Recent reviews by looprider

skating is good. world feels sterile and most of the challenges kind of suck.

It's a mediocre action platformer with too much metroidvania flavor. Level design is pretty bland and the combat is repetitive and dull. Enemies either have hyperarmor or they're just sandbags. It feels more like Shank than Shinobi.

doujin action platformer along the lines of a castlevania or wonder boy. it's an expanded version of a free game, the first half is more or less identical to the original.

all of this dev's games have charming kusoge vibes owing to the mishmash of sprites. some are crisp pixel art, others look like uprezzed jpegs. you'll see two headed dragons next to robots and for some reason the demon king is named santa.

despite the hodgepodge aesthetic, the gameplay is solid. you have a sword combo, magic, a high jump and an invincible dash attack. the combat primarily centers around managing stamina, which is used for all your special moves.

enemy attacks feel shmup-inspired, probably because it's easier to shoot bullets than add frames of animation lol but i'm into it. most attacks can be dodged pretty easily but your magic will cancel bullets if it gets hectic. one area where the kuso comes out is in the fact that there's no knockback or hit reaction and few if any i-frames, so if you do take damage or collide with enemies it can melt your health quick, but enemies don't tend to rush the player so it's not a huge issue.

good puzzles. overworld trophies use the whole buffalo. clever stuff.

you will not believe what is waiting for you at the end of this game. you won't even know if you're at the end of the game at the end of this game

Who needs a buster when you can just dropkick a dude and throw him like a giant pinball

The love letter to Shinobi 3 I've been waiting for. In recent years, we've been treated to a wave of nostalgic ninja action platformers. The Messenger harkened back to Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden, Cyber Shadow to Natsume's Shadow of the Ninja. Strider got a reboot in 2014... hell, even *Ganryu* has a modern sequel. Throughout all this, Hagane and Shinobi fans sat on the sidelines, ignored. Don't get me wrong, those games were fun, but... have you played Shinobi 3?

Thank you Joymasher.

straightforward, satisfying wizard game. big spells, exploding buildings and dedicated post-launch support.

Great puzzles. Very clever and surprisingly generous - if one level has you stuck, there's a half dozen others to try if you just want to progress. Overall I found the difficulty pretty manageable - a handful had me stuck for some time (often due to my own tunnel vision), but only a couple ever felt fiddly or tedious - the solution is almost always simpler than it first appears.

As of release, some of the interactions are a bit buggy around edge cases, but crucially, they never got in the way of the intended solutions.

Nice to have this shareware classic on Steam after all these years at a fair price. It's a simple DOSBox bundle, so there's no modern widescreen enhancements or achievements - just cloud and workshop support. Despite the 4:3 aspect ratio, I think the simpler aesthetic holds up a bit better than Elma visually.

A fair amount of the levels were tweaked and reused in Elma, but there are some differences in physics and level design that make it interesting enough to replay, and the lost levels are a nice bonus.