that most scoring systems are poorly thought out, so whenever there’s a game claiming to be arcadey, they usually just have arbitrary numbers because videogames. The score requirements are always ridiculously low, too. I’m glad Roller Drome has some spooky score requirements. I like to suffer.

I’ll try to be less judgmental when it comes to games. Except for metroidvanias. Give me a robe and a gavel, I’m judging the hell out of those.

Thanks to for recommending this one. If it wasn’t for the suggestion, I wouldn’t have played this, so don’t make the same mistake I did and get Roller Drome. Not reading his blog is also a mistake. Subscribe if you haven’t.

Movin to the Country, Gonna Play a lot of Demos

Another three months have passed, another Next Fest comes up. We locked our interns in the Game Basement and made them play some demos, and now it’s time to tell you which ones you should check out, and which ones you should avoid.

Androfoco

Androfoco is a first person arena shooter. You play as a mannequin and shoot other mannequins. How you go about actually shooting things is a mystery. There’s a lock-on which you can use to, predictably, lock-on to your target, then you fire at them. The lock-on has a cooldown, for some reason, and locking on to enemies is the only way to hit them, since your shots are incredibly imprecise. You can shoot an ineffective projectile, but sometimes you shoot a series of ineffective lasers. Other times, you can’t shoot at all. It’s Benadryl-induced dissociative episode, but it makes less sense.

Everything in the game seems to be tied to some cooldown. Your shots charge up over time, so does your shield, lock on and “maneuver”, as indicated by the helpful icons on the upper left. Those are of a target, a disco ball and a deer. You know, the classic deer icon to represent your inherent deerness. I have no idea what these mean, and I don’t really want to find out. It’s like asking me to decode an encrypted message that starts with the phrase “let me tell you about my hemorrhoids”. I don’t want to know the rest.

As to how the game feels to play, it feels awful. The sensitivity is set so high I could do a 360 by twitching my index finger on the mouse. The need to lock on to anything to hit means you can only attack every few seconds. When you’re waiting for your cooldowns, you’ll just be wandering the arena like a kid lost in a supermarket. On the rare occasion when you manage to hit something, you won’t know you did. Nothing in this game feels like it has any connection to your inputs. You press a button and something happens, other times you press the same button and something else happens, and a lot of the time, nothing happens.

If you have eyes to see, you’ll notice the game looks like a low quality nightmare. Every character is a grey, untextured mannequin ripped straight from some asset database, with the tags still on. The arenas look like someone’s first Blender project, before they’ve even done the Blenderguru donut, and the sounds remind me of the time I had to take a Calculus midterm while suffering from a migrane.

In short, I don’t recommend Androfoco to anyone, except maybe if Hitler gets revived using black magic. He should play this for a few hours.

Anomaly President

Anomaly President is a side-scrolling beat-em-up management game. You go into stages, beat the absolute tar out of dozens of enemies, and collect resources, which you bring back to your campaign van, use them to build rooms and upgrade your gear, so you can go back and do violence for more resources. It’s an interesting gameplay loop with some neat ideas.

In the combat portion, you’ll be running across a stage, doing light platforming and killing any enemy that tries to hinder your presidential campaign. There’s a sword attack which does damage in a large area, and a punch which deals posture damage. If an enemy takes enough posture damage, they can be executed. You can deal posture damage by parrying, too, because Sekiro was the most influential game in the past decade.

Along with the two attack types, there are special anomaly attacks. These are specialty skills that cost mana, which you regenerate by attacking, and are also limited by a cooldown. These usually hit in an area, and deal a lot of damage. There’s one that turns you into a big sumo guy to slam the ground and send your enemies flying for a bit. You can’t combo them in the air afterwards, which is a bit of a missed opportunity.

Seeing as how this game throws every design trend of the past few years in a blender, there’s also roguelite elements. Every now and then you find a fluffy which asks you to pick one of three. With these choices you can modify your various attacks. You can have a support character come out and breathe fire whenever you use an anomaly attack, add ice to your sword attacks so you can freeze enemies, or make it so your parries electrify anyone that tries to hit you. These are kind of interesting. They make your numbers bigger.

The combat itself is solid, if a bit easy. Your attacks have a lot of range, meaning you can attack large groups of enemies easily. Hit stun is generous, letting you lock a group of enemies down with a quick strike. You can dodge out of the way of attacks by moving, which is always nice, but if you need to reposition there’s also an invincible dodge roll. The parry is powerful, but the rest of your tools are useful, so you won’t be sitting around fishing for parries. It works well and feels good, but the enemies are complete pushovers.

Not even strength in numbers could save these hapless mooks from getting mowed down by your mighty sword. You can cut through them like how I cut through all the shrimp wontons at my local Chinese buffet, right before getting kicked out. It doesn’t get to the level of something like Dynasty Warriors, but you’re not fighting real threats. You’re smacking training dummies. They can do damage to you, but only because they attack in packs, and the stages are long, so there are hundreds of chances for you to screw up and take a bite of damage.

There’s a mole enemy that really served to highlight how pathetic all the opposition in this game is. The mole guys are reluctant security guards that clearly don’t want to fight you. When you stagger them, they fall on the ground crying, and when you execute them you violently stab them in the head. It’s excessively mean. That can be applied to the rest of the enemies, too. They don’t make me feel bad for them, but I felt like I was fighting a kid in a wheelchair most of the time.

Once you finish genociding innocent mole guards, you can go back to your tour bus and upgrade it. Stack rooms on it, assign fluffies to work in them, upgrade your equipment, and do more things. If you fail a level, you can come back to the bus with your new materials, make yourself stronger, and try again. You can also go to other areas on the world map and participate in other activities, like dancing, to win votes and get resources.

The game’s visual presentation is a mix of pixel art with heavy digital effects piled on top. Lots of digital lights, depth of field, that sort of thing. There are a lot of particle effects and glows that aren’t done in the pixel style, and that always clashes a little. The overworld map is done in a more traditional illustrated digital style, which is also a little disjointed. The UI elements are all very clean and minimalist, again conflicting with the other aspects. I think it looks okay, but there’s too much digital shine on top of the art.

I recommend you check out Anomaly President. It’s a bit easy and repetitive, but decently fun for a while. The base building/beat em up combat loop is interesting, and it will give you an incentive to explore and keep going for more upgrades. You don’t need them, since the enemies are a bit too easy. You can already go through them like a hot knife through butter, I don’t really see the need to upgrade the knife to make it even hotter. Still, give it a shot. There’s an audience for this out there, and I thought it was a good time.

Towership Defender

Towership Defender is a single-tower tower defense game with a ship that’s also a tower. The ship, which is also a tower, will defend an area, by itself, since it’s a single tower, but also a ship. I’ll stop this dumb bit now. It’s an incremental clicker idle game where you watch a ship spin around and shoot down little alien things.

As the ship shoots, you get fragments. You use these fragments to buy upgrades, which are numerical. You buy the damage increase, you do one more damage per attack. You buy the speed upgrade, you shoot 1% faster. There aren’t any cool tower upgrades or anything, just slowly watching the fragments go up so you can buy an upgrade that makes another number go up. Little by little. Forever.

There really isn’t much to this game. I’m not a fan of idle/clicker games at all. This might appeal to someone other than me. My experience with this game was that it was incredibly boring. I love tower defense games, and this one reeled me in just to see what the heck a single-tower game meant. I imagined it wouldn’t be much fun, with the fact that you don’t have to strategically place different towers to synergize and take down different threats, and I was right. This wasn’t any fun. I just sat there and watched the ship shoot the same three enemy types for a few minutes.

I didn’t like Towership Defender, but if for some reason you like this kind of thing, I suggest you find a new hobby. Take up something more productive, like watching paint dry or counting the leaves on a tree.

Ego

Ego is a huge waste of time. Billing itself as a 3D smoke-based beat-’em-up, it’s actually a surrealist platformer that makes zero sense, and controls about as well as a truck on ice. You play as a smoke wizard, who’s only half as high as whoever thought this game was a good idea.

The tutorial shows you some symbols with a short gameplay video of what the button is supposed to do. What does it all mean? Who knows. You press the A button, or the button that’s at the bottom of the controller, and smoke guy jumps, but watch out! You shouldn’t use it when the smoke meter is red. Why? What do I look like? The Ego expert? Go figure it out for yourself, idiot.

The first stage of this smoke-based beat-’em-up features exactly zero enemies. You move forward in an abstract mess of structures and try to find your way to the exit. Where is it? You keep asking me questions, and I don’t have the answers. I know I’m the one that’s supposed to be reviewing this thing, but I have no idea. Eventually, I had a divine vision of where the exit was, and reached it. I had zero fun.

Upon finishing the level, the game gave me a D grade. D for Dumb. I got on my knees and begged the game to forgive me for my transgressions, and retried the stage, to see if I could become less dumb. I found the path to the exit, which was a straight shot flying through an unmarked trail and up to the exit, with no rhyme or reason. There might be a better way to do this, but I can’t be arsed to find it. I reached the exit and got a B for my effort. I had done it. I had become marginally less stupid.

I decided to try again. Maybe if I really put some effort into it, I might uncover this game’s hidden genius. After all, IGN gave God Hand a 3/10. Maybe this was my God Hand. I tried the level again, stumbled a little because there’s zero sign posting and the level makes about as much sense as the phrase “disco melatonin guava apostrophe”, so I restarted the level and tried again. Once I did, I finished the level pretty fast, and the game awarded me a D again.

Why? Well, this time I know the answer. It’s because apparently, it took me a full minute to clear the level. The thing I did in around 12 seconds, the game says I did in one minute. The game’s timer counts when you start the stage, and doesn’t reset when you restart the level.

At this point, I felt comfortable in my assessment that this game is a complete piece of garbage. The controls are sluggish and weird, the game doesn’t explain anything, the levels were designed by throwing random assets into a void, and the sound design with the constant huffing and puffing makes me feel like I’m standing next to an overweight guy who just sprinted into the elevator with me, and he keeps breathing into my face, trying not to have a heart attack.

Don’t play Ego. Not even as a joke.

Noooo! You didn’t even play the whole demo! How can you judge the game before seeing the combat and all it has offer?

I did. Gotta have a game worth playing for more than ten minutes.

Poly Fighter

Poly Fighter is a single-player roguelike fighting game. I was going to talk about it, but look at the video above. We got throw loops. That’s the game.

Even if you play the game “as it’s intended”, all you have to do is block until your opponent uses their unsafe move, then do light>medium>heavy>special and that’s it. Rinse and repeat. This is terrible.

If you want a single-player fighting game that will teach you the basics, play Footsies: Rollback Edition, instead. It’s a much better game.

Poly Fighter? Not recommended. Skip it.

From here on out I’m going to vent about fighting games, so if you just wanted to know my thoughts on Poly Fighter, you can skip ahead to the next game.

This is the result of fighting games becoming mainstream. Every Tom, Dick and Henry thinks they can make their own fighting game, just because they can mash a few buttons in Strive or SF6. They don’t understand the fundamentals, or any specific quirks. For example, no indie fighter, or modern fighter in general, has jabs that whiff on crouch. There aren’t anymore invincible DPs, everything is tied to meter. It’s about doing the epic combos but they don’t focus on the neutral or anything like that. You can have all that, but when every game is a beginner-friendly combo exhibition made to look fun, it all blends together into a grey mess.

Kingdom Rush 6: Genesis TD

Kingdom Rush 6 is a Tower Defense game. Enemies come in through pre-determined paths, and you have to put down towers to defeat them before they reach the end. There are a lot of different towers, with unique uses, and enemies that have to be taken down with specific tactics. Each tower can be upgraded in each level, and there are also persistent upgrades that give you permanent upgrades. It’s a pretty standard, but solid and enjoyable tower defense.

As you can tell by the 6 in the name, this is the sixth installment in the Kingdom Rush series. It started out back in 2011 as a free game on Armor Games. I say this because the game still feels like a flash game from 2011. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The original still holds up. Don’t fix what ain’t broken, but other than the bigger screen size and shinier art, it doesn’t do much new. It even has a lot of the same voice clips.

The game itself is still good. The towers are well designed, with their own use cases. There’s a good variety to them, letting you make interesting formations. The enemies are combined in ways that make you think ahead and prepare, instead of just plopping down the same tower over and over and calling it a day. It’s got all you could ask from a tower defense game.

The game does have a few things that bother me. The enemies are extremely tanky. They take forever to kill, and it makes levels drag a bit longer than they should. It also makes your towers feel weak. This could be made a little better with a speed up option, to make the game go faster, but there isn’t one, and I think there should be. There are points in these kinds of games where you pretty much solve the level, and you don’t have to do much other than watch each wave go by. A speed up option would be welcome.

There’s also the persistent upgrade system. Towers, heroes and spells can be upgraded and made stronger, which means you can’t do a perfect clear of a level on the first try without the upgrades. You’re expected to level things up by replaying levels. That might get old quick. It’s not necessary, but if you want to beat a level with more than two or three lives left, you’ll have to upgrade. The upgrades themselves are underwhelming. A few numbers here and there. 5% more damage, that sort of thing.

You can look past a lot of these, and there’s a solid game underneath. I recommend checking it out if you’re interested. You can also try the first Kingdom Rush, for free, and see if you’d like this sort of thing.

Check out Kingdom Rush 6 here.

Side note: I’m still surprised that the best version of Kingdom Rush, with all the quality of life features, has already been done… by Nikke. Goddess of Victory Nikke, the phone game. Yeah, the gooner game where anime girls twerk while they shoot. That one. They had an event where they had a tower defense mini game, and it was a copy/homage of Kingdom Rush, but they did a great job at replicating it, and adding their own cool, new twists. It even has a speed-up option.

DASH n CRY: Bursting

DASH n CRY is a precision platformer. It’s legally distinct Celeste. Play as a little girl with pink hair, run, jump and dash through sadistic levels to reach the exit and collect strawberries- I mean- paint stars. It’s one of those games where you’re supposed to nail a pixel-perfect jump, but if you miss, you just get sent back a few steps and try again. A save-state platformer.

Looking at it on its own, it’s a competent game. The platforming is challenging, the controls are tight, and there are some interesting obstacles. The game ramps up its difficulty a lot faster than Celeste does, too. There are some basic obstacles, like moving hazards, and some crumbling platforms, but they’re arranged in clever ways to keep you guessing.

To move around you have a double jump and an air dash. You can jump, dash, jump again then dash before hitting the ground, and the game takes full advantage of this, making the platforming more about staying in the air. The dash has a good sense of speed to it, and the jump arcs are nice and precise. After a few minutes, you’ll be chaining air dashes like one of them anime characters.

I can’t help but make comparisons to Celeste, since this is pretty much just that, but when you’re copying the smart kid’s homework, you’re sure to get an A, too. It has its own ideas and obstacles, like the different moving platforms and the underwater bits, which help it along. They didn’t just take Celeste and change a few words around. They added a few synonyms.

DASH n Cry gets a recommendation. If you loved Celeste and you’re still itching for some pixel-precise platforming punishment, give it a shot. If the idea of slamming your head against the same jump for five minutes straight doesn’t seem like a good time, then give this a skip.

There’s no wavedashing here, which is a missed opportunity. Minus points for that. Wait, I’m not keeping score, am I?

Project Turbo Blast

Project Turbo Blast is a high-speed racing game. You race around a futuristic race track going at ludicrous speeds, chaining boosts and drifting across massive turns. It’s heavily inspired by F-Zero GX, and it’s a high-intensity blast of arcade goodness.

It’s easy to pick up and play. Cars grip the track like their lives depend on it, over/under steer is a suggestion, and you don’t really have to let off the accelerator at any point. It’s a full-on arcade racer. It’s more focused around navigating the massive, sweeping turns, chaining as many boosts as possible, going so fast your head slams against the seat like you’re in one of those tilt-a-whirl things at the fair.

The controls are fantastic. The cars handle with unnatural precision, letting you thread the needle through the turns, even at 600 miles an hour. You can make micro-adjustments on the fly, or keep a smooth line going. It’s responsive and quick, like an arcade racer should be.

The game’s drift system locks you into a sideways slide when you press the button. As you drift, you build drift boost. Press the turbo button when the bar’s full, and you get a speed boost in the middle of your drift. Adjust the angle, and keep surfing the turns while racking up as many bursts of speed as possible.

If that’s not enough boost for you, there’s also a super turbo. When the gauge fills, you can activate it for a long-lasting kick of speed. This ramps you up to exhilarating speeds that go beyond mortal comprehension. It’s so much that, at times, it’s even kind of disorienting. Once you get the hang of it, and know the courses, you’ll be able to use this to sail past everyone else.

The game has a fun, colorful cel-shaded art style. It goes for a Y2K throwback, that’s really trendy at the time, with its blocky font and thick outlines that look like they’re straight from the year 2002. The cars look nice and appealing, with a stylized cartoonish design that makes them look like little toy cars. Along with that, it has a great drum and bass soundtrack to pump you up.

The game has a great sense of speed thanks to some neat visual tricks. The road’s surface is gritty and detailed, making it look like it’s speeding by underneath. There are subtle speed lines going across the screen and the car, making it look like it’s about to break the sound barrier. The UI is full of life, too. It jostles and vibrates as if it’s the instrument cluster in the car, and it can barely stay put together due to all the speed. Whenever you turn, the UI shifts to the same side, giving everything a good sense of movement.

It’s a very well put together package, with some great gameplay and presentation. It’s simple to pick up and play. In a few minutes you’ll be going so fast your eyebrows will be on the back of your head. Then it’s a matter of mastering each track, and keeping the boosts going. It offers a sense of speed you can’t get anywhere else. Except maybe if you see me running back to that Chinese buffet I mentioned (after I was thrown out once).

I recommend Project Turboblast. If you like fun, give it a shot.

Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?!

Truck-kun is an arcade driving game. You drive around a town, completing objectives to extend your time, so you can keep completing more objectives. These objectives are variations on driving stunts, like drifting, driving in reverse, jumping or driving in one direction. A lot of the time they’re also about crashing into objects and running over pedestrians. It’s okay, it’s not murder, according to the anime girl in your head. You’re helping them get isekai’d.

The game has a solid core loop, with some unfortunate missteps. Your main goal is to level up the aforementioned anime girl, so she can gain experience, level up, defeat the demon lord and come back to Earth. You do this by running over pedestrians to supply her with enemies to fight, and running over objects to give her attack power to fight said enemies. This makes you drive around, looking for people and objects to hit in a balance so she can farm them. Spend too much time hitting pedestrians, she has enemies but no attack. Hit too many objects, and she can hit hard, but she isn’t hitting anything. That part is okay.

The rest of the core gameplay is also fun. It has that addictive time extending thing that Crazy Taxi does, where you’re racing against the clock to get more things done. It puts you in a frantic state of mind, looking around the map for the best way to complete your objectives, while balancing the weird xp mechanic. There are also packages to deliver. Do all these tasks to earn stars. You need to accumulate a certain number of them across runs to get to the next milestone.

The game does a lot of cool things, but it has some missteps, like I said. The controls aren’t the best. The truck handles poorly, but not heavy like a truck. It’s strangely unresponsive, it has some inertia to turn that feels weird. Its brakes are terrible, too. You can do a 180 turn with the push of a button, but there are times where you need to stop, and the brakes feel like they engage half a second after you slam them.

In fact, the whole game feels weirdly sluggish. It’s like I’m playing it on Stadia with 200 ping. It slows down at random, slows down when you activate the attack for the anime girl’s isekai thing, it slows down when you hit certain things. It doesn’t do it in a cool slow-mo way, either. It’s chugging.

The worst of it happens with the cops. When you do your objectives, you generate heat, and that makes cops spawn in and chase you. These guys are relentless. They’ll materialize in front of you out of thin air, and slam into you repeatedly, jamming you into walls, killing your momentum, and getting you stuck on tiny bits of geometry. The only way to get them off you is to give them a long speech on how you’re a sovereign citizen. Not really, you slam them back, but you might as well go the long-winded speech route since the game slows down to 1 frame per day when you hit them. It’s like it can’t handle your anti-establishment rebellion and it’s slowing down to cheer you on.

I don’t know if I recommend Truck-kun. It’s fun, and it has some great ideas, but the controls and performance are both a noticeable obstacle. The cops are way too relentless and annoying, too. Literal fun police. They’re not fun enemies to overcome, they’re an active hindrance; a detriment to the enjoyment of the game. If you think you can overlook these flaws, give the game a shot. I know I had fun with it for a few minutes.

HYPERFIST

Hyperfist (no need to yell) is a first-person brawler. Play as a guy with mechanical arms, and punch bots.

There’s different punch attacks. A regular punch, which hits things. A charge punch, which sends you forward, an uppercut which sends enemies flying and a ground slam. They don’t really combine or flow into each other.

The enemies sort of waddle at you, posing no real threat. There are some tanky big guys with guns. They take a lot of hits to kill, and they’re constantly shooting their guns, but they don’t do much. You can heal easily, so nothing has any real consequence.

The game has a very buys, overly saturated hypergraphic art style that kind of looks okay, but starts to wear on the eyes after a bit. It’s very art-college core. The music is a repetitive, droning 4 second loop.

I don’t recommend Hyperfist. Not much to it.

Why do I bring it up? Because while playing, I had a strange sense of Deja-vu. I was playing as a guy with a mechanical arm, dashing around, sending people flying. Wait a minute, this is Doomfist! I’m playing as Doomfist! How exciting! Except it wasn’t They made a game where you play as Doomfist, and it’s boring. That’s an achievement.

Knuckle Jet

Knuckle Jet is a 2D platformer. You play as Anastasia, director of an orphanage and also a high-flying daredevil with a rocket fist. Two games in a row about rocket fists, and this one’s also a precision platformer like the legally-distinct Celeste back there. There’s also some Rocket Knight Adventure thrown in, for good measure. Use your rocket fist to fly around levels to save the orphans.

The Knuckle Jet lets you fly around. Hold the button down and you zip around with full 360 degree freedom, punching anything in your way. Until it overheats, that is. Managing the gauntlet’s heat is key to staying alive. If it happens while you’re in mid-air, you drop into whatever hungry meat grinder is waiting for you below. Managing the heat is intuitive, and a cool challenge. It makes you think about your actions, and how they’ll affect your resource.

Along with the rocket fist, you have a dash and a nitro boost. The dash is a quick step in one direction that cancels out your momentum. It’s useful for switching directions abruptly in mid-air. It doesn’t raise your heat bar, so you can use it to get a little extra distance while conserving your main fist. The nitro boost is a powered-up rocket fist that uses fuel instead of heat. Refill it by rocketing into enemies and other breakables.

These three parts of the movement system come together like a well-oiled machine. You’ll be dashing around, switching between each as the situation calls for it. Fly with the rocket fist for a while, dash out of it for extra height, float back down with the nitro boost and back to the rocket to conserve fuel. Juggling these three can be done with a quick button press, making split-second decision making a breeze, even when you have to switch multiple times in a few short moments.

The levels make good use of the movement. They’re short, meant to be cleared quickly, chasing a gold medal. They have lots of lines and opportunities for you to rocket around, with enemies and obstacles placed in devious locations to keep you alert. The stages are a joy to play, and offer a decent challenge. You can try to go for a gold medal clear time for an even tougher challenge, or take on the optional star missions that are basically Super Meat Boy levels. These get really sadistic, forcing you to take tight, precise paths that push your resource management to the limit. Overall, the levels are great.

The game has a cute hand-made look to it. It’s meant to look like a stop motion cartoon, with the characters made of clay and their clothes made of real fabrics. It reminds me of Kirby’s Epic Yarn or Yoshi’s Wooly World a bit. It has that crafted look to it, but with a dingier, more industrial look to it, which works well.

I recommend Knuckle Jet. It’s a well designed platformer that offers a decent challenge, designed around a cool, smooth flight mechanic.

Takeover 2

Takeover 2 is a beat-’em-up. I’m always looking for a good beat-’em-up in these Next Fests, and I can’t find any. I’m like the guy who gets to the Chinese Buffet after me, and he’s looking for lo mein, but there is none, for I have eaten all of it, and got kicked out for it. Now, with Takeover 2, I’ve finally found my lo mein.

In Takeover 2 you go through a dingy city beating the soul out of random thugs. It’s a standard beat-’em-up, but I’m so glad it is. I want standard. It’s not perfect, but it’s playable.

You have your standard punch combo, which ends in a knockdown. There’s a heavy kick combo, which also ends in a knockdown, aerial attacks; one that staggers and one that knocks down, two running attacks, a special move and a gun. Yeah, like it’s The Punisher or something. You have a gun you can shoot, with limited ammo. The offensive arsenal is dependable. It works as it should, most of the time, and it’ll do the job of punching the crime right out of some punk’s skull, along with 30% of his brain. Seriously, the blood effects in this game are extreme. It reminds me of The Scout from TF2 screaming “He punched out all my blood!”

There are some defensive options, too. You can dodge roll up and down, and there’s a parry, because parries are government mandated now, apparently. Can’t have a combat system without one. These defensive combat options are not my favorite. They’re there, but they don’t have to be. You can walk around the enemies, which is good, but the parry has some implications, mainly the fact that all the enemies now attack a lot slower, because everything has to be reactable.

The game also has an emphasis on combos, to its detriment. The combos aren’t anything too impressive. This isn’t Denjin Makai 2. You won’t have to know what attacks combo into what, or how they launch enemies, or how to pick them up after being launched. You do your regular punch combo, the enemy flies off, bounces off a wall, and you do the combo again. There aren’t any fancy moves to play around with.

This has the unwanted consequence of making every enemy really tanky. Can’t have a combo system if enemies die in a few hits, so the value of their Hit Points is inflated, much like the current value of the US Dollar. This means regular bad guys take a long while to kill, making you feel weak and the stages drag on like one of my run-on sentences.

If I have this much negativity to spout about the game, how could I say it’s good? Well, I get really nitpicky like this because I like the game. I think it’s a solid beat-’em-up. The enemies are well designed; they have their roles, their unique attacks, and they attack from different sides. They actively hunt the player down, surround them and act like real jerks, the way it should be. The combat, while sort of sluggish thanks to those tanky enemies, is still responsive, meaty and satisfying. You can do all the fun things that come with this genre, like crowd control and moving around an enemy’s attack. It’s got the neutral.

It’s a pretty solid core, with some unnecessary trimmings on top. There are also some other complaints, but those are for big nerds like me. For example, the grab doesn’t have i-frames. That’s a big no-no. Sure, your dodge has a ton of i-frames, and you have a parry, but i-frames on a grab is pretty fundamental. It’s a way to create breathing room in some tough situations. The rest of the grab works fine. You toss an enemy and that thing becomes a bowling ball, and everyone else on screen is a hapless pin. It feels good to play, but it has its stinky side.

Overall I recommend Takedown 2. It’s a tough, old-school feeling game with some weird new-school stuff stapled on top. It’s like an old man saying Six-seven to seem hip and cool. Even then, give it a look if you like beat-’em-ups.

Conclusion

Those are all the demos the interns- I mean- I was able to play on Monday and Tuesday. There were a lot more I still have to check out, and a lot more that were probably terrible. If I find anything else worth looking at, I might edit this article and add it, or make a part 2. Probably not.

I spent most of my time sifting through AI garbage. I hate it here.

It’s So Over

Today we’re looking at Decline of Video Gaming. Not the concept of the decline of video gaming, that’s another article, we’re looking at the flash series named Decline of Video Gaming, with no “the” at the beginning. It’s a video game parody cartoon from the early 2000s, so you already know what to expect; pointing out the absurdities in games and some lolsorandom humor. Thankfully there are no jokes about Mario doing drug mushrooms. It’s not that cliched. I used to love the series back when I was a kid, and thought it would be interesting to revisit it as an old man and see if it holds up.

This is a reaction article. It should have been a video, but I don’t make videos. Not yet at least.

I recommend you watch the cartoons first, then re-watch while pausing and reading the article. I suggest watching them on Newgrounds, where they’re available in full quality. Then watch them on Youtube, so you can pause and rewind as much as you want.

• Episode 1

• Episode 2

• Christmas Special

• Episode 3

• YouTube compilation (low quality)

Decline of Video Gaming

The series’ first episode is very simple compared to the others. The art has this distinctly early 2000s flash cartoon look to it, with the thin lines and tweened puppet animation. Thankfully the colors look alright. They didn’t go for the garishly over saturated colors popular at the time, or even- God forgive me for uttering these words- gradients. They do use them, in the Lara Croft segment, but at least they had the restraint to limit it there.

It’s the year 2059, and gaming has gone down hill. At least, according to the overly long intro. The cartoon focuses on three friends, Dim, JT and Dan (the cartoon’s creators) hanging around an EB Games. The guys wander around, pointing at games, and showing little skits parodying them, in Family Guy style cutaways.

First they parody Metal Gear Solid. They reminisce about Metal Gear Solid V, making jokes about playing as old man Snake. This was five years before the release of MGS4, where old Snake is the protagonist. Thought that was interesting.

Next they point out Devil May Cry 4, with Lucia on the cover alongside Dante and Trish. The guys look back on the first Devil May Cry, as the finest in the series, and lament its downfall. This one’s completely understandable. With this cartoon’s release and the fact that they feature Lucia as a character, it means the last game they played was the second one. That would give anyone a grim outlook on the series. Thing is, this cartoon was made barely a year before Devil May Cry 3. That must have been an interesting time for gamers. A strong first entry, then a truly putrid sequel that gets followed up by an unexpected masterpiece a few years later. It was a real “it’s always darkest before the dawn” type moment.

They take a light jab at Alien Hominid, a run and gun game made by the Newgrounds guys. It was a huge deal for me at the time. It was the first real indie game I saw on consoles. Back then, it was a lot less common. Sure, anyone could make a little flash game and publish it on a website like Newgrounds or Miniclip, but consoles were the big leagues. That’s where Mario and Master Chief were, that was no place for people from the internet (said with utmost disgust). It made me think Newgrounds was a real cultural force and that anything was possible. I was wrong on both fronts.

I used to think the Zelda parody was hilarious as a kid, not so much now. Nothing more to say about it, other than “The Lampshade of No Real Significance” got kind of popular in online circles, and the guys who made Decline of Video Gaming made a flash game of it.

Then they look at Ghetto Party 5. A play on Mario Party and all the gangsta themed games of the time. The 2000s were the Bling era. Huge shirts, huge pants, huge chains. Everything was about “the streets”; You needed to be a “baller” and maybe even a “shot caller”. That’s when Fast and Furious rose to prominence along with all the street racing games like Need for Speed Underground, Midnight Club and Juiced. Everything was about being gangsta. It was like the 90s, where every white guy was rapping, but somehow even more embarrassing.

P. Diddy shows up there. That’s the only funny part of the skit, and it wasn’t intentional. If Diddy shows up at a party, a drive-by would be the least of MC Hammer’s worries. Diddy would take “Can’t touch this” as a challenge.

Grand Theft Auto gets a shout-out with Grand Theft Auto Traffic Jam. This is getting close to Mario drug mushroom jokes. What if Grand Theft Auto, but realistic traffic is an easy joke, and this one isn’t very funny.

The Tomb Raider bit is one I think about whenever I see RPG systems in games that don’t need them, which is a lot of them nowadays. I was going to reference it in my Tomb Raider review, but I thought no one would get it- which hasn’t stopped me before- but here you go, now you know it, too.

The first episode is a nice bit of nostalgia. Its slower pace and more relaxed tone make it stand out from the over the top shock cartoons on Newgrounds back in the day.

The animation also helped it stand out. Even if it looks crude now, it was of a higher quality than what you’d normally find online. All the little game boxes have their own complete designs and jokes, it all looks detailed and put together.

I still don’t know why I found it so hilarious back in the day. Maybe I’m just a bored, bitter old man now who can’t see joy or whimsy in anything. It’s still a nice watch, don’t regret revisiting it, and would recommend you give it a look if you want some early 2000s flash nostalgia.

Decline of Video Gaming 2

The second episode gets more of a plot. The guys are invited to E3, but it’s all an evil scheme by the heads of Square Enix, Capcom and Konami, all voiced by Arin “Egoraptor” Hansen, to destroy the guys for all the times they’ve bashed games.

There is more of a focus on the characters this time around. They’re not wandering around a game store, now they wander around E3 while telling jokes. JT was turned into a hyperactive idiot who shouts random phrases and acts like a kid. This kind of character was huge at the time. Think Gir from Invader Zim. Very trendy. The jokes are louder and more “lol so random XD” this time around.

Once the guys get to E3, the game jokes start. They kick things off with an N-Gage joke. For those who don’t know, the N-Gage was a short-lived phone/portable gaming console combo released back in the day. To most of you, the idea of a phone you play games on isn’t anything weird, but it was a novel concept back in the day. It was advertised as the next big thing, but it got laughed out of existence. The design was weird and clunky, it was massive, it looked nerdy as hell and it played terrible demakes of existing games. Any time the N-Gage is brought up, which isn’t often, I always think of this scene, and think “Hey, Dave, this guy bought an N-Gage!”

Then we get introduced to the heads of Capcom, Konami and Square Enix, the bad guys, who bumble around trying to stop the main trio, like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s all silly and pretty funny. The three guys have unique personalities and some funny lines, and even though they’re all played by the same guy, manage to sound distinct.

They use props from their games to carry out their evil plans, like the Capcom guy sending out T-Virus zombies. If you put them in a cartoon in 2026, and had them act the exact same way, no one would be able to tell the difference. Capcom is still milking the Resident Evil franchise, so him only making Resident Evil references would make sense to modern audiences. Same with the Square Enix and Konami guys. If the Super Flash Bros from 2004 travelled into the far-off year of 2026, they’d see that everything is still the same. They’d be excited to check out all the cool new games from the big publishers, only to find the same games they’ve played, but with increasingly bigger numbers tacked on to the end.

After the requisite South Park reference, we get a bit of lol random humor that had a disproportionate impact on me. The Square Enix guy tries to attack JT with a fireball, but he misses because of the Active Time Battle system, and instead hits Tom with the fireball, which sets him on fire and he yells out Oh my god im on fire. For some reason, that was the funniest thing to me back then. I’d quote it endlessly, like a huge nerd, and no one knew what I was talking about. Some things never change.

A few parodies happen, and then the Nintendo DS comes along. The joke is another easy one. The DS has two screens, which is one more than usual, so what if it had more screen?

I remember when I first heard of the DS. A friend told me he saw something about it in a game magazine, and that it was like a Gameboy, but with two screens. I looked him dead in the eye for a bit. Two screens? Really? You expect me to believe that? Why two? So you can play two games at once? Get outta here with that bullshit, man. He kept insisting and even got angry when I wouldn’t believe him, but I just kept calling him a liar. Then I went home and looked it up online, and it was true, and was subjected to the longest “I told you so” in history. Maybe that’s the reason why I never owned a DS. It was a symbol of my moral failings.

The cartoon then closes off with… Maroon 5? Okay there has to be some law against making someone listen to Maroon 5 without their consent.

Episode two is more fleshed out, more dynamic. The characters get more screentime. They’re still props to point at games and trigger the cutaway, but they have more of a personality, even if it’s just one joke. The parodies this time around were a bit weaker, but there are more moments that stuck with me, like the N-Gage bit.

That reminds me of this one time, years ago, when I was looking up information on Xbox 360 emulators. There weren’t any, at the time. Even now, there’s only one and it barely works with anything. I was looking around, trying to see why that is, and among the things I learned about how apparently it’s tough, another reason why is because there isn’t much interest, which shocked me. Then I saw a Reddit post from one guy saying there probably isn’t any interest in it, himself included, since he would rather work on an emulator for the N-Gage, as he was doing.

The N-GAGE!? You’d rather skip over developing the only emulator for the console with Gears of War, Halo, Dead Or Alive and NINJA GAIDEN 2, to develop an emulator for the N-GAGE!? I got legitimately mad at that one. Sure, he says the games aren’t the deciding factor, it’s how interesting the system is. I bet a phone that can play games is real groundbreaking.

Emulating an N-Gage completely defeats the purpose of its existence, too. No, it’s not the ability to play games on the go. The whole thing about the N-Gage was that it was the perfect size, shape, and weight to throw at other people, preferably N-Gage owners.

Now that my N-Gage induced crashout is done, let’s move on to the Christmas special!

A Decline Christmas

I usually have a decline during Christmas, too. Bad weather, mixed with too much food and downtime, usually equals zero productivity and a few extra pounds.

The Christmas episode is a string of vaguely Christmas-themed video game jokes. It’s like a few strips of Penny Arcade back to back, along with violence as the punchline and everything. Don’t have much to say about this one. Didn’t watch it a lot back in the day. It’s still nice, in the same way reading old Penny Arcade comics is still enjoyable.

The Time Crisis carolers scene is really well done, and it’s one of my favorite sequences in these cartoons.

Decline of Video Gaming 3

The big one. The third and final (numbered) installment in this epic series. Clocking in at over seventeen minutes. That’s feature-length in the world of flash cartoons.

This one blew my mind back when I saw it. They stepped up the animation, it was a lot longer, there were a ton of jokes. I thought it was TV quality, and you could watch it for free on the Internet, and it was made by some guys and not a massive studio? Amazing.

In this episode, the guys go to Japan, and the three video game villains try to stop them.

A note about the intro: this cartoon was the first time I heard Guns and Roses. True story.

On the subject of music, I haven’t commented much on the soundtrack for these, but they’re from the time where you could take any copyrighted song and slap it on your project. There was a big stink about piracy, but it was mostly focused around filesharing and such. No one would come at you for using a 40 second clip of My Michelle in the intro for your video game cartoon. No one would lose sales over that. If anything, it’s free advertising, but now you get your face slapped off if you put a few notes from a known song in a video. The free advertising thing didn’t work on me, though. I found out about Guns and Roses there, and I don’t like them.

The first game parody is Devil May Cry. The first one, again. DMC3 had just come out, so maybe they hadn’t played it yet. Pretty succinct summary of the first game, but they missed an opportunity to parody the “dark soul with light” scene. I would have wanted to hear Arin try to do the voice crack.

Then the Konami guy is playing with a DSP- a two screen PSP. Nowadays, DSP is more known for playing with something else. Ayooo. I don’t have anything to add other than this terrible joke. Really regretting my decision to do this as a text article and not a reaction video.

After some random shenanigans with the guys in the hotel (no diddy), we get the Metal Gear Solid 3 sequence. A reference to the land of chocolate scene from The Simpsons. I still haven’t played MGS3, but I’ve always liked this scene. It’s nicely animated, and I really like how charming chibi Snake looks. The cut-off at the end when he gets the microwave out is a good bit of comedic timing.

I also liked the gag the comes after it, with them going around the town in anime form, then they show it was just Dim standing there showing them drawings while playing music. I referenced that in my own comics and doodles.

The part with Nightmare working at a fast food joint scratched at something buried deep within my lizard brain. The whole series is nostalgic, but this scene in particular was one my friends and I used to quote on a regular basis. It was a weird feeling, after having seen this so many times, then not having watched it for decades, to re-watch this part and hear “screw this, I’m going to Burger King”. It was like an MK Ultra activation phrase. I suddenly remembered that I used to say that all the time, and I was hit with a sudden realization that it was from this cartoon that I got that from.

Speaking of realizing stuff after watching it dozens of times, this is the first time I notice how the Square Enix guy’s spikes work. After the Nightmare scene, the guys get captured by Konami, and it cuts to Capcom and Square Enix discussing their plan in a janitor’s closet. The scene is shot from the side, and you can see the spikes are around his shoulder, like water wings. I never knew what those were. Maybe it’s a reference to a character in Final Fantasy, but I wouldn’t know. I’ve only played FF6.

The part with Ken Kutagari planning a PSP with two disc drives was something I referenced a lot, too. Any time a new console was announced, I would jokingly ask anyone I was talking to if it had two disc drives. Hideo Kojima is in jail with him, too. Locked up for Metal Gear Solid 2, apparently. If only the guys had seen Death Stranding. They probably would have exiled Kojima, instead.

Next they go on to a craaaaazy Japanese game show. It’s not that crazy, actually, just a quiz show. They could have done a Takeshi’s Castle parody. Another instance of noticing things on the 30^th re-watch, the scene behind Square Enix is a recreation of the Last Supper with video game characters.

More stuff happens and then another scene that I constantly reference in my mind, even to this day. Another Metal Gear parody, where Snake gets a gun and goes on a rant describing its little intricacies. Whenever I see a really detailed gun in a game, or hear anyone describe a weapon in depth, I think “and it has a subtle orange flavor”. It’s been a really long time, so the quote got re-written in my memory, but it’s roughly the same.

I also liked the Ratchet and Clank part, even if it’s just a few seconds. I’ve always loved those games, and got really excited when they finally showed up in one of these. The guy who does Ratchet’s voice in this is pretty close to the real voice. One thing about this that always gets me is the sound Clank makes when he pops the toast out. It sounds like a thunderous car crash. Where did they record that sample? A busy intersection outside of a bar?

The robot fight is really cool. It was the most impressive thing to me as a kid. It was insane how they animated all that so smoothly, I couldn’t believe it. It still holds up now. The animation in general is great. It’s not on the same level as some of those animators you see on YouTube nowadays that do these insane sakuga proof of concept things, but those are usually a few seconds, or a minute at most.

The Metroid parody is spot-on. I remembered liking Metroid Prime, but that thing where you lose your powers is kind of annoying. Same thing happens in Symphony of the Night. You start at full strength then get reduced to a dumb little rat. It’s like starting a new job as the supervisor, then getting demoted to office clerk after a day. Even the Square Enix guy likes the Metroid joke.

The Square Enix guy launches his final attack, which does nothing, and the guys finish them off with a bunch of “I’d rather” jokes. Tame ones. They’d rather watch ice melt or play dominoes than play those games. Not like the I’d rathers from the Angry Video Game Nerd. No one was weighing the pros and cons of playing Final Fantasy 7, or having a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in their ear.

Conclusion

That rounds off Decline of Video Gaming. I think it holds up pretty well. It’s definitely a product of the early 2000s, with its type of “um… did you just do that” humor, and the game observations can seem a little simple now, with two decades of hindsight, but it’s still a lot of fun. The animation is good, it uses the tweening well, and its good use of camera angles gives it good visual variety. It’s not stuck on a flat three-fourths scene all the time. It’s very ambitious, and it shows that the people making it were very passionate about their work, and they had a strong desire to improve, and it shows throughout the series.

For me it’s a good shot of nostalgia. These, and many other flash cartoons, were a big part of my childhood. They led me down a dark path of gaming, and constantly making autistic references to things no one knows about. They influenced my sense of humor, too. I was all about that kind of “lol so random” humor, mixed in with media-savvy fourth wall breaking “um… actually” observations. I was insufferable as a kid. Still am, but at least I keep it to myself.

Some stray observations:

The most obvious one is the title, Decline of Video Gaming. It seems kind of weird to call the early 2000s the Decline. Sure, the series starts off in the year 2059, and then mysteriously goes back to modern times with the same characters. Uh oh! Plot hole! Boy I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

The early 2000s were a fantastic time for gaming. Splinter Cell, Mario Sunshine, Ratchet and Clank, Halo, Super Monkey Ball, SSX Tricky. A lot of great games, good hardware. Sure, it’s a joke, haha video games bad, but not really, but still. Any medium that releases Super Monkey Ball cannot possibly be in decline. Maybe a very slow, gradual decline. That might be it. They’re claiming the early 2000s are the peak, and after the peak comes the decline, so it’s perfectly understandable to call that period the decline. That’s stretching it.

Doing the “Favorite game of each year” series, I realized how every year I found less and less games I liked. Sure, you can say it’s nostalgia. Oh, how convenient that the peak of a medium you like coincidentally happened when you were a kid at your most impressionable. Curious. I concede that point, but counter point: I was an impressionable child in the 90s, and I don’t have such fond memories of those games, and two: I played a lot of those games after the fact, due to growing up broke. They still hold up.

Now, granted, we are currently in a pretty alright place. Sure, Triple-A games are slop, and everything is a live service time-sink meant to keep you playing forever and paying for battlepasses, but at least the indie scene is doing alright. We got a bunch of smaller games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less, with actual gameplay, designed with fun in mind. Great, things are on the up-and-up, but from where I stand, the time from around 2008 to around 2021, was a dark one. I might elaborate on that at some point, but for now, take my subjective anecdotal evidence. It’s my blog, and I pick what we’re hyper fixating on this week.

A second point, that has nothing to do with anything: Why is the Capcom guy the only one with a stereotypical Japanese accent? Square Enix and Konami are both Japanese, too.

To sum it all up, I recommend Decline of Video Gaming. Watch it, share it with your friends. If you were around during that time, enjoy the nostalgia, laugh at the dumb jokes. If you never saw that era, enjoy a genuine gem from then. Get some high-quality nostalgia for a time you never knew. It’s better than experiencing it through Y2K pastiche. It’s fully of its time, down to the dumb jokes and the accents that will make you go “Um… that didn’t age well”, as is the style of the time.

Drop It Like It’s Hot

There are way too many games out there. You can’t waste your limited time on Earth playing garbage. What’s the solution? Dropping games. Is a game not doing it for you? Make like Elsa and let it go… into the trash! There’s no contract tying you down, making you get through a game you hate, and I’m no stranger to this. Sure, I beat some games I don’t really like, for the sake of reviews, but there are some that are so heinous, I’d rather kick them to the curb instead of trying to make them work for me.

This post was directly inspired by ’s article “Games I Can’t Enjoy Anymore”. Go check it out! He listed Darkest Dungeon as one of the games he stopped playing, and it reminded me of my experience with it. I was enjoying it until randomness destroyed too many of my runs. Then I kept thinking of other games I’ve dropped throughout the years, and now I’ll be highlighting some that are kind of interesting.

It’s mostly an excuse to talk about certain games without having to dedicate an entire review to them.

1 Overwatch

Yeah, I’m admitting to playing Overwatch. Even worst than that, I had fun with it at one point.

When the game first released, I got swept up in its wave of marketing. A brand-new IP from one of the biggest studios in gaming? How could I resist? Nevermind the fact that I wasn’t a fan of the Diablo series, and I was disappointed with StarCraft 2, and by this point Blizzard was starting to be known for more missteps, and their best days were behind them and… damn, why did I bother with them, again? Oh, right, marketing. They showed a lot of cool characters with slick animations, and the game I imagined in my head was different than what we got. I thought it would be more like Team Fortress 3.

I did have fun with it at first. The thrill of a new game, and all that. I played it with friends, and we were having fun with the team aspects and learning the game. Then it got stale real quick. To me, at least. I stopped playing, and only dipped back in if my friends really needed a sixth player, but the magic of those first 20 hours with the game had vanished.

That’s not why I’m listing it here. Not yet, at least. The reason why I stopped playing then, momentarily, was because the game wasn’t really doing anything too interesting. To me, everything in the game felt like a less fun version of something I’d already played. I played Roadhog for a while, but he was just a worse version of Pudge from Dota. I know some of you will say “Um, ackshually, Pudge is a worse version of The Butcher from Diablo, so Pudge is the rip-off, not Roadhog”, and that’s a great bit of trivia, but it doesn’t help with the feeling that I was playing store-brand Pudge, with a less versatile kit. I was also a Pharah main, and she was just the rocket launcher from Quake, but soggy. Torbjorn was The Engineer from TF2, but bad, so on and so on. Nothing that was too exciting.

Then Doomfist happened.

I wasn’t playing the game when he dropped. All I knew was that the big, bad villain of Overwatch had released, and he was terrorizing players. I didn’t get the news until months later, when I saw a twitter clip of him decimating an entire team by himself. It was so glorious, that I had to go and try him out, and it was fantastic. He might be based off another archetype, but I had never played anything like him in a shooter. He was all about getting into the enemy’s back line and sending one person flying. He was fast, he hit hard, and the best part, he made the enemy team seethe with rage.

Every time I got a kill with Doomfist, which was pretty often, if I’m free to brag a little, I’d get flooded with salty messages in all chat. The kind of annoying, passive-aggressive trash talk Overwatch players do where they use UwU soft-boy therapy speak to tell you to kill yourself. Me, being the sewer goblin I am, I lapped it up. I didn’t go for kills to help my team win, it was to piss off the enemy team as much as possible. Winning was a secondary objective. I made several people ragequit in ranked matches. It was a legitimate strategy. I had become the villain, I wasn’t playing as Doomfist, I had become him.

I was finally having real fun with the game. I wasn’t playing a watered-down version of a Team Fortress 2 character, or a single Quake gun made into a character. Doomfist was so cool that he had me playing Overwatch even when my friends weren’t online.

Then one day we got Overwatch 2. It took away one tank, which meant the pre-made six man teams had to cut someone. Then they took Doomfist, and made him into a tank. It was a targeted attack at me, personally. They had everyone fighting over the role of tank, and then they took the best damage character, and made him into the worst tank. I was still getting salty messages, but they were all coming from my own team. Every time I picked Doomfist, I got four soft boys telling me to switch off him, because he’s not a real tank. The worst part of this wasn’t that Doomfist was bad -that part was painful- the thing that sucked was that I had to agree with an Overwatch player. I kept playing every now and then when my friends asked me to. I made safe meta picks, stuff that wasn’t Doomfist, so no fun to be had.

The story of how I fell in and out of love with Overwatch is more interesting than how I stopped playing it. I was playing with friends, using a Reddit-approved meta character, being efficient and playing the game as daddy Blizzard intended, and I came to the realization that I was really bored. I wasn’t angry or frustrated. I didn’t lose one match spectacularly, or get stuck in a rank, I didn’t have a huge falling out with my team, or cyberbullied off the game. It wasn’t anything specific. I was playing and thought “I could be doing anything else with my time right now”. It was a cold, quick decision, like when a company decides to lay someone off. Even the way I quit playing was boring and safe.

I don’t care how many cute girls they add, I won’t play it. The game’s boring, Doomfist is no longer a threat, and Blizzard keeps proving they’re coasting on goodwill they built up almost three decades ago. They’re like a washed-up local celebrity who’s still going on radio shows reminding everyone about that one time they were funny back in 1998, but they haven’t done anything since.

2 Marvel Rivals

Why is this game so familiar? Deja vu, I have been in this place before…

Aww hell no! This is just Overwatch in a Spider-Man mask! No! I don’t care how thick your characters are, I WILL NOT PLAY THE HERO SHOOTER.

If you want my opinion on Marvel Rivals, just re-read the Overwatch section, but leave out anything about Doomfist. Rivals doesn’t have anything nearly as fun as him.

On the subject of multiplayer shooters that aren’t fun with friends…

3 Borderlands (The Entire Franchise)

The obvious joke here is “Borderlands? More like BOREDOMlands, am I right?”

Borderlands is a game series people swear up and down is a ton of fun if you play it with your friends. First off, not a great endorsement. Even waiting in line at the DMV is tolerable with friends. Second, this is a filthy lie. Borderlands can’t be salvaged, even when playing with other people. It’s worse than being stuck at the DMV. There’s no way to play this with friends and have a good time.

I think that a good friend game needs to have some specific traits. It has to be engaging, but not so complicated that you need to lock in. If it’s too intense, you can’t goof around, and all your conversation will be reduced to a few short call outs. I play Dota2 with my friends, and while we’re playing, we never talk about anything other than the game. The game has to let you talk, too. If you have to pay attention to things, or listen for sound cues, you can’t have idle chatter. It needs to have some form of co-operative aspect, to make it feel like you’re all working together towards something.

Borderlands breaks all of these rules. Engaging but not too intense? The game isn’t engaging at all. That’s subjective, and I’ll get back to it, but there’s nothing for you to do other than shoot in the general direction of a bullet sponge. It doesn’t let you talk, because the game never shuts up. Every single nano second in this series is packed with some NPC spouting out inane dialogue.

I was playing Borderlands 2 with a friend once, and he was trying to tell me something about his day, and the NPCs kept yammering over each other, I could barely understand what he was saying, and he couldn’t talk because he had Anthony Burch’s horrid dialogue interrupting his thoughts. He yelled out “SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY!” And we decided to mute the game entirely.

There is hardly any teamplay in these games. There might be some character classes that have skills to help your buddies, but I didn’t find any. These games are simultaneous single-player experiences where someone else is in the same place as you. You don’t need to interact with the other players, except when they need to be revived. You’re both staring forward, blasting at the same enemies. The only other interaction comes from fighting over who gets the shiny new gun that dropped.

I’ve tried playing the Borderlands series multiple times over the years, with different friend groups. Every single time, we come to the same conclusion: This is boring, not even playing with friends can save it, let’s go play Dota. I completely dropped the entire franchise.

Warframe and The First Descendant are much better to play with friends. I’ve spent hours playing both, grinding for loot and shooting the breeze with friends. Borderlands is just straight booty cheeks.

4 Lightning Round: Dropped games I reviewed

I think getting through a game is a minimum requirement for reviewing it, but these were so putrid that they made me puke everywhere, and I had to review them anyways.

• Uppers: A terrible, tedious brawler with horrific controls and repetitive fights. Every enemy behaves the same, there are different playable characters but they all have the same move sets, bosses had two billion hit points so they took forever to defeat, and it was overall a terrible time. The game is the exact same from the first level, all the way to the end. Even the side content is exactly the same. A true waste of everyone’s time. Oh, and you could collect panties from chicks because it was a cool, manly game for hetero dudes.

• Slave Zero X and Evil West: Imagine for a moment that you’re at a restaurant. You order your food, and as an appetizer, they bring you some bread. The bread is stale, moldy, and the butter it came with smells faintly of paint thinner. After seeing this, would you stick around for the main course, or would you run out of the restaurant? That’s what these two games did for me. They failed so catastrophically at their most basic, obvious parts, that I felt comfortable writing them off in the first few hours of gameplay.

• The Ascent: Walk for 15 minutes to get to a mission that lasts two minutes. Then walk another 15 back to the quest giver. It was so boring that I almost lost consciousness playing it. I tried to finish it, but the thought of having to run a 10k between each mission filled me with the same kind of dread I used to feel back in school when report cards were due.

• Urban Reign: This one’s a lot like Uppers. It’s a brawler that plays the same from the first level. I made it up to level FIFTY. Level FIVE ZERO, then I checked a walkthrough thinking I only had like what, five more levels to go? Nope. Not even close. I was halfway through the game. There are 100 levels to this shit. ONE HUNDRED. I wasn’t going to sit through fifty more. That’d be like eating fifty shrimp, having an allergic reaction to them and thinking “hmm… maybe if I eat fifty more, I’ll stop going into anaphylactic shock”. The review is back from when I was first starting, so it’s more experimental.

5 FTL: Faster Than Light

Here FTL Stands for Filter This Loser.

Getting filtered by a game is different than dropping it. Dropping it is when you stop playing it at some point. Getting filtered is when you can’t really say you started, and that’s exactly what happened to me with FTL.

I was there when the hype around FTL was fresh, back in 2012. It’s one of the biggest indie games of the time, and it’s still considered a classic to this day. Everyone around me kept singing its praises, so I tried it out. I got into my ship, did a few jumps and landed in one area with a space pirate that immediately decimated my crew. That’s fine, I’ll do better in the next run, I thought. Try again, run goes better, suddenly go up against an advanced fighter, it sets my ship on fire and we all die. Next run, get boarded by space mantises (manti?) and my crew gets eaten. I stop playing.

Years later, I decide to give the game a second shot. I approach it with a different mind set, and manage to get pretty far into a run. Then I jump into a node with an aggressive space pirate, and they kill me. No problem, I’m a more patient man now, and I can handle this. I start up another run and in my second jump I land on a sun, with a space pirate. The sun blasts a solar flare directly at my oxygen bay, I try to extinguish the fire, but my crew starts to suffocate before it’s out, and the pirate bombarded my med bay with a rocket, now it’s also on fire. Then I used my wits to turn it around and I emerged victorious. Of course I didn’t. I died.

Then I looked up forums and Reddit posts to see if I was missing something. Everyone kept saying “Yeaaahhh sometimes you’ll get into a random encounter with the literal grim reaper and he takes your entire crew and puts them into a coffin and you can’t do anything about it but that’s just how the game is ahahaha you just gotta love it lololol sometimes you get put in checkmate and you just bend over and take it kekekeke it’s all part of the fun”.

No, that’s not part of the fun for me. That sounds awful, actually. I was expecting people to give that wonderful piece of advice they always give, “get good”, but no. Here they sometimes said “yeah you can do this and that to avoid it”, but there was an air of acceptance around it. As if it were more like a casino game than anything. Yeah sometimes you just lose lol get used to it. Nah, if I want to gamble, I’ll do it somewhere where I could potentially lose my mortgage.

On top of that I didn’t like how the game drip fed upgrades to your ship, meaning I was flying around space in the equivalent of a Ford Pinto with airsoft guns taped to it, going up against fully armored death bots. I hated how expensive all the upgrades were, how you had a measly salary that could barely afford anything, and when you got to a store you had to decide between repairing your ship, refueling, or buying a new weapon to defend yourself with. Most of the time, if you had the money for a new weapon, it would be incompatible with your ship, or you wouldn’t have enough slots for it. You also had to buy ammo for them, so you were screwed there, too.

I hated how the game had two time limits: fuel and the encroaching federation ships. They made it so you don’t spend too much time in one sector, and had to pick your route carefully, but I ended up running low on fuel constantly, and that was enough to keep me moving forward in a panic. I didn’t need the ships at my ass to keep reminding me to move to the right. If I ever dared to explore a sector, I’d run out of gas. Exploring wasn’t worth it, either. Every node you visit is another chance at getting killed by some angry aliens. You risk death for a few scraps and maybe some ammo. It was a miserable time all around.

There’s a good chance someone might defend this game in the comments, and I’m willing to hear them out, but it’ll be very hard to convince me to even try this one again. I was filtered by FTL, and I don’t mind.

6 TERA Online

TERA was a korean grindfest MMO. Grind for gear so you can do high-level dungeons, where you grind for more gear. Pure skinner box gear treadmill nonsense. It also ran poorly and had a ton of micro transactions.

I stopped playing the game… because it was shut down. If it were still around, I’d be playing it. I had a blast with it, and it was the perfect game to play with friends, but it’s gone now. There’s no way to play it anymore, so it’s impossible for me to revisit it. I didn’t drop it, technically, someone slapped it out of my hands.

This has happened to a ton of games. Rise of Incarnates was a crappy Gundam VS game where you fought 2v2 using people who represented mythological deities. It wasn’t anywhere near as deep as Gundam VS, but it was a good time with friends. Its servers were shut down six months after it launched. Supervive was an alright MOBA Battle Royale. It got shut down around four months after release. I never played Rumbleverse, but it looked like a fun wrestling battle royale. I never played it because when I found out about it six months after launch, it had already shut down. Multiversus, the Warner Brothers Smash clone where you could play as Bugs Bunny and beat the shit out of Rick Sanchez, was also shut down. Highguard, a first person shooter, was also shut down- okay that one can stay shut down, actually. I don’t mind that one. Still, there might be one or two people out there who want to play Highguard, but it’s unavailable now. Some people want to inhale asbestos but THE MAN is trying to keep it from us.

I’ll use this opportunity to bring up an even more unknown, irrelevant game: Rocket Arena. It was a 3v3 third person arena shooter where you shot at each other with rockets. It was like smash brothers with some Quake thrown in. Your goal was to send the other team flying out of the arena. Every time you hit someone, they took damage, and each shot would send them flying further, like in Smash Bros. It was a lot of fun. You could juggle people in the air with rockets, if you were skilled. It was easy to understand, but it had a good skill ceiling. The game released in July of 2020, and by September of that year it had been completely abandoned. No one knew it existed, no one played it, it sold poorly and it was shut down. Surprisingly, it lasted until November 2023, before being delisted, but it was dead long before that. I bought a copy of it in 2020 for $5, and had fun with it for a few hours, until the game completely died and finding a match became impossible.

Yes this was a real game, and it was published by EA.

I’m sick of these live service games getting shut down instantly because they don’t make billions. If you’re going unplug the game, at least give me some way to play it offline.

Positive Note: La-Mulana

La-Mulana is a metroidvania that has a reputation for being an extremely difficult, unfriendly game. It doesn’t ease the player in, it throws a bunch of tough platforming challenges at them, and then expects them to solve cryptic riddles to progress. It’s a nightmare, and everyone who’s heard of the game knows it.

That kind of buzz got me interested in it, so I checked it out. I spent a few minutes figuring out the opening area, jumping around, exploring, until I finally made it into the first area. I solved some puzzles, and got killed by a few random traps. It was tough, but it wasn’t anything too bad. Then I found the switches.

For some reason, La-Mulana has a system where you interact with switches by dropping little weights on them, like Indiana Jones. These weights are limited. You need to buy them if you want to use them, so you need ammo to activate switches.

After hours of playing, I found myself in a tiny room that you needed to use a weight to get into. There was nothing there, so I was going to leave. I went to drop another weight and nothing happened. I was out of weights. I had soft-locked myself in a tiny room, losing about two hours’ worth of progress. I grit my teeth, sighed, and uninstalled the game. I couldn’t believe the game had such a stupid, nonsensical mechanic. No wonder people thought La-Mulana was hard, this game was made by a fool with a screwdriver.

Months later, I decided to re-install it and give it a second try. I don’t know why I did it, but I did. I replayed the part I had done before, but this time I made sure to stock up on as many weights as I could. I kept going, clearing challenges, solving bizarre puzzles and finding secrets. I wrestled with the weird controls, did some awkward platforming, got killed by countless random traps and kept going until I unlocked the first boss and beat it. When I did all that, I felt a strange feeling in my gut. It was the sense of accomplishment.

I’m glad I gave La-Mulana a second shot, because it turned out to be one of my favorite games of all time. It was insanely hard, full of confusing puzzles. I had to use a hint-based guide to get through a lot of the riddles, but I managed to figure out a good number of them on my own, and it was amazing.

I saw someone say this in a post somewhere, and it explains why I like this game so much: This game gives me the same feeling I got from games I played when I was a kid. A lot of games try to be nostalgic, by imitating sounds and sights from the past, but very few succeed at replicating how the games felt. La-Mulana does this perfectly. It’s incredibly hard. If you played games as a kid, you’d remember that everything seemed like a huge challenge, even if you replay the same game now as an adult, you’ll see it was nothing, but as a kid even Super Mario Bros seemed impossible. It’s confusing and cryptic in a way that encourages exploration. I used to check every corner in a game, hoping to find some secret, and La-Mulana rewards you for that. It brought me back to a time when games were these mysterious things of endless possibilities, that rewarded you for persevering and exploring.

I would have missed out on all that, if I had dropped the game, but I’m glad I gave it another try.

Conclusion

I recommend dropping games. If a game sucks, you don’t have to play it. Simple as. If you’re not having fun with a game, throw it in the trash. Is it possible that you might miss out on a cool game? Probably, but there’s also a chance that you waste hours trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

When I drop a game, I like to make damn sure I’m ready to do it. This is why I waste so much time playing games I don’t like. I’ve had friends ask me “hey, I saw you’ve been playing this game for like four hours today. Is it any good?” and I answer with “No. It stinks”. I’m not hate-playing it, I’m just trying to make 100% sure that I can throw the game out of a window and feel no regret.

I wrote this whole thing just to say that I hate the Borderlands series without having to review any of them.

I Like My Chili Picante!

Last time, I reviewed Total Overdose with the flimsy excuse that it was Cinco de Mayo. Now, there isn’t any holiday attached. I just wanted to play more Total Overdose, and that’s exactly what Chili Con Carnage is. It’s a remake/reimagining/demake of the previous game. Same characters, mechanics and general level sequence, but everything has been compacted. It’s like the Cliffs Notes version of Total Oversdose.

The mechanics were tweaked along with the levels. A lot of the complaints I had with the first game were addressed here: the score needed for a gold medal is a lot higher, there’s an increased emphasis on combos, there are ways to keep a combo going through a whole stage, the open world has been removed and the game feels a bit snappier.

With all those changes, that must mean this is the superior version, right? Well, that’s where things get muy caliente. Sure, it changed a lot of things for the better, but the universe sensed that there was an all-time classic about to be made, so it sent out some radioactive mierda beams to make other parts of the game significantly worse. The level design took a hit, the bosses are now actual torture, like the kind the CIA allegedly uses, the scoring requirements got hit with covid-era inflation, and the limited control scheme introduces its own problems.

Read on to find out if Chili Con Carnage will make you scream Ay Caramba in joy, or Ay Dios Mio in despair.

Look, this is the last of these fake Mexican games I’ll be reviewing for now. Gotta get some use out of those Spanish classes.

Gameplay

Chili Con Carnage (2007, for the PSP) is a third person dive shooter, like Max Payne. You jump around in slow-motion, killing hundreds of bad guys with your dual pistols. Unlike Max Payne, Chili Con Carnage rates you on how good you look during your little murder acrobatics. There’s a scoring system with tricks, a combo meter that keeps track of how many kills you chain together, and you get medals based on your score at the end of a stage. There are also some power-ups you can get, which give you special moves, health, temporary invincibility or one that extends your combo timer.

Your job in each stage is to reach the exit. There are some stages that have objectives, but they’re very linear, with some power-ups hidden in corners or small side rooms. Between each stage, there’s an optional challenge. These are like the ones in Total Overdose, but a lot more limited in scope. Instead of doing a vehicle mission every now and then, these are all point challenges. Some ask you to get a specific combo multiplier, others are about doing certain tricks. They take place in modified versions of the story stages, with the enemies replaced by guys in chicken suits. Why? I don’t know.

The game is competent, and a lot of fun. The mechanics work well, most of the time; the shooting is satisfying, the stages are packed with enemies and explosive barrels to shoot, each level is short and to the point, with no filler and the game is challenging in a way that will force you to play well if you want to beat some of the later levels.

The big downsides come in some of the finer details. The levels are short and sweet, but some of them have weird layouts and annoying platforming sections. Some of the challenges are either too specific, asking you to do trick shots with specific degrees of rotation, like a 270 headshot. This can be done with some tries, but it feels more like a chore than anything. Others task you with reaching a high combo multiplier in empty stages, and they turn into a test of patience rather than skill.

I rarely mention the story in these reviews, but this one’s interesting. Total Overdose wasn’t a serious game. It was full of dumb jokes and self-aware humor, but it was still kind of edgy. Chili Con Carnage goes fully into Looney Tunes territory. The game’s first cutscene is worth watching for how deranged it is. It’s like a Garry’s Mod shitpost. It perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the game.

To understand how this game works and why some of these things stink, you have to understand it deeper, or mas profundo, as they say.

Controls

Chili con Carnage is a PSP game. The PSP was a fine console, but it only had one analogue stick. That was fine for most games, but it’s not ideal for a third person shooter. Other shooters, like Coded Arms, used the stick for movement and the face buttons as an impromptu d-pad for aiming. Chili doesn’t do that. Movement and looking are both assigned to the one stick.

This works pretty well, since most of the time you’ll be diving. Jump in one direction, then use the stick to aim freely. You’ll forget you’re using tank controls. The levels are mostly linear, you can navigate them with straight lines, you won’t run into too many issues since you can quick-turn by double tapping X while standing, or double tap it while holding back to do a quick-turn dive. The controls do a good job of letting you navigate the world and take down bad guys, even if you don’t have the free-aim.

Most of the time, you’ll be letting the auto aim take control, but there are some instances where you have to shoot at helicopters or a fighter jet. With a different control scheme, this would be a no-brainer. You’d be able to aim anywhere while dodging, but with only one stick, things get complicated. You’ll need to dive, so you can start the slow-mo, and then you can auto aim. Problem is that, it’s not as consistent as it should be. There will be times where you jump and nothing happens. You just flop to the ground at normal speed, with all the grace of an overripe orange splattering on a sidewalk, unable to aim at the enemy helicopter.

You can aim freely, by holding down the circle button, but that means you can’t move. You’ll be stuck in the ground, trying to aim at something that is actively raining down rockets and gunfire at you, while you fiddle with the controls. It’s infuriating.

These enemy vehicles have areas you can lock on to. Sometimes. If you’re in range, have them in your targeting area and manage to get the slow-mo to activate when you dodge. It can feel like trying to roll sixes on four dice at once, but this is partly because of the controls, and the inconsistency is the other part. The controls are good, but sometimes the game doesn’t want to cooperate.

During the turret sections (because of course there are turret sections), the aiming feels off. It’s too quick, and the reticle goes off on its own adventures sometimes. There’s a lot to shoot at, too. These are busy and kinetic, especially for such a small screen. Since you’re aiming freely in these, they should have gotten rid of the auto targeting for these sections, but it’s still there, for some reason.

Inconsistency

Chili con Carne is a lot less stable than Total Overdose. It could be because I never had to play perfectly in Total Overdose, since that game is easy and the score requirements are low, and things just seemed to work. In Chili, when you’re trying to keep a combo going and suddenly the slow-mo stops working and you lose the chain, it’s a lot more noticeable.

The biggest issue that I keep harping on about is the slow-mo. 90% of the game is built around that, and if it doesn’t work, the game doesn’t work. It goes back to the controls; when you activate slow-mo, you aim freely while you’re in the air. If it doesn’t activate, you jump aiming at whatever you’re looking at. Sometimes, you’ll jump and the game doesn’t trigger the bullet time effect.

This seems like it’s tied to the distance to your target. If you’re too far, it won’t activate, which is dumb. If you’re too close, it won’t activate sometimes, which is even dumber. Most of the fights in the game take place in small rooms, at close range. There are tricks you can do which involve getting up close to a target. There are melee enemies that rush you, and you need to jump away from them or they’ll keep stun locking you.

There was one boss fight where this inconsistency was really shortening my telomeres. It’s a boss fight against a jet, and the thing is flying around, dumping missiles at you like they’re junk mail. If you’re familiar with planes, you’ll know they’re usually in the air, and this one was no exception. I had to dive around like an idiot, hoping the slow-mo triggered so I could aim upwards and shoot the jet. Seven out of ten times, it worked. The other three times where it didn’t, it made my blood pressure spike.

The slow-mo also seems to cut out at random. If you do it from too high, it might stop before you hit the ground, even if the fall wasn’t enough to trigger fall damage or death. You’ll be lining up the sickest 720 headshot, then you look down like Wile E. Coyote and remember that gravity exists and you slam into the ground in a puff of dust.

There were moments where I jumped three or four times in a row, with an enemy right in range, and the slow-mo didn’t trigger. Again, this could be because I was really trying for a gold medal, and I never did that in Total Overdose, but I don’t remember this being an issue.

The cursor sometimes has a mind of its own, too. In Total Overdose, I praised how the auto-target would keep track of enemies for you, while still letting you aim at explosives freely. Chili Con Carnage does things differently. The lock-on is a lot stronger, to compensate for the lack of free-aim, but sometimes it gets too zealous. There’s a button you can press to target explosives and props specifically, but Ramiro still shoots at whatever enemy is nearest to his crosshair at the moment. Sometimes you want to detonate a barrel behind someone, but end up shooting the guy instead. Not ideal. Sometimes the reticle locks on to enemies two counties away instead of the guy putting a gun to your head in front of you. These are annoying hiccups I can’t blame only on the controls. There’s some software nonsense here, too.

When everything works as it should, it’s beautiful. It’s smooth, intuitive, and it looks really cool. It’s just that, when it doesn’t work, that 10% of the time where the game stops paying attention and refuses to work, it’ll make you want to throw something. Which is terrible for a PSP game. Throwing a controller is one thing, sending an entire console across the room is a whole different story.

I have to restate that these problems were apparent because I was going for the high scores. When a game asks something of the player, when you really have to learn it, and play optimally, you can really put the systems to the test. Despite all this, Chili con Carnage does work, and it holds up when put under stress, but it does crack every now and then.

Scoring

In my review for Total Overdose, I put on my “shit nobody cares about enthusiast” shirt on to talk about the scoring. No one cares about scoring in general, and it didn’t matter in Total Overdose. It was so easy to get the gold medal score, you could do it on accident. The score was an unnecessary little bonus thing. It didn’t ask anything of you, there were no rewards for holding a combo throughout the entire stage. It was there as a half-baked curiosity for anyone interested, and no one was.

In Chili Con Carnage, the scoring has been revamped. The stages have been redesigned with combos in mind. There are enemies spaced so you can keep the combo going. Chickens wandering around you can shoot at for a quick refill. The combo power up now maxes your timer and freezes it for a good while, giving you more freedom to look for hidden goodies. Everything has been overhauled for a more refined, score-focused experience. It’s still shit nobody cares about, but at least the game tries to make you care.

The amount of points needed for each medal is a clear indication of this. Getting a bronze medal is easy, getting silver is tough, and getting gold is a true challenge for sweaty gamers who have studied the way of the pistola. Going from silver to gold is like going from middle school directly into writing a doctoral thesis.

Level two’s score rankings are like this: Bronze is 10,000 points. Easy to do if you just finish the level while killing dudes. Silver is 60,000. Doesn’t seem like much, even though it’s six times the previous threshold. Still doable. You don’t have to do a full combo, but you need to play well to get there. I have been practicing this level, retrying it for 56 minutes, the time it takes to listen to The Fat of the Land by The Prodigy, and coincidentally how long it took for me to get sick of that level. I did a full combo, playing as well as I could, and managed to get 161,054 points. 100,000 points over silver. Pretty good, right?

Except it’s not enough for a gold medal. You need 250,000 for gold. I was 88,946 points short of gold, with a stage-wide full combo, getting the score pick-ups and killing all the enemies I could find. I beat my previous record by around 50,000 points, and it still wasn’t enough. The difficulty varies from level to level, but still, these gold medal scores are nothing to scoff at. You’re going to need to practice each stage until your frijoles fall off.

The scoring system itself is counter-intuitive. This is an obscure game, so not many people have played it, and even fewer have posted anything about it, so information is scarce, but from what I’ve learned while playing, this system is a bit backwards.

Here’s a thought experiment: You’re playing Chili Con Carnage, and you walk into a room full of enemies. You want to take them out while being as stylish as possible. What do you do? You’re probably thinking you’d do something like run up a wall, then spin around, killing as many dudes as possible before you hit the ground, right?

That’s how a reasonable person would approach this. The game does it different. Killing two guys in one stunt gives you the points for the stunt kill, plus one more for the second kill. It doesn’t add a special bonus for being efficient. This means that, if you want to get the maximum amount of points possible, you’re going to have to do a cool stunt while killing each enemy individually. So you run into a warehouse full of banditos, and instead of dispatching them all in a glorious hail of bullets, you’ll be hopping around, taking them down one-by-one.

It’s a bizarre system, and it goes against your natural instincts. You’d think that being quick and efficient would count for something, but you’re punished for it by missing out on points. The score requirements are so high, that you need to maximize each kill, and there isn’t a bonus for time, so you can take as long as you want, as long as you don’t drop the combo.

It’s something I genuinely dislike about the scoring. It discourages cool things like taking down an entire room by shooting exploding barrels, or by using a rocket. In fact, explosives are a detriment to your score. For each guy you take out, you’re losing points. This limits your options in a way that stifles efficiency and creativity.

You’d think that stacking more adjectives on a move would make it more valuable, o algo, like organic food. A bar of chocolate is worth a dollar. An organic, fair-trade, responsibly sourced, single-origin, dolphin-safe bar of chocolate should be around $12 dollars, because it has way more adjectives. In Chili Con Carnage, your 360 wall bounce triple headshot Gringo Frenzy is worth a tiny bit more than the same thing on one guy. It makes no sense. That’s the kind of combo you find at Whole Foods, but they’re giving me Wal-Mart points.

This means Loco Moves are worthless, too. Loco Moves are special room-clearing attacks. You find power-ups as you play, and these can be activated for one of these special attacks. There are some scattered around the maps, and these are pre-set, but the ones you get from enemies are randomized. You can get stuff like a piñata bomb, a spin move that kills everyone around you, and two moves that summon strange men to fight on your behalf. With their description of “room-clearing”, I think you’ll start to see why they might not be very good for scoring.

In the previous game, Total Overdose, these were a resource you could store and use when you needed. You could keep two of each in your pocket. They made you invincible, and they were used to trivialize bosses, mostly. In Chili Con Carnage, you can only have one at a time, only one makes you invincible, and none of them are worth using if you’re going for score. They are a trap. If you activate one, you miss out on a ton of points. In my review for Total Overdose, I compared these to bombs in shmups, but in Chili, the comparison is even more appropriate. Using a bomb in a shmup usually has a scoring penalty, and now Chili has adopted that philosophy wholeheartedly.

I like the scoring overall, even with its weird quirks and drawbacks. I like that it forces you to play the game well, and optimize your routes for a full combo clear, and to get the most out of every kill. I don’t like how it penalizes the player for going for big multi-kills, and how it makes the Loco Moves completely worthless. The scoring decay is heavy, too. If you repeat moves, their point value decreases significantly, but it’s not like in other trick-based games like Pro Skater or SSX where the tricks recover their point value if you do other tricks in between. Here, they have a global point value per-stage, and it decreases with each use, with no way to refresh it.

I have to add a quick caveat here that this is all from my limited research. I tested this as best as I could, and this is what I could find. There isn’t any information out there about how the scoring works. There’s a full-combo playthrough on YouTube, and even that one doesn’t get the gold medals. If you know how the scoring works, and this information is incorrect, feel free to let me know and I’ll make the necessary changes.

Conclusion

I recommended Total Overdose, and said it’d be better if they changed a few things around. Made the scoring better, got rid of the open world, and such. Chili Con Carnage does all that, while still delivering the same gameplay. Sure, it’s not as smooth. The framerate is capped to 30, it doesn’t have free-aim, and there’s some issues with the screen size and the camera, but it’s still Total Overdose, but more concentrated. It was left to simmer and develop more complex flavors, like a good Chili should.

Running around, gunning bad hombres in slow-mo is still as fun as it ever was. The levels are good, even if some of them have layouts that you need to memorize, but once you get them down they flow pretty well and they’re packed with targets.

The selection of weapons is just alright. You’ll mostly be using the guns, as the throwables and explosives are a bit wonky. They never got around to fixing the grenades and molotovs. You still can’t throw them while diving, so they’re not that versatile, and with the way scoring works, you’re not going to want to use them to clear rooms. The melee weapons were completely removed. They were bad in the previous game, but they could have been reworked in this one, instead of just getting rid of them.

To conclude, I recommend Chili Con Carnage. It’s rough around the edges, but it’s still a great time. The limited controls work, and the frustrations that come with it are a lot less common than I made them out to be, but they’re still there, but they’re not bad enough to drag the whole thing down.

Be warned that this game is a lot shorter than Total Overdose. You can get through the game in around two hours if you just blast through the story, and skip the optional side missions. The game was meant to be short and replayable. You’re supposed to grind out the gold medals, even the devs said so.

In an interview with Gamasutra, Soren Lund, the game’s director, talks about his experience working on Chili Con Carnage and Total Overdose. On the subject of the game’s short length, he says:

We were too confident that players would “get” the game and our desire to make players perfect their score and combo-strings. Reading reviews and comments it’s quite obvious that the majority of players don’t have that mentality and would much rather prefer a “play once” game experience. Maybe it was something in our presentation of the levels or we didn’t make it obvious or desirable enough to increase your scores but the end result was that many players felt the game was too short.

You can read the full interview here. It’s full of great insights into this forgotten gem.

Wow, even the game’s director admits nobody gives a shit about the scoring. Well, I care. Everyone else is wrong.

Personally, I like this approach to making games. Short, dense games that are meant to be replayed over and over, where you get to know the mechanics and use them to their fullest. I think Chili Con Carnage manages to pull that off well. I had a great time going for the gold medals, even if I struggled a ton. Through all the frustration and improvised curses, I kept coming back for one more shot at that elusive gold.

You can’t really get Chili Con Carnage anywhere, except a physical copy for the PSP. If you want to try it, you’ll have to become a bandito and emulate it. Oh no! Muy malo! If you download the game that’s been off the market for almost 20 years, that belongs to a defunct studio, you might get in trouble with la policia. You have to be a good little muchacho and pay $99.99 to do things as God intended.

See you next time when I dig up another crusty old game you can’t even get anymore. In the meantime, go play some Chili Con Carnage. Vaya con Dios! AY AY AY AY AY!

If you want to check out a similar shooter that tries to do the stylish shooting scoring thing, but fumbles the bag, check out my review of Bulletstorm here.

El Scorcho!

Ay compadres! Bienvenidos! Today, we celebrate Cinco de Mayo (late) with Total Overdose, a game that’s 100% certifiably Mexican! Arriba!

Wait- what do you mean it was made in Denmark? Like the one in Europe? Are you sure it’s not Denmarko or something? No?

Well, now this whole thing’s just gonna come off as racist.

But what is Cinco de Mayo if not an American-made pseudo holiday that exists just to get drunk? It’s Saint Patrick’s day all over again, but with tequila instead of green beer. If that’s the case, then Total Overdose fits right in! See? I just turned it around and now it’s self-aware and post-modern instead of just racist!

Total Overdose might be about as Mexican as Nacho Libre, but much like that movie, it’s a ton of fun that I’d recommend to anyone. It takes the bullet time diving action of Max Payne, gives it a yellow filter, and ups the intensity. Its levels are shorter, there are more enemies, and all you have to do is blast them. It’s simple, it’s fun, it has a ton of flaws, but it’s still worth checking out.

Read on to find out why Total Overdose is muy caliente! Okay I’ll drop that gimmick now.

Gameplay

Total Overdose: A Gunslinger’s Tale in Mexico (2005), is a third person dive shooter. You know, like Max Payne, WET or Stranglehold. Those games where you dive around like a murderous dolphin, dual-wielding pistols in slow motion. You play as Ramiro Cruz, the early 2000s in human form. He’s out of prison working for the DEA, and he has to solve a case for them by murdering thousands of drug dealers in the most stylish way possible.

The game is straightforward. Each mission has you going to some location that’s full of criminals, and you go through blasting them. There is some attempt at variety, but those are relegated to the side activities, which you have to complete between some missions. At the end of a mission, you get rewards based on your score.

Going up against dozens of armed cartel members is a daunting task, but Cruz is well equipped to handle small armies. You have an arsenal of weapons available, from the basics like pistols, shotguns and rifles, to heavier arms like grenades and rocket launchers. There are also melee weapons. They don’t do much other than give you something more to scroll past while looking for something with ammo.

If your guns aren’t enough, you can whip out a Loco Move. These are super attacks that take out entire rooms of enemies, make you invincible, or summon strange men to fight alongside you. These are limited by stocks, so they act like bombs in a shoot-’em-up. They’re ridiculous and fun to use, and using them is practically required if you want to survive in hard mode. Doing a Loco Move sounds like something Taco Bell would do. Would you like to do a Loco Move and get sour cream on your chips, sir?

The game’s main gimmick is the aforementioned diving. With the push of a button, you can send Cruz into a dolphin dive, which triggers bullet time, and makes you harder to hit. This is essential when going up against angry firing squads. You can jump out from cover, shoot a few dudes, and survive. This is limited by a stamina bar, but it’s generous to the point that it might as well not be there.

There’s a very rudimentary scoring system. It’s similar to the one in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, where each trick has a point value that adds up, and a multiplier that increases with each trick. Every stunt you pull off in Total Overdose has a small point value associated with it, and each kill adds to the multiplier. Getting a high kill combo is the quickest way to a high score, which doesn’t really explore the game’s mechanics, and it doesn’t encourage skilled play. I’ll talk more about the scoring later.

Tacked on to all this is one of the most pointless and boring open worlds I’ve seen in a long time.

This might not sound like much on paper, but it works in practice. The game is simple, but it has enough quirks to keep it interesting. Its style system is a bit basic, but it does what it sets out to do, which is keep you alive while making you look cool. Same with the scoring system. Bare bones, but functional.

To understand some of the game’s missteps, we’ll have to take a closer look at it, starting with the combat.

Combat

The shooting is competent and functional. This isn’t a cover-based shooter, so you’re free to move around, and encouraged to do so. Enemies use hitscan weapons, but they’re inaccurate, and you can dodge them by moving around. The dive move also makes you harder to hit, letting you jump in and out of cover safely.

Unlike other games in this Max Payne-like subgenre, your aim is automatic. Whatever enemy your cursor is near, gets locked on to, and you always fire at that target. It’s made so you can always fire at someone while jumping around, without having to worry about aiming, but this isn’t something to worry about, at least on PC. You never have to aim at anything too precisely, and this sort of thing works on console without lock-on, as seen with Max Payne (even if it had generous bullet magnetism).

It reminds me of the older Grand Theft Auto games, like GTA3 and Vice City, before they switched to free-aim.

This self-imposed mechanical hurdle leads to an interesting system: head shots. Since you can’t freely aim, you can’t aim at someone’s head, so how do you solve that problem? By having a timing-based targeting system. You press the aim button and a reticle closes in on your target’s head. When it’s in the right spot, you shoot and it’s an automatic head shot. This is a neat mini game, which gives you a skill check while fighting, but it has a few wrinkles. Sometimes it doesn’t start when you press the aim button, and the timing for the head shot is weird. Sometimes it feels generous, like you have a half-second window to shoot the guy, but other times you’ll press it with the same timing only for the reticle to reset as if you failed.

Some guns can’t do this headshot, like the shotguns or machine guns. This leads to moments where I was pressing the aim button wondering why the target wasn’t showing up, only to realize I had switched to the spray-and-pray dual Uzis (which can still headshot if you jump at a guy’s head in a specific angle and height). You can head shot with the assault rifle, for some reason, even though it’s not a one shot kill like with the other guns.

Even with the weird head shot system, the combat works well. The auto targeting doesn’t get in the way, it’s smart enough to target enemies in your general area, but it still lets you shoot things you haven’t targeted, like explosive barrels. You can shoot at a guy, aim slightly to the right and hit an explosive barrel, but it won’t stop shooting the guy for anything else. The only downside being that the head shot system is a bit wonky sometimes.

There are also the aforementioned Loco Moves. You activate these like power ups, to gain temporary invincibility and take down enemies. There’s one where you throw an explosive piñata that lures enemies in before detonating, a golden gun that has six shots that kill anything (other than bosses) in one hit, two moves that summon invincible men to fight alongside you, and the tornado, where you spin around and shoot everywhere.

They’re useful. A little too useful sometimes. They’re limited by stocks, so you can’t use them all the time, but the game gives them out like Taco Bell gives out sauce packets. You’re guaranteed to have one on hand, unless you’re spamming them like a maniac. They’re necessary in hard difficulty, but in anything other than that, they’re just a neat luxury. The game’s never hard enough to where you need to use them wisely, if at all.

My personal favorite is the bull charge, which I didn’t mention. When you activate it, Cruz acts like a bull, and runs around, killing anyone he rams into. It looks dumb as hell, but it’s hilarious.

The Loco Moves come with their own janky downsides, too. You can’t use them while doing other stunts. You can’t dolphin dive out of a car and activate a tornado in mid-air for big style points. The other is that they have set activation times, with no way to cancel them. If you activate the bull charge, you’re stuck as an oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee. Which is to say, you’re stuck like that until it runs out. I think that’s what the kids call a humiliation ritual.

Then there’s El Mariachi. You take out two guitar cases with machine guns, like in the movie El Mariachi, and shoot until time runs out. This one leaves you stuck walking at a snail’s pace for a long time, which is bad, but its real use is to completely invalidate bosses.

The Loco Moves are funny, and useful, but they have a tendency to invalidate a lot of the game. They’re a bit too strong, and even though they’re limited by stocks, you can still get them easily. They’re never a resource you have to manage. Just press a button and wipe out an entire city block.

Style

The style is where the game shines and falters. Luckily, the good outweighs the bad, but the bad is still obvious. It’s like a fast food burger. It tastes good, but you can tell there’s something shady going on with the meat.

You’re encouraged to jump around. If you don’t, you won’t get any points, but more importantly, you’ll die. Jumping makes you harder to hit, gives you more accuracy while firing and gives you more time to shoot at someone uninterrupted. After the dive, you plop on the ground, but you recover quickly. You don’t slam the air out of your lungs like you do in Max Payne. It’s not a big commitment in Total Overdose.

You can also jump off walls. Dive next to a wall, and Cruz will run up it and flip, letting you shoot while in the air. This looks cool, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth. For starters, you need to be next to a wall to do it, and they can’t have anything like a low ceiling or an awning over them. If you try to run up them, you’ll knock your head on the way up and drop, losing rizz in the process. If it does work, it’s still not very useful. You barely jump off the wall, meaning you’re floating in mid-air next to it. Last, and certainly least, it locks your aim to a very narrow cone in front of you. If your target isn’t in that specific area, you can’t shoot them, even if you were locked on to someone before you started the jump.

The wall jump is a big, neon sign that highlights everything wrong with the style system, and other mechanics. It makes the auto-target look bad, since you can’t aim freely during the jump, and it ignores what you’re already locked on to. It’s a weird move, leaving you stuck in the air for a while after a contextual action, but there isn’t a way to smoothly transition into or out of it.

The lack of any way to go from one move to the next is the style system’s biggest flaw, along with the lack of moves as a secondary nitpick. You can’t boost off a wall and jump further, you’re stuck in the animation once it starts. You can’t naturally go into a wall run from a dive, you can’t dive over small walls that look like they could be hopped over.

There are melee weapons, but they don’t interact with the cool stunts at all. You can’t swing them while in mid-air, or do anything cool with them, you just hit people with them and they die.

Later on, Stranglehold would do something similar with a smoother movement system. You could run on railings, jump on chandeliers, roll on carts, do all sorts of crazy stuff. Sure, that game came out three years after Total Overdose, which doesn’t seem like much, but I think these little additions needed to be made. There were moments where I thought I could jump on something, or interact with the environment, and there wasn’t a way to do it. There could be more ways to get points, like sending an enemy flying with a grenade, then shooting them while they’re in the air.

I know I should judge a game on what it is, and not what it could be, but in the case of Total Overdose, what it could have been was obvious. It was right there! You can jump out of a moving car, blasting your guns like something out of an action movie, but you can’t do a simple drive-by. It’s stuff like that.

Scoring

The game rewards your kooky gringo madness with points. These points make you feel good when they go up, which is a reward by itself, but the game also gives you upgrades if you do well. There’s a global score, which is tracked throughout the game, rewarding you with small increments to your health, stamina and ammo capacity. The missions give you extra rewards if you hit their three score thresholds, which is ridiculously easy to do, and you gain extra health, lives and Loco Moves periodically if you’re getting a lot of points. This works fine, but this is where I put on my “shit nobody cares about enthusiast” shirt and explain to you why it could have been better.

Like I said a few paragraphs before, the game uses a score system that adds up your tricks, then multiplies them by the number of kills you chain together. Get a kill, and a timer starts ticking down. If it reaches zero, your combo ends and you cash out your points. If you get another kill, the timer resets. Simple, but easy to understand.

The problem I have with this is how easy it is to get the multiplier going. Every level throws dozens of armed goons at you, which is fun, but it also leaves you with multipliers of 20 and 30 after each room. This would be kind of okay, if the score requirements in each level weren’t so low. There isn’t a challenge mode, either. The score thresholds are the same across difficulties. This means you can get the gold medal score for a mission before the halfway point.

The game goes “Ay, muchacho! You truly are el gringo loco!”, and gives me some freebies, and all I did was throw a grenade into a car dealership full of drug mules.

The scoring system doesn’t ask much of the player. It doesn’t make you play the game optimally, or in risky ways. You just do what you were already doing, but maybe a little quicker to keep the combo going.

This is a personal nitpick, but the missions aren’t designed to keep a full chain going from start to end. If there’s a chaining system built around getting kills, I fully expect there to be a way to keep a combo going throughout the whole level. This is how chaining systems usually work, that’s how it is in Dodonpachi, Blue Revolver and- I can’t believe I’m praising the game- Gungrave GORE, as boring as the game is, its levels are designed around keeping your combo going, if you time things right. There isn’t a score bonus or recognition at the end if you do manage to full clear a stage, either.

To me, a good scoring system should push the player to play well. It should focus on the game’s core mechanics, and make you execute them perfectly. Total Overdose doesn’t do that. It has a rudimentary system that hints at something more under the hood, but there isn’t much there.

Open World

Total Overdose is an open world game. Technically. There is a city you can explore freely. You can steal cars like in GTA, drive around and jump off stuff. Shoot pedestrians, blow stuff up, all that good stuff.

Why is it technically an open world? Because there is a map you can move around in. It’s a world, and it’s open. It’s also completely empty. There’s nothing to do in it. This isn’t the typical Ubisoft checklist of icons. It’s a vast, open wasteland of cars and aimless pedestrians existing on sidewalks. It’s the mexican backrooms. Los cuartos traseros.

The only thing there is to do is collect floating point icons. They’re just there. You don’t even have to do anything cool to get them. They’re floating around, on rooftops, in alleys, in a dumpster. They look like leftovers from some Tony Hawk mission, but you don’t have a skateboard to glide across the city with. You’re stuck running around on your stubby little legs. You can’t do parkour, or any cool platforming. Despite this game’s aspirations of acrobatics, Cruz is still just a guy, and he can’t do much other than hop around, subject to gravity like the rest of us non-DEA agents.

You can find two kinds of mini games, where enemies start spawning and you have to kill them, but they’re both the same. The only difference is that one uses guns and the other forces you to use melee. Other than that they’re the same thing. You hit mindless zombie enemies for a few seconds and get some points.

There aren’t any other mini-games to do, no cool stuff to find, no shops to get new gear, no interesting NPC interactions, no jobs. There’s nothing. You can commit crimes and blow stuff up, but guess what? There aren’t even any cops to stop you! You can become an extinction-level event and you won’t even hear a siren. Where’s the fun of shooting an innocent taco stand with a rocket launcher if there isn’t anyone trying to kill you for it?

The game itself doesn’t have any faith in its own open world. You don’t have to drive around to find missions. Once a mission is unlocked, you can open the menu and select it, and the mission starts. Every level takes place in its own dedicated instance, only the side missions take place in the city itself. You can play the entire game without ever interacting with the open world aspect once. I like that part, at least. If I were forced to drive around the city and find my way around, I might have actually died of boredom. The whole thing could have been cut, and the game wouldn’t suffer for it.

Conclusion

Total Overdose is a game that does a lot with very little. It’s not too complex, and it has some areas that could be improved with a little effort, but it’s still solid. For all the whining and nitpicking I did, I still enjoyed my time with it. In fact, I have all those complaints because I like the game. I played it a lot, and saw the vision, and how it could have been taken from good to great.

Even if the trick system is a little lackluster, it’s still fun to mess around with. Running into a room full of bad guys, jumping across in slow-motion and blasting them all in the face is consistently entertaining.

It has to do with how the missions are designed. The game feels like an arcade game that had some unfortunate stuff tacked-on. Each mission is its own stage, with tightly packed rooms full of enemies coming at you from all directions. There’s always something to shoot at. Some missions can get a bit annoying, when they ask you to wander around to find poorly signposted objectives, but those are the exception. Most of them are short, high-impact bursts of carnage. Same with the side missions, which take only one or two minutes each. None of this driving to and from missions, or walkie-talky sections where you’re trying to keep pace with an NPC like in other open world games. You start the mission, shoot a couple dozen bad hombres, and get out, all while listening to what can only be described as “Mexican-American Nu metal”.

In short, I recommend Total Overdose. If you want something fun, simple and high-octane, give it a try. Especially if you don’t mind a little jank here and there. Sure, it could have been much, much better. If only there were a game that combined the stunts, style and madness of Max Payne, Stranglehold, Just Cause and Total Overdose, with a fleshed-out scoring system, it’d be perfect, but for what it’s worth, Total Overdose is still worth your time.

You can get Total Overdose on GOG For $6 USD. It goes on sale often, too.

Now if you’ll excuse me, all these Taco Bell Mucho Reflujo Quesapipas are doing a Spicy Move all over my esophagus. Until next time!

Year Two-ah!

It’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve been at this thing for two whole years now. Today, I’ll look back on what I’ve done this year, and some thoughts on posting stuff online.

Sophomore Year

The year started off with the Street Fighter 6 series, where I discussed each character in the game’s base roster and my experience getting them to Diamond rank. It was a lot of fun to make, even if it took me a while to get all the characters ranked. I saw a clear improvement in my gameplay from the start, where it took me days to get to diamond, to the end of the challenge, where I could do it in a few hours. I got some feedback on those that there was a friend of a friend who really liked this series. I might do one for Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, but don’t expect it anytime soon. I need to get the DLC characters done, too, but I’m not about to spend $90 on them. Same with Granblue. Expect an angry article on fighting game monetization at some point.

The thing I liked the most out of the Street Fighter series were the character illustrations. I had a lot of fun making them, and I think they turned out great. Using the Blanka chan dolls for The Creature came from an inside joke with a friend. Loved drawing those dumb goobers. Also managed to convince another friend of mine to help with the banners, and he did the ones for Ryu and Guile. He also did the header image for the Top 100 Games of All Time post, which is why it looks good for once.

There were some more reviews. Uppers was fun. Reviewing it was fun, not the actual game. A terrible brawler where you collect panties. At some point I did 5 of the raddest 90s mascots, and I said I’d do another part, and I haven’t. I still plan on doing it. Sunset Overdrive was one I had in mind for a long time. I think that game’s underrated. It got a bad rap thanks to its admittedly awful marketing, but it’s definitely worth a try.

I reviewed Bioshock, and I didn’t like it. I thought I’d get more pushback for that one. I wasn’t baiting or expecting a reaction; I genuinely don’t like the game. It’s been something that has been in the back of my mind for a while now, and the review was a good opportunity to play it one last time and decide if I really do hate it, and I did, and managed to get all my thoughts down in writing. I held off on posting it because I thought it would be received poorly, but it went over okay. Mostly because no one reads this stuff, and the rest probably determined I was too stupid to engage with. Then I reviewed Bioshock Infinite, and was even more disappointed.

Later on in the year I started the “My Favorite Game from Every Year I’ve Been Alive” series. It was originally supposed to be a quick and easy way for me to hop on a social media trend, but like all my other reviews, it quickly got bloated and ran away from me, turning into an epic 8 part series.

It was an eye-opening experience. I remembered a lot of inconsequential games I played as a kid, and saw how many all-time classics I missed. A concerning number of them, actually. Genuinely embarrassing. I’ll be using that massive list as reference for stuff to play in the future.

At the end of the year I did the 12 days of Christmas, around the theme of “I Want Shorter Games With Worse Graphics”. Twelve games, all picked because they’re short and low budget. It was supposed to be a quick series of short reviews to have something for people to read during Christmas while I did other things, but again, it got out of hand and I ended up writing twelve articles with their own little illustration. It was a lot of fun to do, at least. I really like the illustrations. The one for Kill the Crows is a personal favorite.

In January I wrote about Highguard, the next big thing. I played the game and gave it a fair shot, but it was offensively boring. I wrote the whole review in past-tense, as a joke on how I thought the game would be shut down in a few months. It didn’t last that long. It lasted longer than Concord, at least. I went in and added an extra section to the article after Highguard shut down, re-stating how much I didn’t like the game. I said all I wanted to say there, but again, I want to say how bad the game was. It’s been a long time since I played something so devoid of fun and entertainment. I didn’t want to explore any of its puddle-deep systems. I didn’t want to engage with any of its mismatched, copy-pasted mechanics. It’s the most boardroom game ever made.

The last big review I want to mention is Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk. It’s the biggest review I’ve ever made, clocking in at 14,700 words. A mammoth manifesto on a game no one cares about. It’s a huge, convoluted Dungeon RPG with dozens of systems and a whole lot of bullshit. I spent over 70 hours playing the game, and then several days writing the review, and my conclusion was: I don’t know if I like this game. I liked it enough to beat it, and had fun with it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone because it kinda stinks, but some would find it interesting, but it’s also ass. Which some people would like. My Dungeon Crawler bias was in full effect here.

That wraps up the notable reviews from last year. It was just one year, but some of these reviews seem like they were from a lifetime ago. Even the Bioshock ones, which were huge and time-consuming, I feel like I wrote those back in the first year, or even earlier. Which doesn’t make sense since this blog isn’t that old, but that’s how time works. It simultaneously flies by and when you think about what you did, stuff from a few months ago seems like it’s in the distant past.

I thought about going back and reading through the year’s reviews, to see if I changed my mind on some things, but that didn’t work. For one, I’m stubborn and don’t change my mind easily, and two, I write my reviews when I’m at least 99.9% sure that’s how I feel about the game, and double-check while I’m writing, so I don’t change my opinion on a game much after I review it. Maybe I will in five or six years, but not right now.

I thought I could expand on some reviews, but I mentioned everything I wanted to mention. I would go back and think “maybe I didn’t talk about this part of the game”, but I did, and even the jokes I was planning to make were already in the review. So all I got from my revisits was that I agree with myself. Narcissistic, I know, but that’s what this once a year navel-gazing session is for.

Those were the most notable reviews... that I posted on Load Last Save, at least. The biggest ones were just at the end of year two.

Clash of Clowns

I collaborated with fellow videogame funny man Big Picture Mode++ on The Clash of Clowns, the biggest collaboration on gaming Substack. Three weeks, six terrible games from the seventh generation going head-to-head. It had jokes, audience participation and too many chest-high walls to count.

It was the most fun I had writing all year. I got to work with Big Picture Mode, a fantastic writer, and we spent time remembering games that were probably best left forgotten. I had to really lock in to make sure I put out something good, and not disappoint BPM’s readers.

Go read the whole thing here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I got the privilege to play classics such as Kane & Lynch and Quantum Theory. You see, this is why I haven’t played a lot of classic games. I could be playing Shadow of the Colossus, or Persona, but instead I’m over here playing Red Faction: Armageddon… for the second time.

It was well worth it. The way I see it, I had to suffer through three crappy games, but the end reward was three new BPM++ articles. If that’s what it takes, I’ll gladly play through some slop.

It goes without saying, you should also subscribe to Big Picture Mode++.

Thoughts on writing and blog stuff

This year was good in terms of growth. Got a lot more subscribers than last year, articles got four views instead of zero, got a few more comments. Lines went up, and that gives me dopamine.

I think I could get more readers if I could advertise somehow, but like I said in last year’s roundup, I don’t know of any way to do that. Reddit is full of ads, but if only for the corporate overlords. If you try to advertise your tiny, hand-crafted works, you’ll get shot. I hate Reddit with a burning passion, but that’s a topic for another time. Twitter isn’t any better. It’s full of bots and people who might as well be bots. You can’t get any reach there. You can’t advertise on the Internet unless you’re some multinational conglomerate. Then you can shove your stinking ads in every visible corner of a user’s screen.

What are my options? Hope the Substack algorithm picks me up, but that ain’t happening. has been asking Substack to make a gaming section for ages now, and they haven’t listened. If they’re ignoring gaming’s most persistent advocate, that means they won’t add a gaming section any time soon, so the gaming writers will have to awkwardly shuffle around in the technology section, overshadowed by the thousands of AI tech bro speculation blogs on here.

We don’t have a gaming section, but at least he got prediction market integration! Can I get a Hell yeah for that? No? Not even a pity cheer? Nah. This stinks.

Even with all that lack of advertising, I still love writing. I like writing reviews on the games I play. It helps me think about them more critically, and get more enjoyment out of them. I like the process of writing, too. Getting my thoughts down in writing, arranging them so it makes sense to others, adding dumb jokes to keep it from being too dry. I also like re-reading them from time to time. It’s a hobby, which is why I’ll keep doing it despite clickthrough rates and other buzzwords. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to get more, though. Writing gives me dopamine, but when the line goes up it adds a little on top.

Shoutouts

In last year’s anniversary post, I spent a long time talking about my influences and other content creators I like. I’ll do a very quick summary of the ones you already know, and add some new ones.

• The Electric Underground: A great youtuber that talks about games, focusing on their gameplay and mechanics.

• Gaming Brit Show: Great in-depth reviews, similar to Electric Underground. Mechanics-first.

• Seer: Funny videogame man. I like his lightning fast delivery and dumb dick jokes.

Now for some gaming substacks you should read.

I already mentioned Big Picture Mode++, but I’ll repeat myself. Go read BPM++. has great articles, hilarious jokes, clever turns of phrase, all that good stuff. I found him through his article on how Skate is for posers. His post on why you shouldn’t talk about gaming when you visit your family during the holidays is one of those things I’ll mentally reference forever. That second one reads like something you’d find on Cracked.com back in the day, when it was still good.

You should also read blog I Play Games So You Don’t Have To. I first heard of it from his article on games he can’t get anyone else to play. He has a skill for finding the crustiest games, ones with less than 10 Steam reviews, and gets you interested in them. His Next Fest posts are great for finding these kinds of games. Every game gets a punchy, concise explanation that hooks you in with a few sentences, while still being detailed. If you think the games I review here, like Uppers or Labyrinth of Refrain, are too mainstream, go check him out.

This last one is both a recommendation and a missing person report: . A videogame funny man with well-written articles that tell some interesting stories. Love their stuff, but they haven’t posted since August of 2025. RIP.

I talked about Learn to Counter in my first anniversary, but the blog doesn’t exist anymore. It’s completely gone. Two RIPs in one article. Damn.

Conclusion

That was a quick overview of what I’ve written over the past year. Good times, fun stuff, even if substack’s algorithm doesn’t want to shove me in people’s faces. It doesn’t do a good job of showing me other writers, either, unless they’re celebrities. I don’t want to read their posts, substack. Stop recommending me Charlie XCX. I only know her as the annoying one from the song Fancy, and that had Iggy Azalea on it. I’m sure she has something to say, but I don’t want to read it. I’m here to read about videogames, hopefully with dick jokes.

I’m extremely grateful to all my readers. It brings me great joy to know there are people out there who like my ramblings. I try to make every article I post better than the last to keep giving you all a great reading experience. Thanks for sticking with me, and here’s to more terrible gaming takes, and unfunny jokes.

Also that Tencent merger didn’t pan-out. I got fired, and I’m back as an independent (AKA: Broke).

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.