This is one of those projects that is so out there and so abstract that each one can take a different meaning from it. I think everything I might say would influence your experience with it, so go blindly and embark on your own journey.

Maybe I only like it this much because I invented a head-canon and I really identify with what I have created. But I’m putting it highest on the list because it’s honestly one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever played, and it touches places that I think no other form of media or storytelling would be capable of.

I think I finally understood the crazy Katamari Damacy guy. And I’m afraid that what might be a crazy game for you… for me it’s just a game.

Man, this is my find of the year. WHAT A GAME!

It got me a while to really understand how much goes into this game, so much so that I actually switched to play Monster Train after a couple of hours of this. But when I got back and things clicked for me, I got a full-course meal

I have no idea how the hell they balanced this game, but I have the feeling that it just does not matter the situation you’re in or which class/build you’ve committing to, if you properly think things out you will have a chance to win. It’s a VERY slow, methodical and strategical game, and in my honest opinion it is just brilliant.

I think the most important thing about why this game is so good is what information is available to you. It’s a deck builder game, so there’s actually a good amount of RNG built into its systems. BUT, even though the options offered to you might not be always optimal, you have enough information about your run at your disposal to make a good decision every time.

Starting with the Act layouts. At first I though this one was dumb and annoying. Why the hell do you need so many different paths and combinations?? But as I played it I realized how good of a thing this is! The amount of options and combinations are all about risk management. If you think your route carefully, you’re always going to have the option to go for a more/less challenging path to better fit your current deck/health situation. With a good start you can snowball rewards in exchange for your health, and with a bad start you can play it safe, winning little by little, slowly saving gold to have a explosive growth at a shop on the next act. You always have an out available, you just gotta think it through!

Second genius aspect of the game: you start with a ~10 card deck, that’s very thin! That means that when you put a new card in your deck, that card will have a huge impact on your battles! But what if you’re offered bad cards? Well, then you just don’t pick anything to not dilute your good cards and make your deck more inconsistent. This single aspect brings a HUGE depth to the deck building, finding the perfect balance between adding new cards and just working with what you have is so interesting and deeply satisfying to figure out. It also feels awesome to have the opportunity to sometimes delete cards from your deck to make it even more consistent! I love it so much

Third thing: predictions. The game offers you just enough information about your future so you have just enough time to prepare for it. The biggest one being that the Act Boss is always revealed to you. At first this one does not make much sense, but as you play the game and get a good feel for the challenges that each Act Boss offers, this information is essential to your decision making. Getting to carefully choose card rewards that best counter the Act Boss that you’re facing is essential to a successful run! The same goes in a smaller scale: during combat you can always see the enemy’s intent, so by knowing just a little bit about how each enemy works you can figure out the best route to deal with the current and next turns of the battle. Once again, getting to figure these decisions out is SO SATISFYING, I always feel like a genius when I get to counter an enemy’s big turn, or when I finish the battle earlier due to good decision making.

And finally, the classes’ design. Each one of them is SO UNIQUE and can be SO POWERFUL on their own terms. It’s just genius, I have no idea how they managed to do it. Some are slightly more powerful than others, but all of them are viable and all of them are SO COOL to play as. I think the devs just understand the player’s twisted desire to just break all of the game’s rules and cook a deck so foul that you can’t help it but to maniacally laugh at the screen. And with the more you play the game, the more you understand it, the more ways you open up to make just the craziest of decks.

I mean, if you managed to read all of this, just make yourself a favor and try the game. It’s honestly the best deck builder I’ve ever played. It’s a masterpiece. It’s so much fun.

This game really feels the result of almost a decade of dedication. I spent the whole play-through saying over and over “no way, this guy is a genius!”

Every puzzle is so simple yet so clever, also the items and mechanics are awesome. I had the feeling that every screen might be hiding a mystery, it’s the first time that I played a metroidvania that I felt it made sense to backtrack just to revisit those weird screens with your new items/knowledge.

I can say with confidence that this is the best metroidvania experience I’ve ever had, I highly recommend you give it a shot without looking too much into it. The pace in which you figure things out is just brilliant and every new discovery is so rewarding

The art is so charming and fun that I think this game could be the biggest piece of shit imaginable and still be enjoyable just because watching those little guys go is so satisfying and fun. Luckily it’s a decent experience for an idle game, there’s a beginning and an end and it actually needs some ~strategy~ in order to win, instead of the win condition being always “wait longer”. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it!

Very short and simple but a soulful game full of charm and charisma. All the characters are great, I really enjoyed going through all of the interactions. So much so that I went out of my way just to read and unlock dialogues which is something pretty rare coming from me. But I think the crowning jewel of the game is the overall ~mood~ and ambience, it really does feel like a little vacation and that feels very unique and special to me.

I’ve been hearing about this game for so long, but I never looked into it because it seemed like a shallow Fire Emblem type of game. Now that I gave it a chance I can say that it is indeed a simple game, but I couldn’t be more wrong

I might even say that I prefer this type of gameplay rather than Fire Emblem’s. Every unit is a fixed “piece”, with fixed characteristics and stats. I’m calling it a “piece” because it resembles more a chess piece than a Fire Emblem character that changes over time. This might look boring at first, but once you get into it, it opens up the “strategy” part of the game much deeper than the traditional tactics games. By having fixed pieces and disregarding any type of character progression suddenly the level design, the choke points, the terrain types, your army’s composition and your overall strategy gets much more attention. It reminds me a lot of Into the Breach, both games sometimes feels like a puzzle board game

There’s also just so many different units and there’s pretty much no overlap between them. Every single one fulfills a specific purpose and have both very strong pros and very concerning flaws that should be taking into consideration when planning your strategy. It’s so fun to plan around this, and structure your positioning in a way that one unit covers the flaws of the others… much like a chess game.

I understand now why fans are desperate for a new game in the series. It has SO MUCH POTENTIAL that is clearly being held back by the GBA limitations. I would love to see them going all out in a “current-gen” version of the game, but honestly I have a feeling that strategy games like this one are only really good when they are simple. Adding too much systems and bloat could easily make it an overwhelming experience that would be only appreciated by a very specific niche of the population, which I’m afraid I’m not a part of.

Balatro is another game that understand the player’s twisted desire to cook a deck so foul that it breaks the game wide open, and I love it! I’m blown away by the sheer variety of jokers, how could anyone brainstorm 150 different nasty ways to cheat at poker lmao. I had a great time learning its quirks, testing out and theory crafting builds!

My current gripe with Balatro is that it just feel a little ~too random~. While Slay the Spire has every piece of important information always available to you, and almost all the really important aspects of the game are deterministic or at least offer you a variety of random options, Balatro seems to intentionally hide things or its systems seem to be just too inconsistent. There’s waaaay more situations where the game just fucks you over and there’s nothing you can do about it, as much as situations that the game just hands you the win on a silver platter and there’s no challenge at all to it.

As much as I want to every game to be like Slay the Spire, I guess it’s just unfair to judge the game for what it isn’t. Balatro is a very fun game that is DESIGNED to appeal to the casino’s risk vs reward feeling. It’s DESIGNED to feel like a slot machine. Even though this is not that satisfying to me, I can really appreciate the deck building ideas!

It took me a while to figure out how the game is supposed to play, but with some reading and the help of some very smart people, I think I got to a point that I can start a run and manage my way through with some good decision making and get a not too bad win rate.

And that makes me feel that the game’s dev has created a beast so complex that he’s having a hard time taming. The skip tag system being the most obvious hint of it. 90% of the skip tags are just way too situational, to not say that they are just straight up useless. Learning to just ignore them is a certified way to make your win rate skyrocket. The same goes for the planets system, some planets are just way better than others for no reason. Who would’ve think that straights scale better than any other hand for no reason at all? And this info is just not available until some nerd crunches the numbers on the internet.

But don’t get me wrong. Balatro is a hell of a good time, I played it for over 30 hours as I’m writing this and I intend to play even more! It’s game of the year for me even with all the issues, and I’m sure they will iron these out over time

This game is great to play with your significant other in one of those boring-ass sundays. It’s nothing revolutionary, it’s just a very interesting, intriguing and fun story to go through with some clever puzzles to shake things up. It has the perfect amount of complexity, uniqueness and mystery to stay as a conversation topic for the whole play-through.

I say this because I feel that I would get bored very fast if I was playing it alone, the gameplay by itself in my opinion is not fun. But the story, the world, the characters, the creatures, the locations, the mysteries, are just so interesting and fun to talk about that it’s the perfect canvas for funny conversations. It feels like it was designed to be a bonding experience. Like, a couple of characters are just SO ANNOYING that it makes me wonder: why would you make such a piece of shit character if not so the players can complain and make fun of them to their friends? Everybody can instantly agree and get in the same page to laugh at that piece of shit muppet, It’s genius. I had such a good time.

I mean, this game is ASS. The story is dumb, the characters are dumb, there’s hardly any challenge to it, but I had SO MUCH FUN playing it with a friend. It’s a short game, the perfect length for you to have a laugh at the jank and the dumb story and have it end before it gets old. A certified childhood classic.

It’s the best multiplayer game of all time, but unfortunately every popular game has to have just the worst and most toxic player base of all time.

Dota 2 ticks all of the boxes to me, fun skill-based gameplay, strategy focused, complex enough to not have an obvious solution to anything, flexible system and mechanics that allow you to be creative and no pay-to-win aspects. They even recently added an update where EVERY CHARACTER got 2+ facets, which are pretty much different “styles” in which you can play your character. That adds SO MUCH VARIETY, and it’s so much fun to play around with it. The new map changes are also all very cool and good for the game in my opinion. The team that develops this game is amazing, I believe I would play this game every single day if it wasn’t just extremely mentally and emotionally draining.

Mastering your character, match-ups and the pace of the game is VERY HARD but so much fun and rewarding. Dealing with emotionally immature/abusive people, constantly trying to make them cool-off and not throw the game is also very hard, but not fun at all and also not rewarding what so ever.

I’m not being original saying things like this, but it’s the truth. Dota 2 is THE best. But at the end of the day you don’t play the best games, you play the ones that make you have a good time.

Me and my friend were on a streak of playing shitty beat ‘em ups until we came across this game’s character designs…. I mean… we had to at least TRY it right? There’s no way this could be a good game we thought….

Welp, we were wrong. It’s an absolute banger of a beat ‘em up, quite possibly the best one I’ve ever played! (keep in mind that I’m not a beat ‘em up connoiesseur).

The art is SO GOOD, but the designs are straight up crimes against humanity. How the hell did this get published? That mermaid design gave me brain damage… the artist responsible for that should be thrown in jail! Or get an award. Or both?! It’s disgusting but genius at the same time, and that sums up this game’s experience

The thing that attracts me to this game is how each character is supposed to just be strong and fun to play. The variety of attacks each one has allows for so many combinations and combo routes, and are so wacky that if you’re playing it multiplayer there’s a high chance you just stare at the screen trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and then die because you dared to think you knew where your character was.

I also enjoy that the devs were just “trying stuff out”. There’s a ton of mechanics that are kinda weird and janky that seems like the entire thought process behind it was “wouldn’t it be cool if they eat a banquet before the mission and you have to cook it with a minigame? Hell yea that would be cool”. It’s kinda naïve but I really appreciate these. They make the game not feel like a “polished experience”, but it’s just FUN, and that is what is all about

This game is probably my biggest surprise of the year, I was expecting NOTHING and they delivered everything…. I hate the fact that this game is awesome

Another big “discovery” from 2024. Me and my friends started playing it as a joke and got completely hooked for a couple of months.

I have a big gripe with games that use as a mechanic the ability to create “walls”. It just makes no sense to me why would you go through the trouble of creating a level, thinking of level design, if the player can ignore any challenge imposed by the terrain creating their own walls and safe zones. Also shooting walls just feel bad.

That being said the “Zero-Build” mode makes all the difference! I never in my life thought I would have fun playing Fortnite, but here I am. I had a blast learning the weapons, learning the map, engaging with the side quests and overall having a good time with my buddies.

Also I would like to specifically praise the “Visual Sound Effects” option, which makes all sound that happens in the game appear as a visual cue on the screen. This option alone allowed us to put music and just goof around on Discord without worrying that it might affect our ability to play the game. GOAT feature, I wish all games that care about sound direction and source had it

What the hell happened to Konami man… these 90’s Konami games are insane. This game is supposed to be wacky and random, pretty much a joke game, but it’s SO GOOD!

The characters are all super fun, the difficulty is just right (even though the game is like ~20 mins long, it took us 2 days to beat it), the power ups are all super creative, and the enemies, stages and bosses are so random and funny you HAVE TO keep playing to see what will come up next. And finally the soundtrack, I’m pretty sure they DID NOT have the rights to play some of these songs, but it’s one banger after the other. This game is a hidden gem

I only bought this game because I got bored of PoE 2, and for my surprise I am now here doing my duty of spreading the word about this hidden gem.

If you’re into theorycrafting your own builds and making crazy characters, I think this is the BEST isometric ARPG I’ve ever played for this purpose. There’s a ton of class combinations, every class has very unique archetypes and skills, and the gear is so flexible that you can make pretty much anything work. I have no idea how they’ve balanced this but on every character that I make, on every class combination that I choose, I am always able to cook a DISGUSTING build at the end. I never felt roadblocked by my decisions, and this process of finding a way to make your twisted ideas work is SO MUCH FUN.

The game is also surprisingly well made, the art is cool, the story is interesting… I feel mad about never hearing about it until now. So here I am, telling you to give a chance to Grim Dawn. I started playing with zero expectations and ended up playing one of the best ARPGS I’ve ever played

I bought this game on launch, and it took me 7 years to finish it. I started a new game about 5 times until I had the strength to finish it. And it took me MONTHS (playing it on and off, of course)

At the moment of writing this, I absolutely hate metroidvanias. I mean, I hate feeling lost and having to backtrack and having no idea where the hell am I supposed to go. My sense of direction must be a bottom percentile, which makes this much more frustrating than average. That’s one of my biggest gripes with the Dark Souls games, which seem to be intentionally confusing and maze-y. I did my best to not watch any walkthroughs and have the intended experience, but maybe I should have. The game is a blast until you have to start backtracking, and this is so un-fun that I put the game down for months at a time.

That being said, I love everything else about this game. The visuals, the moods, the designs, the fights, the music… it’s SO GOOD. My only wish was that it was easier to experience all of this. It needs better hints on the level, or on the map, maybe the NPCs could talk less nonsense too? But that I think would take from the confusing and maddening atmosphere which is pretty cool. Now thinking about it having to FIND fucking Cornifer and BUY a map from him is such a piece of shit mechanic oh my god fuck everyone who likes this type of torture. It just makes no sense for me to ask for anything more intuitive when there’s a fucking guy hiding the map from you. Are you having trouble finding your way through the area or finding the map guy? Well, good luck figuring out the areas you haven’t yet been to because to make it easier to find you have to FIND IT FIRST. I hate this so much. Fuck this and fuck you. Great game.

PSX games just hit different….. This one is SO SIMPLE yet so effective! There’s only two buttons, one to send the ball to your side and the other one to send the ball to the opponent’s side, but depending on the situation and ball height they perform different actions when pressed. It’s surprisingly intuitive and it allows for a surprising amount of strategy

I played it with a friend, and finishing this game on it’s last difficulty was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We spent an entire afternoon seriously theory crafting and making strategies for a two-button game. It was great.

One of the most unique games I’ve played. The pixel art is GORGEOUS and the gemeplay loop is very satisfying and interesting to figure out.

The game has many “secrets” that you can find by exploring with different decks and layouts, but there’s something about it that makes me feel cheated. Some combinations are so obtuse it’s very hard you’ll find them on your own. The game is great, but if you’re interested in playing it yourself I would recommend to read a guide once you feel that you’ve hit a wall. I wish it was easier to figure everything out because the game is even more enjoyable once you know all the pieces necessary to build your strategy.

I’ve played this game a couple of years back, and I don’t know why it gave me the itch to play it again. But I’m glad I did!

This game’s biggest strength is on it’s characters and archetypes. Every single one of them is so unique and very fun to play around with! At first glance I always found them to be weak or boring, but the “completionist unlocks” encourages you to try everything at least once, and it was very surprising to build around something I found boring and then discover that it was actually very strong and fun!

My only wish would be for it to be longer and more challenging? I always feel that the runs are too short and are over just as your build starts to get really stupid

It’s funny how an incomplete, beta version of a game is one of the best games of a genre. They raised the bar SO HIGH is crazy.

The game is cool and all, PoE plays awesome blablabla. What I want to talk about is the art direction, OH YESS. Everything in this game feels meticulously handcrafted, every area has creative visuals and every enemy feels adapted to live on the area it’s in. The details, the props, the NPCs, the animations, the BOSSES, everything is jaw-dropping and memorable.

In my opinion this is what makes this game feel like it’s on a whole other level than its competition, and this was the great reveal of PoE 2 for me. We already know what to expect from the gameplay, the’ve been the best at this for 10+ years on PoE 1. Now the art direction stuff…. I have no idea where the full game is going to go, and I’m really excited to discover.

This game makes me kinda regret not getting into Pokémon TCG earlier. The game is great but the online version is AWESOME.

It’s a little buggy and janky, yes, but the overall ethics of how everything works it’s just beautiful. When I created my account the game just GAVE ME a card pool that is enough to craft 80% of the meta decks with just a couple of days of play. The game also does not constantly coerce you into playing it, the ladder is forgiving, the daily quests are easy and rewarding, the battle pass is essentially free… there also isn’t a cash shop in the game!! The only way to get cards and resources in-game is to buy their respective products in real life

It’s crazy, it actually feels like a company that WANTS ME TO PLAY THEIR GAME! I’m used to being constantly abused by shitty systems and extreme pay-to-win… I’m honestly very invested into this TCG now just because it’s accessible

Now about the TCG, it’s very different from Magic and any other TCG I’ve ever played and learning it was a very interesting process to me. This game has a resource system (energy) that is tied to the combat part, but for the non-combat part every action is essentially free. This mix results in some very interesting strategies and thinking, because even though the combat is very simple, slow and predictable, the setting up and disruption is just WILD. Card draw is insane, card tutors are everywhere, you burn through cards so fast that recursion is a NECESSITY in most decks.

That is honestly pretty overwhelming at times, there’s turns that take upwards of 5 minutes to complete, but this constant access to your deck makes you really feel like you’re playing with your whole deck. Every copy of a card that you add, you ARE GOING TO see it in matches and play with it. That is such a contrast to games like Magic, where tutors are premium and you are mostly dealing with probabilities of a card showing up, but I quite like it. I think this is honestly my favorite aspect of this game, it opens up so many possibilities for deck building and strategy while piloting your deck. It adds an insanely huge skill ceiling to a otherwise rather simple game.

Tl;dr I am very impressed with the PTCG and I’m enjoying so much my time with it. I’ll probably continue to play it for a long time

This game got me to introduce more friends to raiding, and honestly, co-op PvE is the ultimate form of gaming.

It’s SO MUCH FUN having all the squad fighting side-by-side hanging for dear life in order to slay a boss. Giving their all to understand the mechanics and organize a plan of action. Failing again and again, but each time learning something new and stepping up the strategy. And then, suddenly, everything goes according to plan. Every piece falls into place, everyone survives the mechanic doing exactly what should be done, even the newbiest teammate in the heat of the moment pulls out the most miraculous of maneuvers, and the boss is slain. This is beautiful. It’s peak video-gaming. I wish for more games like these.

My girlfriend gave me this game as a birthday gift, I love her so much. I also love The Binding of Isaac and Magic the Gathering, and this game is basically a Commander board game featuring TBOI characters. I’ve only played it with people that are not into MTG, and this game is actually a great introduction to many MTG mechanics and the Commander format itself, since the rules are very similar and the cards doesn’t have paragraphs of text in them.

I had a great time with it, but I don’t know if I can say the same about the people I played it with since I think the rules are a bit overwhelming for non-MTG players. Everyone got to understand, play and express themselves through the game, but there were too many missed triggers and suboptimal sequencing that I felt bad pointing out. I still want to play this with a group of people that are confident with the rules and are comfortable lawyering up to create chaos with their own cards, like on a commander game.

This game captured perfectly the early 2000s “games as chat rooms” vibe. It’s been SO LONG since I last logged into a game to sit around with strangers talking shit, it was a very refreshing and human experience. A certified good time.

It took me a while to wrap my head around the new visuals and new physics, but from every worms game that I played this is certainly one of the best ones. I love this type of game, it’s so much fun with friends

Cute game with very cool art! I love that it is designed to play on couch co-op, I need more games like this.

The only problem is that we’ve spent more time dealing with the janky controls than solving the actual puzzles. We’ve soft locked the game 2 or 3 times in the sections that you have a “mirrored buddy”, and we have no idea how or why. We’ve spent so much time trying to solve unsolvable scenarios, then we’ve just restarted the mission and everything just magically works. That was pretty frustrating to deal with. But it was a fun time nonetheless!

Cheap, short and clever, it was fun to explore builds and strategies. It’s a shame the game is so short and doesn’t have that many different possibilities. I’d love to see at least an infinite mode added to the game. 3hrs of fun nonetheless

We picked this game because its title reads really funny in portuguese

It was especially enjoyable for me because the last time I think I understood so little about a game was in my childhood lmao. I felt like a kid fiddling with buttons and theory-crafting with my friend what the hell any of them did. The “story” is also so confusing, there’s these magical characters fighting against huge planes and military vehicles, the final boss looks like an interdimensional being? I mean… the plot is indecipherable with the information displayed in-game, but I kinda dig that. Being utterly confused by a game but playing it anyways is a certified ~mood~

About the game, it’s an insanely hard shmup, with pretty good visuals imo The explosions hit just the right spot. I wouldn’t recommend this game at all, but I had a fun time with it

It’s a nice Bullet Heaven type of game, but what disappointed me about this one is that I feel like I was mislead by the “Diablo 2” type of graphics. The game presents itself as this ~homage~ to old RPGs, but the feeling I get is that they just did not understand what was special about those games and the homage is strictly aesthetic.

I think the game would also be so much better if the loot system wasn’t so shallow. The items are mostly uninteresting, and upgrading the rarity makes the item do the same thing but 1000x better. This makes builds really easy to figure out, and makes most characters have a clearly preferred way to play.

The runs also take way too long. Once you beat the game you get an item that makes them shorter, which actually gets you into a nice length, but why make me wait that long? The game should start at that speed and only get faster. I had many runs that I knew were wins already but I still had 10~15 minutes left on the clock. Waiting that long was very boring and left a bad taste in my mouth.

There’s also no skill combos, which once again gives me that feeling that they don’t understand what is fun about the genre. You can also select all of the upgrades for a skill, leaving you no meaningful choice to make. There’s no need to carefully select your skills nor to carefully select your upgrades. By the end of the run you’ll have everything maxed out, so even selecting different characters will result on a very similar end game build. This is very boring and disappointing

BUT…. the game feels nice. The graphics are really fun and the mysteries are kinda fun to solve too. I wouldn’t recommend buying it if you’re looking for a cool Bullet Heaven to play, but I had a somewhat good time with it.

I thought I would get bored with it in 5 mins. I in fact did on my first play through, but in the second time I played with my girlfriend and it was a good time.

You wouldn’t think this would be fun for someone to watch, but it’s actually pretty entertaining, especially setting goals of stupid stuff to find

This game is a masterpiece, but for a very specific niche of the population. I feel that if I got a little more into the combat and gave a little more of a shit to the story I would’ve had a hell of a time with this game. I still enjoyed my time with it but I don’t think I like the whole “repetition” kind of thing, and the slow down mechanic just felt bad in my opinion.

The game is way too fast to be enjoyable on a “reaction” play style so in order to fix this there’s the slowdown mechanic, which makes it instead of the player having to defend themself with a well-timed action, you just activate the slowdown mechanic preemptively and slooooooowly watches the events unfold until the right moment for your button press. I find this unsatisfying and I tried for the most part avoid playing like this, but it’s straight up how the game is supposed to be played. Also since everything moves too fast outside of the slowdown, there’s many traps in the level design that WILL get you off-guard, making the level take just too much trial and error to be completed. I also dislike this.

But the game’s visuals, animations, sound and music are SO GOOD that I willingly ignored all the flaws just to spend more time with it. I’m sure it’s a great game, but I just might not be exactly its target audience

Surprisingly fun game, I didn’t know I would enjoy Kirby golf this much. There’s a surprisingly large amount of mechanics yet it’s still a very simple game. I don’t know what it needs to get higher on the list… Maybe it’s just too simple as a “puzzle” to make me really enjoy it more? But it’s a good time nonetheless!

Short and sweet, it’s the perfect game to play on a traditional “burnout weekend”. The story is easy to follow, the puzzles are obtuse but still entertaining and you are rewarded for failing with silly animations. The art style makes it all so charming that is impossible to dislike.

It’s a shame that Gamefreak is blind to the awesome combat system that they’ve created, but luckily there’s some very talented and dedicated fans willing to make games that explore all of its nuances and strategies.

This game is one of the best attempts at a Pokémon rogue-lite, and in my opinion its bigges strength is the entire rebalancing of the whole pokédex. Every pokémon has been tweaked to fill a particular nieche, making (almost) all of them viable. My favorite part of the game was theorycrafting possible team compositions using only the pokemons that I had unlocked. That led me to use mons that I’ve never cared about to make some very cool and strong strategies. It was so much fun

Its biggest flaw in my opinion is the pacing. The game is just too slow. A single run consists of 200 levels, and that can take 2-4 hours to complete. If you want to unlock more pokemon, egg-moves or shinies be prepared to spend dozens of hours grinding on endless mode, which is not challenging or fun.

The amount of “mash A” gameplay burnt me out on this game. Even though I was still enjoying the theorycrafting side of it I stopped playing because I couldn’t care to actually go through the process of playing it.

I’m a very big fan of RoR 1, it was one of the first games that really sucked me in. But every since RoR2 launched I had a very hard time enjoying this game. I don’t know if it’s because I compare it way too much to the first one, maybe it’s because it’s a FPS (a genre that I’m not really into), or maybe it’s because the game is just bad.

So this year I tried giving it another shot with some friends this time, and I must say that the game is much more enjoyable than I remembered! The enemies are very well thought-out and fun to interact with, even when my character is stupidly overpowered, battling against the enemies was never boring or mindless, which is a feeling that I got constantly when playing the remastered version of RoR1. The characters’ mechanics are also very fun, each character feels unique and forces you to think in an unique way in order to beat the game using its kit. This is also so much fun to interact with.

The part of the game which is not fun at all to me, is interacting with the maps. Dear god, finding that goddamn teleporter in every. single. map. is infuriating. I didn’t look too deep into this game’s mechanics, but in RoR1 the teleporter was placed in predetermined locations in every map, so when you played the game a bunch you would know exactly where to look. I honestly don’t know if that’s the case in RoR2, the teleporter’s location just feels RANDOM. Sometimes the fucker spawns in really weird places that look like glitches and are absurdly hard to find. Even when playing in a group of 4 friends, there’s times the 4 of us spend something like 10 minutes running around until we find the goddamn teleporter. When you find the thing it’s not even satisfying, it’s just a “thank god” moment.

Another thing that sucked the fun out of the game for us is that, okay, it’s a rogue-like so death must be punishing so full runs feel exciting, but the game just has way too much “one-taps”. There’s few worse feelings than spending hours on a run then suddenly dying to something that you could not see and can’t even figure out what was. When playing on a group this gets less annoying because your alive friends can still win and carry you to the next level, but watching your alive friends have fun for 20 minutes and get a shit ton of loot while you were dead is also another kind of awful experience.

In conclusion, the game is way more fun than I remembered, it gave us a good week of entertainment and even though I would not preach for it and beg you to buy it, I would still hop on to play a few runs if you invited me.

I played a TON of this game back when it first released. It’s a good game, but I think that today there’s so many other games that follow the same formula that I found it hard to get too deep into it in 2024.

I honestly like this one way more than Gojuko Parodius. It looks better, it plays better, it’s an improvement in every aspect. But this game is SO HARD and it goes by SO FAST that we found it hard to enjoy as much as the first one

I loved this game as a kid mostly because of Baby Commando. But now playing it as an adult I can see that the only appeal of the game truly is only Baby Commando

I’m not a beat ‘em up type of guy, so this game might actually be pretty influential on the genre. But I really cannot see the appeal of it. There’s too few characters with way too few moves each. Few enemy variety, few stage variety, the combat controls are janky, the level design has that retro bullshit to it…. I guess I don’t HATE IT, but I haven’t had the most fun time with it either

The game’s art is gorgeous and it seems somewhat fun, but I’m so fed up with ~fantasy stories~ that once I realized the game would revolve around cutscenes about “oh no the corruption is spreading” it turned me off instantly.

I can see myself enjoying this game, but not right now. I have to be in the right mindset to go through it

I quite liked the game, but the Steam Deck experience was so awful that I dropped it. I just cannot see myself playing the 60h campaign on my desktop, especially since I’m trying my best to separate the “work computer” from the “fun computer”

I don’t know what I was expecting from this one, but it didn’t quite deliver for me. I know that anime stereotypes are pretty simple and unidimensional, but I think I was expecting a little bit more depth into the mental deterioration of a popular streamer more than “i wanna die please let me die” once your stress level get past a certain %. It also was a little bit too cringy for me, the cuteness and thirst bait was so uncomfortable… I think it would be okay if it presented itself as a parody, but I don’t think it was.

This one is more fun than Sonic Wings Special just because it’s more difficult, but it has the same problems.

Hard for me to enjoy this game after playing Parodius. In my opinion it’s just inferior in every way I can think of, but the thing I miss the most is fun power-ups. You only need 3-4 power ups to get to the max level, and it’s so underwhelming

The game is super charming and the puzzles are fun and clever, but the controls are SO BAD and it is so infuriating to play it on 2 players couch co-op that we gave up on te ~5th stage.

I don’t know how they managed to mess this one up. Crash Team Racing already plays perfectly, they just had to make the same game with some new mechanics but for some reason they decided to make everything from scratch, resulting on a very weird game that controls very poorly and has very confusing mechanics and readability.

Maybe it could be a nice idea, but the game lacks a TON of polish. It feels unfinished, feels like an alpha. It’s not satisfying to play at all

Tank controls and I couldn’t see shit when playing on split screen. Terrible experience

From the Twisted Metals we’ve played this one is the most playable one, but that does not say much. I wonder how these game made so much success, and I did love them as a kid… But the controls are so bad, the hitboxes are too small, aiming is infuriating, the radar too confusing. The game feels rushed, feels like it wasn’t playtested enough, overall another bad experience.

This game is SO BAD it doesn’t even feel rushed, it feels straight up like a prototype. I loved this one as a kid… and honestly only a kid could enjoy this. Terrible controls, terrible UI, terrible polish, terrible experience