Going into Scarlet Nexus, I had no expectations whatsoever. I didn't see any trailers or gameplay due to lack of interest, and I've never seen anyone mention much about this game other than it's existence, so I decided to give it a try and was somewhat pleasantly surprised with what I experienced.

Let's start with the two things that I think are absolutely amazing: The Art Direction and the Combat Interactivity.
Starting with the first, most of the environment design ranges from good to amazing. Some of the earlier areas feel a little generic, but by the time I reached the mid game mark, there were plenty of moments where I stopped to take a few screenshots of the areas and their design. However, this doesn't even compare to the stellar enemy designs. All enemies in this game reach a balance of feeling alien, while at the same time bringing some sense of familiarity in their design. Just looking at some of the bosses it's clear the love an inspiration the artists put into their designs, which there's nothing quite like it. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the character designs. Most of them are pretty standard and dull generic anime designs, which I guess isn't exactly bad per say. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing "bad" about them, but nothing good either, it's just something that's been done hundreds of times before.
Now, onto the other subject that surprised me: the combat.
The combat mechanics are pretty simple, your character has a basic attack combo, a dodge, a jump and the ability to use items to supplement combat.
But perhaps the best addition, is the powers that Scarlet Nexus brings to the table. Both main characters you can play as have psychokinesis, which is the ability to move things with their mind. This brings a new edge to combat, where the player can use objects in the environment as extensions of their attacks, supplementing a character's lack of range or damage by throwing big objects from a distance at the enemies. To explain further, in the setting, most characters have superpowers and use them in combat. While it might not seem relevant considering you can only play 2 characters which have the same power, the game introduces the SAS system. When you're choosing your party members, you're not choosing only the characters and what they can bring to the table, but how their power can affect your gameplay style. Using the SAS system, you can connect with a character and user their power, which has some slight alterations to gameplay. These powers can range from elemental buffs to your weapon, to invisibility or the ability to teleport. While appearing not much by itself, the SAS system really shines in it's interactivity with the enemies. For example, the simpler powers like applying a fire buff to your weapon burns the enemy, a lightning buff can paralyse them and so on. But the more esoteric powers, like duplication can duplicate the objects you throw with your psychokinesis, or hypervelocity severily slows down every enemy on screen. This goes much further with the introduction of the Crush Gauge, which functions sort of like a stamina bar, which when depleted opens the enemy up to either be instakilled or to be dealt a very large amount of damage. By a combination of targeting enemy weakspots and correctly choosing the power most effective at dealing with those enemie's weakness, one can master the combat of Scarlet Nexus and truly show the depths of what appears to be such a simple system. There's more combat mechanics like Brain Drive or Brain Field, but they mostly function as combat buffs (the former) or a super mode like Devil Trigger (the latter), and aren't all that innovative.

Now, let's move on with my biggest gripe with the game: the writing in general.
Starting with characters, most of them are really bad, and even the best ones aren't more than decent.
None of them have any depth to them, and are mostly there to fill anime clichê roles and tropes.
I'll describe some of the party members so you can see what I mean: A Spunky Happy-go-lucky Childhood Friend, a Shy and Quiet girl that likes flowers, a Walking Talking Oedipus Complex, a Too Old For This Shit Boomer, and so on...
The biggest problem is that they have nothing to offer outside of filling their clichê roles, the characters have no depth whatsoever, they just feel like they were all taken out of really bad seasonal anime.
And the protagonists might be even worse. The male one is just your typical shounen protag who wants to do good and save the world, and the female one is unredeemably rude, to the point where it's her whole personality, being cold and rude for no reason whatsoever.
Moving on, let's talk story. And boy, if you think the characters were bad, you're gonna be even more surprised. Huge spoilers ahead.


Starting with the setting, it's a technologically advanced society where most people have powers. However, monsters called Others fall from space, so the people with powers joined together to form a military to fight them.
The story starts off with the male protag joining this military, and pretty standard slice of life stuff with the characters going from one place to another saving people and killing monsters.
However, the story quickly takes a dark turn when one of the characters is suddenly turned into an Other, and your shady military superiors clearly know more than what they let on.
What follows next I can only describe as akin to a group of children who have been caught doing something bad so they start blaming each other.
It starts off with a reveal that the goverment you work for is doing 1984 shit like brainwashing whoever goes against them or turning people into Others for research.
This sparks a rebellion led by a dude who creates a rival goverment and who is apparently really important, but you've seen him like twice outside of cutscenes.
Okay, so the government sucks and is behind it all, not giving any points for originality there but it could be a decent setup.
Some shit happens and now there's a gigantic black hole consuming the Earth.
Nope, they then shift gears for the bigger bad being a secluded religious group who you've seen being mentioned in dialogue literally once the entire game. Turns out humanity came from the Moon and that religious group wants to use the main characters power to take control of the Black Hole and open the way up to return to the Moon.
Okay... so you go and beat those guys up but turns out that the true villain behind it all is the Dude that rebelled against the goverment.
All of this happens because the main character's actual power is Time Travel, and the main villain wanted to use that power to try and save his dead girlfriend.
Yeah. That's the plot.
I just have no words for it. It clearly lacked a direction with all the ping-ponging the plot did about who was the actual villain. It just feels really disjointed, especially considering the characters conveniently forget some of the plot elements so the writers can setup reveals.

To conclude this review, I kinda enjoyed the game I guess. I felt like it was held back a lot by the lack of direction that the story had, and it was particularly held back by the awful and boring characters.
The combat system certainly has potential if fleshed out a bit more, but the whole thing is so dedicated to the anime aesthetic, that it ends up being chained down by it in most aspects.

Let's talk about character action games. While not the most niche of genres, they never reached a mainstream audience until perhaps the release of Devil May Cry 5. However, these types of games always found their audience, with each different one bringing something to the table. Whenever character action games are a subject of discussion, the so called "Big 3" of the genre (DMC, Bayonetta and Ninja Gaiden) will always end up being mentioned one way or another. Today, I wanted to share my take on the Sigma version of the original Ninja Gaiden.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma is, in a lot of ways, a product of it's time, a time when game design philosophy prioritized a fun experience, a time when the devs thought of the player as a person capable of performing complex actions and didn't need their hand held to reach the finish line.
While this is in a lot of ways a positive, it can also sometimes reflect negatively on the outdated design.
To put it bluntly, Ninja Gaiden is a hard game, and many times it threads the fine line between challenging and unfair.
To elaborate a bit on that thought, I'd like to present my biggest complaint when playing the game: The punish windows on some of the enemies and the outdated (and sometimes unfair) boss mechanics.
Frankly, the punish windows on some bosses straight up feel random. For example, when fighting Gamov, he has a very clear window to be attacked at the end of his combo. On the other hand, bosses like Spirit Doku and Awakened Alma have very strict windows where they can be attacked, almost frame perfect, making it seem like it has a random nature to it when it looks like you clearly punished the attack of the boss, just for you sword to bounce off them as the block VFX plays.
About the enemy design...Well, while most of them are fine, some just look downright goofy and out of place in the game, like the Red Dinosaur Fiends or the Catgirl Fiends.
As for enemy mechanics, most of them have a varied moveset with clear counters and tells, except for one common thing that most enemies share and that I've seen quite a few people complain about in this game: the grabs.
Since this game has more of an emphasis on good positioning and decision-making, a lot of Ryu's moves have different recovery frames, which makes some options like Flying Swallow very unsafe if not correctly performed. And by virtue of that more tactical combat, there comes the problem with grabs.
A lot of the aforementioned grabs are really fast, some of them pretty much unreactable, and can catch Ryu during any animation of his that has no Invincibility Frames, making it so the player takes a punish that most of the times they couldn't avoid, either because they were animation locked, or in recovery from an animation. Hell, some enemies can even armor through Ryu's combos to grab him, which while I understand comes as a warning to not spam attacks, due to the animation lock I mentioned before, it just feels like an unfair punish (and don't even get me started on the fucking Ghost Fish, contender for Worst Enemy in Gaming History right there).
While the combat does have these minor issues of animation locking and not having animation cancel for dodging, it's hardly ever a problem when the player starts to get familiar with the moveset of the enemies and his own, understanding what attacks have I-frames, what attacks have too much recovery, and what attacks can easily be cancelled into a block.
This formula coupled with the usually good enemy design makes for fun and engaging combat, with just the right touch of challenge, and with plenty of room for the players most familiar with the game to perform stylish and crazy combos, making Ryu look like a superhero at times.
However, there is one thing greatly holding back the combat in this game: the camera.
While not an issue most of the time, whenever it shows it's problems, it really shows them.
While the player has minimum control of the camera, it's turn speed is sluggish, making it a chore to control during combat. If it weren't for the button that centers the camera on whatever direction Ryu is looking at, it would doom the combat.
You can especially see this problem on some of the faster enemies, that require the player to constantly chase them as they evade.
A bit smaller gripe I have with the combat mechanics, is the lack of a hard lock-on.
While not as big a problem as the camera and a lot less common, it becomes a nuisance when it happens.
To explain further, this game has a soft lock on system, which means that Ryu's attacks will go towards the enemy in the general direction the player is poiting their attack towards, and it mostly works, but sometimes I saw my character attacking a completely different enemy than the one I wanted to target, which did bring me some frustration during the playthrough.
These are the few things holding back the combat of this game from being truly amazing, but I chalked it up mostly to the limitations of it's time and hardware.
Moving on to the story, there's not much to say about it. It's a pretty subpar story about searching for the MacGuffin the evil bad guys plan on using to dominate the world. As for the characters, well... Calling them "shallow" at most would be saying too much. Most of them only exist to give plot exposition, and barely interact with Ryu at all. This is especially noticeable on the game's main love interest, Rachel, who has the personality of a dried up newspaper left at the front porch for a week during summertime. Hell, even Ryu himself seems not to care about the characters, which could sometimes be interpreted as funny, due to how overly serious Ryu is about his mission, showing no interest in anything or anyone besides it.
As for graphics, I think Sigma did a good job of fixing the original's aesthethic, which had those "2000's game" aesthetic where the color palette is made only of browns and grays. This version of the game adds some much needed color and graphical improvements, which are not bad on the eye at all, considering just how old it is.
As for the world design, it feels pretty generic. Tairon doesn't really stand-out as far as videogame locations go, and besides a couple of outliers like the entrance to the Vigoorian Palace or the Monastery, most locations are really generic.
As for level design, it's decent for it's time I guess. The game has a semi-open world structure, with every few chapters the player returning to Tairon to backtrack in search of a door he can open with whatever new key he obtained at that moment. While the level design isn't anything to write home about, it doesn't distract from the game by being bad, so decent is really the word to describe, since it's after all just a stage for the action, and not a main selling point of the game.
The soundtrack also isn't anything to give a standing ovation for, but it complements whatever mood the game is currently going for at the moment (especially the combat tracks), and that's about enough to be considered good.

As for closing thoughts, I have some mixed feelings about the game. Sure I enjoyed it, and sure I had some fun with it, but I felt like the things that hold it back, truly hold it back from being a legendary piece of media to be remembered throughout the ages. While it is for sure an anchor of the character action genre and a memorable game, I think it would really benefit from a remake that fixes some of the gaps in the design, so the game can finally realize it's potential and take a spot in the Hall of Fame.

I've always enjoyed the Boomer Shooter genre, and the revival that's been happening to these types of games over the last few years have kept my nostalgia satisfied. So here we have Amid Evil, a really good entry to this whole Renaissance of Arena Shooters (or DOOM Clones as they were called many years ago).
Let's get the lesser stuff out of the way, the story is pretty barebones as usual, it's just a classic "Go here, kill something evil" that these types of games use as excuse to start the genocide. Spread throughout the levels are pieces of text that delve more into the lore of the various worlds, which was a very welcoming addition and lead to some interesting insights about the creatures you're slaughtering. With that out of the way, let's get into the real meat of this game: the gameplay.
As expected of these types of games, it's really fast paced, with the player having to constantly move around and jump in order to dodge enemy projectiles. The weapons are really creative, they go from a staff that fires homing bullets, to a claw that launches motherfucking planets that explode at the enemy. Each gun has it's niche, and they're all pretty useful, serving their purpose. There's even a Soul Charge mechanic, where you fill a bar by killing enemies and collecting their souls, and when activated it supercharges your guns. Unfortunately, it doesn't bring anything novel to the table in terms of changing how the gun works, all it does is make them shoot faster and do more damage. The enemy design fits into certain archetypes a bit too much, you have your melee goons, your ranged snipers, your tanky close ranged behemots, the flying enemies, all pretty much expected.
The art direction is stellar, with special attention just to how varied the levels are. You have your standard mountains and caves and temples, but later you go into a futuristic machinery type of place, with some aspects of brutalistic architecture, and even a Void are that is geometrically unconventional, almost Lovecraftian, which will have you walking in the walls and in the ceiling through it's levels.
Now, the lingering question that everyone has in these types of games is: is it difficult?
No, not at all. I played this game on the secret, highest difficulty and it wasn't much to sweat at. Some of the later levels gave me some trouble, but nothing that couldn't be solved by tryharding a bit.
So is this game good? Yes. Is it great? Not really. It's a frantic FPS that will take you around 12 hours to be done with, and while not a masterpiece, it goes on to achieve all it intended to do.