I’ve been playing a surprisingly large number of games over the last two weeks, so I figured I’d just toss out what I’ve been playing recently. Some of these might get longer writeups, some might not, as there have been a lot of duds as of late.
Here’s the run down.
Magic: Legends – TLDR: It kinda sucks.
Possibly the highest profile game that’s gonna be on this list, and also the biggest dud, in my opinion. I saw someone describe it as “More fun to watch other people play than to play yourself” and I disagree. It doesn’t seem particularly fun to play or watch.
The whole thing just seems cheap and plasticky. If nothing else, it kind of made me want to play Path of Exile again. I’ll give it credit for having exactly one interesting mechanic, in that it is an ARPG where you build a deck of cards, and after you use an ability it goes away until you get it again. In theory, this forces you to play around your hand. In reality, of the few hours I played, I didn’t really feel it.
Armello – TLDR: I wish the gameplay was as good as the collectible in-game dice.
Steam says I’ve played like 12 hours of Armello over the last few weeks, and I’m gonna be honest, I know exactly why that is. See, Armello has what I’d consider to be hands down the best digital dice that I’ve ever seen, and I want them. And the game rewards you with random lootboxes that give you dice after you play multiplayer games. So I tend to log on, try a multiplayer game, not get any super cool dice, and repeat.
For anyone wondering why I haven’t talked about any Armello mechanics, it’s because I can’t say that I love the game itself. It feels really random, and also seems to have a massive kingmaker problem in the late game, which ends up being pretty unsatisfying.
Eximius: Seize the Frontline– TLDR: I like it. None of my friends do.
I like Eximius, and my friends don’t, and more on that when I do the full writeup on the game. But yeah: it’s an RTS/FPS hybrid that’s kind of janky, and maybe doesn’t have a lot of the polish it needs. But I still like it.
Move or Die – TLDR: It also sucks.
On the one hand, I think Move Or Die is garbage. On the other hand, it cost three dollars, and friend bought it for me, and said friend was in the group of folks that I convinced to drop $30 on a indie FPS/RTS hybrid shooter which they did not like. So yeah. We played Move or Die for an hour. I don’t think it’s very fun.
Legion TD 2 – TLDR: $20 Warcraft 3 Mod, but I like it.
I just keep playing this game. A “campaign” mode just got added, but given what campaigns have been in other games, calling it a “single player tutorial” seems more accurate, or maybe a “challenge mode vs the AI.” Legion TD 2 is sorta like Dota for me, I just play it, enjoy it, and it’s purely on the moment to moment decisions you make in game, nothing else.
Shovel Knight: King of Cards– TLDR: It’s the best.And $10.
Easily the most fun game on this list. I feel like King Knight might have the best controls and movement of all the characters in the Shovel Knight series, but that might just be me. This mode also has a card game, with collectible cards that you can win, and unlock. So… yeah. If you want to know more about Shovel Knight in general, you can read our writeup here. But King of Cards is just great, and honestly might get its own article in the future at some point.
That’s all for now. If you’ve been playing something interesting you think we should check out, feel free to hit us up on Twitter, or more likely given that anyone reading this blog knows us personally, hit us up on Discord.
Ed Note: This writeup is based on finishing the Plague Knight and Shovel Knight campaigns. In the time since then, I’ve finished the rest, and they’re also all great, but things like the King of Cards Joustus minigame and such aren’t talked about in this review.
Shovel Knight is great.
The sentence above pretty much sums up my opinions on Shovel Knight, and part of me is really tempted to just leave it at that. The other part of me thinks that a little more explanation is needed. The problem with said extra explanation is that I’ve been having a really hard time trying to put my finger on why Shovel Knight is so good.
Yes, Queen Knight. Normally it would be King Knight. The game has gender swap options which I turned on for this save file, along with custom pronouns that aren’t linked to the selected body type. I don’t think I have anything valuable to say on this feature, as I’m the most cis straight white wonderbread looking motherfucker you’ll ever meet, but it’s cool to see that it’s there.
Okay, so while I stall for time on that, let’s talk briefly about what Shovel Knight actually is: it’s a platformer styled like the platformers of yore. The game itself has a structure similar to Mega Man, where you’re given a set of levels to pick from, and need to clear them all to continue to the next set of levels.
There are some optional mini side levels, and also some enemies that show up and roam on the map, kinda like Hammer Bros from Super Mario. The levels themselves are all pretty varied, with each one having a general theme, and about 3 or so different mechanics regarding the platforming itself. At the end of each level, you’ll fight a boss: an enemy knight and member of the Order of No Quarter. Levels also have hidden treasure, relics, and other good stuff in them.
These GIFs are way more laggy than the game is. Shovel Knight actually runs silkily smooth, and I never experienced any slowdown while playing. At least the GIFs give a good look at the style and palette of the game, I guess. Honestly not sure if I should keep them.
This is just for the Shovel Knight and Plague Knight campaigns, by the way. It looks like the Specter Knight campaign is like a separate sort of thing? And King of Cards has an entire extra board game that you can play? This game has a lot of stuff in it…
Oh, right, I’m still supposed to be writing a review. Well, through the magic of “writing,” in the time between the block of text above, and this one, I went back and played a bunch more to try to put my finger on why the game is so much much fun, and I think a lot of it comes down to movement.
See, everything about Shovel Knight is pretty great. The music is banging, the art feels incredibly fitting and clean, the story is simple but really good, but to me, a lot of those elements are just window dressing. That doesn’t mean they’re not important, but they’re the frosting on top. Even if you frost a brick, it’s still a brick.
But Shovel Knight isn’t a brick because the art, music, and story are all built on top of a solid core of movement, and equally importantly, levels and areas that utilize that movement effectively. Bouncing from enemy to enemy, digging up piles of treasure, and dodging and reflecting projectiles all feels fun and responsive. And the levels are all laid out in ways to give you both tricky platforming challenges, and satisfying instances of pulling them off.
Okay, so unrelated: if this game had come out in like the 2000’s, would tons of folks have Knightsonas on their Deviant Art pages, instead of “X The Hedgehog” sonic recolors? It’s interesting to think about. Like, the game provides built in sprites, recolors, etc, for each of the characters in the game. And the gender swaps mean that you could make just about any Knightsona you’d want.
And this is the cake under Shovel Knight’s frosting. It’s not particularly flashy or obvious, but it’s the base of everything else in the game. It’s what makes the boss fights fun and enjoyable instead of slogs, it’s what makes the platforming fun instead of frustrating, and it’s what makes it so that when you fail, you want to go again.
And, dear reader, let me let you in on a little secret: I called Shovel Knight a bit of a throwback up above, but I’m not sure that’s entirely honest, and that’s to Shovel Knight’s credit. While the game mimics the style of older games, it doesn’t copy their mistakes. There is no traditional game over, and while dying makes you lose money, you can always try to get it back. You can reset levels if things go too incredibly wrong and you end up strapped for cash. The game’s hidden items are purchasable with the gold you find if you’re unable to actually discover them in the level they’re located in, albeit at a slightly higher price.
This, I think, is the best thing I can say about Shovel Knight. It embodies the heart and feeling of those older games, without committing their sins. It mimics their style, without aping it, or being a cheap copy. And it manages to stand out and be joyful to play in a genre with countless competitors.
To just play through the base game won’t take you very long, but it has a lot of potential for speed running, mastery, and secret hunting. Personally, if you think you might like the game I’d suggest buying the Treasure Trove edition, which has all the campaigns and such in it. If you want to try it cheaper, you can buy the base game for $15.
Shovel Knight is six years old at this point, making me perhaps the last person to write a review of it. But I hope I’m not the last person to play it, because it deserves a lot more than that.
P.S. Okay, still thinking about the idea of Knightsonas. I kinda love the idea of an alternate universe where instead of people wearing fursuits, we have an entire subculture of folks who dress up in a pixel art style heavy plate mail and helms, with ridiculous weapons.
It is a video game that you can play, and some of the art is good. This is the end of the nice things I can say about Kunai.
I don’t love Kunai. I wouldn’t recommend it. But I played 8 hours of it, so I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try to get a review out of it. And yes, that was enough to finish the game.
Okay, so this bothers me even after finishing the game: are the helmets just made to look like monitors? Why do robots and humans look so similar in this game?
If I was asked to summarize Kunai in a sentence, it would be something like “Kunai is fine.” That wouldn’t be entirely accurate, though, because if I tried to make it longer, it would be something like “Kunai is on average fine, or slightly mediocre.” The key word there is average, because there are a few areas of the game that take advantage of Kunai’s strongest point: the expressive and expansive movement of the player character, Tabby.
See, Kunai is a platformer/roguelike, or at least that’s what it wants to be. It never quite feels like that, though. When you revisit zones, it’s because you’re required to backtrack through them. There are no items that you find that aren’t clearly in the main story path. Many of the zones feel fairly linear, and don’t actually require much exploring.
What Kunai does do well are your actual movement options. Between the titular Kunai, a late game dash, rockets, SMGs that can be used to gun float, and otherwise just fairly solid controls, Tabby is a lot of fun to run around with. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t play into this as strongly as it could, and many of game’s zones either don’t take advantage of it, or feel like they actively punish it. Moving too quickly gets you killed, and outside of one area, you never really get to just ricochet around.
Zen Mountains, one of the few really good areas in the game, has lots of small platforms and big open areas to jump around in.
There simply isn’t anything that Kunai does that I haven’t seen other games do better. It would be easier to recommend Kunai if the sum of its parts was greater than its whole, or if it collected a bunch of different mechanics into a game for the first time. But there are other games that take everything Kunai does, story, exploration, movement, art, music, and knock it out of the park, whereas Kunai just limps along. Like, if you want to play an expansive indie metroidvania, just go play Hollow Knight. The gameplay is much better, the game is longer, and Hollow Knight actually has a good story.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about the story briefly: Kunai has a story, but it feels rushed and incomplete. There are plot points that feel straight up skipped over, for example a relationship with the villain that’s hinted at, but almost completely ignored the entire game. Nothing ever comes together or makes sense.
We’re part of a rebellion against something, but it’s not clear what we’re rebelling against? Or why? Or why the villain is doing any of this? It’s frustrating because much like Tabby’s movement, the game sets up a very interesting-looking situation, only to never quite utilize it fully.
Swinging your sword to bounce bullets back at an enemy is cool… but gets boring kinda quick.
The game feels like it had heavy cuts to its intended gameplay. For example, there’s a bit where you help power up a giant mech. You put in the power core, see it turn on and… all it does is fly you to a new area, where you do a gauntlet of enemies, then fight the final boss. It’s an incredible letdown.
I feel bad for tearing into Kunai this much, but the only reason I have so much to complain about is because the game feels like it has untapped potential. There’s a fantastic movement system handicapped and hamstrung by mediocre zones and levels. There’s a story that starts out interesting, kneecapped by too little explanation in some parts, and far, far too much in others. Combined, the game just isn’t satisfying to play, and can actually be rather frustrating.
I hope the game makes back its development budget. I hope TurtleBlaze gets to make a second game that doesn’t feel as rushed. There’s a lot of potential here, and a few things that are done quite right.
But there aren’t enough of them for me to recommend this game. If this review didn’t turn you off, you can find Kunai on Steam, and on a few other consoles.
Ed Note: Images are taken from the Steam Store Page. I just don’t have anything really valuable to add with screenshots of this game to be honest.
A solid top-down roguelite, sharing more in common with something Binding of Issac than, say, Stardew Valley.
I like Atomicrops. I have played quite a bit of it, done quite a few cleared runs, a bit of achievement hunting, and I’ll probably keep playing it even after I write this review for a bit. Like the synopsis says, it’s a really solid roguelite. There are a few areas of the game’s design I disagree with, but they feel more like choices, not flaws, and if you like games like Binding of Issac, or presumably, Enter the Gungeon (Okay, I haven’t actually played much Enter the Gungeon, but that’s what it reminded me of), I feel like you’ll enjoy Atomicrops.
Cool, so now that I’ve put the lede first, let’s actually talk a bit about the game.
I’ve tried and failed to write this article about Atomicrops several times now, all with the intention of having it out and ready this WednesdayThursday Friday. Given that I started it writing it about a week, you would think this would have been easy. And it would have been, except for a tiny problem called “I thought Atomicrops was going to be high paced twitchy version of something like Stardew Valley, and not a roguelite.” Second disclosure: I’ve never played Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon. Slime Rancher is probably the closest I’ve ever come to a traditional chill farming game.
So yeah, I went in expecting an entirely different genre of game. In both you can acquire farm animals, grow plants, and get married, but what that means in terms of actual mechanics is incredibly different, as are your goals. In something like Slime Rancher, you’re free to play at your own pace. Even if you lose all your health, there really isn’t a game over in any traditional sense.
Dating consists of giving a character roses, a secondary currency you earn from… harvesting roses. Also, all the pairings are gender irrelevant, which is neat. Also, Atomicrops is the first game I’ve ever seen where polyamory is an actual item/upgrade.
In Atomicrops, if you lose all your health, you die, and you’ll have to start fresh. There is a secondary currency used for small, permanent upgrades called cornucopias, but most of said upgrades are pretty minimal.
Here’s a brief overview of the anatomy of an Atomicrops run. The goal of an Atomicrops run is to simply survive all 4 seasons, and then to beat the final boss in the nuclear winter season. Each season consists of three days. Days have a day/night cycle. During the day, crops you’ve planted are invincible, and cannot be harmed. At night, they can be eaten/attacked by various enemy types, and waves of enemies will spawn in to try to attack them. On the night of the last day of a season, you’ll have to fight a boss.
What you’ll notice, though, is that I haven’t described anything that would require you to actually engage in agriculture. With one fairly big exception, “winning” doesn’t technically require you to farm crops for Cashews, the game’s currency. You could, in theory, just spend every day doing nothing to run out the day timer, fight through the waves at night, and rinse repeat your way to victory. This would theoretically mostly work.
So why go into the trouble of growing serpentine roses, potatoes with more eyes than most monsters from the Cthulhu mythos, and excessively overexuberant peas? Well, growing and harvesting crops gets you Cashews and score, but it also feeds into your end of season meter. And secondly, it lets you buy and upgrade weapons.
Based on how much you harvest during a season, you’ll get various items and boosts. Just surviving might not be enough to keep a run going. It’s also how you get the outside-of-run progression currency, cornucopias.
Let’s talk about the weapons in the game for a second, because one of my big gripes relates to them. Almost all the weapons are cool, powerful and fun. They have single path of upgrades that give them more damage, and also boost their utility. (For example, the flamethrower can water crops after getting enough upgrades.)
They also have a chance to break after you complete a day, requiring you to get a brand new one. And when I say chance, I’m talking about a something like a 98% chance by default on most characters. There is a character that can bring it down to a 48% chance, which is still pretty high. (This decreases as you unlock post-run carryover upgrades. Regardless, break chance is never a happy number.)
So here’s why I consider it a gripe, and not necessarily a flaw: having powerful weapons to take on the end of round bosses isn’t strictly speaking necessary, but it does make them much easier to fight. Trying to take on giant mechs, UFO’s, and a spider the size of a house with a literal peashooter is incredibly difficult. So you’re motivated to save up a pile of cashews to buy and upgrade a weapon prior to a day in which you’ll fight a boss, which means you’ll need to farm, which means you’ll need seeds, which means you need to explore, but harder areas have tougher enemies, so you’ll need a better weapon for that, too….
You get the point. Weapons breaking is a core part of the loop of the game, forcing you to go fight for seeds, upgrades, and farm animals, along with one-use powerups (pigeon scrolls). You do this by leaving the central area near your farm, and clearing out camps of marked enemies. Once you clear a camp, you get a reward.
Once you gun down all the bunnies, you get to pick an upgrade from the locked boxes.
The point is, though, if you could just upgrade a single weapon, and keep it through a whole run, the system would fall apart pretty quickly, and kill a lot of the pressure that the game generates.
Outside of that, I really don’t have any big gripes about Atomicrops. The game also does one thing really well, though kind of subtlety. So I wanna call that out, and talk about it a bit.
Atomicrops handles item effect stacking and resolution really well. A variety of the passive pickups you get have effects like “When X occurs, Y occurs,” and the game handles it super gracefully. As an example, there is an item that causes weeds to do a blast of damage to nearby enemies when cut down. There’s also an item that causes killing enemies to cut nearby weeds. If you end up getting these together, shooting and killing a nearby enemy can turn into a wonderful chain reaction of exploding weeds and shredded enemy packs.
From what I’ve seen, this works for almost every item combo that you would expect it to in the game. Farm animals can trigger items that would proc based off their respective text, and so on. And it’s what makes Atomicrops such a good roguelite. You’re given a limited amount of items to choose between during your run, and spotting and knowing about various synergies can make or break a run. Some items can seem lackluster at first, such as the ability to harvest weeds for small amounts of cashews, but combined with rapid weedcutting, tractors, or chickens, can turn out to be incredibly useful.
Atomicrops is an incredibly solid run and gun roguelite. It’s not perfect. There’s a fairly limited number of bosses, and the game’s controls can be frustrating at times. But the fantastic way that synergies are handled, the number of builds that can be created, and how weapons that are just fun to use (even if they break way too easy) make it sort of sleeper hit for me. It’s not the game I was expecting, but it’s honestly probably more fun than what I thought I was getting into.
(Oh, and the art for each of the irradiated fruits and veggies is also great. Weird without being Binding of Issac levels of discomforting.)
Atomicrops is $15 on Steam or the Epic Games store, and a bunch of other consoles I won’t list here. This review is based on the PC version. Friendly reminder that even if you do loath Fortnite and the stupid dances it has made the youth partake in, EGS gives a higher percentage to developers than Steam.
Ed Note: We received a review copy of Loop Hero prior to release. The only condition we were given was not to release the review until after the embargo for the game.
So I mentioned a while back that I was gonna try to get a copy of Loop Hero to review. And to my surprise, the whole thing actually sorta worked. I’ve been playing it for just under about two weeks at this point. And right now I wouldn’t recommend it.
That probably sounds kind of strange, so let me give a little bit of context here: I’ve played about 30 hours of Loop Hero. After about hour 25, I said “Fuck It” and modified a few configuration files to give myself effectively infinite resources, bought out the rest of the tech tree, and went back to playing the game.
So when I say I wouldn’t recommend Loop Hero, it’s not that I haven’t had a good time with various parts of the game. The opening few hours from the demo were very good, enough to make me want to get the game. The last few hours after cheated to unlock everything were also much better.
The middle 25 hours were one of the most painful, grindy slogs I’ve ever tried to push through, and I ultimately gave up, and cheated. I would not have even tried to power through them if I hadn’t been given a review copy, and felt like in order to actually write a review, I needed to see the entire game. I would have just uninstalled the game, and called it a day.
So let’s talk about the game’s mechanics a bit, in order to explain why I struggled to enjoy myself.
I’ve seen Loop Hero described a lot of different ways, including: idle game, auto-battler, and rougelite. I’m not sure any of these labels quite sticks for me, but it is a game where combat happens automatically, and you as the player don’t have any input over what your character actually does.
What Loop Hero does give you input on is the items your character wears, and the the world they travel through.
As the name might suggest, a Loop Hero run consists of, well…. loops. Each run starts with a blank world map, as pictured below.
And as a run proceeds, you’ll get two types of drops from enemies. Gear, which works exactly how you think it would, and cards.
We’ll quickly talk about gear first. Characters have a limited number of gear slots, and the three classes each use slightly different types of gear, with a few things in common. This doesn’t actually matter, because once a run starts you’ll only get gear that you can equip.
All in all, there isn’t anything in the gear that feels super special or innovative. It isn’t bad, by any sense, it’s just nothing that you haven’t seen if you’ve played an ARPG before. Vamp, attack speed, crit chance, crit damage, etc. Higher rarity gear has additional stat rolls, again, much like a traditional ARPG. Unlike a traditional ARPG, once you put a piece of gear on, you cannot take it off, and any new piece of gear replaces it.
One of my few minor gripes with the game has to do with the fact that the UI display for gear isn’t fantastic, and it isn’t additive. This is fairly minor though, and not actually a big deal.
My second gripe with gear is that as far as I can tell, it’s completely random. I couldn’t find a way to influence the rolls that I got, and as such, it turns into a crap shoot. You either get gear with stats you want, or you don’t. A string of bad luck early can absolutely ruin a run, even if you make all the right decisions, and it’s one of the things that makes the game feel like less of a rougelite to me. So since you can’t influence gear, the extent to which you can do anything with it is just making quick judgement calls on if you should swap your current gear for something new.
So let’s talk about the part of the game you have a bit more influence on: the cards that make up the map.
Cards are (mostly) all from a pool that you choose beforehand. This is the deckbuilding aspect of the game.
Of the different categories, you’re required to have at least a certain amount of cards selected. And while this is purely a guess from my side, it at least feels like the cards have different drop rates.
Individual cards have rules about their placement and effects. I want to look at two cards, the Mountain and the Grove, as examples.
The Mountain is a fairly straightforward card. The more you play of them, the more HP your hero gets. One thing the mountain also does that the game does not tell you, is that after you play 10 mountains or rocks, it will spawn in a goblin camp at a random location near the road. So, after you’ve played 9 mountains, you may want to reconsider playing a 10th unless you want to add another problem to the map for yourself. In addition, you can only play the mountain on spaces at least two places away from the road.
The Grove is even simpler. Every 2 in-game days that pass, the Grove will spawn a Ratwolf enemy, which will either stay on its current tile, or move left or right. It can only be placed on the road.
Now how do these cards interact with each other?
Well, uh. Actually, they don’t.
In fact, a surprising number of the cards in the game don’t interact with each other, or at least don’t interact in interesting ways. And this brings me to my first big problem with the game: Basic Terrain Tile configuration isn’t actually all that interesting or exciting. At the same time, it’s what you’ll be spending a majority of a run doing.
The game has about 26 cards to build your deck , and almost none of them interact with each other in particularly interesting ways. In fact, only one of them really has a large number of interesting interactions: the River card. It’s also one of the very last things you’ll get access to.
And I think this is my primary problem with the game: the “Loop” of Loop Hero isn’t one of interesting runs, where you have to solve tile placement puzzles. It’s a game of perpetual grind, where you make tiny amounts of incremental progress via upgrades, gear and other small stuff, while hoping this is the run where you get the gear you need to kill the boss.
I have some other gripes with the game as well, but they’re ultimately much smaller things, and changing them wouldn’t change how I feel about the game.
There are a lot of good things about Loop Hero. The art is gorgeous, the game has a bunch of text display options, including a dyslexic setting, and the soundtrack is solid.
The core gameplay, though, of a roguelike auto-battler never really clicked for me. The game felt far more like an idle game by the very end. And that’s not what I was hoping for from the demo. I was hoping for a different type of roguelite, one where you build the world instead of just fight it, a game where learning about the interplay of mechanics, and not just farming and numbers was the key to success. And while Loop Hero might be one of the more complex idle games out there, it’s not quite the roguelite I was hoping for.
Loop Hero is available here on Steam. I should mention that at time of writing, the game has been rated “Overwhelmingly Positive” by other people who’ve played it. So I may just be the odd-man out here. But right now, unless you’re looking for an idle game, I wouldn’t recommend it.
