Recent reviews by Foxhack

A fun little game that can be finished in under three hours. I had some issues with my gamepad not being recognized at first, but switching to Xinput in the options fixed it. I still had some random controller dropouts for the first hour, not sure what happened there.

Also, I got a speedrun achievement when launching the game for the first time, so ... that sucked.

The game has collectathon and speedrun achievements which seem doable, but I don't have the patience to do them all these days. This is still worth a playthrough despite the control issues, the game doesn't take itself seriously, which is a plus. It's just a fun, quick game to play through. And free, too.

This is a REALLY good Nonogram game that's also got a bit of a sense of humor to it. Other than some weird controller input issues and bugs with the hint system it's pretty good, but the difficulty spikes up quite a bit pretty early on in the game.

But I have two problems: The first is that it feels like the puzzles in the game were designed to use the hints on purpose. For example, if you have a line where surrounding a couple of blocks with "X"s has a chance of actually being correct, you do it, and it'll fill out the hint on the top or left of the screen. And that'll give you more info on what to do next.

The second is that the hint system sometimes freaks out and clears out numbers that were already automarked as completed because you added or removed something in the line. It's irritating and it means you have to pay attention so you don't make a mistake because of that.

This is still a very solid game, despite that. And not only is there a campaign but there's four more multiple-segment puzzles to complete.

As of this writing, it's taken me 17.5 hours to get all the story mode cleared up and have only done two of the giant mosaics. I'd say I have at least two, maybe three more hours to go before I clear the other two. Not bad for such a cheap game.

After having to bug the publisher to fix the game, playing this and getting all of the achievements... my review is very barely "recommended" and I'll try to explain why.

The game itself isn't bad; it's a serviceable nonocross engine, though it has its quirks with how it marks completed lines and filled in numbers. And for some reason, 15x15 puzzles are arranged in 4x4 blocks, instead of the more common and understandable 5x5 blocks? Weird design choice...

But the biggest issue lies in the puzzles themselves: They are not stored in the game itself. Instead, the game pulls 3D models from some servers using an external API system, downloads them, renders them, then creates a 5x5/10x10/15x15 puzzle based on those models. And that... is a big problem.

Owners of this game spent several months in 2025 unable to progress past the THIRD puzzle in the game because it kept failing to download the model. After complaints, the puzzles were fixed... but broke again soon after. Some more complaints to the publisher finally got them to fix the game, and it's still kinda broken. Users were now able to complete the "built in" puzzles, but they will still fail to download randomly.

There's also an "Endless" mode where you can choose a puzzle size, enter a search term, then search to get a list of models from that external API. You choose a model, it downloads it, then the game creates a puzzle from that model, when you clear it then you get a picture of the model with animation, if it has any.

And as I said before, that's the biggest problem here: Why is this game not shipping with any puzzles included? Why does it rely on an external service to download 3D models and use them to calculate and create a puzzle? The game itself is like 200 MB so it's not a matter of file size. At the very least it should include the puzzles for the "curated" mode, so they can be played offline. But every puzzle is loaded from the cloud.

The other issue with this game is the actual creation of the puzzles. When it downloads the model, it takes an internal snapshot of it then generates a puzzle based on it. The problem is that if the model is too detailed, or too deep (in 3D size)... the puzzles will glitch, and it'll render very easy puzzles. I had multiple puzzles generated where the only thing I had to fill in was a single box in the upper left corner. Other times it was just a few filled in lines. I DID get some good ones at random, but too many were glitched.

The fact that the game relies on external API to get puzzles means that one day this game will just not work anymore, and that's unacceptable. Using the API to download models and generate puzzles is a good idea, but it shouldn't be the only option available.

On the plus side, the achievements are not broken. They all popped as they should have.

But I still don't think you should pay much for this game. So while it's functional, it'll still have issues in the future, and you might end up with a broken game in the near future.

I wish I could rate this as a "meh". The main game itself isn't that bad, it's a tough as balls SNES game where the CPU has a total advantage over you most of the time so you have to cheese them, which works with everyone except the bosses. The story's actually pretty okay, the River City Girls localization isn't an issue at all.

The big issue is with the frontend itself; no way to remap controls, a really weird savegame system where you have to save and quit (instead of just saving), over 4 GB of extra intro / ending videos that aren't needed, a crash bug that happens after beating the game if you have a certain option selected (bug was never fixed), lots of leftover Japanese signage and text in the game itself that wasn't touched - including the game's end credits and original manual - and a rare but easy to reproduce bug that completely kills the SNES audio. And unfinished menu text if you choose an European language.

There was an attempt, but this game could've used another month of QA. But WayForward doesn't do QA, especially when it comes to languages.

I'm happy I only paid a few bucks for this through a Humble Bundle, because it's not worth the full list price, let alone the Limited Run extortion cost for a physical copy.

This is the guy Postal Dude bullied in grade school.

Even though the game has some great music (most of it), decent visuals, and being able to create your own Sonic OC is fun... the actual gameplay feels lacking, movement and jumping in the 2D sidescrolling areas is very imprecise, the homing attack doesn't work all the time, you're -forced- to slow down in several places to wait until a danger passes, and the story. Oh my god.

The story boils down to THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP WITH MY NEW BEST FRIEND ORIGINAL THE CHARACTER CAN DEFEAT ALL. And the story beats themselves aren't bad, it's just how everyone treats your Mary or Gary Stu character like they're the best character evurrrr. It gets very grating.

Infinite (the bad guy for most of the game) got dealt a bad card. And the game's story makes no sense UNLESS you read the prequel comic. And even that's a bit lacking.

But anyway. The thing that made this game a definite "Not recommended" was the forced grinding to get the achievements. You have to get 10K / 50K / 100K rings, kill 5K / 10K enemies... and get a character from every race to max level. For reference, I beat the game with 4000 rings or so total, my character didn't reach max level, and I didn't even have 2000 enemies beaten. And that was after almost 8 hours. I beat the game and that's enough for me to shelve it. And while it is possible to grind the rings and XP easily with daily mission bonuses, it's just not fun enough to do.

Sometimes all you need to wind down is to play a game where all you do is muck around on an island playing with kids, fishing, sailing in a motorboat, collecting shells, digging up lost treasures, climbing a mountain top, freezing your tailfeathers, and dropping down from the mountain with no damage whatsoever.

It's funny and playing it blind is the best way to experience it.

My only complaint is having to wait for very long cutscenes to end after they've played back once. This makes getting some achievements, like the "Get all bios" one, a pain, since you have to wait for the cutscene to end to try again. Sometimes it's faster to close and reopen the game. I wish there was a way to skip them -after- you've beaten the game at least once, to make things faster.

Great art and music, passable controls but running is weird, the enemies seem to have priority attacks at random, there is no way to escape from being caught in a combo like in other beat'em ups, and Wayforward continues their tradition of adding infuriating gameplay elements into games.

Most of the game plays kinda sorta like an updated River City Ransom, but there are two bosses in the game that change things up. One of them is a single plane 2D fight where the boss floats on top of you and shoots bullet hell-like patterns at you (you can jump off the wall to reach them and stun them so you can beat them up.) The other adds a really weird DDR / Pop'N Music attack that you have to evade by jumping and the controls are simply not accurate enough to handle it without taking some cheap hits. And some bosses add projectiles and magical attacks into the mix, to boot.

And stats really matter. You start out as weak as a kitten, gain levels and attributes by beating people up (unlike RCR), and you gain bonus attributes by buying food from stores and eating it (like RCR). You also buy special attacks at dojos but you can't really use them until you reach certain levels. By the time I made it to the last boss, I was able to clear out the first phases with a single combo per phase, but the fight wasn't easy.

This is a solid 6/10. I thought it was okay, but didn't especially like it that much either. Just shy of hating it. Most of the bosses are fair, and there are things I really liked about it, but the bad things just tipped the scales against it too much.

The gamepad used to work fine in the past... sort of? But now no button is even recognized. Pressing Start on the gamepad CLOSES THE GAME.

Why is this thing even still available for sale? Le Cortex went bankrupt years ago and this is an unfinished NeoGeo game...