Me and my friend often joke one of the biggest joys of Trails is busywork. CS1 does not seem to understand that this is a joke.
There is some truth to it (saying it as a completionist who is unreasonably upset about missing one enemy scan), but it's certainly not what most people come to the series for - they want a compelling, multi-layered character cast, tight worldbuilding, and an awesome soundtrack. This game only delivers on one of those at the absolute best.
The music in this game is leagues better than most of Sky, but still doesn't match the Crossbell games in overall quality (aside from standouts like Investigation and Path of Spirits.). However, the atmosphere it creates is refreshing.

I have never been so upset by a games media news cycle as I am right now, watching the best Pokemon game in a decade be globally dismissed out of hand because it runs at 27 FPS.

The mere idea that there are thousands if not millions of people putting these Gen 9 games in the same tier as Sword and Shield or even below them, enrages me. Sword and Shield, regardless of "dexit" were clownish, half-baked things that underdelivered on all familiar fronts while fumbling everything they could have had going for them and offering nothing new except a poorly thought out and unexciting battle gimmick and a suite of ok new mons. They were depressing, and marked a franchise in clear decline, taking away far more than they gave.

I still can barely even believe how far we've come from the flat, barren wild area that Sword and Shield launched with. Thousands upon thousands of manhours have been been bled for this open world, and it shows. Every sector of it is rich with denseness and verticality, every mile a joy to explore. Craftable TMs strike a healthy balance between the doomed movepools of Gen 1 and simply teaching Close Combat to every mon in your party in gens 7 or 8 and grants the world an MMO's incentive for farming, a process that is vastly expedited by the auto-battle feature. I do certainly question the wisdom of building Team Star's content around this feature, but not the auspiciousness of its inclusion.

The new Pokemon themselves are a strong showing, though they almost always are.

Unthinkably, the writing for this game is not totally embarrassing. After the total fumbling of Team Flare in Gen 6, the incessant chattering of Gen 7, and the multifaceted catastrophe that was Gen 8's entire script, when the best writing the series had seen was in TEAM PLASMA, a tale with its own host of questionabilities, I had completely surrendered. It was clear to me that Pokemon's writing would definitely always be garbage, and that I was really only here for the multiplayer. Against all odds, Scarlet and Violet have mostly proven me wrong. Dialogue is decently written across the board with actual, well-executed moments of emotional catharsis on occasion, and aside from one pretty forgivable instance, twists are handled so, so much more gracefully than in Gen 8. Nowhere in this game is there a moment where a character sees a self-explanatory tapestry hanging in the back of a KFC and uses it as a springboard to perform her eighth remix of a circular, substanceless conversation. Characters are written believably and likably, and no major story threads become disasters like that of Chairman Rose.

I've even come around on the lack of level scaled content, though it's a little too easy to unknowingly pick a fight in a high level area only to be locked into a trainer battle with something twenty levels above you. Some way of seeing the level banding in game would go a long way. Forgoing level scaling also forgoes level flattening. An avid Elder Scrolls player is likely to tell you that level scaling can get very boring, very quickly. In reality a scaled version of this game would make it harder to find a challenge, not easier. I recommend that you go ahead and look up that level map online and take on the strongest things you think you can handle before putting together a second, lower level party to work through all of the leftovers. All regular trainer battles are fully optional now, so it's quite easy to underlevel yourself on purpose. It actually allows for a good degree of challenge, something that this franchise seemed hell-bent on eradicating until recently. Postgame offerings are pretty average. It's no Emerald or BW2 or HGSS in this regard but it at least has more going on than X and Y, with DLC on the way. Co-op isn't where I'd want it to be as the Union Circle isn't exactly rich in functionality, but at least they're trying it. Having to set a separate link code to battle or trade with somebody already in a group with you is absolutely deranged when you consider that Halo 3 had a perfect, friend-based lobby system back in 2007. This stuff has been figured out for over 15 years, and the PSS from X and Y was already a nearly perfect system. I cannot comprehend this.

I suppose that signals us toward the more negative critiques. While I have taken it upon myself to shout praises from the rooftops in hope of reversing the miserable tide of this discourse, these Gen 9 games are not without sin. We'll talk about the famous one last.

A quick first note: Being locked to school uniforms sucks! Fix it in the DLC!

Terastalization (or however I'm supposed to spell this ridiculous name) is inherently a wildly unpredictable mechanic, and wildly unpredictable mechanics (like dynamax) lack reasonable counterplay. Anything that lacks reasonable counterplay by Smogon's own past reasoning, is uncompetitive... when tournaments aren't open-sheet. If players are able to see their opponents tera types before that button is pressed like they can in VGC (which is doubles so it doesn't even matter as much), almost every problem with the mechanic disappears. There are definitely instances where the system pushes an already powerful mon over the edge, but those can all be dealt with by the community on a case-by-case basis. If it were used less foolishly in the main game, it would be a neat toy for the campaign. That's not the timeline we live in. Every gym leader uses the mechanic almost exclusively to their own detriment by terastalizing their last Pokemon to their gym's type every single time. Usually, all this accomplishes is robbing that Pokemon of an otherwise beneficial second typing and making them vulnerable to the exact same move that you just swept the rest of their team with. In the competitive meta, it more likely means that you're just going to have to take a wild, blind gamble on what that Garganacl's tera type is and whether you can actually hit the one, largely unpredictable weakness that it's left with, or gamble over whether or not this set-up sweeper is going to get the single turn it needs to destroy your entire life. The generational powercreep by the way is out of control this time around. It's less about stats as in previous gens (Dragapult and Regieleki obliterating the use-cases of basically any Pokemon previously considered "fast") and more about outrageous abilities and signature moves. Kingambit, Great Tusk and Gholdengo in particular have unique features so meta-defining that it seems outright foolish not to have all three of them. At time of writing, Great Tusk and Kingambit's usage statistics for last month revealed that both were present on just under 50% of all Showdown OU teams, at 46.949% and 46.043% respectively. Gholdengo was on close to a third of all teams, but he would surely be higher if he weren't competing with Garganacl for that "completely immune to all status moves" slot. Combine the percentages for both of them and they'd take third place. Even in the future when power creeps again, the specific niches of these four Pokemon will not disappear. Unless their abilities are nerfed, they're banned forever, or those capabilities are given to a bunch of other Pokemon in gen 10 (like they did with Unaware this gen) these bastards are here for the rest of our lives. Even worse, as those power metrics shift, we'll just have to deal with Houndstone, Annihilape, Chi-Yu, Chien-Pao, Esparatha, Fluttermane, Palafin, and Iron Bundle. Unless gen 10 also obliterates everything that came before it, the gen 9 Pokemon are going to dominate competitive Pokemon to a suffocating degree for the rest of time.

While we're on this thread about the competitive scene, Scarlet and Violet retain the infernal 20 minute timer enforced by their predecessor despite the united pleas of every prominent voice in the community. While this feels like a monument to stubbornness, and players should absolutely have control over such a timer in their own personal battling, my annoyance with this has subsided upon realizing that this meta has been purposely directed toward explosive offense, and thus matches should be shorter on the whole. If they're going to design the game around the timer like this while mitigating the stall-based filth that ran rampant in Gen 8, well... that's fine by me. There is however, still one giant flaw in this, and it's my biggest complaint about the whole game.

Battles in Scarlet and Violet are glacially, unacceptably slow. This has been an albatross around Pokemon's neck for years, and the achievements of Legends Arceus in this area have been painfully undone. When an opposing Gyarados enters a double battle, the following happens in sequence:

-The "sends out Gyarados" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-The animation plays where Gyarados enters the field.
-The "Intimidate is happening" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my partner's attack has dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-An animation plays showing that my attack has been dropped.
-The "attack has been lowered" textbox appears and hovers on screen.
-If it's the end of the turn and anyone is holding Leftovers or any other item that needs to activate, the animation for that item plays and then the textbox explaining its effect appears after.

This kind of thing NEEDS to be consolidated. Please, for the love of god, show the textboxes WHILE the animations are happening. Show all of the simultaneous stat drops or increases at the same time. I'm begging here. This is exacerbated by the removal of two features that have otherwise been present for literally all of Pokemon's near-thirty year history: Turning off battle animations, and changing the battle style to "set". The former has an obvious effect on the length of battles, while the latter is more of a hindrance to a specific type of player, and by a specific type of player I mean me. As someone who actually participates in Pokemon's PvP, I hate playing on the default "shift" battle style. It erodes the good competitive habit of thinking about switching Pokemon as something that always carries a cost, rather than a free action. For my playthrough of Pokemon Violet, I ignored each and every prompt the game gave me to switch Pokemon after I knocked out an opponent, which gave me yet more textboxes to mash through. More than this I'm annoyed that Game Freak would raise the entry barriers to competitive Pokemon even higher with this removal. It's something that could only have been motivated by stubborn, backwards philosophy, not time, money, or technical constraints. It's deeply frustrating, even if its impact on the overall experience is relatively trivial. These kinds of removals just feel spitefully anti-consumer and I hate them every time.

In what I'm sure will be a great disappointment to many, the catching mechanics of Legends Arceus are gone. Touching a Pokemon once again triggers a traditional battle, wherein they must be caught in the traditional way. I do not take this as a rejection of those mechanics. These games were very clearly developed in parallel, and we'll see the true results of GF's experiment in Generation 10, not here. While that may be a missed opportunity, the real issue becomes apparent when Miraidon and Koraidon are brought into the mix. Pokemon out in the open world are scaled to their canonical, pokedex-ordained sizes, which means that many of them are absolutely tiny. This in turn means that you will accidentally drive over a Salandit who blends perfectly in with the cave floor your traversing and have all momentum stopped dead as you enter a battle you didn't want. In docked mode on a large screen, this is a pretty avoidable through treacherous predicament. In handheld mode, well... god help you. None of this is aided of course, by the pop-in.

Alright, fine... here we are at last. The notorious technical performance of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. First, the games are locked to 30 FPS. This may feel sacrilegious from 2023's doorstep, but it is not uncommon on the Nintendo Switch, a machine that was born underpowered and is rapidly approaching its sixth birthday. More importantly the game does not maintain that 30 FPS, and rarely reaches it at all.

With that said, let me make this plain: No one but the most decadent of PC gamers should reject these games on the basis of performance alone. In my full, thorough playthrough, I suffered exactly one crash. As a player of N64 games and rememberer of Ultra Sun and Moon on the 3DS, I adjusted to the framerate a few hours in and never thought about it again with the exception of the 2 FPS background characters, which I found hilarious. Lighting can be persnickety, but its fickle whims were little nuisance. In terms of bugs I encountered the following:

-Pokemon clipping through walls in narrow tunnels (trivial)
-Being placed into a wall after a battle and falling until the game sent me back to my most recent Pokemon Center (single occurrence, fixed itself)
-Performing poses in the selfie camera freezes your avatar's face in the chosen expression until you manually reset it, potentially making them perpetually sad or unhinged in cutscenes (humorous, harmless, easily fixed)
-In one cutscene my character's arm was continually twitching (harmless, silly)

That's it. That's the list.

When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, critical darling, normie favorite, and holder of a 94/100 score on Metacritic released in 2011, I encountered so many progression blocking, quest breaking bugs in the first few days that I had to look up how to use the developer's console to try and fix my quest log myself. In the end I just started over. Pokemon Violet currently holds a 76 on Metacritic. Pokemon Sword sits at an 80.

I've seen a tweet with video from this game where the player throws a pokeball at a target, and the framerate plummets as the game rebuilds the whole scene around the ball from scratch, taking a truly awkward amount of time. The tweet says "the entire game is like this." I had this experience exactly twice across more than 40 hours. This is the kind of outright stonefaced lying that is taking place around this game. It's disgusting. Stop.

If you're going to make fun of Scarlet and Violet, the technical performance should only be one of a thousand complaints. Talk about how miserable the process of tera raiding is. Talk about how the impressive-looking puzzle dungeons that were once our gyms have now been replaced with featureless identical boxes that just direct us back outside to do some absolutely pathetic minigame that one guy probably threw together in an afternoon. Talk about how GameFreak habitually removes gameplay options like the ability to turn off the EXP Share or use the Set battle style, seemingly just out of pure, baseless spite. Talk about how Dexit fundamentally damages several of the series core pillars and disrupting the franchises whole appeal, and how there is currently NO place, AT ALL where players can use all of their Pokemon for literally anything. Talk about how YES, actually we DO want a Battle Frontier, VERY BADLY.

And then while you're at it, talk about how this new non-linear direction plays to all of the series strengths by facilitating the player's ability to make their own, personal story, set their own challenges, and tailor to their individuality. Talk about how the story is one of the series best and how your Pokemon can once again finally follow you around the overworld outside of their Pokeballs at a speed that might even be able to keep up with you. Talk about how the optionality of trainer battles and random encounters means that you no longer have to slog through route after route as an overly linear series of battle hallways.

Scarlet and Violet, together with Legends Arceus, give me hope. Pokemon is still many miles from what I want it to be (an enormous live-service game that cares about its multiplayer) but I have been without that hope for a long time. I have not been completely satisfied with a Pokemon game since Generation 5... half of Pokemon's life ago. Gen 6 was exciting and I had a great time with it, but it left me wanting so much more. Gen 7 felt like it existed only to sell me plastic toys. Gen 8 felt like it no longer cared about anything at all. Shortly before Gen 9's announcement, I made up a Word document that I named "How to fix Pokemon." In that document, I asked for Animal Crossing New Horizon's style of drop-in, drop-out co-op multiplayer. I asked for following Pokemon. I asked for a Battle Frontier. I asked for MMO-styled open zones with cities and gyms in their center. I asked for the gyms to be gauntlet affairs that locked the player in and forbade them from hitting up the Pokemon Center after every opponent. I asked for the gyms to be leveled quite highly when a player first arrives, thus encouraging them to either fight totally optional trainer battles in the surrounding area and scavenge for supplies, or to buckle down and use some actual strategy.

I definitely did not get everything that I wanted from that list... but I actually got a lot of it, and that has to count for something. I'll be honest. If gen 10, which coincides with Pokemon's 30th anniversary and will almost definitely be harnessing the power of Nintendo's next machine is not another large, bold step forward... I'll be done. If gen 10 comes and goes as a low-effort contractually obligatory afterthought, devoid of pomp or circumstance, then I'm taking it as my offramp. That said... based on this and Legends Arceus, I believe that we're going where we need to go... if a bit slower than I would like.

ANOTHER EDIT: The DLC is legitimately great and makes me so excited for the future.

This game left me broken for days after playing it for the first time. It's very easy to relate to these characters and this town, and man sometimes you really wish you didn't. I don't mean that as a criticism, it's genuinely great to me that this game got me so deep out of my comfort zone at times. It can be a lot though, especially if you're going through/have gone through a similar situation to any of the characters. The art style is one I adore also, there's a very specific design philosophy with these characters that fits their personalities exceedingly well. The environments also look super great and I love the autumn theming the world of Night in the Woods has.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance X takes everything about the original and improves it delicately and effectively.

For once every classes were now made worthwhile with slight overhauls that do not break their original purpose. Laws have been altered to be less of an annoyance while still providing a slight twist to every fight. Monsters are much stronger and more fun to use on the battlefield, they no longer rely on single abilities and now have a larger scope of utilities.

The added difficulties and strategic depth turn a kiddie'd version of "Final Fantasy Tactics" into a fully matured game.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance X promptly turned a great game into one of my favorite games of all time.

It's pretty bare-bone and passable for an isometric dungeon crawler, it has no music and little graphics. The story and quests aren't really captivating, or deep; they're even quite fetchy.

Agreeably, there are a few merits to this game:
Enemies variety is decent, while there are only so many sprites in the game, most enemies will alternate between casting or using melee weapons quite frequently; either cornering you or roaming. While the environment is undeniably lacky, there are quite a few miscellanies of traps, boulders, lava tiles and pits for the player to mind his surrounding and forget the bland scenery.


While it is definitely better than most gold box SSI games, it's still one of their worse games, not particularly interesting or innovative by 1992 standards. By then, you had games like Ultima VII, Might and Magic IV or even Darklands - all with an open world and better storytelling.

The surface charm of Bayonetta, a hypersexualized spectacle, belies a sadistic seduction, the pinnacle of character action gameplay gate-kept by the genre's tradition of ball-busting difficulty. Taking after it's spindly namesake, the game by nature is a sort of dominatrix, stomping you down into the dirt and cracking the whip at your attempts to fight back. It's brutal, frustrating, agonizing to watch as your nerves fray and senses dull, with each encounter providing a fresh boot to the teeth. Broken, battered and bruised, you look for solace, only to be greeted with a stone-cold consolation prize for your struggles. Against the crushing odds, each step becomes heavier, each mistimed strike putting you at the whims of Heaven and Hell alike. Hours pass, anger boils over, resentment turns to fascination… and the highlight of any character action game, the most brilliant of afterglows, shines clearly – the flow state: the melding of mind and body, attuned to the same frequency for a singular purpose. Free from your submission to unceasing cruelty, you take the reigns as a domineering hellion, a unholy agent of divine retribution against the legions of Heaven's army.

Unshackled from preconceived notions, Bayonetta's essence breaths uninterrupted. PlatinumGames's masterwork is informed by the inescapable interplay of sex and violence; the first glance at Bayonetta herself can tell you that. But despite the game's seemingly adolescent pandering, there burns a heart of rebellion within the work, a feminist bend buried under the suffocating weight of the social gaming sphere circa 2009. The duality of Bayonetta, as sex-positive icon of empowerment versus gross exploitation of sexuality, is ingrained into every aspect of her.

This is to say that, despite the obvious trashiness inherent to the game, the blatant fanservice and standard anime bullshit lacing the game, it's hard not to see a extreme version of myself I'd want to see: a hyper-femme confidence elemental, a perfect beauty that defines human limitation, a plain-and-simple unstoppable bad-ass. Dare I say, with every tasteless shot and embarrassing line in consideration, that Bayonetta is, in fact, transition goals?

In a way, Bayonetta represents an "ideal", a splinter of me shattered and scattered across a million separate works. But with this knowledge in mind, it's difficult not to feel slightly conflicted: after all, the character exists as an amalgamation of Hideki Kamiya's fetishes and fantasies, a woman that literally lives to please a man. For all my desires to view her as some new-age feminist idol, she is a personification of the objectification of women in gaming. I suppose it's only fair to invision her divorced from her initial context, a messy reimagining to fit her into an even messier personal image. Consider it me embracing another odd inspiration into an increasingly messy queer narrative.

The scandalous spirit of Bayonetta is, at the same time, its most beautiful and most reprehensible quality. Without it, it would stand as a husk, mechanically interesting, but without a soul to prop it up. In equal senses, it's the exact reason I recommend and shy away from suggesting the game; it represents a part of me, while also being an element I'm somewhat ashamed to admit to. Needless to say… this game feels essential. Whether it clicks with you on an individual level or not, you owe it to yourself to try it.

Reviewed on 3/17/21

For a smaller team’s first attempt at a Soulslike game, this is fairly competent even if I can’t help but miss the varied leveling and build setups from the games it was so clearly inspired by. Boss fights are usually my favorite parts of any game, and coming from a genre known for its memorable boss designs and difficulty, Mortal Shell severely under delivers in that way. I will say though, completing the game’s No Shell run (essentially a 1HP run) gave me one of the most accomplished feelings I’ve had from gaming since Sekiro. Even if its world, enemies, and bosses are rather forgettable, Mortal Shell has given me a sense of gaming accomplishment I won’t soon forget.

Rating: 6/10
Platinum Trophy #161
Platinum Difficulty: 8/10 (No Shell run is a MAJOR test of patience at times)

I guess I lied about playing more then just Bomberman in terms of playing only 1 PC Engine game for the time being. I couldn't help myself, I was really curious about this game so I gave it a go and honestly I really enjoyed it.

This game is mostly a visual novel so if that is a genre you like, you should give this a look. It's got a nice 90s anime vibe. Well I guess it was made in 1992. It's games like these that really make me see the appeal of the system especially to someone in Japan. I'm not sure if the Sega CD could do what this game does but I was impressed with all of the voice acting and cutscenes. The voice acting is rather nice but it is compressed.

While this game is fun and can have some fun writing, sometimes the story can feel repetitive with you just going to location to location just to find one of the 13 dark frauleins to fight. Though it won't stop the game from being fun a lot of the time. It's got a lot of fun characters and I really like Yuna.

Another gripe I could give the game is the battles. Now I assume they were made with the intention of being super simple, especially since they could detract from people just wanting to enjoy the story. Sadly they just get a little old after a while so I ended up using speed up. The most fun I had was just seeing what verbal abuse Yuna could say to the girls.

The music is kind of hit and miss. Some of it is really good especially the CD vocal songs that feel straight out of an anime. However some of it is just kind of grating and repetitive and the sound mixing is kind of poor at times. The biggest surprise to me was hearing the Bomberman PC Engine Title Screen theme and then actual Bomberman showing up, how does this happen after my first game on this console being Bomberman?

There's a lot to like about this game even if it isn't perfect and hell I'm not even sure if there are lose scenarios in the VN sections. I tried purposefully seeing if there were any in some situations but they just don't lead to anything bad. If anyone has found one, would appreciate to know just out of curiosity. I'm excited to play the sequel to this someday, I'm hoping it's even better!

It’s always going to be weird to me that this is the game that acted as the lynchpin for so many experiences in my life, both essential and easily avoidable. For all intents, its fine, right? It’s Kirby, still coming into his own, but identifiable as the super tuff pink puff that everyone with an ounce of good taste adores. Discussing the actual advancements of any Kirby game is a fool’s errand for all but the most studious of scholars in Dream Land, a topic already worn weary by a thousand writers before me. Plain and simple, this game matters less in the physical reality of what it is and isn’t, and more by where it resides, as this near-constant companion through my memories.

Dream Land 2 settled as permanent iconography, fragmented moments sculpted in grey-matter marble, pristinely preserved and gravely decayed. It was a series of monochromatic rainbows illuminating otherwise melancholic recollections, an eternal love that, even in its greyscale trappings, glowed in vibrant light. It was the life-or-death duel against the celestial duo, Mr. Shine and Mr. Bright, outside of a Wal-Mart in South Colorado, the endless attempts to dethrone the Dede-despot after school… It was lackadaisical searches for Rainbow Drops, late into the night, while talking to loved ones. I don’t want to pretend it’s more than it is, a story of a rose-tinted little guy and his Adorable Animal Friends™ (and Gooey), but perhaps it’s that same simplicity that ensures a presence in my mind.

I feel a lot of retro games from the 90's just have way cooler front covers than a lot of modern games do. I mean look at this beauty, it's like Starscream from Transformers speeding through orbit with a random background explosion. I love it.

As for the actual game it's a pretty good shoot 'em up overall. You control A 'Blaster Fighter' jet plane across six levels using a variety of weapons you can collect liberally. I do mean that as containers with about six power ups at once are found in generous quantities. There are 7 weapons types; Reverse shot, Six way shot, Satellite guns, Homing and three different types of missiles as well as power ups for your main weapon the Vulcan gun. In all honesty I feel the last one is the most important upgrade available. Sometimes the Reverse shot and Homing missiles can be helpful on some small enemies but overall the wall of firepower in front of you will be doing most of the work. Additionally there is a charge shot that damages all enemies on the screen though only the smaller enemies will die from the blast however the recharge time to use it is fairly short and doesn't require collecting or shooting to power up.

Where Aero Blasters really shines compared with Arrow Flash the last Mega Drive Shoot 'em up I played is in the level design and variety. Initially it seemed a little the same with the first level flying across a sky and city landscape followed by a slower cave level but things changed where that level suddenly sped up having to speed through narrow sections with warning signs for the obstacles ahead. The level after that the parallax scrolling came at an angle as if flying into the atmosphere with ships and enemies coming out of the clouds in front of you before finishing in orbit with a gorgeous horizon view of the planet below. From level 4 due to being in space the controls change so that pressing a direction the ship's velocity won't stop due to the vacuum meaning you need to constantly change direction to control it's direction and momentum.

This is a really neat idea but I feel this is where my experience with Aero Blasters slightly loses it's positivity as this can get a little irritating at times and creates an artificial difficulty. The last level inside what seems to be an alien mothership is also a real let down, it's absolutely full of moving obstacle puzzles and is really hard (I'm not good at shoot 'em ups to be fair) and I felt my earlier enjoyment of this title slipping as I directed poor Starscream into yet another moving block where I misjudged the small gap I had to traverse through. The wikipedia page for this game has this quote:

"MegaTech magazine gave the game 78%, commenting on the "excellent graphics, sound and playability", but criticising the low challenge factor."

Which is hilarious to me considering how insanely hard I found the last couple of levels. Overall though I had a good time with this one. The music is pretty fast paced with a nice beat, the action is good and the graphics are crisp and bright with some nice level aesthetics and interesting mechanics. Just slightly too hard for me on the backend, there's a reason the title banner for this game here says 'Game Over'.

+ Some nice unique level design/mechanics
+ Colourful, vivid visuals.
+ Action packed gameplay.
+ That front cover.

- The last couple of levels are way too hard.