Recent reviews by blue

this ain't berserk but if you can ever find this in a bundle or on sale it is an alright twin-stick arcade shooter. pure scoring gameplay and not much else.

easy to pick up and hard to master, and also it's like 3 dollars so

every segment should be like 10% shorter but it's not hard to see why this became the blueprint for a lot of games

as of writing this, servers are still up. the game is cheap, so get a handful of your friends and log in dude, fly some ships and shoot each other down. i have done worse for 5 dollars.

it's a tower defence game that's more focused on a "campaign" than something more traditional like bloons, and i do not think it is very much worth your time overall. it's *fine* but there's better games and series, like the aforementioned bloons, amongst many others.

i thought the recent reviews about this game crashing a lot were exaggerated. they were not. on top of that, considering what happened to EA, just don't buy this game. you deserve better.

classic inti create game, i have no idea what happened and it feels weird but i'm sure once i get my hands on the full game and figure it out it'll click and i'll yell off the rooftops how great this game is

playing this, dropping it, then playing it after the remake just highlights the insane seams in this game. listen, i don't need bells jingled every 3 seconds to keep my attention, and i play games to enjoy them. it's by no means horrible, but it can get tedious fast because of all the backtracking and extra tacked-on steps, despite the charm you can feel in a lot of the game. i am not being very fair because i am writing this almost a decade and after the remake came out, but i would strongly recommend you go play that one instead. the remake isn't flawless either, but i do think it's a much more fun game. still leaving it as a positive because i think this game is interesting even if i would not particularly recommend you go out of your way to make a point to play it.

in some ways yooka replaylee is kind of a character assassination of yooka laylee. it focuses more on a free roam collectathon that completely alters the flow of the game compared to the original, by removing the need to bracktrack, cutting down on character interactions in the various worlds and so on, completely neutering its source inspiration.

at the same time though i hate saying that because i think replaylee is a fun game, much more fun than the original. in terms of ideas, it is much closer to something like mario odyssey, where you're given everything off the bat and nothing other than very light amounts of collectible block your way forward, since you have all your moves from the beginning. it sucks that the original game is mostly "gone" but also i struggle to bemoan the situation because this game is very enjoyable, in spite of that. it's fun to fully free roam a world as soon as you arrive and see what they put in there, then move on to the next.

is this what playtonic initially wanted the game to be? is this a compromise on the vision to deliver an experience that's a bit less divisive? i don't know. what i do know is that i have fun playing this game.

dice gambit is very stylish and that is its strongest point. coupled with a solid customization system (lineage/classes/visuals) and you have an incredible passion project. difficulty is also incredibly customizable, meaning you can have the game as hard or easy as you want it to be, from changing your block option to an evade to reducing your maximum family size.

there's a couple downsides. the biggest is that you will see the same locations often (which i can forgive given it all takes place in a specific location). the second and last i can think of is that the final boss is extremely not fun. just kind of felt like a pain after a pretty tight rest of the game. try the demo and if that's up your alley then pick up the game!