#Review
#Review
By: RJ (@rga_02)
Alternative universes provide a fresh take to well established stories. However sometimes that fresh new take ends up being more rotten than what you can find in your nearest dumpster. Valkryia Revolution is sadly rotten packaged software that belongs in that dumpster.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
SUPERHOT is a shooter that screams postmodern. It takes its place alongside Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line as a shooter about shooters–something interested in deconstructing the act of pulling the trigger. Unlike the others, SUPERHOT feels consistently satisfying to play, not simply to intellectualize. That’s something it makes clear that it’s aware of, building the compulsion towards progress into its narrative in insidious ways.
All of this taking place in a virtual world where time only moved when I did.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
There’s something to be said for games that confidently play with the conventions of their genre. Certain ideas tend to become ingrained into the dynamics of particular game genres, and the more niche the genre the harder it becomes to move away from them. Scrolling shooters are definitely a niche where this applies and it’s easy to see why most of them are indistinguishable to an outside observer. Enter Drifting Lands, a shooter that upturns almost every convention of the genre by combining it with the world of action RPGs. What results is a shooter with bite sized missions, a lengthy story based campaign, and an action loop that will keep you fighting for gear drops and upgrades for hours. It provides a fresh alternative for players not interested in chasing high scores or 1CCs with plenty of scenarios and abilities to tackle them with. Unfortunately, it breaks the conventions of the genre without understanding why they’re in place, and ends up with something more messy than it should be.
By: David (@friendshipguy_)
• Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls
• Developer - IDEA FACTORY, COMPILE HEAR, FELISTELLA
• Publisher - Idea Factory International
• PC/Steam
Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls is, of course, the next series in featuring the plucky cast of the games that centered around them before. If you’ve played a Neptunia game, you more than likely know what to expect - a good or bad thing, depending on who you ask. Most of the cast is back for this entry with new additions to their crew: the aforementioned Sega Hard Girls, which are developed via collaborative efforts between Sega and ASCII Media Works’ Dengeki Bunko imprint. A little esoteric if you don’t know where they’ve come from - I sure didn’t - but it makes sense for Sega’s officially sanctioned characters to eventually meet up with Idea Factory’s creations sooner or later. Doubly so considering the fact that Sega is the distributor of the entirety of the Neptunia franchise. Idea Factory always goes above and beyond with their translations and selection for English voice actors, though theirold habits and mechanics crop up like red flags in this installment. This review is for the Steam version that released this month, this a one for one port of the Vita version.
by Omar (@siegarettes)
The Surge is genre pulp. It’s at its best when it evokes Alien, bathing its industrial architecture and blue collar workplace in high contrast light and shadow. That’s when you begin to wonder about daily life in this sci-fi world, breathing in the heavy air between bouts of sudden violence. This is also something that’s true of half the science fiction games out there–the influences the medium mines isn’t something that runs very deep most of the time. Likewise, nobody who’s kept up with gaming, or even just the conversation around it, is going to be able to avoid comparisons to From Software’s premier RPG series. Even restructured and streamlined, the framework of the Souls series crawls out to reveal itself. But to call The Surge “sci-fi Dark Souls” would be an empty shorthand. It’s about as useful as describing every sci-fi film by pointing out what it owes to Alien, Blade Runner and 2001 A Space Odyssey. It ignores how the structures and themes of the genre have changed in the public consciousness, and what even the pulpiest of entries can tell us about it.
By: RJ (@rga_02)
Have you ever imagined falling down into the abyss only to find yourself in the arms of a humanoid that does nothing with their time other than play the piano? I haven’t – but I’m pretty sure someone out there has imagined that before. For those who wish to live that life, Deemo has you covered, and it also happens to be a rhythm game as well.
By: RJ (@rga_02)
Last night my friends and I were playing Konami’s Beatmania for the PlayStation 2. Frustrated at the amount of input lag on my television we decided to switch to another videogame. I decided to show them SUPERBEAT: XONiC. One of my friends asked how the controls work for the game, but she quickly learned how to play within seconds. Within a few hours, the Beatmania controller was left to the corner while XONiC was blasting away on the screen.
By: RJ (@rga_02)
“It’s time to look for some cute girls,” says the protagonist when you launch the game. The line is signature Compile Heart. At this point you probably know what you are going to get. Fanservice with cheeky silly humor. However every now and then they try to shake it up a bit. Dark Rose Valkyrie is the result of the folks over at Compile Heart kidnapping a few Namco employees who have worked on the Tales of series and asking them to implement that signature Compile Heart feel.