Boy oh boy this one is frustrating. The first 2 Star Wars Battlefront games were a huge part of my childhood. I remember coming home from school, loading up a massive instant action playlist and playing until my TV time was up. When rumors around a possible port of the games began surfacing I had high hopes, both have their strengths and weaknesses, and the PC versions had issues of their own (though years of mods could fix some of these) I really just wanted a way to quickly boot up the original duology and play them on a modern platform. In that way, this collection somewhat succeeds.

Starting this on switch immediately flooded me with nostalgia right down to the profile creation. However, upon jumping into the first game's campaign, I instantly noticed something wrong with the loading sound effects, a portent of what was to come. That said, this was running at a smooth 60fps, and was scaled mostly well to 1080p. Other than that, the game played almost exactly as I remembered, wrinkles and all, but some things looked a little off. This continued once I moved over to Battlefront 2 where certain textures were detached from level geometry, and at the beginning of certain matches, several frames would drop for a few seconds. That said, the game is still playable, largely unupgraded, but I wasnt looking for an upgrade. Unfortunately, the online efforts were near non-existent, with there barely being any servers, and said servers being completely unpopulated after a few days, and the performance on BF2 while in online just being absolutely awful is unacceptable.

This last point is a more personal thing, while I definitely wanted the game to be faithful to what came before, I also thought this would have been a perfect opportunity to fix issues that plagued the original, namely the dumb AI, and the overly aggressive aim assist. Another thing would be that BF1 has air combat on ground maps, and BF2 substituted that with just having space maps, but this would have been a perfect opportunity to port some of that over. Finally, I think it would have been a good opportunity to bring some of the content from the PSP games, and for $35, I think its fair to expect more. However, at the end of the day, the bare minimum is what I expect of Aspyr, and they seemingly cant even do that.

As of today, Aspyr have announced a patch that will be addressing several of these issues, and hopefully returning to this later will prove to be worthwhile.

Um puzzle com uma estética adorável e uma história fofinha da família de gatinhos.

O objetivo é reorganizar as marmitinhas e para isso você tem algumas ferramentas e regras específicas de cada fase, como por exemplo ferramentas que trocam ingredientes de lugar, ou retiram eles da marmita para que você possa organizar e colocar em outros lugares.

Começa muito facinho e gostosinho, nível fazer uns 10 de uma vez só e progressivamente vai ficando mais difícil nível que eu ficava o dia todo pra resolver um só (abrindo de vez em quando durante o dia, como todo jogo mobile deve ser jogado). Infelizmente ficou difícil demais pra mim e acabou a magia, porque começou a me dar preguiça da dificuldade de alguns e passou a me cansar mais do que me divertir.

No fim fiz 93 puzzles de 127 e eu acho que ta bom, aproveitei bastante o jogo e me diverti enquanto deu.

Recomendo com ressalvas.

Jogado no Google Play Pass.

Well, I got what I expected. Not that that's a bad thing, of course.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a remake of the GBA game of the same name. While I'll admit that it's been a long time since I played the original version of this game, I will say that I enjoyed that game a lot. When this remake was announced, it immediately got marked on my calendar. While I didn't buy it day 1, I still got to it eventually, and honestly, I think it does a lot right.

The cutscenes look great and the voice acting (Charles Martinet, surprisingly. Maybe this was recorded before he left?) is fun. I do wish they used the original's script since I liked how chatty Mario was in it. He had some good Popeye energy with the direction in that title that sadly isn't present here.

The graphics look really cute during stages. All the enemies having all sorts of details to show that they're toys was a treat to see. The Mini Marios are pretty expressive, as well. Outside the stages, though, you're met with the same sterilized menus that have become common in Mario titles. I don't know how else to describe it besides too clean, if that makes any sense. It kinda puts me off, and I feel like the menus should have a bit more flair to them that just isn't here. It really gives off this mobile game energy, which makes sense since this is a remake of a portable title, but I just wish there was a bit more life to the menus, ya know?

The game plays pretty well, and pulling off side jumps and handstand jumps is snappy and satisfying. Experienced players will be flipping around all the stages, finding ways to get present boxes in creative ways while speedily clearing stages. I think on average I spent around 20 minutes in each world, including getting the present boxes in each stage. You'll clear this game in no time if you're experienced with games like the original or the Game Boy Donkey Kong title.

In the original, you would need to get a high score on stages in order to earn stars, which would unlock expert stages to test your playing ability. This would involve not only getting all the presents, but also defeating enemies, not dying, and getting through stages quickly to maximize score. Needless to say, it was stressful. Thankfully in this remake, they eased the requirements for stars. Now you only need to get all of the presents in any stage, which is a welcome change.

Despite there being over 100 stages in this game, it's very short. Each stage only takes a few minutes max to clear, with many being beatable in under a minute. A player newer to games like this may have a long journey on their hands, but it only took me a good few hours to beat every stage in the game. This is still a fun game and I don't regret my time playing it, but I think you would be better off waiting for one of Nintendo's fabled sales before snagging this one.

The bottom line is that Sea of Stars is an ultimately mediocre title that manages to cobble together its form by stealing things from a dozen other, older, better titles. Each thing it steals is implemented worse than the game it steals from, but still good enough to not be bad. The act of playing the game is fine. It's Fine. It is the ultimate definition of Mid. Mid of Stars.

To list all this game's faults on a lower level than "wow it looks pretty" would to be sit here all day, but I can't help but go over some of the biggest issues I had during my time with it.

The first and foremost is the writing and plot--the plot by itself is pretty standard, just your basic "go kill the demon king" storyline when you get down to it, but its building off lore from a game pretty notorious for having nonsense lore(The Messenger) so it ends up being nonsense here as well--none of the worldbuilding details or twists really ever land because you never get the sense that this world is anything more than levels in a video game. There's like maybe five actual towns in the game, for gods sake. This is compounded by the character writing that manages to be completely uninteresting at best, and positively dreadful at worst. The worst of it is a major side-character in act 1 that speaks exclusively in video game references, who basically ruins every scene she is in and kill what little pathos there can be in this game. Once she steps aside, it gets a little better and I'd even say act 2 cooks for a short time, but then they do the very bold decision to put the only two characters with any sort of internality on a bus until literally the final boss door. Its frustrating. That's not to speak of the other issue with the game not respecting itself, every scene that gets a little tropey immediately gets a Marvel quip to kill any tension and remind you you're seeing scenes played out in a dozen older games with way more self-respect. It sucks.

Then, there's the game pacing. As mentioned, the game has I think six actual "towns" in it, and you only visit each of them at a single point in your journey which means you consistently go 4+ dungeons at a time without any "downtime" where you can sidequest, play minigames, talk to npcs etc. They completely missed the memo on the "vibes" of a jrpg in spite of aping these games so hard--those points where you're just sort of idly walking around town are important and this game just doesn't have any of that. This is compounded by what I'd call location issues--backtracking even after you get to the end of the game with all movement options is painful, consistently involving traversing old dungeons or going through two-three extra screens to get to where you need to go, so the game actively disincentivizes you from trying to do anything besides progress the main quest.

The actual gameplay is split into two--puzzle dungeons generously described as "Crosscode but worse" and combat described as "Mario RPG but worse", double-hampered by piss-easy difficulty. Like, this game has 8 different accessibility options but I struggle to find how anyone would need them when the game difficulty is toggled so low.

Which sucks, because the one place the game excels in is the economy/item management, you have a very limited inventory that heavily incentivizes consumable usage, and also the gold is a really tight resource that you have to manage. In theory, this is great and adds an attrition factor the long dungeon dives mentioned earlier--in practice, the difficulty tuning being so low means you never interact with those systems because you can easily go through the game never using consumables which means you can sell all the crafting supplies for a surplus of money.

Even the OST manages to not really be striking, like its perfectly serviceable but I never really found myself humming a tune or getting hyped by a song. Its just, rpg music. You could replace it with the rpgmaker default soundpack and I think the experience would have been exactly the same.

And yet, in spite of all this, I still finished the game including the true ending that demands like 95% completion because it was juuuust that not bad enough that I could sunk cost fallacy my way through it.

The final thing I'd leave you with that speaks to the shoddy nature of the game is the opening--after the framing device, the game opens with our new heroes going off to their first mission. You fight exactly one tutorial battle vs a goblin, then it forces you into a flashback where you see their backstory. This last an hour and leads up to exactly the beginning of the game. Why did they have the flashback? Why would you not just start the game from the backstory sequence? Its the sort of thing literally any editor would notice and rectify immediately.

Truly, the Mid of Stars.

Oh no.

I was going to start this off by saying that I've personally dealt with a lot of the subject matter that was tackled in the game and that's why I think it's abysmal but I don't even think you need that to recognize how awfully mishandled pretty much everything is. The whole game feels like it's PSA video on bullying/suicide/parental abuse/whatever else they tried to shove in here that was specifically made for middle schoolers. It's so distilled and surface-level that it would've been insulting had it not been for the almost satirical performances and downright cringey writing. It's also a mess on the gameplay front. The environments are pretty to look at but what's there to interact with isn't interesting and the chase sequences are not only devoid of scares, they're incredibly unfun because they're based on trial and error more than anything else.

Kind of obsessed with how bad this was.

Prince of Persia The Lost Crown was somehow my first ever experience with the series. I know that this is the only 2d Metroidvania, which is my second favorite genre, but if the other games are anywhere as interesting or as well made as this entry I am itching to dig further into the series.

Sargon is an excellent protagonist and easily the most likable of the immortals. His movement, upgrades, battle abilities everything just feels extremely smooth and leaves every moment a joy to play through. The gameplay is something I can easily point to and recommend for the reason to play this game. I also thought the difficulty was perfect. There are parts that will really test you without being overly difficult but nothing in this game just comes easy either. I feel Ubisoft hit the perfect sweet spot for difficulty here.

You can see they really put in a lot of work studying the greats. The sprawling map riddled with secrets, the potential for sequence breaks, the ahh hah moment when you get an upgrade that will let you solve something that was stored in the back of your mind that you couldn’t get to earlier. The game borrows heavily from Hollow Knight with the wak wak trees being Hollow knights bench, your amulets being Hollow Knights charms, the fighting is definitely different but strangle feels similar, and select special abilities when you have enough ather or in Hollow Knights case souls. The movement however feels like they were very inspired by the Ori series. I don’t want to spoil anything but it truely feels like Ori once you get your last movement ability.

The story is good not great. Many of the turns I felt coming a mile away but it was still enjoyable and a good story. I like that they give you bits and pieces of peoples backstory and the lord through items and tablets and such through the game.

My only two issues are I feel they didn’t explore the immortals more in the beginning which hurts your ability to care for them more which hurts by lessening the things that happen to them through out the story. If we would have grown to love them some story beats would have hit so much better. The second is I encountered several bugs. One where the game just froze when talking to someone costing me progress, one where I went out of bounds through a floor and ended up on the other side of the map, and most importantly one of the side quest is bugged and there is a good chance you get locked out of it causing you to miss 100% and some items as well as a trophy for doing all side quests. Ubisoft does apparently know about this as it is a big across all platforms and is supposed to be getting patched out. If it wasn’t for these two things I would have given this a 5 star rating and I’m sure one of those will be fixed with patches relatively soon.

At the end of the day this game deserves to have its name mentioned amongst the titans of genre: Metroid, Castlevania, Hollow Knight, and Ori. It deserves your attention and is an extremely easy game for me to recommend to any type of gamer. I hope this game get the attention it deserves so we can see more Prince of Persia metroidvanias.

Hey it made my top 100 list:

https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/my-favorite-100-video-game-of-all-time/

And here is where it ranks amongst games I’ve played so far this year.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2024-ranked-1/

Initially felt inclined to rate The Lost Crown slightly lower due to some minor annoyances brought about by glitches, but by the end, I realised it represents too much of what I want out of this industry to lowball it. This game’s not just a welcome franchise revival or a showcase of a big publisher’s willingness to get experimental, it’s equally a reminder that not enough people are aware of what consistently great developers Ubisoft Montpellier are, an exercise in hardcore Indo-Persian frisbeeing, a vindication of Warrior Within enjoyers and – if you ask me – the single best search-‘em-up outside of actual Metroid games.

There’s a few indicators that Warrior Within was a point of study here – Sargon dual wields swords, it’s bloodier and more combat-oriented than most other entries, creatures from Persian folklore play a bigger role compared to original monsters and the Prince’s outfit from it was a preorder bonus – but the main one is that Warrior Within was Prince of Persia’s precedent for experimenting with a Metroid-y overworld. That more exploratory angle was always why I liked it best, so it’s just as well that The Last Crown expands on this like a duck to water. Mount Qaf’s dishing out surprises so regularly that the game never once feels stale despite how much longer it is than most of this genre, which is thanks not just to the conceptual creativity and sheer number of its biomes but also how those concepts inform their mechanics. To mention just one, my favourite’s the labyrinthine library whose master’s hunger for knowledge ended up turning him into Mr. X, in which you have to juggle that looming threat with puzzles where realising the solution is only part of the equation; showing you how I did this particular one isn’t even really a spoiler, because the onus is still as much on your dexterity and forward-planning as on figuring out what to do. Comparatively straightforward, linear areas aren’t without some kind of distinctive pull or spectacle either, one major highlight being pressing the resume button on a naval battle which had been frozen in time centuries ago.

That sort of moment-to-moment variety goes a big way towards helping avoid the staleness or tedium that could’ve been invited by its length, but the biggest asset in that regard is what a joy it is to gradually unravel Mount Qaf. I love the powers in this to the point that I’m hoping future metroidbraniacs rip them off wholesale. Nearly every individual one of them opens up several means of approach in both platforming and combat by itself; teleporting to an afterimage with Shadow of the Simurgh to slip through obstacles or set up multiple charged attacks quicker than you normally could, phasing between realities like in Soul Reaver to control when certain enemies or platforms become tangible, stuffing an explosive in your pocket to unveil a hidden respite in a precision platforming segment or even an entire enemy to even the odds in a particularly tough encounter… Every time I unlocked a new one, my mind was racing at the possibilities. Combine just a few with a little out-of-the-box thinking and it feels like you can reach just about anywhere – I’ve no idea how you’re “supposed” to get past the bit in that clip normally, and that’s beautiful.

Its combat designers similarly outdo themselves. Experimentation’s the name of the game, in part thanks to the impressive amount of hit reactions on its enemies’ part. They and bosses can be varyingly be tripped, launched, juggled, wallsplatted and more, but these differ heavily according to their weight class, which contributes to them being as varied functionally as visually in addition to making target prioritisation pretty frantic whenever big bois are mixed in with little ones. Coupled with the aforementioned powers, your means of approach are spruced up by the extent to which you can alter Sargon’s attributes through an equivalent to Hollow Knight’s charm system. I personally set him up with a ranged shockwave on melee attacks and another letting you turn the chakram into a lingering hazard, with an additional one that heals you on successful parries in case I ran out of potions during the increasingly tough later levels and their gleefully Shonen boss fights, but the customisation on offer’s such that your combat comfort zone’ll likely be pretty different. The feedback on attacks also deserves credit, seemingly taking pointers from Dreadtroid in that respect (love the slight screenshake on each hit in particular). As I said to a friend of mine, himself a French weeb, I’d loosely compare The Lost Crown to Streets of Rage 4 in that it represents what happens when a bunch of French weebs get together and stuff as much of whatever they think is coolest into a game as possible: an exhibition of action gameplay so well-studied and thoroughly understood you’d swear it was made by the Japanese genre figureheads they so clearly admire.

Same goes for its visual artists and the carvers of ancient rock reliefs they palpably draw inspiration from. It’s a delight to see this series dig deeper into the historical iconography of its namesake, ornate Faravahars and esoteric cuneiform and all, tempered by the hand of Rayman Legends’ art director to drape it all in this lovely cartoony, stylised edge. I imagine part of why it runs so well both handheld and docked’s due in part to some clever tricks the artists use with the backgrounds and certain characters too, rendering them with painted 2D images as opposed to fully textured 3D models; really lends figures like the Simurgh and places like the Crossroads of Time an otherworldly feel.

I’ve always been iffy on how “Ubisoft” is used as a descriptor, partially because it often crops up regardless of how similar the game it’s used in reference to actually is to any of their games, but also because there are so many Ubisofts that you can’t really talk about them like they’re a singular entity. I mentioned in my Chaos Theory review that I find it hard not to retain some goodwill towards them so long as at least some of their oldheads remain, and while that holds true, The Lost Crown’s also a compelling case for their newcomers. It’s clear evidence that there’s a swathe of latent talent amongst the group’s bloated headcount primed and ready for the chance to be let off the mobile game hamster wheel and deliver some genre-best efforts, with such avalanches of great ideas that I haven’t even mentioned Memory Shards or that this has a Persian Vergil who uses the 3D games’ time powers against you. Severely hoping Ahriman decides to lay off for a bit so that this game and the people behind it can see the success they deserve, and so we can get more of those in turn.

Ubisoft’s best game in years! I had hopes I’d enjoy it a lot given this is by the team that made the exceptional Rayman Legends (a decade ago now oof), but this managed to surpass expectations even and as a Metroidvania it genuinely stands next to Hollow Knight and Ori as my favorites in the genre. Having fantastic combat and boss fights with strong focus on combos/parrying attacks, very fluid platforming controls and traversal powers with razor sharp challenges throughout, and great level design as you explore the large and varied map of Mount Qaf

There’s some minor gripes, had a few crashes and felt like the story it was telling was fine but nothing very noteworthy either aside for the characters just making for cool bosses. Also since backtracking could be frequent, I kinda wish fast travel was a bit less limited and let you move between save trees. But otherwise this was a joy to play and the 25 hours it took me to finish flew by (still have plenty leftover for 100% too)

Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?

Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.