bluebubbee
2017
Its a pretty standard Mario experience. Captures are cool, I guess, but they're far from as cool as regular power-ups would have been. Story isn't anything to write home about, and there's so many moons that they start to feel less special. However, no amount of negatives can change how good it feels to run around and move as Mario here.
I was surprised at just how much I loved this. The characters were charming and the mix of pixel art and portraits, while odd at first, really grew on me. It's like a metroidvania with Zelda dungeons, and they flow together so well. I absolutely loved it.
2011
Really cool concept but way short and feels like they could have explored the idea more. I played this off the heels of Shantae solely because it was also made by Wayforward. I saw there's a collection of this and its sequels, that's probably worth the money, but I wouldn't recommend just this one.
2021
This game is so shittily made but I have never had more fun in my life playing a game with a group of friends. It's a great time with friends, but also gets proportionally harder the more people you play with. A great game for fucking around that I probably had way too much fun with.
The counter is a cool way to try to evolve the Metroid formula, but its clunky having to stop in place to use it and it feels like the game relies so heavily around it. Aeion abilities were also interesting, but led to a lot of grinding for enemy drops. Hunting Metroids down was very fun, and seeing the husks of metroids in the wild was cool. Not a fan of locking upgrades behind the baby metroid (literally right before the final boss so you have to backtrack). Suit designs were so sick tho
The combat works exactly how you'd expect from playing as a Jedi, and almost every ability you get can be integrated into the combat in cool ways. this started as a game I was relieved to just be able to enjoy and not 100%, but a quarter of the way in and I found myself going for 100% completion. It's that good.
2007
Game definitely holds up and its easy to understand why its such a classic, but falls a little short in playtime and doesn't fully explore its concepts. Also load zones are weirdly abrupt even when the game tries to mask it. Is this a modern machine problem or was it like this in 2007 too?
2016
I got this for just a few cents for levelling up on Steam. Pretty fun retro style dungeon crawler with 2 characters. It's fun to replay a few times to go for a high score, but I can tell that it was coded pretty loosely. You can exploit diagonal speed, and touching an enemy drains your health until you get out, so getting in an enemy's path feels like bullshit. This makes common bat and spider enemies scarier than a lot of the bosses, but still cool to experience something I wouldn't have otherwise.
2014
A cool Metroidvania that is based on close-quarters combat rather than long range. Instead of an arm cannon or a whip, you have a sword, so you get to hack and slash through your enemies. The movement was a little weird at first, but quickly became very fluid and easy to understand. The world design is good, but the story is really lacking. It's stuck in a limbo where both more and less story would be welcome, but what's there is confusing and hard to follow. I would still recommend it.
2021
This was free, and I thought it would be a cute game to quick speedrun through and get all the achievements. God was I wrong, this is so hard and I don't wanna master it. I'm not a big fan of games that rely on bullshit and making you retread to create difficulty (like Getting Over It), and that's what this was. Also sex jokes in what looks like a kids game.
Specter Knight's controls feel a little clunky at first, but using the Dash Slash felt extremely cool. Rail grinding feels a little underutilized and I really missed having basic levels in between bosses. The story never grabbed me like in the first two campaigns, except for the big emotional ending, which I wish was spaced out more before the finale. Despite my minor gripes, its more Shovel Knight goodness and I still loved playing it.
Fantastic. The game is able to recapture the magic of the first game far better than Prime 2. I loved how it fully leaned into the Federation side of things as a contrast to the pure isolation of Prime 1. The characters are incredibly well designed, and this is easily a worthy conclusion to the trilogy. There are a few lag and load issues, and you can tell it was made for Wii with the amount of terminals that make you use motion / trace controls. That aside, incredible game that I was happy to 100%.
This is almost the perfect game. The open world is seamless, and the story perfectly weaves together boldly to truly deserve the game title of just "Spider-Man." The base game itself is a perfectly complete experience, and I actually took a break after finishing it before coming back to the 3 DLC campaigns and falling in love all over again. The DLC improves every flaw of the base game (story, boss fights, side quests, everything). I absolutely love it, an instant classic and an immediate favorite.
King of Cards is a fun platformer with creative and fluid movement. The platforming is short but difficult, and I'm glad the platforming doesn't take a backseat to the Joustus gameplay. Joustus was fun to learn but I have no interest in mastering it or collecting all the cards. The game is full of cute references to other classic games that I actually get as well as adorable references to the rest of the Shovel Knight games. Very fun, but sad to finish off the Shovel Knight series.
Genuinely surprised how much I loved this. The combat is way deeper than it has any right to be and is pretty difficult in some places. Characters have diverse abilities and the combat is amazing. Humor is super hit or miss, but it shows lots of love to the IP. Lots of replayability if I ever would want to come back to it. Also I love Rabbid Yoshi, I would die for him.