Diverse cast of characters and great style wasted in an underwhelming destruction derby game.

I’ll start out positive and say that Destruction AllStars has one of the most diverse starting rosters I’ve seen in a multiplayer game in ages, and they should be praised for it. On top of that, the game has a fun art style that I think fits pretty well.

That said, all that is wasted on a game that is unfortunately not very good. It’s completely wild that they opted to charge $70 for this. Glad I got it free on PS+. It has 3 multiplayer modes (that are more or less the same - wreck cars) across 3 maps and a handful of single player “challenges” that take place on one of said multiplayer maps. That’s it. The game is also riddled with microtransactions which can be OK for some games, but to charge $70 for a game that is devoid of content and then charge money on top of that for cosmetics is gross.

And even if all of the above wasn’t true and it had great content, the gameplay itself is just fine. It’s nothing special, really. It’s just not very fun.

+ Great diverse cast of characters
+ Fun visual style

- Completely devoid of content
- Riddled with microtransactions
- Weirdly no music outside of unique character themes that only play on the character select screen
- Gameplay itself isn’t even very fun

It's Picross, so it has the sauce.

Look, there's only so many ways to talk about Picross. I mean, I've played probably three dozen nonogram games at this rate, and I keep finding out about more and more keep coming out, I only have so much to say.

This one has the benefit of having a story, established characters, and humor. I wasn't terribly interested in any of that because I mostly wanted to just play Picross, but the characters are decent for what it's worth, and I had some chuckles. I haven't played the main Khimera game yet - it's free and I have it downloaded so it's only a matter of time - but the characters felt comfortable enough in this game.

I have three complaints about this game, however. First, one that only applies to this game, then one that applies to most nonogram games, and third a unique issue with this game that might apply to others.

For the one that only affects this game, I feel like I'm rarely making an actual image by solving the puzzles. It's a little hard to explain, but in another Picross game, the picture that I made by solving the puzzle feels clear even before the tiles are colored in, but here, the pictures feel nonsensical and the colored-in image looks way different. It doesn't really matter since I'm not truly trying to figure out what I'm filling in until after I already solved it, but still, it feels like the solution comes out of nowhere.

The second complaint is something I see it practically every nonogram game that isn't Jupiter's Picross games. It's... very hard to describe with and without a visual aid and would only bother Picross vets like myself, but still. There are times where the game will tell you what specific number you filled in without the player being able to know what they filled in with just the information in that line. That probably doesn't make sense so let me use an example.

Let's say you're doing a 15x15 puzzle and the line you're looking at has the numbers 1 1 2 1. Now let's say you put a tile in the third spot on that line because you know thanks to other lines that that tile can be filled in, and then you put an x on both sides of that tile. It's the third tile of line so you know that it has to be one of the first two "1s" of the line, it cannot be the two, and that's why you put the x around it. However, given the space on the right side of the filled-in tile, you are not yet sure if this tile is the first "1" or the second "1". Yet this game, and other games like it, already knows if it's the first or second "1" and it'll darken it out. So if it's the second "1" it'll darken out the second number in the sequence (1 1 2 1). You, the player, have no way of actually knowing it was the second "1" given the information you already have, but the game acts as if you do, which gives you more help than you should presently have available.

I don't know if that makes sense at all. As I said, it's hard in just words, but it's a persistent issue in these games, Jupiter seems to be the only developer to get it right. Another thing Jupiter gets right that other devs don't is its hint system. By default in Jupiter's Picross games, they'll have an option turned on where the game will highlight rows/columns where you have more possible moves to make with the information you currently have. I always turn this option off because I don't want the extra help, but it's a great feature for new players - I probably wouldn't have gotten into Picross without it. Other nonogram games don't tend to have this feature. This one... does in a limited and confusing capacity.

Let's say you are looking at a line with the numbers 1 5 2. Now lets say you've filled in the line like so (dots are a tile filled in, underscores are unfilled tiles): . _ _ . . . _ . _ _ . .
Apologies if this doesn't make sense visually, I don't know how else to put it. But anyway, looking at this information, you have the "1" and the "2" filled out already, and even though you don't have it filled in yet, you know you must fill in the seventh tile in that sequence in order to finish the "5". In Picross, this would be represented by the row turning blue; the "1" and "2" would be darkened out, but the "5" will be blue, the game's way in telling you there's a move you can do. In Khimera, instead of turning the line a different color, the game will un-darken the two numbers you already figured out, so now the whole number sequence (1 5 2) are lit up again despite the fact you've done nothing wrong. This is confusing because the game does this if you've fucked up or if there's a number to finish filling in, which makes it confusing. Why not just have different colors to highlight the rows and columns when there's new information for that line?

Well, this is definitely my most incomprehensible review, and awfully negative for a five-star game. Look, I just kinda give all nonogram games five stars, it would have to be a truly bad nonogram game for me to rate it lower. In reality, I think Picross truly is the peak of nonogram games, and pretty much all others have issues that Jupiter's games simply don't. At the end of the day, though, they're still Picross and I love this shit.

A Short Hike + Sword = Lil Gator Game

That's basically what this one comes down to. What's interesting to me is that I definitely enjoyed this more than A Short Hike. Why? It all comes down to expectations.

By the time I got around to playing A Short Hike, it was already a bonafide indie darling -- one that, judging from its review scores, could be considered one of the greatest indie games of all time. So when I played it and found that it was just a short, pleasant (albeit well-executed) platformer, I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed.

Before playing Lil Gator Game, on the other hand, I had zero expectations. And because of this it was a lot easier for me to just accept it for what it is -- a pleasant, short game inspired by A Short Hike, Wind Waker, and Breath of the Wild.

Running around an island and slashing cardboard enemies is mindless, yes, but not every game needs to be Battletoads or Mega Man 2. The writing is a bit too self-aware and the story didn't hit me in the feels like I suspect it hoped to, but the gameplay was engaging enough to keep me invested until the end. Is it a masterpiece? Not by any means. But if you subscribe to Game Pass and three hours to kill, you could do a lot worse than spending them on this game.

I would not have thought to ask the question "what if A Short Hike were about a child running around pretending to be Link in Breath of the Wild?", but I'm sure glad the developers of Lil Gator Game did. An unbelievably charming small-scale open-world exploration game with BOTW-inspired traversal mechanics (climbing on any surface with an upgradeable stamina meter, a glider, a shield you can surf downhill on), writing that's genuinely endearing in its depiction of childhood and growing up without coming across as overly affected, and an open world that's just the right size and density for it to be fun to explore without much in the way of navigational aids. The only reason I didn't give this a perfect rating is that I occasionally wished for more mechanically involving quest design (they usually don't involve much more than talking to one character or easily collecting/smashing a nearby item) or more bespoke platforming or puzzle challenges to make full use of the traversal toolset, but those are ultimately fairly minor complaints given how delightfully compact an experience the rest of the game is.

Alva Majo, the developer of the game, has never tried Hawaiian pizza (pizza with pineaple) because he is allergic to pineapple and because, according to his words, "it stinks", so he made this game so people like him could enjoy (or suffer) the experience of adding pineapple to a pizza.

The game follows the philosophy of ShortGames, not "Short games", but ShortGames. The main difference is that a short game is just that, a game that is short, meanwhile, a ShortGame is a game that not only is short, but conveys the experience of a long game in a short amount of time. For example, taking the first level of any Mario game wouldn't be a ShortGame but a short game, since you are just taking a fraction of a game and it doesn't feel better by being just that. A ShortGame is close to what shortfilms are for movies, they are an experience on their own. Examples of ShortGames could be Morai, Thirty Flights of Loving, or Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist.

It's hard to talk about ShortGames since almost everything could be considered as a spoiler since they tend to last less than thirty minutes, but let's sum up the premise of Pineapple on Pizza based on what you see in the first minute: You are on an island. You hear joyful music. Everyone is dancing happily. Everyone except you, because you are walking around. Everyone seems to be celebrating something in harmony. Everyone except you, who seems to have some kind of curious conscious... From there, you will explore the island and discover as many misteries as your curiosity and exploration allow you to.

The game is not only radically original (at the end of the day, it is trying to adapt a flavour into a videogame) but also surprising and delightful.

And it is free, I mean, what else are you looking for? Go play it!

Oh to be a wee diecast car on a little track going through the loop de loop. pinched fingers emote

I played the original Unleashed and left satisfied, but was left with very little memory of it to the point it took me a bit to realize how many of the cars and modules were reused from that for this. You'll see familiar faces like the Tanknator, Surf n' Turf, and the Nitro Bot here again for another round to fill space in the base game while they get the licensing ready for whatever overpriced DLC I bought with the deluxe edition that I probably won't play until next year when I remember I own this. At least Sol-Aire CX4 is still here, I love you Sol-Aire CX4. You have the coolest name.

The racing itself is improved for the better, with F-Zero X side attacks and Twisted Metal 2 jumping that doesn't require a Mortal Kombat input. It helps make the racing more lively and give it some more mustard, but ultimately I never bothered side attacking much, because I never adjusted the difficulty past easy after how bad the rubberbanding was in the last game, plus I'm not going online against strangers because I don't feel like getting wrecked by the people who put a thousand hours into this somehow after only a little over a week, because I guess they don't work full time jobs like I do.

I'd say the biggest improvement is actually the shop. The one in the last game was absolutely abominable, you couldn't refresh the available cars and it took about six ice ages of in-game time for it to finally swap things out. Here there's more available cars to buy, the time for rotation is like a fifth of the original's, and you can refresh for a paltry amount of coins. Thank christ, fuck those loot crates even if they still snuck a slot machine in here.

The campaign is basically the same, except waypoint, elimination races, and overly demanding drift challenges are added to mix things up. As of this posting date, the drift challenge achievo is the lowest percentage of attained on the global chart on Steam. Whether that's people not caring about the campaign, or not wanting to bother with the idiotically high score needed to clear the Unleashed goal for the drift challenges is up for interpretation. There's little story cutscenes in-between that ultimately were aiming for a saturday morning cartoon vibe, but the only thing I remember was the amount of poses the artist kept putting the female character in who kinda reminded me of Totally Spies for some reason. It was basically just my time killer as I listened to new metal albums, because the in-game music still smells and one of the tracks actually legitimately sounded like bozo the clown music to me. I also rectified this for a little by simply putting the Stunt Track Driver soundtrack on with a bit of Fuel by Metallica.

What fucks Unleashed 2 over the most is unfortunately the same thing that fucked the first game for me, and it's how unanimated the game is beyond the track itself. The sense of scale is there, but there isn't enough being done to showcase that more. There's no dogs barking at the cars as they drive by on a curve, there aren't birds flying by overhead, you're not landing in a bucket of sand at the end of the race, and they didn't even bother putting actual blades of grass onto the offroad portions and everything seems to just have minigolf turf. I truly do hate comparing modern games to things I played from my childhood, because I know it makes me sound like a "kids these days" shithead, but I just think it sucks when a 25 year old FMV game does a better job of scale. It's probably just a case of the entire game being built around the track editor, but it's such an unfortunate side effect of it that makes the whole thing feel forgettable in the long run.

Looks nice, but no lasting impression. Sucks man, why does that feel like I just described a ton of AAA games from the last decade?! I have to be wrong...

While I recognize that The Crew is just another disposable helping of Ubisoft open-world slop full of map-revealing radar towers and distracting activity icons that get in your way at least as often as they represent opportunities for rewards, I can't help but feel a great affection for it. The ridiculous deep-cover gang infiltration (it's incredible how many things can be accomplished through the medium of illegal street racing) story and world flavor, however thin and clichéd, are so much more fun than the bland sports festival theming that seems to be the trend today. Race design is hit and miss, but the hits are memorable, like the time I bested a high-performance supercar with my dirt-tuned Nissan Fairlady by efficiently drifting through a series of off-road shortcuts that ran alongside and often cut across the street, a twisting duel of contrasts that felt much more interesting than a typical race between similar vehicles sharing the same circuit.

But, more than anything else, I just enjoyed tracing my way across the massive map, winding through the mountainous northeast on a rainy night to Laurent Juillet's ambient music or stomping through a southern swamp to Baby or Black Milk. I know it doesn't seem very impressive, but I think I might just be happy if a game gives me a map, a car, and a soundtrack. My love for paths and routes and mazes is something that I think about all the time in the context of videogames but rarely talk about because I don't entirely know how to explain it and doubt most people would understand, but the point here is that I take great pleasure in simply following The Crew's interstates and highways. Those relaxing cross-country trips that lasted twenty or thirty minutes before I reached New York or Los Angeles for the first time, flying down the overpass as the buildings gradually enveloped me, decelerating into the smooth cruise of an exit loop, fluidly weaving through traffic as I cleanly transitioned into a tunnel or a grid of city blocks, coolly emboldened by the Arctic Monkeys or American Princes song on the radio—those are the experiences that I'll remember most from this game.

Is that really anything remarkable for the genre? Am I overvaluing The Crew because I simply haven't played many of its influences, competitors, and successors? I honestly don't know. I look forward to finding out.

I meant to spend more time with it before it got shut down, but thankfully members of the community seem pretty confident that they can get some kind of server emulation up and running to preserve the game. I hope it won't take long. I still have to finish avenging my brother's murder by driving real good.