CrossCode

I can recommend this game to anyone who likes pixel art, craptons of clever puzzles, good combat and a challenge (or any combination of those). It is filled with lots of good content, and features a decent story along with extremely well written characters.

This game takes place within an imaginary MMO complete with the random people queuing up to talk to NPCs. This fact alone removes all stakes from the game. While the game is functionally competent, everything you're tasked with doing is as interesting as listening to two people talk about playing an online videogame. Your party members will even talk to you about how they should be studying instead of playing the game. Isn't the point of a game to pretend you're not playing a game? The game does have an interesting mechanic that involves traversing a mutli-level map to find hidden items, however as the whole game is overhead I could rarely ever tell when two things were the same height and was constantly falling or running into walls.

Very nice, now let us see Paul Allen`s review.

Control scheme is pretty bad. M&K is better for the shooting and controller is better for everything else. Makes for a frustrating experience. Puzzles get tedius after a while. Combat is not very deep. Nice music and art though.

Overall, the game has professional quality written all over it. Good art, good writing, the code actually works consistently, and the RPG elements are straightforward and fun. I gotta say, though, the plot is infantile (a game about a game! How meta!), and the combat reflects a trend in developers that I genuinely hate. Both enemy attacks and yours are structured so that a specific timing or tactic is required for avoiding damage. Rational judgements about speed and timing are thrown out the window as enemies divert drastically off course to land their attacks. It really pigeonholes how you approach combat and the special attacks don't really compensate. But you know, it functions well. So I can't really say they did a bad job, they just made a bad decision. I don't know how people enjoy this kind of play.