Grappling: good. Dogs: good. Combine them and you get Grapple Dog, a fun platformer with plenty of ideas and a whole lot of charm. Grappling hooks. Is there anything better than a good grappling hook? You throw it at a ceiling then fling yourself across a gap, feeling the rush …
As the debut effort from a relatively small indie studio, The Letter is more than a little impressive: a lengthy visual novel that unfolds through the perspectives of seven different characters, their stories all interwoven through a branching structure that gets increasingly more complex the deeper you go. Even if …
Few games establish a sense of flow quite like OlliOlli. The combination gnarly skate tricks, wild combos, high-speed traversal, and platformer level design—Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater by way of Rayman Origins, if you want to get reductive—is a rush that only ramps up as you master its intricacies. This is …
There’s the seed of a good idea at the heart of Gravity Chase: an anti-gravity racing game, but one that plays more like a Tempest-style tube shooter. The race track is a cylindrical tube, and rather than turning corners, your main form of movement—other than accelerating, obviously—is spinning around its …
I tend to be wary of “roguelike shoot-’em-ups”. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I like the appeal of a classic arcade shmup: five handcrafted levels (and maybe a second loop), with consistent enemy layouts and meticulous patterns that you can practice, master, and build a strategy around. I like roguelikes …
Halfway through the third stage of Castle of Shikigami 2, a boss called “Freyr” shows up. With a name like that, shoot-’em-up genre conventions, and the few other bosses under your belt by that point establishing the game’s dark fantasy style, you’d probably expect some huge, threatening mech or a …
Blue Reflection was one of the most uplifting, joyous—dare I say wholesome—games of 2017, even if that point seemed to get lost on a lot of folks. A story about an aspiring ballet dancer who suffers a career-ending injury, and then finding new meaning in a life that she’s mostly …
Space Moth DX was already an accomplished CAVE-style shoot-’em-up that put a unique risk/reward twist on the familiar dichotomy of the rapid-fire spread shot and a high-power, focused laser. With a remixed scoring system and new mechanics, Space Moth: Lunar Edition —1CC Games’ answer to CAVE’s Black Labels—takes those same …
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is an interesting case in itself. The two games that form this collection saw their initial release on the Nintendo 3DS as Japanese exclusives. Now, six years since the release of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures, these historical prequels to the much beloved Phoenix Wright …
For just about any other piece of software, “I’ve been using it for three months and I’ve barely even noticed its existence” would hardly be a compliment. But for an antivirus—those tools that are crucial, yet somehow always manage to be intrusive and annoying to the point that you wonder …
