Recent reviews by Neurotoxin

This is one of those times where I’m ecstatic that I took a chance on a game I knew nothing about!

Despite loving Endgame of Devil, I’d almost written off Magibrick as a similar Luck be a Landlord-like with a similar pixel art style but that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality Magibrick is a brilliant roguelike deckbuilder melded with board game-like mechanics in the vein of Reversi (Othello) & Go. With a deck of creatures at your disposal (unlockable & upgradable with the metagame currency earned during runs), the player is tasked with outmaneuvering the opponent to cover the majority of the board with their color panels/bricks before a certain number of turns elapses. Your deck of creature cards each have various ranges & patterns of bricks they are able to lay alongside particular effects that can influence the state of the board & your score as well as a mana cost equivalent to their scoring potential.

The strategy enters when the enemy also has a gamut of cards at their disposal & both you & the opponent are capable of destroying bricks that overlap one another essentially nullifying bricks that count towards score at the expense of not being able to claim as many panels as might’ve been earned if an unoccupied area of the board was targeted. Should you use your Mammoth’s range of panels to clear away a large portion of your enemy’s bricks to cut away their score or place it where the empty spaces available will boost your score? Focus on building a safe area of the board so you can place down the valuable piece that can quadruple the points scored by adjacent friendly units & panels or will that focus give your opponent the opportunity to gain an advantage in the areas of the board you haven’t invested in flipping to your color? These are the types of moment to moment questions that crop up in what I consider an excellent strategy puzzle deckbuilder - Simple to grasp but an absolute joy to master!

This gem is an absolute must for anyone interested in unique roguelike deckbuilding games outside of the standard formats

An elegant & lightweight pseudo-spectacle fighter revolving around Chinese Kung Fu. Relies solely on the joystick & a single button to test your rhythm in sparing matches of varied difficulties. Fluid pixel art enhances the stellar martial arts choreography with weighty strikes & agile movement. The game encourages the player to treat every battle as a zen experience instead of high energy & high combo battles like expected from the fighting game genre. For the price, this game is a definite high recommendation.

A roguelike that deserves to share space with the likes of Spelunky & Hades as well as a deckbuilder that deserves to stand alongside Slay The Spire. Genuinely in the conversation for one of my personal favorite games of all time. A game that sits comfortably in my rankings of "Desert Island" picks i.e. media that could occupy me anywhere & under nearly any circumstance. I find it simultaneously astonishing & genuinely inspiring that this game is the dev's 1st commercial release because the striking aesthetic, pitch perfect gameplay mechanics & overall captivating, hypnotic style sing together in absolute harmony and in ways that several legitimate AAA game dev studios & subsequent multimillion-scale products (products which are often double or triple Balatro's full price tag mind you) are rarely able to manage these days.

This is a terrific, simple & fast-paced top down shooter! Absolutely recommend to anyone who enjoys quick sessions & reflex-testing scramble gameplay where getting out of a dangerous scrape via quick thinking gives you a rush
Perfectly priced gem of a game

Disc Room is a zen experience with a sharp edge. It's one of those games that you can either zone out to while listening to a podcast or hyperfocus in on while you breath through gritted teeth trying to clear dev par times or complete ruthless challenges.

Before playing this game, Vlambeer's Luftrausers would have ranked somewhere in my Top 50 games of all time. The chaotic arcade-y dogfights, plane customization and overall style made it a game I had a hard time pulling away from when it released back in 2014. 2 hours in though, I have no problem saying that Jet Lancer has dethroned the game for me and stolen its spot.

Jet Lancer is a fast-paced 2D frenetic dogfighting game in the same vein as Luftrausers. The aesthetics though of seeming like an underrated, sharply polished 90's anime are much more my speed. You play a cocky ace pilot testing out a strange and powerful new jet discovered by your rag-tag group of sky pirate hunting peacekeepers. The bird is ultra fast, sleek, and customizable. You're tasked with using your skills to tackle a bunch of different missions that range from hacking com towers, obliterating sky pirates, and destroying immense and mysterious giant boss robots that might have a considerable connection to your own recently found jet. As you complete a mission you'll be graded on your performance with accuracy, quick completion and perfect dodging enemy fire netting you the higher ranks and the desire to S rank everything is strong. You're also periodically rewarded with new parts that will allow you to change your special attacks or maybe modify your defenses. These new additions might prompt you to return to previous missions to raise your score with the toys at your fingertips that you previously didn't have.

Only critique I'd have at the moment of this review and my time played is the lack of an endless mode (that is of course if such a thing isn't already present and just simply unlocked by some method like beating the game which I've yet to find out). Each mission has a distinct endpoint so far and I'd love to play a mode where escalating hordes of enemies (possibly including difficulty settings that could throw random bosses from the main mode into the fray) attack and you have to survive as long as possible with the loadout you've prepared or maybe even randomized. A mode un-tethered by the mission structures and time limits that appear in the campaign where you are treated to difficult & dazzling dogfights that could last a 1/2 hour or more at S+ rank as your skill gradually increases.

Overall, any fans of Luftrausers or anyone else looking for an extremely fun and flashy twitch-based action experience should 100% consider Jet Lancer a must buy.

Never Give Up is Super Meat Boy mixed with the sensibilities of Seth McFarlane. And I know that may sound intensely off-putting to some while intriguing to others but despite whatever way you feel, the core precision platforming of the game is solid.

You play a talkative, sarcastic blue stickman tormented by an equally talkative and haughty stickman villain with a grudge against you and a desire to shove you through the grinder (literally) of multiple torturous levels. The flow of the game starts by giving you a seemingly easy beginning: leap over a few saws, wall jump up to a ledge, avoid an acid pit & get to the exit. The extra touch though is that you go through the level again but this time a spike pit is in the way. Next time through, hostile mechanical rhinos will probably be chasing you and will catch up if you're too slow. Next, missile turrets might be added and so on until you've beaten the multiple instances of the level and get to move on to the next. Levels are also peppered with collectibles you can grab and if you get 'em all while also clearing the devs par times, the level is rubber stamped as truly complete.

Even with the tight controls you'll probably end up dying again and again and again, the level getting painted with blood from your previous deaths. Die enough times and the game's gimmick reveals itself: A giant "Give Up" button prompting you to press it if you've finally had enough. Haven't had the heart to press the button myself but I wouldn't be surprised if it cleared your save. Note though that you're allowed to just save and quit normally if you just want to exit the game and clear your head. Pressing the button is not something you're forced to do if you want a break.

Now my only gripe with the game returns to the first line of this review. The game is peppered with Adult Swim style humor with Blue making dry sarcastic remarks or pop culture references when he dies. The game could easily have re-skinned Blue as Deadpool and it would be extremely fitting. I personally found it tolerable rather than grating. There are enough voice lines that meet the threshold of not making you completely sick of hearing them be repeated but still noticeable when you've heard them before. If you think you can get past that hurdle & love punishingly hard precision platformers, don't hesitate to buy Never Give Up and test to see if you yourself can resist the urge to push the button when your deaths in a single level gets into the triple digits.

Does exactly what it says on the tin oh so well. One of my favorite games from the era of the PSVita was Sound Shapes, a rhythm plaformer with an incredible playlist. Just Shapes spiritually succeeds that game but replaces the platformer gameplay with bullet hell gameplay. Rather than shooting, you're mostly shot at with movement and a quick dodge being the only tools in your belt. Both are used to great effect with the amazing levels matched to music which will have you dodging lasers, centipedes, buzzsaws, gears and all manner of objects on top of the hail of bullets familiar to the genre. Outside of the levels in the campaign is a cute little story that will surprisingly find you rooting for all manner of simplistic shape creatures as they battle against a deadly boss. When you're not in the campaign, the challenge mode will allow you to team up with four players locally or online to tackle two random levels with a boss at the end. Just like in the story mode, challenge can end up sucking up your time with the desire to do run after run. Honestly as of yet I have little in the way of complaints beyond not enjoying the fact that you can't skip the opening studio card for the developers: Berzerk Studio. Obviously a minor complaint but it does eat up like 5 seconds which feels like a minute when you're itching to get back into the game each time you boot it up.

An entertaining, bombastic ride

A great platformer that is equal parts charming, atmospheric, and haunting.