There’s a couple games that I recently played at least a bit of, but that I don’t think I’ll fully finish or get to the end of, at least yet. Some of those came from my recent subscription to PC Game Pass using the absolutely awful Xbox app on PC, some I got on Switch.

The 6 games I’ll be quickly “review” here are Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 1: Phantom Brave / Soul Nomad, Dodgeball Academia, Astria Ascending, Dark Alliance: Dungeons & Dragons and Forza Horizon 5.

So there you go, before I go into my GotY posts, here’s a couple games I’m not likely to post full reviews for.

Let’s go!

Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon

I’m starting with this game because it’s actually quite good and I wanna highlight it, but also I’m kinda done with it so I can’t fully review it. This will be the longest non-review of this post 😀

This is a semi-roguelite action puzzle game featuring everyone’s favorite indie game knight. It is pretty unique in how it works. Basically you’re sucked into some puzzle dimension, and you team up with the Puzzle Knight to get yourself and all the other knights our of that dimension. There’s a bit of progression, though the main thing is unlocking knights and trying to get the true ending.

The core gameplay has you moving in a dropping block puzzle game. The blocks will be enemies, chests, keys, potions, bombs and blocks. You can move up, down, left and right, in a grid of squares. Moving towards an object makes you attack that object (or, in the case of potions and keys, collect them). Blocks just break, while enemies get damaged but hit you back. If you hit a thing that is also touching another one of the same thing (so, say, a beetle touching a beetle), your attack hits both. This keeps going, so if there’s 20 beetles touching each other, you attack all of them. Whichever ones get to zero HP at any point dies, though usually you’ll be trying to kill several enemies at once. Since enemies hit you back, you’ll need to hit potions to restore HP from time to time, otherwise you will die. If you kill an enemy it will not hit you back, so something with 1 HP left is safe to attack even if you’re also at 1 HP. Killing a bunch of enemies at once helps because you get more gems, which you use to buy stuff during runs (and you can also buy stuff in-between runs). Some enemies have special ways they act, like the knights in the second level putting up a shield in the direction you first hit them from so you have to hit them from elsewhere. It can be a bit hectic when there’s a lot of different enemy types, especially ones that do something special like the exploding rats or the electric frogs that shock you if you hit them while they’re in their shock animation.

This is really simple gameplay that adds a lot of depth in pretty interesting ways. There’s a bit more to it of course. There’s a few keys per level, and a few chests (plus a door at the end that lets you go to the next level). Chests tend to give you limited-use items, like swords that allow you to deal more damage per hit (so you can kill beetle chains in a single hit without getting damaged, very nice), or shields that protect you from damage, or axes that ignite enemies you hit for extra damage, or spears that hit 2 spaces at once. There’s some chests that bring you to Chester’s shop, where you can spend a whole lot of gems to get relics, which give you an upgrade (that you lose if you die, obviously, since this is a roguelite). These range from different ways you may get extra damage (like +1 to undead, or +1 after every 5 hits and such), or HP which is really super important.

The main kind of unlockables is knights. Relics are things you unlock very early on, but there’s not much of them to get from Chester’s campsite shop (which unlocks them in future playthroughs). Most of the knights you’ll unlock by beating their boss battles on the world map (after some of the levels). Those boss fights are pretty fun and utilize the gameplay style in pretty different ways. The knights do function differently. For example, Shield Knight has less HP than Shovel Knight, but she gains shields from killing enemy chains, so she has increased survivability. Shovel Knight has 1 more HP, and his power is that he’ll deal extra damage on enemies in a chain (so if an enemy got into the chain later, they’ll get an extra HP down when you kill the rest of the chain). Propeller Knight boosts his attack by killing single enemies, but resets it by doing chains (and gets hit harder by chains). Tinker Knight can gather metal and build a mech for increased attack and HP (temporarily). And there’s a bunch more. There’s some good variety there, since you really don’t end up playing similarly at all with any of them.

It does have problems though. While the gameplay design is fucking impeccable, it could use some help on the UI. I always find it kinda hard to follow how much HP I have despite the bar right under the character, and remembering that, yes, enemies attack you when you hit them, leading me to many easily-avoidable deaths. Not super sure how you make that clearer, but I’m sure there’s something that could be done. Another issue is how fast it takes to unlock all the relics and not really have much progression outside of unlocking more knights (which is a slow burn because boss battles are random). After less than 20 runs (I will note that runs are really fast), I had fully unlocked all the relics at Chester’s shop in the campsite. They’re not the main unlockables since characters are, but after that point gems are kinda pointless. Sure you can get costumes, which… whatever… and unlock shortcuts for the shortcut cannon, which you’ll definitely have enough gems for because you start hoarding them pretty fast… but otherwise they’re kinda… not needed outside of runs (you do need them IN runs to buy relics or unlock the true ending).

I definitely recommend this game. Don’t use the “we think you’re stupid” difficulty-reduction options, play the game as actually intended.

Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 1: Phantom Brave / Soul Nomad

I’m not gonna talk about this one very long because it’s 2 old games. Both action RPGs with pretty unique mechanics.

Phantom Brave is a remaster, though it’s mostly resolution and backgrounds that are remastered (as the game takes the whole screen), as the sprites are just the PS2 ones sized up (and the textures aren’t very ressed-up either, though you can turn on or off filters that blur them up). The game always had nice sprites. In battle, rather than a grid, you have a certain circle movement range to freely move in, and you get one attack per turn. One of the interesting things is that your units are ghosts that you summon by making them possess objects in the map. So a unit summoned in a rock will probably have higher defense than a unit summoned in a flower, but that flower might have its advantages. It’s a really fun game with a few cool systems. Also the soundtrack is fire.

Soul Nomad is a pretty interesting game as well, which is a bit more complicated than Phantom Brave because of how party customization works. Instead of just single characters, you get Rooms. A Room can be upgraded as early on a room can fit 4 characters, one of which will be the leader. Rooms have types that give different passive-ish boosts (or special skills). What you control in battle is the room leader on the map, but when you attack, what happen changes based how you set up your room. People in the front row will usually attack right in front, in the middle will have a variety of ranged attacks, and in the back may have special effects, or more powerful versions of the middle row. Clerics, for example, have no front row skills, heal one unit when put in the middle row and will heal everyone when put in the back. This whole thing makes team-building really interesting, and you get more options as you progress as well. Soul Nomad is a great, kinda unknown NIS game compared to basically everything else they made back in the PS2 era, and it’s real nice that it’s getting a bit of extra sunlight by being in this nice little collection. As far as what this version is, it’s just running the regular PS2 version, but upscaled to HD (not remastered). So it is only 4:3 ratio (unlike Phantom Brave which is properly HD). There are still advantages though, as both games have almost no load times, making them way smoother than playing them on the PS2.

Definitely worth getting if you haven’t played these before. Both are really fun, really good RPGs that don’t have a lot of equivalents.

Dodgeball Academia

This is a game I had some hope for because it gave me some Super Dodgeball impressions.

This is a pretty simplistic RPG, where combat is handled by dodgeball matches. You can charge a throw, build up your super meter for a super attack, and try to catch your enemies’ throws (also each character may have a different dodge function, as the main dude jumps and some others may do a dash or whatever). There’s always several dodgeballs on the field (depending on the battle there may be more), some of them have elemental effects (or move back to the middle automatically rather than just staying where they fall). Some battles have multiple enemies and those work randomly too, as some of them pause the match when you get a kill (to place the dead unit in the back, which can get extra throws if the back units get a ball), some don’t. There’s no indication on which any given battle actually will be until you do it.

I do have some complaints about this one. Namely, it’s pretty random. There’s a few minor strategies you may figure out as far as guaranteeing hits (like timing a throw while an enemy is charging or something), but in the end it’s all about throwing until the enemy stops catching your throws, and your defense is pretty much all about timing your catches (and some characters have counters, those suck since you don’t get a regular throw). You have very little control over when you’ll finally deal damage. Sometimes it’s instant, sometimes it’s not. And catching is very easy, despite having weirdly strict timing.

Also the game is too… strict? Like, there’s only a certain amount of battles in each chapter, so if you do them all, you get identical stats to everyone else (minus how you decide to use your juice items which give permanent stat boosts), so beyond spending a lot of the very limited amount of money you get on juice is the only way to play this differently from anyone else… or you could play a different character but the main guy is the best so… play him.

I wouldn’t really recommend this one, but not because it’s bad. Just because I feel you may get bored before finishing it.

Astria Ascending

I was actually pretty excited to try this out, so I got it right away to play it after finishing Halo Infinite (and trying Forza Horizon 5) since it currently is on the PC Game Pass. I had to stop playing this very quickly once I noticed a huge, glaring, REALLY STUPID glitch.

It has this nice Vanillaware-ish style of visuals and movement and stuff, the combat is pretty well-designed as far as I can tell, and the story sounds dumb if some things I read about it are real. But story doesn’t matter, this is a video game after all.

What problem did I run into? Well… Actually I don’t know if this is a problem on all versions, or all PC versions, or just the PC Game Pass release… but I will say this is a known problem, the devs HAVE to know at this point, as I see posts dating at least 2 months back talking about this problem. So just to be safe, I will re-iterate that this was with the PC Game Pass release… Equipment doesn’t work. Literally, changing equipment does nothing, not even your starting equipment gives you extra stats… So basically you don’t get stronger outside of leveling and the skill trees, but those stat boosts from equipment (which you can see when you’re buying stuff but not when you’re actually equipping it) are pretty solid so it definitely makes a difference. Just in the second dungeon of the game, combat was getting really difficult against just basic enemies. So yeah, the game on PC Game Pass is unplayable.

I don’t know about recommending this, since I don’t know which versions have this massive game-breaking bug. I’d recommend making sure the version of the game you’re getting… works. Maybe if I end up playing it properly later I’ll review it then, but I’ve got other stuff to play in the meantime.

Oh, another weird thing, when the screen goes dark for transitions, instead of going dark it flashes a bunch of colors… weird. They’re very dark colors so you may not even notice, but I did.

Dark Alliance: Dungeons & Dragons

I remember being a bit interested in this game conceptually. A friend and I were thinking about grabbing it to play together, but we ended up just playing other games when gameplay videos weren’t very impressive. When I got PC Game Pass, I figured it would be a good time to try it.

It’s a weird thing, I played through one level and hated it. About a week later I was thinking “Hey, I think I played this on keyboard and mouse, maybe with a controller it would actually work”… So today I figured I’d play it with a controller… which is when I realized I did, in fact, play it with a controller the first time. This game is ass because it controls like ass. This is an action, loot-based RPG that does all the leveling and loot stuff pretty okay from what I can tell. What it doesn’t do well is… everything else. What doesn’t work is the fact that it uses pretty much tank controls, but very slightly smooter. So you only face the direction that your camera is facing, moving left and right just makes you strafe which is awkward as hell. You need to turn the camera around to turn, so… be sure to increase that camera sensitivity so it sucks very slightly less. Attacking is horrible. You can literally only attack right in front of you and, since you turn so slowly, that’s not very helpful when you’re surrounded by enemies. Locking-on to enemies doesn’t even fucking work in making things easier, if anything it makes it rougher. I get that this is a multiplayer game so other characters are supposed to cover for you, but… yeah it’s awful. The dodging is also ass, of course, as is the jumping.

I did finally try, for the lulz, to play it with mouse and keyboard. Yeah it still doesn’t work. Turning around is faster so you can more easily aim attacks, but the rest of the controls are still ass and a half.

I don’t recommend this game. It’s garbo. Terrible game.

Forza Horizon 5

I don’t have too much to say about this one. It looks amazing though, for sure. The framerate is ass on PC as it’s extremely randomly variable depending on where you are on the map, some parts I was consistently above 200fps, some parts would fucking tank to sub 40 where it becomes basically unplayable, but that may be because I don’t have the top of top-end cards (or maybe I should’ve set it 1080p instead of 1440p). The gameplay is fine if you’re into more realistic racing physics and stuff. The open world feels like a bit of a waste of time, like open worlds usually are, but in this case it kinda works since the core mechanic of the game is driving fast, and that’s what you do in the open world so… eh, I’ve seen worse open worlds.

I’m pretty sure this is a really good game. It’s just not my thing. So I would recommend it, I had a bit of fun with it. Thankfully you don’t get to see the character models too much because they look fucking awful though, they clearly cared way more about the cars.