Game Reviews
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Sea of Stars Review – Sailing the Standard Seas
Sea of Stars is this year’s big indie Kickstarter JRPG, and it has a lot in common with last year’s Chained Echoes. That game was a modern reimagining of Final Fantasy XII by way of Skies of Arcadia and Xenogears. This is Chrono Trigger via Super Mario RPG and perhaps Star Ocean. SoS at least…
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Coral Island Review – Stardew Factory
Coral Island is a farming sim that, at face value, is basically Stardew Valley or Rune Factory but with a tropical setting and ocean diving. That first impression is a little over simplified, but at the same time, there’s basically no chance that you’ll like CI unless you enjoy both of those games. Although it…
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Civilization IV: Colonization Review – Death, Liberty, and Taxes
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization is a standalone Civilization IV spinoff that aims to simulate running the New World colonies of a European power from founding through to independence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it reminds me a lot of the Anno games in that it is almost entirely about creating production and export chains. The game is…
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Riptide GP: Renegade Review – Dead or Alive, but Mostly Dead
Riptide GP: Renegade is the sequel to Riptide GP2, although you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is the earlier game in the series. Renegade starts off strong with some interesting tracks featuring fun events like a rocket taking off or a naval battle that change the race with each lap. It actually seemed pretty…
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Summer Party Time Review – Budget Pool Party
Summer Party Time is a yet another collection of minigames from Sat-box, makers of many collections of cheap minigames that I keep buying for some reason. This one is basically their earlier Our Summer Sports except that it’s mostly silly Mario Party-style games instead of Olympic events. You’ll play twelve games in a row, get…
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Roller Coaster Tycoon Review – Revisiting a Classic
It feels fair to say that Roller Coaster Tycoon is one of the most influential games ever made. It obviously hasn’t had the franchise staying power of a near contemporary like Pokemon or Age of Empires, but there was a time in the early 2000s when seemingly everyone who played games played RCT and even…
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Terra Nil Review – Rejuvenation by Puzzle
Terra Nil is a puzzle strategy game in which you’re dropped into a wasteland and need to build machines to restore the climate and habitat without running out of resources. Each level follows the same basic flow of starting out with a toxic patch of dirt that needs to be cleaned up and covered in…
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My Big Sister Remastered Review – Retread
My Big Sister: Remastered is a remaster of a game that is, confusingly, the first in its series to release, but the last in story order. It picks up from where Ashina left off and resolves the cliffhangers from the end of that game, although I suppose it’s more accurate to say that Ashina contrived…
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Red Bow Review – Ornamental
Red Bow is, story-wise, the first of Stranga’s My Big Sister-related games. It’s meant to tell the story of Roh, who was heavily alluded to in Ashina. Despite that, the connection to the other two games is so threadbare that you could easily play this without ever realizing it was part of a larger series.…
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Octopath Traveler II Review – Reaching Nirvana
Octopath Traveler II‘s approach to being a sequel is very much about refining existing ideas. Nothing here will be very unfamiliar to anyone who played the original game, but nearly all of it is more fleshed out and generally higher quality. Although I liked OT1 a lot, I was disappointed by its eight stories being…