Decidedly one of my favourite games in recent years. I’ve always had a love for when things line up to the beat in games and movies, and no game I’ve ever played has committed to it by this much, to where the entire game is built around it.

The story isn’t anything too special and doesn’t ever take itself super seriously, but I absolutely loved the characters, and I think this comes down to how much heart and passion was poured into this game. The animation, the music, especially the voice acting all sell it perfectly. It gets away with a lot by how genuine it portrays itself. For example, the writing can be very quippy and pun-riddled, but thanks to the voice actors all doing an excellent job and the fact the game plays it straight and sticks to its guns, it all comes off more charming than annoying. The writing in itself is very well done, with it hitting all the right notes to set the appropriate mood for every scene, be it goofy, climactic or more emotional.

The entire world is so vibrant and full of life, literally bopping to the beat alongside you. With an action game entirely based around hitting enemies on the beat, it’s so easy to get into a flow-state that never lets up, since everything in combat is dedicated by the music. Said music can get a little bit samey at some points, but it’s always good, with especially the tracks by the end of the game really getting dang good. Only downside I personally had is that because it requires such constant focus on hitting things on the rhythm, it can end up a tad tiring for longer play sessions, so no harm in taking a few breaks. Though it’s not a point against the game in my opinion, that constant focus also made it so that I didn’t really experiment with the different combo’s much. Since it takes quite a bit of focus to stay on beat and the basic combo’s do the trick just fine, I rarely had to change it up, but that didn’t make getting those S ranks any less satisfying.

Its greatest strengths really lie in the passion that the game practically exudes as you play. All the love, time and effort put into the animations, the cutscenes, how it all syncs up with the music flawlessly, the amazing voice acting, the character designs… there’s just a general optimism at play that put me in a good mood while playing it, and the humor, both visually and in writing, landed often enough to make me chuckle and even sometimes laugh out loud a bit.

I have nothing but praise for Hi-Fi Rush, and I think everyone owes it to themselves to at least try it. It might just be your jam, just as it was for me.

To condense dozens of paragraphs full of spoilers to a few sentences: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a game full of potential. A story with potential, characters with potential, gameplay systems that had the potential to be great, amazing even. In my humble opinion, it does ultimately not deliver on any of this potential in the long run, meaning that all the greatness it built up comes crashing down for me. Because of how massive a disappointment it was, story-wise, character-wise, gameplay-wise, mostly due to the high standard the series set for me with the three games that came before it, I really have no desire to return to it. It's a quality game marred by a bunch of narrative and gameplay decisions that either don't mesh with me or show more glaring faults. Thankfully future redeemed literally did redeem it and showed that this game could've been masterful if it was designed with different systems in mind.

There’s satisfying difficulty, and then there’s spikes of frustration in a game that feels it was never designed to ask perfection from you… and this is clearly the latter. There’s no satisfaction to be had here past the music and the ending I fought so hard to get through all the frustration that I essentially couldn’t even enjoy how amazing the cinematic ending that we got actually was. As somebody who absolutely loved the base sonic frontiers, this was the most unwelcome surprise in a long while. You’d think more of the same goodness would be more than enough, but no, it’s made just for the people who love to suffer and bash their head into a wall for hours on end for little reward besides a decent ending… I really pray that they take lessons that making the next games ball-bustingly hard isn’t the way unless they’re way more tightly designed. When you feel like you’re fighting against the games jank and camera even in that stellar final boss and have obtuse game mechanics that were never explained before just to make the boss battle different… who really enjoys that, I wonder? What does the game gain from that sort of thing? It gains my frustration and in some part some genuine hate, that’s for sure.

Cute, short, sweet and SO IMMENSELY FRUSTRATING because I forgot that climbing was a thing for a good hour and a half so I was making it so much harder on myself than was needed. That doesn't count into my score, of course, after I found out that you could indeed climb. The camera frustrations and floaty feel of the controls didn't go away though, but with it being a free little game just gifted to us out of nowhere, I can't be too critical of it. Nice lil trip that is nowhere near as good as Celeste, but it never tried to be, nor had to for a fun experience.

I had high hopes for this one despite disliking rogue-likes/lites due to the high review scores, but in the end it falls into the same kind of dull repetition that kills any of my interest to keep playing. It’s a cool take on poker, but I felt like my losses and wins were so luck-based that I felt no sense of progress or higher understanding, and the cards you unlock after every run didn’t really feel exciting either so that sense of ‘slowly upgrading for better runs as you go’ was very lacking too.

It’s a very nice concept and for rogue-fans, you’ll probably love it, but for me it was just kind of dull and disappointing.

Very charming game, especially as someone who loves cats! It has incited comparisons to untitled goose game, and I think I had more fun with this game than that one, but they decidedly left me with kind of the same feeling. It’s very charming looks-wise, it’s fun going around doing cat stuff, but… the ‘fun’ of playing an animal and doing mischief just fades very, very quickly. I think this game has more cuteness going for it than Untitled Goose Game did, but it also has a lot more jank to it, which in this case I didn’t really mind since I never got stuck, but I was surprised by the sheer amount of it at times. Oh well, in any case, it’s cute, it’s nice, it’s fun and it’s pretty short, so you can’t go wrong with this one if you just want a catastic adventure.

The battle system gives so much more freedom than the first one, the worlds are much more expansive... and none of it felt exciting or fun. During the entire adventure, I asked myself why it is that it seemingly improves upon the first one but somehow it just feels less fun to play.

All I could come up with is that a lot of charm was lost, and we are left with a game that seems more like the annoying and unfunny side of the rabbids is peeking out, where the first one essentially made them bearable and even endearing. There was a lot more humour that worked in the first one because none of the characters could speak, whereas here it seems the very act of giving BEEP-O a more prominent role with voice acting means a lot of that charm was lost immediately, in favor for a lot of verbal jokes that just aren't funny.

The battles in the first one where more interesting because there was a good balance to it all, here it doesn't take much effort to just break the game in half with the right sparks.

A very big disappointment after how pleasantly surprised I was by the first one. It's a huge step down, though it's in a lot of smaller ways so that it isn't easy to tell at first glance what it's even missing that the first had in spades.

I am decidedly not Princess Peach: Showtime!’s target audience, but that didn’t stop me from playing it and having a decent bit of fun. However, I think even for children, this game isn’t exactly the cream of the crop.

Peach herself still feels about as blank of a canvas as ever, which is a bit sad since Luigi managed to really become his own character in his spin-offs. It feels like every outfits she dons just makes her ‘act out’ a personality, which is kind of the point, but also makes basic Peach still feel as bland as ever. Only Cowgirl Peach threw in a nice little bit of sass that I appreciated quite a bit. The voice acting was also a bit hit or miss, with some lines sounding great but a lot of them sounding either off or just devoid of any fitting emotion. I am fully aware these are personal nitpicks though, but for Peach’s first game in a long while, the devil is in the details sometimes, at least for me.

Sadly it’s not just the details that are ‘kind of off’. The variety on display with the different roles Peach plays admittedly works well on a first run, since you’re never doing the same for too long. The theatrical aspect of it is front and center, with every level actually being played out on a stage and more complex structures held up with barely visible wires to give that hand-crafted feel. It doesn’t break immersion as much as it keeps it grounded that this is all a play with an audience watching and clapping as we pose. On that note, things could’ve been a bit more… theatrical. More bombastic. It always felt like the climax of a given costume was kind of short and very ‘oh… that’s it?’. The gameplay styles themselves also kind of get old really quickly because of how simple they are, with a stand-out being the detective transformation with mysteries that sometimes felt so laughably easy even a monkey could do it. To give credit where it’s due, I found most of the ‘sword-punch-lasso’ levels inoffensive and brainless in a fun way on the first go, iceskater Peach was surprisingly tight on timing at some parts and phantom thief Peach was probably some of the most fun I had with the game. It’s always fun to some degree, but it’s never ‘a joy to play’, and I feel like that does significantly knock the game down when all it has going for is its looks and fun factor. Despite how writing can be very important on stage, I never expected Princess Peach to have inspiring or surprising scenarios. It’s all pretty run-of-the-mill, Peach coming to save the day as the hero. I was even a little surprised by the ending of the game, since I figured the villain would get some kind of redemption, but nope, not even that, which felt oddly cold for a supposedly kind-hearted character like Peach. (But again, big nitpick!)
Princess Peach looks decent, plays decent, but never goes above and beyond on either front, and that’s a bit disappointing.

Now, on a second run, the stages kind of fall apart a little. When the surprise and variety is gone, you start to notice how many sections kind of drag along, with no option to skip them. If you miss a single collectable, which can be easier than you’d think when you often get locked out of returning to a previous section, you’ll have to start the entire level over again, non-skippable slowness included. With a sizeable post-game that makes you go through all the stages again for some new collectibles, it’s essentially inevitable that if you want to get the most out of Princess Peach: Showtime, you’ll run into this repetition which makes once fun sections a bit of a chore.

To end on a positive note: I thought this game wouldn’t be for me, at all, but I gave it a go because I was impressed by how far they stuck to the theatre theming in the demo, and on that front I was not let down. The outfits for Peach are all quite a sight, the cutscenes looked quite nice and the music was a nice surprise too, quite a few catchy tunes! I had more fun than I thought I would have, but this is definitely one for kids, seniors or Peach fans only.