Games Xtreme's Reviews
You start out with an old, rough looking Stuffy, who for now is stuffed, and sewn together to look like an Elephant. What a perfect first animal to pick to start off the adventure. Appealing to kids and adults alike, he is a little faded and limping on one leg.
Fast Striker is definitely, firmly a danmaku game. But it does also throw a couple curve balls to keep the design unique. Aside from the actual difficulty adjustments, each difficulty (plus the extra Omake mode, which has a bunch of extra mechanics for score chasing) also puts you in a different ship, with its own firing patterns and thus playstyle. Each ship gets a rapid fire, a sustained fire, rapid and sustained rear fire, and the strike shield.
Tekken 7 is another solid entry in the series, with new tweaks that fit seamlessly into the core fighting system. The single-player content leaves a lot to be desired, though.
A few things really make up the main mechanics of the game. One, the environmental traps. You can go around and poison the punch, call in guests (a personal favorite), electrocute, explode... all in the hopes that you'll knock down the number of attendees a bit. The levels also sometimes introduce an item to the mix which makes for fun and diverse gameplay. Two, is the cops. If someone spots you do something shady, kill someone, around poisoned people or bodies, someone else will freak out and call the cops. They'll had already clocked your face, so the police will come kicking down the doors. They come in extremely fast, so you tend to position yourself for a short run. What this game does well is the timer in which the law actually does chase you before they give up. It feels fair.
When I first sat down to play my copy of Small Radios, Big Televisions, my faith was already in the Adult Swim brand. Coming a long way since the day of flash games, this network-born publisher cradles creativity. When you play an Adult Swim game, it very much feels like someone gave the reins over and said "Hey, great idea my indie friend. Let's take it and run with it." Rarely am I ever disappointed by anything coming out with the AS name attached.
Reader, I'm not going to lie. As a serious Serious Sam fan it's very hard for me to get on board with this installment. I know they tried with some big ideas, but it just feels like every single one of them fell miles short of the intended mark. If you're a die hard fan of the franchise like me, then no doubt you'll want this--but take my word for it and wait for a deep cut or sale. Otherwise, you'll just find yourself frustrated that you've spent upwards of £30 on what feels like a rushed, buggy mess covered in your favourite coat of Sam paint.
I kept running into little things like this, where the game's interface kept fighting me and making it difficult to actually experience and enjoy the core gameplay loop. It was a layer of...Friction, is the only way I can describe it. And it meant every time I went to go roll my fun-ball down the track, it would stop way soonerthan expected. I'd quit having fun, and then I'd have to walk away for a bit so I didn't keep getting frustrated with the game and come back later.
That said, if you don't have turn based games under your microscope, and like the look of Dread Nautical--this might be a good start for you. It's a good one to enjoy without the jaded lens that I seem to bear, and I even gave it to my ten year old to enjoy...which I'm happy to report they did (and learned it pretty quickly without any help). So, proceed with caution, get a few different viewpoints under your belt and best of luck to you sailor!
This is not exactly an action game. More of an strategic approach would be the way to go. I mentioned before that I pride myself on my vocabulary skills and cleverness with fitting words together like a puzzle, but here I was faced with literature obstacles that I nearly couldn't climb. As far as gameplay goes, not much here to describe or brag about.
Don't let looks deceive you. Sure it looks swell, and OK colours are somewhat restricted, being desert and all that, but the textures are well rendered. Dust and mud stick to the cars as you race, very nicely rendered clouds of dust rise up around you but that does not detract from the fact that this is a game that just does not thrill and excite you like Forza 7 or Forza Horizon 4, in fact it is just NOT fun. It's hard, frustrating and vehicle handling, don't get me started.
This is not that good of a game but is certainly not the worst. I could sit down and play this with my daughter just to let her have fun playing such a simple game with simple controls and end game. This is not something that I'd say I could come back to and enjoy time after time.
The Star Wars universe is rich with lore and mystery and we get a bland badly smashed together piece of gaming. For each highlight of the game, such as the well done space battles there is an equally poor stealth mechanic. Fortunately the story is short at around 5 hours and so if you are determined to get through it you won't waste too much time. If you enjoy short and bland this could be the game for you.
I enjoyed the single player campaign for the most part, even though I whinged all the way through it. However, the lacking roster, annoying sound, unimpressive graphics and visual aesthetic, crappy boss fight design, auto combo problem, and power of Infinity Stone spamming mean I doubt I'll ever choose to bust this out to play with my mates when I have them over for a game night. Most of the Capcom characters left me cold (except Dante, sigh, you handsome rogue, you) and even the Marvel characters have some weird choices. All of the style and humorous panache of MVC3 are absent, and in general this was a solid 'meh' of a game.
Sega doesn't know what to do with the series and Valkyria Revolution suffers because of it.
Hampered by some poor decisions in porting, Trulon: The Shadow Engine takes a game with some promise and becomes less than the sum of its parts.
There just is not enough on offer here for me to invest anymore time on this game than I already have, in fact as I type this the game is highlighted and I'm ready to hit the delete option.
Desperately searching for fun, we hung out in the starting zone, hoping to interact with a few players. In the starting zone itself is a safety bubble--like a force field protecting the new players. This is great, but the moment you stepped out--it was curtains for you. Mid to high, and even some braver low level players camped out at the edge of the bubble, waiting for some daft adventurer to cross its threshold. It became very clear that ambushing unsuspecting new players was the fun to be had in Citadel: Forged with Fire. You could make it past one of these malicious players, but once in the wild, you face enemies that never lose aggro, unclear or no instruction as to what to do or build and strange bugs that begged to be squashed.
Really, the one big problem that I think Bubble Bobble 4 Friends has is that, sticking true to the original design doesn't leave you a lot of room to grow and experiment. This feels like a more slick presentation of an 80s arcade game...Because that's what it is. For all of the 3D graphics and such, unless you're busting out the 4-player co-op, there's not that much here to differentiate it from the cabinet you played as a kid or one of the various decently popular home ports you may well have owned.
I absolutely love the level design, specifically the backgrounds, they are breath-taking! (Keanu Reeves breath-taking). When I saw the backgrounds it really made me want to fly off the path and explore, I think if the developers made either an open world or a free roam style game they would make beautiful levels with amazing skyboxes.
The focus on roguelike design, letting a relatively small amount of assets turn into a lot of game. The fact that there's no mid-game saves, because that sort of longer-term multiple-session play wasn't needed and would complicate the design. The little touches of things not quite refined, like how I can hear room tone in the relative handful of voice acting clips. Hell, the fact that the intro cut scene only plays the first time you play, with no way I found to start it up again. Or the hidden shield in the tutorial area, just tucked behind a rock without collision detection. If this is the work of newcomer devs, then it's a really interesting first piece. There's a lot of neat ideas here: I like the fact that a lot of the Berserker and Witch unlockables actually require some degree of success with the other class, thus forcing you to differentiate on playthroughs. It just...needs work, as a commercial product.