Wonder is easily in my eyes the best side-scrolling Mario platforming game since Super Mario Word. What really stands out about this game is the level design variety in terms of backgrounds and overall platforming themes. Even though the "Worlds" have certain themes to them (such as snow, sand, lava, etc) the levels themselves play very different, offering a great amount of varierty.

In addition to the natural variety that each level has, the addition of the Wonder Flower powerup increases variety and innovation even more. The Wonder Flower changes mechanics, visuals, physics and transforms the players to unique characters in certain levels. But there's more: Wonder introduces new powerups in the form of elephant Mario, bubble flower and drill head costume. Each of these new powerups add another layer of strategy for the levels. Collectibles are scattered in the form of wonder flower purple coins.

Controls are incredibly tight and physics extremely well-tuned, making platforming in this game very fair. It must be said though that the difficulty in this game is on the "very low" side making this one of the easiest Mario platforming games.

Lastly, the overall presentation in the game is fantastic. Colors are vibrant and animations are next-level for a Mario game. Somehow Nintendo has managed to bring yet another timeless Mario side-scrolling game so this is a must-have if you own a Nintendo Switch.

One of the more insane games I've played recently. Vampire Survivors is not exactly a well made game, it looks like it could be made in MSPaint and its "secrets", as in secret levels, characters etc. make no fucking sense whatsoever. Not just in how you attain them but in like, their literal content. Why is there a secret character in this game called "Peppino" as in, Peppino the protagonist from Pizza Tower...And he's just a fucking tree? It's literally a tree?? Why can you play as three identical ghosts of different colours called "Esdeath", "Toasty" and "Smithy"? What is the purpose of the Il Molise stage? Or the Moongolow stage? Why is it called "Moongolow"? Why is that O there? What's the deal with all of the (pun intended) batshit insane unlock methods for random shit that makes no sense? What's different about the "challenge" stages like Bat Country and Tiny Bridge that seem to be both easier and quicker to complete (and therefore less challenging) than the regular stages? Could the game please stop to explain literally anything about itself at any point? No? Goofy arcade-ass game.

Oh, yeah. The gameplay.

It's fun! Damn this shit's fun as hell.

Vampire Survivors IS a well designed game. What a trip. I love the bit where I'm all like "whooosh, whooosh, PEW PEW PEW bam! bam! POOOOOOOOOOOOW"

"I am become death, the bullets of hell" -J. Robert Oppenheimer

I played this game for free on Game Pass and it gave me more hours of enjoyment than some somber slice-of-life indie about managing my emotions could ever have! Not bad for some piece of shit shovelware cooked up in Flash that takes half its identity from Castlevania! All of the bestiary entries are actually pretty funny and well-written! You didn't feel like just stopping and telling me what the fuck Eudaimonia M is supposed to be? What it's supposed to mean? How I even unlocked it? Ah, fuck it, I like blowing shit up too much

✅75%

Toy Story 3 is one of my all-time favorite movies, and this adaptation was honestly a surprise. I remember when I was younger I couldn't get past the train section at the beginning. Oh how my skills have grown. The train section was the perfect way for this game to start off not only because that's how the movie opens, but because it has "high stakes" action for a kids/family game and introduces the mechanics really well. After that, it sends you in two directions: the story mode and toy box mode. Story mode was the toys retelling the events of Toy Story 3 and the before and after in bits and pieces, and I'd say it has a lot of memorable things. You get to play through the opening of Toy Story 2 which is a heck of a lot of fun and there's also the junkyard portion which brings all the mechanics and characters into a great penultimate mission. Sometimes it can feel like it's steering off track of the main movie mission with an extended portion of playing in Bonnie's room, but all of the missions are really fun and provide something unique. There isn't anything super notable in the gameplay, but what it does to respect the IP and provide a story mode that doesn't actually suck gives it points.

Then we get to Toy Box mode which made the inner Disney Infinity geek want to scream. I didn't know how much Infinity borrowed from Toy Box mode before I played this, and I truly see the inspiration. The music, sound effects, mechanics, set pieces, controls, and gameplay are all transferred from Toy Box mode to Disney Infinity. The race beacon is even the same! I'm not discrediting Infinity for borrowing too much, but it made me find more stuff in the Toy Box mode to do. The Toy Box mode is basically a Disney Infinity playset but if it was in Infinity I'd consider it one of the better ones. You get to hang out in Woody's Roundup's western town with a big mine, but there's so much else to do. You go through a haunted Sid's house, Lotso's enchated garden, and Zurg's space station. All of these use unique mechanics that are so fun. Woody with a laser gun? Ok! Woody riding a dragon? Awesome! The Toy Box has a lot of repetitive missions of just dressing up townspeople and buildings, but there are so many standouts in the Toy Box. The final main mission can feel a little underwhelming, but it gives you a fun cutscene to end it all off.

Toy Story 3 The Video Game isn't special by any means, but for inspiring Disney Infinity, respecting the Toy Story IP so well and giving great missions like the Buzz Lightyear video game and the Toy Box mode as a whole, it gives an incredible experience for Toy Story fans. Easily one of the better movie to game adaptations!

If there is one thing I can say that Metroid Prime has in spades, it's atmosphere. The music, sounds, and environment design do remind me of other sci-fi shooters of the time, such as Halo or Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. The metroidvania formula was adapted sufficiently to a 3D FPS, but not without some caveats.

First off, far be it from me to complain about backtracking in a Metroid game, but it gets a bit tedious in the back half here. Samus doesn't feel even half as quick as she does in the 2D titles, and the later game power-ups do not do enough to make up for that. Lots of little animations (switching beam types, morph ball transformations, etc.) just feel slightly too long as well. I liked the scanning feature in theory, but again it always felt a little bit too long and ultimately came at the cost of shoving the overall plot of the game into text logs.

All that being said, the ability to freely switch between each beam type was a cool idea and each one maintained relevancy throughout. The level design is as impeccable as always with each area being interconnected in (usually) convenient ways once you've got the necessary abilities. There's good enemy variety, and a couple of cool bosses too.

Having only played Prime 3 (and mostly forgotten it since), Prime didn't quite blow me away as much as I was hoping. It's solid, and I still want to finally play 2 when Nintendo finally decides to port it; just wish everything was a little bit quicker.

There's a good reason why FE Awakening is responsible for popularizing the series in the West: this game manages to provide a complete package with a good story, good soundtrack, good characters with corresponding development and most importantly a well designed strategy jRPG experience.

Levels and characters are very well designed and the story carries the game to an interesting conclusion. Additionally, this game being released on the 3DS was the perfect match in order to take your strategy RPG experience on the go.

Just fantastic, I loved this. Being a 3D top-down Zelda, it has a lot of cool puzzles that play around with depth perception and figuring out the relation between your current position and higher and lower platforms. But then you combine that with the Merge mechanic? Bruh, this game's puzzles become genius at some points. Special mention to the little hollowed out box in Turtle Rock that you can merge into to find rupees, such a cool moment. This is the kind of game that could only work on the 3DS, it's a brilliant example of how to utilise and maximize the technology of the system you're on. On the subject of rupees, the renting mechanic which has you paying money to rent out equipment instead of always finding them in a dungeon makes rupees feel much more meaningful than ever before. It also makes dungeons a lot more freeform, there are a few cases where you can solve puzzles in numerous different ways depending on which equipment you currently have on you! The game is a lot less linear than another traditional Zelda games because you can feasibly tackle the game's dungeons in almost any order and again, whether or not you can progress in them is dependent on which items you've chosen to rent.

This non-linearity is a blessing and a curse. It allows much more freedom and makes the world feel far more cohesive, but it can contribute to a slightly wonky difficulty curve. Some dungeons like the Thieves Hideout and Swamp Palace are clearly intended to be cleared earlier, whereas the Dark Palace and especially Ice Ruin are meant to be tackled later. As a result, if you follow more or less the "relatively open but still very much existent" developer-intended path, you'll have a pretty good curve! But let's all have a moment of silence for those poor departed souls who decided to make the Ice Ruins one of their first dungeons...I don't know how the fuck you did it, but I'm sure you exist and I'm very sorry for you.

The only other gripe I have with the game is that the bosses can feel very "trial and error", as many complaints as people have with Navi and the like; I do think the more traditional 3D Zelda games do a great job of giving you an idea of what to do about the boss without outright giving it away. In A Link Between Worlds the boss is either a giant eyeball literally surrounded by other eyeballs, or I took quite a lot of unnecessary damage trying to figure out what to do about it. The worst offender of this is honestly the final battle against Yuga. How you finish him is VERY cool, merging into the wall, shooting an arrow and then going around the side of him and also shooting an arrow around the whole wall to finish him off, but like I say I took quite a lot of hits and even a whole death trying to figure it out and while I don't like having my hand held, for such a tense situation - the final battle, I think the game could honestly have afforded to make it a bit more immediately obvious here. Very minor, though, some of the bosses are great.