Ramin Ostad
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COGConnectedLatest Reviews
With the Nintendo’s AAA library in a slump, and it’s indie game market in a boom period, I’m certain there are many Switch owners out there thumbing through the eShop catalog. For those people, I offer a warning: If like me, you’re the type of gamer who gets stuck in obsessive completion loops, unable to resist the idea that success is just one more attempt away, then I suggest you stay as far away from Clustertruck as humanly possible.
It’s safe to say that the developers at Housemarque love making twin-stick shooters. Between Super Stardust, Alienation, and Resogun, it’s hard not see them as the top dogs in their niche, crafting and iterating upon genre masterpieces that actually get better with age. It should come as no surprise then that their latest entry, Nex Machina is an utter delight. It surpasses their previous efforts and could very well be the pinnacle of what the genre can achieve.
Vikings – Wolves of Midgard is at it’s best when it engages you in mindless bloody carnage.That’s not to say the game is easy or simple. When I hit “start” on this third-person action rpg from developer Games Farm, I was expecting a Diablo-adjace experience full of hacking and slashing, maybe a spattering of samey classes and perhaps a serviceable upgradeable skill tree. It’s been a long time since a game of this genre has impressed me, so maybe my expectations were a bit skewed.
There were several moments during my playthrough of Styx: Shards of Darkness that felt as if the game was going out of its way to frustrate me. At its core, Styx wants to be a pure stealth game akin to the old Thief series, with every level designed around sneaking from room to room, building to building, stealing gold, forging documents, and opening vaults without ever being seen or heard. You play as the titular Styx, a talking goblin thief with an addiction to magic-imbuing “amber” who has zero combat abilities, his talents instead focused on evasion, espionage, and burglary. To slink through environments he can craft tools like poison bolts, booby-trap alarm bells, throw sand to douse nearby torches, and employ the use of Amber, the game’s version of mana, to do things like turn invisible or vomit out shoddy controllable clones of himself.