Dark Souls III

I finally, finally, got around to playing Dark Souls III. I think this took extra long because I had had enough of the previous two games, so I wasn't even considering playing it for a while. Yet here I am.
I'd hope Dark Souls requires no introduction. It's really a genre-defining game, even if that genre is mostly just "a difficult action RPG". Sure there's also the "convoluted, interconnected level design", and "world state persistence through death" aspects, but at the end of the day it is just an action RPG.

I'm going to be brief today, and mostly refer you to find my review for Dark Souls II. I couldn't get into the third game. I couldn't get into the previous two either, but I think this one was even worse somehow. Perhaps it was the experiences of the previous game still being fresh enough in my mind (it's only been several years after all) combined with this being just... more Dark Souls. Aside from being two years newer, I didn't see much innovation, just new content with a fresh lick of paint.
I'd like to add to what I previously said. I think difficult games have the obligation to be fair. It is important that if you're going to make the player lose, that they feel mostly responsible for that loss. Dark Souls III still hasn't managed to properly port their game to PC, because the keyboard and mouse support isn't of acceptable quality. I do not have sufficient control of my character - I execute certain actions without meaning to. Be those attacks which are triggered by a button combination that has an ambiguous meaning, or the game sometimes not intercepting mouse clicks in menus (so they still perform an attack, plunging me off a cliff or attacking a friendly NPC). There's also issues of enemies hitting you through solid walls, or level geometry making you think you get somewhere, only to be interrupted by invisible walls or bumps, again, causing you to lose. These are not super common occurances, but they happen far more often than I find acceptable, given how punishing such issues are. And I won't repeat what I believe to be persistant issues in level design.

Honestly, my opinion on this isn't really important. I'm happy for what the game has done for the genre, and I know there's plenty of people who enjoy it. Good on them. I find this brand of difficulty to be more frustrating than fun, and I get bored of playing the same content over and over again until I'm perfect at it. Recommending this, or not, is simple. Did you like the previous Dark Souls games? If so, you'll probably like this one. If not, you probably won't like this one. If you haven't played any souls-likes, then maybe the best comparison would be to the more recently popular brand of "difficult" games that you see streamers playing. Getting Over It, Jump King, etc., except instead of being just difficult, with no substance, Dark Souls is the same brand of difficult, but with a lot of substance. Regardless of this, I don't enjoy this kind of difficulty, so I can't recommend it. Perhaps my opinion would be different if the game was of a higher quality, but it isn't.

Fury Unleashed

I was incredibly put off by Fury Unleashed for some reason, as soon as I saw its store page. I think it was the old Flash game art and animation style that caused me to be biased against it. Still, because it had relatively good reviews at the time, I decided to add it to my backlog. Looking at it again now, the reviews had definitely taken a turn for the worse. But what did I think about it?

Fury Unleashed is a platformer shooter. You go between small rooms, evading traps, killing enemies, maybe a boss every now and then. You have a gun, a melee weapon, a special ability, some grenades, nothing unique really. The levels are randomly generated, and there's a focus on fast-paced gameplay - building combos and getting a high score.

Well, truth be told, I didn't get very far, so I can't speak much for the actual depth or difficulty of the game, but I can say that it feels like it looks. The movement and combat is very floaty and does not at all feel expertly made. You can just spam your weapons, you're really mobile, and there doesn't appear to be any weight to neither the attacks nor the movement. The game's also quite zoomed in, as if it was made for a smaller screen, which limits the amount of stuff that can be happening at a time. I wouldn't really say the game feels casual, more like really outdated and cheap. I definitely saw no redeeming qualities in it, so combined with my intial bias, I was quick to toss it aside, and move on to the next game.

So, in short, I think my personal dislike for Fury Unleashed is greater than the game is actually bad, but regardless of that, I can't really see anything unique or particularly well-executed in the game either. It's just another action platformer with an emphasis on speed, which is another thing I personally dislike. In any case, I can't recommend it.

Sea Salt

I think I picked up Sea Salt because of its interesting visuals and the unique concept of controlling a swarm of creatures, instead of just a few of them.
However, interesting concepts do not always translate to interesting games. You see, Sea Salt is a very simple game, with effectively two actions you can do. You can tell your swarm to go to a place, and you can tell your swarm to attack. Considering this, I'm amazed there is no mouse support, as it can be quite annoying to switch directions with how slow your cursor moves with the arrow keys. I guess you can also choose which units you summon, but that's only an action you can do every once in a while. Your swarm handles the pathing, which includes evading obvious danger, except when attacking, then they just diregard their safety to strike. There's various enemies, and numerous bossfights with different mechanics, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to positioning and choosing when to attack, because that's all you can do.

I don't have a lot more to say about this game. There might have been something here if there were more options, both in terms of controlling your army and general things to do. As it stands now, I very quickly got bored of both the simple gameplay, as well as the subpar execution. The AI was dumb enough to constantly force me to question its decisions, be it splitting up the swarm, or focusing the wrong things during attacking. The graphics were perhaps a bit too pixelated and hard on the eyes, and the music, while fitting, wasn't very enjoyable either. Overall, I can not recommend playing it.

Atomicrops

Atomicrops combines twin-stick shooter roguelike gameplay with a farming simulator. It's a game that's visually very exciting. I suppose that's half the reason I picked it up. Looking at the screenshots on the store page, the graphics are quite stylized, and there seems to be a lot going on at the same time. None of that's wrong, but perhaps the busyness of it all is actually a downside.
See, the game gives you a brief tutorial on how to shoot, how to till your fields, plant crops, water them, and then harvest them. That's all fine, but that's a small portion of things that you can do. The game starts off slow with a small patch of land and enemies only appearing at nighttime. It feels manageable, but you quickly realize you can decide to just ditch your land and go to another area to fight enemies instead. You also run out of seeds, because harvested crops don't drop new ones. You don't really know what the right course of action is, and the game doesn't lean you into it either - everything's available straight away, and time is ticking away. Each next day is harder, and each next season is harder, and each next year is harder. Sure, you get some upgrades between all that, but still. So at least I was quicky overwhelmed, trying to juggle somehow getting new seeds, not leaving my farm unattended, planting, watering, harvesting, and defending my crops at the same time, all the while trying to figure out if I might be playing the game entirely wrong.

In the end, after a few failed runs, not that the game expects you to get far at first, I gave up. Part of me feels like I should've stayed for longer to see more of what the game had to offer, but my experience thus far was stressing and confusing, and that's not something I want from a game. I was constantly out of seeds, but I also couldn't go get any because I was always being attacked, and I felt like there was some way to get better crops, but the game didn't teach me any of that, and then every plot of my land was instantly overcome with weeds, or short on water, or in need of tilling, or... You get the point - I always had to do something, and I didn't get much more action speed as the game went on, but I was expected to attend a larger field and defend it from more enemies.

Atomicrops is definitely more of a twin-stick shooter than a farming simulator. I'm not convinced it's a bad game, just a bit unapproachable. So if you're looking for a twin-stick shooter with a twist, then it's possible you'll enjoy Atomicrops. I didn't experience it enough to really tell, so from a personal standpoint I can't recommend it. I couldn't get over trying to do too many things at once, and for a combat-focused game, I can't say I found anything special or particularly enjoyable about the combat either.

Children of Morta

I picked up Children of Morta, which I had sitting in my library for quite a while. I don't remember where I got it from, and I didn't think I'd enjoy a random game, but it turned out to be quite fun, and I'm not even entirely sure why.

Children of Morta is kind of like a mix between an action roguelike and an RPG. The bulk of the game is the campaign, where you run through a series of around nine stages, each comprised of a few randomly generated maps. During a stage, your character gains gold, experience, and items. Items expire at the end of a stage, but can grant powerful active or passive buffs. Experience can be used to upgrade your character on their talent tree, while gold can be used to purchase upgrades for all your characters. You have a total of 7 characters who lore-wise form a family, each playing like a different class. Slow, fast, ranged, melee - something for everyone. There is a minor incentive to actually try different characters, as leveling each gives passive bonuses to all the other ones, and playing one for too long inflicts a debuff on them that decreases as you don't use them.

There is also a more roguelike mode, which does not let you get any upgrades between runs, but makes the runs 13+ maps long, and gives you a a random choice of powerups upon level-up, as well as a lot of currency to purchase and upgrade items at shops that occur every now and then. I found this mode both more fun and more challenging than the main story mode, although there are basically no gameplay differences. It just adds more randomness, and lets you more heavily customize your character with items before the run is up, potentially unlocking very strong combinations.

There's no mechanic that stands out, and I can't say the game's super well made either. I definitely found some smaller bugs, balance issues with certain characters or upgrades being too strong or weak, visual clarity problems, and other imperfections. I think the strong side is the storytelling. The main story actually has a voiced narrator, and the characters have a lot of animations and well-defined personalities that make them feel more alive. Of course, I've never been one to prioritize that too much, so why do I, despite the unimpressive gameplay, like this game? I thought about that for a while, and I actually don't know. Perhaps it helped that I played it in co-op, sticking mostly to ranged characters. Most characters felt too slow for me, some being so immobile and slow to attack while having very few upsides, I wonder why anyone would want to play them at all. I did find one character I really liked who could attack and move at the same time, which caused me to play a lot of the game like a twin-stick shooter instead, but then again, what's stopping anyone else from doing that too, if that is the most fun way to play.

While Children of Morta is far from my favorite action roguelike, it's definitely up there. From a more objective standpoint, I don't think the game's all that good and there are probably similar games out there that are better, but at the end of the day, I liked it. So personally, I would recommend it. It's not super long, not super replayable, not super difficult, but I got a good amount of fun out of it and perhaps you will too.

The Finals

Another recent game for a change, because a friend invited me to play it - it's The Finals, a 3-player-team-based first-person shooter with destructible terrain.
I suppose the reason I agreed to play was because it is free to play, and the low barrier to entry is always nice, but I quickly got bored of it because it really doesn't stand out that much.

There are a couple different game modes, but they're all about collecting, then depositing money, basically like a capture the flag game mode with a slightly modified ruleset. You have a choice of three classes from light to heavy, with heavier classes generally having more health, slower movement speed, and weapons / abilities that are, well, heavier. A light class can, for example, go invisible, use a grappling hook, and use a sniper rifle or submachine gun. A medium class can heal or deploy a jump pad, and has an assault rifle. A heavy class can ram through walls or deploy a barricade, and use a rocket launcher. This is not the full list, as each class has 3 abilities, a couple unique deployables or grenades, as well as the default pool of grenades, and several unique weapons.
Still, having some variety is the baseline minimum I feel a game could do, and with just three classes with abilities that don't majorly define their playstyle and differentiate the gameplay experience, it really just felt like a bland and small round-based shooter. The destructible environment is a cool gimmick, but I don't feel it created many unique or memorable scenarios.

Overall, while The Finals doesn't have any outstanding flaws, it also doesn't have any outstanding qualities. I'm neither for or against FPS-style gameplay, but I don't enjoy most round-based games. So that's the main reason I couldn't recommend The Finals, but even if you were to compare it to any other round-based FPS like Counter-Strike, Overwatch, or Valorant, I don't feel it is in any way better than them, nor different enough to provide a feeling of freshness.

Songbird Symphony

Songbird Symphony is a platformer and a rhythm game. You explore different levels, doing platforming puzzles and collecting some items, and end each level with a rhythm-based boss fight.
I was quickly put off by this game, as it felt a bit too childish for me, with a big focus on the cute and happy art as well as silly lyrics and animations. I've never been too good at rhythm games, and I don't like them a whole lot either, but I still think that the timings of the rhythm bits were quite bad, and the visuals weren't clear if you opted to ignore your ears and follow your eyes instead. Similarly, the platforming seemed quite simplistic, with more time spent trying to figure out where to go than how to complete some part of the platforming.

A short review for a game I didn't spend long playing, but I don't feel like I missed much. The game advertises itself as a metroidvania, and I'm not sure I'd quite agree on that. It's really more of an exploration game, with subpar platforming and rhythm aspects, and probably only enjoyable if you value the style and theme over the gameplay. As for me, it's a most definite no.

Opus Magnum

I'm only 6 years late, but Zachtronics just doesn't miss with their games, and even in all these years, no one has managed to compete with the absoute brilliance that are their puzzle games. I completed Opus Magnum, and while it wasn't my favorite Zachtronics game, I sure as hell enjoyed it.

Opus Magnum is a game about assembling (or sometimes disassembling) compounds from atoms or other compounds. You have an infinite hexagonal grid, arms that can rotate, extend, and move along tracks to move these atoms and compounds around, as well as mechanisms for bonding, unbonding, and altering them.
As usual, there aren't a lot of different mechanics, but they work together very well to create interesting puzzles that have a lot of different solutions. In fact, as far as I know, it is not too difficult to create puzzles with just a single solution, but Zachtronics' games are good, largely because he consistently manages to leave the solutions up to the player's personal creativity.

The reason Opus Magnum is not my favorite from the series, is because the infinite boards give us too much freedom, and make the problems a bit too easy. Of course, having a low skill floor is not too big of an issue, because a big part of Zachtronics games has always been getting high scores on the leaderboards for making good solutions. Still, even in terms of going for high scores, some categories seemed more tedious to set up than difficult to come up with, such as minimal cost solutions, which usually just had one or two arms along some track, and very, very long lines of instructions stashing and retrieving pieces in elaborate ways to prevent collisions.
The appendix was actually space-constrained, and the journal offered more difficult puzzles, but they were not part of the main story, and thus not the bulk of the game.

Regardless of all that, I still heavily enjoyed Opus Magnum. Perhaps due to its lower difficulty, it is the highest rated Zachtronics game, so even if you don't think highly of your puzzle solving capabilities, it would probably be the best Zachtronics game to try, if you were going to try any. I would absolutely recommend it, and I hope to get around to playing the next game in not too long of a time.

Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa

I'm on a roll with these sub-hour games. Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa is a horror game in the same vein as all those really short and badly made ones you saw YouTubers playing for a single video. Perfect for that, since after 30 minutes you'll be done with the game either through completing it, or by having enough of trying to do so. And it relies on cheap jumpscares to get funny reactions. This one's Touhou-themed, so you get anime girls too, oh joy.

Honestly, I didn't have high hopes for this, but I thought it would have at least a little more substance, humor, dialogue, or anything, really. You run around a maze with some rooms, trying to collect 6 books while two 2D sprites chase you in the dark. It takes 5 minutes if you know what you're doing, though as it gets harder with every book, the last ones are quite difficult.
Honestly, it's just bad. I don't like horror games, but that has nothing to do with how low-effort this is. Only the power of memes, anime girls, and cheap horror keeping this afloat, and that ain't enough for me. I'd recommend staying away.

Return.

I probably wouldn't give such a game a try these days, but since it was already in my backlog, I had to play it, and since I already played it, I have to talk about it. It's Return., and it's a free 30 minute platformer about returning an antropomorhic axolotl to life, or something.
It's really basic, with just movement and a tiny little hop you can repeat 3 times. Why they opted for 3 hops instead of a single larger jump, I'm unsure. It was quite unintuitive how to get enough air time at the start, but apparently I just had to mash jump really fast. The game looks like it could have some clever little secret with the progress bar stopping at 2/3 of the way to the finish, but apparently that's just a bug. There's no secrets. You just finish the game, and that's it.

There isn't really anything here to talk about. It's a free game that lasts half an hour. Less if you're good at it. Not that it's particularly challenging. There's no secrets, no branching, no particular story, and no reason to replay it. There's nothing bad about the game per se, but the platforming is just underwhelming enough that it's not even worth checking out, not even for free.

Quantum Protocol

Quantum Protocol is a PvE card game where you choose one of a few existing decks, and then expand that deck over the duration of a level by acquiring new cards as you defeat enemies. It's quite unique in terms of gameplay, and features multiple novel mechanics.
For starters, the game is asymmetrical. While both you and your enemy have a 5x2 board, your enemy's cards come in waves, each appearing after the last one is defeated. Each enemy card has a timer, indicating how many turns are left until it does an action. Meanwhile, you usually play cards from your hand, move cards around on the board, and choose which ones to activate. Each of these actions normally costs a turn, bringing you closer to the enemy's attacks. Each card can only be activated once, except after 5 turns, you can spend a turn to draw a card and refresh your board, allowing you to activate each card again. The actual loop generally relies on clearing your board often and building it up again, as you can choose to activate all your cards (even already activated ones) in a single row in just 1 turn if you discard them after. Many cards then return discarded cards back to your deck.

There are a lot more mechanics, definitely more than I care to list, but I feel that's the gist of it. While novel, these mechanics aren't necessarily good. I can't quite pinpoint my frustrations, which I suppose goes to show that they weren't that severe, but I never felt like there was a pleasant flow to the battle, despite the game advertising "it's always your turn". The general favorable emotion I get from deckbuilders is building a sort of machine that spirals to become better and better. Meanwhile here, I felt I was throwing a lot of trash onto the board, and instead of building up momentum, I was losing it the more the board got full. Sure, cleaning it up and starting fresh is a central game mechanic, but it's the opposite feeling from what I wanted. Add to that that your decks only last for the duration of a level, despite it possibly being half an hour long, and I really didn't feel I was getting anywhere in the game, short- nor long-term.
Oh, and if you were wondering about the visual novel aspect of the game, don't bother. There is a story, but it's very shallow, and only exists to provide context to the gameplay. That's fine, but don't expect to find a good read here.

Overall, Qunatum Protocol might be a fine game for you if you're a fan of card games, thinking, and prefer novelty to tried-and-true gameplay. The levels can be quite long, you can lose and have to reset to the beginning of the level, and you will probably be spending a lot of time reading and thinking, not playing. These aren't necessarily bad things though, just not something I enjoyed. As such, no recommendation from me, but I don't want to discourage you from trying, if the description seemed interesting.

Yume Nikki

It's been well over a decade since I first saw Yume Nikki. It was a Let's Play from a YouTuber I used to watch. I don't think they ever finished it or even got close, but the game definitely seemed intersting from what I could remember, so when I saw it appear on Steam at the start of 2018 for free, I added it to my library. 6 years laters, I finally got around to playing it.

Uhmmm... I don't have a lot to say about it. The game is incredibly cryptic and gives no hints on how to progress. Though I did not intially know this, your goal is to gather all the "effects", which are like little accessories for your character that grant you powers to do things and get to places you couldn't before. I found 4 out of the 24, and found a use for none of them. I spent about an hour wandering around aimlessly in creepy, desolate worlds, listening to the unsettling, and somewhat irritating, background music. There's 12 worlds, I think? They kind of connect to other worlds too and feature sort of unique scenery. None of this tells you anything though. What do you do in the worlds? What's the goal? Where do I go next? Is this a dead end because there's nothing here, or is it a dead end because I don't have the right effect equipped? You'll never know, and the game won't so much as hint to it.

Listen, after an hour, I was emotionally tired. I had kind of given up after 30 minutes, which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you asked me to recount what I saw in that hour, I couldn't tell you. The game is so devoid of any meaning, and it doesn't make it easy to explore it either, with the worlds being large, the field of view being small, the things you want to find being hidden, your walking pace being a crawl, and the music eating away at your sanity. It's definitely an experience, but it's not an experience I would recommend having.

Neoverse

Neoverse is yet another Roguelike deckbuilding game. I really should get around to Slay the Spire in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the genre, but until then, you're getting comparison-free reviews. For what it's worth, my judgement of Neoverse mostly did not come down to how good it was in its genre.
Neoverse has a selection of 3 characters, each with their own decks and playstyles. You start with a few cards in your starter deck and proceed through a series of fights. The default mode has a total of 24 encounters, and up to 4 enemies per encounter. You are given 5 cards, each with some effect, but most importantly, a mana cost. Many deckbuilders give you a limited number of cards per turn, making card draw very valuable, but here you are instead trying to optimize your mana usage, because you always draw a new card upon spending one, unless you mill your entire deck in a single turn. Each encounter gives you a mission that can be completed even after the encounter, with a reward upon completing it. You may choose a tougher encounter for a better mission, more gold, skill points, and better cards at the end of the encounter. Gold can be spent on 1-time consumables, new cards, and skill points. Skill points can be spent on passive upgrades to your character.
There's even more to it, but I can't explain everything, and the point is that there are plenty of mechanics to make for an interesting game. The cards are made well enough to have good synergies that aren't entirely trivial to achieve, and do reward thinking and good planning. There are also different game modes which shift around difficulties and make some changes into how you power up, but the core game is the same.

Based on just the above description, you might think the game is great, but there are a lot of problems. As far as gameplay is concerned, it's too easy. It's simple to get the deck you want, so there isn't a lot of randomness to the game, which also limits replayability. On top of that, the amount of content is still somewhat limited.
Beyond gameplay, the game just lacks polish. The translation is poor and limits understanding of certain game mechanics. Some tooltips are missing, leaving you guessing what some effects do. The graphics may seem like they have high fidelity, but as I understand, most of the game is made with pre-existing assets. This explains the visual dissonance and the clunky animations. There's also plenty of weird bugs, like scrolling a menu too fast makes the music temporarily stop. It's just shoddy work, and I think a big draw of the game for many people who did decide to buy it were the hot anime girls in revealing outfits.

Overall, I had my fun for the first run or two, despite everything. It's an entirely playable game, but I know how popular the rougelike deckbuilder scene is these days, and I'm certain there are many better games than this. I think it's more fair to see Neoverse as a rushed, yet oddly solid, attempt at a quick cash grab from the popularity of the genre, instead of something well-made. I would rather advise to stay away and find something else.

MO:Astray

I picked up MO:Astray because of its positive reviews, because it seemed there had been a lot of effort put into crafting the levels, with the pixel art being both beautiful and quite varied, and the environments looking like they were telling some interesting story. Also because I recognized the publisher as having published some of my favorite mobile games. Even though those were rhythm games, and I don't play many mobile games in general. While those assumptions were correct, there were some caveats. But first, let me explain the game.

MO:Astray is an action and puzzle platformer, with a strong emphasis on the story. You play as a little blob who can jump in any direction, stick onto any surface, and latch onto the heads of enemies to control them and read their thoughts. The thought reading is just for the purpose of storytelling, and is the main method of explaining the lore, allowing you to skip it if you so desire. You will also get some other abilities later on, such as briefly stopping in mid-air and doing another omnidirectional jump from there. I would say that there is a lot of inspiration taken from Ori, both in terms of how some of the story is told, as well as much of the platforming. The biggest difference would be that this is not a metroidvania, and there's no real combat to speak of. Personally, I actually prefer this pure focus on platforming and puzzles, and I would say MO:Astray can definitely stand up to Ori, even if they feel very similar.

I'm a big fan of storytelling in games that is not in your face and not forcing you to pay attention to it. I think the story, or perhaps rather the lore, of MO:Astray can be quite interesting to follow along and discover, but wasn't quite enough to grip me. For people who care more about storytelling though, it's probably worth experiencing. Similarly, the art and many of the backgrounds are very beautifully drawn, even if I feel the animations could be a bit better.
Finally, the platforming, my only complaint is the focus on mobile screens and controllers. I think it would have taken but an hour or two of development time to add a better control scheme for the mouse, but as it stands, you're forced to drag your mouse every time you wish to make a jump, whereas a single click while showing the cursor would have been much more natural. Other than that, the platforming was quite fluid and had a reasonable amount of skill expression without being frustrating for someone like me, who's only average at this.

Ultimately, would I recommend MO:Astray? Kind of. If you are a fan of either Ori game, or enjoy other non-combat-focused platformers, then MO:Astray is definitely one of the better ones. The problem for me is that I've never enjoyed those kinds of games, and I know that's just a personal problem. So therefore, I would have to give this a partial recommendation, because while I can appreciate and recognize this as being a good game, I still didn't quite like it myself.

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension

Today's game is one of the higher rated ones on my backlog - There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. Opening it up, it immediately seemed familiar to me, which must have been because it was originally a free browser game back in 2015. It has increased from its previous 30 minute length to a much more reasonable 6 hour length, and it seems a lot more polished as well, at least as far as I can remember.
There Is No Game is a point-and-click adventure about how there is supposedly no game for you to be playing. It focuses on humor and having you solve casual puzzles by thinking outside the box. It's divided into multiple chapters, each having a different style.

While there are plenty of games that still break the fourth wall, I don't feel it has ever become a common thing in video games, so the concept is usually novel enough for me. However, this kind of fourth wall breaking is only interesting by itself the first time you see it, and I already expect there to be either a solid story or solid gameplay accompanying it. The puzzles presented weren't particularly difficult (time consuming, perhaps, due to having to click around, finding what the game wanted you to click, as is standard in point-and-click games), and the humor of the game didn't even manage to get a chuckle out of me. So between an unenjoyable story and unenjoyable gameplay, I didn't have much reason to finish it.

As usual, I can't outright dismiss the positive reception this game has. If it looks like something you might enjoy, then statistically it's quite likely you will enjoy it. On the other hand, because I did not like it, I can not personally recommend it.

Oh My God, Look at This Knight

A shorter one today - Oh My God, Look at This Knight is a 10-15 minute free adventure game I added to my library some years back.
I was expecting there to be a little bit more to it, but no, what you see on the screenshots is 80% of the game. There isn't even enough to write a review off of. It's slightly humorous, I suppose, but it doesn't subvert expectations enough to actually be funny. There isn't really any gameplay to speak of. You just walk around and click the attack button to whack things, and move out of the way of enemies' attacks. "Help" a few people, do a bossfight, and that's the game.

Usually, I find these short games to be worth the nonexistant time it takes to complete them, but not this one. There isn't really anything remarkable here, and the joke they make is far from novel. I suppose it's just highly rated because there isn't much to hate about it, but I wouldn't recommend you play it, even for the low price of free.

Creeper World 4

I was surprised when I found I hadn't written a review of Creeper World 3, but then I realized its release date was nearly 10 years ago. Turns out Creeper World 4 is not that different of a game, despite visually becoming 3D. Since the Creeper World series is something I've played since the Flash game era when I was still a child, I figured I'd cover the previous game in the series as well.

Creeper World is a mix between a tower defense game and an RTS. You must build towers and harvest resources to protect your base, but your enemy does not do the same. They, the "creeper", are a giant mass of viscous liquid that destroys anything it comes in contact with. It slowly creeps forward from its spawning points, and you have to build a defensive battlefront to halt its advance. After managing to do so, you must then slowly push back the creeper by having your defenses clear a small area in front of them, then building new defenses there. Each map is this tug-of-war between you and the creeper, usually ending when you have managed to push it all the way back. There are several different towers, types of resources, other buildings, and ways for the creeper to spread. Terrain is also an important part, with high ground generally being better to defend, but also harder to attack, as the creeper flows from high to low areas.

I think Creeper World is a very unique game, and I love the feeling of fighting against this giant mass that is bigger than yourself. It feels like keeping an ocean at bay. It's quite exciting for the first 10 or so minutes of each map, as you figure out how much area you can grab for yourself before the creeper reaches your outer buildings and you frantically try to allocate resources to get all the various types of defenses operational and strong enough to withstand the approaching flood. However, after some intial setbacks of maybe losing a few buildings if you were too greedy, or running out of resources if you weren't greedy enough, you arrive at a stable base that can keep the creeper at bay forever. Unless you do something really stupid, it becomes impossible to lose the game, and the remaining time, possibly even as long as an hour, you're just fighting a battle you know you've already won. This is by far the biggest weakness of Creeper World, but honestly, most strategy games suffer from it. At some point, you will just tip over the balance point and become stronger than your opponent, and from there on out, it's just a task of wiping them out. For the player's sake, hope that you can win soon after, but sadly, that's not usually the case with this game. I don't like RTS games, and I'm lukewarm on tower defense games, but despite that, Creeper World is still something that I've enjoyed. Perhaps I don't mind the tedious latter 75% of each map, because it feels satisfying to assert my superiority over the enemy that gave me trouble for the first quarter of the level.

Creeper World has always been a 3D game in some sense, as the creeper is a liquid and flows in accordance to the terrain, which has a different height at different points of the map. So, despite visually extending to the third dimension in Creeper World 4, the game still played the exact same. It looked quite nice, seeing the waves of creeper in 3D, and I found no downsides to the added dimension, but I also found very few benefits. I started off playing in 3D mode, but the erratic terrain elevation made it confusing where things really were, so after a few maps, I just switched to the top-down view, which was exactly like the old 2D mode, only switching back occasionally to admire the view.
Creeper World 3 was the best release in the series, and in terms of features, 4 didn't change a lot. In fact, I'd argue that despite improving the balance of the game in some aspects, it was made worse in others, to the point where I actually enjoyed it substantially less than its predecessor. I did still enjoy it, much like I enjoyed the first game in the series, but after over a hundred hours of playing them all, the new ones really need to innovate in order to keep me engaged for a similar length of time, and Creeper World 4 did not manage to do that.

Would I still recommend Creeper World 4? Yeah, sure. Although, if you have played Creeper World 3, don't really expect anything new or better. If you haven't played Creeper World 3, then maybe that would be the better starting point. The series is definitely starting to show its age, with not having many improvements for over a decade, but I think it's still good as long as there aren't any other games of this type. I do think it's a bit of a niche game, and it's hard to guess if you'd like it because it's so unique, but I know I like it, and if your interests generally align with mine, then perhaps you will too.

Fae Tactics

Another turn-based tactics game today, this time with a better concept, but not as good of an execution. It's Fae Tactics.

I was initially very hopeful for this, considering the large amount of mechanics this game had implemented. It had a good introduction to them as well, usually introducing a new mechanic one battle, then giving one to practice it, then introducing the next one.
You control up to 6 units on a small map. Each unit has 10+ stats, and then several passive abilities as well as an element. You have melee units, ranged units, terrain has varying height, and units have stats for how much higher than themselves can they move and attack. There's benefits for attacking from above, from behind, against enemies of an element weak to yours, combo attacks, and more. Every unit also has an assist or wait ability they can use instead of attacking that turn, those usually being an allied buff and a self-buff, respectively. Combined with leveling, equippable items, customizable team compositions, and probably many more things I forgot, Fae Tactics is actually quite a deep game.

However, the problems start to arise as you actually get into the game. I think the overall largest problem is the sub-par AI. For one, the enemies are very passive until you actually get close to them. They clump up into small groups (or alone, if no one is nearby) and start buffing each other forever while you have your fight at the other end of the map. This trivializes many encounters, because as long as you survive the first group of enemies near your spawn, you can take all the time you want to apply all allied and self buffs, wait for your spells to be off-cooldown, and heal all your units to full. This wouldn't even necessarily be a problem, as the game can be difficult despite allowing you these times of respite, but it takes very many turns to reach an optimal state if you only have a single unit handing out good buffs and/or many injured units to heal. I could just forego this tedious phase and rush onwards, but a good developer knows that the optimal way to play must also be the most fun way to play. At the very least, these two things should be strongly correlated.
The AI troubles don't end here, because the developers have failed at yet another common design aspect - they gave you allied units that aren't under your control, must not die, but are also bad at keeping themselves alive. They do often force you to adapt a more aggressive playstyle to keep up with them, but that still feels bad because of the reasons mentioned above.
Other minor complaints include character level-ups feeling unsatisfying, as they are just stat bonuses, the effects of multiple stats being unexplained, as well as the game lacking a manual to look up mechanics after they were first introduced. Sometimes the party composition decision feels kind of fake, as you just pick the same team, or as many units as you can that are effective against the element the enemy has the most of. Finally, I would also like to mention that while the pixel art looked good, the entire game had a terribly low resolution, making most areas of the screen very blurry and somewhat unpleasant to look at. The entire UI looked more like it was designed for a mobile game, which this game might actually have been good as.

Overall, Fae Tactics has interesting ideas, many systems, and potential to be a good high-depth game. This potential, however, does not translate into reality mainly due to a poorly implemented AI, but also other, less serious problems. I wouldn't go as far as to say Fae Tactics is a bad game, and it could definitely be fun if you're specifically looking for another turn-based tactics game to play. If you're not a huge fan of most games of this specific genre though, and only somewhat like strategy games, then there are probably many better picks out there than this. So, personally, I can't recommend it.

Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX

Only after starting to play this, did I realize that Luminous Avenger iX belongs to a pretty sizable series of Gunvolt games, which I assume play at least somewhat similarly. Perhaps the existance of this series is also part of the reason for its rather positive review score. At least, I did notice a lot of people referencing the other games in the reviews section. Not me though, as I haven't played any other Gunvolt games, and after this one, I probably don't want to either.

Luminous Avenger iX is an action platformer where you clear a bunch of levels, beating up small enemies on your way to the bossfight at the end of each level. Your character has the usual jump and ranged attack, but also a long dash and one of a variety of special attacks. Dashing into an enemy locks onto them, enhanching your attacks and forcing them to target that enemy. Aside from manually dodging the enemy, the game also has a rather unique system where you automatically evade an enemy's attack as long as you have a special resource, which can be reloaded basically at any point, rendering you near-invulnerable.
The game isn't very lengthy, nor is it difficult if you play it safe. It is a score attack game, meaning you're rewarded for disposing of enemies quickly, and swiftly maneuvering through the level. You're probably expected to play through each stage multiple times, gunning for a high score.

As usual, my first and biggest problem was that this game was clearly made for consoles, not PC. The default keybindings were terrible, and even after rebinding them, the character felt awkward and imprecise to control on a keyboard. I think mouse support could have made a massive difference. This is a pretty big problem in a fast-paced action game that rewards precision.
The other problem was that the game just felt kind of bland. There was some level up system, but it didn't have much of an impact. The enemies weren't anything special, mostly just fodder, and the few unique mechanics the game had didn't really set apart the gameplay, at least not in a positive direction.

Overall, I don't see anything noteworthy in Luminous Avenger iX. It played like an average, perhaps even sub-par action platformer without much polish. I can't speak for how it compares to other titles in the series, but even without considering my dislike for score attack games, I can't find any reason to recommend it, especially not on PC.

Wargroove

Let's just jump right into this Wargroove review.
Wargroove is a turn-based strategy, or more precisely, a turn-based tactics game. You play on relatively small maps, conquering buildings to either produce income, or produce units using your previously produced income. While there exist over a dozen playable commanders with different abilities, all players (AI included) otherwise play by the same rules and have the same units. Instead of playing to your race / faction's strengths, more emphasis is put on outplaying your opponent by careful positioning, and choosing the right units for the right battles. See, each unit has units they're strong against, and units they're weak against, as well as a specific circumstance which lets them deal a critical hit. Additionally, while enemies attack back, all damage is multiplied by the attacking unit's health, so being the first to strike is a huge advantage. The first person to defeat the other team's commander (or a stationary building deep on their side of the map) wins.

Sounds simple enough, and it is. Wargroove initially gave me a very positive impression, because it's quite polished, the art looks very nice, and there's even partial voice acting. But the more I played, the more I realized the problem that lies in that relative simplicity. Wargroove is too simple to be a full-fledged 4X game - the maps are too small, the mechanics are too simple, the games are too quick. However it also feels quite heavy and slow for a turn-based tactics game, while lacking a fine tactical element.
My experience is mostly limited to the campaign and co-op campaign, though I do know it also has arcade mode and PvP. For the campaigns, it is quite easy to beat the levels in a slow, methodical, 4X fashion. However, this is kind of boring due to being slow and monotone, and the game itself incentivizes to play more aggressively by giving a suggested turn count for beating the level. Trying to achieve that, however, falls on the other half of being boring. It requires you to really consider the enemy unit composition, think turns in advance, plan stuff out. This makes you spend too much time thinking, not playing, especially considering both armies easily go into double digits of units, unlike most other tactics games, which just have you controlling a smaller, more powerful squad.

There's also other issues like your commander being the most powerful unit that also automatically regenerates, so you want to keep them on the front line to hit those turn goals. However, with how fragile units are in general, it is far from impossible for your commander to get killed in a single turn, instantly ending the level. Loading a save you've played past also incurs a score penalty, which forces you to start over for a good score. On multiple occasions, I got very close to quitting after an accidental commander death on the last few turns. In the end, I stopped playing for the other reasons listed above.

So, in conclusion, Wargroove is a well-produced turn-based tactics game that is a bit too close to a 4X game. Most battles play out in a similar fashion, and there is a tradeoff between the game being too easy or you thinking for too long. It's most definitely not a bad game, but I would guess most players would rather play something with a deeper combat and management system, or something with fewer units to consider. If you really want a tactics game like what I described, then sure, try Wargroove. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend it, as there are almost certainly many better games of this genre.