I’m really glad that I didn’t play Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze on Wii U. It’s a very good game, but so frustratingly difficult that I doubt my controller would have survived the experience. For anyone masochistic enough to enjoy that, the Switch version of Tropical Freeze offers the very …
Platformer
You can always count on Kirby games to be innovative, even within the relatively narrow confines of a 2D platformer. Every game since the first had brought creative new ideas into the fold, going beyond simple sequels to make each game feel like its own unique thing. Kirby Star …
Amid all the high-profile releases we’ve seen so far this year, we’ve also had plenty of indie games that seem to fly under the radar. Here are my thoughts on a few that I’ve been playing: the puzzle-platformer Speer, a NES-style action adventure game called The Quest for BIG KEY, …
Damsel, from Australian indie outfit Screwtape Studios, is a simple game in concept: playing as the eponymous Damsel (who is anything but in distress), you run around short, sharp platformer levels shooting vampires with your trusty shotgun. That’s pretty much the entirety of the game, but it works wonders; Damsel …
Being a sequel, SteamWorld Dig 2 was necessarily focused on improving upon everything that made its predecessor work. It was incredibly successful at that—as I said in my review—had the side effect of giving me an urge to play the original SteamWorld Dig again. I re-downloaded the PS Vita version …
I always enjoy a good rogue-lite. I don’t much care for the more hardcore aspects of proper roguelikes, but I love the way games like Rogue Legacy and Children of Morta find a balance between the high stakes of permadeath and accessibility through meta progression systems. It’s into this camp …
In Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, many communities have no access to clean water. Travelling miles each day to find collect water and lug it back home is a task that falls overwhelmingly on women, taking away from time they could spend learning and helping their families. The UN …
In a combination of moreishness and nostalgia, I followed up SteamWorld Dig 2 by immediately firing up SteamWorld Dig for the first time in years. I knew that the new game was an improvement over the same ideas that drove the original—such is the way with sequels, generally—but I didn’t …
I don’t understand the hate that Knack got when it launched alongside the PlayStation 4 a few years ago. It wasn’t an amazing game by any means, and it could get repetitive, but it was a fun, competent action adventure romp with a few neat ideas that it executed well. …
Rabi-Ribi cleverly combines the Metroidvania and bullet hell genres, using a silly but heartfelt story and adorable pixel art to seal the deal. Two of the very finest game genres are Metroidvanias and bullet hell shoot ‘em ups. (This is a fact. Don’t @ me.) When you take two of …