This could have sucked so very, very easily. Nier is one of those games where it's flaws and rough edges are so entwined with the charm and strengths, and where a low budget and constraints lead to some of it's most inspired moments.

And I think Toylogic and the Producers/Directors behind this project have earned a lot of credit for the approach taken here. Because 1.22 is just Nier, pretty much. Nier with better combat, improved visuals, a smidge of additional content, and some adjustments here and there.

The combat is so blatantly better I don't even really feel like getting into it. It's still nothing particularly special, about the same level as automata's, but as a vector for experiencing the game as a whole, and in particular, it's excellent boss fights, it goes a long way throughout and there's no real compromise here.

The visuals are where I have more to talk about, because to an extent before i saw some comparison clips I thought the game looked basically the same, and mostly amounted to up-ressed textures and new faces. But it's really not that. Lighting has been vastly improved, as has model quality throughout, and there's a few changes in aesthetic even here or there for some areas but all of it is so in keeping with the style of nier that it really makes for one of those things where it just feels like playing the game how you remember it versus how it actually looks. It does make it look a bit more automata-y in general, but this is no Demon's Souls remake aesthetic shift.

The only contentious parts of the looks for me is the faces, which are definetly automata-fied a bit - granted, I don't really see that as an issue considering how butt ugly the original character models are. They also maybe look a bit pale, but I find it fits with the overall vibe, and when i'm nitpicking to that extent the aesthetic is still getting a strong pass overall.

Maybe the thing I'm most surprised by is the inclusion of a lot more voice acting throughout the game. For one, massive props to the voice direction and actors for making the re-recordings and new lines sound completely in line with the original, that must have been a tonne of work. And the increased use of voice acting all around makes the game world feel a bit more alive. The english voice actor for Bro Nier fits in well with the existing cast as well, and whilst I'm not really going to get into it with this review, I think the bro-nier dynamic actually works better with the characters and events than papa nier from Gestalt, despite my initial reservations.

The only real dark spot is the OST, which is still 95% one of the best Soundtracks out there, but a few of the original amazing tracks have been replaced with some weird arrangements that dont work nearly as well. I think if you've never played Nier before, you'll probably just fall in love with the soundtrack and not care, but it's a slight mark on the game, and I really wish the original OST was an option.

But beyond that, Nier 1.22 really is just Nier. There's still a bit of jank, there's still the game's weird and weak connective tissue in the first half, the wandering about , and a myriad of other Nier things. And maybe there's a case for a different remake going further and making huge adjustments to the quests and narrative and fixing the "bad". A "Gestalt" remake, if you will.

But 1.22 isn't that. All 1.22 really amounts to is a more enjoyable, prettier way to experience the Nier from 2010. And that, for me, is all I could really ask for. Whilst good ol' Gestalt still has it's value and place, Replicant 1.22 just makes it so much easier to love.

GGA3 is just lovely. I know that sounds dumb, but I really think it's the best way to describe this, frankly, terrible idea that the 4 devs somehow presumably convinced M2 was commercially viable. Granted, it helps that said 4 devs are industry veterans behind some of the greatest STGs ever made.

And it shows, though not quite in the ways you'd expect, particularly from staff who have worked amongst Raizing and Cave's intricate and wack STGs. GGA3 follows the Aleste series in general in being extremely simple to play, and amounting to little more than holding down one button, dodging, and picking up items. But what GGA3 really brings is polish and the knowledge of 25 years of games development progression to this very rudimentry, classicly made game.

In particular, there's a real eye for presentation here. The sprite art is fantastic, as are the backgrounds, and there's particular attention paid to the pacing of levels, particularly when it comes to integration with it's music. Stage 5 is clearly the standout here, the stage starts with a foreboding track in a base before you take off and dogfight around the scrolling exterior of a ballistic missile nuke to an amazing, upbeat track, the destroying it and facing a rival boss fight with another banger track - it's very comparable to Stage 2-3 in Zeroranger or Stage 3 in eschatos - you know, two of the best STG stages ever made.

The music in general is great - Manabu Namiki, legendary composer of battle garegga, ketsui, DOJ, thunder dragon 2 - is both the composer and (weirdly) director of this game, and he puts in a great shift here with the ancient game gear sound hardware. Hacking Storm, Dogfighter, and Zero-G Tears alone are probably worth the price of admission.

There are issues. It's probably a bit too long - I feel stages 3 and 4 probably should have been consolidated to one stage, for instance. This is only made worse by it's rough performance on original hardware, which legitimately lengthens the game by 15 minutes on special mode due to all the slowdown. Fortunately, this can be turned off in the Switch and PS4 versions of the game, which I would say is an outright neccessity unless youre a complete purist and makes the game a lot more fun, particularly in special mode. I think it's also fair to say there's a bit of a lack of depth - but that's also just a standard of the series and clearly not what the game is going for. Much like Zeroranger, this is a shmup focused on it's presentation much more than it's scoring or gameplay, and as that, it really works.

There really isnt much to GGA3, truth be told. But that's fine. It amounts to 4 industry veterans making a simple old compile-styled shooter imbued with the 25 years of progression in game design and presentation built up in that time and a bunch of passion and respect for the original games. And the end result is really just a lovely time.

Doujin devs really push the envelope on how ugly they can make their games sometimes. Gundemonium was almost pushing me to my limit - until stage 3 started and there were P90s sitting on flying revolvers and I realised it was a shitpost the whole time.

And fortunately, it's also incredibly solid fun. It basically just boils down to one single thing - pacing. Gundemonium is about 15 minutes long and barely a second of it is dead air. Stage 1 alone has about 6 minibosses, most of which last about 10 whole seconds, and its thoroughly engaging. The challenges change so ludicrously fast that it never comes close to being boring. Team that with the dynamic difficulty system and some wild scoring, and it's pretty unique and wild.

The polish isn't quite there, and i still can't quite get past how butt-ugly it all is. The music also isn't great, the various challenges don't always hit the mark and I don't really like the control feel for some reason i can't quite put my finger on.

But this really is the sort of mad shit you only really get in the doujin/indie space. A stupid amount of things happening crammed into 15 minutes because why the hell not.

The game is actually delisted from steam right now but if you're interested, you can get keys from the grey market for about £2. It's well worth that.

I've been trying to work out what the target market for PD Remake is. And I've come to the conclusion it's literally just the people who have heard of Panzer Dragoon but never played it and are mildly curious when they see it on a deep sale on steam or the eshop.

Because I feel for literally everyone else, it's kinda... pointless? And it's not really that it's accidentally pointless, it almost feels by design that there's very little here to appeal to both the Dragoon die hards or the people who don't know what the fuck it is.

The core problem is the premise - not so much a panzer dragoon remake on it's own, but remaking it whilst keeping the content almost identical, and putting it in the hands of an indie studio who don't have the budget to make it look truly current gen.

And when the game you're building your remake on is frankly a glorified Saturn tech demo and the apotheosis of "boneless Launch Title" - as much as I like it - not building content on top of it really leaves it as something only for the die-hards - when the stylistic changes are something that's liable to put them off.

Frankly though, I think the artistic direction kinda works? It's quite comparable to the Demons souls remake in the changes it makes, but i prefer it to that frankly, despite the lower production values. The new look is reminiscent of the FMV cutscenes of Panzer Dragoon past, mixed with a bit of Orta's look. It's not quite right, and I do prefer the original look, but it's quite neat in it's own right.

The remake does, however, have one absolute ace up it's sleeve - a brand new arrangement of the OST by composer of Saga and Orta Saori Kobayashi. It's predictably fantastic and is worth the price of admission alone when the game is on sale.

But still, the game remains this weird chimera. Divorcing PD from being the saturn tech demo thing it is takes something away from it, and to new players, they're gonna experience a stupidly short game with very little to it, frankly.

So I kinda like it, and I definetly reccomend it on the frequent sales it gets put on where you grab it for like $5. But it's a missed oppurtunity for it to only be that.

As of time of writing this game hasn't worked for 5 days because the servers are down. Welcome to DRM hell. When it works, it's maybe a notch or two lower down in quality than DJmax respect but has it's own charms and a lot of unique tracks.

But when you're legitimately looking at a coin flip for the game actually booting on any given day, it's impossible to rate it highly. I only begrudgingly give it more than the lowest rating because I actually want it to get going.

Also the community almost rivals Valorant and LoL for toxicity, jesus christ. Don't ever touch it's discord.

Never before in the history of the STG genre had such a elegant, beautiful shmup been devised. From legendary master of the genre, Shinoubu Yagawa - programmer of battle garegga and armed police batrider - we get his magnum opus.

MMP is a game of such a tight, focused design, building on the foundations of Battle Garegaa and Ibara, and retaining the core game flow of medal chaining, rank management, and the general control, but meshing with a far more CAVE-y, Bullet Hell design in general, which forms for a super unique mix of styles and works really well.

Team this with an amazing narrative and presentation - the tale of earth fighting back against a military dictatorship over the battle over which is better - Beef or Pork, and the subsequent battles over rural japan that take place in it's wake, as our three heroines - each having been disfigured by the enemy prior, make a final stand. Weaker games would lack the pathos to truly deal with the moral quandries of this situation, but Muchi Muchi Pork remains reserved, polite, and nuanced throughout it's short running length.

And there's such an astounding use of metaphor, as our lead characters are both transformed into vile, monstrous chimeras, and then forced to fight against those they have been transformed into - and why do other farm creatures show up in a game so focused on the consumption of pork? In many ways, the game could be considered a companion piece to Bong Joon-Ho's Okja - where a metaphor of consumerism and the cost of it echoes throughout the whole game. And all the imagery is so interesting - our heroines fire what is described as a LARD LASER - by picking up pigs from the ground or the air and... consuming them? Even though they have become half pig themselves? Truly, every frame of this game brings up so much intrigue. Im currently planning a 7 hour long video essay on the topic of symbolism within just this game alone, it has had that much of an effect on me.

And in the end it all comes together to form a truly spectacular package, something no other shmup - hell, no other game can truly compare to - wait hold on, i'm getting handed a note -

"It's just a thicc pig-girl bondage fetish shmup, dude."

Happy April Fools, everyone :D

For what it is, Respect is basically perfect. Being what amounts to a soft reboot of a series which has barely touched western shores, for most people, this amalagmation of 20 years of music games will simply be a 200+ song behemoth of almost entirely original, unique content + some cool crossover stuff.

And DJmax's original music content is absolutely fantastic. DJmax's original music (+the guilty gear, groove coaster, and girls frontline packs) are all keysounded, meaning that keystrokes and presses actually form a note of the music itself rather than having a generic ping (see: cytus, etc.). Its something I feel improves the experience so much it's hard to go back to rhythm games without it. DJmax isn't he only series to do this (EZ2ON, Beatmania), but it's also easily the most accessible, and with Respect, the most polished.

And the tracks themselves are strong. It might be because i've got a bit of a taste for the sheer mid-2000s energy which a lot of the music embodies, but there's an awful lot of songs I frankly really like here - and perhaps more importantly, I think there's frankly very few outright duds. With the whole 400-ish songs that the game+dlc packs has, I could probably enjoy myself going through them all alphabetically, just vibing in it all.

And since the music is good, for me the true strength of Respect really kicks in - the modularity. This is a game that will facilitate almost any player, however casual, however they want to play the game. 4 different core methods of play (number of note tracks), a comprehensive mission mode, online competitive ladders, free open lobbies, freeplay, sitting in air mode with the god-tier koreans spamming hearts, delving through mountains of art and material - Respect has so many ways to play that all feel legitimate and not an afterthought, and the quality of life features are astounding. Respect's sheer amount of content, and the quality of which that content is presented, and the options with which you can play and vibe, makes the rhythm games i used to play - say, Guitar hero, Theatrhtythm, Osu Almost anything licensed - look absolutely pathetic in contrast.

And fortunately, Respect makes it really easy to get into as well. Note timing is extremely lenient compared to other "premium" rhythm games, there's a very smooth difficulty curve thanks to the sheer amount of patterns available, and even in online, you can play the same songs as everyone else just on easier difficulties - which sounds obvious but is honestly one of my favourite things to do in the game - vibe with others just going for our own individual goals.

The only really obvious problem in the gameplay itself is that the game's a PS4 port, and was designed for controller - which makes charts have a little bit less potential for variance and unique stuff than other rhythm games outside of the PC port exclusive "SC" patterns, as tracks 1 and 3/4 and 6 can't be pressed simultaneously in the default controller control scheme and the game is designed around that.

There's also that this game is basically a huge DLC platform now, and going in with just the default package, whilst still giving you a lot of music, means you miss out on a lot, which can get aggravating as it means you'll be forced to observe in open play and get songs you can normally not play on ranked ladder matches. This isn't really to take anything away from the DLC itself - most of the packs are fantastic, and I reccomend all of them at their common sale prices - but fact is to buy all the game, even on sale, is going to cost you about $60+. Now that totals about 5 times the amount of content in the most recent Hatsune Miku game, but I can definetly see how having so much stuff locked off from the off would put people off from Respect, in the same way seeing a gazillion characters locked off in rainbow six siege would do.

Aside from that, the only real other complaint i have is that the game has some stupidly heavy always-online DRM. You can't play it offline at all which is kinda wack. But frankly, it's something that you'll probably barely notice and me even saying it comes out of me trying to come up with more bad things to say more than it actually bothering me - Because frankly, Respect, as a music game platform, is basically as good as it could be.

Whilst I'm here I'll do a quick DLC ranking for any curious people interested.

- Clazziquai: Ridiculously good pack, large amount of extremely high quality songs. Great Mid-2000s energy.
- Technika 1: Basically on par with Clazziquai, with the songs being a bit more contemporary and varied. Has the series' arguably most popular song (I want You). Also comes with unique missions which completely change up the gameplay.
- Portable 3: Great bunch of tracks, including some amazing remixes. Nothing really that special here other than the tracks having some absolutely fantastic hooks that carries that pack on its own.
- V Extension: The most modern and high-production value pack with some great tracks, though not quite as strong as the other packs overall.
- Black Square: The pokemon silver to Clazziquai's gold, a great pack, but not quite as good. Similar vibes.
- Cytus: Songs sadly not keysounded, but the overall track quality is incredibly strong, and has great aesthetic.
- Chunithm: Same as Cytus, but penguins. Sadly has relatively few pattern difficulties, which gives it a heavy jump in difficulty.
- Trilogy: Consists largely of remixes, but extremely good ones. Get if you like the Portable 1 and 2 music in the base game
- Emotional Sense: Arguably overpriced, and also probably should have just been songs in the base game, but a nice little pack.
- Technika 3: Kinda middling overall, but bolstered by about 4 fantastic tracks.
- Girl's Frontline: Weirdly good and surprisingly keysounded, but limited in scope and definetly the most niche pack.
- Deemo: Much weaker pack than Cytus (also from rayark), but bolstered by one absolutely amazing song, Magnolia.
- Groove Coaster: Keysounded, but actually has no good songs, which is just weird.
- Technika 2: Has one great song. But seeing as the Technika Packs are double the cost of most other packs, not good enough.

For every pack wait for a sale - they come about once every two months, there's no point rushing.

There's a certain joy to the fighting game that is completely broken in just the right way. A game where trying to take it remotely seriously is a terrible idea, where every character has an infinite or multiple yet is still wildy imbalanced and has some absurdly swingy mechanics that feel like they were made without much care or thought because this game is basically an ascended college project that's a bonus for buying Daisuke Ishiwatari's rock Album.

Guilty Gear isn't just busted, it's blatantly busted. Spend 2 minutes with any character in training mode and you'll probably find something stupid. Be it the weird instant kill mechanic, some moves doing obscene amounts of damage for no good reason, or Sol's DP being an infinite in the corner. LIke, how could you not notice that?

And I think the thing is, approaching guilty gear from the perspective of it trying to be an actually good fighting game is the wrong way of getting any fun out of it. Guilty Gear is way too focused on being the epitomy of rule of cool to care about anything else. The character designs are sick and they all feel great to play - the music is incredible, it has some of the best sprite work on the PS1 and the act of pressing buttons and doing all the dumb shit has a great feel to it all.

There's a great interview i've read from 1998, where Daisuke Ishiwatari and Hideyuki Anbe - who legitimately seem to have a huge chunk of the work on GG1 by themselves - and they talk casually and enthusiastically about things that don't work, that they were adding random bullshit to the game even in it's final stages of development, and it all sounds like they were basically throwing every idea they had in it. And I think that creative enthusiasm and Laissez-Faire attitude really comes across in the final product.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to play Guilty Gear against anyone that knows what they're doing. Basically every guilty gear fighting game afterwards would improve on it and is just outright better. But the pure slice of creative kusoge that is GG1 is a great arcade mode playthrough, and a fantastic game to revel in the stupidity of everything going on. Sol Badguy may have 4 ways of infinite-ing me, but I'll have a smile on my face whilst he does it.

Whilst every Medium of Media can reasonably tell almost any story, I gotta say that Hypergryph have some goddamn balls going with Gacha as the basis for their cyberpunk fantasy AIDS allegory. Because yes, this game which is about the sociopolitical fallout of a Magical disease and the treatment of the infected is told through the medium of spending $2 on hoping your waifu or husbando pops out of a duffel bag shaped slot machine.

And you know what, I thnk it actually works.

It's bolstered by a core strength of an incredibly strong aesthetic. The presentation in AK is absolutely phenomenal. Whilst there's a few weird character designs, most of them sell the techno-fantasy streetwear look really well, whilst also having enough variation to keep things fresh and interesting.

And fortunately the story is also actually pretty good - at least once you get past the first few pretty dry and boring chapters - but after that, it picks up massively, with each chapter effectively forming a small self contained story about the struggle and dilemmas of the fucked-up world the game takes place in. It's unusually mature and prepared to go to dark places a lot of the time, and frankly maybe less than half of the tales in AK get a happy ending - but it works. And the AIDS allegory stuff is honestly handled very well, focusing on both systemic discrimination and personal prejudices and treating it all with some surprising nuance. Blaze and Greythroat's relatioship in Chapters 5 and 6 is a standout in this regard.

It also, frankly, works well with the Gacha format, which basically demands an absolutely metronomic stream of content, which typically consists of story events which come basically every 3 weeks. And they're mostly pretty great. They do a great job of expanding the world, providing shorter, more focused vignettes, and diversifying the tone - going from full doomer (Darknight's Memoir, which is focused on a recurring antagonist's life as a mercenary) all the way to outright comedic stuff (Ceobe's Fungimist, which is literally about a sctterbrained character hallucinating on mushrooms). It really helps diversify the game, and the long form content structure of AK also ties in well with the 'endless struggle' motif, and that the problems that the player faction faces are systemic and are in there for the long haul. Whilst I'm far from fond of the Gacha mechanics itself, they're easily some of the better ones of the genre, all story content can easily be cleared with freebies, and the game definetly benefits from being a live service - honestly one of the very few I can think of.

Oh I guess there's also gameplay. It's fun - a unit based tower defense game that is frankly way too easy an awful lot of the time - but Harder content, in the form of the contingency contracts and the recent roguelike mode (which was actually better than most modern roguelikes somehow), can be great fun to try and work out strategies for - the only real shame in this is that the super-hard content is usually time limited, and often can also be brute forced by a few incredibly broken characters (Silverash, Eyjafjalla) that would have been nerfed a year ago if this game was in a genre that could get away with that. Avoid using those two if you try out the game for sure.

The overall package really just works better than it has any right to. It's basically the only world in this sort of game that i've ever been able to take seriously, and the story is actually worth paying attention to - whilst AK is also able to serve as an idle, comfort food sort of game at the same time.

So whilst I realise that I cash in every piece of clout I have reccomending this, I actually do. Especially if you can stomach the first few mediocre chapters of gameplay. And obviously dont touch this with a barge pole if you have any tendancies towards gambling or addiction - but if you can weather the urge to dump 100 pulls on the thicc gundam snek or alternative waifu of your choice, I would give it a go.

Aesthetically interesting and I appreciate going for a radically atypical structure for a shmup, but unfortunately Swag is honestly one of the worst of the genre I've played. The structure of the game, focused on a single, long, semi-randomized stage is interesting and has potential for a score attack game - and that's all that's good i have to say.

There's just absolutely no meat on the bones here. There's such a limited amount of enemies and layouts that it got old before i finished my first run, and what's there isn't even interesting. The player themselves has a pretty cool arsenal and playstyle but there's just no good encounters or any reason to not just do the same thing for the entire duration of a run. And the conceit of the game itself - basically just being a single stage score attack - practicaly amounts to being a long, boring Caravan stage with some pretty neat aesthetics. There are bonus modes in NES shmups with more to them than this $30 release.

I hope RS34 can just lend their weird energy to better games in future.

For my money, CAVE have 4 standout titles. Ketsui, Dodonpachi DaiOuJou, Mushi Futari and Progear. The former 3 are incredibly tightly designed, traditional-ish bullet hells. Progear, on the other hand, is more of an experimental mess of cool shit put in a development hell washing machine, that somehow came out as a rad tie-dye T-shirt.

Because Progear, both by the standards of the day and even now, is an almost unique bullet hell. It's horizontal for one, something rare to see for this kind of shmup in the first place, but the true difference comes in it's heavy focus on it's core bullet cancelling mechanic.

Essentially, when bullets are caught up in enemy explosions, they're deleted in Progear. The more bullets you delete in one explosion gives you more points, and then the ability to switch shot type and cause bullets cancelling to cancel other bullets themselves, turning them into precious jewel point items instead - all for huge scoring benefit. It's a frankly, unintuitive, weird system that is awkward as hell to explain and get your head around - especially without the flyers in the original arcade kits that explain it, and without paying attention to the attract mode demos - but when it clicks, dear lord does it click.

CAVE are specialists at making satisfying scoring systems, but Progear's "Jeweling" goes further than any of their others, forming the whole basis for playing the game at any decent level - cancelling huge waves of bullets to gain screenspace to move into, timing enemy kills, streaming enemies to make lines of bullets that lead to full screen cancels. It has such a fantastic flow to it, and gives the game a really unique edge.

This system, along with CAVE experimenting with the weird and wonderful horizontal realm, also leads to Progear having some of my favourite bullet patterns of any STG. Progear's bullets are often fired in weird trajectories and acceleration - partially so they cover up the enemies that fire them for a period - and often behave like snooker balls hit with backspin. Its a totally unique style of bullet pattern for bullet hell, and I am personally a huge fan of it. It all adds up to a system with a great balance of Micro and Macro dodging, where control of the screenspace is a huge factor.

And all of this is contained within a fantastic steampunk setting from frequent CAVE collaborator Junya Inoue. Without getting too into it, it's essentially a lot like a doomer version of Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, and whilst obviously there's only so much you can do with that in a 20 minute long STG, the whole thing provides a great melancholic vibe (gotta love a game that starts with mass infanticide), a fantastic aesthetic that contrasts well with all the bullet rain, and establishes a feeling of desperation that works well with the game system. Inoue in general is one of those artists that gets so into the aesthetic they create that manages to impart a feel of a larger, realised world even in the tiny amount of content in the game itself, and its a huge contributor to why I like this game so much.

The failings of Progear are there - as I said before, it's messy. The scoring system ive been gushing about so much kinda falls apart when played for world records due to it's absurdly powerful max bomb bonus. The rough development cycle with the underpowered Hardware also really shows in the final product - the arcade version of the soundtrack uses crunchy kinda awful samples that make half the songs sound kinda shite, there's a lot of sprite reuse (particularly in the final level), and the slowdown, a hallmark of CAVE's shooters, is incredibly severe. It's still arguably the best looking game on the CPS2 (the same hardware that powers Street Fighter 2), but its pretty obvious CAVE were hamstrung by some combination of Capcom and their Hardware. It's telling they didn't work together again and Capcom were intent on keeping Progear in their Vaults for the better part of 20 years.

And it's a real shame they did. Progear has become one of their least well known games partially due to a complete lack of porting, revisons/arrange modes or a successor. That leaves Progear as CAVE's most unique masterpiece. There's a scant one game that feels like it - Battle Traverse. And for me, one of the kindest things I can say about that game is that it reminds me of Progear. I wish more did.


If you want to try out the game, I reccomend MAME, where it runs very accurately - despite being a CPS2 game, Final Burn Alpha doesnt work well for it - You will also need a rom for QSound. You're best off playing the JP version, as the American release cuts out some voice acting and makes some questionable gameplay changes - it is easier, but that can be adjusted in the service mode of the JP version regardless. And make sure you flip the setting that binds FULL AUTO to button 3 - it will save your fingers. Enjoy!

At it's best, Art of Rally is a glorious homage to the glory days of the motorsport. It sucked me in immedietly, with it's gorgeous aesthetic and fantastic physics/car handling forming an excellent base for a game. A Tribute that truly captures the madness and zen-like state of blasting a car down a road at the edge of control.

But the more I played AOR, and the further I was torn from that first hour of pure zen, the more the cracks show. The main issue is the stages. Rally games have always suffered with stages, because realistically you'd want about a Thousand Kilometres of Road in every game, which is untennable, But AOR really suffers in both quantity and quality.

There's about 30 unique stages in the game (and a lot of reverse versions). That might have been enough, but they are also all extremely short and there's maybe one good one in the entire game. And considering the career mode will have you go through about 25 courses in every class of car, repeats happen thick and fast and by the time you've even reached the group B cars, which are the most popular and a selling point of the game - I was already tired of them.

And the stage design shows some really baffling decisions - whilst each of the 5 location's aesthetic has been gloriously adapted, the nature of their roads has most certainly not been, and it's incredibly frustrating. Every location ends up feeling the same when in real life there's so much more variety and soul to the tracks themselves. Finland is a particular shame, as it's claustrophobic, tree lined roads in real life feel exactly like every other road in this entire game. Different coutries' rally stages are literally like mario worlds in real life and somehow the artsy videogame version makes them makes them all the same.

There's also a mind-boggling choice to keep the road surface at the same, incredibly wide width for every road in the entire game, and there's a severe lack of variety in terms of corner choice. One of the japan stages feels like it has 10 2nd-gear hairpin sweepers in a row and it's remarkably boring. How does an artsy, arcade rally videogame have less interesting roads than the ones outside my house?

Eventually, the stage design's blandness broke through my sheer love of the core aesthetic and feel. And it's a real shame. There's such a love of a lost era here, and it's just one thing away from working.