Matthew Pollesel

Ottawa

229 games reviewed
71.0 average score
70 median score
47.6% of games recommended
7.5 / 10.0 - BattleCakes
Jul 16, 2024

It’s a cozy game that realizes a sickly sweet veneer isn’t enough to draw people in, you also need to provide solid gameplay – and that’s something this game delivers. You’ll have to have a high tolerance for cutesiness, to be sure, but in the end, it’s worth it.

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Jul 12, 2024

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom isn’t the first game that tries so hard to be wacky, nor would I begrudge developers who want a game that’s popular among streamers. But I can’t say that the end result is all that fun – not when there are all kinds of genuinely good modern 3D platformers out there that don’t rely nearly as much on silly gimmicks.

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Jul 9, 2024

While no one would confuse it for a GOTY contender or anything, it’s still a solid riding simulator with a decent amount of content. Given how bad it could’ve been, that seems like a win.

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6 / 10.0 - Frogun Encore
Jul 8, 2024

Games that rely heavily on nostalgia walk a fine line. Done the right way, they evoke games from yesteryear while also adding their own spin; done poorly, and they make you wish you were playing those other games instead. Frogun Encore, unfortunately, falls into this latter category.

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Jul 3, 2024

Even if it was outshined by its successor, Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is still worth your time. It may not be the GOTY contender that Luigi’s Mansion 3 was, but if you give it a chance, you’ll still find it worth your while.

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8.5 / 10.0 - Crow Country
Jul 1, 2024

Crow Country is clearly influenced by some of the scariest games of the ‘90s, but it’s good enough that it can be enjoyed today even if you never played those games the first time around (or even if you’re generally too much of a scaredy cat to play them).

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7 / 10.0 - Dread Delusion
Jun 27, 2024

There’s a very easy way to tell if Dread Delusion will appeal to you. Does the phrase, “Like a trippy, PS1 version of Morrowind” make your heart all a-flutter? Then you need to play Dread Delusion. Immediately.

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Jun 24, 2024

Bang Average Football is a game that deserves having people play game after game after game. Not only does it perfectly nail the feeling of playing sports games back in their infancy, it also adds a cozy, Stardew Valley-style frame around the whole thing that you’ll want to do even if you don’t usually like those kinds of sims. It’s an excellent game all-around that does a whole lot of things right.

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Jun 17, 2024

Seeing as I still have fond memories of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture nearly a decade after I played it, I’ve been eager to see The Chinese Room return to this style of game – and I’m very pleased to see that with Still Wakes the Deep, their return is a huge success

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8.5 / 10.0 - Heading Out
Jun 7, 2024

If you go into Heading Out expecting a driving game, you’re probably going to be sorely disappointed. It’s something entirely different from that – and, improbably (given the different genres being thrown together), it works incredibly well.

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6 / 10.0 - Capes
Jun 4, 2024

Capes isn’t so much a super-powered version of XCOM as it is a mediocre XCOM clone that happens to feature superheroes – and there is a difference, as this game illustrates.

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May 31, 2024

I have no doubt that if you loved Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door the first time around there’s nothing here that will detract from your memories – and if you’re looking to check the game out for the first time, it’s probably aged better than most of its contemporaries, the occasionally slow pacing aside.

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Even as a single-player adventure, Song of Nunu delivers. It may or may not be a faithful representation of the League of Legends characters, but it says a lot about the quality of this game that none of that really matters.

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8 / 10.0 - Dicefolk
May 24, 2024

The neat thing about Dicefolk is the way it defies easy classification, even though it brings together a couple of really well-worn ideas.

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0.5 / 10.0 - Metro Simulator 2
May 21, 2024

Is Metro Simulator 2 the worst game on the Switch? It’s quite possible.

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It’s neither fun nor terrible, but rather simply bad – and bad in a way that never quite makes the jump into guilty pleasure/so-bad-it’s-good terrible.

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6.5 / 10.0 - Biomutant
May 15, 2024

Biomutant is entirely forgettable. There are an abundance of much worse games to play on the Switch, to be sure, but there are also plenty of games that are better, so unless you just want to kill time shooting things in an open world – which, to be fair, is sometimes a wholly understandable impulse – you’re better off avoiding this one entirely.

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May 13, 2024

Little Kitty, Big City is an adorable, delightful gem of a game.

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As this new and improved version shows, El Shaddai ASCENSION OF THE METATRON HD Remaster is still very much a game for a very specific niche. Beautiful visuals and an inventive story can only take you so far; at some point the gameplay needs to be there too, and as you’ll see time and again, that’s not the case here.

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May 1, 2024

One playthrough of Children of the Sun is all you need to love the game. Like Hotline Miami a decade ago it stretches the limits of what a puzzler can be into some bloody places, and it pulls it off so well that you can’t help but enjoy every minute of it.

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