I’m not going to front. This should actually be kind of the easiest review I’ve ever written or will write, because I should be able to just point to my preview of Metal Slug Tactics and note that the full game allows you to play as Leona Heidern. If these two facts placed adjacent to
Inti Creates and I have a complicated relationship as a studio. I’ve mentioned before that the studio can do a lot with a little or a little with a lot, which gives you some idea of how wildly it feels the overall output can swing from one end to the other. They’ve made games I
Back in the long long ago, there was a thing called Flash. Flash was a really useful tool for making games on the internet, and it led to the rise of a certain sort of game that was easy to get into, play for a while, and then hop out of when you got a
First of all, I have to say something, and I believe everyone will understand: It is almost criminal that the third installment in this series has come now, and it doesn’t have a subtitle. Cat Quest and Cat Quest II can get away without them, but Cat Quest III really deserves a subtitle, especially as
There’s a lot of stuff you can do with a game when you explore the space between players and character, but not a lot of games are really interested in doing that. And to be fair, it’s complicated to do in a narrative in the first place. It’s a remarkably short hop between remembering that
Am I allowed to be… like… kind of tired of roguelikes at this point? Don’t get me wrong, that is a rhetorical question; I’m allowed to be tired of anything that I am authentically tired of and I don’t really need to ask permission. But it feels like people have reached a point with roguelikes
So here we are, back to dealing with the Planet all over again. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is a game that has a complicated history to deal with and a complicated set of fan desires to assuage. It’s not a stretch to say that the first game in the remake series was well-received, but it’s
Some of the games I review on this site are like nesting dolls, and each time you think you have a handle on what the game is, you find yourself diving down another layer deeper. Other games are exactly what they appear to be. I mentioned this during a recent review, but I think this
Sometimes my reviews require a fair number of caveats. That’s just good practice, in my mind. It’s a good thing to make it clear if you are predisposed to not particularly like a game or predisposed to like it, that sets out a baseline. If I say that I wasn’t really inclined to like something
When you first start RoboDunk, it asks you if dunk is the meaning of life. This sort of faux-serious absurdity is, I won’t lie, kind of the sort of thing I live for. Lamentably, as much fun as that question might be, you can expect the game to basically leave it there. It does not
As a reviewer, I tend to pick out games that I want to review based on one of three criteria. The first are games where either I had been following early development or just saw the trailer and thought that the game looked like a lot of fun. The second are games that are somehow
After I was most of the way through 9 Years of Shadows, I asked our review editor if I was allowed to simply post an image to review the game. He was… not enthusiastic about that being the entire review, so I will instead write a full review. But I will include the image itself
Despite what seems to have become de rigeur for the gaming industry, making a game a roguelike is not actually cruise control for making it a game with endless content. In fact, I can think of a lot of games lately that have tried to keep themselves engaging by making themselves into roguelikes when neither
For better or for worse – probably worse – the late 80s into the early 90s were a real time that actually happened. Some of us lived through them. And there was a time, perhaps not so long ago in memory, when there was a real sense of a sun-drenched lush paradise ruled over by
Despite what it may seem like, I am actually not an enormous Fire Emblem fan. I am, however, an absolutely unreserved massive fan of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This isn’t to say that I traditionally have disliked Nintendo’s long-running second-party series of strategy RPGs, just that they have rarely risen above “well, that was fun
First and foremost, I think it’s important to look at Power Chord as it presents itself compared to what Power Chord actually is. Because I believe that it’s easy to get swept up in the game’s presentation in such a way that you lose sight of the fact that the game itself is actually simpler
If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you have probably noticed by this point that I periodically make a point of picking a game up that I am in no way qualified to review. This would be one of those times, because quite frankly? If there’s one genre I tend to actively dislike,
It takes very little effort – bordering on no effort – to get me interested in the prospect of a cat cafe. My two cats are two of the most important living things on the planet to me, and I love cats in general. They’re stupid furry pillows full of knives who vibrate and make
On January 28th, 1998, Square-Enix released Final Fantasy Tactics to a North American audience. People who played that game have spent twenty-four years looking for more. I open with that because I feel it’s very important to note my biases at the very least. When I first heard about Triangle Strategy my immediate dream was
Here’s the hidden secret about Metallic Child: It is perhaps best understood not by what it claims to be on the cover but by a series of otherwise ornate references to other games. At a glance, this game is a roguelite, and indeed that’s what it claims to be right on the cover when you