Gangbeasts meets multiplayer puzzle platformer that had my friends and me laughing every time we played it, even on the weaker levels.

The first time I tried Human Fall Flat it was little more than a tech demo. It was fun but it didn't hook me. But revisiting it now with my wife and two of our friends, we had an absolute blast slowly playing through the base game and all the free DLC levels over the period of a few months.

Honestly I really would've expected the noodly Gangbeasts physics to get stale but the level variety make it so you constantly have to find new ways to throw your bodies around to solve puzzles, often to hilarious results. What's more is that the puzzles often have different solutions. In fact, some of the most fun we had was trying to figure out how we could "break" the game or do a puzzle unconventionally. But even when it feels like you've done some exploit, all of that is intentional and part of the game's design.

The shenanigans of the game honestly never got old - grabbing onto a spinning wheel to fling yourself across the level, seeing how far you could launch yourself off some catapult, throwing your friend off the level, etc. The only times this game got boring was in some of the weaker level designs, but even in those, we still had fun just messing around.

+ Great multiplayer fun
+ Fantastic level variety
+ Fun puzzles that take advantage of the wacky physics

- Some weaker levels that overstay their welcome
- Occasionally annoying puzzles that rely too heavily on imprecise physics

Kirby's always been like the little sibling to Mario - Kirby games are fun and cute but they never have any challenge or depth to them; they're just simple fun. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is the first Kirby game that feels like it's really trying to go toe-to-toe with Mario. I still don't think it fully measures up to most of the 3D Marios, and doesn't come anywhere close to Mario Odyssey, but this is still a real standout 3D platformer and easily Kirby's best outing.

Mouthful mode is not only hilarious, but it introduces a great new mechanic that opens the game up to some fun puzzles and action sections of the game. The boss fights are surprisingly fun, and occasionally even challenging. This game has a dodge roll that I thought was silly at first but you actually kind of have to use it for some of the end-game challenges. This game goes harder than any Kirby game has any right to go and it's really a fantastic time.

If you had told me back in October 2018 that some of the most fun I would have in a few years time would be playing the embarrassingly broken Fallout 76 with my friends, I would have laughed.


Fallout 76 has come a long way from the messy state that it launched in. For one, it actually has a lot of content now in the form of tons of quests, actual NPCs, public events, daily activities, seasonal events, and just generally so many things you can do either by yourself or with friends. Over the past 6 months, I’ve logged about 300 hours in Fallout 76. Most of that has been with my wife and some friends, often in a group of 2 or 4, but I’ve also done plenty of content solo. Additionally, I’ve met and made friends in the game as the community is generally quite good. When we were new, we’d often stumble across high level players who would give us stimpacks, outfits, crafting plans, and a variety of other useful items to help us get started. Eventually, when we were higher level, we started hanging around the starting area and doing the same for other players. It’s a fun community.

The other notable thing that has improved since Fallout 76’s launch is general bugs and game stability; however, this one comes with a bit of a caveat. While the game certainly performs better than it did at launch, this is by no means the stable bug-free experience you’d expect from an online game that’s been running for 4 years. It’s still very much a Bethesda game. The goofy bugs like enemies clipping through floors or standing with their back to you while having a conversation are fine, but the real issue are the bugs that halt progress or interrupt your gameplay. While disconnects are infrequent, they still happen and it’s annoying when they do. I’ve also run into quests that I’ve had to reset multiple times because NPCs fail to trigger correctly, walk the correct paths, or even show up in the location they’re supposed to be in. I’ve Google’d issues before to find that some quests have been barely functional for 2 years but Bethesda does nothing to fix it. Despite its massive improvements, the game is still pretty janky.

The other technical issues of the game come down to game limitations and general performance problems. The load times, for instance, are pretty awful. My wife is playing on PS4 and she’d have to wait for several minutes when fast-traveling. Even on PS5, because they never released a native PS5 version, the load times are pretty rough. The camp building portion of the game also suffers from the technical limitations. The game places a limit on the amount of objects you can have in your home but it often feels arbitrary and is not communicated particularly well. A small flat wall-mounted poster takes up the same amount of budget in your camp as a lush, potted plant. I’m no game designer, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

The CAMP-building portion of the game is ripped right out of Fallout 4. For our first couple dozen hours with Fallout 76, we completely ignored the base-building. I genuinely did not care about making some cool camp. But the more I played, the more I came across rad player camps and found more plans of my own, that eventually I wanted to make something cool. Once we started actually making our camps, that became the number one draw of the game. Everything we did in the game from that point on was with one goal in mind - how can we get more plans to build more cool shit at our camps? Your camp isn’t just a place to go home and store your gear, your camp is your trophy shelf to show off all the cool rare things you’ve found in your time exploring Appalachia. Having another player roll into your camp, run around and check everything out, and then run up to you and do the “Cool CAMP!” emote was always immensely satisfying. I was proud of the home I built for myself, so much so that saying goodbye to it was the saddest part about finally quitting the game.

The ongoing support for Fallout 76 has been pretty impressive. Every few months they launch a new season with a new theme, and with that season they’ll add new content to the game that’s free for all players. Sometimes that comes in the form of an incredibly beefy update like the Wastelanders DLC, which added new quest lines, NPCs, new locations, and way more. Other times, it comes in the form of something smaller like the Nuka World On Tour DLC which added a new Nuka World location, some fun carnival games, and a bunch of Nuka World-themed public events you could participate in to earn unique weapons. The best part about all of this content is it’s not timed, so joining the game years into its run meant we had a ton of bonus content to enjoy.

As with any ongoing game like this, there are microtransactions that help fund continued development of the game. The microtransactions in this game come in the form of cosmetic items (armor paint, gun skins, and outfits), fun items for your camp (toys, decorations, furniture, etc), and their Fallout 1st monthly membership. The problem is, they kind of make it so that not joining their monthly program makes your gameplay noticeably more of a pain. You have an extremely finite amount of storage in the game, and with a survival game like this where you’re constantly looting and hoarding materials for crafting, it ends up being a pain in the ass. However, for just $10 a month this can all be solved by joining Fallout 1st which unlocks a junk box (with unlimited storage for crafting materials), and an ammo box (with unlimited storage for ammo). I relied on these so much that when it came time to cancel or renew my 1 month trial of Fallout 1st, I kept it because not having those would’ve made my gameplay experience noticeably worse. I don’t love having something like that locked behind a monthly membership. Sure it’s not necessary and you can play without it, but boy does it make your life a lot easier to have it.

All-in-all, I genuinely loved the few months I spent with Fallout 76. It was a great multiplayer experience that I looked forward to playing with friends several times a week. The quests and all the other content they’ve added to the game over the years is surprisingly good - it actually feels like a true Fallout game. I loved my time in Appalachia even with the problems the game still has.

+ Great multiplayer experience
+ Fun world to explore
+ CAMP building is surprisingly enjoyable
+ Solid quests with good voice acting and good writing
+ Good progression system

- Still plenty of bugs, even if they aren’t game-breaking
- Performance issues and limitations
- Some predatory microtransactions
- Solo quest instances even when playing with friends

A Disney-themed Animal Crossing clone that is better than it has any right to be, and even improves upon its predecessors in some ways, but can get a bit grindy.

I remember when Dreamlight Valley was announced - an Animal Crossing clone, with a Disney overlay, made by the mobile game developed Gameloft. "Welp, this will surely be a soulless cash grab", I cynically thought. And while you could argue whether or not Disney trying to ride off Animal Crossing's success is a cash grab or not, this game is anything but a phoned-in rip off.

Dreamlight Valley is clearly made by people who have spent a lot of time playing Animal Crossing and other farming/life sims like Stardew and Harvest Moon. It takes a lot of what Animal Crossing does, sprinkles in some flavor from farming sims, and adds some really nice quality of life stuff. For instance, I would love to be able to just hold down a button and auto-plant all of my crops in other games like this. And Animal Crossing could really take a page out of Dreamlight Valley's book by showing you where all the villagers are on the map at any given time.

The general objective of the game is to bring the valley you reside in back to life. This involves finding Disney characters, building them homes, and expanding your valley by unlocking new biomes. In general, this game has far more structure than something like Animal Crossing. It actually has a quest log to give you a bit of a push in the right direction. But you can still just do your own thing and expand your town how you want.

As you go, you'll work on your relationship with the Disney villagers, and do quests for them to unlock items, outfits, and things for your village. The problem is, some of the later stages of these quests can get extremely grindy, requiring you to mine a ton of iron from around the valley to progress. Several friends I know who were playing this game completely fell off when the grind hit, and have not gone back.

The good thing is, the devs seem to be extremely receptive to feedback. The game is in early access and they are constantly listening to players which is fantastic. Because the game is in early access, it still definitely has some bugs including some that may lock you out of completing quests until they are patched.

Weirdly, one big thing this game is lacking in is personality. Disney on its own is not a personality. It's got that Disney charm, the theme is great, and the characters' mannerisms are often spot-on. Watching Wall-E cruise around the town and then sit on a bench while holding his feet (?) is very cute. But when you talk to a character they'll just spit out one of five generic voice lines then be silent while you read through some dialogue. There's no cute bebebese to mimic the conversation you're having with these characters like in Animal Crossing.It's just silence which starts to feel a bit cold.

Overall, the game is a great life sim especially if you have any kind of appreciation for Disney properties. And it's only going to continue to grow as they add more characters, biomes, and other content to the game. Unless you're in a rush to try it, I recommend waiting to give them somer time to work through the kinks while in Early Access.

+ A lot more than an Animal Crossing clone
+ Good gameplay loop of finding new villagers and expanding your town
+ Nice quality of life improvements over other life sims
+ Great visual style
+ Plenty of content planned for the future

- Very grindy late-game quests
- Early Access kinks and bugs
- Personality is lacking
- Some incredibly grindy trophies that will take over a year to finish

This was a 4/5 game when it came out in 2010, but this "remaster" is little more than a lazy re-release of an old game with no attempt at cleaning it up.

As a big fan of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, I loved this game back in 2010. I maxed every character, got all the achievements, and saw all the endings. My wife (then girlfriend) and I put a lot of time into the game and I have nothing but fond memories. So when Ubisoft announced a remaster, I was stoked. Unfortunately, they did the bare minimum just to get the old game to run on new consoles and called it a day.

After playing other modern beat 'em ups I've enjoyed like TMNT Shredder's Revenge and River City Girls, Scott Pilgrim hasn't aged quite as well as I remembered. Enemies have seemingly endless block with no way to break it and they'll often fly from off screen and stun lock you with no warning. Even on "easy" difficulty, it's an exercise in frustration especially if you're playing alone. Playing solo means no one to revive you when you go down, so you've only got 3 lives to get through a level - and you'll have to start from the beginning if you fail. Why are we still using this old "lives" systems when we're not playing it on a machine built to eat quarters?

Aged gameplay aside, the game's online multiplayer is busted. If you manage to get through the game's cumbersome party creation and can get a group together without error codes, you get to enjoy latency issues, random hitching, and progress-blocking bugs. For a game that's better with friends, you'd think they'd put a bit more effort into making that part of the game actually work.

I was playing the game with a monthly game club and we all sort of felt like it was a slog to get through until we found an exploit that allowed you to easily max your stats. Once you do that, the game is a dream. You can run through the level quickly, tearing through enemies, and rarely going down. It's just straight fun. Sadly, "just use an exploit and make sure you don't play the game alone" shouldn't be a requirement to have fun with a video game.

It's disappointing that Ubisoft didn't put as much love into remastering this game as the original devs put into making it. The slapping soundtrack by Anamanaguchi, the beautiful pixel visuals, the scene cards drawn by the comic's creator Bryan Lee O'Malley, the references to other games, and the absolute reverence they show to the source material is phenomenal. It just sucks that this game is kind of a bummer to play in 2022.

+ Incredible adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim comics
+ Banging soundtrack Anamanaguchi
+ Fantastic visuals and overall presentatio
+ Some fun hiding under an uphill climb

- Terrible, broken online
- Rough combat issues like stun-locking and infinite blocking enemies
- Too punishing even on "Easy" difficulty

A brilliant music mixing tool trapped in a bad video game.

Ever wanted to create cool music mixes but things like matching tempo & key, handling transitions, and making your own beats are all just too much? Then get Fuser.
Fuser is one of the coolest and most accessible music creation tools I have ever used. It takes all the stuff that DJs have to do manually and streamlines it so you can just slap some songs together to make something that is usually better than it has any right to be.

But Fuser isn’t just a music creation tool, it’s a video game. A video game that makes you play through its entire excruciatingly boring campaign to progress. And by the end of the campaign you still won’t be high enough level to unlock all the songs, instruments, and effects.

The campaign is basically just a tutorial for the music creation tool stretched into something that’s about 5x as long as it should be. The campaign is bad. The characters are bad. And even playing a set for a demanding crowd is often more stressful than enjoyable. You’ll spend the whole song watching the timer, trying to meet the objectives that pop up in the corner, while also trying to meet audience requests that often conflict with the set requirements of the stage. It’s simply not fun. And the fact that you basically have to play it kind of sucks.

Honestly the best part of this game is just popping into freeplay mode and making music. What does it sound like if I take the bass and melody lines of Bad Guy and mix them with the vocals of Take On Me in the minor key? Turns out it sounds hauntingly rad. What if I mix the vocals of 4 songs from 4 different genres? That’s unsurprisingly bad. That is where the fun of this game is - and if that all sounds fun to you, get Fuser. But you’ll need to put in some time with other less-fun aspects of the game if you want to expand your DJ library.

+ Brilliant and accessible music creation tool that makes it easy to just create fun stuff

- Music, samples, and effects are locked behind a slow leveling system
- Terrible campaign that basically just serves as an overly-long tutorial
- The actual act of playing the levels just isn’t fun

Spider-Man 2 is easily my favorite superhero video game of all time. It takes everything I loved about the previous two entries, tosses out a lot of what I didn’t like, and builds on what’s left in meaningful ways. The story hits, the combat feels great, and open-world traversal has never felt this good.

Fast travel in Spider-Man 2 on the PS5 rules. You select a spot on the map, and the camera dynamically zooms into that position, instantly giving you control of Spider-Man swinging through the city. It’s incredible. Yet, despite that, I rarely ever used it because getting around the city is so damn fun and quick that I never wanted to stop. I didn’t think it would be possible but somehow Insomniac took the already fun swinging in Spider-man and Miles Morales and brought it to another level in Spider-man 2 with the addition of the web wings and other traversal mechanics.

Just like the traversal, the combat in the game gets a nice facelift with a slew of new fun abilities. The combat is not anything that dramatically different from the previous games but it still feels so damn good. It was only occasionally frustrating when enemies would have move priority over my big powerful attacks and ended up somehow canceling me out.

I’m not necessarily a big comic reader, but between the three live-action Spider-men, Spider-Verse, and all the random Spider-man cartoons, we’ve had no shortage of variations on Spider-man’s story. So it’s rad that Insomniac is perfectly comfortable breaking canon to tell its own story, and what a blast that story is. Even though a lot of the twists aren’t all that surprising, it’s still a really fun story and the voice-acting is fantastic.

My biggest complaint in the game is all the random minigames that distract from the fun shit you would rather be doing. I get that sometimes it’s fun to break up the gameplay so it doesn’t get repetitive, but bike racing, genome splicing, molecule identifying, and bee drone combat ain’t it gang. It’s baffling to me that Insomniac can make the best-feeling traversal in video game history and then also have the worst-feeling bike riding. I do appreciate that there are far fewer MJ stealth sections this time around, but there are still a few and while they’re a lot better, they still aren’t really that fun.

Aside from some annoying side activities, Spider-man 2 is an absolute blast to play. The traversal, combat, and story come together perfectly to create what is easily the new bar for superhero video games.

+ Somehow made Spider-man’s mobily even better, faster, and more fun than it already was
+ Combat feels fantastic with rad new abilities
+ Fantastic story that has no qualms breaking canon and forging its own path
+ Great audio design, music, and voice acting
+ Beautiful world design both graphically and in terms of making the city feel alive and lived in
+ Just an absolute blast

- Character models look dated
- Bad minigames that distract from the fun stuff you’d rather be doing
- Combat move priority occasionally annoying
- Some bugs that need to be worked out

"Maybe you find a barcode laying around and then you put it down and it turns into a forest!"
"Ah cool. And what does the forest do? Do you solve a puzzle with it?"
"No. But it's cool!!"
- Viewfinder's entire vibe.

The very first moment you place a 2D photo in the world and see it come alive in 3D is genuinely rad. And the game is full of those kind of "wow neat" moments. Sadly, the game as a whole never really amounts to more than a series of cool moments in a mostly pretty easy puzzle game.

The idea for this game was so good. The core mechanic of taking and using photos to manipulate the world around you to solve puzzles is dope! But it almost feels like the devs didn't fully know what to do with the idea after they thought of it so they made a bunch of puzzles and then decided to tell a pretty random story I did not care about with some bad voice-over I wish I could've skipped.

+ Really cool and unique game mechanic
+ Some neat moments that had me go "Oooo cool"
+ Some decent puzzle-solving

- Story's uninteresting and voice acting is not great
- The 2D to 3D translation can feel a bit unpredictable and finicky sometimes.
- Puzzles are generally pretty easy
- Lots of random cool things around the world to showcase the mechanics but are rarely actually used in puzzles
- Last level in the game is randomly timed!!? Why??

A pretty disappointing Assassin's Creed game that I spent almost 80 hours 100%ing because I hate myself.
This was my first memorable experience with "video games can just launch completely broken now and it's apparently OK". Some of the bugs were funny but most were annoying. Even if you strip away all the bugs, what you're left with is a bloated video game that does little to justify its length. It really sounds like I hate this game but honestly, it's not terrible. I had enough fun playing it that I at least wanted to 100% it even if I ended up deeply regretting that decision.

AC: Unity taught me what Ubisoft open world fatigue was and after playing it, I took a multi-year break on one of my favorite game franchises of all time before eventually calling it quits completely with AC: Origins.

Disclaimer: These are my brief thoughts based on my memory of playing this 8 years ago:

A neat 2D Zelda with some fun new items and ideas but ultimately fails to actually do anything radically new or interesting compared to its predecessors.

Oracle of Seasons is fun enough but it’s tough to go from Link to the Past to Link’s Awakening to this. It’s noticeably less impressive than the prior two 2D games both in terms of world design, bosses, dungeons, and puzzles. While I do enjoy the puzzle-first intent of this game, most of the puzzles themselves didn’t feel particularly good to figure out especially compared to the stuff in LTTP and LA. In most Zelda games, the bosses and puzzles have an intentional visual design to them that makes it clear to the player which items they would need to use to interact with the world. Some amount of trial-and-error is to be expected when solving puzzles, but a lot of my time with this game was just cycling through the items in my inventory to see what worked. In fact, almost every boss fight was literally me just playing “guess and check” with my available items to see what damaged the boss.

I do think some of the mechanics in this game were cool. I really like the concept of Seasons as they add variability to a limited map size and a nice degree of puzzle-solving to just getting around the world. That said, it ended up being kind of a pain to find the right stump to change seasons for the location you needed since seasons would inexplicably change or reset between some screens but not others. I also thought the magnetic glove was a really cool spin on the hookshot that we’re used to. In general I liked the system of taking basic items like the slingshot, feather, and boomerang and getting upgraded versions of all of them that are a spin on how we’re used to those items functioning. The ring system was an interesting idea, but having to go back to the ring shop to change which rings are in your inventory is terrible. Plus only being able to equip one at once means that, once you find the good one, why would you ever change your rings again?

Overall, Oracle of Seasons is a fun entry into the Zelda franchise but it is a clear step-down from its 2D predecessors in just about every way. Instead of making improvements in areas that needed it (like combat), the only new things it tries are just a couple of new items and ideas that don’t really offer anything substantially different from other games in the series. The most interesting thing this game does is the Link-Play system but I haven’t played Oracle of Ages yet. Will modify this review after finishing both games.

+ Cool new unique items I haven’t seen in a Zelda before
+ The seasons system is a cool way to get more out of a smaller map

- Puzzles and boss fights felt more like trial-and-error than actual problem-solving
- Combat is still as iffy as prior games
- Seasons are a cool idea but it ends up being kind of a pain
- The ring system sucks

Brilliant world design, storytelling, music, and visuals trapped in a middling golf game weighed down by a bevy of terrible design choices.

Just hitting the ball around the wasteland that was Earth with the incredible radio playing is a rad experience. Listening to the radio and enjoying the visuals of the post-apocalyptic wasteland is amazing. It’s hard to talk about the radio without giving too much away, but it’s honestly one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a game like this. Fully voice-acted with great music and stories that give you so much flavor into the state of the world you’re in. I loved every second of it. I could honestly just listen to the radio without playing the actual game and I think I would’ve had a better experience. But sadly the game requires you to golf to see more of the game and actually perform well in golf at that.

Every level has a diary entry associated with it that gives you context for the level and insight into what your character is thinking and feeling while going through these environments. However, these diary entries that actually tell you more of the story behind the game are locked behind getting par on every level which turns this from a chill vibey experience to a stressful, frustrating game of trying to perform well in an OK golf game so you can actually experience more of the story the game is telling. Additionally, diary entries unlock once you finish a level, so in order to read it you have to wait until the next level, pause the game, sit through the way-too-long “opening the menu” animation, scroll down to “diary”, and flip back a page to the prior level, all so you can then read the guy’s thoughts on the level you finished and hope you remember the previous level well enough to understand the details he’s referencing.

Also worth noting that the “Retry Level” option is in the pause menu, so every time you want to restart the level on your journey for par you must pause the game and sit through that long, unskippable animation. Every single time. Any game that has levels designed around trying to beat a score or a time but doesn’t give you an easy way to retry the level is straight-up bad game design.

Eventually I just gave up on trying to get par on all the levels to organically experience the diary stories in the game and just looked them up online so I could read them as I go. Which, honestly, is a better experience anyway so you can actually read the relevant comments for the level while you’re still on that level.

It’s honestly a shame that the actual act of playing this game is such a mixed experience because the world they’ve created is so incredibly fascinating (and often eerily real) that I wanted to squeeze every last drop out of it. It’s too bad the game ends up getting in its own way at every hole.

+ Notalgia Radio rules
+ The world, lore, and storytelling are all incredible
+ The music owns
+ Fantastic visuals. A post-apocalyptic world never looked so good

- The golf part of this golf game is not great
- Story diaries only unlock if you perform well even on “Story Mode” difficulty
- No easy retry button
- Bad UI choices like long pause animations
- Radio/dialogue doesn’t pause when you pause the game