Another game in the now prolific "indie games made largely or entirely buy one guy appealing to fans of a specific subgenre that manage to blow every other game in that subgenre out of the water because they get everything right that no one else seems to be able to" genre. I'm working on a better name for it.

Spark 3 is an action platformer in the "high speed momentum based 3d platformer" genre. Basically, it's inspired by 3D sonic, but it's good. Really, insanely good.

Levels are all enormous playgrounds with boosters, shuttle loops and springs, but they still have good conveyance to the end and are designed for you to find the fastest routes to the end. Spark can dash, jump and homing attack from enemy to enemy to gain speed. There's also a technique where, if you homing attack and boost right at the same time, you gain absurd speed and can sail over entire level sections. It's so fun. This game was designed for you to break it apart and find big skips.

The sense of speed and momentum in this game is so incredible and yet, you never feel out of control. Spark isn't slippery or floaty or any of that nonsense, he does just what you tell him to, it's remarkable.

Throw in some abilities like an extra boost, a float ability that extends your jump, and a few others and you can beat some levels in under a minute.

Shoutout to the combat, too. There's inspiration from DMC here on display. It's very light but you can straight up chain light and heavy combos, buffer special attacks, air juggle enemies and bosses, and mix in your dashes and special abilities to further mix things up and help deal with bosses. It's remarkable how fun the combat is, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it so much, coming into a Sonic inspired platformer.

The dev knows it too, considering he added a Bloody Palace style mode where you fight all the enemies and bosses. It rules.

This game rules. Play it.

I don't give a dead moose's last shit about Helena Taylor or whether the ending betrayed your fanfiction about Bayo and Jeanne. This game took 5 years from announcement to release and it is a smelly mess.

The combat has been even further dumbed down from bayo 2, giving you Demon Summons to use in battle. Basically, you hit a button and a giant comes in and does some big attacks in the arena. This means, to balance this, all the enemies have been transformed into lumbering giant idiot damage sponges instead of the intelligent dangerous foes they used to be. We're a long LONG ways away from Grace and Glory, here.

The main story sucks too. Half the time you're not playing the damn game, you're doing some obnoxious setpiece mini game. Oh you wanna fight dudes and practice combos? Too bad here's a part where you surf on Godzillas back down a skyscraper. It all looks terrible due to it being too much for the switch to handle, and it runs at an inconsistent framerate to boot. I felt like I was playing a bad rerelease of a 2009 PS3 game.

Thats all I can remember because I haven't played this game outside of maybe a month after release because it was so underwhelming. I still come back to bayo 1 to run through Angel slayer from time to time, I will never come back to this slop.

This is one of the most clever twists on fighting games I've played, and so far the only fighting-game-adjacent game I've gotten my smashie friends to actually give a chance to and enjoy.

It's a platform fighter like smash but the big gimmick is, instead of hitting each other, you hit a ball that is constantly moving in a line and reflects off the walls. Every time you hit the ball, it goes faster. There are various ways you can hit the ball: you can hit it, (adds a little speed) smash it (adds alot of speed), bunt it(stops it no matter its speed) and character's supers interact with the ball in many different ways. You can hit in different directions, you gotta consider how the opponent will react, how the ball will bounce off the walls, etc.

Get hit by the ball, receive damage. The faster the ball hits you, the more damage you take. If the ball goes fast enough, it's an OHKO.

It's such a simple but brilliant spin on the formula and extremely fun. Wrap that up in a Jet Set Radio/late 90s Shibuya punk aesthetic with a bangin' soundtrack and you've got a hell of a game.

This is the only game I've ever played that really captures what fighting in wire fu would feel like.

It's based on the Tokusatsu show Golden Knight GARO, which was basically power rangers for cool adults. GARO is a big franchise in Japan with many shows and games, but this game is based on the first show back in 2005. It's very short, lasting under an hour with the major characters represented. GARO is a boss rush arena fighter, with basic light combos, a heavy launcher, jumps and an air dash. When you get good at the game, you'll find yourself sailing through the air and slamming your opponents against walls, launching your super attack, and slamming him back to the ground. The main draw of the game is the GARO armor, in the show the main character can summon the armor and wear it for 99 seconds. It's the same for the game, granted you've filled your meter high enough. Air dashing feels great, and air movement feels floaty but here it's on purpose because it's supposed to be wire fu after all.

The combat in this game is really interesting, after some practice I found it was possible to spend entire fights in the air, and it feels elegant. There are multiple characters to play as, one of whom has a customizable moveset using attacks from the various bosses you fight, and it's super fun unlocking these moves and making him ultra overpowered.

Then you realize, this guy was the final boss of the main story mode and he uses that moveset you gave him, so on a repeat playthrough all you did was make the final boss super hard. I love stuff like that.

Yknow how, in animes the dude with the katana will slash at a group of enemies, flick the sword and then sheathe it, and then all the dudes he slashed explode in a fountain of blood right after? This game takes that and makes it into an actual mechanic.

The idea is, you fight in one of several arenas against hordes of enemies, do your big huge long combos, and then activate your "Sword flick and sheathe" move to make all the enemies you attacked explode in big blood fountains. It's not super easy to do, since enemies are only vulnerable to this when you get their health down to a critical point. The challenge is damaging as many enemies on the field as possible to that point right before death, and then activating your katana sheathe flourish as a finisher to kill them all at once. The real pro challenge is doing all of this in one long stylish unbroken combo. It looks cool as hell and gives you massive points to spend on more moves in the in game shop, and is the only way to recover health.

The game gives you plenty of standard attacks, sword attacks, jump attacks, iaido slashes, launchers, air slashes, super attacks, a meter you can charge moves with, and the like. There's quite a kit here. Every fight takes place in a variation of the same, empty round arena. No objects in the way, just you and hordes of bad guys capped off by a boss fight. It's also incredibly short, taking under 2 hours even on casual play. All that would be forgivable though if the camera weren't so terrible. It's pulled in way too close and seems to be more concerned with framing the main characters lovingly modeled thighs than allowing you to see what you're attacking. As a result the vast majority of enemies will be offscreen at all times, and will constantly blindside you from the unseen. You really need hyper awareness of all your foes moreso than usual in this game.

Pretty obvious this is a no budget indie effort, but even so it feels more like a proof of concept than a full game. I'd say it'd be nice to see this combat system expanded on in a proper game, but this game is well over a decade old, so, yeah.

This game takes the gameplay of Spikeout and adds in a competitive multiplayer twist, turning the game into a sort of hybrid beat em up/arena fighting game.

The spikeout gameplay is completely in tact, but now there are 7 stages where you and up to 3 friends face off in small arenas littered with weapons. If you play single player, you fight against 3 CPU players who gang up on you. Pro tip: to really enjoy the game single player, enter the NAOMI service menu and change the difficulty dip switch to easy. Otherwise it's just frustrating as the enemies will juggle you to death over and over in the later stages.

This game was intended for multiplayer play, but sadly I can't comment on that as I don't have any friends who like beat em ups and fighting games. But single player is still fun, just not nearly as much as the original Spikeout. The new characters are great with cool movesets, wish there was a modding scene to backport them to the original game.

VR shooting galleries are a dime a dozen but this game is the sole reason I still hook up my Oculus from time to time. Teleporting around, ripping robots apart, juggling their body parts in the air with gun fire, using their limbs as melee weapons, using their bodies as bullet shields, it's all such a blast. This game is arcadey action at its best and fills me with that same type of glee that playing time crisis at the local arcade did when I was in high school. It's one of the few games where I love score chasing because of the super cheesy arcade feel to it.

Minus one star due to the fact that my old oculus account was deleted when I deleted my Facebook and I was forced to rebuy it, even though I originally had it for free. Tired of that scummy crap.

This game reminds me so much of old school capcom and early clover studios that it brings a tear to my eye. It's got big Viewtiful Joe energy and that's a very good thing.

This is a character action game where the gimmick is that everything, all your attacks are to the rhythm of the soundtrack. Fighting naturally has a rhythm to it so I'm surprised this idea wasn't done sooner. It's pulled off very well. The characters and story are really the stars of the show here as the character animation is incredible and the writing is actually funny.

Now, the combat while very competent, I feel is limited by the rhythm gimmick. It's extremely bog standard "light heavy dodge parry super" stuff we've been seeing since the PS2 days. However, since this game in feel largely seems to be a throwback to those days, it gets a pass, especially since it pulls everything off so well. It's just all stuff we've seen before.

>Plays game
Man what the fuck is this looks like some forgotten PS3 game lmao
>dies 5 times
What the fuck I thought this was made by the Ninja Gaiden guys this shit sucks why can't I izuna drop
>discovers guard canceling
OOOHH ok ok I get it now hmmmmm
>Discovers Iron sight canceling
OH MY GOD GOTY GOTY GOTY

This game really wants to be a fighting game, but unfortunately it also wants to be a character action game. There's a reason these are separate genres.

It borrows mechanics like Bursting, Roman Canceling, parrying, and ex attcks from Guilty Gear and Street Fighter, and these have varying degrees of success in how they're implemented.

At first the game is frustrating as you try to chain together stylish combos only to get hit with D ranks over and over, but then when you figure out the game's intended loop, which is

>get all enemies on one side
>activate fatal sync (this games version of Devil Trigger)
>spam combos and EX moves
>when fatal sync runs out, burst out of a combo for free meter
>re-enter fatal sync
>repeat

It clicks and you stop having trouble.

This really is the optimal way to play, and after you realize it, it's kind of disappointing because the game, unlike the character action greats like DMC or Ninja Gaiden, never "elevates" above this loop. This game was explicitly designed for you to be in Fatal Sync ALL THE TIME since the devs idea of difficulty is to throw hordes of enemies at you, and all of them are big damage sponges. You MUST combo everything to absolute hell and back, even the basic mooks. It's fun and feels good, but it gets old since your moveset is limited and you inevitably will do the same MAYBE 3 or so combos over and over. There are no extra weapons or unlockable characters, you have your entire moveset available from frame 1 of gameplay. Some people like that, but I like to have incentives for replays other than the typical rank chasing, if nothing else.

Speaking of, the post game is also seriously lacking. Typically in a character action game, your first playthrough is to learn the combat system and to unlock everything, and then your real playthrough begins your second time around on a higher difficulty now that you're familiar with the systems. In Slave Zero X, there are no extra difficulty modes. All you have to look forward to after beating the main game is the Crimson Citadel, a bloody palace style arena mode where you fight every enemy and boss. It's decent, but very short. A typical Bloody Palace run can last upwards of 2 hours whereas the Crimson Citadel can be beaten in 20 minutes. Other than that, all you really have left to do is unlock color palettes and chase after stage ranks, which, thanks to your limited moveset, can feel like a grind.

There's also a serious lack of real defensive options. If you're in a group of enemies and you get launched, it's very possible you can get comboed from one enemy to the next until death from full health without ever touching the ground. Enemies can throw you back and fourth from one another with no cooldown, with no chance for you to recover, and don't EVER air tech in his game, as all it does is make you float helplessly in the air, which is the worst possible place to be unless you're juggling enemies. All you have is the third strike parry, which is completely infeasible when you're surrounded (example of a fighting game mechanic not suited for an action game, poorly thought out), and your dash which grants a tiny handful of i-frames. Sometimes the game will throw 2 boss enemies at you, who of course have hyper armor and multi hitting attacks or super long combos, and if they manage to get you in a pattern where they're hitting you back and forth, just set the controller down and go get a snack.

There's also a few times where the game resorts to some downright cheap bullshit to make things artificially harder, like putting big objects in the foreground to block your view, or even straight up turning out the lights completely at one part. In a hardcore action game like this, that is just not acceptable.

Silent Bomber is an action game where you run around a gigantic spaceship and blow up everything. Levels are short and sweet, and objectives revolve around finding things and exploding them. There are one or two missions that make you protect a target but they're over quick. The control and overall game feel is shockingly fast and fluid for a ps1 game, and I swear, explosions from this generation of gaming, with their low res billboard sprites, little triangles flying everywhere, and low bitrate stock sound effects blaring loudly, are so incredibly satisfying and crunchy compared to today.

Boss fights are the highlight, you can use your different bomb types, paralysis, napalm and gravity in different ways to handle them, though the final boss is such an insane difficulty spike it leaves a bad taste after hours of otherwise super fun game.