Nightmare Kart is entirely style over substance.

The various racers, karts, tracks, and weapons have a lot of variety and a fun PS1 aesthetic that does a lot to keep this game charming. I love Nicholas as a character who just runs instead of using a kart or the big pig you can ride. It tries to come up with creative ways to blend in parts of Bloodbourne in to a kart racer. You have a choice of melee weapons, and boss fights as a few examples. There is a well thought out game here with devs that I can tell poured passion into it.

When the rubber actually hits the road though, boy howdy, the AI is god awful. A racing game would assume competition but the frequency I found AI driving in to walls and not being able to get out for an entire race was almost every race. Which really sucks because it removed any sense of serious difficulty, urgency, and competition. Mix this with when you hit a wall or enemy you are coming to a dead stop so the flow of a race gets ruined quite quickly.

The game is free so I would encourage people to at least try it to see the neat visual designs, and you can get through the campaign in under an hour and a half. I hope this team takes another crack at this because if they could match the visual aesthetic and design with just good AI and some better collision physics, I would have rated this much higher because there are a lot of good ideas here.

I can only describe this dlc as going back to a meal I enjoyed a second time without the revelatory discovery of “hot damn that was really good” because I knew going in to this that it would be good.

Baseline, the systems of RE 4 hit in all of the same ways but with a grappling hook. Playing through Separate Ways helped me cement some thoughts around RE 4 Remake. The key one being that this game compared to RE2 I think is much easier to pick up without clenching my cheeks through the first act. Which that sounds stupid, but as much as I love the first act of RE2 and Mr.X, I feel like I have to prepare myself to play that game. RE4 you can just slide in zero stress and have a great time start to finish, and I think this DLC speaks to that.

My only gripes with this dlc is the grappling hook movement can feel very gimmicky. This is forgiven by how it plays in to melee combat (especially when you can rip shields away). Secondly, the Ada voice acting can feel very stilted at times. I think this is mainly a consequence of turning a side character to being a main protagonist.

Overall, for the price especially, go play this DLC if you enjoyed the base game.

Getting games that can make you chuckle or laugh for multiple hours without getting annoying I think is a feat that not a lot of games reach.

Frog Detective though, that Frog makes me giggle 🐸

I genuinely loved this trilogy of games, that balances some really good comedy and character dialog, with some good visual and physical gags. At its core you’re doing some fairly basic tasks to solve these three mysteries, but it is the conversations with each character that make everything flow.

Each case takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour and a half, so I’m not going to spoil any plot or joke stuff, because the joy of this game is in its writing and its silly visuals.

If you want to spend an afternoon or to top off the end of a night with a single case, I think playing frog detective 1,2, and 3 are well worth your time, and if you’re a real Frog Detective sicko, Case S.

Thank you for reading my review.
MysteryMonkey49

A game that wants you to go fast but possibly too fast as handling in this game does not keep up with the speed they’re asking of you. Which for a combat racing game is essential. Weapons are not great either as they make it fairly easy to hit yourself with your own weapons. This is due to the handling not being great which you need for aiming, and blast radius weapons that have friendly fire and explode on impact with anything.

This game does get 1 whole star for its soundtrack because it hits the whole damn time.

Unless you have nothing to do, feel free to skip this one and just put the soundtrack on in the background.

I don’t have much to say on this game mainly because I play Company of Heroes as a franchise purely for skirmishes against AI in my down time when I crave approachable strategy games. To which all I can say is that COH 3 feels remarkably like COH 1 with a fresh coat of paint. Which by that I mean the base game feels and plays extremely similar, but it’s just a nicer set of textures to look at, and a new set of archetypes to play as. To which after hating COH 2, turns out is all I wanted from this game.

I have to say that waiting almost 5 years after release was probably the best decision I possibly could have made.

Is this game fantastic and have minimal flaws? Absolutely not. This is a watered down version of fallout 4 at best with a neutered VATS system with no slow mo kills. In terms of general combat, it’s basically fallout 4 which was serviceable. It returns to the old dialogue system prior to 4, and has a crafting system I want to meaningfully interact with.

With that said, this is the first multiplayer game in years that has got me playing for 20+ hours (36 hours at time of writing) and even interacting with others. The game world is incredibly chill to play in. The relaxed nature has made exploring and discovery a fun and simple experience. The part of the gameplay loop that grabbed me is that I feel like I am cycling weapons quite often due to ammo scarcity. It changes up ever so slightly how I play which keeps the combat fresh.

One of the bigger pluses is being 36 hours in that I haven’t hit a single point where I have felt a need to spend money. Which for a live service game is quite nice.

It has also been the first game my significant other and I have put serious time in to playing together, which bridging the gap between our tastes has been hard, but this did it which makes the game slightly more special for me.

If you’re looking for an exceptionally chill experience, I would say to at the very least, try FO76. It’s a completely serviceable game after 5 years and I think offers one of the more interesting living/virtual worlds you can operate in. It’s always neat seeing how others build their little outposts and personalize them.

All in all, FO76 is a totally serviceable game 5 years later that while it doesn’t reach the heights of previous fallout games, I do think it provides a unique experience of the fallout world that we didn’t have prior.

I feel like the lead up to me playing this game was littered with people talking about how great it was and I genuinely think it ruined my experience due to setting the bar too high for what this game actually is.

It’s effectively a 20 minute experience heavily carried by art style, vibes, and a fairly simple gimmick that does not last past that 20 minutes. My issue is the gimmick doesn’t do much for me, and if anything doing simple probability calculations is pretty boring.

The vibe reminds me of a more limited version of Inscryption because you have an antagonistic dealer on the other side playing against you, and the items you use are laid out on a table as interact-able objects that are fully animated when used and don’t appear as just like an effect icon after use (ex. handcuff skips a turn because my character is cuffed to the table).

What sucks is I think if this game was fleshed out, it would actually be something I would enjoy more, but as it is it feels like a proof of concept more then a full game. Replayability is off the table for me because turns feel aggressively slow and I think that comes from that each shot has to have tension, but the problem with that is the pace of the game slows down a lot.

I will say, for the price and length of the game, I can’t really dissuade people from purchasing this game as I think most people will likely have a better experience than me.

Balatro makes me equally feel like a genius and also a moron who is unable to read cards correctly or make good discarding decisions.

Balatro is a pseudo poker roguelike. Really the only part of poker it borrows is the hands in which you make in that card game. Past that, the meat of the game is making poker hands that interact with “jokers”, which are cards that tend to add to your played hands value, multiply it., or change the how a card is understood (All cards are considered face cards is one example) The value of that hand is then determined by the base value of chips times your multiplier count. You have a certain number of hands that can be played and discards that can be done before needing to reach the blind (a specific total number of chips). The game’s depth comes from the fact that there is over 100 jokers, you can purchase additional modifiers outside of the jokers, and you can add or take away cards from your deck.

This all turns Balatro in an incredibly addictive, quick, and refreshing experience that is plenty of fun to comeback to each time. This is paired with a pleasing soundtrack and neat CRT monitor aesthetic. The artwork for the cards is also unique and makes unlocking new jokers interesting from a visual perspective.

My first successful run came after many failed runs of trying to nail builds built on flushes and straights. My successful run was a result of head empty play which was me just putting down a pair over and over and over until success due to nailing a really strong set of jokers.

As much as it felt anti-climactic, Balatro some how showed me that this game can be approached from a lot of different ways, with little understanding, and that sometimes just going with the flow will get you to victory as much as card counting your deck.

If you’re thinking about picking it up, absolutely do, it is worth the full price tag.

It feels weird to say that the worst thing you can do before playing Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (HL2 going forward) is play the first Hotline Miami. The original game is a tight 3-4 hour experience on your first go around that emphasizes fighting in tight space, intensity, quick reactions, and shoulder peeking exploitable AI to bait them to come towards you. It's the kind of game that causes you to clench up when the enemies start rushing you or you peek a corner, but when you complete a level or stage you get a moment to release that tension and it feels glorious. It tries to keep a fairly fresh experience and offers a lot of replayability with a large list of findable masks that change up how you play (some more then others). Lastly, the game soundtrack is outstanding. The devs did an excellent job picking songs that match well with the intensity of each level.

I preface my review for HL2 with this because HL2 starts this way and then quickly deviates. I bought this game when it originally came out and rage quit in the 4th act because I just could not deal with the amount of off screen deaths I was being nailed with. I only picked it up now after seeing the thumbnail for a youtube video called "Hotline Miami 2 is a Misunderstood Masterpiece" where in which I proceeded to fall out of my chair that someone would make this claim.

Having now played through the game I can say that the video title is still extremely hyperbolic, but that this game is a lot better then I ever gave it credit for.

It really tried to change up the approach and made a lot of improvements in keeping the gameplay feeling fresh and different for the full playthrough. This was all done without losing the tense action and feeling that you could die at any moment if you aren't on your toes. For example, the game traded out the extremely long list of masks for 3 - 4 masks on some levels, and sometimes just using different characters all together similar to the Biker character at the latter half of HL1. You have a journalist who won't use guns, but can disarm enemies, or a military soldier who always has a knife, but is stuck with one weapon with limited ammo. My favourite version of this is Ash and Alex where you're functionally playing one character with a melee chainsaw and a secondary character which follows with a gun. It becomes a bit of multitasking to get them to play nicely together but the payoff is fun. The game constantly changes things up so your approach doesn't stay incredibly stagnant. HL1 you could effectively pick a mask and just not change and your playstyle for the full playthrough.

Here's the thing, not all of these new additions were as balanced as you might hope. This game introduced large areas, open areas, and just bigger levels in general. HL2 you die easily and frequently so when you die from a off screen shotgun shot that there was no simple way for you to be aware of, it begins to grind on you quite easily. You have the ability to look further ahead of you which lets you see enemy movement clearly, but due to the size of the levels in HL2 you can look ahead, see nothing, walk 5 steps forward, and you just happen to enter an enemy vicinity that was just slightly outside of your original vision. You end up needing to constantly look ahead of you and around you with that ability to monitor enemy movement as well to avoid getting shot at a distance suddenly. As tense as HL1 is, you could get away with being careless at times and not be punished. HL2 if you get careless, this game will have no mercy. With that said, this is actually where the game clicked for me and where the game got a lot more enjoyable.

A small problem in HL1 that expanded to a larger problem in HL2 is that the AI for enemies is very simple and exploitable. Where I think there were fewer instances in HL1 where this was glaring, in this game it becomes part of the strategy which is something I don't personally like the fact of. Hordes of enemies will just run you down sometimes if you make a noise. It kind of ruins a level when you wipe out 8 dudes with a few knife swipes because they all rushed a door and now their spaces are just empty.

The story is a bit of a change of pace, as the first game was more of a critique of "Does it feel good to do violence" (Turns out yes, when you make it as fun as HL1). This game goes more in to looking at violence in the forms vigilante justice that is more about the fun of violence then justice, the violence of and personal cost of war, someone who wants to step away from violence, and some other story lines that I won't get into. It's honestly a difficult story to follow as everything feels like a drug trip at times.

Lastly, similar to the first game the soundtrack is still equally as good and matches the intensity just as much. I don't know enough about music to be critical, all I know is that it slaps and even when I dropped this game back in 2015, I still listened to the soundtrack, and still listen to it now.

Small/large bonus item in this game is that they included a level editor which I think is a wonderful addition, and I am looking really forward to going back and playing community levels.

All in all, if you are willing to deal with a bit of a learning curve to approaching this game the way it wants you to approach it, it can be a total blast that keeps that gameplay feeling fresh and intense the whole way through.

What a neat little game.

I came to Pony Island years after playing Mullen's other title Inscryption which I adored. I do wish I played Pony Island first ahead of Inscryption as it is similar in its storytelling style, but you can tell they have honed their craft once they arrived at Inscryption. Their ability to setup interesting player interaction and predict what a player might attempt and meet it with an interesting, cryptic, and weird answer is always a joy to play through.

With that said, Pony island is a mechanically simple game that can be primarily played with just the mouse with a fun interactive story that I don't want to spoil. The game creates a lot of unique and interesting sets of interactions between the player, the game, and developer.

Past that, this game is only two hours and on sale cost me $0.89 CAD, so yeah, spend the less then a dollar for a fun 2 hour experience that will suck the soul out of you :)

From my few runs of play, what I quickly realized is this game does a very poor job in displaying and communicating the information about your farm. Be it output of crops being relegated to a setting that is off by default, the multi-level menus you have to go down to find out basic information, to the visual explanation of the impacts of an items placement. Playing this game feels like a chore.

Also, I did not enjoy how it handles the use of cards. Functionally, you get rewards every couple of in game turns/days that give you a certain number of one card. Those cards you get are finite and once used are removed from the deck. The problem for me though was especially early on you run through cards so quick that there feels like there is absolutely no reason for this to be a deck builder because you have no deck let alone a full hand that has variety in it. When the core mechanic is poorly executed then that would explain why I had such a poor time.

The concept of placing structures, crops, animals, etc that interact with each other to reach a certain gold count by a deadline sounds like a simple but interesting concept you can do some fun things with. Doing this via a deck builder I think was either just a wrong call, or executed in a manor that doesn't work. I think a great example of this is Luck be a Landlord in how you can mix RNG with resource generation where each resource or tool interacts with each other in a unique way.