Ballin'tro

I'd staved off a review of Balatro until I'd become victorious and completed a run. Many months and eleven hours of gameplay later I have finally notched my first victory... and boy was it worth it.

Balatro is a poker-based roguelike in which the player is tasked with making their way through eight antes (tiers,) three rounds each, in which they must clear an arbitrary chip count to proceed. To do this, you must take advantage of the rules of Poker and a plethora of accents and boons given to you through chance in the form of Jokers (accent cards that alter multipliers and round scoring,) planets (which create multipliers based upon which hand is played,) tarot cards (consumables that accent certain played cards,) and more. The benefit of this game entrenching itself within Poker is that it's a game that is already engrained in the minds of (most) of its player base. Poker is such a ubiquitous experience to most Americans that jumping into Balatro and its ruleset felt like second nature, making the learning of its tertiary mechanics much easier to parse.

It took some time (clearly) to finagle myself into creating decks that worked for me. At first I tried decks and bought into jokers that accented pairs and the chip gain I could get from playing these in quick succession. I tinkered with straights and flushes a little more before I realized I wasn't doing too hot with the assembly and heightened RNG required in suits that required more cards. I returned once again with a fresh mind into the pair based deck, stubbornly telling myself that I would find victory with two cards played at a time. I lost again and again, but I was getting smarter and going further. I understood the necessity of holding certain cards to heighten their sell value and discarding when I ultimately didn't need to, to boon jokers that gave me a higher multiplier if the lowest card in my hand was higher. Of course as you play more and get further in the ante's, Balatro rewards you with newer jokers, tarot cards, and vouchers that will make subsequent runs (likely) more successful. I kept at it, frustratingly losing even more in the sixth and seventh ante's. I ran into "The Needle," a stipulation that requires a player to clear the certain chip count in one single hand or else they will meet failure, a furious amount of times. Eventually I lucked out and was able to bypass The Needle on my sixth ante through some clever strategizing, and I knew I was in the clear en route to victory. After all this time I cleared the eighth and ante and felt qualified to write a review.

Balatro is a vindicating and involved roguelike that uses a familiar DNA to make a captivating game. The feel of the game's UI and playable experience is seamless, cards floating as you select them and everything snapping in the way that it should to make for a crisp and quick gaming experience that you will want to come back to. I eagerly await my next victory in Balatro... but it may have to come some time down the line when I feel more confident in attempting different decks and hand strategies. I heavily recommend Balatro to fans of roguelikes or for folks looking for a game that will be a good time spender throughout the year. I can't believe that this is the game going head-to-head with Persona 3 Reload as my GOTY so far and not FFVII Rebirth, but here we are.

Another Meh Soulslike

I had high hopes going into the final third of this game, I really did. Another Crab's Treasure for the majority of its runtime was a charming, funny, and ultimately creative endeavor that took a lighthearted approach to an overwhelmingly serious and intense subgenre of videogames. I found myself laughing at plenty of the character interactions and items that our protagonist hermit crab Kril encounters on his journey to return his former shell to his back. Moments like your first encounter with the taxes levied by the areas queen, making your way into New Carcinia, and rummaging through the Blighttown-esque Flotsam Vale fill the player with opportunities for laughter and intrigue. I had this game internally prepared for review as a Four out of Five Stars as I approached what should have been the final boss. It had its flaws, mostly lying in suspect hitboxes, poor camera angles, and a very low health bar, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It wasn't until this fateful fight in which I was bugged on perfect dodges that sent me flying to the sky and back down into boss one shots that I realized where the cracks began to show. I defeated the boss using an in game assist, of which there are plenty, and realized I had only cracked the shell (hehe) of how much more this game had left... and how little of it was enjoyable.

Say what you will about the majority of Souls or Souls-likes as made by Fromsoft, but the final segments of said games are so quick. They end when they should end. They know not to overstay their welcome. I'd make examples here, but this isn't a review of those games. There's a power in having your player built up for a major encounter and having them know they are at what should be the end of the journey, the collective moment where they way upon their experiences and know they can put it all together for one last huzzah. In Fromsoft's games, this moment of self Spirit-Bomb always makes sense and is apparent. Another Crab's Treasure, a game that ostensibly takes inspiration in many ways from Fromsoft (I mean the area is called the Sand Between for example,) Aggro Crab wildly missed the mark on having the finale play out at the right point. You beat the boss and the game keeps leading the player into the worst areas for traversal, littered with the most annoying and rhythm breaking enemies, only to have a handful of multi-phase boss fights left and a needlessly deep narrative introduced. Man, even Lies of P in its endless frustration let the player know that the game was going to end after the one big dungeon, because it made sense.

My frustration with Another Crab's Treasure is that ultimately this could and should have been a game that was much simpler and easier to digest than it was. I get why the developers felt the need to make it deep and introduce a grandiose narrative into it, but it didn't translate to an enjoyable experience.

The act of actually playing their sophomore effort is a different story, that was overall pretty enjoyable. Minus hiccups and difficulty in later game encounters, the variety in shells and shell abilities makes for a fairly fun experience. You are implored to try different shell combinations and levelling up your character in different ways to play with the way you like to do so. If you want to go more physical strength heavy, you are allowed to. If you want to take advantage of the damage and buffs you can derive from the shells that Kril finds upon his journey, you are also allowed to. I enjoyed this and the mixing and matching of playstyles that... mostly worked throughout the game. Parry/dodge timing was overall respectable, yet had a noticeable input lag to it, and damage against enemies/bosses was very apt. An issue I have with many games that try to mold themselves around the Souls games or hack and slashes in general (looking again at Lies of P here) is that they struggle with damage sponging bosses to make them feel more difficult than they should be. Another Crab's Treasure did not do that, and I applaud the developers for that. Outside of combat, traversal and platforming leaves a lot of room to be desired here. No movement from point a to point b is too complicated but many times I found Kril barely missing jumps because of clipping issues on terrain and the climbing mechanic not really snagging the environments as it should have.

In reality I should probably rate this game lower than I did because of how poorly it ends, but my first few days playing were overall very enjoyable and I was a pretty big fan of the direction it took until the last few areas. I can't recommend Another Crab's Treasure unless you're looking for a complete Soulslike in a fairly saturated genre.

Mario Party DS is the first Mario Party game I've enjoyed enough to play singleplayer and I loved every second of it. There's so much charm in this game, especially in the story mode which has a cute storyboard-like art style to tell a narrative between levels.

The boards were relatively simple and fun, nothing too complex like I've seen in other entries of the game but they have enough going on to make them unique and stand apart from one another. After each board, there is a boss fight you must beat before progressing to the next one, and these are so cool and a nice reward for beating a level; the only one I didn't love was the last one which felt a bit underwhelming.

I recommend this game to anyone who has yet to give the series a try. A series with as many entries as Mario Party can be quite overwhelming, especially when hearing how hit or miss they are but this one seems to be a great place to start.

This game had so much potential but it just fell flat for me. This is Peach's first solo game since the controversial Super Princess Peach but there just isn't much content here at all. The content it does have is enjoyable, despite it being extremely easy, but you're probably getting around 7 hours of playtime for a full-price game which, in my opinion, isn't worth it at all.

The concept of Showtime is cool because each world is like a different genre of game, some of my favourites were the more stealth-based ninja levels, the mighty mission levels where Peach becomes a superhero, and the kung fu levels which have awesome combat. However, there are some levels which bring the game down, and every level is mandatory to beat before fighting the final boss so there's no way to avoid them. For example, the detective levels were extremely slow and provided very little challenge to make up for it; you'll spend 10 minutes finishing the level just to feel no satisfaction at all because of how easy it was.

The boss fights were a highlight of this game though, they were surprisingly fun and occasionally provided a bit of challenge. Light Fang is the boss of the second floor and I think he was probably my favourite, and the Madame Grape fight at the end was really cool too.

Overall, I think this game is just fine. I definitely wouldn't recommend paying full price for it but if you can pick it up for cheap it's a somewhat fun game to kill a few hours.