Showing posts with label Pixel Hunted. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pixel Hunted. Show all posts

08/08/2024

Princess Maker 2: Regeneration Nintendo Switch Review 0/10 "In summary, do not buy this game." πŸ‘Ž

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Princess Maker 2: Regeneration is a game that should come with a content warning. How else am I supposed to approach a Nintendo Switch game in which you can feed your 13-year-old daughter pills that increase the size of her breasts and then marry her?

The 1993 original is, for a certain audience, a cult classic. In that as in this modernised remake you play a famed warrior who’s gifted a naked 10-year-old girl by the gods, and must raise her to adulthood. Will you up her combat skills and send her adventuring, make her the best cook in the land or, uh, force her to work in a sleazy bar and become a teen hooker? It’s your call!

17/07/2024

RoboCop: Rogue City PS5 Review 8/10 "Oh, how I miss squibs!" πŸ€– @TeyonGames #IndieGame #GameDev

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Robocop Rogue City PS5 Review
Oh, how I miss squibs. These days action movies simulate blood splatter from gunshots with CGI and, while now relatively convincing, it just doesn’t have the same visceral impact as detonating a small bag of fake blood. 

RoboCop: Rogue City developer Teyon clearly feels the same way. This is a game almost entirely about blasting sneering criminals with high-powered weaponry and every thumping shot sends beautiful fountains of the red stuff spiralling through the air and onto the scenery. If this somehow isn’t enough, the game offers a “More Gore” weapon upgrade to truly paint the town red. Paul Verhoeven would be proud.

03/06/2024

Rainbow Cotton Review 3/10 By Pixel Hunted "Seeing Rainbow Cotton back on sale is genuinely surreal" πŸ§ΉπŸ§™‍♀️ @ININ_Games

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Rainbow Cotton Remake Review
You really can’t polish a turd. We live in a renaissance for video game remasters, remakes, and re-releases, where even the most obscure titles can be given a lick of paint and sent out into the wild world of digital storefronts.

But, even in a world where the likes of Baten Kaitos, Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninjas and Famicom Detective Club have been exhumed from their mouldering gaming graves, seeing Rainbow Cotton back on sale is genuinely surreal.

01/05/2024

Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1 PS5 Review "Now a New Generation Can Enjoy Getting Urinated on By a Guard" πŸ“¦❗️

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Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1 PS5 Review
Bonfire night, 1998. I’m at a friend’s house for fireworks and, afterward, I watch him playing a new import with a weird name. He’s stuck in a prison cell and his only available weapon appears to be a bottle of ketchup.

I joke: “Why not squirt ketchup on the floor and lie in it so the guard thinks you’re dead?”. It works. A single shard of moonlight pierced the window to illuminate me. Trumpets played, angelic choirs sang. I had discovered Metal Gear Solid.

13/03/2024

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review 10/10 "If you have even the slightest interest in games as an art form, you must play this." πŸ¦™πŸ¦™πŸ¦™ @DigitalEclipse #IndieGame #GameDev

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Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review
Jeff Minter has been making my soul sing for three decades. I have hazy memories of being confused by the Amiga version of Revenge of the Mutant Camels in the early 90s, but Tempest X3 on PlayStation blew my young mind. Impossibly cool, brain-meltingly intense, and powered by a throbbing rave soundtrack, it felt like being allowed entry to the clubs the bouncers wouldn’t let me into yet.

Back then I didn’t know X3 was an inferior version of Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar, but it burnt a love of all things Minter deep into my gaming tastes. From there I hoovered up Space Giraffe (which looks incredible on Steam Deck OLED), developed a crippling late-night addiction to TxK that burrowed into my dreams, and played Polybius in VR for so long that after one session I fell down the stairs and hurt my shoulder. Worth it.

26/01/2024

Arizona Sunshine 2 Meta Quest 2 Review 6/10 πŸ• @pixelhunted #IndieGame #GameDev #VRGames

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The VR dream isn’t dead, but it’s starting to look a bit wonky. The Metaverse is a joke, PSVR2 is dying on the vine and, almost four years after the release of Half-Life: Alyx, there hasn’t been a title that comes close to its production values and ingenuity.

Enter Arizona Sunshine 2. The first game released in 2016 across multiple VR platforms and, while an utterly boilerplate zombie shooter, at least delivered on its promise of letting you mow down hordes of the undead with a variety of high-powered weaponry. 

We’re now eight years on and the sequel has finally arrived. So, what’s changed?

02/11/2023

Ghostrunner 2 PC Review 8/10 "Ah, endorphins" 🏍️ @GhostrunnerGame #IndieGame #GameDev

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GHOSTRUNNER II  PC Game Review
One hit means death. I can’t help but respect the purity of Ghostrunner 2, which follows in the muffled ninjacyborg footsteps of its excellent predecessor.

Just as before you’re Jack, a true glass cannon protagonist whose speed, agility, and ever-growing suite of techno-ninjutsu abilities is matched only by his constant fragility.

In Ghostrunner 2 you will enter a combat arena and die instantly. At the tap of a bottom (and with no loading) you’re back to try again. This time you might die after a few seconds. Rinse and repeat twenty times and suddenly you have a plan:


Wallrun, slowmo dodge, kill, grapple, deflect, kill, boost pad, shuriken toss, mid-air grapple, kill, slide, vault, slice your cyberkatana through a cyberfreak’s body as the two cyberhalves spiral through the air in front of you. Ah, endorphins. There you are…

18/09/2023

The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales PC Review 7/10 "Prepare to be tossed into the narrative deep end" πŸ“” @bookwalkergame #IndieGame #GameDev @PixelHunted

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The Bookwalker takes place in a world very much like our own, with the teensy difference that writers can not only conjure up entire worlds within books but travel into them and interact with their characters as if they were real people.

You play writer Etienne Quist, a writer serving a 30-year sentence (geddit?) of writer’s block for a mysterious crime. Etienne hopes to reduce his sentence by taking on “bookwalking” gigs, i.e. diving into various books to retrieve powerful items. For example, you’ll head into a fantasy world to swipe an Immortality Potion or venture into a gloomy robotic take on Norse mythology to get your hands on Mjolnir.

05/09/2023

Death Becomes You PC Game Review 2/10 "Perhaps I’m just not the right person to be writing about anime magical lesbian teenagers" πŸ‘§ @pixelhunted @quill_studios #IndieGame #GameDev

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Perhaps I’m just not the right person to be writing about anime magical lesbian teenagers.

As I sat on the London Underground playing Death Becomes Her on my Switch I became intensely aware of the passengers on either side of me. Before this moment I’d never been self-conscious about gaming in public - why the hell should I care what some random strangers think of me? But I realized a glance at my screen would show two canoodling cartoon schoolgirls. Let’s face it, this is a powerfully bad look for a middle-aged man.

31/08/2023

Ghostrunner 2 Preview by @PixelHunted "harder, better, faster, stronger than the original" πŸ₯· @GhostrunnerGame #IndieGames #GameDev

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I missed Ghostrunner on its original release, but when a polished next-gen edition landed on PlayStation 5 in 2021 I fell deeply dippy in love with its lightning-quick, lethal and acrobatic combat. Since then there’s been nothing else that’s captured the same sense of dynamic combat, where death you or your opponent’s death is a cyber katana swipe away.

Now, courtesy of a demo courtesy of developers One More Level, that same adrenaline rush is back. What’s immediately apparent is that everything great about Ghostrunner is present in the sequel. This is an evolution rather than a ground-up reworking, to the point where my initial suspicions were that little had fundamentally changed.

25/07/2023

Ray’z Arcade Chronology Review 8/10 ☄️πŸš€ @PixelHunted

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If I could wave a magic wand and grant myself video game skills I’d become a shmup expert. The first game I can ever remember playing is Hybris on the Amiga in 1988. I was sat on a cushion in the big computer chair, struggling to weave my spaceship between enemy bullets and take out the boss.

35 years later (...ugh) and, despite my best intentions, I haven’t substantially improved. I’ve often returned to dip my toe into the genre, figuring that critically acclaimed darlings like

Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, or Gradius V would finally give me the motivation to get gud.


I never did, but even though I’m crap at them I maintain an admiration for their purity, the focus they require to master, the complex interlocking systems and, perhaps most of all, for the gaming wizards that can one credit clear these bad boys.


Enter the Ray’z Arcade Chronology, which consists of best-in-class remastering studio M2’s ports of three classic Taito shmups, 1994’sRayForce, 1996’s RayStorm and 1998’s RayCrisis.

14/07/2023

Brain Show PC Review 2/10 "Brain Show may eventually get better..." 🧠 #IndieGames #GameDev

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Sony’sBuzz! trivia game series was a massive PlayStation hit in the 2000s. Its straight forwardness was key to its success, with the game faithfully replicating a TV quiz with the aid of the Buzz! Buzzer controller that lets you chime in to answer just as on a real-life game show.

Sadly the format didn’t last, presumably, because the internet is swimming with free trivia quizzes. These daysBuzz! games and peripherals are most commonly found clogging up the shelves of charity shops across the nation: casual players don’t need this plastic tat in their house and retro games fans are a little snooty about this powerfully mainstream mini-franchise.


It’s now been thirteen years since the last Buzz! game and the (aptly named) developer Simplicity Games thinks it’s time for a comeback. Enter Brain Show, which waits until the dead of night, grabs a shovel, heads to the graveyard, and tries to bring Buzz! back from the dead.

16/06/2023

Planet of Lana PC Review 7/10 "...absolutely reeks of competency" 🐈‍⬛ @PlanetofLana #IndieGames #GameDev

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Planet of Lana absolutely reeks of competency. 

This cinematic 2D platformer is the debut release from indie developer Wishfully Studios, and if they’re setting out to make a name for themselves as an artistically minded team with a rock-solid grip on puzzle platformer mechanics then mission accomplished.

Set on an alien yet familiar world you play as young girl Lana, who we meet enjoying a bucolic life in her cosy fishing village. Naturally, as is the fate of practically every video game hero’s cosy home town, disaster soon strikes. 


Robots emerge from the blue skies to entrap the locals and promptly speed off into the distance. Lana is the sole survivor and must rescue her ambiguously defined best friend/girlfriend/sister/boyfriend/brother from their steel clutches.

12/04/2023

Loretta Review 7/10 "A Nice-Looking Tense Horror Title" πŸ”ͺ @yabutuzoff @PixelHunted #IndieGame #GameDev

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It’s 1947. You’ve just killed your useless writer husband and dumped him the well. Time to get out of town and start a new life… if only you could get into the safe where he’s locked away his final manuscript so you can make a decent payday from his publishers.

This is the setup for the tense and atmospheric Lorettafrom developer Yakov Butuzoff. The game wears its influences on its sleeve, attempting to capture the paranoid vibes of Hitchcock movies like Vertigo, Dial M for Murder and a smidge of the desolate Psycho. Less a game and more of a visual novel, Loretta lets you guide the titular housewife through one of the worst weeks of her life while her sanity gradually crumbles under the weight of her past and her murderous inclinations.

06/03/2023

Sakeworld PS5 Review 5/10 "Outsider art that’s crowbarred its way onto the PlayStation Store" πŸ‘Š @pixelhunted @Sakeforever15 #IndieGame #GameDev

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Sakeworld is objectively not a good game. This side-scrolling brawler boasts some of the worst combat mechanics I’ve played in years, janky animation, repetitive stage design and generally feels like something that might have popped up on Newgrounds twenty years ago.

But - and this is a big but - it’s interesting. And interesting goes a long way.

03/03/2023

Fashion Police Squad PC Review 8/10 "Chalk Fashion Police Squad Up As a Very Nice Surprise" πŸ’ƒ @nomorerobotshq #IndieGame #GameDev

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We’re now three decades on from Doom and iD Software’s cast iron classic has still got it where it counts.

Its blistering speed, streamlined design, badass occult aesthetics, and iconic collection of monsters endures, and many a gamer who wasn’t even a twinkle in their parent’s eyes in 1993 has realized it’s still a supremely fun experience.

The past few years have seen a renaissance in throwback first-person-shooters attempting to recapture that retro magic, with highlights including Ion Fury, Dusk, and Prodeus. But, for me at least, few have nailed it quite like Fashion Police Squad.

16/02/2023

Hogwart’s Legacy PS5 Review 6/10 "...It's fine" πŸ§™‍♂️

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Let’s get one thing right clear right off the bat: I didn’t buy Hogwarts Legacy. I wouldn’t be seen dead giving any money to J.K. Rowling after the shit she’s come out with over the last few years and, as someone who doesn’t care in the slightest about Harry Potter, would have been a very easy game to skip. 

But, for professional reasons, I was obligated to play the game prior to release and was sent a code by WB Games in order to do so. So here’s what I thought after coming to this game with zero excitement and a powerfully icky feeling at loading it up for the first time.


….It’s fine

24/12/2022

A Plague Tale: Requiem PC Review 9/10 "Requiem goes hard on disgusting environments and intense squalor" πŸ€ @APlagueTale

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It’s estimated that the Black Death killed around 25 million people when it tore through Europe in the 14th century. You’ll see most of those corpses in A Plague Tale: Requiem, which doesn’t miss an opportunity to toss you into a charnel house bristling with rotting bones, have you clamber over giant heaps of fly-ridden bodies, or simply gently float downstream on an otherwise peaceful riverboat cruise as dead peasants serenely bob around you.

03/11/2022

⌨️ Outshine PC Review 6/10 "Outshine is one of those games that’s like patting your head while rubbing your belly" ⌨️ @PixelHunted @OutshineGame #IndieGames #GameDev

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As someone who spends literally every hour of my working day with my fingers on a keyboard, I figured I’d sail through Outshine. Type words to blast enemies? 

Pfft, whatever’s in my path is going to be absolutely obliterated. 

So, Area 1, Level 1, max difficulty. Let’s go.

12/10/2022

πŸ›£️ Roadwarden PC Review 9/10 "Endless Hordes of Shit-Throwing Apes" πŸ›£️ @AssembleTeam #GameDev #IndieGames

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Your first steps into Roadwarden’s unnamed peninsula are timid and paranoid. Anyone who’s played a dark fantasy game will steel themselves for untrustworthy inhabitants, death lurking around every corner, and your character forced into tough moral decisions for some ill-defined greater good. 

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