#review
#review
by Amr (@siegarettes )
Some games use their user interfaces to great effect. They become expressive tools that communicate mood, give tactile sensations, or reveal and obfuscate information as contributions to the narrative. Then there’s Frost, which gives a somewhat interesting digital deck building game all the fussiness of a physical board game.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
I’m a sucker for a good racing game. Hell, I’ll hang around for longer than I’ll admit for an OK arcade racer. So when All-Star Fruit Racing showed up looking like it had stolen SEGA All-Stars Racing’s drifting I jumped on it. Seriously, the drifting in those games is incredible.
All-Star Fruit Racing’s drifting, as it turns out, is not incredible. It’s not even good. In fact the driving in general is underwhelming and by trying to build on this middling foundation All-Star Fruit Racing ends up with an inconsistent and mundane racer.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Racing games have gotten flashy. At some point people realized there can only be so much variation in the way you realistically simulate physics, so games started selling the fantasy of driving instead. So I half expected Wreckfest to start off with a five minute long introduction movie, with a woman’s voice reminded you how cool everything you’re about to be doing is. Instead I was booted into a straightforward menu. Here the events, here are the vehicles. Go drive them.
That’s reflective of Wreckfest’s approach as a whole. There’s a minor progression system to earn new cars, parts, and events, but it’s a surprisingly no frills affair, with a serious approach to driving. The focus on destruction and damage physics might lead you to think Wreckfest is an arcade racer, especially coming off Bugbear’s previous project, Ridge Racer Unbounded, but Wreckfest is a sim through and through. And while other sims have made headway by offering more casual play modes and flashy career modes, Wreckfest is content to let the driving speak for itself.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
I started Cultist Simulator with nothing but a dead end job. With few other options I did my daily duty, working diligently to avoid ending up in a hospital bed. Then came my first encounter with the madness. A set of documents left behind, full of scrawlings both incomprehensible and terrifying, which I couldn’t help but find intriguing. Suddenly I was wrapped up in research, slowly toiling to work up meager coin to fund trips to arcane bookshops, and talking with others in public forums about subjects I had only the tiniest sliver of understanding of. Then came the investigators, the mystery and the long, dreadful dreams.
Of course, the truth of these dark mysteries was never mine to find, and so I came to my end, coughing blood in bed, unable to rouse others to my cause. Somewhere, a Bright Young Thing would begin to awaken to their temptations, and a Doctor finds my notes, each with a chance to be gripped by the same madness.
This is the story of Cultist Simulator, told in small, poetic snippets, unraveling through the steady march of ticking timers. It’s a game whose prose clearly invokes cosmic horror, but always leaves it to the imagination exactly what the nature of that horror is. And it’s delivered through one of the most overwhelming games of cards ever conceived.
By: RJ (@rga_02)
At one-point Bomberman was a franchise beloved by everyone. While it wasn’t as iconic as Mario or Sonic, everyone knew about the lovable bomber from Konami.
Nowadays it seemed like Bomberman had been relegated to the depths of video game history. Only the old and those who have an esoteric taste in video games know about the character and IP. However, Konami wants to change that outlook and decided to free up the bomber from their cellar.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Riddled Corpses is the kind of game that I like to wind down to. Difficult enough to keep me engaged, straightforward, but with enough considerations to make it more than just pointing your gun in the right direction. Each stage is made up of multiple arenas where waves of enemies approach, with transitional moments where you fend off attacks as the screen scrolls to a new part of the stage. There’s a decent combo system that gives you a multiplier for points and damage as you chain kills, and there are destructible objects in the environment that can set enemies alight.
There’s also enough character in the sprites and enemy design that keeps it from blending in with every other twin stick zombie shooter I’ve played. The story involves demons and time travel, and honestly isn’t very engaging, but it does keep the mix of enemies and stages more interesting than the same tired archetypes that populate zombie fiction.
Right, so that’s an easy recommendation, yeah? Well, it would be, if I didn’t find its upgrade system so tiring.
By Amr (@siegarettes)
“You are dating every single student in the entire school.”
That’s how Heartbreak High starts. That’s just how damn popular you are. And of course, having done that, that means it’s time to break up with every one of them. The only problem? You’ve got to do it by the end of school, and there’s only 40 minutes left. What follows is a madcap sprint through dialogue trees and surprise minigames, as you play an anti-dating sim in fast forward.
It’s kind of wonderful.
By: RJ (@rga_02)
Ridge Racer used to be a staple for hardware launches. If the new gamestation ultra cube came out, you better believe that a Ridge Racer title was on the horizon. As of late this tradition ended and what we once took for granted is no longer here. There was no Ridge Racer title for the PlayStation 4, Wii U or Nintendo Switch. All we had recently was a stripped-down Vita game and some questionable PC games.
So, let’s look back at the last traditional game we had in the series, Ridge Racer 3D for the Nintendo 3DS.