I often talk about the idea of mixing established genres of games and mechanics. It’s an incredible gamble for a developer as they need to break the players perceptions of how something works on its own and then mash it up with something else whilst maintaining the integrity of their game. I’m not going to rally on games this didn’t work with recently but at least I can write this review with positivity. Oddbug Studio has produced a game that unnecessarily brings together a VR experience with an arthouse platformer, and somehow it works wonderfully.

The Lost Bear is the story of a girl called Walnut who is out in the woods with her brother. As she’s wandering about and learning how to use her catapult she loses her cuddly bear only to find it’s been stolen by a horrible creature. Using relatively simple platforming and minor puzzle solving you must traverse 5 different levels to reclaim your childhood friend. On the face of it all of that sounds rather simple, and it is, but where The Lost Bear becomes something special is in it’s presentation.

In Playstation VR you will find yourself sat in an arm-chair in front of a stage. This stage appears to have been set up in a woods similar to the one being shown before you where Walnut is having her adventure. Quickly the player will realise that the game world is bleeding out into the VR world and it all becomes Inception levels of immersive. As day turns to-night so does the world around you and as you progress to new levels the world around you changes to match the new locations Walnut finds herself in. this sounds somewhat gauche and on the nose I appreciate but as a way of keeping the player involved in a VR platformer this is gloriously emotive.

I can’t pretend that The Lost Bear is particularly long or deep, it could be said that this is closer to an experience over anything else, but it’s a hell of an experience. There really wasn’t much difficulty in the game, the only times I died was down to me not getting the physics right on rope swings or just pressing jump too late. The puzzles are pretty smooth affair for anyone who’s played a game before, the only one to prove troublesome was involving a magnetic crane in a junk yard that stumped me for longer than it should have. Even with this time replaying the same junkyard puzzle over and over I still finished the game in one sitting after about 90 minutes. This raises a question over the cost of games and the time within it. Personally I am of the viewpoint that a trip to the cinema these days is pushing £15 so any game that lasts 90 minutes or longer for less than that is an acceptable cost, especially when it’s as good as The Lost Bear is.

What makes The Lost Bear so good is the world it has created, everything about it screams European Arthouse Animation. The game reminded me of one of my favourite games of the past five years, Valiant Hearts, Ubisoft’s underrated World War 1 puzzle platformer. It may not have the same emotional oomph behind it but the sheer feeling it puts across to the player carries. Breaking The Lost Bear down to it’s parts, the platforming needs the VR, the two separated aren’t enough, they’re good alone, but together they blossom into a truly original, clever and beautiful experience that will stick with you. It’s a fair comment that the game is short and not exactly cheap, but for what you get in terms of the sense of wonder and awe the game produces I can honestly recommend it as worth it. If you own a PSVR unit, don’t question it, just go buy The Lost Bear.

I’ve always liked Street Fighter and other 1 on 1 fighting games, there’s a standard there that you can understand. In my youth characters like E Honda, Blanka and Chun Li always stood out to me because of their ease of use (mash one button repeatedly to win). A few years ago things changed however, I started actually looking at move lists and assigning them to memory. I understood basic concepts of fighting games of zoning and I’ve come close many times to actually having an opinion on frame data. A big problem with fighting games is that there isn’t a huge amount of room for advancement in the genre. Sure we have dress up in Injustice, Power Stones / Gems in Marvel Vs Capcom 4 and Street Fighter has Birdie, but none of these are grand departures for the genre. Step up Senko no Ronde 2 to drop some crazy into the Kool-Aid that is the fighting game genre.

Senko no Ronde 2 seems perfect for something I’ve been talking about a lot on PixelBedlam over the past few months, the concept of genre mash-ups and how they can produce some of the most interesting advancements to a game in lieu of new mechanic hooks. Senko no Ronde 2 brings you a fighting game crossed with a bullet hell shooter. Two players face off in mech suits piloted by anime characters in a Zero G field. When close to each other the camera zooms into a standard side view to allow for some melee grappling, but when further apart the game goes top down for some fascinating fighting. Every melee button is now replaced with different weapons allowing for a chaotic scene where at a moments notice the screen could be filled with a hundred hurt filled bullets spiralling in all directions. At this moment the player has two options, dodge them or block and melee their way through them towards the enemy. Within the restricted playing field the game can lead to some beautiful scenes as coloured orbs fly around whilst two mechs attack each other.

This might be feint praise but the game reminded me of Psychic Force on the PSone way back when with its playing with gravity and disregard for fighting game standards but there is a slightly more unfortunate comparison to be made, and that’s graphically. This is technically a reboot/remaster of a last gen game being released on PC and PS4 and it seems to have carried over graphics that aren’t up to the standards you would hope for today. The highly polygonal characters do have a certain style to them and there’s no denying that when all hell has broken loose the game holds its frames perfectly but you can’t help but feel like when the camera zooms in for some close up action you are playing a game from the ps3 at best but realistically something you’d expect more on the PS2.

It would be hard to ignore this game’s difficulty, single player seemed particularly tough and despite knowing controls and having played the game for a while there definitely seemed to be some difficulty curve issues even against another player. Buttons and the game on a whole is explained to you and is enough to start with, but with the single player difficulty ramping up at such a rate I needed some more concepts and strategies for a new player to use. And that’s a key problem with Senko no Ronde 2; New players are not being catered for. It’s a tough sell at any level. It’s surprising to people who only know Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat but there are actually quite a few fighting games coming out each year, mainly from Japan. And a lot don’t really get anywhere because they struggle to engage new and casual players. Throughout my time with Senko No Ronde 2 I always felt on the cusp of understanding it and then I realised I was just having to rely on button mashing to get anywhere or spam one move over and over.

There is a B.O.S.S. Mode for each character, essentially a meter burn move that brings out a super big version of your mech to just destroy your opponent, especially if your mech has lasers which are OP to the Nth degree. How long you have with your B.O.S.S. mode is dependant on how much health you have leading to a maximum of 12 seconds of crazy time. It’s another great concept and mechanic in a game that seems to think you have cooties and refuses to hold your hand. The single player is basically a visual novel with more text than war and peace that at least mixes up the monotony of reading with some really cool fights that throw in some win modifiers that change how you need to play the game for a round or two.

Where Senko no Ronde 2 excels is in the simple joy of some couch 1 on 1 with a friend, having a game against someone of a similar skill level shows that this is actually a fun fighting with some real potential to be something you’d want to deep dive into. The overall concept is great enjoyable and something that should exist. The series has been going for years, and as cliche as it is to say, I’m sure any fans of the series will lap this up gratefully. The problem is for new players it’s a real struggle to get into. I’m someone who loves fighting games, I’ve spent a stupid amount of money on my fight stick and have colour coordinated buttons and everything, but as someone new to the series I just couldn’t find the hook to really want to invest my time or come close to even claiming I have a ‘main’ in the game.

Almost exactly two years ago I reviewed Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson for the 3DS. At the time I skirted around the most obviously selling point of the now 6 year old series, the incredibly well endowed ninja girls cutting the clothes off other equally buxom young female ninjas. I was trying to be mature and take the game and my review seriously without using the words ‘jiggle physics’. Well it’s two years later and I’m more jaded than before so upfront let me say Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash is a game where big breasts bounce around whilst being shot with water pistols, with that out-of-the-way for hopefully at least a paragraph lets talk about mechanics.

The reason the breasts are wet and jiggling, damn it…

Senran Kagura as a series knows what it is, and I respect that a lot. The developer, Tamsoft, has created a world with the games that have spawned manga, an anime and I’m sure enough Rule 43 to make everyone want to cut their eyes out. Fans have favourite characters and there is actually an interesting story at the heart of the series about rival schools of training and the conflicts with each other and within each discipline. There’s a weird subplot of Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash about a girl resenting the fact she is growing up and on the verge of leaving school, something oddly reminiscent of a lot of Japanese Idol groups like AKB48 and their graduations as the red crystal in the back of their hand tells them they’re too old to be appealing to men anymore.

In Peach Beach Splash all the girls from the series are summoned to what is essentially a giant summer water fight where the more you get shot the less stable you become and the more likely you are to erupt into what the French would call ‘Le Petit Mort’ (the little death) and lamenting the loss of some modesty.

Mechanically this boils down to a team based arena shooter where each character uses a different overpowered Super Soaker to take out the other team. Some will be wielding dual pistols, others Gatling guns and some will be packing a giant sniper rifle. When your H2O starts running low the player must hold square to get your girl to pump up the pressure and water in their guns back to full capacity. All the while you are being attacked by girls wearing similar uniforms to you, a white bikini.

This game does make you feel a little bit skeezy, it’s not something you’ll want people to notice on your ‘recently played’ on your PS4 dashboard. But as someone who is open about watching anime and with everyone I know assuming that anime is nothing but girls bouncing a lot I have no shame and no worry about what others may think about my game history. As an odd aside I actually played this with my fiancé and she was picking out which girls I should play as and what outfits to wear, it was an odd experience.

At its core Peach Beach Splash is a genuinely solid game, there is a some great mechanics that are reminiscent of Splatoon. Tactically using your water is a key feature of the game, dashes and air hovers are great manoeuvres but can drain your water tanks very quickly if not used intelligently. Cards are unlocked through the various modes with each giving you a new power up to drop during gameplay, though they aren’t clear what they’ll do most of the time so often you just bust them out and hope for the best.

For those unaware there’s a concept in Anime called Fan Service, which is sub genre where characters basically show skin. I’m sure there’s more nuance to it than that but in reality unless you’re watching something that already features nudity or jiggling (High School of the Dead or KEIJO!!!!!! for example) you’ll most likely experience it in something like One Piece where after and 40 episode arc you are ‘treated’ to Nami in a steamy bath etc. It’s not big and it’s not clever but then it is Fan Service. As with Deep Crimson, Peach Beach Splash features dress up and diorama modes where you can play out ideas you have in a way that I don’t even want to think about. A game that features a ‘touch’ button as two disembodied hands float on-screen in front of someone who looks slightly nervous doesn’t produce the best gameplay experience.

Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash has a story mode dedicated to each of the schools and to my surprise I found stories that were genuinely funny and entertaining. The whole thing felt at odds with whatever ill-conceived pre-judgements I had, and to be fair, itself. Peach Beach Splash is a game with a dress up mode, I shouldn’t be laughing at quite clever jokes in its story mode. Most of the story boils down to the throwaway concept for the water pistol fight, whoever wins get’s whatever they want in the world. All the while this competition is being streamed on the ninja version of Youtube for various people to watch around the world.

As a third person arena shooter Senran Kagura holds its own. Theres clever mechanics and some really cool animations leading to a quite fast paced battle that is only hamstrung by respawning enemies and a difficulty that seems to have been made for anyone who is playing one-handed. There is value to the product and a genuinely fun time to be had if you can get over the incredibly crass nature of it all. I’ve shown the game to a couple of friends and I’ve had two extremes of reaction, laughter and enjoyment and outright disgust. Choose your friends and lady ninja wisely or you may be judged harshly.

“Choose your battles”… It’s an interesting concept. You need to know where your lines are and in a modern context when to voice concern and when to just keep shut. When starting theHunter: Call of the Wild I weirdly had to take a moment to question my own moral stance on hunting in general. Forgive the indulgence but it’s actually an hypocritical element of my psyche; I’m meat eater, yet I object to hunting. I understand the juxtaposition of this stance but at least I acknowledge it. I’ve always felt uneasy about killing animals, I’m one of those monsters that will sheppard a fly out of the house rather than kill it and will catch spiders to release into the garden, all so I can return to my perfectly cooked steak. When it came to theHunter: Call of the Wild I was coming off the back of a stint mowing down people in GTA, and that’s a key factor here, real life and games aren’t the same thing.

theHunter: Call of the Wild is the first hunting simulator I played since Deer Stalker on the PC in 1998, so in 19 years what has changed in the hunter simulator genre? Well it’s a hell of a lot more relaxing and harrowing. theHunter: Call of the Wild is set in Central Europe, you get dumped into the middle of a reserve surrounded by autumnal scenery and are basically told to go crazy, but in a quite stealthy way. My first run led me to a deer just chewing on some grass right in front of me, I pulled out my sniper rifle and took aim before firing off a shot, the deer ran away. I wasn’t sure if I missed or what had happened, on running down to where the deer was spotted I found a small pool of blood, on inspection my character was able to determine the direction the deer ran off in and I gave chase. The next 30 minutes was spent trying to work out where the hell my dinner had gone. It was a lost cause. I had a similar experience with the next 2 deer I took aim at.

theHunter: Call of the Wild is somewhat lacking in real tutorial or guide, tool tips pop up but to be blunt they’re as useful as someone randomly shouting at you about how you’re doing something wrong. By hour 2 of my time with theHunter: Call of the Wild I had gone native. I was desperately sucked into the beauty of the world around me and just started going for a stroll. Every so often I would hear the call of an animal but once I had crawled my way over, to avoid making too much noise, the furry bastard had legged it. Eventually though something clicked and I got a grasp on how to efficiently take out my pray. My first properly high scoring kill I managed to get a headshot on an unsuspecting thing of nature and watched it crumple from over 400m away, the trophies popped up confirming my excellent shot. I wandered over and took a photo of my victim like Dexter on a vigilante run, but after a moment of moral questioning I realised how satisfying the experience was. The walking for 20 minutes with not so much as a nibble was enjoyable thanks to the swaying foliage in the wind and the nice farmland I ambled over.

As soon as I had the epiphany of fun I was hooked, this game is a time vacuum, the ‘just one more’ principle was in full effect for me as I quietly trudged through woodlands looking for the slightest pixel movement and my next target. I would lay down and point at the various important bits of an animal before taking fire. With each kill I was gaining XP and buying skill points in things like the directional cones from following tracks being more narrow giving me a more defined direction, or spending my money from the trophies on building lifeguard stands for me to get a better view of an animals resting spot. After a few hours of strolling non stop I finally pulled up the map properly and realised that I had made next to no progress on clearing the fog of war, this map is huge. Thankfully after a fair amount of work you do get access to quicker ways of moving around but at the cost of stealth.

theHunter: Call of the Wild is undoubtedly a gorgeous game, the weather effects, the natural foliage and plants all come together to really absorb you into the world and make the slight tedium of belly crawling everywhere not so painful to get through. There is no real soundtrack in theHunter: Call of the Wild, you are just there with the sounds of nature and the occasional roar of a boar or bear as they come at in asking to be culled.

theHunter: Call of the Wild is a game I’ll be going back to, I used to go to games like Mirror’s Edge or even earlier GTA games to just enjoy the music and the design; not to progress the story but to just feel immersed and chilled. theHunter: Call of the Wild is a new game to scratch that itch. There is various ‘missions’ and a story to follow but to be honest you will get just as much out of the experience by just picking a direction and forging your own path. With each kill you claim you get to see an X-Ray of the animal with where your bullet hit, letting you know each time how much you suck, but you will over time get better and start to work out bullet drop and wind and how they affect your shots. From a non fatal shot you could end up tracking a bleeding out animal for a very long period of time, desperately trying to find where it’s final resting place ended up, despite the frustration this could cause it’s also that final element in a game of various parts. The world, the shot and the hunt for the trophy, all of these alone wouldn’t be enough, but together they make for a bafflingly immersive and entertaining experience, equal parts chill, stress and satisfaction; the combo for any great game.

Serendipity, or coincidence; I don’t usually talk behind the curtain stuff when doing my reviews on Pixelbedlam, however sometimes an odd thing happens that needs mentioning. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been in Japan on my honeymoon, my wife and I got engaged there last year and decided we had so much fun we’d go back for our post wedding break. It was as awesome as last time. Previously I’ve taken a 3DS to play whilst traveling but this year I succumbed to purchasing a Switch and taking that in my backpack. I loaded up the code for Phantom Breaker in my hotel and went off to Akihabara for a day of game shop trawling. Whilst waiting for my wife to go run some quick errands I sat in a café of sorts and loaded up the switch, it was a shock to the system to see the first level of Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Overdrive was set in Akihabara, whilst I’m sat looking at said location. This obviously has no baring on my critique but it was an odd experience.

Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Overdrive is a game that harks back to the classic side scrolling brawlers of the Megadrive and SNES. With Chibi style pixel characters generally wielding big weapons as they walk around places like Akihabara and Odaiba taking on the overly tanned Gyaru girls, golf club wielding salary men, pie throwing big fellas, punks and weird masked dancing guys. The game breaks down to the old school style of gaming where your objective is walk right, but to walk right you need to clear all enemies.

Phantom Breaker has a few different modes at launch, with online play coming next year apparently, up front you can choose story, battle ground or arcade. Arcade and Story offer much of the same experience apart from you’re not repeatedly tapping A to skip text in arcade. Battle Ground is a bit more of a traditional fighter but I’m not going to pretend this mode should be a draw for the game.

When you’ve picked your mode you must choose between a handful of anime girls all of whom start at level 0, as you play through the game you’ll be picking up money and gems from fallen foes which in turn level you up, which again in turn means you can progress on a individual skill tree for each character or give their health, defence or speed a bit more oomph. Finding your main is as slow as it is in any fighting game as you work through the list doing one level with each character to see who has the potential for you. For me the long reach Waka was my girl of choice. Each character has a light, medium and heavy melee attack, a range of magic attacks. All of which have the chance to be combo’d into each other if you really feel that way inclined but in all honesty the game can be completed by just repeatedly tapping medium attack and walking right. Obviously that’s a boring way to play and I personally got a sense of accomplishment from finding a range into magic into upper cut launch into down attack combo that would finish just about anyone off.

The problem is that as fun as that combo was to find, the rest of the game just doesn’t have any depth. The extras are all there, character progression and unlocks, various modes and difficulties and a pretty great implementation of up to 4 player co-op, but then when you’re actually in the game you realise how shallow it all feels. You have two planes of movement you can jump between, but I’m not sure why you would when enemies come to you, and outside of that it really is just take out these same handful of enemies over and over and over again until the 2 or so hour story is over. There is some depth with the combat, but there’s not reason for it. The backgrounds are great looking and the music is just perfect for the mood of the game, and to be honest you’re lucky you have the art and the music to enjoy because the actual gameplay is a little….boring.

It’s a damning thing to say about such a great presentation, and for £7 in the UK this really isn’t a bad price for what you’re getting, especially if playing with friends, but if you’re going to be soloing this game, then be warned the rinse and repeat repetition of the game will really start to have an effect on your mental state by the end of the 3rd or 4th stage of the game.

Aesthetically and audibly this is a great game, the style is there and everything work perfectly, but when a key part of any game should be fun then I’m sadly unable to recommend this game to people, it’s a slog of cookie cutter sequences where the only thing that changes is the number of enemies. The story is as anime as it gets with you having to find a missing sister whilst being a member of an ancient clan, and then something about parallel worlds. To be honest I actually zoned out pretty hard and went into auto pilot when playing Phantom Breaker. Want to get the most out of the game? Play with 4 people, I can honestly say I had a lot of fun with the local co-op giving an entirely new feel to the game and making it flow so much quicker. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Phantom Breaker Battle Grounds Overdrive on the Switch, I just feel like it didn’t necessarily take the best bits from the MegaDrive and SNES brawlers, and instead looked at all of the features without thinking about what translates to good gameplay in a modern context.

I have many mental ticks that mess me up on a day to day basis. One of them is that when I’m walking I become obsessed with how weird walking is, it’s unsettling when you see a dog walk on it’s hind legs, but humans are no different. We’re top heavy creatures that are gangly and the majority of us have the grace of a brick. When I think too hard about the act of actually walking then I start to wobble, it’s much like being told to think about your tongue placement or that you need to manually breathe now, and then you are unable to think of anything else for the next 30 seconds. The reason I bring this up is that gravity and physics are weird, and as such are a constant source of inspiration for game makers to take advantage of. Sometimes it’s for semi-realism to show off an engine like Half Life 2 and the Source Engine or it can be used for something that’s actually good and fun like Human Fall Flat.

Human Fall Flat is a curious game, it straddles a wonderful line between being a sandbox and a puzzle platformer. You’re dumped into a land, floating high above the Earth, and must navigate your way to the exit. How you do this is up to you. In the opening area a lot of the game is based around pushing and pulling train carriages and crates to get to your objective, but instead of doing the obvious choice, you can instead drag a dumpster from earlier in the level and use that as your mobile platform. It’s the openness and the lack of hand holding that makes Human Fall Flat something special. Your weird little humanoid is permanently unsteady on his feet and with a combination of buttons you can control his arms to make him reach for surfaces or objects. That is quite simply the crux of the game, apart from some climbing lessons after the second level there really isn’t much progression, just the logic changes and location.

What makes Human Fall Flat so enticing is that encouragement to experiment. If you happen to fall off the world into the void you just appear above the ground and faceplant heavily into the dirt, no set back, no punishment, just another bite of the apple, it’s a joy to play with. When you’re able to recover instantly from failure you are happy to try wacky options like in co-op mode getting your partner to hold only a pole while you hold the other end and swing them around off a ledge. Or the entertainment of hitting the fall over button when on a perilous edge just to see if you survive.

Graphically Human Fall Flat is incredibly simple on the face of it, it feels like old Unreal engine games when the texture pop in would take a few seconds after a loading screen. The benefit of this approach though is the frame rate which holds pretty solidly even in co-op undocked mode on the Switch. There’s one major juxtaposition however with the presentation, the music is amazingly epic and grandiose for what is happening on screen 90% of the time. The first patch allowed two players to use a single joy-con each rather than needing a separate two stick controller for both players, but to be honest, I’d go out of my way to find a second bluetooth controller for player two as the camera controls when using a single joy-con are unfortunate to say the least.

There is no story or even mild exposition in Human Fall Flat, in a less pretentious tone than Journey or something of that ilk you are just given the world and the basic idea of there is no reason to go backwards. The majority of the start of the game is just context setting, climb this, jump that, push XYZ. with each level a new element gets added, the third world adds machines that you can control like a wrecking ball on a crane or the medieval world after that presents you with draw bridges and catapults. It’s these little moments of excitement that push the game forward, rounding a corner and exclaiming “what is that? OH WOW” never gets old. Most of the puzzles are quite obvious and it’s incredibly rare that standing still and thinking for 5 seconds won’t get you at least an option to work on until you fluke a different solution. The only times most players are likely to be stuck in this game revolves around the requirement for platforming, something that this game almost intentionally doesn’t thrive on. Your little fella jumps about as far as a log and mix with that the requirement on the player to have about 28 fingers and the dexterity of a hyper intelligent octopus the inevitable outcome is you’re going to miss a lot of ledges and have a lot of deaths under your belt.

Human Fall Flat is a must play for me, I’m sure it’s great on all consoles but the portability of the Switch and the great quality of split screen on the go makes for an essential purchase for the Switch. Screenshots don’t do this game justice, it’s a game that thrives on someone turning to you and saying ‘just play this’. Simple at first but tougher as it goes, a great sense of minimalist style and with a clearly tongue in cheek sense of humour that permeates every element, Human Fall Flat is a joy from start to finish.

I’ve always had an interest in fighting games, since the first time I played Street Fighter 2 on my brothers’ Amiga at the age of 6 they’ve held a special place in my heart. About 8 years ago, my friend and I decided to stop button mashing and actually learn fighting games, learn the combos, learn the styles and learn the specials. Now, I’m not going to pretend to be pro or even close to entering tournaments, but I can hold my own in most fighting games. Back in the N64 era when Nintendo released Smash Brothers things went wonky for me. No longer was it about learning combos, it was now about learning mechanics and weapons. Rather than being able to jump into 90% of games and trying either charging a character or going straight for a quarter circle and punch I now had to learn every single character. As insanely popular as the Smash series is there isn’t the usual run of similar products that a popular new style of game generally encourages. Years later and we still don’t see that style of platform brawler that often, especially from Nintendo itself. With the Switch creeping up on a year old we still have no announcement of a new smash game or even a re-release of the quite highly regarded Wii U version. So to pick up the slack and try to pick up some of those early adopters and fans of the genre we have Brawlout.

Brawlout wears its inspiration on its sleeve. This is clearly an homage to the smash games, one that brings with it the good and the bad aspects of Nintendo fans favourite brawler. A cast of characters that features a lucadore frog, the main characters from Hyper Light Drifter and Guacamelee and an infuriating bird all come together to try and not be punched off the platforms into an abyss. Where Brawlout differs from the Smash series, apart from missing Mario et al, is the lack of weapons. Instead you must rely on a handful of moves to get you through each fight and that’s it.

This is where brawlout loses me personally. Smash Brothers has 2 main things going for it, firstly the nostalgia and novelty hit of have Nintendo characters beating seven shades out of each other and secondly is the weapons, most of which are call backs to older games. The weapons in smash are the great leveller, they can make or break a match in an instant. With Brawlout the victor is decided on the character select screen. The balancing is pretty atrocious, there’s a number of characters with moves taken straight from Smash but without the other characters that have the suitable counters. It’s not simply a case of ‘the better player will win’, often it feels too much like ‘the better character will win’ which is an intrinsic problem in a fighting game. There’s a bird character who feels like they are able to fly forever and as such only a proper ring out will lose them a life. Other characters like the luchadore frog have a reach on their grab which is just cruel and the Drifter from Hyper Light Drifter has melee range that just can’t be outdone. Playing online will mean you just see the same few characters over and over and that’s a fun killer.

At the start of the game you’ll have just 3 stages and a handful of characters, over time you can unlock more stages by levelling up each character and you can get more characters by hitting up the loot box shop. Loot boxes are in the form of Pinatas, thankfully Brawlout plays the good guy here by not allowing real money to unlock things, the flip side however is that the in game currency takes too long to grind, even if you’re good.

Playing to unlock 100% of levels and characters is entirely do-able and it wouldn’t be a lifetime away, a couple dozen hours or arcade and online should get you everything, the problem with that is that you’ll be pretty much done in terms of interest after a handful of hours tops. Unless the fighting game community pick this game up and the online players stick around there isn’t really much to keep you coming back. The modes are basically play to X lives or play to X time. Sure you could throw in extra AI players but in all honesty getting stuck in combo loops with one AI is bad enough, having 3 enemies constantly bounce you around the map is just too much to handle.

I don’t want a pure Smash rip off, I’m not even the worlds biggest Smash fan, what I wanted was something new being brought to the table, and unfortunately Brawlout doesn’t do that. It brings some nicely stylised graphics and a really catchy soundtrack, Hyper Light Drifter’s Drifter and Juan from Guacamelee are fun additions but outside of that it’s the tournament rules Smash Brothers with simple maps and no weapons, it’s lacking the heart and fun of Smash and doesn’t replace it with anything truly original. The characters it has are all animals with their colours played with, I would have been far more interested if the developers could have kept running with Juan and Drifter and created the first Indie Character Brawler in the vain of Playstation All Stars, but good. Brawlout isn’t a hot mess, it’s a perfectly serviceable game that will entertain for a few hours, especially with friends playing, it’s just missing some of the joy and nuances that made Smash so special. For $20 its certainly worth a go, it has it’s moments, just don’t expect to be playing it in a couple of months time.

It’s weird to look at games out of context of style or presentation. On the face of it Murderous Pursuits is a multiplayer game where you must kill a target assigned to you, controlled by another player, all the while avoiding the player who has been assigned to off you. Without thinking of the style or context this sounds like a horrific manhunt style creepshow that would be sure to get the Daily Mail in a tizzy, thankfully developers Blazing Griffin have gone with a near Bioshock Infinite art style and had confetti explode and horns audibly praise you for a good murder so you don’t feel like the next Ted Bundy.

In Murderous Pursuits you will placed on a time travelling airship under the watchful eye of MR X, a Machiavellian voyeur. he has tasked you with, performing the highest value kills you can within a time limit. To achieve this you must first look at the Favour Board, inside this each of the five weapons available are assigned a point value, a kill with said weapon gets you the points. Add on to that points for doing it whilst hidden from public view and just general style and you start to move up the score board against the other 7 players. When a kill is performed with a weapon it’s point value drops so you are constantly needing to hunt down the most valuable, and nearest, weapon to make the kill even worth while.

To provide you with some help you are able to blend in with certain crowds of NPC’s and stare longingly at paintings. There are two quite clever reasons for doing these actions, the first is that you are blending in with automatic animations that make you look like AI and the other is that as you walk around outside of cover you have an overall awareness rating from 1-5, the longer you’re outside of one of these blend in locations the higher your rating goes and if you hit a rating of 5 you appear on the screen for both your victim, and your hunter. Sprinting is the quickest way to make this rating go flying up and with that we hit one of my gripes with Murderous Pursuits, only players sprint. This is both a benefit and a hindrance, it does mean you can spot your target quicker in a room but on the flip side the basic walking speed is so slow and constant that if you and your target are walking down a corridor you literally can never catch them until they stand still. If your only way of scoring points is a player who sprints everywhere then congratulations, you’ve found a quick way to spot them, but with all weapons requiring you to be within 2 feet of your target it means that the only way to catch them is to sprint also, giving you away; all this leads to a farcical situation like I saw in one game where I saw 5 different people all sprinting around a main room on one level.

With a bit of balancing in patches there is potential for all this to be fixed, but it just seems counter to what the game is, is this a stealth game or is it a deathmatch? there seems to be a real struggle from game to game to know which way the rest of the players are going to go. There are guards littered around levels that will ‘arrest’ and reset your quarry if they see you try to do something bad but theres an odd situation where you end up getting arrested and then another player comes up and performs vigilante justice in front of the guard whilst they berate you and lock you in an animation defenceless.

Players can pick from a handful of characters that match the ones found controlled by NPCs, mix with that that everyone can choose two abilities. These range from the ability to disguise yourself in a puff of smoke and then become a new character or the ability to quickly hit the action button to counter an attempt on your life. By far the most overused and over powered ability is the flash bang that basically allows a hunter to walk into a room, stun the 10 people inside and then stab you up a treat, frustrating but a valid tactic. As with all of my issues with Murderous Pursuits, the game itself is a blast and all of the problems I’ve had with it are things that can be patched to be better balanced.

Murderous Pursuits is a game that will live or die by the community that surrounds it. Being a predominantly online game it obviously needs a player base to ensure that there is value in keeping the servers up and about. I played the game at numerous times throughout the day and the only time I hit problems was around late morning UK time as most people were either at work or asleep in America. In this situation the game will substitute any missing players with an AI counterpart. The issue comes with trying to come spot any bots that may be in your match. The whole premise of the game is to blend in with the AI around you, you look for your opponents to make human errors; sprint whilst in sight, over step into a blend in location and have to take a step back to correct, change direction and then second guess themselves. All of these are things an AI wouldn’t do, and these are things that an AI pretending to be a human pretending to be an AI definitely wouldn’t do. You’re left with using the highly innacurate compass to best guess which of the 12 AI Bots in front of you is your quarry and then just roll with whatever the outcome happens to be.

With it’s live role play bluffing core mechanic Murderous Pursuits has hit the nail on the head for a great concept boiled down to a quite simple mantra, kill or be killed. There is little frill here, you are simply on this airship to hunt your quarry and survive whilst you carry that out. There’s neat little extras like the abilities you can assign and you’ll unlock colour palletes for your character of choice by levelling up and gaining a certain overall score, but outside of those areas, the game is what the game is. I’ve had a blast playing Murderous Pursuits and I imagine it would only take a couple of ‘influencers’ to pick this up and play on their YouTube and Twitch channels for this game to be the next big thing, but if it doesn’t get that traction, if there is even a slight player drop off and bots start filling this game then Murderous Pursuits would be hard to recommend. You need that challenge of finding a human opponent in the mass of AI. There is very little as satisfying as working out who someone is, not because they sprinted, or because they screwed up, just because you’re smart enough to read the compass and the room and like Neo seeing 1’s and 0’s you can spot your quarry and lunge for the kill. Just hope they don’t have that counter ability set up to reverse and attempted kills.

Setting can justify a lot with a game’s potential flaws. Crippling random number generators and games of ‘what am I thinking of?’ can be infuriating and the death of many games, but give context to the struggle and the pain involved with never having the right answer or a good drop for an item and you can reach a certain level of cohesiveness that goes on to make for a fascinating experience.

Death Road to Canada can be boiled down to a simple ‘Oregon Trail’ meets twin stick shooter. It’s an incredibly reductive way to describe what is so much more than that but it will set a tone that needs setting before anyone sits down to get their arse handed to them. From the get go you are given a character, you could create one with great abilities etc but where’s the challenge there, the character you’re given has 3 things, a name, a perk and a trait. Most perks and traits are self explanatory like Martial Artist, Mechanic and Calm under Fire but then there’s slightly more obtuse skills and traits that you need to dig around and find the explanation of like Mysterious Past, Friend of Dog and BERSERK!!

Once you’ve got your hero, and an AI or second player co-op sidekick, you’re good to go, on your 15 day drive from Florida to Canada. The reason you’re taking on this epic journey is down to your character hearing a rumour that the zombie virus that has plagued America isn’t effecting Canada. With just this bit of information and your car you must make your way north. The difficulty comes in you needing to have fuel to run your car and food to run your humans. As such every day you’re stopping at locations and scavenging. In game play this means you go from a simple animation of a car bouncing down a road with your inventory floating around to a top down exploration game. Leading your character around twin stick shooter style you must enter buildings and rooms and spot a little hint sparkle that indicates an item can be picked up or a location can be searched for an item. Whilst you’re doing your hunting dozens and dozens of zombies are being kited towards you.

To aide you slightly you have various weapons that range from a bit useless to completely useless. Something the game doesn’t outright say, but wholly implies, is that killing zombies is pointless. There is no XP, or drops from monsters, instead all there is coming towards you is danger. Death Road to Canada is about survival, it’s not Dead Rising style kill all zombies. If you are unfortunate enough to get bitten by a zombie then your health goes down and the only way to get it back is to hope that one of your characters is any good at medicine and you have a first aid kit going spare. Finding out your party’s stats and abilities in things like medicine and survival, plus character traits like charisma and patience, is all context based. Bump into a really annoying person on your drive; hope you send out someone with charisma or patience to handle them without getting into a fight or losing morale. Need a car fixed; hope that the person you choose to fix it knows what they’re doing and doesn’t cause more harm than good. Only once you’ve tried them in a scenario will their skill level be reveled.

Death Road to Canada looks like a top down twin stick shooter but more than that the game is actually a choose your own adventure, where you’re not allowed to keep your finger in the previous page just in case things go bad. As you drive along you’re presented with scenarios like “you find a camp full of strangers, everyone in your party is tired, do you sleep here or carry on driving?”. If you sleep there then you risk getting mugged in the night and losing half of your inventory, if you carry on driving then the next location you go to will have your party fighting with lower stamina. Every choice you make in this game has a risk, and more often than not things will not go in your favour. Finding weapons as you go around is great but everything has a shelf life and eventually all things must break leaving you trapped with a horde, trying to get back to your car, with just your fists to defend yourself.

It’s easy at this point just to flip the table and call it quits on getting your party wiped over and over and over again. But as I said at the begining, this game justifies it’s difficulty with it’s setting. You’re supposed to have your back against the wall, you’re supposed to be struggling to survive, this is the zombie apocalypse and you’re all only human. Cars run out of fuel and people run out of food, of course you’re not going to find the exact supplies you need in every location you check. In one of my dozens of runs I had 4 members in my party and all needed first aid kits badly, we checked 2 locations with no luck and on the third we found a single med kit, unfortunately in my excitement of being able to keep someone going for just a little bit longer three of my team got taken down and all I was left with was a dog with a knife in it’s mouth. The little fella tried his best to survive but unfortunately with just a couple of days left to travel DOG bit the dust.

Gaining new team members is always a fun experience, you’ll find random travelers wandering down the road and you’ll need to decide quickly if you want them around of if they’re a waste of food. More often than not I took everyone I met on board and that led to more food and med kit shortages, but that extra pair of hands in a pinch sure does help. The characters you meet on the road are all fun with their own quirks, my personal favourites have been a lady in a big dress that used an umbrella as a weapon, a dog with a brutal melee hit and a man in a suit with a horse head that had a thing for guns.

Death Road to Canada will entertain and stress you out in equal measure, this game will be almost unfairly cruel but realistic in its struggle. Adding a player 2 will help slightly but you’ll still end up restarting over and over. Thankfully getting back into a game from death is near instant. Despite many many many hours put into this game I’ve never reached the end, but much like Spelunky and Binding of Issac that’s OK, Death Road to Canada is about the journey, not the destination, just go in knowing the journey is a bit of a bitch and you and your travelling buddies are going to die a hell of a lot.

There’s few genres of game that have, in my humble opinion, aged as badly as point and click games. In the 90’s, and even today, if you asked me for some of my favourite games I would list the Monkey Island series and Sam and Max. Lucas Arts’ games formed my childhood and my humour growing up. I would sit for hours just rubbing every object in my inventory against every other object in the hope that I would find the correct solution to the obtuse puzzles put in front of me. It pains me to say that despite the summers I put into playing and completing all those classics I have struggled to engage with them since. 20 years later and I’ve tried all the Double Fine modern takes, I’ve tried the Sam and Max Telltale style and even the modern equivalent Telltale games I just can’t get behind. It may be the story, it may be I for some reason consider my time to be worth more or I just burned out on it too young. Thankfully The Fall has been released on Switch, from its WiiU origins, to snap me back to the genre. As a back handed compliment however, I’m here for the story, not the puzzles.

I owned a WiiU relatively late into its cycle, the Wii had broken a lot of my good will towards Nintendo with its encouragement to actually make me physically move to play games. As such I, like so so many others, missed out a lot of great downloadable titles released to the eShop. Games like The Fall and Shovel Knight were just references I didn’t get. Thankfully this release, dare I say remaster, is a perfect accompaniment to the Switch for those that missed it first time round on a Nintendo platform.

The game starts with a figure falling from the sky and hurtling towards the ground below. Quite quickly you are introduced to the amazingly clever plot of the game, you are not the person inside this space suit, instead you are the AI of the suit who has three prime directives, you must protect your pilot, you must be obedient and you must not misrepresent reality (lie). These three orders are the thrust of the game, a point and click game with Metroidvania exploration and shoot outs. At first all of your abilities are locked behind coding that must be sanctioned by a higher up in command, but with no one in the area to sign off on you getting abilities like a shield, camouflage and thrusters you must instead use your brain to unlock them. Your goal is to get your pilot to a medical station, but standing in your way is numerous security bots and an unsettling overseer of the robot junkyard you find yourself in. On your way to your objective of medical attention for your pilot you have to traverse things like a sentry gun that requires a shield, quickly you’ll discover that when the pilot is in danger the appropriate ability is unlocked. As such ARID starts self justifying and amending internal logs to hide the fact she’s put her pilot in danger to unlock a shield so that she can use it to safely get through later issues. It’s this juxtaposition of an AI so torn by its coding and its near human empathetic and loyal personality traits that creates such an engaging story.

The game is a 2D scrolling platform at its heart set in a near pitch black world a la Limbo. With your flashlight shining on every inch of the world to try to find the appropriate items to shove in your inventory you’ll need to be incredibly perceptive to find everything you need on your first walk through an area. And this is the first of my issues with The Fall, the game requires you to spot things that aren’t there. With more or less everything being a silhouette you’ll have to not actually be looking for the bucket on the floor or a keycard you need, instead you’ll just be waving your torch around like your at a happy hardcore rave and hope to spot the icon to indicate there’s something to interact with. As an aesthetic the dark world is great, it adds to the tension and helps with the tone of the game and the story, a relentless struggle in low light, but to hamstring a key aspect of gameplay is frustrating.

In the opening area you obtain a gun and are shown another level to the game, an enjoyable shooting mechanic where you’re needing to take out robots that pop up around you as you dive for the nearest cover and wait for them to reload. As you progress through the game the mechanics around this change slightly but never progress too much further than that basic description. When I say I recommend people with a Switch pick this game up it’s for one simple reason, the story is something to behold. The interactions with other characters is a joy as you are shown options in text trees where lying would make your life easier but your directive to not misrepresent reality mean these are not selectable. The talks with the bases’ intercom system is perfection, they also have prime orders that they can’t break but they are desperate to help you and your pilot as best you can. And finally the talks with the Caretaker, your antagonist who again is just following their programming is creepy as it is effective.

The story drove me to finish The Fall’s five or so hour campaign, the game doesn’t outstay its welcome and with a sequel for the intended trilogy coming to Switch you don’t have long to wait for it to continue. The concept of AI becoming human has been played many times in Bladerunner and Deus Ex Machina but rarely in games has it been done to such a compelling way. The voice acting and audio plays pitch perfect in keeping you invested. The only downfall is the aesthetic getting in the way of the point and click elements and the solutions to the puzzles being a little bit too much of a rub X on Y to see if you achieve anything, if nothing else this gave me nostalgia to my childhood with Lucas Arts games. The Fall is a fascinating modern take on the point and clicks of old, with a engaging and stellar story, it’s just a shame that aspects of the gameplay don’t match the standard set by its plot.

Certain genre’s feel like they’re of their time. There are fewer and fewer point and click games for example and the myriad of MOBA’s have thankfully fallen by the wayside too. When most people think of mobile gaming two genres in particular come to mind, the match 3 games that would rinse people of their money and time and the endless runners that would rinse people of their money and time. Bit Trip Runner tried to legitamise this genre with its peak indie spin all those years ago, pushing for a home console release for an endless runner which was nothing if not brave. The Bit Trip Runner series is up there with the pantheon of ‘boy done good’ indie games that broke out of a small niche bubble and became something recognizable amongst the wider gaming audience. Years later we’ve lost the Bit Trip and gained Charles Martinet in Runner3 for Switch and Steam.

The core concept of an endless runner remains the same, the game auto runs in a direction for you and you must use your reflexes to perfectly time jumps, slides, kicks and enemy avoidance into a perfect run. One hit sends you back to the start of a level or the midpoint checkpoint if you’re lucky enough to have made it that far. I’m a relatively calm gamer, I’ll let out the occasional expletive when playing Street Fighter or mutter something when getting killed in Overwatch but on the most part its a split second of annoyance, games are fun and are meant to be enjoyed. Runner3 tested me, it tested my patience and my abilities to an extent that I’m still not sure if I got satisfaction from.

A key theme of the Runner series has been the music, it’s not just there to pump you up and keep you immersed in the world they’re building, it’s also your guide, you jump to the beat and on occasion you could tell what was coming by the music and what speed of taps may be required of you. In Runner3 this is sadly lacking, the music is largely forgettable, reminding me of royalty free music people use on Youtube, and rather than jumping to the beat you just seem to be adding a piano note to the track with each gold bar pick up collected. It’s a shame as the music should induce into the player an essential element for an endless runner, ‘flow’. Flow to me is just that perfect moment when you’re giving your game your full attention yet at the same time you’re on autopilot and just getting the job done. Runner3 is doing everything in its power to get rid of any semblance of flow, the music is just there, the world is so full with craziness and wacky creations that you can’t look at and the difficulty is borderline unfair to an amazing level.

I expected the first few levels to be my tutorial, getting back into the world of endless runners as I personally haven’t touched one since Temple Run 2 a couple of years back. Instead the first couple of levels were tough experiences, but I got them, and I did feel good for my achievement. But then level 3 through 6 I had nothing but trouble. You’re introduced to a few new skills at the start, level 1 is just for running and then a bit later you get the slide to go under objects, then a kick to take out barricades and then wall jumping etc. Each time I got a skill I wondered if the game would click for me and become a bit more manageable but that moment never came through my 6 or so hours finishing the main story. Side missions and new paths are unlocked as you go offering a somehow even tougher experience.

One of the main issues I have with Runner3 is the levels are far too long to be enjoyable. Levels have a checkpoint at the midway point, but when it takes 3 or 4 minutes to just get to the checkpoint you’ll have an idea of how long a perfect run will take, once you then add in the multiple failures you’ll have and be sent back to the start you’ll start to realise that despite the genre’s mobile pick up and play origins, this is not a pick up and play game. You’re not going to be knocking out a couple of levels as you wait for a bus or before your partner gets home from work, both physically and mentally this game is a commitment.

There’s new elements brought into this third game in the series with some quite enjoyable vehicle sequences, and also the occasional change of perspective. A particular favourite of mine is the mine cart where you still have to jump and duck as you go along to avoid things but instead you’ll be viewing all of this over the shoulder rather than in a 2D perspective. All of this is mired by what feels like unfair hitbox detection at times. There’s a particular obstacle that the developers seem to be in love with, short stairs, this normally requires 3 or 4 very quick jumps, unfortunately if you’re not pixel perfect you are destined to fail after your first jump as due to recovery animation from a jump you can’t bounce straight back up. You can mitigate this by hitting down whilst jumping to cancel out of the animation but you’re cancelling into another animation that also requires recovery. It’s obviously possible to make these jumps but to introduce so many unfun elements in just the first few levels of the first world puts the player on the back foot and starts the resentment early.

I want to love Runner3, it has a fun style to it, it has Shovel Knight and Charles Martinet (the voice of Mario), it seems like this would be the perfect on the go game for the Switch, I just worry that this game is mostly going to be enjoyed by anyone who has uttered the phrase ‘git gud’ online without making a joke or being ironic. Cuphead is hard, Runner3 just seems cruel. In Cuphead you know why you failed, you did something wrong whether from greed or lack of skill, in Runner3 it often just feels like its punishing you. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Runner3, its just had a number of decisions made during production that have solely been influenced by the developers who knew how the game worked inside and out, they knew the number of frames after a jump before they could jump again; the average player is not going to have the same experience. It’s a shame, there’s something good here, and perhaps a patch could sort this out if its a widely held belief, but at the moment unless you’re really looking to improve you endless runner skills in 2018 its hard for me to recommend this, I just don’t want to be held finanially responsible for you smashing your Switch into a wall.

About 10 years ago I started building my own arcade machine, a large thrust of doing this was down to a summer where I became obsessed with Track and Field. My friends and I played hundreds of games of the retro Olympic events where everything was achieved with button mashing and an ungodly amount of luck with timing of button presses. I’ve tried other party sports games since then but none have come close to recapturing the fun of that summer with Track and Field, until now and the perfect for Nintendo Switch game, Super Sportmatchen.

Much in the same way as Behold the Kickmen was a game created by Dan Marshall where someone who didn’t know the rules to football created a twisted version of what we expect, Super Sportmatchen doesn’t do anything normally. Whether it’s the buttons required or the event itself, nothing is how it should be and the game is all the better for it. In a modern take on 8bit style the pixel art sports event sees you take on up to 5 events, out of an unfortunately small roster of 10, and assigns points for victory culminating in a final score board for podium places. 1 to 4 players or AI can take on these events and with most of the events being short sharp bursts there is a real potential for this to be a great time sink for group party play.

High points across the events include a fascinating sumo, fencing, tug of war mash up event with pillows. An NBA Jam style basketball game where all players are on the court at once shooting into one hoop and everyone can shove each other or bounce of each other’s heads for greater height. A Hammer Throw event where you’re spinning around and whipping a Capybara 300m and hopefully getting it to deploy its’ parachute before a very heavy meeting with the ground below. A ball toss game cross with shove penny where the ground is divided into scores and bouncing off a back wall first will double your score, every time a round is finished a weasel runs onto the court to take away the ball. What I’m getting at is nothing is as you would expect in this game, with the exception of the 100m sprint which almost feels out of place in its normality by comparison to the rest of the events.

At the start of each event you’re told the buttons, but not the actual rules of the event. I appreciate a super quick and easy guide before each event type but on a player’s first run through of the events there is a large amount that have basic rules or concepts that are not explained at all for new players. I found myself giving a quick rundown of each event before starting to each player I was with, just to make sure we were on a relatively even playing field. My first time playing the bounce a ball off the back wall game I assumed I was trying to whip the little red thing as far as I could so went for a perfect full power and 45 degree toss, I hit a UFO so I guess that’s something at least.

Super Sportmatchen has the audio to match the visuals, it’s all very chip tuney and scratchy as you assume a hundred filters would do to audio and when combined with the visual style you kind of get to a place where you could easily confuse this for the games of old that it’s emulating, apart from it has a much nicer frame rate. The silliness of it all is a real selling point in Super Sportmatchen, its easy to just straight compare this to Track and Field, but with the animals coming on at half time during basketball to dance with pom poms or to replace the clay pigeons in the shooting game, instead allowing you to throw fruit into a flying capybara’s mouth, it just makes for a fun atmosphere as you play.

The game isn’t without it’s flaws though, the great fun of a team tournament (2 humans against 2 AI) was somewhat tarnished by one of the AI matching our skill level wonderfully and the other being a Deep Thought level of AI where it perfected every single event with the reactions of, well, a computer. There’s a canoe event where your boat goes down your track, within which are 3 lanes you can utilise, obstructions come at you thick and fast and the player must jump between lanes to avoid all obstacles. Humans in my experience can expect to get normally around 300-400m before the speed gets a bit much. Good players a bit further, our AI opponent got 1600m. Not only were we beaten to a stupid degree we also were forced to sit and watch this AI monster just flick between lanes insanely fast like he’d imbibed all the sugar and caffeine in the planet in one go.

Issues like that are few and far between and really adding AI is not essential to the experience. Single player is what it is, basically a glorified training space for you to work out the rules and nuance of each event. What this game feels like it was made for however is multiplayer. Get some friends round and add this into your rotation of other games like Gangbeasts, Jackbox and Buzz if you’re feeling retro. Local multiplayer is hit and miss these days with the games being a dime a dozen on Steam, Super Sportmatchen stands out from the crowd as something that’s not only well presented but also fun to play. I wish there was more than 10 events as a couple of them feel quite similar to each other, but for what the package is at the price it is you really can’t complain, you’ll get your money’s worth as long as you have friends to play with.

The launch trailers for many consoles in retrospect look more than a little bit silly. The Nintendo Switch reveal trailer especially is all kinds of aspirational cringe worthy material, with its cool young folk living their bohemian lifestyle of have homes that aren’t filled with crap and playing multiplayer games on rooftops. One reveal element that really took everyone by surprise was the potential for multiplayer on the Switch with each player using a single Joy-Con. It was and still is a novel idea, as such you’d expect the console to be positively dripping in co-op experiences but oddly the store is more filled with mobile ports and just not very good games. Thankfully Pode has stepped up to throw its hat into the co-op Switch ring.

The game sees each player taking on the role of a small elemental, one based around rock and the other based around light. With these incredibly cute and adorably designed avatars you must both navigate cave systems with the simple goal of Bulder, the rock, helping Glo, the fallen star, back home. Each character has its own contrasting traits and abilities. Bulder can eat rocks (and Glo) and change its mass to squeeze through tunnels and push buttons. Glo produces light wherever they go, this has the ability to spawn plant life in these dank and barren cave systems, occasionally the plant life spawns giant leaves allowing themselves to be used as platforms. With these basic mechanics in mind you are tasked with dozens of levels of quite clever puzzles that will on many occasions have you sitting and staring at your screen until divine inspiration strikes and you can progress.

Pode’s main selling point is its co-op, with each player claiming a character, or on the fly swapping if a bit of platforming is a struggle for one player, you can enjoy the wonderful chilled ambience the game produces. On multiple occasions both my wife and I let out an audible ‘awwww’ at the sites and sounds, mainly when Glo was calling for Bulder to hurry up and come to the exit of an area. It’s worth pointing out the Pode can be played in single player but to be incredibly blunt that is not the thurst of the game and there is little fun to be had from it. Controlling both characters and swapping between them all the time is quite simply a tedious affair and really detracts from the joys of running around and for no reason at all spreading the plant life around or having Bulder build crystal displays with his powers whilst you’re trying to solve a particularly hard area.

The visuals are going to be a little twee for some players, with its obviously cute stylings and mascot-esque main characters you could be forgiven for being cynical about its target. But trust me when I say that Pode is a beautiful game that is even better when marveled at with someone beside you on the sofa. Over the years its been easy to lean into the stereotype that non-gaming people see, especially on TV and Film, that games are just running and gunning affairs where if you’re not calling someone something offensive over a headset you’re not gaming; but much like settling down to a nice animal documentary it’s wonderful to have a game that we can all describe as chilled. On warm summer’s evenings my wife and I settled on the sofa and serenely moved through the game just feeling good about ourselves and the world. No screaming, no anger and no negativity. Even getting stuck is a fine experience with the decorating of areas with your element.

Pode’s audio is suitably chilled with a jaw droppingly beautiful soundtrack that doesn’t even try to get you amped up but instead continues to lull you into the world and the atmosphere it generates. Developers Henchman and Goon have a clear vision for the game and have made no comprises in its design. Never pulling a fast one on the player but instead maintaining its eye on the goal of a relaxed pace. The game isn’t going to be for everyone, it does require some thought and is only really viable if someone is sat next to you but if you can get on the same wavelength as your partner and you are able to keep focus on the game you’re honestly in for a treat. The cliché of question of ‘what game is good for my non-gaming partner?’ can easily be answered by Pode, a satisfying and beautiful romp with a fairy tale story and adorable characters you wish you had plushes of on your bed.

Metroidvania was one of those terms in gaming that just had no effect on me, that is until about a year ago. I knew what it meant but outside of that I just had no interest. Then I realised that I should give them a go, see what the fuss is about and educate myself. Cut to a month later and I’ve completed Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission. Quite simply that was one of the greatest decisions I’ve made in my gaming life, to give that style of game a go. Moving on from that I’m currently about 10 hours into a Castlevania Symphony of the Night run and can see why that is held in such high regard. As such when we come to today and I’m talking about Dead Cells, what is described as a Rogue Lite Metroidvania, I can say with some experience that everyone should ignore the Metroidvania genre label; But that’s not to say that Dead Cells isn’t one of the best games I’ve played in the past 12 months.

It may sound like a petty thing to get hung up on but I want to start with getting the negative out of the way before I spend minutes gushing about the awesome experience that Dead Cells is. Metroidvanias to me are all about the exploration to continue the plot, it’s about the different atmospheres that are evoked by the designs of the various areas of the games. Dead Cells in reality only really equates to the Metroidvania style by map design and being a 2D platformer, outside of that, what you’re actually looking at is a wonderfully solid and fulfilling rogue-lite that will consistently have you looking at the time and thinking “oh, just one more run”.

Starting in a prison you are a blob of various decomposed bodies that at the beginning of each run plops down on the floor of the execution chamber to grab a recently beheaded body. With this new shell for your essence you must run through level after level of enemies that are out to get you. During your runs you’ll pick up new weapons and gadgets that will aide you in your slaughtering of the undead and the mutated.

When you kill the foes of the world you’re sometimes award with Cells. Between levels you meet a Collector who has the ability to unlock permanent upgrades for your runs. This is the crux of the game, doing run after run until you’ve earned enough cells to get your next upgrade, which in turn will help you get a little further into the game which in turn gets you more cells. The gameplay loop is satisfying, as long as you survive the first level (which is near impossible to fail) you’ll be able to get some cells and get close to upgrading something. In my first few runs I made the mistake of unlocking weapon blueprints I had found with the goal of starting the game with better attack power when in reality the most useful upgrade you could possible get is the Potion upgrades allowing you to heal yourself multiple times during a level.

As well as meeting the Collector in between levels you’ll also encounter someone offering you mutations. You can hold up to three mutations and these range from extra damage to extra health to the always essential second chance mutation that brings you back to life on hitting zero health. These mutations are a reward for getting through a level and mixed with the random scrolls you find on your runs that imcrease damage or health, depending on which you choose, really can make the difference between a 5 minute run and a 30 minute run.

You’ll eventually start meeting bosses as you progress, defeat these and you’ll unlock abilities and game modes. The first will grant you the ability to grow vines out of certain sections of ground allowing you to climb up areas to make faster progress or reach little treats. On defeating the Conceirge at the thend of the Ramparts level you get the Daily Challenges door unlocked in the opening area, a game mode that tasks you to complete a random level with random weapons and a points system. All of these little things help you in the long run giving you a new blueprint to spend your hard earned cells on giving you that itch of wanting to be as good as possible.

Dead Cells is a hard game, there’s going to be many occasions where you just bite off a bit more than you can chew and you’ll pay the price but with each death you as the player will learn something; struggling to do any damage to a shielded enemy, roll past them and take out the training dummy totem that is protecting them. Early game archers messing you up? Have a bow handy and shoot from crouching as their shots go straight over your head. Quickly these little tactics become second nature and you’ll be sprinting through the first three levels easily.

With the world resetting on each death you’ll have to explore the level to find where the exit is but also take advantage of the ease of the first areas to get some decent gear and upgrades to meet the tougher requirements down the line. All of this, this loop of live/die/repeat, is there to give you satisfaction and stress. Everyone can play this game, some people may be stuck in area one and smacking their head against the wall but with each successful completion of level 1 you’ll be helping your character permanently with upgrades to help you before long smack your head against a wall in level 2.

The overall design of Dead Cells is great, an awesome 3D pixel art gives depths to all the sprites and the world at large, the areas are each unique with the Ramparts especially being a treat visually. The music of the opening prison and the Village on Stilts being a joy to bomb around to.

With upgrades weapons and equipment bosses are still going to kick most people in the behind. You’ll have numerous deaths but at no point are they cheap, you screwed up and that’s how it always is. Enemies have yellow exclamations above their heads when they’re about to attack giving you time to do a well executed roll into punish attack, if you take damage its because you lost focus, even for a second. Bosses especially follow a set routine of attacks that are there to be played on with a good roll. My personal favourite being freeze spell with a couple of automated turrets sat around peppering the bastard, I had one of my best runs to that tactic.

Dead Cells is a game I will recommend to everyone, I played the PC build which ran smooth and had zero issues but personally if the option is there for you (and the port is good) I would say this seems like a perfect game for the Nintendo Switch, something that will fill up your commute or lunch at work, every run always makes progress and the games story is on the light side so there’s no concern about having to put the Switch into sleep to get back to your desk. Everything in Dead Cells is tight, the controls feel good, the animation and sounds is perfect, the procedurally generate levels are always fair and the combat is tasty. Dead Cells is up there with some of the best gaming experiences around, to me its not a Metroidvania like everyone is touting, but it is a near perfect game.

Starting something is hard, I’ve written 3 different introductions to this review already. With games it’s especially hard to find that balance between introduction and teasing what’s to come. When a game is a sequel it become even more of a challenge as you need to appease both new and returning players. DrinkBox Studios with Guacamelee 2 has produced one of the greatest, mechanically and story wise, introductions to a sequel in any game series. The game opens with a ‘Previously on Guacamelee’, you’re shown the final area from the first game and the chatter before taking on Calaca, the big bad of the game. Then you’re told to go fight the boss of the first game. Taking on this monster boss from the first game is intimidating at first, but this gives you an idea of moves you’re going to pick up as you play, helps returning players like me remember how the game works and replays the key story beats from the finale. The boss is an easier version with weaker attacks and lower health than first time around and this, if nothing else, is one of the best ways to introduce someone to the game and tutorialise something that everyone needs, a reminder of what the hell you’re doing.

Guacamelee 2 joins a barrage of recent ‘metroidvania’ games that have been released in the past 6 months; Chasm, Hollow Knight and to a lesser extent Dead Cells. It would be a struggle for another Metroidvania to stand out amongst this crowd but with Guacamelee doing so well all those years ago Drinkbox Studios has earned some good will and a lineage with this genre. I personally spent a whole Christmas holiday playing Guacamelee on the Vita. With Guacamelee 2 it’s fair to say it’s the first game again, but with more.

The story starts with Juan, the luchador hero of the first game, living with his wife and 2 kids in the Mexiverse. He’s now overweight and hasn’t trained or fought in a long time, as such when evil tetronimos appear in the sky over his village he’s not ready to take on the challenge of saving not just his Mexiverse, but all the other timelines that run parallel. You quickly learn that the shapes in the sky are coming from a luchador called Salvador, the one who killed Calaco in his timeline after Juan died and failed to do the job. Salvador is after three stones that will give him the ability to create a Guacamole that will give him the power of the gods. And that’s your set up, Juan must reclaim his luchador mask and the associated powers and retrain himself after 7 years of apathy to get to a point where he can claim the stones first and defeat Salvador and his lackies.

The game is pure Metroidvania, you’ll get to a temple with one of the stones in and struggle to find your way around, filling in the map as you go. As you progress you’ll find hints that you should be able to get somewhere but physically can’t, thankfully you’ll find a Chozo statue near by that will contain a new move for you to learn. Guacamelee 2 is big, really very big, on the most part this doesn’t actually prove too troublesome as rarely will you get lost or confused, on a rare occasion where that are two paths to go you’ll find one is just a challenge room with a chest full of coins is at the end of a troublesome platforming puzzle, and the other route is the story path. But with it being so big you can easily spend a lot of time in just one temple working your way around.

A key feature of the first Guacamelee has returned in the form of the ability to jump between the living and the dead worlds. The majority of the world remains the same but you are required to leap between the two to pass certain platforming puzzles or defeat enemies who are only in one dimension and not the other. When combined with the many different platforming moves at your disposal you’ll end up having quite a lot to keep in mind. The game does a good job of every so often bringing back a concept from a few hours prior in your game time just to keep you abreast of what may be asked of you.

Fighting in Guacamelee 2 is almost exactly the same as it’s predecessor, you’ll be walking along until you find walls appear around you and a large LUCHA sign appear. Now you must use your various melee attacks to kill enemies, once weakened you can grapple them which has another chain of commands (once leveled up) that give you even more potential options in a fight. As you go you’ll find that on the most part you’ll stick with the same couple of combos to finish off enemies, for me it was punch until I could grapple and then drop kick them into other enemies and follow up with a strong punch into Piledriver. It all feels good, and that’s really a key thing about this game, something I cannot praise enough; whether it’s the combat or the flow of movement through a particularly long platforming section, everything feels right and fluid. The early game doesn’t quite have this same feeling but that’s your incentive for progressing and unlocking more moves.

Where the game does falter slightly is in the feeling of the different areas. The most obvious comparison is Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night, two games that defined the genre, both are set in one large sprawling location yet are able to give names and feelings to these areas. The cave based jungle area of Super Metroid feels different to it’s temple like structures later in the game. The ramparts are completely different to the basement areas of Castlevania. Guacamelee 2 doesn’t have these distinctions, with the exception of a prison and pseudo hell later in the game most areas feel interchangeable and don’t have must difference in identity, the overworld stuff does feel a bit different as you run through fields or the desert but these locations are purely there for getting from point a to point b. It’s just a shame as this game has such an identity that you want it to be able to have that cliché review line of ‘the world feels like a character in its own right’.

The soundtrack yet again is a wonderful mix of intense dance/chip tune mariachi and much like the first game I’ve fallen completely in love with it. The jumping between the world of the living and the world of the dead also effects the soundtracks meaning on sections where it’s not relevant which you’re in I would gladly choose which version of the soundtrack I wanted to listen to like my own twisted little radio player. The graphics from the first game have had a slightly overhaul, frame rate on pc holds at 60fps nicely with only a couple of random blips every now and then but what’s really have a kick in the spandex butt is the lighting. Shades and shadows cover everything whereas everything in the first game very much had a vector paper cut art style, thankfully none of this overshadows the movement in the game, the platforming and combat still take priority and you’ll nearly always know where you are and what you’re doing.

One major change between the first and second game is the brazenness of the humour. The first game was played for laughs at times and the writing was incredibly clever on many occasions, the second game however has lost some of the subtlety and instead gone for a more obtuse in your face style with it’s jokes. Often it’s fine and you’ll allow a wry smile across your face but you’ll have many experiences of whispering ‘jesus’ under your breath as you endure another joke that isn’t worthy of being ‘dad joke’ status. The references are as strong as ever in Guacamelee 2, the three stones you’re hunting clearly homaging the triforce, there’s also river city ransom / double dragon dimension you end up in early in the game and a street fighter 2 bonus stage around the half way mark plus hundreds of other little points for you to notice. Some pay off well, like spotting the Skull Girls logo spray painted onto a wall, others are just a little too on the nose like the Grinding Timeline with it’s genre breaking level that goes on a little bit too long. With all my negativity here, do not worry, this is not another Matt Hazzard, this obviously all comes from a place of love and respect for these genres and games, it’s just a little heavy handed, it’s less a nod towards these references and instead more of a KO Headbutt.

Guacamelee 2 has so many mechanics going at once that you feel like it should fail in a lot of areas but in reality this game is something special. With the various unlock trees for you to spend money on, the copious amounts of both combat moves and traversal moves, and with the jumping between dimensions and between human form and chicken form it should be chaos, but in a testament to it’s perfectly tight design you can’t help but be enamored with all aspects of this game. Guacamelee 2 should be on everyone’s list to play, a wonderful package so efficiently designed and scoped to be a great experience it pays off in nearly every regard.

I feel like I’ve spoken a hundred times about genre mash-ups recently here on Pixelbedlam, usually it’s just a couple of game styles that are brought in together, but Vroom Kaboom smashes together so many the game loses it’s focus from the start. Tower Defence, Car Combat, MOBA and Card Collecting all rolled into one free to play game. If it sounds confusing it’s because it really is.

I’m not going to pretend it’s impossible or even it’ll take you hours to understand Vroom Kaboom but it’s worth noting that the part of the menu that says ‘Tutorial’, funnily enough the first thing I went into, was actually just a really easy match of the normal game, no hints or tips pop up, no introduction to the game concepts, it is literally just a normal game, but super easy. As such everything in this review is based on my understanding of what was going on at any point.

Vroom Kaboom sees you take on one of the role of one of three factions, a Tokyo drift style crew, a Mad Max style crew and a low-rider style crew. Each crew has 15 odd missions for you to tackle set in either a desert, a neo-tokyo highway or that dry river sewage thing that the truck chases the bike down in Terminator 2. The goal is as a solo player, in a duo or in a trio take on an opposing team, to win you must destroy the enemies’ oil tank set up at the end of a long stretch of road with various obstacles in your way. Spending the cards in your deck, bear with me here, you summon vehicles. These vehicles need to collect one of the three types of resource along the road, oil; for spending to summon your vehicles, fire; for spending on special vehicles, cards; for adding to your hand and finally these land mine things that after many hours with this game I still am not entirely sure of their purpose.

Once you’ve got your resources it’s time to send out your cars, the game has the potential at this point to move to car combat. If you take control of one of your vehicles, you can have many out at once to cycle between, you aren’t exactly controlling it, instead you’re giving what feels like a vague suggestion of which of a couple of lanes you want it to drive in and when to use it’s nitro and it’s special ability like Jump or Explode, some are also blessed with machine guns. If you meet an enemy, or your own vehicle from behind, it’s at this point you’ll be greeted with a little explosion and the frustration of having wasted oil on that card. What’s more frustrating is that if you don’t control a vehicle the AI does, you would think this would mean an efficient safe run to the oil rigs to destroy them but really it means that you’ll just keep getting indicators to say all your vehicles are blown up and the AI didn’t bother collecting any resources en route so you’re now stuffed and have to wait 20 seconds for the game to pity you and give you a free scooter that is only useful for resource collection. On the flip side whatever they do must work because in 2 vs 2 games with AI on my team I found I would just randomly win with no idea how we achieved our goals.

You reach a point with Vroom Kaboom where you notice something, this would be a good mobile game or even a really good board game. It’s not often you can say that about a game that is only being released on PC and PS4, but with all it’s chaos and 5- 10 minute games this is ripe for that app store and tabletop market. Making the game touch screen may also actually make the borderline useless UI slightly more useful. The PS4 version features a cursor that you can’t actually move and there’s drop down menu’s that don’t feature anything and it took me an hour to realise that the main menu with it’s three cars on podiums was actually your options for changing which faction you were running with.

Graphically the game is fine, the music is fine, even the potentially awful monetisation and loot box system is fine. There’s nothing particularly offensive about Vroom Kaboom, but there’s also nothing I can scream about from the roof tops. It’s just a game I played for a few days and probably wouldn’t have played as long had it not been for due diligence for this review. It’s worth noting that I tried to get into online multiplayer but couldn’t find a game despite trying over a couple of days and at various times, not sure if I had bad luck with timing of maintenance but if I didn’t then that’s not a great sign. Vroom Kaboom is not bad, it’s also free which works in its favour, it’s unfortunately also a game you’ve forgotten you’ve even played a week later. The PSVR support is good despite it’s insistence on Move Controllers and that will give it some legs in that community but outside of that it’s hard to see who this game is for and whether its going to garner any longevity with its fans.

UPDATE: 22/08/2018 – Just as I was getting this review ready to publish I received contact from Ratloop Games Canada regarding common feedback from fanbase about the tutorial issue. They’ve set up this FAQ and Video series to aide new players. This hasn’t effected my opinion on the game but I wanted to help anyone looking for support with the game by posting this here:

Video – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuRZCiYYL08f3mAgT-Qpp4stQe9kQkqvF

FAQ – https://www.ratloopgamescanada.com/faq/

Before I start this proper it’s worth noting that Green Hell is in Early Access on Steam currently, each publication is going to decide whether that denotes a game getting a review or a preview but I personally fall under the logic of if a game can accept money from players then it deserves to be reviewed. As such a disclaimer up front that this review is based on the launch product of the game from the 29^th of August 2018.

Most people’s experience with a survival game would have started with Minecraft a decade ago. Green Hell’s starting cycle is no different. In first person you are tasked with surviving as long as possible in the Amazon with nothing to your name apart from a watch that is so advanced it’ll tell you oddly intimate details about your body like your hydration, protein, fat levels and requirements. Much like Minecraft step one is finding a spot you like and/or feel safe in and then finding stone and wood to start making tools to gather more materials, like more wood from the axe you’ve just made and then progressing down an inventory flow chart. This is where we hit the first issue with this launch build of Green Hell, the game doesn’t tell you recipes. Trial and error are your friends here but they’re the kind of friends you’re only really still connecting with on social media out of obligation and the knowledge that without you they’d probably turn into psychopaths.

The game actually starts with a story tutorial. You’re in the Amazon with Mia, your lady friend, and she’s giving you the basics of survival in the forest. After a few days she goes off to act like a voyeur and ingratiate herself with the local tribes. Weeks later you’re awoken by a walkie talkie transmission and it turns out the tribe turned on Mia and you need to save her; here’s where the story ends and you’re dumped into a new world and tasked with surviving. And surviving is hard.

The game doesn’t hold your hand in anyway. From a gameplay perspective you are spinning a dozen plates at once, finding clean water is your first challenge. Drinking stream or pond water will lead to infections that causes various types of vomit to leave your body. It took about 5 deaths for me to find a video online that says you can leave coconut shells on the floor to collect rain water, the game at no point explained this. Now I had water sorted for future runs I needed food. Fruit was a good start but didn’t give me the fat I needed, I had to hunt. Once I built an axe and realised that wasn’t doing much against the local capybaras I guessed how to make a spear, this upped my hunting game and I was carving fresh meat off animals, unfortunately I didn’t need to eat at this point so by the time I built a fire and decided to set up camp the meat, and all the fruit I was carrying, had gone bad and all I could get from them was food poisoning or maggots. Next death I decided water and then a camp were the priorities so I had somewhere to bring food to. This worked great for one night but on night two when returning to my home in the rain forest I found some local tribesmen had decided they liked my little hovel and just took it over. When I kindly asked them to leave by swinging my axe they jumped me and that was my death count in the double digits.

So once you’ve kind of got the hang of all that then the game is easy right? Well no, it’s at this point I have to admit I’ve missed out a key aspect of this game, the constant need to check your body. By going into your radial menu you can check your limbs and find out how many leaches, snake bites, bee stings, scorpion stings, cuts, grazes, wounds and any number of other ailments that have befallen you on your adventure. Most can be sorted by finding a particular leaf and crafting it into a bandage, others like the leach you just move your cursor and yank the bugger off and some you’ll need a special tool like the bone needle to remove worms. But don’t ask where you get the needle, instead the game will just keep telling you that you must find or craft one with no recipe. And this is one of the biggest issues with the game, there is zero hand holding, which is fine if you’re going for immersion, this player has ended up in an unknown environment, but that being said, I know that I could craft together a rain catcher with some logs, rope and palm leaves in real life, but in the game I have to find one at a random logging camp to learn the recipe. When death is so common it becomes impossible to keep up, your game is fresh each time so you must re-find the useful items to learn their recipes for your notebook.

The final obstacle is a fascinating addition to the genre, your sanity. Being alone in the rain forest is going to mess with you, but eating healthily and sleeping will keep your brain going and stable. But with each tiny mistake your sanity drops, and when it reaches a certain point you’ll swear you heard a noise off to your left, but there’s nothing there, then you’ll think you heard voices, speaking in English, but no one is around. Finally you’ll hear yourself trash talking in a wonderful anti motivational talk like you’re standing in front of a bathroom mirror very drunk and feeling sorry for yourself. Sanity can drop for many reasons but personally I find the most effective is the random leaches that decide to subtract 2 sanity every minute they’re hitching a ride on you, which adds up, and to be blunt breaks flow as you’re having to rotate each limb to find the culprit. Once you intentionally or unintentionally get to peak insanity the real chaos begins. Tribesmen appear everywhere and start attacking you. Once you’ve started attacking them, I recommend the stone spear, you’ll find they die in one hit and were infact a figment of your imagination, a figment that can kill you easily. Eat well and you’ll get your sanity back but to be honest at that point you may as well reload the game.

Visually the game has moments of beauty but with some pretty hefty frame drops you’ll need to be prepared for a not fully optimised game yet. The biggest annoyance is the audio. Voice acting is fine and the stereo sound works great from pinning tribesmen’s chanting down but outside of that I have to hope the first big patch for this game fixes the audio balancing. Parrots will really annoy you, Waterfalls will deafen you even with volume turned down, but the absolute worst experience in this game comes from having to be within 100m of a bees nest. They have no chill. Audio isn’t effected by distance so if you’re within 100m in any direction you will have full volume bees buzzing in your ears with no break. I’ve turned around 180 degrees as soon as I hear the bees now, not because of my crippling real world phobia of bees and wasps but instead that noise is reducing my real world sanity down to a level I worry I can’t come back from.

Early Access is all about showing the potential of a product, and Green Hell has potential. It’s quite similar to other survival games like The Forest but it does enough to distance itself in game, both in location but also tone and style. Green Hell needs a lot of polish and they need to assess whether they’re making a game that’s supposed to be played or feared because right now it’s hard to say the game was fun for the first few hours. After the tutorial when I had no clue how to do anything, tool tips would have helped, an improved notebook would have been better, and dear god please give the players some recipes. There’s clearly greatness bubbling under the surface here, the game shows a real potential to be something that’s awesomely fun and something that could get the viral success of many other survival horror games, it just needs a little rounding off at the edges and a bit of a spruce and it’ll be there. With good updates and a rejig of the early game I would have no qualms recommending this experience to anyone, especially if they like to be eaten by jaguars all the time.

This site is a self indulgence for me, it’s a creative outlet where I can talk about what I love. But there’s a certain genre that I don’t really talk about on here despite it being my favourite, fighting games. Twice a week I meet a friend of mine to play Street Fighter V, on occasion we’ll veer into other fighters like Skull Girls et al but Street Fighter V (and 4 before that) Have been our bread and butter for years. I’ve been to Japan a couple of times over the past couple of years and spend a large amount of time in the arcades with my wife playing fighting games and just seeing what’s going on. As would be no surprise to anyone in the west Anime Fighters are huge there and games like Blaz Blue, Fighting Climax and Under Night In-Birth garner quite a crowd. As someone who enjoys fighting games and anime I feel like these should be my mainline but try as I might the mechanic heavy games always eluded me on a casual level. Thanks to this review I decided to lean heavy on actually understanding an Anime Fighter.

UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH Exe:Late[st] follows in the grand tradition of Anime Fighters having insane names that border on parody. This is the latest revision of Under Night In-Birth featuring various fixes and balance changes across the board, that being said, someone who’s new to the sub-genre may struggle to notice the nuances a true fan would. From an outside perspective I can say that UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH Exe:Late[st] is simply a great fighting game.

With 20 characters up front you have all bases covered with your anime school girls, your evil looking old men, your militarised women and your pseudo demon women who are very comfortable in their lack of clothing. The story mode features a light visual novel style with Japanese voice acting and it’s pretty much what you would expect; few frames explaining character motivation (though these assume some prior knowledge of story), 5 fights before a mid boss with more story, few more fights before you meet big boss with accompanying story to wrap it all up before the credits role. This won’t tax most people with a basic skill in fighting games, the game doesn’t reward button mashing but I imagine most will get by with it if required.

Where the game excels is in it’s strategy. Some fighting games are designed to play defensively, namely Street Fighter, you block and hide in a corner and wait for your opponent to make a mistake before you follow up with your killer punish combo. And while UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH Exe:Late[st] does play well with this style you’re more encouraged to play a different tactic, there’s a lot more reward for you going in aggressive, even if you are just doing footsie and playing the low ground game. On the face of it you’ll feel like each character only has a couple of moves with the usual fighting game down forward punch variations but once you get into the truly impressive 179 lessons in the tutorial or just glance at the command list in the pause menu you’ll realise that those moves are just the start of things. A large number of the character’s move sets are based around the idea of chaining, do one move to then be able to do another. This is one of many areas that new players may struggle with initially but given time and some playing in the tutorial area everyone can pick it up.

I mentioned the push towards being aggressive and this is mainly down to a fascinating concept called the grid. At the bottom of the screen between each player’s individual meter is a shared meter that fills up either when a player holds down the concentrate button, leaving them wide open for a flurry of attacks from their opponent, or more advisably it fills when a player pushes with attacks and gets combos going. Once it’s reached a certain point a button combination will allow the player to pull off their typically over the top flashy special moves. It’s a clever way to keep the action moving and rewarding players for not just sitting back and waiting the timer out.

All of the various game modes you would hope to find in a modern fighting game are present with story and challenge type areas filled out and the obvious multiplayer. Unfortunately finding an online game is a little bit of a struggle currently and if you do get into a game you may find that the lag is a little uncomfortable for the majority, the other issue is that this is the third version of Under Night In-Birth and at this stage if you get in a game online you’ll be realistically taking on people who play the game religiously and have no issue showing you. This isn’t by any means a slight against the game, it’s impressive to see what a top level player can do, but it’s just a shame it comes at the cost of a few minutes of your time and a large chunk of your pride.

Something I’m not sure people are praising enough is the character select screen that launches with an animation of the character tiles falling into places with accompanying music, it’s worth the price of admission alone. On top of that the soundtrack is filled with awesome epic music with hints of classical pieces dropped in for good measure. The backgrounds lack some of the quality I’ve come to expect from my fighting games and is particularly jarring for being slightly barren polygonal areas that don’t match the art style of the characters up front. Some are great simple stages like the street fight under a highway or the dockland area but others like the shopping centre just have no life to them which is quite unfortunate.

With it’s large array of characters covering all standards of player from the zoners to the grapplers to the people who love mechanics on their mechanics and want to control not only their player but a summoned creature from another dimension you’ll be sure to find someone that is going to be your main. Fight sticks are a must for this game and to be honest as with any fighting game the most fun you’ll have is actually with a friend on the couch next to you. There’s a lot to love about UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH Exe:Late[st] and with it’s truly awesome character art and music you’ll be hard pushed to be displeased with local play, it just may be a tough sell if you’re looking for a long term online experience.

Up front I’m going to say that this review is potentially Not Safe For Work! Images whilst not offensive to most will at the very least make your boss question what you’re looking at on your work computer…

Senran Kagura is a series that I’ve become weirdly familiar with during my time running Pixelbedlam. Senran Kagura Reflexions is the fourth game in the series I’ve reviewed here and my understanding of the main characters and tropes are becoming more and more prevalent. This has now reached the point where whilst playing Reflexions with my wife Harriet and friend Beth in the room I was able to explain the over arching plot and recurring characters of the series, something I was honestly surprised by. The reason for this is down to how Senran Kagura works as an IP, what started out as mainly brawlers has been expanding it’s reach to now cover genre’s like “Arena Shooter” in the form of Peach Beach Splash and “Cooking Puzzler Rhythm Game” in the form of Bon Appetite. Really at this point when I see Senran Kagura next I’m going to first think of anime girls getting clothes ripped off and then I’m going to assume it’s a kart racer.

Reflexions finally does away with that annoying ‘game’ feature of the previous titles in the series and goes all out on what I can only really describe as an experience, and my god what an experience this was. All of the games have leaned heavy on the visual novel plot delivery and reflexions does this with reckless abandon. The unfortunate side effect of this transition is that the plot that has been decided on is pure David Lynch abstract surrealist erotica. You’re invited to a class room to meet Asuka, the protagonist of all of the series, the Ryu if you will, and she explains that she wants to feel close to you and to do that you need to give her a hand massage. Reflexions requires many play throughs for a multitude of reasons but the main one being is that on your first run this is just simply confusing. The hand massage, and the following scenarios, actually does a great job of justifying being on the Switch and also a genuine advertisement for the innovative technology inside the Joy Cons. Whilst you pick and finger or a palm to focus on Asuka will show pleasure or uncomfortable at your choice. If you pick a particular finger you’ll then be taken into one of Asuka’s day dreams where she is, I guess, role playing a particular character. On your second play through you’ll be shown a though bubble showing what scenario if you have a particular favourite to experience but on run number one you’ll be kind of bemused by this obscure level select.

At this point I must question the choices of ‘scenes’. Each is a one act play in its own right, needing only the tiniest bit of explanation before you get down to the brunt of the game. They range from a Volleyball player needing a massage post work out to a tutor wanting a rub down for you doing well in your test. The skeeziest comes from the little sister scenario that I guess could be played off as innocent but when anyone over a certain age sees this all play out there’s no other question on the mind other than ‘is this slash fiction? am I playing out the fantasies of fans that wrote in to the producers?’.

Once you’re in and past the porn film levels of exposition you reach the actual game, each character you’re involved with has areas they like to be rubbed and areas they’re not as into, each is represented by a spectrum of colour indicating the levels of pleasure. You must find your area of choice and then using either motion controls or button pressed manipulate the area with rubs, grabs or amazingly slaps. Playing this in a room with two females led me to wonder if I had been doing massages wrong before now, but judging by their wincing faces as Asuka’s chest got slapped I’m guessing I’m not the worst option.

Once a hidden meter reaches it’s limit your then taken to a special mode where Asuka assumes a position and you work your magic on a particular limb with your weapon of choice. If you chose hands you work the thigh, if you chose the spiked roller you work the back of the leg and if you chose the hair brush you rub it on the arm like you’re grooming your horse before the dressage event begins. The mini game here is to not do the massage too hard or too soft and instead keep her pleasure in the middle whilst filling a bar within the time limit. The climax to this is a brief exclamation from Asuka before she collapses in ecstasy from an awesome massage well done. Good job me.

Each run through the game will entail about 5 scenarios, at the end of every scene the colour you achieved with your pre-massage will fill a crystal, the colour of the final crystal will dictate which ending you experience with Asuka and her classroom hand holding massage that she snaps back to between levels. On every completion of the game a locket fills with a piece of a photo and if you finish the game 5 times you’ll be shown a final ‘true’ ending that explains how this, barely, fits into the wider Senran Kagura game series.

The animation work in the game is quite strong considering all the moving parts at play, only minor problems like hair clipping through a face occurs. On each completion you unlock costume pieces and new hair styles for you to dress Asuka in for the following run, or alternatively to play with in the mini-reflexions menu option that does away with any semblance of plot and instead just goes all out on ‘here’s Asuka, put your floating hands to use’. The music is typically anime and fits the world and style well and the voice acting is as strong as ever in this series.

There’s a certain naivety you have to have in mind whilst playing Reflexions, if you think too hard about any one element you’re going to feel, odd. Thankfully playing with a couple of friends in a safe environment knowing what the game is and being an anime fan meant that despite all its issues with tone, and potential decency issues with the little sister scenes, I had a really fun time with Senran Kagura Reflexions. It’s thinly veiled pervy fun, it’s like the vast majority of anime, there’s layers to this game that if you weren’t familiar with Japanese media and manga you may be, rightly in your view, offended. But go in with the right mindset, be an anime fan and be open minded and you can have a blast with this experience on the Switch.

With Cyberpunk 2077 creeping it’s way into the subconscious of the gaming community, thanks to a break in the dam that was their marketing strategy, it’s easy to forget that there’s the other awesome kind of punk subculture that deserves more gaming attention, not skater punks (though I am still waiting for my for my Sum 41 class based shooter) but instead Steam Punk. As a genre it’s been somewhat neglected in terms of gaming, there was the awful Damnation on the last generation of consoles and there’s an argument to be made for something like Dishonoured to be considered, though purists would describe that as Diesel Punk. Either way, when day dreaming about a potential Steam Punk genre game it’s easy to fall back on the ‘lets make it a 3rd person action shooter’. Instead Size Five Games has brought to the table a mix for the genre that is fascinating in itself. The Swindle is a rouge like, stealth, platforming heist game, even with that accurate description after many hours with it I can safely say that it’s basically a bastard of a puzzle game.

Set in the 1800’s Scotland Yard has gone a bit crazy and decided to launch a pre-Orwellian surveillance system on the country to keep an eye on both the good eggs and the bad eggs. Named the Devil’s Basilisk your task as a thief is to half inch it before it gets launched in 100 days. To do that you need to start from the bottom of the crime food chain with zero gear apart from your club. As you start robbing what are essentially slum houses you’ll make some money and be able to invest that either in unlocking better locations to steal from or buying new gear or abilities to aide you in your task. At no point does it seem like you’re 100% sure whether you’re stealing the Devil’s Basilisk for the betterment of society and not turn the UK into a police state, or if you’re just worried about someone cramping your style and life of crime.

Being Steam Punk the houses in The Swindle are defended by robots, at first. As you begin the game you are lured into the a false sense of security as you fly through the first few houses grabbing all the money and defeating all the robots. The security robots start off with the most basic of vision cones pointing straight forward a couple of feet so jumping over them is no issue at all, but as the game progresses you’ll soon realise that The Swindle just wanted you to think that it was possible to finish it successfully as drones, spikes, hardcore robots that just want to put an end to the fleshy ones and other foul defenses. The difficulty curve is pretty brutal and as you unlock more and more locations you’ll find it only gets worse. This is a game about grind, you need to be repeating levels to earn the cash to buy better gear, but even with this improved arsenal you’ll need to hope your skills have improved also as it just doesn’t let up.

Thankfully the levels are procedurally generated so at no point will you have to replay anything exactly, though the same colour and design motifs are used in each location. The big thing here is being a rogue like you are expected to die, and when you do a new character rocks up hoping to pick up your mantle and be the one to do a solid for thieves everywhere. Whilst this sounds harmless enough in theory you are then taunted by having the days drop down closer and closer to day 1, when the Devil’s Basilisk is deployed. A large problem for me was dying four levels in a row, did I mention this was a hard game, and finding I lost 12 days, I couldn’t work out if I was just better off restarting at this point or if there was enough leniency towards failure, I decided to restart and hope for the best with my next attempt.

Once you start getting the wall grab and double jump abilities the actual traversal becomes much more manageable and easier to implement into your stealth. Hanging onto a wall above a robot waiting to drop down and cave its head in with your club never gets old and the sound design gives a particular meatiness to the whole experience. The sound in general is a great addition to this game, between the soundtrack that really drives you forward to all the little touches with the sound effects of combat and atmosphere just complement the world perfectly. A special mention must go to the art design however as this is what is inevitably going to capture most attention to this new audience for the game. With a story book art style it’s easy to forget what a dark story this is and the fact you are in essence the epitome of an anti-hero. The world, the characters and all the little touches to the aesthetics like the command line style font all really make me want more games in this universe.

In a former life writing for another website I reviewed Gun Monkey’s, a game also by Size Five Games, that was far far ahead of its time. An online arena platform shooter with the wonderful Kevin Eldon providing his voice for the game. This was painfully underrated and something I wish had taken off as I personally had a blast with it. The Swindle was first released back in 2015 and this latest port is just another opportunity for The Swindle and Size Five Games to get the attention they deserve. A perfect pick up and play whilst out and about this is exactly the kind of game that should do amazing on the Switch. The controls are relatively tight, apart from the wall grabbing which just feels a bit off, but with great design, a great concept and a really addictive gameplay loop it’s easy to get lost in this caper. The risk/reward nature of the game, run back to base with what you have or push a little further for a better haul, just gives the players full culpabilities for their actions and the outcomes. It’s a hell of a game, that I simply wish I was better at.