So, what's the game like? It's a mix. And a pretty interesting one. You've got mostly hands-free open world exploration with plenty of places to climb, environment to interact and resources to loot. Your magic is a tool for combat as well as for interacting with the world, and the physics sandbox is delightful - yeeting annoying critters off the nearest cliff rarely gets old. Spells can interact with each other, adding to the sandbox feeling. And then there are the bosses. A bit of Dragon's Dogma, a dash of Shadow of the Colossus, and a squirt of Monster Hunter. They're big, they got patterns, you get to climb them to stab them in the weak bits and peel off armour, wings and what have you, and offing them gets you new spells and improves the ones you have. There's gear to craft, hidden collectibles to find and bits of lore to unearth, and personally, I think its a blast. This is the definition of a decent AA action game, at a fair price point, and a tiny bit of jank. It won't reinvent the wheel, but it's fun. Pick flowers, hack trees, set critters on fire and yeet them into each other, climb a drake, freeze its wings, ride it into the ground and do unmentionable things to its weak spots - it's all in a days work for our intrepid heroine and her support cast. Recommended.
Coridden is a pretty competent ARPG. Controls are clearly designed around controller usage. So, in the tradition of Victor Vran, you combo, charge-attack, dodge, and use special abilities which depend on your selected skill tree (which can be freely respecced in the main hub) while you collect various bits of (randomized) loot. You have a melee weapon (I assume 2 later on, since there’s a slot for that), a ranged weapon, and a slot for new…animal forms. Yep, with the flick of a button you transform into a beast shape that has it’s own skill tree, can equip various ranged weapons (basically, various types of elemental barf) and comes with some passive specialities like being able to interact with certain barriers (chonky beast can break walls, water beast can swim, spiky tailed beast can pierce certain crystals…you get the idea). In the tradition of pokemon, you’ll want to catch bonk them all, and hope they drop their shape. Voice acting and visuals are surprisingly good, given the price point, the setting is a lovely weird mix of scifi and fantasy, and to my great surprise, equipment even shows up on your character. You can customize that one later on with various sparkly effects, but you’re limited between 4 siblings to pick from. Then again, that’s twice the amount of warm bodies that Grim Dawn offers, so I won’t complain too loudly. No bugs so far, the game is surprisingly competent for a 2-man-team. Storywise, you end up with a mystical (tech) gauntlet you need to repair and it’s more-or-less helpful onboard-AI (she tries, but she’s fragmented worse than my old hard drives), which, of course, is mostly an excuse to clobber more beasties. It’s no Grim Dawn, but I think I’ll hack & slash a bit further. Difficulty is selectable, the soundtrack is okay, and the only complaint I have regarding the visuals is that the effects are colour-coded between each sibling - meaning you can’t differentialte elements by colour. 7-8/10, excellent given the low price point.
Some people complained about Shelob being turned into some sort of goth girlfriend instead of sticking to the monstrous spider look. Some people complained about the game not being faithful to the source material. Both are fair points. But for the rest of us, this is the Orc Slaughter Simulator 2000. Rarely if ever has the power fantasy of wading through Morder knee-deep in orc guts being realized so phantastically. You get your very own personal rogue gallery of orcs, plenty of places and opportunities to murder them or get murdered in return, an awesome selection to plow through faceless hordes with, and some decent voice acting along with it. Not enough? But there is more! We got assassin mode, Batman mode, not one but three Aussie Uruk-Hais, gambling on arena fights and raising your very own personal despicable hench-orcs. Seriously, yeah, it's a humongous install, but you can usually get the game for a song, and it's absolutely worth your time. Don't delay, buy it and get more orcs to stab than there are boring lines in the Lord of the Rings trilogy!
Excellent little roguelite shooter, plenty of unlocks and runs smooth as butter. If you ever played Asteroids back in the olden days, give this one a shot. The main attraction besides more bullets than you can shake a stick at is the deliclously broken builds you can unlock. Yeah, there's a bit of RNG involved, but the re-rolls are plenty and you unlock a greater selection of stuff per level up as you progress.
The game is great, but its popular to hate on localization on the internet right now. The sub-over-dub weebs are never happy with anything, the more you ignore them the more great games you can enjoy. That goes double for the culture war CHUDs yammering about...well, pretty much anything as "woke" these days. It's "legally distinct" Suikoden. If that's your jam, enjoy the game. If you're here to show some serious small dick energy over video games...get bent.
Slay the Princess a darkly humorous (or humorously dark) visual novel with a metric crapton of branching endings and more twists than a flock of origami cranes. Which may or may not contain existential dread and eldritch horrors. Who may or may not be the princess. Lovely artstyle, oodles of branching paths, with each of them short enough for a quick game. Along with being fully narrated by the Princess, the snarky Narrator and the Voices in your Head, it's a lovely creepy little experience of a game. Don't delay. Someone has to kill the Princess, and it might as well be you.
