I really liked the first 3D Picross on DS, so I was of course very excited when I heard they were making a 2nd one for 3DS. In typical me-fashion, I waited ages until it was on sale so I could get a physical version from Japan (didn't come out physically here), and then waited even longer to eventually play it in the first place XD . I finally started it a couple weeks ago, and then 56.5 hours later, I finished it XD . This game has a TON of puzzles, and they're really good fun! I played through the whole game on "Bitter" difficulty, and got rainbow rank on all 364 puzzles as well as unlocking all but 1 amiibo puzzle (I don't have a Link amiibo XP).
3D Picross turns the traditional picross formula on its side by putting it in the third dimension. Instead of several numbers indicating how many sets of unbroken blocks are in a 2D picture, each puzzle has a series of blocks with solid numbers on them. A plain number indicates a single unbroken stream of blocks, a number in a circle indicates the set is in two sets, and a number in a square indicates three or more sets. 3D Picross 2 ups the ante on that even more by making it not just numbers, but colored numbers. Now blocks can have clues for both orange and blue numbers, both of which can have the aforementioned shape modifiers. Orange blocks indicate a block that will be modified or curved upon the completion of the puzzle, while blue blocks are ones that will stay blocky. Even more-so than 3D Picross 1, the two sets of colors/numbers means re-teaching yourself how to 3D Picross all over again, and it's SO worth it for how tough and mind-bending some of the puzzles are. The game does have some features to make the game more palatable for everyone though. I played on the hardest "Bitter" difficulty, but there are two other flavors of lower difficulties that provide more hints in each puzzle (Bitter is effectively having exactly enough information to complete the puzzles: no more no less). The game even sets the starting difficulty for you depending on how much trouble you have on the tutorial stages. You get higher ranks depending on how quickly you complete each puzzle and on how few mistakes you have, and higher difficulties provide higher points modifiers at the end (how many diamond (the second highest) ranks you have as well as how many points and how many sets you've completed unlock new puzzles to play). The music is good, as well are the puzzles, although give the game is so long I'd really recommend some good podcasts to listen to while you're going through them, as there aren't THAT many music tracks in the game. The only real mechanical issue I have with the game would be that it can be hard to tell if you've completed a section or not because of how the colors look. The colors fade a bit when you've done all of that color's blocks in a line, but it can be hard to tell, particularly with the orange numbers on an orange block, if you've got it dimmed out or not. The same goes with how hard it can be to see the numbers on the much larger puzzles, as there is no dedicated zoom feature. I played this on a 2DS XL, and I can only imagine how hard it is to see the hint numbers playing on a normal 3DS when there are both colors of hint numbers on a block. Even on my bigger screen, I would frequently mistake a circled number for a squared one and vice versa when it was an orange-on-orange number/color combo. However, unless you're going for rainbow-ranks on everything, this is not that important a complaint, and will only add to your miss-counter. Very few puzzles have the penalty for getting misses as puzzle failures (like 10-15 out of the 364). Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's probably one of the best picross experiences out there. Graphical information problems aside, with all the difficulty features helping with accessibility, this is a game anyone can pour tons of time into without running out of puzzles to complete. I'd go as far as to say there are TOO many puzzles, because the game just doesn't want you to run out of puzzles to complete. Play as many or as little as you want, as easy or as tough as you want, and you can still have a great time with 3D Picross 2 ^w^
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My 3DS picross itch was not scratched when I beat the Zelda one back in like January. After 10 months or so of playing the training modes EVERY day and spending 4 bucks on 800 points in-game to unlock stuff, I have FINALLY beaten the last puzzle in this game.
It's a picross game, and it's a fine one, but the F2P parts are really what make or break it as far as I see it. The main Pokemon aspect to this is that you can bring a team of the Pokemon you "catch" (i.e. solved their puzzle) into a puzzle and can use a special power that that type of Pokemon has to make the puzzle easier (trips a certain pattern of blocks, freezes the clock, highlights hints). Each puzzle also has missions you can achieve during them to win points that you can use to unlock more areas (out of 30), expand the number of Pokemon you can take on a mission, or extend your recharge timer (you can place one new block of puzzle every minute after you start depleting the number of your default 200). The powers and missions often meet as you need to use a certain power to complete a certain mission in a level, but that means to get the points for that you HAVE to make it easier, even if you just wanna play it like a normal picross puzzle. That on top of the absolutely GLACIAL pace of unlocking more areas (it's usually about 10-14 days of playing the training mode as your only interaction with the game) that make it a bit of a hard sell as a F2P game. It's fine if you wanted to just pay for the stuff, and that also means you don't need to care about the missions as the points they earn you are meaningless as you've effectively already unlocked everything. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. A bit too slow-paced for a F2P game, but it is technically entirely completable free. It's a neat distraction, but your money would probably be better spent on something like 3D Picross Round 2, which also has several hundred puzzles and in the neat 3D spin-off of picross :3 I was super psyched at the concept of this game when it was announced and I bought it a month or two after it came out in Japan with the (quite reasonable) assumption that it would never be coming out in America. Well it was announced and came out here and I still hadn't finished it, so I decided it was high time to finally play through this game that just couldn't seem to grab me. Compared to other games in the series (that I have played), it's got its lows and highs relatively, but I still enjoyed my time with it well enough. I played through on hard mode and mucked around a TON for side stuff to do, so it took me about 35 hours to finish.
The game's story is definitely one of the biggest complaints I have. I know that given that I've only played Yakuza 1 and 2, I'm a bit spoiled for the quality of storytelling in those games, but this is a real step down from even Yakuza 1's unfinished-feeling pre-Kiwami story. You really might as well not even bother trying to do the Yakuza "walk around the city and try and do fun things" stuff until at least chapter 6 because the previous chapters are so linear and railroaded that there are actually relatively few sidequests to do during them. The main story itself is very tied to its source material, and I would say that is often a chain around it's neck rather than any kind of boon. A lot of the story feels like fanservice pandering to show off Kenshiro fighting iconic bad guys who are just shoved into the story because they just wanted to have him fight that guy. The story is constantly being pulled between the traditional story and its iconic characters and the new alt-universe story the game presents that has the bulk of the narrative taking place around one city (Yakuza-style). The narrative and characters are definitely the weakest part of the game in a series that I associate with at least decent if not great narrative and character writing. The side-activities are all pretty familiar to anyone who's played a more recent Yakuza game. You have the host club, bar tending, a rhythm game, colosseum fights, as well as (what I assume is a new addition) buggy racing. This game adds a big open map you can drive around in a buggy in outside the main city, but it feels a bit tacked on not because of how good the driving is (which is pretty fun), but because of the relative dearth of content to actually find out exploring the desert. The other mini-games are really only any more interesting than in the other games by virtue of the narrative finding an excuse for Kenshiro to reluctantly be doing these silly things instead of the main quest, which is actually quite funny (especially the rhythm and bartending games). The main meat, and where I'd say this is actually one of the best in the Yakuza series, is the combat. This game has totally revamped how the heat action system works and it is SO fun. Although the game doesn't really have any items you can pick up, the heat actions are now tied to enemy positioning and enemy stuns. If you can get behind an enemy or stun them, you can press circle to activate one of Kenshiro's Fist of the North Star techniques for a bunch of extra damage through a small set of QTE actions. There's even a pre-technique other QTE you can do by pressing circle again with the right timing mid-stun and it'll pull off a quick-execution. The big techniques and quick-executions make combat flow super smoothly and a LOT of fun. It is definitely the main thing that makes this game stand out among others in the franchise alongside the FotNS fanservice. The game's presentation is a bit of a mixed bag. While the character models look great, the cutscenes are beautiful, and the mid-battle in-game cutscenes are also amazing, the other parts of the game seem really oddly underanimated by contrast. The in-game cutscenes that are detached from battles have a very odd and robotic feel to them because characters are voiced but barely ever actually move. They're just standing stoically at one another speaking, and it very often looks really unnatural even for FotNS. It's not a game breaker or anything, and the stuff they nail does look GREAT, but it's something that really pulled me out of any immersion in the narrative/world pretty frequently. Verdict: Recommended. This game isn't a brilliant Yakuza game, but it's a really fun video game. It's probably the second to last (just ahead of 6) of the 5 Yazkua games out on PS4 I'd recommend for someone's introduction to the series given how much better the writing is in 0-Kiwami 2, but if you're in the mood for a different kind of brawler RPG then this is one you'll probably enjoy, especially if you like ridiculous head-exploding nonsense that comes with the Fist of the North Star license. Hardly close to a conventional Silent Hill game, but it's the first one I've beaten XD . When searching for PSVita exclusives the other day after being prompted by talk of it in the PSVita thread, I came across this game on Wikipedia's list of Vita exclusives. When I saw a Diablo-like Silent Hill game I had never heard of that had been developed by WayForward of all people, I knew this was something worth checking out. I completed just the main story and it took me around 18 or 20 hours.
Looking at reviews online, I saw this game described as a Diablo game wearing Silent Hill's skin, and that's fairly accurate. As a Silent Hill game, this is up there with Homecoming as just an entirely derivative and soulless experience. Given that it's based around a Diablo-style multiplayer in procedurally generated dungeons, the story is fairly non-specific, but it IS there more than I thought it'd be. The whole concept is that your created character is given a mysterious book (the titular Book of Memories) as a birthday package from Silent Hill, and that this book has the entirety of your memories recorded within its ever increasing pages. Your character discovers that they can actually change reality by rewriting the memories in its pages, but doing so causes the "nightmares" that make up the game's dungeons, seemingly needing to conquer the nightmare to make the reality shift work. It's explained exactly how that works later on in the story, but it's a fair enough premise that's expanded upon by notes you find around each floor as well as through TV audio recordings that are scattered around as well. However, there aren't any original enemies or settings. The dungeons take on the look of settings from other games to decorate its hallways and corridors, and other than the bosses, it has no original enemies as its rooms are filled with scads of sexy nurses, double-headed dogs, Boogymen, Pyramid Heads, and more trying to cave in your greedy reality-changing skull. The dungeon crawling itself is composed of enemy-less corridors connecting rooms in a linear fashion, almost like a Mystery Dungeon game but with doors enemies cannot pass through gating off the boarders of each room. There can be branching paths to dead-ends, but there will never be a ring of rooms (dungeons look more like a tangled up tree, where the branches never circle back). This makes the exploration of the dungeons more fluid and natural, but can make backtracking fairly uneventful and take a while. Especially if you're walking back to a shop or healing spot, it can make it take a while. The dungeon crawling is fun, as you can find the floor's shop (run by the game's only proper NPC, the mailman from Silent Hill Downpour), an artifact room (get a free passive equip item), a karma room, or one of the many battle rooms. Each floor has a fairly simple puzzle at the end that you'll have to solve, but first you must complete a number of fighting challenges in a series of rooms as well as finding the clue for that puzzle. It took me a little while to figure out, but you don't actually HAVE to fight most enemies you come across. The only enemies you have to fight are the ones for the puzzle pieces, and you can otherwise just run away. Of course, there is an incentive and a kind of disincentive to fight every enemy you see (which I did). The incentive, obviously for a Diablo-like ARPG, is that killing enemies gets you level ups! Kill more enemies, level up more so you can buff your stats and unlock more equipment spaces to equip passive buff items onto. However, your weapons you find have durability! If you use it too much, it'll break unless you can find or purchase a wrench to repair it, and those items aren't numerous enough to just use one item in perpetuity. The tension of trying to preserve your weapons as well as your supporting/healing items is, I think, an effort to give the game an aspect of survival horror. On top of the danger of your weapons breaking and leaving you ill-equipped to do the required fights, there's the karma system. There are three types of enemies: steel, blood, and light. Killing light and blood enemies gives you the respective opposite type of karma (light gives blood, blood gives light). Having a lot or a majority one type of karma allows you not only to heal off of that kind of font trap you can find (although the opposite will hurt you), but also gives you access to powerful spells you can activate by touching the touch-screen. The touch-screen use is probably my biggest issue with the game's overall design other than how it's kind of a crappy Silent Hill game, generically speaking (although there are plenty of proper Silent Hill games genuinely trying to be Silent Hill games that also have that fault XP). While the load times are a bit long (like 20 or 30 seconds), they only happen between stages and very far apart from the action, and the game itself runs great and I never had any framerate hiccups or game crashes (something I always worry about while playing a Vita game). But the buttons on the screen for certain things like dropping a weapon (press down on the D-pad and tap the weapon you wanna drop) or repairing an item/switching a weapon (very very close to the "close backpack" button) are awkward to hit during a tense fight and will often result in a misclick or wasting a lot of valueable time. It wasn't a game-breaker or a deal-breaker for me at any point, but it was certainly frustrating often enough that I feel I should mention it here. Verdict: Recommended. This game was a real surprise to me as to how much I liked it. I wasn't really feeling it the first time I tried it out, but when I picked it up a second time, I just couldn't put it down and before I knew it nearly 5 hours had passed XD . It's not a perfect game, and certainly if you want a portable Diablo-like game, Diablo III on the Switch has you covered, but if you're looking for something a bit out of the ordinary from other Diablo-likes and you don't mind a Silent Hill dressing over it, then this is a great curiosity to pick up. I REALLY tried to give this game a fair shake, but 17 hours in and I just get more and more annoyed with this game. The story's pacing is absolutely glacial. The characters are very archetypal and really uninteresting (which is something Tales of Phantasia managed to avoid, so I hold it against this game's writing) even with the skits that this remake adds.
The other thing the PS2 remake drastically changes, shifting the battle system from the old TP-based system to the Chain Capacity system (that would later be used in Tales of Graces much better) is an utterly confusing choice. The CC system is confusing at the best of times in Graces' 3D battlefields. In Destiny's flashy, 2D art style, combat moves SO fast it's hard to even see what's going on or what you're being attacked by, let alone trying to use your CC to get off artes and normal moves in good combos. Older Tales games tend to have a problem with the AI being too dumb, but honestly the AI in this is too GOOD. They'd be so much more efficient at getting off spells and combos than me, that I'd just be trying to get a bearing on the battle when they'd have already finished it for me nearly. Stack on top of that annoying bosses with near immunities to all but one or two damage types (not just elements, types too) that eventually bleed into enemies that are also not just heavily resistant but rely on very powerful status effects, and even the combat just turns into a constant slog. Verdict: Not Recommended. Unless you're a HUGE Tales fan who loved Destiny to death on the PS1 original and are willing to learn an entirely new battle system to play through the new Leon Mode (where you play through an even harder version of the game from the main rival's perspective), this is a fairly uncommon import that you can safely avoid. The Chain Capacity system was an over-complication this game did not need, and the quality of the whole experience suffers for it. Serial Cleaner has the honor of being the first game I've played, let alone beaten, on the Twitch game launcher. I got this game for free through Twitch Prime's free game thing at some point, and I was in the mood for something a bit less committal than the RPG's I'm slowly making my way through, so I put like 5 or 6 hours into this to beat it today. I beat all 20 normal missions as well as the 10 bonus ones on a 360 gamepad.
This is another 2D stealth game in the vein of Party Hard, but it does add a neat spin to Party Hard's formula. You don't do killing, you're just a cleaner for the mob in the early 1970's. A lot of the time period and setting really just add to the visual style, as the story itself is fairly throwaway (it treats itself pretty seriously, but it's fairly minimal and easily ignored). The art style is a kind of art-deco look, with tons of garish colors and no real outlines, but while this does give the game a neat style, it also makes the visuals fairly confusing. There was more than one time I didn't even realize that I could walk between two sections because it looked like there was a wall where there wasn't or vice versa. Luckily, you can hold LT to have "Cleaner Vision" appear, which shows you the enemies on the map, movable objects, hiding spots, as well as your objectives, and that helps a lot with any confusion on where to go (although not entirely). As previously stated, you aren't the killer but the guy who comes in later, so the gameplay involves finding evidence and picking it up, but also picking up bodies and bringing them to disposal points (sometimes it's the back of a car, sometimes its a fireplace/window/etc.). There are also some slightly hidden magazines and film reels on each level, which unlock more costumes or movie-themed extra stages respectively. You also need to clean up a certain amount of blood in each level by holding RT to pull out a vacuum cleaner, and that's just one more thing to do in each stage while avoiding detection from the cops' large, conical line-of-sight indicators (which work very well and are very consistent, from what I played). If a cop sees you they'll give chase and you'll need to hop into a hiding place for safety. This isn't Clock Tower though. You can hop into a plant right in front of a cop and he'll just stand next to it angrily staring at it even though he clearly saw you enter it. Each level also has slight randomization features where bodies, evidence, and hiding places will be shuffled around slightly. This is still fairly annoying, quite frankly, but it's nowhere near as bad as in Party Hard. Party Hard will wholesale remove entire elements of a map between deaths, but Serial Cleaner just shuffles them around a bit, so all the tools you need to complete each level are there every time, just perhaps in a slightly less convenient spot. I still dislike this design gimmick, but at least this game does it less annoyingly. Really, the worst thing about the game are the things endemic to this type of game, and they're the same ones Party Hard had. Other than the randomization annoyance, the other big bugbear is levels that are too long with no save points. Some levels can take 15-ish minutes, particularly in the later game, and it's really difficult to try and learn them when things keep changing. Given that you only get one chance to make it before you're just dead and need to start the whole level over, this leads to some levels dragging on FOREVER just because of one really annoying part in them. A quicksave feature, even if it needed to be unlocked with a cheat, would be a really nice ease-of-play option for games like this. Verdict: Recommended. If you want a 2D top-down stealth game a bit like Party Hard but a bit more polished, then this is a good one to choose. It's not exactly reinventing the wheel for the genre or a stand-out stealth game on PC, but it's a fine entry even if it doesn't set the world on fire. After The Mummy: Demastered was a little bit of a disappointment, I was still in the mood for a Metroidvania, and Iconoclasts was another I'd picked up recently that I'd heard very good things about. It very much did not disappoint! I played on "Harder" difficulty (the hardest one isn't unlocked until you beat the game once), and it took me juuust over 10 hours playing on my 360 gamepad.
I got a very Timespinner meets Cave Story vibe from the narrative of the game. Like Timespinner, it has a very colorful art style to tell a quite serious story, but like Cave Story the audience is dropped into the world knowing nothing about it. Any lore of the world you want to know needs to be gained by talking to NPC's, reading messages, and going through the story, and it makes for a pretty engaging narrative in a rather unconventional take on the techno/fantasy setting. I really enjoyed the story, and I thought the main cast of characters were some of my favorites I've seen in a game with no VA due to how the game uses text (a bit like Ace Attorney, where font sizes, letter spacing, and automatically cycling dialogue boxes are used to get across different tones of voice/patterns of speech). Agent Black, for one, may be one of my new favorite villains in a game ever. Additionally, Robin is probably one of my favorite portrayals of a silent protagonist given that she is canonically quite non-verbal (she talks very seldomly, usually the player giving dialogue choices), and I thought the way she fits into the story as well as the way other characters treat her was done in a very charming fashion. This is definitely up there with Timespinner as one of my new favorite casts and favorite stories in a game that I was not expecting at all to blow me away so hard. Mechanically, this game plays great. The isn't a ton of weapon variety, but there is a fair amount of enemy variety and the situations they're put in makes them always engaging to fight with (and infrequently annoying to fight). You have your standard gun but then also a wrench that can be used to grapple onto points for platforming as well as to both hit enemies in melee and parry their attacks. Each gun you come across has a normal fire as well as a charged fire, and although some will overheat if you fire them too much, it will need to cool down once you unleash a charged attack. There isn't that much crazy movement to traverse as far as a Castlevania-esque backdash or double jump is concerned, but your normal running, ducking, and jumping are more than enough to make boss fights tense and exciting. The optional boss fights get pretty crazy, but the game lets you instantly retry a fight if you fail (generally, as some for some reason make you walk a ways back and some others start from the previous cutscene that initiates the fight), so even the more challenging bosses aren't terribly unforgiving. The level design is well done and the puzzles and combat fit into the environments well, but the game is a very linear Metroidvania. There is often very little exploring to do, and at several points in the story you have no choice but to go forward in the area you're in to complete the current story bit, and then you can come back a fair ways later when you've gotten some new gun/equipment to get a treasure chest you couldn't get to before. It's much more like Cave Story in that way in how it's more of a 2D Action Adventure Platformer and less of a Metroidvania. There are goodies hidden in past areas, sure, but they're fairly optional side-grades, and your maximum number of charms or max HP actually never increase by any means. This isn't a knock against the game, mind you. It's a freaking fantastic action adventure game, but if you go in expecting a more Super Metroid-like experience of recursive game design, you are likely going to be left wanting. The exploring there is to do is often entirely in the pursuit of schematics to make Tweaks as well as the materials to put them together. You get the ability to make and wear Tweaks quite early in the game, and they act as slight add-on to give you passives to slight activatable abilities. They range from nullifying a single hit you take to giving you a double jump, but they're optional, so there isn't any content actually gated behind them. The double jump, for example, isn't required to get anywhere: It just makes getting around that much faster. When you get hit, one of them (starting from the right and going left) will break, and you'll need to kill enemies or break environmental objects to get enough ivory cubes to replenish it. It's a neat system that rewards you for playing well, but given that you craft them at stations and equip them at save points, I will add here that I really wish that crafting stations and save points were more often closer together XP Verdict: Highly Recommended. This has more or less replaced Cave Story for me as my favorite game in this genre of more linear, action-focused Metroidvanias. It's a game with exemplary quality controls, combat, and writing, especially considering it came out of what seems to be a one-man indie studio, and I eagerly look forward to the next thing he makes (although if he's still a one-man team, I imagine it'll be a while X3). A non-mobile movie tie-in video game is a pretty uncommon sight these days, let alone one that's a critically well-received Metroidvania from WayForward of Shantae fame. I love me some Metroidvanias, so I picked it up for $14 when it was on sale this Halloween. I finally sat down and finished it yesterday and it was a very alright game Xp . I finished it in just under 4 hours with no deaths.
One of the main draws of this game is the fairly unique death mechanic. Because you're not a named character and just some faceless agent, when you die you are DEAD, as far the story is concerned. A new agent has to come in and take your place, and the old dead agent is now a victim of the Mummy's curse and you'll need to take them down the next time you go through that area. Maybe I was just trying not to die a bit too much, but I didn't really think the game was particularly hard, as I managed to do a no-deaths run of the game my first time through despite never seeing any footage of it before playing it, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm far from the best at Metroidvanias despite how much I like them. The death mechanic is neat, but I can only really give a hearsay description of it having never experienced it myself Xp . However, on a related note, because you're a faceless procession of soldiers, the game doesn't have any named characters or actual characters of any description. The story is basically non-existent short of a very bare-bones "go kill evil Mummy" plot. It's serviceable, but it's another mark against this game in an era where there are so many good Metroidvanias out there with excellent narratives. The game plays like a WayForward take on Metroid. You don't have a melee weapon like Shantae's hair (the only Shantae game I've played is the first one that was on DSiWare that I thought was pretty bad, for the record), but you have a rifle with unlimited ammo that you can fire in 8 directions. The only issue with this is that your rifle bullets are kinda weak but also very small projectiles, and given that the spaces you're in are quite cramped, the enemies are often fairly small and/or quick as well as decently tanky, and fighting enemies is a real pain quite often. The most difficult part of the game isn't the bosses, it's the really annoying (but fairly low number of) enemy types throughout the game. Like Metroid has missiles for more damage, you can find new guns to use that use ammo enemies drop, and those guns are generally way better than your infinite-ammo peashooter. The combat is alright, but I thought it was just okay considering all the other great 2D run-and-gun action games out there that have such less frustrating enemy design and placement. The world design is a bit odd, but I think that has to do with how your character moves. The corridors you go down feel really claustrophobic, but not in an anxiety-inducing way, but more in a "these are annoying to navigate" kind of way. You're constantly hitting your head trying to jump around because of how tall your character is, and the placement of platforms in some of the larger rooms had me retreading them quite often to go back up and do it again because I bumped my head on the ceiling. You can find extra bandoleers (I guess your soldier just wears dozens of them eventually? XD) just like missile tanks and extra med kits just like energy tanks around the world to increase your max ammo (for all weapons) and health (by 99, exactly like Metroid), but this game has no hidden walls that I could find. If you can see a room to get into, you can get into it. You don't need to spend time whacking at every wall you see hoping it'll be hiding a secret, which is kind of a nice change of pace in a Metroidvania for once. The level design becomes more manageable once you get a few power ups, but even then its still quite frustrating because of the nature of those power ups (you never get a wall-jump or a double-jump, unfortunately :/ ). The last thing I wanna mention is the Switch port of the game. This game runs pretty badly on Switch. It's a quite nice-looking pixel-art design, but all the moving backgrounds combined with the moving enemies on screen make the framerate stutter like CRAZY very often, which is a bit of a problem in an action game like this as you can imagine. It's never a problem with bosses, as screens don't usually scroll in most boss fights, but it makes the annoying enemy types that much more annoying when your button presses are lagging behind a stuttering framerate. Regardless, the fact that the enemy types are so annoying, the platforming can be so irritating, and there is actually NO WAY to heal your health other than picking up drops from enemies or picking up another med kit/E-Tank, means the difficult of the game feels more artificial than legitimate. The game WANTS you to die because it wants you to see the neat death mechanic, but it doesn't feel its doing it in regards to legitimate challenge so much as it is purposefully clumsy game design. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The Mummy: Demastered isn't a bad game, but it's a very underwhelming game for the gaming ecosystem it exists in. As a 4-hour Metroidvania on the same system that sports Hollow Knight, it is a really tough sell at its normal MSRP of $20 when you factor in its clunky design, bad port job, and non-existent story. You can do a lot better with your $20 on Switch if you're looking for a Metroidvania or really a good indie game in general. This game is an interesting novelty as a good movie tie-in from 2017, but not a game that is a must-play by any standard other than that. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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