A few years ago, I stopped (with rare exceptions) playing games on my iPhone. The App Store had become swamped with F2P games with IAPs and other abbreviations, and even “traditional” games had been drugged with mechanisms designed to only allow play if you keep buying gold, or gems, or whatever for ridiculous prices. “Sonic had run out of jumps! Buy 10 jumps for £2.99?”. No. And yet here is Nintendo, perhaps the last bastion of proper games, releasing a …
I do love the SteamWorld series of games. And the world they’re all set in. Of course I was going to get this, although my interest was slightly tempered by the fact it’s the first SteamWorld game not made by the core staff of the previous ones. Would that be OK? I’m pleased to reveal, that yes. The style, humour and world have all come out unscathed. The references to other events in the series – particularly SteamWorld Dig 2 …
I know this was highly lauded on release, but I’ll be honest – I’ve never been a massive fan of the game. Or the Shinobi/Shadow Dancer series, actually. I don’t hate them or anything, but I certainly wouldn’t hold them up as fantastic examples of the best the 8 and 16 bit consoles had to offer like a lot of people seem to. See also Ninja Gaiden, actually. [Edit: Oh, it seems I like the 3D port of Shinobi III …
I do wonder sometimes what it is that makes me decide to play certain games. I’d cast a rough eye over reviews of Biomutant around the time it came out and it seemed to be an average open world adventure/explorey game, so ignored it. It’s now on PS+ (or possibly PS++ or PS+++: It’s hard to tell these days) and I downloaded it for reasons unknown, then started to play it. After picking the fur colours for my… rat? Meerkat? …
And that’s that done again. This time, I played through picking Claude, the guy on the yellow team, as he sits somewhere between the “eradicate all the Church and their allies for no reason” of Edelgard and “defend the Church at all costs” of Dimitri. He wants shut of the Church (they are too influential, or something), but doesn’t really want to be at war and certainly doesn’t want to destroy the blue army. Of course, it just means more …
In which you run a launderette, put washing on, tumble dry, collect it up, and pick up rubbish. Only! In the back room of the launderette is a mostly forgotten and unloved video game arcade with a handful of machines! So when you make laundry money, you buy more arcade machines, and then they make you money, and then they start to make so much money that, actually, the laundrette starts to just get in the way so you oust …
After the reports of how terrible the Avengers game was, and how in this game you only get to play (directly) as Star-Lord, Guardians of the Galaxy went right off my radar. Then I saw some positive reviews, and a lot of people were saying that actually, it was great. And they were right. But first, some downers. You can only play as Star-Lord, with the rest of the team effectively acting as special attacks. Every level is a linear …
Just in case I was misremembering that this was one of the good linear Castlevania games, and my thoughts on Vampire’s Kiss were based on warped memories, I decided to give this a go. It’s on the Switch Online Mega Drive collection too so it wasn’t difficult figuring out a way of running it. And, I was completely right. It is so much better than Vampire’s Kiss it makes that game look like a dodgy c-tier “Dracula’s Castle” knock-off and …
My first impressions of Car Quest were, it has to be said, less than favourable. It had, as I mentioned on Twitter after my first hour’s play, a definite air of “My First Unity” game about it, not least because of the sparse, blocky environment that just screams “I can’t draw but I can sellotape geometric shapes together”. You, a car, don’t fit within this style either thematically or graphically, and it feels like a placeholder that was never replaced …
A short point and click adventure game, with lovely pixel graphics and a few simple puzzles. There’s not a great deal to tell you about it, really, otherwise I’ll spoil everything. But I will tell you this: there’s something wrong in the library. If you’ve played these sorts of games before, then there’s nothing taxing here. I’ve just completed Thimbleweed Park, remember, so this was like easy mode compared to that. It looks and plays beautifully though, so it’s well …
