VGChartz's Reviews
The creative fun of Super Mario Odyssey blends with the beauty of Ori to create one of this year’s indie gems.
With its closest inspirations at the forefront (Playdead & Studio Ghibil), Wishfully's debut makes great strides in honoring them both, despite also retreating back to safe design tropes too often.
Judged only on the hybrid version, Aggro Crab's underwater adventure is a choppy, unsightly mess that veers briefly into unplayable territory in the Unfathom, potentially due to memory leaks. If you're a Souls-like addict, Another Crab's Treasure is worth checking out — as long as it's on a platform other than Switch.
While some gameplay limitations dampen its mechanical & narrative potential, Loretta remains a harrowing & surreal ride through a twisted psyche.
Although Rauniot is shy on its lore and narrative, it still excels at captivating the player with an eerie, haunting world and incredibly tough riddles.
While it's impossible to ignore the surfeit of launch-window technical issues, Abstraction Games recaptures the mechanics & magic that places Gigantic among the best multiplayer games of the past decade.
Its low-stakes, easygoing nature might not be to everyone's taste, but for those who land on the Stardew Valley side of the gaming coin, Bootleg Steamer is a curious, pleasant nightcap to the end of any evening.
Between its great pacing, breezy atmosphere, and more, Botany Manor shows Balloon Studios has a green thumb for game design.
Little Kitty, Big City obviously profits from its feline main character, but remove the cat and you're still left with a breezy, cozy game with a colorful cast of characters and a bunch of diverting side missions.
Thanks to HD visuals, co-op support, and some quality-of-life fixes, this new version is somewhat better than the Dreamcast game. Unfortunately, too much of that game's DNA is preserved here, leading to a middling experience.
With some work, I think there could be something enjoyable here, but as it stands at launch it’s very difficult to recommend.
Presenting El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron to a new audience and preserving it for future generations is a great thing, especially considering its cult status. Whether that audience will enjoy it is another matter entirely.
No copycat should be satisfied in reproducing its inspiration without incorporating a visual, aural, story, and/or mechanical nuance alongside it. None of these four categories are met here, so what's left is a ditto platformer that's content with showing yet another hellish landscape after humans are nearly wiped out.
Snow Day is pretty thin when it comes to both style and substance, offering not quite enough of either to hold up long-term, even with decent multiplayer support and interesting Roguelike bits.
All of Bulwark's building blocks are here for any genre fan to appreciate, but the finished construction is still left wanting.
Ultimately, due to its short running time and unchanging gameplay, the anthology isn't worth purchasing. But it is worth experiencing, at least once. It's too weird, absurd, funny, and different to ignore, even if the games within don't stand on their own.
Ultimately, Wrath of the Mutants can't compete with Shredder's Revenge or the better Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games out there. Still, thanks to its smooth controls, shallow-but-satisfying brawling, and diverse settings, it's a competent beat-'em-up.
Lunar Lander Beyond is a fairly agreeable experience, with nice build variety and some intriguing nods to the rogue-like genre, but it feels only partially realized.
While certain design qualities feel anemic compared to the original's legacy, Pieces Interactive's reboot contains a special atmosphere & story that survival-horror aficionados will likely appreciate.
While it won’t be the best hour of gameplay you experience this year, it’ll probably be one of the more memorable.