HIGH Nuking the dragon with an array of archers before it torched anything.

LOW Wounded swordsmen taking space in my army without ever returning to action.

WTF This is obviously a fantasy world, yet there are no fantasy buildings or units?

The past decade has seen a flood of creative city-builders setting a new standard for the genre. It’s unfair, of course, to expect every indie team to turn out a Frostpunk or The Wandering Village, but the bar has been raised. That means some reasonably competent titles that don’t stand out will be forgotten, and unfortunately, that’s the fate I expect to befall Becastled.

Becastled is a phased-combat city-building game. The player’s forces can only build, recruit units, and gather resources during the day. Every night, “Lunar” enemies attack from a nearby spawn point and follow predictable paths. On each fifth night, a more powerful force attacks. At the edges of the map are a few towers that, when destroyed, provoke a more powerful attack featuring a boss. Destroying all of these towers grants victory.

There’s no campaign to speak of – the closest thing Becastled offers is a series of tutorials – and the meat of the experience is the freeplay mode described above. There’s also a sandbox mode that feels somewhat pointless, as it removes the core resource management aspect of play. A limited map editor is also available. For purposes of this review I tested the sandbox mode, made a few maps, completed the tutorial, and played five full rounds of varying difficulty in freeplay (each of which ran 2-4 hours).

Becastled’s maps are made of irregular polygons of territory, each of which can have a resource and trees, and one curious feature about these resources is that they don’t really deplete. Even on higher difficulties I never had a mineral or food resource run out. Except in the winter season, forests regenerate completely every day. This bounty eliminates the typical progression of city-builders, and among other things, it leads to oddities in city planning like massive stone walls that completely enclose a forest. Another curiosity is that the world of Becastled is clearly one that’s full of magic – the game’s “Lunar” enemies include a golem, a dragon, and a necromancer – but the player can’t create a building or unit that has any obvious magic capability — the closest one can get is an herbalist.

That herbalist building is not initially available, and must be researched on the rudimentary tech tree, which is only about two steps deep on average. Researching new techs is instantaneous and requires only that the player spend resources, primarily wood. This points to a significant resource imbalance in Becastled, as the need for wood is awfully steep since it’s needed to create every early building and also research every tech to get additional resources. Even obtaining the ability to trade other goods for wood requires 2000 units of wood in research, not counting what’s needed to recruit and sustain manpower and gather gold.

The lack of any other resource can be worked around, but if the player spawns in a map with no wood next to the initial position, they might as well restart. Strangely, the bare-bones map editor has no method for adjusting the position or density of forests, so even when creating a specific optimized world, one is utterly dependent on the RNG to get enough wood in the early game to survive.

I also noticed that units sometimes had trouble getting where they needed to go, or that they would make strange movements. This was most notable with the military units — archers would sometimes teleport outside of walls and troops would sometimes get trapped by a cluster of their comrades. Workers would also sometimes get stuck on terrain or be mysteriously unable to reach their work sites, even when nothing had changed from the previous day. Also, walls laid out near lakes would sometimes simply not get built.

During my time with Becastled, I noticed it being patched almost daily, yet each patch seemed to make pathfinding worse. The last time I played, military units would regularly fail to move at all when I clicked on a destination, and numerous workers failed to reach their work sites every day. This leaves me with some doubt that the pathfinding problems will be addressed.

While those are serious shortcomings, the fundamental problem with Becastled doesn’t really lie in its systems — the key issue is that there’s just no hook here. There’s no unique resource, no unusual mechanics, and no unexpected interplay between units or buildings. There’s not even anything approaching a graphical twist. Becastled is simplistic and straightforward to the point of being generic, and the magic that’s missing from the player’s build menu is also absent from the experience as a whole.

Becastled is certainly a game a person could spend hours playing, but in a genre crowded with unique and fascinating takes on the concept, I can’t think of a reason why one should put time into a title with so many annoyances and so little to recommend it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Mana Potion Studios and published by Mana Potion Studios and Pingle Studios. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows 11 PC equipped with a single GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card (driver 581.80), a Ryzen 7 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed (as described above). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains Fantasy Violence. The violence is totally bloodless, just little guys falling over. If it can hold their interest, this is an all-ages joint.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: During main play there is no dialogue. In tutorials, dialogue is accompanied by text boxes (not true subtitles, example of text below) that cannot be resized. There is narration in the opening movie but no subtitles. During play there are no essential audio cues. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers partially remappable controls. Keyboard and mouse bindings can be changed, but it is not clear whether controller mapping can be changed (indeed I couldn’t find a page that even had the mapping on it). In KBM mode panning and rotating the map is primarily on the keyboard while the mouse is primarily for zooming. While hotkeys to perform a few functions on selected buildings are available, most selection and other functions uses clicking and dragging of the mouse. I found the game awkward to play with a controller. The left stick controls cursor movement (sluggishly) and the right stick adjusts the view. Buttons are used to select but once a building is selected the D-pad must be used to enter its menu and assign workers (using the face buttons).

The post Becastled Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Robust roots meet new ideas!

LOW The artificial Intelligence is not so intelligent!

WTF The phrase “balance is key” comes to mind.

There was a time when strategic games were the new live service — back in the golden age of real-time strategy titles made by Westwood and Blizzard. Those days are long gone and those great names are either trademarks of another company or forgotten in the mists of time, but what if we could get another great like Command & Conquer the way they used to be made? The answer is Slipgate Ironworks’ Tempest Rising.

Tempest Rising is a love letter to those days of old, and the devs aren’t shy about it. Play is set in an alternate version of the Cold War during which the Cuban Missile Crisis, but instead of disaster being averted, the result is an all-out nuclear war.

Almost three decades later in a world covered in nuclear radiation, an ivy-like flower blooms across the globe feeding off the fallout. This flora called Tempest, and becomes a great energy source. Thus begins a new war between the Global Defense Forces (GDF) and the Tempest Dynasty for the control of Tempest.

As mentioned, Tempest Rising is clearly inspired by things like Command & Conquer, especially Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. The devs use both pre-rendered and in-game cutscenes as narrative devices akin to the live-action counterparts in the C&C franchise. but it tries to add to that formula by allowing players to ask questions during mission briefings and gather info about the history and the world.

The core gameplay loop is like many classic RTS titles. Players should harvest Tempest and expend it to build an army and complete objectives. The two playable factions each come with different units, but they don’t have dedicated buildings, special weapons, or upgrades like modern titles. Each side has eleven campaign missions that provide different scenarios, such as hit-and-run tactics, seizing control of an enemy base, and using stealth and special units. This variety in design is great, as it prevents repetition and often forces the player to switch up their tactics.

There are four different unit types in each faction — infantry, specialists, ground vehicles, and airborne units. The GDF troops were my favorite due to their flexibility and engagement options. Multiple GDF troops such as the Drone Operator infantry and Drone Control Unit aircraft are equipped with drones that can heavily hit ground and air vehicles. On the other side of the battlefield, Dynasty forces are more focused on high-risk/high-reward tactics in which units use the raw power of Tempest to gain a damage boost at the cost of their health.

Almost every unit on both sides comes with a secondary power. Some units can be garrisoned by the infantry and become a moving fortress, while others can turn invisible or become a mobile artillery station. This is where Tempest Rising combines the unit variety and class-based combat with more modern intuitive functions mostly seen in current strategy and tactics titles.

This structure as described is solid, but there is a downside — there’s a significant lack of balance, and that is no small issue when it comes to a RTS title.

The GDF forces have the upper hand when it comes to combat capabilities. They have multiple S-tier ground and air units that can engage with both airborne and ground targets, while the Dynasty troops are mostly focused on one target type each. The GDF’s Trebuchet tanks can also turn into artillery stations and effectively deal with ground targets from long distances, but there are no long-range troops among Dynasty ground units. The drones used by the GDF can be destroyed, but as long as the mothership/operator is alive, the drones will be respawned — essentially, this provides the GDF with an immortal army. Though Dynasty troops can be trained faster and is much more flexible when it comes to gathering Tempest, that fails to cope with GDF endgame tactics and scenarios.

Unit AI is also problematic when it comes to automatically dealing with a mix of enemy troops. When issuing an “Attack Move” to a group of different units, they engage with enemy troops based on distance, not priority. This leads to scenarios where anti-infantry troops focus fire on a tank in front of them, while enemy infantry is cutting them down while remaining unharmed because they’re places a few feet further away than the tank.

Tempest Rising is what I would call a neo-classic RTS — and it’s something we need and hunger for in the modern gaming landscape. The story, gameplay mechanics, and strategic diversity of engagement scenarios make it one of the best RTS titles of the past few years, yet, the lack of balance and problematic AI behaviors prevent it from becoming a perfect experience for avid RTS fans. However, with such a promising debut, I’m excited to see more from this developer in the form of DLC and stand-alone titles the future. 

8.5/10

Buy Tempest Rising: PC

Disclosures: This game is published by 3D Realms and Knights Peak and developed by Slipgate Ironworks. It is available on PC. This copy was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 23 hours were spent in single-player and the game was completed. There game has multiplayer mode.

Parents: The game is not rated by the ESRB but there are scenes of violence, warfare and human conflicts, as well as running human soldiers over with military vehicles.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present in the options menu.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles and visual options available in the game, all of which can be adjusted. There were no audio cues of note. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls can be remapped.

The post Tempest Rising Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The story feels both boundless and handcrafted. 

LOW Some reused art assets here and there.

WTF A girl who wears a tomato mask  

I keep asking myself, have I really beaten The Hundred Line?

Sure I’ve completed the story — I’ve reached the end credits a little under 40 times now, acquiring nearly half of the 100 available endings. But those 60-or-so endings that remain… they vex me, I tell ya. Not only do they make me second-guess whether or not I’ve really completed The Hundred Line in any meaningful sense, but they also make me wonder whether I’ll ever fully conquer something this vast and labyrinthian.

In general, I hate how bloated games have become. I’m just not interested in titles that prioritize endless Content — to me, they feel like a futile and demeaning attempt to numb the player’s brain and senses. The Hundred Line is different, though. Its endless length is filled to the brim with a number of story routes which vary wildly in tone and genre, acting as a veritable index of modern videogame storytelling, and genre storytelling in general. I continue to be entranced by The Hundred Line’s endless possibilities, in awe of its gutsiness and ambition. 

Despite the bizarre turns the story takes over the course of its gargantuan runtime, the setup is (relatively) simple. The protagonist, Takumi Sumino, is living a blissful (yet boring) existence in the Tokyo Residential Complex, a futuristic, sealed-off metropolis. One day, Takumi and his childhood friend Karua are accosted by mysterious, cartoonish alien creatures called ‘Invaders.’ Takumi is then prompted by an equally mysterious robot to use a special power to fight these Invaders.

Afterwards, Takumi is transported to the titular ‘Last Defense Academy,’ a school that seems to stand within the ruins of a devastated Earth. Awaking at the academy with the robot, Sirei, and a group of quirky fellow students, Takumi is told they must defend the school for 100 days, protecting ‘something’ within the complex that is ‘critical to humanity’s survival.’ 

It’s difficult to summarize The Hundred Line without spoiling anything, given the ways in which the setup is expanded and twisted throughout the initial playthrough and all subsequent runs (which then allow the player to make choices that drastically alter the course of the story). However, to put it in a nutshell, it largely summed up as a combination of Visual Novel and Turn-Based Tactics.

As The Hundred Line cannonballs through different genres and tones, even plot elements that were initially relegated to the background take on new dimensions of significance and pathos. The characters, who can initially feel like caricatures (a ditzy samurai, a morbid goth girl obsessed with lurid videogames, etc.) acquire additional texture as the player spends more time with them, many acting as a sort of secondary ‘star’ of their very own route. It all feels like staring at a painting from different angles, a ritual that becomes comfortably familiar while still having the capacity to surprise and delight. 

This dizzyingly panoramic effect is increased by the fact that, in many cases, the individual routes feel so distinct that each is like a self-contained story unto itself. Certainly, some routes and some endings feel more like ‘True’ endings and routes than others, but The Hundred Line seems open to the idea that the player should shape their experience, in a manner that can only be accomplished in the medium of videogames. Even if the player decides to move on before clearing all 100 endings, they will undoubtedly find a route that feels like a cathartic stopping point.

The Hundred Line’s gargantuan visual novel story is frequently broken up by tactical RPG sections. Players have a pre-determined number of moves each turn, called ‘AP’ with which they can move any unit as many times as they like. This shared pool of moves is the key to The Hundred Line’s excellent gameplay, enabling its best feature — a sort of Shin Megami Tensei-esque extra turn system. By killing larger enemies, the player can gain AP. Also, every attack contributes towards building a ‘Voltage’ gauge, which, when full, grants the player’s units the ability to launch powerful Area-of-Effect attacks at no AP cost, among other possible effects. 

It’s easy to see how these pieces fit together. Combat revolves around efficiently targeting sets of elite units, gaining Voltage, and looping powerful attacks. Often, the player can burn down a huge wall of units in a single turn, which feels both joyously appropriate from a narrative perspective (defending a lone human outpost from an endless barrage of Invaders) and continuously novel from a gameplay perspective. Even though there are a limited number of enemies in The Hundred Line, the play continues to engage as the challenge to ‘solve’ enemy setups with greater efficiency ramps up. It’s a freeform and highly encouraging form of player experimentation — more like a puzzler than tactical RPG, almost. 

Both the story and the gameplay, in fact, are united in a sort of easygoing, confident attitude — they both welcome the player into a playful garden of limitless variations, inviting them to take their time and experiment with the systems and narrative possibilities at their own pace. Unlike many modern titles, The Hundred Line is huge content-wise because the developers just felt that it should be, and it’s not attempting to hoodwink the player with hours upon hours of empty, padded content. Each writer for The Hundred Line’s numerous arcs clearly had their own vision, each slice feeling like a necessary part of The Hundred Line’s grand mosaic. 

Even if I never completely beat The Hundred Line, even if I’m never able to see what that entire mosaic is supposed to look like, I’m just glad I got to play around in its world for a while. 

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Too Kyo Games and Media.Vision, and published by Aniplex. It is currently available on PC and Switch. Approximately 115 hours were dedicated to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes. 

Parents: according to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Violence. The official description reads: This is a role-playing game in which players follow a man recruited to an academy tasked with protecting humanity from destructive invaders. The game contains visual novel elements largely presented as still-screen images and sound effects. Cutscenes sometimes depict instances of violence and blood: characters stabbing themselves with swords as blood erupts from their wounds; a character decapitated off-camera; a knight figure cutting its own throat, resulting in large spurts of blood. Gameplay combat is turn-based, with players selecting movements and attacks from a menu screen to battle colorful demon enemies; players use swords, axes, bats, and fantastical guns to defeat enemies. Some scenes depict/discuss sexual themes: a woman covered in cake imploring a character to eat it off of her while she moans; a character telling players’ character “let me grab them b*obs!” A handful of scenes depict characters partially nude, with hair/arms/weapons covering their breasts; one character is depicted with partially exposed buttocks. The word “f**k” appears in the game.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available. 

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. All the dialogue (and other essential information) is delivered via subtitles. In addition, there are no essential sound cues within the combat system. Thus, all elements of the game are fully accessible without sound. 

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Taking a boss out in five seconds with two perfectly aimed headshots.

LOW Having my driver decide to steer the truck off a cliff for no reason.

WTF That… is a really big worm.

The developers at Runner Duck have a pretty amazing gameplay formula on their hands.

Starting with Bomber Crew, they built a title about a group of cartoon cuties flying a WW2 bomber in missions over occupied Europe. Each flyer has skills that improved their ability to shoot down enemy planes, drop bombs accurately, or repair broken parts of the bomber. It worked like a charm, so they did it again with Space Crew, which was almost the exact same game except with in space, and it was every bit the amazing experience its predecessor had been.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that those same developers were about to apply that winning formula to the most criminally underserved setting in gaming — adorable cuties driving a war rig around the wasteland, turning ornate death wagons into scrap… it’s a match made in heaven.

Badlands Crew puts players in the role of a commander in charge of reclaiming the wasteland from insane warlords. This is accomplished by taking on a series of missions — clear enemies out of areas, seize bases, escort trucks to their destination, and raid enemy convoys for their goods. Yes, all of these, to one degree or another, involve using the gun emplacements of a truck to blow up enemies, but there’s enough variety in the missions to keep things from ever getting boring, even after sinking dozens of hours into the experience.

Unlike their previous titles which put the plane or ship at the center of the screen and asked the player to maintain it via navigation and combat minigames on subscreens, Badlands Crew is a realtime experience through and through. Players actively navigate the wasteland, directing their tractor-trailer through the ruins of the old world. One can find the shattered remnants of a ski lift in one area, the bones of long-dead leviathans in another, and in one particularly memorable location, they can get air off of ramps made from of the roofs of houses that were buried by the ash of an exploding volcano centuries earlier.

Micromanaging the truck is the key to success in Badlands Crew. In addition to keeping the gun turrets manned, players need to have a solid driver to keep the thing running, a navigator to use the map and spot resources in the world, and yes, a drummer who constantly jams on their skins to keep everyone’s spirits up. As objectives are completed and the crew levels up, they can specialize in each role, unlocking useful perks. Drivers can sideswipe enemies off the road, Drummers can heal the crew and put out fires by summoning rainstorms, and Gunners can unlock a VATS-style targeting mode that slows time to a crawl so they can pinpoint exactly what part of an enemy vehicle they want to blast. The best-armed rig in the world won’t be much of a threat with its driver blasted out of his seat, after all.

Progressing through missions and destroying enemies rewards the player with the resources they’ll need to build blueprints they find out in the wild. At the start of the campaign, players will literally be using junk cannons lobbing scrap at their opponents. As they take down each enemy faction they’ll unlock different weapon types — flame from Pyros to wreck vehicle parts, toxic from Klowns to attack crews, blades from Vultures shred wheels, and projectiles from Gun Nutz to tear armor to pieces. Badlands Crew offers almost unlimited freedom in allowing the player to build any kind of rolling beast they want, mixing and matching until they find what works best in each situation.

While I couldn’t stop playing Badlands Crew — I put off finishing it for maybe a dozen hours, just doing random missions so I could have more chances to watch my crew tear opponents to pieces — it’s not without flaws. The biggest is the inability to directly steer the truck. I understand what the developers are going for — the player is giving commands, and it’s up to the crew to carry them out to the best of their ability — but the driving AI has enough quirks that offering a direct control option is close to a necessity. I can’t count the number of times I almost lost a mission because, for no clear reason, my driver decided to make a hard turn straight into a wall, damaging the rig and stunning my crew at a pivotal moment.

The other main issue is with the truck-building mechanic. While I certainly enjoyed building my murderwagons, I won’t claim to understand exactly how it works. The tutorial doesn’t do a fantastic job of explaining things — I’ll be given the notification that some piece of equipment is blocking people from being able to move around the truck, but the interface won’t highlight the offender. Likewise, Badlands Crew never clearly explains exactly how players are supposed to put a second story on their trucks, forcing me to muddle through tough skirmishes with a preposterously overloaded flatbed.

A not-insignificant part of this is certainly a me issue — the user-created trucks that show up as random enemy vehicles from time to time were invariably better designed than my jalopies, but I still feel the devs could have done more to make the construction process accessible.

Not since the Yakuza developers decided to make a Fist of the North Star game have I seen a better melding of developer and subject matter. Runner Duck’s penchant for making hectic management sims about intense action-adventure settings have reached a new high with Badlands Crew. This is the best Mad Max game we’ve had in ages, and given the increasing quality of their work, I can’t wait to see what the developers have in store for us next.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Runner Duck and published by Curve Games It is currently available on PC. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 50 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. The game contains no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was not rated by the ESRB, but it’s basically a T and features an absolute ton of Fantasy Violence. There’s no shocking or offensive content in the game, no alcohol or drug use, just a countless examples of cars exploding or getting eaten by sandworms. While I can’t say it’s safe for everyone, it’s the next best thing.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post Badlands Crew Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Cool concept, solid fundamentals.

LOW Demonic, dismal UI. Boring cards. Confusing structure.

WTF Seriously, why is there a story at all?

The hardest reviews to write are the ones for the nearly-theres — the ambitious failures, the unsuccessful experiments, the polished messes, and the well-meaning shambles. They’re usually built on sound principles and timbered with good intention, but somehow, somewhere, something causes the whole experience to sink. Such a case is Knights in Tight Spaces.

This is a standalone sequel to Fights in Tight Spaces, a game that fused small-scale, position-based tactical battles with deckbuilding to evidently well-received effect — I haven’t played it.

KITS swaps out the modern-minimalist martial art aesthetic for a woodcut-inspired medieval world. There are knights, rogues, wizards, swords and boards, wands and wagons, flagons and flechettes, dungeons but, curiously, no dragons. Along with these trappings comes a new structure — a fusion of the Slay the Spire node board with some RPG-esque questing, party-building, and equipment.

It seems like a logical next step, and due props to Ground Shatter for taking something that worked and making an honest attempt at enriching it. But KITS, sadly, completely trips over its sabatons and exposes its whole ass like a character out of Rabelais.

First and most grievously — for a game that is ostensibly finished, the KITS UI and general readability is shockingly bad.

KITS takes obvious inspiration from Into the Breach, in the sense that its battles unfold in cramped arenas (they definitely delivered on the tight spaces) and positioning is key. Enemies move and telegraph their attacks, and then the player takes their turn. This is where the deckbuilding enters the formula.

Every character action is represented by a card, every card has an energy cost, and the deck is cycled through as the fight progresses — I really, really dislike saying “It’s basically like game X,” but, in a post-Breach, post-Spire landscape, all of this will seem Quite Familiar… KITS is one of those titles that finds its own identity by dovetailing signature mechanics from other games, and there’s nothing wrong with that — in principle.

Whereas both Breach and Spire transmuted the underlying density of their mechanics into beautifully luculent, readable interfaces, no single scrap of key information in KITS is where it should be, arranged how it should be, or at hand when it needs to be. Tiles where an enemy attack will land are marked with a subdued reticule that blends in with the rustic hues of the maps. Barring projectile attacks, there’s no way to tell at a glance which attack is coming from which well-cuisse’d cuss comprising the opposition.

In fact, nearly nothing can be seen at a glance. HP is not constantly displayed, there are no static damage prediction values, and the color-coding for cards and enemy archetypes is riotously borked. Characters have equipment that modifies the parameters of cards and those values are thus altered on the cards, but there’s no easy way to tell what piece of equipment or what skill is increasing/decreasing these values, and by how much. Enemies also have equipment, by the way, which modifies their attack/defense values, and god help the gormless player who wants to see that equipment, because they’re about to take a trip to sub-tab-within-a-tab Land, which I don’t need to point out is one of the worst theme parks in recorded history.

These may sound like nits, but there are a lot of nits, and eventually they swarm together and coalesce into whatever the nit equivalent of a rat king is — it’s a pulsing, pullulating, crawling mound of KITS nits.

Unfortunately, this confusion isn’t a symptom of any additional depth. In fact, there’s a leaden shallowness to KITS’s battles. They just… aren’t that exciting. Too many cards are tepid variants of other cards with numbers slightly tweaked. Positioning never has the razor-edged, nightmare chess energy of an Into the Breach. There’s an aching dearth of Power Turns where, through rigorous analysis and eloquent play, the golden thread of victory is seized and followed through a seemingly unwinnable tangle of dire enemy threats.

Also, far be it from me to kick a knight when he’s down, but I gotta say, the graphics just aren’t doing it for me.

The idea — tavern-smokey woodcut – is great, but the execution seems like RobinGoodfellowWoodcut.tex laid over Unity store rudiments. The characters don’t emote or react, and their faces have less emotional range than a blacksmith’s anvil. I don’t even think the ‘cinematic’ attack sequences are cool — there’s no pugilistic flair, no thudding frisson when sword meets gorget. Also, I think it’s just kind of dumb that fully armored knights are hopping around doing martial arts kicks — I wonder if some of these animations were brought straight over from FITS, because they seem incongruous to the setting.

“Setting,” by the way, would be a strong word for the world in KITS, much like “story” is a strong word for the narrative elements, or how “cutscenes” oversells what the text exchanges between the static medieval archetypes here achieve. I quite literally do not have the space, and mentally do not have the patience, to elaborate any further on the story trappings here. Come for the gameplay or don’t come at all.

That said, there is something worth coming for in KITS, somewhere. I sense there’s the makings of a good game in here, just below the surface. It shimmers at the periphery sometimes, when a particular turn almost lifts itself out of the morass of near-tedium, or when I nearly forget the messy menus and nigh-omnispresent obfuscation and can make my cool sword-guys fight other cool sword-guys in cool sword battles in cramped sword-spaces.

That’s all I wanted.

Maybe Ground Shatter will get KITS there after a few patches and updates, but right now, anybody picking this one up is in for a rough knight.

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

— Ben Schwartz

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ground Shatter and published by Raw Fury. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 8 hours were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game has not been rated by the ESRB. There is (obviously) a lot of fighting going on, and some comic book-adjacent blood and gore effects to go along with it. Some of the attacks have an element of pronounced brutality to them, but the game doesn’t linger on the suffering in any way and when a character dies, they fade away quickly. All in all, the mature elements are fairly low-key in the grand scheme of action/adventure media.

Colorblind Modes: Nothing officially called a ‘colorblind mode’ is available here, but there is an option to remove backdrop color.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All of the narrative elements in the game are text-based and not spoken, but the dialogue text cannot be resized. Enemies and player characters make sounds when attacking/being attacked, but KITS is a turn-based game so these sounds do not play any role whatsoever in comprehending the action. Text size for the card descriptions can be scaled up to 160% of their original value. I’d call it fully accessible.

Remappable Controls No, the game’s controls are not remappable. KITS can be controlled with either keyboard and mouse (or just the mouse), or a controller. In the former setup, clicking with the mouse accomplished pretty much every necessary function. The most important non-mouse action is using the Q key to rotate the map in quarter increments.

When using a controller, the left analog stick is used to flick between cards, select targets, etc. It ‘snaps’ to actions rather than merely control a cursor. The A button (or its equivalent) is confirm/left-click, while the other face and shoulder buttons fill hotkey functions for other common actions: the shoulder buttons rotate the camera, while right trigger and left trigger pull up the draw and discard piles, respectively. The Y button ends the turn and, while the controls cannot be altered, the game offers an option for making a long press on the Y button necessary to end the turn, rather than a single tap.

The post Knights In Tight Spaces Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Rich, flexible mechanics. A boatload of meaningful content.

LOW Some unavoidable clunky menu shuffling.

WTF A pot full of human backs?

What a pleasure it is to see a new Shiren the Wanderer release — and what a pleasure it is to report that it’s an absolute stunner.

Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island first released in 2024 on the Nintendo Switch — a console I haven’t touched since 2023, so I didn’t know a new Shiren had dropped until this new PC release came across my desk. However, I’ve been a Shiren aficionado since getting the DS remake of the Super Famicom original in 2008. As a younger, happier, and less capable man, I beat my head against Table Mountain on and off for years before finally clearing it, in what is still one of my most cherished gaming memories from that period.

I’d wager most people know the Mystery Dungeon series through the Pokemon spin-offs, but the core franchise is a venerable series, as august in its way as Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest — both of which have factored into the Mystery Dungeon lineage themselves. In the grand tradition of major Japanese role-playing games, the Mystery Dungeon family tree is a complicated one. Suffice it to say that Shiren himself is the series’ first original character, and the titles in which he appears represent the choicest, purest Mystery Dungeon experiences, Pikachus, Chocobos and Tornekos be damned.

In Serpentcoil, as in all Shiren titles, the wanderer and his talking ferret companion Koppa (don’t worry about it) drift into a new locale and find themselves embroiled in a major local disaster. In this case, it’s a mysterious maiden trapped inside the belly of a monster called Jakaku, who resides on the 31st floor of Mt. Jatou. These 31 floors comprise the first — but nowhere near the last — of the Mystery Dungeons players are tasked with conquering.

The Mystery Dungeon games are full-blooded, overhead perspective, turn-based roguelikes, and I use “roguelike” very pointedly here, as it’s a term that has been criminally misused by games writing over the last 20 years and can mean virtually anything at this point. With that noted, this is the real deal – a console-oriented answer to the beautiful complexities of the true roguelikes such as Nethack, ADOM, or Dungeon Crawl.

These titles and others like them are long-lived PC masterworks, renowned for marvelous complexity and correspondingly intimidating interfaces. Really, prior to Mystery Dungeon, the genre was perceived as too arcane and baroque to be successfully implemented on anything whose sole input device is a controller. Then in 1993, with Torneko’s Big Adventure, Spike Chunsoft figured out how to square this ornery circle, and the Mystery Dungeon series was born.

They did this by a design trick so brilliant and so clear-eyed it seems effortless in retrospect — hardly even noticeable if the player isn’t paying attention, but it must have taken some serious cogitation on behalf of the Spike Chunsoft crew to execute. They took all of the complexities roguelikes were known for, removed them from control-side inputs, and put them into the interactions between the various game elements — player character, monsters, items, terrain. Thus they could keep the inputs manageable within the reduced capabilities of a controller, while still delivering all the surprise and depth that made the great roguelikes great.

These multifarious, surprising reactions have been expanded and polished to a joyous apex in Serpentcoil Island, and their ruleset is crisp, clean, and flexible. Every single monster, item, and piece of gear has one unique ability, and these individual peculiarities interact in ways that punish sloppy play just as much as they reward creative thinking.

For instance, if Shiren finds a grass but has not identified it, he can use an Identify scroll to determine whether it will heal him, poison him, or make him blind for a few turns. If an Identify scroll isn’t handy, he can throw the grass at a monster, forcing whatever the grass’s effect is onto the creature. But if that unidentified grass happens to be a Strength Grass, well, now Shiren has a monster with boosted power barreling towards him.

Every encounter cries out for analysis and strategy, and once the player is subsumed into its magisterial rhythm, Serpentcoil becomes an endless fountain of deeply engaging adventure. Roguelikes have a deserved reputation for difficulty, but once the basics sink in, Serpentcoil seems less like a ballbuster and more like a permissive, ever-changing delight.

Defeating Jakaku and “finishing” the main quest is just the beginning. Once that’s done, Serpentcoil unfurls a luxurious, multifaceted, sandbox-style postgame. All sorts of extra dungeons are made available, many with unique themes and modifiers, all asking the player to stretch their understanding of the games flexile mechanics to the utmost in order to make it through. I particularly enjoyed the Inference Dungeon which is full of unidentified items – many cursed or dangerous – and demands creativity and wise risk-taking to make it through.

As much as I want to continue fawning over the mechanics, attention needs be given to the audiovisual aspect. The OST is full of lush, traditional Japanese instrumentation, but it’s also catchy as hell – a surprising standout element in the package. And while I’m sad that Spike Chunsoft abandoned the decadent pixel art of Tower of Fortune, I ended up won over by the cheery, shiny polygonal graphics here. Everything is cute and plasticky, with the tactile quality of modern board game components, and a tasteful glaze of Wii-era fidelity and charm. I dig it.

It is customary when talking about Shiren to share at least one story from one’s own experience, so…

I was in one of the postgame dungeons themed around sacred gear, swords and shields laden with multiple bonuses and runes. I had found a Synthesis Pot, into which I could put several weapons and combine their upgrade bonuses and special effect runes. I had just finished cooking up a real masterpiece of a weapon and excitedly threw it against the wall to break it open and retrieve the mighty blade — but forgot I had stepped on a Far-Throwing Trap on the same floor, which means that anything I threw was not stopped by walls. So, the pot containing my masterwork supersword flew right off the map, out of the game and my life forever.

Shiren! Damn, what a game.

Serpentcoil Island is easily, easily one of the best things I played 2024. In a just world, it would be on a lot of others’ lists as well.

Rating: 9 out of 10

— Ben Schwartz

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Spike Chunsoft. It is currently available on PC and Switch. This copy was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 30 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode and the game was “completed” (with dozens of hours of postgame content still ahead of me). There are light indirect multiplayer elements interwoven into the main single-player experience.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E 10+ and contains Fantasy Violence, Comic Mischief, and Use of Alcohol. From the ESRB: “This is an adventure role-playing game in which players assume the role of a wanderer searching for island treasure. From a ¾-overhead perspective, players explore towns, interact with characters, and fight their way through dungeons. Players use swords and arrows to defeat fantastical enemies (e.g., elemental ninjas, spearfish) in turn-based combat. Battles are highlighted by impact sounds, light effects, and dwindling health bars; enemies generally disappear when defeated. During battles, players can consume sweet potatoes, resulting in flatulence cloud effects and accompanying text (e.g., ‘Makes you fart, sending all beings in the room running.’). One sequence depicts a drunk character (e.g., hiccupping, swaying) that is referred to as ‘a lousy lush.’”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no spoken dialogue in this game, everything is conveyed through text. The text size cannot be altered. There are no relevant audio cues. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Shiren The Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A new stealth-strategy title! Flamboyant, powerful character abilities.

LOW Enemy setups are not always interesting. Experience system is underbaked.

WTF Injecting guards with a body-dissolving acid!

Anybody mourning the 2023 closure of Mimimi, the studio that revived the stealth strategy genre with an impeccable trio of games — Shadow Tactics, Desperadoes III, and Shadow Gambit — need only know the following: Artificer’s Sumerian Six is worthy to carry on the legacy of this niche but incredibly compelling caviar genre. It’s a robust, meaty entry into the category and a must-buy for those already tuned in to this type of experience.

For those on the outside looking in, “stealth strategy” is a newish term coined by Mimimi for the genre that what was previously called the “real time tactics” genre, or sometimes just “Commandos-likes,” as the 1998 release from Pyro Studios established the style and mechanics that everything following it built upon.

Each entry in this genre — and there are probably less than 25 — controls like a third-person real time strategy game at a fundamental level, as players tell their units where to go and what to do by clicking around on the screen. However, unlike an RTS, stealth strategies put players in charge of a handful named units, each with a set of bespoke abilities. They are often tasked with infiltrating large, intricate levels to accomplish goals like blow up this building, assassinate that target, steal this document — it’s the usual stealth title skulduggery.

The levels are concatenated layer cakes, intestinal and rife with looping pathways and bristling with guards. Figuring out how to use characters’ abilities to sneak by (or simply kill) is, as many before have said, akin to solving a puzzle, and they often have many different solutions. Any one stealth strategy level can take upwards of two hours to complete, depending on the player’s approach.

I’m convinced huge swathes of players would vibe with stealth strategy’s particular flavor. Anybody who enjoys immersive sims or savors good stealth… even puzzle gamers and fans of programming titles would be delighted with the genre, but I can understand why it’s sometimes a hard sell. Describing the mechanics does not do justice to their brain-nourishing interplay, and screenshots — while pretty — do not often look dramatic.

Sumerian Six has the advantage of an appealing, pulpy setting. It concerns Enigma Squad, a group of specialists operating abroad during World War II. They discover a resource called Geiststoff, which offers the potential for unlimited energy. However, they decide it’s too much for humanity to handle, so they hide their research — all except one member who hips Hitler off about the stuff, thus giving the Nazis a Lovecraftian edge in the ongoing conflict. The rest of Enigma Squad, along with a couple new members, set out to stop him.

The first, brightest joy of any stealth strategy is seeing the characters and their powers, and Sumerian Six gives players a charismatic suite of six heroes. Many abilities will be familiar to Mimimi fans — Wojtek can turn into a werebear and do an area kill similar to Mugen’s Sword Wind in Shadow Tactics, while hothead infiltrator Sid has a blink-style kill skill, a la Afia in Shadow Gambit. These parallels feel affectionate and considered rather than lazy, and the abilities are so cool on a base level that I wouldn’t care even if it were shameless cribbing. Artificer came up with some wonderful powers of their own too — scientist Rosa can plant a hidden bomb on any enemy and detonate it remotely. Slightly sinister psychiatrist Siegfried has a standing camera that renders a slice of the level invisible. What happens in the cone stays in the cone, and it’s extremely satisfying to take out Nazis right in front of their gormless compatriots.

Key ingredient number two are the areas and enemy set-ups. Levels in Sumerian Six are built differently than those in their spiritual predecessors. Often they’re more linear with fewer routes through, but they’re still satisfying. More problematic is that the enemy groupings and patrol routes are noticeably less complicated than the devilish, layered patterns in the Mimimi games. I never felt stumped, never spent whole minutes scrutinizing vision cones for an opening, cross-referencing them with the abilities at my disposal – and thus never experienced the rush that comes from dismantling a room impossibly full of guards in an intricate, choreographed sequence of plays as considered as a chess Grand Master’s mid-game moves.

Sumerian Six still delivers a load of pure, uncut, if somewhat lesser, enjoyment. I think it’s possible to go non-lethal, but killing is encouraged, both on a thematic level and a mechanical one, with an experience system. Concocting elaborate plans to off Nazis never gets old (players will kill Third Reich personnel in droves) even if the action doesn’t rise to the highest of refined heights.

Killing enemies, accomplishing secondary objectives, and finding special crates dotted throughout the level gives characters experience, which in turn levels up their abilities. These level ups do fairly tame things, like expand the range of an ability or reduce the noise it makes. I can see what Artificer was going for, but I’m not a fan of this system. The best thing that can be said about it is that the aforementioned crates are often located in optional areas, with denser enemy setups. However, I’d rather do these rooms because I want to, not because I feel like I have to to keep my characters caught up on the power curve.

But seriously, ignore the carping. The standard of quality for the modern era of stealth strategy games is very, very high. Sumerian Six is not at the front of the class, but it’s still a great entry, and a highlight of 2024. I spent more than 30 hours dispatching fascists with the Enigma Squad, still have two levels to go, will absolutely finish them and someday return for another run. Stealth strategy, when done right, is just that good, and Sumerian Six is absolutely done right. Bravo, Artificer. Sequel please.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

— Ben Schwartz

Disclosures: This game is developed by Artificer and published by Devolver Digital. It is currently available on PC. Approximately 31 hours of play were devoted to the game, and the game was not completed (yet). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: Sumerian Six centers around lethal takedowns of guards. Although the character models are small, the various kill animations are graphic, with blood, bones, and other gore depending on what action is being done. Most enemies are Nazi soldiers and there is much Nazi iconography throughout. There are some monster-type enemies as well. The script includes occasional bad language and some characters drink, smoke, or urinate on screen.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. All subtitles can be altered and/or resized. there are no audio cues necessary for gameplay. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable. Keyboard bindings can be completely customized, but there’s only one setup for controllers, it can’t be changed.

The post Sumerian Six Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Great characters, great superhero vibes, great concepts.

LOW The frustration and annoyance of the pre-patch experience.

WTF How did the “Never Meet Your Heroes” level pass the sniff test?

*Author’s Note: This review is based on v 1.200.00, made available for consoles on August 19, 2024.

Although I love the turn-based strategy genre, I’ll be the first to admit that it can sometimes feel a little static thanks to adherence to long-established tropes, styles and systems. I don’t see many developers rocking the boat in a major way, but when I do find a title taking some risks and trying something different, it’s a delight — and Capes is definitely on my ‘delight’ list.

In a world where superheroes are an established part of life, an evil corporation takes control of a city, isolating it from the rest of the country. Federally-sanctioned superheroes aren’t allowed to move in for political reasons and the homegrown heroes that should have defended their citizens were killed long ago, so it’s up to a brand new crop of supers to fight back.

Capes features turn-based, team-based action shown from an isometric perspective, with a camera offering rotation and limited zoom. Each area is split into squares and filled with enemies scattered amongst various elevations, hazards, pits, and obstacles. However, while this foundation is similar to others in the genre, it’s the characters and team mechanics where Capes shows its ingenuity.

With a maximum of four player-controlled characters per mission, Capes offers a variety of heroes that are designed to double down on the idea of working as a unit in ways that go beyond covering someone’s back or laying down suppressive fire. While each hero is capable of acting on their own, gameplay nudges the player towards thinking about spacing, combos, and positioning in ways that are unusual for the genre.

Looking at the cast, they’re an appealing bunch that have a variety of personalities and abilities. The devs spend a lot of time developing each one, including high-quality voice acting for all dialogue and plenty of cutscenes and interactions that flesh out the world and how each hero feels about their part in it.

The core of the team is Facet, a tank-type who can cover his body in tough green crystals. Leaving his prospective law career behind, he joins the fight to make a real difference. He’s soon joined by Rebound (a fragile teleporter who’s great at backstabbing) and Mindfire, a wheelchair user who can levitate and employs considerable telekinetic strength on the battlefield. This resistance movement keeps growing until the roster reaches eight available heroes, each different from the rest.

Between missions they’ll chat about what’s left of their lives and the nature of power and responsibility. The question of whether violence is acceptable to achieve a goal also comes up. The team’s leader, a surviving old-school super from the previous generation, is a hardliner that sees eliminating threats as the best way towards peace, while the younger crew often wonder if he goes too far. It’s a classic struggle but a valid one, and these concepts are explored until the very end. No spoilers, but I appreciated the finale’s setup and its resolution. Fans of things like The Boys and its ‘take-heroes-off-their-pedestals’ approach will find similar tones to appreciate.

On a smaller scale, I appreciated this crew not just as characters, but because they felt so different to play. Their powers and abilities are far from the norm, and not only is it unusual to have such a variety of options, every member on the team can synergize with others to enhance or alter their effects — it’s still turn-based tactics, but a very different flavor.

For example, Rebound can deliver devastating backstabs when she’s able to get behind an enemy by teleporting or otherwise, but if she’s in proximity to Facet, he’ll generate a giant crystal for her to inflict extra damage with. On the other hand, if Mindfire is in the neighborhood, he can use his psychic powers to force an enemy to turn around, thereby exposing his back to Rebound no matter where she is. Capes is full of teamwork and synergies like these. Adding attacks, buffs and debuffs can turn the tide of a battle, so leveraging them to their full advantage is the key to victory.

The campaign is a pleasantly appropriate length, featuring both main missions and side stories which the player is free to engage in (or not.) However, the EXP needed to level up heroes comes not just from completing missions, but also from performing special challenges within each mission — things like toss five enemies off ledges, disarm eight enemies, and so on. As such, players will want to engage in both side missions and bonus objectives to speed character growth. However, while doing these missions it becomes clear that level design is one place where Capes could use a bit of a boost.

Many of the levels take place where one would expect superheroes to battle — on streets, in a science lab, on rooftops and so forth. In general, most of these are interesting enough and fit the theme well. However, there are certain times when maps don’t hold up — either they felt too contrived and ‘gamey’ with spaces that didn’t make a lot of logical sense, or they held far too many enemies.

Part of this, I suspect, goes back to an initial version of Capes that had a more puzzle-like feel to skirmishes. The difficulty was steep, and each move had to be agonized over for maximum synergistic impact since even the smallest error could snowball into catastrophe. It was certainly different than most in the genre, but perhaps a bit too different.

Not long after that first version hit, the devs received player feedback and decided to make some major changes to the Capes formula. I can’t list all the tweaks and shifts here, but adding a wider array of difficulty levels, reducing the number of enemies and (ironically) pivoting towards more standard tactics combat was one of the bigger changes. Such a radical revamp must have been a huge undertaking for the team, but they made it happen and Capes was greatly improved by the changes.

While there are still a few levels that stick out as being annoying even after the patch, every aspect of the campaign is more manageable. The fights don’t feel as impossibly overwhelming, the EXP system has been reworked, and scenarios aren’t nearly as puzzle-like, giving players more room to make mistakes and experiment. These are all huge improvements. My only criticism of the current version is that some of my favorite levels were small and focused, sometimes only allowing one or two pre-selected characters. This narrower scope and emphasis on specific team compositions was welcome, offering challenges that I enjoyed. More exploration of characters in these small zones, both individually and in pre-assigned units, would have been welcome.

If I had written this review a few months ago, the result would have been quite different. The original version of Capes showed promise and potential, but was held back by aggressive difficulty and a lack of flexibility in its unusual, rocking-the-boat formula. However, I took it for an unpolished diamond and put it on hold while hoping for tweaks and patches that hadn’t been announced at that time. Now that it’s in much better shape, it’s home to the most interesting and enjoyable turn-based tactics this year.

Capes has loads of personality and offers a genuinely fresh experience thanks to new ideas in structure and an emphasis on characters and story. I absolutely loved the reworked and superior post-patch experience from start to finish, and have no problems recommending it to tactics fans craving something besides the usual medieval or military fare. My hat is off to the team for putting in what must have been a huge amount of work and ultimately saving the day — the effort was well worth it.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Spitfire Interactive and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5 and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 30 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode (10 hours pre-patch, 20 post-patch) and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Language and Violence. The T rating is well-earned, and I’d even say it should be older teens playing this one. There’s no sexual content but there is some salty language and lots of people do get explicitly killed, often including innocent civilians. There are a few scenes that are a bit intense, as well.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue is voice-acted and subtitled. The subs cannot be altered or resized. there are no audio cues necessary for gameplay. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Capes Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Fast action. Intense enemy design. Impressive visuals.

LOW Puzzles can be offputtingly difficult in single-player.

WTF There are challenge modes to make things harder???

Teagan wasn’t expecting to start her morning tied to a stake and being burnt as a witch. She certainly wasn’t expecting to be rescued by the spirit of a deceased witch and forced to run for her life without time to mourn her fallen brother, Edwin. 

Finding out that she is descended from a line of witches tasked with maintaining the flow of time and preventing the fall of mankind was almost too much to bear.  Now she must master her newfound powers, attempt to save Edwin by going back in time, and also defeat hordes of enemies under the thrall of the mysterious Dark Puppeteer. 

TimeMelters is a game that nearly defies genre classification. 

It’s partially an action title where players control Teagan from a third-person perspective as she navigates through a fantasy equivalent of the Scottish Highlands while battling foes with an array of magic bolts and life-draining powers. 

However, it’s also something of a strategy/tower defense hybrid.  Teagan gains the ability to go into spirit form, allowing her to fly above the map for a quasi-bird’s eye view to activate summoning and infusing powers while time slows to a crawl. 

Alas, the Dark Puppeteer’s forces are legion, and Teagan, while powerful, is a glass cannon. It takes only one enemy slipping through her defenses to kill her.  This is where TimeMelters debuts its game design coup-de-grace in the form of a third aspect — a time rewinding feature that grants the ability to reverse the flow of time and create copied echoes of herself. These echoes will repeat Teagan’s previous actions exactly, up until the moment that echo would have been killed. 

For instance, the player can move Teagan past a group of enemies the previous version of her has already have killed (tenses are hard when it comes to time travel!) allowing her to concentrate on other foes or achieve other objectives the first echo wasn’t able to. It’s even possible to further alter the timeline by using an echo to distract an enemy that the player can now ambush or lead in yet another direction towards a trap.  It’s astonishing to watch in action. 

I know how this sounds, but read it all again — it makes sense, even if it makes one’s head hurt — but the brilliance of this design cannot be understated.  Using time manipulations and copies of Teagan to defy the odds and solve puzzles that would otherwise be impossible made me feel like a genius. However, therein lies the rub.  I am not super-great at three-dimensional, multi-linear thinking, so this was a real challenge. 

Thankfully, handy markers display the numbers of enemies in a group and the route they are currently taking, which then help the player plan the best use of the limited mana and small number of clones Teagan has at her disposal. For instance, she can kill enemies closing in on her position to gain mana, then switch to spirit mode to scour the map for groups she can ambush so she doesn’t have to deal with them later.  While this all takes a little bit of getting used to, it becomes second nature far more quickly than I would have believed when I first started playing. 

…Then I discovered the co-op campaign. 

With a friend joining in via the Playstation Network, two people can take control of Teagan and her brother, traversing the many levels in TimeMelters‘ campaign, though with slight adjustments in the storyline, dialogue and mission structure. 

For instance, Edwin starts one mission at the opposite end of the map from Teagan, providing cover for an NPC who needs to be protected as he slowly meanders towards the mission goal — a task which Teagan had to coordinate on her own alone in the singleplayer version. 

Players share a mana pool and the rewind feature but they otherwise act independently, so planning and coordination are a must. However, this is offset by bringing double the firepower, which makes battles and puzzles much more manageable than in the single-player campaign.

Despite the fact that I was being pushed to creatively think and temporally strategize in ways that games have rarely asked me to, TimeMelters is a must play — especially for players who have someone to share the cognitive load with. 

Even at its most frustrating, the brilliance on display here is addictive. It would be goofy to say TimeMelters is the best action/strategy/time clone hybrid involving witches I’ve played all year, so let me broaden it a bit and say that it’s one of the best games I’ve played this year, bar none.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Autoexec Games.  It is currently available on PS5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. Three hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Violence. This game features witches using magical forces to kill both human and non-human enemies.  The protagonist absorbs the souls/spirits of dead opponents to power further magical attacks.  The game features heavy occult themes and not-for-kids moments like burning suspected witches at the stake as well as necromancy used as a secondary attack for the protagonist.  There is blood, but not excessive amounts, and most players have seen far worse in other games.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. All story-based dialogue during cutscenes is fully subtitled. The majority of in-game dialog is fully subtitled, with occasional declarations by the main character(s) being voice-only.  These additional declarations do not cause the player to miss anything plot specific, but they do add flavor to the moment. I’d say the game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post TimeMelters Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The atmosphere is sublime.

LOW Seeing everything it contains in an hour.

WTF 70k seems like a low amount, given the stakes.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi Everyone! Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com!

In a dark warehouse, club music plays loudly while neon light strobes across the dance floor, but I’m not here to dance. I open the door to the back room, and the music goes nearly silent. I take a seat at a table where a shotgun rests in front of me. The… thing… across from me smiles a smile that’s too wide, and asks me to sign the waiver. Only one of us is going to leave with a briefcase full of cash.

As you might guess from the name, Buckshot Roulette is a videogame version of Russian roulette. When the shotgun is loaded, players can see how many live and blank shells are being inserted in a random order. Players can either shoot themselves, or shoot the “dealer”. However, unlike real-world Russian roulette, both the player and the dealer have a set amount of health, enabling them to each take more than one shot and still live. If the player shoots the dealer, the dealer gets to shoot next regardless of whether the shell was live or blank. If players shoot themselves and it turns out to be blank shot, they then get to shoot again without passing the gun to the dealer.

Simple enough, right? 

There is a small twist, though — each side gets items with special abilities after the first round. These items can be anything from a magnifying glass that shows what shell is loaded, to handcuffs that force the other player to skip their turn, or even a saw to cut the end of the barrel off to do an extra point of damage. Players are given a random set of items each time the shotgun is reloaded, which gives the roulette a bit more strategy. Taking chances along with using items that can tilt the odds in the player’s favor is the key to winning.

Outside of the normal mode, there’s an endless mode called Double or Nothing. It plays the same, but there are more items — things like a phone that tells players where a shell is, or an inverter that changes a live shell to a blank. Players can choose to try and double their money (which amounts to a high score on a global leaderboard) by winning another three rounds, and with the new items, things get even more chaotic. 

If i had to put my finger on one single aspect that makes Buckshot Roulette stand out besides the premise, it’s that it feels like I’m playing against an actual human because the dealer makes mistakes. In one round, both the dealer and I had one life left. I was fairly certain that there were only live rounds in the gun, and it was the dealer’s turn. The dealer used an item that allowed him to see which shell was loaded, so I was sure I was done for. Then — unbelievably — I watched the dealer shoot themselves with a live shell, giving me the win. Since the dealer isn’t perfect, the tense atmosphere never fades, and Buckshot Roulette never ends up feeling like an easily-solvable puzzle.

Buckshot Roulette has tension and drama, enough strategy to make gameplay not fully dependent on luck, and the fact that the dealer doesn’t always make the right move just puts it over the top. While there’s currently not much content as it’s still under development, the joy in its simple, ruthless premise makes it an easy recommendation regardless.

For me, Buckshot Roulette gets 8.5 shots to the face out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Mike Klubnika and published by Critical Reflex. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 3 hours of play were spent playing the game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: The game is not rated through the ESRB. This game is a short horror experience where players will shoot either the dealer or themselves with a shogun. There is blood that splatters the screen when the players successfully complete a round and defeats the dealer. Beer is as a usable item, and players can take a pill (medicine/drugs) or smoke cigarettes to heal damage.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind Modes are present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles, but they are not resizable. Audio serves aesthetic purposes and is not needed for gameplay. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable controls: Controls are not remappable, and there is no control scheme layout. Players will use a mouse to move across the screen and click to select an item to use or to pick up the shotgun and choose who to shoot. 

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