It's a good game with a lot of good ideas, but I have a few hang-ups about it. For the price it is, it's worth it, but the problems regularly rear their heads.
What you have is a bullet hell-styled top-down shooting action game. You progress through levels and then encounter a boss at the end and midpoint of each level. The levels themselves are mostly just mechanisms to deliver encounters with enemies, and the enemies are mostly there to introduce and acclimate you to mechanics and concepts that will be put to the test in the bosses. Not to say that the levels are trivial, there's just not that many particularly memorable encounters outside the bosses; a special attack will handle most types of enemies after you've farmed enough ammo off of them. It's fun though, and the reflect, absorb, and dash abilities let you weave through and take advantage of enemy bullet patterns and feel like an expert doing it. The story is silly, but takes itself seriously enough that I was still compelled by the various idiosyncrasies of the characters. The music is very good, and I didn't find myself getting tired of any of the songs.
There are a couple problems though.
1. Hold inputs. By default, tapping right click does a reflect shine, and holding it activates absorb bullets. Both of these moves are suited to somewhat different situations (for example, it'd be nearly pointless to reflect bullets that aren't going to bounce back to hit an enemy, like those from a fragmenting grenade) and take up different amounts of meter, so it's frustrating that the input for each isn't more distinct. When you start the game, go into the options and change the absorb input from hold to hold and release; this fixes the problem. It does not fix the same problem for the spacebar's tap to dash, hold to do a meter-draining special move problem. The special move is useful in certain situations, but when the meter it drains is empty, you can no longer do the dash. The difference between the two inputs is so small, I suspect the dash might actually be a glitch entirely (as it's a very useful move, but isn't mentioned in the tutorial).
2. Meter placement. In a top-down shooting game like this, I find most of my time is spent looking at the player character and the area directly around the player character. Unfortunately, all the important meters for health, magic, shine, and ammo are at the bottom right corner of the screen, and are very small, and the same color as most environments, making them very difficult to evaluate at a glance. Audio indicators for low health and text pop-ups indicating low shine can be helpful, but often the text pop-ups obscure incoming bullets, and only appear when you're trying to activate a shine move anyway, so by then it's too late. This is also a problem with the rhythm bar at the top of the screen (which, as a sidenote, is a system that, while very necessary to success, feels a little tacked on somehow. Perhaps because the bar is so indistinct among the rest of the game).
3. No controller support. This isn't a large issue, but it might certainly be a problem for a few users.
Despite these problems and a few minor glitches, I still recommend the game. I don't think the issues it has drag it too far down once you learn to work around them, and I think the ideas it brings to the table are more than worth the price of admission.

Steam only allows a thumbs up or down rating, so on that ground it gets a positive review, but only barely, and with respect to its original release.
When I played this, I was baffled that it was apparently well-regarded, but finding out that the original release was on the Sega Saturn, and that it pre-dates Starfox 64 changes my perspective on it a lot. It brings some unique (for the time) elements to the flying rail shooter genre. The dragon feels very slow though, and it's often unclear where on the screen you'll be allowed to move or what obstacles you need to immediately avoid. These annoyances are easily adjusted to, and don't come up more than a few times in the short run time.
This remake version runs decently well (though v-sync is off by default and is absolutely necessary, on my machine at least), which I've heard was not the case for the Switch version. Unfortunately, control options are limited to basically 4 schemes, (modern or classic, with either controller or keyboard and mouse), with no option to individually remap functions. I think I'd only really recommend the game as a historical curiosity, and only if you can find it on a good deal; I was able to pick it up under a year after launch for under 1/5 the asking price.

Incredibly short, but more than worth the asking price, if you approach it on its own terms. I wouldn't call it one of my favorite visual novels of all time, but it resonated with me at certain points, and I felt like I understood what it was saying to me, even if maybe I misunderstood it. There aren't many branching paths (as far as I can tell, the different choices either all lead to the same "route", or contribute to a possible "failure state" ending), but I kept flipping through it and reread it a few times after finishing it. Upon the second or third reading, I had a moment where I really felt like I "got" what was being communicated. Not the biggest twist in visual novel history, but a very good "aha" moment.

Absolutely fantastic. May appeal to a sort of niche crowd, given the genre typing being closer to a visual novel and sports game than an action rpg like most of Supergiant's other work thus far. Everything you do feeds into either your characters stats, or the lore of the world. The story is great, though after only a single playthrough I can see how many branching paths and possibilities I might have missed. The modularity of all the story components is staggering. My only complaint is the lack of a new game+ mode, though I can see how that would go against their intended design, so it's not really an issue.

It's...okay. The big twist of Pony Island is that it's not about ponies or an island at all, and it's instead something else entirely. It's very good about building on the bits of knowledge it's already given you in order to tutorialize throughout the whole experience without shoving any abrupt explanations in your face about some new game element, so you feel clever when you solve a problem, like you figured it out entirely on your own even though your thought process was probably exactly what the developer wanted you to go through. Presentation-wise, it's kind of clever, a little bit irreverant about its subject matter at times, which comes across as odd when a lot of the hints at the "lore" seem to suggest it's meant to be taken more seriously. It's one of those games that works far better if you play it yourself rather than watch someone else play it, and there are several points where the narrative/game design tricks they pull honestly made me laugh. But overal, I disagree with the overwhelmingly positive rating the title is being given right now, and I don't think I'd recommend it. It's not awful, it's just that your money is just better spent elsewhere.

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, it strikes me very much as a "student's first game" sort of project, with very simple graphics, no story to speak of, minimal graphics, etc. On the other hand, it presents itself very well. The music is well-fitting and relaxing, of the sort of genre that I like, the graphics are crisp and the lighting makes it feel not repetetive despite it all just being the same blocks everywhere. I 100% completed it with all achievements and moving at a leisurely pace in only 26 minutes. I don't think I'm going to go back to it. If I'd bought this game on an impulse or heard it talked up somewhere and bought it at full price, I'd be upset with my purchase. But since I got it in a humble bundle full of other games I'd had my eye on, I'm kind of okay with it. I don't know if I agree with the "overwhelmingly positive" rating it's being given though. It's a good game, keep in mind, but the question being asked by this review system is if I would RECOMMEND it. And I'd have to say no. It's too bare-bones, too much like a student project or a freeware game. I enjoyed it, but I would not recommend it.

Retro City Rampage tries to do the whole GTA/Bethesda game/Ubigame thing of being a big open world that you get familiar with by driving around a hub, and that's a pretty modern convention. It also tries to do this while clumsily weilding about what they will assert is a very retro playstyle. The thing is, this ends up being a worst of both worlds scenario, strung with boring and repetitive combat scenarios spread across a pretty uninteresting city, with little motivating you to follow through with the dozens of side missions that show up on your radar. When I did try to do them, they felt like they were repeating the worst parts of the main campaign, which itself was largely juvenile in tone and design. They throw a million expendable cops, thugs, and soldiers your way, with a hundred invisible checkpoints and an infinite supply of lives so that you die a million times (97 by the end in my case) without losing a lot of progress. And I can't help but feel like that blind jab at "difficulty" is what they believed would make their game justifiable as "Nintendo Hard". RCR is less a game and more a hamfisted, halfhearted, and mostly unfunny collection of cheap references and gags.