It's a monster catching gacha game with pretty decent turn-based combat that actually has some unique mechanics. Unfortunately it has one big issue: the two main gameplay features - monster catching and gacha - literally oppose each other. Why on earth would you ever use a 2 star monster you caught in the field when you could just use the 5 star character you just rolled in the gacha? After you roll a few times there's literally no reason to ever again catch a monster in this monster catching game. This is actually a perfect example of what could have been a pretty ok little phone rpg being absolutely ruined by its gacha mechanics. Shame.

A spinoff of Mobile Legends, which is pretty much just a League of Legends ripoff but for mobile devices. Apparently it's pretty popular in Indonesia, go figure. Anyway, this one's also a ripoff, this time of AFK arena and other similar idle games. It's fine, I guess. The character designs aren't bad, I suppose? meh

A pretty standard idle game. The pixel graphics are pretty cute and the UI seems pretty polished actually, especially compared to some other janky idle games that get pushed on you in the play store. Some of the dialogue is pretty witty, and they have some fun with tropes here and there. It's alright

Pretty dang decent little indie fighting game. Aesthetic is on-point, love the flat colors and smooth animation. Reminds me of Samurai Jack. Music fits well, but I kinda wish there was more than the few minimistic tracks currently offered. Mechanics are rock-solid, emphasizing spacing (footsies galore) and cancelling out of any move using a special meter in a very similar way to a SFIV FADC. Unfortunately the community's pretty small, despite the GGPO rollback, and there's very few characters and even fewer stages. Hoping they continue work on it, I'd love to see this stylish little fighter get popular in the future.

A pretty standard gacha auto-battler. Presentation's nice though. The 3d anime art style is cute and polished and the character designs are actually pretty good, in my opinion.

2021

Pretty spooky. Another one of these PS1 style horror games, though this one blends security-camera type footage backgrounds with the low-poly characters for an incredibly unnerving effect. The monster's rather abstract but honestly still terrifying and the ending sequence is actually pretty sick. Reminds me of the Anubis Rex boss from Pac-Man World, if anyone gets that.

Neat little Lynchian fable. Love the voice acting, especially from the titular owl. Really only like one puzzle to solve and you're done, though. Wish there was a bit more to it, though looking forward to anything else the creators make.

Love any game that reminds me of Pikmin. This one's pretty okay. A lot of greek philosopher and god lore, most of which I'd never even heard of, didn't really expect that. Great game for Mythology majors, if they do indeed exist. Wish there was a bit more to it, gameplay wise. I know it's ostensibly an angry mob simulator, but some of the combat feels a bit too chaotic even so. That stage one theme is a bop though, can I just say. Whatever stringed instrument that lead is sounds fantastic with the chiptune accompaniment.

The presentation of this gacha game auto-battler is actually extremely well done. The art is detailed and the live 2D is pretty well done, if excessive at times. The waifu art isn't exactly to my taste though. Some of the proportions go way too overboard imo, and that combined with the baby-like faces that the artists like to use a lot kinda give me some creepy vibes, I don't know. That being said, the gameplay is nonexistent, you kinda just put your best characters on a team and then press the auto and fast forward buttons. There's not even really that much of an emphasis on gear builds and team composition strategy like other games in the genre. There's just grinding and many ways to use money to skip grinding. Yet another flashy slot-machine game made explicitly to attract whales with bells and whistles, who would've thought.

Sick gameplay and a banger soundtrack. Can't believe there aren't more off-the-wall crazy racing games like this. Boosting the car off the road and wall-riding and even ceiling-riding is so goddamn satisfying and cool I can't get enough of it. This game is literally free, I don't understand why more people aren't talking about it, or DISTANCE for that matter, it's a damn crime.

おじさんゲーム。Yep, it's a Dead or Alive gacha game. You roll for cute swimsuits to dress up the girls, level them up, and then press the auto battle button so you can sit back and creepily watch them play beach volleyball. It's absolutely the most transparent it's ever been. There's a girl for every oji-san taste, pretty much. One of them calls you owner-chan, another calls you owner-han, y'all know how it is. Yes, there's a photoshoot mode, and yes, you can spray the girls with water to make their skin shiny, strictly for photo shooting purposes of course. Of course there's a casino, like in the other Xtreme Volleyball games, and that's pretty fun, since y'know, it's a casino. Also, is it just me, or does the casino theme in this game kind of slap? I kinda want to listen to it on a loop outside of the game, unironically. The music in general's not bad, actually. Pretty tropical and laid back, all in English, though, with a few not-exactly-native odd lyrics and pronunciations here and there, interesting choice. Overall, pretty okay game if you wanna get your creep on, but not really much to offer outside the sex appeal. Oh yeah, and Sayuri's absolutely the hottest woman out of all of them, by far. I have no idea why she's not more popular with the fanbase. 24 too old for Japan, I guess? Ah well.

This game is basically split in two, gameplay-wise. There's an rts part, where you play as a dragon with a jetpack commanding your troops on the field, and a politics part, where you decide policy issues for the new government you're making which effect both the rts game as well as your relationships with each of the fantasy race's representatives. The rts part's just okay, it's a little janky, even. The politics part is more compelling, as the character writing's pretty good. While the representatives are basically just caricatures of political ideologies (the elf's an environmentalist, the dwarf's a capitalist, etc.), they're pretty dang funny caricatures. Accurate even, I dare say. Your officers are also pretty well developed, and I loved hearing what they had to say. I especially loved Scarlett. She's great! Also unexpectedly pretty good queer representation, how 'bout that?

Well-made gacha auto-battler with an extreme emphasis on cuteness. Gameplay is typical of the genre, where the only real decisions you make are team composition, and which gear to grind for with your daily stamina. As usual, there's pretty much never any reason to turn off the auto battle and fast forward buttons.

What sets this game apart is the fully voice acted story, fully animated anime style cutscenes, and legitimately banger music. Cygames puts a lot of thought into making their games look extremely polished and professional, and they put more effort than I would expect for a gacha game.

For example, every time there's an event, you hear an instrumental of the main event theme on the main event page. There's a different version of the same theme throughout the event stories. And by the time you get done with the event quest, you get presented with a fully animated musical credit sequence where the theme now has lyrics, sung by the main characters featured during the event. It's cute, and indicative of way more time and effort put in than I've seen in other games in the genre. This amount of polish is even more apparent in their latest game, Uma Musume.

The biggest criticism I have (outside of being a gacha game), is that the overall tone of the game is waaay to cute for me, personally. As much as I love wholesome cuteness, most of the dialogue seriously makes me feel like I'm losing IQ points. There's kawaii, and then there's saccharine, and somehow this game has managed to go even beyond that. All the characters are just SO DUMB and since they're trying to appeal to otaku, they of course are all in love with the main character and do the same blushing stammering bits where they don't want to reveal their true feelings to you, yada yada. I really like the character designs though. they're all pretty iconic and fit their respective character personalities while consistently being cute-sexy, which seems to be what they're going for.

Overall, this actually one of the better gacha games I've played. Gameplay is braindead as usual, but the characters are cute and the story's perfect if you find yourself really needing just like a huge dollop of kawaii anime bullcrap.

(Content warning: rape)

A hentai gacha game with a dark magical girl theme. Aesthetically and plot-wise it liberally takes a lot of inspiration from Madoka Magica. There's actually two versions of the game, Magicami, the "safe" version which does not have sex scenes, and Magicami DX, the nsfw version which does. This review is for the DX version, since I imagine most people play that one, obviously.

Aesthetically, the game looks pretty dang good, especially for a browser game. The girls are cute and they have a sizeable variety of magical girl outfits to wear, and roll for of course. I actually quite like the monster designs. Since the theme is dark magical girl porn, the monsters accordingly are also sexy demon creatures, some of which have been horrifyingly transformed into pretty disturbing abominations. You can see the spider demon in the cover art here I think, where she has like sexy human legs instead of spider legs, it's frankly disturbing but also kind of rad, not gonna lie.

The characters are pretty cute, and personality wise actually rather likeable, a lot of which I think is owed to the quite decent voice acting. The goal, I think, is to endear you to the characters so that you can be adequately horrified when they, in accordance to the plot, horribly lose and then get tortured and uh, raped, by the monsters. A lot of the sex scenes I'm pretty sure are rape scenes by the way, so if you were looking for something more Jun'ai or vanilla, there's probably better games for you to play. And let me tell you, for better or worse, the voice acting is horrifyingly good during the rape scenes. They, uh, really sell the tortured screaming, I guess. Even the guy main character has some pretty gnarly screams of despair. The performances as a whole are like, genuinely disturbing and don't exactly put me in the mood, personally. I'm not really sure why these are in a porn game? Though I guess if you have a rape kink, that's like, part of it, probably. They're thoughtful enough to put a content warning before the scene happens though, so that's nice.

Gameplay wise it's actually not bad, if you like jrpg combat. The animations are snappy and the dynamic camera angles combined with the clean Persona-esque UI make battles rather nice to look at. The battle music also reminds me of Persona, to be honest. It's nothing too especially interesting though, and you can just auto-battle once you get sufficiently strong enough anyway.

Overall, a pretty decent game if you have a rape fetish, but probably not worth it otherwise.

To be honest, it would've been better if it wasn't a roguelike. The story and atmosphere are so strong that if they had manually tailored the combat progression more rather than leave so many elements up to random chance, it would've felt more of like a polished experience which would've better served the cinematic vibe they're going for. Otherwise, some pretty solid sci-fi that, in my opinion, succeeds in making the player asks themselves some pretty interesting philosophical questions, the goal of any good sci-fi really.