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Review Convergence: A League Of Legends Story - A Fine (But Framey) Metroidvania
It's rewind time
It’s been fascinating to observe the kind of variety coming out of Riot Forge, as the publisher has worked tirelessly these last couple of years to produce spin-off games based on the lore of its enormously popular League of Legends MOBA. Since the publisher’s inception, we’ve seen a rhythm game, a JRPG, and a top-down action...
Review Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun - Bold, Bleak, And Bewildering Boomer Ballistics
For the imperium!
Fun fact: origins of the term ‘grimdark’ can be directly traced back to the original Warhammer 40k tabletop game. Suffice it to say, the cynical and nihilistic world of Warhammer 40k sucks. Despite the highly advanced and amazing intergalactic society that mankind has built, to live in this universe is to live in a bleak place...
Review Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection - Divine Dungeon Crawling But Not Definitive
Back from the dead
One of the unfortunate casualties of the end of DS and 3DS eras was the death of games that were uniquely suited to the quirky dual-screened devices. The Etrian Odyssey series, the first three games of which are represented in the new Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection (also available separately) was a good example of this bespoke...
Review Puzzle Bobble Everybubble! - Bubbles Over With Charm (And Useless Bots)
PAYONPAH!
One of the biggest games to dominate the scene of the golden age of arcades was Bubble Bobble, a cute Japanese action platformer centered around little dinosaurs that could shoot bubbles out of their mouths. While that original game eventually went on to spawn a ton of sequels and ports that iterated on the concept, it also led to the...
Review Super Dungeon Maker - A Promising 'Zelda Maker' That Needs More Time In The Oven
Prematurely hatched
Ever since Nintendo gave players the tools to develop their own levels with Super Mario Maker, there’s been talk about the Big N expanding the concept to other franchises, especially Zelda. This was allegedly discussed at greater length behind the scenes and eventually led to the addition of the Chamber Dungeons concept in the...
Review Nuclear Blaze - A Neat Little Action Platformer, Small And Cool
I don't want to set the world on fire
In April of 2021, the beloved Ludum Dare game jam took place with the theme of 'Deeper and Deeper'. Participants had 48 hours to throw together a game, and Sébastien Benard—known for working on Dead Cells—decided to give it a shot by making a firefighting game called Nuclear Blaze. After the competition was...
Review Minecraft Legends - A Jankier, Less-Fun Pikmin, And A Massive Disappointment
Not quite legendary
Few games have had more cultural impact than Minecraft, but it seems that Mojang has struggled to recapture anywhere near the same success in its efforts to expand the IP beyond its sandbox origins. Minecraft: Story Mode was a decent, if uninspiring Telltale game, while Minecraft Dungeons proved to be a solid, but unexceptional...
Review The Mageseeker: A League Of Legends Story - An Enthralling Hack-And-Slash Spin-Off
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me
It’s a shame that League of Legends has become such a meme for being a source of toxicity, as Riot Games has consistently shown that the world of Runeterra has quite a bit more potential than the MOBA lets on. Through its Riot Forge publishing arm, the company has enlisted...
Review Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection - A Rock-Solid Compilation
Jack in!! Mega Man, Execute!
In the early 2000s, an ancient and long-forgotten era when Capcom regularly released new Mega Man games, the company decided to produce not one, but two mainline Mega Man series on the popular Game Boy Advance. Mega Man Zero would continue the gameplay and storyline that the previous action platforming franchises were...
Review Batora: Lost Haven - An Interplanetary Action RPG That Plays It Too Safe
That's no moon!
Italian-based studio Stormind Games came onto the scene in 2016 alongside the announcement of Remothered: Tormented Fathers, a decent survival horror game that eventually found its way onto the Switch. After its more critically panned sequel dropped two years later, the studio decided to pivot to another genre with a new project,...
*spooking intensifies*
It’s remarkable how easy it can be to see the effects of developers' genuine passion when playing a video game. In Kraino Origins—the product of one man, Angel Dorantes—you can just feel how much appreciation the dev has for classic retro platformers. Better yet, it turns out that he clearly understands what made the...
Review Have A Nice Death - Delightfully Dark, Brutally Tough Roguelite Action
Dead good
In 2019, Magic Design Studios—a new team comprised of many ex-Ubisoft staff—put out the Rayman-esque Unruly Heroes, which we thought was a great platformer with some amazing visuals. For the next few years, the team went quiet while working on its next game, revealed in late 2021 as Have A Nice Death, a tough action roguelite about the...
Review Blade Assault - A Competent 2D Roguelite In Desperate Need Of Sharpening
To be blunt
It must be tough being a developer in the roguelite space these days. The absolute explosion of popularity this genre has enjoyed over the past several years has led to an impressive number of innovative new titles that find cool ways to create new play experiences or reinterpret old ones, but competition has never been higher and the...
Review Dead Cells: Return To Castlevania - An Intense, Brilliant Nostalgia Trip To Dracula's Castle
Have at you!
Few games have enjoyed post-launch support as robust and high-quality as Dead Cells has received for the past six(!) years. Motion Twin has produced wave after wave of updates, some free and some paid, which have packed the already awesome base game with a dizzying amount of new biomes, weapons, cosmetics, and more. And all of it feels...
Review Figment 2: Creed Valley - Charming Action Puzzling, But Sluggish On Switch
Sleep well
In 2017, Bedtime Digital Games released Figment, a cute and dreamlike action puzzle game that aimed to be a little more ambitious and expansive than their debut release, Back to Bed. We enjoyed it, and evidently plenty of other people did, too, as the studio has now brought us Figment 2: Creed Valley. Though Figment 2 feels like more of...
Review Pronty - A Challenging, Aquatic Metroidvania With Beautiful BioShock-Inspired Visuals
They're good dogs, Bront
These days, it feels like it takes a lot more for a Metroidvania to stand out from the pack, especially when there are so many excellent titles that have already shown impressively creative takes on the genre standards. Pronty from Taiwanese indie developer 18Light makes its bid for your attention by plopping players in a...
Review Labyrinth Of Galleria: The Moon Society - A Deep, Dense, Devastating Dungeon Crawler
Moon's haunted
Though the JRPG has remained the de facto king of the RPG space for the last few decades, one could argue that the popular genre would never have existed were it not for DRPGs. What started in eons past with titles like Ultima and aimed to translate a traditional D&D gameplay experience to the screen has given way to more...
Review Octopath Traveler II - A Confident Follow-Up And One Of Switch's Finest RPGs
Eight roads diverged in a wood, and I... well, I took them all!
A year after the Switch released, Team Asano—who made its name on the Bravely Default games on 3DS—released Octopath Traveler for the Switch. The fascinating HD-2D art style immediately grabbed people’s attention, while the clever implementation of classic JRPG gameplay quickly...
Review Tales of Symphonia Remastered - A GameCube Classic That Shows Its Age On Switch
Dwarven Vow #108: Let sleeping dogs lie
Though it’s never quite had the popularity of the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest franchises, the Tales series has set a good reputation as the ‘other’ classic JRPG series that’s consistently maintained a decent quality for quite some time now. Back in 2004, Namco (no Bandai yet) was only on the fifth...
Hands On Octopath Traveler II Looks Incredible, But Can It Forge Its Own Identity?
Boosting the original without breaking anything
Not every sequel needs to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes simple refinement does the job just fine. For every game that mixes things up, like Breath of the Wild, there’s another like A Link Between Worlds that takes a more subtly iterative approach to the standard formula. After playing through the...
Review SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake - The Best SpongeBob Platformer Yet
Across the Spongeverse
A few years ago, Purple Lamp Studios released SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated, a solid revival of a 3D platforming classic from decades past. Sales for that remaster were evidently robust enough to justify development of an all-new sequel, as SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake was announced a...
Review Persona 3 Portable - A Fine Series Entry, Though One That's Tough To Return To
"Remember you will die"
Though Persona 3 was actually the fourth mainline release in the series, the meme goes that it was really the first because Atlus just refuses to acknowledge the previous games. As a fresh start for the series, Persona 3 was eventually followed up with not one, but two ‘final’ versions that each had important new features...
Review Persona 4 Golden - A Must-Buy Classic That's Stood The Test Of Time
"Heartbreak, heartbreak, you tell me goomba"
Although Shin Megami Tensei is technically the flagship RPG franchise over at Atlus, its spin-off Persona series has made huge strides in finding mainstream appeal in recent years. While Persona 5 may have done most of the heavy lifting, Persona 4 Golden (P4G)—the enhanced re-release of the PS2...
Review Lone Ruin - A No-Nonsense, Roguelike Twin-Stick Shooter
It's dangerous to go 'lone
Though it flew under a lot of radars, Cuddle Monster Games’ Hell is Other Demons was a standout platform shooter of 2019, featuring razor-sharp, ultra-tough action gameplay alongside a delicious neon aesthetic. Considering it was mostly the work of just one man by the name of Hannes Rahm, Hell is Other Demons was an...
