GameCritics

HIGH Fascinating story. Numerous options for exploration and combat. LOW Minor balance issues between the two characters. WTF Look at the bones! Back during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yoshio Nishimura decided to move to a remote mountain village and pursue a passion project.

HIGH Saving the world from a killer fog via the power of dance. LOW Sidequests with difficult-to-parse instructions. WTF How is it this hard to go camping with friends? For a franchise with a generally optimistic view of human possibility, the Atelier games sure are preoccupied with apocalypses, and its stars are forever discovering ancient technology from forgotten, collapsed civilizations.

HIGH Turning scrap into a ship. LOW Progress. Bars. WTF How are all batteries so anemic? Ostranauts bills itself as a difficult, top-down role-playing, noir space survival that begins with salvaging space hulks but could end with an asteroid base to call my own. My foray into this stylized world began with the conspicuously-labeled manual on the main menu. A beautifully informative binder filled my eyes as faux air traffic calls echoed in the background further immersing me.

HIGH Metatextual levels are off the charts. LOW Occasionally frustrating puzzles. WTF Incorporating real life footage into what seems like a game from the ’90s. Lucas Immanuel held a microtalk at the Game Developer’s Conference this year on an oddly metatextual topic — Games About Games. If that wasn’t meta enough, he also introduced the project that he and his co-developer jucobee had been working on for the past two years, The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time.

Canon is not the enemy of Star Wars games. That feels worth saying up front, because any argument about Star Wars and canon tends to turn into a bar fight within three minutes. Someone brings up the old Expanded Universe. Someone else brings up Disney. Someone says the word “timeline” with the weary tone of a person who has seen too many flowcharts. Then everyone gets angry about whether a helmet, a bloodline, or a background alien technically matters. But canon itself is not the problem.

HIGH It’s the most time-efficient roguelike I’ve played in a while. LOW The final biome’s difficulty spike. WTF The character names for each hero. TRANSCRIPT: Hi everyone! Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com. There are lots of roguelike games out there that allow players to dive deep into nuanced strategies and tricky builds while getting absorbed into lore-rich worlds.

In this episode, Brad covers: Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut Somber Echoes Dead Estate Intelligent Qube Bellwright Black Flag …And more! You can also hear the show on iTunes Please send feedback and mailbag questions to SoVideogamesPODCAST (at) gmail (dot) com, or post them in the comments section below. Thanks! Senior Editor of GameCritics.com and host of the So Videogames Podcast. Transformers fan. MOTU stan. Black Lives Matter, pro-LGBTQIA. Anti-fascist. Latest posts by Brad Gallaway (see all)

This is a transcript excerpt covering the score awarded to 007: First Light on the So Videogames Podcast, Episode 493: British Invasion. BRAD: Carlos, let’s go over to you, uh, for a little game that’s been keeping all of us busy in one way or another. 007 first light. One of the biggest games debatably to come out this year so far.

HIGH Christie absolutely rocks in this iteration. LOW It’s more of a rerelease than a real upgrade. WTF I hope Dead or Alive 7 shows more ambition than what’s on offer here. It’s been just over seven years since Dead or Alive 6 first limped onto the market. That might sound somewhat cruel, but even as a fairly entrenched fan of the series it’s hard to ignore that it was an entry that just didn’t seem to be trying too hard.

In this episode, Brad covers: Rune Dice Hyperwired Gargoyles Remastered Kabuto Park Roadout …And more! You can also hear the show on iTunes Please send feedback and mailbag questions to SoVideogamesPODCAST (at) gmail (dot) com, or post them in the comments section below. Thanks! Senior Editor of GameCritics.com and host of the So Videogames Podcast. Transformers fan. MOTU stan. Black Lives Matter, pro-LGBTQIA. Anti-fascist. Latest posts by Brad Gallaway (see all)