So I reviewed a decent amount of games this year. But I played more than what I reviewed. I did have a few “I don’t want to review X game” posts, where I’d give a quick synopsis of why a review felt a bit pointless, or I didn’t finish the game and had little to say about it. Like Dawn of the Monsters which I found kinda meh, or Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes which I really liked but didn’t review because it’s just another Warriors game.

So I figured, let’s take all these games I played and didn’t review, and put them all in one big stupid post. Why not!

Here are the games I’m having a look at in this post: Windjammers 2, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2, Azure Striker Gunvolt 3, Hot Wheels Unleashed, Blossom Tales 2, River City Saga: Three Kingdoms, Shovel Knight Dig, Metal Hellsinger, Omega Labyrinth Life, River City Girls 2, Freedom Planet 2, Demon Throttle, Gungrave G.O.R.E., Ground Divers. A bit of a random post, but hey I like talking about most of the games I play, so there it is.

Well, let’s go!

Windjammers 2

It’s Windjammers! I actually have the arcade version of this (the big Neo Geo MVS cartridge). Great game, unique fighting game take on Pong. You throw frisbees across the field, have it bounce of the walls, you have special shots, and much like Pong you must get the frisbee to hit the goal behind the other player. Superb game.

Windjammers 2… is Windjammers 1 with nicer graphics… pretty much. It’s great, but it’s also the kind of game where you want to have someone else to play with. Or… play online I guess, I’m not too into that. That said, this game is great. If you never played Windjammers before, this is as good a game as the first, pretty much.

Really nothing more to say about this. It’s good.

Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2

I remember enjoying the first Luminous Avenger iX. I didn’t like this one. I honestly don’t even remember this game much anymore, just that I didn’t really like it. Not very memorable, seemingly pretty average overall. Also short.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 3

While Luminous Avenger iX 2 obviously didn’t impress me… I had a bit of fun with this one. It’s weird because they’re such similar games, but yeah, I liked this one. Here you don’t play as good old Gunvolt anymore (though you can play as him, he’s a sort of power-up), instead you play as this girl who attacks with a sword and throws cards. The cards have a damage stacking property and stuff, with some cool lock-on attack functions. Other than the kinda BS way to get the true ending, I had a good time with this one… but also had not much to say about it, so… no review.

Hot Wheels Unleashed

This is one I bought on a whim during boxing week last year. I saw videos of this and it looked weirdly good, so… why not? Well… yeah, why not, this is a good game. Surprise! It gives me some F-Zero vibes in gameplay and track style, though it has more “realistic” physics and a pretty cool drifting mechanic. But it’s also one of those that I didn’t have much to talk about overall. It’s just a well made racing game, with great controls, pretty okay graphics and a lot of wacky cars.

Blossom Tales 2

So I was kinda excited for this one. The first Blossom Tales was pretty fun, it was a kinda Link to the Past-style Zelda-like. This one… It was okay, but it felt like I was playing the same game again, so I stopped being motivated to keep going. So I just… stopped playing it. It was fine, just not… something I felt like playing any more of.

River City Saga: Three Kingdoms

I love me the Kunio-Kun series. This is a game where you play through the Three Kingdoms historical story thing, but all the characters being “played” by various characters in the Kunio-Kun series. It plays like the River City Ransom games, though each chapter limits where you can go in the world. This was a decent beat ’em up, but I found one attack that was clearly the best thing to spam (the jumping downward punch that bounces you back up) and it became a bit dull. Just power up your punch stats, spam the bouncy shit, win every battle without effort. Okay game, there’s some replayability since there’s more endings after the first playthrough… but yeah I didn’t feel like playing any more of this because all battles degraded to spamming an OP attack.

Shovel Knight Dig

This is a Shovel Knight… roguelite… platforming… thing? I honestly barely remember it because it was… kinda boring? Yeah. Like, most of the separate elements are fine on their own, but it’s really short (which is a big no-no for a roguelite), not very replayable (which is a huge crime for roguelites), and just overall… quite meh. It won’t take you too many runs to win, there’s not much to do after, and the runs feel way more similar than a roguelite should be.

I dunno, Shovel Knight needs a proper sequel rather than these kinda weird undercooked spin-offs.

Metal Hellsinger

I was really hyped for this game. This isn’t the only rhythm FPS on the block, with BPM: Bullets Per Minute being around and fun too, but it’s very different. Where BPM is an FPS roguelite, this is a more standard style of FPS. But both share the rhythm concept. This was pretty fun overall. Not super long and I felt I didn’t have enough to talk about in a full review, but it was a good time. It has interesting weapons that act differently to the rhythm, pretty varied enemies, and the same boss battle many times which is a bit eh (they have variations, but it’s the same enemy and it acts pretty similar). Overall a fun game. I think I mildly prefer BPM, but this was fun too.

Omega Labyrinth Life

The game SO OBSCENE that Sony forced the devs to change the title and remove content in the Playstation release. It is called simply “Labyrinth Life” on Playstation, because the Omega symbol… is DRAWN TO LOOK LIKE TITS. THE HORROR. Yes that is real, and yes Sony are fucking dumb and I hope they implode soon.

As for this game… It was okay. It’s a roguelike (yes, rogueLIKE, because it plays LIKE ROGUE), very standard shit as far as this genre goes. You’ve probably played a few of these games or similar stuff like Chocobo Dungeon or Pokemon Mystery Dungeon or Shiren the Wanderer or Void Terrarium or Azure Dreams. This one is the same thing pretty much, but from time to time you get 2 girls to play rock-paper-scissors with their boobs. And also as they fight stuff in a dungeon their boobs get bigger which makes them stronger (alongside normal leveling). Not much to say about this one, it’s okay. Quite a dumb game, in a good funny way. Would be better if the gameplay was a bit more exciting.

River City Girls 2

River City Girls 2. It’s River City Girls 1, but with a different story! And the performance is weirdly shit. I’m not sure if it’s only the Switch version, or if all version eat shit the moment you step out of your house. Yeah in the house you get perfect smooth framerate, but the rest of the game feels stuttery.

This is fine, the game is very good, but I dunno, I just feel like I’m playing a stuttery RCG1. I don’t know if a lot of the graphics were just straight recycled from 1, but they sure look like it to me a lot of the time. There’s new characters to play as though… but by the time I unlocked them, Misako was like 15 levels higher and I didn’t feel like having to power up different characters. And TBH I’m not sure I want to keep playing.

Freedom Planet 2

Freedom Planet was a Sonic fangame-turned-new-indie-IP, that was a pretty cool game overall.

Freedom Planet 2 is also good. Seems sufficiently different from the first one, so we don’t have another “I feel like I’m playing the exact same game again” problem some other games here had. And the characters play quite differently too which is nice. For me it was a “this is quite good, I don’t feel like playing any more of it, for no reason at all” kinda thing. I don’t really have much to say here, the levels are fun, the bosses are fun, it looks great… I have nothing specifically bad to say about this one.

Demon Throttle

I had a big post prepared for this game, unironically. It wasn’t gonna be a big review though (the review was gonna be a small part of it). Instead, it was a post talking about scam companies like Limited Run Games and such, who only have FOMO as their gimmick and kinda actively refuse to not be shit (remember that time where LRG banned a guy from buying from them again because he made a meme? yeah). It was a big, long, thought out post criticizing shit exploitative business practices. This game specifically is a PHYSICAL ONLY NEVER DIGITAL release that, at first, was meant to also be a limited release from Special Reserve Games. I got that release because I was interested in the gameplay. But man it’s a stupid release (and took like a year to get here). Physical only made sense, back in the days when, you know, downloads didn’t exist. But nowadays, makes sense for games to just… be at least digital, and for bigger games to have a physical version. Not everything needs to be physical, but not being digital is a big limiting factor for sales… and is especially shitty if you’re doing it in a way to artificially produce FOMO.

While the release method remains stupid, the game itself is actually pretty good. It’s a take on the Squaresoft classic King’s Knight, a vertical scrolling shooter where you break the environment to find power ups and secrets to find and make your characters stronger and stuff. It’s pretty good, though the final boss is a bit fucking wacky. I had lots of fun with this one. Shame the release is stupid and most people won’t ever fucking find out it exists.

Just put it on the eshop (and Steam), morons. Why limit the sale of the game both by limiting the actual printing of it and losing all the digital sales you’d get? It’s really dumb. At least there’s a not-as-limited print of it now so it’s buyable, but it’s still physical-only (with the “NEVER DIGITAL” tagline on the official website)… but no one’s gonna find this.

Gungrave G.O.R.E.

Gungrave is both a classic PS2 series and a pretty cool anime I watched way back. Pretty basic but fun action games, cool story in the anime. This one… Feels similar to the PS2 games as far as I can remember (it’s been a LONG time since I played those), but something about this one just isn’t doing it for me. It’s kinda meh, the story feels basically non-existent because they just gloss over everything. Not bad but… I dunno, I feel it’s a bit of an awkward game overall. Also coming out at the same time as the much superior Evil West may have been a mistake.

Ground Divers

This popped up on a Nintendo Direct. I thought it looked interesting. It wasn’t. It’s a digging puzzle action game where you direct a robot to spots to dig and need to mash a button to keep it happy. You can find materials to make items, use items to heal/power-up/do explosions, fight monsters along the way (which is difficult because your robot is pretty weak) and you can build bases where you can use resources to level up, and the goal of every level is to get to a specific treasure spot on time, but also getting some side treasures. It’s a cool idea, but man is this game fucking boring. I don’t think it’s even that far from being good, but it needs some spice.