Game Reviews
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Yakuza: Like a Dragon Review
When I first heard that Ryu Ga Gotoku was ditching the tried-and-true Yakuza combat in favor of a JRPG, I thought they were crazy. It was already their first outing with a new protagonist, and turn based JRPGs are about as far as you can possibly get from bombastic hand-to-hand combat. It’s a famously bonkers…
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Catherine: Full Body Review
Catherine: Full Body is the improved edition of Catherine much in the same way as Atlus makes an improved version of all their games after a few years. It just took longer. It brings the game to a bunch of new systems, adds a new character and associated route, and tosses in some new endings…
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For the King – Lost Civilization Review
For the King is probably best described as a roguelite tabletop RPG. You form a party of three custom characters from a pool of different class archetypes and then go out into the overworld to do fights and complete quests until you reach the big bad. There’s some time pressure because bosses called scourges spawn…
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Donut County Review: Special Delivery
Donut County is Katamari with a hole instead of a ball. That sounds reductive, but it’s also what this game is. You steer a hole around and things fall in it, which makes your hole bigger so you can make bigger things fall in, and so on. It shakes up the Katamari formula with some…
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Let’s Play Every Game Boy Color Game, Part 15
F1 Racing Championship (Ubisoft, 2000) Apparently the PS2 version of this was notable for having GPS-modeled all the tracks and using a 360 degree camera to capture even small track details, but obviously none of that comes through on GBC. F-1 World Grand Prix (Video System, 1999) A much better racing game that has an…
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Hotshot Racing Review: Drift Away
Hotshot Racing doesn’t directly say that it’s inspired by Cruisin’ Exotica, but it clearly was. It’s a series of races on tracks with everything from cartoonishly massive eight balls to actual dinosaurs hanging out behind the barriers. There’s even a countdown timer that refreshes when you pass checkpoints. The old Cruisin’ games were unashamedly designed…
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Heeey! Park-Boy Review: Dehydrated
Heeey! Park-Boy was the bonus game in January’s Humble Choice. It’s pretty clearly inspired by early 2000’s “little guy, big world” games like Chibi-Robo and Katamari, and admits to as much on its itch page. HPB follows U-Boy, an alien whose head looks like a U, after he crash lands on Earth because negative emotions…
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Train Station Renovation Review
Train Station Renovation follows in the footsteps of games like Viscera Cleanup Detail and House Flipper by focusing on dropping the player in a messy location and asking them to clean it up. Levels are, unsurprisingly, mostly train stations, and they’re covered in litter, graffiti, broken windows, and other problems that can only be solved…
