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I played through book 1 the other night and enjoyed it. I'm not sure it clicked for me the way it has for others but it is a lovely looking game, hard to dislike

It’s not as bad as easy allies made out with its 5.5. Eurogamer must be drunk to give it 1/5. It very much falls into the 6.5 - 7/10 ball park. I cant stress enough that depending on how much you enjoyed the previous two entries will greatly determine how invested you’d be with this newest adventure. I’ve only played and completed the first game of the in game console which is an isometric brawler. It’s better than I’d expected while also being pretty straight forward. Level design so far is very simple but I was surprised to learn I’d missed some secrets a long the way. Its only £25 Digitally without the season pass and I’d say that feels the top end of acceptable from what I’ve played and enjoyed of it so far. Also it’s obsessed with tee shirts ??‍♂️

I haven't played a huge amount of this but someone should start a thread It's the easy comparison but Wargroove is basically Advance Wars meets Fire Emblem, but bigger. It's got the commander concept, stronger units that mean victory/failure if defeated, and who also have special abilities that can affect surrounding units (health recovery, defence boost, an extra turn), this is the titular Wargroove. Aside from that it's the familar Advance Wars tile based gameplay, with units being strong or weak against other types or units. This could be clearer, you click on them and have little icons that show the types they're strong to or weak to, but it might be better to have it spelt out a little more, maybe even showing that they're boosted as you line up an attack. There's also critical traits, things like having two pikemen next to each other means that the one that's attacking will have boosted attack. It's a key part of the gameplay but some are much easier to act out than others. For whatever reason, as much as Wargroove is Advance Wars and it is Fire Emblem, it doesn't quite feel like either of them, it's not as immediate or as compulsive. It might just be that it's be that it's not as good, the first Advance Wars rates as right up amongst the most I've enjoyed a game on first encountering it. I think part of it is the maps, they're larger than the early stages of the Nintendo games its aping, and they quite quickly start trying to trip you up in a way that those games don't in their early stages. The fog of war it introduces for example, Advance Wars would leave enemies very deliberately in place so you could breeze through learning the mechanic, Wargroove turns it in to a proper level. It also feels like some units are just not very good, it's less rock/paper/scissors and more that swordsmen are just worse than pikemen. The longer length of missions is probably not helping it either, but then, that's just in comparison to Advance Wars and the like, it's a good game, it just suffers because it wears its influences so obviously I will say though, I'm enjoying it, and the way the audio pans as you attack from one side of the screen to the other is a great touch

I'm surprised there is no thread for any of these. I got this a little while ago and just started getting around to it. I've not really played any of these games before except looking at the Vita one for a few minutes when it was on PS+ so I'm more than a little late to this party. So its a relatively simple block puzzle game with ties to music. You make up squares and they disappear... then you get points and you have to last a long time. Sorry, I'm not very good at the game yet and I don't think I understand it that well. I've played a few of the missions were it sets up certain situations and you have one move to eliminate all the blocks but I've not been strategically setting anything up yet in the main game; I just whack stuff down vaguely together hoping it will all combo together further down the line. I do try to time my dropped blocks to get the most down before the music's BPM(?) bar does a scan so I can get the most down and get combos... I think, that's how it works. I'm having fun with it, anyway. I'm a bit hot or cold with the music so far to be honest but I'm enjoying the game. I have no idea how I'm gonna get anywhere near @spatular's score.

Well,this is a very welcome return for the Onimusha series. It’s been laying dormant for far too long (So has Dino Crisis,Capcom. Hint hint). So when it was announced that the first game was getting a Remaster,I was all for it. I absolutely loved these games back in the day,which was basically “Resident Evil but in Samurai times”. And the game has held up really well. The combat is simple enough to learn, one button for sword attacks,another for magic,one for blocking. Killing enemies earns souls,which are used to level up your gear. The graphics have been given a nice lick of paint, it looks good. Though as it’s a straight up port,there’s things to be aware of. Cutscenes are totally unskippable. Which wouldn’t be a problem,except for the infamous Water Puzzle section. Which puts you through 3 traps in a row,the final being a sliding tile puzzle,which are always a massive ball ache. Made worse here as you’re up against a time limit,and failing means doing the entire section again, after going through a lengthy cutscene preceding it. YouTube guides to the rescue for that bloody bit. It would have been nice to have some extra content thrown in,such as a history of the series,promotional material,stuff like that. Something like the effort Capcom put in to the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection last year. And it’s a shame it’s only the first game,rather than all 3 in one collection. But I’m just glad to have the series back. And hopefully we will see more of it in the future.

Odd that Blakey just posted a picture in the Latest Purchase thread as I just finished this myself today. Its only a couple of hours long. The immediate comparison in my mind was Katamari Damacy where as you move something around and as you add to the thing you're moving it gets bigger. In this case it's a hole. The more that goes in the bigger the hole gets and the bigger the things you can swallow. It's more set pieces in opposition to Katamari's sprawling playscape and Donut County is much more story driven. Its about a racoon called BK and his pal, a young lady called Mira. Using an app on his phone that controls the moving hole, BK has basically swallowed up the town including himself and Mira. Turns out the Earth is hollow and all the townsfolk have gathered together underground to try to figure a way out. The levels you play are flashbacks leading up to the current event. In the levels themselves you move the whole around, swallowing things up. Each level is split in to little areas and sometimes the hole size resets, depending on the goal. Also there are puzzle elements. Like in the second level you need to launch a hot air balloon by swalling a flaming kiln. The hole then emitts hot air so you can lift the balloon and end the level. It gets more complicated than that obviously but you get the picture. BK the racoon is quite funny, he's a selfish cunt to comedy effect. The games humour continues in the Trashapedia which is basically a log book of all the shit you pick up with amusing(ish) descriptions. So yea, its nice. Looks nice, nice music. You know, nice. It's just quite short. I liked it though, my kind of game. Nice.

After seeing a glowing review at Eurogamer I thought this would be a nice counter game to the gritty/bleak violence of God of War, and an excuse to pry the Switch away from the kids. You have to bare with me on the premise - you play as a dung beetle who's the new postmaster on the tropical island of Mokumana, who's guardians are being attacked by the 'God Slayer'. After meeting the previous postmaster, your given a postman badge and told to go meet some fellow further on in the island. Navigating the island is a joy, you push a ball (of what I hope isn't shit) about in front of you and there are numerous pinball flippers around that you activate with the L and R triggers, launching you all over the place. You meet various strange characters and creatures along the way, who give you challenges and rewards. One example is having to find six soot balls in a lighthouse, with the lighthouse essentially being it's own pinball table. Completing these tasks gets you new abilities granting access to other parts of the map, a la Metroid/Castlevania. The art style is great, the music is fantastic and it's a joy to play. All in all, well worth the £15 entry fee.

This is an odd one. It starts somewhat typical; you play as a young woman called Mina who is fed up of the small village she lives in and wants to go out and explore the world. What makes this a little different, for video games at least, is she wants to do that through cooking. But being a chef in this game's world is a little more exciting than it is in reality. The general gameplay goes like this: Next to the kitchen where you cook the food there is an area brimming with monsters (oh yeah, you're feasting on monsters in this world, too) and you go out chop them up into tasty little bits using a combat system which is maybe more versatile than needed. Rather timely it is very Smash-like: a direction with an attack gives you a move with its own properties (launchers etc) and you have special "magic" moves also tied to a button and direction. But these can be chained together too. It's not to serious about its combat but I do like to launch them, combo, teleport behind them and combo more to keep them in the air. It's fun but kinda needless as you do just need to be killing things quickly for their tasty bits as you are timed. When you have enough bits you put your spoils in the pantry and start cooking. This is done through a match three puzzle game. And this is where it gets surprisingly complicated. I'm not gonna go into it too deeply because I'll be here all night but each ingredient contain either two, three or four Bejeweled gems (lets just call it what it is) and chaining three together intensifies the taste, where it turns into a different gem which can be chained again to intensify the flavour further. But there are so, so many additional mechanics as the game moves on. Different pans can alter the properties to how things are chained. The story factors in too. It's very Monster Hunter in it's story as it adds a plague to monsters to add some stakes (or steaks! lol! *dies of comedy abuse*) to keep things from being too twee. Ben will hate this game. It'll make his teeth itch or whatever. But what the plague does is add further mechanics as you'll have to deal with eliminating poisons and dealing with taste gems that break down and disappear. It's generally well acted, especially by the lead, and kinda funny at times. It's a pretty game too with its hand drawn backgrounds and animations. It does repeat its areas bit but I think its just a function of the insular, low-key story its telling. I've been enjoying it more than I thought I would. I know back in the day there was that platformer puzzle game on the DS that was like this a few people here liked. I think this could be good for those, too.

Started this today, put in about 3 hours. It left a hell of a first impression I must say, absolutely loved what I've played so far. I played 2014's The Stick of Truth and whilst I thought it was very good overall, it lost its way towards the end for me and became incredibly repetitive, leaving a sour taste in my mouth as I limped over the finish line. Being a huge South Park fan and seeing an idea like that executed so well and with all the trademark humour and lore established in the show translated into the game flawlessly was fantastic. Being able to go around South Park and explore every nook and cranny of it, finding chinpokomon and all sorts of mad side quests, it was really cool. But towards the end it became real repetitive and a lot of the reason for that was the combat. It was enjoyable for the most part and quite a bit of fun but towards the end where you're put into challenging fight after challenging fight it felt like a real slog. It just felt too basic for me after x number of hours, it didn't feel as deep or tactical enough as I wanted it to be and just became a chore. Fast forward to 2018 when I finally get round to playing the second South Park game, The Fractured But Whole, and I was somewhat trepidatious as to what to expect. Even though it has been over 3 years since I played the last game the finale left such a sour taste in my mouth that I really didn't know if I was going to enjoy this or not, I thought it would just be more of the same and with Ubi SF taking over development duties I just didn't know whether it would have as much charm and humour as the original game. Thankfully - as mentioned at the introduction, the opening 3 hours of the game I've played today have put all my worries to bed. It has just been an absolute joy to play in every regard, exploring the town again, speaking to all the characters around the town that we know and love. It's just great to be back in South Park again. Probably the best aspect for me though has been the ability to open every door on every house or store and look in a hell of a lot of cupboards for loot, it is just incredibly addicting in a Fallout kind of way, I can't remember an awful lot from the first game apart from the ending, combat and the abortion clinic so I don't remember the first game having this level of loot to find. I remember going to people's housing and exploring the town - looking for chinpokomon especially - but yeah I don't remember there being this level of reward for looking in every draw in a house or store. Another aspect is the little puzzles you come across, some have that metroidvania element to them where you haven't got a certain ability yet so will have to come back later to get to the chest/item just out of reach in a particular locale. That level of exploration, exploring the town and encountering all these little side quests you can pick up like discovering who key'd Randy's car at night or speaking to Morgan Freeman in the Taco stand so he can teach you how to Craft bits and pieces. There's a ton of collectibles too, but the main ones I've found so far are these Japanese-style art pieces called Youi or something like that which are a bit anime looking and quite strange. One of the other new elements is the 'Coonstagram' stuff which encourages you to take a selfie with everyone you can see so you can get more followers - and unlock more missions down the line I presume. So there's another puzzle element of getting someone to have a selfie with you, sometimes it'll be something simple like buying stuff from a vendor but other times you'll have to help Jimmy finish a school project or something like that. There's also this artifact system where you can equip one into a 'hero slot' on your character and it'll give you and your team some kind of boost in combat. Most hilarious one I've found so far is a buttplug I found in Big Gay Al and Mr Slave's house that gave me +35 'might. You can find costumes all over South Park too - of course I got the AC costume with some uPlay units though The aspect that has impressed me the most though and is the biggest improvement from the original is most definitely the combat. I don't remember it especially well from the first game but here it feels SO much deeper and a hell of a lot more tactical with the new tactics grid. The grid enables you and a bunch of enemies to move about turn by turn, using different x, y, x or a abilities but all the abilities require a certain placement in order to attack multiple enemies or knock an enemy back into another for a bonus. A lot of abilities cannot be activated if the targeting square cannot reach the enemies square so placement on the grid itself is key. As well as this there's numerous ailments to consider and AOE damage when certain enemies die, you still have a timed element by pressing A at the right time when taking a hit or doing a move - which fills up your Ultimate meter quicker - but it doesn't seem as full on as the first game and the tactics grid makes everything feel much clearer and less simplistic if that makes sense. A bit more side-scroll XCOM-lite and less Child of Light if that makes sense to anyone So yeah, I really didn't expect to be as impressed as I am with it but it's safe to say it has got me hook line and sinker, cannot wait to dive back in tomorrow. Some pics:

Managed to put a little bit of time into this this morning. I am absolutely staggered at how good it is for now. Bearing in mind I've not played a mainline FIFA since '14 or '15 this just feels exactly like a mainline FIFA game, doesn't seem to be any compromises at all, feels like the real full-fat FIFA experience to me. I was playing in Docked mode in 1080p and it just felt exactly like I remember FIFA feeling like when I played the last on XBOne/PS4 in the past. I only thing I really noticed as 'missing' is the PL-partnered presentation over the matches, instead they use that older more blocky style that was in place before 2016 or so, I only knew this having watched some FIFA 16/17/18 preview videos but as I haven't played one for a while, again, it felt just the same as I remembered and lets be honest, it matters very little. Only had time to mess around in the menu's, do a bit of team management and controller setup and do one online game. Looked through all the menus and everything looked like it was in there to me apart from the single-player story thing that they came up with last year, didn't touch FUT yet so don't know how many packs you get to start with or anything but yeah that's definitely a huge inclusion right there, will have to have a word with myself to make sure I don't buy too many packs The game itself felt just like FIFA really, more fluid than I remembered maybe? Some of the technical little touches you could do, being able to lean in and shoulder-charge players off the ball and things like that felt new and the ball/player physics felt way easier to zip the ball around in, less glued to the feet than when I last played for sure. It will definitely take me a while to get used to the controls again, I'm so used to playing FIFA on xbox/PS controllers that learning to play on Cradled JoyCons will take a bit of time to get used to, it feels great to play though, just got to retrain my brain to the new face buttons. I'm quite pleased I didn't lose my first game online though despite a hell of a lot of wrong button presses! I'm sure it'll come back to me.

So this is the third game in the Bit. Trip Runner series, the sequel Bit. Trip Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien. First impression is I'm disappointed with the title of this game. Runner3 does not do the legacy of the series any justice in terms of title. It sticks pretty well to the formula made in the earlier games so if you've played one you'll know what to expect. It's an auto runner game where the obstacles and collectables create a little tune along with the game's music, and as you progress through the levels the obstacles get trickier. Simple, really. But Runner3 adds a few things to make things trickier. One of them I'm not the biggest fan of and that's vehicle sections. They just turn a very tight and nuanced game into something that feels like it comes from a much worse game. There isn't very many of them but I can't help but have an inner little groan when one comes up. The second addition doesn't seem much but it is applied in some genius and evil ways: a double jump. When I first started playing I thought the double jump was just their to make things easier, like you can correct some badly timed jump. But as you go through the game you start to see that creative use of the double jump is the only way to traverse the obstacles and get all the collectables. And sometimes double jumping is dangerous so you can't do it at all so it's not something you just do all the time; far from it. And combining it with the slight glide (hold the jump button) and the hard drop (dress down to fall quickly which was introduced in Runner2) you get some evil level design to make use of it all. These moves also make it so the levels can have multiple ways of doing them and that is explored in Gold Runs and Gem Runs where the latter is a harder route to collect everything. Sometimes the paths just fork off into a different place but there are also situations where you're required to traverse the same bit of level but in a different and harder way. And it is very hard. I think I remember Runner2 being a little easier than the original but this is much harder, at least to get everything. Maybe just going through the game not doing the gem runs would be easy enough but there is evil, evil stuff in this game and I kind love it.

Space Dave! is a follow up to Woah Dave! that came out a few years ago. It is a retro style arcade game with clever little twists that make it an interesting little game. Woah Dave! is an underrated score attack game and it seems Space Dave! is gonna have the same fate, though I don't think it's as good as Woah Dave!. So I guess that's why I'm starting a thread for it. So what Space Dave is is like a combination of Space Invaders, Galaga and Missile Command. You get waves of alien ships in formation, scrolling along the screen in different ways and you have to shoot them down and protect six trees. You're attacked by simply being shot at but they also dive bomb the ground, destroying the tree and turning the section of screen into a pool of lava, which you then have to avoid while you're protecting the others. You can fix the ground and eventually grow back the tree by killing certain enemies that drop skulls but you have to throw them at the pool of lava yourself. It's taking known, classic arcade gameplay and mixing in these new mechanics that keep the gaming loop really interesting. Oh! and you only get points for picking up pennies so having to pick up items to score adds another element of risk/reward. I think the problem with the game is the visuals. I know they're going for an a look reminiscent of pre-NES games but I just don't think it's striking enough to pull it off. But they're functional so fine. I also think they could have added more types of enemy patterns because there isn't that many and they do loop a bit too often. The bosses are pretty good, though. The fucker I'm on now can fuck off, mind. It's currently under £2 on Switch at the moment and I do think its at least worth that as a score attack game to play for 15 minutes. Or get something that plays Woah Dave! instead.

Guess what you do in this free to download game for children aged 3-10 or whatever. It it can be played touch screen or rather surprisingly with motion controls that work well. Or you can just use the analogue sticks. It even has co-op play. Although I guess if you don’t like how the other is colouring in it’s actually pvp? If you have young children/a child this might be a nice activity in the morning or before bed and maybe even a little tutorial into using a game controller.

Finally Trine has come out on PSN, and rather than the £10 the devs hinted at way back when it's actually £16 (or £17 I forget), which is actually cheaper than Steam still but disappointing all the same. Obviously whether it's worth it depends on the content that's in there and how good it. Also I had £4 in my account still which softened the blow a bit. The game is really good, and shows it pretty quickly. You start off as the thief, who can grapple to certain items and fire arrows, which are a bit shit truth be told but I'm sure will prove useful later. Once you touch the magic stone with her you take control of the lecherous and lazy wizard. The wizard can use a pointer to grab things out of reach, such as platforms or blocks, and he can also create blocks which adds to the puzzle element. Then there's the knight who has a shield on the right stick and a sword on the shoulder or square. The presentation is a bit weird. Some parts of it seem a bit cheap and unfinished, things like the load screen and menus, but then the graphics and voice acting are brilliant. That said there's been a few other things, firstly the knight glitched along while i was walking backwards with my shield up, and secondly a large block i had to pull down got stuck on a wall and wouldnt fall, so i had to force my way through the obstacle. It's really good fun though, the combat isnt perfect, but it looks like you'll be able to use the scenery to help you. There's lots of collectable to find, and some levelling up, which isnt explained all that well yet. Hopefully it's a decent size though

Or not-Overwatch. I can't talk about this game without mentioning Overwatch as it is a massive game that a lot of people have played and Paladins is very similar, to the point of being accused of being a clone. But while I don't believe that since games like this take years to plan and the were announced and released very close to one-another I think it's fair to say it isn't strictly a clone, especially since the devs history shows they've made a number of games that look like they could easily and naturally lead to this. But there is also no doubt that they have certainly leaned into being a lot like Overwatch around and post release. So its a hero shooter where you pick a character with specific skills that are tied to a certain class like Defence or Support, but this time you can't change mid-match which is an alteration I'm not against since it potentially requires some creative use out of a character if things aren't going well. If you have played Overwatch then the characters will be very familiar. Some are like character X from OW, and other are like a mix of Y and Z. And there are the odd few that draw inspiration from elsewhere. I kinda like this even as someone who played a lot of OW because Paladins feels like some weird remix where you have a character who is a mix of Tracer and Mei and trying to deal with that combo is kinda fun. On a pure gameplay level it is some OW style fun but it doesn't have the character of OW. A bunch of them are quite fun looking and charming but OW has some straight up modern iconography which is hard to stand next to. And Paladins doesn't have the character or polished presentation of OW. Character voices don't stand out as much and it makes following the gameplay a little harder since you don't have distinct verbal calls and attack effects. You know, the character and the polish in OW helps communicate the gameplay a lot and that's not quite here in Paladins, or at least its not as clear. I'm sounding more down on it than I actually am. Like I said, I'm enjoying what feels like a remix of characters to me coming from OW. And, tbh, since its been a while since I played OW playing a game that has a much lower current skill level is making it kinda chill (though not all the time). Actually, skill level is wrong... I sometimes get frustrated at some players' I've come across and their decision making. Currently I'm into it. Dunno how long for but I'm on Switch if anyone wants to play some not-Overwatch with non psychos.

So this is a top down racing game. That's the nutshell at least. I saw that trailer for it a while back and just from looking at it I got a strong impression that it had some nice handling in it. And it does. It's like I have a sixth sense or something. But to be honest, apart from the handling and general act of racing the game has some frustrating things about it. So how the career mode works in MBR is you have a path to work through with it splitting off from time to time so you can get extra money, xp and "gears". Gears are obtained by doing special little missions in a race like "drift for so many metres in total" and "beat a lap in xx:xx time". There's actually quite a lot of them and do add a little pressure to the races. You then use the gears to unlock further races. The progress actually reminds me a lot of 2D Mario games; especially the "New" series if you think of the gears as the big coins. The way its done isn't too bad but since there are a limited amount of tracks, at least a lot less than there are events, you play the same tracks a lot. They are very good tracks, but they certainly could be placed in the progression in a way that makes the number of tracks seem less limited. What also is limited is the amount of vehicles. There are three in each speed class: one light, one medium and one heavy and you have to buy these with the money you've earned, and you need all three as some races require a specific weight class so I don't know why they just don't have them selectable instead of going through this buying process that doesn't add anything. It's not like you have multiple cars in each weight class to commit to. Well, there are others but they are in their own speed class and have their own races. Also, the upgrade system is as clear as mud. You get upgrades to engine, tyre, gearbox, etc and they are like consumables and they seem to be finite and when you remove one it is gone forever. It also isn't clear if it upgrades your vehicle. Like you can use it and find it has no effect. I dunno, I could be being an idiot but it kinda sucks. I also don't think the upgrades that do work even affect the performance much. But apart from the puzzling stuff in the menus the racing itself is really damn good. It has some really nice drift mechanics. When I think of Wipeout I think of how cornering is like smoothly carving the apex and this has that too; it's just as satisfying. And I think the perspective benefits it too since you can see more of the track (more specifically what is coming next to the side because of how they are laid out) the game can run faster. It's like a Scalextric track in that there are a lot of u-turns you can speed around nearly at top speed. It feels really good, especially in the lightweight buggies. The tracks as a whole are so good. They group a lot of u-turns together pretty often and there are a lot of angular turns that make me think of F-Zero on the SNES or any Mode 7 racing game except much more elaborate in that they often loop back and cross over themselves. The only thing that catches me out sometimes is because of the top down view seeing ramps and other gradients that affect handling can be hard to see until you're familiar with the tracks. I've been hankering for a good drift-y racer for a while and this is actually doing a pretty good job of satiating that. Thumbs up.

I don't really know how to give impressions on this game since it belongs in the MOBA genre and they are usually those Computer Games. You know the kind; billions play them but you never see them out in the street, irl. I guess they're inside, playing their Computer Games all the time. I should tell the press about them. Who knows what other degenerative stuff they get up to *shudders* But this one is on Switch as well so it must be cool and not have people who write things (((like this))) for some reason. Anyway! The game itself. I think I like it. Its made by a large Chinese tech company that bought Riot Games, responsible for League of Legends, and from what I've read it feels like that to play. It's designed for mobile so matches are a lot shorter. Around ten minutes. As I understand it a LoL or DOTA match can approach an hour(?) I could easily be wrong. The general impression I've always had of MOBAs is they are pretty much competitive Diablo from my perspective. You deal with that kind of gameplay, defeating other players and dealing with simple objectives that level you up on a game by game basis. Thankfully you can set it to be pretty automatic. Levelling up skills can be done automatically and buying better equipment can easily be done by setting an upgrade route and things get purchased as the money comes in. I can't put me finger on it at the moment; it's all quite new to me, but I do find the game compelling and I'm certainly into while in a match. I absolutely dominated on my first game, but I suspect it was everyone's first game and they didn't pay as much attention to the UI as me, because they weren't upgrading shit and just got slaughtered by me. In my second game, we won, but I wasn't dominating at all. To be honest, I solo'd the middle lane in that game and I think I held it pretty well. None of our towers got destroyed and they were double teaming me a lot. My stats didn't look good but that middle lane was barely touched. I still think I'm the best MOBA player.

This is out on tablets and PC too, but specifically this is for the Switch version (because I don't think anyone else is going to buy it, let alone on anything other than Switch). It's not a bad version. My understanding is that it potentially has the full database, but because you aren't playing on a powerful PC with a good cpu, you're only supposed to select a small number of leagues to keep the speed up. Even with than it can get a bit framey in handheld mode when you're on the match screen, bouncing between tactics, the opposition's line up, then the game screen, the cursor will skip Controls are a bit weird, the touch screen works in handheld mode, which is mostly how I've been playing it, but it doesn't completely control the game, which I'd assume it does on an actual tablet and the pc can be entirely played with a mouse. So you'll need the physical controls to access menus and bring up context menus, and tbh given when your hands are it's probably quicker As a game though it's pretty good, certainly the most I've enjoyed and wanted to play Football Manager in years. It's easier, and given that United have, on paper, a very good team, I've been banging in the goals, probably averaging close to 3 goals a game... so not very realistic but a nice antidote to Mourinho It's got the 3D match engine too, so you can watch Valencia volleying in a cross for Rom to mess up PSG

Gorogoa is a hand drown indie puzzle game that has been in development for years and years and was finally released today. It's gotten some very good reviews. Basically the game involves you interacting with pictures and moving them around in order to cause something to happen or open a way forward etc. It starts off easily enough but soon gets devilish. I've played it for an hour but am well stumped on Chapter 3 so I've taken a break, but I won't give up... Lovely game so far.

I've seen no mention of this game yet. Like a lot of games like this, it was pushed a bit on the Switch store but it's out on pretty much everything. I thought it looked really damn cool so I bought it. So its a platform kind of game but you don't move in the traditional way. You use the analogue stick to point yourself in the way you want to go and you zip there with a direct trajectory. It's a game you have to really learn from scratch as it's not quite like anything else. When combat is introduced it does vaguely (very vaguely) remind me of PN.03 and I'll take anything that gives me the feeling that game did. Your shot can be aimed the same way as the jump but it has a very short range, though it does have a bit of a spread. It means you really have to get in there to defeat enemies and it makes you really learn this kind of movement the hard way. Yeah, the game is pretty hard, babies. It's kinda preposterous with the plot. As it says in the trailer: "explore a directionless world", and a lot of the messaging in the game is this on the nose. So far I've inspired an artist and a musician to help me and their assistance actually moves parts of the world. But its so earnest I love it. And the one boss I've fought is basically M. Bison's (Dictator for our Japanese readers) disembodied head. There so many games like this at the moment so I think its got lost but I would say it's worth trying. It's a cool game.

It hasn't got to go far to be better than Mario Tennis Ultra Smash which i didn't hate but was just another of these super lite versions of big franchises, like Wii U Smash. This has an Adventure Mode which I think these games need, a little meat in the sandwich as the Tournament only thing has been done many times before. Although it isnt the campaign I was hoping for from Camelot, it seems we've been treated to the best they have to offer with their Mario Tennis and Golf games on the Gameboy/GBA. This has a terrible story attached to it about some old god or something inside a tennis racket that posseses people or some shit, anyway, it's been split in to five bits and scattered accross the lad - who fucking cares. Baiscally you wonder around a map and play tennis. Some spot ont the map are straight up matches against a characters from the Mario universe but the courts have hazards, like piranha plants along the net line that eat the ball and spit it back at you. Other spots on the map are challenges, mostly involving getting the ball back to specific area of the court (like knocking Shy Guys off platforms). Some of this challenges present you with new rackets with different strengths. Surprisingly there are also boss battles. All play rewardeds you with XP so as to level up and become more powerful. I have to mention I hit a difficulty spike pretty early. There was a game where as you had to hit 30 piranha plants within a time limit and i failed 3 or 4 times before I was sucessful. Previous to this I was winning whatever the game threw at me with little effort. Controls. I dunno if anyone played much of ther online tournament a few weeks back? If you did you'll know the game has a few new tricks up it sleeves. I was a little overwhelmed at first, there's a lot to learn but the full version of the game spoon feeds it to you a little gentler. So you have A as topsin, B as Slice Y as Flat. Up and X is Lob, down and X is dropshot. If you hold down the button before the ball gets to you you do a charge shot which is a more powerful version of whaterever button shot you choose to return with. Each time you charge your shot you add power to a meter in the top left corner. You can use some of this power to run, hold down the R button and you'll go in to slow mo and it gives you more of a chance to get to a tricky ball. You can also use it in stars that appear on the court - if you stand in the star and press the R button you can jump up in the air, then the game switches to a first person perspective and you can aim your return anywhere on the court. These are called Zone Shots Let the meter fill up however and you have access to a super shot which is the same as the star shots but you can activate it whenever you like instead of waiting for a star to appear. You can use these powerful shots to almost guarentee a point OR you can wack it at the opponent and see if they can successfuly return it, which is tough. Failure to return, or block as it's called, the shot and you take damage to your racket. If your racket takes too much damage that's it - match over even if you were winning. When it happens to you you'll have a small window which is pretty much when the ball is right in your face to block/return the shot which is a timing i'm starting to pick up. It's fucking handy to know and use as I'm about midway throught the campaign ( i have two bits of the racket and am well on course for the third) and the characters use these shots a lot. Frustratingly so. I do have a few little control beefs. Holding down the button for a charge shot is one, as i tend to line up the directon of the return at the same time. But sometimes after a second or Mario just tends to run in the direction i'm pressing. I thought when you're charging the shot that's it, you're sacrificing movement for a powerful return but that's not always the case. I've lost a fair few points to this. The other thing is that double tapping Y, B or A hits a more powerful shot back. However, double tapping X makes Mario do a trick shit in which he jumps to the left or right. You're supposed to use this to get to a tricky return and you can perform the same action with the R stick. Two beefs in one with this- the R stick is awkward to reach , it's not in a good place in conjunction with the buttons to be ustilised in high intensity gameplay. Also, why use a double tap as a substitution for the R stick? When a double tap of any other of the face buttons has a different function? It just makes it unnecessarily complicated. Anyway, I'm enjoying it but it is tough now. I was losing to Shy Guy and only won because I broke his racket. I felt I got bailed out the shit but also I felt like a bit of a king for pulling it off. I've been getting arsey with it though, i'm afraid of what's around the corner anger wise.

Let me tell you the story of Vault 111. In the beginning, there was Vault 489 and it was a happy place. For about 30 minutes. It turned out that the Overseer really didn't know what he was doing and had badly misjudged how much power he needed and sent too many of his people out into the wasteland to forage instead of looking after the vault's meagre power station, canteen and water system. So the people left in Vault 489 were pretty much fucked. The Overseer being a heartless bastard abandoned his people and left for a bigger screened vault to look over (albeit with slower, more sluggish technology) and opened Vault 111 to the world. He was expecting maybe a round of applause or special item for naming it 111, but sadly that didn't happen. Everything was going pretty good. The people were happy, the vault was improving all the time. People went out looking for goodies while others stayed behind and looked after the vault, then everyone was called back to work together and help with booting out (or straight up murdering) raiders who broke in, killing giant roaches who burrowed in or putting out random fires. The Overseer paid special attention to hooking couples up in the private quarters and watching them pair up to make new little survivors. Of course the pregnant vault people were pretty useless in a fire or fight but could do any other job the Overseer told them to do. After a certain amount of time (approximately 3 hours), the pregnant survivors gave birth to little ones who would take the same amount of time to become an adult. The Overseer spent this time shouting at his control screen demanding the rubbish ankle biters "hurry up and drop your balls, for the love of Christ", as children can do absolutely nothing but wander the vault smiling in their stupid smug manner. The water, power, canteen and even the vault door got upgraded and everything was going well until supplies were running low and that stupid child wouldn't grow up quick enough and the other pregnant survivors weren't popping soon enough and people started getting sick. Then the roaches came and the Overseer pretty much gave up. About 6 of the 16 inhabitants died before he gave up, turned his control screen off and refused to go back to the vault. I'm sure later on he'll arrive at a new vault and start the whole process over again. With a new goal of seeing if he can cause incest, seeing as the men and women in there will pretty much fuck anything after a while.

Only put 3 hours in so far, clearly there's far more to do, probably a ton of grinding. I've never played a Dynasty Warriors game before but from the videos I've seen it looks pretty much the same. What I didn't expect was having to manage the map constantly as different sections fall to the enemy and you have to decide whether to go to that section and help bring it back to friendly control or sack it off and do your main missions. It is what I expected though from the mashing thing. You pretty much just mash the Y button with the occasional A to do your special move once it's charged up. Not sure how dull that will get over time but you are constantly upgrading your stats and getting stuff to upgrade weapons and items for in-between missions. I've gone all in though and pre-purchased the DLC packs which release every month or so from next month. So far a cautious thumbs up.

Capital R, small i, captial M and capital E. You can't change it, so just accept it. Anyway, RiME is nothing like the last game I played. I'm not sure it qualifies as indie, I guess it does since Tequila Works re-acquired the rights from Sony. The Switch version is out in November. I've played 1.4 hours. There are some pretty obvious comparison points - Ico, The Witness - however from what I've played RiME would have to improve dramatically to match either of those games (even though I only played 6 hours of The Witness). The game takes played on a large island but you are guided along by a fox, and so far I've been following a very linear path. I'm not sure yet if there's a point where the games says "ok, now go explore", or it's simply up to you to do that if you want. The game tells you nothing. Essentially, you move along solving quite simple puzzles to open doors, and everywhere you go there's always a red-caped character in the distance ahead of you (not always, but e.g. in the doorways of towers like in the photo above). The puzzles in the opening hour are simple and don't remotely give any sense of achievement like in Ico or The Witness. The controls are ganky but serviceable, it would be nice if sprinting was a bit faster than it is. Everything else just works I guess. The camera is mostly ok although the few times I dived underwater it was really annoying (didn't Spyro have perfect swimming over 20 years ago?) The game looks and sounds very nice, although again, it isn't remotely on the same artistic level as the two games I mentioned. The game has a day/night cycle and I remember reviews complaining about how daytime was too short and you spent half your time playing in the dark, and I agree. On the whole, based on the first hour, it's a pretty decent 3D adventure game/puzzle-platformer. But the gameplay has been the weakest element.

I read Nintendo Life’s review of this at work today and decided to pick it up. So far it’s only been released on the Japanese eshop store. All the western press seem to refer to it as Gal Metal so that’s what I’ve called this thread, although I can’t find any official English title for the game, just the Japanese title ガルメタル (ga-ru-me-ta-ru). I was wondering why it wasn’t translated as Girl Metal, so I checked my dictionary and apparently “girl” is usually written ガール, a slightly longer “ga” sound, so maybe Gal Metal is the best translation. (Side note, Gal Gun is written differently again in Japanese, ギャル - gya-ru.) Semantics aside, it’s a visual novel/rhythm action game. You can play using the joy cons, pro controller or even touch screen I think. I wanted to play with the joy cons as in this video: But the game wouldn’t recognize my joycons (I realised afterwards this was because I had them set as Controller 2, you have it set them as Controller 1 in the Switch controller menu) so I played the first chapter using the pro-controller. For the rhythm-action part of the game, it’s not about matching button presses with on-screen icons, it’s more about keeping rhythm with the song and trying to string together combos, but as long as you are doing that you are free to play however you like (but if you haven’t built up a sufficient score by the end of the performance, you will fail). In the first chapter there were just two button presses introduced, the bass drum and the snare drum (if memory serves), so it was really easy to play on the pro controller. I can’t say I understand what I’m supposed to be doing completely but o got a way high score than required so...so far so good. Later once i connected the joy cons properly I tried it with that, I got a much lower score but it’s the more fun way to play so I think I’ll stick with that for now. But it’s as much a visual novel/manga as it is a rhythm action game. Basically the story is, a group of alien octopuses come to destroy Earth because people from Earth sent a cd of metal music into space which subsequently destroyed the alien octopus planet, because...because that’s their weakness. So they’ve come to exact revenge. They abduct a young boy and girl (the girl is a drummer) and put the boy inside the girl’s body (like in the anime Your Name). The girl whose body the boy has taken over is a drummer in a school metal band, so she basically acts as your teacher. So basically you defend Earth against their attack by performing metal music. Yeah it’s pretty crazy... The reason that I say it’s as much a visual novel as it is a rhythm action game is that there was more more reading than rhythm-action in the first chapter, so your enjoyment of the game (and value for money) will be reduced significantly if you can’t read Japanese. So far there has been no mention of a western release but it’s early days I guess. In terms of the difficulty of the Japanese, it’s pretty similar to the manga I’ve read. I’ve studied around three-quarters of the regular use kanji so I have a pretty good base to work with. I didn’t have to look up new words too often in the first chapter (but the game does have kanji that I haven’t studied and it doesn’t give you the readings for them). But because there are no kanji readings it will be really good reading practice for me I think. The game is pretty learner friendly because the text doesn’t advance until you tell it to, and the writing is large and easy to read on the tv. The art style and animation has been relatively simple so far, it’s obviously not a AAA game. But it’s pretty cool, if nothing else other than a fun way to study some Japanese.