Bobbles

"Mostly a fun game, but the item management is hugely tiresome. A character's inventory has 18 slots in total, and if you want to fill every equipment slot, 16 of these slots will be occupied (17 if you use a weapon and shield). That leaves two slots per character to hold key items and cycle through the 1000+ equipment drops you'll get during a playthrough. It felt like I spent several hours of play time just shuffling items around. Without the "Where are We" mod, this would have been unbearable."

90 _93%

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (2009) - Nov 25, 2022

"An excellent dungeon crawler with great music, strong writing, and an excellent setting. My main complaint is that it's very long; it took me at least 110 hours on expert mode, which meant about half a year of on-and-off gameplay. I prefer my grid-based dungeon crawlers a bit shorter than that. (played the Redux version)"

83 _80%

Roguebook (2021) - Oct 30, 2022

"A fun and relatively easy deckbuilder with a neat little exploration system. Got an enjoyable 23 hours out of it before I got bored. The main problem is that the content variety isn't quite big enough to sustain all the playthroughs required to reach Epilogue 15; I gave up somewhere around E8, not because of difficulty but because I just stopped caring."

88 _91%

Vigilantes (2018) - Oct 21, 2022

"A fun and well-paced tactical RPG. I especially liked all the little side events. The crafting and base building mechanics also felt good; almost every upgrade seemed impactful. No noteworthy problems apart from some minor UI issues."

83 _80%

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (2018) - Oct 15, 2022

"A fun story-driven tactical combat game. Sadly the finale feels very rushed, and almost all encounters can be beaten without the enemy taking a single turn (using stealth and/or stuns). I recommend playing on the hardest difficulty to keep the challenge as fun as possible."

64 _36%

Mega Man ZX (2006) - Oct 05, 2022

"The limited lives system combined with the bad save point locations is a major flaw for me; it's hard to learn a boss or a jumping challenge when you get sent back multiple areas on every third death. Highly, highly frustrating. And I had to use save states for the final boss rush; at my skill level, that "rush" takes about an hour, without any opportunity to save in-game. Apparently the re-release adds a "checkpoint" system to make things easier, and I'd recommend using that."

72 _45%

Rebel Galaxy (2015) - Sep 21, 2022

"Reasonably entertaining, but quite shallow. The biggest issues are too much side mission grinding and the terrible static noise every time the radio turns on or off (though apparently this can be modded out on PC)."

83 _80%

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse (2014) - Sep 17, 2022

"A fun Metroidvania, although I would have liked to see more variety and complexity in terms of weapon selection and exploration tools. Separating the world into islands that get unlocked in a very rigid and formulaic manner also feels worse to me than the more open world-seeming design of the best Metroidvanias."