When you want to be able to read our thorough breakdown on a game because you just can’t stand our voices, this is the place to go! Rich (and sometimes the other guys) get into the meat of a game and give you a recommendation on whether or not it’s worth purchasing.
Do you know what's cool? JRPGs, also Sailor Moon, also Shakspeare. Do you know who else is having these thoughts? The team at Zeboyd games. This Way Madness Lies is a mashup that I’m pretty sure no one asked for that fires on all cylinders to make an old-school RPG that is truly unique, entertaining, and incredibly engaging.
Free-to-play games have never appealed much to me. Too often they are saddled with mechanics that are reminiscent of old-school arcades; they are designed to suck money from you at a very specific cadence. Sure, there have been examples in my life, and often, the ones I like I have put money into, especially if they eschew “Pay to win” mechanics. For instance, I think I put about 400 dollars into the now-shutdown Marvel Heroes because it was a fun Diablo-style game, with lots of very nice-looking costumes. I am willing to pay for cosmetics generally, not an in-game advantage. I guess Marvel has some sort of rent-free space in my head, because the newest free-to-play game that has been taking up a lot of my time is once again owned by that infernal mouse, and that game is Marvel Snap.
I have long been an Assassin’s Creed fan. Been playing since the first game, and I have beaten every mainline entry that the series has put out. I have rolled with the punches, story-tone changes, playstyle differences, bad modern-day crap, nickel-and-dime DLC schemes, XP boosters, and glitchy messes. I love the historical murder-tourism and generally I have enjoyed several of the changes that have happened with the curren batch of AC titles. While I miss the sprawling urban playgrounds of Ezio’s day, and especially the zipline utopia that was Victorian London in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, I came to enjoy the forays into the truly ancient history that AC Origins, Odyssey, and Vallhalla have put forth. While the latest entry, Valhalla, is probably the title I have enjoyed the least, it still presented enough new story beats, and a general mood that justified its existence. Does the first larger DLC pack, Wrath of the Druids justify its existence in the greater game? The short answer is no, no it does not.
The original Lego Star Wars was something special. It packaged the robust story that billions love in a cute and hilarious format and spawned what was basically a genre all its own for developer Traveller’s Tales. The format of Lego games hasn’t changed much over the years, but with Star Wars being the very first entry in the now long-running series, it was the most deserving of a fresh coat of paint.
The latest entry in Traveller’s Tales Lego games attempts to cram all of those Star Wars you love into a single game and mostly succeeds even if it has to resort to cutting a few corners.
Kirby thrives on reinventing himself; back when Masahiro Sakurai first introduced us to the pink ball of destruction, he aimed to make a platformer that anyone could enjoy where the player could make their own challenge. Kirby and the Forgotten Land may have the outward appearance of another game reinventing the Kirby formula like Planet Robobot. Instead, they take the classic Kirby formula and attempt to move it into 3D.
