#pc
#pc
by Amr (@siegarettes)
What kind of person would you be in a disaster? Would you take advantage of the situation for your own gain? Or would you act with kindness and help those around you? Those are the fundamental questions at the heart of Disaster Report. After a prolonged development cycle, surviving cancelation after the Japanese Tohoku earthquake, and an uncertain localization, Disaster Report 4 Summer Memories is finally here–just in time to launch in the midst of another crisis.
By Amr (@siegarettes)
The tactics genre is having a small revival. With the success of Fire Emblem, the return of Advance Wars-esque strategy through Wargroove and Tiny Metal, and several smaller, but interesting games such as Children of Zodiarcs, there’s a plethora of choices to whet the appetite for the tactics hungry. So what better time to return to Langrisser, a series that’s enjoyed popularity overseas, but stayed quiet in the West?
by Amr (@siegarettes)
With forgettable stock fantasy enemy designs and featureless level design, you’d be forgiven for writing off 3000th Duel off first impressions. It plays with several popular tropes of modern game design, with a non-linear map structure, and a combat loop that borrows the RPG systems and corpse run format from Souls games. A Souls-like Metroidvania if you must. Despite that it doesn’t capture any of what makes those games beloved, and they even feel at odds with anything interesting about the game. 3000th Duel barely has an identity to itself.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Get to the top! It’s a simple conceit, and Super Hiking League turns it into a competitive scramble that tests your precision and nerves. You can jump, attack and use your grappling hook to ascend to the top of various mountains, trying to beat your opponent there. And with such straightforward mechanics, Super Hiking League relies on everything surrounding them to build its complexity.
The complications come with each stage, which weave symmetrical and asymmetrical layouts together, allowing you chances to interfere with your opponent’s progress. I found the ones that favor asymmetrical layouts to be far more engaging, since they gave you more chances to interfere with the other player and make it feel like you’re competing in the same space.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Take the elaborate bullet patterns of modern STGs, give them to adorable fantasy monster girls, then combine them into a fighting game and you get Maiden & Spell. A niche within a niche, Maiden & Spell is part of a line of surprisingly varied shooter-fighting game hybrids, following in the mold set by G-Rev’s Senko no Ronde. As you might expect from a combination of such obsessive niches, Senko no Ronde was a maximalist game, one with highly detailed mechanics and obtuse nuances that required serious effort before you could begin to understand what you were playing.
Compared to its contemporaries, Maiden & Spell is stripped down, focused on immediate communication. It turns an intimidating genre into an inviting one, one you can show to your friends and immediately have them understand.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Everything in Straimium is a little off. What initially presented as a regular rogue-lite shooter became something more curious as I realized how obscured its details were. Each screen is a miniature ecosystem, with flickers of life within its biomechanical interiors. Enemies, constructed with sparse pixel counts, swarm you as you enter new areas, while bosses and NPCs dominate the space with elaborate detail. Powerups appear only as symbols, leaving me to figure out their effects only through experimentation. All of this is obscured with a haze of color and visual effects, blending foreground and background, and having me wonder which parts of its ecosystem are hostile to you.
But as I began to parse its visuals and understand its small eccentricities, I came to another realization: under all its obtuseness Straimium Immortaly is a deeply average game.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Old School Musical had me thinking a lot about what makes a rhythm game enjoyable to me. On the surface it seems like an easy slam dunk–take the aesthetics of old videogames, mash them together into a narrative and turn it into a musical you play along to. But the end result ends up a little incoherent. It draws on many sources for its homages, and does a reasonable job of replicating them, but it never finds a coherent direction, mixing aesthetics haphazardly, and scoring the scenes with tracker style music that brings to mind the European PC scene more than the console and arcade games it pays homage to.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Returning to the series PC roots, DJMAX Respect brings over the latest entry in the stylish rhythm game series, with some new features and major omissions. When the original PS4 version of Respect dropped three years ago, both RJ and I adored it, and I personally found it to be the best introduction into the bullet hell-esque sensory overload of the series. Respect V is generally that same game, but the changes here leave it feeling barebones compared to its console counterpart.