This is one of those rhythm games that's too easy on the easy difficulty and too hard on anything else. It needs more granularity.

It's also WAY too long at 100 levels for the main campaign, especially as most of the maps are copypaste and there's very little enemy variety throughout.

Not bad by any means, but pretty lightweight.

A textbook demonstration that "good" politics can't fully compensate for lackluster writing and gameplay.

The first hour or two of this is pretty rough - the dialogue is insanely ham-fisted and it takes a while to get to grips with the somewhat clunky procedural mechanic.

But even with the corny writing and not-great V.O. for the most part, the characters did warm to me and there were a few tough decisions to be made.

If this had been longer I probably would've marked it down.

What a breath of fresh air this was. For the first 80% or so I would rank this as one of the best RPGs I've played in years. Loved the art style and the voice acting. Great variety of tones and genres between the chapters.

The final chapter is a massive slog, though, and I didn't enjoy it much at all. I ended up copping out for the "bad" ending because I couldn't be bothered to go through the boss rush. I was just exhausted by the end.

[Emulated on Steam Deck]

It was OK. I enjoyed the combat a lot but the gameplay feels incredibly dated otherwise - especially the boring repetitive quest designs. I know it's only a remaster of the original game, but shame they didn't give it a more comprehensive overhaul as a legit remake. A lot of the mini-games are bad and I found most of the gameplay outside of the combat quite boring, especially mandatory fetch questing to push the story forward.

Story and especially the dialogue are insanely corny even for FF standards. Sometimes it's funny and charming, sometimes it's just obnoxious and lame.

I respect it for having a fairly short golden path though; I beat it in around 12 hours and that included like an hour of grinding the training missions. It was an easy game to play through, though if you actually want a challenge it's definitely worth playing on Hard.

Feels like a straight-to-video spin-off of the main FF series, which I guess is appropriate. Enjoyable to a point but the combat did so much of the heavy lifting for me.

[DID NOT COMPLETE - played approx 5 hours]

What a disappointment, though considering Nintendo unceremoniously dropped it on the eShop a few days before Christmas it's not THAT surprising.

Some of Golf Story's charm remains in the writing but the gameplay is so obscenely tedious. The fetch-questing is a relentless chore and made worse by the vague objectives and total lack of a minimap. I found myself deferring to Let's Plays to figure things out but after a while I conceded I wasn't having much fun and my time was better spent elsewhere.

Performance is also embarrassing for such a visually undemanding game. Stutters all over the place, which in a game which begs split-second reactions for golf swings is reaaaaally bad.

What a letdown.

This was unfortunately but unsurprisingly a pretty big step down from the original TOTB which I really enjoyed.

Even for the standards of an episodic adventure game it's such a passive experience, to the point that the boring button presses actually detract from just watching and enjoying what's going on. I failed a few QTEs and had to spend 2-3 minutes rewatching the same scene play out, which was dumb.

On the plus side I liked the three central characters and the VA was generally very good. The problem is that the script is so inconsistent - the humour ranges from amusing to cringe, like somebody on Twitter wrote it. It clearly wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy but it's just not there. It doesn't help that the story is just a completely forgettable nothingburger.

Visually it looks a lot better than most of the Telltale stuff, at least.

All in all this wasn't a chore to play but it probably should've been a bit shorter with how little dramatic meat it had on its bones. I can't imagine this'll get a second season and it's easy to appreciate why.

Just a damn fun time. It looks great in both the gameplay and animated cutscenes, the voice acting and music rules, and the combat is fluid and fun as hell.

A few minor issues hold this back from being any higher than an 8 - the repetitive industrial environments got kinda boring after a while, the platforming is annoyingly finnicky in parts, and I wish there were more delineated rhythm-based set-pieces.

But still, a pleasant surprise to kick the year in gaming off.

I'm usually pretty low on the Wales Interactive games, as much as I love the FMV genre, so it's a pleasant surprise that the rom-com of the bunch was actually pretty good!

Sure, it's very straight-forward from a design perspective and isn't doing anything interesting from a technical standpoint, but it's clear that a lot of effort went into the charming writing and especially the performances of the cast.

Unlike the other Wales game this actually makes it super achievable to easily see all the possible endings, which is nice.

Overall it felt like they put more effort into the writing and making this a charming experience, whereas most of the action/thriller games Wales has produced have felt quite low-effort and trashy.

This is one of those "nice try" games. It looks really nice for a low-budget indie and has some great atmosphere but it's held back by tedious mechanics and jank.

A sci-fi walking simulator on the Moon? Great! Except most of the game has you walking at a snail's pace - or, when the game allows you, jogging - while performing a repetitive slew of dull tasks.

The worst offenders are by far the irritating time-based missions which, while not difficult, will make you start them all over again if you fail. And I really hated the stealth part with the drones mid-way.

All in all I admire the effort even if I found this incredibly flawed, and even at only 4 hours long it felt quite padded.

Charm can take you a long way, especially if you've got very little money to work with.

This thing was clearly thrown together at minimal cost but thanks to the fun performances and knowing script - which pokes fun at FMV games themselves - it's actually a good laugh.

And at 25 minutes in length it doesn't even begin to outstay its welcome. Kind of a shame the guys who made it never put out a sequel.

I will say that this is by far one of the best-looking FMV games I've ever played, right up there with Late Shift. The cinematography looks incredibly cinematic, the acting is solid, and it largely feels like a "real movie."

The problem is that the script isn't terribly interesting; this is a generic crime procedural with a hilariously obvious big reveal.

Also the choices aren't all that compelling; I played through it twice just to see most of the alternate scenes, but didn't really care about what was going on either way.

For some reason you can't pause or skip scenes on the Steam Deck, so I couldn't be bothered to play it anymore to see more footage. Bummer.

I had a lot of fun with this. It's a nice evolution from Five Dates with dates in physical locations and a total of 10 romantic prospects. The production values are slick, the acting is solid across the board and the dialogue has a fun, cheeky vibe even when it's a bit corny at times.

I think having more fluid dating options would be a nice improvement for a future game, where the guy and girl could date all 10 of the suitors, but I'm glad they added one gay option per character, and this is a solid sequel all the same.