Imagine if a group of people looked at Wario Land 4 and said "What if we made it even MORE insane?"

If you like fast-paced action platforming with unique gimmicks for each stage that constantly surprises and entertains you, then Pizza Tower is your dream come true! Peppino feels great to control, there's secrets galore, and speedrunning stages is both challenging and satisfying.

When you finish Pizza Tower, you're gonna immediately wanna go back for seconds!

I'll be honest I'm not getting much out of this one.

The boss fights feel a little too unforgiving on normal and the game as a whole is a boring cakewalk on easy. While it feels good to play, I feel like you need to care about Astro Boy as a series at least a little to get much out of this besides the fun gameplay since that's all there really is here. Also, everything I'm hearing about needing to beat it twice is turning me off from it.

It also does the thing where it's a beat-em-up with stat upgrades and mixing those two together is a major turn-off for me. How will I know which stats I should be caring about before I enter the next stage and get beat to a pulp because I upgraded my special attack stat instead of life? I feel like games like these work best when you can easily respec your character to experiment with different combinations of upgrades to see what works best for a stage. Given the short nature of the game (going based off HowLongToBeat's stats) I guess it would make sense that they wouldn't want to include that but having the option would be welcome.

I want to like this game! Everyone calls it a classic! I feel like I'm missing something here, but I just don't get the hype. I'll have to give it another shot sometime and hopefully I'll be nicer to it then. Maybe you'll get more out of it than I did, so give it a shot if you want to see if it's right for you.

Also, it's complete B.S. that you don't get a stat point if you skip the tutorial.

There's a lot you can say about this game.

The story is wonderful from beginning to end. It does a great job fleshing out the events before FFVII, and Zack is an endlessly charming character. It's impossible to hate him. You'll fall in love with him very quickly.

The gameplay is pretty unique, but also kind of weird. There's a slot machine mechanic that determines buffs you'll get in battles, as well as how Materia and Zack level up. There's no real consistent way to get level ups, so you kind of rely on luck for them throughout the game.

Materia matters a bit more than levels, though. With the right set of materia you can bend this game over your knee easily. One mastered MP++ and a mastered High Jump will easily carry you throughout the entire game. Because of this, it's hard to justify experimenting with weird materia combinations. Despite that, I'm sure there's plenty of interesting setups you can have to get through the game.

Along with the campaign are missions which you can access at any save point. They're often short but there's a ton of them to keep you busy. If it weren't for me getting lost in doing a bunch of these, I would've finished the game way sooner. Honestly if you ignore missions (not recommended for a casual playthrough) you'll finish the campaign in a relatively short amount of time, maybe like 12 or 14 hours?

I like this game a lot. A part of me wants to dive back in right after I finished. I want to do the rest of the missions and get a platinum trophy. Maybe I'll do it one day.

As for you, the reader, I highly recommend you give this a playthrough, especially if you beat FFVII and want to learn more about Zack and the world before Cloud became the star.

Embrace your dreams.

[Average Reading Time: 4 Minutes]

I will be avoiding story spoilers here, so no worries there. I go into gameplay stuff and talk about some mechanics, but I don't detail any specific items or enemies here.

There's a lot to unpack with this one.

Graphically, it looks great in the headset. Each mountainside you approach looks really nice up close, allowing for great immersion. However, there's some texture pop-in issues that you will notice quickly. It's nothing disorienting, but it is a little immersion-breaking.

Aside from a few rare dips in framerate, the game ran fine, overall. There are also plenty of accessibility options to help make the game more enjoyable if certain gameplay styles cause motion sickness.

The story is pretty weak. I didn't really get attached to the characters, and the plot is pretty straightforward. Don't go into this expecting a jaw-dropping narrative, or much of an interesting narrative at all, sadly.

Where this game shines and flickers, though, is its gameplay. Climbing mountains, ropes, and other things feels natural, for the most part. Moving too rapidly to quickly climb a mountain can cause some controller detection issues that can rarely lead to you missing an important grab and making you fall, but for the most part it works well.

Throughout the game you'll acquire different traversal tools to spice up climbing. Some of which you'll be using constantly throughout the game. However, there's one item you get that sadly doesn't get much use outside of the first area you get to play with it in. You'll reach the end of the game and forget it exists. The final traversal item gets plenty of use in the end, but you'll often need to be using it while looking directly up, which can make your neck pretty stiff after a while. If you have lights on in the room you're playing in and they're above you, this will also cause the VR headset's cameras to lose track of your environment, causing the game to stop for you to reorient yourself.

One half of this game is climbing and traversal. The other half is enemy encounters. Sadly, this is the weakest part of the game. Enemy encounters feel like they're designed for you to be facing one or two enemies at once at max. When 3 or more enemies appear, it quickly goes from exciting to stressful, requiring you to keep track of multiple enemies all doing different attacks while finding small pockets of time to allow you to shoot or eat a healing item.

As you progress, you'll acquire different types of ammo for your bow that cause status effects when you shoot enough of them at an enemy. Because enemies are constantly moving, for the most part, you'll either miss shots or spend too much time trying to aim. Along with needing to hit the enemy with enough of a status type, you also need to hit them rapidly. Wait too long and the status effect meter goes down, nullifying your hard work. It would be better if one or two arrows did the job regularly, instead of the multiple enemies and bosses require.

Speaking of bosses, there are some here. Visually, they're impressive. Fighting them, however, is kind of a nightmare. Bosses have multiple area-spanning attacks that will quickly tear through your health bar. You'll spend more time hunting for tables with apples on them during these matches than you will be actually fighting back. Enemies and bosses all have weak points that the game shows to you, allowing you to do good damage to them. It's great for common enemies, but when it comes to bosses, they can often be small or hard to hit, and with some bosses moving around rapidly, aiming for these points becomes an arduous task.

Enemy and boss arenas contain not only infinitely respawning healing items but also a limited number of special ammunition. Using special ammo is encouraged, if not required, for having a more fun experience fighting bosses as you expose weaknesses with them. However, the fun stops when you run out of special ammo. At this point all you can do is unload your basic infinite ammo into a boss until it falls over. Bosses take very little damage from regular ammo, turning fast-paced fights into boring slogs.

Perhaps the worst part about fighting bosses is that there is no checkpointing during them. If you're a few shots away from taking one down and you die, you restart from the beginning of the fight. This is highly frustrating, especially if a certain fight is dragged out due to previously mentioned special ammo problems.

Overall, I don't hate this game, but I don't think I'll be returning to it anytime soon. It does some cool stuff and is a long playthrough, so you do feel like you get your money's worth here. It's also a great workout, since you're moving your arms a lot during gameplay sessions.

If this game ever goes on sale for like $20 or $25, give it a shot if you want. While this game is not without its flaws, it isn't something I dislike.

One thing's for sure, it made me realize just how big the robots are in this universe. Honestly the coolest part of the game is getting to see these things up close. You can just boot it up to look at them and you'll immediately get your money's worth, if ya ask me.

(As a disclaimer, I spent like $40 to get the diamond miner, which helped with unlocking pokeomon and decorations to help boost progress. You probably don't need to do that to have a good time, but it made some of the grind a bit less tedious.)

It doesn't do anything spectacular on its own, but I won't deny that it's addicting. There's just something about raising these Magikarp faster and faster while making them stronger that feels good.

As with almost any mobile game, you can skip this one and lose nothing. For me, though, I got a good amount of enjoyment out of this, and will probably keep playing it until I max out everything.

Give it a shot if you like grinding games and funny fish.

As much as I like me some 2D Rayman action, I can't recommend this one. Because of the GBA's screen size, everything feels too zoomed-in, leading to some blind jumps and unfair deaths. This game also likes to hide things behind the player when they first enter a stage very often.

For example, when I encountered the first boss, I had no clue how to fight it. I punched at it, and it did no damage. I thought maybe I need to jump over to the other side and do something to the gears on it. I tried that and fell to my death. Upon respawning, a message appeared giving a tutorial on throwing barrels, and I thought to myself "What barrels?" I then moved Rayman an inch to the left, and the camera swiveled over and there was the barrel. There are zero indicators that it's there when you enter the fight.

What made me drop this game was the second boss. After getting through a bad stage full of platforms you need to hit in order to be able to jump on, I was completely done with the gimmick. Imagine to my surprise that it would be a key feature in the next boss fight, which really doesn't like to count some of your punches as connecting with the platforms! Two Game Over's later, I'm completely done with this fight and have no desire to see what lies beyond it.

Maybe you'll have more patience for this game than I did, but I know where I stand on this one, and that is on a solid 2/5.

Fantasticaneer, I kneel before your offerings to the Egglike genre.

This is the game that started a cult genre called Egglikes, which are basically really weird walking sims where you collect stuff, do some platforming challenges of questionable quality, and encounter strange memes.

One of the major components of a Egglike is making sure the graphics look archaic enough without going overboard in making it look bad. The graphics of an Egglike aim to capture the feel of playing someone's first Unity project, mainly because that's what these probably are.

Fantasticaneer pioneered the Egglike genre with this game, The Fantastic Game. In this game, you explore an aimless world hunting for dollar bills. You'll explore weird areas, meet eggs that sing Smash Mouth's All Star, and more in this very short romp.

If you like janky first-person exploration-based platformers, The Fantastic Game is for you!