My god, what a success. I've never played a franchise revival that gets so much right. Toys For Bob have proven that they understand much of the original Crash trilogy's appeal and that the series still has plenty of wriggle room for growth that the subsequent Crash outings weren't inspired enough to capitalise on.

Linear corridor-pushing platforming is back to Crash again with a base moveset as shrunken down as it was in 2 more specifically. What ensues are levels that are meticulously and appropriately balanced towards tight and challenging platforming around your more limited toolset. The devs have said "When we think about hazards and enemies and how they’re distributed, they stream across in almost a rhythmic way, so we’ve been really focused on how do we maximize that and use that differentiation to really push Crash gameplay", and that much is demonstrated in how the game retains the core trilogy tenets while also being more momentum-based than before.

For variance, new masks are thrown into the mix with controlled segments that require you to make use of their unique abilities - as well as entire characters that control very differently from the heroes. This is about as welcome as this kind of shakeup could be, these levels being immediately more cognisantly put together than the more extraneous-feeling vehicle segments in Crash 3. It's so nice that they're rarely ever necessary for completion, too, if the player doesn't happen to be keen on the way any given side character's levels play out.

I'd be remiss not to mention how gorgeous the game is. Toys For Bob seemed like the right choice for Crash after their art team's stellar work on the Spyro Reignited trilogy - proving that they are essentially the masters of stage and character design, adding details and changes to the base work that make the world feel effervescent.
I LOVE what they've done with the character redesigns here, taking their old shapes and making them as stylised and expressive as the GPU can handle. Coco's new style is a particular standout; she's never looked this good. Cortex's taller design is quite enlightened too. It suits his character so perfectly for him to try and look as big as he thinks he is, only for him to be a wee rodent when anyone else in the cast enters the frame.

It feels almost cruel and unfair to compare 4 to the remake trilogy that came out just a few years prior, but it's worth noting how incredibly dated that game already looks. A remake mired in bizarre visual choices that, while all minor in the grand scheme of things, illustrates a full image of a team that doesn't know what to do with the paints provided. I wish I could embed images for comparison's sake, but please believe me when you can pinpoint any minute detail from 4 (the water, fire effects, character shadows, foliage, animation, the list goes on) to their direct counterpart in the remake to see it almost completely botched. It all sounds like nitpicking, and it is, but art is an art babye.
https://twitter.com/BeachEpisode/status/1382872345321291785

Where things get particularly interesting with Crash 4 is sadly also where my problems begin. If you were to go into 4 with the same completionist ethos as you would in the OG trilogy, you'd get chewed up and spat out by some senselessly cruel design choices that are actually quite baffling. Crash 4 should act as a case study for how much goodwill can be diminished by level after level of "fuck you", bosshi-like cruelty. Where 100%'ing a given Crash game used to simply add about five or so hours onto the total playtime as you aim for optional collectables, 4 is quite literally padded front and back, forcing you to play through each given level (twice), with an "N.verted" visual filter. Doubling the level count in the laziest way conceivable. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the levels in Crash 4 are considerably longer and more densely packed with crates than ever before. I have to specify; it's not so much the difficulty being the problem; the content surrounding the difficulty is so disproportionately bloated. Racking up tens of minutes in a single level as you try to break every crate you can as you scan every nook and cranny with a fine-tooth comb, only for you to come to the end of a level, one crate short, it's enough to knock a star off a total score (and it did).

One of Crash 4's best elements is how unpredictable it is from a pacing standpoint. There are numerous points where you think you're in the final runup to the end only for the trapdoor beneath you to fall out, revealing a whole new slew of levels. This would normally be quite exciting, if not for how easily you could get burnt out at any point by the game's padded nature, making it hard to savour how much of a rambling journey the game takes you on. Sure, you could ignore these side things and sprint to the ending. You'd definitely finish the game with a more positive take away than me! But I am a simple man who wants those unlockable skins.

While I'm effortposting far too much about this orange marsupial game, I might as well add that I love the interdimensional story this game is trying to tell. Its sense of humour gets me to a tee and is filled with very subtle winks to even the prior games that are now rendered "not canon". Cutscenes with incredible squash n stretch tex avery loony tunes esque animation that conveys character better than any game I've ever played. I love it to death.

Crash 4 is a fleshed out, wonderfully well-studied sequel. Built with a uniquely high grade of technical skill that is often diminished by design choices that can feel a little misguided. This is one of the most concrete building blocks I have ever played, and is one iteration away from complete perfection to my eyes. (Like... just make it so the checkpoint boxes tell you how many crates you missed. That would help SO MUCH). I'm hoping Toys For Bob continue pumping out wall to wall bangers now that Skylanders seems to have bitten the dust; they're more qualified than most to make gorgeous, satisfying and engaging platformers that are absolutely drenched in personality.

Compared to Half Genie Hero's hub-based level design, Seven Sirens shifts into a singular metroidvania world map, and I'd be lying if I said that this has done Shantae any favours.

Where the isolated stages used to provide a sense of theming, helping the world feel cogniscantly designed with particular mechanics and visuals in mind, each acting as engaging steps in your overall journey - Seven Sirens is happy to be a sweeping topography of almost amateurish, vaguely comprised rooms using palette swaps and clashing assets, spending the majority of the playtime in claustrophobic spaces enclosed by sewer and cave walls of only minor variation. The game is mercifully short, which is nice because I found myself lost and bored numerous times in the labyrinth of repeating room layouts.

Wayforward are about as good as it gets at capturing the feeling of a game that belongs on like, the Nintendo DS, and I'm sure part of the appeal is the overall simplicity, but it can play into why I rarely find any of their games all that engaging. Seven Sirens is essentially a track back to the school of Risky's Revenge or something.

Worth noting that, also compared to Half Genie Hero, this ~wasn't~ Kickstarter funded, so the relatively slim levels of quality and content may be explained away as there simply being less on the line.

Liked the Studio Trigger intro though!!

"OVER 500 HOURS of new gameplay", threatens Isaac.

This expansion is essentially the point where I took my first real plunge into this game. I was interested in Isaac after years and years of hearing "no two runs are ever the same"-esque platitudes, but it's kind of just "you'll never see this specific concoction of a handful of +/-1 stat passives ever again" so far. I'm fully willing to accept that the game only really opens up dozens of hours in; seeing the item list with like 600 greyed out boxes is very enticing, but I'd also be lying if I said I'm having any fun with this early game.

Dull item pools bloated with effectless stat ups and active items, with next to no wriggle room for rng manipulation - It really doesn't feel like I'm playing Isaac as much as the seed is stringing me along to whatever predetermined end it has devised for me, until I'm cut down by a slew of terrible and untelegraphed zero-delay room-wide lasers or pounces. The options to manipulate your luck with characters and items that synergise like mad just don't feel present at all until apparently tens of hours in? I had a 15 loss streak broken by a run that was so ridiculous I saw Delirium for the first time and killed him with such ease I could spare the time to play with my cat. It kind of shredded apart my honeymoon period. Nobody likes a pity win - which is how it feels. The variance is peaks and valleys with no in between. My successes feel obvious and detracted because I'm given a loadout where it's almost impossible to fail, not even helped when one follows a string of runs where I feel underpowered to the point where failure appears inevitable.

Granted, I could just read a wiki or watch some streamer with thousands of episodes of playtime so I can get a grasp of how to play efficiently. I COULD. But I'd rather just hold R until the shop stocks Chaos. A man can only Lemon Party so hard.

Exceeds at being addicting as fucqe, though! This soundtrack is filled with hummable earworms, and it's easy to get lost in a cycle of "just one more go" in the hopes I'll find two items that go together like olive and feta. (I think I'm just gonna aim for all the endings, then I'll bounce.)

EDIT: Finished the Repentence content finally! Well, Final Ending - I don't care for anything else. I can honestly say without a hint of stockholm syndrome that the content of this DLC is genuinely fuckin incredible. These new floors look STUNNING, with rooms, encounters and bosses that are tough but completely fair. As a basic rule of thumb; if I like something, it was added in Repentence. Hilarious to think that this game took nearly ten years for there to be bosses that ACTUALLY TELEGRAPH their attacks with great animation quirks. Nice surprise to see it end on a deus ex machina sequence i was convinced was beyond the scope of the engine. would prob have hit harder if this game wasn't mostly just a boring trial by fire that bothered to ingratiate me with the setting but hey. They said "what this game needs is a Wonderful 101 finale" and they were right.

The item pool expands to fit passives and active items that greatly alter your approach to a given run - made better with outright upgraded crown rooms and item shops. What was once an absolute pittance of reward, ensuring that you had to follow the RNG's rigid script laid bare; you eventually become able to make risky decisions that let you feel more in control of your fate.

It absolutely fuckin should not have taken this long, my first tens of hours of playtime could mostly be chalked up to sheer spite playing, frantically trying to see the appeal - which thankfully rears its head up to a point. An honest to god easy improvement you could make would be to reduce all "Kill X boss Y times" unlock criteria to just one. Just dump items on you for beating a boss, who wants to fucking grind.

>INHALE
Robin inhaled.

>HOLD BREATH
Time passed.

>EXHALE
Robin exhaled.
Robin felt his body lighten as he drifted into a deep trance.

>METAMORPH INTO EAGLE
That will mean loading the next section of the game. Do you wish to continue? (Remember, this is your last chance to SAVE a part 1 position to TAPE/DISK!)

Played this for a few minutes on a complete whim because I was in the mood for a humble vidcon about a simulated aminal. Nothing mindblowing, but surprisingly cute! Pet games are essentially desktop toys where you throw objects into the digital pet's playpen as you watch them react with canned animations and stat ups. Dogz gba seems to revolve more around the player character living their life while a new pet has been introduced to their family, so you're doing daily child chores while balancing dog duties. This level of context to the game does wonders, and as a dogless child, I'd probably be all over it for the placebo effect tbh. Also, the sprites are adorable. I aww'd at every little thing my character did as I excitedly explored the house looking for interactibles.
Hand on heart believe that this game's exact formula but gr8ly expanded could be the next halo killer.

Slaps like absolutely fucking crazy, but the music isn't my bag, despite their overall presentation absolutely being so. The best UI's I've ever seen adorning amateurish tweening anime girl illustrations set to the tune of JRPG Starting Village. It seems to be adopting a bit of a service model, so I can certainly expect some song packs down the line. Chillin out in the live online mode mostly meant being subjected to League of Legends and Korean MMO tracks.

DJMAX RESPECT is a beast of difficulty customisation and modularity, pretty much making it impossible to feel overwhelmed by a track unless you go out of your way to walk too far out of your comfort zone. Large amounts of modes ensuring a smooth learning curve and a wide array of visibility options just in case you find your eyes glazing over the largely bombastic presentation. Seems bizarrely reluctant to implement controller prompts, though.

In terms of its sheer wealth of rhythm game content, I think this is about the best you can get on the PC. Its DLC packages include songs from every earlier iteration of the DJMAX series to bump the tracklist to ridiculous heights, and if I were keener on the setlist, this game would be where my life comes to its end. Needs more Skepta.

My largest and more valid complaint than that of the tracklist would absolutely be that the anti-cheat module the game employs is fucked. Slams my drive like a sledgehammer and causes stutter with semi-regularity, which is essentially the death of a fast-paced rhythm game. Worth at the very least keeping an eye on how this game is affecting your PC.

Pokemon, for me, is at its best when it focuses on its conservation science and ecology theme, allowing their cast to feel like a part of their living world in ways more meaningful than random encounters materialising out of tall grass. With every mainline entry, it feels like they make the world map first and drizzle Pokemon on top like a complete afterthought, their inclusion almost never feels cognisant to the way the human inhabitants build their cities or live their lives - we're STILL fixated on collusiums. New Poke Snap takes advantage of this to charming extent and is the prettiest of the 3D games imo in part because of it. It's so nice to just passively glide by and be reminded that Pokemon can just vibe in a forest, any step away from constant tedious battles and cold hard stats is a step closer to primo.

Kind of weak as an actual photography game, though, but I've yet to find a game that has any idea how to gamify effective employments of elements of composition like the rule of thirds or whatever. You want one (1) pokemon in dead-centre of the frame, looking like an idiot, for max pointz.

Since this game is all about Looking, my most tedious complaint would probably that the human characters look fucking weird man. Bizarrely high quality clothing textures and soft plastic lighting on their faces making them look like uncanny Sylvanian Families dolls??? Cel shading is a dirty word these days I think, this weird toy rendering is all anyone does. Look, I just think Herdy Gerdy was on to something and we've been regressing ever since.

Anyway, this is fun! A little grindy, but this is a comfy game I'll be returning to for months to come.

Looove the style on display here. March of the Black Queen SNES vibes in these desolate roguelite playthroughs as grey, green and orange mold weeps over the petri dish of a screen. It's a joy to watch this diseased world slowly take form from nothing. Clicker game aesthetiqks are normally such bright cuddly things (cookie....), all in an effort to be as low mental engagement as possible - but Loop Hero is a FESTERING CORPSE and wants u to know about it.

Anyway the games alright but not my kind of thing what so ever. Far too reliant on sequential stat ups than the player's actual strategy, at the very least in these opening hours. If living, dying, and repeating with a +4% potion potency forever until you beat the next incremental boss sounds tight to you.......... go off and off and off and off!!! I'd rather have master chef on my other monitor.

I have a certain level of apprehension about airing my RE takes. Not only do I adore 6 as a madde gonzo fast & furious co-op xperience with movement options the likes of which I’ve never seen..... I've also never played RE4. There's always going to be someone unfavourably comparing any given RE to that one, and it makes me feel wholly unqualified! The basic throughline is that I've essentially liked to adored every title I've played so far;-

...except 7. A dull as dishwater and largely homogenous Outlast-like that, the second it runs dry of horror juices, leaves you with Only Serviceable combat to tide you over for the game's astoundingly creatively barren final third. I was a little displeased to see that 8 would follow the same trajectory, acting as the next step in a kind of “third trilogy” for the RE mainline.

RE8, thankfully, kind of slaps. A virtual ticket to a Tim Burton theme park (sorry for the tired analogy, but it’s the right one) where every ride strives to do something drastically different from the last. A venturesome monolith of genre and series love letters that begs to be explored and interfaced with. I found it impossible to grow weary of the combat when the game reinvented the wheel often enough for tense resource manage-y hostile encounters to end up feeling like returning to a warm blanket. I loved the experience so much that I explored every inch of the map, collecting whatever I could find, solving environmental puzzles and fighting optional bosses for the sheer joy of it. I can’t stress enough how happy I am to have had the exact opposite experience to my playthrough of 7 that I essentially wanted to be over as quickly as possible.

Adored the four lords, the way each of their areas felt like entirely different servings from a Dread X Collection but polished to a mirror shine with some of the best art and technical direction I’ve seen from a Capcom title in years. Mob Psycho Walter White. The journey of RE8 gains momentum towards the end as your arsenal is as kitted-out as possible, and it almost smacks of Lost Planet 2 at points. Also the final boss is probably the most stunningly animated thing I've ever seen in a game. King shit!!!!!!

Trying on the clothes from Persona 5's wardrobe and failing to come up with an outfit that isn't mismatched and ill-fitting. Now that the Vita has been excised, Nippon Icchi feel as though they're struggling to maintain their longstanding legacy of producing wall to wall ribald dogshit for idiots. Poison Control, on the absolute surface, does an okay job at posturing like it belongs on a home console with admittedly slick presentation, brave colour choices and effervescent UI design - but going any lower than skin deep reveals that it's just not even trying.

A genuinely dire third-person corridor shooter where the central mechanic of cleaning goo off the ground wastes absolutely no time in making itself known to be simple padding for content.
The game's structure is a series of levels that contextualise themselves as the hells made manifest of their respective victims, from which the player is tasked to cleanse those tortured souls and free them from their damnation. Where this could be a pretty intriguing premise, as each of these victims do have drastically different folk-tales among them, the game is pretty contempt to explore this setting in the most superficial way imaginable. Wall-less corridors floating in a void, stringing together enemy waves and interspersed with an apt decal and decoration or two. If you're making a game that is comprised entirely of one of the best-received elements from Persona 5, namely the mind palaces, try not to fail at realising that they were effective because of the insight they offered of their rulers. It’s nigh impossible to be invested in Poison Control because I’m not even convinced it’s all that interested either.

As comes with the NI territory, the dialogue is tropey and leery and pathetic. Each level is embarassingly titled a "Belle's Hell" (the entire cast of victims is female), every spoken line is a tit joke, the game even blatantly manipulates players into choosing the crudest dialogue options by tying them to the better stat boosts. I’m the type of mother fucker to be willing to throw a bone if it was at least any fun, but with these sluggish unreliable controls, difficulty spikes that force you to revisit older levels to grind… I’m keeping my bone!!!!!

All credit goes to the UI designers, the only mother fuckers to show up to the office. Or log in on Teams.

I want to preface that all of this may sound very unfair and nitpicky but please let me be flippant, this game is naff. Farming is a game genre that, much like the real-world application, is essentially all about math. I never did homework at school, and I don’t plan to start in my mid-twenties. https://i.imgur.com/P28ClZe.png
Hundred Days is the first victim of my Post-Sakuna: Of Rice & Ruin depression. Sakuna singlehandedly revitalised my interest in the farming genre because it was absolutely radiating in a level of reverence for its chosen craft that I’d otherwise never seen in a game of its kind. It took great strides to make sure that not only does the player have to partake in every step in the ricemaking process by hand, it also hid away much of the controllable and uncontrollable variables that contribute to the quality of the harvest until you finally hit that year-end stat page. It forced me to have a steady hand, examine my environment carefully and learn which cues require which actions to counteract. After handing the player a new tool, it took the time to explain their importance in the overall process, as well as a little of their history; each cog in the cultivation machine is shown to be as important as the other. Greedily, I think I NEEDED all of this to care.

I was hopeful about Hundred Days because it focuses entirely around the art and business of winemaking, to a level seemingly more detailed than Sakuna! The problem is that the very distinct dropoff in reverence to the craft almost hit me like a wet sponge - I’m willing to believe that the developers crafted this game out of genuine interest and passion for winemaking, but absolutely none of that verve made it to the final cut. You’re looking at your vineyard empire from a hot air balloon that only seems to become more distant as your empire expands. The higher up my perspective and scale of my empire got, the less the details mattered, beautiful fields of grapevines slowly camouflaging themselves into mere data points on a spreadsheet. The tutorialisation is as shoddy as the story, I barely knew how to navigate the UI, how to find all of the upgrades let alone know what each of them even did. Many of which are insanely expensive, so you just need to grind away to receive incremental boosts to production. Everything you can click on just brings up a new window filled with fucking numbers and percentages. Fun stuff man. Go outside and touch rice.

The rub is that the game starts with a Stardew Valley-esque “boring office life” introductory sequence, used to introduce the player to the basics of the core gameplay loop. Basically, placing cards with specific functions down onto your field grid. It then sends you to your winemaker’s paradise, an idyllic vineyard somewhere in the Tuscany hills or whatever, before making you do the exact same card-based grind. Guess the message here is that even your life’s dream can become a desk job if you aren't willing to give it some respect.