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Review Valkyria Chronicles - SEGA's Strategy Classic Still Shines Ten Years Later
Democracy is non-negotiable
For many Nintendo fans, last month’s Valkyria Chronicles 4 was their first experience with the franchise, and it no doubt was a pleasant one at that. Valkyria Chronicles 4 acted as a lovely return to form for SEGA's strategy series, but this was largely due to how the game essentially went back to the gameplay template...
Review Super Hyperactive Ninja - Even A Massive Cup Of Joe Can't Save This Middling Effort
Far too bitter
Back in its heyday, Super Mario Maker was notorious for the proliferation of ‘Kaizo’ stages in its community; these were hyper-difficult platforming gauntlets that required dozens if not hundreds of tries and usually had only one successful route to completion, eliminating any margin for error. Games such as Super Meat Boy and...
Review Mark Of The Ninja: Remastered - A Stellar Stealth Hit That's Better Than Ever
Hello darkness, my old friend
In 2012, Klei Entertainment (which would later go on to produce Don’t Starve) debuted Mark of the Ninja on the Xbox Live Arcade, introducing a bold 2D take on the stealth genre. Boasting gorgeous hand-drawn visuals and tight, open-ended gameplay, this new platformer quickly developed a reputation for its quality,...
Review Tricky Towers - A Tetris-Like Puzzler Best Suited To Multiplayer Madness
Feel the magic
Nintendo has always been known for dominating the portable gaming space, but much of its early success can no doubt be chalked up to the viral popularity of Tetris, which came as a pack-in game. The block puzzler has since become an institution of gaming, with a version available on just about every electronic device with a screen and...
Review The World Ends With You: Final Remix - A Stylish Reimagining Of The DS Cult Classic
That power is yet unknown
Nintendo certainly transformed the gaming landscape when it launched the Nintendo DS line of systems, offering up a distinct two-screen experience that had seldom been attempted before in hardware. Though there were plenty of first-party releases through the years that did a great job of showing off the dual-screen concept,...
Review Chasm - A Procedurally-Generated Metroidvania That Pleases Rather Than Dazzles
If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you
Procedural generation is something that can be tough to balance when developing a game; too much reliance on it can make for a game that feels insincere, like it was artificially churned out by an algorithm, while too little can often extend the development time considerably to reach a...
Review Mega Man 11 - A Glorious Return To Form For One Of Gaming's Greatest Heroes
Return of the king
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Mega Man in action. 2010’s retro revival Mega Man 10 was the last time the Blue Bomber received a new release, with Capcom being seemingly hesitant to give the character a spotlight after the very public departure of Keiji Inafune, the iconic designer of the robotic hero. Since the...
Review Alwa's Awakening - An Authentic Throwback To Gaming's 8-Bit Past In More Ways Than One
Short, but sweet
There’s a fine line being walked nowadays with the proliferation of indie games modeled after the 8 or 16-bit releases of the good ol’ days. On one hand, it allows for retro games to rise above the limits of their time so that their full potential can be realized through weaving in modern game design where needed, such as in...
Review TowerFall - This Couch Co-Op Classic Is Perfectly Suited To Nintendo Switch
Towering over the competition
Back in 2012, the gaming world was taken by storm by the announcement of the OUYA, a crowdfunded attempt at creating a major console platform geared specifically towards indies. Though we could easily write a thesis on all the reasons why the OUYA ended up being an enormous failure, the hardware did have some saving...
Review Velocity 2X - A Finely-Tuned Arcade Extravaganza That Will Seriously Test Your Talents
Faster than greased lightning
In 1975, a Hungarian psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try pronouncing that one out loud) coined the term 'flow', referring to a state of mind in which one becomes so enchanted or focused on something that all sense of space and time outside of that focus point essentially seems to disappear. The state of flow...
Review Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition HD - An Inferior Clone Of An Already Divisive Game
Not quite fit for a king
It took Square Enix twelve years to finally finish development on Final Fantasy XV, and while the end result was a good game by many measures, it also felt needlessly bloated and meandering in many ways. There’s a saying going around now that Final Fantasy XV went from being the game that would never come out, to being the...
Review Undertale - A Postmodern RPG Classic That Every Fan Of The Genre Should Play
"Aren't you happy?"
RPGs have been around for nearly as long as the modern gaming industry has, and though genre standards are constantly being raised through the generations, there tends to be a homogenous sameness that many RPGs inevitably fall victim into. Octopath Traveler, for example, is a fantastic game, but it’s about as firmly traditional...
Review Bastion - A Captivating Indie Gem That Hasn't Been Dulled By The Passage Of Time
You've done good, Kid
The debate over whether or not video games should be considered an artform will likely never reach a firm conclusion, but that doesn’t stop developers from trying to show how a game can be something more meaningful and touching than mere disposable entertainment. Enter Bastion, the debut release from Supergiant Games, which...
Review Valkyria Chronicles 4 - A Sublime Strategy Experience On Switch
At ease, soldier
Suffice to say, the release history of Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles series has been uneven, both in terms of quality and availability. After the original game — which is due to arrive on Switch later this year —successfully kicked the series off on home consoles, the sequel only saw a release on PSP, while the third game (also...
Review Into The Breach - The Turn-Based Pacific Rim Simulator You've Always Wanted
Right at home on Switch
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life.” That nugget of wisdom comes not from Confucius or Machiavelli, but from Star Trek: The Next Generation's Captain Jean-Luc Picard. It’s difficult to think of a game that exemplifies this sentiment better than Into The...
Gotta go fast!
When producing a work of art as an homage to something that came before, there always exists the danger of the new product doing the job a little too well. It could very well be that the new product perfectly matches its inspiration beat for beat, yet it still feels hollow because it’s missing a soul of its own. Fortunately, Freedom...
Go, ninja, go!
Twenty-five years ago, a bright-eyed elementary school student whiled away time in class doodling crude pictures of ninjas in his notebook, completely unaware that such pictures would grow into a lifelong passion project. Indeed, The Messenger is the culmination of decades of daydreaming and prototyping, slowly being refined down into...
Review Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate
Let the hunt begin, again!
Everything changed for Capcom’s Monster Hunter series in January 2018, which saw the successful release of Monster Hunter: World on the PlayStation 4. Not only did the series change platforms from Nintendo’s family to that of Sony’s (a reversal of the situation that took place only a few years beforehand, when it...
A true dinosaur
In recent years, 3D platformers have experienced something of a renaissance in the modern game industry, with the likes of Yooka-Laylee, Super Mario Odyssey, and Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy making a notable impact on sales charts and the general conversation surrounding games. Though the appetite is clearly there for these sorts...
Our arrows will blot out the sun
The RTS genre is a tricky one to pull off correctly on consoles due to the limitations imposed by the much smaller number of available buttons on a controller. Still, games like Pikmin have shown that it can be done smartly, and there are ways to infuse RTS elements into another genre, like Tower Defense, as...
Gone in 60 seconds
There’s an old story in the literature world that Ernest Hemingway was once getting lunch with fellow authors and his signature stripped-back writing style was brought up as a discussion point. One of the other writers made a bet that Hemingway couldn’t write a story in six words, to which he replied by grabbing a napkin and...
They're good dogs, Brent
Nowadays, Platinum Games is one of the most respected names in gaming when it comes to action titles, but long before the studio was founded, many of its staff members were part of a Capcom subsidiary called Clover Studio. Clover made its name on producing interesting new IP instead of sequels, and its magnum opus was the...
If it ain't broke, don't fix it
Nintendo’s Picross series has been around for almost as long as the company has been making video games and it’s largely remained the same over all that time. What’s remarkable is how long this technique has worked, as the core gameplay is so simple - yet so addictive - that it doesn’t really need too much...
Chef's special
One of the first titles to truly show off the co-op power of the Switch was 2017's Overcooked, a fun arcade action game about chefs scrambling to get food orders out the door. Overcooked was a goofy, chaotic, and refreshingly original title that was a wonderful addition to the Switch eShop, so it was unsurprising that the sequel,...
