Recent reviews by Mumen Rider

Tales of Zestiria is pretty good - the length is right and the combat is fun. Like other tales games it's an action rpg but you will find yourself stopping mid-battle to manage recovery items and the sort. There are some options in terms of the types of attacks your characters peform, too, but it doesn't stray far from the hero being the sword guy, the girl being a caster and so on.

The plot is a bit slow to develop and it's pretty standard fare -- good guy with a mysterious past must defeat all evil and restore the world type stuff. Things get a lot more interesting after the first ten hours or so - with subquests to do all around the various towns.

The game runs pretty well on a modern rig - an i5 6500 w/ a GTX 1070 was able to run it at 60 fps maxed most of the time (you'll need the TOZfix patch to unlock the 30fps limiter bamco has on the game). It's not a bad entry if you're looking to get into the Tales series.

I didn't play Slain before the relaunch so I cannot comment on the state the game was in at that point, but currently the game is pretty great. The bosses are challenging, but fun. The environments are cool, and the metal soundtrack is interesting if not exactly memorable. There are check points in the right places for this kind of (somewhat difficult) action-platformer.

There are a few level sections that could use some re-balancing. Especially towards the end of the game, there is one level (Hogres area) that eschews level design in favor of simply throwing waves of enemies at you. On the technical side of things, the game ran great on my PC, although the store page claims "full controller support", there is in fact a launcher that you can't navigate with a gamepad. It's a minor thing, but it sucks if you play games on a TV through Big Picture Mode.

Despite those weak points the overral experience is excellent. Get it if you enjoy classic action games like Castlevania.

Strider is a great metroidvania-style game - the pacing is good, the bosses are fun and the environments are varied. All that said, I don't know what Double Helix did with this version of the game, but it crashes nonstop. I've tried it on two PCs, one an i7-4790k with a GTX 1070 and the other an i5-6500 and GTX 970. Both are more than capable of running this game, yet at random points it will just crash inexplicably. It's doesn't seem to be tied to what's going on in the game at the moment, and it can be really frustrating to have the game lock up before you reach a save point.

If you can tolerate the crashes, there's a good game here. But there's plenty of great games in this genre that take quality control a little more seriously.