Lofi Girl Simulator, and I mean that in the best way possible.

This isn't really a "game", more of an interactive screensaver. Personally I haven't really bothered much with the progression like spirit unlocks yet. And that aside, I do think that its sort of a niche thing that will only work for some people. But personally I've had a great time with it and it has genuinely helped me focus or relax sometimes. It's really cute and I'm super excited to use it more while doing my silly little tasks, and I definitely recommend it to anyone else who wants something to work along with that's way more fun than just putting on a video or a music track.

Might be one of the best free updates I've ever seen to a game. It goes all-in on the perspective shift of playing as the Noise and it's honestly hilarious. Of course the Noise doesn't play by the game's rules - he's the Noise!

The moveset will absolutely feel jarring at first but gradually becomes as second nature as Peppino's. I do think it would have been cool to see at least one level designed for it, but it honestly mixes up things enough to make all the levels feel completely different already. It's much faster too, which is really neat!

Fun as hell, does the "rhythm action" thing brilliantly and is great as a roguelike with the variety of stuff you can find. You'll learn enemy patterns until they're ingrained in your mind, and there's always a strategy for each you can use. And the soundtrack, appropriately, is incredible.

The one downside is how it puts the ending to the story behind a character that demands you play perfectly with the worst weapon, starting with the hardest area. I don't mind challenge - this game as a whole is challenging after all - but there's such a ridiculously huge difficulty spike going from Melody to Aria that it just made me stop playing. Definitely spare yourself the frustration there and play all characters but Aria as they all offer better challenges/gimmicks.

Being honest - the online aspects of Palia feel completely forced, especially when the chat is almost entirely people calling out objectives like Flow Trees that require multiple people for…some reason. The game feels like a single player one-time-purchase game shoehorned into an online free-to-play format. You’re forced to play online, but removing the online element would change almost nothing. I honestly would prefer if this wasn’t a free to play game and could be played offline.

This is all really a shame, because I feel like there’s a lot of fun ideas here. The character customization is fun, the characters you meet seem interesting so far, and the village itself - while a bit too empty and a headache to navigate at times - is pretty cool. Palia has a lot of potential with how it develops sure, but when the main drawback is the format itself rather than the content it’s going to be hard for me to invest my time in it.

There are other issues I have with the way things are laid out (finding the one villager on the map you need to talk to is hard, the inventory takes too long to open) but I can at least hope it will be more refined in future updates. A heads up as well - the game struggles on the Switch. There’s no some stuttering, the graphics don’t look the best, and the fans do get a bit loud. Personally it didn’t bother me much though.

(Side note - this game is in an open beta, which I only found out after looking at the change log on its wiki. This wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the Switch eShop or in game as far as I saw. But with most early access/beta games, I’ll try to revisit this review once it gets fully released. )

(Also, making it so that pressing the button to open the map while the map is open brings up the freemium shop instead of closing the map is…something. I keep accidentally opening it.)

It's honestly really disappointing how I just enjoyed this game less and less as I got further into it. The game's mechanics are on point - the sense of speed is very much here, and it's easy to feel like a badass hooking and swinging around. But it gets insanely bogged down by the inconsistent level design. The first levels are wide open arrangements of platforms in the air that demand you think outside the box and head off a beaten path in order to get the best time possible - something that genuinely got me excited for the rest of the game, improving times through experimentation like that with such a useful moveset? Hell yeah.

Then, as the game goes on, levels shift towards being more closed in "boxes" that prioritize precision over speed. In a game that, with it's time-based scoring and rankings, tells you speed is important. This isn't "the levels get harder" - the difficulty spike is extremely noticable, and you go from replaying levels to improve your time to replaying levels because you have to hook yourself through a tunnel just big enough to fit through. It leaves you with zero drive to play them again to improve your time.

While this is the biggest issue for me because of how genuinely great the controls are, there are other things I'm not a fan of here. The aesthetics are great, but then you realize that all levels use the exact same background and block designs. It never gets switched up - aside from the DLC that is. There's also the story. I get it, this game isn't supposed to really have much of a story, it's "you go fast". But I would have rather it didn't have any at all instead of what it has. The story is another thing that gets worse as time goes on - you start with this command line intro and you get dropped into a cybernetic world and meet the tutorial character. Cool. In between levels there are some brief dialogue cutscenes that are neat. Then by the end of the game, the antagonist is...just kind of ignored. There wasn't even a credits roll. The story only truly concludes in the DLC, which even then the conclusion there feels off but that's its own review.

It's not all bad though. Aside from the positives I already mentioned, the music is amazing. And the visual style, while repetitive, is still pretty good. And when the game lets you feel like a badass, you sure as hell feel like one.

Anyway, in conclusion this game has an incredibly strong start but progressively takes a sharp dive downhill. It's got a great foundation, but the mileage varies a lot with how it's built on.

It can be funny to hit the griddy while Peter Griffin sings Bad Romance but when you have to pay $5 per song if you want to play ones outside of the daily rotation it's a bit ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that the charting feels pretty wacky and spammy with some insturments. To be clear I've never played Guitar Hero, but based on what I've seen of it the charting does feel like it'd work better on a guitar controller rather than an actual controller. When there's no way to officially link up a guitar controller and the main draw of this game like the rest of Fortnite is that it's completely free to enjoy, it kinda sucks.

Jam Stage is also just...baffling. They basically made Fuser but you walk around on a hub-area map that looks like it was made in Creative and each person can contribute their own track of audio. But...you still have to pay $5 per song? So what's even the point, besides grinding out playtime XP or the quests that expect you to play on the Jam Stage for 30 minutes daily? There's no way Epic doesn't know everyone will just load it up and then go AFK until they hit the daily XP limit from it.

But in all honestly, it isn't entirely bad, and despite its flaws I do appreciate the effort to try and make a sort of gateway rhythm game that tries to maintain the mass appeal Fortnite had but in a different format entirely. The song choices definitely are an example of that. If this gets more people into rhythm games, I won't complain - although I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them better ones myself.

Honestly surprisingly absorbing at least for the first few hours. The idea of building your own goofy Lego village is really fun. The combat isn’t anything special but isn’t bad either which is good enough. The fact that I could get really into it is generally a good sign for a game like this - it’s nice and slower paced most of the time while not necessarily feeling boring.

…but why is the BUILDING of all things the worst part of a Lego game?? It takes so long to build anything and whenever you break something it spills out debris that, while funny, destroys any furniture or props or workstations you’ve built on contact. There’s also not that many good storage options in the early game, and all items stack to 30 which starts to feel low pretty fast.

I do see myself coming back to this game a lot though. It definitely has such a high number of people playing it (between 1.5-2 MILLION consistently) for a reason.

This game is a blast, I love arcade racers and feel like it's hard to come across good ones nowadays especially good ones that are free to play. The flying/wall riding mechanics allow for some fun track designs and add a lot. Soundtrack is on point and is full of bangers.
Despite all that though, I can't shake the feeling that this would have been better fleshed out as its own game or at least that it isn't too fleshed out yet. It has a lot of potential, but it currently feels like a sort of early access - I guess time will tell. That only makes it suck more to see it with the least players of all the new gamemodes, though.

The only Minecraft mod that I’ve found myself always coming back to, with it being a part of pretty much every multiplayer mod pack I’ve played. Why? Well, I like engineering stuff with it, sure, but there’s something to be said about how elegant all of its implementation is. There’s few new crafting menus - you have to arrange a bunch of machines in your world to make something. The ponder system is downright genius, and immediately pushes this beyond so many other mods that force you to rely on a wiki, a book item you spawn with, or documentation. Not to mention that the mod is surprisingly balanced - usually you’ll have to put a lot in to making a machine if you want to get a lot out. Somehow, despite being very obviously a mod, Create feels like something pulled directly out of vanilla Minecraft to the point that I rarely play without it anymore.

Oh yeah, and trains. I’m a sucker for making rail systems in Minecraft and the trains in this mod are way too fun

Literally how is this free what the hell. This is easily one of the best rhythm games I have ever played. It leans into modcharting-esque level design while still feeling consistently readable. Every single level is "wacky judgement line and/or notes do unexpected thing" but you learn over time how to read these levels from playing more and more, and everything falls into place. Not to mention, the wackiness is appropriately scaled to the difficulty - while keeping most of the magic of the level's design intact.

This game is SO fun and you have zero excuse to not play it because its ONE HUNDRED PERCENT FREE. Go play it NOW if you like rhythm games.