MonsterVine
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Latest Reviews
Silent Hill 2 brings a classic horror game back in an impressive way. Despite over 20 years of time passing, the story still feels poignant and unique in video games. As someone who never played the original, but has heard people sing its praises, Silent Hill 2 delivers on those,...
I like the improvements Yuke’s made to the first game. While they could have phoned in the development of World Brothers 2, I was greeted instead with a completely new story, lots of new brothers, and enough enemy variety to keep me entertained through the end. I was pretty impressed...
For all its faults, I think Visions of Mana is a pretty good game. It went down easy and there was a lot to do. Likewise, the visuals and music make it the modern Mana game that’s precisely what’s required to become invested in the series. Unfortunately, especially in a...
The particle effects and colors are especially noteworthy in Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, though the visual style in general is absolutely incredible. Every time a Dragon Ball game comes out, I assume they can’t get any closer to Akira Toriyama’s iconic style, but as is the case here, my expectations...
When you’re done with the main course, replay addicts will find a lot to chew on, with each level featuring a hidden photograph for you to find, along with a par time to try to beat and daily challenges. There are leaderboards to compete on and a full blown level...
The only issue I have with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom comes from the performance. The frame rate seemed to randomly sway, leading to times when it was inconsistent at best. It doesn’t strike me as an especially demanding art style, though I recall the Link’s Awakening remake...
Bloomtown: A Different Story was a great playthrough and I’m really glad I got the chance to play it. Some of the pitfalls in its design are very apparent and while some of the puzzle design and moment-to-moment combat wasn’t stellar, I think it’s overall a very worthwhile experience.
Worth noting is that this game doesn’t contain the cutaway scenes of Advance Wars and Fire Emblem that show your units battling up close. I do miss these a fair amount as they add exciting impact to skirmishes, but the increased pace as a result of the quicker zoomed-out animations...
I also wish the nicely animated cutscenes were given full voice-acting for this rerelease, as hearing simple grunts as characters say entire sentences is a bit jarring. I didn’t mind on the Wii, but with the amount of pleasant changes that were made to Epic Mickey: Rebrushed, I had hoped...
Look, I’m not going to lie to you, this isn’t some subversive indie game where deep down there’s a deeply moving story about a sad dad with a beard discovering he loves his son or whatever. There’s a squirrel, there’s a gun. What more do you want?
Funko Fusion seemed to have potential with the LEGO games having much longer development cycles than they used to, but dull gameplay and mindless third-person shooting remove any fun that could have been had here. The tone and smattering of franchises from different genres don’t gel well with the gameplay...
Everything does look substantially better, and I never ran into any performance issues while playing – even with the gigantic hordes of zombies. There are new costumes to try on – as well as classics like the Servbot head – the Psychopaths are more vivid than before, and blood splatters...
