(This is the 35th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The final game I played for my 1990 play-list is Actraiser, the fourth SNES game to ever release, which released on December 16th and is unique for combining two genres that you don't see combined often: City building and platforming.

There are multiple towns that you have to liberate from monsters in order for humans to live in them. You then help them establish themselves there and help them out with all their needs. Basically, you play god. Each town has a few monster lairs that you need to close and then a final one that you need to venture into in platforming sections to kill the boss. Once a town has no monsters left, you can move on to the next one.

Each town tells its own little story, which adds a lot of motivation to playing this game to completion. The gameplay itself offers a fun loop for a few hours, but due to its age and limitations does get repetitive after a while, at least it did to me.

But the mix of these genres works pretty well here and this game was yet another standout for the SNES, which looks to provide a lot of fun as I move on to 1991, where the world was greeted by classics like Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Castlevania IV, among others.

OVERALL
Should be in your play-list if you're looking to find out what some of the better games of the early 90s were. It has a unique mix of city-building and platformer that is pretty simple in execution due to the time it released in, but overall pretty successful in offering the player a fun 10 hours or so of gameplay.

Reviewed on Nov 07, 2022


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