It’s probably worth confessing at this point that I have never played XCOM, or rather the modern XCOM, I did dabble with the series back on the Amiga but that was nearly 25 years ago at this point. Instead my concept of turn based tactical shooters in a modern context really comes from the reboot of Shadowrun and a game called Hard West from a few years ago on Steam. Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden has come in to show me what a game dedicated to the genre can be, something incredibly satisfying; almost like a violent puzzle, but also incredibly frustrating.

The world has ended, lots of things went wrong. All that’s left is wastelands and a surprisingly healthy supply of trees. There’s actually also some survivors, human and otherwise. The Elder run’s the Ark, a shanty town built high in the sky requiring a lift to access it from the wastelands below. The Elder is an old man rigged up to enough bags intravenously that he’s beginning to look like a medical testing doll. He commands the Stalkers, the ones who go outside of the Ark and scavenge for materials and supplies. In Mutant Year Zero you start by taking control of two of these stalkers, Bormin and Dux, a boar and a duck.

On the face of it, it would be easy to rather simply class Mutant Year Zero as a strategy game; you get in combat, you have a certain number of action points to spend, you have partial and full cover bonuses to defence and you take it in turns to blast someone and be blasted. But there’s also a quite satisfying stealth/action aspect to the game the blends nearly perfectly with the slower pace of the combat. Outside of fights you have full real time control of your party, wandering around the land and exploring buildings and wrecks for any materials or new gear you can use. When within sight of an enemy a large circle indicating combat area will appear. At this point you could just run in all guns blazing or you can use your advantage to set up choke points or gain the high ground before triggering the initiative order.

With your acquired gear from scavenging you tackle all manor of tactical scenarios to test your strategic brain muscles. More often than not combat does boil down to you being vastly out numbered and having to work your early magic to pick off stragglers before the real fight begins. Fights see you have to balance your party order and action points carefully as one misstep will cause you to see the Game Over screen for the hundredth time, and trust me, you’ll see it a lot.

I really don’t want to have to spend yet another review here on PixelBedlam talking about difficulty in games, at some point I’m going to start thinking it’s my skill level rather than every developer of the past 12 months having it in for me. But there’s no denying that Mutant Year Zero is hard as nails. The ‘Normal’ difficulty is actually the lowest the difficulty will go, and this just seems borderline cruel for the majority of the play through, your opening couple of hours will make you feel smart but in reality it’s just preparing you for failure. The addition of party members as you go seems to see the difficulty curve increase at a rate that doesn’t seem proportional. If the option was there I would have dropped the difficulty to an even easier option just to see the world that has been wonderfully crafted.

As you move through the world you will slowly start to level and earn skill points, there’s the usual critical chance increase as you would expect but there’s also some fascinating mutations that the wasteland has caused like Dux unlocking relatively early the option to grow moth wings and hover above the battlefield to cover a greater distance. None of these moves really pay off r how you hope and for the longest time you’ll be using weapons that are only ever really useful in the pre-combat stealth sequences. You’ll want to save your game all the time and take advantage of the relatively generous auto saving but with the load times on console not exactly being snappy this will be a very quick way to lost focus and interest.

The selling point for me of Mutant Year Zero is the story, the world and most of all the interactions between Dux and Bormin. The love/hate bromance between the two grizzled veterans of the wastelands really makes the slog of difficult combat quite tolerable. I want to love Mutant Year Zero and scream about it from the rooftops but to put it bluntly, unless you have mastered other tactical turn based shooters you’ll really struggle to get past the first few hours. Normally ‘for fans of…’ is a banned term in video game reviews but without prior in depth skill at this type of affair the incentive to invest the 15-20 odd hours into the game is somewhat lacking. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a great story wrapped in beautiful world design and lore, with top notch voice acting and UI, but it is all let down by one of it’s key features, the combat. This is yet another case where the GIT GUD mentality has unfortunately hindered what could have been a must play.

It’s wonderfully easy to see the three cultural touch points that inspired Hong Kong Massacre; Hotline Miami, Max Payne and the Hong Kong action films of the 1980’s and 1990’s. From a top down perspective you must guide our former police officer ‘hero’ through 35 odd levels of bullet hell chaos with the goal of taking vengeance for…well to be honest I got completely lost with the plot.

The story is drip fed through minimalist cut scenes that, whilst admittedly looking cool and are well lit and directed, don’t really explain the plot to any great level. On top of the cut scenes you also a treated to a non-linear time hop between conversations with a childhood friend barman and your former colleague in the police force. Each do an ok job at explaining what the next level will be but at no point did I really know why I was seeking vengeance against the triad, at first there was a cutscene where I presumed my girlfriend was shot down but then a character part way through the game talks about a childhood friend of the pair having been in the wrong place at the wrong time and been killed at a drug deal. All in all the story is not what you should be here for, it’s a wrapper to justify one level being in a casino and the next being on a rooftop.

Mechanically the game plays incredibly similar to Hotline Miami, from your vertical view you must navigate levels ,with a more often than not trial and error approach, to find the rough locations of the enemies dotted around. One bullet kills an enemy but the same is true of you, as such any time you’ve completed a level it’ll be down to a perfect run. I say rough locations of enemies as going from one restart to another you’ll find that some will have moved a good 10 feet or so in any direction meaning you can’t shoot off screen to where you know they’ve been each run or overly rely on muscle memory to get through.

To help you survive your run and gun with twin stick shooter controls you have two other key mechanics at play, the first is a Max Payne style bullet time. The world around you, and all bullets slow to a crawl for a few seconds at a time before returning to normal chaotic speed. A bar depletes as you hold down the slow-mo button leading you to need to conserve a little meter just in case you have an unexpected shot sent your way. All of this leads to the movie style ‘going past a door spraying lead everywhere before hiding on the other side’ whilst waiting for the bar to refill. Thankfully this is an incredibly quick process. The other feature to help you survive is a dodge button that makes you invulnerable during the length of the dodge, normally this works incredibly well when it wants to, but I found more often than not I was killed during the standing up animation of a dive, and this is where the game caused more than a little frustration for me. During my gameplay I found that my deaths were rarely caused by elements I would call ‘fair’. It would be a dive ending sooner than the animation would imply and my invulnerability running out or alternatively I would just randomly die. It’s been said in many films and TV shows that “you never see the bullet that kills you” and that is essentially the mantra of Hong Kong Massacre. Whilst usually the game highlights the bullets with yellow blips followed by a long streak, it’s quite often the case that general flashes and other particle elements on the screen just seem to either hide or distract from these bullets leading to the quick end of your run.

A great aspect of Hotline Miami was how quickly you could get back into the game once dead, a near instant to a button press and you’re at the start. Unfortunately Hong Kong Massacre’s refresh takes longer, I’m not going to pretend it even takes more than 3 seconds, an incredibly quick time most would agree, but when death is a single bullet away and on my worst level I died just shy of 30 times you can imagine the staring at the word ‘dead’ on my screen quickly started to grate whilst waiting for my next go to load.

It’s easy to read this review so far as a bit negative, but it’s worth noting that once I finished the game I went back and tried to get top of the score boards for finishes, on the first level I was number 1 in the world (I’ll admit this was pre-release so it was only other reviewers who were playing), I then went back and had the number 1 clear time on about 5 levels in the end. I then started working on the challenges on each level, challenges like 100% accuracy or no slow-mo. These challenges earned me stars which I could use to upgrade my 4 weapons choices, pistol, UZI, shotgun or rifle. So despite getting really quite angry during my time with Hong Kong Massacre I also actively want to keep playing it after review, I’ll be thinking about it for a while and I can honestly say that this is an awesome game. Much like the classic Max Payne there’s something cathartic and fun about just holding a couple of pistols and diving through a door whilst spewing out ammo at an ungodly rate, pieces of paper fly above you and sparks litter the screen, everything in this game is there purely to make you feel like Chow Yun-Fat in a John Woo film. The story is lacking and sometimes the game can be a little unfair but even with those in consideration it’s hard not to feel like an MLG Pro for completing any level, you’re always a badass and simply put, this game is a great endorphin pumping experience.

There’s a weird disconnect when I watch kids adventure films like Goonies or series like Stranger Things. If I was in either of those situations I would be the worst team member, a toxic mix of being lazy and a coward. Now in my 30’s I can’t pretend much has changed, but I can at least say I’m more honest about it. My point is that in these awful situations the are children in I would be pointless, it turns out that if we simulate that in 2019 with new Steam Early Access release The Blackout Club then we can 100% confirm this to be the case.

The Blackout Club is an Early Access up to 4 player, co-op, objective based, FPS, stealth ‘em, up puzzle game. The game starts with a single player prologue to get you into the world of The Blackout Club. Through some really well performed voice acting the stage is set. You and other children are falling asleep at night and waking up somewhere else, like outdoors or even on some railway tracks. The adults don’t believe the kids so you take it upon yourself to record some evidence and take it outside of the town’s lockdown on internet and phones. You are home alone when a video call from your parents explain they’re going to be late, it’s at this point the seeds start getting sown for a really fun kids vs adults / invasion of the body snatchers style story. With small objectives you’ll be taught the basic controls including the eye closing mechanic. Holding Z will cause the world to turn red like you’re watching through your eye lids, this highlights the optimum route to the next objective and also highlights the location of the most feared enemy, The Shape.

The prologue plays out teaching you the basics of what items do and how to traverse an area quietly and in the dark to avoid the attention of the various enemies in the game. Your most common enemy will be the sleep walking parents who are blind and react to sound, if they grab you then you can quickly use one of your items you’ve brought or found, like a taser or a tranq dart. Alternatively you can pre-empt issues by jumping on the backs of enemies and tackling them to the ground. Once you’ve done the first couple of missions you’ll find you’re encouraged to go underground more and more. Down here in this painfully complicated labyrinth you’ll find more cult like figures with new abilities like the Lucid who can see meaning the player needs to stick to the shadows. It’s also underground that you’ll realise how quickly you’re out of your depth. With each level progression new enemies and elements are added to the world and rarely are they explained, trial and error are your only way to know for sure what the buzzy robot ball on the floor is and what triggers it. Normally this would be fine but as I said this is a 4 player co-op game, when one person screws up this can very quickly lead to the house of cards collapsing and turning into a total party wipe. If you cause too much chaos in the world you essentially build a wanted level that leads to The Shape coming after you, you can only see the shape with your eyes closed and he has shortcut doors around the world. In all the time I played The Blackout Club I rarely felt like I knew what to do when the shape was coming, running works well, and being an arse and leading the shape to other people on your party also played out pretty well, but much like with a lot of the mechanics in The Blackout Club I can’t say I’m 100% sure I understand.

Thankfully for the my first 4 hours in the world I ended up joining a game with some random American player, then some incredibly hyperactive (but also high level) American 10 year old and then finally a brit with the mouth of a sailor. All on microphones, all talking tactics. On one hand having a party of experienced people made the game a lot clearer in some regards, I understood where to take the glowing head I nicked from a garage and then where to take the cryptographs I stole from the underground base below the town, but I still didn’t know why sometimes I would get caught, or how the wanted system works or when it’s ok to trip the cameras and when it’s not. All of these may be high level elements, or they could be day one tactics, but having only had the prologue for training I can’t be sure one way or the other. And this is The Blackout Club’s only real flaw at this point in it’s development, loading screen tool tips aren’t a replacement for a fair difficulty curb. Once the prologue was finished the first mission was relatively easy, but had numerous requirements that weren’t mentioned previously (like door kicking/lock picks/open windows to access houses). Once the first mission was over online play was only producing epic missions for my level 3 character.

All of the presentation of The Blackout Club should be praised, the world is stylised and has a quirky charm to its design without falling into surrealist traps of wacky sloped doorways. The enemy models all have elements to instil unease in the player as they walk inches past you as you cling to a shadow desperate to not be caught. Audio queues from the other characters are a wonderful touch indicating dangers you may have missed. The world, despite being a bit silly in reality feels very real and just grounded enough to be wonderfully immersive.

As you progress through the random missions you’ll find yourself levelling up, as well as being rewarded with awesome new clothes for your character and dances! Points from levelling can be spent on Minor or Major Powers, ranging from things like taking a lock pick into the start of the game to having a drone that can make sounds to distract enemies. On top of that you can choose an initial item to take in on each run, a grappling hook, a taser and a crossbow all being available. In all my time playing online I didn’t actually come across anyone with the same build as me, or even using the same clothes and character model combination as me. This did wonders for the feeling of immersion, the idea that each run is with different members of this child led club with the goal of proving the towns been taken over and sabotaging the enemies operation.

The Blackout Club has a couple of rough edges as you would expect from an Early Access game, the font is somewhat default, the hit box detection seems a bit off and the difficulty curve is brutal. But if you’re lucky enough to find someone to hold your hand, like I did with my American brother BloodyRag, then you’ll find this to be a really rewarding, and at times quite scary, game. It doesn’t hold your hand, it wants to make you jump out of your skin with enemies appearing from what seems like no-where and the visuals of The Shape who you can only see with your eyes closed, all come together to produce a really affecting game. This will live or die with its audience retention, if a player ever struggles to find a party to join then that’s it, but whilst it still has a world of potential and not a huge distance to go before what feels like could be a full release it’s easy to recommend The Blackout Club, just make sure you’re not in a party with me as I’ll definitely scream “Wildcard” and jump on every sleepwalker’s back.

The Nazis were bad, I think that’s an opinion we can all agree on. And as one of the easiest ‘bad guys’ to put into a game it means we’ve had decades of killing Hitler’s buddies over and over again. So with the depressing thought that killing Nazis is getting old how can you make them even more evil and make the player feel like they’re doing good again taking out the SS rather than just going through the motions? Why make the Nazis dick about with the Lovecraftian style occult of course!

Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics sees you take on the role of 4 allied soldiers from across the world to use their special abilities to take out Hitler’s recent occult activities. Through turn based strategic combat you must balance your action point usage to wipe out the axis forces. It’s easy to see the table top influences of its original form seep into the world of Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics, everything plays out like a slow methodical game with your friends, unfortunately a lot of that slowness comes from trying to understand the rules. Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics was previously released on Xbox One, PS4 and PC and throughout my time playing the game I wished I was on the PC version as quite simply the controls for a game like this have not transferred well to the Nintendo Switch. The UI in theory is absolutely fine, but when working out whether a right arrow indicates D-Pad or Stick, or just clicking the correct shoulder button to scroll along a list or amongst your party it quickly becomes a lesson in frustration.

I actually have a fondness for any game that uses Action Points, the concept of movement and attacks being a resource makes for a much more puzzle like affair. There were numerous battles during my time with Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics that I was forced to make some pretty tough but enjoyable decisions about whether moving or attacking was a move valuable use of my AP. Unfortunately self styled tactics are really as deep as Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics really goes, the combat in most scenarios is pretty standard with few surprises and the whole experience feels a bit ‘light’. There is a nice touch with the concept of the Fog of War, enemies can’t be accurately targeted until they’ve emerged onto the battlefield, and until they have they’re shadowy creatures, giving you a hint at their actions but nothing more.

The story within Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics feels like it’s just a wrapper for the game, something that’s only there to give you the characters and a motivation to kill but nothing more. There’s in game story beats that are just completely ignored; the very first mission is 2 of the characters being asked to rendezvous with the rest of the party, this is the characters first interactions with each other in this world, and there’s no dialogue, you literally walk up to them and then they’re in the party. The only story is drip fed by a suitably 1940’s BBC voiced commander at the mission briefing stage. This is pretty much how the whole game proceeds for the 10 or so hours you’ll get from a run.

After combat you’re awarded XP and can level up your characters with new abilities or stats, and occasionally some new gear or weapon mods. Your french occult expert for example can use her literal inner demon to buff or debuff or alternatively just suck the life out of enemies. Much like nucelear bombs it seems like in WW2 it’s ok if the allies use the powers but not the Nazis.

The presentation is one of the strongest elements of Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics, the fog of war mentioned above adds an interesting feature to the map and the different levels all have some nice ‘arena’ areas for you to take out the Nazis in. Some more variation would have been nice, especially in the early game to keep interest high but the game does enough to keep you going and not feel like you’re playing the same level over and over. The music is exactly what you imagine it to be, a rousing military orchestral piece heavy on the violins and brass much like anything you’d have heard in Saving Private Ryan or the early Medal of Honour games.

All in all Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is not a bad game by any stretch, it works and when a plan comes together on the battlefield it fires off those endorphines that we all seek. The issue is that it all just feels like it’s ‘enough’, no one area is particularly strong, nothing leaps out at you as being groundbreaking or a particularly unique selling point, it just seems be enough to not be bad. For the Switch there aren’t a huge number of these turn based tactics games so for a bit of fun on the go this is definitely worth a pick up for established fans of the genre, for everyone else, the PC version would be the way to go for sake of ease with controls. When all is said and done however, I guess we should just be happy to have another way to give it to those damn Nazis, and their alien/demon/mutants.

At this stage it’s quite apparent that the only times I ever use the NSFW in the title is when I’m talking about the latest release for Senran Kagura, the series that if you live with your parents you should never risk playing as it will raise a lot of questions, thankfully I live with my wife and she happily sat through my multiple play throughs of Senran Kagura Reflexions so to be honest I’m relatively safe. Upfront it should go without saying, the Senran Kagura series is fan service in the anime sense, it’s a lot of boobs being shown and talked about and a lot of underwear being shown. But amazingly, much like the other Senran Kagura games, that isn’t all the game has to offer, there is actually solid brawler underneath.

A re-release of the 2014 3ds 2.5d Senran Kagura Burst this game drags the original platform brawler onto the home consoles with a fully realised 3rd person action brawler. Telling the story of two different ninja academies, the ever good and great Hanzo Academy and the dark nefarious Hebijo Academy. Across your couple dozen hours with the game you’ll be treated some quite meaty ninja tales, but you’ll also be given 10 minute text based side stories, with japanese voice over, about the first love of Asuka, the lead heroine. It’s this juxtoposition of high flying good vs evil mixed with heartfelt story telling and boobs that really is why i’m consistently fascinated by the Senran Kagura series. It’s like a game designed by committee but the outcome was actually kinda of awesome.

To be incredibly reductive the gameplay boils down to Dynasty Warriors crossed with Final Fight / Streets of Rage but with school girls in underwear, and I’d love to say it’s more than that but with the waves of cookie cutter grunt enemies barely charging you and rarely attacking it’s hard not to just see them as the most simple of Dynasty Warriors AI. That’s not to say combat isn’t fun, the boss battles range from quick and messy one on one combats that are all out flashy brawls to slow and drawn out tactical combats whilst you block, parry and counter your way to a technical victory. A key selling point for some, and morbid fascination for others, is that with each hefty strike you or the enemy take clothing rips and eventually leaves the character in their underwear. If you really want to deep dive into the creepiness you can choose your underwear of choice in the menus.

At the start of each level you’re offered the chance to go ‘Frantic’. When activated you must use your PS4 touchpad to slide off the characters clothes meaning she has less defence but a stronger attack in the coming level. The opening few hours of the game were actually incredibly easy meaning I was relying on this to increase my end of level score and XP gain from each run. After a while however it became clear that I needed to keep my ladies dressed or I was going to get my arse handed to me. Combat is fast and frantic as you try to cut everyone down as quickly as you can, combo counters fly up and and in Devil May Cry style you must tactically launch enemies to get a breather whilst you combo in mid air before plummeting back to earth sword first. Each character you play as have different play styles from the fast and slashy Asuka with her twin swords to the kicky Katsuragi. Each also have their own special moves which require meters to fill from attacks. It would be easy to dismiss Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal as a button mashy game, and don’t get me wrong it could easily be played that way, but you’d be doing the game and yourself a disservice. There is a depth to the game that isn’t immediately apparent, once you start unlocking styles in the menus and learning the deeper cuts of the game it really can feel rewarding and look badass as you get those high combos.

As well as the main game there’s the series staple of the diorama and dressing rooms. Dress your characters and pose them however you want to get a trophy that you hope no one will ever notice you have. Apart from some new clothes and backgrounds there isn’t really anything here you haven’t seen in previous titles in the series, it’s a nice extra if you have a purpose for it.

I’ve always been impressed by the graphics in the Senran Kagura games, they capture the style of anime so wonderfully in 3D and minus some hair clipping problems if you decide to customise the characters, there really aren’t any issues, the frame rate remains high and whilst the locations and enemies are a bit plain, the style of the game and the world shines through. Voice over is limited to Japanese so get ready to tap your way through some subtitles or hit Triangle for auto-next. As for the soundtrack, well, imagine any anime soundtrack and that’s exactly what’s here.

Much like the other Senran Kagura games you don’t need to be a fan of the genre or the series to ‘get it’, what you really need to be a fan of is anime. The somewhat questionable representation of women, the combination of violence and silliness and the ability to have an entire chapter dedicated to two characters fighting over a plush bear can all be justified and accepted under the guise of ‘anime’. Whilst not the hard genre swerve I’ve come to expect from Senran Kagura recently with it’s cooking rhythm games and super soaker arena shooters, Burst Re:Newal continues the fine tradition of a) having an annoying name and b) being a really solid game that is built around the concept of having fun.

Single screen local multiplayer games had something of a resurgence over the past 5 years, games like Gang Beasts, Overcooked, Nidhogg and Ultimate Chicken Horse all came like in like a tsunami quenching the first of many a Youtuber’s uploads. The pick up an play ability of these games meant that players of any skill level could get involved and have a good time. At Sundown: Shots in the Dark tries its best to keep this tradition alive for just a bit longer, but does it hit its mark?

The elevator pitch for At Sundown is quite simple, up to four players start in an arena, the lights switch off apart from a few select locations. All players turn invisible in the shadows and must both navigate themselves through the mazes and find their opponents to blow them away with an array of weapons. Every time a weapon is shot they show up on the screen for everyone meaning that you must make your first shot count before skittering away into the darkness to stalk your next target.

On the face of it At Sundown is a great concept, there’s an element of skill and reaction but a lot of the game is actually decided on luck and chaos. During its best moments the game quickly jumps between quiet contemplation about where someone might be now based on their previous sighting, predicting where they went and where they might be, and then, in a split second, everyone is firing off shots and running for their lives before returning to the shadows and the quiet.

The problem for At Sundown is that this game isn’t as pick up and play as the other games I listed above. Firstly the other games rely on one key element, non-gamers can play them. Overcooked has only a couple of buttons, Gangbeasts can be played with button mashing, Nidhogg has a simple concept and Ultimate Chicken Horse is a platformer which even non-gamers recognise. Now don’t get me wrong, all of these games have a learning curve, there’s a benefit to having played games before and there is the ability for high level play if you want to go down the route of being a world class Nidhogg player. At Sundown however is not a game for people who don’t play games, trying to break this game out at a social gathering where you may have done Jackbox is just not going to work. Players are required to keep an eye on three different elements, their aim, their location and the enemies locations, this is no simple task even for ‘hardcore’ gamers. On top of that all of the games i mentioned are open and ready to be fully played from the outset (exception is Overcooked level progression). On the flip side At Sundown has unlock system for players to gain new weapons and game modes. This means that whoever owns the game will have to play a lot on their own or sacrifice their friendships to get everything.

I say play on their own because in the past week I have tried a couple of times every day to find an online game on the PS4 version of the game, I’ve tried Quick Game and I’ve tried hosting and at no point have I managed to find a game, this was all done post launch. This meant I was relegated to playing bots and waiting for friends to come over. I take great issue with playing against bots on a game like this, the whole concept relies on human error; walking into a light, letting off a shot too early, not being clever with the way you hide after being visible. A computer doesn’t make real mistakes, there are difficulty options that mean you can ramp it up but it all feels somewhat unfair as the AI has to essentially pretend not to see you, or you have to have faith that it’s doing that.

All of this negativity is under the presumption that you’ll be breaking this out at parties and that the game is trying to claim some of that ‘games night’ action, assuming that isn’t the target I can say that with four players who are all invested and have an idea of the controls and concept, this is actually really fun. The mind games that can be implemented and the tactics you discover all come together to produce a really solid multiplayer experience. It’s beautiful chaos that causes shouting and swearing which is exactly what you want in a single screen multiplayer game.

Graphically the game has gone for a bright and colourful style that does well to contrast with the invisible shadow nature of the game and the soundtrack is suitably pumping enough to get you in the spirit of things. The various weapon unlocks all bring something new to the table like the Sniper that can shoot through walls but takes about four years to reload or the amazingly cool umbrella that requires close up attacks but can also act as a shield when deployed.

As with all local multiplayer games it comes down to who you’re playing it with. If someone is willing to learn over a few games before getting into the serious play then they’ll be rewarded with a really solid arena shooter with a very clever stealth mechanic at play. But as I said above, this does require some pre-play if you’re looking to show off all the cool things At Sundown hides behind XP and levelling.

There’s a few blind spots in the gaming history, certain genres that I never really tried and kind of missed the boat on. Some I’ve gone back to, like my recent play through the Metroid series and Castlevania’s Symphony of the night, or my attempts to get into Roguelike’s with Binding of Issac. Thankfully some genres are held deep in indie developers hearts so it’s only a matter of time before I get to try out certain much loves styles of games that to modern revivals. Wargroove has shown me what I was missing by not playing games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem.

Turn Based Tactics games were always something I looked at from afar, no idea really how they played and instead were something that I just ignored thinking they weren’t for me. I felt the same way about Civilisation until about 6 months ago when a friend and I grew tired of our weekly Age of Empires II games and decided to try our hand at a more strategic affair. This has set me up perfectly for Wargroove and Turn Based Tactics games, the genre where it’s part strategy and part puzzle. All mixing up into one of the most stressful and yet satisfying styles of play I’ve had in a long while.

Wargroove, from Chucklefish, publisher of Stardew Valley and developer of Starbound, is from everything I can tell a screaming homage to the Advance Wars series first found on the Gameboy Advance, a series that hasn’t had a proper release (I’m ignoring virtual console re-releases) since the DS in 2008. In Wargroove the concept is simple, you’re presented a top down map, you must either complete a set objective or alternatively take out your enemies stronghold or defeat their leader. Each member of your army has a set movement distance and attack range. You must balance all of these movement and attack numbers to get the upper hand. An added element is that each unit has almost a rock, paper, scissors style strength and weakness to other units. Pikemen are great against mounted units, mages can wipe out flying units with ease and so on and so on. Thankfully you don’t need to remember this information as you can click on any unit on the battlefield to find out whats the best unit to use and even see how far the opponents unit can move.

All of this produces a great sense of satisfaction when a plan comes together, knowing that next turn a knight can make it to an enemy outpost, which produces a source of income each turn, an claim it for your own side all the while your ranged units and soldiers have enough movement to flank an enemy and wipe them out before they get the chance to counter the knight. Moments like this, where everything comes together is what Wargroove does best. What it doesn’t do so well with is in the story mode, there are far too many missions where you’ll feel like you’re just a couple of turns away from victory when from the opposite side of the map some high damage dealing enemy soldiers appear under the guise of ‘reinforcements’. I understand from a story perspective sometimes this makes sense and it does add something to the battles when done right, but far too often this seemed to happen 30 minutes into a really tough battle only for me to be wiped out a few turns later. You can’t strategise against random.

Each unit has critical hit conditions that are listed in their bio. Positioning is the key for all of these crit conditions, being near your leader character or having another unit of the same type beside them all lead to higher damage. Damage is displayed before you confirm your attack by hovering the cursor over an enemy which shows the damage they’ll receive and the defence damage you get in return. If your unit should die it’s not the end of the world, units are almost encouraged to be burned through during a battle as for each outpost you’ve capture you’ll be awarded money each turn which can be used to buy new recruits for at any point during your turn. This does sometimes lead to an almost conveyor belt of death as you just keep chipping away at certain stronger enemies with a constant line of canon fodder spewing out from your base.

The campaign mode is long, taking me somewhere in the region of 15 hours for me, though that was with me failing at a lot of VERY long battles. Where the game really hits strong however is its arcade mode, featuring random maps in quick succession that really just give the meat of the game, its puzzle like combat sessions. Also available is multiplayer, co-op and competitive all feature and there’s even options for asynchronous mutiplayer meaning you can play like you’re old people sending your next chess move through the post. Between the multiplayer and story mode you’d already be getting insanely good value for money by getting this, but add a map editor and a campaign creator, with cutscenes and everything, and you’d be a fool to miss out on this. Given time I’m sure we’ll be seeing some wonderful custom content produced for Wargroove, I just hope that patches can improve the discover-ability of the best homebrew available.

The games design is a huge selling point to the whole experience of Wargroove. Cute but justified pixel art gives all the units characters. Despite the sodliers all being cookie cutter repeats of each other you do still grow attached to them as a concept thanks to the frankly joyous cutscenes. When combat is initiated the top down view is replaced by a quick animation of the two combatants bumping into each other to see who gave and took damage and whilst you are able to speed these up with a button press I found myself never wanting to do so, the animation is just there for a bit of fun relief during what can be epically long battles. The soundtrack throughout is an epic fantasy affair suiting the nostalgic world perfectly.

Wargroove is available on Xbox and PC but having put the time in on Switch I can safely say this is the platform to pick it up for. A great handheld experience that will kill any time you give it. With an amazing art style, genuinely funny scenes and dialogue in the story and some of the best representations of dogs that deserve a treat in games I can’t recommend this highly enough. Sure the missions can be incredibly frustrating and the inability to undo mistakes or quick save or load on the Switch feels downright cruel at times there is still a lot of fun to be had with this game. On a system that also has the joy that is Into the Breach it hopefully leads the way for more of the Turn Based Tactics games to find a very worthwhile home.

Real life Ruaidhri is very different to how I conduct myself in games. I’m not talking about the obvious hyper-violent characters or anything to that effect. I’m not even saying I become a troll when gaming online, I avoid conflict wherever possible. There is one area of my psyche that does a full 180 when playing games, I become vengeful. I’ve played a lot of Civilization V and VI over the past year and it’s common for the first person to annoy me to be the first nation I destroy, even if that’s 2000 years later. Something about getting wronged by artificial intelligence rubs me the wrong way and I often feel the urge to scream about them ‘ruing the day’. Bow to Blood: Last Captain Standing is essentially prime for my play style. AI come out the woodwork begging for help and issuing threats in this dystopian future televised flying ship competition allowing me to make snap judgements on their character and the tone. I may have a god complex, and I may be a vengeful one at that.

Taking the role of the Freelancer its up to you to command your ship and crew of two to victory in a competition that will test your flying abilities, your combat skills and your bravery when it comes to risk and reward. You’ll also be interacting with all of the opponents in the competition; aiding them in missions, flying below the toxic clouds you sail on to get some treasure to share or doling out your hard earned points. After every couple of missions there’s a culling where the bottom two ships, by points on the leader board, are up for eviction from the game. This is dictated by votes from the other competitors, and here’s where diplomacy comes in. Early on people will start asking for help, give them a hand and if you find yourself in the bottom two you may find that they vote to save you. Once certain opinions have been made regarding you it can be hard to win people back and often there are already pre-formed cliques meaning angering one person may jade another.

Before each new mission you get to pick from two choices, each will have a different location and mission objective within, there will also be something related to one of the other competitors, be it let’s share the loot, lets share the points or simply let me win. Missions include grand battles with big bosses, racing across the sky, hunting for eggs or just cruise around a valley looking for crates with points within. Once you’ve chosen your mission type and location you must then work out the impenetrably confusing control scheme. At the start of the game you’re run through a basic tutorial that fires out information at such at rate it’s amazing users aren’t getting whiplash. The move controllers especially suffer from this issue where the attempt to have shortcut buttons for some powers and abilities instead just over complicates things.

The ship controls wonderfully however and despite it’s size is really quite maneuverable. Once you’ve got the hang of the controls you’ll be whipping around corners and taking steep inclined and declines in your stride. The ship is broken into five sections. Shields, Guns, Engines, Surveying and the Smart Drone. If you’ve played the Star Trek Bridge Crew VR game and been engineer or been through FTL you’ll be familiar with the set-up, move limited energy around and prioritise what’s best in any given situation. To help with the running of the abilities you have a crew of two, this man and woman (who I thought were robots for the longest time thanks to their armour, a loading screen piece of artwork corrected me) can be assigned to any of the sections to either repair or trigger the abilities. Whilst you’re juggling energy, flying, shooting and navigation it certainly helps to have a couple of people to mess about with the sections at least to some extent. Though realistically this meant leaving one of them on turrets 24/7 and using the other to repair or use the smart drone that disables elements on enemy ships.

With your move controller you can shoot the cannons on the left and right of the ship to take out enemies and if any smaller drones come too close you can pull out your gun from it’s holster and manually take them down at close range. All in all this adds up to a crazy complicated affair, that is also wonderfully satisfying. Once you’ve reached a certain objective you’ll be allowed  to warp out of the location to the next mission or the voting. However this is optional, you can instead just fly around and grind enemies for points, hunt for more treasure cache’s or just enjoy the scene. When you’re ready to go you can cash in your points and see your ranking. If you stayed behind and died however then it’s gone.

For this review I was primarily playing on a PS4 with PSVR, however as part of this latest update ‘flat versions’ are now available across all systems. The game has a wonderful stylised world with its almost 3d vector art / cell shaded models. This transfers wonderfully between the Virtual Reality and the Flat versions of the games, the frame-rate holds strong and it really is a memorable world to inhabit. Personally I would recommend going down the VR route if you have the option, something that is somewhat lost in the regular game is the scale of the ship and the world that is somewhat dampened on a television. On the flip side, if you’re going to break out your PSVR to play this be aware that the aliasing (jagged edges) is incredibly jarring when you first load up. That is not to say you can’t get used to it but it really was a shock to the system on first boot. The audio is just as stylised as the visuals. Cannons and energy shots ping and pop all over the canyons you’re in, the ambient music gives a little bit of joyful epic to any situation, the sound and visuals match in a way that a lot of games don’t, the theme and the style blends across the two perfectly.

Whether playing on the flat version on any of the consoles or PC or the VR version on PS4 or PC you’re sure to get enjoyment out of this. The aesthetics and design of the world are strong and the humour of characters and interactions are a pleasant surprise to what could have been another grey / brown post-apocalyptic first person game. There isn’t much world building in terms of lore which is a shame as there are story beats hinted at with this reality show competition but it’s never built upon enough to be a key feature. The randomised missions and interactions means that each run will give you something different. With a season only taking a few hours it’s easy to get a few runs out of this and enjoy the replay-ability. The scale and drama is best represented in VR and that will always be my go to way to play Bow to Blood: Last Captain Standing but even on a TV this has the makings of a seriously addictive game.

No one truly dislikes the entirety of any one genre of anything, with people that say they don’t like Superhero films, perhaps they’ve only seen the Marvel stuff and should try out some fun time stuff like Disney’s Condorman from the 80’s. Or perhaps like me you’re not a fan of Reggae, but have you listened to every Reggae track ever? No, of course not, we as a species just make snap judgements and close our minds off from experiences because of a preconceived notion of a genre or taste. In gaming for me it was always Tower Defence Games. I’ve played a handful in my time running PixelBedlam and I’ve occasionally had fun with them but still felt slightly disconnected from the genre. I’m always one for a mash up of genres, often these days the only way to make something feel fresh is to smush various concepts together. Lornsword Winter Chronicle which recently hit Steam Early Access mixes Tower Defence, Action and RTS all together to make something that nearly makes me look past any prejudice I have to the genre.

Set in a fantasy world, Lornsword Winter Chronicle sees you take on the role of Corun, a family man who seems to be accidentally amazing at military careers and falls his way up the chain of command. Through the prologue you’re tasked with capturing rebel bases and temples making your way up the food chain to capture to capture a local villain. The game packs on the lore pretty heavy upfront leading you the player to feel somewhat out of your depth; terms, people’s titles, names and past conflicts all come flying thick and fast with barely any explanation. Obviously writing this side of things into story text is hard without relying on an amnesiac character as the audience puppet, but the pace that the developers, Tower Five, have gone for does deliver a little whiplash.

The story is presented in still cut-scenes that has some truly original and visually stunning art pushing it along, almost like stained glass or papaer collage images present a world to you that really is intriguing. A family dinner on the eve of battle alone makes for a glorious sight and some oddly believable writing despite the world at large. This art style of the cut-scenes is juxtaposed by the sparse and quite plain world you then play in. I wasn’t expecting a one-to-one translation but it’s odd to have something so stylised for story and text boxes in world but then something, whilst by no means unpleasant, but ‘normal’ be used for game-play.

The game itself sees you start as a lower ranking military man until a general takes a shine to you and with the help of his adviser teaches you ways of commanding an army. This Prologue could probably take most players about 30-60 minutes to get through and to be blunt it’s quite a slog. Each mission presents a new mechanic to get through and whilst none of the tasks assigned are hard to do by any stretch of the imagination it really does make the opening couple of hours feel like a chore and could put a lot of people off moving further into the game. The crying shame is that any that do drop off before getting out of the desert maps and hitting up some snowy scenery are really going to be missing out on something that is absolutely fascinating as a gaming experience.

Lornsword Winter Chronicle pushes the player to use a controller which would be considered sacrilege for most PC players looking at the this genre but Tower Five really have worked in a control scheme that simply makes sense. From a high view you directly control Corun, with him you must run, at least for the opening section of the game, around the battle field building up new forts, huts and temples to produce soldiers, watch towers to defend key locations and mines and farms to bolster your resources.

The game is all about resource management and path management. When laying down a new spawner for your army, a fort for example, fighters are produced at X per minute. Once it reaches 7 they will join a near by row of lanterns that lead the way to the nearest enemy stronghold. You are somewhat restricted here, you have no options as to where the paths start or finish and it is entirely possible to build in a location not close enough to a light path meaning your army will just stand around like they’re waiting for the job centre to open. If you have an objective to destroy three enemy encampments you’ll need to spend time after the first is destroyed demolishing your structures that no longer connect to an objective as building numbers are restricted by food. A saving grace of this is the split screen co-op.

Drop in drop out co-op arrives after finishing the prologue which is slightly odd as the prologue is a long tutorial, if your co-op partner wasn’t there for the introduction it does mean that you as the player will need to spend time explaining the nuances of the game and the general set up. It’s not the most arduous thing in the world but it is a tough game to get your head around when going in blind. Once you’re over that issue the actual co-op works wonderfully, being able to delegate jobs with someone makes the action flow so much smoother as you’re not hopping back to close down spawners or being pulled in too many different directions at once.

In it’s current Early Access state Lornsword Winter Chronicle already feels like good value for money, with 2 really quite loaded chapters that takes many hours to play through you’ll definitely find the experience worth it. The only gripes in it’s current state that I have relate to the feedback of Corun. Whilst navigating the battle it’s possible to swing your sword and be involved in the combat with your minions, the unfortunate thing is that there’s no controller vibration, there’s no feeling of damage being done, you just tap a button and the enemies flash red and eventually fall down. You don’t feel like the badass general getting involved in front line fighting, you almost feel like a hindrance that your troops roll their eyes at wondering why you aren’t dealing with the awful economic situation that the army has found its way into.

With content drops coming out already since launch it feels like a safe recommendation to say that Lornsword Winter Chronicle is definitely worth picking up. A mash up of genres that I haven’t seen before and a way of revitalising the tower defence genre that has somewhat fallen out of favour since the downturn in mobile gaming means that Lornsword is doing something new, and it’s doing it right. The minor issues I have are patch-able and the base game is something solid that plays like a dream in co-op.

Golem Gates did something I never thought would happen, something that seemed so foreign to me I couldn’t even comprehend it as a potential outcome, it entertained me with Collectable Card Game (CCG) mechanics. I’m not saying I have an abject hate for the genre or mechanic, but really my only true experience of CCG is in the real world during my handful of dalliances with Magic: The Gathering. Thankfully Golem Gates also brings the Real Time Strategy (RTS) to the mix with CCG. This leads to a really interesting juxtaposition between the strategy and forward planning nature of RTS and the pure random chaos of CCG. You may think your plan is solid but if you don’t have the right hand of cards in front of you then you’re likely crap out of luck.

I’d love to explain the story behind Golem Gates at this point but everything in the world built by Laser Guided Games is so abstract and drip fed I honestly struggle to explain anything beyond this; You’re the Harbinger, a pseudo-angelic being who is tasked with making their way through the world with the sole goal of destroying any Golem Gates they find. Golem Gates are machines that produce evil demonic robot beasts. Throughout the game you’re targeting these Golem Gates on each map and tasked with taking out an enemy.

If that sounds simple, it’s because really it is. You’re given cut-scenes and dialogue between missions but with no real lore building intro it’s hard to get context to any of the information you’re gaining. Cool, this guy that has been watching me fight for a while now wants a crack and taking out the Harbinger…awesome.

Thankfully the lack of coherent story doesn’t effect the gameplay which is on the most part a really solid experience. The main story mode will see you take on various objectives around a core principle, keep your Harbinger alive and destroy the enemy Golem Gate. To reach this end goal of destruction you may have to survive waves of enemies, destroy generators, raise a bridge or other such menial tasks. Aiding you in this goal your Harbinger generates Nano’s that are your currency to purchase Glyphs, which are the cards in your deck. Purchasing a Glyph allows you to place units, turrets or cast spells on the battle field. Once placed you can then command the units to move or attack as you see fit.

Using the Switch as opposed to mouse and keyboard does add a certain level of difficulty to the game where moving quickly around the field of play becomes a bit cumbersome. The shoulder buttons are there to help quick scroll between locations but with everything looking really quite similar this ends up being more disorientating rather than helpful.

The design of the world is interesting, a H.R.Giger style heaven and hell motif with industrial mechanical trappings. It really is fascinating to look at and gives a real interesting style to everything, it’s just not something that evolves enough throughout the game. I’m not looking for Mario style ‘Ice-World’ and then ‘Fire-World’, but some stronger variants would really have made the progression feel a bit more appealing. Something that’s worth really calling out though is the truly wonderful soundtrack. Epic is a word that is thrown around a lot in this day and age and it’s lost a lot of meaning but in it’s original meaning epic is the perfect adjective for the swelling soundtrack. The Mission Complete screen especially really hammers home the ‘I won a battle’ feelings and just nails the emotive intentions.

Moment to moment gameplay sees you trying your best to capture Nano Generators from around the map to increase your resources to buy units quicker. All of this works quite well in terms of a gameplay loop and by the end of each map you’ve built a decent sized army to push on the final Golem Gate. The early game is a lot of quick decisions as to whether you’re going to save up for a large unit that costs more or just spam a few small units to get the Nano Generators from the enemy early. It leads to a quite fascinating risk reward aspect to the game, something that you don’t get that much of, to such a visceral effect, in other RTS games.

Golem Gates is a really interesting mix of genres that pays off. The game does have it’s somewhat plodding moments in the story campaign but the unlocking of new Glyphs will justify it in the long run. It’s an odd situation but I’m not sure that it’s a must purchase on the Switch over the PC however. Full disclosure I haven’t played the PC version but I can’t help but imagine that the controls and map moving is a lot easier with a mouse and keyboard. The portability of the Switch is a real selling point however as this would be a great commute filler, as long as you’re not driving.

Like a lot of people in this bubble of hobbyism for gaming, I also play a lot of board games. Often when playing games I think about the potential transfer of mechanics to tabletop gaming and vice versa. A couple of years ago at a board game expo at the Birmingham NEC I picked up Colt Express, a cowboy themed train heist game where the objective was to be last person standing with the cash as multiple people raid the train at once. The key mechanic at play was the concept of locking in your actions for a round before knowing what your opponents were doing. Then every action would play out in turn at once. This concept fascinates me, the idea of not only being a strategist but also someone who can read and predict opponents. I know one of my friends is quite aggressive in games so I could assume he would go for the attack. I know my wife is relatively cautious and would move at the first sign of trouble and I knew another friend was simply an agent of chaos. Reading their faces, watching where their eyes were looking at the make-shift train, I knew I could play them as I needed like a Machiavellian god. Then I’d lose.

Mini-Mech Mayhem brings this concept to VR with some of the damn cutest mechs since Astro-Bot on PSVR. The game pits you against 3 others players in a first to score limit game. Your objective is to have your mech avatar stand on a square within a large grid at the end of a turn order. This sounds quite simple but you must lock in your turns actions before anything happens. Shooting your weapon and moving are your key abilities and each requires a certain amount of action points limiting your options per turn. Once everyone has locked in their moves the order of play is dictated by the complexity of the actions set down. Someone moving 1 square on the 9 by 9 grid will get priority over someone sprinting nearly end to end.

On the grid is the coin floating, taunting everyone into making mistakes. You also have ot be warey of the red squares that indicate a death trap. If one player’s move action forces them into another they will push that receiving mech with them potentially causing their death. Finally you’re tempted by blue crystals that power up your specials. You’re given the option each round to swap out your powers and for something else from the potential pile. Wind’s that move everyone one random square, an ability stealing ability and a air strike all fall within the potentials, some are awesome, some are a little too random in a game that is already predicated to random.

Your end goal is to reach 3 points, this can be achieved by getting points for the coin, or alternatively being a sick swine and blowing enemy mechs to kingdom come. Although walking is in one of the 4 cardinal directions shooting can be done in 8 meaning a random shot across the diagonal of the board towards the coin has the chance of causing some fun chaos. Mech’s have 3 hearts indicating health and once you’re out you’re done for the turn. In theory this is fine but I found the punishment for being directed into a death pit to be slightly unbalanced vs being shot accidentally.

The game is clearly meant to be played online against humans and I found games pretty much every time I tried and to the credit of the PSVR community, much like with Firewall, I found everyone to be talkative and friendly. There was ‘banter’ as the uncouth would say but it was all pleasant and enjoyable. The big difference between this and the Colt Express board game is that obviously it’s hard to read the player. Much like with online poker you have to just learn the opponents through play and hope you are guessing their actions appropriately.

The game looks great in VR and the audio design is suitable chirpy for the aesthetic. Your own avatar and your mech can be dolled up and coloured in as you want, obviously this meant I made my avatar a bright pink bunny of death because ‘pink is punk’. The one thing I am still struggling to justify however is was this essential to be in VR? The move controllers are the way to go with controlling, you can use dualshock if you see fit, but there isn’t really any reason to look around. The board is in front of you, there’s no platforms or obstacles to look around, it’s just there and a flat screen experience, whilst less immersive, would have suited the game just fine. With online PSVR games often losing its online community a lot quicker than flat screen games I do fear for how long this is viable. The single player is absolutely fine, and the AI is fair in its playstyle, but it still feels like you need human foibles to truly stand a chance or as much fun. I love PSVR, it makes me always so happy to go in, but I wonder if this would have been fine as an optional extra to the game, play in VR or flat just to keep the community alive.

Mini-Mech Mayhem is essentially chaos on a board. The cute mechs are a selling point for me in a game filled with potential strategy and skill. It’s easy to sweep it away as pure randomness, something where luck is the only thing your really need but I’d say whilst it plays a part there is something to having a few games in a row against the same opponents and working out their play styles. I can’t read faces or watch eyes in VR but people are still people and as such they are predicatable. Mini-Mech Mayhem may not be pure mayhem as the name suggests but with the right human opponents it really does bring some wonderful mechanics and concepts to the table.

So it’s time for my bi-annual talking about Senran Kagura, I refuse to capitalise the entire name. At some point when I know a new one is coming out I can guess a number of elements of the game, Asuka and the other ninja school girls will be jiggling their way across my screen in a way that originally I was kind of creeped by but now I’m desensitised to, I can also assume that their clothes get torn when they lose and finally I know that the story is going to be bat poop weird. But one thing I can never predict is the genre of the game. I have played and completed 5 or so of these games now, I haven’t even completed that many Call of Duty’s. We’ve had standard brawlers, the bread and butter of the series, there was the team arena shooter with water pistols, the cooking game and last year we had the ‘lets stop with this pretence’ game of Reflections that was all about massaging the girls in various costumes and scenarios. Well damn, I wish I could say I called it when I say the latest is a pinball game but nope, didn’t have a clue.

For the uninitiated Senran Kagura is a series that supposedly has lots of spin offs but to be honest I’m confused as to what’s cannon and what isn’t at this point. The core concept is rival ninja schools that teach teenage girls to murder. The characters remain the same throughout the majority of the series and tick off pretty much every anime trope you could require; brave hero, ditsy big boobed girl, deadpan straight girl, head in the clouds dreamer and everything else you could want. It’s sad to say but you’re basically being given a car showroom of women each game to pick your ‘type’ and then enjoy some jiggle physics.

As reductive as that is that isn’t to say there isn’t a story in Peach Ball, there is, but it may be the weirdest justification for the genre change I’ve seen yet. Peach Beach Splash had a weird reality TV show thing running through it and Reflextions was all a day dream but strap in because we’re hopping on the crazy train for Peach Ball.

There’s a fighting tournament at an arcade, one of the women working their creates an elixir that turns people into animals. One of the students mistakes the elixir, that was left on a shelf in a bathroom, for a bottle of hand soap and then starts to turn into a dog, she then licks and touches other girls turning them into a bear, a tanooki, a cat and a bunny. They all then scatter to the winds forgetting their human selves. They are one by one brought back to the arcade where the owner has turned a pinball machine into some sort of Glade Plugin that emits the antidote but to get the furries into prime cure zone you must beat them at pinball.

So that’s the plot of Senran Kagura Peach Ball.

It’s delivered through Japanese voiced visual novel style with some animation to show off the jiggles. Now I realise this seems like I’ve been dunking on the game for the past 4 paragraphs but the honest truth is that I love this. The simple fact that I’ve been watching what is essentially the most eclectic anthology series where only characters remain but setting and plot doesn’t is wonderful. We don’t trash Blackadder for the same foibles.

When we hit the game-play however we do hit some problems. On the most part the actual pinball moment to moment plays well, you have a choice between heavy and light balls and the physics feel mostly right, but with just two tables to play on, with just day/evening/night modes to change the aesthetics, it is quite easy to get into a bit of a routine with them. I’ve never really been someone to chase high scores and when i’m the only person on my Switch playing this it does mean that I’m competing with myself. The elements of the tables are fun and there’s rails and pits as you would expect to find in any table after the 70’s.

‘But Ruaidhri’ I hear you cry, ‘how do they make pinball sexy and/or unsettling?’. Well it’s simple, in the centre of each table is one of the ladies you’re trying to save, you must complete objects that fill the right of the screen, like hit this item 3 times, and you’ll weaken her. Once weakened you need to smack the ball into her to trigger a Sexy Challenge (their words not mine). On a new mini-game table you must complete a challenge like hit a mini ice cream van or spinning parasols. Once you have hit it enough you get a cut-scene showing ice cream falling over your lady of choice. It’s exactly as it sounds.

Do a couple of these challenges and you get a Super Sexy Challenge (again not my words) and this time you’re in the end game. The ladies chest or butt of the lady is set to get pummelled by a multi-ball onslaught. You build up a point multiplier each time the balls bounce off their ladies skin and then the final challenge is using the Joy-Cons to rhythmically slap the chest or butt to keep the score multiplier in the 10x zone. This all then climaxes with a final animation showing the animal personal falling away leaving an undressed ninja school attendee prone trying to hide.

As with every Senran Kagura game you will earn money and items for the always unashamedly creepy diorama room where you can dress up your ladies, put props in their hands or wherever and you and just swivel a camera round to your hearts content. I always use this to produce what closest resembles a Jack the Ripper crime scene but that probably says more about me than the game.

I feel every one of these Senran Kagura reviews has to have the same context thrown in. You know what you’re getting into with these games, if you’re into anime and I’d say just on the fun side of the line of pervy then you’re going to get enjoyment out of this. Thankfully, like every time i review a Senran game, my wife sat in on my play time and even she was enjoying the show. It’s a spectacle, it’s fun and it’s something you don’t want anyone to see you play lest they know you well already. The story is crazy, the game-play is fine, nothing special but as a whole package, like the other games, it really is something you should play just to see what it is.

As someone who has been critiquing games in my own little corner of the internet for nearly a decade at this point it’s incredibly crass for me to show behind the curtain. But to let my readers in on an aspect of this hobby that you may not think about. Often when reviewing a game I have a relatively short amount of time to complete it, especially when you consider I have a day job. This often causes game burn out to some degree and I would say that with one or two exceptions, often once a review is done, no matter how much I enjoyed my experience with it, I have not gone back to play anymore. Killsquad is the first game in a long long while where I’ve played many hours of a game for review and even as I type this I’m looking forward to going back and playing some more. Although I’m going to carry on for another 900 words it’s worth noting that that is the strongest recommendation I can make towards a game.

A few years ago my then girlfriend, now wife, were looking for a new game to play, we decided to try our hand at Diablo 3 which had been just released at the time. Despite not having gamed properly for a few years my wife loved her time with the game and we both dropped hundereds of hours into the eponymous action RPG since. I’ve dipped into others in the genre here and there but never really dug the style, they all try to hard to be Diablo or have some wacky genre twist that doesn’t sit right. Thankfully Novarama has come along with an Early Access game that whilst not all there right now, has the potential to be something incredible.

In Killsquad you take one of four characters through a couple of sci-fi locations to complete contracts. With said contracts you earn credits which can be used in the shop to buy new weapons and gear. This weapon and gear have ‘Vector’ ratings and this is essentially your character level and dictates the difficulty of contracts you can go on. To be slightly reductive it’s basically the end game ‘light’ leveling from Destiny.

This changes a key element of the Action RPG for me, there is no consistent character abilities or skill tree as you would know it, instead what we have is essentially MOBA elements brought into the field. Each contract starts you at level one, a different track to your ‘Vector’. As you progress and get kills you’ll level up, upping your damage and stats and every couple of levels presenting you with a selection of three skills or ability buffs. The issue with this approach to leveling is you don’t feel like you have much ownership over your character, not only do you end up realistically choosing the same abilities each time, but as certain skills are the ‘obvious’ choice it also means that if you happen to end up with a squad with the same classes people will tend to gravitate towards the same options.

The 4 characters all have the pros and cons, my personal favourites Zero and Troy are both ranged characters though Troy does more DPS and Zero can provide healing to the team. On the flip side you have Cass and the character I will only ever refer to as Jason Vorhees. These two are your speedy and slow melee characters and as such if you’re playing as the medic they are the ones who will drive you insane by permanently needing to be healed or revived. On the roadmap we’re already being promised more characters which will be welcome as the four are somewhat restricting in terms of squad builds. With four player online co-op being a focus of the game it would be nice to see some new characters added that shake-up the game a bit and maybe produce a gaming meta where certain squad builds are better for certain contract types.

The majority of the contracts that appear in Early Access are kill this enemy, escort this truck or destroy this crystal. If you’re playing a long session in the game you’re likely to be replaying the same scenarios across the same locations. There is an element of randomness to the enemy layout and types but on the most part you know that when walking into a certain area enemies are going to come from location X,Y and Z. This is the nature of Early Access however, this is a slice of the game, it’s not right to be holding this against the product as it currently stands, as long as Novarama are true to the roadmap and new elements are added with relative frequency.

In it’s current build bugs are still an issue and things like audio getting stuck in a loop, frame rate inconsistencies and things like the main menu just not responding to clicks, which is extra annoying as the Exit Game button is hidden behind a click into Options. There’s still a long way to go with Killsquad, but as we head into week two since launch the game is already getting much requested features like in game text chat and language options. The online community is strong and it really doesn’t take more that 30 seconds of waiting for a full squad to come together in matchmaking.

I think my main want for the game is some sort of ownership of my character; they’re already named, have one colour swap option, no matter what gun you purchase the attack animations remain the same and if you happen to be in a squad of four of the same character, as I once had, it’s painfully evident that there is a ‘correct path’ for in game leveling for damage output and progression.

Presuming the game continues with the momentum it has I can’t see this ending up anything but a success. The long term goal is for console release and if they can implement local co-op somehow I know this will be a new heavy rotation game for my wife and I. For now, I wasn’t kidding when I said that I really want to go back and play some more. It’s not perfect right now, but the potential is there, and it’s really strong.

I stopped playing games on my mobile phone a number of years ago now. A mixture of me having to drive to my day job and having various generations of handheld consoles just meant that once the novelty wore off for playing Cut the Rope and Angry Birds I just never went back. All of this means that I have missed out on a slew of releases on iOS and Android from the past half decade. Weirdly the ‘saviour’ of this has been the Switch, a console that seems to have its store filled with ports of iOS games. A screen with many levels and star ratings next to each is often the tell tale sign to what you’re getting into. Now, do not take this as me being dismissive of mobile games, there is clearly a market and I’d still be part of it if I didn’t own a Switch and my commute was public transport based.

For a multitude of reasons we’ve seen the eshop packed with mobile releases and more than anything it’s fascinating to see how each game that was previously free to play has adjusted to the concept of being a one time payment offering. Into The Dead 2 has tackled this greatly in some areas, and in others the classic micro-transaction roots are just buried too deep.

Into The Dead 2 is an endless runner with a difference, there’s an end. By that I mean you’ll be taken through nearly a hundred levels across the main story and side missions, each one sees you auto-running through horde after horde of undead trying to reach the target distance, at which point you’ll get a little bite size piece of story to encourage you to jump straight into the next run.

To help you on your traversal across country you will be loaded up with a couple of guns, grenades and a knife. At the start of each sprint you’ll begin with barely any ammo meaning you’ll be dodging more than gunning down your shambling enemies. As you go however there are flares indicating ammo dumps to refill your supplies.

On completion of each level you have the ability to unlock some bonus perks like armour piercing rounds, manuals with power ups like ‘start the game with more ammo’ or finally gold bars. These gold bars are clearly the currency from the previous iterations of the game. The gold is used to buy new unlocked weapons, upgrade said weapons or buy new companions. The problem is the game’s currency just feels broken. I ended up not upgrading my weapons as they simply doesn’t seem worth it. The 5-15 gold bars I got for completing my run, which I had to take instead of the special ammo etc, just doesn’t accumulate quick enough. The average upgrade is 50 gold bars, weapons start at 120 odd gold and by the time you’ve saved up the gold from 20 odd levels just made me wonder the point of ever setting my hopes on buying a new rifle. By completing challenges within levels you can unlock big bundles of 100 gold bars but these assume a certain level of control that the player just doesn’t have; kill 100 enemies with X weapon is just no feasible with the ammo available for example. With the upgrading of weapons the game feels like it’s tailored more for avoidance rather than the kills so why upgrade something you’re avoiding shooting.

Looking past the negatives that have been dragged across from the mobile games market there is actually a fun game here. The air of desperation produced with each run is actually quite tense at times, knowing that your ammo is incredibly low and zombies can corner you at any time really can be exhilarating. The world is dark and gloomy with a mist obscuring long distance views, planning ahead is a luxury that you just don’t have, instead you must just run and wing it as much as possible.

I learned a few hours in that guns and killing is really a reactive element of the game rather than proactive. Rather than gunning down every undead creature in front of you, the best bet is instead to figuratively dodge, duck and dive your way across the map and only pick off the zombies that are a clear obstruction to you. As you progress through the game you’ll find zombies bulk up requiring more bangs to take out. This adds a nice risk reward element to the game that really forces you to make quick calls on the fly as to the lesser of many evils.

The main story of Into the Dead 2 is revolving around your character desperately trying to make it to his sister and daughter as they run from one unfortunate series of events to another. The end of each level is topped with a bit of walkie-talkie chat between James and Helen that is fine for giving a reason to progress but isn’t exactly a truly compelling arc to run with. Weirdly though the side-missions that are unlocked as you progress through the game have some fascinating stories. The first about a squad of soldiers spread across a bayou like area has some wonderful writing about power struggles and trust issues, it’s not what I expected to enjoy most but it really played out well across the few levels within. It made me wish the whole game played out more like an interwoven anthology story rather than these side-missions being drip fed throughout.

Apart from one or two frame-rate dips the game stays pretty solid throughout and whilst not groundbreaking the graphics and design of the world at large is fun and fitting. The menu’s have some issues with needing to jump between selections being overly arduous, upgrading of weapons for example not being able to be done on the pre-mission weapon select screen.

As a whole package Into The Dead 2 achieves on Switch what it would have on mobile phones; it’s a solid pick up and play experience, not something you’ll get much out of if you try to play for hours at a time on your sofa, but for a lunch time at work play or for filling a train ride it gets your blood pumping and taxes your brain and reflexes in an enjoyable way. Into The Dead 2 is fun at it’s heart, it tests you and pushes you to manage a lot of spinning plates despite the running being taken away from you. The big thing that needs mentioning however is the price. For $35 this is a lot of money for something that you can right now download on your phone for free. Admittedly you don’t have the micro-transactions in the Switch version, but instead you have a quite brutal grind if you want to unlock weapons or companions. This isn’t a deal breaker and hey if you’re one of the people who might have dropped that much in micro-transactions on iOS then you’re probably quids in with this purchase, but at full price this is a hell of an investment for what the game is.

I’ve had my PSVR helmet a couple of years at this point, I’m always looking for that holy grail of VR, that feeling of immersion. Now that doesn’t mean I’m seeking photo-realism or a grounded real-life story. For me it’s more that enveloping feeling of being there, wherever being there is. Throw Anything has made me swear and get stressed in both a positive and negative way more than most other VR games has achieved.

Starting with a rather lacklustre story intro you’re shown that a mysterious plague doctor mask wearing scientist has unleashed the undead on earth and you’re tasked with finding pieces of a broken cube across the globe to bring everything back to normality. This is exposition is dolled out to the player with some unexciting still images that don’t really do anything to invoke the vibe of the game. Mix with that the music, which throughout the game seems completely mishandled. At no point did I feel like any music was appropriate for the level or menu I was in, all screamed of royalty free placeholder until the real soundtrack is put in.

After getting through a basic tutorial you’re introduced to your first level, the apartment. Each level presents essentially two elements, the first is a window that when looked out of you can see a slowly meandering crowd of zombies. If they make it across the street, up the wall and into the window it’s game over. The second element is 180 degrees behind you, a room of stuff. Using the two Move controllers you must grab everything that isn’t nailed down and whip it out the window to knock the zombies back and hopefully kill them. The size of item dictates damage meaning the easier to grab books, fish, fruit, clocks and stationery etc isn’t going to do nearly as much good as a chair. Nearly all larger objects like sofas and tables can be smashed with smaller objects meaning more detritus to be weaponised against the horde.

This is where I feel I need to caveat most of my opinions on Throw Anything, the game is bubble-gum, it’s a harmless arcade experience that would be a perfect ‘show game’ for people new to VR to try when they come to your house (assuming you have the wrist straps on the Move controllers, otherwise say goodbye TV). It doesn’t need a super in-depth story or the greatest graphics or audio. It just needs to work.

And on the most part the game does work. Very rarely was I grabbing something I didn’t want, or my throws weren’t heading where I intended, it was all reacting incredibly well to my actions, with one exception. Originally Throw Anything was on PC VR headsets which all allow for 360 movement thanks to their fancy antennas around a room or in headset cameras. PSVR on the whole teaches you very quickly to keep your feet planted and don’t walk around, partially for safety, but also because the system simply can’t see what your hands are doing if you turn away from the camera, unfortunately with the set up of Throw Anything you are basically required to turn around completely to be able to grab all the items to be chucked out the window. I did see news on a patch coming to allow a button to be pressed to turn around but at time of review it wasn’t live.

This isn’t to say this is a game breaking element of Throw Anything. The game is a lot of fun and can get stressful, in a good way, when the challenge of item management and defence comes together. Not wanting to use all your large objects or guns upfront at the start of the level and instead burning through every keyboard and mouse or book on a shelf to hold back an onslaught is a lot of fun and really got me ‘in’. The immersion of the situation, rather than the world, played me well and I was frantic, there’s no other word for it, just frantic in my actions and my accuracy. When those moments did happen the game was a blast, I was sucked into the scenario and let go and played along.

There are six levels with difficulty ranging from ‘walk in the park’ to ‘this isn’t fair’ (see the police station level that had a boss that caused me to drop the difficulty level after a rather unceremonious rage quit). All the level’s have their ‘gimmick’ like the office having a photocopier, the kitchen with its freezer and the police station with it’s small arsenal hidden away. It’s not a game you’d feel inclined to finish in one sitting but for a pick up and play arcade experience Throw Anything ticks a lot of boxes and is a lot higher quality than a lot of other PSVR games that try to put out that similar vibe. Once the game has had its quick turn patch it’s easy for me to recommend, with one slight exception; it’s a little expensive for what it is. Currently in the UK PSN store the game is selling for £24.49 which is a fair bit on the high side. For that money you could pick up a couple of the games which are considered classics on PSVR like Astro-Bot, Moss or Blood and Truth. If you’ve played those and want something easy then during a sale I can definitely recommend Throw Anything, but until that price drops you’re just not getting enough bang for your buck, especially if a house guest throws a Move controller at your TV.