Another Crab's Treasure is such a video game.

A crab-coded Dark Souls set in a colourful ocean is something I had no idea I needed until I started playing 2 days ago. And once I started, I felt compelled to blitz right through the game. It took me 15 hours to beat and just about all of those were fun. The movement feels great, the platforming is fun and so is the combat.

Sure, the game is very derivative of Dark Souls but I do think Aggro Crab gives it their own spin. Enough that it feels unique. The different shells modified the way I approached combat a lot and turning shells into hammers was such a cool "oh my god, I can do this?" moment.

Biggest complaints are how the fps tanks in a few random transitionary areas. I'm playing on ps5 so this really shouldn't be a thing and it annoyed me enough to mention here. Also, the way the map just shows a small portion of where you are right now and doesn't let you scroll it is a little dumb. I wish they just gave me a normal map.

Another Crab's Treasure is a shining example of how an indie developer can take such a widely known gameplay concept and make it their own. What a fun little game.

Harold Halibut is an outstanding technical achievement. It's not, however, a compelling game.

Harold Halibut is an adventure game that looks just like a stop motion movie. And my god do they ever do a great job at that. The game is downright gorgeous and the stop motion continuously impressed me. I really wish this tech was used in service of a better narrative.

I found it very difficult to care about the characters and plot in this world. The voice acting is excellent but the dialogue is so dull. Very rarely do characters have anything remotely interesting to say. And although some personalities shine through (namely Harold and his surrogate mother Mareaux), most of it is forgettable. This is especially true in the first 10 hours of the game which is very slice of life. The plot gets a bit more interesting by the end, but it's too late by then.

I appreciate the themes they're going for. I really like how they approached an autistic coded main character with Harold for instance. There's something so pure about how he deals with problems. I'm sure this game is for someone. Just not for me.

EVOLAND 1

An interesting game dev experiment that doesn't really hold it's own.

I liked how Evoland was constantly changing the core gameplay up, especially in the early game. There's something inherently exciting about opening a chest and getting an upgrade for "better graphics". Evoland eventually reaches a point where a good chunk of the game is dumbed down FF7 turn based battles mixed in with mediocre Link to the Past copycat dungeons.

Again, it's a fun idea but it ultimately just reminded me of better games I could be playing instead.

The SoLA dlc has probably the best biome of the entire Dead Island 2 package. The Coachella vibes are great and the map is really unlike anything I have ever played in a game like this. It feels fresh and looks phenomenal visually.

From a gameplay POV, this DLC adds two new enemy types and is hellbent on throwing them at you at every possible instant. In general, the SoLA just throws all the enemy types at you and it's absolutely exhausting. I get it, you want to challenge your players. But god damn. The amount of times an enemy would trigger my character's tumbling down animation is insane. This was an issue in the main game as well but it happened to me so frequently in SoLA that I felt like a good chuck of my playthrough was spent watching the tumbling down animation play out only to then die by from environmental damage. It blows. Like Haus, this DLC also does nothing to the level cap, which is a bummer since there's loot everywhere and all of it is useless because anyone who played the DI2 story has been max leveled for a long time now.

The last boss of the DLC is great and one of the most creative bosses of Dead Island 2. I liked that. But yeah, this DLC ended up accentuating issues I already had with Dead Island 2 and soured me a bit on it. It's not bad. It's an impressive package. Just not one I enjoyed all that much.