Alright, so this all assumes you've played the first game. See below if you haven't. The second game cranks the gameplay up a few more notches, far increasing the complexity but also the depth of the initially simple match-3: * You have two girls with distinct preferences and separate gifts. You can freely aim matches at either of them. * That is, mostly. On top of the move limitation of the first game each girl has her own stamina meter that depletes while you throw matches at her and replenishes when you throw matches at the other. You can match for Stamina (the silver pentagons) but you still need to eventually swap back and forth. * On top of that each girl also has "baggage". Various negative rule changing elements per girl of which one is randomly selected (but you can see beforehand which it'll be) for each date. These can be things such as "Extra stamina loss on big matches", "Move loss on repeated matches" or "passive effect gifts sometimes get lost". I can readily recommend this. Sure, mostly it's more of the same, but the extras are really well done and nicely follow from the end of the first game, mechanically. If you're new, HuniePop 1 and 2 are naughty match-3 games that despite what the theme might suggest have some of *the* deepest (pun intended) gameplay around. But, importantly, you should not start with this one. Get the older one first. This one assumes you've finished that and then want more mechanics on top. Oh and the uncensor patch can be found linked on the forum here, or on the official webpage. 👍
Now, this is a new one for me. I'd usually rate this 4/5 stars, stating how while it does a lot and can be extremely impressive, it bit off more than it could chew and tries too many things which leads to it underdelivering on half its systems. What works is an extremely impressive immersive sim about being a random no-gooder in a cyberpunk city that ends up in a middle of a few weird plots. The city in particular bears mention because while the simulation flip-flops between perfect and inexistent, the visual splendor cannot be overstated and really sets the bar for this type of setting. Plus, overall the places are well done, varied, and provide good atmosphere. Other amazing elements include much of the writing and - in particular - the voice acting, which elevates many otherwise pedestrian scenes to a very high level of emotional impact. So yeah, it's not a 5/5, but it is a really really good game for a 15-20 hour romp through the city and maybe another few hours spent on a few interesting side quests even if many of the less prominent ones openly show how they are just padding. Like I said, not 5/5, but easily 4/5. Then... come the bugs. Oh wow. Between constant t-poses, randomly disappearing NPCs / items / cars / doors / whatever, the parade of weird AI behavior about NPCs walking into/through walls, cars randomly crashing into things, NPCs being stuck in a short loop, weird combat AI, inexistent stealth-combat AI, weird combat animations that constantly bug out, the game looks and feels *extremely* unfinished to play. Plus on top of that, the performance is terrible even on good PCs. Sure the game is visually impressive, but it's not halfway impressive enough to warrant how it runs. So yeah, I'd say "Wait". Hard wait, too. Get the GOTY edition in a year or two.
This is a a bit tricky to truly review without giving away too much. At its gameplay core, Senua's Sacrifice is a third person action adventure game about fighting through a norse underworld to get a loved one back. But, it's a *lot* more than that. The game has to be played either with headphones or a surround system to work - seriously, do *not* try it without either of those, it'll lose 90%+ of its magic. But with it, you'll get an experience unlike any other game here as voices yell at you in the back of your head, the world around you goes crazy and so do you, slowly.
The new Shantae is here! It returns to the connected world map the first few games had before they went for a more level-based design. You control Shantae, a half-genie that ends up having to rescue a whole bunch of other half-genies. Each one gives you a new ability, and you learn a few extra utility abilities (activated via dancing!) throughout the game, such as healing yourself or making hidden things visible. You can also equip and cycle between multiple sub-weapons using up your mana. As far as progression/collectables goes, there's heart-containers to gather and there's cards enemies drop that you can mix&match (up to 3) to enhance your abilities, in a manner reminiscent of Castlevania Order of Ecclesia (to a degree at least). The graphics are extremely cartoony and colorful, but also very well crafted. The cutscenes are straight up cartoon scenes. There's no serious tone at all, rather it's all slapstick and silly overdone cliches, but given the art style it fits in well. If I had to criticize something (and hence only 4/5 stars) it's the technical issues. The game freezes the entire machine on swapping areas when it has to load a new tileset. The title screen won't remember the set language until you get to the savegame select. There is no borderless windowed mode. The cursor isn't hidden when using a controller. And so on. It's all minor stuff, but there's a lot of it. Other than the technical issues, fully recommended.
So this is a narrative centric game somewhere between a puzzle game and actually a walking sim or something. You play as an AI assisting a survivor of an accident aboard a space station. Everything is done in painstaking detail, from the extremely realistic space station over the slightly old-tech Alien inspired computer UI to the pedestrian part of the puzzles that come down to repetitive tasks evoking how boring this part of the work would actually be. Really really well done. It's also *insanely* buggy. Puzzles bug out, savegames get bugged, the controls bug out, the graphics bug, everything is buggy. If you can stomach that, this is one of the best games of 2020, IMO. But be warned ,you can't manually save/load, so maybe do manual backups of the autosave.
This is a game that wears just about every inspiration it took very openly on its sleeve: It has the suspense horror with the occassional moment of scare from the older Resident Evil games, it couldn't have its visual, world and design any more inspired by Bioshock if it tried, and it wants to tell a story in the way games such as Gone Home did. Sadly, these pieces just don't come together. There's too little work done, too many disjointed moments, too much focus on the sadly not workable atmosphere. And above it all towers an incredibly bad technical implementation, where in 2019 (or now '20, for this release!) a game comes out that won't even let you rebind keys. Seriously. No rebinding keys. In 2020. And this is the tip of the iceberg, you can't change FoV (and its stuck in some binoculars-like zoom level...), you can't do even the most basic of graphics details, the game runs terrible despite how dated it looks, and if you got multiple monitors with non-standard resolutions then good luck even getting it to work. If the technical side were decent, this'd be a 3/5 or maybe even a 4. But as it is, there's just better ways to spend your time.
The title might seem a bit off, but Children of Morta only has a single noticable flaw IMO, but it's one that easily drops it to 3/5 for me, and I was tempted to go lower. What is Children of Morta? At its core it's a hack&slay game where you explore dungeons and slowly advance a story, with the typical roguelite element of repeated runs and slow permanent upgrades thrown in. What sets it apart is that there's in fact a host of player characters you slowly unlock, each with only a couple of abilities, but as a result there is a ton of variety. Oh and it looks gorgeous. The artwork is something to behold. But speaking of looks, the one crucial flaw: The game doesn't scale its pixels, and for some reason the *text* isn't scaled properly. This has the effect that *everything* is blurry, and quite significantly so. There are resolutions where it's better, but it never goes away, there doesn't seem to be a "match", pixel-perfect, resolution. And while that might be okay for the artwork which is still pretty, having the text not scale cleanly sadly makes it induce a headache in me whenever I need to read a bit. It's... weird to describe. It's like your eyes are over-strained and keep going out of focus. Super weird thing, especially because the game had a lot of patches, so there's no hope this'll get fixed. Without that flaw it'd be a really really great game though so I'm still hoping it'll eventually be resolved.
Well, I didn't expect much but being a fan of the old Pharaoh and Cleopatra games or Children of the Nile, I was at least hoping for the same overall experience. However, this feels almost like an entirely different simulation game - and a rather basic one at that - with a thin egyptian veneer pasted over it. So much just doesn't try to convey any theme or setting at all. Shame, really.
So, here's the "edutainment" visual novel. Or sorts. I think the language-learning part gets blown out of proportion too often. What I can say after having just finished the last ending is that you're getting a medium length VN that has a very cute and very very light romance at its heart that bridges a language barrier, and that uses the context of this budding romance to teach you about the language of the other person. It has cute artwork, the characters are done well, the main char's thoughts are presented well (even though I though she was obnoxious), and the main supporting "third" character is really cool. The only thing I didn't like - and hence the -1 star - was that the choices ultimately feel random. There's lots of choices but virtually none of them matter and those that do change to little to explain their different ending IMO. Still, a very very solid VN with a rather unique language-study aspect.
