I’m going to die. I don’t care about that. I care about what it means. It happens. I consider myself decent at video games, and I rarely get particularly angry with games. It’s part of my job. Sure, it might be a bit annoying to get stunlocked and killed, but there’s no reason to get
Before I begin this review in any sort of proper context, let me just say how I am deeply and personally wounded by the fact that this title is not Educator’s Creed. I thought of that joke when I was first told that this was a thing to be reviewed and I am, in hindsight,
The thing that you have to understand about Actraiser is that it’s a classic game that is at the same time so unique it’s never really had a proper sequel. (Yes, I’m aware there’s an Actraiser 2, I’ll get to that.) The game is already a blend of two different genres in a melange of
This is a weird review for me to be writing. Not in the sense that it has to be a negative one or anything like that, but in the sense that this is the first time that I’ve reviewed a game I previously previewed. As soon as it was clear we would be getting a
Here’s the hidden secret about Metallic Child: It is perhaps best understood not by what it claims to be on the cover but by a series of otherwise ornate references to other games. At a glance, this game is a roguelite, and indeed that’s what it claims to be right on the cover when you
Dice Legacy is a strange game. This is not inherently a bad thing. I’m generally of the mind that strange but distinctive games have a decided edge in the now-crowded indie game space, and I’m inherently very fond of any game that’s trying to do something very different. And a roguelike city-builder strategy game is
There’s a certain je ne sais quoi that accompanies a JRPG that a lot of games try and fail to emulate. It feels reductive to say that these games have to come from Japan, of course, but for every game that manages to feel authentic to its JRPG aspirations despite not originating in the country
It’s hard to review major DLC for the Assassin’s Creed games. I noted this back when I was reviewing the first piece of major post-launch DLC for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, since on a simple level you have the fundamental problem of taking a very big game and giving you more stuff to do in it.
So, the first of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are out. And it is impossible to review the whole product just yet, because the whole product isn’t available right now. We haven’t yet played the Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy VI remasters. They’re simply not available to be experienced yet. At the same time,
My review copy of Chernobylite arrived on my front doorstep as an ammo box wrapped in bubble wrap, taped haphazardly and bearing half-ripped labels. That last part probably has more to do with the fact that it was shipped from Poland, but it felt somehow appropriate to be tearing at the bubble wrap only to
So here it is, the sequel. It’s not exactly a mystery that The World Ends With You became a cult hit on its release, and with good cause. It wasn’t just that it had a very different setting than normal, setting itself in the beating heart of a stylized version of Shibuya with a cast
After playing the current early access build for Lost Epic, I have mixed feelings. Or perhaps more accurately, my feelings about the game varied a lot depending on whether I was at a part of the game that felt particularly polished or one that still felt like it had most of the game’s rough edges
I was intrigued as soon as I saw Hot Wheels Unleashed announced, because it hit on one of the great things I love about video games: the potential for fun arcade racers that sit in the space between aggressive simulation and kart-based games. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some kart games, and aggressive
For whatever reason, I wind up reviewing and previewing a lot of roguelikes here. I don’t know exactly why, especially when the line between a good roguelike and a mediocre one can be so thin. See, the thing is that it’s really easy to make a game wherein you start out underpowered and have to
The problem of expanding a game in the Assassin’s Creed series, at this point, is that usually the base game is already so fully stuffed with stuff that it’s difficult to really see obvious places to go. Of the criticisms you could offer for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, a lack of content was not one of
The thing about Yoko Taro games is that there’s nothing else quite like them. And that is, to a certain extent, the problem with Yoko Taro games, because among the things they traditionally haven’t been is very good. Drakengard was the first Taro game I played, and that was a janky mess that got widely
Sometimes, it feels almost wrong to really criticize a game for what it’s trying to be, even though there’s absolutely stuff to be critical about with regards to its design. For example, take the time-honored tradition of the mobile gacha game. It’s clear that there are some major issues with these games in terms of
Let me tell you, there’s nothing that gets me to give something side-eye faster than when it doesn’t want to be up-front about what it’s trying to sell me. Maybe a given store is trying to tell me moldy hot dogs. I don’t want moldy hot dogs. No one should ever be trying to sell
There’s a very delicate balance to be struck when making a game that expects the player to walk in and die on a regular basis. Roguelikes and their kissing cousins, roguelites, have kind of exploded in popularity in the past few years. At the core level, they’re pretty easy games to make. You give players
For a while there, it really looked like we were done with side-scrolling shoot-em-ups for good. I say that without any particular joy at that fact, obviously, because I really like this genre. But it seemed like the spark had gone out, the genre had been pushed as far as it could go, and without
