One of the early FMV games that both plays well and has a story and many comedic moments that work well because of the better acting and writing rather than the more common unintentional humor from incompetence often found in the genre.

Set in 2042, three years after Martian Memorandum, Tex has married and divorced Sylvia from Mean Streets and realizes that he has hit rock bottom and its time to turn his career around. Succesfully catching the criminal and retrieving a stolen item for a local pawn shop gets Tex back on his feet and leads to a larger case the following day that promises Tex a large amount of money but puts him in the path of the doomsday cult the Brotherhood of Purity. Now playing as more of an FMV interactive movie there are frequent FMV scenes with controlling dialogue choices, each character you interact with his voiced and portrayed by an actor, and there is more interaction with objects as you explore areas. Margot Kidder plays a role and James Earl Jones provides voice work as God (or The Big P.I. in the Sky) who decides to become personally involved in Tex's case believing that he will need all the help he can get.

Gameplay has you moving around areas in a first person view and hitting the spacebar to bring up your options for interacting with the environment or talking to people, entering buildings often begins a scene of you talking to someone or with a still shot of the location with Tex and the character interacting until you choose to leave. When you hit the spacebar you can see the top left of your screen while the bottom becomes options for how to interact and for text and subtitles and the right side shows you conversation options, questions to ask, the ability to view your inventory and combine items, a fast travel button, and access to a hint button. Successful actions give you a score like old adventure games while using hints can tell you what to do but lowers your score, the hints themselves can tell you exactly what to do but are often accessed in a step by step form so if you only need the next step but not an entire solution it is often good for that. Everything works really well except for the awkward movement as you control your walking by moving the mouse and look up and down with the arrow keys. It doesn't sound that bad but you don't just move with your mouse movements, as you move the mouse you are setting a constant speed in that direction until you move the opposite way to slow or stop so with a modern mouse a fairly slight movement can send you flying forward or backwards while spinning in constant rapid circles around a room. Moving slowly I was able to control it without even turning my mouse sensitivity down but it takes some getting used to.

The story keeps you interested. The jokes often land and when it becomes more corny it is often as an intentional spoof of the detective genre. Exploring the environments soon shows that Tex has an amusing quip or story about many of the random objects you can interact with. As you often aren't getting the best when a company uses its own employees to play characters, it is surprising that Tex ends up as one of the best portrayed characters while always being played by the game's director and designer and by a founder and the Chief Financial Officer of the company. Puzzles are typically logical and finding what you need to in the environment doesn't devolve into pixel hunting.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789880623579987975

A unique RPG with good art and music, good moments more fitting for a slice of life style story, interesting mechanics that aren't utilized enough, and incompetently designed but easy and fairly infrequent combat.

The main plot is hurt quite a bit by the fast pacing and somewhat nonsensical opening that bristles against the main more serious plot that it doesn't take the time or have the quality of writing to deal with in any meaningful way. With how quickly you are rushed into the main narrative you have no build up about the state of the world and no time spent working with the people in the army you begin the game being part of or seeing anything that could appear to give them any kind of sensible personalities based on their training and indoctrination.

You are part of an army of soldiers that have been born and raised in an underground high tech facility and trained to be soldiers since birth, all under the orders of a Father General who says their goal is to keep peace throughout the world. You've been trained as a sniper all your life and when the sniper of a more elite unit is injured you are assigned to take his place and join others on what ends up being a false flag operation where you pose as Polish soldiers attacking Russian civilians in small towns in order to start a war because your leader seems to want to be part of an invasion of Poland. Everyone knows you are killing civilians, except your character (mixture of night vision scope, lack of understanding about outside world, indoctrination explaining why he doesn't notice he's shooting unarmed random people in a town I guess), which as the the sniper and by extension the person who should be the most likely to be a psychopathic murderer that raises a lot of strange and never answered questions. Did they suspect you would have some personality flaw towards their goals if so why did they assigned you, why would they keep you as a sniper, did they not train any other snipers, why did they even need a sniper or a particularly talented one in this situation, why is everyone else ok with this when its most of their first assignment when they seem to have similar personalities to you, etc. It doesn't help that all of this seems to be completely contradicted by the shared briefing you had with the other soldiers, some early tutorial like lines in the opening area are also wrong as they reflect former mechanics that were changed over the early access period the game was in. You and another soldier you convince to join you flee the army after your first mission.

When you fight your old army many of them do seem to be portrayed more as the psychopathic characters they should be, but nearly everyone you meet at the start of the game is bumbling anime cliches like, "Can you bring me a gift from the surface," "lol my medical supplies weren't assigned correctly and I was excited and didn't bother to check," "Guard duty is boring can you bring me some cookies and apples?" You have people who should be closer to the Kurt Russell Soldier film and often are when it wants you to fight them, but seem more on the Forrest Gump side for the opening. Your two early characters also have no difficulty interacting with others or personality conflicts from their upbringing other than trying to make amends for being with the army in the opening and some repeated confusion over food. It's kind of like Tales of Arise's plot of, "Ok we freed the people who have been starving worked to death mining slaves for 100s of years...no other issues to deal with from that everything is fine now." 22+ years of indoctrination and it takes about five minutes to go, well everything we've ever been told must be a lie, we had better shoot them.

Combat involves the worst of the genres kind of buffs, debuffs, and lack of information. Each character has four stats and while ATK and DEF are usually pretty obvious you get no information on what AGI (turn order, dodge, hit, multiple attacks, etc?) or LUK (crit, hit, dodge, skill influence, bit of everything, after battle rewards, basically nothing, etc?) do. Combat follows a shown turn order, except when it decides it doesn't want to follow it. Many of the game's skills are worthless. Skills that cost SP may say they do more damage but then do less damage than a basic attacks. Buffs are often the useless kind of, my attack does 80 damage, if I instead use my attack buff skills by spending SP I sacrifice one turn to do 90 damage for my next three turns. Lynn is easily the best combat character in the game because she has more useful skills including one that can damage and blind all enemies and because the second gun you get for her shoots twice and only checks if the attack hits the one time. When you find an upgrade for your first gun it is worse than the second even with the higher damage, when you find her last gun after that it is still worth even with a high attack and agility bonus. The second gun says nothing about attacking twice and with the lower agility bonus compared to the last gun doesn't even make sense that it would attack twice. Keeping this gun has her often doing more damage than your sniper even when he's equipped with the game's most hidden and high attack value weapon. During combat you can aim at different parts of a targets body with torso shots being more accurate but less damaging, arms forgetting to mention an armor value but having a chance to paralyze (so low you have almost no reason to ever aim there), and head shots deal a lot more damage but have a high evasion chance (no idea what that means and since you rarely miss I would suggest never aiming for anything else, unless they have low enough health to finish with a torso shot or it makes sense to try for to paralyze based on turn order). After most battles you can choose a reward of either getting an item or equipment piece or regenerating some SP, the item and equipment is the better choice 95% of the time since most characters don't even have useful skills. Luckily combat isn't a constant focus of the game and it is so easy that it is never a challenge.

The areas where the game does a better job that can make it worth a playthrough is the good visuals with some nice environment details and some good CGs and animated moments. The music is good throughout the game from story tracks, exploration tracks, and battle tracks. The writing as the characters spend time with each other and interact with others is good and makes it fairly obvious that the developer's talent would lie much more in writing and working on a kind of slice of life story or civilians dealing with the situation of being in a war or civil war rather than the main plot dealing with former soldiers and civilians taking up arms against an army trying to gain control of the world and if the combat was replaced by dialogue choices and activities. Based on side quests you complete and your choices in different conversations characters can gain morale and while it can't have too massive of an effect on the game based on the smaller scale of it you can see some different fates for characters in their final scenes, different scenes or lines between characters, and may gain access to a few different quests if morale is high or low enough.

You are going to be spending more time seeing likable characters interact and doing side activities and that does push the game into an area where I can somewhat recommend it in spite of the poor combat and areas that shouldn't have been the focus.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789401810634973206

-PC Steam Version-

A solid vertical shoot em up with good graphics for the time, six different planes to use, and eight stages with a bit of randomness on the order you can play the first four in and with what bosses and sub bosses can appear on later stages. Each plane has a unique shot type, bomb types, and as they power up they have different subweapons that you can charge up by holding shoot to activate a different temporary attack mode. Bosses often shift from their first mode into some type of mech for their final form. Playing through the game once begins a second more difficult run. No story other than your final score and completed runs altering an ending look at your pilot either in full uniform with no details known to detailing their name and having them in less clothing until they are topless (and covering themselves except for the one male pilot).

The stages don't do too much of interest with the environments. There are some ground targets and at one point effects of enemy planes coming through the clouds but nothing too interesting apart from good visuals. Enemy bullet patterns are often fair as is there spawn locations but certain attacks can cover such a wide area or come at you so much faster than normal enemy shots that you really have to know the game to be able to avoid what is coming at times, even more so in the slower planes. Enemy types themselves never do anything too interesting but there is just enough variety, though the mechs bosses transform into are never very visual interesting or too distinct from one another in style.

The PC version has the typically expected positive inclusions. You can remap the controls, you can make a button auto shoot when held down (so you still need a normal shot to activate your charge attack), you can choose between seven difficulty modes (though only 4 and up have the additional runs after a completion), you can give yourself nine lives instead of the usual three, and can add more or infinite continues (which become disabled when you access a 2nd or 3rd run in the same playthrough), there is a high score mode, co-op is supported, etc.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1787247721482764378

A PSX/CRT visual styled action horror game with tropes and scenes inspired from Italian zombie films from people like Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei.

The portals to hell have been opened and you have seven chapters set in various locations to play through as your main character and a group of mostly weirdos and a terrifying maybe child try to survive. You are armed with a revolver and shotgun that you load and aim slowly, can't aim while moving, and need to land hotshots to kill your enemies, whose heads might not always be in the normal place anymore. Knives can be found and act as a defensive item when you are grabbed by an enemy. The combat is slow and weighty and works and feels good enough in a game with this atmosphere. To interact with or pick up objects or open locked doors you need to unequip your weapon, but open doors can often be nudged up as you move into them.

There are some strong creepy moments, though they often don't lead to much when you might have been thinking you were going to get into a situation that might change up the mechanics in an interesting way. Good sound design and some nice haunting visuals in the quiet moments.

Each of the seven chapters is set in a different area and has their own style and feel to them, some better than others from an atmosphere or combat perspective. Its a short entertaining time. Finishing the game unlocks the more comedic focused Booty Creek Cheek Freak episode and a quick and fairly dull oriented episode that opens with a few elements similar to Call of Duty's zombie game mode.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1786992271877079122

Brief horror title done in a grainy PS1 visual style that gives a strong buildup mixed with a strange atmosphere as you interact with the locals but mechanically never really puts you in enough danger which starts to detract from the feeling of being under a current threat.

The main character finds dirty clothes around her apartment as her boyfriend hasn't done the laundry. Needing fresh clothes for a morning interview she finds the apartment's washer broken and is told about an old laundromat that is open 24 hours a day near the edge of town. She decides to take a bus there ignoring the warnings about a serial killer that has been targeting pregnant women. As your clothes wash and dry you are giving time to explore a small area where you can find clues about the past murders and area and talk to some local people often giving off a mixture of a strange or humorous vibe while maybe noticing the same car in the parking lot that you saw when you got on the bus by your apartment.

It's a good environment and visual style that does a lot right but you start to find yourself in situations where in most titles the killer would be stalking you and you would be in active danger and would need to sneak around but as you come to notice that you have no direct threat in these early sections it removes a lot of the possible tension.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1785228111526891669

A bizarre, funny, well acted story in an interesting setting, with some of the best writing in the medium, mechanically and visually feels like playing a mixture of Max Payne and Control except with frequently boring repetitive gameplay and a length that has it stay long past its welcome.

El Paso, Elsewhere is visually similar to a Playstation era title with the movement and controls of the first two Max Payne titles with some of the colors and environment styles that can feel like you are playing Control. The story involves your character entering a motel to stop his ex, the lord of vampires, from destroying the world. He believes his addictions as well as the battles themselves will lead to his death. As you enter an elevator you are transported to the void and are slowly lowered down where floor after floor you must fight through an area while attempting to rescue people who have been captured to be used as sacrifices. As you your journey goes on the environments shift from the motel to areas that were important to your ex's life and some by extension important to your life. Memories of both your lives are discussed with entities you meet, each other, and can be further expanded on by finding projectors in stages themselves. Radios are also scattered around with often humorous stories or references to noir style monologue filled with increasingly ridiculous metaphors. The visual style and writing are the highlights of the game and can make it worth playing on their own merits. Though another issue is that it takes about 1/3 of the game for that writing to go beyond just being entertaining to reaching that next level.

The problems with the game come from the dull enemies that don't fit with the Max Payne bullet time style gameplay. That there are 50 stages and you only start to see more interesting things around 20 stages in. You are only given enough enemy variety for combat to be interesting and a bit varied, if the enemies were even fun to fight (which they typically aren't), around stage 26. Nothing interesting is ever done with the hostages you want to save, they are just sitting around waiting to be saved, there is no threat to them, no timed deaths, no real issue even if they do die from you killing them other than a slightly different ending. Even when the enemy variety is better and the stages become more interesting you are still doing the same thing over and over and with how long it took to get to the second half of the game I was just wanting it to end, keeping the slightly higher quality of the gameplay from making much of a difference at that point. As there can often be points where something narrative wise might only happen over other level it would have felt like a much better experience if about 1/3 of the stages had been cut.

There is a dull weightlessness to the combat where bullets hit enemies until they die and rarely feel like they did anything until that moment, you can take a massive hit that takes off 60+% of your health and not even know you got hit unless you look at your healthbar, the stake melee attacks are powerful damage wise but there is no visceral satisfaction for hitting an enemy with one. The entire Max Payne style gameplay of using a slow-motion toggle, diving, rolling, etc is almost entirely pointless due to the boring melee focused enemies and how you move with where the reticle is in relation to your body always makes aiming a bit awkward. Rolling becomes more useful about 27 stages in when there are some enemies with AoE attacks you can try to roll out of the way off but you never really want to dive into a room in slow motion shooting things because it isn't practical with these kinds of enemies and isn't even fun due to lack of any real response to your shots and lack of things like the killcam Max Payne games had. The only positive thing I can say for the gameplay is that there are great difficulty settings where you can alter anytime you start a new game or continue your current one, you can give yourself infinite ammo and stakes, change the speed, change how much slow motion time you have, change enemy and weapon damage, enemy health, etc and from playing on the base settings for 35 stages when I realized it was never going to become remotely enjoyable and I gave myself infinite stakes and ammo so I at least wouldn't be bothered with picking up supplies or needing to melee objects to try to find more stakes.

It's a game that I am glad that I played and will continue to think of in the future, especially now that the gameplay is over.

Has the annoying frequently found problem in PC titles where it doesn't disable your controller when using a keyboard and has no ability to turn off controller rumble, so if you keep a controller plugged in you will likely want to unplug it.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1784465308822237639

Simple but unique and intuitive mechanics, a story that remains constantly interesting and entertaining, and features vivid locations, expressive personality filled animations, and two of the best pets in the medium.

A puzzle mystery game where you wake up with no memories after having recently been killed only to witness an assassin threatening a woman near your body and discovering that you have developed special powers. These "ghost tricks" allow you jump between and manipulate objects, travel through phone lines to other locations, and to travel back in time four minutes after a person has died to change their fate which also allows you to speak with them in the past and once they are safe in the present. In one night you attempt to keep your potential friends and allies safe from a group of assassins, discover the truth about your powers and others who have gained similar abilities, and learn of a decade old event that ties together your former life, the police, and foreign spies.

Each stage has you using your ghost tricks to manipulate objects in a way that will effect the environment or people in the environment in a way that leads to you completing your goals. This can have you moving and manipulating objects to increase your reach allow you to jump into new things, manipulating lights or sounds to attract or distract people, leading a character through a dark room while avoiding assailants, or timing multiple interactions to create a particular sequence of events that will aid you. There are some new mechanics added over time but little gameplay wise changes over the course of the adventure. This can normally be a bad thing but each area is designed in a way where they are interesting and amusing to explore, the story that remains the highlight is allowed to progress quickly, and none of the events ever become overly cluttered, confusing, or tedious to deal with in a way that would detract from the enjoyment of the game and its strongest elements. The narrative over time explaining why certain thing can't or couldn't be done in a way that fits for the setting and often in ways that make more sense as more elements of the story reveal themselves.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1782596763070976441

A few years after the events of Mean Streets, Tex Murphy is hired by one of the wealthiest men in the world, the founder of the TerraForm Corporation, to track down his missing daughter as well as an item that he doesn't want anyone knowing about. The case takes Tex to locations in San Francisco, the jungles of South America, and to Mars.

Martian Memorandum removes the stranger aspects of the previous game, the side scrolling shooter segments and spending the majority of your time sitting in your speeder as it moves you to a destination, and makes updates common for the genre in the 90s. You no longer have to type in exact names to ask people about and have a list of everything you have discovered that can be clicked through. You now have more control and verb action buttons with different types of interactions as you explore a wider variety of locations, though with these changes now comes some moments of the worst pixel hunting I've seen often due to the grainy style of the environment and models.

Good voice acting, animation, and video clips and character portraits for the time. Dated now but still a decent adventure title.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1779720617178362134

Has the strong tactical gameplay and varied characters similar to Mimimi's previous games, with a new bafflingly terrible mission structure that starts to make the game a chore to complete.

Shadow Gambit takes the gameplay of Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 to a new setting, this one focused on undead/cursed pirates fighting against a tyrannical order that is trying to destroy them and control the citizens of various islands. As a pirate looking to make a name for herself you free a captured sentient ship from the inquisition with the hope of finding the former Captain's hidden treasure. To do that you have to join forces with the ship, who has the ability to record events and move time back to those former spots, and revive her former crew in order to follow the clues left by the Captain.

In the base game there is a total of eight playable characters with an extra unlockable one if you reach 80% completion by doing different stage and character challenges. Each character has a slow or fast kill/knockout attack with their weapon of choice, a pistol that has one shot per map unless you find ammo, and usually two other abilities with often one of them changing to something else under certain conditions or when something else is in use. One of the more unique characters has the ability to possess other enemies and can then move them within a certain range of where he took over their bodies and he might gain some of their abilities, one character can grow a bush almost anywhere on the map to hide characters or enemy bodies, one has a cannon she can use to launch allies to distant places or that can be used to attack enemies, many characters have a item or animal partner that allows them to distract or lure enemies to a location. The crews various skills can pair together in useful ways and can allow you to handle locations in different ways. The characters are also likable and have their personalities brought out by their banter during gameplay, having some unique dialogue based on who is chosen to go on certain missions, story elements on your ship in between missions, and in the later game a mission or series of missions that focuses on some part of a character's backstory.

You play against the usual types of enemies the the genre has become known for having. You have the generic grunts that are easy to fool with distractions and traps, sentries that won't move or be distracted long from their set locations and line of sight, one that activates an alarm to summon reinforcements, a sniper with a longer and more quick to activate line of sight, a stronger types that requires multiple characters to take down, and in a new more setting unique enemy a pair of two enemies that need to be killed quickly before one revives the other. You have the helpful time stopping planning button found in their previous games that allows you to chain multiple actions together and the always nice to have fast forward button that Desperados 3 had so you aren't needlessly waiting around for enemies to get into certain positions or for alarms and alerts to end.

In this genre Shadow Gambit would be of the same excellent quality of the developers previous games, if not for suffering from one area that those previous games didn't struggle with.

The game unfortunately becomes something of a chore to finish, even more so with the DLC, due to the constant need to replay the same locations with little changes 3-5+ times. Even with the ability to bring a different set of crew members and to start and finish in different locations the repeated visits to the same maps is easily the worst part of this game. It's so bad you might get into a situation where you have to go to the same map 3+ times in a row. In Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 a map was designed for the mission and characters it was made for (Desperados 3 eventually giving modes where you could try different characters), the maps here are made to play for multiple missions where almost nothing changes except for the minor mission objective targets or the time of day (a much bigger change than just about anything the objectives will do). Many of the missions will focus on you really only needing to complete your objectives around a portion of the total location with you being able to pick from a few starting locations and exit locations once your tasks are complete. The problem with the approach is that it leads to some very short uninteresting missions in the worst times, but there is also the problem that they didn't necessarily spread out how those missions tend to limit themselves. You might play a mission that focus on a third of the map, only to find your next mission focuses on pretty much the same area of the map, then to find you have another mission on the island that now deals with 2/3s or the entire map that again will have you dealing with that same 1/3 all with the same enemy groupings and locations. There being a lot more playable characters and being able to take the 1-3 you want to each time does help to alleviate some of this problem, but it still ends up getting dull as you end up playing a lot more total missions than in Minimi's previous games, less interesting missions, much less challenging missions, and the types of enemies you are facing doesn't really expand as the game goes on.

The challenge badges for each map and crew member are a lazily handled mess where it is needlessly difficult to check your progress or what you have done on the revealed badges, the logbook is a mess that you can't even access for some reason while on the mission planning screen, some badges just don't seem to want to unlock when you complete them, and the challenges aren't all revealed until you complete the game. Because you really want to go back to that one map you just played six times, however many more times to try to hit a ridiculously high 80% badge completion rate to unlock a hidden character so you can play the same maps some more times with them.

Both sets of DLC adds a new character, giving you total of 11 playable characters with the additional unlockable one, one new location that will have three missions on it and three new missions on the older locations. The characters are both fun to use but the new islands tend to only have one mission on them that is actually interesting and the other three missions mean you will be going back to areas you've already played even more than you have to in the base game. If you are really playing the game a lot and see yourself frequently replaying missions or just really like having the varied characters then they are going to be worth getting just for that.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1779332521110691961
Video: https://youtu.be/l2mPhZSk5dc?si=kceIF0gjE0bhbcXe

AKA Clock Tower: Ghost Head

Horrible graphics, story, enemies, voice acting, and generic locations full of constant backtracking. Has you constantly running back and forth from zombie like enemies that you need to hit with melee weapons sitting in set locations or that can be pushed off you if they try to strangle you. This is everything bad about the real Clock Tower 2 but even worse.

Turning into your alter ego and just kicking zombies and beating up possessed enemies is pretty funny though.

The sequel went from the great 2D art of the SNES to ugly early 3D, losing a lot of the atmosphere of the first game and most of what made it memorable while still having some positive elements.

Good replay value, choice of playable characters that change events and character actions in the story, ability to save most characters leading to different endings. There is a lot more dialogue than the first game giving some more characterization, though it is mostly awkward conversations with often poor voice acting. Fairly slow working text box when exploring. There is now faster movement and response to commands than the first game which can remove some frustration but due to how the enemies work they just no longer seem threatening furthering taking away the horror and atmospheric elements of the previous title.

Great art, atmosphere, and multiple endings and ways certain events can play out.

Point and click mechanic is a little annoying due to some objects only having one spot that it allows you to interact with them making it easy to miss things unless you know that you can interact with it.

It's fairly basic premise but they nailed the art and atmosphere of the location.

The Lamplighters League takes place in the 1930s where a man who was part of a former heroic team, now all dead, attempts to recruit thieves, murderers, renegades, and adventurers for hire to fight against his old group's enemies. Your opponents are three different groups that are attempting to access a mystical tower that will allow their leader to reshape the world in the way that they want. Each week you send three or four agents on a main mission and some of your other agents on side missions where they gain items from safehouses or spend intel to unlock new special missions. Based on your actions, you can lower faction progress level but will typically see two factions coming closer to reaching their goal while slowing the third. As each faction's circular meter fills up they gain new benefits when you fight against them. Completing missions gives you skill points to improve your agents as well as giving you random Undrawn Hand cards, of which each agent can eventually equip three of that give access to new active or passive abilities. These cards can be upgraded over time either by spending Ink that you gain from discarded or replaced cards or by drawing the same ability again and equipping it onto the same skill. The goal is to complete the heist missions needed to steal an object from each faction as well as the missions that give you the keys to accessing the tower before you go onto the game's finale.

Each mission takes place on a fairly small map where you move your agents by themselves or in a group trying to avoid, stealth kill, or engage groups of enemies while trying to complete a main or side objective while also gathering items and supplies. The actual manipulation of your characters in real time here is both pretty basic and somehow never feels good to control, even the way enemy visual cones are handled is odd compared to similar games. A lot of the equipment you find will never be remotely useful and the kind of equipment you can buy is very limited in scope.

The combat can be pretty good as you gain varied characters with their own styles of play that can work together well and be further enhanced by different Undrawn Hand cards. Even the characters that seem to be thought of as much worse than others can work well in certain teams and with certain upgrades and consumables that fit with their unique passive abilities. Problems come from the game doing a horrible job at explaining anything. You have no effective way to look up what status effects do, how long those buffs or debuffs last, what will trigger and who has reaction attacks, some abilities only partially tell you what they do, and many improvements have the usual lazy descriptions with text like greatly improved crit chance/increases accuracy/increases damage/increases ammo capacity/etc without giving you the numbers you want to have in anything but especially in a turn based strategy game. It is constantly trying to mess with the target you are aiming at. I've had it randomly perform actions where it used consumable items that I was at no point even close to selecting. Certain abilities like ones that can knock enemies down are so much more useful than anything else and can lead to the majority of fights being extremely easy.

The randomness preventing you from using the characters you want in a playthrough by limiting who or when you can recruit or making it difficult to get the randomly generated cards at the end of the mission that you actually want to use with a particular character who had to have gone on that mission. The terrible, and far to common in the genre, decision to limit party size to three characters (though 4 can be available in recruitment missions when you find the new character and in some of the main missions) is made even worse in this particular game due to the three types of classes each character can be. You typically want to have one of each of in a party to be able to do the interactions with the environment to find alternate paths and items which even further limits how you are likely to make use of the game's agents. While skill points earned in a mission can be spent on any character you have, the random Undrawn Hand cards have to be equipped, turned into upgrades for copies, or discarded right away and can only be assigned to the characters who participated in a mission. This can make it hard to get what you want, or what is even useful on certain characters, making it worse is that there are a few cards that are pretty much made specifically to fit one or two characters and would be of poor use on the other 10 or 11 (and some that just look to be a poor choice on anyone).

Map are frequently reused with no changes other than potential faction or enemy variety based on their current threat level. After 15 random missions two map repeated twice and one repeated three times (this became four times a few missions later). Even if a mission objective is different this does little to change how the maps play out as a main objective can be as simple as picking something up, killing a certain enemy, or destroying a device before having to move to a small area for extraction (that is, for some reason, located in a place that usually requires you getting through one more large camp of enemies).

Random text events that were added to the game after launch are an improvement to the game. Giving you a text scenario with three options to choose that can benefit you in different ways. They did do a strange thing at times where an option might have a specific agent doing something (possibly something that keeps them busy for the weak possibly just them as flavor text) but the option with an agent can sometimes have the exact same reward as one of the other two options, usually having a specific person could give better results but here it seems like that might have been the case while it was in development but then that was ignored. While the results aren't always that interesting, these events add more flavor to the setting, enemies, and agents while also allowing you to potentially gain items you need or to have another way to manage the threat of one or all three enemy factions giving you a bit more freedom to play the missions you want to play. The additional setting information is also nice because the character conversations between missions and there varied personalities is one of the better parts of the game, as is some of the back and forth that can happen between them during missions.

When you aren't dealing with too much randomness and get into a fight with the characters and abilities you want it can feel like a decent game is there but it falls far short of the developer's previous narrative and exploration elements found in their Shadowrun games and the gameplay mechanics of Battletech while completely failing at the overworld system and a desire for multiple runs that the game seems to be going for. Even the 1930's pulp style adventurers dealing with mystical cult like enemies was better handled in the game Pathway that also handles multiple quick rougelite style runs with a small team of characters that some elements of this game feel like it might have been aiming for at some point in its development. It has what could have been an interesting setting as well as fun varied characters whose abilities can synergize well if used in certain pairs but handles nearly every system poorly.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1767053132495040916

The Japanese exclusive action platformer that has been said to be the best Spider-Man game on the platform (ignoring the beat em ups). It is, but it's still really bad. The slow and clunk controls allow you to punch, dash, dash attack, jump, jump attack, fire a little web ball shot, crawl, climb on walls or a ceiling, and to hit the trigger buttons to swing left or right from your webs. Movement and attacks feel awkward and slow, stage enemies are both very strange and can typically either be dash attacked through or present on odd target that you can't stunlock so you hit them until they hit you once then you either ignore them and move past or hit them one or two more times to destroy them. It has the usual Spider-Man game problem of being too visually zoomed in to make use of web swinging and to give some awkwardly placed stage hazards and off screen enemies that suddenly appear. Bosses require you to attack in whatever cheap way to discover that allows you to basically ignore their attacks or to stun lock them by knocking them over or backwards repeatedly. Stage design is poor and at times like a small maze (thankfully nowhere near as bad as some of the other games) there just to try to run down the pointless timer. You have some allies that show up in story scenes like Iron Fist, Human Torch, Speedball, etc but they don't do anything mechanically like in Maximum Carnage.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1766965902371947002