Black Bird isn’t a substantial game by any metric, but that doesn’t mean it's not worth your time. There are a lot of games with smaller scope that don’t get a lot of attention because they aren’t the “next big thing.” Most people’s favorite game isn’t a short 30 minute indie game, and I’m not here to say it should be otherwise. But I do think that games with a scope as large as Black Bird’s do get overlooked in favor of something more substantial.

Black Bird is charming to an extent that few games are. I would almost put it up there with games like Earthbound and Katamari Damacy in how charming it is. The pixel art is gorgeous, the color palettes are subdued in a way that makes such vastly different environments feel cohesive to one project. The character designs are as charming as ever, most of Onion Games stuff has a distinct look to it, and it's not absent here. The music is great too, ranging from old classical music, to new tracks in the same vein. It acts as a nice background since so many goofy and wacky sound effects layer over the music.

The gameplay isn’t noteworthy, but it doesn’t have to be. I heard someone recently talking about how Shmups have almost become synonymous with Bullet-Hells, and it really struck me how few Shmups are slower paced. It's refreshing to see something that isn’t as intense in the same genre. It allows the player to focus on the presentation more and fits better with the tone of the game.

I think Black Bird understands that it's not a monolithic title, and it's all the better for it. Onion Games really honed in on what their vision for the game was, and it turned out great.

Crossovers are incredibly tricky things to do right. A strong crossover to me is one that not only pulls from unexpected sources to keep that surreal "this should not be possible" sense of surprise, but treats those sources with proper care and respect. In this day and age though, it's hard for me not to feel kind of apathetic to crossover media in general, as it seems like every entertainment megacorporation wants to create their own multiverses in order to circlejerk over how many IP they've managed to eat up. Lego Dimensions has a bit of both in it, though I'm happy to say it's moreso the former than the latter.

As someone who has had both huge Lego and toys-to-life phases in my youth (a very deadly combination for the wallet of my parents, for sure), this game has always interested me. I wasn't able to buy it in its time due to it being significantly more expensive than other TTL games. Like, I remember this game charging 100 dollars for the starter set and 30 dollars for the character packs, shit was not within my realm of affordability at the time. Luckily, we happen to live in the cool future that has NFC stickers and android apps to basically unlock all the money-gated content without having to buy discontinued lego sets from dubious resellers!

The game is a pretty typical Lego game, the formula really hasn't changed at all since the Lego Star wars games that released a decade prior. Collect studs, find minikits, solve puzzles, etc. My two biggest gripes come from the level length and the toys-to-life integration. Levels are far longer than is comfortable for me, with shit taking anywhere from 30-80 minutes to complete which is just too exhausting for the type of games these lego titles are. The toy pad is also used in a rather annoying way, as there are three sections to it that each have their own bespoke NFC readers and LED lights, and the game constantly requires you to shift characters around on the portal in order to solve puzzles. Whether it's having each section on the pad correspond to warping your character to three different places, coloring your characters in game and then moving their figure to color in the pad lights to match a certain pattern, having different sections give different elemental attributes, or having different parts of the pad change your in-game character size, playing this game required me to constantly keep stopping everything I was doing to go lean over to the pad on the table and shuffle characters around constantly. It also means that most of the puzzles are the exact same, so the actual act of playing campaign levels gets really stale really quickly.

The crossover aspect of this game is its biggest strength, though not all properties are treated equal. There are 30 "worlds" that the game picks characters from, though the amount of content each world has varies depending on the IP. The main campaign consists of the trio on the cover going through 11 different worlds and engaging with various mashup shenanigans throughout. Your mileage definitely varies with how many of the crossed-over IP you actually care about, as I was mostly going into the campaign eager to see the Portal, Ghostbusters, Scooby Doo, Midway, and Back to the Future content only to get mostly jebaited by constant DC Universe characters invading random places I didn't give a shit about. Scooby and the gang barely got any screentime in the main campaign!!! There are also one-off bonus levels that exist, but they only are there for certain worlds so fans of specific series might be disappointed to see they only got table scraps. Lastly there are huge explorable hubworlds full of side missions and collectables for every single world in the game, so at the very least there's something to do for fans of each IP. Regardless of the total amount of content each IP was given, they did make sure to do them all as much justice as they possibly could, and filled the game to the brim with details and references that fans can appreciate. There's a sonic level with both a Mecha Sonic fight AND a chaos fight. The back to the future world has multiple different variations for each of the many time periods that you can travel between. The midway arcade world has nearly an entire compilation titles worth of playable arcade games on their own janky emulators. The Doctor Who character has fully voiced, uniquely animated variations for every doctor incarnation, AS WELL as bespoke theme music for using the TARDIS complete with period-accurate TARDIS interiors. There are over 45 minutes of unique character-to-character dialog for all sorts of interactions ranging from your expected quirky chatter (Sonic can remark on Doctor Who supposedly naming his screwdriver after him) to unexpected deeper cuts (the midway gamer kid straight up references LJN's shitty back to the future game when paired with Marty Mcfly). The credits music is even a brand new Jonathan Coulton GLaDOS song for petes sake! At the end of the day the crossovers could be seen as shallow fanservice, but it felt to me like it was a labor of love by fans on the developmental side.

The game really is built like a kid playing with their own Lego sets. Playful, ambitious, slightly unhinged, messy, and unbalanced as there's clearly favoritism towards certain sets over others. All the different aspects of the game definitely make it difficult to review and cleanly get my thoughts on it properly out, that's for sure. A messy, fragmented, review for a messy, fragmented game, I guess. Still something that I am overall impressed by the scope of, I didn't even mention the fact that there are one thousand and sixteen gold bricks to earn throughout the game. In my first playthrough being as generally thorough with the levels as I could, I earned about 20, to put how rediculously insane that total number is. Would definitely suggest giving it a shot if you have the means to play without breaking the bank and like enough of the worlds present. Just do yourself a favor and avoid the Wii U port like the plague.

A must-play if you like anything relating to squaresoft, or 90s rpgs. You are obligated to help giving this gem of a game the recognition it deserves.

This game kicks ass, its a sidescroller shooter mech rpg with lots of different possible playstyles, high end graphics for the snes, a great albeit somewhat repetitive soundtrack, a colourful cast of characters, and most importantly, its just really fun. Your Wanzer (in universe name for mechs) has this weight and feel unlike most platformers that just feels so satisfying, and since its an rpg, you'll get stronger, more mobile and more capable. It takes a bit to get the wheels rolling, but still emerges as one of squaresoft's best 90s releases, yet unfortunately remains one of their most obscure and underappreciated games as well.