IGN reviewers be like "Paper Mario fans will be delighted with this loving homage!" because it looks and plays like Paper Mario. I'm a paper Mario fanboy (recently indoctrinated into Mario & Luigi, but I digress), and Bug Fables is the real deal. This game has is original, has a wonderful, multifaceted, engaging combat system, is cute, and has side quests that I actually want to play (remember Troubles in Thousand Year Door?). You can even play a challenging hard mode on your first run if you want to. My playthrough clocked 30 hours, so it's fully featured, too. Would recommend!

Oh, it's... slow. It's real slow. Movement's slow. Combat loads slow. Mario jumps slow. In the dream world, he jumps even slower. It's... slow. Even if a battle lasts one turn, if you measure it in seconds, it's far too many.

The need to utilize the 3DS' 3D functionality likely butchered the game performance-wise. And, like... trying to be more accessible to children than the series already was.

Colors are washed out. 3D environments feel small and flat, because they're 3D. Game's not very funny. It's cute but not interesting.

A well-polished, well-considered game. The moveset has been clearly thought through to both give players options and wiggle room for mistakes, while being demanding and precise. Pizza Tower is as fun to watch as it is to play itself. Levels are designed with care to be fun and interesting in casual play while also accommodating high level play (ie high speed flow state). The Warioland 4 timer-return segments are ripe for psychological warfare. Despite Peppino being completely invincible, players feel like they're in danger, feel embarrassment and alarm when they mess up a time-costly segment during pizza time. Pizza Time recontextualizes every level not just because blocks become solid and other blocks become transparent, but emotionally recontextualized, due to the fast pace and alarm of it all. It's got that "star wars pacing," if you've ever seen that graph. Also, the sprites are really fucking good. Also, the bosses are really fucking good. Also, the achievements actually incentivize players to interact with fun parts of the game in ways that compliment what the game already does. Also, the sound design is really fucking good. Funny screams, garish sirens, and genesis-inspired flashes make Pizza Tower exciting and energetic. It's clear that Pizza Tower isn't limiting itself arbitrarily to be retro; it simply knows what it likes and does it well. Great game. Very replayable. Fun and funny. Soul.

A mechanically simple adventure game with lots of love put into the animation and animation-transitions of the cat. However, if you're here for JUST the cat, prepare to put up with a by-the-numbers sci-fi escape story. I love that the camera held low the entire time, made the environments more interesting. My favorite parts of the game were the open town segments, in which the player can explore nonlinearly and discover things at their own pace. I don't see myself replaying this in the future.

This isn't Stray's fault, but "innovative gameplay" my ass. The gameplay is the least innovative part of the game. I can't wait to play more cat games in the future that are more mechanically involved.

What's that? A game with a multifaceted moveset, with not only multiple methods of gaining speed, but a challenge of keeping speed and transferring it to different directions? Count me the fuck in! Movement is technical and fun in this one! Skill floor: low, skill ceiling: sky high. I wish the level select didn't take so long and that certain stages didn't transition into cutscenes and boss fights every time.... It's kind of a basic thing to get wrong, but, hey, this game was made by two people, so I can forgive it.

Freedom Planet 2 focuses on quantity over quality this time around. The game's the size of two Freedom Planet 1s. It has four characters instead of three and with more moves. Sprites are higher resolution, despite the resulting aesthetic and readability being neither better nor worse than its predecessor. Levels feel less polished this time around. Lots of areas in which players bounce around somewhat randomly, and they don't evoke much emotion, in contrast to Freedom Planet 1's layouts feeling more choreographed and exciting. Lilac starts levels with a full meter instead of an empty one, making the first four seconds of every level a thoughtless affair of holding the dragon boost button down. Boss fights as Lilac too easily turn into mindless waiting for your dragon boost to recharge, which doesn't take very long at all, and using the new sparkly explosion move to pour damage on the boss and using the i-frames to bounce away. Levels are physically larger, yet much of it is mindlessly running forward, and the zoom outs crunch the sprites worse than Pokemon Black and White(laugh track). Freedom Planet 2 is a platformer in which players run, bounce, and kick robots in the face, and, if it's your first playthrough, much of it is interrupted by poorly written cutscenes in which players stand and talk for ten minutes that the developers really really wanted to make sure every player experienced, so they locked Classic Mode behind beating the game once ow ow ow ow, interspersed with town segments. Sadly. Freedom Planet 2 falls flat for me.