Mates Bogdan Robert
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Atomicrops’ wacky tone courses through both visuals – including overall style and enemy design – but also its soundtrack which, sadly, can get a little repetitive a bit soon. Items, weapons and powerups also begin to repeat as you put more hours into the game but this never becomes bothersome because of how well it’s all paced. Neither of its elements could stand on its own, but Atomicrops’ mixture of farming sim, bullet-hell game and rogue-lite make it a compelling indie title that’s well worth giving a shot.
Star Renegades is one of the most gorgeous pixel art games you can currently play and has a turn-based combat system whose twists do keep you engaged. Learning what heroes excel at and how to combine them to disable and destroy opponents feels great and its Adversaries and Behemoths have their moments. At the same time, this system doesn’t manage to spawn quite enough notable opponents and repetition becomes a little too prevalent, especially given how you have to start over from scratch and go through the same environments and much of the same enemy types with each restart. Its rogue-lite elements don’t always work in its favor but, provided you have a good chunk of time to set aside and some patience to spare, Star Renegades will draw you into its seemingly cyclical conflict.
Carrion’s concept of playing the evil, inhuman creature that’s out to eat everyone is definitely interesting and, at times undoubtedly visceral despite its distant 2D perspective, letting you bloody up rooms and leave halves of corpses lying around for later consumption. Its movement enforces the foreign nature of its protagonist but frequent frustrations like repeated difficulty spikes during combat and getting lost in its unremarkable facility do chip away at its awesome parts. Nevertheless, if you can weather some frustration, you’re in for a lot of delicious dismemberment and many horrified screams as you take Carrion’s flesh beast on its bloody journey.
Desperados III is a prime example of an excellent real-time tactics game that emphasizes observation, planning and knowledge of its five characters’ different kits and how they interact while also testing your reactiveness. It can be brutal at times and it relies a bit too much on outnumbering you but also lets you pick your difficulty and quicksave as often as you like. Its tactical core is strong enough to carry you over its campaign’s 25+ hours but developer Mimimi Games didn’t stop there, also offering a rich color palette across the game’s levels and excellent voice acting and sound design. Add difficulty customization and characters who feel like actual individuals with their own personalities to the mix, and you’ve a game that, in spite of its niche appeal, easily deserves the status of must-play.
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem bears the signs of an ambitious project that proved to be a little much for its developer. A story that feels put together in a rush and lacks flow, coupled with all manner of small and large issues ultimately compound into an experience that, overall, comes off as uneven. The title could have definitely used more polish before leaving Early Access. And yet, even so, I enjoyed leveling my character, trying out various skills and figuring out how to put together a build. The sheer depth of character customization has enough fuel to propel Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem for a decent time following its release. It also most certainly makes for an experience that’s very much worth trying, as long as you’re a systems-driven ARPG enthusiast or one that simply likes the idea of melting hordes of enemies and getting shiny loot while traversing a gorgeous world. As for its longevity, as long as developer WOLCEN Studio stamps out the current bugs and adds polish at a rate that doesn’t undermine new content that refreshes the title’s endgame, Wolcen has a good shot at becoming a staple of the genre alongside the games from which it...
Even so, Darksiders Genesis proves that the franchise still has plenty of juice left. Although it brings a familiar mixture of elements to the table, shooting, slashing and crushing Hell’s denizens as War and Strife feel great. The platforming and puzzling come in just enough quantity to provide breaks in between the game’s intense fights, establish a rather consistent pace through its chapters. While its story doesn’t pull everything off and the fixed camera does work against you on several occasions, the 12 hours I spent with Darksiders Genesis were, ultimately, a total blast.
Phoenix Point can be quite a handful initially and takes a while to settle into its usual pace. It’s no stranger to great ideas, like free aiming and the mutation system, but it’s also home to soulless randomly generated levels and repetitive, tedious, or impossibly difficult battles, particularly towards the latter portion of the mid-game and beyond, that sometimes feel like middle fingers to the work you put into leveling up your units. I can definitely see people soldiering through all the challenges just like I can see people giving it up after the third encounter with armored grenade launcher-wielding crabs that disable most of your weapons in the first two turns or those blasted Sirens that mind control units willy-nilly unless you focus fire on their heads. But, as long as you’re willing to weather some fairly harsh storms, deal with lackluster onboarding and presentation and, in the worst cases, restart a campaign or two, Phoenix Point’s great aspects do eventually shine through.
Mosaic’s point may become obvious before its final reveal which, itself, isn’t free of predictability and a sense of being slightly cliché. However, the means through which it gets there, the power of the established routine, the depressing revelations of medication meant to push workers to maximum productivity while disregarding their actual health, and the often surprising perspectives its surreal bits throw you into more than make up for it. It’s a harrowing yet also enchanting four-hour journey through a world where in spite of the number of people physically close to one another, isolation is the status quo. Mosaic paints all its scenes with great care and, while it might be a slow burner, it’s as cerebral as it is emotional and tells an enthralling story.
On paper, Sparklite has all the ingredients for a modern title that looks towards the games of yore for inspiration. The hub world with several shops, a simple attack system complemented by extra gadgets and a procedurally generated world that constantly refreshes the experience – it’s all there. But just like the concept itself isn’t necessarily unique, the execution stumbles too much for its own good, the pieces failing to fit together into a cohesive whole. Sparklite fails to squeeze value out of the systems that could make it a good game, resulting in an experience that struggles to keep you invested the further you push.
Untitled Goose Game is a charming, simple title that lets you live out the fantasy of being a jerk goose. From the fowl’s lovely waddle to stealing slippers or pulling chairs from under people as they try to sit down, its simplicity carries it well over its short run-time. The small village has quite a bit of activity going on within its small area, always giving you something to do, while more optional tasks pop up once you’ve “beaten” it the first time. Its idea might not have much juice left after a few hours, but for what it offers, Untitled Goose Game is a wonderful, silly, and surprisingly relaxing escapade.