Everyone has that one game. The one which they have started to play but shelved at some point. But it doesn’t end there, as you will continue to think about it. The only thing stopping you from continuing your journey is you making up excuses from picking it up again.
For me that game was Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, a game whose existence has fascinated me way before I ever got the chance to play it, just as it does now after finally completing it; my playthrough spanning around two years.

My fascination of Soul Reaver sprung of, from another fascination of mine. I was born in 2004 and thus barely missed the time Sega was a competitor in the console business. They might just have the most interesting history in videogames and that is what made me suddenly really want to own a Dreamcast in 2021. Browsing through some of the more well received games for the console, I came across a relatively little-known game with maybe 500 logged players on this very website and a respectable rating, you probably know where this is going.
Looking up “Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver” on YouTube, I found a ton of people singing its praises, especially when it comes to its story; it was then that I realized I needed to play this, and I eventually did.

Back in January I released a Blood Omen review (which I don’t recommend reading), in which I stated multiple reasons, of why I might’ve stopped playing Soul Reaver and while they may have been a contributor as to why, they weren’t the main reason. Truth is, I didn’t enjoy the game very much.
While I could derive enjoyment out of the technical prowess and it’s devotion to telling it’s grandiose story without having to read a single word of text, it was the gameplay that kept the game from actually clicking with me and reading some of the reviews at the time, this wasn’t just an issue I had with it.
The game just isn’t nice to people who are conditioned to all the modern QoL improvements the industry has been blessed with, combat being the biggest offender to me back then.

So during the last hours of last year, only a day after completing this games predecessor, I sat myself down with my phone on a “tripod”, which I had constructed using a selfie-stick, when I was 12 years old and wanted to become a YouTuber, recording my whole journey through this game (which I unfortunately can’t share as I also used it as a form of a video diary) and most importantly started from a new profile, as I thought I might’ve missed something with the combat-system back then and therefore wanted to experience that opening hour, which made me shelve the game, a little more than a year ago, again.
And I was right, the moment I started playing Soul Reaver again, I couldn’t stop doing so and do now really enjoy what they tried to do with its combat and its way of incentivizing the player to scour your surroundings.
Every encounter you have with an enemy at the beginning of the game will play out like its own little puzzle, as for any non-human enemy-type you will not only have to beat them up, as they cannot die, but when they are stunned, find an object to finish them off and devour their soul. Said object of interest may be a spear, that skewers them, but it can also be a light source, a spiky part of the walls surrounding you, a campfire, an accumulation of water and many more.
Your creativity is only aided the longer you play as you might find enemies immune to one of these methods together with others that aren’t and now plan your fight accordingly.
The moment I got the titular Soul Reaver, which is basically able to defeat any enemy, I was worried that this would be detrimental to the combat-system, but rather than relying on it further on it would only proof as a new option in Raziel’s kit, as it will only be available to use at full-health (in the Material-Realm) which isn’t always sustainable.

Talking of which, the game incorporates a system of switching between realms. Not only are both loaded at any given time, but the game will remember every location of everything you have/haven’t ever interacted with. I cannot start to think what kind of sorcery this would’ve needed to be pulled of in the 90s, or even today for that matter. And when I see every object, I really mean that. During backtracking, which is mostly optional, but you are really missing out on some amazing side-content if you chose not to engage with it, I found myself thinking “oh I remember putting that there.” or “oh yeah that enemy followed me here back then, didn’t it?”, more times than I can count.

Outside of combat your gameplay will be spend exploring the landscapes of Nosgoth, which have changed a lot since your last adventure. If I had to compare the changes to anything, it would be how Gotham City changes during the Dark Knight trilogy, with it basically functioning as its own character in Begins, and existing as a background to the narrative of The Dark Knight, the only difference being, that I didn’t see this as detrimental in this case.
Nosgoth is definitely more videogamey here in the sense that the game starts you of with a platforming tutorial at a place that only exists, because you need to learn how to platform at some point, but these extreme cases are few and far between, as the game also has its high points of its world-design at pretty much all the major locations.
For example, the entrance to the Human Citadel is flooded to keep out vampires and only houses one of Rahab’s’ tribe, which evolved to swim over time. But if you change to the Spectral Realm, it will be the home of many more Sluagh than regular, which feast on all the lost souls.
The Human Citadel is a masterclass in level-design for a 3D-Zelda like game in general. I got there shortly after defeating Melchiah, at the beginning of the game and spend almost an hour just exploring and thinking I had seen most if not everything it has to offer. I then went on going back there after each new acquired ability and not only realized that my previous assessment was totally wrong, but that I had yet to explore the majority of its content. I have rarely seen a, dare I mention totally optional, location that opens up so much after each new chapter of a game.

This serves as a microcosm of Lok’s design, which is built around the fact that you may save at any time. But as I already mentioned, saving will not bring you back to your previous location, no it will bring you back to the beginning of the game, where you can select between fast-travel points; but rather save the location of every object, which serve as shortcuts.

This is demonstrated best with this game’s dungeons, which are in my opinion far better designed than any 3D Zelda dungeon, I have experienced.
Now they also aren’t close to being perfect. The Silenced Cathedral has an intentional softlock, if you enter the Spectral Realm in the wrong room, but said softlock, funnily enough, also signifies the biggest strengths of Soul Reaver’s non-linear dungeons, as even if you get trapped in a room, you can always save your progress and therefore barely lose any progress.
Was it still demoralizing? Yes, of course, you can observe a big gap in my playtime after it happened, after it happened to me, but the second I started to play again, I realized that what had taken me half an hour to get to last time, only takes around five now, as you can see (epilepsy warning) here, because every puzzle was already solved and serving as a short-cut, I never really lost my progress.

I won’t argue that softlocks are good game design of course, just saying that they would be more detrimental when they occur in any other game, because of how good this one is designed to accommodate that issue.

The dungeon design in general is more akin to a Metroid-Vania, as you will go through it without any new abilities, and see many points of interest, which you will then later check out after acquiring said ability after defeating the boss, which also uses it against you.
I won’t spoil any of the secrets, but the way your view of the Drowned Abbey changes, just by you being able to traverse the waters in the Material Realm could be a whole paragraph on its own.

Now the game (still) isn’t perfect, and I still have my own gripes with it, withholding me from replaying it anytime soon.
For one, this isn’t a game I can just sit down and enjoy, as you really must lock-in and search any nook and cranny for maximum enjoyment, something helped by the fact I recorded my playthrough and could easily rewatch any points of interest. If I didn’t have that, I would’ve probably had to look up a guide at some points, due to the lack of an in-game map.
Combat also can still be a bit tedious and it’s often just better to right-out ignore any enemies. The glyphs were more fun to hunt down, than use. The boss fights, while cleverly designed to be puzzle boxes where you must find your enemies weakness, and use your surroundings, to defeat them rather than hand-to-hand combat, still mostly don’t put up much of a fight.
The drawing-distance and camera are hurt by the hardware and unfortunately the fact that the world is constantly loaded twice, which probably is no issue when playing the fan-made HD-remaster, which was good enough to get the people responsible for it noticed by Crystal Dynamics and got them to work on the recent Tomb Raider remasters.

And that is not even touching on this games story, which is expectingly great coming off such a great basis, being Blood Omen.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is not just a cornerstone of the medium as a whole and one of the most technically impressive games ever made, it is also one of the best games I have ever played and made me even more happy with my recent acquisition of a PlayStation 2, including every sequel of this game.

Soul Reaver will now, and the foreseeable future, be that game; that one game I always continue to think about and will always remember.

Mars After Midnight is a game I have been anticipating to play for around two years now, more specifically after completing another Lucas Pope- and now one of my favorite games ever made Return of the Obra Dinn. While not the only reason, the announcement of Mars After Midnight as a Playdate exclusive of all things, was a big contributor to me buying the console and I don’t think I’m alone with that, as their tweets about the game are noticeably more popular and comments about it riddle the sections of tweets that don’t even mention it.
After the announcement of the release date, around two weeks ago, even after playing through this game, it still doesn’t feel real to finally own it after this long time, so I probably don’t have to describe how high my expectations for this game were.

Did it meet said expectations?
Yes!
Did it exceed them?
No, but that should never be a standard to hold anything on now, should it?

Mars After Midnight is another entry in Lucas Pope’s paperwork series and is (to my knowledge) the first one based around a job that has yet to exist.
You will see yourself as the owner of a Martian-help-center and work at the reception while finding out which Martian, Robot or even Human needs help. The ways of going about this are relatively simple. Some you can deduce, for some you need to use a device and for others both, just know that there are always 6 Martians that need any given kind of help.
After letting someone in, they may eat some refreshments and may leave a mess, which you may have to clean up for the next customer to dabble in said refreshments. After the session is done you get two Mars-Dollars for every right customer. These Mars-Dollars can then be used to advertise, buy food etc. for the next Martians. They can also be spend on items or new treatments, sold by a merchant that shows up every day.

Planning out your next day is always fun, with you looking at the map of your colony, with the living quarters of the six Martians you want to attend being highlighted and picking out where to advertise and which food is most popular at any given place, every day. The only issue I had with this is that it disincentivizes experimenting with new foods, as the cleaning-up process, the only one with a timer, will be different with every item of food. Furthermore the first item of food doesn’t only cover a lot of area, but becomes the easiest to clean up with your dependency on it in the early game.

I’m conflicted on the amount of Martians you have to get right, as 6 is pretty much the perfect amount, if you fail, as you will have more than enough time to deduce what you did wrong, but it does get a bit repetitive if you instantly know what to do and now have to go through a random amount of visitors to pick out the six obvious candidates. This small issue gets heightened by the fact that this game is really easy, and I only had to redo two jobs, because I forgot what reading was; so the fact that six is the perfect amount in those cases didn’t really come up. Even if you fail the punishments are relatively insignificant as you get paid more than enough, for those 2 Mars-Dollars not to matter, if you only miss a few.

As I already mentioned, there aren’t that many ways of finding out which Martian needs a given treatment, but don’t worry, there is enough variation in these ways of deduction for this to never get repetitive, over it’s relatively short runtime of ~3 hours. The gadgets especially, even with them being simple in concept, were fun to mess around with, just to see the reactions of the Martians you try them on, which is even incentivized by the reactions acting as a collectible, with new phrases being registered in the blab-o-dex, a sort of encyclopedia of the Martian language.

Now I’ve tried to stay spoiler-free up until now, but there is one small gripe I had with the game which I cannot talk about without spoiling something that happens at around 2/3rds through the game, so I will write my conclusion here while everything after may be a spoiler.
Mars After Midnight is probably not worth you buying a Playdate, solely to play it, for, even with it being a quality, although simple game. If you are on the fence of buying one anyways, with this game just being a big contributor to why, then there probably is no better time than now, as they have now ended the preorder structure, with me waiting for around a year for mine to arrive in September and there currently being a sale on their online storefront going on; some of my recommendations of other games on Playdate to keep an eye on are Resonant Tale and Sparrow Solitaire

The spoiler(-y) section will begin here.

As I already mentioned something happens in Mars After Midnight at around the 2-hour mark, being that you will leave your colony and go to the people’s colony, which primarily serves as a way for there to be more visual variety. My problem with this comes from the brevity of time you spend there, as the previous colony had 78 Martians to provide help for, while this one has only 24, which also means it is way smaller, which then means even less variety in the food items to use and such. I also found the ways to deduce way easier in this section than some of the more difficult ones of the first colony.

I’m still very conflicted on how I feel about Yo-Kai Watch 2. It’s the only one in the series that I would call derivative of one of its predecessors.
And while I can see it being an overall improvement over the first Yo-Kai Watch game, I did still not enjoy it as much; as I believe most of its improvements can be summarized by saying that there is a lot of stuff in this game; you will basically not be able to do everything there is in this game.

The version I played “Psychic Specters” is the definitive Version of Yo-Kai Watch 2, combining the contents of both Bony Spirits and Fleshy Souls, but unlike the Pokémon equivalents, which may mix and match aspects or even add some, this game gives you the choice of which versions content you want to engage with at certain points in the story, which is as interesting as it is flawed, because if you want to truly experience everything there is in this game you now have to either write down every choice you take, to do the opposite on your second playthrough, or basically just play through the base versions one after another on this fancier cartridge.

When it comes to your gameplay loop, this is basically a rehash of the first one. You might expect QoL changes, but I believe it to actually the other way around, as Mirapo, these games fast-travelling system, and the bike will be locked away from you for way longer, the latter you for some reason only unlock at around 85% through the main game. So most of your (early) game will be spend learning the ins and outs of the Yo-Kai Watch train-network, which takes you station by station (makes sense), it will ask you whether or not you want to exit every station, during the rides you will either be encountering people/Yo-Kai that basically tell you nothing, give you an item or battle you.
Another Mirapo related issue is when you travel to the past, you won’t be able to use them at all, with one exception (which doesn’t count), meaning you will have to walk everywhere, in these maze-like past versions of the city, which at least has some of the greatest music of the already great OST.

Speaking of which, the soundtrack while brief is as good as in any other Yo-Kai game. The only problem with it being that most of it is taken straight from its prequel, with most new tracks being restricted to the past areas. The most egregious example of old music being used is during one moment where the villains of the chapter show up and the Final Boss theme of the first game just starts playing for some reason.

One change I was really waiting to see is how they fixed how you befriend Yo-Kai, as it is my biggest gripe with the first game and it was (somewhat) fixed in the third one and color me shocked when I found out it’s the worst it has ever been. Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s roughly the same as the first in theory, but this game forces you to befriend Yo-Kai way more than that game. There is one point where you enter a cave, where you must use your Yo-Kai to change the water levels to progress. When I got there my playtime was at around 8 hours, the water can be at three different levels, and you need one specific Yo-Kai per level. Luckily you can encounter them in that cave, but remember if you beat them, it will take a seemingly random amount of time for them to respawn, and they might just not do so at all. So, you better pray that the RNG for them befriending you is in your favor, as the item that guarantees befriending does not exist yet, and guess what happened to me.
One of them, this guy right here, just hates me for some reason, and I spend a bit more than two hours in that cave just hoping that they would befriend me. Well at least you can get the Yo-Kai at the same place where you need them.
A bit later in the game you will hunt down some documents the protagonists dad lost on his way to work, which first forces you to ride the train multiple times, after doing that Whisper tells you to get a Yo-Kai called Flushback which will be able to go through the memories of you father and find out where he left the documents. Now guess three times where you might find such a Yo-Kai. The cave of course and if you didn’t get them last time, have fun walking from one side of the map to the other, if you didn’t activate the Mirapo and do all that encountering in the cave once again, just for that to not give you a clear answer as to where he left the documents.

Now to the thing I was the most disappointed with. The combat system is the same from the first game with two small changes. 1: When charging your soultimate attack, there is one new method of doing so and 2: if you click the center of the Yo-Kai Watch you have two new options, being a stronger soultimate (I think) and the option to spam-click the opponent and either deal damage, steal their soul-charge, or giving you a higher chance to befriend them, which does not solve my previous complaint as you have to first inspirit the enemy, it being random as to which effect it will have on them and it still not guaranteeing it.
Back in 2022 I wrote a review for Yo-Kai Watch 3, in which I called this combat system of Yo-Kai Watch 1 more of an annoyance than fun to mess around with, which is a sentiment I still mostly agree with, and guess what, these two minor changes don’t change much. This is magnified by the fact that I didn’t even like the boss fights in this one as much as I did in the others. There are some winners, but most of them are just bland and don’t require much strategy.
Let’s go back to the tidal cave (with the most minor spoiler warning I can give out), which I’ve spend so much time complaining about. At the end of your first excursion through it you will encounter some pirate-Yo-Kai-boss-guy (I think he is from the early-game of 1), whose name I can’t remember. The only thing I did was using all of my front three Yo-Kai’s soultimate-attack and he was basically already defeated, and this happens here more often than I hoped it would.
I will now talk a bit about the final boss, without spoiling who or what their attacks are, but if you feel unsafe you may skip to the next paragraph. I was really looking forward to seeing if they fixed the difficulty curve of the first one, where it is easy for all of the game, only for the final boss to suddenly become impossible to beat at your current level, which you thought to be over leveled, but in a funny twist of events that didn’t happen at all. This game is so derivative of its predecessor that it even copied the two-hour grind for the final boss.

My last point is on the writing of this game. Now don’t get me wrong these games are not known for their groundbreaking storytelling, with the story basically only existing to give you a reason for why you are now suddenly in an all-out Yo-Kai war, with some funny quips thrown in to lighten the mood, but I found this one in particular to be lacking in the latter. The main villains of these games usually don’t have a presence before the game is already basically over and while they are handled better here than in the first one, this is still mostly the case. My problem however isn’t that they did that again, that was expected, but much rather how they handled the new tribe of Yo-Kai, the Wicked-Tribe), which you can see on the box-art. They also only show up during the end of the game and do nothing, outside of being mini bosses that you can dispatch with two attacks, showcasing maybe the biggest wasted potential in this series. At least they give out around 700 experience points.

Now I spend most of this review being critical of the game but remember that is still an overall improvement over the first game, which is also flawed, but a good game in its own right. I’m just disappointed that it didn’t change more. This is also the end of my journey across the Yo-Kai Watch series, at least until this materializes into something, which started all the way back in 2021, or maybe even 2015 if you count my time with the demo-version of the first one and I don’t want to end it on such a downer, as this is such a great series and definitely worth experiencing, especially the third one, which I was so lucky to buy before the 3DS eshop closed down and has since become one of my favorite games of all time. My final ranking is 3 > 4 > 1 > 2.

I have been putting of actually releasing a review for a while now; for many reasons, but I will now do my best to force myself into actually releasing this one; in that way me actually releasing a review I wrote for once, is kind of similar to my experience with the Legacy of Kain franchise, which I’ve tried to get into for a while now.
I’ve had begun playing Soul Reaver, the second instalment in the series, for about an hour in 2022, but had set it off until now, because I had just completed Link’s Awakening and usually need some time between two Zelda(-like) games, to deflate for a bit, and because I knew, I wanted to experience the entire series (or at least the ones I still can cough, cough Huge thanks to @Detectivefail for helping me fix this hyperlink), I wanted to start with the first entry in the series, and that brings me here Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain.

If you have ever heard about this series, but never experienced it by yourself, you have probably been exposed to tons of praise for their story, which is mostly deserved, being one of the earlier examples of an action game that cares about these aspects, while reportedly bringing on great voice talent to deliver it (I wouldn’t know, I played the German version).
But the game unfortunately fumbles when it comes to actually playing it.

One of the first things you will notice about Blood Omen is that it is surprisingly somewhat open world. There are still obstacles in the way, as to limit your progress to closed of areas, but the order in which and whether you even complete certain dungeons is let completely up to you, go ahead and call it a Metroid-Vania if you will.
Your gameplay loop will look something like this:
”Find a vista-marker/Ariel telling you where the next big dungeon is, which you can at that point either fast-travel to directly, or preferably walk to; finding smaller dungeons, Blood Fountains, villages and miscellaneous pick-ups along the way; beating said big dungeon and defeating the ‘boss’ (I will talk about these a bit later); and then maybe backtrack.”
I don’t have a problem with this loop in theory, as it is constantly engaging and doesn’t get repetitive, but this basis will start to show its cracks if you look at it a bit closer.

First of combat, which is probably the aspect of Blood Omen that you will spend the most time with.
At first glance this games combat system might seem surprisingly fleshed out, with you being able to select between multiple armor sets, weapons, spells, items and transformations, which Kain will gradually be unlocking on his adventure through Nosgoth, but you will be discovering fairly quick that just using the Repel Shield and your strongest weapon (regular-/flame- sword) is just the most effective strategy.
If you don’t remember to renew your shield and take damage for some reason don’t worry, because Kain is not only almost as spongy as some of the regular enemies in the late game, but you will most likely have acquired enough Hearts of Darkness (this games instant revives), to never actually be in any amount of danger.
The only way I actually lost health later was by walking through water or waiting for my magic gauge to fill up again after using spells or such; you will do this a lot and it takes multiple minutes for most of the game, as the magic- and health- bar kind of work as opposites of each other.
Not only do you need one to keep yourself alive, while you use the other one to take them, but your health bar will slowly drain with time, while your magic gauge will refill, which could’ve been a really cool concept if it didn’t force you to use spells (which drain magic) and transformations (which also drain magic), for puzzles and straight up locking you progress if you don't refill it so often; which to be fair is somewhat remedied by the regular magic-pick-ups towards the end of the game and this system being easily cheesed as you can just either use one of your hearts of darkness, refilling Kain’s health or switch to the axes and the Flesh Armor, which automatically fills up your health every time you defeat a living enemy.

This games swordplay in general was just not very enjoyable to me. The game sometimes fails to signify if you are currently even damaging an enemy, which gets worse with boss fights and later way too spongy types of enemies. There is one boss fight, in which you first must defeat a guy that destroys the ground beneath you, but just ignores you otherwise, even if you hit him.
Kain will sometimes just not feel like attacking and instead yell out “Vae Victis!” and pose when you press the button to attack; this will also be a common occurrence and happen at the exact moments you don’t want it to happen during your playthrough.

You can skip this next paragraph if you want to, as it solely hinges on me talking about a weird link to another completely different game, I had made while playing, which is probably only interesting to me.
There is a point relatively early into the game where you acquire a lightning spell, which you can either use as a projectile attack or activating switches across gaps, which was the exact point where I drew a weird similarity between
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and another game I have played through and reviewed almost two years ago now, which is strangely similar in terms of puzzles, combat and the sort , being Lego Knights Kingdom. The connection is made even weirder by the fact that one of that games lead designers Alastair Cornish apparently had some kind of role within Eidos, which published the Legacy of Kain series and being credited in the game Nosgoth, the controversial last entry in the series. Just thought this was interesting enough for me, to keep in the review.

Now the game doesn’t only rely on its swordplay for combat, as already mentioned. There are some more or less useful spells, the Repel Shield probably getting the most use during yours and definitely during my playtime. Unfortunately, most other spells are severely outclassed by the items, whose power should be regulated by them being single use, but they are just so abundant that you will never be in a shortage of them.
You can only chose one spell, item or transformation to be used at a time, if you want to change them, you can either put up to four of each in a quick-menu, which were actually really tedious to access for me, because I for some reason decided to play this on the PS Vita and am now probably the only person to ever do so, as accessing said menus (or the map) requires you to hit the touch buttons on the back, which I didn’t even know existed and are situated exactly where you want to rest your hands.
Putting spells in and out of your quick menu will also be greeted with a loading screen, so I never really used any spells outside of the ones I needed for puzzles or again, the repel shield. It goes without saying that the same issue also applies to the items.

Moving around the world also is awfully clunky and slow. The devs knew this and tried to remedy this problem by introducing the Wolf-Transformation, which is faster, but weaker in combat and even clunkier to control, but it sometimes allows you to leap over small gaps; it sometimes also might just decide to not do this, but it also has the drawback of using up your magic, which is one better used in combat and two means that if you magic gauge is depleted, you won’t be able to use this transformation even if you need to, so you will just have to wait again.
There is also the Mist-Transformation, whose only use cases are walking over conveniently placed patches of water or moving through hard to see cracks in the wall, while using up your magic while being even less useful than the wolf and leaving you open to enemy attacks, while giving you no way to counterattack.
The Bat-Transformation is the only one that doesn’t use up your magic and thus is the best one. It lets you fast-travel across the world to various Bat-Beacons scattered around Nosgoth.
The final transformations name is offensive and will for that reason not be mentioned by name here. I also didn’t ever feel the need to use it. If I had to say something interesting about it, then I would like to mention it being the only one you can upgrade (as far as I know) and is notable for breaking my game when I used it in the upgraded state, luckily not enough to where I couldn’t finish it as this takes place during the last hour of playtime.

Still on the topic of moving around the world, this game visually doesn’t hold up to a point where it made it hard to differentiate between things you can or can not interact with. For example, you will usually not be able to move behind a roof, but there was at least one where you could do it and collect optional items. This isn’t the end of the world but did impair my experience with the game.
~1/3rd of the screen will be used up by really nice looking, but distracting UI.
I did enjoy the janky, early 3D cutscenes though.

I won’t really talk about the contents of the story in this review as the only things you need to know are, it isn’t really that present for most of the game, but when it is, it is a nice break of pace and fairly good, while not reaching the heights it will in later entries. It is the one thing I would recommend you play this game for, outside of historical relevance.

I will be honest. I didn’t really enjoy Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain as you might’ve noticed, but that doesn’t detract from its significance to the development of this medium. Completing it also made me pick up Soul Reaver again, which I have mostly really enjoyed so far.
If anything, I won’t ever forget my time with this first entry in the Legacy of Kain franchise.

For most of my Star Fox Adventures playthrough I didn’t feel like reviewing it. I definitively look upon it more fondly than most, but even then, I didn’t think I would have much to add to the discourse.

The starting hours of Star Fox Adventures were a blast, with very few hick-ups. I really enjoyed the gameplay-loop of finding a Gatekeeper making it able for me to get to a dungeon, finding a SpellStone which makes me able to find a Krazoa Spirit and then finding a SpellStone and so on.
Gameplaywise Star Fox Adventures brought with it an eerie feeling of familiarity.

Now I’ve never been interested in the mainline games, as I’m not big into on-rail- or any kind of shooter, so this feeling took me a while to understand, but after thinking about it for a while Star Fox Adventures really felt like a proto-Kameo, which makes more and more sense the longer I think about it.

You visit pretty much the same settings in both games, the combat system can feel similar at points (though not as fleshed out here) and these are only a few of the similarities between both games, which makes sense as it’s mostly the same people working on them.

Now unfortunately this game really takes a dive in the final stretch and starts decreasing in quality around the half-way point, which is around when you have seen all Dinosaur Planet has to offer and must start backtracking. They probably had to rush the game out, considering it came out a day before Microsoft announced its acquisition of Rare and it shows.

You will have to revisit old dungeons, which repeat their previous puzzles, but a little harder, one of the Gatekeepers is just a random guy and it all accumulates (slight naming spoiler for this 21-year-old game) Dragon Rock.

Dragon Rock is the worst thing any game has ever made me suffer through and this isn’t meant as some kind of metaphor, no! It is the worst part of any game I’ve ever had the displeasure of going through and me beating it should only show you how much I liked the rest of the game before it. I should probably say that at least some of my criticism of this part of the game is partly made worse by my controller being a bit overresponsive and having a few blind spots, both of which only becoming a problem when I had to do more precise movements.
Dragon Rock doesn’t start of all to bad. You had to shoot at some turrets using the Fire Blaster, which might be the wort controlling thing conceivable, but it isn’t too bad.
After a bit you get told to save a HIghTop and this is where it all falls apart and I started to embark on a journey. This funny little guy is trapped by four fire-blaster-targets, two in the back, two more to the front, symmetrical to the HighTop in the middle. It is your task to shoot all of these 4 points within around 10 seconds. When I got to this part of the game my in-game timer showed ~15 hours.
This task doesn’t sound too bad after all, but let’s talk a bit more about the Fire Blaster.
First of the Y-Axis is inverted, which at least for me didn’t mesh well with quick thinking, the controls are already overresponsive, which only got worse with my controller, the targets are far away enough to make it really hard to exactly line up your shots and if you miss the HighTop will start stomping and shake the screen, making you miss more and making him stomp more. He is also a big moving hitbox, sometimes blocking the targets.
Now the worst aspects of the Fire Blaster. When you stop moving the cursor it will snap back to the middle of the screen and when you want to turn forget it. Fox will accelerate in a way I don’t yet fully understand and then snaps back to some position like 3 screens away. The only way to kind of understand where your camera ends up is to look at the map, which has its own problems.

I tried for around 1 hour, when I got there on April 30th, to do it the intended way, but had to give up and started to investigate if I were the only person with troubles here and unsurprisingly, I wasn’t. Look at any comment-section of this part of the game and you will find complaints.
Not too long after I found positions on both the right and the left, where I can hit two targets by only looking further up. The one on the left is more finnicky as the target on the back-left is more towards the middle than its right counterpart.
I tried it using this knowledge for 2 more hours and went to bed after, thinking about giving up, or spending a lot of money to buy a more or less new first party controller, which was when I had an idea.
Why didn’t I try creating consistent set ups using visual cues to hit the targets, so I would only have to turn to said point, aim up and shoot.
On the next day I found out, that the soot-detailing could be used for such a set-up and the ledge get-up can be used to always shoot from the same position.
Using my amateur picture-editing skills I created my first consistent set up tutorial. After printing it out I noticed that I forgot one crucial point, the turning. As I said I was kind of able to look at the map, but this wasn’t by any means optimal. This set-up was also way to slow. This whole process took me another 3 hours.
Then I had another idea, the position on the right. I had written it off, as I couldn’t make it possible to always stand on the same position, but then I had another idea after looking at my stack of transparent paper. I think you know where this is going.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever able to draw out a 1:1 copy of the map, and I now could only use it to know where I had to shoot to hit the other two targets, but it was better than nothing. I tried this method for around 2 and a half hours, it was still to slow and hell to set up after using all your energy and having to run out of the building to replenish.

After 5 and a half hours of trying and failing miserably at what should be an easy task I reconsidered quitting and thought to myself that I might as well go for the whole 6 hour mark. My next strategy was to do it the intended way, but to shoot from the position I tried before, rather than the middle and to my own surprise I got it, not very confidently, but still. I think I just missed the 6-hour mark. But it wasn’t over yet, because what followed was a 3-minute long auto-scroller, which if you fail it you must free the HighTop again.
I luckily did it first try and saved a dozen times.

Dragon Rock doesn’t get much better after. Luckily I found out, through watching the speedrun of the game, to see if you could skip the part somehow, that you can skip a lot of the next by lining up Fox with a line on the wall, looking a bit to the left and throwing the barrel through the wall.
What follows is another (uncapped) auto-scroller and what many say is the actual hardest part of the game, even without a non-assuming third party Wave-Bird-Controller making you struggle even more.
This time I bit the bullet and got myself a controller with turbo-functionality as my fingers started to hurt after not too long.

This is Dragon Rock. I only completed it to finish a game I had thoroughly enjoyed before it and was it worth it? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. The only thing you might be missing is the best Krazoa-Spirit task after the most lackluster Krazoa-shrine.
I should also mention that my game crashed at the final boss, setting me back half an hour, as the game apparently ceased to auto-safe after big, ingame events.

A lot of people have already talked a lot about the let’s say “interesting” final confrontation with General Scales. I personally think it would’ve helped a lot as now the last two boss fights are on-rail shooters which is a really undercooked mechanic, which is only there to remind you that you are playing STARFOX Adventures.

At the end of the day, I still enjoyed most of Star Fox Adventures, but I will never replay it completely. The TV my Gamecube is hooked up on will now forever tell the tale of Dragon Rock with its glue residue.
Play it on an emulator with some kind of Fire Blaster fix, if that exists.

I have never really cared much about Bayonetta as a franchise, because the mainline never really seemed like they would be something I would like. Thus before playing Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon I've had only been exposed to the franchise through Smash Bros., trailers and whatever that situation with Hellena Taylor was about last year.
But when this game got announced at the end of last year and I saw the trailers, the art style and the very interesting looking gameplay, it instantly clicked with me.

Now it took me a bit to get around to start playing it, as I am have been participating in a Pokemon Draft League since January, but when I did 4 days ago (on my birthday) I got sucked in and the game not only met my-, but exceeded my expectations.

As I kind of alluded to before, the gameplay of Bayonetta Origins is very unique. If I had to compare it to anything (and take this comparison with a salt mine) this felt a bit like an isometric platformer/collectathon, as in Skylanders or Lego games, mixed with Kameo and a few sprinkles of Metroid Fusion (in terms of map-design) mixed in and then only the best parts of these games.
This is an extremely scuffed comparison, but it's the best I have got, as it is really original.
Originality for the sake of originality and nothing else is a pitfall for a lot of games or pieces of media in general and make them anything but fun to experience, but believe me when I say that Bayonetta Origins clears that.

I rarely ever go out of my way to 100% a game, even the ones I really like, with a few exceptions, but I had so much fun playing this game that I travelled through Avalon Forest for an extra 10 hours (estimation as the Nintendo Switch for some reason doesn't tell you exactly how long you've played something and doesn't at all until 14 days after starting it the first time.), just to see and experience everything it had to offer.
Now I should mention, that for you have to control 2 characters at the same time for most of the game, but the controls are easy enough that I had them down in under an hour (it probably didn't hurt that I have played this 1p2c), they are also mapped, so both characters can be played using one Joy-Con each.

I can't understate how much fun I had playing this and the ingenious overworld design definitely helped.
During my "item-clean-up" were multiple moments where I unlocked a short-cut, that made me go "wait you can go from here to there?" and this wasn't a one time occurrence.
When talking about the overworld-design I have to mention the map which at best is confusing. It's this games biggest flaw and did sour my experience a bit during said "clean-up" (shout out to Wrapper the wisp), but I think I can say that I kind of understand how it works now and it didn't occur to me as a problem during most of it and definitely not during the (for the lack of a better term) normal playtime of me going through the story.
I would also like to mention that when saying that I have 100%ed this game, I mean that I did everything in the main game and not the new game+.

Outside of the stellar gameplay loop this game also looks incredible. If you don't have an image of it already take a look at this trailer, which still doesn't do the game justice through all its compressed glory and the ost is also really whimsical and beautiful.

The story suffices. I had predicted a lot of story beats, but their execution was good enough for me to not care. I wasn't really the biggest fan of the voice work, but it isn't worse than botw's is and I also didn't care all to much in that game, but be warned if that is something you care about.
The story, such as the game is obviously more tailored towards children than the mainline games (which isn't a bad thing, for the record) and that also shows in its difficulty.

This game for the most part is easy. There is a supposedly harder new game+ though. The only times I died was during one-hit "Tír Na Nóg" trials, but there was one significant difficulty spike during one boss fight.
I have read another review, in which the author said they had problems with the final boss, which might be because they didn't collect the Vitality Petals and/or upgraded their inventory, which probably made the fight easier for me.

I really hope that Platinum will make more games like Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon. There aren't many people talking about it and I could also get the game on Amazon for 40€, which doesn't paint a good picture when it comes to sales figures and that is really unfortunate.
As someone who's first real exposure to this franchise was this game and already loved playing it as a standalone, I really implore you to give this one a chance if you are on the verge of buying it.
Get it! It's good.

Krabat: The Secret of the Sorbian King might just be the most obscure game I have ever played and remember that I have played this, this and (of course) this.
But when I say this game is obscure I don't only mean that it isn't popular, but also its content.
This is the first Sorbian game, it is entirely voice acted in said language tells a story about/is based around Krabat, an old Sorbian tale, which I was vaguely familiar with (more so with Otfried Preußlers adaptation)).

This is a point & click game inspired by the likes of Monkey Island and other classic point & clicks, but before I get into talking the gameplay I would like to mention the overall presentation of the game, which really hit a soft spot of mine.

Visually this really looks like german early to mid 2000s like Little Amadeus, which I personally grew up with and the soundtrack is surprisingly good. I have uploaded a short clip to YouTube to show this, because it is really hard to find anything about this game.

So as I said this is a point & click puzzle game and this could be considered my first foray into said genre and from what I have learned this genre doesn't mesh well with obscurity. There were multiple puzzles which I found to be too hard to complete, but not in the way of me missing something obvious in hindsight, but rather something being obscured by something in front of it, or including an unintuitive to retrieve item.

I know I didn't do the best job describing these scenarios, but I'm going to give a few examples to make my problem more understandable.

Now these might be a bit spoiler-ish (which I will also mention when I get there), so if that is a problem you can skip to the next paragraph, but I'm not the only one who had problems with these parts of the game. So my first and least problematic example of this is a part where you need to de-rust something. Problem is that at this point you have probably already interacted with each thing near you, nothing of which could help you with rust. The solution to this is that there is some sort of lubrication you can find behind a lot of letters, which visually blends in with the background. I came to the solution by asking the nice devs at Rapaki on Twitter. Now the problem here wound up being more about not knowing what to search for, than the blending in with the background thing, because I could figure out were this lubrication was through context clues. Now the second example is way more offensive in my eyes and it is a big part of the end of the game and this is where I might get a bit into the spoiler territory. So the last part begins with you having to bring back two bulls to a farmer. One of them involves a really nice puzzle, but the other one is just way to hard to solve. I had to work with these posts in a German only forum, to solve it. I won't spoil the whole solution here, but one part of it was literally finding a needle in a hay stack, which only spawns there after a certain trigger and another part of it is stealing a crown from a group of snakes, which was way harder to execute than it should've been. I have uploaded a clip of the latter to YouTube, but I did watch a stream in the background, because of it just taking way to long to do and me eventually growing bored of skipping through the same dialogue over and over again, but if you still want to watch it here it is.

Now overall Krabat: The Secret of the Sorbian King is still a pretty solid game, with good puzzles (for the most part), nice visuals and a good soundtrack and for the low asking price of around 5€ and the first chapter being completely free I can only suggest you to give it a shot. Now this being the game that it is, it's of course not that easy to get a hold of, but it is available to download on Rapaki's website.

SteamWorld Tower Defense feels like a time capsule to a time long forgotten; drowned by the luxury that is everybody being able to make and upload a game to a storefront and everybody then being able to experience said game. Through the passage of time and evolution technology gamedev has become way easier than ever before, which is obviously a good thing, but it sometimes makes me forget that it wasn't always like this.
It is especially interesting to me as it is the first game in a series I'm very fond of.

Unfortunately this wasn't only the first game in the SteamWorld series, but also the first of many games by Thunderful (which were back then known as Image&Form),
while they were going through the transition from edutainment games to full on indie-development in the year of 2010, where it wasn't nearly as profitable as nowadays and therefore obviously suffers from some growing pains.

That said, if you have ever played any game by Thunderful you likely how talented their developers are. They often try their hands on a new genre of game and hit it out of the park on their first try and a lot of those qualities are already present here, especially in terms of their trademark humor and visual delivery, which are both stellar.

The game could be a fun enough tower defense game if it only weren't for the overly punishing difficulty. Now I am by no means somebody who has played a lot of this genre, but the difficulty has not only been a problem to me, but is a sentiment of a lot of different people (some even on this site) and is not helped by the lack of documentation on this game.
The only gameplay video I've been able to find on the internet is the twelve year old one uploaded by the official YouTube channel, which doesn't show a minute of actual gameplay and the trailer. This game is so obscure that even the wiki page is far from complete.
To beat the last few levels I had to visit this Twitter thread from 2015 which has been visited by (comparatively) many people over the years and has responses all the way to last year and while it is far form perfect, it was the best resource I could find.

All in all I can only recommend this game to one specific kind of human, which is basically me, who is really into SteamWorld games and videogame/-history, which is something I would have said about 2 months ago.

If you want to play this game nowadays, you can't, because it has now outlived both storefronts it has ever been available on, being the DSi- and e-Shop. I would really like this getting the Anthill/remaster treatment where it was not only made available on the Nintendo Switch, but also given some quality of live improvements, after it became harder to access.

But as it stands that probably won't happen. The SteamWorld series is currently undergoing a now 3.5 year long hiatus, there have been three+ projects in the series we have been aware of, only one of which ever got an official name and a trailer being SteamWorld Headhunter, which itself we haven't heard a word about since last year (late 2021). Furthermore Thunderful has recently showed their disinterest of currently making another SteamWorld game via Twitter.
Even if a SteamWorld game releases in the next few years, it probably isn't this one as the last significant mention was a Vinyl released commemorating this games 10th anniversary

So if you are interested in playing this game or any new SteamWorld game, the best thing you can probably do is wait, re/play the previous games and spread the message as menial of an audience as it may reach, just like I did by writing this review.

Lego Ninjago Nindroids might just be the weirdest Lego game I've played yet.
It is some kind of blend between the modern TT mainline games and the (at the time) mostly faded out of existence isometric handheld games, which were most prevalent during the GBA era.
While somebody could say this is a consequence of hardware limitations you also have to consider the time of release. Not only have TT games been ported to the 3DS since its release 3 years before this game came out, but the 3DS also got its own original TT Lego game 1 year prior to this games release.
This game is also the sequel of some sort to Hellbents' previous Lego game Lego Battles: Ninjago, while at the same time being a tie-in for Ninjagos 3rd season.

As I have already mentioned the gameplay loop is fairly similar to the TT games, with one significant difference being the combat system.
This should not be a surprise to anyone who has played more than one Lego Ninjago game, which have, for the most part, always had an unconventional combat system, usually based their systems features.
Lego Ninjago Nindroids in particular doesn't completely alter the TT combat system but much rather add to what is already there.
First off enemies tank more hits than the one or two in other Lego games, due to different characters also having different kinds of attacks. As an example Zain might attack quicker than Cole, but Cole will inflict more damage.
Due to the enemies bigger health pool combat is now more centered around putting attacking enemies, which are now marked by a thick red outline, in hit-stun/dodging their attacks using the new roll, while preventing to be hit by of the rest of them.
There are two other kinds of other common enemy types.
Firstly the enemy that can either block incoming attacks or has a shield. These can not be defeated using regular attacks, but much rather have to be picked up using the grab move and in that state either pummeled or thrown. My biggest problem with these enemies is that the pummel does little to no damage, so does the throw, and that there is no obvious indicator as to when they will break out of the grab.
The second kind of new enemy type is the big robot enemy, which can technically be defeated if you hit them for long enough, but a way easier way to defeat them is to get behind them and climbing on to of them. I also have a problem with them, which is kind of already solved within the game, which is that when trying to get behind them they turn around almost the same speed as you.
Now if you defeat enough enemies in the right way you will start to build up a combo meter, which increases your characters base movement speed, increases their attack damage and allows your character to perform a special attack, if they are able to perform one.

I believe this combat system to be pretty good overall, but I also have some gripes with it.
If you are in a group of enemies you can focus on individual enemies and zip to them, kind of like the Batman Arkham games (if I had to compare it to anything), now my problem with this is that this just sometimes doesn't work, I couldn't identify why this happens but it has something to do with too many enemies being on screen.
My only other (bigger) problem with the combat system is that, as I already mentioned, attacking enemies will be indicated by a red outline. You will only be able to counter attack or dodge while this outline is on screen, which in it self is good, but there is a small moment during the outline disappearing where the enemy will glitch out and attack multiple times. Now the span for this to happen isn't particularly big, but it did happen more than once during my only 7hr playthrough.

I also wanted to mention that the boss fights are surprisingly well designed, but I didn't know where to put it.

Hellbent didn't change all to much from the rest of the gameplay loop of the TT Lego games. You will still be able to platform and collect studs in various levels.
During platforming segments you might have problems with the depth perception due to the isometric perspective, but this is mitigated in the 3DS version using the 3D feature, but it might still be a problem for anyone playing on a PSVita or 2DS.
The levels themes are usually very interesting. One of the first levels sees you break into a building using the automated cleaning robots to open doors you aren't able to open otherwise.
Two levels later in the game see you first sneak into the rogue civilians "secret hiding place" and in the second of them play a mini game which takes no longer than a minute in said hiding place.
These two levels are a perfect example for this games biggest flaw, which is that there are too many levels,which is made even worse by the long loading times.
My main problem with this "design decision" is the quest system, now popularized by The Skywalker Saga, which this game actually introduced.
Unfortunately it is inserted quite poorly.
Not only are there 10 per level, but you also can not see which are in said levels unless you are already playing it and open the pause menu, meaning you might have to replay levels with character requirements. Furthermore some of them contradict each other like "don't take more than this amount of damage" and "take more than this amount of damage". These quests are totally optional to complete, but did somewhat decrease the fun I had with the game, as I usually try to 100% Lego games.
Now as I said, I like the levels overall, but there is no reason to not combine some of them other than padding.

I want to end this off by saying that I still after all its flaws really enjoyed my time with this game.
This is still Hellbents' first attempt at making this type of game and it does make for a great proof of concept.
Yes some of the mechanics are flawed, but they are still solid ideas that could be ironed out in a hypothetical sequel.
Unfortunately we will probably never see that sequel as TT-Fusion, a subsidiary of TT Games would go on to work on the next Ninjago game Shadow of Ronin and after the recent change in trajectory after the Skywalker Saga I doubt we will ever see another game in this style.
Hellbent would technically still develop another Ninjago game on IOS called Lego Ninjago Tournament, but I never got to play it and from what I could gather about it, it looks like a port of this games fighting mechanics into a wave based PvE game, so my point still stands.

I did not expect to like this game as much as I eventually did as little to no-one talks about it and its Avg. Rating (currently 2.6/5) is below average. If you are only a little interested in this game after reading this and are able to play it, I would give it a try as it is incredibly cheap to buy second hand; I got my complete in box copy for around 3-4€ (including shipping) which it is definitely worth.

Soul of Darkness is a 2D metroidvania, although it is way more inspired by the -vania part especially visually where it straight up copies these games.

I’m really conflicted on Soul of Darkness. This game achieves most things it sets out to do with an asterisk, as there is just one big flaw in every facet of this game which just kind of ruin the overall experience.

Moving around the various environments actually feels really good, but the lack of coyote time and not being able to jump out of the first few frames of the turn-around animation led to a few undeserved deaths and made some jumps unreasonably hard.

When defeating an enemy or destroying an object you will collect this games’ main currency called souls. These souls can then be used to upgrade an attribute of one of your two weapons. For some reason you can invest souls into these attributes even if you don’t have enough to upgrade them, which just led to me opening the menu every time I defeated an enemy or broke an object significantly hampering the flow of the game.
Another product of this system, combined with the respawn system, was that there were moments where I just left and reentered rooms to grind upgrades, which isn’t something I thought I would ever have to say about a 2D metroidvania game and made gate flashbacks to my first Super Metroid playthrough where I had to do a similar thing before the Ridley fight, which was also the worst part of that game.

This game also had a lot of boss fights considering its length. These are all well designed and actually fun to fight, but they unfortunately suffer from the same problem the rest of the game does which is, that it is really easy. You one- or two-hit most late game enemies, if you just upgrade your weapons strength by a little bit, which you almost couldn’t even avoid if you tried to.
The best boss of the game is the Giant Worm Enemy, which spans a whole level and was also the most “difficult” section of the game for me.

Everything else is held back by the short length (about 2-3 hrs of game time).

At around the halfway point you will first encounter the mechanic of transforming into specific enemies. While a fun idea, it also only appears 3 times making it feel severely underdeveloped.

During your playthrough you also might find life-/magic-crystals hidden throughout 10 of the 11 levels, which work a lot like heart pieces in Zelda, as in they increase the amount of health- and magic in fours. These would in theory increase the replayability of the game, but (and this is just my experience with them) they are not only hidden all to well, but more importantly there are just not a lot of them in the game. My completion percentage after completing the game was 99% and I did not go out of my way to collect these gems. This means all but two are “hidden” on the main path.

But the story had to suffer the most from the games’ short runtime. The developers obviously wanted to tell a story grander than the playtime would allow as a lot of said runtime came from skipping through text boxes.
Now the story would not have been all to great anyways as the protagonist named Kale is described as (and this is a direct quote from the e-manual):”a mysterious, powerful man.”, but I think it would’ve still helped the pacing a lot if this was a 4 hour game.

My main criticism is over now, but I still want to talk about the two obligatory DSi camera mechanics.

The first can be accessed through soothsayer-huts hidden throughout the levels, which upon interacting with give you a prompt to take a photo.
The predominant RGB color of that photo then determine the quality and quantity of soul you get. This obviously didn’t work (which could be partly related to me playing this on a 3DS), except when I held the camera directly into the sun, which led to the same outcome every time.

The second camera feature might be the best camera, nay the best feature of any game ever.
When first setting up my profile, which also gives you the ability to name it for whatever reason (whatever you type in will not appear ever again), there was an unlabeled option with a camera-icon. Feeling intrigued I quickly clicked it and my 3DS without any warning quickly took a photo of me. Now this wasn’t a normal photo, but much rather the ugliest photo taken of me, ever. Words can not describe how ugly I look in it. But I just ignored it and got on with the game not thinking much about it, up until the first time the main antagonist showed up and started babbling his uninteresting bad guy dialogue.
Lo and behold as the main antagonists’ dialogue icon had been replaced by the ugly photo.
This might just be the funniest thing I have ever come across in any game and definitely made the game worth the 5€ I spent on it.

Lego Knights' Kingdom was very interesting to me as it was not only released a few months before the first TT Lego game and the subsequent redirection of Lego games, but also because it is based on an obscure Lego theme; being the second season of Lego Knights' Kingdom sets and these sets were really weird on their own.
Unfortunately the game itself is not nearly as interesting as its source material.

Lego Knights' Kingdom at its core is an isometric action adventure game. There are four playable characters, which all share the same basic actions and therefore have no differences in gameplay except their character models.
The gameplay loop alternates between combat- and find the button sections.

Despite being the games main focus the combat feels incredibly sluggish.
While there are in theory more than one way to go about fighting enemies, as in not only normal attacks and the shield, but also combos and any of the 5 special attacks, which can be performed by holding the A button and one hit most enemies. It will actually just end up as holding up the shield and listening for the sound queue of it being hit by the enemy and subsequently counterattacking, as there isn't enough time between the enemy being hit and your character being able to attack again, for combos to be even possible, some enemy attack animations being deceiving and not actually representing its hitbox' active frames and there usually not being enough time to execute a special attack.

The find the button portions of the game aren't much better.
Now let's start with the positive. The placement of the button is usually very clear, same as how to activate them, so finding them is no problem most of the time, but that is pretty much everything positive I can say about it as there is a severe lack of an indicator for if you have hit all buttons to open the door connected to them. Now I have to preface that said lack of an indicator is very inconsistent, but there where multiple situations where this really hampered the already not amazing experience.
This problem gets even worse considering the excruciatingly slow movement speed and sometimes deceiving background making it unclear as to how to actually get to the button.
There was also an example in the final stage of the game where the game laid five buttons in front of the player and they just had to guess the order in which to activate them. The chance of someone actually guessing the right order first time is around 0.83% by the way (the order is 32514 if you for whatever reason want to play through this game).

The game peaks at its last stage, which is actually pretty fun (outside of that one incident), as it marks the first time of the game being actually challenging.
Unfortunately there is another occasion around 3/4s through this around 20 minute long level, where the two hardest sections of the game take place one after another. This wouldn't be a problem if there were any checkpoints, but there aren't, so you have to play the whole level again for 15 minutes, if you don't get defeated before that, just to probably fail again. Fun fact: I spend most of the last three days of my journal in this level. Now these playing sessions where mostly just me failing once or twice and then getting unmotivated, but I thought it could still be interesting.
This should probably be the moment where I mention the lack of in game saves, but much rather a password system to save your file.
The level ends with this games only boss fight against Lord Vladek, which can be cheesed using the tried and true strategy of shielding and counterattacking their attacks.

There is also a second and third mode, being the tournament arena and last man standing.
The tournament arena is basically a mix between 1v1s of the four main protagonists, which can be won with the already explained cheese tactic, and jousting, which isn't properly explained and I couldn't bother finding out how it works, as you should still win the arena every time due to the points you accumulated in the 1v1 matches.
I also couldn't access the last man standing mode even after beating the game.

Now the ost is the best part by far (take a listen if you want) and definitely the reason for at least one of this games stars.
Another reason why I didn't absolutely hate this game was because its problems mostly only get really apparent in longer sitting. This game is sometimes able to provide short bursts of fun.

Which is actually my final verdict. If you still want to play this game, for whatever reason, restrict the time you spend with it and you might not regret it that much.

I had a lot of hope for Tyler Model 005 as the game looks very nice graphically and has an above average soundtrack considering that this is Reversed Interactives first game. This game was published by Maximum Games, which is a name I knew, but didn't really remember from where. If you are currently facing the same situation or haven't heard of them before, Maximum Games have also published a game called Troll and I, which would've been a red flag and turned me away from buying this game, but obviously this didn't happen.

As I already mentioned, I do not have any problems with this games graphics or soundtrack. My real problems lay in the controls and mechanics.
At it's core Tyler Model 005 is a 3D action platformer with RPG elements. Unfortunately none of these elements are implemented in any sensical way.
I'm pretty sure Tylers jumps aren't physics based, meaning that they just move you up and forward by a bit. Tyler also has the ability to move objects with the left bumper. As I already mentioned there isn't really a physics engine, meaning that objects won't fall down whatever is beneath them as long as they touch that other object. I should also mention that this ability is only needed to be used during the tutorial.
Tyler has two abilities when holding the A button. The first one is an auto jump to a ledge, which is fairly well implemented and whose only problem lays in it needing the same input as another ability, leading to a misinput.
The second ability situated on holding the A button is a wall-run. This only works in theory as it sometimes just decides to stop working. Another problem with it is that you can use it against sloped objects. This builds up infinite speed and creates a backwards long jump situation where you are able to clip through floors, which allowed me to skip a whole section of the game.

This game also just happens to be home to one of the worst combat systems I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Tyler has a knife which can be used by first pressing Y to actually equip the thing and then the right trigger to use it. Now you can also not use the knife, but due to doing way less damage without it, this is never practical. Now my problem with this stems from Tyler sometimes just randomly unequipping the knife for no reason. But even when you hit an enemy, there is no indicator, that you have actually hit them. Combat is also, with one exception, entirely optional.

The only reason why you might want to attack an enemy is them dropping experience points, leading to Tyler leveling up.

Most of the abilities you can get by leveling up either make the game even worse or are almost useless, but there is just one ability, that only attempts to make the game a bit less insufferable, which is increasing Tylers battery life, which gets me to talk about the main gimmick of the game.
Tylers battery will continuously drain, when he isn't in close proximity to a light source. Not only does this mechanic not add to the game, but it rather gets worse because of it. For example, I died around 5 seconds after starting the game while reading the tutorial, because it starts you off in a dark area. This mechanic frankly is nothing more than an annoyance and has no reason to exist. As I already mentioned, you can upgrade Tylers battery life to last up to 40% longer which does fix this problem for the most part, but leads to a whole new problem, as it lead to me forgetting about the mechanic a few times and then randomly dieing when I put my controller down due to getting bored of this game.

While this game is graphically impressive for such a small game studio, the actual environments look very boring. You basically move around rooms of a run down house during the 1950s and later the 1970s. The rooms themselves look mostly the same. The enemies and other models also tend to look like Unity stock assets and after looking up the developer Reversed Interactive online I found out that they are mostly known for creating and selling said assets, which is not at all surprising.

This games story is unsurprisingly mediocre. To summarize it a bit, Tyler basically wants to find out what happened to his creator. This is an alright basis, but they didn't really do anything with it. After meeting a second robot called Conrad you basically only do what he says and things just happen around you for no reason. About halfway through the story shifts to suddenly be about time travel and I don't have to tell you that they didn't manage to create and subsequently follow a ruleset for this.
The game ends with one last filler mission where you have to find four switches, two of which require to be powered (so you have to find out how to do that too), which are hidden randomly around the house. Finding these switches was anything but fun.

Overall Tyler Model 005 was one of the greatest wastes of money and time I've had to endure in my life. I basically only beat it because it being only about 4 hours long. I would not advice you to ever consume this game in any significant way. Please stay away from it.
I only didn't give this game half a star because of it's small length. The rush of positive emotions I experienced when the credits rolled are yet to be matched by anything else.

A little known time in Lego game history is the early 2010s, where Lego created mobile games for their new themes. Most of the time these mobile games where some sort of highscore based endless runner, but some of their bigger successes, like NInjago, got complete games.

Flash-forward to me a few months ago remembering that this game existed. Surprisingly this game is actually a (more or less) complete game especially because while Lego Hero Factory is a spiritual successor to the Bionicle line of Lego sets, it never really struck me as to successful or known.

The game itself is a wave based top down shooter. Due to the limitations of a phone being the primary platform this game is very simplistic in nature. This actually helps the controls of the game. A lot of mobile games control schemes are either to overblown or way to simplistic. Lego Hero Factory: Brain Attack strikes a nice mid ground between these two extremes.
The most important actions, being moving and shooting, are located on the left and right side of the screen respectively, meaning that they are accessible in any situation. The only other actions you can perform are switching between primary and secondary weapon and using an item, which are both located in the bottom middle of the screen, in theory creating a sort of risk reward when using them.
Unfortunately the controls are the only redeeming quality of this game.

The content of the game is divided into seven levels, which themselves are segmented into 20 waves each.
The level design is okay I guess. My only problem is that there isn't much differentiating them from each other. Of course there are some level gimmicks like the city level being split into two parts divided by a train station going through them, but there is also no reason to ever go from one to another side as the object of the game isn't to defend something from the enemies, but just to not get defeated and the enemies spawn inside a radius from the player and always move towards them.
I am also positive that 4/7 stages being the sewerage, the spaceport, the power plant and the obligatory mall level don't even have a gimmick.
I also don't get why these stages are segmented into waves, because there isn't any difficulty curve to talk of.
The number of enemies in a stage is, as far as I know, random. The first wave could have 37 enemies while the 18th might have 12.
The game (only) boasts a whole ten different enemies (not the actual number of enemies, just a guess, could be even less to be honest). These enemies, with one exception, don't even have different variations.
Most of these enemies aren't even a threat due to them only being able to damage the player in close combat, but even if they could damage the player using a projectile, they probably would even be able to do that, because of their AI not noticing the player until it is to late or them taking way to long to actually be able to attack the player.
There are only two types of damage that might pose a threat to the player, being some enemies sending out projectiles when they are defeated. These projectiles do way to much damage when compared to other ones and are practically not able to be reacted to, because of either the enemies being defeated before you even notice them, or because of the enemies all looking the same. The only other threat can only be found in ever 20th wave of a stage.
These waves only end after defeating around 200-500 enemies called "Brains" (you are able to see one in the cover art).
These Brains themselves aren't too threatening, even with some of their stronger variations, but being attacked by 200 of them at once poses a threat. Especially the red colored ones. These not only take away a bit more than half your health, when hitting you once, but also leaving the burn effect on the player, meaning that they take around 90% of your health with just one hit; around 80% using the strongest character. They also take around a minute to be defeated themselves, meaning that the most effective strategy in every 20th wave is finding a big circle to run around in them beforehand and shooting constantly. While meaning that you are basically able to cheese the enemy AI this way, this also means that these waves alone take around 20-60 minutes each. This isn't what I would call fun gameplay.
Did I already mention that this game costs 4€. This is about as much as Castlevania Symphony of the Night on mobile.
Now the game doesn't technically cost that much. Unlocking all stages, weapons and characters to be able to then be purchased using in game currency is more like 2€ each. But if you remember about what I said around two sentences ago about the red colored brains, you definitely want to get the so called "advantage pack" saving you 1/3 of the price, because while you could definitely technically beat this Lego game not using the best character, weapon and sub-weapon, you could also technically run against a refrigerator at max velocity, while the floor is made out of Lego and would derive around as much fun from both options.

Even with all that much going against this game; and I didn't even mention how you there is no difference in weapon and sub-weapon, the speed power-up basically outclassing every other and there being only three different pieces of music in this entire game (one of which {the wave 20 one} literally being a 6 second loop), this game was still fun for around 1-2 hours. Like not incredibly fun, but at least a 2.5, it just dragged on for far too long. Especially with the final boss only spawning after you defeat 500 Brains, around 300 of which are red ones and subsequently one hitting you making you do all that again and stealing 40 minutes of your time.
But I would lie if I would say this game didn't have to be at least a bit better.

Why are so many german, phone related creations labeled as crazy?

"Batman: The Dark Knight" the video game deniers might want you to believe that this game was cancelled, but not only wasn't it, but they actually created a console just for it to compete with the Atari Lynx. Unfortunately this is another Metroid Prime Pinball clone.