You are a samurai and you can die. But that's okay because the game is in a perpetual loop of replaying and doing something new every playthrough. There's a couple of endings and a couple of ways of playing. The game plays over a set amount of days with a couple of events happening and you need to do them in order to progress. Some events can be missed without consequence and some halts your progress. There's main characters you have to form alliances with or become their enemy. It's a small sort of game with segmented map areas, but the replayability is where it's at. You will play this multiple times, try different routes, try different playstyles until you reach an ending, all the while unlocking new things and getting new weapons. Now to the cool part: being a samurai. You get to use katanas and spears and a few other oddball weapons like leeks. There's a couple of different techniques for swords, like double handed, left handed, reverse handed, draw style, right handed, dual wielding etc, and all of those and different movesets. Most of the time you won't really be caring about the movesets anyway. Spear has less options in techniques but the game was centred around swords anyways. Character customisation keeps getting better the more you unlock, so be sure to keep replaying until you get something you want. You could be a dual wielding samurai with a demon mask terrorising the villages with your twin leeks (because you can do that). Swords have a durability meter so if you keep bashing that stick against a rock it'll break. It's fine because you never stick with a single sword anyway. Once you kill an enemy you get their weapon so you have to somehow kill the main characters of the story to get theirs. You can craft your own weapon as well, and name it. Nice, you're an actual samurai now. When you die, there's very little that you actually lose aside from progress. I don't actually remember if you lose money or not but there has never been any consequence for dying.
Bubsy was a dead franchise. Or so people thought. Can we just appreciate the devs for bringing back their franchise when most other developers are scared to do so? This was a very, very bold move and should always be praised and encouraged. I first got into the game thinking it would be a mix of Rayman's physics and Yoshi's Wooly World's aesthetics. It did not deliver on both of those accounts but instead stood as it's very own fragile feet. What's a platforming game without platforms? With big hit platformers in 2017 how does Bubsy stand out from the crowd? Not by much. Bubsy returns and isn't as annoying as before. And uhhh I've run out of things to say about the game. 4 stars out of pity and out of appreciation for the effort they went through to bring this back from the dead. Probably not worth your time but definitely worth your attention.
Dustforce DX is a great game. You go around cleaning with acrobatic janitors. Lack of story isn't really a big issue and neither is difficulty. The problem lies with its controls. Even after playing it for at least an hour the controls still don't feel second nature. As someone has already pointed out, this game is incredibly floaty. There's nothing to fix the sensitivity. Apart from this its a good buy. A must for speed runners or hardcore platformer fans but will be a hard time for anybody else.
Jotun is a beautiful game. Everything is hand drawn and well animated. The narration and story telling is also well done. The only gripe I have about the game is that the game itself is kinda boring, with the only driving force being interesting boss fights. The bosses are massive and impressive. Titans that take out more than half your life if you're unlucky enough to be hit by one. Thankfully they are slow and predictable, with the only problem being their AoE. Aside from the bosses there are a few dungeons you need to go through, most of which are just exploration with environmental obstacles. These dungeons give you health upgrades, runes and a little narration. The problem with Jotun is its basic combat. You have a light slash, a heavy slash and a dodge roll. The light slash does pitiful amounts of damage to a boss and cannot connect into a heavy slash (as in there are no combos except for chaining it into another light slash). The heavy slash has a hold and release sort of weight to it which I never really cared for, but it does good damage and is great against bosses. The dodge roll has no stamina backlash so you could do that the entire time, even though it's not that effective. To make combat interesting you have runes. Spells that can buff you or debuff the enemy. Spells that can heal you, make a clone of yourself to get away from enemies, a shield to protect yourself temporarily, strengthening spells to make your attacks stronger, etc. These can turn the tide of the battle and make boss fights much better. All in all Jotun is a very pretty game with shallow combat that's only redeemed by the bosses and runes.
Race the Sun is good at what it does and what it does is good. All you really need to do is go left and right and sometimes jump. You get boosts and points along the way. You need to catch up to the sun so that you don't run out of solar power (i.e. lose the game). Losing solar power and crashing into things are the only two ways you can possibly lose in this game, and you'll be doing that more often than you expect. Don't let it deter you though, perfection can only come with pracitce. You are meant to die, it's an endless runner. The sun setting makes obstacles cast larger shadows, making it even harder. You'll have to constantly try and get boosts, but the more boosts you get the more prone you are to crash. The further you go the obstacles get increasingly difficult. You level up by completing tasks, and the harder the task the more "experience" you get. The real shining factor though, is the community. The game changes it's maps every 24 hours so you don't go through the boring slog every single time you play but it doesn't have the uncertainty and unpredictablity of a roguelike. There's a level editor so you can make your own maps and share them online. Race the Sun is an all round fun experience, focused at a single thing instead of trying to be a jack of all trades. Again, don't let the difficulty scare you. It's challenging, but never feels unfair.
There is very little negatives to this game apart from that other review pointing out that all death animations look alike and that it gets very stale later on. But apart from that one tiny gripe, the entire game is very solid. The entire game would take around 10 hours to finish, 20 hours to complete all of the side objectives and unlock other items and costumes. After you finish the game you unlock new game plus (more on this later). The game is a 2D stealth side scroller with a violent or non violent way of doing a level (the non violent way is encouraged) with the levels having a few branching paths, but not too many so you lose your way. Side objectives add a thin veil of challenge to a pretty easy game. Stealth is done spectacularly, which is my favourite aspect of the game. Footsteps, hiding places, line of sight, silent takedowns, alarms, distractions; nearly every stealth trope you can think of is here (apart from dressing up as the enemy like in Hitman). Klei Entertainment did a brilliant job with the art style and general feel of the game. The different costumes really bolster the replayabilty of the game and really makes you want to play the new game plus (more on this later). You can either go with a completely silent costume without any weapons, or a really powerful costume without distraction items. My personal favourite is the Mark of Terror which lets you terrorise guards into shooting their own allies in sheer terror under certain conditions. In New Game Plus, you retain every single unlocked item (which you unlock through doing the side ojectives) from your previous run. To make the game harder in NG+, they removed everything that makes the game easy on the normal run. You can no longer see how much noise you make by walking. You can no longer see the guard's line of sight. All in all it's a spectacular game and a must buy for anybody a fan of 2D sidescrollers or stealth games. 10/10 would play again.
