Well, its better than Vampire Survivors. An art style that isnt just bad Castlevania and the remote sniff of actually having gameplay will do that. The character designs are good, there's some silly synergy stuff and a good general atmosphere which suits the horde gameplay.

So, it's best in class, and maybe the best oppurtunity for these games to show some worth. And all that makes me realise is that these games are terrible. Built around a constant drip feed of level ups, slowly gaining power through synergies and trying to cut through the hordes of enemies, which disguises the fact that you're not really doing anything, but oooh gotta follow those breadcrumbs of dopamine.

It's a brainworm. After i've finished a game like this I feel absolutely nothing, whilst the game itself is so effortless to play and dangles just enough carrots at the end of a stick to keep you playing for hours you will never get back.

And this is the best of them.

I'm worried its only a matter of time before this genre's predatory consumption of manhours turns into a predatory consumption of money too. I can see a deplorable company like Blizzard or Riot making a game like this with gacha or some shit and daily challenges and whatnot, and it makes me want to throw up.

I don't think 20 minutes was made maliciously, and there is worth in it's cool atmosphere and cool characters. But it's design is still built on exploiting human tendancies, not being engaging, or fun, or anything you will remember a minute after you finish. It and it's ilk are a blight.

I wish I liked Iron Lung more. So much of what it attempts, and what it does well, are horror themes and practices that I tend to love/scare me. Isolation, weird alien deepest lore that you aren't really meant to understand,, and general creeping dread of the unknown. I really like how it puts you in the shoes of this poor sod laboured with this creep-ass submarine, and I like the aesthetic and hook of having to take increasingly creepy pictures of a hellscape, bound to go wrong, to navigate it.

So, why don't I love this? It seems like an easy slam dunk, and yes - for the most part - it's executed quite well. There's some spookiness to the navigation, and the game does have one very, very good scare.

And I think a lot of my problem is with Iron Lung's contrivance. The Sub is such a perfect horror location idea that it kind of feels fake in it's own way. It is probably just me, but the whole layout of everything feels artificial, designed around horror factor, perfectly claustrophobic, perfectly making you wait for the picture, perfectly putting the controls on the other side of the sub. Considering you spend the whole game in it, I do think this takes a lot of out of the experience - for me, there's always this feeling that I am ultimately in a safe, controlled environment which I just can't shake.

I also think the pacing is just a tad too slow. The game only comes out about an hour long, but I think there's just a bit too much dead air in that time, and the navigation is sadly mostly just annoying, which again is one of those things that can take you out of the horror elements easily.

Outside of it's one big setpiece, I just don't think Iron Lung is scary. A lot of the subtle stuff just feels a bit off, and the frustration overtakes the horror for me.

What's most frustrating perhaps is that David Szymanski's Squirrel Stapler, despite it's silliness and surrealism, is a far, far scarier game than Iron Lung, that's better paced, has a frankly incredible final setpiece. Seeing the same dev just make a few mistakes with a premise that could have turned out something far better is the saddest part of the endeavour.

After my first session of Dokapon, I put a review up on this site maligning how I had been dead for about a quarter of the playtime thus far, beset by a whole pile of RNG bullshit and being fucked over by every other player in the game. I was having a fun time but sheesh.

Oh, how little i knew.

Dokapon Kingdom's sheer chaos starts at a level that makes Mario Party look like checkers. From week 1, straight up murder is on the table, with all players having the ability to fight both each other and enemies within a RPG battle system which is, of course, heavily luck based. All the while you're meant to be clearing towns of monsters and doing quests to earn the highest monetary worth.

And then things get worse.

The sheer amount of things that WILL fuck you over in full playthrough of dokapon, often completely out your control, is remarkable. The game will both continually mess with you with random events, broken enemies, stupid locations which are hard to get to, random drops, etc, whilst also giving your fellow players all the tools to make it worse. Want to send a killer robot after your friends? Sure. Want to nuke your friend across the map with magic? Go ahead. Want to ruin two sessions' progress for everyone by forcing them to your current position? Yeah.

With Dokapon, it's not a question of will you get fucked, it's when, and how. And somehow, I have no idea how, the game constantly one-ups itself. Just when you think it can't get any more stupid, it does. This is partially due to the map opening up slowly throughout the game, giving access to more places to lose, more insane dungeons to get caught up with, more places to be crabs in a bucket together. And it's an absolute riot.

I think the genius of Dokapon is that it gives you just the right amount of control. It's an RNG-fueled madness festival for sure, but the game lets you influence things, lets you play in enough different ways, lets you go about enough diferent means to progress and raise your own stonks that there's a true tension to when the best laid plans of mice and men fall apart, or very occasionally, don't.

During the 30 hour ish playthrough we did, there were just too many great moments to count. So many story arcs of each of us all murdering each other as we pursued one goal, so many times where we just murdered each other for dubious reasoning, about 10 different truces and agreements broken, a lot of lying, a lot of begging, a fair amount of stealing, a few times sparing people by exchanging their deaths for putting poop on their head and only two or three complete collapses of the economy.

I could not begin to tell you how fun it is. After a first session where i was feeling kinda peeved at the game, I slowly began appreciating the absurdity, and when it was at my expense, I started laughing more. And somehow, between all it's randomness it did tend to even things out and make for a game that was tense and surprisingly close the whole entire time, even after 700 turns - which is a testament for how good a manged chaos it pulls off, and maybe also a testament to how much we enjoyed fucking each other over constantly.

Of course the game has plenty of problems. Many of which are intwined with it's benefits. If you don't have the right sort of environment for this I think it could legitimately make you lose friends (which to be fair, is advertised). There's a level of camraderie needed at some point, and you kinda need to understand that being murdered is really quite funny. If you take this game too seriously, and focus too hard on the ultimate winner, you will not have the best of times.

There's also just a fair amount of broken stuff, and weird balance. There's a handful of routes to effectively infinite money that you basically need to ban as a house rule, Magic is either incredibly busted or useless iwth no inbetween as a stat, and a couple of the super secret classes are weirdly useless despite being a massive pain in the arse to even obtain. It's kinda dubious and i'd chalk up a lot of it to this game effectively being a straight remake of the original Super Famicom Dokapon - warts and all.

A natural consequence of the game system is also that the endgame gets a little stalemate-heavy if you're trying to guarantee first place. Because the game finishing relies someone beating the final dungeon and getting the big final reward, but that also takes quite a while, it creates a game state where it's arguably best to let some other fucker do it. It's not a huge issue, but I think it's something i'd probably house rule around in the future.

But who cares about that, because this game is incredible. It really did not take long for Dokapon Kingdom sessions to become the highlights of my week, eventually trying to sneakily suggest the sessions happen more often than usual in our group chat and finding that, for some fucking reason, everyone was as ok with that as I was.

I have outright never had as much fun in a Multiplayer game. It's a game where i got 30 Hours plus of scheming, dying, killing, and most importantly, laughing my ass off. Yes, you probably a group that is level-headed enough to not actively want to kill each other afterwords. But as a lens for sheer absurdity, comedy, and extracting the best moments out of group interactions, I am not sure i will ever experience something again quite like Dokapon Kingdom.

It is an absolute masterpiece.

Special shoutout to fellow players:
Sombes (This was her fucking idea)
Arnust (Schemer and no balls)
Tacos (Banged his head on the table at least once this playthrough)

THERE IS A TAPE IN THE DINING ROOM

Like most of Anatomy, it is not a line that should be utterly terrifying. Consciously - thanks to it being the first moments of the game, and having absorbed enough of the game through osmosis to know the game is not heavy on jumpscares/whatever - I knew there was nothing truly to be scared of in that room that is going to rip my head off IRL. And yet the first two times I tried playing this game, the sheer intensity of just walking around the few innocuous rooms at the start of the game was enough to have me Alt-F4 before anything had even really happened.

And yeah, I will concede, when it comes to this sort of thing I am a bit of a wuss. Particularly when it comes to the interface screw-y glitchy horror you get in a lot of Itch games, which Anatomy does like to throw at you.

But whilst that stuff always freaks me out, the general presentation of Anatomy is what really hooks under my skin. Just moving around the house has this weird feeling of intensity to it. The sound design is impeccable, the lighting just right, with a narrow field of view that makes it feel like the whole time you're never really sure you're alone. And of course, the fact that the game's setting is so deliberately ordinary adds this extra, primal layer to it all. Like an old memory of being alone in the house I grew up in and the fear that came with it resurfacing.

The main conceit of the horror is also really cool and well done. The concept of a place or location being the source of the horror itself is nothing new, but the intimacy of Anatomy adds a nice layer to it, especially with the very erudite sounding sciencey person who reads most of the tapes to you - the game's horror thesis is still gnawing at me a little, and I do kinda buy the point the guy on the tapes is saying...

So for a 30 minute experience of dread, Anatomy is fucking great. Probably the best horror game i've played since PT, even, and frankly, is very comparable to that game in general but for having less of a focus on direct scares. I do think it has issues - the game desperately, desperately needs subtitles and an actual options menu. It wouldn't clash with the game's aesthetic even as it basically already uses VHS closed captions on occasion. Without them i literally had to go find a subtitled playthrough on youtube to parse the entirety of some of the last tapes you collect. I would also say the game's one big actual scare is a bit dissapointing - its ok, and a perfect rounding out of the game's big theme, but looks a little goofy compared to the rest of what is an immaculate aesthetic, and is nowhere near enough of a crescendo to match up to the sheer dread built up before it.

Also, and this is the smallest of nits to pick, but the UNITY PERSONAL EDITION logo popping up every time you boot, for game that you will have to do so 3 times in 30 minutes to finish, is a bit immersion breaking for something that is otherwise so utterly captivating.

But don't let that take away anything too much from Anatomy. The small issues I have with the game are also mostly in retrospect. When playing it I haven't been as scared by media since PT, and it's theme is one that feels like it's going to linger with me for a while just like it. When a game makes walking down a simple Hallway I KNOW has nothing at the other end scary, that's when you know you're dealing with a properly excellent Horror creator.

One of the things I love most about racing games, espeically arcade ones, is the feeling of being on the absolute edge of control. Taking all the risks, braking just before the limit, brushing against the walls, and entering this zone in your mind where all you see is the next apex.

And yeah, a lot of the time you'll eat shit, landing in the nearest hedge. But thats well worth the thrill.

Super Hang-On is a game also dedicated to this exact feeling, and very little else. It's far from the only arcadey racing game to incite the feeling - see Ridge Racer Type 4, Wipeout 3 - but the sheer ease with which it's able to achieve this mindset, in me at least, is remarkable. It only takes a few corners of blasting through traffic for the mindset to take hold. Push every corner tighter, boost as early as I can, see if I can shoot for a vanishing gap.

An awful lot of it is just in pure gamefeel. It's a bit boring to say, but the bike just controls super well - way better than the cars of outrun (partially because the way super scaler games do turning is way more appropriate for a motorbike). The sense of speed is also utterly incredible, especially when you boost.

And that boost is such a great gameplay addition. It has unlimited use, but can only be used at top speed and is incredibly satisfying to use. Which means the game heavily encourages carrying as much speed as possible through corners, and also abusing the boost button as far as you can take it.

The game is also quite difficult - clearing anything other than the beginner course being quite a task itself even if you knock the dipswitches down a bit. This only feeds more into the desire to push even harder, because those split seconds absolutely count.

On top of that, you get the great looking super scaled landscapes to blast through and some of Sega's absolute best music to choose. And that's about it. But who needs anything else?

Super Hang On is simple bliss. The problems I have with it are so miniscule - basically just that I think it's a little too punishing sometimes - that I think it's up there with Ridge Racer Type 4 and Wipeout 3 Special Edition in the Arcade racing stakes. It's an absolute joy.

The fact the same man designed this as Shenmue 3 terrifies me.

I've gotta stop getting fooled by the switch eshop sales. This is becoming a problem.

Hong Kong Massacre gets one thing right - the idea of Hotline Miami meets Hong Kong Action cinema from the 80s/90s is a very good one, and it does get some things right. The grimy tone is right, as are the gunfights that tear the environment to shreds. At it's best it evokes a glimmer of a feeling of something like the Hospital shootout from Hard Boiled.

But my word, it fucks up almost literally everything else. Despite being so blatantly inspired by Hotline Miami, it almost feels like it was recreating the gameplay based on being told how it works rather than actually playing it.

The main problem is probably the pace of the gameplay. You move extremely slowly with even the most mobile of weapons, and enemies are often hidden beyond your range of view (which, no you can't extend at least in the console versions), which makes the game very slow and methodical. The natural way to play the game is to peak for half a second, usually with the ridiculously overpowered shotgun, take down everyone in a room, and then go to the next one. Enemies in the next room on barely every aggro onto you and there's almost no oppurtunity to have an extended gunfight, and if you do you're probably just dead. There's a slow-mo gauge and jump dive like Max payne but the dive in particular is almost entirely useless and the slow mo is of dubious use most of the time, other than being quite cool.

The level design is a key culprit here. Enemies, which love to obscured by the graphics and the tight camera view, don't have completely fixed spawn points. Which only encourages more stop and pop, hyper conservative gameplay. Oh, and those super fast stage restarts from Hotline Miami which made all those deaths less frustrating? Yeah, how about a 10 second wait each time instead and a menu. God.

It's shit. There's a world where a more slow-paced, more down to earth take on hotline miami works, but this is absolutely not it. Good set dressing can only go so far to cover up what's a super shallow, frustrating and boring gameplay loop.

And the real annoying thing is that I don't think it's that far off. It legitimately feels like the base is all there for this to be at least a decent hotline miami clone, if legitimately things like character movement speed and enemy aggro range were increased, and enemy spawns were fixed. That game would still be a bit rough, but it would be fine. And it's so close. Yet so far.

Waking up on a sunday and finding that Team Ladybug, out of nowhere, have released a brand new shooting game, is quite a nice surprise. And what's more it's really, really pretty, with an excellent combination of 3D and 2D sprites that works so well.

And the game's gimmick is pretty good - it's effectively Gradius meets Mars Matrix, with the player having a rechargeable shield that absorbs bullets and releases a blast the more is sucked. It's pretty fun and works particularly nicely with the bosses, but it's extremely lenient. Even un-upgraded it comes with about twice the energy you will ever need.

Though, in general, the game is really easy all around. Not easy by shmup standards, mind, just by game standards. The shield suck ability alone is overtuned, but on top of that, instead of dying when hit, you only lose power ups (unless on the unlockable "ridiculous" difficulty which still isnt that bad) on hit, which can allow you to take upwards of 25 hits per 4-5 minute level, even on hard and the also unlockable Arcade mode. Easy and Normal are outright insultingly easy outside of some occasional spikes in boss fights.

I've no objection to easy game, but Drainus' sheer lack of challenge feels contrary to it's other design principles - hell, after you max out your upgrades, you can get a shield like the Gradius games which feels very pointless on top of the sheer beating you can already take.

I almost feel it's an overreaction to this game's horrible feedback and some occasional visibility problems. It is often very unclear when you are actually hit, when invulnerability from your shield actually ends, and especially which parts of stage backgrounds are collidible terrain and which you can fly by freely. When actually playing on that "ridiculous" difficulty, it's sometimes hard to tell what exactly killed you at all.

The other key issue is the game's weird upgrade system. It's a fine idea on it's own, allocating resources to whatever thing you're most into is a fine evolution on the Gradius formula, but the upgrades are exceptionally poorly balanced (Laser+bits+hurricane bomb completely trivialises the game even more than it already was), and the game bizzarely doesnt constrain this upgrade system to a natural place like stage end, but lets you upgrade and reconfigure your ship at any time in the pause menu. This absolutely murders the flow of the game, but if you want to min-max you'll want to! It's a good job the game is so easy you can basically just use it at stage end but wow its a bad idea.

As mentioned, the game's core strength is its aesthetic. Boss sprites in particular look fantastic, embodying the look of something like Battle Traverse with the intricacy of Radiant Silvergun's bosses, folding and contorting as they're broken apart. The boss fights themselves are also quite good, especially the final boss and a very blatant shoutout to Gradius.

But overall the game is more a well of potential than something actually fulfilled. It's very pretty, sure, and the mechanics have good prospects, but that doesn't quite cut it. I actually think of Team Ladybug go through the effort of refining it, increasing the difficulty for some modes and sort out the issues regarding visibility, it could be a very good game. For now though, I can't reccomend it.

Mechanically, Trio the Punch is quite poor. It's a beat 'em up which is both super basic, with a single attack button per character, very simple enemy designs and a very weak feedback on hits and damaging an enemy. Game strategy rarely gets any more interesting than very simple whiff punishing, like im playing Rogue Legacy 2 or Dead Cells. I do not want to play more Rogue Legacy 2 or Dead Cells.

So it's a good job Trio the Punch is impressively stupid. In each of it's minute long stages, you will start by beating up a number of Karnovs - the large, fire breathing Data East mascot inexplicably turning up about 100 times over the course of the game for... reasns? - then face a boss, which could just basically be anything from a simple gargoyle to a giant foot, to an angry man who gets mad at you hitting his tortoise shell, to a sheep. Then after winning, you get sent to a roulette wheel of powerups, which you're practically unable to influence. These include powering you down, at which point you are told "BAD CHOICE". Then, for some reason, the sheep boss might have just cursed you into being a sheep for the next level on it's death, but the sheep is also obscenely strong compared to the standard Trio. And then you get attacked by a bunch of giant heads in a stack. And sometimes the game can just decide to make your sprite tiny or force everything on screen to stop moving, or fuck knows.

The dedication to the bit is key here. On the face of it, Trio the Punch is like Parodius, Rainbow Islands, or Space Invaders 95, where it's a send up of the companies' games and tropes, but those games still have structure, are usually reverant of those properties and are also competent, or are least trying to be kind of fun in those cases, the joke is on Konami and Taito respectively. In Trio the Punch, i am 100% convinced the joke is on the player. A credit of Trio the Punch is likely to consist of a few gags that land, a few that dont, and a constant stream of the game taking the piss.

It's like pre-paying for a restaurant and finding out upon arrival that you have to eat out of a cement mixer. Yeah, its kinda funny at first, but you also have to eat out of a cement mixer. But then again, the very fact that you, the fool, are actually going through with it, becomes funny itself.

Trio the Punch is not a good game, and it's gags dont always hit. But as a sheer act of disrespect and as a wild trip for a player to go down, it's great. Data East might have pranked you, but there is often as much joy in the recipient to being dunked at the fair as there is to doing to dunking. And to be the one who's dunkedd in a game, is a rare experience indeed.

Few games have left me as strong a first impression as Xeno Crisis. In it's opening, and it's first few levels, there's just so much it absolutely nails. There's a very distinct vibe - probably deliberate - of this being an Aliens tie-in game for the mega drive lost to time. It's kind of awesome - the core gameplay of just blasting aliens in this twin stick shooter has a fantastic feel - animations are great, the muzzle flare is about the player character, spent shells and alien corpses literring the rooms. It's essentially smash TV, but grimey and alien.

And the soundtrack that accompanies it is so damn good. The YM2612 soundchip of the Mega Drive is partially notable for being able to produce a kind of synth that for lack of a better word is a bit "grimy", with strong bass and a bit of reverb (i am not good with music). If you've played something like MUSHA Aleste or especially Thunder Force IV - and Savaged Regime, the composer here, captures that synth and uses it to incredible effect. It works so well, and if nothing else, i heavily encourage checking out this game's soundtrack. The music, never, ever lets the side down.

Which unfortunately, I can't say for the gameplay. It's still good overall, don't get me wrong, but the cracks begin to show when the honeymoon period ends. Which is probably going to be at stage 3, which is awful. It's stupidly overlong with enemies that take an age to spawn, and it doesn't even have a boss. It's a weird drop in intensity which lets some of the frustrating features of Xeno Crisis set in - the pointless ammo system, the waiting for enemy spawns, the slight bit of inertia that your character has preventing accurate movement, the random map generation and upgrade system that feel rather pointless.

But the biggest issue of all is that the game is interminably long. 45 Minutes is short by most standards but for the lightning paced gameplay this is going for it's way over the mark. By the end of stage 4, the game feels ready to wrap itself up in the next stage.... but then stage 5 is another insane filler chapter and there's two stages after it! Maybe the sheer awesome catharsis of the game wears off a bit early for me, but I bet it would wear off for anyone by the time it decides to end, especially as the formula ane enemy variety never really gets interesting enough to make up for it.

But don't get me wrong, Xeno Crisis is quite good. If it could pace itself better and carry its remarkable opening feeling for it's entire runtime, it would be one of the best Mega Drive games. And it's soundtrack is outright amazing. And maybe the sad thing is that the game could be too, if it just knew when to stop.

I don't think it's out of line to say that Trek to Yomi is one of the prettiest games I have ever played. It's fixed camera angles are always pointed towards some of the most beautiful landscapes i've seen in a game, cast with incredible use of lighting, a fantastic film grain filter thing, a bit of tilt shift, and cast with enough fidelity to really snap.

From minute 1 to it's final moments, Trek to Yomi just never misses in terms of looks. Every single of what must be hundreds of camera angles is beautiful, and whilst it is blatantly inspired by the work of Akira Kurosawa, it doesnt wallow in it, spending about half it's runtime making shots and going through environments beyond the scope of the great filmaker, dabbling with the supernatural.

And on top of the visuals, there's a great score and fantastic voice acting, basically nailing the feeling of playing through a samurai cinema film. The story's simple, but is emotionally charged enough to carry this facismile the whole way through, and does a great job of carrying the player through all the cool shit.

And if you can accept that is what Trek to Yomi's hook is, you will probably enjoy it, possibly quite a bit, like I did. Because Trek to Yomi - despite having a fair amount of combat - is way closer to a walking sim or cinematic platformer than anything else. There's a teeny bit of exploration and puzzling, but they mostly serve to give you more cool shit to look at.

The real core issue with Trek to Yomi is it's combat. It's actually mostly serviceable, basically a footsies sword game, and the enemy variety, particularly in the midsection, adds a swell of momentum. But there's just too much of it, and once you've figured out how to take down each of the enemy types consistently, it's pretty repetitive. When played on the one-shot Kensei mode (which is sadly unlocked only on a second playthrough), it benefits massively from the increased pace, to the point that i'd reccomend downloading a save file with it unlocked or something on PC. Some sections of the game on normal/hard difficulty do just feel slightly too long, so shortening it down helps trim the fat.

The character animation of the game is also a little weird. Again, it's not too bad and it mostly effects the combat, but it's a bit stilted and animations cancel into each other in a bit of a disorienting way. It's odd in that I only really noticed it for the first part of each play session before i got used to how it looked - just kind of unusual.

But those are only the only huge blemishes on what is otherwise a unique, very engaging 6 hour experience, and I think if you know what you're getting into, there's an awful amount to love here. I will admit to being basically exactly the target audience for this game, being a fan of both janky vibe-based games and Akira Kurosawa's movies, but honestly, if you go in expecting something closer to a game like INSIDE than Ghost of Tsushima or - god forbid - a beat em up with good combat, it will be one fantastic 6 hours.

From the primordial ooze of the first videogames, an era where game design was an exercise no one really knew what they were doing, Namco emerged as the apex species. From 1980 to 1984, they released a string of incredible titles - Galaga, Xevious, Pac Man, Rally-X, Dig Dug, Tower of Druaga, Pole Position even fucking Pac Land - that whilst not neccessarily always holding up in a modern context, defined genres and nailed their control and general game feel.

Gaplus is not that. Gaplus has an identity crisis. And it's evident from the moment you start controlling it, and you realise you can move upwards. Badly. Vertical movement is about half the speed you do Horizontally, and this also effects diagonals - meaning diagonal movement is done at about a 15 degree angle versus the 45 you get in basically every other shmup that allows it.

It's so wack. It's a bizzare middle ground that feels like it was made to give galaga a bit of vertical movement - it's not like Namco didn't know what they were doing, at the time this was out Xevious was a massive hit in JP arcades, which has normalised diagonals and verticals. So it's deliberate and clearly trying to go for something, but what is a bit unclear. Especially when you can pretty much get spawn killed by enemies when you do dare move the ship up.

The other remarkable thing about Gaplus is how mad it is regarding secrets. It's kind of tower of druaga-y, secrets with no rhyme or reason, from a hidden 1-up available on every Parsec if you can navigate the maths, to the secret ship which spawns if you die in certain ways, to the entire way bonus rounds work and what they entail (sometimes, if you complete the wrong word, it will just steal a life from you, for instance). It's stupid.

But Gaplus has got it where it counts. From Parsec 1, Gaplus is a remarkably intense early shmup, notably starting at a much higher difficulty than Galaga, and it's frantic. The dual fighter from galaga is gone, replaced with the ability to suck up enemies and bring them in formation with you, only for them to slowly get whittled down by stray shots and rammers. I actually prefer this a lot to the dual fighter, it's generally more strategic and there's much less pain involved in losing an ally, and it also contributes to this great feeling of tug of war between you and the galaga, as you gain and lose power over parsecs.

And that bonkers movement actually works as well - giving you the oppurtunity to slowly gain ground, and put your formation at a riskier position to give more effective firepower (due to shot limit) and also give important room for dodging backwards. It's still weird and i'd hesistate to call it good, but combined with the sheer intensity of Gaplus, there's something weirdly compelling about it.

And as boring as it is of the billion elements in Gaplus, that intensity, and mostly just it's devious enemy formations and their attacks, is the core of it's strength. There's never much room to breathe, never really any dead air, and for that - and it's idiosyncracies - i do prefer it over the original.

Also it has a way better jingle i'm sorry.

Lets get this straight from the off - The original Andro Dunos is bad. It's a very boring Horizontal STG with frankly, very few redeeming qualities. Whilst not abjectly awful, it completely lacks character, has horrible pacing (which to be fair, was almost a standard for Hori STGs from it's time), and just has absolutely no hook at all. Even compared to when Platinum pulled Nichibitsu's mostly just ok Cresta series out of the pile for Sol, making a successor to AD is a very weird decision. Where the Cresta series at least has two good games for their times and a unique mechanic to jump off with it's docking, Andro Dunos is just a worse Zero Wing, and Zero Wing isn't even good.

So, as bizzare a decision as making a sequel to AD in the first place is, it's not a surprise that it's better than the first. Infinos Gaiden Dev Piccorinesoft is at the helm here, and the game feels a lot like that one, with similar feel and aesthetic, with lots of sprite scaling enemiesl, as well as similar level design. Gameplay wise it feels more remake than sequel, with the exact same set of weapons and switching through them as the original - just generally balanced much better, without AD1's awful rank system which disentivised actually using multiple weapons, and a generally well thought out game flow between using it's powered shots. It's fine.

But that's about it. Maybe its in attempt to be authentic to the source material, but Andro Dunos 2 is still so very white bread. AD2 is in absolute desperate need of a hook. Aesthetically it's about as bland a space shooter you can get, it's only real gimmick gameplay wise is a weapon system that is basically a rip-off of thunder force's, the music is... fine again, there's no real presentational tricks. Where Sol Cresta went balls out on its soundtrack, reverance for the originals and with it's core gameplay systems - sometimes for better and worse - AD2 is so fucking safe. It seems it's only real hook is that "it's on the 3DS and dreamcast", and im sorry, that doesn't count.

Also doesn't help that despite a pretty good core, the Quality of life stuff on offer here is sub-ZUN levels of awful. You can only rebind controls in a certain number of setups, the training mode/stage select doesnt give you any starting power so is basically useless, there's no online leaderboards or replays, you legitimately just can't adjust things like the volume or display - it's maddening and makes it particularly tempting to drop.

Overall, yeah, the game's decent. Pretty good gameplay. But that's just not enough, not even close. There are so many Hori shmups that can either outmatch it entirely or have pretty good gameplay as like the last bulletpoint on it's list of virtues, and when the rest of the product is also just not backing it up, it's just not worth the time.

"Damn, this game looks good! Why is it £1 on the eshop?"

We've probably all been there. Scouring through the absolute deluges of shovelware on the current offers page of the switch eshop searching for gold. It might be better coined dumpster diving at this point, between all the hello neighbours and ancient PC object finder games clogging the drain at 90% off. But every once in a while, it does seem like an actually ok game ends up there. And I thought it could be pathway.

When handed a couple of screenshots and a general idea of Pathway, it seems really good. The idea of FTL meets XCOM, teamed up such top quality art in a setting of Nazi-occupied 1930s Norh Afirca (A lot of indiana jones vibes) - it sounds legitimately awesome, and with those screenshots in particular, you can really piece together the good game here in your head.

Well, it doesn't exist. Aside from some pretty exceptional aesthetics, which is pixel art used in a 3d space with some great, stark lighting effects - the game is an absolute trash fire, and worst of all, so frustrating that even the presentation starts to leave a sour taste.

The core problem is how slow the game is. In a roguelike, snappiness of actions and being able to do things fast is very important, because they inevitable drive replays and eventually tend to boil down to mechanical pleasure being the primary draw. Well, everything in this game is too slow. From the clunky, horrible menus, to the animations, which are mindboggling at times (the animation to move to another node on the map, like FTL, takes upwards of 7 seconds sometimes...), to even verifying actions like the position you go to on a battlefield take way too long, to the point where it feels uncomfortable and i repeatedly had to check i had missed something. No, the game is just that slow.

The UX is also absolutely horrible. When you conisder Pathway as a fusion of two genres that tend to need to convey information clearly to the player, turn based strategy and roguelike, it doing such a poor job is an unforgivable slight. The diagetic journal and stat sheets are cute, but also very hard to parse and very limited information is given about what everything does, and even navigating these menus is a pain because things like the button prompts are tiny and faded.

It's the sort of thing you'd learn in time, for sure, but makes the onboarding experience miserable despite some pretty heavy tutorialisation.

And the game below it all is just too uninteresting and bland to even bother wading through it. It's XCOM meets FTL and both halves are pretty mediocre. The strategy layer arguably suffers most from the laughable UX, with very basic things like turn ending, being able to tell what terrain is traversible, and it's implementation of cover being a pain to work out. The AI is also quite bad, as are the maps, and there's not really any hook that makes it more than just worse XCOM.

The FTL-node-whatever layer is just boring. There's a few interesting events but I got some repeats as early as run two, and the cool ones are laboured with being stupid long animations as well because this game has no respect for your time.

And that's the crux of it. Pathway is plodding, awkward, asks an unreasonable amount from the player and gives basically nothing in return except being very pretty. And when those stupid long animations keep playing and the aesthetic starts getting in the way of a good UX, even that starts feeling ugly.

The idea of this game is much better than actually playing it. I'd suggest maybe looking at some screenshots, thinking "neat idea". But putting that £1 into the eshop turned that prospect into quite possibly the worst roguelike i've played.

Discovering that Weird West is kinda jank is like learning that Snoop Dogg smokes weed. Like, no fucking way, the new, ambitious, semi-indie immersive sim/WRPG thing from the co-founder of Arkane is a bit rough? I'd almost be dissapointed if it wasn't.

Ambition is the real kicker here, and probably the game's greatest issue. Weird West is a reasonably short game but it's also vast, with dozens of locations, and it's also going for telling 5 character's stories, each of which with their own set pieces and locations and artwork. Barring a dev cycle that lasted until the heat death of the universe, something has to give, and it does.

There's just a real lack of stuff in Weird West. I appreciate that its a relatively short game, but even if you're rushing only the main quest, it's lack of breadth in nearly every department is stark. There's a real element of every area feeling like a procgen version of each other, with one template for town, dungeon, temple and fields put on different floor textures - with every story gets basically one location each that feels hand-made. Combat, whilst actually fairly fun and certaintly above most WRPGs, quickly becomes repetitive. Each character gets only 4 unique skills on top of about 20 shared ones, which only in the werewolf campaign feel very different - and otherwise behave mostly identical. Random events across the west get quite repetive to the end, and sidequests of any substance are extremely limited.

But again, if you're signed up for Weird West, if you know the context - you were probably expecting something along those lines. But the story and the worldbuilding will be good, there'll be some really cool shit to make up for it, the quest design will be great or something - right?

And there is, but there is a twist in the tale, and in my opinion it's what makes Weird West a game I think could be very divisive. Normally, good Western RPGs with a similar smorgasboard of problems actually make sure to do all they can to make sure you don't just miss the good stuff. Take New Vegas, a game that despite being ostensibly open world, funnels you in a general direction and makes most of it's really good questlines cross your path at some point or another.

Meanwhile, if you follow the path of least resistance in Weird West, do everything you're told to and keep an eye on that objective marker, you will have probably the most miserable time possible. You will experience the least interesting versions of the stories available, have the worst gameplay experience, because it'll all be pretty basic and the game wont really be responding to what you do.

To get the juice out of Weird West you need to squeeze it. Mess with the narratives, do weird shit like kill your husband for no reason, make vendettas, truly test how far you can push the narrative and choices until the game stops you. Usually, it'll go further than you think, and it's great. The game in general is extremely good at giving the player's actions long term consequences, both in major story decisions and in gameplay ones. Even in the next life, the actions of previous characters resonate through the west, leaving a world changed, be it in the ghost towns, or the peoples in it. This stuff is fantastic, especially as the events and people of the world itself is interesting - so getting to influence it in a noticeable manner that you get to interact with is satisfying.

Gameplay also benefits greatly from throwing a spanner into the works. Whilst the core systems are pretty basic - it's twin stick shooter with some stealth elements and skills basically - things like environmental effects, third party enemies/wildlife, friendly fire and such add up to make a system that quickly descends into chaos, which is where it thrives. Going into NPCs estate to negotiate for a thing, failing, deciding to steal it, getting caught and then quickly getting involved in a fireight that leads to a dozen dead, including the mayor and the rest of your posse, with you having gained a bounty and a vendetta - that's a good encounter. And when those posse members can be major NPCs, and these encounters can significantly change the world, it makes rolling with the chaos massively enjoyable and unpredictable. It helps that the flat out gunfights where everything is on fire is by far the best way to get fun out of the gameplay.

When the game's played like this - wild and chaotic - the world of weird west, story and gameplay and world, integrate so well. Far gone from those ten UE Marketplace assets placed over the map 90 times, it becomes a thick, cruel world, where death lies around every turn, stories come from nothing and the supernatural wraps around it all like a thorny rose.

The game ends well, to boot, with a satisfying conclusion that answers the right questions, even if the final Oneirist story is probably the weakest without it. And again, at about 12-15 hours, it knows when to end.

But you have to put your own effort in, and possibly stretch your sense of disbelief a bit, for it to work. And I think it is perfectly reasnable for the game's myriad problems to really not make that worth it for many. Hell, I myself am not really sure how to score or truly think about it, and i'm a veteran of enjoying kusoge through it's faults.

Ultimately it's miles better than anything Arkane have put out since dark messiah, and probably the best Western RPG since New Vegas - if you can put the legwork in to get the juice.