Pikuniku is a playful little romp with a very postmodern sense of humor, dialogue that reads like an IRC chatroom (in a good way), some optional exploration that can tend to drag on and yield little tangible result, and all of about two actually engaging setpieces in its entire 3-hour campaign. I'm not against shorter games, but when you've got 3 hours of material you REALLY need to hit the nail on the head, and all I'm left with at the end of this is, "eh, that was neat I guess." This is, of course, leaving aside the co-op mode which I don't have the means to actually play -- so I suppose it's possible there's a whole host of crazy inventive 2-player puzzles that I'll just never know about, but the solo adventure is just "alright".
I don't think anyone really saw this one coming. What we have here is a remaster of a 2006 PC/PS2 game (or sequel, rather) that was actually pretty good. Its original release was confined exclusively to Europe, didn't have a digital release I'm aware of, is awful to try and get working on a modern OS, and happens to be inflicted with a particularly nasty strain of DRM -- so it's nice to have this. There are also proper controller prompts and volume sliders now, so you can be less confused and compensate for the TERRIBLE audio balancing the game has by default. If you aren't familiar with the universe of Asterix and Obelix, you're likely not the target audience for this. The game's foremost quality is being a ridiculous and heavily non-canon firehose of references and gags to both the videogame universe, and Asterix's. We're in a video game based on a comic series based on a loose interpretation of 50 BC Gaul, where the already-parodic facsimile names of historic locales are themselves parodied in this bizarre Matryoshka doll of alternate-alternate-universe humor. It might be a few layers too deep. With that out of the way, the actual gameplay is a mix of a mid-2000's 3D puzzle platformer and solo brawler. It was actually quite good for its time, particularly for a licensed game, but given the advancements that have been made in the brawler genre in the last decade, it ends up feeling quite repetitive before long. The puzzles are very basic fare, too. And for some godforsaken reason the remake decided to crank up bloom and saturation by about 200% with no options to decrement it. The only screenshot on the storefront that does it justice is the one with the blinding green glow in the center. All this being said, I enjoy it. It's above average, works well for what it is and is uniquely ridiculous with some fun setpieces, but for anyone who doesn't already know the game or isn't a massive Asterix fanatic, its age betrays it.
YIE is an utterly original genre mashup which I can only hope signifies the birth of "Pinballvania". For the most part, it's a fairly casual romp through a series of pinball-based setpieces in an open world. It looks and sounds beautiful and plays amazingly well, although it's not entirely bug-free and I did manage to get softlocked a few times. The difficulty never gets overwhelming and even the more dramatic moments don't have an explicit failstate, so it's more about the novelty of pinball-based progression than it is about white-knuckle challenge. That is, until you make it to the postgame and try to shoot for 100%. As thoroughly tantalizing as the 100% incentive seems, I would advise against attempting it. The exploration is all well and good but many of the optional trials are more gimmicky than they are clever, involve unreasonable amounts of trial and error, have extremely tight timing windows, and/or rely on flippers that happen to have slightly wonky physics, rendering some of the collectibles borderline impossible to get. In short: great game, would recommend, aggravating for completionists.
I'm going to lead with this game's positives: its map is really awesome, and in general it's really pretty -- although they should tone it down with the wildflowers just a bit. It's charming for about an hour. Unfortunately it's all downhill from there. On paper, Staxel aims to blend the "romanticized farm life" genre--all the homey touches and NPC interaction--with the "explore, terraform and craft in a block-based world" genre. In execution, it *technically* covers these bases, but fails to develop any of its systems to the point of justifying their existence. The farming feels anemic because the only real restrictions you deal with are time and money; there's no stamina or hunger to worry about, although the NPCs have at least become somewhat less wooden as of the Friendship Update. The exploration feels similar, as the world is smallish and largely devoid of anything meaningful to discover. The crafting... well, let me tell you about the crafting. Your first construction project, as dictated by the (mandatory yet unhelpful) tutorial, will be a barn. To build the barn you need to dig large chunks out of the landscape to collect stone and dirt, scrounge cash for mortar and a special crafting station--which the craft shop does not include for public use for some reason--chop down the trees for wood, saw the wood into lumber, saw the lumber into FINE lumber (goodbye trees), scrounge more cash for nails, dig up more stone... or just skip most of that crap and disassemble an abandoned (or occupied, who cares!) house to repurpose into a barn. The best way to deal with the utterly overwrought crafting system is to skip it entirely. Then there's the multiplayer, which by most accounts is too unstable to bother with. As it's in-dev these things may yet improve though my review will be cemented as-is now, and I worry about the game's future as it's only had about 1.5 significant content additions since its January launch and the rate of news posts has already dried up.
The first Shadow Warrior reboot title had issues with the guns being largely worthless, and very anemic enemy variety leading to somewhat glacial pacing. The swordplay, humor, and story were largely excellent. SW2, instead, swings wide with their multiplayer-focused design and procedurally generated levels which largely sacrifice whatever pacing, humor, and plot that remained in favor of a Borderlandsy loot grind utilizing an interface that is actually somehow even worse for managing loot. The procedural level generation manages to be incredibly slipshod, not only requiring frequent backtracking to get a key to progress, but also outright failing to populate entire level segmets with enemies, and sometimes having vast tracts of a level with the densest enemy populations leading to featureless dead-ends. Combat engagement suffers the usual problem of player vs enemy levels resulting in encounters either being boring pushovers or impossible bullet sponges if they're more than 2 levels above or below your own, compounded by a rock-paper-scissors elemental system that has no good reason to exist. When starting a multiplayer session (if you are ABLE to start a multiplayer session), you must manually set the enemy scaling in anticipation of how many people will be in the session, which presents obvious problems if someone leaves or joins mid-session. Finally, the game suffers on the technical level from poor optimization, connection issues, missing high-quality textures, egregious audio skipping, host-only progression tracking in multiplayer, and even occasional save corruption. Fun!
