Salt & Sanctuary is an interesting 2D Souls-like with an artstyle and overall control feeling that really turned me off. It’s a bit of a bummer, because it also felt like a metroidvania in some capacity and the skill tree/item systems were really speaking out to me. Ultimately it was a bit too “floaty” and unprecise, while at the same time requiring too much precision, for me to stick with.
Space Pirates And Zombie is a space strategy game about forming factions, upgrading your ship, fighting and conquering sectors while managing a zombie threat. I remembered having fun with the first game, so I went into this one wondering how it would go. I was overall pleasantly surprised, with the move to 3D being more or less only aesthetic and the core loop of the game still being pretty fun, but I had some issues with progression, both of your ship and of the story, so I didn’t stay with it until the end.
Hollow Knight is a quintessential metroidvania, oozing with its gloomy charm and strange cast of character, this nail-wielding bug-starring platformer is a game I really enjoyed. A bunch of smart systems working together with familiar tropes and design concepts make for a really well-playing responsive action game with a ton of places to discover and enemies to fight. If you haven’t played Hollow Knight, I really recommend it!
I’ve never been the biggest Elder Scrolls fan but some stuff stuck with me with the other versions of these games; The sense of exploration, character building and the story. The combat always felt a bit too random for me, so I went with the ranged options - or just trying to diplomacy my way out of most situations. Elder Scroll Blades on mobile devices is the distilled essence of walking along linear maps to try and accomplish cookie cutter quests while doing a ton of combat. Not my cup of tea, even if as far as mobile first person games go, this wasn’t terrible.
Steamworld Dig 2 might be a known quantity, but it’s a great game regardless. I almost knew exactly what I was getting into when I booted the game up - and besides a few interesting ideas thrown in, I was exactly right - but that sweet loop of exploring mines, finding materials to sell in order to buy upgrades to allow you to do the same thing over again was just the thing I needed. I don’t exactly remember the original Steamworld Dig, but this one is just better in every point and a great game you probably should play.
Velocity 2X is a space shooter/platformer where you move through a space drama by running and shooting in a few environments, alternating between the two different gameplays. You mainly do this to complete four objectives per level - beat the level quickly enough, get enough crystals/survivors and get a high enough score, all of this feeds into an XP system that ultimately just allows you access to more levels. I first tried playing this on a keyboard and really couldn’t, but even with a controller this game suffers from the ‘rub your belly and pat your head at once’ syndrome, there’s just so much to do that it’s quite difficult to do everything correctly and it quickly becomes frustrating. I tried to give it a chance, but at some point the game introduced one mechanic too many, and I stopped.
Cuphead is a neat little platformer featuring creative and colorful boss fights that reminds me of Contra and other run-and-gun games of old. You go through a world map - that looks like the one in Commander Keen 4: Keen Dreams - and fight through stages and bosses, getting coins and buying powerups, getting new weapons and uncovering special moves in order to save your soul from the devil. I've played through most of the game in co-op, and even if it became a bit frustrating because of the difficulty, I would still recommend it. Just know what you're getting into!
FURI is an amazing boss rush game where you use a small but useful array of skills in order to defeat a varied array of bosses, each with their own gimmicks and patterns. The main drive of this game are the bosses themselves, with small tidbits of story being drip-fed between fights. I had a wonderful time with this game and I managed to beat most of it as intended - although I dropped the difficulty on the last boss after three hours of fighting seemed like too much.
Broforce is a really neat shooter where you run around battlefields, shooting an extreme number of enemies with various characters - each equipped with signature weapons and special abilities - while dodging bullets, explosions and other hazards. I really enjoyed my time with it, although I didn't get all the references it makes - characters all have 'Bro' puns, like Rambro and the Brosen One. The chaos is a bit overwhelming at times, but the game is pretty forgiving with its checkpoints and the difficulty isn't that high, so I could have a good time with the whole game.
Dead Rising 3 felt way more arcade-y to me compared to what I remember from the second game; You had to die and restart from the beginning in order to improve your chances on your subsequent runs. Dead Rising 3 is nothing of the sort, I've managed to play a good chunk of the game without ever dying - although there were some tight spots here and there - and besides a few bosses that took way more punishment than regular zombie hordes, the game was pretty easily in general. I still had fun with it, going from objective to objective, building weird weapons and exploring around the streets of Los Perdidos.
Castle In The Darkness is mighty tough and loves to make references to various NES games. It's a metroidvania where you play a knight going around variously difficult maps, killing enemies, getting gold and finding items. There are traps everywhere and the checkpoints are too few. If the game had allowed some kind of easier mode, I probably would've stuck with it until the very end, unfortunately the high difficulty combined with some frustration towards certain systems made me stop after a few days of playing.
Infested Planet is a neat little tower defense/action game where you control a bunch of soldiers and you need to complete objectives that most often than not involve destroying alien bases and taking them over while hordes of enemies move toward you. I had a good time with it, even if I'm not a fan of the upgrade system/general and that gameplay often felt confusing.
Dragon Hills is an 'endless runner' type of game where you go through some hills with the titular dragon, collect cash doing so and use that cash in order to unlock upgrades that will help you do better the next time around. Clunky controls and uninteresting upgrades made this game something I didn't want to spend more time on than I had to. It's not terrible but it's also not very fun, so you can pass this one.
While I gave a 4/5 to Hotline Miami and enjoyed the puzzle-esque ultra-violent psycho trip, the second game didn't catch my attention as much and I found it much more difficult and frustrating than the first one. It is still the same shooter/puzzle, pitting you against horde of enemies and you always need to kill them all to proceed. With a weird story and a large cast of character this game could've been pretty amazing and I really tried to like it, but it just didn't compare.
Lego Marvel Super Heroes isn’t very good. The last lego game I’ve played was the first Star Wars one and that was a while ago. While I think this game has some charm with its characters and references and while I think somee of the core gameplay is quite solid, there was too much of a confusing mess when I tried playing this one and I stopped pretty quickly to go spend my time somewhere else.
State of Decay is a vast and complex game full of systems and things to do. I feel like the game is too open and maybe a bit too complex, leaving you with a short list of actions you can take and a ton of systems to observe and care about as some kind of real-time clock decays the world around you - I think?
Tomb Raider is a third person shooter/exploration game with intensely constructed set pieces that bear no impact or gravitas on actual gameplay. A reboot of the playstation hit where you played wisecracking Lara Croft, shooting tigers and raiding tombs, you now play a much somber character that needs to save her friends and escape an island by mowing down a bunch of guys and raiding a tomb here and there. I've never played Uncharted, but I feel that while the gameplay might be similar, the tone isn't.
Nimble Quest is similar to the 'snake' game, you need to move a line that grows longer without touching anything, nor the walls, nor the other parts of your snake. In this case, you have a line of heroes that walk alongside arena-style maps where you have to defeat enough enemies before you can proceed to the next level. You start with one hero from a list of fifteen heroes or so (albeit they are but all locked at the beginning) each with their attack types and armor values and then you acquire more heroes by finding them randomly in the levels.
You drop your line down the sea, you navigate carefully between fishes, you either hit fishes or go to the maximum depth you can go, then your line comes back up, during which you try to get as many fishes as you can, then they pop out of the sea and you hate to shoot them with guns to get money. You use that money to buy upgrades and you go to other maps with different fishes by catching different species. This is ridiculous fishing, and it's pretty good, almost perfect in the way that small games can be with their simplicity and amazing fun factor.
Does Hotline Miami really need to be that gory and messed up in a graphical and auditive sense? Not really, I'm quite sure it would've worked as any other kind of game with different aesthetics and another theme but the weirdness of it mixed with great gameplay systems, customization and an interesting story that reminds me of the Killer 7 and the No More Heroes of this world; A story weird enough you want to know more, enough to play through any bad gameplay there could be. Luckily for HM, there's not much bad in here.