Okay that’s it, I don’t think I can keep this rate of posts up. The last ~2 weeks have been crazy here on JOBOCAN Game Reviews. I’m gonna slow down a bit now, but I did just finish this after grabbing it from a boxing day sale, so let’s talk about it!

It came out in early 2021, but I had other stuff I was playing back then and it took until now to finally jump in. I do like to try out all the stuff Nippon Ichi Software puts out, even though a lot of it hasn’t been amazing recently.

Let’s see if Nippon Ichi has a winner with this third-person shooter!

Just sayin’

Right?

I mean, it’s a faithful remake of the old one. It has some new post-game stuff you probably won’t care about. It has the Grand Underground which is pretty meh so far. It has EXP Share, either you like that (like I do) or don’t. And it has no need to use pokemon for HMs, so you can have a full team at all times (which means you don’t need to evolve your bidoof anymore, and keep it in its godly state). Not really much to say about it, you already know, right now, if it interests you. Not worth my time to review it. I WILL review Legends though.

So, fuck it, I’m not reviewing it.

Did the Nuzlocke thing (up until Pokemon League, where I just kept trying over and over with the underleveled team I had at the time), it went okay. That Jirachi might look like overkill (and is probably against some of the rules people use, I had to take an executive decision late in the game to have anything on my team), but it was level 48 when I started the Elite 4, so he was basically useless (in fact everything here was below level 55 when I went in, except for Skuntank). And the first 2 members would wreck me because I had bad weaknesses to most of their pokemon, lul. Also didn’t implement many rulings for the Grand Underground, my final decision was to use only the first fossil I found and nothing else, which ended up being a cranidos that died early lol.

I don’t know why I bought this. I never played the first Caligula Effect, or the “Overdose” version which I hear is much better. What I did experience was a few episodes of the Caligula Effect anime, which is an adaptation of the first game’s story. I wasn’t sure, watching that kinda-meh anime, how that translated into a video game at all, it was lacking in segments that could have gameplay other than boss battles… and that’s basically because, obviously, they removed the dungeons from the anime. It wasn’t a very good anime.

So anyways I got this one, hearing that it’s basically self-contained so knowing the original game’s story isn’t very important… let’s see if this is good!

Time for another slightly older game. I had wanted to play this before, but my old PC was just not wanting to play it even though it was more than strong enough. I think I had a weird bottleneck going that just made the game unhappy, maybe the CPU, maybe the RAM, definitely not the GPU. But when I originally bought this, I’d get roughly 3 seconds of gameplay, then the game would legitimately freeze for 10 to 30 seconds, then would give me another 3 seconds where I could move… calling it unplayable would be putting it lightly.

But with my recent PC with a pretty beef GPU and a pretty beef CPU and RAM that has lights on it, I can run this game on ultra at a very high framerate and no weird freezing. So finally I can play it!

I’m late to the party, but let’s check out a Star Wars game!

This was in the recent Humble Bundle. I picked up the bundle mostly for this, and also Neoverse which… I don’t think I’ll end up playing anywhere near enough of to review.

It’s a card-based RPG in the SteamWorld Universe. Not a universe I’m super familiar with, the only other SteamWorld game I’ve played is Dig 2, which was pretty good. This is a bit of an older game, but I do try to review everything I play. I like going back and trying things I missed from time to time, so here’s one that’s been on the wishlist for a while.

Not much else to talk about in the intro, so let’s go!

I was interested in this game when it was announced. Pretty simple reason: it’s made by People Can Fly, the same people that made Painkiller and Bulletstorm. So they have a pretty good track record for great games, Bulletstorm being one of my favorite non-DOOM FPS games.

But quickly red flags were showing up for this game. It just… looked strange. It finally ended up getting a demo. That demo… removed all possible hype for me. But I did notice some people saying it was good, and it’s possible that I just chose a character class that’s not fun to play. So with the current Epic Game Store sale and the constant 10$ coupon during the duration of the sale, this ended up being half-price. So I figured on friday that I’d grab it and it’d be my long-weekend game (it was Victoria Day weekend in Canada). And boy do I feel like I wasted my time.

Let’s go and talk about why! No, this is not a review because I’m not done with it, and I don’t want to play any more of it. If you want to treat this as a review go right ahead because this is the closest I’ll get to it.

What is it with the “New” in the title? Why not called it Pokemon Snap 2? Or Pokemon Snap Switch? It’s only gonna be new for a short amount of time.

That said, people have really been waiting for a new one of these for a long time. The N64 Pokemon Snap was really fun. A bit short, but a cool experiment with mixing rail shooter gameplay with puzzle gameplay, adding a really interesting scoring system too. But somehow it never happened, for 22 whole years. I figured back in the Wiii era that the Wiimote would be perfect for a new one, but nope. So I was pretty excited to finally see this one popping up.

Let’s see if it lives up to the original… or if it’s even better!

I tried NieR back on the Xbox 360. Here in America we only got NieR Gestalt, while Japan got both Gestalt and Replicant (which seem fairly identical, minus the character being older in Gestalt… I’m sure there’s other differences). I played it for a very short amount of time and gave up pretty quick, it didn’t click with me at the time. But since then I did play NieR Automata, and that’s one I quite enjoyed.

I figured because I really liked Automata and that this was coming out, I might as well give it another chance. So I played it through and… well, here’s the review.

So let’s go and try to review this maybe. I dunno.

6 reviews in a month, not bad. There’s been some okay stuff here, some GotY-level stuff too.

I do have a bunch of reviews incoming too. SaGa Frontier Remastered, Nier Replicant, Smelter, and a bunch of other stuff probably. I think I’ll be busy with reviews for a bit still, I’m really not running out of games to play that’s for sure. Plus MHR is coming back for more with the 2.0 update.

So anyways, this month I’m highlighting: 7 multiplats, 4 Switch releases, a PC release and a PS5 port of an old Switch game. It’s a pretty quiet month but there’s certainly some interesting games there. It’s the calm before the June storm.

Disclaimer: I only list games that I think are worth mentioning. This includes games I’m personally interested in, games that will likely be popular, highly advertised games, small interesting ones I may notice and such. And of course I can’t see the future, so I may be missing games and I may be listing games that may get delayed.