- Spoiler: show
- 02/01: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past [SNES Classic]
04/01: Oxenfree [Switch]
13/01: Axiom Verge: Multiverse Edition [Switch]
14/01: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim [Switch]
15/01: Super Mario World [SNES Classic]
20/01: BioShock Infinite [360]
23/01: The Fall [PSN]
26/01: Celeste [Switch]
31/01: Super One More Jump [Switch]
05/02: Night in the Woods [Switch]
08/02: Dandara [Switch]
14/02: Dragon Quest Builders [Switch]
20/02: Bayonetta [Switch]
21/02: Puzzle Puppers [Switch]
23/02: Fe [Switch]
24/02: Old Man's Journey [Switch]
26/02: Portal Knights [Switch]
28/02: Bayonetta 2 [Switch]
07/03: Subsurface Circular [Switch]
14/03: Coffin Dodgers [Switch]
15/03: OPUS: The Day We Found Earth [Switch]
18/03: Tesla vs. Lovecraft [Switch]
22/03: Fear Effect Sedna [Switch]
23/03: Destiny 2 [PS4]
31/03: Devious Dungeon [Switch]
31/03: Warp Shift [Switch]
01/04: Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap [Switch]
02/04: Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder Devastated [Switch]
09/04: Attack on Titan 2 [Switch]
11/04: The Bunker [Switch]
14/04: Streets of Red: Devil's Dare Deluxe [Switch]
16/04: Slayaway Camp: Butcher's Cut [Switch]
18/04: L.A. Noire [Switch]
23/04: Rayman Legends: Definitive Edition [Switch]
01/05: Saturday Morning RPG [Switch]
05/05: Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze [Switch]
06/05: God of War (2018) [PS4]
13/05: Secret of Mana (2018) [PS4]
15/05: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle [Switch]
19/05: Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition [Switch]
22/05: Shadow of the Colossus (2018) [PS4]
25/05: Runner3 [Switch]
30/05: Resident Evil 7: Biohazard Gold Edition [PS4]
06/06: PixelJunk Monsters 2 [Switch]
09/06: Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn [Switch]
13/06: The Banner Saga [Switch]
16/06: Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion [Switch]
28/06: Hollow Knight [Switch]
30/06: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus [Switch]
30/06: Star Fox [SNES Classic]
01/07: Bleed [Switch]
01/07: Bleed 2 [Switch]
03/07: Infinite Minigolf [Switch]
04/07: Crash Bandicoot [Switch]
07/07: Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back [Switch]
07/07: Mario + Rabbids: Donkey Kong Adventure [Switch]
08/07: Crash Bandicoot: Warped [Switch]
12/07: Riptide GP: Renegade [Switch]
14/07: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker [Switch]
29/07: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link [NES]
04/08: The Walking Dead: A New Frontier [PS4]
18/08: Titan Quest [Switch]
I was skeptical that a game like Titan Quest, a Diablo II wannabe-successor heavily reliant on the mouse to interact with its world, could be translated well to a cursor-less platform like the Switch (or the PS4 or Xbox 1 for that matter). "Clicking" on enemies and interactables in the environment works through a sticky-targeting system that automatically selects the nearest viable target. This works well enough in most combat scenarios, but a handful of unique enemy clusters require certain enemies to be eliminated first. These enemies are typically ranged, but even if they're not, they're easy to lose in a cluster of melee enemies. Specific enemies may be selected by holding down an action button, which brings up a cone-shaped targeting reticle. This does not slow down or freeze the game and I could not move while using this reticle, leaving my Brigand a sitting duck for enemy hordes. Only by kiting enemies in specific ways is this reticle in any way useful for targeting particular enemies. The right stick seems like a prime candidate for manipulating this reticle without sacrifice the ability to move, but instead it zooms the camera in and out, an option that not once felt game-changing.
Titan Quest's console port adaptations are functional in a bare minimum way but are no substitute for playing with a mouse and keyboard.
None of this disguises that Titan Quest is a boring videogame no matter the platform you're playing on. The Class system sounds promising: Nine skill trees may be mixed-and-matched to create 45 individual classes. The resulting hybrid classes don't get new powers, relying entirely on skill synergy to create a distinct experience. The result is less each class feeling unique as mashing up one skill you like with another skill you like; whether it's a Soothsayer, a Bonecharmer, or a Warlock, all three classes will be able to field the same Lich King tank courtesy of the Spirit skill tree. I opted to mix the Hunter with the Rogue, resulting in a Brigand, which I came to regret. The Hunter's core class skill is a net that pins enemies in place. Naturally all bosses and a good chunk of enemies are immune to this ability. Both the Hunter and the Rogue otherwise focus on boosting direct damage and supplementing it with Bleed and Poison effects; again, I constantly encountered enemies immune to one or both of these effects, turning the entire game into one long grind of hurling arrows into meat wall enemies. I can only presume if I had chosen a different class I might have enjoyed myself better.
I will not find out as the Titan Quest campaign was uninspired and boring, leaving me with no desire to revisit it, a
huge problem for a loot-dropping ARPG. Environments--set in and around the Mediterranean--were not particularly interesting to look at, enemy design was predictable, and the story seemed to consist entirely of chasing bosses to their goals and arriving just minutes too late to foil them. These bosses, possessing no personalities or distinct characteristics, don't qualify as characters, just goals to be reached, macguffins to be sought, and faces to be pummeled. I had no investment in the story from start to finish, little interest in its stakes, and zero attachment to its characters. It was only in the final area, which saw me entering Hades to challenge... uh, Hades when he attempts to take over the world, that anything memorable happened. Turns out this entire sequence was an expansion pack for the original release of Titan Quest.
Every player character begins as the same boring muscledude and only distinguishes itself from other player characters by the armor they wear. Subsequently every player character ends up looking mostly the same regardless of class. Boring.
Avoid.
23/08: Immortal Redneck [Switch]
While vacationing in Egypt, a redneck gets drunk and crashes a dune buggy. When he wakes up he is on another planet and has been mummified. He cannot leave the desert valley he is in, and the three pyramids within the valley beckon ominously...
Immortal Redneck is a first-person shooter "roguelite." It handles like a dream; the Redneck is fast and responsive and able to make huge leaps. Make no mistake, this is an FPS very much in the spirit of Quake and not the cumbersome Modern Warfare. The Redneck begins quite weak, but every attempt at penetrating a pyramid showered me with more and more gold which may be spent on an upgrade tree in the valley. The tree literally sprouts and grows branches as I unlock more and more of its branches, finally growing into a massive, twisting Tree of Life that dominates the center of the valley when I reached its highest points. Also unlockable on this tree are additional "Allegiances," different Gods which the Redneck may temporarily align with. This changes his weapon loadout and active skill. His default Redneck class gets a pistol, shotgun, and sticks of dynamite, with an active skill that increases reload speeds; before long I had shifted to mainly using Amunet, a god who transforms the Redneck into a speedy ninja able to run backwards, drop decoys, and use super-powerful and accurate but slow-firing Kunai. Gods you haven't aligned with in a few runs get stat boosts, encouraging me to play with a variety of them (but I mostly just played with Amunet because the Kunai were that good).
Each pyramid has two bosses and both must be defeated in a single run (in normal conditions) to conquer the pyramid and unlock the next one. When all three fall, the game ends. Rooms and enemy composition within them are pre-built but randomly arranged; I immediately encountered rooms I'd already seen in my second visit to the first pyramid. The action is fast and challenging enough that this never really bothered me, but some rooms are quite large and only get larger in the second and third pyramids, making getting around the larger floors a bit of a chore. A teleportation system like those seen in Enter the Gungeon would have been appreciated.
Enemies and chests randomly drop scrolls which alter the Redneck's stats or confer other effects. Stacking these effects is essential conquering the bosses, and while the scrolls' are usually beneficial, several of them are not. The "Sorry Not Sorry" scroll, which replaces all of your weapons with randomly selected ones, came up quite often for me and is the most frustrating thing I've encountered in a videogame in 2018. As many of the weapons are less useful than others, having all of the weapons I opted to take replaced with random ones was nearly always a death sentence.
Immortal Redneck is a flawed experience. It's the first "Roguelite" on the Switch I've actually finished, and by no accident also one of the easiest. It could get a little tedious and grating but it's a fun idea and overall I enjoyed my time with it.
27/08: Slime-San: Superslime Edition [Switch]
Slime-San is a hyper-responsive platformer about an anthropomorphized blob that makes disgusting noises when it moves and stains floors and walls green when it touches them. Some videogames want to be Super Meat Boy so badly you can smell it on their store page.
Where Super Meat Boy focuses on basic platforming mechanics, Slime-San is much more ambitious. Slime-San can jump in midair, perform air-dashes, and enter an alternate state that lets it pass through objects that are colored green. More and more unique mechanics are stacked on these extra abilities in each level, ranging from riding on the back of ultra-fast slugs, Poochy-style, to a powerup that lets Slime-San's bird friend fly the pair to new platforms. It was all challenging and it
worked but it seemed to move on to a new idea before it had really nailed an old one and left me feeling like I was constantly scrambling to keep up with it. Each of one hundred levels has four screens to be conquered, and each level has four apples and a challenge coin hidden in it. Finishing just one world was exhausting. Then there's the post-game levels and remixed New Game+ levels. If you're into difficult platformers, Slime-San will keep you busy for a long time.
All of this might have left Slime-San feeling like an inferior masocore platformer, but its art design is truly repellent. It has a good idea at its core: Things colored green are good, things colored red are bad. But these colors, plus white, black, and grey, are the only colors used throughout the entire game. It's a unique look in the current videogame market, but it was one that was offputting and unpleasant to look at. The underlying pixel art beneath it seems to be good, but the deliberately limited color palette held it back. There's a whole city and alternate environments to explore in Slime-San but it's all so ugly that I only ran through it briefly. I literally could not stand to look at it.