Останні рецензії користувача ManlyMeatMan

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Tower of Guns is a roguelike first-person shooter where you fight your way through increasingly difficult floors of enemies to reach the top of the tower.

Combat shares a lot of similarities with many old-school shooters: fast-paced movement, assorted power-ups, and a lack of reloading. It’s been slightly polished and refined, but it still plays about the same. I enjoyed the old-school style at first, but it did get a bit repetitive after a while, especially because of the game’s roguelike aspects, the most notable of which is the upgrade system. While playing, you will come across minor stat boosts, which can give you more health, damage, speed, and so on. Technically, this qualifies the game as a roguelike, but just barely. Outside of a handful of upgrades, each playthrough will mostly be shaped by the weapon and trait you choose when starting the game. There’s a decent variety of guns and they are fun to try out, but once you settle on a favorite, every run will play out the same way. It lacks the addictive “one more run” quality of better roguelikes. Once I beat it, I played a few more times with new guns, but I had already seen everything the game had to offer.

Easily my favorite part of Tower of Guns is the enemy design. Most are actually stationary turrets, almost as if you are playing a tower defense game from the first-person view of an attacker. Bosses are typically robotic behemoths and are generally well-designed, with the final boss being my personal favorite. Among standard enemies, even the smallest ones are taller than you, really making it feel like you are an insignificant person in a monstrous deathtrap. The huge, wide-open levels give you a sense of the sheer scale of the enemies you are up against. It’s a completely different vibe than most first-person roguelikes, and it works well here.

Unfortunately, while enemies may have a great theme as a group, they are repetitive individually. Even with all the different turrets you’ll face, they look and feel roughly the same. It’s not terrible, but it further exacerbates the game’s lack of replayability.

Graphically, everything is heavily stylized, almost like a cartoon or comic book. The color palette is a bit drab, but it fits the setting, even if it doesn’t look great. All in all, it looks like a mid-range indie game and that’s enough for me.

The soundtrack isn’t one of my favorites, but it does a good job setting a different tone for each chapter/area. On the other hand, the overall sound design is a bit of a missed opportunity. Most of the sound effects are fine, but it could have really elevated the atmosphere with some better audio.

This might be the only game I’ve played with a toggle for turning off the plot. It’s an odd decision, but it makes a lot of sense for Tower of Guns. The vast majority of players are here for the Unreal Tournament-esque gameplay, not a gripping narrative. Many games that focus on gameplay over story still include a narrative out of obligation, but it typically detracts from the experience. A story toggle gives the player the ability to tailor their experience to whatever they want. If they want some goofy dialogue to break up the monotony, they can have it with the touch of a button, but they also have the option to focus exclusively on the gameplay and turn off the story if they know they won’t care about it. With the dialogue enabled, a random storyline is selected and each level reveals a small piece of the plot through a text pop-up. It’s certainly an unusual idea to have a different narrative for each playthrough, but it’s only set dressing. The stories are, by necessity, surface-level; losing a run means the plot gets cut short, so it makes sense for the developer to have ~20 small stories instead of a few big ones.

While Tower of Guns is a solid blend of retro shooter and roguelike, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. It shines when you focus on the combat, but the roguelike mechanics leave a lot to be desired. The setting and premise are surprisingly unique, especially in a genre that’s oversaturated as it is. Overall, I’d strongly recommend ToG to fast-paced shooter fans, but roguelike fans might be dissatisfied with the lack of meaningful randomization and thus, replayability.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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BloodRayne is a third-person hack-and-slash game where you play as Rayne, a Dhampir (half-vampire, half-human) working for the mysterious Brimstone Society. Your job is to prevent supernatural creatures from taking over the world, while seemingly keeping it a secret from the general public.

The graphics are pretty bad by today’s standards, even with the additional polish from the Terminal Cut, but it’s passable for such an old game. Most environments are barren and levels can start to run together after a while. Granted, the three major chapters are fairly distinct in visual style, but I would have liked some more variety between levels within the same chapter. It’s tough to stay interested in the environment when it’s your tenth time running through a swamp.

Nothing about the soundtrack stood out to me while playing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This isn’t the type of game where players expect a unique score full of interesting tracks; straightforward background tracks will do the job just fine. Surprisingly, the most memorable sounds come from the horribly mixed effects. When Rayne jumps on someone’s back to suck their blood, you can’t hear anything over the sound of her slurping. On the other hand, sometimes characters speak so quietly that you have to strain to hear them. This brings up the other major audio issue, the voice acting.

No offense intended towards the voice actors, but there are some dismal performances. It could be due to inexperienced actors, rushed production, or bad direction, but regardless of the reason, it’s impossible to take any character seriously. Rayne speaks with no emotion, yet her lines are full of quips and one-liners. Some villains go in the opposite direction and have cartoonish voices that clash with Rayne’s during cutscenes.

BloodRayne's story is split into three parts that take place at different times and in unique settings. There’s an overarching narrative, but each piece still has a self-contained storyline. None of these mini-stories appealed to me because they tended to drag on. You could sum up the entire plot in only a few scenes, but there’s a bunch of combat sections breaking it up. The overall story is equally weak, but I don’t expect many people to be playing it for the plot. I tend to expect a good story if the gameplay is lacking, but here all I got was some nonsensical narrative full of bizarre twists and reveals. Still, I actually started to appreciate how bad the story was, so it can still be a satisfying experience if you don’t take it too seriously.

Awkward cutscenes abound, adding a whole new level of terrible to the game’s attempts at quality storytelling. Rayne is the epitome of edgy protagonists from the 2000s. Regardless of the situation, she’s always ready with a quip to let you know she’s a badass with a devil-may-care attitude.

If my critiques stopped here, I would probably enjoy BloodRayne. The story is charmingly bad and if the gameplay was decent, this might actually be a strong recommendation. Instead, the combat is a frustrating mess that almost singlehandedly ruins the game.

It sounds cool to jump around stabbing and shooting enemies, but in practice, it feels like you are always fighting with the controls. Even switching to a controller, which shouldn’t be necessary, didn’t help much. Guns lock on to enemies, which can be annoying when you are stuck shooting an enemy you don’t want to. Melee combat is stiff and doesn’t work well with the movement system. Draining someone’s blood seems to be the most polished part of combat, but it’s nothing special.

There’s some visual variety in enemies, but ultimately, they are all generic humanoids. The main distinction is that some have guns and others don’t, but neither of them makes for an interesting fight.

Bosses are a little different, in that they have more thought put into their designs and they all have specific gimmicks that change up how you fight them. Unfortunately, many of these fights are made trivial by using Blood Rage, a move that boosts your damage to insane levels, allowing you to kill most bosses before the buff ends. The main exception is the final boss. You have to kill it in a specific way, preventing you from using Blood Rage. It’s easily the worst fight in the game and almost made me leave it unfinished. The only reason I didn’t quit was that I encountered a bug that killed the boss in a few seconds, after dozens of unsuccessful attempts.

Performance-wise, it runs how you would expect a mediocre port of an old game to run; passable, but generally unimpressive. On the other hand, bugs and glitches are everywhere. It’s unclear whether all these issues were present on release, or if some were introduced by the new port, but whatever the case, they are clearly noticeable. They range from minor glitches, like getting stuck on the edge of an object’s hitbox, to game-changing bugs, such as the one that kills the final boss for you. Some people might play the whole game without facing a major issue, but it’s all up to blind luck.

There are some fantastic elements in BloodRayne, but not enough to carry it through its weaker moments. I loved the cheesy, ridiculous dialogue, yet I could never look past the combat. It always felt like I was suffering through boring gameplay just to get to the next cutscene. Because of that, I can’t recommend this game unless you know you won’t mind the gameplay. For the average player, I suspect it’ll be too much of a slog to enjoy.

Minor performance issues and significant bugs running on: AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 1070

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Striving for Light is an action roguelike with hack-and-slash combat and an infinitely expanding skill tree. It’s a novel idea for a roguelike but given the game’s Early Access status, there’s a lot of room to grow.

The handpainted art style is rough around the edges but has an indie charm. Everything looks a little odd or goofy, but not outright bad. Sometimes the motion blur is a bit much, but my only major complaint is the lack of visibility caused by certain skill upgrades. You can add fire and explosions to your attacks, but when you combine it with the AoE size increase, you get massive orange circles covering half the screen.

You begin each run with a ranged and melee weapon that you can switch between during combat. There’s a stamina system, but it isn’t shared between ranged and melee, so your basic strategy will involve using up all of your mana on ranged attacks, then switching to melee to use endurance while your mana recharges, continuing this loop as need be. It’s not the most complex system ever designed, but it adds a tactical flair to the combat, at least early on. Later, as you acquire more upgrades and focus on a certain playstyle, you’ll probably have enough mana/endurance to only use one attack type, unless you go for a jack-of-all-trades build.

In typical roguelike fashion, your goal is to clear floors of enemies while collecting items and upgrades. Each floor has a boss fight, but it’s only an upgraded version of a standard enemy instead of a unique monster. There are a handful of different floor types, but the only noticeable differences are the color palette and the environmental hazards. Once you make it far enough, even these minor changes go away. Every floor is full of each hazard type, crammed into a big pile. They become your biggest threat because they are the only enemy you can’t kill.

Instead of a standard skill tree, your potential upgrades will be laid out in a randomized web for you to choose from, generating new branches as you level up. This means min-maxing your character won’t be much of an option, as you’ll be forced to occasionally take an upgrade you don’t want, simply because you have no good choices left. If Striving for Light was an ARPG, I would find it annoying, but the randomness works well for a roguelike trying to encourage the player to use different skill builds on each run. Unfortunately, while I like the overall concept, the skill web is mostly comprised of simple stat bonuses. There are a handful of more impactful skills, but they are distributed sparingly across the web. The result is that your character gets better in terms of basic stats like damage and speed, but your tactics don’t change much.

Build options are quite limited, with only ranged attacks and melee attacks being viable options. Technically, you can go for a companion-based build, but their poor AI coupled with their low damage output means that they are always inferior to upgrading your own stats. Going for a standard skill build also results in quickly becoming far too powerful. It got to the point where I could kill every enemy on the floor with a single attack (The developer seems to have made a change to fix this post-release, so it may not be relevant anymore).

Similar to many modern roguelikes, there’s a meta-progression system where you can unlock weapons and skills that will show up next time you play. Yet even with everything unlocked, multiple runs feel the same. You only have a few possible builds and they aren’t that different from each other. Most of the weapons fail to stand out as a unique tool for a distinct playstyle. Everything just feels so “samey” that it kills any desire to play again, the cornerstone of any successful roguelike.

Complaining about performance in an Early Access title isn’t entirely fair, but it's still important to note. It runs fine at first but clearly isn’t designed for long playthroughs. After your skill web gets large enough, it begins to lag badly, almost to the point of unusability. It also ran abysmally once I was deep into a run, but this was prior to a bug fix, so I can’t confirm that this issue remains.

I know it seems like I’m just hating on this indie game to be mean, but really I’m trying to give the developer honest feedback. I like the core framework and I think it has a lot of potential, but in its current state, it has too many flaws to recommend it.

Moderate performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Wind Peaks is a hidden object game designed like a Where’s Waldo/Wally book.

Wind Peaks is part of a small niche in the hidden object genre, popularized by the game Hidden Folks. The basic gameplay loop involves searching intricate scenery for people or objects, usually accompanied by some sort of hint system in case you get stuck. It’s casual, best played when you don’t want to get invested in a game that requires your full attention.

Unfortunately, it’s so short that you could probably beat it in an hour without much trouble. I enjoyed it while it lasted, but you run out of content so quickly that it feels more like a long demo than a full game. Hidden Folks is slightly cheaper while offering more levels and environmental variety. The graphics are black and white, plus there’s no story, but the content-per-dollar is much higher and the game is more enjoyable overall.

The art looks great at first but wears out its welcome halfway through the game. By that point, I had begun to realize that every environment was going to be a forest with most of the scenes copied and pasted from previous levels. It’s okay to do that sparingly, but it’s so common that it’s impossible to ignore. The addition of color gives it a small boost, but it’s only a consolation prize.

I thought the soundtrack was decent, especially with the ambient forest sounds complementing it. It’s nothing game-changing, but it gives the whole experience a chill, relaxed vibe.

There’s no voice acting or even dialogue in Wind Peaks, so the narrative is told purely through silent cut scenes, almost like a mime performance. To compensate, the developers have kept the storyline simple, although it’s still vague at certain points. The main issue is that as soon as the story starts coming together, the game ends. It’s like a prologue for the real story.

I mostly enjoyed my time with Wind Peaks, but I also feel that the price doesn’t correlate with the amount of fun you’ll get from it. It’s an exceptionally short game and I would have been disappointed if I had paid full price for it. I would recommend it if you’ve played Hidden Folks and loved it, but even then, only at a steep discount.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Glass Masquerade is a jigsaw puzzle game with a stained glass aesthetic.

The game’s visual design is one of its biggest strengths. The art looks great in most puzzles, with only a handful of outliers that are a little too cluttered. There’s also a surprising amount of variety in the subject of each stained glass window. It not only helps avoid repetitive visuals but also improves the puzzle design.

Music takes a backseat, but it still pulls its weight. Your focus is on the puzzle, and the soundtrack knows it. You won’t find experimental pieces of music that grab your attention or great tracks that you want to listen to over and over again, but you will get top-quality background music that sets the tone of the game.

Mechanically, it's simply a series of pretty jigsaw puzzles. I typically don’t enjoy this type of game because of its simplicity, yet I constantly found myself in a “one more puzzle” loop. I suspect it’s because the game doesn’t show you what the puzzle looks like until you solve it. Instead, every window is based on a different country, which slightly hints towards what the subject might be without explicitly revealing it.

If Glass Masquerade had any negative, it would be the controls. It’s a simple drag-and-drop mouse scheme, but it has a slightly janky feel to it sometimes. Even so, this is barely a problem, and it didn’t significantly affect my enjoyment.

Glass Masquerade is defined by its simplicity. There aren’t any deep mechanics, and there’s no engaging story. Instead, you get a virtual jigsaw puzzle. It won’t have mass appeal, but for those intrigued by the premise, it’s worth an hour or two of your time.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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Borderlands 3 is a first-person looter shooter that tries to build off of previous entries in the franchise but winds up being the worst of the series.

When I first launched Borderlands 3, I played on an Nvidia 1070 GPU that struggled to run it on high settings. It ran okay, once I lowered the graphics, but it looked terrible. I didn’t play it again until I had a new GPU, a 3070. With this, I was able to run it on max settings and was shocked to find out the graphics don’t look much better. It drops ~60 fps for a marginal increase in graphical quality. While playing, I experienced occasional stutters and frame drops, inexcusable for a AAA game running on top-of-the-line hardware.

The general look of Borderlands 3 is a garish mess of oversaturated colors and excessive visual effects. After playing for only a short time, it hurt to look at all the flashing lights and bright colors. I had to turn the brightness down to its lowest setting just to play normally, although more subdued sections then became too dark. The texture quality isn’t awful, but it only looks marginally better than previous games in the series. Borderlands 2 is seven years older, yet I prefer its graphics to BL3 due to the more muted color scheme.

One area where BL3 is strong, relative to the rest of the game, is its sound. The music is a bit forgettable, but it does its job of setting the tone of each encounter. Similarly, the sound design is acceptable. It’s not exceptional, but there isn’t much to criticize either. None of the general sound effects stick out; they all play their part in creating a decent, albeit generic, atmosphere. Unfortunately, the potential for a solid atmosphere is ruined by the obnoxious voice acting. Don’t get me wrong, the cast list is full of top-tier actors, but their performances are hindered by what I can only assume is dreadful direction. Every character is voiced with the same style and cadence. When combined with the abysmal dialogue, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Like its predecessors, it struggles with storytelling and writing. The plot is entirely forgettable and has no business being so prominent. It’s only there to push the player from one setting to another, yet the studio seems to think it’s one of the game’s main strengths. Maybe it plays better to a teenage audience, but I doubt it. Most of each characters’ dialogue sounds like a 40-year-old man trying to be hip, with what’s left consisting of dry exposition. The “random” humor is so omnipresent that it becomes the game's worst quality. Before this, only a handful of characters fit this awful archetype, but BL3 ups the ante by making most NPCs unbearably annoying.

Going into BL3, I expected the combat to be roughly the same as the earlier games but polished up a little bit, maybe with a few new bells and whistles. Initially, my expectations were met: you have the same basic looter-shooter, action RPG gunplay, but with refined movement and some extra weapon variety. The issues only begin to crop up when you hit the mid-game. Enemies start having a little too much health around this time, and it only gets worse the farther your progress. The one caveat is that I managed to find an extremely overpowered gun halfway through the game that was still my best weapon at the end. Unsurprisingly, it was the one I had the most fun with because it felt useful, especially when other guns struggled to kill anyone. This problem was made more apparent by the piles of weapons that enemies drop. Every fight ends with five minutes of sifting through garbage to find the best gun, only to discover that it deals 1% more damage than what you already have. It’s a mind-numbing experience that had me wishing the game would end soon.

NPC behavior is an issue that isn’t as major as the gunplay but is still a clear negative. The vast majority of enemies have no strategy to their movements, and worst of all, there’s no variety. Everyone behaves the same, regardless of the situation they’re in. If foot soldiers can’t find cover, they simply stand in the open until you kill them. It results in bland, unengaging combat in a game that is sorely lacking anything that can hold your attention.

Once again, BL3 fails to meaningfully improve on a long-running weakness in the franchise; this time, it’s the characters’ skill trees. They’ve always been rudimentary, typically amounting to small numerical bonuses that boost different statistics but rarely give your character a unique playstyle. The issue is that, no matter which tree you invest in, the results are underwhelming. You can get some bonus damage, some movement speed, some extra shields, but it’s all just numbers. You get a few new abilities, but most of your skill points go towards simple stat boosts. Leveling feels impactful at first, but your character’s playstyle has been established after only a few levels, and it won’t change much going forward.

As you make your way through BL3, you explore a decent variety of locales. They don’t feel unique in terms of gameplay, but each has a different style that sets them apart, typically regarding the mission’s plot points. One location might be a wide-open wasteland where you have to drive everywhere while fighting bandits, while another could be a small swamp full of alien creatures. These are all nice touches that would complement a better game, but here, they are just a reminder of unrealized potential.

Surprisingly, one of the most frustrating parts of BL3 is the map. For some godforsaken reason, Gearbox decided that it should be divided into layers based on elevation, and that every layer should be displayed at once. The result is a 3D map shown from a top-down perspective. It’s utterly incomprehensible, most egregiously in the ship that serves as your base of operations. That area is shockingly difficult to navigate, thanks to having four levels that overlap on the main map.

When you aren’t fighting the world map, you’re completing missions and progressing through the story. Unfortunately, even these core elements aren’t safe from major annoyances. The most significant issue is the heavy usage of mandatory vehicular combat sections. The driving mechanics have been unchanged since the first game, yet for some reason, Gearbox thinks this is the best driving has ever felt in Borderlands. First off, the control scheme is so awful that it creates pointless difficulties when trying to pull off driving maneuvers that would be simple in most other games. Secondly, vehicles have low health and only heal if you don’t take any damage for five to ten seconds. This leads to combat sequences that require you to hide after every fight, throwing off the flow of the mission. All in all, driving adds nothing but tedium to BL3, and it’s appalling that it shows up as often as it does.

BL3 simply isn’t fun. It has the potential to be good, but it’s crippled by problems that are too numerous for a game of this size and budget. It was a chore to finish, and I struggle to compliment any aspect of it. The story was laughable, the gameplay was bland, and the visuals were lackluster. When you factor in the AAA price tag of $60, it’s a tough pill to swallow, given that so many better games are available for half that price. Maybe I could recommend it to huge fans of the franchise, but even then, it feels like the worst entry in the series. For the average action RPG fan, this is an obvious skip.

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Moderate performance issues with: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070

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DiRT 4 is a simulation/arcade racing game with a strong focus on rallying. You can choose between a hardcore rally simulation, a straightforward arcade racer, or a blend of the two. Career mode allows you to spend your race winnings on new cars, staff, and facilities. It’s a fairly customizable experience that has the potential to appeal to a range of players.

DiRT 4 does a commendable job introducing new players to the concept of both rallying and general driving principles. The tutorial is split up into dozens of different training modules that each cover a specific skill you will need to drive well. There are also overview sessions that only focus on the most crucial gameplay mechanics, in case you are impatient and just want to get to the action. It’s clear that a lot of care went into this part of the game, and it translates into an impressively smooth learning experience.

Once you have a handle on how to play, you can get started in either simulation or arcade mode. From there, you can customize the difficulty if you want a middle ground, but I found that the game was most enjoyable in arcade mode. It’s still challenging, but it removes some of the more brutal realism that I didn’t care for, as well as the micro-management, such as tuning your car for each course.

For those unfamiliar with rallying, it’s a type of race that typically takes place on a winding course with large bumps, U-turns, etc. that are intended to make it difficult to drive based on sight alone. Each driver is accompanied by a co-driver/navigator who calls out every turn and hazard as they go through the course. In DiRT, these notes appear on-screen and guide you through the race. Every track is randomly generated from a set of predefined sections. It gives some variety to the relatively small list of courses, but ultimately, not enough to keep me interested long-term. After playing for a while, you begin to recognize the individual segments that make up each location, and the illusion is broken.

The progression in career mode is basic but still fun as a side mechanic. You can upgrade your cars with higher quality parts, buy new cars, upgrade your team facilities and sign sponsorship deals. The biggest issue with career mode is that normal rally races are roughly 50% of the game’s content. The rest is filled out with rallycross, landrush, and historical rally. Historical rally is fine but doesn’t deserve to be its own race type: it’s the same exact thing as regular rally, the cars are just older. Rallycross and landrush, however, were clearly an afterthought during development. They’re boring races that play like a standard racing game, rather than the much more polished and interesting rally mode. None of it’s egregiously bad, but it’s still only filler.

Graphically, DiRT 4 is excellent. My expectations were high given that it’s a modern AAA racing game, and I think they were certainly met, if not exceeded. Everything is beautiful and detailed without being a huge drain on performance. The cars look fantastic and the progressive damage, if you drive poorly, is a nice touch. Each course has its own environment, be it a snowy mountain, forested hills, or a scenic highway. To add even more variety, you can choose the time of day or what weather you want to drive in. Night driving during a torrential downpour is a completely different experience than driving at dawn on a clear day, and bad weather is especially fun because of all the added visual effects, making races significantly more challenging. Playing in first-person is surprisingly immersive, largely due to the superb graphics.

The exceptional visuals are complemented by the great sound design. The audio is crisp, and the cars sound powerful without being over-the-top. My favorite detail is the ability to hear the damage to your car, whether it be an issue with braking, accelerating, gear shifting, and so on. On the other hand, the soundtrack is underwhelming; it’s mostly comprised of generic radio hits, feeling more like listening to a pop station than a video game score. This would typically be a negative, but it’s tolerable because it doesn’t play during races, only being used as background music when navigating menus and managing your career.

DiRT 4 is a heavily customizable racing game that allows a wide range of players to enjoy it. The rally mechanics are engaging, the tracks are challenging and the career management is a nice break from racing. Even for a AAA title, the production value is high. The biggest issue is the repetitive gameplay and lack of course variety. It’s fun while it lasts, but it’s not something I would revisit in the future. I’d recommend it to most racing fans, but those that only play hardcore sims or extremely casual arcade racers might be disappointed with its balanced approach to difficulty.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 1070

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Lovely Planet is a challenging first-person shooter with platforming elements. It’s set in a colorful, light-hearted world in contrast with its brutally difficult gameplay. Each map is designed around a handful of relatively simple mechanics, yet the fast pace and unforgiving combat make the various stage hazards more demanding than you would expect. There’s a focus on speedrunning and challenges after defeating a level for the first time, offering solid replay value for the right player. There isn’t any story or even individual characters, but given the type of game the developer was trying to make, it makes sense to sacrifice those elements.

Lovely Planet has a distinctive art style that blends minimalist graphics with a soft, pastel color palette. The result is a game that appears to be a relaxed, casual experience. Enemies look like basic polyhedrons with faces rather than monsters or armed men; even your own weapon has a whimsical design. The world itself reinforces this aesthetic with its bright, cheerful setting.

The soundtrack complements the visuals nicely with upbeat music that sounds like it could show up in a Mario game. It didn’t blow me away, and it’s not a score that will stick with me, but it’s simple and does its job well. Once you begin playing and realize that Lovely Planet is much more difficult than it seems, the music almost feels like it’s mocking you with such happy background music as you die over and over again. It’s a fun dichotomy that heightens as you progress through harder and harder levels.

The meat of Lovely Planet is its gameplay. It plays somewhat like a precision platformer, except the focus is on difficult shots rather than jumps. It heavily utilizes platforming tropes but with a shooting-based twist. A platformer will often have traps set up for the player to catch them for not paying enough attention. In Lovely Planet, this takes the form of enemies hiding around corners, allies being caught in the crossfire, or events happening off-screen that you need to react to based on sound. It ventures into unfair territory, but it’s more fun than frustrating due to how short most levels are. When combined with all of the assorted enemies and hazards, you get a complex game that relies more on memorization than reaction time.

Mechanically, the shooting and platforming are exceptionally polished and allow you to flow through each stage smoothly. The developer aptly describes it as “Gun Ballet”; you run and jump through the world while shooting enemies, but it’s mostly about choreographing your actions rather than reacting in the moment. You practice numerous times to perfect your run, and when you finally master a level, you know exactly what to expect and how you should respond. Pulling off a flawless run feels amazing, and that’s where the magic comes from. Even when the game can be annoying, it’s only heightening the payoff when you beat your previous time, complete a challenge, or even just finish a stage for the first time.

Lovely Planet falls into a particular genre and won’t appeal to most people. It’s a blend of 3D platforming and first-person shooting that works well but is also extremely challenging, especially near the end of the game. Furthermore, it’s barebones with a complete lack of story and dialogue, so those that enjoy something more than just polished gameplay mechanics will probably be disappointed. As for me, I enjoy it for what it is—a heavily choreographed speedrunning game with a cute aesthetic.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 1070

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Grim Fandango is an old-school adventure game that follows Manny Calavera and his journey through the Land of the Dead on his way to the Land of Eternal Rest. While traveling, he encounters a variety of people and becomes embroiled in a nefarious underworld conspiracy.

When playing Grim Fandango, the first thing I noticed was the fantastic production value, especially for a game from 1998. The backgrounds are detailed, the voice acting is superb, and the writing is excellent. It feels grand and expansive, even though it’s a relatively modest production.

Graphically, the remaster has significantly overhauled the blurry textures of the original. This doesn’t apply to cutscenes, which were already animated fairly well. Notably, you can switch between the original and remastered graphics in real-time, letting you truly appreciate the improvements. Thankfully, nothing was visually redesigned, so the graphics get a fresh coat of paint while the art style remains intact.

The game’s aesthetic pulls inspiration from the Mexican holiday, Día de Los Muertos, Aztec mythology, as well as classic noir films. It’s an unusual combination that doesn’t seem like it would work, but it somehow manages to blend together seamlessly. The noir elements also add a sinister side to an otherwise cheery vision of the afterlife.

The other side of Grim Fandango‘s excellent presentation is sound. Both the soundtrack and voice acting are superb and complement the title’s atmosphere beautifully. The score is primarily jazz with a small amount of Mexican folk music worked in. It fits the setting perfectly and does a great job setting the tone for each scene. It can get repetitive if you are stuck on a puzzle and have to wander around as the music loops, but even then, the tracks are still enjoyable.

The sound design is generally solid, aside from two notable problems. The first is that the sound mixing is occasionally horrendous. It’s rare, but when it happens, it’s extremely noticeable. You’ll be in the middle of a normal conversation and then hear a line or sound effect that is way louder than the rest of the audio, sometimes covering up plot-related dialogue. The second is the usage of looped dialogue that gets irritating after only a few listens. If you have to stay in a room to solve a puzzle, you might hear Glottis obnoxiously imitate a car engine a dozen times. Overall though, these issues are relatively mild and didn’t have a huge impact on my enjoyment of the game.

As for the voice acting, it’s amazing how high the production value is. This could have easily been the cast of a high-budget animated film. The voice acting is good enough that someone who doesn’t understand English would still comprehend the mood of a scene; it’s a perfect example of video game voice acting done right. Some characters are a little too annoying, but it has more to do with their writing than the voice actors doing a bad job.

The writers of Grim Fandango did an exceptional job balancing dialogue between important plot moments and interesting filler. Conversations avoid the common video game problem of being so focused on exposition that they feel unnatural. Sure, talking to another character still drives the majority of the plot, and you can usually guess which dialogue option is the most important one, but the variety and quality of conversation topics make you want to hear the filler dialogue anyway.

A large cast of characters in a game typically results in shallow, one-dimensional caricatures, but in Grim Fandango, most are written with a fair amount of depth and characterization. Even those that initially seem like one-off jokes often get more development as the story progresses. It’s a welcome reprieve from interacting with characters whose sole reason for existence is to deliver exposition. It isn’t wholly immune to this issue as a point-and-click adventure game, but it occurs relatively rarely, given the genre’s track record.

The overall narrative is steeped in noir tropes, so don’t expect many unique story beats. Yet, despite its formulaic plot, it still manages to be a fun adventure. The experience is a bit like reading a decent Sherlock Holmes novel; you know the basic story structure ahead of time, but you enjoy it for what it is.

Exploring the world of Grim Fandango is a joy until you have to deal with the puzzles. The problem with them is that some require gymnastic leaps in logic that the average player would never figure out in a reasonable time frame. Specifically, certain puzzles require you to overhear a line of dialogue to hint at the solution. Others involve time-consuming trial and error. Before I was even halfway done with the game, it had become a slog of puzzles that were often too clever to be enjoyable for me. Thankfully, I came across uhs-hints.com, which had a great hint-based walkthrough for Grim Fandango. It gives hints one at a time, so it’s perfect for when you only need a push in the right direction. For me, this fixed the worst part of the gameplay, the frustratingly difficult puzzles. On the other hand, if you love old-school adventure games, you probably won’t need a walkthrough, as the puzzle difficulty is on par with other genre classics.

When you aren’t solving cryptic point-and-click puzzles, you’ll be wandering around talking to everyone you meet. This is where the game shines. You learn about the world and gain insight into different characters’ backstories and motivations while working your way to the next location. Some parts of the world have overly long transitional animations, which quickly add up if you have to backtrack. When combined with the handful of annoying puzzles, Grim Fandango can waste your time on a relatively minor part of the game. The payoff was great, but the journey there was sometimes tedious.

Grim Fandango feels dated when it comes to puzzle design, but the vast majority of the game has aged exceptionally well. Overall, the gameplay is underwhelming, but the writing and voice acting do most of the heavy lifting. It has a bit of a learning curve for players that aren’t familiar with classic adventure games, but it’s still manageable. I’d recommend it to anyone that’s looking for a quality story with high production values, as long as they don’t mind working through mediocre puzzles on the way there.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 1070

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Sunblaze is a precision platformer with a cute art style and brutal difficulty. Most levels are designed to challenge your platforming abilities while also giving you a small puzzle to solve.

Sunblaze's difficult gameplay differs from its bright, happy aesthetic. It’s a nice dichotomy but nothing exceptionally unique. The bloody deaths of your character contrast with the colorful style of a teenage girl, but it never goes anywhere interesting. Although the hardcore platformer genre is one that typically focuses almost entirely on gameplay, it’s still a missed opportunity to do something unique with the visuals.

Quality-wise, the graphics are great thanks to solid animations and various locations that each have their own theme. The art direction is stylistically consistent but still diverges when it comes to the design of each chapter’s levels.

Sunblaze's music is fine. Nothing stuck out to me as an amazing track or something that would grab my attention, but I doubt that was the goal. The music keeps the game lively while allowing you to focus on the platforming; in a different genre, this could be a negative, but here it works well.

The title clearly models itself after games like Celeste and Super Meat Boy. It uses a movement system vaguely similar to Celeste, as well as using a pixel art style, but it isn’t a direct copy. Super Meat Boy‘s excessive difficulty and intricate level design is on display in Sunblaze, but thanks to the vastly different platforming styles, the game feels more unique than it normally would. Emphasizing puzzle elements in its stage design is another fun departure from its two main influences.

Every level, excluding some of the early ones that try to teach you how to play, has a small puzzle to solve. Generally, these are pretty easy, often consisting of a falling platform you need to save for the end or an unusual pattern you need to follow. It never drifts into puzzle game territory, but it’s enough to make you think. To go along with this, each chapter features new stage designs, so even if you don’t enjoy a certain type of platforming mechanic, the next chapter will throw it out and give you something fresh. This makes each chapter very hit or miss. For example, one set of levels uses platforms that need to be attacked in order to make them move. Initially, it’s only used to linearly traverse the stage, but in later ones, it’s used as a puzzle mechanic where you need to move platforms in the correct order to win. It’s an excellent use of basic platforming mechanics to create interesting puzzles, but it’s disappointing when this theme is thrown out and replaced by an underwhelming fireball-based theme that allows you to fly through levels with clunky controls as long as you keep dodging waterfalls. Overall though, the fire chapter is the only one that stands out as a significant downgrade; the rest are enjoyable with a good sense of progression in complexity.

Sunblaze's difficulty is another standout feature, but for a different reason than you might expect. Most platformers don’t have a way of making the game easier or harder, so it’s almost impossible for casual and hardcore fans to enjoy the same one. For Sunblaze, this is removed in favor of a variable system with a huge range of customization options. Zen Mode is the most relaxed experience, where levels have actually been redesigned to be easier. Some are outright removed, but you can still play a good portion of the game without much of a challenge. This is excellent for players that are either inexperienced with precision platformers or simply don’t like them. At the default difficulty, stages vary between basic ones that only exist to introduce new mechanics and complex ones intended to challenge your puzzle-solving abilities and your platforming skills. You can also enable certain cheats if you dislike specific gameplay elements. You can give yourself invincibility, extra jumps or dashes, etc. For fans of brutal platformers, Hard Mode can be unlocked by collecting a handful of cubes in each chapter. These levels are the counterpart to Zen Mode in that they are redesigns of existing ones to make them more challenging. After beating the game, you also unlock the Lost Chapter, full of levels that didn’t make the final cut for whatever reason. Quality is somewhat lesser for these, but they’re only intended to be a behind-the-scenes bonus rather than a full-fledged chapter.

The story of Sunblaze is one of its weakest elements. It’s written to be a sweet narrative about a loving father-daughter relationship, but it’s generic and bland. Maybe I would connect with it more if I was a young girl, but as an adult male, it comes off as rather corny. The humor is also a miss for me, with most of the jokes sounding like an adult pretending to be a teenager. The writing rarely takes itself seriously, so it’s hard to get invested in what amounts to a series of jokes. Thankfully, it’s not a major focus and only shows up a few times each chapter, so players only interested in gameplay shouldn’t mind it.

Sunblaze isn’t a ground-breaking platformer that will influence the genre for years to come, but it’s still a very well-executed game that achieves what it sets out to do. It allows players to choose between a masochistic challenge and a simple, relaxed experience. It’s easy to recommend to a wide range of platforming fans because it’s not only a great game; it’s also an accessible one.

No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 1070

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